Calling Parrots in Walter de la Mare and Elizabeth Bowen: A Communion in The London Mercury

Abstract

In The London Mercury, Walter de la Mare and Elizabeth Bowen each published a short story featuring a cryptic parrot within three months of each other: de la Mare’s ‘Pretty Poll’ appeared in the April 1925 number, and Bowen’s ‘The Parrot’ in July 1925. Given Bowen’s appreciation for de la Mare’s work and her familiarity with The London Mercury as the ‘dominating magazine’ in the 1920s, this publication context turns their stories into possible companion pieces. This chapter first delineates the textual and thematic links between the two stories, then explores how the magazine — its presentation; its interactive community of contributors and readers; and its self-professed position as an arbiter of taste, committed to protecting and advancing literature and culture — plays a role in this intertextual communication between the two stories, which influences our interpretation. Both stories participate in the aesthetic debates in The London Mercury, subtly challenging some of its contributors’ assumptions about prose fiction. As this analysis of the magazine’s contents alongside the two authors’ literary essays show, the characteristics of the magazine seem to have stimulated de la Mare and Bowen to engage with questions of genre and form through their own stories.