The Last September: Bowen’s novel, Walker’s film: peculiarly contemporary

David Tennant as Gerald Colthurst (Lesworth in Bowen’s book)

Dear friends and readers,

My daughter, Izzy, is taking a course in Irish Literature this term and I find myself enjoying the books — and connected films — with her. (See Irish Authors!) I’ve long loved hyphenated-lit (Anglo-Indian, French-Canadian, Anglo-African) and two favorites are Anglo-Irish and Anglo-Scots (and vice-versa). I re-watched the marvelous Huston film, The Dead, after she talked of Joyce’s Dubliners, and now I’ve returned to a favorite novelist, Elizabeth Bowen.

I have a whole bunch of her novels, travel books, memoirs and literary criticism; I’ve assigned her The Heat of the Day which conveys supremely what it is like to live in a city bombed daily and in daily anxiety for your life, watching daily people killed (and shown the film with Michael Gambon, Michael Yorke and Patricia Hodge). I used to say — before I got on the Net and widened my knowledge and world so and allowed me to reach so many more books I can love — one of the great books of the 20th century is her Death of the Heart; I now think it’s one of the great novels in the mode of l’ecriture-femme, and still a favorite with me, but understand better that Bowen’s reactionary politics limits her work. Her Bowen’s Court is a love letter to her house.

She’s a kind of Virginia Woolf & Edith Wharton crossed by Jane Austen. Bowen is a supreme stylist, writes an evocative poetry in prose at the same time as she ironically, with distance records the domestic lives of her characters. No one writes better of green people in blue woods than she.

I still remember lines from her books that resonate in my heart:

outside [one’s beloved] lies the junkyard of what does not matter.

The best known of Bowen’s ghost stories is one called ‘Demon Lover’ (1945); like many of her best fictions, it’s set in London during the Blitz; a stolidly middle class woman comes to her house in-between bombs and is abducted by a lover who was killed in first World War; there’s a gradual build up of terror until we begin to suspect he’s a vampire.

She’s a good critic of ghost stories and novels: she says the trouble with realistic novel is it excludes the crazy; it’s a calm and orthodox form; once realism turns into the gothic by which she means includes the supernatural, it can reach into the psyche as well as reality which she suggests due to the nature of our minds always contains strong elements of fantasy; much horror lies below the surface of life, much terror, much cruelty. I agree with her about the limits of realism. She was very much influenced by having lived through 4 wars: Irish, Spanish, WWI and WWII. She also writes interestingly on
how to write fiction.

Elizabeth Bowen (1899-1973) looking out a window from (idealized) Bowen’s Court by Patrick Hennessy RHA (1915-1980)

On top of reading Last September and returning to other Bowen books, I’ve watched a second fine film: Ceborah Walker’s Last September, one of these film adaptations with a brilliant cast, intelligent script, beautiful images and much serious meaning.

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Bowen’s Court — as will be seen, it’s very large and was expensive to sustain

So to The Last September: Bowen said it came close to her heart, among the novels it meant a great deal. It’s unusual for being a “historical novel,” if not 60 years since, set 10 years earlier than the writing, which is unusual for her. Here is wikipedia to fill you in on plot-design, characters, circumstances.

One of the powers of the book is to convey what it’s like to live in a place where you are silently surrounded by a war going on around you which remains undeclared. Thus the book has parallels with the so-called War on Terror in the US only in the US it’s mostly poppycock. The elite here got scared when Bin laden and his lunatic fringe managed the stunning feat of murdering huge numbers of people in a highly symbolic building by a suicide flight mission. Most of those killed (as usual) were not elite, but working people, office people, but the elite saw they could be hit back as they have been doing outside the US since say 1948. In Ireland the Irish Catholics themselves were taking back their country from the small “tribe” the film calls them of Anglo-Irish, rather likes the Tutsis in Rwanda. So in the novel we see these people desperately carrying on while just outside their door, raids, murders, burnings, all sort of small scary and deadly incidents occur. An early scene is of the family group deciding to sit outside on the lawn — braving what’s out there. Well the film at the close did bring the Irish killers to the fore and now and again incidents we are told about are dramatized before us.

At the same time the situations are much different. These Anglo-Irish are now the powerless (well they are still wealthy); the state they live in is controlled by Catholic Irish and they are not wanted by the Catholics. Their protection we see comes from the British and Protestants. A serious question is asked, Are they not Irish too? They had not wanted to identify with the “lower orders” and now they find they do connect as people and want to remain on the level of human connection even if they represent all that deprived the Irish of decent lives for three hundred years. Bowen seems to have believed if only the various factions could get together under one large capacious roof such houses could have a new function. It never happened.

Sir Richard (Michael Gambon) and Lady Naylor (Maggie Smith) welcoming Francie (Jane Birkin) and Hugh Montgomery (Lambert Wilson)

I recommend this film, and (if you can get it to work) the DVD features which accompany it. It’s a fine and mostly faithful (transposition type) adaptation of Bowen’s powerful book. It’s labelled a “film by Deborah Walker” who was the director. The screenplay writer was John Banville and producer Yvonne Winter (with a few other producers – this is a recent film so it’s a number of companies getting together to fund it).

