Progressive Writer’s Association

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Progressive Writer’s Association

April 23, 2006

The radical muse

Dawn

Progressive Writer’s Association

Progressive Writer’s Association

Progressive Writer’s Association

This book documents the rise of the Progressive Writer’s Association, its period of ascendancy, its crucial role in the struggle for independence and its unflagging spirit of resistance against injustice

Ali Husain Mir and Raza Mir write about the emerging of a movement that grew into the Progressive Writer’s Association

On the evening of November 24, 1934, the atmosphere at London’s Nanking Hotel must have been electric. A group of young Indian intellectuals were engaged in an intense discussion over a draft document, that had been circulated by the convenor of the meeting, Sajjad Zaheer. The document was audacious in its scope, for it sought to articulate a manifesto for the future of Indian literature.

Some of the faces in the meeting were to become familiar personalities. Jyotirmaya Ghosh would rise to prominence as a key figure in Bengali literature. Mulk Raj Anand had already begun to gain global prominence as an English novelist. Mohammad Din Tasir was to go on to become the founder of the magazine Nairang-i-Khayaal in Lahore. The British writer Ralph Fox was attending in the capacity of an adviser. The fog of history has blurred the names of other attendees, but the institution that was emerging through this meeting was destined to majestically straddle the traditions of Indian literature in general and Urdu poetry in particular for a long time.

The fact that this meeting was being held in London was no accident. Rather, it was a curious outcome of the history of the colonial experience of India. Many among the gathering were students in England, who had been sent by their affluent parents to develop professional skills in areas such as law and medicine. Yet, their experiences with colonial servitude back home were fresh in their minds, and this smouldering energy was readily spurred by the emerging anti-fascist and socialist currents all over Europe. The formation of the United Front in France, the protest against the persecution of writers like Georgi Dimitrov, and the workers’ rebellion in Austria in the early 1930’s, had galvanised the attendees of the Nanking meeting. In their minds, the literary manifesto that was being discussed would serve to lay the framework for the emergence of a new, emancipated identity.

This gathering had its genesis in an interesting episode that had taken place in 1932 with the publication of a book in India called Angaare (Embers), a set of 10 short stories written by Sajjad Zaheer, Rashid Jahan, Mahmuduzzafar and Ahmed Ali, which had attacked a whole range of sacred cows. The stories dealt with prevailing familial and sexual mores, the decadence and hypocrisy of social and religious life in contemporary India, and took more than one potshot at religious orthodoxy, attacking it with what Ahmed Ali later referred to as “the absence of circumspection”.

Within months of its publication, the book generated an uproar within Muslim circles, and was condemned by a variety of organisations as being “obscene” and “blasphemous”. The All India Shia Conference, for example, passed a resolution in 1933 sharply condemning “the heart-rending and filthy pamphlet called Angaare ... which has wounded the feelings of the entire Muslim community by ridiculing God and His prophets and which is extremely objectionable from the standpoint of both religion and morality.” Responding to this outcry, the Police Department of the United Provinces promulgated an order on March 15, 1933 declaring “forfeited to his Majesty every copy of (the book) ... on the grounds that the said book contains matter the publication of which is punishable under Section 295A of the Indian Penal Code.”

The Angaare authors were unrepentant. Writing in the April 5, 1933 issue of The Leader, an Allahabad-based newspaper, Mahmuduzzafar’s article “Shall we submit to gagging?” declared:

The writers of this book do not wish to make an apology for it. They leave it to float or sink of itself. They only wish to defend the right of launching it and all other vessels like it ... They have chosen (to critique) the particular field of Islam not because they bear any “special” malice towards it, but because, being born into that particular society, they felt better qualified to speak for that alone ... Our practical purpose is the formation immediately of a league of progressive authors, which should bring forth similar collections from time to time, both in English and the various vernaculars of our country.

Undettered by the widespread criticism, Sajjad Zaheer, the leader of the Angaare group had set about trying to use the field of literature as a battering ram to break down the orthodox and conservative fortifications of Indian society. The Nanking Hotel gathering was a significant step in that direction.

By the end of the meeting, the attendees had resolved to formalise their group as an institution, which would be called the All India Progressive Writers’ Association (henceforth, the PWA). The PWA was to be based in India, and Sajjad Zaheer volunteered to give it institutional shape in the subcontinent.

Their experiences with colonial servitude back home were fresh in their minds, and this smouldering energy was readily spurred by the emerging anti-fascist and socialist currents all over Europe

By the middle of 1935, the final manifesto of the PWA was ready. Zaheer returned to India with the document and circulated it among prominent Indian literary figures. The manifesto found an immediate champion in Premchand, one of the most highly respected figures in Hindustani literature, who published its Hindi translation in the October 1935 issue of his journal Hans (Swan). Subsequently, the English version of the manifesto was published in the February 1936 issue of London’s Left Review. The text of the manifesto was as follows:

Radical changes are taking place in Indian society. Fixed ideas and old beliefs, social and political institutions are being challenged. Out of the present turmoil and conflict a new society is emerging. The spirit of reaction however, though moribund and doomed to ultimate decay, is still operative and is making desperate efforts to prolong itself.

It is the duty of Indian. writers to give expression to the changes taking place in Indian life and to assist in the spirit of progress in the country. Indian literature, since the breakdown of classical literature, has had the fatal tendency to escape from the actualities of life. It has tried to find a refuge from reality in spiritualism and idealism. The result has been that it has produced a rigid formalism and a banal and perverse ideology.

Witness the mystical devotional obsession of our literature, its furtive and sentimental attitude towards sex, its emotional exhibitionism and its almost total lack of rationality. Such literature was produced particularly during the past two centuries, one of the most unfortunate periods of our history, a period of disintegrating feudalism and of acute misery and degradation for the Indian people as a whole.

It is the object of our association to rescue literature and other arts from the priestly, academic and decadent classes in whose hands they have degenerated so long; to bring the arts into the closest touch with the people; and to make them the vital organs which will register the actualities of life, as well as lead us to the future.

While claiming to be the inheritors of the best traditions of Indian civilisation, we shall criticise ruthlessly, in its political, economic and cultural aspects, the spirit of reaction in our country and we shall foster through interpretive and creative work (with both native and foreign resources) everything that will lead our country to the new life for which it is striving. We believe that the new literature of India must deal with the basic problems of our existence today — the problems of hunger and poverty, social backwardness and political subjugation, so that it may help us to understand these problems and through such understanding help us to act.

With the above aims in view. the following resolutions have been adopted:

• The establishment of organisations of writers to correspond to the various linguistic zones of India; the coordinations of these organisations by holding conferences, publishing of magazines, pamphlets, etc.

• To cooperate with those literary organisations whose aims do not conflict with the basic aims of the association.

• To produce and translate literature of a progressive nature and of a high technical standard; to fight cultural reaction; and in this way, to further the cause of Indian freedom and social regeneration.

• To strive for the acceptance of a common language (Hindustani) and a common script (Indo-Roman) for India.

• To protect the interests of authors; to help authors who require and deserve assistance for the publication of their works.

• To fight for the right of free expression of thought and opinion.

The manifesto was unabashedly modernist and anti-religious in its tenor, and utilised a left-liberal vocabulary that was popular at that time. It sought to play an integrative role in the Indian literary landscape through the acceptance of a common language and script. It made a case for building international solidarities. Importantly, it emphasised realism, with its insistence that literature be used as a tool to display the “actualities of life”. Finally, despite the stridency of its tone, it sought to leave the door open for coalitions with other literary groups “whose aims did not conflict with the basic aims of the association.” The manifesto was an astute political document, and a highly ambitious one that sought to position the PWA as the harbinger of revolutionary changes in the literary landscape of India.

The publication of this manifesto had a huge impact, especially in Urdu literary circles. The ideas it espoused were, however, not entirely new. Just a year earlier, a young literary critic named Akhtar Husain Raipuri had published an essay called “Adab our Zindagi” (Literature and life), in which he had attempted to analyse the entire corpus of Urdu literature, and had denounced all works of fiction and poetry that did not directly link themselves to the material conditions of the society in which they were produced. Raipuri’s essay in some measure made the manifesto easier to sell to Urdu literary figures, just as Premchand’s support (and subsequent endorsements by the Hindi poets Sumitranandan Pant, Maithilisharan Gupt and Suryakant Tripathi ‘Nirala’) succeeded in broadening the horizon of the PWA’s influence.

Stalwarts of Indian literature like Mohammad Iqbal and Rabindranath Tagore also provided legitimacy to the PWA through their approval, and eventually Urdu poets like Hasrat Mohani, Josh Malihabadi, and Firaq Gorakhpuri also joined it, as did the Telugu poet Sri Sri, the Gujarati poet Umashankar Joshi, the Punjabi writer Gurbaksh Singh and the Marathi writer Anna Bhau Sathe. The PWA’s anti-colonialist reputation was enhanced and its credentials endorsed by the fact that the British government expressed its deep suspicion of the group. On September 7, 1936, the Home Secretary of India sent a private circular to relevant authorities, which read:

I am directed to address you in connection with an organisation known as the Progressive Writers’ Association ... The proclaimed aims of the association are comparatively innocent and suggest that it concerns itself solely with the organisation of journalists and writers and the promotion of interest in literature of a progressive nature. The inspiration however comes from ... organisations and individuals who are ... advocating policies akin to those of the communists ... I am desired to suggest therefore, that suitable opportunities may be taken to convey, preferably in conversations, friendly warnings about this association to journalists, educationists and others who may be attracted by its ostensible programmes.

It appeared that the PWA had perceptively tapped into the groundswell of a great upheaval in Indian society. The first all-India meeting of the PWA was held at Lucknow in 1936, and was presided over by Premchand, whose inaugural address “Sahitya ka uddeshya” (The purpose of literature) remains one of the most important documents of the movement. The manifesto of the association was reworked to make it more inclusive of those whose politics were not avowedly socialist. Further the demand for a common language and script for Indian literature was dropped, reflecting the political realities of the country’s multilingual structure.

The Hindi version of the manifesto also attempted to articulate a definition of “Progressive” which could accommodate a wide spectrum of views and attract as many people as possible, and included the following additional paragraph:

All those things which take us toward confusion, dissension, and blind imitation are conservative; also, all that which engenders in us a critical capacity, which induces us to test our dear traditions on the touchstone of our reason and perception, which makes us healthy and produces among us the strength of unity and integration, that is what we call Progressive.

From its very inception, the PWA had a group of committed socialists at its core but its larger membership was not limited to writers of any particular political persuasion. In fact, it was consciously opened out to include all writers who shared the manifesto’s basic commitments. The PWA thus functioned as an umbrella under which progressive writers of all stripes could find a place. The PWA understood its mission to be that of constructing a “united front” of writers against imperialism and reactionary social tendencies, and for a life-affirming art. For the longest time then, taraqqi-pasandi or “progressivism” in Urdu literature was justifiably identified with the PWA. Never before had writers across India been mobilised around a single platform so effectively, and in no previous movements had a literary school so redefined the terms of its creative output and its engagement with its society and times.

Excerpted with permission from A Celebration of Progressive Urdu Poetry: Anthems of Resistance By Ali Husain Mir and Raza Mir India Ink/Roli Books Pvt. Available with Liberty Books, Park Towers, Clifton, Karachi. Tel: 021-5832525 (Ext: 111) Website: www.libertybooks.com ISBN 81-86939-26-1 248pp. Indian Rs395

Ali Husain Mir and Raza Mir are university professors. They grew up in Hyderabad, India, on a steady diet of progressive Urdu poetry. They divide their time between India and the US

Base and Superstructure in Marxist Cultural Theory

Source: http://newleftreview.org/I/82/raymond-williams-base-and-superstructure-in-marxist-cultural-theory

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RAYMOND WILLIAMS
BASE AND SUPERSTRUCTURE IN MARXIST CULTURAL THEORY

Any modern approach to a Marxist theory of culture must begin by considering the proposition of a determining base and a determined superstructure. From a strictly theoretical point of view this is not, in fact, where we might choose to begin. [1] It would be in many ways preferable if we could begin from a proposition which originally was equally central, equally authentic: namely the proposition that social being determines consciousness. It is not that the two propositions necessarily deny each other or are in contradiction. But the proposition of base and superstructure, with its figurative element, with its suggestion of a definite and fixed spatial relationship, constitutes, at least in certain hands, a very specialized and at times unacceptable version of the other proposition. Yet in the transition from Marx to Marxism, and in the development of mainstream Marxism itself, the proposition of the determining base and the determined superstructure has been commonly held to be the key to Marxist cultural analysis.

