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The rigid Procrustean bed of the middle class is that on which his fictions, these nightmares of bourgeois unease, are dreamed.

There is a caricature by Max Beerbohm of de la Mare staring fixedly across a fireplace at a grim, black-clad old lady sitting unresponsive in an armchair opposite: ‘Mr W. de la Mare gaining inspiration for an eerie and lovely story.' It is one of the most perceptive, and wittily unkind, criticisms of de la Mare that could be made. Let his fancy meander whence it pleases, may his antennae be never so sensitive to messages from the Other World, there is a nanny inside him slapping his hand when it wanders to the forbidden parts of his mind.

However, repression produces its own severe beauties. Out of this terrified narrowness, this dedicated provincialism of the spirit, emerges a handful of pieces of prose with the most vivid and unsettling intensity, work which disquietingly resembles some of that which the surrealists were producing in France at the same period, operating from a rather different theory of the imagination. Indeed, it would be possible to make a claim for
Memoirs of a Midget
as the one true and only successful English surrealist novel, even though de la Mare would have hotly denied it. That he didn't know what he was doing, of course, only makes it more surrealist; and more baleful.

And I should say that Miss M. herself, in her tiny, bizarre perfection, irresistibly reminds me of a painting by Magritte of a nude man whose sex is symbolised by a miniature naked woman standing upright at the top of his thigh.

Miss M.'s size, in fact, is nowhere given with precision. It seems to vary according to de la Mare's whim. At five or six years old, she is small enough to sit on the lid of a jar of pomatum on her father's dressing table; she feeds butterflies from her own hand. This suggests a smallness which is physically impossible. Later, when she learns to read: ‘My usual method with a common-sized book was to prop it towards the middle of the table and then seat myself at the edge. The page finished, I would walk across and turn over a fresh leaf.' This method has not much changed by the time she is twenty, except now she sprawls
between the pages. At that age, she still has difficulty in descending staircases and, at her twenty-first birthday, can run down the centre of a dining-room table while, a few weeks later, she can travel comfortably in a disused bird-cage. However, earlier that year, on holiday, driving a goat-cart, she is disguised as a ten-year-old and though a grown woman the size of a ten-year-old child would be distinctly on the smallish side, she would scarcely be a midget; Jeffrey Hudson, the court dwarf of Charles I, was forced to retire when he reached the dizzy height of three feet nine inches.

Miss M.'s actual size, therefore, is not within the realm of physiological dimension; it is the physical manifestation of an enormous
difference
.

The midget child is a sort of changeling. Her mother treats her as a ‘tragic playmate' rather than a daughter, and her father, affectionately embarrassed by her existence, effectively abandons his paternal role and makes no financial provision for her on his death. She is an anomaly. For their own sakes as well as hers they keep their daughter isolated from the world and their deaths leave her vulnerably inexperienced, besides newly poor.

Yet Miss M.'s childhood is itself a magic garden, in which, like Andrew Marvell in
his
garden, she is alone and hence in paradise. Almost all of
Memoirs of a Midget
takes place in Kent, the ‘garden of England', and, as it happens, de la Mare's own home county; and Miss M. is most herself in a garden. When she is accompanied it is scarcely ever by more than one person. These country gardens, far from the habitations of common humanity, are almost always a little neglected, the ‘wild gardens' of the English romantic imagination, nature neither dominated by man nor dominating him by its ferocity, but existing with him in a harmonious equality. The paradisial garden of childhood is that of Stonecote, her parents' house, to which, after the vicissitudes of her twentieth year, she will return and into which, taking only ‘a garden hat and cape', she eventually, according to her editor, disappears, possibly accompanied by a Platonic angel.

But the garden of Stonecote is also where Miss M. first learns the stark and irrevocable fact of mortality, when, as a child, she encounters there a dead mole:

Holding my breath, with a stick I slowly edged it up in
the dust and surveyed the white heaving nest of maggots in its belly with a peculiar and absorbed recognition. ‘Ah ha!' a voice cried within me, ‘so this is what is in wait; this is how things are;' and I stooped with lips drawn back over my teeth to examine the stinking mystery more closely.

It is a mole, a blind creature that lives in the earth, who conveys the existence of a ‘stinking mystery' in this world. Without the power of inward vision, the mole exists only in its corruptible envelope of flesh.

