Elizabeth Bowen Stories (10)
AS CONTINUED FROM THE NINTH PART OF THIS REVIEW OF ALL ELIZABETH BOWEN’S STORIES HERE: https://zencore2007.wordpress.com/elizabeth-bowen-stories-9/
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
Just like Maria and Oliver in Bowen’s ‘Brigands’ who “were quite staggered. For a moment, they accused each other of having gone to sleep.”
And thus dreamt the co-vivid dream?
Now we have Nancy and Herbert… one of whom asked to play that same game of Brigands within this experimental masterstroke of a story, outdoing even ‘Green Holly’ in the stakes of memorably meaningful life-changing Christmases…
THE TOMMY CRANS
“Now into the hall Mrs Tommy Cran came swimming from elsewhere, dividing with curved little strokes the festive air – hyacinths and gunpowder. Her sleeves, in a thousand ruffles, fled from her elbows.”
With ‘holly wreath’ and ‘cemetery tram’, a clock that struck four, then eight and sixpence for a gold watch, and we start with Nancy as Christmas queen or bride at nine (when Herbert is eight), and Uncle Joseph, with ‘staring juicy eyes’, then has her on his lap. And other aunts and uncles in somewhat disarray, I guess. And this was the Christmas Party of Mr and Mrs Tommy Cran who shall ever be destined to remain children and needing to be looked after, and Nancy and Herbert once beside the lake of two swans never consummated whatever silent love they bore each other, and, as the years go by, Nancy marries richly to someone otherwise beNeath (SICnificant?) her in order to keep this Cran couple safe and away from ruin after the Riviera trip, and they are for ever and ever Nancy’s children….whatever one’s belief in fairies.
“Now Nancy, standing up very straight to cut the cake, was like a doll stitched upright into its box, apt, if you should cut the string at the back, to pitch right forward and break its delicate fingers.”
So many Bowen wordy and absurdist masterstrokes in this relatively short story, and I cannot do justice to it. The poignancy of dream and regret and loyalty to duty. I don’t know half of it, not even a third. “…we seem to know everything. Surely there should be something for us we don’t know?” Why should I understand?
“‘You never played games,’ he said, ‘or believed in fairies, or anything. I’d have played any game your way; I’d have been good at them. You let them pull all the crackers before tea: now I’d have loved those crackers. That day we met at Mitchell’s to sell your watch, you wouldn’t have sugar cakes, though I wanted to comfort you. You never asked me out to go round the island in your boat; I’d have died to do that. I never even saw your swans awake. You hold back everything from me and expect me to understand. Why should I understand? In the name of God, what game are we playing?’
‘But you do understand?’”
No. Or I don’t know.
COMFORT AND JOY
“The soldiers billeted everywhere whistled carols, crisply trampling the snow. In the dusk of Christmas Eve afternoon the Devises’ hall was wreathed with holly…”
Wartime, and Comfort uncomfortably boarded out at school in the country, her family’s London home being shut up because of that very war, and Joy a fellow schoolgirl lives at home nearby and invites Comfort — despite the uncomfortably chance or fateful linkage of their names by the season — for three days from Christmas Eve, three robins, three women without wartime’s men, two girls and a billeted soldier, looking glum; he is left a khaki muffler outside his bedroom door for the cold weather by one of the women as a female version of the three wise men, and the two girls in the next bedroom who listen to him tossing and turning find the uncomfortable letter he had earlier received that he drops accidentally when picking up the muffler. Don’t go there? He is disappointed in love, and Joy tries to instil precociously herself as touching recompense during breakfast. A mature Bowen that is worthy of unmuffling, and now found today by my own chance or fateful drawing of its title from my Bowen hat.
This work also has many depths that seem to ache for discovery, e.g.: Three into one makes the trinity, female not male…while blacked-out houses spread out in the snow and the clock strikes midnight (and the word ‘shadowy’ is in this story somewhere but, tantalisingly, I can’t seem to find it now), and there is that inherited Bowen minute: “…the first Christmas minute seemed to echo over the world: each of the three women, in that minute, felt something move in her heart.”
Another story with a ‘gift’ left outside a bedroom door, is now nagging at me, but I can’t fully recall it.
Aickman or another Bowen, probably?
Bartolozzi
AUNT TATTY
“Lunch went through with strands of talk spun out fine till they dwindled to thin little patches of silence.”
Just as Paul Pellew’s train arrived in dwindling tranches of ten minutes each, until the constraint of the countryside and its trees consumed him, meeting Eleanor at the station, in whose acquaintance in London there had developed a romance, even a secret engagement, and here he was faced with the tension of meeting her family, the countryside in discomforting Interface with the city, Eleanor now a ‘different’ person, amid a family that should not know about their affair, with the excuse he is just a friend of the Jennings here to ‘see churches.’ And a choice of flowers, if not weapons, as defining forces. And Bartolozzi images amid the Bowen furniture of subtlest situation. And three little sisters about whom Paul wondered about tweaking their pig-tails. Like testing temperaments within such tableaux or engravings of constraint?
