The Death of the Heart

Elizabeth Bowen – The Death of the Heart 

I’ve read a fair bit of Bowen over the past couple of years – The Last September*, The Heat of the Day, various pieces of shorter fiction and prose – and, having liked everything I’ve read, it seemed a good choice to celebrate the end of exams with a novel of hers where I didn’t have to think about her postcolonially.  I chose The Death of the Heart because I’ve come across its name continually in my reading about Bowen, about its being the novel for which Bowen is best known by a wider reading public.

[It’s just a side note, but didn’t she do titles well?  “The Heat of the Day” – how evocative is that?]

It centres on Portia Quayne, an adolescent orphan who has recently come to live in her half-brother’s home inLondonin the 1930s.  The story that emerges out of this scenario is that of Portia’s education in the social niceties of the world she has been thrust into.

I am in two minds about this book.  Elements of it are just wonderful, and the opening chapter is a quiet corker, atmospheric and full of suspense, with Portia’s sister-in-law Anna discussing her troublesome houseguest with a friend in a snowy Regent’s Park (and doesn’t that make you want to go away and read it right now?).  It gets your antennae up, makes you curious about this set of people, where it’ll go; not coincidentally, Anna is a magnificent character and really pulls you in from the off.  (I would have liked more of her: she’s in the Lady Naylor tradition, another somewhat snobbish, somewhat controlling but at bottom decent female in Bowen’s work.  She does them well.)

Yet so much of the book seems fearfully inconsequential, so much so that it could at times stand as a parody of the female Bildungsroman of the 30s and 40s, books in the mould of, say, I Capture the Castle.  Nothing very significant happens in it – Portia falls for a worthless but wholly unthreatening young man, she visits the seaside and mingles with a new set of people there – but everything is invested with a terrible amount of meaning, as such events are invested when you’re sixteen.  Perhaps it’s something to do with how unsure I am of Bowen’s own investment in the seriousness of Portia’s predicament, which is essentially that she’s directionless, and has no obvious cure for her directionlessness beyond, at some point in the future, marriage.  But Portia has clothes on her back, food to eat and a roof to shelter her (a roof in the immediate vicinity of Regent’s Park, too).  I feel churlish pointing these things out, because it’s not as if a character so situated couldn’t have something fascinating happen to her, but really gripping events don’t occur, as far as I’m concerned, in this book.

Which is a terrible shame, because so much of this book is delightful.  Bowen has a great gift for characterisation; in addition to Anna, there is a wholly likeable, outdated Major Brutt – who bears out Elizabeth Bennet’s assertion about “deep, intricate characters” not being “more estimable” than bluff, straightforward types – as well as the thoroughly charming Mrs Heccomb, Portia’s chaperone during her stay at the seaside.  One of the best things about Mrs Heccomb is that she is a woman who seems totally fulfilled by her busy life, full of the running of her home (a circumstance that some feminist criticism elides: not every woman is unfulfilled by such a life), spreading warmth and order about her.  There is also rather a nice line about her having been glad to have married and not unhappy to be widowed, which I thought pretty sharp.

As well as characterisation, Bowen’s general style is so becomingly epigrammatic.  Mrs Heccomb says a good deal on first meeting Portia and Portia wonders whether so much talk is wise, whether they’ll have anything left to say by the end of their first week together.  To this the narrator observes that Portia “had yet to learn how often intimacies between women go backwards, beginning with revelations and ending up in small talk without loss of esteem”.  You know you’re in good storytelling hands when such a thought is so casually thrown out in the midst of the narrative.

*I recently watched the 1999 film adaptation of The Last September and it is totally mad.  I would advocate not watching it at all, and certainly not before you’ve read the book.  It’s a shame, because it’s got a great cast (Keeley Hawes, Maggie Smith, Michael Gambon, Fiona Shaw; Jane Birkin in particular is FAB) and I can see what it is trying to do, but it’s so entirely different from the book’s plot that it might as well not have used the title; and the changes are in any case appallingly heavy-handed.  A missed opportunity.