This is somehow coincidental as the next story’s photo frame is said to be coincidental, inasmuch as, by chance, I read and reviewed (HERE) ‘The Swimmer’ by John Cheever this very morning before reading ‘Disillusioned’… Please read my review of the Cheever followed by this WDLM story, if you want to know why!
“Even the faint fume of drugs on the air and the persistent tapping of water in a shallow basin behind the dark-blue screen only intensified the quiet.”
This is a conte à clef involving a man seeking help from a doctor for his disillusionment and a solipsism that I mentioned earlier above in connection with a ‘slopbasin’, a work bordering on Ligottian Anti-Natalism, and what revenge Grandmother Nature is having on mankind by a vivid prophecy of Global Warming and its human repercussions. And about the relationship between patient and doctor. Even a sort of telepathy at the end, as a hint of the cosmic gestalt, but with a broken barometer that is ever set fair…
The patient as narrator is a writer of fiction for magazines and we hear his descriptions of three stories he has had published that demonstrates his severe malady of mind. The final one being almost a frame for this one, of patient and doctor together with the relationship between them with a plum tree outside the doctor’s window as objective-correlative. And with much food for thought on philosophical and scientific matters. Even plagiarism involving a Chekhov story.
“‘The fact is I can’t regain my grip on things. It is as though whatever I do or think or say – or feel for that matter – serves no purpose, is no manner of use – to myself, I mean. And yet, my friends talk to me much as usual. Nobody seems to have noticed anything wrong.’ […] ‘I am, as I say, a writer, an author by profession. I scribble a good deal for the magazines, fiction chiefly.’ […] …fiction is read almost solely by women – a sort of stimulant, or sedative perhaps. […] Tennyson, you know, used to say under his breath “Alfred, Alfred, Alfred” until he became like a shell with the wind in it – empty. But I say instead, “In failing health – in failing health – in failing health” – the meaning intensifies, doctor, the longer you brood on it.’ […] ‘But then, you see, there is all the difference between not seeing a purpose in life because you haven’t looked for one; and being sure there is no purpose when you have.’ […] ‘Not that I am by profession a solipsist!’”
The three stories are wonderful frames for real stories that we might want to write ourselves, with many evocative expressions, and they can be projected onward, especially if you are also a writerly spirit with a malady like his!
“The people in the street – creatures from another planet: Traherne, of course: all colours and beautiful forms intensified. They walk as if they had wings – head, shoulder, thigh, like the angels in Isaiah:”
And a cathedral…
“…Palestrina, the Bach and the Beethoven and the Purcell and so on, that had floated up and into silence and rest into the fretted roof century after century. I overdid it a little perhaps.”
The Ligottian element has its centre here: “Good Lord, doctor, this whole stellar universe of ours may be no more than the bubbles in a bottle of champagne – or soda-water! And we humans the restless maggots in a rotting excretion of the sun. And yet – we go on breeding!”
But the most powerful moment of Nature’s revenge upon humanity is hinged here: “The doctor turned back his head again, shifted his elbows on the arms of the chair, leaned his chin on his fingers, and once more out of his calm settled eyes patiently surveyed his visitor.” leading to… “There is an orgy of crises: changes of Government: International Conferences: ever more and more impotent and ineffectual. And then at last the newspapers fall on the scare like bluebottles on carrion.”
***
The full context of above review: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2022/09/06/the-elbow-stories-of-walter-de-la-mare/
The Des Lewis Gestalt Real-Time Reviews 
The next story I chose below is the perfect onward progression of the ‘solipsism / slopdish’ theme-and-variations that I proposed earlier above, together with a man’s whole family, en masse, being tantamount to this book’s erstwhile ‘Visitor from Porlock’! —
THE NAP
“Like all Saturday dinners in his household, this had been a hugger-mugger dinner – one of vehement relays.”
Ostensibly, and as an early Corrie fan, I deem this an early working-class soap-opera (“…slid the soap out of the basin where Charlie had abandoned it, and hung up the draggled towels again in the tiny bathroom.”) It has gender rôle issues of the day, that we should forgive for what they are. “…half-sexed nagger” and, like most women, his wife “always went off at a tangent.”
The scene is that of Mr Thripp (“He was breathing heavily, for he inclined nowadays, as he would sometimes confess, to the ongbongpong.”) He cherishes his solitude especially when his beautiful man-hunting young daughter Millie goes out and two sons, smoking James and footballing, Charlie, go out, too, the latter with the noise of “fifteen Charlies”. And particularly when his wife Mrs T is about to go to what we all called ‘the pictures’ in those days, she going with a flighty, flirty, highly made-up Mrs Brown (“Mr Thripp indeed was no lover of the ultrafeminine.”), Mrs Brown who says of picturehouses: “But I enjoy the dark, Mr Thripp … It rests the eyes.’”
Mr T has two clocks, one with a Zeno-like “pendulum – imperturbably chopping up eternity into fragments of time.” He is jug just as much as a jug is a jug, and insists ironically on doing the housework so that he can be sooner alone with his precious pot of tea for one and the ‘nirvana of a nap’ as I’m not sure what? — not exactly a dream, but a nap as a solipsism wherein his family anxieties play out and are hopefully transcended as the real truth of this fiction. For example, he witnesses Millie with a new boy friend whose “elbows were on the marble-top table, and he was looking at Millie very much as a young but experienced pig looks at his wash-trough.” Soap-basin, wash-trough, and, now, yes, I infer, slopdish! Aptly, then, it is Millie who is transcended this time, by dint of the nap as she returns home somehow to share Mr T’s tiny pot of T! But… “…it might be multitudinous shades of the unborn that were thronging about the glass of his window. Mr Thripp rose from his chair, his face transfigured with rage and desire for revenge.” — and thus the previously read story’s Anti-Natalism above is also played out by Mr Tea within our own solipsistic eyes, I guess.
“Within, the two clocks on the chimney-piece quarrelled furiously over the fleeting moments, attaining unanimity only in one of many ticks.”