My other reviews of Walter de la Mare: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2022/11/02/my-reviews-of-walter-de-la-mare-in-alphabetical-order/
My previous reviews of older or classic books: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/reviews-of-older-books/
When I read this novel, my thoughts will appear in the comment stream below…
INTRODUCTION
“…a chance word of mine had been her actual incentive to composition – the remark, in fact, that ‘the truth about even the least of things – e.g. your Self, Miss M.! – may be a taper in whose beam one may peep at the truth about Everything’”
In the light of the Truth Compass in WDLM’s ‘Strangers and Pilgrims’, these words: “What was my true course? Where my compass?”, are what M asks the writer of this intro, namely Sir Walter Dadus Pollacke, who is publishing her memoirs, here. And this is his introduction that paints the picture and context of M, our midget narrator — a narration in the form of memoirs from Chapter One below onwards. Perhaps Sir Walter puts the memoirs into chapters, or WDLM himself? And I shall myself in 2022 onwards endeavour to prove that all we readers of these memoirs are beads, too, on the same string…
“For after all, life’s beads are all on one string, however loosely threaded they may seem to be.”
***
LYNDSEY
Chapter One
“So truth, in this case, was not so strange as Mrs. Ballard’s fiction.”
An evocative WDLM-archetypal countryside with church etc., (“…the faint rich scent of the cowslips – paggles, as we called them, in meadows a good mile away.”) — beautifully couched in prose, and M quotes someone else who had written about someone whom I infer to be her, someone who eventually became a woman of freakish tininess, and he jokingly said she had been born in Rutlandshire, when in fact her birthplace was Lyndsey in Kent. And we hear of the nature of her father’s house there, a house called Stonecote. And she tells of a childhood when she was almost mistaken for one of Miaou’s kittens by Miaou herself! About the characters of her father and mother. Her father in the paper mill business and having written a book about paper, and with clumsy fingers, but adroit enough to delicately handle M herself as well as a pizzicato on his fiddle. But what of his vile snuff!
Her mother, too, and “My mother’s mother was French. She was a Daundelyon.” and her Aunt Kitelda as ‘the Naiad.’ Not forgetting an ugly portrait of one of these women – I forget which – by someone called Wagginhorne….
“…’little o’ – a letter for which I always felt a sort of pity; but small affection.”
Chapter Two
This book is as delightful as when I first read it many years ago, too many! But it is somehow now even better. The character of M comes out, feisty with self-admitted ego-centricity as she grapples with her size, on growing up, not really like the male comparable character in AT FIRST SIGHT, reviewed earlier. She suffers the ‘shrimp’ taunt from Miss Fenne, and boys like Hoppy. But we follow her into the ‘garden of Kent’ with the richness of WDLM-archetypal prose. And we hear about her kindly French Grandfather and much else. I will not be able to detail everything as I reread this classic, yet surely underrated, book, but I will try to mention things that please me or inspire me today in the larger WDLM context. (So far no sign of any facing of death or of gravestones with epitaphs or of dark churches with old vergers and gargoyles!)
Chapter Three
“My grandfather sent me other pygmy books from Paris, including a minute masterpiece of calligraphy, Une Anthologie de Chansons pour une Minuscule Aimante et Bien-aimée par P. de R.”
M is a wonderful writer, or Sir Walter or WDLM are on her behalf! But they have futures her character fir us, still feisty as she reaches 17, having learnt her childhood lesson from, say, a dead mole or scolding one of those pesky boys!
“…such a delight in words that to this day I firmly believe that things are at least twice the better and richer for being called by them.”
And the frontispiece of a book that haunts her as such frontispieces did in my own childhood and youth…
“This depicts a large-headed and seemingly one-legged little girl in a flounced frock lying asleep under a wall on which ivy is sprawling. For pillow for herself and her staring doll there lies on the ground a full-sized human skull, and in the middle distance are seen the monoliths of Stonehenge. Beyond these gigantic stones, and behind the far mountains, rises with spiky rays an enormous Sun.
