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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.
PART TWO of my review, 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:
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:
1.
“The sun rose on a landscape still pale with the heat of the day before.”
Strange coincidence that I started this book today soon after starting the real-time review of The Heat of the Day concurrently with this one. A real-time that seems to fit the nature of the clock in Montefort’s ‘ceaseless’ kitchen.
We are elegantly, clause-tentacularly, yet simply told the backstory of the characters in this small mansion called Montefort in the post-first world war Irish mountains near an obelisk monument, and with farm buildings, full of unnatural heat and flies and flypaper, and one sealed-up Venetian window. A mansion with a bluebottle bumbling, and other things buzzing, and a twelve year old girl with crimson hives. Yes, simply read this chapter to find out about the deceased Guy, and then about Antonia, Lilia, Fred, Jane, Maude, and Kathie. I will not attempt to brief you here, as it would simply read like the first chapter, read as I just did, a chapter that has again utterly captivated me with its novelistic skills, as well as its possibly meek ghosts that I have so far made bold throughout. As bold as Bowen with once equally bold elbows. And there is a letter just retrieved by 20 year old Jane from a dead person’s trunk from which trunk she also found and wore a ball gown, wore it in the fields outside, having forgotten to do some unknown duty with her father, it seems. And why did Jane then ask Antonia to finger the skirt of the ball gown while she was still wearing it? Or did I misunderstanding something? Some connection between these respective duties of Jane?
Yes, again, simply do please read this first chapter as its own real-time review of itself, a very engaging infodump to beat the more artificially strained infodump of St Quentin and Anna talking about backstories in the first chapter of The Death of the Heart.
Just a few extracts to entice you to read the whole chapter…
“A girl came out of the house, and let herself through the gate in the fence. Wearing a trailing Edwardian muslin dress, she stepped out slowly towards the obelisk, shading her eyes. She walked first up the shadow then round the base of the monument:”
“…propped an elbow on a convenient ledge of the stone and, leaning, began to re-read a letter; or, rather, ponder…”
“…, she was a beauty. The cut of her easy golden hair was anachronistic over the dress she wore: this, her height and something half naive half studied about her management of the sleeves and skirts made her like a boy actor in woman’s clothes, while what was classical in her grace made her appear to belong to some other time.”
“Had the façade not carried a ghost of style, Montefort would have looked, as it almost did, like nothing more than the annexe of its farm buildings –“
“…everlasting buzzing inside my head, not to speak of waking drenching with perspiration. And in this heat this house gets more dreadful day after day.”
“‘Oh, very well,’ replied Lilia. ‘By all means. Just as you like.’
She added the candlestick to the glass and saucer and, keeping the pyramid they formed in precarious balance against her bosom, proceeded through the tricky dusk to the door – her form, the exhausted mauve of her cotton dress, by turns appearing opaque or ghostly. She was electing to move, as she sometimes did, with a sort of superior smoothness, as though trollied.”
“Lilia, wife of Fred Danby, mother of Jane and Maud, was half the hostess at Montefort, half not.”
“These two engendered a climate; the air around them felt to her sultry, overintensified, strange; one could barely breathe it. Yes, they had passed beyond her – she had made the match, they the marriage.”
“…her pregnancy added to and became her, and this great never quite smiling snow-woman, come into being almost overnight, was formidable.”
“She then asked: ‘Know there’s a fly on your neck?’
To oblige, he slapped at it, but in the wrong place.”
“‘I’m half sure I saw Miss Jane this morning, away out over the country in a ball gown.’
‘Then why not say so?’
‘Away out over, and I’d the sun in my eyes. – Unless could it ever have been a Vision?’”
“On the dresser, from one of the hooks for cups, hung a still handsome calendar for the year before; and shreds of another, previous to that, remained tacked to the shutter over the sink. These, with the disregarded dawdling and often stopping of the cheap scarlet clock wedged in somewhere between the bowls and dishes, spoke of the almost total irrelevance of Time, in the abstract, to this ceaseless kitchen.”
“Her cotton frock with its pattern of orange horses had shrunk in the wash and clung to her narrow chest – it was clean, but for some ghostly fruit-stains from the summer before.”
“‘If you call it going: you’re all the time somewhere else. What’s the matter with you? Why are you in this trance?’”
2.
“From somewhere out behind Montefort, she at one time imagined she heard a call –“
Jane bicycling home from the fête the previous evening, feeling as if ‘summoned’, but by what or by whom? Unmissable Bowenesques of atmosphere and scenery as well as details of the fêteful event, and the journey home by bike, and we get to have more of a feel for the characters and their behaviour at the fête, Antonia, Livia, Maud and Fred and his Ford to the rescue! And, above all, Jane, upon her return, fatefully being drawn into the attics of this insular, reclusive family’s mansion and its decline and claustrophobia, and the trunk in which Jane finds the muslin gown and the dateless letters she lets shuffle, letters to be sifted by her into gestalt…
“Only attics now remained to be searched; and how could they (she reflected, for she was practical) show anything? She remembered at least a hat, not unlike Lady Latterly’s of this afternoon, left for years up there to hang on a broken harp. She lighted a candle and went to look.”
“The flame of Jane’s candle consumed age in the air; toppling, the wreckage left by the past oppressed her –“
“They all had been to the Fête, and a backwash from it still agitated their tempers and nerves – in the house itself residual pleasure-seeking ghosts had been set astir.”
“(Maud had become the solitary, seldom-failing occupier of the family pew). As to the Fête, however, there remained an imperative:”
“Stains on her [Antonia’s] long fine fingers, actually nicotine, were with awe attributed to her profession – as an artist photographer she had made a name,… […] Pungent sweat and heatedly trodden grass, fumes of tea and porter, thrum of hoofs from the paddock, the strikings-up and dyings-down of the band all fused into an extreme for Antonia, whose own senses, boastful, stood up to it. – But then she tripped over a tent peg, jarred the lens in her brain: in the instant revulsion set in, as it now did always. Like a bullet-hit pane, the whole scene shivered, splintered outward in horror from that small black vacuum in its core.”
