Part Three of my review of this novel as continued from HERE.
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:
Part 2 (7)
“one shadow more in the shadowy net”
A skein of Shadowy Thirds from Theodora? And all one needs to know about what this novel is a theme-and-variations upon is….
“Theodora, pursued hot-foot by Hermione, had hurried across the fields to tell him [Rodney] that Edward had just arrived, without warning, furious, in a fly, without a suitcase, to take away his children who were being corrupted. A spontaneity in Theodora’s enjoyment of the crisis made her almost lovable; she frankly glowed. While Hermione, dancing, was naturally in her element.”
If Edward (who was in such a tantrum he did not pay the fly that brought him!) takes his kids away who would do the bran dip at the fête? Hermione? Seems a matter worth the reader getting worked up about, as well as, later, about Lady Elfrida getting out her powder puff as a gesture….!
Theodora later plays the untimely piano — thump on the floor to stop her, I say! Thumping on it like dead apples?
Edward …”even relaxed a little. But he felt as though he had screamed and might scream again. To have screamed, in fact – he thought as he sat relaxed – would be a simplification.”
He thinks of Laurel at this distance travelled from her, with whom he is usually in proximity, today full of his complicated emotions about her and Janet…
“Proximity was their support; like walls after an earthquake they could fall no further for they had fallen against each other.”
He runs as Lady E and Considine and his kids arrive back outside from the latter’s haircuts…
“But Lady Elfrida and the children, hopefully waving, saw Edward swerve off through the trees, like wild life away from the camera; one shadow more in the shadowy net.”
Theodora answers Lewis’s telephone call. Well, all is a bit of a flurry, with Elfrida and her son Edward now in interface…. the muddle net of shadow now focussed as some emerging personal gestalt … beyond any reach of Lewis?…
“Confusion: she embraced the whole and seemed for the moment to suffer it, solitary.”
Just an intermediary thought – this book’s title makes me think of the common dictum that one may choose one’s friends but not one’s relations. But that begs the question – who are friends with whom in this book?
“She [Elfrida] reconsidered this strange desire of Janet’s to be related.”
When I wrote above interpolation at 1.09 a.m. having woken at that time with such thoughts in my head, I had no remembered idea that I was about to read this chapter below, and then some of the hidden complex implications about Janet, Edward and Considine woke the cuckoo in the nest of my head and very nearly crystallised!…
Part 2 (8)
“Trees gave out a perceptible chill, the burnished landscape held an effect of after-glow from a week, a season, a finished eternity, more than a day.”
… that Aickman Zenoism again? An African KÔR?
Edward and his kids now gone.
“The whole party was in disgrace with Theodora, who did not speak throughout dinner.”
Thus, somehow it seems apt that the chance or deliberate ricochets of a game of billiards ensues: Considine with Theodora at Thirdman.
And all my earlier comments upon the thuds or thumps of Bowen’s Apple Tree leitmotif comes to full breathtaking apotheosis… apple THEOsophy. Read it all! —
“‘This is a fiasco.’
Elfrida’s ‘this’, though moulded by her long ring-laden fingers into a very small kernel of, as it were, intensive action, or pain, remained so comprehensive that Janet could not tell how far she ought to look back. With impassive docility she lent herself to the retrospect. She looked beyond him steadily at the old branching sin that like the fatal apple-tree in a stained-glass window had in its shadow, at each side, the man and woman, Considine and Elfrida, related only in balance for the design. And in her confused thought this one painted tree associated itself, changed to another, the tree of Jesse; that springing – not, you would think, without pain somewhere – from a human side, went on up florescent with faces, perplexed similar faces, to some bright crest or climax or final flowering to which they all looked up, which was out of Janet’s view. If you felled the tree, or made even a vital incision, as Elfrida impatient of all this burden now seemed to desire (for if her heart were the root, it had contracted, if hers were the side, it ached), down they all came from the branches and scattered, still green at the core like July apples, having no more part in each other at all: strangers.”
Elfrida complexly – but, for us, osmotically – dwells on her son Edward, upon Janet, too, and J’s ‘love’ of ‘relations’ with him as well as with Considine? And who is the shadowy third?
“Her [Elfrida] look burnt itself out on those downcast eyelids.”
“She [Elfrida] reconsidered this strange desire of Janet’s to be related.”
As J meanders…
“‘It seemed something for me – I wanted to be related. I suppose that seems odd to you – I can see now it was odd,’ said Janet, with her calm precision.”
Always a small part in the play, as J plumped sadly in this playbook for Rodney?
Stones as prehensile things?
Elfrida upon J…
‘And I thought you never thought!’
