One hasty glance around him showed that he was the sole traveller to alight on the frosted timbers of the obscure little station. A faint rosiness in the west foretold the decline of the still wintry day. The firs that flanked the dreary passenger-shed of the platform stood burdened already with the blackness of coming night. (The Tree)
When murky winter dusk begins to settle over the railway station at Crewe its first-class waiting-room grows steadily more stagnant. Particularly if one is alone in it. The long grimed windows do little more than sift the failing light that slopes in on them from the glass roof outside and is too feeble to penetrate into the recesses beyond. And the grained massive black-leathered furniture becomes less and less inviting. It appears to have been made for a scene of extreme and diabolical violence that one may hope will never occur. One can hardly at any rate imagine it to have been designed by a really good man! (Crewe)
. . . at this instant the sad neutral winter landscape, already scarcely perceptible beneath a thin grey skin of frozen snow and a steadily descending veil of tiny flakes from the heavens above it, was suddenly blotted out. The train lights had come on, and the small cabin in which the two of them sat together had become a cage of radiance. How Lavinia hated too much light. (A Froward Child)
She was standing at the open window [of the train], looking out, but not as if she had ever entirely desisted from looking in – an oval face with highish cheekbones, and eyes and mouth from which a remote smile was now vanishing as softly and secretly as a bird enters and vanishes into its nest. (A Nest of Singing Birds)
The noonday express with a wildly soaring crescendo of lamentation came sweeping in sheer magnificence of onset round the curve, soared through the little green empty station – its windows a long broken faceless glint of sunlit glass – and that too vanished. Vanished! A swirl of dust and an unutterable stillness followed after it. The skin of a banana on the platform was the only proof that it had come and gone. Its shattering clamour had left for contrast an almost helpless sense of peace. ‘Yes, yes!’ we all seemed to be whispering – from the Cedar of Lebanon to the little hyssop in the wall – ‘here we all are; and still, thank heaven, safe. Safe!’ (Ding Dong Bell)
It is surely impossible not to feel ourselves in the presence of an obsession – the same obsession that haunts the melancholy subtle cadences of Mr de la Mare’s poetry. Such trite phrases as ‘ships that pass’, ‘travellers through life’, ‘journey’s end’ are the way in which for centuries the common man has taken a sidelong glance at the common fate (to be here, and there, and gone) – and looked away again. But every once in a while, perhaps only once or twice in a century, a man finds he cannot so easily dismiss with a regulation phrase what meets his eyes: the eyes linger: the obsession is born – in an Emily Brontë. a Beddoes, a James Thomson, in Mr de la Mare.
‘Mors. And what does Mors mean?’ enquired that oddly indolent voice in the quiet. ‘Was it his name, or his initials, or is it a charm?’ ‘It means – well, sleep,’ I said, ‘Or nightmare, or dawn, or nothing, or – it might mean everything.’ I confess, though, that to my ear it had the sound at that moment of an enormous breaker, bursting on the shore of some unspeakably remote island and we two marooned. (Ding Dong Bell)
One thing, it will be noticed in all these stories. Mors does not mean; it does not mean Hell – or Heaven. That obsession with death that fills Mr de la Mare’s poetry with the whisper of ghosts, that expresses itself over and over again in the short story in the form of revenants, has never led him to accept – or even to speculate on – the Christian answer. Christianity when it figures in these stories is like a dead religion of which we see only the enormous stone memorials. Churches do occur – in All Hallows, The Trumpet, Strangers and Pilgrims, but they are empty haunted buildings.
At this moment of the afternoon the great church almost cheated one into the belief that it was possessed of a life of its own. It lay, as I say, couched in its natural hollow, basking under the dark dome of the heavens like some half-fossilized monster that might at any moment stir and awaken out of the swoon to which the wand of the enchanter had committed it. (All Hallows)
What an odd world, to those of us with traditional Christian beliefs, is this world of Mr de la Mare’s: the world where the terrible Seaton’s Aunt absorbs the living as a spider does and remains alive herself in the company of the dead. ‘I don’t look to flesh and blood for my company. When you’ve got to be my age. Mr Smithers (which God forbid), you’ll find life a very different affair from what you seem to think it is now. You won’t seek company then, I’ll be bound. It’s thrust on you’; the world of the recluse Mr Bloom, that spiritualist who had pressed on too far ignoring the advice that the poet would have given him.
