16 thoughts on “The Last September by Elizabeth Bowen”

  1. 16

    “…the rooms smelt of window-sills.”

    Marda is packing to leave, to catch a train to Dublin, rain outside…

    “Also, what was he to do about her suitcase if it ever turned up? But he almost feared now it would never turn up. He sighed and went back to the library.”

    Lois (in the aftermath of yesterday’s “pistol’s little acute, pig eye”) is idly bouncing a tennis ball against the wall between the portraits.?..

    Lois flees Livvy, fickle friends, but where is Hugo?
    Should Lois help Marda pack, in view of yesterday “passingly intimate” moment with the pistol or for some other reason for Marda’s back of the hand to be abraded? And what of the latter’s engagement ring?

    On the boxroom refuge’s whitewash, Lois sees that Laura had abraded the letters “L.N., and left an insulting drawing of somebody, probably Hugo.”
    That world of love again.

    Other passing matters…
    Of the English…
    “But if one stops talking, they tell one the most extraordinary things, about their husbands, their money affairs, their insides. They don’t seem discouraged by not being asked.”

    Hugo sent by Francie to Marda’s too with the occult message of eau de cologne….
    He had earlier been reading in a magazine ….
    “There was that Tsar being bombed by Nihilists: very interesting.”

    Fickle In the yard, “under the dripping chestnuts, Lois and Livvy walked about in their mackintoshes.”

    “Visitors took form gradually  in his household, coming out of a haze of rumour, and seemed but lightly, pleasantly superimposed on the vital pattern till a departure tore great shreds from the season’s texture […] There was to be no opportunity for what he must not say to be rather painfully not said.”

    Tennis ball skirmish as play, Lois and Livvy, the latter abrading her chin. David to rub it better later?

    Most amazingly touching, haunting closure to this chapter, enfolding my own personal moments today, living dents in the pillow of Bowenesque time, that ironic world of love…
    “Lois found in the empty spare room a piece of paper that crept on the floor like a living handkerchief. Through the defenceless windows came in the vacancy of the sky; the grey ceiling had gone up in remoteness. More wind came through, flowers moved in the vases, the pages of a book left open beside the bed turned over hurriedly. The pillow was dinted, as though half-way through packing Marda had lain down lazily. Or as though since last night the pillow had not forgotten the feel of her head.”

    ‘More wind came through’? And we all know what might happen later today in the reader’s real-time…

    ***
    Eunice glanced at the white forms that whirled rather frighteningly over the wind-teased garden.
    — Elizabeth Bowen

    ‘I know,’ Eunice said. ‘It apparently can’t be helped.’
    — Elizabeth Bowen

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  2. THE DEPARTURE OF GERALD

    17

    “During a strained little silence, between two gusts of wind, Mrs Vermont observed that an angel must be passing over the house; she wanted them to listen for its wings.  They listened; they thought of empty country blotted out by the darkness.”

    One of Elizabeth Bowen’s most famous novel quotes, I’d say, or at least the one I remember best from my earlier reading of her novels. This quote comes from the end of this chapter. And now highly poignant, in the light of what happened yesterday with Eunice in my own real-time, now waning in aftermath…

    A dance party, with much used gramophone needles, in the barracks, despite the troubled times and the danger of girls travelling to it to pair up with men…
    “Entertainments in barracks had been given up long ago. But it was not easy to veto what ladies described as ‘a little fun in the huts.”

    One man shell-shocked, fear of madness over the edge …
    “The flash of his partner’s legs in their glassy stockings exasperated him, he gripped one of her ankles – harshly, as though it had been a man’s. […] His eyes, dark with fatigue and nervousness, were set in too close together, like a good-looking shark’s.”

    Lois has travelled far with David and Livvy, against the advice of the Naylors, with Lois hoping Gerald would be present…but there is no sign of him.
    Livvy with ‘common’ black pansies…

    “; he [Gerald] might have been sealed up permanently in tin, like a lobster. Did he regret the kiss? – he had not added a word to it.”

    “The wind came, knife-like, down through the lines of huts from the mountain, over a gulf of land where the farms were dark –“

    Lois has written to Viola that she intends to marry Gerald…

    “But the wind like a lunatic…”

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  3. 18

    “The wind whipped round the edge of the hut, ran through her hair at the roots and stung her ears –“

    The endemic wind continues, as it does in my own real-time today. Here a wind that takes the dance party and its denizens into a ‘stampede’ and ‘waterfall’, including the Death of the Gramophone as well as the Heart, and the cigarette dance of Gerald (now impassively turned up) in the wind! — in the then Neo-modernist novel with romcom elements, its Joycean wind of words and ironing out of misunderstandings or embedding them again, about a previous ‘administered’ kiss, and today’s kisses between near strangers, English cad or bounder (or ghost?) called Daventry flirting with Lois, plus talk of ‘spies’ et al… and a sentry in the night as a shadowy third for L and G? She sees G as no different than anyone else? Or what else do we deduce? We become as confused and impassive as them under the modernist spells of emotional wind now pent up: “….as though to see if a watch had stopped.” Not forgetting the flaccid cucumber sandwiches!

