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/)
www.nemonymous.com
Des Lewis - GESTALT REAL-TIME BOOK REVIEWS
A FEARLESS FAITH IN FICTION — THE PASSION OF THE READING MOMENT CRYSTALLISED — Empirical literary critiques from 2008 as based on purchased books.
MISS DUVEEN
‘“And the long, bony creature, all rub and double’ – she jogged briskly with her elbows,…”
This is wondrous! Meeting her across the brawling brook, my neighbour amid houses and land that only WDLM could conjure with their pervading angels or phantoms or Others, she with a stern lady companion, and me an orphaned boy living with my stern grandmother, having mostly secret trysts with Miss D and her memories of her dead sister and the man in a locket around her neck & what else was in her forehead wherein she said we first met. And she kissed my sticky fingers. Till we never met again, and my now feeling cold against her like the winter. (“The autumn will divide us; and then, winter; but, I think, no spring.”) You will find out how or why this was so that we never met again, if you read this story about me and her. Be sure I will never read it, because it may make me meet her again. I have even already forgotten what I wrote above, it all having now escaped my own forehead.
My review of Seaton’s Aunt from May 2021
=================================================
SEATON’S AUNT by Walter de la Mare
“…two slippers dozed, with noses each to each,…”
We come full circle from Hartley’s embedded feet now softened by being conserved like jam in death, their hard day’s night of travelling now complete. Life versus death in their own chess match declared a draw by the eponymous dusky faced aunt, having done something to her equally dusky nephew just prior to his equivalent death, as it were, by marriage, as she saw it. The attritional experiences of the narrator Withers from boyish schooldays into adulthood — having been reportedly the strange nephew’s only school friend — and he tells us one concluding day that this nephew “looked out at me for a mere instant of time” from the still living aunt’s eyes — as if, I infer, she had sin-eaten him, and thus effectively added, in my eyes, to Aickman’s own tropes of cannibalism in his own work.
A death wish by the nephew who, I noticed, bought rat poison from his local chemist right at the start of the very first of the three visits that Withers makes to the Seaton House. Some incredible material here that must have influenced Aickman. And you need otherwise to map out its plot and dense emotions and attritionally heartfelt, arguably political but essentially mad speeches by the Aunt for yourself without my help, as I feel helpless to do so. I am staggered yet again by yet another rereading of this work. Its many God’s eyes upon me, and its monstrously overlarge meals readying me, very soon now, for my own Hospice of Palliation. Seaton’s Aunt or Seaton’s Haunt — the de la Mare character who ‘fills’ the “collective consciousness” of all us ghosts who recurrently or sporadically populate this story as readers — played the piano and its Beethoven music seemed to me like an exhumation of the organ’s ‘rolling music’ from the previous Gaskell story….
“All you read in ghost stories, that’s all rot,” the aunt explicitly stated in supreme irony at one point…
“That’s what it is — a cannibal feast. She’s a spider.”
The full context of the above here: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2021/05/20/the-1st-fontana-book-of-great-ghost-stories-edited-by-robert-aickman/
=================================================
“He bought, for instance, a silver bangle, which he wore above his left elbow, until some of the fellows showed their masterly contempt of the practice by dropping it nearly red-hot down his neck.”
“ And there was Seaton’s face in the candlelight – and his eyes looking into mine.
‘What’s up?’ I said, lurching on to my elbow.”
Pingback: Separate horror stories from many years ago… | The Gestalt Real-Time Reviews of Books Edit
OUT OF THE DEEP
“That high cupboard in the corner from which certain bodiless shapes had been wont to issue and stoop at him cowering out of his dreams; the crab-patterned paper that came alive as you stared; the window cold with menacing stars;”
I have not previously read all of WDLM’s stories, and this is one that is new to me. And, wow! Simply that.
In one hand, this author vividly summons memories of my dreams as a small boy (dreams that felt like realities or were indeed actual realities around me) when living in a large house with many bedrooms and a long landing. But no servants!
