Walter de la Mare (1873–1956)

"Melancholic Arthur Lawford meanders through a graveyard, recovering from a bout of the flu, until he falls asleep against the tomb of Nicholas Sabathier. Feeling invigorated, he hurries home only to find out his face is that of Sabathier! Lawford then spirals and begins to question who he is and who he might become."

As the victim, Lawford's inner monologue has some of the most insightful and heart-rending lines in the book: "And depression, always lying in ambush of the novelty of his show more freedom, began like mist to rise above his restless thoughts." His sensitive wife is not emotionally equipped to handle this sudden change. Their friend Mr. Bethany, is sympathetic to Lawford's plight but offers little advice beyond powering through it. Thankfully he meets the bookish Herbert and his sister Grisel. Herbert tackles it clinically, which is a step in the right direction but not what Lawford needs. His cure, his exorcism, comes from Grisel. Above all else she listens: "Don't we all change as we grow to know one another?" She offers him true empathy. He begs, "Think of me as that poor wandering ghost of yours; how easily I could hide away in your memory!" Nevertheless, she smartly refuses to be a crutch, and he recovers.

With such a simple plot and no action, this one should have been a short story. De La Mare really drags out the initial confrontation within his household, especially with his wife Sheila and their daughter Ana. It leads the reader to believe that she will have a bigger role as the story progresses, but halfway through Sheila takes their daughter and leaves him to "fight it out, alone!" I was ready to write her off as completely insufferable, but the longer I stayed in Lawford's head, I came to realize that each character was a demonstration of how people react to depression. It's not thrilling or supernatural by any stretch of the imagination. Sabathier could've been any name, from any era, and died in any violent fashion. Still, it's beautifully written, and it kept me engaged, but the ghostly elements are disappointingly weak in comparison to the overall drama. show less

This is a fairly traditional creepy story, set mostly in a big house, where even Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata becomes menacing. However, the gratuitous nastiness of the first few paragraphs nearly made me put it aside: “distastefully foreign” compared with “us true-blue Englishmen” and more besides. I'm glad I persisted, though. The narrator’s desire to be “deliberately aloof” from the “sallow” Seaton is part of the point, and sadly common in his class at the time.

The show more narrator is at boarding school and spends an uneasy night at a fellow pupil’s home:
“We stood leaning over the staircase. It was like leaning over a well, so still and chill the air was all around us. But presently, as I suppose happens in most old houses, began to echo and answer in my ears a medley of infinite small stirrings and whisperings.”

Years later, he visits again, and I thought of Great Expectations, though they’re not much alike.

Eyes and ears

I first encountered de la Mare as a young child, via his poem, The Listeners. The plot seems to be about listening, but really, it's more about the eyes:
“She sees everything. And what she doesn’t see she knows without.”

There are 37 mentions in 15 pages, including:
• “slow chocolate−coloured eyes”
• “sluggish eyes fixed for the most part on my face”
• “her eyes regarded me with such leaden penetration beneath their thick lids that I doubt if my face concealed the least thought from her.”
• “There's hundreds of eyes like that in this house; and even if God does see you, He takes precious good care you don't see Him. And it's just the same with them.”
• “I saw his face change, saw his eyes suddenly drop like shot birds and fix themselves on the cranny of the door he had just left ajar.”
• “his eyes gleamed darkly, watching me”
• “those flat, slow, vigilant eyes.”
• “their eyes met in a kind of instantaneous understanding”
• “her eyes groped, as it were, over my vacant, disconcerted face”

Image: An eye, surrounded by the words, “Thou God seest ME”, hangs in the room where Withers, the narrator, stays (Source)

Also:
“I could scarcely see her little glittering eyes under their penthouse lids.”
I was surprised to read "penthouse" as a metaphor based on its current meaning in a story from 1922. I know multi-storey apartment buildings existed by then, but I had assumed it was a relatively recent coinage. Etymology online attests it in that meaning to 1921, HERE.

