Saturday, November 27, 2021

The Hotel by Elizabeth Bowen (1)

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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 of THE HOTEL will be conducted in the comment stream below:

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13 responses to “The Hotel

  1. 1. QUARREL

    “It had been a Moment, not a succession of moments,…”

    This is an exquisitely subtle and psychologically ornamental chapter that does not disappoint someone who has just read all 108 stories of its author. In fact, it even builds on that experience, although incredibly it must have been written before a good deal of those stories.

    “Her wait prolonged itself, the minutes seemed interminable; now and then she glanced at the lounge clock.” 

    We see Miss Pym following the endlessness after that Moment of Quarrel with Miss Fitzgerald, and, then, via the ping of balls at some tennis courts within this Mediterranean hotel’s grounds, we expect at least one mention of an elbow to go with the tennis, but here we are disappointed! Yet, as recompense, there are the protocols of parasols on arms…

    And a possible ‘John Milton’ arriving as a future guest at the hotel to fulfil this name’s mention being in textual contiguity with a “jigsaw puzzle” that may indeed be this novel’s latent plot.

    I gradually get to know Miss Pym and Miss Fitzgerald and their ‘truth’ of such ladies’ girlish talk imputed as potential ‘nonsense’ about stoicism versus hedonism
    And a subsuming Mrs Kerr and her Sydney Warren, the latter possibly being a young lady continuously expected to be drawn into Mrs Kerr’s “Limbo”?

    Not forgetting the first appearance of a wraith, whether it be as more ‘nonsense’ or ‘truth’, I do not yet know. This attached to Miss Fitzgerald, I infer, in the post-Moment’s aftermath…

    “Everything that, abroad, an English lady takes out with her swung from her arm and bumped as she fled: the coloured straw satchel, the native umbrella, the golf-jersey, the net bag supplementing the satchel. There streamed from them, to Miss Pym’s perception, a pitiful wraith.”

  2. 2. SYDNEY

    “I’m not a Feminist, but I do like being a woman.”

    Says Mrs Kerr.
    I am beginning to re-establish or correct in my mind the respective ages of the main characters, their emotional as well as ‘political’ pecking orders as people in this hotel frame of affairs. Here, amid tennis balls and a more blame-framed ‘glare’ for 22 year old Sydney Warren’s game with a man that Mrs Kerr watches and thus drains Sydney’s ‘moon-y’, if not ‘sun-y’, luck! Sydn-y who depends on the power of Mrs K thinking of her all the time.
    As if Mrs K is the freehold deity as author?

    “An exaggerated attention to what was being said or suggested would arch up the eyebrows tragically, harden the eyes and draw in the mouth to a line that prefigured maturity’s.”

    Sydney on the brink of breaking through into ‘maturity’ rings well with a review I carried out earlier this same morning hereabout females actresses of the 1970s, which is equivalent to another distance of past: the late 1920s as seen from those 1970s.

    I know my overall heading for my forthcoming, arguably naive, and ‘intentional fallacy’, reviews of Bowen’s novels is the book that summons up her ‘Shadow Over The Page’… so Mrs K (with only a glancing reference to her absent son Ronald in Germany) is made to deploy that very essence of Shadow and perhaps Shadowy Third…

    “It had never occurred to me that my eye might be evil.”

    “From out of the black shadow that hid the rest of her, her scrutiny like a livewire was incessantly tugging at Sydney’s consciousness.”

    In ironic contrast to that ‘glare’.
    And the mention of a girl who reads a book while walking along the road without traffic near the hotel, thus ‘to read without menace’…

    To a new mention of menace…

    “The possibility of not being kept in mind seemed to Sydney that moment a kind of extinction. Mrs Kerr had many friends; all these demi-gods would leap up at a reference to one of the least of them, shadowy and menacing.”

    Apparently Sydney has been choosing books for Mrs K, and Mrs K claims she does not want ‘depressing books’ chosen … as they approach the “cold steps of the library.”

