"The House in Paris" by Elizabeth Bowen

"the soul stand[s] still like a refugee, clutching all it has got, asking: 'I am where?'"

Warning: spoilers ahead

“Today was to do much to disintegrate Henrietta’s personality.”¹

So the narrator tells us near the beginning of Elizabeth Bowen’s complex and fascinating 1935 novel, The House in Paris.

The book is divided into three sections, with the first and third taking place in one day in Paris, while the second section travels to the past.

In the first section, eleven-year-old Henrietta arrives at a house in Paris belonging to family friends: the deteriorating invalid, Madame Fisher, and her anxious daughter Naomi. Henrietta is stopping over for the day on her way to the South of France to live with her grandmother. There she meets nine-year-old Leopold, another child in transit, waiting to meet his mother for the first time at the house.

The middle section is set ten years earlier, where we learn about Leopold’s mother, Karen, and the origin of his existence. Then in the final section, we return to Henrietta and Leopold and see them on their way to their next destinations.

People in transit, time disrupted. Despite the clear tri-part structure, Bowen’s writing is modernist and experimental, purposefully disorienting the reader along with her characters who are all trying to get somewhere, belong somewhere, or be united with someone without much success. Disintegration is the essence of this story.

Part I: The Present

The first section of the novel focuses in large part on the hopes that Leopold places in his mother. Since infancy, he has been living with his adoptive aunt and uncle, the Grant-Moodys, in Italy. Their stifling helicopter parenting and evasiveness about his biological parentage has made him take refuge in imaginings about his mother—that she never meant to give him up and that she intends to take him home to England with her. He declares with absolute confidence, “We shall understand each other.”² However, when Leopold’s mother fails to come, the fulfillment of his hopes remain unresolved.

Part II: The Past

In Part Two, we meet Karen at twenty-three, in her own state of transition: she is engaged to be married. She is also literally on a journey to Ireland to stay with her Aunt Violet and Uncle Bill. And like the eponymous house in Paris, her aunt and uncle’s house is not a source of permanence and stability, not a place where you can truly belong.

She learns that her aunt is on the way out of this world, suffering from a terminal illness. But her aunt, like the Grant-Moodys, wishes to maintain an illusion of peace and control and discusses this information with no one.

Back in London, Karen meets her friend, Naomi Fisher, whose Paris house she stayed in a few years prior when she was studying art. Naomi is in London to sort out the belongings of her recently deceased aunt, and she encourages Karen to become better friends with her fiancé, Max, whom Karen had met in Paris.

Naomi's aunt's house becomes the scene of Karen and Max's reunion, and like the houses before, it lends its atmosphere of impermanence and unreality to the characters’ thoughts and dialogue. Karen tells Max they “are in a place that’s hardly a place at all, in a house belonging to someone dead.”³

Karen and Max soon begin a short-lived affair involving more travel to and fro across the Channel. Karen believes this affair will bring both a fulfillment and a death of the desire she’s harbored for Max since she first met him, so that she will be able to move on. Instead, as she lies awake on their first night together, she thinks, “I thought to-night would be the hour of my death but here I still am, left to die.” Observing the silent room, she hollowly concludes that all the time she and Max were pursuing each other, they “were travelling to only this: a barred light on a ceiling, a lamp, a tree outside.”⁴

Like other characters who try to maintain an illusion of peace, she plans for Max to return to Naomi and she to her fiancé, Ray, with no one knowing of their transgression. But even at this stage, she begins to contemplate the reality of a child: “I should have to do what I dread, see them know. There would be something to dread. I should see the hour in the child. I should not have rushed on to nothing.”⁵

And when she realizes that a child, a tangible disruption in time, has indeed come of their union, she is consumed with the urgency of giving the sense of permanence and belonging to her child that she herself lacks:

“But I must see some way for him to live. I could go off and live with him somewhere I suppose. Somewhere where no one knew us…[But] he would hate that—hate exile, hate being nowhere, hate being unexplained, hate having no place of his own. Hate me too, because of all that. He would be better without me, in any place he could believe was his.”⁶

It is a terrible irony that in trying to give Leopold a place of his own, she cuts him off from the knowledge of his origins and he becomes exactly as she fears: exiled, nowhere, unexplained. In the present day, Leopold tries to make sense of this tragic gulf between his origin and his present life: “People who knew me must not know I was born, and people who knew I was born must not know me?”⁷

Part III: The Present

In the final section, we return to the present where Henrietta witnesses the dismantling of the fantasy Leopold had built up in his mind:

“She could not know how sharply Leopold realised everything that at this moment perished for him…She had seen the country he had thought he would inherit…his passionate ignorance made it great—trees rounded, standing in their own shadow, spires glittering, lakes of land in light, white puffs from the little train travelling a long way. He is weeping because he is not going to England; his mother is not coming to take him there. He is weeping because he has been adopted; he is weeping because he has nowhere to go.”⁸

Following this passage, we have perhaps the only real and redeeming glimpse of communion between characters and the only moment any character possesses peace: Henrietta embraces Leopold and weeps with him. “Now that she cried, he could rest.”⁹

Henrietta becomes almost a cruciform image supporting Leopold and bearing his suffering. She is like Eliot's “still point of the turning world...where past and future are gathered,” and she stands in sharp relief to the adult characters in the novel—adrift and perpetually grasping for fulfillment.

The last scene of the novel aptly takes place in a train station where Leopold asks, “Where are we going?” This central question of the narrative is taken up by the narrator:

“Where are we going now? The station is sounding, resounding, full of steam caught on light and arches of dark air: a temple to the intention to go somewhere. Sustained sound in the shell of stone and steel, racket and running, impatience and purpose, make the soul stand still like a refugee, clutching all it has got, asking: “I am where?”¹⁰

The vision of the human experience presented in The House in Paris is one that is in constant flux. Bowen captures the shadowy, transitory condition of our world—a world in which people fall short of union with one another and no place offers any lasting consolation. No house is ever a true home, only a place belonging to someone who is or will be dead. But Bowen acknowledges the human soul’s desire to know where it is, where it is going, and where it is belongs.

She doesn't explicitly give us the Christian’s resounding comfort of the resurrection in the face of the Heraclitean fire of this world, but she does put forth the hope that all may be resolved and peace may come sometime in a transfigured reality.

Of Leopold’s desired meeting with his mother, the narrator says: “Actually, the meeting he had projected could take place only in heaven…Or call it art…Only there—in heaven or art, in that nowhere, on that plane—could Karen have told Leopold what had really been.”¹¹

Only in heaven.

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Recommended for fans of Elizabeth Taylor’s In a Summer Season and Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Unconsoled.

1. Elizabeth Bowen, The House in Paris (New York: Anchor Books, 2002) 13.

2. Ibid., 65

3. Ibid., 117

4. Ibid., 167

5. Ibid., 167

6. Ibid., 207

7. Ibid., 224

8. Ibid., 219

9. Ibid., 220

10. Ibid., 267

11. Ibid., 66