Past and Present
by Edward Power
When Elizabeth Bowen sold Bowen’s Court in 1960, she was assured that
the new owners would live there, and preserve and cherish it. She’d been
reluctant to sell it, but the poorness of her health was mirrored by that of
her economic situation, and she’d been left with little choice but to
dispose of the ancestral home. Within a year, the great house was reduced to
a pile of rubble, and today it is almost impossible to trace where exactly
it stood. It was an act of betrayal which, I think, hastened Elizabeth’s
decline. The Irish Times of the day described the demolition as an act of ‘outrageous
vandalism’, and the late Waterford poet, Sean Dunne, writing in the Cork
Examiner in 1987, more quietly expressed his sorrow: ‘An old man was
walking on the other side of the road. I asked him the way to Bowen’s
Court. “Sure, there’s nothing there, now” he said.’ The
Big House ‘died’ in 1960.. Elizabeth lived on into another decade,
and died of lung cancer in 1973.
In her acclaimed family history, Bowen’s Court, first published in 1942
and republished by The Collins Press, Cork in 1998, Elizabeth notes with a
kind of stoic sadness the passing of buildings great and small. Churches; great
houses put to the torch before and after the Treaty years. She refers to discontinued
churches as ‘voluntary ruins’.
‘
When Protestants in a parish decline to a low number the roof is taken off
the Protestant church. Sometimes the church is no more than locked up, sometimes,
as in the case of Rockmills (the first village on our road to Fermoy) the building
is pared down to the spire.” The poignant irony, of course, was that
as she penned these thoughts she seemed to have no inkling at all that during
her lifetime her beloved Bowen’s Court would be razed to the ground.
Elizabeth Bowen was born in Dublin in 1899, and grew up in the city and at
the family home in county Cork (her ‘summer place’). Some early
traumatic events seem to have shaped her future career as a writer. She was
just seven years of age when her father suffered a nervous breakdown and her
mother took her across the Irish Sea to live in Kent. Her father recovered,
but a year later, her mother died from cancer. Bitha, as she was affectionately
called, was then twelve years old, and went to live again at Bowen’s
Court with her maternal aunts.
Bowen’s Court, her wonderful 450-page memoir of the Bowen family and
the Big House, is also a window on Irish history from the mid-1600’s
down to the 1920’s, and was first published in Great Britain in the 1940’s.
The 1998 edition on my bookshelf has a perceptive and illuminating Introduction
by the Cappaquinn poet, Thomas McCarthy. I met McCarthy at a book-launch in
Raheen House Hotel in Clonmel late last year, and the conversation touched
on Molly Keane and Elizabeth Bowen. He has a quiet gentle voice that, in a
strange way, seems to emphasise his learning and authority. ‘Irish history’ wrote
McCarthy, ‘ is a room that becomes animated when Elizabeth makes her
stylish entrance’.
She certainly had a marvellous ‘presence’ - even in the flickering
black & white of old film footage, the strength of her personality comes
across very forcibly. I remember, a few years ago, watching an RTE documentary,
and feeling, even through the remove of decades and a television screen, the
power of her personality. That power comes through most engagingly in her books,
two of which were set in Ireland. Indeed, her ancestral home became the template
for these two novels, ‘The Last September’ , published in 1929,
and ‘A World Of Love’ which appeared in the mid-1950’s.
In a sense, Bowen’s Court the house transcended the dust of demolition,
as it had already been lovingly built by Elizabeth, using words for cut-stone
and memories for mortar. The book ‘Bowen’s Court’, is now
the house, and the house, the book. And in it, the personality of Elizabeth
Bowen lives on. Her life, and the strength of her personality, the richness
of her creative gift, touched so many other lives. Among these were Hermione
Lee, Victoria Glendinning, and the broadcaster and pilgrim, Donncha O’Dulaing,
who wrote his M.A. thesis on Elizabeth Bowen.’ Quite a diverse grouping
of individuals.
Close to where Bowen’s Court once stood, St. Colman’s Church, Farahy,
remains like a small outpost of what was. It was ‘tucked rather deeply
into a crease of trees’ when Elizabeth worshipped there, and it was here
that she was laid to rest on a cold, snowy day in February 1973. Almost every
year since then, a service has been held to commemorate her and the annual
Farahy Address has been delivered. A selection of these was published by Four
Courts Press in 1998, and included contributions from Hubert Butler, Martin
Mansergh, Roy Foster, and the late Canon Oliver Peare, who recalled seeing
Elizabeth for the first time.
‘
It was a Sunday morning at an early celebration of H.C. She sat near the back
of the church, dressed in a warm grey-green over coat and a silk scarf on her
head. I remember it clearly because I could feel the attention she paid to
the service and the sincerity she brought to worship.’ Later, Molly Keane
wrote to Canon Peare congratulating him on his address.
Farahy church, tucked away as it was in a corner of the demesne had, even during
Bowen’s lifetime, a small congregation. She describes a moment there
exquisitely:
‘
The sun winked through the trees and the south windows on to pewfuls of little
girls in white muslin dresses and stretched white muslin hats and of little
boys in sailor suits.’ Here is another description of Farahy church, ‘seasoned’ by
something bitter-sweet:
‘
All through the week the church remained locked up. There is felt to be either
a touch of demonstration or else a smack of popishness - reserved sacrament, ‘images’ -
about the wish to pray in a silent church: if the Protestant wants God at irregular
hours he has to sanctify his own place. There were no weekday services. Throughout
fine weeks of summer the shut up church would bake in the sun that streams
through the south windows, warping the prayerbooks left in the pews. At all
other seasons mildew set in, and damp clung to the rope of the one bell’.
Elizabeth writes bitter-sweetly, too, about Bowen’s Court, and she doesn’t
attempt to paint a rosy picture of her ancestors. Indeed, her narrative is
at times painfully honest, and she makes no attempt to conceal the fact that
some of them were irascible and litigation-conscious, and even downright unpleasant
(but what family history is essentially different, if one trawls back far enough
- and what rose garden is without thorns?). The house itself was completed
in 1776, and almost remained roofless when a shortage of cash-flow supervened.
Farahy church, in its present form, dates from 1720 - almost half a century
before the completion of Bowen’s Court, and still stands half a century
after the demise of the Big House.
Thomas McCarthy, if memory serves, once worked as a gardener to a Big House
in county Waterford (Molly Keane’s, I believe), and when he won the prestigious
Patrick Kavanagh Award for Poetry, the ‘Sunday Independent’ ran
a full-page feature on him. That award-winning collection of poetry was later
published under the title, ‘The Sorrow Garden’. He later wrote
a novel set within the world of Irish party politics.
McCarthy deems ‘Bowen’s Court’ to be one of the most complex
and beautiful books produced by Irish memory. I’d go further and say
that it is greater than any of her novels. McCarthy Introduction is perceptive
and illuminating, warm and yet not uncritical, and I think I should leave the
last word with him: ‘Elizabeth Bowen was a magnetic person, a truly modern
woman, displaced and yet deeply rooted. I’ll always remember how Molly
Keane spoke about her; with reverence and love and a kind of fearful admiration.
Many have fallen under her spell.’