Now it is important, as we try to analyse this proposition, to be aware that the term of relationship which is involved, that is to say ‘determines’, is of great linguistic and real complexity. The language of determination and even more of determinism was inherited from idealist and especially theological accounts of the world and man. It is significant that it is in one of his familiar inversions, his contradictions of received propositions, that Marx uses the word ‘determines’. He is opposing an ideology that had been insistent on the power of certain forces outside man, or, in its secular version, on an abstract determining consciousness. Marx’s own proposition explicitly denies this, and puts the origin of determination in men’s own activities. Nevertheless, the particular history and continuity of the term serves to remind us that there are, within ordinary use—and this is true of most of the major European languages—quite different possible meanings and implications of the word ‘determine’. There is, on the one hand, from its theological inheritance, the notion of an external cause which totally predicts or prefigures, indeed totally controls a subsequent activity. But there is also, from the experience of social practice, a notion of determination as setting limits, exerting pressures.

Now there is clearly a difference between a process of setting limits and exerting pressures, whether by some external force or by the internal laws of a particular development, and that other process in which a subsequent content is essentially prefigured, predicted and controlled by a pre-existing external force. Yet it is fair to say, looking at many applications of Marxist cultural analysis, that it is the second sense, the notion of prefiguration, prediction or control, which has often explicitly or implicitly been used.

Superstructure: Qualifications and Amendments

The term of relationship is then the first thing that we have to examine in this proposition, but we have to do this by going on to look at the related terms themselves. ‘Superstructure’ has had most attention. People commonly speak of ‘the superstructure’, although it is interesting that originally, in Marx’s German, the term is in one important use plural. Other people speak of the different activities ‘inside’ the superstructure or superstructures. Now already in Marx himself, in the later correspondence of Engels, and at many points in the subsequent Marxist tradition, qualifications have been made about the determined character of certain superstructural activities. The first kind of qualification had to do with delays in time, with complications, and with certain indirect or relatively distant relationships. The simplest notion of a superstructure, which is still by no means entirely abandoned, had been the reflection, the imitation or the reproduction of the reality of the base in the superstructure in a more or less direct way. Positivist notions of reflection and reproduction of course directly supported this. But since in many real cultural activities this relationship cannot be found, or cannot be found without effort or even violence to the material or practice being studied, the notion was introduced of delays in time, the famous lags; of various technical complications; and of indirectness, in which certain kinds of activity in the cultural sphere—philosophy, for example—were situated at a greater distance from the primary economic activities. That was the first stage of qualification of the notion of superstructure: in effect, an operational qualification. The second stage was related but more fundamental, in that the process of the relationship itself was more substantially looked at. This was the kind of reconsideration which gave rise to the modern notion of ‘mediation’, in which something more than simple reflection or reproduction—indeed something radically different from either reflection or reproduction—actively occurs. In the later twentieth century there is the notion of ‘homologous structures’, where there may be no direct or easily apparent similarity, and certainly nothing like reflection or reproduction, between the superstructural process and the reality of the base, but in which there is an essential homology or correspondence of structures, which can be discovered by analysis. This is not the same notion as ‘mediation’, but it is the same kind of amendment in that the relationship between the base and the superstructure is not supposed to be direct, nor simply operationally subject to lags and complications and indirectnesses, but that of its nature it is not direct reproduction.

These qualifications and amendments are important. But it seems to me that what has not been looked at with equal care, is the received notion of the base. And indeed I would argue that the base is the more important concept to look at if we are to understand the realities of cultural process. In many uses of the proposition of base and superstructure, as a matter of verbal habit, ‘the base’ has come to be considered virtually as an object, or in less crude cases, it has been considered in essentially uniform and usually static ways. ‘The base’ is the real social existence of man. ‘The base’ is the real relations of production corresponding to a stage of the development of material productive forces. ‘The base’ is a mode of production at a particular stage of its development. We make and repeat propositions of this kind, but the usage is then very different from Marx’s emphasis on productive activities, in particular structural relations, constituting the foundation of all other activities. For while a particular stage of the development of production can be discovered and made precise by analysis, it is never in practice either uniform or static. It is indeed one of the central propositions of Marx’s sense of history that there are deep contradictions in the relationships of production and in the consequent social relationships. There is therefore the continual possibility of the dynamic variation of these forces. Moreover, when these forces are considered, as Marx always considers them, as the specific activities and relationships of real men, they mean something very much more active, more complicated and more contradictory than the developed metaphorical notion of ‘the base’ could possibly allow us to realize.

Base and Productive Forces

So we have to say that when we talk of ‘the base’, we are talking of a process and not a state. And we cannot ascribe to that process certain fixed properties for subsequent deduction to the variable processes of the superstructure. Most people who have wanted to make the ordinary proposition more reasonable have concentrated on refining the notion of superstructure. But I would say that each term of the proposition has to be revalued in a particular direction. We have to revalue ‘determination’ towards the setting of limits and the exertion of pressure, and away from a predicted, prefigured and controlled content. We have to revalue ‘superstructure’ towards a related range of cultural practices, and away from a reflected, reproduced or specifically dependent content. And, crucially, we have to revalue ‘the base’ away from the notion of a fixed economic or technological abstraction, and towards the specific activities of men in real social and economic relationships, containing fundamental contradictions and variations and therefore always in a state of dynamic process.

It is worth observing one further implication behind the customary definitions. ‘The base’ has come to include, especially in certain 20th-century developments, a strong and limiting sense of basic industry. The emphasis on heavy industry, even, has played a certain cultural role. And this raises a more general problem, for we find ourselves forced to look again at the ordinary notion of ‘productive forces’. Clearly what we are examining in the base is primary productive forces. Yet some very crucial distinctions have to be made here. It is true that in his analysis of capitalist production Marx considered ‘productive work’ in a very particular and specialized sense corresponding to that mode of production. There is a difficult passage in the Grundrisse in which he argues that while the man who makes a piano is a productive worker, there is a real question whether the man who distributes the piano is also a productive worker; but he probably is, since he contributes to the realization of surplus value. Yet when it comes to the man who plays the piano, whether to himself or to others, there is no question: he is not a productive worker at all. So piano-maker is base, but pianist superstructure. As a way of considering cultural activity, and incidentally the economics of modern cultural activity, this is very clearly a dead-end. But for any theoretical clarification it is crucial to recognize that Marx was there engaged in an analysis of a particular kind of production, that is capitalist commodity production. Within his analysis of that mode, he had to give to the notion of ‘productive labour’ and ‘productive forces’ a specialized sense of primary work on materials in a form which produced commodities. But this has narrowed remarkably, and in a cultural context very damagingly, from his more central notion of productive forces, in which, to give just brief reminders, the most important thing a worker ever produces is himself, himself in the fact of that kind of labour, or the broader historical emphasis of men producing themselves, themselves and their history. Now when we talk of the base, and of primary productive forces, it matters very much whether we are referring, as in one degenerate form of this proposition became habitual, to primary production within the terms of capitalist economic relationships, or to the primary production of society itself, and of men themselves, material production and reproduction of real life. If we have the broad sense of productive forces, we look at the whole question of the base differently, and we are then less tempted to dismiss as superstructural, and in that sense as merely secondary, certain vital productive social forces, which are in the broad sense, from the beginning, basic.

Uses of Totality

Yet, because of the difficulties of the ordinary proposition of base and superstructure, there was an alternative and very important development, an emphasis primarily associated with Luk`cs, on a social ‘totality’. The totality of social practices was opposed to this layered notion of a base and a consequent superstructure. This totality of practices is compatible with the notion of social being determining consciousness, but it does not understand this process in terms of a base and a superstructure. Now the language of totality has become common, and it is indeed in many ways more acceptable than the notion of base and superstructure. But with one very important reservation. It is very easy for the notion of totality to empty of its essential content the original Marxist proposition. For if we come to say that society is composed of a large number of social practices which form a concrete social whole, and if we give to each practice a certain specific recognition, adding only that they interact, relate and combine in very complicated ways, we are at one level much more obviously talking about reality, but we are at another level withdrawing from the claim that there is any process of determination. And this I, for one, would be very unwilling to do. Indeed, the key question to ask about any notion of totality in cultural theory is this: whether the notion of totality includes the notion of intention. For if totality is simply concrete, if it is simply the recognition of a large variety of miscellaneous and contemporaneous practices, then it is essentially empty of any content that could be called Marxist. Intention, the notion of intention, restores the key question, or rather the key emphasis. For while it is true that any society is a complex whole of such practices, it is also true that any society has a specific organization, a specific structure, and that the principles of this organization and structure can be seen as directly related to certain social intentions, intentions by which we define the society, intentions which in all our experience have been the rule of a particular class. One of the unexpected consequences of the crudeness of the base/superstructure model has been the too easy acceptance of models which appear less crude—models of totality or of a complex whole—but which exclude the facts of social intention, the class character of a particular society and so on. And this reminds us of how much we lose if we abandon the superstructural emphasis altogether. Thus I have great difficulty in seeing processes of art and thought as superstructural in the sense of the formula as it is commonly used. But in many areas of social and political thought—certain kinds of ratifying theory, certain kinds of law, certain kinds of institutions, which after all in Marx’s original formulations were very much part of the superstructure—in all that kind of social apparatus, and in a decisive area of political and ideological activity and construction, if we fail to see a superstructural element we fail to recognize reality at all. These laws, constitutions, theories, ideologies, which are claimed as natural, or as having universal validity or significance, simply have to be seen as expressing and ratifying the domination of a particular class. Indeed the difficulty of revising the formula of base and superstructure has had much to do with the perception of many militants—who have to fight such institutions and notions as well as fighting economic battles—that if these institutions and their ideologies are not perceived as having that kind of dependent and ratifying relationship, if their claims to universal validity or legitimacy are not denied and fought, then the class character of the society can no longer be seen. And this has been the effect of some versions of totality as the description of cultural process. Indeed I think that we can properly use the notion of totality only when we combine it with that other crucial Marxist concept of ‘hegemony’.

The Complexity of Hegemony

It is Gramsci’s great contribution to have emphasized hegemony, and also to have understood it at a depth which is, I think, rare. For hegemony supposes the existence of something which is truly total, which is not merely secondary or superstructural, like the weak sense of ideology, but which is lived at such a depth, which saturates the society to such an extent, and which, as Gramsci put it, even constitutes the limit of common sense for most people under its sway, that it corresponds to the reality of social experience very much more clearly than any notions derived from the formula of base and superstructure. For if ideology were merely some abstract imposed notion, if our social and political and cultural ideas and assumptions and habits were merely the result of specific manipulation, of a kind of overt training which might be simply ended or withdrawn, then the society would be very much easier to move and to change than in practice it has ever been or is. This notion of hegemony as deeply saturating the consciousness of a society seems to be fundamental. And hegemony has the advantage over general notions of totality, that it at the same time emphasizes the facts of domination.

Yet there are times when I hear discussions of hegemony and feel that it too, as a concept, is being dragged back to the relatively simple, uniform and static notion which ‘superstructure’ in ordinary use had become. Indeed I think that we have to give a very complex account of hegemony if we are talking about any real social formation. Above all we have to give an account which allows for its elements of real and constant change. We have to emphasize that hegemony is not singular; indeed that its own internal structures are highly complex, and have continually to be renewed, recreated and defended; and by the same token, that they can be continually challenged and in certain respects modified. That is why instead of speaking simply of ‘the hegemony’, ‘a hegemony’, I would propose a model which allows for this kind of variation and contradiction, its sets of alternatives and its processes of change.

But one thing that is evident in some of the best Marxist cultural analysis is that it is very much more at home in what one might call epochal questions than in what one has to call historicalquestions. That is to say, it is usually very much better at distinguishing the large features of different epochs of society, as between feudal and bourgeois, or what might be, than at distinguishing between different phases of bourgeois society, and different moments within the phases: that true historical process which demands a much greater precision and delicacy of analysis than the always striking epochal analysis which is concerned with main lineaments and features.

