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.
STORIES OF LANDSCAPE AND FEAR, 1925-1938, by Helen de Guerry Simpson
Edited by Melissa Edmundson
My previous reviews of classic or older works: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/reviews-of-older-books/
When I read this book, my thoughts will appear in the comment stream below…
PART FOUR, AS CONTINUED FROM HERE: https://nullimmortalis.wordpress.com/27208-2/
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…
THE RETURN by Walter de la MareWith 22 comments
‘Memoirs of a Midget’ by Walter de la MareWith 19 comments
Stories by Walter De La MareIn "Walter de la Mare"
MONK’S HILL
Chapters Forty-Four and Forty-Five
This is the crux or epiphany of M’s Memoirs, I sense, having read them once before fifty plus years ago. It seems appropriate that I now re-read these chapters on this Christmas Day, as M is reborn within a dream as a soldier on a battlefield. Also, she has been exiled in shame to countrified Monk’s Hill from the social heights of No. 2, because of her behaviour at her own coming of age banquet, and the ‘green stuff’ she had imbibed as spiked by Percy. But from bad things a resurrection happens, as she comes to terms with her own feelings for Fanny and crude Adam Waggett. But what of Mr Anon, I ask myself?
It is the circus — so evocatively, almost frighteningly described by the God’s Eye of Wanderslore’s WDL(M) — that trundles by her new abode, with all its caged and freakish accoutrements, and her sudden realisation that she herself could be a ‘gold mine’ for such a scenario, as she is told. This is the epiphany itself, I guess, and I think again of Angela Carter’s ‘Lizzie’s Tiger’ that I first read and reviewed here only a comparatively short while ago.
Meantime, just two of my takes from a choice of many, in these passages from the two chapters…
“In that sheltered half-light I stood myself before a down-tilted looking-glass. If I had been malshapen, limbless, contorted, I would have drowned myself in mud rather than feed man’s hunger for the monstrous and obscene. No, I was a beautiful thing, even if God had been idly at play, when He had shaped me, and had then flung away the mould; even if to Mrs. Monnerie I was nothing much better than a disreputable marionette. So I boasted myself. Percy’s Chartreuse had been mere whey compared with the fleeting glimpse of a tame circus elephant.”
“I was but a kind of infinitesimal will-o’-the wisp gliding from peak to peak of an infernal mausoleum of which every eye, though dead, was watching me. But there was one Eye …”
Chapter Forty-Six
“In the attitude of Madame Recamier in the picture, I reclined on a lustrous spread of crimson satin and rabbit skin draped over a small lump of wood for bolster to give support to my elbow.”
It is tellingly Adam W who takes, in Chakka’s cage, M the ‘me’ of these entrancing memoirs to the circus, and she negotiates a fee for her future work as exhibit and living doll upon a pygmy steed, And I am indeed more than entranced at her entrance to this world. And her eye to eye empathy with some of her public. Her subsumption of self at some sort of fulfilment of process as initially triggered by the above elbow moment.
“And a peculiar rapturous gravity spread over me. When one’s very self is wrapt in the ordeal of the passing moment, is lost like that, out of time and space, it seems, well – another presence had stolen into my mind, had taken possession. I cannot explain.”
Chapters Forty-Seven and Forty-Eight
“Isn’t half the world kicking down the faces of those beneath them on the ladder?”
Quiz question for the future: who said that in this book? Who spins the truth in these chapters the most?,
Another turning-point for M, as her love-hate relationship with Fanny crystallises, and she is determined to wreak some crux from her circus showmanship. One more show to do and earn some crowns? To and fro wherever in Kent the circus winds in a cage wielded by Adam W? She lists, amidst her plight of aloneness in this world, some of the characters we have met…
“Mrs. Monnerie there; stepping into her brougham, ebony cane in hand, Marvell at her elbow; Mrs. Bowater languishing on board ship, limp head in stiff frilling; Sir Walter dumb; the showman cursing his wretched men; the bills being posted, the implacable future mutely yawning, the past unutterable. Everything in its orbit. Was there no help, no refuge?”
