The Shadowy Third – Julia Parry
Duckworth 2021
My Gestalt Real-Time Review
When I read this book, my thoughts will appear in the comment stream below…
My long-running Elizabeth Bowen site: https://elizabethbowensite.wordpress.com
My two widely published articles about her work: https://elizabethbowensite.wordpress.com/the-drogulus-article/ and https://elizabethbowensite.wordpress.com/another-100-best-books-eb-article/
Reblogged this on Träumtrawler.
The quotations I collected from EB’s work over the years….
https://nullimmortalis.wordpress.com/2010/11/30/elizabeth-bowen-quotes-1/
https://nullimmortalis.wordpress.com/2010/11/30/elizabeth-bowen-quotes-2/
https://nullimmortalis.wordpress.com/2010/11/30/elizabeth-bowen-quotes-3/
https://nullimmortalis.wordpress.com/2010/11/30/elizabeth-bowen-quotes-4/
https://nullimmortalis.wordpress.com/2010/12/01/elizabeth-bowen-quotes-5/
https://nullimmortalis.wordpress.com/2010/12/01/elizabeth-bowen-quotes-6/
https://nullimmortalis.wordpress.com/2010/12/01/elizabeth-bowen-quotes-7/ #
https://nemonymous.livejournal.com/156039.html?rfrom=weirdmonger
https://nemonymous.livejournal.com/156249.html?rfrom=weirdmonger *
# includes quotes from ‘Bazaar and Other Stories’
* includes my quotes from EB’s love letters to Charles Ritchie.
My earlier public mentions of the expression ‘SHADOWY THIRD’ —
================================
In my Elizabeth Bowen Quotes:
Tontine
“We’re not safe and I don’t believe we’re even good. It can’t be right to be so happy when there isn’t enough happiness in the world to go round. Suppose we had taken somebody else’s happiness, somebody else’s life…”
From ‘The Shadowy Third’ 1923
Mentioned several times re ENCOUNTERS in my review here: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2014/12/16/encounters-early-stories-by-elizabeth-bowen/
(Also here: Shadowy Encounters of the Third Kind: https://elizabethbowensite.wordpress.com/df-lewis-real-time-review-of-encounters-story-collection/)
Re Truman Capote’s THE BARGAIN: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2015/08/10/the-complete-stories-truman-capote/#comment-5224
Re THE CLOSED CABINET by Lady Gwendolen Gascoyne-Cecil: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2018/06/03/a-suggestion-of-ghosts-supernatural-fiction-by-women-1854-1900/#comment-12878
Re HE DRANK ME UP by Clarice Lispector: https://nullimmortalis.wordpress.com/19426-2/#comment-14680
Re “Remember You’re a One-Ball!” by Quentin S. Crisp: https://nullimmortalis.wordpress.com/2010/08/23/remember-youre-a-one-ball-by-quentin-s-crisp/
Re MAGS by William Trevor: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/22666-2/#comment-19162
There may be other such mentions.
Please read published information about this book to establish what it is fundamentally about in Elizabeth Bowen’s life. Meanwhile…
Chapter 1
Oxford: Encounters
“There is nothing quite like being the one clever woman in the room.”
I am usually a reviewer of fiction. I shall try to read this book — of seeming academic strength as well as, no doubt, authorial sentiment — as fiction, but I already sense it has a preternatural truth about it that often makes fiction, from my empirical work upon it, even truer than truth. A paradox, perhaps. Yet this beautiful first chapter confirms me in such a belief.
I have publicly called ‘A World of Love’, although a novella, the greatest ever ghost story. And now we have this chapter that fulfils my belief on a level yet to be established. A “psychic affinity” between not only sender and recipient of a letter (any letter but I suppose LOVE letters in particular), but also sender and recipient of fiction. A two-way filter, perhaps. A mutual synergy. An “electric connection.”
“I heard the dynamic voice not just of one of my favourite novelists, but one of the great writers of the twentieth century.”
Indeed.
