When Eliza Marian Butler, who published as E. M. Butler, died in November 1959, her Times obituary noted, among her many accomplishments, that “She also published two not very good novels.” Daylight in a Dream was the first, and I hope here to demonstrate that the Times writer was not only tactless but wrong.
The story in Daylight in a Dream reminded me a bit of Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Solder and Julian Barnes’ The Sense of an Ending. In all three books, a character is confronted by the uncomfortable fact that they’ve fundamentally misunderstood some key aspect of their past — the kind of realization that shakes a person to the roots. In this case, however, the fiction is also an attempt by its author to look back on her experiences — in particular Butler’s experiences during World War One — through the eyes of an alter ego.
Butler’s fictional self, Miss Rawlinson, is known and feared among the other faculty at Arcady Teaching College as “Old Raw.” “Her behaviour, her silences, her very pronunciation and choice of words implied a tacit criticism of their standards of conduct.” When they all relapse “one and all into mental undress” at the end of a hard day, she holds herself erect and aloof. She refuses to engage in gossip or impugn the good character and motives of the Principal, Miss Cardigan. “You ought to be governess to the Vere de Veres, that’s what you should be,” one of them snips sarcastically. [The Vere de Veres refers to a family of stratospheric nobility invented in a Tennyson poem, the source of the line “Kind hearts are more than coronets/and simple faith than Norman blood.”]
The very qualities that alienate “Old Raw” from her common room peers were what endeared her to the women’s nursing unit she served with on the Eastern Front in Russia in 1916-17. They were “fascinated by her phraseology, by her excessive personal modesty, by her manners, by her morals, by everything that was hers.” Soon after her arrival, someone refers to her as “Heart of Oak” and this quickly becomes her universal pet-name, “Oakey Darling.” Her Red Cross commander recommends her to Dr. Everet, the head of the unit, as “a capable mechanic, as steady as a rock, hasn’t a nerve in her body or one flighty thought in her head.”
Dr. Everet is Butler’s fictional substitute for Dr. Elsie Inglis, the Scottish surgeon and suffragette who established the Scottish Women’s Hospitals for Foreign Service at the start of World War One. The SWFHS organized and deployed field hospitals manned by women volunteers near the front lines in France, Romania, Russia, Macedonia, and Serbia. Inglis led the mission to Russia, which E. M. Butler joined as a translator and driver in 1916.
Already fluent in German and French and working as an assistant lecturer at Newnham College, Butler added a third language to make herself useful in the war effort. As she later wrote in her autobiography Paper Boats (1959) (available on the Open Library), “I set about learning Russian as a first step to getting out to Russia with the Red Cross or in any other way.” The Red Cross took her word that she could speak Russian and assigned her to escort four nurses down to the SWH unit already in place in Bessarabia (now part of Moldova), traveling via Norway, Sweden, Finland and down through much of White Russia and the Ukraine.
Along the way, she had an unsettling encounter with a seer while waiting to change trains in St. Petersburg. “Kakoe narod? (What people?),” the woman asked Butler. “Angliski,” she replied. “Ah,” the woman exclaimed, “Haroshi narod! (A fine people).” The woman told her to listen, then recited this list of names: “Kathleen Theresa Blake, Maude Juhemie, Rose Georgina, Theobald Blake, Fitzwalter, Francis James.” Despite the mispronunciation, Butler recognized the names of her six brothers and sisters. Butler, who later wrote an influential book on Ritual and Magic (1949), was always open to supernatural phenomena and accepted the woman’s instruction to “Go where you are waited for,” despite the warnings of the nurses accompanying her. Butler later claimed that the ghost of her first biographical subject Prince Hermann von Pückler-Muskau came to her while she was studying his papers and promised to make his handwriting decipherable.
Butler described her time at the front as “the happiest in my life.” In Paper Boats, she recalled odd mix of the grim and the sublime she experienced there:
At least twice every night it was my duty to collect all the bed-pans in the hospital and all the blood-stained dressings, empty them into so-called sanitary pails and stagger with them for about a quarter of a mile across the steppe to the so-called sanitary trench. It was noisome work, and frightening too, for I was nearly always accompanied by a savage pack of pariah dogs snapping and snarling at my heels. On the way back, I used to pause, drink in great gulps of air and look up at the stars. I would then become conscious of a sound never heard in the daytime. It was as if the steppe were sighing, softly, hopelessly, uncomplainingly. It was in fact the subdued chorus of the wounded men, hundreds of them, moaning in the night. They were heroically silent under suffering by day; but nature spoke at nightfall.
The dynamo powering the SWH unit in Russia was the organization’s founder, Dr. Inglis. Butler pays eloquent tribute to Inglis in Daylight in a Dream:
There was a driving-power in her fragile body which would have put a Rolls-Royce to shame, a genius for getting miracles to happen, and administrative gifts hardly distinguishable from statesmanship; for she refused to recognise impossibilities, and the hearts of her subordinates often sank like lead when she issued orders which must be obeyed and yet seemed impossible to fulfil.
