“It has been said that a judge is a member of the Bar who once knew a Governor,” Curtis Bok quips in the first story in his collection of judicial stories, The Backbone of the Herring. With this opening line, the reader immediately gets a sense of Bok’s easy-going humor and self-deprecation. Although John Lukacs once described Bok’s personality as “glacial”–which it may well have been in public–as a writer, channeled through his fictional identity as “Judge Ulen” in these stories, Bok comes across as the kind of judge you’d want to have hearing your case–whether as plaintiff or defendant: conscientious, empathetic, impartial, and capable taking or making a joke once in a while.
Lukacs’ assessment might stem from Bok’s position on the highest tier of Philadelphia society. His father, Edward Bok was editor of The Saturday Evening Post and a Pulitzer Prize-winning author, and his mother, Mary Louise Curtis, brought a fortune and her husband’s access to his editorship courtesy of her father, Cyrus Curtis, who founded the Post along with a half-dozen of the other leading American magazines of the time. She herself founded the Curtis Institute of Music, considered the toughest American conservatory to get into, and somewhat shocked Philadelphia when, a widow of 67, she married the violinist and bon vivantEfrem Zimbalist (Senior). And, not to stunt the family tree, Curtis’ son, Derek grew up to become president of Harvard.
On the other hand, for a son of the Main Line, Curtis showed a remarkable capacity for choosing his own path. After a tour in the Navy during World War One, he studied law at the University of Virginia and became a member of a prestigious Philadelphia firm. He won a place on the cover of Time magazine in 1933 when he turned down the chance to run the family publishing company and, instead, kept his low-paying job as an assistant district attorney. Despite his time in the military, he was a practicing Quaker and a lifelong opponent of the death penalty.
Time magazine cover from July 1933 featuring Curtis BokIn 1937, he became President Judge of the Philadelphia Court of Common Pleas, the city’s primary civil and criminal court. Early on, he began keeping a notebook of his observations from the courtroom–not so much to aid in writing his opinions as to help shape his understanding of the nature of justice, and these developed into fictional sketches that he began publishing in The Shingle, the magazine of the Philadelphia Bar Association in 1939. These stories are collected in The Backbone of the Herring
“These are not entirely autobiographical or fictitious, nor is Ulen,” Bok writes in his foreword. His point in recounting these stories was “that our system of justice, apart from Justice, which will remain undefined so far as I am concerned, can be made to work when applied with art and sympathy and a sly sense of humor.” Describing himself as a “mediocre lawyer with good connections,” Ulen took some time to overcome his timidity and found, somewhat to his surprise, that “when at last he had drifted to a point of rest he came rather abruptly into his full powers and began to use them with a delight.”
Although Ulen’s reflections on justice (“Justice has to do with the play of an enlightened personality within the boundaries of a system”) are a constant motif, the real interest of these stories is in Bok/Ulen’s observations of people. One defendant, a hulking laborer, is “the kind of man who puts his hands on his hips to think.” A large woman at the end of a difficult day collapses into a chair “like an exhausted avalanche.” A wife leaves her husband not because he beat her, cheated, or “was actively unkind: he simply lived as though he had been cored out and had nothing with which to respond.” Of another left man, Bok writes that, “No one thought to educate him in the art of getting on with his fellow man: this knowledge is supposed to grow on trees.”
His survey of human relations includes his own. When his friend, Henry Fielder, newly elected as Governor, offers him a post on the bench, the little dance Bok describes is something you often witness in male interactions:
Gosh, said Ulen to himself, this is serious. He was an introvert and Henry was an extrovert, and they were very shy of sentiment. The one feared a rebuff and the other was afraid of falling in a swamp. It was an impasse of language, for each of them was continually delighted by what the other did and bothered by what he said. Fielder called the thing he saw a spade. Ulen preferred to call it nothing, on the chance it might turn into something else of make a reasonable answer. The result was that when they were together they spent a great deal of time looking at their own feet and thinking what a wonderful fellow the other was in his own way.
On the other hand, Bok/Ulen is clearly operating in unfamiliar territory in those sketches where he ventures out of the courtroom, and positively lost when he tries to imagine what people do and say when he is not there. In “Artema’s Story,” about a failed romance that ultimately winds up on his docket, he expects the reader to believe that any woman would say the following to her lover: “We must lie greatly or not at all. To me this evening was a natural as walking in the city and suddenly seeing the hills. Maybe we stop being prisoners only when we don’t care whether the gates are open or shut. I may never know that with lucidity, but you will when the time comes.” Perhaps she was talking to Master Thespian. Fortunately, these potholes are few and easy to veer around.
Bok spent over twenty years in charge of the Court of Common Pleas, and wrote several well-regarded law texts, along with a few influential opinions. In his most famous, throwing out obscenity charges against a Philadelphia bookseller who was offering works by such smut-mongers as William Faulkner and James T. Farrell, he wrote that “It will be asked whether one would care to have one’s young daughter read these books.” The worst that might happen, in Bok’s view, was that “they will learn what is in the world and in its people, and no parents who have been discerning with their children need fear the outcome. Nor can they hold it back, for life is a series of little battles and minor issues, and the burden of choice is on us all, every day, young and old.”
He also wrote a sequel to The Backbone of the Herring, I, Too, Nicodemus (1946), which collected further “judicial adventures” of Judge Ulen. He also wrote two novels: Star Wormwood (1959), written as an illustration of the moral harm of the death penalty, and Maria (1962), a romance set on his beloved coast of Maine and published posthumously. Bok was appointed to the Pennsylvania Supreme Court in 1958 and served there until his death in 1962.
The title of The Backbone of the Herring, by the way, comes from a judicial oath used on the Isle of Man centuries ago: “You swear to do justice between cause and cause as equally as the backbone of the herring doth lie midmost of the fish.” The dust jacket design is by renowned graphic designer W. A. Dwiggins, who provided Knopf with some of its best covers of the 1930s and 1940s.
The Backbone of the Herring, by Curtis Bok New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1941
For a dozen years or so, starting in the late 1930s, Edward Newhouse was one of The New Yorker’s most prolific fiction writers, working with editor Gus Lobrano in an impressive stable that included John Cheever, Irwin Shaw, and Jerome Weidman. Granville Hicks rated Newhouse “high in the ranks of contemporary short-story writers,” and a Publisher’s Weekly once wrote that, “If I were to receive in the same mail new books by the dozen best writers of fiction in America, Edward Newhouse’s would be the first I’d read.” But hardly anyone has heard of Newhouse for the simple reason that he stopped writing.
Between 1934 and 1954, Newhouse published seven books–four novels and three short story collections. Then nothing, then a few stories in The New Yorker’s in 1957, then nothing more aside from a short autobiographical piece, “Hungarians,” published in The New Yorker’s in 1965. Unlike the magazine’s legendary Joseph Mitchell, who came to work for decades without producing a single article, however, the issue in Newhouse’s case wasn’t writer’s block. He simply didn’t need the work.
Born Ede Ujhazi in Budapest in 1911, Newhouse emigrated with his family to the U.S. in 1923. His father, an unemployed actor (who named his son after a famous 19th century Hungarian actor), was simply desperate to find work. Thrown into the New York City public school system without a word of English, Newhouse weathered a fair number of schoolyard fights until he established his street smarts. After a short attempt at City College, he spent the better part of a year riding the rails around the country and looking for work. In the end, he came back to New York and got a job covering sports for the Communist newspaper, The Daily Worker, and wrote a novel, You Can’t Sleep Here (1934), based on his time as a hobo. He went on to join the staff of The New Masses, an experience he later satirized in his third novel, The Hollow of the Wave (1949).
Edward NewhouseHe had already published a second novel, This is Your Day (1937), before placing his first story with The New Yorker in 1939, and his first collection of stories, Anything Can Happen, appeared soon afterward in 1941. Around this time, he met and married Dorothy DeLay, a classical violinist, and became friends with another rising star at The New Yorker, John Cheever. Cheever later said that he and Newhouse shared “an inability to draw the parts of [their] lives together.”
Joining the Army Air Corps after Pearl Harbor, Newhouse was selected to attend Officer Candidate School and quickly found his niche as a public relations man for the service. He finished up as a lieutenant colonel, writing speeches and reports for General H. H. “Hap” Arnold, the Army Air Corps commander and working in the same Pentagon office as James Gould Cozzens, whose diary of the experience was later published as A Time of War. Newhouse went straight back to work for The New Yorker right after separating from the Army. He published a third collection, of short stories dealing with childhood, The Iron Chain, in 1946.
Many are Called (1951) was his last collection. Thirty-nine of the stories in the book were from The New Yorker. The stories are arranged thematically. The three shortest and least interesting sections gather stories based on characters gathered around a bar (“At Jake’s”), a candy-and-cigar store (“A George’s”), and from Newhouse’s time as a hobo (“En Route”). These are more sketches than complete stories, and none rises above the level of an imitation Ring Lardner.
The book opens with “In Edgerton,” six stories set in a fictional town north of New York City, and with one of the best stories in the whole book, “My Brother’s Second Funeral.” In it, the narrator reflects on the attitudes of his home town to the burial of his brother, a war hero killed in Italy now with the local chapter of the American Legion named after him. Barely ten pages long, it somehow manages to capture so much about the ways in which American men attempt–sincerely, pretentiously, ineffectually–with life. “He was my friend, and I’ll never have another one like him,” the narrator observes. “Grown men can’t make friends, not really, not like boys. That piece of steel at Salerno killed the only man that ever knew what I was all about.”
The stories in “Waiting” could easily remind readers of Newhouse’s friend Cheever. Set in and around New York City, they are all about people poised on the edge of a transition. A man takes a bus tour of Manhattan on his last day before entering the Army. A man tries to contain his thoughts and emotions after quitting his job. A woman whose husband is serving in the Pacific decides to move back into the city after an awkward time living in suburban Westchester. In each, Newhouse displays what short story expert William Peden called “his own special kind of genius for the usual.”
The best pieces in the book, however, can be found in “The Captains Depart,” which collects stories clearly drawn from Newhouse’s own experiences on active duty. Though he spent most of his time in the Army Air Corps in the relatively comfortable position of a speechwriter and press liaison, Newhouse did accompany senior officers on numerous trips overseas, saw many different aspects of life in the Air Corps, and seems to have flown as an observer on a least a couple of combat missions.
This variety of contacts is reflected in the ten stories in “The Captains Depart.” Some are set stateside, where the safety and petty concerns of base life can still be unexpectedly disrupted by a telegram from North Africa or an accident that scatters parts of an aircraft and its crew over half of a farm. Others are scattered all over the map, from a fighter base in England to a transport field in Nigeria. “The Four Freedoms” takes place one evening in Cairo, with part of the entourage of generals and staff returning with Roosevelt from the Teheran Conference. At one point, Newhouse’s fictional counterpart, Captain Wyatt, considers the situation of the Air Corps general he works for:
The General will be descending the great staircase soon, Wyatt thought, in full consciousness of his role as the most important man in a room filled with rank. He will slap his current favorite, the new young General Jack Crane, on the shoulder, and he will play wicked uncle to April Starr and Gail Fiske. If he likes the comedian and the juggler, he will ask them if they have any relatives in the Air Forces or what they thought of the food at some A.T.C. base. With the juggler and the comedian, he’ll be Harun-al-Rashid, incognito on the streets of Baghdad, sounding out public opinion. He might confound them by asking how long they thought the war would last and why.
Like most, though by no means all, other soldiers, the General was obsessed by that question.He’ll never again attain a fraction of the power he wields. A coal miner’s son and still drawing only moderate pay, the chief was living as only the wealthiest men in the history of the world had lived. In England he had stopped at the greatest of feudal castles, elsewhere in a series of royal suites, and here among such Byzantine splendors as gold cups on the table and zippers on the mosquito net. He had at his disposal any means of transport or communication known to man. Presents and honors came to him from everywhere. And large formations of bombers went on critical missions, at tree-top level, against targets selected by him.
Newhouse may be the only American writer of fiction to take in the global scope of the war, as well as its industrial capacity and efficiency for destruction. At the same time, however, he never loses sight of the fact that this destruction also operates as a very human scale. In “Irving,” Wyatt recalls an earnest young Jewish kid from New York who worked as a speechwriter in the Pentagon. Irving had worked himself up from being a towel boy in a Turkish bath to second lieutenant’s bars by virtue of a series of cheap mysteries featuring a Boston Brahmin detective named Sedgwick Cabot “equally at home in an opium den off the Embarcadero, at a coming-out party in the Pierre, down in a bathysphere, or aloft at the controls of a PBY.” Eager to experience combat, Irving wheedles his way into being sent to the Philippines to accompany a minor party of reporters. He talks his way onto a B-25 on a bombing mission over Formosa and is promptly killed, along with the aircraft’s whole crew. Wyatt and another speechwriter retire to a bar when the news arrives. “We covered the whole subject of Irving in some detail. All we left out was that he had been the only child of two very old people who lived behind a tailor shop.” As Granville Hicks wrote in his review of Many are Called, “These stories, with their wonderful combination of sensibility and intelligence, belong with the best writing the war has produced.”
Newhouse published less than a dozen stories after Many are Called. His last novel, The Temptation of Roger Heriott (1954), was well-received, but marked his last serious attempt at fiction. In the view of Cheever and others, Newhouse’s primary reason was simply money. He’d sold several stories to Hollywood studios and made good investments with the proceeds. By the late 1940s, Dorothy DeLay had moved from performing to working as a member of the faculty at Julliard and earned a respectable income. He took on the role of supporting spouse, and helped many of his wife’s students–who included such luminaries as Itzhak Perlman, Nigel Kennedy, and Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg–with grant applications and business decisions. Few of them were aware that their teacher’s husband had had a successful career as a writer, and some even assumed he was somehow attached to the faculty. Newhouse stayed friends with Cheever, lunching with him regularly (although Blake Bailey reports in Cheever: A Life that he came to think of Newhouse as a bore). Dorothy kept on teaching at Juilliard up to her death in March 2002; Newhouse followed his wife just eight months later.
I’ve written about many good books on this site over the years, but this may be the most important one, particularly now.
Even when it was first published in 1980, Elizabeth Janeways’s Powers of the Weak was labelled as a feminist tract and fairly quickly dismissed and forgotten. Which was an apt demonstration of the very phenomenon noted in the quote from Victor Turner’s Image and Pilgrimage in Christian Culture from which Janeway took her title and which she prefaces her book:
INFERIORITY: A value-bearing category that refers to the powers of the weak, countervailing against structural power, fostering continuity, creating the sentiment of the wholeness of the total community, positing the model of an undifferentiated whole whose units are whole human beings. The powers of the weak are often assigned in hierarchic and stratified societies to females, the poor, autochthons [indigenous peoples], and outcasts.
Ironically, Powers of the Weak is actually an intensely empowering book that should inspire hope in anyone who is feeling desperate, hopeless, and voiceless.
“My aim is to understand power,” Janeway writes in her opening chapter, “that ambiguous, menacing, much-desired quality whose accepted definition seems to me unsatisfactory.” Indeed, she immediately rejects the premise that power is a quality or a property and instead defines it as “a process of human interaction”–a dynamic process that only exists in the context of a relationship. In this way, it’s analogous to potential in electricity, mechanics, or gravity–the tension created between two opposing charges, forces, or masses.
And because of this view, Janeway holds the weak accountable for their part in relationships with the power. “[W]hen the weak habitually turn their backs on power because they accept the stereotypes that undervalue them, they permit their rulers to define proper processes of governing according to the experience of the rulers alone, so that it comes to seem that only one ‘right way’ to handle power exists.”
Even in the extreme conditions of a totalitarian state. As natural “as fear must be when the weak face unbridled oppression from the state, this fear is intended. It has a political purpose–to interfere with the normal functioning of the human beings who make up the mass of the governed”–to “separate them, and sick each one in isolation and paralysis.” She cites as evidence Charlotte Beradt’s remarkable survey of the dreams recounted by ordinary Germans living under the Nazi regime, The Third Reich of Dreams: “What she found was a kind of mental lockjaw. Anxiety dreams were everywhere. In them the dreamer was invited again and again to take some action in the face of danger and could not manage to do so; did not dare to move a finger.”
Elizabeth Janeway, 1980In response, Janeway rallies the weak to hold onto what she calls “the first and last power of the weak”: skepticism, mistrust, and dissent. “If, in the face of repression, the governed can still hold to mistrust, they will not, of course be safe; but they will preserve the inner citadel of the self and with it the capacity of judging the exterior world in terms of their own interests.” Dissent, she writes, “is the intellectual steel which strengthens the self in the face of the tyrant’s weapon of induced panic.”
This suspicion should even extend to whatever bright alternate futures might be held up to excite the action and loyalty of the weak. “I have never, myself, read a Utopia that seemed to approach even distantly the size and the vitality of the human world. The past was full of surprises; the present is astonishing (as well as frightening): who knows what the future may be?”
In fact, though Janeway holds those who consider themselves weak, oppressed, or alienated accountable for taking charge of their own lives, she would reserve some skepticism for any political construct that might be devised. In a line that ought to be engraved and put up on the wall above any thinking person’s desk, she cautions that “There is always more more reality around than we allow for; and there are always more ways to structure it than we use.”
If you’re one of those who’ve felt depressed, disenchanted, or disgusted since November 8, I highly recommend getting a copy of Powers of the Weak and let her reinvigorate your power to dissent: “The basic trust of reality that we learned in our first creative conquest of the world is our defense against the magic image of a new system presented by the tyrants.”
Powers of the Weak, by Elizabeth Janeway New York City: Alfred A. Knopf, 1980
Gladys Bronwyn Stern, or G. B. Stern (17 June 1890 – 20 September 1973), born Gladys Bertha Stern in London, England, wrote many novels, short stories, plays, memoirs, biographies and literary criticism,” states the opening sentence of G. B. Stern’s Wikipedia entry. Many as in over fifty, or roughly one a year starting in 1914.
She was never, apparently, at a loss for words.
One way she managed such an impressive rate of production was that she dictated most of her books while laying on the sofa, staring up at the ceiling. “If I wrote them myself, I know I should always be stopping to draw patterns,” she told an interviewer once. Another was that she was perhaps more open to the potential of detours than any other writer. Wherever her thoughts might wander in the course of her dictation, she was more than willing to follow:
A straight line, so I have been taught, is the shortest way between two given points. This book [Monogram, her first volume of autobiography] will probably prove to be the longest possible way between three given points: objects picked up at random from my own sitting-room; from the rubbish heap of a garden in the South of France; from anywhere. A straight line cannot enclose anything; but if you join three points, you have a triangle, and something exciting may or may not be discovered, afterwards, enclosed inside a triangle, wherever and however you happen to draw it.
So Stern was a born non-linear thinker, and her reader should not be surprised when her thoughts not only lead off the beaten path but often cross the lines between one genre and another. Her temperament was well-matched with the imaginative absurdity of the snippet of Marx Brothers dialogue that serves as the epigraph to Monogram:
Groucho: “It’s my opinion that the missing picture is hidden in the house next door.”
Chico: “But there isn’t a house next door.”
Groucho: “Then we’ll build one!”
When her publishers, Chapman and Hall, approached Stern with the idea of writing an autobiography, she chose to interpret the label liberally: “So let us try, for a change, to put our words into thoughts. Surely this should be what they call autobiography?,” she asked.
Inspired by the example of Xavier de Maistre’s Voyage Around My Room, she determined to follow his example, in which “everything is linked to everything else.” This worked for Stern, for as she saw it,
There is hardly an object, however recently acquired, however sharply free from cobwebs and memories, that would not start an association with some incident, some person, that would lead on to another and another; honestly allowing the line of the pattern to take whatever twists and curves and backward looks, angles and zigzags and convolutions it wills; honestly; not forcing it in this direction nor in that, simply because this or that direction might make the prettier or the more rhythmical pattern.
So Stern seizes upon a little blue and white glass dragon figurine on her mantelpiece, and off she goes. In the space of the next ten pages, she leads us to the Mount Wilson Observatory in Los Angeles, to the fact that she had named characters Maitland in four different books but had never known anyone with that name, to a memory of associating the word “Hydrant” with magical powers until her Nannie explained what one was, to a recollection of a chalet in the Tyrols, to an account of attending the first performance of R. C. Sherriff’s war play, Journey’s End, in Berlin in the early 1920s.
