My huge Elizabeth Bowen story review (6)
AS CONTINUED FROM THE FIFTH PART OF THIS REVIEW OF ALL ELIZABETH BOWEN’S STORIES HERE: HTTPS://NULLIMMORTALIS.WORDPRESS.COM/25604-2/#COMMENT-15536
My reviews of EB stories so far, in alphabetical order: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/31260-2/
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, Katherine Mansfield and Vladimir Nabokov.
“She never had had illusions: the illusion was all.” — EB in Green Holly
SEE BELOW FOR MY ONGOING REVIEWS OF BOWEN’S STORIES
I HEAR YOU SAY SO
“…thinking – suppose the world was made for happiness, after all?”
Today seems to be the exact optimum moment to re-read this magical and new altered Mysterious Kôr syndrome over London in the shape of a nightingale singing in the days after VE Day, as it affects various individuals as they come to terms with things getting better… with mixed feelings and fears and a sense of airbrushing some of the blitzed buildings around. Some wonderous character sketches, and idyllic Fragments of Life à la Machen, on this day today when I just heard before re-reading this story that the Covid invasion may be on the wane and things may not be as bad as we feared during the coming winter….
“Inside their tawny squares the rooms, to be seen into, were sublimated: not an object inside them appeared gimcrack or trivial, standing up with stereoscopic sharpness in this intensified element of life.”
“It sang into incredulity like the first nightingale in Eden. Note after note from its throat stripped everything else to silence: there was nothing but the absolute of its song. It sang from a planet, beyond experience, drawing out longings, sending them back again frozen, piercing, not again to be borne.”
“…and, as it always did, the hope flashed through her mind that the whole year might be a dream, and that someone else lay breathing here in this room, having come back or else never gone away.”
THE LAST NIGHT IN THE OLD HOME
“Throughout the house, disappearing in dusk, there reigned an unnatural silence that first he could not account for: all the clocks had been let run down.”
A family abandoning the house where they had lived, parents off to the Valley, Adrian dead, grown up children without children themselves, Annabelle still in fact a ten year old from within her mature body, obsessively and annoyingly trying to assign ownership of the blue gloves she found in the wardrobe before it and them were auctioned along with the rest of the house. She plays with a mincing machine, scolded by the soon to be ex-cook. Backstories inferred, recriminations of blame as to their predicament, John kicking the DH Lawrencian rocking horse as if to blame it for the horses he had mis-backed in life’s gamble, life’s measurements aching to be erased towards this vignette’s near-endlessness of a future without heirs. Ever endless outside its own empty frame with arguably indelible growing-marks on the walls of unclockable silence. Zeno’s Paradox in Bowen is not made of Halves but Thirds? The blue gloves were too small for Annabelle.
“They both felt home had lasted a day too long. […] the rocking-horse was still rocking.”
Cf The Inherited Clock
THE EASTER EGG PARTY
“Ghostly just inside her shut window, or like a paper figure pasted against the glass, she had watched strange children invade the garden she knew.”
Two spinster sisters “bowed to nothing but their own noble ideas, and flinched from nothing but abandoning these.” They take on, as compromise of a sudden uncharacteristic bifurcation in their single mind, the young girl Hermione, daughter of a once young girl whom they had once helped before she later became Hermione’s troubled mother. It was their noble duty, but could they have expected to turn up this Jane Turpin-like child (cf Bowen’s own Maria?), a surlier and more amoral girl version of Crompton’s Just William, a girl character created, at the same time as Bowen wrote this story, as created by Evadne Price? Once a famous character, now relatively unknown. But did this Hermione ‘steal’ those six Easter Eggs in the children’s Easter Egg Treasure Hunt party arranged for her by the two spinsters, while she tried to care for a so-called “doomed” little boy, who could become one of her ‘outlaws’?
