Memoirs of a Midget (2)
CONTINUED FROM HERE: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2022/11/02/memoirs-of-a-midget-by-walter-de-la-mare/
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…
WANDERSLORE
Chapter Eighteen
“It was more like reading a story about myself, than being myself, and what was to be the end of it all?”
Indeed, along with M herself, I wonder not only that, but what actually happened in this chapter! There are two letters starting ‘Dear Midgetina’ from M’s beloved Fanny, and M reads them in their erstwhile star observatory overlooking the empty house WANDERSLORE, I think! One an official letter, the other secret, concerning Mr Crimble wanting to marry Fanny, and she wanting to befuddle him, I think! And there is news of Mrs Bowater’s husband having broken his leg in Buenos Aires, I think! What I am certain of is that M continues to read about Elinor in S & S!
Chapter Nineteen
A busy chapter, as Lady P arrives appropriately while M is reading Austen! She is invited back. And she enters new social circles, where she is both a novelty and someone with something important to say or recite as learnt by heart. One senile old lady happens to mention she was once taken to the circus as a young girl, but was quickly quietened by her son Mr Crimble. This is Walter de la Mare writing even more like Austen than Austen! About someone called Sir Walter, too!
Chapter Twenty
“‘Hypnos,’ I sighed the word; and – another face, Fanny’s, seemed to melt into and mingle with the visionary features.”
More of the Miss M / Mr Crimble / Fanny Bowater romcom.
Deceptions, collusions, rivalries, epistolary redactions et al. I will not bother thy pretty head with it! Nor mine!
“‘Listen, Mr. Crimble,’ I said, ‘look at me, here, what I am. I have had my desperate moments too – more alone in the world than you can ever be! And I swear before God that I will never, never be not myself.’”
Except if you are beset as Arthur Lawford was?
Chapter Twenty-One
“Why, isn’t that beech-tree we sat under a kind of cannibal of its own dead leaves?”
— in a letter from M to F
“I have finished Wuthering Heights. It is a mad, untrue book. The world is not like Emily Brontë’s conception of it. It is neither dream nor nightmare, Midgetina, but wide, wide awake.”
— in a letter from F to M
Much trying to sort out the Crimble syndrome and F’s explanation for not singing at his concert and calling M a “fretful midge”.
Yet our own Midgetina’s memoirs now bear a fruition of purpose, if she laughs at herself and then sees the world smile. Watched by a blackbird, amidst the WDLM-archetypal countryside fiction lore, at the empty house of Wanderslore. WDL wanderslore? M, our Midgetina? Yes, WDLM! Strung through with my own vision of knots as ligotti?
“I had taught myself to make knots in string, but actual experience seemed to have proved that most human fumblings resulted only in ‘grannies’ and not in the true lover’s variety.”
Pingback: Chapter 21 of Memoirs of a Midget by Walter de la Mare | The Gestalt Real-Time Reviews of Books Edit
Cross-referenced Lorrie Moore here: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2022/11/06/that-glimpse-of-truth-6/#comment-26084
Chapter Twenty-Two
“Nor at that time did I even consider how strange a chance had brought two such human beings as he and I to this place of meeting. Yet, after all, whales are but little creatures by comparison with the ocean in which they roam, and glow-worm will keep tryst with glow-worm in forests black as night.”
A momentous chapter, a shock, though I first read this book many years ago… It was not a blackbird spying on her, but this man only an inch or two higher than M!!!
It is a relief to shrug off, if only for a while, the complexities of the Crimble-Fanny syndrome, by means of this simple meeting. But not quite so simple. The conversation is WDLM-wrought as if in one of his most famous stories. Allusive and elusive. And, whether accidentally or deliberately, she leaves Fanny’s letter and the Austen book behind after he leaves, so that it may be an excuse to return here to the environs of the empty Wanderslore wherein, he tells her, a woman once hung herself.
“‘Then’, said he, almost coldly, ‘do you deny that Man is an evil spirit? He distorts and destroys.’”
Chapter Twenty-Three
Knots, real ones mentioned by M as well as ‘intellectual contortions’ re the nature of the word ‘gentleman’ in social circles, firstly a gentleman who irritates M by ignoring the novelty her tiny existence! –
“Vanity of vanities, when one old loitering gentleman did not so much as lift an eyelid at me – he was so absorbed in his own thoughts – I felt a pang of annoyance.”
And then Mrs B asks whether the tiny stranger M says she met is a gentleman…
”Gentle man – why, of course, self muttered in shame to self convicted of yet another mean little snobbery. He had been almost absurdly gentle – had treated me as if I were an angel rather than a young woman. But the nettlerash produced by Mrs. Bowater’s bigotry was not to be so easily allayed as all that.”
Contortions, indeed…
“That morning I had gone out to free myself from the Crimble tangle, merely to return with a few more knots in the skein.”
Until M unexpectedly receives a gift of Hypnos as an image from Sir Walter, if not Sir Wanderslore, and an invitation by Lady P to another social gathering…. while M herself is near devastated that F is not coming to visit when she had promised to come! Why am I so closely itemising my path through this book? It is probably because it is probably the last novel I shall ever submit to my reviewing processes.
Now unsure about that Hypnos bit.