And on the book rolls, taking countless twists and turns and diversions, until ending 300 pages later with a joke about Einstein’s wife. And on Stern would roll, through a further eight volumes over the course of the next twenty-four years. Although several conformed a little more closely to a pre-set structure (And Did He Stop and Speak to You? (1957) was a collection of sketches of famous people she had known, such as Somerset Maugham and Max Beerbohm, All in Good Time (1954) and The Way It Worked Out (1956) were about her conversion to Catholicism), none fully restrained her from wandering off-topic when her curiosity took over.
It’s no surprise, then, that some critics couldn’t stand this approach. Reviewing Trumpet Voluntary (1944), Albert Jay Nock wrote that Stern “… presents uninteresting personages doing most uninteresting things in extremely uninteresting circumstances. Its narrative is desultory, garrulous, inconsequential.” (Another critic wrote that Stern was “occasionally inconsequential but never trivial”).
Most reviewers struggled to capture the unique nature of these books. One called Another Part of the Forest (1941) “a desultory, enticing, and ingenious volume of recollection, comment, reverie, and imagination.” Another labeled Trumpet Voluntary “a Commonplace Book, into which the author throws quotations, favorite and otherwise, opinions on books, on authors, everyday happenings–in short, everything that comes into her head at the moment.” A third wrote that “for those who love them,” each of Stern’s autobiographies was “a river of a book, now in flood, very rarely reduced to a trickle, but with occasional excursions into idle, tree-protected pools.” In its starred review of Monogram, Kirkus Reviews provided a good description that could any of the nine books:
There is no beginning, no end; no background of birth and parentage; no chronology of events; no category of friends and acquaintances. Instead, at the end, you have a rich tapestry of a full life, a life savored, shared, enjoyed to the utmost. You pick up facts, and weave them into the pattern, with no illusion of importance as to where and when they belong. You meet as intimates — or as passing acquaintances–the people that enliven today’s literary world, artistic world, theatrical world. There is humor–and poetry–and appreciation–and keen commentary on the passing scene–and it’s grand reading from first page to last.
Looking across the full set, from Monogram (1936) to One is Only Human (1960), a gradual trend toward more serious, deep-rooted thoughts can be seen. Monogram is almost effervescent, still retaining the high spirits and optimism of Stern’s first great successes as a novelist, playwright, and celebrity in the 1920s. Another Part of the Forest (1941) is full of enthusiasm for Merry Olde England (and crazy new America) but mentions of mobilization, bomb shelters, and the fact that her beloved France was cut off and under occupation remind the reader that Stern was writing in wartime. the war becomes even more prominent in Trumpet Voluntary (1944), which opens with a reflection on the destruction of her flat in London:
I used to wish that something would happen, something quite harmless, naturally, to remove the Military Tailors [a shop across the road from her flat] and leave me with a wider view. How I used to wish it! … I need not even have seen it happen; one morning, pulling aside the curtains, the building opposite would not be there, and I should have my unremorseful view.
… And then one morning, the morning of October 15, 1940, to be exact, the Military Tailors drew aside their curtains, and my rooms were not there, and instead, they had a heavenly outlook; at least, they would have when the rubbish and ash and bits of gutted wall had been cleared away. It was almost the same thing, you see; the Green Djinn had got it as nearly right as could be expected from Djinns, only it had not struck me, and I am afraid did not strike me till two years later and on this afternoon of November, 1942, that the Military Tailors might also have been doing a bit of intensive wishing, and that they were better at it than myself.
In Benefits Forgot (1949), the memories of war are still fresh. Stern comes across letters written her by American and British soldiers and learns that the R.A.F. pilot who wrote her in praise of Trumpet Voluntary died while on a raid the day after he posted his letter. All in Good Time (1954), The Way It Worked Out (1956), and, to a large extent, One is Only Human (1960), all deal with spiritual matters, tracing Stern’s long journey from being raised as a secular Jew to embracing Catholicism in her late fifties.
Throughout all the books and all their many changes of subject, one thing remains constant: Stern’s unwavering good humor. Even Albert Nock admitted that, “Chatterbox as Mrs. Stern is, commonplace as her people and their doings are, she brings them before you pervaded with the warmth and glow of an inexhaustible affection.” If her spirit of whimsy and stream-of-consciousness narrative logic can, at times, become a wee bit tiresome, Stern’s fundamental generosity and gently self-mocking tone almost always provides a restorative effect.
I have to confess that while I’ve never managed to read any of them from beginning to end, I have kept one or more of Stern’s books in my nightstand for most of the last two years and probably always will. Dip into any page of any of these books, and I guarantee that within a page or two you will have read something interesting, something amusing … and probably switched subjects at least twice along the way. Someone could probably assemble a terrific book of about 400-500 pages with the best excerpts from the lot, but I suspect it might come off a bit like a fruitcake without the cake. Till then, I highly recommend picking up any one of them (many copies are going for as little as $1.00 plus shipping) and diving in.
Louise Bogan didn’t write her autobiography. Or rather, she didn’t write this book. Always an intensely private person, she rarely risked putting details about her life in print, preferring to confide in her own diaries and journals and, occasionally, in letters to a few friends. “The poet represses the outright narrative of his life. He absorbs it, along with life itself,” she once wrote. “Actually, I have written down my experience in the closest detail. But the rough and vulgar facts are not there.”
Journey Around My Room was assembled some years after Bogan’s death in 1970 by her literary executor, Ruth Limmer, a professor of English at Goucher College, after the idea was suggested by Amanda Vaill, then an editor at Viking. Limmer framed the work in rough chronological order, using text from a story Bogan published in The New Yorker in 1933 titled “Journey Around My Room” as introduction, close, and chapter prefaces. She also used the lines from one of Bogan’s poems, “Train Tune” (“Back through clouds/Back through clearing/Back through distance/Back through silence…”) as chapter titles. Finally, she pulled from the mass of papers Bogan left: extracts from journals, notebooks, poems, letters, short stories, scraps of paper, essays, even recorded conversations hundreds of fragments — the tesserae from which she assembled this mosaic.
The rough and vulgar facts are not there. Without the outline of Bogan’s life that Limmer provides in her introduction, the reader would not know when she was born, that she was briefly married to a soldier with whom she had almost nothing in common, that she had a daughter and then left him, that she had a second marriage to writer Raymond Holden that also ended, that she had an affair with Theodore Roethke and an infatuation with Edmund Wilson, that she served as Poet Laureate to the Library of Congress, that she was hospitalized several times for depression, that she spent much of her later life living alone in what she called the faubourg of Washington Heights. Bogan explained her reticence as an attempt to make sure that future researchers into her life would have to work for their pay, but the truth was simpler: her solitude was essential to both her work and her survival.
William Jay Smith, one of her few close friends, with whom she collaborated on a collection of poems for children, wrote after her death that when he used to call her up to meet for lunch, Bogan would always decline, saying she had a dentist appointment. He eventually figured out that no one could need so much dental work. As Limmer puts it, “She came first.” She once wrote, in response to a questionnaire she set for herself, that her wish was “To live without apology.” She had no desire to confess her sins and no interest in trumpeting her virtues. “The fact of the matter,” Limmer writes, “is that Bogan was far more absorbed by the texture and meaning of experience than with the events giving rise to them.”
Bogan’s childhood experiences clearly did much to shape her sensibility and emotional strengths and weaknesses. Her father was a reticent man who held a series of jobs in small mill towns in Maine, New Hampshire, and Massachusetts, moving the family every few years. Her mother was the catalyst of the explosions and scandals that led the family to pull up stakes. “The secret family angers and secret disruptions passed over my head,” Bogan writes, but she does remember one scene: “The curved lid of the trunk is thrown back, and my mother is bending over the trunk, and packing things into it. She is crying and she screams. My father, somewhere in the shadows, groans as though he has been hurt. It is a scene of the utmost terror.”
From Elizabeth Frank’s Pulitzer Prize-winning biography, Louise Bogan: A Portrait (1986), one can learn that Bogan’s mother saw herself as a great beauty and pursued men she met in the hotels and boardinghouses in which the family often stayed. She was victim to “her own vanity’s desire for praise and love.” She left her husband on at least one occasion and always considered him unworthy of her. As she grew older, her pursuits more and more ended in frustration. A certain level of resentment and impending chaos simmered throughout Bogan’s childhood. “I had no idea of ordered living.” No wonder she remembers such affection for the home in which her friend Ethel Gardner lived. “I can only express my delight and happiness with the Gardners’ way of living by saying that they had one of everything.”
Eventually Bogan’s mother surrendered her hopes of romantic escape and the family settled in a poor neighborhood on the edge of Boston. Revisiting the area as an adult, Bogan found the sense of failure overwhelming: “I felt the consuming, destroying, deforming passage of time; and the spectacle of my family’s complete helplessness, in the face of their difficulties, swept over me.” Yet she also recognizes that “The thing to remember, and ‘dwell on,’ is the extraordinary courage manifested by those two disparate, unawakened (if not actually lost) souls: my mother and father.” What little money they had paid for music lessons for Louise and her brother, for occasional theater tickets, for tram fares to the Girl’s Latin School, from which Louise graduated in 1915. And they survived “in this purgatory — with an open hell in close relation.”
Again, for what happened next we have to turn to Limmer’s introduction or Frank’s biography. Bogan attended Boston University for year and was offered a scholarship to Radcliffe. She had begun to attract some attention for her writing, getting a number of poems published as a freshman. She chose instead to marry an Army corporal named Curtis Alexander and followed him when he was assigned to a post in the Panama Canal Zone. She found the life unendurable. “All we had in common was sex. Nothing to talk about. We played cards.” She took her baby, Maidie, back to Boston in May 1918. A few months later, the family was notified that Bogan’s brother Charles had been killed in a battle in the Haumont Woods in France. The news devastated Bogan’s mother, leaving her emotionally shattered for the rest of her life. About a year later, Alexander died.
Bogan took the meager widow’s pension from the Army and used the money to pay for a trip to Europe. She spent a year in Vienna studying piano, reading Tolstoy, Joyce, and T. S. Eliot, and writing. Then she returned to the U. S., settling in New York City, where her first collection of poems, Body of This Death (1923), was published. Her portrait appeared, along with those of Edna St. Vincent Millay, Amy Lowell, Elinor Wylie, and Genevieve Taggard in a Vanity Fair article, “Distinguished American Women Poets Who Have Made the Lyric Verse Written by Women in America More Interesting Than That of the Men.”
She began a relationship with Raymond Holden and they married in 1925. She was invited for a stay at the Yaddo Colony and published her second collection, Dark Summer (1929). On Boxing Day 1929, the house she and Holden were living in burned down, taking with it almost all of her first ten years’ work. Her relationship with Holden was troubled by her jealousy and their mutual heavy drinking, and she entered a sanitarium, complaining of depression and exhaustion. There would be more such stays in the next thirty years. She took advantage of a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1933 to return to Europe, this time spending the spring and summer in Italy and France.
She separated from Holden in 1934, began her affair with Roethke in 1935, and lived by writing reviews and stories for The New Yorker and other magazines. These stories, which can be found in Poet’s Prose: Selected Writings of Louise Bogan (2005), edited by Mary Kinzie, were impressionistic but clearly autobiographical, and Bogan discussed the possibility of building a novel, to be titled Laura Daly’s Story, with an editor at Scribner’s. Limmer incorporates passages from several of the stories into Journey Around My Room.
By the end of the 1930s, Bogan had divorced Holden, taken up residence in the apartment in Morningside Heights that she maintained to the end of her life, and become the regular poetry editor for The New Yorker. Over the next three decades, she continued to write, if more slowly as time wore on, and kept up a steady round of engagements as a lecturer and visiting professor at colleges around the U. S.. She published three more collections, one per decade: Poems and New Poems (1941), Collected Poems, 1923-1953 (1954) and The Blue Estuaries: Poems 1923-1968 (1968).
Unlike many of her peers, she avoided involvement with social causes, and one would have little idea what was going on in the outside world, as well as her own life, from reading Journey Around My Room. “What is staler than old politics?” she once wrote. “It is like walking over old furnace cinders to read what once was news of political chicanery or change.” Her foremost concern was her own work. “Saw my real, half-withered, silly face in a shop mirror on the street, under the bald light of an evening shower, and shuddered. The woman who died without producing an oeuvre. The woman who ran away.”
Bogan felt her talent doomed her to insignificance.”‘My time will come,’ you say to yourself, but how can you know whether or not your time has not already come and gone?”:
Perhaps it has been spent, all spent, squandered out, in taking streetcars, drinking gin, smoking cigarettes — in connubial love, in thousands of books devoured by the eye, in eating sewing, in suspicions, tears, jealousy, hatred, and fear. Perhaps it is now, on a dark day in October, in the bedroom where you sit with emptiness in your body and heart; beside the small fire, drying your hair — older, more tired, desperately silent, unhappily alone, with faith and daydreams (perhaps luckily) broken and disappearing, with the dreadful pain in your shoulder which presages dissolution, infection, and age.
This is not to suggest that she faded away in lonely isolation. While Journey Around My Room shows us a woman who spent a great deal of time exploring the deeper currents of her spirit, an hour reading her letters, particularly those from the Forties on, in What the Woman Lived: Selected Letters makes it clear that she never lost touch with what was going on around her. She read copiously and was quick to recommend books to her friends. She went to plays and kept up with the movies, taking delight in Jules and Jim and other films that hit the New York art houses in the Fifties and Sixties. She loved an occasional indulgent dip into gossip and could toss out razor-sharp barbs when in the mood.
But she also struggled increasingly with depression and was frustrated by the necessity for — and the effects — of the the drugs she took to cope with it. “This morning I thought that the 1st pill was going to see me through; a clear, untroubled interval would show up (take over) every so often…. But soon that secondary sort of yearning hunger (which is not real hunger, but is in some way attached to the drug) began again.” She found less and less energy to write. “Any true writing … will have to be done in the afternoon.” The unpublished poems Limmer includes in the last chapter, “Back through the midnight,” however, reveal that Bogan maintained some amount of hope that this, too, would pass:
The Castle of My Heart
Cleanse and refresh the castle of my heart Where I lived for long with little joy. For Falsest Danger, with its counterpart Sorrow, has made this siege its long employ.
Now lift the siege, for in your bravest part Full power exists, most eager for employ; Cleanse and refresh the castle of my heart Where I have lived for long with little joy.
Do not let Peril play its lordly part; Show up the bad game’s bait, and its employ. Nor, for a moment, strut as future’s toy. Advanced, and guard your honor and my art.
Cleanse and refresh the castle of my heart.
Six months before her death, she wrote her long-time New Yorker editor, William Maxwell:
The struggle with silence still goes on. —But I plan some secretarial help, after the holiday. If this doesn’t help, I’ll have another conference with you; and plan some strategy. Surely I can outwit this thing! I don’t want to give up just yet.
Louise Bogan died in her apartment, in the early hours of February 1970, of a heart attack.
“Whatever I do, apart from the short cry (lyric poetry) and the short remark (journalism), must be in the form of notes. Mine is the talent of the cry of the cahier,” she once complained. Yet the scraps she left and the mosaic that Limmer assembled from them are breathtaking in its power, truth, and beauty. Journey Around My Room has not left my nightstand since I first read it over 18 months ago. I have discovered and written about many good books over the course of the past ten years, but I am conservative in the use of words like “great” and “masterpiece.” Journey Around My Room is a masterpiece, one of the truly great American autobiographies. Every time I open it I find something stunning in its honesty and insight.
Journey Around My Room: The Autobiography of Louise Bogan – A Mosaic by Ruth Limmer New York: The Viking Press, 1980
On the few times I get to spend in a used bookstore, I find myself increasingly depressed at how often I can tell in a glance that there’ll be little chance of finding something I haven’t seen before. Which is, obviously, something of a natural consequence of running this site for over ten years. When this happens, I give it one last shot by heading for the poetry section.
If they have one. If they don’t, it’s time to abandon all hope.
If they do, there is a better chance of finding something hitherto unknown because by God there are a lot of skinny books of poetry that have been published over the last hundred-some years. A lot of it is pretty forgettable, as a growing stack of skinny books of poetry in my “To Donate” box attests. But there’s a good share that was doomed to neglect simply because it’s from too small a press, doesn’t include anything that got pulled into an anthology, or has some hideous design or amateur artwork that screams “Stay Away!” to all but worshippers of one of the poetic muses.
Or, as in the case of Helene Mullins’ collection, The Mirrored Walls and Other Poems, 1929-1969 (1970), so boring that it could easily be mistaken for a review draft. Except the one I found earlier this year was in immaculate shape, protected in Brodart, included an inscription by the author (“To Bob Adams with good wishes”), and sold for just $4. The Mirrored Walls came from a moderately well recognized publisher (Twayne) and included blurbs from John Hall Wheelock, Louis Untermeyer, and A. M. Sullivan, so it indicated that Mullins had made it under the mid-20th-century American poetry Big Top, if not quite into the center ring.
So who was Helene Mullins? Of the few online sources, the short bio sketch on the Yale Library page devoted to her papers (and those of her sister Marie McCall, who published a few novels) offers the most information. Born in New York City in 1899, she spent most of her life in the city. Married twice, began publishing poems in the early 1920s, including regular appearances in FPA’s (Franklin Pierce Adams) “Conning Tower” column in The New York World newspaper. Along with poetry, she wrote two novels early in her career — Paulus Fry: The History of an Esthete (1924), a quirky, elegant little jeux d’esprit in the vein of Carl Van Vechten and James Branch Cabell (“a flutterby-butterfly book,” one review called it), co-authored with her sister; and Convent Girl (1929). Convent Girl was an apparently autobiographical account of a girl’s life in a city convent boarding school for three years that was praised for its “clearness of vision” and “calm, well balanced prose, free of all flamboyant sentimentality and flashy brittleness, written frankly, and undoubtedly without prejudice.” She published four collections of poetry: Earthbound and Other Poems (1929); Balm in Gilead (1930); Streams from the Source (1938); and The Mirrored Walls. Married twice, she was seriously injured in an automobile accident in 1935. She spent several weeks in a coma and it took her several years to recover. She lent her support to a number of liberal, human rights, and peace causes over the years, and died in 1991.
Mullins was one of the younger women poets to come to notice in the 1920s, when Edna St. Vincent Millay and Elinor Wylie reigned, but she quickly gained a solid foothold, publishing in Scribners, Commonweal, The Atlantic Monthly, and other popular magazines. She was among the more frequent contributors of poetry to The New Yorker in its first ten years.
Irony to the Ironical
Accept from me, at least, an admiration Not cultivated too laboriously. Most delicate shall be the situation, A matter of wit and wine and poetry.
You need not give me caution in exchange, For I am self-sufficient and content. I think that you are beautiful and strange, And willingly I yield to sentiment.
Passionate Beyond Belief
Passionate beyond belief Is the crisp and dying leaf. Watch it whirl through clouds of dust, Determined not (until it must) To yield and be forever still. What a brave display of will! What a glorious, futile fight! O gathering dark, O waiting night, Few such do you absorb when all The casualties of autumn fall.
I like the fact that this last little ode to death appeared alongside ads for Peek Frean biscuits, the National Horse Show, Kauffman for Riding Togs (since 1876), and Alix’ Famous Collarless Wrap from Bloomingdale’s. You can see why at least one acquaintance called her “a mix of Dorothy Parker and Edna St. Vincent Millay.” On the other hand, Mullins managed to rub Southern poet Allan Tate wrong in a big way: “I’m in favor of rejecting all verse henceforth by this piece of baggage! She’s the vulgarest, rudest wench I’ve yet graced with my presence. She also has a voice like the taste of a persimmon.”
Mullins’ basic style changed little over the years. Of her first collection, Earthbound and Other Poems, one reviewer wrote, “She is content to let the theme develop with practically no ornament; she delights in harmony but rarely employs counterpoint.” Of Balm in Gilead, another wrote that her verse “is honest, admirable, and wise”: “Constant war is being waged between her high heart and the lesson of bitter resignation she thinks we all must learn.”