She also thinks of Anon’s consumption, while she dallies with a blue butterfly, and is determined to return to him, or is she not? But she does also glimpse another, presumably full-sized, man in the audience of her circus show…
“Aloof, his head a little bowed down, his face in profile, he stood there, framed in the opening, dusky, level-featured, deep-eyed – a Stranger. What in me rushed as if on wings into his silent company? A passionate longing beyond words burned in me. I seemed to be carried away into a boundless wilderness – stunted trees, salt in the air, a low, enormous stretch of night sky, space; and this man, master of soul and solitude.”
WDLM?
“What was the meaning of it all – this enormous ocean of time and space in which I was lost? Never else than a stranger. That couldn’t be true of the men and women who really keep the world’s ‘pot boiling’.”
Chapter Forty-Nine and Fifty
“There is our beloved Sovereign on her throne; and there the last innocent little victim in its cradle; and there’s the old sun waggishly illuminating the whole creaking stage. Blind beggar and dog, Toby, artists, authors, parsons, statesmen – heart and everything else, or everything else but heart, on sleeve – and all on show – every one of them – at something a look. No, my dear, there’s only one private life, the next; and, according to some accounts, that will be more public than ever. And so twirls the Merry-go-Round.”
That is said by Mrs M, that we are all on stage, said amidst mild ‘midget-baiting’, with Susan, Fanny and M herself, debating M’s concern for another midget on circus-show called Angélique. None of us unique.
And so to a new section between these two chapters: WANDERSLORE and to Mr Anon. A chance deliberate encounter of sorts as he rescues her from passage around quagmire and over stile. An escape, a fear of claustrophobic life, but also fear of escaping it? Death or a fairy tale eternity?
“Shouldn’t life be a High Road, didn’t he think; surely not a hot, silly zigzag of short cuts leading back to the place you started from, and you too old or stupid, perhaps, to begin again?”
Chapter Fifty-One and Fifty-Two
“The old pony plodded up yet another hill; we went clattering down its deep descent; and there, in the green bowl of a meadow sloping down from its woody fringes above, lay scattered the bellying booths, the gaudy wagons and cages of the circus. All but hidden in the trees above them, a crooked, tarnished weathercock glinted in the sunset afterglow. Lights twinkled against the dying daylight. The bright-painted merry-go-round with its staring, motionless, galloping horses was bathed in the shine of its flares, a thin plume of steam softly ascending from its brass-rimmed funnel. A knot of country boys, gabbling at one another like starlings, shrilled a cheer as we came rattling over a stone bridge beneath which a stream shallowly washed its bank of osiers. I laughed at them, waved my hand. At this they yelled, danced in the road, threw dust into the air. Not, perhaps, a very friendly return; but how happy I was, all anxiety and responsibility gone now. The faint, rank smell of the wild beasts mingling with the evening air was instilling its intoxication in my brain. I longed for darkness, the din and glare; longed for my tent and the gaping faces, for the smoky wind to fan my cheek as I bobbed cantering round the ring.”
This is literature’s apotheosis of light and dark circus, the freeing of Midgetina’s spirit, the painted masquerade in the living transmigrated role of Angélique for greedy eyes, even Mrs M and the gentry turn up to gawp at this tableau, crucially…
“Mrs. Monnerie had paid for elbow room.”
Mr Anon and M merged, as a further transmigration? …as he clumsily fills in for her on the horse act, before the elephant comes on. No way to do justice to these two chapters and their interlinking tensions, glances, mergings, imprisonings and freedoms. ‘The showman’, too, who might be the man too mean to be me, who is WDLM.
“Would he not realize, too, that even my small body had its value, and was admired in a dismal world that cared not a jot for the spirit that inhabited it?”
“‘I dreamt that I dwe-elt in mar-ar-ble halls,’ I piped out in a quavering falsetto. The folly of taking things so solemnly. What was humanity but a dressed-up ape?”
“Yet so much alone were she and I in that last infinite moment that we might have been whispering together after death.”
“…the watching multitude beneath the enormous mushroom of the tent,…”
We have all paid for ‘elbow room’, I say!
More than just elbow, more a mortal pain to supplant those now vanished mergings and circus smells… three very short chapters… and beware SPOILERS galore below while the last chapter of these memoirs is writ under the heading LYNDSEY, but still writ, it says, by M herself? Or by WDLM in hope at what might have been?
Fifty-Three, Fifty-Four and Fifty-Five
“‘My shoulder,’ he answered thickly, as if the words came sluggishly and were half-strange to him. ‘I fell …Nothing: nothing. Only that I love you.’”
