Literary Impressionism: Vision and Memory in Dorothy Richardson, Ford Madox Ford, H.D. and May Sinclair 9781474269056, 9781474269087, 9781474269070

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Literary Impressionism

Historicizing Modernism Series Editors Matthew Feldman, Professor of Contemporary History, Teesside University, UK Erik Tonning, Professor of British Literature and Culture, University of Bergen, Norway Assistant Editor: David Tucker, Postdoctoral Researcher, University of Chester, UK. Editorial Board Professor Chris Ackerley, Department of English, University of Otago, New Zealand; Professor Ron Bush, St. John’s College, University of Oxford, UK; Dr Finn Fordham, Department of English, Royal Holloway, UK; Professor Steven Matthews, Department of English, University of Reading, UK; Dr Mark Nixon, Department of English, University of Reading, UK; Professor Shane Weller, Reader in Comparative Literature, University of Kent, UK; and Professor Janet Wilson, University of Northampton, UK. Historicizing Modernism challenges traditional literary interpretations by taking an empirical approach to modernist writing: a direct response to new documentary sources made available over the last decade. Informed by archival research, and working beyond the usual European/American avant-garde 1900–45 parameters, this series reassesses established readings of modernist writers by developing fresh views of intellectual contexts and working methods. Series Titles Arun Kolatkar and Literary Modernism in India, Laetitia Zecchini British Literature and Classical Music, David Deutsch Broadcasting in the Modernist Era, Matthew Feldman, Henry Mead and Erik Tonning Ezra Pound’s Adams Cantos, David Ten Eyck Ezra Pound’s Eriugena, Mark Byron Great War Modernisms and The New Age Magazine, Paul Jackson John Kasper and Ezra Pound, Alec Marsh Katherine Mansfield and Literary Modernism, Edited by Janet Wilson, Gerri Kimber and Susan Reid Late Modernism and The English Intelligencer, Alex Latter The Life and Work of Thomas MacGreevy, Susan Schreibman Modern Manuscripts, Dirk Van Hulle Modernism at the Microphone, Melissa Dinsman Reading Mina Loy’s Autobiographies, Sandeep Parmar Reframing Yeats, Charles Ivan Armstrong Samuel Beckett and Arnold Geulincx, David Tucker Samuel Beckett and The Bible, Iain Bailey Samuel Beckett’s German Diaries 1936–1937, Mark Nixon Samuel Beckett’s ‘More Pricks Than Kicks’, John Pilling T. E. Hulme and the Ideological Politics of Early Modernism, Henry Mead Virginia Woolf ’s Late Cultural Criticism, Alice Wood

Literary Impressionism Vision and Memory in Dorothy Richardson, Ford Madox Ford, H.D. and May Sinclair Rebecca Bowler

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published 2016 Paperback edition first published 2018 Copyright © Rebecca Bowler, 2016 Rebecca Bowler has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on p. vii constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover design: Eleanor Rose All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN:

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Contents Acknowledgements Introduction 1

2

3

4

Literary Impressionism: Subjective and Objective Visions in Dorothy Richardson and Ford Madox Ford ‘The thing perceived and herself perceiving’: The double impression Realism, impressionism and Henry James Subjectivity and objectivity Representing the unrepresentable I: Total experience and the distracted subject in Ford Madox Ford’s Parade’s End Representing the unrepresentable II: Masculine blindness and feminine angles of vision in Dorothy Richardson’s Pilgrimage Selection and patterning: The impressionist text as tapestry Mystical Visions and Primary Perception: May Sinclair and Dorothy Richardson Naming the unnameable: Silence, mysticism, philosophy, religion Silence and Maeterlinck Mysticism, philosophy and the absolute ‘Breaking through the veil of sense’: God and reality Visual Metaphors: Dorothy Richardson and H.D. Seeing through representation I: The world as art Seeing through representation II: The body as art The composite image: Fidelity through multiplicity Weaving Cinematic form Soporific cinema and the creative collaboration of art and audience Interlude: ‘To focus from a distance’: Solitude and coming to writing Memory, Distance, Perspective Psychology and the novel-memoir: May Sinclair and Ford Madox Ford

vii 1

17 17 19 30 35 45 52

63 72 73 79 86 93 98 108 115 120 128 137 142 163 163

vi

Contents

‘Post-war Freudianity’: Trauma, repression and detachment ‘Disinterested contemplation’: Dorothy Richardson’s March Moonlight and the ‘middles’ Gallery spaces: Memory and metaphor in Richardson and H.D. Conclusion: ‘Proust and Proust and Proust. Forwards, Backwards, Upside Down’ Works Cited Index

183 193 208

223 233 245

Acknowledgements I owe a great debt to Scott McCracken and all members of the Dorothy Richardson Society, for scholarly discussions, inspiring projects and the excitement of being a part of something significant. The AHRC funded the Dorothy Richardson Scholarly Editions Project, which enabled me to work on the editing of Richardson’s letters as well as giving me the means to undertake archival research. I would like to thank the staff at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, where I  held the H.D. Fellowship in British and American Literature and spent a whole month looking at Richardson’s, Bryher’s and H.D.’s letters and manuscripts. Thanks too go to David McKnight and the staff at the Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Book and Manuscripts, UPenn for all their help in negotiating May Sinclair’s papers. Scholars at the H.D. Society, the Ford Madox Ford Society and the May Sinclair Society provided ideas, support, information and book loans. I  am grateful too to all the staff at Keele University and the University of Sheffield for support in both the writing of the thesis and later of the monograph. Adam Piette was the best PhD supervisor I could have hoped for. The greatest thanks go to my friends and family, and in particular to Joe, for absolutely everything.

Introduction

Literary impressionism was not the same as painterly impressionism. Jesse Matz, in his seminal work Literary Impressionism and Modernist Aesthetics, recounts some similarities: The Impressionisms of painting and literature share an interest in subjective perception. This shift from object to subject, with its emphasis on point of view, seems to have entailed in both arts attention to evanescent effects, radical fidelity to perceptual experience, and a consequent inattention to what had been art’s framing concerns. [. . .] Emphasis on the experience of the senses enabled the artist to make art more perfectly reflect lived experience.1

However, Matz sees literary impressionism as a move away from simple visual representation, or ‘sensation’, to an awareness of the ‘combination of (or middle ground between) sense and thought’.2 Where painterly impressionism is firmly grounded in the senses, and the simple representation of atmosphere, literary impressionism is concerned with the representation of atmosphere, and then the representation of the effect of atmosphere on a character’s mind, or, conversely, the character’s sensibilities and the way they then create atmosphere. Literary impressionism, as Matz defines it, is not simply the perceptual, sensory impression, it is ‘a metaphor for perception’.3 Within this metaphor the impression is double. It is both ‘what brushes by the mind and the physical impress it leaves there’. It is the moment, and the reflection on the moment. In Virginia Woolf ’s aesthetics, it unites ‘experience and essence’, or ‘living and being’.4 In Henry James, the doubleness is expressed as experience and impression. The first part 1

2 3 4

Jesse Matz, Literary Impressionism and Modernist Aesthetics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), p. 45. Ibid., pp. 49–50. Ibid., p. 18. Ibid., p. 32.

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of the impression, perception, as it ‘brushes by the mind’ and the experience implied by ‘the physical impress it leaves there’ are inextricably linked. The impression is not just the in-between of perception and impress; it explores the tension between an objective looking outwards and a subjective looking within. In her discussion of impressionism within modernist literature, Tamar Katz makes precisely this point: On the one hand impressionism seems to argue that the subject is indeed isolated, its only contact with the world a stream of unreliable perceptions. In this view we appear as autonomous selves, constructing fictions about the shape of a world that is outside us. But impressionism also posits a subject who is thoroughly permeated by sensation and is thus so formed by its specific setting that it lacks any autonomy; rather it is wholly constructed from without.5

The objective external world and the subjective inner workings of the mind are both implicated, and the tensions between each are difficult to negotiate. The literary impression is thus the concern of the modernist subject who perceives, who registers that perception, and who later comes to the act of writing and the attempt to render this doubleness of the impression in all its complexity: both the act of primary perception and the nature of its encoding by the intellect. In the late nineteenth century, and well into the twentieth century, as new visual technologies were being developed, transport became faster and more efficient, the world became smaller, and life became faster, the prevalent feeling was one of sensory overstimulation. In about 1887, for example, Friedrich Nietzsche was writing of ‘modernity’ as an overwhelming ‘flood of impressions’: the abundance of disparate impressions greater than ever: cosmopolitanism in foods, literatures, newspapers, forms, tastes, even landscapes. The tempo of this influx prestissimo; the impressions erase each other; one instinctively resists taking in anything, taking anything deeply, to ‘digest’ anything; a weakening of the power to digest results from this.6

The fear was that this constant demand for attention would change people’s ways of seeing and that, as Nietzsche put it, people would ‘unlearn spontaneous action’ and ‘merely react to stimuli from the outside’. This new passive observer, formed by a continual exposure to external media, and to new global tastes in food, literature and ‘even landscapes’ is a new and modern subject, created, as 5

6

Tamar Katz, Impressionist Subjects:  Gender, Interiority, and Modernist Fiction in England (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000), p. 9. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Vintage, 1968), p. 41.

Introduction

3

Karen Jacobs writes, by ‘changing cultural conditions’.7 New fragmentary ways of seeing and of processing the world then lead to questions about the politics of the visual, and what Jacobs calls ‘this Western crisis of confidence of the eye’.8 The crisis of confidence in modernist vision was actually a crisis of knowledge, caused in part by new visual technologies that presented different versions of visual reality than were previously seen. Photography and cinema provided realistic representations of the world, and were seen as perhaps more objective as representations than the representations of the eye itself. The microscope and X-ray improved upon the human eye and enabled new visions previously unimagined. Optical illusions and mechanized peepshows proliferated. As Maggie Humm writes, ‘Modernity witnessed a transformation in the production of the visual more profound than the discovery of Renaissance perspective’.9 However, the problem with the proliferation of new visual productions (as was also the case with Renaissance perspective) was how to distinguish the real from the artificial, the original from the representation. This became, as Humm points out, a distinctly modernist preoccupation: ‘The production of new representations of cognition, of new ways of seeing and knowing the world, became the common project of the modernist writers Woolf, Joyce and Richardson as well as modernist artists, such as Picasso and Braque in their Cubist periods’.10 Sara Danius argues convincingly that the modernist ‘sensory crisis’ was actually caused by emergent technologies, particularly ‘technologies of perception’.11 This is certainly the case for Dorothy Richardson, Ford Madox Ford, H.D. and May Sinclair. As a necessary adjunct to a preoccupation with the processes of perception, all four authors seize upon and exploit emergent visual technologies for the light that they can shed upon the complex acts of perception and representation. Adam Parkes writes, in A Sense of Shock, that ‘literary impressionism was shaped by active engagement with larger cultural phenomena that defined the modern age’. It is important to place literary impressionism in its wider cultural context, which for Parkes includes ‘anarchism and terrorism, homosexuality and feminism, nationalism and war, economic depression and the new global media’.12

7

8 9

10 11

12

Karen Jacobs, The Eye’s Mind: Literary Modernism and Visual Culture (London: Cornell University Press, 2001), p. 4. Ibid., p. 8. Maggie Humm, Modernist Women and Visual Cultures: Virginia Woolf, Vanessa Bell, Photography and Cinema (New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 2003), p. 1. Ibid., p. 2. Sara Danius, The Senses of Modernism:  Technology, Perception, Aesthetics (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2002), p. 3. Adam Parkes, A Sense of Shock: The Impact of Impressionism on Modern British and Irish Writing (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), p. x.

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However, it is arguably even more important to recognize the importance of the influence of cinema, photography, painting and theatre on literary impressionism, as impressionist writers were self-consciously and purposefully engaging with these media. The struggle within literature for new ways of seeing, and subsequently representing the visual world, was then a reaction to other visual media, and to the speed and relentlessness of modernity itself. In modernist literature we have many examples of close-up seeing, of phenomenological attention to the pure visuality of ordinary objects, notably in early Imagist poetry, where to capture an image was the aim. The project of presenting images using words, however, is necessarily flawed. Thus we have Ezra Pound’s image of faces as ‘Petals on a wet, black bough’,13 which metaphor, as Andrew Thacker points out, gets in the way of the direct objective image, which ‘is vanquished by the subjectivism of the perceiving consciousness’.14 Another technique was a textual appropriation of the cinematic close-up, such as Katherine Mansfield uses repeatedly, for example the ‘exquisite little amber lamp with a white globe’ in ‘The Doll’s House’, and her recurring motif of intensely drawn fruits and flowers.15 As famous, for its montage effect, is Virginia Woolf ’s aeroplane scene in Mrs Dalloway, in which the looping of the aeroplane and the effort to decode what it is writing is intercut with the faces of the Londoners ‘gazing straight up’.16 There are multiple faces and multiple interpretations, but the crowd is unsure as to what they see, and so vision itself is destabilized. What is interesting here is not merely the gesture towards cinematic technique, but the implied critique of the equation between seeing and knowing. It is no longer a given that we acquire our knowledge through the eye. Each member of the crowd is seeing differently, and subjectively. Subjective visions cannot co-exist with the Cartesian model of seeing and knowing, and modernist literature repeatedly emphasizes this in its own destabilizing of vision, and its commentary about the new ways of seeing and representing that it sets up in the place of the old model. This new model is one in which subjective vision and objective visioning can co-exist. 13

14

15

16

Ezra Pound. ‘In a Station of the Metro’, in Imagist Poetry, ed. by Peter Jones (London:  Penguin, 1972), p. 49. Andrew Thacker, Moving Through Modernity: Space and Geography in Modernism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003), p. 101. Katherine Mansfield, Selected Stories (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 351. I’m thinking of the fruit in ‘Bliss’: ‘tangerines and apples stained with strawberry pink. Some yellow pears, smooth as silk; some white grapes covered with a silver bloom and a big cluster of purple ones’ (p. 175), as well as ‘The Garden Party’s ‘canna lilies, big pink flowers, wide open, radiant, almost frighteningly alive on bright crimson stems’ (p. 339). There are, of course, many more instances of close-up phenomenological seeing in Mansfield. Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 17.

Introduction

5

In 1935 the editor of The London Mercury, R. A. Scott-James, reviewed Clear Horizon, the last chapter-volume of Dorothy Richardson’s long novel Pilgrimage which was to be published in her lifetime.17 He found in it a kind of reflection upon, and bringing together of, all the previous chapter-volumes: In summing up all the impressions that have gone to the making of Miriam as she is now, in minutely exposing the mature subtleties of apprehension with which she takes in every situation, her record has acquired an intellectual character; Miriam is no longer merely perceiving; she is seen severely reflecting upon perception. It is perhaps natural that at this stage her mind should be filled with memories; and memories, for her, evoke criticism of past thought. [. . .] It is evident that the distinctive excellence for which Miss Richardson stands made it desirable for her to have just such a vehicle as she has chosen; her technique exactly serves her purpose. It lends itself – one might add – to artistic laziness  – possibly a feminine defect?  – to following the least line of resistance in recording the unordered flow of impressions as they pass through the mind.18

In the Richardson Papers at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, there are two copies of this review, both of which have Richardson’s comments written in the margin. Where Scott-James has declared Miriam to be ‘no longer merely perceiving’, Richardson comments: ‘The critic has failed to realise that M’s experience, maturing her, renders possible a less crude expression, of her perceptions & reactions, than formerly was inevitable’. And where Scott-James criticizes the ‘feminine defect’ of ‘following the least line of resistance in recording the unordered flow of impressions as they pass through the mind’, Richardson has written ‘By no means “unordered”. Ordered by relative prominence’.19 What Scott-James has unwittingly pinpointed here is Dorothy Richardson’s literary impressionism. Miriam wanders the world with her eyes wide open, delivers to us her perceptions and delivers to us too her reflection upon those perceptions: she then retrospectively orders these impressions through memory. She aims for, and achieves, an objective rendering of subjectivity. Scott-James’s 17

18

19

Dorothy Richardson called each instalment of Pilgrimage a ‘chapter-volume’, emphasizing the continuous nature of the work. See for example her letter to Sylvia Beach in 1934. Gloria Fromm, ed., Windows on Modernism: Selected Letters of Dorothy Richardson (London: The University of Georgia Press, 1995), pp. 276–7. R. A. Scott-James, ‘New Literature: Quintessential Feminism’, in London Mercury (December 1935). Dorothy Richardson Collection. General Collection, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. Ibid.

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assumption that this ‘intellectual character’ is new is perhaps understandable:  the later volumes of Pilgrimage feature, as Richardson points out in her annotation, a more mature Miriam, one capable of more critical reflection. But reflection upon perception, and analysis of the problems of perception, representation and memory have been present in Pilgrimage from the very beginning. It is this continual self-reflection that makes Pilgrimage a tour-de-force of modernism, and of literary impressionism. In To The Lighthouse, Woolf ’s Lily Briscoe as fictional artist is a good example of this tendency towards the narrativization of reflection upon perception. Lily sees the world with such intensity, as ‘the colour burning on a framework of steel; the light of a butterfly’s wing lying upon the arches of a cathedral’, that she cannot fall back on traditional realist modes of painting and must instead create her own.20 Her creation of the ‘triangular purple shape’ as a figure for Mrs Ramsey and her son comes about through an abstracted method of seeing: ‘subduing all her impressions as a woman to something much more general; becoming once more under the power of that vision which she had clearly seen once [. . .] – her picture’.21 Woolf here seems to be stressing that the artistic eye, the way of seeing that comes to closest to reality is a mixture of both the subjective and the objective vision. The vision that Lily sees is subjective, a creation consisting of light and shade, and abstractions. However the method by which she attains this is an objective one. She casts off her individual impressions, and becomes instead ‘an artist’: a decorporealized eye. The solution, in Woolfian terms, is one available to artists, and to creators, but not to the crowd. Karen Jacobs places great importance on the ‘interior gaze’ as a modernist strategy for preserving ‘a positivist fantasy of the availability of visual truths by strategically conceding their difficulty of access’.22 The artist can see, and can report to the world what they see, and also, by being aware of the complexities of vision, can criticize and comment upon their own methods for doing so. The four writers discussed in this volume all do just this, but they approach their impressionist experiments in different ways. Ford creates and promotes his idea of the ‘literary Impression’ as a means of probing into the question of perception, its encoding and its representation. He tries to represent both the primary vision and its registration upon the mind, and he watches himself (and invites us to watch him) in the attempt. May Sinclair claims that she has access to primary

20 21 22

Virginia Woolf, To The Lighthouse (London: Blackwell Publishers, 1992), p. 43. Ibid., pp. 46–7. Jacobs, p. 19.

Introduction

7

perception, but only at moments, as a kind of mystical epiphany or realization of the ‘Absolute’. She then struggles valiantly to represent that primary perception without resorting to encoding methods, or the use of metaphor, and finds that the application of language to the pre-linguistic vision is impossible. H.D.’s work dwells upon metaphor as the way her impressions are processed (as with Lily Briscoe’s ‘butterfly’s wing lying upon the arches of a cathedral’) so that primary perception is never available to her: she sees through metaphor. Dorothy Richardson engages with all three of these strategies in turn. Pilgrimage’s protagonist Miriam Henderson sees, and she presents what she sees, but in the process she comments upon her own seeing, her own representation, and how it relates to art: both the art of life and the textual art she eventually goes on to produce. Richardson then presents us with the quintessential modernist artist figure:  a mobile, gazing woman whose insecurities about perception and representation typify the entire modernist ‘crisis of confidence in the eye’.23 As Max Saunders outlines in his excellent study of modernist experiments with life-writing, Self Impression, literary impressionism, previously ‘elbowed out of the way’ in narratives of modernism as a reaction against the old, the Victorian, and the realist, has recently received considerable critical interest. An examination of impressionism’s influence on modernism not only ‘gives a new kind of coherence to the longer story of the development of modern literature’;24 but reveals impressionism as the foundation upon which modernism was built:  ‘Literary history from the late nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth century is thus re-read as a series of responses to impressionism’s challenge to subjectivity – to the experience of perception, the experience of time, and the intelligibility of the self ’.25 This book will suggest that Richardson’s engagements with vision, with literary impressionism, with visual technologies and with the Proustian turn to memory are crucial to an understanding of modernist impressionism, vision and memory more generally. There are three reasons why Richardson is so important to a study of fin-de-siècle literary impression: her innovative visual aesthetics, her use of visual technologies as metaphors and the importance of time and memory to her project. She is exemplary in the way she adopts and adapts each of these aesthetic narrative strategies progressively throughout Pilgrimage. Because of this, Richardson is a useful lens through which to view the work of the literary impressionists Ford Madox Ford, H.D., 23 24

25

Ibid., p. 4. Max Saunders, Self Impression:  Life-Writing, Autobiografiction, and the Forms of Modern Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), p. 13 Ibid., p. 14.

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and May Sinclair and their related but different experiments with ideas of vision and memory. Paul B.  Armstrong’s The Challenge of Bewilderment groups together three writers as proponents of the literary impression: Henry James, Joseph Conrad and Ford Madox Ford.26 Jesse Matz’s Literary Impressionism and Modernist Aesthetics looks at the impressionism of Walter Pater, James, Thomas Hardy, Conrad, Ford and Virginia Woolf.27 To this list of writers concerned with the impression is sometimes added the names of Stephen Crane and Gustav Flaubert.28 Tamar Katz’s list contains more women alongside the familiar names: George Egerton, Sarah Grand, Woolf and Dorothy Richardson, as well as Pater, Conrad and Ford. Julia van Gunsteren’s Katherine Mansfield and Literary Impressionism also presents a strong case for Mansfield as an impressionist.29 Of all these writers, however, only Ford adopted the term as a descriptor of his own work, as Saunders notes: ‘He proclaimed himself an impressionist figure from an early stage, and became literary impressionism’s most prolific exponent’.30 Despite the reluctance of other writers to adopt such a label, ‘part of the modernism of writers like James, Proust, Conrad, Dorothy Richardson, and Woolf is precisely their concern for the impression’.31 H.D. and May Sinclair are conspicuously absent from the roll call of impressionist writers, as they are conspicuously absent too from the grand narratives of modernism. H.D.’s fame as an Imagist poet has resulted in her experimental prose being sidelined in favour of a Poundian ‘make it new’ modernist story, and Sinclair’s status as fin-de-siècle writer (she is often considered as a Victorian realist in her early works, and a modernist innovator in her later works) has made her difficult to fit into the ‘great works of 1922’ framework.32 Both H.D.  and May Sinclair are, however, deeply concerned with the literary impression: with the processes of perception, reflection upon perception, and the difficulty of 26

27 28

29

30 31 32

Paul B. Armstrong, The Challenge of Bewilderment: Understanding and Representation in James, Conrad, and Ford (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1987). Matz, Literary Impressionism and Modernist Aesthetics. See James Nagel, Stephen Crane and Literary Impressionism (Philadelphia:  Pennsylvania State University Press, 1980). Julia van Gunsteren, Katherine Mansfield and Literary Impressionism (Amsterdam and Atlanta:  Rodopi, 1990). See also Rebecca Bowler, ‘ “The Beauty of Your Line  – The Life Behind It”: Katherine Mansfield and the Double Impression’, in Katherine Mansfield Studies, Vol. 3, No. 1 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011), pp. 81–94. Saunders, Self Impression, p. 267. Ibid., p. 265. May Sinclair’s short novel Life and Death of Harriett Frean was in fact published in 1922, and has been hailed as an example of modernist brevity, introspection and psychology. However, subsequent novels are more comic, and more middle-brow. Her 1922 modernism was the end of her period of modernist experimentation.

Introduction

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representing impressions in all their complexity with any fidelity. The central tension in H.D.’s Palimpsest, Bid Me to Live and Asphodel; in May Sinclair’s Mary Olivier: A Life, and her impressionistic A Journal of Impressions in Belgium; in Ford’s The Good Soldier, Parade’s End and his auto/biographies, and in Dorothy Richardson’s Pilgrimage is between immediacy and distance. How close can writing get to the pure perception, or how near can memory get to the perception before it was inscribed? Is a subject shaped by its environment, by its profession, by its economic status, or is there something detached, something which can ironically comment on the outward display of that status? How can one get close to inner ‘reality’ when social details, language and even mental processes have a distancing effect? If cosmopolitan modernity itself, with its ‘overwhelming burden of stimuli’, inevitably produces a subject who cannot and will not receive impressions deeply then how to represent this modernity if you can do it only through a subject’s impressions?33 What is the distance between the actual and the represented in art? Can cinema’s mobility render events as more immediate and thus effectively remove the distance between observer and observed? Where, above all, can one place oneself in relation to one’s surroundings so that they can be perceived, registered and then represented, with the greatest possible immediacy? This essential modernist dilemma was addressed by literary modernists in a variety of ways. It was, according to Christina Britzolakis, partially solved by Joseph Conrad by an attention to close-up detail, by his ‘defensive persistence of vision; concentration on the isolated visual detail averts a traumatic overwhelming of the spectator by the abysmal city’.34 It was also partially solved by Katherine Mansfield in her characters’ sympathetic becoming and embodying of the objects they see, as in ‘At the Bay’, in which Linda examines, wonders at, and ultimately becomes the manuka tree: If only one had time to look at these flowers long enough, time to get over the novelty and strangeness, time to know them! But as soon as one paused to part the petals, to discover the underside of the leaf, along came Life and one was swept away. And, lying in her cane chair, Linda felt so light; she felt like a leaf. Along came Life like a wind and she was seized and shaken; she had to go.35 33

34 35

Christina Britzolakis, ‘Pathologies of the Imperial Metropolos:  Impressionism as Traumatic Afterimage in Conrad and Ford’, in Journal of Modern Literature, Vol. 29, No. 1 (Fall 2005), pp. 1–20, p. 4. Ibid., p. 12. Angela Smith, ed., Katherine Mansfield, Selected Stories (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), pp. 294–5. For my account of Mansfield’s use of symbolic becoming in her use of the literary impression, see Bowler.

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It was partially solved too by Virginia Woolf when Lily Briscoe stumbled upon her symbolic abstraction of the purple triangle.36 However, the solution to this problem posited by Richardson, Ford, H.D., and Sinclair is the removal of the subject from the site where the overwhelming impressions proliferate, and ironically, a presentation of distance as necessary to immediacy in representation. This is both a physical distancing and a temporal one. As Arthur Symons writes, ‘Impressionistic writing’ relies on two distinct processes: ‘The first thing is to see, and with an eye which sees all, and as if one’s only business were to see; and then to write, from a selecting memory, and as if one’s only business were to write’.37 The emphasis on memory as a necessary filter for a complete representation corresponds with a Proustian emphasis on time regained. Jesse Matz, in a discussion of Proust and distance, claims his memory filter as impressionist: The conflicting demands of receptivity and judgement become functions of experience and retrospection:  a former self receives an impression, and a later self receives its later counterpart and does the work of retrospective analysis [. . .] Proust reconfigures the old opposition between sense and intellect as a collaboration between past and present selves, and this self division appears in the work of every literary Impressionist.38

In the impressionism of the writers discussed in this volume, the old self does the initial work of perceiving and processing the impression; saving it as a memory, and then the later self re-processes the impression, refraining as much as possible from the temptation to alter or edit unnecessarily, but nevertheless translating these primary perceptions, shaping them, ordering them by ‘relative prominence’ from a distanced perspective.39 However, distance is not posited as a solution to the capturing of perception. The paradox of literary impressionism, as Matz puts it, is that ‘the immediate impression takes time to decipher, and so it is not effectively immediate; the immediacy comes only after the work of deciphering, only after some mediation occurs’.40 The lack of immediacy, however, is inevitable, and in all four writers is actually embraced as a virtue. The final aesthetic turn of these impressionist writers, towards focussing from a distance, allows them control over their material. The immediate impression does not dictate, the selection does: the artist is self-consciously arranging their material, 36 37

38 39 40

Woolf, To The Lighthouse, pp. 46–7. Arthur Symons, ‘Impressionistic Writing’, from the 1923 collection Dramatis Personae, in R. V. Holdsworth, Arthur Symons: Poetry and Prose (Cheadle Hulme: Carcanet, 1974), p. 93. Matz, Literary Impressionism and Modernist Aesthetics, pp. 8–9. Richardson’s annotations on R. A. Scott-James. Matz, Literary Impressionism and Modernist Aesthetics, p. 11.

Introduction

11

in a new way. As Saunders writes, this kind of modernism, informed by literary impressionism, ‘explores the redemptive possibility that lost experience can be regained in memory’.41 The first chapter of this monograph, ‘Literary Impressionism: Subjective and Objective Visions in Dorothy Richardson and Ford Madox Ford’, looks at Ford’s statements about the impression and impressionism alongside Richardson’s pronouncements about novelistic aesthetics. Both Ford and Richardson turned to the work of Henry James as a possible model for their own literary experiments. Richardson was a big admirer of James’s work, with reservations, and Ford was so much an admirer that he wrote a ‘monograph’ on James. Both writers saw in James a perfection of style and an immediacy of representation, and both held this in mind as they came to develop their own styles. Richardson’s and Ford’s engagement with James as model sheds light on several of Ford’s impressionist dictums (which were also shared, although not identified as ‘impressionist’, by Richardson): the negation of the author, the objective rendering of subjectivity, the presentation of internal consciousness and external realities and the way that they inform one another. Both authors were aware of the limitations that these dictums brought, but both embraced the limitations as necessary if anything ‘real’ was ever to be represented. The chapter then presents two case studies. The first is concerned with Ford’s efforts to ‘represent the unrepresentable’ in his portrayal of Tietjens’s war experiences, and the second with Richardson’s argument in Pilgrimage that everything in life is unrepresentable because life itself is so various. Miriam herself possesses many ‘angles of vision’, and no writing can contain them all. She must, if she wants to represent, misrepresent. The chapter ends with a discussion of the impressionist text as tapestry. A tentative solution to the difficulty of representation via impressions posited by Ford and Richardson (and James) was conceptualized as a narrative weaving of impressions. Both Pilgrimage and Parade’s End achieve their final coherence through a building up of images and impressions, and it is in this multiplicity that their impressionism achieves its effects. The second chapter, ‘Mystical Visions and Primary Perception: May Sinclair and Dorothy Richardson’, looks at the moments of epiphany in the novels of Sinclair and Richardson and their attempts to capture, define and record such moments without destroying the original. This chapter begins with an examination of May Sinclair’s review of Pilgrimage in The Egoist. Critics commonly focus exclusively on the review’s use of the phrase ‘stream of consciousness’, the first 41

Saunders, Self Impression, p. 83.

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application of the phrase to literature. However, it is Sinclair’s remarks towards the end of the review that really encapsulate what exactly she found admirable about Pilgrimage. For Sinclair, Richardson’s portrayals of her protagonist’s mystical visions, her ‘happiness’ and sudden visions of ‘golden light’ are what makes Pilgrimage so significant. These mystical visions recur in Sinclair’s own fiction: in The Creators, The Three Sisters, The Tree of Heaven, and her novel in verse The Dark Night. She explains them most fully in Mary Olivier, written just a year after her review of the first three volumes of Pilgrimage was published, and she examines their philosophical basis in her book A Defence of Idealism (and again, later, in The New Idealism). For Sinclair, as for Richardson, the visions are the most important thing that a novel can represent, and they are also the basis of creative inspiration. I explore the two writers’ attempts to define and label these visions through their own reading (and through the dramatized reading of their characters) of mystics and philosophers. Sinclair reads Kant, Schopenhauer, Evelyn Underhill and others, and eventually comes to write her own two philosophical works. Richardson reads Maurice Maeterlinck, Schopenhauer, and Gustav Geley, but embraces a less rigid framework for her final mystical aesthetic: one informed as much by Quakerly introspection as by Idealist philosophy. Chapter 3, ‘Visual Metaphors: Dorothy Richardson and H.D.’, focuses on the second part of the double impression:  the imprinting of an already encoded image upon the mind. Both authors’ prose works abound with visual metaphors and their perceptions are encoded as snapshots, paintings, tableaux, stage sets, films and embroideries. An awareness of the saturation of visual metaphors in everyday language is, as Martin Jay points out in a Joycean phrase, important to understanding ‘how ineluctable the modality of the visual actually is’, and their use can be accounted either as ‘an obstacle or an aid to our knowledge of reality’.42 Richardson would have agreed with the ‘ineluctability’ of visual metaphors, and the importance of recognizing them, believing as she did that in speech, ‘the metaphor you choose will represent you more accurately than any photograph’ (IV, p. 331). She could not, however, have provided a simple answer to the question of whether visual metaphors enable or inhibit an understanding of reality: this is precisely what her exploration of visual media as metaphors for perception attempts to clarify. Both writers examine the composition of images, the nature of framing and the posing of their own bodies as ways of imposing order on a messy and uncontained life. The pictorial arts are used as metaphors

42

Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes:  The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth- Century French Thought (London: University of California Press, 1993), p. 1.