My brief review in 2011 of THE SENSE OF AN ENDING By Julian Barnes –
https://nullimmortalis.wordpress.com/2011/10/27/the-sense-of-an-ending-julian-barnes/
“I need the space for other aspects of the EB greatness in ‘A World of Love’, i.e. the ability to impute a ghost so subtly yet so definitely there, it will give that ‘special reader’ the best set of collywobbles of any ghost fiction effects, modern or old.” – from my DROGULUS article.
Having said above, I realise BOTH sets of love letters were available to the author.
Cross-referenced to another book about a literary woman here: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2021/02/09/vampires-with-fairy-wings-selected-verse-prose-poems-and-meditations-of-victoria-plumjob/#comment-21057
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“The air of the house is filled with Elizabeth. She hums through every conversation.”
Some passages here could have been written by Elizabeth herself, and I don’t say that lightly. I am already fully captivated by this book, with real people of the past, with this author as herself and her subjects, and ‘fictional characters’ that Elizabeth filled her letters, I’m told here. More real than fictional by being fictional, I infer.
From L.O.P.H. to a convenient if unsatisfactory marriage, we already know Elizabeth better than she knows herself perhaps. Her independent spirit. Her elegance and strange beauty. And when married, her own room in the “viscera of the house.” But her separate forays out to social gatherings. All amid the world of TS Eliot’s Waste Land if not our waste land today. But Elizabeth’s social circles were immune. And we also learn of this book’s author’s grandfather, Humphry (sic), a younger man whom Elizabeth was destined to meet, and I am intrigued in particular by his work on Gerard Manley Hopkins…
The social ‘sexism’ among young men, the defenestrations of the Wall Street Crash, Humphry a shadowy presence, once approaching a ‘spirit medium’ for mediation and anchor … shadowy till now?
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Chapter 3
Deals, inter alia, with Elizabeth’s short story THE SHADOWY THIRD. My own earlier short review of it –
https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2014/12/16/encounters-early-stories-by-elizabeth-bowen/#comment-3692
(My further quotation from it is already shown above, that I somehow related to a ‘tontine’…)
I love the way these biographical details are couched, so very Elizabeth, so very much the book’s author herself and her own implied character, too, and how she discovered these details by travel and lemon serendipities. Genius loci or “place-feeling” important to this book as well as to Elizabeth’s fiction. The place with ‘apple trees, mentioned in the chapter, where Humphry and Elizabeth (the latter being “a gifted schemer”) met early in their affair, thump, thump, thump…
The ability or not to see Sicily as gestalt from an aeroplane, early public aeroplane travel featuring, I recall, in Elizabeth’s fiction.
Their letters, one ‘soaking’ into the other. Humphry’s example letter here economical with truth? “A game of hide-and-seek, perhaps, in the large house of her life.”
The author tellingly dwells in this chapter on her grandmother (Humphry’s wife), and that made me think of my own grandmother, Alice, an important figure in my life; she was born, as Elizabeth was, in 1899, and had, in hindsight, a striking physical resemblance to Elizabeth. Feisty, too. Very strong personality, worked often as a barmaid in London in her younger and, indeed, older days.
As an aside, a quote from my Dogulus article about Elizabeth’s novels:
‘There is also a demon provocateur in ‘Friends & Relations’ disguised as Theodora Thirdman. Do look out for her. I dare not expand, for fear of evil readerly repercussions! Widmerpool and Moosbrugger, eat your hearts out!’
F&R, I think, was her third novel.
Chapter 4
“Elizabeth describes the landscape’s quiet anonymous charm: ‘The country conceals its pattern of life, which can wholly be seen from an aeroplane. […]”
Aeroplanes, apples, gestalt as pattern, the sword of Richard Strauss, the environs of Bowen’s Court in County Cork… I treat of fiction empirically, so usually eschew knowledge of the author as part of my immersion in the Intentional Fallacy since the 1960s. Yet I know more about Elizabeth as a person, or think I do … more than any other author. Yet I feel myself resisting it, despite the captivating wiles of this book. You all probably know more about Bowen’s Court and its earlier circles than I do. “…her land, her home, her bedding. I hoped, of course, for psychogeographical revelations.” So, I obediently follow Julia, counterintuitively eager to learn more about EB. This house – now derelict, seemingly – was her ‘fixed foot from which her other selves adventured’, her Proustian selves as I might call them, a place where Humphry visited in the early days of their association. The more my osmosis picks up on H, the more I dislike his soul-searching letters and fickleness of desire, yet relish it as fiction. His open-plan heart, as J aptly calls it. Yet E’s letters to him also somehow vie with my erstwhile images, especially of E herself. Where can pattern-seeking reach, other than into more complexity of intention or intentional fallacy? While “…knotweed gripped the steep banks.” Clandestine passports towards fusion, gleam by gleam, intimation by intimation.
