Elizabeth Bowen Stories (18)
AS CONTINUED FROM THE SEVENTEENTH PART OF THIS REVIEW OF ALL ELIZABETH BOWEN’S STORIES HERE: https://dflcollaborations.wordpress.com/elizabeth-bowen-stories-17/
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 STORIESTHIS ADP
BREAKFAST
“Why was the only empty chair always beside Miss Emily?”
“…and squaring his elbows till one touched Miss Emily, who quivered.”
From squared elbows to lost collar-studs (“Perhaps they took little legs unto themselves and walked”) this is a series of tranches of breakfast talk amid an overnight growth in family members, and no matter we are confused, Ivy Compton Burnett would timelessly approve at this scatter-brained satire upon her? Or would she? She would be part of the Auntish ‘skirmishes’ about servants, and the fractured debate on early, late or rushed breakfasts (“whirling endlessly through space […] the unceasing consciousness of her unceasing consciousness”), and train times against the “round relentless clock face on the mantle”. The start of a huge book with all the ingredients necessary for retold dreams and Zeno’s Paradox and recriminatory cold-shoulders. Just take these examples —
“…the thick fumes of coffee and bacon, the doggy-smelling carpet, the tight, glazed noses of the family ready to split loudly from their skins […] only all my legs and arms were somewhere else. That was the time when you came into it, Aunt Willoughby. You were winding up your sewing machine like a motor car, kneeling down, in a sort of bunching bathing dress …”
“‘They’re not taking off the eight-forty-seven, are they?’ ‘Not the eight-forty-seven?’ ‘They are. That means either the eight-twenty-seven or the eight-fifty-three. The eight-fifty-three!’ […] ‘Mr Rossiter, we really must try not to lose our collar-studs.’ All his days and nights were loops, curving out from breakfast time, curving back to it again. Inexorably the loops grew smaller, the breakfasts longer; looming more and more over his nights, eating more and more out of his days.”
And, finally, premonitions of Bowen’s and Aickman’s Cows of Bashan…
“…her fumbling arguments that crushed you down beneath their heavy gentleness until you felt you were being trampled to death by a cow. By a blind cow, that fumbled its way backwards and forwards across you …”
I shall now show what I said in 2014 about this early story…
Breakfast
“‘Behold, I die daily,’ thought Mr. Rossiter, entering the breakfast-room. He saw the family in silhouette against the windows; the windows looked out into a garden closed darkly in upon by walls. There were so many of the family it seemed as though they must have multiplied during the night; their flesh gleamed pinkly in the cold northern light and they were always moving. Often, like the weary shepherd, he could have prayed them to keep still that he might count them.”
…as we do, as we try to count the many different things happening in this otherwise static realistic tableau of a breakfast, a feast of gossip, a recounting of last night’s dream (worth a whole surreal story in itself), the loss of collar studs, relationships pregnant with innuendo, plus much more – and that passage I quote above is the start of this amazing story and, alone, it takes up nearly half a page of a 12 page story. Why else ‘amazing’, you ask? Well, be there, and see. The language, paradoxically fractured yet smooth, meticulously picks images out of a pixelated painting of deeper and deeper things that you begin to feel and, yes, want to count or itemise. Plus a jabbing Ivy Compton-Burnettish dialogue. Eventually, you, too, leave this breakfast room, along with its characters, dissatisfied but equally full up.
Cf my recent review of Aickman’s novel: LATE BREAKFASTERS – https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2020/12/03/the-late-breakfasters-robert-aickman/
Is the “Old Mr Rossiter, who was not what he seemed,…” the same Mr Rossiter as in the previous story above, ‘Breakfast’? But, here it is dinner while the family is still just as mad, it seems!….
HER TABLE SPREAD
“I’ve destroyed my beautiful red dress and they’ve eaten up your dinner.”
Bowen’s trope of a torn red dress again, a destroyer in more ways than one, and here, again, Bowen’s ‘Unromantic Princess’, within a classic Bowenesque pre-Aickman dislocation, as well as the sound of Mr Alban playing piano music as accompaniment. But, there again, the windows are opened by the family to ‘let the music downhill’, in a castle upon an island amid the “bad times” (Ireland?) and thus becomes, I feel one of those alignment games of my childhood called Battleships and Destroyers. The Submarine, here, though, is missing. Alignment striving critically towards meaning or madness in the resistant water-dragging times that we also live through today.
