Women Talking: England & New York

The fifth Elizabeth Bowen novel in my recent run was The Little Girls, one of the talkiest of her novels. Even taking into account my weakened, flu-ish state these past days, I struggled to stay with the little girls and the women they became. They had nicknames, which doesn't help the reader's focus. Clare was Mumbo and Sheila was Sheikie and Diana was Dicey. Their concerns revolve around a coffer they buried in the grounds of their school when they were eleven or twelve, containing unnamed objects they each chose, to be discovered by someone in the future, and a new iteration of this in a kind of cave near Dicey's (Diana's, now Dinah's) home. There's great emphasis on houses and their objects, and much discomfort around emotions: talk blurs rather than reveals, so much so that I found myself only imagining these women in their settings and taking no interest in who they were or had been. I kept imagining Elizabeth Bowen in her society — polite yet wilful, almost eccentric but not quite — and in her house in North Cork, visited by various culturati and relatives or near-relatives, a society that knew itself but did not warm the cockles of anyone's heart. I started to read the book again to see if these women and their objects would come clear, but gave up after a few chapters. 

Grace Paley, on the other hand, in the last of her three collections of stories, Later the Same Day, plunges me from the first sentence into groups of friends in a time and a place, mid-twentieth century and New York. Not only are these women talking to each other, there is no style in the stories other than the talking style. Here is a writer who talked life into being, who talked relationships and politics in the voices she had heard all her life. She pulls writing into the world she knows. Elizabeth Bowen pulls the world she knows into writing. Neither is a world I know firsthand, but Grace Paley's is the one I'm drawn to, the one I almost envy, perhaps because her jewishness makes the lifelong attachments and warm humanity she writes about seem viscerally close to who I am, or at any rate who I might have been. Others have talked about families where vehement discussion about politics was the norm, where real concern transmuted into action and consensus.

Last night, in the last story in Later the Same Day, I read, twice, startled each time, the word intelligentsia. When did I last read/hear/say that word? Probably never said it; it would have seemed at least presumptuous. Now practically seditious, or just irrelevant. An end of night dream brought it into focus. A large room, full but spacious, lots of tables, people eating or talking or reading or writing. I considered for a while which table to choose: one that would let me eavesdrop or join in the conversation, or one where I could write, and think, and daydream. I think I chose the latter.

A World of Love, Elizabeth Bowen at home, more or less

A girl wearing a muslin dress she found in a trunk in the attic, goes out to look at the landscape wearing it, diffusing at the end of a hot summer. Later she finds a packet of love letters which she hides under a stone beneath an elder bush, and her younger sister finds and so we all come to understand something but not everything. Every time you learn something —who the letters were to, for example — you feel immediately you didn't need to know, you just needed to step outside in a muslin dress in north county cork, early twentieth century, and sense the summer ending.  

strangeness at the end of may

I read three Elizabeth Bowen novels in a row: The House in Paris, The Death of the Heart and Eva Trout or Changing Scenes. Children all askew, often sad, and aside, long-legged girls and young women shift from place to place for obscure reasons, strong compulsions run amok, they're observant, these long-legged girls and young women, as you need to be if you live on shifting sands. Dodging what? With a view to what? Her teacher Miss Smith asks Eva Trout, age sixteen, newly arrived at the school, if 'here' seemed strange still. Eva replies 'Anywhere would seem strange that did not'.

All Elizabeth Bowen's girl creatures can relate to this. The wayward English chill and freedom, hairpins flying, as with Virginia Woolf. I too can get there in a trice. The pleasure of pinning strangeness to the page, this is the locus, the focus, of reading as the season shifts.

 

Elizabeth Bowen, Eva Trout

I started re-reading Eva Trout by Elizabeth Bowen among two days of gales. What is she doing, Eva Trout, why is she always escaping, to another household, another hotel, another country, and who are her allies, if any? Lashings of plot are bathed in onward uncertainty.  Elizabeth Bowen, and Eva, do not give much away. The sentences are tight and loose, nervous and lax. You can avoid saying by saying a lot as well by saying a little. You can fall into the abyss almost anywhere.

Twinges of recognition impel me on. I'm glad someone else has written this. I continue reading on flights to and from London, on trains to and from Gatwick. Eva Trout comes into her own when I'm on the move, all antennae out.

