Between the Old World and the New

'At no time', suggested Elizabeth Bowen in 1950, 'whether in the Old World or the New, can it ever have been less simple to be a person'. Bowen offered this remark to an American audience during her first return visit to the United States in seventeen years.2 In the meantime, she had witnessed more than enough to persuade her that nations old and new now lived in an altogether more complicated and confusing world than they had done previously. Having personally endured the Blitz in wartime London as well as witnessed the isolation of Emergency Ireland, more recently Bowen had also reported on the negotiations of the Paris Peace Conference and on the harrowing living conditions in occupied Europe.3 By contrast, in those educated Americans to whom she addressed her observation Bowen identified a great deal more confidence and optimism, but at the same time she detected in them an almost adolescent self-consciousness about just where they should locate themselves in the postwar order, now that their country played such an obviously central role in it. Reprinted by permission of Cork University Press