Death of the Heart

Irish novelist Elizabeth Bowen who penned such wonderful novels as The Death of the Heart and Demon Lover, and helped establish the ‘Big House’ in Irish literature, failed in her own efforts to save Bowen’s Court, the family home in County Cork.

The N73 between Mallow and Mitchelstown in County Cork is a sharply twisting two-lane road, shadowed by high hedges and unforgiving stone walls. Drivers must concentrate as they zip through this placid farmland since they can rarely see what’s ahead, and so it is easy to miss the metal sign, set low to the ground at the top of an uphill curve, that points to Farahy church, the tiny Protestant church at what was once the gates of Bowen’s Court, the famous house of the great Irish writer Elizabeth Bowen.

Bowen’s Court was demolished nearly 35 years ago, so visitors who bother to go looking for Farahy church these days—often American students — are usually looking for a connection to Elizabeth and her beloved family home. They might be familiar with her books and her life, and the fact that the end of Bowen’s Court was a loss of tragic proportions to her, but what they may not know is that in the 1950s, this sensitive Irish novelist turned to America in an attempt to save her house, built in 1776, a last-ditch effort that ultimately failed.

Farahy church, of course, gives no hint of the human struggles to save the house whose gates it guarded. The architecture is nothing special and the graveyard, with a mass famine grave in one corner, boasts no one of fame beyond Elizabeth herself although it is full of Bowens long-past. But still visitors keep stopping by here, sometimes knocking on the door of the gate house to ask for the key to the church. Farahy has that lingering glow that writers can impart to buildings, since it is the only remnant of Elizabeth Bowen in Ireland.

Farahy church stands just inside what were the gates of Bowen’s Court. A grassy path leads visitors on foot up a steep hill past a high stone wall, and the church is not visible until you round the corner. All around the little gray building, gravestones slump and trees overhang the walls as if weary from the layers of history that smother this spot. There has been some sort of church on this spot since the 17th century, but this current building was built in 1721, and no less than Jonathan Swift mentioned it in a 1736 letter to Lady Edward Germaine, in trying to procure the deanery there for a friend of his. A plaque on what was later to be the church’s vestry piously notes that the room was erected in 1721 by a London lady concerned about the Christian instruction of the “poor children of the parish of Farahy.”

Bowen’s Court did not come along for more than fifty years after Farahy was built, and it stood several hundred yards northwest in the shadow of the Ballyhoura Mountains, its broad, flat, gray stone facade facing southeast.

It was Italianate in design, with a severity of line that made an unsympathetic eye like Virginia Woolf’s describe it as “merely a great stone box.” Looking now to where the house lay, visitors see only trees bordering a smooth field whose long grasses ripple in the wind. There are no bumps or ridges to show signs of a foundation and even the daisies, which for years outlined the disused avenue, have been swallowed up in meadow grass.

Elizabeth was born in 1899 and she grew up shuttling between Ireland and England, due largely to her father’s psychological problems which forced her and her mother onto the charity of relatives. But she spent much of her childhood and almost every summer at Bowen’s Court and she considered it her home.

She chronicled the history of the house as it intertwined with the history of her family in her book Bowen’s Court, first published in 1942. It is a long confusing tale full of litigation and vengeful family relations and in it she blames the eventual decline of the house on her grandfather, a man so demented by his son’s decision to study law that he destroyed and sold off as much of the estate as he legally could.

Bowen’s Court had been built in 1776 by a Bowen ancestor she designates Henry III, given the Bowen family fondness for that name, which usually alternated generations with Robert. Her father was Henry VI, and when he died in 1930, she became the first woman ever to inherit the house, although, just the same as all the other Bowens whose dates are known, she came into possession of the house before she was 31.

Elizabeth first visited the United States during the decade after her father’s death, going to New York City to meet her American publishers, Alfred A. Knopf. She loved New York from the start, and noted later that she would always speak of trips there as going “back” to New York, not going “to” it. Not long after that first trip, however, the war intervened and she did not go back until 1950. But from 1950 until the year before she died, there was not a year that she did not visit the U.S. In 1951, she was back for a lecture tour that had her traveling to universities all over the U.S. Compared to the dreary privations of England during the war, the United States was a land of plenty. She loved the shiny side of American living – jazz, skyscrapers, strong mixed drinks, appliances and conveniences – as well as the American habit of easy friendliness and quick intimacy.

She and her husband, Alan Cameron, a BBC executive, had lived mostly in England, returning to Bowen’s Court every summer. When Alan retired in 1952, they went to live in Ireland full-time. Less than a year later, however, Alan died suddenly and Elizabeth headed promptly for America, to take her mind off of her loss and to enjoy the hospitality and comfort of friends there.

She was even able to find the strength to start writing again during an extended stay with Alan and Catherine Collins in Hopewell, New Jersey. Their 17th-century home, Hunt’s House, was even older than Bowen’s Court.

