Walter de la Mare
The Stories of Walter de la Mare (Part 3), continued from HERE
When I read these stories, my thoughts will appear in the comment stream below…
(My previous reviews of older or classic fiction: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/reviews-of-older-books/)
AT FIRST SIGHT
“He detested rags, dirt, and neglect; even the brazen spectacle of ‘potatoes’ in stockings or of leaking welts failed to amuse him.”
“Two large bony hands had been holding his elbows,…”
A novella or novel, but really a long short story? I cannot do justice to it, so I won’t try. There is potential for keeping one’s eyes low, and as you get used to Cecil’s disability, you see everything, when reading it, from under his facial green shade, too painful to raise your eyes, every word sullen, till it slowly pans out into a love story ….and a story as a kindred work to WDLM’s THE RETURN (reviewed here)….
“For a minute or two he stood listening, then raised his face by a painful inch or so to peer in at what was confronting him in the wide mahogany looking-glass. […] ‘You mean,’ said Cecil, speaking out of the turned-up collar of his overcoat, ‘that as I can only see their lower halves, I cannot be any judge of their upper. You don’t seem to realize that a person’s character is scrawled all over him – over his boots even, rough-hew them as he will.’ The reply would have been almost sprightly if it had not sounded so bitter.”
A facial justice. Keeping a slightly perfumed grey glove (with a hole in one of its fingers) that Cecil finds amid the minutiae and litter he keeps his eyes bent on, a young man cowed by his Grummumma, and a woman cousin and a Canon with the bony hands.
And that grey glove he finds on the pavement with a hole in a finger is a link to a draper’s assistant, a woman beneath him as it were, if not visually, but certainly beneath him on the social ladder. And they both ebb and flow against the blind love — in a red jagged thunderstorm — for each other. A painful passionate, poetic, textured work that will play about my mind perhaps forever. Raise your eyes at least once to read it. But it is often difficult and insufferably frustrating.
“…as if this were the first face that as a mortal creature he had ever seen at all – a landscape, a garden, a marvel, before time, lovely, earthly, yet unbelievable, all-pitying, burnt up with pain, never to be forgotten, never to be exhausted, never to be understood.”
The ‘grey glove’ as another cross-reference with THE RETURN today! — https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2022/09/20/the-return-by-walter-de-la-mare/#comment-25536
Rampant Synchronicity: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2017/06/08/synchronicity-rampant/
“And a solid or a substance become a mite, and a mite then become a mighty revenge by a ghost of a man who survived cremation after his suicide,…’ from my review of CREWE above.
A MOTE
“His bald mauve head was propped upon his right hand, and his elbow was supported by his chequered knee. He seemed to be watching with minute attention a sun-beetle diligently labouring between the stubborn grass-blades. His attitude was conventional, but his gaze was extraordinary; for he was looking at the beetle with the whites of his eyes.”
This being a trigger for the ultimate linguistic hysteria of an inner madness, as the narrator’s ageing uncle and godfather (ex bank manager and still in love with his wife), rolls his eyes back into his head, and tells his nephew of a world within his head and the mite of a man who is himself within such a world. This is the astounding detail of a “dream expressed algebraically” as dissipated and kaleidoscoped by the wild battle with one’s self-identity when exploring this separate autonomous fantasy world within the head, the battle that was described differently, more calmly by THE RETURN (which I finished reviewing yesterday HERE). But why this question by the ex-banker within ‘A Mote’: “Oh! where the white men with kindly white faces? Are there no white men? None?”
Gratuitous madness for those of us who think they woke today from nightmares inner and outer?
“And ever goes that one mite of a man, stalking unheeding and alone under sun and moon. […] The man who courted your aunt, begot hale and whole children, who sits in his pew and is respected. That beneath my skull should lurk such monstrous things! […] This brood of creatures, of which I am the god and maker, are multiplying like worms in offal; cities teem with ugly and deformed, with lame and vile.”