“Fred. He arrived, stared, resignedly took Antonia by the elbow and got her through the crowd to the parked car. ‘Sick?’ was all he asked,”
“…a stranger, who detoured to drop them at the Montefort gates. ‘No idea there was anyone living here,’ he confessed, with a glance of renewed amazement at Lilia’s hat.”
“Lilia swept indoors past him without a word, hid the fudge in the hall clock and went on into the drawing-room. […] – white cart-wheel hat, gloves to the elbow, crêpe floral gown. She and her image confronted each other and the day’s disillusionment, of which the marvel was that it should recur – summer after summer, the same story.”
“Any charm of a chattery circle had been broken by condemnatory pushing apart and back of armchairs, ‘occasional’ chairs and sofas; exposed to fade still more, an expanse of carpet remained for Kathie to sweep when she had time; and the effect, according to mood, was that either there had lately been a catastrophe or that there was about to be a performance. […] Uneasily light by day, at night slow to darken, the room seemed to be waiting, perhaps for ever, for its dismantlement to be complete.”
“She [Jane] could not fail, however, when first she handled them, to connect these letters with that long-settled dust: her sense of their remoteness from her entitled her to feel they belonged to history. […] …the inner course of her life was about to change, and the cause was somewhere here in the room. […] Then the word ‘obelisk’ caught her eye. Then was it that she gave the tug at the band. When that snapped, down, again, fell the letters, this time altogether spilled out and showering. […] Only by reading all of them was one to come upon their sequence, the ‘sooner’ or ‘later’ giving them sense and story – […] She enjoyed being: how could it not depress her to realize that the majority of people no longer were? […] Yes, so far as she was against anything she was against the past; and she felt entitled to raid, despoil, rifle, balk or cheat it in any possible way. She gloried in having set free the dress. But the letters – had they not insisted on forcing their own way out?”
To ‘baulk the past’, to cheat time? – does that not bring us back to someone earlier putting fudge in the clock!
Jane’s trigger word of ‘obelisk’, tempting her to start reading the letters beside that very ‘monument’…?
3.
A ghost story and an elder tree cave as hiding place for its epistolary evidence… the day after the gaiety of the fête, amid the bespoke habits of those alive today…
“The inappropriateness of the fuming dish to the torrid day was noted, but only as one more stroke of fate: Antonia, for one, did not bat an eyelid.”
“‘Of course it was not: how could it be? I told you,’ Jane said, beginning to colour up, ‘it, they, fell out when I took the dress.’
‘You’re far too quick to assume that people are dead.’
‘The trunk was up in the attics,’ Jane told her father, as though in justice to him if not to herself she ought to give the entire picture,…”
“‘What Antonia means, and she has the right to do so, is, why were you interfering with her things?’”
“Antonia’s face, in spite of its show of indolence, had something energetic about the cast of it – nothing sagged except when she foresaw death: there were hollows, tensions and shadows, but they were speaking ones, kept in play by the contrarieties of her mood, the many dissonances of her nature.”
“‘Falling in love with a love letter,’ said Antonia.”
“‘To me it’s rather peculiar that in spite of her chances, all we hear about London, and that keeping on dancing yesterday night, Jane should have to stoop for romance to a musty trunk, belonging to who knows who? Myself I should have been sorry to, but times alter. Are there no men about who are good enough? – Maud, I thought I said no more custard!’”
“He flatly told her: ‘This morning isn’t this afternoon.’”
“‘But if you’d like to know why I’ve had enough, it’s this everlasting maunder about those attics. – You, Antonia, it must be twenty times I’ve asked you to get that stuff at the top cleared out – burned, junked, sold, shifted: I don’t care what. I’ve offered you the pack of men for the job. I need that space, I tell you! I’m short of storage.’”
This family ‘hardy’ like Kelway family?
Inflammable — Jane started a fire? Go to blazes….
“Jane then drew her fingers slowly across her forehead, as it were as a dragnet for her thoughts.”
“‘They are simply signed with a squirl.’”
Cousin Guy, its G such a knot..
“…though I’ve heard you prancing up there, from time to time, Maud, with your hobgoblin.”
A hobgoblin called Gay David…
And another knot….
Antonia —
“She could not even be bothered to speak again till she had finished tightening her pearl slip-knot and twisting her neck to see if she had choked herself.”
Livia —-
“…it was afternoon, most brutal phase of the day, which had leapt upon and was demolishing the poor snow-woman. She forgot the plates and began to pluck at the deep V neck of her cotton dress, desperately trying to fan air down it; until the humidity starting up even in the insides of her elbows made her unjoint and drop her arms like a doll’s.”
Jane —
“‘There’s a stag in that picture I never saw.’
‘They never, never were to her,’ Lilia averred, in a voice of not yet exhausted scorn.
Antonia shrugged. ‘She likes to feel that they are.’
That brought Jane back slowly from the painting, with something of its phantasmagoric and distant oddness still in her eyes.”
“…the red doors, ajar, all seemed caught by a spell in the act of opening;”
“Jane, going into the walled garden, made her way round the end of the house under the sightless Venetian window: she roamed zigzag across the garden, and, getting out again through a gap, found herself facing the sealike uplands. Step quickening, she kept in close to the flank of the woods raggedly edging the river gorge. Some way along an elder grew leaning forward, its branches clotted with waxen blossom within themselves forming a cave. Heavy was the scent, rank the inside darkness which filtered through. The girl, having reached the spot, without hesitation parted the branches and dived between them.”
