*My huge Bowen story review (2)*
As continued from the first part of this review of all Elizabeth Bowen’s stories here: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2021/10/05/the-collected-stories-of-elizabeth-bowen/
My previous dealing with Bowen’s novels: https://elizabethbowensite.wordpress.com/the-drogulus-article/
My previous reviews of general older, classic books: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/reviews-of-older-books/— particularly the multi-reviews of William Trevor, Robert Aickman and Katherine Mansfield.
SEE BELOW FOR ONGOING REVIEWS
CARELESS TALK
“As fast as people went wading out people came wading in,…”
“He reminded her of one of the pictures arrived at in that paper game when, by drawing on folded-over paper, you add to one kind of body an intriguingly wrong kind of head.” (my italics)
The consequences of war, a war ‘in media res’, as Mary from the country visits a now more cosmopolitan London, carrying with her three eggs as a present for someone in these rationing days (trustingly giving them to a waiter in the restaurant to keep safe till she finishes her meal) while meeting some of her old friends in this restaurant – talking of evacuees, cigarettes, the ‘Free French’ and secrets some could not talk about during the war….
“The only men one likes now are always late.”
The movement of peoples, not only between nations, but between each individual people’s houses, recalling, for me, the romantic logistics in the. small rooms of Mysterious KÔR….within this omelette of secret thoughts as well as life’s new habits when in bad times.
‘it can’t be as late as this?’
‘I just ought to keep an eye on the time.’
The time it will take for me to read and real-time report on all EB’s stories from the Vintage and EUP Collections. Bizarrely, this is the first story, after the ones I have already covered for choice personal reasons, the first that has been picked out of a tin of many titles each written on ‘folded over’ paper! Bearing in mind the chance quote above, this perhaps obliquely bodes well for my fearless faith in fiction that has been empirically identified for some years now and such faith’s preternatural patterns of an evolving gestalt?…
“One’s mind gets like that these days,’…”
A very short story, this one. And not much time perhaps for the rest. The Null Immortalis that hard times incubate? Three ‘thuds’ from The Apple Tree, three eggs here.
Cross-referenced here: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2021/10/06/nightscript-7/#comment-23191
There is an Undine mentioned in The Apple Tree, that I quoted earlier above…
STORY SCENE
“She looked tensed up — she had overdone herself. She was a small pale woman with an Undine face —“
“While Len, startled, looked down at her [Rene’s] hand on his chest, she withdrew it as though he were a jellyfish.”
An apparent draft of a scene for a story that seems already complete to me, because it seems to me that the results of the arrival of Len’s female cousin Flora on a planned visit by train are deliberately and tantalisingly left open-ended at the end, to make us wonder how he will fill not only his lost pipe but also his whole life now that his wife Rene has suddenly announced to him (with her Undine face) that she is about to run off imminently with his best friend Alec with whom she has been secretly committing adultery, announcing it now to him despite her having just diligently tarted up the whole house especially for Flora’s visit to them both.
By the way, we could do with using ‘coalite’ today, I guess.
And Len had grown up in this same house, ever hearing distant trains and the village clock striking.
IN THE SQUARE
“The sun, now too low to enter normally, was able to enter brilliantly at a point where three of the houses had been bombed away;”
The post- or mid-wartime square where the iron railings had been taken, and some houses inhabited others not, a square echoing its own past (a square prefiguring one of future’s portable screens?), and some houses re-occupied; a boy of 16 having a bath before going out; a woman is visited by a man as part of some past’s pattern re-establishing itself; caretakers in the basement; and a maid who writes on a pad. And much telephone logistics, and protocol, also predicting some indeterminate future of unknown communicative protocols that Bowen somehow knew about as if instinctively. Patterns uninterrupted by war or plague.
“‘Who would think that this was the same world?’ She looked sideways out of the window, at the square. […] She had not enough imagination to be surprised by the past – still less, by its end.”
My review today of THE DANCING-MISTRESS here: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2021/10/12/the-rucked-top-of-a-hyacinth-dress/
THE CONTESSINA
“He grabbed at her diaphanous skirts that swirled about her like a ballet dancer’s.”
One of the Dancing Mistress’s girls? This one has grown up into a 16 year old Italian heiress, and, for one so young, her shape or ‘figure’ as they used to call it was already well-defined, carrying a cerise parasol, as compared to her imposing Aunt’s ‘sombre lace’ one, the niece’s ‘unfurling like wings’, alongside her naive flirting ability ‘vis-à-vis’ the men who payed tennis and went boating on this story’s idyllic hotel’s lake, even enticing one married Englishman called Barlow, here with his wife.
Men she jokingly or seriously deemed gods. But Barlow here gets his come-uppance with her own near Marabar-like downance and horrifyingly grazed palms! An eternal moment by encroached halves. She had been chaperoned on a boat by a Mrs Pym to an island in the lake who then allowed the girl to walk alone with Barlow. . “…this was more than throwing lollipops, it was spiking buns to an insatiable little eager bear at the end of a stick.”
