The House in Paris
Elizabeth Bowen
with an Introduction by A. S. Byatt
First published in Great Britain by Gollancz 1935 Published in Penguin Books in Great Britain 1946 Reprinted with an Introduction by A. S. Byatt 1976 Reprinted 1983, 1986
First published in the United States of America by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. 1935 Published in Penguin Books in the United States of America by arrangement with Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. 1987
Copyright 1935 by Elizabeth Cameron Copyright © renewed by Elizabeth D. C. Cameron, 1963 Introduction copyright © A. S. Byatt, 1976 All rights reserved
Contents
Introduction
Part I The Present
1
2
3
4
5
Part 2 The Past
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
Part 3 The Present
1
2
3
4
Introduction
MY relationship with The House in Paris has been odd, continuous and shifting, for roughly thirty years. It has had a disproportionate influence, both good and bad, on my ideas about the writing of novels and, indeed, about the nature of fiction. It seems proper to begin by explaining this since I do now believe it to be both the best of Elizabeth Bowen's novels, and a very good novel by any critical standards. But the reading process behind these judgments has been complicated.
I was given The House in Paris by my father when I was quite a small child, maybe ten or eleven, roughly the age of Henrietta in the novel itself. My father was under the impression that the book was a historical novel, having mistaken Elizabeth Bowen for the historical writer, Marjorie Bowen. I began the book, a compulsive reader, having already worked my way through most of Scott and much of Dickens, expecting to find a powerful plot, another world to inhabit, love, danger.
I found instead my first experience of a wrought, formalized 'modern' novel, a novel which played tricks with time and point of view. A novel, also (and this I remember clearly as being supremely important), which clarified, or would have clarified if I had been clever enough to focus it, the obscure, complex and alarming relationships between children, sex and love. There were powerful phrases which lodged in my mind and have stayed there. 'Years before sex had power to touch his feeling it had forced itself into view as an awkward tangle of motives. ' Or, 'The mystery about sex comes from confusion and terror: to a mind on which these have not yet settled there is nothing you cannot tell. ' Or, 'There is no end to the violations committed by children on children, quietly talking alone. ' I finished the book, deeply uncertain about what was happening, deeply troubled about how to judge the relative weight of any of the events or people. I read it, in fact, with a social, sexual and narrative innocence which was the equivalent of Henrietta's own. I learned, from that reading, two things. First, that 'the modern novel' was difficult: it stopped and analysed little things, when you wanted to get on with big things — it made it clear to you that you did not understand events, or other people. And, more important, more durable, I learned that Elizabeth Bowen had
got Henrietta right. Adult readers are too given to saying, of children like Henrietta, that 'real' children are not so sophisticated, so articulate, so thoughtful. What I remember with absolute clarity from this reading was a feeling that the private analyses I made to myself of things were vindicated, the confusions I was aware of were real, and presumably important and interesting, since here they were described. There is a sense in which Henrietta, and indeed Leopold, are more subtle images of the innocent or immature perception of adult behaviour than James's Maisie, in
What Maisie Knew. Maisie is a
tour de force, a brilliant creation, a vehicle both for James's technical mastery and for his moral commentary. But Leopold, and still more Henrietta, are children equipped with the language of the secret thoughts of intelligent children, with no more and no less than that. They make Maisie seem very much a creature of adult artifice.