Both Anon and M by pony trap back to Wanderslore and Beechwoood…
“I realized how sorely he was hurt, yet not then in my stupidity and horror – or is it that I refused to confess it to myself? – that his hurt was mortal.”
Anon he was, now Nemonymous he shall remain.
“I crouched on the ground, elbows and knees, and now kept steady watch upon those night-hung upper windows.”
An old woman who had hung herself now returned?
“All that day I spent in the neighbourhood of the water, overhung with the colourless trumpets of convolvulus.”
“He was dead; and I had killed him – pride, vanity, greed, obstinacy, lovelessness. Every flower and fading leaf bore witness against me.”
“…a self sat at the windows of my eyes gazing heedlessly out over that peace and beauty without consciousness even of grief and despair.”
“At last, a continuous churring, like the noise of a rattle, near at hand, betrayed them, I lay in my solitude in the midst of a whirling flock of nightjars,…”
Then poised to be poisoned: an ‘evil bush’ of nightshade, or something far more personal?
“– a voice like none I had ever heard in the world until that moment. Yet I raised the fruit to my lips. Its bitter juices jetted out upon cheek, mouth, and tongue, for ever staining me with their dye.”
“A gigantic nightjar swirled on me, plucking at my hair.”
“A piercing, vindictive voice was calling me. No hope now. I was damned. In senseless hallucination I began systematically, laboriously, a frenzied search. Leaf, pebble, crawling night-creature – with slow, animal-like care, I turned them over one by one, seeking and seeking.”
“…and that wildest, happiest, cruellest, dearest, blackest twelvemonth of my life?”
“That is so; and so I must leave it, hoping against hope that one friend at any rate will consent in his love and wisdom to take me seriously, and to remember me, not with scorn or even with pity, but as if, life for life, we had shared the world on equal terms.”
I am that friend, I hope, at last. To wake this book to its due acclaim without any woke fears for its entitlement as midget!
end
GREY SAND AND WHITE SAND
“Her absence brought things nearer, halved the weight of time.”
This is quite a stunning and worrying revelation, a painstakingly detailed story of a male painter called Hilary Monk, alongside merging, almost anthropomorphic seasons and sands and sea and skies that remind me of where I live and where I wander, too. With tricksy winds. And psychologically shifting sands, as he finds a secret in a marsh, and uses his painting and his own seemingly autonomous and rebellious thoughts to battle against such a secret in order somehow to discover it. His wife in their lonely cottage is almost nastily perceived, a woman who, he finds, knows the secret, too, or so I infer. Till such nastiness reaches a disarmingly non-didactic apotheosis. As if one of his battles, the one with his own thoughts, results in what was merely seen — a reached pointlessness of ‘disdain’ in his marriage as well as in his own painting — as becoming something far more brutal than just the black cockerel he captures for some unknown ritual of legacy or posterity. The neuro-diverse weather and the painter now as one? The secret of this story about a secret as well as a would-be miracle will no doubt continue to bug me and also make me “vaguely connected in some way with the secret”— as once happened with the sandman?
PS: This story seems perfectly to fit the overall title of this collection.
I shall be reviewing this book in due course…
THE RITE
“The sun was malignant.”
A textured work of high heat and dilemma. And the flowers in the relative cool shade of this vignette’s Parvus wood were fleshy. Len goes there to shake off grievances with her mother. And to resolve whether to marry an indifferent man for his money or another man because she needed such a man… and when she finally leaves the wood, the omniscience or narrative point of view switches to the wood itself…
Perhaps this was the secret of the previous story’s marsh. Gaia readying to do battle against those who made the sun seem malignant?
THE OUTCAST
The narrator is a woman arriving at an inn on her own, out of the cold, given the parlour as she checked in, after being checked over. Overheard a conversation in the bar about 17 yew trees as memorials, in the local churchyard, for men lost in some wars, but one yew that did not grow right as the man was a foreigner or ‘gypsy’. She returns to her parlour bed and meal. This story did not grow right, either, for me if not a yew for you. But it hangs in the memory.
AS MUCH MORE LAND
“Half an hour gone, anyhow. I haven’t been frightened yet. Not properly. I’ve been making my own terrors.”