    “….bursts from the gramophone came downhill like somebody coughing.”

    “; the dancers seemed to be moving slowly in jam. A group of young men stood by the door, coughing.”

    “..balanced his cigarette on the rim of the gramophone…”

    “The evening ‘went’ with a rush, with a kind of high impetuousness out of everybody’s control. Everyone looked and spoke and danced close up with a kind of exalted helplessness; intimacy tightened the very air.”

    “If the hut had risen and soared up into the air, so that someone stepping out at the door had to step back dizzily, she would hardly have been surprised.”

    “The pink room melted round, beatific and syrupy. He was closer than ever under the lovely compulsion of movement.”

    “…his face blinking in and out of the dark, faintly red with the pulse of his cigarette. She nursed her bare elbows, unconsciously shivering.”

    “…whistles that ran out long tongues when you blew them,

    “He [Daventry] stared at her [Lois’s] arms, at the inside of her elbows, with such intensity, she felt Gerald’s kisses were printed there.”

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  4. 19

    “‘Oh, marvellous . . . But what do you think: we broke the gramophone!’
    ‘Oh, the poor gramophone!’”

    It seems beautifully ironic that this further hot potato of concern is mentioned concurrently with helping Lois with her ‘suitcase’ from the trap, on her return from the dance party overnight.

    Hugo and Francie have discussed their future, as if moving to a bungalow with no stairs might help their marriage!

    “He [Laurence] dragged at his chair and stared at the trees through a flawed pane, across which Laura Naylor had scratched her name with a diamond. At his elbows, books were in toppling stacks; movement produced an avalanche. A wasp hung round him, tentative, scrawling Z’s on the air.”

    A ‘Z’ represents the two elbows?
    A wasp as yet another hot potato! Buzzing on and on like a bee in a bonnet!
    Laurence tellingly follows it into Marda’s ex-room where an eight day clock still ticked…

    Lois: “‘I thought the hut would be blown away. And we broke the gramophone. There was a most sinister man called Daventry, with shell-shock . . .’”
    Sorry, I forgot the shell-shock angle there!

    “: she [Lois] thought of her room with the high ceiling, the foreign touch to the cheeks of afternoon pillows, the delicious crime of crossing one’s stockinged ankles over the rucked-back quilt and the slow recession of fact down a long tunnel till the windows stretched and faded.”

    Laurence with Lois, as she asks: what am I for?
    He suggests to carry on with her German (despite the recent first world war?) and telling mention of a novel of Mann’s: Aickman was inspired by Mann; Bowen, too, I guess.

    Lois reads a (resignedly?) loving letter to her from Gerald, after last night… there seems to be an inevitability to their marriage, joyful or joyless? Telling images of sweet-peas as a Lois leitmotif, “a discovery of a lack”…?

    “Noiselessly, a sweet-pea moulted its petals on to the writing-table, leaving a bare pistil. The pink butterfly flowers, transparently balancing, were shadowed faintly with blue as by an intuition of death. Lois bowed forward, her forehead against the edge of the table.”

    Did Marda call her drawings ‘nice’?
    Lois and Hugo amid ‘apple trees’….

    “The graded elephants on the bookcases were all fatality.”

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  5. 20

    “Anna Partridge, whose brain was all shreddy with rabbit-combing and raffia, had had electric light for years, just from living in England; even the Trents talked of harnessing their waterfall.”

    Lady Myra Naylor wonders, in yellow gloves, why she is responsible for the lighting…
    “She swept the rags and the lamp scissors into a drawer, shut the drawer on their malodour, and pulled off her gloves, sighing. She saw life, perhaps, as a shuffle of setting to partners, then a drawn-out, coupled but somehow solitary curtsying, to him, the other, the rest of the eight.”
    Yet, the opaque part of Bowen comes out here, as this is related to Myra’s interest in Schiller and Art. Lighting and its fittings as a part of the Enlightenment, and she is scornful about Lois’ probable marriage to Gerald, and says she should go to Art school instead.
    Ironic, in light of the enlightenment and destiny, that Lois is now in fact being less ‘clandestine’ about her love life, while still a love life full of its own shadows and potential drops…an ominousness that somehow shines through the prose!

