The Haunting of Lamb House by Joan Aiken

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The Haunting of Lamb House by Joan Aiken is a novel published in 1991. Lamb House, a Georgian building in Rye, Sussex, has been home to several writers over the years. Henry James lived and wrote there, as did E F Benson and later on, Rumer Godden. James wrote The Turn of the Screw there; Benson wrote his Mapp and Lucia novels, in which the house itself features, as well as many ghost stories there. It is now a National Trust property. Joan Aiken was born in Rye and lived not far away all her life.

This is an atmospheric and fascinating novel, an intriguing mixture of fact and fiction. It is composed of three linked stories. In the first, Toby Lamb, son of the builder of the house, tells the tale of tragic events in his childhood and youth. This is a very credible recreation of life in early eighteenth-century Sussex. We find out towards the end that what we have been reading is his own manuscript, written later in life, which he conceals behind a wall in the house.

Many years later, Henry James becomes the occupant of the house. This story is written in the third person in a style rather like James’ own. He feels as if the house has chosen him, rather than the other way round. A mysterious fire leads to some reconstruction work and the discovery of the manuscript. There are troubling similarities between Toby’s story and James’ own life. James considers publishing the manuscript as it is, but his brother William dissuades him. James considers that Toby’s use of the first-person style is a weakness and he re-writes it. He shows his new version to his friend and fellow-writer Edith Wharton. She considers that the work is not up to his usual standard.

After James’ death the house passes to E F Benson. He too has the feeling that the house is calling to him in some way. This story is the shortest of the three, written in the first person in the style of one of Benson’s ghost stories. Behind a garden wall he discovers another secret garden in which he erects a writing hut. It is while writing there that he sees the apparition of a man in black, a figure who featured in the first story, when Toby saw him in the garden. I shall not spoil things by saying who he is. A meeting across time resolves things in a satisfying way but also with a suggestion that the cycle will carry on when Benson says: “Perhaps you and I, Hugh, will be the next pair of ghosts to take over the lease. Perhaps we shall be occupying the secret garden here in the year 2030!”

This is as much a meditation on ideas of literary quality and posterity as a conventional ghost story. James is disconcerted by the fact that Edith Wharton’s novels sell so much better than his own, which he considers to be of higher quality. Benson is aware that although his own novels are successful, they do not really go deep enough.

Joan Aiken’s reader’s note is slightly misleading, perhaps deliberately so. She says that Toby’s story is completely fictional, yet elements of it, such as the visit of King George, are part of the history of Rye. She acknowledges that she has drawn on writings by and about James and Benson for their stories. She says that the ghosts are entirely fictional. What she does not say is that the description of the man in black is taken almost word-for-word from E F Benson’s 1940 autobiography, in which he describes an encounter with what he took to be a ghost.

How much you like this novel will probably depend on how much you like the writing of Henry James and E F Benson and whether or not you have been to Rye. For an admirer of E F Benson’s ghost stories like me, it’s a real treat. I have the feeling that there’s been something of a competition over the years as to whether Lamb House should be a literary shrine to James or to Benson. I know James is generally considered the superior writer, but Benson wrote not only in the house but about the house, so for me that secures his claim to it. After all, he lived there much longer than James, from 1918 until his death in 1940.

I have also written about E F Benson’s stories The Temple and Pirates.

Tender is the Night by F Scott Fitzgerald

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One of the things I like about being a bit older is going back and reading books that I read many years ago to see whether they pass the only test that matters in literature, the test of time. How accurate were my earlier judgements and how much were they a product of the enthusiasm of youth?

Tender is the Night, published in 1934 is not quite as well-known as Fitzgerald’s earlier novel, The Great Gatsby. It is longer and more complex than Gatsby, and does not quite have that sense of perfect construction. It’s a more difficult read but perhaps a more satisfying one.

I always preferred it to Gatsby though, and going back to it, I’m stunned at just how good I still find it to be.

It is the story of American psychiatrist Dick Diver and his marriage to wealthy heiress Nicole Warren, who is his patient before becoming his wife. This takes place mainly in the glamourous locations of the French Riviera and Switzerland in the 1920s. There is also the wider background of the aftermath of the first world war, something we are reminded of during a visit to the abandoned trenches of the western front.

