Eva Trout by Elizabeth Bowen
PART TWO of my review, as continued from here: https://elizabethbowensite.wordpress.com/2021/12/01/eva-trout-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:
6. SATURDAY AFTERNOON
I happen to have read this relatively short chapter and now reviewing it on a Saturday afternoon in my own real-time. Miraculously, time seems to have gone on beyond the end of Eva’s illness (bronchitis the aftermath of which she is still suffering as it turns out) and if I tell you about Eva’s plans as she discusses them with the precocious boy, Henry Dancey, at the vicarage, then that may spoil any surprise when you come to the next chapter, so best to leave reading my next review entry, due to appear below this one, until after you have read the next chapter itself. Meanwhile, I will leave you with some choice quotations from THIS chapter that includes a strange smoky fire that heats the room…
“He and Eva were seated at either end of a long lean sofa draped in a cretonne cover, facing the fire – a captious February wind puffed smoke back again down the chimney. The room behind them showed signs of exhaustion, like Mrs Dancey; but also bespoke, by its very scars – tracks trodden like field-paths across the carpet, veneer chipped from furniture and the hard-used look of the cabinet wireless in the window – the inexhaustible energy of her brood.”
“A virulent puff of smoke caused an interruption. Both coughed: Henry with some distinction, Eva rackingly and persistently. Experienced, Henry dug about in the sofa , extracted shreds of Kleenex from its interstices and handed them to Eva to mop her eyes with.”
“Now, Mrs Dancey addressed herself to the drawing-room door – ajar as ever – though not as yet coming round it. ‘Who’s in here, I wonder?’ she soliloquised. She liked to prolong suspense.”
As I do, too.
7. CATHAY
“At the far end of the platform, against the sky, she stood in lonely importance. She wore the ocelot – yet somehow the cut of the jib of the massive coat made her less feline than paramilitary: she brought to mind Russian troops said to have passed through England in the late summer of 1914, leaving snow in the trains.”
Eva has travelled — only with Henry presumably knowing — to Broadstairs, renting furnished CATHAY secluded nearby with channel skyline, near cliffs, and I almost think of some visions of MANDERLEY (that when I hear it spoken seems to rhyme). Though Bowen makes this house and its environs truly Bowenesque, and perhaps that is all one needs to say about it! Yet, it is not well equipped, with rust in the bath, and a dangerous gas cooker etc.; it is Bowen’s posher houses now morphed into meticulous entropy…so right for a final novel?
Eva even needs to learn how to a boil a kettle! And there is much settled dust ‘made stale by used-up sunshine.’ ‘Chilled, bronze radiators were mocking, inactive presences.’ Eva thinks of a doll’s house from her childhood, and please compare my concurrent review yesterday of Bowen’s The Hotel in this light. (Such dust and such a doll’s house, what do they remind you of?)
I laughed at estate agents Mr Denge’s thoughts of ‘erotic risks’, before he scuttles off, and Eric Arble turns up out of the blue, now near alcoholic who might welcome such risks….
Seems strangely apt when they are in Cathay’s garage a garden fork induces Eric to ask Eva: “Where’s the Jag?”
The articulation of her joints and her head rolled on her shoulders, her arms swinging (and thus the elbows, I think!) — as Eric shook her in semi-passion, and she accuses him of being her keeper’s husband. Read into that what you will, I guess. Yet, airbrushing any erstwhile honeymoons mentioned on the castle visit, they seem naturally together when beachcombing wood for the fire and then visiting local places that serve alcohol, well, shandy for Eva.
“The eternal shingle skeined with eternal sand was strung and clotted with dunglike seaweed; bedrabbled seaweed slimed some exposed rocks proceeding outward like stepping-stones to nowhere. A last-summer’s child’s bottomless bucket, upturned, could have been jettisoned by expeditionaries from some other planet.”
8. MIDNIGHT AT LARKINS
“Her dramatic orbs are turning another way. Or were. Now off she flies like a wee bird out of a window, and he goes after her. – I forgot, I sent him.”
