Part Three of my review of ‘The House in Paris’ by Elizabeth Bowen continued from HERE
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:
PART 2 (8)
“The telephone held her eye; she saw it going to speak. The bell rang:”
May turns to Summer heat in the wake of AV’s death, for which K had not prepared — or even figuratively telegraphed in advance – for K’s mother….
Will we ever equally be able to unlock the mind of K? – as we follow alongside her visit to Boulogne to meet her own ‘unwilling love’ of Max who had suggested such a meeting by thus telephoning ahead.
“Never to lie is to have no lock to your door, you are never wholly alone.”
Boulogne itself is painted Bowensquely for us as we enter M-and-K’s shadowy interactions in a French cafe amid the mannered manoeuvres of a waiter, as part of the emerging rhombus of M, K, N and Mme Fisher’s own illicit ‘love’ and machinations as a Lady Waters type figure, or rather that woman in The Hotel whose name I forget, indeed, all of the matriarchal manipulators often mischiefed by Bowen into her emotional geometries….
“But however far into the town you penetrate, beside trams, under arches, you never feel inland or forget that the downhill streets have a line of water ruled across at the end.”
“The man brought some dusty ice in a zinc pail, and Max scraped the sawdust off Karen’s piece of ice with a spoon out of her saucer. The inside of the cafe was transparently dark, the marble table cold to Karen’s bare elbows….”
Approchements between the elbows…
“But because inside here was so suddenly dark – and so suddenly chilly, making her cup her bare elbows in her hands –“
“Karen saw she had let in an enemy worse than time.
‘She used not to go to bed when there was nothing to say.’
‘There used not to be nothing to say.’”
“‘I think she [Mme F] is in love with you.’
‘I cannot think of her that way,’ he said violently.
‘She suggests you are marrying Naomi for her money.’”
“‘She told me you loved me.’
Karen looked at a vase of roses on a middle table, then round the restaurant, with its embossed brown wallpaper, in which they were shut up with what Mme Fisher said.”
“We [M and K] should never tolerate one another if we were not in love.”
Leaps in the dark and French kings. History as a Jungian backdrop or gestalt of memory, that brings even strangers together with one mind, one hinterland…providing the saucer for the cup…
“They could remember nothing that they could speak of, and memory is to love what the saucer is to the cup.”
“History is unpainful, memory does not cloud it; you join the emphatic lives of the long dead. May we give the future something to talk about.”
“Everyone in here must be asleep, if not dead of a plague.”
“An incoming tide of apartness began to creep between Max and Karen, till, moving like someone under the influence of a pursuing dream, he drew the cigarette from between her fingers…”
A kiss and an ‘impossible marriage’… but they do not close anything down by allowing Hythe as a prophetic possible rapprochement, a distant ‘indistinctness’ of a magnet …
or simply their next meeting place after Boulogne…
Outcomes are ever uncertain as long as outcomes are made possible: whether the outcome is the best of Pangloss or a dire anti-natalist fate…
“Karen could only tell how the time passed by the changing shadows on the roofs below.”
“‘I don’t like Folkestone; I’ve been there.’
‘We can stay somewhere else.’
‘Hythe is along the coast. About five miles.’”
PART 2 (9)
For whatever reason, I felt the need to share with you the whole first paragraph about Hythe … the next assignation of Karen and Max…
“Rain drifted over the Channel and west over Romney marsh; there was no horizon, the edgeless clouds hung so low. Centuries ago, the sea began to draw away from the cinque port, leaving it high and dry with a stretch of sea-flattened land between town and beach. The grey barracky houses along the sea front are isolated; if the sea went for them they would be cut off. Across fields dry with salt air, the straight shady Ladies’ Walk, with lamps strung from the branches, runs down from the town to the sea: on hot days a cool way to walk to bathe. Inland, in summer, a band plays in a pavilion beside the canal, whose water is dark with weeds that catch at the oars of pleasure boats, and overshadowed by trees. On and off, there is rattle of musketry practice from the ranges along the edge of the marsh. West of the town, the canal bends under a bridge then goes straight to Lympne between the hills and the marsh; across the marsh martello towers in different stages of ruin follow the curve of the coast towards Dungeness, where at nights a lighthouse flashes far out. On its inland side, the town climbs a steep hill, so that the houses stand on each other’s heads. The beautiful church must have crowned the town; now new houses spread in a fan above it, driving back the thickety hazel woods. Back from the brow of Hythe hill the country – cornfieldy, open and creased with woody valleys, Kentish, mysterious – stretches to the chalk downs. Now and then you hear bells from Cheriton, or distant blowy bugles from Shorncliffe camp: this week-end, they were muffled by low clouds.”
‘You’ve come with no mackintosh?’
Mackintoshes discussed and Max chain-smoking cigarettes. New dances of mummers.
Pure aloneness together, especially with no sun.
“…in the lodging-house terrace, someone played a piano, but then stopped. […] on its far-out silence Dungeness lighthouse flashed, stopped, flashed.”
A priapic lighthouse no longer Virginia, no longer Virgin…?
“Max put a hand under her elbow and they went in.”
