Friends and Relations 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:
“He would be shot, he said, if he let one past him…”
Part I
Edward and Rodney
1
“The bride’s relations frowned in sleep and were roused with a sense of doom by rain’s inauspicious mutter on roofs and windowsills. Clouds with their reinforcements came rolling over the Malvern hills.”
A new Laurelbow from the Laura in the previous novel The last September that I reviewed….
The wedding of Laurel Studdart & Edward Tilney, confused as I am by Wolf Cubs, little girls, Cousin Richard directing people-traffic hoping to not let one past him, Theodora Thirdman (15) (gauche and ungainly?) being, possibly, as well as a mock ‘shadowy third’, a sort of older version of Evadne Price’s Jane who was arguably a female Just William, and while wondering who, out of Mrs Studdart, Lady Elfrida Tilney & Mrs Daubeney, is the demon Bowen matriarch …. while, earlier, from 10.30 to Noon, Laurel and her father “Colonel Studdart, shut into the morning-room, played demon patience.” He never having given away a daughter before! And after the rain ceased, there was sunshine…
“the graves glittered.”
“A playing-card, overlooked, lay face down on the carpet. Edward stooped for it – ‘Don’t!’ she cried, ‘leave it!’ her heart in her mouth.”
Some business with lilies and Mrs S.
“Lady Elfrida Tilney tittering in the porch.”
“Labels?”
Laurels?
Julien Sorel mentioned – Stendhal’s The Scarlet and the Black? (see one of my closing quotes from The Last September)
“Alex and Willa Thirdman remained in the drawing-room doorway, turning this way and that their charming, anxious faces.”
Theodora Thirdman “had gained the buffet without being forced to acknowledge the bridal pair by the simple expedient of pushing her way through the hall door and walking round outside the house.”
“The bride’s two attendants, little girls grilled to the waist, with pink knickers, had escaped from old gentlemen on to the spongy lawn. Here they were playing clock golf till the cake should be cut.”
A long wonderful Bowenesque description of Laurel at the nd of this chapter, and I think I have a reasonable fist upon most of the characters introduced.
“Janet, the bride’s younger sister, knew that Cousin Richard would be certain, sooner or later, to say ‘Pass along the car, please.’”
And one of the comparatively few elbows in this novel compared to the other nine Bowen novels…
“At this point Theodora, opening her mouth to speak, saw Mrs Daubeney being removed by a skilful touch on the elbow.”
“For the Studdarts, the summer of 192– was to prove eventful. […] Six weeks after the wedding of Laurel, Janet announced her engagement to Rodney Meggatt.”
The Studdarts of Cheltenham…
Janet, more forbidding than her sister Laurel, is invited, after latter’s wedding, to ——shire with three new dresses from her father as consolation, a tennis party at Batts Monachorum, and she meets Rodney, but he is unfortunately connected by Lady Elfrida’s past adultery with the cross-pollen of of these sororal affairs, or so I understand. But Elfrida makes this no bar to J marrying R.
This Bowen novel is an attempt at a more traditional one, also as a sort of romcom that is not as Bowenesque as might be more natural to her, with info-dumps of descriptions of characters in this chapter, dashes for missing dates and placenames, and a defiantly bland title for the whole novel. Yet, I sense Bowenesqueness will creep into it like a Siamese cat….
“Rodney’s uncle Considine had been Lady Elfrida’s co-respondent.”
“….they felt Rodney was owed to her [Janet]. The growing-up together of Meggatt and Tilney children might well heal the ugliness of that adultery, cheerfully re-linking the two names. […] She was to be an October bride: one could forecast chrysanthemums, a certain quality in the sunshine. Janet (though she did not clearly formulate this or any idea) personified Weather as someone feminine, tractable while perverse, agreeably subject to the dominance of some wills, upon whom Rodney could not fail to exercise a compulsion.”
“some triangular awkwardness;”
“failed with the demigoddess.”
…if not with Cheltenham carytids?
Elfrida speaking to Janet about Laurel and Edward…
“They are like sparrows tugging little pieces of things about; little patterns, you know, of the wrong brocades.”
“The Siamese, reappearing like a malign sun over the cushions, looked at his mistress with penetration, without sympathy.”