    The evil is in the eye of the beholder (Sydney or Mrs K?) or simply in the eye of the reader?

  3. 3. LATE FOR LUNCH

    So much within so little, we gather meaning like perplexed soft oranges. We are now in a Thomas Mann book, perhaps, witnessing — along with Sydney and her cousin sponsor Tessa — some other hotel guests’ rituals at lunch from beyond the welcoming double doors. Mrs K typically and grandly late for her separate table, much to Sydneys’ telling study of indifference. Mann, even though this is not a sanatorium. Although Tessa is sickly and has only come downstairs for her lunch as asparagus omelettes are quick to serve and the bee-like waiters should be considered…

    One man with his botany-case and his anemones, their roots on show, pesters some tables with talk of a future picnic, And we duly get to know some more characters that I will not burden you with here, although with whom Bowen blesses you there.
    Some me and women already paired off.

    “The Ammerings should not see his anemones.” 

    …while Miss Pym wears “an anaemic string of turquoise beads.”

    Knitting, elsewhere, as a wifely haven … some other women are conversationally ‘reft’ while another soul, possibly a waiter, “veered left”, and different women endowed with conversation… yet others waiting with the timelessness of food “temporizing off the tips of their forks.”

    And “one could see visitors take form with blank faces,” before entering with real faces for lunch…resonating with Sydney having no face at all earlier after looking at her reflection.

    “….time put out no compulsion and the afternoon might have stretched ahead, as it seemed to stretch, brightly blank.”

    “…the panorama of faces […] sleek satin draperies into dark folds.”

  4. Pingback: From The Hotel | The Des Lewis Gestalt Real-Time Reviews Edit

  5. 4. BATHROOM

    We learn of the bathroom logistics of the hotel, their pecking-orders of privacy and the ability for your smalls to be aired out there… and we also learn of the respective views whether you are at the back or front of the hotel, the sight of the sea somehow being seen as…
    “…the spiritual, crude and half-repellent beauty of that changing curtain,…”
    with perhaps a single ship upon it.

    And that sense of half-repellency, so-called, brings us to James Milton whom someone earlier in this book wondered if he were somehow to be ‘John Milton’ — and this now summons up for me a vision of the half-repellent Lucifer or Satan in Paradise Lost when compared to a half-repellent God… and ironically he turns out to be a clergyman who has just arrived at the hotel, with the grime and whiffs of travel upon him, and he co-opts a bathroom without realising the protocols involved! He even sings Gregorian chants in there as he wields his loofah! The outcome is hilarious, specially as it affects Mrs and Miss Pinkerton whose Edward as husband and brother to these women is only alive in a picture in their hotels rooms, a picture wherein, Bowenly,…
    “He was making a third with them, this evening as ever, his mild bewhiskered face, with that expression of awe on it with which fancy is wont to invest the pictured faces of the dead,…”

    I discerned a hint, meanwhile, that James Milton somehow recognises Sydney?

  6. 5. PICNIC

    “She carried a mackintosh over her arm in contempt of the sky,… […] Mr Lee-Mittison was pleased with his wife, as with everybody, and now and then patted affectionately the folds of her mackintosh.”

    Well, after the anemones and his roots, we read of Mr L-M’s promised Picnic almost at Hanging Rock, “the five girls with their short skirts”, bright faces, girls acting “mulishly” with cigarettes, till they later reach a “mule-track” with another ‘glare’ in its scimitar view… well, I put words from any text in abeyance for later exhumation of meanings, just like Sydney’s abeyance of the past, as well as Saracens. Prefigured by “Little distinct shadows from branches above their heads shivered over their figures and faces.” Yes, Sydney has come on the picnic rather than have a car-ride with Mrs K. She is ‘remote’ compared to the other girls, but she has a tête-à-tête — among such shadowy Saracens — with Mr Milton who is trying to shake off his own reputed tutelary character that would otherwise spoil his holiday break. Did he and she once meet before – on a bus? I think not. “Left- left- left.” The girls had sung this earlier. Reft, reft, reft?

