A World of Love: Bowen’s Obelisk
PART THREE OF MY REAL-TIME REVIEW CONTINUED FROM ….HERE
A WORLD OF LOVE 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:
Who went aWoL first?
8
“The clock-hands stood still: she was seventeen.”
“She swam with her elbows,…”
Lilia amid those ‘fuming cataracts and null eternal’ of a Bowen story called ‘Those Happy Autumn Fields’ where Whovian time travel brainstorms the shadowy thirds of love and fate, with Lilia sewing in her ‘now’ with sunstroke in the region of the ‘exhausted river’ or obelisk, and equally her being back in time, when as near young as Jane is now, at the railway station with Guy’s leaving for death and war (“She broke away, wanting only to vanish. But she found herself walled in, wedged to a stop amongst rooted oblivious sayers of the goodbye”), and the double-take of Antonia as palimpsest to this scene (was she there at the station, too, in reality?), succubus or incubus, a new Matchett and Portia conjoined, and this chapter actually contains the word ‘brainstorm’ as a nod, I hope, to my own attempts at the Brainstorming of Bowen for her inner truth, here now leading to awareness of the disappointing Antonia-arranged marriage of Lilia to Fred (here tellngly witnessed at the end of this chapter by their daughter Jane), Fred who turns up in the real-time of the ‘exhausted river’ along with the letters from Guy to her, letters he had cruelly manhandled from a now physically abused Maud (their younger daughter who had found the letters where Jane had hidden them in this now elder time zone)…all culminating in not only Livia’s vision of Guy as a ghost but our own vision of it, too, by sheer bravado of brainstorming.
Meanwhile, as a calmer counterpoint to this chapter’s atonal symphony of precocious speculative fiction beyond Bowen’s adventures with Haggard’s Kôr, Fred and Lilia almost heal their disappointed marriage through such a catharsis of enforced readerly brainstorming….
“Antonia unlike Lilia got clean away – so fast that the fiancée, though craning her neck, never so much as set eyes upon the cousin, though one could keep track of her thrusting course. Lilia indeed effected her own escape in the backwash from the fleeing Antonia, and so got to safety under the clock.”
“She set up as a statue, posed there smirking at nothing – and why not? Nothing made sense, till at last it seemed the station had heard the train with him in it, gone, go –“
***
“Yes, but if not the Beloved, what was Lilia? Nothing. Nothing was left to be. And now these letters. To whom, why?”
“A young thrush flew in affright from the twisted apple tree, and away in a corner a door creaked; somebody had come in and was in this garden.”
Thud thud thud
“– of whom was this the ghost in the afternoon?”
Guy a liar, like even a Prime Minister could become in a new real-time? —
“…a runner-out upon his unconsummated loves. He had stirred up too much; he had scattered round him more promises as to some dreamed-of extreme of being than one man could have hoped to live to honour.”
“: not memories was it but expectations which haunted Montefort. His immortality was in their longings, while each year more mocked the vanishing garden.”
Fred notices, in their real-time, Lilia’s recent haircut….
“Upheld by him by the elbows, having the sensation that her feet were being washed away from under her, but that she did not need them, Lilia, from nearer to it than she had been to it for years, studied Fred’s chest, numbering the buttons gone from the shirt.”
“For the brainstorm set up in him by Maud’s overture, for his inordinate violence to the child (whom actually he had not only shaken but struck, battered at, in wrenching the letters from her)…”
Brainstorming can work in various direction of rightness and wrongness, but there is no right without wrong? No lies without truth?
“In the taut blue lap of her frock remained the letters; he whistled a bar, then asked: ‘What made you say you saw him?’
‘Thought I did.’
‘But what made you tell me?’”
‘“All I know is, someone was in that garden, and for a reason known to me. How am I to tell you for how long; well do I remember how it felt – each knowing the other to be there. And there was more to it than that, Fred. What was about to take place I shall often wonder – all I did was stop sewing and watch the bird watch me. You know I was never one to imagine; and who was I to imagine it could be you? As we now are, anything seemed more likely. Guy seemed more likely, dead as he is.’