Some wonderful passages here, throughout, that also apotheosise Katherine Mansfield whose stories I have already gestalted (here). Comic and ‘me-too’ telling, and perfectly couched in Bowenesque dressstuffs and fol de rols. And a sense of the omniscient near-Sapphic standpoint. When a lit was ever lighted.
“He lighted cigarette after cigarette, and allowed each to slip from between his relaxed fingers into the water. Each sizzled, then was silent. It was a pity one couldn’t put oneself out like that.”
THE DOLT’S TALE
“Dot-and-carry-one”
This is the maddest story I have ever read. 1944, it says. In London. Far more Mysterious than even Kôr! Why do I not remember first reading it? My mother listened to doodlebugs before they cut out. She told me about them. Here a male narrator who rambles neatly enough, I guess, and is the dolt, to go with the doodles and someone’s duodenal? Well, his chat starts at a club and those he meets, Margery and her so-called husband, Ken Timpson, and shenanigans and someone is a saboteur but who?
“Joining up at the club, we would then trool out to their place, Ken running me back into town again next morning.”
A saboteur is worse than an unreliable narrator, I say, Another hanger-on, Denis, is in the art world and he is a ‘sissy’. Who’s getting off on whom? Who the troll, who the victim? And there is even a co-vivid dream to match our days of lockdown with the war then, and the madnesses that prevailed then and now.
“It was like the sort of dream that you are told about, which I have I am glad to say never had. Not, I mean, like any form of real life – in that I think I may say I always know where I am.”
I really think Bowen is a prophetic genius through her preternature of literature, making her even alive today beyond her coastal haunt in 1973! But what happened to Margery’s dog, her clumping mules and the Timpsons’ ever unseen kid? What happened to us? Who among us still waits the next jolt with bated breath?
“As it was, there was a silence over the Timpsons’ place like there is overhead when a doodlebug has cut out: that or something or other gave me gooseflesh.”
My review of Chapter 14 of Julia Parry’s “Shadowy Third” book, concerning doodlebugs etc.: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2021/03/02/the-shadowy-third-julia-parry/#comment-21114
So if the narrator dolt was a shadowy third, in this mad troilism, who was Denis? – troilism or trollism?
My previous reading and review before writing above (here: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2021/10/06/nightscript-7/#comment-23213) quoted: “A little too dollish, too Dali, but still—they followed us into our restless dreams.”
REDUCED
“…Mrs Laurie (now widowed) and bought reduced coats and shoes for the little girls.”
Reduced as in cut-price (or even cut-RICE!) or reduced because they were “thin, remote little girls”?
You may judge for yourself as you differentiate the space between Mrs Laurie and her visit to her more dowdy friend with dowdy husband and these their two daughters, and the latter in her house with cold, mean grates. All perfectly Bowened-out. And the girls ‘ governess, Miss Rice, too-good-to-be-true and beautiful and proficient as governess or cheaply reduced because of her secret shocking backstory. But not a secret to the parents. But a secret let out of the bag, as once, when the girls wanted their previous governess to die and Miss Rice arrived with the spit-spot of a Mary Poppins with games like making plasticine animals to sit along the mantelpiece.
An embarrassing silence and the husband “Chidden, he stopped awkwardly, with a glance at the children.” We all know what omniscience can do as it slowly arrives for all in it, and the girls create their own future backstory by siding with Miss Rice. A story that reduces the reader into a sudden truncation of a longer story into a short more powerful one of thoughtful haunting.
But I haven’t yet mentioned another character: Frank Peele. He is the story’s reader-haunted, open-ended ending’s innocent catalyst who peels earlier or, rather, later thudding apples. Making reduced last forever.
“The bloomy red plums and mellow apples bending the boughs this month were pagan company for it. Indoors, there was no electricity; panels absorbed the lamplight; before October, no fires were lit till night. It had not even the insidious charm of decay, […]
A man with a book is practically not present. Mrs Laurie whipped out her petit point, and the two women, pulling their chairs together zestfully, settled down for a talk. Rain streamed down the windows, paper rustled inside the cold grate.”
And from one Laurie to another…
Having read and reviewed THE DOLT’S TALE, as above, I looked up the story’s title in the index of this book: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2021/09/27/elizabeth-bowen-theory-thought-and-things/ (there not being much at all on-line about this amazing story) and I was truly fascinated by Laurie Johnson’s substantial take on it!
TEARS, IDLE TEARS
“‘Here,’ she said, ‘have an apple.’”
…a girl with a “truculent, homely smile.” Flat chest, too. Almost a cure-all for seven year old Frederick’s engulfing tears. You will never have read such painful weeping words about weeping anywhere else in literature, I am sure. A Bowen apple as well as talk of salt on duck’s tails and an angry groundsmen in this park, a park where the girl stumbled upon the weeper near willows with their own less shocking weeping.
His mother is also in the vicinity who had scolded him for so much weeping, punishing him by not taking him to the zoo. (“His own incontinence in the matter of tears was as shocking to him, as bowing-down, as annulling, as it could be to her.”) After all she had been so brave when his RAF father Toppy had died in an air crash a few years before.