“He signs off: ‘I hope soon to see you under apple-trees.’ […] —the thumping heart,…”
Cross-referenced with ‘Death’s Dark Abyss’ here:
https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2021/02/23/massimo-carlotto-deaths-dark-abyss/#comment-21068
Chapter 5
“Retracing Humphry’s songlines across Ireland,…”
From retreat to retreat, past to future, J helps us journey through the interactions and sexual mœurs of another age. Upon a ferry back to England from Ireland, we see J’s own photograph. And embodying perhaps her own regrets at what she has left there, even soon after telling us, in her perfect lunge and parry of the Bowenesque, about H’s epistolary openness to M — his future wife and J’s future grandmother — about the ley-lines of his urges whether they be spread to different women or onannealed within himself. More salubriously, perhaps, we hear of his aborted first novel, based on a Biblical Ruth, but not known to be aborted then, only later ruthfully found to be so. I admire M as she is set out here. I admire J, too.
Because or in spite of this book, its blending of truthful, if not ruthful, fictions and truths, I will ever continue to revere E, of course, but, so far, I somehow feel the reverse for H. With regard to my attitude to E, as this book reminds me, E herself states, “It might, it appears, be said that writers do not find their subjects: subjects find them.” Give or take the odd bar of Toblerone (a word, when slightly altered, reminding me of a childhood board game I played with my grandmother, or was it a card game?)
Realised I was thinking of ‘tombola’, neither a board or card game! More the inverse tontine of housey-housey?
Chapter 6
“The photograph was unlikely to have been displayed on the mantelpiece, but she would haunt the third chair at their table.”
I wonder if the word “de3few” on page 85 is some oblique innuendo of the “shifting identities” triangulation (in contradistinction to E’s at least fictional propensity for ‘continuity of self’) as this increasingly haunting book’s major shifting triangulation of E, M & H with the even more shadowy presences of E’s husband, of another Madeleine with an extra ‘e’ associated with the cake that generated ‘Proustian selves’, … of J, me, you, the increasing few? With H working in Exeter (where a premonitorily retrocausal ‘blitzed’ building is seen in J’s real-time), H missing Oxford and E, and M later in Nazi-awakening Germany of 1933, and then perhaps aptly corresponding with friend Berlin, followed by the eventual H-M marriage, and all the striking revelations of various letters shown here, including a would-be cleansing bus accident! Striking, yes, but all pervaded by subtlety, especially the “subtle power” of E herself like sending a photo to H with which one cannot help but fall in love! Even or especially loved by the “sprinkle of sapphism” in her first novel? A wonderful chapter rounded off by Christmas (my EB Christmas quotes here) and by reference to Thomas Hardy whose Year 2000 poem I discovered in the last few days (here) about a house as strange or momentously house-like as Bowen’s Court.
Chapter 8
“It is more like the ballroom of a country house than the upper floor of a Devonshire farmhouse.”
A Devon hamlet from the Domesday book, and a house there — and its perceived morphing of its own proportions and atmosphere is as serendipitous with my chance simultaneous review of The House of Leaves (here) as with J’s own visit to this first married home of H and M with J arriving just an hour before the people who had lived there many years finally left it to have it gutted by the new owners! Literature and its accoutrements I have found empirically over the years are full of such preternatural serendipities. Just as real life is interpenetrated by literature, intentionally or not, often not – as E’s work on writing of The House in Paris attests.