At that time a favourable exchange rate meant that Americans found the dollar went a long way in France. At Gausse’s hotel on the Riviera, the Divers have gathered a group of friends around them, including alcoholic composer Abe North, French-American soldier Tommy Barban and would-be writer Albert McKisko.   

This tale of wealthy American expatriates in Europe inevitably recalls the writing of Henry James and Edith Wharton, but there is a lush, poetic feel to the language here and the title is taken from Keats’ Ode to a Nightingale. Yet it is faster paced and there is a fluidity of time that shows the influence of modernism. We are in a different era, the characters are more volatile and there is an undercurrent of violence here with events such as a duel and a shooting featuring in the story. Some of this is similar to the world depicted in Hemingway’s Fiesta.

It’s a very American novel in that most of the references to the British are negative, mentioning the decline of the empire, and one of the few British characters, Lady Caroline Sibley-Biers, is quite decadent.

The novel has a clever flashback structure, opening in the south of France at what is actually the middle of the story, before going back to the beginning in Switzerland in 1917 then resuming in the 1920s and going on to the tragic ending. This gives a mystery element and a dramatic tension to the whole opening part of the novel. What is the secret behind the Divers’ idyllic world and seemingly perfect marriage?

This is enhanced by the whole of that opening section being seen through the eyes of Rosemary, the young film actress who is attracted to Dick Diver. We see the Divers and their seemingly perfect world through her eyes. Dick is attracted to her as well, but it is not immediately apparent why a seemingly happily married man might be tempted to stray. The tensions in the Divers’ marriage are gradually revealed.    

Throughout the novel Fitzgerald subtly varies the point of view. This is particularly effective in conveying the way in which Dick declines and Nicole rises, as their relationship changes. At first, the reader hardly notices what is happening, as Dick begins to drink more, and his charm and perfect manners begin to drop away, alienating their circle of friends. The tipping point of the story after which the balance between them shifts is when Dick has an affair with Rosemary in Rome, gets into a fight and is beaten up by the police.

There is some very murky psychology on display here. Nicole’s mental troubles have been caused by sexual abuse by her father. Dick is as much her doctor as her husband, a figure of authority. “Control yourself!” he snaps at her as she begins to unravel. The film that has made Rosemary a star is called Daddy’s Girl. Her mother, too, is a controlling figure who encourages her relationship with the older, married man.

The novel has an autobiographical element, based as it is on Fitzgerald’s marriage to Zelda and their life in France.

Finally, Dick is corrupted by wealth, drink, and endless leisure, his plans to do pioneering work in psychiatry abandoned and his career in tatters. At the end, Nicole and Dick divorce and he disappears into an obscure life as a local doctor back in America. With Nicole cured and now married to Tommy Barban, Dick has served his purpose as far as the Warren family are concerned. “That’s what he was educated for” her older sister cynically says. She had planned for Nicole to have a doctor husband all along, she just didn’t necessarily think it would be Doctor Diver. The reader knows it was a real love, on both sides. As Nicole said “I don’t ask you to love me always like this, but I ask you to remember. Somewhere inside me there’ll always be the person I am tonight.”

The final image is very poignant, as Dick says goodbye to the beach in front of the hotel where the story opened. He and Nicole created a world and now it is all gone.

The later parts of the novel are almost unbearably sad. It is beautifully written and an absorbing, heart-breaking reading experience. It was Fitzgerald’s own favourite of his books and he was rather puzzled by its relative lack of success on first publication, but its reputation has risen steadily ever since.  

The Pursued by C S Forester

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The Pursued is the third of C S Forester’s inter-war crime novels. It was written in 1935 but not published at the time. The manuscript somehow went missing, to be rediscovered and finally published in 2011. Like the two earlier novels it’s a tale of dark deeds in suburban London, but it’s slightly different in that here the female characters are given more prominence. I suspect that the real reason it was not published at the time was a frankness about sexual matters unusual for an English novel then. It’s also perhaps the closest of the three to the writing of Patrick Hamilton, with the same sensitivity to the position of women in that era. Like many crime novels of this vintage, there is an echo here of the events of the real-life Thompson and Bywaters case.   

