THE DEEP ONES: "Missing" by Walter de la Mare

"Missing" by Walter de la Mare

Discussion begins February 3.

First published The Connoisseur and Other Stories (1926).



ONLINE VERSIONS

http://www.gutenberg.ca/ebooks/delamarew-beststories/delamarew-beststories-00-h....
http://www.fadedpage.com/showbook.php?pid=20120925 (free eBook)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?1505923

SELECTED PRINT VERSIONS

The Connoisseur and Other Stories

MISCELLANY

http://www.npg.org.uk/collections/search/portraitLarge/mw119349/Walter-de-la-Mar...
http://www.walterdelamare.co.uk/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_de_la_Mare
http://tinyurl.com/jkw6d5m

The eBook again for me, my Kindle is becoming a fatted calf and inviting some Weird predators in 2016.

I couldn't find a touchstone for it, but I've got this in a Hesperus Press paperback of three de la Mare stories. "Missing" is the title story.

Edited to add: Oh, it's the first image in that Google search in >1 gwendetenebre:
(we all get the same search return, I assume)

Best Stories of Walter de la Mare for me (the Faded Page eBook linked to in >1 gwendetenebre:).

>3 housefulofpaper:

Yeah, that's the first one that comes up for me, too.

Well, that wasn't so very "weird," but it was disturbing, and I can see why Ligotti and HPL might like it.

I was ready for Bleet to confess murder in any given sentence.

I was too, and had to read it over again this morning to figure out what happened, if indeed anything happened beyond what was stated by Bleet. I was very much reminded of our readings of Henry James, such slow pacing and seemingly an elephant in the room but so little actually said about it.

The newspaper clipping would seem to put to rest any idea that Edna wasn't real, and her uncle the Colonel would seem to settle any notion of her not being human, though I thought of both those possibilities in reading the story.

Bleet's sister, Maria, was disturbing in the way residents of mental hospitals can be: a fear they have been abused, that they are incarnate form of evil behaviours going on about the place. But again, other than that she's dead with no explanation, it seems straightforward.

The disturbing elements of the story pretty much come from Bleet's state of mind, and it's not Weird.

I think now I nominated the wrong de la Mare tale, and may read through a few of the other stories in the collection, just to see what there is.

>6 elenchus:

Your comparison to H. James is an apt one. This tale certainly did take its time! There is a touch of the gothic here, too, although the expected dreadful secret lurking in the Bleet family's collective closet never materializes.

I think that Miss Dutton would have been a role tailor-made for a 1960's-era Shelly Winters.

Mr. Bleet is such an uncomfortable oddball! I found the character to lie somewhere between amusing and irritating.

Reading this story really brought home to me the extent to which genre framing influences our experience of a story. I came to "Missing" as a Deep Ones selection. If I had read it as a short story in a monthly mass-market magazine or a literary journal, I would probably not have had the same sense of menace, nor the profound distrust of the characters that I developed. But I had my antennae extended on the weird frequencies.

>8 paradoxosalpha:

Exactly! That precisely describes my own experience.

I hasten to add, I don't regret reading the story, I liked it quite a bit. But my experience was shaped by its selection for a Deep Ones reading. Actually, I think my appreciation for the story was enhanced. I had to look closely and test suppositions a little more keenly than I probably would have, elsewise.

Of course, it's always the case that some sort of expectation is set up before I read, but this was a strong case.

>7 gwendetenebre:

Uncomfortable as Mr Bleet was, I can't say I found the primary narrator appreciably more endearing.

>8 paradoxosalpha:

I too very much had my weird antennae out, and might very well have perceived the story quite differently if I'd encountered it in a different context. The literal and metaphorical oppressive atmosphere would, I think, however always invite an expectation of, if not outright Weirdness, then at least a shocking revelation of some sort.

A structural oddity I noticed: Bleet early on says that his sister has died; the primary narrator has evidently forgotten this towards the end when he asks if the sister, too, has gone missing - yet he recalls it to tell the reader! Past-tense narrators, are of course generally permitted to have implausible recall of conversations and incidental details, but the conceit was jarringly brought to my conscious attention here, precisely because his all too realistic forgetfulness in the story is brought up against his narratorial photographic (phonographic?) memory.

Can't say I enjoyed the story much.

I suspected that this story might not have any overtly weird elements because it wasn’t included in the big Tartarus Press collection, Strangers and Pilgrims. Although I’ve had this particular in paperback for a while, I hadn’t got around to reading it until now.

I think de la Mare, as a writer, is quite interested in issues of conscience, morality, sin, forgiveness - things that would possibly lead one to believe he was a practicing Catholic (as it happens he wasn’t one, looking at his Wikipedia entry).

I don’t think we’re supposed to be able to “work out” what actually happened. Bleet could be innocent, and the victim of local suspicions, or he could at worst be a double murderer (could he have killed his sister to keep her quiet?).

What the story’s doing, I suspect, is presenting a conflict between manners/social morés and individual conscience: do you settle a man’s bill, take his hand, if you suspect he’s a murderer? Or do you feel obliged to behave “properly” in a social setting, or if you’re drawn into listening to what may be a veiled confession, how are matters supposed to end? Are you somehow obliged to give some kind of absolution?

I have to confess, I’d completely missed de la Mare’s sleight-of-hand (or slip up) over the sister’s death.

Liked it. Didn't find it weird. (My expectations included, at various times, something being uncovered in one of those drought-stricken fields, magical water, sister as specter, Edna showing up as a ghost.)

>11 housefulofpaper: That's an interesting notion about tension between social and moral obligations. The narrator is snarky yet he keeps listening.

>12 RandyStafford: That's an interesting notion about tension between social and moral obligations.

Agreed.