A significant shift in perspective, however, can be detected in the poems found in Streams from the Source, the first collection to appear after her accident and convalescence:
She Marvels Over What They Say
It cannot last,” they said to me, When I with Love went dancing. “The end is always ruthlessly And quietly advancing.” But I knew better, being young. And I would not endeavor To understand a dismal tongue; My dance would last forever. Now that with Pain I’m lying prone, “It cannot last,” they tell me, And in a calm and soothing tone Endeavor to compel me To be assured the end will come. But though it chafe or grieve them, I find their comfort wearisome; I still do not believe them.
“Her lines are no longer founded on self-pity or self-preoccupation,” wrote Louis Untermeyer in The Saturday Review. “It is not an austerity so much as a gathering of intellectual forces, a translation of the fanciful in terms of the philosophic.”
Her subjects also shifted to social issues: unemployment, justice, and, with the start of World War Two, the fight against totalitarianism. “Interview with a Dictator,” for example, asks “What is it to be in power, a ruler of men/To advance beyond the humble of the earth/Who strive and suffer, and fall to rise again/Begging their fellows to recognize their worth?” These would remain a major focus of her work, at least as reflected in her last collection, The Mirrored Walls. In “How Forgive the Power of Rulers,” twenty years after “Interview,” her question remains essentially the same: “How forgive the power of rulers/waging wars with borrowed breath/of entertainers who copyright/our dramas of life and death.” (You can hear Mullins reading this and other poems, along with fellow poet Henrietta Weigel on a KPFA show from 1964 on the Internet Archive (Link).
These are not, however, the poems to remember her by. They remind me a little of the Red flag-waving poems that Genevieve Taggard wrote during her New Masses phase. You do have to give credit for hanging in with her causes, though. Rounding the corner on seventy, she still managed to feel the fire of comradeship with the Flower Power generation: “We march and sing and demonstrate./We are the rebels who extol/the equal rights that cry for peace,/the liberty which keeps man whole” (from “Hippy Song”).
Instead, if there is anything to be remembered from The Mirrored Walls, it is Mullins’ poems that deal with the personal, not the social, the intimate and not the public:
My Mother’s Final Gesture
Before she left, my mother, trying to make it easier for us, by slow degrees erased her identity. Shedding the meretricious ornamentations, the perpetual hopes, the outworn new beginnings, she covered with the tenuity of old age her beauty, grace, the poor remains of a gaiety hoarded against a need that might arise. So intent was she on divesting herself of all familiar lineaments, she did no heed a word of what we were saying: that we were glad she soon would be released from the tremors of our menaced civilization, the fears and horrors seeping through our walls. Barely recognizable at the end, except to us who knew her as she was, she slipped away with a reassuring flutter of her hands. We watched her go toward her unknown destination, then turned to face our own.
Dynamic of Life
Everything changes, everything passes away, And I lift my hands and hold them in front of my face. The joys impatient to leave me I try to delay, None of them pause, outlast my clumsy embrace.
New flowers bloom and new songs come into fashion, The hair of my love is black and then it is gold. I shrink from the touch of an unfamiliar passion, I reject the strange and new, I cling to the old.
Everything changes, everything passes away, Nothing will heed me, nothing remain in its place. The warmth I will need tomorrow goes from me today, And I lift my hands and hold them in front of my face.
I wouldn’t say that any of what I read in this neglected collection were great poems. But as someone about a block away from rounding the corner on sixty, whose mother is going gently into that good night, I will say that these two were tough to read without feeling a chill down my spine.
The Mirrored Walls and Other Poems, 1929-1969, by Helene Mullins New York: Twayne Publishers, 1970
Books on jazz, blues, country, rock, soul, and other styles of popular music are, for me, the closest written equivalent to potato chips. I have to be careful taking one down from the shelf, because there is a high risk I will get nothing else accomplished until I finished it. And it’s worse now with the Internet, since just about any tune mentioned, no matter how obscure, can be located and downloaded in seconds, so reading slips all too easily into listening and, suddenly, who knows where the time goes? At least in the old pre-Net days, all you could do was write down the record title and hope that some day in the distant future you might have the luck to find a copy in some used record store.
So when I got a copy of Val Wilmer’s terrific autobiography, Mama Said There’d Be Days Like This, I saw a lost weekend coming. She got her first taste of jazz via an early teen boyfriend and a copy of Rudi Blesch’s pioneering study of jazz, Shining Trumpets (1949), and the rest is history. Over the course of the last 60 years, she has listened to, photographed, interviewed, wrote about, partied with, and gotten to know most of the major figures, and many more of the minor ones, in pop music. You can get a good sample of her talent for sizing up musicians as performers, artists, personalities, and human beings in The Guardian’s archive of obits she’s written (and you can get a small sample of her work as a photographer here, here, and here).
But there’s some serious starch in Mama Said There’d Be Days Like This. As Wilmer’s eyes and ears were opened up by her exposure to a variety of styles — including African, West Indian, and Jamaican pop years before it hit white audiences — her understanding of the social, economic, and gender dimensions of the music and the musicians also grew deeper and more sophisticated. She quickly learned a few lessons as a young and single white woman spending hours in the company of musicians, mostly black and uniformly male:
Many feminists believe there to be an unspoken bond between males, the understanding that all women belong to all men. Where the white woman and the Black man are concerned, this understanding of the woman as shared possession, breaks down under the white man’s gaze — unless the woman can be shown to be a “prostitute.” If she wasn’t, back in the 1960s, then in my experience the white men on the scene made sure she’d be treated like one. This was the penalty to pay for associating with Black men and breaking down the order of things white men had established. No woman was allowed to exist in her own right as an autonomous individual, if she was there, it had to be for the benefit of some man. As a result, hotel porters, bus drivers, stage doormen — real “jobsworth” to a man — became a thorn in my side when it came to moving around with musicians. If the thought of sex had never crossed anyone’s mind, these people certainly put it there.
Mama Said There’d Be Days Like This is really much more than a book about music, though it’s exceptional on that level. But Wilmer’s life is something of a distillation of much that was of importance in the 1960s and 1970s. The growing recognition of race as a political factor, of the rise of civil rights. The increasing influence of American culture in British life. The changing British economy (Wilmer collaborated on a never-published oral history of coal mining). And the sexual revolution.
“It is how we are treated as women, rather than as individuals, what happens to us because we are women, that dictates the direction of our lives,” she declares in the book’s introduction. “To us the personal is political, whether we like it or not.” In her case, it was not only a matter of being witness to the rise of the woman’s movement: she took an active part, helping to organize the first “Take Back the Night” events in London.
And her understanding of her own sexuality grew, as she came to recognize her preference for women. She describes experiencing a thrill when Althea Gibson was kissed by an opponent after a match at Wimbledon and the shock of seeing lesbian couples openly embracing and dancing in Paris nightclubs. In the mid-1960s in London, however, lesbians had to seek the safety of forming private clubs — which even then were occasionally subjected to vice squad raids. Yet the act of going to one of these clubs was also a matter of asserting a gay woman’s rights:
… because what we were doing by walking through that door was declaring ourselves — what some would call “coming out” — there was about the whole exercise a sense of terrible excitement. It revolved around bravado and ritual. Getting ready to go there was a ritual, the crease in the trousers, the eyes made-up just so Parking the car was a ritual, as near to the club as possible to avoid the voyeurs and the challenge of passers-by. Gaining entry meant mustering bravado. And for what? To spend time in a place where you could, supposedly, be yourself.
Val Wilmer’s mother and drummer Herbie Lovelle, 1959Wilmer acknowledges the large and positive role her mother played in her life. Her father died when she was still young, and her mother raised two children on her own, taking in boarders to get by. Despite a most conventional English middle class upbringing, her mother was remarkably open to both her daughter’s interests and the string of musicians — almost all of them black, male, and from other countries — that Val brought home for tea. Her hospitality became legendary among jazz performers visiting London. Harry Carney, Duke Ellington’s great baritone sax player, sent her Christmas cards every year. “Randy Weston stayed at our house and talked Africa and Nationalism, she cooked him bacon and eggs; the Liberian Ambassador invited her to his parties and she drank champagne.”
And though her mother never quite understood her daughter’s sexuality — “Well, not for women, dear” — she was open to just about anyone Val associated with: “I always knew I could bring my friends home to a warm welcome. Without such a love behind me, I doubt whether I could have even coped with the stresses of trying to be myself in an essentially homophobic society.” The only things she wouldn’t tolerate were slovenliness and mistreatment of her daughter. Other parents could learn from her example.
“People often write autobiographies as if they had no mother, no children, as if sexual love had passed them by,” Wilmer writes at the start of Mama Said There’d Be Days Like This. “This not one of those.”
Amen.
Mama Said There’d Be Days Like This, by Val Wilmer London: The Women’s Press Limited, 1989
The Sisters, by Hugh Ramsay (1904)“Let us begin with two sisters dressed for a ball,” Drusilla Modjeska writes in her introduction to Stravinsky’s Lunch. “Whenever I look at this painting — which, as it is in the Art Gallery of New South Wales, is quite often — I think they are waiting for the century to begin…. You can see from their faces that they are not the girls who went to balls in nineteenth-century novels; and you can see from their clothes that there is nothing of the modern woman about them.”
In Stravinsky’s Lunch, Modjeska looks at how two near-contemporaries of the two women in the painting (the painter’s sisters), Stella Bowen and Grace Cossington Smith — both Australians, both painters — took on the century they encountered and carved out lives and careers very different from the conventions of the Victorian world in which they were raised. Modjeska refers to the book as “a koan in my own practice as a woman and writer.” The choice of the term is apt, as Stravinsky’s Lunch is a book that raises many questions and finds few definitive answers to them.
Questions such as those raised by the story of Stravinsky’s lunch, which Modjeska first heard over a restaurant meal with other writers and artists. It’s not really a story, so much as the fact that when the composer Igor Stravinsky was working on a composition, he insisted that his family eat lunch in silence. “All artists are selfish,” wrote Robert Craft in Stravinsky: Chronicle of a Friendship (1972), “they must be, to get their work done. And they sacrifice the people around them.” for Modjeska, Stravinsky’s selfishness raises larger questions: “What are we prepared to ask of ourselves and of those who love us, what value we put on love and what value we put on art; what compromises we will make; which gods we will appease?”
Stella Bowen offers an example of a woman who, at first, sacrificed herself willingly on the altars of love and art. She happily entered into a relationship with the writer Ford Madox Ford, taking on the many domestic burdens of their rustic, near-penniless existence, in return for the sake of his love and his company: “… to have the run of a mind of that calibre … was a privilege for which I am still trying to say ‘thank you,'” she wrote in her memoir, Drawn from Life. But she also sacrificed her own development as an artist, as tending to Ford’s needs left her with little time and energy for her own work:
Ford never understood why I found it so difficult to paint whilst I was with him. He thought I lacked the will to do it at all costs. That was true, but he did not realise that if I had had the will to do it at all costs, my life would have been oriented quite differently. I should not have been available to nurse him through the daily strain of his own work; to walk and talk with him whenever he wanted, and to stand between him and circumstances. Pursuing an art is not just a matter of finding the time — it is a matter of having a free spirit to bring to it.
When, after one too many affairs with other women on Ford’s part, Bowen broke off their relationship, he failed to understand what all the fuss was about. As Modjeska puts it, he didn’t realize “that the qualities that had drawn him to her in the first place — her courage, her intelligence, her engagement with life — were precisely those that would take her away from him.” And that courage and intelligence were also what allowed her to produce her best work when she herself was free to focus. Yet, as is clear from Drawn from Life, Bowen never looked upon her time with Ford with regret, certainly not when she thought of their daughter. “Was Love the one, in the end, that she chose?” Or did she even chose one or the other? “Is choosing what she did?”
When I first read the story of Grace Cossington Smith that makes up the second half of Stravinsky’s Lunch, I was quite disappointed. There was none of the drama of Stella Bowen’s life. “No husbands. No babies. No affairs. No scandals. No cafes in Paris…. In the prejudices of her time, she was, simply, a spinster.” Smith spent most of her life in the same house with her parents and two of her three sisters. Most days, she painted scenes and people she saw around her in Sydney and the nearby country and seaside, working in a small studio her father had built at the back of their yard. She was over sixty before she was accepted as a serious artist of her own generation, over seventy when she was finally recognized as one of the greatest Australian painters of her century.
Much of Smith’s story is a matter of producing painting after painting, moving first towards a striking mix of realism and abstraction, as illustrated by her 1926 painting, Trees. Smith said she was trying to paint all sides of a tree at once. When it appeared in her first solo show, one newspaper critic condemned it as a “freak.” Modjeska sees the work as revealing Smith’s keen eye for the dual nature of her Australian world: “For this was a young woman who understood both the settled pleasures of a garden with its bloom of peach, and the hectic tangle of branch and leaf, the mysterious possibilities that lay beyond, in bush and gully.”
As she grew older, Smith turned from subjects such as the Sydney Harbour Bridge to her immediate surroundings, painting the rooms in her family home — always with at least one window or door opening out into the world, but always from the perspective of someone on the inside. She experimented with color, settling on yellow as her primary tone, offset with blue (which is why it’s surprising that Modjeska doesn’t quote the opening phrase from Drawn from Life: “The land where I was born is a blue and yellow country”).
Grace Cossington Smith with her father and sister Madge (1919)
But there is another story that Modjeska reveals. Of Smith’s three sisters, one married early and another took on a lifetime profession as a nurse. But her sister Madge stayed at home and cared for their parents and Grace, and after their parents died, for Grace alone. It was Madge who cooked the meals and saw that the rooms were cleaned and laundry washed and ironed. Modjeska reprints a photo of Grace, Madge, and their father from 1919. It’s one of those family photos that, though accidentally and perhaps misleadingly, seems to betray a secret. “There is Grace with her strong, intelligent face lifted to the sun. Madge’s lowered head is shrouded in misery so intense it seems to burn the paper their images are printed on…. You can tell at a glance that there’d be no question of Grace taking over the kitchen.”
So, despite forging a career in art that was very much of her own shaping, deliberately enforcing her isolation so that she could focus on her work — focus to the point that her paintings from her last decades all depict scenes less than a few yards from her own home — Smith did, in her own way, insist on a form of Stravinsky’s lunch. No wonder that when Madge accompanied Grace on a trip to England in 1949, she found a widower in need of a wife and married him, leaving Grace to return to Australia alone.
Yet Modjeska admits that her attitude toward the story of Stravinsky’s lunch changed in the course of writing the book, and, in particular because of Smith’s example. The nature of the book as a koan is revealed in her realization that the story “not only buys into a way of thinking that would separate art from life, with art striding above and beyond, transcending the ordinary and humble, but it sets life against art, or art against life.” Smith never involved herself in artistic movements and stayed rooted to the home and family she knew. And as her energies diminished with age, she focused on the things she saw immediately around her: her bed, her table, her windows, her mirror.
Some reviewers objected to Modjeska’s interjection of herself, of her own reflections, into her accounts of the lives and careers of Bowen and Smith. But Stravinsky’s Lunch is not really a work of biography as much as an exercise in understanding — and as much Modjeska’s self-understanding as her understanding of the two women she portrays. In 1999, perhaps it was just slightly too early for critics to be comfortable with a work that did not fit neatly into the boundaries of one particular genre, but I think we are seeing now a proliferation of books that sweep across genre boundaries with never a second thought. I hope today’s readers will be ready to seek out a copy of Stravinsky’s Lunch and enjoy it as thoroughly as I did.
Stravinsky’s Lunch, by Drusilla Modjeska New York: Farrar Straus and Giroux, 1999
I came to Stella Bowen’s memoir, Drawn from Life (1941), through Drusilla Modjeska’s wonderful book, Stravinsky’s Lunch (which I’ll discuss in a separate post). Born in Adelaide, Australia, Bowen met the writer Ford Madox Ford while studying art in London and they lived together from 1919 to 1927. Modjeska devotes the first half of her book to an account of how Bowen struggled to establish herself as an artist while simultaneously dealing with domestic demands — first of Ford and later as a single mother raising their daughter, Julie — and quotes liberally from Drawn from Life. It only took a few excerpts to convince me that I had to read more.
“The land where I was born is a blue and yellow country,” opens Drawn from Life, with a rhapsody about the landscape of Australia — which, ironically, she left at the age of 18 and never returned to. Though her father died when she was just three, her childhood, as she recounts it, was entirely conventional: “We were, in fact, a suburb of England.” Her mother was a staunch Victorian, pure and true in her principles, and Bowen acknowledges it “a privilege to be associated with anyone whose life is a simple and perfect demonstration of all that they believe.” Her mother did, however, bend a little, allowing Stella to take classes at an art school run by a pioneering woman painter, Rose McPherson.
When her mother died in early 1914 and Stella and her brother were left with an annuity of two hundred pounds a year, Stella seized an opportunity to accompany a friend’s family on a journey to England. In London, she studied painting under Walter Sickert, who drove the importance of seeing the unique visual features of any subject. “He taught one to trust one’s faithful eyes, and to open them wide. I had never before been required to look at things so minutely, and having looked, to record them with so little fuss.”
She also met a number of influential figures, starting with the poet Ezra Pound, and in early 1918, at one of Pound’s parties, she was introduced to Ford Madox Ford. They experienced an instant rapport. Bowen found him “quite simply the most enthralling person I had ever met.” He quickly began confiding in her about all his troubles, including his inability to divorce his wife and to disentangle himself from his lover, the writer Violet Hunt. Soon he was telling her that “he wished to place his person, his fortune, his future in my hands.” He was tired of the world and just wanted “to dig potatoes and raise pigs and never write another book.”
Within a year, after Ford’s discharge from the Army, they were moving into a tumble-down cottage in Sussex. It had a hole in the roof, continuously damp, and surrounded by mud whenever it rained, but they loved their hideaway. They bought some chickens and pigs and planted a garden. Not long after, Bowen became pregnant.
Although Ford had vowed to give up writing, it didn’t take long for them to realize they couldn’t survive without the income. He set to work on articles and a novel, eventually published in 1923 as The Marsden Case. Soon the rhythm of the house became set by Ford’s work:
He would retire upstairs to write, and leave me to wrestle with the dinner. At eight I would say, “are you ready to eat?” and he would reply, “in a minute.” At eight-thirty I would say, “It is eight-thirty, darling,” and he would reply, “Oh, give me another twenty minutes,” and I would return to the kitchen and concoct something extra — another vegetable, or a savoury. At nine I’d say, “what about it?” and he’d tell me to put the meal on the table. At nine-thirty I would suggest putting it back on the fire, to re-heat. “What!” he’d cry, “dinner on the table all this time? Why ever didn’t you tell me?” Well, we’d eat perhaps at ten, with enormous appetite, and discuss the progress of his book and of my cooking.
“We enjoyed ourselves,” Bowen writes, but the preservation of Ford’s “working conditions” meant that she had to take over most of the domestic chores and all of the responsibility for managing their affairs. “I must manage to keep all worries from him, which was difficult. It meant that I must not let him know how overdrawn we were at the bank, nor how big the bill from the corn mills had become, nor how badly we needed a paraffin tank.” It was not enough for Bowen to keep the pig from wandering off to the next farm or take care of all the cooking and cleaning and feeding while in the last months of her pregnancy. “If ever a man needed a fairy godmother, he did,” she eventually concluded. And meanwhile, her painting “had, of course, been hopelessly interfered with by the whole shape of my life….”
Stella Bowen: Self Portrait, 1928A major theme in Drawn from Life is the near-impossibility of a woman working as an artist when all her time, attention, and energy is devoted to caring for a man pursuing his own career. “I was learning the technique of a quite different role: that of consort to another and more important artist.” Bowen’s blunt eloquence makes this a pioneering work of feminism, on the order of Virginia Woolf’s “A Room of One’s Own.” And still quite relevant, as the following quote from Jenny Offill’s recent novel, Dept. of Speculation: “I was going to be an art monster instead. Women almost never become art monsters because art monsters only concern themselves with art, never mundane things. Nabokov didn’t even fold his own umbrella. Vera licked his stamps for him.”
Eventually, both Ford and Bowen came to resent the drudgery of rural life, and in 1922, they sold the cottage and, with daughter Julie in hand, headed for France. Their friend, the poet Harold Monro, had offered them the use of his tiny villa perched on a hilltop outside the town of Villefranche. Although the house was barely better furnished than their cottage, they relished the warmth of the Mediterranean weather, and Ford began working on Some Do Not …, the first volume of Parade’s End. The next spring, Ezra Pound’s wife Dorothy invited Bowen to join her on a tour of Tuscany, and the precise and flattened perspectives of Giotto’s murals strongly influenced her subsequent work.
