The Death of the Heart 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:
PART ONE — THE WORLD
1.
“Their oblivious stillness made them look like lovers – actually, their elbows were some inches apart; they were riveted not to each other but to what she said.”
And what she (Anna) said represented, for me, one huge narrative info-dump to a family friend (St Quentin) — and she even asks him at one point whether he was bored! — regarding the backstory about the circumstance of how she and her husband (Thomas) are having 16 year old Portia staying with them for a year. A backstory of many complex turnings regarding Thomas’ father and mother, and the daughter (Portia) of his father with a woman called Irene. An endlessly spreading backstory imperfectly couched, with all the fractured brilliance of Bowen. All this re-telling by Anna taking place in Regents Park, London, in the swan-cold iciness of winter, with some vividly strange descriptive effects beyond even what I imagine to be the scope of Portia’s diary – a muddle buried in muddle? – that Anna tells St Quentin she found recently in Portia’s muddled escritoire and read secretly.
A muddled escritrix like Bowen?
“One may never reproduce the same muddle exactly, but she would never know.”
A signal conjuring of Bowen’s own constructively fractured muddles of high literature, fictionally looked at critically (crisis?) by herself in a fiction containing nearly forty references to ELBOWS that I have already counted, yes, as many as that, a gamut of Royle’s Sheer Kinks, arguably …
“‘I mean, more, completely distorted and distorting. As I read I thought, either this girl or I are mad. And I don’t think I am, do you?’ […] ‘You’ve got to allow for style, though. Nothing arrives on paper as it started, and so much arrives that never started at all. To write is always to rave a little – even if one did once know what one meant,…’ […] ‘Style is the thing that’s always a bit phony, and at the same time you cannot write without style.’”
“There does not seem to be a single thing that she misses, and there’s certainly not a thing that she does not misconstruct.”
Back to the backstory…
“He [Thomas’s father] had got knit up with Irene in a sort of a dream wood, but the last thing he wanted was to stay in that wood for ever.”
“Does this bore you, St Quentin?”
2.
“Everywhere, she heard an unliving echo: she entered one of those pauses in the life of a house that before tea time seem to go on and on.”
Later: “A whir from Thomas’s clock – it was just going to strike six. Six, but not six…”
“‘But she goes to bed at ten.’
‘Well, it never is ten, as you know.’”
Portia and her elbows come in from the cold (she seems, as a 16 year old, made of elbows like this chapter is, too) into the big house, with its errant hierarchy of the various other new servants under Matchett who is a woman — imported from Thomas’s family into the house outside of Anna’s control — and Matchett, in contrast to elbowy Portia, has “The monklike impassivity of her features made her big bust curious, out of place;” — “That’s the way to give yourself chilblains. Those want rubbing – here, give me!’ She came over, took Portia’s hands and chafed them, her big bones grinding on Portia’s painfully.”
The elbowy bones as elbowy Bowens…
“She slid books from under her elbow on to the console table,…”
“The solid stone staircase was so deep in carpet that her feet made no sound. Sometimes her elbow, sometimes her school-girlish overcoat, unbuttoned, brushed on the white wall.”
“Short sleeves showed her very thin arms and big delicate elbow joints.”
Now with her half-brother Thomas:
“Then, as Thomas said nothing more, she came round the chair and sat down – drew up her knees, nursed her elbows, and stared forward into the red concavity of the electric fire.”
In the past with her dying mother Irene in hotels of Europe that match the Bowenesque hotel and environs in her first novel I am currently reading:
“They went up, arm-in-arm in the dark, up the steep zigzag, pressing each others’ elbows, hearing the night rain sough down through the pines: they were not frightened at all.”
And St Quentin in from the cold walk in the previous chapter with Anna, while Thomas is in his study below waiting for him to leave…
“How obliging …’ St Quentin said, while Portia was out of earshot. But Anna, propping her elbow on the mantelpiece, looked at him with implacable melancholy.”
