A Profligacy off Inference

By Paul Gray

THE COLLECTED STORIES OF ELIZABETH BOWEN Knopf; 784 pages; $17.95

Tales have no doubt existed ever since the first cave woman asked her mate what happened during his day in the ooze. The modern short story is a very late mutation of his long-ago answer. Innovators such as Chekhov, Turgenev and Joyce, among others, turned the brief narrative away from its traditional purpose, i.e., telling what happened next, quickly. By the early decades of this century, serious story writers had pretty much replaced sequence with pattern, events with perceptions. The virtual disappearance of plot from short fiction produced, to be sure, plenty of wispy work, attenuated aperc,us evoking the memory of an echo of a sigh. But the masters of the new form understood and met its twin demands: a stringent economy of language fused to a profligacy of inference.

Elizabeth Bowen (1899-1973) belongs among these masters. Her skill as a short-story writer attracted some notice during her lifetime, but she was better known as the author of novels, particularly The Death of the Heart (1938) and The Heat of the Day (1949). The most recent volume of her stories published in the U.S. appeared more than 20 years ago, so her reputation in this field had to be taken on faith or hunted down in libraries. No longer. The Collected Stories of Elizabeth Bowen assembles 79 stories, the complete record of four decades of work. It offers old fans old favorites, plus some pieces they probably missed. New readers can sit back and watch a dazzling career unfold.

Bowen's Anglo-Irish background, her childhood on a rural estate in County Cork, served her well when she went to London to write in the 1920s. Although sophistication came easily to her, along with Bloomsbury friends, she did not forget that cultivated society was a veneer over a more fundamental life, governed by forces of nature and timed to the rhythm of the seasons. This double vision gives a peculiar intensity to many of her stories; beneath their bright, sometimes ephemeral surfaces, implacable forces can be felt moving, well beyond human control. Sometimes they break out. In The Storm, a husband and wife visiting an Italian villa find their quarrel interrupted by a ferocious thundershower: "The attack begun, the clouds brought up their artillery; lightning, splitting the sky, shimmered across the flagstones of the terrace." Despite its fury, the storm is not malign; it subtly changes the marriage into something both partners can live with.

Many of Bowen's stories were influenced by the work of Henry James and Virginia Woolf. What saves them from the pallid artiness of imitation is the author's taste for melodrama. She knows how to slip in the bizarre or improbable for the purpose of raising expectations, not eyebrows. Ghosts walk in some of these tales, and they are not explained away as wandering, ectoplasmic neuroses. They are what they are. Bowen's fiction is sometimes as strange as truth. In The Evil That Men Do--, a bored housewife writes a love letter to a man who, unknown to her, has just been run over by a truck. In The Cat Jumps, a couple buys a house whose previous owner had murdered and dismembered his wife ("He put her heart in her hatbox. He said it belonged in there").

The Harold Wrights are too enlightened to feel superstitious about their new lodgings, but not all of the guests for their first house party are so sure. The weekend winds down as a frightful comedy.

Perhaps the best group of stories in this collection deals with England during World War II, especially London in the blitz. Bowen courageously, stubbornly stayed in her house there, when many friends had taken to the countryside to escape the German bombardment. While the city shook and plaster fell, Bowen collected images and wove them into stories that hauntingly balanced civilization above an abyss. In the Square notes how the bombs were returning London to nature: "The sun, now too low to enter [the square] normally, was able to enter brilliantly at a point where three of the houses had been bombed away; two or three of the may trees, dark with summer, caught on their tops the illicit gold."

In Sunday Afternoon, a man who has stayed on in London visits some friends in the country. He misses "the aesthetic of living" that he and they once shared and finds it hard to explain what the bombing is like: "As it does not connect with the rest of life, it is difficult, you know, to know what one feels. One's feelings seem to have no language for anything so preposterous." Someone present replies, sympathetically, that the blitz "will have no literature."

He was wrong, as the story he appears in proves. Bowen consistently found language for feelings that might otherwise have simply seemed preposterous. She worked artfully to make her work appear unlabored. An apt, if unintended, description of her achievement appears in Ivy Gripped the Steps, one of her finest stories. A young boy visits a seaside resort and marvels at the glittering life he sees:

"Everything was effortless; and, to him, consequently, seemed stamped with style." --By Paul Gray

Excerpt

"Full moonlight drenched the city and searched it; there was not a niche left to stand in. The effect was remorseless: London looked like the moon's capital --shallow, cratered, extinct. It was late, but not yet midnight; now the buses had stopped the polished roads and streets in this region sent for minutes together a ghostly unbroken reflection up. The soaring new flats and the crouching old shops and houses looked equally brittle under the moon, which blazed in windows that looked its way. The futility of the black-out became laughable: from the sky, presumably, you could see every slate in the roofs, every whited kerb, every contour of the naked winter flowerbeds in the park; and the lake, with its shining twists and tree-darkened islands would be a landmark for miles, yes, miles, overhead."

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