They moved to Paris in September 1924, and were soon at the heart of the thriving expatriate scene. Ford’s brother, Oliver Hueffer, convinced him to take on the job of editing a new magazine he was establishing called the transatlantic review. Although the review failed after just one year, what a year that was. Ford has a marvelous gift for spotting good writing and collected pieces from Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, Djuna Barnes, and H. D., although with the first excerpts from James Joyce’s “Work in Progress” (Finnegans Wake). He also published the work of a fragile and destitute writer from the West Indies named Jean Rhys — and began an affair with her.
Though circumspect about the affair, the memory of it drives her to her most strident tones. She lumps Rhys in with a larger group of bohemians she refers to as “Wild Ones”: “It was quite all right to be dirty, drunk, a pervert or a thief or a whore, provided that you had a lively and an honest mind, and the courage of your instincts.” The affair was brief, however, and Ford and Bowen agreed to stay together in another rough villa outside Toulon for the winter of 1925-6.
Here, the Spanish painter Juan Gris encouraged Bowen to put her painting ahead of the matters of tending after Ford, and she managed to produce a number of vibrant landscapes. It was becoming clearer, however, that she could not continue to struggle with two competing demands, particularly not after being betrayed. When a French painter remarked that her work still seemed very immature, she thought in exasperation, “It is platitudinous to say so, but being a woman does set you back at great deal.” She refers to homemaking as a “specialization”: “Perhaps you never intended to devote your life to his kind of specialization, but society, and your own affections, and the fear of loneliness that besets us all, may keep you at it…. But beware: unlike other specialists, you will receive no promotion after years of faithful service. Your value in this profession will decline, and no record of long experience, or satisfaction given, will help you if you want to change your job.”
They made one last move back to Paris, and enjoyed something of a productive truce period. They placed their daughter in the care of a French woman outside the city and rented a space in Montparnasse where Bowen was able to set up a studio and the two worked during the week, visiting Julie on the weekends. But even with her own work space, Bowen found Ford constantly sending her out on errands: “I wish you’d go and sound so-and-so about such-and-such. I don’t want to do it myself, but it should be quite easy for you.”
Ford spent much of the next two winters in the United States, and Bowen was able to focus on her own work without distraction for the first time. Upon his return from his second trip to the U.S., however, Ford informed her that he had taken up with another woman painter, Janice Biala. That was enough for Bowen. She began action to take full custody of Julie and told the girl that Ford would no longer live with them. “I imagined that facing Paris without Ford was going to be full of difficulties,” she writes. Instead, “There were none. I felt chilly and forlorn at one moment and like a million dollars the next.”
Unfortunately, that feeling soon faded as Bowen confronted the practical obstacles of an increasingly unfavorable exchange rate and a crashing real estate market. Desperate for ways to bring in some much-needed cash, she took an opportunity raised by her American friend, Ramon Guthrie, and sailed for the U.S. where she could get portrait commissions and make several thousand dollars in the course of a few months. Though it helped her out of her financial straits, the visit to America makes for easily the weakest chapter in the book, one filled mostly with unremarkable observations about American life and culture.
By the time Bowen returned to Paris, it was clear that she could not afford to keep living in France, and she and Julie moved back to England, settling in London. With the onset of the Depression, work was almost impossible to get and the two struggled through some lean years. And Bowen found herself temperamentally out of place: “I dare say I have never known how to communicate with people in the English idiom.” In Paris or New York, she could manage to carry on conversations, tossing the ball back and forth with others. In London, however, the conversational ball “crashes to the ground where it lies looking like a suet pudding under the cold and silent eyes of the company. Agony!”
After a few years, she managed to make some headway. “I developed a technique for doing portrait sketches in two or three days and got a good many orders.” Julie studied set design at the London Theatre School and Bowen found a quiet cottage to her tastes in Green End, a hamlet in the Norfolk countryside east of London. Janice Biala contacted them saying that Ford was dying and Julie traveled to Honfleur, France to see her father one last time. It was June 1939.
Drawn from Life closes as summer 1940 nears. Though military encampments are being set up around Green End and the possibility of evacuation is being whispered about, for Bown, “Mostly I feel this is my last ditch.” Earlier, she wrote, “Four times in my life I have gone away with two suitcases, leaving all behind me, never to return,” but she was ready to “stay put and take what comes.”
Three group portraits painted for the Australian War Memorial by Stella Bowen
Though written on the promise of popular interest in her relationship with Ford, Drawn from Life earned Bowen little more than her advance, and she struggled to keep things going until late 1943, when she was commissioned to paint for the Australian War Memorial in Canberra. She produced several dozen canvas over the next two years, including several group portraits of Australian bomber crews that evoke the murals of Giotto that she’d seen in Italy with Dorothy Pound. Before the war ended, however, she had been diagnosed with colon cancer, and, after a short remission, she died in October 1947 at her home in Green End.
Drawn from Life deserves to be recognized as a minor classic. It’s a fiercely feminist text, one that echoes the messages of Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s speech, “The Solitude of Self,” and anticipates The Feminine Mystique and other works of decades later:
If you are a woman, and you want to have a life of your own, it would probably be better for you to fall in love at seventeen, be seduced, and abandoned, and your baby die. If you survived this, you might go far! Otherwise, emerging from a love-affair into the position of a middle-aged housekeeper, you may suffer the most desperate sensations of constriction and futility which your situation will give you little chance to survive.
At present, there appear to be around thirty copies available for sale, with prices starting at over $20 and ending at over $2,000, according to a search on AddAll.com. First published in the UK in 1941, when a paper shortage ruled out the possibility of any immediate reissue, it’s been republished several times (in 1976 by George Mann, a small regional UK press, in 1984 by Virago, and in 1999 by Picador in Australia), but none of these were large quantity runs and (I’d like to think), it’s a book that, once bought, people tend to hang onto.
Drawn from Life: Reminiscences, by Stella Bowen London: Collins Publishers, 1941
I’ve had Catherine Gore on my list long before I started focusing on the works of women writers in the last two years. Gore was perhaps the most prolific authors of Regency and early Victorian era genre known as the silver fork or “fashionable” novel. As Tamara Wagner describes the silver fork novel on Victorianweb.org, “it was at once escapist in describing former elegance and glitter, anticipating the genre of the Regency Romance, and censorious in judging the frivolities and often supercilious emphasis on the aesthetic rather than the moral that characterised aristocratic high society.” At the time, these books sold like hot-cakes. By many estimates, one of the most representative silver fork novels, Bulwer-Lytton’sPelham , was the single biggest bestseller of 19th century England. They indulged the fascination of a large share of the British reading public with the details of what the rich wore and ate, of the interiors and exteriors of their city houses and country estates, and of their manners and affairs.
Although the “silver fork” label is usually applied to works from this period, some consider it a genre that’s never gone out of style. As recently as 2008, Diane Johnson opened a New York Times review of Alex Witchel’s novel, The Spare Wife by asking the question, “Is it a ‘silver fork’ novel?” Silver fork novels, she argued, were “a subgenre that has been around almost as long as novels themselves, affording the reader the double pleasures of following the lives of the aristocracy and scorning its mindless snobbery, triviality and malice.” They allow us to peek in on “a world most of us can only participate in vicariously.” In other words, the literary equivalent of The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills or Keeping Up with the Kardashians–or, what comedian Jim Gaffigan calls “McDonald’s of the soul”: “Momentary pleasure followed by incredible guilt eventually leading to cancer.”
But my theory was that somewhere in Catherine Gore’s 60-plus pile of silver fork trash there must be a pony. And so I’ve carried a half-dozen of her books, none of which are now in print (I refuse to include the crap that comes from Kessingers and other print on demand recyclers of public domain material), on my Kindle for a couple of years, waiting for an opportune time to dive in. That time came recently, on a long flight from Frankfurt to Seattle, and so I launched into Men of Capital (1846) with an open mind, leaving it up to Gore to win me over.
“Few will deny that the age we live in is the age of Money-worship,” she writes in her preface, clearly declaring the moral tone she would be taking. While she credits the spirit of capitalism “constitutes a fertile source of national greatness,” she also identifies as one of its most corrupting elements a practice dating back to the Middle Ages: “One of the chief causes which render this pursuit a bitterer as well as more pardonable struggle in England than on the Continent, is the unequal and capricious distribution of family property.” She’s referring to primogeniture, the automatic inheritance by the first son of the entire estate — leaving any succeeding children to fend for themselves on a small annual income or the charity of their elder brother.
In “Man of Capital,” the first of the two novels that comprise Men of Capital, Gore illustrates the effects — good and bad — of primogeniture on the younger sons. It opens by introducing us to Bartholomew (Barty) Brookes, a daredevil younger son. Though he follows his older brother to Eton, their paths diverge from that point on. Sir Robert Brookes goes on to Oxford and becomes master of Wrenhurst Park, their father having died when they were still boys. Barty learns early on “that a man must square his elbows who has to push his way through the crowd; while his elder understood the wisdom of standing still, that his way might be pushed for him.”
An officer in the Life Guards regiment, 1837
Barty secures a commission in a Guards regiment through a family connection but quickly discovers that in the high-spending world of hunts, balls, and card-games in London clubs, five hundred pounds a year doesn’t go very far. At this point, he meets Percy, a fellow younger son in his regiment. It is Percy who narrates the story, which soon becomes as much about him as about Barty. Barty is easily the most popular lieutenant around, charming his way into invitations to country house weekends while Percy remains in barracks, reading about nature and taking long walks in the countryside. Percy confesses — in a passage that only a woman could have written — that,
Men by themselves, and in numbers, are the greatest beasts on earth. Like trees, they require thinning out from the plantation, to acquire anything like dignity of proportion ; and it is only by associating with women that the higher qualities of their nature are developed. The earthly particles require too much preponderance when fed with nothing but cigars, brandy-and-water, and the unlicensed gossip of bachelorhood.
But the two share their misery as paupers in a unit full of lords and baronets. They also share secret passions for beautiful but poor young women: Barty for Emma, orphan ward of his guardian, Justinian Broadham, M. P., and Percy for Barty’s own sister, Harriet. The two sets of lovers pledge their respective troths to wait for a day when they can wed and live on in humble happiness. But when Barty learns that his brother has up and married Emma, something cracks within him, and he sets his aim on finding the quickest route to a fortune he can. When Juckeson, a millionaire from the spice trade, acquires a grand estate near the regiment’s garrison outside Windsor, Barty begins stalking Juckeson’s daughter, Sabina.
The true heart of the story, though, is less about Barty than about the narrator himself. Walking in the Windsor Forest one day, he meets Mr. Stanley, an elderly gentleman, as they shelter together from a sudden rainstorm. Stanley invites him home for dinner, where Percy meets the very beautiful (and much younger) Mrs. Stanley. He hears that his friend Barty has been a regular visitor, and eventually realizes that Stanley had been wandering about the forest in hopes of catching Barty en route to a rendezvous with Mrs. Stanley.
Mr. Stanley and Percy soon become close friends, but a few months later, while on leave, Percy reads a death notice for Mr. Stanley. When he returns to Windsor, he learns that Stanley died from despair. And when he sees Mrs. Stanley again, he realizes why. Mrs. Stanley is … well … with child.
Percy proves himself a good Christian and sticks with Mrs. Stanley through her difficulties, shielding from her the fact that her husband took his revenge upon her infidelity in his will, leaving her to become destitute upon the birth of the child. And twisted the knife by dictating that the child be taken from her and sent to a guardian in London. The bad things continue to snowball until both child and mother are dead and Percy is left to pick up the pieces.
The dramatic twists don’t end there, though. The last thirty pages of “The Man of Capital” is chock full of plot turns, and the story ends in a lovely but tragic scene as the wheels of Percy’s coach roll through his beloved Harriet’s village, crushing the flowers from her wedding into the dirt, as he moves on to a new life as a “Man of Capital” like his former friend, Barty.
The second novel, “Old Families and New,” is longer and less effective than its predecessor. Gore contrasts the haughty Squire Cromer, a man of old blood, with Mordaunt, a man of new wealth from his Manchester cotton mills and his shares in the regional railroad. Gore writes cynically of Cromer that,
Of modern improvements in rural economy he knew nothing, and took care not to improve his knowledge either by reading or observation; while, as to refurnishing or remodelling his house, nothing short of a fire would have driven him to so dire an extremity. It was an article of religion with him that every thing should remain in the state in which, at the marriage of his father, sixty years before, Cromer Hall had been fitted up in honour of the bride.
She also reaches back to an old plot warhorse, the romance between the children of two feuding families. Squire Cromer vehemently opposes his daughter’s marriage to Mordaunt’s son, declaring, “I would as soon have my blood mix with that of the hangman, as with that of a Manchester cotton-spinner.” Like “A Man of Capital,” the story ends with a wedding — but a happy one this time around. Which, of course, is why you know it’s a bit of a let-down after the juicy drama and hanky-wringing tragedy of “A Man of Capital.”
An anonymous reviewer, assessing one of Catherine Gore’s novels for the Westminster Review, once wrote, “We do not deny the smartness, and occasionally, the shrewdness, of Mrs. Gore’s views of manners and life, but still we are far from tracing even a remote resemblance between the labours of the two ladies. Miss Austin’s [sic] novels are histories of the human heart, and in the more occasional parts, wonderfully exact analyses of character and disposition: whereas, in Mrs. Gore’s books, we can see little more than a series of brilliant sketches, bordering occasionally on the caricature.” Which, as April Kendra put it, is a little like Lloyd Bentsen’s retort to Dan Quayle, “Jack Kennedy was a friend of mine. Senator, you’re no Jack Kennedy.”
But honestly, isn’t any attempt to equate the work of two writers a bit of a slap in the face to one or both of them? Catherine Gore spent most of her life writing at a frantic pace to bring in enough cash to keep an unemployed husband and a house full of children (she bore ten, only two of whom survived to adulthood), so it’s not surprising that the average artistic quality level of her output might come in a few notches below Jane Austen’s. What should matter for a reader is whether the reading experience of a book proves worth the time invested. For me, “A Man of Capital” was more entertaining and more interesting than any movie Lufthansa had to offer, while “Old Families and New” tested my commitment to get through at least one of Catherine Gore’s books. “A Man of Capital” would make a terrific little show on BBC or Masterpiece Theatre: it moves, has a core cast of well-rounded characters, and plenty of plot twists to keep the momentum rolling. Its companion piece, “Old Families and New,” on the other hand, does come off a bit too stale and predictable to recommend to any but a Gore absolutist — and I suspect there aren’t any of them still walking the planet.
Men of Capital is available on the Internet Archive in the original 1846 three-volume edition (Vol. 1, Vol. 2, and Vol. 3) and in a one-volume edition from 1857 (link).
Men of Capital, by Catherine Gore London: Henry Colburn, 1846
Neglect is a relative term, particularly when you look at writers from a global perspective. Charmian Clift is a good example. In the U.S., she gained slight notice for her two books about life on a Greek island back in the 1950s, disappeared after that, and is utterly unknown today. In Australia, she and her husband, the novelist George Johnston are major figures in the country’s cultural history, and adjectives such as myth, legend and phenomenon are attached to her story, and this collection of her essays can be found on the Australian Society of Authors’ list of the 200 Greatest Works of Australian Literature.
George Johnston and Charmian Clift, from the cover of The High Valley.
Had Clift been American and People magazine been in business during her life, she would have been a staple of the supermarket check-out aisles. Beautiful, smart, and talented, she was already gaining considerable publicity and attention before she met and married Johnston, who was one of the most dashing of Australia’s war correspondents and a rising figure in the country’s postwar literary scene. Their romance scandalized some, as Johnston was married and eleven years older. They collaborated on a novel set in Tibet, The High Valley (1947), that won the Sydney Morning Herald award as the best Australia novel–the first of three they would write together. “I was the journalist who supplied the substance,” Johnston later said, “She was the artist who supplied the burnish.” A vocal opponent of the government of Prime Minister Robert Menzies, Johnston left Australia in 1950 to take a job as a correspondent in London, bringing along Clift and their two young children.
After a few years in chilly England, chafing against the constraints of journalism, Johnston quit his job as correspondent and the family moved to Greece in 1954, where they soon set up house on the small island of Hydra. Their dream was to enjoy the warm weather, cheap living, and freedom from distractions and concentrate on writing. And at first it worked. George wrote several novels, as well as a number of thrillers under the name of “Shane Martin” (the names of their first two children), and Charmian wrote two books about life on the island: Mermaid Singing (1956) and Peel Me a Lotus (1959).
But although Hydra was a small and largely forgotten island, it had attracted a fair number of expatriates, and some of them, like Johnston and Clift, were hard drinkers and partiers. They collected in the back room of a small grocery store run by the Katsikas brothers, and soon the parties were starting right around noon and running all night. Hydra’s reputation as a haven for bohemians spread, attracting, among others, the young Canadian poet, Leonard Cohen, who bought a house there in 1960. Photographer James Burke visited the island and made the expat scene the subject of a photo essay, with Clift and Johnston prominently featured. Both passionate people, Johnston and Clift gave vent to their feelings when drinking, and became known for their bitter fights. Cohen would later write of the couple that they “drank more than other people, they wrote more, they got sick more, they got well more, they cursed more, they blessed more, and they helped a great deal more. They were an inspiration.”
George Johnston and Charmian Clift and their children, shortly before leaving Hydra
And, despite the warmth of the Greek summers, life in an unheated house took its toll on Johnston, who never enjoyed the most robust constitution. He contracted tuberculosis, and spent long months incapacitated, which cut into his time for writing and hence the family’s income. Finally, he borrowed some money and flew back to Australia in 1964, and Clift followed him soon after with their children (now three with the addition of Jason, born on Hydra).
Johnston’s health continued to decline, although he was able to complete his autobiographical novel, My Brother Jack (1965), now considered an Australian classic. But Clift had to take over as the main breadwinner, and, by happy coincidence, was offered the job of writing a weekly column in the women’s section of the Melbourne Herald and Sydney Morning Herald. The papers published a large ad announcing Clift’s engagement alongside her first column featuring her photo and mentioning the couple’s recent return from Greece.
Clift’s first piece (titled “Coming Home” but changed by the editors to “Has the Old Place Really Changed?”) reflected on the contrasts between the landscapes, urban environments, and people of Greece and Australia. She remarked how often her old acquaintances would tell her, “The old place has changed quite a bit since you saw it last.” But, in fact, she noted, many of the characteristics of Australian life — characteristics that had led her and Johnston to leave ten years earlier — hadn’t changed. It was, she found, still a country wrapped up in its concerns for conformity.
Though the column came to her largely as an accident, the timing was perfect. Australian society was beginning to open up, influenced by the racial, sexual, and cultural changes it saw happening in England and America. Before Clift began writing, the women’s page of the Herald confined itself to lightweight pieces on beauty, fashion, food, and child-rearing. Clift’s style and outlook was anything but conventional. Though her debut column noted that Australia’s symbolism was growing old, she saw on the horizon “a real cultural and social flowering, spiky and wild and refreshing and strange and unquestionably rooted in native soil.”
And she was aware of significant geopolitical changes on the horizon as well. The Menzies government introduced military conscription for young men the same month that Clift began writing her column, and soon after began increasing its commitment of troops to support the Americans and South Vietnamese in Vietnam. At the same time, Asian immigration was being seen as a threat to the Australian economy and identity. Clift argued that the shift was inevitable:
Indeed, our national policy might be dedicated to the proposition that we stay, racially, as we are — 98..7 per cent European excluding the Aborigines (although it seems doubtful whether the Aborigines are going to go on meekly submitting to exclusion) — but since the end of the war it has been impossible for any one of us, as Europeans, to ignore the fact that two great continents, teeming with the differently coloured skins that comprise half the world’s population, lie between us and home base….
Coming back to Australia one is even more conscious of Asia. Not as the Far East. Not as the Near North. Not even as Our Neighbours. One is conscious of Asia as the place where one lives.