In the other hand, this story bell-pushed my love for the type of strange stories that follow in his wake or alongside him, such as those of Aickman, Elizabeth Bowen and L.P. Hartley.
Here the boy returns as a young man to the ‘white elephant’ that was his boyhood house, with precarious memories under the microscope of his late uncle, also his late aunt, and the late ‘butler’ called Soames who “had been wont to pile up his plate with lumps of fat that even Destiny had never intended should consort with any single leg of mutton or even sirloin of beef – jelly-like, rapidly cooling nuggets of fat. And Soames invariably brought him cold rice pudding when there was hot ginger roll.”
He is seemingly still the same mischievously spiteful boy he ever was, and he enjoys obliquely frustrating fate by summoning ghosts at their peril, and eventually at his own peril. He no longer sleeps, as he did as a boy, in the attic, but he chooses a bigger room, with painted nymphs on the ceiling and an array of bell-pulls that evokes campanology in his mind. Suffering from insomnia, he tempts fate by impetuously, petulantly tugging the crimson tassel of a bell-pull and receives ‘bell-answerers’, i.e. the service of a valet he desires as a sort of boyish vision and later a girl with pigtails as her own bell-pulls. He taunts them with capricious requests, like the one for primroses. (“‘Look here,’ said Jimmie, dexterously raising himself to his elbow on the immense lace-fringed pillow, ‘it’s all very well; you have managed things quite admirably, considering your age and the season, and so on. But I didn’t ask for primroses, I asked for violets. That’s a very old trick – very old trick.’”) But later what he summons is a blurred whitish animal, not the white elephant he thought of before, but a pig-like creature in word-resonance with the pig-tails. With at least a hint of social satire filtered by this ‘whiteness’ theme: “And snapping out insults at former old cronies who couldn’t help their faces being as tiresome as a whitewashed pigsty had soon grown wearisome.”
And eventually I was left engulfed by a frighteningly deep sea of selfishness and ironically a tantrum of a smashed ‘slopbasin’ as that very solipsism!
“Yes, if he could be perfectly sure that some monstrous porcine caco-demon akin to the shapes of childish nightmare would come hoofing up out of the deeps at his behest – well, he would chance it. He would have it out with the brute.”
And so from the solipsism above as a sea of solitude in the previously read story, a solitude disrupted by visitors, here it is no coincidence we have a story I picked on next — one that takes place near Porlock…
“Solitude, too, is like deepening water to a swimmer: that also lures you on. […] …a peculiar sense of unreality and isolation. My universe seemed to have become a mere picture – and I out of place in it. It was as if I had been mislaid and forgotten. ‘I hung by now, I suppose, about two or three hundred feet above the sea; and maybe a hundred or so beneath the summit of the wall which brushed my left elbow.’”
MR KEMPE
Here a penny-slot automatic machine in a pub, where three men sup, triggers a story from one of them, a schoolmaster, and this machine acts later as a parallel thought (“‘But then, open your newspaper any fine morning of your life, and which is the more likely to greet you on the news-page: the innocent young lady in the pink gauze petticoats over there, or that old figure of fun in the monk’s cowl?’”) to the thought at the crisis point of this story, a story involving the schoolmaster in precarious climbs in Algernon Blackwood-like terror, to reach the man Mr Kempe he accidentally visits, a man who is himself visiting this world with an ‘idée fixe’, i.e. a warrior-kempe’s search for the human soul, he being, in turn, effectively our world’s or gestalt gaia Nature’s own visitor from Porlock! — “‘I declare I am a visitor here. I declare that this’ – he swept his hand down his meagre carcase, – ‘this is my mere tenancy. All that I seek is the simplest proof.’”
Nature as passive enemy?
“It’s a foolish thing perhaps to imagine oneself picked out clean against the sky on a precipitous slope – […] …even the massive bulk of rock itself might be honeycombed to its foundations. What once had been a path was now the negation of one. And the third prodigious bluff towards which I presently found myself slowly, almost mechanically, advancing, projected into space at a knife-like angle; cut sharp in gigantic silhouette against the skies. […] One becomes conscious, too, of the sort of empty settled stare which fixes an intruder into such solitudes. It is at the same time vacant, enormous and hostile.”
