Backlisted - The Death of the Heart by Elizabeth Bowen

Episode Date: May 23, 2022

Tessa Hadley (Free Love, Late in the Day) joins us for a discussion of The Death of the Heart (1938), the sixth novel by Anglo-Irish novelist Elizabeth Bowen; as you'll hear, Tessa has been reading and rereading Bowen's work since she discovered it in her local library when she was 12 years old. We go deep into the glorious idiosyncrasies (and idiosyncratic glories) of Bowen's style and consider why her reputation has waxed and waned in the years since her death in 1973. Also in this episode, John celebrates his recent trip to New Orleans with a reading of Nine Lives (Random House US), Dan Baum's book about the city; and Andy navigates his way round Géricault's painting The Wreck of the Medusa using Tom de Freston's new book Wreck (Granta) as his compass. Timings: (may differ due to variable advert length) 07:20 - Wreck by Tom de Freston. 14:40 - Nine Lives by Dan Baum. 21:36 - The Death of the Heart by Elizabeth Bowen * To purchase any of the books mentioned in this episode please visit our bookshop at uk.bookshop.org/shop/backlisted where all profits help to sustain this podcast and UK independent bookshops. * For information about everything mentioned in this episode visit www.backlisted.fm *If you'd like to support the show, listen without adverts, receive the show early and with extra bonus fortnightly episodes, become a Patreon at www.patreon.com/backlisted Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Do people generally read government websites in detail before they go on planes? I mean, it's the point where they say your passport has to have three months on it. Pass me by, I'm afraid. That's so tragic. I'm so sorry. John, what message would you like to pass on to listeners that are in Britain at the moment?

If you're trying to leave the country, check your passport. If you haven't got three months to run on your passport, they're not going to let you out. If there was even the tiniest smidgen of logic. Where were you meant to be joining us from? I was meant to be joining everybody from Turin in Italy, Torino, which I've never been to. It's meant to be lovely. I was there as a guest fellow of the Turin in Italy, Torino, which I've never been to. It's meant to be lovely.

I was there as a guest fellow of the Turin Book Fair. As it's my birthday tomorrow, the delicious dinner that they had promised me in the restaurant afterwards will be a virtual. But at least I'm at home. Just order a pizza in, John. Be the same. Yeah. Well, now the good news is, though, and there is some good news. yeah well now the good news is though then there is some good news i went on holiday last week and i was i'm doing a touring holiday in suffolk which was wonderful and um i spotted something that i thought i don't know anyone on the whole planet who would enjoy this more than my friend and colleague john mitchinson and so you've got it there, haven't you?

I have. So it's your birthday present. Oh, my goodness. And also you're cheering you up after your disastrous day present. Well, I have to say, I hadn't planned on the cheering up aspect, obviously. But it's very, very sweet. I'm opening it now. I'm doing it live.

It's actually very well wrapped, Andy, obviously. That's why I said have some scissors to hand. I'm doing it live. It's actually very well wrapped, Andy, obviously. That's why I said have some scissors to hand. Tell everyone what it is. Absolutely marvellous. I know that book. A book that I've actually only – I've got several of his books.

It's by George Ewell Evans, the father of Matthew Evans, former chairman of Faber, and it's called Where Beards Wag All, The Relevance of the Oral Tradition. And it's beautiful. It's published naturally by Faber. And it's got lovely David Gentleman illustrations. This is absolutely my catnip, Andy. I know.

I thought when I bought one or two, because they're first editions i'm not even going to say on air where i got them from because i plan to go back there and plunder further but look i got a first edition of the pattern under the plow lovely faber first edition with david gentleman's drawings and we've actually beautiful we've just launched i mean the famous one is ask the fellows who cut the hay and we've just launched, I mean, the famous one is Ask the Fellows Who Cut the Hay. We've just launched a book on the Unbound site, which is somebody's gone back to explain what's happened in the years since that book was written and talking to people in the same village. Oh, there you go.

This is a marvellous bit of serendipity, I have to say. Happy birthday. It's fun. Thank you. Tessa, where are you calling from? Are you in Turin? I'm in Cardiff, which is sort of like the Turin of Wales. It is. And I think my husband, who loves George Ewan Evans,

is cooking me pasta with courgettes and garlic for when we finish tonight. So that sounds a bit vaguely Torinese. We're keeping it going, John. We're trying to keep the vibe up for you as much as we can. Shall we do it? Let's go. Hello and welcome to Backlisted, the podcast that gives new life to old books. Today, you find us on the edge of a wood above a rural railway station on the Kent coast, sometime in the mid-1930s. The late spring sunshine is beating down, and lying on the grass among thickets of hazel and clumps of primroses are a young man and a woman. He is lying with his eyes shut. She is leaning against him,

and in between the sobs, kisses his cheeks, his mouth, his chin. I'm John Mitchinson, the publisher of Unbound, the platform where readers crowdfund books they really want to read. And I'm Andy Miller, author of The Year of Reading Dangerously, and today making her backlisted debut as a guest, though not as an author we have discussed and admired because we did that a few weeks ago. That's a, What a strange coincidence. Is the writer Tessa Hadley. Hello, Tessa Hadley. Hello, Tessa.

Lovely to be here. Thank you for joining us today. Tessa has published eight novels, including The Past, Late in the Day and most recently Free Love, and three collections of short stories. She publishes short stories regularly in The New Yorker and reviews for The Guardian and the London Review of Books. She was awarded a Wyndham Campbell Prize for Fiction and the Hawthorne Prize in 2016 and the Edge Hill Prize in 2018. And she was the chair of judges recently of the Rathbones Folio Prize. How was that experience this year? My favourite prize, that one.

