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:
PART ONE – GENESIS
1. OUTING
“For all she knew, now, this could be tomorrow.”
…and that’s the defatigable Mrs Dancey left in the car this cold day, as she observes Eva (24) take the five Dancey children to look at the castle that was once Eva’s school, later the place where Eva was to have had her honeymoon, a castle that now belongs to Eva’s father’s friend, Constantine. I wonder if this castle was similar to the mad one I remember in ‘Her Table Spread’, and whether they would now go to a hotel, as one of the children suggested, for tea. There’s surprisingly no ice on the lake, and no daffodils, of course, as there might have been in the spring.
“Eva did not reply; she was getting out. Having done so, leaving her door open she walked round the car throwing all others open, with an air of largesse. January knifed through the heated Jaguar; a child sneezed as it battled its way to freedom, and Mrs Dancey, erecting her fur coat collar and sinking so far as might be down into it, declared: ‘I think I‘ll stay where I am.’ Eva did not reply; she had walked away. The children set off in the reverse direction – their mother, impaled on draughts, sent a whinny after them: two of them came back and banged shut the doors.
Symbols of Mrs Dancey’s feigned nap leading to genuine drowsiness or Null Immortalis?
Some famous art depicting the gentle drowsiness of human divinity.
Cross-referenced with ‘The Hotel’: https://elizabethbowensite.wordpress.com/2021/11/27/the-hotel/#comment-1383
2. MR AND MRS ARBLE
“The late are apt to be later —“
Eva is late home to Larkins, it seems.
Iseult Arble, née Smith, and her husband Eric, are being paid well by Eva’s guardian, Constantine, to house and oversee Eva following the death of her mother and now here father. Eva is not allowed to inherit her fortune until she is 25. The various backstories are methodically revealed to us. Eva has, I infer, been the apple of Iseult’s eye since the latter taught Eva around age 16 and, now, Eva, by staying there, has filled a gap in the Arbles’ marriage but since she has been often going out with the Danceys and their children, that gap is returning. Their house is called Larkins; Eric failed as fruit farmer with Larkins orchards and now runs a garage. The fruit were plums, and do not seem (I see) to have been apples to resonate with Arbles, so that might explain something…. Plumps not thuds?
And the Arbles seem to have not ‘made love’ for some time…
“— fruited boughs bowed, voluptuous, to the ground, gumminess oozing from bloomy plums. She had been a D.H. Lawrence reader…”
“The new grate, post-Eva, gave out its advertised glow. So far, the living-room was consistent – Iseult’s own ‘touches’ had been less fortunate: thought-out low white bookcases, now in place, for all their content looked cramped and petty; block-printed linen curtains, skimped by economy, had between them strips of vacuous darkness – as also the room, in the main excluded from the Anglepoise’s intellectual orbit, became what it least in the world was: spectral. She would do well to switch on the ceiling light before Eric entered: he liked to see. But the switch was away by the door. Nervosity wired her to her chair.”
3. CLERICAL LIFE
“Occupationally, his anxiety was his voice , which had taken to varying in volume as unaccountably as though a poltergeist were fiddling, with the controls,…”
…this being Mr Dancey, the vicar, and such was his condition it presented a drawback when addressing his congregation, a condition that entailed a ready supply of a new invention called Kleenex, and when he sent his daughter for some, having desperately run out of them, the daughter could only come back from the village shop with lemon (as well as rose) scented versions, because the plain white had gone out of stock! While there, the daughter saw Eva and her Jag parked outside the shop, and Eva told her that she had been suddenly called to London to meet her guardian, Constantine, so she would have to disappoint the Dancey children, who had been Waiting For Eva (another title for this chapter?), waiting, in fact, all morning to take them out, as promised. (I had earlier forgotten to tell you that the Danceys lived in the Vicarage around which we are given a tour earlier in the chapter.)
“She [Eva] wore a Robin Hood hat and an ocelot coat and carried a mighty crocodile handbag.”
“The vicarage had witnessed various scenes of clerical life. Not old, it was elderly, landed on this village by a wave of ecclesiastical betterment in the 1880s. In many ways it was a dreadful building: narrow-visaged, four storeys high, topped by peaky gables. The windows were church-like, as was the porch. Internally it was no better: an ill-lit staircase climbed up a shaft in the middle, conducting draughts. Draughts also rose from between floorboards, causing the ascetic carpets to billow. […] no occult manifestations, which was as well, for the hollow plan of the house made home life already noisy enough.”
4. CONFERENCE
“The reader felt herself smile.”
A crisis meeting between Constantine Ormeau and Iseult Arble about Eva, he with his box file labelled “TROUT: XIV”. And I note some, but not all, factors as questions provided by this chapter…
What sort of “vivisectional interest” drew Iseult to her once ‘uncouth pupil’? And what sort of crush did Eva have for Iseult that made Iseuit’s marital home a safe haven (now threatened?), a haven for Eva following the death of her parents, her mother in a plane crash after a “skite with a paramour”, as Constantine put it? Can one actually take a so-called “sip” at an Egyptian cigarette, as Iseult seemed to do? Could the hat shop that Iseult might have entered near Constantine’s Knightsbridge establishment be Ann Lee’s? Are we any the wiser about Constantine with the incredibly detailed and lengthy facts imparted about his appearance? What is so significant about Eva’s “heredity”? Why so much detail about the food they ate when they lunched together, including the salivating over ‘a host of oysters’? Do they fear Eva harbours her own prospective ‘skite with a paramour’?
