Monday, December 27, 2021

To The North by Elizabeth Bowen (4)

 


Part Four of my review continued from here: To The North by Elizabeth Bowen

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:

92C4BAAB-2761-482E-AA59-BF2B01882B89
Edit

8 responses to “*”

  1. nullimmortalis
    December 27, 2021 at 2:43 pm Edit

    XVI

    “She had even invited Tim Farquharson, as she feared to be short of men. […] Gerda’s line as a hostess was of adorable inefficiency; with the air of a lost child she tottered among her guests, in one hand a glass dripping sherry, in the other a semi-opaque yellow drink in which the skewered cherry appeared as a threatening shadow.”

    How can one ever surpass Bowen with her skewered words and her shadowy cherries as well as thirds?

    “; his name was Frank and he felt rather shy and masculine.”

    Something rather disarming about that, too, as well as disabling, diselbowing… A party in Gerda’s drawing room, with celebrities, the great and the good, as well as her girl friends (“The girl friends, however, provided a sort of padding: intense in their interest, unflagging in their responsiveness, punctual with their laughter, they passed on the great to each other from palm to palm like scarabs.”)
    Gilbert’s coming, too, but Emmeline has not yet arrived; later Cecilia never turns up.
    Frank, you must read here about Frank, the most major minor-character ever, a sailor from someone’s past…

    “…the Channel tunnel, would it or would it not promote good international feeling?” 

    …as then Emmeiine does arrive, ironically a shipping agent and a claustrophobic, to meet such a discussion ! 

    ‘I have been talking,’ he said sternly, ‘about the Channel tunnel.’
    ‘But God must have meant us to be an island,’ said Lady Waters,…”

    …Lady W who had also arrived, trying to manoeuvre Frank and Emmeline, amid the sad case of Gilbert’s arrival, too…

    Windows extend “on to a platform among the tree-tops. There seemed no room for Emmeline even to stand: guests by this time were being pressed out through the windows. Pink floppy lilies dropped pollen into the sticky glasses; cigarettes fumed to death in little jade saucers.”

    “Nonentities gathered impetus as the party proceeded, celebrities mounted like hilltops into a haze of kind ambiguity.”

    This sceptred isle, with a channel tunnel?! (was that even dreamt about in the 1930s, I ask?) as we move dangerously within Bowen’s own rarefied claustrophobia in this novel of early airports…
    “This fortress built for nature by herself / Against infection and the hand of war.”’.
    ‘You mean what about quarantine? What about the Navy?’”

    Tim F goes off with E to her car. Merely that. Social-distancing.

    *
    Cecilia, meantime, meanwhile, is alone elsewhere in her place, alone with Henry’s photograph. The quarantine of death, I wonder? Ghosts socially distancing, too, and dead friends on dead pillows.

    “…the bright emptiness of this room with its smile fading became, brought up to the microscope of her nerves, a living tissue of shadows and little insistent sounds: the clock and the trees outside, a blind-cord tapping, her own dress rubbing against the sofa-back as she turned to listen. […] …an arc of emptiness spanned Cecilia’s horizon: she was so seldom alone.”

    “She looked into Emmeline’s room, which, with counterpane drawn up over the pillow, looked shrouded, as though no one slept here now. A friend’s room with its air of guarding a final secret is like a death-chamber; here, still unknown, the sleeper seems many times to have died.”

    “But she lent herself to a fiction in which she did not believe;”
    …and so we believe in it more!

    “…he [Henry] had not known when he died that this house existed and that a shadowy part of his life would continue here. […] His ignorance made, for the moment, the room ghostly. Propped up in a frame on a mantelpiece against which he had never leaned, over a hearth before which he had not reflected – for like Emmeline Henry had been a great stander and leaner – he looked across at a bed in which he had never slept.”

    “She nightly returned to this mirror, these pillows, her sense of being a far too general gift to the world:”

    “In the cupboards her dresses hung bosom to bosom coldly, as though they had never been worn. She ran down like a clock whose hands falter and point for too long at one hour and minute: the clock stops dead. She dissolved like breath on a mirror and trailed away like an echo when nobody speaks again …”

    Bowen’s or Cecilia’s clock stopped dead: not even with the half measures of Zeno? The claustrophobia of flying nowhere? Ships crossing in the night with unbuilt or empty tunnels beneath the seas?

