Yet, in 1948, Faber issued a Tribute to Walter de la Mare on his Seventy Fifth Birthday, which contained contributions from J. B. Priestley, Vita Sackville-West, Dover Wilson, J. Middleton Murry, Laurence Whistler, John Masefield, C. Day Lewis, Lord David Cecil, and, among others, not Uncle Tom Cobley but Marie Stopes, of all people. De la Mare was the court magician to the literary establishment and, at least after his middle age, enjoyed the pleasantest but most evanescent kind of fame, which is that during your own lifetime.
It seems unlikely his reputation as a poet will revive. His fiction is another matter. His output of novels and stories is uneven, his range limited, but Memoirs of a Midget is a novel that clearly set out with the intention of being unique and, in fact, is so; lucid, enigmatic, and violent with the terrible violence that leaves behind no physical trace.
Memoirs of a Midget was first published in 1921; it was not the work of a young man. De la Mare was born in 1873 and, in his fiction, remained most at home, as most of us do, in the imaginative world of his youth and early middle age. Victoria is still on the throne of Miss M.’s England, a queen who, as Miss M. notes, is not that much taller than herself. The novel was instantly successful, brought de la Mare a vastly increased readership and drew from its admirers curious tributes in the shape of teeny-tiny objects, miniature Shakespeares, and so on, suitable for the use of Miss M. Russell Brain (Tea with Walter de la Mare, Faber, 1953) describes a cabinet full of these wee gifts in the writer’s home.
These gifts tell us something important about de la Mare’s readership; it was particularly susceptible to the literary conjuring trick because it wanted to believe in magic. The writer seduced his readers, not only into believing in the objective reality of Miss M. but also into forming a sympathetic identification with her little, anguished, nostalgic, backward-looking figure, lost in a world she has not made. Perhaps she was an appropriate heroine for the English middle-class in the aftermath of the First World War; she is both irreproachable, lovable, and, as an object for identification, blessedly oblique.
At the time of the publication of Memoirs of a Midget, de la Mare had been earning his living as a man of letters for thirteen years; was an established poet in the Georgian style, in which he remained; a critic (Rupert Brooke and the Intellectual Imagination, 1919); and had published several novels, the most significant of which are a death-haunted book for children, The Three Royal Monkeys (1910), and The Return (also in 1910).
The Return is about the demonic possession of a dull suburban householder by the perturbed spirit of an eighteenth-century French rake and suicide. It is extraordinary, given such a plot, that so little should happen in the novel. Like Memoirs of a Midget it is about estrangement. The hero spends the novel in a state of intense alienation from himself, partly because the revenant boasts an infinitely more complex and attractive personality than its host; and, indeed, it is a notion to make the mind reel – that of Dagwood Bumstead possessed by, say, Casanova. No wonder de la Mare scares himself. It is as if, having invented the idea of demonic possession as a blessing in disguise, de la Mare shies away, terrified, from the consequences, perhaps because he knew he wanted to make evil attractive, but not all that attractive. It is a problem he faces again, and deals with more successfully, in the character of Fanny Bowater in Memoirs of a Midget, where he seems more at home with the idea that a sexually manipulative woman is inherently evil.
The Return is not a good novel. It is blown out with windy mystification and can hardly have satisfied de la Mare himself since he spent the next decade concentrating on poetry and short stories. He perfected his use of language until his prose is music as plangent as that of Vaughan Williams or Arthur Butterworth, composers with whom he shares an interest in the English lyric. Some of these short stories, ‘The Almond Tree’ and ‘In the Forest’, for example, achieve a high gloss of technical perfection that deflects attention from the cruelty of the content, which in both these stories is the brutal innocence of children.
Later stories retain this high surface sheen upon an internal tension of terror, often a psychological terrorism, as in the remarkable ‘At First Sight’, from a collection aptly titled On the Edge (1930). Here a young man’s family drive an unsuitable girlfriend to suicide. But all is done gently, gently, over the teacups. This young man suffers from a startling affliction; he is physically incapable of raising his head, of looking up, without suffering intense pain, so his sight is confined to a limited, half-moon-shaped segment of the ground before him. This circumscribed, painful, but intense vision is somewhat similar to de la Mare’s own.
