The Little Girls by Elizabeth Bowen
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:
Part 1 (1)
“Her sweater sleeves were rolled to above the elbows; out of a pocket of her slacks trailed a man’s handkerchief with signs of being used as a duster.”
I am thankful I have nine novels under my ‘re-read/ real-time review’ belt in order to cope with this chapter! I must assume you know it already, full of business and characters, even one character called Frank, another Francis, the latter being Dinah’s houseboy!. Dinah having bought Applegate (cf the Bowen Apple Tree syndrome) and its prehistoric cave and crooked swing, now leaving strictly curated objects in the cave from people as posterity, from the planet of the past to the planet of the future, with also a Mrs Coral who keeps vacancies, an Indian and a Finn, and Frank is a compatriot of Dinah in this posterity-venture, to be sealed up in the cave, and Dinah’s concomitant epiphany of constant Zeno’s Paradox memory that she has to seek out two other shadowy thirds to her own, from her past when all three were little girls of 11 years old. Where are they now?
By what sections I have chosen to quote below for posterity, please judge what I have already learnt of Bowen leitmotifs in the previous nine novels that I have re-read and reviewed in my own epiphany of real-time, especially now in today’s light of global warming and possible nuclear war to put a stop to time itself, let alone to its posterity…
(The planet that has an earlier Bowen novel’s ‘Macabre North’….?)
Cigarette-dance catalogue cave Frank Dinah
“Down here, however, it was some other hour – peculiar, perhaps no hour at all.”
No ancestors’ objects, Frank’s box, carved bone fan, obsession…
“– a clue for posterity. Or, poser.”
Cough —
“Mrs Coral, cased in a mackintosh amid drippy dahlias, stood looking down at them. Soul of integrity, she as ever held herself wooden-straight. Her wide-boned face with wide eyes and strong, blunted features was like a Saxon carving outside a church; the childlike hat she wore was turned up all round. Stalwart as a fourteen-year-old, Mrs Coral appeared a typical forty, though past that. […] Never more than one thing at a time could be in her mind, and it was always important, at least to her.”
Mrs Delacroix as Dinah, Major Wilkins as Frank. Dressed alike, in the prehistoric cave, cactuses, table for objects, a museum?… no not a museum as it turns out be sealed up as a time capsule…
“He tied knots with his eyebrows,” … if not his elbows!
“: a cheating of Time.”
“One hears of those who were behind the door when looks were being given out; but what about those who happen to be behind the door, or elsewhere, when looks are being called in again?”
“This type of rock perspires; it always has done.”
Objects to be deduced by some ‘far future’, ~~ as we deduce Bowen own’s novels as full of prehensile, psychological objects in characters’ houses…?
“Those early races probably never thought; or what I suppose is still more likely, never really expected they would vanish. But we should be odd – don’t you agree? – if the idea’d never occurred to us.”
“…by dint of placing a hand on their visitor’s mackintosh at the elbow, confidently and swiftly reclaimed her audience.”
Personalities so extremely complex. — a dozen objects for each personality chosen for the capsule…
“And everywhere along the serpentine walk where anything else grew not, dahlias grew; some dwarf, some giant, some corollas like blazons, some close-fluted, some velvet, some porcelain or satin, some darkening, some burning like flame or biting like acid into the faint dusk now being given off by the evening earth. “
Much plantage described in rich Bowenesque, mainly left unquoted here in my review, otherwise for posterity….
“This had been an orchard. Twisted, old but only too fruitful still, such trees as had not been cleared away were to be seen in the near distance, their boughs weighted. Already an apple or two had begun to drop:”
Frank soon to become a grandfather, his daughter being Joan? A countervail against the Anti-Natalism theme often found in Bowen?
“‘Oh, yes. Just, when it swings it twirls.’ Dinah answered, as though from another planet.”
Important not “‘…to be too upstage with posterity. Not too high-brow.’
‘I don’t expect to deal with absolute fools.’”
That last bit of dialogue was Dinah, and this passage is her, too…
“– ‘I’ve been having the most extraordinary sensation! Yes, and I still am, it’s still going on! Because, to remember something all in a flash, so completely that it’s not “then” but “now”, surely is a sensation, isn’t it? I do know it’s far, far more than a mere memory! One’s right back into it again, right in the middle. It’s happening round one. Not only that but it’s never not been happening. It’s – it’s absorbing!”
