'Those Little Dear Saving Illusory Worlds'

In 1948, Elizabeth Bowen published Ivy Gripped the Steps, a collection of stories written between the spring of 1941 and the late autumn of 1944, when Britain was under regular aerial attacks by the Germans. In her preface to the American edition she writes: 

“I wonder whether in a sense all wartime writing is not resistance writing? In no way dare we who were in Britain compare ourselves with the French. But personal life here put up its own resistance to the annihilation that was threatening it—war. Everyone here, as is known, read more: and what was sought in books—old books, new books—was the communicative touch of personal life.”

 

The twentieth century normalized the notion of total war, in which the fighting is no longer confined to professional militaries. Civilians are targets. No immunity, few rules of war, terror. Now, Ukraine. Not long ago, Syria. Those of us safely on the other side of the world weigh what Bowen means: “the communicative touch of personal life,” how quickly it can be destroyed. As civilians, we might think: “I didn’t sign up for this. I did nothing wrong.” Naïveté, of course. Bowen’s excellent stories are not “war stories” in the banal sense. She hints at war’s impact. From the title story:

 

“Here and there, portions of porches or balustrades had fallen into front gardens, crushing their overgrowth; but there were no complete ruins; no bomb or shell had arrived immediately here, and effects of blast, though common to all of Southstone, were less evident than desuetude and decay. It was now the September of 1944; and for some reason, the turn of the tide of war, the accumulation of the Invasion victories, gave Southstone its final air of defeat.”

 

Bowen was, in a qualified though literal sense, a spy. From 1940 to 1945, she worked for the British Ministry of Information, secretly reporting on neutral Ireland’s attitudes on the war. Bowen was born in Dublin, lending her the double vision of the great Anglo-Irish writers (Swift, Synge, Yeats, Beckett, Hubert Butler, William Trevor). The metaphor is irresistible: writer-as-spy. She writes in the preface:

 

“The search for indestructible landmarks in a destructible world led many down strange paths. The attachment to these when they had been found produced small worlds-within-worlds of hallucination—in most cases, saving hallucination. Writers followed the paths they saw or felt people treading, and depicted those little dear saving illusory worlds.”

 

[See also Bowen’s wartime novel The Heat of the Day (1949), as well as Henry Green’s Caught (1943) and a number of V.S. Pritchett’s stories.]