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 centr
al 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)
• 13 •
The Alchemy of the Word
Surrealism celebrated wonder, the capacity for seeing the world as if for the first time which, in its purest state, is the prerogative of children and madmen, but more than that, it celebrated wonder itself as an essential means of perception. Yet not a naive wonder. The surrealists did not live in naive times. A premonition of the imminent end of the world is always a shot in the arm for the arts; if the world has, in fact, just ended, what then? The 1914–18 war was, in many respects, for France and Germany, indeed the end of the world. The Zurich Dadas celebrated the end of the world, and of art with it. However, the Russian Revolution of 1917 suggested the end of one world might mark the commencement of another world, one in which human beings themselves might take possession not only of their own lives but also of their own means of expressing the reality of that life, i.e. art. It is possible for the true optimist to view the end of the world with sang-froid. What is so great about all this crap? Might there be something better? Surrealism’s undercurrent of joy, of delight, springs from its faith in humankind’s ability to recreate itself; the conviction that struggle can bring something better.
Any discussion of surrealism must, first of all, acknowledge that it was never a school of art, or of literature, as such. The surrealist painters and poets were not in the least interested in formal art or literature, and if they started to show signs of becoming so, Andre Breton, the supreme arbitrator, kicked them out of the group. It was the irreducible psychological element that makes a wonder out of the commonplace, the imagination itself, that obsessed them. As for art, anyone can make it; so they made art, out of word and image, though their techniques were haphazard and idiosyncratic, and it must be said that some of them were better at it than others, though an unfair proportion of them all had that ability to light the blue touchpaper of the imagination and then retire, which a more élitist culture than the one at whos
e service the surrealists placed their work, or play, would have called genius.
Surrealism was not an artistic movement but a theory of knowledge that developed a political ideology of its own accord. Its art came out of the practice of a number of men and women who formulated and committed themselves to this theory of knowledge, some for a few years, some for their whole lives. They were practitioners and theoreticians at the same time. A poet, Andre Breton, wrote the Surrealist Manifesto; a film-maker and a punk painter, Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dali, made the two most comprehensive surrealist visual statements, Un Chien Andalou and L’Age d’Or, though Dali later recanted on the whole thing. Buñuel never recanted, kept turning them out, the greatest poet of the cinema and of love, who used the camera like a machine-gun, the dialectic like a coup de grâce.
However, surrealist theory is derived from a synthesis of Freud and Hegel that only those without a specialist knowledge of either psychoanalysis or philosophy might have dared to undertake. Over the surrealists, or, rather, around them lie the long shadows of Plato, amongst whom they moved as if they were made of flesh. The immediate literary avatars are easier to assimilate: Baudelaire, Lautreamont, Rimbaud, Alfred Jarry. The surrealists soon incorporated Marx, yet, with digestions like so many boa constrictors, were greedy for occult phenomena and utilised a poetic methodology based on analogy and inspiration, the free play of the unconscious, tangling with the French Communist Party – losing Louis Aragon and Paul Eluard to it. Most of the painters found themselves prize exhibits in the Hitlerian gallery of decadent art. The poetry, especially that of Eluard, with its themes of freedom and love, was used as propaganda in the French Resistance.
Like most philosophical systems put together by artists – like neo-Platonism itself – surrealism was intellectually shaky, but, artistically speaking, the shakier the intellectual structure, the better art it produces. (Christianity has produced some perfectly respectable painting, even poetry.) The British could never take its philosophic pretensions seriously; none of the surrealists knew any maths, and besides, they kept dragging sex and politics into everything, including the relations between men and women and the individual and the state, where every good Briton knows sex and politics have no right to be. Nevertheless, surrealist art is, in the deepest sense, philosophical – that is, art created in the terms of certain premisses about reality; and also an art that is itself a series of adventures in, or propositions and expositions of, this surrealist philosophy.
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