By Kohinoor Dasgupta
Elizabeth Bowen’s The House in Paris was published in 1935, when she was thirty-six. It is an energetic and suspenseful novel. In her candid Introduction to the Penguin Classics edition of the novel (1976) author A. S. Byatt wrote:
"I think, finally, it is in the simple brilliance of the plot that the power of The House in Paris lies. It is a plot of considerable primitive force – child in search of unknown parents, parents in search of unknown child, love and death as identical moments of extremity. It works by playing these powerful emotions and events off against the confusions, the limitations, the continuities created by a particular civilization, a particular time and culture.”
The novel is divided into three parts, The Present, The Past and The Present. This is an ouroboros of a literary plot! I do not want to know what happens to the characters after the novel ends. Their intensity is concentrated in the novel, reciprocating the intensity of the author’s attention, just as The Clubfooted Boy continues to live intensely on that sunny day in Naples 382 years after he was painted by Jusepe de Ribera.
I dread reading the novel again, yet I have dared to do so twice in the past ten years. So back I go to the February day which is the beginning of the single day of the novel’s linear chronology, when the child Henrietta, transiting through Paris, is picked up by the marvelously mysterious Miss Naomi Fisher at the Gare du Nord.
The theme of "child in search of unknown parents, parents in search of unknown child” pointed to by A. S. Byatt is introduced right away. Naomi informs Henrietta that another child, Leopold, is already there at their destination, the small house on Rue Sylvestre Bonnard. Leopold lives near Spezia in Italy with his adoptive family. He came to Paris to meet his mother for the first time since his infancy. He remembers nothing of her. This is too much information from a stranger and about another stranger for any eleven-year-old. Henrietta's mother is dead. To her, Naomi's information is more than bewildering.
Henrietta, Naomi desires, should not bother Leopold with questions; she should just play with him. As soon as we meet Leopold we understand that Leopold does not play. How did Naomi miss that?
When later, alongside Henrietta, we meet Naomi’s bedridden mother, we cannot but wonder, was Naomi entirely truthful in the taxi when she told Henrietta that she was unable to consult her mother about hosting the two children at once? Mme. Fisher knows all there is to know. Thus, early on, Bowen sows doubt about Naomi’s ability to perceive and recount accurately.
In Part II (The Past), Karen Michaelis, who spent a year living with the Fishers in Paris, reflects:
"But at any time she [Naomi] had a way of making straight lines bend and shapes of things fluctuate as though a strong current were flowing over them. With her there, there seemed to be no more facts. Under her unassumingness, Naomi had a will that, like a powerful engine started up suddenly, made everything swerve."
The behavior of the two children, together and apart, is a draw of this novel. Children experience and inflict pain. They are entirely capable, at nine and eleven years old, of feeling both bitterness and love. They may be arrogant and cruel, and they may be contrite and broken in the space of a few moments, and all the emotions may be pure expression. They may bristle at being fawned on (Leopold), and they may miss being extravagantly comforted, at least once in a blue moon (Henrietta). Between the two of them, Leopold and Henrietta pack an extraordinary amount of poignancy. The house in Paris receives an airing because of them and the salon, an exorcism.
The adult interactions and transformations at the heart of the story are difficult and opaque. The Max sitting under the cherry tree at Twickenham is different from the man who lurched out of the house in Paris. Karen’s reliance on Naomi even after all that happened is good for the plot, but unlikely in real life. In real life, people are full of doubts in the best of times. They are also unforgiving. Bowen veils Karen’s mind from us (we grew used to hearing Karen) regarding the unnatural death described in the novel, as though Karen became permanently benumbed.
Did Karen believe Naomi’s version of events? She certainly had her own ideas about Mme. Fisher’s friendship with Max. After all, even at Mony’s at Boulogne, Karen "saw she had let in an enemy worse than time” when she asked Max about Mme. Fisher. As for Naomi, Karen, even at eighteen, detected in her a sort of madness. So, did she believe that Max told Naomi: "She [Karen] does not know me”?
Mothers and daughters, women who are surrogate mother figures, for whatever reason or duration, appear in the novel as a deeper exploration of the theme of mothering or being brought up by mothers. Henrietta’s grandmother, Mrs. Arbuthnot, would read Mme. Sévigné’s letters with Naomi at Chambéry. While even Henrietta knows that Naomi is one of her grandmother’s “sub-friends” whom "she remembered when they could be of use,” Naomi continues to idolize Mrs. Arbuthnot. On her part, Mrs. Arbuthnot writes archly that Naomi, ensconced in the house in Paris with her mother, has forgotten her. Max tells Karen about Mme. Fisher’s mind games with him. He met her when he was twenty and Mme. Fisher, already widowed, was middle-aged as per perceptions in the 1920s. Mme. Fisher drew him into an addictive intellectual relationship that is ultimately harmful for his emotional wellbeing, and he cannot "twist his life his own way”. Bowen looks at Karen and her mother, Mrs. Michaelis, in tender, ironic detail in Part 2 (The Past). Although we are separated by almost 100 years, mothers may find Mrs. Michaelis a sympathetic character. When did mothers give up good intentions? In Ireland, fleeing from the awful stability of serene home and perfect fiancé, Karen briefly finds a degree of understanding and rebelliousness in her mother’s sister.
The dominating relationship in this category is that between Mme. Fisher and her only daughter Naomi, who is single and lives in her mother’s house. It is against this dark devotion that we must see nine-year-old Leopold’s yearning for garden-variety anonymity in the company of his mother, versus being forever the heroic outsider, "over understood” by his adoptive family. Against the Fishers too, we must view Henrietta’s life without a mother to indulge her.
The point of view changes without warning, and you need to be attentive to catch Naomi’s the single time it sneaks in. The plot does a terrific job of keeping us anxious and curious up to the end.
You might want to read The House in Paris just for the experience of being dunked by words into a place, a day or a mood cinematically, more so than most movies are able to do any more.
The House in Paris by Elizabeth Bowen
With an Introduction by A.S Byatt
Anchor Books
Cover design: Megan Wilson
Cover Painting: Piano Lesson by Henri Matisse, 1916
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