The letters…
“She [Antonia] did not know what she expected, until she caught the faraway pink flicker of Jane’s frock disappearing into the flowering elder. ‘So that’s where she has hidden them,’ she then knew.”
El der, el bow.
4.
Death, dead space…
Opening paragraphs that should be quoted but not before you have read them.
Latterly paragraphs, though, are sampled below…
.”This had been so, so far, for Antonia in the case of her cousin Guy: yes, though a generation was mown down his death seemed to her an invented story.”
“…death, yes, why not? – but deadness, no.”
Cousin Guy (relevant to the letters or one single letter with several pages or a real-time diary of a letter dated only by the names of weekdays — as found by Jane in the attic trunk now hidden in the elder oubliette); Guy, or Guy David (sic, at one point) or Gay David as Maud’s hobgoblin, dead but somehow still alive, a shadow or ghost between Livia and Antonia, who jibbered at each other, amid the deliveryless paranoia of Montefort, and as Jane is the ‘golden changeling’ between them both, and Jane perhaps longs to belong to to London where her school is, but the arrival of a chauffeur with his “Martian gauntlets”, in Lady Latterly’s Daimler, causes Jane to need to choose between London or Latterly, the latter for a chatterly dinner at the lady’s place? All of this after we watch Jane and Maud by the endless sea…
“It would be long before Guy was done with life . . . Antonia’s reading of the War Office telegram had been followed by a blasphemous incredulity which she could not believe to be hers alone.”
“Earthbound? – no, she was never to think of him like that, nor had he the makings of any ghost. It was simply that these years she went on living belonged to him, his lease upon them not having run out yet. The living were living his lifetime; and of this his contemporaries – herself, Lilia, Fred – never were unaware. They were incomplete.”
“So it had gone on. Meantime, another war had peopled the world with another generation of the not-dead, overlapping and crowding the living’s”
Those shoals of such dead in London’s heat of the day, greater than the sticky heat in Montefort’s Ireland, making me wonder (or remind myself) if this new war was the one they were neutral from…
“Antonia and others younger were creatures of an impossible time, breathing in wronged air –“
“Jane, on the other hand, unaware of loss, should be taken to be in balance perfectly: she had come late enough”
Almost already Elder even as a child? —
“that thicket held, though Jane might not know it, signs of its infestation by many childhoods.”
“Or, was the elder masking a secret gateway, outlet of a precipitous brambled dog-path to the river? Had the girl gone down break neck to where, near Guy David’s Hole, light from the current ran up the rock? Antonia pictured all but the act of reading.”
“‘They say the sea’s as far as you can go.’
‘That’s why.’
‘And there’s no end to it, once you’d get there. –“
“Also Maud was photographed on the water, crouched on the ledge of Gay David’s Hole, a small low cave under the cliff’s face. ‘Ca-ar!’ she bawled across to Jane. Jane lay face down among growing bracken, on the Montefort side. Water-mint wet in the dwindling current and meadowsweet creamily frothing the river bank sent up a scented oblivion round her; a hot tang came from the bracken fronds crushed into bedding by her body. Languidly she neither answered nor raised her head, merely caught at a frond by the tip, bending it down to let a ladybird make its way more easily. ‘Car, car, car!’ Maud repeated, each time for emphasis punching Gay David in the unseen ribs – the ladybird paused as though it could hear; Jane yawned, pushed her hands up into her hair and, for peace sake, shouted back: ‘Not the tractor?’”
“…the deep keen dream come combing through her, keeping her being running like tressy water-weed, like Ophelia’s drowned hair. Nowhere was silence: flies droned over the bracken, far off the tractor patiently drew the mower – and at the instant, with a cave-echoed splash Maud swung her legs into the pool; while all through the minutes conspiratorially the child and her familiar gabbled together in the afternoon distance across the river. Yet all blent into a sort of hush.”
“Through bickerings, jibings, needlings, recriminations, sulks, traps set, points scored, ignominies inflicted, they had remained in communication; their warfare met their unwilling need for contact with, awareness of one another. Almost no experience, other than Guy and their own dissonance, could they be said to have had in common; and yet it was what they had had in common which riveted them.”
“This idol of Fred’s, this golden changeling was, in so far as she belonged to anybody, Antonia’s – but see, today, how even Antonia had been out-monstered.”
“The idea of that agitated Lilia beyond proportion: the truth was she had a neurosis about anyone standing outside a door – it linked with the sense she’d had since she came to Montefort of being besieged, under observation or in some way even under a threat.”
The Cliffside Pareidolia…
“…out of the cliff, for instance, out of the vagaries and traceries of the limestone did look a clown’s face, ferns for eyebrows, loony eye-hollows, neb awry, fallen-open mouth where the cave yawned; and the clown did seem to be swallowing terrified gold fish as light-spangles went darting under the rock.”
“Seeing how brief all time was it seemed impossible she could be too late:”
“Between him and her dwindled the years: where indeed was he if not beside her? They could not now miss one another, surely? His letter had been no more than delayed on its way to her. Footsteps, however, came no nearer.”
“Jane searched the cliff: its face of the clown was gone – below it the water, disenchanted, now wore nothing but Maud’s reflection.”
“The designing glance darted by Maud at the radio in the corner caused Lilia with passion to declare: ‘And I won’t have you running after Big Ben!’
Maud shrugged her shoulders inside her narrow frock; her mother put down her cup, adding: ‘I’m beginning to think I’m ill with all the monomania in this house.’ She spoke as one in search of a fellow-being; her conviction that she was gripped by something mortal made it frightening to be left alone with a child. Her inner face, by now gaunt with solitude, looked out not without nobility through the big white mask padded with flesh. Sorrow was there in front of her like an apparition: she saw now, with belated dread, what life had proved to be, what it had made of her. Could there have been an otherwise, an alternative? Who was to tell her, who was to know? She did not pity herself, for there is an austere point at which even self-pity halts, forbidden. Loss had been utter: not till today had she wholly taken account. Guy was dead, and only today at dinner had she sorrowed for him.”
