The House in Paris Read Free

way through. Fairy-tales always made me impatient also. But unfortunately there is no doubt that in life such things exist...' (page 200). Ray, described as looking like 'any of these tall Englishmen who stand back in train corridors unobtrusively to let foreigners pass to meals or the lavatory ... was the Englishman's age: about thirty-six ... He had exchanged the career he once projected for business, which makes for a more private private life' (pages 212-13). Ray, that is, appears to be anonymous. But Karen's dramatic act has changed him too; he is in a fairy-tale, and his wife sees him as a fanatic. He is aware that he and Karen are not alone, are not two — they are haunted, as Max and Karen, momentarily, were not — by the absent third, Leopold. Ray, mystically according to Karen, practically according to himself, sets out to rectify the situation. And when Ray meets Leopold, the identities of both are defined, in action. Elizabeth Bowen's description of this action is a marvellous continuation of the fairy-story metaphor and the practical detail of the 'non-poetic' novel working together. Leopold is both the prince and the cross, bewildered, egotistical little boy, clearly seen and taken in hand. The story has moved, in our minds, from innocence, through violence, to insight, from the child's eye, through the obsessive eye of love and the momentary act, to the extraordinary and I think unpredictable ending, where expectations are more than fulfilled and the disparate elements of plot and vision are brought together.
    There is much more that could be said. This is both a very elegant and a very melodramatic novel. Again in the Notes on Writing a Novel, Elizabeth Bowen discusses the concept of 'relevance' which she declares is 'imperative'. Everything, she concludes, Character, Scene, Dialogue, must be strictly relevant to the Plot. The elegance of this novel bears witness to her triumphant skill in this field. Not a dialogue in the book does not turn in some way on the central problems and forces it deals with. No situation is described which does not illuminate others. (Consider Mme Fisher's marriage, as it is presented by Mme Fisher to Henrietta, and its relation both to Leopold's idea of love and marriage and to Henrietta's own.) Images recur: mirrors, and eyes as mirrors of identity, Leopold as a growing tree. There are times when such formal elegance, such energetic pursuit of total relevance, can seem narrowing, or claustrophobic, or detracting from our sense of reality and importance. Elizabeth Bowen learned much from James, and much from Virginia Woolf. One of the things she learned was James's respect for developed form in fiction, his sense that one could achieve subtleties unavailable to the creators of the 'loose, baggy monsters' of the nineteenth century. In her weaker works this preoccupation can create a sense of strain, contrivance, even fuss, which diminish the force of the poetic truth. In this novel her priorities seem to me vindicated by the power of the plot. She writes, for all her elegance, with a harshness that is unusual and pleasing. There are moments of vision and metaphor, akin both to James and to Virginia Woolf, but recognizably Elizabeth Bowen's own. As when Naomi's 'sudden tragic importance made her look doubtful, as though a great dark plumed hat had been clapped aslant on her head'. Or Henrietta who, 'feeling like a kaleidoscope often and quickly shaken, badly wanted some place in which not to think'. But the characteristic tone is the author's cool judgement of the power of events, the true nature of events, of the Plot, as she sees it. As a child, I thought I was learning sensibility and fine discrimination from this novel. Now, more importantly, I feel that Elizabeth Bowen's description of Ivy Compton-Burnett's quality applied also to her own work. She wrote of her in 1941: 'Elizabethan implacability, tonic plainness of speaking, are not so strange to us as they were. This is a