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Three Stories By Walter de la Mare

Russell Hoban

Talk given at One-Day Conference on the Short Stories of Walter de la Mare at King's College, University of London, 7 November 1996

"Is there anybody there?" said the Traveller…' With those words Walter de la Mare immediately became a friend to my mind. I was twelve or so when I encountered his poem, 'The Listeners', and he's been a mind-friend ever since. 'Is there anybody there?' is the question so often implicit in his writing: his question to the shadows, to the dim places where the ordinary blurs into something else. I've been living in England for over forty years; I came here because of English writing - I wanted to be in the place where it was done. Although I'd read all of Dicken's novels and most of Trollope with great satisfaction, it was stories of the supernatural and the strange and fantastic that irresistible pulled me here: tales by such as A.E. Coppard, Arthur Quiller-Couch, M.R. James, Oliver Onions, Arthur Machen, Algernon Blackwood, and Charles Williams; they take my mind to the places where it likes to be, territories beyond the accepted boundaries of reality.
My favourite kind of story is the smoky evocation at which de la Mare excels: with his perception of the perhaps, his attention to the whispers of the unseen and his recognition of those realities not always recognised, he spins invisible webs to catch the unspoken. His imagination is unique in the completeness of its realisation, its making real what he sees in his mind; whatever detail he offers - Miss Duveen's mulberry petticoats, white stockings, and spring-side boots; the immense coils of Miss Seaton's hair, the rings on her left hand and the small jet buttons on her bodice; or the 'grained massive black-leathered furniture' of the first-class waiting-room at Crewe - unerringly bring with them the person or the place of which they are parts.
The imaginative projection of which he was capable may or may not be shown in a little story told to me by his grandson, Giles de la Mare, which appears in True Ghost Stories of Our Own Time, compiled by Vivienne Rae-Ellis: Walter de la Mare and his son Richard were intending to look at antique shops one afternoon when a friend turned up unexpectedly. De la Mare didn't especially want to see this friend but felt he had to stay and talk, and so the antique-shop expedition was called off. That same afternoon two other friends went to a shop regularly visited by de la Mare (and here I quote Vivienne Rae-Ellis): '…while they were looking in the window the wife suddenly ran away from the shop in some sort of distress and her husband went after her and said, "what on earth's the matter?" And she said, "Well, I'm worried about Mr de la Mare because I could see a bureau through him…" Ms Ellis goes on to report that Giles de la Mare remembered his father telling him that the woman had seen the apparition of the poet in the shop heard later that her own mother had died that day. Perhaps the woman who saw him was especially tuned in at that particular time, but I prefer to think that it was de la Mare's uncanny ability to put himself in the places he saw in his mind that caused her to see him in the antique shop. I know that I'd not at all be surprised to encounter him even now, forty years after his death, in the railway station at Crewe.
Three of his short masterpieces are models of the magical art of causing the reader to know a great deal more that what is on the printed page: in 'Miss Duveen', 'Seaton's Aunt,' and 'Crewe' the words don't spell things out; they function as a developing solution - washing quietly over the white paper they cause a picture to appear in all its subtleties and shadings, its light and its shadow.
As I look at these stories now with the aim of introducing new readers to them I see that they differ structurally from other stories both modern and traditional. The old style of short story has a beginning, middle and end; the modern story is more likely to be episodic, boneless - a glimpse, a mood a close-up of an hour or two. De la Mare's stories have no apparent scaffolding - they are not so much held together by plot or narrative line as energised and made firm by their dynamics: there is in each of them an integrative action that gives them muscle and keeps them going in your mind after the narrative is finished. I thought it might be quite a clever thing to diagram these three things for you but when I came to do it I found that for me all three diagrams would be the same, a pattern of overlapping waves, like transmissions radiating from and to a number of points. Overlapping transmissions and receptions and endless permutations of states of being are what these stories are made of.
Everything works in a de la Mare story. The first line of 'Miss Duveen' is: 'I seldom had the company of children in my grandmother's house beside the river Wandle.' In the name Wandle we hear suggestions of wand and fondle and wander. Wands are used in magic; affection makes for fondling; feet wander, also minds. The story is about a magical affection that grows between a boy whose feet wander on stepping stones across the Wandle and a lady no longer young who is, in a fond and magical way, somewhat wandering in her wits.
In any context water heightens the effect, intensifying whatever mood it finds. In some mythologies water is the road of the dead; writing from Japan, Lafcadio Hearn, in In the Cave of the Children's Ghosts, speaks of 'the primitive idea of some communication, mysterious and awful, between the world of the waters and the world of the dead. It is always over the sea, after the Feast of Souls, that the spirits pass murmuring back to their dim realm in those elfish little ships of straw which are launched for them on the sixteenth day of the seventh moon.' 'Miss Duveen' is about the death of the heart, and the river that appears in the first line is always mystically present. On the first page it 'was lovely and youthful even although it had flowed on for ever, it seemed, between its green banks of osier and alder'. Arthur, the narrator, says, 'I heard more talking of its waters than any of the human tongue.' On the second page the river is joined by the rain on the day when Miss Duveen first speaks to Arthur:

It was raining, the raindrops falling softly into the unrippled water, making their great circles, and tapping on the motionless leaves above my head where I sat in shelter on the bank. But the sun wasshining whitely from behind a thin fleece of cloud, when Miss Duveen suddenly peeped in at me outof the greenery, the thin light upon her face, and eyed me sitting there for all the world as if she were a blackbird and I a snail.

