Showing posts with label Walter de la Mare. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Walter de la Mare. Show all posts

Sunday, June 30, 2019

Islomanes (1): Austin Tappan Wright's Islandia



Alberto Manguel & Gianni Guadalupi: The Dictionary of Imaginary Places (1980)

'Now,' he said as we left the bridge and walked into Anglesey, 'now you are like Robinson Crusoe, you are on your island. How should you like to live in that house all the year round, winter and summer?' he said pointing at a white house on a little rock island in the straits. I said I thought there might be worse places. 'They live like fighting cocks there,' winked the old man with the merry twinkle in his eye and his tall white hat nodding from side to side. 'They have got a weir there and they catch all the fish.'
- Kilvert’s Diary: Selections from the Diary of the Rev. Francis Kilvert, 1 January 1870 - 13 March 1879. 3 vols. Ed. William Plomer. 1938 (London: Jonathan Cape, 1977): I: 360.


Walter de la Mare: Desert Islands and Robinson Crusoe (1930)


The fascination of islands and island living is something a great many people have written about. English poet and whimsical anthologist Walter de la Mare devoted an entire book to the subject, and of course that old reprobate Lawrence Durrell also had a good deal to say on the subject as well:



Lawrence Durrell: Reflections on a Marine Venus (1953)

Somewhere among the notebooks of Gideon I once found a list of diseases as yet unclassified by medical science, and among these there occurred the word islomania, which was described as a rare but by no means unknown affliction of spirit. These are people, Gideon used to say, by way of explanation, who find islands somehow irresistible. We islomanes, says Gideon, are the direct descendants of the Atlanteans, and it is toward the lost Atlantis that our subconscious is drawn. This means that we find islands irresistible.
― Lawrence Durrell, Reflections on a Marine Venus: A Companion to the Landscape of Rhodes (1953)
He went on to say, in a letter to a friend, that 'Islomania is a rare affliction of spirit. There are people who find islands somehow irresistible. The mere knowledge that they are in a little world surrounded by sea fills them with an indescribable intoxication.'


One of my students, Carlota, comes from the Canary Islands. She tells me that it sometimes seems to her as if the whole of New Zealand were enclosed inside a bubble – 'like a floating island.'
'I know, because I'm from an island too,' she goes on. Hers, though, was first settled by a blue-eyed, fair-haired race ('perhaps Vikings') before the Spanish arrived to wipe them all out.
'Atlanteans?' I ask. She agrees that many people think so. She's a little sceptical, though.
'A floating island.' She describes it like something out of Jules Verne: a huge transparent membrane, sealing us off from the pressures of the world outside. Or perhaps a better comparison might be with José Saramago's 1986 novel The Stone Raft, where the whole Iberian peninsula breaks off from Europe and floats into the Atlantic Ocean, splitting apart, once and for all, the pillars of Hercules.
- Jack Ross, "The Stokes Point Pillars." 11 Views of Auckland. Edited by Jack Ross & Grant Duncan. Social and Cultural Studies, 10 (Auckland: Massey University, 2010): 155.
Carlota's islands, the Canaries, are a small archipelago of seven islands situated 100 kilometres off the coast of Morocco. By contrast, our two main islands, Te Ika a Māui and Te Waipounamu - complemented by 600-odd others - are pretty much on their own: 2,000 km east of Australia and 1,000 km south of New Caledonia. 'Next stop Antarctica,' as they say.



Janet Frame: To the Is-land (1982)


One more quote before we get going properly:
When the New Zealand writer Janet Frame was 7, she found in her school reader an adventure story, 'To the Island,' that she read as 'To the Is-land.' Though corrected by her teacher, she accepted the word thereafter as meaning what it said, the Land of Is, not the Was-Land, not the Future. In this first volume of her autobiography, which she calls 'a selection of views of the Is-Land,' it is the place of her childhood and adolescence.
Helen Bevington, 'The Girl from New Zealand.' New York Times (21 November, 1982)
All of which should serve to prepare us for the actual subject of this post, the strange utopian romance Islandia (1942), by eccentric American lawyer Austin Tappan Wright:



Austin Tappan Wright: Islandia (1942)


Wright had been dead for eleven years when his immense novel finally saw the light of day. Not that the publishers of the day were prepared to contemplate the publication of the whole thing. In her afterword to the 2001 paperback edition, his daughter Sylvia explains that this 1,000-page tome 'represents only a part of the total Islandia papers.'
The original novel, containing close to six hundred thousand words, was so vast as to be virtually unpublishable, particularly during a wartime paper shortage. It was in this form, however, a manuscript contained in seven thick spring binders, too heavy for me to carry by myself, that it was accepted by the publishers.
- Sylvia Wright Mitarachi, 'Afterword.' In Austin Tappan Wright. Islandia. Ed. Mark Saxton, Margaret Garrad Wright & Sylvia Wright. 1942. Introduction by John Silbersack (New York: Overlook Duckworth, 2001): 1015.