‘What d’you mean,’ he said, ‘ “as we now are”?’
‘You know you know. What’s the use of asking?’”
“Pick pick, pluck her fingers went at the ribbon bow on the letters,…”
Nettie’s purple rose and the nothingness-window at her back…
The default outcomes of time…
“‘…after all you’d been, in the first place, led on to expect and hope for. You never should have had to put up with me, but there it was: that was how things worked out.’”
“; all else had part in the majestic pause, into which words were petering out.”
The nature of the eventernal slumber, drowsy with divinity as in Eva Trout….
“Impossible is it for persons to be changed when the days they have still to live stay so much the same – as for these two, what could be their hope but survival?”
Null Immortalis, now immortalised by Bowen. That happy moment of a perpetual Autumn. Beyond the fields we know. Over the hills and faraway.
Note, it was Lilia who once went aWoL, not Fred!
And it was Guy who impossibly came back?
9
“‘May I wash blood off my frock?’
‘No; not in here,’ said Antonia sharply. ‘You’ve probably simply been tearing at your hives.’
‘No, I fell on my knee. And I could be bleeding internally.’
‘Not you, Maud.’”
The Hobgoblin, Gay, if not Guy, David, here becomes intrinsic with the Demon Child, if not Mad or even unMad, certainly a precocious Maud, who is still child, with those ‘listless cattle’ outside skirting Montefort’s Antonia-perceived stair-Well, as factored into by my earlier perceptions of Bowen’s and Aickman’s Cows (and/or Bulls?) of Bashan…
Maud “psalm-singing” from the Old Testament to bring due damnation down on her father Fred, even down on Antonia who, as the Demon Lover, brought Lilia back to Fred in the past, thus facilitating Maud’s very existence, Maud’s ‘making’ having been Made, with her father in his torment now holding, I infer, the hot-coals in the shape of the letters she’d gained by ‘spying’ in the heat of the day on Jane’s hiding-place for them, letters he did not know what to do with, and thus tried, by extreme physical abuse, to make Maud unMade. Yet, there were various named parts of her body that he had explicitly wounded, leaving no place for damaging the text’s significantly unmentioned elbows, I guess.
Maud — the Demon of the Protestant Van and the manic cat-fights, inside it, with the other girls that she managed to induce — is now faced with the shame of her own father’s ‘mania’ exerted upon her body, thus his letting her down, a father whom , I infer, she had created by somehow being the Child as Father of the Man… or a new Goddess usurping God? Even while communing with a WOund that is Woman, and having taken advantage of “Antonia’s minutes of abeyance.” Antonia aWoL.
“Maud, in wet weather rendered still more terrible by a pixie hood, and often perched atop of a cracked gatepost, was to be found contemplatively waiting, one knew for what. The Protestant Van – it had been said – became like a bag of cats inside from the moment Maud stepped up into it. For she knew not only how to begin but how to beget fights.”
“A point to be noted about Maud was that she confined her attacks to her co-religionists: she had never been heard of kicking a Catholic child.”
“…heels hitched up under her on the chair-rung, she bent forward as though actually communing with the wound.”
“She had put into power, one might say forced into being, a father-figure: this had collapsed on top of her in the Horse Field. Wrath need not necessarily have ill become Fred; if anything, anger became a father. But he had made an exhibition of himself – the last thing she ever wanted to see. He had been human, and she could not forgive him.”
“But she was still brooding, and brooding probably over what (she felt) she felt more keenly than could the Lord – her father’s letting of her down. He had affronted, totally, her ideas for and her idea of him. Mania had burst out. He had misjudged her attitude, misconstrued her motives, gone so far as to call her a little-so-and-so.”
“Reopening her eyes, Antonia found herself in the course of being regarded by Maud strangely; from, as it were, some new cosmic standpoint.”
“We’re the instruments of each other’s destinies right enough, but absolutely I [Antonia] won’t agree that I caused you.”
