The Death of the Heart by Elizabeth Bowen
Part Four 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:
Part Two: 6
“She [Daphne] had set her hair a new way, in a bang over her forehead, and she had not so much as batted an eyelid as Eddie, steering Portia by one elbow, walked away from Waikiki down the esplanade.”
“There is nothing like exploring an empty house.”
An intense sense of menace is summoned here as Portia and Eddie get into an empty lodging-house, and their conversation is perhaps even more menacing than the house itself.
Horror is Bowen’s forte, literary Horror in interface with Romcom absurdism and prehensile furniture and ambition to entertain with an over-sophisticated mind … cf Aickman.
“A stale charred smell came from the grates – Waikiki seemed miles away. These rooms, many flights up, were a dead end: the emptiness, the feeling of dissolution came upstairs behind one, blocking the way down.”
“Portia felt she had climbed to the very top of a tree pursued by something that could follow.”
Later Eddie says “…you start driving me up trees and barking at the bottom like everyone else.”
And later still — “Freeing his arm, he caught both her hands in his in a bothered but perfectly kindly way, as though they had been a pair of demented kittens.”
[All in later interface with a darkly remarkable new extended overview for us of the poorly accomplished but effective pastel portrait of Anna with a kitten by Mrs H, in P’s room at Waikiki.]
“By now, he had twirled the string round his finger so tight that the flesh, with its varnish of nicotine, stood out in ridges between.”
“In his own eyes, shutters flicked back, exposing for half a second, right back in the dark, the Eddie in there.”
Then, right back at Waikiki…
“Portia walked round her puzzle and stared at it upside down.”
And there is a difficult conversation for Portia with Daphne who warns her against Eddie…
“But if you get so potty about him without seeing what he’s like, you’ll get an awful knock. You take it from me. […] …he’d play a kitten up if we had a kitten here. You’ve no idea, really.”
What did Daphne do with her thumb in the Grotto Cinema? Do I remember? Probably not. Do you?
The Sunday Dinner scene with the others and the arrival of Mr Bursely do not relieve the menace for me.
“Even by day, though, the unlike likeness disturbs one more than it should: what is it unlike? Or is it unlike at all – is it the face discovered? The portrait, however feeble, transfixes something passive that stays behind…”
Sometimes I think I look at Bowen as a puzzle from upside down. This review is one of its patterns still evolving…
Nothing like exploring an empty memory, refilling it as one goes.
“people have to get off when they can’t get on”
Eddie has wisdom. As well as menace.
Part Two: 7
A highly fraught chapter, with Eddie full of himself but full of a creeping chaos, too, as he threatens to leave Seale by train that night. His chaos creeping itself into Bursely, Cecil, Dickie… But first in the Lawrencian woods with Portia …
“Light, washing the stretching branches, sifted into the thickets, making a small green flame of every early leaf. Unfluting in the armpit warmth of the valley, leaves were still timid, humid: in the uphill woods spring still only touched the boughs in a green mist that ran into the sky. Scales from buds got caught on Portia’s hair. Small primroses, still buttoned into the earth, looked up from ruches of veiny leaves – and in sun-blond spaces at the foot of the oaks, dog violets burned their blue on air no one had breathed. The woods’ secretive vitality filled the crease of the valley and lapped through the trees up the bold hill.”
“Eddie stopped, sat, then lay down in a space at the foot of an oak. Slowly flapping one unhinged arm from the elbow, he knocked the place beside him with the back of his hand till she sat down too.”
“‘What an awful house that was! Or rather, what awful things we said.’ ‘In that empty house?’ ‘Of course. How glad we were to get back to Waikiki. I’m frightened there, but it feels to me rather fine. The mutton bled, did you see?’”
The unconscious lies of a like those of the prime minister he created just for the times in which I re-read this.
‘That’s not true, across my heart. I think we are perfect, darling. But I’d much rather you knew when I didn’t mean what I said, then we shouldn’t have to go back and put that right.’”
‘“‘We don’t want to eat each other.’
“‘Oh no, Eddie – But what do you mean?’”
Eddie lying without knowing that’s he is lying; Portia lying bodily…
“‘You fill me with such despair,’ she said, lying without moving.
Eddie reached across and idly pulled her hand away from her eyes. Keeping her hand down in the grass between them, he gently bent open her fingers one by one, then felt over her palm with his finger-tip, as though he found something in Braille on it.”
9Terrified by his voice and face of iron, Portia cried, ‘Oh no!’ Annihilating the space of grass between them she flung an arm across him, her weight on his body, and despairingly kissed his cheek, his mouth, his chin. ‘You are perfect,’ she said, sobbing. ‘You are my perfect Eddie. Open your eyes. I can’t bear you to look like that!’
Eddie opened his eyes, from which her own shadow completely cut the light from the sky. At the same time frantic and impervious, his eyes looked terribly up at her. To stop her looking at him he pulled her head down, so that their two faces blotted each other out, and returned on her mouth what seemed so much her own kiss that she even tasted the salt of her own tears. Then he began to push her away gently. ‘Go away,’ he said, ‘for God’s sake go away and be quiet’.”