    Reply
  2. nullimmortalis
    December 28, 2021 at 11:54 am Edit

    XVII

    “A huge blue June day filled the aerodrome and reflected itself in the hall: she heard a great hum from the waiting plane hungry for flight. Such an exalting idea of speed possessed Emmeline that she could hardly sit still and longed to pace to and fro –“

    Emmeline and Markie flying from Croydon aerodrome to Paris to meet the two Serbs, and something about that word ‘Serb’ halts me phonetically/ graphically if not semantically, and for a moment I nearly forgot to tell you of the amazing prose in all these adverb powers, including syntactically, as we are literally taken of from the earth in 1930s public air travel and landed back, via the archipelago of clouds, and visual, vibration-feeling and humming-hearing senses, in France, a Zeno speed pent up and expended whilst still in limbo. Probably the greatest few passages of the visionary-sensory (even hindsight SF) that Bowen ever wrote. (Writing ‘Bowen’ there reminds me momentarily of a punny joke someone recently cracked on social media when they saw my current obsessions with her work, a joke about a Bowen 747!) 

    I could quote the whole chapter, but I won’t.

    “…he observed, however, from Emmeline’s face of delight that something had happened: earth had slipped from their wheels that, spinning, rushed up the air. They were off.”

    “Close in the strong light and distant in roaring silence her face appeared transparent; watching the thoughts come up like shadows behind it he thought of the Scottish queen’s ill-fated delicate throat, down which, says a chronicler, red wine was seen to run as she drank.”

    And a pencilled real time review on paper between them when travelling on the plane, against the deafening sounds, gives a new slant on this review itself!

    “…free of that veil of uncertainty and oblivion that falls on the posted letter, the repercussions upon her of all he said. The indiscretions of letter-writing, the intimacies of speech were at once his.”

    “Stayed by this feeling of unimmediacy she reviewed one by one the incidents of their friendship, each distinct from the other as cloud from cloud but linked by her sense of something increasing and mounting and, like the clouds, bearing in on her by their succession and changing nature how fast and strongly, though never whither, they moved. She was embarked, they were embarked together, no stop was possible;”

    “– pointed a pause in which both felt something gained or lost, though neither, perhaps, knew which.”

    It was still a ‘quivering plane’ even while they unboarded it.

    “Paris, approached by its macabre north, wore its usual first air of being not quite Paris, or more like Paris than one foresaw.”

    “An intense sense of being forced so close to the other as to be invisible,…”

    Reply
  3. nullimmortalis
    December 30, 2021 at 11:18 am Edit

    XVIII

    “‘If I shot anyone, I am the sort of man I should shoot.’ One clock struck midnight, a little before the hour.”

    “There was a quiver of rockeries and hot gravel, burnt petrol hung over the privet and perfume from Mme Scherbatskoff’s abundant corsage. […] From the balustrades, from the stone rims of pools where there were no fountains heat quivered up;”

    …as if both those quiverings are still attuned to the singular quivering of the earlier landed aeroplane?

    And this chapter about Emmeline and Markie in the atmosphere of various parts of the Paris area, the business meeting with the Serbs and their wives, and the need for Emmeline never to be ready as she always has to go back to her hotel room by lift regarding varying business with her gloves, as well as the changing loves between them, hates and loves in relationship to all these activities…. Including Bowenesque timelessness and stillness and taxis swerving towards death or self-assassination, and the later views from the religious heights of Montmartre by contracted moonlight… all these passages of thought and event and scenery and self-characterisation by Emmeline vis à vis Cecilia so utterly utterly pretentious and rarefied they enter realms of Literature that cannot be gainsaid, merely absorbed, especially the passages that I have NOT quoted below…

    “His eyes in a kind of extinction, blank of their evidence of an intelligence ravenous and satirical, fixed a shimmering point in the black-and-white vestibule tiles: passers-by stepped knee-deep into their cold light. Travelling at high velocity he had struck something – her absence – head on, and was not so much shattered as in a dull recoil.”