And we sense books in a the obsessive’s house, a house more window than wall, books hugger-mugger as truly tactile reading-matter. Near unto a hermit chapel, and he seems to have kept others away by his own lethal means or by nature’s crags — evidence, I infer, of headstones and photos of the dead visitors from Porlock who had come to disrupt his solitude and obsessive quest. Even his dead wife has become her own faded photo.
And whether the schoolmaster — narrator of his own story to those in the pub including the narrator of his narration as part of such a narration — escapes this his own story, do we believe him, when we hear he escaped by a window in its wall? The window of the soul?
(And what of the rusty hobnailed Brobdingnagian boots and their footprints!)
“He was arguing with himself, not with me. I nodded. ‘But what was your impression – was he sure – Mr Kempe? Either way?’”
And from the above disrupting ‘Visitor from Porlock’ into a recluse’s hermitage, now we have a new version of, for me, a personally empathisable old man, St Dusman, who becomes a pilgrim, via various animal and human roles, arguably, gradually and retrocausally (“…marked at intervals with a XII, a III, a VI and a IX. And though he had no clear notion of what exact quantity of time consisted his day,…”) becoming, via an infinitesimal gift, the young man himself, aka Blumen and Cuspidor, this young man being the one whom, at outset, he thus visits, like a Visitor from Porlock, at the house at no. 13, where the young man is with his cherished possessions or collectibles selfishly garnered almost like a Gollum-with-many-treasures, possessions later to be sloughed off when he becomes, inter alia, a mere shoe-cleaner (please factor in the Brobdingnagian boots above) during a confused pilgrim’s compartmentalised and fantastically evocative but rambling dream visions as entitled chapters in this novella, to fully understand which work its readers, I feel, have to depend on each of their own bespoke osmoses…
THE CONNOISSEUR
PARK STREET
“St Dusman came shuffling along between the houses to keep a rather belated tryst.”
“Now I’ll be bound, Mr Blumen, when you were a small boy, you must have dreamed now and then? So far at least you were conscious of circles within circles – and without – so to say?’ There was remarkably little of the childish in the keen, ashen face confronting him. The dark, large-pupilled eyes had wandered almost stealthily from point to point of the objects around them, every one of which seemed now to be flashing secret signals one to the other in this motionless creek of air.”
“‘They are works of art,’ agreed Mr Blumen. ‘They represent years of human skill, human delight, and human devotion and desire. What have you against them? For that matter what has he against them who has so punctually provided me with your company this evening?’”
From a pet canary in cage to more exotic birds, one like an angel, as well the vans of vultures…
***
SASURAT
…and a mountain leopard and the old man, and the ‘treasures’ precariously recreated here …
“While scattered about the rounded entrance to the arbour lay bright pebbles, bright ‘everlasting’ flowers, scraps of quartz, and what appeared to be flakes of a shining metal. The old man sighed, though he did not stop smiling, as he feasted himself on these simple artifices and awaited the appearance of the hidden designer.”
The crouching leopard’s attack upon the angel bird, then…
“‘Poor soul, poor soul,’ the old man whispered. Then hastening down to the stream, he dipped the hem of his outer garment into the water and returning, squeezed out a few drops into its yawning bill.”
***
KOOTOORA
“…this Plain of Kootoora, would have discerned no sign of life. Minute slender steel-coloured midges, it is true, their burnished wings like infinitesimal flakes of mica beating the arid air, their horn-shaped snouts curved beneath their many-prismed eyes, drifted in multitudinous clusters in every hollow. They might be animate ashes.
vulture vans.”
Lava dunes, midges and the crater of Ajubajao…
“Abject and futile creature though he appeared to be, he came undeviatingly on.”