What’s it all about? - no spoilers

I like the ambiguity, even after I spotted foreshadowing when I immediately reread it. Is Seaton mad? Is his aunt mad? Is Withers making it all up? Are there supernatural forces at play? To what extent was the “chance” meeting chance?

The closing metaphor chills without supernatural force. It echoes what’s happened and firmly underlines Seaton’s isolation and Withers’ wilful blindness to it. I don’t think de la Mare is espousing Withers’ prejudice.

Quotes

• “Seaton was about the only fellow at Gummidge’s who ever had the ostentation to use bad language.”

• "She's in league... She just sucks you dry."

• “The breakfast−room was sweet with flowers and fruit and honey. Seaton's aunt was standing in the garden beside the open French windows, feeding a great flutter of birds.” [Such a contrast to the disturbing night.]

• “A pale haze of cloud muffled the sun; the garden lay in a grey shimmer—its old trees, its snap−dragoned faintly glittering walls. But now there was an air of slovenliness where before all had been neat and methodical… The goddess of neglect brooded in secret.”

• “We are nothing better than interlopers on the earth, disfiguring and staining wherever we go.”

• “The meal was tremendous. I have never seen such a monstrous salad.”

• “The flashing blooming of the covered-in jeweller’s shop.”

Short story club

I read this in Black Water: The Anthology of Fantastic Literature, by Alberto Manguel, from which I’m reading one story a week with The Short Story Club, starting 4 September 2023.

You can read this story HERE.

You can join the group here. show less

A book of poems for children? Perhaps, if written by Uncle Edgar Allen Poe to niece and nephew Wednesday and Pugsley Addams 💀

While not overtly horrific, the overall atmosphere is of melancholy, loss, death, night and febrile passion.

The opening poem, The Horseman, initially reads as a bit of nonsense nursery rhyme, but then, surely, the pale rider on his ivory horse coming over the moonlit hill can be none other than Death stalking the fitfully sleeping child.

There is an excellent show more illustration by Emett of the gangling Thief at Robin's Castle, who steals not only Robin's silverware, but his children, whose hands imploringly poke out of his swag bag. Raised as his own, the children "never really loved him" despite his stolen riches.

I initially thought this would be a slight set of childish rhymes, but they're ageless, dark, macabre and fey, the cumulative effect being greater than the individual poems. I loved them 🖤

Sibelius's "Valse Triste" (Sad Waltz) from his score to the drama "Kuolema" (Death) catches something of the mood:
https://youtu.be/5Ls8-pk4IS4?si=isJZxdiecsifeir_ show less

"Up on their brooms the witches stream, / Crooked and black in the crescent's gleam; / One foot high, and one foot low, / Bearded, cloaked and cowled they go..." And so begins Walter de la Mare's wonderful poem, The Ride-by-Nights, which supplies the text for this lovely Halloween picture-book, illustrated by Moldovan artist Carolina Rabei. As the witches fly through the night sky, under and over all of the constellations, a group of children is depicted trick-or-treating in the accompanying show more artwork. The two groups are mostly separate - the witches above, the children below - although the witches sometimes do appear on earth, as when one mischievously steals some candy for herself and compatriots. At the end of the night both witches and children return to their homes...

Originally included in Walter de la Mare's 1913 poetry collection, Peacock Pie, this poem is a witchy delight! Simple but descriptive, it captures the wonder, the mystery, the enchantment of the night sky, and the extraordinary celestial flight of the eponymous witchy "ride-by-nights." Carolina Rabei's choice to pair this text with artwork depicting both the witches' flight and children trick-or-treating through a rural and small town setting, is inspired, opening up parallel narratives - one in which the witches explore the cosmos, and one in which the children explore their own world. The artwork itself is lovely, utilizing a deep color palette dominated by purples, blacks and reddish-oranges, and it beautifully depicts many of the constellations mentioned in the text. Speaking of which, I was tickled by the mention here of "Charlie's Wain," an old-fashioned term for the "plow" or "cart" said to be contained in the Ursa Major constellation.

All in all, a wonderful Halloween picture-book, one which presents a classic poem, and uses it to tell a fuller story, one about witches, constellations, and children trick-or-treating. show less