![]() Rosinante seemed to have carried me out of a March morning, blue and tumultuous and bleak, into the grey, sweet mist of a midsummer dawn. When at last I lifted my eyes with a great sigh that was almost a sob, I found myself in a place utterly unknown to me…. ![]() As his horse trots along, Henry falls into a reverie: One day he saddles his uncle’s old mare, Rosinante (despite the name, it isn’t Don Quixote’s mount-or is it?), and sets off in search of the storybook realms he has hitherto only read about. Growing up an orphan, young Henry escapes into books. His first published book, Songs of Childhood (1902), proved only a succès d’estime but was followed in 1904 by his first novel, Henry Brocken: His Travels and Adventures in the Rich, Strange, Scarce-Imaginable Regions of Romance. Much admired and frequently anthologized, it is composed in plain, efficient prose avoiding the occasional vagueness and lavish descriptions of his later adult fiction. One early story, “The Almond Tree,” relates the breakdown of a marriage through the eyes of an uncomprehending little boy. In 1899 the young clerk married Elfrida Ingpen, ten years his senior, with whom he had four much-loved children.Īt that time he was also beginning to write in earnest. He hated the job who would not? In his spare time he read voraciously in English literature, and his later thematic anthologies of poetry and prose-focusing on verse for children ( Come Hither), romantic adventure ( Desert Islands), reverie and the imagination ( Behold, This Dreamer!), love’s mysteries ( Love), and childhood memories ( Early One Morning in the Spring) -testify to the range of that reading. As he once wrote, “This workaday actuality of ours-with its bricks, its streets, its woods, its hills, its waters-may have queer and, possibly, terrifying holes in it.” Read him at length and you’re likely to agree with the critic Diana Waggoner, writing in The Hills of Faraway (1978), that de la Mare was “the most beautifully melancholy fantasist of the twentieth century.”īorn into a lower-middle-class family in London in 1873, Walter de la Mare left school at sixteen and spent the next eighteen years working as an accounting clerk for the Anglo-American Oil Company. Which, of course, each of them eventually does.ĭe la Mare’s many stories for grown-ups proffer even more complex visions of the familiar transfigured by strangeness. In “The Riddle” seven orphans are taken in by their grandmother, who allows them the run of her great house, with one Bluebeard-like caveat: they mustn’t open a certain trunk. As Dylan Thomas once commented, de la Mare’s fairies can be “as endearing as Dracula.” In “Alice’s Godmother,” an ancient crone is so small that “when she was seated in her chair it was as if a large doll sat there-but a marvellous doll that had voice, thought, senses and motion beyond any human artificer’s wildest fancy.” This dry, wizened creature, with eyes “of a much fainter blue than the palest forget-me-not,” suddenly asks the story’s teenaged protagonist, “How long do you wish to live?” In essence, she offers Alice near immortality, but at what cost? In “Broomsticks” Miss Chauncey discovers that her black cat, Sam, during nights of full moon, signals messages to swooping, airborne witches. ![]() While most of these, such as my favorite, “The Lord Fish,” are utterly enchanting, several are distinctly unnerving. Only the previous year de la Mare had been awarded the Carnegie Medal for his Collected Stories for Children. Eliot, and an appreciation by Graham Greene, who argued that de la Mare’s prose was “unequalled in its richness since the death of James, or dare one, at this date, say Robert Louis Stevenson.” As late as 1948 a tribute volume marking his seventy-fifth birthday featured a Max Beerbohm caricature, a verse greeting from T.S. In the 1920s and 1930s Walter de la Mare was considered one of Britain’s major literary figures, a triple threat as poet, storyteller, and anthologist. “Do diddle di do,/Poor Jim Jay”-there, summed up in a nonsense rhyme, is the fate of most authors, no matter how revered or honored in their time. When last glimpsed, he had become a mere speck and soon would be “past crying for.” ![]() Among much else, it includes the story of Jim Jay, who “got stuck fast/In yesterday.” No matter how hard his friends pulled, Jim slowly slipped away from the present. If the name Walter de la Mare elicits any recognition at all, it’s probably because your tenth-grade English class used an ancient textbook that reprinted “The Listeners,” an eerie, tantalizing poem that begins, “‘Is there anybody there?’ said the Traveller,/Knocking on the moonlit door.” You might even have been given-by an elderly relative, no doubt-a copy of de la Mare’s most famous book of children’s poems, Peacock Pie.
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