Housewife Marjorie Grainger, ten years married with two small children, returns from a night out visiting an old school friend. She finds a strong smell of gas in the kitchen and her sister Dot, who has been babysitting, lying dead on the floor with her head in the oven. At the inquest it is revealed that Dot was pregnant and a verdict of suicide is returned. It is a mystery as to who the man responsible could have been. Dot was twenty-eight, had always lived with her widowed mother and her job did not bring her into contact with men very often.

Marjorie is puzzled by her discovery of two broken wine bottles in the dustbin. She has already noticed her husband Ted’s unusual excitement on the night of Dot’s death. Then she finds that he has lied about his movements on that night. And he works at the local gas showroom and is knowledgeable about gas appliances.

When her chatterbox four-year-old son blurts out what he saw on the night of his aunt’s death, Marjorie realises in a flash that it was Ted who had an affair with Dot, got her pregnant and then killed her by getting her hopelessly drunk and leaving her with the gas tap turned on. It appears that Marjorie’s mother, Mrs Clair, has reached the same conclusion, because she says that the boy will not repeat what he has just said. It’s crucial to what happens later that the two women never really have a direct and open conversation about what they both suspect.

Marjorie suggests that Mrs Clair could now come and live with Ted and her. Ted is not keen on this and proposes instead that Mrs Clair, who lives nearby, takes on his junior employee George Ely as her lodger.

The auditors are due at Ted’s firm, so rather than cancel the usual family holiday in Sussex, they agree that George should take Marjorie, her mother and the children in his new motor car. For Marjorie, this is a longed-for break from her sexually demanding husband who she no longer loves and now believes to be a murderer.

For Mrs Clair, it is something rather different. She has realised that if Ted were convicted of murder, it would ruin Marjorie’s life and taint the children forever by association. She is coldly planning a different sort of revenge on Ted. During the long sunny days, she takes every opportunity to bring Marjorie and George together. She suggests that they go out for evening trips in the car. As she has intended, the inevitable happens and Marjorie and George become lovers.

When Marjorie tells her mother that she does not want to return to her husband and hints at her belief that he is a murderer,Mrs Clair pretends to misunderstand. She plays the innocent leaving Marjorie to think that she alone knows the truth and that her mother has no idea that she and George are lovers. George and Marjorie spend the last few days of the holiday in a panic about what they are going to do. Ted is George’s boss. Ted’s manager Mr Hill is very strait-laced, and will sack anyone at the merest hint of impropriety. Marjorie realises that it may be fear for his job that led Ted to kill the pregnant Dot.

Marjorie returns to the family house but George is unhappy about this. He doesn’t want her to submit to George’s sexual demands. There is a path running along the back of the houses next to the railway line. George uses this to visit Marjorie for snatched moments of passion in the garden. He is a tender and gentle lover, younger than Marjorie and a complete contrast to her husband. What neither Marjorie or George realise is the extent to which they are being manipulated by her mother.

Meanwhile, Mrs Clair is planning her next move, buying a hatchet from the hardware store and hinting to the local police constable that Ted is in a peculiar state of mind.   

Marjorie has put Ted off with excuses about her monthly cycle but she knows that he will work that out soon enough. When she finally tells him that she will not submit to his demands anymore, he threatens to hurt her daughter if she does not give him what he wants. A distraught Marjorie runs to her mother’s house. This is the crisis that Mrs Clair has been working to bring about. The now furious George, Marjorie and Mrs Clair return to Marjorie’s house. Mrs Clair is carrying the hatchet in her bag, and utters the fateful words “we’re going to kill him”. This dramatic moment is not the end of the story by any means.        

This is a short novel, only just over two hundred pages, but it’s very intense with a lot packed into it. Forester is a master of succinct prose and there is not a word too many. The final most tragic part makes the reader think about the difference between moral guilt and physical guilt, and the plot shows how chance events can disrupt the best-laid plans. This is not a novel that the reader will forget and it leaves one at the end thinking about just who is a villain and who is a victim. A final twist in the very last sentence reveals that for one character at least there has been a sort of natural justice.

