by Alison Lurie
Most children, though they may enjoy Alice’s adventures, don’t want to visit Wonderland, which is full of disappearing scenery and dangerous eccentrics, some of them clearly quite insane. They prefer Oz, where life is all play and no work, and all adventures end happily.
To some extent Baum’s endorsement of escapism was hidden—disguised as lighthearted comic fantasy, with a series of sweet, pretty-little-girl protagonists, the most famous of whom at first declares that all she really wants is to go home to flat, gray Kansas and see her dull, deeply depressed Uncle Henry and Aunt Em again. But, as anyone knows who has read even a few of Baum’s later Oz books, Dorothy may return to Kansas after her adventures, but she doesn’t stay there very long—somehow, a natural disaster (shipwreck, earthquake, whirling highways) always appears to carry her back to Oz and the magical countries that surround it. She spends more and more time there, and has more adventures. Finally, in the fifth volume of the series, Dorothy not only moves to Oz permanently, but arranges for Uncle Henry and Aunt Em (whose failing farm is about to be repossessed by the bank) to join her there. Yes, you can escape from your dreary domestic life into fairyland, Baum’s books say: you can have exciting but safe adventures, make new friends, live in a castle, never have to do housework or homework, and—maybe most important of all—never grow up.
This subversive message may be one of the reasons that the Oz books took so long to become accepted as classics. For more than half a century after L. Frank Baum discovered it in 1900, the Land of Oz had a curious reputation. American children by the thousands went there happily, but authorities in the field of juvenile literature, like suspicious and conservative travel agents, refused to recommend it or even to handle tickets. Librarians would not buy the Oz books, schoolteachers would not let you write reports on them, and the best-known histories of children’s books made no reference to their existence. In the 1930s and 1940s they were actually removed from many schools and libraries. As a child I had to save my allowance to buy the Oz books, because the local public library refused to carry them. This censorship was justified at the time by pointing out that the books were not beautifully written and that the characters were two-dimensional. This is arguable, but it has not prevented many other less than stylistically perfect children’s books of the period from being admired and recommended. It seems more likely that in the dark years between the first and the second waves of American feminism, critics recognized the subversive power of Baum’s creation.
Not until recently did the Oz books enter the canon, and in some communities they are still under attack. Fundamentalist Christians have complained that The Wizard of Oz contains two good witches (to them, an oxymoron) and also that, “in Oz, females assume traditional male roles, and animals are elevated to human status.”33 Apparently, if you believe in creationism, characters like the Cowardly Lion and Billina the hen, who not only talk but give good advice and help defeat evil, are a serious threat.
Yet these Ozophobes, like the Nomes, are clearly on the losing side. A new edition of Michael Patrick Hearn’s exhaustive and entertaining Annotated Wizard of Oz has appeared; and there is now an International Wizard of Oz Club with headquarters in Kinderhook, Illinois, a name that Baum himself might have invented. In July 2000 more than four hundred fans, many of them in spectacular costume, gathered in Bloomington, Indiana, to celebrate the hundredth anniversary of Oz. They shared a five-foot-high green birthday cake in the shape of the Emerald City, and watched the current Wizard (a professor of orthodontics from San Francisco), accompanied by nine plastic pigs, take off in a giant gas balloon.
IS THERE ANYBODY THERE?
WALTER DE LA MARE’S
SOLITARY CHILD
LIKE many famous writers for children, Walter de la Mare had an idyllic early childhood that was cut short too soon. His first nine years were spent in a large, happy family in the outer suburbs of London, at the edge of the countryside he loved. But at ten he became a chorister and boarding student at St. Paul’s Cathedral school in central London. The boys there studied and practiced and performed seven days a week, with only one hour of freedom a day. Soon memories of his early life began to fade; later he would write that “those happy, unhappy, far-away days seem like mere glimpses of a dragon-fly shimmering and darting.”1
For the rest of his life de la Mare would try to recapture this dragonfly. He would also continue to believe that it was better to be a child than an adult. At thirty-one he wrote to a friend that growing up “is a fiasco I am more convinced every day.”2 When he was seventy-five, his biographer, Theresa Whistler (then twenty-one), “protested against this wholesale dismissal of adult life.” De la Mare, who had known her since birth, insisted that he was right. “Take your own case,” he told her. “Look how diluted you are!”3
Like Wordsworth, de la Mare saw childhood as intrinsically superior not only to adulthood but to boyhood. In 1919 he declared that
The child divines, the boy discovers.
The child is intuitive, inductive, the boy logical, deductive.
The child is visionary, the boy intellectual.
The child knows that beauty is truth, the boy that truth is beauty.4
In this sense, de la Mare remained a child all his life, preferring intuition and vision to logic and reason. In many of his stories and poems he views the world with the intensity, innocence, and credulity of childhood. De la Mare’s world, like that of an imaginative child, is full of mystery and wonder. As he once wrote, children do not distinguish sharply between reality and invention: “between their dreams and their actuality looms no impassable abyss.”5 Nature is alive; animals and insects and birds may be conscious beings; places have strong and definite personalities. Ghosts inhabit deserted old houses; fairies and witches and elves haunt woods and gardens; any tree or pond may have its attendant spirit. De la Mare’s characters, especially if they are children, are often intensely aware of these supernatural presences—sometimes, they catch a glimpse of one.