Introduction

13

for perception and for the registration of impressions on the mind; and then as inspiration for H.D.’s and Richardson’s efforts at experimental narrative form. These metaphors are thus crucial to an understanding of both writers’ impressionism, and modernist impressionism as a whole. They provide a visual-textual answer to the problem Miriam poses about the difficulty of processing important perceptions:  the moment of ‘suddenly seeing something celebrated, and missing the impression through fear of not being impressed enough; and trying to impress your impression by telling of the thing by name’ (III, p. 66). The perceptual gap between ‘suddenly seeing’ something and the impression itself, and then the subsequent gap between that impression and the translating of it into language are thus bypassed. The chapter then builds on the final section of the chapter on Ford and offers an account of H.D.’s own particular form of tapestry impressionism. It explores H.D.’s and Richardson’s engagements with cinema, film criticism and their experiments with weaving cinematic style into their novels. The problem of how to translate mystical visions or any primary pure perception, unmediated by encoding or by metaphor, is an insoluble one for all four writers. The next section, ‘ “To Focus from a Distance”: Solitude and Coming to Writing’, looks at May Sinclair and Dorothy Richardson and their final aesthetic turn: an emphasis on the importance of a physical and temporal removal of the subjective impression-receiving consciousness in order that the processing of impressions can take place. The distance between the original perception and the impressed form, and the distance between that secondary impression and its inscription in a novel, can only fully be overcome if the inscriber is at both a physical and temporal distance from the original. The distance which presents itself as an obstacle to representation in the double impression is embraced by Richardson and by Sinclair as necessary and clarifying. The final chapter, ‘Memory, Distance, Perspective’, is the longest section of this study as it examines how each of the four writers used memory to bridge the gap between perception and representation. Memory was adopted by all four writers as an aesthetic strategy, but it was applied in different ways by each. The chapter begins with a discussion of the ‘novel-memoir’ as auto-psychological enquiry, and analyses two works of autobiography: Ford Madox Ford’s Ancient Lights and Certain New Reflections: Being the Memories of a Young Man, and May Sinclair’s A Journal of Impressions in Belgium, both texts which declare themselves to be both impressionist and novelistic in form. Both are accounts of a portion of a life, and are written as investigations into the psyche:  a way of reworking aspects of experience through memory in order to understand

14

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the past self-in-process and the present-day self. Both texts posit that temporal distance is, ironically, necessary to the effect of immediacy in recording impressions. Although memory is shown to be vital to impressionism’s project of veracity of representation, of atmosphere and of emotion, it is not always reliable. The impressionists then, particularly in war-time, when memory is fragmented, often repressed, and sometimes effaced, are caught in a double bind. The process that is necessary to a complete understanding of the impression of a moment can also be what obscures the sense of that moment. In the second section, I examine how Ford and Sinclair highlight this fallibility of memory in their memoirs-as-novels, but also in their examinations of memory’s effects on the psyche in fictional prose: the novel-as-memoir. Sinclair’s Life and Death of Harriett Frean and Ford’s The Good Soldier are dramas of memory’s limitations. They both show their protagonists in the act of looking back and trying to reorder and aestheticize their past into some kind of coherent whole, but the protagonists are too short-sighted and too wilfully self-protective to be able to manage this with any success. There is no end point to this reshaping and narrativizing of experience, in either novel, and the emphasis is instead on the drama of (failed) auto-psychological enquiry, through memory, in process. The third section of ‘Memory, Distance, Perspective’ explores Richardson’s use of memory as ‘disinterested contemplation’ and her presentation of Miriam coming to writing in the last volume of Pilgrimage. March Moonlight is primarily about memory, and about memory’s transformative effect on previous, imperfect impressions. As Miriam considers her past through memory, she also thinks about how she is going to go about the task of beginning to write. The two projects: a reordering of the past so that it becomes aesthetically pleasing, neat and knowable, and the search for subjects to write about and a style with which to write about them become one project. I  examine here the dramatization of Miriam’s writing of ‘middles’ in March Moonlight, for the ‘Friday’ review, alongside Richardson’s own first forays into writing fiction for The Saturday Review. In this section, March Moonlight is read as the final and ultimate expression of both Dorothy Richardson’s and Miriam’s attempts to render visual impressions using words, and memory as the only viable way of effecting such a translation. The fourth section looks again at the visual metaphors of Dorothy Richardson and H.D. and the use to which they are put when describing memory. Memory is described as a text in the mind, as snapshot images, film clips, projected images and paintings. Memories are sometimes external realities:  they can build up around a person, they can be deposited and stored in objects, or they can leap out and startle. Dorothy Richardson has a very specific theory of memory: one that is

Introduction

15

not dissimilar to the Bergsonian construct of ‘sheets of the past’,43 on which, in Deleuze’s commentary, people must ‘draw to evoke the recollection-images, that is, to reconstitute the former presents. But they are themselves as different from the recollection-images which actualize them as the pure past may be from the former present’.44 The past recalled, and experienced as present, is not the same as the recollection-image, which in turn is not the same as the ‘pure past’ which is a virtual entity. Here are more chasms to be crossed. Richardson and H.D. both negotiate these representational gaps by celebrating the very act of representation: the metaphors we need in order to classify modes of perception, the artistic arrangement that is necessary to a comprehensive view of the past, and subsequently, the act of writing, which places the ‘pure past’, or ‘pure’ perception, at an even greater distance.

43

44

Dorothy Richardson claimed in a letter to Shiv Kumar that she was ‘never consciously aware of any specific influence beyond the overwhelming longing to pay tribute to the marvel of the existence anywhere, of anything; to sing a song of thanksgiving to the spirit of the universe. No doubt Bergson influenced many minds, if only by putting into words something then dawning within the human consciousness: an increased sense of the inadequacy of the clock as a time-measurer’. Letter to Shiv Kumar, 10 August 1952, Dorothy Richardson Collection. General Collection, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. However, this denial of influence, one suspects, is merely characteristic of Richardson’s distrust of categories. In an earlier letter to Lita Rothbard (Hornick), she admits a ‘love’ for Bergson whose ‘philosophical limitations do not tarnish my love & reverence for Henri Bergson who cleared so many obstructions’. She typically does not say which parts of Bergson’s thought she sees as ‘limited’ and which cleared her ‘obstructions’. For an illuminating discussion of Richardson’s Bergsonian tendencies, see Bryony Randall, ‘Dailiness in Dorothy Richardson’s Pilgrimage’, in Modernism, Daily Time and Everyday Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: the Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (London: The Athlone Press, 1989), p. 106.

1

Literary Impressionism: Subjective and Objective Visions in Dorothy Richardson and Ford Madox Ford

‘The thing perceived and herself perceiving’:  The double impression Dorothy Richardson was aware of Ford Madox Ford’s writing and seems to have admired it. In 1919, when considering contributing to the Little Review, but unsure about the ‘literary level of the paper’ she writes to Curtis Brown for information. Upon being informed that ‘James Joyce & Mr Hueffer are amongst its current contributors’, she decides in its favour.1 It is difficult to say how much Richardson read of Ford, or vice versa, but Ford was certainly familiar with the early volumes of Pilgrimage, and Richardson read Ford’s The Transatlantic Review regularly in 1924, when her friend Bryher gifted her a subscription.2 She published her short story ‘The Garden’ in its pages (although she dealt with Ernest Hemingway as temporary editor rather than Ford), and commented on the content of the magazine to Bryher.3 She must have being reading Ford’s ‘Some Do Not’, the first section of Parade’s End, which he was serializing in the paper, and she must also have been reading his work The Nature of a Crime, co-written with Joseph Conrad and also published serially in the Transatlantic Review in 1924. She would therefore have been familiar with Ford’s premier literary experiment:  the attempt to render the proliferation of contradictory

1

2 3

Dorothy Richardson to Curtis Brown, 2 June 1919, Woodson Research Center, Fondren Library, Rice University, Houston. Dorothy Richardson to Bryher, July 1924, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. ‘Thats [sic] an amazingly illuminating thing by Carlos Williams in the Transatlantic,’ Dorothy Richardson to Bryher, n.d., c. 4 May 1924; ‘Thank you over & over for making us transatlantic subscribers’, Richardson to Bryher, July 1924, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.

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impressions from a single viewpoint, which he called ‘Impressionism’. It was the same literary experiment that Richardson herself was engaged in, but which she was more reluctant to label. Ford wrote several statements on impressionism, which taken together constitute a far-reaching, if sometimes contradictory, manifesto of impressionism. The key tenets of this impressionism were the rendering of experience as multiple and fragmentary, the suppression of authorial commentary, and a concern with the subjective and objective: the objective rendering of subjective experience. He also took great pains to distinguish his aesthetic project from established ‘realism’, claiming that impressionism could approach more directly to reality than realism, with its emphasis on description: telling rather than showing. All of these manifesto points were ones that Richardson also engaged with, but she never acknowledged any debt to Ford’s writings, and never labelled her aesthetic aims as impressionist ones. It is important to note that Ford was the exponent of statements on impressionism. Henry James, Joseph Conrad, Stephen Crane (all commonly labelled impressionist) and Dorothy Richardson, H.D., and May Sinclair, were all called impressionist at one time or another, and they all certainly had shared impressionist aesthetics, but, as Elsa Nettels points out, ‘the impulse to transform the writers in England into a cohesive group came only from Ford’.4 Ford wrote two statements about impressionism at about the time Richardson was beginning to write her first novel, Pointed Roofs, in August 1913. Both articles were called ‘Impressionism – Some Speculations’, and both were written for poetry journals (Harriet Monroe’s Poetry: A Magazine of Verse and Poetry); both laid out Ford’s ideas about the representation of reality in art. In the piece published in Monroe’s Poetry: A Magazine of Verse, he dismisses descriptive poetry, archaic forms and sentimentalisms: ‘It is the duty of the poet to reflect his own day as it appears to him, as it has impressed itself upon him’.5 ‘The main thing’, Ford insisted, for the poet (and by implication the prose writer), was the ‘genuine love and the faithful rendering of the received impression’.6 In 1914, he expanded upon these ideas in ‘On Impressionism’, published in two parts in Poetry and Drama. In this article, he declared ‘one is an Impressionist because one tries to produce an illusion of reality – or rather the business of Impressionism is to produce that illusion’.7 Reality in this sense is best described as the experience 4 5

6 7

Elsa Nettels, James and Conrad (Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 1977), p. 7. Ford Madox Ford, ‘Impressionism – Some Speculations’, in Poetry: A Magazine of Verse, ed. Harriet Monroe, Vol. 2, No. 5 (August 1913), p. 221. Ibid., p. 224. Ford Madox Ford, ‘On Impressionism’, in The Good Soldier, ed. Martin Stannard (London and New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1995), p. 265.

Literary Impressionism

19

of perception, and of the registration of impressions, both as the perception happens and as the impressions are registered: impressionism, Ford says, aims to capture the moment of perception; it is ‘a thing altogether momentary’.8 However, one moment of perception is not a single unit, but rather is composed of many perceptions and impressions, of ‘places, persons, emotions, all going on simultaneously’: It is, I mean, perfectly possible for a sensitised person, be he poet or prose writer, to have the sense, when he is in one room, that he is in another, or when he is speaking to one person he may be so intensely haunted by the memory or desire for another person that he may be absent-minded or distraught. And there is nothing in the canons of Impressionism, as I know it, to stop the attempt to render those superimposed emotions. Indeed, I suppose that Impressionism exists to render those queer effects of real life that are like so many views seen through bright glass – through glass so bright that whilst you perceive through it a landscape or a backyard, you are aware that, on its surface, it reflects a face of a person behind you. For the whole of life is really like that; we are almost always in one place with our minds somewhere quite other.9

The impressionist project is then to try to encapsulate and represent reality, which is perceived in the moment as multiple, fragmentary and bewildering. There is an emphasis here on what life is ‘really like’, and the importance of capturing that reality with absolute fidelity. Life as it is lived does not have the narrative coherence of a realist novel, and so any attempt to render it as it appears to the subjective perceiver must necessarily be more realist than the realists. Tamar Katz highlights this tension between realism and impressionism, stating that impressionism suggested ‘a rift between conventions of realist representation and the subject’s perceptions, as well as between realist conventions and the simultaneity of the object world’.10

Realism, impressionism and Henry James In 1938, Ford published a long survey of the history of the novel in Europe and America entitled The March of Literature, in which he defined his attitude to 8 9 10

Ibid., p. 262. Ibid., p. 263. Katz, p. 5.

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realist novels and realism in novels. In it he called Richardson ‘that great figure Dorothy Richardson’, whose Pointed Roofs, he says, is a ‘beautiful book’, ‘much more verbally beautiful’ than Proust.11 Richardson didn’t read the volume for more than ten years after its publication, but when she did she was astonished to find these references to herself. She wrote to Rose Odle: ‘Ford Madox Ford, who used to pat my head rather patronisingly in early days, comes out to my surprise, in The March of Lit: with sonorous trumpetings’.12 Half a year later, after reading and digesting the whole of the book, she is pleased with her treatment, and finds herself in sympathy with Ford’s view of the development of the novel. She writes to Henry Savage: Following the long-lived Romantics, the other-side-of-the-moon people came, in protest, the so-called Realists, (with Ford’s definition of realism I  absolutely agree) most of them from, & depicting, bourgeois Philistia. These two R’s are twins, comparable to optimist and pessimist, nearly cancelling each other. The representation of life-as-experience is another matter, now with us. Joyce remained hampered by the handcuffs firmly fixed in youth by the Jesuits. V. Woolf, via Leslie, was a diluted male, wobbly & irrelevant. Ford saw what without-realising-its-effect-upon-the-developm.of-the-novel (odious word) I was moved to do.13

Richardson may have been instrumental in the development of the modern novel, but she claims that she did not and has not considered where her work fits into a grander narrative of the novel as ‘representation of life-as-experience’. Ford’s placing of her work into this narrative pleases her, even while she resists classification. In The March of Literature Ford had dismissed Balzac’s claim to be properly called a realist, insisting that ‘his budget of realities’ was too small for such a grand title. The real first realist, he claimed, might as well be Thackeray or Dickens, both writers whose works are ‘simply records, that from time to time attain to the height of renderings, of life transfused by the light of their writers’ temperaments as modified by their vicissitudes’.14 Ford here, as elsewhere, distinguishes between description and what he calls ‘rendering’: the highest accuracy that prose could aspire to in portraying life as lived, since, as Frank MacShane points out, ‘rendering was an attempt to be objective’.15 In other words, Thackeray

11 12 13 14 15

Ford Madox Ford, The March of Literature (Illinois: Dalkey Archive Press, 1998), pp. 827, p. 848. Dorothy Richardson to Rose Odle, 26 August 1949, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. To Henry Savage, 6 January 1950, Pattee Library, The Pennsylvania State University. Ford, The March of Literature, p. 811. Critical Writings of Ford Madox Ford, ed. Frank MacShane (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1964), p. xi.

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21

and Dickens are realists because they are proto-impressionists. Richardson’s work, by extension, is great because her budget of realities is great. Dorothy Richardson, in the writing of Pilgrimage, struggled to find an existing narrative model which could act as a framework for her vision of the autobiographical, bildungsroman novel of feminine consciousness and ideas which she wanted to write. In her 1938 foreword to the Dent collected edition of Pilgrimage, she summarized what she felt to be her solution. Instead of ‘following one of her regiments’ she chose to try and produce ‘a feminine equivalent of the current masculine realism’ (I, p. 9). This ‘masculine realism’ she associated with Balzac and Bennett, whose realist narrative models, since they ‘happened to be men’, must be adapted and not simply appropriated. Balzac, the male realist, may have ‘inserted block[s] of merely referential narrative’, but Richardson’s feminine equivalent was going to be tied very closely to the consciousness of the main character, in order, hopefully, to bridge the rift between representation and ‘the subject’s perception’ and produce a ‘simultaneity’ which could make the represented world closer both in space and time. This impulse is both impressionist and modernist. Richardson is responding here to what Todd K. Bender calls a new and modern ‘widespread anxiety about how impressions are formed’, which leads inevitably to the kind of modernist aesthetic experiments that can produce new ways of seeing: The authors reply to that anxiety by developing a set of technical devices for the telling of the story, such as limited narration, verbal collage, subversive laughter, open plot and characterization, and cognitive dissonance and turbulence in their texts.16

The modernist crisis of seeing leads to an inevitable experimentation with form. The list that Bender supplies here of potential impressionist strategies will be familiar to a reader of Richardson or Ford, as they both experiment with all of these in their attempts to represent the impression as it is impressed. The beginnings of literary impressionism, although responding to a modern anxiety about the representation of what Richardson calls ‘life-as-experience’, built upon earlier realist models. Both Ford Madox Ford and Dorothy Richardson saw the work of Henry James as exemplary in its attempts to catch something of the essence of experience. Ford, in fact, insists in his book on James that the principal feeling conveyed to the reader is ‘a sense of extraordinary reality’.17

16

17

Todd K.  Bender, Literary Impressionism in Jean Rhys, Ford Madox Ford, Joseph Conrad and Charlotte Brontë (London: Garland Publishing, 1997), p. 14. Ford Madox Ford, Henry James: A Critical Study (New York: Albert and Charles Boni, 1915), p. 21.

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James’s status as a pioneer of modern(ist) fiction often leads to definitional confusion around his status as variously realist and impressionist. Eric Savoy, for example, refers to James’s late work as a ‘departure from the certainties of realism to the vague, occulted perspective of impressionism’,18 while Raphaël Ingelbien argues for a scenario in which ‘James was mounting a calculated and strenuous defence of English realism against decadence, naturalism, and the rise of modernist definitions of subjectivity’.19 Henry James’s status as a fin de siècle innovator, and as an impressionist figure whom Ford Madox Ford proclaimed ‘the Master of all masters’,20 meant that the young Dorothy Richardson could not fail to notice and to be influenced by James while formulating the beginnings of her aesthetic theory of the novel. In Pilgrimage, Richardson describes her protagonist Miriam’s first delighted encounter with James’s work, in the form of a red-backed copy of The Ambassadors. It is the style of James’s writing which so delights Miriam, yet at the same time she is embarrassed by her triumphant feeling at decoding the text, and the elitist attitude this implies in her: This man was a monstrous unilluminated pride. And joy in him was a mark of the same corruption. Pride in discovering the secrets of his technique. Pride in watching it labour with the development of the story. The deep attention demanded by this new way of statement was in itself a selfindulgence. (III, p. 409)

It is a self-indulgence that Miriam feels she cannot afford, with her time taken up with her work as a dental secretary, and her evenings with the Lycurgans and the Wilsons.21 It is also a self-indulgence that, as Jean Radford argues, Miriam associates with a particularly complacent, masculine style of reading: she ‘vehemently repudiates it – as formalist, concerned only with technique, not its meaning’.22 There is in Miriam’s guilty masculine reading of James for the style alone a kind of rueful acknowledgement that in so reading, the reader is cut off from

18

19

20 21

22

Eric Savoy, ‘The Jamesian Thing’, in The Henry James Review, Vol. 22, No. 3 (Fall 2001), pp. 268–77, p. 274. Raphaël Ingelbien, ‘Reversed Positions: Henry James, Realism, and Sexual Passion’, in The Henry James Review, Vol. 21, No. 1 (Winter 2000), pp. 63–71, p. 64. Perhaps more useful to this discussion is Mhairi Catriona Pooler’s definition of James’s work (and Richardson’s) as the endeavour ‘to represent that elusive thing: personal truth’. Jamesian realism is the realism of the subjective. Mhairi Catriona Pooler, ‘Of Language, Of Meaning, Of Mr. Henry James’, in Pilgrimages:  A  Journal of Dorothy Richardson Studies, No. 4 (2011), pp. 95–101, p. 97. Ford, The March of Literature, p. 835. The Lycurgan society is Richardson’s fictional version of the real life Fabian Society, of which she was a member. The Wilsons are the fictional counterparts of H. G. and ‘Jane’ Wells. Jean Radford, Dorothy Richardson (London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1991), p. 12.

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23

everyday and prosaic reality. Ford expresses a similar reservation with the word ‘style’, in his essay ‘Mr Conrad’s Writing’: ‘If you call it “style” you will be at once in a frame of mind more monumental and much less intimate. Style implies a man in dress uniform; writing, the same man in working dress’.23 Miriam is suspicious of the formality of style, particularly as she is reading The Ambassadors in a room in which working-class removal men are shifting furniture. However, her excitement at the novelty and innovation of James’s technique wins out: And it was he after all who had achieved the first completely satisfying way of writing a novel. If this were a novel. There was something holy about it. Something to make, like Conrad, the heavens rejoice. Perhaps at lunch times, or rare solitudes, she could go on, get at the whole of the light there was in him. Style was something beyond good and evil. Sacred and innocent. (III, p. 410)

Miriam reconciles her feeling of guilt with the decision that the style of writing which pleases her so much is ‘sacred and innocent’. Appreciating the stylistic subtleties of a text does not have to involve pride as ‘corruption’, because style is ‘holy’. Richardson, through her third-person narration of Miriam’s thoughts, then attempts a parody of James’s style: And as she searched for her gloves the note described itself as it were aloud, in a voice speaking urbanely from the surrounding air. Its indubitable descent; its perhaps too great and withal so manifestly, so wellnigh woefully irretrievable precipitancy. Its so charming and, for all she could at the moment and within the straitly beleaguering the so eminently onerous and exciting circumstances assemble of disturbing uncertainty, so brilliantly, so almost dazzlingly sunlit height. In simpler words, things were going too fast and too far. (III, p. 417)

Miriam almost seems to hear the ‘urbane’ speech of Henry James in the room, with its ‘almost dazzlingly sunlit height’ and the wandering parenthesis within a parenthesis within a parenthesis, (‘Its so charming [. . .] so absolutely dazzlingly sunlit height’, ‘for all she could at the moment [. . .] assemble’, and the centre, ‘within the straitly beleaguering the so eminently onerous and exciting circumstances’). Richardson offers variant phrases to describe the voice of James, in sentences that are never quite finished, extra clauses being affixed to her sentences

23

Ford Madox Ford, ‘Mr Conrad’s Writing’ (1923), in Critical Essays, ed. Max Saunders and Richard Stang (Manchester: Carcanet, 2002), p. 228.

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as elaboration upon a theme (‘wellnigh woefully’ is grafted into the middle of the second sentence for this purpose). The phrases are like music to her, the ‘note’ of the voice descending and then lifting again to a height, in a movement remarkably similar to Miriam’s description of the bells of St Pancras:  ‘rapid scales, beginning at the top, coming with a loud full thump on to the fourth note and finishing with a rush to the lowest which was hardly touched before the top note hung again in the air’ (II, p. 21). In both of these scenes the emphasis is on the exciting and exhilarating experience of rhythm. Richardson’s own comments on this encounter are summarized by her in a letter of December 1948, to Eleanor Phillips, who had written to ask specifically about Miriam’s reaction to James. Richardson reread the passage in question, and replied with an elaboration of Miriam’s reactions. She called it: the fascination of the leisurely meticulous weaving of the long sentences, with modifying parentheses neatly tucked inside them, instead of spilling over in the manner of afterthoughts. She does not of course spot, in thoughts, the reasons for her enchantment, which seems, when thought of as confessed to Selina Holland, busy with good deeds, a trifle preposterous.24

Since Richardson will not say what ‘the reasons for her enchantment’ are, either in Pilgrimage, or (presumably frustratingly for the recipient) in the letter, then Miriam’s ignorance remains our ignorance. Miriam still attempts to capture James’s essence: partially characterized, perhaps simplistically, by the invocation of polysyllabic Latinate diction. The use of five syllable words (‘indubitable’, irretrievable’, ‘precipitancy’) is a symptom of Miriam’s awe and respect for James, and inevitably prompts her rejection of the style for use in her own life: She tried to imagine herself producing phrases for the landlord from a mental landscape of what would be occurring between them in terms of thought. It would certainly make her dignified, and to the landlord, mysterious. It might daunt, reduce him, keep him at a distance. But it was difficult to weave in the word ‘rent’ the so simple, the so potently humiliating monosyllable that was the immediate, the actual, the dreadfully unavoidable . . . ornate alias. (III, p. 417)

The realities of everyday life are incompatible with the ‘ornate alias’ James creates:  the word ‘rent’ doesn’t fit. However, Richardson is still keeping up her Jamesian repetition, or what Seymour Chatman calls ‘elegant variation’ in The 24

Letter from Dorothy Richardson to Eleanor Phillips, 3 December 1948, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.

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Later Style of Henry James: ‘daunt’, ‘reduce’; ‘immediate’, ‘actual’.25 She has not quite finished with James.26 Perhaps Miriam’s enchantment is related to this elegant variation: the circuitous attempt to affix words to an impression which Mhairi Catriona Pooler writes is ‘typical of James’s very careful use of language and his awareness of its only tentative relationship to the meaning he intends’.27 Ford Madox Ford counted Henry James as a personal friend, as well as considering him, in 1915, ‘the greatest of living writers’.28 He saw James, moreover, as ‘more than anything else, an impressionist’,29 who has ‘observed human society as it now is, and more than anybody has faithfully rendered his observations for us’.30 Ford sees James’s representation of consciousness, too, as precisely the kind of impressionism he had advocated in his 1913 articles, passing ‘as it does in real life, perpetually backwards and forwards between the apparent aspect of things and the essentials of life’.31 James, in fact, stands for the culmination of a tradition of realism the ashes from which impressionist writers such as Ford himself and his friend Joseph Conrad could rise. Ford’s Henry James is ostensibly a critical study, but one which is singularly unacademic. Ford admits himself that he has not made ‘any very German study’ of James’s novels, but instead ‘I am presenting you rather with my impressions of our author’s work than the outpourings of any note-books’.32 In so doing, he fashions a critical text which is, as Saunders notes, more ‘novelistic’ than analytical: a ‘carefully progressing set of apparently discursive episodes’.33 It is a technique akin to the impressionism of James and of Ford himself: the layering of impressions, one by one, and at the end, somehow, a visible and coherent whole: ‘the expressive effect somehow exceeding the visible means of its achievement’.34 The technique of the ‘monograph’ on James then mirrors what Ford considers to

25 26

27 28 29 30 31 32 33

34

Seymour Chatman, The Later Style of Henry James (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1972), pp. 85–6. The temptation amongst impressionist and modernist writers to attempt parodies of the Jamesian style was immense. Ford Madox Ford in The March of Literature found himself (supposedly) unconsciously doing so when writing about the reception of Henry James:  ‘And having, as they Americanly must, an immense curiosity to know how all sorts of wheels go round, and finding, as they intelligently and brightly did [. . .] And isn’t it astonishing how, at the mere mention of the Master’s – the American not the French one’s – name, one’s style at once takes on bewildering involutions! . . . So that we had better drop that sentence and begin again’ (p. 830). Elegant variation is contagious. Pooler, p. 108. Ford, Henry James, p. 9. Ibid., p. 40. Ibid., p. 48. Ibid., p. 153. Ibid., p. 40. Max Saunders, Ford Madox Ford: A Dual Life, Vol. I: The World Before the War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 389. Ibid.

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be James’s own supreme achievement: the evocation of atmosphere through the laying down of multiple trivialities: He can convey an impression, an atmosphere of what you will with literally nothing. Embarrassment, chastened happiness – for his happiness is always tinged with regret – greed, horror, social vacuity – he can give you it all with a purely blank page. His characters will talk about rain, about the opera, about the moral aspects of the selling of Old Masters to the New Republic, and those conversations will convey to your mind that the quiet talkers are living in an atmosphere of horror, of bankruptcy, of passion hopeless as the Dies Iræ! That is the supreme trick of art to-day, since that is how we really talk about the musical glasses whilst our lives crumble to pieces around us.35

This, intimates Ford, is true realism. People in real life do not discuss their dramas, their passions and their tragedies, but rather they convey a sense of them to the people around them through gestures and intimations. They radiate atmosphere. James has achieved the ultimate aim of impressionism:  to convey atmosphere through consciousness, and consciousness through atmosphere, and he has done it without the reader realizing that they have been told anything very important at all. Ford also paints James as an objective artist, who does not ‘advocate’ any personal views, or, as a literary celebrity, any ‘public aims’:  ‘He merely gives you material’.36 His narrative is detached and unsympathetic, claims Ford, and as such ‘he is the only unbiassed, voluminous and truthful historian of our day’.37 He has ‘bestowed his sympathies upon no human being and upon no cause, has remained an observer, passionless and pitiless’.38 Ford’s impressions of James as judge from on high here come from his understanding of James’s narratorial style. James the author does not judge: his characters do any judging that needs doing, and different characters judge in different ways. Throughout Pilgrimage, the point of view is Miriam’s: everything is slanted through her consciousness. The narration is occasionally in first person, but more consistently Richardson describes Miriam’s thoughts indirectly, using the third person. It is a technique Richardson found intriguing in James’s work, and highlighted specifically as Jamesian in her foreword to Pilgrimage, crediting him with the role of ‘pathfinder’: keeping the reader incessantly watching the conflict of human forces through the eye of a single observer, rather than taking him, before the drama begins, 35 36 37 38

Ford, Henry James, p. 153. Ibid., p. 28. Ibid., p. 66. Ibid., p. 68.

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upon a tour amongst the properties, or breaking in with descriptive introductions of the players as one by one they enter his enclosed resounding chamber where no plant grows and no mystery pours in from the unheeded stars. (I, p. 11)

There is a subtle distinction being made here between the restrictive (significantly monocular) eye of the single observer, and what seems to Richardson to be the equal restrictiveness of the author’s own mind as enclosure. She writes of Henry James as a man ‘inhabiting a softly lit enclosure he mistook, until 1914, for the universe’ (I, p. 11), implying the limitations of the author’s own mind, which, in true solipsistic fashion, he could not transcend in order to provide an objective description of ‘properties’ or ‘players’ even if he wished to. Here again Richardson is impressionist: the only objective description of drama possible is an objective description of a drama already received subjectively. This lack of authorial interruption is also what delights Miriam in her reading of The Ambassadors in The Trap, although she is, at this stage, unsure why she is so delighted with this technique. She ‘imagined herself trying to explain why the phrases that lit the scene were wonderful. And it seemed, thought of as a public matter, ridiculous to have been so excited by the way he conveyed information without coming forward to announce it’ (III, p. 409). Miriam is enchanted by the atmosphere created by James, and his departure from realist descriptive narrative. Ford’s ideal was also the limited point of view. In ‘On Impressionism’ he emphasizes this:  ‘the Impressionist gives you, as a rule, the fruits of his own observations and the fruits of his own observations alone. He should be in this as severe and solitary as any monk’.39 It meant that the Fordian narrator, particularly Dowell in The Good Soldier, was renowned for unreliability:  being ‘Selfcontradictory, frequently biased and jealous, and often ruled by unconscious desires he seeks to ignore’.40 This showing rather than telling is also what Ford cites as the central theme of literary impressionism: The main and perhaps most passionate tenet of impressionism was the suppression of the author from the pages of his book. He must not comment; he must not narrate; he must present his impressions of his imaginary affairs as if he had been present at them [. . .] the author is invisible and almost unnoticeable and [. . .] his attempt has been, above all, to make you see.41

39 40

41

Ford, ‘On Impressionism’, p. 260. Randall Stevenson, Modernist Fiction:  An Introduction (Lexington:  Kentucky University Press, 1992), p. 26. Ford, The March of Literature, pp. 840–1.

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Ford echoes Conrad’s declared artistic purpose from the preface to The Nigger of the Narcissus: ‘My task which I am trying to achieve is, by the power of the written word to make you hear, to make you feel – it is, before all, to make you see’ (emphasis in original).42 Miriam also thinks of Conrad in this connection: her enjoyment of The Ambassadors being ‘something to make, like Conrad, the heavens rejoice’ (III, p. 410). The unobstructed vision, with the author effaced and invisible is, for both Ford and Richardson, Conradian; Jamesian; impressionist. James was himself proud of this lack of ‘coming forward’. In his preface to The Ambassadors he states that his aim was: to wave away with energy the custom of the seated mass of explanation after the fact, the inserted block of merely referential narrative, which flourishes so, to the shame of the modern impatience, on the serried page of Balzac, but which seems simply to appal our actual, our general weaker, digestion.43

Richardson was keen to follow James’s example, to avoid any ‘mass of explanation’, and to narrate Miriam’s consciousness, from the third person, obliquely. The Jamesian alternative to Balzac’s descriptive realism turns out to be remarkably similar to Richardson’s ‘feminine equivalent of the current masculine realism’ (I, p.  9). For Ford, the ‘moment you depart from presentation’ or allow yourself to say such a thing as ‘Now, gentle reader, is my heroine not a very sweet and oppressed lady?’: ‘at that very moment your reader’s illusion that he is present at an affair in real life or that he has been transported by your poem into an atmosphere entirely other than that of his arm-chair or his chimneycorner – at that very moment the illusion will depart’.44 For Ford, this kind of authorial interruption destroys the ‘illusion of reality’, which is only attained by an objective rendering of subjectivity. In a letter to Josephine K Piercy, in 1929, Richardson echoes this dictum: In so far as my ‘method’ came to me innocently and took me by surprise, it is my own. Setting out to present, at the beginning of Pointed Roofs, the girl Miriam going upstairs I was, as far as I know, ready to supply descriptive information about her and her family, but found it immediately impossible to step aside for the purpose of chatting with the reader. I realised the restrictions involved in this sacrifice and also what was to be gained thereby in vividness of presentation. It is the pursuit of this clue that gives some of

42 43

44

Joseph Conrad, ‘Preface’, in The Nigger of the Narcissus (New York: Doubleday, 1914), p. 14. Henry James, ‘Preface to “The Ambassadors” ’, in The Art of the Novel: Critical Prefaces (London: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1962), pp. 307–26, p. 321. Ford, ‘On Impressionism’, p. 265.