***
This is the first time I have read ‘A MOTE’ and so I am inspired by its hindsight synergy with one of my own earlier published works, an excerpt from which I have just posted here: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2022/10/02/37699/
THE PICNIC
“….there had presented itself in the skies opposite to her the most astonishing sunset she had ever seen. It appeared as if the clouds must have been waiting in the wings all day for this last huge transformation scene. They were journeying, rank on rank, each to its appointed place, not only drenching heaven and earth with an enormous pomp of colour, but widening, shallowing, patterning the whole western horizon and even the zenith arched over her simple head. It was an amazingly joyful spectacle. One could hardly believe that again and again and again throughout the centuries of the earth’s solitary and peopled existence just such vast preparations as these must often have been made before…”
There are glimpses of various lengths and regularity in this wondrous story, a story about a woman’s obsession. A story that should be one of the best 100 stories of all time in ‘That Glimpse of Truth’ I have been reviewing for months now (HERE). It embodies the non-supernatural sides of Elizabeth Bowen and Elizabeth Taylor as one, and even exceeds them!
This woman is now in charge of a shop. An efficient life. And she nears spinsterhood, and today she glimpses a blind man outside the shop where she works. And she thinks of memories of holidays at the seaside when she was younger, a seaside that you know for what it is, utterly believable in that era when it is set, and the solitary picnics she had on the sand-dunes, and the glimpse of a man sitting on a balcony — a resident or tourist or, somehow, neither? — a glimpse that turns into a recurrent period of hope and passion, while reading a trivial, badly-written novel of romance back in the seaside hotel, as she puts herself within his sight with such slavery of obsession that cannot have been more overpowering. Then that lingering glimpse of a seaside sunset, that is nearly as temporary as glimpses go. And that brings us full circle, just after this very dying sunset, to the final glimpse, embedded within time’s own pervading of its own succeeding glimpses of itself, a glimpse of another blind man being led….
.
An Ideal Craftsman
“He struck a match soundlessly on the edge of his mattress.”
That, in some insidiously oblique way, triggers what now happens to the boy who struck the match. The eventual mock-up of a suicide by hanging from a rope the dead body next to a craftsman’s ‘master-touch’ of a kicked-over chair.
The story of a boy who remembers his beloved mother dying, and who now, while having been put to bed by his father and showy step-mother before they went out for ‘entertainment’, ventures from his bedroom with his swashbuckling belt and toy dagger, into the creepy darkness of the large house, eager to dodge the notice of Jacobs, some surly, ferrety servant who hums nauseatingly and often catches the boy and canes his legs for taking eatables from the larder when he should be in bed.
“This passage, if followed to the end, turned abruptly at right angles; and at the inner angle near the fusty entry to the cellars he paused to breathe and then to listen again. […] But before reaching it [the larder]. the boot cupboard, sour den of long-legged spiders and worse abominations, must be passed,…” — in which cupboard he later finds the rope. But suddenly hears panting…. “Even when, with sleeves turned up and sharp elbows bared, Jacobs was engrossed in any job, he never breathed like that.”
And he finds a fat woman in the kitchen who was panting. Who is she? And he helps her recover from a fit, as he might have done once, I guess, for his now dead mother, by burning something under her nose. “She walked in angles to a chair and sat there rocking her body to and fro and smiling at him – an odd contorted smile of blandishment and stupidity sicklied over with fear.”
With her “whites gone up”, I thought of ‘A MOTE’, above, and, so, was this her inner vision, expunging the sense of omniscience we had heretofore received from the boy?
SPOILER: And Jacobs is somehow in the cupboard, was he dead already, and had she been brought into the house to gratify him? He had said she wasn’t the first. Or had she murdered him, a crime of some unknown passion? And the boy (somehow, under whose influence? his own? the author’s? or the woman’s?) mocks things up by crafting a hanging? Although her offer of sixpence was declined, with later reference to the whistling of the gas, and the boy’s own florin… “And all the blind things of the house took wooden voices.”