“I don’t consider Jane even halved. Seldom does she permit him to speak to Jane; that is, when the girl is allowed home. Now we see what comes of it – making a game of everything!”
“Animosity itself had become a bond, whose deep-down tightening suddenly made itself felt today. Antonia’s half of the past fitted in to Lilia’s: looking back, one saw through both lives the progress of the unfinished story. Thrown together, they had adhered: virtually, nothing more than this had happened to them since their two girlhoods.”
“So, as some dread the telegraph boy, she dreaded any comer at all – men wanting Fred, tinkers with their sky-empty blue eyes annihilating their patter of talk, beggar-women sephulchral in black shawls, with the saints behind them. Worst were those who stood at the door mute, neither speaking nor going away.”
“The chauffeur, overhearing or not, reclasped Martian gauntlets behind his back: he was staring in the other direction faceless. That uniform of his was disaster-dark among the feckless front garden roses.”
“Though with time the Daimler seemed to begin to subside from view, as though there were quicksands in front of Montefort.”
“What was this that grew like a danger in her? What had she been tempted up to the very brink of? Was she lost for ever? Was there a path back?”
***
I can only encompass this remarkable chapter within this remarkable ghost story by wielding here so many quotes from it, an aide memoire and a real-time mandala, as — crucially and necessarily to make it work — , shared here with others as a triangulation of coordinates.
From an earlier review of mine a few months ago (a book called Time Present and Time Past) …
[[“Full moonlight drenched the city and searched it: there was not a niche left to stand in. The effect was remorseless: London looked like the moon’s capital – shallow, cratered, extinct.” — From ‘Mysterious Kôr’ by Elizabeth Bowen
And there is a chauffeur in Bowen’s ‘World of Love’ who wore “Martian gauntlets”, gauntlets as psychic armour but, like the high fashion gloves that I always recall my grandmother wearing, they are not always able to hide the ten digits that formed the irresistible archetype for human counting systems and for the human time scheme beyond the seconds, minutes and hours and days into decades and centuries and, even, millennia…]]
My beloved grandmother who was also born in 1899 and visually looked like Bowen.
CHAPTER SIX
“Apart from the ambiguities of her tie with Robert, Stella at Holme Dene felt every one of the anxieties, the uncertainties of the hybrid.”
Well, that tie again, as I assumed would eventually be linked, now interfaced with Robert’s memory of his relationship with his father, as Stella and Robert travel by train plus the plot device of a Bowenesquely truncated taxi drive to Holme Dene, his family home in a Home County, a manor with gables and balconies of later Cheshire Cat smiles and sloping ceilings and detailed, time-prehensile objects or furniture — and Robert’s many photos on two walls in his preserved boyhood room, the middle class compared to Stella’s original upper class, a class of middle as if in the middle of nowhere with the Kelway family’s apportioned collective war rations of butter etc, a family made to be hardy by the war as they would have had to be hardy anyway — his mother, Mutterkins, and associated family members, including various connected children and Robert’s sister Ernestine (Ernie), and one of the children who plays the piano in the only warm room (centralised before a different central heating), a warmer room as might have once been granted to Robert’s ‘failed’ father who never sold the manor unless he could get more than he paid for it: a perpetual syndrome of pride as counterpointed by a plot device of a Mutterkins’ possibly understamped parcel needing to have an accompanying supplement of insurance by a few tangible pennies for extra postage costs… and this family’s soldierly complement of Stella’s Roderick by the name of Christopher Robin… this also being my Matchett / Prothero type monologue, with examples…
“And more: in these years the idea of war made you see any peaceful scene as it were through glass.”
“…it took being shot in the leg to make Robert walk!”, but he ends the chapter still limping.
“…a dumb-waiter and an upright piano, could be marked as evacuees out of other rooms; the grandfather clock, on the other hand, must have stood here always – time had clogged its ticking.”
…like the fudge in the clock in another World of Love?
“If Ernie’s regard had held unawareness, her mother’s showed the mute presence of an obsession. For, why should she speak? – she had all she needed: the self-contained mystery of herself. Her lack of wish for communication showed in her contemptuous use of words. The lounge became what it was from being the repository of her nature; it was the indoors she selected, she consecrated – indeed, she had no reason to go out. By sitting here where she sat, and by sometimes looking, by sometimes even not looking, across the furnished lawn, she projected Holme Dene: this was a bewitched wood. If her power came to an end at the white gate, so did the world.”
“A pink plastic brooch representing a dog was pinned to Anne’s chest; Peter sported an armlet with cryptic letters.”
… a code never to be worn outside the house, a Brutt puzzle to match Stella’s Y.X.D?
“Stella pressed her thumb against the edge of the table to assure herself this was a moment she was living through – as in the moment before a faint she seemed to be looking at everything down a darkening telescope.”
“Late afternoon striking into the blue of his eyes made him [Robert] look like a young man in Technicolor.”
She saw the Kelways suspended in the middle of nothing. She could envisage them so suspended when there was nothing more. […]
Having been born to some idea of position, she seldom asked herself what her own was now – still less, what position was in itself. Mrs Kelway and Ernestine, on the other hand, occupied a self-evident position of their own.”
“His reluctance to move downstairs from his boyhood’s den had evidently been seen indulgently: first-floor manly comforts had moved upstairs to him. They interspersed fictions of boyishness. A ‘varsity’ chair was padded in fadeless butcher blue; a swivel lamp stood attentively at the chair’s elbow;”
Even objects have elbows in El Bow!
“…the books gave the impression of being gummed together in some sort of secretion from their disuse.”
More of that fudging of time? And literature as an ostensible Bowenesque non-clarity being clearer than other people’s clarity — by dint of the poetry of deliberately kinked osmosis as well as the poetry of words itself.