    “Sliding heavily in its grooves the lift came down twice, twice the gates clicked open: there was no Emmeline. She might have melted in some corridor of their hotel, her bodily vanishing would, to the nascent uneasiness underlying his reason, hardly have been incredible; for he had been oppressed since last night by sensations of having been overshot, of having, in some final soaring flight of her exaltation, been outdistanced:”

    “Following him with eyes that saw at once nothing and too much, she had seemed unwilling to be a moment apart from him: her finger-tips in the palm of his hand, in which every swerve and jar of the taxi became recorded, they had motored to Neuilly this morning to lunch with the Serbs.”

    “….a sultrily-bright Paris Sunday of Maupassant’s, dramas behind the leaves.”

    “Round Paris and far to the south, empty France spread her plan of baked plains and highways, treed river-valleys and splintery limestone hills. West of London, slopes rushing with cars diluted in sunshine: the Farraways hedge arched its view of an older summer, the lime showered shadow on to a lawn with Cecilia sitting: from the air you would look at chimneys that reeled as you flew …Emmeline, who had sent so many clients flying that her Bloomsbury offices seemed to radiate speed, now stood still with her hand on the bark of a tree in St Cloud – for they had gone a short way up an avenue – bark whose actual roughness blurred to the touch at the thought of so many forests, and longed to stand still always. She longed suddenly to be fixed, to enjoy an apparent stillness, to watch even an hour complete round one object its little changes of light,…”

    “Markie, seeing how tired she was, with a lover’s tenderness and self-reproach, slipped a hand under her elbow. ‘Come along,’ he said gently. […] …he hurried Emmeline on, drawing her, with a hand still under her elbow, up avenue after avenue, wheeling her angrily round where perspectives met.”

    “Markie, unused to going about with a woman on these terms, had yet to learn that a woman who seems to be ready early is never ready.”

    “…so I walked down again: it took years.”

    “: everyone moved in a fever or feverishly stood still.”

    “…who had stripped off her glove to turn over and kiss her hand. She felt untrue to Cecilia: an unspoken good faith, based on some understanding that life must not be allowed to pass out of a certain compass, existed between them and was not lightly to be abused.”

    “The new power, momentarily not bearing her up, became like wings dragging, a heaviness at the shoulders.”

    “Their taxi steered between two lorries, bumped on an island and spun just clear of a bus. Emmeline laughed, seeing Paris spin round, and blinked at the crash of light. Markie stiffened and swore: his nerves were never too good.”

    “Oh well, if one’s killed one’s killed.”

    “Moonlight fell glacial, sinister, Doréesque on the roofs of the city and caught a curve of the Seine.”

    “The church – for Markie an oppressive monument to futility – towered up high and frosty. An idea of the stored-up darkness of its interior – only apart from them by a door and curtain – stale gilt, cold incense and peering images in the perpetual scarlet of hanging lamps, created for Markie a kind of suction,…”

    “‘We waste time,’ he said passionately…”

    Indeed!

    Reply
  4. nullimmortalis
    December 31, 2021 at 9:51 am Edit

    XIX

    “Unfortunately it was raining, bad weather was moving steadily south;”

    This is a borderline absurdist house party chapter, mistress-minded by Lady Waters, yes, the rain’s waters as well as the gluey Zenoism and Null Immortalis that I recently identified squelching from or into Aickman’s later absurdism of gatherings, say, in his Late Breakfasters or Go Back at Once novels. This gathering takes us back to Farraways, with a boring ornithologist in whom we should not be interested but later we are told he is called Graham Watts, and a celebrity composer called Marcelle Veness, who plays the piano at midnight. Into this world Pauline is plunged by Lady Waters who has her eyes on consequent machinations vis à vis Cecilia and Pauline’s Uncle Julian… and Cecilia later turns up at this gathering, but not Julian. Pauline is given a horrible girl called Loretta (who keeps her lipstick in a strange place), a girl provided by Lady W to amuse Pauline. And there is much about birds in this chapter, to match Emmeline’s latest flying from Croydon… “Are you fond of birds?”, Lady W asks Pauline gratuitously!

