The Bazaar and Other Stories (2 page)

 

Of all influences on Bowen’s short stories, none is stronger than

Katherine Mansfield’s. As Bowen confides in the preface to

Early
Stories
, Mansfield was “not only to be the innovator but to fly the
flag” (viii) when it came to short story technique. Building upon
Mansfield’s example, Bowen’s modernism is cosmopolitan in orien
tation and detailed in texture. All details, however fine, count
towards narrative meaning. Bowen’s earliest stories, “Salon des
Dames” and “Moses,” both set in Europe, bear a resemblance to
Mansfield’s
In a German Pension
(1911) and
Bliss
(1920), although
Bowen declared with chagrin that she did not yet know those stories
in the early 1920s. Coincidentally, both Mansfield and Bowen revel
in encounters between British and European characters as occasions
for pretentiousness and misunderstanding. If the New Zealand-born
writer had no impact on Bowen’s earliest stories, “The Bazaar,” which
probably dates from the late 1920s, reveals a careful assimilation of
Mansfield’s ironic handling of situations and fluid narrative tech
nique. Mansfield specialises in the juxtaposing of different temporal
dimensions, as when the woman in “A Dill Pickle,” accidentally
crossing the path of her former lover, remembers moments from
their romantic liaison six years earlier. Bowen layers time with
similar finesse. In several stories narrated in the first person in this
volume – “The Claimant,” “I Died of Love,” and “Candles in
the Window” – an older woman thinks back upon her earlier
experiences. Tension emerges from the split between incident and
reflection. Moreover, Bowen, like Mansfield, achieves narrative
economy in dialogue, characterisation, and action. Gestures reveal
hidden meanings; spoken words convey unspoken treacheries. In
a long preface to a selection of Mansfield’s stories, Bowen praises
the older writer’s art for being “tentative, responsive, exploratory”
(
Mulberry Tree
72). Guided to some degree by her predecessor’s
example, Bowen developed an acute consciousness of the short story
as a way to convey the partial, the interrupted, and the disconnected
aspects of contemporary life.

By the late 1930s, Bowen was an acknowledged master of the
short story. Because of her success as a fiction writer, she was asked
to edit and introduce

The Faber Book of Modern Short Stories
(1937). In
addition to providing forewords to volumes published by friends and
acquaintances, she wrote introductions to
The Observer Prize Stories
(1952) and the first number of the literary journal
Chance
(1952).
Bowen’s extensive commentary on the short story, including inci
dental comments in prefaces and reviews, sheds light on the care
that she took to perfect her own fiction. In a brief introduction to
Guy de Maupassant’s “The Little Soldier,” she singles out “sharp
actuality” and “direct emotions” as hallmarks of the French author’s
style (“Guy de Maupassant” 26). The short story permits immediacy,
whereas the novel exploits elaboration and indirection. In her short
stories, Bowen aims for sharpness and directness without neglecting
the atmosphere that envelops characters in conflict. About Anton
Chekhov, Bowen recalls that “no sooner were his stories translated
into English than he began to be felt as an influence. Why? Because
the Chekhov stories deal more with mood than with action. To us
in England that was something quite new; and it opened infinite
possibilities” (“Short Story in England” 39–40). The short story
evokes an atmosphere, a particular climate in relation to which
characters take on a face and a function.

Retaining traces of its Russian, French, and American lineage, the
short story hybridises with the English language in Britain and
Ireland. In “The Short Story in England,” Bowen names six English
short story writers whom she considers exemplary: D. H. Lawrence,
Rudyard Kipling, Somerset Maugham, Aldous Huxley, William
Plomer, and Katherine Mansfield (41). She refers also to James
Joyce, Frank O’Connor, Liam O’Flaherty, and Seán O’Faoláin as the
best Irish contributors to the genre. Plomer and O’Faoláin figured in
Bowen’s circle of intimate friends, which accounts for their flatter
ing, if not entirely justified, inclusion on these lists. Kipling’s name,
too, comes as something of a surprise, but Bowen insists that
“Kipling the artist tended to be obscured by Kipling the national
institution,” which caused a delayed appreciation of his craftsman
ship (“Short Story in England” 39). In “Flavia,” Bernard and Flavia
receive a set of Kipling’s works as a wedding present, a detail partly
explained by Bowen’s reverence for Kipling’s mastery of the short
story.