“‘No, they’ve only made this room as though you were dead.’ […]
One elbow on the sill of the open window, she looked thoughtfully back down the room at Robert.
‘What are you really wondering?’ he said.”
“I often think that if Hitler could have looked into that dog’s eyes, the story might have been very different –“
“‘Don’t say “goodness” to someone older than you, dear.’”
CHAPTER SEVEN
“Stella walked back to her flat alone. The country seemed to have followed her back into London and to be on her tracks like a disaffecting ghost, undoing the reality of the city;”
Another truly remarkable chapter, one that allows its rarefied conversation between Stella and Harrison to become a series of absurdist undercurrents that prepared later ground for Aickman’s fiction work as well as part of the weird or kinked literary traditions, as well as being a genuine spy story with a mainstream plot that has its own kinked channels and is a puzzle such as that posed by Brutt and Portia at the Karachi Hotel, and Stella’s own Y.X.D and the boy’s cryptic code yesterday and the conundrums of psychological literature amid the real time of the second world war’s history. This conversation takes place after Stella returns from the Kelways country manor, here in the city’s KÔR of starting rain. Rain that becomes even more important, with her feeling watched or followed, as it turns out, dogged by Harrison, and they enter together her small apartment where chairs form the pattern of a shadowy third, and a profile suddenly pivots from face to face, and towards a Miltonic‘hell’, as do slowly pivot, like time and gender, various motives: motives spoken, misspoken and unspoken, including a blackout blind compromised within a curtained window embrasure that becomes a rainy balcony… a timelessness of sensitivities and another mysterious KÔR or gestalt of meaning…
And Harrison end up by taking over the duty of posting Mrs Kelway’s parcel addressed to her soldier son, Christopher Robin…
“Muteness was falling on London with the uneasy dark; here and there stood a figure watchfully in a doorway; or lovers, blotted together, drained up into their kisses…”
“Carrying the hat she had worn all day, she had a finger of the same hand crooked through and cut by the string of Mrs Kelway’s parcel.”
“Now her approaching footsteps were being numbered; no instinctive check or pause in them went unmarked. […] He was up the steps, respectfully at her elbow, before her key had turned in the latch;”
“He sat planted well forward in his armchair – which, like so many third armchairs in a room in which normally only two intimate people sit, was a stranded outpost some way away down the carpet, and was turned towards hers (which faced towards Robert’s, empty) at a tentative angle which he had not changed. So placed, he viewed nothing but Stella’s profile, unless he could provoke her to turn her head.”
“Still, there are dreams one checks up on, even so, don’t you think? I mean, if I’d seemed to dream I saw a chap at the foot of my bed going through my pockets, I’d take a look through my pockets first thing next morning. Who wouldn’t? You would. The devil, of course, would be, what exactly had I had in my pockets the night before? It’s queer how a thing comes popping back and back to one’s mind – something gone, but one cannot be sure what.”
Barking up trees, doing what Harrison would have done, by Stella having just gone to Robert’s root “where rot could start”, his home… “Mind, I wouldn’t dream of asking you what you found.” Two birds with one stone, or two stories? Selling country or not?
“One could only suppose that the apparently forgotten beginning of any story was unforgettable;”
“‘No, I appeared to be up against sheer kink.’
‘What kink?’”
“You did not have to! You did not have to dog me – to gnaw and nibble round the edge of summer, to loom and gloom!”
“But a woman takes time. I could take twice the time you’ve got.”
“Harrison jibbed, or else winced. He touched his tie, made a jerky involuntary movement of the head.” (My italic)
“Harrison parted the curtains with his thumb and edged between them; they swung into place behind him. The window embrasure was deep; nothing showed there was a person in there at all: it occurred to Stella that any night anybody could have stood hidden in there, listening.”
“Only by the smell of refreshed stone was one to know that this rain fell on a city. The night was neither warm nor cold; it belonged to no season; it was a night of rain.”
“…now in effect the war became as unmeaning as the quarrel; two persons speechlessly at a window became as anonymous as the city they overlooked.”
“The darkness by force of being so long looked into resolved itself into particles, some lighter; air and solids just lifted apart; rooflines took on an uncertain form.”
“By the rules of fiction, with which life to be credible must comply, he was as a character ‘impossible’ –“
No continuity, or no physical weightiness, or going into abeyance.
“…between appearances. ‘Appearance’, in the sense used for a ghost or actor,..”
“Just now, for an instant, in the darkness in which she could not even remember the colour of his coat, he had been for the first time palpably someone near her: a being – continuous, secretive, dense, weighty,…”
“‘No, I have not heard a clock strike all the evening,’ she said aloud. ‘It might be any hour.’”
A breather alone … a blind parcel… today’s breath of contamination in our own times…
“…indoor-plotted; this was a war of dry cerebration inside windowless walls.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
“To talk, which she had to do, was to tender what words she had; to be forced to search for anything further, better, was as persecuting as having to dip for escaped coppers into the depths of her handbag –
Please compare those earlier pennies that Mrs Kelway provided for her possibly understamped parcel, thus bringing an obliquely ironic interface between Louie Lewis’s down-to-earth factory girl world and the Kelway middle class — and then, circuitously by the explicit post-box mouth of Louie’s ARP warden friend Connie, an interface with the Stella Rodney upper class, as I understand it.
Many have scratched their heads at the comic intrusion of these two girls. Louie with her tragic parental backstory and her husband Tom elsewhere in the army, a girl who sees it her duty to be flighty with other men (but having failed picking up Harrison in the first chapter’s park).
And then there is an obsession with newspapers as a prophecy of todays populism as engendered by social media, and Connie, who has some instinctive wisdom about the war, as well as the farcical scene of dropping vegetables on their dark stairway, sparking off, I infer, shadowy thirds derived from the girls unconscious Sapphism for each other, a factor also seen in a similar scenario. between the girls featured by her MYSTERIOUS KÔR story?
