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Des Lewis - GESTALT REAL-TIME BOOK REVIEWS
A FEARLESS FAITH IN FICTION — THE PASSION OF THE READING MOMENT CRYSTALLISED — Empirical literary critiques from 2008 as based on purchased books.
UNDERTOW PUBLICATIONS 2021
PART THREE of this review, as continued from here: https://classicalhorror.wordpress.com/daniel-mills/
My previous reviews of Daniel Mills: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/tag/daniel-mills/and this publisher: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/tag/undertow-publications/
This author had a story in my edited Classical Music Horror Anthology in 2012.
I HOPE TO CONTINUE REAL-TIMING THIS BOOK IN THE COMMENT STREAM BELOW…
AS CONTINUED FROM THE ELEVENTH PART OF THIS REVIEW OF ALL ELIZABETH BOWEN’S STORIES HERE: https://cernzoo.wordpress.com/elizabeth-bowens-stories-11/
My reviews of EB stories so far, in alphabetical order: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/31260-2/
My previous reviews of general older, classic books: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/reviews-of-older-books/ — particularly the multi-reviews of William Trevor, Robert Aickman, Katherine Mansfield and Vladimir Nabokov.
“She never had had illusions: the illusion was all.” — EB in Green Holly
SEE BELOW FOR MY ONGOING REVIEWS OF BOWEN’S STORIES
THE MAN OF THE FAMILY
“Such awkward clashes often occurred in novels.”
If not in short stories? A Bowen-beautifully written but straightforward tranche of social comedy and social morals in the thirties around Regent’s Park. William the new young so-called man-of-the-family amongst two Aunts and two nieces, the pretty niece Rachel deeming the other niece Patsey a ‘slug’, and a man called Chummy who arguably has various degrees in a being a divorced cad, a bounder and a financial chancer. A tranche of life that comes to no conclusion other than they are all quite madly self-deceived.
“She ran in and out of documents like a spider, at demoniacal speed.”
“Patsey kept re-settling her cushions behind her, and Rachel re-crossing her legs; the room was full of the amiable drooping silence of relatives who have nothing special to say.”
“…manners (or people not having them) undermine happiness far quicker than morals.”
Aunt Luella pent up like an alarm clock, as the shutter shook.
But which dog dug up the shot poodle?
I DIED OF LOVE
“If a dress coming downstairs, and a dress going up brushed against one another, they did not whisper.”
Another remarkable story, with undying death as its cursor, one that carries the drops of an awaited storm in a single minute. The repercussions of the death of “a mystery factory”, a sewing establishment, run by Miss Mettishaw who talks above or in tune with the noise of the sewing-machine, a sewing woman now part of the narrators’ first person plural home. Miss M once running an establishment where one of the assistant sewers coughs blood over the material of a richly betrothed girl’s would-be wedding dress, and a story catalyst, in the shape of a debt-laden, but handsome, soldier who affected the made-to-ill-measure coordinates of all whispered-of characters, including the betrothed girl with ballroom shoulders as part of a complete figure, including the sick coughing sewer, including the emotions of Miss M herself, and including the built-in fateful destruction of the mystery factory — and the eventual arrival of Miss M in our communal home or head. Amid a thunderstorm as well as a renewed surge of noisy sewing and its promised aftermath. Such a complex stitching, this story’s texture is more than just satisfying; it somehow clogs the throat and makes the reader choke, too, upon its ‘cascade fern’ of still unresolvable implications, and its ominous hawk in the still clearing sky. I died of story.
….to another dying love to have already died of?
A LOVE STORY 1939
“From a cabinet came a voice announcing the six o’clock news. In the middle of this, three berries fell from a vase of holly and pattered noisily into a brass tray.”
This opens with the demands of a theatrical play, various characters at an Irish hotel with a nearby Protestant church, and someone visiting such a posh hotel from via the woods and the pink house near the sea. There is also a honeymoon couple, the new husband typing…
“…typewriter in the pit of his stomach, chin tucked down into his chest. With elbows in to his ribs in a trussed position, he now and then made a cramped dash at the keys.”
I can imagine Bowen typing this story like that. It is as if the start of the war has sent them in all and any directions of crazy intent, even to the extent of someone getting in the wrong car and there being a ricocheting romance between another man and woman, with unlikely impulses, with various theatrical props in the process, and an older woman making up to a young man who looks like the one whom she had just tragically lost: her previous toy boy now lost to the war. She acted her sorrow well, as if acted by someone just like her! Oh yes, that young man sitting in the car that she wrongly got into had gone there to think in a deflated fashion after promising to get his new wife’s ‘pussy gloves’ because she had left them there.
