The Death of the Heart by Elizabeth Bowen
Part Two of my real-time review – as continued from HERE
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:
7.
“…he had come all this way to see a holy family.”
That holy family we just saw apotheosised in the previous chapter? Major Brutt, still with no job but “irons in the fire”, that is, returns to relive his first visit, drawn there by a 16 year old Portia, as well as by a connection with Anna’s past lover Pidgeon, alongside whom, Brutt, as shadowy third, had once been a “vicarious lover” himself! He returns his visit from the latest hotel, as is his cursory wont, unpreplanned, just ringing the bell by chance, disturbing Thomas’s doodling of cats on a Bowen blotter.
“Almost unremitting solitude in his hotel had, since his last visit, made 2 Windsor Terrace the clearing-house for his dreams: these reverted to kind Anna and to that dear little kid with fervent, tender, quite sexless desire. A romantic man often feels more uplifted with two women than with one: his love seems to hit the ideal mark somewhere between two different faces.”
Phyllis, the parlourmaid “opened the door and saw Major Brutt, she knew it was in her power to oppress. She raised her eyebrows and simply looked at him.”
Raising eyebrows, if not elbows.
“The room now held fumy heavy afternoon dusk – Thomas had been asleep in here for an hour before un-screwing his pen, opening the blotter,… […] he could only look out through slits at grotesque slits of faces, slits of the view. His vision became, from habit, narrow and falsified.”
“Friendships were dotted with null pauses, when one eye in calculation sought the clock.”
“Makes of men date, like makes of cars; Major Brutt was a 1914–18 model: there was now no market for that make.”
And now that resonance with the earlier blotter… Brutter and Blotter…
“Major Brutt’s being (frankly) a discard put the final blot on a world Thomas did not like.”
Brutt remembers Thomas had “…put his hand under Anna’s elbow with a possessing smile”, when they had met by chance at the cinema. And Brutt recalls “Only Portia’s presence made him bear it at all. […] The glow on the rug, Anna on the sofa with her pretty feet up, Thomas nosing so kindly round for cigars, Portia nursing her elbows as though they had been a couple of loved cats – here was the focus of the necessary dream.”
Nursing elbows as those now blotted cats?
And back with the connected righteous entitlement of our recent prime minister and his mass coterie, we now have Thomas’s “The most we can hope is to go on getting away with it till the others get it away from us.” – which is very telling…
…which brings me neatly to the arrival of Eddie, to disturb the Brutt-Thomas encounter, Eddie shockingly, perhaps, accompanied by Portia, having visited the zoo with her. Thomas sees them as ‘terrible twins’, along with the body parts that humans share with animals. (Do animals have elbows, I suddenly wonder?)…
“Thomas took pleasure in thrusting Portia into the study, away from Eddie, to talk to Major Brutt. A hand on her shoulder-blade,… […] Major Brutt, during the colloquy in the hall, had sat with his knees parted, turning his wrists vaguely, making his cuff-links wink.”
With such body parts, one often needs to know where to put oneself, I guess. Half absences and shadowy thirds as whole syndromes… but who’s the shape here, Brutt or Thomas, or even an invisible Pidgeon?
“Portia and Eddie had either to sit down somewhere also, or else, by going on standing (as they continued to do), to make their semi-absence, their wish to be elsewhere, marked.”
8.
“No, Brutt is a brute. Do you realize, Portia darling, that it is because of there being people like him that there are people like me? How on earth did he get into the house?”
…as spoken by Eddie (23) in a revelatory tête-à-tête with Portia over tea and salted crumpets at Madame Tussauds Waxworks, literally exchanging smiles, she using the same lips that firmed his own “demoniac smile.” As if waxworks by the same waxworker. Proustian selves off the same block? This includes the debrief after being discovered about their trip to the Zoo, where monkeys, I guess, exchange facial expressions, too, in this chapter of faces. And Eddie’s thoughts on meeting his doppelgänger soul, called Brutt, like hating like.
“ – all the waxworks were in some other part. He and she sat side by side at a long table intended for a party of four or six. Her diary, fetched from Windsor Terrace, lay still untouched between their elbows, with a strong india-rubber band round it.”
This important diary between their elbows, to be borrowed by Eddie. She learning to pour tea as Eva Trout was later to learn how to boil a kettle for tea.
Revelatory about Eddie, even his “The whole of Shakespeare is about me.” His views on Matchett, and above all on Anna. His sneery imitation of Anna smoking a cigarette, with that synergy of selves again? The innocent ones with their manifold victims. Or horror without victims at all? “Smiles to match smiles.”