“Number Nine” — their hotel room
So much melodramatically literary here, almost laughably overblown with pomposity of literariness, Bowen magnified, yet balanced by a most poetic truth that only Bowen can create, a truth about two people in blanket rain and an almost manipulated love, and I see now how wrong I was about the likely source of a future possible Leopold…
“What have I done? […] She only knew she had slept by finding an hour missing on her luminous watch.”
“…the idea of you, Leopold, began to be present with her.”
“I shall die like Aunt Violet wondering what else there was;”
“These hours are only hours. They cannot be again, but no hours can. Hours in a room with a lamp and a tree outside, with tomorrow eating into them.”
“Only poisons, they think, act on you.”
Everyone’s poison is everyone else’s, I ask?
And an explicit thought here about a game of Hide and Seek – with Death as seeker?
And before the next day’s daylit but rainy Funicular Coda to the previous night’s Symphony of Literary Truths…
“No one will ever know.”
…except possibly Mme Fisher herself (“She is a woman who sells girls; she is a witch. She is here; she is that barred light.”) ….a pervading and omniscient source who represents not only Lady Waters et al but Bowen herself, Bowen whose own Hythe and Seek is prophetically embodied here…
“But all that time we were travelling to only this: a barred light on a ceiling, a lamp, a tree outside.”
As a boy, in the 1950s and 1960s, I lived quite close to a place in Colchester called Hythe, and I lived at 89 Old Heath Rd in those many years, with ‘Heath’ being a derivation of ‘Hythe’ as a port, rather than anything to do with a heath.
Of course, a Doctor Who story once had an Aickman Road that was supposed to be in Colchester.
PART 2 (10)
“His cigarette-case was open on the table beside him, and she came over once for a cigarette. He did not look up; she went back to the window-seat.”
A new cigarette dance following the theatrical posture in the hotel foyer of M’s showily yet unself-consciously writing what turns out to be a letter to N about some crucial thing that has just happened without ever landing on it, I guess,, just as, meanwhile, this flabby, barely comprehensible K/M chapter reports upon a past incident with blood induced by a needle prick in K’s needlework. Or was it N’s? The ignition points and memories in this K/M ‘dance’ are beyond me, including the outcome of their fling or, is it, love affair, whether inducing a future Leopold or not, a ‘madonna trick’ or the bounty in thin ugliness: those Hythe canals: a future flashpoint in Bowen’s life? A ‘statue’s face’ asking for forgiveness as to what was said or what was not said, as in Eva Trout? The typically Bowenesque search for a postage stamp to put on M’s letter, a letter that K later does what to? “Max guiding Karen’s elbow in keyed-up silence,…”
“He writes like a man on the stage, she thought, so much not caring who watches, he almost writes to be watched. Not a pause: what he writes must have been here all this morning, mounting up. So we were not alone . . .”
“‘Must we walk here? I’ve always hated canals.’ […]
Later, they turned and began to walk back to Hythe, the canal on their left now,…[…]
….looking back for the last time at the canal.”
*
“The force of the moment seemed to have no end;”
PART 2 (11)
“Like rain on the taxi windows, soft affections and melancholies blurred her mind; she saw inanimate things as being friendly to love.”
This is possibly one of the most provocatively evocative chapters in the Bowen canon. Starting with Karen saying farewell to Max and leaving in a taxi for the station in the still relentless rain. A rain that has threatened things, perhaps threatening K and M together as a potentiality with an as yet unborn Leopold already crystallised in a passage that no other writer could manage with such sensitivity to, and such clairvoyance about, ‘birth’ — as well as with an instinctive Ligottian anti-natalism — and rain that threatened, too, even the people she observes in the train to London, as well as those she glimpses in passing lighted villas in the deepening dusk…
“Rain made fools of people.”
“: you open yourself so entirely to fate. Spoilt pleasure is a sad, unseemly thing; you can only bury it. The sea not having been blue had made everyone meaner: for some time they would not think of the sea again.”
“When Max spoke of marriage, no child of theirs had been present. What he wants is that I should be tender to him, know him and not go away. Which is what I want. But his life will stay his life, as it was before. Leopold belongs to when I thought of Max going, when I thought I must stay alone.”
“Everyone waited for the train to impale them on London.”
*
K arrives back home…
“Mrs Michaelis came to the door of the drawing-room. She wore a black, full-falling dress, with lace from the elbows, a ‘picture’ dress that made her belong to no time. […] She was not of the generation that fingers things on a mantelpiece, but Karen could see her eyes in the mirror, uncertainly moving from object to object in the reflected room. A yellow rose on the mantelpiece suddenly shed its petals, but did not make her start.”
This is Bowen’s psychic ‘furniture surrounding K’s seeing a letter from Ray (that she leaves unread) and a carbon-dinted telephone message showing that another message had been removed from the notepad, a message that Mrs M had taken from a friend of K that proved she had lied about where she had been that day!
“Nothing was said.”
Perhaps Mrs M’s means justified kinder ends?
Nothings was said, except, eventually, everything. The power of a lie’s knowledge wielded by another Bowen powerful matron or ‘witch’…one who later, when the truth unravels also warns K in a kinder motherly way against M as a mercenary suitor, pointing out, as well as his treachery to Naomi, that “No Jew is unastute.”
This review continues here: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2022/01/30/the-most-insidious-of-all/#comment-23927