So what got left out? Sylvia Wright goes on:
With the intelligent and sensitive help of Mark Saxton, then an editor of Farrar & Rhinehart, I cut the [twenty-three hundred pages of the] original novel by about a third. This is its form today. As I indicated in a note in the original edition, my father knew the exact lineaments of every scene John Lang saw, down to its geological causes, and enjoyed describing such things. Much of the cutting was of this sort of leisurely observation. Also, as Mr. Basil Davenport pointed out in his essay on the Islandia papers, published as a companion volume to the novel, my father's writing became more succinctly his own as he went on. The bulk of the cutting, therefore, was in the early part of the book. [1016]


Austin Tappan Wright: Islandia (2006)

It seems rather a pity that the decision was taken to include this essay by Basil Davenport as part of the original publication, rather than more of the ancillary papers associated with the novel itself:
My father knew the country so well because he had considered it and travelled around it in so many guises. In one, he constructed its history, a scholarly work entitled Islandia: History and Description, by M. Jean Perier, whom readers of the novel will recognize as the first French consul to Islandia.
This document, of about 135,000 words, is the major part of the remainder of the unpublished Islandia papers. In addition, there are a large number of appendices to the history, including a glossary of the Islandian language; a bibliography; several tables of population; a gazeteer of the provinces with a history of each; tables of viceroys, judges, premiers, etc.; a complete historical peerage; notes of the calendar and climate; and a few specimens of Islandian literature. There are also nineteen maps, one geological. To use Leonard Bacon's phrase from the introduction he wrote to the first publication, here one discovers, 'the very Devonian outcrop of Never Never country.' [1016]


John K. Wright: Map of Islandia


So what is the book itself like? That phrase 'never never country,' with its echoes of J. M. Barrie's Peter Pan, implies a kind of fantasy world, with fairies and elves and other mythological trappings. Nothing could be further from the truth. Islandia is a fully fleshed-out, realistic fantasy world with politics, history, and - above all - human relationships to the fore.

Ursula K. Le Guin, a big fan of the book, once wrote that she and her family was Islandia-philes in the same way as a later generation would be Tolkien-freaks. They quoted from it, argued over details, and generally lived through its pages.

So, it seems, did the entire Wright family. Austin's brother John, a professional geographer, contributed the splendid topographical map pictured above to the enterprise, and his daughter Sylvia recalls it having been an inextricable part of her childhood:
We always knew about Islandia, although apparently my father did not talk very much about it outside the family. We had ideas of what it looked like, from comments like, 'This view looks like Islandia.' Our boat was called Aspara, the Islandian word for seagull. [1019-20]
It's in this same section of her afterword that she explains how the word should be pronounced: 'Aye-landia' - rather than 'Iz-landia' or 'Ee-landia':
My father originated Islandia as 'my island' when he was a boy. This is why the name is the only exception to the rule that there are no silent letters in the Islandian language.


Interestingly, this genre of imaginary Islandian landscapes appears to be alive and well in the alternate Never-never world of Facebook. There are a number of pages devoted to the subject (though it is quite easy to confuse it with Ísland, Íslendingur - Iceland, Icelandic - especially when Islandia happens to be the word for "Iceland" in Spanish and various other languages).



It's important to emphasise the slightly ponderous - though very serviceable - nature of Wright's plotting and prose generally. Islandia is a perfectly readable novel, though its interests are not quite those of the 1920s, when it was written.



It bears only a slight resemblance to a work such as outsider artist Henry Darger's 15,000 page magnum opus The Story of the Vivian Girls, in What Is Known as the Realms of the Unreal, of the Glandeco-Angelinian War Storm, Caused by the Child Slave Rebellion. Darger's work is unpublished, and will probably remain so, though extracts have appeared in various catalogues as well as in Jessica Yu's wonderful 2004 documentary about his life, also entitled (what else?) In the Realms of the Unreal.