Elfrida on Elfrida when abandoned by C…
“I was grateful when anyone trod on my toe and apologized.”
Elfrida ever awake at 3 in the morning, regularly as I am, too.
C eventually smaller than she remembers…
His “Fumbly little things, never very well done; a cue being chalked, a cigarette being rolled;” and his hansom tricks…
“Then last thing you turn over, hear your eyelashes on the pillow and something hammering inside the pillow, think, ‘Here I still am.’ Then when you wake next morning the tide’s right out, you could weep.”
These being Elfrida’s erstwhile night fears?
Janet now ironically assuages Hermione’s night fears. (“‘I had a frightful dream; I dreamed I was nowhere.’ […] I’m all inside my head.’ […] She [H] was hidden like a corncrake, distant like a cuckoo, close like a nesting swallow under the roof.” – as she finally sleeps.)
‘I’m beginning to raven; I can’t bear people to go away.’
Who says that? Perhaps it was me.
‘Oh yes, poor Lewis; no one would let him speak.’
Cross-referenced with a Michael W. Thomas novella here: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2022/02/13/sing-ho-stout-cortez-by-michael-w-thomas/#comment-24226
Pingback: Elizabeth Bowen’s Apple Tree Leitmotif | Bowen KÔRner (The Circumflexing Elbow) Edit
PART 3: WEDNESDAY
1
“This left only the ashtrays: Willa did not smoke.”
The most erratic, potentially irrelevant chapter in Bowen, which means it is the opposite of that! Who is Mrs Hamilton and why do we need to know so much of what happened or what might happen in Brittany, when our eyes are not on Brittany but on Batts? Yet we learn how the ‘fiasco’ has radiated wider and wider, here in Laurel’s club — the Bowenesque description of which club ambiance is equally unerratic and non-irrelevant — where we see Willa Thirdman, Mrs Bowles, Mrs Studdart, Laurel and a sudden phone call from Janet — like a message from death? They have been talking about various characters as if they are in a book discussion group about this very novel in literature! And why is Laurel ‘recklessly’ going to Brittany and not to Batts as planned, with the so-called fiasco widening even worldwide, and into a our future’s literature and discussion of it in real-time?
“Yet as Mrs Bowles’ story continued, gathering years of such talk on its vigorous dullness as on a running-thread, Laurel’s nostalgia for girlhood became acute. Her ‘teens’ – their exposure to stingless boredom, their extravagant reverie; a home that gave her life colour, taking none of her life’s; the cool ball-dress slipping over her arms; her impatient stitching of summer dresses, their lyric wearing. Janet and Mother tacking roses on her bodice (it would be a wonder if someone did not propose tonight), Mrs Bowles’ voice ran on. So the trees drowsed (a dull London sycamore crossed the window now) while Mrs Bowles talked and Laurel’s reel of pink cotton rolled away underneath the piano; Laurel had to go flat on her stomach: Mrs Bowles, on a visit, talked on: Laurel getting up bumped her head on the underneath of the keyboard and thought suddenly of Edward: Mrs Bowles’ words like rather old dulled fish gently tipped from a barrow went on slipping and slipping.”
Souls slipping, I think, as earlier….Laurel’s “thoughts fled by like water, as elusive, spinning their own shadow. With a composed movement, a ghost of Janet’s, she once more took up the menu. ‘Sole, I think?’ she said.”
Part 3 (2)
“Where had the three met, how did the two, innocent, recognise the third?”
The still shadowy triangulation of Laurel, Edward and Janet, but who that ‘thitrd’ now?
Janet and Edward lunching at Ionides, and the circumstances of this meeting is full of meaningless meaning, and meaningful meaninglessness, full of gluey Zenoism, another Bowen tour de force… perhaps the Bowen gestalt is literature’s tour de force, and we are made to grapple with implications and obliquities of how the train journey by Janet forming a new Janet or an old one that already existed hidden, the Tilneys disbanding from Batts, Elfrida, Considine, Theodora included, Janet’s earlier Bowen-archetypal unstamped letter, Janet meaning to meet Laurel and scold her for her plans for Brittany, but meeting Edward instead… and I can only give you glimpses, if lengthy glimpses, of half of what I mean above! —
“His mind was no more than a clock where each minute struck like a little hour, with such a reverberation among his senses that the hum of the restaurant was retarded, the indoor light paled or darkened, damask coarsened to canvas as though some magnifying quality were in his touch. This clang of over-charged minutes pointed the irony of those years …”
“Her very innocence, her unguardedness, the approach there was to extravagance in her slow, dark looking, the directness she brought from her practical life to express passion, seemed in their present triumphant misuse to shadow decay, so that the whole bitterness of an unfruitful autumn was present in this belated flowering.”
