PART TWO, as continued from here: https://elizabethbowensite.wordpress.com/2021/11/27/the-hotel/
All my reviews of Bowen novels will be linked here: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2021/11/27/elizabeth-bowens-novels/
All my links of Bowen stories: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/31260-2/
My gestalt real-time review of THE HOTEL will be conducted in the comment stream below:
8. IN THE DRAWING-ROOM
“‘I personally find the day so very full here, it seems only too short.’
‘I wouldn’t say too short. But as days abroad go, one seems to get through them quickly enough.’”
We are now with the aforementioned forbiddingness of the ladies group in the drawing-room. And as they talk about Mrs K (later about the mysteries of her “nearly grown up” son) but, first, her generally being seen, from other balconies, sitting on her balcony alone all day, and someone says that she must have something on her mind. And another lady says (in this drawing room, hence my bold print)…”I should rather say that she had something in her mind all the time, at the back of it.”
“….another lady who with the aid of much gamboge and vermilion was touching up a water-colour, a sunset.” See later reference in this chapter to Monet (which reference Sydney makes later upon entering the room when looking for Tessa.)
Earlier, the ladies had discussed Mrs K being absorbed in or by Sydney or vice versa, I forget, but there is even mention of a “violent friendship”…
And a lady tellingly with no name at all, or none that we are given, says about ‘aloneness’: “Once I sat with the door open and, believe me, I could hear four different clocks ticking – […] …as if I didn’t exist. If somebody does come to the door or the telephone does ring, I’m almost surprised to find I’m still there.”
All this is the oblique essence of Bowen, someone who is not “motherly-looking” but can nevertheless absorb us “point blank.”
9. MY LITTLE BOY
“Carnations are not costly before they reach the flower-market, grown on terraces that stagger up the hills and picked in the grey quiet of the morning to the accompaniment of singing and of never-answered calls that come dropping down forlornly from terrace to terrace to the coast.”
Yes, this is this chapter about carnations, and Sydney’s view of happiness. as a fragile bubble or learning to ride a bicycle. After a plea from Cordelia (aged 11) for Sydney to walk with her instead of her boring Nanny, a plea that was refused, Sydney takes a letter that has arrived at reception for Mrs K in her room, a letter from her son Ronald currently in Dresden announcing that he will be visiting their hotel, and thus The Hotel itself. The implications of this for Sydney’s and Mrs K’s relationship is batted back and forth subtly.
“…leaning her side and elbow against the side of the sofa. ‘I could stay like this for the rest of the afternoon,’ said Sydney.”
Staying as still as Ronald in his mother’s photo of him that the latter has displayed in her room? Well, I, at least, wondered that.
As a postscript, I will says that I have already spotted that the next chapter is entitled ‘Mr Milton’, so I’m now intrigued, in hindsight, by Mrs K’s view that Mr Milton “feels spikes everywhere and rushes to impale himself.”
10. MR MILTON
“The Lawrences made him an apple-pie bed and used to send him suggestive Italian picture post cards anonymously to see how much he would stand.”
A portrait of Milton the clergyman by dint of his interface with two women, at first with Miss Fitzgerald (she of the Quarrel with Miss Pym)…
“She broke off and reached up suddenly in apparent confusion to pluck a small, still rather sickly orange from a branch above her. This, without looking at him again, she bit, right into the peel.”
A strange, tellingly psychological act of bitter taste, that seemed impulsive during this encounter with Milton.
And Milton also in interface, of course, with Sydney, that seems to summon up or, rather, inspire a later Bowen’s Mysterious Kôr (the place, not the story which contained that place)…
“…that no part of dark Africa remains undiscovered,…”
Milton seems to receive psychologically the comfort of his own safety at the thought of the danger of such mysterious realms that appear in Adventure stories, rather than that they may be vanishing.
“Night had come as always, with the catastrophic suddenness which does not for a long time cease to be alarming.”
After the remarkable colour Sydney and Milton saw during a Mediterranean sunset.
And Sydney’s dolls house description of opening the front of hotels to see everyone at once seems strongly to pre-figure Aickman’s The Inner Room story …
And Milton’s then having the “idea of God of which he permitted himself to be conscious, as of an enormous and perpetually descending Finger and Thumb.”
The ‘compulsion of furniture’ in this image also seems to pre-furnish Bowen’s ornamental psychoses…
And Sydney’s consequent ‘Idea’ with a capital ‘I’ of the church with ready made pews, almost a dolls house image itself, suggesting that such an Idea encouraged Milton to become a ‘parson’, an Idea that seems rather memorable, although I had forgotten about it till now!
