The Bazaar and Other Stories (4 page)

Unhappiness is one of the steepest costs of love. Accordingly,
broken engagements preoccupy Bowen. In “Comfort and Joy,” “So
Much Depends,” and “Happiness,” lovers manage their break-ups
with varying degrees of success. Some lovers call a truce to their
unhappiness; others remain permanently suspended in despair. A
broken engagement is surely in the offing in “Flowers Will Do,”
but the uncertainty of that outcome reflects Sydney and Doris’s
uncertainty about why they are engaged in the first place. As Bowen
demonstrates in her novels

To the North
(1932) and
The Death of the
Heart
(1938), a love affair is most modern when it frays and unravels
under the force of mobile circumstances. “Flavia” proves the incom
patibility of being a wife and a lover at the same time. The story also
stakes a claim for the husband’s inability to recognise his own wife
in the guise of his epistolary lover. He wants some mystery to
occlude his knowledge of the woman he loves. Perhaps some stories
in this volume remain unfinished because Bowen did not know how
to reckon the costs of unhappiness brought about by love and its
ending.
Editorial Practices

I first began to gather Bowen’s uncollected stories and essays with
a view to writing a critical book about her novels. J’nan M. Sellery
and William O. Harris’s

Elizabeth Bowen: A Bibliography
, listing both
published and archival materials, proved indispensable for locating
obscure pieces. As thorough as Sellery and Harris’s bibliography is,
it does not record all of Bowen’s publications. By good luck and a
scrupulous reading of Bowen’s correspondence, I discovered “The
Lost Hope” in the
Sunday Times.
It is possible that some of the stories
included in this volume as “unpublished and unfinished” did appear
in magazines in the United Kingdom or the United States, but I
have not been able to find them. Other stories, as yet unknown, may
come to light. As I accumulated documents in order to obtain a
better-rounded sense of Bowen’s fictional output, I realised that
other scholars would probably have to retrace the process of photo -
copying and visiting archives to access these same stories. This
volume, therefore, is intended to widen the frame of understanding
of Bowen’s short stories for lay readers and scholars alike. Although
some stories in this volume were published in magazines or books,
others exist only in handwritten or typescript drafts. Published
stories automatically have a base text against which variants can be
compared, should manuscripts or drafts be extant. A manuscript for
“The Unromantic Princess,” located in the Columbia University
archives, shows few variants from the published text. The typescript
for “The Good Earl,” held at the Harry Ransom Center at the
University of Texas at Austin, deviates in minor details from the
published text. Unpublished stories create a different set of
problems. Although she has rounded, legible handwriting, Bowen’s
manuscripts occasionally defy decoding. From about 1935 onward,
she wrote directly on to the typewriter, which makes decipherment
easier. She edited typed copy either by using carets to insert text
with a pen or by typing words between lines. Her crossings-out
sometimes create confusion because parts of two formulations
contradict each other. Whenever significant variants occur that
might reveal something about the content of the story, I have noted
them.

In Bowen’s complicated and sometimes inverted syntax, punc
tuation carries the burden of hesitation, silence, and emphasis.
Bowen applies colons and semi-colons, sometimes several per
sentence, where other writers would place a full stop. Writing
quickly in drafts, she leaves out quotation marks and commas around
quoted speech. When necessary, I have added missing punctuation
without drawing attention to these changes; they are oversights
rather than artistic decisions, as I surmise from Bowen’s regular
practice. Yet punctuation affects meaning. For instance, in the hand -
written version of “The Bazaar,” dashes accumulate wantonly: “With
a sense of delicious guilt she touched their petals – she knew now,
but could not explain, why women went wrong – ‘They’re so sweet,
they’re so dark,’ she said – no, they were pale too: it was not that.
She thought, ‘I should make quite a florist,’ dipping her face into the
sweet-pea.” The full stop after “that” is not clear in the manuscript
because the word “dipping” rises below as an insertion and may have
been written over the top of the full stop. No comma follows
“thought” in the manuscript either. Bowen might therefore have
meant to write “it was not that she thought” as a single clause, which
would create an unusual subsequent sentence. In such cases, I have
opted for plausible punctuation that renders syntax coherent.

