BWBC 34: “Seaton’s Aunt” by Walter de la Mare
I don’t know what to think of this week’s story.
Walter de la Mare’s one of those obscure weird English writers you sometimes hear about, influential and lauded by others, but whom you feel time has left behind or at least buried beneath other more recent obscure weird English writers. “Seaton’s Aunt” is considered one of de la Mare’s best, and it’s very much one of those Weird English stories that leans heavily into its 5.5ness instead of trying to go all the way up to 11. Is this good? Is this bad? I can’t say, but it’s certainly a puzzler and I’m not sure if the bits that I do find unsettling are the bits De La Mare intends.
“Seaton’s Aunt” by Walter de la Mare
This is the bit where I give a rundown of the story’s plot, but there’s not really much of one.
Withers and Seaton were schoolmates, even if Withers denies that they were ever friends. On three occasions Withers has a chance to visit Seaton at home and encounter his aunt. The first occasion is when they’re schoolboys and Seaton makes his aunt sound like she has supernatural powers, compelling ghosts and spirits to visit her. Withers refuses to believe this and claims Seaton is only trying to make a fool of him. And so the visit ends. The second visit comes some years later when both men are in their twenties, and a random meeting rekindles their acquaintance. Seaton’s about to marry and ask Withers to visit as a way to distract his aunt. Against his better judgment Withers agrees to this second visit, and like the first it is awkward. Seaton’s aunt says many arch and ominous things and seems to delight in needling her nephew and his fiancé. The third visit occurs some months after the second when Withers realizes he never heard from Seaton about the wedding, so he decides to make the trip to the house. When he gets there though he can’t find any sign of Seaton and the aunt seems much diminished, or possibly more resident in the netherworld where she exists. She mistakes Withers for Seaton then grows angry when she realizes her mistake. Withers leaves, only to learn from the village newsagent that Seaton died a few months back.
And that’s it.
There’s a thing M. John Harrison does in The Sunken Lands Begin to Rise Again where the whole of the novels seems to taking place in orbit around this void where a mystery may or may not exist. Apparently that must be a trope in weird British fiction, because that’s what’s going on here. On one hand there’s the mundane nature of the mystery: an unliked and lonely schoolboy, the “mysteries” of an elderly women, and the slow decay of lost wealth. On the other hand there are all manner of ominous hints and questions raised that get no answers: the Aunt’s appetite and callous views of death, the strange way Seaton speaks of her being one of “the first lot” and his relationship to her coming from his father’s first marriage, the fear that spurs the narrator to make his third visit.
Does it all point to something or nothing?
I can’t say.
The bit that hit me the hardest was in the way Withers treats Seaton. From the first he makes much of his dislike for Seaton for being in some vague way different and throughout the story Withers never shows any great affection for his classmate. Even when sparring with Seaton’s Aunt it’s all a bit of a game for Withers, up until the end when he walks away from the mansion, somehow judged by the Aunt and found lacking. And that’s the thing that gets me, not whatever question I want answered about the Aunt’s nature, but whether things might have turned out differently if Withers had deigned to care about his classmate at all.
Ultimately, this is the kind of story I enjoy having read even if I didn’t enjoy reading it, the sort of story you could see updated and made compelling by some contemporary creator mining that ambiguity that lies at its heart.
Next week, another purveyor of two-fisted prose. . . Henry James!
Yesterweird 
I enjoyed the synopsis. One minor correction though: it’s mentioned above that Seaton’s relation to his so-called aunt comes “from his father’s first marriage,” but what Seaton actually told Withers was that “she’s not my mother’s sister, because my grandmother married twice; she’s one of the first lot.” What he appears to be saying is that his mother and the aunt of the title share the same mother, but had different fathers, thus making her Arthur’s mother’s half-sister.
Nice catch. I feel like I’m missing something with this story, but I can’t figure out what it is. What did you make of this story?
There were several aspects of the story that I found inexplicable. One was that the aunt was so pointedly unkind to Arthur; and another was that he was convinced that she saw and heard everything—that she was in league with the devil, even having led to the death of his mother. But why did he believe those things? There seemed to be little basis for those notions—at least none that he explained to Withers—other than that she was strange and a bit formidable. What surprised me most in the story wasn’t that Arthur died shortly before being able to marry his fiancée—that event was almost forecast—it was that on Withers’s final visit to the aunt’s house, she without any provocation referred to him, almost in the third person, as “disgusting” and ordered him to leave. Yet formerly she had been so kind to him! Why the sudden about-face? It doesn’t seem likely that it was because he hadn’t visited Arthur in a long time, given that she seemed in any case to be hostile to Arthur.
I’m halfway through reading the first volume of Tartarus Press’s collection, Strangers and Pilgrims, of de la Mare’s tales. Perhaps when I’ve finished reading both volumes I’ll reread Seaton’s Aunt, which seems almost universally to be proclaimed as his best story, and see whether I can get more out of it on the second go-through. (There were other stories that I enjoyed more than Seaton’s Aunt.)
I find de la Mare’s writing style stilted, and almost affectedly literary at times. His dialogue strikes me as especially odd: It’s almost as if he imagines his characters to be declaiming upon a Victorian stage using highly stylized language that I doubt that anyone in real life would ever have used! I probably just need to read more of his stories to get a better feeling for them.
I actually find De la Mare’s prose in this story well-crafted and constantly enjoyable. Whether the sinister/supernatural actually happens here is up to the reader, but there is definitely an air of mystery about it all. For instance, what would have killed someone as young and reasonable healthy as Seaton?