PART THREE 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:
11
“But it was the louche yellow dog from the lodge, intent on rabbiting. Soon a square black eye of the house [Danielstown] –“
…with some telling echoes, too, from the previous chapters! That Yellow God, earlier, too?
As Gerald walks through beech woods in what turns out to be a shower of big raindrops, expecting to find Lois at home (which she is eventually), his having been given an open invitation to drop in any time for lunch…
“But she was nowhere; the place was cold with her absence and seemed forgotten. The tennis party became a dream – parasols with their coloured sunshine, rugs spread, shimmer of midges, amiable competition of voices. Something had now been wiped from the place with implied finality. Gerald told himself it was all very queer, quiet; that it was disappointing about Lois. […] The smell of sandalwood boxes, a kind of glaze on the air from all the chintzes numbed his earthy vitality, he became all ribs and uniform.”
“But she [Lois] was his lovely woman: kissed. He shone at her, she helpless. She looked out at the hopeless rain.”
Lois is taken out of her comfort zone by the unexpected arrival. Where are the servants, where are the knives?
“‘I can’t think why you are being so sudden all of a sudden, in every way: you never used to be.’ […] – to be enclosed in nonentity, in some ideal no-place, perfect and clear as a bubble.”
She teases him about her loving a married man, but, accidentally, perhaps, she calls him ‘Darling’ just before the gong.
“‘You know I’d die for you.’”
Is that something that Gerald says accidentally, too?
You know, I am getting fed up with talk of Marda’s suitcase! And the shifting positions of war views and politics take over, almost just as boring. Although Laurence’s ‘cigarette dance’ with Gerald makes the former seem Sinn Fein… and Gerald seems shocked that his night manoeuvres capturing a Peter Connor, Connor being a friend of the family now entertaining him!
Small talk…
“Lois tried to explain to Hugo about Augustus John.”
Someone else talks of the Cork Militia.
“But his kissing of her, his attack, were no longer part of him. He concentrated upon his raspberries, crushing them, on his cream with carmine beautifully folding through, on his flushing sugar.”
Marda’s own ‘cigarette dance’, in turn, is co-opting Gerald away from a further test by Lois of his lips in a kiss…. (Significantly, perhaps, Marda’s ‘dance’ involves cigarette ash?)
“; an exact and delicate interrelation of stresses between being and being, like crossing arches; […] Their minds remained cutting-books.”
12
“‘. . . Am I pawing things?’
‘I like it. But haven’t you got some drawings?’”
Lois in Marda’s room showing her the Farquar drawings (drawings of “Morte d’Arthur and Omar Khayyam. They remembered Beardsley”), her full name now revealed as Lois Honoraria Farquar — and in a pattern of women’s talk (with proffered chain smoking!) about their respective Leslie Lawe and Gerald Lesworth and about engagement and travel and marriage etc. in general (women’s talk that only AustEN as BowEN would know about), till LaurENce comes in, irritated at Lois being there, at her being in Danielstown at all, instead of fulfilling her dreams of travel and travel arrangements à la a future ‘To The North’…
Earlier, though …
“An armoured car called for Gerald at four o’clock and he was driven away through the rain. Towards the end of the afternoon he had become very dull, a kind of fog came over his personality; […] The drawing-room became to Gerald fantastic and thin like an ice-palace,…”
And an apotheosis of the Nemonymous Night carpet…much exquisite prose in this chapter including a description of Marda’s little pots that you will need to read for yourself! … meanwhile…
“Over the mottled carpet curled strange pink fronds: someone dead now, buying this carpet, had responded to an idea of beauty. Lois thought how in Marda’s bedroom, when she was married, there might be a dark blue carpet with a bloom on it like a grape, and how this room, this hour would be forgotten. Already the room seemed full of the dusk of oblivion. And she hoped that instead of fading to dust in summers of empty sunshine, the carpet would burn with the house in a scarlet night to make one flaming call upon Marda’s memory.”
Lois’ Havoc of Hugo, and her being ‘neurotic’, her drawings dubbed “Sinister”…
“I like to be in a pattern.” — she says (or was it Marda?), and this review of a gestalt or a,pattern is thus in honour of her Honoraria. And getting a stiff neck if she ever travelled to America. Travel as a means to be herself…away from any War…
“She had never seen anything larger than she could imagine. […] She wanted to go into cathedrals unadmonished and look up unprepared into the watery deep strangeness. There must be perfect towns where shadows were strong like buildings, towns secret without coldness, unaware without indifference.”
Marda’s
“…the merest fumbling for outlet along the boundaries of the self.”
….writing to Leslie Lawe in little gushes and pauses, the letter never posted, as oftEN happens… Marda’s view on how engaged men act, and will she have three little boys or five arty daughters in the fateful future!
“I’m sick of all this trial and error.” Marda says, though, perhaps thinking of any Bowen book she may be in the pattern of?! Or was it Lois who said that?
Castle Trent spoken about in the same breath as weapons and the IRA, but the army only found boots! Will the weather permit the tennis party there to go ahead? I’m sick of all this trial and error. 🙂
Talk of bridesmaids and a flurry of umbrellas vis à vis the Montmorencies!
13
“….that windy gulf full of a fateful clapping of empty book-covers.”
