Memoirs of a Midget presents itself as the first-person account of the early life, in particular the tempestuous twentieth year in the life, of a Victorian gentlewoman who has the misfortune to be, although pretty and perfectly formed, of diminutive size. This year includes death, passionate infatuation, some months as a lion of high society, suicide, and attempted suicide. It ends in temporary madness. This summary gives the impression of melodrama yet Memoirs of a Midget seduces by its gentle charm and elegant prose. It may be read with a great deal of simple enjoyment and then it sticks like a splinter in the mind.
Miss M.’s fictional autobiography is introduced with the nineteenth-century imitation-documentary device of an editor’s preliminary note. Here the reader learns something of Miss M.’s life after the end of her own narrative, and of her – not death, but vanishing. She has, she explains to her housekeeper in a note, been ‘called away’. Called away, perhaps, to a happy land where all are the same size as she, where she is not a stranger in a world designed for clumsy giants with sensibilities of a cruel clumsiness to match.
For Miss M. is always a stranger in this world. She, literally, does not fit in. The novel is a haunting, elegiac, misanthropic, occasionally perverse study of estrangement and isolation. Miss M. herself describes her predicament: ‘Double-minded creature that I was and ever shall be; now puffed up with arrogance at the differences between myself and gross, common-sized humanity; now stupidly sensitive to the pangs to which by reason of these differences I have to submit.’ She may stand as some sort of metaphor for the romantic idea of the artist as perennial stranger, as scapegoat and outcast – the artist, indeed, as perpetual adolescent, with the adolescent’s painful sense of his own uniqueness when alone and his own inadequacy when in company. In some ways, the novel is about making friends with loneliness, which is not quite the same thing as growing up. And, of course, it is impossible for Miss M. to grow up.
The narrative is imbued with that romantic melancholy which was de la Mare’s speciality in both prose and poetry. The novel has all the enigmatic virtues of repression; what is concealed or disguised speaks more eloquently than what is expressed.
Walter de la Mare evaded some of the more perilous reefs of literary criticism in his lifetime by simply casting a spell of charm over his readers. He also liked to suggest elements of religious allegory, which is as good as putting up a ‘No Trespassers’ sign. Kenneth Hopkins, in a British Council pamphlet on de la Mare published in 1953, entirely abandons discussion of Memoirs of a Midget, claiming that ‘the work is its own interpretation’. The adjectives, ‘beloved’ and ‘magical’ were frequently applied to de la Mare’s work; his poetry for children, in particular Peacock Pie and his anthology, Come Hither, remain beloved cornerstones of the middle-class nursery. Nevertheless, the middle-class nursery is a rapidly dwindling constituency and his reputation as poet and writer for adults has softly and silently vanished away since his death in 1956.
Yet, in 1948, Faber issued a Tribute to Walter de la Mare on his Seventy Fifth Birthday, which contained contributions from J. B. Priestley, Vita Sackville-West, Dover Wilson, J. Middleton Murry, Laurence Whistler, John Masefield, C. Day Lewis, Lord David Cecil, and, among others, not Uncle Tom Cobley but Marie Stopes, of all people. De la Mare was the court magician to the literary establishment and, at least after his middle age, enjoyed the pleasantest but most evanescent kind of fame, which is that during your own lifetime.
It seems unlikely his reputation as a poet will revive. His fiction is another matter. His output of novels and stories is uneven, his range limited, but Memoirs of a Midget is a novel that clearly set out with the intention of being unique and, in fact, is so; lucid, enigmatic, and violent with the terrible violence that leaves behind no physical trace.
Memoirs of a Midget was first published in 1921; it was not the work of a young man. De la Mare was born in 1873 and, in his fiction, remained most at home, as most of us do, in the imaginative world of his youth and early middle age. Victoria is still on the throne of Miss M.’s England, a queen who, as Miss M. notes, is not that much taller than herself. The novel was instantly successful, brought de la Mare a vastly increased readership and drew from its admirers curious tributes in the shape of teeny-tiny objects, miniature Shakespeares, and so on, suitable for the use of Miss M. Russell Brain (Tea with Walter de la Mare, Faber, 1953) describes a cabinet full of these wee gifts in the writer’s home.
