A fearless faith in fiction — Employing, since 2008, a Kantian or Jungian sensibility and an ‘intentional fallacy’ consciousness — Various passions of the reading moment — Walter de la Mare, ELizabeth BOWen, ROBERT aiCKMAN and many others old and new — Please click my name below for this site’s navigation and my backstory as intermittent photographer, writer, editor, publisher & reviewer.
My reviews of all Walter de la Mare stories in alphabetical order…
Rereading several Walter de la Mare stories with @DF_Lewis commentaries.
All tales begin well that begin with talk like “old sherry” and pipes being knocked out on the bars of the grate, but few develop into work so rich and singular as this. https://t.co/VTjlA0xiSX
From my earlier review of Jimmie in OUT OF THE DEEP…
He no longer sleeps, as he did as a boy, in the attic, but he chooses a bigger room, with painted nymphs on the ceiling and an array of bell-pulls that evokes campanology in his mind. Suffering from insomnia, he tempts fate by impetuously, petulantly tugging the crimson tassel of a bell-pull and receives ‘bell-answerers’, i.e. the service of a valet he desires as a sort of boyish vision and later a girl with pigtails as her own bell-pulls. He taunts them with capricious requests, like the one for primroses. (“‘Look here,’ said Jimmie, dexterously raising himself to his elbow on the immense lace-fringed pillow, ‘it’s all very well; you have managed things quite admirably, considering your age and the season, and so on. But I didn’t ask for primroses, I asked for violets. That’s a very old trick – very old trick.’”) But later what he summons is a blurred whitish animal, not the white elephant he thought of before, but a pig-like creature in word-resonance with the pig-tails. With at least a hint of social satire filtered by this ‘whiteness’ theme: “And snapping out insults at former old cronies who couldn’t help their faces being as tiresome as a whitewashed pigsty had soon grown wearisome.”
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From my earlier review of Jimmie in OUT OF THE DEEP…
He no longer sleeps, as he did as a boy, in the attic, but he chooses a bigger room, with painted nymphs on the ceiling and an array of bell-pulls that evokes campanology in his mind. Suffering from insomnia, he tempts fate by impetuously, petulantly tugging the crimson tassel of a bell-pull and receives ‘bell-answerers’, i.e. the service of a valet he desires as a sort of boyish vision and later a girl with pigtails as her own bell-pulls. He taunts them with capricious requests, like the one for primroses. (“‘Look here,’ said Jimmie, dexterously raising himself to his elbow on the immense lace-fringed pillow, ‘it’s all very well; you have managed things quite admirably, considering your age and the season, and so on. But I didn’t ask for primroses, I asked for violets. That’s a very old trick – very old trick.’”) But later what he summons is a blurred whitish animal, not the white elephant he thought of before, but a pig-like creature in word-resonance with the pig-tails. With at least a hint of social satire filtered by this ‘whiteness’ theme: “And snapping out insults at former old cronies who couldn’t help their faces being as tiresome as a whitewashed pigsty had soon grown wearisome.”
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