It’s beautifully atmospheric, hauntingly shot. Films are collaborative events and very important are the performances of Maggie Smith and Michael Gambon as Sir Richard and Magda Naylor. Unlike the book (I feel — this is a reading or interpretation) Sir Richard is made intensely aware that he is Irish, not English, even if Anglo-Irish and we feel he is sympathetic to the lower orders as people and will be at a terrible loss if he loses this house and world. Maggie Smith makes Lady Naylor more sympathetic than the book too — though a hideous snob to the young English officer, Gerald Colthurst (names Lesworth in the book) who the adopted niece, Lois Farquar falls in love with with. A 19th century style humiliation of him by Lady Naylor goes on when he asks for Lois’s hand (in the book and in the film).

Innocent Lois (Keeley Hawes) and Gerald, with a servant carrying a victrola behind them

David Tennant was very good as Gerald and Keeley Hawes fit the part of the naive girl, Lois. Fiona Shaw was an Irish woman come to the house, Miss Norton, who is marrying a wealthy English Londoner for his place and money; she becomes a (corrupt) mentor to Lois who admires her.

Hugh Montmorency with Marda Norton (Fiona Shaw)

There is a sexual story too. In the novel it seems that the pair of people visiting, the Montgomeries include a philandering promiscuous man, Hugh Montgomery who chases after Miss Norton and Lois (and anything in skirts). Jim said this was the way with the male English aristocracy when they had nothing to do but hunt beyond that. Jane Birkin was his much put upon wife, Francie. they have just lost their house to dire economic conditions. As far as I can tell there are hints that Lois may be the daughter of Hugh (not sure) who did not marry her mother, Laura, now dead; Laura married someone still alive who no one speaks of — “below them.” The terrific snobbery of this set is that of fringe insecure people. That’s in the book and film.

My feeling is Bowen sympathizes intensely with these people while seeing what they are. Again, her book is utterly relevant to us today — in the economic realm, only the elite have the poor on the run, not the other way round (at least in the US). There are real victims. One is the English officer – who in another scenario would be a brute. Here Tennant is an innocent sort of Hamlet used and his ending is bad. So too Francie Montmorencie, the weak Irish woman who lets her husband so what he wants and is going down down down. Jane Birkin has found meaning in her life as a French woman I know and in the feature one learned how she constantly phoned home.

A film which sympathized or book with the Catholic Irish would show them – not just as the put-upon servants which this does do. And there silently serving while we see them (scary you see)

Marda Norton with Captain Daventry

Fiona Shaw did two of the features — her part in the film was played up and developed more than the book. In one she discussed the book intelligently. She comes from the area of Ireland the book is set in — as did Bowen. Danielstown (the name of the house) is Bowen’s Court which Bowen found so expensive to keep up and in the end sold — to see it pulled down immediately by the owner. She did live in dread lest it be set on fire — an important dread in the novel. In the second feature she read wonderfully well from the book.

The other feature was Walker who discussed how she made the film and saw it. Very seriously. She did turn it into a love story and is aware of that; that is, she made that the central drive of the film while in the book it’s important (we see the book often from Lois’s point of view) but only a central thread. Walker does capture Bowen’s idea that the characters are themselves Irish and can’t escape it, her valuing of the house.

I think there is such a thing as Anglo-Irish Literature: Maria Edgeworth wrote it, Anthony Trollope (whom Bowen admired), Sheridan LeFanu, Bram Stoker, and Irish-Anglo lit (Oliver Goldsmith, Oscar Wilde, George Bernard Shaw). Anglo-Irish is gothic, melancholy, elegiac somehow. Pure Irish (like Synge) is a more robust comic strongly ironic-satiric austere mode. Mood even more central.

This the first book by Bowen I’ve read in a long time. I know Bowen said it was very important to her and I see how that is now. Her techniques are in place — a startlingly intelligent incisive way of describing people’s psychological stances towards one another, the world, themselves inside their minds. A subtle creation of atmosphere. But here they are serving a central political alignment of her life. She was a Nazi spy one must not forget and her The Heat of the Day no matter how great comes out on the side of making the world run by Nietzschean men and women,the superior men and women as these deserve the best of lives because they can grab and make them so-called beautiful. Actually in the book the hero kills himself and the heroine ends desolate so as with Last September you could read the book as undermining the Nietzchean point of view. There too it’s a matter of a loss of a house. It opens up with the desolating “to let?” the hero’s family has been driven by lack of money to let their house. It’s a come-down in status too.

Robert Kelway (Michael Yorke) and Stella Rodney (Patricia Hodge) in Heat of the Day, the screenplay is by Harold Pinter

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I should say that I’ve a house I live in which I value, a safe harbor, from which the scariest dreams are that I’m locked out. I can understand Bowen’s love of her house, to me it’s not property or money either; it’s a place of memory, it surrounds me and I and Jim and Izzy shape it.

What runs on most through a family living in one place is a continuous, semi-physical dream. Above this dream-level successive lives show their tips, their little conscious formations of will and thought. With the end of each generation, the lives that submerged here were absorbed again. With each death, the air of the place had thickened: it had been added to. The dead do not need to visit Bowen’s Court rooms . . . because they already permeated them. (BC 451)

And I can understand and value some of the outward culture of the characters in these books.

Ellen