From Elizabeth Bowen (1899-1973) we can always
learn something. Her prose is identifiably modern, and always economical, never
flamboyant, but you would not confuse it with that produced by those patron
saints of minimalism, Hemingway and Beckett. One of the books I’m reading as
respite from Doughty is Bowen’s A Time in Rome (1960), which begins like
a conventional travelogue and becomes a digressive meditation on many things,
especially architecture and the ravages of modernism on city life. She writes a
graceful catalog, unlike writers who apply a vacuum cleaner to the landscape.
Here is her rendering of the “vertical suburbs” of Campagna:
“[L]ean young skyscrapers jumbled on one another
like pyramids of cosmetics or tinted candy – white, lemon, orange, apricot,
rose, blue-pink, chalk-blue, henna, pistachio, olive, mulberry, violet. Some
ape New York, others Scandinavia. Shiny with glass, honeycombed with balconies
spawning flowerpots, these appear to be settings for youthful marriages (rentier).”
And this on the following page:
“[A]n outburst of what looks like Germanic neo-mediaevalism.
. . .Gasworks, slaughter-houses, rubbish dumps, cattle markets, an abandoned
shooting gallery, a defunct racecourse, duststorms of demolition, skeletal
battles of construction, schools, asylums and hospitals, squatters’ villages,
marble-works, and other relics of pleasure or signs of progress crop up
according to where one goes.”
Such writing has a deceptively casual transparency.
Bowen never draws attention to her own virtuosity. Her friend the poet Howard
Moss, in a tribute he wrote after her death, has an interesting explanation for
the quiet confidence of Bowen’s prose:
“Her amazing vocabulary was partly the result, I
think, of her conquering her stutter. She seemed to know synonyms for every
word in English. Her celebrated command of language may have begun as an effort
to circumvent it, and her wit, in part, derived from the successes and the
failures thereof.”
He’s right. There’s a precision about her prose.
It never feels desultory. Bowen’s language is suffused with her sensibility.
Though unmistakably hers, her prose is not freakish or flowery, and never there
just for the sake of showing off. She has a way of setting up a paragraph in
which the tail carries, like a scorpion, a sting:
“We the democracies, for instance, are surprised
by the stated totalitarian view of us—we are, we learn, given over to luxury,
the enslavement of the worker, power-mania, whoring, boredom, imperialism,
unseriousness, dyspepsia, blood-lust, insecurity, venality, money-making,
sloth, intrigue, competitiveness, terror of wrath to come, servile art,
sleeping-pills, hangers-on, sterilizing fantasies, degeneracy. Really, they
make us sound like the ancient Romans.”
Parse that paragraph metrically. Read it for
rhythm. And remember to smile if not laugh.
[Read Bowen’s
novels, of course, in particular The Death of the Heart, and her short stories,
but don’t forget Bowen’s Court, described by Hubert Butler as “that
wonderful book of social and family history"]
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