The Heat of the Day

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The Heat of the Day

THE LITERARY WORK

A novel set in London during the middle of the Second World War; published in 1949.

SYNOPSIS

Stella Rodney’s faith in her lover is called into question when she is told that he is a Nazi spy, in a novel that explores a woman’s perspective on the psychological impact of war.

Events in History at the Time of the Novel

The Novel in Focus

For More Information

Elizabeth Bowen was born in 1899 into an Anglo-Irish family, the Bowens of Bowen’s Court in County Cork in Dublin, Ireland. The relative security of her early years was shattered in 1906 by her father’s nervous breakdown, after which her mother took Elizabeth to live in England. More upheaval followed when Elizabeth was 13 and her mother died of cancer. Elizabeth Bowen’s first collection of short stories, Encounters, was published in 1923, and was followed soon after by her marriage to Alan Cameron. The couple settled in Oxford in 1925, and it was there that Bowen established important and lifelong friendships with other writers and intellectuals. The next 13 years were extremely productive, resulting in the publication of three further collections of stories and six novels, including The Last September (1929), The House in Paris (1935), and The Death of the Heart (1938). The outbreak of war in 1939 found Bowen living in London, where she and her husband remained throughout the war, except for occasional visits to Bowen’s Court, which Bowen had inherited on her father’s death in 1930. Bowen wrote two memoirs, Seven Winters and Bowen’s Court (both 1942) and she continued to write short stories (which would be collected in The Demon Lover and Other Stories in 1945), but found that the stress and disruption of wartime prevented her from working successfully on longer fiction. Thus, although she began The Heat of the Day in 1944, Bowen finished it only after the war was over. When the novel finally appeared in 1949, it was instantly acclaimed for its accurate portrayal of the atmosphere of wartime London, and of the intense, dislocated lives of those who remained there throughout the war.

Events in History at the Time of the Novel

The blitz

The main action in The Heat of the Day takes place between the beginning of September and the middle of November 1942, with a coda covering the period up to June 1944. However, the affair between Stella Rodney and Robert Kelway started earlier, in September 1940, at the beginning of the blitzkrieg (“lightning war”), or blitz, the air raids on British cities by the German Luftwaffe (air force) from September 1940 to May 1941.

Although war had been declared in September 1939, the British public saw little evidence of it until mid-1940 when, having overrun Holland, Belgium, Luxembourg, and France, Germany Elizabeth Bowen turned its attention to preparations for an invasion of Britain.

The Luftwaffe first attacked British coastal shipping and southern ports, and then its fighter defenses, which led to spectacular dogfights over the skies of southern England in what came to be known as the Battle of Britain. Then, from the end of August on, came the blitz: night bombing raids on London and other British cities. Germany’s primary objective was to facilitate an invasion by crippling British war production, but as time went on and it became obvious that Germany would not gain the air superiority necessary to launch an invasion of Britain, the objective increasingly became to cause as much damage and terror as possible, in the hope that British morale would collapse.

The blitz transformed the phrase “the home front” from a metaphor into a reality. The destruction wrought by the bombing was enormous: by the time the blitz ended in mid-1941, more than 43,000 civilians had been killed and around 139,000 had been injured, and over 2 million houses had been damaged or destroyed, 60 percent of them in London (Calder, The People’s War, p. 242). Ins te ad the re ian population of Britain been so closely involved in a war. As historian Angus Calder explains, this was:

the battle of an unarmed civilian population against incendiaries and high explosives the battle of firemen, wardens, policemen, nurses and rescue workers against an enemy they could not hurt. The front line troops were doctors, parsons, telephonists, and people who in peacetime life had been clerks, builders, labourers and housewives.
(Calder, The People’s War, p. 156)

The blitz was exhilarating as well as traumatic and exhausting. As Bowen explains in Chapter Five of The Heat of the Day, the sense of nightly danger gave the early days of the blitz a strange glamour: “one bought the poetic sense of it with the sense of death” (Bowen, The Heat of the Day, p. 90). Furthermore, by fostering a new sense of shared suffering and effort, and at the same time exposing shocking differences between the standards of living of the well-off and those of the poor, the blitz also gave rise to aspirations for a better, more democratic future.