Part 1 (3)
“She [Laurel] returned all the patterns Lady Elfrida deprecated to the wrong shops and was in tears when Edward came home because they would never have any curtains now.”
Edward Tilney and Laurel, his fearful backstory as a boy, the Considine and Elfrida backdrop, with C thankfully now mostly in Africa…. Why does this talk of C initially remind me of someone in Eva Trout? Why does the name Tilney remind me of Jane Austen?
“They lay side by side on their two low beds as on tombs and were each aware in the other, falling asleep, of the same carven air of finality. […] their fingers groped for each other over the chasm between the beds. A small thrill animated the tombs.”
Laurel and Jane meet, with a quadrilateral meeting planned with Edward and Rodney.
People have been contacting Laurel now she is in London…
“And the girl Theodora Thirdman had rung up, no one could think why.”
“Sun streamed in generously; from chairs and cushions colour must already be makins: a ghostly departure.”
(makins?)
A mini Bowenesque cigarette dance ensues….
“Janet, who seldom smoked, took a cigarette from the shagreen box and lit it seriously. […] …Janet landed her ash in the little tray with lotuses.”
“When he [Edward] was six he asked if his mother was dead and they said, “Practically.” You can imagine what he felt about that; he had just seen a skeleton.”
Laurel as seen through the eyes of Sylvia, the servant…
“…she had tried to suggest that Sylvia and Simpson should dress like waitresses in a fancy teashop,…”
But they would not have it, nor allow Laurel to “have a dog, children or dinner-parties.”
Returning earlier than was expected of him, with the two sisters still together…
“Mr Tilney stood blindly, as though the hall were the coal-hole.”
Part 1 (4)
“Theodora had a very clear view of her family’s situation; it was important that the Thirdmans, after long exile, should establish themselves in England. […]
Returning, third class, knee-to-knee with the Bowleses, she [Theodora] glowered a general disparagement from under her bright hat. […]
…her spectacles magnifying a horror of that cold lake, of the bleak excellence of her Swiss education. […]
The telephone became at once her distraction and torture. […]
She must have lain kicking her heels against the wall, for they heard thump – thump – thump against the thin partition.”
Theodora Thirdman is Society’s socially greedy but shadowy third, solid enough, though, with her glasses and perhaps unmatureable ‘figure’ at a ‘difficult’ age, an interesting theme and variations on other Bowen girls of a similar age, on the brink of growing up into a novel.
“And why does Father always carry a mackintosh?” Well, Alex, this father, later eyes Janet…
The thump thump thump of Theodora’s future thump of death’s falling apples. While she masquerades as fruity-voiced Lady Hunter Jervois on the telephone, importuning Laurel and others for their yearned for society, as they the Thirdmans have been in Swiss exile. Laurelbow, Bowle(ses)…
Now taken by mother Willa and Alex to Mellyfield in Surrey, to check out a school for her, something fated to stunt her society ambitions? She looks at a kid outside the school’s window and turns her mind to Considine whom she also rings!
“A child running past the window in a scarlet tunic made happiness concrete, the lawns stood solid in sunshine, a piano-study issuing from a floor above built up a diligent self-rewarding pattern over this shining silence of application and still trees. […]
Considine – something came alive, she could perfectly see him: disengaged, blasé, rucking a tiger-skin, backed by the major feline masks, almost visibly shredded – like a fine, upgrowing thistle on a cobwebby morning – with feminine reputations.”
The good tiger?
“the ‘rational’ bodices”
“Willa, in the marabout boa, massaging over each thumb her carefully cleaned gloves,…”
And something about Janet, Theodora’s racquet and Alex….
“Have Rodney and Edward met before?’
‘Never,’ said Janet.”
Theodora: about the prospects of school, thinking of the tiger as the King in Yellow?…. (The Siamese cat is now winning?)
“I am like a dog going to the lethal chamber.”
Part 1 (5)
“Edward and Rodney arrived at the Ionides some minutes before either Laurel or Janet. Janet had miscalculated the distance from Gloucester Road and Laurel had changed her dress twice. […]
They had both thrown cigarettes away and now brought their cases out simultaneously; Edward had one of Rodney’s, but Rodney preferred his own. He seemed likeable, a scrupulous, slow young man, without the disengagedness of Considine, that light-hearted, light-handed seducer who (Edward had come to believe) even shot lions negligently.”