“In a deep angular hollow of the nearest of these lava dunes, lay basking a serpent, flat of head and dull of eye,…”
“The hours of Kootoora’s morning glided on, revealing little change except an ever increasing torridity, until the thin air fairly danced in ecstasy – like an exquisitely tenuous gas boiling in a pot – above every heat-laved arch and hollow.”
“A minute whirlpool of air came dancing like a host of dervishes into the sheserpent’s hollow. Lifting the dried scaly fragments of her discarded skin, it dispersed them here, there, everywhere, in its minute headlong rout …”
***
THE SEVEN VALLEYS
“The Rest House at the mouth of the Seventh Valley was made of a supple withy woven together layer above layer, with a shell-shaped thatch roofing it in.”
“And so on and on, as it would seem, valley by valley, to the very gates themselves.”
“Saints only of the First Hierarchy, he had been told, had occasion to traverse in turn each of the Seven Valleys.”
“Having come to where the shoe-cleaner stood awaiting him with downcast eyes beside his bench, the pilgrim would rest first one foot, then another, on the wooden block prepared for the purpose. And the young man, having unlatched them, would remove shoes or sandals, scrape off into the hollow beneath whatever foreign matter, dust or mud, still adhered to their under-surface, set them out of the sun, and have them ready when their owner next appeared, bent on his outward journey.”
“…infinitesimals of an endless variety, objects far past their present owner’s sagacity to give a name to, or even to recognize, lay scattered and buried in this heap.”
“…there had risen in dream into his imagination a phantasmal face of a beauty beyond any that he remembered to have seen in actuality. And yet how strangely familiar it seemed. It had outlasted the dream that gave it birth,…”
And the moulding desperately from clay to recreate the possessions or treasures, with this up-bent trigger…
“The young shoe-cleaner thrust out his hand over an up-bent elbow, poising his earthen lump in his right palm. And by some secret device of the light that gently flooded the green meadow which stretched in tranquil amplitude around them, there appeared in his crude model a trace of something a little closer to his hope…”
“The old man’s eyes were of the dimmest blue – far paler than any flower dropped from Dis’s wagon,… […] …slender stem of ivory expanding into a narrow spoon-like groove. ‘He must have noticed my miserable “lumps of mud,”’ he explained.”
***
PRINCE AHMAT NAIGUL
Dense forest lands…
“The horsemen – the scarlet of their head-dresses and their cloaks scarcely discernible in this dense dusk – rode so far in advance of the cavalcade…”
And now the crucial leper stage of the pilgrimage, with bell to warn others away as a catalyst for swords and sorcerous fantasy…
“It was the Prince Ahmat Naigul, returning with his bride after the feasting and festivities of their marriage-rites. Coach after coach,…”
“Nevertheless, the first clear glimpse of this whited wayside figure seemed to turn Ahmat Naigul’s body to stone. […] …drew a ring from his finger and advancing a pace nearer dropped it into the leper’s bowl.”
“But no dreadful horror of mortal malady now showed itself. Even the holes, where nostrils as sweet with health as his should be, were now dark casements commanding a secret country; and the narrowed eyes above them were as windows lit with such sunlight as springs reflected from untrodden snows.”
“…an object so minute that the Prince had to press it firmly into the skin with his third finger lest he should lose it. […] …the frettings and mouldings on its infinitesimal surface resembled the features and hollows and fairnesses of a human face. And that, her own …”
***
EN ROUTE
“The mud houses at the western end of the vast city, crammed hugger-mugger together within its enormous sun-baked walls, showed no sign of life,…”
Hugger-mugger like the books and reading-matter in the previous pilgrimage above…
The watchman and the pilgrim…
“…Into its palm the pilgrim pressed an object that appeared to have been carved out of ivory, but which in magnitude was whole worlds smaller than a pea.”
“Bugghul Dur,… […] …infinitesimal gift, he gave thanks to his lucky stars that he had not broken…”
***
Thus my personal pilgrimage within the osmosis of just one confused reading-mind still whispering on, just.
