PART TWO OF MY REAL-TIME REVIEW CONTINUED FROM ….
HERE
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All my links of Bowen stories: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/31260-2/
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5
“Lady Latterly found an emerald ring, forced it on, made it flash undecidedly, tore it off.”
Now we come to it. This is the Bowen chapter to end all Bowen chapters. How could I have forgotten its importance and power? It is evidently the reason that I have, publicly, long since dubbed this book the world’s greatest ghost story. But now after my recent rite of passage through much of Bowen and Aickman, I can also safely call it Bowen’s apotheosis of a future Aickman’s novels and stories. It contains his essence, his works, his themes, his soul — all such factors perhaps working retrocausally upon Bowen, if one believes in the preternatural power or parthenogenesis of fiction itself. Or Aickman contains the Bowen soul? While there is a drogulus disguised as an old man like me (or like Terence in this chapter) acting as the grouchy messenger between these two souls. And another mention of the Montefort hall clock: a disinherited clock: and please don’t miss the reference to this clock further below in my Bowen quote-upholstered real-time review as ‘Soliloquy of Prothero’ (SICnificant)……..
At first I thought Lady Latterly would be a reincarnation of Lady Waters in ‘To The North’ and the equivalent in ‘The Hotel’, and in many ways she is. But she is also the predatory Sapphic from Aickman. And the mannish woman or feminine man in, say, ‘The Trains’…a cross-dressing between each of the aforementioned pair of souls. Evolving in this chapter, a panoply of dense visionary text that staggers the mind, page after page after page…. It is an importuning and inveigling fantasy Mariendbad somehow in this brand of Irish castle (“It was about two years since Lady Latterly had bought this unusually banal Irish castle, long empty owing to disrepair.”) — with dinner party guests and masks et al, the women outshining the men to the nth power, to the north power. All cohering and evolving in real-time toward the Guy gestalt or ghost as soon as Jane, drinking alcohol for the first time in her life, utters his name aloud before dinner, where an empty place had already been set! Meanwhile, Lady L is “haunted – nobody could be certain by quite what.”
“Oh, so that’s where you’ve always been, is it – not here? Why has nobody told me you existed?”
Lady L, having said this to Jane, sets her sight upon her Sapphically as the golden changeling, and there is much disarming (or as I now call it, diselbowing) physicality that the lady exerts upon the young girl.
“‘Why have I never seen you?’
‘I imagine because I am never there.’
‘You ought to do something about that,’ said Lady Latterly, abstractedly leaning forward to view her make-up foreshortened inside the triple glass.”
“…a replica, priceless these days, of a Mayfair décor back in the 1930s – apparently still lived in without a tremor.”
“The bedroom gained still more unreality by now seeming trapped somewhere between day and night – this marvel of marbling and mirror-topping, mirror-building-in and prismatic whatnots being at the moment a battleground of clashing dazzling reflections and refractions.”
“‘Any moment, these bastards will be arriving!’
Jane asked: ‘Is it a large party?’
‘Eight or ten; it depends if some of them come.’
Lady Latterly rose, cast away her wrapper and, in little else, stood vibrating as though with an engine running.”
Lady L is dogged by Murphy’s Law, it seems…
“….the number of baths she had had installed under dry tanks, the lovers said or servants known to have left her, the failure of her house-parties to arrive or, still worse, leave again,…”
“But if she chose to make history out of her vicissitudes, that was really from vauntingness – nothing beat her; she had a way of worsting one. Now she was cunningly finding her way into her own dress; and as the yards upon yards of sun-coloured chiffon perfectly fell into place around the hostess, leaving her only to make negligent play with a few loops, Jane’s spirits mounted: this was what one had come for! For the girl tonight was in a mood for the theatre, and for that only – what else, as a finale to her inconceivable day, was to be endured? Here she was, spirited out of Montefort into this foreign dimension of the castle, in which nothing, no one could be unreal enough.”
Jane is given a controlling rôle at the dinner party, a theatricality that Jane yearned …
“Jane said, ‘Lady Latterly will be late,’ for the first time wondering why. A woman, the apparently only other, diagonal in a black dress on a white sofa, nodded tardily at her over a picture paper, then took a cigarette out of a box – scoffingly, she had lighted it for herself before the group had so far collected its wits as to break ranks. Who knew where they had all come from? The girl, at the advantage of being less surprised by them than they were by her, detachedly heard the silence break up into a clash of experimental, isolated remarks. She had no way of identifying the male speakers, nor did she try to – she looked from face to face, with her lips apart, uncertain as to whom to award the golden apple of her attention.”
