Elusive Genius

At one time or another, during the past 45 years, almost every critic or lover of English letters has rubbed his eyes and recognized the genius of Walter De la Mare (rhymes with beyond compare). Then, like a man waking at dawn and suddenly sure about something unusual, the reader has either turned over and drifted off again or has quickly lost his hunch--whatever it was--in daytime business.

It is literary news, therefore, that in the 76th summer of De la Mare's life, his work has at long last gotten some of the critical recognition it deserves. In April a book of praises from some of England's most respected writers came out on his birthday; last month the Crown made him a Companion of Honor (TIME, June 21).

T. S. Eliot has paid his homage to De la Mare in unusually limpid verse:

. . . when the lawn

Is pressed by unseen feet, and ghosts return

Gently at twilight, gently go at dawn,

The sad intangible who grieve and yearn;

When the familiar scene is suddenly strange

Or the well known is what we have yet to learn,

And two worlds meet, and intersect, and change;

When cats are maddened in the moonlight dance,

Dogs cower, flitter bats, and owls range

At the witches' sabbath of the maiden aunts;

When the nocturnal traveller can arouse

No sleeper by his call; or when by chance

An empty face peers from an empty house;

By whom, and by what means, was this designed?

The whispered incantation which allows

Free passage to the phantoms of the mind?

By you; by those deceptive cadences

Wherewith the common measure is refined . . .

The Strange & the Profane. But such tributes cannot define De la Mare's quality nor pin his shoulders to a critical mat. In contemporary literature no figure is more elusive. Even De la Mare's best friends sometimes think of him as a creature they may have imagined, and he himself long ago made it clear that in imagination he has his breath and being.

For nearly 20 years, after leaving St. Paul's Cathedral Choir School at 16, he worked as a bookkeeper. Except for a few oblique words written--but never published--as preface to a very early fantasy of his, there are few references in his writings to his business life.

De la Mare's best novels, The Return (1910) and Memoirs of a Midget (1921) are model achievements in mixing realism with a profound sense of the strange. His best stories, especially Seaton's Aunt, have been compared with Henry James's classic Turn of the Screw for their shivery revelation of supernatural influences that might be merely states of mind.

In 1915, De la Mare received a small pension from the government and has never since needed to live in any world but his own--a country house in Buckinghamshire where his four children grew up, later an apartment in Twickenham.

De la Mare has made two trips to the U.S., bringing back impressions of train travel that might give Americans a shock of recognition--"and the dread tolling of the engine's bell--surely, apart from that monster's prehistoric trumpetings, the saddest sound in Christendom--as one's huge metallic caravan edges slowly through Main Street."

Last Man Across? As a poet, De la Mare discovered his own vein early and deepened it steadily over half a century. His most famous poem, The Listeners, is no more perfectly written than hundreds of others, some of them, like John Mouldy, as grisly as a child's daydream:

I spied John Mouldy in his cellar Deep down twenty steps of stone;

In the dusk he sat a-smiling, Smiling there alone . . .

To some acute and saddened critics it has seemed that De la Mare's poetry belonged to an age that is. gone for good. Wrote J. Middleton Murry last spring: "A kind of disorganization seems to have overtaken poetry. 'London Bridge has fallen down.' Perhaps De la Mare was the last man to get safely across, before the first direct hit was scored upon it."

Colored Thoughts. During World War II, which De la Mare described characteristically as "the extremest crisis man has ever seen (except a few)," the poet lived quietly, delighted with visits from his grandchildren (he has ten). To his young visitors the old man with his dark massive head like that of a Roman emperor, would sometimes put one of his odd, sharp questions: "What do you think is the color of your thoughts?" He has had nothing to say about the new honors given him, or the reawakening admiration for his work. As for the hardbought value of civilization, in his neat hand he once wrote on that subject:

As I mused by the hearthside

Puss said to me

There burns the Fire Man,

And here sit we.

Dear God, what security

Comfort and bliss

And to think, too, what ages

Have brought us to this.

You in your sheep's wool coat,

Buttons of bone, And me in my fur-about

On the warm hearthstone.

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