THE COLLECTED STORIES OF ELIZABETH BOWEN Knopf; 784 pages; $17.95
Tales have no doubt existed ever since the first cave woman asked her mate what happened during his day in the ooze. The modern short story is a very late mutation of his long-ago answer. Innovators such as Chekhov, Turgenev and Joyce, among others, turned the brief narrative away from its traditional purpose, i.e., telling what happened next, quickly. By the early decades of this century, serious story writers had pretty much replaced sequence with pattern, events with perceptions. The virtual disappearance of plot from short fiction produced, to be sure, plenty of wispy work, attenuated aperçus evoking the memory of an echo of a sigh. But the masters of the new form understood and met its twin demands: a stringent economy of language fused to a profligacy of inference.
Elizabeth Bowen (1899-1973) belongs among these masters. Her skill as a short-story writer attracted some notice during her lifetime, but she was better known as the author of novels, particularly The Death of the Heart (1938) and The Heat of the Day (1949). The most recent volume of her stories published in the U.S. appeared more than 20 years ago, so her reputation in this field had to be taken on faith or hunted down in libraries. No longer. The Collected Stories of Elizabeth Bowen assembles 79 stories, the complete record of four decades of work. It offers old fans old favorites, plus some pieces they probably missed. New readers can sit back and watch a dazzling career unfold.
Bowen's Anglo-Irish background, her childhood on a rural estate in County Cork, served her well when she went to London to write in the 1920s. Although sophistication came easily to her, along with Bloomsbury friends, she did not forget that cultivated society was a veneer over a more fundamental life, governed by forces of nature and timed to the rhythm of the seasons. This double vision gives a peculiar intensity to many of her stories; beneath their bright, sometimes ephemeral surfaces, implacable forces can be felt moving, well beyond human control. Sometimes they break out. In The Storm, a husband and wife visiting an Italian villa find their quarrel interrupted by a ferocious thundershower: "The attack begun, the clouds brought up their artillery; lightning, splitting the sky, shimmered across the flagstones of the terrace." Despite its fury, the storm is not malign; it subtly changes the marriage into something both partners can live with.
Many of Bowen's stories were influenced by the work of Henry James and Virginia Woolf. What saves them from the pallid artiness of imitation is the author's taste for melodrama. She knows how to slip in the bizarre or improbable for the purpose of raising expectations, not eyebrows. Ghosts walk in some of these tales, and they are not explained away as wandering, ectoplasmic neuroses. They are what they are. Bowen's fiction is sometimes as strange as truth. In The Evil That Men Do—, a bored housewife writes a love letter to a man who, unknown to her, has just been run over by a truck. In The Cat Jumps, a couple buys a house whose previous owner had murdered and dismembered his wife ("He put her heart in her hatbox. He said it belonged in there").