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 of THE HOTEL will be conducted in the comment stream below:
I
“…through a blighted fag-end of Italy, through Switzerland in the rain.”
A train journey to the North from Italy toward Boulagne — and nobody could forget, except perhaps me, the meeting of two people — on this train though scenery now seen through the window by Mark Linklater (33 year old, barrister), scenery gloatingly seen by him to be déshabillé — the meeting in the dining-car of the train between himself and Cecilia Summers, widow, 29. He had left Rome because of a quarrel, another quarrel in a first Bowen chapter of a novel, both Cecelia and, eventually, Markie, reluctant to pick each other up, but still they do. He a bit like an “agreeable reptile” and she with an uncut novel, but “If she did not like him, she loved strangers, strangeness:…”
The scenery “looked distraught but perpetual, like an after-world. And in an after-world, she might deserve just such a companion: too close, glancing at her –“
And if he had a backstory of a Quarrel, and having lunched at the Vatican, her backstory is simply this: “…uncertain whether to marry again, she was quite happy only in one relationship: with her young sister-in-law, Emmeline.”
“…with a shriek on past Zug to Lucerne through the muffling rain, dashing light on wet rocks and walls, lashing about its passengers as though they were bound to a dragon’s tail.”
“The very thought of an intellectual talk as they writhed through Switzerland over a muggy dinner made him sweat with discomfort and put a finger inside his collar.”
“Neither Cecilia nor Mark had nice characters; all the same, this encounter presents them in an unfair light. On a long journey, the heart hangs dull in the shaken body, nerves ache, senses quicken, the brain like a horrified cat leaps clawing from object to object, the earth whisked by at such speed looks ephemeral, trashy: if one is not sad one is bored.”
Will they meet again in England?
The chapter ends not with elbows but with knees, feet and a hip. But to whom do they belong? — you will need to read this already cut book to find out! And, oh yes, I think I recall that Cecelia does not like fish. But there is much more in the chapter than I had enough room in my memory to recall.
II
“Lady Waters was quick to detect situations that did not exist.”
Lady Waters being ever on a hair-trigger alert (“Her smallest clock struck portentously, her telephone trilled from the heart, her dinner-gong boomed a warning”) for a crisis, this chapter of competing tulips, ending with suspicions of a secret (?) party having taken place in this wondrously described St John’s Wood surrounded house! Tells us much of the backstory concerning the family connections between — and characters of — Lady Waters, Emmeline and Cecilia: Cecilia who turns out to be waiting outside in a taxi, having returned from Italy and waiting for irritating Lady W to leave so she could come home to Emmeline alone together.
Lady W and E discuss the wanderlust Cecilia (“‘I often wish she would fly.’ / ‘She would arrive too quickly,’ said Lady Waters”) …. and their kitten cat Beelzebub (Benito) that may have come straight out of a yet unborn Aickman story!
A chapter that balances its first elbow against the onset of prehensile furniture amid the tulips colluding or even colliding with the weight of a thematic Link now set to fracture its Mark upon the already complexly, if naively, novelistic scenario just set up…
“‘Poor Markie …’ said Emmeline, balancing with an elbow against the mantelpiece. Cecilia thought what a lovely thing Emmeline was; […] Clear as a still-life in the limpid afternoon light, the ornaments smiled at each other and might be supposed after midnight to dance and tinkle: […] a tall rosy clock from Dresden (a heart on its pendulum, silent under a shade), a small gold clock, ticking.”
III
A chapter where a man called Tower small-talks answers with ignorance and indifference and boredom in mind, till he seems trapped by life passing as short sighted shadows by arguably a ‘shadowy third’ in the shape of Emmeline, who casts such shoals of shadows with her eyes?
We gain much of Emmeline, decked in those earlier white roses, at the party that turns out to have been held elsewhere, a party from the night before Cecilia arrived home. Emmeline meets Julian Tower in an equally white tie (compare the white tie of Thomas concurrently yesterday that I noticed in my review of Death of the Heart.) Julian had been walking out with Cecilia (a diminishing affair, now?) and he had only spoken with Emmeline before on the telephone… Emmeline who now reveals to him and us that she is a travel agent with the motto MOVE DANGEROUSLY – “But what everyone feels is that life, even travel, is losing its element of uncertainty; we try to supply that.”
Moving dangerously is perhaps what she is doing now, or was it then?
Raising eyebrows, as she does, while other Bowen women often seem to raise elbows!
