Walter De La Mare (1873–1956): A Biography

Walter De La Mare was born in 1873 at 83 Maryon Road, Charlton (then in Kent). His family background was both respectable and culturally rich. His father, James Edward de la Mare, was a principal at the Bank of England and came from a line of French Huguenot silk merchants, which explains the family’s continental surname. His mother, Lucy Sophia Browning, was the daughter of a Scottish naval surgeon and author, Dr Colin Arrott Browning. Walter was the sixth of seven children. The family was substantial, and their home in Anerley, South London, was known for imaginative parties and games of charades—a detail that hints at the theatricality that would later infuse his fiction. His father died when Walter was only four years old in 1877.

In 1892, De La Mare joined the Esperanza Amateur Dramatics Club. There, he met and fell in love with Elfrida Ingpen, the leading lady of their productions. Elfrida was ten years his senior and had already experienced personal tragedy; her parents had died when she was young, and her former fiancé had passed away before their marriage. Her father had been a Clerk to the Insolvent Debtors Court and Clerk of the Rules. De La Mare married Elfrida on 4 August 1899. The couple went on to have four children: Richard Herbert Ingpen, Colin, Florence, and Lucy Elfrida.

His early adulthood was marked by conventional necessity. For eighteen years, De La Mare supported his growing family as a statistics clerk for Standard Oil, an occupation that, ironically, taught him the value of precision in measuring the immeasurable.

His literary career could only begin in earnest when Sir Henry Newbolt secured him a Civil List pension in 1908, a significant patronage that freed him from commercial drudgery to pursue what he termed the "visionary imagination."

The marriage endured for over four decades until Elfrida died from Parkinson's disease in 1943. De La Mare spent his final thirteen years in Twickenham, where he continued writing until his own death in 1956. His ashes were interred in the crypt of St. Paul's Cathedral.

The Psychology of the Uncanny

De la Mare’s greatness as a writer of supernatural terror lies in his deliberate focus on suggestion, not statement. While most ghost story writers employ obvious devices—creaking floorboards or spectral visitations—De la Mare achieves his unsettling effects by refusing to explain himself, leaving readers suspended in a state of metaphysical uncertainty.

His poem "The Listeners"—originally a bedtime story for his children—demonstrates this characteristic technique: a traveller knocks at a moonlit door, calls out to unseen presences, and receives no answer except the echo of his own voice. The terror resides not in what occurs, but in what remains withheld.

His prose extends this approach. Stories like "Seaton's Aunt," his most celebrated supernatural work, or the novel The Return (1910), explore psychic possession without offering conventional explanations. The power of these works is derived from their refusal to provide the resolution that would diminish the mystery at hand. De la Mare’s central conviction was that "what we see and hear is only the smallest fraction of what is." He employed the supernatural as epistemology—a method for exploring the boundaries of human perception and challenging the notion that consciousness is limited by material existence.

De La Mare and Modernism

De la Mare occupies a fascinating and paradoxical position in literary history. Though often bracketed with the Georgian poets—a movement that became a by-word for conservatism after the rise of Modernism—he transcended that dismissal. This is largely because major Modernist figures, including Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot, were fans of his work. Eliot, in particular, was not only an admirer but also his publisher, recognising a psychological depth in De La Mare's exploration of fragmented consciousness that aligned with Modernist concerns.

The core paradox is that De La Mare pioneered techniques that Modernism would later champion—such as the unreliable narrator and the collapse of rational certainty—but wrapped them in traditional forms. This left him in an awkward position: too psychologically complex for the Georgian mainstream, yet too formally traditional for full Modernist acceptance.

The Visionary Against the Analytical

De La Mare distinguished between two modes of consciousness crucial to understanding his fiction: the "childlike" imagination, which remains open to the numinous, and the "boylike" imagination, which seeks to categorise and explain everything.

His philosophical stance was an implicit critique of scientific materialism. His stories consistently feature protagonists whose analytical frameworks prove inadequate when confronted with phenomena that exist outside conventional categories of thought. He recognised that rationality alone could not account for the full range of human experience. This critique aligned with broader currents in early twentieth-century thought, such as the emergence of psychoanalysis, which questioned the absolute dominance of the rational mind.

Literary Achievement and Influence

The critical establishment acknowledged De La Mare’s distinctive contribution during his lifetime. His novel Memoirs of a Midget won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize in 1921, and his Collected Stories for Children was the first collection ever to receive the Carnegie Medal in 1947. He was also appointed Companion of Honour in 1948 and received the Order of Merit in 1953.

His influence extended to genre masters and literary giants alike. H.P. Lovecraft praised De La Mare’s ability to achieve "a keen potency which only a rare master can achieve." Crucially, both W.H. Auden and T.S. Eliot acknowledged his influence, recognising that De La Mare had discovered a genuinely new way of using supernatural fiction to explore metaphysical questions that conventional realism could not address.

The Persistence of Mystery

What makes De La Mare's work enduringly relevant is its refusal to provide comfort through explanation. In an age increasingly dominated by scientific materialism, his stories serve as reminders that mystery might not be a problem to be solved but a condition to be acknowledged.

His supernatural fiction continues to offer what conventional ghost stories cannot: not answers, but better questions—invitations to consider possibilities that exist just beyond the threshold of ordinary perception, in those twilight regions where psychology meets metaphysics and where the rational mind encounters its own limitations.

Link to Bad Company by Walter de la Mare