THE GIRL WITH THE STOOP by Elizabeth Bowen
“I don’t need to plan; I plot. I don’t believe in plans.”
November at the seaside (“the promenade gardens, with their few wet roses, wore the smile of November, pallidly gay”), just like the place where I live today. Tibbie, to be or not to be whatever the destiny-lines on her hand, a girl with a stoop, nay, the girl with the stoop, betrothed to Tom in India, but today co-opted by Geoff on behalf of his crippled cousin Francis, the latter knowing her even before he met her, having stalked her with his eyes from his Palace hotel room aloft.
“But, of course, I believe in my destiny.”
And, of course, the tea in his room. And Francis’s will power upon wheels of life… With her: “He must not come after me – on wheels, on wheels: wheels turn very fast” competing with the time paradox of of her: “She reached the corner; then she lagged slowly, slowly back to her aunt’s gate” after her: “She broke into a run. She ran down the promenade, stooping, breathless, not looking back once, not daring to listen. The cold sea flashed alongside.” Alongside the heat of India?
The ownership of life’s sentences.
They had held hands briefly, after all, each one’s ‘life-lines’ matching the other’s ‘destiny-lines’ (this story subtly showing there is such a difference in similar patterns, I guess), and I wonder? — Her Tom in hot India, is he merely a Shadowy Third even if one with ineluctable, irresistible, immoveable plans? But I hope Tibbie stays with Francis, even though the pre-planned plot makes me think I am wrong to make such competing plans about their lives. But, then, I remember, there was always that Bowen cassowary of an umbrella much earlier in this story, as a protective force for our destiny…. “she unfurled her umbrella, then turned her profile away to the dark sea. ‘I can’t sometimes believe I shall be in India,’ she said.”
***
My onward march of pre-planned reviews of Bowen stories started here: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2021/10/05/the-collected-stories-of-elizabeth-bowen/
THE VISITOR
“The thing had crouched beside his bed all night; he had been conscious of it through the thin texture of his dreams.”
‘“‘How much more black will there be before the pattern?’”
This I have just (re?)discovered is seminal Bowen, the essence of her work for me, a genuine masterpiece that had slipped my mind like the thuds of death and the ticks of time. That thud thud of apples from the apple tree (to climb which one can see a promised land perhaps beyond death) and the ticks of Bowen’s clock’s inherited minutes. I have now climbed this story’s apple tree myself and seen the waylaying of death by delay or at least by some Bay (of Naples) or an Immortalis that is somehow full not null. Thud thud tick tick, a Zeno Zone’s Apple tree — “I don’t dare go up, and I don’t dare go back to the house.” That ultimate Bowen tea cosy. And elements of time’s Zeno’s Paradox as well as ticking minutes (“a little boy who half had a mother and half hadn’t.”) — as nine year old Roger is sent to his Aunts Emery while his mother dies, away from whom he considers to be his hateful father. The Aunts with their blinds from which acorn drawstrings hang as well as lace curtains. So much here, I am breathless. Death as (Perpetual) Autumn, as the eternity in another quote about Autumn from Bowen’s stories earlier. Roger, with his childish paranoia (“Their observation licked his back like flames”) and whose little sisters he sees playing mindlessly with hoops rather than worrying about their mother. Aunts with “white, quick hands and big bosoms”, bosoms to bury any of his passing sorrows in. I can now only quote some seminal passages below, some quite lengthy, so as to depict the journey of not only this story but also the whole Bowen canon. Rug-making patterns of the Aunts with their colours, who want him to be a replacement for their ‘awful’ nephew Claude who seems to be lost in India? And his bedroom ceiling netted with shadows as if netting him ready for market. And, ironically, someone else said that patterns on wallpaper are ‘atrocious’. But there are many more such passages or patterns in this story than just these! —
“Could a world hold death that held that cosy? […] Must it happen, mightn’t it be a dream?”
“If only I had somebody to help me sort the apples!”