A description that makes one long for such leadership today’s pandemic. In her book, British Women of the Eastern Front: War, Writing and Experience in Serbia and Russia, 1914-20, Angela K. Smith calls the SWH units “one of the most successful women’s organisations of the war”: “Of primary importance, they enabled women doctors to get to the heart of the action and save lives.” Inglis continued to work with the unit even after it became clear she was dying from cancer.
In October 1917, recognizing the increasing instability of the situation in Russia as the war was being overtaken by revolution, Dr. Inglis was ordered to evacuate her unit and take it by train to Archangel, from where it would sail home to England to be reorganized and sent to support the Serbian army fighting in Macedonia. Butler vividly recalls the long and difficult journey all the way from Odessa to the port in the Arctic north.
At one point, the driver takes the train through Moscow at high speed to avoid being stopped and attacked by rioting mobs. “Outside was the unknown and the unknowable,” she writes. “Inside, crowded together in fourth-class compartments, eating what little bully-beef there was out of battered tins, sharing knives, forks, and spoons and their inmost thoughts a handful of girls and women were living with an intensity which perhaps comes to few in a lifetime; and one of them with equal intensity was dying.”
This train journey is at the heart of the crucial revelation that comes to Miss Rawlinson. She encounters another former member of the unit, Miss Pearson, and they dine together, sharing memories. Pearson makes a passing comment to the unit’s almost losing all its supplies just before sailing from Archangel. Rawlinson is mystified and Pearson recounts a long and complicated tale of how Brook, the woman charged with getting the equipment on board, battled with recalcitrant rail officials and customs officers and managed, despite speaking almost no Russian and the imminent start of a nationwide strike, to prevent its being abandoned miles outside Archangel on a lonely siding.
This forces Rawlinson to remember the task given her at the start of the trip from Odessa: “You will place yourself unreservedly at Brook’s disposal on the journey whenever she needs help with the equipment.” When Brook had been asked who she wanted as an assistant, she had specifically picked “Oakey Darling.” Though Oakey Darling had accompanied Brook in checking on the cars holding the unit’s supplies at every stop along the way, when they arrived at Archangel she thoughtlessly boarded the freighter with the rest of the group, leaving Brook in the lurch. This, Rawlinson suddenly realizes, was why she had been ostracized — suddenly and without explanation, on the voyage back to England and thereafter. “There must be a blind spot in her somewhere,” she thinks. “That blind spot was her heart.”
In reality, it was Butler who saved the equipment. After pleading fruitlessly with the Archangel station master to shift the cars so the equipment could be loaded, she sought Dr. Inglis in her cabin on the Porto Lisboa. “She opened eyes which looked enormous in her small, white, freckled face, and whispered: ‘You must either get the equipment on board before we sail, or stay behind to guard it. Your duty is to the equipment.” Butler returned to the rail yard, where she spotted a last lone engine being returned to its depot in preparation for the strike. “In much more fluent Russian than I have ever commanded,” she recalled, “I told him what lay in store for me if those vans weren’t shifted immediately; and to my horror and dismay I found myself pulling out the vox humana stop. That did it. Without a word said on his side, the engine was driven up to the vans, coupled to them and driven up to the quay.”
Rawlinson leaves the unit when it arrives back in England. As with the real Elsie Inglis, Dr. Everet survives long enough to salute the Serbian troops accompanying the unit as they debark in Newcastle, only to retire to a nearby hotel and die in her sleep. Butler herself stayed with the SWH through its time in Serbia, returning to England in December 1918, whereupon she was hospitalized for nearly a year with malaria.
She went back to lecturing at Newnham in 1921 and remained until 1935, when she took a full professorship at the University of Manchester. She then returned to Cambridge in glory in 1945 as the Schroeder Professor, the pre-eminent faculty post in German language and literature. Her partner, Isaline Blew Horner, was a leading scholar of Pali literature, the canon of religious writings at the core of Theravada Buddhism. In keeping with the discretion of Butler’s time, Horner names appears just once, and in an innocuous context, in Butler’s autobiography. When he reviewed Paper Boats for the Telegraph, Anthony Powell wrote, “There is nowhere else in the world except these islands where women of Miss Butler’s kind are produced, scholarly and daring lades, never wholly out of touch with a kind of Jane Austen primness even at their most rebellious and outspoken, and in the midst of unlikely adventures.”
Daylight in a Dream is a slight novel, more of a novella at a mere 125 pages. But the Times did it and Butler a disservice by calling it “not very good.” In reality, it’s the kind of book that can only be written late in life, when the blacks and whites of youth and idealism have shaded and grown subtle with age and perspective. A book of the quality of A River Runs Through It or H. L. Davis’s The Winds of Morning — books in which, as I once wrote, the author’s voice is “spare, ironic, experienced but never claiming to be wise, with a soft-spoken good humor.” It’s also a book where you get the sense that by waiting so long to tell the story, the author was able to make it as short as possible.