We catch snatches of conversation … from people we cannot now barely recall…
“‘Everywhere’s far from here,’ she said, elatedly taking in the fictitious room. ‘Round here, you know, that seems to be true of everywhere.”
“Lady Latterly was either defying them to have seen enough of Jane, or inviting them to look at the girl again in the new entrancing relationship she had with her.”
Peregrine the barman seems a controlling force further up some leasehold pecking-order beyond Jane or even Lady L or even the Bowen freeholder! Not leasehold at all?
“The evening reeked of expense: everything cost, nothing was for nothing – Lady Latterly calculated the pretty penny, and everbody was being kept hard at it paying up. Nor did ‘everybody’ exclude Jane, who was paying by being the lovely nobody, exhibited but not introduced.”
Other snatches of words between the cocktails, even a reference to telepathy.
“Vanity, guilt and sentimentality were at work in him, undiagnosed yet worked upon by the aliens.”
And Terence, an older or even old man, is later given a place beside the empty space at the table. Ophelia is mentioned again in this book, and Shakespeare is somehow summoned for his Macbeth and a role for a drogulus at the dinner table, But who is the drogulus that Jane pesters for memories? Someone called Terence, it seems. But even Montefort seems to vanish in the mind of whatever drogulus he is — just as something called Guy seems to form out of Jane’s later foolhardy enunciation of this name into the air or Ayer of the castle.
“Do you remember Montefort?’
‘Montefort? Pity that place has gone.’”
Lady L’s Mamie…
“Jane glanced at Mamie’s pomegranate toenails, curling out of a sandal, but said nothing: the contents of the glass, which sip by sip became the contents of her, had no bearing whatever upon the situation that she could see. She experienced the absolute calmness, the sense of there being almost no threat at all, with which one could imagine fighting one’s way down a burning staircase – there was a licking danger, but not to her;”
Then the crux comes, a mix of Antonia as Guy himself transverted? —
“She drew a profound breath. ‘My cousin Guy –’ But Peregrine stood over her with the shaker;”
“Only, all went to heighten her striking power – and had she not struck when she spoke the name! It had left her lips and was in the room. Guy was among them. The recoil of the others […] the butler vanishing from the door had no more than offered an alibi or afforded cover for a single, concerted movement of disarray on the part of these poor ghosts on whom the sun had risen, to whom the cock crew. Lady Latterly moaned as she stood up; dissolution flowed through the chiffon and her limbs as she linked what was left of an arm through dissolving Mamie’s.”
“…the glissade of the shadow-show, the enforced retreat from here to nowhere – but herself was caught in the mist of their thinning semblances.”
“She was right; there was one more figure among the men – all knew this; what were they waiting for? Or might no man move till she raised the spell?”
“In the following pause the rest of the roses, outraged and candle-scorched, began to shed petals over the salted almonds. Seated across the table, which was a round one, Jane faced the gap in the ring of lit-up masks.”
“Guy had dined here often. A moth sheered the candles and fell scorched on to Mamie’s rose – at which Terence’s eyes consulted Jane’s: unostentatiously putting a hand out he pinched the moth to death.”
“The girl’s odd bridal ascendancy over the dinner table, which had begun to be sensed since they sat down, declared itself – she was the authority for the slaying. Tolerating the tribute of the rose, she could not suffer dyingness to usurp: she let out a breath as the moth was brushed from the cloth. That done, she was withheld again. Her dilated oblique glances, her preoccupation less with eating and drinking than with glasses and forks gave her the look of someone always abstaining from looking across too speakingly at a lover – not a soul failed to feel the electric connection between Jane’s paleness and the dark of the chair in which so far no one visibly sat. Between them, the two dominated the party.”
“In this particular company, by this time of the evening, even counterfeit notions of reality had begun to wobble. Who knew, who could not compute, to a man, exactly how many.”
“– there was something phantasmagoric about this circle of the displaced rich.”