A short chapter (Bowen’s shortest novel chapter?), as the two brothers-in-law meet amid their own cigarette dance and the various latenesses of the two sisters, one with a green hat? Or does that go the same way that everything else goes in this chapter, even as far as my short-term memory is concerned? And Rodney’s Uncle Considine – where is he due to fit in?
Part 1 (6)
“The Siamese cat slid past Rodney’s legs as he slowly looked at her [Elfrida] in surprise.”
Later to trace that cat’s spine.
Some business about curtains, too, and, then, Rodney and Elfrida meet again after their recent first meeting, and discuss Janet and his marriage to her.
A clumsy paragraph I did not fully understand but one that needs quoting as something one needs to read so as to fully understand Bowen! —
“He recollected having heard that she [Elfrida] was impossible. She was certainly feminine, and because she chose to appear rather charmingly muddled and inconsequent he set her down as astute, more astute than she was. Brought up on Considine’s cheerful ruthless generalizations as to the Sex, Rodney reacted towards a careful slowness of judgement on any woman. The Sex did not interest him; till now they had, as persons, appeared alarmingly like one another in only one particular: an aptness to set stages out on to which one stepped unawares and where it was impossible to behave without consciousness. Janet had pleased him by a rather masculine unawareness of ‘situation’.”
Discussion of Considine and any uneasiness under a roof with herself
Talk (talk by or to whom or just E’s thoughts?) of one of Edward’s boyhood’s Christmases, tinsel catching fire, a teddy bear present from Considine: a name that assonates with ‘coincidence’. Will he be coming to the wedding, as he is still in Greece?…
“For this unhappy mother of Edward’s – now so contentedly tracing her cat’s spine – was for himself and Janet a major, almost a tragic, coincidence. Bearing down, spectacular as an iceberg over the sunny waters of their engagement, she had so nearly wrecked them.”
Note to self as aide memoire: Lady Elfrida once had an adulterous relationship and left Edward’s father for a man [Considine, Rodney’s uncle] who then didn’t marry her.
“Lewis was Edward’s best friend. […] Lewis rang up Edward at midnight to tell him everything would be all right.”
Part 1 (7)
“One of the girls had been nearly captured by brigands;”
Bowen’s brigands are legendary! And so are her Eva Trout like school dormitories for Jane Turpin like girls, here Marise (sister of Lewis) being the head of dormitory, as Theodora starts her first term at Mellyfield, all girls interested in each other’s characters as well as carrots! “Theodora went in to geometry with earth in her teeth.” Radishes, too, and sitting in potting-sheds, too! Marise, whose brother was best man at the Tilney wedding, spreads rumours about Janet and Rodney. Theodora (who becomes an actress in school plays, say, as a man who walks with elbows splayed) masquerades on the phone as her own mother when talking to Elfrida about such rumours! As an aside, we learn E’s Siamese is called Sixtus, a double set of shadowy triangulations? Or a pair of Thirdmans? And, meantime, does one’s stomach have intermissions or rest periods in the digestive work it does? A beautiful shadowy June for this first term….
“….girls, stepping in and out of the windows, crossed the lawns from shadow to shadow in fluttering red tunics;”
“In mid-morning break she [Theodora] played the Rachmaninoff prelude in G sharp minor loudly on the gymnasium piano…”
“She [Theodora] made her first impression on Jenna, who collected tortures. Theodora knew of two new ones, one Chinese, something to do with a rat, and one Italian, with weights. Jenna went green, became quite friendly and asked Theodora if she had ever been into a used vault. Neurosis had quite a value at Mellyfield; the third night Theodora shrieked with confidence when a bat came into the dormitory.”
And possibly the most important quotation in the whole of Bowen*…
“Men walk with their elbows out, women walk with their elbows in”
*other than perhaps: “ You look like a statue, up there against the sky! Whatever I do or say, or don’t do or say, do forgive me…” (Eva Trout)
This review continues here: https://nullimmortalis.wordpress.com/26321-2/