Elizabeth Bowen's Friends and Relations

Bowen, Elizabeth. Friends and Relations. New York: Avon, 1980.

(The original copyright is 1931.)

Huh? Really. That’s the first thing that comes to mind when I think of this book. The whole time I was reading it I felt the way I used to feel as a child sitting amongst the grownups on my parents’ front porch after dinner parties, listening to them talk. I’d have moments of understanding, pieces of conversation I could actually follow. Then the conversation would leap off the path into the thicket, and I’d disappear into my own little dream world until I caught a glimpse of it coming back into view again, just up ahead, and I’d run to catch up with it.

I’m not opposed to sparse writing, you know. I’m in love with Alan Garner, and not too long ago, I was raving about Joan Didion. However, when I start feeling that the writing is so sparse, surely words meant to be there have somehow faded off the page, that reading this book is like trying to talk to someone on a cell phone with bad reception, well, then, I’m not quite so keen on “sparse.” Likewise, enigmatic. I’m as game for a good enigma as anyone, always ready to exercise my problem-solving skills, such as they are, hoping I can surprise others by coming up with the answer. However, the fun of a good riddle is knowing that the answer is right there in front of you, hidden amongst the clues. A really good puzzle might distract the problem solver with irrelevant information, but it doesn’t present a wolf, a sheep, and a chicken only to tell you that the answer is a crocodile. Then again, maybe the problem is that I’m just too stupid to have seen that crocodile so obviously hovering right above everyone.

The back cover copy on the book notes that “the story reveals, by the most delicate means, the secret loves of Janet and Edward.” Okay, so I knew what was going to happen, didn’t I? I was aware and watching it from the get-go. Now, I know I tend to be about as delicate as a hippopotamus most of the time, but that doesn’t mean I can’t appreciate a cat who can walk along a shelf of priceless crystal and leap off it with nary a sound of tinkling glass. I couldn’t find the cat here, though. He must have been black. It must have been midnight. Then suddenly, the hippopotamus rose up onto the shelf, the sound of shattering glass ringing in my ear. For a brief moment, I understood.

Janet was in London. Edward was missing. But then, huh? What the hell happened?

Don’t get me wrong. I didn’t really hate the book. I just didn’t understand it. All the characters seemed as though they’d be extraordinarily interesting if only I knew more about them. Bowen, described (again, in the back cover copy. I wish I had this copywriter to put a spin on my blog) as a “novelist acutely aware of every nuance of feeling,” must have shown off this awareness in other books, because I didn’t notice any passages (maybe they were just so delicate they expired when I breathed on the pages of the book?) that allowed me to get much past the faces and into the heads of the characters.

I can’t help feeling cheated. I’ve been presented with a roomful of fascinating people, but I’m not allowed to talk to them, to ask them questions, to get to know them in any real way. When they leave the room, someone will say to me, “Hope you enjoyed meeting them, because they’re all off to Alaska now and won’t be coming back.”

Perhaps the problem is that while reading this book I also happened to be reading A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, a book that is lush with descriptions of characters’ feelings, a book that’s so much heart it beats in your hands as you turn the pages. Perhaps I’m more in the mood for that sort of book now. Maybe I’ll be better off with Bowen during the heat of the summer when I’m in need of stripping off layers of description and needless words, getting down to bare skin while sipping cold lemonade instead of hot lemon ginger tea. After all, I recently vowed to give every author I choose to read at least two chances before deciding I don’t like him or her. If someone would like to recommend a Bowen novel (Litlove, I think you might be able to do so?) suitable for this July, I will give her one more try before throwing in the towel.

The House in Paris, by Elizabeth Bowen

The House in Paris / Elizabeth Bowen
New York: Anchor, 2002, c1935.

This is the only book I have yet finished for the Outmoded Authors challenge (although I have Italo Svevo's Confessions of Zeno started & waiting on the bedside stack). I've been putting off writing about it, however, because I'm not sure what to say. I wanted to love Elizabeth Bowen; one of my most respected history profs at university cited Bowen as her absolute favourite author and ever since then I've intended to read her. I liked this book, I even found some quotable passages which I delightedly copied out. But somehow it didn't coalesce into a Great Read, at least not for me. Perhaps I didn't quite understand the end, or perhaps the structure threw me a little. I'm not sure what it was.

In any case, the book begins with little Henrietta being met in Paris by an acquaintance of her mother's, who is essentially going to babysit for the day between Henrietta's trains. This lady, Naomi Fisher, and her stern mother Mrs. Fisher, have run a boarding house for young women for years, and are on this very day also babysitting a young boy, Leopold. It's really poor Naomi responsible for the children, as her mother is an invalid, ruling the house from her upstairs bedroom. Leopold is waiting to meet his mother, another friend of Naomi's, who is revealed to have had him via an affair and given him up. Leopold has never seen his mother, and doesn't know the true story of his life. As he and Henrietta come to terms with one another, their balanced tension ends part one of the story.