These gifts tell us something important about de la Mare’s readership; it was particularly susceptible to the literary conjuring trick because it wanted to believe in magic. The writer seduced his readers, not only into believing in the objective reality of Miss M. but also into forming a sympathetic identification with her little, anguished, nostalgic, backward-looking figure, lost in a world she has not made. Perhaps she was an appropriate heroine for the English middle-class in the aftermath of the First World War; she is both irreproachable, lovable, and, as an object for identification, blessedly oblique.
At the time of the publication of Memoirs of a Midget, de la Mare had been earning his living as a man of letters for thirteen years; was an established poet in the Georgian style, in which he remained; a critic (Rupert Brooke and the Intellectual Imagination, 1919); and had published several novels, the most significant of which are a death-haunted book for children, The Three Royal Monkeys (1910), and The Return (also in 1910).
The Return is about the demonic possession of a dull suburban householder by the perturbed spirit of an eighteenth-century French rake and suicide. It is extraordinary, given such a plot, that so little should happen in the novel. Like Memoirs of a Midget it is about estrangement. The hero spends the novel in a state of intense alienation from himself, partly because the revenant boasts an infinitely more complex and attractive personality than its host; and, indeed, it is a notion to make the mind reel – that of Dagwood Bumstead possessed by, say, Casanova. No wonder de la Mare scares himself. It is as if, having invented the idea of demonic possession as a blessing in disguise, de la Mare shies away, terrified, from the consequences, perhaps because he knew he wanted to make evil attractive, but not all that attractive. It is a problem he faces again, and deals with more successfully, in the character of Fanny Bowater in Memoirs of a Midget, where he seems more at home with the idea that a sexually manipulative woman is inherently evil.
The Return is not a good novel. It is blown out with windy mystification and can hardly have satisfied de la Mare himself since he spent the next decade concentrating on poetry and short stories. He perfected his use of language until his prose is music as plangent as that of Vaughan Williams or Arthur Butterworth, composers with whom he shares an interest in the English lyric. Some of these short stories, ‘The Almond Tree’ and ‘In the Forest’, for example, achieve a high gloss of technical perfection that deflects attention from the cruelty of the content, which in both these stories is the brutal innocence of children.
Later stories retain this high surface sheen upon an internal tension of terror, often a psychological terrorism, as in the remarkable ‘At First Sight’, from a collection aptly titled On the Edge (1930). Here a young man’s family drive an unsuitable girlfriend to suicide. But all is done gently, gently, over the teacups. This young man suffers from a startling affliction; he is physically incapable of raising his head, of looking up, without suffering intense pain, so his sight is confined to a limited, half-moon-shaped segment of the ground before him. This circumscribed, painful, but intense vision is somewhat similar to de la Mare’s own.
These stories are ‘tales’ in the nineteenth-century sense, highly structured artefacts with beginnings, middles, and ends and a schematic coherence of imagery, not those fragments of epiphanic experience which is the type of the twentieth-century short story. He sternly eschewed modernism, with the result that his fiction has more in common with that of, say, Borges, especially in its studied ‘literariness’, than with his own contemporaries who are, of course, the great moderns – Joyce, Lawrence, Kafka. I can find no evidence that de la Mare liked, or even read, these writers. Here the analogy with the hero of ‘At First Sight’ is almost distressing.
Even, or especially, in his most adult and cruellest writing, he shares some qualities with certain Victorian writing for children – George MacDonald’s The Princess and the Goblin and Christina Rossetti’s Goblin Market come to mind – in which the latent content diverges so markedly from the superficial text that their self-designation as ‘fairytales’ seems to function as a screen, or cover, designed to disarm the reader.
