Customer Reviews

The Death of the Heart

5 star:		(10)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(5)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

First off, let me say that the Anchor paperback edition is a pleasure to read, as are all the Bowen novels in this series. It has clean generous type, a binding that stays open, a cover that feels good in the hand, an attractive and totally relevant illustration, typography that captures both Bowen's elegance and her modernity, and -- wonder of wonders -- a back-cover blurb that brilliantly encapsulates the essence of this elusive novel. For example: "As she deftly and delicately exposes the cruelty that lurks behind the polished surfaces of conventional society, Bowen reveals herself as a masterful novelist who combines a sharp sense of humor with a devastating gift for divining human motivations."

Not for nothing does the book-jacket writer compare Elizabeth Bowen to Henry James. For this is a very Jamesian subject. The recently-orphaned 16-year-old Portia, Bowen's heroine, is significantly older than James' Maisie (WHAT MAISIE KNEW) and younger than his Isabel Archer (THE PORTRAIT OF A LADY), but like them she is thrust into sophisticated society as a naive observer, and the book is mainly taken up by the author's razor-sharp dissection of that society and sensitive exploration of the heroine's feelings.

What is surprising here, even in comparison to Henry James or to the other Elizabeth Bowen novels that I have read (THE LAST SEPTEMBER and THE HOUSE IN PARIS), is that so little actually happens. Everything seems to point to a premature sexual affair which will proves disastrous for Portia, especially once she falls for the charms of the caddish Eddie, whose previous dalliances we have already seen described. Portia herself is the offspring of her father's late-life affair, which has forced him to leave his life of English respectability and to live abroad; there is a sense of unreliability in the bloodline. Even the title of the book, THE DEATH OF THE HEART, and the subtitles of its three major parts -- "The World," "The Flesh," and "The Devil" -- all seem to be leading in this direction.

And yet, while sexuality is always present in the subtext (another Jamesian quality), it never tips over into action. This is a book in which so simple an event as Eddie's holding the wrong girl's hand at a movie can have traumatic significance; there is no need to go farther. I can only think that Bowen's misdirection is deliberate. In the course of waiting for something to happen, the reader finds that he has absorbed countless details and impressions of everyday life that, taken cumulatively, have an even more devastating effect. This book is like a timed-release drug capsule; you may feel comparatively little after you have finished reading it, but it continues to work in the mind long after you have put it down.

In her three-part structure, Bowen contrasts two different strata of English society. The outer sections are set in the upper-class world of Portia's half-brother Thomas and his wife Anna, who live in an expensive house in one of the Nash Terraces fronting Regent's Park. Thomas is withdrawn and remote; Anna leads a busy social life with many male friends; they communicate only superficially with each other and hardly at all with Portia, who is forced to turn to the housekeeper, Matchett, as the nearest thing to a confidante. It is no wonder that she falls for Eddie, whom she sees as an outsider just like her. Meeting him at first assuages her loneliness, but his eventual small betrayals only serve to heighten it.

Contrasting with London society is a month that Portia spends with Anna's former governess Mrs. Heccomb, in an off-season seaside resort. Having been brought up in a similar resort town myself, I found Bowen's description of the wind-battered setting and the cheerfully rowdy life of the young people whom Portia meets there one of the most vivid sections of this excellently-observed book. While the apparently free-and-easy quality of this middle-class setting can be seen to have its own limitations and proprieties, it sends Portia back to town with an unbearable sense of the shallow frigidity of her life with Thomas and Anna. And the events of the weekend when Eddie comes down to join her, although slow to make their full effect, eventually alter their relationship (and Portia's view of herself) irretrievably.

One of the most poignant aspects of the book is its awareness of transience. Thomas and Anna are eminently settled in their house, their work, their society; even the constant motion of the Heccomb young people and their set is based on an underlying stability. But Portia's life has always been rootless, moving from one European hotel to another, staying out of season and in the cheapest rooms -- rootless with one vital exception: the security of her parents' love. Eddie's rootlessness is of a more dangerous variety, coming of having rejected the life of his still-living parents without creating anything significant of his own to replace it, but it takes Portia time to realize the essential difference between them. The theme is further reflected in one minor character who will become important at the end: the sad Major Brutt, who "had a good war" but has been rattling around since, growing rubber in Malaya, and now staying in a seedy London hotel waiting for something to turn up; it is a touching portrait, albeit a frightening one.