“They had warped their wits with disproportionate stories; at any turn the preposterous might lay final claim on them – there was no censor. Even Shakespeare had stalked in. He and drink played havoc with known dimensions. There was a stir if not a kindling of exhausted senses, only now to be heated by being haunted;”
“there remained the sensation that there had been a moment.”
“…to distinguish each man from the others by the revivification of some unequivocal quality he and he only had had when young. At the same time, while these men helped to compose Guy, they remained tributary to him and less real to Jane – that is, as embodiments – than was he.”
And now I realise why I made much earlier in my review of fudge being hidden in the Montefort hall clock…the essence of Zeno’s Paradox in both Bowen and Aickman, as we recall Jane gave a half-smile a little earlier in this chapter…
“Snapshots taken before Antonia was a photographer fused with the ‘studio portrait’ taken in uniform for Lilia, on the hall wall at Montefort (oak framed, overcast by the flank of the stopped clock, all but secretively to be disregarded) and with what was inadvertently still more photographic in shreds of talk. Over the combination of glance and feature, the suggestion of latitude in the smile, rested a sort of indolent sweet force. Now more than living, this face had acquired a brightened cast of its own from the semi-darkness, from which it looked out with an easy conviction of being recognized. Nothing was qualified or momentary about it, as in the pictures; this was the face of someone here to the full – visible, and visible all at once, were the variations and contradictions, the lights and shades of the arrested torrent of an existence. Invisibly concentrated around him was all the time he had ever breathed: his todays, his yesterdays, his anticipated tomorrows –“
“…she recollected a glass and again drank from it or, putting out what seemed no longer to be exactly her own hand, played with a petal between her plate and Peregrine’s – was solely in her sense of his being here. Here he is, because this is where I am. He had come to join her – join her, and on the strength of one invocation of his name! Before speaking it, had not the breath she drew been big with risk and exhilaration? The sound had gone out on to knowing air: had not the moment suffered as, with a shock, it took the charge of immanence and fatality? . . . And now? She must hope never in all her life again to be so aware of him, or indeed of anyone – for this was becoming so much too much for Jane, so giddying, as to be within an iota of being nothing. The annihilation-point of sensation came into view, as something she was beginning to long to reach.”
And perhaps as an echo of this book starting with ‘heat of the day’, I recall the nature of the photo that Tom left Louie Lewis to remember him by…
“The resemblance, nothing to do with feature, had come out in none of the photographs of Guy: it was an affair of mobility, of livingness – something to do, perhaps, with an interlock between the cousins’ two ways of being, apart, yet one the cause of the other. Neither could be in abeyance while the other lived:”
“Antonia, as she must often (had one known what was happening) have recalled him. His tenancy of her perhaps accounted for the restless mannishness in the woman she was – and yet, no: for all her accesses of womanishness one could make a guess at the man she would have been, and it would have been a different man, not Guy.”
“To mark this, at the same moment Terence, swaying sideways to give force to an argument, leaned a hand on the back of the empty chair. It was to be noted – and Jane did note, for she stared hard at it – how characteristic the old fellow’s turned-up thumb was.”
“That he had been with them, with her, was an unfettered fact – where is there perfection but in the memory?”
Peregrine brings Jane back to Earth…by conjuring up the future and her own old age…a golden changeling changed for good.
“‘You might just be there,’ he added, turning to Jane, ‘but shrivelled up like a monkey, with black teeth. So why don’t you make hay while the sun shines?’”
Some of us droguli, though, vanish into nothing, not even leaving a memory, let alone a photo.
Cf the thumb in ‘Death of the Heart’
6
“Jane’s ecstatic willingness to be silent became as insistent as though the girl were singing –“
Jane is fetched truculently, truculently on both sides of passenger and driver, fetched by Antonia, in Fred’s Ford, from Lady L’s castle, Jane being in an alcoholic state of cocktails, and this car journey — its ghostly white horse, and gate and link manipulations — is as confused as the rest of this highly rarefied chapter that must be beyond most readers, even those who think it belongs in a straightforward Gothic tale — but now, here, words are morphed beyond a meaning’s recognition, a meaning I once attached to a war-torn ghost called Guy amidst wartime grievances and three women, if you include Jane, as shadowy thirds to each other in relation to Fred and Guy, incestuous or otherwise, transcrossing or not, but with a potential escape route for Jane in the Sapphicisms of Lady L, or in men as nobodies, or in droguli like Terence Foxe. There was at least one long paragraph in this chapter (quoted below) that I read time and time again without grasping its tantalising implications. But the fact that it gave hope of meaning was meaning enough. The fact was that Antonia had locked it against me…
.
“Antonia spoke and said: ‘This road I knew before you were born.’
‘Oh. Was there always that white horse?’
‘Why?’
‘Only, I think we drove right through it.’”
“, Jane declared: ‘I still am not what you think.’ Shock, nevertheless, made her hands shake, mismanaging, so that the knot of links heavily only tightened upon itself,…”
“From up there, a nightbird over their heads, she croaked: ‘Such a wonderful party . . .’
‘Was it?’ Fred instantly asked Jane, to feel only, in her closeness to him, a half-movement like a submerged answer.” […] …stupefied by the sweet mistake of the embrace, ran a hand down one side of his jaw and up the other, over the stubble. ‘Or, how was it?’ he tentatively went on. […] But there was a ‘later’, a reckless impassioned promise, a look of meaning to stay till they were alone.”
At this point, I think was my first realisation that Jane had worn, at the Lady L do, the gown that she found in the trunk.
“Jane sat on giddily in the hot lamplight: on the wall behind her hung generations of coats, cloaks, mackintoshes,…”
“Up there, Antonia’s watching-and-waiting attitude, known to this staircase in whose shadows and corners she had in adolescence so often crouched, now was changed by a new activity – she began licking brine from one of her wrists. In one half of the self which had come apart she was recalling the sea as she had left it – nobody’s, empty as a glass under heat mist which began to darken, tide sucking at the beach as it went out.”
Antonia with two halves as Proustian selves, while sea swimming…?
“…there, on the dark side of the projecting clock, ought to hang (and had certainly hung for years) the military photograph of Guy. One remembered its having been in position. How lately? Why should it not have fallen the last time plaster fell from the wall? If so, no one had said so – but who would ever say so, say so to her, when her sole recognition of the thing had been, from the outset, of an enormity? . . . Was he, all the same, looking on now? . . .”
“Drawn she was, all but knowing why. Going to stand in the doorway, she was met at once by a windlike rushing towards her out of the dark – her youth and Guy’s from every direction: the obelisk, avenue, wide country, steep woods, river below. No part of the night was not breathless breathing, no part of the quickened stillness not running feet.”
“Ghosts could have no place in this active darkness – more, tonight was a night which had changed hands, going back again to its lordly owners: time again was into the clutch of herself and Guy. Stamped was the hour, as were their others. What was returned to her was the sense of ‘always’ – the conviction of going on, on and on. His and her customary battles, ordeals, risks had been so many violent testings of immortality; nor had the two of them yet not won. They had used an unpitying roughness with one another – and yes, the brunt of that was to be felt again. What had started, when first she came to the door, as a righting and pacification of her senses had gone on to be an entire re-tuning of them. Bodily she had been left a clean slate, as it were at the start of a child’s day – likely to be, and being, soon scored all over with cuts, stings, burns, bruises, grazes and brambly flesh-tearings. Inflicted wrenchings echoed over her joints; once again she tasted the poison-berries experimentally forced between each other’s lips to see whether it was possible to kill. What they did to each other, or at each other’s expense, uncaringness kept from having been cruelty, just as unknowingness kept it from having been love. They conceived of no death, least of all death-in-life – an endless rushing, or rushing endlessness, was their domain, as it was their element. They had, by their action upon each other, generated a ceaseless energy, which accumulated in them when they did not use it – when they went blank, for instance, when they projected nothing, or when, all out, they flung themselves down into abeyances like dogs. Or, having been running, one bringing the other to a stop they would stand at attention, face to face, waiting for the signal to go on again, waiting to see from which of them it was to come – for not come it could not and never did.”
“But tonight the ceremony became a mockery: when Antonia had done bolting and barring she remained, arms extended across like another crossbar, laughing at the door. For the harsh-grained oak had gone into dissolution: it shut out nothing. So was demolished all that had lately stood between him and her . . . Behind her, however, was someone else.”
I was left with a glass of milk. If not a golden obelisk as the now undead-monument-to-once-ancient-hope, a hope for a meaning soon to be fulfilled.
