Contemporary Treason

THE HEAT OF THE DAY (372 pp.]--Elizabeth Bowen--Knopf ($3).

For 20 years the literary reputation of 49-year-old Irish-born Novelist Elizabeth Bowen has been based on a polished prose style and a special ability to write about sensitive children and young people in their first discovery of the compromises and dishonesties in the grown-up world. Her best-known novels (To the North, The House in Paris, The Death of the Heart) were so skillfully wrought that literary critics ranked them with the work of the late Virginia Woolf.

The latest news about Elizabeth Bowen is that, in her new novel (her first in ten years), she has taken in hand a whole new range of novelist's material; that this material includes the war and many of the unprecedented goods & evils, loyalties and disloyalties that emerged into mid-century consciousness in the course of it. It is by all odds her finest book.

The Corroding Drop. When war came, Elizabeth Bowen was 40, a homely-handsome woman with a slight stutter and great charm, married to an executive of the BBC. She and her husband, Alan Cameron, had a tall house facing London's Regent's Park. There, Novelist Bowen sat down deliberately to restudy her Irish background, her English foreground and the lives she knew as they settled into war. The first result was a long book, Bowen's Court, on the history of her family and the estate in Cork that they had owned since Cromwell's day. The second was a book of short stories. The third is The Heat of the Day.

The typical scene of the novel is London in the blackout of 1942; the relations of human beings to each other have become fragmentary, indefinable and constantly subject to shock. To the apartment of attractive Stella Rodney comes a visitor known to her only as Harrison. He tries to argue her into being seduced and fails. He makes fantastic charges about Stella's friend and faithful lover, Captain Robert Kelway, and, for a time, fails to make the fantastic believable.

What Harrison claims to know is that the admirable Captain Kelway is dealing with the enemy. This is incredible in a man like Kelway, who was wounded at Dunkirk and has responsible duties at the War Office. But Harrison is clever; the drop of suspicion that he injects remains to corrode a happy love affair.

The Man of No Class. The terrible human lesson that all three--Harrison, Kelway and Stella Rodney--have to learn is in the peculiar contemporary meanings of treason. Who is to be trusted, and why, and how far? It is appropriate that each of Miss Bowen's characters is engaged in secret work, for each is mysterious to the other. But before the end it is clear that each represents an important type of modern personality.

Harrison is the new man of no class at all: unromantic, infinitely disabused, superficially amoral, homeless but looking for a home, the unpleasant agent of the saving truth. Stella is the daughter of an older civilization, of the gentry, attached to the land; though long astray from it, she is still strong and still able to learn. Robert Kelway is the middle-class man of sophisticated ambition; he is split down the middle between the commercially created and shopworn forms of life that have weakened his patriotism, and a madly pure fantasy of future order to which, finding no alternative, he has committed himself. Kelway is a Nazi agent. He accepts his own destruction when he learns that Stella cannot understand him and his fantasy, and knows that he has lost.

Power & the Void. "Subjection to fantasy and infatuation with the idea of power" were elements that Elizabeth Bowen found in the history of her own Irish forebears, but with a difference. "One may say," she wrote in Bowen's Court, "that while property lasted, the dangerous power-idea stayed, like a sword in its scabbard, fairly safely at rest. I submit that the power-loving temperament is more dangerous when it either prefers or is forced to operate in what is materially a void. We have everything to dread from the dispossessed." That observation takes on flesh in The Heat of the Day.

The relief in the novel is provided by Stella's 20-year-old son, Roderick, on furlough from the army, and by interludes given over to a sunburned, dreamy young countrywoman named Louie who works in a London factory. Like the innocents in Miss Bowen's early novels, Louie is a creation of pure poetry, but her wandering life is in some ways a lower-class counterpart of Stella's. For both, the enormous, rubble-strewn city is a void in which they own nothing, and both seem to be at the mercy of those who operate for power in the void: Robert Kelway and Harrison on the one hand and newspaper war propaganda (to which Louie becomes touchingly addicted) on the other. Each woman gets a terrible pulling and hauling, but each comes out with something valuable at the end. As for Roderick, he inherits land in Ireland on which after the war he may construct, in his own way, fantasies of an older sort.

It is no wonder that this novel, dense as a poem with symbol and suggestion, should be obscure in one or two places and loose in one or two others. It is nevertheless the strongest work of a writer whose rich and winning gifts, had it not been for a war and a conscience, need never have wrestled with any but private material. The Heat of the Day, for lack of great actors, is not a great novel; but it is one of those rare books that prove that the forces of history are never better understood than when a fine artistic intelligence applies itself to them.

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