This should be a classic ghost story for all ghost story lovers. Perhaps it’s the young priggish, self-entitled, self-styled Patrician of a male protagonist that has prevented it being so, with his thoughts about ‘pose’ and ‘poise’, and the colour white, and Elizabethan poets, and his patronising of the woman who owns the house where he is staying, and where the servants are consigned to the upper floors. And women, in general, to be consigned to the will of God, and yearly confined to the bed with green curtains! Having said that, the story is genuinely spooky, through those very thoughts of the young man, and his daring himself to visit the rumoured haunted room, his precarious means of getting to it on the outside of the building, the nature of induced fear by hearsay versus actual fear, as a haunting tied up with a burning candle where they could not have been such a candle in a room said to be cursed by a now hanged man who had once occupied it, and this priggish young man’s own thoughts seemingly transforming into autonomous thoughts, thoughts with their own volition in dealing with the horrifically prehensile room itself…
The room was a cube, and white….but the rest is yours to read from white blank pages with such a story rumoured to be on them?
YOUNG MAGIC
(Possible spoiler.)
Now something even more special, if that were possible! An ‘imaginary friend’ story perhaps even outdoing the more boy-like Slopbasin Soilipsism stories of Walter de la Mare!
Viola starts, of course, here, as a child with her ‘imaginary friend’ she calls Binns, in all the magic of those times and of large houses and sewing rooms, and pareidoliac cosy fires, flames as flowers, and much else like that, and her sense of her head as a bare attic to fill, and getting her own back on her frustrating nurse by spitefully setting Binns to make the scissors start walking on their round-headed handles towards the nurse! A magical kinetic power? Or something even more rarefied? The passages describing these scissors are second to none.
Or is Binns real in some peculiar sense? As she grows older we feel her associative emotions when in France with its strange songs — and even when aged 17 and a man only she seems to know as James woos her, or does she woo him? And she has these daydreams or real sightings by magic of what he is doing when he is not with her. She somehow resents his absences and she calls him back and perhaps it is only myself who thinks his full name may be James Binns even though he is unaware of his own magical existence. I somehow doubt it, but a part of me does wonder…
Her laughter at the end — does she now relate his presence in her room to the shadow that she herself casts of Binns upon its wall? Whatever the case, I cannot do justice to this substantive work, and I am spoilt for choice in quoting from it, so I shall quote nothing.
Pingback: YOUNG MAGIC by Helen de Guerry Simpson | The Gestalt Real-Time Reviews of Books Edit
DISTURBING EXPERIENCE OF AN ELDERLY LADY
Wondrously prose-styled, this story made me note that the “unostentatious holding of elbows” by the participants of a coach party at glimpse of the roofs of a grandiose English historical house of Kings once staying in it as it first appeared to ‘common’ Mrs Jones. And she took a grievance or jealousy or envy against it, to the extent that, when her husband’s death equally triggered sufficient legacy, she bought it! To get her own back. To halt, as her potential pet builder put it, its hanging together as time’s mighty gestalt. She went through wallpaper patterns you won’t easily forget to alter it beyond recognition, but upon epiphany in the woods nearby after her first night sleeping there, as part of some ‘disorderly folly’ in the grounds that she had seen, you wonder who or what said the perfect ending’s clinching ‘Mine; mine now.’
GOOD COMPANY
A story told by a good friend of Elizabeth. A leasehold Canidia as “half-self”? A saint who shared the soul of Elizabeth (“a wealthy and eccentric foreigner. She was nobility obliged…”) touring Italy, after a most lingering scene Elizabeth witnessed of a religious procession and a holy statue meeting a holy statue, a sort of priestly hide and seek of saints. Elizabeth later arrives penniless, her pack stolen, in a a town and allowed to stay in a room over a wine-shop, upon the promise of a letter with money in it. The wife threatens to evict them both, Elizabeth and the saint within her. But the husband of the place ‘sex-consciously’ importunes Elizabeth as part of her missing rent! This is very complex spiritual material even though I think we know she resists the man but I wonder how the story is told to us at all. By the ‘good company’ of another saint in the shape of a freehold Helen de? — herself with the same bleeding knuckles? A story as some Purgatory of truth as fiction?
“…a number written in metal, the same number but differently wrought, two X’s together;”
A CURIOUS STORY
“‘And it was there you noticed about the shadow?’
‘It noticed itself.’”
