If And So Did I were to be published afresh today as the work of a woman in her late thirties with a number of well-received short story collections behind her, I have no doubt that it would be quite successful in its sales and critical reception. Thanks to Wild, Eat, Pray, Love, The Argonauts, The Liar’s Club, and dozens of other books, the world is ready–indeed, seems insatiable–for memoirs written by women with strong and distinctive voices.
Instead, when it was published in early 1939 in an England finding itself in a world of increasing uncertainty and dread, it received from an anonymous reviewer in The Spectator one of the most ruthless drubbings ever seen in print:
And So Did I (Jonathan Cape, 7s. 6d.) is a dangerous attempt to make new ground. It consists, apparently, in damp comments and scrappy reminiscences written at odd moments during her life in Yorkshire, and huddled together inconsequently into a full-size book. The result, from a conventional literary point of view, is worthless. Mrs. Malachi Whitaker has a certain talent for economical description; but her thoughts and feelings are dull. That she should find Ouspensky vain and pretentious, or admit that her own marriage was sordid, does not distinguish her intellect any more than her emotions. But presumably And So Did I is an attempt to exploit the personality of the author, even at the expense of deliberate literary faults…. Surely Mrs. Malachi Whitaker has been a little rash to attempt without artifice what, even had she used the greatest art, was likely to have failed.
This reviewer seemed to want Malachi Whitaker (the pen name adopted by the Yorkshire writer Marjorie Whitaker) to take her voice and personality and retreat to the silence and domestic matters that were a proper Englishwoman’s concerns. And if this was, in fact, his intent, then he should have been pleased with the results. Whitaker stopped writing almost entirely. She published just two more stories in the next ten years and, aside from the 1949 Selected Stories compiled from her previous four collections, never published another book. She died in 1976, noted in just a few brief obituaries. And thus was another fine woman writer effectively stifled.
Yet it’s hard to believe that Whitaker’s silence in print signified the stifling of her own spirit, for And So Did I is in its way one of the most original and vibrant spiritual autobiographies ever written. Whitaker took her title from a line in Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”: “And a thousand slimy things/Lived on; and so did I.” But it’s useful to read the lines that preceded it:
Alone, alone, all, all alone,
Alone on a wide wide sea!
And never a saint took pity on
My soul in agony.The many men, so beautiful!
And they all dead did lie:
And a thousand thousand slimy things
Lived on; and so did I.
Early in the book, Whitaker writes, “For at last, I have time to take up my long-abandoned search for God and the Truth,” and this search is the thread that weaves, sometimes overtly but most of the time indirect and subtly, throughout this seemingly haphazard collage of memories and observations.
For Whitaker, the world of the spirit is never quite tangible. She envies Saul for the revelation that came to him on the road to Damascus: “Yes, lucky, lucky Saul, to have all responsibility taken from him! All that was left for him was to do as he was told, then he could be sure of eternal salvation.” No voice speaks to her from the clouds. Instead,
I can only sigh and pass on, because the Hound of Heaven and me seem to keep about the same distance apart, both lolloping along with our tongues out, downhill, and stopping at the same time for meals and so forth. I have never even felt his warm breath at my shoulder.
Church is no use in her search:
If I could find God in a church, I should be glad. But I cannot. I go often to sit in churches, both here and abroad, to think about faith and piety, and to be sorry that I possess neither. Now and then I see a good and lovely face, but it is mostly on a very old woman; and it makes me think there might be some consolation in age.
Perhaps I have no deep feelings at all, in the religious sense. I am glad to see young creatures, and leaves, and patterned beetles and snowflakes, and to savour the taste of each season. But life itself is difficult, full of unfinished ends and unfinished thoughts. I once went into Cologne Cathedral just as a service was starting, and saw a beautiful coloured show. The faces around me were moved by some deep feeling; and I stood, alone, frowningly curious but quite cold.
The abstractions of God, heaven, and eternal life can never quite compete with the intensity of the things and people she encounters every day. Her daughter pulling herself up by the back of the typewriter as Whitaker sits trying to write at it. A box of fresh peaches from a friend. A delicious meal at her sister’s, with new potatoes and mint, grilled plaice with parsley sauce, and a rice pudding cooked five hours in a slow oven. But she pulls against these temptations:
There is one part of me which greatly wants to be a good cook, but I suppress it. It is a kind of road to ruin. If I went along that road, I should look for God and the truth no more. My mind would be intent on flavours and sauces. I should have a garden full of herbs, and a quantity of fat friends. No, I’ll do it when I have to, but I will not make cooking my reason for being on earth.
Words are another temptation: “Reading flows in and out of my like breath,” she writes, a phrase I’d easily adopt as a motto. “It is something to keep my mind alive, as oxygen and–I have forgotten what else–keeps alive my body.” The books she reads populate her thoughts every bit as much as the people in her life. And the people, particularly her husband and their two adopted children, constantly draw her mind away from its attempts to escape to a more ethereal level:
Where am I? Here is my adopted son, reading the evening paper, one knee up and one knee down, his fair hair darkened on this side which is away from the light of evening. He has twisted round and shown me a hole in the seat of his trousers with an expression of great surprise. It is the first of what I suppose will be many. Baby is by now fast asleep in her cot. My husband is in London. So I suppose I should look at the living moment and find it doleful, but I don’t want to. There is a fire, and that is such good company.
Malachi Whitaker herself is such good company that whether or not one is in sympathy with her efforts to escape the mundane, And So Did I is never less than vivid and amiable. “I like to read what other people have written,” she writes, “in the hope that I can get a glimpse of the garden enclosed, through a tiny peephole”:
For I do believe that everybody owns the equivalent of a garden; a place inside themselves that they know has something really good in it; something from which they can give. But the flowers have a habit of turning to the rankest weeds during the transfer.
One can only conclude that for The Spectator’s reviewer, And So Did I turned to rankest weeds during the transfer–which undoubtedly was his fault and not Whitaker’s. As Philip Hensher has written, “Malachi Whitaker is not like other authors…. [I]t is inexplicable how English letters failed to find a place for a writer of such verve, colour, range and power.” “Life has been perfect in parts,” she writes at the end of And So Did I. And for my life, reading this book was one of those parts.
In 1984 Carcanet Press, a fine U.K. independent now based in Manchester, published a collection of Whitaker’s stories, The Crystal Fountain, edited by Joan Hart, another Yorkshire woman and writer of short stories, and followed it in 1987 with And So Did I. Paladin reissued it in paperback in 1990–the last time it was in print. However, with the recent release by Persephone Books of The Journey Home and Other Stories, edited by Hensher, there is a chance that And So Did I might see the light of day again.