Continued from HERE
My previous reviews of WDLM are linked 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/)
MISSING
“; rose;”
If you met a stranger in earlier 20th century London staring at crumbs on a plate in a cafe, would you have expected him to engage you in conversation, just like one of WDLM corner-seat train travellers, but here, it turns out, he is waiting for the no. eighteen bus, while emitting to you a stream of his previous life with his now dead dumb-witted sister as a shadowy third to a singular Miss Dutton who acted as the sister’s brainwright? And later, what was she to this stranger himself, this Miss D?
A would-be comic masterpiece, if it had not grown flabbily too bizarre towards the end of the stranger’s story as the full repercussions — of his narrative’s trinity of characters, including himself, about whom he is passionately adumbrating — become clearer: a diatribe (evolving in parallel with the weather) from this stranger who has come to London and its hurly burly amidst this day’s heatwave gradually drifting into a niagara of a thunderstorm, to get it all off his chest! Including when the unrequited Miss D “threw a vause full of flowers at me: snowdrops.” (sic)
“Was he merely to prove yet another of those unfortunate travellers who have lost the return halves of their railway tickets? Had he marked me down for his prey!”
You can actually visualise the stranger’s house in the country as well as his pitiful sister, and the gradually smothering Miss Dutton, the latter having gone missing, subject to police inquiries that the stranger has faced. And visualise, too, the bullying of his sister by Miss D and later by the police
“It was not, I have to confess, a taking face.”
The stranger’s face, that is, as perceived by you. And the later ‘trumpeting’ of his nose.
“Since she [Miss D] has gone I feel almost sometimes as if she can never have been real. There, but not real; if you understand me. I see her; and then the real thing goes again.”
The philosophical existence of a teapot, and a ‘storm in a teacup’, and now the storm outside the cafe, and the half-melting ice cream you gratuitously bought the stranger amidst his tale.
“I have never met any one that made such active use of his chin in conversation, by the way, as Mr Bleet did.”
Ah, yes, the stranger and his sister were called Bleet. Makes me think that your eyes are having some wool pulled over them!
“…the mere zigzagging of his narrative was interesting. Its technique, I mean, reminded me of the definition of a crab: ‘The crab is a little red animal that walks backwards.’”
“It was a foul outburst, due in part, I hope, to the heat; in part to the suffocating dehumanizing foetor which spreads over London when the sun has been pouring down on its bricks and mortar as fiercely as on the bones and sands of some Eastern mud village.”
“It seemed for the time being as though the whole of my right arm had become partially paralysed.”
The Stranger: A Dialogue
“…revealing colour by colour the pattern of the carpet on the floor.”
…as you do — all our backstories being the ground we walk upon into the future, and this dialogue likewise, too, a chat between an adolescent schoolgirl and her mother, as she practises the piano. She had been late home because she went too far on the bus, and had not had enough money to get a bus all the way back. Much to the mother’s concern, the girl had talked to a male stranger on the bus, another WDLM-archetypal stranger verbally accosting the main protagonist while travelling on public transport. What the girl gradually admits as to the darkly good-looking nature of this stranger and what she divulged to him, seemingly revealing — from the nemonymous to the naming — a part of the pattern in her own mother’s backstory…
PRETTY POLL
“A kind of call-note which appeared to have come out of the cage. Without being quite conscious of it, it seems to have been this faint rumour, at least as much as anything else, that persuaded him to invest in the bird.”
This is definite masterpiece. And it seems to me to be a sequel or prequel to the Parrot parroting the same name ‘Minnie’ in Elizabeth Bowen’s Parrot story that I once reviewed here: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2021/11/19/how-world-lay-overlapped-with-world-visible-each-from-the-other-and-yet-never-to-be-one/
Worlds, overlapping indeed, as well as words. The story told within a frame story where a man talking about the state of marriage to two sewing women is induced by these women into telling a story about a man (shall we call him Bysshe?) who bought a parrot in Leadenhall Market, and about his relationship with Minnie who ended up (SPOILER) murdering the parrot, because Bysshe had been colluding with or been possessed as well as obsessed by constant investigative quest for the parrot’s roots, this parrot who had suddenly erupted into all manner of a harangue of foul language that ironically froze blood in the veins as well as, later, echoes of a Mozart minuet and much else, a whole torrent that echoes the Niagara Falls analogy for marriage in the frame story, a frame story that actually finished with an open-ended glimpse of the moon for one of the listening women (the cratered moon in Mysterious Kôr?)….
