By Kohinoor Dasgupta
A World of Love (1954) is a lesser-known novel by British novelist Elizabeth Bowen (1899-1973).
Three people in their fifties in a manor with an obelisk. You might think this is a tagline for a comedy. A World of Love? A biting satire then. Those three characters were teenagers when World War I broke out. The man, Fred Danby, fought for the Australian Army. Ten years after the War, when they were in their thirties, all their lives became conjoined. World War II broke out within a decade, further chipping away at their economic viability and options. The three people have now stumbled into their fifties.
You might as well arm yourself with preconceived notions. The novel pulls no punches. A beautiful young woman reading a letter at the foot of an unlikely obelisk is the beginning of neither a romance nor a comedy. A World of Love is also not satire or fantasy. It looks at the real and exacting chore of being human when a known world is slipping away. As such, all of human resilience, in darkness and in splendor, comes into play. You will find romance, comedy, satire and fantasy in Elzabeth Bowen’s second Irish novel.
Antonia owns the manor with the obelisk, which stands in a rural part of County Cork. She inherited it from Guy, who was her first cousin and "dear ally", the instigator of spectacular childhood adventures which tested their insouciance and revealed a natural world hidden from the timid. Guy was older than Antonia and Fred. He died early in 1918, fighting in World War I.
The ancestor who built the obelisk may have thought that he had made himself memorable. However, he had no children. Montefort passed to his first cousin. The line of succession zigzagged its way to Antonia, who remembers unsavory details about the obelisk man but has forgotten his name.
Fred Danby is the illegitimate son of an uncle of Guy’s and Antonia’s. He is also darker in complexion than them. His mother was rumored to have "foreign blood”. There was a huge class difference between young Fred and the legitimates. While Guy and Antonia were in and out of Montefort, in between education and travel, Fred was allowed to grow up in the stable yards. He was too useful around the farmland to be sent to school. It was only in his late teens that Fred left Montefort. He stayed away for more than a decade. Upon his return, Antonia maneuvered him into farming her land and marrying Lilia, who was Guy’s fiancée, and seventeen at the time Guy fell in battle. Fred, at last, moved into the manor.
Fred and Lilia do not pay rent, but they own nothing at Montefort. Fred sends on to Antonia half of the earnings from the farm. Antonia very occasionally turns up at Montefort and occupies the best room, which is never used by anyone else. Bowen writes: "Her overweening sentiment for the place went, as her cousin’s had done before her, with neither wish nor ability to remain here always.” No one has cared to know, except perhaps Maud, what Fred feels for the place. Presumably he both wishes to and has what it takes to remain in Montefort. Lilia and Fred have two daughters, aged twenty and twelve, Jane and Maud. Jane has hardly lived in Montefort. Antonia, by no means comfortably wealthy, preferred to sponsor Jane’s education at boarding school, finishing school and secretarial college, rather than helping with the upkeep of Montefort. Maud lives at home and attends the local Protestant school.
Three nights and three days tick by in this book of tricky time (there is no working clock in the manor, and love letters written before 1918 take over the present). In A World of Love Southern Ireland is having an extraordinarily dry summer. On day two, the young maid, Kathie, spends hours filling buckets at the shallow river. There is anxiety about thirsty cattle. Rain is expected on the third morning.
Jane gets noticed by the chatelaine, Lady Latterly, during the castle Fête. She is invited to dinner at Vesta’s castle the following day. In the meantime, shabby old Montefort and its boring monument become to her imbued with a strange magnetism, thanks to their place in the old letters which she finds in the attic and reads avidly. Not normally given to emotion or sentimentalism, she is suddenly receptive to a world of love. In this state of mind, she attends what for her is an old people’s party, at Lady Latterly’s. She has a couple of martinis. She sees a ghost at the table. She is convinced (and Bowen agrees) that she is not the only one to see Guy at the table.
"… not a soul failed to feel the electric connection between Jane’s paleness and the dark of the chair in which so far no one visibly sat. Between them, the two dominated the party.
"Or, they acted on barbarian nerves. In this particular company, by this time of the evening even counterfeit notions of reality had begun to wobble. Who knew, who could not compute, to a man, exactly how many sat round the table? The evening offered footing to the peculiar by being itself out of the true – there was something phantasmagoric about this circle of the displaced rich. Reason annihilated itself when these people met. Together, they pressed themselves and each other to the extreme limits of their faculties: beyond what they were capable of lay what? They had warped their wits with disproportionate stories; at any turn the preposterous might lay final claim on them – there was no censor. Even Shakespeare had stalked in. He and drink played havoc with known dimensions.”
