I’ll be quick about this.
First, I had mentioned recently that I was reading Stamboul Train or Orient Express by Graham Greene.
Well, that didn’t last.
For once, I was put off by content.
No, not the plot itself, which I was not finding that interesting anyway, but rather some choices Greene made in his characterization and description in this admittedly early work, written when he was younger, and dependent, in seems, on unquestioned mid-century English casual prejudices and stereotypes.
First was his frequent and go-to descriptive of one of his main characters as “the Jew.” Yes I suppose that the fact that this character is Jewish – and his headed to Turkey to (I think) finish off some sort of business deal is important, but it just got increasingly tiresome and jarring to read the Jew….the Jew….the Jew….over and over and over again.
(Greene also used “the Jew” and some stereotyping descriptives of Jewish people in Brighton Rock, but apparently re-edited the work later to minimize them.)
Secondly, there’s a lesbian character who is just such a caricature – she’s a central character and supposed to be our heroine, I think, but Greene draws her in the pathetic-half-a-real-woman-mannish-sort of mode that it’s just…tiresome. Not insightful. Tiresome.
So I quit. That’s one Greene that will go unread.
(Note – it’s not about being “offended” – it’s about shallow characterization in service of a plot that wasn’t interesting me much anyway.)
Okay, what did I finish?
Well, I picked up this collection of novellas at an estate sale some time back, and read No One Writes to the Colonel by Gabriel García Márquez, and which I liked a lot. Specific yet subtle, mesmerizing in a way. Evocative, as we say. I liked it. How’s that for some deep criticism!
Finally, over the past few days, I read The Death of the Heart by Elizabeth Bowen.
Bowen is an author I’ve long thought I should read as she is celebrated as one England’s best writers of the 20th century. Reading this was a good use of my time. I enjoyed the experience about 2/3 of the time – the other 1/3 felt tedious and repetitive. Some really wonderful descriptive writing and deep character exploration gave me a lot to think about especially in terms of my weak own writing efforts.
But in the end, it was a fairly exhausting experience, and I’m not sure for what purpose.
The sense of being orphaned that Bowen surely felt after her mother’s death clearly informs “The Death of the Heart.” Portia has lost first her father and now her mother, with whom she had moved rather merrily through a succession of cut-rate European hotels. Bereft and lost, she is shipped off to the handsome house on Regent’s Park in London of her half brother and his wife, Anna. Thomas Quayne, two decades older than she, the child of their father’s first marriage, is a successful advertising man whom Bowen captures perfectly in just a few words:
“His head and forehead were rather grandly constructed, but at thirty-six his amiable, mobile face hung already loosish over the bony frame. His mouth and eyes expressed something, but not the whole, of him; they seemed to be cut off from the central part of himself. He had the cloudy, at some moments imperious look of someone fulfilling his destiny imperfectly; he looked not unlike one of the lesser Emperors.”
The house in which Thomas and Anna live is indeed handsome, but it is “all mirrors and polish,” offering “no place where shadows lodged, no point where feeling could thicken.” It is a house where “people said what they did not mean, and did not say what they meant.” Thomas is vaguely well-intentioned, but distracted and distant. Anna is beautiful but cold and devious. Soon it becomes the house where Portia “has learnt to be lonely,” her only friend the housekeeper Matchett, reticent and terse but kindly inclined.
Then into the house comes Eddie, 23 years old, “a bright little cracker that, pulled hard enough, goes off with a loud bang.” My old Avon paperback copy of the novel calls him “an astonishing cad,” but sleek opportunist is more to the point: “He took an underlyingly practical view of life, and had no time for relations that came to nothing or for indefinitely polite play.” He pays court on Anna, who humors him but does not succumb to him, and turns his attentions on Portia, who falls wildly, hopelessly in love with him. He strings her along, and when she’s sent to the seacoast while Thomas and Anna go to Europe, he comes for a weekend that turns into a disaster. The precise reason for the devastation she feels will seem tame to many of today’s readers, but the devastation itself is utterly real and believable.
Some describe Bowen’s writing as rather “Jamesian” – and yes, this is true. She goes deep into a character’s mind, emotions and point of view, often with longer, intricate sentences.
But it wasn’t quite that was exhausting to me. It was more that this is a portrait of an mostly inauthentic crew of people who are living on the most superficial level imaginable – all of them except, of course, Portia, the housekeeper and a couple of other minor characters.
This is who they are, and this Bowen’s intention here – to lay out this ultimately inhumane superficiality – and she succeeds. But honestly, given my attention span and taste, I prefer my between-the-wars casual English cruelty and indifference offered with more viciousness and humor, a la Waugh, for example.
It just felt like a very long autopsy of people who weren’t exactly bad – because that might be more interesting – but who were quite ordinary in their mistaken sense of their own extraordinariness. They are not trying to do anything interesting, they seem to have no interest in doing anything truly interesting, there’s no real passion. The only character who is invested in her world, who puts energy into caring for it and making it better is – of course – the housekeeper, Matchett.
That said, Bowen is a masterful writer, in terms of craft. Her descriptions are poetic and precise.
For example – this gets at the point of the emptiness of this life and Matchett’s place in it:
In this airy vivacious house, all mirrors and polish, there was no place where shadows lodged, no point where feeling could thicken. The rooms were set for strangers’ intimacy, or else for exhausted solitary retreat…(42)
….In fact, something edited life in the Quayne’s house – the action of some sort of brake or deterrent was evident in the behaviour of such people as Eddie. At the same time, no one seemed clear quite what was being discarded, or whether anything vital was being let slip away. If Matchett were feared, if she seemed to threaten the house, it was because she seemed most likely to put her thumb on the thing. (173)
Since this is just a quick look, a couple more quick quotes to let you see what I mean when I praise writing as succinct and evocative and true. This, of another teenager, Portia’s only friend of her own age, a life full of drama, not quite grasped by Portia:
Lilian had all of these mysterious tomorrows: yesterdays made her sigh, but were never accounted for. (59)
Finally this. Nothing life-changing, but containing so much. Portia has been shipped off to the seaside while her brother and sister-in-law, Anna, go to Italy. She is staying with her sister-in-law’s former nanny and her two adult children. This is at the end of her first breakfast, after meeting Dickie and Daphne in succession, as they descend for breakfast and then dash off:
She rushed, and soon was gone down the esplanade. Daphne used nothing stronger than ‘goodness’ or ‘dash’: all the vigour one wanted was supplied by her manner. In this she was unlike Anna, who at moments of tension let out oaths and obscenities with a helpless, delicate air. Where Anna, for instance, would call a person a bitch, Daphne would call the person an old cat. Daphne’s person was sexy, her conversation irreproachably chaste. She would downface any remark by saying, ‘You are awful’, or simply using her eyes, When she had quite gone, Portia felt deflated, Mrs. Heccomb looked dazed. For Portia, Daphne and Dickie seemed a crisis that surely must be unique: she could not believe that they happened every day. (146)
I love that last line – it’s just perfect.
Charlotte was Both 