Yeah, we love that prize. It's my favourite prize too. So it was lovely. It's quite daunting, as you can imagine, when 80 books arrive in their boxes. But I had two lovely fellow judges and it was funny as well as everything else with some of the ones which shall be nameless, which were our less favoured books. We had fun with those. And then we had even more and much more rewarding fun, of course, with the ones we loved. And it just seemed an incredibly good year. I don't know whether that's just how it feels when you when you have a good spread of books and read them together but it seemed like it was really was quite hard to choose except that in the end it wasn't hard I mean I accidentally read all of the shortlist well I never did that I mean I sort of read six

of the half a dozen of the books already and then I just thought I'm gonna these were all good so I'm going to read the other two I haven't read. So thank you very much. Fabulous. The book that we're here to discuss is The Death of the Heart by the Anglo-Irish novelist Elizabeth Bowen. First published in the UK by Victor Galantz in 1938 and in the US by Knopf in the following year,

it received rapturous reviews on publication and still regularly features in lists of the greatest 20th century novels. Focused on Portia, a recently orphaned 16-year-old who moves in with her half-brother and his wife and proceeds to fall in love with Eddie, who Bowen describes as a bright little cracker that, pulled hard enough, goes off with a loud bang. That bang echoes disastrously through Portia's life.

And the book delivers one of the most original and painful accounts of adolescence ever written. Anyway, before we brave the cold and knock on the door of two Windsor Terrace, Andy, what have you been reading this week? Well, I'm finally going to talk about a book that I read a few months ago and

really, really liked. It's called wreck Jericho's raft and the Art of Being Lost at Sea. It's by an artist called Tom de Fresten and it's published by Granter. And I read this book because I was asked to do an event with Tom at the Fathersham Literary Festival a few months ago. And events are funny things. Sometimes they are OK and sometimes they are a bit dull and occasionally they are incredible and something really happens in the room

and the 20 or 30 people there who witness it really take it away with them and think about it forever and this event with Tom was one of those. I really liked the book, and I'll say why in a moment. But during the event, Tom, who is a visual artist and a writer, we projected The Raft of the Medusa, the painting by Jericho, behind him. It hangs in the Louvre of course and will be students of 80s pop culture will know it because it was parodied on the cover of rum sodomy in the lash by the pogues and also it's the centerpiece of julian barnes's novel in ten and a half chapters

but i said to tom okay here's this painting that you're obsessed with. Just talk me through it. And the 10 minutes that followed, improvised by him, were some of the most illuminating and fascinating that I've ever seen happen in a book event or a lecture of any kind. To see that famous painting through the eyes of somebody who knows it so well and has the sensibility of an artist because they are an artist was revelatory to me. And actually, the book delivers that same experience, albeit in a longer format over the course of a few days. It's almost like it's several fascinating books bound into one. It's a biography of a world-famous painting. It's an analysis of Jericho's creative process by an artist. It's a memoir of Tom de Freston's personal trauma.

And it's a journal of a friendship but actually what i think it struck me as being about a tom's own attempt to reconcile himself and the world outside himself what's happening in the world in his art and if you know the painting and you know the history of the painting, you'll understand why The Wrath of the Medusa fits all those categories I've just listed. It was a vast, symbolic attempt to create a current affairs epic, and it was a failure when it was exhibited in paris and then it was brought over to england where it was hung in piccadilly circus rather like a freak show where you would queue up pay you or however many bob it was, to look at this extraordinary, enormous, there are no paintings like this in the world.

Also, I will say about the book, it has two incredible plot twists. I can't say what they are, but it's not the sort of book you think would have plot twists. But there are points where I went, no, no, no, no, that can't happen. It's just wonderful, wonderful. Sounds brilliant, I have to say. So I'm just going to read a little tiny bit from the beginning of chapter eight,

which is called Emergence. And I think this gives you a flavour of it. At the centre of the raft lies a darkness. Hidden in the gloomy shadows of the billowing, swirling sail at the base of the mast are two figures, almost lost from sight. They are not afforded the same light or space as the rest of the cast, being cut off from the bright theatricality and quasi-religious glow of the main cast. These figures live or cling to life in the gloaming, a cave-like pocket of space. It is as if they belong to an altogether different surroundings, separated from the others in a realm beyond hope, one of pure anguish despair. One of the figures is in profile,

lent up against the unside scene of the mast, at the deepest point of the group. It is hard to decipher his appearance or race. A shadow has climbed up across his back, veiling his head and consuming it. Is this the shadow self? Not just of that now lost individual, but of the whole raft, the whole of France or Europe, the whole of humanity, a figure left to live in the margins, to carry the burden and weight of the repressed troubles of the raft, and by extension humankind. The second figure sits on the other side of the mast, emerging into view out of the shadow, on close inspection decipherable, a spectre of utter dejection and angst. Both hands grasp the sides of his head, while his eyes and mouth, barely visible,

are contorted into a picture of existential worry. He is reminiscent of one of the souls thrown from the boat to damnation in Michelangelo's Last Judgment. He stares into nothingness as if he is contemplating the hellscape the raft has become. These two figures lie almost alone in this dark heart of the painting, fetal in their loss and despair. There is something else hidden in the windswept shadows and folds, and another face emerges. Two pitch black horizontal marks counter the diagonal and vertical folds. They read like the large eye and nostril of a face, perhaps more of a skull. Once seen, it cannot be unseen. The head of the figure in deepest shadow now morphs into this new face, perhaps more of a skull. Once seen, it cannot be unseen. The head of the figure in deepest shadow

now morphs into this new face, becomes an open gaping mouth, a wide scream, a head the size of a cluster of bodies formed by the billowing wind, weather finding human form, cruelly screaming as it pushes the raft towards the waves. And then he goes on. I look again, and I'm less certain the head I saw is even there. From another angle, it seems to disappear. Were these lives coming from or being placed onto the painting? There are ghosts in the shadows which live in the gaps. We just have to look for them

and that's what the book's about the book the book is about constantly investigating the work of others and his own work to find what he has said what he was trying to say and what he ought to stay, say instead. It's brilliant, brilliant book. So that's wreck by Tom DeFreston and that's published by Granta. Uh, 1699. That's definitely on the list.

Amazing. I think, I think lots of people who listen to this podcast would enjoy that book. John Mitchinson, what have you been reading this week? Well, I've been reading a book that was published in 2009 called Nine Lives by Dan Baum. The subtitle is Mystery, Magic, Death and Life in New Orleans.

