Part Four of my review continued from here: To The North by Elizabeth Bowen
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 will be conducted in the comment stream below:
XVI
“She had even invited Tim Farquharson, as she feared to be short of men. […] Gerda’s line as a hostess was of adorable inefficiency; with the air of a lost child she tottered among her guests, in one hand a glass dripping sherry, in the other a semi-opaque yellow drink in which the skewered cherry appeared as a threatening shadow.”
How can one ever surpass Bowen with her skewered words and her shadowy cherries as well as thirds?
“; his name was Frank and he felt rather shy and masculine.”
Something rather disarming about that, too, as well as disabling, diselbowing… A party in Gerda’s drawing room, with celebrities, the great and the good, as well as her girl friends (“The girl friends, however, provided a sort of padding: intense in their interest, unflagging in their responsiveness, punctual with their laughter, they passed on the great to each other from palm to palm like scarabs.”)
Gilbert’s coming, too, but Emmeline has not yet arrived; later Cecilia never turns up.
Frank, you must read here about Frank, the most major minor-character ever, a sailor from someone’s past…
“…the Channel tunnel, would it or would it not promote good international feeling?”
…as then Emmeiine does arrive, ironically a shipping agent and a claustrophobic, to meet such a discussion !
‘I have been talking,’ he said sternly, ‘about the Channel tunnel.’
‘But God must have meant us to be an island,’ said Lady Waters,…”
…Lady W who had also arrived, trying to manoeuvre Frank and Emmeline, amid the sad case of Gilbert’s arrival, too…
Windows extend “on to a platform among the tree-tops. There seemed no room for Emmeline even to stand: guests by this time were being pressed out through the windows. Pink floppy lilies dropped pollen into the sticky glasses; cigarettes fumed to death in little jade saucers.”
“Nonentities gathered impetus as the party proceeded, celebrities mounted like hilltops into a haze of kind ambiguity.”
This sceptred isle, with a channel tunnel?! (was that even dreamt about in the 1930s, I ask?) as we move dangerously within Bowen’s own rarefied claustrophobia in this novel of early airports…
“This fortress built for nature by herself / Against infection and the hand of war.”’.
‘You mean what about quarantine? What about the Navy?’”
Tim F goes off with E to her car. Merely that. Social-distancing.
*
Cecilia, meantime, meanwhile, is alone elsewhere in her place, alone with Henry’s photograph. The quarantine of death, I wonder? Ghosts socially distancing, too, and dead friends on dead pillows.
“…the bright emptiness of this room with its smile fading became, brought up to the microscope of her nerves, a living tissue of shadows and little insistent sounds: the clock and the trees outside, a blind-cord tapping, her own dress rubbing against the sofa-back as she turned to listen. […] …an arc of emptiness spanned Cecilia’s horizon: she was so seldom alone.”
“She looked into Emmeline’s room, which, with counterpane drawn up over the pillow, looked shrouded, as though no one slept here now. A friend’s room with its air of guarding a final secret is like a death-chamber; here, still unknown, the sleeper seems many times to have died.”
“But she lent herself to a fiction in which she did not believe;”
…and so we believe in it more!
“…he [Henry] had not known when he died that this house existed and that a shadowy part of his life would continue here. […] His ignorance made, for the moment, the room ghostly. Propped up in a frame on a mantelpiece against which he had never leaned, over a hearth before which he had not reflected – for like Emmeline Henry had been a great stander and leaner – he looked across at a bed in which he had never slept.”
“She nightly returned to this mirror, these pillows, her sense of being a far too general gift to the world:”
“In the cupboards her dresses hung bosom to bosom coldly, as though they had never been worn. She ran down like a clock whose hands falter and point for too long at one hour and minute: the clock stops dead. She dissolved like breath on a mirror and trailed away like an echo when nobody speaks again …”
Bowen’s or Cecilia’s clock stopped dead: not even with the half measures of Zeno? The claustrophobia of flying nowhere? Ships crossing in the night with unbuilt or empty tunnels beneath the seas?
