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)
