THE LYNX and DE MORTUIS by Walter de la Mare

THE LYNX

“She could have repeated the letter word-perfect, and yet could no more resist reading it again than a dog can refrain from returning to its vomit.”

This is a very powerful morsel excelling most WDLM”s stories in style but also in inscrutability, involving, I think, a servant girl with love letters in a tea-caddy, the last of which she has just placed in there, and her view of the romantic goings-on in the rest of the household, making me think she is implicated in one of the men who may or may not marry the daughter of the house, and so — accidentally or deliberately — smashes, by dropping it, a valuable ornament in front of the other participants, including the house’s matriarch. But what is the significance of the title? The matriarch, I guess, earlier “lowered her fair-fringed pale lids” — but who was it at the end whose “cold greenish eye had surveyed each conspirator in turn – ‘would you be so kind as to pass me that little tea-caddy?’”?

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De Mortuis

This is the apotheosis of WDLM’s graveyard epitaphs that play their part in some stories. This one is not a story at all, but the epitaphs shine forth with wit and candour. And the lonesome graveyard is a wondrous wild wayside genius-loci teetering on the edge of its own eventual evanescence. “Perhaps, but for its abundance and its solitary tower, it will presently be at one again with the wild and broomy moor.” The eventernal evanescence of this work and of all WDLM stories the tail end of which is soon to be swept up in my reviews before I also die.

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Just some examples in this work…

Here lieth alone John Alfred Mole:
He hath burrowed now so deep, poor soul.

This quiet mound beneath Lies Corporal Pym,
He had no fear of death, Nor death of him.

Here lieth our infant Alice Rodd;
She was so small,
Scarce ought at all,
But just a breath of sweetness sent from God.
.

What seek ye in this old Churchyard?
The dead are we,
The forgotten dead who, dead long since,
Close together in silence laid,
Find death sweet we once thought sad,
And peace the last felicity,
The dead are we.

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All my WDLM reviews: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2022/11/02/my-reviews-of-walter-de-la-mare-in-alphabetical-order/

A GARDEN OF DREAMS by A.L. Salmon

“A garden, to be perfect in its appeal, should never be new; the youth that each Springtime brings to it is not the garish tidiness of the new, but the rich quickening life of the old that is always young.”

This wordvine is so idyllic, so part of past’s dreamland, its description of a garden becomes perfection outweighing the proverb’s good for the very first time. The narrator is that ‘good’ trying but failing to catch the cupid de-winged as a beautiful boy dallying with the statue’s nymph. Just as the gardener in Bill and Ben never caught Bill and Ben playing, and even missed seeing the Weed even though she stared into his face?
Books are my garden, these days, but “perhaps my faith failed.” Something I shall always fail to see, staring me in the face, even if it’s my own soul still playing?

“It is with such a feeling that we turn to the book still unread, and even to the volume whose pages have already delighted us; there must be something that till now we have missed.”

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My other ALS reviews: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2022/11/08/the-ferry-of-souls-a-l-salmon/

THE COFFIN ON THE HILL by Denton Welch

“I had the idea that a monk’s life was nothing but a waste of idleness, and I decided that they would all go mad in the end.” 

Someone, presumably English, looking back to when he was eight years old and his parents — along with their Boy, Cook and Coolie — took him for a houseboat cruise on the river Yangtze from Shanghai, and as seen though his eyes, we share evocations of the sights he sees, and his fears of being dragged down by the current in the shape of creatures with monstrous tentacles, and other naive matters such as his doll (neither masculine nor feminine) whom he cherishes and the name of whom he knows but has never written down before, viz. Lymph Est. Which seems ironically pertinent to this particular reader today — when he recently knows he will soon or eventually perish by an invasion specifically of his Lymph. Not Est but Diest, I guess. And indeed this child faces death disarmingly amidst the picnics and other sight seeings. The monks and the granite incense burner with broken lip his parents are given by monks, a graveyard on a hill where in one grave he can see the rotted dead within. A coffin into which all of us, even his mother, will end up. And so defiantly, almost accidentally, almost deliberately, he drops the doll into the running, sucking river. An experiment to disprove the future’s dire rite of passage he dreads? Or just his own version of my own petulant attention-seeking? Some wondrous passages in this work.

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My other reviews of DW: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2022/10/27/the-stories-of-denton-welch/

THE WEREWOLF by A.L. Salmon

A carefully telegraphed horror, yet miraculously unrestrained in that very horror for a man and his ‘faithful’ dog lost within a darkened forest and reaching a crazily pre-expected cottage of shelter, a maiden. if not red riding hood herself (?), as sole inhabitant of this cottage and she insists, if he is given shelter, he must tie up his dog. A story of ‘abuse of his position’ in sexual desire, as tellingly, in effect, a self-released dog fights dog. As self fights self within us?

“‘Where I am he must be also,’ he answered simply.”

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My ALS reviews: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2022/11/08/the-ferry-of-souls-a-l-salmon/

WINTER by WALTER de la Mare

One only remembers the unusual…

“I have sometimes laughed out. And queer the echo sounds in a barrel roof. And perhaps an old skimpy verger looks at you, round a pillar. Like a bat.”

Just like the story ‘Strangers and Pilgrims’, or ‘All Hallows’, but also it is another like LICHEN or BENIGHTED, and THE RETURN, with gravestone epitaphs in a symphony of words, alongside the WDLM-archetypal richness of landscape and spirituality, here possibly at its most powerful of soul pain as self seems to meet self in death, each the ghost of the other, spotted across this cruel winter scene.

“Stranger, a light I pray!
Not that I pine for day:
Only one beam of light
— To show me Night!”

Alice Rodd, as just one of the many examples of those buried here. Rodd a name that recurs in WDLM. 

And this perhaps a summary of this WDLM ethos…
“I turned to go – wearied a little even of the unwearying. Epitaphs in any case are only ‘marginal’ reading. There is rarely anything unusual or original in such sentiments as theirs. Up to that moment (apart from the increasing cold) this episode – this experience – had been merely that of a visitor ordinarily curious, vulgarly intrusive, perhaps, and one accustomed to potter about among the antiquated and forgotten.”

Till the even richer, more rarified prose during the later more monumental momentousness, as self meets self in such a setting, even if one does not fully recognise the other.

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My other WDLM reviews: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2022/11/02/my-reviews-of-walter-de-la-mare-in-alphabetical-order/