Statement

11 Feb 24

It was exactly a year ago I started experimenting with AI Visual Art, little knowing what I was entering. There was indeed much stimulation in triggering shifting collages from my gestalt real-time reviews of individual authors. But that was then, and now is now. From today, I no longer have this facility

Shadows & Elbows · KÔRner as a Cicumflexed Elbow — A site for all Elizabeth Boweneers by DF Lewis as editor, publisher, writer and reviewer of fiction.

My recent reviews of all her fiction: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/31260-2/

#elizabethbowen

I recently completed my personal journey through Bowen’s 108 stories and 10 novels.
Links to this material:https://t.co/cQ9IWTDCtO
 My summary:https://t.co/MTr4155yfn@Matt_Casbourne @LitCamb @NicDarwood @RobertJStone2 @Duckbooks @ailsacox @EvelynBarbalet

— Des Lewis (@DF_Lewis) March 31, 2022

Stroking Her Elbows, Her Table Spread

From today’s review of THE LAST SEPTEMBER by Elizabeth Bowen here: https://elizabethbowensite.wordpress.com/2022/02/02/the-last-september-by-elizabeth-bowen/

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But, importantly, it starts with an incipient Bowen ‘stroking her elbows’ and thinking of her future life, with the hinterland of ‘doubles’ if not future shadowy thirds! This in contrast to the ‘consoling of her elbows’ in her final novel Eva Trout! So this is a crucial passage to quote…

“Lois took a cushion and sat on the top step with her arms crossed, stroking her elbows. ‘I shouldn’t sit there,’ her aunt continued; ‘at this time of night stone will strike up through anything.’
‘If you don’t get rheumatism now,’ added Francie, ‘you will be storing up rheumatism.’
‘It will be my rheumatism,’ said Lois as gently as possible, but added inwardly: ‘After you’re both dead.’ A thought that fifty years hence she might well, if she wished, be sitting here on the steps – with or without rheumatism – having penetrated thirty years deeper ahead into Time than they could, gave her a feeling of mysteriousness and destination. And she was fitted for this by being twice as complex as their generation – for she must be: double as many people having gone to the making of her.”

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“The writing-table overlooking the sea, where she rested her elbows…”

A site for all Elizabeth Boweneers established in 2010 by DF Lewis as editor, publisher, writer and reviewer of fiction.

My reviews of Bowen and Aickman  HERE and HERE, I hope, successfully convey the themes and stylish elbow-power of their short stories, although I have found relatively fewer actual elbows in Aickman!

The Des Lewis Gestalt Real-Time Reviews

My Bowen and Aickman Summary

It was my recent re-reading of Elizabeth Bowen’s ‘A Day In The Dark’ (my having now re-read all the Bowen stories in a random order), that became the first occasion ELBOW dawned on me as a significant word in her work, having instinctively related the meaningfulness of the two elbow incidents in that particular story. I then started noticing more and more elbows in other stories. I think there are about 80 in the main collected stories book and I haven’t yet counted all those in the Bazaar EUP collection of her stories. For me, these elbows add to the stories’ meanings in different ways.There are 38 elbows in the novel ‘Death of the Heart’, too! And many also in the other novels.

Robert Aickman (1914-1981) and Elizabeth Bowen(1899-1973) , as far as I can see, had significant mutual friends and entered the same sort…

View original post 233 more words

Nine huge pages of Elizabeth Bowen quotes – that DF Lewis has garnered from a lifetime of reading her fiction – start HERE (Nine long pages). There is at least one quote from each story and novel chapter.  These quotations are stunning. You will not quite realise how stunning until you experience them.

[EDIT 2022: Above is now superseded by my methodical quotes and commentary on Bowen’s ten novels here: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2022/01/02/my-ongoing-reviews-of-elizabeth-bowen-novels/ ]

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My past real-time reviews of many books where I mention Elizabeth Bowen: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/26537-2/
Just a few of my Elizabeth Bowen books are shown below.

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The ultimate expression of Gluey Zenoism from an author who wrote The Demon Lover in one of the Robert Aickman Fontana Ghost Books:

“‘I’ll tell you something, Clara.  Have you ever SEEN a minute? Have you actually had one wriggling inside your hand?  Did you know if you keep your finger inside a clock for a minute, you can pick out that very minute and take it home for your own?’  So it is Paul who stealthily lifts the dome off. It is Paul who selects the finger of Clara’s that is to be guided, shrinking, then forced wincing into the works, to be wedged in them, bruised in them, bitten into and eaten up by the cogs.  ‘No you have got to keep it there, or you will lose the minute.  I am doing the counting – the counting up to sixty.’ . . . But there is to be no sixty.  The ticking stops.”
From ‘The Inherited Clock’ (1944) by Elizabeth Bowen

ELizabeth BOWen’s Elbow and Elbow Sign…

…within the old painting of her image below:

Eli

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beth

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Elbow Shadow

Desperate Measures

As I leant on my walking-stick, I watched him as he inched nearer to the goods behind the glass. It was as if he were slowly measuring the pavement rather than preparing to window-shop.