The parrot becomes an entity of smothering, swaddling horror to me, a familiar, a horla, a hawler, an entity haunted with what haunted it, indeed haunted its parrot-fashion voices as ghosts, and the frame story and the inner story are somehow embodied in this singular remark by one of the characters (and in its concomitant torrent of thoughts):
“What are we all but ghosts – of something?”
Some of the many unmissable passages in this tour de force that may give you some clue as to the shuddering gestalt it gave me…
“I can’t describe the evil of the effect. One stopped thinking. One lost for the moment even the power of being shocked. A torrent of outer darkness seemed to sweep over, dowse, submerge the mind, and you just floated like a straw on its calm even flood.’”
“‘It was the voice of a seraph, the voice of a marvellous fiddle (that bit of solo, for example, in Mozart’s Minuet in E flat). A voice innocent of the meaning – even of the degree – of its longing; innocent, I mean, of realizing that life can’t really stand – if it could comprehend it – anything so abjectly beautiful as all that; that there’s a breaking-point. It’s difficult even to suggest the effect. Absolutely the most beautiful thing in the world a cousin of mine once told me he had ever seen was from the top of a bus. He happened to glance into the dusk of an upper room through an open window, and a naked girl stood there, her eyes looking inward in a remote dream,…’”
“…to track the embodiment down. And how could he tell which he’d unearth first – angel or devil.”
“Anyhow, Bysshe gave up the quest; and lived on in a furious, implacable dream.”
PS: I note WDLM’s Pretty Poll and EB’s The Parrot were both first published in 1925!!!!!
Also cf Robert Hichens’ Guildea: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2021/04/28/parrot-priest-and-professor/#comment-25797
“What are we all but ghosts – of something? And who’s telling this story for you, pray, but your ghost of me?”
NEIGHBOURS
This text is an incredibly complex and sophisticated obsession with two elderly ladies’ obsessions with outdoing each other by dint of the rarity and beauty of the flowers in their neighbouring gardens. A lengthy feud until one suddenly notices in the other’s garden “flaccid, nidnodding buds on blight-enfeebled stalks.” — invoking perhaps “an excuse to give up, to surrender, to turn over a new leaf.”
Or simply an emptying of the purpose in life itself … until one takes wild flowers to the other’s grave?
“What are flowers, their beauty passed away, their sweetness gone?”
THE WHARF
“‘Then I look nice, Mother, nice, nice, nice?’ she cried. And her mother smiled with half-closed eyes, just as if she were drinking up a little glass of some strange far-fetched wine.”
A story about the mother, the real mother made ill by nightmare, not a foster-mother of evil, but a loving mother of three lively daughters eager to go to a party, and their father, whom she’d dreamt of in the wharf’s nightmare heap. This is, of course, the most horrific story written by WDLM, preempting Ligotti, sidelining Jean Ray, out Poe-ing Poe, gazumping the Gothics. And more.
‘Of course’, did I say? I had never heard of this story before reading it today! Did this horror appear in this book out of its own “foster-mothering heap” but since airbrushed or disguised by the wild flowers growing on its top. A heap of “stable-mook” on Mr Simmonds’ farm as attended by a friendly heifer called Nellie. And thus with horror blocked, the mother goes back to her family after a rest cure’s epiphany of redemption while staying at a farm. Back to the happy ‘handful’ of daughters in the city!
***
A story topped and tailed by its own flowers of mud masking the manure mound. Disguising its utter utter horror within such margins, disguising it from the readers who might have otherwise sought such a Mysterious Kôr of horror… “And that time was like the throes of a nightmare in a hot, still, huge country – a country like Africa; enormous and sinister and black.”