Does Mrs Clair take her motherly devotion too far? Or is the course of action she chooses the only one she can take, given her circumstances and those of her surviving daughter?

For this is the world of shabby suburban London, where the furniture and carpets are threadbare, people have just enough money to get by on and the neighbours take a keen interest in each other’s doings. This was the time when it was a woman’s role to run the house, with even a fit young man like George not expected to lift a finger to help. Ted expects domestic and sexual slavery from Marjorie as no less than he deserves in return for earning the money. For women the only alternative is to live in a cramped bedsit in a boarding house for professional women as Marjorie’s schoolfriend does.

I was surprised at the end to find out that Mrs Clair is only fifty-nine. She is constantly referred to as elderly and I thought she must be over seventy at least. That’s another way in which the world has changed.

Echo by Lawrence Durrell

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Lawrence Durrell (1912–1990) was a very versatile writer. He is probably most famous today for his Alexandria Quartet novels. He was also a renowned travel writer, specialising in the Mediterranean area that he knew and loved so well.

I particularly like Bitter Lemons, his memoir of his time in Cyprus during the political upheavals of the 1950s. Another of my favourites of his is White Eagles Over Serbia, an excellent Cold War era spy story in the outdoor adventure style of John Buchan. 

His striking, painterly prose style tells you immediately that whatever genre he was working in he was primarily a poet. It’s quite odd, then, that when I have read his poetry, I have tended to find it somewhat lacking in comparison to his prose works.

The short poem below is a welcome exception. I came across it by chance the other day and I really like it. It has to be heard to be fully appreciated, as the beautiful internal rhymes act out the theme of the poem.        

Echo by Lawrence Durrell

Nothing is lost, sweet self,
Nothing is ever lost.
The unspoken word
Is not exhausted but can be heard.
Music that stains
The silence remains
O echo is everywhere, the unbeckonable bird!

The Little Sister by Raymond Chandler

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Having read a Philip Marlowe continuation novel, Only to Sleep by Lawrence Osborne, I felt it was time to return to the original novels by Raymond Chandler. A long time ago, he used to be a real favourite of mine. How would his writing seem to me now, a lifetime later?

I assumed that I had read all the Philip Marlowe books, so when I took The Little Sister out of the library, I thought I would be re-reading it. As I started reading, it did not seem very familiar and I realised that I had missed this one.

What a treat it was to have a Marlowe story come up fresh! I think it might just be the best of them, having a slight edge over The Long Goodbye. What I had forgotten is the intensity of Chandler’s writing, the visual quality that makes reading him feel like watching a film noir in one’s mind’s eye. He is such a marvellous prose stylist. Let’s face it, he’s a considerably better writer than many other American writers of the second half of the twentieth century who have more “literary” reputations.  

He didn’t invent that distinctive first-person style, but he did refine and perfect it. Every now and then we get a hint that Marlowe is an educated man. “Browning, the poet not the gun.”, for example. This justifies the language in which his thoughts are framed.

So many of the writers I have liked over the years use a style that derives from Chandler. Len Deighton borrowed quite heavily from Chandler in his early novels, perhaps most of all in Billion Dollar Brain where the assassin uses the same killing method as in The Little Sister. Derek Raymond went so far as to adopt “Raymond” as his pen name. Philip Kerr used a world-weary, Marlowe style detective to examine the Third Reich.

This time, I’m not going to bother with a detailed description of the plot. Chandler himself was famously unconcerned about that side of things. During the filming of The Big Sleep, when asked to confirm a detail in the plot, he said he had no idea. What plot there is here is driven by the search for some photographs that could compromise the career of a rising Hollywood star. But why are people prepared to kill to get them? 

It’s the atmosphere, the sense of place, the feeling that Marlowe is involved in murky goings-on that he can’t quite understand, that are so compelling. Marlowe’s not really a logical detective in the Holmes manner, more of an intuitive one like Maigret.

This story seems even more cynical than the others. It’s full of quotable passages, including the famous line about Los Angeles: “A city with all the personality of a paper cup”. There is a description of a well-off lawyer: “He looked as if it would cost a thousand dollars to shake hands with him.”