XVII
“A huge blue June day filled the aerodrome and reflected itself in the hall: she heard a great hum from the waiting plane hungry for flight. Such an exalting idea of speed possessed Emmeline that she could hardly sit still and longed to pace to and fro –“
Emmeline and Markie flying from Croydon aerodrome to Paris to meet the two Serbs, and something about that word ‘Serb’ halts me phonetically/ graphically if not semantically, and for a moment I nearly forgot to tell you of the amazing prose in all these adverb powers, including syntactically, as we are literally taken of from the earth in 1930s public air travel and landed back, via the archipelago of clouds, and visual, vibration-feeling and humming-hearing senses, in France, a Zeno speed pent up and expended whilst still in limbo. Probably the greatest few passages of the visionary-sensory (even hindsight SF) that Bowen ever wrote. (Writing ‘Bowen’ there reminds me momentarily of a punny joke someone recently cracked on social media when they saw my current obsessions with her work, a joke about a Bowen 747!)
I could quote the whole chapter, but I won’t.
“…he observed, however, from Emmeline’s face of delight that something had happened: earth had slipped from their wheels that, spinning, rushed up the air. They were off.”
“Close in the strong light and distant in roaring silence her face appeared transparent; watching the thoughts come up like shadows behind it he thought of the Scottish queen’s ill-fated delicate throat, down which, says a chronicler, red wine was seen to run as she drank.”
And a pencilled real time review on paper between them when travelling on the plane, against the deafening sounds, gives a new slant on this review itself!
“…free of that veil of uncertainty and oblivion that falls on the posted letter, the repercussions upon her of all he said. The indiscretions of letter-writing, the intimacies of speech were at once his.”
“Stayed by this feeling of unimmediacy she reviewed one by one the incidents of their friendship, each distinct from the other as cloud from cloud but linked by her sense of something increasing and mounting and, like the clouds, bearing in on her by their succession and changing nature how fast and strongly, though never whither, they moved. She was embarked, they were embarked together, no stop was possible;”
“– pointed a pause in which both felt something gained or lost, though neither, perhaps, knew which.”
It was still a ‘quivering plane’ even while they unboarded it.
“Paris, approached by its macabre north, wore its usual first air of being not quite Paris, or more like Paris than one foresaw.”
“An intense sense of being forced so close to the other as to be invisible,…”
XVIII
“‘If I shot anyone, I am the sort of man I should shoot.’ One clock struck midnight, a little before the hour.”
“There was a quiver of rockeries and hot gravel, burnt petrol hung over the privet and perfume from Mme Scherbatskoff’s abundant corsage. […] From the balustrades, from the stone rims of pools where there were no fountains heat quivered up;”
…as if both those quiverings are still attuned to the singular quivering of the earlier landed aeroplane?
And this chapter about Emmeline and Markie in the atmosphere of various parts of the Paris area, the business meeting with the Serbs and their wives, and the need for Emmeline never to be ready as she always has to go back to her hotel room by lift regarding varying business with her gloves, as well as the changing loves between them, hates and loves in relationship to all these activities…. Including Bowenesque timelessness and stillness and taxis swerving towards death or self-assassination, and the later views from the religious heights of Montmartre by contracted moonlight… all these passages of thought and event and scenery and self-characterisation by Emmeline vis à vis Cecilia so utterly utterly pretentious and rarefied they enter realms of Literature that cannot be gainsaid, merely absorbed, especially the passages that I have NOT quoted below…
“His eyes in a kind of extinction, blank of their evidence of an intelligence ravenous and satirical, fixed a shimmering point in the black-and-white vestibule tiles: passers-by stepped knee-deep into their cold light. Travelling at high velocity he had struck something – her absence – head on, and was not so much shattered as in a dull recoil.”
“Sliding heavily in its grooves the lift came down twice, twice the gates clicked open: there was no Emmeline. She might have melted in some corridor of their hotel, her bodily vanishing would, to the nascent uneasiness underlying his reason, hardly have been incredible; for he had been oppressed since last night by sensations of having been overshot, of having, in some final soaring flight of her exaltation, been outdistanced:”
“Following him with eyes that saw at once nothing and too much, she had seemed unwilling to be a moment apart from him: her finger-tips in the palm of his hand, in which every swerve and jar of the taxi became recorded, they had motored to Neuilly this morning to lunch with the Serbs.”