The people who are holding the Front Line are fighting and suffering for a new democracy, … to which they themselves are giving the meaning. and its superscription is that simple remark of the docker “We are all in it together.” Because, if it is not a “we-are-all-in-it-together” democracy, there is going to be hell to pay.
(Richie Calder in Hewison, p. 46)

“The lightless middle of the tunnel.”

Despite the damage done, the bombing raids of the blitz did not significantly disrupt British industry, nor crush people’s resolve to fight, and in May 1941, having postponed indefinitely his plans to invade Britain, Hitler turned his attention to the invasion of Russia. The blitz itself was over, although British cities continued to be bombed intermittently throughout the rest of the war, and there was a renewal of intensive bombing in January-March 1944, known as the “little blitz.” This little blitz reached its peak with five major raids on London between the 18th and the 24th of February. After the heroism of what Prime Minister Winston Churchill referred to as Britain’s “finest hour”—its holding out against Germany during the Battle of Britain and the blitz—the months that followed were distinctly dispiriting. From the middle of February 1941 until October 1942, “the British public was not to hear of one victory on land … which seemed at all meaningful” (Calder, The People’s War, p. 242). Instead there were endless “reverses, losses, deadlocks” and a “deadening acclimatization” to the routines of war (The Heat of the Day, p. 92). Paramount among these routines were the material discomforts of rationing and of blackouts that “transformed a capital city into a network of inscrutable canyons” and the psychological stress of dealing with the “stupefying” magnitude of the conflict (Bowen, The Demon Lover, pp. 219-23). In the novel, it is during this “lightless middle of the tunnel,” when it was by no means clear that the Allies would eventually win, that Stella’s faith in her lover, and her allegiance to her country, are tested by Harrison’s allegation that her lover is a spy. (The Heat of the Day, p. 93)

El Alamein to D-Day

The first good news for the British public came on November 4, 1942, when British commander Bernard Montgomery’s Eighth Army defeated General Erwin Rommel’s forces at Al-Alamein in Egypt. Five days later, on November 9, forces of the Allied powers (Britain, France, and Russia) landed in French northwest Africa to do battle with forces of the Axis powers (Germany, Italy, and Japan), and the good news mounted. By early May 1943, the Allied forces had completely defeated the Axis forces on the southern side of the Mediterranean. The summer of 1943 saw the Allied landings in Italy, and the defeat of German forces on the Russian front, and from then on, Hitler’s only hope of victory was to delay his own defeat so long that the Allies would fall apart (Parker, p. 177). However, the Allies finally opened a “Second Front” in western Europe in the summer of 1944, landing over 2 million troops in northwestern France in the three months that followed D-Day, June 6, 1944, the day the allies invaded German-occupied Europe. Also, the Russians began an offensive in the East, after which Germany’s defeat was inevitable.

Ireland’s neutrality during World War II

The Irish Free State had won its independence from Britain in 1922, and, although it remained a formal member of the British Commonwealth until 1949, in practical terms it had been fully independent since 1937. The new state, Eire, remained neutral during the Second World War, and although on balance its neutrality favored Britain, there was mutual mistrust between the two countries: Britain suspected Eire of harboring Axis agents and of secretly helping to re-supply its U-boats, while “when the Germans accidentally bombed a Dublin suburb, most of those on the ground thought the British had raided them” (Dear and Foot, p. 324). On an individual basis, however, many citizens of Eire committed themselves to the Allied cause: around 50,000 volunteered for the British armed forces, and many more were employed in civilian war work in Britain (Calder, The Myth of the Blitz, pp. 65-66).

For the Anglo-Irish, descendants of the English Protestant ruling class that had established itself in Ireland from the early seventeenth century onwards, wartime allegiances were particularly complicated. In The Heat of the Day, the Anglo-Irish Cousin Francis fiercely defends Eire’s right to independence and to determine its own position in the war, but hopes that it will enter the war on the Allied side, and, when this does not happen, Francis travels to England to offer his services.

