Elizabeth Bowen’s Stories (16)
AS CONTINUED FROM THE FIFTEENTH PART OF THIS REVIEW OF ALL ELIZABETH BOWEN’S STORIES HERE: https://weirdtongue.wordpress.com/elizabeth-bowen-stories-15/
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
SUNDAY AFTERNOON
“Now, the sensations of wartime, that locked his inside being, began as surely to be dispelled – in the influence of this eternalized Sunday afternoon.”
Eternalised by Maria’s wrist watch or the number on her wrist when she visits Henry in wartorn London from here in relatively peaceful Dublin. Henry has come back to Dublin to experience his Proustian chocolate cake and to see a petal fall on a sandwich, amid the older people he once knew in a Dublin, but only as a holiday assuming the bus back is not already ten minutes early when they send him off. He survived the bomb on his London flat but losing his valuables within it. So much meaning in this relatively short war story, amid these older Dublin people but also the young petulant Maria who had been too young when he first left for London, I guess. But too young for what? Old enough for what, now? What Fate awaits them? Those times were sensed as significantly Fateful. A sense of importance in matters around them that have now slipped away into history, and replaced by our triviality today, I guess. Even Fate has gone crazy today, I find.
“With folded arms, and her fingers on her thin pointed elbows, she immediately fixed her eyes on Henry Russel.”
Maria thus has elbows as well as wrists. But later she touches his elbow!
“She looked secretively at her wrist-watch. Henry wondered what the importance of time could be. He learned what the importance of time was when, on his way down the avenue to the bus, he found Maria between two chestnut trees. She slanted up to him and put her hand on the inside of his elbow.”
Fate as the meeting of elbows.
“…she seemed to be crouched up inside herself.”
“Maria has no experience, none whatever; she hopes to meet heroes – she meets none. So now she hopes to find heroes across the sea. Why, Henry, she might make a hero of you.”
“The tug her rubbing gave to the cloth shook a petal from a Chinese peony in the centre bowl on to a plate of cucumber sandwiches. This little bit of destruction was watched by the older people with fascination, with a kind of appeasement, as though it were a guarantee against something worse.”
So much detail within details as well as petals, you need to absorb every particle of this story. And someone said this Sunday afternoon that the war around them would have no literature! Think again!
“So much so, that Henry felt the ruthlessness of her disregard for the past, even the past of a few minutes ago.”
“…the grace of the thing done over again. He thought, with nothing left but our brute courage, we shall be nothing but brutes.”
But then Maria suddenly becomes Miranda, as, by projection, she enters the stage of a world’s tempest if not temple of time… where she will become as nothing to those she leaves behind in Dublin. And nothing to us when we finish this story, whatever the memories invoked by a cake. The stuff dreams are made on. With thin elbows, growing even pointier, even thinner, till attenuating to nothing?
“‘Miranda. This is the end of you. Perhaps it is just as well.’
‘I’ll be seeing you –’
‘You’ll come round my door in London – with your little new number chained to your wrist.’”
My review of THE NEEDLECASE is shown here: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2021/11/20/no-doubt-she-sews-like-hell/
With its own version of Bowen’s martyred red dress!
THE CHEERY SOUL
“There was no holly, and no pieces of string.”
But this Christmas story of fir cones thrown upon extinct fires has at least made ME into a cheery soul, beyond even the cheeriness (not) of Miss Fox and the house to which she was invited in the previous story I kindly reviewed for you! This re-reading of The Cheery Soul has reminded me of the wonderful synergy in it, another synergy with the Aickman style of absurdism, although I suspect that it is Aickman who shares a retro-conduit of synergy with an originating form of Bowenesque absurdist fiction. Well, you must all already know the plot of this surely classic work. How could you not? A man’s hope for a cheery Christmas when he would otherwise be alone for Christmas in a blackouted and rationed Britain, this hope engendered when he was invited to a house near a Midlands canal (Aickman again!), indeed, surprisingly invited by an otherwise reputed,y inhospitable threesome-as-one who have also been reputed to be in “a ferment of war production” as humourless do-gooders. There, in this house, he finds this threesome’s aunt, a mishandled refugee from Italy, and evidence of a missing cook having left empty ovens and a rude note in a fish kettle as large as an infant’s bath, and there is also a clock whose ‘loud tick was reluctant’…despite suspenseful whirrs to strike hours in the badly acoustic hall. Like the aunt from Italy, he now had no other roof to call his own, and we all know what roofs mean to Bowen as well as to Aickman! — climbing up to them together to socialise or to solve the mystery of the universe. But then a policeman arrives and the rest is story, if not history. At least there was one sprig of mistletoe left by the aggrieved cook. You know how this story ends already, I guess. All those claims of espionage and other shenanigans. So I will not ask you to to boil your heads if you demand more from me. I will simply go half way, with this my own ending of a helpful review…
“…about half way, I turned on my lamp, I watched mist curdle under its wobbling ray.”