The girls are living creatures created by newsprint — the beginning is the word. And there is no way I can convey all the many angles and niches of this relationship that possibly become far more than a comic interlude, indeed far more than Bowen trying to extend her range of fiction beyond the classes about which she feels most comfortable writing about.
But, meantime, please try this Lewis-bespoke monologue below of Bowen words from this chapter, words that tell us more about the war mentality of the then working people — engendering views of its participants about the then real-time history as palimpsest for what we have ourselves just endured today, another interface that Bowen seems to have prophesied instinctively by the rarefied and inspirational way she writes fiction as truth, or, contrastively, fiction as religion… even fiction as one of the girls’ conversation about migratory birds. Now become homing birds of fiction truth?
“Within the narrowing of autumn, the impulses of incredulous loneliness died down in her; among them that readiness to quicken which had made her look for her husband in other faces. True, she felt nearer Tom with any man than she did with no man – true love is to be recognized by its aberrations;”
“Louie was swept along in one shoal of indifferent shadows against another.”
“: the darkness did not love her. To be seen was for her not to be. It was a phenomenon of war-time city night that it brought out something provocative in the step of most modest women; Nature tapped out with the heels on the pavement an illicit semaphore.”
“Sunday her only daylight”
“…the ilexy love mound rode in a waste of lawn like a ship abandoned; strangers gave one another unmeeting looks.”
“Yes, it was in the disenchanted park that London’s indifference to Louie stood out most stark and bare.”
“Why now, therefore, should it be his [Tom’s] chair that gazed at her? […] Why now, therefore, should it be his chair that gazed at her? It directed something at her whichever way she pushed, pulled or turned it, in whatever direction she turned herself. The discountenancing of the chair by filling it had been her object in bringing strangers she met in the park back here.”
Silent wireless
Gas fire
mirrored cafe in Tottenham Court Road
Connie ARP warden “a brick-red postbox mouth.”
Living in the same block of apartments as Louie, but out of her area of air raid jurisdiction.
Kiosk, voice like a file…
“at the post throughout long hours of duty she dislocated her jaw yawning,…”
“No one who held you were paid too high for doing damn all by the hour could themselves have tried doing damn all by the hour. Not, as she pointed out, that she was by any means doing damn all;”
Connie thinks Louie would be better of if she had started a child?
“Tom wrote back, he was glad to hear Louie had made a girl friend, particularly one in their own house:”
“It is advantageous being among all sorts if you are some sort, any sort; you gravitate to your type.”
“The stair and landing lighting in No. 10 was of the kind which puts itself out automatically after two minutes: it not only now did so but continued to do so throughout the search – Louie, galumphing up and down in her pink nightie, helped Connie gather up the potatoes, turnips, carrots, and it was she who finally found the torch.”
Newspapers: addiction
“…smoke to read the last of the print till a flame ate it – you never knew what you might not just happen to miss.”
“in the beginning was the word;”
Louie’s war a middle, never a beginning?
And thus we became in Brexit Britain —
“The papers knew Britain had something up her sleeve – Britain could always, in default of anything else, face facts.”
People of Headlines. Equivalent to texting in shorthand while Bowen texted like Proust!
“Dark and rare were the days when she failed to find on the inside page of her paper an address to or else account of herself. Was she not a worker, a soldier’s lonely wife, a war orphan, a pedestrian, a Londoner, a home- and animal-lover, a thinking democrat, a movie-goer, a woman of Britain, a letter writer, a fuel-saver, and a housewife? She was only not a mother, a knitter, a gardener, a foot-sufferer, or a sweetheart – at least not rightly. Louie now felt bad only about any part of herself which in any way did not fit into the papers’ picture;”
“…it appeared that we were becoming less standoffish; the Americans had been agreeably surprised. War now made us one big family . . . She was reinstated; once again round her were the everlasting arms.”
“she longed to fondle a copy still warm from the press,”
“While deferring to Connie’s droit du seigneur over any newspaper entering the house, Louie hated to see her use it with that sensual roughness.”
“She was now, even, in a fair way to make those friends of whom, having Connie, she was no longer in need.”
“Her [Connie’s] re-reading of everything was the more impressive because the second time, you were given to understand, what she was doing was reading between the lines.”
And that is exactly what I am now doing when re-reading Bowen after many years, my weak memory as a veil, or a migratory cage whence I cannot escape!
“They go to show how Nature pursues her course under any circumstances. Birds like that wouldn’t notice there was a war –“
“Still, you’d surely not rather be like the Germans, Connie? I was told how they swallow anything they are told.”
Yanks and Russian, the girls have instinctive theories about these and…
History itself.
The photo Tom left Louie.
‘Abeyance’
“…he had not considered the one she already had, the enlarged snap of him in a Byron collar on Seale strand, adequately serious.”
“To see, however, is not to look.”
“what the camera had recorded had been the face of a man already gone.”
This chapter as camera has brought back people who never left, I guess.
The book that Bowen left Lewis — to be never left.
Memory as well as Zeno’s fudge left in that ‘World of Love’ hall clock, both transcended?
Migratory birds from or to Africa, I think it says.
Darkest Africa as Kôr…
ELBOW as #KÔRner
#ElizabethBowen’s classic short story #MysteriousKÔR
The #circumflex as her Symbol of the Elbow? — https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2021/11/23/wake-the-elbow/
FROM ‘MYSTERIOUS KÔR’ —
“Next, two wardens coming off duty emerged from their post and crossed the road diagonally, each with an elbow cupped inside a slung-on tin hat.”
