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.