Now the theoretical model which I have been trying to work with is this. I would say first that in any society, in any particular period, there is a central system of practices, meanings and values, which we can properly call dominant and effective. This implies no presumption about its value. All I am saying is that it is central. Indeed I would call it a corporate system, but this might be confusing, since Gramsci uses ‘corporate’ to mean the subordinate as opposed to the general and dominant elements of hegemony. In any case what I have in mind is the central, effective and dominant system of meanings and values, which are not merely abstract but which are organized and lived. That is why hegemony is not to be understood at the level of mere opinion or mere manipulation. It is a whole body of practices and expectations; our assignments of energy, our ordinary understanding of the nature of man and of his world. It is a set of meanings and values which as they are experienced as practices appear as reciprocally confirming. It thus constitutes a sense of reality for most people in the society, a sense of absolute because experienced reality beyond which it is very difficult for most members of the society to move, in most areas of their lives. But this is not, except in the operation of a moment of abstract analysis, in any sense a static system. On the contrary we can only understand an effective and dominant culture if we understand the real social process on which it depends: I mean the process of incorporation. The modes of incorporation are of great social significance, and incidentally in our kind of society have considerable economic significance. The educational institutions are usually the main agencies of the transmission of an effective dominant culture, and this is now a major economic as well as cultural activity; indeed it is both in the same moment. Moreover, at a philosophical level, at the true level of theory and at the level of the history of various practices, there is a process which I call the selective tradition: that which, within the terms of an effective dominant culture, is always passed off as ‘the tradition’, ‘the significant past’. But always the selectivity is the point; the way in which from a whole possible area of past and present, certain meanings and practices are chosen for emphasis, certain other meanings and practices are neglected and excluded. Even more crucially, some of these meanings and practices are reinterpreted, diluted, or put into forms which support or at least do not contradict other elements within the effective dominant culture. The processes of education; the processes of a much wider social training within institutions like the family; the practical definitions and organisation of work; the selective tradition at an intellectual and theoretical level: all these forces are involved in a continual making and remaking of an effective dominant culture, and on them, as experienced, as built into our living, its reality depends. If what we learn there were merely an imposed ideology, or if it were only the isolable meanings and practices of the ruling class, or of a section of the ruling class, which gets imposed on others, occupying merely the top of our minds, it would be—and one would be glad—a very much easier thing to overthrow.

It is not only the depths to which this process reaches, selecting and organizing and interpreting our experience. It is also that it is continually active and adjusting; it isn’t just the past, the dry husks of ideology which we can more easily discard. And this can only be so, in a complex society, if it is something more substantial and more flexible than any abstract imposed ideology. Thus we have to recognize the alternative meanings and values, the alternative opinions and attitudes, even some alternative senses of the world, which can be accommodated and tolerated within a particular effective and dominant culture. This has been much under-emphasized in our notions of a superstructure, and even in some notions of hegemony. And the under-emphasis opens the way for retreat to an indifferent complexity. In the practice of politics, for example, there are certain truly incorporated modes of what are nevertheless, within those terms, real oppositions, that are felt and fought out. Their existence within the incorporation is recognizable by the fact that, whatever the degree of internal conflict or internal variation, they do not in practice go beyond the limits of the central effective and dominant definitions. This is true, for example, of the practice of parliamentary politics, though its internal oppositions are real. It is true about a whole range of practices and arguments, in any real society, which can by no means be reduced to an ideological cover, but which can nevertheless be properly analysed as in my sense corporate, if we find that, whatever the degree of internal controversy and variation, they do not exceed the limits of the central corporate definitions.

But if we are to say this, we have to think again about the sources of that which is not corporate; of those practices, experiences, meanings, values which are not part of the effective dominant culture. We can express this in two ways. There is clearly something that we can call alternative to the effective dominant culture, and there is something else that we can call oppositional, in a true sense. The degree of existence of these alternative and oppositional forms is itself a matter of constant historical variation in real circumstances. In certain societies it is possible to find areas of social life in which quite real alternatives are at least left alone. (If they are made available, of course, they are part of the corporate organization.) The existence of the possibility of opposition, and of its articulation, its degree of openness, and so on, again depends on very precise social and political forces. The facts of alternative and oppositional forms of social life and culture, in relation to the effective and dominant culture, have then to be recognized as subject to historical variation, and as having sources which are very significant, as a fact about the dominant culture itself.

Residual and Emergent Cultures

I have next to introduce a further distinction, between residual and emergent forms, both of alternative and of oppositional culture. By ‘residual’ I mean that some experiences, meanings and values which cannot be verified or cannot be expressed in the terms of the dominant culture, are nevertheless lived and practised on the basis of the residue—cultural as well as social—of some previous social formation. There is a real case of this in certain religious values, by contrast with the very evident incorporation of most religious meanings and values into the dominant system. The same is true, in a culture like Britain, of certain notions derived from a rural past, which have a very significant popularity. A residual culture is usually at some distance from the effective dominant culture, but one has to recognize that, in real cultural activities, it may get incorporated into it. This is because some part of it, some version of it—and especially if the residue is from some major area of the past—will in many cases have had to be incorporated if the effective dominant culture is to make sense in those areas. It is also because at certain points a dominant culture cannot allow too much of this kind of practice and experience outside itself, at least without risk. Thus the pressures are real, but certain genuinely residual meanings and practices in some important cases survive.

By ‘emergent’ I mean, first, that new meanings and values, new practices, new significances and experiences, are continually being created. But there is then a much earlier attempt to incorporate them, just because they are part—and yet not part—of effective contemporary practice. Indeed it is significant in our own period how very early this attempt is, how alert the dominant culture now is to anything that can be seen as emergent. We have then to see, first, as it were a temporal relation between a dominant culture and on the one hand a residual and on the other hand an emergent culture. But we can only understand this if we can make distinctions, that usually require very precise analysis, between residual-incorporated and residual not incorporated, and between emergent-incorporated and emergent not incorporated. It is an important fact about any particular society, how far it reaches into the whole range of human practices and experiences in an attempt at incorporation. It may be true of some earlier phases of bourgeois society, for example, that there were some areas of experience which it was willing to dispense with, which it was prepared to assign as the sphere of private or artistic life, and as being no particular business of society or the state. This went along with certain kinds of political tolerance, even if the reality of that tolerance was malign neglect. But I am sure it is true of the society that has come into existence since the last war, that progressively, because of developments in the social character of labour, in the social character of communications, and in the social character of decision, it extends much further than ever before in capitalist society into certain hitherto resigned areas of experience and practice and meaning. Thus the effective decision, as to whether a practice is alternative or oppositional, is often now made within a very much narrower scope. There is a simple theoretical distinction between alternative and oppositional, that is to say between someone who simply finds a different way to live and wishes to be left alone with it, and someone who finds a different way to live and wants to change the society in its light. This is usually the difference between individual and small-group solutions to social crisis and those solutions which properly belong to political and ultimately revolutionary practice. But it is often a very narrow line, in reality, between alternative and oppositional. A meaning or a practice may be tolerated as a deviation, and yet still be seen only as another particular way to live. But as the necessary area of effective dominance extends, the same meanings and practices can be seen by the dominant culture, not merely as disregarding or despising it, but as challenging it.

Now it is crucial to any Marxist theory of culture that it can give an adequate explanation of the sources of those practices and meanings.We can understand, from an ordinary historical approach, at least some of the sources of residual meanings and practices. These are the results of earlier social formations, in which certain real meanings and values were generated. In the subsequent default of a particular phase of a dominant culture, there is then a reaching back to those meanings and values which were created in real societies in the past, and which still seem to have some significance because they represent areas of human experience, aspiration and achievement, which the dominant culture undervalues or opposes, or even cannot recognise. But our hardest task theoretically, is to find a non-metaphysical and a non-subjectivist explanation of emergent cultural practice. Moreover, part of our answer to this question bears on the process of persistence of residual practices.

Class and Human Practice

We do have indeed one source to hand from the central body of Marxist theory. We have the formation of a new class, the coming to consciousness of a new class. This remains, without doubt, quite centrally important. Of course, in itself, this process of formation complicates any simple model of base and superstructure. It also complicates some of the ordinary versions of hegemony, although it was Gramsci’s whole object to see and to create by organization the hegemony of a proletarian kind which is capable of challenging the bourgeois hegemony. We have then one central source of new practice, in the emergence of a new class. But we have also to recognize certain other kinds of source, and in cultural practice some of these are very important. I would say that we can recognize them on the basis of this proposition: that no mode of production, and therefore no dominant society or order of society, and therefore no dominant culture, in reality exhausts human practice, human energy, human intention. Indeed it seems to me that this emphasis is not merely a negative proposition, allowing us to account for certain things which happen outside the dominant mode. On the contrary, it is a fact about the modes of domination that they select from and consequently exclude the full range of human practice. The difficulties of human practice outside or against the dominant mode are, of course, real. It depends very much whether it is in an area in which the dominant class and the dominant culture have an interest and a stake. If the interest and the stake are explicit, many new practices will be reached for, and if possible incorporated, or else extirpated with extraordinary vigour. But in certain areas, there will be in certain periods practices and meanings which are not reached for. There will be areas of practice and meaning which, almost by definition from its own limited character, or in its profound deformation, the dominant culture is unable in any real terms to recognize. This gives us a bearing on the observable difference between, for example, the practices of a capitalist state and a state like the contemporary Soviet Union in relation to writers. Since from the whole Marxist tradition literature was seen as an important activity, indeed a crucial activity, the Soviet state is very much sharper in investigating areas where different versions of practice, different meanings and values, are being attempted and expressed. In capitalist practice, if the thing is not making a profit, or if it is not being widely circulated, then it can for some time be overlooked, at least while it remains alternative. When it becomes oppositional in an explicit way, it does, of course, get approached or attacked.

I am saying then that in relation to the full range of human practice at any one time, the dominant mode is a conscious selection and organization. At least in its fully formed state it is conscious. But there are always sources of real human practice which it neglects or excludes. And these can be different in quality from the developing and articulate interests of a rising class. They can include, for example, alternative perception of others, in immediate personal relationships, or new perceptions of material and media, in art and science, and within certain limits these new perceptions can be practised. The relations between the two kinds of source—the class and the excluded human area—are by no means necessarily contradictory. At times they can be very close, and on the relations between them, much in political practice depends. But culturally and as a matter of theory the areas can be seen as distinct.

Now if we go back to the cultural question in its most usual form—what are the relations between art and society, or literature and society?—in the light of the preceding discussion, we have to say first that there are no relations between literature and society in that abstracted way. The literature is there from the beginning as a practice in the society. Indeed until it and all other practices are present, the society cannot be seen as fully formed. A society is not fully available for analysis until each of its practices is included. But if we make that emphasis we must make a corresponding emphasis: that we cannot separate literature and art from other kinds of social practice, in such a way as to make them subject to quite special and distinct laws. They may have quite specific features as practices, but they cannot be separated from the general social process. Indeed one way of emphasizing this is to say, to insist, that literature is not restricted to operating in any one of the sectors I have been seeking to describe in this model. It would be easy to say, it is a familiar rhetoric, that literature operates in the emergent cultural sector, that it represents the new feelings, the new meanings, the new values. We might persuade ourselves of this theoretically, by abstract argument, but when we read much literature, over the whole range, without the sleight-of-hand of calling Literature only that which we have already selected as embodying certain meanings and values at a certain scale of intensity, we are bound to recognize that the act of writing, the practices of discourse in writing and speech, the making of novels and poems and plays and theories, all this activity takes place in all areas of the culture.

Literature appears by no means only in the emergent sector, which is always, in fact, quite rare. A great deal of writing is of a residual kind, and this has been deeply true of much English literature in the last half-century. Some of its fundamental meanings and values have belonged to the cultural achievements of long-past stages of society. So widespread is this fact, and the habits of mind it supports, that in many minds ‘literature’ and ‘the past’ acquire a certain identity, and it is then said that there is now no literature: all that glory is over. Yet most writing, in any period, including our own, is a form of contribution to the effective dominant culture. Indeed many of the specific qualities of literature, its capacity to embody and enact and perform certain meanings and values, or to create in single particular ways what would be otherwise merely general truths, enable it to fulfil this effective function with great power. To literature, of course, we must add the visual arts and music, and in our own society the powerful arts of film and of broadcasting. But the general theoretical point should be clear. If we are looking for the relations between literature and society, we cannot either separate out this one practice from a formed body of other practices, nor when we have identified the particular practice can we give it a uniform, static and ahistorical relation to some abstract social formation. The arts of writing and the arts of creation and performance, over their whole range, are parts of the cultural process in all the different ways, the different sectors, that I have been seeking to describe. They contribute to the effective dominant culture and are a central articulation of it. They embody residual meanings and values, not all of which are incorporated, though many are. They express also and significantly some emergent practices and meanings, yet some of these may eventually be incorporated, as they reach people and begin to move them. Thus it was very evident in the sixties, in some of the emergent arts of performance, that the dominant culture reached out to transform them or seek to transform them. In this process, of course, the dominant culture itself changes, not in its central formation, but in many of its articulated features. But then in a modern society it must always change in this way, if it is to remain dominant, if it is still to be felt as in real ways central in all our many activities and interests.