“Autumn was the time of the death of the year, but he loved it, he loved the smell of autumn. He wondered if one died more easily then.”
“He wasn’t going to remember last autumn, the way the leaves had rustled … running races, catching each other up.”
“…arms flung round the girth of the apple tree, grinding his forehead into the bark, clamouring through the orchard. When his own voice dropped he heard how silent it was. So silent that he thought his father was dead too,…”
“I can’t let them tell me. Oh, help me, let them not have to come and tell me! It would be as though they saw me see her being killed. Let it not have to be!”
“A clock ticked out in the passage; it must be a very big one, perhaps a stationmaster’s clock, given the Miss Emerys by a relation. It had no expression in its voice; it neither urged one on nor restrained one, simply commented quite impartially upon the flight of time. Sixty of these ticks went to make a minute, neither more nor less than sixty, and the hands of the clock would be pointing to an hour and a minute when they came to tell Roger what he was expecting to hear. Round and round they were moving, waiting for that hour to come. Roger was flooded by a desire to look at the face of the clock, and still hearing no one stirring in the house he crept across to the door, opened it a crack, quite noiselessly, and looking down the passage saw that the clock had exactly the same expression, or absence of expression, as he had imagined.”
“Roger spent the morning with Miss Emery, helping her sort the apples and range them round in rows along the shelves of the apple-room, their cheeks carefully just not touching. The apple-room was warm, umber and nutty-smelling; it had no window, so the door stood open to the orchard, and let in a white panel of daylight with an apple tree in it, a fork impaled in the earth, and a garden-hat of Miss Dora’s hanging on the end of the fork, tilted coquettishly. The day was white, there were no shadows, there was no wind, never a sound. Miss Emery, her sleeves rolled up, came in and out with baskets of apples that were too heavy for a little boy to carry. Roger, squatting on the ground, looked them over for bruises – a bruised apple would go bad, she said, and must be eaten at once – and passed up to her those that were green and perfect, to take their place among the ranks along the shelves … ‘That happy throng’ … It was like the Day of Judgment, and the shelves were Heaven. Hell was the hamper in the musty-smelling corner full of bass matting, where Roger put the Goats. He put them there reluctantly, and saw himself a kind angel, with an imploring face turned back to the Implacable, driving reluctantly the piteous herd below.
The apples were chilly; they had a blue bloom on them, and were as smooth as ivory – like dead faces are, in books, when people bend to kiss them. ‘They’re cooking apples,’ said Miss Emery, ‘not sweet at all, so I won’t offer you one to eat. When we’ve finished, you shall have a russet.’”
“Not trapped in here among Miss Emery and the apples, when all he wanted when that came was to be alone with the clock. If it were here he would hate apples, and he would hate to have to hate them.”
“Roger had never believed that the Miss Emerys or any of the people he and his mother visited really went on existing after one had said good-bye to them and turned one’s back.”
And so he turned his back on his mother’s death, as long as this story lasts, and it lasts forever, I guess. A garden or bay of literature to gaze upon from the windows of our souls.
“Roger had an imaginary house that, when it was quite complete in his mind, he was some day going to live in: in this there were a hundred corridors raying off from a fountain in the centre; at the end of each there was a room looking out into a private garden.”
“…and here was ‘Ann Lee’s & Other Stories’. What the hell? That was no proper title. Ann Lee’s what? Elizabeth Bow-… the spine was smeared, the black had run. Bowen. Bet it wasn’t Ann Lee’s quim.”
— a quotation from ‘Bed & Breakfast’ in The Cartesian Sonata by William H. Gass (my old review of it here: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2017/02/01/cartesian-sonata-other-novellas-william-h-gass/)
Did Gass have some insight, I wonder, into the meaning of the title story of that book. … (a square man in a round hole? Or if the cap fitted, wear it!) —
ANN LEE’S
“They were young women with faces of a similar pinkness; they used the same swear-words and knew the same men.”
