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:
The Arrival of Mr and Mrs Montmorency
1
“In those days, girls wore crisp white skirts and transparent blouses clotted with white flowers;”
Who are Sir Richard and Lady Naylor (is this the Aunt Myra as referenced by Lois and Lois’s cousin Laurence?)? Are these Naylors the hosts at this house in Ireland, with ‘mounting lawns’ and decorated inside by 22 year old Lois with mauve sweet-peas for the guests, Mr and Mrs M, whom she hasn’t seen since she as 10?
Lois “clasping her elbows tightly behind her back,…” at the front door as the guests arrive in a car; is this elbow dance a defence mechanism because of the innuendo I sense behind the character of Mr M when she was ten? As she then, all those years ago, watched him lying ‘exposed’ by sleep?
Was their car stopped, the guests are asked? Why may they have been stopped? The Troubles?
Lois writing letters to soldiers in her room….
I have, in recent years, read the stories of William Trevor — all reviewed in detail on this site — but his take on things was mainly regarding a lower social class?
“…the house stared coldly over its mounting lawns.”
Dusty guests from travel, and unsettled dust inside… And Kerry cows. The nature of food and the eavesdropping possibilities between rooms and staircases.
“Mr Montmorency, who had not seen Lois since she was ten and evidently preferred children.”
“Two stories up, she could have heard a curtain rustle, but the mansion piled itself up in silence over the Montmorencys’ voices.”
“Going through to her room at nights Lois often tripped with her toe in the jaws of the tiger; a false step at any time sent some great claw skidding over the polish.”
“: yards and yards of inexhaustible nail coming out of one.”
…Lois’ gratuitous thought about her fingernails, as well as this book’s ‘good tiger’ on the floor, and the nature of a married couple’s nocturnal talking compared to illicit midnight feasts at boarding school…
“And there was the festival air of those candles, virgin, with long white wicks.”
“…a virile boot-rack for every possible kind of boot.”
And, amid any innuendo, there is Brigid, the watching servant of the house…
2
“The Naylors and the Montmorencys had always known each other; it was an affair of generations. […] ; time, loose-textured, had had a shining undertone, happiness glittered between the moments.”
Myra and Richard, Francie & Hugo respectively.
And a tragic backstory concerning Louis’s sister Laura…?
And other backstories for these characters , their relative ages / ‘ageing’ and their points of interface with this Bowen world in which they live, whence I gather much directly but also by a strange literary osmosis to which I have now become even more attuned, I think, as I head towards two more novels after this one and then a Bowen finale after absorbing for a second time all the Bowen stories and novels.
And the house of Danielstown itself…
“Rooms, doorways had framed a kind of expectancy of her; some trees in the distance, the stairs, a part of the garden seemed always to have been lying secretly at the back of her mind.
It was, also, on the first and only other visit, that she had made friends with Myra –“
“Only as they drove away did the trees run, watery, into the sky and Francie’s lids prick: she slipped her hand into Hugo’s under the rug.”
“High on the curve of her [Francie] cheeks, like petals, bright mauve-pink colour became, within kissing distance, a net of fine delicate veins. Her eyebrows, drawn in a pointed arch,… […] …washing her hands – they turned in the water like gentle porpoises in a slaver of violet soap. […] – how Hugo was too much for her altogether.”
“Francie’s delicacy, her absences from him, her long queer relapses into silence gave her the right to ask curious things, as from a death-bed.”
“But the dust seemed to have gone, perhaps because she was happier, less tired; or perhaps she had left a drift of it between the two pillows.”
Between the moments, indeed. But also earlier stated as a ‘valley of pillows’— pillows as plumped down by Hugo that echoes that ‘death-bed’….?
3
“; two stamped letters, her handiwork, leaned on the clock.”
Lois, at the end of this chapter, I think, is seen through Mr M’a ‘surface observation’ of her. But I absorb this book so far without full understanding of it (it is yet unstamped!), viz. the Irish politics and their views of England, the buried guns and mines, and I have not re-checked the plot elsewhere to help me. The named families coming tomorrow for tennis seem confusing. Something clinching will clear up my mind later perhaps. Many perfect descriptions of place and people in this chapter, and one paragraph I needed to quote in full below, as it is unmissable Bowen.