Critical Theory as Consumption

What then are the implications of this general analysis for the analysis of particular works of art? This is the question towards which most discussion of cultural theory seems to be directed: the discovery of a method, perhaps even a methodology, through which particular works of art can be understood and described. I would not myself agree that this is the central use of cultural theory, but let us for a moment consider it. What seems to me very striking is that nearly all forms of contemporary critical theory are theories of consumption. That is to say, they are concerned with understanding an object in such a way that it can profitably or correctly be consumed. The earliest stage of consumption theory was the theory of ‘taste’, where the link between the practice and the theory was direct in the metaphor. From taste you got the more elevated notion of ‘sensibility’, in which it was the consumption by sensibility of elevated or insightful works that was held to be the essential practice of reading, and critical activity was then a function of this sensibility. There were then more developed theories, in the 1920’s with Richards, and later in New Criticism, in which the effects of consumption were studied directly. The language of the work of art as object then became more overt. ‘What effect does this work (“the poem” as it was ordinarily described) have on me?’ Or, ‘what impact does it have on me?’, as it was later to be put in a much wider area of communication studies. Naturally enough, the notion of the work of art as object, as text, as an isolated artifact, became central in all these later consumption theories. It was not only that the practices of production were then overlooked, though this fused with the notion that most important literature anyway was from the past. The real social conditions of production were in any case neglected because they were believed to be at best secondary. The true relationship was always between the taste, the sensibility or the training of the reader and this isolated work, this object ‘in itself as it really is’, as most people commonly put it. But the notion of the work of art as object had a further large theoretical effect. If you ask questions about the work of art seen as object, they may include questions about the components of its production. Now, as it happened, there was a use of the formula of base and superstructure which was precisely in line with this. The components of a work of art were the real activities of the base, and you could study the object to discover these components. Sometimes you even studied the components and then projected the object. But in any case the relationship that was looked for was one between an object and its components. But this was not only true of Marxist suppositions of a base and a superstructure. It was true also of various kinds of psychological theory, whether in the form of archetypes, or the images of the collective unconscious, or the myths and symbols which were seen as the components of particular works of art. Or again there was biography, or psycho-biography and its like, where the components were in the man’s life and the work of art was an object in which components of this kind were discovered. Even in some of the more rigorous forms of new criticism and of structuralist criticism, this essential procedure of regarding the work as an object which has to be reduced to its components, even if later it may be reconstituted, came to persist.

Objects and Practices

Now I think the true crisis in cultural theory, in our own time, is between this view of the work of art as object and the alternative view of art as a practice. Of course it is at once objected that the work of art is an object: that various works have survived from the past, particular sculptures, particular paintings, particular buildings, and these are objects. This is of course true, but the same way of thinking is applied to works which have no such specific material existence. There is no Hamlet, no Brothers Karamazov, no Wuthering Heights, in the sense that there is a particular great painting. There is no Fifth Symphony, there is no work in the whole area of music and dance and performance, which is an object in any way comparable to those works in the visual arts which have survived. And yet the habit of treating all such works as objects has persisted because this is a basic theoretical and practical presupposition. But in literature, especially in drama, in music and in a very wide area of the performing arts, what we have are not objects but notations. These notations have to be interpreted in an active way, according to particular conventions. But indeed this is true over an even wider field. The relationship between the making of a work of art and the reception of a work of art, is always active, and subject to conventions, which in themselves are forms of social organization and relationship, and this is radically different from the production and consumption of an object. It is indeed an activity and a practice, and in its accessible forms, although it may in some arts have the character of a material object, it is still only accessible through active perception and interpretation. This makes the case of notation, in arts like drama and literature and music, only a special case of a much wider truth.

What this can show us here about the practice of analysis is that we have to break from the notion of isolating the object and then discovering its components. On the contrary we have to discover the nature of a practice and then its conditions. Often these two processes may in part resemble each other: in many other cases they are of radically different kinds. And I would conclude with an observation on the way this distinction bears on the Marxist tradition of the relation between primary economic and social practices, and cultural practices. If we suppose that what is produced in cultural practice is a series of objects, we shall, as in most current forms of sociological-critical procedure, set about discovering their components. Within a Marxist emphasis these components will be from what we have been in the habit of calling the base. We shall isolate certain features which we can so to say recognize in component form, or we will ask what processes of transformation or mediation these components have gone through before they arrived in this accessible state. But I am saying that we should look not for the components of a product but for the conditions of a practice. When we find ourselves looking at a particular work, or group of works, often realizing, as we do so, their essential community as well as their irreducible individuality, we should find ourselves attending first to the reality of their practice and the conditions of the practice as it was then executed. And from this I think we ask essentially different questions. Take for example the way in which an object is related to a genre, in orthodox criticism. We identify it by certain leading features, we then assign it to a larger category, the genre, and then we may find the components of the genre in a particular social history (although in some variants of Marxist criticism not even that is done, and the genre is supposed to be some permanent category of the mind). It is not that way of proceeding that seems to be required. The recognition of the relation of a collective mode and an individual project—and these are the only categories that we can initially presume—is a recognition of related practices. That is to say, the irreducibly individual projects that particular works are, may come in experience and in analysis to show resemblances which allow us to group them into collective modes. These are by no means always genres. They may exist as resemblances within and across genres. They may be the practice of a group in a period, rather than the practice of a phase in a genre. But as we discover the nature of a particular practice, and the nature of the relation between an individual project and a collective mode, we find that we are analysing, as two forms of the same process, both its active composition and its conditions of composition, and in either direction this is a complex of extending active relationships. This means, of course, that we have no built-in procedure of the kind which is indicated by the fixed character of an object. We have the principles of the relations of practices, within a discoverably intentional organization, and we have the available hypotheses of dominant, residual and emergent. But what we are actively seeking is the true practice which has been alienated to an object, and the true conditions of practice—whether as literary conventions or as social relationships—which have been alienated to components or to mere background. As a general proposition this is only an emphasis, but it seems to me to suggest at once the point of break and the point of departure, in practical and theoretical work, within an active and self-renewing Marxist cultural tradition.

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[1] Revised text of a lecture given in Montreal, April 1973.

