The Bazaar and Other Stories
EDITED BY ALLAN HEPBURN
THE BAZAAR
AND OTHER STORIES
Elizabeth Bowen
Edinburgh University Press
Allan Hepburn
© Curtis Brown Ltd, London, Literary Executors of The Estate of
Elizabeth Bowen 2008
22 George Square, Edinburgh
Typeset in Weiss
from the British Library
and printed and bound in Great Britain
by Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham, Wilts
ISBN 978 0 7486 3572 6 (paperback)
v
1
Uncollected Short Stories
29
35
39
53
66
77
83
99
111
120
135
143
152
171
183
193
204
Unpublished and Unfinished Short Stories
217
227
232
239
247
267
274
292
309
320
330
Notes
350
Works Cited
376
v
and perseverance of many people in far-flung places. Two research
assistants, Robin Feenstra and Liisa Stephenson, indefatigably
located materials and helped me to proofread the entire book aloud;
offering astute comments on the nature of editing, they detected
implausibilities where I suspected none. Phyllis Lassner and
Shannon Wells-Lassagne shared their vast knowledge about
Elizabeth Bowen with me on numerous occasions; I have been
blessed by their insight and scholarly generosity. A month-long
Mellon Fellowship at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research
Center at the University of Texas at Austin enabled completion of
this book. Further research funds came from the Arts Insights
program in the Faculty of Arts at McGill University and the Social
Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada; invaluable
support from these sources helped me to hire research assistants,
secure permissions for this volume, and travel to the British Library,
the Bodleian Library at Oxford, and Durham University Library.
Jackie Jones at Edinburgh University Press, a champion of this
project from beginning to end, has made every step of the process
delightful. By supporting this project, Camilla Hornby at Curtis
Brown in London, literary executors for the estate of Elizabeth
Bowen, kindly assisted with negotiations for permissions and
thereby ensured that these stories would, deservedly, come to public
attention. I wish to thank Bowen’s estate in particular for allowing
me to proceed with this project.
Elizabeth Bowen never collected all of them into volumes. Owing to
indifference or forgetfulness, she omitted at least twenty-eight tales
from the books of short fiction that she assembled over the course
of her career. These stories are gathered here for the first time. Two
of them rank among her most accomplished: “The Lost Hope” and
“Flowers Will Do.” Others, especially “Salon des Dames,” “The
Bazaar,” “Miss Jolley Has No Plans for the Future,” and “Women in
Love,” afford insight into Bowen’s technique and preoccupations.
Despite the fact that some of these stories remain unfinished, they
all demonstrate a command of characterisation, atmosphere, and
situation that few other modernist short story writers possess. The
best of these stories unfold miniature dramas in an intensely visual
language.
After abandoning her studies in fine art at the London County
Council School of Art – starting in 1919, she attended for two terms
stories. Her first two books,
Encounters
(1923) and
Ann Lee’s and Other
Stories
(1926), led to a series of dazzling collections:
Joining Charles
and Other Stories
(1929),
The Cat Jumps and Other Stories
(1934),
Look at
All Those Roses
(1941), and
The Demon Lover and Other Stories
(1945).
Her short story production peaked in the 1930s and early 1940s,
then slowed after the Second World War. As her productivity as a
short story writer declined, her productivity as an essayist rose.
From the late 1940s onward, magazine editors solicited essays from
her on diverse subjects. Despite the energy that writing essays
demanded, Bowen, to satisfy publishers and readers who clamoured
for her fiction, repackaged old stories with new.
Selected Stories
(1946)
prepared the way for a reprint of
Early Stories
(1951), a volume that
joins together all of the tales in
Encounters
and
Ann Lee’s
. The
anthology,
Stories by Elizabeth Bowen
(1959), included a sampling of
the best stories, but no new work. The last volume published during
her lifetime,
A Day in the Dark and Other Stories
(1965), mixed five
relatively new stories (four had appeared in magazines) with fifteen
reprinted works. Even after Bowen’s death in February 1973,
previously printed stories were shuffled according to thematic
connections, as happened with
Irish Stories
(1978).
Bowen often published the same story in several places in order
to maximise its exposure. For example, the story entitled “No. 16,”
about a young female poet who visits an ailing male writer, first
appeared in the
in January 1939, then was reprinted in the
magazine
Living Age
in September 1939. Subsequently it was
collected in
Look at All Those Roses
. Thereafter, “No. 16” appeared in
Stories by Elizabeth Bowen
and
A Day in the Dark
. It was reprinted a sixth
and last time in the posthumous volume,
The Collected Stories of Elizabeth
Bowen
(1981). With an introduction by Angus Wilson,
The Collected
Stories
slots all the works in
Encounters
,
Ann Lee’s
,
Joining Charles
,
The Cat
Jumps
,
Look at All Those Roses
, and
The Demon Lover
by decade. Wilson,
paying homage to his friend, praises Bowen for the “instinctive
formal vision” (7) and “witty” (8) representations of families and love
affairs that make her stories unique. No fugitive pieces from news
papers or magazines are included in
The Collected Stories
.
Understanding that one short story could have many incar
nations, Bowen also sold her stories to international markets.
Business correspondence with her literary agents, Curtis Brown,
indicates a brisk trade in Danish, German, Japanese, French, Greek,
and other translations of her fiction. Moreover, realising that a story
could achieve new vigour in another medium, she sold the rights
for radio adaptations. Bowen herself reworked an early story, “The
Confidante,” for broadcast in 1943 (HRC 2.3). Not normally
inclined to undertake the business of rewriting her own fiction,
however, she granted others the right to adapt her works while
holding the power to veto a script should it deviate too far from the
original. In a letter dated 11 April 1953, she distances herself as
much as possible from an adaptation of “Pink May” by Mary Jones:
“I should like the broadcast to be announced (if it is accepted) as
‘based upon the short story by Elizabeth Bowen’” (HRC 10.5). The
original might inspire Jones’s adaptation but Bowen does not want
the adaptation to be identified as her own work. Sometimes stories
were read on the air without dramatisation. Versions of “The Tommy
Crans,” “Reduced,” “Love,” “Tears, Idle Tears,” “Telling,” “Songs My
Father Sang Me,” and numerous other stories were broadcast on BBC
radio in the UK and overseas. Although the radio market provided
constant exposure, other stories gained public notice as adaptations
for the stage and television. “Oh, Madam . . .” had a run as a play in
London, and “The Inherited Clock” was broadcast on television.
In light of the extensive publication and adaptation of Bowen’s
stories, the omission of some works from
requires
explanation. Some stories in the present volume were written for
specific occasions at the request of editors; for this reason, Bowen
may have viewed them as journeyman’s labour not worth collecting.
These commissioned stories presume widely divergent audiences.
“Brigands,” included in a compilation of pieces for children called
The Silver Ship
(1932), addresses a readership of ten- to twelve-yearolds. Similarly, “The Unromantic Princess” appeared in
The Princess
Elizabeth Gift Book
(1935), likewise intended for children. “Brigands”
and “The Unromantic Princess” are no less funny or expertly crafted
because they speak to young audiences. In fact, Bowen indulges a
satirical streak in these stories that she typically holds in check in
adult stories. Other stories show the signs of being written to
measure. Tapping the women’s magazine market in the United States
in the 1950s, Bowen published romances and Christmas stories in
Vogue
and
Woman’s Day
, at the same time as she wrote essays on
similar subjects for
Mademoiselle
and
Glamour
. The Christmas stories
tend towards lovers’ reunions or melodramatic terrors. Obsessed
with the nativity as a central mystery of Christianity, Bowen set
several stories, not all of which she completed, on Christmas Eve
or Christmas Day. The cluster of Christmas stories from the 1950s
promotes the holiday as a time of generosity and sentiment, if not
enforced gaiety and sentimentality.
The stories in this volume bespeak multiple, distinct literary
influences. When Bowen first tried her hand at writing stories in the
early 1920s, she had no real idea of the challenges that the genre
imposed, as she later claimed. In the preface to
, she
states that the story was, in her youth, not
recognized as “a form.” There had appeared so far, that is to say,
little constructive-critical interest in the short story’s possibilities
and problems . . . I had read widely, but wildly. I did not know
the stories of Hardy or Henry James; I may have heard of
Chekhov; I had not read Maupassant because I imagined I could
not read French. (viii)
Not educated at a university, Bowen disciplined herself by voracious
reading throughout her life. As a reviewer for the
between
1945 and 1949, and again between 1954 and 1958, she consumed,
on average, three books a week. Book by book, she acquired an
extensive knowledge of British, Irish, American, and European
fiction, with special attention paid to advances in the short story. In
a 1959 radio interview, she acknowledged that she learned fictional
technique by imitating other writers:
I can still see streaks or threads and patches of other influences of
other people. I think when you get started – for my generation,
my kind of writer, it was one way to teach yourself. You became
aware of influences anyway – it was one pattern of one’s
imagination. It was rather like a palisade round a young growing
tree, you knew that you felt secure in other people’s work. (HRC
2.3)
To consolidate her grasp on the short story, Bowen read master
works by her slightly older peers: James Joyce, D. H. Lawrence,
Katherine Mansfield. The signs of many authors’ influence, as
unlikely as Isak Dinesen and Maxim Gorky, flash throughout her
fiction. Several times she alludes to the fact that her first two books
of stories were published by Sidgwick & Jackson, the firm that also
released E. M. Forster’s
(1911). In the title story
of Forster’s collection, a boy takes enchanted coach rides; fully
acquainted with Forster’s book, Bowen modifies the trope of the wild
ride in her celebrated story, “The Demon Lover,” and, less dia
bolically, the bus rides that structure “The Last Bus” and “Christmas
Games.”