Perhaps it is the Hollywood setting that makes this one so good. Chandler had seen it all from the inside by the time this was published and he uses his knowledge to great effect. He had worked very successfully in the film industry, writing the original screenplay of The Blue Dahlia and adapting Double Indemnity. As the movie mogul says “Save fifty cents in this business and all you have is five dollars’ worth of book-keeping”.

The reference to the studio owning “1500 theatres” is a reminder that this was published in 1949 and set in the late 1940s, just before the legal challenge that forced the studios to sell off the cinemas, thus ending their monopoly of the business that was more or less a licence to print money.

It’s a detective story but also a look at the dark side of Hollywood glamour. Money values have become the only values in Los Angeles, making the city a target for all kinds of criminal interests and vulnerable to corruption. This is something more than a murder mystery and Chandler is a serious writer who cannot be confined to a category marked “detective story”.

He is contemplating serious matters here as in this description of Marlowe coming across a dead man: “Something had happened to his face and behind his face, the indefinable thing that happens in that always baffling and inscrutable moment, the smoothing out, the going back over the years to the age of innocence.”

A Smuggler’s Song by Rudyard Kipling

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When I watched Wimbledon on the TV not so long ago, a virtual tour of the clubhouse revealed those words of Kipling’s that the players see before they walk on to the Centre Court: “If you can meet those two imposters, triumph and disaster, and treat them just the same.”

That reminded me of one of my favourite Kipling poems, A Smuggler’s Song.

When Kipling returned from India and settled in Sussex, he saw the English countryside and its history with an outsider’s eye. His two books of historical stories set there are the sort of children’s books that are not really intended just for children. They contain some of his finest poems. A Tree Song, Cities and Thrones and Powers, and A Smuggler’s Song are in Puck of Pook’s Hill. If, The Way Through the Woods, and The Thousandth Man are in Rewards and Fairies.

A Smuggler’s Song poem is wonderfully evocative, with its rhythm capturing the movement of the ponies. It brings a clear picture of the night time activities of the “gentlemen” to mind. The world depicted here is the eighteenth century Dymchurch that Russell Thorndike wrote about in his Doctor Syn stories.

A Smuggler’s Song by Rudyard Kipling

If you wake at midnight, and hear a horse’s feet,
Don’t go drawing back the blind, or looking in the street;
Them that ask no questions isn’t told a lie.
Watch the wall, my darling, while the Gentlemen go by!

Five and twenty ponies,
Trotting through the dark —
Brandy for the Parson,
Baccy for the Clerk;
Laces for a lady, letters for a spy,
And watch the wall, my darling,
While the Gentlemen go by!

Running round the woodlump if you chance to find
Little barrels, roped and tarred, all full of brandy-wine,
Don’t you shout to come and look, nor use ’em for your play.
Put the brishwood back again — and they’ll be gone next day!

If you see the stable-door setting open wide;
If you see a tired horse lying down inside;
If your mother mends a coat cut about and tore;
If the lining’s wet and warm — don’t you ask no more!

If you meet King George’s men, dressed in blue and red,
You be careful what you say, and mindful what is said.
If they call you “pretty maid,” and chuck you ‘neath the chin,
Don’t you tell where no one is, nor yet where no one’s been!

Knocks and footsteps round the house — whistles after dark —
You’ve no call for running out till the house-dogs bark.
Trusty’s here, and Pincher’s here, and see how dumb they lie —
They don’t fret to follow when the Gentlemen go by!

If you do as you’ve been told, ‘likely there’s a chance,
You’ll be given a dainty doll, all the way from France,
With a cap of Valenciennes, and a velvet hood —
A present from the Gentlemen, along o’ being good!

Five and twenty ponies,
Trotting through the dark —
Brandy for the Parson,
‘Baccy for the Clerk;
Them that asks no questions isn’t told a lie —
Watch the wall, my darling,
While the Gentlemen go by!  

On Eastnor Knoll by John Masefield

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Here’s another poem by John Masefield (1878–1967), Poet Laureate from 1930 to 1967.

It’s the sort of poem you can easily overlook and dismiss as a typical pastoral piece. Repeated readings, though, reveal some lovely sound effects and the feeling that the sunset symbolises something else.  