But what set out Clift’s columns from anything that had preceded them was how personal and intimate her voice was. There was really no concession to objectivity or fitting into a pattern. She wrote about the passing of the kitchen as the focus of family life, or the act of transcribing the addresses of friends and family members from an old address book to a new one, or of the wonder of discovering a jungle filled with “billions of nasturtiums” at the bottom of a ravine near her house. “I am becoming addicted to sunrises,” she wrote in one piece:
I suspect I always was, only these days I get up for them instead of staying up for them. Staying up needs stamina I don’t have any more, although I remember with pleasure those more romantic and reckless days when it was usual for revelries to end at dawn in early morning markets, all-night cafes or railway refreshment rooms, with breakfasts of meat pies and hot dogs and big thick mugs of tea, or — in other countries — croissants and cafes au lait, bowls of tripe-and-onion soup, skewered bits of lamb wrapped in a pancake with herbs and yoghourt, in the company of truckers and gipsies and sailors and street-sweepers and wharf-labourers and crumpled ladies with smeary mascara: it is amazing how many people and of what a rich variety belong to that indeterminate dawn time. Real enjoyment of this sort of thing depends, probably, on a sense of drama, the resilience of youth, and whether you can get in a decent kip after.
Clift quickly gained a large and loyal following of readers, both women and men, who had been hungering for something original and alive in their routine newpaper fare. She was able consistently to convey, as Nadia Wheatley put it, “the sense that the writer is conducting a two-way conversation — a dialogue — with the reader.” Less than a year after she had begun the column, her first collection, Images in Aspic, was published with an introduction by Johnston. “Charmian Clift writes thoughtfully and carefully,” he wrote.
She is concerned with style, elegance, choice of the exact word. She often writes very long, unjournalistic sentences. She takes time to muse, to reflect, to drive through experience. If this is daily journalism it is very different from anything in my experience.
Johnston’s health continued to deteriorate during this time, however, and he had to be hospitalized for the better part of a year. Clift took over the job of writing the script for the television series based on My Brother Jack, and her hopes of finding the time and energy to write another novel faded. Despite the success of her essays with newspaper readers, she was sensitive to the fact that she was working in a generally disrespected form. As Wheatley writes, “Through the beauty of her prose style and her mastery of the essay form, Charmian Clift was putting literature onto the breakfast tables of these thousands of very different Australians. Yet there has always been a kind of critical question mark over her place as a writer. She herself got to the heart of the matter when she told David Higham that she was ‘writing essays for the weekly presses to be read by people who wouldn’t know an essay from a form-guide, but absolutely love it.’ The problem, as far as her reputation is concerned, is that she was writing essays at the wrong time and in the wrong place.”
Though she prided herself on her commitment to the regular schedule of writing the column, as she entered her forties, she appears to have begun to feel trapped.
Clift and Johnston with their children in 1969, shortly before Clift’s suicide
It didn’t help that she and Johnston had continued to be heavy drinkers. Some of the inevitable physical damage of prolonged alcohol abuse can be seen in photographs from this period. She began to suffer from depression, perhaps connected with the onset of menopause. Finally, one night in July 1969, after an evening of drinking and fighting with Johnston, she swallowed a bottle’s worth of his sleeping pills, laid down on their couch, and never woke up.
The news of Clift’s suicide came as a huge blow to her readers. According to one observer, “Thousands couldn’t believe it, bombarded the Herald with inquiries and sent the switchboard berserk.” The paper published a special Letters to the Editor section a few days later to accommodate just some of the thousands of letters sent in. The critic Allan Ashbolt wrote in a lengthy obituary piece published in the Herald, “As a columnist she found, I think, a role eminently suited to her witty and humane outlook…. She went straight to the human essence of any problem, straight to what a situation would mean in human happiness or suffering.”
Johnston assembled a second collection of her Herald essays, The World of Charmian Clift in 1970, and it was reissued again in 1983. In the second edition, her son Martin, who had by then become recognized as one of Australia’s leading poets, wrote,
For most writers with only a couple of novels — by no means bestsellers — a couple of travel books, and miscellaneous essays to their credit, that would have been that. And yet it hasn’t been. I couldn’t begin to count the number of people who’ve asked me, ever since my mother’s death, when they could expect a re-issue of one or all of the books, so I can hardly be alone in welcoming this one.
For the Johnston family, however, the tragedy continued to play out after Charmian’s suicide. George died just after The World of Charmian Clift was published. Their daughter Shane committed suicide three years later, and Martin died of the effects of alcoholism in 1990 at the age of 42.
In 2002, Suzanne Chick published Searching for Charmian: The Daughter Charmian Clift Gave Away Discovers the Mother She Never Knew. Working with newly opened adoption files, Chick discovered that her birth mother was none other than Clift, who apparently became pregnant at 19 and gave up the baby for adoption. Chick’s book is written in the form of parallel biographies, and though she harbored an unavoidable resentment toward Clift, her writing is fluid and remarkably empathetic. This was followed by several other books about Clift and Johnston, including Susan Johnson’s fictionalization, The Broken Book (2006) and Nadia Wheatley’s superb biography, The Life and Myth of Charmian Clift (2014).
Several of Clift’s books, including a collection of her essays, are available in Kindle format from Amazon Australia. Aside from these, however, her other works are all out of print.
The World of Charmian Clift Sydney, Australia: Ure Smith, 1970
About the time I was well into reading through Dorothy Richardson’s Pilgrimage a couple of months ago, I discovered that Kate Macdonald, Visiting Fellow at the Department of English Literature at the University of Reading and fellow Brussels expat, was also working through the series and posting about it on her blog. So I asked if she would be willing to undertake a dialogue about the experience and our respective thoughts on the work as seen from a distance of nearly a hundred years and in the context of the literature of its time and since, and she agreed most generously. The following is being posted simultaneously to our blogs, in hopes that one of us might inspire other intrepid readers to discover the fascinations (and frustrations) of Pilgrimage.
Brad: Congratulations on finishing Pilgrimage! It’s a happy coincidence that we both chose to tackle Dorothy Richardson’s magnum opus at the same time, since Pilgrimage is certainly a work that, once read in its entirety, one feels compelled to talk about with others. And given its relative neglect, there aren’t a lot of other readers who’ve made it through all thirteen novels.
With a work of this magnitude, there is an enormous number of possible topics to discuss–starting with the question of how to refer to it: Is it one novel in thirteen “chapters,” as Richardson sometimes referred to it? Is it thirteen novels linked through a common narrative? Is it in fact a novel or fictionalized autobiography? But lest we get bogged down counting angels on a pin, let’s start with a basic question: what was your experience of reading Pilgrimage?
For me, it was an endeavor that consumed a large share of my time and attention over the course of a month or so. I chose to read the 2,000-plus pages straight through and set myself a quota of pages to complete each day. As Richardson writes in a highly impressionistic style that often takes liberties with time and narrative continuity, I found it challenging as I sat at the dining room table, pencil in hand, and with George Thomson’s Reader’s Guide nearby to help explain the many glancing and cryptic references in the text.
On the other hand, I found it profoundly illuminating to spend so much time looking at the world through the eyes of a woman who dedicated herself so utterly to understanding her own thoughts, experiences, and emotions. I’ve been exclusively reading the works of women writers for the last year or so, but nothing else I’ve read in that time was so immersive and so forcefully different from a male perspective. And yet, though Richardson is at times almost strident in her feminism, in the end, I think what distinguishes Pilgrimage is its dedication to the importance of individual identity. I found its emphasis on making–and accepting the consequences of–one’s own choices very contemporary.
How did it seem from your side of the gender divide?
Kate: That’s a very disciplined approach! I let the structure of the novels, and the edition I was using (the 1938 4-volume Cresset press) dictiate how I read the sequence. When I finished a novel (and sometimes when I’d stopped for the night, still with chapters to get through), I wrote it up in my reading diary. This was essential: I could not have recalled much of the plot, the events, my responses and my unfolding thoughts about her writing, without recording as much as I could along the way. Once I’d fnished reading a novel, I sometimes went straight onto the next one, but I also often took a break and read some science fiction, or a novel I needed to review.
I found Miriam a demanding narrative voice, and don’t like her very much, but her London life resonated very strongly with me. I agree with you about the immersive power of the reading experience in that respect. I too (I think I’ve already said this in my earlier blog about Backwater and Honeycomb) was a young woman earning my own living in my twenties, alone in London, with not many friends, but revelling passionately in the freedom and opportunities for finding out what I liked to do and who I wanted to be. I spent a lot of time in and around Bloomsbury, as I was reading for my PhD at University College London, so I know the ‘Tansley Street’ and Euston areas well. All her midnight wanderings and long walks, and her dingy rooms and uncongenial neighbours: been there, done that too.
I found Richardson’s feminism less strident than you. I was very aware (because I’m a book historian) that DR was writing these novels as historical accounts, and so although Miriam was discovering feminism, and suffragism, for DR these issues were old hat when the novels they appeared in were published. (Some) women received the vote in 1919, when only the second or third novel was published, so when Amabel was in prison for militant suffragism, her first readers were in the 1930s, and about to receive full suffrage for all women. But at the same time, these novels were probaby among the first historical accounts of the very recent advances in feminist history (as opposed to the suffrage fiction published at the time of the Suffrage campaigns), so they were powerful even for their first readers.
I didn’t have the Readers’ Guide (until you lent it to me much later), so I wasn’t able to check things as i read. Though I did some research online to sort out Richardson’s connection to H G Wells. It was obvious when Hypo Wilson appeared that he was Wells: such an opinionated, obnoxious little man. (Though I enjoy his fiction greatly, had I ever met him I would have slapped him for his condescending philandering and preying on young women.) I was content to absorb the novels’ characters and settings as probably based on Richardson’s own life, but it wasn’t important for me to find out the ‘real’ source, because these are novels, not autobiography. I was determined to read them as fiction.
Which produces my question: did you read these novels as conventional, linear realist fiction, in which a plot and characters are constructed and arranged to produce what we in the trade call ‘rising and falling action’, ie a simulation of tragedy, or any other kind of story, that is tidily contained within the novel’s beginning and end? Or were you able to read the texts more impressionistically, to follow her ‘stream of consciousness’ experiment? (Thank you, May Sinclair, for that genius descriptive term.) I ask because I don’t think many of the Pilgrimage novels are a success as a pure stream of consciousness, as with (the inevitable) Mrs Dalloway, or as a slice of unplotted, no beginning-and-end life, as in Sylvia Townsend Warner’s The Corner That Held Them.
First UK edition of The TunnelBrad: I didn’t read Pilgrimage as conventional linear fiction, or at least that wasn’t the way I perceived the novels. To me, the story is far less about what happens to Miriam than about how her understanding of herself develops. Richardson clearly found herself by far the most fascinating character in her own story, which is probably one reason why Miriam isn’t fiction’s most likeable character.
I’d have to agree with you that Pilgrimage isn’t purely a stream of consciousness narrative. It’s really more of a hybrid, a mix of two different generations of fiction, if you will. Don’t forget that the writer who most influenced Richardson was Henry James (remember Miriam’s revery over The Ambassadors in the early part of The Trap?). So throughout the books, the style shifts back and forth from interior monologue to closely (at times microscopically) observed social intercourse: Richardson puts us inside Miriam’s head, then sets aside and recounts the scene from the perspective of a detached observer. Not an omniscient observer–at least I don’t recall that she ever tries to get inside the thoughts of any other character.
When I described Richardson’s feminism as strident, I wasn’t referring to feminism as a movement in any political sense, so perhaps my use of the word was incorrect. What I meant was that Richardson is emphatically of the view that men are relatively unthinking, unobservant, and unperceptive lunks who have done a pretty poor job of organizing and running the world. Now, having raised two sons and one daughter, I’ll admit that there’s some truth to that, but as Pilgrimage progresses, you’ll find statements to that effect being made over and over, to the point that it does get somewhat tiresome.
What never got old for me were the wonderful passages about life in London, the life in the streets and the cafes, the light on the rooftops, the bustle of crowds on the sidewalks, the shop windows and omnibuses. You could say that Miriam’s most passionate relationship is with the city itself–I think she says something to that effect in one of the later books (Dawn’s Left Hand?). All the lyrical passages about London collected together would add up to a work of a hundred pages or more, and they certainly had the effect for me of leavening what might easily have become a monotonous string of long stays inside Miriam’s head. I love visiting and walking through the streets of London, and it was a pleasure to imagine Regent Street, Oxford Street, and Bloomsbury from a hundred years ago as channeled through Richardson’s prose.
This leads me, though, to a question I told you I wanted to discuss–namely, how should Pilgrimage be approached, if there is any hope for it to regain a place of greater recognition among the literature of its time? Even when the authoritative edition emerges over the course of the next decade or so, most readers won’t be willing to take on the task of reading through all 13 novels. The easy answer is to say, read Pointed Roofs and keep going if you feel like it. It’s not the book I’d choose as an introduction, though. My vote would probably be for The Tunnel. But as one who teaches literature as a profession, how would you approach it? Or would you say that it doesn’t quite rate a spot on the syllabus? (There are plenty who’ve assessed Pilgrimage as an impressive but ultimately minor work.)
Kate: The close-gripped focus on Miriam and her life, her perspective, her view of the world didn’t seem to get annoying for me, despite her personality being aggravating. I liked the consistency, and I liked trying to see pst her point of view to think about how her behaviour might have seemed to others, like Mrs Philips or Dr Densley. The confusion I felt as she left each (what seemed to me to be) perfectly reasonable situation or relationship, again and again, was me putting myself in her situation (so that’s a sign of good fiction-writing). I had to respond to that to ask why Miriam had taken each action, eg to ask myself questions about her character and motivations. By making the narrative so completely Miriam’s, DR was making the reader observe her more closely than we might have done if other perspectives had been available.
I’d forgotten the Henry James elements, and I agree. I don’t particularly like reading James, so perhaps the more Jamesian parts of Pilgrimage may be where I did a little skim-reading….
I think DR does draw some fairly enlightened male characters: Dr Densley and Mr Hancock seem sensitive and considerate human beings, and Michael Shatov puts up with Miriam for way longer than I could have done. But the system (political, social, economic, educational) was entirely directed at and for men, so that’s what she was rightly railing against. And there was no sign of change, which would explain why the subject is returned to again and again in successive novels.
The London parts are wonderful for a Londoner! (Anyone who’s lived in London for a few years is a Londoner.) Even though the buildings and street patterns have changed after wars and demolition, what she writes about is still there, which is lovely.
How should Pilgrimage be approached for teaching? The Dorothy Richardson Project will be doing something about that now, since they have UK academic funding, and their website has finally been updated (http://dorothyrichardson.org/), and the Dorothy Richardson Editions and Letters will be published by Oxford University Press between now and 2020, so the basic resources will be there for students to use. Teaching it now is easy enough using e-editions (although I loathe them, students like them). I would start with Oberland as a standalone example of Richardson writing, and because the novel is relatively unconnected to any of the others, to need extensive explanations and catch-up briefings. It’s also short, and about a very appealing, recognisable subject (holiday! Learning to sledge in a long skirt! Flirting with new people!). Its attention to introspection and details is just as strong as in other novels, and the narrative voice works in the same way.
First UK edition of BackwaterIf I were teaching a seminar on Richardson and other modernist authors, where we had to work on three or four novels for each author, I’d also use Backwater and Honeycomb as a pair, since they make a strong contrast, they show Miriam’s character in many different ways, they raise questions about women’s education and careers, about inhabiting spaces not one’s own, about resisting external pressures and corruption. Lots of talk about and get students working on in there. The Tunnel is VERY long, which is a negative (but did that ever stop Ulysses being taught?), but I can see lots of positives: an excellent ‘London’ novel (often teaching by theme is more interesting than teaching by chronology or by genre), very good for modernist style and the development of s-of-c; good for the sociology of the period (women in work, women sharing rooms, the boarding-house economy, illness and health). It also has the immortal (or, rather, not immortal, but still) Miss Dear, who is a parasitic monster the like of which I have never encountered before.
I do think Pilgrimage should be on the syllabus, if only for students to know that it exists, and what it represents as a woman’s literary endeavour and as a monumental modernist work. The individual novels should be taught, because they (some more than others) are significant works of literature, and there are precious few woman modernist authors taught apart from the inevitable V Woolf, and DR predates her considerably.
My question now: I’ve often wondered whether London’s attraction as a setting in fiction of the past 2 centuries or so depends on its familiarity. If DR has set these novels in Birmingham, or Glasgow, or another large and successful British city, would they have the same appeal to those who don’t know the cities? I can’t quite work out where the Londonness of the novels comes from, and how important it is to Miriam’s story. The contrast of city versus the country and suburbs is very important, but why London?
Brad: The release of Pilgrimage in authoritative editions from the OUP should go a long way toward restoring Richardson’s status in the academic community, and I can only hope that a certain amount of publicity in the press will accompany it. But I suspect many readers will still be put off at the prospect of scaling its massive rock face. Oberland is an interesting choice as a point of entry–as you remarked in an earlier email, it’s something of an anomaly within the overall context of Pilgrimage. I also thought it was the most Jamesian of the lot. (I’m not a great fan of James, either, but more because my life doesn’t offer sufficient time and energy to give his work the level of focus I think it demands–at least not at the moment.)
I am a great lover of novels set in big cities, but I’m not sure the actual choice of city always makes a difference. I loved John McIntyre’s Steps Going Down, for example, which is set in Philadelphia, but it could just as easily have been set in a dozen other US cities or in an entirely fictional one. Still, for some countries, there is one city in particular that is such a focal point that any other choice turns the novel into a regional work: London for the UK, Dublin for Ireland, Paris for France, Rome for Italy, Madrid for Spain, and, yes, New York City for the US.
In the case of Pilgrimage, London had to be the setting merely because Miriam’s story is so closely based on Richardson’s own. It certainly helps to make the series more accessible to a wider audience than if she had chosen, say, Glasgow or Manchester. London was where the Fabians were founded and thrived, where there was a strong current of foreign influences as one of the great global cities of its time and capitol of the Empire, and where a wide variety of cultural and religious activities could be found. If you think of a contemporary novel from her time set in a city outside London — one of Arnold Bennett’s for example — there is always a sense that whatever is going on, the really big, important things are happening in London.
I’m glad to hear that you would put Pilgrimage, at least in part, on the syllabus, particularly to broaden the coverage of women writers beyond Woolf. Woolf has come to dominate the place of women writers in the first half of the 20th century to a point that almost everyone of her peers is unfairly ranked as second-classers as a result. And, in some ways, I think Pilgrimage stands a better chance of finding sympathetic readers among female students, in particular, since her protagonist is an independent and working woman, which was such a rarity in literature of the time and yet such a commonplace of our world today. There aren’t a lot of Clarissa Dalloways walking around London today, but the tubes and busses are full of Miriam Hendersons.
One question you raised when we were considering this dialogue was: Do the novels in Pilgrimage bear any resemblance to other novels being published at the time? When Pointed Roofs came out, it was immediately remarked upon as a work of some novelty, but by the time Dimple Hill and the first four-volume editions came out (1938), a whole generation of modernistic literature, much of it considerably more experimental and challenging, had been published and read. We know from Richardson’s own correspondence that she was an active reader and kept up with much of what was being written. Do you sense that she was influenced in any way by the changes in literature? Or did she just stubbornly stick to the furrow she began plowing in 1915?
Kate: I’ve been doing some research on women writers of this period, as it happens, so this is something I have data for. Contemporary and present-day critics interested in women’s writing of DR’s period write about these authors, as well as Woolf and Richardson: Rose Allatini, Edith Bagnold, Mrs Baillie-Reynolds, Stella Benson, Mary Borden, Phyllis Bottome, Lettice Cooper, Clemence Dane, E M Delafield, Ethel M Dell, Mary Fulton, Constance Holme, Winifred Holtby, Violet Hunt, Storm Jameson, Sheila Kaye-Smith, Margaret Kennedy, Rosamond Lehmann, Rose Macaulay, Viola Meynell, Hope Mirrlees, Eleanor Mordaunt, Baroness Orczy, Amber Reeves, Vita Sackville-West, Dorothy L Sayers, Ethel Sidgwick, May Sinclair, Cynthia Stockley, Rebecca West and E H Young. Obviously loads of male authors were active at this time too, but they are more easily looked up in the canonical sources. Of the women authors that I have read working in DR’s period, I’d say Mary Borden’s work was closer to DR’s in terms of the emerging technique of stream of consciousness, and Stella Benson’s in terms of writing about London as an experience rather than as a setting. I think also that once DR had got Miriam going, she stayed with that style because it suited what she wanted to say and do. There are fluctuations, obviously: the novels as a single creative stream have ebbs and flows of more modernist, less modernist, more realist, more novelettish, even. The Jamesian moments are like quicksand.