I was that child; and mine her sun that burned in heaven, and he a more obedient luminary than any lamp of man’s. I would wonder what she would do when she awoke from sleep. The skull, in particular, both terrified and entranced me – the secret of all history seemed to lie hidden in the shadows beneath its dome.”
…that being one of the most exquisite passages you would go far to find! Meantime, I did not really understand her naïve take on what I assumed to be Darwinian tenets towards the end of this chapter…
Chapter Four
“…the Hop, the Oyster, or the Cherry,…”
N’s memoirs grow darker, as she turns 18, seeing frightening shadows, the inevitable deaths that life always promises, and her perhaps hopeless hopes to be a pygmy mother of normal sized children, and her father’s failed business projects, the utter poignancy of her caring mother, and M is irritated by anyone bending low to pick her up, even to be picked up by the relatively small Mrs Sheppey, a new servant, the telling description of whom is perfectly visualised in our mind amidst other various apotheoses of WDLM-archetypal prose to die for.
Chapter Five
“Double-minded creature I was and ever shall be; now puffed up with arrogance at the differences between myself and gross, common-sized humanity; now stupidly sensitive to the pangs to which by reason of these differences I have to submit.”
This is wondrous stuff, with orphan M’s explicitly Swiftian speculation that her pygmy size may be the norm one day, and those normal-sized are freaks.
And her facing out her Godmother, Miss Fenne, not to live with her. And the latter consigns her to work for a Mrs Bowater……
“Looking in on her [Miss Fenne] from my balcony, I had the advantage of her, as she faced me in the full light in her chair, dressed up in her old lady’s clothes like a kind of human Alp among my pygmy belongings.”
“So sprawling and straggling was my godmother’s penmanship that I spelled her letter out at last with a minifying glass,…”
Chapter Six
“…my thoughts darting hither and thither like flies under a ceiling – those strange, winged creatures that ever seem to be attempting to trace out in their flittings the starry ‘Square of Pegasus’.”
“– the stretching hours seemed endless; and every minute of them knelled the fate of some beloved and familiar object.”
M is at a watershed of leaving Lyndsey, familiar things being auctioned around her, and we alsosee her in the night forced to clamber with dangerous difficult down the stairs and up them again on a sort of false alarm whereby her tiny shape has to face giant cockroaches, I infer. A rapture, too, with seeing pear-shaped droplets of rain, then a nightmare where heavy stone pears nearly fall upon her from the iron branches of trees. And between, seeing in the dark the ghostly shapes of her dead parents. I, too, was enraptured and disturbed, in turn, by this powerful chapter.
“the stony murmur of the garden stream,…”
Chapter Seven
I don’t think I have mentioned Pollie before, but on M’s departure from Lyndsey with this serving girl who often carries M about, I was touched, alongside M, by P’s character…
“She was now a sedate, young woman, but still my Pollie of the apples and novelettes.”
“‘But, Pollie,’ I demured; ‘a dream is only a dream.’
‘Honest, miss,’ she replied, thumbing over the pages, ‘there’s some of ’em means what happens and comes true, and they’ll tell secrets too if they be searched about.’”
Dreams of eggs or, now, indeed of pears. WDLM’s dreams, indeed, where I search out their secret secrets.
Till we reach M’s first “steam monster”, taken by train, with P, amidst those WDLM-archetypal corner-seat passengers et al, and the boy passenger who falls in love with M as a sort of living doll that suddenly revealed she lived indeed! As onward they go towards M’s new fate with Mrs Bowater, and, unlike P, never to return to Lyndsey. Despite all the stares, as if she is a circus freak, she is determined to face out such a fate in defiance of Miss Fenne….
One of M’s thoughts in this chapter will stay with me perhaps forever…
“Was there, in truth, a wraith in me that could so steal out; and were the invisible inhabitants in their fortresses beside my stream conscious of its presence among them, and as happy in my spectral company as I in theirs?”
BEECHWOOD
Chapter Eight
“Never before had I been out after nightfall. […] Indeed I was drinking in Romance, and never traveller surveyed golden Moscow or the steeps of Tibet with keener relish than I the liquid amber, ruby, and emerald that summoned its customers to a wayside chemist’s shop. Twenty – what a child I was!”
