The Last September
PART TWO of my review continued from here:
The Last September 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:
6
“‘Nummy-nummy,’… […] ‘Hoity-toity!’… […] ‘…piggy-wig…’”
Cakes, ghosts and Ford cars talked about or eaten at the continuing tennis party —- and the ‘occupying’ and somewhat patronising English there.
Meanwhile, Lois…
“. . . How is it that in this country that ought to be full of such violent realness, there seems nothing for me but clothes and what people say? I might just as well be in some kind of cocoon.’”
“She thought a major proposed to her, though he seemed rather old, but he was so much confused and had such a mumbly moustache she could not be certain.”
Gender as well as racial patronising, as I believe Gerald is one such English.
Lois is preoccupied with writing to her English friend, Viola — from back in L’s schooldays backstory in London — about Gerald…and L thinks of V’s own ‘flashes of the pen’ to which L cannot emulate!…
“Viola flashed off her men in a phrase, with a sweep of her red quill pen. The red pen had leaned from the Chinese inkpot, against the window, like a thin flame, a leaning flamingo on that day’s sunny mist… […] Her pigtail had been the one loose end there was of her, an extension of her that had independence, a puppyish walloping thing with nerves of its own. Now the hair was woven in bright sleek circles over her ears, each strand round like an eel’s body. The effect completed her;”
L remembers saying farewell to V…
“…a slight day, anxious between the enormous past and future.”
Seems so time-Bowenesque…
“ She [V] wanted to know, to see, to hear him, even to smell him –
Moustaches, smiles, eyebrows and other bodily parts as well as ineffable ones …. “as though his thoughts were under his eyelids.”
“And she [L] knew she liked something about the back of his [G’s] neck: it was a personal neck – not just a connection, an isthmus – with skin fitting closely over the muscles.”
“She had this one limitation, his darling Lois; she couldn’t look on her own eyes, had no idea what she was, resented almost his attention being so constantly fixed on something she wasn’t aware of.”
A chapter where thankfully my mind clarified about certain characters and situations. I laughed at my own earlier naivety. Meanwhile…
“: her Lol was really the final Sphinx.”
7
“The Trents left last but one, the Hartigans and their aunt Mrs Foxe-O’Connor had just gone jogging away up the avenue, knee to knee in their little trap.”
A ‘retreat into silence’ after the end of the tennis party. Another one tomorrow at Castle Trent? Although a retreat from dutiful talking, we are allowed to eavesdrop on two ‘casual’ dialogues, one Laurence and Francie…
…then Francie and Myra, while Lois eavesdrops them, as prefigured earlier…. Patterns within patterns, then within the literary gestalt.
“This gold weather had all the delights of a new perception, it made Danielstown real as a memory.”
Laurence and Francie. Talk of Hugo and Mrs Trent?
And Black and Tans assaulting people on the way home!
And of Livvy: “Why should they chop up the rather beautiful name of Olivia into something that sounds like cat’s meat?”
“She [Francie?] liked the young men, but they seemed all limbs and faces, not yet related.”
Francie and Myra…. about Lois and Gerald Lesworth
Myra thinks Francie mixes up up young men!
Gossip L and G
Opposition leading to confidence between these two ladies. Who of these is the Bowen matriarchal demon this time, I wonder!
Myra: “Really altogether, I think all English people very difficult to trace. They are so pleasant and civil, but I do often wonder if they are not a little shallow:”
“Francie felt like something being put back in its box.”
Lois “pulled the pillows over her head. It was hot thus and still the voices penetrated. They came on steadily, like the Hound of Heaven.”
“Was she now to be clapped down under an adjective, to crawl round lifelong inside some quality like a fly in a tumbler?”
And a crack in a washstand as air memoire. “…real as a memory” again?
“; of ghostly roses that still showed faintly when one drew the curtains over the daylight.”