DUNKIRK

As France was falling to the German “blitzkreig,” or lightning war, in May 1940, plans were made to evacuate British soldiers fighting in France from the northern French port of Dunkirk. The Dunkirk evacuation is famous as much for the method of the rescue as for the number of soldiers saved: between 850 and 950 ships and small craft were involved, and for the last five days of the evacuation, these included civilian vessels with volunteer crews. Over eight days, under heavy attack from the Luftwaffe, these vessels succeeded in evacuating around 338,000 Allied troops, including 110,000 French soldiers (Dear and Foot, pp. 312-13; Keegan, p. 81). This success was, initially at least, a boost to civilian morale, but as Prime Minisier Winston Churchill said at the time, “wars are not won by evacuations”: Dunkirk was a “colossal military disaster” (Churchill in Calder, The People’s War, p. 110). Many of the evacuated soldiers themselves shared this view, feeling humiliated and resentful of those-—their own commanders—whom they considered responsible. In The Heal of the Day, Robert Kelway attributes his decision to betray his country to the disgust he felt during his experience at Dunkirk.

Women’s roles in wartime

With the conscription of men into the armed forces, and the need for increased production to meet demand for war supplies, the war prompted women to work outside the home in unprecedented numbers. Two million British women took on paid work, or moved from domestic service into different jobs between 1939 and 1942 (Parker, p. 141). Some joined the armed forces in noncombat roles, while others worked as air raid wardens or ambulace drivers, in factories or on farms as so-called “land girls.” By 1943 it had become almost impossible for a woman younger than 40 to avoid war-related work unless she had heavy family duties, or was caring for a war worker whom she lodged: 90 percent of single women between 18 and 40 years old, and 80 percent of married women, were in the forces or in industry (Calder, The People’s War, pp. 331-32).

War work offered some women more freedom and a wider range of experiences than they had ever known. Others, however, particularly many working-class women, were trapped in monotonous factory work, and found themselves burdened with two jobs—toiling at laborious employment outside the house, and raising the children and managing the housework within. In the novel, Stella Rodney’s perception of the war as a social opportunity, and her employment in “secret, exacting, not unimportant work” for a (fictional) government organization “better called Y.X.D.” are much more typical of the experience of middle-and upper-class women than of the majority (The Heat of the Day, p. 26). Perhaps more representative are the experiences of two of the novel’s other characters, Louie Lewis and her friend Connie. Louie is married to a soldier and so is exempt from compulsory war work but, like many who found they could not survive on the allowance they received as servicemen’s wives, has to work in a factory. Connie, single and in her early thirties, and therefore classed as a “mobile woman,” eligible to be sent wherever in the country labor was required, worked in a tobacco kiosk before the war, and volunteered to become an air raid warden in September 1939. Although she finds she dislikes the work, it is better than the alternative of being allocated, with little say in the matter, to factory work or to a women’s branch of the services: “a Mobile Woman,” she thinks, “dared not look sideways these days—you might find yourself in Wolverhampton . or at the bottom of a mine, or in the A.T.S. [Auxiliary Territorial Service] with some bitch blowing a bugle at you till you got up in the morning” (The Heat of the Day, p. 148). Connie’s fear of finding herself at the bottom of a mine is perhaps excessive, as even with the labor shortage no women went down the coal mines. But Wolverhampton, one of the industrial cities in the Midlands where many women were sent to work, and the A.T.S., a women’s service that supported the army by taking over many noncombat tasks and freeing men for frontline duty, would have been strong possibilities.

The Novel in Focus

Plot summary

The Heat of the Day opens in Regent’s Park in central London on the evening of the first Sunday of September 1942. Louie Lewis, who has spent the day wandering in the park looking for company, meets the as-yet-unnamed Harrison at an outdoor concert, and, intrigued by his seemingly “cryptic behaviour,” tries to strike up a conversation. He rebuffs her, saying he has a date (The Heat of the Day, p. 9). Meanwhile, Stella Rodney waits apprehensively in her nearby flat: despite her having already firmly rejected Harrison’s advances, he has asked to see her again, and some “undefined threat” has been implied (The Heat of the Day, pp. 22-23).

