DOROTHY RICHARDSON AND HER CENSOR
The novelists are behind the naturalists in the recording of minutiæ.
Many of the latter have set down the life history of certain species
of birds in exhaustive detail--every flip of the tail, every peck
preceding the grand drama of courtship and marriage, every solicitude
of paternity, every callousness of guardianship.
An analogous contribution to realism in the domain of fiction has
been made by Dorothy M. Richardson, an interesting figure in English
literature today. She has written six books about herself. When one
considers that her life has been uneventful, one might say drab,
commonplace, and restricted, this is an accomplishment deserving of
note and comment.
Critics and connoisseurs of literary craftsmanship have given her a
high rating, but they have not succeeded in introducing her to the
reading public. She is probably the least known distinguished writer
of fiction in England, but she has a certain public both in her own
country, and in this in which all her novels have been republished.
Her influence on the output of English fiction since the publication
of “Pointed Roofs,” in 1913, is one of the outstanding features in
the evolution of novel-writing during the present decade. Since
Flaubert set the pace for a reaction against the conception of the
realistic novel as the faithful transcription of life as perceived
by the novelist; and his followers introduced into novel-writing a
more subtle art than that of mere transcription of life, by making
the hypothetical consciousness through which the story is presented
a determining factor in its essence, this factor has been assuming a
more and more important rôle. The autobiographical novel, tracing its
lineage straight back to Rousseau, has become a prevailing fashion
in fiction. It remained, however, for Miss Richardson to give the
example--aside from James Joyce and Marcel Proust--of a novel in which
the consciousness of the writer should assume the leading rôle in a
drama that just missed being a monologue. Miss Richardson has made,
not herself in the ordinary sense of the word, but her subjective
consciousness, the heroine of her narrative; and the burden of it has
been to present the development of this consciousness, or energy,
directly to the reader in all its crudity and its dominancy. The
result is a novel without plot, practically without story interest.
It is a question what influence this “artistic subjectivism,” as Mr.
J. Middleton Murry has called it, will have upon the fiction of the
future. Of its influence upon that of the present there can be no
question.
Her technique is intensive, netting in words the continuous flow of
consciousness and semi-consciousness. She is first and foremost a
symbolist, an exponent of autistic thinking, a recorder of the product
of what is called by the popular psychology her “unconscious mind,”
which has got by the “censor,” a mythical sort of policeman who, in her
case, often sleeps on his post, or is so dazed by the supply from her
unconscious he cannot carry on.
This recently rechristened official, from the baptismal font of the
Freudians, is responsible for much literature of questionable value.
Latterly he has become something of a radical and has been permitting
stuff to get by on many wires and postal avenues that seems to those
whose “censors” have been doing duty in the name of Reason or _Amour
Propre_ to be, if not immoral, at least indecent. Miss Richardson's
“censor” is a Socialist, but he is not a Red. He hasn't much time for
appearances and diplomacy, and he has so many fish to fry that he
cannot have all his time taken up with putting his best foot forward.
Therefore Miriam Henderson doesn't believe in the religion of her
forebears, she isn't strong for the National cause, and she doesn't
hark to any party cry. She doesn't like her mother, and it is the
tendency of the modern “censor” to emphasise that; but to “pater”
her allegory and her ordered stream of thought are uniformly kind
and indulgent. Her “censor” early in life warned her that he was no
parent of shams and if she wanted to live a peaceful life she must
be unconventional. So Miriam determined to be “different.” She is
unsociable. She cannot think of anyone who does not offend her. “I
don't like men and I loathe women. I am a misanthrope. So is pater.”
He further assured her that “freedom” is the gateway and roadway to
happiness, and to travel thereon, with a little money to satisfy the
self-preservative urge, constituted the joy of life. Up to this point
Miriam and the “censor” got on famously. It was when he announced that
he was determined not to exhaust himself keeping down her untutored
passions that she revealed a determination that staggered him. The
“censor” capitulated. The result is that Miss Richardson's books are of
all symbolic literature the least concerned with the sinfulness of the
flesh, therefore furthest removed from comedy.