“‘Sorry,’ the girls said in unison. Then Pepita laughed soundlessly, making their bed shake, till to stop herself she bit the back of her hand, and this movement made her elbow strike Callie’s cheek. ‘Sorry,’ she had to whisper. No answer: Pepita fingered her elbow and found, yes, it was quite true, it was wet. ‘Look, shut up crying, Callie: what have I done?’”
CHAPTER NINE
“She [Stella] had forgotten that by travelling west you enter longer days: this hour, as she stood looking down the length of a room at a fire distantly burning inside white marble, seemed to be outside time – an eternal luminousness of dusk in which nothing but the fire’s flutter and the clock’s ticking out there in the hall were to be heard.”
A WORLD OF LOVE and its own hall clock so important yesterday takes on a Jungian confederacy (see further below when I have written about it, in order) — as Stella travels to Mount Morris in war-neutral Eire as her son Roderick’s troubleshooter for his inherited property as well as his inherited clock. Do they have rations? Are the 16 year old girls, like Hannah Donovan, innocent as well as beautiful to Stella? Hannah’s father the caretaker, who later shouts to Stella, despite being cut off from Connie’s newspapers and a telephone and a dusty disused wireless, of Montgomery’s breakthrough in Egypt, the land of Haggard or at least near Kôr, a turning point in the war in interface with ‘a confederacy of mad women’, including Nettie’s drawing of the Titanic disaster. All very oblique, but all very meaningful to the osmotic reader with a fearless faith in fiction.
Firstly, Stella has to resist Robert’s love for her (or his lying to her?) not to stay in London…
“‘The whole thing’s a racket of that old lunatic’s. To get you back.’
‘After all, he’s dead – if you mean Cousin Francis?’
‘A little thing like that wouldn’t bother him.’”
String and an understamped parcel, still involved, as we are, in this package of irrelevance that is so far more relevant than it seems.
The aura of the house and its environs, in this October 1942…
“Elsewhere rising woods or swelling uplands closed Mount Morris in. By anyone standing down by the river looking up, sky was to be seen reflected in row upon row of vast glass panes. The façade, dun stucco, seemed to vary in tone, but never altered in colour except at sunset – which, striking down the valley, gave the stucco an oriental pink and enflamed the windows.”
“…the walls and soaring curtains were of a deadening red.”
“Balanced upon the bales, a tribe of tray-shaped baskets invited Stella’s inspection of their contents so carefully sorted out – colourless billiard balls, padlocks, thermometers, a dog collar, keyless key-rings, a lily bulb, an ivory puzzle, a Shakespeare calendar for 1927, the cured but unmounted claw of a greater eagle, a Lincoln Imp knocker, an odd spur, lumps of quartz, a tangle of tipless tiny pencils on frayed silk cords. . . .”
Cards of Francis’ instructions from the dead, he being one of those dead, I guess, who are in shoals around us, and “another, inaudible, clock, empty branched candlesticks, and embossed bronze vases holding charred spills, there was nothing further.”
“Oh to stay here for ever, playing this ghostly part! Unwillingly she looked behind her – her gloves, shaped by her hands, her bag, containing every damning proof of her identity, were still, always, there on the centre table where she had put them down.”
“…the rounded glimmer of its venetian window (ever wholly extinguished only by blackest night),” — Cf the sealed Venetian window in ‘A World of Love’.
“Innocent in its resemblance to no other, the minute merged itself in the immortality of the house.”
“Stella had assumed there to be no shortages of any kind in Eire. The exciting sensation of being outside war […] the uncurtained windows had spelled ease, yes; but still more had set up a barbaric joy, as might wine let run soaking into the ground.”
“After supper she twiddled perfunctorily the knobs of the wireless beside Cousin Francis’s chair – it had pleased him to have the war at his elbow;”
“…assurance of being utterly out of reach added annullingness to her deep sleep that night.”
Letter to Roderick…
“Mrs Kelway’s parcel – had Harrison posted it?”
Was Harrison whom he seems? He seems he did visit Mount Morris. Was there more to espionage and selling one’s country than psychological or even Irish and scenic counterbluffs?
Rock sunk boat at Mount Morris, cf Titanic.
No stamp for her letter. That happens often in Bowen.
“Now primarily it was the scene, for her, of those conversations late into the nights – what had they been up to in here? what had they been cooking? Evidently Harrison was not a man to have come back and back for nothing.”
“What was her defence but this – that he lied, must lie, could not not lie, had lied from the very start?”
To lie is to know one lies? Ironically, we are told lies everyday that we know are lies, but become no longer lies as a result?”
“This book-dark darkening room, through which imperceptibly the current of time flowed, held truth sunk somewhere in it, as the river held the boat.”
“She had asked nobody anything about Harrison – why, yes, but of course she had: had she not asked Robert?”
Motives and the confederacy of love? Stop – stop him? It would be stopped when Harrison closed the trap. World of Love. World of Women. Working parties hemming dresses….”from mirror to mirror, into misted extensions of the room. She was proof against it. Constrained to touch things, to make certain that they were not their own reflection, she explored veneers and mouldings, corded edges, taut fluted silk with the nerves of her fingers;”
“the society of ghosts”
“She wore the look of everything she had lost the secret of being.”
“…under this illusion that Cousin Nettie Morris – and who now knew how many more before her? – had been pressed back, hour by hour, by the hours themselves, into cloudland? Ladies had gone not quite mad, not quite even that, from in vain listening for meaning in the loudening ticking of the clock.”
“Everything spoke to them – the design in and out of which they drew their needles;”
“And though seated together, hems of their skirts touching, each one of the ladies had not ceased in herself to reflect alone; their however candid and clear looks in each others’ eyes were interchanged warnings; their conversation was a twinkling surface over their deep silence. Virtually they were never to speak at all – unless to the little bird lying big with death on the path, the child being comforted out of the nightmare without waking, the leaf plucked still quivering from the felled tree.”