Cross-referenced with the doll’s house today in my concurrent review of Eva Trout here: https://nemonymousnight.wordpress.com/864-2/#comment-810
11. THE DANCE
“…a close-packed row of onlookers sat or stood along the walls, pressing up so near to the band that the red-coated fiddlers began to look desperate, having scarcely elbow-room.”
This is almost as if the hotelbow has been turned into one of those fairy-tale balls rather than tennis ones, while still harbouring the various characters and their interactions, but potentially with any inhibitions removed…
“…several couples of girls were dancing together. Some of the elder ladies had also taken the floor and were spinning round at a high velocity in the arms of their usual bridge-partners,…”
Mrs Duperrier watches her husband vanish into the garden after …Veronica, is it?
But the main outcome that Ronald’s sudden arrival in the role of Mrs K’s son is almost unnoticed, an anticlimax he feels, as if snubbed, while he watches the dances. Mr L-M takes charge of him, I recall.
Milton, meanwhile…is flirted with by Eileen Lawrence, I think,
“…she had less on than he could have imagined possible.”
“Heavens, if this were Monte!” Or Monet? …
Milton “thought of the whole band of white hotels like palaces along the line of coast into which their own seemed now to be knitted – hotels with light streaming out of them towards the tideless sea that, never advancing on the shore or receding from it, was like an inexorable unfailing Memory,…”
What a wondrous image. Bowen is second to none.
Gauche Milton with so much attention on Eileen’s arms without even mentioning her elbows, but the elbows are of course absurdistly inferred, at least for me!
“‘What jolly arms you’ve got!’ he, feeling still immensely far from her, was moved to exclaim.”
But it is Sydney whom Milton so gauchely wants, not Eileen? But he still wants to dip a finger in the latter… with the smouldering of a luminous-nosed Dong?
“…laid a hand on her arm to detain her. He entreated, ‘Not till the end of this dance!’ His unwillingness to give her up was not decreased by a sharp irritation that she with her white arms and her attractiveness. […]….which he was conscious of as something as material as phosphorescence, in which he could have dipped a finger curiously…”
Love is spoken of in the same breath of his mind as the name Sydney, as Milton counts the balconies in the night and Mrs K at her balcony turns into Sydney and, so, who is the shadowy third to his hopes of ‘love’ with Sydney? Ronald or Mrs K?
Meanwhile, to explain my startling Dong thought above…
“Their cigarette ends glowing and fading preceded them like a pair of luminous noses, and equidistant spots of fire advertised that other pairs of Dongs were promenading solemnly.”
One of those chapters of literature that should be enshrined.
12. ANY HOPE?
“Cordelia begged that she might be allowed to visit the graveyard. Milton observed conventionally that her taste seemed a little bit morbid.”
After discovering that Mrs K is now co-opted by her son, she accepts a walk with Milton but then is also persuaded, without his knowledge, to make it a Bowensque threesome with Cordelia, a precocious little girl. The results are classic romcom material, but the character of the girl seems to bear the soul or mysterious core or even Kôr of Bowen herself.
Cordelia discusses books with Milton… as she says “My two favourite authors are Rider Haggard and the Baroness von Hutten. Who are yours?”
Then, Sydney’s mood, perhaps a preternaturally prophetic reference — as affected by the intrinsic girlish morbidity of Cordelia — to a far future book by another author as yet unwritten…
“…some new mood, not of her own, was coming down over them like a bell-glass.”
13. CEMETERY
“Cordelia for the last ten minutes had been hurrying, her whole self narrowed down; she had become silent with apprehension. She was tortured by an expectation that the cemetery with its ornaments might have rolled itself up and vanished, or worse, that it might fail in its pungent appeal, so that she would not this time experience what she had learned to describe as a frisson as she gazed through the gloom of the trees down that distracting prospective of monuments.”
I now realise that this is Bowen as the young woman Sydney talking with herself as a young girl called Cordelia, even calling her at one stage a horrible little ghoul! So, in effect, one of these two Proustian selves (as herself! ) must have been the shadowy third in the threesome with Milton, the clergyman who (SPOILER) has now gone off in a huff, with his marriage proposal declined, not only abandoning this ‘date’ with Sydney but also the ‘dates’ Cordelia was bringing back to him.
