So, I’ve really been reading books from my 100 Books List, but I haven’t been writing about them, er, until now with Elizabeth Bowen’s The Death of the Heart. Which I’m not comparing to a movie. But I am going with a book: Tom Rachmann’s The Imperfectionists, which got a lot of people hot and bothered last year.
Anyway, here’s some light banter for you: Let’s talk about innocence for un minuto. The basic line on The Death of the Heart is thus:
“Orphaned Portia goes to live with her half-brother, Thomas, and his wife, Anna, in Regent’s Park in the late 1930s. She falls for a young man, who we would academically refer to as a ‘real douchebag,’ and things decline from there.”
Not much more happens than that, it’s in the PROCESS OF THE CRAFT as James Franco might say. This is probably Bowen’s most famous novel — she sort of gets forgotten in the popular conversation about great novelists, but she’s one the best-regarded of the 20th century — and it all flows from a central axiom that Jonathan Yardley described a few years ago: “Innocence inevitably must confront and be vanquished by experience.” Bowen tosses this at you early into the thing:
“Innocence so constantly finds itself in a false position that inwardly innocent people learn to be disingenuous. . . . The system of our affections is too corrupt for them. They are bound to blunder, then to be told they cheat. In love, the sweetness and violence they have to offer involves a thousand betrayals for the less innocent. . . . The innocent are so few that two of them seldom meet—when they do meet, their victims lie strewn all round.”
Interesting theory, no? The first impulse is to reject that as some metal hearted thinking (my favorite kind!), but then the mechanics of it stick with you: Who doesn’t know an idealist or a romantic whose friends suffer the burden and the brunt of the innocent’s actions? And, in the other instance, those sad trombone vicious cynics who merely mask an eternally optimistic idealism?
The effect of the novel, though, is to use perspective in a round, as in, the Von Trapp children and the Fleet Foxes singing “round,” where you bounce from individual to individual, and the question ends up being: How is Bowen pulling this off?
Christopher Buckley asked the same question about Tom Rachmann’s The Imperfectionists. That book basically works out like a dark Love, Actually, with each chapter consisting of a short story about an employee at a dying English-language newspaper in Italy — the irony’s all jacked up, though, so you’re not sure if we’re laughing at these people, or sympathizing with them, or pitying them, or what. Claire Messud’s The Emperor’s Children is like that.
But the comparison isn’t bad, because Rachmann and Bowen are doing a similar thing. Each novel depends on the authenticity of the perspective shift. When Rachmann brings forward Arthur Gopal, the underachieving son of a great writer but a father himself, his voice in the third-person present must be as tangible as editor Kathleen’s, whose vignette comes much later, whose arc is much different, who wants different things, but who still interacts with Arthur in his chapter. You have to believe everyone for it to be a real newspaper.
Bowen does that, too, except Elizabeth Bowen loved Edmund Burke, so ho does it on one page. One second your with Anna Quayne, detached socialite, and sentences later, hustled without hitch into earnest, weary Major Brutt’s perspective.
In that way, Bowen makes the read worth it for Dickie and Daphne, the young adult step-children of Anna Quayne’s former governess. They’re like pure force, like vectors, always moving, and Portia’s opinion of them constantly shifts, settling seemingly in the narrative, until finally, when Eddie dismisses them, laughs at them, and assigns them ‘rough’ motives, do you both want to defend Dickie and Daphne, but suddenly find yourself wondering if the novel’s perspective got it all wrong, and Eddie could be on to something. The shifting perspective underscores the uncertainty of perception and reputation — that’s kind of sexy, right?
I read Bowen’s “Heat of the Day,” which is a good deal sexier with Nazis, the Blitz, spies, inquests, and torrid love affairs, for a British Modernism class — this is not that book. It actually is sort of a tease.
Eddie and Portia’s “check yes or no” affair doesn’t hold up all that well, and that’s a major problem for the book in modern terms. Eddie’s 23, a failed writer, a socialist, and prone to dandyish language and oddly asexual mannerisms that leave you alternating between “HOO BOY HE IS A REAL DBAG” and “BUT MAYBE A GAY ONE?” to a point beyond the generic “I do not know what she sees in him.” For plot expediency purposes, Bowen actually jumps past the moment Eddie and Portia meet, which, I think, cripples the appeal from the outset. We never seen the angelic descent of the Teen Idol here, or even the most fleeting moment of kindness from Eddie, so there’s not a hook for Portia-as-reader.
Part of it is that 2011′s 16 year-old is a different breed than 1938′s (a point Bowen actually makes: “Makes of men date, like makes of cars; Major Brutt was a 1914-18 model: there was now no market for that make”), and Portia’s innocence is, well, grounded emotionally but seems both she reads too quiet and intelligent to fall pray to such a tame, by our standards, heartbreak. Eddie and Portia don’t even make sense as a mistake, if that makes sense. As the inimitable Nancy Tan once said, “That’s…that’s like putting peanut butter on…your foot.”
Despite that central relationship not holding up, however, it’s beside the point: the premise is so simple — ILL-ADVISED CRUSH GOES HORRIBLY AWRY — that the worth of the book lies in the delivery and the observation, and not the mechanics of the plot. Even if you don’t quite buy the external specifics of the innocence on display, here, you see the bodies strewn all about.
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