And Thomas with Anna:
“Then he got up, took her by one elbow, and angrily kissed her. ‘I’m never with you,’ he said.”
And a chapter of books as well as elbows, books “stacked at elbow-level”, so many elbows and books, and the muddled diary Portia now fears has been seen when Matchett tells her that Anna has been complaining about the muddle in Portia’s room.
And via these accoutrements of hinges and brackets and latchkeys and furniture and ambiance, we gain a growing adumbration of all these characters, their backstories and today’s undercurrents. A house with room-to-room telephones, but who was that ‘Eddie’ who rang on the external telephone that Anna answered?
“The vibration of London was heard through the shuttered and muffled window as though one were half deaf;…” — just like Jeremy and his malacca cane vibrations on London railings I reviewed earlier today in ‘Eva Trout’!
“She may become anything … Portia, what hundreds of bears you’ve got on your mantelpiece. Do they come from Switzerland?”
Portia that Bowenesque ‘Unromantic Princess” with another foreign steamer?
3.
“From the grotes-queries of that marriage he had felt a revulsion. Portia, with her suggestion – during those visits – of sacred lurking, had stared at him like a kitten that expects to be drowned.”
Meanwhile, we are stylishly given more of Anna’s backstory, her tentative indolence, her non-slenderness, (thus her non-elbowiness?); Thomas’s attraction to her ash blondeness despite his normal attraction to dark women — and her previous two miscarriages. Thomas’s backstory, too, at the advertising agency.
Why do stories have backs? They simply do.
Portia’s room specially decorated for one year (“Matchett, who was as strong as a nigger, carried the little desk from another floor. Anna, fitting a pleated shade on the bed lamp,…”) with a high barred window (“Anna had, at this moment before they met, the closest feeling for Portia she ever had.”)
“Matchett’s ideas must date from the family house, where the young ladies, with bows on flowing horsetails of hair, supped upstairs with their governess, making toast, telling stories, telling each other’s fortunes with apple peel. In the home of today there is no place for the miss: she has got to sink or swim. […] In this airy vivacious house, all mirrors and polish, there was no place where shadows lodged, no point where feeling could thicken.”
Much to Matchett’s discomfort, I infer, gaining my readerly bearings or coordinates.
A new backstory, this novel itself, commences when Thomas and Anna take Portia to the cinema… “The Marx Brothers, that evening at the Empire, had no success with Portia. The screen threw its tricky light on her un-relaxed profile: she sat almost appalled. Anna took her eyes from the screen to complain once or twice to Thomas: ‘She doesn’t think this is funny.’ […] The organist still loudly and firmly playing had gone down with his organ, through floodlit mimosa, into a bottomless pit,…”
They meet Major Brutt, a perhaps naughty loiterer from Soho, a man, too, from Anna’s past when she had a lover called Robert Pidgeon, I infer, while Portia seems fascinated that the Major lives in hotels…
“Anna felt bound up with her fear, with her secret, by that enwrapping look of Portia’s: she felt mummified.”
A sense of Mysterious Kôr? A sense of being ‘steered by one elbow’ in this chapter. We have yet to get our readerly bearings…
“‘I must say, this is an amazing coincidence.’ Portia sat twisted sideways, so that her knees should not annoy Thomas.”
“Magnetism to that long-ago evening – on which Robert and she must have been perfect lovers – had made her bring back this man, this born third, to her home.”
Major Brutt invited back for a drink as this BORN THIRD. This shadowy third.
A man of a London that Is the SHE in “After dark, she is like a governess gone to the bad, in a Woolworth tiara, tarted up all wrong.”
Portia, too, with a moving unstable gaze, more than just a sullen teenager?
“She saw Portia, kneeling down by the fire, look up at Major Brutt with a perfectly open face – her hands were tucked up the elbows of her short-sleeved dress. The picture upset Anna, who thought how much innocence she herself had corrupted in other people – yes, even in Robert: in him perhaps most of all.”