The dinner group…
“Strokes of the gong, brass bubbles, came bouncing up from the hall.”
“The distant ceiling imposed on consciousness its blank white oblong, and a pellucid silence, distilled from a hundred and fifty years of conversation, waited beneath the ceiling.”
Some clarification, already! —
“‘Tell me,’ continued Mrs Montmorency, ‘wasn’t that your cousin Laurence?’
‘As a matter of fact I am Uncle Richard’s niece and he Aunt Myra’s nephew.’’
So who is Laura? And Laurence’s ‘wrong’ politics from Oxford?
“; he [Sir Richard] could not remember how well he had once known Francie, or decide at just what degree of intimacy he was expected to pick her up again.”
“Day, still coming in from the fields by the south windows, was stored in the mirrors, in the sheen of the wallpaper,”
“‘Listen, Richard,’ said Francie; ‘are you sure we will not be shot at if we sit out late on the steps?’”
One of ‘Her Table Spread’ type meetings with young soldiers by Lois in the grounds outside described in this chapter, but tantalisingly not quoted here!
Perfect Bowen….
“In the dining-room, the little party sat down under the crowd of portraits. Under that constant interchange from the high-up faces staring across – now fading each to a wedge of fawn-colour, and each looking out from a square of darkness tunnelled into the wall – Sir Richard and Lady Naylor, their nephew, niece and old friends had a thin, over-bright look, seemed on the air of the room unconvincingly painted, startled, transitory. Spaced out accurately round the enormous table – whereon, in what was left of the light, damask birds and roses had an unearthly shimmer – each so enisled and distant that a remark at random, falling short of a neighbour, seemed a cry of appeal, the six, in spite of an emphasis of speech and gesture they unconsciously heightened, dwindled personally. While above, the immutable figures, shedding on to the wash of dusk smiles, frowns, every vestige of personality, kept only attitude – an out-moded modestness, a quirk or a flare, hand slipped under a ruffle or spread airily over the cleft of a bosom – cancelled time, negatived personality and made of the lower cheerfulness, dining and talking, the faintest exterior friction.”
Six peas floated in Laurence’s clear soup amid talk of buried guns and being blown up! And talk of a coffee-pot looking like an army vehicle….?
“‘This country,’ continued Sir Richard, ‘is altogether too full of soldiers, with nothing to do but dance and poke old women out of their beds to look for guns.”
“But Mrs Montmorency, in an absence of mind amounting to exaltation, had soared over the company. She could perform at any moment, discomfitingly, these acts of levitation.”
See the famous Angel that I remember later in this book flying over the house!
“…of course there is a great deal of disintegration in England and on the Continent.”
.
4
“Lois was sent upstairs for the shawls; it appeared that a touch of dew on the bare skin might be fatal to Lady Naylor or Mrs Montmorency. On the stairs, her feet found their evening echoes;”
…outside in this ‘silly island’ probably the most beautiful ghostly, atmospheric Bowen chapter of all.
But, importantly, it starts with an incipient Bowen ‘stroking her elbows’ and thinking of her future life, with the hinterland of ‘doubles’ if not future shadowy thirds! This in contrast to the ‘consoling of her elbows’ in her final novel Eva Trout! So this is a crucial passage to quote…
“Lois took a cushion and sat on the top step with her arms crossed, stroking her elbows. ‘I shouldn’t sit there,’ her aunt continued; ‘at this time of night stone will strike up through anything.’
‘If you don’t get rheumatism now,’ added Francie, ‘you will be storing up rheumatism.’
‘It will be my rheumatism,’ said Lois as gently as possible, but added inwardly: ‘After you’re both dead.’ A thought that fifty years hence she might well, if she wished, be sitting here on the steps – with or without rheumatism – having penetrated thirty years deeper ahead into Time than they could, gave her a feeling of mysteriousness and destination. And she was fitted for this by being twice as complex as their generation – for she must be: double as many people having gone to the making of her.”
Ants and cigarette smoke and Mr M: “Creaks ran through the wicker, discussing him,…”
“The house was highest of all with toppling immanence, like a cliff.”
