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Elizabeth Bowen / Charles Ritchie
For those who read my article 'Towards The Drogulus' about Elizabeth Bowen in WORMWOOD Journal No. 11 (Autumn 2008), may be interested in this astonishing quotation from a single entry in Charles Ritchie's diary of 1941 after his initial meetings with Elizabeth (a quotation taken from a new book 'Love's Civil War' Simon & Schuster 2009 containing extracts from her letters to him and from his diaries about her):
"She is as acute as a razor blade and about as merciful ... She is a witch, that's what it is. In the first place how can a woman of forty with gold bangles and the face of a woman of forty and the air of a don's wife, how can such a woman have such a body - like Donatello's David I told her when I first saw what it was like. Those small firm breasts, that modelled neck set with such beauty on her shoulders, that magnificent back... Would I ever have fallen for her if it hadn't been for her books? I very much doubt it. But now I can't separate her from her literary self. It's as if the woman I 'love' were always accompanied by a companion spirit infinitely more exciting and more poetic and more profound than E herself... When it comes to writing, well I had a letter from her the other day so blunderingly expressed, so repetitive, that the least of her characters in one of her books would never have been guilty of it."
That "witch" or "companion spirit": the 'demon of EBness' I wrote about in my article??
PS: I don't usually read biographical material about writers (eg: letters and diaries), but I have made an exception for Elizabeth Bowen! :)
Charles Ritchie (who also knew JFK, I gather) makes this
statement above: "a companion spirit infinitely more exciting and more
poetic and more profound than E herself" which gives, paradoxically -- by
means of 'intentional' material (ie real life impressions comparing EB's
work to a *discrete* 'companion spirit') -- a boost to those who are
purists vis a vis 'The Intentional Fallacy'.
Have you read - I've just read - Le Fanu's 'Carmilla', the first vampire
story? It's most exquisite, delicate, beautiful; an 'amitié amoureuse'
betwen 2 young girls, one of whom turns out to be a vampire. It had the
most erotic effect on me - more so than any book I have read for a long
time. Do you think I have got a vampire complex?
"The only thing that is making me sad, and very sad, is that I suddenly
saw in the 'Times' that Humphrey House, that friend and long-ago lover
of mine, is dead. At 46. The announcement just said 'suddenly'. I've
written to Maurice Bowra to ask the details. How people come alive,
almost unbearably, when they're dead."
from Elizabeth Bowen's letter to Charles Ritchie (25 Feb 1955)
"Another pleasure of Venice was a fascinating conversation over dinner one
night as to whether one thinks in words or not. I said, certainly not; one
thinks in images and the language found for them is nothing more than a
translation. I was hotly supported by a professor who is a Croce-ite.
Apparently this is a topic which splits intellectual Italy to the core: and
it's a question I can't leave alone - wherever I've been since, it's
started again, and there has been a dog-fight. Do you think in words?"
from a letter by Elizabeth Bowen to Charles Ritchie (27 March 1953)
"The mood of the evening, with that faint taste of spring about it, and the
curious compulsive smoothness of the car - I felt as though someone else,
not
me, were driving - all seemed to melt into what you were saying. And my
love for
you reached a pitch of anguish, almost, out of our very nearness and sheer
happiness. Those particular miles of tree-road will always be yours. In a
way I
don't want to drive them again till you come back, though I suppose I
shall."
--from a letter by Elizabeth Bowen to Charles Ritchie (1957)
Some more quotes continued at link immediately above.