These stories are ‘tales’ in the nineteenth-century sense, highly structured artefacts with beginnings, middles, and ends and a schematic coherence of imagery, not those fragments of epiphanic experience which is the type of the twentieth-century short story. He sternly eschewed modernism, with the result that his fiction has more in common with that of, say, Borges, especially in its studied ‘literariness’, than with his own contemporaries who are, of course, the great moderns – Joyce, Lawrence, Kafka. I can find no evidence that de la Mare liked, or even read, these writers. Here the analogy with the hero of ‘At First Sight’ is almost distressing.
Even, or especially, in his most adult and cruellest writing, he shares some qualities with certain Victorian writing for children – George MacDonald’s The Princess and the Goblin and Christina Rossetti’s Goblin Market come to mind – in which the latent content diverges so markedly from the superficial text that their self-designation as ‘fairytales’ seems to function as a screen, or cover, designed to disarm the reader.
De la Mare is a master of mise-en-scène. He is one of the great fictional architects and interior designers; he builds enchanting houses for his characters and furnishes them with a sure eye for those details of personality that are expressed through everyday objects. His ability to evoke mood and atmosphere, especially that of the English countryside in its aspect of literary pastoral, are related to this talent for mise-en-scène. The countryside often functions as a backdrop that partakes in the action, as the gardens do in Memoirs of a Midget. This quality of romantic evocation, of soft reverie as scenery, combined with the solid, conventional, middle-class milieu in which his most horrible stories take place, both domesticates, normalizes, the terror at their heart, and gives it a further edge.
He has a tremendous and, as if self-protective, enthusiasm for cosiness. There is scarcely a novel or a short story of his that does not involve an elaborate tea-time; tea, that uniquely English meal, that unnecessary collation at which no stimulants – neither alcohol nor meat – are served, that comforting repast of which to partake is as good as a second childhood. However, at certain of his tea parties – especially the one in ‘At First Sight’, and at several of Miss M.’s own – the cosiness only augments the tortures that are taking place, until the very crockery takes on the aspect of the apparatus of despair and it chinks like the chains of prisoners.
Nevertheless, this deliberate, cosy homeliness sometimes deflects the thrust of his imagination, an imagination which is permitted to operate only without reference to any theories of the unconscious.
This is important. De la Mare constantly invokes the ‘imagination’ but he does not mean imagination in the sense of the ability to envisage the material transformation of the real world, which is what the graffitistes of May 1968 meant when they wrote, ‘Let the imagination seize power’, on the walls of Paris. No. For de la Mare, the imagination is a lovely margin, a privileged privacy in the mind – ‘that secret chamber of the mind we call the imagination’, as Miss M. herself puts it. To read de la Mare’s imaginative prose is to begin to understand some of the reasons for the tremendous resistance the English literary establishment put up against Freud, that invader of the last privacy.
This is an imagination that has censored itself before the dream has even begun. It is, of course, all traces of sexuality that must be excised especially rigorously. As Kenneth Hopkins says i
n his British Council pamphlet: ‘if his [de la Mare’s] characters kiss, he seldom tells.’ This process of censorship means that the imagery arrives on the page in disguise and then, lest even the disguise give too much away, the writer must revise the structure which contains the disguised imagery, while the material world recedes ever further away until it is itself perceived as unreality. ‘Death and affliction, even Hell itself, She turns to favour and to prettiness’; that offensive epitaph on the mad Ophelia could be applied to Miss M.’s narrative, did not de la Mare’s imagination, perhaps because of the extraordinarily narrow range in which he permitted it to operate, retain its own sinister integrity.