Bethink thee: every enticing league thou wend
Beyond the mark where life its bound hath set
Will lead thee at length where human pathways end
And the dark enemy spreads his maddening net.
How wrong, however, it would be to give the impression that Mr de la Mare is just another, however accomplished, writer of ghost stories, yet what is it that divides this world of Mr Kempe and Mr Bloom and Seaton’s Aunt, the dubious fellow-passenger with Lavinia in the train, the stranger in Crewe waiting room from the world of the late M. R. James’s creation – told by the antiquary? M. R. James with admirable skill invented ghosts to make the flesh creep; astutely he used the image which would best convey horror; he was concerned with truth only in the sense that his stories must ring true – while they were being read. But Mr de la Mare is concerned, like his own Mr Bloom, to find out: his stories are true in the sense that the author believes – and conveys his belief – that this is the real world, but only in so far as he has yet discovered it. They are tentative. His use of prose reminds us frequently of a blind man trying to describe an object from the touch only – ‘this thing is circular, or nearly circular, oddly dinted, too hard to be a ball: it might be, yes it might be, a human skull’. At any moment we expect a complete discovery, but the discovery is delayed. We, as well as the author, are this side of Lethe. When I was a child I used to be horrified by Carroll’s poem The Hunting of the Snark. The danger that the snark might prove to be a boojum haunted me from the first page, and sometimes reading Mr de la Mare’s stories, I fear that the author in his strange fumbling at the invisible curtain may suddenly come on the inescapable boojum truth, and just as quickly vanish away.
For how they continually seek their snark, his characters – in railway trains, in deserted churches, even in the bars of village inns. Listen to them speaking, and see how all the time they ignore what is at least a fact – that an answer to their question has been proposed: how intent they are to find an alternative, personal explanation: how they hover and debate and touch and withdraw, while the boojum waits.
There’s Free Will, for example: there’s Moral Responsibility; and such little riddles as where we all come from and where we are going to, why, we don’t even know what we are – in ourselves. I mean. And how many of us have tried to find out? (Mr Kempe)
‘The points as I take it, sir, are these. First,’ he laid forefinger on forefinger, ‘the number of those gone as compared with ourselves who are still waiting. Next, there being no warrant that what is seen – if seen at all – is wraiths of the departed, and not from elsewhere. The very waterspouts outside are said to be demonstrations of that belief. Third and last, another question: What purpose could call so small a sprinkling of them back – a few grains of sand out of the wilderness, unless, it may be, some festering grievance; or hunger for the living, sir; or duty left undone? In which case, mark you, which of any of us is safe?’ (Strangers and Pilgrims)
‘My dream was only – after; the state after death, as they call it . . .’ Mr Eaves leaned forward, and all but whispered the curious tidings into her ear. ‘It’s – it’s just the same,’ he said. (The Three Friends)
There is no space in an essay of this length to study the tech
nique which does occasionally creak with other than the tread of visitants; nor to dwell on the minor defects – the occasional archness, whimsicality, playfulness, especially when Mr de la Mare is unwise enough to dress his narrator up in women’s clothes (as he did in The Memoirs of a Midget). Perhaps we could surrender without too much regret one third of his short stories, but what a volume would be left. The Almond Tree, Seaton’s Aunt, The Three Friends, The Count’s Courtship, Miss Duveen, A Recluse, Willows, Crewe, An Ideal Craftsman, A Froward Child, A Revenant, The Trumpet, Strangers and Pilgrims, Mr Kempe, Missing, Disillusioned, All Hallows – here is one man’s choice of what he could not, under any circumstances, spare.
