Short Stories 1895-1926

INTRODUCTION

When Walter de la Mare brought out his first collection of short stories called
The Riddle in
1923 at the age of fifty, it would have been a surprise to some to discover how long he had been attracted by the genre. Few people would have guessed that his earliest published works had been stories. His first printed story, ‘Kismet', had appeared in
The Sketch
in August 1895, and at least seven others had been serialized before the publication of
Songs
of Childhood
in 1902. De la Mare continued writing and re-writing stories throughout the rest of his life.
The Riddle
was followed in quick succession by
Ding Dong Bell, Broomsticks
(for children),
The Connoisseur, On the
Edge, The Lord Fish
(for children), and
The Wind Blows Over
in the 1920s and 1930s; and his very last major work,
A Beginning,
came out in 1955 less than a year before his death.

Apart from the
Collected Stories for Children
of 1947, he did not publish any comprehensive collection of stories comparable to the
Collected Poems
of 1942, although there were several selections from the eight main collections. The most important of these (since de la Mare was involved in the choice on both occasions) were
Stories, Essays and Poems
of 1938 published in the Everyman series and
Best Stories of Walter de la Mare
of 1942 published by Faber – who brought out all the major collections after
The
Connoisseur
. The latter came out with Collins in 1926,
The Riddle
and
Ding Dong Bell
having appeared with Selwyn and Blount in 1923 and 1924, and
Broomsticks
with Constable in 1925. All in all, seventy-nine stories were published in collections, and over a score of them have never been reprinted elsewhere. The three volumes making up the first complete edition, include all these stories together with all the uncollected stories that have been found and a few unpublished ones.

De la Mare was as assiduous in serializing his stories before publication as he was in serializing his poems. Indeed, no less than sixty of the seventy-nine ‘collected' stories were first published in magazines, newspapers or collections compiled by other people. When they appeared in volume form, which might be over fifty years later as happened with ‘The Quincunx', they were often revised. (The interval between writing and serialization or publication in a collection could also be enormous: for example, ‘A Beginning', which was published in the volume of that title in 1955, seems to have been written in about 1900, and ‘The Miller's Tale', which was serialized in December 1955, was probably written about then as well.) But not all the stories that were serialized were collected. This is particularly true of the period 1895–1910 and altogether eighteen uncollected stories have so far been found. In all likelihood, de la Mare deliberately did not reprint some of them. There is, however, clear evidence that he intended to publish certain stories like ‘Kismet', which was revised for publication in
A
Beginning
but omitted from it at the galley-proof stage. Others may well have been forgotten in the course of time. As it is no more possible to determine the exact reasons for stories remaining uncollected than it was in the case of the poems, all the stories found have been included. They are printed in the order in which they were first serialized or published – in sections at the end of
Short Stories 1895–1926
and
Short Stories 1927–1956.

Although a number of stories in manuscript and typescript form were discovered among de la Mare's papers, there only seemed to be good grounds for publishing four of them. Three of these had been omitted from
A Beginning
at the galley-proof stage, and the fourth was the second half of ‘The Orgy: An Idyll' which was cut in two when it was published in 1930, probably because it was too long. The unpublished stories follow the uncollected ones at the end of
Short Stories 1927–1956.

The same general arrangement has been adopted as in the
Complete
Poems.
The stories have been grouped chronologically according to the volumes in which they originally appeared.
Short Stories 1895–1926
includes the first three main collections and uncollected stories from the earlier period;
Short Stories 1927–1956
the last three main collections and uncollected and unpublished stories from the later period; and
Short Stories
for Children
the two children's collections. To give an indication of the order in which the stories were written or revised, a chronological list of earliest known printed versions has been included on page
495
.

With one or two exceptions, the text is based on the latest printed versions worked on by de la Mare,
Stories, Essays and Poems
(1938),
Best
Stories of Walter de la Mare
(1942) and
Collected Stories for Children
(1947) being the three chief sources for these apart from the eight main collections. For further details, see the Bibliographical Appendix on page
483
.

The contents of the three volumes are as follows:

I am very grateful to the late Dorothy Marshall for help in tracking down uncollected stories and checking references, and to Theresa Whistler for information about early manuscript versions. The late Leonard Clark's
Checklist
for the 1956 National Book League exhibition of de la Mare books and MSS has been a useful source of information.

Giles de la Mare