Dorothy RichardsonBetter critics than I have already spent a lot of time discussing DR, and I not an expert by any means, I just know the period well. Kristin Bluemel, Gloria Fromm and George Thomson are the scholarly names to read, while waiting for the DR project to get underway. Their bibliography is also useful for further investigation.
My question for you: I’ve been thinking about how DR expected her reader to read these novels. They are unrelentingly personal, interior, single-perspective: there is no omniscient third-person narrator to give useful and helpful background details, nor is there a coherent cumulative list of dramatis personae. By the time of The Tunnel Miriam is no longer focused on her sisters, and her mother is dead (which we have to infer), her father simply disappears for several novels. Her perspective is written as tunnel vision, a beam of light on her world that doesn’t record anything that was happening elsewhere. This is part of the modernist technique, I assume, to get away from the conventional realist novel and only focus on what was important to one character. How did reading this technique feel to you, I know I was struggling between two ‘modes’ of reading, if you like: absorbing the single-directional Miriam-perspective as DR intended, but also querulously grumbling that I wanted to read the novels as if they were Victorian or Edwardian sagas; to know the continuing stories of Sarah, Eve, Harriett, the Philips family that we re-encounter in Interim, all the people that Miriam meets and rushes past, as if they’re leaves blown away in the wind of her high-speed velocity. DR makes no concession for that need the reader will feel, except for a few very late catch-up remarks much later in the sequence.
Brad: I actually enjoyed DR’s “unrelentingly personal, interior, single-perspective,” perhaps because it seemed more “exterior” than other works based in an interior monologue. When Miriam sits by herself in her room and reflects, her window is open and she’s taking in the world outside, where the feeling from many other books using the technique is one of having to live inside the narrator’s head–with the windows shut, the door locked, and maybe even the lights out.
It’s absolutely true that what DR sacrificed in her pursuit of this one very focused objective was a huge amount of the context one would expect from a conventional novel. Contrast, for example, the family in Rebecca West’s series that started with The Fountain Overflows. Here the sisters all have lives, experiences, and come and go in a fairly predictable manner, so that at the end of the series the reader can, essentially, tot up the status of the original cast. Whereas in Pilgrimage–to take the most blatant example–the manner in which the suicide of Miriam’s mother is conveyed is so indirect and glancing that more than a few readers have finished Honeycomb without a clue to what actually happened.
Which is probably why the ending of the series, the last few pages of March Moonlight, do seem so out of keeping with the rest of the work. There is just enough tying up of loose threads that it comes off as more conventional than anything the reader has come to expect.
For me, there is something quite refreshing in DR’s willingness to let characters step away and disappear. It reminds me of the experience of watching Monty Python when the series first came on in the 1970s. When the Python crew found that a sketch wasn’t working, they simply cut to something else. This was so liberating after years of watching sketch comedy shows where the conventional form, which demanded an ending that provided some dramatic closure or a punch line, forced the actors and writers to carry on to some painfully awkward and unfunny endings.
It may have also been the right decision in terms of her own ability as a writer. I honestly think she could be a better writer in sticking to her monomaniacal individualism than if she had tried to conform more closely to existing narrative conventions. I probably am somewhat biased in thinking that it takes a exceptional talent to create a work of striking originality while staying within the bounds of a conventional form, and that sometimes the abandonment of form helps a writer overcome her own limitations as much as it enables her artistic aims. I’m not sure DR’s work would be quite so memorable and distinctive if she had tried, say, to follow scrupulously the example of Henry James. Given a choice, I’d take any volume of Pilgrimage over one of H. G. Well’s conventional novels (Ann Veronica? The Passionate Friends?)–or even, for pure reading pleasure, one of James’.
But then I don’t really agree with the view, which Thomas Staley and some others have proposed, that each of the books in Pilgrimage should be viewed as a complete and independent novel outside of the context of the series. That might be the only way to introduce students to Richardson’s work, but I don’t think it does justice to her accomplishment. She truly committed her life to reinterpreting and transforming her own life through a continuous narrative centered on a fictional counterpart. Once she set out on this path, she really abandoned the possibility of other works. As long as she had the energy, she worked on Pilgrimage. The fact that it was incomplete when she died was, to me, inevitable. Could she really have set it aside and written a 200-page satirical novel? Or a play? Or a romance? I can’t fit any of those possibilities with what I’ve learned of Richardson’s life and character.
Which is why, in trying to reach my own summary assessment of Pilgrimage, I have to put it in something of a category of its own, or perhaps a category by In Search of Lost Time and possibly a few other works one could call “life-long narratives.” It is fiction, and it is, technically, a form of autobiography, but both labels are inexact fits. The term roman-fleuve, taken literally, might be more accurate, since the story flows on from book to book like a river–but, like a river, without precise borders between stages. It’s kind of Michael Apted’s Up series of films, which are individual documentaries but so much more when seen as a series, as a whole bundle of “life-long narratives.” Few writers have the resources or take the opportunity to stick with a work over the course of decades, as Richardson did. And yes, the result is massive and intimidating and, at times, frustrating. But also immersive and illuminating and rewarding. So whatever label you choose to apply, I think you’d agree that Pilgrimage is a monumental accomplishment absolutely worthy of acclaim, endless study, and appreciation by anyone who loves remarkable writing.
Kate: I agree completely that DR’s ‘interiority’ is completely about what Miriam is experiencing through her senses: it is not about her internal agonies. The world really matters to her, whereas in other modernist works the exterior world is occluded by the size of the narrator’s ego. I also agree that March Moonlight is a sad falling-off of quality and tone. It really does feel as if she had forgotten how she produced the fierce focus of the earlier books: but it’s an unrevised draft, I think, not a final novel, and published after she died, so it wouldn’t be fair to judge DR on that. However, its existence does suggest that DR could have written a competent realist novel in the conventional way, had she wanted to. Its a hybrid.
I do try to read Wells’ novels when I stumble across old editions: about to start Marriage, which should be a hoot, considering his actions and views on the subject. His personality and convincement that he was right, suffuse his writing. Its not possible to know if the same happens with DR, because she didn’t make a living forcing her opinions on the world the way that Wells did: his novels are just extensions of his personality and his times, whereas hers are creative accomplishments of technique and perspective, far less bound to the period in which she was living. Perhaps that is what makes them feel so outside historical time, they simply aren’t concerned with the social environment of Miriam’s day, but with Miriam’s own growth.
DR’s willingness to allow characters to disappear and for scenes to end without conventional resolution is one of the most revolutionary techniques that she introduced. Narrative unity is abandoned completely, and it is so refreshing. She mimics real life perfectly in that respect, because the effect is a result of Miriam’s lack of knowledge about the future, she cannot know that X will reappear in two books’ time, or that she will never see Y again. Roman-fleuve seems about right to me.
I’m sure that we could keep going with this dialogue for many more pages, particularly if we rolled up our sleeves and dove into a volume-by-volume analysis. As it is, we may well have exhausted the patience of all but the most intrepid readers. But I have no doubt that we would both agree on two points: first, that reading Dorothy Richardson’s Pilgrimage is a large investment in time and attention that richly rewards any reader who undertakes a serious effort to work through the series; and second, that it’s a book that makes you want to seek out other people who’ve read it, so you can have a chance like this to exchange thoughts and help process that experiences into some meaningful form and refine your own understanding of its meaning and significance.
For nearly 30 years, Dimple Hill (Amazon) was the last chapter in Dorothy Richardson’s novel series, Pilgrimage.
That was not Richardson’s plan. Even as the 1938 collected edition of Pilgrimage was being distributed by J. W. Dent in the U. K. and Alfred A. Knopf in the U. S., she was continuing to write, still planning to add further chapters to the work. But as the saying goes, life is what gets in our way as we’re making other plans. By 1938, Richardson was in her sixties, and she and her husband, the artist Alan Odle, spent their lives shuttling between cheap lodgings in Cornwall and London, getting by on almost no money, going without heat at times, skipping meals, fighting colds that hung around for months, and consuming most of their energy just getting through their days.
In her correspondence (published in the excellent Windows on Modernism: Selected Letters of Dorothy Richardson (1998), Richardson mentions working on the book once in 1939. The next mention comes in 1943, when she writes to her friend Bryher that “Since my break-down eight years ago I’ve been slower than ever…. [I] don’t care a hoot whether or no I ever write another word. In 1944, she writes of “my recently hauled forth Pilgrimage ms. put away nearly five years ago.” In 1945, she complains that “present conditions & lack of domestic help … have permitted me to write, in six years, half a book….” In 1948, she tells Bryher, “I’ve written a few lines of Pil….” Two years later, she writes that “Whenever possible, my morning includes the putting together of a few lines of the new vol.” To the novelist Claude Houghton in early 1952, she wrote, “I still add scraps, when poss., to another volume.” In November, she wrote Bryher that “The second half of the book goes more & more slowly, the days when I can manage any writing beyond dealing, usually belatedly, with my ever-increasing correspondence.”
March Moonlight is, therefore, an awkward book. It was assembled from papers found when Richardson died in 1957 and published as the last chapter in the four-volume collected edition of Pilgrimage released by Dent and Knopf in 1967. Though by far the shortest book in the series, it covers the longest span of time — from 1909 to 1912 (based on the sketchy temporal milestones provided in the book). Three sections of the book were published under the title of “Work in Progress” in several issues of the journal Life and Letters Today, which was owned by Bryher, between 1944 and 1946.
In his introduction to the 1967 J. W. Dent collected edition of Pilgrimage, Walter Allen called March Moonlight “a coda … the rounding off and summation of all that has gone before.” I think that credits too much intent to what clearly is an assembly of parts rather than a finished work. Chapter One of March Moonlight is somewhat anomalous, not only based in Switzerland, away from the setting of the rest of the book, but written in the first person. There is a genuine coherence of narrative and style in Chapters Two through Nine, as Miriam shifts between family and friends in London and the farm at Dimple Hill, and, as George Thomson details in his careful chronological explication in A Reader’s Guide to Dorothy Richardson’s “Pilgrimage” (which is an invaluable aid to unraveling the often mystifying use of time and flashbacks in Pilgrimage, fits fairly neatly within a space of six months, from April to October 1909. But Chapter Ten is closer to an outline of future work: set two or possibly three years later, and blasting through a half-dozen dramatic highlights in the space of eight pages.
The book opens with an extended flashback describing a visit Miriam made to Switzerland in “the winter of ’08-’09,” as guest of Miss Lonsdale, a retired English school teacher. The memories are stirred by a letter from Jean, a Scottish woman she became friends with during the visit (Jean refers to Miriam as “Dick,” one of the many references a reader is likely to miss without Thomson’s guide at hand). Jean is deeply religious, and during Miriam’s stay it becomes obvious to her that Jean is infatuated (at least in a spiritual sense) with an Anglican bishop vacationing at the resort. Though the two never discuss religion, Miriam does decide she has “a preference for living, if ever circumstances should compel the choice, with even the most hypocritically sanctimonious pietists, flopping to their knees on every possible occasion … than with even the most enchanted and enchanting humanists.” As with the Quakers in Dimple Hill, Miriam finds great sympathy with the quiet nature of this religious woman: “Out intermittent silences, rather than tension-creating searches for fresh material, were fragments of a shared eternity….”
This flashback occurs to Miriam as she sits in the backyard of her sister Sally’s house in suburban London, and Chapter Two, which returns to the present and third person, is certainly the most conventionally domestic in all of Pilgrimage, with Miriam joking with her niece and nephew and observing her sister’s care for all the conventional proprieties and mundane household concerns. This theme continues in Chapter Three, where she moves on to a visit to her friends Michael and Amabel, now married and preparing to move to their own house. “Marriage is awful,” Amabel confesses to Miriam. Miriam sees that “the absence in their daily life of a common heritage” (he is a Russian Jew, she is a passionately feminist Frenchwoman) makes “the state of these two the worst of all.” “Be glad,” Amabel tells her, “that you can go away.”
Miriam is happy to return from London to the Roscorla’s farm at Dimple Hill. As she waits for her train, she thinks, “Last year this station had meant just the end of the journey towards an unknown refuge. Today it is the gateway to Paradise.” Though she is benefiting from a gift from her friend from Oberland, Mrs. Harcourt, intended to help Miriam set herself up again in London, she plans to use the money to allow her “to stay where I can live on almost nothing, and am going to write.” “To write is to forsake life,” she acknowledges, but she has come to see that this is the only choice that works for her.
Paradise never lasts, however. Rachel Mary, the Roscorla sister and housekeeper, tells Miriam that she will be away for much of the summer visiting a distant brother, and that, as a consequence, Miriam will not be able to stay. With few options, Miriam settles on taking a room at the Young Women’s Bible Association (Richardson’s fictional counterpart of the YWCA) house in St. John’s Wood in London. And even though she returns to Dimple Hill in September, the stay is short-lived.
She learns that the Roscorlas have agreed to provide refuge for Charles Ducorroy, a former French monk who has decided to leave the Church and needs time to regain a sense of himself. Able to speak French, Miriam naturally spends a great deal of time in conversation with Ducorroy, who proceeds to fall in love with her. Ever a believer that honesty is the best policy, though, Miriam feels she has to tell him about her affair with Hypo Wilson and the miscarriage. Ducorroy rejects her, then has second thoughts, but not before Miriam is informed that her room at the Roscorlas’ will not be available again due to redecorating (hard as it is to believe that a poor Quaker farm family would redecorate).
So once again Miriam returns to London, this time taking a room at a Bloomsbury boarding house run by a Mrs. Gay. There she meets a scarecrow-like figure, an artist named Mr. Noble, for who she feels an immediate sense of … well, not attraction so much as, perhaps, protectionism. Mr. Noble is Richardson’s counterpart for her own husband, Alan Odle, whom she meant in just such circumstances. And seconds later, it’s all over.
Bear in mind that what I described in the last three paragraphs takes up barely 30 pages in March Moonlight. This is not Richardson’s typical closely-observed, slowly revealed style but a break-neck sprint for the finish. It’s generally assumed that Richardson meant for Pilgrimage to end with Miriam’s equivalent of her own meeting with Alan Odle, and these last pages do appear to be a set of fragments thrown together to get to this point rather than to provide a coherent narrative.
Is March Moonlight the end of Pilgrimage that Richardson intended? It seems clear that Richardson intended to write more. As late as 1952, she wrote Bryher that “I hope to survive long enough to finish the present vol [March Moonlight]. There were to have been four, but war-time demands put them out of the questions, & post-war conditions, though differently, are hardly less exacting.” George Thomson argues in his Reader’s Guide that Richardson’s idea was to produce “a Volume V comprising Dimple Hill, March Moonlight and two or three further books.” From an artistic standpoint, this makes some sense, as Clear Horizon brought Miriam’s London period to an end, while Dimple Hill and March Moonlight move her forward into a period like that of Richardson’s early years as a writer, living in different places on almost nothing and establishing herself as a writer.
I’ve purchased several of the major works of Richardson scholarship to help guide me through Pilgrimage, which is, as Thomson writes in A Reader’s Guide, “a compressed & fragmented narrative,” “an exactingly selective narrative,” and “a demanding narrative.” I’ve also gone through the issues of Pilgrimages: The Journal of Dorothy Richardson Studies on the Dorothy Richardson Society website. I’m struck by how little information there is available on the process of assembling March Moonlight and the 1967 collected edition, so it’s difficult for me to do much more than speculate. But it seems clear to me that one can only view it — and consequently, Pilgrimage itself, as an unfinished work.
I’m planning to publish a conversation with Kate Macdonald about our respective journeys through Pilgrimage when she finishes it, and one of the questions I’ve already thrown out for consideration is whether Richardson set for herself what was, effectively, an impossible artistic task: that of writing a work so carefully considered and closely examined that it could never be finished — at least not within the meager economic means and hard-scrabble life she lived with Alan Odle. I think this has a lot to do with the subsequent neglect of Pilgrimage: we have an inherent bias toward books that are complete, that have a clear beginning, middle, and end, that reflect, if you will, a complete artistic conception and design. Just the idea of a 2,000-page novel that is ultimately unfinished is probably enough to put off all but a tiny number of readers, and also kills its chances of being widely taught or written about.
Which is a true shame. Pilgrimage is easily the best, most involving, most thought-provoking, and most memorable work I’ve read in years. Reading it has been one of the most rewarding journeys I’ve taken in my life.
March Moonlight, published in Pilgrimage, a 4-volume set, released by: London: J. W. Dent & Cresset Press, 1938 New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1938
1938 Knopf edition of PilgrimageTwenty-four years after launching Pilgrimage with Pointed Roofs, Dorothy Richardson found herself struggling to progress with its twelfth volume, Dimple Hill (Amazon). The sales of her books had dwindled into the hundreds with each succeeding volume. Over sixty, she was thirty years away from the experiences she was trying to recreate through her fictional counterpart, Miriam Henderson.
Yet Dimple Hill manages to be something of a new beginning for both author and character. Miriam literally packs a new set of bags, buying a glossy new cabin-trunk and a hat box, “incredible symbols of freedon,” before she sets out from London. She starts out on her rest vacation with a week with Grace and Florence Broom, the sisters she first met at Wordsworth House school in Backwater, whose home has always represented something of a sanctuary of happiness and acceptance for Miriam. They visit Chichester Cathedral, and although Miriam still resists any conciliation with the Anglican church, she finds herself relaxing, giving in to the luxury of an undefined time ahead of her, even saying to Florence, “I’m never going to think any more.”
Quickly, though, life as an itinerant guest, wandering from friend to friend, staying a week here, a week there, pales, and she searches to find a place where she can remain for a much longer time. Fortunately, her friend Michael Shatov recommends the Roscorlas, a Quaker family whose farm, Dimple Hill, lies just a few miles from the coast in East Sussex. There, they keep orchards, grape vines, vegetable plots, and an herb garden, and have a spare room they let to boarders.
The Roscorlas take in Miriam on the assumption that she has suffered some kind of emotional breakdown and will need a long period of quiet recovery. She soon comes to love the beauty and peace of the country around Dimple Hill, spending hours reading under a great tree that spreads a gentle shadow over the lawn behind the farmhouse and walking through the fields and along the lanes. She finds herself marveling at the taste of fresh food from the farm: “Long ago, before she had learned that fod could be a substance indifferently consumed to keep life going, its flavour had had this assaulting power, taken for granted…. For a moment, with the first shock of perception, she had indeed felt that even in a potato grown upon their happy land some special virtue must reside.”
But even more than the landscape, the soft-spoken grace of the Roscorlas, who often sit together in silence after supper:
In place of the sense of loss oppressing the air when silence descends at last upon a talking group and its members, fallen apart, deprived of the magnetic stream, realize each other as single individuals, lessened and variously pathetic or in some way, for all their charm, offensive, there was a sense of recovery, of return to a common possession, the richer for having been temporarily forgotten.
Miriam finds something to like and admire in each member of the family. Richard, the strong, handsome older brother who runs the farm, has an air of self-confidence grounded in ability that contrasts with the blustering front of Hypo Wilson and other men she encountered in the city, and she is somewhat attracted to him. But both she and Richard are too reserved for anything to come of it. Alfred, the younger brother, is usually the butt of family jokes, yet he astonishes her in the depth of his spiritual expression when he reads a passage at the first Quaker meeting she attends with them. Rachel Mary, the sister, has charge of the house and kitchen and takes her duties seriously without losing a sense of humor and perspective. Even their quiet elderly mother warms to Miriam, taking tea with her and conversing in soft, gentle tones.
A 1907 photograph of Windmill Hill, near Herstmonceux, East Sussex
A profound sense of peace and healing pervades much of Dimple Hill. Richardson herself felt a great affinity with the Quakers, who were the subject of her first book, The Quakers Past and Present (1914). Sometime in spring 1908, she resigned from her post in Dr. J. H. Badcock’s dental practice in Harley Street and went to stay with a Quaker family, the Penroses, at their farm near Windmill Hill, a hamlet near Herstmonceaux in East Sussex. She appears to have spent most of the next three years with them, although as Gloria Fromm writes in her biography of Richardson, “These are veiled years she spent in Sussex.” There is no correspondence from this time, although she did publish several color sketches in The Saturday Review around this time, including a piece titled “A Sussex Auction” that was reworked into a chapter of Dimple Hill.