“…hidden chambers in the shoe-cleaner’s mind the ghosts of memories, rather than memories themselves.”
That infinitesimal gift being death itself?
Bughuul (sic) is an obscure Pagan deity that feeds on children, according to some modern parlance after seeing Wagner’s Ring….
In view of today’s still ongoing events, I confirm I read and wrote the above review before hearing the news items, and I thought I would now quote the novella’s final paragraph for whatever it is meant to mean:
“For though his faded sight was utterly unable to discern what similitude it bore, or his wits to skip from its fretted surface to the Queen Mother who now had no one but her son for inmost company, he realized that here was a jewel of great price. And he vowed within himself, too, that when the moment came for its presentation, he would do his utmost to secure that Bugghul Dur, his fellow watchman, should then be on duty.”
A connoisseur (French traditional, pre-1835, spelling of connaisseur, from Middle-French connoistre, then connaître meaning ‘to be acquainted with’ or ‘to know somebody/something’) …
This is somehow coincidental as the next story’s photo frame is said to be coincidental, inasmuch as, by chance, I read and reviewed (HERE) ‘The Swimmer’ by John Cheever this very morning before reading ‘Disillusioned’ … Please read my review of the Cheever followed by this WDLM story, if you want to know why!
DISILLUSIONED
“Even the faint fume of drugs on the air and the persistent tapping of water in a shallow basin behind the dark-blue screen only intensified the quiet.”
This is a conte à clef involving a man seeking help from a doctor for his disillusionment and a solipsism that I mentioned earlier above in connection with a ‘slopbasin’, a work bordering on Ligottian Anti-Natalism, and what revenge Grandmother Nature is having on mankind by a vivid prophecy of Global Warming and its human repercussions. And about the relationship between patient and doctor. Even a sort of telepathy at the end, as a hint of the cosmic gestalt, but with a broken barometer that is ever set fair…
The patient as narrator is a writer of fiction for magazines and we hear his descriptions of three stories he has had published that demonstrates his severe malady of mind. The final one being almost a frame for this one, of patient and doctor together with the relationship between them with a plum tree outside the doctor’s window as objective-correlative. And with much food for thought on philosophical and scientific matters. Even plagiarism involving a Chekhov story.
“‘The fact is I can’t regain my grip on things. It is as though whatever I do or think or say – or feel for that matter – serves no purpose, is no manner of use – to myself, I mean. And yet, my friends talk to me much as usual. Nobody seems to have noticed anything wrong.’ […] ‘I am, as I say, a writer, an author by profession. I scribble a good deal for the magazines, fiction chiefly.’ […] …fiction is read almost solely by women – a sort of stimulant, or sedative perhaps. […] Tennyson, you know, used to say under his breath “Alfred, Alfred, Alfred” until he became like a shell with the wind in it – empty. But I say instead, “In failing health – in failing health – in failing health” – the meaning intensifies, doctor, the longer you brood on it.’ […] ‘But then, you see, there is all the difference between not seeing a purpose in life because you haven’t looked for one; and being sure there is no purpose when you have.’ […] ‘Not that I am by profession a solipsist!’”
The three stories are wonderful frames for real stories that we might want to write ourselves, with many evocative expressions, and they can be projected onward, especially if you are also a writerly spirit with a malady like his!
“The people in the street – creatures from another planet: Traherne, of course: all colours and beautiful forms intensified. They walk as if they had wings – head, shoulder, thigh, like the angels in Isaiah:”
And a cathedral…
“…Palestrina, the Bach and the Beethoven and the Purcell and so on, that had floated up and into silence and rest into the fretted roof century after century. I overdid it a little perhaps.”
The Ligottian element has its centre here: “Good Lord, doctor, this whole stellar universe of ours may be no more than the bubbles in a bottle of champagne – or soda-water! And we humans the restless maggots in a rotting excretion of the sun. And yet – we go on breeding!”
