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!