The House in Paris by Elizabeth Bowen
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My gestalt real-time review will be conducted in the comment stream below:
PART 1: The Present
1.
“(Henrietta had heard how much blood had been shed in Paris)”
The nature of the non-parenthetical parts of this first chapter is that of building up a picture of this little girl with her toy monkey in travel transit alone in Paris, and of Miss Fisher who meets her from the night train and who runs a circumflexed “depôt”, this being the eponymous house (“Henrietta took a last look at the outside of the house, which she never saw in daylight again”), here described as narrow and Tardis-like from outside and with doll’s house qualities, “it stood clamped to the flank of a six-storied building with balconies”, a house for such time-transitting children to stay, but today with the unfortunate ‘coincidence’ (a coincidence that Miss F hopes H’s grandmother back home will forgive) of a young boy Leopold also staying at the house simultaneously, a boy whom we see briefly with unspoken. instinctive knowledge of his nature at the end of this chapter as he interrupts H’s daylight post-breakfast sleep by entering her room without permission. You must know all this already, of course. But no harm in my supplementing the book’s osmosis with samples below of its Paris and its characters along with their adumbrated backstories, and a reference to Miss F’s sick mother (“This illness made her mother sound most forbidding: Henrietta had a dread of sick-rooms”) in another room of the house….and the circumstances of Leopold (“– it is Leopold’s mother he is going to meet. And he has not met her before – that is, since he can remember. The circumstances are very strange and sad . . .” — “Henrietta regretted that Leopold was not a girl: she did not like boys much.” — “…he had the stately waxen impersonal air of a royal child in a picture centuries old.”) :-
“These indifferent streets and early morning faces oppressed Henrietta, who was expecting to find Paris more gay and kind.”
“Henrietta, nervous, tried to make evident, by looking steadily out of the window on her side, that she did not expect to be spoken to. She had been brought up to think it rude to interrupt thought.
But Miss Fisher, making an effort, now touched one of the monkey’s stitched felt paws. ‘You must be fond of your monkey. You play with him, I expect?’”
“Often when she [Miss F] spoke she seemed to be translating, and translating rustily. No phrase she used was what anyone could quite mean;”
“They swerved right, round the dark railings of a statuey leafless garden – ‘Look, Henrietta, the Luxembourg!’ – then engaged in a complex of deep streets, fissures in the crazy gloomy height.”
“She felt the house was acting, nothing seemed to be natural; objects did not wait to be seen but came crowding in on her, each with what amounted to its aggressive cry. Bumped all over the senses by these impressions, Henrietta thought: If this is being abroad . . .”
“…she lay stretched straight out in alarmed passivity, as though on an operating table. Miss Fisher having carried away the coffee tray, everything immobilized in the salon but the clock’s pendulum, which Henrietta watched. […]
But she could not hear the clock without seeing the pendulum, with that bright hypnotic disc at its tip, which set the beat of her thoughts till they were not thoughts.”
“The stern dying go on out without looking back; sleepers go out a short way, never not hearing the vibrations of Paris, a sea-like stirring, horns, echoes indoors, electric bells making stars in the grey swinging silence that never perfectly settles in volutions of streets and empty courts of stone.”
***
We watch H chasing a cake of sandalwood soap in ‘foreign water’, and later we learn that “Henrietta’s heart sank slightly: she felt like a meal being fattened up for a lion.” …and yet I know I must build my gestalt of this book’s fragments judiciously and patiently alongside this information from a lurking Bowen: “Today was to do much to disintegrate Henrietta’s character, which, built up by herself, for herself, out of admonitions and axioms (under the growing stress of: If I am Henrietta, then what is Henrietta?) was a mosaic of all possible kinds of prejudice.”
Yet I fear as well as relish this thought…
“At each end, the street bent out of sight: it was exceedingly quiet and seemed, though charged with meaning, to lead nowhere.”
The “waxen” air of L: cf the wax in H’s ears that her grandma is said to have sought out, and the waxed parquet in this chapter.
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2
“Creak – creak went his shoes on the parquet.”
