June 22, 1956

Walter de la Mare (April 25 1873 to June 22, 1956) was an English writer and anthologist. Praise and literary assessment of this author is always -- qualified. He writes for -- children. His fame is because of the people he knew. Dear reader, I wonder if this slighting tone is appropriate. For you do not study English literature without Walter de la Mare. Take this excerpt from his novel, Memoirs of a Midget. (1921).

But every family, I suppose, has its little pet traditions; and one of ours, relating to those early years, is connected with our kitchen cat, Miaou. She had come by a family of kittens, and I had crept, so it was said, into her shallow basket with them. Having, I suppose, been too frequently meddled with, this old mother cat lugged off her kittens one by one to a dark cupboard. The last one thus secured, she was discovered in rapt contemplation of myself, as if in debate whether or not it was her maternal duty to carry me off too. And there was I grinning up into her face. Such was our cook's—Mrs Ballard's—story. What I actually remember is different. On the morning in question I was turning the corner of the brick-floored, dusky passage that led to the kitchen, when Miaou came trotting along out of it with her blind, blunt-headed bundle in her mouth. We were equally surprised at this encounter, and in brushing past she nearly knocked me over where I stood, casting me at the same moment the queerest animal look out of her eyes. So truth, in this case, was not so strange as Mrs Ballard's fiction.



There is, apparent in the above passage, a rare quality in writing, in people: a slender, unobtrusive, objectivity. And a rare vision in fiction of a child's recollecting.