When Harrison arrives, he tells Stella that her lover, Robert Kelway, who works at the War Office, is passing information to the enemy. Harrison, who has been watching Robert for an unnamed counterespionage organization, claims that he can prevent him from being arrested if Stella will agree to end her relationship with Robert and take up with him. Incensed and incredulous, Stella rejects the proposal, but Harrison gives her a month to consider it. Later that evening, Stella’s son Roderick arrives for two days’ leave from the army. Having borrowed Robert’s robe, he finds a piece of paper in the pocket, and Stella’s reaction reveals to the reader that the seeds of suspicion about Robert have taken root.

Chapter Four goes back four months to the funeral of Francis Morris, a cousin of Stella’s former husband Victor. At the funeral, Stella is snubbed by most of the family, who believe her to be a femme fatale and responsible for the breakdown of her marriage. She discovers, however, that in the absence of any child of his own, Cousin Francis has left his estate in Ireland, Mount Morris, to her son, Roderick. She also meets Harrison for the first time; initially she takes him to be an inmate of Wistaria Lodge, the home for uncertified mental patients in which Francis’s wife Nettie has been living. She is forced

BOWEN’S WAR “ACTIVITIES”

Elizabeth Bowen worked as an air raid warden during the war, but she also volunteered her services to the Ministry of Information, thinking she might be able lo help in relation to Ireland. Her activities in this regard, which had the added benefit of allowing her to come and go between London and Bowen’s Court, involved attempting to understand Irish attitudes to the war, and in particular whether Eire could be persuaded to allow Britain to use ports in the south and west of the country. In her report to the Ministry, she stressed that Britain must not attempt to use force in gain access to the ports. She also, “castigated… the Anglo-Irish for presenting themselves as England’s stronghold in Ireland. If they merged their interests with ihe Irish people, she said, they could make Ireland a very much more solid and possible country with which to deal” (Glendinning, p. 162). Bowen’s work for the Ministry led to her essay “Eire” 1941), an attempt to explain to the British the situation in wartime Eire, and its reasons for choosing neutrality in the war.

to abandon this notion after Harrison telk her that he was a friend of Cousin Francis’s, had visited Francis at Mount Morris, and had met with him in London shortly before his death. Still, she is uncertain about what sort of man Harrison is and what his profession might be.

Chapter Five looks even further back, to describe the beginning of Stella and Robert’s relationship in the “heady autumn of the first London air raids” (The Heat of the Day, p. 90). Having chosen to remain in London because she found that “the climate of danger” suited her, Stella felt “on furlough from her own life,” and, if anything, this distance from her everyday outer world increased when she fell in love with Robert: they lived in their own private sphere, “afloat on [a] tideless, hypnotic, futureless day-to-day” (The Heat of the Day, p. 100). Harrison’s visit has disturbed this world, however, and a few days later, Stella tentatively raises with Robert the question of what she should feel if somebody told her something “preposterous” about him (The Heat of the Day, p. 102). He responds flippantly.

In early October, Robert takes Stella to meet his mother and his sister Ernestine at their house,

MI5 AND MI6

During the war, responsibility for intelligence relating to national security was divided between MI5 (the Security Service), M16 (the Secret Intelligence Service), and the Special Branch of the (London) Metropolitan Police. M15 had the role of evaluasing and advising on all intelligence relating to subversion (other than that relating to known Irish and anarchist groups and to the maintenance of public order, which remained in the province of the Special Branch) and to espionage” within the United Kingdom and, with the co-operation of local authorities, the countries of the empire. M16 gathered foreign intelligence in relation to national security. MI5 was responsible for detecting and intercepting German spied in Britain; it would therefore have been M15 that was watching the novel’s Robert Kelway if he was suspected of passing information to the Germans. In the latter years of the war, MI5 had a number of notable successes; in particular, agents’ reports, along with photographic reconnaissance, allowed the Allies to neutralize radar defenses around the German heartland, and to disrupt the development and deployment of German V-weapons—flying bombs and bombardment rockets that could be fired at British cities from across the channel—thus saving many Allied lives.

Holme Dene, on the outskirts of a Home Counties dormitory town. The visit is not a success: to Stella, the place seems like “a bewitched wood,” and the widowed Mrs. Kelway the malign presence at its heart (The Heat of the Day, p. 110). As they leave, Stella notices that Robert is limping from his Dunkirk wound, something she has previously observed that he does only when he feels like a wounded man.

