by Alison Lurie
In 1921 de la Mare published his strangest and most famous work of fiction, The Memoirs of a Midget. It is a tour de force: a middle-aged man’s fully imagined and convincing vision of what it would be like to be a young woman between two and three feet tall (de la Mare never gives his heroine’s exact height). His narrator, Miss M—whose full name we never learn—is, like her creator, self-educated, thoughtful, dreamy, and fascinated by natural phenomena from the stars to the patterns of lichen. She begins life as a sheltered only child, becomes an orphan, falls in love with a beautiful and ambitious full-sized woman, and is courted by a male dwarf. Later she is taken up by London society as a kind of pet, and finally she joins a circus.
According to Theresa Whistler, de la Mare always spoke of Miss M as a real person, a kind of imaginary companion. He saw himself as equally isolated and peculiar; and Whistler is surely right in tracing a connection between Miss M’s emotional life and de la Mare’s. Like her, de la Mare felt an alternating pleasure and distaste when he was lionized by London society hostesses; like her, he both enjoyed and resented being taken care of.
Though Theresa Whistler does not point this out, it is also possible to see echoes of his relationship with Naomi Royde-Smith in the story. When Miss M tells the dwarf who loves her, “I share my secretest thoughts—my imagination, with you; isn’t that a kind of love?”17 it is easy to imagine de la Mare giving the same excuse to Naomi. And when Fanny, the young woman Miss M romantically adores, complains of Miss M’s rejection of physical contact, we may hear Naomi’s voice accusing de la Mare.
“You said you loved me—oh yes. But touch me, come here—she laid her hand almost fondly on her breast—“and be humanly generous, no. That’s no more your nature than—than a changeling’s. Contamination, perhaps!”18
Like most good novels The Memoirs of a Midget can be read in many ways. It can be seen as an inversion of de la Mare’s psychological situation: Miss M is an adult in a child’s body, while de la Mare is in some ways a child in an adult’s body. It also works as an allegory about the position of middle-class women in the late nineteenth century: petted and minimized when weak, condemned when they want independence. Except for the days when she is displaying herself in the circus, Miss M never earns a shilling; people take care of her because she is helpless and cute. Only after great difficulties is she able to live alone, on inherited money.
Miss M’s friend Fanny, on the other hand, has to earn her living as a teacher; at one point she comes to Miss M desperate to borrow money (probably for an abortion, though de la Mare does not spell this out). Hard as she tries, Fanny cannot survive on her own. She ends up making a loveless marriage and blaming all her troubles on Miss M, whom she accuses of having been her enemy for years. In terms of the story this accusation is cruel and unreasonable, but it works symbolically. Rich, childish, dependent Victorian women were in a sense the enemies of poor working girls like Fanny. If the author of The Memoirs of a Midget had been a woman, the book might now be acclaimed as an early feminist classic.
Classic or not, it is impressively well written. De la Mare cared about prose, and his is often brilliant; no one can set a mood or describe landscape and weather better:
Soon after six . . . a storm, which all the afternoon had been steadily piling its leaden vapours into space, began to break. . . . The very air seemed to thicken, and every tree stood up as if carved out of metal. Of a sudden a great wind, with heavy plashing drops of rain, swept roaring round the house, thick with dust and green leaves torn from the disheveled summer trees. There was a hush. The darkness intensified, and then a vast sheet of lightning seemed to picture all Kent in my eyes, and the air was full of water.19
The emotional intensity and subtle, haunting charm of The Memoirs of a Midget also power de la Mare’s best stories. As his biographer points out, very often they are told from the viewpoint of a child coolly observing the passions and tragedies of adults, or by an uninvolved narrator to whom strangers confide odd or dreadful histories. Many of them recall the ghost stories of Henry James, whom de la Mare admired. A few of these tales, such as “Seaton’s Aunt,” “Crewe,” and “Miss Duveen,” are still occasionally anthologized; they deserve to be classics, and so does de la Mare’s early, haunting tale “The Riddle,” in which seven children, singly or in pairs, vanish into an old oak chest in a house deep in the country—perhaps into death, perhaps only into adulthood.