His steps were so methodical he sometimes back-tracked them and then started new steps from a precise point marked by a crack in a paving-slab or a hardened smear of a substance that once must have been chewing-gum — or that was the least unsavoury assumption to make about such a smear.

Eventually, after much toing and froing, he reached the pane’s closed threshold, so near to it that his nose was almost pressed up against it.

I could see he had been counting silently to himself — much like small children do when mouthing the words they read, head lowered close to the page to prevent anyone spotting them thus mimic the shapes that were configured against a sea of white.

“How far was it then?” I dared ask, while leaning against the support of my stick.

He pretended not to know me. In fact, pretence wasn’t hard, I guess, as I was a complete stranger poking my own nose closer and closer with each jab of my words.

I assumed he was a local council official, in what I estimated to be the portly Autumn of his years. Why else was he pacing the pavement so painstakingly if not to divine some need to narrow or widen it? Surely, he would be using a graduated yardstick purposely marked out with strict stages of significant scope. That would have looked far more professional.

“Are they going to move the road nearer the pavement?” I asked, while waving my stick officiously. I was ever alert for local council shenanigans in our town. I didn’t approve of ANYTHING they ever did, WHATEVER they did. My letters were often in furious capital letters when written down.

He turned round to face me, forcing me to realise that my stick-waving had been wasted … Until now.

But perhaps he had been window-shopping after all. Or, as it turned out, being window-shopped himself, his meted-out steps having been just a means to delay the inevitable.

Before I could even blink, two men in shop-soiled white coats emerged from inside and dragged him to the business-end depths of the establishment.

“Cheap at half the price!” I shouted out, victory in my voice. I now saw it was a butcher’s shop, where bones often cracked audibly at night, if there was anyone outside to hear them.

Supplements for the food chain. Off-street curmudgeons were second-best to horse meat, but hardly anyone ever noticed.

I suddenly felt the urge to touch heel to toe, the business-end of my notched stick ready in hand to walk off and gloat. Pleased I had grown old so elbowily.

NcfN

NOTHING COMES FROM NOTHING
Because Nothing was ever what was there before
And what was there before ever ends up as Nothing
We shall trouble you no more
Truths can only be said once
Otherwise they are taken for granted
And Truths that come from Nothing have haunted
The rest of us forever until we also came to Nothing

These words were written on the side of the stable that Owen had owned, and Owen’s son peered further beyond the stable towards the broken down house where he had not yet dared enter, something he had recently inherited and where he had spent his boyhood but never returned till now after a lifetime of marriage and his own children and state business abroad. He turned back and frowned. He could not recognise the handwriting, if such words created with paintstrokes could actually be called handwriting. A very narrow brush however had evidently been used. As a widower, Owen’s son had once painted a coffin for his wife with a similar fine brush. It was the least he could do, in the circumstances. His children, meanwhile, had never forgiven him for the circumstances of her death, and a teardrop came to Owen’s son’s eye as he thought of them. Basil, the only one of Owen’s son’s grown-up children to travel to England with him, despite previous estrangement, had already entered the broken down house where Owen, Basil’s grandfather whom Basil had never known, spent a lifetime since Owen’s wife had died in giving birth to Basil’s father who had just surveyed the words on the stable. Basil’s father now gazed across the fields towards the forest. There were not many real forests in England. But this forest seemed to stretch forever. And there was not even any sign of Basil returning to fulfil some sort of stability for the father with whom he had just been reunited.

All these words above, in turn, were written on the flyleaf of an old Bible. Owen’s Bible. The one he used every day to fill the available free space in it with words using an old-fashioned fountain pen with a fine narrow nib. The sheets of blank writing paper in Owen’s room had run out before the ink. So this was the obvious place to use for the words that were left over. They owed Owen that at least, whatever life’s instability.

In the Beginning was the Word. But every page was blank. Even the freehold God was born instable.

