Elizabeth Bowen Stories (9)
AS CONTINUED FROM THE EIGHTH PART OF THIS REVIEW OF ALL ELIZABETH BOWEN’S STORIES HERE: https://nemonymous123456.wordpress.com/elizabeth-bowen-stories-8/
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 CASSOWARY
My ongoing reviews of all Elizabeth Bowen stories start here: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2021/10/05/the-collected-stories-of-elizabeth-bowen/
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“For Christmases, Crecy holly-branches had decorated the church; the theft was hallowed, yet those darkly cavernous or lividly-shuttered windows searching through the December garden still afforded spoilers an agreeable tremor.”
Holly and umbrellas, important Bowen objective-correlatives. Pince-nez and ping-pong, too. And only pot boilers need to worry about plot spoilers, but never Bowen’s richness of expression and shadowy thirds.
“‘And remember to ask them about the holly for church.’
‘I’ll warn them that if they don’t send some we’ll steal it. We always have,’ said the Vicar’s daughter.”
In this story, the Shadowy Third syndrome reaches apotheosis. Whatever the shapes in Burne Jones, or the shape, that is, of Paul Melland, the once missing missionary in the Bowen jungle who now rhymes with cassowary. Crecy Lodge has been empty for a long time, and the Lampeters fill it till their staying there makes it even emptier like an encamped ghost house (full of furniture that we are asked to touch and savour) as the dead one returns to haunt it, too — that Melland who once made one of the spinster sisters a widow and now returns to make the other a wife.
Margery Bonner, some ten years younger, is the shadowy third to the changing pairs within that triangle of two spinster sisters and missionary? Quite young to be spinsters at all.
Him back too from Timbuctoo. Makes two three. That missionaree!
Some important passages….
“Mr Melland, taboo but intensely vital, accompanied her everywhere; it was like meeting a married couple to whom the sister, her office of protector and showman declining, became an awkward and often superfluous third.”
“…a kind of encamped and temporary expression about the furniture, the fall of the draperies, the pictures and ornaments, choice but too thinly disposed. By an almost over-discretion in the arrangement of the drawing-room each member of the family seemed to have striven and failed to impose on the others a feeling of permanence she herself did not possess. The harmony of those evenings Margery passed with the Lampeters seemed to her, looking back afterwards, to have been upheld intact, like a ball of glass upon a fountain, by a perpetual jet of effort. Evening on evening spent in Crecy lamp and firelight could never assure her that at any time, twelve hours after, they might not have stolen away, and that only vast unlit chandelier would be left there dripping iridescently over an empty floor.”
“She [Margery] forgot the Lampeters, first deliberately and then with such ease and naturalness that when she did endeavour to remember them they returned reluctantly, very pale and almost indistinguishable.”
Shadowy Thirds as a Venn Diagram of areas blurring in and out of haunting. The reader and an inferred Bowen as first mover, too.
From Internet: “Cassowaries are shy and they are usually hard to spot, at least in their natural rain forest habitats. They are not overly aggressive, and attacks are rare. But they can do a lot of damage if they are provoked or angered.”
Looks like an umbrella with two handles. Aiaigasa!
Perhaps relevant page about Aiaigasa in the context of this story: https://skdesu.com/en/aiaigasa-love-umbrella/
MOSES
I wonder if Mr Thomson and his fiancée Fenella shared his parasol at the end when they remained in the heat of Rome, upon the “blazing steps”, and upon this, their late assignment from their separate hotels (whose fault, the lateness?). They were meant originally to be viewing the wrist-bones and sinews, if not elbows, of Michaelangelo’s Moses past the top of the steps in the cooler church, but, instead, they face life’s Zeno Paradox together. Never to arrive, or never were at all. Irises bought from dark-skins to match.
“‘We might have been half-way to the what’s-his-name by now!’
Indeed, they might have been further than half-way.”
WOMEN IN LOVE
“‘And one sees,’ she told him, ‘the top of that marvellous flowering apple tree.’
‘Pear’, said Joanna. ‘Apple trees blossom later.’”
