Elizabeth Bowen Stories (17)
AS CONTINUED FROM THE SIXTEENTH PART OF THIS REVIEW OF ALL ELIZABETH BOWEN’S STORIES HERE: https://weirdmonger.wordpress.com/elizabeth-bowens-stories-16/#comment-476
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
My review of what has turned out to be a most remarkable story: MRS MOYSEY, here — https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2021/11/22/children-in-a-coloured-earthquake-city/
HOME FOR CHRISTMAS
“He got up as soon as he woke and stood in the bow window, looking out in a queer, rather caged way.”
This seems the natural follow-on to the previous story above. Tom, here, in the bow window, like Leslie, but looking at the snow, infrequent snow generally in this area, but matching the snow of a previous family Christmas at this house where, today, Tom has brought his new bride and wife Millie, travelling over seas, in what seems to be a rehearsed arrival echoing a previous one, for Millie to meet his sisters and parents.
“They walked, with rather ironly happy steps, up to the homey house.”
Was that an irony of steps, instead?
Meanwhile, you must explore this house to get its full ambience but whatever you do, do not play hide and seek! This is possibly Bowen’s most creepy story, most nasty one even, with more than a mere Christmassy frisson. Claustrophobia in the Mistletoe Bough chest and madness, and Aunt Shandie seems to ‘devour’ Millie “with an interested eye.” But that veiled cannibalism to match that in other stories of Bowen and Aickman, may be a bit of a red herring on my part. And the abrupt ending makes this story seem even creepier, when, at this end, most of the characters looked at “me”, as if Aunt Shandie held the meaning to the yet untold ending.
A disarmingly abrupt ending, then, not abrupt at all?
Should be anthologised, as it was not even reprinted in the Collected Bowen!
PINK MAY
“No, I didn’t see what it was. The point was, whatever it was saw me.”
This is effectively a war time one-sided monologue like Oh Madam (here with curtly curious responses from an interlocutory bosom friend, I guess), the meanderings of a woman who was happy that month during the war when others were suffering, when the may on the trees outside was pink, and she lived in this house near the ‘depot’ with Neville, her husband, I guess, whom she was betraying by dating another man, I equally guess. And during her bath and her pre-gallivanting drinkie in the evening (when tomorrow was another day)… and “… Each evening I dressed in that room I lost five minutes – I mean, each evening it took me five minutes longer to dress.” And a sense of the ghost of a woman haunted her, a ghost that she thought mischievously brought a poltergeist along with it? Eerily hubristic… and the may eventually turns brown… It could easily have been expressed by Aickman in one of his trans modes or in another life, both with the gender relationship-related eerinesses alongside another shadowy threesome… in fact he may have been the poltergeist itself!?
Implications of projected self-pity and blame, and more. And a ghost’s jealousy.
“— she used to be right at my elbow…”
THE STORM
“…he leant forward and spread his elbows out on the parapet with a prolonged ‘Phew!’”
And I, too, uttered Phew! upon finishing my current re-read of this story today, another one I can’t believe had abandoned my mind, but now returned to it with the force of its own storm. The story of an English couple, Rupert and his wife. Is she named? You know, I somehow can’t remember. They are in Italy, on an island, with Rome in the distance, and their marriage is shaky. And it is serendipitously by chance the perfect story to have re-read straight after the perhaps less profound ‘Pink May’, with its similar circumstances of a catalytic ghost. But, contradistinctively, in The Storm, we have the couple’s different approaches to God and Religion. And the sudden freakish storm itself seems to bring them closer together. (‘The Storm’ is an earlier longer story, ‘Pink May’ a later shorter one!)
‘The Storm’ has various perspectives or viewpoints, including that of some Danish ladies below the terrace where the couple had been standing, and Rupert’s vision of six nuns in a chapel with an unreliable archway…
God as a beleaguering force or a catalyst like the ghost? The noise of fountains that plagued her as much as the marriage. A chain of rooms where he needs to defy echoes….
“…forms assumed a menacing distinctness, blade-like against the architecture of the clouds.”
The girl in orange, the ostensible ghost, a resisted-motion-in-time as an element of my erstwhile thoughts on Zeno’s Paradox…
“…and though she had not passed in an imponderable moment there had been an effect of speed about her forehead and blown-back hair.”