Her “half-full” diary with some blanks for blank days seems essentially Bowenesque and timeless, and almost a Chekhov’s gun now in Eddie’s hands? The conceit of this diary in his head has much bearing on my own gestalt real-time reviewing, and whether they were started as written purely for myself but now mutated by the thought they have become public…
“I like thoughts when they were thought.” – says Eddie.
“I mean, it would alter my diary. Up to now, it’s been written just for itself. If I’m to keep on writing the same way, I shall have to imagine you do not exist.”
“‘I don’t want you to write about you and me. In fact you must never write about me at all. Will you promise me you will never do that?’
‘Why not?’”
“And I detest after-thoughts. In fact,…”
“Now she saw with pity, but without reproaching herself, all the sacrificed people – Major Brutt, Lilian, Matchett, even Anna – that she had stepped over to meet Eddie.”
Cross-referenced Portia and Eddie with Emmeline and Markie here: https://etepsed.wordpress.com/2021/12/19/to-the-north-by-elizabeth-bowen/#comment-2409
9.
THE DIARY
“This diary has come back from Eddie by post. He did not write any letter as he did not have time. The parcel had the office label outside. I shall have to write hard now, as I will have missed nine days.”
As this is a secret diary I will keep most of it secret from you, several days of it reproduced here, with Portia’s naive thoughts telling us much more about all the characters and herself than the heady sophistication of Bowen’s prose ever will.
London smog, and its dogs included.
Just a few quotes to give you a taster beyond its account of her various study projects:
“I like a day when there is some sort of tomorrow.”
“No table in my room looks large enough to hold the whole of my jigsaw.”
“Anna said, it will be spring before we know where we are.”
I sincerely hope so!
PS I have added one extra quote from the diary as a sub-comment to my review of chapter 5.
Cross-referenced Anna’s fast Spring with today’s chapter VII in To The North: https://etepsed.wordpress.com/2021/12/19/to-the-north-by-elizabeth-bowen/#comment-2413
PART TWO: The Flesh
1.
“You must be north of a line to feel the seasons so keenly.”
And elsewhere towards the north I read.
And it is ironic I read this on Winter Solstice Day, as its Spring version is approximated here…
“– autumn arrives in the early morning, but spring at the close of a winter day.”
“….nothing appears inanimate, nothing not sentient: darkening chimneys, viaducts, villas, glass-and-steel factories, chain stores seem to strike as deep as natural rocks, seem not only to exist but to dream.”
Darkening chimneys, as Spring starts is ironic in itself as…her memory of seasons on the Riviera with Irene had transpired quite differently,
“Memory enlarged and enlarged inside her an echoing, not often visited cave. Anna could remember being a child more easily and with more pleasure than she could remember being Portia’s age:”
“…and saw pigeons cluttering the transparent trees.”
That memory of Robert Pidgeon in Anna’s life, too, the one that is connected, by dint of past events, to the seaside place where Portia now travels and to the woman who lives there, Portia staying there while Anna and Thomas are on holiday abroad…Miss Yardes, now Mrs Heccomb, widowed by a car crash as one often was in those days, I guess, with two awful-sounding step-children, Daphne and Dickie, in Seale on Sea, a house called Waikiki (evocatively described) in a terrace and seaside place that reminded my weak memory, perhaps wrongly, of ‘Ivy Gripped the Steps’, and like whereto Bowen herself retired… meanwhile, Mrs Heccomb’s “husband’s first wife had not been quite-quite.” Quite.
Train journey from London, Matchett’s send-off with thirst-quenching lime drops that were not thirsty-quenching at all. She could still taste the tunnels.
This is probably one of the greatest ever novelistic chapters in Bowen’s whole canon, as based on my weak memory of them, now gradually being resuscitated.
“…the platform stretching its dead length.” A station in the woods, while Waikiki is literally on the sea’s edge. The seaside town itself perfectly adumbrated. It has stayed in my memory all these years and now re-lives in a distant past that expunges the memory of any petty futures nearer to today.
“Portia noted scars in her fur coat where buttons had been cut off and moved out.”
Mrs Heccomb’s last minute shopping… “It made her sad to think how Matchett would despise Mrs Heccomb’s diving and ducking ways, like a nesting water-fowl’s. Matchett would ask why all this had not been seen to before.”
Yet Irene had been more like Mrs H that Matchett…
As Daphne arrives home…
“Waikiki, she [Portia] was to learn, was a sounding box: you knew where everyone was, what everyone did.”
We feel everything in Bowen injected straight into the reading vein.
This review continues here: https://nullimmortalis.wordpress.com/25991-2/