Robert Suggs (January 22, 2000)Two fine "aunts" whose visits you don't want to prolong."Miss Jemima" isn't a family member as such. No, she's too domineering to be a mere family member. Jemima is a servant (nominally) to Susan's ailing uncle. In one of those forced-child-abandoment situations, 8-year-old Susan must stay out in the sparse, seemingly desolate countryside while her mother seeks to better her condition in India. All of this is being told by a now elderly Susan to her fascinated granddaughter, also named Susan, 75 years later as they sit on a hill overlooking the two buildings where all the story's events once played out--the house and a churchyard. All those years ago Susan had put up with a considerable dose of Jemima's abuse, and the only males--the uncle and an ineffectual if kindly minister--are powerless to help. Susan's only refuge is the churchyard, where dwells a legendary and ethereal creature. The fascinating thing about this beautifully rendered piece is that the monster is fully human and in no way supernatural; the fantasy element is almost beside the point--but not quite. De la Mare understands the desperate powerlessness of a child perfectly--particularly, it seems to me, in the special female-to-female politic that exists in a separate universe from the world of unnoticing and ultimately uncaring men. All the important characters in this tale are women--two Susans, one mother and one monster--and all add an important layer to a deceptively textured little masterpiece of a children's tale. Find this one in "Dread and Delight: 100 Years of Children's Ghost Stories," edited by Philippa Pearce. That's a book you need in your library anyway.
The more celebrated "Seaton's Aunt" is notably short on lyrical children's nostalgia. Or anything comforting whatsoever. Somehow I'd never gotten around to this story, and I'm glad I saved it. This is the De la Mare I'd been waiting for, a perfectly staged tale that is not quite a ghost story, not quite a vampire tale, not quite a psychological study, not quite a horror tale at all. Nor do we, the readers, quite get a grip on the narrator, or on Seaton, or on his aunt. Each character just eludes us, so humanly and convincingly drawn are they. Nothing runs according to formula or convention here. Seaton, a fellow none-too-beloved among his schoolmates, prevails on our narrator to accompany him home for the holiday, where he and we witness the the unsettling danse macabre that is the relationship between the sadistic aunt and her pale, spiritless nephew. Who or what is she? "I don't need to look to the living for company," she remarks near the end of the tale. And unless that describes you as well, this is a house where you won't want to be up for a midnight snack. This is the kind of story that brings some to suggest that Robert Aickman extended the trail that Walter De la Mare first began to cut through the dark wood of the ghost story. Nothing's quite neat or tidy by the denouement--though it's as clear as we want it to be. A fine, decadent gothic, one that could well be set in the American South by Faulkner. Find this one in pretty much any decent anthology that comes to hand.
Rob
oOo
rbadac (January 23, 2000)
Robert Suggs wrote:
> Two fine "aunts" whose visits you don't want to prolong.
>
> "Miss Jemima" . . .Whew. I'm glad that *was* somewhere else besides in BROOMSTICKS. Hopefully you folks in the dress box seats got it in one of those obtainable volumes of the new COLLECTED TALES, though it would be just your luck if it were in Vol. 2, that elusive chimaera Bill A. probably has a stack of in his basement, trying to drive the price up.
It is indeed a complex story. In a uniquely vulnerable moment of childhood, the elder Susan was caught between the frying pan of a horrid old bat Saki would have dismembered in short order and the fire of as baleful a fairy as ever found in Machen, and her curious apologies for Miss Jemima to the younger Susan are all the more poignant for it.
> The more celebrated "Seaton's Aunt" ...
It was No. 10 on my list certainly more because of familiarity, as it is No. 1 on most people's. But at least I did have the decency to compare it with the Beatles' 'Yesterday.' [please see rbadac's Walter De la Mare's Ten Best Stories, online at Violetbooks.com Weird Review] Again de la Mare plays havoc with our sympathies, truncating the Aunt into the most odious mold possible, then funnelling her out like poisonous frosting at the end, where Arthur Seaton's bitter prediction of her fate is verified, and we can't help but tremble at the awfulness of same.
This may be the most devastating counter-attack on such a cynical, overbearing personality as ever made in a contranatural short story, topping even 'Sredni Vashtar', and the Faulknerian comparison is also very apt.
rbadac
ooOoo