A deserted, vaguely haunted house is the subject of de la Mare’s most often anthologized poem, “The Listeners” (which I learned by heart as a child).
“Is there anybody there?” said the Traveller,
Knocking on the moonlit door;
And his horse in the silence champed the grasses
Of the forest’s ferny floor. . . .
Ay, they heard his foot upon the stirrup,
And the sound of iron on stone,
And how the silence surged softly backward,
When the plunging hoofs were gone.6
De la Mare’s sense of time often recalls that of a child. Hours, days, and seasons seem to go on forever, or telescope suddenly. Many of his characters appear to live in an eternal present, where they are shown staring so intently at some landscape, person, or creature that they are unaware of time passing. What their elders might call “daydreaming,” de la Mare suggests, is in fact an intense, self-forgetful absorption in something outside the self: a condition of mind made famous by Keats, who called it “negative capability.” In one story, for instance, the child Maria looks so intently at a fly on the wall that she in effect merges with it. “She seemed almost to have become the fly—Maria-Fly. . . . When [she] came to, it seemed she had been away for at least three centuries.”7
There is almost always a dark side as well as a bright one to de la Mare’s work. His characters are very often either lonely old people or children, and when he speaks as a child, it is usually a special kind of child: solitary, dreamy, half-frightened and half-fascinated by the world around him. One critic has even claimed that what the solitary child in de la Mare’s poems and stories sees most clearly is death.8 It is true that his work is full of unexplained disappearances, but many of them can be seen as an accurate picture of the way the world looks to many small children. Adults come and go unpredictably, and often no explanation is given, or the explanation is one that a child cannot really understand. A day or a week is much longer than it is for adult
s—even an hour’s delay or absence may seem interminable.
Theresa Whistler’s intelligent, well-researched, and wonderfully readable biography of de la Mare presents itself as a record of his life; but it is also a sensitive and thoughtful study of his fiction and poetry. Whistler comes to her task with important advantages: as the granddaughter of de la Mare’s old friend and patron Sir Henry Newbolt, she knew him and many of his associates from infancy. As she says in her prologue, she “inherited a friendship with him already intimate through three generations.”9 She began her research for the biography shortly after de la Mare’s death in 1956, when many of his friends and relatives were still alive.
Whistler does not attempt to present de la Mare as an unfairly neglected writer. If anything, she rather undervalues him. Though she claims that his work “carries the tang of authentic spiritual experience,” she calls his subjects “elusive, fantastic, fine-spun and minor-keyed” and says that for her his prose is sometimes “exhausting and blood-thinning,” and his “sentiment dated.”10
But minor or dated as de la Mare may now seem even to his own biographer, he is one of the few writers of his generation who was able to discover and claim a new literary territory, and change his readers’ perception of the world. Half-abandoned old houses; odd, lonely children; eccentric spinsters and bachelors; and foggy, melancholy woodlands existed before he wrote, but he described them with such intensity that it is now possible to recognize a de la Mare character, mood, or landscape anywhere.
To those who know his books, it may seem surprising that it took so long for a full-length life of de la Mare to appear. But biographers today prefer subjects who do much of the preliminary work themselves, creating themselves as dramatic public figures—something de la Mare avoided whenever possible. They also like crisis and scandal, and if possible, violence and tragedy. De la Mare’s life, after his early struggles for recognition, was private and uneventful. He married at twenty-six and remained married until his wife died forty-eight years later, and he was an affectionate father to their four children. He had few enemies, and only one—unconsummated—love affair. Even his biographer calls his history “unexciting and respectable.”11
Essentially de la Mare had the life that Forster’s Leonard Bast, the doomed clerk of Howard’s End, might have had with better luck. Like Leonard Bast, he began in the lowest strata of the middle class: his father died in 1877 when he was four, plunging de la Mare’s mother and her seven children into poverty. As a choirboy at St. Paul’s Cathedral between the ages of ten and sixteen he received a good education. But when his voice changed, he had to leave school. There was no money to send him to a university; instead he became a low-ranking clerk in the city, overworked and underpaid. The same thing happened to Kenneth Grahame, the author of The Wind in the Willows, and with some of the same effect, though he was luckier in finding a less demanding job with the Bank of England—and like de la Mare, Grahame accepted adulthood only reluctantly.
For eighteen years de la Mare worked fifty-seven hours a week in the statistical department of the Anglo-American Oil Company, adding columns of figures and copying documents. Hating this organization, which he once described as “carnivorous,”12 he lived as much as he could in the world of his imagination, believing in the existence of what he called “another reality,” which would be sought through “make-believe, daydream, empathy, [and] free association.”13
According to all accounts de la Mare was a good-looking, sensitive, romantic young man, with vague but intense intellectual and literary ambitions. Like Forster’s Leonard Bast, he married unwisely, and probably under pressure—in his case, two and a half months before the birth of his first child. His wife, Elfie, was eleven years older, a clerk in an insurance office, and the leading lady of the local South London dramatic society. She was essentially uneducated and rather silly, but from the beginning she believed wholly in de la Mare as a writer, and for many years, starting even before the marriage, she took on the task of sending out his manuscripts in order to spare him the pain of rejection slips.