Elizabeth Bowen

Source: http://www.ricorso.net/rx/az-data/authors/b/Bowen_E/life.htm#crit

For Original Visits above Link

Elizabeth Bowen (1899-1973) Life [Elizabeth Dorothea Cole Bowen;] b. 7 June 1899, 15 Herbert Place, Dublin; only child of dg. Henry Cole Bowen of Bowen’s Court (Farahy, nr. Kildorrery [Cill Dairbhre], N. Co. Cork) and Florence [née Florence Isabella Pomeroy Colley] of Mount Temple, Clontarf (m. 1890); her father (BL, TCD), a victim of anxiety with a history of bad relations with his own father, who suffered mental breakdown and entered a home [asylum] in 1907; Elizabeth removed to England by her mother at seven (viz., ‘seven winters’), on the advice of her father’s doctor, 1907, living variously at Folkestone, Hythe (Erin Cottage), Lyminge (Erin Cottage), Seabrook; learns to read only at 7, on her mother’s theory of not straining her brain; ed. Lindum [primary school], Folkestone; interim of lessons with children of the vicar (Salmon); forms friendship with cousin Audrey Fiennes; recovery of her father, who resumes work as Land Purchase lawyer in Dublin, c.1910; visits Bowen’s Court, summer 1912; suffers death of her mother, from cancer, at Hythe, following several operations, Sept. 1912 (EB aetat. 13); placed in charge of Laura Colley, whose br. was curate at St. John’s, Harpenden, Herts.; enrolled in Harpenden Hall as day-girl, Sept. 1912, being visited by her father there during holidays; travels to Cologne and Switzerland with her father and her guardians, 1913; becomes a boarder at Downe House School, Kent, Sept. 1914 (scene of ‘the mulberry tree’ where secrets were shared); enrolls in Central School for Arts and Crafts (Southampton Row), London, and stays two terms; participates in Bloomsbury society; stayed at Bowen’s Court with Henry and Aunt Sarah [Bowen, of Mitchelstown], summer 1916; Henry m. Mary Gwynn, sis. of Stephen Gwynn, 1918, staying in a Merrion St. flat; EB visits Bowen’s Court with Audrey during summers as before; enjoys parties at Bowen’s Court with Audrey, friends and some British officers; becomes briefly engaged to officer in nearby garrison, quickly broken off through intrusion of an aunt [Aunt Edie, Mrs. George Colley]; spends spring 1921 in Italy recovering; contribs. story to Saturday Westminster; introduced to Rose Macaulay by her Downe House headmistress, and helped by her to find a publisher for a first story-collection,Encounters (1923); through Audrey’s mother [Mrs. Fiennes] meets Alan Charles Cameron (1893-1952), an ex-military Scottish educationalist and broadcaster, afterwards Sec. of Education to City of Oxford, 1923; m. Cameron, 4 Aug. 1923, settling at [Waldencote] Old Headington, Oxfordshire, afterwards becoming a solely companionate relationship; friends incl. the Buchans [son of Lord Tweedsmuir], Lord David Cecil, William Plomer, Maurice Bowra and Isiah Berlin - a life-long friend; issues Ann Lee’s and Other Stories(1927); contrib. to Lady Cynthia Asquith, ed., The Funny Bone (1928); issues The Hotel (1927), a novel set on the Italian Riviera and concerning Sydney Warren, a young woman who makes the wrong decision and breaks off her engagement; issued The Last September (1929) - ‘of all my books … nearest my heart’ - set in 1920 and centred on the character of Lois Farquar, torn between her own class and her sympathy for her Catholic neighbours the Conners, and ending when Danielstown House is burned down, its door standing ‘open hospitably upon a furnace’; Henry Bowen retires from bar, 1928; enjoys increasing celebrity in London and Oxford; issues Joining Charles and Other Stories (1929); Henry falls ill, relapses into mental sickness, and dies May 1930; EB inherits Bowen’s Court, Co. Cork, 1930 [aetat. 31], hosting many parties there, with Virgnia Woolf, Isaiah Berlin, Stuart Hampshire, Rosamund Lehmann, Cyril Connolly and O’Faolain, and among the guests; clandestine love affair with Humphrey House (lecturer at Wadham Coll., Oxon.), then engaged and afterwards married; issues Friends and Relations(1931), a tale of marital confusions containing the adolescent horror, and later lesbian, Theodora Thirdman, an early example of the troubled child in her fiction; issues To the North (1932), the narrative of young Emmeline Summers’ doomed encounter with Markie, a barrister whom her sister-in-law Cecilia meets on a train, and featuring the interfering Lady Waters; issues The Cat Jumps (1934); contribs. reviews to New Statesman, Spectator, Times Literary Supplement, Observer, Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, Tatler, et al.; Humphry House visited Bowen’s Court in 1935 shortly prior to a move to Calcutta with his family; issues The House in Paris (1935), dealing with an affair between two people, Karen and Max, who are each engaged to others, revealed during the sojourn of two displaced children, Leopold and Henrietta, the products of those confused relationships; Cameron appt. Sec. of Central Council of School Broadcasting (BBC), 1935; moves with him to 2 Clarence Tce., Regent’s Park, London; engaged in literary work in London, unavoidably refusing an invitation from Virginia Woolf, now a friend and correspondent (though occasionally perturbed by Elizabeth’s non-communication); moots love affair with a younger man, Goronwy Rees (ass. ed. at Spectator), who became engaged to Rosalind Lehmann at a hunt ball held at Bowen’s Court, Dec. 1936; ED attends Salzburg Fest., spring 1937; encounters Seán O’Faolain - who was coincidentally in Salzburg also - in Dublin, 1938, and embarks on a brief affair; ed. Faber Book of Modern Stories (1937), describing the ‘new literature’ as ‘an affair of reflexes, of immediate susceptibility’ and never apt to ‘attempt a synthesis’; elected to MIAL, 1937; issued The Death of the Heart (1938), tracing the disillusionment of sixteen-year old Portia amid her London bemused relatives but chiefly at the hands of a ‘cad’ who disastrously fills the vacuum in her life; takes O’Faolain to meet Virginia Woolf at Tavistock Sq., 8 Feb.1939 (‘I wouldn’t ask if he were not so very nice’); gets Bowen’s Court wired for electricity, 1939 - this and other matters on the estate managed by Jim Gates a second-generation ‘local’ associated with the family; EB serves as an air warden [ARP] in 1939; volunteers for work with Ministry of Information and and writes confidential reports as “Mrs Cameron” on state of opinion in Ireland, travelling between London, Dublin and Bowen’s Court, while occupying a flat on St. Stephen’s Green; quotes views of Frank Gallagher, George O’Brien et al., while conveying her own toleration of Irish neutrality; contribs. “The Big House” to The Bell (Ist iss.; 1940), a plea for reconciliation the Irish and the Anglo-Irish traditions; speaks of the ‘failure of the ’thirties generation to achieve greatness in its poems, plays and novels in “The Leaning Tower”, a paper given to the Workers’ Education Assoc., May 1940; visits Woolfs at Monk’s House, Rodmell, in Sussex (following the bombing of ; contribs. ‘Eire’, a distillation of her reports, to New Statesman and Nation (21 April 1941); meets and forms lasting friendship with Charles Ritchie [aetat. 35], a Canadian diplomat from Nova Scotia, 1941 - with whom she maintained close contact for thirty years, enabled by ‘compassionate’ marriages on either side; issued Look at All Those Roses (1941); issues Seven Winters: Memories of a Dublin Childhood (1942), initially with Cuala Press, and Bowen’s Court (1942), with Longmans, having been rejected by Jonathan Lane as ‘subversive’; undergoes unsuccessful treatment for stammer, 1942; issues English Novelists (1942); issues The Demon Lover (1945), a tale of the supernatural, with other stories; Clarence Tce. damaged by German V2 bomb, and vacated for repairs, July-Oct. 1944; expresses alienation from ‘Labour wets’ of post-war Britain, Sep. 1945 (letter to Wm. Plomer); contracts jaundice, 1945-Feb. 1946; reads Coleridge’s “Ancient Mariner” incessantly in bed; Ritchie departs for Canada, early 1945, briefly returning to London in 1949; Bowen writes, with John Perry Castle Anna, a play (Lyric Hammersmith, 1946); commences broadcasting with BBC, 1946; awarded CBE 1948; serves as acting principal at summer-school for teachers, Kent Folkestone; Ritchie marries his second cousin Sylvia, largely for career reasons 1948; Bowen undertakes lecture tours in Czechoslovakia and Austria for British Council, 1948-50; dines with Greene in Vienna night-club where he arranges a police raid to amuse her (acc. to himself in A Sort of Life); issues The Heat of the Day (1949), a wartime novel commenced in 1944, concerning Stella Rodney’s affair with Robert Kelway, a man revealed to be spying for the Nazis by a British agent who propositions her as the price of his freedom; joins Graham Greene and V. S. Pritchett in Why Do I Write? (1948), a set of epistolary exchanges; profits from this novel enabled her to install bathrooms in Bowen’s Court; invested Commander, Order of the British Empire (CBE), 1948; served on Royal Commission on Capital Punishment, 1949-53, resulting in Abolition, 1953; received Hon. DLitt., TCD, 1949; Earliest Stories (new edn., NY Knopf 1949); issued Collected Impressions (1950); moved to Bowenscourt in 1951; EB becomes god-mother to the Spenders’ dg. Elizabeth; Cameron suffers heart attack, 1951 - having semi-retired some time earlier with eye-trouble stemming from WWI gas attack; moves out of Clarence Tce., the lease passing to Louis MacNeice; returned with furniture to Bowen’s Court, after Christmas 1951, spending the first night in a Fermoy hotel; her style parodied in an issue of New Yorker, 1952; Alan Cameron d., 26 Aug. 1952; Veronica Wedgewood stays as guest at Bowen’s Court, winter 1953; EB visits Rome, and invites John Lehmann to Bowen’s Court [1954]; serves with others on editorial board of his London Magazine; writer in residence, American Academy, Rome, 1955; issues A World of Love (1955), an Irish novel centred on Jane Danby, a dg. of the big house, coming to terms with the changing reality of contemporary Ireland; holds Lucy Martin Donnelly Fellowship, Bryn Mawr, 1956; forms friendship with Iris Murdoch; receives DLitt (Oxon.), 1956 [vars. 1952, 1959]; sold Bowen’s Court to Cornelius O’Keefe, a farming neighbour, on the misapprehension that he would make it a family home, 1959; roof removed and house demolished, 1960 (‘It was a clean end. Bowen’s Court never lived to be a ruin’); moves into a flat in a house of Isaiah Berlin at Old Headington; wrote script for a 60-min. programme on Ireland in an American TV series, ‘The Twentieth Century”, produced by Isaac Kleinerman; issues A Time in Rome (1960); issues Afterthought (1962) and The Little Girls (1964); moved into modern house which she called “Carbery” at Hythe, Kent, always keeping a room ready for Ritchie, 1965; issued A Day in the Dark (1965) and Eva Trout (US 1968) - of which A. N. Wilson wrote, ‘The book shimmers with life in every paragraph’, concerning the life and death of the title-character, a disturbed orphan and heiress who acquires a ‘son’ in America, and eventually dies by gunshot at his hand; issued The Good Tiger (1970), for children; suffered acute bronchitis, an effect of smoking; radium treatment, 1972; acted as Booker Prize judge from hospital; visited Ireland, Christmas 1972; returned to Hythe and d. in hospital, of lung cancer, 22 Feb. 1973; bur. with her husband Alan Cameron, in Farahy churchyard, obit. by Francis King - erroneously making Robert a Communist rather than a Fascist spy in Heat of the Day); Pictures and Conversations (1974), autobiographical sketches, appeared posthum. on her instructions; her agent Spencer Curtis Brown became her literary executor; her papers held at Harry Ransom Humanities Research Centre (Texas U., Austin). NCBE OCEL DIL DIW DIB KUN ATT FDA OCIL Family & home: family name ultimately derived from Ap Owen, occupants of a “court house”, Glamorganshire]; descended from Col. Henry Bowen, a Cromwellian settler who changed sides in the English Civil War and received a grant of land confiscated from Garrett Cushin [gent.], at Farahy; Bowen’s Court, located on the site of a former established in a ‘Court House’ of the family, commenced following Col. Bowen’s gg-son. marriage to Jane Cole, 1716, and completed in 1775; family associated with landlord beneficence in the Famine, g-m. of Elizabeth, Eliza Wade, having provided food in the basement of the house; famine pit at Farahy; the Bowens wintered at Bowens Court and summered at Herbert Placecapt. Bowen-Colthurst, who unlawfully executed Francis Sheehy-Skeffington during 1916 