    “After some miles, the chauffeur stopped to inquire if she [Pauline] were comfortable, but looked with far greater solicitude at the turbot.”

    “…Lady Waters, in grey knitted wool, standing out on a duckboard, directed a gardener who was putting down numbers for clock golf.”

    “‘My other niece,’ she said, ‘flew to Paris today – though she is not really my niece. Visibility looks to me poor today but it may have been different at Croydon; one never knows.’
    ‘Never,’ agreed Pauline. ‘How I dream of flying!’”

    “When the gong for lunch sounded she [Pauline] crept like a mouse to the stair-head, then pranced heavily down.”

    “Or, drawing out foot after foot with a squelch they would advance step by step cautiously and as though by accident.”

    “No doubt she looked like a fairy, with bare legs and arms beside the pool in the rock-garden where the late spring flowers had fallen and the sundial, sad with no shadow, was streaked with rain … “

    “Jarred by the late cry of a cuckoo, Cecilia found in the cloudy low arch of the sky, in the distant country like something reflected in water, the halt, the chill, the not quite oblivion of death.”

    “Strangers, the kindly touch of the unforeseen – it was high time she [Cecilia] was abroad again.”

    “…a widow keeps her prestige though she lie with a ghost.”

    “She [Cecilia] said: ‘Does your dress do up at the back? Perhaps I could hook it.’
    ‘Thank you ever so much, it does up at the side.’
    ‘In my day, they did up at the back. Would you like your hair brushed?’
    ‘I brush my own hair, thank you ever so much.’
    ‘Was that a nice girl you were talking to in the garden?’
    ‘No,’ said Pauline in a burst of confidence, ‘she was a perfectly awful girl.’”

    Reply
  5. nullimmortalis
    January 1, 2022 at 9:53 am Edit

    XX

    “Sense leapt at the shade of a shadowy tussle about a door-knob.”

    Julian arrives at Farraways for the day: a setting and a gathering already established in the previous chapter, ostensibly to see Pauline, but obviously or perhaps to see Cecilia, too. And J and C debate their future (or not) together — and they discuss Markie and Emmeline, the former being a Byronic figure? I sense a later Aickman-like Sapphic yearning in C when she thinks of there being a moon in Paris, whilst the cosmic shifting of the world as well as its clouds means there is none this evening in far Farraways nearer to home! And coupled with a typical retroactive Aickmanesque hint of women’s secret signs … when J is talking to P…
    “Mrs Summers came in last night and offered to hook my dress, but it hooks at the side.”

    Our picture of events and their linking by Bowen over the head of Lady W!
    Bowen a sort of BoWending towards Null Immortalis?

    “‘Why should one be tolerant?’ said Cecilia. ‘Life is really too short.’”

    “I suppose I am worried; you see, it was I who picked Markie up in the train. If Emmeline likes him enough to be consistently charming, he would be mad if he didn’t fall for her. He isn’t a fool: he must know what’s good when he sees it. But their marriage would be a catastrophe: I should do everything to prevent it. He’s a bully; he’d make her wretched!”

    Objects and furniture are sardonic…
    “ – brass bowls, the piano, a tall screen painted with lilies – a sardonic indifference to their company. Remembering he was supposed to have come to see Pauline, she made off towards the door.”

    “If this fresh understanding with Julian – or at least this return to a point where they had been more or less happy – could not lift the lowering sky or tune up the cuckoo, it at least set ticking again in Cecilia a clock that counted most hours of pleasure. Something unexpectedly sweet was dropped into her mouth opened wide for vacuous afternoon yawn.”

    A vacuous yawn worthy of Eva Trout! And perhaps a teenage Pauline?

    “‘That’s right, Pauline,’ she said.
    ‘Have you shown your uncle the view.’
    ‘I couldn’t find it,’ said Pauline, flustered.”

    And the hidden cosmic theme of this novel, as well as the global, hinting at our darkening times, our travel recently stultified by Omicron…

    “… Clouds closed in; the moon did not appear; darkness spread over the skies again; only the lime and a wet path silver for less than a moment had known of the moon’s rising. The tree and path faded; cloudbound while that tide of light swept the heavens earth less than suspected the moon’s perfection and ardour.”