H’s seeming manipulative, if well-written, if thoughtlessly thoughtful letters to E, with no real sensitivity that men like me, I sense, have learnt to have in more recent times, continue to give a clear picture of this man that I dislike, although I share his love of Hopkins and Coleridge. (Coleridge’s sword here to replace Richard Strauss’s?)
J’s resolution to be a biographer of truth as far as possible, even if it hurts people she loves, is very well described and I totally agree with this approach.
I love E’s monumental letter in the latter half of this chapter, as I imagine it to be a gestalt from the fractures of its […]s. Being ‘shadowed’ by a pregnant M, as J describes it, and reference to a previous pregnancy of the M with an extra ‘e’.
I find much else in this chapter engaging, even shocking — “Emotional co-ordinates” as ley-lines or songlines of “topographical” ones. M as an “invisible amanuensis” for H. And E’s visits to Rome. Past and present as one. “…emotional boundaries rather than physical borders”. And the fact – had I been told this fact already? – that M in later life placed marginalia on many of these letters between H and E as I myself today lightly pencil into the margins of this book.
Sorry, I have just noticed that I accidentally leapt over Chapter 7.
I intend to read this and report on it next time I pick up this book, hopefully tomorrow.
“‘I’ll tell you something, Clara. Have you ever SEEN a minute? Have you actually had one wriggling inside your hand? Did you know if you keep your finger inside a clock for a minute, you can pick out that very minute and take it home for your own?’ So it is Paul who stealthily lifts the dome off. It is Paul who selects the finger of Clara’s that is to be guided, shrinking, then forced wincing into the works, to be wedged in them, bruised in them, bitten into and eaten up by the cogs. ‘No you have got to keep it there, or you will lose the minute. I am doing the counting – the counting up to sixty.’ . . . But there is to be no sixty. The ticking stops.”
From ‘The Inherited Clock’
Chapter 7
“(being a writer before I am a woman)”
The cat jumps back! How could I have covered up the gap of this once missing chapter, if not with the same rug that E pulled out from beneath the feet of H and M?
The latter’s first married home before the house in Devon (how could I have also missed the housey-housey of H’s surname till now?) was a flat in Exeter, now a pub, today visited by J so evocatively. Comparison of E’s fiction in one novel with “the earliest shadow of saying goodbye” of the irregular meetings of E with H. The bi-polar nature of that relationship. Surprised that the Apple Tree in an early E anthology gets second billing from J, bearing in mind it being a thumping good ghost story. Two bonfires in Exeter as enlightening metaphors for this book that J has chosen to write even as part of physical healing as well as spiritual? Sustenance like sin-eating? The essence of M. Her cooking abilities, too, and the emotions attached to them. This chapter possibly the keystone to this whole book, one with E’s own “‘unchecked power’ afforded by writing…”
Above Elizabeth Bowen quote from ‘The Inherited Clock’ (stirred into being by the last sentence of Chapter 7) now cross-referenced later the same day here: https://nemonymousnight.wordpress.com/holy-hol/#comment-734
Chapter 9
“The room’s spirit expands into the dormant space between the tousled beds. […], robbed me of breath.”
“Lines were redrawn, breath freshened.”
J explores the type of cheaper digs where E and H may have ‘trysted’ each other near Paddington Station. Often J’s book is as effective for me as something by E herself. And that, of course, is an enormous compliment to it.
M, with her baby, becomes the “fixed compass” of triangulated coordinates, as M and E also meet and stay with each other. Telling events. And E has complex thoughts, judging by her letters to H. Is there anything simple about her? Very much admits to her hedonism and self-centredness, but any genius like E needs to be thus, and so I forgive her. No “double standards” with me, just objective subjectiveness! I am the shadowy outsider to this book. And, indeed, it is chilling, through the window of this book, to witness M witnessing E and H together when the latter thought they were alone and unwatched. Perhaps why the E-H letters survived warming if not consuming bonfires… necessary aide-memoires to be used as a sort of masochistic summoning of being chilled as a means to underpin life’s memories as a life proudly lived and inextinguishable even by death or dementia? Now helped by J’s book itself.