4.
“…the gravestones are all ranged round the walls like chairs before a dance, and half way across the lawn a circular shelter looks like a bandstand.”
A disused melancholy graveyard beyond any Dancing Mistress’ purvey, I wondered?
Portia and her friend, Lilian, the only friend she has made since staying in London, a girl with a figure more precociously developed than Portia’s, indeed, not elbowy at all! One who recently fell in love with her cello mistress. And washes her hair frequently.
They walk together through the graveyard to a different teaching mistress, Miss Paullie’s academy in a renovated billiard room. Lilian teaches Portia how to carry a handbag. Lilian “walked about with the rather fated expression you see in photographs of girls who have subsequently been murdered, but nothing had so far happened to her … This morning, when she saw Portia coming, she signalled dreamily with a scarlet glove.”
She washes her hair, with Stravinsky records. Or was that all for show in front of Portia?
“Lilian had all those mysterious tomorrows: yesterdays made her sigh, but were never accounted for. She belonged to a junior branch of emotional society, in which there is always a crisis due.”
Miss Portia’s fees are high, and her secretary ‘lives on the telephone.’
Portia and Lilian are a bit too down market for Miss Paullie. Especially when Portia is found reading a letter from someone called Eddie under the table, still with her handbag on her lap. Eddie, a friend of Annie, is someone who is often in Thomas’s study and she had handed Eddie his hat when leaving once. Flirting as a doorman might?
“….the billiard- (or school-) room of carpet, radiators, and fog – this room had no windows: a big domed skylight told the state of the weather,… […] She could not keep her thoughts at face-and-table level; they would go soaring up through the glass dome. […] …then a gurgle came from a hot pipe – the tissue of small sounds that they called silence filled the room to the dome.”
Portia “kept feeling at her bag against her stomach.” And mutton and red currant jelly preoccupies Lilian one day, and the ‘pig’ next door having lunch at Miss Paullie’s.
London involves purposefulness for Portia compared, I infer, to her free and easy European jaunts with Irene, mother and daughter, sharing a bed and acting like friends (“giggling into eiderdowns that smelled of the person-before-last”). In London “even people pausing on bridges seemed to pause with a purpose; no bird seemed to pursue a quite aimless flight.”
Portia later listening to Thomas, her half-brother, linger on the landing momentarily — having put on a white tie. To ask for a dance, I wondered … but the dance floor is not ready?
Cf Julian Tower’s white tie in my review of ‘To The North’ today.
5.
“But Eddie, with the affectionate nonchalance of someone whose nearness does not matter, put a hand on her elbow. ‘How much I owe you!’”
This is the famous Eddie character-study chapter that I still can’t get my head round. He is a bit or a lot like Boris Johnson in embryo or prophecy, like an unguidable shopping trolley with his mood and opinion swings — a chancer or mountebank with his womanisizing, writing for public agenda thrown up like kites, his flirtations with Anna and now, I guess, about to impinge on Portia. Got himself a job, along the way, at Thomas’ advertising agency through whatever he did to get it!
Later in Portia’s diary, as reproduced in chapter 9, she writes: “Eddie says our lies are not our fault.”
6.
“She felt it must be very late, past midnight: that point where the river of night flows underneath time, that point at which occurs the mysterious birth of tomorrow.”