    “‘But this age,’ Lady Waters went on, ‘is far more than restless: it is decentralized. From week to week, there is no knowing where anyone is. […] The human spirit is more than literature. What, I often say to myself, does one want with books:’”

    My only salve are books… And, as happens every time I read and absorb a Bowen: “Time fled, she had discovered a masterpiece;”

    Reply
Posted by at No comments:

Friday, December 24, 2021

The Death of the Heart by Elizabeth Bowen (4)

 

The Death of the Heart by Elizabeth Bowen
Part Four of my real-time review – as continued from HERE

8EFE0947-0B28-4538-9969-06928B5BBD59

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:

Edit

7 responses to “*”

  1. nullimmortalis
    December 24, 2021 at 3:02 pm Edit

    Part Two: 6

    “She [Daphne] had set her hair a new way, in a bang over her forehead, and she had not so much as batted an eyelid as Eddie, steering Portia by one elbow, walked away from Waikiki down the esplanade.”

    “There is nothing like exploring an empty house.”

    An intense sense of menace is summoned here as Portia and Eddie get into an empty lodging-house, and their conversation is perhaps even more menacing than the house itself.
    Horror is Bowen’s forte, literary Horror in interface with Romcom absurdism and prehensile furniture and ambition to entertain with an over-sophisticated mind … cf Aickman.

    “A stale charred smell came from the grates – Waikiki seemed miles away. These rooms, many flights up, were a dead end: the emptiness, the feeling of dissolution came upstairs behind one, blocking the way down.”

    “Portia felt she had climbed to the very top of a tree pursued by something that could follow.”
    Later Eddie says “…you start driving me up trees and barking at the bottom like everyone else.”
    And later still — “Freeing his arm, he caught both her hands in his in a bothered but perfectly kindly way, as though they had been a pair of demented kittens.”

    [All in later interface with a darkly remarkable new extended overview for us of the poorly accomplished but effective pastel portrait of Anna with a kitten by Mrs H, in P’s room at Waikiki.]

    “By now, he had twirled the string round his finger so tight that the flesh, with its varnish of nicotine, stood out in ridges between.”

    “In his own eyes, shutters flicked back, exposing for half a second, right back in the dark, the Eddie in there.”

    Then, right back at Waikiki…
    “Portia walked round her puzzle and stared at it upside down.”

    And there is a difficult conversation for Portia with Daphne who warns her against Eddie…

    “But if you get so potty about him without seeing what he’s like, you’ll get an awful knock. You take it from me. […] …he’d play a kitten up if we had a kitten here. You’ve no idea, really.”

    What did Daphne do with her thumb in the Grotto Cinema? Do I remember? Probably not. Do you? 

    The Sunday Dinner scene with the others and the arrival of Mr Bursely do not relieve the menace for me.

    “Even by day, though, the unlike likeness disturbs one more than it should: what is it unlike? Or is it unlike at all – is it the face discovered? The portrait, however feeble, transfixes something passive that stays behind…”

    Sometimes I think I look at Bowen as a puzzle from upside down. This review is one of its patterns still evolving…
    Nothing like exploring an empty memory, refilling it as one goes.

    “people have to get off when they can’t get on”

    Eddie has wisdom. As well as menace.

    Reply
  2. nullimmortalis
    December 25, 2021 at 4:55 pm Edit

    Part Two: 7

    A highly fraught chapter, with Eddie full of himself but full of a creeping chaos, too, as he threatens to leave Seale by train that night. His chaos creeping itself into Bursely, Cecil, Dickie… But first in the Lawrencian woods with Portia …

    “Light, washing the stretching branches, sifted into the thickets, making a small green flame of every early leaf. Unfluting in the armpit warmth of the valley, leaves were still timid, humid: in the uphill woods spring still only touched the boughs in a green mist that ran into the sky. Scales from buds got caught on Portia’s hair. Small primroses, still buttoned into the earth, looked up from ruches of veiny leaves – and in sun-blond spaces at the foot of the oaks, dog violets burned their blue on air no one had breathed. The woods’ secretive vitality filled the crease of the valley and lapped through the trees up the bold hill.”