I sense this is a famous chapter in literature should anyone ever read it, especially just after reading today, in Bowen’s first novel, about herself as young Cordelia with her favourite writer Rider Haggard (here): and it is Iseult typing — in her last novel — this chapter as soliloquy, she being the Bowen of this book, when nearing Midnight, with tomorrow as a Chekhov ending. Eva shortly to receive her father’s “mountainous money.”
Overall, it is a complex summary of her school-teaching backstory with Eva, and Eric’s recent departure to Eva at the seaside — and the circumstances about Constantine and Eva’s late father in the past…. Meanwhile, Iseult also types:
“I murdered my life, and I defy anyone to defend me. I should hang for it.”
“I suspect victims; they win in the long run.”
“I have lived through books. I have lived internally.”
“Imagining oneself to be remembering, more often than not one is imagining: Proust says so. (Or is it, imagining oneself to be imagining, one is remembering?)”
And the word ‘however’ now becomes ‘frankly’, I wonder?
9. A LATE CALL
“The dimensions of everything had altered. Furniture, amorphous in the distance, was uncertainly lit by a standard lamp – which, off in a corner, out of the perpendicular, had the air of one street lamp surviving in a ghost city. A parcel shaped like a bottle was on a table. Stark night-filled windows served to mirror the room.”
In CATHAY with the driftwood fire, Eric and Eva, with focus on the fire’s qualities and later much talk of wrist watches, and also their not being grandfather clocks. Till, with Eric upstairs in his allotted room, (SPOILER) Constantine arrives out of the dark blue….
“The bell sounded angered – no doubt by the assumption, indeed Eva’s, that like almost all else in Cathay it was out of order. In return Cathay, long untroubled, was appalled by the bell – the Stygian service quarters, most affected, went on as though stung by a hornet. Elsewhere, the baronial woodwork crepitated; vibration made any electric candles left in their sockets between the antlers appear to flicker, as might the genuine kind. The owner was no less outraged than was her property; halting, she looked down the stairs aggressively. The attack from the bell – but who had attacked the bell?”
“Or was it the dead themselves who were at the door?”
…the ‘jostling dead’ today from my reading of The Hotel.
Much furtherance of plot transpires, and who or what intends what, until both men leave!
Just some observations…
Eric’s ‘black desert’, but it was Constantine’s elbows that were “spread-eagled slackly over the chair-arms.” The agent Denge had told C of his worrying experience with Eva, it seems. Why has Eva left Iseult, C asks, what had the latter done? What has changed so convulsively? Eva has interactions with her reflection – today’s theme being Proustian selves? “The ecstatic blaze had fled back into the nothing that gave it being: it might never have been.” …like the dead Admiral in my reading of The Hotel today? “What the dead said sometimes is later listened to; but to what the mad have to say, who would ever listen?”
Perhaps more people will read this review after I am dead?
“…all wraiths and spirals.” … when Constantine and Eva once went on a solitary walk together in the Dolomites. There is so much backstory that is held in abeyance — and the reader is richer for that fact.
And we end with Eva’s famous rib-distended, cracking-point yawn.
THE EMPTY CHAIR, 1870, Sir Luke Fildes
10. A SUMMER’S DAY
“Iseult stood by herself in the Dickens room in Bleak House, Broadstairs….”
The above chair is in this room, Dickens’ empty chair, imported to this room from Gad’s Hill to ‘Bleak House’, with the above painting on its wall. A significant psychological moment for this book as Iseult is seeking reconciliation with Eva after the latter had received her due “astronomic” inheritance from her late father, with compensation for Eva’s behaviour having now been paid somehow twice over to Iseult, once by Constantine, and again by Eva herself — and this room has been chosen by Iseult as a neutral meeting ground WHEREBY DICKENS HIMSELF Is explicitly their ‘shadowy third’! — “a third person (virtually).” …
This is the year 1959 and we now learn that Eva, along with all the other modern contraptions, will be soon getting a home computer. Yes, in 1959.
The scene around Bleak House and the sea, and the donkeys on the sand, are beautifully described. With mention of “The jibbering self-mockery”, et al, within the book Bleak House where Dickens wrote it.