The middle section of the book is the backstory of Karen, Leopold's mother. This is the part I most enjoyed. Karen is a strange character, fairly passive and with no clear vision of the direction her very banal, suburban life should take. Staying as a student in the house in Paris, she meets a young man, Max, who visits the boarding house as a friend of Mrs. Fisher's. Although he is not supposed to talk to boarders, he does, and Karen takes him in dislike. It is through her friendship with Naomi that she meets him again a few years later, this time as Naomi's fiancé. It all goes to pot as Karen and Max begin what seems to be a rather short-lived affair. They meet once in France, and once in England (where the consequences of her actions catch up with her). She gives the child away, with no-one in England knowing about it. Strangely, it is Naomi who efficiently arranges Karen's 'trip abroad' and finds a family to take Leopold. After Karen is finally married she confesses to her long-suffering husband, who has the idea that they should bring Leopold to rejoin their family.

The affair has been precipitated by the unease Karen feels about her engagement to an earnest friend of her family, who is of the same class and will give her the same life she has always known. She begins to feel stifled by this idea and distances herself by taking a socially acceptable trip to visit her little-seen aunt in Ireland. This aunt and her odd Irish husband live in a small house overlooking the harbour, and it is when Karen first arrives that I think a very meaningful statement is made. Throughout the entire book, houses are minutely detailed. The erstwhile House in Paris, of course, but also Karen's family home, the empty house that Max and Naomi intend to purchase in England, the hotel where they have their tryst, as well as Aunt Violet's Irish home. Karen wanders alone through the living room, waiting for her aunt to come down, and thinks,

It is a wary business, walking about a strange house you know you are to know well...The you inside you gathers up defensively; something is stealing upon you every moment, you will never be quite the same again. These new unsmiling lights, reflections and objects are to become your memories, riveted to you closer than friends or lovers, going with you, even, into the grave: worse, they may become dear and fasten like so many leeches on your heart. By having come, you already begin to store up the pains of going away...to look around is like being, still conscious, dead: you see a world without yourself.

It is this melancholy that permeates the entire novel. The setting seems blurred, a few precise houses linked by incessant travel. The characters are restless, they can't stay still.
The third section of the book then details the intersection of the first two. Karen is indeed in France, but can not bring herself to see Leopold after all. Her husband Roy goes in her stead, and Leopold, after some intense and dramatic disappointment, decides to go with Roy who on the spur of the moment takes him along when they drive Henrietta to her train. I think the idea is to go on to the hotel where Karen is staying. And that's where I'm not sure. Does Karen abhor the idea of meeting Leopold because he will look like his father? Or because admitting him into her life means she will have to acknowledge her premarital behaviour? Or simply because of the guilt of abandoning him so handily at birth? Perhaps by coming to Paris, Karen feels she is 'storing up the pains of going away'. I'm not sure her motivation is clear enough, at least not to someone not steeped in the social conventions of the era Bowen is writing about. I think I would have to reread, looking for clues carefully as I go rather than rushing to the end, thinking, does Leopold see his mother?!? And she did have me anxious about the poor lost soul.

I did find this book superbly written, in a quiet, precise manner. What I'd really meant to read was The Last September, but I couldn't find a copy at the moment I wanted it, so I picked this one up instead. It was intriguing, but I am still intending to find The Last September, preferably in the edition Eva talks about, which has a preface about writing the story, by Bowen herself. Doubly tempting. I'm glad I finally broke the ice between Bowen and I and intend many more meetings!

Cross posted at The Indextrious Reader

The Death of the Heart, by Elizabeth Bowen

I thought I might fall in love with this book, and it turns out I didn’t, but I don’t want to hold that against it. It is a very good novel; I’m glad I read it, and I’d like to read more Bowen. There’s something cold about the book, though, that made me admire more than love it. Its subject matter is rather depressing, and although I generally like depressing books, this one … well, it left me sad and didn’t dazzle me in a way that would make me feel better. But, really, I do admire it, and I believe I don’t need to fall in love with a book to recognize that it’s quite good.

It’s a story of lost innocence; Portia, a 16-year-old girl who is newly-orphaned comes to live with her much older half-brother Thomas and his wife Anna, and while she is there she learns some harsh lessons about the world. Her new family doesn’t really want here there; they took her in because it was Portia’s dying father’s request and because it seemed like the right thing to do. But Anna particularly resents having Portia in her home — the opening scene reveals that Anna has secretly read Portia’s diary and found that Portia has written some unflattering things about her and her friends. It’s as though Anna feels like she is competing with Portia; we learn that Anna had a love affair when she was much younger that ended disappointingly and it’s implied that Anna has never really recovered — now she sees Portia with her youth and beauty and attractiveness and resents the life she has ahead of her.