As with other Masefield poems that have a rural setting, it’s not clear where we are in time. I had assumed that it was written during the first world war and was a sort of coded reference to that conflict. I was surprised to find out that it was actually written earlier, around the time of the Boer war.

Is it actually the British Empire on which the sun is metaphorically setting? Or is it just a memorable image of a country sunset with words taking the place of paints?

Perhaps it has a more personal meaning because Eastnor is in Herefordshire, near Ledbury where Masefield was born and spent his early years.

On Eastnor Knoll by John Masefield

Silent are the woods, and the dim green boughs are
Hushed in the twilight: yonder, in the path through
The apple orchard, is a tired plough-boy
Calling the cows home.

A bright white star blinks, the pale moon rounds, but
Still the red, lurid wreckage of the sunset
Smoulders in smoky fire, and burns on
The misty hill-tops.

Ghostly it grows, and darker, the burning
Fades into smoke, and now the gusty oaks are
A silent army of phantoms thronging
A land of shadows.

Ding Dong Bell by Walter de la Mare

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This small book of four linked short stories was published in 1924. Knowing that De la Mare wrote extensively for children, you would be forgiven from the title for thinking that this is a children’s book, but it is not. Before the first story, there is a selection of quotes from authors such as Shakespeare, Robert Burton and Thomas Browne. These are reflections on mortality and the passing of time, that set the tone and the theme for the stories to follow. I think the bell of the title is the passing bell.

Each story is set in a rural churchyard and features characters contemplating the inscriptions on the gravestones. These epitaphs and inscriptions are quoted in full, in italics within the stories. I assume that these were written in the traditional style by De la Mare himself, but there is no author’s note, so no way of telling if any of them were found in actual churchyards. Probably not, as they fit the stories so well. De la Mare showed his love of rhymes and verses of all sorts with his anthology Come Hither.

If this all sounds rather gloomy, it really isn’t. As so often with De la Mare, there is that nagging doubt about what has taken place that leaves the reader thinking about the story long after finishing it. Not that too much really does take place in these stories, they are as much meditations as descriptions of events.

In the first story, Lichen, a young woman waiting for a train at a country station passes the time by investigating the churchyard opposite in the company of a fellow passenger, a local old man. He is not an enthusiast of modern developments such as steam trains. “I see no virtue in mere size, or in mere rapidity of motion. Nor can I detect any particular preciousness in time ‘saved’, as you call it, merely to be wasted.” The story has something in common with De la Mare’s poem The Railway Junction. By the end the old man has become a “kind of King Canute by the sad sea waves of progress”.

In Benighted, a couple find themselves stranded in remote countryside and pass the warm summer night in a churchyard. Their reading of the inscriptions appears to have an implication for their future together and the story is presented as an episode in their past.

In Strangers and Pilgrims, the verger of an old church, who is accustomed to showing visitors around it, finds something unusual about his guest, dressed all in black, who is searching for a particular inscription. This is the longest and most complex of the four. Much of it is a conversation between the initially taciturn stranger and the talkative verger, on subjects such as the nature of the past and whether or not the dead can return. At the end there is still a mystery about the visitor’s identity.

For me, the last story, Winter, is the most effective. The narrator recounts his fleeting vision of an uncanny figure in a bleak and silent snowbound churchyard, an encounter that has stayed with him for years. “But such things are difficult to describe – to share. Date, year are, at any rate, of no account; if only for the reason that what impresses us most in life is independent of time. One can in memory indeed live over again events in one’s life even twenty years or more gone by, with the same fever of shame, anxiety, unrest. Mere time is nothing.” It is striking that the apparition is as put out to see the narrator as the narrator is to see him. Then there is the ambiguity of the figure’s final question: “Which is yours?”    

By the time the reader reaches this last story it has become apparent that the book is structured around the four seasons.

De la Mare’s way of writing about the countryside is quite unusual. It’s highly visual and evocative yet somehow slightly unreal at the same time, almost more intense than reality. You find yourself wondering where exactly such a place might actually be. It’s quite different to E F Benson, say, where you can identify the real place even when he doesn’t name it. It’s more akin to the kind of painting that offers a vision of the landscape rather than a directly realistic transcription of it.    

