The Door in the Wall (short story)
It covers the whole life of a successful politician who has always been haunted by his memory of having in early childhood been welcomed into a paradisal garden of innocent happiness, access to which depends on finding by chance a particular door.
Over the years he has several times rediscovered the door in different locations in London, but has always declined to enter, being distracted by some step in the advancement of his worldly career.
As a boy of about five years old, orphaned of his mother but given a good deal of freedom, he had once, when wandering through the streets of West Kensington, come across a white wall with a green door.
He encountered two tame panthers and various friendly people, including a sombre, dark woman who showed him a book which contained the story of his life.
After Oxford he embarked on a successful political career, and once more encountered the door, this time near Earl's Court, but again he decided against going in since it would make him late for an appointment.
The narrator ends by telling us that Wallace's body has just been found at the bottom of an excavation, and that he had in poor light walked through a small doorway that led onto it.
[5] T. E. Lawrence, reviewing the 1927 Ernest Benn collection in The Spectator, called this story "a very lovely thing, [which] seems rather by itself, like a gloss on an E. M. Forster fragment".
[9][10][11] Adam Roberts has written that The tone of this piece is exquisitely handled, and it remains one of the most affecting portraits of that palpable but indefinable sense of loss entailed by growing up...the way the petty business of living repeatedly get[s] in the way of recovering that childhood numinosity.
[14] Alfred Borrello believed it showed that our "very aspirations...can be the sources of self-delusion and ultimately doom if man understands them only as the means whereby he might escape from his duties to himself and to his race".
[20] Claims have been made for the influence of "The Door in the Wall" on, amongst others, T. S. Eliot's Four Quartets,[21][22][23] Rebecca West's novel Harriet Hume,[24] Julio Cortázar's story "La puerta condenada",[25] and various works by Vladimir Nabokov, Valentin Kataev and Yury Olesha.