Fresh back from New Orleans. It's a book I read when I was there and I have to say it was a wonderful companion. It's a kind of Studs Terkley attempt to capture some of the spirit and culture of the city through looking at nine different people, a transsexual bar owner, a white cop, a woman whose aspiration is to get out of the poor life

she's born into and go to university, a repairman on the streetcar, and a woman who's married to one of the most influential of the extraordinary troops, tribes of Mardi Gras. There are 39 tribes of Mardi Gras Indians, which I became mildly obsessed with when I was there because they capture the mystery and the oddness and the brilliance, I think, of why New Orleans is such a robust culture. It's poised between two massive disasters,

the flood of 1965 and the flood of Hurricane Katrina in 2005, both of which would have destroyed, I think, most places. And it's written in 2009, so it's not clear at the end of the book here whether New Orleans is going to sort of pull itself together and recover, which I have to say, as of last week, it really does seem to have done. And a lot of the reason for that is that the culture goes beyond just music and food. It's an extraordinary place. And if you're even remotely interested in how to write great oral history

in the Studs turkle kind of style this is a really exemplary piece dan bam new yorker writer he was sent down to cover uh katrina after it happened and this is done so well he says rather kind of insouciantly at the beginning he says don't worry if for the first 50 pages or so you can't remember who's who these chapters were written to be enjoyed as individual stories. Everybody will fall into place eventually. In other words, be a little bit New Orleans about it. Don't stress over achieving anything. Just have a good time. It will all work out in the end. It really does. I'm going to read you a little bit and then we'll crack on. So this is Joyce Montana, who's married to Tutti Montana, who is

the big chief of the Yellow Pocket Hunters tribe. And he has a really important role in New Orleans history, the reason which will become apparent from this reading. She asked him early on how it came to be that black men dressed up as Indians on Mardi Gras Day. She'd heard the standard explanations, of course, that it started as a way to honor the Indians who'd taken and escaped slaves during the bad days, that it started as a way for blacks to evade

the prohibition against their participating in Mardi Gras. But she wanted to hear it from him. He'd really know. His answer made her love him all the more. I don't know, he said simply. They were doing it before I got here. I only know I love it. said simply. They were doing it before I got here. I only know I love it. On their living room mantle was a forest of framed photos. In the oldest, a 15-year-old Tootie and his uncle Bicate wore bearded tunics, baggy suede trousers, and for headdresses, sadly drooping strings of turkey feathers. They looked like Indians in an old black and white western. Tootie hated those suits. They wouldn't do what he wanted them to do, he told Joyce early in their courtship. And what was that, she asked him. He only shook his head for a long time. He

didn't answer that question. Then one day he told her he wanted to stop the fighting. Joyce had snorted and flapped her hand. To her, it seemed the whole point of being an Indian was the fighting. For years, it was the same. After every Mardi Gras and St. Joseph's night, Tutti would walk in with his suit cut up and bruises all over his face. The battlefield always seemed to be the little pontoon bridge over the canal at Forth and Rochebleu, the one they called the Magnolia. Some would start with the Humba Humba, the Creole bow-down challenge, and it was on. Joyce had often asked why they had to cross that bridge, and Tutti's explanation was always infuriatingly the same. Indians go where they like. It made her crazy. Tootie always blamed the suits. If a man put more of himself into his suit, he said, he wouldn't

need to fight. Every year he went down to Circle Food Store to see the man who slaughtered the fowl, got his turkey feathers and made another suit. And every year he'd come home from Mardi Gras bloody. Then came the year he didn't go by the circle for feathers. Instead, he'd taken three buses out to a costume and hobby shop in Metairie and come home with a shopping bag full of garish feathers and bright, crazy orange God never intended a bird to be. Another bag had beads and sparkly sequins and a mind-boggling array of colours and sizes. Joyce had peeked under the rug when he wasn't looking. All the money was gone. Tootie had set to work right then, with a bruise from the Mardi Gras humbug still fresh on his cheekbone. He'd used half-egg cartons, lifting a flap in the apron of the costume, wedging an egg carton under

it so that it pushed out a dazzling grid of beads. A three-dimensional suit, he called it. His father had dreamed of such a suit. This suit, he told her, was going to make them stop fighting with the gun and the knife and start fighting with needle and thread. Tutu had always been careful to put his suit in progress away when people came to call, but with a three-dimensional orange suit, he became obsessed with secrecy. Nobody could pass through the door until he had every piece of the suit packed away. He'd go over every rug and sofa cushion so that not a trace of bright orange feathers showed

anywhere. The suit was so bright, it was painful to look at under the harsh kitchen light bulb. The headdress, Tutti called it a crown, radiated in every direction with a snake rising from its middle. Pirouetting in the kitchen, Tootie had become a man of beaded flame. No vestige of the Hollywood Indian remained. It had worked just as Tootie hoped. He'd come home unbruised that year. His suit had struck the others blind, and they started taking after him. Nobody made those tired old blanket and turkey feather suits anymore. Everybody came out in colours. It took Boku work to make a suit that could stand up to Tuti's, and nobody wanted to work all year and

take a chance of having a suit cut up and bloodied by some knucklehead with a broken beer bottle. For his part, Tuti made it his mission to stay ahead of everybody else. The green suit, the white suit, the pink suit. Year after year, each was more beautiful, more elaborate, more extreme than the last. Oh, that's terrific. Sentences, everyone. Sentences. It's a really, really good book about culture and how cities renew themselves. It's really recommended.

What's it called? It's Nine Lives, Dan Baum, and culture and how cities renew themselves. It's really recommended. What's it called? It's Nine Lives, Dan Baum, and it's published by Random House. And it's in print? It is in print. Oh, there we go. We'll be back in just a sec. Would you or I, as readers, be drawn into a novel, implicated with what may be its other issues at all,

if our interest was not pegged to the personalities and the outlook and the actions of the people whom we encounter inside the story. They are the attractive element in the book. This being so, which comes first, actually, into the mind of the novelist when he begins to work? The people or characters or the plot? Don't think it's strange when I say or the plot. Don't think it's strange when I say that the plot comes first,

that the actual idea or outline of a book is there, the possibilities of a situation. And then the novelist thinks, what would be the kind of person who would perform such an action? What would be the other kind of person who would react in a particular way? I think to myself, I need a proud man, or I need a woman so idiotically romantic in temperament that she will do unwise things. Oh, I need, perhaps, an almost excessively innocent or ignorant young person.