Eventually the boy frightens her. And eventually he frightens himself. And certainly he frightens me, as this story’s reader, its latest victim, most of which readers have self-evidently never lasted long enough to tell others about it. Its own ‘soundless’ ‘gaslit’ ‘master-touch’ as struck from paper.
“Something had gone wrong – the house was changed; and he didn’t know how or why. He glanced up at the clock, which thereupon at once began to tick. […] The whisper in the dark outside of the uncertain wind, the soft bubbling whistle of the gas, the thousand and one minute dumb things around him in the familiar kitchen – nothing had changed. Yet now every object had become suddenly real, stark, menacing, and hostile. Panic…”
The Count’s Courtship
“You stupid, short-sighted men! He has seen me day after day. He has seen me go fingering on from chair to chair.”
This seems to be in the same world as ‘The Almond Tree’ featuring the Count and there is a fleeting mention of Mrs Rodd. It is about a gentlewoman called Lucy Lindsay, past the prime of her life, who is secretly going blind and seems to blend this sort of encroaching disability with my memories of the main younger character in ‘At First Sight’ and the older character in ‘A Mote.’ She is being courted by the ageing Count, and the narrator, her nephew, acts as their chaperon, and she confesses privately to the narrator about her disability and is determined to evade the Count’s attentions for his own sake. Lingeringly poignant and gratuitously strange that such blindness could have had metaphorical blind eyes turned to it.
“I was seized with dismay at the very sight of her.”
‘What Dreams May Come’
“….huddled and stooping forward on the backmost seat of all, elbows on knees, his face cupped in his hands, his eyes, it appeared, fixed on the floor.”
…as a part of the description, at the start of Emmeline’s benighted journey, of the conductor on the motor-coach that mysteriously stops for her, after she studied her own reflection in the window, striving to fix her own identity much as Lawford did in ‘The Return’ and, coincidentally earlier today, Jaffa Codling in Coppard’s story reviewed HERE where I already mentioned WDLM’s name! And I did have a strong sense of déjà vu as I read this work from the point of view of so-called Emmeline, as if I were trying to fix my own identity, and I believe I have not read it before…Also that sense of inward eye of ‘A Mote’ above: “…she kept her inward eyes fixed on the reflected image of the face, of her own face, as she had seen it in the coach window glass. […] She couldn’t be utterly helpless, utterly astray, with her own inward eyes for guidance.” And later….
“Her handbag clutched under her elbow, she descended from the coach. […] …completely detached from her surroundings as a character who has escaped from a story.”
An iron gate … “A dense avenue of evergreen trees…”
“‘“Emmeline”,’ she whispered to herself. ‘“Emmeline”, I must remember that!’”
“…that in order to see the picture fully she had to mount the stone that stood in front of this altar-like chimneypiece, with its fireless and yawning cavity.”
A face with eyes like stone caverns and, facially, “exquisite zigzag sutures,…”
A sort of modern password … “sesame”…
Patient reader of a story that is the reader’s nurse? Or one that has escaped? No accounting for each reader’s bespoke dreams…
THE LOOKING-GLASS
“‘Some’ll tell you only the old people have eyes to see the mystery;…”
This is possibly the most rarified of all stories. Alice Through the Looking Glass (“As if, indeed, thoughts could be like fragments of glass, reflecting light at their every edge and angle”), the Looking Glass of the Garden, as she is shuttlecocked, I infer, between two old women like two queens, one being the old servant next door (with a thing for ‘ribbings’ that matched Alice’s blue ribbon around letters from nobody as this story is the apotheosis of ‘aloneness’) and the other being the spinster woman to whom Alice is the supposed companion as she, Alice, reads Macaulay aloud, inter alia. A ‘catechism’ of a triangulation, where I begin to realise who is the ghost with the watch-gown needed to harvest the “Lagging Time brought at length” of Zeno ‘s Paradox that might have intrigued Dodgson? Indeed, I begin to realise who the Bowenesque ‘shadowy third’ is amid the three of them — “It was like hiding in a story.”