Portia meets a young friend of Anna’s named Eddie and the plot gets more complicated from there. The two quickly begin a relationship, but this relationship means something quite different for each of them. Portia in all her innocence believes she has fallen in love, but it’s clear that Eddie is merely interested in having some fun.

Poor Portia. She doesn’t fit in anywhere, and she clings to Eddie as the one she feels she can trust the most. She attends what sounds like a dreadful school and makes one friend there, but this friend doesn’t really satisfy, and she only gets in trouble while trying to make it through the school day. In the book’s second section, Anna and Thomas head off to France and leave Portia behind at the house of Anna’s old governess. Here, too, Portia feels like an outsider, and when she invites Eddie to visit her there, events head in a direction she never anticipated.

It’s Portia’s innocence that causes so much trouble, or, rather, it’s the world around her that causes the trouble, not knowing what to do with her innocence. Portia isn’t trained to deal with proper London society or with boys who make rash promises or with the isolation she endures. Anna and Thomas live dull, sterile lives; they have carefully cordoned themselves off from any real interaction with other people or even with each other:

Callers were unheard of at Windsor Terrace. They had been eliminated; they simply did not occur. The Quaynes’ [Thomas and Anna’s] home life was as much their private life as though their marriage had been illicit. Their privacy was surrounded by an electric fence — friends who did not first telephone did not come.

In this atmosphere Portia dries up; it’s no wonder she turns to other people, even harmful people, to try to find some liveliness and love.

Bowen is very much interested in psychological states. The back cover describes her style as Jamesian, and I think that claim holds true; Bowen describes her characters’ inner lives in depth, capturing the ebb and flow of their feelings and responses. It’s a thoughtful book, one that moves slowly — although not in a way that might bore — and tells its story with pleasing thoroughness. If you like books with emotional and psychological insight — ones that capture the complexity of character, then you may like this book.

Cross-posted here.

#2 Death of the Heart - Elizabeth Bowen

Outmoded Author Challenge #2

Sixteen years old Portia Quayne has grown up exiled not from her own country but from normal, cheerful family life. She is the product of an ignominious affair between her mother Irene and a married man. However much chagrin the adulterous number has caused Thomas Quayne, Portia’s half-brother, his mother, before she died, had gone out of her way to accommodate the mistress and approved the marriage.

Recently orphaned, Portia moves into Thomas’ house at Windsor Terrace, a luxurious but emotionally sterile London home where each person lives impaled upon a private obsession. Life is so restrained and edited that no feeling can ever thicken intimacy. It is not so much that the Quaynes don’t like the teenage girl as they find her keen eye, observant perception unsettling. Anna, Thomas’ wife, especially finds Portia unnerving because she “doesn’t like to be watched.” Her eyes are so riveting as if the invincible innocence and perspicacity give her power to see through Anna’s secrecy.

But the monotonous life at Windsor Terrace is quickly intruded by Portia’s falling for Eddie, a close friend of Anna with whom she has a liaison. That Eddie has made a villain of Anna, who treats her with a polite hostility, hypnotizes her and binds her close to him like an alliance. Unfortunately Portia cannot (she has no clue) comprehend evil or unkind motives. Though the main plot follows her relationship with Eddie, the novel’s real tension lies between Portia and Anna, as the girl comes to grief against Anna’s cynicism and insidiousness.

Bowen has very keen eye for such shadings of morality that in between the lines of her writing she exposes the ugliest, the most cruel, the most despicable in the genteel society. A sensitive observer of the way we live, she deals in motives and mind games that render the novel very psychological and haunting. The tension between Portia and Anna is not revealed by their interactions, who are meager, but between their ears.

I mentioned a very significant quote on innocence in a previous post. So the theme of innocence being corrupted is inverted in order to fully accentuate the destructive power of innocence. While innocence is a virtue, those who are innocent can be very vulnerable to betrayal, for innocent people, who exact a very brave happiness and sanguine nature, are strangers to the world. Portia’s innocence might poise as a challenge to a society that is completely lacking in compassion. In the end this respectable virtue makes her a victim of the social conventions in which the players tend to be more civil and kind than they really are.

Thoughts up on The Last September

I finally got around to talking about The Last September by Elizabeth Bowen! I absolutely loved this one, and I think everyone who hasn't read Bowen should at least look into her. :) See lots of passages from the book, and a little about my thoughts here.

The Last September by Elizabeth Bowen

I'm about fifty pages into The Last September by Elizabeth Bowen, and so far I'm absolutely loving it! It rather reminds me of an interwar Jane Austen so far, and it also evokes Eudora Welty's Delta Wedding. I think I may have a new favourite author on my hands. :)

The reason I'm posting now is that I just had to share the great preface in my edition (a 1964 Knopf hardcover I bookmooched). She discusses writing the book, and she just seems so graceful and classy. I'd like to share some of her thoughts on writing. While I'm not a writer, these seemed full of insight.

