caught in the whirl
by Douglas Messerli
Elizabeth Bowen Eva Trout (London: Jonathan Cape, 1969)
As we first glimpse this towering and overpowering figure, she is about
to bolt from the household in which she had originally asked her guardian to
place her: Larkins, the run-down farm house wherein reside the Arbles. Iseult
Arble, a former teacher of the girl, is perhaps the first and only person who
attempted to actually educate her; while Iseult's husband, the less than
brilliant Eric, has grown comfortable with Eva's presence, he feels a growing
tension with his wife, a shift that Eva interprets as Eric's attraction to
herself.
In preparation for the move, announced to the Dancey family, while kept
secret from the Arbles, Eva's London-based guardian, who has gotten wind of
Eva's plans, calls Iseult to the city in order to plot a way to keep his charge
from running off before inheriting, a few months later, the fortune left to her
by her father, Willy. And the interchange between the two is one of the great
moments of the book, as these most intelligent figures of the work attempt to comprehend
and outwit one other. Constantine, as one might describe him, is a darker and
more sinister version of Iseult, a man who clearly is used to hatching
plots—although in this case he fails. For Eva rushes to the small town of
Broadstairs, purchasing a house by the sea. But it is clear that this woman,
incapable of even boiling water, will not be able long to care for herself.
Eva has left behind numerous signs of her destination, and both Eric
and, soon after, Constantine follow her, the latter believing he has found the
two in an uncompromising situation (in fact, Eric has simply taken a nap). Eric and Iseult divorce, just the first of
numerous negative effects that this giantess will have on all the figures
around her.
After gaining her inheritance, Eva travels again, this time to the US to
purchase what is presumably an illegal baby, there coincidentally meeting up
with her first love, a former fellow classmate, Elsinore, who is now married to
a traveling salesman. Her encounter with Eva results in an expression of great
unhappiness with her current circumstances.
Eva soon returns to England with her young son in hand, this time
staying in a series of hotels. The child is a deaf mute, perfect for a mother
who has little of intelligence to say, and who throughout the fiction is
searching for someone upon which to shower love. In short, Eva continues to
wreck havoc upon all those with whom she becomes involved.
For Eva, we gradually discover, is not so much a realist character for
the author, as she is a metaphor of pure action, a big, clumsy, whirlwind of a
figure of thoughtless motion. Those least able to act, the emotionally complex
and introspective Iseult and the eldest Dancey child, Henry, a bright and witty
boy who ultimately enrolls in Cambridge, are naturally attracted (if slightly
disgusted) by this energized force. Eva represents precisely what these two are
missing in their lives. Yet by nature they both fear her: Iseult is not at all
amused by Eva's blank stares, and Henry chastises Eva several times for her
failure to think things out. Yet both enter into strange commitments with this
force. Iseult determines to read to the young Eva in hopes of opening her mind
and, later, of course, opens her house to her. Against his better judgment,
Henry agrees to play her husband in order to fulfill the fantasy of love and
marriage for which Eva has so longed.
The disaster with which Bowen's fiction ends, the child murdering his
mother with Eric's loaded and real
gun, is somehow inevitable. For in a sense, the great vortext that Eva
symbolizes must be destroyed in order that other, more normal figures, can
survive. Ultimately Eva's son, Jeremy, would have suffocated in Eva's fantasy
of love, and he would never have been able to return enough to fill the vacuum
at its center.
Bowen reiterates the tension between the two kinds of people she has
created with references to Victorian literature that both Iseult and Henry
mention. Broadstairs, the town to where Eva first retreats, is the home of
Charles Dickens, a place which Iseult later visits. Henry mentions Browning's
narrative poem-play, Pippa Passes.
These two authors could not be more different. Dickens' works, filled with
motherless and fatherless orphans desperately seeking for love, are played out
on huge stages of vast action that catches up its characters into circumstances
that are nearly always extreme, very bad or very good.
Pippa, of Browning's carefully rhymed poem, walks through the city,
singing songs that almost no one hears, but who changes everyone for the better
as she invisibly passes. While the figures of Browning's work may be
contemplating divorce, rape, murder, revenge, and other horrible acts, Pippa's
very existence, for the most part, alters their awful plans.
Iseult must certainly see herself more as a Pippa than a Dickensian
figure, while Eva, it is clear, is a 20th century equivalent of more than one
of the great novelist's desperately needy beings. Iseult's feeling that she has
somehow magically connected to Eva's son Jeremy, is perhaps a kind of Pippa
fantasy. But Iseult, in the end, does find some sense of balance, returning to
Eric.
Henry, like Constantine is too cynical to see himself as aligned with
either, but the family in which he has grown up behave much like a series of
Dickens' comic characters. But he, like Constantine—who changes in the process
of the story from a wicked controller of others to a man in love, in his case
with a priest—is so thoroughly affected by Eva that by work's end, he is ready
to really marry her instead of simply mimicking the act. Eva, drama itself, may
be wonderful to contemplate, but is impossible to have and to hold.
Los Angeles, July 18, 2011
Reprinted from EXPLORINGfictions (August 2011)
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