Miss Letty Ames and Mrs Dick Logan, these young women friends, the latter having taken her husband’s name, as women did then, but we eventually get to know she is called Lulu. Meanwhile, Ann Lee owner of this hat shop, near Sloane Street, is described as growing from the floor like a ‘lily’, and it is her hat shop that the two women enter (in preference to the more expensive hats at Clarice’s). Ann Lee is a discreet lady and not very hard-selling of her hats, but subtly some sort of priestess showing Lulu what hats to wear in Cannes rather than the gold turban the latter had intended to wear. Ann’s hats are like subtle magic, with expressive green, blue, et al, and they all debate the costs and choices, almost a hypnotism of interaction between them, hat after hat after hat, another after another, until there is a dreadful desecration of the atmosphere into this “world of tissue” by an ‘Incident’: the entry of a ‘square man’ who insists he has an appointment with Ann Lee at four o’clock.
“The two ladies stood at gaze in the classic pose of indignation of discovered nymphs. Then they both turned to Ann Lee, with a sense that something had been outraged that went deeper than chastity. The man was not a husband; he belonged to neither of them.”
But for what purpose did he enter, what was his appointment about? I am left with the impression he later had to scuttle out into the streets with more than just a flea in his ear, after the two women friends had already left the shop — having been thus hustled into choices, I wonder, as some divergent sales technique?
“These were the hats one dreamed about – no, even in a dream one had never directly beheld them; they glimmered rather on the margin of one’s dreams.”
“He looked about him with a kind of cringing triumph, as one who has entered desecratingly into some Holiest of Holies and is immediately to pay the penalty, might look about him under the very downsweep of the sacerdotal blade.”
He saw the two ladies as “part of the fittings of the shop – ‘customers’ such as every shop kept two of among the mirrors and the chairs; disposed appropriately; symbolic, like the two dolls perpetually recumbent upon the drawing-room sofa of a doll’s house.”
Meanwhile “…there was something splendid about Lulu. The way she went through it, quarter-day after quarter-day …” whatever that means, other than a reference to Zeno’s Paradox with half measures!
The mind boggles at what is happening here. The only story so far in my re-reading journey of the Bowen canon that has outdone me, but, of course, I am probably yet another man sent back out into the streets from this story’s choice of meanings, if not its hats to wear!
Perhaps Gass was right with his own irony of vulgarity as a swear word, thus hinting at how Woman fits herself upon Man before engulfing him!
THE SECESSION
“Miss Phelps and Miss Selby were pressed close together in the narrow frame of the window; their sides and elbows touched, they could have felt one another’s hearts beating.”
They thus “leant out over Rome”, elbows touching, indeed, this psychic troilism, more Henry Jamesian than sexual? But who the shadowy third? Who the singular standpoint or soul? Who is it who wishes to push whom out of that window upon the richly Bowenesque described scenery of Rome? Bowen Rome in broad assonance as well as Baedeker detail. Keeping it for ‘Somebody’, and that somebody is you the reader, more than it is Humphrey Carr, in ultra-subtle patterns with Miss Selby, an English lady,, and with Mildred Phelps, the latter being one of a threesome of American ladies staying at the Pension Hebe, herself detached to become a a stronger pattern with the above troilism of subtle spirits in shade and detail. We know how dependably detailed when reading about the diary of the finally absent Miss Selby, if not reading the diary itself… all perhaps a soap bubble of implication still swelling even as I write this in real-time.
“She had arrived at the blank hour of eleven,…”
Time always has its blank moments, some that seem to last forever.
“She was a very independent woman, sat a good deal in her own room, and must have known Rome very well, since one never met her in the accepted places. She dismissed acquaintances, but was ‘out’ for intimacies; she was as avid for them as she was for letters.”
“He felt her measure his appreciation; not the finest shade, the finest lack of a shade, could escape her.”