Meanwhile, nobody discusses the word ‘nice’ today, I guess. At that time, H jealous of E’s still being connected with the Oxford set while he is in Devon with a baby. You see, E always has the last word. Nice to think that thought at today’s end of times!
“…the ‘H’ of ‘House’ bleeding slightly into the creamy paper.”
Another chapter to cherish. Including an evocative visit by J to E’s London classy house in the 1930s, its environs to be later blitzed. N’s growing social life with Bloomsbury and Virginia, then to Texas, to see the original manuscript of the House in Paris on creamy paper, this being the first E work I ever read and has a special place in my heart before its death. This novel is adeptly adumbrated here. I had not conceived before that HOUSE running down its spine could be a reference to Mr H. House. And indeed this chapter is its own House of Leaves, one ‘leave’ by H from E being by dint of a telegram from M about a missing roof on their house in Devon. The other ‘leave’ by H is for a new job in Calcutta, that follows a car crash of an argument with E, attested by her highly pen-dented handwritten letter on ad hoc notepaper during one of her own train journeys. So much more accreting here, such as E’s would-be mothering side and scorn of women like M whom she sees as weaker than herself, and much else. But who was C.D. Lewis?
“Elizabeth did not like people leaving her life unless she ejected them first.”
Cross-referenced the same day with my concurrent review of chapter 19 of The S-WF here: https://elizabethbowensite.wordpress.com/612-2/#comment-1214
Viz. ‘…Humphrey (sic) had loved Elizabeth all in vain and now would have his love returned tenfold!’ (my sic)
Chapter 11
“The shape of the words he ‘reads’ gives breath to her ghostly presence.”
Meanwhile, H travels to Calcutta by ship, crossing geopolitical and cultural and spiritual and character-changing lines as well as global climactic ones. Not that I see H as particularly spiritual, on second thoughts. This chapter speaks of “emotional latitude.” And the nature of Britishness. The relationship with E via letters does change, too, some of her letters now produced by E with a “clattery steel hedge” between such differently dented letters and herself. Yet his letters are censored by the authorities as I somehow presaged with my earlier reference to the fractures made by J’s […]s and I had already sensed her awareness of her own tantamount to censoring for this book even before I read about it, although she possibly would prefer to call it ‘editing’. “Words erased between the imagination and the page.” By the way, I admire the photo of J in Calcutta, when she goes there to soak up for this book what she can of H in situ. Past and present as one, as E herself states within this chapter, a TS Eliot thing, I guess, related to J’s gestalt real-time reviewing of E and H in her book… and mine of the same book. And H becomes a popular teacher of literature to his students in Calcutta…and we learn much else about him while he is still there…
Incidentally, the reference to ‘The Parrot’ links serendipitously to my earlier blog post using a quote from it as the title, here.
And a letter quoted from E in this chapter seems to contain an encapsulation of something crucial about the E who is adumbrated by this book: “— impressions, dreams, pleasures, false starts, excitements, inevitable glooms, exhilarations — […] In fact, what is current.” (my […])
Chapter 12
“One way of controlling a conversation is not to let it happen.”
Like deleting a text before the recipient has read it, which I believe is possible? Any ‘erotic fondling’ of pens, notwithstanding.
This is another chapter that will likely long haunt me after reading it, irresistibly franked on my mind. None of it censored, or spied upon.
Each chapter title in this book with a cipher or symbol of a fiction title by E. Indelible fiction versus forgettable facts. Public real-time reviewing of books, though, helps my fading memory during the reading process and afterwards. But somehow it needs to be public for it to work. As if the world has a collective unconsciousness. I see somewhere in this chapter that M has her horoscope prepared by an attractive Indian man in mutual flirtation with both H and herself. (She had travelled to stay with H along with her two infant daughters, one of whom being the mother of J.) H and M are now experiencing a sort of marital rapprochement in the conscious and subconscious face of almost taunting letters to H from E, with E making him feel homesick and telling him of her new ‘lover(s)’, betraying her own tetchy jealousies and expectations, one untold fleeting lover Sapphic in nature, in this chapter’s contradistinction to J’s mention of the “homosocial” in H (mostly male-bonding and general masculine bonhomie, no doubt.) One of those letters to H seemed to me to demonstrate E’s finest public fiction expression, a feeling I had even before J confirmed the same feeling in her own mind. Watershed moments in this book’s triangulation and its shadowy and less shadowy accoutrements. A watershed for J, too, in a growing estimation for H, her grandfather. Ah, I included, in this long ramble of mine above, a reference to a horoscope, and I had forgotten till now that at least part of me believes and has studied, alongside planetary ephemera, the Jungian synchronicity (as above, so below) of astrology as preferable to astrology’s crass ‘cause-and-effect’. Meanwhile, J in Calcutta discovers, in a wonderful bookshop, that H’s work is more famous than E’s!