They both notice another girl at the party with a mole on her back…
EMMELINE:
Below are some important passages about Emmeline for you to scry and cherish, details that are shared at the party, and after she got home to the Dresden Clock, with her sister-in-law Cecilia still on her way back on the train…
“Her thin arms, blue-veined inside the elbow, were crossed on her knee; the fingers curled idly up. He tried to say something to bring back her eyes to his own, to command her mild interest and lovely attentive face.”
“Had she wished, she could not have seen into him very far; she was short-sighted in every sense. Watching slip past her a blurred, repetitive pattern she took to be life, she adored fact – the exact departure of trains – and had taught herself to respect feeling. At a dance on a battleship she had been kissed by a sailor while searching the stars for Orion through a pair of opera glasses he lent her. He had breathed hard, knocking the opera glasses out of her hand – but now she remembered more clearly how the launch with her laughing companions ran under the bulk of the ship, and the stars at one startling moment … Since the sailor, she seemed to have been surrounded by shadowy people, acting without impetus, with no spring of passion to their behaviour, not throwing cracked opera glasses, as he did, into the sea.”
“Nothing could be as dear as the circle of reading-light round her solitary pillow.”
“The Dresden clock stood still at some ghostly hour:…”
IV
A lot of Bowenesque half-measures, and slow motion feeding of our awareness of Emmeline’s travel business with Peter Lewis, a man thought to be too Peterish! He feared he left the travel office unlocked – and he was right! When I feel anxiety at having left a place unlocked, I am always wrong.
And body-parts as potentially autonomous creatures…
“Cecilia was interested to hear that Emmeline had met Julian, at that party last night, while one was asleep in the train. […] All the same, as she lay turning on with her toe more and more hot water, melancholy invaded her.”
“…knee-to-knee round the painted table, […]
They were young women delicately compact as hyacinths;”
Later there is “lunching elbow-to-elbow.”
Raising eyebrows, seen again, if not elbows, as Cecilia looks at the photo of her late husband:
“…their whole married year seemed annulled; — a past they had not shared,… […] But Henry, raising his eyebrows, drawing down a little his upper lip, was still with amusement deprecating something or someone – or perhaps simply deprecating his own amusement.”
That time annulled, if not halved?
‘I’m half dead.’ Later ‘half-dressed’.
“…the perpetuation of the half-look that in life was so rare and fleeting disconcerted Cecilia.”
Peter’s later “glassy half-look.”
“Their secretary occupied a deal table half into the fireplace; she had wedged the legs with blotting-paper…”
I now notice there were four ‘halves’ in Chapter III.
Is Cecilia fat, or as bones sticking through like elbows of another book’s Portia?
“Cecilia picked two more grapes from the bunch on her tray. She was a little greedy, but, though the attractive lines of her face and figure showed no bones anywhere, did not put on weight.”
“Lady Waters insisted that they should call her Georgina, saying she did not feel like an aunt or an elder cousin at all, but an intimate –“
Well the story and its character interactions thus build up.
“Their secretary, recently down from Lady Margaret Hall, who worked for ten shillings a week and the experience, made more mistakes than usual in her typing.”
Mattresses as hands, apparently.
“There were maps stuck over with flags (to denote the position of clients),…”
One flag marked upon Cecilia’s emotional territory. We gather she has seen Julian again and fears the arrival of Markie!
I ain’t half enchanted and beguiled by this book. I don’t remember it being thus this much to the north of good.
Meanwhile, my reviews continue to live, if not, move dangerously!
V
“Julian had depressed Cecilia by talking about his niece, a girl of fourteen.”
…by the name of Pauline — a proto-Portia, I wonder? In any event, this is the ‘spotty’ orphan Pauline chapter, Julian having been made her guardian, and currently having her stay, as his sister who usually has her stay is having her own baby, or so I recall, without checking back.
“Her confirmation, which seemed to him premature, the fixing-in of a plate to correct prominent teeth and treatments for flat feet and curvature had all been reported to him.”
Her preparation for confirmation involved a book of “impure curiosity.” The mind boggles.
“She was diligently little-girlish; whimsicality distorted their conversation. She alternated between the romp and the dream-child, occasionally attempting the mouse,…”
“…she scratched his records and walked a whole box of needles into a rug:”
Some of Bowen’s literary analogies can only serve to stagger:…
“This descent of an orphan child on his life might have been superficially comic, or even touching. But the disheartening density of Proust was superimposed for him on a clear page of Wodehouse.”