PILLAR OF SALT by Shirley Jackson

Stories as often oblique and dark palliators now reach their end. I seem, by random chance, to have left the best until last. An almost direct experience  of the holiday of a seasoned husband and wife, Brad and Margaret., visiting New York from New Hampshire, innocents abroad, but their ideals of a city break gradually takes various turns of alarms, confusions and even the imposing city buildings are in entropy as well as the panic and meltdown of Margaret, conveyed by dense attritional paragraphing that effectively plunges the reader into her various emotions, towards an ‘elbow’ moment that helps bring matters to a frighteningly open-ended close. And this final story makes even my reviewing methods crazily credible….

“We’ve been playing anagrams.”

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My other reviews of Shirley Jackson: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2024/02/15/my-reviews-of-stories-by-shirley-jackson/

THE BUS by Shirley Jackson

“It had clearly been an old mansion once,…  […] … it needs paint and tightening all round and possibly a new roof…”

Miss Harper travels on a pervasively rainy night in a dirty old bus, with a grumpy driver who claims he is not an alarm clock, and other passengers blurred and soft speaking, and someone behind her who says they are running away from home. She is put off in a strange place, not her own home town, and she eventually finds an ex-mansion that seems to have echoes of her own childhood home with  prehensile wooden toys…

It is a great scary story with an oblique loop of déjà vu and ‘fairyland colours’, that I am glad I have now read by the skin of my teeth in catching its late bus, astonished that I have not read hardly any Shirley Jackson before. Especially as my own work has been compared recently by an independent source to an amalgam of Lautréamont, Barthelme and Jackson! It has now stirred me to order a copy of THE HAUNTING OF HILL HOUSE to read for the first time, too. I’ve not read Barthelme or Lautréamont, either!

My Jackson reviews here: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2024/02/15/my-reviews-of-stories-by-shirley-jackson/

Red Hats (2)

Why they call people with ginger hair redheads I have no idea. I suppose the expression ‘redhead’ predates the invention of the word ‘orange’ to describe the orange colour. So, is ‘red’ older? And did it previously cover other colours that approximated red and now are called something else with their own adopted disciples of colour variations eager to emerge and be given their own name. Each colour as parent colour subsequently with its own disciples of colours that were a shade or two away from such a parent colour? And they all eventually have their own names, I guessed, as I watched, over the years, my redhead friend pass from ginger to grey during the course of her life, which begged the question, in my mind, about the colour disciples that are radiated from ‘grey’ as the parent colour itself. Until I saw her in later life among her disciples of friends all wearing red hats to make the twilight years brighter than some of the dusks that bedevil the grey sunsets every autumn. Each of the ladies considered the other ladies were her own disciples. There is a term in music called a ‘dying fall’ and when I noticed most of their other clothes were purple, a tear came to my mind for no accountable reason. Except for the fact that one of these ladies of a certain age was wearing a purple hat and a bright red coat. And I smiled as the red coat reminded me of ancient holiday camps and once happy endings. Her gloves were mauve. A nice touch.

My Peeling Paint Photos

Red Hats

The Red Hat People lived in Red Hat Land and rarely wandered beyond its margins. I was one such Red Hat Person who had wondered why wearing red hats was such a ‘thing’, and so the only way to find out was by means of foolhardiness, viz. to see what hats other people wore elsewhere. Not that it was easy to leave — dragging myself through hedges backward and across foot stiles meant for a different bodily scale and configuration to mine. And none of it was made any easier through my needing to maintain standards while continuing to sport the standard red hat on my head. However, in thankful counterpoint, the hat bore a brim that gave me sporadic shade from the scorching sun during the hottest part of the day. In fact I felt as if it must seem invisible when silhouetted against a similar colour in the red hot sky. But can a silhouette be any other colour but black? It is strange how my thoughts can twist and turn once seeded in my mind. And as soon as I emerged from one particular hedge with the hat still perched on my head, I saw the nature of the next foot stile that faced me. Near it or upon it, a man could be discerned in a blue hat and the biggest head imaginable within it, at least the biggest head imaginable by me. He had needed to hang his hat on the stile’s hand-hold and it was as if the stile’s structure also bore a harness somewhere to give further support to his head. I looked at the sky beyond the stile upon which he was propped and saw the firmament was gradually turning as blue as his hat, with indications the sun was setting on the other side of the stile, with later signs, even as I watched, of the blue becoming a navy sort of blue, evidently soon to turn black. It was then, in sudden panic, that I escaped back through the last hedge and it was far more difficult than when I had come in the opposite direction, and this was because the spiky bits had firmly turned against me. And the difficulty was the same when I turned round and tried to go forward instead of backward into the hedge whence I had so recently emerged. My red hat from Red Hat Land was already forgotten in the earlier panic, and I could now see it was hanging upon one of the hedge spikes as tiny as the tiniest red berry. And I felt tears on the point of brimming over.