Week 3

Virginia Woolf and Elizabeth Bowen (b. Dublin 1899; d. 1973) had been friendly to each other in the Thirties after Bowen established herself as a novelist. Woolf once visited Bowens Court in Ireland, one of the few remaining 'Big Houses' (the estates of the protestant minority who effectively ruled Ireland until The Irish Free State was established in 1922). Yet an Anglo-Irish person would never be quite at home either in England or Ireland, regarded as vaguely English at home, vaguely Irish even in London-- especially during World War II, when Ireland remained adamantly neutral. One chapter into The Heat of the Day (the episode in Regents Park, where Bowen lived (Clarence Terrace) in the war years until bombed out1) is enough to show us that we have to learn again how to read 'English' fiction: Bowen offers a new form of attention, a new sentence structure, a new sensibility.

Below is a classic passage from this remarkable writer (from chapter 5). It is long, but we didn't work our way to the university to do anything but our best, and to read the best. Wait until you read the whole novel; then come back to this passage (pp. 98-100). What do you see of significance in this passage? How can you relate what you see to the novel as a whole? Again, show us by reference to passages, so we can see it as you do. Don't just report back on what you think.

They had met one another, at first not very often, throughout that heady autumn of the first London air raids. Never had any season been more felt; one bought the poetic sense of it with the sense of death. Out of mists of morning charred by the smoke from ruins each day rose to a height of unmisty glitter; between the last of sunset and the first note of the siren the darkening glassy tenseness of evening was drawn fine. From the moment of waking you tasted the sweet autumn not less because of an acridity on the tongue and nostrils; and as the singed dust settled and smoke diluted you felt more and more called upon to observe the daytime as a pure and curious holiday from fear. All through London, the ropings-off of dangerous tracts of street made islands of exalted if stricken silence, and people crowded against the ropes to admire the sunny emptiness on the other side. The diversion of traffic out of blocked main thoroughfares into bye-ways, the unstopping phantasmagoric streaming of lorries, buses, vans, drays, taxis, past modest windows and quiet doorways set up an overpowering sense of London's organic power—somewhere here was a source from which heavy motion boiled, surged and, not to be dammed up, forced for itself new channels.

The very soil of the city at this time seemed to generate more strength: in parks the outsized dahlias, velvet and wine, and the trees on which each vein in each yellow leaf stretched out perfect against the sun blazoned out the idea of the finest hour. Parks suddenly closed because of time-bombs—drifts of leaves in the empty deckchairs, birds afloat on the dazzlingly silent lakes—presented, between the railings which still girt them, mirages of repose. All this was beheld each morning more light-headedly: sleeplessness disembodied the lookers-on.

In reality there were no holidays; few were free however light-headedly to wander. The night behind and the night to come met across every noon in an arch of strain. To work or think was to ache. In offices, factories, ministries, shops, kitchens the hot yellow sands of each afternoon

1 Here is a useful (and terrifying) map plotting the bombs dropped on London. If you put in Mecklenburgh Square you will see where Virginia Woolf's house was bombed. ran out slowly; fatigue was the one reality. You dared not envision sleep. Apathetic, the injured and dying in the hospitals watched light changing on walls that might fall tonight. Those rendered homeless sat where they had been sent; or worse, with the obstinacy of animals retraced their steps to look for what was no longer there. Most of all the dead, from mortuaries, from under cataracts of rubble, made their anonymous presence—not as today's dead but yesterday's living—felt through London. Uncounted, they continued to move in shoals through the city day, pervading everything to be seen or heard or felt with their torn-off senses, drawing on this tomorrow they had expected—for death cannot be so sudden as all that. Absent from the routine which had been life, they stamped upon that routine their absence—not knowing who the dead were, you could not know which might be the staircase somebody for the first time was not mounting this morning, or at which street corner the newsvendor missed a face, or which trains and buses in the homegoing rush were this evening lighter by at least one passenger.

These unknown dead reproached those left living not by their death, which might any night be shared, but by their unknowness, which could not be mended now. Who had the right to mourn them, not having cared that they had lived? So, among the crowds still eating, drinking, working, travelling, halting, there began to be an instinctive movement to break down indifference while there was still time. The wall between the living and the living became less solid as the wall between the living and the dead thinned. In that summer transparency people became transparent, only to be located by the just darker flicker of their hearts. Strangers saying "Good night, good luck" to each other at street corners, as the sky first blanched then faded with evening, each hoped not to die that night, still more not to die unknown.

That autumn of 1940 was to appear, by two autumns later, apocryphal, more far away than peace. No planetary round was to bring again that particular conjunction of life and death; that particular psychic London was to be gone forever; more bombs would fall, but not on the same city. War moved from the horizon to the map. And it was now, when you no longer saw, heard, smelled war, that a deadening acclimatisation began to set in. The first generation of ruins, cleaned up, shored up, began to weather—in daylight they took their places as a norm of the scene; the dangerless nights of September two years later blotted them out. It was from this new insidious echoless propriety of ruins that you breathed in all that was most malarial. Reverses, losses, deadlocks now almost unnoticed bred one another; every day the news hammered one more nail into a consciousness which no longer resounded. Everywhere hung the heaviness of the even worse you could not be told and could not desire to hear. This was the lightless middle of the tunnel, Faith came down to a slogan, desperately re-worded to catch the eye, requiring to be pasted each time more strikingly onto hoardings and bases of monuments…. No, no virtue was to be found in the outward order of things: happy those who could draw from some inner source.

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