Time, which de la Mare so often portrayed as flexible, in the end was ruthless to him. Taste in literature, like taste in food, changes. The complex, sugary custards and meringues and soufflés that crowned a company dinner fifty or a hundred years ago are seldom seen today—like many of the writers most admired in the early twentieth century.
De la Mare’s work, once celebrated on both sides of the Atlantic, is now little known here. Almost none of his many books are still in print, and his brilliant anthology of “poems for children of all ages,” Come Hither, is only available in secondhand bookshops. Like old-fashioned desserts, much of his work now seems overelaborate, too full of air and sugar.
Though de la Mare was long considered a master of ghostly fantasy, his spooky tales may be too low-key for current tastes. In his time readers—at least middle-class readers—were somewhat sheltered from the violence of the world; it did not take much to create a pleasing shudder. Now many authors feel they must compete with the horrors served on television; as a result popular fantasy fiction is crowded with exploding bodies, drooling vampires, carnivorous reptiles, and repellently decaying corpses raised from the grave. To readers used to such coarse fare, de la Mare’s skillful, haunting tales and verses may seem “bloodless”—which they usually literally are.
In another sense, however, many of de la Mare’s stories are as strange and terrible as any told today—and often far better written. In contemporary thrillers evil usually assaults the central character from without; he may be terrified, injured, or even killed, but he is usually sympathetic. But in some of de la Mare’s most successful tales ordinary-looking heroes, very like his readers, turn out to have dark histories and violent impulses. Often, simply being alone or idle is enough to call them up. As the heroine of “The Wharf” says, “If you remain empty, ideas come creeping in. . . . It is always dangerous—leaving doors ajar.”20
Occasionally, evil in de la Mare is external; but if so, it tends to be embodied not in obvious villains, but in people and places that at first sight seem familiar or even reassuring: a spinster aunt who sends generous food parcels to her nephew at boarding school; a picturesque old cathedral in the depths of the country. Only gradually do we realize that Seaton’s aunt, in the story of that name, has psychologically devoured her nephew, or that the country cathedral has been taken over by demons.
De la Mare’s collections of fairy tales for children, Broomsticks and The Lord Fish, are well worth rereading. Nothing is harder than to invent a convincing modern fairy story, but in a couple of cases de la Mare manages it, notably in “The Lovely Mywfawny,” which features a father who, like de la Mare himself at one point, cannot bear the idea that his daughter will marry and leave home. The story was written the summer that Florence de la Mare announced her engagement to a family friend—upon which her father “blurted out ‘I am sorry to hear it.’”21 Yet his sense of humor and proportion reasserted itself, and in the tale the foolishly jealous father is turned into an ass.
It is harder to make a case for de la Mare’s verse. In his own lifetime he was even more famous as a poet than as a storyteller, but today much of his work seems dated. His contemporary Middleton Murry called it a “flourish of clichés,”22 and it is weakened further by de la Mare’s conviction that only certain subjects, certain emotions, and a certain diction are truly “poetic.” From the beginning he thought that his “other reality” should be described in a language different from that of everyday life: it demanded fine writing and a special vocabulary.
De la Mare’s verses are full of inversions, of wor
ds already archaic at the time (’tis, aught, eve, amidst), and of capitalized nouns (Fate and Evening). He prefers the standard late Romantic subjects: nature, the fleetingness of beauty, children, minor supernatural figures, and lost love. The subject for which he became most famous was the mysteriousness of empty landscapes and deserted or half-deserted buildings. And in spite of their old-fashioned diction, some of his verses on these subjects still convey a subtle thrill.