According to Bowen, the dimensions of the short story impose
constraints, and these constraints create the inevitability of a single
mood and a compression of effect, even to the point of “emotional
narrowness” (

Collected Impressions
154). In a review of Gorky’s tales
translated into English, Bowen incidentally provides a concise
definition of the short story:

Short story writers form a sort of democracy: when a man en
gages himself in this special field his stories stand to be judged
first of all on their merits

as
stories, only later in their relation to
the rest of his work. The more imposing the signature, the more
this applies. The craft (it may be no more) of the short story has
special criteria; its limitations are narrow and definite. It is in the
building-up of the short story that the craftsman side of the artist
has to appear. Very close demands on the writer’s judgement are
made; the short story is not a mere case for the passing fancy; it
offers no place for the unobjectified sentiment, for the impulsive
start that could not be followed through. It must have impli
cations which will continue when the story is done. (
Collected
Impressions
153)

Short story writers comprise a democracy insofar as no single author
towers above another; the genre exacts submission from all writers,
converting them into equals before the onerous obligations of art.
Even if the limits of the story cause “a necessary over-simplification
of characters, and a rather theatrical tensing-up of the dialogue”
(

Collected Impressions
154), the same limits contribute to unity of
action. For this reason, the story requires craft – a knowledge of how
to sustain pace and how to find the exact objective equivalent for
sentiments. Bowen further specifies that the short story, unlike the
novel, does not aim at comprehensiveness or verisimilitude. A
certain trickery, out of step with mimesis, brings a short story to its
conclusion, a conclusion that may seem brusque because of the a
priori terseness of the form.

Yet the short story appeals to Bowen because of its brevity.
Shortness borders on incompleteness and enhances the atmospheric
unseizableness of situations and characters. Character, in Bowen’s
estimation, always takes second place to action in narrative. In
“Notes on Writing a Novel,” she denies the commonplace idea “that
the function of action is to

express
the characters”; in her opinion,
“characters are there to provide the action” (
Collected Impressions
249).
This novelistic principle holds true also for the short story, in which
character is elaborated in very few scenes. The form of the short
story prevents prolonged analysis of individual characters in terms of
their motives, pasts, or feelings. In the preface to
Stories by Elizabeth
Bowen
, she comments, “I do not feel that the short story can be, or
should be, used for the analysis or development of character. The
full, full-length portrait is fitter work for the novelist; in the short
story, treatment must be dramatic – we are dealing with man, or
woman or child, in relation to a particular crisis or mood or moment,
and to that only” (
Mulberry Tree
129). Notwithstanding the com
pression of character, the details that constitute their fictional being
are metonyms for other forces. As Phyllis Lassner explains, “This
technique reflects Bowen’s theory of character as shaped by
historical processes” (75).

The short story requires compression in dialogue and dramatic
situation. In Bowen’s stories, people talk at cross-purposes or do
not express themselves fully in conversation, which exacerbates
tensions. Drama arises from misunderstanding and withheld mean
ing, as happens between Tom and Antonia in “The Man and the
Boy.” Dialogue, even when mined with misapprehensions, displays
character. Any recourse to description would merely add to the
length of the story. The “full-length portrait” of character suits the
novel, where motive and feeling can be explained in the

Bowen invariably conceives of fiction as a coincidence of
pressures:
longueurs
of
exposition. The short story, by contrast, “confers importance:
characters in it are given stature, and are moreover spotlit, so that
their gestures are not only clearly seen but cast meaningful shadows”
(“Rx for a Story Worth the Telling” 14). The embodiment of actions,
characters do not explain their every motive, nor need they. Action
unfolds in a series of spotlit manœuvres, but the glare of the
spotlight elongates the shadows thrown by characters. Characters
act according to the dictates of plot, which their own volition
distorts.