A story that needs the poet’s imagination to review it, a reviewer who needs, too, the skill to act out the parts that are in it. Although there seems to be some confusion between ‘the author’ and ‘the poet’ and the latter’s interaction with ‘the actor’, this is a tantalising theatrical ghost story where make-up is applied by a hare’s foot upon the actor by a man who suddenly appears without introduction but is called Gibbons. The actor, or the author describing him, seems to think he is ‘clay’ acting to an audience of ‘lumps of dough’, and there is a ghostly actress as a shadow of pain evolving in this work, making it a ghost story that might appeal to Reggie Oliver and his readers, should they be given the poet’s imagination that the actor gives him. Meantime, the author, if he is indeed another character in it rather than its typo, threatens to turn this brief curious story into a novel, I guess. Thus giving them all substance more than mere clay or dough?
THE MAN WHO HAD GREAT POSSESSIONS
“He was no longer gracefully strong as the room was accustomed to see him, for he had forgotten to adjust that other appearance which here was his, and the clumsy and angular figure with which his mirror in the real world was familiar had leave to show itself.”
This a writerly tour de force that no review could possibly do justice to. A story about writer’s block? Paradoxically gauche, too, but inspiring what I dream to be a Big Book of Gauche Stories, Ghost characters that grow and flourish — and fight back at the author, or ironically with whom the author or his protagonist is in unrequited love, and this one is about a man with only one friend called Philip but a whole imaginative life whereby he created a real terrain with a woman who lives by having this written fiction about her, whence she then becomes autonomous. He seeks to retrieve the manuscript from the friend to whom he had sent the sole manuscript for comment, to reclaim the woman he had created… unless I have clumsily, if creatively, misinterpreted it all!
There is so much more in this work, and I guess its male author as fiction character has been effectively created by a female author, and here we experience a description of her being the one he truly seeks so as to reclaim her or to melt back into her or somehow to punish or even to love her without unrequitedness, the Guerry de Guerre and its rapprochements between fiction and reality?
TEIGNE
A strange strangeness of a story, a story without structure, about the Teigne structure of a folly as house-within-castle, that, over the generations, involves you in the adumbrated lives of of those who built it and who lived in it and who eventually demolished it to escape its curse. But the latter tenant — tellingly named Mr La Vie who is a collector — was pursued by some of its contents….
THE PLEDGE
The beautiful thing about this book is how different each story is from the others. This one of a well-conjured street, now a distance from the sea but near enough to see it, a street of ship-like buildings with portholes and it tells of a woman called Miss Alquist, as a lodger in one house, whose ‘acquisitions’ accrete gradually and thus the space she takes up threatens the family living there as she yearns for her lover once lost at sea. And one night she has a vision of the sea getting closer… The exquisite prose style is as textured as some of the objects in it, including a brooch with blue feathers, a prose to die for. Can a sea leave its mark upon where its hasn’t been, I ask?
THE PYTHONESS
“I could hardly leave her boo-hooing after me like a punished dog and so took action at once; gripped her by the elbow,…”
As described earlier in this review, there is possibly the classic ‘imaginary friend’ story, and this the similar candidacy as the classic ‘séance’ story, full of suspense with ungainly love and secrets revealed. The medium is a gauche lady called Mrs Bain who performs her skills ‘stark’ and with a coil of heavy black hair, one of the party being called Pybus, but those are perhaps asides. The man somehow attracted to this ‘ugly’ widow Mrs Bain is the widower Mortimer whose late wife Aileen is now a catalyst from the realms of death….
But what, I ask, is the pythoness? The meaning of THONESS by numerology is said to be ‘Leader, Visionary, Powerful’. And I shudder at the thought of Mrs Bain’s involuntary trance and the beguiling humour in the last words of this story, a story about a few baneful HYPNOSES et al. And what part did Tarrant and the possibly unreliable narrator called Findlay play in this fateful ‘circle’?
AN EXPERIMENT OF THE DEAD
“Time will show.”
A solicitor who loves Jarndyce & Jarndyce, evidently!
But ironically he seems facilitator of an explicitly thaumaturgical pact that speeds up a proof of life after death, as a woman to be hanged for murder returns straight after it happens. A fitting coda to this book, with another lethally humorous ending similar to the one above, the whole book itself being a gestalt better than any of its parts, even though at least two of its parts, as adumbrated above, are potential separate classics of the supernatural. “We may safely leave the whole matter to Time.”
end