After her father's death and the expulsion from this primal Eden where Miss M. has been an infant Eve without an Adam, she takes a room with the very grim and black-clad woman from Beerbohm's drawing, the stern, kind, and irretrievably ‘literary' Mrs Bowater, a mother or nanny surrogate. Here, Miss M. meets, not Adam, but Lilith. Fanny is Mrs Bowater's daughter . . . ‘her voice – it was as if it had run about in my blood and made my eyes shine'. Fanny, who is lower class in spite of her beauty and cleverness, works as a teacher; she arrives home for Christmas, she is cognate with ice, snow, cold. Miss M.'s most passionate meeting with her takes place on a freezing, ecstatic night when they go star-gazing together, in the wild garden of the abandoned house of Wanderslore nearby.

This garden, untenanted, uncared for, is the garden of revelation. In this same wild place she meets the dwarf she calls Mr. Anon, who falls in love with her. In this same garden, Miss M. will later think of killing herself. In
Memoirs of a Midget
gardens function in the rich literary tradition that starts with the Book of Genesis, places of privilege outside everyday experience in which may occur the transition from innocence to knowledge. In yet another garden, that of the country house of her patroness, Mrs Monnerie, Miss M. conducts her last, fatal interview with Fanny, when Fanny announces her intention of destroying her.

Miss M.'s sado-masochistic relation with Fanny is central to the novel. Fanny, typical of the
femme fatale
, enslaves through humiliation. She writes her supplicant letters addressed to ‘Dear Midgetina', and Miss M. replies signing herself with the same name, so that Leslie Fiedler (in a discussion of the novel in
Freaks: Myths and Images of the Secret Self
New York, 1978) thinks
‘Midgetina' is Miss M.'s given name. But it sounds more like a nickname callously bestowed and gratefully received – she is grateful for any attention from Fanny. For Miss M.'s anonymity is exceedingly important to de la Mare, I think.

Fanny's indifference is irresistible: ‘I might have been a pet animal for all the heed she paid to my caress.' Later, Fanny will turn on Miss M. after a final declaration of love: ‘Do you really suppose that to be loved is a new experience for me; that I'm not smeared with it wherever I go?' She is
la belle dame sans merci
in person, the cruel dominatrix of Swinburne and Pater, a
fin de siècle
vamp disguised as a landlady's daughter. Or, rather, stepdaughter, for Fanny is a changeling, too; unknown to her, Mrs Bowater is her father's second wife. No blood of common humanity runs in Fanny's veins. She reminds Miss M. of mermaids and, sometimes, of snakes. She drives a love-sick curate to cut his throat for love of her. She is woman as sexual threat.

Fanny forces Miss M. to see herself as a freak, an aberration, an unnatural object. She promises ironically: ‘Midgetina, if ever I
do
have a baby, I will anoint its little backbone with the grease of moles, bats and dormice, to make it like you,' quoting an ancient recipe for the commercial manufacture of dwarf beggars and entertainers, as if Miss M. had herself been made, not born. The account of Miss M.'s enslavement by Fanny burns with pain, although Fanny is far too motivelessly malign for any form of naturalist fiction; she is simply, emblematically, a
femme fatale
, or, perhaps, a bad angel.

When Fanny accidentally meets Miss M.'s friend and would-be lover, her casual description of him – ‘a ghastly gloating little dwarfish creature' – makes Miss M. see how Mr Anon must look to
other people
, and so wrecks her own idea of him.

This question of the definition of identity recurs throughout the novel. Miss M. describes Fanny's charm: ‘she's so
herselfish
, you know'; Fanny is powerful because she knows who she is. But Fanny uses all her power to define Miss M. as a deviant: ‘Why was it that of all people only Fanny could so shrink me up like this into my body?' This problem is not altogether resolved; on the last page of her narrative, Miss M. says: ‘We
cannot
see ourselves as others see us, but that is no excuse for not wearing spectacles.' Yet the last words of the novel are a plea to her editor, to whom she dedicates her memoirs, to ‘take me seriously', that
is, to see her as she sees herself. This unresolved existential plea – to be allowed to be herself, although she is not sure what that self is – is left hanging in the air. The suggestion is that Miss M. exists, like Bishop Berkeley's tree, because the eye of God sees her.

