Grow up Portia: The Death of the Heart by Elizabeth Bowen

The Death of the Heart by Elizabeth Bowen

published 1938

 

 

This picture is Boredom, 1935 Alexander Deineka – I don’t believe Portia would have worn such a low-cut dress, BUT her elbows feature a surprising amount in the book, and there are several mentions like this one:

‘Portia nursing her elbows as though they had been a couple of loved cats’

 

I very much enjoyed a recent re-read of

Friends and Relations by Elizabeth Bowen

I liked it much more than I remembered and found a lot to talk about.  So on to this, one of her better-known ones, and I think a great favourite of many people. 

[As it happens, the writer Laura Thompson has also been reading this book, and I strongly recommend her Substack post on it: she feels much as I did about the book, so is plainly correct in her views, here…

The Death of the Heart by Elizabeth Bowen

Laura Thompson wrote excellent books on two of my favourite topics, Agatha Christie and the Mitford family]

 

Death of the Heart tells the story of 16-year-old Portia, an orphan who has come to live in London with her much older  half-brother and his wife, Thomas and Anna. She has lived a life that is familiar from many a novel of the 1930s: wandering around Europe with her now-dead mother, living in hotels and rented villas, not enough money and not much fun.

Given the name of the book you will not be surprised that things are not going to improve in the posh house on the edge of Regents’ Park.

In the first third, Bowen does a brilliant job of seeing both sides of a question. Portia, poor soul, doesn’t have much in life, but she is incredibly annoying and awkward and you feel would try the patience of a saint. And Anna, her sister-in-law, is no saint. Anna is thoughtless and selfish, but, she has had this young woman dumped on her, has no idea what to do with her, and finds her wholly unsympathetic. There are many awkward, cringe-making but wholly believable incidents and conversations - just normal happenings around the house, but making it clear that Portia is in the way, and doesn’t offer much back. But you still feel tremendously sorry for her, while also wanting to give her a good shake.

There are great lines and intriguing ideas:

Anna did not reply; she had forgotten to listen.

Though ash blonde, [Anna] had, in some way, the personality more of a dark woman. She was, in fact, the first blonde woman who had attracted Thomas.

Major Brutt was the sort of man who, like a ghost with no beat, hesitates around the West End about midnight.

She walked about with the rather fated expression you see in photographs of girls who have subsequently been murdered ***

Overcome by the dullness of what he had been saying, Thomas trailed off and slumped further back in his chair

I didn’t really see what the middle third – where Portia goes to the seaside to stay with some vague connections of Anna – added, apart from giving Bowen the chance to be accurately snobbish about this rather down-market family.

The rest of it is all too clear: Portia meets a worthless young man called Eddie, a friend of Anna’s, and becomes very attached to him. Portia writes a diary, which we know from the opening pages that Anna has read. This isn’t even going to be as exciting as you might think, it is just the breach of trust that matters, not the content.

Thinking about it afterwards, I don’t know how Bowen managed to fill 300 pages. I am not the only person to say this book should have been a lot shorter – it would have made a good novella.

As Laura T says, it is difficult to have sufficient sympathy with Portia, and Anna is a much more entertaining character. When I read it before I was much closer in age to Portia, but even that did not make me like her. As the book wore on I became more bored with and annoyed by her, so I didn’t much care about the Death of her Heart. (It is true that from the beginning of the book you are never in any doubt as to whose heart is in question – in the memorable words of Patricia Wentworth, others ‘didn’t look as though [they] had a heart to break’.)

And honestly – she’s 16, she has a crush on the wrong person, she feels lets down by the people around her. That’s what being 16 is like – is it really going to ruin her life? Grow up Portia.

The descriptions of London, the park, the January evening as the lake freezes – all are wonderful, and I am a person who would often skim over those bits. The opening chapters gave me very high hopes, not fulfilled.

Clothes: Everyone wears fitted or knitted dresses in blue or black:

 

Though Daphne (the daughter of the family at the seaside) break out into colours: She wears a ‘crepe de chine dress, cut clingingly into the thighs and draped lusciously elsewhere: on it poppies, roses nasturtiums flowered away…’

 

In the memorable opening scene Anna has a big fur collar, a fur  hat and a muff to walk in the park:

 

The book has an unlikely connection with an Agatha Christie short story, and modern times enabled me to answer a question which has been lingering in my mind for 50 years.

Bowen is describing Daphne’s bedroom: ‘A Dismal Desmond dog sat on the bed’

Well! This rang a bell: in one of the Parker Pyne short stories by Agatha Christie, someone throws something out of the window. Mr Parker Pyne gazes out and says ‘Considerable surprise has been created. The gentleman selling Dismal Desmonds does not know what to make of it’. (short story first published 1932)

I was intrigued by this, and wondered what a Dismal Desmond was, but in those days there really was no way of finding out – but as you can see, it stuck in my mind all that time, without ever surfacing in the Internet age when it is easy to Google.

The answer: It was an incredibly popular toy in the 1920s, a stuffed dog.  

Dismal Desmond | V&A Explore The Collections

gives a good overview

The picture could easily represent Daphne holding her dog: She wore her hair in a mop, but the mop was in an iron pattern of curls, burnished with brilliantine.’

*** another diversion: This reminded me of a very fine moment in my life, when I featured in New Scientist magazine. Not for any original research, I fear, but contributing to a series of items about mystified children: