A World of Love 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:
1.
“The sun rose on a landscape still pale with the heat of the day before.”
Strange coincidence that I started this book today soon after starting the real-time review of The Heat of the Day concurrently with this one. A real-time that seems to fit the nature of the clock in Montefort’s ‘ceaseless’ kitchen.
We are elegantly, clause-tentacularly, yet simply told the backstory of the characters in this small mansion called Montefort in the post-first world war Irish mountains near an obelisk monument, and with farm buildings, full of unnatural heat and flies and flypaper, and one sealed-up Venetian window. A mansion with a bluebottle bumbling, and other things buzzing, and a twelve year old girl with crimson hives. Yes, simply read this chapter to find out about the deceased Guy, and then about Antonia, Lilia, Fred, Jane, Maude, and Kathie. I will not attempt to brief you here, as it would simply read like the first chapter, read as I just did, a chapter that has again utterly captivated me with its novelistic skills, as well as its possibly meek ghosts that I have so far made bold throughout. As bold as Bowen with once equally bold elbows. And there is a letter just retrieved by 20 year old Jane from a dead person’s trunk from which trunk she also found and wore a ball gown, wore it in the fields outside, having forgotten to do some unknown duty with her father, it seems. And why did Jane then ask Antonia to finger the skirt of the ball gown while she was still wearing it? Or did I misunderstanding something? Some connection between these respective duties of Jane?
Yes, again, simply do please read this first chapter as its own real-time review of itself, a very engaging infodump to beat the more artificially strained infodump of St Quentin and Anna talking about backstories in the first chapter of The Death of the Heart.
Just a few extracts to entice you to read the whole chapter…
“A girl came out of the house, and let herself through the gate in the fence. Wearing a trailing Edwardian muslin dress, she stepped out slowly towards the obelisk, shading her eyes. She walked first up the shadow then round the base of the monument:”
“…propped an elbow on a convenient ledge of the stone and, leaning, began to re-read a letter; or, rather, ponder…”
“…, she was a beauty. The cut of her easy golden hair was anachronistic over the dress she wore: this, her height and something half naive half studied about her management of the sleeves and skirts made her like a boy actor in woman’s clothes, while what was classical in her grace made her appear to belong to some other time.”
“Had the façade not carried a ghost of style, Montefort would have looked, as it almost did, like nothing more than the annexe of its farm buildings –“
“…everlasting buzzing inside my head, not to speak of waking drenching with perspiration. And in this heat this house gets more dreadful day after day.”
“‘Oh, very well,’ replied Lilia. ‘By all means. Just as you like.’
She added the candlestick to the glass and saucer and, keeping the pyramid they formed in precarious balance against her bosom, proceeded through the tricky dusk to the door – her form, the exhausted mauve of her cotton dress, by turns appearing opaque or ghostly. She was electing to move, as she sometimes did, with a sort of superior smoothness, as though trollied.”
“Lilia, wife of Fred Danby, mother of Jane and Maud, was half the hostess at Montefort, half not.”
“These two engendered a climate; the air around them felt to her sultry, overintensified, strange; one could barely breathe it. Yes, they had passed beyond her – she had made the match, they the marriage.”
“…her pregnancy added to and became her, and this great never quite smiling snow-woman, come into being almost overnight, was formidable.”
“She then asked: ‘Know there’s a fly on your neck?’
To oblige, he slapped at it, but in the wrong place.”
“‘I’m half sure I saw Miss Jane this morning, away out over the country in a ball gown.’
‘Then why not say so?’
‘Away out over, and I’d the sun in my eyes. – Unless could it ever have been a Vision?’”
“On the dresser, from one of the hooks for cups, hung a still handsome calendar for the year before; and shreds of another, previous to that, remained tacked to the shutter over the sink. These, with the disregarded dawdling and often stopping of the cheap scarlet clock wedged in somewhere between the bowls and dishes, spoke of the almost total irrelevance of Time, in the abstract, to this ceaseless kitchen.”
“Her cotton frock with its pattern of orange horses had shrunk in the wash and clung to her narrow chest – it was clean, but for some ghostly fruit-stains from the summer before.”
“‘If you call it going: you’re all the time somewhere else. What’s the matter with you? Why are you in this trance?’”
2.
“From somewhere out behind Montefort, she at one time imagined she heard a call –“
Jane bicycling home from the fête the previous evening, feeling as if ‘summoned’, but by what or by whom? Unmissable Bowenesques of atmosphere and scenery as well as details of the fêteful event, and the journey home by bike, and we get to have more of a feel for the characters and their behaviour at the fête, Antonia, Livia, Maud and Fred and his Ford to the rescue! And, above all, Jane, upon her return, fatefully being drawn into the attics of this insular, reclusive family’s mansion and its decline and claustrophobia, and the trunk in which Jane finds the muslin gown and the dateless letters she lets shuffle, letters to be sifted by her into gestalt…
“Only attics now remained to be searched; and how could they (she reflected, for she was practical) show anything? She remembered at least a hat, not unlike Lady Latterly’s of this afternoon, left for years up there to hang on a broken harp. She lighted a candle and went to look.”
“The flame of Jane’s candle consumed age in the air; toppling, the wreckage left by the past oppressed her –“
“They all had been to the Fête, and a backwash from it still agitated their tempers and nerves – in the house itself residual pleasure-seeking ghosts had been set astir.”
“(Maud had become the solitary, seldom-failing occupier of the family pew). As to the Fête, however, there remained an imperative:”
“Stains on her [Antonia’s] long fine fingers, actually nicotine, were with awe attributed to her profession – as an artist photographer she had made a name,… […] Pungent sweat and heatedly trodden grass, fumes of tea and porter, thrum of hoofs from the paddock, the strikings-up and dyings-down of the band all fused into an extreme for Antonia, whose own senses, boastful, stood up to it. – But then she tripped over a tent peg, jarred the lens in her brain: in the instant revulsion set in, as it now did always. Like a bullet-hit pane, the whole scene shivered, splintered outward in horror from that small black vacuum in its core.”
“Fred. He arrived, stared, resignedly took Antonia by the elbow and got her through the crowd to the parked car. ‘Sick?’ was all he asked,”
“…a stranger, who detoured to drop them at the Montefort gates. ‘No idea there was anyone living here,’ he confessed, with a glance of renewed amazement at Lilia’s hat.”
“Lilia swept indoors past him without a word, hid the fudge in the hall clock and went on into the drawing-room. […] – white cart-wheel hat, gloves to the elbow, crêpe floral gown. She and her image confronted each other and the day’s disillusionment, of which the marvel was that it should recur – summer after summer, the same story.”
“Any charm of a chattery circle had been broken by condemnatory pushing apart and back of armchairs, ‘occasional’ chairs and sofas; exposed to fade still more, an expanse of carpet remained for Kathie to sweep when she had time; and the effect, according to mood, was that either there had lately been a catastrophe or that there was about to be a performance. […] Uneasily light by day, at night slow to darken, the room seemed to be waiting, perhaps for ever, for its dismantlement to be complete.”
“She [Jane] could not fail, however, when first she handled them, to connect these letters with that long-settled dust: her sense of their remoteness from her entitled her to feel they belonged to history. […] …the inner course of her life was about to change, and the cause was somewhere here in the room. […] Then the word ‘obelisk’ caught her eye. Then was it that she gave the tug at the band. When that snapped, down, again, fell the letters, this time altogether spilled out and showering. […] Only by reading all of them was one to come upon their sequence, the ‘sooner’ or ‘later’ giving them sense and story – […] She enjoyed being: how could it not depress her to realize that the majority of people no longer were? […] Yes, so far as she was against anything she was against the past; and she felt entitled to raid, despoil, rifle, balk or cheat it in any possible way. She gloried in having set free the dress. But the letters – had they not insisted on forcing their own way out?”
To ‘baulk the past’, to cheat time? – does that not bring us back to someone earlier putting fudge in the clock!
Jane’s trigger word of ‘obelisk’, tempting her to start reading the letters beside that very ‘monument’…?
A Dead Monument To Once Ancient Hope?
3.
A ghost story and an elder tree cave as hiding place for its epistolary evidence… the day after the gaiety of the fête, amid the bespoke habits of those alive today…
“The inappropriateness of the fuming dish to the torrid day was noted, but only as one more stroke of fate: Antonia, for one, did not bat an eyelid.”
“‘Of course it was not: how could it be? I told you,’ Jane said, beginning to colour up, ‘it, they, fell out when I took the dress.’
‘You’re far too quick to assume that people are dead.’
‘The trunk was up in the attics,’ Jane told her father, as though in justice to him if not to herself she ought to give the entire picture,…”
“‘What Antonia means, and she has the right to do so, is, why were you interfering with her things?’”
“Antonia’s face, in spite of its show of indolence, had something energetic about the cast of it – nothing sagged except when she foresaw death: there were hollows, tensions and shadows, but they were speaking ones, kept in play by the contrarieties of her mood, the many dissonances of her nature.”
“‘Falling in love with a love letter,’ said Antonia.”
“‘To me it’s rather peculiar that in spite of her chances, all we hear about London, and that keeping on dancing yesterday night, Jane should have to stoop for romance to a musty trunk, belonging to who knows who? Myself I should have been sorry to, but times alter. Are there no men about who are good enough? – Maud, I thought I said no more custard!’”
“He flatly told her: ‘This morning isn’t this afternoon.’”
“‘But if you’d like to know why I’ve had enough, it’s this everlasting maunder about those attics. – You, Antonia, it must be twenty times I’ve asked you to get that stuff at the top cleared out – burned, junked, sold, shifted: I don’t care what. I’ve offered you the pack of men for the job. I need that space, I tell you! I’m short of storage.’”
This family ‘hardy’ like Kelway family?
Inflammable — Jane started a fire? Go to blazes….
“Jane then drew her fingers slowly across her forehead, as it were as a dragnet for her thoughts.”
“‘They are simply signed with a squirl.’”
Cousin Guy, its G such a knot..
“…though I’ve heard you prancing up there, from time to time, Maud, with your hobgoblin.”
A hobgoblin called Gay David…
And another knot….
Antonia —
“She could not even be bothered to speak again till she had finished tightening her pearl slip-knot and twisting her neck to see if she had choked herself.”
Livia —-
“…it was afternoon, most brutal phase of the day, which had leapt upon and was demolishing the poor snow-woman. She forgot the plates and began to pluck at the deep V neck of her cotton dress, desperately trying to fan air down it; until the humidity starting up even in the insides of her elbows made her unjoint and drop her arms like a doll’s.”
Jane —
“‘There’s a stag in that picture I never saw.’
‘They never, never were to her,’ Lilia averred, in a voice of not yet exhausted scorn.
Antonia shrugged. ‘She likes to feel that they are.’
That brought Jane back slowly from the painting, with something of its phantasmagoric and distant oddness still in her eyes.”
“…the red doors, ajar, all seemed caught by a spell in the act of opening;”
“Jane, going into the walled garden, made her way round the end of the house under the sightless Venetian window: she roamed zigzag across the garden, and, getting out again through a gap, found herself facing the sealike uplands. Step quickening, she kept in close to the flank of the woods raggedly edging the river gorge. Some way along an elder grew leaning forward, its branches clotted with waxen blossom within themselves forming a cave. Heavy was the scent, rank the inside darkness which filtered through. The girl, having reached the spot, without hesitation parted the branches and dived between them.”
The letters…
“She [Antonia] did not know what she expected, until she caught the faraway pink flicker of Jane’s frock disappearing into the flowering elder. ‘So that’s where she has hidden them,’ she then knew.”
El der, el bow.
4.
Death, dead space…
Opening paragraphs that should be quoted but not before you have read them.
Latterly paragraphs, though, are sampled below…
.”This had been so, so far, for Antonia in the case of her cousin Guy: yes, though a generation was mown down his death seemed to her an invented story.”
“…death, yes, why not? – but deadness, no.”
Cousin Guy (relevant to the letters or one single letter with several pages or a real-time diary of a letter dated only by the names of weekdays — as found by Jane in the attic trunk now hidden in the elder oubliette); Guy, or Guy David (sic, at one point) or Gay David as Maud’s hobgoblin, dead but somehow still alive, a shadow or ghost between Livia and Antonia, who jibbered at each other, amid the deliveryless paranoia of Montefort, and as Jane is the ‘golden changeling’ between them both, and Jane perhaps longs to belong to to London where her school is, but the arrival of a chauffeur with his “Martian gauntlets”, in Lady Latterly’s Daimler, causes Jane to need to choose between London or Latterly, the latter for a chatterly dinner at the lady’s place? All of this after we watch Jane and Maud by the endless sea…
“It would be long before Guy was done with life . . . Antonia’s reading of the War Office telegram had been followed by a blasphemous incredulity which she could not believe to be hers alone.”
“Earthbound? – no, she was never to think of him like that, nor had he the makings of any ghost. It was simply that these years she went on living belonged to him, his lease upon them not having run out yet. The living were living his lifetime; and of this his contemporaries – herself, Lilia, Fred – never were unaware. They were incomplete.”
“So it had gone on. Meantime, another war had peopled the world with another generation of the not-dead, overlapping and crowding the living’s”
Those shoals of such dead in London’s heat of the day, greater than the sticky heat in Montefort’s Ireland, making me wonder (or remind myself) if this new war was the one they were neutral from…
“Antonia and others younger were creatures of an impossible time, breathing in wronged air –“
“Jane, on the other hand, unaware of loss, should be taken to be in balance perfectly: she had come late enough”
Almost already Elder even as a child? —
“that thicket held, though Jane might not know it, signs of its infestation by many childhoods.”
“Or, was the elder masking a secret gateway, outlet of a precipitous brambled dog-path to the river? Had the girl gone down break neck to where, near Guy David’s Hole, light from the current ran up the rock? Antonia pictured all but the act of reading.”
“‘They say the sea’s as far as you can go.’
‘That’s why.’
‘And there’s no end to it, once you’d get there. –“
“Also Maud was photographed on the water, crouched on the ledge of Gay David’s Hole, a small low cave under the cliff’s face. ‘Ca-ar!’ she bawled across to Jane. Jane lay face down among growing bracken, on the Montefort side. Water-mint wet in the dwindling current and meadowsweet creamily frothing the river bank sent up a scented oblivion round her; a hot tang came from the bracken fronds crushed into bedding by her body. Languidly she neither answered nor raised her head, merely caught at a frond by the tip, bending it down to let a ladybird make its way more easily. ‘Car, car, car!’ Maud repeated, each time for emphasis punching Gay David in the unseen ribs – the ladybird paused as though it could hear; Jane yawned, pushed her hands up into her hair and, for peace sake, shouted back: ‘Not the tractor?’”
“…the deep keen dream come combing through her, keeping her being running like tressy water-weed, like Ophelia’s drowned hair. Nowhere was silence: flies droned over the bracken, far off the tractor patiently drew the mower – and at the instant, with a cave-echoed splash Maud swung her legs into the pool; while all through the minutes conspiratorially the child and her familiar gabbled together in the afternoon distance across the river. Yet all blent into a sort of hush.”
“Through bickerings, jibings, needlings, recriminations, sulks, traps set, points scored, ignominies inflicted, they had remained in communication; their warfare met their unwilling need for contact with, awareness of one another. Almost no experience, other than Guy and their own dissonance, could they be said to have had in common; and yet it was what they had had in common which riveted them.”
“This idol of Fred’s, this golden changeling was, in so far as she belonged to anybody, Antonia’s – but see, today, how even Antonia had been out-monstered.”
