Memoirs of a Midget
| Author | Walter de la Mare |
|---|---|
| Language | English |
| Subject | fiction |
| Published | Telegram Book |
| Media type | |
| Pages | 528 |
| Awards | James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction |
| ISBN | |
| Foreword by: Alison Lurie | |
Published in 1921, Memoirs of a Midget is a surrealistic novel, told in the first person, by English poet, anthologist, and short story writer Walter de la Mare, best known for his tales of the uncanny and poetry for children.
We never learn her name, but the protagonist and principle narrator "Miss M." is playfully referred to as "Midgetina" by her faithless friend, Fanny. Hers is the story of a person who, though at home in nature and literature, is physically, spiritually, and intellectually out of place in the world. Her exact size is never made clear and seemed to shift throughout the story. At times she is described as of being of Thumbellina-like smallness. She recounts that she remembers as a child her father lifting her up in the palm of his hand to see herself in a small mirror. At the age of five or six, while sitting on a pomade jar watching her father shaving, she remembers being frightened when a jackdaw, attracted by her colorful red clothing, starts pecking at the window pane to get at her. She says she jumped up in alarm and ran away, tripping over a hairbrush, and falling sprawling beside a watch on his dressing table. She reads books that are taller than she is; and even at age twenty is carried on a tray and walks across the dining table. Yet she becomes a skilled horsewoman—riding sidesaddle on a pony—and at one point, we are told, can pass for a ten-year-old child.
Notwithstanding her stature Miss M.'s intellect is large and her perceptions preternaturally sharp. "Of a serious turn of mind", she studies astronomy; loves shells, fossils, flints, butterflies, taxidermy animals, and even investigates the phenomenon of death in the form of a maggot-eaten mole she finds rotting in her family's garden. She reads Elizabethan poetry, seventeenth century prose, and nineteenth century novels. Her family dotes on her, especially her grandfather, who is French, and who delights sending her miniature books and finely crafted custom furniture he has made for her. But her mother dies in a fall, possibly from fainting when Miss M. jokingly pretends to be dead, and her father, crushed by grief, soon follows, leaving his affairs in disarray. The house and furniture are sold to pay his debts. Miss M. at age 20 is left only with a small annual income from an unknown benefactor that in the course of the book, vanishes in a stock market downturn.
Most of the book's narrative covers the events of the twelve-month period between Miss M.'s twentieth and twenty-first years as she attempts to make her way in the world alone after the death of her parents. She lodges in the house of a dour but kindly, somewhat Dickensian landlady, Mrs. Bowater, whose absent husband "follows the sea." Mrs. Bowater has a daughter Miss M.'s age, who teaches English at a provincial boys' school. "Beautiful, outspoken, and wonderfully alive", Fanny Bowater is perhaps the book's most memorable and fully realized character. She comes home for the school holidays with a present for Miss M. of a red. hand-sewn jacket; and Miss M., in her turn, is smitten. The two go out together at night to study astronomy, though when they return home Fanny confides that the stars have never attracted her: "'Angels' tintacks' as they say in the Sunday schools. Fanny Bowater was looking for the moon." Consumed with ambition to escape her poverty and narrow surroundings, Fanny is "desperately capricious and of a cat-like cruelty." "A pitiless heartbreaker," critic Michael Dirda calls her, she “toys with Miss M., whose passions are awakened to such a pitch that today’s readers may be astonished at the avowals not of girlish friendship but of passionate longing. But what can you expect from two young women who read Wuthering Heights together?' Fanny has been stringing along the weak and unstable local curate, Mr. Crimble. He confides in Miss M., but she is herself ensnared by Fanny and is unable to help him. Miss M. advises Fanny to "cast the stone" and make a clean break with Mr. Crimble. She later learns Mr. Crimble has cut his throat with a knife. Fanny also repeatedly borrows money from Miss M.'s savings—it is implied at one point that she needs it for an abortion—finally draining them. Miss M., meanwhile, is courted by a brooding young man, whom she calls Mr. Anon, a name intended to be symbolic. Pale, dark-haired, and angular, Mr. Anon is a dwarf only four inches taller than herself. He lives in a cottage on the edge of the park of an abandoned mansion and has observed Miss M.s nocturnal star-gazing expeditions. Fanny calls Mr. Anon misshapen and ugly, but Miss M. states that the only thing grotesque about him are his oversized clothes—though in talking to Fanny she refers to him as a hunchback. Fanny's mother Mrs. Bowater, for her part, likes Mr. Anon. She speculates he may be the son of a lord, "Stranger things have happened," but fears he is unwell and may be tubercular. Miss M., however, is unable to return Mr. Anon's love. She rejects him and tells him she resents his watching over her.
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