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.

Charing Cross Road Bookshop

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).

Eliot at Faber & Faber (1944)

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.

Animal Stories (1939)

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.

Bookshop Browsing

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.

Walter de la Mare: Two Tales: The Green Room / The Connoisseur (1925)

"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)

In the Court of the Crimson King

[Stephen King: The Wind Through the Keyhole: A Dark Tower Novel (2012)]

Well, it's finally happened. I knew it would if I kept at it for long enough: kept reading Stephen King books, that is (you can find a full list of my accumulations here).

It's one of those guilty pleasures - the kind where you keep on telling yourself that you can take it or leave it alone. Until it turns out you can't, that is.

I first started reading him, on the advice of a friend ("He's my favourite pulp author! You've got to give him a try") in the mid-eighties, when I was living in a hall of residence in Scotland. There was no chance of watching television of an evening - my usual way of unwinding - as all the channels were set permanently to snooker tournaments (this is the UK we're talking), so I had to find something else to do. That something turned out to be reading endless Stephen King paperbacks.

Or not that endless, really. This was, after all, twenty-five years ago, and the Master has never really stopped producing since, despite occasional threats of "retirement." To be honest, I don't think he'd know what to do with himself.

When I got back to New Zealand in the 90s, I discovered that my habit had gone up a notch. From now on it wasn't enough to buy the books second-hand when I came across them accidentally: from about Four Past Midnight (1990) on, I had to buy each new one the moment it came out.

So when I bought The Wind through the Keyhole at the local stationers on Friday, there was no reason for me to suspect anything out of the ordinary. Until I got it home and started reading, that is.

[King Crimson: In the Court of the Crimson King (1969)]

I guess at this point that it's necessary to point out something about Big Steve's books which mightn't be apparent to outsiders, or those who've only read the occasional one of them: They're all linked.

It used to be that backwoodsy Maine regionalism was the common factor in most of his tales: a great many of them were set in or around the mythical towns of Castle Rock or Derry, Maine, and the occasional character would turn up in another book from time to time.

Around about Insomnia (1994), his other world, the alternate universe known as Mid-World, associated principally with his long-running fantasy series The Dark Tower (1982-2004), began to leak into the "real-world" novels. Specifically, that Dark Lord of chaos and disorder known as the "Crimson King" (rather analogous to H. P. Lovecraft's "crawling chaos Azathoth") ...

Then, in 1999, he had that terrible car accident, where a van ploughed into him while he was out jogging, and he was forced to lie still in traction for more than a year, with multiple fractures of virtually everything that could be fractured. He wrote about the experience in his non-fictional memoir / how-to manual On Writing (2000). Then he wrote about it again, in slightly fictionalised form, in the last volume of The Dark Tower. Then he wrote about it again, in even more fictionalised form, in his adaptation of Lars von Trier's mad Danish mini-series Kingdom Hospital (2004). By now I think it could be said to have become an obsession.

What, then, was my horror to discover that - not only was the nightmarish "Dark Tower" series not at an end (though the one he's just published is, strictly speaking, neither a prequel nor a sequel: it falls somewhere between volumes 4 and 5 of the set: 4.5, as he calls it), but I had myself somehow taken up residence within it.

What does he mean, I hear you ask? Has he gone as potty as his favourite author? No. What I mean is that in the third story of this frame-story encrusted narrative (a little like Potocki's Manuscript Found at Saragossa), there's a character called "Big Ross." Fine and dandy - Ross is a common enough surname. But then, on p.128, it specifies:

Once upon a bye, Nell Robertson, Jack Ross, and Bern Kells had been children together.

After that, the references come thick and fast. I don't want to ruin the story for you, but suffice it to say that Big Jack Ross is murdered by his best friend Kells, who then marries his widow Nell. When Big Ross's son Tim finds his body lying in a stream in the woods:

The chill of the water has preserved him, and he appears to be unmarked, because the man who murdered him struck from behind. [p.175]

The rest of the river is infested with bugs, which "are voracious flesh-eaters, but according to the old wives, they'll not eat the flesh of a virtuous man" - which is, I suppose, some comfort, though not very much.

So there you go. He's caught me at last - as a character, a dead character in fact (albeit a "virtuous" one) in his latest novel. But how did he get wind of my existence at all? How did he come up with this plan for snaring me in the inexorable toils of "Ka", in the Court of the Crimson King?

One theory that occurred to me was that he might have chanced upon the review I wrote of one of the earlier volumes of the Dark Tower saga -- volume 4, in fact, the one which immediately precedes this latest, out-of-strict-sequence addition to the series. It appeared in out short-lived cultural journal the pander in 1998. Here it is:

[Stephen King: Wizard and Glass (1997)]

Stephen King. Wizard and Glass. The Dark Tower, 4. London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1997. 672 pp. $34.95.