In all these stories we have a prose unequalled in its richness since the death of James, or dare one, at this date, say Robert Louis Stevenson. Stevenson comes particularly to mind because he played with so wide a vocabulary – the colloquial and the literary phrase, incorporating even the dialect word and naturalizing it. So Mr de la Mare will play consciously with clichés (hemmed like James’s between inverted commas), turning them under-side as it were to the reader, and showing what other meanings lie there hidden: he will suddenly enrich a colloquial conversation with a literary phrase out of the common tongue, or enrich on the contrary a conscious literary description with a turn of country phrase – ‘destiny was spudding at his tap root’.
With these resources at his command no one can bring the natural visible world more sharply to the eye: from the railway carriage window we watch the landscape unfold, the sparkle of frost and rain, the glare of summer sunlight, the lights in evening windows; we are wooed and lulled sometimes to the verge of sleep by the beauty of the prose, until suddenly without warning a sentence breaks in mid-breath and we look up and see the terrified eyes of our fellow-passenger, appealing, hungry, scared, as he watches what we cannot see – ‘the sediment of an unspeakable possession’, and a certain glibness would seem to surround our easy conscious Christian answers to all that wild speculation, if we could ever trust ourselves to urge that cold comfort upon this stranger travelling ‘our way’.
1948
THE SARATOGA TRUNK
THE long trainload*5 draws by our platform, passes us with an inimical flash of female eyes, and proceeds on into how many more dry and gritty years. It set out in 1915 with some acclamation, carrying its embarrassing cargo – the stream of consciousness – saluted by many prominent bystanders – Miss West and Mrs Woolf, Mr Wells, Mr Beresford, Mr Swinnerton, and Mr Hugh Walpole:
Miriam left the gaslit hall and went slowly upstairs. The March twilight lay upon the landings, but the staircase was almost dark. The top landing was quite dark and silent. There was no one about. It would be quiet in her room. She could sit by the fire and be quiet and think things over until Eve and Harriet came back with the parcels. She would have time to think about the journey and decide what she was going to say to the Fraulein. Her new Saratoga trunk stood solid and gleaming in the firelight.
Who could have foreseen in those first ordinary phrases this gigantic work which has now reached its two thousandth page, without any indication of a close? The Saratoga trunk becomes progressively more worn and labelled. There is no reason why the pilgrimage should ever end, except with the author’s life, for she is attempting to represent the whole effect of every experience – friendship, politics, tea-parties, books, weather, what you will – on a woman’s sensibility.
I am uncertain of my dates, but I should imagine Miss Richardson in her ponderous unwitty way has had an immense influence on such writers as Mrs Woolf and Miss Stein, and through them on their disciples. Her novel, therefore, has something in common with Bowles’s Sonnets. She herself became influenced about halfway through these four volumes (comprising twelve novels or instalments) by the later novels of Henry James – the result, though it increased the obscurity of her sensibility, was to the good, for she began to shed the adjectives which in the first volume disguise any muscles her prose may possess – ‘large soft fresh pink full-blown roses’ is only one phrase in a paragraph containing 41 adjectives qualifying 15 nouns. Or was it simply that Miriam became a little older, unhappier, less lyrical? In the monstrous subjectivity of this novel the author is absorbed into her character. There is no longer a Miss Richardson: only Miriam – Miriam off to teach English in a German School, off again to be a teacher in North London, a governess in the country, a dental secretary in Wimpole Street: a flotsam of female friendships piling up, descriptions of clothes, lodgings, encounters at the Fabian Society: Miriam taking to reviewing, among the first bicyclists, Miriam enlightened about socialism and women’s rights, reading Zola from Mudie’s (surely this is inaccurate) and later Ibsen, losing her virginity tardily and ineffectually on page 218 of volume 4. When the book pauses we have not yet reached the Great War.
