Walter de la Mare: Critical Appraisals

 

Liverpool University Press have recently issued a paperback edition of Walter de la Mare: Critical Appraisals edited by Yui Kajita, Angela Leighton and A.J. Nickerson.  This is one of the most substantial collection of essays on de la Mare for some years. It covers the full range of his work, including his poetry, stories and novels. 

 

My contribution is 'Walter de la Mare and The Modern Ghost Story', an extended version of my earlier work on this theme. In this, I place de la Mare in the context of other classic ghost story writers and note his particular concern with the idea of absence, expressed through his lonely, haunted figures and the desolate houses and landscapes they inhabit.

 

Other essays exploring de la Mare's relationship to writers of the supernatural include 'The close, the curious, the deep’: Walter de la Mare and Henry James by Adrian Poole; 'Sharing the Inkpot: Walter de la Mare and Forrest Reid' by Andrew Doyle; ‘That remoter, changeless England’: Walter de la Mare and Edward Thomas' by Guy Cuthbertson;  and 'The Lost, the Haunted, and the Holy: De la Mare and the Otherworldly' by Rowan Williams. There are also creative responses to de la Mare from a gallery of poets, composers and essayists.  

 

The paperback edition is available for £23.99 direct from the press, or at similar prices from independent bookshops and the usual outlets.

 

(Mark Valentine) 

'That Strange Little Book': Ding Dong Bell by Walter de la Mare

Walter de la Mare was most known as a poet when, at the urging of his friend and fellow-author Forrest Reid, he gathered a first volume of his short stories, The Riddle and Other Stories (1923). This was a success, and was already into a third edition by the following year. It includes such classics as “Seaton’s Aunt”, “Out of the Deep”, and “The Creatures”.

His publishers, Selwyn & Blount, were therefore interested in a further book of fiction. De la Mare had from time to time worked on pieces that his biographer, Teresa Whistler, labels ‘essay-stories’. These explored personal experiences or interests in a reflective, meditative way, but using a fictional framework, as for example, in “The Vats”, another story in The Riddle.

In Ding Dong Bell (1924), which celebrates its centenary this month, he offered the reader three pieces in this style, all based on graveyard epitaphs (a fourth was added in a later edition). The author enjoyed visiting old churches and churchyards, and a character in the book, no doubt speaking for him, says he simply cannot pass them by without looking in, even if he only has a few minutes to spare.

In "Lichen" a young woman waiting for a train at a rural station gets into conversation with an older man who tells her all about the neighbouring churchyard, quoting some of the epitaphs and recalling the people they commemorate. In "Benighted" a couple out walking lose their way one summer evening and take shelter in a churchyard, reading the inscriptions by match-light. In "Winter" a solitary traveller is the one who cannot pass a churchyard.

All of the characters are well-drawn, with brief but telling details, and de la Mare also uses fine detail to describe the wild flowers, mosses and shrubs of the quiet sanctuaries, the deep dark yews and cypresses, the crumbling, lichened memorials. He conjures up well the stillness of a country halt, the half-light of a summer night, and the brittle loneliness of a dwindling winter’s day. But the particular interest of his three vignettes is in the epitaphs, all invented, with singular phrasing, sometimes blunt and brusque, at other times yearning. De la Mare deploys these obliquely to discuss larger themes such as individuality, mortality and the after-life, if any.

In its way, the book is an unusual experiment which confounds expectations. The graveyard settings are likely to lead the unwary reader to suppose that some apparitional scene will follow, that there will be some distinct flitting of phantom forms. We might expect these to be subtle, elusive, delicate, but surely there will be something there, some glimpse. There isn’t. The only haunting is in the faded, fragmentary memorials of past, lost lives.

Forrest Reid, in his Walter de la Mare, A Critical Study (1929) calls Ding Dong Bell ‘that strange little book which is neither wholly essay nor wholly story . . . Quaint, whimsical, and delightful it is . . . A faintly macabre note is struck once or twice, but for the most part a playful friendliness prevails, an affection tinged with humour.’

Ding Dong Bell is indeed an odd book, pleasantly curious, and highly characteristic of its author, but I wonder: does it quite work either as fiction or as essays?  It has atmosphere, certainly, and eccentricity, but I am not sure there is enough narrative in the pieces to make them satisfying as stories, whereas, since the epitaphs are imaginary, they do not offer the interest of antiquarian scholarship. They are best read perhaps as prose vignettes, reveries, evocations of moments, more akin to his poetry than his fiction.

Walter de la Mare was soon to go on to issue a second full short story collection, in The Connoisseur and Other Stories (1926), which was equally as good as his first: it included more of his poetic and enigmatic tales such as “Mr Kempe” and “All Hallows”.

(Mark Valentine)

'29 Songs' by David Power, with settings of Visiak and de la Mare

Some years ago, the National Centre for Early Music in York, situated in the converted church of St Margaret, ran a series of concerts under the heading ‘Late Music’, offering work by contemporary composers. At a performance of songs for solo voice and piano accompaniment, I was surprised and delighted to find there were several pieces setting verses by E H Visiak.

Visiak (1878-1972) was an early champion of David Lindsay (whom he befriended), the author of the fantastical seafaring romance Medusa (1929), and of other very strange fiction, and an eminent Milton scholar. But his early work was as a poet. He published five main volumes: Buccaneer Ballads (1910); Flints and Flashes (1911); The Phantom Ship (1912); The Battle Fiends (1916); and Brief Poems (1919).

The composer of the pieces I had heard was David Power, also a notable Lindsay scholar, and I am pleased to report that a selection of his work has now been issued on the Prima Facie label, entitled 29 Songs, 1985-2016, performed by Robert Rice (baritone) and William Vann (piano). They include not only five pieces based on Visiak poems, but others setting work by Walter de la Mare, Robert Louis Stevenson and Ronald Duncan. 

It was also a pleasure to see three songs from pieces by the late Paul Newman, editor of the journal Abraxas, biographer of Frank Baker, authority on White Horse hill figures and lost gods, Wormwood contributor, and much else besides. There are also works by other contemporary poets. Each of the pieces is brief, a few minutes at most, but achieve an admirable concentration of character.

In the accompanying booklet, David Power records that he first discovered Visiak through Colin Wilson’s book Eagle and Earwig, then greatly enjoyed Visiak’s autobiography Life’s Morning Hour. He agreed with Wilson that Visiak ‘had a gift of writing about things as if seeing them for the first time and brought an almost visionary freshness to ordinary things.’ This inspired him to set some of his poems to music.

The Visiak songs here include ‘An Old Song’, with Satie like piano and a delicate, wistful melody; ‘Passion’, with the urgency and tumult suited to its theme; and ‘The Shipwreck’, grave, slow, elegiac. The setting of Ronald Duncan’s ‘Remember Me’ has a gentle, haunting melody, while the four de la Mare pieces capture the uncanny, nursery-rhyme oddity of his verses (from Peacock Pie), especially in the terse, tripping melody of ‘Five Eyes’. Paul Newman’s humorous ‘In my More Thoughtful Moments’ (‘I can feel sorry/For the Four Horsemen/Who never halt/ At an inn’) has a jaunty treatment capturing its tone.

In their commitment to mystery and their angular individuality, the songs seem to me to have an affinity with the piano works of Charles-Valentin Alkan. The album is  thoroughly engrossing, offering unusual selections and achieving an aura of the singular and strange. 

(Mark Valentine)