Chapters Twenty-Four and Twenty-Five
“‘Well, yes,’ said I; ‘you see, when one is listening to poetry, not reading it to oneself, I mean, one hasn’t time to pry about for all its bits of meaning, but only just to get the general – general –’
‘Aroma?’ suggested Mrs. Monnerie.”
More social business, and M gives a recitation and is taken up by Mrs Monnerie. But why the signature of Josephine Mildred Spratte? A question I put out there without context. It needs to be answered.
Later, M’s debriefing with Mrs B, invoking talk of ‘ghosts’ at Wanderslore, and more thoughts about the tiny male stranger M had met there. And this memorable passage below describing M’s inner thoughts, but if so memorable, why quote it?
“Smallest of bubbles I might be, tossing on the great waters, but I reflected the universe. What need of courage when no danger was apparent? Surely one need not mind being different if that difference added to one’s share in the wonderful banquet. Even Wanderslore’s story was only of what happened when the tangle was so harshly knotted that no mortal fingers could unravel it.”
Cross-referenced with A REAL DOLL here: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2022/11/06/that-glimpse-of-truth-6/#comment-26112
Chapter Twenty-Six
A Heavenly chapter, a WDLM-magical chapter, possibly WDLM’s core, mixed with Glimpses of Truth and of Hell.
“The least and humblest of them – not merely crisp-edged lichen, speckle-seed whitlow-grass and hyssop in the wall – are so close to earth, the wonder, indeed, is that common-sized people ever see them at all.”
“Could there be any doubt at all, too, that men had always coveted to make much finer and more delicate things than their clumsiness allowed?”
There are other thoughts here upon what the world would be like if everyone was a small as M.
She takes Mrs B as chaperone to fulfil an uncertain ‘tryst’ with the tiny stranger. The meeting eventually evolves, with Mrs B being introduced to Mr. Anon, even though we are led to believe that M knows his real name.
Mrs B is scornful of the environs of Wanderslore, a place that I have heretofore personified as WDLM, the midget as that name’s M. Now defended by M against miggle maggle…
Mrs B…
‘Not a walkable walk, nor the trace of a border; and was there ever such a miggle-maggle of weeds! A fine house in its prime, miss, but now, money melting away like butter in the sun.’
M, meanwhile, praises such wilding!…
‘What you call a miggle-maggle is what these things were made to be.’
And Mr Anon is scornful of Mrs B… Mr Anon is an embodiment of the WDLM?…
“The words curdled on his tongue as he expressed his loathing of poor Mrs. Bowater and her kind – mere Humanity – that ate and drank in musty houses stuck up out of the happy earth like warts on the skin, that battened on meat, stalked its puddled streets and vile, stifling towns, spread its rank odours on the air, increased and multiplied. Monstrous in shape, automatic, blinded by habit, abandoned by instinct, monkey-like, degraded!”
There are other plot machination regarding F’s letter that has now vanished where M left it in the trysting-place. Don’t worry your pretty little head about such sub plots, I suggest. There’re are many sub plots in this work.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
“The idiot clock chimed five.”
I am becoming quite frustrated by the Fanny, Miss M, & Crimble thirds of a whole kerfuffle, by long-winded epistle or whatever. Beautifully written, though, with many thoughts to hold. As M regrets her sharp words to the tiny stranger and they meet at night under stars as reconcilement? Mrs B now seems persuaded that any arguably worthy fish one catches is worth keeping! Meanwhile, I look forward — so as to clear my head — to Miss M visiting the sea at hopefully an equally persuasive Lyme Regis along with Mrs B!
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Mainly, after bits about the troublous Crimble-Fanny knot, a delightful chapter, whereby our M meets Mr Anon in a countryside scene worthy of WDLM, ducks and all, and what he imparts to her near Wanderslore could have come from WDLM himself. It is to he, WDLM, she speaks? …
“There can’t be one God for the common-sized, and one for – for me; now, can there? […] Did you not say yourself that the smaller the body is, the happier the ghost in it?”
“Was there, even at this very moment, cramped up among the moss and the roots, a crazy, brutal Pan in the woods? And those delicious Nymphs and Naiads! What would he do if one beckoned to him? – or Pan’s pipes began wheedling?”
He even outstares a sheep dog…
And even Mrs B is in full rapport with them as she later stares at them “like that of a grown-up peeping into a child’s dolls’ house.”
Now, without him, we head for LYME REGIS…
Chapters Twenty-Nine and Thirty
Starting off happy, the journey to Lyme Regis with Mrs B and the idyllic start of her holiday, with fulsome WDLM enhancements of sea and of Cobb, and, earlier, a happy first class train journey locked in for safety despite the possibility of being cut short! Then a carriage ride – all exhilarating in exhilarating prose. But then a tragic downturn by news coming to them of Mrs Monnerie planning to take over our Miss M from Mrs B and also news of the Fanny-Crimble knot, involving decapitation? Surely not such a knot untied thus? I fully fail to understand. Something more than simple intrigue.
Chapter Thirty-One
For me, emotionally confused machinations regarding a box and its money back in Beechwood, and later the story is taken over not by money but by Mrs Monnerie?
The Miss M/ Crimble/ Fanny knot in even more tragic intensity leads, I guess, to Miss M abandoning Beechwood for LONDON….
This review continues here: https://nullimmortalis.wordpress.com/27208-2/