    “Eddie stopped, sat, then lay down in a space at the foot of an oak. Slowly flapping one unhinged arm from the elbow, he knocked the place beside him with the back of his hand till she sat down too.”

    “‘What an awful house that was! Or rather, what awful things we said.’ ‘In that empty house?’ ‘Of course. How glad we were to get back to Waikiki. I’m frightened there, but it feels to me rather fine. The mutton bled, did you see?’”

    The unconscious lies of a like those of the prime minister he created just for the times in which I re-read this.

    ‘That’s not true, across my heart. I think we are perfect, darling. But I’d much rather you knew when I didn’t mean what I said, then we shouldn’t have to go back and put that right.’”

    ‘“‘We don’t want to eat each other.’
    “‘Oh no, Eddie – But what do you mean?’”

    Eddie lying without knowing that’s he is lying; Portia lying bodily…

    “‘You fill me with such despair,’ she said, lying without moving.
    Eddie reached across and idly pulled her hand away from her eyes. Keeping her hand down in the grass between them, he gently bent open her fingers one by one, then felt over her palm with his finger-tip, as though he found something in Braille on it.”

    9Terrified by his voice and face of iron, Portia cried, ‘Oh no!’ Annihilating the space of grass between them she flung an arm across him, her weight on his body, and despairingly kissed his cheek, his mouth, his chin. ‘You are perfect,’ she said, sobbing. ‘You are my perfect Eddie. Open your eyes. I can’t bear you to look like that!’
    Eddie opened his eyes, from which her own shadow completely cut the light from the sky. At the same time frantic and impervious, his eyes looked terribly up at her. To stop her looking at him he pulled her head down, so that their two faces blotted each other out, and returned on her mouth what seemed so much her own kiss that she even tasted the salt of her own tears. Then he began to push her away gently. ‘Go away,’ he said, ‘for God’s sake go away and be quiet’.”

    With Portia, so with whatever woman he was with. The violent violets…

    “In every pause of Eddie’s movements a sea-like rustling could be heard all through the woody distance, a tidal movement under the earth. ‘Wretched violets,’ said Eddie. ‘Why pick them for nothing?’”

    “Don’t you see we’re all full of horrible power, working against each other however much we may love? You agonize me by being so agonized. Oh cry out loud, if you must: cry, cry –“

    To where untruth starts…

    “‘Don’t force me to where untruth starts. You say nothing would make you hate me. But once make me hate myself and you’d make me hate you.’9

    Accept the whole of him, or none of him. Gestalt or nothing. Bits of something are null and void.

    Cinematic scenes with cigarettes and words…

    “We are as drowned in this wood as though we were in the sea.”

    “Eddie chain-smoked; Portia put down the window near her and leaned out with her elbow over the top. Sea air blew on her forehead; she borrowed his comb again.”

    “By this time, the Pavilion hung like an unlit lantern in the pinkish air; the orchestra was playing something from ‘Samson and Delilah’.”

    That comb, that shorn hair?

    “Propping an elbow on Cecil’s shoulder, he said how much he wished they could go to France together. He printed his name with Evelyn’s lipstick on the piece of paper off Clara’s straw. ‘Don’t forget me,’ he said. ‘I’m certain you will forget me.’”

    In this chapter, the creeping chaos belongs to Bowen, too. Off the rails, while Eddie wants to be back on such rails toward London. Away from this once holy haven. Seale with no Lease-hold left. Just the madness of its freehold author.

    Reply
  3. nullimmortalis
    December 26, 2021 at 11:19 am Edit

    Part Two: 8
    THE DIARY

    “…as though yesterday had been all my dream. I have gone on with the puzzle, it has been knocked, so part that I did is undone and I could not begin again where I left off.”

    As before, I shall keep most of this secret diary as secret as it should be, just with three shadowy quotes to adumbrate Portia’s dying days at Seale, amid all those characters, characters with characters that create (or lay themselves open to) what happens to them, or things that happen to characters that create their characters, in three separate shadowy places – one that changes when certain people are in them, and when they are not in the places without ever having been in them, and when they have left the places by having been in them first…
    Obliquely like and unlike nesting swans that can have a change in behaviour if we get near them?
    Portia says she “caught” a headache on the canal where the swans were nesting.
    The mixed feelings of leaving somewhere certain to go to the uncertainty of the place and the people there to whom she is returning…

    “All the days that go by only make me seem to be getting further and further away from the day I last saw Eddie, not nearer and nearer the day I shall see him again.”