You won’t forget, I insist, the travel from the train to Mrs Bowater’s, the nature of the house and of Mrs B herself, nor of Henry the cat, nor the sad farewell to Pollie.
Chapter Nine
“I would talk to myself in the glass, too, for company’s sake, and make believe I was a dozen different characters.”
Mr Bates, a distant relation of Mrs B, carpenters a bespoke bedchamber for M, and later a bespoke independent door to the outside for early mornings, when prying eyes were few. She even heard a legend of “elf-folk” in the stuffy house’s vicinity …
“A few hundred yards up the hill, the road turned off, as I have said, towards Tyddlesdon End and Loose Lane – very stony and steep. On the left, and before the fork, a wicket gate led into the woods and the park of empty ‘Wanderslore’. To the verge of these deserted woods made a comfortable walk for me.”
She also tried the steep steps to the house as well as the little ones Mr Bates made to her own door. Thoughts of homesickness for Pollie and even Miss Fenne, despite Mrs B’s generosity. And thoughts of an interface with church going and whether size matters when being let into Heaven. The reader is a giant, I guess, compared to the book he or she reads. And M yearns for different books to the ones she brought to Mrs B’s.
“Naturally people grow ‘peculiar’ when much alone: self plays with self, and the mimicry fades.”
Chapter Ten
“So the stars came into my life, and faithful friends they have remained to this day.”
From books et al. We relish her truant nights out with the stars, the dangers of wandering, and what she might bring back with her unawares, after walking out from her Bateses M-flap and stairs to the open skies, and the empathy of self and star.
“It seemed to me that a Being whom one may call Silence was brooding in solitude where living and human visitants are rare, and that in his company a harmless spirit may be at peace. […] …self seemed to be the whole scene there, and my body being so small I was perhaps less a disturber than were most intruders of that solemn repose.”
Amazing material, and the growing backstory of Mrs B and her now persona non grata of a husband is intriguing, and then the foreboding visit of Mrs B’s daughter Fanny who I think has just discovered M’s latest truancy…?
Chapter Eleven
“At length thought tangled with dreams, and a grisly night was mine.”
Star-gazing trips, Christmas Day, visit from doctor, mixed feelings from hatred to respect for Mrs B’s daughter Fanny who held the secret of M’s trips out, and M gives her an ivory box with a moon design, perhaps in exchange for gifts F had given her. Sophistication of feelings and thoughts, and the moon has a place in what M eavesdrops of F mockingly talking to a beau outside with whom she had been partying. I infer, I guess. F is not nice, The reader flounders. I grew suspicious of F when she gave M some context for stars as “angels’ tin-tacks”.
“…I fell asleep, to dream that I was a child again and shut up in one of Mrs. Ballard’s glass jars, and that a hairy woman who was a kind of mixture of Mrs. Bowater and Miss Fenne, was tapping with a thimbled finger on its side to increase my terror.”
Chapter Twelve
“Now, first of all, it is true, isn’t it, that giants are usually rather dull-witted people? So nobody would deliberately choose that kind of change. If, then, quality does vary with quantity, mightn’t there be an improvement in the other direction?”
For me, a very odd chapter! I think WDLM was a little off-key when he wrote it, or intoxicated by something. M’s strange theories (exemplified above) on ‘Norms’, medians and averages as to size, as she chats with Dr Phelps, and I’m not sure who persuaded him to stay for tea, M or Fanny, and then there is Mr Crimble arriving, the curate, who has never met M before, and much chatter about singing songs for some ‘do’ and M dancing, and who would be be the Claque! I think I am sure only of one thing, tonight is the night F and M will go out together stargazing.
“I know now that it is not when we are near people that we reach themselves, not, I mean, in their looks and words, but only by following their thoughts to where the spirit within plays and has its being.”
Chapter Thirteen
“It seemed impossible that Mrs. Bowater could not hear the thoughts in my mind.”
…hear the excitement in her mind at the night’s date with a Fanny to see Sirius et al in the darkness, a comradely adventure which in turn turns near Sapphic to my eyes, as Fanny’s Midgetina caresses Fanny’s cold fingers, after Fanny appeared belatedly almost as a Quincunx sleepwalker in the night!
