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Walter de la Mare | |
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 Photo of Walter de la Mare by Lady Otoline Morrell | |
| Born | Walter John de la Mare (1873-04-25)25 April 1873 Charlton, Kent, England |
| Died | 22 June 1956(1956-06-22) (aged 83) Twickenham,Middlesex, England |
| Occupation | Writer |
| Genre | Poetry Supernatural fiction Children's literature |
| Notable awards | James Tait Black Memorial Prize 1921 Carnegie Medal 1947 |
Walter John de la MareOM CH (/ˈdɛləˌmɛər/;[1] 25 April 1873 – 22 June 1956) was an English poet, short story writer and novelist. He is probably best remembered for hisworks for children, for his poem "The Listeners",[2] and for hispsychological horror short fiction, including "Seaton's Aunt", "The Green Room" and "All Hallows". In 1921, his novelMemoirs of a Midget won theJames Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction,[3] and his post-warCollected Stories for Children won the 1947Carnegie Medal for British children's books.[4]
De la Mare was born at 83, Maryon Road,Charlton, then in the county ofKent but now part of theRoyal Borough of Greenwich. He was partly descended from a family of FrenchHuguenot silk merchants through his father, James Edward de la Mare (1811–1877), a principal at theBank of England; his mother was James's second wife, Lucy Sophia (1838–1920), daughter of a Scottishnaval surgeon and author, Dr Colin Arrott Browning.[5] (The suggestion that Lucy was related to the poetRobert Browning has been found to be incorrect.) He had two brothers, Francis Arthur Edward and James Herbert, and four sisters, Florence Mary, Constance Eliza, Ethel (who died in infancy) and Ada Mary. De la Mare preferred to be known as "Jack" to his family and friends, as he disliked the name Walter.
De la Mare was educated atSt Paul's Cathedral School, then worked from 1890 to 1908 in the statistics department of the London office ofStandard Oil. He left the company after SirHenry Newbolt arranged for him to receive aCivil List pension so that he could concentrate on writing.
In 1892 de la Mare joined the Esperanza Amateur Dramatics Club, where he met and fell in love with (Constance) Elfrida Ingpen, the leading lady, who was ten years older than him. Her father, William Alfred Ingpen, was Clerk to the Insolvent Debtors Court and Clerk of the Rules.[5] De la Mare and Elfrida were married on 4 August 1899, and they went on to have two sons and two daughters. The family lived inBeckenham andAnerley from 1899 till 1924.[6] The home in Anerley in South London was the scene of many parties, notable for imaginative games ofcharades.[7]
From 1925 to 1939, de la Mare lived at Hill House, Taplow.[8]
On 7 September 1929, his daughter, Janette de la Mare[9] married Donald John Ringwood inTaplow, Buckinghamshire, England.[10]
In 1940 Elfrida de la Mare was diagnosed withParkinson's disease. She spent the rest of her life as an invalid and died in 1943.
From 1940 until his death de la Mare lived inSouth End House, Montpelier Row,Twickenham, on the same street on whichAlfred, Lord Tennyson, had lived. De la Mare won the annualCarnegie Medal, from theLibrary Association, recognising the year's best children's book by aBritish subject, for hisCollected Stories for Children (Faber and Faber, 1947).[4] It was the first collection to win the award.
De la Mare suffered from acoronary thrombosis in 1947 and died of another in 1956. He spent his final year mostly bedridden, being cared for by a nurse whom he loved but never had a physical relationship with.[11] His ashes are buried in the crypt ofSt Paul's Cathedral, where he had once been a choirboy.
Come Hither is an anthology edited by de la Mare, mostly of poems, but with some prose. It has aframe story and can be read on several levels. It was first published in 1923 and was a success; further editions have followed. It includes a selection of poems by the leadingGeorgian poets (from de la Mare's perspective).
De la Mare was, notably, a writer ofghost stories. His collectionsEight Tales,The Riddle and Other Stories,The Connoisseur and Other Stories,On the Edge andThe Wind Blows Over each contain several ghost stories.
De la Mare's supernatural horror writings were favourites ofH. P. Lovecraft, who in his comprehensive studySupernatural Horror in Literature said that de la Mare "is able to put into his occasional fear-studies a keen potency which only a rare master can achieve".[12] Lovecraft singled out for praise de la Mare's short stories "Seaton's Aunt", "The Tree", "Out of the Deep", "Mr Kempe", "A Recluse" and "All Hallows", along with his novelThe Return.