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my work the quality of scenes thrown on a screen and caused it to be called first kaleidoscopic and later cinematographical.45

This statement throws light on two aspects of Richardson’s ‘method’, one being her tendency to think of Pilgrimage in terms of visual metaphors, and the second both her rejection of the overt authorial voice and the realization that such rejection brings restrictions. For Richardson, however, adhering to these restrictions is a kind of formal aesthetic discipline, and is the only way to achieve a realistic portrayal of life; of reality. As she wrote in a letter to P. B. Wadsworth, then an aspiring writer looking for advice: ‘At present you & Bernard are telling the tale between you. If you want to achieve full current reality as you go along you must accept his limitations’. If ‘reality’ is to be captured at all, the writer must leave out ‘any information given by you, the author, in its own right; any commentary, or conclusive statement, on your part with regard to scenes & conversations he registers & memorises’. The emphasis here, crucially, is on the registration of impressions, and their saving to memory. If you want to capture reality you must capture the moment impressions of reality are impressed, and you can do that through memory. The writer, Richardson tells Wadsworth, must also be careful not to impose any artificial structure or plot line, but instead to keep the ‘imagined whole’ or final shape in their head, whilst being careful not to let the main character outline it themselves. It ‘must not come neatly from him’.46 Although the authors do not come forward to announce their views in this kind of impressionist writing, their personalities are still very much in evidence. Miriam realizes in her own reading that she senses the author’s personality in every phrase, every characteristic way of turning a sentence, every assumption made. She writes to her sister: ‘Dear Eve; I have just discovered that I don’t read books for the story, but as a psychological study of the author’ (I, p. 384). Richardson also has Miriam declare that books are ‘people. More real than actual people. They came nearer. In life everything was so scrappy and mixed up. In a book the author was there in every word’ (I, p. 384). If life is ‘scrappy and mixed up’, the imposition of some kind of order by the author shaping every word and conducting the whole makes the novel, in Miriam’s mind, more real than reality. It is what Ford suggests is key to all successful representation: ‘all art must be the expression of an ego, and [. . .] if Impressionism is to do anything, it must, as the

45 46

Letter from Dorothy Richardson to Josephine K. Piercy, 2 July 1929, Lilly Library, Indiana University. Letter from Dorothy Richardson to P. B. Wadsworth, 30 June 1919, Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection, The New York Public Library.

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phrase is, go the whole hog’.47 The impressionist novel is then simultaneously only successfully impressionist if the interjecting author is absent, and if the author is nevertheless present in every phrase. This novel is a ‘frank expression of personality’, with the author’s essence ‘there in every word’.48

Subjectivity and objectivity Max Saunders, in a discussion of what he terms ‘autobiografiction’, mentions Richardson, and writes that she, along with May Sinclair, Richard Aldington and H.D., presents a form of modernist autobiography in fiction which seems, initially, ‘at odds with modernism’s programme of impersonality and innovation’.49 However, modernist engagements with life-writing are tied up with an earlier literary impressionism, and thus are crucial to an understanding of a fin-desiècle transition where subjectivity is the focus. Richardson’s preoccupation with subjectivity, objectivity, and the process of perception, explored by and through an autobiographical protagonist, is precisely what is innovative about her modernist life-writing. As Saunders highlights, what literary impressionism gave to modernist fiction was a fundamental questioning of values previously taken for granted. Impressionism is a ‘challenge to subjectivity – to the experience of perception, the experience of time, and the intelligibility of the self ’.50 The familiar modernist concerns represented here – the ‘inadequacy of the clock as a timemeasurer’,51 the attempt to communicate perception and consciousness directly, and the mobility of the female subject within the cityscape – are all informed by literary impressionism, and by the limits of autobiography. The modern and the impressionistic are inseparable. Jesse Matz, in fact, claims Richardson as the most modern of all modernists, as the ‘singular modernist’, and writes that her ‘new concept’ of consciousness, which for him necessarily entails impressionism, is her ‘main claim to modernity’.52 Richardson’s writing practice, in which

47 48 49 50 51

52

Ford, ‘On Impressionism’, p. 258. Ibid., p. 259. Saunders, Self-Impression, p. 13. Ibid., p. 14. Letter from Dorothy Richardson to Shiv Kumar, 10 August 1952, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. As Matz points out, the engagement with consciousness and literary impressionism is by no means the only thing that makes Richardson modernist. He lists some of her more striking modernist tendencies, including ‘her feminism and her sexuality, her cosmopolitanism, her radical politics, her immersion in metropolitan perception, her sense of alienation, her appearances in little reviews, her struggles to overcome the limitations of language and to “reconfigure the map of fiction” through

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she uses her own life as the primary material, is the more significant because she is simultaneously criticizing and commenting upon her own method for doing so. As Saunders says: ‘Modern engagements with life-writing are important because they accumulate into a developing and sustained critique of the conditions of self-representation; of the writing of subjectivity’.53 Even with the publication of the very first volume of Pilgrimage, Pointed Roofs, in 1915, readers were confused as to whether this new kind of writing was subjective and introspective, or objective and realist. J. D. Beresford, for example, in his introduction to the first edition of Pointed Roofs, expressed his uncertainty as to the nature of the novel. He explains that he has read the novel three times, and that each time it seemed to him something completely different. Upon the first reading, in manuscript form: I decided then that ‘Pilgrimage’ was realism, was objective. The influence of the varying moods I inferred from the vagaries of the holograph, inclined me to believe that the book presented the picture of a conscious artist, outside her material, judging, balancing, selecting.54

However, a second reading gave Beresford a very different idea as to Richardson’s method. She perhaps, as author, was not so external to the text as to be able to judge, balance or select, but quite the opposite: I thought I had a clearer sight of the method and I swung round to a flat contradiction of my earlier judgement. This, I thought, is the most subjective thing I have ever read. The writer of this has gone through life with eyes that looked inward; she has known every person and experience solely by her own sensations and reactions.55

The third reading brought Beresford to the conclusion that neither of these judgements were completely accurate, that instead, Miriam is ‘one with life’, enabling her somehow to be both objective ‘conscious artist’ and subjective consciousness, always looking within and chronicling ‘sensations and reactions’ rather than the external world. That he cannot quite explain how this perceptual dichotomy is bridged is alluded to with a rather prompt resignation. The ‘new

53 54

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radical plotlessness, through temporal experiment, and through the revolutionary being of her autobiographical character’. It is interesting, though, that the autobiographical nature of Pilgrimage is mentioned in this list of modernities. Jesse Matz, ‘Dorothy Richardson’s Singular Modernity’, in Pilgrimages: A Journal of Dorothy Richardson Studies, No. 1 (2008), pp. 8–26, p. 10. Saunders, Self Impression, p. 22. J. D. Beresford, ‘Introduction’, in Dorothy M.  Richardson, Pointed Roofs:  Pilgrimage (London: Duckworth, 1915), p. v. Ibid., pp. v–vi.

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attitude towards fiction’ is an ‘unanalysable quality’: ‘one that I could not hope to explain in an introduction – even if I could explain it at all’.56 Richardson, in her attempt to construct a new kind of narrative, explores precisely this tension between subjectivity and objectivity, between internal and external vision: she felt that it was necessary to portray both visions. The ‘feminine equivalent’ of realism is then a realism of the subject, wherein ‘the onlooker is a part of the spectacle’: allowing for, as Dorothy Richardson writes of a female cinema goer, a ‘balance’ between both ‘the thing perceived and herself perceiving’.57 The inside and the outside are both equally important. The literary impressionist must capture the experience of a consciousness which is not selfsufficient, but which is informed by its surroundings, and simultaneously, must represent the scene in which its characters act as informed by that consciousness. As an aesthetic principle, this was more of an ideal to be strived towards rather than a simple matter of following a formula. Both Richardson and Ford struggled with the restrictions of their chosen forms, and enjoyed the opportunities they offered. Both writers were continually aware that they were striving for the impossible:  the representation in words of a pre-linguistic experience. As Laura Colombino notes of Ford’s imperfect aesthetic: ‘Outer reality and the inner self are equally elusive. [. . .] All the writer can offer is the manner in which the experience of these bewildering substances of consciousness is conveyed’.58 In 1924, upon the death of Joseph Conrad, Ford wrote a memoir of his friend and collaborator, the novel-as-biography of which Max Saunders writes: ‘Besides being an example of impressionism, it is a study of it: a discussion of its methods, and also an investigation into the mind of an impressionist writer – the fragmentary, hallucinatory quality of his memory; his reticence about his own past; his fascination with the power of the written word’.59 The ‘Preface’ to this work makes it very clear that the reader is not to expect the usual kind of biography; rather, Ford is going to present ‘a projection of Joseph Conrad as, little by little, he revealed himself to a human being during many years of close intimacy’.60 It was meant to unveil the spirit of Conrad in the order in which aspects of it were

56 57

58

59

60

Ibid., p. viii. Dorothy Richardson, ‘Continuous Performance VIII’, in Close Up, 1927–1933:  Cinema and Modernism, ed. James Donald, Anne Friedberg and Laura Marcus (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), p. 176. Laura Colombino, ‘Ford’s Literary Impressionism’, in An Introduction to Ford Madox Ford, ed. Ashley Chantler and Rob Hawkes (Franham: Ashgate, 2015), p. 73. Max Saunders, Ford Madox Ford:  A  Dual Life, Vol. II (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 180. Ford Madox Ford (Ford Madox Hueffer), Joseph Conrad:  A  Personal Remembrance (London: Duckworth, 1924), p. 5.

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unveiled to Ford himself, and as such Conrad’s life story appears in fragments and flashes, with Conrad relating his own memories, which then are filtered through the consciousness and then through the memory of Ford the portraitist. Ford claimed for the work no veracity of fact or date, and claimed that this did not matter. In the preface Ford goes as far as to admit that ‘Where the writer’s memory has proved to be at fault over a detail afterwards out of curiosity looked up, the writer has allowed the fault to remain on the page; but as to the truth of the impression as a whole the writer believes that no man would care – or dare – to impugn it’.61 The book is unapologetically a partial narrative or ‘record of the impression made by Conrad the Impressionist upon another writer, impressionist also’.62 One woman, however, did dare to impugn not only the facts but the veracity of the impression. Jessie Conrad, Joseph Conrad’s wife, wrote to the Times Literary Supplement in December 1924, objecting to what she called Ford’s ‘detestable book’. Ford’s impression of the relationship between the two was a false impression, she claimed. Ford was not Conrad’s ‘literary advisor’ nor his ‘literary godfather’.63 Dorothy Richardson was thrilled when she read this letter in the TLS. She seems to have hoped that it was true: that Ford’s Joseph Conrad was indeed a scandalous (and entertaining) misrepresentation rather than a real and true representation. When the Transatlantic Review suddenly ceased publication at the start of 1925, she wrote to Bryher hoping for gossip: Wot’s this I hear about the Transatlantic being held up ‘for a few months’ – solemn notice in the papers? Is it that the prospect opened by the newly vocal ‘Jessie Conrad’ of a categorical denial of each lie as it appears has frightened F. into withdrawing, for revision, several instalments of lies all rolled out & ready for print? I expect you saw her shattering letter of protest in ‘The Times’ L.S. a few weeks ago.64

Jessie Conrad’s own memoir of her husband, Joseph Conrad as I Have Known Him, is just as impressionistic as Ford’s memoir, but she is more didactic about the ‘facts’ of her husband’s life. She is at pains to point out specific instances where she thinks that Ford claimed a greater participation in the literary production of the two writers’ co-written works, and where he claimed a greater personal influence than she believed he wielded over Conrad’s affection and 61 62 63 64

Ibid., p. 6. Ibid., p. 39. Jessie Conrad, Letter to the TLS, 4 December 1924. Dorothy Richardson to Bryher, 8 January 1925, Bryher Papers. Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.

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admiration. Regarding ‘Amy Foster’, a story in Typhoon, for example, she says that ‘F.M.H.  claims that the plot was his’ but that actually Ford did no more than point out a certain interesting gravestone to Conrad, and the rest came from Conrad’s own observations.65 She betrays her resentment of Ford, too, in her admission that she ‘persuaded’ Conrad not to let him help to finish The Rescue: ‘It appeared a sacrilege to me. [. . .] I could not endure the idea’.66 Her ‘Preface’, however, undermines the authority of these facts by setting Jessie herself up as an impressionist storyteller: But I  see I  am already slipping into story-telling and forgetting that I  am writing an introduction; yet the very fact that I have done so will prepare the reader better than any preface of mine for what follows. For I am going to write just as though I  were talking to a friend beside the fire; searching my memory for those intimate recollections which others, who could draw a much more brilliant portrait of my husband, cannot supply. Many of them may seem trivial, but they may help the imaginative and sympathetic to know Conrad as he was.67

Jessie Conrad’s style in this memoir, she admits, is going to be one in which impressions, or recollections, are dug up out of memory and presented in the order in which they occur to the mind. There will be no attempts at narrative ordering, or attempts to frame the recollections with relation to any of the apparatus of a critical biography (she will be ‘story-telling’ rather than writing an ‘introduction’ that would set up the subject objectively). There are also echoes here of Ford’s most unreliable narrator, The Good Soldier’s George Dowell, and his admission, ‘I don’t know how it is best to put this thing down’: So I shall just imagine myself for a fortnight or so at one side of the fireplace of a country cottage, with a sympathetic soul opposite me. And I shall go on talking, in a low voice while the sea sounds in the distance and overhead the great black flood of wind polishes the bright stars.68

Jessie Conrad sets up her own memoir as a corrective to Ford’s (and the various tributes written by other artists and admirers) because hers is the only one that can communicate the personal and intimate impressions of a man that only a wife can receive. In framing her work in this way she unfortunately echoes one 65 66 67 68

Jessie Conrad, Joseph Conrad As I Knew Him (London: William Heinemann Ltd, 1926), pp. 117–18. Ibid., p. 149. Ibid., p. xvii. Ford Madox Ford, The Good Soldier, ed. Martin Stannard (London and New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1995), p. 15.

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of the most famous admissions of unreliability in modern literature, but also unwittingly undermines her own project: Ford’s book after all can present different impressions still; the impressions of a writer at work. Ford’s several memoirs have been accused, not least by Arthur Mizener, an early biographer, of being ‘imprecise in fact’. They are however, as Mizener admits, ‘always magnificently true to the quality of the time and place they deal with’.69 This latter truth is one that Richardson would have prioritized. Later in life she decides that Ford has a ‘trustworthy flair’,70 and calls him ‘mendaciously truthful’,71 and her previous opinion, formed after reading only Jessie Conrad’s condemnation, was revised when she had read more of his work. Upon reading The March of Literature in 1949, she declares that she enjoys the book so much because ‘I share several of his prejudices & like his tone of voice’.72 The chief prejudice that the two writers shared was the sense that of primary importance in literature was an attempt at rendering the essence of life; the impressions as they are received by the conscious mind, and the importance of the sustaining atmosphere of surroundings. Both writers were aiming for absolute fidelity to life as it was lived, but both writers found that this fidelity was not entirely possible.

Representing the unrepresentable I: Total experience and the distracted subject in Ford Madox Ford’s Parade’s End Parade’s End is an attempt to render a war experience, or series of war experiences, in impressionist prose. It has been described, not least by Ford himself, as, in Sara Haslam’s words, an ‘attempt to capture and to report the pluralities of a whole (and complex) age’.73 It is also, as Pilgrimage is, what Sara Danius calls a ‘total’ work of art: ‘The Book of the World’. It presents ‘an aesthetic programme for which the text itself serves as an example’, and it aims at complete representation: ‘encyclopedic, totalizing, all-inclusive’.74 It also aims for a realism of impressions: a faithful ‘rendering’ of the whole of contradictory and confusing

69 70 71

72 73

74

Arthur Mizener, The Saddest Story, quoted in Saunders, A Dual Life Vol. II, p. 439. Dorothy Richardson to Eleanor Phillips, 24 May 1949, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. Dorothy Richardson to P. B. Wadsworth, 4 November 1943, Berg Collection, New  York Public Library. Dorothy Richardson to Eleanor Phillips, 24 May 1949, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. Sara Haslam, Fragmenting Modernism:  Ford Madox Ford, the Novel, and the Great War (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002), p. 42 Danius, pp. 3–4.

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perception. Because it is a story about war, these impressionist concerns became even more important, as Andrew Frayn points out: ‘Realism in the context of the First World War provoked other questions: how, when propaganda had failed to show what was really happening on the Western Front, could literature redress the balance? How could the complexity of experience in that long, narrow, shifting, impromptu modern walled city at war, be represented in fictional form?’75 Parade’s End becomes a text about the impossibility of representing anything that is perceived at the moment of the first ‘subjective and passive perception’ as fragmentary, bewildering and hallucinatory. As Colombino writes, Ford approaches this impossibility by stressing ‘the need for an ever-new representation’: which, departing from old styles and amazing the beholder with its novelty, may, each time, produce in the observer the feeling of a truthful and innocent perception. Such a vision cannot aspire to the status of an image without a code; which, according to Ford, is, by definition, unachievable. Yet it succeeds in sparking, right into the observer’s eyes, at least the impression of straightforward truthfulness and a plausible, if only illustrative, effet de réel.76

Perception is always already encoded: at the moment of the impression of the perception upon the mind, and again when that impression is ‘rendered’ in language. The best that a writer can hope for is to convey the ‘impression’ of an impression. For Ford, the doubleness of the impression is best rendered by the presentation of opposites. His prose writing and his criticism thus vacillate ‘between opposite terms:  present perceptions and past memories; subjective expression and objective rendition; the impermanence of ever-changing sensations and the arresting quality of first impressions’.77 As Tietjens reflects, in Some Do Not: In every man there are two minds that work side by side, the one checking the other; thus emotion stands against reason, intellect corrects passion and first impressions act a little, but very little, before quick reflection. Yet first impressions have always a bias in their favour, and even quiet reflection has often a job to efface them.78

75

76

77 78

Andrew Frayn, Writing Disenchantment:  British First World War Prose, 1914–30 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2014), p. 165. Laura Colombino, Ford Madox Ford: Vision, Visuality and Writing (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2008), p. 45. Colombino, ‘Ford’s Literary Impressionism’, p. 74. Ford Madox Ford, Parade’s End (London: Penguin, 2012), p. 87.

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Tietjens’s first impression here is one of Valentine Wannop, the woman who is to become his lover, as an ‘unnoticeable young female’; a ‘domestic maid’ in a cheap ‘pink cotton blouse’.79 He realizes that his ‘surface mind’ or conscious reason contradicts these impressions with its insistence on Valentine’s breeding, her physical agility and her connections. He does not realize, however, that even the first impression is not an innocent unmediated perception: it is already encoded. The cotton blouse stands for poverty and a lack of elegance. The fact that Valentine was a domestic maid is interpreted as a shameful or at least a questionable thing according to his system of hierarchies. The first impression has already been reflected on. Parade’s End is a mosaic of dramas of the difficulty of impressionist writing in miniature: Tietjens’ fragmentary war experiences; Valentine’s emotional conversation with Mark Tietjens outside the War Office, presented twice, from different points of view; the way in which Valentine receives the news that Christopher Tietjens is home from the war over the telephone (and her employer, the headteacher, receives a very different idea of the situation). The text interrogates itself: how much do impressions change between the primary perception and the recorded impress? How differently do different people perceive the same event or experience? When Tietjens is leaving England to join the war, and saying his goodbyes to Valentine, he gropes for a metaphor to explain their two separate views on political events and moral duty: ‘You and I  are like two people . . .’ He paused and began again more quickly: ‘Do you know those soap advertisement signs that read differently from different angles? As you come up to them you read “Monkey’s Soap”; if you look back when you’ve passed it’s “Needs no Rinsing.” . . . You and I are standing at different angles and though we both look at the same thing we read different messages. Perhaps if we stood side by side we should see yet a third . . .’80

The soap advert is an unchanging artefact, but in the impressions of the two viewers it does change. Each view of the advert is just as valid as the other, and a third view would be also valid. One of the questions Ford tries to address in Parade’s End is how can all these different impressions be collated in a work of art, in order to present a full account of a situation? Or, as Max Saunders asks, ‘What gives artistic coherence to a series of rendered impressions?’81 Parade’s 79 80 81

Ibid., p. 87. Ibid., p. 234. Saunders, Ford Madox Ford: A Dual Life, Vol. I., p. 442.

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End experiments with repetition as a solution to this problem. Whole scenes are presented from first one character’s point of view, and then another, in a kind of dramatic extension of Jamesian elegant variation. When Mark Tietjens sits with Valentine on a bench in the war office and tells her that he means to give her and her mother some money to help them get by, the episode is first narrated from his point of view. He appraises Valentine. She is an ‘athletic sort’, ‘clean run’, a ‘real good filly’.82 She is also suitably and femininely passive: the kind of upright but dependant girl that a man like Mark, in his pride, would like to support: ‘Her pressure on his elbow flattered him. He resisted it a little, hanging back, to make her more insistent. He liked being pleaded with by a pretty woman; Christopher’s girl at that’.83 He tells her that he wants to give her mother, as per his late father’s wishes, ‘a nice little plum’; he worries that Valentine is going to faint, and says so, but she responds ‘No. I don’t faint. I cry.’84 The narrative then switches, in the space of one paragraph, to Valentine’s perspective: ‘The girl was crying, softly and continually. It was the first moment of the lifting of the strain that she had known since the day before the Germans crossed the Belgian frontier, near a place called Gemmenich’.85 The first sentence is wholly Mark’s; the second is Valentine’s, and signals a leap back in time. After an account, from Valentine’s perspective, of how she came to be at the war office in the first place, forty-seven pages later we are back with her, ‘sat on a hard bench against a wall’ next to Mark: ‘a brown-visaged sort of brother-in-law with bulging eyes, who in his shy efforts to conciliate her was continually trying to thrust into his mouth the crook of his umbrella’.86 In Valentine’s impression of the scene, Mark is ridiculous. He is also exact as to the amount he is going to be gifting her, her mother and her brother: ‘If now we bought your mother an annuity of five hundred . . . You say that’s ample to give Christopher his chop . . . And settled on her three . . . four . . . I like to be exact . . . hundred a year . . . The capital of it; with remainder to you . . .’ His interrogative face beamed.87

In Mark’s impression of events, greater emphasis is laid on his asking of Valentine ‘How much do you and your mother need to be comfortable?’, and suggesting she also take ‘a bit for you. [. . .] And something for your brother’.88 Valentine has

82 83 84 85 86 87 88

Ford, Parade’s End, p. 227. Ibid., p. 228. Ibid., p. 229. Ibid. Ibid., p. 276. Ibid., p. 278. Ibid., pp. 228–9.

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not registered the moment of being asked this question. She begins paying full attention only when the actual figures are discussed. She also does not register the fact that she is crying. In fact she feels, at the prospect of the lifting of her financial burdens, a ‘tranquillity’ and peace. It is Mark, in Valentine’s version, who is upset by the scene, when he finds he has to describe to her the gossip about Valentine and Christopher Tietjens’s relationship: ‘He very nearly sobbed’; ‘His face became panic-stricken’.89 Literary impressionists, according to Matz’s definition, often stage their encounters with the doubleness of the impression by creating opposing characters to personify each part of the impression. Matz cites Woolf ’s ‘Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown’ as an example of this, as well as Ford’s ‘peasant cabman’ in ‘On Impressionism’, and James’s ‘woman of genius’ in ‘The Art of Fiction’.90 Matz posits that: In order to imagine sensations and ideas fully working together, the Impressionists seem also to need to imagine collaboration of the social beings to whom sensations and ideas correspond. Uncertainty about the impression’s perceptual status derives in large part from the conviction that certain people naturally correspond to certain faculties  – specifically that women and lower-class people have special access to contingent, sensuous, concrete existence.91

Mark Tietjens and Valentine are two such opposed characters in the war office scene in Parade’s End, and Christopher Tietjens, although he is to be Valentine’s lover, is no less set up as a contrast and an alternative viewpoint to Valentine’s impressions of the world. Laura Colombino calls Christopher Tietjens ‘a dogged collector of exact observations’.92 He looks at the visual phenomena of the world around him, he classifies what he sees, and he stores the impressions away in their correct place in what Colombino calls his ‘roomy “house of observations” ’: the space where, within the protected edge of his subjectivity, he can cultivate a narcissistic vision of the world. It is in this magic circle that the imaginary relation between Christopher and his objects takes place:  like an endless platoon of soldiers, the items parade before his gaze while his

89 90 91 92

Ibid., p. 278–9. Matz, Literary Impressionism and Modernist Aesthetics, p. 33. Ibid., p. 34. Colombino, Ford Madox Ford, p. 127.

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masterful eye complacently reviews them. He looks at things only so as they may look back at him and confirm his identity.93

This is Valentine’s own view of Tietjens’s mind. She says to him, in their first long conversation in a horse and cart, that she feels she needs to feed him ‘useless facts’ because that is the way his ‘mind works’: ‘It arranges the useless facts in obsolescent patterns and makes Toryism out of them’.94 His own interpretation of the power of his classifying mind is rather more flattering: It was in that way that his mind worked when he was fit: it picked up little pieces of definite, workmanlike information. When it had enough it classified them: not for any purpose, but because to know things was agreeable and gave a feeling of strength.95

When Valentine and Tietjens are separated by the First World War, the contrast between Tietjens’s classifying mind and Valentine’s visual imagination is most apparent. They originally each endeavour to forget the other, but circumstances do not allow for such convenient forgetting. The point at which Valentine is forced to remember Tietjens, when she receives a phone call from Mrs Duchemin telling her that he is back, she realizes that she has been repressing her memories of him. Tietjens similarly is reminded of Valentine when he sees a boy in the trenches whose bearing reminds him slightly of her bearing. Once she is recalled to him he cannot put her out of his mind: ‘She was certainly now obsessing him! Beyond bearing or belief. His whole being was overwhelmed by her . . . by her mentality, really’.96 Valentine also realizes that she has been avoiding her thoughts of Tietjens: ‘perhaps you were not always with yourself spiritually; you went on explaining how to breathe without thinking of how the life you were leading was influencing your . . . What? Immortal soul? Aura? Personality? . . . Something!’97 Valentine’s memory of Tietjens – the impressions she has gathered of his self, his physicality and his personality – are primarily visual. The conversation with Mrs Duchemin brings up images of Tietjens, which then recur, ‘continually forcing themselves’ into her mind’s eye: ‘his grey-blond face, his clumsy, square, reliable feet; his lumpish bulk; his calculatedly wooden expression’.98 Tietjens, in his sudden memory of Valentine, has no such visual image: And as a matter of fact, he did not remember exactly what Valentine Wannop looked like. Not vividly. He had not that sort of mind. It was words that his 93 94 95 96 97 98

Ibid., p. 132. Ford, Parade’s End, p. 135. Ibid., p. 70. Ibid., p. 604. Ibid., p. 519. Ibid., p. 518.

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mind found that let him know that she was fair, snub-nosed, rather broadfaced, and square on her feet. As if he had made a note of it and referred to it when he wanted to think of her. His mind didn’t make any mental picture; it brought up a sort of blur of sunlight.99

His classifying mind has processed the perception of Valentine’s physicality into so many interpretations. The impressions have been changed, and practically erased, by their inscription of themselves on the mind. Despite the difference in the way their impressions of each other are processed and stored, however, they both interpret their relationship in the same way. Tietjens thinks that he needs Valentine because ‘She was, in effect, the only person in the world that he wanted to hear speak. Certainly the only person in the world that he wanted to talk to. The only clear intelligence!’100 Valentine too thinks that she must go to Tietjens now he has returned from the war, ‘Because she was the only soul in the world with whom he could talk . . . They had the same sort of good, bread-and-butter brains; without much of the romantic . . . No doubt a touch . . . in him’.101 The two very different minds, with their different ways of processing impressions, make a pleasing whole when they meet. The drama of Valentine and Tietjens’s relationship is a drama of the kind of rounded impressionism that is only possible when two receiving minds, after receiving their impressions in their own different way, are both presented one to the other. The feminine mind, passive, instinctive and visual; and the masculine mind, which processes, interprets and classifies, stand for the doubleness of the double impression. Frayn sees Tietjens’s mind as always already feminine, saying that ‘His intelligence is vital and intuitive, the latter often understood as feminine. His analytical brain enables him to read social situations effectively, but he does not take conventional choices’.102 This is the same femininity that Valentine refers to when she says that Tietjens has a touch of the ‘romantic’. Valentine, similarly, has a vital, ‘clear intelligence’, which may be understood as masculine. Each character recognizes the similarities between their two processing minds, and these similarities are what enable them to bring their differences alongside each other and to create a hybrid mind: what Richardson would call ‘somewhere between a man and a woman; looking both ways’ (II, p. 187).

99

Ibid., p. 604. Ibid. 101 Ibid., p. 526. 102 Frayn, p. 181. 100

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Tietjens’s war experiences damage the part of his brain that stores and classifies, and he becomes unable to process his impressions in the same way. As he tells his wife Sylvia: ‘It’s [his brain] half of it, an irregular piece of it, dead. Or rather pale. Without a proper blood supply . . . So a great portion of it, in the shape of memory, has gone.’ She said: ‘But you! . . . without a brain! . . .’ As this was not a question he did not answer.103

The Tietjens who used to spend his leisure hours correcting the Encyclopaedia Britannica now finds himself reading the same encyclopaedia to relearn the facts he used to know. The shock of the explosion in France has erased part of his memory, but metaphorically it is the repeated shocks of modernity that have eroded his old certainties and undermined the way impressions are received, catalogued and understood. The damage done to his mind and the stress of trench life not only limit Tietjens’s ability to classify and remember, but give him access to recollections of visual impressions. At the beginning of No More Parades, in the hellish dark hut with the noise of shelling all around, he has a vision of his wife. He is worried about her activities while he’s in France, and this worry, combined with the torture of his current conditions sparks a vivid hallucination of Sylvia: She appeared before him so extraordinarily bright and clear in the brown darkness that he shuddered: very tall, very fair, extraordinarily fit, and clean even. Thorough-bred! In a sheath gown of gold tissue, all illuminated, and her mass of hair, like gold tissue too, coiled round and round in plaits over her ears. [. . .] His eyes, when they were tired, had that trick of reproducing images on their retinas with that extreme clearness, images sometimes of things he thought of, sometimes of things merely at the back of the mind. Well, to-night his eyes were very tired!104

There is a marked difference between his failed attempt to remember Valentine’s appearance, in a moment of relative calm, and the forcing of this image of his wife, in such visual detail, into his mind’s eye. The pressure of war, noise and boredom has given him that same ‘access to contingent, sensuous, concrete 103 104

Ford, Parade’s End, p. 168. Ibid., p. 299.

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existence’105 that women and lower-class men have. He can see more clearly because he has lost the power to process those perceptions. Ford himself claimed to see hallucinations, or ‘visions’ like this, ‘every day of my life’.106 Like Tietjens, he decides that they are due to ‘ocular fatigue’, and that although they are not artistic or mystical inspirations in themselves, they are legitimate material for art:  Max Saunders claims that these visions are in fact ‘the foundation of his aesthetics’.107 A few pages later, Tietjens’s stress is increased dramatically by the appearance of a wounded man in the doorway of the hut, who says ‘’Ere’s another bloomin’ casualty’, and then falls to the floor. Tietjens rushes to help the man, but finds himself instead holding a dead and very bloody body. The shock of this sends his thoughts spiralling: Tietjens’s thoughts seemed to have to shout to him between earthquake shocks. He was thinking it was absurd of that fellow Mackenzie to imagine that he could know any uncle of his. He saw very vividly also the face of his girl who was a pacifist. It worried him not to know what expression her face would have if she heard of his occupation, now. Disgust? . . . He was standing with his greasy, sticky hands held out from the flaps of his tunic . . . Perhaps disgust! . . . It was impossible to think in this row . . . His very thick soles moved gluily and came up after suction . . . He remembered he had not sent a runner along to I.B.D. Orderly Room to see how many of his crowd would be wanted for garrison fatigue the next day, and this annoyed him acutely. He would have no end of a job warning the officers he detailed. They would all be in brothels down in the town by now . . . He could not work out what the girl’s expression would be.108

The internal monologue of his thoughts and perceptions while he is in the trenches is markedly more disconnected than when he is in England. He thinks about his physical situation, covered in blood; he sees, vividly, an image of Valentine (although not so vivid as the vision of his wife, as he can’t imagine her expression); and he thinks about jobs that he has left undone. This juxtaposition of stressful and portentous situations with the banal is a feature of Ford’s depiction of trench life, but it is the stressful and the banal that enable Tietjen to see visions. On the one hand, the alternate boredom and horror of trench

105 106 107 108

Matz, Literary Impressionism, p. 34. Ford Madox Ford, ‘Sologub and Artzibashef ’, in Outlook, No. 35 (26 June 1915), p. 830 Saunders, Ford Madox Ford, Vol. I, p. 385. Ford, Parade’s End, p. 308.

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warfare leads, for Tietjens, to contemplation of domestic worries and longing after Valentine, but on the other, both the boredom and horror spark a kind of mental retreat into administrative or trivial details: Tietjens debated whether he should first drink of the coffee and army rum to increase his zest for the sandwiches, or whether he should first eat the sandwiches and so acquire more thirst for the coffee . . . It would be reprehensible to write to Valentine Wannop. The act of the cold-blooded seducer. Reprehensible! . . . It depended on what was in the sandwiches.109

As Ford writes in ‘On Impressionism’, the mind is capable of holding several impressions, or ‘superimposed emotions’ in parallel. The mundane and the significant jostle for attention. Indeed, writes Ford, ‘we are almost always in one place with our minds somewhere quite other’.110 Similarly, a person does not remember the ‘exact words’ of a long speech, rather they remember fragments.111 And if they came to write down a half-remembered speech, or invent one for the purposes of fiction, it would be more realistic to do so with only these halfremembered phrases: you would give the impression of the whole thing, of the snorts, of the characteristic exclamation, of your friend’s disquisition on morals, a few phrases of which you would intersperse into the monologue of the gentleman dissatisfied with his sole. And you would give a sense that your feet were burning, and that the lady you wanted to meet had very clear and candid eyes. You would give a little description of her hair . . . 112

Ford here conflates the immediate impression of a speech with the memory of that speech after the event. The implication is that the memory is not complete because the impression was never complete: the attention of the listener was divided between physical sensation, observation of the speaker’s ticks, and excursions into memory and fantasy. This is his strategy in Parade’s End. Tietjens’s attention skips from one thing to another: he cannot maintain concentration upon any one category of impression. Parade’s End aims at a complete and faithful rendering of experience, and of life as it is lived, but it continually comes up against representational problems: every person sees the world only partially, whether because of the quality

109 110 111 112

Ibid., p. 631. Ford, ‘On Impressionism’, p. 263. Ibid., p. 263. Ibid., p. 264.

