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Walter de la Mare

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Walter de la Mare
Walter de la Mare in 1924 (photo by Lady Ottoline Morrell)
Walter de la Mare in 1924
(photo by Lady Ottoline Morrell)
BornWalter John de la Mare
(1873-04-25)April 25, 1873
Charlton, Kent
DiedJune 22, 1956(1956-06-22) (aged 83)
Twickenham, London
OccupationWriter
GenrePoetry, supernatural fiction, children's literature
Notable awardsJames Tait Black Prize
1921
Carnegie Medal in Literature
1947

Walter John de la Mare, OM, CH (/ˈdɛləˌmɛər/;[1] 25 April 1873 – 22 June 1956) was an English poet, short story writer and novelist. He is probably best remembered for his works for children and for his poem "The Listeners". He also wrote some subtle psychological horror stories, amongst them "Seaton's Aunt" and "Out of the Deep". His 1921 novel Memoirs of a Midget won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction[2] and his post-war Collected Stories for Children won the 1947 Carnegie Medal for British children's books.[3]

Life

De la Mare was born in Kent at 74 Maryon Road, Charlton,[4] now part of the Royal Borough of Greenwich), partly descended from a family of French Huguenots, and was educated at St Paul's Cathedral School. He was born to James Edward de la Mare, a clerk at the Bank of England, and Lucy Sophia Browning (James' second wife), daughter of Scottish naval surgeon and author Dr Colin Arrott Browning. The assertion that Lucy was related to poet Robert Browning has been found to be incorrect. He had two brothers, Francis Arthur Edward and James Herbert ('Bert'), and four sisters Florence Mary, Constance Eliza, Ethel (who died in infancy), and Ada Mary ('Poppy'). De la Mare was known as Jack by his family and friends as he hated the name Walter.

In 1892, de la Mare joined the Esperanza Amateur Dramatics Club, where he met and fell in love with Elfrida (Elfie) Ingpen, the leading lady, who was ten years older than he. She was pregnant when they were married on 4 August 1899. They went on to have 4 children: Richard Herbert Ingpen ('Dick'), Colin, Florence and Lucy Elfrida ('Jinnie') de la Mare. Their house at Anerley in south London was the scene of many parties, notable for imaginative games of charades.

De la Mare's first book, Songs of Childhood, was published under the name Walter Ramal. He worked in the statistics department of the London office of Standard Oil for eighteen years while struggling to bring up a family, but nevertheless found time to write. In 1908, through the efforts of Sir Henry Newbolt he received a Civil List pension which enabled him to concentrate on writing.

In 1940, Elfie was diagnosed with Parkinson's disease and spent the rest of her life as an invalid, eventually dying in 1943. From 1940 until his death, de la Mare lived in South End House, Montpelier Row, Twickenham, the same street where Alfred, Lord Tennyson had lived a century earlier.[5] For the Collected Stories for Children (Faber & Faber, 1947), he won the annual Carnegie Medal in Literature from the Library Association, recognising the year's best children's book by a British subject.[3] It was the first collection to win the award.

De la Mare suffered from a coronary thrombosis in 1947 and died of another in 1956. His ashes are buried in the crypt of St Paul's Cathedral, where he had once been a choirboy.

The imagination

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 that Shakespeare, Dante, and the rest of the great poets lay.

De la Mare claimed 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".[a] [when?] Children "are not so closely confined and 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 for ever or grown bold enough to face the real world. Thus emerge the two extremes of the spectrum of adult minds: the mind moulded by the boylike is "logical" and "deductive". That shaped by the childlike becomes "intuitive, inductive". 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 terms). 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]

Writer Joan Aiken cited some of his short stories such as Almond Trees and Snow Mountains for their sometimes unexplained quality, which she also employed in her own work.[6][clarification needed]

Come Hither

Come Hither was an anthology, edited by de la Mare, mostly of poetry with some prose. It has a frame story, and can be read on several levels. It was first published in 1923, and was a success; further editions followed. Alongside children's literature it includes a selection of the leading Georgian poets (from de la Mare's perspective). It is arguably also the best account of their "hinterland", documenting thematic concerns and a selection of their predecessors.

Supernaturalism

De la Mare was also a significant writer of ghost stories. John Clute comments that "in his long career, de la Mare seems to have published about 100 stories, of which about eighty-five have been collected. At least forty of these have supernatural content".[7] Many of de la Mare's ghost stories can be found in the collections Eight Tales, The Riddle and Other Stories, The Connoisseur and Other Stories, On the Edge and The Wind Blows Over. His complete short stories have now been published in three volumes issued by Giles de la Mare Publishers, London. De la Mare also wrote two supernatural novels, Henry Brocken (1904) and The Return (1910). His poem The Ghost Chase appeared in Punch magazine, March 26, 1941 (page 299) and was illustrated by Rowland Emett. For children, de la Mare wrote the fairy tale The Three Mulla Mulgars (1910, AKA The Three Royal Monkeys), praised by literary historian Julia Briggs as a "neglected masterpiece" [8] and by critic Brian Stableford as a "classic animal fantasy".[9] 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".[10] Boucher and McComas, however, dismissed his 1949 Collected Tales, saying "we freely admit we find Mr de la Mare's self-consciously subtle wordiness unreadable."[11]

Several writers of supernatural fiction, including Robert Aickman and Ramsey Campbell,[10] have cited de la Mare's fiction as inspirational.