The sinister atmosphere of the Holme Dene edifice seems to follow Stella back to London, where, when she returns to her flat, she finds Harrison waiting for her. He says that he knows she has been thinking things over, adding that her visit to Holme Dene was a “look at the first place where rot could start” (The Heat of the Day, p. 131). They quarrel, Stella telling him that she cannot bear the way he has “distorted love” by “making a spy of [her],” and eventually he leaves, promising to return (The Heat of the Day, pp. 138-42).

Meanwhile, Louie, intrigued by her encounter with Harrison in the park, hopes to run into him again. Chapter Eight describes Louie’s loneliness without her soldier husband and her parents, who have been killed by a bomb, and her attempt to find recognition and understanding in a series of one-night stands. From Connie, an acerbic ARP (Air Raid Precautions) warden who moves into her building and befriends her, Louie acquires an addiction to newspapers. But whereas Connie’s attitude to the news is suspicious, Louie reads the papers in order to feel included in the “one big family” of the nation at war (The Heat of the Day, p. 152).

At the end of October, Stella goes to Mount Morris to attend to some business on Roderick’s behalf. While she is there, she finds that Harrison’s account of having visited Cousin Francis is true. She also has a vision of the generations of women of Mount Morris going “not quite mad” from the isolation of a purely private life in which they “knew no choices, made no decisions” and “suspected what they refused to prove’XThe Heat of the Day, p. 174). These revelations prompt an obscure change in her: walking in the woods near the house, she seems to draw strength and hope that “something might intervene to save her” from the place itself. At this moment she hears that “Montgomery’s through” in Egypt (The Heat of the Day, pp. 177-78). She returns to London and confronts Robert with Harrison’s allegations. He denies them, and later that evening proposes to her but, although she accepts his denial, she cannot agree to marry him.

While Stella is in Ireland, Roderick arranges to visit Nettie, Cousin Francis’s widow, to set his mind at rest over the fact that he has inherited what he thinks of as her house. From Nettie he learns that it was his father Victor, and not Stella, who ended his parents’ marriage: he left Stella so that he could live with the nurse who had cared for him after he was wounded in World War I. When Roderick rings his mother to ask her why she never told him this, Harrison is at her flat, and she and he discuss the issue: Stella explains that she did not challenge the story that she had been the one to leave Victor because she would “rather sound a monster than look a fool” (The Heat of the Day, p. 224).

Harrison takes Stella to dinner and says he knows she has alerted Robert that others suspect Robert of being a spy. Convinced by Harrison’s account of the changes in Robert’s behavior since the night she returned from Ireland—changes that would be consistent with guilt—Stella is on the brink of agreeing to save Robert by becoming Harrison’s mistress when Louie, who has mistakenly come to the same bar looking for Connie, interrupts them. A furious Harrison turns viciously on Louie, and as she is about to leave, Stella indicates to Harrison that “a friend is out of danger,” meaning that she agrees to his proposal (The Heat of the Day, p. 240). But Harrison unexpectedly sends both women home.

While Stella, Harrison, and Louie are in the bar, Robert is at Holme Dene. He has been called there by Ernestine and Mrs. Kelway to discuss the offer they have received for the house, which has been for sale for many years. Their farcical and inconclusive exchange is terminated by a mysterious telephone call, which no one answers. The following night, Robert goes to Stella’s flat and confesses that he has indeed been passing information to the enemy: the ringing telephone, he says, suddenly brought home to him the possibility that he might be arrested and never see her again. The lovers spend a final night together, during which Robert explains that he chose to side with the enemy because England seems to him to be “muddled, mediocre, damned,” while Nazism represents a better, more definite, future (The Heat of the Day, p. 268). In the early morning, believing the other exits from the flat to be watched, Robert leaves through a skylight onto the roof. He slips, or jumps, to his death.

The last two chapters form a coda to the novel. The morning of Robert’s death brings news of the Allied landings in North Africa. A week later, on the day when, for the first time in three years, church bells across the country were rung to celebrate the Allies’ victories in the desert, Stella visits Roderick to talk to him about his father and to explain what happened to Robert. She finds, however, that she cannot explain it because she knows “less than her little part” of the story (The Heat of the Day, p. 296).

