Elizabeth Bowen Stories (15)
AS CONTINUED FROM THE FOURTEENTH PART OF THIS REVIEW OF ALL ELIZABETH BOWEN’S STORIES HERE: https://admtoah.wordpress.com/elizabeth-bowen-stories-14/
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
THE NEW HOUSE
“We got the bedrooms tidy, but your basin and jug are odd, I’m afraid.
Brother and Sister, Herbert and Cicely, move to the eponymous house after the death of their mother, along with all the furniture from their mother’s house at No. 17 where they had lived with here, both of them heading into middle life both unmarried. The gas has not yet been installed so they have to make do with candles; Cicely in the garden amazed at the countryside noise of thrushes, and no wonder there is a sense of their mother’s ghost here, a shadowy third, as they seek to re-order their lives. Thoughts of a grand piano, too; no wonder, when they had lived with their mother next door to a no. 16……I wonder? Cicely now suddenly feeling herself free to marry that man with the straggly moustache, a prospect of her leaving him then much to Herbert’s abrupt dismay — a dismay at at not being looked after properly, even with the servant Janet. But he then imagines getting married himself… with thoughts of a dark triangle: a shadowy triangle, at that — but this image representing something else more bodily and basic to his mind, you wonder? No, of course not.
“Over by the fire was the dark triangle of a grand piano; the top was open and a woman, with bright crimpy hair, sat before it, playing and singing.”
[I will now look up what I wrote about this story in 2014 and append it in the next comment.]
2014
The New House
“…the air of startled spirituality that had become her as a girl now sat grotesquely on her middle-aged uncomeliness.”
A middle-aged unmarried sister and brother, following the death of their mother, move to a new house. He is set in his ways and we get a humorous glimpse into his obsessions with habits and creature comforts, until a Bowenesque ‘third’ affecting his sister surprises and distresses him, until it gives him an even more surprising glimpse into his own future…
Meanwhile, that sororal ‘third’, indeed, had a telling “shadow gesticulating behind him on the wall.” Another masterstroke from the mistress of literature.
GONE AWAY
“Striking, to any eye, was the hyper-congestion of antique gravestones. These, so closely set edge to edge that you could not have slipped the blade of a knife between them, flocked up in serrated ranks, each rank being not more than inches behind another.”
This, in 1946, is an amazing SF prophecy of our co-vivid dream today, both darkly dystopic and disarmingly uplifting. Somehow serious and absurd, depicting our pointless façades today, our population diaspora, with mention of many “infection carriers”, amidst a longer endless stoppage in over-bored Brighterville beyond any brief visit that Bonnyville elsewhere required. This story (not necessarily uncharacteristic of Bowen if one delves deeply enough in all her works) is an apotheosis of certain elements in ‘Go Back At Once’, a novel by Aickman recently published having slept for many generations, and the huge amounts of absurdist fantasy of a writer called Rhys Hughes for whose work I have so far conducted more gestalt real-time reviews than any other writer living or dead. With ingredients from E.M. Forster’s The Machine Stops which at the turn of the 19th century was the spitting image of the Internet. And May Sinclair, Ionesco, Pere Ubu, and you will wish to list other names, as I do — all of this stemming from a conversation, at afternoon tea, between a newly awoken Rip Van Winkle (after years of sleep aka Null Immortalis) and an English vicar, both of them faced with a modern Zenoist dystopia surrounding the vicar’s parish and his lady parishioners. You couldn’t make it up! Uncanny how it could ever have been written, let alone read. Perhaps it never existed till now. I certainly feel that may be the case.
My earlier review of Rip Van Winkle: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2019/07/05/the-big-book-of-classic-fantasy/#comment-16280
My review of MAKING ARRANGEMENTS is now here: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2021/11/18/red-dress-dead-dress/
THE CLAIMANT
“You never come to the end of knowing a man —“
Aickman also wrote a ghost story of a couple who bought a house the ownership of which was subsequently in doubt. But that was in France. And from my memory, quite different circumstances. This, contrastively, is a loving couple who have been married 35 years and retire to the West Country to an estuary area where Arthur can ply his sailing hobby. They are very happy till they get a letter out of the blue from Australia, a man appropriately named Hobart, a man who ends with a mania? He claims he is the legally rightful owner of the house, but to cut a short story shorter, he comes over on a plane to thrash it out, but the plane crashes. He becomes a very petulant ghost the whites of whose eyes you could see. And near cornered, as far as ghosts can be cornered. What I have long called antipodal angst.
And those who enjoy ghost stories, take it from me, there are some very effective frissons in this work. Until the wife leaves, here and leaves the house to both of them, Arthur having …. Well, to tell more would spoil it. There is no coming to know the end in any of us, I guess. And these reviews are my own never ending. Or so I claim.
I recall The Claimant appeared in Lady Cynthia Asquith’s Third Ghost Book — but not in EB’s Collected Stories.
THE PARROT
“…a very new-looking parrot, newer-looking even than the complete edition of Lord Lytton,…”
Lytton’s The House and the Brain? The Parrot — with its refrain of “Minnie” beyond mere mimic — being this House’s brain, parrot fashion, evidently House No. 16…
“past the Willesdens’, past No. 17’s, 18’s and 19’s, till it broadened out under the Lennicotts’ poplars… […] ‘I never knew there were so many people who didn’t live in London. Of course, one sees the houses, but it is difficult to realise, isn’t it, that they have insides and that they really mean anything!’”
This an Aickman-like study of social interactions in the suburbs where the Lennicotts, bookish, a discarded couple seeming strange and foreign with their impossible books against which grudges are fostered — whereby people, as often in Aickman, share a roof to meet new challenges and forget the small world below, that world with petty trolls. Pretty Polly, with masculine pronoun, who yearns for his Minnie, Polly as catalyst, bringing people together by escaping its cage, setting up the chase and prophesying as well as transcending today’s social-media grudges, and much more. Can one make up how a story can be so powerful?
The poignant story of Eleanor with pince-nez caged as the parrot owner’s ‘companion’, as she deals with the parrot’s escape, a shape wobbling like a pony in the sky and landing in the Lennicott’s garden and eventually bringing us to their roof of knowledge.
Yes, the parrot’s house was No. 16! And Eleanor, now inside the Lennicotts’ house, further along, finds the necessary deliciously ‘wicked’ piano…
“…the great jutting triangle of the piano. She was still drawing shallow breaths and walking delicately, and had the sense of passing down a long low shining tunnel of wickedness,… […] She was here in those Lennicotts’ very house; its shadows and scents were surcharged for her, every contact was intolerably significant. […] Mr Lennicott’s dragons glowed; he might have stepped out of a cathedral window, and had indeed even that air of ornate asceticism. […]The room smelt of cigarettes and masculine unguents and had sloping ceilings. She remembered all those terrible books…”
Stair carpet of sinister sleekness, and a gutter to clamber along, so finely and ironically absurdist, like Aickman, this story…I am breathless with this reading escapade. And its potential Zeno’s Paradox of time…
“…a lost hour that had slipped through a crack in her life and vanished. […] …she did not want to go back to that house of shut-out sunshine and great furniture, where the parrot was carried royally from room to room on trays, and she was nothing.”
Never to be fearful of being ‘under compliment’ to anyone, like the parrot’s owner, who stayed in her own cage once our catalyst is re-caged. A sad case, a sad cage, a head with its housed brain. The Haunted and the Haunters. Today’s technologically linked poly-world and its peoples never to reach nirvana or gestalt…
“How world lay overlapped with world; visible each from the other and yet never to be one!”
This review continues here: https://weirdmonger.wordpress.com/elizabeth-bowens-stories-16/