“‘Seeing churches’ – Eleanor’s mother beamed on his cultivation. Diffuse yet stately, she had Eleanor’s fine hardness with an alloy, melted over the edge of the mould, running into a form of its own, a privileged kind of formlessness.”
Aunt Tatty (spinster sister of Eleanor’s dead father?) who acts as a mixed catalyst of knowingness, fairness, but muffled by her muffler, and wearing a “decidedly-looking felt hat”, just as Eleanor in the defining forest, as Joan of Arc, sought just such a defining hat, before abruptly ‘eloping’ with Paul without saying goodby to her family… but through various forces Paul is made to decide to face up … to what?
Stoutish Aunt Tatty, I forgot, to mention was often dressed in “‘good’ black.” Amid a story of various Bowen objective-correlatives that form Venn diagrams, towards an eventual vanishing-point of railtracks or treelines, beech or otherwise. Flowers, too. But not hyacinths.
“He tried to make his mind slack as an empty sack to be trailed along, but he couldn’t; there was something in it that kept catching on things, bumping.”
My review of JOINING CHARLES here:
https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2021/11/06/the-frightened-taxi/
ALL SAINTS
“Wouldn’t you describe a saint as somebody who, going ahead by their own light —“
A vicar after the service is importuned by the lady left over at the back and she accompanies him into the November dusk outside, much to his life not requiring confession, but something perhaps far deeper about real people whom she knows, some good, some bad, being God’s go-betweens, and the vicar advises she should contact God direct, despite what he had said in a sermon about us all being saints, saints with healing and invigoration. She wants to donate a window in the church depicting the people who have helped her as saints. One a missionary’s wife. A church window is a sort of translucent flattened umbrella, I guess, within the impermeable stone of faith protecting those within the church without them missing out on natural light lighting up the saints as stains that are light-cast shapes upon the shadows in the pews, a light now ironically vanishing in the dusk outside. The vicar instinctively resists this woman and her apparent naivety or disingenuousness, thinking she is more inclined towards his body than his soul, perhaps! The concupiscent healing and invigorating of god-betweens? One can endlessly scry such prose vignettes of light and darkness, and of body and soul, and of God, in and outside us, spreading our ribs, God who should serve people, not vice versa. Bowen, such a saint of mixed faith herself? This is her first story by alphabetical order of her story titles.
I shall now look up what I wrote about this story in 2014 and place it in the next comment below.
nullimmortalis December 18, 2014 at 1:35 pm Edit
All Saints
“Evensong was over, and the ladies who had composed the congregation pattered down the aisle and melted away into the November dusk.”
In hindsight, a still ever-increasingly haunting story. Dialogue in Bowen often feels crafted yet constipated, while prefiguring an onrush of words later off-stage. Here in a conversation between a lady newcomer to town (someone who gives the impression of being a spiritual maverick) and the apprehensive vicar after the service, the former wants gratuitously to donate a window to the church… Yet, she wants to fill it with all the saints doubling as her friends. Each a recurring shadowy third?
“Nobody was ever meant to be a go-between,…”
CHARITY
“Rachel loathed the butterflies and the way they would all quiver suddenly on their pins as though coming alive again;…”
Cf ‘All Cousin Janet’s moths kept me awake: their wings made such a flutter behind the glass, till I had to get up and take them off their pins.’ — from Bowen’s ‘Ghost Story’, reviewed earlier, when Verena spent a night in Janet’s room; girls get older, I guess.
These two schoolgirls after some talk by Rachel’s father about fun of midnight feasts et al, jump into each other’s bed here too, after an exciting day — butterflies never to be pinned down by men, I guess!
These two girls are still young, still at school, Rachel having invited Charity to stay at her home, and, here, all manner of characterisations make a fleetingly mindless excitement fill them, especially when vying with the archetypal stern earringed Elder Sister, Adela, by the two girls’ mischief in tying up her bedroom door with their dressing-gown ropes.
“Atrociously cruel”, the pinners or the pinned?
Reminding me of the still growing versions of the two young women in Aickman’s novel, Go Back At Once, but go back to where or when? Girls, when “Sometimes there was a war on, and, as none of the men were brave enough, they were both going to fight.”
‘Laughing Tomahawk’ role-playing, being more misChief! — and sitting on the bike shed roof, they are also two versions of the character in Evadne Price’s then contemporary books about Jane Turpin, an equivalent to Crompton’s William Brown, and our two, although excitable, were not shrinking Violets but, rather, screaming Elizabeths!
Screaming at ghosts and monsters and all.— “She was so excited that something throbbed in her ears, and she wanted to scream and rush back across the passage before a something that was worse than Adela put out a long arm and grabbed her into the dark room.”
Poached eggs, meanwhile, forgotten and left to moulder.
“With a wave, as though they had been sparrows quarrelling, Adela dispersed them.”
Adela has originally confused herself that Charity would be a ‘charity child’ that needed disinfecting!
A story of secret thoughts.
“She left behind a fatal gash in the peace of the afternoon.”
This review now continues here: https://cernzoo.wordpress.com/elizabeth-bowens-stories-11/