The discussion that follows fills us in with how the plot of Eva Trout (she now sounds like a character from Dickens!) has developed during our absence. The anthropomorphic Jaguar now back in her ownership. And after this neutral meeting in Bleak House, Iseult is persuaded to visit CATHAY, and we now see the latter house again through her eyes….
Eva now has a tape recorder and they wonder what they could now play back if they’d had one at Lumleigh school!
The end of this chapter has a dynamite of a plot spoiler, one that shocked me even though I have read this novel before, a spoiler that I will not divulge till you have read this chapter for yourself. Meanwhile, I shall leave you tellingly with possibly the ultimate Bowenesque moment of them all, a description (earlier in the chapter) of Iseult…
“She bowed her head, acceptingly, then folded her arms, consoling the elbows.”
***
[My recent, possibly unconnected, review of a huge new novel entitled THE EMPTY CHAIR by Roger Keen: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2021/08/29/the-empty-chair-roger-keen/ ]
“So today was, but for the corn gone and the butterflies with it. Butterfly-like sails, however, danced out over the dazzling water. Scarlet, yellow – blue most of all prettily, in that they were a blue other than the sea’s. Sun made them quiver like flames […} The sands, not quite obliterated by people who ran about them or lodged upon them like coloured beads, were tawny, deeper than coagulated honey.”
“Outstanding examples of everything audio-visual on the market this year, 1959, were ranged round the surprised walls: large-screen television set, sonorous-looking radio, radio-gramophone in a teak coffin, other gramophone with attendant stereo cabinets. […] What looked like miles of flex matted the parquet. Electronics had driven the old guard, the Circe armchairs, into a huddle in the middle of the floor. […] Glaring in upon all this, the June sun took on the heightened voltage of studio lighting.”
11. INTERIM
“You liked bruised apples, you told me, you liked the taste.”
A supposed undelivered letter at the end of October 1959 from a man recovering from a virulent bowel disease called Holman (a man with a hole to fill? — a man “prone to abeyances, lacunae”) who teaches Descartes in America, a letter he wrote addressed to Eva whom he thinks is a Mrs Trout, a mother with a small boy infant somewhere, Holman having met her on a flight to New York and he seems to over-dramatically need to be reunited with her, having met her across the aisle of the plane when, after another possibly feigned drowsiness of divinity for this book, this one being Eva’s drowsiness, he replaces rolling apples next to her with himself.
Apparently he lost sight of her amid the mayhem at New York airport. The nature of giving birth (possibly a sense of Anti-Natalism I discovered earlier today when reading The Hotel) – thus perhaps Eva is seeking a bruised apple in America…?
Also the nature of public plane flights in the 1950s. Almost a Cartesian mistrust or fear?
“The nullity of speed, the nullity of height.”
12. COFFEE SHOP
“A ferocious wind off one of the Great Lakes tore through the city, bouncing the Stars of Bethlehem, clawing at garlands, setting festoons, transparencies and Noel streamers a-writhe tormentedly as they swung from the many filigree arches anxiously creaking over the avenues. All the way down perspectives, a flapping twisting went on amidst jewel illuminations; as it might be, angels blown off course. Here or there, flying fragments of tinsel caught at the stripped-down boughs of the kerb maples, harassed enough.”
A mighty chapter in New York: and, if inspired by Aickman, she has inspired him back multifold! A season to be absurdist as well as merry, to match my own on today’s date….
“It was evening. Though early homegoing traffic already piled up at intersections, waiting on stop-go lights, nothing drained off the crowds perceptibly. Glass-built stores, floor upon floor, were transparent ant-heaps; through their whirling doors gusted out renditions of sleigh bells. Stores cast slabs of synthetic daylight on to the sidewalks: not a soul was unseen. In or out, being buffeted bothered nobody: phlegmatic masses of people, flowing like lava, contrasted with the aerial agitation. The hundreds now in two-way procession exhibited not more than three makes of face, as though with regard to this city and its environs the invention of the Almighty had given out. And these three makes of face in use were not unalike, all being weatherproof, sizable though coming in different sizes, innately wary. One great stalwart teeming family, roots Nordic. Not animated, adults nevertheless gave off a collective sound of some volume, while children escaped on roller skates, blew on squeakers or aimed guns at each other with lifelike pops. Bright the night was (or the evening). Calm it was not. Eva, having completed her one purchase, had had enough.”