Tessa, an almost excessively ignorant or innocent young person. My little alarm went off then. Yes, she's got to be thinking about Portia then, who's the heroine of Death of the Heart. But what an extraordinary extract that is. I mean, it does remind us of how long ago the world of these books existed because in voiced like that it feels like a vanished world but written sentences are so beautifully fluent that we can read them and hear them in our in our own way in our own lives can't we and actually there's no such barriers to reading her on the page whereas listening to that voice it just takes a little while and then you get used to it i think she's very she's trying really hard isn't she remembering she has that stammer it's taking her an effort to

to speak to the microphone and so on but it's she she didn't record she didn't record her own audio books that's uh that's true she did they would have been long they would they would it's from a talk called truth and Fiction, which she gave for the BBC in October 1956. We're going to hear another bit later on. But she was very much the public intellectual in that period, wasn't she? I mean, there is a lot of her broadcast work out there.

They've even published books of transcriptions of things that she did. I think the first thing we should say to listeners if they don't know Elizabeth Bowen is she was very prominent in her own lifetime wasn't she? And I love that in her that she is on the one hand I suppose you'd have to say a highbrow writer and a writer hugely ambitious for her art. It's as complex and sophisticated as can be, and yet always an absolute determination to touch earth, to communicate widely, which you can hear in the very thing she's arguing there, because she isn't making some modernist, alienated account

of what fiction is. She's saying first story. And what is story? Well, we immediately need to look for the characters. I mean, it's like being back down in the creative mud, making the primeval forms of fiction, which she's sort of at once so approachable and yet so ambitious and so complex.

And I love that meeting in her always of somebody who wants to talk to everybody about everything but isn't going to in any way limit what she has to say to make it easy. John, have you read The Death of the Heart before? No, and I'd read very little Bowen before, although she was on some of the stories really, but I'd never read a novel. So that's such a backlisted moment,

but I've got another favourite novel now. I could not believe how compelling this book was and how original and how, yeah, I mean, yes, you can see that there are maybe connections to other writers of the period, Rosamund Lehmann, you know, later on you can feel that there's a connection with Elizabeth Taylor, but this book is Antonia White. It's so original.

You know, it's not a book you can read quickly. You really need to take it steadily. And her insights, you know, I didn't feel there was a dull or half-baked thought or sentence in the whole book. And the other thing is it's a pain how how do you make it a page turner how do you make a given given the sort of this in a way the slightness of the of you know teenage girl living in a house with her with her half brother and wife and then

goes on holiday and comes back that's pretty much that's right that's about it but it's those final those final pages which i read read again earlier today while sitting in the airport waiting to be escorted out of i mean just had me i mean it's not exactly in tears just in sheer admiration of the of of the of the the brilliance of her control. And finally hearing that voice, she's saying this is somebody who really, really, going back to sentences, who really delivers at a sentence level,

but also has the skills to make a plot. Brilliant. So loved it. Tessa, I was really keen when you mentioned this as a possible backlisted, I think I basically said yes let's do it immediately and there are two reasons for that first is um i know and i'm going to ask you in a minute you have a lifetime literally a lifetime's experience of reading bone i'm going

to want to talk to you about that but also um so my first experience of reading lizabone was about five years ago and i mentioned it on this podcast and long-term listeners I I fool it even as I was doing I was thinking this is a hostage to fortune and so it's proved everyone so I'd never read any Bowen and I read um the novel that follows this one the heat of the day and I could not get on with it at all. I found the prose so extreme, so contorted, that I couldn't find my way into it at all. And it's talked about in the same breath as The End of the Affair by Graham Greene is a great British wartime novel of, you know know psychology and betrayal but you could not find two books more unlike one another in how they deliver their prose and um but as as time has gone on i've thought as i try to that wasn't elizabeth bone's fault that was my fault and i was hoping you would help me out of that and indeed you have because this

has been a revelatory for me do you hadn't read this other work I hadn't read this either I've read several other novels over the last few years and so I feel I've really warmed up to her yeah as I sent you a wonderful essay in the LRB. I sense you, tell us about your experience of first discovering her and then the years that you've spent reading her. Well, it really was an accident when I promoted myself to adult books in the local library. I can't really remember, but I think about 11 or 12, something like that. I went up the three sacred

steps into the adult book section and as I have written about in that LRB piece I especially I had no idea we had we had books at home but we weren't really a an initiated bookish family we were always reading but but I didn't have any clues as to where to start. And so I went for long series, uniform series, because I loved Anne of Green Gables and Swallows and Amazons, so this seemed to me a good... So I ended up reading all kinds of extraordinary things,

which I've never read again, like Compton Mackenzie, like Hugh Walpole, then, and among them, Elizabeth Byrne, which I now have no memory of except knowing I read it. Maybe that's a backlisted future episode and maybe it isn't. I don't know. It might not be worth going there. Who knows? I love the illustrations in the little uniform volumes of the Elizabeth Bowen books that they had in my local library. There was something, they were a doorway into the books for me, as I think with apprentice readers in those days, that was often the case. I remember reading Dickens, and the pictures really helped. And I read those books, and I have such a sensuous, vivid memory of reading them, in that I hadn't got a clue what was going on. I mean, I didn't know what Ireland was. I can remember reading the last September.

But what why why was there any hostility between the people who lived in the big house and the people burying guns in the shrubbery? I didn't know. I didn't know who the black and tans were. So I was you know, I didn't know how people like that lived. They dressed for dinner. What did that mean? Were they wearing their pyjamas all day or whatever? I know from my own experience that you can love writing which you don't properly understand. In fact, I suspect it's always that way around, a little bit like what you've described, Andy. You read at first hostile and in a fog and you just see bright sparkly things shining out at you and you either you don't or you do you rise to them and you expand to them and something signals back to you that this effort you're making is worth it that it's it's worth the candle. And I had, I suppose, difficult writing when you start it.