A great deal of Wright's text, by contrast, is devoted to a rather wistful, Edwardian-flavoured exploration of the nature of love, which the Islandians divide into four separate concepts:
  1. alia: love of place and family land and lineage
  2. amia: love of friends
  3. ania: desire for marriage and commitment
  4. apia: sexual attraction
John Lang, the hero, experiences all of these in the course of the narrative, and it is this aspect of the book which is referred to specifically in Ursula Le Guin's almost equally ambitious fantasy work Always Coming Home (1985), devoted to the future anthropology of the Kesh, inhabitants of the land now known as Northern California (and now available in an expanded, 'definitive' edition through the Library of America):



Ursula K. Le Guin: Always Coming Home (1985 / 2019)


Curiously enough, Islandia is not really set on an island - in the strictest sense of the term, at any rate. The country of Islandia is merely the tip of the immense 'semi-continent' of Karain, whose location is as elusive as that of the lost continent of Atlantis.



Johnny Pez: Karain Continent, 1907 (2006)


Sylvia Wright (as usual) sums up the evidence judiciously, if inconclusively:
Elmer Davis, and other writers, decided that Islandia is in the South Pacific. Both Lang and Perier assume that everyone knows where the country is, so neither mentions latitude and longitude. M. Perier does say, however, that the Karain subcontinent is not on the Spanish side of the Pope's line, which I have been told by so eminent an authority as Dr. John K. Wright, former head of the American Geographical Society, means that Islandia cannot be in the Pacific proper. Dr. Wright has studied the situation. He also feels that the Atlantic is too crowded.


For those of you unfamiliar with the expression, the 'Pope's line' refers to an imaginary line drawn by Pope Alessandro Borgia in 1493 (and subsequently shifted slightly in 1494) which divided up the entire world into (respectively) the Spanish and Portuguese spheres of interest.

The idea was to keep the Spanish out of the Portuguese discoveries in the far East, and the Portuguese out of the Spanish discoveries in the Americas. However, as you'll observe, the existence of one Portuguese-speaking country in Latin America - Brazil - is due largely to this shifting of the lines. Moreover, as you'll see from the image below, any line drawn on a sphere such as the earth must come, literally, full circle, so considerable latitude for debate remained even after this apparently 'definitive' decision had been reached.



There's an indescribable atmosphere to the slow unfolding of Wright's long tale which makes it immensely beguiling to read. I'm on my second run-through myself, and am finding it quite as attractive as the first time round. What's more, I'm fascinated to discover that the entire text is finally available online, through the good offices of Harvard University Library.



Here's what you'll see if you click on the link above. You can (if you wish) read the typescript of the entire novel there, without the 1942 cuts, as well as examining in detail the text of M. Jean Perier's comprehensive guidebook Islandia: History and Description.



Like all utopias, however, Wright's has its fly in the ointment. Isolationist Islandia is unquestionably dominated by white people. The 'natives' to the south are regarded by the Islandians with a certain disdain (not unmixed with fear). As described, in fact, the continent of Karain sounds a lot more like South Africa than, say, Australia, with which it would otherwise tempting to identify it.

Is it a racist state? Certainly it betrays many of the characteristics of its era. Wright describes the 'blacks' and 'mulattos' who surround Islandia with the patronising attitudes of his time. He is, moreover, careful to make it clear that the people he is interested in originated somewhere in Northern Europe. They sound quite a bit like Icelanders, in fact - stubbornly independent and proudly different - albeit displaced from the North to the South of the globe.

Hard though he tries to sideline it, this is one of the features of his work which makes it difficult for me to embrace it quite so wholeheartedly as Ursula Le Guin and all of its other fans. It also explains why this constitutes only part one of my consideration of Islomania.

In part two I'd like to look further - at the risk of being accused of reductionism - into this political dimension of such 'pure' creations of the imagination. It is with a certain discomfort that many New Zealanders, myself included, have observed the conscious transformation of our country into an ersatz simulacrum of Tolkien's Middle-earth over the last couple of decades. The fact that so many Māori were cast as Orcs (albeit with a leavening of whining Dickensian cockneys), while the Elvish roles were reserved for willowy Europeans, was, to say the least, a trifle disconcerting.



Let's not romanticise this island-mania too much, then. One of the important points about islands is that they are more easily policed and kept under control than other parts of the earth - witness the infamous rounding-up of the aboriginal population of Tasmania: a pointless enterprise in other parts of that vast, turbulent continent.

The Celtic New Zealand hpothesis does not exist in a vaccuum. Many of us would like to rewrite the history of our world to our own satisfaction, leaving certain key aspects out - islomania, in its more extreme forms, could be seen to lend itself awfully easily to ethnic cleansing ...