The psychomachia of Stephen King continues. By now, his “constant readers” (that is how he addresses us) have become accustomed to author’s asides intended to keep us up to date with the never-ceasing agony of creation. The latest volume in the “Dark Tower” series has been unusually long in gestation, and since the one before it – The Waste Lands – ended on a cliffhanger, this has been frustrating for fans accustomed to a regular fix. What excuses does he have to offer, then?

I knew that Wizard and Glass meant doubling back to Roland’s young days, and to his first love affair, and I was scared to death of that story. Suspense is relatively easy, at least for me; love is hard. Consequently I dallied, I temporized, I procrastinated, and the book remained unwritten.

It’s just like the old song, really: “I dillied, I dallied; I dallied, I dillied” – and so what, really? Where does all this get us? Well, it gets us to a day in western Nebraska where a still small voice spoke to the self-styled “shlockmeister” as he travelled across the deserted miles of cornfields. “I will help you,” it said; and over time he came to realise that this was the voice of his young self, facing him across a whore’s bed in a land of his own imagination!

I’m being a bit sarky at the master’s expense, I suppose, but I must confess that I see a certain danger in so relentless a self-dramatisation. As he whispers confidences to us, his wide-eyed audience, mentioning in passing that he’s “written enough novels and short stories to fill a solar system of the imagination, but Roland’s story is my Jupiter,” he sets himself an increasingly difficult standard to live up to.

This kind of literary hubris is nothing new, of course. In the preface to The Rescue (1920), Conrad recounts all the vicissitudes which kept him from the book for twenty years. He laid it aside in 1898, and took it up again in 1918. In between these two dates, he wrote everything worth reading that’s associated with his name. “Sentiment, pure sentiment … prompted me in the last instance to face the pains and hazards of that return.”

As I moved slowly towards the abandoned body of the tale it loomed up big amongst the glittering shallows of the coast, lonely but not forbidding. … One after another I made out the familiar faces watching my approach with faint smiles of amused recognition. They had known well enough that I was bound to come back to them … and every moment I felt more strongly that They Who had Waited bore no grudge to the man who, however widely may have wandered at times, had played truant only once in his life.

Conrad writes more elegantly than Big Steve, of course, but this is frighteningly close to the latter’s description of the moment when “I found myself confronting myself across a whore’s bed [he particularly likes that phrase, it seems; it comes up twice in a two page Afterword] – the unemployed schoolboy with the long black hair and beard on one side, the successful popular novelist … on the other.”

Why “frighteningly” close? Because The Rescue is a dreadful book: dull, and overwritten, and interminably dragged out, and because it sets the tone for other elaborately unreadable pieces of late Conrad such as The Rover and The Arrow of Gold. This kind of musing on the past, on the mysteries of craft which can connect a scene begun in 1970 and not completed until 1996, sounds valedictory, not constructive. For almost the first time we begin to doubt the master’s fecundity.

So does the problem stem from writing prefaces to your works at all? No, I don’t think so. Anyone who has graduated to a collected edition will presumably be leant on to provide prefaces. Henry James did it, Graham Greene did it, Thomas Hardy did it. But most of them took up an attitude of commenting on past achievement without ruling out the possibility of further heights. Ending an aside to the reader with the words: “I have started to believe I might actually live to complete this cycle of stories. (Knock on wood.)” scarcely inspires one with confidence in Stephen King’s present state of mind. And commenting of your own book, “I don’t know if it’s good or bad – I lost all sense of perspective around page six hundred – but it’s here” sounds unnecessarily grovelly also. It deliberately (and, to my mind, disingenuously) plays into the hands of hostile critics. We all love to kick a man when he’s down, but if he squeals enough while we’re doing it, at least we might feel a bit ashamed of ourselves – that’s the reasoning, I think.

So, after all that, what’s the book actually like?

Well, better than The Rescue, certainly. That book begins quite well and then gets terribly dull. Wizard and Glass kicks off with about a hundred pages of the dullest writing that Stephen King has ever perpetrated. I may be alone in having quite enjoyed the previous volume of the series, which ended with our hapless heroes caught in the clutches of an evil monorail train, but the way in which they extricate themselves from this dilemma really makes “with a single bound, Jack was free!” look like a masterpiece of the storyteller’s art.

Imagine reading a Big Steve book where you start checking to see how many pages you still have to endure, rather than how many are left to enjoy!

