Beryl Pong. British Literature and Culture in Second World Wartime: For the Duration

Abstract

Near the end of Elizabeth Bowen’s The Heat of the Day (1949), the double-agent Robert Kelway tells his lover Stella Rodney that the only way for her to understand his treachery would be ‘to re-read [him] backwards’. A time and mind-bending formulation typical of Bowen, this contorted phrase carries within it a hint of the damage that will be inflicted on Stella’s sense of the past when what was once contingent and ineffable is reconfigured in light of this revelation. The Heat of the Day makes much of the common emotional climate that ties Stella and Robert’s turbulent affair to the conflict within which it had flourished. And as one whose past and future have been devastated by an unforeseen threat, its heroine’s summons to backwards re-reading likewise seems indicative of the ‘temporal paradox’ of ‘wartime’ itself: a notion considered at length in Beryl Pong’s British Literature and Culture in Second World Wartime: For the Duration (pp. 1, 25).