Elizabeth Bowen by Patricia Laurence

Author:Patricia Laurence
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783030264154
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

It was also a relationship, as Ritchie acknowledged, that “floated on alcohol.” Bowen’s cousin, Laetitia, observed of Bowen’s drinking habits at Bowen’s Court, “glasses started clinking early in the day, tea at 4, then gin on ice.” She presents a memory of Bowen, cigarette and drink in hand, often coughing, and addressing her, Ritchie, and others she felt an affection for as “darling.”

As Bowen continued to yearn, Ritchie’s affections in 1945 vacillated among his fiancée Sylvia, Bowen, and other women. In April 1946, he wrote in his journal of his sexual excesses with another: “Symptoms 12 hrs after—rapid heart action, guilt, feverish erotic spasm, irritability and cruelty.”179 He was a man who liked his pleasures, acknowledging that there were different kinds of love. He may have been in flight from marriage, at times, fearful that Sylvia had become a “symbol of obligations, and this was stripping her of all charm […] What can I do with my shifting irresolute nature which spoils other people’s lives and my own.”180 Yet Ritchie was also aware of the heartbreak in his relationship with Bowen, tenaciously waiting in the background. He continued his lament, being frozen “in the same trance of indecision between love and doubt.” He would compare himself in one letter to the characters in Somerset Maugham’s book The Narrow Corner, where two men marooned in far-off Malaysia spar for the love of the same beautiful, tragic woman. Ritchie felt it was a perfect novel for his mood in 1947 as he usually was suspended between two (or more) women: Bowen accepted the triangle of his marriage, intuiting his other relationships.

November 1946 brought the first mention of Ritchie’s intention to marry Sylvia Smellie, and Bowen took the high road: “Charles, I don’t want you to think I am going to take your marriage au grand tragique. I can take it how you want me to, and I will.”181 Upon the eve of this marriage in 1948, Bowen wrote:You are extraordinary, I am extraordinary, we have been extraordinary together. I ought (I can see how you could feel it) to be able to take one more extraordinary thing (your marriage.) The incalculable thing is sadness—how it shoots one down. The moment one is sad one is ordinary.182

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