But the ‘handful’ of us who truly do reach the story’s core will have its happy margins removed, will find the heap’s flowers dead, indeed, will be shocked, along with the mother, as “She stood on this dreadful wharf, beside this soundless and sluggish river under the impenetrable murk of its skies, as if in an eternal Present.”
A slave to a cargo of shame … “shovelled away by these gigantic, angelic beings.” Fostered by luminous darkness to real darkness.
(As a ‘handful’ implies ‘a few’ it also means a difficulty in handling, so, at a wharf, the key is that it is a place to load or unload?)
PS: Believe me this is definitely an unmissable horror story.
I can’t see it has ever been anthologised other than in a handful of complete volumes of his stories.
“Midnight
One more night without sleepin’
Uuh, Watchin’
Till that mornin’ comes creepin’
Green door
What’s that secret you’re keepin’?”
— Green Door (1956)
A popular song I remember as a child, one played on the wireless.
THE PRINCESS (1955)
“We continue to warm our ageing hands at some small fire which went out perhaps thirty, forty, sixty years ago!”
The memories of childhood, young love et al, dwelt upon rhapsodically, as he remembers going, as a boy, into the unlatched green door of a house in the Inverness-shire wilds having previously visualised — after once seeing her as a ‘dream-creature’ — a figure he calls a ‘dusky’ princess, one he deems is dead, and with whose painted portrait, inside this atmospherically evoked house, he falls in love. The portrait’s face has ‘pallor’ not duskiness.
Eventually, he returns in winter with a bouquet of snowdrops for his love but meets her for real instead. I will not spoil its nut’s husk or kernel nor its wondrous ‘oval miniature’ further except possibly to quote…
“The last of dusklight was beginning to drain out of the room; a paler, more furtive radiance was stealing in. […] …full wintry moonlight and the virgin loveliness of the snow.”
THE LOST TRACK
“For after all, the meaning and beauty of anything depends on who is looking at it.”
“What follows then is merely a plain and precise account. It is not intended to titillate your fastidious taste in style. You need not even bother to read it if you feel disinclined. But if you do read it, I should like a word later on concerning one or two points in it that will suggest themselves;…”
Not a missing music track on an LP with Gluck music about Virginia, not exactly an O Henry story (whose works I have been reviewing over the last year or so) an author, along with Poe, that is mentioned here, but this work is near to being an O.Henry who often depicted diamond pilferers and rogues.
This WDLM work is a lost carttrack that an Englishman wanders down and tells his friend about when he returns to England from his American trip. A story with too many nuances of changing emotions to fully cover here. And thus, by telling his friend, he tells us, too, as a spin-off about this, his epiphany, a civil war and a self. Another WDLM masterpiece, how many are there of such works that have since become their own lost tracks? A work with shades of his MR KEMPE, where a wife also languishes, I recall, but here in the shade of something of a lustrous pervading light, a stone like a diamond (placed in a shrine by her husband) from an ex-terrestrial substance (“…a visitant from the wilds (or the serene) of ‘space’, of the unknown, of the dreamed of.”)
I can only offer my own soon to be lost tracks through this major reading experience in case you can’t find this lost track for yourself …the narrator having suffered flu, a flu that had given him audacity as he wanders out, a stranger as pilgrim, into the wilds of…
“…the land where a twenty-four hours’ railway journey is looked upon as a jaunt one can enjoy between tea and supper,…”
He finds an abandoned railway line, sees a man like Charlie Chaplin with his ‘negro’ servant, a servant who seems to figure later in the tragic news of the outcome after our narrator left off visiting the English woman in the plot where the narrator finds, too, a house into which he audaciously intrudes and encounters this woman with a gun pointed at him, with whom there arises a sort of relationship in the ‘gentle lustrous light’ of the enshrined stone that our narrator had upturned…
“the young moon in the old moon’s arms”
***
Landmarks for my soon-to-be lost tracks of memory in this work…
“The line, as I say, led out of a gully and into a gully. And anything, my dear James, which, like Life itself, emanates from no discernible whence, and vanishes out into no detectable whither, is – well, you notice it. […] …a slight flavour of the preternatural.”
“It was a diamond in size and shape rather like a flat-ended apple – flat at the base, I mean; and in its cutting a blunted cone.”