This interface of Bowen’s two younger selves prefigures the nature of death, and her older self’s ‘shoals of the dead’ after the London blitz, and, here the visit to the cemetery, with some exquisite unmissable prose descriptions of it, has the jostling dead longside the Zeno’s Paradox timelessness she came to share, I feel, with Aickman or at least with his work…
“The present, always slipping away, was ghostly, every moment spent itself in apprehension of the next, and these apprehensions, these faded expectancies cumbered her memory, crowded out her achievements and promised to make the past barren enough should she have to turn back to it.”
“‘Oh!’ said Sydney, and glanced behind as though she might expect to see the new dead jostling one another in the gate.”
And if you are an Admiral when alive that means you are still an Admiral after your death, Cordelia meaningfully out-meanings her older self with this thought!
14. MUSIC
“He sang ‘Funiculi-Funicula’ and ‘O Sole Mio’, and presently (encouraging his little girl to dance for their English friends and quickening the measure till her brief skirts spun out into a disc) a song about the beauties of a doll.”
Some amazing material here about a Mann minstrel in the siesta with a Manndolin, and his blind dancing girl; I must quote much of the performance below! Particularly for what happened after it between Ronald and his mother, Mrs K, in interface now with the shadowy third that has become Sydney in the older lady’s mind, perhaps… [Mrs K says later to Ronald: “She is a very disappointable girl. But it really is a pity from our point of view, because she’d be moving out now and you would be moving in.”]
“‘The little devil’s blind,’ said Ronald, pointing down and moving his shoulders angrily, for there were two what he called great fat women leaning on his back.
The word spread somehow, and when the child’s eyes again dropped open, then lazily shut, several people were alert to notice that the eyes were china-white. The minstrel, appreciative of the interest thus created, pulled his companion forward and stopped in his song to advertise her with a flourish. ‘Cieca, cieca!’ he exclaimed, and straddled shining up at them, all teeth. The little girl, in the ecstasy of this, flung her arms out and began to dance again, whirling at such velocity that it was as though she tore the music from the mandolin to follow her. Ripples of ‘Shame’ and ‘Cruel’ crept down the balcony, but from the windows above the first drops of a shower of nickel were spinning already. The shower thickened, and there was for a moment or two in the air a continous glitter. The little girl paused leaning against the wind of her movement and seemed to listen in ecstasy. She snatched up handfuls of air and surrendered them laughingly, then flung herself with cries of delight to and fro on the gravel and, groping, gathered up her harvest. There followed some heavier coins, the escape of a sigh and a faint burst of horrified laughter. ‘But she is happy,’ maintained Sydney, standing back against the frame of the window, and a voice she could not trace but believed to be Milton’s supported her with ‘Yes, yes, she must be.’
Ronald wriggled beneath the weight of the two good women,…”
As the fat women who had been leaning upon Ronald’s body, his legs and arms, thus knees and elbows, as they all looked at the show below from the potential Last Balcony of all! Eventually leaving Ronald and his mother alone, in possibly one of the most rarefied and subtle love scenes in the whole of literature. The shoals of the dead having left the stage..
‘“And now?’ his mother said, after some moments in which the music, having come to an end, the shoal swept past from the balcony with a sympathetic aversion of glances.”
“Ronald, you were so subtle. I was inadequate.’”
Whether a bathroom’s “white tiles” or a “thickness” become “infinite deprivation”, or “a thousand satirical reverberations in – say – a Wilde play. But really, one is able to take it quite simply….”
“Of course, I do date hopelessly, as Sydney says.”
More of Milton’s avoided ‘dates’?
“schärmerie” versus “backfisch”…
“…he drew in his feet and stared a little haggardly round the drawing-room.”
Thus now moving his knees as if now become a rider (haggard)…
“One had a sense of being caged into this crowded emptiness.”
“…the stretched brocades would rip audibly, the potbellied vases crack.”
“Looking down at her he went back through his memory, past his admiration for Rossetti, to the day when at six years old he had called his mother ‘My Beautiful’.”
He ends “with folded legs and limply hanging arms”, while Mrs K submits to Siesta. Hanging arms have no elbows to speak of, I vouch, while folded legs retain their knees, which takes on a new significance when one remember what happened earlier between Mrs K and Ronald with regard to their knees! —
“She laid a hand on his knee, leaned back her head against the wall and, he believed, even blushed her contrition;”
“His mother took up one of his hands, turned it over thoughtfully, then laying it down on her knee pulled each finger gently, spreading each out and feeling the tip with her own.”
This review continues here: https://etepsed.wordpress.com/1013-2/