“The chosen childish children with whom he [Leopold] played made a crook of him, and all the time he impressed them he despised them for being impressed; he wanted to crack the world by saying some final and frightful thing.”
“…that even in sleep Henrietta was being exposed to unfamiliar sensation. She had lain, hair hanging down, like someone in a new element, a conjurer’s little girl levitated, rigid on air, her very sleep wary.”
L thus thinks that H is a bit like Alice In Wonderland, as he surveys this now awoken girl to whom nothing bad seemed likely ever to happen, and she eventually gives the boyishly presumptuous L some perspective on himself. And it is easy to miss noticing a reference later in this chapter to the effect that “The disengaged Henrietta had been his first looking-glass.”
“Picking Henrietta’s monkey up by the ears he examined it distantly: its limp limbs and stitched felt paws hung down.
‘Don’t!’ exclaimed Henrietta. ‘His ears may come off!’”
There is much more backstory eked out by this chapter’s meeting and dialogue between the two children, their circumstances, where they live and their various specified relations (most of which you of all readers must already know), but I do need to record here that L is 9 and H is 11, as based on what they say, and H has had this monkey all her life and that she still believes it “notices” things. Later, when we have forgotten about the monkey, it is easy not to notice this is written about H thinking about L: “All he [Leopold] wants is somebody who will notice.”
And even later that she ‘notices’ a scar on one of his knees.
Leopold (having become “his own rocking toy” on the parquet, I recall) “was not even interested in hurting, and was only tweaking her petals off or her wings off with the intention of exploring himself. His dispassionateness was more dire, to Henrietta, than cruelty.”
“There is no end to the violations committed by children on children, quietly talking alone.”
“His spirit became crustacean under douches of culture and mild philosophic chat from his Uncle Dee,…”
This reference to ‘douche’ prefigures the sponge bag in H’s “paper-leather dispatch case”, and L’s swinging it and spilling (accidentally or deliberately, we can’t trust Bowen to know) the rest of her possessions from it…
“…two apples, a cake of soap and an ebony-backed hairbrush came bouncing and crashing out; the sponge-bag made a damp thud,…”
Apples, as you know, are important in Bowen, specially those that make ‘thuds’, too, when falling — from Bowen’s Apple Tree, if possibly not Daphne du Maurier’s…
That scar on L’s knee must have been as a result of ‘tripping while running’… and one of these two apples is indeed rolling off if not running…chased like that earlier cake of soap, if not the later one in the douche-bag…
Knees, but no elbows, so far, in this novel, I notice.
BEWARE SPOILERS for any who are reading this review before reading the book….rather than reading this review as a geometric co-triangulation of its plot coordinates alongside or after your reading of the book… “You’ll have to re-read me backwards,…” – The Heat of the Day
Other objects to fall out of Henetietta’s bag that I forgot to mention in the previous chapter —
“The Strand Magazine and the pink Malheurs de Sophie fluttered face down on the floor. The pack of playing cards, happily, stayed in their box.”
***
3
My italics.
“Frowning with scornful mystification, but still reading, he walked, when the women had gone, across to the sofa, where he lay over the magazine on one elbow, turning over the pages with quick brown hands as though he had England here. […] The magazine perplexed Leopold with its rigid symbolism, Martian ideology. […] He sighed, shifted on his elbow and looked away.”
And from the first renewal of elbow in this book, we reach more unexpectedly revealed innards from a different bag, the handbag of Miss F that she leaves next to the once rolled-off apple as she takes H to see Miss F’s sick mother upstairs….leaving L alone with the bag, in which there is a letter that he sneaks out of the bag from his Aunt Marion to Miss F referring, as L finds out, to his possible ‘bowel’ trouble… as well as the ‘sex-instruction’ he has been receiving based on ‘botany and mythology’ in his earlier preparation for now imminently meeting his second-time-married mother…
There is also a second letter he slyly reads — H’s grandmother, Patience Arbuthnot, writing to Miss F about the logistics of H’s necessary over-day stay in transit to her in Mentone…and whether Miss F could show H Paris while waiting for the next train…
This letter also reveals that Mrs Arbuthnot addresses Miss F with a Sapphic ‘Kingfisher’…(“Your pressed wild pansy fell out of de Sévigné only the other day, and I smiled again at that passage we marked together. […] My little flat has big balconies but such wretchedly small and so few rooms that I hardly know yet how to fit Henrietta in.”)