Miriam Henderson--who is Dorothy M. Richardson, the narrator of her
own life--is the third of four daughters of a silly, inane, resigned
little mother and an unsocial father of artistic temperament, the son
of a tradesman whose ruling passion is to be considered a country
gentleman. His attitude toward life and his efforts to sustain it have
culminated in financial ruin, and Miriam finds herself at the age of
eighteen, all reluctant and unprepared, confronted with the necessity
of depending upon her own efforts for a living--unless she can achieve
escape, as do two of her sisters, in marriage. She meets the situation
bravely--cowardice is not one of her faults--and the six books contain
a statement of her struggles against circumstance and a psychological
analysis of her personality. As self is less able to accept compromises
or to make adaptations in her case than in that of the average mortal,
the conflict is fierce; but it is soul struggle, not action.
Miriam's first tilt with life, recorded in “Pointed Roofs,” is as
a governess in a small German boarding-school, from which she is
politely dismissed, without assigned reason, at the close of the
first term. Her second, in “Backwater,” is as a teacher of drab
youngsters in a North London school. After less than a year, ennui,
restlessness, and discontent compel her to resign without definite
outlook or prospects. She finds herself, in “Honeycomb,” established
as governess to two children in the country home of a prosperous Q.C.
The situation suddenly becomes unendurable after a few months--for no
stated reason--and she eagerly seeks escape in her mother's illness. In
“The Tunnel” she at last finds a “job” to her taste when she becomes
assistant in the office of several London dentists, and denizen of a
hall bedroom in a dismal Bloomsbury rooming-house. In “Interim” she
loses her opportunity of marrying a wholesome Canadian by flirting with
a Spanish Jew. And in “Deadlock” she puts forth her first tentative
efforts to write and becomes engaged to a man with whom she believes
herself to be in love, but of whom she does not intellectually approve.
Her next novel is likely to be called “Impasse,” for meanwhile, in real
life, Miss Richardson has married and a new element has been introduced
into her life which she will not be able to keep from tincturing and
tinting her “unconscious,” but which she will not be able to get past
her “censor.” It would not surprise us either should she switch from
this series and cast her next book in the form of an episode or short
story. Revelations of impulses, thoughts, determinations have been
considered “good form” in literature when they were one's own, but when
they were another's, submitted to the narrator's judgement or reason,
especially a wife's or a husband's, it has been considered bad taste
either to narrate or to publish them. Moreover the alleged facts are
always questioned.
In the six books, whose titles are symbolic and which were originally
meant to be grouped under the one head of “Pilgrimage”--her adventure
of life--the author has presented what might be described as a cinema
of her mind, not particularly what the New Psychology calls, with
all the assurance of infallibility, the “unconscious mind.” She has
the faculty of taking a canvas and jotting down everything she sees
in a landscape and then finishing it in the studio in such a way as
to convince the person who has seen similar landscapes or who has an
eye for scenic beauty that her work is nearly perfect. She does it by
a skillful blending of the mind products of purposeful and autistic
thinking.
The autonomic mechanism of man displays the closest approximation to
perpetual motion that exists. It never rests. As yet we do not know
how far thought is conditioned by the autonomic nervous system, but
we know that the mind is never idle any more than the heart or the
lungs. Constantly a stream of thoughts flows from it or through it.
These thoughts vary in quality and quantity, and their variations
have formed endless and bitter discussions of psychologists. Whenever
the waking mind is not entirely occupied with directed thoughts, it
is filled with a succession of more or less vivid or vague thoughts,
often popularly referred to as “impressions,” which seem to arise
spontaneously and are usually not directed toward any recognised end or
purpose. A significant feature of them is the prominence of agreeable
impressions concerning oneself, people or things--or thoughts of these
as one would wish them to be, rather than as they are known to be. It
is these autistic, or wishful thoughts, which, constantly bubbling
up to the surface of consciousness like the water of a spring, give
colour to personality. They reveal it more luminously than anything
else--unless one goes still deeper and lays bare the thoughts at the
hidden source of the spring, thus penetrating the unconscious itself,
as the Freudians claim to do through the symbolism of dreams.
Whether Miriam Henderson, proceeding in this fashion, revealed more
of her real self than did Marie Bashkirtseff, or Anatole France in
“Le Petit Pierre,” “La Vie en Fleur” and the other charming books
with which he has been ornamenting his old age, is an open question.
