I haven't read that book which says in its very title that men are from Mars and women are from Venus. From somewhere, however, I had learned its basic premise: that the differences between men and women are so vast that it would seem that they are creatures from different planets.I am a married man and it is not infrequent that my wife would, say, raise a howl of violent exasperation about something I did which I find completely normal and ordinary. On the other hand, I never cease to wonder how she, after talking with or meeting someone, would have an inexplicable change of mood for something which, on the surface of the previous conversation or meeting, simply doesn't deserve any such reaction. If the premise is true that men and women are from different planets, I imagine women with antennae like cockroaches, going hither and thither as they interact with people, picking up hidden signals which men simply have no way of perceiving. Then her mood will be dictated by these hidden signals and this could be a problem when she's with her man because the latter is not equipped with a similar set of antennae capable of picking up such invisible waves. Or maybe forget about cockroaches. Think of men and women as two sets of armies, one equipped with a powerful radar system and the other does not have any. So while the women (with the radar) are already panicking because enemy planes, as seen from their radar, are coming, the others (the men) are still asleep in their barracks, hearing nothing unusual, their lookouts seeing nothing but the clear, glorious, early morning sky."The Heat of the Day" was written by one such antennaed creature from Venus with her radar in full blast (is it relevant to say here, as mentioned in the brief introductory bio of the book itself, that she outlived her husband by 21 years? Is this strange sensitivity of women, and the difficulty of coping with this, the reason why there are more widows than widowers?). A love story in the backdrop of world war two London, complete with mystery, espionage and a love triangle, the reader (especially, I imagine, those like me from Mars) would be distracted from following the plot by massive introspective digressions which seemingly come from nowhere and everywhere, as well as those highflown dialogues which make it sound as if the characters are communicating wordlessly through their minds, like aliens from outer space, and not verbalizing them through their mouths.Like this scene (among the many examples I can give!) where the principal female protagonist named Stella(Victor's widow, now Robert's lover, has a son--Roderick--in the British army) had just been brought to a bar by a friend who now leaves. She then turns briefly away to wave goodbye to her friend. THAT brief act of turning away and waving goodbye to her departing friend was enough for Elizabeth Bowen to go into this:"That gesture of good-bye, so perfunctory, was a finalness not to appear till later. It comprehended the room and everybody, everything in it which had up to now counted as her life: it was an unconscious announcement of the departure she was about to take--a first and last wave, across widening water, from a liner. Remembered, her fleeting sketch of a gesture came to look prophetic; for ever she was to see, photographed as though it had been someone else's, her hand up. The bracelet slipping down and sleeve falling back, against a dissolving background of lights and faces, were vestiges, and the last, of her solidity."I don't know if this has a sequel, but in this book I do not remember Stella having such a dramatic departure from a liner across widening water. Now, in this other scene, Stella is with the other guy, Harrison, inside her apartment. She tells him to get her a glass of milk. Harrison briefly leaves the room and goes to the other room where the milk is. Elizabeth Bowen then ambushes her reader with this:"Left like this in the room with the empty chairs, she took the opportunity to breathe. Harrison became nothing more than a person she had for the moment succeeded in getting rid of. She looked from the armchair proper to Robert to the armchair commandeered by Harrison, but found herself thinking of neither of these--of, rather, Victor, her vanished husband. Why Victor of now? One could only suppose that the apparently forgotten beginning of any story was unforgettable; perpetually one was subject to the sense of there having had to be a beginning SOMEWHERE. Like the lost first sheet of a letter or missing first pages of a book, the beginning kept on suggesting what must have been its nature. One never was out of reach of the power of what had been written first. Call it what you liked, call it a miscarried love, it imparted, or was always ready and liable to impart, the nature of an alternative, attempted recovery or enforced second start to whatever followed. The beginning, in which was conceived the end, could not but continue to shape the middle part of the story, so that none of the realizations along that course were what had been expected, quite whole, quite final. That first path, taken to be a false start--who was to know, after all, where it might not have led? She saw, for an instant, Roderick's father's face, its look suspended and non-committal. In this room, in which love in the person of Robert had been so living, this former face had not shown itself till tonight--now, she was penetrated not only by as it were first awareness of Victor's death but by worse, by the knowledge of his having been corrupted before death by undoings and denials of all love. She had had it in her to have been an honest woman