In manuscripts and typescripts, and occasionally in published
stories, dialogue bunches together in a single paragraph; two or
more speakers are quoted without any paragraph breaks. In almost
every instance that such bunching occurs, I have taken the liberty
of separating dialogue into paragraphs to distinguish one speaker
from another. In this regard, “The Last Bus” represents a particular
challenge, for the accumulation of diverse voices all talking at
once might deliberately create cacophony. Notwithstanding such a
possible authorial intention, Bowen distinguishes individuals on the
bus and their voices are, in my opinion, better served by being kept
distinct from each other with a view to producing a clear reading
text. In most cases, I signal paragraph breaks that have been added.

In a related matter of textual layout, typesetters often introduce a
space break to distribute text across the page. In newspapers and
magazines, the text has to fit into so many inches of space. There
fore editors laying out the text insert space breaks to stretch out the
text. These space breaks sometimes fall in unlikely places and in all
probability do not coincide with Bowen’s intentions. Not having
access to typescripts or manuscripts of all of the published stories,
I can only deduce what Bowen’s intentions might have been. In
some cases, such as “Emergency in the Gothic Wing,” “So Much
Depends,” and “Happiness,” I omit typesetters’ space breaks to
prevent choppiness. Some breaks fall in the middle of dialogue and
interrupt the continuity of the story. Bowen typically uses a space
break to indicate a shift in space or time, but she does so sparingly.
As a general principle, the more polished a story, the fewer space
breaks that she inserts.

In drafts and revisions, Bowen maintains a conscientious regard
for details. She tends not to repeat herself or forget the thread of the
story. None the less, she makes occasional spelling errors, the result
of hunting and pecking on the keyboard – she was not a fast typist

 

– or, less often, not having revised. I have silently corrected obvious
spelling errors. French gave Bowen minor problems. As she recounts
in the essay “The Idea of France,” she glimpsed the mauve contours
of the French coast across the English Channel when she was a child
and yearned to go there. Go there she did. With her husband, Alan
Cameron, Bowen visited out-of-the-way destinations in France in
the 1920s and 1930s, and she resumed her romance with the
country after the war. To improve her French, she translated sections
of Proust’s
À la recherche du temps perdu
and Flaubert’s
L’Éducation
sentimentale
into English, as documents in the Harry Ransom Center
prove (HRC 9.7–9). A long quotation – so long as to be show-offy

 

– from Stendhal’s
De l’Amour
appears in
To the North
. Despite im
mersion in the French language, Bowen consistently makes errors
with accents. Perhaps under the influence of Italian, she does not
hear the phonetic difference between an
accent grave
and an
accent
aigu
. She has an unaccountable preference for the
grave
, so that, for
example,
necessité
becomes
necessitè
and
négligée
turns into
negligèe
.

As far as possible, editorial emendations have been kept to a
minimum. Where variants reveal something about the text, I have
recorded them. Because these stories were written over four decades,
from approximately 1920 to 1960, spelling and hyphenation
change. Early stories show a preference for keeping “for ever” as two
words, whereas “forever” becomes the norm in later stories. Bowen
also makes distinctions between “on to” and “onto,” with the latter
preferred in phrases concerning contact with a surface. Both “on to”
and “onto” appear in the opening paragraph of “Happiness” to
indicate distinct prepositional properties. Some of these stories,
having appeared in the United States, adopt American spellings,
which I alter to standard British spellings for consistency. On the
other hand, neologisms, such as “multitudinies” in “Moses,” stand on
their own, without alteration or gloss; such invented words are part
of Bowen’s resourcefulness, which never ceases to surprise for its
aptness and its freshness.