“….a sultrily-bright Paris Sunday of Maupassant’s, dramas behind the leaves.”
“Round Paris and far to the south, empty France spread her plan of baked plains and highways, treed river-valleys and splintery limestone hills. West of London, slopes rushing with cars diluted in sunshine: the Farraways hedge arched its view of an older summer, the lime showered shadow on to a lawn with Cecilia sitting: from the air you would look at chimneys that reeled as you flew …Emmeline, who had sent so many clients flying that her Bloomsbury offices seemed to radiate speed, now stood still with her hand on the bark of a tree in St Cloud – for they had gone a short way up an avenue – bark whose actual roughness blurred to the touch at the thought of so many forests, and longed to stand still always. She longed suddenly to be fixed, to enjoy an apparent stillness, to watch even an hour complete round one object its little changes of light,…”
“Markie, seeing how tired she was, with a lover’s tenderness and self-reproach, slipped a hand under her elbow. ‘Come along,’ he said gently. […] …he hurried Emmeline on, drawing her, with a hand still under her elbow, up avenue after avenue, wheeling her angrily round where perspectives met.”
“Markie, unused to going about with a woman on these terms, had yet to learn that a woman who seems to be ready early is never ready.”
“…so I walked down again: it took years.”
“: everyone moved in a fever or feverishly stood still.”
“…who had stripped off her glove to turn over and kiss her hand. She felt untrue to Cecilia: an unspoken good faith, based on some understanding that life must not be allowed to pass out of a certain compass, existed between them and was not lightly to be abused.”
“The new power, momentarily not bearing her up, became like wings dragging, a heaviness at the shoulders.”
“Their taxi steered between two lorries, bumped on an island and spun just clear of a bus. Emmeline laughed, seeing Paris spin round, and blinked at the crash of light. Markie stiffened and swore: his nerves were never too good.”
“Oh well, if one’s killed one’s killed.”
“Moonlight fell glacial, sinister, Doréesque on the roofs of the city and caught a curve of the Seine.”
“The church – for Markie an oppressive monument to futility – towered up high and frosty. An idea of the stored-up darkness of its interior – only apart from them by a door and curtain – stale gilt, cold incense and peering images in the perpetual scarlet of hanging lamps, created for Markie a kind of suction,…”
“‘We waste time,’ he said passionately…”
Indeed!
XIX
“Unfortunately it was raining, bad weather was moving steadily south;”
This is a borderline absurdist house party chapter, mistress-minded by Lady Waters, yes, the rain’s waters as well as the gluey Zenoism and Null Immortalis that I recently identified squelching from or into Aickman’s later absurdism of gatherings, say, in his Late Breakfasters or Go Back at Once novels. This gathering takes us back to Farraways, with a boring ornithologist in whom we should not be interested but later we are told he is called Graham Watts, and a celebrity composer called Marcelle Veness, who plays the piano at midnight. Into this world Pauline is plunged by Lady Waters who has her eyes on consequent machinations vis à vis Cecilia and Pauline’s Uncle Julian… and Cecilia later turns up at this gathering, but not Julian. Pauline is given a horrible girl called Loretta (who keeps her lipstick in a strange place), a girl provided by Lady W to amuse Pauline. And there is much about birds in this chapter, to match Emmeline’s latest flying from Croydon… “Are you fond of birds?”, Lady W asks Pauline gratuitously!
“After some miles, the chauffeur stopped to inquire if she [Pauline] were comfortable, but looked with far greater solicitude at the turbot.”
“…Lady Waters, in grey knitted wool, standing out on a duckboard, directed a gardener who was putting down numbers for clock golf.”
“‘My other niece,’ she said, ‘flew to Paris today – though she is not really my niece. Visibility looks to me poor today but it may have been different at Croydon; one never knows.’
‘Never,’ agreed Pauline. ‘How I dream of flying!’”
