Love's Civil War: Elizabeth Bowen and Charles Ritchie, letters and diaries 1941-1973

My thesis on Elizabeth Bowen should have left me looking to read something unrelated, but _Love's Civil War_ was released the same day as I got my reader reports and I felt I had to start it right away. It did not disappoint. Ritchie describes Bowen in one of his first diaries entries about her:

"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."

It seems terribly intimate after a couple years of reading and researching a person to hear her lover's description of her. Her voice is so strong in her novels, literally authoritative, but many of her letters to Ritchie display an enormous vulnerability. I tend to stay away from biographical interpretations, but this really does give me greater insight. She writes that The House in Paris seems the most "screenworthy" of her novels: my chapter on that novel was called "Palimpsests and Portals: The Screen Aesthetic of The House in Paris." I felt vindicated. It was also illuminating to read about how she wrote, not only the process but also where and with what she surrounded herself. Much of her writing is about love and innocence; to see her in love, and hear her thoughts on her experiences, is a privilege. It's unearned but welcome.

I'm often quite cynical about love, but I want to believe in it. I feel like the kind of love between Bowen and Ritchie would perhaps not have survived marriage. In fact, it seems like the longest they were ever physically together was two weeks and as painful as those separations were they probably contributed to the longevity of the relationship. They are such strong personalities that it seems like clashes would have been inevitable. Charles had a good marriage with Sylvia because she accomodated him, and he could sleep with other women as he wished. Nevertheless, the fact that this love was sustained, that they had each other, that they were each the other's most important person, is a beautiful thing to try to know.