De la Mare is a master of mise-en-scène. He is one of the great fictional architects and interior designers; he builds enchanting houses for his characters and furnishes them with a sure eye for those details of personality that are expressed through everyday objects. His ability to evoke mood and atmosphere, especially that of the English countryside in its aspect of literary pastoral, are related to this talent for mise-en-scène. The countryside often functions as a backdrop that partakes in the action, as the gardens do in Memoirs of a Midget. This quality of romantic evocation, of soft reverie as scenery, combined with the solid, conventional, middle-class milieu in which his most horrible stories take place, both domesticates, normalizes, the terror at their heart, and gives it a further edge.
He has a tremendous and, as if self-protective, enthusiasm for cosiness. There is scarcely a novel or a short story of his that does not involve an elaborate tea-time; tea, that uniquely English meal, that unnecessary collation at which no stimulants – neither alcohol nor meat – are served, that comforting repast of which to partake is as good as a second childhood. However, at certain of his tea parties – especially the one in ‘At First Sight’, and at several of Miss M.’s own – the cosiness only augments the tortures that are taking place, until the very crockery takes on the aspect of the apparatus of despair and it chinks like the chains of prisoners.
Nevertheless, this deliberate, cosy homeliness sometimes deflects the thrust of his imagination, an imagination which is permitted to operate only without reference to any theories of the unconscious.
This is important. De la Mare constantly invokes the ‘imagination’ but he does not mean imagination in the sense of the ability to envisage the material transformation of the real world, which is what the graffitistes of May 1968 meant when they wrote, ‘Let the imagination seize power’, on the walls of Paris. No. For de la Mare, the imagination is a lovely margin, a privileged privacy in the mind – ‘that secret chamber of the mind we call the imagination’, as Miss M. herself puts it. To read de la Mare’s imaginative prose is to begin to understand some of the reasons for the tremendous resistance the English literary establishment put up against Freud, that invader of the last privacy.
This is an imagination that has censored itself before the dream has even begun. It is, of course, all traces of sexuality that must be excised especially rigorously. As Kenneth Hopkins says in his British Council pamphlet: ‘if his [de la Mare’s] characters kiss, he seldom tells.’ This process of censorship means that the imagery arrives on the page in disguise and then, lest even the disguise give too much away, the writer must revise the structure which contains the disguised imagery, while the material world recedes ever further away until it is itself perceived as unreality. ‘Death and affliction, even Hell itself, She turns to favour and to prettiness’; that offensive epitaph on the mad Ophelia could be applied to Miss M.’s narrative, did not de la Mare’s imagination, perhaps because of the extraordinarily narrow range in which he permitted it to operate, retain its own sinister integrity.
In this theory of the imagination, the ‘inner life’ is all that is important but, although de la Mare was a great admirer of William Blake, he could scarcely have concurred with him that ‘All deities reside within the human breast’. The ‘inner life’ is perceived as though it was a gift from outside, as though the imagination is the seat of visitations from another, lovelier world, from, in fact, that Other World which forms the title for the scrapbooks of poetry assembled by the anagrammatic Nahum Tarune in the fictional introduction to de la Mare’s anthology, Come Hither.
It goes without saying that de la Mare’s idea of the poet as somebody with a special delivery service from one of those spirits who, in Plato, operate like celestial telegraph boys, speeding messages from the Other World of real forms to this world of shadows, is directly at variance with the idea of the poet as privileged, drunken lecher which directly superseded it; both represent a mystification of the role of poet. Nevertheless, there is a suggestion it is one such spiritual messenger from the Other World who calls Miss M. away at the last, strengthening her possible role as metaphoric artist.
De la Mare’s homespun neo-Platonism, filtered through Shelley, Coleridge, and the seventeenth-century neo-Platonists such as Traherne and Vaughan of whom he was particularly fond, gives him enormous confidence in the idea of the imagination as a thing-in-itself, an immaterial portion of the anatomy for which, in a profound sense, the possessor is not responsible. The possessor witnesses the work of the imagination but is not engaged with it. From this conviction comes the consolatory remoteness of his fiction from human practice, even when his characters are engaged in the most mundane tasks, like travelling in railway trains or eating breakfast; all seems as if frozen in time. There is a distance between the writer and the thing, feeling, or sensation he describes that removes it from everyday human actuality. In addition, literary devices, like saying of the taste of a fruit, ‘I can taste it on my tongue now . . .’, do nothing at all to reproduce the sensuous actuality of eating a nectarine. If you have ever eaten a nectarine, however, perhaps it will make you remember.