    “Once more she saw her fellow-visitors as they were to remain – undesired, secure and null.”

  7. 6. THE KISS

    Six and Kiss are almost mutual palindromes. Seems appropriate somehow, with the description of two separate incidents making this seem equally almost a Picnic at Hanging Rock, as I felt earlier… especially now with Bowen’s sense of ‘elbows’ added…

    “…the foundations of the picnic shook. Everybody stopped eating, rolled over sideways on their elbows and looked down.”

    “…their stillness for some moments was profound.”

    The latter also happens to be the chapter’s kiss. Between a girl called Veronica and Victor Ammering, if not thudding, mentioned earlier at lunch, and now as gatecrasher and water-battler, and disrupter of Mr L-M’s plans for his picnic’s anemone-hunting, under the tutelary gaze of his wife. She who “spread out the mackintosh, on which she hoped she might later persuade Herbert to arrange himself”, a mack he earlier almost touched, I sense, with religious awe…

    Mrs L-M herself…
    “her whole being in a state of happy suspension, a pause as distant from life as a trance.”
    Her vision of a house with a blue door and a goat, perhaps a passing dream, drowsy with divinity, a feeling I discovered earlier today in Mrs Dancey’s drowsiness after starting ‘Eva Trout’ HERE.
    And the thuds from ‘The AppleTree’, now, lemons?…
    “On still spring nights the thud of a falling lemon would be enough to awake one in terror. / The villino suddenly dropped away from her eye as though she had put down a telescope, and as her life sprang back into focus…”
    And so she awoke, above the pageant below of some of the other participants in the picnic, including the V & V kiss …. and Sydney is in some short of strange interaction with Milton. It’s almost awesome as well as mannerist and funny. So much left out.

    Those lemons almost go with the oranges whose stains Victor used as subterfuge to syphon off Veronica to the tank he’s found in the valley.

    “A story interrupted half-way through can hardly be of interest.”

    While the party masque is divided “transversely into generations rather than vertically into sexes…”

    I felt sorry for Mr L-M, his plans halved, then halved again.

  8. 7. OUT OF ORDER

    “‘At any rate,’ said Miss Fitzgerald, ‘it is better than to be taken half-way up and then stuck between two of the floors.”

    …and that is so significant, I am at a loss for words. But not for long

    Today is another day at the hotel…
    “…cold walls around an inward emptiness. In many rooms the tick of travelling clocks, the stutter of rain along the balconies, were being listened to attentively.”

    A “staccato indignation” among the women at the lift being broken. Fancy having to climb the stairs to get one’s scissors!

    One of the male guests diverting himself with a “patience-board”, though, produced another significance for me.

    And then we come to the encounter of Colonel Duperrier (note he is married with a wife at the hotel) and Joan Lawrence, and although not having been participants at the picnic yesterday, they managed together to give each other a de-brief on it.
    A strange rapprochement between these two — and Colonel D has the inclination to ask Joan to go walking with him. But, there again, we already know…
    “One missed the tug of association and habit towards one chair: there were too many, groves of chairs through which Colonel Duperrier wandered sadly. He could not even remember where he had been sitting before.”

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    And then, of course, there is the matter of what I shall call the Hotelbow pen…
    “…trying to write a letter with a Hotel pen that screeched and staggered. She leant on her elbows, tilting her chair up. […] …once more arranging the sheets round her elbow so that the slightest movement must again disturb them.”
    What man is there who dares offer to disturb a closed group of women to borrow a better pen or, instead, to offer the hugely generous loan of his own Onoto to avoid such daring!

    [From the Internet: “It [the Onoto fountain pen] is possible that it was named after Ono Tokusaburo, a Japanese watchmaker [who] registered a patent in 1885 for a stylographic pen whose features may have been incorporated in the Onostyle and other stylos made by Thomas De La Rue at the turn of the 20th Century”] (my italics)

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