However, Dorothy M. Richardson has established a reputation as one of
the few Simon-pure realists of modern English literature.
Another faculty which is developed to an exceptional degree in Miriam
is what psychologists call the association of cognitions and memories.
The “Wearin' of the Green” on a hand organ while she is big with
thoughts of what her trip to a foreign land may bring her makes her
think of
“rambles in the hot school garden singing 'Gather roses while
ye may,' hot afternoons in the shady north room, the sound of
turning pages, the hum of the garden beyond the sun-blinds,
meeting in the sixth form study ... Lilla with her black hair
and the specks of bright amber in the brown of her eyes, talking
about free-will.”
Then she stirs the fire and back her thoughts whisk to her immediate
concerns.
Music more than anything else calls into dominancy these associated
recollections. Listening to the playing of one of the schoolgirls at
the German school she suddenly realises:
“That wonderful light was coming again--she had forgotten
her sewing--when presently she saw, slowly circling, fading
and clearing, first its edge, and then, for a moment the
whole thing, dripping, dripping as it circled, a weed-grown
mill-wheel.... She recognised it instantly. She had seen it
somewhere as a child--in Devonshire--and never thought of it
since--and there it was. She heard the soft swish and drip
of the water and the low humming of the wheel. How beautiful
... it was fading.... She held it--it returned--clearer this
time and she could feel the cool breeze it made, and sniff
the fresh earthly smell of it, the scent of the moss and the
weeds shining and dripping on its huge rim. Her heart filled.
She felt a little tremour in her throat. All at once she knew
that if she went on listening to that humming wheel and feeling
the freshness of the air, she would cry. She pulled herself
together, and for a while saw only a vague radiance in the room
and the dim forms grouped about. She could not remember which
was which. All seemed good and dear to her. The trumpet notes
had come back, and in a few minutes the music ceased.... Someone
was closing the great doors from inside the schoolroom.”
It would be difficult to find in literature a better illustration
of revival of unconscious or “forgotten” memory than this. An
extraordinary thing about it is that these and similar revivals are
preceded by an aura or warning in the shape of a light, similar to the
warnings that Dostoievsky had before having an epileptic attack during
which he experienced ecstasy so intense and overpowering that had it
lasted more than a few seconds the human mechanism would have broken
beneath the display. Miriam's ecstasy is of a milder sort, and the
result is like that which the occupant of a chamber with drawn blinds
and sealed windows might experience should some magic power stealthily
and in a mysterious way flood it gradually with sunshine and replace
the stale atmosphere with fresh air.
Many can testify from personal experience the power that music has to
influence purposeful thinking. It would not astonish me to hear that
Einstein had solved some of the intricate problems of “relativity”
under the direct influence of the music of Beethoven, Wagner, or Liszt.
It is the rod with which most temperamental persons smite the rock of
reality that romance may gush out and refresh those who thirst for it.
Miriam often wields the rod in her early days to the reader's intense
delight.
While giving Miss Richardson her full measure of praise as recorder of
her unconscious mental activity in poetic and romantic strain, we must
not overlook her unusual capacity to delineate the realities of life,
as they are anticipated and encountered.
The description of her preparation for going away in the first chapter
of “Pointed Roofs” is perfect realism: the thoughts of a young girl
in whom a conflict between self-depreciation and self-appreciation
is taking place. This is marvellously portrayed in the narration of
her thoughts and apprehensions of her ability to teach English in the
German school to which she is journeying. It is a fool's errand to be
going there with nothing to give. She doubts whether she can repeat the
alphabet, let alone parse and analyse.