We all know what blackbirds do with snails. But when Miss Duveen, hoping for the shelter of his innocence, cracks Arthur open on the stone of his solitude, it is she who will be consumed. And all through the story the great river of time that bears all things away flows with the waters of the Wandle, meticulously observed in all its changing moods.
The emotional dynamics of the story grow out of an interesting physical symmetry. We see the story through the eyes of the boy Arthur who lives in his grandmother's house on this side of the Wandle. The grandmother's garden slopes down to the water where it faces the garden of Willowlea, the house where Miss Duveen lives with her cousin, Miss Coppin, who knows best and thinks that 'too much company is not expedient for' Miss Duveen. The narrow river can be crossed by stepping-stones. On this side of the river, the house containing the unfriendly grandmother and the lonely boy; on the far side, the other house containing the unpleasant cousin and the lonely Miss Duveen. In their very first conversation across the water Miss Duveen says to Arthur, 'I know you Arthur, very well indeed. I have looked, I have watched; and now, please God, we need never be estranged… What is a little brawling brook to friends like you and me?… I am Miss Duveen, that's not, they say, quite the thing here', tapping here forehead. And she tells Arthur a great truth:

One thing, dear child, you may be astonished to hear, I learned only yesterday, and that is how exceedingly sad life is… You really can have no notion, child, how very sad I am myself at times.In the evening, when they all gather together, in their white raiment, up and up and up, I sit on the garden seat, on Miss Coppin's garden seat, and precisely in the middle (you'll be kind enough to remember that?) and my thoughts make sad.' She narrowed her eyes and shoulders. 'Yes and frightened, my Child! Why must I be so guarded? One angel - the greatest fool could see the wisdom of that. But billions! - with their eyes fixed shining, so very boldly on me. I never prayed for so many, dear friend.

Thus Miss Duveen who, in a pause in her long speech, 'leaned her head questionably, like a starving bird in the snow.' What happens in 'Miss Duveen' has the quality of real life: suddenly everything is different from how it was five minutes ago because someone or something that we thought was on the other side of the river is now inside us for ever.
To return to what Miss Duveen said at the outset of her astonishing monologue: 'And now, please God, we need never be estranged.' 'Estranged'! Interesting word that. One doesn't think of being estranged from a stranger - you be estranged from an old friend or from you wife or husband; to be estranged from a stranger implies a previous state of non-estrangement, or another place of being, perhaps, where no one is a stranger. Maybe Miss Duveen has never been a stranger, has always lived in that place in the heart where the broken birds sing.
'Child,' she calls Arthur: 'dear child' and 'my child'. Arthur's age is never given us but the boy I see in my mind is nine or ten perhaps, pale and lonely. We learn in the first paragraph that his mother and father are dead. 'My grandmother', he tells us, 'found no particular pleasure in my company'. Miss Duveen, on her side of the Wandle, is spoken to by her cousin, the perpetually angry Miss Coppin, 'as one might talk to a post'. Recognising a fellow prisoner of solitude, one not corrupted by grown-upness and the practical world, she opens her heart to him by slants and glimpses, hints and obliquities in their pitiful little assignations - her word - by the river Wandle. While her angels in their white raiment gather in her mind, she trusts Arthur with her story that she offers like bits of drowned and tear-stained letters plucked from time's uncaring river: a happy time in a white sunny rambling house, she no long remembers where; a father who rode a black horse; a mother walking in the garden in a crinolined gown; her elder sister Caroline who married Colonel Bute and was drowned, her eyes blue as the forget-me-not.
Their friendship reaches its peak in a furtive little tea in the absence of Miss Coppin and their gaunt maid-servant Ann. There is a saffron bun for Arthur, a grey pudding, and a plate of raspberries gathered, he suspects, from his grandmother's canes. In a later meeting she tells him of the gas that sings and roars all over the house while she is not allowed even one bracket of her own. She shows him, 'threaded on dingy tape, [a] tarnished locket' containing 'the miniature of a young, languid, fastidious- looking officer'. 'Miss Coppin, in great generosity, has left me this, ' she says. 'Some day, it may be, you, too, will love a gentle girl. I beseech you, keep your heart pure and true. This one could not.' Later, violently: 'Pray, pray, pray till the blood streams down your face!'
'All are opposed…The Autumn will divide us', she predicts. Summer passes into autumn and 'I begin to see,' says Arthur, 'we were ridiculous friends, especially as she came in now in ever dingier and absurder clothes.' He hides from Miss Duveen whenever he can. When the first ice appears in the garden his grandmother tells him that Miss Duveen's friends 'have been compelled to put her away.' Here is the last paragraph:

But I now know the news, in spite of a vague sorrow, greatly relieved me. I should be at ease in the garden again, came the thought - no longer fear to look ridiculous and grow hot when our neighbours were mentioned, or be saddled with her company beside the stream

I'm thinking now of Big Things in literature. It must be about fifty years ago that I read War and Peace. I know there were big things in it. I remember vaguely a great battle - was it the Battle of Boridino? Was there a Prince Andrey lying wounded among the dead and was Bonaparte looking down at him? I'm not sure but I know it was a big thing. Much more clearly I remember Ahab on that fateful third day of the chase when he harpoons Moby Dick and is caught by the hissing harpoon line and dragged to his death; certainly that was big. Jean Valjean's flight through the sewers of Paris; Hans Kastorp, with bayonet fixed, running through the mud singing Der Lindenbaum while the shells explode around him - these are all Big, and the question arises: are they bigger that what happened to Miss Duveen? Of course not. There is only the mortal tragedy to talk about; doing it in multiples or on horseback doesn't make it more important. Arthur's innocence and perfidy and gallant Miss Duveen's defeat loom as tall as the Sack of Constantinople or anything else you care to mention, but you need to be as good as de la Mare to bring them out of the cobwebs and the shadows of that consciousness that lives in all of us.

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