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of their mind or because of the quality of their attention. Each person then processes those impressions differently. Every representational strategy with which Ford experiments (showing more than one point of view, presenting opposites and multiple versions) is then flawed from the very beginning. You cannot superimpose enough people’s impressions one upon the other to give a total, encyclopaedic representation of the whole: the most you can do is gesture towards it.

Representing the unrepresentable II: Masculine blindness and feminine angles of vision in Dorothy Richardson’s Pilgrimage Because Pilgrimage is presented entirely through the consciousness of Miriam Henderson, we are never given contrasting impressions of scenes. Instead, we are confronted with Miriam’s frustrated wondering whether anyone sees the world in the way she does, and if not, how do they see it? Sissie, the workingclass daughter of Miriam’s landlady, Mrs Bailey, is one such mystery. Miriam sees her lost in thought, and wonders what thoughts she is having. She watches her face for clues as to the nature of her perception, her impressions and the working of her memory, and she tries to project herself into Sissie’s mind; to see her memories with her: These visions, stored up, dimly returned to her at moments such as this? But they were now far away. They had been faithless and unfruitful. There was nothing ahead with which they could link themselves. If indeed they returned at all, they brought no light to her face [. . .] Even if, on spring and summer mornings, they rose in her mind, they would be driven back by the nature of her familiarity with the spectacle before her eyes, which for her was so much more and so much less than a stately old street, serenely beautiful in the morning light. (IV, p. 275)

Miriam’s conjecture here is that if Sissie is really seeing ‘visions’ of the past, they are held at bay, or ‘driven back’ because of the ‘familiarity’ of the surroundings immediately before her external, observant eyes. The knowledge of the practicalities of existence, in Sissie’s case a daily struggle with household management, prevents memory visions from bringing ‘light’, which is ever Richardson’s word for joy in knowledge, or knowledge in joy. The struggle for clear sight, for the illumination of untrammelled vision, means that Miriam is often contemptuous of those who could see, but will

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not. In the early Pilgrimage volumes particularly, Miriam rages against what she sees as the blindness of men, their ‘unconscious brows’, their way of seeing only one angle of a question. In Pointed Roofs, this prejudice is directed specifically at German men. When contemplating a possible life in Hanover as a housewife, Miriam rebels: ‘She thought of the men she had seen – in the streets, in cafés and gardens, the masters in the school, photographs in the girls’ albums. They had all offended her at once. Something in their bearing and manner . . . Blind and impudent . . .’ (I, p. 167). Miriam is, in Pointed Roofs, young and naïve, but even in her later London life she feels an irrational loathing for German men and their perceived blind impudence. In Deadlock, she sees some German men talking in the park, and these two also offend her ‘at once’: In the cold rheumy blue eyes beneath their unconscious intelligent German foreheads [. . .] They were the answer. Sitting hidden there, in the English park, they were the whole unconscious male mind of Europe surprised unmasked. Thought out and systemized by them, openly discussed, without the cloudy reservations of Englishmen, was the whole masculine sense of womanhood. One image; perceived only with the body, separated and apart from everything else in life. Men were mind and body, separated mind and body, looking out at women, below their unconscious men’s brows, variously moulded and sanctified by thought, with one unvarying eye. There was no escape from its horrible blindness, no other life in the world to live . . (III, pp. 207–8)

Here, the Germans represent the mindset of the entire male gender:  the European masculine viewpoint, apprehended as a threatening blindness (once more a monocular viewpoint), a refusal, or inability, to see ‘womanhood’ in its entirety. The implication is that women’s perception is multi-faceted, various and complex but that the ‘systemizing’ male mind sees just one image, with its one unvarying eye. Miriam’s interior monologue presents the word ‘unconscious’ three times in this passage. Her definitions of male blindness are often labelled ‘unconscious’ in Pilgrimage, as in The Tunnel, when ‘she glanced impatiently at Mr Leyton’s bent unconscious form’ (II, p. 69) or when she visits an ABC café filled with ‘City men’: ‘the complacent laughter of the men amazed her; their amazing unconsciousness of the things that were written all over them’ (II, p. 76). Fellow lodger Mr Gunner is described as ‘flat ignorance on the top of his unconscious shiny round black skull’ (II, p. 439). The sheer repetition of the word ‘unconscious’ in

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Miriam’s descriptions of men seems to imply a psychoanalytical leaning. By the time Deadlock was published in 1921, Dorothy Richardson was certainly aware of Freudian theories, having read her friend Barbara Low’s Psycho-Analysis which was published in 1920.113 Low defines the ‘Unconscious’ as ‘all that realm of the mind which is unknown and is incapable of being spontaneously recalled by the subject’.114 The Unconscious is assigned an inscrutable influence ‘of the profoundest kind’ on the conscious mind, including the ‘artist’s “inspiration”, an unknown force coming from some unknown area of the mind’.115 Freudian analysis, states Low, in order to gain access to the Unconscious mind, must do away with the ‘ever-present selection and criticism of the conscious “intellectual” mind’. ‘The impulse to select, to co-ordinate, to ignore irrelevancies, to rationalize, has become instinctive to most of us’.116 The conscious mind is then the masculine rationalizing mind, and the Unconscious is the instinctive and feminine mind. Richardson is using the word ‘unconscious’ in a more popular sense: her unconscious men are men who are actually unaware of the depths of their unconscious. This gendered conception of a divided mind is played out in Deadlock, where Miriam’s preoccupation with masculine blindness reaches a crisis. Her relationship with Michael Shatov, who she contemplates marrying, is played out through the tropes of blindness, of unconsciousness and the limitations of the masculine vision. In the light of this relationship, the German men seen in the park, conceptualized as archetypes of ‘the whole unconscious male mind of Europe’, are screens upon which Miriam projects her ideas about the ‘unconsciousness’ of her Russian fiancé. Watching Michael Shatov observing the events around him, Miriam sees his brow as limiting his vision: ‘his head decorously bent, the Jew in him paying respect, but looking up and keenly about him from under his bent brows, observing on the only terms he knew, through eye and brain . . .’ (III, p. 327). The bent brow overhangs his eyes, and he can only peer from under it: the brain literally overshadows the eyes, and his perceptions are limited because they are ‘systematized’. Maren Linett points out that here, and elsewhere 113

114

115 116

Apart from being a good friend of Barbara Low, and reviewing Psycho-Analysis in Dental Record in 1920, she refers to the book in letters as late as 1929. To Tommy and John Austen, presumably in response to a request to borrow, she writes: ‘I can’t so far find Barbara Lows [sic] handbook on psychoanalysis – but shall have another search before coming to the conclusion that someone has walked off with it’. Letter to John and Tommy Austen, c. 17 September 1929, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. Barbara Low, Psycho-Analysis: A Brief Account of the Freudian Theory (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1920), p. 24. Ibid., p. 26. Ibid., p. 29.

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in Pilgrimage, Miriam’s attitude to Michael’s perceived restrictive masculinity is not merely a gender issue, but a religious and racial issue: Judaism in Pilgrimage is seen as especially patriarchal. It is viewed as masculinist not only because of Michael’s typically masculine attributes  – his emphasis on generality, continuity, and literal meaning – but also because Miriam associates the Jewish God with an obsolete patriarchy, the Christian God with feminist advances.117

As Miriam tells Michael, she believes that ‘Christ was the first man to see women as individuals’ (III, p. 221), with the implication that she feels her very individual identity is threatened by the Jewish and masculine way of seeing. Miriam’s perceptions, in contrast to Michael’s, are exaggeratedly various: ‘She seemed to be looking with a hundred eyes, multitudinously, seeing each thing from several points at once, while through her mind flitted one after another all the descriptions of humanity she had ever culled’ (III, p. 324). This is the same varied seeing that Miriam invokes when she declares that ‘women can hold all opinions at once, or any, or none’ (III, p. 259). A point is being made here: the hyperbole of the description of Miriam’s varied perception is held up as triumphant proof of Miriam’s individuality, and the superiority of feminine perceptual possibilities. Miriam’s theorizing of the perceived differences in perception is played out with Shatov, with passers-by, with a black man seen in a cafe, and with Hypo Wilson. To Hypo she declares: It’s amazing, the blindness in men, even in you, about women. There must be a reason for it. Because it’s universal. It’s no good looking, with no matter what eyes, if you look in the wrong place. All that men have done, since the beginning of the world, is to find out and give names to and do, the things that were in women from the beginning, and that the best of them have been doing all the time. Not me. (III, p. 256)

This rather elliptical statement insists that Hypo recognize that there is something else in women that he cannot see, something that has been ‘in women from the beginning’:  the effects and the atmosphere creation that Miriam half-ruefully and half-boastfully says is a feminine art she does not have. The ‘something else’ is deeper, and undefined, perhaps because it is resistant to the masculine tendency to ‘give names to’ things. The perceived gulf between masculine and feminine seems to be unbreachable, and Miriam’s aim in talking over 117

Maren Linett, Modernism, Feminism and Jewishness (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 2007), p. 74.

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this gulf with Hypo, in her own mind, and with Shatov himself, is to find a way to breach the unbreachable. She ponders to herself: ‘Ought men and women to modify each other, each standing, as it were, half-way between the centre and the surface, each with a view across the other’s territory? Or should they accentuate their natural differences? Were the differences natural?’ (III, p. 271). The essentialist mask falls for a second, as she wavers on the brink of a nature versus nurture debate within herself. However, this is not taken up, as her imagination instead finds fertile ground in the more interesting image of men and women as warring countries, attempting peace talks. Miriam’s impatience with what she sees as masculine unconsciousness often tends towards violence. A potential suitor is imagined as an unconscious condescending husband with no idea of the deep inner life of his wife: ‘Horrible – and so easy to deceive, and yet cruel to deceive. Hit him . . . hit him awake’ (I, p. 446). Another imagined phantom husband she conceptualizes as just a ‘smooth motionless brow’ which is a ‘rampart of hate’ (I, pp. 437–8), a military defence against understanding: 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 conceitedly 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. (I, p. 438)

Taking a ‘line’ and having an opinion is limiting, stultifying and false to the variety of life with its ‘million sides’ to every question. The ‘shattering’ of the brow, as well as being a violent strike on masculinity as an opposing, murdering nation destroys the ‘systematizing’ intellect which limits the point of view to only one rationalized opinion. It is interesting that the imagined violence is enacted primarily at potential husbands, imaginary or otherwise. When Miriam does become engaged, her previous years spent conceptualizing the unconscious evil of ‘husbands’ in general informs her attitude towards her actual fiancé: years of prejudice about masculine failings make an engagement more a question of reconciling opposing

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factions than of giddy romance. Michael Shatov becomes a useful subject for Miriam to test routes towards a compatibility of vision. His ‘gaze of unconscious wide intelligence’ (III, p. 77), informed as it is by years of philosophical thought, diligent reading and a desire to know is not so different from her own intellectual questing. She has moments of affinity with him, a realization that they share opinions as well as the desire for knowledge. She contemplates his ‘unconscious thoughtful brow; for a strange moment feeling her own thoughts and her own outlook behind it’ (III, p.  41). Miriam’s ‘own outlook’ is reproduced, but crucially is reproduced behind an ‘unconscious’ masculine brow. There are affinities between the two, in thought and outlook, but Shatov is still not aware of the things Miriam sees. The predominance of the conscious rationalizing mind prohibits Michael from seeing the wordless truth Miriam perceives as all around them. He is ‘invisibly enclosed by the waiting incommunicable statement that yet left him, accusing him of wilful blindness, so cruelly outside’ (III, p. 171). The accusation of ‘wilful’ blindness is one that he could see if he tried, that his wide intelligence is capable of acknowledging the ‘incommunicable’, if only he would turn away from his words, his philosophizing and systematizing. Miriam conceives this ‘incommunicable statement’ as life: we will always sit like this; we must, she said within herself impatiently towards his unconsciousness. Why did he not perceive the life there was, the mode of life, in this sitting tranquilly together. Was he thinking of nothing but his reading? (III, p. 190)

Michael Shatov’s potential to understand and to perceive prompts Miriam’s desire to change him, to widen his consciousness, to facilitate the flow from his Unconscious, and to show him, casting away the reading for a second, what she herself perceives. The couple fall into explicit arguments about the status of women. Michael is suddenly faced with an ‘unexpected anger’ from Miriam, and attempts to adjust himself to her viewpoint: ‘You see, Miriam, if instead of beating me, you will tell me your thoughts, it is quite possible that mine may be modified. There is at least nothing of the bigot in me’ (III, p. 217). However, Miriam feels that her thoughts cannot be communicated:  ‘it was history, literature, the way of stating records, reports, stories, the whole method of statement of things from the beginning that was on a false foundation’ (III, p. 218). Miriam rather wants to make Michael perceive, adapt his vision, but, in her apprehension that ‘thought’, logic and narrative sense are important to Michael, she must then adapt the way in which he thinks: ‘for a moment she faced the certainty that she would rather

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annihilate his mind than give up overlooking and modifying his thoughts’ (III, p. 306). In her desire to modify Michael’s thoughts, direct challenges must be made to his mode of perception. In a cafe, Michael looks at a group of women in the wrong way, and Miriam reacts: the moment of catching, as they sat down, the flicker of his mobile eyelid, the lively unveiled recognizing glance he had flung at the opposite table, describing its occupants before she saw them; the rush of angry sympathy; a longing to blind him; in some way to screen them from the intelligent unseeing glance of all the men in the world. ‘You don’t see them; they are not there in what you see.’ ‘These types are generally quite rudimentary; there is no question of a soul there.’ ‘If you could only have seen your look; the most horrible look I have ever seen; alive with interest.’ (III, p. 279)

Significantly, Miriam’s anger and her desire to ‘blind’ Michael stems from the way his glance sums up the women into types, ‘describes’ them (thus reducing them to a trick of language) and dismisses them. His eyes, although intelligent, are ‘unseeing’, and the essence of the women seen is ‘not there’ in his apprehension of them. Michael’s glance is summary and dismissive, and the wider deeper Unconscious perception that Miriam wants him to see becomes, in Michael’s conception, named as ‘soul’. He understands that she wants him to see something else, and denies its existence. There is nothing more to see. Miriam’s response to this is a little disingenuous: And now she herself was interested; had attained unawares a sort of connoisseurship, taking in, at a glance, nationality, type, status, the difference between inclination and misfortune. Was it he who had aroused her interest? Was this contamination or illumination? (III, p. 279)

Miriam’s ‘sort of connoisseurship’ and interest in rapid judgements as to ‘nationality, type, status’ is not new, and is not ‘attained unawares’ through association with a masculine mind. She has been seeing and classifying in this way from the very beginning of Pilgrimage. In Pointed Roofs, the group of girls around the tea table in the school in Hanover consist of ‘four Germans’ and ‘six Englishspeaking girls’ (I, p.  37). The English girls are subject to swift scrutiny:  their appearance and probable personality are summarized rapidly, starting with an

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observation as to the quantity of their ‘Englishness’. The Martins, we are told, are ‘as English as they could be’ (I, p. 39), and this observation devalues their worth in Miriam’s eyes. In a café with Mr Mendizabal she had sampled a masculine way of sorting into types:  ‘she was there as a man, a free man of the world, a continental, a cosmopolitan, a connoisseur of women’ (II, p. 394). If it is contamination to look at people in this way, then Miriam was contaminated long before. Although the masculine and feminine modes of viewing may be combined and moulded in Miriam’s use of them, she gives up the battle to reconcile the two perceptual viewpoints in her relationship with Michael Shatov. Michael’s ‘recognizing glances’ and dismissals cannot be conquered, modified or annihilated. Miriam’s defeat is acknowledged to be one of irreconcilable perceptions: But the things she threw out to screen her incommunicable blissfulness, or to shelter her vacuous intervals from the unendurable sound of his perpetual circling round his set of ideas, no longer reached him. She could silence and awaken him only in those rare moments when she was lifted out of her growing fatigues to where she could grasp and state in all its parts any view of life that was different from his own. Since she could not hold him to these shifting visions, nor drop them and accept his world, they had no longer anything to exchange. (III, p. 304)

The primary perceptions of Miriam’s ‘vacuous intervals’ and ‘incommunicable blissfulness’ crumble before the logic of ‘sets of ideas’. The incommunicable, naturally, cannot be sent across the gulf to the masculine consciousness, preoccupied as it is with language. This masculine consciousness can only be detached from classifying statement and interested in wider perception by a mimetic grasping and stating on the part of Miriam herself. Statement fails, and there is no other way to communicate.

Selection and patterning: The impressionist text as tapestry In ‘On Impressionism’, Ford emphasized the need for surprise and novelty in the portrayal of life. The reader must be startled if they are to really think about, or engage with, the impression they are being presented with. The structure of a

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novel, Ford writes, should alternate between ‘arguing, illustrating and startling and arguing, startling and illustrating’: until at the very end your contentions will appear like a ravelled skein. And then, in the last few lines, you will draw towards you the master-string of that seeming confusion, and the whole pattern of the carpet, the whole design of the net-work will be apparent.118

This is an argument for fidelity through inclusivity. Pilgrimage also tried to represent ‘truth’ by adding layer upon layer and impression upon impression. Jean Radford, in fact, felt that Pilgrimage was too inclusive, calling Miriam’s impressions ‘a mosaic of particularities’, which ultimately make it ‘hard to see the overall pattern’.119 The resultant effect is a large, unwieldy text, ‘like an enormous room, crammed with portraits and memories, with light and dark places, scents and textures, dusty cretonne at the window’.120 Katherine Mansfield also objected to the apparent lack of selection of impressions in Pilgrimage. In 1920 she reviewed Interim in the Athenaeum and concluded: Darting through life, quivering, hovering, exulting in the familiarity and the strangeness of all that comes within her tiny circle, she leaves us feeling [. . .] that everything being of equal importance to her, it is impossible that everything should not be of equal unimportance.121

Mansfield’s description of Miriam’s mind and range as a ‘tiny circle’ echoes Richardson’s own criticism of James’s ‘softly lit enclosure’ (I, p. 11). Richardson does select her material, of course:  Pilgrimage would be impossible to lift if she didn’t. However, seemingly insignificant details are included along with the important impressions Miriam gathers (in Mansfield’s parodic list, ‘a pair of button boots, a night in Spring, some cycling knickers, some large, round biscuits’).122 These ‘treasures’ are as important to the concept of Pilgrimage as Miriam’s observations of people’s expressions or appearance. Miriam keeps her eyes open all the time, collecting impressions and acting as a ‘Recording Angel’, as one contemporary reviewer commented.123 Mansfield’s criticism of

118 119 120 121 122 123

Ford, ‘On Impressionism’, p. 268. Radford, p. 17. Ibid., p. 2. Katherine Mansfield, ‘Dragonflies’, in The Athenaeum, No. 4680 (9 January 1920), p. 48. Katherine Mansfield, ‘Three Women Novelists’, in The Athenaeum, No. 4640 (4 April 1919), p. 141. L. P. Hartley, ‘New Fiction’, in Saturday Review (10 December 1927), p. 828.

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Richardson’s work seems at first strikingly similar to James’s criticism of impressionist painters (who he describes as ‘foes to arrangement, embellishment, selection’). However, in James’s view, the impressionists ‘send detail to the dogs and concentrate themselves on general expression’, whereas Mansfield felt that Richardson had too many details.124 As Jean Radford notes, to the exasperated reader, ‘the book seems composed of minute observations of the particular, the details of colours, sounds, scents and textures as these are registered in Miriam’s mind’.125 The minute observations are important, because they constitute a wide sample of the impressions Miriam receives. An important distinction between painterly impressionism and literary impressionism is thus apparent: the impressions in impressionist prose proliferate and are distinct from each other, and are not subsumed into a general picture. May Sinclair, in her review of Pilgrimage, actually emphasized what she saw as Richardson’s ‘compression’. Her view was not that there were too many details provided, but the opposite: It is as if no other writer had ever used their senses so purely and with so intense a joy in their use. This intensity is the effect of an extreme concentration on the thing seen or felt. Miss Richardson disdains every stroke that does not tell. Her novels are novels of an extraordinary compression, and of an extenuation more extraordinary still.126

Everything seen and everything felt is rendered with an absolute economy, but also with a direct concentration that occludes any attention given to a thing seen or felt which is irrelevant: in Sinclair’s reading the things seen are all contributors to the whole pattern of Pilgrimage. Sinclair hits the mark here. When Richardson does include apparently trivial observations in her pattern, their significance becomes apparent later on. Miriam’s relationship with food, for example (although she never eats ‘large, round biscuits’) is always indicative both of her social position and her cultural and geographic position: from the ‘solid butter-brot’ (I, p. 140), hot chocolate and patisseries she eats in Germany to the thick bread and butter she is given every night for tea at the school in North London that she feels will never fill her up (‘she was always so hungry’, I, p. 230). The fancy meals at the leisured and wealthy home of the Corries, where she is a governess, are both a joy and a challenge

124

125 126

Henry James, ‘The Impressionists’, in The Painter’s Eye: Notes and Essays on the Pictorial Arts, ed. John L. Sweeney (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1956), p. 115. Radford, p. 17. May Sinclair, ‘The Novels of Dorothy Richardson’, in The Egoist, Vol. 5, No. 4 (April 1908), p. 58.

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to her ignorance (‘strange hot wine-clear, wine-flavoured soup’; ‘sweets, curiously crusted brown almonds’; and unaccustomed fish “how on earth do I  know that it’s red mullet? And those are olives I  suppose’, I, pp.  354–5). At Miriam’s fourth place of employment, the dental surgery, she is given a large lunch every day, which she eats as much of as possible because her only other food in the day will be the cheap ‘boiled egg and roll and butter’ she can just about afford from an ABC cafe (II, p. 76), or the ‘quickly produced soup’ occasionally offered by her friends Mag and Jan. Food thus functions as a class marker, and knowledge about food is cultural wealth. Accepting food is shameful as it admits poverty (‘I say, I can’t go on for ever eating your soup’. ‘Drink it then for a change, my child’. ‘No, but really’, p. 88); admitting ignorance about exotic foods is shameful because it implies both poverty and a lack of cosmopolitan worldliness (‘Like Caviare?’ ‘I don’t even know what it is’ [. . .] ‘Caviare to the million, eh? – oh, I ought not to have put it like that, things one would rather have said otherwise  – no offence intended  – none taken, I  hope  – don’t yeh know really?’ II, p.  168). A  quick glance through Pilgrimage will find Miriam eating various foodstuffs, but each mention of a bread roll or a bowl of soup or a salad (‘Do you think I should like salad? ‘If you had a brother would he like salad?’, II, p. 147) is significant because it marks Miriam’s journey from middle-class to working-class and back again. Each trivial detail contributes to the overall pattern: Miriam’s ongoing quest to become an independent, sophisticated and cultured woman. In Ford’s writing of his memoir (or ‘novel’) of Joseph Conrad, he both discusses and practices the kind of impressionism that he and Conrad ‘evolved’ together.127 One of the tenets of impressionism, as Ford outlines it, was ‘selection’:  ‘To render your remembrance of your career as a fish-salesman might enhance the story [. . .], or it might not ’.128 Illustrative incidents, memories, and incidental distractions are only included if they are a stroke that adds to the general picture; and it is the general picture (the complete impression) that matters the most. This general picture might be large, unwieldy, complex and contradictory, but if it is so then it is a faithful representation of ‘the complexity, the tantalisations, the shimmering, the haze, that life is’.129 As Colombino argues, Ford felt that a full truthful representation of life would never be possible, although it should be attempted, seeing writing as ‘the strenuous attempt to defeat the

127 128 129

Ford, Joseph Conrad, p. 129. Ibid., pp. 182–3. Ibid., p. 191.

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impression’s fleeting character by trying to renew it over and over again in the reader’s eyes’: But this aspiration is always accompanied, in his texts, by the awareness of its partial defeat. The language of literary Impressionism never succeeds entirely to give body to its fictional world. The characters’ bewildered and estranged perceptions, along with the disorientating logics of narration  – the time-shifts which juxtapose memory and experience, the effects of vibration, multiplicity, and displacement – run counter to our serene identification with the characters’ impressions.130

There are, as Miriam insists, ‘two sides to every question . . . a million sides . . . no questions, only sides . . . always changing’ (I, p. 438). For both writers, the complete portrayal of a world was an impossible ideal, but nevertheless one to aim for. Both writers were caught between their desire, on the one hand, to show the world from different angles and through disparate and conflicting impressions, and on the other, to select the telling detail: the one impression that illustrates the whole of the situation. Richardson’s and Ford’s attempts to capture a whole impression through synecdochal detail are similar to James’s sense of what can constitutes visual fidelity in ‘The Art of Fiction’; how to produce ‘the illusion of life’: [The author] competes with his brother the painter in his attempt to render the look of things, the look that conveys their meaning, to catch the colour, the relief, the expression, the surface, the substance of the human spectacle.131

The visual impressions, which are important to James, are only of value when they are ordered. Life is compared to a tapestry, with many-coloured threads that must be woven together to create a picture. The best authors, James says, have ‘the power to guess the unseen from the seen, to trace the implication of things, to judge the whole piece from the pattern [. . .] this cluster of gifts may almost be said to constitute experience’. The writer must give due attention to the ‘seen’, if only to make possible a wider knowledge: a prediction of what constitutes the ‘unseen’; an artistic arrangement of impressions. James goes on to specify what exactly he means by experience: ‘If experience consists of impressions, it may be said that impressions are experience’.132 The impressionism’s duality is expressed by James in a striking image: Experience is never limited, and it is never complete; it is an immense sensibility, a kind of huge spider-web of the finest silken threads suspended in 130 131 132

Colombino, Ford Madox Ford, pp. 25–6. Henry James, ‘The Art of Fiction’, in Partial Portraits (London: Macmillan, 1922), p. 390. Ibid., p. 389.

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the chamber of consciousness, and catching every air-borne particle in its tissue. It is the very atmosphere of the mind; and when the mind is imaginative – much more when it happens to be that of a man of genius – it takes to itself the faintest hints of life, it converts the very pulses of the air to revelations.133

One imagines James as an immense spider, scuttling across this web, surveying the impressions caught, and trying to make a pattern from them.134 James’s 1888 phrase ‘air-borne particles’ also foreshadows Woolf ’s 1919 suggestion in ‘Modern Fiction’: Let us record the atoms as they fall upon the mind in the order in which they fall, let us trace the pattern, however disconnected and incoherent in appearance, which each sight or incident scores upon the consciousness.135

Here the emphasis is on letting the atoms fall and then ‘tracing’ the patterns they have made in their landing. Where the nineteenth-century James was concerned not only with capturing the essence of these particles, but with the construction of form (‘my necessity to weave into my general tapestry every thread that would conduce to a pattern’),136 Woolf suggests that modern fiction is interested more in ‘recording’ the pattern of events as they occur to the mind. This passage from ‘Modern Fiction’ is often read as an injunction in which Woolf suggests ‘the writer as mere reporter from the interface of subjective consciousness and outer reality’. However, as Jane Goldman argues, Woolf is here talking about James Joyce’s literary technique and not her own. Her method in the essay is to ‘describe the attractions of her contemporaries’ methods and then show their shortcomings’.137 It is James Joyce who lets the atoms fall and then traces the pattern that chance reveals; Woolf herself reserves the right (or the duty) of the author to create their own pattern. In ‘Modern Fiction’, she perhaps expresses

133 134

135

136 137

Ibid., p. 388. The image of the web recurs throughout nineteenth century fiction. See for example George Eliot’s image of the tangled web of Middlemarch society: ‘I at least have so much to do in unravelling certain lots, and seeing how they were woven and interwoven, that all the light I can command must be concentrated on this particular web’. George Eliot, Middlemarch (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), p. 132. In both instances the web is already in existence and it is the novelist’s task to make sense of what is there, but where James’s web differs from Eliot’s is in its location within the mind of the person perceiving. The Jamesian web is one of subjectivity, whereas Eliot’s web is an objective tangle of external societal relations. Virginia Woolf, ‘Modern Fiction’, in The Essays of Virginia Woolf. Volume 4:  1925 to 1928, ed. Andrew McNeille (London: The Hogarth Press, 1984), p. 161. Matz, Literary Impressionism and Modernist Aesthetics, p. 32. Jane Goldman, Modernism 1910–1945:  Image to Apocalypse (Basingstoke:  Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), p. 69.

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more unconditional admiration for Chekhov’s narrative patterning in his short story ‘Gusev’: The emphasis is laid upon such unexpected places that at first it seems as if there were no emphasis at all; and then, as the eyes accustom themselves to twilight and discern the shapes of things in a room we see how complete the story is, how profound, and how truly in obedience to his vision Tchehov has chosen this, that, and the other, and placed them together to compose something new.138

Woolf is looking for emphasis and for evidence of composition, and at first she doesn’t find it because Chekhov has simply layered and overlayered impressions. However, in the layering of impressions there is a pattern: the juxtaposition of seemingly unrelated impressions creates a whole. When Woolf reviewed Richardson’s The Tunnel in 1919, it was in similar terms. She noted the essential stability of Richardson’s representation of consciousness, and made an attempt to link this central core to an analysis of Dorothy Richardson’s ‘method’. Woolf opens the review with the comment that Richardson, with her fourth book, ‘must still expect to find her reviewers paying a great deal of attention to her method’.139 Woolf goes on to try to describe this method: So ‘him and her’ are cut out, and with them goes the odd deliberate business: the chapters that lead up and the chapters that lead down; the characters who are always characteristic; the scenes that are passionate and the scenes that are humorous; the elaborate construction of reality; the conception that shapes and surrounds the whole. All these things are cast away, and there is left, denuded, unsheltered, unbegun and unfinished, the consciousness of Miriam Henderson, the small sensitive lump of matter, half transparent and half opaque, which endlessly reflects and distorts the variegated procession, and is, we are bidden to believe, the source beneath the surface, the very oyster within the shell.140

In Woolf ’s reading, we are not presented with a pure perception, but rather are given an encoded, altered and distorted impression. Woolf is unable to accept what she feels Richardson is telling her: that this oyster-like, sensitive and reflecting consciousness is ‘the source’; the stable truth and the depth of a being.

138 139

140

Woolf, ‘Modern Fiction’, pp. 162–3. Virginia Woolf, ‘The Tunnel’ (1919), in Virginia Woolf: Women and Writing, ed. Michèle Barrett (London: The Women’s Press Ltd, 1979), p. 188. Ibid., p. 189.

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Woolf is also looking for ‘some unity, significance, or design’, but complains that having sacrificed the constraints of the realist novel, ‘for the prospect of some new revelation or greater intensity, we still find ourselves distressingly near the surface’.141 The ‘surface’ appears to be equated with perception itself, or rather with the receiving of impressions. Woolf characterizes the substance of Pilgrimage (as Mansfield did) as fragments of sensory perception: ‘words, cries, shouts, notes of a violin, fragments of lectures’, and says that the reader is invited to ‘follow these impressions as they flicker through Miriam’s mind, waking incongruously other thoughts, and plaiting incessantly the many-coloured and innumerable threads of life’.142 Here, however, it seems that Woolf has unwittingly answered her own question. Despite the transience of the ‘flicker’ of Miriam’s sensory impressions, the transience implied also in the oyster’s ‘reflecting and distorting’, Pilgrimage is actually creating a ‘unity’: it is ‘plaiting’ the ‘many-coloured and innumerable’ sensory impressions into a narrative. The realist, traditional narrative has been replaced by a new kind of patterning, which in turn provides what Woolf felt was so lacking: ‘unity’, ‘significance’, ‘design’. The word ‘pattern’ recurs in discussions of Pilgrimage: it is a useful word for the structure which is not, as Woolf points out, a traditional realist structure, but an attempt to represent, in Carol Watts’ words, ‘the patterns of women’s lives’.143 The text, most critics agree, has a ‘pattern’, but not a clearly defined structure. One contemporary reviewer praised Richardson for the development of her style in precisely these terms: She has become, strangely enough, a literary person such as we could never think of her being before – in the sense, say, that Mrs. Virginia Woolf is a literary person – composing her sentences with much elaboration, arranging her pattern, advancing with less appearance of spontaneity but more certainty to her end. The thoughts and impressions that used to fly over the pages in short exclamatory sentences now move slowly, analysed minutely and guardedly, almost in the manner of Henry James.144

However, while the patterning of each chapter or chapter-volume may be ‘literary’ and ‘guardedly’ composed, the whole structure of Pilgrimage is less clear. The very method that was so new and so exciting, and that placed consciousness

141 142 143

144

Ibid., p. 190. Ibid., p. 189. Carol Watts, Dorothy Richardson. Writers and their Work Series (Plymouth: Northcote in association with The British Council, 1995), p. 12. Scott-James.