But the most powerful moment of Nature’s revenge upon humanity is hinged here: “The doctor turned back his head again, shifted his elbows on the arms of the chair, leaned his chin on his fingers, and once more out of his calm settled eyes patiently surveyed his visitor.” leading to… “There is an orgy of crises: changes of Government: International Conferences: ever more and more impotent and ineffectual. And then at last the newspapers fall on the scare like bluebottles on carrion.”
The next story I chose below is the perfect onward progression of the ‘solipsism / slopdish’ theme-and-variations that I proposed earlier above, together with a man’s whole family, en masse, being tantamount to this book’s erstwhile ‘Visitor from Porlock’! —
THE NAP
“Like all Saturday dinners in his household, this had been a hugger-mugger dinner – one of vehement relays.”
Ostensibly, and as an early Corrie fan, I deem this an early working-class soap-opera (“…slid the soap out of the basin where Charlie had abandoned it, and hung up the draggled towels again in the tiny bathroom.”) It has gender rôle issues of the day, that we should forgive for what they are. “…half-sexed nagger” and, like most women, his wife “always went off at a tangent.”
The scene is that of Mr Thripp (“He was breathing heavily, for he inclined nowadays, as he would sometimes confess, to the ongbongpong.”) He cherishes his solitude especially when his beautiful man-hunting young daughter Millie goes out and two sons, smoking James and footballing, Charlie, go out, too, the latter with the noise of “fifteen Charlies”. And particularly when his wife Mrs T is about to go to what we all called ‘the pictures’ in those days, she going with a flighty, flirty, highly made-up Mrs Brown (“Mr Thripp indeed was no lover of the ultrafeminine.”), Mrs Brown who says of picturehouses: “But I enjoy the dark, Mr Thripp … It rests the eyes.’”
Mr T has two clocks, one with a Zeno-like “pendulum – imperturbably chopping up eternity into fragments of time.” He is jug just as much as a jug is a jug, and insists ironically on doing the housework so that he can be sooner alone with his precious pot of tea for one and the ‘nirvana of a nap’ as I’m not sure what? — not exactly a dream, but a nap as a solipsism wherein his family anxieties play out and are hopefully transcended as the real truth of this fiction. For example, he witnesses Millie with a new boy friend whose “elbows were on the marble-top table, and he was looking at Millie very much as a young but experienced pig looks at his wash-trough.” Soap-basin, wash-trough, and, now, yes, I infer, slopdish! Aptly, then, it is Millie who is transcended this time, by dint of the nap as she returns home somehow to share Mr T’s tiny pot of T! But… “…it might be multitudinous shades of the unborn that were thronging about the glass of his window. Mr Thripp rose from his chair, his face transfigured with rage and desire for revenge.” — and thus the previously read story’s Anti-Natalism above is also played out by Mr Tea within our own solipsistic eyes, I guess.
“Within, the two clocks on the chimney-piece quarrelled furiously over the fleeting moments, attaining unanimity only in one of many ticks.”
“‘You will find a basin and a towel in there, sir, if you will be so kind.’ […] A print of the Crucifixion was tin-tacked to the panelled wall, and beneath it stood a tin basin and jug on a stand. […] It is curious what a refreshment of spirit a mere tin basinful of water may be.”
And so with the above words quoted from the next story below, a story with its own constructed and mis-constructed storeys of massiveness, a literally sheer masterpiece, we seem to arrive preternaturally as well as spiritually at a prophecy of our times today, as filtered through the ancient battle of good and evil, while cohering and then transcending the incidental trappings of M.R. James fiction … and an inferred vast crane (cf the materials-handling of Oliver Onions’ ‘Rooum’) as a configured elbow…
ALL HALLOWS
“(as time is measured by the clocks of sleep)”
The story of a pilgrim as narrator who, by walking laboriously, hill over hill, to ecclesiastical All Hallows, within its evocatively invoked sea-bay, he becomes the necessary stranger for the real but static pilgrim (an old man working in the church and direly beset by the trappings that I have already adumbrated above) who himself could not have otherwise sought out such a stranger, and thus the old man hopefully reaching a relatively calm ending with his family….