It isn't like you're just initiated at once and aha, how clever, how brilliant. I understand that you completely bemused by difficult sentences, but it promises you that fiction can be as complicated and thick with meaning as life. can be as complicated and thick with meaning as life. Obviously, already you know life is thick and complicated and impenetrable and impossible to understand when you're 13 or 14. So when you come across that prose, even though you're not there yet, it answers to your perceptions. That's so interesting.

What you've just described reminds me of my experience with the film Phantom Thread, which came out about five years ago, which I know. I mean, if you're regular listeners, you know, I feel my love. I went to see it at the cinema. I hated it. Three days later, I was still thinking about it. So I went back to see it again. Yeah, that's the same thing. And I feel that might be my relationship to Bowen. Tessa, you're so right. The idea that

you can't let your own taste, your own instant taste be a gatekeeper. You have to kind of just let these things soak and then perhaps come back to them. I wrote her off. I thought she was just another Compton Mackenzie and not worth considering. But then I came back to it in my 30s and, ah, it was just, it was lovely. It was like those foolish things where people meet some old boyfriend on Friends Reunited and then, except this time it really worked. It worked. Ah, it was a joy.

I just found she was, she really is the writer I need I think it seems mad to have a favorite writer and perhaps there isn't such a thing and there are so many there there are of course others but something about what John described about the descriptions, the particularity and the stuff, the furniture, the thickness, the sensuousness, and yet so smart, so sophisticated, so clever. And it's that mixture of those two parts of life and parts of writing. I loved it when John said, there's not a sentence wrong in here. As a writer yourself, presumably we all as writers have, you know, crushes on the attitudes of other writers, particular writers.

And Bowen, I mean, for me, I don't know what you feel about this. Yeah. She was very friendly with both, at at different times with both Virginia Woolf and with Elizabeth Taylor the writer Elizabeth Taylor and to me she occupies a space between the two while deriving nothing from either Tessa how does she manage to be so uncompromising on one level yet so readable on another once you're acclimat readable on another. Once you're acclimatised, I would say, once you're acclimatised, it's a fascinating thing to do.

Yes, you need to learn to read her. But I think that's true of all good writers, isn't it? You need, they teach you how to read them. And you start off fumbling with their forms and their sentences and their tone. And then the more you read, the more you get it. I mean, it's so true with poetry, but it's actually just as true with novels. I mean, I suspect her not having done any kind of formal education really helps with something about her, that warmth and that appetite for life, just going straight in there, almost in the earlier stories, maybe not the very first collection, but certainly by the second collection. It's life she wants to write about. She is not deriving anything about her style or her sentences from study. And yet at the same time, she's so bright and so clever and such a reader

that she immediately, in order to express life, reaches for a very sophisticated form. So that's this blend of appetite with subtlety and sophistication. Tessa, I'm going to ask you to knock our socks off by reading us something by Elizabeth Bowen. And then I'm going to give you the equivalent of a blurb so that if you haven't read it, the novel, you can at least get the basics of it for the rest of the conversation. But please, can we hear some of this very particular and peculiar style?

And this is from very early on in The Death of the Heart where Portia, the young adolescent, is uncomfortably living with her sister-in-law Anna, her brother Thomas or her half-brother Thomas who isn't present in this scene. Here she's having tea with Anna and Anna's clever, dry novelist friend St Quentin. Getting up from the stool carefully, Portia returned her cup and plate to the tray. Then, holding herself so erect that she quivered, taking long, soft steps on the balls of her feet, and at the same time with an orphaned unostentation, she started making towards the door.

She moved crabwise, as though the others were a royalty, never quite turning her back on them. And they, waiting for her to be quite gone, watched. She wore a dark wool dress in Anna's excellent taste, buttoned from throat to hem and belted with heavy leather. The belt slid down her thin hips and she nervously gripped at it, pulling it up. The belt slid down her thin hips and she nervously gripped at it, pulling it up. Short sleeves showed her very thin arms and big, delicate elbow joints. Her body was all concave and jerkily fluid lines. It moved with sensitive looseness, loosely threaded together. Each movement had a touch of exaggeration as though some secret power kept springing out.

At the same time, she looked cautious, aware of the world in which she had to live. She was sixteen, losing her childish majesty. The pointed attention of St Quentin and Anna reached her like a quick tide or an attack. The ordeal of getting out of the drawing room tightened her mouth up and made her fingers curl, her wrists were pressed to her thighs. She got to the door, threw it ceremonially open, then turned with one hand on it, proudly ready to show she could speak again. But at once Anna poured out another cup of cold tea.

St Quentin flattened a wrinkle out of the rug with his heel. She heard their silence till she had shut the door. I just written down, these are the phrases I've written down. Yes. In Anna's excellent taste. Yes. These little bombs, these little verbal bombs with so much packed in them, like a quick tide. A cup of cold, even a cup of cold tea. Not a cup of tea, a cup of

cold tea. Not a cup of tea because somehow we, because it's cold, we know that Anna isn't pouring the tea because she wants tea. It's part of a punctuated dance between the three of them and that anguish of being 16 where your fingers curl up at the ends because you don't know how to get your body out of the room elbow joints not elbows elbow joints i mean she finds a way

every time to take the quotidian the kind of of lower middle class life, and to invest it with this kind of, I mean, I can only describe it. It's energy. There's something really alive in her language. And yet it's a book where you can put a shopping list. She actually has a shopping list in this book. She actually has a shopping list. Yeah. This is from an essay that was written in the early 1980s by Bowen's friend, the Irish writer, Sean O'Fallon.

