The Climate of War

IVY GRIPPED THE STEPS AND OTHER STORIES (233 pp.)--Elizabeth Bowen--Knopf ($2.50).

Any book by Anglo-Irish Novelist Elizabeth Bowen (The House in Paris, The Death of the Heart) is an event, even if a large section of the U.S. has yet to realize it. This new collection of short stories may bring a few more readers to appreciate her peculiar talent. She is one of the most knowing and subtle of modern writers, working usually in muted tones, off-colors, remotely gross or secret moods. At her best she is delicate, witty, adroit, a genuine craftsman in the sense that Virginia Woolf was a genuine craftsman. At worst she is simply an unsuccessful craftsman--wasting her skill on an obvious pattern, drawing her lines so fine that a reader is not sure what she is trying to show.

The dozen stories in Ivy Gripped the Steps are stories of England and Ireland during the war. There is no gunfire or other military matter in them, not even the sound of an air-raid alarm, though Miss Bowen herself served during the war as an air-raid warden, and saw what bombs could do to her own London home. A spare, poised, shy but sociable woman, Elizabeth Bowen in private life is Mrs. Alan Cameron, the wife of an educator and ex-BBC official.

In a preface Miss Bowen remarks that the stories are "disjected snapshots--snapshots taken from close up," or "studies of climate, war-climate, and of the strange growths it raised. . . . These are between-time stories--mostly reactions from, or intermissions between, major events. They show a leveled-down time, when a bomb on your house was as inexpedient, but not more abnormal than, a cold in your head."

Miss Bowen's most effective stories are those which deal openly or implicitly with the "war-climate" rather than those which treat of "strange growths." In the title piece, relaxation of wartime travel restrictions lures a middle-aged man back to the seashore resort which he visited as a boy and in which he had been fascinated by a restless widow much older than he and now long since dead. In a story called Mysterious Kor, a pair of young lovers walk through bomb-torn London in the moonlight ("London looked like the moon's capital--shallow, cratered, extinct"), eventually go up to the flat off the

Regent's Park Road which the girl shares with an uneasy friend.

In some stories, the war and its pressures are almost intangible; in others they are physically far away; in others, apparent almost everywhere.

Miss Bowen's touch is not always sure. When it is, it is as light as fine porcelain, as sudden as the crack of a whip.

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