Much business on stage regarding the typist’s feet on the Daily Sketch and someone else trying to get a postage stamp from hotel reception for a letter after the post collection had gone. Perhaps she’ll tear it up and write a warmer letter. I remember this story, but only because the scene of the older woman getting into the wrong car in the darkness has haunted me ever since. Pussy gloves, games of Patience and Penguin books, too. But I still wonder about the nature of pussy gloves!
A misbegotten love story, I guess. A dying love that had already died at birth?
“He switched the lights off, folded his arms, slid forward and sat in the dark deflated – completely deflated, a dying pig that has died.”
ATTRACTIVE MODERN HOMES
“A single twist of smoke from a chimney melted into the thin November grey,…”
It seems as if I was meant to read a huge tranche of the Bowen stories during a November. Any November. The perpetual Noseason edging Winter… as in this Thirties version, an established married couple, with two children called Vera and Freddie, move from their community with a heart, to the heartless new suburb, still being built, of semi-detached houses and people, all pre TV and certainly pre any Internet’s working-from-home. The roads are such that they can’t get their cars out but depend on buses. With a wood nearby and elms opposite their house, and a Nut Lane where Freddie sees a ghost or sees himself.
A mid-life crisis for the wife who ends up embracing the earth — till a timely intervention by another woman, an event only fiction can provide, giving our poignancy at her fate a glimpse of hope. Like the glimpses of hope in du Maurier’s ‘The Apple Tree’ read and reviewed yesterday. But at heart, my heartlessness must point out that any false white blossoms that remain today look even more off-putting, whatever the subsequent interventions. Bowen instinctively knew already of this hindsight waiting to pounce on her timely words of geared apprehension, I guess. Each guess a ghost.
“The armchairs and settee covered in jazz tapestry, the sideboard with mirror panel, the alabaster light bowls, even the wireless cabinet looked sulky, as though they would rather have stayed in the van.”
“No wonder the move had been like stepping over a cliff. Now no one cared any more whether she existed; she came to ask, without words, if she did exist.”
[Then that glimpse —]
“The orange curtains would flame, the bedroom dazzle with sunshine. Though rain often set in later and almost all nights were wet, the early mornings were brilliant. She used to sit up, pull off her shingle-cap and shake out her short, blonde hair, seeing light burn its tips.”
[But—]
“Something behind her silence he learned to dread.”
[Yet the ghosts persisted, haunting us still today—]
“The idea of a ghost’s persistent aliveness comforted some under part of his mind.”
[This idea persists every day I have left.]
“She stood stock still in her buttoned mackintosh, staring woodenly past his shoulder at the bleak wood, unconscious as any dummy of being touched.”
The Account of David Stonehouse, Exile
Continued…
“I lie upon the floor with the journal resting open on my breast and the pencil moving over the page, keeping pace with my mind, as the past weeks return in fragments. The memories twist in my hands, bending to one side and another in the manner of a blacksmith’s puzzle.”
That metal puzzle I used to have to fathom every Christmas when a boy, to separate the pieces. I now seem to be working towards opposite goals, a new revelation of putting the bits together again as gestalt. David recounts here the dreams of Jerusha as once told to him by her (or as he felt them as or through her, I wonder?) and a younger more innocent girl with a Bowen apple amid broad Biblical cycles, but since when, I ask, was any creature’s self-cannibalism Biblical? Even Aickmanesque? I fear I am being led astray again. Meanings escape me as do the pieces of the puzzle, the puzzle of my life?
Read up to: “That sensation.”
“I dropped from the broken window and scuttled away on all fours to the shelter of the apple-trees.”
This work is so maddening it fills the reading veins with the spirit and need to master it. As David, too, is now determined to reconcile its loose ends, the identity of August Fitch whose journal’s residual blank pages David is using, AF’s similarly initialled boots and those of the to be exhumed man to whose body David takes me (on all fours?) so as to dig it up using this book’s textured goriness of tactile text…no longer ‘to be exhumed’ but laid out. Stench and all.
Read up to: “striking my elbow”
Cf my review of Bowen’s I DIED OF LOVE that I completed before reading that Mills section above: https://nullimmortalis2010.wordpress.com/elizabeth-bowen-stories-12/#comment-754
“…the severed roots belching warm fluid in rhythmic spurts, as with the beating of a great god’s heart.”
As words root each other, so do skulls, one man or many, Fitch as stalker, a ghost of a girl whose footprints vanish, this is intrinsically a ravening wolf pack of words the power of which you have surely never experienced before, a pack of dreaming words, too. It’s like separating word from word as if they are heady sinews. Surely this exhumation of meaning has never left human senses such as sight, touch, smell intact but also tactless. Each reader bereft of their own meaning. And no hope that such meaning will be found even by the end of this work. Unless that ‘great god’s heart’ beats again? (That ‘persistent ghost’ in Bowen earlier today?)