In this theory of the imagination, the ‘inner life’ is all that is important but, although de la Mare was a great admirer of William Blake, he could scarcely have concurred with him that ‘All deities reside within the human breast’. The ‘inner life’ is perceived as though it was a gift from outside, as though the imagination is the seat of visitations from another, lovelier world, from, in fact, that Other World which forms the title for the scrapbooks of poetry assembled by the anagrammatic Nahum Tarune in the fictional introduction to de la Mare’s anthology, Come Hither.
It goes without saying that de la Mare’s idea of the poet as somebody with a special delivery service from one of those spirits who, in Plato, operate like celestial telegraph boys, speeding messages from the Other World of real forms to this world of shadows, is directly at variance with the idea of the poet as privileged, drunken lecher which directly superseded it; both represent a mystification of the role of poet. Nevertheless, there is a suggestion it is one such spiritual messenger from the Other World who calls Miss M. away at the last, strengthening her possible role as metaphoric artist.
De la Mare’s homespun neo-Platonism, filtered through Shelley, Coleridge, and the seventeenth-century neo-Platonists such as Traherne and Vaughan of whom he was particularly fond, gives him enormous confidence in the idea of the imagination as a thing-in-itself, an immaterial portion of the anatomy for which, in a profound sense, the possessor is not responsible. The possessor witnesses the work of the imagination but is not engaged with it. From this conviction comes the consolatory remoteness of his fiction from human practice, even when his characters are engaged in the most mundane tasks, like travelling in railway trains or eating breakfast; all seems as if frozen in time. There is a distance between the writer and the thing, feeling, or sensation he describes that removes it from everyday human actuality. In addition, literary devices, like saying of the taste of a fruit, ‘I can taste it on my tongue now . . .’, do nothing at all to reproduce the sensuous actuality of eating a nectarine. If you have ever eaten a nectarine, however, perhaps it will make you remember.
De la Mare’s prose is evocative, never voluptuous, and it depends on a complicity of association with the reader for it to work as he intends. This community of association depends on a response of glad recognition to certain words – ‘old-fashioned’ is one. It always means good things in de la Mare. So does ‘reclusive’ and, with the implication of a deprecating smile, ‘bookish’. And to live in a remote house in the country with a large garden is to be half way towards a state of grace.
A common set of literary associations is important, too. Sir Walter Pollacke recognises Miss M. as a kindred spirit when he hears her recite the anonymous sixteenth-century poem, ‘Tom a Bedlam’: ‘The moon’s my constant mistress, And the lovely owl my marrow . . .” Conversely, when Fanny Bowater quotes Henry Vaughan in a tone of facetious mockery, it is a sign of the blackness of her soul. To have a small, choice library in which Sir Thomas Browne and the metaphysical poets are well represented, with access to a good second-hand bookshop in a nearby country town takes one a little further towards bliss.
All this inevitably raises the question of social class. De la Mare’s fiction most usually moves within a very narrow band of English society, characterised by phrases like ‘a modest fortune’, ‘a small private income’, ‘comfortable circumstances’ . . . sufficient to enable one to pick up the odd first-edition Herrick. In Memoirs of a Midget he manifests a kind of snobbery not unlike Jane Austen’s, in which the aristocracy, typified by Mrs Monnerie, ‘Lord B.’s sister’, is, like the Crawfords in Mansfield Park, cynical, corrupt, and vicious, while the lower-middle and working class – Miss M.’s landlady, Mrs Bowater, and her nursemaid, Pollie – are good-hearted stereotypes whose fictional execution uses techniques of physical idiosyncrasy derived from Dickens. (Jane Austen, of course, simply doesn’t mention the lower classes.)
The rigid Procrustean bed of the middle class is that on which his fictions, these nightmares of bourgeois unease, are dreamed.
There is a caricature by Max Beerbohm of de la Mare staring fixedly across a fireplace at a grim, black-clad old lady sitting unresponsive in an armchair opposite: ‘Mr W. de la Mare gaining inspiration for an eerie and lovely story.’ It is one of the most perceptive, and wittily unkind, criticisms of de la Mare that could be made. Let his fancy meander whence it pleases, may his antennae be never so sensitive to messages from the Other World, there is a nanny inside him slapping his hand when it wanders to the forbidden parts of his mind.