“; behind the gaudy silk she was like some palpitating wild thing, a bird half-seen in a thicket. The emotion slipped away and left him numb; he was so much ashamed to have caught her unawares that he turned away his head and did not speak for two or three minutes: still he felt her eyes beseeching his return. He was numb; and worse, vacant and hollow. That, he supposed, was why he was so alive to other contacts, those American women … He echoed to their tapping like an empty jar.”
“…she felt the silence as a slip-noose being tightened about her.”
“…she still felt herself transparent to this gaze and knew that her transparency must be darkened visibly by a hurrying shoal of thoughts.”
Like those ‘shoals’ of the blitzed dead swirling along the streets and through the broken walls in later Bowen works?
“It’s the perfect understanding, the harmony, that makes your company, your friendship, dear, so beautiful to both of us, something that will be always interwoven with the deepest in our lives. I – I wanted you to understand.”
“…but they still saw her lips alive, her brain glowing through her features, while her dark glance flitted, stabbed and flitted from face to face.”
“…and from the diary that not a glance, a half-smile, an intonation, not the slightest interchange between any of them, had escaped her. She had charted the atmosphere of her company; she had been meticulously accurate.”
All of above as part of the singular soul of Bowen as shoaled from within by her created characters as well as us readers, each of us meticulously detailed as well as shadowy dark. Each of us joining with other ‘Proustian selves’ in a gestalt self of endless threesomes or trinities. The lack of shade as well as actual shade itself shimmering like a bubble about to burst within the slip-noose of once withheld emotion or about to float onward forever after being pushed out from the window of the soul upon the precisely tactile and airy-scenic buoyancy of Literature.
“the hill above swept up to the skyline unpeopled, netted over with the shadows of olives.” — in THE SECESSION
“the ceiling was very faintly netted over with shadows, and when the sun washed momentarily over the garden these shadows became distinct and powerful, obstructive; and Roger felt as though he were a young calf being driven to market netted down in a cart.” — in THE VISITOR above
And similar nets in the concurrent Daniel Mills review as well as an elbow and comparable prose style, just now cross-referenced with Bowen here: https://classicalhorror.wordpress.com/daniel-mills/#comment-768
Beware shocking spoiler!
TELLING
“‘If I could just think things out,’ he had tried to explain to his father, ‘I know I could do something.’ And once he had said to Josephine: ‘I know there is Something I could do.’”
In ironic comparison with the previous story (‘The Secession’ where a woman kept a place for ‘Somebody’), Terry (I sense he is the black sheep of the family judging by his meeting with his father at the end), Terry with the dirty nails, just back from Ceylon, his Something was something far more shocking, his sudden murder as a gratuitous act, a murder of a relative Étranger out of the blue with an African knife, a woman called Josephine as a random friend of a family gathering helping Terry’s family move into a house near a ruined chapel, the chapel where the murder happens just below the chapel in its grounds as Terry and Josephine have desultory talk, if not a kiss, as he looks at the chapel windows above, windows wherefrom someone else may once have made the Secession’s at least thought-about murderous push of someone out of it as they both leant out above the sights of Rome … here, though, it is a murder by Terry that will spoil this plot if you know about it first — and in both stories did the murder really happen at all or were they both “Nothing, nothing, nothing.” Three nothings. A sense of Right and Wrong and something between. But Terry was “shaking with exaltation”. Had he lost the knife or simply left it beside the dead body? At least if you push someone to death, there is no weapon to leave.
“And his brain, like a watch, was still ticking.”
“His sister Catherine sat with her back to him, playing the piano. (He had heard her as he came up the path.) He looked at her pink pointed elbows – she was playing a waltz and the music ran through them in jerky ripples.”
“Beatrice, Josephine’s friend, stood with her elbows on the mantelpiece looking at herself in the glass above. Last night a man had kissed her down in the chapel (Terry had watched them).
Note the four elbows.
This review will now continue here: https://nullimmortalis2010.wordpress.com/elizabeth-bowen-stories-12/