SO MUCH DEPENDS
“The girl on the window seat, stretched at full length, rolled over onto one elbow to eye them blankly.”
In many ways, this is the most accessibly crafted Bowen story, as the seventeen year old Ellen is posed upon one elbow amid blank rainy days in Bowen’s effective reprise of her Seale-on-Sea, lovelorn Ellen alone in a self-imposed stay at a guest house where meaningfully and explicitly “there was no elbowroom”!
But she ends up leased with a Mackintosh just as the sun starts shining upon, of all days, the Eve of St Swithin’s Day — as well as eventually gaining a new life of friends instead of dwelling morosely upon the young man she had originally come to Seale unsuccessfully to seal in romance… and not only that, both her arms become stretched out at the end of the story, explicitly like wings! No elbows at all?
This journey of Ellen is in interesting counterpoint with the backstories of some of the other guests, including Erica Kerry, who hides behind her book, and is in tangle with her own unseen romance which is potentially sorted out by the preempting of an already posted letter. And of course the ‘plucky’ Miss Plackman who runs the guest house with all her savings buried in its future under rainy skies and often morose guests, and just one telephone in the whole place, upon her desk in her personal office wherefrom Ellen needed to make her many desperate calls. Or so she used to do … up to St. Swithin’s Day. 🙂
THE SHADOWY THIRD
“Often they were through the barrier and half-way down the road before she found a word to say.”
“They skirted the flower-bed and went to lean up against the fence, resting their elbows on the top.”
The new house on a small estate facing the countryside, the house Martin lived with his first wife, and we gradually learn what happened to her as he called her. Or we think we do. A birth and possibly two deaths? And now his new wife Pussy, who sews with a thimble from a thimblecase he recognises. How did she get it? And he buys her another.
You can imagine the emotional Venn diagram of shadow with real person. Who overshadows whom? Martin himself acts sometimes like a shadow when arriving at the railway station from work, thus arriving home before Pussy who had gone to meet his precisely timed train…
…and, indeed, in the light of the Bowen time essence, it is interesting that Pussy wants a sundial for the garden (“Her mind had a curious way of edging away from the immediate future.”) “…up and down, up and down”, the stairs. And where the meaningfully ‘tiresome’ grandfather clock “with a reverberating tick” used to be, Pussy puts a china bracket, and we all know what a bracket means to Boweneers! And now another ‘halfway’… “He could never get used to the silence half-way up the stairs, where the grandfather clock used to be.”
“Oh, not Venice. I don’t think you’d care for Venice. It’s nothing very much really.” — and we all know that Aickman went on to write ‘Never Visit Venice’, as a synchronicity if not a cause and effect!
Martin had obviously gone to Venice with his first wife…? But how funny to lock empty drawers, Pussy thinks.
“We’re not safe and I don’t believe we’re even good. It can’t be right to be so happy when there isn’t enough happiness in the world to go round. Suppose we had taken somebody else’s happiness, somebody else’s life …”
Pussy said that.
And I, too, now stare into the corners of the room, perhaps wondering what once bracketed them. A story that haunts you with its own eponymity, if not nemonymity. A template for what comes later.
I will now look up what I said about this story in 2014 and place it in the comment below.
2014
The Shadowy Third
“You shouldn’t play with dreadful thoughts.”
A masterpiece by Bowen and so very early in her life, too. I have read this story elsewhere before, of course, but in this edition, pages 134-135 were still uncut and thus unread by whoever had owned this secondhand book, which seems rather appropriate. It echoes this book’s ‘houses are people’ theme, except here a previous wife ‘haunts’ it (and we gradually gain a picture of her and the circumstances, but not completely) as he and his young new wife consciously optimise their time together but worry about how very happy they are, bearing in mind that happiness is rationed for the world, and they are taking too much of their share…
This review continues here: https://dflcollaborations.wordpress.com/elizabeth-bowen-stories-17/