“These weeks, a grotesque, not quite impossible figure, had come to interpose between herself and Laurel. A woman, an unborn shameful sister, travestying their two natures, enemy to them both. Against her Laurel’s derision, Janet’s pride was powerless. She resembled each for the other, and pressing in between them since they had permitted themselves to part a little interposed a preposterous profile that to each, at the very edge of her vision, was somehow darkly familiar. ‘Surely Laurel could not take her for me or I for her Laurel?’ Where had the three met, how did the two, innocent, recognise the third? We know of her, we do not know her. Never overt, less than a sinner, worlds apart from Elfrida, she was the prey of all speculation, the unpitiable quarry of talk. Laurel once said: ‘Do you notice, it’s always the same woman whose letters are read in court?’ This ever-presence in profile had, for each of the sisters, the Egyptian effective defect: from Janet’s side or from Laurel’s – could either have seen her, she was so close, or, faced her, she was so dreadful – two eyes were visible, focused elsewhere with an undeviating intentness. The look directed upon Edward its whole darkness.
For Janet, used to a small range of thought and great clarity, this horrible illusory figure had materialized on the upward train journey. The porter shutting the door shut Janet in with it; while the train ran down through a cutting they shared darkness; while the carriage crossing the downs became a running box of light the figure, feeding on day itself, enlarged, took Janet within its outlines, occupied finally her own corner place.”
That waste of moments…
“…pulling her gloves off slowly, she had rejoiced in this waste of moments; she was prodigal of security. In fact, she had waited so long that the narrow scope of this hour was immaterial.”
Part 3 (3)
“The two had perfected a system of half-allusion – it is not difficult for women to live together – and rarely had to say anything more direct than ‘What are we out of?’ or ‘You are looking like death today.’”
…Marise and Theodora…
Having absorbed so much Bowen in recent months, I am beginning to think like her! A succubus…
“; the lamps were practically on the floor. But perhaps contrast was grateful to Marise and Theodora, who stood about so much. […] We’ve had the mantelpieces taken away, so there’s no dust. […] In a varnished colour-scheme of almost menacing restraint there were scimitar-curves and discs and soaring angles.” […] And lighting a cigarette she became lost in gloomy reflection. ‘Did you hear,’ she said suddenly, ‘we’ve had a green china bath put in? It’s square; the water runs in from the bottom; I must show you. It makes such a difference to life…’”
M and T entertain T’s mother, Mrs T…
“An interesting life, she repeated. Yet twenty-six years ago she had borne Theodora – to what? For this? And an idea remained in her mind that the furniture in the flat was made of ground glass;”
Mrs T leaves …. “She resigned herself to the hour’s nonentity,”
***
Anna and Simon…
“‘But we would rather go to the pictures.’
‘Oh, Anna, this lovely day!’
‘But the weather is always the same inside the pictures.’”
Sylvia was not wasted by Bowen, now brought back even larger than life as Janet meets Laurel at Laurel’s…Sylvia takes A and S out, while the two sisters talk, and we realise the power of their pent-up sadness, their sororal love decimated by the Edward situation yet still existent love…
“… In ten years, many of the wedding presents had been broken or put away. The room was sadder, civiller, less inconsequent, a room that ten years ago, with some tears and quarrels but all in a glow, had been contrived together and chatted about. Its order was now fixed; you must not move the furniture or a patch of ghostly new carpet appeared, that had not faded. The cupidy clock ticked on, a heart on its pendulum:”
Times’s pendulum and a ring on a string, a sort of polite jerk circle…
“‘Laurel …’
‘I wish we could just go back.’”
“The catastrophe was very quiet.”
Part 3 (4)
“There was now nothing not to be done,…”
Nowhere not be gone to…Edward lost without Lady E, is this the inverse of the mother and son syndrome in The Hotel?
Edward goes in the end to Laurel…
“But summer after summer, inevitably, they had joined the Meggatts at Batts. Now that they stood committed to villeggiatura, a Brittany beach, could they swim, sleep, eat but not speak? Laugh but not touch? Touch but not look?”
“In the glass, she saw Edward’s eyes on the pink flounce, resolutely expressionless. To his reflection stole her long tender look that her looking-glass only received and perhaps recorded. Too shy to make herself known, she stood smiling in contemplation of her pretty feminine envelope; as though Edward were someone to whom she had already said goodbye, who had left her then slipped back for something forgotten; someone in haste, unwilling to be detained, impossible to accost, so that she must only secretly watch through the crack of a door or over the banisters his ghostly coming and going.”