    Well, an officer is coming, Kathleen the cook knows and she plans…
    “…would she slap up a sally-lunn? On the whole, Lady Naylor thought drop-cakes.”

    “Unaccountable iced cake” is the actual result! As G turns up on his motor bike…

    Hugo still moons over Marda, and wants Francie to write to her as some sort of connection with himself…
    “‘There was a point I wanted to clear, about Metternich – you remember that argument? I’ve just come on a hook – I suppose I had better write myself.’”
    A hook or a book? My version of the novel has the former.

    Meanwhile, tellingly, art and literature is superseded by that suitcase again!…
    “Francie, looking down in despair at her blouse as he walked away, saw that the jabot was crumpled. She could not understand how a woman who travelled with suitcases could look as smooth as Marda.”

    Hugo has some moving Bowenesque passages of thought about himself when once watching Marda with Gerald. Too long to quote here.

    Lois tussling with thoughts of Gerald…
    “– from Japanese prints she had ignored in shops, an idea of odd, angular archways and some strips of vertical writing. He must no doubt some day be a captain, and ‘captain’s lady’ had a ballad-like cadence. She almost took Gerald’s arm.”
    A sense of that pulling destiny, but which one?

    Gerald thinks of Hugo as ‘ruined’ by ‘adultery’. As if marriage itself has this risk built in…? And he says out loud…
    “‘She [Marda] was all herself. Doesn’t love kind of finish people off . . . with something that isn’t them, in a way you can feel?’”

    “…her [Lois’] physical apprehension of him [Gerald] was confused by the slipping, cold leaves. Her little sighs elated then alarmed him.
    ‘What’s the matter?’ he said, his lips close to her face.
    ‘I don’t like the smell of the laurels. Let’s come out of here.’”

    Laurels in assonance with Laura?

    Trent’s arrival tellingly puts Gerald “in joyous eclipse” – or is abeyance a better word for it, I ask?

    But who is Anna Partridge?

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  6. 21

    “Minnows, disturbed like thoughts, darted shadowy over the clear yellow stare of the stones.”

    Hugo, desolate, now at the erstwhile Gothic mill; Marda’s letter swallowed by Lois a snub by Lois to H bungalow brushing F’s hair confused… Or is that me?

    “He was swept by an irresistible anger back to that affair of the pistol. For Marda had written: her hand had healed; no one had asked any questions or wondered, she said.”

    Lois writing back to M with a sort of Aickman gluey Zenoism:
    “Since you went, it has been the same time all day:”

    Lois…
    “But when she looked for Gerald there seemed too much of him.  He was a wood in which she counted from tree to tree – all hers – and knew the boundary wall right round.  But how to measure this unaccountable darkness between the trees, this living silence?  So she turned back to Mr Montmorency, adding a paragraph.”

    Hugo seen in Lois’s own youthful desolation. That Bowenesque nothingness…
    “Hugo was pleased with the place; here he seemed to have stepped through into some kind of non-existence.”
    He sees a vision of Marda as a sort of hologram and he touches her hand…

    ***

    Imperious Myra to meet G at the Fogartys. Meanwhile, why is Mr Fogarty under lock and key? My rhetorical question.

    “Thus, she [Myra] conceded no more to the room than an imposing silhouette of hat and boa, while Gerald, glancing round pessimistically at the chairs, remaining with elbow planted among photo-frames on the mantelpiece, was exposed to her full in the strained green light coming over the bushes.”

    ….That elbow’s pivot of plot again… the question of G’s pedigree and money, whatever his rank in the army from Surrey…
    Myra skirmishes with the topic of Livvy and David till reaching the main battle about G and Lois. Myra is another of those Bowen demon ladies, manipulating the plot just like Bowen herself. Even more powerful than her!

    “…touched her boa, her jabot, two carnations pinned in the lace.”

    “An unusual pendulum swung in him, he was ruined – resolute – ruined.”
    Anger airbrushing G’s ‘niceness’…

    “And love, meanwhile, did not so much lie bleeding as sit back stunned, bruised, a little craven from shock.”

    “Francie was shown in. ‘Oh!’ she cried, ‘what a lot of cushions! Kittens! Fancy sitting on them, I should feel like a cannibal.”

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  7. 22

    Bowen’s arguably most oblique chapter that means far more than it means…

    “You know, Hugo, it may be horrid, but I don’t trust Myra sometimes. She says things aren’t, and then she turns and makes these curious little dabs at them. She dislikes the Clonmore rectory people, she says they are breath-y,… […] My dear Francie, life is too short for all this.’ (Though that was not the matter with life, really: life was too long.)”