Just started itemising my past real-time reviews of books over the last few years that mention Elizabeth Bowen: all linked from here: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/26537-2/
Cross-referenced this review today here: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2021/02/09/vampires-with-fairy-wings-selected-verse-prose-poems-and-meditations-of-victoria-plumjob/#comment-21102
Chapter 13
“The din of Calcutta was replaced by English birdsong,…”
The cottage with an apple orchard in Ashdown Forest. J’s mother Helen never knew H, her father, till she was already walking and talking in this cottage. Now we all know him, of course. His ‘uncanny’ knack to read four Dickens novels in a day, included! There is much of the uncanny in reading Dickens, I say. E, says this, too, I infer. H’s Dickens book — despite or, rather, because of E’s withdrawal of collaboration with it — made a lasting name for H, too. His work for the BBC, too, after recommendation from E’s husband. We learn a lot from some of the things that people do, not from all of the things they do or say, or whatever we prejudge them to be, I guess. E says at one point that H ‘over-intellectualises things.’ She should know!
Meanwhile, we are now on the brink of war with all the anxieties involved. E was detached, because history is to be seen through literature, as is my own view following my almost religious communion with it, a communion still delevloping even at my relatively advanced age. Her books are life, her life and its characters, now they are our lives, too. Each one of them.
The developing relationships in all these triangulations of people and things, E’s work on a book about Bowen’s Court, photographs that tell a million stories, the telling expressions of M in them, E and H’s trip to Brighton where E is hit by a skeleton, H’s escaping to Oxford from “those bushes” of the cottage and of life’s undergrowth, too, wherein or through which (back and forth) we all play our part equally, even if we don’t all know about how many of us know even what part we did play till it is too late. E is just a prominent prickle.
“My story, she says, should not be all about her.”
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“Like trying to crawl through a long horizontal hedge. It’s easier than you thought. Coming out at the end of the hedge – find oneself lodged on a cliff-face. No way forward. Yet, the hedge going backwards has turned itself against you. More nettles. More spiky obtrusions pointing in the wrong direction… ”
— Nemonymous Night (2011)
“Most of all the dead, from mortuaries, from under cataracts of rubble, made their anonymous presence – not as today’s dead but as yesterday’s living – felt through London. Uncounted, they continued to move in shoals through the city day, pervading everything to be seen or heard or felt with their torn-off senses, drawing on this tomorrow they had expected – for death cannot be so sudden as that.”
From ‘The Heat of the Day’
“The febrile atmosphere of war, the shattered streets, chimed with her psyche.”
E stays in London, eventually under a direct hit on her house from a V-1 flying bomb, a type of bomb that my mother called doodlebugs from having sat under them (sheltering ironically under the furniture) and listened breathlessly to their spluttering engines, too. A Poliakoffian metaphor for the chances of life itself, perhaps. And anxiety-imagined and non-imaginary threats, especially throughout our days today of co-vivid dreaming. In one such dream, it seems, in this chapter, J is spoken to by M. A chapter that marks a decided and welcome shift towards the proper emergence of M. While the war enhanced even more E’s power of fiction, and her love life elsewhere, it strengthens M, too, whether this be cause and effect or synchronicity. With her two small daughters ever growing. No longer identified with furniture, if she could ever be, I doubt. Beyond others’ “reconstructions, projections, fictionalisations.”