Some notes and quotations I made while on my own pilgrimage…
The necessary gestalt we all constitute…
“And yet, if we could but free ourselves from our timidities, and follies, we might realize that even we ourselves have an obligation to leave behind us similar memorials – testaments to the creative and faithful genius not so much of the individual as of Humanity itself.”
That Mysterious Kôr…
“Given the imagination, man himself indeed may some day be able to distinguish what shapes are walking during our own terrestrial midnight amid the black shadows of the craters in the noonday of the moon.”
The way of the world we are now that I noted earlier in the review of other stories above…
“They are greedy monsters – those newspapers: no respect, no discretion, no decency, in my view. And they copy each other like cats in a chorus. […] It’s a heartless age, sir. […] What I mean, sir, is that there’s very few left in this world who have any place in their minds for a sacred confidence – no reverence, sir. […] What is the use of argufying, splitting hairs, objurgating about trifles, when matters are sweeping rapidly on from bad to worse. […] But they refuse to see how close to the edge of things we are: and how we are drifting. […] …there are devilish agencies at work here. […] The light is smalling,…”
And, astoundingly, the counterintuitively positive disruption we have seen in our own Government lately in our own real-time…
“Nothing but strife and juggleries and hatred and contempt and discord wherever you look. […] …though up there in London things may look different. He gets his company there; and then for him the whole kallyidoscope changes, if you take me. […] One doesn’t repair in order to destroy. […] An institution may be beyond saving, sir: it may be being restored for a worse destruction.” (My bold)
And with this work’s own explicit reference, soon after the Great War, to today’s coastal erosion and the global warming theme I noticed when reviewing other stories above, we reach the crux of this work, the hybrid architecture of All Hallows, and intrinsic masonry, evil thrust into good, its zenoism of time (“minutes sometimes seem like hours”), the “bent bow” and the inferred crane on its pedestal…
“Forty inches, and forty inches, and forty inches corroding on and on: […] …where stones lately as rotten as pumice and as fretted as a sponge have been replaced by others fresh-quarried – and nothing of their kind within twenty miles. There are spots where massive blocks a yard or more square have been pushed into place by sheer force. […] Gazing out, I could detect scaffolding poles – like knitting needles – thrust out from the walls and a balloon-like spread of canvas above them. For the moment my ear was haunted by what appeared to be the droning of an immense insect. But this presently ceased. I fancy it was internal only. […] …the stablest stones set one on top of the other with an ever slightly varying weight and stress might be likely to make perceptible in a world of matter. A world which, after all, they say, is itself in unimaginably rapid rotation, and under the tyranny of time. […] …this particular figure held stretched in its right hand a bent bow, and was crowned with a high weather-worn stone coronet. […] …a figure – at two removes – which was silhouetted at that moment against the starry emptiness: a forbidding thing enough, viewed in this vague luminosity, which seemed in spite of the unmoving stare that I fixed on it to be perceptibly stirring on its windworn pedestal.” (My bold)
The grinding millstone, the two headed crocodile, the sinister eagle, instead of the usual, more holy gargoyles of horror? Whatever the “muddle of metaphors”!
“Terrifying in this narrow valley…”
“….what does the same Word or very near it (I speak of the Apocrypha) say of their purpose? It says – and correct me if I go astray – ‘Devils are creatures made by God, and that for vengeance.’”
“He dropped his hands to his sides.”
“What is anybody’s life, sir (come past the gaiety of youth), but marking time …”
“…the shape, the line, the fold, the angle of the lid and so on – that gives its finer shades of meaning and significance to the human eye.”
“….a young child with little short of awe, sir, knowing that within its mind is a scene of peace and paradise of which we older folk have no notion,…”
My bold oldness.
Sorry for being All Elbows!
This review continues here with Volume Two: https://elizabethbowensite.wordpress.com/walter-de-la-mare/
*
NB: I may, in due course, return to the first volume to read and review the stories in it that I have not yet managed to do.