A House of Air

by Penelope Fitzgerald

  De la Mare met his wife, Elfrida Ingpen, at an amateur dramatic society. She was more than ten years older than him, and they did not marry until 1899, by which time Elfie, perhaps in desperation, had become pregnant. (Whistler believes that de la Mare was passionately interested in birth and death, but not in sex.) He did, in any case, the decent thing, struggling to support four children on £3 a week. ‘Worry about money, he said, ‘thrust its foul nose into [my] thoughts,’ although Elfie was an excellent manager, ‘working tirelessly to preserve whatever small graces of living she could, since they meant so much to Jack.’

  De la Mare was less cautious than Eliot in escaping from his city desk. The order of release came through Henry Newbolt, then literary editor of the Monthly Review, who began to accept de la Mare’s verses and stories. In 1908, Newbolt (a great fixer) succeeded in getting him a grant of £200 from the Civil List. On the strength of that, he gave in his notice to the Oil and scarcely thought of it again. By now he was in the generous care of the Settee, which consisted of Newbolt, living in mysterious harmony with his wife, Margaret, nicknamed ‘Lad,’ and his mistress, Ella Coltman, Margaret’s cousin. The writer Mary Coleridge made up a gracious fourth. De la Mare, who had been used since he was a little boy to a protective female household, responded and expanded, while Elfie, usually not invited by the Settee, aged rapidly in the cramped house in SE20.

  He still worked very hard, reviewing, reading for Heinemann—both tasks that ground away the soul—and writing, at the rate of about fifteen hundred words a day, novels which were ventures into ‘the other real.’ The novels made their way slowly. When, however, The Listeners and Other Poems and Peacock Pie both came out in 1911, de la Mare became one of the best-loved poets in England. The following Christmas, when Eddie Marsh collected his first volume of Georgian Poetry, he included five poems from The Listeners, and for de la Mare ‘invitations multiplied—to join the English Association and the Omar Khayyam Club, to improve André Gide’s conversational English, to lunch with Asquith at 10 Downing Street…De la Mare accepted and accepted.’

  The years of success are a biographer’s nightmare. Friends and patrons begin to crowd the page, but all are firmly dealt with by Whistler, who concentrates on those who ‘seemed to give fresh bearings on my theme.’ This means that some loyal supporters (Percy Withers, for example, and Sydney Cockerell) hardly get a mention, but there is a close and sympathetic account of the dearest friend of all, Edward Thomas, who actually got de la Mare to take a five-mile walk. The two of them loved England’s earth and sky perhaps about equally, although de la Mare valued the past not for its weight of history but simply for its pastness. This partly accounts for his disconcerting goblin diction, ‘the dusk of words’—pelf, hark, nay, shoon, e’en, saith, and so on. Thomas couldn’t be doing with this, and said so, but their friendship held.

  Equally careful is the chapter on the handsome journalist Naomi Royde Smith. Said by Storm Jameson to be like the younger Queen Victoria, she might be considered a tiresome woman, but Mrs Whistler makes us see how de la Mare came to love her for nearly five years. She herself was certain that it was good for her to be with him—it was not good, of course, for Elfie—and he waited until 1930 to describe what he had felt in Memoirs of a Midget. ‘The core of the book is the Midget’s passion for the full-sized Fanny, beautiful and false,’ Whistler says. ‘The condition itself is unmistakeably what he had known for Naomi.’

  Imagination of the Heart shows de la Mare, by and large, as he describes himself in A Portrait—a child gone grey, ‘haunted by questions never answered yet’—and his day-to-day life is given in absorbing detail. The one thing missing is the different climate of artistic and intellectual correctness that was developing around him almost without his noticing it. In 1912, for instance, the Post-Impressionist Exhibition had been open a year, the Ballets Russes had made their first visit, and Conrad Aiken had arrived in London with Prufrock for sale, while Yeats had given warning that in future his poetry would be walking naked. Meanwhile, Barrie was causing the Peter Pan statue to ‘appear’ in Kensington Gardens, and Constable was bringing out Peacock Pie. Walter de la Mare’s strangeness and greatness might have detached themselves more clearly against a middle distance.