    “I cannot say anything even in this diary. Perhaps it is better not to say anything ever.”

    Reply
  5. nullimmortalis
    December 27, 2021 at 12:45 pm Edit

    Part Three: The Devil

    That Miltonic Satan as a ‘lucid’ mixture of God and Lucifer from ‘The Hotel’?

    1.

    “The clocks, set and wound, ticked the hours away in immaculate emptiness. Portia – softly opening door after door, looking all round rooms with her reflecting dark eyes, glancing at each clock, eyeing each telephone – did not count as a presence.”

    ‘Immaculate Emptiness’, Null Immortalis….

    Portia has returned to London, a day before Anna and Thomas return there. Ann@‘s print and now Matchett’s spring cleaning….tainted by the future with which we in our own real-time is due to pollute them! —

    “…the inner net curtains stirred over windows reluctantly left open to let in the April air with its faint surcharge of soot. Yes, already, with every breath that passed through the house, pollution was beginning. […]
    Portia said, in a hardly alive voice: ‘I thought you said you had finished everything.’
    ‘Finished? You show me one thing that is ever finished, let alone everything. No, I’ll stop when they’ve got me screwed into my coffin, but that won’t be because I’ve got anything finished …’”

    “‘I must say,’ said Portia, sitting on Matchett’s table, ‘today makes me wish only you and I lived here.’”
    That reminds me uncertainly of a short story I read recently? By Bowen? A house refilling unwelcomingly, to the consternation of a person who was there already?

    “She [Matchett] looked built back into the half darkness behind her apron’s harsh glaze.”

    “….her speckless house, and a reckoning consciousness of it showed like eyes through the eyelids she lowered over her knitting. […] …she was knitting; there was something pacific about the click-click-click.”
    Cf Daphne’s erstwhile knitting in the library.

    ‘You don’t want to be in two places, not at your age. You be at the seaside when you’re at the seaside. You keep your imaginings till you need them. […] If you had have been here, you’d have been under my feet one worse than Mr and Mrs Thomas if they hadn’t gone away. […] You never quite know when you may hope to repair the damage done by going away. […] Now it’s all over, get it out of your head – I sec you’ve worn the elbows out of that blazer. […] What I don’t think I don’t think – you ought to know that. I don’t make mysteries, either.”
    Cf this Matchettery with what was chatted about with similar considerations as reported about in my previous review entry above.

    “Matchett gave another sideways look at the clock, as though admonishing time to hurry for its own sake. Her air became more non-committal than ever; she appeared to be hypnotized by the speed of her knitting,…”

    Eddie is reported to have said thus tellingly earlier to Matchett on the telephone.
    “‘Oh dear, oh dear,’ he said, ‘I must have muddled the days.’”

    *

    And then Anna and Thomas return to be welcomed by carnations sent by Major Brutt, a hovering presence they now regret ever meeting by chance at a cinema…

    “Thomas was back again in his armchair, as though he had not left it, one foot on a knee.”
    With bodily parts as a electrical earthing, the furniture remembering him, too. Electric elbows?

    Anna” “Let’s face it – who ever is adequate? We all create situations each other can’t live up to, then break our hearts at them because they don’t.”
    She gazes at the quilt Thomas has rumpled. They wonder if they should discourage Eddie’s attentions upon Portia.

    Thomas and his half-sister, Portia, in the park, where this book started…
    “The etherealization of the early morning had lifted from the long narrow wooded islands, upon which nobody was allowed to land, and which showed swans’ nests at the edge of their mystery. […]
    He looked at Portia, at their father’s eyebrows marking, here, a more delicate line. […]
    Thomas said sharply, gripping her elbow – a car swerved past them like a great fish. ‘What’s the matter?’
    ‘There was Anna, up there. She’s gone now.’”

    As we move through this book, we wonder again which window of a page in it will next become not simply empty but immaculately empty? Which diary day will next be left blank? Which swan’s nest?