And somehow I feel I was in the story, too.
“And if the old man was to look down out of the blue up there this very minute, ay, and shake his fist at me…”
CAPE RACE
“Just now, however, chairs as empty as possible were all the company Lettie needed,…”
The beautifully adumbrated story of young Lettie’s still ongoing, impenetrable-monster-wallowing journey from England in a liner towards the Statue of Liberty with her sea-sick fiancé and his mother, with Lettie venturing very early onto deck before breakfast and glimpsing the eponymous section of coast in Newfoundland that is rarely seen because of shrouding fog… Cape Race as well as…
“‘That, miss? That’s Mistaken Point,’ he said.
‘Why was it mistaken?’
He shook his head, and smiled out of his sea-clear eyes at her. ‘That’s got me, miss,’ he replied.”
The future she beholds with a future floundering husband to match the rhythmic wallowing of the ship, and her future Mother in Law who would have had the ship diverted to land to help free a small trapped (English?) bird upon it. And this story is about that very bird and Lettie’s own way of rescuing it. Not forgetting this ship’s previous voyage when a woman was said to have jumped overboard towards a ‘ghost of a chance’.
And we hear of a different pea-soup fog Lettie remembers, “…beyond and beyond and beyond her.”
Selina’s Parable
Unsure exactly what this exquisitely phrased briefness means other than its obvious future interpretation I thought today, but Selina is ever ‘crunched up’ at the square window on the staircase, looking at the busy farmyard with its congregation of bird-life, and the farmer who goes to get their daily feed from up in the granary as part of his devious purposes of their future eggs or whatever carnivorous people wanted. Today, his granary seems empty. All of this seen in a strange human way by God who thus uses His flock, as watched by a “trussed-up soul” like Selena’s, a soul that we all now bear, just waiting for our next meal.
PHYSIC
“It was as if some fiendish hand were clutching her back hair and dragging the scalp from her forehead taut as the parchment of a drum over her eyes. It was as if she had swallowed unwittingly a dose of some filthy physic.”
This is poignant tranche of a woman’s marriage, with two children, one a new baby, and wayward husband, yet …”Never trouble trouble till trouble troubles you, was her motto when driven into a corner.”
An ‘animated automaton’ of a mother, and she has rituals with her son William, playing beggar-my-neighbour in the kitchen before he goes to bed, as he pretends to be her husband over supper and then the understudy for the local doctor, while she pretends to be his wife.
But she feels the need to call the real doctor as the baby seems feverish, while William has consulted himself as doctor using the thermometer on himself, also feverish as he sees his own face and then more frightening ones in the window with the blind only partly pulled down over the glass.
“Still, all vocabularies are minute for what they are sometimes needed to express – or to keep silent about.” And she is scared to call the scullery a ‘scullery’. And to read a farewell note from her husband saying he’s going off with another woman, a note that she returns to the cocked hat whence she found it as she hears his unexpected return. All part of the autonomous putting off of time’s trouble…or the ‘twenty demons’ that pursue her up and down the stairs.
The doctor comes with wise saws. And mottos about not worrying. ‘…it’s wiser never to wake anybody up, merely to give them physic – and certainly not mere doctor’s physic.’ She, I feel, puts off the day that she might need to love him instead of her husband, now that her son William has given up both roles…
“And why do faces come in the window, horrid faces? Is that blind right down to the very bottom?”
THE BIRD OF TRAVEL
“And now, Hamilton lies far away, unburied amid the Andes, and Paul drowned in the Straits of Magellan.”