One may perceive that, generally, in the novel the characters are held in the same orbit by some sort of situation which sets, as it were, a trap-some central device, devilmen, search or passion. My own solution, however, was a more childish one: again in The Last September, as in The Hotel, I used the device of grouping my men and women actually under the same roof, and of keeping them thus located, whether by choice or chance, for such time as the story should need to run its course. The Italian resort hotel of my first venture was, for the second, replaced by the Irish country house. I recognise that I am, and was bound to be, a writer intensely subject to scence and time: both do more than figure, they play their parts in my plots. The approaching close of the visitors' winter season adds edge to the little drama of The Hotel. The Last September, even more, takes its pitch from that lovely, too mortal month which gives the novel its name.

The writer is like the swimmer caught by an undertow; he is borne by it back to those scenes of his own life most steeped in subjective experience which he did not know of. Sensation accumulates where it is least sought; meaning flows in, retrospectively, where we were blind to any. One is captured by the mysterious, the imperious hauntedness of a pariod not understood in its own time.

I was very much struck by her observations on being young. I turned twenty-one in April, and I feel as if she put her finger on where I am right now. It's reassuring to know that I'm not the only one!

In "real" life, my early girhood in the County Cork, in the house which is the "Danielstown" of the story was, though accented from time to time by aspiration, passing romance or pleasure, mainly a period of impatience, frivolity, lassitude or boredome. I endlessly asked myself what I should be, and when? The young (who are, ironically, so much envied) do all, I suspect, face those patches of barren worry.

When one is young, years are longer; each one one has lived seems dynamic and fraught with a conquest. In most lives (and mine conformed to the shape) the years between twnety and twenty-eight are often important, decisive ones.

Letters from a prisoner by James Blake

Ever since I started this challenge some of the selected authors have been popping out at me. Elizabeth Bowen was apparently a friend with Ivy Compton-Burnett and I spied a J.B. Priestly book (a nominee who didn't quite make the cut) on a used book store's shelf. James Blake mentioned Bowen and a more popular author, D.H. Lawrence, in two out of series of letters published in the 13th issue of the Paris Review in 1956. I've posted excerpts of each below.

"...James Blake, a night club pianist by profession, was a convict in a southern county jail. The Mr. X to whom a number of the letters are addressed is a well-known American author."

DEC.9, 1951

Dear X:
This week I finished a book that Jack O. sent me, Elizabeth Bowen's Heat of the Day, and for a couple of days, impressionable ass that I am, I was clipped in my speech and moodily English. That kind of performance needs a discerning audience, though, and if my colleagues noticed it at all, it was to give me a brief, dimly suspicious glance and dismiss the matter, the way a cow does when she looks at you.

--My work out on the road has brought me into contact with quite a number of cows lately, and I've never seen anything to beat the way they can convey quiet contempt. It may be that one brief glance tells them I'm not a bull and therefore beneath notice -- Still, you can't tell. A number of the funloving lads on the gang give vivid and explicit accounts of illicit relations with cows, and it may be that the harrassed and confused animals have put down the whole human race as warped, or inconstant, or at the very least impotent... I think I shall leave all that to the admirable Kinsey.

Thank you ever so much for the deuce and the stamps and postcards. I was able to get a haircut, buy some tobacco and writing paper, and some food that wasn't drowning in glutinous gravy. Our cook is a con who was a merchant mariner and he seems to believe that if it ain't afloat it ain't digestible. As a result, I am awash most of the time.

I have the published versions of four plays I'd like to send you, if you care to send me about forty cents in stamps, and if you're interested. Not hawking anything, I just would like to reciprocate in any way I can. They are Rose Tattoo, King and I, Moon is Blue and Gioconda Smile. If you don't read plays yourself, you might know someone who does.

JAN. 13, 1952

Dear X.:
Of the books you sent, I've enjoyed re-reading Huck Finn very much and D.H. Lawrence's hotsy-totsty opus The Lost Girl, new to me. Some rather shrewd and delightful humor in this Lawrence book, though, something I've encountered in his other things.

One thing I have noticed about Lawrence, though (said the mountain, proudly bringing forth a mouse). I ran across Lady Chatterly not long ago and re-read it. To my intense disappointment, most of the "hot parts" were deleted, and it was spangled with asterisks -- but in both books, it seemed to me that his descriptions of scenes of passion, or bedroom bouts, were almost womanishly fervent. That is, the viewpoint seemed to be female. Curious.

However, maybe it is all "in the eye of the beholder", and instead of being penetrating, I am merely tipping my mitt. The hell with it.