Thankfully, once we get into the swing of the central narrative, the old master begins to exert his spell (sorry, all those old reviewers’ clichés seem to erupt in me at once: “ a rattling good yarn,” “suitable for readers from six to sixty,” “I read till two tall candles were stumps” [I always used to wonder what they’d been doing with the candles]). I don’t myself find the strange mélange of King Arthur, Gary Cooper and post-apocalyptic America which characterises Roland’s world anything but incongruous, but it doesn’t matter very much, really. King has generally been better with people than with places, and the people here are interesting enough to keep us turning the pages (I’m doing it again: “ a real page-turner.”)

The “young love” aspect is fine, I think. I don’t see what all the fuss was about. If Big Steve thinks that that’s the worst thing about the book, he’s got another think coming. The real problem is that everything good is in the central flashback narrative. Most of the weaknesses come from the fact that he (and we) have really lost interest in Eddie, and Susannah, and Jake, and especially Oy the billy-bumbler as they make their interminable way towards the increasingly unimaginable Dark Tower.

Hitherto, I’ve yielded to none in my admiration of Stephen King, but I rather resent the fact that he has taken up this tone of Who’s not with me, is against me. The book has been made to resemble a loyalty test. Click your heels three times and say “There’s no King like Stephen,” and you might be rewarded with more volumes in the series. Tough love – that’s what he needs now, I think. I want more Heart of Darkness and The Secret Agent, not more stuff like this, hovering on the very brink of being declared, once and for all, a load of old tosh.

[Pander 3 (1998) 20-21].

Yee-owch! I don't know what possessed me to bother the Dark Master with such glib fatuities, such grad-school inanity. All I can say in my defence is that it was roughly the fifth book review I'd ever written in my life, and I didn't yet know that you don't have to offend someone every time.

It isn't so much what I said, I suspect, as the patronizing tone of the whole thing. Who am I, after all, to condescend to the likes of Stephen King? I virtually am that "constant reader" he so often addresses in his prefaces and afterwords. Not this time, though - this latest "Dark Tower" tome is largely free of all such appurtenances.

Anyway, point taken - revenge has been wreaked. Just as Stephen King's car accident set off such huge reverberations in Mid-World, so (apparently) did my cheeky review of Wizard and Glass - hence my avatar's being found miraculously preserved in a stream, with an axe-blow to the back of the head. I guess it's a bit late to say sorry, but I do take some comfort in the very last page of The Wind Through the Keyhole:

The two most beautiful words in any language are ... I forgive. [p.335]

Thank you, Master, for your kind forebearance. I shall not offend again.

Don't Think It Couldn't Be You

[Peter Reading: Vendange Tardive (2010)]

i.m Peter Reading
born Liverpool 27 July 1946
died 17 November 2011

Well, it's happened again. I was just looking up a few details for my lecture on Peter Reading on Saturday when I saw that he had died:

They told me, Heraclitus, they told me you were dead ...

- Callimachus, tr. William Cory

I have to say that the news left me feeling quite upset. It was almost exactly the same sequence of events as I experienced with J. G. Ballard a couple of years ago: you start checking someone's dates online, and next thing you know, you find out they've been dead for months ...

Don’t think it couldn’t be you -
bankrupted, batty, bereft ...

as he says in his most famous poem, Perduta Gente [Lost People] (1989), exploring the cardboard canyons of the homeless in Thatcher's Britain.

"Don't think it couldn't be you" -- now that Thatcher's been Hollywood-ised, another notch in Meryl Streep's list of accents, it's hard to remember that cold face presiding over Nuremberg-style rallies at Brighton, the faithful baying with ecstasy as she preached her crusade against the poor, the starving, the mentally ill:

grievously wounded veteran of the Battle of Bottle,
jobless, bereft of home, skint,
down in the cold uriniferous subway ...

It's a curious irony that she should have ended that way herself, her mind betraying her, all that self-reliance eroded into complete dependency on the social services she so deplored.

Peter Edwards: Peter Reading: Poet

But who was Peter Reading? The "laureate of grot" was one disimissive phrase (dreamed up by hollow-man pundit Blake Morrison) ... People who considered themselves quite well-informed on contemporary British writing would turn out never to have heard of him. To me, he was one of the very few justifications for even daring to speak of a contemporary British poetry scene.

You loved him or you hated him. For most readers, it was clearly the latter. His strange books, with cut-out newspaper clippings, classically turned verses, scribbled notebook entries all jostling for position on the page, were calculated to excite or offend.

When Perduta gente first came out I was living in Scotland, recently targetted as the victim of one of Thatcher's bigtime social experiments: the poll-tax. The subject matter Reading had chosen did not surprise us; what was really surprising was that no-one else seemed to be writing about these things. All the news round the streets was that the last time someone had tried to bring in a poll-tax, it had led to the Peasants' Revolt ...