It was the description of the story Winter in the 2013 essay Ghosts in the Material World by the critic John Gray that set me on the path to explore De la Mare’s stories. I am so glad I did because I find something in his writing that I don’t find anywhere else.

I have already written about some of his other stories, such as The House and The Almond Tree in greater detail.

My 1936 edition of Ding Dong Bell comes with a quote from The Daily News that sums this book up rather well: “An odd, loveable little book, stamped with its author’s original imagination and filled with his haunting sense of wonder and beauty.”

The book also has what looks like a woodcut on the title page, that depicts the sort of scene found in the stories, but the artist is not credited.

To Others Than You by Dylan Thomas

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I’m never quite sure whether or not I like the poetry of Dylan Thomas (1914–1953). These days, he’s in danger of becoming one of those poets, like Byron or Rupert Brooke, whose life and premature death overshadows what they wrote.

It’s hard to know where to “place” Thomas; he was a bit of a one-off. There’s no doubt that he had a very individual and unusual way of writing, perhaps showing the influence of the Welsh language. The poem below is densely packed with imagery, a sort of extended metaphor to do with money and fairground attractions.

This evocation of conjuring tricks is entirely appropriate for the theme of false friendship, of looking back and realising that one’s friends were not quite what one took them to be at the time.

I don’t know about Thomas’ work in general, but I admire this poem very much, both for what it says and the way it says it.    

To Others Than You by Dylan Thomas

Friend by enemy I call you out.

You with a bad coin in your socket,
You my friend there with a winning air
Who palmed the lie on me when you looked
Brassily at my shyest secret,
Enticed with twinkling bits of the eye
Till the sweet tooth of my love bit dry,
Rasped at last, and I stumbled and sucked,
Whom now I conjure to stand as thief
In the memory worked by mirrors,
With unforgettably smiling act,
Quickness of hand in the velvet glove
And my whole heart under your hammer,
Were once such a creature, so gay and frank
A desireless familiar
I never thought to utter or think
While you displaced a truth in the air,

That though I loved them for their faults
As much as for their good,
My friends were enemies on stilts
With their heads in a cunning cloud.

To His Mother, CLM by John Masefield

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John Masefield (1878–1967) had a long and productive writing life. He was the Poet Laureate from 1930 until his death, but today he is perhaps best known for his children’s stories.

His own childhood, though was far from happy. Masefield’s mother died giving birth to his sister when he was six years old and his father died soon afterwards. He did not get on with the aunt he lived with and he attended a boarding school at which he was unhappy.

It was his aunt who decided he should pursue a career in the merchant navy and he was sent to a training ship at the age of thirteen. It was during his time there that he discovered his love of poetry and storytelling, setting him on the path to becoming a well-known writer. He was never really healthy enough for a maritime career and he left the sea, with his first book of poems published in 1902.

This poignant poem about his mother is from 1912 and is deeply personal, the attitude to birth and death reflecting his own sad experience and sense of guilt. The view of women expressed here feels quite ahead of its time.

To His Mother, CLM by John Masefield

In the dark womb where I began
My mother’s life made me a man.
Through all the months of human birth
Her beauty fed my common earth.
I cannot see, nor breathe, nor stir,
But through the death of some of her.

Down in the darkness of the grave
She cannot see the life she gave.
For all her love, she cannot tell
Whether I use it ill or well,
Nor knock at dusty doors to find
Her beauty dusty in the mind.

If the grave’s gates could be undone,
She would not know her little son,
I am so grown. If we should meet,
She would pass by me in the street,
Unless my soul’s face let her see
My sense of what she did for me.

What have I done, or tried, or said
In thanks to that dear woman dead?
Men triumph over women still,
Men trample women’s rights at will.
And man’s lust roves the world untamed.
O grave, keep shut lest I be shamed.

What have I done to keep in mind
My debt to her and womankind?
What woman’s happier life repays
Her for those months of wretched days?
For all my mouthless body leeched
Ere Birth’s releasing hell was reached?

What have I done, or tried, or said
In thanks to that dear woman dead?
Men triumph over women still,
Men trample women’s rights at will.
And man’s lust roves the world untamed.
O grave, keep shut lest I be shamed.