“Rupert had remained leaning forward on his elbows till the sound of her angry breathing from above him died away and the rustle of her dress diminished.”
As well as a blister on his foot…
“…through air that impeded his movements as in a dream.”
“doorways showed him empty doorways”
And a pin’s head vanishing-point.
“He did not know that there was a wind; indeed, it had been more than negative, that windlessness.”
A pent up timelessness followed by an incredible literary storm that you will surely not forget as easily as I once did! Leading to more of those Mackintoshes as objective-correlatives…
“They sat close together, so that their mackintoshes creaked in contact; each one enclosed within herself, aloof, chaste, inviolable to emotion. It was sitting thus that they heard the Englishwoman scream.”
The couple’s relationship and its future manqué?…
“…looking back over his shoulder at the destruction of her cities, trailing after him with slack steps.”
“…made him protective; something passive and weak was wanting, to come and cower against him. A dog, even, or one of the children that they might have had; but better than all, his wife.”
“She also had it in her to project herself, to stamp on time her ineffaceable image. She had an urgency which made her timeless,…”
“…eventually found him, squatting on one of the stools by the altar, low and toad-like, and her own shadow darkened his white face upturned towards her as she stood in the square dull greyness of the open door.”
“Rupert had been making himself nuns.”
Quite a catharsis of a story, that is both somehow overdone and restrained. No mean feat.
You see, God was at her elbow or pent up in her pen.
“God was everywhere, making arrangements,…”
THE LOVER
“…the very tick of the clock was hardly regular.”
Mention of No. 17 in this early story, where Cicely used to live, and now her brother Herbert had got her married out of spinsterhood to Richard and living here in a new place, and we glimpse a “piano top.” Herbert is even impolitically incorrect about women even in those days, I guess. Herbert who is also now engaged to Doris who is the perfect wife — “A young lady with symmetrically puffed-out hair returned both regards from out of a silver frame with slightly bovine intensity. Her lips were bowed in an indulgent smile – perhaps the photographer had been a funny man – a string of pearls closely encircled a long plump neck.”
Well, we go from a plump neck to an elbow…
“…they heard two blue-bottles buzzing against the ceiling. Richard hacked three-quarters of a new cake into slices, placed the plate invitingly at Herbert’s elbow and sat down on a music-stool.”
as Herbert visits the happy married couple in this rhombus of marital manners, that Aickman surely must have read!
“‘Doris has confessed to me that she was affected, quite extraordinarily affected, by our first meeting. It made little or no impression upon me. But Doris is a true woman.’
‘What is a true woman?’ asked Richard suddenly.”
“Richard; I consider woman most consistent, if she is taught – and she can be easily taught.”
“It was wasting pity to be sorry for them; he turned from his anaemic relations to review his long perspective of upholstered happiness with Doris. One might almost say that the upholstery was Doris. Herbert, feeling his heart grow great within him, could have written a testimonial to all the merchants of Romance. Having given love a trial he had found it excellent, and was prepared to recommend it personally, almost to offer a guarantee. Dear Doris would be waiting for him this evening; demure, responsive, decently elated; he was going to visit at her home.”
I quoted at length there to prove a point; what a strange farrago of social history we have been made to enter here. And Herbert, having forgotten everything, goes home shallowly to the upholstered bovine Doris. You can’t make it up! Bowen has plunged, across space, time and timelessness, such ironies straight into our woke hearts today.
I shall now look up what I said about this story in 2014 and place it in the next comment below…
2014
The Lover
“Richard had insisted on consigning the coal-scuttle that Herbert had given them to the darkest corner of the study.”
This turns out to be a sequel of ‘The New House’, where what the modern eye would see as unpolitically correct marriages ensue for the brother and sister. But dialogue rolls like water off the duck’s back of consciousness while, from ‘Lunch’, Marcia’s concept, of how ‘selfishnesses’ compete and eventually win out for each self, comes true. If ‘The New House’ was emblematic of Richardson’s Pamela Volume One (without the lust), ‘The Lover’ is Volume Two (still without the lust). A lunch without lust.
Woke the Elbow?
#waketheelbow
There are no formulae that apply to matters of the heart,
This review continues here: https://expenscusil.wordpress.com/elizabeth-bowen-stories-18/