This is a crucial Bowen chapter, as transcendental as Mysterious Kôr, a land of bedrooms and pillows and here the bodily rapprochement of Matchett and Portia as what I shall call Kôrtia — servant and child, the child brought to fill a room for Anna from the family’s hinterland that Matchett has lived through, including its living prehensile furniture, too, and Kôrtia’s wrists ritually arranged by a priestess called Matchett like living ornaments. Religious moments of literature, mixed with an almost tantalising erotic contact between old fleshy depth with bones within it and younger exterior sharp elbows, currently elbows now inferred and left unspoken. No need to speak their name in this chapter. All mingled with Kôrtia’s co-vivid dream of herself with Eddie in a hut. That letter now confiscated by a Matchett from under the girl’s pillow… a sense of heredity and of Child as Father of the Man o Mother of the Woman, a sense that is later, not dissimilarly, to fill Eva Trout and her deaf-mute boy child, Jeremy (“Thomas put him into the car and drove him off as if he had been a child. What a thing to make Mr Thomas do to his own father!”) The word ‘Matchett’ sounds to me more like a JC-Powysian tench than a trout? Matchett who likes polishing furniture for its own sake. “All those snowdrops and that piano playing – to make out she’d had her share in your being born.” – Matchett says.
And these passages (just as a few examples among many) to scry and then cherish…
“The impassive solemnity of her preparations made a sort of an altar of each bed: in big houses in which things are done properly, there is always the religious element. The diurnal cycle is observed with more feeling when there are servants to do the work.”
“Portia instinctively spoke low after dark: she was accustomed to thin walls.”
“…but now, as though to shift the weight of the past, she put a hand on the bed, the far side of Portia’s body, and leant heavily on it so that she made an arch. Through this living arch, the foot of the bed in fluctuations of half-darkness was seen. Musky warmth from her armpit came to the pillow, and a creak from the stays under her belt as she breathed in the strain of this leaning attitude.”
“Tentatively sighing and turning over, Portia put on Matchett’s knee, in the dark, fingers that by being urgently living tried to plead for the dead. But the very feel of the apron, of the starch over that solid warm big knee, told her that Matchett was still inexorable.”
“‘Why goodness,’ she said softly. ‘Why do you want to start breaking your heart?’”
“She shifted her weight from her hand, groped over Portia, found her wet wrists, uncrossed them. ‘Goodness,’ she said, ‘whatever good does that do?’ All the same, the question was partly rhetorical: Matchett felt that something had been appeased. Having smoothed the top of the sheet, she arranged Portia’s hands on it like a pair of ornaments:…”
“Good furniture knows what’s what. […] – I’ve been at it years and years with the soft cloth:…”
“‘She had this room empty, waiting,’ said Matchett sharply. ‘She never filled it, for all she is so clever. And she knows how to make a diversion of anything – dolling this room up with clocks and desks and frills.”
“But Portia’s hand, with its charge of nervous emotion, still crept on the firm broad neck, the strong spine. Matchett’s embrace had made felt a sort of measured resistance, as though she were determined to will, not simply to suffer, the power of the dividing wall. Darkness hid any change her face might allow itself. She said finally: ‘I’ll turn your pillow now.’’”
“Portia by in a sort of coffin of silence, one hand under the pillow where the letter had been.”
“Portia lay and saw herself with Eddie. She saw a continent in the late sunset, in rolls and ridges of shadow like the sea. Light that was dark yellow lay on trees, and penetrated their dark hearts. Like a struck glass, the continent rang with silence. The country, with its slow tense dusk-drowned ripple, rose to their feet where they sat: she and Eddie sat in the door of a hut. She felt the hut, with its content of dark, behind them. The unearthly level light streamed in their faces; she saw it touch his cheekbones, the tips of his eyelashes, while he turned her way his eyeballs blind with gold. She saw his hands hanging down between his knees, and her hands hanging down peacefully beside him as they sat together on the step of the hut.”
“…this light was eternal; they would be here for ever.”
… being Bowen’s essence of Zeno’s Paradox and Heredity versus Anti-Natalism and a future Aickman and Elbows as ‘proud’ bony Stigmata (in both meanings of ‘proud’) rather than stigmatised holes in flesh to find bones within — and Null Immortalis.
And now my rarefied Kôrtia, in synergy with Matchett, duly becomes this book’s Portia again….
This review continues here: https://etepsed.wordpress.com/2021/12/18/the-death-of-the-heart-by-elizabeth-bowen/