Why do people often become so ghostly, shadowy, even elbowy in Bowen?
E and L dine, talking about their daughter Anna. A potential Bowen heroine?
***
“‘Oh! Do you know about novels, Lewis?’
‘No, I have no ideas.’”
Janet, Lewis and Edward — a dance of who goes out first, not one of which cigarette goes out first! Lewis goes out with Edward, and Edward comes back, if not the flame to light him…
“; disingenuousness, hydra-headed, had many smiles. […], he could feel her assemble, give out through her very wound itself some power, dark in the light she had from him,…”
“Edward took Janet in his arms. He felt her face cold against his; her life unextended, deep in the compass of the moment, at a dark standstill and past astonishment.”
A parting without any promise of a flame’s return. A final goodbye? I may know nothing about novels, but Bowen’s are not normal novels. Never will be.
“‘What is the time?’
‘Twelve o’clock.’
‘Oh,’ she said, ‘Wednesday.’”
Part 3 (5)
“What ideas we all have; we do all have ideas. We do each other no good.”
Hermione is Buffalo trapping at Batts, bang bang!
Janet, by inchoate impulse from the previous chapter has returned by the all-night train. Aren’t all impulses inchoate?
Now trying to sleep by day, with the Mother’s Union coming, her excuse for returning by night….Rodney concerned for her health…
“She could not sleep, she was ashamed to be lying here. Ruled through her thought that was no thought, the unseen skyline behind those billowing curtains sustained the enormous day. She was the earth, hooped round with roads and netted with railways, intolerable to itself, afflicted by movement, nightless.”
Janet sees, before sleeping or in the middle, Hermione, seen from the window, French flag writhing behind her, perhaps as an ironic reference to Laurel and Edward’s trip to Brittany…via St Malo.
Janet dreams, too…
“Elfrida went away, dragging across the floor of the Ionides, over Laurel’s carpet, the long French flag.”
She eventually sleeps, and woken by the Mother’s Union arriving, for whom the flags were out! Even Bowen can rationalise a dream….
“afflicted by movement, nightless.”
Part 3 (6)
“Laurel also had watched this Wednesday in. Gutting out the Chelsea roof-line, feeling about her bedroom with cold fingers, it made an extraordinary demand on her faith, her religion almost: a dependence upon the usual. Edward was still absent.”
This is the chapter where Lewis, who I once thought to be a minor character and one with whom I playfully played, subsumes me as its major character in his devastation at what has happened and the visualisation of being in a ship leaving harbour, as if sailing for St. Malo? I only give the first paragraph of that ‘ship’ section below, but, as a whole, with its other choreographed paragraphs, it becomes perhaps the most significant section in the whole of Bowen.
Alongside Lewis’s frustrated exchanges with Theodora, and I wonder at her own devastation — which of the two Studdart sisters does she really love?
Meanwhile, Laurel’s earlier outwaiting of Edwards’s ever non-return — as fast and fixed as Zeno’s Paradox…
“First she found herself dreading each step, each taxi for its deception, then she longed for any step, any taxi for its very deception’s sake, the stirring of hope. At half-past-four – by the stroke of three clocks imperfectly synchronised, so that the moment was in itself protracted, deformed – Laurel ceased to expect him.”
“After this no more clocks struck, something had died down somewhere or been arrested.”
***
Anna with a bite from a Genoa cake, early in the morning, as Laurel telephones, and Anna is now a minor-major character thinking of Edward…with her once having “played hot, dishevelling games with him: pirates and so on. But now, he – her mind stretched tiptoeing up for some final fatal word – he is impossible.”
Lewis and Anna speculate, could Edward have had an accident? Or is this just a tracing out of an older template, that template traced by the promises between Elfrida and Considine?
“The violence of this departure, this outgoing from the self, appalled Lewis. A portrait had crashed down leaving, worse than a blank of wall, a profound recess in which there might or might not be eyes. […] While her [Laurel’s] house fell like Usher’s cracked through the heart, through the hearth; with where there had been fires the stare of a cold unsuspected moon.”
***
“Watching a ship draw out you are aboard a moment, seeing with those eyes: eyes that you can no longer perceive. You see the shore recessive, withdrawing itself from you; the familiar town; the docks with yourself standing; figures – but later (where was the crowd?) all gone. The high harbour crane is dwarfed by spires behind; there are buildings very distinct, paste-board houses: you can still count the windows.”
Just the beginning for Lewis. That ship is still leaving.