and borne more children; she had been capable of more virtue than the succeeding years had left her able to show. Her young marriage had not been an experiment; it is the young who cannot afford to experiment--everything is at stake. The time of her marriage had been a time after war; her own desire to find herself in some embrace from life had been universal, at work in the world, the time whose creature she was. For a deception, she could no more blame the world than one can blame any fellow-sufferer: in these last twenty of its and her own years she had to watch in it what she felt in her--a clear-sightedly helpless progress towards disaster. The fateful course of her fatalistic century seemed more and more her own: together had she and it arrived at the testing extremities of their noonday. Neither had lived before..."Now, how many minutes would transpire before someone would finish thinking of these or--to the reader--reading them AND comprehending what they say? Certainly longer than the few seconds it'll take for Harrison to get the milk in the adjoining room. Yet it was only after all the above that Harrison reappeared with the glass of milk and even this reappearance reminded Stella, this time, of "her own extremity (that) was in this being bargained for."Force me to read novels like this for six months and by the end of that time I imagine I'll be ready to die by my own hand. Let's see now how Elizabeth Bowen imagines her characters talking. Here is the scene where Robert, Stella's lover, finally admits to her that he's working/spying for the enemy (the Germans). I'm rewriting the dialogue like that in a play to highlight the exchanges and so you can judge for yourself if people in planet earth really talk like this in real life and in real time:Stella: "...Were you never frightened?"Robert: "Of getting caught?"Stella: "I meant, of what you've been doing?"Robert: " I?--no, the opposite: it utterly undid fear. It bred my father out of me, gave me a new heredity. I went slow at first--it was stupefying to be beginning to know what confidence could be. To know what I knew, to keep my knowing unknown, unknown all the time to be acting on it--I tell you, everything fell into place around me. Something of my own?--No, no, much better than that: any neurotic can make himself his corner. The way out?--no, better than that: the way on! You think, in me this was simply wanting to get my hand on the controls?"Stella: " I don't think I think."Robert: "Well, it's not; it's not a question of that. Who wants to monkey about? To feel control is enough. It's a very much bigger thing to be under orders."Stella: "We are all under orders; what is there new in that?"Robert: "Yes, can you wonder they love war. But I don't mean orders, I mean order."Stella: "So you are with the enemy."Robert: "Naturally they're the enemy; they're facing us with what has got to be the conclusion. They won't last, but it will."Stella: "I can't believe you."Robert: "You could."Stella: "It's not just that they're the enemy, but they're horrible--specious, unthinkable, grotesque."Robert: "Oh, THEY--evidently! But you judge it by them. And in birth, remember, anything is grotesque."Stella: "They're afraid, too."Robert: "Of course: they have started something. You may not like it, but it's the beginning of a day. A day on our scale."And her is Stella asking Robert why he had sided with the enemy and the latter giving his reasons:Stella: "What is it you are, then, a revolutionary? No, counter-revolutionary? You think revolutions are coming down in the world? Once, they used to seem an advance, each time--you think NOT that, any more, now? After each, first the loss of what had been gained, then the loss of more? So that now revolution coming could only be the greatest convulsion so far, with the least meaning of all? Yet nobody can rid themselves of the idea that SOMETHING'S coming. What is this present state of the world, then--a false pregnancy?Robert: "No."Stella: "No, I see you couldn't think that, or you wouldn't have...You know, Robert, for anybody DOING anything so definite, you talk vaguely. Wildness and images. That may have been my bringing my feeling in. But to me it's as though there still were something you'd never formulated."Robert: "This is the first time I've ever talked."Stella: "Never talked to the others--the others you're in this with?"Robert: "You imagine we meet to swap ideas?"Stella: "But then in that case, all the more you've thought."Robert: "All the more I've thought. More and more the outcome of thinking because you never can talk is never to talk. The thing isolating you isolates itself. It sets up a tension you hope may somehow break itself, but that you can't break. You don't know where thought began; it goes round in circles. TALK has got to begin--where? How am I to know how to talk, after so much thought? Any first time, is one much good? Unformulated--what was?"Stella: "I don't know. Or perhaps, missing?"Robert: "How am I to know what's missing in my own thought? I'm committed to it. What did you want, then--brass tacks?"Stella: "Though they are always something. You are out for the enemy to win because you think they have something? What?"Robert: "They have something. This war's just too much bloody quibbling about some thing that's predecided itself. Either side's winning would stop the war; only their side's winning would stop the quibbling. I want to cackle cut--Well, what have I still not said?"Stella: "I still don't know. Never mind."And neither do I know yet. I say, too: Never mind! Only after I've stopped reading that these characters stopped their quibbling!