For the moment, though, I would like to emphasise the immense charm and complexity of Wright's Islandia. Little could be said to happen in the novel, but then it exists really to provide a setting for his own sense of displacement and Heimweh: that belief we all share that there is a true home for us, somewhere, if only we could find it - if not in the real world, than in memory, or (better) still, the realms of the imagination.

That, it seems to me, is at the heart of this thing called Islomania.



Ursula K. Le Guin: Always Coming Home (1985)



Monday, June 04, 2012

Classic Ghost Story Writers: Walter de la Mare



William Rothenstein: Walter de la Mare (1929)

The Green Room


"The Green Room" is a story about a young man named Alan, who is one day let in on the old bookseller Mr. Elliott's "little secret - namely, that at the far end of his shop - beyond, that is, the little table on which he kept his account books, his penny bottle of ink and his rusty pen, there was an annexe."

Beyond the annexe itself (whose paint "must once have been of a bright apple green. It had faded now"), though, there's yet another room, up through "the narrow panelled door above the three stairs on the other side of the room." Alan is lured into going through that door by the image of a young woman's face, which appears in his mind as if out of nowhere. And there he finds - well, I suspect it would spoil the story if I told you too abruptly.


The author of the story, Walter de la Mare (1873-1956), was once quite famous. Even now his poems still turn up in anthologies from time to time: "The Listeners" ("Is there anybody there?" said the Traveller, / Knocking on the moonlit door") is probably the best-known, but there's also "Tartary," "The Children of Stare" ("Winter is fallen early / On the house of Stare") and quite a number of others which have ended up in the children's section of the library.

In his time, though, children were only one part of the audience he wrote for. He was thought of as a poet for grown-ups as well, and in fact the 1940s edition of his collected poems was divided into two separate volumes: Poems (for adults) and Rhymes and Verses (for kids). Here's a list of some of the books by him I have in my collection:

    Poems & Plays
    (for Adults & Children):

  1. Peacock Pie: A Book of Rhymes. 1913. Illustrated by Edward Ardizzone. London: Faber, 1946.

  2. Crossings: A Fairy Play. Music by C. Armstrong Gibbs. London: W. Collins Sons & Co. Ltd., 1923.

  3. Collected Poems. Decorations by Berthold Wolpe. 1942. London: Faber, 1944.

  4. Collected Rhymes and Verses. Decorations by Berthold Wolpe. London: Faber, 1944.

  5. A Choice of de la Mare’s Verse. Ed. W. H. Auden. London: Faber, 1963.

  6. The Complete Poems of Walter de la Mare. Ed. Richard de la Mare. 1969. Rev. ed. London: Faber, 1975.

The Auden selection is particularly good, and has a most insightful introduction (as one might expect). De la Mare was quite an important poet for him, and he was quick to reject any simplistic distinctions between "verse" and "poetry" in discussing his work (the rather questionable dichotomy T. S. Eliot tried to introduce in his own 1941 Faber selection of Kipling's Verse).


I guess largely as a result of "The Green Room," which I first encountered in an anthology called A Century of Ghost Stories when I was a kid, it's always been de la Mare's fiction which has fascinated me most. "The Green Room" is not a particularly easy story to read. De la Mare is a self-indulgent and over-elaborate prose-writer (or he certainly seemed so to me as a child), and there were few sentences in the story which did not have to be read over twice.

Its subject matter - old books, and the strange and even disturbing discoveries that can sometimes be made in them - was enthralling to me, though, so I persevered. As you can see from the list below, I've been collecting him assiduously ever since:

    Fiction
    (for Adults & Children):

  1. Henry Brocken: His Travels and Adventures in the Rich, Strange, Scarce-Imaginable Regions of Romance. 1904. Illustrated by Marian Ellis. London: W. Collins Sons & Co. Ltd., [1924].

  2. The Three Royal Monkeys, or The Three Mulla-Mulgars. 1910. Illustrated by J. A. Shepherd. London: Faber, 1928.

  3. The Return. 1910. London: Penguin Books, 1935.

  4. Memoirs of a Midget. 1921. Illustrated by Mabel Lapthorn. London: Collins, n.d.

  5. The Riddle and Other Stories. London: Selwyn & Blount Limited, 1923.

  6. The Connoisseur and Other Stories. 1926. London: W. Collins Sons & Co. Ltd., 1926.

  7. On the Edge: Short Stories. 1932. London: Faber, 1947.

  8. The Walter de la Mare Omnibus: Henry Brocken; The Return; Memoirs of a Midget. 1904, 1910, 1921. London: W. Collins Sons & Co. Ltd., [1933].