    Something about H’s collars! And talk again about looking after Marda’s ‘luggage’!
    A poignant almost comic interlude about one ‘sad’ marriage towards another one about to be aborted…

    Myra’s earlier doubts instilled in the ear of Gerald, and F with candlestick goes to warn Lois in her bedroom, who tellingly adjusts her dress to prove she had already started undressing in readiness for sleep….

    “Her [Francie’s] candlestick, wobbling with indecision, brushed the ceiling with shadows. Wires twanged where some cattle rubbed on a fence in the damp darkness. Francie went across and tapped on Lois’s door.
    Lois turned in alarm from the dark window where she stood holding her elbows, not quite thinking. Her heart thumped as the crack of the door widened, letting in foreign light.”

    Possibly, now, the most obliquely Bowenesque moments of Gluey Zenoism in the whole of Bowen?…Earlier some talk by Lois Laurence inadvertently squashing a snail on the path. And later 3 armed men stealing Laurence’s shoes and watch; 3 minutes become 50 minutes, and his watch is later returned in the post still, working. Later mention in text of a clock stopped.

    Next day… Lois and Gerald meet, in the wake of Myra’s oblique ‘poison’ about their proposed engagement.
    Lois calls her Aunt mad; Lois with hands but no touch.
    “– Gerald, you’ll kill me, just standing there. You don’t know what it’s like for a snail, being walked on . . .”
    G looks at his own wrist watch and fingers his belt.

    Not sure whether below is a typo in my electronic version of the book, but, even if it is, it does seem to become one of the many meaningful typos that I often discover when gestalt real-time reviewing…
    “‘Gerald I’ she called. But by this time he seemed to be out of ear-shot.”

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  8. 23

    “…a blank space occupied by Anna Partridge.”

    You must know this novel already, so you will not be surprised by the shock in this chapter, as if one was expecting it and, so, it happens, which seems an apt thing to think today of all days!

    Starting with a comic scene to act as a foil or reverse looking-glass to this chapter’s end…
    The English and their always dropping in before Midday. And their supercilious righteousness and condescension to the Irish who they are ‘defending’, thus allowing them to drop in unannounced, with all the flurry ensuing when the Vermonts and sundry ‘drop in’ in their Ford (cf A World of Love)…referring to the ‘darling cows’ and snooping on behalf of Gerald’s black mood and making snide comments to Lois. And there is another wasp (!), when Laurence ‘greets’ them surlily and Lois asks after the gramophone!

    “Francie was lying down with ‘a head’;”

    “Betty said with dignity: ‘There may be going to be an offensive.’
    ‘Sssh,’ whispered Denise, pinching her elbow.”

    “Gerald says all your looking-glasses make him feel sleepy.”

    *

    “The news crept down streets from door to door like a dull wind, fingering the nerves, pausing. […] Mr Fogarty dropped his glass and stood bent some time like an animal, chin on the mantelpiece.  Philosophy did not help; in his thickening brain actuality turned like a mill-wheel.  His wife, magnificent in her disbelief, ran out, wisps blowing, round the square and through the vindictively silent town.”

    “Then Denise saw Lois clearly, standing affectedly on the Danielstown steps with a tin of biscuits, a room full of mirrors behind her.”

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  9. 24

    “And listen: are you getting in your apples?”

    “She thought how accurate Gerald was and how anxious, last time, he had been to establish just when she had been happy because of him, on what day, for how long.”

    Seems appropriate Daventry brought the news to Lois! (If I recall that correctly.)

    *

    “‘Well, don’t stop, Laurence. You’re going somewhere, aren’t you?’
    ‘Nowhere particular. Not if you –’
    ‘No, I don’t specially. Though if it has to be anyone, you.’
    Taking this for what it was worth, he went on, brushing awkwardly past her against the laurels.”

    *

    Chapter 24, and February 24, today, a terrible synchronised omen for the world’s real-time….

    “For in February, before those leaves had visibly budded, the death – execution, rather – of the three houses, Danielstown, Castle Trent, Mount Isabel, occurred in the same night.  A fearful scarlet ate up the hard spring darkness; indeed, it seemed that an extra day, unreckoned, had come to abortive birth that these things might happen.  It seemed, looking from east to west at the sky tall with scarlet, that the country itself was burning… […] The roads in unnatural dusk ran dark with movement, secretive or terrified; not a tree, brushed pale by wind from the flames, not a cabin pressed in despair to the bosom of night, not a gate too starkly visible but had its place in the design of order and panic.”

    All was sudden, yet expected, as impassive as waning marriages or aborted ones, but still shocking, like a war. An attrition to stoicise about. A great novel that disarmingly has its own way of being out of ear-shot. Until now?

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