“It was a child’s face, tense over the bones with skin, a high look of candour about the forehead, awakeness widening the eye-sockets. Singularity, the unsludged clearness of a coin fresh from the mint and not to be struck again, and that sort of intentness hard not to identify with a sort of purity appeared in it; and among other attributes of the gaze was fearlessness, only not more attractive because it was so complete and, one might feel, justified. Nothing, or almost nothing, made Maud not young, not a child throughout. Only, one missed in regard to her some natural sensation within oneself— some fond perturbedness or anxiety. In general one feels on behalf of children the enemy menace of the future: […] Few are children for whom one feels no concern: Maud happened, however, to be one of them. Solicitude, in this case, went into reverse – what might the future not have to fear from her?”
“A minute later, anybody watching Montefort from the fields might have seen the child waving out of the window, making a summoning signal to Gay David, who waited below. Antonia meanwhile was at the stairhead – hand on the shaking rail or shaking hand on the rail, she did not know which. […] ….cattle were in a listless file proceeding towards the river woods: […] It was the bottom of a well, this bottom of the stairs – she looked round to notice with what she shared it. Not yet quite aired out of the place was the reek of last midnight’s burned-out lamp;…”
…listless towards the exhausted river, I infer.
This chapter has, for me, today, at last, attained Fiction as Religion.
10
“‘Hop in. Vesta wants to speak to you.’
‘You left the gates open.’
‘So?’ asked Peregrine, glancing back.
‘Cattle.’”
“Jane’s pink dress, tattered by light-and-shade, itself looked to him like a fragment —“
“Unhandily retying the gate chain-knot, he split a finger-nail, which he showed her.”
This is the most constructively confusing chapter yet, echoing the characters’ own inchoate instincts about what they are and what the others are, their histories, their bodily jigsaws, whatever their age young or older, their incubations now on the potential brink of a break in the weather with rain, a rain that somehow seems to fit Jane’s proposed visit to Shannon tomorrow, a sort of replenishing of the exhausted river nearer the obelisk. A visit to meet someone called Richard after a debriefing martini with Peregrine at the castle, and a kiss, at least a kiss — in an ‘empty’ drawing room…. But where was the white horse on the road there?
***
Jane and Peregrine
“Pyramidal the flowers were upon the piano, their scent exhausting what was left of the air. Never could drawing-room have been more empty.”
“Marble like a temple in a fever-swamp it stood, chilled off and haunted by the miasma – where, last night, had she rested her burning hand?”
“She was on the middle edge of the sofa, pressing her elbows to her sides: each end, above her, overpowering cushions stacked themselves up into lady-effigies.”
“In the sultry-scented inside of the elder, there the stone was, nothing at all to show it had been disturbed till she came to lift it – then, so completely no trace was to be found on the crushed-down, whitened roots of the grass that her first fear was, had they ever been there at all? Or, had they conjured themselves into nothingness?”
“; ignorance cannot be made good.” [see further below]
“Disregarded, everything he had written! She’s had her revenge like anything, thought the girl – and, even while she looked, the trophy slid down the taut blue cotton of the dress, failed to be stopped by a careless hand, fell. Dust rose where it fell, in a little puff, as unnoticed Jane fled back the way she’d come.”
“So here now was Jane, through the instrumentality of Peregrine (acting under orders) biting upon the void of the whole story in this void, staled, trite and denying drawing-room –“
Jane as medium? Or the reader as the medium for any ghosts in this book?
***
Kathie and Antonia.
“Miss Antonia’s unwillingness to account for what she was doing was most interesting; for never had she been known to so much look into a pot or shift a kettle.”
“The old cattle fouled what’s left in the river. –“
Those Bashan herd immunities?
Ribbon to be burnt or the letters it had bound?
“‘Miss Maud put a curse on the house.’ Having chucked the letters on to the table,…”
“Heat, you can’t overlook: they say it was never like this till now –“
“Bent in two, she vomited laughter;”
***
Lilia, recently with haircut, cutting her toenails so as to match Peregrine’s split fingernail?
