I think that is why Bowen was so good at writing ghost stories. Ireland in particular is full of ghosts and haunted houses, and she understood that atmosphere and a sense of place are all-important to the success of the genre. Just as important as Ireland are London, and War (she once said that she did not quite know how she would manage without one). If you want to know what London was like during and in the aftermath of the Blitz, a bombed-out terrain of half-houses hanging almost in mid-air, of blacked-out streets, of rubble and waste ground across which valerian and ragged robin grew, read Bowen. If you want to know how people talked and walked and tried to go about their everyday lives and above all how there was a strange hollow at the heart of things, read Bowen.
The broad canvas is not for her. She expresses, describes, highlights by a perfect use of detail – a lace doily with a few crumbs left on a plate, a pair of chamois-leather gloves being buttoned at the wrist, a man striking a match in the street to light the cigarette of a stranger, furniture, food, drink, items of clothing. She knows that detail can either be pointless, tiresome padding which contracts the reader’s own imagination, or that it can be made to count, in the way it can somehow echo a sentence, illuminate a moment of choice, stand for a very particular emotional situation.
Bowen makes the reader think. You do not take sides with her characters, because, on the whole, she does not, but you come to understand them, to know what makes them tick and why they have become what they are.
Her stories can induce fear, the chill down the spine, a moment of horrified realisation at what is about to happen. They do not spread happiness – they are too clear-eyed for that. On the whole, they do not make the reader cry either, but there is one that I can never read without a pricking behind the eyes. The House in Paris is her masterpiece. The structure at first seems disjointed but read it again and the central section, which explains those that bookend it, as the past explains the present, does, after all, fit exactly where it should.
The book is about two children, Henrietta and Leopold, who first meet at a house in Paris. Henrietta is travelling with a woman who is being paid to take her to her family in the South of France, and Leopold is about to meet his mother for the first time since infancy. Henrietta is a neat, precise, well-mannered, reserved little girl; Leopold is a rougher, more awkward boy, full of confused emotions, wants and dreads. In the dark, old-fashioned house, they are left alone together for hours and must somehow come to an understanding and an accommodation, if not a friendship. It is almost impossible. They are worlds apart and each for different reasons resists any identification with the plight of the other. Both are lonely, unhappy, strange little children, both have reasons for keeping themselves apart from one another, and the house.
It is a tense book. We read it with in-drawn breath. Bowen was one of the best writers about children, seeing them on their own terms as well as from the viewpoint of the adult outsider. She understood how cruel they could be to one another, how the small savage was so very close to the surface of the charming young person. I do not think that I know a fictional scene more poignant and moving than that in which Leopold finds out, finally, that his mother is not coming after all, and he starts to cry, his head against the mantelpiece in the cold formal room, Henrietta beside him, clutching her toy monkey, reaching out to touch him for the first time with a sort of unpractised and stiff comfort. All the dashed hopes and bitter loneliness, all the feelings of being rejected and unloved and entirely isolated from the rest of the world, come together, crystallised in this one scene which I can hardly bear to re-read.
All writers are asked about their influences and it is a hard question to answer correctly because almost everything we read is an influence, and usually quite unconsciously. Other people’s ways of writing can surface in one’s own years later, influences but barely recognisable as such. But a few are known and those few are the ones that strike a chord at the moment of reading. This is how it is done, this is how I want to do it. Elizabeth Bowen is one such for me. From the beginning, how she does what she does, the sort of people and places that are unmistakeably hers, were absorbed as I read, and read again. Writers are formed by their childhoods, by places which have given up their inner meaning, by people glimpsed, and above all by emotions both felt and observed. But they are also formed by other writers, other books, and I am very conscious that Bowen was one of those who formed me.
She knew a great many people of note, from her early years in Ireland, through to her marriage and time spent in Oxford and London. She had an interesting war. She was a handsome woman, with dramatic and arresting rather than beautiful features and she had a number of serious lovers of both sexes – but a rather lonely old age, as is so often the case among those who have outlived so many friends and had no family of their own. Through William Plomer I came to know her a little at the end of her life, via letters. We had planned to meet but cancer intervened and we never did. But I cherish her letters, written in a wild hand with lots of capital letters and loops. She was one of those people who gave herself to the page so that her personality came vividly across, and so I felt that I did know her, that we had met. It happens.
Sebald
BOOK COLLECTIONS GROW organically and in part they grow according to mood so that one ends up with a library that runs the gamut, from frivolous to suicidal, and in this year I may be inclined towards both, and all shades of mood in between.