With Portia, so with whatever woman he was with. The violent violets…
“In every pause of Eddie’s movements a sea-like rustling could be heard all through the woody distance, a tidal movement under the earth. ‘Wretched violets,’ said Eddie. ‘Why pick them for nothing?’”
“Don’t you see we’re all full of horrible power, working against each other however much we may love? You agonize me by being so agonized. Oh cry out loud, if you must: cry, cry –“
To where untruth starts…
“‘Don’t force me to where untruth starts. You say nothing would make you hate me. But once make me hate myself and you’d make me hate you.’9
Accept the whole of him, or none of him. Gestalt or nothing. Bits of something are null and void.
Cinematic scenes with cigarettes and words…
“We are as drowned in this wood as though we were in the sea.”
“Eddie chain-smoked; Portia put down the window near her and leaned out with her elbow over the top. Sea air blew on her forehead; she borrowed his comb again.”
“By this time, the Pavilion hung like an unlit lantern in the pinkish air; the orchestra was playing something from ‘Samson and Delilah’.”
That comb, that shorn hair?
“Propping an elbow on Cecil’s shoulder, he said how much he wished they could go to France together. He printed his name with Evelyn’s lipstick on the piece of paper off Clara’s straw. ‘Don’t forget me,’ he said. ‘I’m certain you will forget me.’”
In this chapter, the creeping chaos belongs to Bowen, too. Off the rails, while Eddie wants to be back on such rails toward London. Away from this once holy haven. Seale with no Lease-hold left. Just the madness of its freehold author.
Part Two: 8
THE DIARY
“…as though yesterday had been all my dream. I have gone on with the puzzle, it has been knocked, so part that I did is undone and I could not begin again where I left off.”
As before, I shall keep most of this secret diary as secret as it should be, just with three shadowy quotes to adumbrate Portia’s dying days at Seale, amid all those characters, characters with characters that create (or lay themselves open to) what happens to them, or things that happen to characters that create their characters, in three separate shadowy places – one that changes when certain people are in them, and when they are not in the places without ever having been in them, and when they have left the places by having been in them first…
Obliquely like and unlike nesting swans that can have a change in behaviour if we get near them?
Portia says she “caught” a headache on the canal where the swans were nesting.
The mixed feelings of leaving somewhere certain to go to the uncertainty of the place and the people there to whom she is returning…
“All the days that go by only make me seem to be getting further and further away from the day I last saw Eddie, not nearer and nearer the day I shall see him again.”
“I cannot say anything even in this diary. Perhaps it is better not to say anything ever.”
Part Three: The Devil
That Miltonic Satan as a ‘lucid’ mixture of God and Lucifer from ‘The Hotel’?
1.
“The clocks, set and wound, ticked the hours away in immaculate emptiness. Portia – softly opening door after door, looking all round rooms with her reflecting dark eyes, glancing at each clock, eyeing each telephone – did not count as a presence.”
‘Immaculate Emptiness’, Null Immortalis….
Portia has returned to London, a day before Anna and Thomas return there. Ann@‘s print and now Matchett’s spring cleaning….tainted by the future with which we in our own real-time is due to pollute them! —
“…the inner net curtains stirred over windows reluctantly left open to let in the April air with its faint surcharge of soot. Yes, already, with every breath that passed through the house, pollution was beginning. […]
Portia said, in a hardly alive voice: ‘I thought you said you had finished everything.’
‘Finished? You show me one thing that is ever finished, let alone everything. No, I’ll stop when they’ve got me screwed into my coffin, but that won’t be because I’ve got anything finished …’”
“‘I must say,’ said Portia, sitting on Matchett’s table, ‘today makes me wish only you and I lived here.’”
That reminds me uncertainly of a short story I read recently? By Bowen? A house refilling unwelcomingly, to the consternation of a person who was there already?
“She [Matchett] looked built back into the half darkness behind her apron’s harsh glaze.”
“….her speckless house, and a reckoning consciousness of it showed like eyes through the eyelids she lowered over her knitting. […] …she was knitting; there was something pacific about the click-click-click.”
Cf Daphne’s erstwhile knitting in the library.
‘You don’t want to be in two places, not at your age. You be at the seaside when you’re at the seaside. You keep your imaginings till you need them. […] If you had have been here, you’d have been under my feet one worse than Mr and Mrs Thomas if they hadn’t gone away. […] You never quite know when you may hope to repair the damage done by going away. […] Now it’s all over, get it out of your head – I sec you’ve worn the elbows out of that blazer. […] What I don’t think I don’t think – you ought to know that. I don’t make mysteries, either.”
Cf this Matchettery with what was chatted about with similar considerations as reported about in my previous review entry above.
“Matchett gave another sideways look at the clock, as though admonishing time to hurry for its own sake. Her air became more non-committal than ever; she appeared to be hypnotized by the speed of her knitting,…”
Eddie is reported to have said thus tellingly earlier to Matchett on the telephone.
“‘Oh dear, oh dear,’ he said, ‘I must have muddled the days.’”