All I know for a fact, is that Constantine and Iseult are now due to collaborate much more than heretofore over the case of Eva, to stymie her capacity to ‘strew endless trouble’, especially now that she seems to want to leave the house of Iseult and Eric Arble…
“‘A Trout,’ he said, ‘of any kind, is a liability’”
— if not a J.C. Powysian ‘Tench’, I ask?
What had Eva been up to? Iseult felt stirrings of that original vivisectional interest which had drawn her to her uncouth pupil. In the glow of knowing herself fallen in hate with (for what else was this?) she relived the year at the school, and the years after, during which this organism had so much loved her. She regretted nothing. Might it not be, she wondered, that she and Eva had only now arrived at their true bourne? […] Yet the ambiguities in themselves had one sort of merit, a sort of promise – one was at least on the verge of the Henry James country.
5. TWO SCHOOLS
(I have so far only read up to the first section break of this chapter.)
“Time, inside Eva’s mind, lay about like various pieces of a fragmented picture. She remembered, that is to say, disjectedly. To reassemble the picture was impossible; too many of the pieces were lost, lacking. Yet, some of the pieces there were would group into patterns – patterns at least. Each pattern had a predominant colour; and each probably had meaning, though that she did not seek. Occupationally, this pattern-arriving-at was absorbing, as is a kindergarten game, and, like such a game, made sense in a way.”
“Only the living-room knew of the slow combustion going on inside the banked-down fire. The motherly chair by the fire would be rejoicing in having no unmotherly occupant. Nobody was down there – nobody to object, nobody to wince. All day, there had been no one to suffer whitely. Up here, one could have been going all out on one’s transistor, full blast. Or one could have roller-skated . . . One lay in languor.”
Two important paragraphs above for any Boweneers who have already been following my many Bowen gestalt-patterning reviews to date, and they will know why these paragraphs are important.
And following my earlier reference above to the ‘drowsiness of divinity’, I notice Eva‘s heavy cold, that has caused her to be landed in bed with a “slight feverish drowsiness” running the hours together, and I question her sense of time as well as doubting the above word ‘slight’ as this drowsiness seems to me to border on delirium. Even that transistor quoted above feels ice-cold. And I note her window is said to look to the north..
“The voice had come in as a door opened — but what door? where?”
(I have read this chapter up to the end of Eva’s first school at “This is fishy.”)
“Kenneth’s haul of children were coloured only by having rushed about on private beaches —“
“…whimpering in the tortuous chimneys as though young lost souls had come into harbour.”
With Eva’s first school at the castle owned by Constantine and used as an experimental co-educational establishment mainly to keep someone called Kenneth (Kettle-Drum) busy – we truly enter Robert Aickman territory, with midnight discussions on roofs with the owls etc. etc. Eva is 14 but not yet reached puberty and a girl called Elsinore with a situation straight out of the Aickman playbook of Elsinore’s attempted suicide in the castle’s lake, Elsinore rescued by a boy. Then, also so Aickman like, …
“What made Eva visualize this as a marriage chamber? As its climate intensified, all grew tender. To repose a hand on the blanket covering Elsinore was to know in the palm of the hand a primitive tremor – imagining the beating of that other heart, she had a passionately solicitous sense of this other presence. Nothing forbad love. This deathly yet living stillness, together, of two beings, this unapartness, came to be he requital of all longing. An endless feeling of destiny filled the room.”
Then we have the earlier Bowen use of DAFFODILS in education! But Eva ironically never sees the daffodils as the school is closed before they arrive! And Bowen’s as well as Aickman’s gluey Zenoism of time and her own shadowy thirds…
“: whatever the hour by the clock, nothing made the ceiling less of an umbrella-shaped canopy of shadows, which multiplied within it, as do cobwebs, as time went on — though, did time go on?”
(I have now read this wonderful chapter to its end.)
“‘…what were you saying before? Anywhere would seem strange to you that did not . . . what?’
‘Seem strange.’
‘That is a complicated thought.’”
Eva is now 16 and strangely at that age asks her indulgent father to go to a girls’ boarding-school. It is found difficult to find anywhere that would accept her but she eventually arrives at the enlightened glass garden huts at Lumleigh School where she seems favoured by a teacher who happens to be Iseult (then Miss Smith). A school with yellow oilskins, meaningfully not mackintoshes, and Miss Smith has an ‘electric current’ and teaching ways and means even beyond the prospective Daffodils syndrome earlier hinted at above. So much here, including naively budding and engaging Aickman-like Sapphics, and much else that I cannot here do justice to.
“Towards it, ahead of the walkers went their two shadows: Eva saw nothing else. Miss Smith, too, saw them — ‘Yes, we’re like coming events.’”
A sense of a divinity not yet drowsy, Miss Smith as if ‘Before the Fall’, with her Eve or Eva…Meanwhile, Eva could not distinguish between her fellow girl pupils, even what was ‘under their shirts’ were indistinguishable! Eva’s sense of insecurity, her regard for her not yet dead father, the use of the word ‘however’, a poem of Light and Darkness to scry, and her sense of being dragged up explicitly from the bottom of a lake by Miss Smith (cf Elsinore.)…
“‘Time’s very long’, answered Iseult Smith, whom it had not yet troubled. ‘Very long, very dangerous — how can I tell you?’ […] ….a face already become unearthly. Before, quite shut, the door became part of the wall, Eva glimpsed that involuntary beauty.” The beauty of Iseult…
…which brings us back tellingly to the missing door in Eva’s feverish drowsiness (cf the earlier sweaty oilskins) in the present day, and Iseult Arble’s return to Eva and her husband from her conference in London with Constantine.
This review continues here: https://nemonymousnight.wordpress.com/864-2/