…as do stories after many years of neglect (neglect, because their ending comes to a thud more than a ‘contented’ if not ‘tentative’ or even ‘happy’ ending). As Joanna puts a ‘cosy’ on the teapot, someone has just started pouring out this neglected story, with no Lawrencian undercurrents as far as I can tell, but there are cigarettes and tea-making. Maybe Tonia walking towards the woods and ending up in a woodshed is Lawrencian, but do please compare the other Bowen story the title of which comes very close to this one’s title in the terms of alphabetical order and the other story’s own Lawrence stamp! The story of Joanna’s selling of her house (with Bobbin the cat as sitting tenant) in the country, selling it for financial reasons, her father’s death we are led to believe causing this embarrassment, but later, perhaps, we wonder if an exploding camping cooker blinding a male painter friend of hers is the real reason? Or was that cooker by word association with her own kitchen range that she tries to ‘sell’ to the engaged couple, Andie and Tonia, and the non-business heart-to-heart conversations this couple end up having with an adopted shadowy third (Joanna), talking about their own romantic angsts? Leaving us all in the dark, not only the painter.
“To me, the link between two things stands out a mile.”
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My still continuing Bowen tea-pourings in alphabetical order: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/31260-2/
A woman’s white hands — and Archie’s twisted legs, for Wilson to trip over. The elbow tree is just just an added extra from me, a photo I happened to take earlier today.
“‘They’ve been ringing for the last half-hour and you didn’t seem to mind,’ said Gilda Roche, bending down to knock the ash off her cigarette into Laura’s tea-cup.”
“…listening to Gilda and watching Laura listen – he had been curiously attracted lately by the movements of her big head and big, rather incapable-looking white hands.”
“Not when there was nobody about. What would it matter if everything was off or on? Nobody would be the better for it. What’s the good of being sincere when there’s nobody to be sincere at?”
“‘I suppose one will live a good bit in the past and future if one has got too much time to think and not enough to do in the present.’
‘What future, Archie?’ said Mrs Roche with curiosity.”
A group of people talking in the drawing-room having tea, Wilson the servant impatient to clear up the cups, during a golden dusk and amid the start of bells pealing outside. Archie is about to go off to Africa for four years, and he says the bells are holy, while these bells are irritating to some of the others, various women, and a big fair girl, talking confusedly enough for us to let the chatter flow over us, about Adam and Eve, and whether to be naked is more real as a person or is it less real than if you have chosen clothes for yourself to wear, and the nature of time in past, present and future that fits with a gluey Zeno’s Paradox again, and will things continue without you, and whether it is worth doing anything if nobody else is aware of it. Does this story exist at all if you never read it, I wonder? Or does it last forever unless you read it, and then it can finally end, along with its bells. And Wilson can clear up at last. (Son of (free) will?)
I shall now look up what I said about this story in 2014 and append it in the next comment.
nullimmortalis December 22, 2014 at 6:33 pm
Sunday Evening
“What’s the good of being sincere when there’s nobody to be sincere at?”
The best argument (from 1923) against the current fashion of Anti-Natalism that I’ve ever heard!
A Socratic conversation between ladies and one man in an informal free-for-all about life, the universe, everything – a conversation that has the remarkable quality of being innocent and complex, simple and confusing, all at the same time. Both Ivy Compton-Burnett and Bridget Jones.
The Adam and Eve topic – that they cover – seems to take on a new nullimmortalis December 22, 2014 at 6:33 pm Edit
Sunday Evening
“What’s the good of being sincere when there’s nobody to be sincere at?”
The best argument (from 1923) against the current fashion of Anti-Natalism that I’ve ever heard!
A Socratic conversation between ladies and one man in an informal free-for-all about life, the universe, everything – a conversation that has the remarkable quality of being innocent and complex, simple and confusing, all at the same time. Both Ivy Compton-Burnett and Bridget Jones.
The Adam and Eve topic – that they cover – seems to take on a new slant when you think of Adam and Eve’s ‘Shadowy Third’… You heard it here first.
My review of THE GIRL WITH THE STOOP: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2021/11/04/the-smile-of-november/
THE MAN AND THE BOY
“…leant on doubled elbows on the table, gouging the gravel under his chair with one heel.”
…and that is Benjie, 12, sitting (near a mad dog) with Tom, 12 years older than Benjie, the former being his stepfather, having married B’s mother, Antonia, 33. And they are touring Europe with Theodore, a sixty something expert on churches, and all are controlled by Antonia, but Tom has put A’s car in premature decarbonising, thus the stymie of their moving on to another more interesting town today, much to A’s irritation. She’s recently suffered a tummy with “tin rats”, it seems — a cacophonism for some euphemism involving indigestion, I guess. There are also two nuns with stuffy skirts that sweep the dust. And Benjie kicking an apple in desultory fashion. The last sentence, for me, completes the work satisfyingly by adding these words: “deleted the eupeptic Theodore.”
This review continues here: https://conezero.wordpress.com/elizabeth-bowen-stories-10/