“Why should it be only Quakers who employed, in public as well as privately, this method of approach to reality,” Miriam wonders at a Quaker meeting as she sits with the congregation in contemplative silence. For her, the stillness allows her to draw energy for the work she is determining to undertake, the piece that in Richardson’s hands would become Pilgrimage:
Bidding her mind be still, she felt herself once more at work, in company, upon an all-important enterprise. This time her breathing was steady and regular and the labour of journeying, down through the layers of her surface being, a familiar process. Down and down through a series of circles each wider than the last, each opening with the indrawing of a breath whose outward flow pressed her downwards towards the next, nearer to the living centre.
She sets up a table under the branches of the great tree behind the Roscorla’s house and begins to write. “Here,” she thinks, “amidst the dust-filmed ivy leaves and the odour of damp, decaying wood, was the centre of her life.” “Write the confessions of a modern woman,” she recalls a man saying to her many years back. The notion to her represents everything she does not want in her work: “… everything would be left out that is always there, preceding and accompanying and surviving the drama of human relationships; the reality from which people move away as soon as they closely approach and expect each other to be all in all.”
The wedding of her friends Michael Shatov and Amabel draws Miriam back to London for a brief visit, and when she returns to Dimple Hill she is determined, despite her love of the place and the Roscorlas, to move on. Much as she has gained from the experience, she realizes that she could never in a lifetime become a true local. An acquaintance from her time in Switzerland (Oberland) writes to suggest that Miriam join her at a resort near Geneva the book closes.
Although Richardson had some hope that the promise of Dimple Hill’s inclusion in the four-volume edition published by J. W. Dent in 1938 would create some suspense, so fresh interest in the work, the entire oeuvre went virtually unnoticed in the U. K. and received only a few reviews (for the parallel publication of a four-volume set by Alfred A. Knopf) in the U. S.. She concluded that reviewers either saw the book as “a cul de sac rather than a conclusion” or congratulated themselves for predicting years before that Pilgrimage would end with a whimper, not a bang. Aside from a very occasional short piece — mostly for Life and Letters Today magazine (owned by her friend Bryher) — the sets from Dent and Knopf where her last publications. It would be almost thirty years before the last chapter of Pilgrimage would appear.
Dimple Hill, by Dorothy Richardson Published in Pilgrimage, a 4-volume set, released by: London: J. W. Dent & Cresset Press, 1938 New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1938
Cover of UK first edition of Clear HorizonClear Horizon (Amazon) brings the London period of Pilgrimage to its end, ten years later, with Miriam Henderson passing thirty and taking the decision to turn her back on her life and work there.
Having struggled with her feelings for Amabel, whose own love for her was open and ardent, and having ended her affair with Hypo Wilson (the fictional counterpart of Richardson’s real-life lover, H. G. Wells), Miriam seems to be searching for ways to gracefully cut her ties. The thought occurs to her of introducing Amabel to Michael Shatov, the Russian Jew she had been involved with, at least tentatively, in earlier chapters, and she seizes upon it immediately. “It stood there before her, solving the mystery of her present failure to suffer on Michael’s behalf, filling so completely the horizon of her immediate future that it seemed to offer, the moment it should become the reality into which she had the power of translating it, a vista ahead swept clean of all impediments.”
She also experiences a moment of revelation that fills her with a sense of joy that strengthens her resolve to take a deliberate step away from the life she has been living:
And it was then that the wordless thought had come like an arrow aimed from a height downwards into her heart and, before her awakened mind, dropping its preoccupation, could reach the words that already were sounding within it, in the quiet tone of someone offering a suggestion and ready to wait while it was surveyed, she was within that lifting tide of emotion.
With a single up-swinging movement, she was clear of earth and hanging, suspended and motionless, high in the sky, looking, away to the right, into a far-off pearly-blue distance, that held her eyes, seeming to be in motion within itself: an intense crystalline vibration that seemed to be aware of being observed, and even to be amused and to be saying, ‘Yes, this is my reality.’
She was moving, or the sky about her was moving. Masses of pinnacled clouds rose between her and the clear distance and, just as she felt herself sinking, her spirit seemed to be up amongst their high, rejoicing summits.
When she later tries to share this experience with Hypo, and then with Amabel, however, it is taken as metaphor rather than sensations she took as reality. Miriam was already a person who tended to see herself as separate and apart from others. To now have an intense physical and spiritual memory of the moment and find it impossible to communicate with those she feels closest to only reinforces her sense of isolation.
This sense is compounded by a meeting she has with Hypo Wilson, who manages in his glib way to ensure that Miriam is pushed yet further away. He thinks at first that Miriam is pregnant (with his child), then interprets her saying that she has come down from the clouds as meaning that she had discovered that she wasn’t. He clumsily compliments Donizetti’s, the little Italian cafe that had become Miriam’s favorite refuge outside of her room: “It’s almost the irreducible minimum in little haunts, isn’t it?” And then he proposes that “one has to invent … a special category” for Miriam: “the individual’s individualist.” As they leave the restaurant and walk out into the London evening, she thinks of their relationship as “so conclusively ended.”
Having already made an emotional break with Amabel, Miriam’s decision is confirmed when she visits her in Holloway Prison after Amabel’s arrest in a suffragette demonstration. “I wanted to come,” she says, but immediately wonders, “what kind of truth lay behind her words, whether she had wanted most to see Amabel or, most, to achieve the experience of visiting an imprisoned suffragist….” Upon further reflection, she decides that “Amabel was a tornado, sweeping oneself off one’s feet and one’s possessions from their niches.”
The process of separation takes its toll on Miriam. Michael is concerned at her appearance, telling her that she looks “pulled down.” And when she visits her doctor to discuss an operation to be performed on her sister, Sarah, who has been living in increasing poverty and has to be taken as a charity case, he demands, “What are you going to do to get the better of this seriously run-down condition?” His prescription is simple and emphatic: “Well, my dear, I should say, in the first place, rest; and secondly, rest; and, in conclusion, rest.” His conviction pushes Miriam into the decision she has been hovering around, and she sets her course to find a place in the countryside, away from London, where she can rest–which she interprets as devoting herself to reading and writing.
Perhaps the most touching moment in Clear Horizon–indeed, in the whole of Pilgrimage–is Miriam’s farewell to the dental office where she has worked for the last ten years. Although Hypo Wilson jokes that she should use the experience to write “a dental novel,” the office–and Dr. Hancock in particular–has occupied a large place in her life, thoughts and emotions. She lingers an extra few minutes to tell him a trivial story, but in reality, just to “remain, for yet another moment, encircled by the glow of his kindliness, in the midst of the busy activities of the practice, by whose orderly turmoil surrounded they had so often taken counsel together.”
Among the many remarkable attributes of Pilgrimage, I think its most overlooked is its treatment of work as an activity that can be intellectually stimulating; personally satisfying as well as, at times, exhausting; and the basis of a web of relationships that leave lasting impressions–whether good or bad–that echo in our consciousness ever after. In what other work of fiction from the early 20th century is the experience of working given such extended, balanced, and overall positive treatment? It’s one of the factors that I find strikingly contemporary in Pilgrimage. I suspect one could find a dozen women of Miriam’s age, independence, and intellectual aspirations working in London dental offices today–and, I would hope, a dozen dentists of Dr. Hancock’s professionalism and generosity.
Over sixty, and having spent over seventeen years caring for her sickly husband, Alan Odle, in a series of cheap and ill-furnished digs in London and Cornwall, Richardson found it harder and harder to find the energy and time to focus on Pilgrimage. After sending the manuscript off to her publisher, J. W. Dent, she wrote her friend, the novelist John Cowper Powys, that she feared they would find it “too short & its last third ‘too thin’, & may send it back to be enlarged….” To her friend Bryher, she wrote that “The last few sections, having been written under difficulties, are rather scrappy & dim.” She later reported that Dent had sold just 400 copies of the book, although they were still quite interested in releasing Pilgrimage as a set, assuming it was the end of the series.
The last chapter in Pilgrimage to be published as a separate book, Clear Horizon went virtually unreviewed. By the time it came out, Richardson’s work had either been forgotten or was considered worth forgetting. The latter view was expressed by Queenie Leavis in her review for Scrutiny: “This is the eleventh and latest, but not last, volume of the novelcycle Pilgrimage, the first, Pointed Roofs, having appeared in 1915, when it fell like a rock from a height into the literary waters. Since then each succeeding volume has made less of a splash, and the latest is likely to part the surface with scarcely a ripple.” Leavis thought Pointed Roofs by far the best of the series, dismissing the rest as “increasingly small beer.” Hardly a fan of feminism herself, she saw that Richardson’s strong focus on the feminine perspective “a pervasive weakness.” About the only good thing she had to say about Pilgrimage was that it “will be a gift to the research student of the two-thousands,” which has proved more true than she might have thought.
Clear Horizon, by Dorothy Richardson London: J. W. Dent & The Cresset Press, 1935
Dorothy Richardson in 1932, about a year after Dawn’s Left Hand was publishedOf all the Pilgrimage series, Dawn’s Left Hand (Amazon) by far offers the richest lode for Richardson scholars to mine for publication material. Not because it’s the longest (it’s not) or the best (it’s not, IMHO) or the densest with references (my vote for this award would be Deadlock), but because of the sex. This is not only the book in which Miriam finally recreates with Hypo Wilson the affair Dorothy Richardson had with H. G. Wells somewhere around 1907, the affair that led to her pregnancy and miscarriage and that added to the long list of talented women (e.g., Violet Hunt, Rebecca West, Odette Keun) with whom Wells had slept. But it is also the book in which another woman writes “I love you” with a piece of soap on Miriam’s mirror, and in which Miriam wonders if she can reciprocate that emotion. While certainly not the first novel of its time to deal with lesbianism, it is among a tiny number to entertain the possibility of bi-sexuality. And like it or not, sex sells, folks, even in academic circles.
To dispense with the affair, of which the angst beforehand greatly exceeds the passion in the actual conduct thereof, Miriam returns from her trip to Switzerland (Oberland) to find a letter from Hypo Wilson that declares, “I’m more in love with you than ever.” The mixed feelings Miriam had about Hypo before getting the letter are not the least bit changed by this revelation. “[B]ehind the magic words was nothing for her individually, for any one individually,” she thinks. And even when the two finally do spend an evening together in one of the discreet London restaurants that specialized in individual rooms and maximum privacy for consenting couples, she notes that Hypo’s body is not beautiful and caters to his sexual egotism, murmuring, “My little babe, just born” as they embrace.
My theory is that, for Miriam, the attraction in the affair is almost entirely the novelty of the experience. Having gotten past romance novels, having had at least a few men show genuine attraction and interest in romance with her, and having considered whether she could have the same feelings — and dismissed the idea in all cases so far — the great unknown for her at twenty-eight is not romance but sex. And I suspect she was pragmatic enough to realize that this was an affair that held little risk of turning into romance, let alone marriage, on either’s part. And so, with the opportunity to leap in front of her, she decides to take it. At one point, a few days before their first rendezvous, Miriam thinks of herself as “this person, who was about to take a lover,” almost as if she were giving the notion a trial run. In any case, Miriam’s trial run with Hypo proves to be a pretty short run. By the end of Dawn’s Left Hand, it has joined the many memories that Miriam has to reflect upon in future chapters.
The other relationship in the book, with Amabel, a passionate and beautiful young woman raised in France, also reproduces one in Richardson’s life, in this case with Veronica Leslie-Jones, who was an activist and suffragette she met around the same time as her affair with Wells. Unlike Hypo/H. G., who was more interested in the getting than the keeping, Amabel is clearly in love with Miriam, and considers it destiny for them to spend the rest of their lives together. She sneaks into Miriam’s flat to leave the message on her mirror, she leaves a very long and beautifully penned love letter at Miriam’s office, she frequents their women’s club and Lycurgan Society meetings in hopes of encountering her.
And Miriam is drawn to Amabel to an extent fundamentally different and more perplexing to herself than in any previous relationship with men. When Amabel asks if Miriam is repelled by the prospect of a woman being in love with her, she replies, “No, it makes no difference . . . with you.” She thinks about stroking Amabel’s hair, and considers that, unlike her affair with Hypo, it would demand a long-term and fundamental choice: “For if indeed, as her own ears and the confident rejoicing that greeted every work she spoke seemed to prove, then she was committed for life to the role allotted to her by the kneeling girl.”
“Amabel” was, in fact, Richardson’s working title for Dawn’s Left Hand. And though it’s the affair with Hypo/H. G. that tends to get mentioned most often in sound-bite mentions of Pilgrimage, it is Amabel’s love that causes the more significant spiritual dilemma for Miriam. It’s not clear that she ever feels love for Amabel with quite the same certainty and intensity, but she does recognize the price, in terms of personal commitment, that it would demand of her. And the competition it presents for her first love — her own individuality — is what causes her the greatest distress.
Dawn’s Left Hand ends with Miriam fairly definitively closing the door on her short affair with Hypo, but the story of her relationship with Amabel continues to unfold in Clear Horizon. If Miriam has learned nothing else thus far in her journey of self-discovery, she understands that her choices can only be made through long consideration. Which is something Hypo misses entirely:
“It’s the committing yourself you’re afraid of. Taking definite steps. You’ll miss things. And live to regret it.”
“How can one miss things?”
“Mere existence isn’t life.”
“Why mere? Most people have too much life and too little realization. Realization takes time and solitude.”
Which could easily serve as Dorothy Richardson’s credo.
Richardson struggled with Dawn’s Left Hand for years. She refers to it (as “X”) in letters as early as 1927, and almost four years later, in January 1931, she writes Bryher, “So once more I sat down to Vol. X.” When it was finally at the printer’s in September 1931, she wrote (again to Bryher, who had become her closest friend and supporter), “[T]he book fills me with despair by reason of its ‘thinness’ & brevity; the shadow of a book it is, result of momentum of the unconscious, got going a thousand times in these four years, & a thousand times broken off with devastating results to both author & work.” It was very nearly four years more before Clear Horizon was to follow it.
On the less serious side, I must note that Dawn’s Left Hand deserves special recognition for Pilgrimage’s single greatest Moment of Zen. Sitting in an opera house box with Alma and Hypo, listening to Wagner, Miriam thinks,
To know beforehand where you are going is to be going nowhere. Because it means you are nowhere to begin with. If you know where you are you can go anywhere, and it will be the same place, and good.
These are lines truly worth painting on a rock.
Dawn’s Left Hand, by Dorothy Richardson London: Duckworth, 1931
First UK edition of OberlandFor those reviewers who were growing weary of the “gas-light drabness” of Pilgrimage’s London novels, Oberland (Amazon) offered a refreshing change of scenery — literally. For reasons that, in typical Richardson fashion, are never quite explained, Miriam Henderson has been given the gift of a two week trip to a resort in the Bernese Oberland region of Switzerland, and the action — and, by Pilgrimage’s standard, this is certainly the most action-packed book in the series — is entirely set within the space of Miriam’s trip. So, in terms of time covered, this is also the most condensed chapter.
Oberland is based on a trip Richardson made to Adelboden, a resort town, in 1904, on a recommendation and at the expense of her employer, Dr. J. H. Badcock. In Miriam’s case, the time is two years later, in February 1906. When Richardson was writing the book, therefore, she was looking back some twenty years, from the perspective of a woman over fifty, and the increasing distance between author and subject as time went by — when added to the not-insignificant hardships she was dealing with as a nearly penniless writer — is certainly one of the reasons why progress on Pilgrimage grew slower and slower.
1906 Panoramic postcard from Adelboden
Oberland most differs from the rest of Pilgrimage in its treatment of landscape. The great snow-covered mountains that surround Miriam are completely unlike anything she has ever seen:
The leap of recognition, unknowing between the mountains and herself which was which, made the first sight of them — smooth snow and crinkled rock in unheard-of unimagined tawny light — seem, even at the moment of seeing, already long ago.
They knew, they smiled joyfully at the glad shock they were, sideways gigantically advancing while she passed as over a bridge across which presently there would be no return, seeing and unseeing, seeing again from the first keen vision.
Looking out on them from her hotel room, she imagines them saying to her, “Watch, see, if you can believe it, what we can do.” And when she wakes the next morning, she feels “It was as if all her life she had travelled towards this radiance, and was now within it, clear of the past, at an ultimate destination. The bold, bright light that bounces off the mountains and all the snow-covered slopes around her, is such a contrast with the rare bursts of sunshine she enjoys in London that Miriam experiences a spiritual glow whenever she ventures out during her stay.
There is more outdoor activity in Oberland than in the rest of the series in total. Many of the guests go skiing, a sport which had just begun to become popular among visitors, although Miriam is never persuaded to try it. Tobogganing (or what Americans would call sledding) is the favorite among the less athletic, and Miriam takes her first runs down the slopes after a little convincing, and takes up the sport with the same enthusiasm as she did cycling. For the more sedate, there is always a leisurely glide around the town’s large skating rink. And, towards the end of the book, she watches a ski-jumping (referred to as sky-jumping) competition, which Richardson describes in a much more visually dramatic style than has been typical:
Here he came, in black against his snow, deep velvety black against the snow, gliding past the little hut with a powerful different gait. . . . From the edge of the shelf he leapt high into the air and seemed to stand there against the sky, in a dream. Down he swooped, sailing, dreaming, to the track, rose smoothly from the terrific impact and smoothly went his way. . . .
All the Swiss, though some were rough and ungainly, moved with that strong and steady grace. But Zurbuchen was the best. It was he who would live in her memory, poised against the sky like a great bird.
Miriam comes to the Hotel Alpenblick, a small, over-heated pension at which a variety of guests, mostly English but including one American and an Italian businessman whom everyone takes for Russian. This little interior world is the counterpart to the bright, white outdoors. Unlike the preceding chapters, much of the social interactions in Oberland are related directly or through observation, and far less is refracted through Miriam’s subsequent thoughts. Closely observed, though, it remains, and I wonder if Richardson was, perhaps, trying to emulate Henry James rather than the unique interior style of her previous books.
Yet this is still Richardson and Miriam we are dealing with, and even in the invigorating and liberating mountain setting, the fierce battle to retain individuality carries on. Approached by a silly but warm-hearted English woman named Mrs. Harcourt, Miriam is both pleased and on guard. As they exchange introductory chit-chat, a warning voice tells her to withhold: “Even a little talk, a little answering of questions, would falsify the past. Set in her own and in this woman’s mind in a mould of verbal summarizings, it would hamper and stain the brightness of to-morrow.”
However, it is Mrs. Harcourt who alerts Miriam to the last stunning sight of her trip:
“Look out of ve window!”
Sitting up in bed, she saw hanging in mid-air just outside the window a huge crimson lamp, circular in a blue darkness. Sleepily she cried her thanks and leaped awake to dwell with the strange spectacle, the gently startling picture, in its sudden huge nearness, of the loveliness of space. The little distant moon, enormous and rosy in blue mist, seemed to float in the blue as in blue water, seemed to have floated close in sheer unearthly kindliness, to comfort her thoughts, on this last day, with something new and strange.
Richardson struggled to get Oberland published. She had become frustrated with the poor sales and lack of promotion by Duckworth, which had published the first eight books in Pilgrimage, and H. G. Wells encouraged her to think that she would do better with other firms. After wasting nearly six months on unsuccessful approaches to three other publishers, she ended up settling for Duckworth’s offer, which was worse than anything she’d taken before: instead of giving £10, half of their previous price, they gave her a royalty of 7.5% of sales. Knopf, her U.S. publisher, was only slightly more generous at 10% royalty. Duckworth sold under 300 copies; Knopf less than 500.