An errant, erratic, feisty, mutually self-insulated, almost cerebral relationship growing up between them … “…and far down, oh, far down, Berenice’s Hair, which would have been Fanny Bowater’s Hair, if you had been she.” And a star M called the Midget, I recall.
I did not fully understand how M solved F’s problem with F having forgotten her door key just like a sleepwalker indeed, logistics vis à vis the main door and M’s Bateses midget-flap…
Chinese boxes et al. Small and large.
“A few months more and I was to watch a lion-tamer …” Is this a prophecy of LIZZIE’S TIGER I recently reviewed here?
Chapter Fourteen
“Perhaps a curious and condescending fondness for me for a while sprang up in her – as far as that was possible, for, apart from her instinctive heartlessness, she never really accustomed herself to my physical shortcomings. I believe they attracted yet repelled her. To my lonely spirit she was a dream that remained a dream in spite of its intensifying resemblance to a nightmare.”
M’s unrequited love for Fanny touchingly adumbrated. As is her relationship with religion when talking to Mr Crimble, whom F also disappoints!
Factored into by Longfellow’s shipwrecked sailors…
Also by hearing that M once jumped out of a church window where Pollie had propped her, during the service!
Cross-referenced with THE GIANT by WDLM here: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2022/11/26/the-giant-by-walter-de-la-mare/
Chapter Fifteen
An exquisite chapter of unrequited love, and the seeing in of New Year alongside the precarious grandfather clock, Fanny as M’s beloved Heathcliff but soon to depart.
WUTHERING HEIGHTS followed by such lows….
This passage early in the chapter needs preserving outside of any book…
“Fanny herself, with musing head – her mockings over – was sitting drawn-up on a stool by the fire. I doubt if she was thinking. Whether or not, to my enchanted eyes some phantom within her seemed content merely to be her beauty. And in rest, there was a grace in her body – the smooth shoulder, the poised head that, because, perhaps, it was so transitory, seemed to resemble the never-changing – that mimicry of the unknown which may be seen in a flower, in a green hill, even in an animal. It is as though, I do think, what we love most in this life must of necessity share two worlds.
Faintly out of the frosty air was wafted the knelling of midnight. I rose, stepped back from the firelight, drew the curtain, and stole a look into space. Away on the right flashed Sirius, and to east of him came gliding flat-headed Hydra with Alphard, the Red Bird, in his coil. So, for a moment in our history, I and the terrestrial globe were alone together. It seemed indeed that an intenser silence drew over reality as the earth faced yet one more fleeting revolution round her invisible lord and master. But no moon was risen yet.
I turned towards the shape by the fire, and without her perceiving it, wafted kiss and prayer in her direction. Cold, careless Fanny – further than Uranus.”
Chapter Sixteen
“We chattered; we laughed; we sniggled together like school-girls…”
…describing our tiny M with Pollie, who suddenly arrives with news of her engagement, a timely break from the Sapphic crush M had for the now departed Fanny. A ground-breaking literary examination of such unrequited love that had no name…? But when M later tells Pollie to put her down as a tiny creature upon the pavement, it is a different sort of ground-breaking as she is baited by boys and gawped atby others. Another tour de force of literary force depicting a feisty smallness within the awesome large that outdoes Swift with poignancy and a real truth of experience. I see, as an aside, that, following such Wuthering Heights, M is now set to read Sense and Sensibility!
“The sun poured wintry bright into the house-walled gulf of a street that in my isolation seemed immeasurably vast and empty.”
Chapter Seventeen
Debriefing after yesterday’s events as Mr Crimble comes to apologise watching in while M has been baited, but she tells him she had not seen him seeing her! Has he got a soft spot for her?
Reading Sense and Sensibility, and writing aborted letters and their postscripts to Fanny. The sense of self as size of just the fact one IS? Self ‘at first sight’ or intrinsically? I not be the next part of this book is entitled WANDERSLORE. I wonder what will transpire.
This review continues here: https://elizabethbowensite.wordpress.com/2022/11/30/memoirs-of-a-midget-2/