Meanwhile, Julian allows Cecilia as a would-be analgesic against such angst: a Zeno’s Paradox of a Null Immortalis…a drowsiness of divinity, prefiguring ‘Eva Trout’…
“To be with Cecilia made a slowing-down and a break in this anxious consciousness; it was like falling asleep. Aware of her pretty figure in black on the sofa beside him, her head turned his way, her expressive hands – that, unlike other hands, seemed to exist to touch, to communicate their vitality – he relaxed under the enchantment of a delectable strangeness, this foreignness to himself that passed for her mystery. To be with her, so nearly to love her was to lend oneself wholly to an illusion, to hang in a drop of light in the lustres along her mantelpiece, to be reflected for less than a moment, like a bird’s shadow flashing across a mirror, in her dazzling ignorance of oneself.”
… that being a moment of reading passion in literature that is measureless and strangely memoryless. Harking back , too, to Cecilia’s toe-manipulation in the bath…
“…all the same she liked to receive confidences if these were conferred prettily, with some suggestion of her own specialness, not dropped on her toes all anyhow, like a bulky valise someone is anxious to put down.”
“Looking thoughtfully past Julian while he maundered on about Pauline, she remembered the one occasion when he had kissed her passionately, and looked again at his rather beautiful mouth.”
The ghost of one’s old love impinging on any future love…
“She told herself, she would have married Henry again and again. Turning half round, her elbow among the cushions, fixing on Julian a melancholic dark look, she missed Henry with impatience, as though he had gone to come back and was already too long away.”
A “shadowy continuity”… the ghost of Henry…
“These moments when he and she met – he going up, she down on a moving staircase, when their fingers brushed for a moment across the handrail – still left Cecilia perplexed and smiling.”
Meanwhile, Pauline on her own, awaiting Julian’s return…
“…the late afternoon, ticked away by small clocks all over the flat, had been more than long.”
She has earlier embarked on bus journeys across London on her own, following advice about what she should be wary of, involving the best anthropomorphism of a bus …
“Pauline had been told what happens in London and warned, especially, to avoid hospital nurses. […] The No. 11 is an entirely moral bus. […] – too busy to be lascivious –“
No hospital nurses, but nuns on the no. 11, which brings us back, perhaps with trepidation, to her ‘confirmation’?
“‘Do you like nuns?’ said Julian.
‘They have such sweet faces,’ said Pauline firmly. ‘It was a No. 11; coming back, the City looked quite enchanted.’
‘It doesn’t enchant me.’
Approaching, she stood at his elbow and watched with large eyes while he mixed himself a whisky and soda. ‘Do you really like that?’ she inquired, ‘or do you only drink it because you are tired?’”
The most amazing section in this wholly amazing chapter — one that has amazingly slipped my mind from first reading it years ago — is Pauline’s doll’s house vision, out of the window, a vision of the other windows she can see from Julian’s place. The pre-Kôr sensibility, the pre-Aickman Inner Room…
“Here she hung alone, at a toppling height in the London sky.
Pauline fingered the switches, but light poured into the pictures only, leaving the heart of the room cold. Olives writhing in the mistral, campanili flat in the sun, shadows gashing white water, a hare’s blood dripping into a glass all blazed alive at her with unfriendly vigour, as though she had opened windows into the wrong world. The room with its bunch of shadowy furniture became full of vacancy, in which Pauline hardly seemed to exist. A nice room, she thought, and suitable for an uncle – it had a too intelligent, muted luxury, a gloom of rugs and deep chairs, rather triste repose: in the shelves gilt lettering just did not catch the light – but needing a woman’s touch … When Big Ben struck, there was no one to whom to say, as she always did, that this made her think of the wireless.
[…] the windows darkened, reflected that she was an orphan, had had a French great-aunt and a troubled family history, had been confirmed when she was thirteen, was alone in her rich uncle’s flat five storeys up, and that her favourite poet was Matthew Arnold. These dramatic facts of her life fully coloured an hour’s blankness.”
Julian returns…
Pauline “sprang up to embrace him and kiss him just short of the ear,… […] …they should go to a film at the Polytechnic, a film with no nonsense in it, about lions.”
This review continues from here: https://etepsed.wordpress.com/2021/12/19/to-the-north-by-elizabeth-bowen/