Rising, was a cousin. [ top ] Works Novels The Hotel (London: Constable 1927), [4], 314, [2]pp., Do. (NY: Dial Press 1928), 294pp.; Do. [Penguin Classics] (Harmondsworth: Penguin 1942), and Do. [rep. edn.] (London: Vintage 2003), 208pp.; The Last September (London: Constable; NY: Dial Press 1929; London: Jonathan Cape 1948; NY: Avon 1952; Penguin 1988 [see extract]; Friends and Relations (London: Constable; NY: Dial 1931); [also Jonathan Cape 1951], and Do. [rep. edn.] introduced by Candia McWilliam [Vintage Classics] (London: Vintage 1999), 159pp.; To the North (London: Gollancz 1932 NY: Alfred A. Knopf 1933); The House in Paris (London: Gollancz 1935; NY: Alfred A. Knopf 1936; London: Jonathan Cape 1982); The Death of the Heart (London: Gollancz 1938) [FDA ERR 1935 &c.], and Do. [rep. edn.] introduction by Patricia Craig [Vintage Classics] (London: Vintage 1998), 318pp.; Look at All Those Roses: Short Stories (London: Gollancz; NY: Alfred A. Knopf 1941); The Heat of the Day (London: Jonathan Cape 1949; rep. edn. 1982) [ded. Charles Ritchie], and Do. (NY: Alfred A. Knopf 1949), 372pp. [see extract]; A World of Love (London: Jonathan Cape; NY: Alfred A. Knopf 1955), 224pp. [ded. Catherine Collins]; The Little Girls (London: Jonathan Cape; NY: Alfred A. Knopf 1964); Eva Trout, or Changing Scenes (NY: Alfred A. Knopf 1968; London: Jonathan Cape 1969); The Shelbourne (London: Vintage 2001), 208pp. [ top ] Short Stories Encounters (London: Sidgwick & Jackson 1923; NY: Boni & Liveright 1925); Anne Lee’s and Other Short Stories (London: Sidgwick & Jackson 1926; NY: Boni & Liveright 1926); Joining Charles and Other Stories (London: Constable; NY: Dial Press 1929); The Cat Jumps and Other Stories (London: Gollancz 1934); The Demon Lover and Other Stories (London: Jonathan Cape 1945) [extract], Do., publ. in America as Ivy Gripped the Steps (NY: Alfred A. Knopf 1946); Encounters: Early Stories [new edn.] London: Sidgwick & Jackson 1949), xiii, 178pp., and Do. [US edn.] as (NY: Alfred A. Knopf 1951); Stories by Elizabeth Bowen (NY: Alfred A. Knopf 1959); A Day in the Dark and Other Stories (London: Jonathan Cape 1965); Victoria Glendinning, intro., Elizabeth Bowen’s Irish Stories (Dublin: Poolbeg 1978) [by arrangement with Jonathan Cape]; Angus Wilson, intro., The Collected Stories of Elizabeth Bowen (London: Jonathan Cape 1980; NY: Knopf [1981]), 784pp., and Do. [rep. edns.] (London: Jonathan Cape 1981; 1985; 1999 &c.) [see contents]; Allan Hepburn, The Bazaar and Other Stories (2008), 384pp. [ top ] Commentary English Novelists (London: W. Collins 1942); Seven Winters: Memories of a Dublin Childhood (Dublin: Cuala Press 1942; London: Longmans, Green 1943), Do., publ, in America as Seven Winters: Memories of a Dublin Childhood and Afterthoughts, Pieces on Writing (NY: Alfred A. Knopf 1962) [see sep. printing infra]; with Graham Greene & V. S. Pritchett, Why Do I Write (London: Percival, Marshall 1948); Collected Impressions (London: Longmans, Green; NY: Alfred A. Knopf 1950) [incl. ‘The Big House’ (first pub. in The Bell), pp.195-100’, ‘Notes on Writing a Novel’, &c.]; Bowen’s Court (London: Longmans, Green; NY: Alfred A. Knopf 1942); Do. [2nd edn.], with afterword (London: Longmans, Green; NY: Alfred A. Knopf 1964); Do. (NY: Ecco Press 1978), Do., with intro. by Hermione Lee (London: Virago 1984), and Do. [resized facs. of 1942] (Cork: Collins Press 1998), 476pp., 16 pls. [see extract]; The Shelbourne: A Centre in Dublin Life for More Than a Century (London: George G. Harrap 1951; rep. 1955), 200pp. [incl. Index]; Do., pub. in America as The Shelbourne Hotel (NY: Alfred A. Knopf 1951); A Time in Rome (NY: Alfred A. Knopf; London: Longmans, Green & Co. 1960); Afterthoughts: Pieces on Writing (London: Longmans, Green & Co. 1962); Pictures and Conversations, foreword S. C. Brown (London: Allen Lane 1975) [based on notes for an autobiography]; Hermione Lee, sel. & intro., The Mulberry Tree: Writings of Elizabeth Bowen (Dublin: Poolbeg 1978; London: Virago 1986), and Do. [rep. edn.] (London: Vintage 1999), viii, 325pp. [incls. little-known portrait of a beloved family servant; unpubl. letters to Virginia Woolf and William Plomer, &c.; ‘The Moores’ (New Statesman, 18 (1939), pp.758-60]. [ top ] Miscellaneous The Good Tiger (NY: Alfred A. Knopf 1965), for children; Anthony Trollope: A New Judgement (OUP 1946); English Novelists (London: Collins 1942); Why Do I Write, and Exchange of Views Between Elizabeth Bowen, Graham Greene, and V. S. Pritchett (Percival Marshall 1948); A Time in Rome (London: Jonathan Cape 1959); Do. (London: Longmans; NY: Alfred A. Knopf 1960), 169pp.; Do. [another edn.?] ([London:] The Quality Book Club 1960);Do. (Harmondsworth: Penguin 1989, 1990), 169pp., and Do. (London: Vintage, 2003), 256pp. Introductions Introduction to J. S. Le Fanu, Uncle Silas (London: Cresset Press 1947); Introduction to Elizabeth Gaskell, North and South (Lehman[n] 1957) [4pp.]; Introduction to A. P. Ryan, ed., Critics Who Have Influenced Taste (1965). See also her Introduction to The House by the Churchyard, in Gary William Crawford, Jim Rochill & Brian J. Showers, ed., Reflections in an Glass Darkly: Essays on J. Sheridan Le Fanu (NY: Hippocampus Pres 2011) [in Sect. V: Studies of Individual Works]. [as infra] [ top ] Contributions ‘Eire’, in New Statesman and Nation (21 April. 1941); ‘The Short Story in England’, in Britain Today, 109 (May 1945), pp.11-16 [rep. in Phyllis Lassner, Elizabeth Bowen: A Study of the Short Fiction, NY: Twayne 1991, pp.128-43; see text, infra]; ‘She Gave Him’ [sect.] to Consequences, a complete story in the manner of the old parlour game in nine chapters (Waltham St Lawrence: Golden Cockerel Press 1932), [3] 66pp., ill, with John van Druten; G. B. Stern; A. E. Coppard; Seán O’Faoláin; Norah Hoult; Hamish Maclaren; Ronald Fraser; and Malachi Whitaker. [ top ] Letters Victoria Glendinning with Judith Robertson, ed. Love’s Civil War: Elizabeth Bowen & Charles Richie - Letters and Diaries 1941-1973 (NY: Simon & Schuster 2009), 475pp. [many letters discarded by Ritchie] Lectures ‘The Experience of Writing’: Notes to a lecture deliveres at Wellesley College, 20 March 1950) [Berg Collection, NY Public Library] [ top ] Films Death of the Heart, dir Sean Ó Mordha [1998] (RTE 12 Feb. 1999), and BBC2 Bookmark (7 Feb. 1999); The Last September dir. Deborah Warner, screenplay by John Banville (filmed 1999). Recent compilations Jack Lane & Brendan Clifford, eds., Notes from Eire: Espionage Reports to Winston Churchill 1940-42, with a review of Irish Neutrality (Millstreet, Co Cork: Aubane Historical Society; Belfast: Athol Press 1999), 266pp. [the “Notes” occupy 30pp.], and Do. [rep. as] Elizabeth Bowen: “Notes on Eire” (Belfast: Aubane Hist. Soc. 2008; 3rd [enl.] edn. 2009), 296pp.; Elizabeth Bowen: More of Her Espionage Reports from Ireland to Winston Churchill (Belfast: Aubane Hist. Soc. 2009), 38pp. [being the newly discovered pages added to the 2009 edn. of “Notes on Eire”]; Allan Hepburn, ed., People, Places, Things (Edinburgh UP 2008), 480pp.; Allan Hepburn, ed. Listening In: Broadcasts, Speeches, and Interviews by Elizabeth Bowen (Edinburgh UP 2010), 392pp.; Eibhear Walshe, Elizabeth Bowen’s Selected Writings (Cork UP 2011), 271pp. [ top ] Bibliographical details The Collected Stories of Elizabeth Bowen, intro. by Angus Wilson (NY: Knopf 1981), 784pp. FIRST STORIES: “Breakfast”; “Daffodils”; “The Return”; “The Confidante”; “Requiescat”; “All Saints”; “The New House”; “Lunch”; “The Lover”; “Mrs Windermere”; “The Shadowy Third”; “The Evil That Men Do -”; “Sunday Evening”; “Coming Home.” The Twenties: “Ann Lee’s”; “The Parrot”; “The Visitor”; “The Contessina”; “Human Habitation”; “The Secession”; “Making Arrangements”; “The Storm”; “Charity”; “The Back Drawing-Room”; “Recent Photograph”; “Joining Charles”; “The Jungle”; “Shores: An International Episode”; “The Dancing-Mistress”; “Aunt Tatty”; “Dead Mabelle”; “The Working Party”; “Foothold”; “The Cassowary”; “Telling”; “Mrs. Moysey”. THE THIRTIES: “The Tommy Crans”; “The Good Girl”; “The Cat Jumps”; “The Last Night in the Old Home”; “The Disinherited”; “Maria”; “Her Table Spread”; “The Little Girl’s Room”; “Firelight in the Flat”; “The Man of the Family …”; “The Needlecase”; “The Apple Tree”; “Reduced”; “Tears, Idle Tears”; “A Walk in the Woods”; “A Love Story”; “Look at All Those Roses”; “Attractive Modern Homes”; “The Easter Egg Party”; “Love”; “No. 16”; “A Queer Heart”; “The Girl with the Stoop”. THE WAR YEARS: “Unwelcome Idea”; “Oh, Madam …”; “Summer Night”; “In the Square”; “Sunday Afternoon”; “The Inherited Clock”; “The Cheery Soul”; “Songs My Father Sang Me”; “The Demon Lover”; “Careless Talk”; “The Happy Autumn Fields”; “Ivy Gripped the Steps”; “Pink May”; “Green Holly”; “Mysterious Kôr”; “The Dolt’s Tale.” POSTWAR STORIES: “I Hear You Say So”; “Gone Away”; “Hand in Glove”; “A Day in the Dark”. See also see Ian D’Alton, ‘“My name is Alan Charles Cameron ...”: The Farahy Address, 9 September 2007’, in The Irish Review, Nos. 40-41 (Winter 2009), pp.171-76. [ top ] Criticism Full-length studies Jocelyn Brooke, Elizabeth Bowen [Suppl. to British Book News No. 28] (London: Longmans, Green & Co. 1952), 32pp. William Heath, Elizabeth Bowen: An Introduction (Madison: Winsconsin UP 1961). Allen E. Austin, Elizabeth Bowen (NY: Twayne 1971) [err. A. Allen, FDA]. Edwin J. Kenney, Elizabeth Bowen [Irish Writers Series] (Lewisburg: Bucknell UP 1975). Victoria Glendinning, Elizabeth Bowen: Portrait of a Writer (London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson 1977 ; NY: Alfred A. Knopf 1978), and Do., as Elizabeth Bowen: A Biography(rep. NY: Knopf 1979; rep. Orion/Phoenix 1993), 261pp. Harold Bloom, ed., Elizabeth Bowen: Modern Critical Views (NY: Chelsea House 1987) [incl. Richard Gill, ‘The Country House in a Time of Trouble’, pp.51-61; also contribs. by Clare Hanson, et al.]. Hermione Lee, Elizabeth Bowen: An Estimation (London: Vision; NJ: Barnes & Noble 1981). J’nan M. Sellery, and William O. Harris, Elizabeth Bowen, A Bibliography (Texas 1981). Victoria Glendinning, Elizabeth Bowen: Portrait of a Writer (Harmondsworth: Penguin 1985). Patricia Craig, Elizabeth Bowen (Harmondsworth: Penguin 1986), 143pp. Phyllis Lassner, Elizabeth Bowen (London: Macmillan; Savage, MD: Barnes & Noble 1990), 186pp.; Do. [listed as] Elizabeth Bowen: A Study of the Short Fiction (NY: Twayne 1991), 192pp. [see extract]. Heather Bryant Jordan, How Will the Heart Endure?: Elizabeth Bowen and the Landscape of War (Michigan UP 1992), 253pp. Andrew Bennett & Nicholas Royle, Elizabeth Bowen and the Dissolution of the Novel: Still Lives (London: Macmillan 1994), 224pp. [see contents]. Renée C. Hoogland, Elizabeth Bowen: a Reputation in Writing [Lesbian Literature Ser.] (NYU Press 1994), xix, 369pp. Andrew Bennett & Nicholas Royle, Elizabeth Bowen and the Dissolution of the Novel : Still Lives (Basingstoke: Macmillan 1995), 181pp. [see contents] Eibhear Walshe, ed., Elizabeth Bowen Remembered [Annual Farrahy Addresses] (Dublin: Four Courts Press 1999), 96pp. [13 short contribs.; lim. to 375 copies - see Do., 2009 - infra]. Lis Christensen, Elizabeth Bowen: The Later Fiction (Museum Tusculanum 2001), qpp. Maud Ellmann, Elizabeth Bowen: The Shadow Across the Page (Edinburgh UP 2004), xiv, 241pp. Neil Corcoran, Elizabeth Bowen: The Enforced Return (Oxford: OUP 2004), 211pp. [incls. sects. on “Ireland”, “Children”, and “War”; see extract]; Eibhear Walshe, ed., Elizabeth Bowen, with a foreword by Neil Corcoran [Visions & Revisions Ser.] (Dublin: IAP 2009), xxiii, 216pp. [contribs. incl. Noreen Doody, Derek Hand, Vera Kreilkamp, Hether Laird, Clair Wills, et al.] Susan Osborn, ed., Elizabeth Bowen: New Critical Perspectives (2009), pp.234 [see contents]; Articles & chapters ‘The Bellman [Seán O’Faolain], ‘Meet Elizabeth Bowen’, in Bell, 4 (Sept. 1942) [q.pp.]