8
This paragraph helped me out, plot wise…
“Sir Richard, to whom the idea about Lois and Gerald percolated in time through the family conversation, declared the idea was preposterous. What chiefly worried him was, might she not have mentioned to Gerald those guns in the lower plantations? He had charged her not to, but she was just like Laura, poor Laura’s own child in fact; she would talk and talk and you never knew where you had her. He announced, he had been thinking for some time subalterns should be fewer and more infrequent. He was delighted when he heard from the postman, and was able to pass on, how three young women in the Clonmore direction had had their hair cut off by masked men for walking out with the soldiers. And indeed they got no sympathy from the priest either, the postman said, for the priest knew that English soldiers were most immoral.”
And I realised, perhaps belatedly, who the late Laura actually is or was to Lois, the creator of Lois as a whole, and Lois may have been only ‘half there’ today if Mr Hugo Montmorency had married Laura, and now Lois is in a ‘trap’ with Hugo in complex girl-like quandary about the crazy idea of falling in love with a married man such as Hugo, (his cinematic brushing his wife’s hair at the end of this chapter as observed by Lois) — a pony and trap that took them into the equally cinematic Irish Landscape and this era’s complexly emotional and precarious Irish History (the more dire quandaries of that history, man versus man, English versus Irishman felt by us after Hugo and Lois’ meeting with Mr Connor and his pigs). And what might Viola write about Hugo and Lois, as opposed to Lois and Gerald, we do find out towards the end of this chapter, too.
“Height had the quality of depth: as they mounted they seemed to be striking deeper into the large mild crystal of an inverted sea. Out of the distance everywhere, pointless and unrelated, space came…”
“‘And so much bitterness,’ he exclaimed, ‘over this empty country!’”
Feet and knees touching in the trap, amid this novel’s recurring theme of silence and of silence broken. History has silences as well as loud bangs, I guess.
“But Laura’s unrepose had been an irradiation,…” The start of a passage to die for.
Her tree had fallen…
“She [Lois] looked gênée, dispirited; some failure, no doubt, in his [Hugo’s] company:”
Ironically, not a Lois to her Superman, indeed!
But, tellingly…
“: some failure, no doubt, in his company: he must be an old man to her. She glanced back once or twice at the mountains, from which a light peaty breath still came after them down the descending road.
She laughed suddenly, parted the reins, and jerking a rein in each hand, with wide elbows,…”
The ultimate Bowen stance of superwoman, I guess: with widened elbows!
As Hugo and Lois arrive home in their moving trap, the house seems ‘smothered’ and much more to take one’s prose-reading breath away, arriving at just one of the classic Bowen passages in this chapter…we are there, we are in her moving trap of a penned-nib……
“Square cattle moved in the fields like saints, with a mindless certainty. Single trees, on a rath, at the turn of the road, drew up light at their roots. Only the massed trees – spread like a rug to dull some keenness, break some contact between self and senses perilous to the routine of living – only the trees of the demesne were dark, exhaling darkness. Down among them, dusk would stream up the paths ahead, lie stagnant over the lawns, would mount in the tank of garden, heightening the walls, dulling the borders like a rain of ashes. Dusk would lie where one looked as though it were in one’s eyes, as though the fountain of darkness were in one’s own perception. Seen from above, the house in its pit of trees seemed a very reservoir of obscurity; from the doors one must come out stained with it. And the kitchen smoke, lying over the vague trees doubtfully, seemed to be the very fume of living.”
Also later talk between Livvy and Lois of the whereabouts of Gerald and David, missing, ill or what? This whole book has an ominous sense of something hanging over it, like no other novel. Not just a sense of war. Whether it were war or were not war.
Meanwhile, Viola uses split infinitives … Voilà!
THE VISIT OF MISS NORTON
9
Lois and Livvy in Clonmore amid the rain and Miss Fogarty’s social arena of photos of dead soldiers, a place as collateral rain shelter. Livvy’s David is there, but not Lois’s Gerald who is on ‘extra duty’, it seems. 😦
“And there were cushions with Union Jacks that she wouldn’t, she said, put away – not if They came at night and stood in her room with pistols. And this was all the more noble in Mrs Fogarty in that she was a Catholic, with relations whose politics were not above reproach at all.”