De la Mare was also lucky in that his ambitions were more focused than those of Leonard Bast: from the age of twenty he was determined to be an author. Often, after office hours ended at six thirty, he remained at his desk until midnight in order to write. Presently this industry was rewarded: his first story was accepted when he was only twenty-two, though he didn’t publish a book until seven years later. He was fortunate also in that he was not taken up by well-meaning but ultimately destructive well-to-do people like Forster’s Schlegels. Instead he gradually became friends with other young writers, including Rupert Brooke, W. H. Davies, Ralph Hodgson, and Edward Thomas.
Unlike most male writers of his time (or ours) de la Mare enjoyed domesticity. He was good at housekeeping: he could change diapers and bake a cake. But overwork and constant worry about money dragged him down. In his twenties and early thirties he was often depressed and troubled by doubts about his own ability as a writer. By the time he was thirty-five he had published several books of poetry and the fantasy novel Henry Brocken, but though reviews were good, he was still earning almost nothing from his writing, and only £143 a year from Anglo-American Oil.
Now, however, his luck improved. His friend Henry Newbolt (who at the time was a far better known poet than de la Mare) managed to get him a government grant of two hundred pounds a year, and persuaded him to quit his job and accept it. Suddenly de la Mare had time to write. Poems and stories and essays poured forth; he began to review regularly and started a juvenile fantasy based on the tales he had told his four children, The Three Mulla-Mulgars, which is generally recognized as one of the sources of Tolkien’s The Hobbit. From then on de la Mare still had periods of self-doubt and depression, but essentially he was out of the woods—though in his case this seems the wrong metaphor, since nothing delighted and fascinated him more than an ancient and shadowy forest.
The landscape of de la Mare’s stories and poems, of course, was not unique to him, but part of the late-nineteenth-century Romantic tradition of the haunted English countryside: the numinous, isolated woods and fields and marshes that provided the background for writers like Arthur Machen, Forrest Reid, Lord Dunsany, and Sylvia Townsend Warner. Their best-known stories are set by preference in a rural world that was vanishing in their lifetimes, a world not yet shrunken by the telephone and the motorcar. Its characteristic atmosphere of romantic melancholy is a sort of pathetic fallacy—loss of landscape embodied in landscape. What makes de la Mare’s writing exceptional is that for him this scenery and the mixture of sadness and enchantment it embodied were often the central subject of his work: foreground as well as background.
Though the landscape that most moved de la Mare was that of southwest England, especially Devon and Cornwall, his ancestry was in fact part Scotch and part French Huguenot. A geneticist might suggest that this inheritance made him both a dreamer and a Puritan—a combination that might help to explain his current loss of popularity. Today, passion is expected to express itself in physical data: size and color of parts, number of orgasms, type of contraception used; the description of a love affair that doesn’t include such details seems fuzzy and incomplete. But though de la Mare could be deeply romantic, the erotic is almost wholly absent from his work. According to his biographer, Theresa Whistler, he was not much interested in sex. He was, as she puts it, “romantic, fastidious, and private,” someone for whom “the physical aspects of anything, not merely of love, would always be secondary.”14
When he was thirty-eight, and just beginning to be well known, de la Mare fell in love with the literary editor of a magazine to which he was a contributor, the Saturday Westminster Review. Naomi Royde-Smith was thirty-three—a lively, intelligent, and independent woman with a romantic imagination. She had always wanted to be the soul mate and muse of a great writer, and de la Mare was happy to assign her that role.
For the next three years Naomi and de la Mare were intensely in love wit
h each other. But, evidently to her annoyance, the affair remained platonic, though he wrote her nearly eight hundred love letters. Even so he was often tormented by guilt; as he once wrote to her, “Surely a man with a wife and four children has no justification for allowing any of his flock of selves to stray from the domestic fold.”15 Also, according to his biographer, in some ways he preferred the idea of Naomi to the reality.
I long to get things over, to have them safe in memory [he wrote to her]. . . . Even you are almost best in memory, where I cannot change you, nor you yourself.16
In the summer of 1913 de la Mare spent three days in Naomi’s room, but apparently refused to sleep with her. From then on, though the letters continued, Naomi became increasingly impatient with his demands on her time and attention, and the relationship went downhill fast.
Soon after the start of World War I de la Mare contracted appendicitis, followed by complications that kept him convalescent for many months. Another man might have resented the enforced inactivity and separation from historic events, but de la Mare, who had had to share his mother with six other children and his wife with four, enjoyed being fed and cosseted by nurses. His return home brought on a period of depression, but in 1915 he had two strokes of good luck. First, he was made a Royal Society of Literature professor (a largely honorary office) and granted a pension of one hundred pounds. Then Rupert Brooke died in Greece and left everything to three friends and poets, of whom de la Mare was one. Death transformed Brooke into a world-class hero and best-selling poet, and the resulting royalties gave de la Mare economic security for the rest of his life.