In another night interview between Fanny and Miss M. in the garden at Wanderslore, Fanny says: ‘There was once a philosopher called Plato, my dear. He poisoned Man's soul.' With that, Fanny declares herself the eternal enemy; she has denied idealism. And something very odd happens here; Fanny goes off, leaving Miss M. calling helplessly after her, ‘I love you'. They have been, apparently, quite alone. Then up out of nowhere pops the ‘gloating, dwarfish creature', Mr Anon himself, to murmur to Miss M. how ‘they' – that is, other people – ‘have neither love nor pity'. She runs away from his importunity as Fanny has run away from hers; but this is only one of several places in the text where Miss M., believing herself alone in the garden, discovers Mr Anon is there, beside her. At last she decides he has been watching her secretly since she first discovered Wanderslore, just as the eye of God, in her nursery lesson book,
The Observing Eye
, watches over everything.

Although Mr Anon's corporality is affirmed throughout the book – he even takes tea with the emphatically ‘real' Mrs Bowater – he has certain purely metaphysical qualities, not least the ability to appear whenever Miss M. needs him. He is her good, her guardian angel, the spiritual pole to Fanny.

But Miss M. is bewildered. Mr Anon's ugliness is that of the flesh alone, yet it is sufficient to repel her; Fanny's beauty is only an outward show, yet Miss M. finds her compulsively attractive. Poor Miss M., the psyche fluttering in between. ‘And still he [Mr Anon] maintained . . . that he knew mankind better than I, that to fall into their ways and follow their opinions was to deafen my ears, and seal up my eyes, and lose my very self.'

Miss M.
does
fall into the ways of mankind for a season, however; indeed, not ‘a season' but ‘the Season'. She is collected by rich, aristocratic, corrupt, easily bored Mrs Monnerie to add to an assortment of ‘the world's smaller rarities' in her London mansion. Miss M.'s stay in London is the most straightforward part of the novel, with a degree of satiric snap and bite oddly reminiscent of parts of Balzac's
Lost Illusions
. She is not by any
means the first young person from the provinces to go to hell at the dinner tables of the gentry. ‘What a little self-conscious donkey I became, shrilly hee-hawing away; the centre of a simpering throng plying me with flattery.'

Miss M. brings her own doom upon herself by introducing Fanny into this artificial paradise, where the only garden is that of the square outside, an arid, over-cultivated town garden where only ‘piebald plane-trees and poisonous laburnums' grow. Fanny immediately seizes her chance and usurps Miss M.'s position as court favourite; she will marry unscrupulously for money and entertain herself by leading the
haute monde
a dance in preference to disrupting a vicarage tea party.

The climax of the London sequence is Miss M.'s twenty-first birthday party, with its cake decorated with replicas of twenty-one famous female dwarves, a fiesta of bad taste which is only exceeded by the dinner menu composed entirely of the minute, culminating in a dish of nightingales' tongues, on which Miss M. gags. Enough is enough. So Midgetina comes of age, in an orgy of humiliation, drunkenly making a spectacle of herself. ‘Sauve qui peut!' she cries to Fanny, intent at last on rescuing her from damnation, calling out the name of a book Fanny once gave her as a satiric jest, Jeremy Taylor's
Holy Living and Holy Dying
, and passing out.

Banished to Mrs Monnerie's country house, Miss M. now exhibits herself in a circus in order to earn the money to buy her freedom. She paints her face and pads her bust and bottom; the disguise appears to her to be ‘monstrous'. She takes on, in other words, the appurtenances of the flesh, and those of the flesh of a mature woman, at that. It is sufficient indirectly to cause Mr Anon's death.

This raises some interesting questions about the central spiritual conflict for which the dreamy beauty of the novel is a disguise. For, even if Mr Anon
is
Miss M.'s Good Angel and her rejection of him in favour of Fanny brings her near to losing her soul, why should she marry him, when she has no wish to do so, simply because they are a match in size? Not only is de la Mare quite definite about Miss M.'s not wanting to marry Mr Anon – ‘not even love's ashes were in my heart' – but he scrupulously documents her absolute revulsion from physical contact. She flinches from all human touch except that of her childhood nursemaid.
Miss M. seems as alienated from sexuality as she is from all other aspects of the human condition, and if her passion for Fanny suggests it is only heterosexual contact from which she is alienated, de la Mare feels himself free to describe her emotional enslavement by Fanny because the idea this might have a sexual element has been censored out from the start. Although Miss M. declares repeatedly that she is in love with Fanny, the reader is not officially invited by de la Mare to consider this might have anything to do with her rejection of the advances of Mr Anon. The conflict is played out in terms of pure spirit.