EDINBURGH UNIVERSITY PRESS 2008
All my reviews of Bowen novels are 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:
Reblogged this on Bowen KÔRner (The Circumflexing Elbow).
LIGHT
Modern Lighting
Sophisticated array of light involving Proust and Poe, going in and out of rooms and doors. Even more sophisticated than light and darkness in Bowen fiction. Ending…
“…light drifts and trickles down on the moiré wallpaper.”
The 1938 Academy: An Unprofessional View
A beautifully erratic Bowenesque tour of the Royal Academy Exhibition in 1938, pre-war as well as pre-Anita Brookner.
Facts as fiction, and vice versa. Disconcertingly un-disconcerting, and vice versa.
Christmas at Bowen’s Court
This is essential Bowen non-fiction for any fiction-loving Boweneer. The aura of Christmas in this Irish house, echoing some of the Bowen Christmas fiction itself. The force of light through its windows and the later light of a Christmas candle. It is exquisite. And it has, in at least two places, references to Shannon Airport and its early air travel threaded into it. Which seems somehow appropriate as, earlier this same afternoon, I read and reviewed (here), some remarkable fiction by a modern author whom I am increasingly seeing as a Boweneer himself, i.e. some of his fiction that happened to feature Shannon Airport in it.
The Light in the Dark
This essay is possibly the apotheosis of Bowen, an ineffable inevitability, a summoning of Christmas as an exquisition of the soul that stems from a sort of spiritual nostalgia for its childhood trappings and its storified backstory, rather than from being strictly Christian as a faith. Reading this today has lifted my heart or spirits and I sensed an Angel passing above my roof. It also gave some meaning to aspects of Bowen fiction as a blessing, an upwelling within those somehow psychologically meaningful, if ornate, objects we place around us simply to see as a home, to sit around or upon.
“‘On Christmas Eve,’ I thought, as a child, ‘even the furniture looks different!’”
ECSTASY OF THE EYE
An apotheosis of Bowen as a rapture of perception, here Christmas candles and other epiphanies of vision. But as nothing, I say, when compared to the passion of this reading moment, especially as reading is through my eyes, too.
This LIGHT sub-section ends with …
NEW WAVES OF THE FUTURE
“The bent-down ray falling cleanly onto the page: what a reader’s paradise.”
The development of light into electric modernity, one being the older need to keep things from fading from light, the other now worshipping it as sun lovers in later years — a polarity of ‘light’ genders paired, and each shadow its shadowy third? With obliquities of candies and mirrors and fountains as Greek chorus?
BRITAIN IN AUTUMN
This is unmissable Bowen, not fiction, but still unmissable for Bowen fiction lovers, full of Bowenesque prose skills, and necessary for details of the Blitz in London, those ‘shoals of the dead’ haunting not only some of Bowen’s fiction but also the streets themselves, ghosts that the heat of the day still makes our clinging human gestalt. Themes and Variations on our times today, like virtual communication, Etonian voices, our coming crisis of Winter at the barest edge of Autumn today, and how our people should react or indeed already have reacted in a mix of horrors and even hopes! Nothing is ever straightforward enough to warrant destructive polarities. Levelling down, too. But did they have Time-Bombs in the Blitz. Apparently, so. Still ticking now, I guess. Any ‘excisions’, notwithstanding.
Just some samples from this substantive essay, …
“But virtually, there are no strangers now.”
“We people have come up out of the ground, or from the smashed blocks or places with time-bombs. We now see what we heard happen all through the night. In this corded-off silence we find ourselves on an island, which feels comic – please, when may we move? Standing, like risen dead unsure of their destination, in the mouths of shelters or doors of the smashed shops, we have nothing to do but smile or glance at each other, or at the sky, or yawn down the void streets . . . It has been a dirty night. The side has been ripped off one near block – the great sore gash is dusty, colourless, pale. (As bodies shed blood, buildings shed mousy dust.) Up there you see mirrors over the mantlepieces, shreds of carpet over the void.”
“One change in Britain is that almost no one pities himself. The more that happens to you, the less you pity yourself. The reason for this is, we have no feeling to spare. The pity you spare for neighbours is terse, active, economic and gaunt. One thing absorbs us – anger. This anger varies over the face of Britain: I suppose you could make a chart of it. There is no acre on which it does not exist: in London and round the Dover coast its pressure is at the highest. This anger has lost us our native fat; the moral muscles stand out in everyone. And this anger acts like a weight in the base: it keeps us upright. Also, it keeps us calm. There is no question of your controlling such anger; such anger controls you. You do not spend anger like this in small change. It is the complete corrective for ‘big’ talk. What I notice about the British now is that superficially we are more articulate. (Observe this new free flow of chattiness.) Fundamentally, we are more silent. Our talk is smaller than it has ever been; it acts as a cheerful nervous release; it does not attempt to connect with deep-down things.”
“The Etonian voice hasn’t said what we had to hear . . . Meanwhile, we walk the streets shabby.”
“It is true that what we see, from day to day, acts as a leveller. All destructions make the same grey mess; rich homes, poor homes, the big store, the one-man shop make the same slipping rubble;”
“… prepared to die but not to think. Perhaps (unconsciously) we would rather have died than thought. As things turned out, thought was asked of us first. We hated to – but we thought. You may say that, about the middle of summer, Britain woke up to find herself alone.”
Yet, levelling up, too?…
“It is this stir of big power in little people, the wide-awake look in the eyes, the nerve in the step, that makes this autumn in Britain a sort of spring.”
Quotes from Elizabeth Bowen’s premonitory essay: AUTUMN IN BRITAIN…
“The pity you spare for neighbours is terse, active, economic and gaunt. One thing absorbs us – anger.”
“But virtually, there are no strangers now.”
“The Etonian voice hasn’t said what we had to hear . . . Meanwhile, we walk the streets shabby.”
“It is true that what we see, from day to day, acts as a leveller. All destructions make the same grey mess; rich homes, poor homes, the big store, the one-man shop make the same slipping rubble;”
“It is this stir of big power in little people, the wide-awake look in the eyes, the nerve in the step, that makes this autumn in Britain a sort of spring.”
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BY THE UNAPPROACHABLE SEA
A Bowenesque portrait of Hythe, and its own bombs skirting church for cinema. A Cinque Port, the sea retreated.
In my one seaside home, I shall resist the ebb and flow of truth-fictioneering about this non-fiction book, and continue reading it on my own without the public gaze of real-time reviewing it with my every other word about it being ‘Bowenesque’!
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