'A Soliloquy for Two'

The ideally named English neurologist Russell Brain died in 1966 but his textbook, Brain’s Diseases of the Nervous System (1933), remains in print. The Royal College of Physicians has called it “the standard British textbook on his subject.” Brain was also a poet and wrote studies of Jonathan Swift, Christopher Smart, Dr. Johnson and Charles Dickens. He befriended Walter de la Mare in the final years of the poet’s life and published a slender memoir of his friend, Tea with Walter de la Mare (Faber and Faber, 1957). Beginning in 1951, Brain would visit de la Mare at his home in Twickenham and the men would talk: 

“His talk was highly idiosyncratic: perhaps it can best be described as a soliloquy for two; and in this form it could not survive in a larger company.”

 

Much of the book is a transcript of their conversations, two highly learned, well-read, articulate men. After leaving de la Mare, Brain would write down as much of their talk as he could remember. The result is the most charming book I have read in years. De la Mare seems to have been a hedonist of the imagination. He loved dreams and altered states of consciousness. He was open to the existence of ghosts, telepathy and survival after death but seems not to have been dogmatic about anything. I marvel at his equanimity, friendliness, sense of wonder and absence of pretentiousness. Two successive paragraphs:

 

“He asked: ‘Which is more real, a character in fiction, someone you have imagined, someone you have dreamed about, or someone you know but who is absent? Most people say a character in fiction, but how odd! Why should a character in fiction seem more real than an actual person?’

 

“Comparing youth and age he said that as one grew old one felt that there was nowhere further to go. So many questions were unanswerable and yet one had a feeling  that a single answer might explain a good many things.”   

 

In 2008, in the British Medical Journal’s “Medical Classics” feature, Dr. Martin Eastwood wrote of Tea with Walter de la Mare: “The language of the book is deceptively simple, the pace slow and redolent of two friends gently exploring complex topics over tea. It is a privilege to eavesdrop on the private conversations of such men.”

 

Here is a late poem by de la Mare, “. . . All Gone . . .” (O Lovely England and Other Poems, 1953), written around the time he and Brain were meeting:

 

“‘Age takes in pitiless hands

All one loves most away;

Peace, joy, simplicity

Where then their inward stay?’

 

“Or so, at least they say.

 

“‘Marvel of noontide light,

Of gradual break of day;

Dreams, visions of the night

Age withers all away.’

 

“Yes, that is what they say.

 

‘Wonder of winter snow,

Magic of wandering moon,

The starry hosts of heaven –

Come seventy, all are gone.

 

‘Unhappy when alone,

Nowhere at peace to be;

Drowned the old self-sown eager thoughts

Constantly stirring in thee!’ . . .

 

“Extraordinary!

That’s what they say to me.”

 

De la Mare was born on this date, April 25, in 1873, and died at age eighty-three in 1956. My brother, who died last August, would have turned seventy today.