When I began to collect supernatural fiction in my late
teens, I turned first to Billingham’s, the second-hand bookshop in the town
centre which had been established in the Thirties in Towcester, an old Roman
town ten miles west along Watling Street. Now in the county town, Northampton,
they had an old-fashioned shop in St Giles Street.
Here I found, among other things, some Machen in the slim
green volumes of the New Adelphi Library, and two short story collections by
Walter de la Mare, The Riddle in royal blue binding, and The Connoisseur
in sand coloured cloth, both with gilt titles. These soon became favourites. I
found the stories beguiling and elusive, and I learned that tales did not have
to be emphatic or dramatic: they could be atmospheric, they could conjure
reverie.
The Connoisseur and Other Stories celebrates its
centenary this month. According to his biographer Theresa Whistler in her 1993
study, the book ‘got a more mixed welcome than the general favour’ his new work
usually received: ‘Many people found the title-story far too obscure, and the
tales in general too elaborate.’ However, for his Best Stories selection
(1942), de la Mare himself chose ‘Missing’ and ‘All Hallows’ from this volume.
The first story, ‘Mr Kempe’, has a framing device—a
meeting in a pub—which introduces the main narrator, who then takes over the
story. The initial first person narrator then becomes mostly a listener, with
occasional brief interjections. This is someone else’s story. The effect is to
give a sense of a certain distance, and also of ambiguity: how much of the
story is reallly being told?
The pub narrator, walking in lonely cliffside country,
seeks directions from Mr Kempe, a reclusive retired cleric who seems to have been
sent askew by his meditations on the soul: does it exist or not? This obsession
has led him to a rather grim, not to say grotesque, interest in the accidental
victims of the precipitous path leading to his house. Thus far, this is a
study in morbid psychology. But there is an ironic, almost throwaway remark by
the pub storyteller, which implies a definite spectral aspect: the place
was thronging with spirits, he notes, to which his host seemed oblivious. Thus,
this is a story about ghosts, but they are simply just there, in the
background, like the trees and the stones and the glimmering sea. Perhaps the
implication is that our instincts and impressions are better than our intellect
for experiencing the otherworldly.
The title story is in some ways uncharacteristic of de la
Mare in that, although it starts in the exquisite London rooms of the
aesthetical title character, who is about to receive an unavoidable visitor, it
then moves into several scenes of an exotic Eastern realm, embracing
concepts of reincarnation and fate. It is beautifully composed and rather like
a mingling of tales by Algernon Blackwood and Lord Dunsany.
In two other stories, we listen to monologues by
characters who have been oppressed by a sense of the dinginess of the mortal
lot, and by despair at what appears to be an actively hostile universe. One, in
‘The Wharf’, is a mother on her own by the kitchen fire reflecting on an
episode of serious illness which included a disturbing dream of angelic type
figures shovelling a pile of men’s souls. A farmer’s wild flowers on a dung
heap, and his matter-of-fact response to them, help her to reinterpret the
vision. In ‘Disillusion’, a weary author explains to a doctor why he is low in
spirits while at last admitting that his work at least still sustains him.
These are brooding pieces about characters like Mr Kempe who have become
obsessed but who unlike him may have a way out.
Wanderers, strangers and listeners feature in several of
the other stories in the volume. The second story, ‘Missing’, has a similar
framing device to ‘Mr Kempe’ but here the venue is a frowsty café on a hot day.
As before, the initial first person narrator gives way to a
stranger he meets, who tells a long story. Here, de la Mare is adept at
depicting the spell cast by the hard heat, the dreariness and desolation of the
city streets and the café itself. The story was based, de la Mare noted, on a
real encounter with a stranger in a tea shop.
Forrest Reid, in his 1929 study of his friend’s work, thought this story
‘among Mr. de la Mare’s masterpieces’ whose ‘sinister quality springs largely
from its reticence.’ He ranked it with ‘Seaton’s Aunt’ ‘for sheer
suggestiveness’.
‘All Hallows’, perhaps the most notable story here, has
another character wandering on cliffside paths, until he comes unexpectedly on
the cathedral of the title. De la Mare said the story was inspired by a
description of St David’s, Pembrokeshire, though he had never in fact visited
it. That cathedral is not actually on the coast but is not far inland, and it is
a grand edifice for the small village where it is situated. When de la Mare did later visit he admitted to being slightly disappointed by the setting, though delighted to be mistaken himself for a cleric.
Here, the narrator
learns from a talkative verger (there are few other kinds in fiction) of dark
presences in the church which seem to be pursuing a subtle and gradual
spiritual assault on its structure. We are never quite sure how to take his
story, whether it stems from the mind of a lonely eccentric, as in ‘Mr Kempe’, and may be all the result of morbid fancy, of if there is indeed some shadowy
power at work.
The essence of de la Mare’s stories of this type, which
includes examples in other volumes, such as ‘The Creatures' and ‘The Vats’,
seems to be that not only is the landscape itself stranger than we might think,
but so are some of its inhabitants. Wherever we go, he seems to say, we might
encounter the peculiar and the uncanny, famously, in ‘Crewe’, even in the
waiting room of a busy railway station. We think we walk in one world but there
is another far stranger alongside it. In The Connoisseur and Other Stories
he explores this theme with particular subtlety and ambiguity.
(Mark Valentine)