[Lannan Foundation]

That's not to say that he was neglected, exactly. After his London publishers dumped him in the mid-nineties, Bloodaxe Books of Newcastle reissued his entire back-catalogue in three successive volumes of collected poems. He ended up being one of the most extensively available poets around: another factor in this being the decision of the Lannan Foundation in America to record his entire back-catalogue on a series of DVDs - 24 hours or so for him to read out 26 separate poetry collections.

And here they all are:

Contemporary Writers

Poetry:


1. Water and Waste. UK: Outposts Magazine, 1970.
2. For the Municipality's Elderly. London: Secker & Warburg, 1974.
3. The Prison Cell and Barrel Mystery. London: Secker & Warburg, 1976.
4. Nothing for Anyone. London: Secker & Warburg, 1977.
5. Fiction. London: Secker & Warburg, 1979.
6. Tom O'Bedlam's Beauties. London: Secker & Warburg, 1981.
7. 5 x 5 x 5 x 5 x 5. Ceolfrith Press, 1983.
8. Diplopic. London: Secker & Warburg, 1983.
9. C. London: Secker & Warburg, 1984.
10. Ukelele Music. London: Secker & Warburg, 1985.
11. Essential Reading. London: Secker & Warburg, 1986.
12. Stet. London: Secker & Warburg, 1986.
13. Final Demands. London: Secker & Warburg, 1988.
14. Perduta Gente. London: Secker & Warburg, 1989.
15. Shitheads. Squirrelprick Press, 1990.
16. Three in One. London: Chatto & Windus, 1991.
17. Evagatory. London: Chatto & Windus, 1992.
18. Last Poems. London: Chatto & Windus, 1994.
19. Collected Poems Volume 1: 1970-84. Northumberland: Bloodaxe, 1995.
20. Penguin Modern Poets 3 (Mick Imlah, Glyn Maxwell, Peter Reading). Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1995.
21. Collected Poems Volume 2: 1985-96. Northumberland: Bloodaxe, 1996.
22. Chinoiserie. Bay Press, 1997.
23. Work in Regress. Northumberland: Bloodaxe, 1997.
24. Apophthegmatic. Bay Press, 1999.
25. Ob. Northumberland: Bloodaxe, 1999.
26. Repetitions. Cleveland, OH: Cleveland State University, 1999.
27. Marfan. Northumberland: Bloodaxe, 2000.
28. Faunal. Northumberland: Bloodaxe, 2002.
29. Collected Poems: 1997-2003. Northumberland: Bloodaxe, 2003.
30. -273.15. Northumberland: Bloodaxe, 2005.
31. Vendage Tardive. Northumberland: Bloodaxe, 2010.

Secondary Literature:


• Martin, Isabel. Reading Peter Reading. Northumberland: Bloodaxe, 2000.

[Isabel Martin: Reading Peter Reading (2000)]

It is, however, revealing that the one major critical work about him was written in German, before being translated and published (in somewhat abridged form) in English. There was something a little "European" about his immense, concentrated pessimism; his decision to be a professional Jeremiah. The UK newspaper obituaries tend to concentrate on the his (alleged) "sense of humour" - as if that were a kind of excuse for daring to take things so seriously for so long, in such a thoroughly un-English way.

I suppose, too, that some saw a degree of affectation in his refusal to take up the usual "poetic" ways of making a living: the Academic teaching, the light journalism and reviews. Instead, after an early stint at Art College, he worked as a weighbridge operator for almost twenty years, a job which he claimed gave him "plenty of time to think."

That is, until a newly appointed manager tried to get him to wear a uniform. He promptly resigned and (according to Isabel Martin, his principal witness to the world) managed to achieve depths of indigence rivalling those of his characters Mucky Preece and Boris the Swine in Perduta gente, until he was rescued by the Americans.

Reading's books are complex, intertwined, Dickensian in their balancing of form and content. Their message is grim, but his late shift from social to ecological lamentation certainly showed a refusal to settle into any reconciliatory "final manner" - no Shakespearean late romances for him. The very last one, Vendange tardive seems, in retrospect, prophetic of a mind at the end of its tether. There was little more to say that hadn't been said already, so many times over, but those last words of Perduta gente somehow had to keep sounding out:

Woe vnto woe vnto woe
vnto woe vnto woe vnto woe

It seems a fitting epitaph.

If you'd like to hear the man himself in action, reading from his later works in the Lannan Foundation archive, here are a few links:

• Peter Reading reading Civil (2002) [Video Recording]


• Peter Reading reading ∂ (2003) [Video Recording]


• Peter Reading reading -273.15 (2005) [Video Recording]


• Peter Reading reading Vendange Tardive (2010) [Video Recording]

For the rest, what can I say? A great soul has passed. No-one can claim he didn't warn us, though, to the very utmost of his ability. We'll regret not having listened more carefully as the last tree falls in the ash-pits of the future.

•
[Peter Reading: -273.15 (2005)]