There are passages of admirable description, characters do sometimes emerge clearly from the stream of consciousness – the Russian Jew, Mr Shatov, waiting at the end of the street with a rose, patronizing the British Museum, an embarrassing and pathetic companion, and the ex-nurse Eleanor Dear, the lower middle-class consumptive clawing her unscrupulous petty acquisitive way through other people’s lives. There are passages, too, where Miriam’s thought, in its Jacobean dress, takes on her master’s wide impressionist poetry among the dental surroundings, as in this description of the frightened peer who has cancelled all his appointments:
Through his staccato incoherencies – as he stood shamed and suppliant, and sociable down to the very movement of his eyelashes, and looking so much as if he had come straight from a racecourse that her mind’s eye saw the diagonal from shoulder to hip of the strap of his binoculars and upon his head the grey topper that would complete his dress, and the gay rose in his buttonhole – she saw his pleasant life, saw its coming weeks, the best and brightest of the spring season, broken up by appointments to sit every few days for an indefinite time enduring discomfort and sometimes acute pain, and facing the intimate reminder that the body doesn’t last, facing and feeling the certainty of death.
But the final effect, I fear, is one of weariness (that may be a tribute to Miss Richardson’s integrity), the weariness of the best years of life shared with an earnest, rather sentimental, and complacent woman. For one of the drawbacks of Miss Richardson’s unironic, undetached method is that the compliments paid so frequently to the wit or intellect of Miriam seem addressed to the author herself. (We are reminded of those American women who remark to strangers, ‘They simply worshipped me.’) And as for the method – it must have seemed in 1915 a revivifying change from the tyranny of the ‘plot’. But time has taken its revenge: after twenty years of subjectivity, we are turning back with relief to the old dictatorship, to the detached and objective treatment, while this novel, ignoring all signals, just ploughs on and on, the Saratoga trunk, labelled this time for Switzerland, for Austria, shaking on the rack, and Miriam still sensitively on the alert, reading far too much significance into a cup of coffee, a flower in a vase, a fog, or a sunset.
1938
ARABIA DESERTA
ONE opens the new novel by Mr Conrad Aiken*6 with all the excitement that comes from complete confidence in the author. One is satisfied beforehand of the impregnable front he will offer to the details of criticism, the contemporary nature of his thought, the subtlety and exactitude of his style, his technical ability which never allows a value to escape. One can surrender at once to appreciation, to the deep interest of his psychological exploration. One of the characters in Great Circle described the map of a brain as being like ap imaginary map of Mars. ‘Full of Arabia Desertas. Canals, seas, mountains, glaciers, extinct volcanoes, or ulcers . . . And all that strange congregation of scars, that record of wounds and fissures, is what speaks and acts.’ That is the region in which Mr Aiken moves.
King Coffin is a study in madness. The Arabia Deserta of Jasper Ammen’s brain lies much further from the ordinary trade routes than the brain Mr Aiken mapped in Great Circle o
f the damned-to-be-cuckolded dweller in polite Cambridge, Mass., further, I think, than many previous novelists have gone. Jasper Ammen is an egocentric; one sees him always from inside his brain, trying to get free in a crazy superman pride from life, from the little circle of theoretical anarchists he has supported with his money, from the woman who loves him, from every friend in turn, by deliberate acts of rudeness, by mystifications, asserting his superiority by small social immoralities such as reading other people’s letters and diaries. The last stage of that assertion, of course, must be to destroy life. But the crime must be a pure one; if he murders a friend, too many impure motives, of irritation, boredom, jealousy, may play their part. So Ammen chooses a complete stranger, a little man he happens to notice in the subway.
To satisfy his sense of power Ammen sets himself to learn all the details of the life he proposes to end; he speaks to Jones on the telephone, sends him theatre tickets anonymously the better to watch him, shadows him to his office and his home in its mean villa-ed street, he even makes his way into the cellar of his house when all above are occupied with childbirth. All interests but Jones, the chosen stranger, and his own sense of power fade out of Ammen’s brain: ordinary life reaches him only in snatches of overheard conversation, married people talking on stairways, girls in the street, two students starting a car.