  In ‘The Old Men,’ written when he was about fifty, he had thought of the old as caged and riddle-rid, lost to Earth’s ‘Listen!’ and ‘See!’, but nothing of the kind happened to him, and Theresa Whistler has a long, tranquil, attentive old age to record. It wasn’t that he had nothing to suffer. Elfie declined slowly and painfully, and his younger daughter, Jinnie, became an alcoholic. But Florence, his eldest, was at hand, as his sister Flo had been, and a private nurse, Nathalie Saxton (to whom the book is dedicated), devoted herself to him entirely. In fact, Walter de la Mare was spoiled for eighty-three years, as poets probably should be. He knew this and was grateful for it, as he would be grateful for this fine biography.

  Times Literary Supplement, 1993

  The Consolations of Housman

  ‘I can no more define poetry,’ A. E. Housman wrote in 1928, ‘than a terrier can define a rat when he comes across one; and I recognise poetry by definite physical sensations, either down the spine, or at the back of the throat, or in the pit of the stomach’—a warning, surely, that poetry can’t be usefully argued about. Housman also said that he didn’t begin to write it until the ‘really emotional part of my life [that is, his unreturned love for Moses Jackson] was over.’ I accept what Housman says—no biographer has made it much clearer, nor does Tom Stoppard’s play The Invention of Love.

  Last Poems came out in 1922, when I was nearly six years old, and in fact my copy is a first edition, published by Grant Richards, with discreet ‘printer’s flowers’ at the end of each poem. Most of them had been written much earlier and recall A Shropshire Lad’s themes of guilt, longing, distance, absence, the dead friend, and the soldier who trades in his life for thirteen pence a day (‘everything comes un-stuck,’ as George Orwell complained, while admitting grudgingly that Housman was likely to be immortal). But in Last Poems there is more relaxation of Housman’s glacial severity:

  I, a stranger and afraid,

  In a world I never made.

  He has been born, however, as we all are, within the confine of the laws of God and the laws of man. The daily effort has to be made. ‘Oh often have I washed and dressed,’ Housman says:

  Ten thousand times I’ve done my best

  And all’s to do again.

  England, meanwhile, is beautiful (and was much more so in 1922), and at the end of Last Poems is the unforgettable ‘Tell me not here,’ a description of his own border country, so quiet that a single pine cone falling to the ground and the cuckoo that ‘shouts all day at nothing’ are the loudest sounds in it. But he reminds us that although we may be beguiled, as he was, for a lifetime, it will be at our own risk. ‘Heartless, witless nature’ makes no response to us whatsoever.

  These are the verses of a reserved, unbending man who was first a clerk at the Patent Office, then a meticulous Professor of Latin. I cannot explain why I find them such a great consolation.

  ‘Book of the Century’: Last Poems by

  A. E. Housman, Daily Telegraph, 1998

  * * *

  1Monro could not resist ‘improving’ the title poem by leaving out the last two verses. But Field Marshall Lord Wavell, when he included ‘Magpies in Picardy’ in his anthology Other Men’s Flowers (Cape, 1944), was able to remember the verses from the Westminster Gazette, where they had first been printed.

  M. R. JAMES Monty and His Ghosts

  An introduction to The Haunted Dolls’ House and Other Stories

  There is something dismaying in a life with nothing to regret and nothing to hide. In the case of Montague Rhodes James, however, this has to be accepted. ‘No loveless childhood to be thrust out of mind,’ wrote his biographer, Michael Cox, ‘no parental iniquities to be kept secret.’ Monty (as he preferred to be called) did not like talkin
g about himself. How much, in fact, did he have to say?

  He was the fourth and youngest child of the rector of Livermere, near Bury St Edmunds. Born in 1862, he spent almost his entire life between Eton and King’s College, Cambridge, the two foundations of Henry VI. After entering Eton (on his second attempt) as a King’s Scholar in autumn 1876, he spent there, as he always acknowledged, the happiest years he could remember. He was twenty years old before he left Eton. Passing on to King’s he took a double first in classics and was appointed junior Dean, Dean, Provost, and, in 1913, Vice-Chancellor of the University. During this time he had made himself one of the leading authorities on the Apocryphal Books of the Bible and on western medieval manuscripts. In 1918, just before the armistice, he was called back to Eton as Provost. In 1930 he received the Order of Merit. He died in his Lodge in June 1936, while in Chapel they were singing the Nunc dimittis.