… and with that repeated refrain from my grandmother, I knew I would never get to the bottom of the world that swooned in this story. It is too rarified to be called rarified at all. A story of a large house in the woods, a house actually called The Wood, and its Capulet-Montague dichotomy or opposition within my family and the yen to travel, but this house is out of bounds to my part of the family, I guess, as a result — and I travel back to childhood when I once glimpsed a pretty girl in the woods near the house and when I look back she’d gone or had ben simply a little ghost, and I recall an all important bird, a phoenix possibly or bird ghost, a thing that hung about the house, now talked about with a woman in those woods, and about a familial wanderlust or ‘wander-taint’ in the family, and, as a grown up, I visit these haunted realms again and meet the girl now grown up into this woman, I previously mentioned, with whom I had been talking … a woman or just a bigger ghost? Good job I have written about it straightaway, as it would have faded, otherwise. But was I soon enough to get it written down properly about what I remembered feeling when reading it?
“And now they thrid (sic) some finer air, have rarer senses, and their tap is heard on walls of the mind that are scarcely there, so tenuous they are.” My insertion of ‘sic’.
THE TALISMAN
“The nightingale having sung, falls silent. How different are the two silences – before the song and after!”
Rapt, as I am, by this rhapsodically numinous story of love at various ages, youthful as well as aged love, and in between, unrequited or not, using the eponymous catalyst as timepiece found in the “now dark and battered old rosewood bureau.” In the curiosity shop near the three bridges and double spires of Weissehäuser. A timeless everlasting Zeno moment : ‘For him who bears me I of Love and Death tell out Eternity: While Life tells only Moments.’ enscribed upon “a delicate oval and seemed to be of a very pale gold. Beneath its thick crystal glass, and above a markless face there moved a single slender hand, telling no hours, no minutes, no seconds even; only Time.”
A La Mare moment that needs no retelling, a tale of the narrator and his beloved Pauline, divided by few but crucial years when young, and old Gessen the shopkeeper in the curiosity shop, mentor to our narrator, even his old age has love to requite, alongside simply the themes and the moonbows, and a selfless abandoning of love, and the inbuilt conflict in, say, ‘The Return’, viz. here in ‘ The Talisman’: “Still, one must at least attempt to be just – even to a past self – for who knows what future self may not some day be upon us!”
THE BOWL
“ – an unusually hot morning for October – “
…as it has been this morning in my own real-time. A presaging of an Aickman sensibility of disarming strangeness or constructive impenetrability, as we follow the mind of a boy as narrator while his friend Mrs Orchardson’s new baby seems to be dying, and a rector Mr Cairns is called in, a man with the mien of WDLM’s ‘The Return’ competing duality-syndrome for the boy, a rector who is asked to give the baby last rites and he uses, at the boy’s suggestion Mrs O’s silver bowl with the splendid plainness of which the boy has been obsessed as a shape or spirituality — “And when he dipped his fingers into the bowl I saw the water-butterflies jig on the ceiling.”
But Mrs O’s parlourmaid senses ‘evil’ in the boy, although I instead sense ‘evil’ in her.
A work of healing by the power of distracted fiction. An arguable masterpiece about which little is known or little has been said for a reason. I hope I have not now blemished that perfect record.
Meanwhile, thankfully, I can now recall… “…abstractions like death are for a child little more than a vague and menacing something in a dream.”
cf this bowl with the earlier ‘slopbasin’ solipsism.
IN THE FOREST
“The baby was asleep too, but it scarcely seemed to be really breathing – it was like a moth fluttering on a pin;…”
This seems, fortuitously and quite by chance (!), to be the natural counterpart to the previous story THE BOWL above that I read and reviewed yesterday. About a dying baby, and here the boy narrator who is associated with this growing tragedy becomes a cowardly selfish catalyst instead of the healing boy in THE BOWL, as his father goes off to war, his mother left with the sick baby, layers of dead leaves, sounds of guns and cannons in the air… and no respite, just what gratuitously is.
“… it seemed I was sitting in front of the warm hearth in a dream that would never come to an end.”
THE THREE FRIENDS
“There’s nothing to come.”