De la Mare’s prose is evocative, never voluptuous, and it depends on a complicity of association with the reader for it to work as he intends. This community of association depends on a response of glad recognition to certain words – ‘old-fashioned’ is one. It always means good things in de la Mare. So does ‘reclusive’ and, with the implication of a deprecating smile, ‘bookish’. And to live in a remote house in the country with a large garden is to be half way towards a state of grace.
A common set of literary associations is important, too. Sir Walter Pollacke recognises Miss M. as a kindred spirit when he hears her recite the anonymous sixteenth-century poem, ‘Tom a Bedlam’: ‘The moon’s my constant mistress, And the lovely owl my marrow . . .” Conversely, when Fanny Bowater quotes Henry Vaughan in a tone of facetious mockery, it is a sign of the blackness of her soul. To have a small, choice library in which Sir Thomas Browne and the metaphysical poets are well represented, with access to a good second-hand bookshop in a nearby country town takes one a little further towards bliss.
All this inevitably raises the question of social class. De la Mare’s fiction most usually moves within a very narrow band of English society, characterised by phrases like ‘a modest fortune’, ‘a small private income’, ‘comfortable circumstances’ . . . sufficient to enable one to pick up the odd first-edition Herrick. In Memoirs of a Midget he manifests a kind of snobbery not unlike Jane Austen’s, in which the aristocracy, typified by Mrs Monnerie, ‘Lord B.’s sister’, is, like the Crawfords in Mansfield Park, cynical, corrupt, and vicious, while the lower-middle and working class – Miss M.’s landlady, Mrs Bowater, and her nursemaid, Pollie – are good-hearted stereotypes whose fictional execution uses techniques of physical idiosyncrasy derived from Dickens. (Jane Austen, of course, simply doesn’t mention the lower classes.)
The rigid Procrustean bed of the middle class is that on which his fictions, these nightmares of bourgeois unease, are dreamed.
There is a caricature by Max Beerbohm of de la Mare staring fixedly across a fireplace at a grim, black-clad old lady sitting unresponsive in an armchair opposite: ‘Mr W. de la Mare gaining inspiration for an eerie and lovely story.’ It is one of the most perceptive, and wittily unkind, criticisms of de la Mare that could be made. Let his fancy meander whence it pleases, may his antennae be never so sensitive to messages from the Other World, there is a nanny inside him slapping his hand when it wanders to the forbidden parts of his mind.
However, repression produces its own severe beauties. Out of this terrified narrowness, this dedicated provincialism of the spirit, emerges a handful of pieces of prose with the most vivid and unsettling intensity, work which disquietingly resembles some of that which the surrealists were producing in France at the same period, operating from a rather different theory of the imagination. Indeed, it would be possible to make a claim for Memoirs of a Midget as the one true and only successful English surrealist novel, even though de la Mare would have hotly denied it. That he didn’t know what he was doing, of course, only makes it more surrealist; and more baleful.
And I should say that Miss M. herself, in her tiny, bizarre perfection, irresistibly reminds me of a painting by Magritte of a nude man whose sex is symbolised by a miniature naked woman standing upright at the top of his thigh.
