Elizabeth Bowen Stories (13)
AS CONTINUED FROM THE TWELFTH PART OF THIS REVIEW OF ALL ELIZABETH BOWEN’S STORIES HERE: https://nullimmortalis2010.wordpress.com/elizabeth-bowen-stories-12/
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
ELIZABETH BOWEN AND THE DISSOLUTION OF THE NOVEL
by Andrew Bennett and Nicholas Royle
My previous review of these authors: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2015/01/22/this-thing-called-literature-andrew-bennett-nicholas-royle/
I have been rereading and reviewing all Elizabeth Bowen’s collected and uncollected stories in my personal fashion, and have found many references to elbows and mentioned this fact in my still continuing reviews here: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/31260-2/
I have been recently browsing through the above book and seen its mere mention of Elbow as a name on page 139. There may be other references yet undiscovered. Just to say I am intrigued and inspired.
The Trance of Reading
The introduction of this book mentions the ‘veiled cannibalism’ of Bowen, making me think more and more that there is, yes, more to the relationship of Aickman and Bowen, and why this is just one aspect of an essential synergy between them and their respective works, a synergy critics have missed heretofore.
More thoughts on this and Aickman and Zeno’s Paradox may appear here as comments to it: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2021/11/12/the-trance-of-reading/
“You have to have names for things, I suppose.”
— from the next story re-read as picked from the hat:
OH, MADAM . . .
“There usen’t to be a thing wrong in it, used there, madam?”
A female house servant I guess, where we hear only what she says to the lady of the house but not the latter’s responses, as if it is the overheard side of a telephone conversation. But we feel the lady’s presence in the house, having just returned from being away, and as the servant shows her how it has suffered collateral damage from the ton weight of a bomb dropped by Hitler on the now destroyed cinema nearby … the one where a film starring Mabelle was first shown, I wonder?
The loyalty of the servant and our poignant reading between the lines as she gradually realises the lady would now be leaving the house ‘for the duration.’ And we also admire the servant’s industry in not leaving the house like one with Aickman’s unsettled dust….
The satin curtains are badly damaged, but the lady’s dresses are untouched. The clock is of course, for me, still ticking, even though the servant seems surprised at this.
She attends the lady with a sense of duty and unconscious persuasion …
“really: I’m sure if I were a smoker – you have to have something, don’t you, to fall back on? I’ll bring the ashtray upstairs with us for the rest of the stumps …”
“It’s good of you to say so. I know how I’d have felt if I’d thought there ever was dust in here. It used to sort of sparkle, didn’t it, in its way … As it is – why, look, madam: just this rub with my apron and the cabinet starts to come up again, doesn’t it? Like a mirror – look – as though nothing had happened …”
“Autumn’s always the nicest season just around here, I think.”
THE CONFIDANTE
A theatrical complexity of statements by two people about relationships between them and another, then that other arrives making a third, and they all talk. about another shadowy triangle of people as a withdrawing part of their relationships, involving the battle between love’s loyalty or positive abandonment, a further complexity that any loss of imagination would make even more complex, but at least the reader has enough imagination to read such a work in the first place, and creates a different angle of observation, seeing one triangle destroyed, and the other side of things leaving, and then just like two fish out of water, but the reader completes the final triangle. Rain-loud room, cosy fire its centre point, and two dying fish picked up at the end by the reader and placed back, at the last moment after finishing this tale about them, in their life-saving habitat, I assume.
I shall now look up what I said about this work in 2014….
2014 review
The Confidante
“Unconsciously she had been drawing her imaginations in upon herself like the petals of a flower, and her emotions buzzed and throbbed within like a pent-up bee. / The room was dark with rain, and they heard the drip and rustle of leaves in the drinking garden.”
A pent-up bee like an issue of ‘allusions, insinuations and double-entendres’, as one woman craftily brings a couple together, for a sort of dangerous match-making, but with dark undercurrents like those in much Ivy Compton-Burnett dialogue in her fiction, and the room is earlier given ‘point’, I recall, by an otherwise ‘unnecessary fire.’ The fire is now in the words, and the abandonment from three people to two, towards a deeper fire, I infer, at the story’s end. Some fires burn things, other fires weld things together. But which fire is this? As weird as Robert Aickman, but without any weirdness.
Cross referenced today’s review of THE CONFIDANTE with the Okotie work here: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2021/11/09/best-british-short-stories-2021/#comment-23378thanks
SHE GAVE HIM
“Swinburne, for instance, dripped thickly over his nerves like an upset custard.”
Treating this story as what appears on the page, without exterior influence or inferred intention, as happens with all my gestalt passions of the reading moment, this story is a supreme example of experimental automatic writing which is not automatic at all, with the spine of a man’s last look upon a woman before he died in a road accident, a look that extends beyond death, but now we are uncertain as to his name, given a choice, and the women who look after him in the aftermath, including the woman he last saw…
She gave him — as “the woman ministrant”, or “nursing nun” — his life through the power of brainstorming fiction. A nursing none.
Death as not only a mysterious night but also a mysterious story none of us understand, except for our feet that look like separate animals attached to our own bodies….they somehow understand. Readers as phantom appendages upon phantom limbs.
“…as though his thought was on crutches.”
Cross-referenced with FIELD OF SHOES here: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2021/11/12/thanatrauma-steve-rasnic-tem/#comment-23386
My review of the seminal Bowen story FLOWERS WILL DO is now shown here: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2021/11/14/some-nonsense-about-clark-gable/
My review now continues here: https://admtoah.wordpress.com/elizabeth-bowen-stories-14/