Gary William Crawford has described de la Mare's supernatural fiction for adults as being "among the finest to appear in the first half of this century", whilst noting the disparity between the high quality and low quantity of de la Mare's mature horror stories.[13] Other notable de la Mare ghost/horror stories are "A:B:O", "Crewe", "The Green Room" and "Winter".
A number of later writers of supernatural fiction have cited de la Mare's ghost stories as inspirational, includingRobert Aickman,Ramsey Campbell,[13]David A. McIntee andReggie Oliver.Horror fiction scholarS. T. Joshi has said that de la Mare's supernatural fiction "should always have an audience that will shudder apprehensively at its horror and be moved to somber reflection by its pensive philosophy".[14]
For children de la Mare wrote thefairy taleThe Three Mulla Mulgars (1910, later retitledThe Three Royal Monkeys), praised by the literary historianJulia Briggs as a "neglected masterpiece"[15] and by the criticBrian Stableford as a "classic animal fantasy".[16]Richard Adams described it as his favourite novel.[17]
Joan Aiken cited some of de la Mare's short stories, such as "The Almond Tree" and "Sambo and the Snow Mountains", for their sometimes unexplained quality, which she also employed in her own work.[18][clarification needed]
De la Mare described two distinct "types" of imagination – although "aspects" might be a better term: the childlike and the boylike. It was at the border between the two thatShakespeare,Dante, and the rest of the great poets lay.
De la Mare opined that all children fall into the category of having a childlike imagination at first, which is usually replaced at some point in their lives. He explained in the lecture "Rupert Brooke and the Intellectual Imagination"[19][a] that children "are not bound in by their groping senses. Facts to them are the liveliest of chameleons. [...] They are contemplatives, solitaries,fakirs, who sink again and again out of the noise and fever of existence and into a waking vision." His biographer Doris Ross McCrosson summarises this passage, "Children are, in short, visionaries." This visionary view of life can be seen as either vital creativity and ingenuity, or fatal disconnection from reality (or, in a limited sense, both).
The increasing intrusions of the external world upon the mind, however, frighten the childlike imagination, which "retires like a shocked snail into its shell". From then onward the boyish imagination flourishes, the "intellectual, analytical type".
By adulthood (de la Mare proposed), the childlike imagination has either retreated forever or grown bold enough to face the real world. Thus emerge the two extremes of thespectrum of adult minds:logical anddeductive orintuitive andinductive. For de la Mare, "The one knows that beauty is truth, the other reveals that truth is beauty." Yet another way he puts it is that the visionary's source of poetry is within, while the intellectual's sources are without – external – in "action, knowledge of things, and experience" (McCrosson's phrasing). De la Mare hastens to add that this does not make the intellectual's poetry any less good, but it is clear where his own preference lies.[a]
Six poems were published byFaber and Faber as part of theAriel Poems, for both series. They were the following:
C. K. Scott Moncrieff, in translatingMarcel Proust's seven-volume workRemembrance of Things Past, used the last line of de la Mare's poem "The Ghost" as the title of the sixth volume,The Sweet Cheat Gone[22][23] (French:Albertine Disparu andLa Fugitive).
In 1944Faber and Faber and one of de la Mare's friends, a certain Dr Bett, arranged to secretly produce a tribute for his 75th birthday.[24] This publication was a collaborative effort involving many admirers of Walter de la Mare's work, and included individual pieces by a variety of authors, includingV. Sackville-West,[25]J. B. Priestley,[26]T. S. Eliot,[27][28]Siegfried Sassoon,[29]Lord Dunsany,[30] andHenry Williamson.[31]
Richard Adams's debut novelWatership Down (1972) uses several of de la Mare's poems as epigraphs.[32]
De la Mare's playCrossings has an important role inRobertson Davies's novelThe Manticore. In 1944, when the protagonist David Staunton is sixteen, de la Mare's play is produced by the pupils of his sister's school in Toronto. Staunton falls deeply in love with the girl playing the main role, a first love that has a profound effect on the rest of his life.[33]
Symposium byMuriel Spark quotes de la Mare's poem "Fare Well": "Look thy last on all things lovely / Every hour."[citation needed].
Benjamin Britten set several of de la Mare's verses to music: de la Mare's version of the traditional song "Levy-Dew" in 1934, and five others, which were then collected inTit for Tat.[34]
Theodore Chanler used texts from de la Mare's story "'Benighted'" for his song cycle8 Epitaphs.[35]
Julian de la Mare and Jane Baddeley (daughter ofAngela Baddeley) fight for the last of the cakes at the wedding of Janette de la Mare and Donald John Ringwood in Taplow. Janette is the daughter of poet and author Walter de la Mare.
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