Miss M.’s size, in fact, is nowhere given with precision. It seems to vary according to de la Mare’s whim. At five or six years old, she is small enough to sit on the lid of a jar of pomatum on her father’s dressing table; she feeds butterflies from her own hand. This suggests a smallness which is physically impossible. Later, when she learns to read: ‘My usual method with a common-sized book was to prop it towards the middle of the table and then seat myself at the edge. The page finished, I would walk across and turn over a fresh leaf.’ This method has not much changed by the time she is twenty, except now she sprawls between the pages. At that age, she still has difficulty in descending staircases and, at her twenty-first birthday, can run down the centre of a dining-room table while, a few weeks later, she can travel comfortably in a disused bird-cage. However, earlier that year, on holiday, driving a goat-cart, she is disguised as a ten-year-old and though a grown woman the size of a ten-year-old child would be distinctly on the smallish side, she would scarcely be a midget; Jeffrey Hudson, the court dwarf of Charles I, was forced to retire when he reached the dizzy height of three feet nine inches.
Miss M.’s actual size, therefore, is not within the realm of physiological dimension; it is the physical manifestation of an enormous difference.
The midget child is a sort of changeling. Her mother treats her as a ‘tragic playmate’ rather than a daughter, and her father, affectionately embarrassed by her existence, effectively abandons his paternal role and makes no financial provision for her on his death. She is an anomaly. For their own sakes as well as hers they keep their daughter isolated from the world and their deaths leave her vulnerably inexperienced, besides newly poor.
Yet Miss M.’s childhood is itself a magic garden, in which, like Andrew Marvell in his garden, she is alone and hence in paradise. Almost all of Memoirs of a Midget takes place in Kent, the ‘garden of England’, and, as it happens, de la Mare’s own home county; and Miss M. is most herself in a garden. When she is accompanied it is scarcely ever by more than one person. These country gardens, far from the habitations of common humanity, are almost always a little neglected, the ‘wild gardens’ of the English romantic imagination, nature neither dominated by man nor dominating him by its ferocity, but existing with him in a harmonious equality. The paradisial garden of childhood is that of Stonecote, her parents’ house, to which, after the vicissitudes of her twentieth year, she will return and into which, taking only ‘a garden hat and cape’, she eventually, according to her editor, disappears, possibly accompanied by a Platonic angel.
But the garden of Stonecote is also where Miss M. first learns the stark and irrevocable fact of mortality, when, as a child, she encounters there a dead mole:
Holding my breath, with a stick I slowly edged it up in the dust and surveyed the white heaving nest of maggots in its belly with a peculiar and absorbed recognition. ‘Ah ha!’ a voice cried within me, ‘so this is what is in wait; this is how things are;’ and I stooped with lips drawn back over my teeth to examine the stinking mystery more closely.
It is a mole, a blind creature that lives in the earth, who conveys the existence of a ‘stinking mystery’ in this world. Without the power of inward vision, the mole exists only in its corruptible envelope of flesh.
After her father’s death and the expulsion from this primal Eden where Miss M. has been an infant Eve without an Adam, she takes a room with the very grim and black-clad woman from Beerbohm’s drawing, the stern, kind, and irretrievably ‘literary’ Mrs Bowater, a mother or nanny surrogate. Here, Miss M. meets, not Adam, but Lilith. Fanny is Mrs Bowater’s daughter . . . ‘her voice – it was as if it had run about in my blood and made my eyes shine’. Fanny, who is lower class in spite of her beauty and cleverness, works as a teacher; she arrives home for Christmas, she is cognate with ice, snow, cold. Miss M.’s most passionate meeting with her takes place on a freezing, ecstatic night when they go star-gazing together, in the wild garden of the abandoned house of Wanderslore nearby.
This garden, untenanted, uncared for, is the garden of revelation. In this same wild place she meets the dwarf she calls Mr. Anon, who falls in love with her. In this same garden, Miss M. will later think of killing herself. In Memoirs of a Midget gardens function in the rich literary tradition that starts with the Book of Genesis, places of privilege outside everyday experience in which may occur the transition from innocence to knowledge. In yet another garden, that of the country house of her patroness, Mrs Monnerie, Miss M. conducts her last, fatal interview with Fanny, when Fanny announces her intention of destroying her.