Mr Alban has come, dared to come, despite this family’s rumoured madness, to seek the hand of their heiress, a special needs child called Valeria Cuffe aged 25 who mistakes him, amid her lantern-waving at the lit portholes of the anchored destroyer, at night, mistakes him for the sailor she once met from an earlier destroyer. That time before when the destroyer came, the sailors walked without touching the daffodils…
“…the windows, of which there were too many. He received a strong impression someone outside was waiting to come in.”
“…that constant reflection up from the water that even now prolonged the too-long day.”
“‘But they’ve been afraid of the rain!’ chimed in Valeria Cuffe.
‘Hush,’ said her aunt, ‘that’s silly. Sailors would be accustomed to getting wet.’”
“Once, wound up in the rain, a bird whistled, seeming hardly a bird.”
And in Bowen’s mackintoshes, nobody knows the whys and wherefores about anything, I guess…
“In mackintoshes, Mr Rossiter and Alban meanwhile made their way to the boat-house, Alban did not know why.”
And “among the apples and amphoras”, there is also an elbow to tweak…
“‘Let’s go for a row now – let’s go for a row with a lantern,’ besought Valeria, jumping and pulling her aunt’s elbow.”
“Ornamental Psychosis” cross-referenced to EB from LOOM: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2021/11/09/best-british-short-stories-2021/#comment-23467
SHOES: AN INTERNATIONAL EPISODE
“Outside, the pale glare of morning, unreal like mid-summer sunshine remembered at Christmas, painted garden tree-tops, blonde tiled roofs, and polished some green glass balls cemented on to a wall till one wanted to reach out and touch them.”
Here, the young English couple also “breakfasted”, Dillie with cigarettes, together with her husband, in a Katherine Mansfield sortie into French Farce, with serious adumbrations of characters and gender relations (“They discussed Edward and Dillie, Dillie in relation to Edward, Edward to Dillie, Edward and Dillie to Dillie’s shoes, and Dillie’s shoes to the Latin attitude. They discussed sex.”), and of self-sufficiency as buoyed or spoilt by tantrums, while, in this French hotel where they are staying on honeymoon, the shoes left outside their room overnight are wrongly replaced, or, at least Dillie’s shoes are wrongly replaced. What an episode of tantrums and thrown tempers as well as shoes out the windows in Dillie’s preserved pride in the dark light of the shoe-horrors she was left with! Not that size mattered (“She took six-and-a-halfs for ordinary wear and, when she wanted to be really comfortable, sevens.”) so much as a fevered concern about fashion’s taste.
Still they went out as planned to sight-see…
“How,’ she said scornfully, ‘can we possibly eat peaches in a cathedral?’”
“Dillie wore one of the local hats of thin, limp, peach-coloured straw;…”
A pair of ‘peach’ references to match the later ‘scarlet’ ones… her face went scarlet, as scarlet, I guess, as her later scarlet straps. Details we needed to know.
Edward is more philosophical…
“‘Queer thing, life,’ he said, marking time.”
And we mark time, too, in fine Bowenesque fashion, as he calms her down by suggesting whoever now had ownership of her shoes took them in order to ‘copy’ them; her shoes being so nice. And so rare in France!
Dillie, however, is no pushover ‘little wifey’ type! Or is she? She seems to be a bit of a creative writer. Maybe she wrote this, and tries to put herself in a good light, and Bowen altered things somewhat afterwards, so as to mention Van Gogh and the ‘brushing of crumbs from under her elbows’! One of them may even have been tipsy when Dillie was said to throw one foreign shoe out the window into a tree and the other upon a sun roof. A shoe tree! No, a palm.
Intense scenes of what I now understand can be called by the above term of ‘ornamental psychosis’, a condition that Bowen, typically, has given Dillie, but then Dillie counteracts against such writerly “inefficiency”, against a writer who does not really understand her.
I myself would round it all off, instead, with a honeymoon’s reconciliation and a regathering of self-respect, against any other “whirlwind of thought” or unreachable green glass balls.
Even if…
“The travelling clock loudly, officiously ticked.”
And now a shoe was tucked beneath either armpit in the next story below…
My review of a very scary horror story and a very rare one called ‘JUST IMAGINE . . .’ is shown here: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2021/11/24/hells-elbow/
This review continues here: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2021/11/24/my-huge-review-of-elizabeth-bowen-stories-19/