”Overhead, an enemy plane had been dragging, drumming slowly round in the pool of night, drawing up bursts of gunfire--nosing, pausing, turning, fascinated to the point for its intent. The barrage banged, coughed, retched; in here the lights in the mirrors rocked. Now down a shaft of anticipating silence the bomb swung whistling. With the shock of detonation, still to be heard, four walls of in here yawped in then bellied out; bottles danced on glass; a distortion ran through the view. The detonation dulled off into the cataracting roar of a split building:direct hit,somewhere else.” This novel is set against the backdrop of the very tail end of the London Blitz. There are still explosions, but the inhabitants of London have more pressing concerns dealing with the rubble that has steadily accumulated. Stella Rodney, like most women with husbands in the war, has been displaced to a smaller apartment. None of the possessions that fills the rooms are hers. Her husband Victor, after leaving her for a nurse, promptly paid for his sins with a glorious/inglorious death in the war. His family think that the reason the marriage dissolved was that Stella was a tart, and she is unsure of how best to disabuse them of that idea. Stella is still a lovely woman. ”She had one of those charming faces which, according to the angle from which you see them, look either melancholy or impertinent. Her eyes were grey; her trick of narrowing them made her seem to reflect, the greater part of the time, in the dusk of her second thoughts. With that mood, that touch of arriere pensee, went an uncertain, speaking set of the lips. Her complexion, naturally pale, fine, soft, appeared through a pale, fine, soft bloom of make-up. She was young-looking--most because of the impression she gave of still being on happy sensuous terms with life. Nature had kindly given her one white dash, lock or wing in otherwise tawny hair…”She is in love with Robert Kelway, a man with a limp from a war wound at Dunkirk. ”His experiences and hers became harder and harder to tell apart; everything gathered behind them into a common memory--though singly each of them might, must, exist, decide, act, all things done alone came to be no more than simulacra of behavior: they waited to live again till they were together, then took living up from where they had left it off.”Robert has a nebulous job with the war effort that has him gone for days at a time. His personality morphs as the novel progresses. He seems so strong; and yet, he has unresolvable issues with his dead father, and bitterness about the circumstances that led to his wounding at Dunkirk. ”I never knew you before you were a wounded man.”“In one way that would have been impossible--I was born wounded; my father’s son. Dunkirk was waiting there in us--what a race! A class without a middle, a race without a country. Unwhole. Never earthed in--and there are thousands of thousands of us, and we’re still breeding--breeding what? You may ask: I ask. Not only nothing to hold, nothing to touch. No source of anything in anything.”Stella may have some worries in regards to Robert, but she has some real problems with another Robert referred to by his last name Harrison. (Okay there are only a handful of characters in this novel, why do authors insist on using a similar or in this case the same name. Bowen resolves it by referring to Harrison by his last name.) Harrison works in counter-intelligence, and is convinced that Robert is working for the Germans. He is an odd fellow as those shadowy characters always seem to be. ”...one of his eyes either was or behaved as being just perceptibly higher than the other. This lag or inequality in his vision gave her the feeling of being looked at twice--being viewed then checked over again in the same moment. His forehead stayed in the hiding, his eyebrows deep in the shadow, of his pulled-down hat; his nose was bony; he wore a close-clipped little that-was-that moustache. The set of his lips--from between which he had with less than civil reluctance withdrawn a cigarette--bespoke the intention of adding nothing should he happen to speak again. This was a face with a gate behind it--a face that, in this photographic half-light, looked indoor and weathered at the same time; a face, if not without meaning, totally and forbiddingly without mood.”Harrison is willing to make a deal if Stella will leave Robert and become his girlfriend. If she complies he will turn a blind eye to Robert’s transgressions. She is unconvinced of Robert’s guilt, but at the same time she has doubts about his loyalty to his country. She is also attracted to Harrison which lends even more confusion to her already jangled feelings about both men. There are some interesting sub-characters in this novel. Stella’s son Roderick who is in the service not because of any loyalty to the cause, but simply because that is what young men of his generation did. He has recently inherited an estate from his father’s family. He takes some time off from the war to tidy up the affairs of his inheritance. ”Dark ate the outlines of the house and drank from the broken distances of the valley. The air had been night itself, re-imprinted by every one of his movements upon his face and hands--and still, now that he was indoors and gone to bed, impregnating every part of the body it had not sensibly touched. He could not sleep during this memory of the air.”This whole novel feels dipped in shadows. The descriptions of the terrain of London and the surrounding areas certainly had me thinking of how noirish this book would look on film. Stella is dramatic, elegant, and trapped in circumstances that feels like only something tragic can free her from the bonds of two men. Harrison and Stella are both characters who could have stepped out of any Raymond Chandler or Dashiell Hammett novel. Louie Lewis, the opposite of Stella, in so many ways. She sleeps with men to feel closer to her husband who is away fighting in the war. That is so sweet… I’m not sure the husband will see it quite that way. I really enjoyed Bowen’s description of Louie.”Everything ungirt, artless, ardent, urgent about Louie was to the fore: all over herself she gave the impression of twisted stockings.”Louie is somehow connected to Harrison and isn’t about to go quietly into the night. She wouldn’t know how. Bowen has an unusual writing style that continually caught me by surprise. The words sometimes came at me in machine gun flashes. At other times her sentences were almost languid like Stella’s droopy eyelids. The first Elizabeth Bowen I’ve read and certainly not my last. Categorize this book as noir espionage with a splash of blitz.