Or did these so-called “supernatural” Easter Eggs appear as if from a strange Fate we cannot fathom? These Eggs found under the equally so-called “original” Apple Tree (cf Bowen’s own thuds of falling sounds of death in her ‘The Apple Tree’). Just remember this fact: “In her [Hermione’s] eyes existed a world of alien experience.” The white Panama Hat is merely an ironic decoy for what we can scry from such an obliquely amoral fable as this is. And the fact Hermione did not eat them nor even turn them to pulp — the latter transubstantiation perpetrated by God or the Devil? In a large village called West Wallows, one with a “nursery-rhyme hill.” And other nonsenses of truth that fictions often disguise.
“Sloping south to the brook, the garden was made devious by swastika hedges: it was all grots and plots.”
With her …
“She was, in fact, for herself a most unfriendly playmate, for she was treacherous.”
another prime Jane Turpin candidate in the shape of Geraldine from Bowen’s THE LITTLE GIRL’S ROOM masterpiece!
So far in this series of reviews of all Bowen stories, I am struck by her Evadne Price girls, and her Zeno’s Paradox in Thirds not Halves, and the stages of the Second World War in London as the stages of Covid….,all creatively fractured by Bowenesque style. And there is of course her links with Aickman, probably in real life, a mutual synergy in gender/sexual/marriage trains and ghostly-horror absurdism.
Also her Disinherited* ‘Forever Autumn’, see my https://nullimmortalis.wordpress.com/2012/09/20/forever-autumn/ in 2012, links with Ligotti and general Weird Fiction anthologised by the VanderMeers.
* “This first phase of autumn was lovely; decay first made itself felt as an extreme sweetness: with just such a touch of delicious morbidity a lover might contemplate the idea of death. […] Everything rotted slowly. […] eternity seemed to have set in at late autumn.”
Interim findings.
Aptly, the next story I today pulled out of the Bowen hat is THE LAST BUS and my review of it is shown here: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2021/10/28/the-planet-at-the-last-bus-stop/
Beware spoilers or critical aberrations! But not both.
RECENT PHOTOGRAPH
“His [Lukin’s] eyes went down to the faintly stirring shadows of the branches on the pavement, then stole gradually, cautiously, paving-stone by paving-stone,…”
An Aickman synergistic story of a newspaper reporter called Bertram Lukin, an American who often said “Git!” and who wore a pince-nez, and later he is given a “demilune of furiously crimson cheek” by a chatty woman’s flighty daughter whom she called a little girl Totsie but her daughter was really called Verbena …in the streets of suburban London where, nearby, a Mrs Brindley had had her throat lethally cut by her husband who had then proceeded to put his head in a gas oven, duly dying, too. Lukin, previously thwarted by a policeman from getting into the crime scene house, gets his scoop from the mother and flighty daughter Verbena as to the backstory of the murder and suicide with the evidence of a recent photograph showing Mr Brindley’s plaster on his head where he had hit it when “running straight into” an apple tree, yes, a Bowenesque apple tree (!), while being goaded, I infer, by Verbena and his own wife Mrs Brindley, two women who’d had a crush on each other and who often laughed at him — especially when he ambled “unamusedly round and round the little zigzag gravel paths like an old billy-goat”.
Running straight into something or slowly ambling paving stone by paving stone is a dilemma for Zeno, I guess…
“The clock ticked on interminably, registering the flight of hours.”
Meanwhile and perhaps forever, I look deadpan at the selfie camera, and leave it at that. But I cannot help wondering if Lukin really got his scoop, or was he happy because he hadn’t got a useable scoop as he much preferred the prospect of his later date with Verbena? Perhaps his pince nez was due to get stuck in her demilune? You can’t make it up.
“She [Verbena] was fair and plump and dapper, and walked as though she had no opinion of the pavement.”
Was the truth verbatim, though?
This review now continues here: https://classicalhorror.wordpress.com/elizabeth-bowen-stories-7/#comment-743
All the Bowen story reviews so far in alphabetical order: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/31260-2/