Montefort, Mount Morris…
Monument: (anagram) Mount Men [or Women (incubus or succubus?)…]
Obelisk, Wobel-isk…
[The first sentence of ‘A World of Love’ (a happenstance simultaneous review) contains the words ‘heat of the day’…]
7
“And as I’ve always said to you, spies everywhere. No, I never shall trust this country.”
…and that statement seems to be “semi-jelled” (like the soup Jane remembers for dinner at Latterly Castle) with the spiritual Eire house consistency of ‘The Heat of the Day’, a book fatefully being reviewed simultaneously with this book. And we learn more about Clonmore where our Montefort characters go shopping, and I now feel the Bowen synergy with William Trevor, rather than Robert Aickman or even V.S. Pritchett, Katherine Mansfield, and Virginia Woolf (all of whom I have also real-time reviewed.): – and those relatively ‘solid’, if not ‘semi-jelled’, thoughts bring me to realise this chapter has more straightforward novelistic strengths, when compared with the previous two visionary, absurdist and semi-sexual extravaganzas…
“Lilia, holding a cup and saucer, wore cotton of an extinct blue, of a shade only less indolent than the sky’s – side-by-side on a stone bench, she and Antonia were under a twisted apple tree silvered over with lichen.”
Thud thud thud – I think.
“…and not far off stood the sundial, around which old poppies lolled, bees dozed on the yellow lupins. Below, the river had almost ceased to run; a nonchalant stillness hung over everywhere. It was thought to be about eleven o’clock.
The three [Antonia, Lilia, Jane] becalmed by each other.”
Leading to a pair of Bowenesque yawns.
Vesta, as a friend Jane made at the Latterly Castle event? A name perfect for an Aickman work! It may be my notorious memory, but I cannot recall anyone called Vesta during the event. Nor do I exactly recall Peregrine being in a rôle Jane tells the others he had.
“Serious drought” in the news. Lilia has chosen to have a haircut in Clonmore to help absolve the incubating heat, and to get salad servers and semolina for Fred. And there is Jane’s precarious driving, there, that Maud keeps a beady eye on.
“…this was heathen weather, in which but for God who was to predict what might happen next?” – someone says. I think this was a shopkeeper called Lonergan who gives sweets to Maud, and called Jane a debutante in having come out at Latterly Castle, and she in turns let’s a fly on a cake come out, too!
Clonmore…
“Gone was third dimension; nothing stood behind anything – opposite Lilia, a hillful of holy buildings appeared to weight down the slated street roofs below.”
And, amid these streets, Jane again suddenly speaks the name ‘Guy’ aloud with almost equal convulsive effect upon the preternatural guying of our reading balloon and of our sense of the Antonia-Lilia-Fred-Guy rhombus of a backstory, its regrets and its history of evacuations to London by one or other of them…
“Accumulated, the panic of twenty years broke in a wave over Lilia.
‘Where else, now, is there? For me, nowhere!’
‘Oh, damn Antonia!’ said Jane, really concerned. She relieved her mother of several parcels, dropped one or two of them, then said: ‘I’m sorry I mentioned Guy.’”
I wonder if any of the parcels were understamped, needing pennies to supplement their postage…
The hairdresser’s establishment is conveyed just as William Trevor might, and the intermittent rhythmic absences or blanknesses of its proprietor Francie — on one such abeyance, she sees Maud outside with the latter’s hobgoblin, I guess, something that Francie senses as a ‘dream companion’.
“…triple net blinds shimmered over the outlook, and magazines, on a gilded wicker table, from time to time lavishly were renewed. Jane, her elbow sociably hitching back the curtain of the cubicle filled by Lilia,… […] The salon ran therefore behind schedule: happily, however, time did not press – who could wish to hurry to quit this magic oasis of tinted mirror, enamel and bakelite?”
“‘Your hair looks sad on the floor, waiting just to be swept away!’
‘Well, it’s only litter, isn’t it? Though I gave Guy a piece once.’
‘A piece the colour of mine?’
‘Then, it was something of myself! He wrapped it round his finger into a ring, then laughed and slipped it into his pocket book. So I suppose it went back with him to the Front.’”
“The clock started me counting the hours back to how long ago it was since we’d both been dancing.”
A Destiny waltz…
“But one forgets people when they are always there.”
This review continues here: https://admtoah.wordpress.com/a-world-of-love-bowens-obelisk/