This mastery of realism is displayed throughout the series. The
inwardly rebellious governess in the country house of prosperous people
is made vivid in her setting when she says:
“There was to be another week-end. Again there would be the
sense of being a visitor amongst other visitors; visitor was not
the word; there was a French word which described the thing,
'convive,' 'les convives' ... people sitting easily about a
table with flushed faces ... someone standing drunkenly up with
eyes blazing with friendliness and a raised wineglass ... women
and wine, the rose of Heliogabalus; but he was a Greek and
dreadful in some way, convives were Latin, Roman; fountains,
water flowing over marble, white-robed strong-faced people
reclining on marble couches, feasting ... taking each fair mask
for what it shows itself; that was what this kind of wealthy
English people did, perhaps what all wealthy people did ... the
maimed, the halt, the blind, _compel_ them to come in ... but
that was after the others had refused. The thing that made you
feel jolliest and strongest was to forget the maimed, to _be_ a
fair mask, to keep everything else out and be a little circle of
people knowing that everything was kept out. Suppose a skeleton
walked in? Offer it a glass of wine. People have no right to be
skeletons, or if they are to make a fuss about it. These people
would be all the brighter if they happened to have neuralgia;
some pain or emotion made you able to do things. Taking each
fair mask was a fine grown-up game. Perhaps it could be kept up
to the end? Perhaps that was the meaning of the man playing
cards on his death-bed.”
The author has the gift of narration, too, of making a picture with a
few sweeps of the brush. In “Pointed Roofs” Miriam gives a synopsis
of her parents and their limitations in a few words, which is nearly
perfect. She does it by narration of her thoughts in retrospection,
which is another striking feature of her technique.
“She thought sleepily of her Wesleyan grandparents, gravely
reading the 'Wesleyan Methodist Recorder,' the shop at
Babington, her father's discontent, his solitary fishing and
reading, his discovery of music ... science ... classical
music in the first Novello editions ... Faraday ... speaking
to Faraday after lectures. Marriage ... the new house ... the
red brick wall at the end of the garden where young peach-trees
were planted ... running up and downstairs and singing ... both
of them singing in the rooms and the garden ... she sometimes
with her hair down and then when visitors were expected pinned
in coils under a little cap and wearing a small hoop ... the
garden and lawns and shrubbery and the long kitchen-garden
and the summer-house under the oaks beyond and the pretty
old gabled 'town' on the river and the woods all along the
river valley and the hills shining up out of the mist. The
snow man they both made in the winter--the birth of Sarah
and then Eve ... his studies and book-buying--and after five
years her own disappointing birth as the third girl, and the
coming of Harriet just a year later ... her mother's illness,
money troubles--their two years at the sea to retrieve ...
the disappearance of the sunlit red-walled garden always in
full summer sunshine with the sound of bees in it or dark
from windows ... the narrowings of the house-life down to the
Marine Villa--with the sea creeping in--wading out through
the green shallows, out and out till you were more than waist
deep--shrimping and prawning hour after hour for weeks together
... poking in the rock pools, watching the sun and the colours
in the strange afternoons ... then the sudden large house
at Barnes with the 'drive' winding to the door.... He used
to come home from the City and the Constitutional Club and
sometimes instead of reading 'The Times' or the 'Globe' or the
'Proceedings of the British Association' or Herbert Spencer,
play Pope Joan or Jacoby with them all, or Table Billiards and
laugh and be 'silly' and take his turn at being 'bumped' by
Timmy going the round of the long dining-room table, tail in
the air; he had taken Sarah and Eve to see 'Don Giovanni' and
'Winter's Tale' and the new piece, 'Lohengrin.' No one at the
tennis-club had seen that. He had good taste. No one else had
been to Madame Schumann's Farewell ... sitting at the piano
with her curtains of hair and her dreamy smile ... and the
Philharmonic Concerts. No one else knew about the lectures at
the Royal Institution, beginning at nine on Fridays.... No one
else's father went with a party of scientific men 'for the
advancement of science' to Norway or America, seeing the Falls
and the Yosemite Valley. No one else took his children as far as
Dawlish for the holidays, travelling all day, from eight until
seven ... no esplanade, the old stone jetty and coves and cowrie
shells....”
Nature was in a satirical mood when she equipped Miriam for her
conflict. Early the casual reader recognises her as the kind of girl
who is socially difficult and who seems predestined to do “fool
things.” The psychologist looks deeper and sees a tragic jest. Plain
in appearance, angular in manner, innocent of subtlety, suppleness,
or graciousness of body or soul, with a fine sensitiveness fed by
an abnormal self-appreciation, which she succeeds in covering only
at the cost of inducing in it a hot-house growth, Miriam Henderson
enters upon the task of an unskilled wage-earner with a mind turned
inward and possessed by that modern and fashionable demon politely
known as a “floating libido.” Dogged, if not actually damned, by her
special devil, Miriam is driven in frenzied and blinded unrest from
one experience to another, in vain efforts to appease its insistent
demands, placing the blame for her failure to achieve either success or
happiness everywhere except where it belongs.