Because she wants to understand what happened, Stella longs to see Harrison, but he has disappeared. He eventually reappears in the middle of the “Little Blitz” of February 1944, but their meeting is far from conclusive: Harrison cannot tell her what happened because the night before Robert’s death he was switched to another case and since then, he has been out of England. He seems to hope that they might now be able to begin an affair, but Stella insists that it is impossible, because the link between them—Robert—is gone. She plans, she says, to get married to a cousin of a cousin.

That same week finds Roderick at Mount Morris, taking possession of his inheritance and becoming aware for the first time of the claims on him of both the past and the future. In London, too, a future is taking shape: Louie announces to Connie that she is going to have a baby. The child is not her husband’s, and Connie takes charge of helping Louie through the pregnancy. Just at the point that Connie sits down to write a letter to Tom, trying to explain Louie’s unfaithfulness, a telegram is delivered saying that he has been killed. Louie’s child, Thomas Victor, is finally born in June 1944, shortly after the D-Day landings. The novel closes in September 1944 with Louie’s return, with her son, to Seale-on-Sea where she grew up.

“You have been my country”: the individual in wartime

While Stella still believes in Robert’s innocence and in the integrity of their love, she thinks of Harrison as “an enemy,” and compares him to the Gestapo (The Heat of the Day, pp. 23, 33). Once she is convinced of Robert’s guilt, however, she faces a choice between loyalty to her lover—which would require her to give him up for Harrison—and loyalty to her lover—which would mean Robert’s arrest. By the time she chooses to try to save Robert, the chain of events that will lead to his death has already begun.

The choice between lover and country is particularly difficult for Stella because she feels profoundly disconnected from the things that would give personal meaning to loyalty to her country. Her dislocation is brought home to her at Holme Dene, where she becomes acutely aware that, as a divorced, 40-year-old working woman who has lost touch with her family and her social class, she is a “hybrid” who has “come loose from her moorings,” and whose past has “dissolved behind her” (The Heat of the Day, pp. 114-15). The disruptions of war have only accentuated this feeling; indeed, for all three of the novel’s main characters, as Harrison puts it, the war “hasn’t started anything that wasn’t there already” (The Heat of the Day, p. 33).

Robert’s account of the reasons for his betrayal of his country, as almost every critic who has written about the book has noted, is singularly unsatisfying. He offers only fragments of an explanation Stella’s description of it as just “wild-ness and images” seems justified (The Heat of the Day, p. 282). As far as his reasons can be re-

BRITISH FASCISTS AND NAZI SPIES

Robert Kelway is not unusual in his dissatisfaction with English society; such feelings were common in the years between the wars. He is unusual in that his dissatisfaction turns him into a fascist rather than a communist, as would have been more likely in Britain at the time, and even more unusual in that this does not happen until 1940, after Dunkirk. In the 1930s, on the other hand, fascist sympathizers were far from unknown in Britain; at its peak in 1934, Sir Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists had perhaps 30,000 members (Calder, The People’s War, p. 133). But support for fascism had declined by the beginning of World War II, and never recovered, while popular sympathy for communism seems to have risen during the war (Calder, The Myth of the Blitz, p. 77). Despite this decline, fascists were seen as a threat to British security. In May 1940, when paranoia over the possibility of a German invasion of Britain was at its height, Mosley’s party was banned, and he and 1,600 other fascists, along with others thought to pose a threat to national security, were imprisoned without trial.

Fears of a Nazi “Fifth Column” waiting to destabilize Britain from within turned out to be unjustified. In reality, Germany was singularly unsuccessful in establishing agents in Britain. By the end of 1940, all of the 21 agents dispatched so far had been captured and either imprisoned or “turned” to become double agents, sending misinformation to their German controllers. The German strategy to infiltrate Britain, which continued into 1943, failed miserably. Later in the war the double agents gave very useful information to the Allies, helping them deceive Germany about the location of the D-Day landings.

constructed from these fragments, it seems that he grew up in a malevolent, inquisitorial atmosphere at Holme Dene, with imitation antique architecture and passages that resemble “swastika-arms” (The Heat of the Day, p. 258). The experience has bred in him an instinct to conceal what he is up to, and a loathing for his “un-whole,” rootless “race”—by which he means the men of his generation, growing up in a world dominated by Mrs. Kelways, and born too late to believe in the ideals of patriotism and honor for which a slightly earlier generation had died in World War I (The Heat of the Day, pp. 272, 276; see Rawlinson, p. 102). Robert believes that the humiliating retreat from Dunkirk showed that England was doomed by its own emptiness and weakness to be defeated by Germany.