Sound of army patrols in the distance jarred spines with furtive menace, and then there is talk of a Tennis party with the Trents etc. tomorrow.Trents in assonance with the ‘trench-coat’ man or ghost that, later, Lois, alone, sees or thinks she sees in a new ‘Her Table Spread’ excursion this night in the vicinity of the house …with her also remembering someone called Gerald…
“: on her bare arms the tips of leaves were timid and dank, like tongues of dead animals. […] – she was indeed clairvoyant, exposed to horror and going to see a ghost.”
The aforementioned ‘silly island’ become an oblique, frayed one…
“She could not conceive of her country emotionally: it was a way of living, an abstract of several landscapes, or an oblique frayed island, moored at the north but with an air of being detached and washed out west from the British coast.”
Later Lois thinks of inside beyond the ‘carpet border’, thinks from outside in the night of mysterious sounds…
“Inside, they would all be drawing up closer to one another, tricked by the half-revelation of lamplight. ‘Compassed about,’ thought Lois, ‘by so great a cloud of witnesses . . .’ Chairs standing round dejectedly; upstairs, the confidently waiting beds; mirrors vacant and startling; books read and forgotten,…”
But what of the Procession of Elephants? Whatever the case, she somehow goes to bed alone, unannounced that she had returned to the house at all.
“Silence healed, but kept a scar of horror.”
Her Table Spread —
“The writing-table overlooking the sea, where she rested her elbows…” – The House In Paris
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5
“It was nonsense for him to pretend he did not care for parties;”
Gerald, that is. And we gain much knowledge of this Lois-lover or whatever through Bowenesque adumbrations of his character and appearance to kill for.
Livvy Thompson, Louis’s friend, too, a girl with a thrilling spine and an elegant mushroom hat, and is it David we meet here who is her beau, I forget…
“She peered through gaps in the shrubbery towards towards the gate of the garden. This concern for her friend she put up and twirled like a parasol between them. She sighed: the expansion of her thin little frame, the rise and fall of her two little points of bosom were clearly visible under her white silk jersey. Her panama hat turned down and light tufts of hair came out in fluttering commas against her cheek bones.”
Ironically, I’ve made that full passage about Livvy available here without doing similar for Lois’ passages about her that are wonderful (Lois being far more a figure and character indeed for me to wonder at) when she finally arrives at the tennis party, to which she seems to have invited ‘half of Ireland’. Indeed, I am awash with these guests’s names, and still expecting the so far unknown Trents to arrive by the end of this chapter. I shall give some clues about this party and guests, and tennis ball gatherers amid the scenario of the Troubles… and what emotional troubles do these people face?
“; shoes had wandered away from each other under the chairs.”
Some man’s attitude to women using powder on their faces, midges, rugs, raspberries?..
“…the English unnatural and said it was extraordinary how their voices sounded when they were all shut up in the one room.”
The English as temporary army of occupation…?
“Chinks of sunlight darted up her like mice and hesitated away like butterflies.”
“He [Gerald] had sought and was satisfied with a few – he thought final – repositories for his emotions: his mother, country, dog, school, a friend or two, now – crowningly – Lois.”
“Mr Montmorency sat on the ground with his knees apart, holding his ankles limply.”
Laurence kindred spirit with Mr M, laconic and whatever lurks in their desires.
Each a shadowy third between two groups of people or two individual people.
Ball collectors get halfpenny each, if not Hercules, a child, afraid of bats and with Mr M and Laurence makes a threesome of loners, each of them a shadowy third, I guess.
Some talk by someone of a gold cigarette case thrown into the Cher (a river?), and whose case I now forget! It does not matter that I forget, being a laconic reader even if a copious observer of what I read.
“And children seem in every sense of the word to be inconceivable.”
That tone of Anti-Natalism that often rears its head in Bowen.
“I feel all gassy inside from yawning. I should like to be here when this house burns.”
Who said that?
Mr M in a married prison where he even has to share his bed…
“And while she [Lois] spoke she counted the crimson strings in her racquet: three down, six across.”
Two pairs of Shadowy Threesomes playing Mixed Doubles?
I keep my laconic powder dry.
This review continues here: https://expenscusil.wordpress.com/the-last-september/