Sean O'Faolain had been a republican activist during the Irish war of independence, and although a passionate critic of the priest-ridden state that had emerged, his allegiance to Ireland was total.
'When my father found out much later,' says Julia O'Faolain, 'he dismissed it by saying she had done it for personal aggrandisement.' Others thought Bowen's behaviour mere harmless literary caprice, although one former admirer - the rightwing Fine Gael politician James Dillon - never spoke to her again after discovering she had reported, not unreasonably, that he had fascist leanings.
Bowen's preoccupations made her a perfect double agent. Her characters live in a haunted, unreliable world; her prose is riven with images of destruction, displacement and horror (if only of a bourgeois nature) beneath the surface. A Dublin-born member of the Anglo-Irish gentry, she was neither kosher Irish in Ireland nor a fully acceptable Anglo in England. Writing about her other lover, the Canadian diplomat Charles Ritchie, Bowen said they both felt like spies in England: he because he was Canadian and she because of her Irishness.
In fact, she volunteered to be a spy at the outbreak of the war. Her reports were headed 'Secret', and read by John Betjeman, press attache in the Dublin embassy, who skittishly signed himself in Gaelic, 'Sean O Betjemean, attache na press.' O'Faolain might have felt more bitter if he had known the full extent of Bowen's involvement, which was only revealed recently by Oxford's Carroll Professor of Irish History, Roy Foster, in his essay, The Irishness Of Elizabeth Bowen. 'Her real themes,' says Foster, who also appears in the documentary, 'are dispossession, double-crossing, cruelty and betrayal.' Her marriage, to a good-hearted 'chum', Alan Cameron, was riddled with betrayal, which her friends say would not have bothered her too much.
In the beleaguered Britain of 1940 there was widespread hysteria about a possible leakage of information through Ireland to the Germans. A Leakage of Information Committee (yes, it was really called that) later established that there was no real leakage; indeed, Eamon de Valera's Irish government had extensive secret dealings with England, not revealed until many years later.
'In Bowen's reports,' Foster says, 'there was a certain colonial impatience with the obtuseness of the natives - which she was careful to excise from more public writings. She reported that the standard of Irish political debate was 'at once cagey and muddled'. However, she found 'the worst defeatism on behalf of Britain ' among the Protestant Anglo-Irish and she bitingly related this to self-interest.' The key question of the time was what the Irish really felt about Churchill's demand that they hand over their ports to Britain. While Bowen was a passionate supporter of the war effort, on this crucial issue of Ireland's neutrality she was firmly on Dublin's side.
'It may be felt in England that Eire is making a fetish of her neutrality,' she reported. 'But this assertion of her neutrality is Eire's first free self-assertion She has invested her self-respect in it. It would be more than hardship, it would be sheer disaster for this country, in its present growing stages and with uncertain morale, to be involved in war' Bowen died in 1973. In the late eighties a mellowing O'Faolain, still not aware of the full extent of her earlier activities (he had even allowed Bowen to use his periodical, The Bell, to air her views on Anglo-Irish relations), ruminated on this odd relationship. 'I still wince a little at all of us - at Elizabeth, at myself, at some patriotic woman who wrote to the press about visiting spies disguised as harmless visitors Or else I can see the whole trivial incident as a tiny symbol of what war does to people. It puts an end to that civilised balance of values that normally encourages us to see everybody's dilemma from other angles besides our own.' Today his daughter Julia is not overly concerned about Bowen's 'betrayals'. 'I was left with the feeling,' she says, 'that my father did not take it as seriously as perhaps he should have. But my impression was she did not do an awful lot of betraying anyway, simply finding out. The interesting thing is that [in 1944] she wrote that novel, The Heat Of The Day, about a spy. So espionage was very much on her mind. She may even have just been looking for ideas.' Bookmark's profile of Elizabeth Bowen is on BBC2 on Sunday at 8pm.