Eva enters a coffee shop …
“This coffee shop, true to the Middle West, was, though blameless, obscurely lit like a dive or nightspot. In the assuaging raspberry-tinted darkness, Eva’s sentiments homed to the piped-on carol. Ignoring somebody seeking to direct her, she ploughed through the gloom with its density of assembled women, whose hands, busts, throats fitfully did appear, though those only: all were decapitated. For this reason: each of the tables sat at had a down turned dwarf lamp simulating an oxblood toadstool – above lamp-level (for those first minutes) visibility nil. Each lamp showed just enough of its table to show it not only taken but full to complement; the marauder would be lucky to come upon one place vacant. She was, she did. Inserting herself, she squared off what had been a trio. These three were presences only in glints and glimmers: one wore octagonal spectacles, one a dangly charm-bracelet, the third was smoking. There was a rustle as they resigned themselves. (She was their penance for sitting on – they had done eating, plates held nothing but smears; they were starting in over again with coffee.) Gloves, purses were whisked punctiliously out of the Eva area. She, stooping, lodged her bulky, slippery parcel upright against a leg of her chair. Righting herself, drawing a breath, she pulled off her gauntlets. She left a forgotten hand lying, in outline, under the lamplight.”
And a waitress who would not arrive if she had been seen first, as she preferred pouncing…
Eva suddenly meets Elsinore again by amazing coincidence, Eva being with the big bear that she had bought for her infant boy whom she sought by conspiracy and password, another Christmas child, perhaps, and Elsinore is with a gaggle of girls that would send you crazy, and they do somehow send Eva drowsy with delirium, if not divinity, again, all swimming curdled or dreamy — until they all go to one of the girl’s father’s place, a father called Anapoupolis, who makes various meaningful or meaningless manoeuvres with his Bowenesque pince-nez…on one occasion intoning – “T-R-O-U-T’ spelt out like a spell?
“Mr Anapoupolis senior, compact as a toad though degrees more human, probably, sat upright under a beaded lampshade. His skin, back to half of the skull, down into the dewlaps, was curd-pale; currant-black eyes shot forth, magnetically, through pince-nez. A dark ex-business suit continued to brace the shoulders into a business alertness, maintained in vacuo, but left belly to downward-ripple, despondent, and thighs to spread. He terminated in tiny, impatient, pointed-toed feet.”
His clock has stopped so it was a “dead clock” so Eva “prised its glass face open and stood moving the hands round to imaginary hours” so that she could keep an assignation with regard to her infant son, the Trout heir, I guess. The father’s stories, meantime, of baby snatchers et al are more than a little gob-smacking, and what channels of baby and child exchange there are in America seemed to somehow hark back to an inverse Anti-Natalism… or not?
Eva’s poignant, even hysterical, scene departing from Elsinore (herself now a mother of a threesome)…
“‘I shall be back,’ swore Eva. Not a gleam of belief lightened Elsinore’s lost but composed countenance. The floor of the lobby widened between them. Elsinore, top-heavied by her mother’s equipment, totteringly in balance on spike heels, stood in the elevator as in a showcase: its tarnish framed her. She waved, playing up to the daydream. ‘See you!’ The door slid to.”
Eva’s elbow moment in the chapter, subsequently, on her journey onwards, harks back to the castle where she first met Elsinore…
“Eva forged her way up the avenue, a mild gradient — fur cap and gauntlets flattened under an elbow, hands thrust down into greatcoat pockets. Her stride was resolute, yet the turmoil that was everywhere was within her. Between bouts of the wind came an ululation such as used to be heard in the castle chimneys. Tomorrow was a banged-about Bethlehem star, yesterday a writhing unravelled pattern.”
This review continues here: https://etepsed.wordpress.com/1017-2/