And I'd ask you both what you think about this. I just thought this was so great. Every critic has made fun of Elizabeth Bowen's swanky vocabulary. This too is part of her longing to dissipate the actuality of the familiar. Hence her atmospheric rectory, he's quoting, unclouded amicability, phantasmagoric variety, bewildered gardens, sublimated Ingle Nook, and so on. Besides, although she has her

countless visual felicities, a girl stands up suddenly, quote, uncoiled like a spring for an armchair, or somebody gives somebody, quote, a doctor's look or quotes the sea mackerel blue swelling sleekly between breakwaters. She, as a rule, transfers feelings to our sensibilities rather than images to our eyes. He goes on to say, but is there actually a recognizable bone style as there is, say, a recognizable Jamesian style? One single style for so complicated so protein a personality she has to employ half a dozen styles to suit her varying responses to her various occasions there are the familiar domestic style that we all use the hectic style that uses all of us when we get overexcited the sibber, which we whisper over a coffee, glancing about less the victim

over here. The Impressionist style that is only for the most delicate artists to employ. The Waggish, which only a few command. The Moody style with which we address ourselves when alone and overcome. The Social, which requires a great deal of cold or amused observed experience. The Grand Duchess, which can also be disrespectfully called the fortnum and mason or the bond street or the ritzy style unless those places have all been taken over by lord 40 within the last couple of weeks or of all the styles that one that one which i feel she held most close to her heart and which again disrespectfully i call the bowen 707 or the takeoff style isn't it which lifts her into the

skies of her poet's imagination for her essential nature is not as has been so often asserted that of the social critic but but of the visionary. Yes, that's beautiful writing and lovely. What a great piece of analysis that is, actually. I mean, that's brilliant, Andy, because that's something that I think I really loved about it too, is that she can say, you know, experience isn't interesting until it begins to repeat itself. In fact, until it does to repeat itself in fact till it does that it is hardly experience but then she she puts in an adolescence diary then she gives you a kind of stream of consciousness of the brilliant match it the domestic she has none of the trace that i

always feel disfigures virginia wool's work of snob. She's really interested in all of the characters, of unlocking what makes the characters, even if those characters are disturbing, like Eddie. It's really extraordinary writing. Shall I give you a plot summary? Yeah, go on, it's a good idea. Because I feel like if listeners don't know this, then we have to help them out slightly.

Okay, so here's a review. There was no blurb on this novel when it was originally published. All it says on the jacket is Elizabeth Bowen's new novel, The Death of the Heart, by Victor Galant in 1938. But here's the original review that appeared in Country Life magazine in 1938, unsigned. Miss Bowen's new book, The Death of the Heart, is like one of Henry James's novels, the story of the awkward age, the record of a conflict between the innocent and the sophisticated. Portia, the daughter of a second marriage, comes to live with her half-brother Thomas Quain and his wife Anna in their house in Regent's Park. She's a schoolgirl of 16 and young for her awkward age and is no match for Anna and her set who are under vitalized rather than corrupt

Miss Bowen looking down upon her characters awards the moral black marks from the ineffective Thomas to the young parasite Eddie the brilliant child of an obscure home who frequented the Regent's Park house Eddie who quote gets off with people because he cannot get on with them sets out to possess himself of the child's heart. The plot hinges on the fact that Anna, who has housemaid's tricks, has found and read the diary. Portia is sent for a time to Anna's old governess, whose house on the southeast coast

is filled with young people whose social deficiencies are amusingly exploited by Miss Bowen. On her return, she learns that Anna has read her diary and that Eddie knows that it has been read. She rushes away to a Major Brutt, a gentle and ineffective creature who has intruded on Anna's set, a soldier who has dated like an old car. Quote, he was a 1914 to 1918 model

and there was no market for that make. And begs him to let her stay with him. The book ends with Major Brutt telephoning that Portia will come back to Thomas if Thomas and Anna do the right thing. It is not certain that they are aware what the right thing is. The old housemaid, Matchell, who goes with the furniture, is sent in a taxi to bring her home.

There is no climax and no violence in this remarkable and singular book. Summarised, the thread of the story is slender only the desperation of a child who has quotes the loving nature in vacuo but the book is absorbing and miss bowen writes with sustained brilliance and power no worry about spoilers in reviewing in those days. I should have warned people, shouldn't I? I'm sorry about that. Can I just share with you, this is the end of the review that appeared in the Manchester Guardian at the same time. And I'll ask you, Tessa, what you think about this. Of the power of this book in its intense and impartial ability to wring out the last drop of innocent pain there can be no question many who can address themselves to its perusal without spiritual repugnance will properly regard it as a work of high literary importance others like the present reviewer while

fully conceding its strength and the unfailing grip in the writing will think that it contravenes aristotle's canon which laid it down that there are certain things too painful to be the subject of fiction. That's a wonderfully squeamish review. Although, you know, quite right about how, although nothing, nobody actually sleeps with anybody, although Anna's obviously slept with her old lover before she was married. But Eddie doesn't take advantage of Portia.

No, there's very little sex in the book, although it's throbbing with sexual passion. Why is that? Why has she made that decision? I found that totally fascinating. Because of Eddie. Because that is what he's like. And it isn't because he isn't sexual. Obviously, he's used his sexuality to some extent in terms of making his way and being charming. But no, I think she thinks he wouldn't have, that there's some bit of decency in him.

No, decency is completely there. There's an imaginative refusal to do that to her, I think. This will be controversial for Andy at least, but the scenes between Eddie and Portia had, at times for me, almost a Laurentian quality to them. You know, that sort of... Oh, did you? That kind of...

I don't... I'm really... Okay. She's showering, the bit you read, John, she's showering those kisses on him and he's sort of trying to find words for the discrimination that makes him not... She wants him to make love to her at that point. That's what's going on.

You know, I know we may disagree andy about lawrence in in those scenes but i've made that when lawrence is at his best he was brilliant at doing that between that that thing between the different expectations of men and women in a particular scene yes i feel that she does this also but without hectoring without without sort of having some grand you know kind of sort of suave loins of darkness type kind of philosophical thing. I've still got De Profundis on the brain because I read, because this is the last episode we did, because I read Eddie and thought, oh, this is really interesting.