Tortured by romantic sentimentalism unrelieved by a glimmer of
imagination or humour; over-sexed but lacking the magnetism without
which her sex was as bread without yeast; with a desire for adulation
so morbid that it surrounded itself with defences of hatred and
envy, Miriam's demon drove or lured her through tangled mazes of the
soul-game, and checkmated every effort to find herself through her
experiences.
In “Pointed Roofs,” even through the wall of self, the reader catches
the charm with which the German school held Miriam, in the music
floating through the big _saal_, the snatches of schoolgirl slang and
whimsical wisdom, and Fraulein Pfaff with her superstitions, her rages,
her religiosity, and her sensuality. But this is the background of the
picture, just as the background of the home which she had so clingingly
left had been the three light-hearted sisters with their white plump
hands and feminine graces, the tennis, the long, easy dreamy days; and
the foreground had been Miriam cherishing a feeling of “difference”
toward the feminine sisters, feeding her smarting self-love by her
fancied resemblance to her father who hated men and loathed women,
and dreaming of the “white twinkling figure coming quickly along the
pathway between the rows of hollyhocks every Sunday afternoon.”
The “high spot” in her experience at the German school is revealed in
the answer to the question: Why could not Miriam get on with “tall
Fraulein Pfaff smiling her horse smile”? Miriam leaves the school
cloaked in injured innocence. But the cloak is no mask for the native
wit of the schoolgirls. They know--and Miriam knows--that the answer
is the old Swiss teacher of French upon whom the Fraulein herself has
designs. Even before he is revealed reading poetry to the class with
a simper while Miriam makes eyes at him, or in a purported chance
encounter alone in the _saal_, the girls have twitted Miriam in a way
that would have warned a more sensible girl that she was venturing upon
dangerous ground. But Miriam's demon had made her insensible to such
hints, just as it had robbed her of the common sense which would have
made her understand, even without warnings, that she could not work for
a woman and “go vamping” on her preserves.
If Miriam's flirtation with the Swiss professor had been in a spirit of
frolicsomeness it would have presented at least one hopeful symptom.
But Miriam is incapable of frolicking--abnormally so. The absence of
the play impulse in her is striking, as is the lack of spontaneous
admirations or enthusiasms for people or things. Her impressions are
always in terms of sensuous attraction or repulsion--never influenced
by appeal to intellect, æsthetic taste, admiration, or ambition.
Other girls exist for her, not as kindred spirits, but as potential
rivals--even her sisters--and she is keen to size them up solely by
qualities which she senses may make them attractive to the other sex.
The exceptions to this are certain German girls whose over-sentimental
make-up furnishes easy material for Miriam's starved libido.
The next picture is at her country home where a dance has been staged,
in Miriam's own consciousness, especially as a temporary farewell
appearance of the “white twinkling figure,” now materialised into Ted.
Ted appears on programme time bringing with him a strange young man
with a German name and manner of speech, with whom she promptly goes
off spooning in a dark conservatory, where she is discovered by Ted.
She hopes the scene will stir Ted to emulation. But it does not. When
she returns to the light Ted has gone home. And that seems to be the
last of him. The strange young man is keen to announce his departure
the coming day for foreign parts. So Miriam is left to set off for her
next school without further adventures in love-making, and the reader
is left to wonder whether she is not one of the girls who are incurably
given to taking their Teds more seriously than they intend to be taken.
In “Backwater” Miriam is a teacher of little girls in a Bambury Park
school kept by three quaint refined little old English women--a
palatable contrast to the coarseness of Fraulein Pfaff--for nine
months. She is successful as a teacher, but finds her situation
unendurable and resigns. The emotional shallowness of the girls and
their lower middle-class mothers with aspirations to “get on” are
dreary, but hardly sufficiently dismal to provoke the black despair and
unreasoning rage which cause her to cry out in her moments of revolt,
“But why must I be one of those to give everything up?” There is no
masculine element connected with the school life, as there had been
with that of the German school. She contrasts herself with her sisters
who have made adaptations to life, two having become engaged and the
third having settled happily into a position as governess. But Miriam
can not settle, nor adapt. Her demon will not permit.