Though I loved many of de la Mare’s poems as a child, I found others disturbing. I was especially troubled by the fish in the frying pan that “put up his mouth / And moaned ‘Alas!’”23 and by Poor Jim Jay who “Got stuck fast / In Yesterday”24 and then slowly vanished. It did not occur to me, of course, that de la Mare might have been foreseeing his own fate. But by the time “Poor Jim Jay” appeared there were already signs that the kind of verse he wrote was being replaced by the work of writers like T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound. His children’s poems were still anthologized, but critics began to see him as stuck in Yesterday; and after his death he gradually began to vanish from literary history.
Probably many writers, if given the choice, would prefer to be successful and honored in their own lifetimes rather than after death. De la Mare, in spite of his air of dreamy estrangement from the contemporary world, now seems very much a figure of his time, and I was not surprised to learn that he disliked most mid-twentieth-century writing and voted Tory.
The last years of his life followed the standard pattern of literary success. He continued to write and publish, and to gather awards and honors—though he twice refused the knighthood that he had already covertly awarded himself by creating the benevolent and learned Sir Walter of Memoirs of a Midget. He had lengthening periods of poor health; but for him this had advantages. Being taken care of by others, he once said, brought him “a curious inward happiness,”25 and he liked the dreams that morphine gave him. He was horrified by news of the atomic bomb and concentration camps, but continued to enjoy the things that had always made him happiest: reading, nature, his children, and the companionship of other writers.
De la Mare died at eighty-three, surrounded by friends and family, and devotedly cared for by a young nurse. And though his reputation did not long survive him, he escaped the pathetic fate he had ironically predicted for himself in one of his best stories, “Willows.” Here, a once-promising poet turns out not to have died young and romantically, but to have survived as “a tubby little man” with “bright blue eyes of an extraordinary intensity”26 whose world has become obscure and incomprehensible. (De la Mare was also rather small, with bright blue eyes, and by the time the story appeared in 1929, he had become rather stout.)
But his waning popularity and unsensational life also saved de la Mare from what, in the same story, a character calls “the danger worse than death” of predatory biographers and critics, “these so-called ‘lovers’ of poetry—these parasites—their jealousies, their quarrels, the pretences, their petty curiosity, their suffocating silliness.”27 Instead he had to wait nearly forty years for a serious biography; but in Theresa Whistler he found one without any of these failings. Her perceptive and thoughtful book was worth the wait.
JOHN MASEFIELD’S
BOXES OF DELIGHT
I must down to the seas again,” declares the first stanza of “Sea Fever,” John Masefield’s best-known poem:
To the lonely sea and the sky,
And all I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by.1
But Masefield did not go down to the seas again. In fact, this “poet of the sea” suffered from seasickness, and at the age of seventeen he left the merchant marine, which had inspired his most famous work, and spent the rest of his life well inland. As soon as he could afford it, he moved with his wife and children to an increasingly grand series of English country houses where, for the rest of his life, he enjoyed the quiet existence of a rural squire.
The private Masefield was the opposite of the Masefield projected in his books: the tough, hearty, gregarious old sea dog, full of yarns and tales of adventure in foreign lands or on the ocean among rough men in bad weather (or among bad men in rough weather). In reality he was gentle, courtly, self-effacing, literary, and fond of children and nature.2 His best writing, according to many critics, was in his books for children: the adventure stories Martin Hyde and Jim Davis, and the brilliant fantasies, The Midnight Folk and The Box of Delights.
