Borderline Cases

ON THE EDGE--Walter de la Mare--Knopf ($3).

Even in his poetry Walter de la Mare traffics in the spooky, but in spooks of a gossamer, indefinite kind. He understands that an effective ghost is never concrete. On the Edge contains many a tale that will give you the creeps, some that will merely set you musing. Some of them:

An eccentric old gentleman who infests a most attractive old country house invites a casual stranger to spend the night. It turns out the old gentleman is a student of the occult; the stranger takes no stock in such truck, but before the night is over he changes his mind.

A Uriah-Heepish butler sets the gardener and the houseman at such odds that they come to blows. When the gardener is discharged he hangs himself. But he promises to come back, and one threatening night the butler sends the houseman outside to see what is there. He never returns.

A young man partly blind meets a shopgirl on one of his walks, falls in love with her though he cannot see her face. But she is unable to stand up before his formidable Grandmamma, and their strange idyll is ephemeral.

Browsing in an old bookshop, a young litterateur discovers a manuscript book of poems. The authoress, who once lived in the house, comes to haunt him; his publication of the poems nearly leads him into a nasty death.

A young London bank clerk (this story is in the nature of comic relief), just fired for incompetence, celebrates with an orgy of shopping, orders everything sent to a vacant house, the bill to his peppery uncle; by some miracle escapes arrest.

De la Mare never speaks out, never clothes his spooks in a simple declarative manner. They might be merely states of mind, queer tricks of sensation, strange coincidences. There is nothing solid in this dank mistiness that you can lay your finger on, but you feel it. Sometimes it chills you to the bone.

The Author. Walter de la Mare, 58, English minor poet, anthologist, editor and bedtime-verse-writer (he is most widely known for his children's verse & tales), has written many a prose book which critics rank as high as any of his verse. An enthusiastic fictioneer, he sometimes lectures on the art. Married, he has four children, lives in London. Other books: Songs of Childhood, Poems, The Listeners and Other Poems, The Return, Peacock Pie, The Veil and Other Poems, The Riddle and Other Stories.

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