This is what the Wildean wit and epigram had been reduced to by the time Bohm was writing that character. He seems informed as a personality by some half-baked idea of what it means to be a daring young man. But without the... Courage isn't right. He's almost trying to rid himself of scruples but can't. You know,

that's, that's. I read the final part of this, the novel this time differently. And I found myself on several occasions taking Eddie's side and finding that Portia was actually a nightmare, which I sort of think was more what Bowen originally intended and that she got misread. Of course, Portia is not just a nightmare.

She's also the way we feel the whole book for a lot of the time. And she's immensely sympathetic, but she's hysterical and ignorant, too ignorant. She doesn't know what she's doing fatal innocence yeah what she does to major brut near the end yes yeah it's terrible absolutely what she does to anna i think the book is very sympathetic to anna what she does to thomas it's very you know i think the book sympathies are really evenly distributed and lots of it's with Portia, but by no means is it a story about innocence betrayed by a wicked world. It's partly about how innocence is like having a landmine in your house. Why is this novel called The Death of a Heart?

I don't know. It's really odd, isn't it? Whose heart, what death? Yes. And is it a quote? It has a quotey sound, but I don't I don't recognize it. I think that I read somewhere that she regretted it, that she felt that everybody was writing to her about the death of their heart. I mean, I guess it's it's sort of H.A.R.T., isn't it? I've never that's obvious, maybe, but I've never thought that before. It's the death of the deer who's being pursued in the hunt.

And you can kind of transfer that onto loss of innocence. Yeah. Well, she's also, her background is, as is that of, she grew up in Ireland, of course,

as the resident of a big house, quote unquote, Bowen's court. And we have a clip here. This is from a 1985 Channel 4 documentary. Three sisters, Anglo-Irish, of a similar generation, maybe slightly younger than Bowen, but only 10 years or so younger, who are reminiscing here about what life was like

growing up in the big house after the events of the early 20th century in Ireland. And this, I think, will give you a sense of Bowen's split identity. that seems to me a really important part of her voice, her artistic approach. Mummy's mother was English. Mummy's father was Irish. His father was Irish and his father before him was Irish. And then our father was English, so we feel that both. Our father was killed at the end of the First World War. The very end.

Ardfey House was still standing when the three sisters returned, but their inheritance didn't amount to much. It was beyond repair. No, we've never been able to live in the big house. We've lived up here, in this little place, which was the steward's house. The step-grandmother, she left it empty. And so everybody, you know what happens if a house is left empty.

Well, they just came and just rampaged over everything and took everything back, the doorway, on boats and boats and chandeliers and silver things and everything. That old piano we've got, that was found years afterwards in a barber shop in Galway. And Mummy couldn't do anything about it. Oh well we were quite used to not having any money, actually. Yes, but you had an awful time. I have turkeys in the kitchen. Sorry, Mr. Trump. May I borrow the cat basket?

Cat basket? Cat basket. You're in Ireland, remember? that's my find of the year that documentary that is your find of the year if you look on youtube anglo-irish sisters channel 4 documentary you'll find it it's absolutely incredible that documentary. That is your find of the year. If you look on YouTube, Anglo-Irish Sisters Channel 4 documentary, you'll find it. It's absolutely incredible. But that, Tessa, that is the world in which Elizabeth Bone grew up. Yes, yes. And there's her first novel. No, it's not her first novel, maybe her second, The Last September. The Last September. Yes, first novel maybe her second the last september last september yes that's all set in one of those big houses i i am going to deliver a spoiler on the last page the big house is burnt to the ground

that's how it it ends with the gate clanging open yeah to the fire but in the middle it's it's got exactly that wit that those three sisters have there that dryness and and some of their English visitors at some point sort of remark um well your your your tenants are that you know they seem to be revolting against you and Lady Naylor thinks to herself yeah but your English tenants are too stupid to know they're being exploited you know the sort of lovely mockery which is which clearly arose in some part out of the precariousness of that that protestant gentry class in Ireland that that feeds so directly into Bowen's perspectives and then of course when she moved across her father went mad and her mother and she moved you know know, literally had to be put in an asylum.

It's very tragic. And her mother and she moved to England and they lived in these funny places like seal in the middle of this novel. English villas in the seaside sort of trap gentility. villas in the seaside sort of trapped gentility and what she's brilliant about when she writes about that move herself is that to her that was exotic it wasn't that Ireland was exotic and England was ordinary and I think it gave her an eye that made everything exotic wherever you went things were weird because they are weird unless you're used to them. And that you can feel the sentences. You can feel the weirdery of what she sees. Sean O'Fallon says in that piece, he says, I once when I was staying at Bones Court, I once intruded on her while she was working and I had expected that she would turn round

in a rather raffish way, having easily, you know, dispatched another 500 words of Bon Mo. When she turned round, being interrupted, there were beads of perspiration on her forehead. You know, and for me, I think this is where the strength of the prose lies. There's not only the words not lazily chosen, it's not even about the sentence here, is it? It's about, we were picking up on phrases, each phrase, each carefully weighed phrase.

She's straining to express what she perceives, and that is a huge effort. And then the great writers who make the greatest effort translate it into limpid effortless sentences but but the strain to to stare to even in a comic scene especially in a comic scene at those old ladies in the library and work out why it is that they not only accept Daphne they applaud her intolerance of literature. The strain of comprehension and perception is enormous,

but then it results in that beautiful flow, that ease that makes us all fall about laughing. This is Bowen talking about dialogue in novels, not just her own dialogue, but as she goes on, she develops a thought which seems to me really contemporary and I'd be fascinated to hear what you make of this. But look now, is there not an emergence of dialogue of a different kind, stylised, formalised? I call to your attention the use of dialogue in two of our immediately contemporary authors, Henry Green and Ivy Compton Burnett.

In these we have a dialogue which is not representative of the persons, which does not aim in its own way to sound either realistic or spontaneous. All the characters in a Burnett novel speak, as you will know, more or less alike, young and old, powerful and humble. Dialogue is used as, in a parallel way, Henry Green does use it, apparently as an end in itself. And yet, nothing in the novel is an end in itself.