“…that the bedroom since Fred’s absence had gone on to spawn every kind of knick-knack.”
Lilia going to London for a week, as she once did years before, without Fred?
The echoes of Bowen’s time.
“‘We thought of going for a spin.’
‘You and who?’
‘I and Fred – for a blow of air,’ amplified Lilia, fanning her brow to show the need. She opened the fence gate into the elsewhere of the evening: up stood the obelisk over floating light; sunset kindling the belt of trees dissolved into others the faint elder –“
***
“Antonia and Maud, at supper in silence, were waited upon by Kathie, also either subdued or preoccupied – that was to say, the servant came in from time to time with after-thoughts,…”
Jane arrives back from her second visit to the castle ….
“Maud got up, sped to the wireless in the corner and turned the knob – out came blood-up laughter, which, thanks to the force of the new battery, blasted its way round and round the room, bringing the instant look of a quarry, terror, mortification, to Jane’s face. Maud, mind set at rest, switched off— ‘It’s not,’ she explained to them, ‘nine o’clock yet.’”
“‘And I was seduced, this time,’ said Jane, defiantly helping herself to beetroot, which no one had so far touched.”
Jane to stay to look after Fred, but look after him in what way?
“Rising, Jane walked round the table and to a window: she gave a twitch to the yellow blind, considered whether to raise it but did not. Passing behind Antonia’s chair, she repeated the performance with the two others, each time with more indecision.”
I open each chapter of this book, thus. The blackout blinds as in another heat of a day. Including Nettie’s Titanic, too…
“From the first, the room was a struck ship – hither, thither slithered the thoughts and senses; the windows, like port-holes careened over, appearing actually to fill up. The sound of Time, inexorably coming as it did, at once was absolute and fatal. Passionless Big Ben.”
The chimes that were heard darkly in another heat of a day. Alongside any Elder gods that haunted London.
The Chimes of Time towards the ultimate paradox.
“But now came Now –“
“Time swooped as it struck –“
“The child crouched lower, heard out the final echo, then switched off – disdaining to answer, disdaining, as ever, to hear the news.”
I thankfully can ever make good my ignorance about this book, even if I look as deeply as I can into its version of whatever insular news it contains …
“– Jane the more hurriedly left the window. Coming behind Antonia, knowing the proscription to be suspended, she slid her arms into a clasp round the pearl-choked neck and, pressing the embrace closer, leaned round and brought her lips to the tarnished cheekbone. Under that dwelling kiss, at once comforting and beseeching, Antonia eased back her head on to Jane’s breast. The girl then sighed, the woman said nothing. Simultaneously, both looked at the head of the table. As ever, it was after Guy had gone that he most nearly was to be seen. Gone for good, he had never appeared more clearly than he did at this last.”
“‘Shannon, did I hear you say?’ asked Antonia.
‘Vesta’s van’s got to go there.’”
11
“The obelisk on its rise looked like the enlarged photograph of a monument.”
What a chapter! What a ghost story-novella! Its strength in making you wait as if forever…
Is reading tantamount to doing?
I dreaded the suspense of a fate for the van holding the whole fruit of Lilia’s marriage to Fred to become that of the car in the last chapter in ‘To The North’. Then reaching — via Limerick (a city as preliminary epiphany for Jane) and a visionary causeway — the airport’s waiting-if-not-doing lounge (as there was also an airport in the latter, if not Latterly, Bowen North novel) whereby I dreaded that Richard Priam’s aeroplane — while landing amid the heavy rain’s sudden breaking of this book’s incubating heatwave — might crash on them all, including on Maud’s hobgoblin! What actually happens instead is so disarmingly and gratuitously powerful I dare not divulge it here. The ultimate epiphany of sorts for Jane… there was no point in waiting otherwise, a story undone…
(And what new name did Kathie find in the letters before they were ostensibly burnt? Priam’s chief wife, Hecuba? Or a muslin woman’s name?)