Seal it up, crooked swing — some clinching gestalt or epiphany for Dinah…
‘And two other girls and I. There were three of us.’
“Later, he was moved to compare his wrist watch with her French clock –“
Part 1 (2)
Here starts probably the most amazing Bowen character study, chapter-long, so utterly off the wall, it is as believable as sin. Or as the music of Rhapsody in Blue that is often played by the house-boy, Francis, in Dinah’s Applegate, this heaven or hell towards the end of Bowen’s life, and even Frank is getting acclimatised to it. As we eventually get acclimatised to Bowen herself after 10 novels and 108 stories…
“Francis’s eye defect was in fact not a squint but a cast – one eye stayed riveted to his profile, leaving the other to dart where it would. The arrangement seemed, if anything, to suit him: he saw the more. Nor, and least of all here at Applegate where there was so much vanity in the climate, did his vanity suffer: he met himself constantly in the mirrors and looking-glasses about the house not only without turning a hair but with, by all signs, fortified self-esteem. But if neither his vision (so far as one could make out) nor his looks (at least in his own view) were impaired by his peculiarity, he did yet feel that it narrowed his future. In this day of the career open to the talents, the career for which he deemed himself truly fitted, and to which he fanatically aspired, was closed to him, talents and all, by his mischance. What gnawed at Francis was, how far he might have gone in the Secret Service. He had renounced his intention of entering the Secret Service for this reason: it would be impossible for him to assume disguises – that was, effective ones. Agent X must not be an identifiable man.
Origin need not have stood in his way; though, Maltese by descent on both sides of his family, he looked (as people who came to Applegate who had been to Malta at once said) so Maltese that it was nobody’s business.”
2 years he has been part of Dinah’s habit-forming….
….his frustrated ambitions as protégés.
“Or he would devote days to some special skill, such as worrying at the inlay in her furniture with a toothbrush steeped in linseed oil.”
A politically confused, if politically incorrect, lone wolf…Unbreakable coded notebook hidden in plain sight, in ‘the bowels of the plumbing under the pantry sink’.
Knows everything, and he snoops when Dinah is out.
Till this character study reveals the raw data of Dinah’s search for the two other girls who now appear to have buried their own earlier time capsule box, raw data that is real-timed by Francis into a potential gestalt…just like this review Desmond Francis Lewis intends to do, too. Not Lewis Gibson any more?
“…a wad of thin, crumpled sheets in her handwriting – scarred with erasures, corrections, inserts, loops, brackets, arrows, marginal scrabblings. And all (that was, to judge by the first glance) saying, or attempting to say, the same thing, here or there with omissions or variations. He was sincerely puzzled – what <was she up to? […] Will the former Clare Burkin-Jones and Sheila Beaker at once get in touch with the former Diana Piggott, with whom they buried a box. Imperative Dicey confer with Mumbo and Sheikie. […]
IDEA, though. Get hold of Packie. Knows all the ropes, always did – or is he still furious? No harm trying.”
And she returns too early during this snooping and we see Francis’s “grimace which Dinah (who’d come on it once or twice) likened to that of an infuriated Chinese warrior’s decapitated head, being brandished about by a foe in a gory drawing …”
Cf Francis with Bowen’s Prothero as another remarkable character study…
Part 1 (3)
“Now and then a mannequin prowled through.”
…through a Knightsbridge tearoom, a type of tearoom I remember from the 1950s, and it makes me wonder at the end of this astoundingly weird chapter whether Aickman was there, too, sipping at tea and playing with a lemon wedge in his cup, while looking in one of those compacts — that my mother and grandmother once used — examining his face before powdering it…. Toward the end of this future-prophetic chapter where there is a most mysterious ending of a glove dropped in the tearoom and then the dropping of the other glove by tying to pick up the first one, following after “….the sea of tables was disembellished neither by crumb nor speck. Agoraphobia threatened. All that there was not yet was silence:…”
Yet, these two middle-aged ladies, part of the shadowy once-little-girls triangulation, have found each other by the prior description of each other’s hats (hats from Ann Lee’s? — one a black turban the other with pink roses), having been menaced by the many mentions in Local and National newspapers intended to find them.