News item about 1928 Femina Prix AnglaisThe U.K. reviews were few and negative. In the U.S., Earl Aldrich dismissed it in The Saturday Review: “Oberland, vivid though it be, is after all only a very limited travel book — the thing that a female author might send in sections to a friend, and later publish because he public wanted some personal impressions.” The New York Times gave the book first place in a full-page review of new fiction, gushing that, “It is scarcely possible to say enough in praise of a book of such rare, such quietly dazzling beauty.” Unfortunately, next to the review, they also printed a photograph of an American author, also named Dorothy Richardson. This mistake would be repeated several times during Dorothy (M.) Richardson’s life, and it always drove her nuts. “I shall write advertising,” she wrote in frustration the first time it happened. And in The New York Post, Conrad Aiken made the generous prediction that Richardson was entitled to “as precise and permanent a place in the history of literature as it is ever possible to predict for a living author.”
The book was even short-listed for the Prix Femina Anglais, although it lost to H. M. Tomlinson’sGallion’s Reach. Richardson herself admitted that the book was “slight.” Writing to her friend, the novelist E. B. C. Jones, she explained that, “It is due partly to the need to condense that grows with each vol. & partly on M’s becoming more out-turned really living, partic. for this year or so, much more on the surface than she did.” “Each episode could have filled a single volume in the old wudgy manner — but I should have been in my grave before M’s fortnight was at an end & there are things calling ahead.” And years later, the novelist Eva Tucker, who was otherwise a tremendous advocate for Richardson’s work, told an interviewer that Oberland “doesn’t quite hang together for me as part of the series. It seems a bit out of step of out of place in Pilgrimage as a whole.”
Oberland, by Dorothy Richardson London: Duckworth, 1927
Having expanded her social horizons over the course of the last four chapters, in The Trap Miriam Henderson decides to undertake an experiment in social living that proves the quandary from which Richardson takes her title. After years of living alone in her room at Mrs. Bailey’s, Miriam lets a flat in a house in Flaxman Court that she will share with a recent acquaintance, a social worker named Selina Holland.
At first, the two women see the move as a great adventure. Miriam hears in the tone of Selina’s voice “Garden sunlight that had been missing through all the wandering years.” They collaborate on arranging their things, putting up a curtain, buying a few small pieces of furniture to fill the vast space of their two rooms. And Miriam, for the first time in her life, splurges on her own desk to write at: “The bureau was an experience: seen from any angle it was joy complete. Added to life and independent from it. A little thing that would keep its power through all accidents of mood and circumstance.”
“Here in the mornings,” she delights, “there would always be beauty, the profiles of things growing clear on either side of the pathway of morning light. . . .” As the men move in the last of her belongings, Miriam can’t resist dipping into her copy of Henry James’ The Ambassadors — “the book that had suddenly become the centre of her life.” Even in that first hour, though, she can see the first warning signs that her personality and Selina’s are simply too different to avoid an inevitable strain. “Miss Holland would get nothing from James. She would read patiently for a while and pronounce him ‘a little tedious.'”
First edition of The Ambassadors: “the title, set within the golden lines of an upright oblong in letters of gold upon the red cover…”Neither is she likely to appreciate the revelation of who the tall figure who inhabits the apartment opposite theirs on the court:
Yeats: and he lived here. Miriam drew back and sat down on the end of her bed. This queer alley was then the place in all London in which to live. Was he dismayed at the sight of Philistines invading the retreat where he lived hidden amongst unseeing villagers? . . . .
To which Selina’s response is, “The strange room,” said Miss Holland, who also had left the window, “has a tenant as eccentric as itself.” No wonder, then, that Selina also fails to appreciate the little Italian cafe, Donizetti’s, that Miriam had discovered years before and come to think of as a haven. In bringing Selina to Donizetti’s, Miriam is offering her a little piece of herself. Selina, however, has little patience for the experience: “It is now well past midnight. This has been a unique experience. And just for this once, I do not object to it. But it must certainly not be repeated.”
To add to Miriam’s headaches, she comes to realize that their landlord is a bit of a creep with a mother complex and their downstairs neighbors an alcoholic commercial sculptor who battles frequently with his wife. Yet she has a tremendous capacity to find joy in the midst of tedium. Even waking on a work day in a bedroom she shares with a less-than-compatible roommate, she can find something wonderful:
The morning lays cool fingers on my heart and stands there an intensity of light all about me and there is no weight or tiredness. When I open my eyes there is a certain amount of light — much less than I felt before I opened them — and things that make, before I see them clearly, an interesting pattern of dark shapes; holding worlds and worlds, all the many lives ahead.
“I shall go on getting happier and happier. Because it takes almost nothing to make me as happy as I can bear.” Miriam’s Pollyana dream cannot, of course, last. Later that same day, a woman at the dental office cautions her, “It’s your life you are living here, lassie,” and Miriam suddenly realizes that “This scene that she persisted in seeing as a background, stationary, not moving on, was her life, was counting off years.”
She does have some respite from this bleak prospect as she attends a happy New Year’s celebration held by the Lycurgans. A handsome older man asks her to dance, and she looks around the floor and sees George Bernard Shaw and Wells (not referred to as Hypo Wilson this time) dancing as well. “That’s not dancing, it’s the Ethical Movement,” someone wisecracks, but Miriam finds the innocence and awkwardness charming. And when everyone joins hands to sing in the new year with “Auld Lang Syne,” she thinks, “To stand thus linked and singing was to lose the weight of individuality and keep its essence, its queer power of being one with every one alive.”
At 110 pages, The Trap is the shortest book in the Pilgrimage except the final, unfinished March Moonlight. The experiment in group living has been short and unsuccessful. The experience has shown Miriam that a room of her own is essential for her survival, and as The Trap ends, with the wild squealing of cats outside and Mr. and Mrs. Perrance having another drunken quarrel downstairs, she thinks, simply, “Away. Away. . . .”
Published 10 years after Pointed Roofs, The Trap was reviewed by relatively few, and the general tone of most reviews was that of ennui. Pilgrimage was beginning to seem endless, fulfilling the prediction first made in 1920 in S. P. B. Mais’ Books and Their Writers: “there is no reason why the series should not be continued to infinity.” As Hamish Miles put it in The Saturday Review,
And so, for the eighth time, Miriam Henderson trickles sandily through her predestined hour-glass. One more stage measured. One more pallid dawn suffuses the Euston Road. Grain by grain, Miriam has slipped through the upper bubble to the lower. Turn over the contraption the other way up (the glass is clean and dry) and there, once again, patiently marking off a ninth furlong of time, the same sand will accomplish the same journey: one more novel will have been tacked on to Miss Richardson’s untiring sequence.
She would offer them some relief with the next chapter, Oberland, of which one reviewer would write, “The book is rich in poetic passages that are a full reward for the gas-light drabness of the earlier books in the series.” Which is what folks in the Midwest refer to as a left-handed compliment.
The Trap, by Dorothy Richardson London: Duckworth, 1925
Revolving Lights is both a fairly seamless continuation of the preceding chapter, Deadlock, and a progression towards the style and perspective of the remaining books in Pilgrimage. Having spurned Michael Shatov’s interest in marriage, Miriam carries on with their friendship, if only for the opportunities it provides her for encountering different people and outlooks. She spends a long vacation at the seaside home of Hypo and Alma Wilson (Richardson’s fictional counterparts for H. G. Wells and his wife Amy Catherine), which both excites her intellectual interests and reinforces her sense of the superficiality of even those society consider intellectuals. And she has her first encounter with Quakers, whose silent worship makes a profound impression on her and whose company, in later books, she seeks out. Yet the book is also full of passages that demonstrate Miriam’s growing assurance that her preference for solitude is an honest and proper response to the world.
Revolving Lights is organized in four chapters, each centered on one or two episodes around which the whole chapter is constructed. Chapter One is almost the entirety of the London chapters of Pilgrimage in microcosm. Having attended a meeting of the Lycurgan Society (Richardson’s stand-in for the Fabian Society), Miriam walks through midnight London to her room in a Bloomsburg boarding house and reflects on the meeting, on a party she attended with the Wilsons, on her daily work at the dental office on Wimpole Street, and on her own preferences and choices.
Of the hall in which the meeting took place, she thinks,
The building of the large hall had been brought about by people who gave no thought to the wonder of moving from one space to another and up and down stairs. Yet this wonder was more to them than all the things on which their thoughts were fixed. If they would take time to realise it. No one takes time. No one knows it. . . . But I know it. . . . These seconds of knowing, of being told, afresh, by things speaking silently, make up for the pain of failing to find out what I ought to be doing. . . .
Noticing and reflecting are essential for Miriam. Although Richardson, a great fan of Henry James’ style and careful observation, never quotes him in the book, it’s clear that she aspires for Miriam to “Try to be one of the people on whom nothing is lost!” Her choice to continue working in the dental office, which, while not well-paid, provides her with just enough money and time to follow her interests where they lead her: “She, with no resources at all, had dropped to easy irresponsible labour to avoid being shaped and branded, to keep her untouched strength free for a wider contemplation….” In this, Miriam is something of a forerunner of what is an increasing segment of today’s workforce, among whom there are more and more people choosing to take undemanding jobs with lower pay for the freedom it gives them to pursue travel, sports, or creative interests.
Miriam worries, though, that the choice to devote great chunks of her time to contemplation could be dangerous in the long run. “[B]eing her own solitary companion would not go on for ever. It would bring in the end, somewhere about middle age, the state that people called madness.” But Richardson is clear that this would only be a case of being labelled as mad for what society simply finds unfathomable and irrationally non-conformist, that “Perhaps the lunatic asylums were full of people who had refused to join up,” but who spent their days in a “state of amazed happiness.”
And for Miriam, one of her constant sources of happiness is the experience of living in London. As she walks along Oxford Street, passing Bond Street, she imagines the city saying to her, “Walking here you can keep alive, out in the world, until the end, an aged crone, still a citizen of m kingdom, hobbling in the sun, along my sacred pavements.” She feels “the spirit of London” coming to greet her, and thinks in almost romantic terms, “Nothing in life could be sweeter than this welcoming — a cup held brimming to her lips, and inexhaustible. What lover did she want? No one in the world could oust this mighty lover, always receiving her back without words, engulfing and leaving her untouched, liberated and expanding to the whole range of her being.” But she sees that these are feelings she must keep to herself: “. . . she must go on, uselessly, unrevealed; bearing a semblance that was nothing but a screen set up, hiding what she was in the depths of her being.”
The long interior monologue that comprises Chapter One (at 56 pages, one of the longest in the entire sequence) is contrasted by the next two chapters, which deal with social encounters. Michael Shatov takes Miriam to meet the Lintoffs, an intense couple, both Russian intellectuals and revolutionaries, attempting to show her off to them and hoping to rekindle some romantic feelings in Miriam, but which leaves her feeling weighed and found wanting. When he takes her to a Quaker meeting on St. Martin’s Lane, however, she experiences, for the first time, a form of worship that doesn’t make her feel lectured to and chafing to escape: “[B]eing in the silence was being in something alive and positive; at the centre of existence; being there with others made the sen of it stronger than when it was experienced alone.” Richardson foreshadows the final books of Pilgrimage in writing that, “It had felt like the beginning of a life that was checked and postponed into the future.”
Spade House, the real-life counterpart of Bonnycliff in Revolving Lights
The weeks she spend with the Wilsons at Bonnycliff, covered in Chapter Three, however, leave her with mixed feelings. She is thrilled by the talk and music and self-confidence of Hypo Wilson and their other guests, which include a woman novelist (Edna Prout, a ficitional stand-in for Violet Hunt) and the editor of a literary magazine. In the course of the stay, we learn that Miriam has begun to write. Her first piece was a review “of a bad little book on Whitman,” but she recalls feeling overwhelmed at the experience: “I went nearly mad with responsibility and the awfulness of discovering the way words express almost nothing at all.” Hypo encourages Miriam to do more: “You’re lucky you know, Miriam, in your opportunities for odd experience. Write it up. Don’t forget.”
Towards Hypo Miriams feels both attracted and repelled. She is interested in him because he is quite obviously interested in her, and because he is an interesting person in much of his talk and in what he has been able to accomplish as a writer. But she also resists what she considers “his twofold vision of women as bright intelligent response or complacently smiling audience.” There is always a somewhat mocking edge in his treatment of Miriam. During one conversation, Hypo refers to her as, in order, “Quarrelsome Miriam,” “Harsh Miriam,” “Pugilistic Miriam,” “Mysterious Miriam,” and “Diplomatic Miriam.” And he is incapable of just sitting in silence. “The test of absolutely everything in life,” she tells him, “is the quality of the in-between silences. It’s only in silence that you can judge of your relationship to a person.” At the end of Chapter Four, however, which is devoted to a busy day at the dental office, Richardson leaves us with the closest thing to a cliff-hanger to be found in Pilgrimage. Returning home, Miriam finds a letter from Hypo waiting: “Dear Miriam … When can I see you? Just to talk.”
What happens next? Tune in next time, kids, for another exciting episode of Pilgrimage.
Revolving Lights, by Dorothy Richardson London: Duckworth, 1923
Cover of first UK edition of DeadlockDeadlock (Internet Archive, Amazon) opens the third volume in any of the various four-volume editions of Pilgrimage. Roughly half way through, in other words, at least in terms of pages. And I suspect that many readers find themselves giving up hope at this point.
The problem is that the flow of Miriam Henderson’s thoughts here begins to flow at such an unmoderated rate that anyone who hasn’t by now become accustomed, if not enamored, with it can be excused for turning away and gasping for air. Dorothy Richardson clearly put intense effort into capturing these thoughts and sensations by mining her own memories. But at times — and those time start coming more frequently as the chapters roll on — artistry (and here I take the definition of artist from that old quip: “Someone who know when to stop — and does”) becomes the victim of authenticity. As Rebecca West once wrote, “Miriam’s interior monologue went deeper and deeper, and in the end Dorothy Richardson would not interrupt it to record such external facts as the going out and coming in of other characters, with the result that is is never certain who is speaking to whom.” Or when, either, as she increasingly began to play with time, leaping backwards and forwards with no notice and few clues to ensure the reader could keep up with her.
Deadlock is further weighted down with a few too many philosophical discussions, none of which I can imagine are of any serious interest to today’s readers. Yes, Miriam’s intellectual development, her exposure to different political, moral, scientific, and cultural perspectives and beliefs, is a major element of her process of self-discovery, and in that way, absolutely important. But page after page of, say, a conversation about the virtues and shortcomings of the French versus the Russian versus the English, benefits neither our understanding of Miriam nor the narrative momentum. After a few too many of these, I could not help but agree with the nameless woman in the following snippet from one such discussion:
“I think I have said” — his face beaming with the repressed radiance of an invading smile, was lifted towards the audience, but the blue eyes modestly addressed the frill of green along the platform edge — “that metaphysic, with respect to some of the conceptions of science, while admitting that they have their uses for practical purposes, denies that they are exactly true. Theology does not deny the problems of metaphysic, but answers them in a way metaphysic cannot accept.”
“In that case theology,” began a rich, reverberating clerical voice . . .
“This is veggy boring,” said the woman.
Richardson’s tendency to allow the ideas being discussed to drown out the spirit of a conversation particularly plagues what otherwise would be the centerpiece of Deadlock: Miriam’s acquaintance, then friendship, then unsure romance with Michael Shatov, a lively, sophisticated, and highly opinionated Russian Jew living (initially) in the same boarding house as Miriam. Michael is Miriam’s guide, introducing her to a number of different the philosophical and political movements. They share an enthusiasm for Emerson. She is excited by his willingness to accept her as an intellectual being, to consider her having an equal capacity for intelligence and discrimination. They kiss — at least once — and she refers to him as her “dear, funny little man.”
But Miriam is also never free from her constant conflict between the expectations of other people and her own need for solitude and introspection. And Michael helps usher Miriam towards what is perhaps the greatest discovery along her pilgrimage — namely, her ability to reach much greater depths of understanding through writing. At first, it’s not really writing but translating, translating a lecture written by another boarder, a Frenchman named Lahitte. As she translates Lahitte’s piece, however, she becomes aware that her own sense of prose style is far better than his — indeed, that she can express herself quite well. The moment is a great turning point in Pilgrimage, like its first great turning point: the recognition of her room at Mrs. Baileys as her haven. “You know in advance when you are really following your life,” Miriam thought at that time. Looking at her papers, she is reminded of that moment:
Rising from the table she found her room strange, the new room she had entered on the day of her arrival. She remembered drawing the cover from the table by the window and finding the ink-stains. There they were in the warm bright circle of mid-morning lamplight, showing between the scattered papers. The years that had passed were a single short interval leading to the restoration of that first moment. Everything they contained centred there; her passage through them, the desperate graspings and droppings, had been a coming back. Nothing would matter now that the paper-scattered lamp-lit circle was established as the centre of life. Everything would be an everlastingly various joyful coming back. Held up by this secret place, drawing her energy from it, any sort of life would do that left this room and its little table free and untouched.
And ironically, this realization also tempers — perhaps forever — Miriam’s expectations of connecting with other people, and Michael in particular — through conversation. A thought occurs to her in the midst of a discussion of women’s rights that could almost be seen as Richardson’s credo: “If only one could speak as quickly as one’s thoughts flashed, and several thoughts together, all with a separate life of their own and yet belonging, everybody would be understood.” Unfortunately, she concludes that, “As it was, even in the most favourable circumstances, people could hardly communicate with each other at all.”
There are other reasons that lead Miriam … well, not so much to break up with Michael as to choose not go further in their relationship. One is something in his past that she finds she cannot accept. What it was — an old love? a shameful episode? indecent exposure? — is a mystery, given Richardson’s hyper-oblique treatment:
“Before you go,” Mr. Shatov was saying. She turned towards his suddenly changed voice, saw his pale face, grave, and working with the determination to difficult speech; saw him, while she stood listening to the few tense phrases in painful admiration of his courage, horribly transformed, by the images he evoked far away, immovable in the sunshine of his earlier days. The very trembling of his voice had attested the agonising power of his communication. Yet behind it all, with what a calmness of his inner mind, had he told her, now, only now, when they were set in the bright amber of so many days, that he had been lost to her, forever, long ago in his independent past. The train was drawing in. She turned away speechless.
I leave it to your imagination to fill in the details.
And the other reason is, ahem, the Jewish question. Michael tells Miriam that he would not expect her to convert if they were married, tells her that he has no special religious feelings himself, but there is something about the fact of his being Jewish that becomes like a scab she cannot resist picking. And so, having learned of an Englishwoman who married a Jew and converted, Miriam writes and goes to learn about the woman’s experience. Again, in typical Richardson style, much is inferred from glancing references and truncated conversations. “Much of course depends upon the synagogue through which one is admitted,” the woman tells her. “Ah,” Miriam thinks; “she had felt the impossibilities. She had compromised and was excusing her compromise.”
This episode, and numerous other references to Jews and Jewishness in Pilgrimage — none of them in the least suggestive that Jews are malicious or devious or racially impure or any of the other stereotypes of outright anti-Antisemitism — obviously leave today’s reader a little unsettled. There are just enough hints of an other-ness about Jews that Richardson will never get a clean bill of tolerance. And that graduate students will for years to come find an easy subject to base theses and dissertations on.
Deadlock ends with Miriam closing the door on her relationship with Michael; and the next chapter, Revolving Lights opens another on the relationship that will keep Richardson’s name in the history books no matter what happens to Pilgrimage: Miriam’s relationship with Hypo Wilson, the fictional counterpart of H. G. Wells, with whom Richardson had a brief affair that led (it is believed) to a miscarriage.
Deadlock, by Dorothy Richardson London: Duckworth, 1921
“It has been said that a judge is a member of the Bar who once knew a Governor,” Curtis Bok quips in the first story in his collection of judicial stories, The Backbone of the Herring. With this opening line, the reader immediately gets a sense of Bok’s easy-going humor and self-deprecation. Although John Lukacs once described Bok’s personality as “glacial”–which it may well have been in public–as a writer, channeled through his fictional identity as “Judge Ulen” in these stories, Bok comes across as the kind of judge you’d want to have hearing your case–whether as plaintiff or defendant: conscientious, empathetic, impartial, and capable taking or making a joke once in a while.
For a dozen years or so, starting in the late 1930s, 
was labelled as a feminist tract and fairly quickly dismissed and forgotten. Which was an apt demonstration of the very phenomenon noted in the quote from Victor Turner’s 
(1914). Sometime in spring 1908, she resigned from her post in Dr. J. H. Badcock’s dental practice in Harley Street and went to stay with a Quaker family, the Penroses, at their farm near Windmill Hill, a hamlet near 
