Kind Lady

COLLECTED IMPRESSIONS (269 pp.) --Elizabeth Bowen--Knopf ($3.50).

Elizabeth Bowen is a fine novelist, as she proved in her To the North and The Death of the Heart; but she has written some very poor book reviews. Kindness of heart that does her credit as a woman sometimes blinkers her as a critic. Many of these Collected Impressions are reprinted reviews recording her pleasure with some very ordinary books, and they will explain why her British fellow authors wait eagerly for her notices of their work. It is rarely that she lets anything pass without a kind word, quotable on a book jacket.

Yet for all her egalitarian treatment of geese and swans, she writes with such grace and elegance that she is always worth reading. Her own virtues bring her home even when she is farthest off the beam. It is a joy to read her preface to 19th Century Sheridan Le Fanu's Uncle Silas; seen through the delicate, complex lenses of the Bowen prose, it seems a masterpiece. But anyone who takes the preface away from his eye, and looks squarely at the book, will see only a first-rate thriller about a mid-Victorian miss pursued by a bogeyman.

The best sections of Collected Impressions are those which deal with damp-rotted Irish country houses, with Author Bowen's school days, and with her own maxims on novel writing. Samples:

What is the object of a novel? "The non-poetic statement of a poetic truth." At what point does the novelist get his perceptions about his characters? "In the course of the actual writing of the novel . . . The novelist is in the same position as his reader. But his perceptions should be always just in advance." What is the novelist's--or any writer's--object? "To whittle down his meaning to the exactest and finest possible point. What, of course, is fatal is when he does not know what he does mean: he has no point to sharpen."

V. S. Pritchett, the best critic in Britain today, has called these and the rest of her pungencies the only really instructive statement on novel writing that he knows. Carpers may feel that she merely tells how to write like Elizabeth Bowen if you have the luck to be Elizabeth Bowen. But even that is something which few writers writing of their craft have managed to do.

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