Friends and Relations by Elizabeth Bowen

Friends and Relations by Elizabeth Bowen

published 1931

A most intriguing novel, strange and allusive and memorable.

Two sisters, Laurel and Janet, get married in one summer, 1920-ish. Their husbands are connected in a weird way: Edward’s  mother ran off with Rodney’s uncle, with great scandal resulting. That makes life awkward for all of them. (It is quite hard to keep this straight, at times). I was delighted to see that Janet gets married in a gold dress, just like Harriet D Vane in the 1937 Busman’s Honeymoon.

The story picks up 10 years later: there are now various children and the two families are intertwined (as Janet said earlier, there’s 50 years of Christmases together to be got through). But Edward still has an issue with his mother’s seducer, and wonders whether his children should be allowed to mix with the other family.

That’s a simplistic view of things (there are deep deep further undercurrents that we are expected to work out for ourselves). It is a short book, a novella really at 150 pages, but you read too fast at your peril: you will miss something. And there are incomplete conversations, weird comments, strange sentence constructions (which may be editing errors, hard to tell – see below). But at the same time it is a highly enjoyable comedy of manners, with some excellent scenes.

Take this sentence:

Beyond calling Edward Maisie she had at no time seemed to take any account of the Tilney problem.

This is hard to parse – the name ‘Maisie’ does not appear anywhere else in the book – and eventually I decided it was a reference to the Henry James book What Maisie Knew, about a child of divorced parents, which does make sense but is expressed in a a strange manner, and not metnioned before or after.

Then this one:

Janet… knew that if Elfrida had not adored as a sacred disqualification her Janet’s stupidity, she must have despised Janet.

[I have removed an extra confusing clause]. I think there should be commas marking off the second ‘Janet’ but even with that it’s a sentence that could have been recast…

The book features some favourite tropes: scenes at an awful girls’ boarding school which really have no purpose except establishing one friendship, a garden fete (hurrah!) which I will include in a different post, an awful Christmas scene – wait till December for that one – with a stuffed bear.

There is a frightful character called Theodora – other readers found her amusing, but I just wanted to strangle her. She is rude, overbearing and causes endless trouble.

Bowen has a cool eye for the children. There is a terrible shopping trip where the grandmother and her former lover take the children for haircuts and ices. It’s probably as well that the expedition is cut short by news from home. In this book people are always being called up in in unlikely places, in the absence of yet-to-be-invented mobile phones: here Lady Elfrida calls into the chemists’ shop, and is informed by the pharmacist that she must phone home at once.

Later, Laurel is facing a family crisis with her daughter:

Anna had an immediate sense of emergency; she entertained several possibilities, all of them dire, without either relish or horror… Laurel, feeling the warm young shoulder against her own, thought: ‘What a comfort Anna would be to anyone else.’

‘If I was you,’ said the child, ‘I should have a good cry’.

[I first read this book more than 30 years ago, and 'What a comfort...to anyone else' has stuck in my mind ever since as a sharp, mean-minded funny line, the kind of thing that pops into the head occasionally]

The book made me think of Rosamond Lehmann – a great compliment from me – in its clever commentary and funny passages, combined with the weight of how hard love can make life. Something like Lehmann’s EchoingGrove, one of my favourite books.

And the writing is marvellous. I loved Lady Elfrida being described as ‘the most tiresome kind of cathedrale engloutie, full of backwashes and large drowned bells’. And this: 'Elfrida’s damaged beauty, Considine’s dry polish, like someone’s notable tame panther loaned with its cage for the afternoon  to a village entertainment.’

surely - lady Elfrida and Uncle Considine in their glory days

I found the ending of the book ambiguous and rather mysterious – perhaps readers have to decide for themselves how the future is going to pan out for the characters and for the two crucial marriages.

This wedding picture is a couple of years late but had a look I thought… complete with the little-girl attendants and the hats.

However it is an American picture, and this shows in that the men are wearing bowties: that would not have been the case at a conventional English wedding (which this most certainly was) at the time. Morning suits would have been worn.

This chap is off to the races in fact, but would have been equally acceptably-dressed for a wedding.

In my copy of the book it says ‘The bride’s two attendants, little girls grilled to the waist, with pink knickers…’, which had me mystified. (Later in the book some children are ‘grilled on the hot cushions’ while sitting with bare legs in a car on a summer's day – I wondered if there was some connection). But I managed to check in another copy, and it should say ‘FRILLED to the waist’. Ah.

The early copy I checked in, btw, has this illo which is SO unsuitable – it was one of the first things I saw and I honestly thought I must have got to the wrong book. It could not be further from the tone and feel, looking like a Gothic fantasy.

A very good book, well worth looking out for - I'd love to hear opinions from others who have read it.

Various dress styles - NYPL Digital Collections 

"On se reverra, j'espère..." - NYPL Digital Collections

Wedding party | Digital Accession Number: 2008:0502:0002.000… | Flickr

Colonel Wyndham-Quin | A high key shot of a gentleman at the… | Flickr