W.G. Sebald was German-born and lived and worked in England, as an academic – in his last years as Professor of Modern German Literature at the University of East Anglia. He wrote in German but the translations of his books seem so perfect, flexible and subtle in their choice of English vocabulary and syntax that if one had not been told that the books were translated, one would never have guessed. I know of no other writer like Sebald. Nobody does. He is totally European, and yet with a profound, if detached, understanding of England. His subject matter is extraordinary, unpredictable and odd – he seems to collect the unusual and be interested in the outlandish, but, through his eyes, even the ordinary and prosaic becomes somehow strange. Everything he sees, everywhere he goes, every person he meets, all are filtered through some curious lens of his own devising. He brings to a walk through a landscape, or an object or a memory or a historical anecdote, the entire weight and depth of his own vast reading and learning and knowledge. It is all lit in a unique, Sebaldian light.
But he is a writer who induces the most profound sense of melancholy. Over all his writing is a sort of miasma of existential despair. Is it that he chooses to visit places which are in deep shadow, hold memories of a terrible past, are bleak and run-down, poor and seedy and out of date, or is it that this is his permanent mood, a mood that somehow infects and alters places?
Sebald was a great walker (this accounts for the detail) and in Vertigo, he visits a village in the Tyrol he calls W a place he has not seen since he was a boy. Having taken a bus from Innsbruck, he alights at the Oberjoch customs post, and starts to walk.
The gorge was sunk in a darkness I would not have thought possible in the middle of the day. Only, to my left, above the brook invisible from the path, there hung a little meagre light. Spruce trees, a good seventy to eighty years old, stood on the slopes. Even on those growing up from the depths of the ravine the evergreen tops did not appear until far above the level of the path. Time and again, whenever there was a movement in the air above, the drops of water caught in the countless pine needles came raining down. In places where the spruce stood further apart grew isolated beech trees that had long since shed their leaves, their branches and trunks blackened by the persistent wet. It was quite still in the gorge save for the sound of water at the bottom, no birdsong, nothing. Increasingly a sense of trepidation oppressed me and it seemed as if the further down I walked the colder and gloomier it became. At one of the few more open places, where a vantage-point afforded a view both down onto a waterfall and deep rockpool and upwards into the sky, without my being able to
say which was the more eerie, I saw through the apparent infinite loftiness of the trees, flurries of snow high up in the leaden greyness …
Not far from the margin of the forest stands the Krummenbach chapel, so small that it can surely not have been possible for more than a dozen to attend a service or worship there at the same time. In that walled cell I sat for a while … What I remember most … is the Stations of the Cross, painted by some unskilled hand round the mid-eighteenth century and half already covered and eaten by mould. Even on the somewhat better preserved scenes little could be made out with any degree of certainty – faces distorted in pain and anger, dislocated limbs, an arm raised to strike. The garments, painted in dark colours, had merged beyond recognition with the background, which was equally unrecognisable. Insofar as anything was visible at all, it was like looking at some ghostly battle of faces and hands suspended in the gloom of decay.
That walk through the dripping dark valley between the pines, and the scene in the tiny, cold chapel with its mouldy frescoes, could have been conjured up by almost no one but Sebald and, like so many others in his extraordinary books, cling to the walls of the memory like the atmosphere of a nightmare. The same seems to happen to him.
A good thirty years had gone by since I had last been in W. In the course of that time many of the localities I associated with it such as… the parish woods, the tree-lined lane that led to Haslach, the pumping station, Petersthal cemetery where the plague dead lay, or the house in the Schray where Dopfer the hunchback lived, had continually returned in my dreams…
The hotel, when he reaches it, is empty, hollow-sounding and ghostly as any in a horror film.
Behind the reception-desk … after I had rung the bell several times to no avail, a tight-lipped woman eventually materialised. I had not heard a door open anywhere, not seen her come in, and yet there she suddenly was. She scrutinised me with open disapproval.
But so many places on a Sebald journey are eerie, deserted, out of date, and lie under a pall of dismal weather. In The Rings of Saturn he walks through East Anglia and manages to make places I know well, and have found sparkling and lively, suicidally depressing. Lowestoft is not one of the country’s most prepossessing of towns and has suffered like many others from neglect and poverty but I do not remember its being as drear as Sebald finds it.
I walked for a good hour long the country road from Somerlayton to Lowestoft, passing Blundeston prison, which rises out of the flatland like a fortified town and keeps within its walls twelve-hundred inmates at any one time. It was already after six in the evening when I reached the outskirts of Lowestoft. Not a living soul was about in the long streets I went through, and the closer I came to the town centre the more of what I saw disheartened me …
And as he leaves the town the next day, inevitably he passes a hearse.
In it sat two earnest-faced undertaker’s men … And behind them, in the loading area, as it were, someone who had but recently departed this life was lying in his coffin in his Sunday best, his head on a little pillow, his eyelids closed, hands clasped, and the tips of his shoes pointing up.