What do You think about The Heat Of The Day (2002)?
In The Heat of the Day by Elizabeth Bowen, while I enjoyed the book, as I read it I searched for the humor, but I must admit that much of the humor in it was too deep for me to fully comprehend. I can only speculate on what I think my be considered Bowen’s unique form of humor.In Barreca’s book she says about Bowen’s humor, “In contrast to her relentless refusal to supply the usual feminine applause for the important man or woman, the poor soul, and the good Samaritan, she illuminates instead the working of the hearts and minds of the outsiders and social outlaws who must never the less live inside society” (109). I think that this quote explains The Heat of the Day, very well, for not one of the characters in this book is anything more then a social outlaw. Stella is an older woman sleeping with her male “friend” Robert but refuses to marry him. On top of that she is known for having divorced her previous husband. Robert turns out to be a spy. Harrison is wants nothing more then to seduce Stella, but when she finally offers herself, he doesn’t want her anymore (the game is over for him). Louie is having extra marital affairs, and Connie is a single woman who is living it up and refuses to ever get married. If Bowen’s humor lies within the “social outlaws” living “inside society” then this novel is rampant with them. What I did find humorous about the novel was Louie and Connie. They reminded me a little of the Odd Couple. Louie was especially silly and childish to me. In the beginning of the novel, her obsession with Harrison, who was obviously trying to get rid of her, was rather naive. Then when she saw him in the bar, she made a foolish attempt and gaining intelligence on the situation between Stella and Harrison, and at the same time join them in conversation. I actually thought the part about “Spot” was rather funny. When Stella asked Louie “Why do you call your dog spot? He hasn’t gotten any”(Bowen 264), and Louie is discovered in her fabrication, then the act of Louie saying that she should go and leave them alone while simultaneously pulling up a chair and sitting down at their table. This situation then leads to the curious and farcical story that Louie reiterates to Connie, including when she, herself said “’Funny you calling your dog Spot when it hasn’t got any,’ so they took that well ands asked me to join them, making a third’” (274). So perhaps I didn’t find some of the deeper humor that Bowen intended, but I still appreciated the book non-the-less, and found it quite interesting.
—Jeane
I found this a difficult but engrossing book. I read in snatched dribs and drabs throughout the day, and it was so hard to dip into and then out of the book that I ended up reading it only at night, when I could sink deeply into it. The story of a love affair in London during World War II, Bowen's narrative is full of slow, contemplative passages rich with sensuous, vivid detail about the world about us, touching on all the senses, like this passage from the first chapter:"In this state, drugged by the rainy dusk, she almost always returned with sensual closeness to seaside childhood; once more she felt her heels in the pudding-softness of the hot tarred esplanade or her bare arm up to the elbow in rain-wet tamarisk. She smelt the shingle and heard it being sucked by the sea."It's gorgeous stuff, but definitely a challenge to get into, though deeply rewarding. I particularly loved the description in Chapter Five of wartime London (especially as the setting is what caused me to want to read the book). Don't expect an easy read, but do expect a compelling one, if you can take the time to submerge yourself.
—Margaret
I picked this novel up as, after reading and identifying so much with 'The Death of the Heart' I knew I would be in for a treat of a read with anything by Ms Bowen. I also was attracted by the Los Angeles Times' correspondent rating it as " probably the most intelligent noir ever written...". I have recently realised that my own stumbling efforts at a novel are driven by the wish to write an intelligent noir, albeit one set our current times, when suspicion is a different brew.What can I say about this incredible, layered, incisive, humbling work. Perhaps I should say I identified again immediately with the protagonist, the intelligent, educated, aware Stella, who in trying to act in way in which she "always done what she could", gently and with pain walks 'a soul astray' towards her fate, almost embracing the inevitable. Perhaps I should note that it illuminates how I always pictured London in the 1940s to be? My images based only on folk memory of course, but Bowen's prose, certainly of its time, resonates and amplifiers those second hand accounts that were told to a child at the knee of those who lived through the conflict. The delicious uncertainty of the continuation of life, the distrust of and the need to keep hold of anything real, the 40s way of expression, of seeing everything through the lens of something way outside one's control but with a uncontrollable desire to make sense of what is and what is not. The author marshal's all of this into a tale which drips with dread but in a compelling manner. There are countless purple patches but one breathtaking example is when she captures the events of 1943 in one page after the majority of the novel has taken place over a few months of the preceding year.Perhaps I should just day that if Elizabeth Bowen had been male, then her work would be spoken of in the same vein as Maughan's or Waugh's or later Amis or Greene. She is that good, I urge you to read this novel.
—Gabrielle Goldsmith