  Monty’s sedate memoirs are called Eton and King’s (1926). ‘It’s odd,’ Lytton Strachey wrote after reading them, ‘that the Provost of Eton should still be aged sixteen. A life without a jolt.’

  Monty never married, although he remained on affectionate terms with his brothers and sister, and acquired, in the course of time, a surrogate family. They were the widow and daughter of a pupil who became a friend, James McBryde. McBryde died early, and Monty became guardian to little Jane, taking his responsibilities very seriously. But he was still a bachelor, and a late-Victorian bachelor at that. It has been pointed out that in every photograph of Monty, from his childhood to his seventies, he has the same benevolent but almost expressionless look, latterly behind round, wire-rimmed spectacles. Probably he felt the greatest pressure on him in 1905, when he was appointed Provost of King’s. ‘You will have to get a Provostess, that’s that,’ a distinguished friend told him. And Monty, well used to deflecting this argument, would hint at his admiration for a certain actress who was appearing in Peter Pan, but nothing came of it. Much more important to him, although what he said about it is not on record, was the question of ordination. Like Lewis Carroll, he became a deacon but never a priest.

  Monty is remembered today for his ghost stories. They are entirely his own, written in an irresistibly appealing manner, in accordance with rules which he had invented for himself. Writing at the end of the 1920s about contemporary ‘tales of the supernatural,’ he said, ‘They drag in sex…which is a fatal mistake; sex is tiresome enough in the novels; in a ghost story, or as the backbone of a ghost story, I have no patience with it.’ Certainly sex doesn’t trouble his protagonists. It is their unclouded innocence, combined with their serious scholarship, which is precisely Monty’s strong card. By way of contrast there are deferential inn-keepers, agents and chambermaids, who may know a little more than their employers, may wink or smile, but are a thousand miles from guessing the shocking truth.

  It would be a mistake to think of these stories as something separate from his life. His predilection began early. His biographer quotes from a contribution to the Eton Rambler in 1880 (when he was seventeen): ‘Everyone can remember a time when he has carefully searched his curtains—and poked in the dark corners of his room before retiring to rest—with a sort of pleasurable uncertainty as to whether there might not be a saucer-eyed skeleton or a skinny-chested ghost in hiding somewhere. I invariably go through this ceremony myself.’ To the skeleton and the ghost we may add spiders, owls, the sound of voices talking just out of earshot, a creature covered with long hair, a figure cloaked or cowled or with its head in a sack. The Apocrypha, too, which had fascinated him very early and continued to do so all his life, has been described by Richard Holmes as ‘a somewhat twilight field, neither orthodox Biblical studies nor entirely medieval folklore, and it contains many strange presences, such as Solomon and the Demons.’ At the same time, Monty’s recreations remained guileless—long bicycle rides with two or three friends, church music, Animal Grab sometimes in the evenings, then (like Anderson in ‘Number 13’) ‘his supper, his game of patience, and his bed.’

  Having written ‘Canon Alberic’s Scrap-Book’ some time after April 1892 (when he visited St Bertrand-de-Comminges in the Pyrenees) but before 1893 (when he read it aloud to the Chitchat Club in Cambridge), and ‘Lost Hearts’ at about the same time, Monty produced his ghost stories at regular intervals, and read them to a Christmas audience of friends in his rooms at King’s, blowing out every candle but one. They were published at regular intervals: 1904, Ghost Stories of an Antiquary; 1911, More Ghost Stories of an Antiquary; 1919, A Thin Ghost; 1925, A Warning to the Curious; and 1931, The Collected Ghost Stories, for which he wrote five additional pieces, ‘There was a Man Dwelt by a Churchyard,’ ‘Rats,’ ‘After Dark in the Playing Fields,’ ‘Wailing Well,’ and ‘Stories I Have Tried to Write.’ He also wrote a preface, in which he cautiously answered the question, did he believe in ghosts: ‘I am prepared to consider evidence and accept it if it satisfies me.’ That is to say, he used the same criteria as he did in his life as a scholar, teacher, and administrator.