“Sum-m-ject and om-m-ject, as Coleridge used to say: here we were: en rapport.”
“Our spirits, our revenants, our secret sharers, or whatever one means by such words, had exchanged greetings in their secret tongue;…”
“…this miracle of serenity and light. What on earth at such a moment could anything practical matter – even a bullet in your stomach? Mere self – that horrible Ego one talks about, perched inside one, like the blackened anatomy of a crow – seemed to be of no importance. I was hardly even thinking. I glanced at the sinister little round black hole of the revolver and then looked straight up again into this stranger’s face, and knew I was smiling.”
“hunter and quarry; pilgrim and priestess”
“I replaced its ebony hood over the diamond as you might place a rusty extinguisher on a guttering tallow candle; and in that moment it seemed as if all interest, life and reality had vanished out of the room.”
“Browne is even more disappointing, merely citing (in order to dismiss it) the vulgar error that a diamond may be ‘made soft, or broke by the blood of a goat’.”
“And yet the whole experience remains not only a mortifying but a horrifying memory. If it is not absurd to say so – it terrifies me with its perplexity. I could never be ‘happy’ about it, even if – but wait. I started off the next afternoon – it was a Sunday, of course –“
“– the problem, I mean, of hoarding versus exploiting; the problem of spiritual intensity versus material enterprise; of imaginative intuition versus man’s mere reasoning powers. It sets me thinking of my own part in that afternoon’s adventure. That inescapable law – the immutability of one’s past!”
“…this incredible bauble which, if it emerged into our civilized world, would instantly knock the bottom out of the diamond market, and would awaken in scores of human hearts the vilest passion of which they are capable.”
“…embittered war of the spirit must have been raging between these two poor human derelicts.”
“Then, suddenly, had appeared this interloper from the great Outside – and had reminded her of her childhood and of England. I see as I write the troubled simplicity that lightened her face as she spoke of it. The very ghost of childhood returned into it.”
“I listened; but after all, the thread that skeins up even the most sophisticated heart is tied only with a slip knot.”
“The first thin silver of a crescent moon had come into the sky low down in the west and was being dogged by a planet glassy as a raindrop by candle-light.”
“It was as if we two, for the century of a passionate moment, had been in love, and that in that moment I myself had exhausted that strange and terrifying experience. And then so far as I was concerned – then, not now – only ashes, ennui, disillusionment. And yet, I blame it less on myself than on the stone – its dream, its nightmare.”
“To me the worst horror of the account is not so much that my visit may have been the occasion of some fatal quarrel, but that that old, humpbacked, greying negro was all but lynched on account of it, and that he died of the shock. But not, I gather, before he had consigned his master and his miserable talisman to the abyss prepared for them.”
“What actually did I do or leave undone that sickens me so? What was there in this unintelligible ordeal that still eludes me?”
THE GUARDIAN
“This appearance – and he was by nature a sensitive and solitary child – suggested effeminacy. But since in his case it implied only fineness and delicacy of mind as well as of body, it was nothing but a tribute to him. I consider it a poor compliment to a woman, at any rate, to be regarded as mannish and masculine. Let us all keep to what we are and as much of it as possible.”
Well, that is all to be pondered today, I guess! Yet, such ponderings are soon taken over by Aunt Caroline’s tale of her nephew Philip for whom she officiates his life after his mother — her badly backstory-afflicted sister— bowed out of such responsibilities. Much thought by Caroline upon childhood in general and, as you can see above, upon Philip himself and his night anxieties, if not terrors…
“‘I – often lie awake at night. And it goes on, you see, Auntie Caroline, sometimes into the day.’ Strange: I failed even to ask him what precisely he meant by that ‘it’.”
One my ‘glean’ ‘Satan’, perhaps? Those eyes bending to see what ever IT is, like the boy’s eyes in ‘At First Sight’?
“He told me that when he turned his eyes as far as their orbits admitted in a certain direction – and after recent experiments of this kind he had ventured to do this very seldom – he perceived a shape, a figure there. A something dark, small and stunted, I gathered, with humped shoulders and bent head, and steadily scrutinizing him.”
