When the sun's rays beat down too fiercely on my head I would make myself an umbrella of wild angelica or water parsnip.

Caring little for playthings, and having my smallest books with me chiefly for silent company, I would fall into a daydream in a world that in my solitude became my own. In this fantastic and still world I forgot the misadventure of my birth, which had now really begun to burden me, forgot pride, vanity, and chagrin; and was at peace. There I had many proportionate friends, few enemies. An old carrion crow, that sulked out a black existence in this beauty, now and then alarmed me with his attentions; but he was easily scared off. The lesser and least of living things seemed to accept me as one of themselves. Nor (perhaps because I never killed them) had I any silly distaste for the caterpillars, centipedes, and satiny black slugs. Mistress Snail would stoop out at me like a foster-mother. Even the midges, which to his frenzy would swarm round my father's head like swifts round a steeple, left me entirely unmolested. Either I was too dry a prey, or they misliked the flavour of my blood.

My eyes dazzled in colours. The smallest of the marvels of flowers and flies and beetles and pebbles, and the radiance that washed over them, would fill me with a mute, pent-up rapture almost unendurable. Butterflies would settle quietly on the hot stones beside me as if to match their raiment against mine. If I proffered my hand, with quivering wings and horns they would uncoil their delicate tongues and quaff from it drops of dew or water. A solemn grasshopper would occasionally straddle across my palm, and with patience I made quite an old friend of a harvest mouse. They weigh only two to the half-penny. This sharp-nosed furry morsel would creep swiftly along to share my crumbs and snuggle itself to sleep in my lap. By-and-by, I suppose, it took to itself a wife; I saw it no more. Bees would rest there, the panniers of their thighs laden with pollen: and now and then a wasp, his jaws full of wood or meat. When sunbeetles or ants drew near, they would seem to pause at my whisper, as if hearkening. As if in their remote silence pondering and sharing the world with me. All childish fancy, no doubt; for I proved far less successful with the humans.



*

A forgotten gem, poetic and strange -- if not as successful as his short fiction, still very beautiful.

A weird novel that is a masterclass of perspective writing, though could have greatly beniffited from a good editor

On the bottom shelf of the back room in the cluttered East Village bookstore I stumbled on Miss M. Tattered, in hardcover, in the dark, and with the kind of title that begs to be examined. I read three pages and was enamored, and bought the book without question. Looking back, I now realize this was unusual behavior. I only buy books I've been meaning to read, and have read about, or did read, and have been meaning to find. So Miss M. became very dear to me because I discovered her for myself, without newspaper, book review, website, or recommendation, under the fingerprints of someone who bought her first, new, in 1922. I had never heard of Walter de la Mare, and neither has anyone I've spoken to since meeting him. He is, like Miss M, his own kind of curio, which I hope does not mean that I learned nothing from his work.

This beautiful, sad, twisted novel resonated with me to a frightening degree. Miss M. speaks for young women finding their way in this world of vanities, curiosities, magic, and nature. At once her universe is too large for her to wade in and too small for her to breathe in. And when do we ever come upon obscure novels in original print these days? So Miss M. was like a treasure to me, though only the kind of treasure I am sure that she herself would gladly be. That which is a good friend.

“Memoirs of a Midget” by De La Mare captures the limbic-strange-oosphere that individuals who have some isolated physical problem inhabit. His prose is sympathetic and does what many writers on physical disabilities do not: it uses an uncanny brushstroke and paints the portrait of a person who possesses a vivid imagination which is limited to a small set of delights. Hilarious, also.

P.9

A perfectly uncanny novel. Subtle, too, as evidenced by the sheer number of complete misreadings it's accumulated over the years (see, for instance, the laughably crap review in Rain Taxi from a couple years back).

The fictional introduction to these fictional memoirs promises an account of a remarkable woman, of keen intellect, whose travels and experiences are such a marvel that they must be shared via publication.

What are we delivered? A single year in the life of this woman. During this year, her twentieth, she loses her parents and her home; is set up with a livable income and provided a home-for-life as a boarder; becomes a spoiled pet of the bored nobility; and finally, joins the circus for three nights to earn enough money to return to her life as a boarder. Throughout this, she treats those around her with contempt or at least disrespect, living the life of a privileged shut-in. We are, in summary, offered no evidence of a keen intellect nor of a remarkable personality, and the travels and experiences of a shut-in are neither extensive or interesting.

Oh, and the woman is a midget. Not an actual midget or little-person or insufficiently-altitudinous or whatever the proper term might be, but a scale model of an attractive woman, about two feet high.

Very strange and exquisite. A story that stays with you for a long time.

n  "When one speaks of de la Mare one must go heavy on the cream..."n

I miss this book. But I don’t miss it like I missed Don Quixote or The Book of Ebenezer Le Page when I finished them. Those two books for me were the embodiments of two people; two people I dearly missed as soon as I finished reading the final page. I missed their presence as people in my life. I still miss them! even though they’re ever within arm’s reach right there on my shelf… The way I miss Memoirs of a Midget is different. I miss the book itself. I miss being in, being rooted within, the book itself. The book was a world I entered as I stepped through my reading into it. It enveloped me, or rather it enveloped my imagination, but then that’s not quite right either, since in a way it was my own imagination that I entered while reading it. Walter de la Mare provided the portal with his own imagination, but it was the congruence of my own imagination with his that allowed his world to accept my imagination into it, where it (my imagination) then ballooned, filling the space I lived within while reading the book. I am not ashamed to admit that this kind of experience is my ideal reading experience. I want an escape. I want to live in an alternate world for a spell, for as I well know living in an alternate world for a spell permanently alters one’s brain, sending ripples of resonance and significance and splendid otherness throughout one’s consciousness forever, or at least as long as that consciousness is conscious, and so becomes not so much an escape as a subtle transformation into a permanently freer being. All I want is this kind of experience, but I rarely get it, even though I seem to fill all my spare moments with reading. This isn’t to say that all the other books I read come up short. No, I read for a multitude of reasons and almost always satisfy at least one of those reasons with every book I read. So it’s not like I’m perpetually pining for this experience, letting languidly fall book after book as I fail to achieve it, withering and growing paler and paler in my chair, cast-off dusty tomes piling around me. No, I follow the old precept of “one book opens another”, and zigzag through literary daisy-chains of verbal stimulation. I want to be stimulated! At all times! And that’s what books help me almost achieve, abetted by my too-numerous-to-count reasons for reading. But certain books are rare and different, and so by definition should be few in number, which anyway helps heighten their significance, their strange profundity. They somehow insinuate themselves into the daily, non-literary, fabric of my life, and slightly elevate the entirety of my existence, from stirring things with spoons to contemplating self in a sea of stars. Really, how many books capable of doing that do you need in your life? Their numbers should be few, and I’ve just added one more, doubling the number in my life. The other? Little, Big by John Crowley.

"...the spermatozoa of adoration."

Listened, dramatisation, BBC Sounds.

Do all things miniature fascinate you? I confess I have a weakness for small objects, so the autobiography of Miss M., a very small person indeed, was an enchanting read. De La Mare
weaves a deft story of Miss Midgetina's struggles in the enormous and complex world she
ventures into. Themes of love, loss, death and fidelity make this a big novel about a small heroine.