His turning to the other side, he tells Stella, gave him “a new heredity” and a new confidence that came not only from being able to get away with acting secretly, but from the sense that the fascists stand for a more noble future—one that has cut the unmanly “cackle” out of life, one based on totalitarian power rather than freedom (The Heat of the Day, pp. 273, 282).

Stella rejects Robert’s justification of his treachery, seeing it as a betrayal of their country, the London in which they have loved each other, and of the other people who inhabited it with them (The Heat of the Day, pp. 274-75). She concludes, however, that she cannot judge him; he is a product of his time.

Although Robert dies believing that his ideas are worth living for, the revelation of his betrayal has awoken in Stella a realization: in her belief that their love had nothing to do with the times in which they were living, she had been under an illusion. As the anonymous narrator observes, “they were not alone, nor had they been from the start… . Their time sat in the third place at their table. They were the creatures of history” (The Heat of the Day, p. 194). But the dilemmas of allegiance in The Heat of the Day. not resolved in favor of an uncomplicated affirmation of patriotism and commitment to the Allied war effort. Indeed, it has been argued that “the precise project of the book is to entertain the thought that vulgarity dwells with the democratic victors of 1945, and civilization with fascism” (Sinfield, p. 17). Literary historian Mark Rawlinson contends, however, that Bowen is not endorsing fascism, let alone suggesting that the war should not be fought, but expressing fear about the cost of the war, even in the event of an Allied victory.

The war affected almost every aspect of people’s lives, from what they ate and wore to where they worked. Furthermore, the government expected all citizens to support the war effort, whatever their personal beliefs. These aspects of wartime life prompted fears, even among those who were committed to the Allied cause, “that the survival of private life”—which the Allies believed they were fighting to preserve from total-itarianism—“demanded its surrender” to the needs of the wartime state (Rawlinson, p. 33). Many writers on the right and on the left worried that the legacy of the war would be a devaluation of the individual in the face of an increasingly powerful state. These fears grew as the war dragged on, and they lasted into the immediate postwar years, when Bowen was writing the Heat of the Day (Hewison, pp. 106-202).

Despite her active involvement in war work, Bowen seems to have had doubts about the kind of society that was emerging from the war, and particularly about the incoming Labour Government’s vision of an increased role for the state. Writing to a friend in the summer of 1945, she stated that although she had adored Churchill’s England for its “stylishness,” she “[couldn’t] stick [put up with] all these little middle-class Labour wets with their Old London School of Economics ties and their women. Scratch any of those cuties and you find the governess. Or so I have always found” (Bowen in Glendinning, p. 166). Certainly, Bowen felt very strongly the war’s threat to private life, and the need to assert the importance of the individual. In her postscript to her collection of wartime stories, The Demon Lover, she suggests that all wartime writing is “resistance writing,” in which “personal life … put up its own resistance to the annihilation that was threatening it—war” (The Demon Lover, p. 220). This resistance, as Bowen saw it, meant clinging to “every object or image or place or love or fragment of memory with which [individual] destiny seemed to be identified, and by which the destiny seemed to be assured” (The Demon Lover, p. 220). But, as Stella discovers in The Heat of the Day, an attachment to a personal world inevitably brings one back to face the “hammerlike chops” of the war (The Demon Lover, p. 219). Remembering the “crystal ruined London morning when she had woken to [Robert’s] face,” she realizes that he has betrayed both their love and the “country”—the time and place—of which it was a part (The Heat of the Day, p. 274). Having thought that, through their love, she had “turned away from everything to one face,” she instead finds herself “face to face with everything” (The Heat of the Day, p. 195). Stella’s awareness of her unavoidable involvement in the war is experienced as a loss rather than a gain: when we last see her in February 1944 she has learned how to be a survivor, but seems to care little about whether she lives or dies.