Miss M.’s sado-masochistic relation with Fanny is central to the novel. Fanny, typical of the femme fatale, enslaves through humiliation. She writes her supplicant letters addressed to ‘Dear Midgetina’, and Miss M. replies signing herself with the same name, so that Leslie Fiedler (in a discussion of the novel in Freaks: Myths and Images of the Secret Self New York, 1978) thinks ‘Midgetina’ is Miss M.’s given name. But it sounds more like a nickname callously bestowed and gratefully received – she is grateful for any attention from Fanny. For Miss M.’s anonymity is exceedingly important to de la Mare, I think.
Fanny’s indifference is irresistible: ‘I might have been a pet animal for all the heed she paid to my caress.’ Later, Fanny will turn on Miss M. after a final declaration of love: ‘Do you really suppose that to be loved is a new experience for me; that I’m not smeared with it wherever I go?’ She is la belle dame sans merci in person, the cruel dominatrix of Swinburne and Pater, a fin de siècle vamp disguised as a landlady’s daughter. Or, rather, stepdaughter, for Fanny is a changeling, too; unknown to her, Mrs Bowater is her father’s second wife. No blood of common humanity runs in Fanny’s veins. She reminds Miss M. of mermaids and, sometimes, of snakes. She drives a love-sick curate to cut his throat for love of her. She is woman as sexual threat.
Fanny forces Miss M. to see herself as a freak, an aberration, an unnatural object. She promises ironically: ‘Midgetina, if ever I do have a baby, I will anoint its little backbone with the grease of moles, bats and dormice, to make it like you,’ quoting an ancient recipe for the commercial manufacture of dwarf beggars and entertainers, as if Miss M. had herself been made, not born. The account of Miss M.’s enslavement by Fanny burns with pain, although Fanny is far too motivelessly malign for any form of naturalist fiction; she is simply, emblematically, a femme fatale, or, perhaps, a bad angel.
When Fanny accidentally meets Miss M.’s friend and would-be lover, her casual description of him – ‘a ghastly gloating little dwarfish creature’ – makes Miss M. see how Mr Anon must look to other people, and so wrecks her own idea of him.
This question of the definition of identity recurs throughout the novel. Miss M. describes Fanny’s charm: ‘she’s so herselfish, you know’; Fanny is powerful because she knows who she is. But Fanny uses all her power to define Miss M. as a deviant: ‘Why was it that of all people only Fanny could so shrink me up like this into my body?’ This problem is not altogether resolved; on the last page of her narrative, Miss M. says: ‘We cannot see ourselves as others see us, but that is no excuse for not wearing spectacles.’ Yet the last words of the novel are a plea to her editor, to whom she dedicates her memoirs, to ‘take me seriously’, that is, to see her as she sees herself. This unresolved existential plea – to be allowed to be herself, although she is not sure what that self is – is left hanging in the air. The suggestion is that Miss M. exists, like Bishop Berkeley’s tree, because the eye of God sees her.
In another night interview between Fanny and Miss M. in the garden at Wanderslore, Fanny says: ‘There was once a philosopher called Plato, my dear. He poisoned Man’s soul.’ With that, Fanny declares herself the eternal enemy; she has denied idealism. And something very odd happens here; Fanny goes off, leaving Miss M. calling helplessly after her, ‘I love you’. They have been, apparently, quite alone. Then up out of nowhere pops the ‘gloating, dwarfish creature’, Mr Anon himself, to murmur to Miss M. how ‘they’ – that is, other people – ‘have neither love nor pity’. She runs away from his importunity as Fanny has run away from hers; but this is only one of several places in the text where Miss M., believing herself alone in the garden, discovers Mr Anon is there, beside her. At last she decides he has been watching her secretly since she first discovered Wanderslore, just as the eye of God, in her nursery lesson book, The Observing Eye, watches over everything.
Although Mr Anon’s corporality is affirmed throughout the book – he even takes tea with the emphatically ‘real’ Mrs Bowater – he has certain purely metaphysical qualities, not least the ability to appear whenever Miss M. needs him. He is her good, her guardian angel, the spiritual pole to Fanny.