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as the stable centre point of the text, also made for a proliferation of impressions, at points so diverse and contradictory that it is difficult to trace any kind of structure. Ford’s emphasis on the importance of rendering impressions as they occur is similarly double-edged. He reports from his talks with Conrad: it became very early evident to us that what was the matter with the Novel, and the British novel in particular, was that it went straight forward, whereas in your gradual making acquaintanceship with your fellows you never do go straight forward. You meet an English gentleman, at your golf club. He is beefy, full of health, the moral of the boy from an English Public School of the finest type. You discover, gradually, that he is hopelessly neurasthenic, dishonest in matter of small change, but unexpectedly self-sacrificing. [. . .] To get such a man in fiction you could not begin at his beginning and work his life chronologically to the end. You must first get him in with a strong impression, and then work backwards and forwards over his past.145

On the surface this looks like an advocation of ‘tracing the atoms as they fall’: the narrator finds out about the ‘English gentleman’ piece by piece and so the reader is presented with the picture of the man piece by piece also. However, the emphasis actually falls on the association of impressions. The working ‘backwards and forwards’ over the past of the character is one dictated by a different kind of impressionistic and modernist patterning, which Saunders describes as ‘disrupting linear chronology, and following instead sequences of mnemonic association’.146 The pattern presented is dictated by what Paul B. Armstrong calls, in his discussion of literary impressionism in Henry James, ‘our habitual interpretative schemes  – the extent to which they pattern our perception in ways we do not notice’.147 The pattern of Pilgrimage is then the pattern of Miriam’s ‘habitual interpretative schemes’. However, Miriam’s ways of seeing, and ways of interpreting are continually in flux; her ‘habitual’ methods for perceiving and processing develop over time. This is what makes Richardson an impressionist, possessing the impressionist ‘heightened self-consciousness about the way in which any technique for rendering the world rests on assumptions about how we construe it’.148 Here lies the basis for Miriam’s criticisms of masculine blindness, and, subsequently, the ‘dead level of astounding . . . something ’ (III, p. 146) that is

145 146 147 148

Ford, Joseph Conrad, pp. 129–30. Saunders, Self Impression, p. 83. Armstrong, p. 6. Ibid., p. 5.

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inevitably ‘left out’ (IV, p. 239) of all masculine novels, because it is not a part of the ‘habitual interpretative schemes’ of men. Here, also is the explanation for her continual striving to find a way in ‘word-pictures’ (IV, p. 585) of expressing what she feels to be the inner light of mysterious life, and, simultaneously, the beauty and significance of the exterior world. Parade’s End has as its framework not one character’s ‘habitual interpretative schemes’, but several. It does not complain about the things which are, or have been, left out of novels, instead it aims for a total and various inclusivity. Both Richardson and Ford develop their impressionist aesthetic as an aesthetic of patterning. One impression received is recorded, another impression is recorded alongside it, and the overall text is a palimpsest, or superimposition of impressions. The nearest approach to completeness that a fictional portrayal can achieve is apparent only from the final pattern. Initial impressions, second impressions, and even third impressions, are partial: it is the pattern that reveals the whole.

2

Mystical Visions and Primary Perception: May Sinclair and Dorothy Richardson

The ‘dead level of astounding . . . something ’ (III, p. 146) that Richardson felt had been left out of all novels was something that May Sinclair also felt was missing from literature. Both authors were unsure what this ‘something’ was, and were ruefully aware that the uncertain nature of this thing meant that an attempt to render it would be at best an impressionist’s attempt to ‘represent the unrepresentable’. Both, nevertheless, embarked on similar representational strategies in their attempt to capture the ‘something’:  a representational strategy always accompanied by ‘the awareness of its partial defeat’.1 Sinclair greatly admired Dorothy Richardson’s Pilgrimage, and her sympathetic review of the first three chapter-volumes of Pilgrimage in The Egoist in 1918 has become a classic modernist text in its own right. In this review she writes of ‘the startling “newness” of Miss Richardson’s method’, which she goes on to label ‘stream of consciousness’; in what is famously the first application of the phrase to literature:2 To me these three novels show an art and method and form carried to punctilious perfection. Yet I have heard other novelists say that they have no art and no method and no form, and that it is this formlessness that annoys them. They say that they have no beginning and no middle and no end, and that to have form a novel must have an end and a beginning and a middle. [. . .] It is just life going on and on. It is Miriam Henderson’s stream of

1 2

Colombino, Ford Madox Ford, pp. 25–6. Sinclair, ‘The Novels of Dorothy Richardson’, p. 57.

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consciousness going on and on. And in neither is there any grossly discernible beginning or middle or end.3

Dorothy Richardson refused to embrace the term ‘stream of consciousness’ as representative of her own work, or as an adequate metaphor for consciousness itself, saying that:  ‘amongst the company of useful labels devised to meet the exigencies of literary criticism it stands alone, isolated by its perfect imbecility’. Consciousness, she insists, although seeming stream-like when ‘superficially regarded’, is rather a still point. One’s consciousness ‘sits stiller than a tree’.4 It is a critical commonplace that Sinclair’s quintessential modernist work Mary Olivier: A Life, written in 1919, was a response to her reading of Pilgrimage and the thoughts she had explored in the 1918 review. The first public encounter between these two writers has in Suzanne Raitt’s words ‘set the terms for most subsequent critical analyses of Mary Oliver’.5 Sinclair’s early novels had been realist, and had followed a conventional plot structure. They explored finde-siècle issues: the new woman as autonomous individual or benighted genius; new attitudes to marriage and family; class relations and the commercialization of the modern world. Pilgrimage, which is largely set in the nineteenth century, dealt with the same issues, but was markedly modern in form. It dealt with the action of a single consciousness, rather than the actions of a group of characters caught in a situation, and it gave Sinclair the impetus to experiment with the representation of consciousness herself. In both Pilgrimage and Mary Olivier readers are confined to the protagonist’s point of view (Miriam in Pilgrimage; Mary in Mary Olivier) as they grow up, learn and evolve. Both texts are impressionist in their attempt to render, objectively, the subjective experience of their protagonists. Pilgrimage begins with Miriam leaving home at seventeen, although we have occasional flashbacks to Miriam’s childhood and her first memories. She goes through several jobs, living spaces and friendship circles; she goes to lectures and reads books, talks to writers and political activists and scientists. Mary Olivier begins when Mary is a baby, with pure sensory perceptions that are later to be Mary’s first memories. She never leaves home, but her journeying through life is an intellectual quest similar to Miriam’s. She reads, she thinks and she tries to define herself in and against a world that has been defined by masculine thought. Both narratives end rather inconclusively, with a middle-aged Miriam

3 4

5

Ibid., p. 58. Dorothy Richardson, ‘Autobiographical Sketch’, in Authors Today and Yesterday, ed. Stanley J. Kunitz (New York: The H.W. Wilson Company, 1934), pp. 562–4, p. 562. Suzanne Raitt, May Sinclair: A Modern Victorian (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 214.

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and a middle-aged Mary both coming to some kind of necessarily provisional conclusion about their findings so far. This is indeed ‘life going on and on’ with no ‘discernible [. . .] end’. The primary focus of most critical attention given to Sinclair’s review of Pilgrimage has been on Sinclair’s use of the phrase ‘stream of consciousness’ and its usefulness (or not) as a descriptor of modernist form, and the subsequent similarities between the representations of consciousness in Pilgrimage and Mary Olivier. The end of the review, however, in which Sinclair quotes several passages from the three chapter-volumes she reviews in order to demonstrate what she believes is the ‘author’s intention’, has been generally overlooked. This is likely due to the fact that Sinclair, in true impressionistic fashion, never sets out precisely where it is she feels that Miriam is ‘going to’, but rather announces that, by reading the passages themselves, the intention is ‘transparently clear’. Sinclair selects several passages, two of which are worth quoting in full: Her room was a great square of happy light . . . happy, happy. She gathered up all the sadness she had ever known and flung it from her. All the dark things of the past flashed with a strange beauty as she flung them out. The light had been there all the time; but she had known it only at moments. Now she knew what she wanted. Bright mornings, beautiful bright rooms, a wilderness of beauty all round her all the time – at any cost.

And yet not that: Something that was not touched, that sang far away down inside the gloom, that cared nothing for the creditors and could get away down and down into the twilight far away from the everlasting accusations of humanity . . . Deeper down was something cool and fresh – endless – an endless garden. In happiness it came up and made everything in the world into a garden. Sorrow blotted it out; but it was always there, waiting and looking on. It had looked on in Germany and had loved the music and the words and the happiness of the German girls, and at Banbury Park, giving her no peace until she got away. And now it had come to the surface and was with her all the time.6

Sinclair presents these two extracts as a kind of progression. In the first, Miriam decides she wants life, luxury and beauty all around her. In the second, she decides that actually the beauty and the freshness of spring luxury are within

6

Sinclair, ‘The Novels of Dorothy Richardson’, p. 58.

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her, if not continually accessible. Sinclair’s ‘and yet not that’ is both a critical interjection and an echo of the progression of Miriam’s own thinking. Sinclair as reviewer thinks ‘but that is not quite what I mean’ as Miriam thinks ‘but that is not quite what I mean’, and the passages are left, without explanation, to speak for themselves. Sinclair’s review is following the model suggested by Pilgrimage itself: the reviewer is presenting her ideas about the significance of the text as they occur, and modifying them later. Because the reviewer at this moment cannot pinpoint exactly what is so significant about these passages, the reader is not told. But in each is a kind a vision: a kind of background to life made up of joy; something ‘cool and fresh – endless’ that is ‘there all the time’. This atmosphere vision is a steady, sustainable and sustaining appreciation of the ‘magic’ in the background of daily life. There are many other examples of this kind of vision in the first few chaptervolumes of Pilgrimage. In Backwater when Miriam is working as a teacher in a North London school, she has one of these moments while she is walking up some stairs: The staircase was cold and airy. Cold rooms and landings stretched up away above her into the darkness. She became aware of a curious buoyancy rising within her. It was so strange that she stood still for a moment on the stair. For a second, life seemed to cease in her and the staircase to be swept from under her feet . . . ‘I’m alive’ . . . It was as if something had struck her, struck right through her impalpable body, sweeping it away, leaving her there shouting silently without it. I’m alive . . . I’m alive. Then with a thump her heart went on again and her feet carried her body, warm and happy and elastic, easily on up the solid stairs. She tried once or twice deliberately to bring back the breathless moment standing still on a stair. Each time something of it returned. ‘It’s me, me; this is me being alive,’ she murmured with a feeling under her like the drop of a lift. But her thoughts distracted her. They were eagerly talking to her, declaring that she had had this feeling before’. (I, p. 245)

She has indeed had this feeling before. Later in Backwater, Miriam remembers the first instance of it. She remembers it because she has just had, in her solitary gazing at sunlight and seascape, another of these moments: She tried to remember when the strange independent joy had begun, and thought she could trace it back to a morning in the garden at Babington, the first thing she could remember, when she had found herself toddling alone along the garden path between beds of flowers almost on a level with

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her head and blazing in the sunlight. Bees with large bodies were sailing heavily across the path from bed to bed, passing close by her head and making a loud humming in the air. She could see the flowers distinctly as she walked quickly back through the afternoon throng on the esplanade; they were sweet williams and ‘everlasting’ flowers, the sweet williams smelling very strongly sweet in her nostrils, and one sheeny brown everlasting flower that she had touched with her nose, smelling like hot paper. She wanted to speak to someone of these things. Until she could speak to someone about them she must always be alone. [. . .] It would be impossible to speak to any one about them unless one felt perfectly sure that the other person felt about them in the same way and knew that they were more real than anything else in the world, knew that everything else was a fuss about nothing. (I, pp. 316–7)

This is what Richardson scholars (following Carol Watts) call the ‘bee memory’.7 It is also the subject of Richardson’s short story ‘The Garden’, with its child protagonist wholly taken up by the ‘pretty pretty flowers. Standing quite still, going on being how they were when no one was there’, and the bees which ‘had not noticed her. They were too busy. Zmm. Talking about the different colours’.8 The child in ‘The Garden’ sees the flowers around her, and the bees, but cannot interpret them. Claire Drewery calls this story a ‘depiction of a child who is unable to make sense of or attach meaning to her surroundings’, because she ‘has not yet made the full transition into a speaking subject’.9 ‘The Garden’ thus reflects Miriam’s attached importance to this first memory, and the desire to simultaneously recapture it in feeling, and to express it in some spoken form to someone: ‘Until she could speak to someone about them she must always be alone’ (I, p. 317). The child protagonist blurs the boundaries between the objects she sees and herself, and is not yet spatially aware: the flowers ‘all put their arms round her without touching her. Quickly’.10 As Drewery states, the disjointed narrative here ‘reveals that a presentation of objects in space is impossible without recourse to language and its representation of the subjective consciousness’.11

7

8

9

10 11

Watts describes the ‘bee memory’ as an ‘Edenic founding of selfhood in a Berkshire garden, where the child moves in a magical sphere presided over by a natural and sentient trinity of flowers, bees, and sunlight. It is a scene that connotes innocence, security, and, above all, home, for Richardson, the lost garden of her Babington childhood’ (Watts, p. 20). Dorothy Richardson, ‘The Garden’, in Journey to Paradise:  Short Stories and Autobiographical Sketches, ed. Trudi Tate (London: Virago Modern Classics, 1989), p. 21. Claire Drewery, Modernist Short Fiction by Women: The Liminal in Katherine Mansfield, Dorothy Richardson, May Sinclair and Virginia Woolf (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011), p. 21. Richardson, ‘ The Garden’, p. 21. Drewery, p. 22.

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The child cannot yet fully process her experiences using language: she perceives first and foremost. Although she can articulate her immediate sensory impressions (‘the sound of feet [. . .] pretty pretty flowers [. . .] she could see the different smells’) she cannot explain the world around her, and so, without the power to define, the landscape itself becomes undefined, and boundaries are blurred. In Pilgrimage, it’s not the details of the memory itself that make the memory important – the flowers or the bees – it’s the feeling that Miriam had at the time she was looking at the flowers and the bees. It is not only the child Miriam who cannot articulate what this feeling is: the adult Miriam tries again and again to express it, and fails. The thing that is ‘more real than anything else in the world’ is inexpressible. Instead of explaining the nature of it, Richardson presents us with the markers that signal its presence. It always happens when Miriam is alone and untroubled, and is usually sparked by some kind of perception of light. It brings a kind of fresh seeing of the world, and, subsequent to that and reliant on it, a revelation of the self as the only real thing. There are similar visionary moments in May Sinclair’s fiction. Savage Keith Rickman, in The Divine Fire (1904), discovers ‘Nature’s innermost ultimate secret’ on the top of Harcombe Hill whilst looking at the lights of Harmouth, and his ‘genius’ becomes ‘one with the soul of the divine illimitable night’;12 Jane Holland in The Creators (1910) finds, in Kensington Gardens, that ‘of a sudden the world she looked at became luminous and insubstantial and divinely still’;13 Gwenda in The Three Sisters (1914) has whole hours where ‘the visible world, passing into her inner life, took on its radiance and intensity’, and she ‘discerned the hidden soul of the land that had entranced her’.14 Sinclair’s visionary moments are also enabled by light; in her case a still white light as opposed to Richardson’s ‘bright sunlight’, and in each the hero/ine is alone, and in nature. The difference between Sinclair’s visions and Richardson’s visions is that while, in Pilgrimage, Miriam’s visions allow her to see herself – to feel herself – clearly and fully, as if for the first time, the characters in Sinclair’s novels have visions which allow them to see the world with the purity of a first perception, and allow their inner selves to become one with the external world. Although Sinclair has, from the beginning of her career as a novelist, been making her characters have luminous visions, they are most prominent in her

12 13 14

May Sinclair, The Divine Fire (Toronto: William Briggs, 1904), p. 249. May Sinclair, The Creators: A Comedy (London: Hutchinson and Co., 1910), p. 107. May Sinclair, The Three Sisters (London: Virago Press, 1984), pp. 339–40.

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1919 novel Mary Olivier. Mary’s narrative is in fact structured around these visions, as high points in a life. This is the first of these moments in Mary Olivier: A queer white light everywhere, like water thin and clear. Wide fields, flat and still, like water, flooded with the thin, clear light; grey earth, shot delicately with green blades, shimmering. Ley Street, a grey road, whitening suddenly where it crossed open country, a hard causeway thrown over the flood. The high trees, the small, scattered cottages, the two taverns, the one tall house had the look of standing up in water. She saw the queer white light for the first time and drew in her breath with a sharp check. She knew that the fields were beautiful. She saw Five Elms for the first time: [. . .] A flagged path to the front door. Crocuses, yellow, white, white and purple, growing in the border of the grass plot. She saw them for the first time.15

As in Pilgrimage, Mary Olivier’s visions are sudden realizations of the innate beauty of the world, and as in Pilgrimage, they recur frequently:  ‘Here was the sudden, secret happiness you felt when you were by yourself and the fields looked beautiful. It was always coming now, with a sort of rush and flash, when you least expected it’.16 It very quickly becomes established in Mary Olivier that the vision that comes ‘when you were by yourself and the fields looked beautiful’ is not just fresh seeing, but happiness. Miriam in Pilgrimage also calls her sudden visions happiness, and ‘strange independent joy’. Miriam wonders ‘if the last deepest level of her being was joy’ (III, p. 321). Eva Tucker claims that ‘happiness’ and the real deep eternal self are, for Miriam, the same thing. She describes the struggle between social performativity and a deeper ‘being’ as a dichotomy of ‘worldliness’ versus happiness: ‘it is only because we are constantly blunting our sensibilities that we lose sight of the happiness’.17 After it is established that this is happiness, happiness becomes the word that Mary Olivier uses for it, to explain it to herself; in the ‘Adolescence’ chapter of her life story: And as if Mark had never gone, as if that awful thing had never happened to Dan, as if she had never had those thoughts about her mother, her hidden happiness came back to her. Unhappiness only pushed it to a longer rhythm. Nothing could take it away. Anything might bring it: the smell of

15 16 17

May Sinclair, Mary Olivier: A Life (London: Virago Press, 1994), pp. 48–9. Ibid., pp. 75–6. Eva Tucker, . . . The Enchanted Guest of Spring and Summer  – Dorothy Richardson, 1873– 1957: A Reassessment of her Work (Essex: Hypatia Press, 2003), pp. 6–7.

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the white dust on the road; the wind when it came up out of nowhere and brushed the young wheat blades, beat the green flats into slopes where the white light rippled and ran like water, set the green field shaking and tossing like a green sea; the five elm trees, stiff, ecstatic dancers, holding out the broken-ladder pattern of their skirts; haunting rhymes, sudden cadences; the grave “Ubique” sounding through the Beethoven Sonata.18

May Sinclair’s selections from Pilgrimage in her 1918 review are of the moments when Miriam not only realizes that this background radiance is there, but when she realizes that it is there all the time. ‘Sorrow blotted it out’, Miriam thinks, but ‘it was always there’, underneath, and waiting to be realized. Similarly Mary’s unhappiness temporarily blots it out, but her recovery from sorrow reveals that it is still there, and that in fact it has reached ‘a longer rhythm’, much as Miriam’s relief from unhappiness reveals it as ‘come to the surface’ and ‘with her all the time’. Sinclair admires Pilgrimage so much because it shows traces of a kind of realization about the world that she felt herself, and that she wanted to share: the realization that there is some kind of mystical something behind the prosaic appearances of things and people and nature. Her reading of Pilgrimage produced a kind of recognition similar to the recognition that Mary Olivier has when she reads Shelley’s ‘Hymn to Intellectual Beauty’: ‘Sudden thy shadow fell on me: – I shrieked, and clasped my hands in ecstasy!’ It had happened to Shelley, too. He knew how you felt when it happened. (Only you didn’t shriek.) It was a real thing, then, that did happen to people. She read the ‘Ode to a Skylark,’ the ‘Ode to the West Wind’ and ‘Adonais.’ All her secret happiness was there. Shelley knew about the queerness of the sharp white light, and the sudden stillness, when the grey of the fields turns to violet: the clear, hard stillness that covers the excited throbthrobbing of the light.19

Mary Olivier has an adolescent thrill at the thought that Shelley, this great poet, understands her. She also feels relief that her experience has been validated. She is not odd, or mad like her Aunt Charlotte: her visions ‘did happen to people’. Sinclair’s admiration for Pilgrimage is at least partly born of the same need to connect with someone who sees life the same way that Miriam articulates when she says she must talk to someone about her visions, but she cannot unless she

18 19

Sinclair, Mary Olivier, pp. 124–5. Ibid., pp. 129–30.

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finds someone who already ‘knew that they were more real than anything else in the world’. For both writers, this hyper-real – this ‘Reality’ – is the thing that fiction and poetry should attempt to portray above all other things. It is the primary perception that proves so elusive but the representation of which should be strived for. For Richardson, what was missing from fiction was ‘what the floods of sunshine and beauty indoors and out meant to [a novel’s characters] as single individuals, whether they were aware of it or not’ (III, p. 243). For Sinclair it was what Laurel Forster calls the ‘psychic vision’.20 It was the quest for a way of portraying ‘Reality’ that was the attraction of Imagism, which, Sinclair claimed in a review, was ‘ “out for” [. . .] direct naked contact with reality’.21 Jane Dowson writes that for Sinclair, ‘Reality’ was the kind of reality perceived by the primary consciousness. In Dowson’s reading, ‘the hues of primary consciousness are the moments of epiphany’ of modernist literature, and Sinclair’s self-imposed task was to try to ‘catch our present primary thinking untainted by the processes of secondary consciousness such as inference and reasoning’.22 This is the recording of the motions of perception without the compromise of recording the second part of the ‘impress’. It is not surprising, then, that Sinclair was attracted by Richardson’s use of the double impression: her portrayal of a heroine who is continually and ruefully aware of the intangibility of her ‘present primary thinking’, her already encoded impressions; the need to record, and the loss that this brings. In The Tunnel, for example, Miriam thinks of moments when: ‘something comes along, golden, and presently there is a thought. I can’t be easy till I’ve said it in my mind, and I’m sad till I have said it somehow . . . and sadder when I have said it’ (II, p. 43). The initial moment, ‘alive in steady colour’, ‘glowing’ or ‘golden’ is impossible to capture, but these moments are not rare in Pilgrimage. They are not as elusive as the Joycean epiphany; they are continually occurring. Dorothy Richardson’s ways of seeing, or those that she chooses to record, are more often than not ‘golden’ moments, or colourful moments, and Miriam’s life is full of these. The impulse that led Richardson to write Pilgrimage is her need to capture the light and record the significant moment, and she shows Miriam struggling with this same need: ‘trying to impress your impression by

20

21 22

Laurel Forster, ‘ “Imagism . . . Is a State of Soul”: May Sinclair’s Imagist Writing and Life and Death of Harriet Frean’, in May Sinclair: Moving Towards the Modern, ed. Andrew J. Kunka and Michelle K. Troy (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), p. 101. May Sinclair, ‘Two Notes: I. on H.D. II. On Imagism’, in The Egoist, Vol. 2 (1 June 1915), p. 88. Jane Dowson, ‘The Dark Night: The Novel Into Some Other Form’, in May Sinclair: Moving Towards the Modern, ed. Andrew J. Kunka and Michelle K. Troy (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), p. 146.

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telling of the thing by name’ (III, p. 66). The problem lies in the method of representation, the difference between the initial ‘something [. . .] golden’ and the ‘thought’ which needs to be expressed, but can never be fully expressed, leaving Miriam ‘sadder when I have said it’.23

Naming the unnameable: Silence, mysticism, philosophy, religion In the manuscript draft of her 1914 novel The Three Sisters, the bulk of Sinclair’s revisions occur when she is trying to describe Gwenda’s mystical visions. Whereas pages of dialogue and action are relatively clean and unrevised, the moments of mystical contemplation are scored through and rewritten, with phrases added and then deleted, then added again. One such passage, where Gwenda compares her mystical feeling with the creative energy of her musician sister, is particularly illuminating. In the published novel, we have: Her passion found no outlet in creating violent and voluptuous sounds. It was passive, rather, and attentive. Cut off from all contacts of the flesh, it turned to the distant and the undreamed. Its very senses became infinitely subtle; they discerned the hidden soul of the land that had entranced her. There were no words for this experience. She had no sense of self in it and needed none. It seemed to her that she was what she contemplated, as if all her senses were fused together in the sense of seeing and what her eyes saw they heard and touched and felt.24

In the manuscript, Sinclair tries several ways of describing this fusing of the senses, before resorting to the helpless ‘There were no words for this experience’: It was passive, rather, & attentive. Its It listened for the voice of the earth, of the beck & of the hill-streams & of the wind that flowed in the ash-trees like a river, And she was silent with their silence. Cut off from all fles contact with the flesh it had knew the

23

24

The word ‘golden’ refers here to a moment of realization, or moment of being, but can also have connotations of memory. The paradox here is that although Richardson is remembering her significant moments and could therefore be charged with romanticizing events, she claims that the moment itself as experienced is golden, rather than later becoming so. Sinclair, The Three Sisters, p. 340.

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courtyard itself with what it the distant & the undreamed. Her She very senses had became infinitely Subtle; And it was as if she discerned at last the secret hidden soul of the land that had entranced her. She had no words for its exquisite austerity. Nor for its mystic and consoling beauty. This what she experienced. She had no sense of self & needed none . It seemed to her that she was what she contemplated, as if all her senses were fused together in the sense of seeing & what her eyes saw they heard heard & touched & felt.25

The ‘experience’ is ‘exquisite’, austere, mystical and beautiful. Sinclair piles up her words, hoping that each one will suggest something of the quality she is trying to express, and that cumulatively they will describe Gwenda’s vision. The experience itself is also equated, as elsewhere, with the natural world: trees, rivers, hills and wind. It is the noises of nature and yet it is silence. It appears through silence and its silence makes the protagonist silent too. However, none of these tropes satisfies Sinclair. In the end, there are ‘no words’. For both authors these visions were difficult to define. They are continually referred to as ‘it’ or ‘something’. Both use the word ‘light’ as a handy shorthand for them: Richardson talks of ‘golden light’, a ‘steady glow’, ‘bright sunlight’ and Sinclair talks of ‘queer white light’; ‘still white light’. Richardson calls it ‘magic’ and ‘revelation’ and ‘radiance’ and ‘joy’; Sinclair calls it ‘hidden happiness’, ‘secret happiness’ or ‘queer, sudden, uncertain ecstasy’. Miriam, in Pilgrimage, and Mary, in Mary Olivier, dramatize the authors’ own struggles with definition through their attempts to explain their visions to themselves, and through their reading; both characters turn to philosophers and to mystics.

Silence and Maeterlinck Miriam reads Maurice Maeterlinck, the French Symbolist dramatist and sometime mystic philosopher. She idealizes ‘my Maeterlinck’ (IV, p.  642), particularly The Treasure of the Humble, his book of mystic essays, asking herself ‘how many people knew that Maeterlinck had described in words what life was like on the inside?’ This ‘inside’, which Richardson herself was trying to describe using 25

The Three Sisters manuscript. May Sinclair Papers, Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Book and Manuscript Library, University of Pennsylvania.

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words, is a gendered inside that can be destroyed by language: ‘women always know their questions are insincere, a treachery towards their silent knowledge’. This gendered inner vision, explored in Chapter  1, comes to the fore in Deadlock, as Miriam is beginning her tentative relationship with Michael Shatov. Despite her respect for his intelligence, her fondness for him, and the excitement with which she approaches their intellectual discussions, she feels that there is something missing from their interchange: Michael does not see or recognize the ‘something’ that lies beneath life’s facades; he has not had visions such as hers. To make him understand what she means by these visions, she lends him her copy of The Treasure of the Humble. Michael, Miriam decides, ‘must read the chapter on silence and then the piece about the old man by his lamp. That would make everything clear’ (III, p. 68). Miriam respects Maeterlinck because he manages to put the ‘incommunicable’ into words, something which she cannot do herself. He can do this because his words are rhythmic, mimicking the tide of the inner knowledge itself: she explained aloud that she had learned most of her French by reading again and again for the sake of the long, even rhythm of its sentences, one book. [. . .] It was like a sea, each sentence a wave rolling in, rising till the light shone through its glistening crest, dropping to give way to the next oncoming wave, the meaning gathering, accumulating, coming nearer with each rising falling rhythm; each chapter a renewed tide, monotonously repeating throughout the book in every tone of light and shade the same burden, the secret of everything in the world. (III, p. 128)26

Maeterlinck (and Emerson, the other writer Miriam entreats Michael to read) communicates his meaning about the light and flowing tide of the inner life by making his prose imitate it.27 His style reflects his content, and the perceived profundity of this has such an effect on Miriam that she declares she can’t read novels any more, as ‘they showed only one side of people, the outside’ (III, p. 12). Richardson later discussed how the style of a text, its musicality and tone, could communicate meaning that words taken alone could not. In ‘About Punctuation’ (1924), she writes that readers must read with their ‘whole self ’; ‘listening’ to a 26

27

John Cowper Powys records that Dorothy Richardson herself treated Maeterlinck as a language tutor: ‘Defends Maeterlinck – described how when poor she bought a 2d edition of the Treasure of the Humble in French and learnt French from it’. John Cowper Powys, ‘Notes at the Time of First Meeting Summer ’29’, in The Letters of John Cowper Powys and Dorothy Richardson, ed. Janet Fouli (London: Cecil Woolf, 2008), p. 244. The two writers themselves recognized a kinship between their works. Maeterlinck, for example, wrote a ‘profoundly appreciative’ introduction to Emerson’s Essays. George H. Thomson, Notes on ‘Pilgrimage’: Dorothy Richardson Annotated (Greensboro, NC: ELT Press, 1999), p. 141.

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text and immersing themselves in its rhythm.28 As Annika Lindskog points out, this reading strategy enables not only the ‘creative collaboration’ between author and reader that Richardson promoted, but also a kind of personal recognition.29 It ‘entails grasping what is not directly expressed in the text itself: it is a matter of finding resonances of one’s own experiences and/or knowledge between the lines’.30 Miriam finds in Maeterlinck the recognition through immersion that Mary Olivier finds in Shelley and Sinclair finds in Pilgrimage itself. The two essays Miriam wishes Michael to read reflect the preoccupations she has, and her struggle to resolve them. The first, ‘Silence’, is a discourse on the impossibility of words to express anything, with Maeterlinck’s assertion that ‘it is idle to think that, by means of words, any real communication can ever pass from one man to another’. Speech, in Maeterlinck’s thought, is a barrier to communion between souls: ‘it is only when life is sluggish within us that we speak: only at moments when reality lies far away, and we do not wish to be conscious of our brethren. And no sooner do we speak than something warns us that the divine gates are closing’.31 Communication blocks the ‘incommunicable’: the ‘true life’, the ‘soul’, the ‘depths where angels dwell’.32 Maeterlinck conceives silence as dangerous, threatening and yet the only way to awaken the soul: No sooner are the lips still than the soul awakes, and sets forth on its labours; for silence is an element that is full of surprise, danger and happiness, and in these the soul possesses itself in freedom. If it be indeed your desire to give yourself over to another, be silent.33

It is this promise of fulfilment and communion through silence that Miriam clings to in her relationship with Michael Shatov. Russian people, she feels, have the potential to understand this need. In seeing Michael’s friend, Mr Rodkin, smiling and silent at Mrs Bailey’s dinner table, she wonders at the effect he creates: He was illuminated; she had his secret at last given by Mr Shatov. Russian kindliness. Russians understand silence and are not afraid of it? Kindly

28 29

30

31

32 33

Dorothy Richardson, ‘About Punctuation’, in Adelphi (1 April 1924), pp. 990–1. In a response to one reader’s letter, Richardson expressed ‘joy’ in hearing of ‘your collaboration, your re-creation of the book’, going on to ask ‘who was it who said a book is written exactly as many times as it is really read?’ Letter to Sheila Wingfield, 2 April 1939, National Library of Ireland. Annika J. Lindskog, ‘Dorothy Richardson and the Grammar of the Mind’, in Pilgrimages: A Journal of Dorothy Richardson Studies, No. 6 (2013–14), p. 9. Maurice Maeterlinck, The Treasure of the Humble, trans. Alfred Sutro (London:  George Allen, 1897), pp. 4–5. Ibid., p. 6. Ibid., p. 13.

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silence comes out of their speech, and lies behind it, leaving things the same whatever has been said? This would be truer of him than of Mr Shatov. (III, p. 67)

The quality of silence, then, has the potential to exist behind speech and in spite of speech, as a kind of background communication more real than discourse with its power to change things. Despite the promising foreign otherness of Mr Shatov, Miriam cannot get him to understand silence in the way she wishes. A conversation with him has her ‘stiffening in angry refusal to face the banishment of her tangled mass of thought by some calmly oblivious statement, beginning nowhere and leading them on into baseless discussion, impeded on her part by the pain of unstated vanishing things’ (III, p. 72). The unstated vanishing things she tries to find words to summon, but cannot: ‘none of them expressed the underlying thing . . . Why had she not brought down Maeterlinck?’ (III, p. 77). The ‘underlying thing’, expressed again as something ‘incommunicable’, impossible to define or to express in words, is pointed towards in Maeterlinck’s essay ‘The Tragical in Daily Life’, which contains Miriam’s ‘piece about the old man by his lamp’ (III, p. 68). Maeterlinck emphasizes the importance of dailiness, of the ‘essential tragic element’ in the lives of the humble and aware, of which the purpose is to ‘reveal to us how truly wonderful is the mere act of living, and to throw light upon the existence of the soul’. The tragic everyday reveals ‘the mysterious chant of the Infinite, the ominous silence of the soul and of God, the murmur of Eternity on the horizon’.34 Here we have several of Miriam’s favourite sayings and translations of the feeling of being in a mysterious universe in one sentence. Miriam’s refrain of the recurring ‘realization of the wonder of being alive and in the midst of life’ (III, p. 416), of ‘current existence, the ultimate astonisher’ (IV, p. 611), in another form, is linked by Maeterlinck with silence, rhythm and eternity. He expresses Miriam’s wonder and joy, and describes in his own words the importance of her golden light, ‘endless light’ (III, p. 345) and the feeling of life as mysterious and vast. As Miriam exclaims: ‘there’s so much – eternally. It’s stupendous. [. . .] Fancy people being alive. You would think every one would go mad’ (II, p. 99). Life itself contains something so mysterious, overwhelming and ‘astounding’ that to become aware of it is to become impatient with labels, words and forms: There is something else; that’s the worst of novels, something that has to be left out. Tragedy; curtain. But there never is a curtain and, even if there

34

Ibid., pp. 97–8.