And what will happen to Portia? Will her heart remain dead? Is it indeed HER heart that dies? The book ends on a spiritual and psychological crisis, but it offers no resolution. Perhaps it is wishful thinking on my part, but I do not see her life ending in either tragedy or pathos, despite the book's title. Portia's first innocence has been dispelled, certainly, but there is an energy in her, a drive towards the good which I believe will enable her to learn from her experiences and ultimately rise above them. Not the least of the qualities of this admirable edition which I praised at the beginning is the cover painting, which goes far to contractict the implications of the title and declare that this wonderful novel is not, after all, depressing.

I don't know what those who called this Bowen masterpiece "boring" expected of this novel. Perhaps they hoped for a simple, bland, beach-blanket novel they could skim in a day. I'm sure they were disappointed to find that this is an intense, at times intellectually difficult novel to read. Bowen's descriptions of the inner workings of an adolescent girl often require a second or third reading. This is not because her writing is dull or too enigmatic; it is because Bowen materializes the thoughts of an unconscious mind, thoughts that for some are difficult to understand because we do not realize we have them until they are before us on a white page. This is the genius of this novel; the poignancy of it is not in the plot but in Bowen's subtle display of humanity. This is not so much a novel as a psychological study, and it is brilliant. The simple-minded need not apply.

An extraordinary book--far and away Bowen's best, and one of the most perfectly constructed novels of all time. Perhaps its most astonishing achievement is to show not only the devastating effects of experience upon innocence but also the seriously alarming and equally destructive effects true innocence can have in a world of experience. Anna's sophistication and coolness make her no less vulnerable than the fifteen year-old Portia, and I don't think anybody who's read it can ever forget Anna's great speech at the end of the novel about how she would feel if she were Portia, or the famous scene with Portia discovering she's been betrayed in the movie theater. It's also a very funny book: the sequences with Mrs. Heccomb and her children at Waikiki are hilarious. I heartily recommend this novel.

It feels perfectly ridiculous to be sitting here alloting stars to a writer as established in the firmament as Elizabeth Bowen. She is one of the great contemporary writers, and she was teaching when I was in college. We were too young to be in awe of her, but reading or especially rereading Bowen is one of the greatest pleasures of a lifetime. This is my favorite of her novels, but she hasn't written a single one I don't admire. Enjoy the winter with Bowen on hand!

The reviewers who have come before me have variously praised this fine book, and called Elizabeth Bowen a sadist. Quite so. This book has the suicidal weariness of Brideshead Revisited, and a protagonist that you'd like to shake some sense into, a la Of Human Bondage. That said, both the prose and the dialogue are pure pleasure to read. If you find this book a downer, cleanse your palate with I Capture The Castle, the flip side of this story.

Following the death of her parents, the sixteen-year-old Portia Quayne comes to live with her older half-brother Thomas and his wife Anna. Although they are brother and sister, Thomas and Portia have had very different lives. He, in his late thirties, is a wealthy advertising executive, who has also inherited money from his mother and lives in one of the elegant Regency terraces surrounding Regent's Park. She is the family's guilty secret, the daughter of Thomas's father by his second wife. The elder Mr Quayne, a seemingly respectable middle-aged businessman, was divorced by his first wife after getting his mistress, Portia's mother, pregnant. As a result he was banished from polite society in England, and Portia has spent her entire childhood living in various seedy hotels on the Continent.

The book is divided into three sections, entitled "The World", "The Flesh" and "The Devil". The first and last sections are set in London, the middle one in the Kentish seaside town of Seale-on-Sea, where Portia goes to stay with Anna's old governess, Mrs Heccomb, while Thomas and Anna are abroad. (Seale, a fictitious town probably based on Hythe near Folkestone, also features in a later Elizabeth Bowen novel, "The Heat of the Day").

Portia is a quiet, naive and unworldly girl, who finds it difficult to fit into the fashionable world of her brother and sister-in-law. Thomas is a rather dull individual whose main preoccupation is making money, Anna a glamorous and sophisticated, if cold and conventional, society hostess, with a number of suspiciously close male friends,. Neither of them welcome having Portia staying with them, and take her in reluctantly out of a sense of duty. Anna in particular resents Portia, whose innocence is at odds with her own worldliness. Portia also seems out of place in Seale; although Mrs Heccomb treats her kindly, she cannot fit in with Mrs Heccomb's children Dickie and Daphne and their "fast" set of fun-loving friends.

