Love's Civil War is an edited (by Victoria Glendinning) record of the 32-year affair between Canadian diplomat Charles Ritchie and Anglo-Irish writer Elizabeth Bowen. It comprises many of Bowen's letters to Ritchie and relevant entries from Ritchie's private diaries (Ritchie published four carefully and personally edited volumes of his diaries after retiring).
When Bowen and Ritchie met in 1941, she was an already famous writer living in an unconsummated (or at least "not fully consummated," whatever that means) but agreeable marriage. The six-years younger Ritchie was senior staff at the Canadian high commission in London, where he remained throughout World War 2. Their connection was immediate: the affair began days after they met and lasted until she died in 1973.
Over the course of the three decades, Ritchie rises through the ranks to become Canada's highest-ranking diplomat, instrumental in the creation of the United Nations Security Council and eventually serving as Ambassador to Germany, the United Nations, and the United States and High Commissioner to the United Kingdom. He marries a second-cousin he is fond of, "the female version of [him]self," mainly because he is urged to take a wife for the sake of his career. Sylvia, Mrs. Ritchie, is an interesting character we learn almost nothing about. Despite the obvious, he believes it was a mostly happy marriage.
Bowen suffers the whims of being in or out of popular taste, becomes a widow, and spends a lot of time at dinner parties with other people of her class who seem to have little to do and a lot of influence to do it. Eventually forced to sell her family estate in Ireland, Bowen complains about money as only someone who has never needed for anything can: while in a villa in Rome or jetting from London to New York. They are both somewhat brutal. Her only of others. He mostly towards the two of them.
Although Elizabeth Bowen is a novelist, essayist and short-story author, I find her contributions to the book dull. Obvious. Expected. Saccharine Needy. Forgettable. - at least on the subject of them. Her sardonic insight into others is sometimes entertaining. On the other hand, in nearly every one of Charles's entries there is something painfully or embarrassingly familiar worth holding on to, or a hidden truth laid so brazenly bare as to be both recognizable and shocking.
Perhaps the difference is partly explained by the media used - Elizabeth is quoted through her letters to Charles and she adopts the most clichéd language of the love letter; Charles is writing diary entries for, one imagines, his eyes only - or at least for his eyes only until he is gone. He talks of destroying them all - the letters he received as well as diaries, though in the end they were mostly preserved - he mentions now and then destroying a letter from Bowen because is it 'unlike her' or unusually painful. Unfortunately, the bulk of the content comes from Bowen's letters.
I hardly know what to make of this book or the story it reveals. I've never been fond of infidelity as a trope for star-crossed lovers. I hated The Bridges of Madison County. When I watched Scandal, I never cheered for Olitz. So this book had a sort of strike against it from the beginning - I didn't root for them staying together. But it did fascinate on some level, mostly because of their status and social circles - they knew everybody in the literary and diplomatic worlds.
Charles at least has the decency to feel guilt and mixed emotions, especially because his marriage is, on balance, a happy one. Bowen (again, I think reflective of her circle) seems to think dalliances, trysts, and multiple marriages are no big thing, though it's clear her marriage is an arrangement. I was very confused by how much "a couple" they were within their circles, and even to Ritchie's family in Halifax. Bowen even visited at the Ritchie's home more than once when Sylvia was at home. His mother and Bowen kept frequent correspondence, and she visited his brother and sister-in-law without him more than once. And, it's hardly a passionate love story.
Despite all her whinging and pleading and following him around the globe (e.g. she takes a writing-in-residence semester at the University of Wisconsin primarily to be closer to him in New York City), the whole thing reads as somewhat dry and asexual. I wonder if that was Ritchie's selective saving of material, the work of the editors, or reflective of their reticence to put anything too damningly physical in writing (it can't be that though, since Ritchie writes about other lovers without the same filter).
Bowen, raised on an estate with friends and family of the same class, suffers from both classism and intellectual snobbery, not to mention anti-semitism. She's somewhat less offensive about people of colour, though I suspect that's because she rarely interacts with them. She also employs that irritating and pretentious practice of dropping French words and phrases into English sentences like Corabeth Godsey.
I'm interested to read some of Ritchie's professional diaries. I'm much less interested to read Bowen's novels, though in what she revealed of her life I did learn some things as an erstwhile writer: writing is real work that you set aside time for and treat like a job; even the very rich and somewhat successful have a hard time making ends meet just from earnings from their writings; fictionalising your own life is a valid basis for a novel; if you come from the landed gentry, you can spend a month or more in Rome doing research at a lovely hotel with a spacious corner room full of light.
I will hold on to this book, and perhaps look through it again in time - maybe to compare with Ritchie's public notes. I might recommend it, though I'm not sure to whom.
Some Charles quotes:
"... The affair threatens to develop into one of her long psychological novels in which I see myself smothered in love and then dissected at leisure. If I am not cruel now, she will be later."
"It would be shattering to quarrel with her. I have so much more respect for her than I have for myself."
"All of my love affairs have been floated on alcohol. If the rationing of wines and spirits becomes effective I shall become considerably less interesting as a lover."
(One discussing his annoyance at her devotion) "Any woman who kept me in a state of anxiety could keep me permanently. It's so simple, but none of them will."
"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."
"One of the luxuries of this love affair is the giddy feeling of being carried along on the tide of her imagination, being transmitted into literature; sitting for my portrait, or being swallowed alive?"
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