Thursday, October 21, 2021

The Stories of Elizabeth Bowen (4)

 

My huge Bowen story review (4)

As continued from the third part of this review of all Elizabeth Bowen’s stories here: https://etepsed.wordpress.com/1004-2/

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 and Katherine Mansfield.

“She never had had illusions: the illusion was all.” — EB in Green Holly 

SEE BELOW FOR MY ONGOING REVIEWS OF BOWEN’S STORIES

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16 responses to “* * *

  1. FOOTHOLD

    “(I like the third person imperative.)”

    …’Let it howl’, as imperative — the wind. And at the end the wind fidgets the curtain and I believe THAT is Clara, the ghost behind the curtain blaming wind for her shape being able to shape it out as her shape. But that’s just me!

    The ghost has got or is getting a foothold here, called Clara, as we earlier came down to breakfast, but the butler has not yet brought the boiled eggs. Thomas is staying with a married couple Janet and Gerard in their new mansion where Janet, to her husband’s worrying chagrin, has sort of set the ghost going from her mind, and it has now become arguably real. With Thomas seeing it and then he suspects Gerard sees it, too, at the end, after circling the port, and as Thomas can’t find the light switch on the landing, listening to Janet in her room talking to Clara… And, in between the breakfast and the end, there is the most complex Proustian, Aickmanesque paradox of unending time and half-atmospheres, but essentially a Bowendigo of meticulous and stylistically difficult, endlessly interpretable, interaction between the three people and the ghost, but whose is the Shadowy Third’s imperative? With much prose tactility of decoration & fabric words and psychological furniture (“It wears the material veil pretty thin”) and breakfast food, and yes, port, and talk of dogs and the couple’s distant, but still growing up children. Thomas wants to retire as a writer into Proust… while reading this story is like (its own) “losing a book in the move, knowing one can’t really have lost it, that it must have got into the shelves somewhere, but not being able to trace it.” It has a foothold somewhere other than in what you can grasp.

    Some important passages… 

    “Janet, pausing half way down to say something to someone above, stood there as if painted, distinct and unreal.
    Janet had brought awareness of her surroundings to such a degree that she could seem unconscious up to the very last fraction of time before… […] ‘I suppose,’ said Janet, ‘one lives two lives, two states of life. In terms of time, one may live them alternately, but really the rough ends of one phase of one life (always broken off with a certain amount of disturbance) seem to dovetail into the beginning of the next phase of that same life, perhaps months afterwards, so that there never seems to have been a gap. And the same with the other life, waiting the whole time. I suppose the two run parallel.’”

    “‘I’m glad you don’t have blue at breakfast,’ said Thomas, unfolding his napkin. ‘I do hate blue.’”

    “‘If you’d been half a man,’ said Gerard, ‘and Clara’d been half a ghost, you’d have come down this morning shaking all over with hair bright white, demanding to be sent to the first train.’”

    “I do feel the house has grown since we’ve been in it. The rooms seem to take so much longer to get across. […] I do think one needs perspective from a library window; it carries on the lines of the shelves.”

    “Gerard, his fine back square and black to the room, bent with a creak of the shirt-front to kiss the inside of an elbow. Janet’s fingers spread out, arching themselves on the mantelpiece as though she had found the chord she wanted on an invisible keyboard and were holding it down.”

    “Thomas concentrated a sporadic but powerful feeling for ‘home’ into these triangular contacts. He was an infrequent visitor, here as with other friends, but could produce when present a feeling of continuity, of uninterruptedness.”

  2. Without the three characters in Foothold, the ghost would have not been able to exist.

    Just as fiction cannot subsist as its own truth without the (Jungian?) cooperation of its readers?

  3. CHRISTMAS GAMES

    “…below a sombre engraving representing a scene from Macbeth, vases held a few sprigs of berry-less holly — stuck in, she guessed, for her benefit, at the last moment.”

    But we know as prime Boweneers that this type of holly is an ominous sign for our young Canadian woman called Phyllida invited by a near stranger, with pretensions of connection with her aunt, to a Dickensian Christmas at a secluded English house in a place called Little Birdover, after a benighted bus ride and a few warning glances from other passengers when she mentioned where she was headed. Luckily a young man in the house rescued her by taking her up on the Aickman-like and Gothic Wing-like ROOF, away from the various darksome characters down below, for a cigarette and a kiss. I won’t tell you the outcome of this slight fol de rol for fear of spoilers. But after that review, I don’t suppose you’ll feel impelled to read it in any event? The horror of Phylidda’s spoilt nylons, notwithstanding.

  4. MISS JOLLEY HAS NO PLANS FOR THE FUTURE

    “…he said I crawled on the news.”

    A startling monologue in the sense it is not a monologue at all but a dialogue by Miss J with a newspaper reporter about her backstory with a con man, now imprisoned, named Mr Wallace — where we don’t read the interpolations by the reporter, a screed that feels as if it was scribbled out for us in a rush, and as if the future does not exist at all, which means it lasts forever? – a screed that is itself interrupted by a one-sided conversation on a telephone with her best friend Miss Kisby. What you infer from the screed is half the story.
    [As the screed is printed, we can’t really make any judgment on how she forms the letter g. All beginnings and endings end each with a g, I am guessing.]

  5. CANDLES IN THE WINDOW

    “Then, drawing off her fine, shabby French gloves, she would sweep ahead of Mother into the parlour where, under the mantle now wreathed in holly, the same chair by the fire was always hers.”

    Aunt Kay came every year on Christmas Eve, a solitary imposing woman, widowed when she was 19 years old, ages ago, a loss of her man at sea, so the children had to shield her from the sea in Ireland close to where they lived. She brought her own routine and bolstered theirs with her regular and habit-regulated Christmas visits. Beautiful passages of Christmas objects and the many candles (almost religious, not festive) the aura of which spread safety in the town, an aura that helps Aunt Kay’s namesake niece, who, at 16, still boyish, is coming out at the local Christmas dance. She is made up in truly felt finery for the first time, hooks and eyes, and given a reticule by Aunt Kay as part of her props. There seems some connection here between tonight’s event for her and Aunt Kay’s ancient loss, and the girl is tempted to stay at home where the sight of her parents and siblings and all the Christmas decor seem to anchor her. But these sights of family and home setting succeeded instead in triangulating the coordinates of her existence outside the ‘home’, ironically not as a ghost but as a budding real woman… she has breached the boundaries of Nullimmortalis and timelessness — or do the Aunt’s earlier words to her echo on? Well, they do at least for me.

    “‘So, Katherine,’ she said, ‘You are growing up.’
    ‘Does it take long, Aunt Kay?’
    ‘The rest of your life.’”

    “‘I was widowed at 19. Did your father tell you?’
    ‘He told us it was all a long time ago.’
    ‘Not to me,’ she said, ‘To me it is still today.’”

    “What ancient scene did she [Aunt Kay] see, in the dancing flames? Suddenly, vibrant and certain, her voice spoke out. ‘There’s a stranger in everyone, at moments. Life would be a finished story, if there were not.’”

    So when a story seems to end, we read on forever? Specially one with a narrator remembering when she was as young as 16. Thinking herself back then and what she then thought. But a leasehold narrator’s words are told us by a freehold author, that very stranger in us. Nothing was left behind, then, and everything was up ahead. Still is. Each ending a new beginning of future speculation and past harmonisation. An eternity of words. Or by words.

    PS. What exactly are “fine, shabby” gloves?

  6. Elizabeth Bowen’s own triangulating signal—

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