Portia has fallen in love with Eddie, a rather useless young man who is one of Anna's protégés (and possibly one of her former lovers, although Bowen is never explicit on this point). After being sent down from Oxford, Eddie has tried becoming a writer, abandoning that career after his first, satirical, novel upset too many people, and currently works in Thomas's agency, where Anna has found him a position, despite his having neither a liking nor an aptitude for the advertising business. The bored, cynical Eddie and the innocent young Portia are, of course, quite unsuited to one another, but she is too besotted with Eddie to notice his bad points. Only when she invites him to Seale for the weekend and he spends most of his time flirting with Daphne Heccomb does she realise that he might not be the man of her dreams. Portia has been confiding her intimate thoughts to her diary; when she discovers that Anna has been invading her privacy by reading this, she takes a drastic step.

Elizabeth Bowen demonstrates in this book her gift for descriptive writing; I was particularly struck by the opening chapter, in which she conjures up a vision of Regent's Park on a frosty January evening. Her main concerns, however, were characterisation and in social and psychological analysis. This is not a book which will appeal to those who like their fiction be packed with physical action; the most interesting action is that which takes place in the minds of her characters, especially Portia. The "death" of the title is a metaphorical one, as Portia's innocent idealism is shattered by the cynicism and heartlessness of Anna, Eddie and their set. "The Death of the Heart" is a sensitive, finely-written novel which justifies its owner's reputation as one of the leading British novelists of the twentieth century.

Although not of the same era, Elizabeth Bowen's The Death of the Heart brings to mind the work of Jane Austen. This literary masterpiece, written in the Modern Period (during or immediately after World War I), centers around an adolescent girl's "coming of age" in an era of many questions and precious few answers. The brilliance of this novel is the linking of the familiar novel format to a Virginia Woolf-like stream of conciousness style of writing. I've recommended this book to many a bibliophile and never have had it fail to make an impact on the reader

Bowen is quite plainly superb in her observation of her characters and their surroundings, noting with precision tiny gestures and details that cut straight to the heart. Her description of Portia 'hanging her head like a cat in a bag waiting to drown' (I paraphrase as I do not have the book in front of me) says everything (and is uncannyly similar to a Verve lyric in Bitter Sweet Syphony! .. so be it). Read this book. Read it carefully.

I have to admit that I read this critically acclaimed novel under some duress -- it was picked for my book group on the basis that it is one of our member's writing professor's favorite book. (It's also on the Modern Library and Time Magazine lists of Top 100 Novels, for whatever that's worth.) Unfortunately, I tend to like books with plots, and this is certainly not that -- it's more of a psychological portrait of a teenage girl as she undergoes the process of having her "innocence" utterly revoked by the social milieu she is thrust into.

Portia is a 16-year-old orphan sent to live with her half-brother and his cold and catty wife in their lovely Regency Park-fronting home in 1930s London. Having been raised in a succession of continental hotels (an experience Bowen herself had for about a decade, starting at age 12), she is wholly unprepared for the invisible and unspoken rules of the game operating in the upper-class English home she's entered. With her distant half-brother and cold sister-in-law, she struggles to locate some kind of human connection, and only manages to find it in unsuitable people such as an older head servant, or a dissolute young male "friend" of her sister-in-law (he's apparently based on the Welsh writer Goronwy Rees).

It is this latter relationship that inevitably leads to tears at the end, as her naive dreams are dashed by the self-absorption of everyone around her. It's all pretty bleak stuff, as there is not a single character in the book who lives in anything approaching happiness. It does have some appeal as a fictional ethnographic case study of a strange bygone (and peculiarly English) ecosystem, but it's hard not to wish for World War II to arrive and force these characters into doing something useful and thinking about something other than themselves.

Although it's not a book I can imagine recommending to many people, it is worth checking out if you're the kind of reader who likes to linger over every sentence, picking it up, turning it around, and examining it from every angle. The language is rich enough to warrant this kind of close reading -- even if it didn't generally strike a chord with me. It's also worth reading by anyone with an interest in the interwar era or in the manifestation of class in Britain at the time. Note: The novel was adapted as a miniseries for BBC television in 1985, however this version remains unavailable on DVD.

This is not an easy read and nor did Bowen intend for it to be so. God forbid any of these commentors who hated it should make the mistake of ordering a Henry James novel. Bowen has such remarkable powers of penetration; her ability to shape compelling images with words is nothing short of astonishing. Every time I read a review that uses the word boring, I feel the urge to buy the book just to spite them. What the hell does that mean, boring? Impatience, that's what I believe it means. Well, this isn't a book for the impatient. I'm not interested in what impatient people like or want. Sorry if this bruises any egos, but I have a great fondness for Elizabeth Bowen and this novel in particular.