Life is an anti-novel, I read on page 211 of my Avon edition, 1978. The front cover has a woman in an unrealistically long blue satin dress, draped about on a sofa, also draped. The blue satin is at your own risk. 'Everything must be plausible, by tomorrow', on page 261. But it isn't.

Anyhow, what a slippery fish is identity; and what is it, besides a slippery fish?... What is a person? Is it true, there is not more than one of each? If so, is it this singular forcefulness, or forcefulness arising from being singular, which occasionally causes a person to bite on history? All the more, in that case, what is a person?

Elizabeth Bowen, The heat of the night

Elizabeth Bowen on 'that heady autumn of the first London air raids', has a freedom, a light-headedness, the intimacy of the besieged, which she must have had already in her Anglo-Irish blood. The heat of the night, Chapter Five, I read in astonishment. Fear is my inherited sense of the Blitz, not privilege.

All through London, the ropings-off of dangerous tracts of street made islands of exalted if stricken silence, and people crowded against the ropes to admire the sunny emptiness on the other side.

Something of that sunny emptiness lasted into my childhood, fifty miles from London, drifts of leaves, dazzling silences. I didn't know bomb sites on the ground but I knew them in my mind.

The night behind and the night to come met across every noon in an arch of strain. To work or to think was to ache. In offices, factories, ministries, shops, kitchens the hot yellow sands of each afternoon ran to slowly; fatigue was the one reality. You dared not envisage sleep.

How much of this we take in with mother's milk is a conundrum.

That autumn of 1940 was to appear, by two autumns later, apocryphal, more far away than peace. No planetary round was to bring again that particular conjunction of life and death; that particular psychic London was to be gone for ever; more bombs would fall, but not on the same city.

Whence our sense of ruin.

The first generation of ruins, cleaned up, shored up, began to weather — in daylight they took their places as a norm of the scene; the dangerless nights of September two years later blotted them out. It was from this new insidious echoless propriety of ruins that you breathed in all that was most malarial.

I read this, not even at three a.m., and recognised everything.

The Little Girls, Elizabeth Bowen

The Little Girls by Elizabeth Bowen, a Reprint Society edition of 1966, sturdy hardback for these summer days.

The eponymous little girls are grandmothers at the start, mysteriously convoked by one of them. Part Two returns to their time at St Agatha's school, a coven of 11 year-olds who bury a box just before World War 1, a coffer of their secret, significant things, with a message written in blood.

We are dead, and all our fathers and mothers. You who find this, Take Care. These are our valuable treasures, and our fetters. They did not kill us, but could kill You. Her Bones, too. You need not imagine that they are ours, but Watch Out. No wonder you are puzzled. Truly Yours, the Buriers of This Box.

If I am drawn to the writing of the early-mid-twentieth century, it's because the psychic metronome was set then, the discomfort and the transparency. My own reunions going on fifty years are opaque, though I'm drawn to them. The nearest I can get to understanding female friendship and its angularities is via my mother and her friend Gertie, who bickered and sulked their way into old age; and the movie The Second Wives Club.

You know, a person's only a person when they have some really raging peculiarity—don't you notice that, Mrs Coral, with all your friends? 

So says Dinah. My mother was also called Dinah, always, (she disliked being mistaken for a Diana) unlike Elizabeth Bowen's principal Little Girl, who began as Diana, and was Dicey to her friends.

You are Dinah. One becomes, you've become. So look here, Dinah, try and have sense! Sad though it was we lost touch, you and I have got on perfectly well without one another for going on fifty years—

Up at the pond, I lean in on the uncomfortable prose, the frequent asides and italicised emphases, the unfinished sentences, so English, so chilly and sensible. The plot, the buried coffer, all turn out to be empty. Everything, home and reality, the blood of messages, has run away.

Everything has. Now it has, you see. Nothing's real any more ...  Nothing's left, out of going on fifty years.

Part Three draws into deepening disquiet as Dicey, Sheikie and Mumbo re-enter each other's lives. Nothing, of course, is resolved or revealed. Sentences lean into their hesitations, their uncertain clauses, exhaustive precisions, their long stories never quite told, the door to the cave, the new, expanded coffer for the future, is tied shut with thick, damp rope.