There is the plot: that is, the author’s intention. And inside that
plot (or, situation) and in it only can the characters operate. And,
that they may operate the better, the novelist subjects them to an
inhuman pressure – keeping them at the alert, and extracting the
utmost from them, forcing them along. He exposes them, night
and day, to a relentless daylight in which nothing is hid. No
human being, other than a fiend, would treat with his fellow
humans, in daily life, in so ruthless, uncompromising a manner.
(“Novelist and his Characters” 22)

The author’s handling of characters borders on sadism. Plot moves
along a chain of cause and effect, or event and consequence.
Character, auxiliary to sequence, is gripped as if in a vice. In her
introduction to

The Observer Prize Stories
, Bowen calls this “inner
inevitability” a merit in any narrative (viii). The situation lays hold
of the characters, rather than the characters laying hold of the
situation. Whether they make the situation or not, characters have
to respond to the force of circumstance. They act under the burden
of necessity.

Bowen responded to a different kind of necessity by writing
stories for collaborative volumes. In addition to “The Unromantic
Princess” and “Brigands,” three stories – “She Gave Him,” “Flavia,”
and “The Good Earl” – initially appeared in books by several hands.
“The Good Earl,” a political allegory masquerading as an Irish folk
tale, was written for

Diversion
(1946), a book sold to raise money for
the Yugoslav Relief Fund. Proceeds from
The Princess Elizabeth Gift
Book
, in which “The Unromantic Princess” appeared, supported the
Princess of York Hospital for Children. On the other hand, “Flavia,”
written for
The Fothergill Omnibus
(1931), had no specifically
charitable aim. As editor, John Fothergill invited several authors to
write a story on a given plot: a correspondence between a man and
woman is curtailed when the man marries; when he resumes the
correspondence after his marriage, he learns that his wife and his
correspondent are one and the same person. Whether
Diversion
,
The
Fothergill Omnibus
, or
The Princess Elizabeth Gift Book
, the collaborative
book either demonstrates public-mindedness or endorses public
causes. The story need have no direct connection to the cause it
ostensibly supports. In terms of content, “The Good Earl” has no
link at all to Yugoslavia. By contrast, “The Unromantic Princess”
does offer sly advice about governance to Princess Elizabeth;
although only nine years old when the book bearing her name was
published, she was in a direct line to ascend the British throne.

Bowen’s exuberance for collaboration grew out of her fondness
for games of all sorts. After-dinner games regularly occurred at
Bowen’s Court, the country house in Ireland that Bowen inherited
from her father in 1930. An avid player of “paper games, card games,
parlour games,” she also invented new games to amuse house-guests
(Glendinning 87). Party games extended to book culture. “She Gave
Him” forms one chapter in

Consequences
, a book that takes its
inspiration from a parlour game of the same name. In turn, nine
participants add a chapter to the manuscript before passing it on to
the next person. Rushing to submit her chapter, Bowen felt that she
botched “She Gave Him,” as she told A. E. Coppard, editor of the
book, in a letter dated 16 August 1932:

I found what I had written was too long and talky, & cut it –

now
,
I find much too vigorously, so that I find it is now underweight.
I’m so sorry: this wasn’t meant to be. Please dock my percentage
accordingly.

To tell you the truth, I liked the scene (your’s [sic]) but disliked
the characters, so made heavy weather of it: there’s something
about exposing the poseur I find very unrewarding: I could wish
the He & She had been more straightforward and picaresque.
I very much wish that my part were better. (HRC Coppard
Archive)

Other writers’ contributions not only create intractable problems
in the plot, but also impose challenges to maintaining consistency
of style and quality. The collaborative book ultimately exposes
the incommensurability of talent and imagination among several
authors.

Notwithstanding her unhappiness about “She Gave Him,” Bowen
entertained the possibility of writing for other omnibus editions.
In the postscript to a letter dated 15 October 1932, she proposed a
novelty book to Robert Gibbings, who published