***
Earlier, though, before the two girls departed in the van as driven by Harris, the chauffeur who once wore Martian gauntlets, I guess….(Tellingly he finds a four leaf clover near the obelisk.)
“– one was aware of trees as each a great individual thirsting plant,
“The uncanny imminence of rain hushed almost every other sensation. Today seemed not yet to be reality: one had so far no more than passed or been sent on out of one deep dream into another –“
Antonia’s own epiphany of regrouping, like returning to London…
“The girl [Jane] pulled from her wardrobe the muslin dress, shook it out, contemplated the stained hems, wondered. She asked herself why she had cut the sleeves out – they were the beautiful thing about it, she now knew; sunshiney, softly flopping while she’d made play with a letter beside the obelisk. What had she mutilated?”
“Haystack, yes; but the needle was in it somewhere. She and I knew the truth – Guy did love her, like it or not. So why go back over that?
He came back, through Jane, to be let go. It was high time.”
“The future was now the bore; which was to say, the future was now the thing – it could do it no harm, however, to be left in abeyance a short time longer; till Jane, for instance, was back from Shannon.”
“Maud had meanwhile seized the occasion to settle herself on the van’s front seat: she had with her her plastic raincoat, in whose pocket could be seen to be folded the pixie hood, and less visibly was accompanied by Gay David.”
***
Fred and Lilia left at the door of Montefort by the van with their two daughters in it, as if frozen in time on their wedding day…
“Left behind in that doorway the pair had stood, watching Antonia drive away in their wedding taxi, free of them. Those two she had forced to their bridal doom; she had left them to it, and to what?”
“What might be the acquaintanceship of their bodies seemed by this moment to be dissolved to nothing; for there, being carried away in the van, went all there had been to show for it: Jane, Maud.”
“…letters, how had they come into the house? Sent back to Guy, why? A breaking-off, a reproach, a revengeful act? Or had she died, leaving somebody else to take speaking action? Had they returned here among Guy’s things after Guy’s death? Or had he, alive, on one of his leaves here, wandering with the husks of them in his hand, seeking their right grave, bitterly or poetically buried them in the ceraments of some other expired summer, the muslin of the dress?”
Not buried but placed where they could be easily found by a future Jane,I wonder?
“…thrusting the letters under the lid of a trunk to lie stifled there with a muslin woman;”
***
“The van bounded along smoothly, at a rate appropriate to its size – the obelisk dropped from view,…”
“The order along the front seat was as follows: himself, Maud, the non-dimensional Gay David, and Jane with an elbow out of a window.”
“Each time the child slid down on the seat she’d seemed to be dragging with her another entity, whom she kept down with her in a grapple; and each time she’d reared herself up again she’d done so with an oblique bullying hoist, forcing whatever it might be to sit still more erect, take still more furious notice than she had decided to do herself.”
Airliner, birds, van converging … enormous suspense built up by Bowen.
“Air as it tore by the open windows entered and lifted the speeding van, and this was in a sort of crescendo, making Jane’s hands clasp and reclasp.”
“…when the Turn Off did come, it was a vast taut cemented causeway, special, polished-looking like solidified water: all else stood back from it in awe, for it looked like the future and for some was. Yet this the Latterly van was now travelling in an accustomed way. ‘How do you beware of low-flying aircraft?’ Maud asked, reading a warning notice.”
“…the girl [Jane] did not know what to do now – oh yes, she thought, I <am doing something, I am waiting; but reason told her that waiting is not a thing to do. A wait is something being done to you.”
“– her blazer being across her [Jane’s] knee, she ran a finger slowly along a stripe, for the sake of seeing anything move in this dead standstill. Rubber-muted silence would have surrounded her, but that far-off doors sucking open and shut from time to time fanned through degrees of voices:”
“The scattering of people were looking up. And the sky, as though reminded of something else, began at this moment to let fall far-apart tepid drops; each so surprising, as it splashed on to cuff, forehead or eyelid, as to seem larger than it was; each too individual and momentous to be rain.”
***
“And so, what was Jane for? Beautiful, yes; but why?”
end