Books: It Swarms with em

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THE COLLECTED TALES OF WALTER DE LA MARE (467 pp.)—Edited by Edward Wagenknecht—Knopf ($4.50).

Every man has the books he deserves, says Boston University's Edward Wagenknecht in his introduction to this collection—"We find, inevitably, the things that were destined for us." Thus, Wagenknecht and Britain's Walter de la Mare have proved to be made for each other. In fact, Wagenknecht paid his idol what is perhaps the highest compliment that can be given an author: he took him along to read on his honeymoon.

Not everybody would go that far, and in the two-dozen Tales in this collection new readers of De la Mare will see why.

Closing Chest. First published between 1923 and 1936, the stories show variations in skill and manner but they are ruthlessly fixed in mood and point. In The Riddle, one of the earliest, the lid of an old lady's silk-lined chest is eagerly opened by her seven grandchildren in succession—and is silently, fatally closed by an unknown hand, with the children inside. In Strangers and Pilgrims, one of the 76-year-old master's latest, a stranger dressed all in black visits an old churchyard and examines the inscriptions on the tombstones. The old man is looking for the grave that was denied him when he committed suicide some 50 years before.

Such are the corners of the imagination into which De la Mare has been prying for a lifetime, both as poet and short-story writer. Deceptively sedate, sedately deceptive (it is not an author's business, he holds, to "answer each of our riddles in turn; 'tidy things up' "), he is usually content to say, "Behold, I tell you a mystery." Each reader can supply his own explanation.

"You can't see much, Withers," says one schoolboy to another in Seaton's Aunt, one of the grisliest of the Tales, "but you know all the same." "Know what?" "Why, that they're there." "Who's there?" "Why, in the house. It swarms with 'em." By the end of the story the reader is likely to agree, without ever having been told just what " 'em" are.

Trembling Murderer. Only when De la Mare views the world through the eager, self-seeking eyes of children does his aura of uncanny mystery give place to explicit clarity. The clarity is usually even more gruesome than his riddles.

"But you aren't of course going to leave him like this," says the thrilled little hero of An Ideal Craftsman on finding an old man's strangled body in a closet. "Why . . . it's as easy as A B C," he assures the trembling murderer. "You get a rope and make a noose, and you put it . . . round his neck . . . And then you hang him up on a nail or something. He mustn't touch the ground, of course . . . They'll say he hanged himself, don't you see?" And in two ticks the corpse is dangling from the nail and the horrified murderer is running away through the dark yard, pursued by a polite cry of, "I say! mind that ditch there . . ."

Stories like these have a surface resemblance to the grimmer work of Cartoonist Charles Addams; the difference is that Walter de la Mare never suggests for a moment that he may be joking.