  9. The Wind Blows Over. London: Faber, 1936.

  10. The Nap and Other Stories. The Nelson Classics. 1936. London: Thomas Nelson and Sons Ltd., n.d.

  11. Best Stories of Walter de la Mare. London: Faber, 1942.

  12. Collected Stories for Children. 1947. Illustrated by Robin Jacques. A Puffin Book. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984.

  13. A Beginning and Other Stories. 1955. London: Faber, 1955.

  14. Ghost Stories. Lithographs by Barnett Freedman. 1956. London: The Folio Society, 1960.

  15. Short Stories 1895-1926. Ed. Giles de la Mare. 1923, 1924/36 & 1926. London: Giles de la Mare Publishers, 1996.

  16. Short Stories 1927-1956. Ed. Giles de la Mare. 1930, 1936 & 1955. London: Giles de la Mare Publishers, 2001.

  17. Short Stories for Children. Ed. Giles de la Mare. Illustrated by ‘Bold’ & Rex Whistler. 1925 & 1933. London: Giles de la Mare Publishers, 2006.

De la Mare was fortunate in leaving behind a family of literary enthusiasts. His son Richard de la Mare edited the definitive edition of his poems in 1969, and his short stories have now been published in a sumptuous three-volume edition by his grandson Giles, who runs a firm called Giles de la Mare publishers. The ghost stories, such as "Seaton's Aunt" and "All Hallows," are probably the ones most frequently read today, but there are some strange and disconcerting pieces among the stories for children, also ("The Lord Fish" and "The Riddle," in particular).


Walter de la Mare: Short Stories 1895-1926 (1995)


Walter de la Mare: Short Stories 1927-1956 (2001)


Walter de la Mare: Short Stories for Children (2006)

The introduction to Auden's selection of de la Mare's best poems concentrates largely on his famous anthology Come Hither (1923), or rather on the allegorical introduction to the book. The narrator, Simon (Somni? Sleep, or Dream?), comes to a house called Thrae (Earth? Heart?), owned by a Miss Taroon (Nature?), whose brother Nahum (Human?) left behind a collection of writings and curiosities in his room when he left to search for East Dean (the East of Eden?). It is the study of these which led the compilation of the book, which is a strange amalgam of poems, long footnotes, and evocative pieces of prose.

None of his subsequent anthologies and collections of essays could quite repeat the magic of the first, but all of them are interesting, more to dip into than to read from cover to cover: Behold, this Dreamer! (1939) is probably the best; Love (1943) perhaps the most disappointing (one contemporary critic said that one could virtually define the subject by what did not come up - passion, eroticism, obsession - in this immense but patchy book).

    Anthologies & Essays:

  1. Come Hither: A Collection of Rhymes and Poems for the Young of All Ages. Ed. Walter de la Mare. 1923. New edition. 1928. London: Constable and Co. Ltd., 1943.

  2. Tales Told Again. 1927. Illustrated by Alan Howard. Faber Fanfares. London: Faber, 1980.

  3. Stories from the Bible. 1929. Illustrated by Edward Ardizzone. London: Faber, 1977.

  4. Desert Islands and Robinson Crusoe. Decorations by Rex Whistler. 1930. London: Faber, 1988.

  5. Tom Tiddler’s Ground: A Book of Poetry for Children. Ed. Walter de la Mare. 1931. Foreword by Leonard Clark. Illustrated by Margery Gill. 1961. London: The Bodley Head, 1975.

  6. Early One Morning in the Spring: Chapters on Children and on Childhood as it is revealed in particular in Early Memories and in Early Writings. London: Faber, 1935.

  7. Animal Stories Chosen, Arranged and in Some Part Rewritten by Walter de la Mare. London: Faber, 1939.

  8. Pleasures and Speculations. London: Faber, 1940.

  9. Behold, this Dreamer!: Of Reverie, Night, Sleep, Dream, Love-Dreams, Nightmare, Death, the Unconscious, the Imagination, Divination, the Artist, and Kindred Subjects. 1939. London: Readers’ Union, 1942.

  10. Love. London: Faber, 1943.

  11. Private View. Introduction by Lord David Cecil. London: Faber, 1953.

There are still a few anthologies - Old Rhymes and New (1932), principally, as well as various books of essays - which I don't have, but most of the rest are listed above.