*
And then Anna and Thomas return to be welcomed by carnations sent by Major Brutt, a hovering presence they now regret ever meeting by chance at a cinema…
“Thomas was back again in his armchair, as though he had not left it, one foot on a knee.”
With bodily parts as a electrical earthing, the furniture remembering him, too. Electric elbows?
Anna” “Let’s face it – who ever is adequate? We all create situations each other can’t live up to, then break our hearts at them because they don’t.”
She gazes at the quilt Thomas has rumpled. They wonder if they should discourage Eddie’s attentions upon Portia.
Thomas and his half-sister, Portia, in the park, where this book started…
“The etherealization of the early morning had lifted from the long narrow wooded islands, upon which nobody was allowed to land, and which showed swans’ nests at the edge of their mystery. […]
He looked at Portia, at their father’s eyebrows marking, here, a more delicate line. […]
Thomas said sharply, gripping her elbow – a car swerved past them like a great fish. ‘What’s the matter?’
‘There was Anna, up there. She’s gone now.’”
As we move through this book, we wonder again which window of a page in it will next become not simply empty but immaculately empty? Which diary day will next be left blank? Which swan’s nest?
Part Three: 2
“A face at a window for no reason is a face that should have a thumb in its mouth: there is something only-childish about it. Or, if the face is not foolish it is threatening – blotted white by the darkness inside the room it suggests a malignant indoor power. Would Portia and Thomas think she had been spying on them?”
Another shadowy third, a chapter of diaries and secrets and gestalt real-time reviews as a triangulation of the coordinates of fiction, spies and lies…
“Directly the two had gone out after tea, she [Anna] had gone to this drawer with the clearly realized intention of comparing the falseness of Pidgeon with the falseness of Eddie. […] …that experience means nothing till it repeats itself. […] She [Portia] might have been run over, which would have been shocking. But, after all, death runs in that family. What is she, after all? The child of an aberration, the child of a panic, the child of an old chap’s pitiful sexuality. Conceived among lost hairpins and snapshots of doggies in a Notting Hill Gate flatlet.”
Portia and Eddie—I will issue no lies about how they re-encountered each other…
St Quentin and Portia in the Park…
“Instead of replying, St Quentin looked up at the windows. ‘We’d better not talk too loud: this is full of nursing homes. You know how the sick listen …’”
They listen and look at windows, too. Ironic that we had earlier seen Anna at a window after or before renewing a relationship with her own secrets, and why St Q divulges a secret about secrets to Portia, a secret that I will not divulge here, my now being intrinsic [sic] within this book instead of being a mere reader or reviewer of it.
“‘Now what can have made me [St Q] think you [Portia] kept a diary? Now that I come to look at you, I don’t think you’d be so rash.’
‘If I kept one, it would be a dead secret. Why should that be rash?’
‘It is madness to write things down.’
‘But you write those books you write almost all day don’t you?’
‘But what’s in them never happened – It might have, but never did.”
FICTION lies
“No, really, er, Portia, believe me: if one didn’t let oneself swallow some few lies, I don’t know how one would ever carry the past.”
Real time, heading towards a ‘nonplussed pause’ of nonminus immortalis…immoralist…
“But a diary (if one did keep it up to date) would come much too near the mark. One ought to secrete for some time before one begins to look back at anything.”
“All the time, you go making connexions – and that can be a vice.”
“You set traps for us. You ruin our free will.”
MEA CULPA, the reviewer!
“Because I [St Q] quite like Anna, I overlook much in her, and because she quite likes me she overlooks much in me. We laugh at each other’s jokes and we save each other’s faces – When I give her away to you, I break an accepted rule. This is not often done. It takes people in a lasting state of hysteria, like your friend Eddie, for instance, or people who feel they have some higher authority (as I’ve no doubt Eddie feels he has) to break every rule every time.”
*
The shifting lies and truths of Eddie, again as a pre-cursor of our times.
“Between Portia and Anna extended the still life of the tea-tray. On her knees, pressed together, Portia kept balanced the plate on which a rock-cake slid. Beginning to nibble at the rock-cake, she sat watching Anna at tea with Eddie, as she had watched her at tea with other intimate guests.”
That pause as a disarming pre-elbow…
“By coming in, however, she had brought whatever there was to a nonplussed pause. The fact that they let her see such a pause happen made her the accessory she hardly wanted to be. Eddie propped an elbow on the wing of his chair,…”
Memory of that Waikiki-pedic sketch of Anna as a child with kitten… versus the betraying Anna today…
“Since the talk with St Quentin, the idea of betrayal had been in her [Portia], upon her, sleeping and waking, as might be one’s own guilt, making her not confront any face with candour, making her dread Eddie. Being able to shut her eyes while he was in this room with her, to feel impassive marble against her cheek, made her feel in the arms of immunity – the immunity of sleep, of anaesthesia, of endless solitude, the immunity of the journey across Switzerland two days after her mother died.”
An endless pause of SICnificant anaesthesia for a sickroom spy. Non-plussed, non-subtracted.
This review continues here: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2021/12/28/the-death-of-the-heart-by-elizabeth-bowen/