“The idea of that agitated Lilia beyond proportion: the truth was she had a neurosis about anyone standing outside a door – it linked with the sense she’d had since she came to Montefort of being besieged, under observation or in some way even under a threat.”
The Cliffside Pareidolia…
“…out of the cliff, for instance, out of the vagaries and traceries of the limestone did look a clown’s face, ferns for eyebrows, loony eye-hollows, neb awry, fallen-open mouth where the cave yawned; and the clown did seem to be swallowing terrified gold fish as light-spangles went darting under the rock.”
“Seeing how brief all time was it seemed impossible she could be too late:”
“Between him and her dwindled the years: where indeed was he if not beside her? They could not now miss one another, surely? His letter had been no more than delayed on its way to her. Footsteps, however, came no nearer.”
“Jane searched the cliff: its face of the clown was gone – below it the water, disenchanted, now wore nothing but Maud’s reflection.”
“The designing glance darted by Maud at the radio in the corner caused Lilia with passion to declare: ‘And I won’t have you running after Big Ben!’
Maud shrugged her shoulders inside her narrow frock; her mother put down her cup, adding: ‘I’m beginning to think I’m ill with all the monomania in this house.’ She spoke as one in search of a fellow-being; her conviction that she was gripped by something mortal made it frightening to be left alone with a child. Her inner face, by now gaunt with solitude, looked out not without nobility through the big white mask padded with flesh. Sorrow was there in front of her like an apparition: she saw now, with belated dread, what life had proved to be, what it had made of her. Could there have been an otherwise, an alternative? Who was to tell her, who was to know? She did not pity herself, for there is an austere point at which even self-pity halts, forbidden. Loss had been utter: not till today had she wholly taken account. Guy was dead, and only today at dinner had she sorrowed for him.”
“I don’t consider Jane even halved. Seldom does she permit him to speak to Jane; that is, when the girl is allowed home. Now we see what comes of it – making a game of everything!”
“Animosity itself had become a bond, whose deep-down tightening suddenly made itself felt today. Antonia’s half of the past fitted in to Lilia’s: looking back, one saw through both lives the progress of the unfinished story. Thrown together, they had adhered: virtually, nothing more than this had happened to them since their two girlhoods.”
“So, as some dread the telegraph boy, she dreaded any comer at all – men wanting Fred, tinkers with their sky-empty blue eyes annihilating their patter of talk, beggar-women sephulchral in black shawls, with the saints behind them. Worst were those who stood at the door mute, neither speaking nor going away.”
“The chauffeur, overhearing or not, reclasped Martian gauntlets behind his back: he was staring in the other direction faceless. That uniform of his was disaster-dark among the feckless front garden roses.”
“Though with time the Daimler seemed to begin to subside from view, as though there were quicksands in front of Montefort.”
“What was this that grew like a danger in her? What had she been tempted up to the very brink of? Was she lost for ever? Was there a path back?”
***
I can only encompass this remarkable chapter within this remarkable ghost story by wielding here so many quotes from it, an aide memoire and a real-time mandala, as — crucially and necessarily to make it work — , shared here with others as a triangulation of coordinates.
From an earlier review of mine a few months ago (a book called Time Present and Time Past) …
[[“Full moonlight drenched the city and searched it: there was not a niche left to stand in. The effect was remorseless: London looked like the moon’s capital – shallow, cratered, extinct.” — From ‘Mysterious Kôr’ by Elizabeth Bowen
And there is a chauffeur in Bowen’s ‘World of Love’ who wore “Martian gauntlets”, gauntlets as psychic armour but, like the high fashion gloves that I always recall my grandmother wearing, they are not always able to hide the ten digits that formed the irresistible archetype for human counting systems and for the human time scheme beyond the seconds, minutes and hours and days into decades and centuries and, even, millennia…]]
My beloved grandmother who was also born in 1899 and visually looked like Bowen.
This review continues here: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2022/01/07/a-world-of-love-elizabeth-bowen/