  ‘Places have been prolific in suggestion,’ he wrote. The stories are not only set in, but arise from real localities, and Monty himself was a deeply engaged traveller, with his map spread out on his knee—like Mr Davidson, for example, in ‘The Uncommon Prayer-Book,’ who spends the first morning of his holiday taking a train a couple of stations westward and walking back to his hotel along the river valley. Denmark, Sweden, Felixstowe, Belchamp St Paul in Essex—not exotic places, but that is why he selects them—respectable hotel rooms, libraries, cathedral cities, modest country houses, seaside towns out of season, dark passages leading to candlelit bedrooms where there is something wrong with the window. The reader, of course, is always one or more steps ahead of the victim, and would like to tell him not to pick up objects from archaeological sites, or to put his hand on carved figures on a choir-stall, or, if he dreams, that it is only a dream.

  But that would not be quite accurate, because in Ghost Stories of an Antiquary Monty introduces dreams that wonderfully suggest the feeling of suffocation and powerlessness that comes with ‘dreaming true.’ There is Stephen Elliot’s dream of a figure of a ‘dusty leaden colour’ lying (and smiling) in an old disused bath, W.R.’s dream of a sickeningly bloodstained Punch and Judy show, Professor Parkins’s dream (or vision) of a man desperately climbing over the groynes on Felixstowe beach, Mr Dillet’s dream (or nightmare) in ‘The Haunted Dolls’ House.’ They are equally likely to be projected from the past (like Frank’s in ‘The Rose Garden’) or from the immediate and unescapable future. In either case, they anticipate the climax of the story, but don’t diminish it. Whether Monty himself was troubled by dreams I don’t know. In January 1907 he told Arthur Benson (who noted it in his diary) that he was only happy in bed or looking at manuscripts. This hardly sounds like a dreamer, but I am not sure that Monty told Arthur Benson the whole truth.

  He was, from first to last, a man of books. ‘The library was the obvious place for the after-dinner hours. Candle in hand and pipe in mouth, he moved round the room for some time, taking stock of the titles.’ This is from ‘Mr Humphreys and His Inheritance,’ but might just as well be about its author. With old-fashioned courtesy he welcomes his readers to his world, just as, when Provost of King’s, he welcomed students and friends with tobacco and whisky decanters already laid out in the hall, while the lock had been replaced by a plain handle. A natural mimic in real life, he could imitate the style of any period that interested him—it seemed less a deliberate imitation than a natural process, like protective colouring. There was Medieval Latin, of course, the ‘fragments of ostensible erudition,’ as he called them, which persuade us into accepting as real the manuscripts, the inscriptions, the ‘rather rare and exceedingly difficult book, The Sertum Steinfeldens Norbertinum.’ This last is in the possession of a Mr Somerton, an antiquary, but his story, ‘The Treasure of Abbot Thomas,’ takes place in 1859, and Monty is careful to adjust himself to that date, three years before he himself was born. ‘M
artin’s Close’ begins ‘some four years ago’ but consists largely of the verbatim report of the trial in 1684 (it is said to be in seventeenth-century shorthand, so there has been some delay in translating it) of George Martin for the murder of a half-witted girl, Ann Clark. Lord Chief Justice Jeffreys is the judge, and Monty, using, as he says, the State Trials, has reproduced Jeffreys’ style so exactly that it seems ventriloquism. Almost as good, and almost as chilling, is the diary of Archdeacon Haynes from August 1816 onwards in ‘The Stalls of Barchester Cathedral.’ Monty approaches slowly. First he tells us that he read an obituary of Haynes ‘quite by chance’ in an old copy of The Gentleman’s Magazine, then, ‘quite lately,’ he is cataloguing the manuscripts of the college to which he belongs. The first hint of something unusual comes when the librarian says he is ‘pretty sure’ that a certain box is one that the old Master of the college said they should never have accepted. It contains the diary. Now Monty has shut the trap on us. He can rely on the guilt and fascination that all of us feel when we open a private diary. The placing of the entry ‘There is no kitchen cat’ is a masterstroke.