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were, the astounding thing is that there is anything to let down a curtain on; so astounding that you can’t feel really, completely, things like ‘happiness’ or ‘tragedy’; they are both the same, a half-statement. Everybody is the same really, inside, under all circumstances. There’s a dead level of astounding . . . something. (III, p. 146)

Again, the ‘astounding’ is a ‘something ’:  indefinable, incommunicable. The references to tragedy here can be explained by Miriam’s preoccupation with Maeterlinck. His essay ‘The Tragical in Daily Life’ seeks to redefine true tragedy as not the tragedy of ‘bloodshed, battle-cry and sword-thrust’,35 but of dailiness: ‘are there not elements of deeper gravity and stability in happiness, in a single moment of repose, than in the whirlwind of passion?’36 The tragedy of ‘the old man by his lamp’ (III, p. 68) is the real portrait of life, as Maeterlinck says: I have grown to believe that an old man, seated in his armchair, waiting patiently, with his lamp beside him; giving unconscious ear to all the eternal laws that reign about his house, interpreting, without comprehending, the silence of doors and windows and the quivering voice of the light, submitting with bent head to the presence of his soul and his destiny – an old man, who conceives not that all the powers of this world, like so many heedful servants, are mingling and keeping vigil in his room, who suspects not that the very sun itself is supporting in space the little table against which he leans, or that every star in heaven and every fibre of the soul are directly concerned in the movement of an eyelid that closes, or a thought that springs to birth – I have grown to believe that he, motionless as he is, does yet live in reality a deeper, more human and more universal life than the lover who strangles his mistress, the captain who conquers in battle, or ‘the husband who avenges his honour’.37

The old man by the lamp is significantly ‘unconscious’ of the ‘eternal laws’, does not understand silence, or the physical laws which enable the world to turn and the table to stay fixed to the floor. He is not interpreting the world with his head, or intellect, but rather submitting himself ‘to the presence of his soul or destiny’. Miriam’s love of this passage, then, implies her respect for, and privileging of, an unconscious acceptance of the flow of life: the ‘something ’ which cannot be analysed or ‘comprehended’, but must rather be accepted and felt. Her reluctance

35 36 37

Ibid., p. 103. Ibid., p. 100. Ibid., pp. 105–6.

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to name this something is perhaps due to a superstitious fear that, once named, it would be unreachable. In May Sinclair’s 1914 novel The Three Sisters, Gwenda and Rowcliffe experience their coming together as lovers through a moment of silence. They stand together on the moor and see the thorn trees on Greffington Edge as a ‘vision’: ‘thrown back to a distance where they stood enchanted in a great stillness and clearness and a piercing beauty’.38 In the manuscript, Sinclair writes that the two, aware that they have shared a sacred moment, and that the moment must not be destroyed by conversation, ‘walked back in silence, guarding the memory of the mystic thing’.39 In the published text, however, the formulation has changed to ‘They walked back in a silence that guarded the memory of the mystic thing’.40 The silence has transferred from the trees themselves to the shared consciousness of the two lovers: it has its own agency. In Mary Olivier, silence is also powerful. It is not created by the players in a scene, but is rather an active force in the atmosphere, that is either left to work its magic or denied and destroyed. Mary recognizes that silence is important if the background ‘something’ is ever to be realized, and like Miriam and Gwenda she finds this both more difficult and more necessary when she is trying to connect with a lover. Towards the end of Mary Olivier, as Mary sits in a cafe with her soon-to-be-lover, Robert Nichols, she realizes that her talk is blocking something – some background radiance that would break through if she were quiet for a moment: She was chattering like a fool, saying anything that came into her head, to break up the silence he made. She was aware of something underneath it, something that was growing more and more beautiful every minute. She was trying to smash this thing lest it should grow more beautiful than she could bear. ‘You see how I score by being shut up in Morfe. When I do get out it’s no end of an adventure.’ (Was there ever such an idiot?) Suddenly she left off trying to smash the silence. The silence made everything stand out with a supernatural clearness, the square, white-clothed table in the bay of the window, the Queen Anne fluting on the Britannia metal teapot, the cups and saucers and plates, white with a gentian blue band, The King’s Head stamped in gold like a crest.

38 39 40

Sinclair, The Three Sisters, p. 321. The Three Sisters manuscript. Sinclair, The Three Sisters, p. 321.

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Sitting there so still he has the queer effect of creating for both of you a space of your own, more real than the space you had just stepped out of. There, there and not anywhere else, these supernaturally clear things had reality, a unique but impermanent reality. It would last as long as you sat there and would go when you went.41

The ‘something’ underneath Mary’s chatter is the same something that Miriam is continually trying to make other people realize. Conversation threatens it, but does not destroy it. It is, Mary realizes, ‘reality’.

Mysticism, philosophy and the absolute Evelyn Underhill’s 1911 Mysticism:  A  Study in the Nature and Development of Man’s Spiritual Consciousness was hugely influential for Sinclair. She read parts of the manuscript in draft, and offered, according to Underhill’s preface, ‘helpful and expert advice’.42 As Sinclair’s biographer Suzanne Raitt points out, Sinclair must have been greatly attracted by Underhill’s ‘idea of a religious life that was not defined by Christian truths’, and her stressing of ‘the importance of an instinctive as well as an intellectual spiritual life’.43 Underhill’s Mysticism is primarily about precisely those moments that May Sinclair reproduces again and again in her fiction, when ‘some of the veils of that substantial world are stripped off: Reality peeps through, and is recognized dimly, or acutely, by the imprisoned self ’.44 Underhill follows strands of this search for a connection with ‘Reality’, or the ‘Absolute’, through Western thought: in Idealism, Philosophical Scepticism, Psychology and Theology. She thinks of herself, perhaps, as one of those thinkers she describes who: cannot be content with the sham realities that furnish the universe of normal men. It is necessary, as it seems, to the comfort of persons of this type to form for themselves some image of the Something or Nothing which is at the end of their telegraph lines: some ‘conception of being,’ some ‘theory of knowledge.’ They are tormented by the Unknowable, ache for first principles, demand some background to the shadow show of things. In so far as man possesses this temperament, he hungers for reality, and must satisfy 41 42

43 44

Sinclair, Mary Olivier, p. 343. Evelyn Underhill, Mysticism:  A  Study in the Nature and Development of Man’s Spiritual Consciousness (London: Methuen & Co. Ltd., 1911), p. xi. Raitt, p. 236. Underhill, p. 24.

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that hunger as best he can:  staving off starvation, though he may not be filled.45

Mary is also one of these ‘types’ who are ‘tormented by the Unknowable’. A large part of Mary Olivier is given over to Mary’s reading of Plato, Spinoza, Schwegler, Kant, Hegel and Schopenhauer. She is obsessed with finding out what her visions mean and with the idea of giving a name to them. She tells her brother: ‘I’d give everything – everything I possess – to know what the Thing-in-itself is.’ ‘I’d rather know Arabic. Or how to make a gun that would find its own range and feed itself with bullets sixty to the minute.’ ‘That would be only knowing a few more things. I want the thing. Reality, Substance, the Thing-in-itself. Spinoza calls it God. Kant doesn’t; but he seems to think it’s all the God you’ll ever get, and that, even then, you can’t know it. Transcendental Idealism is just another sell.’

Mary is torn. She desperately wants to know what her visions are and she wants to analyse them, but she is brought up short by, on the one hand, Kant’s insistence that ‘you can’t know it’ whatever you do, and on the other, the fear that, as Laura Mulvey says in ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, ‘analysing pleasure, or beauty, destroys it’.46 She perseveres, however: There was Schopenhauer, though. He didn’t cheat you. There was ‘reine Anschauung,’ pure perception; it happened when you looked at beautiful things. Beautiful things were crystal; you looked through them and saw Reality. You saw God. While the crystal flash lasted ‘Wille und Vorstellung,’ the Will and the Idea, were not divided as they are in life; they were one. That was why beautiful things made you happy.47

This, for Mary, is the key to all of her visions. All of them have happened when she was looking at something beautiful; at a garden or a sunlit scene. All of them brought a sense that she was seeing clearly, as if for the first time, with a kind of ‘pure perception’; and all of them made her feel that she was connected to something else: the landscape, ‘Reality’, ‘God’ or ‘the Idea’. She does not yet know what the something else is, but she has that fact of the visions explained. Miriam reads Schopenhauer too, but she is less enthusiastic. Her reaction to reading him is instinctively one of revulsion to his ideas, and she finds it

45 46

47

Ibid., p. 9. Laura Mulvey, ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, in Screen, Vol. 16, No. 3 (Autumn 1975), pp. 6–18, p. 6. Sinclair, Mary Olivier, p. 254.

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difficult, initially, to formulate her objections to him. She tells her friend Miss Holland: ‘He was a Weary Willy. That is to say a pessimist’ (III, p. 462). This is not enough, and so she continues: When they [men] make up their philosophies of life they leave out themselves. Like the people who talk of the vastness of space and the ant-like smallness of humanity. If one man, says Schopenhauer, sees quite clearly all the misery of life, and that it ends, for everybody, in disease and pain and death, then there is something in mankind which is not corruption. [. . .] But the great thing is you must consider life obscene. You must look at it from the outside, as shapes, helplessly writhing in the dark. If you see all this, and Schopenhauer did, you grin and snort and stand aside. Women, he proves, don’t see it. And so they are obscenity, blind servants of obscenity, for ever. (III, p. 463)

When Miriam makes up her philosophy of life, she keeps herself very much in it. Her revelatory moments are ones in which she realizes the reality inherent in, not just her surroundings, but her self as a vital part of those surroundings. To her mind, when you’re in it, you don’t see the misery, you see the secret joy: the radiance that lies behind, and permeates, everything. Miriam knows that she disapproves of Schopenhauer’s view of the world from the outside looking in, and she knows that she approves of Maeterlinck’s idea that it is life as it looks on the inside that is important. She knows also that she can get access to her ‘something’ only when she is attuned to her inner tide of thought and when the chatter of the external world is silenced. However, she does not know what the ‘something’ is that she wants so desperately to access. Richardson found a partial solution in Gustave Geley’s From the Unconscious to the Conscious, which according to John Cowper Powys’s notes ‘at the first time of meeting Summer ‘29’, she ‘praised highly’.48 Geley’s answer to Schopenhauer’s pessimism is that it does not realize fully the importance of the inner ‘something’ central to being. This something, in Geley’s words: The One, the Real, as opposed to the many and the illusory, is the divine principle of the religions of India. It is the single principle of pantheism and Monism. It is the ‘Idea’ of Plato, the ‘Active Intellect’ of Averroes, the ‘Natura naturans’ of Spinoza, the ‘Thing in Itself ’ of Kant; it is the ‘Will’ as understood by Schopenhauer, and it is the ‘Unconscious’ of von Hartmann.49 48 49

Powys, p. 243. Gustave Geley, From the Unconscious to the Conscious, trans. Stanley de Brath (London: William Collins Sons & Co., 1920), p. 188.

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Geley’s assumption that Plato’s ‘Idea’, Kant’s ‘The Thing in Itself ’, Schopenhauer’s ‘Will’ and the like are all different names for the same phenomena recalls Mary Olivier’s speech to her brother: it is more difficult to find the essence of something if it goes by many names. Sinclair herself uses several terms interchangeably. One is ‘Reality’, and another is ‘God’. The concept of ‘will’ is characterized by Schopenhauer as ‘the only one among all known concepts which does not take its rise from phenomena and intuitive representations, but comes from the depth of the individual consciousness which recognises itself essentially, directly, without any forms, even of subject and object’.50 ‘The World as Will and Representation’ has the ‘will’ as central being, as the only true thing. Any seeing, or ‘representation’ done by the will, not only ‘does not take its rise from phenomena’, but actually creates the phenomena: ‘In the multiplicity of phenomena which fill the world, which co-exist or succeed each other as the succession of events, it is Will only that it manifested. All these phenomena do but make it visible and objective’.51 This is a reading in which the impress part of the impression not only creates the impressions, but denies the primacy (or even the existence) of the initial pure perception. It is this will, eternally creating, and central, unchanging, that is the ‘something in mankind which is not corruption’ in Miriam’s explanation. However, the problem here is that Schopenhauer has done what Miriam sees as the problem with all male philosophy: ‘they leave out themselves’ (III, p. 463). If all of life is a projection, a representation of the will, or Kantian ‘divine Idea’, then the phenomena do not exist, and the self (as series of projections, performances and phenomena) also does not exist. This is Schopenhauer’s pessimism: that all these projections are transitory. However, Geley provides a solution: The assimilation of consciousness to a mere ‘representation’ is not logical. Why should consciousness be exclusively bound to the temporary semblances which make up the universe? Why should not all that falls within its domain be registered, assimilated, and preserved by the eternal essence of being? What! The divine principle, the will or the unconscious, is to be allowed all potentialities except one, and that the most important of all – the power to acquire and retain the knowledge of itself. How much more logical it is to presume that this real and eternal will which is objectified in transitory and factious personalities, will keep

50 51

Arthur Schopenhauer, ‘The World as Will and Representation’, quoted in Geley, p. 190. Ibid., p. 191.

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integrally the remembrances acquired during these objectifications, thus by numberless experiences passing from primitive unconsciousness to consciousness. Certainly the human personality which covers the period from birth to death of the body is destined to perish and have an end as it had a beginning; but the real ‘individuality,’ that which is the essential being, keeps and assimilates to itself, deeply graven in its memory, all states of consciousness of the transitory personality.52

In Geley’s theory, the central being, ‘will’, or indefinable ‘something’, is not only the projector from which visions of the world are created. There is a two-way process:  the phenomena of the world affect and imprint the will itself. It can assimilate. There is no longer ‘no point’ in living, changing, learning, ‘representing’ – the ‘being’ is affected by this as well as affecting it. Schopenhauer’s argument (in Miriam’s reading) that women are inferior because they do not feel sufficiently pessimistic about the unchangeable nature of the will is therefore void. Geley’s argument is empowering to Richardson, and also allows her to theorize and explain the nature of the ‘something’ she believes in so wholeheartedly. May Sinclair wrote the first of her two books of philosophy, A Defence of Idealism, in 1917. It was meant as an ‘Apology for Idealistic Monism’ (although the typescript calls it an ‘Apology for Spiritualistic Monism’),53 and intended also as a riposte to the New Realism which Sinclair saw as the province of G. E. Moore and Bertrand Russell.54 She wanted to ‘reconstruct what Realism is destroying’, and to that end she wrote her Hegelian study of the Absolute.55 Russell and Moore had long ago begun what is now known as their ‘revolt against idealism’,56 in the ‘spring of 1898’, according to Russell’s memoirs. He writes in 1959: ‘I think that Moore was most concerned with the rejection of idealism, while I was most interested in the rejection of monism. The two were, however, closely connected’.57 Sinclair, in declaring her book to be an avocation of both Idealism and Monism, is directly challenging these rejections. She explores, analyses and criticizes Russell’s Realist, Pluralist and Pragmatist works, including ‘The Principles of Mathematics’, which she refers to throughout her book as Principia Mathematica; this was actually

52 53

54

55 56 57

Geley, p. 198. A Defence of Idealism, typescript. May Sinclair Papers, Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Book and Manuscript Library, University of Pennsylvania. May Sinclair, A Defence of Idealism: Some Questions & Conclusions (London: Macmillan, 1917), p. vii. Ibid., p. xvii. Bertrand Russell, My Philosophical Development (1959) (London: Routledge, 1993), p. x. Ibid., p. 42.

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a subsequent work that Russell had written with Alfred North Whitehead and published in three volumes between 1910 and 1913 and which Sinclair had not read. Sinclair primarily disagrees with the New Realism’s contention that all sense perceptions belong to the object that prompts them, that there is an ‘irreducible real world outside consciousness’, and upholds a belief in Idealism’s reality ‘inside’ ‘universal consciousness’.58 She admits, however, that ‘Some misunderstanding may have been inevitable in dealing with the mathematical side of Mr Russell’s argument; since mathematics are, for me, a difficult and unfamiliar country. It is here that I have every expectation of being worsted’.59 Bertrand Russell reviewed A Defence of Idealism twice, first in The English Review in October 1917 and subsequently in The Nation on the 13th of August, 1918. In the first review he praises Sinclair’s ‘readable and interesting’ account of the history of philosophy,60 and sidesteps with a kind of chivalrous dismissal her ‘account and criticism of the New Realism’: ‘It is, of course, impossible to achieve a complete absence of bias in regard to a system which one has oneself advocated, but it does not seem to me that the criticisms advanced in this book are very formidable’.61 His second review, almost a year later, maintained that ‘in spite of her admittedly rigorous intellectual honesty, on certain points the author fails to satisfy even the amateur realist’.62 His main objection to Sinclair’s ‘Hegelian’ philosophy, as might be expected, is her determination to uphold the Absolute, but he objects also to Sinclair’s mystical reading of the nature of that Absolute. In his first review, he expresses bewilderment at what Sinclair can mean by her spiritual Monism: Miss Sinclair believes that the ultimate reality is Spirit. ‘To the unity and the reality we are looking for we can give no name but Spirit. This leaves a wide margin for the Unknown.’ It certainly does, since no one quite knows what is meant by Spirit. If Miss Sinclair knows, she keeps the knowledge to herself. She says:  ‘Raise either psychic energy or physical energy to their highest pitch of intensity, and you get Spirit.’ I confess I cannot understand what this means. Does it mean that if an express train were to go really fast it would acquire a soul? – for that certainly is what it seems to say.63

58 59 60

61 62

63

Sinclair, A Defence, p. 200. Ibid., p. xvi. Bertrand Russell, ‘Metaphysics’ (review of A Defence of Idealism: Some Questions and Conclusions), in The English Review (October 1917), pp. 381–4, p. 381. Ibid., p. 383. Bertrand Russell, ‘A Suggestive Philosophy’ (review of A Defence of Idealism: Some Questions and Conclusions), in The Nation (31 August 1918), pp. 231–2, p. 231. Russell, ‘Metaphysics’, p. 383.

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According to Ray Monk, Russell believed that if only Sinclair could master mathematical logic, she would be able to accept his position as a New Realist: ‘on the day of his first lecture on mathematical logic Russell invited May Sinclair to lunch’; the two also corresponded extensively, with Sinclair apparently promising ‘not to write on philosophy again until she had considered all the points he had raised’.64 When in 1922 Sinclair published her second book of philosophy, The New Idealism, she was unrepentant, and sent a copy to Russell, who wrote back: ‘I quite believe that Idealism can be rehabilitated as a possible theory [. . .] I therefore approach your book with an open mind, & with great respect for your patience in mastering views with which you disagree’.65 Both Russell and Sinclair, in their encounters with one another, planted their feet the more firmly on their own epistemological turf, but both approached the other’s work with respect and with patience. The lunch, and the exchange of letters which Monk refers to, may have been the point at which Russell’s understanding of Sinclair’s position was clarified. Where in his English Review piece he expresses baffled amusement at Sinclair’s reclassification of the ‘Absolute’ as ‘Spirit’, in the later review in The Nation he shows some understanding of her framework. He still finds it ‘difficult to admit one ultimate reality, a spiritual universal’, but he realizes that Sinclair’s insistence on this comes as much from her status as mystic and artist as it does from her Idealist philosophy: As an artist having a preoccupation with philosophy, Miss Sinclair’s ‘A Defence of Idealism’ defines the bond between the two interests. Artist and philosopher alike are remote from the demand for action, withal absorbed in building out of the fragmentary, illusory data of perception a choate world, which, for all their fabrications, is essentially real.66

Russell implies that Sinclair’s ‘Spirit’ is an artistic production akin to the building of whole, complete and ‘choate’ worlds from the fragmentary unknowable of modernity. Her philosophy is informed by her art, and both reflect an impulse to rationalize, to make whole, and to understand. This is the same impulse that he writes about in ‘A Free Man’s Worship’, in which ‘Man creates God, all-powerful and all-good, the mystic unity of what is and what should be’; God as ‘the creation of our own conscience’.67 God, the Absolute, one unified and complete

64

65 66 67

Ray Monk, Bertrand Russell:  The Spirit of Solitude, 1872–1921, Vol. 1 (London:  The Free Press, 1996), p. 506. Letter from Bertrand Russell to May Sinclair, 20 June 1922, Kislak Center. Russell, ‘A Suggestive Philosophy’, p. 231. Bertrand Russell, ‘A Free Man’s Worship’, The Independent Review (1903), reprinted in Mysticism and Logic (London: Allen & Unwin, 1917), in The Basic Writings of Bertrand Russell, ed. Robert E. Egner and Lester E. Denonn (London: Routledge, 2009), p. 40.

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Reality, all are artistic creations to Russell. To Sinclair, however, the one something is absolutely real, and it is the purpose of art to describe it.

‘Breaking through the veil of sense’: God and reality Sinclair’s The Dark Night is a ‘novel in unrhymed verse’, published in 1924. The dust jacket of the first edition proclaims that the poem has ‘two themes’: the narrator Elizabeth’s ‘finding, and losing, and finding again of her lover, and the finding, and losing, and finding again of God’. This is a rather reductive description of The Dark Night, although the poem does indeed introduce both ‘God’ and the lover early in the narrative. It begins with a scene in which Elizabeth is sitting in her garden, gazing at the trees and the flowers, and suddenly sees a vision, which she identifies as a vision of God: While suddenly, in a flash, my garden changed: The wall and the hot flagged walk were gold, The larkspurs became a blue light, burning, The beech-tree a green fire, shining; And I knew that the light and the fire were the real, secret life of the flowers and the tree, And that God showed himself in the fire and the light.68

Elizabeth’s ‘God’ is not the same God as she imagines, in the next section, that her grandmother sees (a ‘nice, kind man | Who knows all about Grandmother’), but is something else. It is ‘the secret hidden in the flower and the tree’.69 The lover who is to be found and lost and found again is then introduced; significantly through the medium of his poetry rather than his physical presence. The mystic Elizabeth reads a book of poems by Victor Rendal (her cousin’s cousin), and is overjoyed to find that he too has seen visions like hers: ‘He knows the hushed peace and the unearthly ecstasy; | He has seen God as the beauty of tree and flower | In gardens stilled with light’.70 The vision of God and the finding of a lover are linked from the very beginning. In her portrayal of Elizabeth and Victor’s shared vision of ‘God’, and the ‘mystical expansion’ that enables it, Sinclair is drawing on ideas she had propounded 68 69 70

May Sinclair, The Dark Night (London: Jonathan Cape, 1924), p. 8. Ibid., p. 9. Ibid., p. 17.

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in A Defence of Idealism. The ‘God’ that Elizabeth sees is actually ‘Reality’, as described in Sinclair’s Defence: Our perceptions, like our passions, maintain themselves at higher and lower intensities. It is with such rapid flashes of the revolving disc, with such hurrying of the rhythm of time, with such heightening of psychic intensity that we discern Reality here and now. No reasoning allows or accounts for these moments. But lovers and poets and painters and musicians and mystics and heroes know them: moments when eternal Beauty is seized travelling through time; moments when things that we have seen all our lives without truly seeing them, the flowers in the garden, the trees in the field, the hawthorn on the hillside change to us in an instant of time, and show the secret and imperishable life they harbour; moments when the human creature we have known all our life without truly knowing it, reveals its incredible godhead.71

The emphasis in A Defence of Idealism is on the ordinariness of the background on which Reality is glimpsed. As when Elizabeth sees God in her garden at the very beginning of The Dark Night, the flowers and trees and hawthorn described in Defence are everyday objects, suddenly transformed: ‘The green tree and the tall blue flowers stand still. | Then suddenly, suddenly, time stood still with them’.72 And Victor too sees Reality in Elizabeth’s garden. When the two first meet, they stand side by side looking at the blue larkspurs, and Elizabeth’s cousin shouts to Victor ‘You look as if you saw something that isn’t there’: ‘It is there,’ he answered. And I: ‘Yes, I’ve seen it.’ ‘You would see it,’ he said. ‘I knew that you would, There were your poems, But how did you know that I –?’ ‘There were your eyes –’73

These epiphanies or sudden glimpses of Reality all take place in Elizabeth’s garden. When Gwenda in The Three Sisters has a glimpse of Reality it is also when she is outside, in nature. She suddenly sees a newly blossoming hawthorn tree, which ‘gave her the same subtle and mysterious joy that she had had on the night

71 72 73

Sinclair, A Defence, p. 379. Sinclair, The Dark Night, p. 8. Ibid., p. 24.

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she and Rowcliffe walked together and saw the thorn-trees on Greffington Edge white under the hidden moon’.74 In Evelyn Underhill’s novel A Column of Dust, it is also a tree that is the catalyst for a vision of reality. Sheila Kaye-Smith says of her early reading of Underhill that in A Column of Dust: the vision is of the tree, seen for the first time really as a tree, fresh from the Artist’s hand and signed with his signature. That was the sort of vision that I longed for, and I tried hard to make it come to me [. . .] I would earnestly contemplate my surroundings in the hope that they would suddenly become changed into the furniture of another world; but they never did.75

Jim Greatorex, the simple farmhand, has seen these visions before, but he cannot make them return. Gwenda asks him about them: ‘Jim,’ she said, ‘shall I always see it?’ ‘I dawn-knaw. It cooms and goas, doos sech-like.’ ‘What makes it come?’ ‘What maakes it coom? Yo knaw better than I can tell yo.’ ‘If I only did know. I’m afraid it’s going.’76

Neither Gwenda nor Jim has the mystical ability to make their visions come whenever they wish. Even Miriam, when she walks up the stairs, trying to recreate the sudden moment she’s just had, can only bring back ‘something’ of it, which frustrates her. She says to herself ‘What’s the use of feeling like that if it doesn’t stay? It doesn’t change anything. Next time I’ll make it stay. It might whisk me right away. There’s something in me that can’t be touched or altered. Me. If it comes again. If it’s stronger every time . . . Perhaps it goes on getting stronger till you die’ (I, p. 246). Richardson, in The Quakers Past and Present, tried to account for the unpredictability of these moments of illumination. She also draws a connection between what some people call ‘Reality’ and others call ‘God’, explicitly linking the Quaker’s attempts at ‘breaking though the veil of sense [. . .] making a journey to the heart of reality’, to the mode of being of the ‘artist’.77 She writes: With most of us [. . .] the times of illumination are intermittent, fluctuating, imperfectly accountable, and uncontrollable. The ‘artist’ lives to a greater or

74 75

76 77

Sinclair, The Three Sisters, p. 364. Sheila Kaye-Smith, All the Books of My Life:  A  Bibliography (London:  Cassell and Company Limited, 1956), p. 90. Sinclair, The Three Sisters, p. 369. Dorothy Richardson, The Quakers: Past and Present (London: Constable, 1914), p. 35.

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lesser degree in a perpetual state of illumination, in perpetual communication with his larger self. But he remains within the universe constructed for him by his senses, whose rhythm he never fully transcends. His thoughts are those which the veil of sense calls into being, and though that veil for him is woven far thinner above the mystery of life than it is for most of us, it is there. Imprisoned in beauty, he is content to dwell, reporting to his fellows the glory that he sees.78

Here the emphasis is less on seeing the external world clearly (although as an artist is trapped ‘within the universe constructed [. . .] by his senses’, this is unavoidable) but on self-communion. The important thing for the artist is to be in ‘perpetual communication’ with the essential self. Richardson’s phrase the ‘larger self ’ means the same thing as Sinclair intends when she invokes the ‘godhead’ within the self: the larger self contains the world. Here, also, the definition of an artist is inextricably linked with the attainment of epiphany: not the ‘intermittent’ epiphanies available to most of the human race, but ‘perpetual’. Both Dorothy Richardson and May Sinclair claim that perpetual illumination can be brought by middle-age. The ‘intermittent, fluctuating, imperfectly accountable, and uncontrollable’ visions of youth give way before the ‘one continuous, shining background’ that Mary Olivier attains: It had come to her when she was a child in brilliant, clear flashes; it had come again and again in her adolescence, with more brilliant and clearer flashes; then, after leaving her for twenty-three years, it had come like this – streaming in and out of her till its ebb and flow were the rhythm of her life.

In the final pages of Mary Olivier, the ever-questioning Mary comes to a conclusion about her visions, her happiness. And, surprisingly, it is a similar conclusion to the one Miriam Henderson came to in the first three volumes of Pilgrimage. Mary thinks: All her life she had gone wrong about happiness. She had attached it to certain things and certain people. [. . .] If you looked back on any perfect happiness you saw that it had not come from the people or the things you thought it had come from, but from somewhere inside yourself. When you attached it to people and things they ceased for that moment to be themselves; the space they then seemed to inhabit was not their own space; the time of the wonderful event was not their time. They became part of the kingdom of God within you.79

78 79

Ibid., p. 34. Sinclair, Mary Olivier, pp. 378–9.

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Mary places herself as central to her experience of her visions, bringing them closer to Miriam’s cry of ‘It’s me, me; this is me being alive’ (I, p. 245). As Laurel Forster points out, Sinclair’s psychic visions conjoin ‘the inner self to the outer world in a harmonious revelatory experience’;80 they make the self and the world one for just a moment. When you see a flash of reality, Mary thinks; when you are really aware, other people cease to matter in themselves. They become a part of you instead; a part of the holy inside part of you. Mary Olivier is God, or ‘all the God you’re going to get’, to echo her paraphrase of Kant, and so her happiness is both a consciousness of God and God’s consciousness. Mary’s revelation of the kingdom of God inside her is what makes her an author. She no longer sees things and people from the outside: she brings them inside. She can do this for two reasons. The first is because she has detached herself from all the people around her, and the second is because she has reached ‘Middle-age’: Why hadn’t she known that this would happen, instead of being afraid that she would ‘go like’ Aunt Charlotte or Uncle Victor? People talked a lot about compensation, but nobody told you that after forty-five life would have this exquisite clearness and intensity. Why, since it could happen when you were young  – reality breaking through, if only in flashes coming and going, going altogether and forgotten  – why had you to wait so long before you could remember it and be aware of it as one continuous, shining background? She had never been aware of it before; she had only thought about and about it, about Substance, the Thing-in-itself, Reality, God. Thinking was not being aware. She made it out more and more. For twenty-three years something had come between her and reality. She could see what it was now. She had gone through life wanting things, wanting people, clinging to the thought of them, not able to keep off them and let them go.81

Richardson’s insistence in Quakers Past and Present that ‘Reality’ can never fully be realized as long as the artist (or mystic, or Quaker) remains imprisoned by his senses is also one of the central tenets of Evelyn Underhill’s Mysticism. When asked what the world is like, the seer cannot help but turn to ‘the “evidence of her senses” ’, and construct a picture of that world to present to the 80 81

Forster, p. 101. Sinclair, Mary Olivier, pp. 377–8. In The Three Sisters, Gwenda is also ‘lured on the quest of Ultimate Reality, and found that there was nothing like Thought to keep you from thinking. She took to metaphysics as you take to dram-drinking. She must have strong, heavy stuff that drugged her brain’ (p. 352).

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questioner. This picture, however, cannot be ‘the external world, but only the Self ’s projected picture of it. It is a work of art, not a scientific fact’.82 It is, in fact, an artistic ‘impression’ of the world. However, both Richardson and Sinclair find a way for their heroines to escape, at least partly, the trap constructed by their senses: in staying away from people and their claims. For Sinclair, this is something that a true mystic, or true artist, can achieve. In A Defence of Idealism, Sinclair maintains that access to Reality is a mental process: ‘The mystic, deliberately seeking Ultimate reality, has left normal consciousness behind him; [. . .] he has opened doors to anything that may be waiting for him below or beyond the threshold’.83 The mind is a house, and the doors must be open. This passage also resonates with a section from The Dark Night. When Victor leaves Elizabeth and runs to Italy, she meets God again in the darkness: her dark night of the soul. To do this she must sever her earthly, material ties; both to her body and to the house she is in. She undoes ‘the clasp of clinging flesh’, and breaks loose from ‘the shining net of senses’. I empty myself For the night to fill me, I open the doors of my house For the darkness to come in.84

Towards the very end of March Moonlight (the last novel in the Pilgrimage series) Miriam articulates what conditions she needs in order to write fiction. First of all, Miriam must be alone: Solitude, Secure. Filled each morning with treasure undamaged by compulsory interchange. Every distance a clear perspective. Why say distance lends enchantment? Each vista demands, for portrayal, absence from current life, contemplation, a long journey. Slower this morning, more difficult, because of that meeting with Mrs Gay. (IV, pp. 655–6)

‘Compulsory interchange’ with other human beings damages the writing process (you need to, as Mary Olivier says, ‘keep off ’ people and ‘let them go’): even a conversation early in the day can make it ‘slower’ and ‘more difficult’ to journey down into the ‘living reality’ in the centre of her being. The writing process, Miriam emphasizes, requires an inward journey, if life is to be seen in all its facets, and to be translated, portrayed, in all its vastness. Distance, Miriam thinks, is

82 83 84

Underhill, pp. 6–7. Sinclair, A Defence, p. 291. Sinclair, The Dark Night, p. 59.