A girl of nineteen, brought up in middle-class culture, without
previous experiences except as teacher in two girls' schools, becomes
governess, as “Honeycomb” relates, in the country home of a Q. C.,
upon the introduction of friends of a future brother-in-law. From the
day of her arrival her wishful thinking revolves around the man of the
family. She loathes teaching the children and fails to hide from them
her boredom. By lampooning the eccentricities and stupidities of Mrs.
Corrie she betrays her hatred of women, her besetting “inferiority
complex,” which, in this instance, is partly justified by the adult
infantilism of the lady and her absorbing attachment to a woman of
questionable morality. Without anything to which to tie it on the
other side, Miriam constructs--as a spider might a web out of her own
unconscious self--a bridge of affinity between herself and the Q. C.,
placing such significance as her demon prompts upon his insignificant
words or looks, until he snubs her at dinner when she attempts to take
too leading a part in the conversation. Immediately she hates it all,
with the collapse of her bridge, and is ready to throw up her “job” and
all it implies.
Romance would seem remote from a hall bedroom in a sordid London
rooming-house and the duties of first aid to a firm of dentists. But
this is where Miriam finds it, for a time at least. The central figure
is one of the dentists in whom her autistic thoughts discover a lonely
sensitive man eager for the sympathetic understanding which Miriam is
ready to offer. The boredom of teaching gives place to ecstasy in the
discharge of the details, often repellent, which go to fill up the
“strange rich difficult day.” Her drab existence becomes a charmed
life until Miriam's libido, which has been running away with her like
a wild horse, shies right across the road at the first young girl she
sights within the orbit of the dentist. Judging from the reaction of
the latter, the explosion of jealousy and hatred that took place in
Miriam's mind must have found outward expression, for he retreats
behind a barrier of an “official tone,” which infuriates Miriam into
demanding an explanation and brings in reply to her demand a letter
from him beginning: “Dear Miss Henderson--You are very persistent”;
and concluding “foolish gossip which might end by making your position
untenable.” For the first time Miriam admits her folly, saying,
“I have nothing now but my pained self again, having violently
rushed at things and torn them to bits. It's all my fault from
the very beginning.... I make people hate me by _knowing_ them
and dashing my head against the wall of their behaviour.... I
did not know what I had. Friendship is fine, fine porcelain.
I have sent a crack right through it.... Mrs. Bailey (her
landlady) ... numbers of people I never think of would like
to have me always there.... At least I have broken up his
confounded complacency.”
When Miriam's dingy lodging-house becomes a boarding-house new food
comes to her creative urge in the form of daily association with
masculine boarders. Her resolution in the early pages of “Interim” to
take “no more interest in men,” collapses like a house of cards upon
the first onslaught. A close companionship develops between her and
a Spanish Jew of more than unconventional ideas and habits. But her
special devil is soon busy again, and Miriam discovers romance in the
presence in the house of a young Canadian who is studying in London.
When he comes into the dining-room where Miriam is sitting with other
boarders after dinner, and sits down with his books to study:
“He did not see that she was astonished at his coming nor her
still deeper astonishment in the discovery of her unconscious
certainty that he would come. A haunting familiar sense of
unreality possessed her. Once more she was part of a novel; it
was right, true like a book for Dr. Heber to come in in defiance
of every one, bringing his studies into the public room in order
to sit down quietly opposite this fair young English girl. He
saw her apparently gravely studious and felt he could 'pursue
his own studies' all the better for her presence.... Perhaps if
he remained steadily like that in her life she could grow into
some semblance of his steady reverent observation. He did not
miss any movement or change of expression.... It _was_ glorious
to have a real, simple homage coming from a man who was no
simpleton, coming simple, strong and kindly from Canada to put
you in a shrine....”
And yet all he does is to look at her! She goes for a walk and
“the hushed happiness that had begun in the dining-room half an
hour ago seized her again suddenly, sending her forward almost
on tiptoe. It was securely there; the vista it opened growing in
beauty as she walked; bearing within her in secret unfathomable
abundance the gift of ideal old-English rose and white gracious
adorable womanhood given her by Dr. Heber.”