Family

Works

Novels

  • Henry Brocken (1904)
  • The Three Mulla Mulgars (1910) – also published as The Three Royal Monkeys (children's novel)
  • The Return (1910; revised edition 1922; second revised edition 1945)
  • Memoirs of a Midget (1921)
  • Mr. Bumps and His Monkey (1942)

Short story collections

  • The Riddle and Other Stories (1923)
  • Ding Dong Bell (1924)
  • Broomsticks and Other Tales (1925) (children's stories)
  • The Connoisseur and Other Stories (1926)
  • On the Edge (1930)
  • The Lord Fish (1930) (children's stories)
  • The Walter de la Mare Omnibus (1933)
  • The Wind Blows Over (1936)
  • The Nap and Other Stories (1936)
  • Stories, Essays and Poems (1938)
  • The Best Stories of Walter de la Mare (1942)
  • Collected Stories for Children (1947)
  • A Beginning and Other Stories (1955)
  • Eight Tales (1971)
  • Walter de la Mare, Short Stories 1895–1926 (1996), Walter de la Mare, Short Stories 1927–1956 (2000), and Walter de la Mare, Short Stories for Children (2006) (Complete edition, ed. Giles de la Mare)

Poetry collections

  • Songs of Childhood (1902)
  • The Listeners (1912)
  • Peacock Pie (1913) (illustrated by Rowland Emett)
  • The Marionettes (1918)
  • Bells and Grass (1941) (illustrated by Rowland Emett)
  • O Lovely England (1952)
  • Walter de la Mare, The Complete Poems Giles de la Mare (1969)

Plays

  • Crossings: A Fairy Play (1921)

Nonfiction

  • Some Women Novelists of the 'Seventies (1929)
  • Desert Islands and Robinson Crusoe (1930)

Anthologies edited

  • Come Hither (1923; new and revised edition, 1928; third edition, reset and printed from new plates, 1957)
  • Early one Morning, in the Spring. Chapters on children and on childhood as it is revealed in particular in early memories and in early writings. (1935)
  • Behold, This Dreamer! Of reverie, night, sleep, dream, love-dreams, nightmare, death, the unconscious, the imagination, divination, the artist, and kindred subjects. (1939)
  • Love (1943)

References in other works

De la Mare's play Crossings has an important role in Robertson Davies' novel The 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, Canada. Staunton falls deeply in love with the girl playing the main role – a first love which would have a profound effect on the rest of his life.

See also

Notes

  1. ^ a b In the lecture "Rupert Brooke and the Intellectual Imagination", de la Mare used the term "imagination" for both the intellectual and the visionary. To simplify and clarify his language, de la Mare generally used the more conventional "reason" and "imagination" when discussing the same idea elsewhere.

References

  1. ^ Alec Guinness, Blessings in Disguise, p. 93.
  2. ^ "Fiction winners". James Tait Black Prizes: Previous Winners. The University of Edinburgh. Retrieved 11 November 2012.
  3. ^ a b (Carnegie Winner 1947). Living Archive: Celebrating the Carnegie and Greenaway Winners. CILIP. Retrieved 15 August 2012.
  4. ^ Walter de la Mare. PoemHunter.Com. Retrieved 23 September 2007. [dead link]
  5. ^ Twickenham: Walter de la Mare". Telling Trails: Children's books authors, illustrators & literary landmarks.
  6. ^ Joan Aiken (1976). Writers, Critics, and Children. New York: Agathon Press. p. 24. ISBN 0-87586-054-0. {{cite book}}: Unknown parameter |coauthors= ignored (|author= suggested) (help)
  7. ^ John Clute, "Walter de la Mare", in E.F. Bleiler, ed, Supernatural Fiction Writers: Fantasy and Horror Vol 1 (Scribners Sons, 1985).
  8. ^ Julia Briggs, "Transitions", in Peter Hunt, ed., Children's literature: an illustrated history, Oxford University Press, 1995, p. 181. ISBN 0-19-212320-3.
  9. ^ "De la Mare, Walter" in Brian Stableford, The A to Z of Fantasy Literature. Scarecrow Press, 2005, pp. 104-05.
  10. ^ a b Gary William Crawford, "On the Edge: the Ghost Stories of Walter de la Mare" in Darrell Schweitzer, ed., Discovering Classic Horror Fiction I, Wildside Press, 1992, pp. 53-56. ISBN 1-58715-002-6.
  11. ^ "Recommended Reading," F&SF, February 1950, p. 105.
Citations
  • Bleiler, Everett (1948). The Checklist of Fantastic Literature. Chicago: Shasta Publishers. pp. 96–97.
  • McCrosson, Doris Ross (1966). Walter de la Mare. Twayne.
  • Whistler, Theresa (1993). Imagination of the Heart:The Life of Walter de la Mare.

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