However, repression produces its own severe beauties. Out of this terrified narrowness, this dedicated provincialism of the spirit, emerges a handful of pieces of prose with the most vivid and unsettling intensity, work which disquietingly resembles some of that which the surrealists were producing in France at the same period, operating from a rather different theory of the imagination. Indeed, it would be possible to make a claim for Memoirs of a Midget as the one true and only successful English surrealist novel, even though de la Mare would have hotly denied it. That he didn’t know what he was doing, of course, only makes it more surrealist; and more baleful.
And I should say that Miss M. herself, in her tiny, bizarre perfection, irresistibly reminds me of a painting by Magritte of a nude man whose sex is symbolised by a miniature naked woman standing upright at the top of his thigh.
Miss M.’s size, in fact, is nowhere given with precision. It seems to vary according to de la Mare’s whim. At five or six years old, she is small enough to sit on the lid of a jar of pomatum on her father’s dressing table; she feeds butterflies from her own hand. This suggests a smallness which is physically impossible. Later, when she learns to read: ‘My usual method with a common-sized book was to prop it towards the middle of the table and then seat myself at the edge. The page finished, I would walk across and turn over a fresh leaf.’ This method has not much changed by the time she is twenty, except now she sprawls between the pages. At that age, she still has difficulty in descending staircases and, at her twenty-first birthday, can run down the centre of a dining-room table while, a few weeks later, she can travel comfortably in a disused bird-cage. However, earlier that year, on holiday, driving a goat-cart, she is disguised as a ten-year-old and though a grown woman the size of a ten-year-old child would be distinctly on the smallish side, she would scarcely be a midget; Jeffrey Hudson, the court dwarf of Charles I, was forced to retire when he reached the dizzy height of three feet nine inches.
Miss M.’s actual size, therefore, is not within the realm of physiological dimension; it is the physical manifestation of an enormous difference.
The midget child is a sort of changeling. Her mother treats her as a ‘tragic playmate’ rather than a daughter, and her father, affectionately embarrassed by her existence, effectively abandons his paternal role and makes no financial provision for her on his death. She is an anomaly. For their own sakes as well as hers they keep their daughter isolated from the world and their deaths leave her vulnerably inexperienced, besides newly poor.
Yet Miss M.’s childhood is itself a magic garden, in which, like Andrew Marvell in his garden, she is alone and hence in paradise. Almost all of Memoirs of a Midget takes place in Kent, the ‘garden of England’, and, as it happens, de la Mare’s own home county; and Miss M. is most herself in a gard
en. When she is accompanied it is scarcely ever by more than one person. These country gardens, far from the habitations of common humanity, are almost always a little neglected, the ‘wild gardens’ of the English romantic imagination, nature neither dominated by man nor dominating him by its ferocity, but existing with him in a harmonious equality. The paradisial garden of childhood is that of Stonecote, her parents’ house, to which, after the vicissitudes of her twentieth year, she will return and into which, taking only ‘a garden hat and cape’, she eventually, according to her editor, disappears, possibly accompanied by a Platonic angel.
But the garden of Stonecote is also where Miss M. first learns the stark and irrevocable fact of mortality, when, as a child, she encounters there a dead mole:
Holding my breath, with a stick I slowly edged it up in the dust and surveyed the white heaving nest of maggots in its belly with a peculiar and absorbed recognition. ‘Ah ha!’ a voice cried within me, ‘so this is what is in wait; this is how things are;’ and I stooped with lips drawn back over my teeth to examine the stinking mystery more closely.
It is a mole, a blind creature that lives in the earth, who conveys the existence of a ‘stinking mystery’ in this world. Without the power of inward vision, the mole exists only in its corruptible envelope of flesh.