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the key. As she has already stated in March Moonlight, ‘Distance in time or space does not lend. It reveals’ (IV, p. 607). The distance is both physical and temporal, and is traversed by contemplation. In a letter to E. B. C. Jones, Richardson writes of the advantages of middleage’s ‘clearer distant focus, like that of middle-age eyes’.85 And to Ruth Pollard she writes of old age that ‘one comes in, so to speak, to all one’s investments’: the whole of one’s life, finished and complete, comes into one’s hands for rerealisation. And this past sometimes described as reared up and staring one in the face is misrepresented on being called ‘unalterable’. The whole of it ceasing to be a chronological sequence, composes itself after the manner of a picture, with things in their true proportions and relationships. Many are completely transformed.86

This ‘re-realization’ of life, freed from its chronological constraints, makes a more true picture, with the unity thus achieved a pictorial unity. Dorothy Richardson and May Sinclair both present us with the same conclusion: life as experienced, even those significant moments – flashes, sudden bursts of happiness – is not realized until middle-age because people and things get in the way, and because the chronological structure that life has as it is lived is limiting. It is when you are old, and you come into possession of a continuous vision of reality, say both Richardson and Sinclair, that you become an artist. As Max Saunders writes of literary impressionism and modernism: ‘The characteristic predicament of the modernist self is bewilderment in the face of the present  – the experience of mysteries, enigmas, uncertainties, which can only be resolved, if at all, later’.87 The ‘intense personal experiences’ (moments of being, the epiphany, sudden visions of ‘Reality’) must be examined through a distance of time, and retrospectively patterned; ‘strung on fictionalized narratives’.88

85

86

87 88

Letter to E. B. C. Jones, 11 November 1938, Richardson Collection, General Collection, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. Letter to Ruth Pollard, 20 February 1944, Richardson Collection, General Collection, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. Saunders, Self Impression, p. 83. Ibid., p. 206.

3

Visual Metaphors: Dorothy Richardson and H.D.

Literary impressionism’s concern with the representation of perception, with the sight seen and the self seeing, had to engage with the problem of the intellect and its interpretations of those perceptions. The impression is both the pure perception and the imprint left upon the mind. In becoming imprinted; becoming the ‘impression’, the original perception can be changed utterly. This was not a new modernist concern. As early as 1888 Nietzsche had written that he was interested in the ‘phenomenology’ of the inner workings of the mind, and its effect upon seeing and knowing: everything that reaches our consciousness is utterly and completely adjusted, simplified, schematised, interpreted  – the actual process of inner “perception”, the relation of causes between thoughts, feelings, desires, between subject and object, is absolutely concealed from us, and may be purely imaginary.1

Edmund Husserl, in his 1900–1 book Logical Investigations, explored precisely this phenomenology of the mind:  consciousness, experience and the ‘formal grammar’ we use to express perception to ourselves and to others. He echoes Nietzsche’s frustration at the concealment of the original, writing that ‘The objects which pure logic seeks to examine are, in the first instance, therefore given to it in grammatical clothing. Or, more precisely, they come before us embedded in concrete mental states [. . .] and forming a phenomenological unity with such expressions’.2 In other words, the essence of the thing seen or the perception perceived is always already encoded. We have no access to the first part

1

2

Friedrich Nietzsche, November 1887–March 1888, Will to Power, Book 3, in Complete Works, Vol. 15, ed. Oscar Levy, trans. Anthony M. Ludovici (Edinburgh: T.N. Foulis, 1910), No. 477, p. 7. Edmund Husserl, Logical Investigations, Vol. 1, trans. J. N. Findlay (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1970), p. 250.

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of the double impression, we only have access to the second part, which is not only already ‘in grammatical clothing’, but this clothing is inextricably a part of the original. The sign and signified appear as one. How then can a writer present a sight as seen, if the original is no longer available? Both H.D. and Dorothy Richardson were engaged with this complex aesthetic project. They wanted to represent the multi-faceted self, fragmentary perception, and contradictory visions, and they wanted to present these things as they appeared to the mind. The encoding of the impression thus becomes material: as soon as perception is impressed, or registered, it changes. It is, as Nietzsche says, ‘adjusted, simplified, schematised, interpreted’. The only truthful way to represent perception as it becomes experience, then, is to describe the act of encoding: to present the drama of perception as representation. Both writers turn to the use of visual metaphors to accomplish this, but both find such metaphors unsatisfactory. A scene seen is and is not a painting; a woman standing is and is not a statue; a remembered fragment is and is not a snapshot photograph. Because each metaphor is insufficient for the representation of the large and complex world, each metaphor ends by being partially erased and replaced by another and yet another. In Pilgrimage and in H.D.’s novels, Palimpsest and Bid Me to Live, the aesthetic project of representation begins as a quest to find the perfect visual metaphor to represent the world and the self seen, and ends as a palimpsest of visual correspondences. Dorothy Richardson attempts to balance external and internal visions in Pilgrimage:  the thing seen and the self seeing. The emphasis on interiority in Pilgrimage does not negate the impulse to look out and to record, and she balances this by adopting, experimenting with and adapting various aesthetic models. Miriam Henderson looks at paintings, and describes their qualities and their limitations. She then looks at the world as painting, and decides how far representation of the real can become the real. She sees the sociality of the Wilsons as a scene: a stage set and an ongoing performance, and she positions the figures in her life as static snapshots, tableaux and short repeating film clips. In doing so she is looking for a way of representing both the inner reality of her characters living and their social performance through language. She uses visual metaphors because she distrusts language, and is always looking for a way to avoid the reductive epithet. She says of her friend Eleanor Dear: ‘To call Eleanor an adventuress does not describe her. You can only describe her by the original contents of her mind. Her own images; what she sees and thinks’ (III, p. 285). Richardson is trying to present the complexity of reality through a proliferation of images: Miriam sees singly, and we don’t see any more than she sees, but

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then she sees again, and differently. The juxtaposition of these images makes Pilgrimage a patchwork text, and that patchwork bridges the gap between perception and the registration of perception. When listening to a gramophone record for the first time, for example, Miriam does not appreciate the initial moment of perception in and of itself, but rather observes its transformation into lasting impression in her mind as it weaves itself into her existing patchwork: ‘woven securely into experience, beginning its life as memory’ (III, p. 98). Each patch is single and is reductive, but the whole patchwork laid out, seen from a distance, represents, more or less adequately, perception in the moment of perceiving and an understanding of experience as a whole. H.D.’s prose writings are similarly multi-layered, and similarly concerned with visual representation through metaphor. In Susan Stanford Friedman’s own metaphor, H.D.’s work is ‘like a cubist painting’, examining ‘again and again the same kind of events and people, each from a different angle of vision’.3 In her repetitive and revisionary semi-autobiographical novels, the characters are often easily identifiable as real figures, and they all have at their centre a version of the poet H.D. As in Pilgrimage, the representation of the complex world and the multi-aspected self is approached through juxtaposed images, seeings and re-seeings, and experiences patched together:  she revisits the same autobiographical events in her different works, and she also revisits the finished works, revising and tweaking and rewriting. As Friedman writes, H.D. found the ‘linguistic construction of identity’ an ongoing process: ‘As she wanders through the labyrinth of her writings, rereading and reconstructing them, the autobiographical selves she finds are fictive loops that originate in and refer back to a living woman whose identity is inseparable from its many inscriptions’.4 However, it is not just the linguistic representation of the self that is at stake here, it is also the visual representation of the self. H.D.’s revisionary process also manifests in her plethora of visual metaphors, used to describe her own body, her surroundings and her angles of vision on the world. H.D.’s work is frequently read in terms of the visual. Her status as the Imagist poet – her naming by Pound as ‘H.D., Imagiste’ – has dictated the terms by which her oeuvre can be read. Imagism aimed at ‘economy’ and a ‘precedence of image over abstraction’.5 It even, according to one critic, achieved ‘freshly

3

4 5

Susan Stanford Friedman, Penelope’s Web: Gender, Modernity, H.D.’s Fiction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), p. 90. Ibid., p. 78. Cyrena N. Pondrom, ‘H.D. and the Origins of Imagism’, in Signets: Reading H.D., ed. Susan Stanford Friedman and Rachel Blau duPlessis (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1990), p. 96.

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recorded perceptions’:  the direct transposition of an image as seen onto the page.6 H.D.’s prose works inevitably came to be read as extensions of, or dilutions of, this ‘delicate crystalline sharpness’ of her capturing of a moment of perception, and critics invariably apply visual metaphors as an aid to decoding the complexities of H.D.’s narrative style.7 In her remarkable study of H.D.’s prose, Penelope’s Web, Friedman likens the revisionary and repetitive novels to a ‘labyrinthine tapestry’.8 Rachel Blau duPlessis emphasizes H.D.’s ‘frame-breaking, time-leaping, visionary perception’:  a perception encoded and represented with ‘wonderful avatars’, or visual metaphors, including ‘constructivism, cubism, surrealism, impressionism and abstract painting’; and, of course, cinema.9 Although there have been efforts to encourage more comprehensive readings of H.D.’s work, away from what Annette Debo calls the ‘limited imagist portrayal of H.D.’, contemporary scholarship returns again and again to the visual in her work.10 More recent scholarship on H.D.  has developed duPlessis’s emphasis on the importance of H.D.’s borrowings from cinema.11 In her use of all of these visual metaphors, and stylistic borrowings, H.D. is trying to communicate something of her perception of reality, a mystical reality that needs for its expression a ‘spiritual language’.12 The representation of reality, H.D. thinks, is easier in the visual arts than it is in writing. In her writing on cinema she celebrates gesture, the signifying posed body, and the framed image as a new kind of writing, one that is accessible to everyone: ‘You see I was right. You see it will come. [. . .] it must come soon: a universal language, a universal art open alike to the pleb and the initiate’.13 The statement is meant to be a levelling one, but there is a snobbery inherent in H.D.’s terms that was prevalent in Close Up as a whole: the distinction between ‘film as art’ and movies as popular

6

7

8 9

10 11

12 13

Adalaide Morris, ‘Reading H.D.’s “Helios and Athene” ’, in The Iowa Review, Vol. 12, No. 2/3 (1981), pp. 155–63, p. 155. Conrad Aiken, review of Body and Raiment, and Profiles from China by Eunice Tietjens, in Poetry: A Magazine of Verse, Vol. 15, No. 5 (1920), p. 274. Friedman, p. 27. Rachel Blau duPlessis, H.D.: The Career of That Struggle (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1986), p. 68, p. 67. Annette Debo, The American H.D. (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2012), p. x. See for example Christina Walter’s ‘From Image to Screen: H.D. and the Visual Origins of Modernist Impersonality’, in Textual Practice, Vol. 22, No. 2 (2008), pp. 291–313 and Jean Gallagher’s ‘H.D.’s Distractions: Cinematic Stasis and Lesbian Desire’, in Modernism/Modernity, Vol. 9, No. 3 (2002), pp. 407–22. duPlessis, p. 82. H.D., ‘Conrad Veidt: The Student of Prague’, in Close Up, 1927–1933: Cinema and Modernism, ed. James Donald, Anne Friedberg, and Laura Marcus (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), p. 124.

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culture. In her prose fiction, she tried to appropriate the stylistic techniques of the visual arts as far as they could be applied to actual language to create something approaching a representation of her sense of reality. Her project is the representation, using words, of the wordless. Dorothy Richardson was similarly aware of the restrictions she was imposing on herself by using language to represent inner reality. Her use of metaphors is only ever a partial solution to this dilemma. Richardson’s protagonist Miriam has a distrust of metaphors. In considering the difficulty of the realistic representation of anything, Miriam thinks: I must remember to tell Jean about thought. About the way its nature depends upon the source of one’s metaphors. We all live under a Metaphorocrasy. Tell her I’m giving up thinking in words. She will understand. Will agree that thought is cessation, cutting one off from the central essence, bearing an element of calculation. (IV, p. 607)

This ‘central essence’ is the incommunicable essence of life; the primary perception, and the ‘calculation’ or codifying of concepts using metaphors is highly suspect. The irony is, however, that ‘giving up thinking in words’ is impossible, and to give up the attempt to represent using words, when you are the writer of a long modernist novel, is counterproductive. Instead of ‘giving up’, the project just needs to be approached with self-awareness and with caution. The right metaphors must be chosen. In an argument about women and maternity with Hypo Wilson, in which Miriam’s carefully constructed artist-identity is threatened, she highlights the unreliability of metaphors, but uses her own metaphor to do so: ‘You may call the proceeding by any name you like, choose whatever metaphor you prefer to describe it  – and the metaphor you choose will represent you more accurately than any photograph’ (IV, p. 331). In fact, Miriam suspects that the unreflecting use of metaphors may be what is wrong with all great work: ‘Are all the blind alleys and insufficiencies of masculine thought created by their way of thinking in propositions, using inapplicable metaphors?’ (IV, p.  427). The irony of course here is that in expressing her own thoughts about metaphor, Miriam cannot help but use metaphor herself. In her notes for an unpublished essay, ‘The Rampant Metaphor’, Richardson comes to a kind of conclusion about metaphor: The thought-life of man if it is to maintain itself alive must go warily along a thread thrown forward across an abyss of metaphors. That is a metaphor. The man who does his thinking casually, gathering his metaphors from his daily exp[erience]. or daily reading is even in worse case for he makes his

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way not amongst metaphors recognised as such but amongst a fine confusion of mixed metaphors.14

Metaphors endanger the purity of abstract thought, but the real danger, Richardson feels, is in metaphors not recognized as metaphors, when the thinker is not aware that the words they are using to think with are second hand. However, codifying and applying metaphor is something that Miriam must inevitably do in order to capture, impress, register, or represent the experiences she wishes to write out.

Seeing through representation I: The world as art The visual reality with which Miriam is confronted daily often becomes confused with representations of reality. Often visual reality is negated, transformed into a painted medium due to the company Miriam is in. At Hypo Wilson’s house, for example, the view through the windows is rendered artificial by her sense that the environment she is temporarily inhabiting is one in which only ideas, and ‘talk’, are appreciated: the curious glimpses of pinewood from the windows; pinewood looking strange and far away  – there were people in Weybridge to whom those woods were real woods, where they walked and perhaps had the thoughts that woods bring; here they were like woods in a picture book; not real, just a curious painted background for Mr Wilson’s talk. (II, p. 130)

The thrill of hearing an author speak in his study cancels out the woodiness of the woods. They become a ‘curious painted background’, an illustration in the book that is Hypo Wilson. The spring, Miriam’s particular recurring joy throughout Pilgrimage, is also sometimes held back by being a framed scene through a window. In North London, the spring is distant:  ‘At Wordsworth House it had stood far away, like a picture in a dream, something that could be seen from windows, and found for a moment in the park, but powerless to get into the house’ (I, p. 392). At the Corries’, the country house with its large windows, luxurious atmosphere and bright colours, spring is real and can enter. The elusiveness of spring means that special measures must be taken in order to capture its essence: ‘Going to stay and talk in people’s houses did not bring 14

Dorothy Richardson, ‘The Rampant Metaphor’:  notes. Dorothy Richardson Collection, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.

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spring  – landscapes belonging to people were painted; you must be alone . . . or perhaps at the Brooms’ (II, p. 147). The emphasis is Richardson’s: she uses ‘landscape’ to refer to the vision of the surrounding countryside primarily in a non-pictorial way, but emphasizes that her view of the landscape in certain situations is, on the contrary, pictorial. As John Barrell writes, the word landscape was originally purely ‘a painter’s word’ but was later employed more popularly in the double sense of both ‘countryside represented in a picture, and another, more loose, of a piece of countryside considered as a visual phenomenon’.15 There seems to be no way of communicating the idea of landscape as anything other than ‘visual phenomenon’, which limitation is perhaps what Richardson is playing with here. The houses of friends are like galleries and the company of fellow observers reduces landscapes to framed distinct pictures, separate from Miriam’s sense of reality. H.D. also uses painting as a metaphor to highlight the unreality of a scene. In Bid Me to Live, the H.D. figure Julia Ashton continually sees her surroundings as if they are pictorial representations of the real rather than reality itself, and, as with Miriam, this is heightened when she is made to feel ill at ease in masculine company. Julia is married to Rafe Ashton, a sensitive poet whom she loves for his mind. They live in a small room in Bloomsbury, a room which is, Julia thinks, ‘the frame to the picture’ of their lives together.16 However, their marriage and their lives are torn apart by the First World War. When Rafe goes to France, Julia’s perception of him changes. He is no longer himself but instead a ‘great, over-sexed officer on leave’, his body loses its familiarity and its reality, and he becomes instead a ‘bronze late-Roman image’; some statue ‘that moved or talked’; or a painting of a man: ‘like the picture of the Roman soldier in the Judgment of Solomon in their child’s illustrated bible spread open on the floor’.17 The war makes bodies unreal: other soldiers, seen in a restaurant, are ‘so many paper-dolls, a string of paper-dolls’,18 while Julia herself feels unreal, an actor in a play.19 When Rafe has his affair, it is Julia’s insubstantial physical presence that he blames. She is, he claims, ‘some nun-figure, gaunt, over-intellectualized’, while Bella, his mistress, is more vital.20 When Julia transfers her intellectual affections 15

16 17 18 19 20

John Barrell, The Idea of Landscape and the Sense of Place 1730–1840: An Approach to the Poetry of John Clare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972), p. 1. H.D., Bid Me to Live (1960) (London: Virago, 1984), p. 9. Ibid., p. 47. Ibid., p. 118. Ibid., p. 20. Ibid., p. 8.

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on to Rico, the Lawrencian poet who reads her poetry and who inspires her to write, Rafe is jealous: ‘What is this about you and old Rico?’ ‘Oh  – nothing  – I  mean  – I  told you  –’ but she had not told him. She put the yellow-backed books on the table; the gold of the globe-flower, the cone-shape of the yellow candle-flame, the halo of light, were separate golds, different yellow-gold. The candle-flame was paler. The edge of the outer ring just touched the edge of the bed. It was a painting, they were a picture, drawn here, outlined here, something hung on the wall in the Scuolo di San Rocco in Venice. It was misted over, dim, a picture that had been hanging a long time [. . .] It was natural, normal, it was stage-set but it was real.21

The Bloomsbury room is, as Julia has already noted, the ‘frame’ for the tableau of Rafe and Julia: lovers alone in domesticity. The fact that they are no longer lovers, and that they have both found other partners (although Julia and Rico never progress beyond the platonic: intellectual debate and mental sparring) makes the whole scene unreal. It is frozen in time, and it is representative: ‘It was the same scene, the same picture, it was herself and Rafe Ashton, for the last time’.22 There is no despair in this realization of ‘the last time’ however, because the still life of the books and the flowers and their arrangement on the table project images, of ‘woods and wild spaces, of snow falling softly on peaked roofs, of a picture from a picture-book, the Little Match Girl with the last match’.23 The metaphor of the painting, the idealized and beautiful tableau, makes the difficult moment – Julia is down to her last match – not only manageable, but aesthetically pleasing. It is a technique that Richardson also uses. In Clear Horizon, Miriam engineers a marriage between Michael and Amabel, tying two loose ends together, and making two potentially difficult people into a pleasing visual arrangement. Jean Radford calls this marriage a ‘way of disposing of Amabel and Michael, of clearing the horizon’,24 but significantly, Miriam’s way of disposing of them is not to leave them or cut them out of her life, but rather to arrange them, to group them as a pictorial construct, as ‘the vista of a future’ (IV, p. 293). Miriam first creates for Amabel’s contemplation a ‘scene’ of the two together. The suggested picture is presented, but needs care in being rendered: With careful carelessness, lest, by an instant’s loss of poise, she should presently close the door upon the newly opened perspective, Miriam made her 21 22 23 24

Ibid., p. 63. Ibid., p. 69. Ibid, p. 64. Radford, p. 103

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way downstairs to the unsuspecting Michael [. . .] For now, indeed, she must keep her hand on Michael. (IV, pp. 294–5)

Miriam’s skill in presenting the image, or ‘perspective’ of a possible new grouping to Amabel is one thing, but in this passage she fears she does not have the social skills to bring it off. This event is a mirror of an event in Dorothy Richardson’s own life. The real-life Amabel and Michael (Veronica and Benjamin Grad) were pushed together by Richardson, a marriage which suited her need to have the two lovers near but disarmed, relying on the their shared love for Miriam herself to bring them together, or, as Veronica put it after Richardson’s death: ‘she knew I would for her’.25 Gillian Hanscombe writes that by setting up this marriage, Richardson ‘created and, indeed, manipulated her material for the purpose of artistic production’.26 Amabel and Michael are reduced to ‘material’ for the higher end of Miriam becoming a writer, and as such are grouped together, arranged as a perspectival picture, or literally manipulated as sculpture (‘she must keep her hand on Michael’). The manipulation of reality into a representation of reality has far-reaching effects. In Bid Me to Live, Julia comes to associate her Bloomsbury room with the difficult moments that her visualizing and tableaux creation have only made more fixed, and her early establishment of the room as a frame for her relationship with Rafe means that when the relationship is definitively over, she must leave it. She goes to Cornwall with a man called Vane. The absurdity of her situation in London, and of the terrors of the war make Cornwall’s landscape enchanting: She had walked out of a dream, the fog and fever, the constant threat from the air, the constant reminder of death and suffering (those soldiers in blue hospital uniform) into reality. This was real. She sat down on a rock. [. . .] She was at home in this land of subtle psychic reverberations, as she was at home in a book. The very landscape was illustration in a book.27

Whereas for Miriam the perception of the actual landscape as a representation of that landscape reduces it, makes it ‘not real, just a curious painted background’, Julia sees the representation as reality. In this she is similar to Palimpsest ’s Hipparchia, who ‘apprehended poetry physically as she had never apprehended

25

26 27

Gillian E.  Hanscombe, The Art of Life:  Dorothy Richardson and the Development of Feminist Consciousness (London: Owen, 1982), p. 173. Ibid., pp. 159–60. H.D., Bid Me to Live, p. 146.

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loving’.28 There is nothing more real for Julia than the representative world of books and of pictorial art:  the gritty and compromising world of wartime London, which could more conventionally be called ‘reality’, is in fact a dream. The whole landscape of Cornwall is described in terms that relate it to representative art:  ‘The early spring was soft, fragrant, soaked with salt. There was a strange static quality, the ivy was cut out for a stencil, each leaf was separate and moisture settled, symmetrically like rain-drops in a pre-Raphaelite painting’;29 ‘Her perception was sharpened, yet she was not thinking. That tick-tick of her brain had been stilled, that pulse of fever in her, quieted. [. . .] She moved swiftly down the exactly outlined path, like a path in an Italian background’.30 She returns to the cottage, and notes that the stairs look unreal, as if ‘folded from cut-out strips of paper (to set up in a doll’s-house) or cardboard’.31 The ‘old-fashioned lamp’ on the table is ‘the sort of lamp they place on a table, with a fringed shawl-cover, in a play of Chekhov’.32 Despite Julia’s claim that she is merely perceiving and not thinking (i.e. not processing her impressions), she is unable to see an object in the world without relating it to another object; without interpreting it. There is no version of reality that is not always already processed. Everything in Julia’s world is ‘stage-set’ and ‘real’ simultaneously. As Friedrich Kittler says in Optical Media, ‘we knew nothing about our senses until media provided models and metaphors’.33 H.D. cannot represent the action of her senses, particularly the process of perception, without turning immediately to those ‘models and metaphors’ of the visual arts: illustration, painting, dolls’ houses, stage sets. The heroine in Palimpsest ’s ‘Secret Name’ faces exactly this problem when looking at the distinctive Egyptian landscape. The hills she thinks, look unreal, as if they are ‘cut of paper cardboard’.34 She tries to articulate this sense to Captain Rafton, her companion: ‘No not that, but everything seems painted,’  – she did manage it  – ‘cardboard’. He said, ‘you mean you seem to have seen all this before? But it’s on everything, cigarette boxes, posters in the underground; cigarette boxes, magazine ads’. She said, ‘yes, magazine ads’.35

28 29 30 31 32 33

34 35

H.D., Palimpsest (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1926), p. 47. H.D., Bid Me to Live, p. 151. Ibid., p. 152. Ibid. Ibid., p. 153. Friedrich Kittler, Optical Media:  Berlin Lectures 1999 trans. Anthony Enns (Cambridge:  Polity Press, 2010), p. 34. H.D., Palimpsest, p. 267. Ibid., p. 268.

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Modernity, with its proliferation of images, cheap printed snapshots in magazines and on advertisements, provides so much visual information that it is impossible to see the thing itself purely and for the first time: a sight such as the pyramids at Giza is already imprinted on the mind before it is seen. In Bid Me to Live, however, Julia’s mode of perception of the real is informed as much by her cultural background as by the visual bombardment of modernity. Julia is educated, and she is well connected. Despite having no money of her own, she can rely on her network of cultured and intellectual friends to put a roof over her head: ‘As if she, Julia or he, Rafe or someone who had met Bella’s mother before they gave up their studio in Paris had this right, this power – they were rich, in their way’.36 The flat in Bloomsbury belongs to a Miss Ames, who leaves her ‘pieces’ of antique furniture in there when she rents the room to Julia, and she barricades herself in there with Rafe Ashton, reading Mercure de France, French novels, Pindar, and the Greek Anthology.37 Julia has travelled and she has visited art galleries. It makes sense that the first thing she thinks of when she looks at dew on a leaf is not the dew itself, but the stylized raindrops in a pre-Raphaelite painting. Miriam, by contrast, has very little knowledge of or even experience of art. It is at Newlands, the country home estate of the Corries, where she works as a governess in Honeycomb, that she first encounters works of art. Elisabeth Bronfen characterizes the space of Newlands as one of Miriam’s ‘islands’, an ‘unfamiliar site within the familiar world of England’.38 The unfamiliarity of Newlands, and the new and unfamiliar experience of art are inextricably linked. Upon her arrival, Miriam notices ‘white walls up here and again strange pictures hung low, on a level with your eyes, strange soft tones . . . crayons? . . . pastels? – what was the word – she was going to live with them, she would be able to look at them – and everything up here, in the soft pink light’ (I, p. 353). Despite her ignorance about the pictures she sees, Miriam’s primary reaction is one of gratitude and a sense of privilege. She has been accepted into a social environment in which having pictures framed, displayed and perhaps even understood is taken as a matter of course. Her appreciation of the art, as with her clumsy attempts to understand the complexities of upper class social life, makes her feel ignorant: ‘the harmony of soft tones and draperies at distant Newlands . . . etchings; the strange effect of etchings . . . there were no etchings in the suburbs . . . curious, close, strong lines that rested you and had a meaning and expression even 36 37 38

H.D., Bid Me to Live, p. 8. Ibid., p. 11. Elisabeth Bronfen, Dorothy Richardson’s Art of Memory:  Space, Identity, Text (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999), p. 16.

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though you did not understand the subject’ (I, p. 468). In Pilgrimage, art is a luxury and a self-indulgence, but not one which is easily understood. Unlike H.D.’s Julia Ashton, Miriam never attains any technical understanding of the subject. It seems odd, when Miriam’s other passions are accompanied by intense speculation as to the formal nature of the phenomena. Theatre, music, philosophy, writing and translation are all reduced to their formal elements and analysed, but pictorial art remains a mysterious joy, all the more enchanting for being inexplicable. Richardson, in her book on the illustrations of John Austen, places importance on formal understanding, saying that ‘he who will intelligently survey a cathedral, statue or picture must first learn something of the language in which it is written’.39 Miriam, however, does not have the capacity to look ‘intelligently’ at pictures because she does not understand the language, but she does have a different kind of appreciation, which Richardson calls in the same book ‘unawares, the love of that which comes forth from the picture before its intention is grasped: aesthetic love’.40 Primary perception, grasped unawares before any interpretation can intrude, is the level of Miriam’s appreciation of pictorial art, particularly the engravings that ‘rested you and had a meaning and expression’. John Austen’s engravings, in their simplicity of line, are by implication the kind of engravings Miriam would like, dumbly, for their expression. The closest Miriam gets to an understanding of the formal elements of painting is a brief flurry of experimentation with watercolours, inspired by a whim of Mrs Corrie’s that ‘an artist should come once a week and teach them all to paint, from Nature. This decision excited Miriam deeply, putting everything else out of her mind’. Miriam is overjoyed by this idea, which promises to satisfy a ‘desire she had cherished with bitter hopelessness ever since her schooldays’ (I, p. 420). Mrs Corrie’s whim is forgotten, and Miriam’s disappointment is twofold – her childhood longing and teenage passion are both rejected and knowledge is withheld. However, this second rejection does not immediately bring ‘hopelessness’, but rather a drive to teach herself painting. Without any knowledge of formal technique, these experiments are disappointing: She filled sheet after sheet with swift efforts to recall Brighton skies – sunset, the red mass of the sun, the profile of the cliffs, the sky clear or full sea. The painting was thick and confused, the objects blurred and ran into each other, the image of each recalled object came close before her eyes, shaking her with its sharp reality, her heart and hand shook as she contemplated it, and 39 40

Dorothy Richardson, John Austen and the Inseparables (London: William Jackson Ltd, 1930), p. 12. Ibid., p. 16.

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her body thrilled as she swept her brushes about. She found herself breathing heavily and deeply, sure each time of registering what she saw, sweeping rapidly on until the filled paper confronted her, a confused mass of shapeless images, leaving her angry and cold. (I, p. 430)

The images held in her mind are so distinct, with ‘sharp reality’, and yet she cannot record them. What is lacking is shape and form: the perception and the instinct to record are not enough, she must have technique. This is the last we see of Miriam attempting to paint. Unlike her first attempts at fiction, similar in their chaotic ‘havoc-working confusion [. . .] bringing fatigue and wrath in her failure to materialize it’ (IV, p. 524), Miriam’s anger at her shapeless painting makes her give up the attempt, not struggle the harder to master the form. Instead, she creates a construction of painters as superior, the visual arts themselves as mysterious, and develops her own ways of appreciating them, without either a knowledge of the form or an understanding of the ‘subject’. Julia, in Bid Me to Live, also sketches. In her reminiscence about her early travels with Rafe, the couple find the Louvre closed, and walk instead to the Cluny Museum to sketch ‘Gothic fragments’: They compared their sketch-books, his drawings were niggling and tight, hers better conceived but vague in outline. His were squat and too tight. They completed each other, even in their crude sketches; ‘Between us we might make an artist,’ he said.41

In both these accounts, emphasis is laid on the importance of ‘shaping’, of selecting and composing. In Bid Me to Live, the two drawing styles (of Rafe and of Julia) become equivalents for the two poets’ literary styles: Julia’s poetry has a unity but is perhaps not very ‘tight’, whereas Rafe’s poetry is too tight and less spontaneous. The two scenes (Miriam in Pilgrimage and Julia in Bid Me to Live) in which the heroines draw can also be seen as equivalents for their authors’ literary styles. Despite Julia’s knowledge of art, and her ability to conceive a subject as a shapely whole, her drawings lack skill. She does not mind this, however. She places greater emphasis on the imaginative, the spontaneous, the mystical. Miriam’s failure is different: she lacks the knowledge to compose the sight seen as an orderly ideal, as well as the physical skill needed to control the hand and the paintbrush. She is also trying, stubbornly, to represent the sight as seen, a directly transposed perception, rather than framing it and constructing it as a picture. 41

H.D., Bid Me to Live, pp. 33–4.