When he goes to church she interprets it as a symptom of falling in
love, but if it is, the further progress of the disease is along
lines which would baffle even those who have specialised in the study
of the malady in fiction and poetry through ages. He goes back to
Canada, along with his companion students, without saying a word to his
fellow-boarder and leaves to the landlady the difficult task of warning
Miriam that her association with the Spanish Jew has furnished a
subject of gossip in the house, and that another boarder has confided
to her that Dr. Heber had “made up his mind to speak,” but that he had
been scared by Miriam's flirtation with the little Jew.
Miriam never questions the correctness of the landlady's diagnosis, nor
the authenticity of her information. Still less does she doubt her own
interpretation of the wholesome direct-minded Canadian's silent looks
in her direction.
Finally a man comes into her life who literally proposes marriage.
He is a young Russian Jew student, small of stature and suggestive
of an uncanny oldness. Under his influence she begins translating
stories from the German and seems to find some of the beneficial
possibilities of “sublimation” in the task. The test is not a true
one, however, because this little stream into which the current of her
libido is temporarily turned is too closely associated with the main
channel--Shatov--and when she becomes engaged to him the translation
seems to be forgotten.
“Deadlock” is the conflict between instinct and taste, involved in
marrying a man with whom she is in love but who arouses a revolt of her
inherited traditions and intellectual and æsthetic biases; or between
her ego instinct and her herd instinct. There the reader takes leave of
her at the end of the sixth volume.
A far more serious deadlock than that presented by her engagement is
the deadlock imposed upon Miriam by nature in creating her a woman and
endowing her with qualities which keep her in a state of revolt against
her Creator and against what to her is the indignity of being a woman.
This is epitomised splendidly in “The Tunnel,” when she is fretting her
mind through the wearying summer days to keep pace with the illness
that is creeping upon her. Entries in the dentists' index under the
word “Woman” start the train of thought:
“inferior; mentally, morally, intellectually and physically
... her development arrested in the interest of her special
functions ... reverting later towards the male type ... old
women with deep voices and hair on their faces ... leaving off
where boys of eighteen began.... Woman is undeveloped man ... if
one could die of the loathsome visions.... Sacred functions ...
highest possibilities ... sacred for what? The hand that rocks
the cradle rules the world? The future of the race? What world?
What race? Men.... Nothing but men; forever.... It will go on
as long as women are stupid enough to go on bringing men into
the world ... even if civilised women stop the colonials and
primitive races would go on. It was a nightmare. They despise
women and they want to go on living--to reproduce--themselves.
None of their achievements, no 'civilisation,' no art, no
science can redeem that. There is no possible pardon for men.
The only answer to them is suicide; all women ought to agree to
commit suicide.... All the achievements of men were poisoned at
the root. The beauty of nature was tricky femininity. The animal
world was cruelty. Jests and amusements were tragic distractions
from tragedy.... The woman in black works. It's only in the
evenings she can roam about seeing nothing. But the people she
works for know nothing about her. She knows. She is sweeter than
he. She is sweet. I like her. But he is more me.”
Earlier, but less consciously, she expresses it when, watching the men
guests at the Corrie's,
“Miriam's stricken eyes sought their foreheads for relief.
Smooth brows and neatly brushed hair above; but the smooth
motionless brows were ramparts of hate; pure murderous hate.
That's men, she said, with a sudden flash of certainty, that's
men as they are, when they are opposed, when they are real.
All the rest is pretence. Her thoughts flashed forward to a
final clear issue of opposition, with a husband. Just a cold
blank hating forehead and neatly brushed hair above it. If a
man doesn't understand or doesn't agree he's just a blank bony
conceited thinking, absolutely condemning forehead, a face
below, going on eating--and going off somewhere. Men are all
hard angry bones; always thinking something, only one thing at
a time and unless that is agreed to, they murder. My husband
shan't kill me.... I'll shatter his conceited brow--_make_ him
see ... two sides to every question ... a million sides ... no
questions, only sides ... always changing. Men argue, think they
prove things; their foreheads recover--cool and calm. Damn them
all--all men.”
