PART FOUR of my review, as continued from here: https://etepsed.wordpress.com/1017-2/#comment-2405
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:
4. THIS IS WHERE WE WERE TO HAVE SPENT THE HONEYMOON
“Life is an anti-novel.”
And vice versa? I often think I live in such a novel, or my gestalt real-time reviews approximate such a novel manqué, here with a pattern of inferred conspiracy and paranoia, upon Jeremy’s unexplained blasé return to her, impelling Eva to take flight to Paris — France having a different sort of cinematography from that of America….
“Jeremy watched Paris, this further movie. At this hour, it exhausted the resources of Technicolor, and exceeded them. Creamy buildings transmuted to honey yellow as the sun came languidly down the sky, dazzling half the city out of existence. Viridian shadow clothed such trees as were not in the sun’s path. Rainbows of traffic frayed into splintering whirlpools. Flowers spumy like sherbets though more brilliantly chemical in colour effervesced from their artificial settings. Lancing its way through Paris, the steel-bright Seine magnetized leaners over its parapets.”
And this chapter in its first fifth, somehow becomes epistolary, with much to be inferred about the resumed contact between Constantine and Iseult, whatever he thought Iseult’s ‘blunder’ to be in contacting Eva, and the nature of that earlier sculptress called Applethwaite? And Henry acting as a conduit of Eva’s otherwise secret whereabouts, with no forwarding addresses otherwise left by her at hotels. And Iseult’s visit to see Mrs Dancey. And a sort of Portia-muddled escritoire wherein Iseult sees a photo of Henry, the boy become man. And Eric, what of him? In this who-fathered-Jeremy anti-whodunnit. Bowen is the freehold parent of us all, perhaps.
“Shoals of people were going by, in the violet air.”
And Eva sometimes has to lock Jeremy in his room.
And now a tease of a whosaidit: “I must boil the kettle…”
Finally, in one French town, Eva discovers a psychic called Bonnard who begins to help Jeremy’s disabilities and French may become his first language….
I have so far read up to this point in the chapter:
“As soon as one pictures you somewhere, you’re somewhere else.”
I feel much the same about this novel named after Eva as Henry, does in his letter to her, about Eva herself. Henry also feels everything in his life would be an anticlimax without her. And when we eventually finish reading this novel or anti-novel will it also leave us with an anticlimax? A rhetorical question.
We, meanwhile, see Constantine and Eric in encounter in person, thus beyond any epistolary exchange with each other. Eric is angrily accused of once abusing Eva’s trust. Or did he? We later learn in this second fifth of the chapter that Eva is both mother and father of Jeremy, laced with Bowen’s perceived Anti-Natalism as a forerunner of Thomas Ligotti’s?
Predestination, the ‘dominance of heredity’ — countered by a statement that encapsulates something I often try to feel, something that fulfils my Null Immortalis faith in fiction as a power that fights against Anti-Natalism:
“One need not be frightened of growing old; to the last, there will always be something new.”
Will I continue to find something new in this novel, some new place to escape to, without leaving a forwarding address?
All this discussed when Eva leaves Jeremy to stay with Dr Bonnard and his wife for a short while, as an experiment in the treatment of his disabilities. To match the short break from Eva that Jeremy had earlier when ‘abducted’, abducted and treated by whom? Including also the nature of lies that we have all been faced with recently, I guess… And whether she is to bring Jeremy up as a reincarnation of her father?
Then we have a non-epistolary encounter between Iseult and Constantine, harking back to an emotional Anti-Natalism, perhaps, with her “emotional hysterectomy”, as she describes it, before she drains “the vodka out of the sleazy ice.” And a question of where to leave her gun? Yes, gun! Don’t go there! Except to say that Bowen loves Chekhov endings to her works, doesn’t she!!!
“My inside’s gone.”
“You look like a statue, up there against the sky! Whatever I do or say, or don’t do or say, do forgive me…”
..,and a previous example of my quoting the above quote is here: https://zencore2007.wordpress.com, a major quote for me, over the years. It is spoken by Henry to Eva, now back at the castle where this novel started (the first chapter when he was a boy and she a 24 year old woman). It seems incredibly pre-destined that I should re-read today this crucial scene between Eva and Henry in this third-fifth of the last chapter of Bowen’s last novel, ‘Eva Trout’, about an hour after reading a similarly crucial chapter involving Sydney Warren and James Milton in her first novel, ‘The Hotel’, HERE.
Henry and Eva are in a boat on the castle’s lake, with a bottle of wine. They reminisce about the first occasion when they were there, Eva having left Jeremy temporarily with the Bonnards in France (“Jeremy, whose destiny she had diverted?’— Indeed where did he come from, I ask?)
Henry and Eva have a heart to heart, with subtleties, as to the future, if any, of their still non-sexual relationship…
“Eva rolled a vermilion shirt-sleeve further up, the more freely to scratch a bite on her elbow.”