The novel is the end and aim of the author. Are we to take it that this change in the manner and use of a dialogue denotes or symbolizes some change in the form of the novel and still more in the intentions of the novel in our day? Does it mark the ending of a study of individualized character, the individual for its own sake as a theme? Are we going back to the symbolic, the masked speaker? Is this turning away from naturalism, A lapse or suspension of interest in single people and a greater sense on our part of the importance of crisis or the meaning of group emotion and group feeling?

Do we think more of kinds of people? What a brilliant critic she is. God almighty, yeah. Isn't that incredible? Yeah. I listened to that and I think many listeners, I hope, will have felt the same thing. You start the going home, she's speaking like that.

And as it goes on, you're thinking, wait a minute, this is totally contemporary. The articulation of what she's talking about, which we've talked about on this show before. That's absolutely brilliant. The individual versus types of people. That's where we are. That's exactly what's happening.

And imagine that in the 1970s she was not on the English literature curriculum. We should have a feminist moment of just saying that was outrageous. But she was on the Booker Prize judging panel that gave John Berger's G the Booker Prize. Did she? Yeah. Wow. Fantastic.

And Tessa, what do we make of her late novels? I really love the last one, Eva Trout. It's actually quite a favourite of mine. It's very odd. She does, obviously, she becomes out of sync as any old writer does with her era. That's just what happens. And if you're clever like Penelope Fitzgerald,

you decide to write about 1913 and 1780 because you sort of know that you won't know about your own time because you're elderly and that happens at some point. So there is some sense that the last two or three books are odd then they don't quite have the complete kind of wedge into the center of life that this one does for me um and i'm not mad about the little girls but it's i have to say at the level of the centers and the paragraph it's superb it's so worth reading. The stories, there's one marvellous late story called Day in the Dark,

which is perhaps my favourite of all of hers. That's really late. Seems as if you can go on doing short stories. There's a lovely collection called The Mulberry Tree, which came out maybe 15, 20 years ago off her non-fiction, I think edited by Hermione Lee. I have it here.

It transcribes some of her bbc sort of we'd now call them creative writing lectures and i used to use them with my students when i was teaching creative writing and the stuff on dialogue is superb how nobody should ever talk about the plot or about how they're feeling or what their situation is they should do you know they should talk they should say the strange things people actually say to each other right off the point. There's a fantastic notes on writing a novel. Yeah.

And you can just dip into it anywhere. There's something fantastic. The novelist's perceptions of his characters take place in the course of the actual writing of the novel. And to an extent, the novelist is in the same position as the reader, but his perceptions should be always just in advance. I mean, so obviously very true. Yeah.

The ideal way of presenting character is to invite perception. Invite perception. That's what those sentences, Portia going out of the room with orphaned unostentation. That invites perception, but you have to work, don't you? Perception works as we read those two words. Right. And sadly, that's where we must leave our discussion huge thanks to tessa for suggesting such a rich and rewarding novel to nicky birch for pulling all our threads into one

and to unbound for all the jigsaw puzzles you can download all 163 previous episodes of backlisted plus follow links clips and suggestions for further reading by visiting our website backlisted.fm and we're always pleased if you contact us on Twitter or Facebook, and now in sound and pictures on Instagram too. You can also show your love directly by supporting our Patreon at www.patreon.com forward slash backlisted.

We aim to survive without paid for advertising. Your generosity helps us do that. All patrons get to hear Backlisted episodes early. And for roughly the price of a coffee and a plate of chocolate biscuits at the Corona Cafe, lot listeners get two extra lock listed a month. Our very own Seaside Villa where we three roll back the carpet and dance to the gramophone at full volume, smoke our own Waikiki, smoke players cigarettes and rattle on about the books, films, shows and music we've enjoyed in the previous fortnight.

A lot of listeners also get to hear their names read out on the show as a mark of our thanks and appreciation. And this week's roll call is... Mackenzie Jean. Sorry we got your name wrong the last time, Mackenzie. William Thijs, Alice Tomlinson, Mark Kennedy,

Michael Jopling, Beans, Steve Daly. And we're also delighted to welcome Matthew Sims to our Guild of Master Storytellers, the highest tier in the backlisted firmament. Thank you all. Thank you, everyone. For your generosity. And to all our patrons, thanks for enabling us to continue to do what we love and enjoy and, you know, make long rambling programmes about Elizabeth Bowen. Tessa, I've got a question for you. Should readers start with The Death of the Heart? I think it's a good place to start unless you love short stories, in which case start perhaps with the short stories.

She's one of those rare writers who does both sublimely well. Yeah, our friend Andrew Mayle put me on the right track by recommending The Demon Lover, which is the short stories that come out at the end of the Second World War. Personally, I thought that's an extraordinary collection. And you've edited a selection yourself, haven't you? I've edited Selected in Vintage, which, of course, happens to be full of wonderful, my favourite stories as I chose them. That's so fortunate. And really wickedly, really wickedly, I didn't put any ghost stories in

except The Demon Lover. I thought people would object if I didn't put that in because it's probably her most unapologised. I'm not a great fan of ghost stories, so they're missing from this. But she's marvellous and everyone in here is a gem. We'll put a link to that on the website. We certainly will.

For sure. And there'll be links to everything that we've heard today as well on the website too. Well, thanks very much, everybody. It would be inappropriate not to leave you with our queen, Elizabeth Bowen, on her platinum jubilee. So keep listening. The last word will go to her, and we'll see you next time.

Thanks, everyone. Bye. Thank you. I leave you, in closing, with this suggestion. People are the novel's concern, and with people are the novel's concern and with people the novel will remain involved though who they are and what parts they are to play may change

with time and the showing may change accordingly If you prefer to listen to Backlisted without adverts you can sign up to our Patreon. It's www.patreon.com forward slash backlisted. As well as getting the show early, you get a whole two extra episodes of what we call Locklisted, which is Andy, me and Nicky talking about the books, music and films we've enjoyed in the previous fortnight.