Much is revealed by these letters (much of which I have not revealed here) about future revelations et al, and there is another empty envelope from the handbag, one with a missing letter that L actually reads through a strange form of osmosis similar to that needed for reading the missing bits in Bowen, as well as the not-so-missing bits in her books, I guess! (We thus can ‘read’ his mother’s letter, alongside him.)
‘“And after the Trocadéro,’ pursued Henrietta, ‘might we –’
But someone was tapping decisively overhead.
‘My mother is waiting all this time,’ cried Miss Fisher.”
“We feel that, apart from the circumstance of his birth, Leopold’s heredity (instability on the father’s side, lack of control on the mother’s) may make conduct difficult for him, and are attempting to both guard and guide him accordingly. He shows extreme sensibility and his mind is most interesting. We believe him to be creative, so are encouraging handicrafts and, so far as possible, relaxing outdoor games. We do not consider him ripe for direct sex-instruction yet, though my husband is working towards this through botany and mythology.”
“He saw himself tricked into living. Then I will not, he thought.”
***
“There are enough mad people in this house!”
4
Henrietta, now in the sick room of Mme Fisher, is accompanied there by the latter’s daughter Naomi (Miss Fisher), and we learn, by dialogue, more of various characters’ backstories, in addition to Mme Fisher’s joke about Henrietta’s monkey being alive, a joke H took seriously and had to assure her that it was not alive!
These backstories concern, inter alia, Captain Fisher (Mme Fisher’s dead husband and Naomi’s father), and Leopold’s father who, Mme Fisher claims, had broken Naomi’s heart, and the ‘kingfisher’ context of Mrs Arbuthnot and Naomi….reminding me, in this oblique context, of another scenario embodied by a fish in the name Eva Trout. All of this information filtered through Bowen’s own filter of Henrietta’s precocious maturity for her age combined with a more natural naïvety for her age.
The breaking of Naomi’s heart by a man evokes another ‘death of the heart’ ambiance and the shock Naomi feels that H should hear this from such a gratuitous comment to a child by her mother, is followed by these musings of Henrietta as filtered by Bowen…
“Grown-up enough to shy away from emotion, Henrietta felt she had seen Miss Fisher undressed. Half of her blindly wished to be somewhere else, while the other half of her stood eagerly by. She knew one should not hear these things when one was only eleven. All the same, she felt important in this atmosphere of importance: she liked being in on whatever was going on.”
“Henrietta knew of the heart as an organ; she privately saw it covered in red plush and believed that it could not break, though it might tear. But, Miss Fisher’s heart had been brittle, it had broken. No wonder she’d looked so odd at the Gare du Nord.”
***
It seems important for my own benefit of later future Bowenesque recall-hindsight-and-gestalt to record two passages here at length, one of them with a clocked stillness of word-sensory furnishings — and the other with another ‘waxy’ reference…both with factors I cannot yet evaluate.
“A cone of sick-room incense on the bureau sent spirals up the daylight near the door; daylight fell cold white on the honeycomb quilt rolled back. Round the curtained bedhead, Pompeian red walls drank objects into their shadow: picture-frames, armies of bottles, boxes, an ornate clock showed without glinting, as though not quite painted out by some dark transparent wash. Henrietta had never been in a room so full and still.”
“Henrietta found in her smile a perplexingness she had once been told was beauty and learnt to recognize by some pause in herself. The smile was pungent, extraordinary, as deep as darkness and as dazzling as light.
Mme Fisher was not in herself a pretty old lady. Waxy skin strained over her temples, jaws and cheek-bones; grey hair fell in wisps round an unwomanly forehead; her nostrils were wide and looked in the dusk skullish; her mouth was graven round with ironic lines. Neither patience nor discontent but a passionate un-resignation was written across her features, tense with the expectation of more pain. She seemed to lie as she lay less in weakness than in unwilling credulity, as though the successive disasters that make an illness had convinced her slowly, by repetition. She lay, still only a little beyond surprise at this end to her, webbed down, frustrated, or, still more, like someone cast, still alive, as an effigy for their own tomb. Her illness seemed to be one prolonged mistake.”
