In “The Riddle” seven orphans are taken in by their grandmother, who allows them the run of her great house, with one Bluebeard-like caveat: they mustn’t open a certain trunk.
Curious george narrator full#
As Dylan Thomas once commented, de la Mare’s fairies can be “as endearing as Dracula.” In “Alice’s Godmother,” an ancient crone is so small that “when she was seated in her chair it was as if a large doll sat there-but a marvellous doll that had voice, thought, senses and motion beyond any human artificer’s wildest fancy.” This dry, wizened creature, with eyes “of a much fainter blue than the palest forget-me-not,” suddenly asks the story’s teenaged protagonist, “How long do you wish to live?” In essence, she offers Alice near immortality, but at what cost? In “Broomsticks” Miss Chauncey discovers that her black cat, Sam, during nights of full moon, signals messages to swooping, airborne witches. While most of these, such as my favorite, “The Lord Fish,” are utterly enchanting, several are distinctly unnerving. Only the previous year de la Mare had been awarded the Carnegie Medal for his Collected Stories for Children. Eliot, and an appreciation by Graham Greene, who argued that de la Mare’s prose was “unequalled in its richness since the death of James, or dare one, at this date, say Robert Louis Stevenson.” As late as 1948 a tribute volume marking his seventy-fifth birthday featured a Max Beerbohm caricature, a verse greeting from T.S. In the 1920s and 1930s Walter de la Mare was considered one of Britain’s major literary figures, a triple threat as poet, storyteller, and anthologist. “Do diddle di do,/Poor Jim Jay”-there, summed up in a nonsense rhyme, is the fate of most authors, no matter how revered or honored in their time. When last glimpsed, he had become a mere speck and soon would be “past crying for.” Among much else, it includes the story of Jim Jay, who “got stuck fast/In yesterday.” No matter how hard his friends pulled, Jim slowly slipped away from the present.
If the name Walter de la Mare elicits any recognition at all, it’s probably because your tenth-grade English class used an ancient textbook that reprinted “The Listeners,” an eerie, tantalizing poem that begins, “‘Is there anybody there?’ said the Traveller,/Knocking on the moonlit door.” You might even have been given-by an elderly relative, no doubt-a copy of de la Mare’s most famous book of children’s poems, Peacock Pie.
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