Night fears whence he tried successfully to recover, but still he reached a possibly near tragic outcome of self-destruction, if not for love of a ‘dormitory-maid’, maybe for one of Caroline’s half-believed-in ‘guardian angels’?
This is a most agonising, haunting tale, yet one with maybe a flicker of hope?
“What then else could he be pining for? What could I do – or say – to rest his mind, comfort him? I pondered in vain.”
KISMET
With vague echoes of ‘The Traveller’ and his other poems, WDLM here atmospherically evokes a midnight track through trees — and a cart, and the man at the front as driver of its pull, and the unexpected lonely traveller it meets and to whom is offered a lift, from both points of view of carter and traveller, the latter coming back from sea unpreannounced to his wife. The same place as where the the cart happens to be going . The rest is his story. One I will not spoil here.
“This, too, was a willow, but it was a good many years older than most of its companions, and in part devoured and hollowed by rot. It leaned far out over the water from its few feet of grass-green sandy bank. And, as she looked at it, the complete experience of the night before flooded back into memory.”
This is the unmissable epiphanic story of Nora, engaged to marry stolid George, as, from her bedroom, she watches him today in the garden with his racing pigeons and tomatoes, after her having, on a previous night, wandered off at night to The Ponds to yield and then regather her soul, as it were, and had fallen into the dark depths of the pond at the willow’s feet and managed to resurface, then saw the singular face, her own face or the face of all women and men as a transgender prophecy?
An epiphany she tries with difficulty to explain to George when alone with him after their having been baited at dinner by men in the family about separate islands of men and women when you die, and these men jokingly digressing about marriage as altar or halter: “And what, might I ask you, does anybody expect at an execution? Why, to lose his head! Aye, and to have it picked up out of the sawdust before the trickling lids are down over the eyes.”
Whether she eventually succeeds in being happy with George we are left to wonder. Faced, too with her mother, who ironically is a more social creature, especially when she says “Give me faces; give me company; give me talk. I’d mope me head off with nobody to see.”
And what of George himself? A singular WDLM elbow-moment —
“The only sound he uttered was a sort of breathless grunt as he stooped forward, his elbows on his knees, and hid his face in his hands, thrusting back his hard, round hat on his neatly oiled hair, as he did so.”
THE HANGMAN LUCK
“The cuckoo clock clucked on its shelf above the two Delft fat men, with good bellies full of tobacco. I sipped my rum with feigned good comfort, eyeing the loose-sitting stranger over the brim.”
Smalltalk, rum pubtalk, amid the clock sounds, and, as with this author’s KISMET, two unknown destinies meet as a single tragic destiny at the end, despite the simple-mindedness of two strangers meeting and fraternising in this tavern, as the defiantly non-omniscient narrator, a tramp, gradually reveals things about himself, including the wound in his hand, and cornfields as part of an otherwise idyllic, WDLM-archetypal countryside, and the other stranger (stranger to that stranger) who is an over-kindly local promising to take him to his (the local’s) dear mother for a good feed-up with pork belly already boiling in her pot. Emotions suppressed by simple-mindedness and boastful mindless murther. And if I tell you more, luck will sure depart any reader reading this out there inasmuch as the ending can ever hang its head suspenseful till the very end…
“The spirit had gone out of him and he stalked on, solemn and silent at my elbow.”
THE PICTURE
“Once a busy spectre begins to frequent the mind, you never – she had discovered this long ago – you never know even yourself what devils it may not at length invite in.”
A woman watches her much older husband in the garden, speculating how his past must have more of him than she herself. She stands by the hung portrait of his late wife upon his study wall, an obsession with which grew in her. And she wonders upon the nature of her husband’s belief in superstition, so she tempted gravity with the hanging’s thread charred by her candle one late night. And she hoped he would assign such an eventual crash to the floor to some omen that would make him love his now younger wife more? Instead the crash must have betokened his own deathly end by the strength of superstition’s fiction or truth. A moving story. Rarified prose so hanging by a thread of suspended disbelief that is so typical of WDLM.
This review continues here: https://elizabethbowensite.wordpress.com/2022/11/22/the-stories-of-walter-de-la-mare-6/