Trying to forge a duality to face the bossiness of Dinah/Dicey. We learn their backstories since being aged 11. Too much to delineate here. But we do get a picture of these ladies (Clare/Mumbo and Sheila/Sheikie, each described Bowenesque-redolently) and what pressure they feel themselves to be under, as they compare each other’s manifold newspaper cuttings that Dinah had set in motion to find them — as if such cuttings are hard copy of today’s social media and dark web conspiracies and reputation-destruction campaigns.
“Little girls don’t make sense.”
One of these ladies married Mr Wrong, or was that Trevor, already with two kids from a previous marriage? As they continue to compare life’s cuttings…
“‘A, I know them by heart, B, I could no longer touch them with the end of a bargepole.’ Her voice thinned to a species of shrieking whisper or whispered shriek.”
They speculate on Dinah’s erstwhile pedigree, Dinah being this monster they are persuading themselves to meet so as to neutralise her menace….
“Her mother wore tea gowns. They had no gong.”
“‘You heard me. Aren’t you mad with curiosity?’
You mean, see her?’”
“Tea-logged, the disc of lemon submerged; the point of the spoon, however, ran it to death at the bottom of the cup, goring away at it without mercy. Here and there a shred rose to the surface. ‘Well?’ asked Mrs Artworth, when that was over.”
Then the greatest ever cigarette-dance in Bowen is deployed to us in two episodes,.,
“Thus querying, Clare extracted a cigarette from a monogrammed case (which Sheila weighed with her eye), lit it, after some to-do with her lighter, and went on to take two or three tense, inexpert puffs. […] Before thought took place, it became devolvent on Clare again to go through the act with a cigarette. This time, it miscarried – she choked, spluttered, while water from her smarting eyes made gutters out of the pouches under them.”
“‘Innuendo,’ said Sheila promptly, colouring deeply. ‘Insinuations – malicious, insidious, mischievous, damaging.’”
Trevor is said to think it all menacing blackmail these cuttings…
And what of MOPSIE PYE, the gift shop that keeps on giving,at least literarily.
“These days there are so constantly being such revelations, one can hardly wonder at everyone’s being nervous. Spy rings, dope rings, art thief rings, white slave rings, Black Mass rallies (or whatever they call them), and of course always, naturally, Communists.”
Part 1 (4)
“Ten days after Frank had become a grandfather, Dinah pulled up her car at a lonely crossroads. She lit a cigarette, then unfurled a map.”
…as if every dance choreography needs a torch, however tiny. This mighty chapter sprawls, smoulders, too, and for the first time I see that the triangulation of shadowy thirds is, in Bowen, important as an emblem from the Three Witches meeting in Macbeth!
Here they meet, whatever the plans of meeting at crossroads or on a train or in someone’s home, or by Hillman or Mini-Minor or an invisible taxi…
Dinah, with daddy long-legs…meeting Clare…
“She had with her her transistor, a flask, In Memoriam bound in once-violet suede, and The Midwich Cuckoos,…” […] …putting a hogskin-gloved hand on the frame of the window, ‘getting out, or do I get in?’”
“From above, around, poured on to them the not wholly untender or hostile noon.”
“‘Look, oh do look, at those hundreds of birds! Off to Africa, can’t make up their minds to start.”
Off to Africa, off to a mysterious Kôr …
“Count on Dicey, she thought, to lay on no scene without towering stage-effects. Meet in a railway station? Oh no, never.”
Not to meet but to converge…
‘Bubble-bubble,’ toil and trouble, ‘a nigger in the woodpile.’
Meeting like Evadne Price’s Jane Turpin might via secret messages et al…
“I have to picture everything in advance. It’s by picturing things that one lives, I completely think.”
Sabotage or whatever, as the other third, Sheila, has arrived separately at D’s Applegate, with Francis and, surprisingly, Frank already there and the smell of chops. Waiting till after the three asterisks below for more of that… while the dance of gloves, made of hogskin or not, continues…
“And back Clare had to dart, to recover a dropped good glove.”