Probably the most morbid tale in all respected literature, Mr Sully “like an over-glutted vulture” and Mr Eaves, two friends, who, amid ominous thunderheads, enter a bar to seek comfort from a sewing-woman called Miss Lacey, being a naïve woman with basic common-sense who unknowingly provides a sort of simple-minded confessional, overlooked from another part of the bar by a commissionaire.
Mr Eaves is a young man suffering a spiritual crisis as a result of a dream about Hell, aka death, as a stasis of not being able to die except as being sentenced to a nothingness of now. A death sentence seemingly commissioned by all these sentences as realised by each reader’s current self, I guess — plunged into what my own self sees as its own Eaves cupboard of Hell, while the thunderstorm continues to rumble outside. “‘Oh, fast; bless you,’ said Miss Lacey.”
“; over and over again, click, click, click, click, click;”
‘A Froward Child’
“…thump-thumpity-thump of the wheels, she could hear him breathing – a squat man, rather than merely a small, with a head too big for his long thick body and short legs, and a face that looked at the same time cold and shockingly pale.”
…a meeting-of-a-stranger-on-a-train story, and a suspenseful hunting of what she fears by the woman who is herself haunted by it, a story of inscrutable terror, and another long lost WDLM work? Whatever the case, it is a definite classic of disarming strangeness as well as textured prose that lingers, hunts and haunts. The story itself presents the words ‘haunting’ and ‘haunting’ in interface. Blackmail and interrogation, too.
We first see Lavinia, a youngish spinster, at the family home of her new beau called Charles, having travelled by train with enveloping evocations of Christmas (even an evil sense in the expression ‘white Christmas’), and there i arrives a squat old man who sits in the corner of the same carriage. “He too had once been a child, and, like herself, had come to this moment pace by pace.” A ghost pursuing a ghost?
For no evident reason, she is now obsessed by a ‘time-blackened’ oak beam in the bedroom she has been given (“And even though no terror she might be betrayed into would induce her to press the ivory bell-nipple in the wall behind her, she might begin to shiver again, or even to talk to herself”), as she remembers the journey to get there, the telling of which to Charles has caused some inducement in her mind never to forgive him for his unsympathetic attitude to this story of her journey. “But how was it that no story she had ever read had told her that these shapes of the mind, these fantasies, can come at one so rapidly; and, unless she was very, very careful, might come to stay?”
Some moments below from this story that I would like to crystallise here for others hunting them on-line and may well now find… the predatory nature of train passengers en masse seeking corner seats, notwithstanding! —
“What odd transmogrifications life is capable of, and one’s self with it. A touch, a scarcely perceptible jar, and the complete pattern changes.”
“….a dingy shapeless bag, clipped between his ankles. But could anything so motionless be real – alive? He looked like some glass-eyed dressed-up figure in wax, for show; although in that case his proprietors could hardly have chosen him a worse pitch. Indeed, in that shadowy obscurity he looked even more like an obscure shadow himself!”
“And presently with the aid of a faint gibbous moon above the clouds of the night, Lavinia discerned a landscape as still and miraculous as that of a dream – vague undulations, wooded hollows, smooth-scooped fallowland and meadow, utterly calm, numbing, swooning to its cold Christmas slumbers beneath the multitudinous bewildering whispered lully of the snow.”
“The rack over the old man’s head was empty now. The dank-looking shapeless roped-up carpetbag was gone.”
“An intolerable foreboding and something little short of terror had taken possession of Lavinia, a terror perhaps not wholly her own.”
“Life may admit of many pregnant pauses, though only of one conclusion.”
***
“And now she was calm again: though one, alas, may be calm but still horrified. So she continued to watch, her hot-water bottle no longer much of a companion between the sheets, just in case her fellow-passenger or his old friend should decide – well, to come out into the open. Her open, that is; for they had enjoyed, of course, their own also. And it was thus the maypole parlour-maid, a little shocked, found her in the morning – fast, fast asleep; but with the lamp, held rigidly on tip-toe by the small china Cupid on her bedside table, still burning on, in faint conflict with the reflected splendour of the Christmas snow.”