“When the gong for lunch sounded she [Pauline] crept like a mouse to the stair-head, then pranced heavily down.”
“Or, drawing out foot after foot with a squelch they would advance step by step cautiously and as though by accident.”
“No doubt she looked like a fairy, with bare legs and arms beside the pool in the rock-garden where the late spring flowers had fallen and the sundial, sad with no shadow, was streaked with rain … “
“Jarred by the late cry of a cuckoo, Cecilia found in the cloudy low arch of the sky, in the distant country like something reflected in water, the halt, the chill, the not quite oblivion of death.”
“Strangers, the kindly touch of the unforeseen – it was high time she [Cecilia] was abroad again.”
“…a widow keeps her prestige though she lie with a ghost.”
“She [Cecilia] said: ‘Does your dress do up at the back? Perhaps I could hook it.’
‘Thank you ever so much, it does up at the side.’
‘In my day, they did up at the back. Would you like your hair brushed?’
‘I brush my own hair, thank you ever so much.’
‘Was that a nice girl you were talking to in the garden?’
‘No,’ said Pauline in a burst of confidence, ‘she was a perfectly awful girl.’”
Lady Waters in To the North as an earlier version of St Quentin in Death of the Heart as an agent provocateur within a novel, trying to change it to another novel’s plot?
XX
“Sense leapt at the shade of a shadowy tussle about a door-knob.”
Julian arrives at Farraways for the day: a setting and a gathering already established in the previous chapter, ostensibly to see Pauline, but obviously or perhaps to see Cecilia, too. And J and C debate their future (or not) together — and they discuss Markie and Emmeline, the former being a Byronic figure? I sense a later Aickman-like Sapphic yearning in C when she thinks of there being a moon in Paris, whilst the cosmic shifting of the world as well as its clouds means there is none this evening in far Farraways nearer to home! And coupled with a typical retroactive Aickmanesque hint of women’s secret signs … when J is talking to P…
“Mrs Summers came in last night and offered to hook my dress, but it hooks at the side.”
Our picture of events and their linking by Bowen over the head of Lady W!
Bowen a sort of BoWending towards Null Immortalis?
“‘Why should one be tolerant?’ said Cecilia. ‘Life is really too short.’”
“I suppose I am worried; you see, it was I who picked Markie up in the train. If Emmeline likes him enough to be consistently charming, he would be mad if he didn’t fall for her. He isn’t a fool: he must know what’s good when he sees it. But their marriage would be a catastrophe: I should do everything to prevent it. He’s a bully; he’d make her wretched!”
Objects and furniture are sardonic…
“ – brass bowls, the piano, a tall screen painted with lilies – a sardonic indifference to their company. Remembering he was supposed to have come to see Pauline, she made off towards the door.”
“If this fresh understanding with Julian – or at least this return to a point where they had been more or less happy – could not lift the lowering sky or tune up the cuckoo, it at least set ticking again in Cecilia a clock that counted most hours of pleasure. Something unexpectedly sweet was dropped into her mouth opened wide for vacuous afternoon yawn.”
A vacuous yawn worthy of Eva Trout! And perhaps a teenage Pauline?
“‘That’s right, Pauline,’ she said.
‘Have you shown your uncle the view.’
‘I couldn’t find it,’ said Pauline, flustered.”
And the hidden cosmic theme of this novel, as well as the global, hinting at our darkening times, our travel recently stultified by Omicron…
“… Clouds closed in; the moon did not appear; darkness spread over the skies again; only the lime and a wet path silver for less than a moment had known of the moon’s rising. The tree and path faded; cloudbound while that tide of light swept the heavens earth less than suspected the moon’s perfection and ardour.”
“‘But this age,’ Lady Waters went on, ‘is far more than restless: it is decentralized. From week to week, there is no knowing where anyone is. […] The human spirit is more than literature. What, I often say to myself, does one want with books:’”
My only salve are books… And, as happens every time I read and absorb a Bowen: “Time fled, she had discovered a masterpiece;”
This review continues here: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2022/01/01/part-five-of-my-review-of-to-the-north-by-elizabeth-bowen/