. Elizabeth Hardwick, ‘Elizabeth Bowen’s Fiction’, in Partisan Review, 16 (1949), pp.114-21. Harriet Blodgett, Patterns of Reality: Elizabeth Bowen’s Novels (The Hague, Mouton 1975). Gary T. Davenport, ‘Elizabeth Bowen and the Big House’, in Southern Humanities Review, 8 (1974), pp.27-34. Margaret Church, ‘Social Consciousness in Elizabeth Bowen, Irish Murdoch, and Mary Lavin’, in College Literature, 7 (1980), 158-63. Martha McGowan, ‘The Enclosed Garden in Elizabeth Bowen’s A World of Love’, in Eire-Ireland, 16, 1 (Spring 1981), pp.50-70. Patricia Craig, ‘The Power of the Unstated’, review of The Collected Stories of Elizabeth Bowen, in The New York Review of Books (14 May 1981) [go online; accessed 18.09.2008]. W. J. McCormack, ‘Mask and Mood’, in New Statesman, 103 (3 Feb. 1981), pp.19-20. Seán O’Faolain, ‘A Reading and Remembrance of Elizabeth Bowen’, in London Review of Books ( 4-17 March 1982), pp.15, 17 [see extract]. Antoinette Quinn, ‘Elizabeth Bowen’s Irish Stories: 1939-45’, in Heinz Kosok, ed., Studies in Anglo-Irsh Literature (Bonn: Bouvier 1982), pp.314-21. Deirdre Laigle, ‘Images of the Big House in Elizabeth Bowen’s The Last September’, in Cahiers Irlandaises, 9 (1984), pp.61-79. Bridget O’Toole, ‘Three Writers of the Big House, Elizabeth Bowen, Molly Keane, and Jennifer Johnston’, in Gerald Dawe and Edna Longley, eds., Across the Roaring Hill: The Protestant Imagination in Modern Ireland (Belfast: Blackstaff 1985), pp.124-38. Margaret Scanlan, ‘Rumors of War: Elizabeth Bowen’s The Last September and J. G. Farrell’s Troubles’, in Eire-Ireland, 20, 2 (Summer 1985), pp.70-89. A. C. Partridge, ‘Language and Identity in the Shorter Fiction of Elizabeth Bowen’, Masaru Sekine, ed., Irish Writers and Society at Large (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe; NY: Barnes & Noble 1986), pp.169-79. Hubert Butler, ‘Elizabeth Bowen’, in Escape from The Anthill, foreword by Maurice James Craig (Dublin: Lilliput Press 1985), q.pp. [c.pp.151, 203.] Eve V. Patten, “Irish Murdoch: Morality and the Methods of Fiction” (TCD 1987) [MPhil Diss.] Phyllis Lassner, ‘The Past is a Burning Pattern: Elizabeth Bowen’s The Last September’, in Éire-Ireland, 21, 1 (Spring 1986), pp.40-54. R. B. Kreshner, ‘Elizabeth Bowen’s Oneiric House in Paris’, in Texas Studies in Language and Literature, 28 (Winter 1986), pp.407-23. Dominique Gauthier, L’image du réal dans les romans d’Elizabeth Bowen (1986). Toni O’Brien Johnson, ‘Light and Entertainment in Elizabeth Bowen’s Irish Novels’, in Ariel, 18 (April 1987), pp.47-62. John Hildebidle, Five Irish Writers: The Errand of Keeping Alive (Harvard UP 1989), [10], 245pp. [with Liam O’Flaherty, Kate O’Brien, Seán O’Faoláin, Frank O’Connor]; John Cronin, ‘Elizabeth Bowen, The Last September’, in The Anglo-Irish Novel, Vol II (Belfast: Appletree Press 1990), pp.114-28. John Coates, ‘Elizabeth Bowen’s The Last September: The Loss of the Past and the Modern Consciousness’, in Durham University Journal, LXXXII, 2 (1990), pp.205-17. Renée C[arine] Hoogland, From Marginality to Ex-centricity: Feminist Critical Theories and the case of Elizabeth Bowen (Amsterdam: Benjamins 1991), 230pp. [prev. Van marginaliteit naar ex-centrisme [… &c.], doct. thesis, Amsterdam 1991] Reynolds, Lorna. ‘The Last September – Elizabeth Bowen’s Paradise Lost’, in Ancestral Voices: the Big House in Anglo-Irish Literature, ed. Otto Rauchbauer (Hildesheim: Olms, 1992), pp.149-58. Gearóid Cronin, ‘The Big House Novel and the Irish Landscape in the Work of Elizabeth Bowen, in J. Genet, ed., The Big House in Ireland (Dingle: Brandon; NY: Barnes & Noble 1991), pp.143-62. R. F. Foster, ‘The Irishness of Elizabeth Bowen’, in Paddy and Mr Punch (London: Allen Lane 1993), pp.102-22 [see extract]. Alexander Gonzalez, ‘Elizabeth Bowen’s “Her Table Spread”: A Joycean Irish Story’, in Studies in Short Fiction, 30, 3 (Summer 1993), pp.343-48. W. J. McCormack, Dissolute Characters: Irish Literary History Through Balzac, Sheridan Le Fanu, Yeats and Bowen (Manchester UP 1993) [q.pp.]. Declan Kiberd, ‘Elizabeth Bowen: The Dandy in Revolt’, in Inventing Ireland: The Literature of the Modern Nation (London: Jonathan Cape 1995) [Chap. 20], pp.364-79. Lis Christensen, ‘A Reading of Elizabeth Bowen’s “A Day in the Dark”’, in Irish University Review, 27, 2 (Autumn/Winter 1997), pp.299-309. Tessa Hadley, ‘Landscape and Land Ownership in Elizabeth Bowen’s The Last September’, in Irish Encounters: Poetry, Politics and Prose, ed. Alan Marshall & Neil Sammells (Bath: Sulis Press 1998) [Chap. 8; qpp.]. Benedict Kiely, ‘The Great Gazebo’, in A Raid into Dark Corners and Other Essays (Cork UP 1999), pp. 31-44; espec. pp.34-36. Ruth Frehner, The Colonizers’ Daughters: Gender In The Anglo-Irish Big House Novel (Tubingen: Franacke 1999), 256pp. See also Peter Somerville Large, The Irish Country House: A Social History (London: Sinclair-Stevenson 1995). Jeanette Shumaker, ‘Bruised Boys and “Fallen” Women: The Need for Rescue in Short Stories by Elizabeth Bowen’, in South Carolina Review, “Ireland in the Arts and Humanities, 1899-1999” [Special Issue], 32, 1 (Fall 1999), q.pp. Carmen Concilio, ‘Things that Do Speak in Elizabeth Bowen’s The Last September’, in Moments of Moment: Aspects of the Literary Epiphany, ed. Wim Tigges (Amsterdam: Rodopi Press 1999), pp.279-92. Neil Corcoran, ‘Discovery of a Lack: History and Ellipsis in Elizabeth Bowen’s The Last September’, in Irish University Review, 31, 2 (2001). pp.315-33. R. F. Foster, ‘Prints on the Scene: Elizabeth Bown and the Landscape of Childhood’, in The Story of Ireland: Telling Tales and Making It Up in Ireland (London: Allen Lane 2001), pp.148-86. Raphael Ingelbien, ‘Gothic Genealogies: Dracula, Bowen’s Court and Anglo-Irish Psychology’, in ELH [English Literary History] 70, 4 (2004), p.1089ff. [seeextract]. Eluned Summers-Bremner, ‘Heart(h) and Home: Elizabeth Bowen’s Irishness’ in Études Irlandaises, 29, 2 (2004), pp.135-50. Nicolas, Dominique. ‘The Last September by Elizabeth Bowen, or a Chronicle of a Foreshadowed Death’ in Back to the Present, Forward to the Past: Irish Writing and History Since 1798, Vol. 1, ed. Patricia Lynch, Joachim Fischer & Brian Coates (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2006), pp.297-308. Edwina Keown, ‘Elizabeth Bowen: Empire, Gender and Travel in the Twentieth Century” [PhD thesis] (TCD 2006). Brook Miller, ‘The Impersonal Personal: Value, Voice, and Agency in Elizabeth Bowen’s Literary and Social Criticism’, in Modern Fiction Studies, 53, 2 (Summer 2007), pp.351-69. Jed Esty, ‘Virgins of Empire: The Last September and the Antidevelopment Plot’, in Modern Fiction Studies, 53, 2 (Summer 2007), pp.257-75 [available at Muse - online]. Jack Lane, ‘Elizabeth Bowen [...]’ in the Irish Examiner (Aubane Hist. Soc. 2008), 31pp. [sequel to Elizabeth Bowen: Notes on Eire]; James F. Wurtz, ‘Elizabeth Bown, Modernism, and the Spectre of Anglo-Ireland’, in Estudios Irlandeses, 5 (2010), pp.119-28 [see extract]; James Wurtz, ‘Elizabeth Bowen, Modernism, and the Spectre of Anglo-Ireland’, in Estudios Irlandeses, 5 (2010), pp.118-28. Kathryn Johnson, ‘“Phantasmagoric Hinterlands”: Adolescence and Anglo-Ireland in Elizabeth Bowen’s The House in Paris and The Death of the Heart’, in Irish Women Writers: New Critical Perspectives, ed. Elke d’Hoker, et al. ([Intern.] Peter Lang 2011), q.pp. Tina O’Toole, ‘Unregenerate Spirits: The Counter-Cultural Experiments of George Egerton and Elizabeth Bowen’, in Irish Women Writers: New Critical Perspectives, ed. Elke d’Hoker, et al. ([Intern.] Peter Lang 2011), q.pp. [ top ] See also ... Seán Ó Faolain, The Vanishing Hero: Studies in Novelists of the Twenties (London: Eyre & Spottiswoode 1956); Walter Allen, The Short Story in English (OUP 1981); John Bayley, The Short Story: Henry James to Elizabeth Bowen (Brighton: Harvester [St. Martin’s Press] 1988); Julia Briggs, Night Visitors: The Rise and Fall of the English Ghost Story (London: Faber & Faber 1977); 1983); Eva Figes, Sex and Subterfuge: Women Writers to 1950 (NY: Persea 1982); Sandra Gilbert & Susan Gubar, No Man’s Land: The Place of the Woman Writer in the Twentieth Century (Yale UP 1988); John Hildebidle, Five Irish Writers: The Errand of Keeping Alive (Harvard UP 1989); Rosalind Miles, The Female Form: Women Writes and the Conquest of the Novel (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul 1987); Margot Gayle Backus, The Gothic Family Romance: Heterosexuality, Child Sacrifice, and the Anglo-Irish Colonial Order (Durham: Duke UP 1999); Neil Corcoran, After Yeats and Joyce: Modern Irish Literature (OUP 1997); Heather Ingman, Women’s Fiction between the Wars: Mothers, Daughters and Writing (Edinburgh UP 1998); Vera Kreilkamp, Anglo-Irish Novel and the Big House (Syracuse UP; Eurospan 1999). [ top ] Bibliographical details Phyllis Lassner, Elizabeth Bowen: A Study of the Short Fiction (NY: Twayne 1991), 192pp. CONTENTS. Preface [x]; Acknowledgments [xvi]; 1: THE SHORT FICTION - Introduction [3]; The Ghostly Origins of Female Character [10]; Comedies of Sex and Manners [25]; Children’s “Disconcerting Questions” [41]; Comedies of Sex and Terror [54]; Elegies of Loss and Dispossession [75]; Three Masterworks [97]; Notes to Part 1 [111]. 2: THE WRITER - Introduction [119]; From “The Experience of Writing” [122]; From the Preface to The Faber Book of Modern Short Stones [123]; From a Review of Gorki Stories [127]; From the Preface to Ann Lee’s and Other Stories [128]; Preface to The Demon Lover [131]; From the Preface to The Second Ghost Book [137]; “The Short Story in England” [138]; From “The Forgotten Art of Living” [144]; From “Sources of Influence” [145]; From Bowen’s Court [148]. 3: THE CRITICS - Introduction [157]; William Trevor [168]; Eudora Welty [173]; Chronology [181]; Selected Bibliography [183]; Index [189]. [ top ] Andrew Bennett & Nicholas Royle, Elizabeth Bowen and the Dissolution of the Novel: Still Lives (Basingstoke: Macmillan 1995), 181pp. CHAPS.: Foreword; Acknowledgements; List of Abbreviations; Introduction; Abeyances: The Hotel and The Last September; Shivered: To the North and Friends and Relations; Fanatic Immobility:The House in Paris; Dream Wood: The Death of the Heart; Sheer Kink: The Heat of the Day; Obelisk: A World of Love; Trance: The Little Girls; Convulsions: Eva Trout; Index. [ top ] Susan Osborn [Rutgers U.], ed., Elizabeth Bowen: New Critical Perspectives (Cork UP 2009), 256pp. CONTENTS. 1. Sinéad Mooney, ‘Unstable Compounds: Bowen’s Beckettian Affinities’; 2. Osborn, ‘How to Measure this Unaccountable Darkness Between the Trees: The Strange Relation of Style and Meaning in The Last September’; 3. Eluned Summers-Bremner, ‘Dead Letters and Living Things: Historical Ethics in The House in Paris and The Death of the Heart’; 4. June Sturrock, ‘Mumbo-jumbo: The Haunted World of The Little Girls’; 5. Shannon Wells-Lassagne, ‘She-ward Bound: Elizabeth Bowen as a Sensationalist Writer’; 6. Shafquat Towheed, ‘Territory, Space, Modernity: Elizabeth Bowen’s The Demon Lover and Other Stories and Wartime London’; 7. Brook Miller, with Luke Elward, Tessa Hempel & Philip Kollar, ‘Narrative, Meaning and Agency in The Heat of the Day’. Bibliography, pp.159-66. [ top ] Commentary See infra. [ top ] Quotations See infra. [ top ] References Desmond Clarke, Ireland in Fiction: A Guide to Irish Novels, Tales, Romances and Folklore [Pt. 2] (Cork: Royal Carbery 1985), lists The Last September (1929), 312pp. [Black and Tan period from big house standpoint, Sir Richard and Lady Naylor of Danielstown House, Co. Tipperary [err.], and dg. [recte niece] Lois [Farquar] who thinks herself in love with young British garrison officer later killed by the IRA; psychological interest (‘unfortunately people of little interest or importance’, acc. Clarke)]; A World of Love (Jonathan Cape 1955), 244pp. [middle class family on farm in Co. Limerick; parents, and dgs. Jane, 20, and Lilia, 12]; and lists The Heat of the Day, Eva Trout, A Summer’s Night, andBowen’s Court. [ top ] Seamus Deane, gen. ed., The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing (Derry: Field Day 1991), Vol. 3 selects “The Happy Autumn Fields”, from The Demon Lover and Other Stories [939-48]; The Last September [1167]. Bowen is quoted as showing that in Anglo-Irish gothic fiction, the Victorian period remains central (ed. W. J. McCormack) [833]; identified with an Irish gothic tradition as distinctly Protestant (do.) [837]; social origins in the countryside (do.) [838]; qualitatively different phase of literary history [from Bram Stoker et al…, do.], [846]; finely delineated studies in farouche desperation […] in The Last September made rare use of her own Irish origins in a novel that employed the final stages of British occupation as the backdrop to a young girl’s encounter with new realities (do.) [853-54]; The Last September [bears] violent witness to big houses of Ireland, their ‘glory and their doom’ (Augustine Martin, ed.) [1022]; the tradition of the big house hardly produced a work equal to The Last September (ibid.) [1026]. BIOG., 949 [as above]. Vol. 3 selects Seven Winters, Memories of a Dublin Childhood (1943) [453-55]. [ top ] Anne Owen Weekes, ed., Unveiling Treasures (Dublin: Attic 1993) cites passage from Last September, with plot summary. [Biog. as supra; corrig. father d.1928 from 1938, other source]; Naylor family at Danielstown, and niece Lois Farquar; also Laurence, the Naylor nephew at Oxford, and Gerald Lesworth, the British Officer. [‘I’m not English … Thank God!’] Elaine Showalter, A Literature of their Own (1984), bio-note: 1899-1973; novelist, b. Dublin, only child of a barrister; ed. Downe House School, Kent, and in Ireland and Europe; m. Alan Cameron in 1923; first book Encounters (1923); best known for The House in Paris (1935), and The Death of the Heart (1938). Anthologies, Katie Donovan, A. N. Jeffares & Brendan Kennelly, eds., Ireland’s Women (Dublin: Gill & Macmillan 1994), selects “The Most Unforgettable Character I’ve Ever Met”, from The Mulberry Tree (Poolbeg 1978). Hermione Lee, The Secret Self: A Century Of Short Stories By Women (Phoenix 1995) incls. Bowen’s story, “Her Table Spread”. Other anthologies with stories by Bowen incl. Derek Hudson, ed., Classic English Short Stories 1930-1955 (OUP 1971), and Evelyn Conlon & Hans-Christian Oeser, eds., Cutting the Night in Two: Short Stories by Irish Women Writers (Dublin: New Island 2001). [ top ] Booksellers' Catalogues Hyland Books (1997) lists Lady Cynthia Asquith, ed., The Funny Bone, New Humorous Stories (London: Jarrold 1928), 287pp.; Selected Stories [Hour Glass Library] (Dublin 1946); ed.: The Faber Book of Modern Stories [1st ed.] (1937) [incl. Bowen, Joyce, O’Connor, O’Faolain, O’Flaherty among the 26 authors]; Jocelyn Brooke: Elizabeth Bowen Supplement to British Book News, No. 28. 