And, somehow, she now cannot marry Charles, and this seems in oblique connection with some lines from another author that she had earlier read at random on the train…
Those lines…
‘When all is done (they were trying to tell her), human life is, at the greatest and the best, but like a froward child, that must be played with and humoured a little to keep it quiet till it falls asleep, and then the care is over.’
I myself perhaps sit in the corner waiting for the maypole parlour-maid to leave and for Lavinia to wake, another old man, if not squat.
Lispet, Lispett and Vaine
“L.L. & V. merely graciously bestowed on their customers the excellence of their wares, of their ‘goods’ in the true old meaning of the term – a peculiar something in the style and finish which only the assurance of their history and their intentions – their ideals, if you like – made possible.”
“– in the blowy sunshine, like some grotesque Staffordshire figure on a garret chimney-piece – there, at the street corner, sat so ludicrous an old man that one might almost have described him as mediaeval.”
…another old man and his corner that, by chance, matches his counterpart in the previous story above, a story otherwise about a froward child. This old man chews on a strand of bast, and bast, aka phloem, the internet tells me, is ‘the part of a vascular bundle consisting of sieve tubes, companion cells, parenchyma, and fibers…’ Here, from this old man trigger as the Last Living of the eponymous firm of traders, L, L & V — Maunders himself is triggered, with his malacca cane (“…almost as difficult to keep abreast with Maunders as it was to follow his obscure meanderings”) to tell me another tale of a froward child, a man called Anthony who was part of this ancient firm (“Lispet, Lispett and Vaine; Mercers to Their Majesties … two inverted V’s with a kind of P between. There are others – a cone ‘supported by’ two doves;”), a loose cannon called Anthony (“…Anthony had bats in his belfry. Not the vampire variety; just extra-terrestrial bats. He was ‘queer’?”) who grows, according to Maunders, doo-lally, and he gradually corrupts the firm’s incomparable standards of merchandise, incomparable since truly ancient of all ancient times, as told in a rich, often confusing, cornucopia of Maunders’ words, yes, Anthony fills these standards with nymphs, angels and finally a ghost, with Anthony becoming as old as the old man with whom we started and who survived till now!
Here are mind-bogglingly wild semantics in tactile phonetics, samples below, and I felt Maunders was actually standing there with his malacca cane and garbled story-telling, filling me with this Anthony and the famous firm that Anthony did bring down, if Anthony alone did not do this, because, of course, we are in an era that was then already becoming the age of the “god of machinery” rather than of meticulous craftsmanship.
“Puma, pelican, Patagonian papalja, pretty Poll.”
“But what is history – mummified fact; desiccated life; the irretrievable.”
“A friend of mine (an earnest man) was once given a fact, and it exploded – in his bathroom.”
“But they could no more resist the insidious growth of the creature [Anthony] than Jack’s mother could have held down the sprouting beanstalk. He was clearly the fruit of breeding-in,… […] …this extra-Lispetted old day-dreamer, fell in love – with a non-entity. […] He tapped an earth-bound spring and set up fauns and dryads, amoretti and what not, spouting subterranean water. He built a shrine of alabaster – with an empty niche. […] In short, he grew madder and madder, and the custom, the good-will, even the reputation of the firm melted like butter in the sun. […] He trafficked in a kind of ludicrous dolls’ merchandize – utterly beautiful little infinitesimals in fabrics worth a hundred times their weight in rubies.”
***
And I ended by walking the Fruit Walk myself! … Perhaps a vascular bundle that is the self.
“The Fruit Walk was merely the cherries and quinces and crab-apples and damsons that had been planted in rosy, snowy, interlacing, discontinuous quincunx fashion;”
“And, of course, some gay imbecile set the story about that the whole lovely abandoned, derelict place was haunted. Twangling strings and vanishing faces,…”
Just another fact that exploded into dark fantasy.
This review now continues here: https://etepsed.wordpress.com/walter-de-la-mare/