The secondary literature on de la Mare is pretty sketchy: fortunately there's quite a full biography, but besides that it consists mainly of a book of table talk compiled by neurologist Russell Brain, a volume in the Twayne critical series, and a few essays and bibliographies.

Besides that, he comes up in most discussions of the twentieth century ghost story. His work falls more in the penumbra between supernatural and fantasy fiction, though.


    Secondary:

  1. Brain, Russell. Tea with Walter de la Mare. Drawing by Andrew Freeth. London: Faber, 1957.

  2. Clark, Leonard. Walter de la Mare: A Checklist prepared on the occasion of an exhibition of his books and MSS at the National Book League, 7 Albemarle Street, London W1 (20th April to 19th May 1956). Introduction by Lord David Cecil. Cambridge: The University Press, 1956.

  3. Whistler, Theresa. Imagination of the Heart: The Life of Walter de la Mare. London: Gerald Duckworth & Co. Ltd., 1993.


Barnett Freedman: Walter de la Mare: Ghost Stories (1956)

If one set out to psychoanalyse Walter de la Mare, I guess one of the first things that would stand out would be the threatening nature of the feminine in most of his work. "Seaton's Aunt" is the classic case: a sensitive small boy is psychically consumed by his predatory aunt for undisclosed reasons. The narrator of the story abandons him to his fate with the reflection, "he had never been much better than 'buried' in my mind".

There's a particularly strange story ("At First Sight") about a man who is unable to lift his eyes from the ground, and who tries (unsuccessfully) to court a young girl without being able to look at her. Then there's "The Riddle," with its mysterious chest that swallows the children one by one, and its strange last line:
And gossiping fitfully, inarticulately, with herself, the old lady went down again to her window-seat.
Old ladies tend to be survivors in Walter de la Mare - but often (as in this case) they seem to survive the loss of their own faculties as well.


"The Green Room" is, to my mind, one of the most fully realised of all these stories. The backroom of Mr. Elliott's shop seems to be haunted by its former occupant, a young lady who was left on her own there by her lover, and who confided her doubts and fears to a notebook of poems and thoughts, before (eventually) committing suicide there.

Alan finds the notebook (fully and lovingly described, with transcriptions of many Emily Brontë-ish verses in de la Mare's very best manner), and determines to publish it. He decides that this is what she wants, on the evidence of her appearance to him, but it seems he is wrong. The story ends with the ceiling of the room falling in on his privately-printed edition of her verses, destroying all of the copies, and utterly confounding his desire to make it all up to her, somehow, even after her death:
It was too late now - and in any case it hadn't occurred to him - to add to the title page that well-worn legend, 'The heart knoweth his own bitterness, and a stranger doth not intermeddle with his joy.' But it might at least have served for his own brief apologia. He had meant well - it would have suggested. You never can tell.
The citation is from Proverbs 14: 10. More to the point, though, it's also the title of a poem by Christina Rossetti:
When all the over-work of life
Is finished once, and fast asleep
We swerve no more beneath the knife
But taste that silence cool and deep;
Forgetful of the highways rough,
Forgetful of the thorny scourge,
Forgetful of the tossing surge,
Then shall we find it is enough?
Alan has fallen in love with the ghostly face that appears to him; but he hasn't really earned that love. It isn't enough to make up for the betrayal she suffered while she was alive - all she can share with him is bitterness. Her scorn for his presumption outlasts her own death.

I suspect that this - and possibly others of de la Mare's stories - are anchored in events from his own life. Any suggestion that his work is "tame" or "childish" is belied by the dark and hope-denying imagery of the poetry in the story, though. Above all the one that begins:
Last evening, as I sat alone -
Thimble on finger, needle and thread -
Light dimming as the dusk drew on,
I dreamed that I was dead.
It ends:
And you I loved, who once loved me,
And shook with pangs this mortal frame,
Were sunk to such an infamy
That when I called your name,

Its knell so racked that sentient clay
That my lost spirit lurking near
Wailed, like the damned, and fled away -
and awoke me, stark with Fear.
I've never been quite able to decide what exactly "The Green Room" means, but it's a story whose influence I've been unable to escape since I first read it. It's taken on new shades and complexities in every rereading since. Its final effect is the reverse of comforting, but perhaps that's of a piece with de la Mare's stoic view of life as something to be endured rather than enjoyed - evaded rather than embraced. Brrrr ...


Christina Rossetti (1830-1894)