But Miss M. is bewildered. Mr Anon’s ugliness is that of the flesh alone, yet it is sufficient to repel her; Fanny’s beauty is only an outward show, yet Miss M. finds her compulsively attractive. Poor Miss M., the psyche fluttering in between. ‘And still he [Mr Anon] maintained . . . that he knew mankind better than I, that to fall into their ways and follow their opinions was to deafen my ears, and seal up my eyes, and lose my very self.’
Miss M. does fall into the ways of mankind for a season, however; indeed, not ‘a season’ but ‘the Season’. She is collected by rich, aristocratic, corrupt, easily bored Mrs Monnerie to add to an assortment of ‘the world’s smaller rarities’ in her London mansion. Miss M.’s stay in London is the most straightforward part of the novel, with a degree of satiric snap and bite oddly reminiscent of parts of Balzac’s Lost Illusions. She is not by any means the first young person from the provinces to go to hell at the dinner tables of the gentry. ‘What a little self-conscious donkey I became, shrilly hee-hawing away; the centre of a simpering throng plying me with flattery.’
Miss M. brings her own doom upon herself by introducing Fanny into this artificial paradise, where the only garden is that of the square outside, an arid, over-cultivated town garden where only ‘piebald plane-trees and poisonous laburnums’ grow. Fanny immediately seizes her chance and usurps Miss M.’s position as court favourite; she will marry unscrupulously for money and entertain herself by leading the haute monde a dance in preference to disrupting a vicarage tea party.
The climax of the London sequence is Miss M.’s twenty-first birthday party, with its cake decorated with replicas of twenty-one famous female dwarves, a fiesta of bad taste which is only exceeded by the dinner menu composed entirely of the minute, culminating in a dish of nightingales’ tongues, on which Miss M. gags. Enough is enough. So Midgetina comes of age, in an orgy of humiliation, drunkenly making a spectacle of herself. ‘Sauve qui peut!’ she cries to Fanny, intent at last on rescuing her from damnation, calling out the name of a book Fanny once gave her as a satiric jest, Jeremy Taylor’s Holy Living and Holy Dying, and passing out.
Banished to Mrs Monnerie’s country house, Miss M. now exhibits herself in a circus in order to earn the money to buy her freedom. She paints her face and pads her bust and bottom; the disguise appears to her to be ‘monstrous’. She takes on, in other words, the appurtenances of the flesh, and those of the flesh of a mature woman, at that. It is sufficient indirectly to cause Mr Anon’s death.
This raises some interesting questions about the central spiritual conflict for which the dreamy beauty of the novel is a disguise. For, even if Mr Anon is Miss M.’s Good Angel and her rejection of him in favour of Fanny brings her near to losing her soul, why should she marry him, when she has no wish to do so, simply because they are a match in size? Not only is de la Mare quite definite about Miss M.’s not wanting to marry Mr Anon – ‘not even love’s ashes were in my heart’ – but he scrupulously documents her absolute revulsion from physical contact. She flinches from all human touch except that of her childhood nursemaid. Miss M. seems as alienated from sexuality as she is from all other aspects of the human condition, and if her passion for Fanny suggests it is only heterosexual contact from which she is alienated, de la Mare feels himself free to describe her emotional enslavement by Fanny because the idea this might have a sexual element has been censored out from the start. Although Miss M. declares repeatedly that she is in love with Fanny, the reader is not officially invited by de la Mare to consider this might have anything to do with her rejection of the advances of Mr Anon. The conflict is played out in terms of pure spirit.
And, at the circus, when she is in her erotic disguise, it is as if the spectacle of Miss M. suddenly transformed from visible spirit (she is slight, fair, pale) to palpable if simulated rosy flesh is too much for Mr Anon, who is, as ever, watching her. He refuses to allow her to degrade herself still further and takes her place in the circus ring on an unruly pony for the last parade, suffering a fatal injury while doing so. Miss M., therefore, out in the world on her own for the first time, tremulously experimenting with the appearance of sexuality, and, indeed, of work, too – for this circus turn is the first time she has attempted to earn her own living – actually loses her soul; and has to undergo an ordeal in the same neglected garden of Wanderslore where she used to meet both Fanny and Mr Anon before she can start out again on the path to regeneration, the return home.
