One can hardly think of a less Jonathan Swift-like poet than Walter de la Mare (1873-1956), yet each is a master in his own wayward fashion. Both have been marketed as authors of children’s books, and I have read and enjoyed both since I was a boy. Swift I never doubted was for grownups but de la Mare I had unconsciously segregated as “minor,” exclusively a “children’s poet” for whom the adult reader has to make allowances. Thus, the lasting power of ignorance and snobbery. Lately I have been reading the verse and prose of de la Mare, friend to Robert Frost and Edward Thomas, much admired by Eliot and Auden, and have reevaluated his worth. Here is his “Jonathan Swift,” published in Inward Companion: Poems (1950):
“That sovereign mind;
Those
bleak, undaunted eyes;
Never
to life, or love, resigned –
How strange
that he who abhorred cant, humbug, lies,
Should be
aggrieved by such simplicities
As
age, as ordure, and as size.”
De la Mare
captures Swift’s conflicted, contradictory nature. By “size,” of course, he
refers to Gulliver, reminding us of Dr. Johnson’s silly dismissal of Swift’s
greatest book: “When once you have thought of big men and little men, it is
very easy to do all the rest.” Speaking
of size, de la Mare’s finest novel is the strange and delightful Memoirs of a Midget (1921). Normally, I’m
allergic to fantasy but Memoirs is
an exception to every rule I can muster. About Memoirs of a Midget in her “London Letter” in the May 1929 issue of
The Bookman, Rebecca West writes:
“Thus it
happens that all the best imaginative productions of the last decade in
England—Walter de la Mare’s Memoirs of a
Midget, David Garnett’s Lady Into Fox,
Sylvia Townsend Warner’s Mr. Fortune’s
Maggot, A. E. Coppard’s Best Short
Stories and Virginia Woolf’s Orlando—have
all been in the nature of fantasies. Yes, London is like a museum in which there
can flourish only the drones who like conning over the books of the dead, or
the strange souls who are so transported out of themselves by ecstasy that they
might as well be there as anywhere else.”
West
obviously is forgetting Ford Madox Ford, Ivy Compton-Burnett and P.G. Wodehouse,
but I draw the line at Virginia Woolf.
2 comments:
Rebecca West's use of "conning" was new to me. Thanks for a new word, Patrick!
West also forgot Warner's novel of witchcraft, Lolly Willowes, though she gets points for including Lady into Fox, which is a brilliant and disturbing tale. I have a treasured paperback copy from the 40's that also includes Garnett's A Man in the Zoo. Both stories remind me a little of John Collier.
In your perusal of de la Mare, make sure you take Benadryl before you read "Seaton's Aunt"; it's one of the greatest ghost stories ever written.
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