Elizabeth was famous for her hospitality and had always spent money carelessly to keep Bowen’s Court full of people. After Alan died, she was left largely to her own resources, and she began to struggle hard to pay the bills. Novel writing may make one famous, but rarely wealthy, and thanks to her grandfather, the estate could no longer support itself.

In despair, she started to supplement her fiction with feature articles for American magazines and, more prestigiously, teaching at American colleges. In 1955, she was the writer-in-residence for a term at the American Academy in Rome, and in 1956, she taught at Bryn Mawr, having been awarded the Lucy Martin Donnelly fellowship there.

In New York, she accepted whatever free-lance assignments came along. She wrote for British publications too, but glossy American magazines were able to pay much more, and more was what she needed if she was going to keep Bowen’s Court.

She wrote indiscriminately for Harper’s Bazaar, Mademoiselle, American Home, Parents, McCall’s, House & Garden and The New York Times Book Review. In service to Bowen’s Court, this great literary mind turned itself to such pieces as “How to Be Yourself But Not Eccentric” for Vogue and “The Case for Summer Romance” for Glamour.

The money came in, but with a large old house to maintain and heavy taxes to pay, it was not enough. “I should, I thought, be able to maintain the place somehow,” she wrote in an Afterword to a 1963 edition of Bowen’s Court. “Had not others done so before me? But I was unable to.”

By 1959, it was inevitable that she must sell, and a County Cork neighbor, Cornelius O’Keefe, agreed to buy the house and lands. Elizabeth believed that the O’Keefe family was going to live in the house. “It cheered me also,” she wrote, “to think that his handsome children would soon be running about the rooms – for it was, I believe, his honest intention, when first he bought the place from me, to inhabit the house. But in the end he did not find that practicable, and who is to blame him?”

Her friends would later say that O’Keefe only wanted the land and timber around Bowen’s Court, and never had any intention of living in it, and that Elizabeth had simply convinced herself so in order to go through with the sale. She certainly sold hastily, without consulting anyone, and even O’Keefe tried to warn her that she could probably get a better price through a Dublin real-estate office.

She was already back in America working again in early 1960 when O’Keefe decided to pull down the house, and she made a flying visit back to Ireland to say goodbye to her family home. Bowen’s Court was a pile of rubble within days.

Of the event, Elizabeth wrote calmly, “Finally, he decided that there was nothing for it but to demolish the house entirely. So that was done. It was a clean end. Bowen’s Court never lived to be a ruin.”

It was a brave front, but she took the demolition very hard. One friend, Eddy Sackville-West, wrote to novelist Molly Keane to be prepared for when she saw the change in Elizabeth after the loss of her house. “She looks like someone who has attended her own execution,” he said.

For her part, Elizabeth buckled down to her work in America, looking again for consolation in her work there and the adulation of her many fans. She had a gues teaching position waiting for her at Vassar right after Bowen’s Court was razed, and in the next several years she traveled to even more universities around the U.S., sometimes to teach for a term, sometimes stopping through for a lecture. In 1960, she took a trip to Mississippi to visit Eudora Welty and write about the trip for Holiday magazine.

She visited the Universities of Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Washington at Seattle and California at Berkeley. She was also at Stanford, Amherst, Williams and Princeton, where she taught in 1969.

After she sold her home in Ireland, she never bought another one there, and in 1964, she bought what friends described as an ugly modern semi-detached house in Hythe, in England, to keep as a home base. It was there that she died in 1973 of lung cancer.

Because Elizabeth and Alan were childless, perhaps Bowen’s Court would have suffered the same fate anyway, sold for estate taxes or death duties. Even Farahy church, fallen into disrepair, was to be pulled down in the late 1970s, but the efforts of her friends Derek Hill, a painter, and the Rev. Robert McCarthy saved the structure, which now stands as a little-attended church, but a strong reminder of Elizabeth Bowen and Bowen’s Court. Standing earth and Alan’s joint gravestone at Farahy, it is comforting to think that she ended up in Ireland, near the site of her house, her church intact after all.

Fifteen years ago last October 18, a small group of her friends and admirers gathered at Parahy for the erection of a memorial tablet in her memory inside the church. The esteemed Irish essayist, Hubert Butler, who was also her cousin, addressed the group, admitting that it is hard not to connect our remembrances of people, families and races with bricks and mortar.

“We had all assumed that because she was so hospitable, so generous and so celebrated a writer, she must be rich. She was too proud to admit prolonged financial worries. Surely, if all those to whom Bowen’s Court had been an oasis of friendliness and lively thinking in a dreary world had known the truth, they would have done something to assure its future.”

Elizabeth may have thought otherwise, however. After Bowen’s Court’s destruction, she wrote, “There is a sort of perpetuity about livingness, and it is part of the character of Bowen’s Court to be, in sometimes its silent way, very much alive.”

Judging from the trimmed grass and well-kept grounds of tiny Farahy Church, and the visitors who still come to look at the Bowen gravestones and gaze over the low wall toward the empty space where Bowen’s Court once stood, she just might have been right.

Editor’s Note: This article was originally published in the March/April 1995 issue of Irish America. ⬥