Capitalisation has been regularised, as has the spelling of certain
recurring words (“earring” and “drawing-room”). In fact, the hyphen -
ation practices of the 1920s and 1930s tell a story about the
evolution of compound words in the English language. Some
hyphenated words have been preserved because they attest to the
decades in which the stories were written: “tip-toe” and “trap-door.”
Other hyphenations have been regularised to contemporary usage:
“to-day,” “to-morrow,” and “week-end” lose no significance when
spelled “today,” “tomorrow,” and “weekend.” Over the years, hyphen -
ated compounds tend to lose their hyphens. Whereas “drawingroom” usually appears with a hyphen in stories from the 1920s and
1930s, later compound nouns dealing with rooms seldom have
hyphens: “schoolroom,” “classroom,” “diningroom,” “livingroom.”
And, by the same token, the disappearance of the drawing-room
from postwar households causes the word to retain its hyphen as a
vestige of another era.

Although this volume aspires to create a fuller sense of Bowen’s
short story

œuvre
, not all unpublished fragments have been included.
After deliberation, I decided to exclude seven story fragments that
are housed at the Harry Ransom Center. In their unfinished state,
these sketches seldom exceed a few pages in length and are uneven
in quality. “Amy Ticer” and “Ellen Nevin” are short character
sketches (HRC 1.1). “A Thing of the Past” concerns celebrity (HRC
9.1). Although Sellery and Harris claim that the fragmentary “A
Thing of the Past” is a sketch for “The Last Bus” (234), the two
stories – one set on a hot summer day near the sea and the other set
two days before Christmas – have nothing to do with each other.
“Beginning of this Day,” a brief start to a story, plunges immediately
into dramatic conflict: a girl, orphaned during the war, behaves
awkwardly in front of her adoptive mother’s friends (HRC 1.5).
The five-page fragment called “Now the Day is Over” bears some
resemblances to “Christmas Games”: a young woman flees a weird
consistory in a country house (HRC 8.7). The trope of the young
woman out of her depth or out of familiar surroundings appears in
other fragments. In “Only Young Once,” a young woman’s engage
ment does not sit well with her family, especially her mother, and
she walks the countryside with her
fiancé
to avoid the scrutiny of her
siblings and parents (HRC 8.7). In “Still the Moon,” a young woman
named Nona is hired to write the “autobiography” of Mrs. Du Picq
based on her diaries and other personal papers; Nona travels to an
isolated house to perform this task (HRC 8.16). Another fragment,
mistakenly catalogued as a fragment of an untitled story (HRC 1.1),
is, in fact, Bowen’s translation of part of a letter by Gustave Flaubert.
Other copies of the letter can be found among her translations
(HRC 9.8). Each of these stories begins with intensity, but that
intensity is brought up short by the unfinished state of these works.
Of all the fragments that have been omitted from this volume,
“Beginning of this Day” is notable for the quality of its writing, yet,
living up to its title, it remains a mere beginning.

By contrast, I have included longer stories that are nearly com
plete, but not quite: “The Bazaar,” “The Man and the Boy,” “Story
Scene,” and “Ghost Story.” Other stories in this volume remain
unfinished, although in certain cases – notably, “Flowers Will Do,”
“Christmas Games,” and “Women in Love” – the end is clearly in
sight. The value of these unfinished stories lies in their manifest
“pressure,” to recall Bowen’s term. Characters and events coalesce
with inevitability. At the end of “Flowers Will Do,” the wordless
meeting between Mrs. Simonez and Sydney leaves the impression
that everyone has lost something, but the story is tantalisingly
inconclusive. Not liking each other, Mrs. Simonez and Sydney will
meet again, awkwardly, because their troubled relations are filtered
entirely through Doris. Bowen does say that a story “must have
implications which will continue when the story is done” (

Collected
Impressions
153). The scale of the short story in general makes any
conclusion seem sudden. Rather than ending, a story rounds off,
then continues to reverberate after it stops. In this sense, a short
story always implies more than it says and suggests more than it
shows.

In this volume, finished and unfinished stories alike display
Bowen’s fierce control over materials. Authorial control does not
preclude the disarray into which a story can throw a reader’s expec
tations. In “Rx for a Short Story,” Bowen describes the detonating
force of the story:

We have within us a capacity, a desire, to respond. One of the
insufficiencies of routine existence is the triviality of the demands
it makes on us. Largely unused remain our funds of pity, spon
taneous love, unenvious admiration or selfless anger. Into these, a
story may drop a depth-charge. (1)