This is an amazing chapter, ahead of its time, starting with literature’s most heart-wrenching passages of an ageing or failing marriage, Hugo and Francie, at night in bed, where something of aching sadness had been put in the dinner …. as well as Hugo’s annoyance at the umbrella incident … and Francie’s ‘quenching tears’ about coming to Danielstown at all…
“– and the perspectives of his regret opened fanwise, profound avenues each white at the end with a faceless statue –“
… and continuing with Laurence’s equivalent thoughts elsewhere in Danielstown’’s night…
“…the darkness, a sticky and stifling texture, like cobwebs, muffling the senses.”
Imaginary groups outside to whom he will feed bread and apples….
“….this confrontation of a positive futurelessness, his mind ran spider-like back on the thread spun out of itself for advance, stumbling and swerving a little over its own intricacy.”
“that windy gulf full of a fateful clapping of empty book-covers.”
– worth quoting twice!
A different destiny envisaged by Laurence – for himself, Laura, Lois, Hugo and other..
“….the dragging tick of the watch under his pillow, slowing down as at the mortal sickness of Time,…”
“Below, through the floor, a light drawling scrape climbed into stuttering melody, syncopated dance music, ghostly with the wagging of hips and horrid in darkness.”
Then all to awaken to daylight….
“‘Listen,’ said Livvy, clutching Lois’s elbow.”
The elbow alert, Bowen in attendance from out of the darkness?
Gerald’s kiss still lingering and Livvy’s long monologue about herself and David in Cork….
“All in a dream she had sat and bled from the gums in a train.”
Livvy’s father a mild widower with droopy moustache; Lois remembers when there with David and Gerald…
“The dining-room was dark red, with a smoky ceiling, and Gerald said afterwards he had felt like a disease in a liver. When the blancmange came in it lay down with a sob and Miss Thompson frowned at it.”
Blancmange, moustache and ‘disease in a liver’ and Livvy…
Chapter ends with Laurence’s thoughts on Marda’s and there is something about Mutton.
“….that windy gulf full of a fateful clapping of empty book-covers.”
14
“And really I am superstitious about her visits, already this time she has lost a suitcase.”
Myra has not since held a children’s party, and she gossips with another lady about Marda, Hugo, Francie…
“…that Hugo should be attracted towards a fellow visitor; […] She dreaded the suitcase…”
Don’t we all!
Marda tried to put Hugo off!
“Her reward: at the foot of the stairs at bedtime, a contact of finger-tips – all of himself in the touch – as he gave her her candlestick:”
Marda leaving…
Fine weather is back…
“The day was featureless, a stock pattern day of late summer, blandly insensitive to their imprints. The yellow sun – slanting in under the blinds on full bosomed silver, hands balancing Worcester, dogs poking up wistfully from under the cloth – seemed old, used, filtering from the surplus of some happy fulfilment; while, unapproachably elsewhere, something went by without them.”
A mysterious Smith! Something to do with someone called Nona? All very nemonymous…
“…a prologue being played out too lengthily, with unnecessary stress, a wasteful attention to detail.”
Unexplained jokes. Laurence’s sense of a watcher from the mountains, and, yes, a strange ‘pattern’….
“His ears, of unfortunate conformation, curled out semi-transparent against the evening light. Laurence said nothing, but thought; he must write that novel,…”
15
“Ashamed, the two young women stood elbow to elbow.”
Marda and Lois, the latter enticed into this now famous Gothic mill by the former (playfully?) to hide from Hugo, Lois always having been scared by this mill (its Marabar Caves potential in literature?) …and they find a man in there with a pistol….
Earlier Hugo remembered Laura, and now his shadowy triangulation on this walk with Marda and Lois, his inchoate feelings for Marda facing her antagonistic ones, leaving Francie waving at them as they had departed on this walk into a Bowenesque wordery of landscape and river…
“; like country seen from the train, without past or future. And, having given proof of her impotence to be even here, Laura shrank and drew in her nimbus,…”
Hugo on Marda:
“Had she a ghost everywhere? – there was something of her in Francie.”
Marda: ‘I never thought of there being stepping-stones. I only wanted to cross because we couldn’t. Why does one always seem to be on the wrong side?’
Then that famous mill… brittle, with nettles that had stung that man’s hand white..
‘Oh, what is that? The ghost of a Palace Hotel?’
“It was a fear she [Lois] didn’t want to get over, a kind of deliciousness. Those dead mills – the country was full of them, never quite stripped and whitened to skeletons’ decency: like corpses at their most horrible.”
“…the dead mill now entered the democracy of ghostliness, equalled broken palaces in futility and sadness;”
“…Lois entered the mill. Fear heightened her gratification; she welcomed its inrush, letting her look climb the scabby and livid walls to the frightful stare of the sky. Cracks ran down; she expected, now with detachment, to see them widen, to see the walls peel back from a cleft – like the House of Usher’s.”
Explosion, pistol shot or elbow striking elbow?… blood, but whose and how? The past’s ‘scraper’, or today’s edge of slate? This strange World of Love…
“‘No more hide-and-go-seek,’ he said, playful with fury. ‘Still bleeding –?’”
Hugo seems to think Marda should have been shot. But that is Bowen thinking, not him? Nothing is black and white in her books…
“One had always heard that dye ran into the blood.”
Thankfully Lois’ hankie is white not coloured like Marda’s. Marda soon to lose colour in life…?
Marda returns tomorrow to walk with Leslie Lawe ‘in Kentish light’. Inchoate and sad? Light as well as blackness?
“together – to become as the bricks and wallpaper of a home.”
“Ashamed, the two young women stood elbow to elbow.”
This review continues here: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2022/02/17/the-last-september-by-elizabeth-bowen/