Modern writers, even poets—who might have been sympathetic, since some of them have equally incongruous public and private lives—have been dismissive of Masefield, or have sought him out mainly because of his connection to other writers. The gifted poet and critic Daniel Hoffman, for instance, visited Masefield in 1961 in order to ask him about Yeats, whom he had known as a young man. Though he appreciated some aspects of Masefield’s poetry, its “moments of fierce archaic emotion” and “clear and supple verse,”3 the visit was disappointing. When Hoffman arrived in a steady drizzle at what he describes as “a large, ungainly mock-Tudor structure in brown stucco with a dark roof,”4 Masefield’s daughter, Judith, mistook him for the television repairman. His interview took place in a “vestibule” lit by one bare hanging lightbulb; afterward he was served tea and a “sticky sweet cake.”5
Perhaps as a result of this unhappy experience, Hoffman afterward characterized Masefield’s daughter as “a squarely built middle-aged woman in . . . groundgripper shoes”6 and Masefield himself as “an anachronism who embodied very parochial British values” and whose “ambitious narratives are hobbled by conventionality.”7
It is true that Masefield’s poems today may seem dated; encumbered by a conventional adherence to meter and rhyme, and by his determination to tell stories in verse. A case can probably still be made for works like Reynard the Fox, and Muriel Spark, in her brilliant early study of Masefield’s work, has done her best to make it8—but not all readers have been convinced. In many ways it is appropriate that Masefield should end up most famous as a writer for children. For one thing, he had the history that seems to be characteristic for authors of juvenile classics. In a sense some part of him did not leave childhood slowly and naturally, but was abruptly forced underground, where it was preserved unchanged. As a result, in his writing he was always able to think and feel as a child.
Masefield’s daughter, Judith, in a brief memoir, describes her father as a wonderful playmate—essentially, another child. Once, when she was housebound with a sprained ankle, he bought her a toy butcher’s shop; and she reports that “we played tirelessly until my foot was well, taking it in turn to be butcher and customers.”9 Judith also notes that in old age, “When asked to name two great books of modern times, he said without hesitation, The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame and The Tailor of Gloucester by Beatrix Potter.”10
Although he wrote a short literary autobiography, So Long to Learn, in 1952, Masefield was always secretive and vague about his early years, except with a few close friends. He did not want his biography to be written or his letters published—indeed, according to rumor, he put a curse on anyone who might attempt this. It was not until 1978, more than eleven years after his death, that the first biography, by Constance Babington-Smith, appeared. (Apparently the curse was ineffective, for Babington-Smith went on to publish several more books.)
It now seems ironic that Masefield should have tried to suppress the most interesting aspects of his life. The truth, when it finally emerged, was far more remarkable and also more impressive than the conventional picture of an easy and confident rise to respectability and literary eminence. Indeed, when a reader knows what obstacles Masefield had to overcome, and how hard he worked for his success, it is hard not to feel amazement and admiration.
According to Masefield, until he was six he was “living in Paradise.”11 Paradise was located in Ledbury, Herefordshire, where Masefield was born in June 1878, the third of five children of a local solicitor. But in January 1885 his mother died after giving birth to her sixth child.
Earlier writers reported that his father also died soon afterward. In fact, Mr. Masefield senior survived for more than six years, during which he became increasingly disturbed mentally; he ended his life in a local hospital. Meanwhile, care of Masefield and his brothers and sisters passed to a dim, silent uncle, an unsympathetic aunt, and a critical and suspicious governess whom all the children detested.
Masefield was a solitary, sensitive, dreamy boy, who loved wandering in the countryside and telling himself long stories. Before his mother’s death his relationship to nature had been idyllic and Wordsworthian.
All that I looked upon was beautiful, and known by me to be beautiful, but also known by me to be, as it were, only the shadow of something much more beautiful.12
Now everything began to go wrong: he lost “the ecstatic bliss of my earliest childhood.” “Certain . . . sorrows then crushed my power to enter it: and for a long time I mourned, thinking that I had been damned, as some of my elders had said I should be. The effect upon myself could not be distinguished from damnation.”13 Masefield’s aunt believed that books and the arts were a waste of time, “and worse still they opened the door to an immoral life.”14 When Masefield said that he would like to study art or literature, she was scornful. “It was agreed that I had no talent” and “was always far too much given to idle reading.”15 Instead, he was literally shipped off, at thirteen, to a merchant marine training ship in Liverpool, the Conway.