“She was a gallant-looking, correct woman, wearing today in London a coat and skirt, a silver fox, white gloves and a dark-blue toque put on exactly right – not the sort of woman you ought to see in a Park with a great blubbering boy belonging to her.”
— later becoming “the perfect friend for men who wished to wish to marry but were just as glad not to,…”
The girl had already told him of another boy called George who also wept. And for this girl…
“The eyes of George and Frederick seemed to her to be wounds, in the world’s surface, through which its inner, terrible unassuageable, necessary sorrow constantly bled away and as constantly welled up.”
Was Frederick cured, after all, by such a chance encounter? And did he go to the zoo ever again? We know not, in a world today which has truly opened up to more than just sorrow as our pain, but also as it own pain. Prophetic Bowen again, a woman I can’t picture weeping. Although she probably did.
His mother, as told us by Bowen, allowed a swan within her sights and mocked the duck. Who needs salting, now? Or a thud of sweet apple?
Prophetic Bowen again, a woman I can’t picture weeping. Although she probably did.
THE UNROMANTIC PRINCESS
“But to please her dreamy side she read fairy tales.”
Did you know that a Third Son is the man a Princess wants eventually to marry?
A fairy story that is a sort of trans-Cinderella where the golden slipper becomes a hollow golden ball thrown by a Princess to a red-haired boy in the crowd who failed, much to his hindsight regret, to throw it back to her but threw it to another girl whom he judged better merely by the colour of her clothes — and, meanwhile, despite having been blighted by two Fairy Godmothers who had given her at birth the boring ‘virtues’, Punctuality and Commonsense, with no curls in her hair, she does here effectively help Bowen regather a worthy moral to her own story: for me, a regathering of the wondrous sense of the Ridiculous as well as Curls in the syntax towards Unwords and Between Spaces and Cracked Meanings, turning a Third Son (as the boy indeed happened to be) into the Shadowy Third to whom she is really wed. Never too punctual to be late for that. She still is, with words thrown to us in the crowd. Ironically unhollow, difficult to understand but never misunderstood.
Golden and delicious, or eggs that never break,
Pingback: Third Son, Third Shadow | The Des Lewis Gestalt Real-Time Reviews
Finished, but not finished: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2021/09/27/elizabeth-bowen-theory-thought-and-things/
No. 16
“Eternity is inside us – it’s a secret that we must never, never try to betray. Look where just time has brought me; look at where it’s left me.”
…In “the end house […] tacked, living, to the hulk of the terrace.”
Another seminal, serial Null Immortalis story, where Jane visits the (once) famous author Maximilian Bewdon, now down on his creative luck, who had reviewed her proud book of prose, now wanting to hear her poems. Always to return to see if he was still there within this Bowenly cracked end house of an otherwise empty terrace, even a ghostly piano being played in the empty no. 15, next door — a St John’s Wood area that had seen better days, Maximilian living with his caring, tired, confused.y endearing wife.
Young Jane should never have come, having missed the telegram not to come because of his currently suffering another era’s earlier version of influenza. Jane had it, too, so both feverish minds wandering, with near delirium, his with dementia, too, I guess, his mind as old as mine, even though he was then probably physically younger than I am now. I can empathise.
They end up sleeping together while the wife slept upstairs. But not exactly, but you will know what I mean should you read it.
“Every corner brings you to something out of the scheme – even without a touch of fever on you (and Jane Oates had more than a touch of fever) some starts of taste or fancy look like catastrophes.”
“To walk there is to have a crazy architectural film, with no music, reeled past. Every corner brings you to something out of the scheme – even without a touch of fever on you (and Jane Oates had more than a touch of fever) some starts of taste or fancy look like catastrophes. Pale tan brick blocks of flats, compressed cities, soar up over studios all trellis and vine.”
But what about the bunch of coloured, if flaccid, balloons, he had hanging inside?
“They [Jane & Maximilian] looked like a suicide pact. The room smelled of the scorching of Bewdon’s rug. Mrs Bewdon, when she had drawn the curtains, stooped and gave Jane’s shoulder a light pat. ‘Tea-time,’ she said.”
Jane ends up back at home, finding the telegram asking her not to go. Does that mean she is forced to go again and again, to match the pattern of unconscious defiance in the nature of time? To go play the piano at no. 15 for real? As a feverish poltergeist?
She ends up with a pillow, a pillowghost, I infer. Ever within the pact of their co-vivid influenza dream of going back not simply to thank Mrs B for her ‘chagrining’ kindness but, above all, to hear Maximilian say to her again and again: “Don’t write”, and to burn her book? As he had burnt his rug? That telegram from lost time is sent by time yet again and again? This time with an invitation to a party, the balloons now strung pointedly outside the derelict terrace to show at which number the party is taking place?
“Eternity is inside us – it’s a secret that we must never, never try to betray. Look where just time has brought me; look at where it’s left me.”
There was no no. 16…
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nullimmortalis
This review continues here: https://etepsed.wordpress.com/1004-2/