I should never write what had happened down. One's nature is to forget, and one ought to go by that. Memory is quite unbearable enough, but even so it leaves out quite a lot. It wouldn't let one down as gently, even, as that if it weren't more than half a fake—we remember to suit ourselves. [...] If one didn't let oneself swallow some few lies, I don't know how one would ever carry the past. Thank God, except at its one moment there’s never any such thing as a bare fact. Ten minutes later, half an hour later, one’s begun to gloze the fact over with a deposit of some sort. The hours I spent with thee dear love are like a string of pearls to me. But a diary (if one did keep it up to date) would come much too near the mark. One ought to secrete for sometime before one begins to look back at anything. Look how reconciled to everything reminiscences are. . . . Also, suppose somebody read it?

The discovery of a sentimental teenage diary catalyzes the plot of The Death of the Heart. Once it's discovered that recently orphaned Portia analyzes her feelings and is susceptible to sincere love, the adults in her life seek to "socialize" her by inuring her to feeling anything at all. In lieu of processing trauma, her brother and his wife advocate a sort of anaesthetization to any emotion rising above pique. Portia's free sincerity is meant to be constrained, folded under. Any loss or pain is meant to be "glozed over" with a varnish of falsity. But Bowen shows us that by editing certain facts from our memory and hiding the truth from ourselves and others we turn our lives into a fiction—a mere pantomime of life—which inevitably results in a sort of existential atrophy. That is, a death of the heart. ( )

How sharply and poignantly the writing cuts. This book is a gorgeous vessel full of poison and (mostly) despicable people. There is a keen reading pleasure to be had, though, despite the cruelty.

Oh, those polite conversations over tea – fine china, scones, crumpets, it’s all there. There are gaping maws underneath all that polish, and they will swallow you whole if you are not careful.

“One thing one must learn is, how to confront people that at that particular moment one cannot bear to meet.”

“In that airy vivacious house, all mirrors and polish, there was no place where the shadows lodged, no point where feeling could thicken.”

Even when the object is Eddie (=let me teach you everything you need to know about abusive relationships, and aren’t you a darling to let me, aren’t you sweet…), I do like things Bowen has to say about love. “One solid pleasure of love is to check up together on what has happened.”

As soon as Portia appears on the page for the first time, you know that she will break, that she will dissolve – the question is only of how, not if and when. Bowen has no mercy for anyone. Portia puts sharp knives of her clear-eyed innocence into the empty people around her, and they cannot take it.

It is so right that this novel should end with a door opening.

P.S. I should definitely read more Bowen, being careful not to overdose. ( )

There's a bit in one of Eddie Izzard's comedy shows where she describes a genre of British film that she calls A Room with a View with a Staircase and a Pond films, where all the acting is very good but the dramatic tension consists of people opening doors meaningfully and making mundane statements that are nonetheless supposed to be highly if cryptically fraught.

I thought of that bit more than once while reading this book, where feelings are almost always intimated and suggested and charged and obscured.

Written in the late '30s, The Death of the Heart is about a naive 16-year-old called Portia who, recently orphaned, goes to live in London with her well-off and much older half-brother and his wife. Neither brother nor sister-in-law are happy to have her there. Portia plainly wants to have them like her, but can't understand that she's seen as a bit of an embarrassment and an obstacle in their rather jaded lives—she clearly reminds them that they're unhappy.

Elizabeth Bowen has some beautifully observed character moments throughout the book, some deliciously mean one-liners too, and I could believe in many (though not all) of her characters as real people. Yet where The Death of the Heart didn't work for me—apart from the too-abrupt ending—was in how Bowen had the characters relate to one another. It's not that I don't believe that people can be cynical and petty in how they dealt with one another. There was just something about the register in which Bowen conveyed their interactions, something about the why behind their actions, that struck me as just a bit too... well, A Room With a View with a Staircase and a Pond. ( )

Love the way this lady describes people. Describing the words and actions of middle-class English people who take themselves so seriously, with comical words, you get such a clear image of them, it makes me laugh out loud. ( )

This is the story of a 16 year old orphan who comes to live with her fashionable half brother and his wife. The girl is completely emotionally needy and innocent but her brother and sister-in-law are completely unable to comfort her, and she becomes romantically involved with a cad.

Throughout the novel there is this incredible suspense about whether she will make a disastrous decision to consummate their relationship. I won't disclose what happens, but the tension this uncertainty creates leads you to focus on tiny, very finely wrought descriptions of social interaction and expression. Comparisons with Henry James are entirely appropriate.

Although there is an undertone about the loss of romantic naivete and trust, I think there is another interesting theme about the perverse relationship between writers and the people they write about. Early in the novel, the sister-in-law discovers the girl's diary and eagerly consumes her descriptions about herself. Though the sister-in-law laughs at the school-girl observations and concerns, she also feels judged and spied upon. I think Elizabeth Bowen was commenting on writing about people you know can poison relationships.

I think I like this book more the more I think about it. ( )