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gh7's review
1.0
I suspect that the love letters of most people reading this review would be more captivating than these of Elizabeth Bowen. I’m not sure why they were ever published. It’s very clear she never expected them to be – which is to her credit as often writers can appear to be writing for posterity rather than the intended recipient. The only other letters I’ve read are those by Virginia Woolf, Katherine Mansfield, Rainer Marie Rilke and Franz Kafka. I’d classify these four as artists; Bowen, on the other hand, as a professional author. Writing was her job rather than her raison d’etre. That said I’ve got a lot of love for Bowen.
The first problem is this is a bizarre, almost adolescent relationship (Bowen is in her late forties when it begins). Bowen and Charles Ritchie appear to see each other on average about five times a year, if that. During their “affair” Ritchie marries another woman and has affairs with countless others. At times he’s four-timing Bowen. He’s a serial philanderer and his journal is characterized by a megalomania that leaves you wondering what on earth any woman could have seen in him. She, meanwhile, seems to be living in cloud cuckoo land. Her letters are always characterized by the winged emotions of the first two weeks of an affair. It’s like she writes the same letter over and over again, with different scenery. This maybe is the appeal, a relationship that never really leaves her imagination. There isn’t a note of criticism in any of the letters. They never apparently have a row. Not even really a sense that she knows him. As for the excerpts from his diaries, he rarely mentions her and when he does you feel he’s a bit star struck by her status as a best-selling author. In the meantime, her husband comes across as a complete buffoon and this perhaps is the ultimate cruelty – to ridicule for posterity the man you’ve lived with all your life.
One thing these letters did explain. In The Heat of the Day which is based on her affair with Ritchie the hero is a spy working for the Nazis. It’s always baffled people why she chose her spy to work for the Nazis rather than, as was much more likely in those days, for the Soviets. The answer is, Bowen and Ritchie were vehemently hostile to communism and there’s an unpleasant whiff they might not have been in private as unsympathetic to the Nazis as morally they should have been. Ritchie even looks a bit like a Gestapo agent. When Bowen goes to Prague shortly after the war she refers to the Czechs as uniformly ugly to look at and this kind of decadence, nothing short of vulgar especially so soon after the end of the war, is a prevailing feature of their relationship. Ritchie himself refers to Paris as a dreary city, which is doubly odd as moving there from Canada enables him to be closer to Bowen. Virginia Woolf has often been criticized as an upper-class snob but it’s worth remembering she did voluntary work educating poor women, that her husband was a committed socialist and they lived in a modest cottage on a tight budget. Bowen, on the other hand, ticks all the boxes of the allegations made against Woolf. I was disappointed to learn she was a committed Tory. Interested in little more than furthering her own social privileges – she had a very posh house in London and a country estate in Ireland. I don’t want the authors I love to have such self-interested party politics.
Another disappointing thing is how little of interest she has to say about writing or the writers she knew, especially Virginia Woolf. She only says Virginia was such a hard person to write about. Perhaps the one thing I learned from her letters is what dreadful taste she had in men. I’m afraid these letters (I gave up half way through) made me dislike her rather. Which is sad because I’ve always greatly admired her as a writer.
I didn't write a single one star review throughout 2017; my first two of 2018 have both been unmitigated hatchet jobs!
The first problem is this is a bizarre, almost adolescent relationship (Bowen is in her late forties when it begins). Bowen and Charles Ritchie appear to see each other on average about five times a year, if that. During their “affair” Ritchie marries another woman and has affairs with countless others. At times he’s four-timing Bowen. He’s a serial philanderer and his journal is characterized by a megalomania that leaves you wondering what on earth any woman could have seen in him. She, meanwhile, seems to be living in cloud cuckoo land. Her letters are always characterized by the winged emotions of the first two weeks of an affair. It’s like she writes the same letter over and over again, with different scenery. This maybe is the appeal, a relationship that never really leaves her imagination. There isn’t a note of criticism in any of the letters. They never apparently have a row. Not even really a sense that she knows him. As for the excerpts from his diaries, he rarely mentions her and when he does you feel he’s a bit star struck by her status as a best-selling author. In the meantime, her husband comes across as a complete buffoon and this perhaps is the ultimate cruelty – to ridicule for posterity the man you’ve lived with all your life.
One thing these letters did explain. In The Heat of the Day which is based on her affair with Ritchie the hero is a spy working for the Nazis. It’s always baffled people why she chose her spy to work for the Nazis rather than, as was much more likely in those days, for the Soviets. The answer is, Bowen and Ritchie were vehemently hostile to communism and there’s an unpleasant whiff they might not have been in private as unsympathetic to the Nazis as morally they should have been. Ritchie even looks a bit like a Gestapo agent. When Bowen goes to Prague shortly after the war she refers to the Czechs as uniformly ugly to look at and this kind of decadence, nothing short of vulgar especially so soon after the end of the war, is a prevailing feature of their relationship. Ritchie himself refers to Paris as a dreary city, which is doubly odd as moving there from Canada enables him to be closer to Bowen. Virginia Woolf has often been criticized as an upper-class snob but it’s worth remembering she did voluntary work educating poor women, that her husband was a committed socialist and they lived in a modest cottage on a tight budget. Bowen, on the other hand, ticks all the boxes of the allegations made against Woolf. I was disappointed to learn she was a committed Tory. Interested in little more than furthering her own social privileges – she had a very posh house in London and a country estate in Ireland. I don’t want the authors I love to have such self-interested party politics.
Another disappointing thing is how little of interest she has to say about writing or the writers she knew, especially Virginia Woolf. She only says Virginia was such a hard person to write about. Perhaps the one thing I learned from her letters is what dreadful taste she had in men. I’m afraid these letters (I gave up half way through) made me dislike her rather. Which is sad because I’ve always greatly admired her as a writer.
I didn't write a single one star review throughout 2017; my first two of 2018 have both been unmitigated hatchet jobs!
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