This ordeal concludes with a balked attempt to poison herself with the fruit of the deadly nightshade, with ‘forbidden fruit’.
This is not the first time she has been tempted by forbidden fruit. In the secure garden of childhood, she has ‘reached up and plucked from their rank-smelling bush’ a few blackcurrants very similar in appearance to the ‘black, gleaming’ poison berries on which, in her extremity, she gazes ‘as though, from childhood up, they had been my one greed and desire’. But, desire them as she may, she cannot eat them; she seems physically incapable of doing so. She picks one, its ‘bitter juices’ jet out upon her, and then, overcome, she flings ‘the vile thing’ down. The fruit remains forbidden. Whatever taboo it represents remains unbroken, and the breaking of this taboo involves the ‘stinking mystery’ of mortality, anyway.
So the central core of the novel remains mysterious to itself; we never penetrate the real nature of the ‘stinking mystery’ in the garden, represented by the rotting carcase of the mole. Miss M. will remain a stranger in this world. She will not even learn to rejoice in her estrangement, although at last she rejoices in her solitude. But that is not the same thing.
The image of forbidden fruit has all the more potency because Miss M. customarily subsists on a fructarian diet. She drinks milk, nibbles biscuits but partakes freely only of cherries, slices of apple, strawberries, nectarines. Her diet is similar to that of the heroes of de la Mare’s metaphysical novel for children, The Three Royal Monkeys, who promise their mother never to taste blood, to climb trees, or to grow a tail; their diet is a sign of their spiritual ascendancy over the other apes and Miss M. marks the beginnings of her own spiritual erosion in London when a doctor puts her on a strengthening diet of white meat. She starts to put on weight and that seems to her also a sign of degeneration; there is an interesting touch of the anorexic about Miss M. revealed in her choice of words to describe her padded circus costume: ‘monstrous mummery’. This is connected with an odd little episode during her life at Mrs Bowater’s, when she buries a bloodstained nightdress in a rabbit hole in the Wanderslore garden, just as young girls sometimes attempt to hide the evidence of their menses. (Miss M. tells us that this blood, however, comes from a scratch.) Mr Anon later returns this nightdress; nothing, nothing whatever, can be hidden from him. No wonder he annoys her.
After she throws down the forbidden fruit, untasted, she suffers a period of derangement and hallucination. We know in advance from her editor’s preface that sufficient private means are stumped up somehow to buy back for her her father’s house, and there she lives on, in seclusion, with Fanny’s mother to wait on her. We leave Miss M.’s life in the same state of purposeless rustic gentility as it began but we already know she will be ‘called away’, by, it is implied, that spiritual messenger from the Other World, perhaps the beautiful stranger she saw in the audience in the circus tent. And yet the mystery of her departure seems arbitrary and forlorn.
De la Mare has certainly equipped the novel with hermetic meaning, yet this does not, finally, seem to console even the writer. The metaphysical sub-text seems to me a decoy; he offers a key to a door behind which is only another door. The novel remains dark, teasing, a system of riddles, leaving a memory of pain, a construct of remarkable intellectual precision and scrupulous dovetailing of imagery, finally as circular as hopelessness.
Something awful is looking out of the windows of the novel, just as it looks out of Fanny’s eyes in Miss M.’s startling description of her: ‘a beautiful body with that sometimes awful Something looking out of its windows.’ De la Mare himself found this image sufficiently striking to use a version of it again in his own Introduction to the 1938 Everyman edition of a selection of his stories, essays, and poems:
Feelings as well as thoughts may be expressed in symbols; and every character in a story is not only a ‘chink’, a peephole in the dark cottage from which his maker looks out at the world, but is also in some degree representative of himself, if a self in disguise.
All fiction, as Balzac said, is symbolic autobiography. Miss M.’s ‘M’ may stand, simply, for midget, or Midgetina; or, Metaphor. Or, Myself.
(1982)