Few writers could have sketched Miriam Henderson without condemning her
and without inviting the condemnation of the reader. Miss Richardson
has done it. She has given us Miriam as she knows herself, without
explanation, plea, or sentence, and left us to judge for ourselves. She
does not label her. And this is probably the reason Miss Richardson's
work has found so small an audience. People demand labels. They want to
be “told.” And she does not “tell” them. She invites them to think, and
original thinking is an unpopular process.
If ten people were to read these books and write their impressions of
them, the results would be as different as were the thoughts of the ten
people. Because each result would add what the author has left out: a
judgment, or an estimate of Miriam. And this judgment would be rendered
upon the evidence, but according to the mind of the judge.
The question which everyone must decide for himself is: when such
revelations of the conscious and the unconscious are spread before
him in words and sentences, does the result constitute gibberish or
genius; is it slush or sanity; is it the sort of thing one would try
to experience; or should one struggle and pray to be spared? It may be
the highroad to dementia--this concentrating of all one's thoughts upon
oneself, and oneself upon a single instinct. And Miriam might well have
been headed for it when she failed to differentiate between ideas based
upon objective evidence and ideas created solely out of her instinctive
craving, which is an approach toward the belief of the insane person in
his own delusions.
We identify ourselves, motives, and conduct with the characters of
fiction who cut a good figure; we identify with the ones who do not,
those we dislike, disdain, or condemn. Has anyone identified himself
with Miriam Henderson and added to his or her stature?
The strongest impression made upon an admirer of Miss Richardson's
craftsmanship is a wish that it might be applied to the study of a
different, a more normal, type of personality. But the wish that such
a study might be given us is burdened with a strong doubt whether its
fulfillment would be humanly possible. Could anyone but an extreme type
of egocentric person make such a study of himself? Could anyone whose
libido was normally divided in various channels follow its course so
graphically? And would not such division destroy the unity essential to
even so much of the novel form as Miss Richardson preserves?
Here is a deadlock for the reader: Miss Richardson's art and Miriam as
she is; or a Miriam with whom one could identify oneself as a heroine
of fiction.
The novel, according to Miss Richardson, may be compared to a
picture-puzzle in a box. Properly handled, the pieces may be made
to constitute an entity, a harmonious whole, a thing of beauty, a
portrait or a pergola, a windmill or a waterfall. The purpose of
the novel is to reveal the novelist, her intellectual possessions,
emotional reactions, her ideals, aspirations, and fulfilments, and to
describe the roads and short-cuts over which she has travelled while
accomplishing them. People and things encountered on the way do not
count for much, especially people. They are made up largely of women,
whom she dislikes, and men, whom she despises. It should be no part
of its purpose to picture situations, to describe places, to narrate
occurrences other than as media of author-revelation. Undoubtedly
it is one of the most delightful things in the world--this talking
about oneself. I have known many persons who pay others, physicians
for instance, to listen. But unless the narration is ladened with
adventure, or interlarded with humour, or spiced with raciness, it is
often boring; and reluctantly it must be admitted that when we have
ceased to admire Miss Richardson's show of art, when we no longer
thrill at her mastery of method, when we are tired of rising to the fly
of what Miss Sinclair calls her “punctilious perfection” of literary
form, she becomes tiresome. Egocentrics should have a sense of humour.
Samuel Butler thus endowed might have been assured of immortality.
Lacking that, they should have extensive contact with the world. That
is what enlivens the psychological jungle of Marcel Proust. If Henri
Amiel had had a tithe of Jean Jacques Rousseau's worldly and amatory
experiences his writings might have had great influence and a large
sale.
Miss Dorothy M. Richardson has revealed herself a finished technician.
She may be compared to a person who is ambitious to play the Chopin
Studies. She practices scales steadily for a year and then gives a
year to the Studies themselves. But when she essays to play for the
public she fails because, although she has mastered the mechanical
difficulties, she has not grasped the meaning. She reveals life without
drama and without comedy, and that such life does not exist everybody
knows.
She may have had compensation for her effort from two sources: her
imitators and her benefactors. The former are too numerous to mention,
but Mr. J. D. Beresford and Miss May Sinclair would undoubtedly admit
their indebtedness.
It is vicarious compensation, also, to be praised by one's peers and
superiors. If Dorothy M. Richardson hasn't yet had it, in the writer's
judgment she may look forward to it with confidence.