Mme F seems to remind me of having been borne here more sickly from some Hotel?
***
“‘ – So, Henrietta,’ said Mme Fisher suddenly, ‘you have not only your monkey but Leopold down there?’”
5
“Caroline writhed at this like a hooked fish. ‘I wish I had died,’ she said, ‘when I was your age.’”
Whatever fish the fisher fished, H’s memories sharing a bedroom with her 11 years older sister, Caroline, and the latter’s aborted holiday-romance with a Mr Jeffcocks at a place, I imagine, not far from Seale, as in Lease, a seaside place like Dymchurch, mentioned here, and I wonder at the place’s likeness with The Children of Dynmouth, too, that place of William Trevor that I reviewed here.
Something, too, connected, in H’s mature-naïve mind, with a heart breaking, the death of the heart then re-healed…or, later, a grave to be dug with spades?
“When Caroline saw Henrietta get out of bed she had said, ‘No; don’t go.’
‘I was going to see my starfish.’
Starfish seemed to have fatal associations, for Caroline wept again.”
“Henrietta’s relief at finding herself alone was overcast by the prospect of returning to Leopold. Feeling like a kaleidoscope often and quickly shaken, she badly wanted some place in which not to think. So she sat down on the stairs, with her eyes shut tight, pressing her ear-lobes over her ears with her thumbs: she had found this the surest way to repress thought. But something had got at her: the idea of Miss Fisher’s heart.
Why could it not mend, like Caroline’s?”
***
“For growing little girls are tempted up like plants by the idea that something is happening that they will some day know about. Mme Fisher’s eyes, her indifferent way of talking, made Henrietta feel that nothing was going on – never had, never would: you knew that when you knew. Henrietta could not understand why that picture of Mrs Arbuthnot walking by the seashore with her green parasol had made her so nearly blush:”
Names Karen Brown, Grant Moody, Forrestier float with a muddle of meaning in my mind like the later ‘porridge’ of playing cards when fortune telling with L, and turning up mainly spades….
Miss F Sitting on the fence, as it were, of the stairs, just as H herself is plainly and decisively sitting on the the stairs…
“…made Henrietta feel that fumes of insanity must have twisted down here.”
Later, L tells H that it was his mother whom Miss F liked, not his father…
L who, perhaps, thinks his own self was never born?
***
“‘Oh, you oughtn’t to thought-read letters to someone else!’
Leopold, stuffing a handkerchief carefully over the envelope, took no notice.
‘It’s dishonourable to touch other people’s letters,’ Henrietta went on.”
“The weeping-willow fall of her hair as she stooped and the sturdy way she got up, tugging her belt round to bring the buckle over her navel again, pleased Leopold. Whenever he looked direct at Henrietta she was not an enemy. Her grey eyes, stretched wide open to keep the tears back, met his when he said Miss Fisher was mad:”
“: moving her elbow his way she felt his arm as unknowing as wood. Perplexity and sudden unchildish sadness made her remove her touch.”
“There seemed no doubt he and she would go to England together to live a demi-god life there, leaving Henrietta forgotten, luckless, cold.”
***
“‘Muddle – muddle – muddle,’ he muttered,…”
The playing cards actually created, as cause and effect, what was about to happen because H, along with L, had simply started using them to scry synchronicities as fortunes of the future? But creating what?…….
“The cautious steps of women when something has happened came downstairs, sending vibrations up the spine of the house. The women came down with a kind of congested rush, like lava flowing as fast as it can.”
“Miss Fisher’s entrance, like anything much dreaded, happened at no one moment; she seeped in round the door.”
“Miss Fisher, farouchely, lost to all but the crisis, held her arms out to him, dropped on her knees and advanced on her knees, arms out. Her eyes streamed as she rode at him like the figurehead of a ship.”
“Henrietta, waiting, breathed on the table and absorbedly wrote an H in the mist.”
PART 2: The Past
1
“‘Why am I? What made me be?’”