“Had their going scribbled itself across the sky of London? So savage rumour creeps through the forest,…”
Palimpsests and Borders
I think Bowen is her own ‘To The North’ type travel agent in the dangerous emotional geographies — with borders changing by politics and wars, not only linearly on the surface like a painful, ghostly-landscaped, womanly/girlish, often beautiful panoply, but also as a cross-section of character-geological depths beneath the borders, palimpsest upon palimpsest. The key to this is Lewis’s subsumption in ‘Friends and Relations’ by minor to major manipulation of these vectors and moral/ amoral/ even immoral compasses of the Bowen gestalt plot of all her fiction. (All aided and abetted by Lewis’s fictional sister Marise and her own ‘novels-within’ as agent provocateurs or Zeno-evolving moles, & by later literary retroactivity from Aickman?)
Part 3 (7)
“‘But thank you, Lewis, thank you so much! But I wish now we had never –’
[…] Dear Lewis – but how imperceptive he was!”
“There was no longer any impossible.”
Edward has been asleep in Lady Elfrida’s otherwise empty house, discovered by the charlady.
“Laurel lay lightly on the surface of his mind, a skeleton leaf too frail to disturb water. His silence, his cruelty to her were transparencies, casting no shadow.”
He needs a clean collar, needs to telephone Laurel, but doesn’t. As he thinks of things he might say… ‘I could not come back to you. If I could have told you I could not, I could have come.’
“As though his cruelty to her were something he had knowingly executed but not knowingly designed, something composed phrase by phrase, carved detail by detail or minutely painted standing close to the canvas, he had to stand back from it now with a new-comer’s awe at its largeness, its ignorant boldness, its realization of some giant and foreign self in him.”
He thinks of Janet in abeyance at Batts…
“Oblivion of her, of her whole look and her last look, had established itself in sleep with him; become, if he were indeed entombed, entombed here with him; become the intimate of his spirit. Became his very spirit itself that travelled about his cloudy idea of her form like a blind hand, without regret or desire. […] Her absences, her silences, her abstentions were now again informed by the only sense he had of her.”
And Laurel…
“…the agonizing tension between them now of a silent telephone-wire,…”
Lewis and Laurel together, and does Edward send Laurel a telegram, bearing out her confidence that she would eventually receive such a message? Or is it a message that never came? Anna is indeed unsure, believing that something is ‘still the matter’. I myself believe the message and its Brittany outcome was, at least for a Bowenesque moment, in Lewis’s head and not real within the fiction as laid out by Bowen herself! It was Lewis’ colourless, collarless hairshirt of a short fiction in tune with his sister’s fiction… and even that the last chapter (yet to be read) of this book is Lewis’s, not Bowen’s at all?
“– Rodney had telephoned – Edward would soon be returning. The ship had not sailed, the aloe had not flowered.”
I don’ t emember that upturned playing card of yore? Do you?
“They had only to listen; three clocks struck, imperfectly synchronized, deepening the moment.
‘Simon’s been marking off days on his calendar till we go to France. How lovely; we’re going away on Saturday!’
‘Day after tomorrow.’ ‘Is it tomorrow now?’
He was right; it was almost tomorrow. All this time they had been carried along on the smooth stream; they had only to keep still, not rocking their boat.”
“They did not miss their daughters but they regretted them”
This coda is as if a coda to a different novel!
It gives a perspective to calm the fevers of my Lewisite brain from having read the rest of it. This is Bowen when she is not possessed by her demons. Yet, it is possessed of a beauteous style that aches to finish off this book with an open ending.
It tells of the separate visits of Laura and Janet to Cheltenham, a place now in full circle, both sisters still married to whom they once married, visiting Mr and Mrs Studdart, their parents who simply existed to be in this final chapter, and for no other reason. Then, a visit from both daughters together… but that is where the ending stays open, as if we care any more.
A constructive ‘dying fall’ as in music.
The best part is Mrs S’s viewpoint as seen through an imaginary friend, a phenomenon which I doubt she had as a child,…
“Mrs Studdart, never confidential to friends, had a confidante, an intimate always present, who did not exist. […]
This intimate was informed as to Mrs Studdart’s sciatica, those qualms in the night, her mistakes at bridge, Colonel Studdart’s habit of clicking his teeth while he read. She pressed Mrs Studdart’s hand when a silence occurred at a dinner party. What could not be explained to her Mr Studdart refused to recognise, what could not be described she did not observe. Any sense of guilt became a sense of complicity. Perhaps if she had been a religious woman…? She wondered sometimes about Roman Catholics, whether the Virgin Mary…”
end
“‘He’s a Lewisite. He’s misplaced like me.’”
— Robert Aickman (Larger Than Oneself)