THE TREE by Walter de la Mare

How can I go on? Story after story, whether read before or not, staggering in their dark beauty. This is possibly the most powerful story so far in my current reading and re-reading spate of WDLM, and that is saying increasingly half and half and half more than I can express in this real-time review. Each sentence of the story is priceless, and temptingly quotable, but so utterly quotable it somehow seems to become unquotable. So I have restricted myself to just one quote below, possibly one of the least quotable in the whole story, the one concerning ‘semi-fraternal’ truths…

“To submit to being half-starved simply because nobody with money to waste would so much as look at your bits of drawings; to sit there dreamily grinning at a tree in your back-garden, twenty times more useless because there wasn’t its like for miles around, even if there wasn’t; to be content to hang like a bloodsucker on the generosity of a relative half-blood and half-water – well, he had given P.P. a bit of his mind.”

POSSIBLE SPOILERS TO OR BY THE BARK AND BRANCHES OF THIS REVIEW’S TREE, AND THE DARKLY STRANGE AND TANTALISINGLY BEAUTIFUL BIRDLIFE (AND BEAUTIFUL, PERHAPS POISONOUS, FLOWERS, FRUIT OR WHATEVER) THAT IT HARBOURS:

This is is the story of the rich Fruit Merchant returning by dreary and surprisingly downtrodden first-class train carriage and by horse carriage manned by a sort of animal human, through hoar-frost and country wilds to see his half-brother whom he somehow makes us refer to as P.P., also remembering when they first met 12 years before. They have since had disputes over money, as well as their ongoing natural mutual antipathy, and when you read the descriptions, you understand why, at least from the Fruit Merchant’s point of view — but in some sort of button-focussed OCD way, the Fruit Merchant needs to harvest a principle as well as a principal, to reclaim a monetary debt that P.P. owes him, even though the Fruit Merchant does not need the money.
We gradually learn of the giant tree whence P.P. makes valuable woodcuts and drawings, or as our Fruit Merchant deems them, ‘miserable scribblings and scragglings.’ And the tree is the one that grew huge as if from nothing, like magic, in the two half-brothers’ inherited land, though I may be wrong about that last bit, as, after putting down this story, one feels one needs to destroy any memory of it just as P.P. must have tried to do with the tree itself by a lethally cut tree-ring in it, and also as the Fruit Merchant later destroys, in turn, each of P.P.’s priceless auctioned woodcuts and drawings that, as a rich Fruit Merchant, he can easily afford to buy, thus to destroy them. But I can write no more about it in real-time, and I somehow do not wish to refresh anything by browsing the story again.

PS: Memory  of the tree in The Tree has so far remained indelible.

PPS: Ditto

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Context to this review: https://elizabethbowensite.wordpress.com/walter-de-la-mare/#comment-1783