And Lois’ telling ‘cigarette dance’…
Thoughts of the deaths of a piano tuner and a cake maker…
Meanwhile they sang songs…
“‘The Green Eye of the Little Yellow God’. The piece was very tragic and sinister, […] ‘Melisande’, which sent every girl there into a trance of self-pity; it was so clearly written about oneself.”
“There was something so very experienced about the tip of her [Livvy’s] nose that Lois felt went flat. She felt that she herself must be like a cake in which the flour had been forgotten. […] Livvy was so happy. If David should die now, she did not think Livvy would have to reproach herself.
Smothering rain as Livvy returns Lois to Danielstown in the trap. Dodging a Black and Tans lorry en route.
Mackintoshes and a borrowed fur coat, as Miss Norton (29), somehow still single, arrives, also with younger memories of a Hugo and Francie, and having lost a suitcase en route. She is a loser, perhaps? Lois strikes up a rapport with her, telling of Hugo brushing Francie’s hair…. some sort of silent collusive lolsbetween the two women…?
Earlier smothered in Miss N’s fur (mink?) (but who is the minx?)…
“She [Lois] touched the fur lightly, touched the edge of a cabinet – her finger-tips drummed with a foreign sensitiveness. And the blurred panes, the steaming changing trees, the lonely cave of the hall no longer had her consciousness in a clamp.”
10
“…beneath the pressure of omniscience.”
Or the ominousness of war?
“One did not lightly telephone.”
“…if the boys had not fled it would have been almost a battle. What times, said Francie, looking at Marda doubtfully, they did live in!”
The evocative aftermath of rain, but still heavy drops amid the beech trees.
“‘But I feel,’ persisted Marda [Norton], ‘I must have tennis shoes. I don’t mind wobbling.’” Wobbling as driven by Laurence to get new tennis shoes to replace those in the missing suitcase, and later:
“‘There is something in Lady Naylor’s eye: a despairing optimism. I feel that suitcase won’t be the end of me here.’”
“She [Marda] escaped the feminine pear-shape, […] …her speech was a lightning attack on one’s integrity out of the stronghold of her indifference.”
Woman-intense Hugo takes boyish Marda (“She was already real to him as a woman” — a man as born lover “eaten at either margin by past or coming shadows of change”), takes her for a turn amid the residual heavy drops of the beech trees (“beech trunks; great pewter limbs went turning and straining up with the sheen of muscles” with glimpses of mountains between) — Marda who later admits she is engaged to someone called Leslie Lawe, something she has not even told Myra!
“; she covered a yawn.”
Marda as another version of Bowen?
“‘Were you here when I bled so much at that children’s party?’
‘Not actually, but I have always heard of it. Didn’t you lose a ring?’”
Hugo on Lois:
“She is like someone being driven against time in a taxi to catch a train, jerking and jerking to help the taxi and looking wildly out of the window at things going slowly past.”
As well as the bean-bag syndrome that you will need to read for yourself!
Another trench-coat premonition of a ghost, I guess, in the beech trees, Gerald in ‘cigarette dance’ with Marda, a man “square and facty,”…
“…he would have come on Lois, somewhere, somehow, and amazingly kissed her amazed hands….”
Marda “Leaning with her elbow against the tree, returning instinctive thoughts of war and love
An elbow that makes kissing Lois, kissing Marda, too. As we all do, when we read Bowen. Kiss her books?
“– as though a flower’s centre had been revealed by an impetuous opening out of lovely confused petals…”
A war’s lorry or a blessing of literary sight in disguise?
“They met the white stare of a cottage, stared and turned.”
A stare stared where Dannie Regan lives with his 104 year old mother (if she is still alive), a man who, in the past, ironically within this stare, shot out one of his own eyes when rabbiting….
Marda and Hugo here on there walk are “Youth to his eyes”. But please note Dannie’s plural of eyes there. Making me repeat myself…
“…a flower’s centre had been revealed by an impetuous opening out of confused petals…”
This review continues here: https://weirdmonger.wordpress.com/506-2/