An ambiance of fear in the world, as there is today…
“”There’s too much of everything, yet nothing. Is it the world, or what? Everything’s hanging over one. […] The knowing there’s something one can’t stave off.”
They allow us to see yet another cinematography of the Gothic castle, the one that they can’t get into to review Eva’s past there as a schoolgirl. It is still like a frontage of a film set…. Then Henry persuades Eva to let him drive them both home in the reincarnated Jag, the first time he would have driven it …”We may both be killed on the way back, me driving.”
Cf the Next Corner crux in ‘The Hotel’, the next elbow, or knee, too…
“Henry, this was a wrong place to stop the car, just round a corner;…”
“The whole thing’s too near the bone —“
“He slid a hand about in the air over her knee, then withdrew the hand. The remaining miles to the vicarage began to be demolished silently, evenly; and as evenly, time demolished itself.”
Another crux for all Boweneers as Zeno-Paradoxes.
From one fictional honeymoon to another.
Pingback: “forgive me… forgive me… forgive me…” | The Des Lewis Gestalt Real-Time Reviews Edit
“‘— You are accustomed to twisted motives?’
‘I almost meet none that are not.’”
The Bowen canon encapsulated… GONE AWAY, the Vicar and RIP Winkle. Is it a concupiscent coincidence that Eva’s father was called Willy? Now the Vicar is Dancey with unstained church windows for All Saints, clear-sighted windows, if green-natured from outside, himself fired and made mute (like Jeremy?) with hay fever, potential. drowsy with divinity (till, like a miracle, his voice thunders it out of existence), a fever like Eva’s original delirium — but with Dancey, concerned, too at his grown-up son Henry’s preoccupations with Eva, I guess, and the “pre-natal” state of Henry’s closed-eyes blindness negotiating the pews of the mis-spired church interior (Jeremy again?), looking at his dead sister’s prayer book with handwritten marginalia about Hell, and surrounded by another sister arranging of a “bi-sexual cricket match”, or rather a MIXED one, and of course this book’s now famous thrush — and another Vicar or Priest here, as a separate scene, in this fourth-fifth of the last chapter is that erstwhile mentioned Constantine-Ormeau (Omicron?)’s connected Tony who here provides a confessional or exorcism for whoever once abducted that selfsame Jeremy… a culprit’s identity I shall not divulge here.
As to “pre-natal”, or even anti-natal, or post- or ante-, did that pregnancy of Eva ever exist — in this book about mixed motives and blames. A virgin birth, an adoption, a parthenogenesis of late-labelled literature, a Willy stream… another now concurrent Bowen-Aickmania as published in 1968? Passages as written here that one needs to stand back from in complete readerly awe and creative miscomprehension.
Jeremy as seen by his erstwhile abductor: “I cannot tell what satiated eyes he had, or how his weariness of seeing, seeing, seeing without knowing, without knowing, without knowing was borne in on me.”
And never point a gun at someone , even if it is a toy.
Tony’s next ‘client’ is a “Black Muslim”.
I had forgotten that telegrams in those days airbrushed punctuation.
“Sorrow is anger, of a kind.”
“A retaining hand of his was under her elbow; at the same time, he conveyed the impression of having no objection to her having him in tow,…”
Exactly my own sense of being led by Bowen’s elbow into the “concatenation” of corners in her fiction, and I’ve just realised that the ARBLES are indeed assonant with Elbows. They along with other characters from this book congregate at Victoria Station like another stage of this novel’s other cinematography themes crossed with a conflux denouement of a French or Brian Rix farce. A Chekhov gun in a cinematic moment that the Alec Baldwin incident in our real-time has very recently made even more significant (as if Bowen had predicted that I would re-read this book, in the light of her Aickman-like stories, around now!) — and there are even shoals of phantom dead aunts and uncles with carnations as staged wedding guests to echo Bowen’s own London blitz era stories.
“Hoaxed were they? An unreal act collects round it real-er emotion than a real act, sometimes, he thought.”
You will not believe the underrated power of this last fifth of the last chapter of the last great novel, bearing in mind what happens and to whom and how, without even a single why. There is no way I can enlighten you about its catharsis. The gratuitous act. And the sacrifice of self by Eva as Bowen by Bowen. Along with one of “her great anti-climactic yawns”, prefigured earlier in this book. The malacca cane “nude”. The carton behind the curtain. The ‘disinfected minute reigned over by calmness.’ Jeremy, the ‘child star’, conditioned by ‘psychological engineers.’ The telegram that created a concatenation beyond any vocabulary of sense. The great brooch. The Golden Arrow to outpace those Hotel darts. Every hinged and denged corner of them.
“‘Look sharp, darling,’ said Henry, at Eva’s elbow,…”
end