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“A fleeting image of an evening when Nadia and I did walk under a fleet of doodlebugs—and suddenly a thing like a plum-pudding bursting with a fiery sauce came down and a lot of glass fell out of the windows on to us.“
from CÆSURA here written about 20 years ago.
‘…for death cannot be so sudden as that.’
“Full moonlight drenched the city and searched it: there was not a niche left to stand in. The effect was remorseless: London looked like the moon’s capital – shallow, cratered, extinct.”
From ‘Mysterious Kôr’
Chapter 15
“They built, right down to the last detail, a cathedral made of sand.”
St Paul’s, no doubt, I say.
Madeline in Pendine, with the family: H, Rachel, Helen, and the new son John. Regular family holidays ensue. As adumbrated by J’s mother and aunt there named. A touching note towards perfecting this biography of several people, including the conscientious participation of the biographer herself. As inspired by H himself, this is a biography without footnotes being flagged throughout its body, but all left to the end, pages of notes etc. that I have not yet read (there are two more chapters still to be read, too, after this one).
This is, meanwhile, a moving chapter, with H expanding welcomingly more in my consciousness, accepting and understanding his fragilities, alongside his ongoing academic success and fulfilment of ambitions, his work on Dickens and Hopkins, M as “associate editor” (more than just shadowy) on the former, it being a monumental and momentous project, still then in process. Nor is it a civil war with E, amid mutual respect and amenable if fading relationships mainly prevailing in all quarters of this book’s main triangulation and in other members of its circle with whom we have been able to make friends.
Until, on a heartbeat, there is that sudden last thump of an apple upon the metaphorical orchard floor. And they knew at last what or whom they had all lost.
“Astounding coincidences have occurred in all directions, and bits of information have clicked together while I have been asleep.”
Chapter 16
“You went by your star,…”
…and thus, astrally, M flourishes as an individual, for the first time, as it were, in a real sense, in her completion of the Dickens project as its main moving star, as you will read here, with some satisfaction, I guess.
E, meanwhile, from her lifetime’s high point, diminishes gradually toward a memorial on a gravestone that is shocking, as you will also read about here.
E’s loss of Bowen’s Court for financial reasons, her more humble house in Kent, the coincidence of the name Dorothea involved, the same name also appearing on that sad gravestone, her teaching to make ends meet, and I’m delighted I started studying and reviewing (here) O. Henry stories fairly recently; then her final illnesses, her monumental memorial being her literature and thoughts as some intrinsic communication across the barrier between death and life that, incidentally, should be considered alongside an appropriately epistolary-like message someone, as recounted here, received paranormally from her (although I prefer the word ‘preternaturally’), seeming to making my attempts at a religious or spiritual approach to literature (literary and genre), with its pervasive connections toward a gestalt, seem almost almost believable!
“She was again in beauty, of a lofty late lightless inert kind; her pregnancy added to and became her, and this great, never quite smiling snow-woman, come into being almost overnight, was formidable.”
From ‘A World of Love’
Chapter 17
“It responds well to a scrub with soapy water. […] As I drop the crocus and snowdrop bulbs into the shallow trench, something tugs at me.”
J ‘repairing’ a different gravestone. Seems beautifully ironic.
This chapter is M’s chapter to end the book with her. Including her continued determined work on the Dickens project through increasing frailty of age.
The balanced partnership of the participants of the main triangulation contributing to the interpreted details and eventual gestalt of this astonishing biography, if that is the right word for it. More a dance, than a typing on easier ribbons than Victoria Glendinning’s, if otherwise using similar ink! Grey letters that will try to “make things black and white to you”, while also being subtly complex and accretively colourful and substantiating. A chapter that is such an optimum closing experience, I hesitate to describe it more than I have already. It is all that you hope.
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“She danced beautifully with her slim, balanced partners; they moved like moths, almost soundlessly, their feet hiss-hissing faintly on the parquet. Hewson’s hand brushed across the switchboard, lights would spring up dazzlingly against the ceiling and pour down opulently on the amber floor to play and melt among the shadows of feet.”
From ‘Making Arrangements’