As well as being full of places which, if not already weird, become so through the Sebald lens, his books teem with curious people. He neither meets nor knows anyone unnoticeable, dull, ordinary, everyday and, also in The Rings of Saturn, he tells a story of an idiosyncratric man and woman which is so poignant that it turns into a sort of operatic tragedy which haunts the mind.
The book opens with Sebald in a Norwich hospital, after having had some form of nervous breakdown, looking out onto the city under a pall of grey cloud, from his room on the eighth floor. And he remembers Michael, a colleague at the University, typical of certain academics, wholly absorbed in their work, usually in some minor byway of an abstruse subject – careless of their appearance, detached from the rest of the human race and still children in most respects other than the mere physical.
Michael was in his late forties, a bachelor and, I believe, one of the most innocent people I have ever met. Nothing was ever further from his thoughts than self-interest; nothing troubled him quite so much as the dire responsibility of performing his duties under increasingly adverse conditions. Above all, he was remarkable for the modesty of his needs, which some considered bordered on eccentricity … Year in, year out, as long as I knew him, he wore either a navy blue or a rust-coloured jacket, and if the cuffs were frayed or the elbows threadbare he would sew on leather trims or patches. He even turned the collars of his shirts himself … It often seemed to me … that, in his own way, he had found happiness, in a modest form that is scarcely conceivable nowadays.
Also then teaching at the University was Janine, a similar character, totally immersed in her work and her passion for Flaubertian minutiae. Sebald brings her to life and vividly re-creates her office:
where there were such quantities of lecture notes, letters and other documents lying around that it was like standing amidst a flood of paper. On the desk, which was both the origin and focal point of this amazing profusion of paper, a virtual paper landscape had come into being in the course of time, with mountains and valleys. Like a glacier when it reaches the sea, it had broken off at the edges and established new deposits all around the floor, which in turn were advancing imperceptibly towards the centre of the room. Years ago, Janine had been obliged by the ever-increasing masses of paper on her desk to bring further tables into use, and these tables, where similar processes of accretion had subsequently taken place, represented later epochs, so to speak, in the evolution of Janine’s paper universe. The carpet, too, had long since vanished beneath several inches of paper; indeed, the paper had begun climbing from the floor, on which, year after year, it had settled, and was now up the walls as high as the top of the door frame, page upon page of memoranda and notes pinned up in multiple layers, all of them by just one corner.
Neither of these two academics could survive in any university today – indeed, it is a wonder they survived then, but somehow their childlike eccentricities, a retreat from the real world in which people must grow up, were tolerated and they managed to carve out harmless corners in which they could live and defend themselves against the encroachments of responsible adult life.
Of course, the story is a tragedy. Michael died one night, alone in his Norwich house, presumably of natural causes and the shock affected Janine more deeply than anyone.
One might say that she was so unable to bear the loss of the ingenuous, almost childlike friendship they had shared, that a few weeks after his death she succumbed to a disease that swiftly consumed her body.
She had clearly been profoundly in love with a man who would never have known it – for she would never have been able to express it.
Time is the connecting thread running through Sebald’s books, time and a sense of place. The past and how it lives on inside oneself, the decay of the solid edifices of the past and how their fragmentary remains are found in the present, are constant themes.
He is a writer for whom melancholia is a semi-permanent condition and who could probably never have produced a book had it been otherwise.
The story of Michael and Janine reminds me of a novel which has become woven into the fabric of my reading life. Love is the most difficult thing to write about successfully. It is the litmus test of greatness in a novelist if a love story moves and convinces and never once makes the reader grimace, smirk or feel embarrassed. Modern novelists are bad at writing about love because they feel that it has to mean writing explicitly about sex. On the whole, it was Dickens’s one great failing, too, because it brought out the sentimental in him, whereas Thomas Hardy succeeds every time. Graham Greene is one of the moderns who best conveys a great many aspects of love, whereas D.H. Lawrence is mawkish. Virginia Woolf did not often try, probably because other human relationships interested her more. The classic French novelists did it well. The great Russians are pre-eminent.
But I know one novel which tells more than any other about u
nrequited love, foolish love, and love which matures, after a poor start, into greatness; a novel that pierces to the heart of the sort of love that endures to death and beyond, without ever having been fulfilled. It is a small, quiet novel by a writer who was first published at Leonard and Virginia Woolf’s Hogarth Press and was admired both by them and many of their circle, including E.M. Forster and Lytton Strachey.
My copy of The Rector’s Daughter by F.M. Mayor is quite battered but I have never bought another because I am so fond of it. It has been on long train journeys with me, I have read it during delays in airports and in a tedious hospital bed. And it has never failed me – never failed to make me forget myself and everything going on around me, never failed to move me beyond tears.