    Reply
  6. nullimmortalis
    December 28, 2021 at 9:53 am Edit

    Part Three: 2

    “A face at a window for no reason is a face that should have a thumb in its mouth: there is something only-childish about it. Or, if the face is not foolish it is threatening – blotted white by the darkness inside the room it suggests a malignant indoor power. Would Portia and Thomas think she had been spying on them?”

    Another shadowy third, a chapter of diaries and secrets and gestalt real-time reviews as a triangulation of the coordinates of fiction, spies and lies…

    “Directly the two had gone out after tea, she [Anna] had gone to this drawer with the clearly realized intention of comparing the falseness of Pidgeon with the falseness of Eddie. […] …that experience means nothing till it repeats itself. […] She [Portia] might have been run over, which would have been shocking. But, after all, death runs in that family. What is she, after all? The child of an aberration, the child of a panic, the child of an old chap’s pitiful sexuality. Conceived among lost hairpins and snapshots of doggies in a Notting Hill Gate flatlet.”

    Portia and Eddie—I will issue no lies about how they re-encountered each other…

    St Quentin and Portia in the Park…

    “Instead of replying, St Quentin looked up at the windows. ‘We’d better not talk too loud: this is full of nursing homes. You know how the sick listen …’”

    They listen and look at windows, too. Ironic that we had earlier seen Anna at a window after or before renewing a relationship with her own secrets, and why St Q divulges a secret about secrets to Portia, a secret that I will not divulge here, my now being intrinsic [sic] within this book instead of being a mere reader or reviewer of it.

    “‘Now what can have made me [St Q] think you [Portia] kept a diary? Now that I come to look at you, I don’t think you’d be so rash.’
    ‘If I kept one, it would be a dead secret. Why should that be rash?’
    ‘It is madness to write things down.’
    ‘But you write those books you write almost all day don’t you?’
    ‘But what’s in them never happened – It might have, but never did.”

    FICTION lies

    “No, really, er, Portia, believe me: if one didn’t let oneself swallow some few lies, I don’t know how one would ever carry the past.”

    Real time, heading towards a ‘nonplussed pause’ of nonminus immortalis…immoralist…

    “But a diary (if one did keep it up to date) would come much too near the mark. One ought to secrete for some time before one begins to look back at anything.”

    “All the time, you go making connexions – and that can be a vice.”
    “You set traps for us. You ruin our free will.”
    MEA CULPA, the reviewer!

    “Because I [St Q] quite like Anna, I overlook much in her, and because she quite likes me she overlooks much in me. We laugh at each other’s jokes and we save each other’s faces – When I give her away to you, I break an accepted rule. This is not often done. It takes people in a lasting state of hysteria, like your friend Eddie, for instance, or people who feel they have some higher authority (as I’ve no doubt Eddie feels he has) to break every rule every time.”

    *

    The shifting lies and truths of Eddie, again as a pre-cursor of our times. 

    “Between Portia and Anna extended the still life of the tea-tray. On her knees, pressed together, Portia kept balanced the plate on which a rock-cake slid. Beginning to nibble at the rock-cake, she sat watching Anna at tea with Eddie, as she had watched her at tea with other intimate guests.”

    That pause as a disarming pre-elbow…

    “By coming in, however, she had brought whatever there was to a nonplussed pause. The fact that they let her see such a pause happen made her the accessory she hardly wanted to be. Eddie propped an elbow on the wing of his chair,…”

    Memory of that Waikiki-pedic sketch of Anna as a child with kitten… versus the betraying Anna today… 

    “Since the talk with St Quentin, the idea of betrayal had been in her [Portia], upon her, sleeping and waking, as might be one’s own guilt, making her not confront any face with candour, making her dread Eddie. Being able to shut her eyes while he was in this room with her, to feel impassive marble against her cheek, made her feel in the arms of immunity – the immunity of sleep, of anaesthesia, of endless solitude, the immunity of the journey across Switzerland two days after her mother died.”

    An endless pause of SICnificant anaesthesia for a sickroom spy. Non-plussed, non-subtracted.

    Reply
Posted by at No comments:
Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)