1952. Peter Ellis (Cat. 19; 2003) lists Angela Thirkill, An Angela Thirkill Omnibus [Ankle Deep; High Rising; Wild Strawberries] (London: Hamish Hamilton 1966), with 3pp. Introduction by Elizabeth Bowen. Libraries: BELFAST PUBLIC LIBRARY holds Shelbourne, Centre of Dublin Life (1951). HARRY RANSOM HUMANITIES RESEARCH CENTER (Texas Univ., Austin), holds MSS of the majority of her novels together with extensives correspondence [online]. [ top ] Notes The Last September (1929), Set in Co. Cork during the Irish Troubles of 1919-20, the novel deals with the emotional awakening of Lois Farquar, a young, unformed woman living at Danielstown, the home of her aunt and uncle, Sir Richard and Lady Myra Naylor. Hugo Montmorency and his ailing wife Francie are sem-permanent guests at Danielstown also. Hugo is a charming but ineffectual: he has sold his own country house (inherited from his wife’s family), planning to move to Canada at the time but forever lacking the determination to do so. He is the initial object of Lois’s attachment, which afterwards shifts to Gerald, a young officer stationed nearby. Gerald presses an unwanted engagement on her but is killed in an ambush soon after. Meanwhile Marda, a sophisticated young woman, comes to visit Danielstown. Hugo and Lois are drawn to her in different ways, as too is Laurence, a young relation of Lady Naylor studying at Oxford who maintains an air of studied indifference to Lois (and life in Ireland generally). After scenes involving Anglo-Irish and Catholic bourgeois neighbours of different shades of social acceptability and Empire loyalty (including an intoxicating dance in the local British barracks where Lois unwillingly commits herself to Gerald), Lady Naylor brutally shreds Gerald’s hopes and the Montmorencys prepare to depart. A series of encounters with an IRA-man - son of tenants of the Naylors - lends urgency to the narrative while the eventual ‘execution’ of Danielstown and other ‘big houses’ in the surrounding area at the close brings an era of Irish history to a blazing conclusion. [ top ] The House in Paris (1935): Leopold, a ten-year old young illegitimate child, is brought to the Fisher’s home in Paris in expectation of meeting his mother Karen Michaelis who rejected him at birth. Leopold is the product of her affair with Max Ebhart when both of them were engaged to to others - respectively Ray Forrestier and Karen’s friend Naomi Fisher. Max has been driven to suicide by the malicious interference of Naomi’s mother. At the house Leopold meets a girl called Henrietta, situated similarly to himself, and is finally taken away by his stepfather Ray Forrestier in the course of events that reveal the child to be neurotically obsessed with his absent mother. [ top ] The Heat of the Day (1949): Stella Rodney is having an affair with Robert Kelway, an Englishman who is spying for the Nazis in wartime Britain. She is approached by Harrison, a British agent who is on to him, and offered his freedom if she has an affair with him (“I quite see. I’m to form a disagreeably assocaiation in order that a man many be left gree to go on selling his country.”) Though set mostly in London, the novel contains constrasting scenes in the imperilled “big house” own by her soldier-son in Ireland and the country house owned by Kelway. Stella finally confronts Robert in her London home and he confesses to spying for the Fascists before falling to his death in uncertain circumstances from a rooftop. The novel shows a mastery of atmosphere and is duly celebrated for its evocation of the war-time atmosphere there, as well as a masterly mixture of styles, but lacks for cogency at the level of plot. How and why Robert spies for Germany is never made clear, for instance (but perhaps because it is the more understandable Anglo-Irish form of ideological defections). [ top ] A World of Love (1955), a story of awakening girlhood passion, set in an Irish ‘big house’, and dealing with Jane Danby’s discovery of a packet of letters from the former owner Guy and thought to be addressed to her own mother Lilia, to whom he was engaged but later found to be to an unknown woman; Jane finally falls in love Richard Priam, breaking her obsession with her mother’s supposed lover. Eva Trout (1969), a story of ruined childhood and life-long paranoia in which Eva leads her boarding-school teacher Iseult Smith, on whom she has a crush, to believe that she is pregnant by the latter’s newly-married husband, later travelling through America with a deaf-mute child whom she has illegal acquired; on her return to England, she steps in between Iseult and Constantine Ormeau, formerly her own father’s lover, and takes up with Henry Darcy, a neighbour’s son. She is finally killed by her deranged ‘child’ Jeremy at Victoria Station with a revolver from Iseult’s luggage. Review: ‘Elizabeth Bowen, who started out with such authority in the Henry James country to which she refers once or twice here, has now moved into a still more rarefied world. Now certainly she is as curious, cryptic and capricious as Iris Murdoch. So actually is Eva Trout, her oversized and rather outlandish heroine-heiress who disappears unpredictably from time to time, having generated difficulties in between. But then Eva was “misbegotten” to begin with - abandoned as an infant by her mother who rushed off to a lover and death, shunted around in a slapdash fashion by her father who was more interested in the homosexual Constantine who becomes her guardian. In changing scenes Eva is seen long enough to become the enzyme of uncertainty and unrest that she is - disrupting the marriage of a former teacher, attracting the youngest son at a nearby vicarage, hovering here, unsettling there, disappearing to reappear eight years later with the deafmute who was “virtually born” to her but then is “not of her flesh and blood.” The child, Jeremy, shares in her anonymity: “Anyhow, what a slippery fish is identity; and what is it, besides a slippery fish” and how totally baffling is la Trout with her “genius for unreality?” And would you like her more if you could understand her better? Brushing the cobwebs aside, one is left only with the hooded enigma of her presence, a precarious reward were it not for the calligraphy of one of the enduring, elegant writers of our time.’ (Kirkus Reviews; see COPAC online.) [ top ] Charles Ritchie: Ritchie’s diary documents the beginning his love affair with Elizabeth Bowen, which lasted until her death 32 years later. The first letter from Bowen that he kept was written at the time of their first separation when he left London for Ottawa in 1945. In it she told him he took with him ‘my real life, my only life, everything that is meant by my heart. I am in your keeping. And you are in mine.’ In the years that followed they were never under the same roof for more than a week, including the days they spent at Bowen’s Court each year - which she regarded as their joint home - days remembered for their intensity in her letters and his diaries. (See Victoria Glendinning, ‘I am in your keeping’, The Guardian, [Sat.] 7 February 2009, accessed online 28.08.2010). [ top ] Benedict Kiely: ‘Now this is exactly what Elizabeth Bown said to me: “Few of his critics have noticed about Henry James that he displayed all the careful qualities of a Protestant from Lower Ulster.’ ( Kiely, Sing to the Bird, London: Methuen 1991, p.141.) Peter Somerville Large, The Irish Country House, A Social History (London: Sinclair-Stevenson 1995), includes account of Bowen’s ‘furtive disposal’ of Bowen’s Court without advertisement for sale; see review by Desmond Guinness, in The Irish Times (1 July, 1995). [ top ] Seán Bán (Candid Sean): The candid additions to Seán Ó Faolain’s Vive Moi (1963; rev. edn. 1993) include remarks on the Queen of Bowen’s Court: ‘the last time I had lunched there [at Jammet’s] had been with Elizabeth Bowen in the role of another Dublin Matty O’Hara [cf. Mata Hari] carrying an Irish tricolour in one hand and in the other a Union Jack.’ (From full page extract, Sunday Independent, 12 Nov. 1993; p.6.) See also Augustine Martin, review of Roy Foster’s Paddy and Mr Punch (1993) [in Irish Times, q.d.]: Bowen invited O’Faolain to lunch at Jammet’s in 1941, two years after the end of their affair, he wondering why, and not knowing that she was a British agent at the time; includes sketch by Virginia Woolf: ‘very honourable horse-faced, upper-class hard constricted mind.’ [ top ] Lunchtime express: Elizabeth Bowen is identified to as a reader for the publisher to whom Briony sends her manuscript in Ian MacEwan’s shortlisted Booker novelAtonement (Jonathan Cape 2001): ‘Simply put, you need the backbone of the story. It may interest you to know that one of your avid readers was Mrs Elizabeth Bowen. She picked up the bundle of typescript in an idle moment while passing through this office on her way to luncheon, asked to take it home to read, and finished it that afternoon. Initially, she thought the prose “too full, too cloying”, but with “redeeming shades of Dusty Answer” (which I wouldn’t have thought of at all). Then she was “hooked for a while” and finally she gave us some notes, which are, as it were, mulched into the above.’ (p.314.) [ top ] Rose Macaulay: ‘Macaulay’s memory of her free childhood in Italy is reflected in the half-wild character of the young girl, Barbary, who - sent to England to be “civilised”, for complicated family reasons - finds her true home among the ruins. Romantic and didactic though this novel is, it has a strong atmosphere (it would make a good film), comparable to - and surely influenced by - Elizabeth Bowen’s The Death of the Heart.’ (See Hermione Lee, review of Sarah Le Fanu, Rose Macaulay, in The Guardian, 14 June 2003.) Mistress of the house: Elizabeth Jane Howard (Slipstream: A Memoir, Macmillan 2002), recalls how ‘Elizabeth Bowen, when brought breakfast in bed, took one swift look at the tray and said, “You’ve forgotten the Marmalade spoon.” Most people would think that funny, at any rate in retrospect, but with Jane Howard it seems another example of her domestic burdens. [… &c.].’ (Quoted in Sarah Curtis, review of same, Times Literary Supplement, 13 Nov. 2002, p.25.) Booked: In 1972 a Booker judges’ panel consisting of George Steiner, Cyril Connolly and Elizabeth Bowen gave the prize to John Berger for G, who handed half of it to the Black Panthers. [ top ] “Notes of Ireland” is the title of the communications sent by Bowen to the British Wartime Ministry of Information for transmission to the Dominions Office; there is a gap in the archive from 1940 to 1942 arising from unknown causes. A letter to Virginia Woolf (1 July 1940) discussing the origins of this commission and her misgivings about it (‘Ireland can be dementing, if one’s Irish, and may well be so now’) is reprinted in Hermione Lee, ed., The Mulberry Bush: Writings of Elizabeth Bowen, Poolbeg 1986, pp.215-16; see R. F. Foster, ‘The Irishness of Elizabeth Bowen’, in Paddy and Mr Punch (London: Allen Lane 1993), p.331. Source note: information in the Life section [supra] largely derives from Patricia Craig, Elizabeth Bowen (Penguin 1986). [ top ]