Some critics have argued that Stella’s difficulty in choosing between allegiance to Robert and to her country is compounded by her sense that, as a woman, she is marginal to the largely masculine enterprise of war. For these critics, despite Stella’s work for “Y.X.D.,” in the espionage plot she is the object of both Robert’s and Harrison’s desires: both men assume that she has no opinion of her own about the larger political questions at stake; and the choice that Harrison offers her—to take up with him or let Robert be arrested, is far from real decisionmaking. In this reading The Heat of the Day is an exploration not only of the status of the individual, but also of women in wartime.

Sources and literary context

The Heat of the Day was a product of Bowen’s own experiences in wartime London and Ireland. The sense it conveys of the strange combination of excitement and fear during the blitz, and the exhaustion that succeeded it, were Bowen’s own. The relationship between Stella and Robert, too, is generally thought to be modeled on Bowen’s own affair with the Canadian diplomat Charles Ritchie, seven years her junior, whom she met in 1941, and to whom she dedicated The Heat of the Day. Specific details of their affair found their way into the novel: the description of the roses in Regents Park in Chapter One, for example, seems to come from a visit Bowen and Ritchie paid to the Park in September 1941 (Glendinning, pp. 148-49). More importantly, Bowen seems to have drawn on the intensity of her relationship with Ritchie, and their shared sense of being “outsider-insiders” in England, in depicting Stella and Robert’s affair and the issues of allegiance it raises. The Anglo-Irish Bowen, and the Anglo-Canadian Ritchie, writes Glendinning, were able to “pass” in England, but felt “in a subtle sense secretly different, like spies” (Glendinning, pp. 138-39). The Heat of the Day has affinities with other British wartime fiction. Its descriptions of the blitz, for example, echo those of Henry Green’s Caught and Graham Greene’s The Ministry of Fear (both 1943), the latter of which, as Hermione Lee points out, is another “novel about treachery and concealment between lovers” (Lee, p. 169). The Heat of the Day’s portrayal of the malaise of middle-class England in the deadly atmosphere of Holme Dene also has much in common with other writings of the 1930s and 1940s, as does its anxiety about the shape of the postwar world, which found its best-known expression in Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited (1945; also in WIAIT 4: Brítish and Irish Literature and Its Times).

Reception

The Heat of the Day was an instant success when it appeared in February 1949, selling 45,000 copies almost immediately. But critics had reservations about the novel. The reviewer for The New York Times complained that “its principal characters are… never believable human beings,” and wished for “the sure hand of an expert in psychological thrillers such as Graham Greene” (Prescott, p. 21). This view was echoed by the anonymous reviewer for the Times Literary Supplement, who found the scene in which Robert explains his actions “the least satisfactory in the book,” and lamented that “if only we fully understood him, what a magnificent book this would be” (“Climate of Treason,” p. 152). Bowen’s friend and fellow-novelist Rosamond Lehmann disagreed with these complaints about Robert’s plausibility, arguing that Robert “had to be discovered through Stella”; Lehmann was, however, concerned by the lack of explanation in their final scene. She was bothered by the absence of any real justification for Robert’s not having “been a Communist and therefore pro-Russian, pro-Ally, rather than pro-’enemy”’ (Lehmann in Glendinning, p. 151).

Subsequent critics have tended to argue, however, that Bowen was not interested in writing a conventional spy novel or thriller, but in exploring what she called the psychological war-climate. Lee, for example, acknowledges that considered “as a spy-fiction against the work of Conrad or Kipling, Buchán or Greene, Fleming or 1e Carre, [The Heat of the Day] is obviously risible,” containing as it does “no scenes of recruitment, no government department meetings, no stories of infiltration, no details of espionage or counter-spying, no information about Intelligence, nothing about the operations of M.I.5 or S.I.S”; she argues, however, that the novel is actually “a woman’s view of the male world of ‘Intelligence,’ rendering in personal terms ‘a war of dry cerebration inside windowless walls’” (Lee, p. 175).

—Ingrid Gunby