The same night, at Montefort, Antonia experiences exhilaration and closure. Earlier, she drove Fred’s Ford for miles, up to the sea and back. No doubt, during the solitary outing, she mulled the prospect of being eventually ousted as the prime mover in Jane’s life. She then drove to the castle to pick up Jane. On that drive, the Ford "canted” on the country road, alongside hedges that were otherwise only honeysuckle but had acquired “secretive night-scents". Jane even saw a "hallucinated” white horse crossing the road. Jane has dozed off at the kitchen table. Inexorably drawn to the wide-open front door, stoked by Jane’s certainty that she saw Guy at Lady Latterly’s dinner table, Antonia invites in the abundant gifts of the rustling night of Montefort. In one deep breath, she recollects all. Absorbed in being limitless and incorporeal, she forgets to be sad.
On night one itself, the ground shakes when Guy’s love letters fall out of an old muslin dress, at Jane’s feet. The letters quickly worm themselves into everyone’s consciousness. They fear, they wonder, they watch each other. Guy’s outreach finally splinters the molds that had encased and were choking the life out of the three middle-aged people bound to the decrepit manor. A little surprised, a little foolish, they look at each other, at their shared home and at the girls. Why, a ghost is more credible than their own awful, stupid selves of yesterday!
One mold breaks noisily when Fred disciplines Maud, ironically finally becoming the masterful father Maud waited and waited for him to be, but the alleged battery (Fred twists Maud’s arm and inadvertently treads on her toe, making her fall), distracts her from noting the transformation. Incensed, the child positions herself under Antonia’s window, and loudly invokes maledictions on her father. She is summoned up and has a candid dialogue with Antonia. An excerpt:
[Maud]"… .I’ve been to a lot of trouble, honouring him. But in spite of all, there he went about, this last day or two, looking small. Why should I put up with that?”
"Nonsense; he’s not a small man – nothing makes him look it.”
"He’s looked like nothing,” the pitiless Maud pronounced.
Antonia marvelled: "How you do come to conclusions!”
"Yes, Cousin Antonia, I do.”
"And act on them – really one could admire you!”
"Father did not,” Maud said with a curling lip.
"He didn’t know, I expect, as well as you and I do, what you were up to.”
"What do you know I was up to?” asked the child, showing, for the second time in this interview, a flicker of speculation as to Antonia.
"A purge, perhaps?”
"I don’t know what’s come over this place,” Maud stated, “However, the Lord did, so in despair He showed me what I had better do.”
"And did the Lord suggest you sticking up your father for ten shillings?”
"No, I thought of that,” said Maud, not turning a hair.
…..
"If it comes to that, they were, as you say, my letters.”
Maud … pointed out: "They were father’s thorn in the flesh.”
"And were altogether doing no good, you thought?”
"That’s for you to say, Cousin Antonia. You were the one who knew Cousin Guy.”
"So, it’s generally thought, Maud. Generally thought.” Tilting her head back against the bed-head, Antonia closed her eyes, having for far too long had a view of this room and all in it, including Maud.
The nature of the outrage this afternoon became clear enough – rather clearer, perhaps, than one wished it to. To invite or allow any more from Maud would be to get in irretrievably deep with the Old Testament.”
The brief author bio provided with the Anchor Books edition of The World of Love informs us that Elizabeth Bowen was born in Dublin and inherited a manor, Bowen’s Court, in County Cork. She traced the history of her family in Bowen’s Court, published in 1942.
As I said, this novel has it all, romance, comedy, satire, and fantasy. Above all, it is about three people who were in their teens when World War I began, and a world of love they were beginning to imagine and remake was taken from them. The larger context, of the economic consequences of two World Wars, the decline of large private estates because of heirs dying in war, is always present. In A World of Love, Antonia reflects at one point that Guy, even as a relatively young landowner, kept up Montefort. Despite having been a well-earning photographer, and even with a generous ex-husband, Antonia long gave up on keeping up Montefort the way Guy had, though she is emotionally entangled with the place and, in a complicated way, with Lilia and Fred.
An abbreviated quotation from Thomas Traherne’s Centuries of Meditations is used at the start of the novel. The following is the full quotation:
"… though it be a maxim in the schools that there is no Love of a thing unknown, yet I have found that things unknown have a secret influence on the soul, and like the centre of the earth unseen violently attract it. We love we know not what, and therefore everything allures us. As iron at a distance is drawn by the loadstone, there being some invisible communications between them, so is there in us a world of Love to somewhat, though we know not what in the world that should be. There are invisible ways of conveyance by which some great thing doth touch our souls, and by which we tend to it. Do you not feel yourself drawn by the expectation and desire of some Great Thing?” - Thomas Traherne, Centuries of Meditations
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