“Karen, her elbows folded on the deck-rail, wanted to share with someone her pleasure in being alone: this is the paradox of any happy solitude.”
From Leopold — a cork upon the present’s tides, and his unknown mother not meeting him after all at the Paris doll’s house or Proustian Time Tardis, her non-arrival there for whatever reason — to his mother whom we shall know as Karen Michaelis, ten years before upon the past’s tideless uncharted waters of a ship sailing a river towards Cork itself, a sort of unknown country or Combray where I anticipate, by hints, we shall hear more of her engagement to a slightly inbred cousinage of a future husband, a future father for Leopold? A man called Ray Forrestier?
“He [Leopold] expected her account of what is really: apples and trains, anger, the wish to know: what else is there?”
But she never came. But Karen’s past must surely have happened. It must have, as L is here today…
“Or call it art, with truth and imagination informing every word.”
“They might meet later, but nothing then could impair what had not been.
So everything remained possible.”
When I read this novel years ago, I called it Proustian. But is that memory of mine, even if right, as conjured up by the apples, as the tea and Madeleine cake of this text? But it now seems at most an inversion of the Proust or perhaps, at a push, with its Bowenesque ‘moments’, a revolutionary recasting of Proust…
“He [L] has travelled less, so his imagination is wider; she has less before her but a more varied memory: referring backwards and forwards between imagination and memory she relives scenes, he sees them alive. The mystery about sex comes from confusion and terror: to a mind on which these have not yet settled there is nothing you cannot tell. Grown-up people form a secret society, they must have something to hold by; they dare not say to a child: ‘There is nothing you do not know here.’
Talking to a very young clever person, you do not stick at hard words; on the other hand, you do not seek mystery. In the course of that meeting that never happened, that meeting whose scene remained inside Leopold, she would have told what she had done without looking for motives. These he could supply, for he would understand. You suppose the spools of negatives that are memory (from moments when the whole being was, unknown, exposed), developed without being cut for a false reason: entire letters, dialogues which, once spoken, remain spoken for ever being unwound from the dark, word by word.”
What is more real, the past or the present? Possibly neither of them is a real-time all? Only the future is real, and Leopold is in the future now…
***
Karen reaching her destination, a stay with Uncle Bill Bent – a man with irrational fears, a phobia about unpunctuality and memories of his earlier house that had been burnt in the Irish Troubles — and Aunt Violet …and the exquisite style is Proustian about the environs of the journey and the bland doll’s house destination, and about Karen’s character and the Uncle himself….
“Nowadays, such people seldom appear in books; their way of life, though pleasant to share, makes tame reading. They are not rococo, as the aristocracy are supposed to be, or, like the middle classes, tangles of mean motives: up against no one, they are hard to be up against. The Michaelis were, in the least unkind sense, a charming family.”
“Houses asleep with their eyes open watched the vibrating ship pass: against the woody background those red and white funnels must look like a dream.”
“Uncle Bill Bent only to glance mistrustfully at the clock.”
Karen as you…
“This makes any lover or friend a narcissus pool; you do not want anyone else once you have learnt what you are; there is no more to learn.”
She has worked at her own self portrait, to make whatever Proustian self she is to be in that real future, but here in the past….
“He [Uncle Bill] tucked her into his car as though she were made of glass, then started the car with a jolt that would have shattered anything.”
“The nineteenth-century calm hanging over the colony makes the rest of Ireland a frantic or lonely dream.”
“From the harbour, Rushbrook looks like a steep show of doll’s-houses; some gothic, some with glass porches, some widely bow-windowed and all bland. Yet this unstrange place was never to lose for Karen a troubling strangeness, a disturbing repose. Marshes threaded with water, pale tufts of pampas, grey bridges, a broken tower lie for some flat miles between here and Cork.”
And so much more.
A reader is also ever a cork upon tides of the Bowenesque texts, negotiating its elbows and thudding apples and shadowy thirds but, as yet in this novel and perhaps forever, no cigarettes at all! The heat of the day is in the troubled past, I guess, and the death of the heart seems constantly beyond a null immortality…while the future never comes?
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