“That was that – or, could there still be something more? That her own life could be a chapter missing from this book need not mean that the story was at an end; at a pause it was, but perhaps a pause for the turning-point?”
That turning-point of the war, too.
“…could not but be somewhere in the directive, as Roderick chose to read it, from Cousin Francis. It was usual in this house to bring home a wife: if that had not yet occurred to him, it would.”
“…the daughter-in-law curled forming like ectoplasm out of Stella’s flank.”
“…the fatal connexion between the past and future having been broken before her time. It had been Stella, her generation, who had broken the link – what else could this be but its broken edges that she felt grating inside her soul?”
“This was the peace of the moment in which one sees the world for a moment innocent of oneself.”
Autumn is staying for her decision?
“In the hush the dead could be imagined returning from all the wars; and, turning the eyes from arch to arch of boughs, from ray to ray of light, one knew some expectant sense to be tuned in to an unfinished symphony of love.”
A symphony of love, a world of love.
“Hannah was beautiful – a year older, yet somehow further back than her sister Mary. This was Stella’s first full view of her in daylight: she stayed below stairs over her cooking, […] Having not a thought that was not her own, she had not any thought; she was a young girl already upon her unmenaced way to Heaven.”
Indifferent to whatever victory…
Sometimes quote marks vanish, and the words become mine?
The ‘She’ who is this book, its Egypt, its inherited clock. Ayesha! A Sapphic link or kink? Or just another tuck to be sewn? Even a pausing moment’s disinherited tick?
Montefort, Mount Morris…
Monument: (anagram) Mount Men [or Women (incubus or succubus?)…]
Obelisk, Wobel-isk…
[The first sentence of ‘A World of Love’ (a happenstance simultaneous review) contains the words ‘heat of the day’…]
CHAPTER TEN
“Arrival of shades in Hades, the new dead scanned dubiously by the older,…”
Evocative journey by a black-outed train (open tracks and tunnels) as Stella travels to Euston from Eire…and precariously being met by Robert at the station…
“Despair made her press her lips. Then before she knew, under her elbow was his hand.”
He is with an unexpected transitter, his sister Ernestine (a buffer or an impediment?), and a hired car with a chauffeur to take her and, then, them onwards… a strange journey where much is lost in a handbag (but what had Ernie lost?) and in the streets themselves, even if the chauffeur had, I infer, his own Martian gauntlets of geared guidance!
“….to the point of wondering what would happen if she were to try slipping her arm through Robert’s sister’s. She wondered how Ernestine’s arm would feel. She wildly contemplated, even, a conversation with Ernestine about Robert before it was too late –“
“What, you expect me to offer Mrs Rodney a penny for her thoughts?”
… a thought that brings to mind that unshakeable-off parcel again! (A parcel that reminds me of the ‘silly pie’ in Aickman’s ‘The Swords’!)
“The impression of being in a wood gave place to one of phantasmagoric architecture improbable in London.”
No questions, no lies…
Lies that lie in the air like, I infer, with Jungian breathing, a respiratory disease, or, as it says here, flu, as brought into the car from in the Eire…. (or by migratory birds from Africa?!)
“‘In that case you must mean this is a haunted car.’
‘Hired cars of this type could some pretty curious tales unfold, I shouldn’t wonder,’ said Ernestine.”
After Ernie’s departure in the Earl’s Court area…
“Or we began as that: that was what we were at the start – but now, look how all this ruin’s made for our perfectness! You and I are an accident, if you like –“
And, like Jane suddenly and monumentally enunciating the name ‘Guy’ at the the Latterly Castle in Eire, Jane issues her own momentous question…
“‘They said you were passing information to the enemy. . . .’
‘I what?’ he said blankly. She repeated the statement, adding: ‘I did not know what to think.’ […] ‘—what does one say in a situation that doesn’t make sense?’ […]
“‘I lost my head. How was I to know what was true?’
‘How indeed?’ said Robert, with frozen irony.”
Various non-people as shadowy thirds (if not birds) now visible, shadowy thirds as the momentous question for truth or lies (and its concomitant implications for their love and frankness) as gestalt answer — and as Time itself, fulfilling perhaps the Zeno’s Paradox alliance of Bowen and Aickman…(“But they were not alone, nor had they been from the start, from the start of love. Their time sat in the third place at their table. They were the creatures of history, whose coming together was of a nature possible in no other day – the day was inherent in the nature.”)
— the Time that is our co-vivid day today? Our inherited clock?
“This thing locked up inside you, yes; yes, but always secretly being taken out and looked at – and how without going mad am I to let myself imagine at what moments?”
“We have not then been really alone together for the last two months. You’re two months gone with this.”
“One can live in the shadow of an idea without grasping it.”
“Yes, a drink will sober us down.”
A late-night ‘waning’ restaurant and a discrete carpet for their table, as they continue their ‘frankness’…
Mount Morris debriefed. The place, soon or now, of Roderick.
And the need to insulate that initial weightiness-guyed question by cutting through to the prospect of marriage…
And what of Harrison who had started this sequence of truths and lies…?
“On from now, every moment, with more and more of what had been ‘now’ behind it, would be going on adding itself to the larger story.”
A ‘Titanic’ marriage, or one that is buoyed rather than weightiness-guyed?
Cf that earlier loose barrage balloon in the skies of London during the park band concert,
“‘Roderick would like it,’ she reflected, with an elbow on the table, supporting her temple on her hand, obliquely following with her eyes a scroll in the damask pattern of the cloth.”
“‘How am I to know what more reservations you may not still have in your mind? I see only one way of knowing. – Are you going to marry me?’ […]
…Robert, looking at the bill, which had been for some time unobtrusively at his elbow, then putting notes on the plate.”
What about the tip? Pennies?
“Anything one must say, one must say as soon as one can.”
This review continues here: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2022/01/10/the-heat-of-the-day-elizabeth-bowen/