***
Francis Frank Sheikie
Francis impersonating a butler.. And Frank is in the dark…
“Blazing into the fire, the sun all but brought off its trick of putting the fire out;”
“The hall through which Frank strode was, being principally lit by the staircase window, darker in summer than in winter: outside the window grew the copper beech, and the tree when in foliage was a curtain. It still was in foliage, black-crimson. But something further, foreign, not there till now, intercepted the light darkened by the branches: on the halfway landing, someone or something stood looking out. Like anything at a height it appeared to float, though manifestly it was solid.”
And can we ever appreciate, in the context, the full irony of exorcising that ghost at the window with his sceptical shout of ‘Mumbo Jumbo’ …”’Mumbo-jumbo!’ he shouted to himself, internally, silently and violently.”
That crooked swing seen through that window as part of this supreme moment in Bowen (quoted below)…Three witches, if not ‘three masters’, and the prestidigitative nature of Bowen’s fiction as literally magic realism… and the ‘nothing’ of gluey Zenoism, or that earlier inherited clock…
“The tree itself did not keep Clare at the window, beautiful though a copper beech is in its late tarnish. What she beheld, by looking down, was the swing – which she watched as she might have done if it were in motion, though it had no occupant. Under it, a small bald patch had been kicked in the grass. But no ground-kicking, from whatever angle, with whatever force, can steer an unevenly-hung swing out of the twirl. Higher you go the crookeder, leaning, lurching. Great it is to master a crooked swing: greater than straighter swinging. There were three masters. Sheikie a firework in daylight. Dicey upside down, hooked on by the knees, slapping not kicking at the earth as it flew under. Mumbo face down, stomach across the seat, flailing all four limbs. Pure from the pleasures of the air, any of them could have shot into Kingdom Come. But they had not.
Those were the days before love. These are the days after. Nothing has gone for nothing but the days between.”
Eight egg omelette to kill the appetite for not enough chops, as Francis was expecting only one lady as guest…
“One forgets that each tear is shed for the first time.”
“There’s no such thing as ‘a whole thing’.”
No gestalt, after all.
Johnnie Packerton-Carthew, who is he? How as he helped D gather S and C here for the cave and the crooked swing, and the later unburying of their own erstwhile time-capsule box from a war-bombed St Agatha’s School…?
The apportionment of ‘treacle tart’ …. For a ‘blonde demoniac’, but which witch was that? Where are the three death-thumps of apples…?
“…the few twisted apple trees of the ancient orchard, some of whose fruit, by lying bruised in the grass, not rotted yet, gave a cider-like taste to the afternoon. The hour was nearer to four than three.”
‘We are posterity, now,’…
Part 2 (1)
“Miss Kinmate looked at the clock. The whole class (but for Sheila Beaker, who couldn’t be bothered, and Muriel Borthwick, who having picked at a good big scab on her arm now dabbed blotting-paper at the resultant blood) did likewise, in an awed, considering way.”
We have travelled, back to when our trio were 11, within that very clock’s own Tardis, I guess, to hear the pupils at St. Agatha’s, in ‘butcher-blue’ tunics, recite, in the ‘poetry hour’… we are actually there, in the Bowenesquely depicted schoolroom to witness these little girls’ faltering efforts to be alive again inside their own fiction of the past, making what we already know of their future more real than it otherwise would have been for us.
The school’s own earlier version of the crooked swing is deployed, too, and we sense the school’s seaside ambiance as another Hythe & Seale….
And we get to know our threesome’s earlier personalties, and the spirit of which season for one of them to dance next…
And Sheila’s pigtailed parting…. and what it might backtrack for Portia or portend for Eva Trout…
“With sharp, clean thumbnails Sheila split blades of grass-she sat up. Diana lay on her back, now and then drumming with her heels. As Sheila bent frowning over her task, the immaculate shell-pink of her skull showed along the division of her hair. So dead straight was the parting-back from the centre-forehead, over the top and on down behind, where it served to allot each hair to one or another of the flawless pigtails — that her head looked as though it had been slightly split. Should it fall apart, it would do so in two perfectly even halves …”
What can we ever know of fiction truth, other than what is in this chapter and what Sheila did at its end….
“Turning, she selected a leaf from the hedge behind her, then set about splitting that. But the glossed thick leaf with its saw-edges proved to be more of a job than a blade of grass.”
This review continues here: https://nemonymousnight.wordpress.com/900-2