Read up to end of ‘Part Three’.
PART FOUR
Judah’s illness segued with listening to Jerusha’s belly after the Gift transfigured into sex amid the cornfields at the stone house, but Elder Job despaired the Gift was squandered…
All couched in words to which I cannot do justice… and this makes me despair, too, that my reviews are just a measuring out of time as a record of words, as a ritualised record of my own false achievement, words without exterior elucidation. And, here, words without interior elucidation, too.
Judah’s plight and the gathering wolves… and time measured not in words but in marked crosses.
“….moonlight on the apple-blossoms as they fall.”
“More disturbingly, however, one can be unknowingly inhabited by the crypt or crypt-effect of someone else — […] …the logic of cause and effect is placed in abeyance and becomes a function of reading itself. […] …a kind of wound, or, more accurately, a cicatrice …“
From The Dissolution of the Novel here: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2021/11/12/the-trance-of-reading/
“We entered the orchard, where I laid him down amidst the crush of fallen blossoms.”
The apple blossoms coming down upon the most poignant scenes of exposed brain and tactile dying that you will probably read in any literature. A wrenchingly tactful putting to sleep that overlaps with David’s memories of being found out when a new life promised from within such exposed brain that any author needs. Elbow become bowel, in my own terms. Angels below…
Amid songs of angels, one of ‘whom’ once came down upon while the Eldress Rose. While I still add words to my review of Daniel’s work without yet fully understanding why.
“…til the Gift of Interpretation was granted me that I might understand the Gifts…”
“In our exile we were even then in Eden,…”
Enlightenment for me as this plot at last coheres excoriatingly or umbilically for me here in our own co-vivid co-here. Those co-memories I can now share with David about the circumstances of his exile along with Jerusha. I Have A Dream?
Read up to: ”Abba abba lema sabachthani?”
I believe in angels.
“We haunt ourselves. We are dead but unburied and with nothing left to us save the haunting.”
And now I face the haunting enlightenment with a larger saudade of text till its very end. It is not enlightenment at all, but creative God-given confusion. And I consider this some of the strongest writing I have ever read, where fiction has at last become the fearless faith I always believed it was. Through into PART FIVE where the handwriting changes again. A woman’s hand. The Child is Mother of the Woman, in contrast to being the Father of the Man as Wordsworth once said in his intimations of Null Immortalis. The Eden created. A birth in death resurrected as life. Out of such awesome tactility of gory living expression couched within words. The word as flesh.
“I have told you that faith is a gift of God.”
A passion of the reading moment, and I may think differently of the the Bible in the dying days that will never die.
“…to rain down earth and apples til the grave’s walls collapsed and he vanished into the ground. Only the white hands visible. They sat upon his chest, folded together, as though he were praying.
An apple tree grows there now,…”
“He was known for it when he was young, but it suffered, I think, for the cold of this place and there are passages inside which I cannot make out.”
Marked to die. As we all are. But what is dying?
***
I shall complete this review below by re-reading and reviewing this author’s DE PROFUNDIS as a coda to this book, but one that is not printed within it…
“Do you remember the sower, how some seeds fall on good ground? Others fall among the weeds and are choked by them.“
[In Isaiah, ‘Fitch’ are aromatic seeds (seeds that happen to be native to southwest Asia).]
Some of this possibly needs cross-referencing here as a mutual synergy, whether preternatural or not — https://etepsed.wordpress.com/mark-samuels/
DE PROFUNDIS as Apocrypha
“It is January 18th.”
It always used to snow in whiteouts upon my birthday, which that date happens to be! This rare story, compared to the story of David, is of a character called Damien but the style is often more staccato, representing “jagged static”, an element of the ‘atonal’ as this reliving of a father-son relationship with cruel spatula and Catholic upbringing, talking in tongues, belief in angels, he has a dream, too, and his religious theology studies clashes with his musicianship in discovering my favourite composer Scriabin and the hidden melodies or mystic chords that slowly develop like photographs or as slowly as I read David’s story until its sudden clinching enlightenment manqué, God not Azathoth from boiling chaos? DE profundiS. All centred upon on David’s ‘pine grove’. And much more. Beyond #abba or other key registers such as C. F# E. et al. The chord of the Pleroma…
***
As a whole, this is a most inspiring book, now finished reading, even with that ghostly participant of a story that appears like a forgotten mystic chord that I now understand more than I did when I first read it. This book is important and holistic enough not to need this unseen extra at all; it is in fact even more holistic for its absence, its absence as a Holy Ghost or inferred Shadowy Fraction.
This mighty spiritual Undertow of a book is not simply (simply?!) weird fiction; it is a religion by fiction. It talks in tongues and things are still developing even as I write this.
End Immortalis