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Miriam’s formative experience of picture viewing at Newlands brings home to her her lack of knowledge. The mysterious pictures on the walls are linked in Miriam’s mind with the mysterious, incomprehensible upper class of the Corries. On entering the drawing room, Miriam is struck first by the ‘curious oval pictures in soft half-tones, women in hats, strange groups, all tilted forward like mirrors’, and then by Mrs Corrie herself, looking ‘so picturesque sitting there, like something by an old master, but worn and tired’ (I, pp. 357–8). The ‘curious’ pictures of ‘strange’ women tilt forward and mirror the real-life society lady sitting in her armchair. Real life in this case takes on the appearance of a painting because both are equally strange to the young naïve Miriam. This extension of the visual aspects of painting, transposed onto the way Miriam sees her world, is most apparent in Honeycomb, because this is her first chance to live among paintings, and to ‘be able to look at them’. However, as with Richardson’s other aesthetic experiments, Miriam’s seeing of the world through paintings continues through several chapter-volumes and is never fully discarded. In The Tunnel, Miriam’s first tentative steps into intellectual London are accompanied not only by pilgrimages to scientific lectures, but by visiting famous artists with a new acquaintance, Miss Szigmondy. In one artist’s studio, as she holds a painting in her hands: impressions crowded upon her. The thing moved and changed as she looked at it; it seemed as if it must break away, burst out of her hands into the surrounding atmosphere. Everything about took on a happy familiarity, as if she had long been in the bright bare plaster-filled little room. From the edges of the small white group a radiance spread, freshening the air, flowing out into the happy world, flowing back over the afternoon, bringing parts of it to stand out like great fresh bright Academy pictures. The great studios opening out within the large garden-draped Hampstead houses, rich and bright with colour in a golden light, their fur rugs and tea services on silver trays, and velvet-coated men, the wives with trailing dresses and the people standing about, at once conspicuous and lost, were like Academy pictures. It was all real now. (II, p. 159)

The moment of realizing a picture becomes a profound mystical experience: the picture of the horses becomes so real to her that it assumes motion and changes; even threatens to break free from its frame and become flesh. This spreading light and realization then extends both to the other pictures in the room (the ‘small white group’) and to Miriam’s remembered scenes from earlier in the afternoon, visiting similar studios. The merging of visual art and reality also

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makes Miriam’s own memories ‘all real’, as if her understanding of the social life of the artists and the ‘wives with trailing dresses’ is not only explained, but corporealized by a clear vision of the pictures that come with that life. In highlighting the permeability of the frame, Richardson is anticipating later postmodern questions about the boundaries of art and just where the internal space of a pictorial representation begins. Jacques Derrida, in The Truth in Painting, devotes much energy to a deconstruction of the frame, of Kantian ‘parergon’, and of what exactly this delineating ‘frame’ is: ‘a hybrid of outside and inside, but a hybrid which is not a mixture or half-measure, an outside which is called to the inside of the inside in order to constitute it as an inside’.42 The frame, in Kant’s philosophy, is both the external border of art and a part of the internal space of the painting. As Derrida points out, this is problematic: ‘Where does it end. What is its internal limit. Its external limit. And its surface between the two limits’.43 The question is made even more problematic by a consideration of the viewer’s position with relation to these unspecified ‘limits’. In a discussion of Heidegger’s reading of Vincent van Gogh’s shoe painting, Derrida writes: ‘All of you seem too sure of what you call internal description. And the external never remains outside. What’s at stake here is a decision about the frame, about what separates the internal from the external, with a border which is itself double in its trait, and joins together what it splits’.44 The boundaries between external and internal are thus not only difficult to locate but are fluid, and the doubleness of the frame allows for an ‘overflowing’, which permits the viewer ‘to cross the line in both directions, now in the frame, now outside the frame’.45 Miriam’s appreciation of painting is enabled by a sudden awareness of precisely this ‘overflowing’. She has the nuanced appreciation of Henri Lefebvre’s ‘cultured art-lover’ who is: aware that the picture is framed, and that the internal relations between colours and forms are governed by the work as a whole. He thus moves from consideration of the objects in the painting to consideration of the picture as an object, from what he has perceived in the pictural space to what he can comprehend about that space.46

42

43 44 45 46

Jacques Derrida, The Truth in Painting, trans. Geoff Bennington and Ian Mcleod (Chicago; London: University of Chicago Press, 1987), p. 63. Ibid., p. 63. Ibid., p. 331. Ibid., p. 345. Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), p. 114.

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This overflowing of the frame is Miriam’s first awareness of painting as ‘text’, both a space to look into and an object in itself. It links itself to an acknowledgement of the framing which brings aspects of reality only as ‘parts’, and that simultaneously enables reality to become more real, more beautiful and more harmonious. It is a knowledge, suddenly acquired, that was lacking when she tried to paint her Brighton sunsets without imposing shape or composition. Similarly, Miriam’s own myopic vision increasingly relies on the concentration of the visual within the frame of her pince-nez, giving her an implicit understanding of how boundaries artificially imposed can create a pleasing composition. No matter how she frames the compositions of her glances, however, she is also aware of the blurred marginalia beyond the frame. The two:  painting and her own particular vision, are inextricably entwined in her understanding of the visual:  in Miriam’s vision of the Academy pictures, the edges are transgressed, but this also happens occasionally in her own vision. At a lecture, for example, when she is annoyed, ‘her customary expletives shot through her mind in rapid succession. With each one, the scarves and silk and velvet of the audience grew brighter about the edge of her circle of vision’ (II, p. 192). Much later, ‘the edges of things along the margin of her sight stood for an instant sharply clear and disappeared leaving her faced only with the swirling darkness shot now with darting flame’ (III, p.  192). The radiance, brightness and sharp clarity of the images outside the frame temporarily intrude. With optical illusions such as these accompanying Miriam’s daily vision, the issue of what is beyond the frame becomes important. They highlight Richardson’s preoccupation with selection: to impose a frame upon a vista and select only a portion of it for viewing is as reductive as choosing a single word to express a feeling or a situation, and yet it must be attempted.

Seeing through representation II: The body as art At the end of H.D.’s Bid Me to Live, Julia comes to a realization about herself, her life and her art, which she couches in terms of the visual. The realization is that her art and Rico’s art (the D. H. Lawrence figure) are very different, and that the existence of Rico and his ‘seemingly effortless expression’ does not threaten her own existence and autonomy as a poet.47 The parallel she draws is between Rico

47

H.D., Bid Me to Live, p. 179.

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and Vincent van Gogh. Rico, Julia thinks, conceives of the world, of men and women and of the vibrating forces of nature in much the same way as van Gogh did. In the letter she writes to Rico at the end of the novel, she tells him: And you see things as Vincent saw them, that upturned pot or basket of pansies and those old shoes. He would draw that magnetism up out of the earth, he did draw it. His wheat stalks are quivering with more than the wind that bends them. There is peace at the centre of the cyclone.48

For Julia, van Gogh’s paintings are moving, dynamic images. They are contained within their frame but they are ‘dynamically exploding inside’. Her own images, by contrast, are ‘magic lantern pictures [. . .] all on one plane or parallel’, like a series of film images which accumulate vertically instead of appearing sequentially.49 She does not need to permeate the boundaries of the frame; she does not need to imitate another’s art. Her own static images are flat and self-contained. This static and self-contained quality mirrors the characterization of Julia by Rafe. She is, he tells her, all mind and no body. Because of this controlling, and partially accepted narrative Julia is hyper-aware of her body and the way that it looks, and she continually presents herself as a posed and still figure: ‘symbolically clear, frozen, static’.50 When the Bloomsbury ménage act out the story of the garden of Eden, as a ‘Bible-ballet’, she does not see the action as movement, but rather in fragments, as a tableau effect: ‘In her head was a picture, seen at the far end of the field-glass, very clear; tiny figures unfolded in bright colour’.51 In a moment of emotional stress, she stands still by the ‘marble mantelpiece’, wearing a dress which she has been told falls to give ‘a Greek line’ and sees herself as if from the outside: ‘She stood like someone in a play, she would have to say something, she was very cold, very far away, very frozen by her frozen altars’.52 She is a statue, and she is a figure in a play: waiting, very still, for another actor to gain the stage. H.D. herself was intensely aware of her own physical presence: she was very tall and very thin, and she felt that this gave her simultaneously a grace and a kind of imperious presence. In Palimpsest, Hipparchia’s body is cast in precisely these terms. She is seen by her lover Marius as alternately a ‘phantom’, or a static

48 49 50 51 52

Ibid., p. 183. Ibid., p. 179. Ibid., p. 112. Ibid., p. 113. Ibid., pp. 127–8.

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and frozen marble sculpture.53 Her second lover, Verrus, sees her in fragments, as impersonal and idealized beauty. He dresses her up, ornaments her, decks her ‘like some image, trying new effects against her, urging her to set off “authentic fragment” of chin, of odd cheek-turn’.54 She begins to see herself in the terms dictated for her, as a statue broken up; her body at odds with her mind. Her hand, as she contemplates it, splits itself off from the rest of her body: Her hand lay, separated in her consciousness, a marble hand broken, separated. It was as if a heavy marble hand had been broken from the draped body of some exiled Muse or early unfashionable Aphrodite. An archaic hand, heavy, firm-weighted, of priceless texture, lay heavy white stone on the green floor of some tiny tide pool. Hipparchia sat so considering it.55

Miriam too struggles to see her body in her own terms. She is only occasionally conscious of her own body and the poses it makes. When her love affair with Hypo Wilson is coming to a head, for example, the mutual nakedness of the lovers gives Miriam a clear insight into her appearance. However, she does not see herself directly through her own eyes, or as if through Hypo’s eyes, but instead as she imagines Amabel would see her: With the eyes of Amabel, and with her own eyes opened by Amabel, she saw the long honey-coloured ropes of hair framing the face that Amabel found beautiful in its ‘Flemish Madonna’ type, falling across her shoulders and along her body where the last foot of their length, red-gold, gleamed marvellously against the rose-tinted velvety gleaming of her flesh. Saw the lines and curves of her limbs, their balance and harmony. Impersonally beautiful and inspiring. To him each detail was ‘pretty,’ and the whole an object of desire. (IV, p. 231)

When Miriam first meets Amabel, an intensely feminine French girl, who was later to become her lover, she is stunned by her ability to remain conscious of her body and its effect on others: Yesterday’s figure in the rose-red gown, again producing the effect of being aware of the impression she made, and contemplating it in the person of the one upon whom it was being directed and also, to-day, offering it as something to be judged, like a ‘work of art,’ detachedly, upon its merits. (IV, p. 187)

53 54 55

H.D., Palimpsest, p. 14, p. 22. Ibid., p. 74. Ibid., p. 57.

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When Miriam speaks to Amabel, we are told there is ‘first silence and a fresh pose of her whole person, a plastic pose, studied and graceful, and a careful, conscious management of the accompanying facial effects that preceded her answer’ (IV, p. 191). Amabel presents herself to Miriam as the object of her gaze, and at the same time is fully aware of her self, her own movements, Miriam’s movements, and the effect the whole makes. Each movement she makes is made with the end of a static pose in view, as though Amabel sees herself as a static picture more than as a moving human being. Anne Hollander writes of such self-conscious imaging that: ‘Bodily movement – especially conscious movement but also unconscious action – must always have tended, as it still does, to conform to mental self-images; and these must have been at least partly conceived with the help of external images’.56 Amabel’s self-awareness owes much to the image of herself she sees in the mirror which holds her gaze, and photographs of herself: both static. Amabel’s self-presentation as a ‘work of art’ has directly influenced Miriam’s vision of herself. In the intimate moment with Hypo Wilson, when Miriam has just recognized that ‘there was a woman [. . .] waiting to be born in her’ (IV, p. 230), she gains an impersonal awareness of the lines, curves and balance of her body’s composition. The impersonality of the description and the complementary colourings evoke paintings of nudes, with the ‘balance and harmony’ of selfconscious composition. Miriam is a painting. Hollander posits that this artistic production of nakedness is a common one: ‘A sense of “natural” nakedness in actual life is trained more by art than by knowledge; people tend to aspire to look like nudes in pictures in order to appear more like perfect “natural” specimens’.57 In this way, Miriam’s concept of her visible self is informed by art, and not only by art, but by Amabel’s conception of art. H.D.’s Hipparchia also manages to resolve her body-mind dissociation through art. She is, she realizes, seeing her reflection in a pool in a garden in Capua, not ghost-like or frozen; rather she is queenly: Hipparchia regarded an image that had grown in dignity. This image must be stamped in dignity, in splendour now on her least undertaking. Hipparchia with carefully arranged fillet, gazed at a silver goddess.58

56 57 58

Anne Hollander, Seeing Through Clothes (London: University of California Press, 1993), p. 314. Ibid., p. 87. H.D., Palimpsest p. 74.

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The Capua retreat with her new lover Verrus has given her power and strength, much as Julia’s retreat to Cornwall with Vane gives her the strength to see herself as someone apart from her messy personal situation. Hipparchia becomes deified, and she not only accepts her body, but incorporates its presence into a new aesthetic ideal: Spirit (to Hipparchia) dwelt in flesh as well as intellect. Ice-green-sea-water was a huge gem and she, exquisite intaglio, was cut in it. She must hold firm to this. Regarding an image that regarded her from a salt pool, she must make firm decision. She must imprint that image on her intellect as the tortoise, bird or olive is stamped frequently on silver. She must stamp this image, this abstract non-human Hipparchia repeatedly on the coinage of her thought.59

In this striking image of the ‘impress’ action of the double impression, Hipparchia finally works out a way to bridge the gap between perception and the processing of impressions. She not only must draw strength from her own beauty (which she recognizes as ‘beauty’ as well as power and godliness), but she must create using her body as source. Hipparchia’s new aesthetic is one in which the shape of her posed and static body informs her thought and shapes her intellect. Mind and body are no longer, for her, diametrically opposed. As Diana Collecott writes, in H.D.’s work, the thin but strong body; H.D.’s own body ‘is always a meeting point, between temporal and spiritual, nature and art, male and female’.60 It is also, here, a meeting point between the intellectualized self and the earthy, physical world. Hipparchia’s Greek body is no longer fragments of cold marble but is instead a living statue. She is still static, her hair ‘the only frail thing in motion against that static image’, but this ‘stone self ’ is alive and can speak.61 Hipparchia has become a sentient work of art. H.D. had a passion for all things Greek, and she was particularly fascinated by Greek sculpture. Images of sculpted Greek bodies recur time and again in her prose and poetry, and she even experimented with a kind of statue-becoming herself. In the Beinecke there is a photo album full of composite images of H.D., Bryher, and Kenneth Macpherson, assembled when the three were living and working together, that features six images of a naked H.D., in classical poses, cut and pasted onto landscape images. These ‘photomontages’ were probably

59 60

61

Ibid., p. 73. Diana Collecot, ‘Images at the Crossroads: H.D.’s “Scrapbook” ’, in Signets: Reading H.D., ed. Susan Stanford Friedman and Rachel Blau duPlessis (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1990), pp. 155–81, p. 160. H.D., Palimpsest, p. 75.

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composed by Macpherson, as a note by H.D.’s archivist and friend Norman Pearson suggests. This ‘Scrapbook’ is, as Diana Collecot points out: not the randomly associated pictures we expect of a scrapbook, but carefully composed images. They juxtapose photographs of H.D. herself with photographs of Greek architecture and sculpture, some acquired on site during H.D.’s visits to Greece and others culled from brochures and from museums elsewhere.62

The images cut together H.D.’s naked body with fragments of Greek sculpted bodies and suggest a correlation between the two. In one image, H.D. is Nike. In another, she is posed, reclining, between the images of two temples: ‘Between Poseidon and Athene’. These images also imply that the Greek backgrounds highlight the body’s own poetry better than the original modern background to the photo; they are aesthetically and symbolically better than modernity. As Raymonde Ransome thinks, in the second section of Palimpsest, ‘all of modernity (as she viewed it) was the jellified and sickly substance of a collection of old colourless photographic negatives through which gleamed the reality, the truth of the blue temples of Thebes, of the white colonnades of Samos’.63 There is a kind of purity in a nostalgic retrospective of the art of Ancient Greece that a dispassionate view of modernity cannot attain: the temporal distance of the era, coupled with the unreality of viewing Ancient Greece as the sum of its artifacts, an original only viewable via its representations, make it an ideal background for the discovery of the self, both mental and physical. H.D. does not merely use visual metaphors to express aspects of her life, she acts out her bodily self as visual metaphor. The intellectual poet self and the desiring female body can thus be fused. As Hipparchia realizes, the unity of mind and body gives access to an apprehension of a kind of primary perception:  what Sinclair calls ‘Reality’, Richardson calls the ‘something’ behind the fuss and drama, and H.D. calls ‘Beauty’. Physically complete, it seemed she might reach out, step across some separating space of material dullness, find herself (as but this moment she had almost done) face to face with Beauty. God inspires the Muse, but she wanted a direct personal inspiration. She would do away with any intermediate stylus, reach him direct, in one bound realize him.64

62 63 64

Collecot, ‘Images at the Crossroads’, p. 156. H.D., Palimpsest, p. 224. Ibid., p. 59.

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The beautiful aestheticized Hipparchia, resembling as she does a Muse figure, can do away with any need for another Muse as intermediary between herself and ‘Reality’; between the artist and inspiration. She has gained artistic autonomy by cutting out the middle man. Dorothy Richardson was less comfortable with her physical body. Richardson was notoriously protective of her privacy, and refused to give biographical details or photos out to the press. Her refusal to provide photographs once backfired when the New  York Times printed a photograph of an American writer also called Dorothy Richardson in error.65 This photograph was also used on the back cover of Horace Gregory’s 1967 book on Richardson.66 The misidentifications continued. A baby photo was once sent out by Richardson as ‘the most recent picture’ of the author, and subsequently used by the magazine in question. This was not actually the most recent picture of Richardson: some pictures had been taken of herself and her husband Alan Odle in a pleasant garden setting by their friend Peggy Kirkaldy. Of these photographs, Richardson wrote to Kirkaldy in September 1931: ‘Burn the negatives of me. Not the grimmest of my imaginings had come near the awful truth. I shall now proceed to join whatever community remains that drape its womankind in veils’.67 To Ruth Pollard, who also sent a photograph, she wrote ‘Thank you for the photograph and your kind offer of more. On the whole I think I won’t broadcast it amongst my friends. Didn’t know I could look quite so much like an elderly chimpanzee’.68 The same unease about photographs surfaces occasionally in Pilgrimage: any figure in a picture has the potential to get in the way of the background and obscure the meaning. Miriam reacts particularly strongly to posed representations of women in photographs. At the Corries’s, she sees a ‘strange photograph’ of Mrs Kronen before meeting her in person: ‘a woman in Grecian drapery seated on a stonework chair with a small harp on her knees, one hand limply tweaking the strings of her harp; her head thrown back, her eyes, hard and bright, staring up into the sky, “Inspiration” printed in ink on the white margin under the body’ (I, p. 399). The self-conscious posing, and the deliberate and false application of meaning enrage Miriam: Miriam looked closely at the photograph with hatred in her eyes. Why not the stone steps and the chair and the sense of sunlight; sunlit air? That would 65

66

67 68

See Gloria G.  Fromm, Dorothy Richardson:  A  Biography (Urbana:  University of Illinois Press, 1977), p. 214 Horace Gregory, Dorothy Richardson: An Adventure in Self-Discovery (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1967) Letter to Peggy Kirkaldy, 10 September 1931, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. Letter to Ruth Pollard, c. February 1926, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.

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be enough. ‘You get in the way of the air, you thing ’, she muttered, and the woman’s helpless unconscious sandalled feet reproached her. (I, p. 400)

Part of what offends Miriam about this photograph is the arrested gesturing of the woman, assuming a tragic pose. In this revulsion, she is once more reacting against society pictures, social niceties, the sanctity of eternal, posed womanhood. Whereas H.D. appropriates the tradition of the posed woman for her own aesthetic purposes, acting out her Muse-pose of inspiration, Richardson simply reacts against it. She is discomforted by the artificiality of performance, with the posed photograph, which in Max Saunders’s words records ‘someone posing rather than just being’: ‘it shows selves caught in the process of constructing themselves, the self performing itself, and is grasped by the viewer as an effect of perception, interpretation, performance’.69 However, she is also here reacting against formulaic narrative art, or, as Svetlana Alpers describes it: the Italian Renaissance recipe for pictorial narrations:  through the visible actions of the body, through gesture and facial expression, the artist can present and the viewer can see the invisible feelings or passions of the soul. This notion of pictorial narration had its roots in the art of antiquity and drew in time on an established vocabulary of bodily movements and gestures familiar to artist and viewer.70

The ‘invisible feelings or passions of the soul’, in this case ‘inspiration’, are represented in pantomime style, and ineffectually: the ‘limp hand’ pretending to play the harp, the head ‘thrown back’ dramatically. Miriam does recognize the effects being used here, and understands the reference to ‘antiquity’ through costume and props, but ridicules the scenario. The lofty figure’s humanity is emphasized, as Miriam sees ‘as if it were in the room with her’, the scene in which the photograph was taken, with Mrs Kronen’s ‘cross face coming down from its pose to argue with the photographer, and then flung upwards again, waiting’ (I, p. 400). The acting out of divine inspiration through still images seems to Miriam to be false, and ridiculous. Inspiration to her can be expressed perfectly by ‘the sense of sunlight; sunlit air’.

The composite image: Fidelity through multiplicity Light in Pilgrimage always signifies enlightenment, but not always enlightenment of the same kind. For Miriam, sunlight brings a kind of joy in existence, 69 70

Saunders, Self Impression, p. 63. Svetlana Alpers, The Art of Describing:  Dutch Art in the Seventeenth Century (Chicago:  John Murray, 1983), p.  212. Alpers is here contrasting the Renaissance ‘pictorial narrations’ with the ‘descriptive surfaces’ of ‘Dutch illustrations’.

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and firelight brings the past visually into the present. Electric light however, that man-made phenomenon, brings a scientific, unsentimental enlightenment:  a bright clear space for rational thought. At a scientific lecture, attended with Mr Hancock, the lecture goers are surrounded by electric light, which seems to Miriam to inform who they are: ‘This was modern improvement – hard clear light. Their minds and their thoughts and their lives and their clothes were always in it. She stared at the screen. A large slide was showing, lit from behind. It made a sort of stage scenery for the rest of the scene, all in one light’ (II, p. 191). The ‘hard clear light’ enables hard clear thought. The speed with which lighting could be switched on becomes a metaphor for Miriam’s own mind pictures: the sudden ones that are fleeting and ephemeral and must be captured. She casts this as ‘realization’: ‘here within, lit up as if by a suddenly switched on electric light, was one’s own real realization going back and back; in pictures that grew clearer, each time something happened that switched on a light within the blank spaces of your mind’ (II, pp. 351–2). Here, the smell of mimosa makes Miriam think of Eve, and think of various childhood memories where mimosa was linked with the arrival of Spring. The electric light is almost a flashbulb taking snapshot photos, taking instantaneous images of the fleeting moment of realization: a realization of light, life and Spring, and beauty. Bid Me to Live’s Julia Ashton has similar snapshot realizations, but her pictures ‘going back and back’ are not pleasant memories. For her, it is moments of stress that bring a sudden switched on light. When she sits, trapped and annoyed, in her Bloomsbury room, she stares at the Spanish screen in her room and sees, in a sudden moment of clarity, ‘this whole problem, flung out like so many magic lantern pictures on the screen before her’.71 A calm contemplation of the difficulties of the past and the present, seen as pictures projected, enables Julia to detach herself from her situation. She remembers this moment as significant. When she first gets to Cornwall (and thus has actually escaped), she sees the countryside in explicitly the same terms: The scene displayed, the first morning after her arrival, was so clear, so vibrant that it had for a moment struck her as, not so much a dream, but part of the series she had called magic lantern slides, when her memory back in town, had suddenly apprehended (not seen but so suddenly apprehended) the separate cypress-tree or ledge of island within her, yet seen projected on the Spanish screen, in too bright colour. So this.72 71 72

H.D., Bid Me to Live, p. 86. Ibid., p. 145.

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As with Miriam’s realizations, each successive suddenly seen image is part of a series. Julia’s metaphor of the magic lantern slides recalls a vision which H.D. and Bryher shared in Corfu, shortly after H.D. had left behind the complicated tangle of relationships that she portrays in both Bid Me to Live and Palimpsest. She saw what Susan Stanford Friedman calls ‘mysterious light pictures projected onto her hotel wall in Corfu’.73 Each image is what H.D. later calls a ‘hieroglyph of the unconscious’, in her Tribute to Freud, and each image, when decoded, gives partial illumination.74 Snapshots are limited in their ability to express. Miriam compares snapshots to both men’s blindness and limited point of view, and to language, which she distrusts. In a conversation with one of the boarders in Mrs Bailey’s house, Miriam revolts against a phrase of his: There was a truth in it, but not anything of the whole truth. It was like a photograph . . . it made you see the slatternly servant and the house and the dreadful-looking people going in and out. Clever phrases that make you see things by a deliberate arrangement, leave an impression that is false to life. But men do see life in this way, disposing of things and rushing on with their talk. (III, p. 14)

Life, in all its complexity, cannot be ‘neatly described in single phrases’, even if that single phrase is clever and evocative. Miriam does ‘see’ the image the boarder is trying to make her see, and so the phrase is effective. However, there is more to the scenario than that freeze-frame image. There is ‘how extraordinary it was that there should be anybody, waiting for anything ’ (III, p. 14). Miriam’s familiar refrain here calls for a deeper, more nuanced portrayal of life, one that cannot be encompassed by one single phrase, or photograph, but several. The flashes of realization, and by extension any attempt to render the truth of a situation using an image, are only good enough if they are presented as a series. Because single snapshot images are so unreliable, Miriam experiments instead with the metaphor of multiple photographs. Her early relationship with Michael Shatov is characterized by their sitting together, learning and thinking together, getting to know each other, ‘exchanging photographs of their minds’ (III, p. 23). Later, her conversations with Shatov fail because she tries to get across a point which must be broken up, or framed, in order to be understood: ‘She glanced over the picture. Any single selection would be misleading. There was enough

73 74

Friedman, p. 310. H.D., Tribute to Freud (Boston: David R. Godine, 1956), p. 93.

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material for days of conversation’ (III, p. 81). Miriam’s picture includes a large chunk of her life, wide and distanced, and cannot be expressed neatly by the one phrase, or the one static image. She later tries to build up a picture progressively, in a conversation with Hypo Wilson: He had followed with interest, gentle and patient at first before her overwhelming conviction, allowing her to add stroke after stroke to her picture, seeming for a moment to see what she saw and then – What has he done? Either it was that his pre-arranged picture of European life had no place for these so different, inactive Russians, or her attempts to represent people in themselves, without borrowed methods of portrayal, were useless because they fell between the caricature which was so uncongenial to her and the methods of description current in everyday life. (III, p. 254)

Miriam struggles to create a picture that manages to bridge the gap between satiric caricature (Hypo’s own preferred method of portrayal) and prosaic, clichéd descriptions. Her ‘stroke after stroke’ method is an attempt to render depth and complexity: more than one snapshot image in order to capture more than a caricature. This is still the ‘deliberate arrangement’ (III, p.  14) that Miriam was wary of, but it is a kind of picture composition that does not reduce the subject: the angles of vision are multiple. This presentation of multiple angles then becomes (and is already) the aesthetic structure of Pilgrimage:  several contemporary reviewers picked up on Pilgrimage’s tendency to present an image as a combination of several images. One reviewer, for Punch, even drew a comparison between Pilgrimage and Futurist painting: ‘Miss Richardson has evolved a way of writing a novel which somehow suggests the Futurist way of painting a picture’.75 Futurist art, similar to Cubist painting, aimed at ‘simultaneity’: ‘the same subject from different viewpoints and different times all at once’.76 Richardson presents her same subjects (Miriam, and all that Miriam sees) from many different angles, and progressively through different times. H.D. does the same. In the first section of Palimpsest, ‘Hipparchia’, a moment of crisis forces Hipparchia to a new kind of vision. She has realized that her (ex-)lover, the Roman soldier Marius, is not going to leave his new woman, and she realizes also that he still loves her, Hipparchia. The figures of the familiar love triangle

75

76

Anonymous, ‘Our Booking-Office (By Mr. Punch’s Staff of Learned Clerks)’ (review of The Tunnel ), in Punch, Vol. 156, No. 4060 (30 April 1919), p. 351. David Ohana, The Futurist Syndrome (Eastbourne: Sussex Academic Press, 2010), p. 22.

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(Hipparchia – Marius – Olivia/Julia – Rafe – Bella) merge and glide into one another in Hipparchia’s hallucinatory vision: she saw with her own eyes, with the eyes of Marius, with the dark eyes of Olivia, Olivia. She saw Olivia as Olivia must see Olivia. Seated in a low chair with small feet crossed, cornelian encrusted. Gazing with vacant, shallow great eyes at an image that shone back from the polished metal that a slave held. She could see with the dark eyes of Olivia, Olivia, satisfied, hang from a heavy ear-lobe an enormous pendant, ‘waist-long’ as Verrus put it, where light, reflected, caught sun as from a green ice-pool. Mingled in some horrible phantasy, vision superimposed, she saw with her own eyes, white Hipparchia who from her own ice and green sea-water looked out to regard as her reflected image, dark Olivia.77

This is H.D.’s version of Richardson’s ‘angles of vision’ composition:  multiple images superimposed instead of juxtaposed. Hipparchia’s viewpoint shifts. She is looking at Olivia in her mind’s eye, first as she herself sees her, then as Marius must see her, and then she inhabits Olivia’s own point of view. The vision begins as sympathetic understanding, but it also contains detached commentary. Hipparchia is not fully inhabiting Olivia’s point of view; she is separate enough to voice her criticism of Olivia’s lack of intelligence: her ‘vacant, shallow’ eyes. She then sees herself, reflected in the pool in Verrus’s garden, the real self she was so triumphant to find, superimposed on this image of Olivia. The two become the same person. Their relations to each other, both satellites to the Roman Marius, are visually represented. In Bid Me to Live, Julia has a similar vision of the actors in her love triangle, but for Julia, the vision is not ‘horrible phantasy’, but a welcome moment of clarity. The individuals, including Julia herself, are reduced to types and merged: They seemed to be superimposed on one another like a stack of photographic negatives. Hold them up to the light and you get in reverse light-and-shade, Julia and Bella seated on that same chintz-covered couch, a composite, you get Rico seated in Rafe’s arm-chair, you get Elsa, Germania, in its largest proportion, superimposed simply on Rule Britannia.78

Julia and Bella are a composite, as Hipparchia and Olivia are. Julia’s vision goes further than Hipparchia’s, however, and superimposes Rico and Rafe, and Elsa and a posed Britannia figure. Julia’s superimposition of the image of one figure over 77 78

H.D. Palimpsest, p. 91. H.D., Bid Me to Live, p. 89.

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another makes clear that these people, these actors, are just human types. Julia and Bella are both women, lovers, bodies and souls; Rafe and Rico are both demanding and unsympathetic men; in a dissolving of war-time distinctions Elsa is both Germany and Britain, less of a national stereotype and more of a generic goddess. It is a vision that can only come, Julia thinks, when you are ‘past the danger point’: ‘past the point of any logic and of any meaning, and everything has a meaning. A meaning in another dimension, not even that. Casual meaning in everything, in Elsa’s work-bag spilling its homely contents on the floor’.79 The superimposition not only makes meaning apparent, but creates new meaning: the problems that have arisen from the unconventional coupling and recoupling are solved by treating the people involved as still images and artistically rearranging them.

Weaving In the summer of 1925, H.D. sent Richardson the first and last sections of the manuscript of Palimpsest. Richardson responded with genuine enthusiasm: They are wonderful to me, both, all one glowing texture, authentic. They are what one expects of H.D. poetry pure, woven tapestry between heaven & earth. And, for their peculiar individual zest, that fresh close reality of a past that is not past. Bang goes the sighing sentimentality of ostrich aesthete, bang also the underestimations of the secularist. Your world is the poet’s world persisting all along history, all along humanity. Your Egypt & your Greece stand in my mind side by side, alive, irrevocable.80

Robert McAlmon, who published Palimpsest in 1926 with the Contact Press, alluded to Richardson in his preface, ‘Forewarned as regards H.D.’s Prose’ as ‘some good author’, who, he claimed, called this book of H.D.’s a ‘tapestry hung between heaven and hell’. McAlmon’s misquotation here turns Richardson’s metaphor about the divine and the physical into something more macabre. Where Richardson is admiring of H.D.’s negotiation of the poet’s higher mind and the poet’s body; or the fate of the intellect in the destructive modern world, McAlmon sees Palimpsest as a negotiation between the divine and the hellish; a story about ‘a generation split like the quick crack of doom by war’.81 79 80

81

Ibid., pp. 88–9. Letter from Dorothy Richardson to H.D., c. summer 1925, H.D. Papers, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. Robert McAlmon, ‘Forewarned as Regards H.D.’s Prose’, in Palimpsest (London: Feffer & Simons, Inc, 1968), p. 241.

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The three sections of Palimpsest are versions of the same story, with mirrored characters and the same pattern of circumstance. The two that Richardson read before publication, ‘Hipparchia’ and ‘Secret Name’, are set respectively in Ancient Greece and in modern Egypt: the heroine of ‘Secret Name’ reflecting on the past of the country that she finds herself in, and Ancient Greece and Rome too, as a means of understanding her own situation. Palimpsest thus does not only layer, or superimpose, character with character, but era with era. What is striking is that Richardson chooses to call this superimposition or palimpsest of narratives a ‘tapestry’. H.D. herself described the process of writing as weaving, stitching and embroidering. She spoke of including real-life people in her texts as placing them ‘in the texture of the cloth or the weave or the “broidery” ’.82 She wrote to Bryher in the 1930s that she must write every day ‘to keep little stitches in the tapestry, so easy to let things go’.83 Critics of H.D.’s work have picked up on this metaphor. Susan Stanford Friedman in particular sees the whole of H.D.’s prose oeuvre as a tapestry, as ‘Penelope’s web’: both the ever-unfinished burial shroud that Penelope weaves and unweaves in Homer’s Odyssey, and as Roland Barthes’s author as spider, ‘dissolving in the construction secretions of his web’.84 She takes the mixed metaphor – tapestry and web – from H.D.’s own poem about Penelope, ‘At Ithaca’, in which the woman waiting for her husband to return compares her tapestry to a ‘web of pictures’.85 Friedman sees the weaving repetition of the autobiographical fiction as an ongoing quest: There was no end to the weaving, unweaving, and reweaving of Penelope’s web for H.D. In the midst of war and the dissolution of her marriage, she began writing fiction as a means to an end: to save the impersonal, clairvoyant poet by writing the personal, tangled fictions of the woman. Originally handmaiden to the poet, the prose author developed her own genderinflected authority and agency.86

This aesthetic and personal quest is, like Pilgrimage, a process without an end point. The ongoing nature of the struggle is most apparent in Palimpsest, where, as Friedman points out, ‘while each story ends with a tentative resolution of the protagonist’s conflict, the next story begins with the same conflict manifesting in

82

83 84

85 86

Letter from H.D.  to Norman Pearson, 14 August 1948, Beinecke Rare Books and Manuscript Library. Letter from H.D. to Bryher, 12 July 1936, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text, trans. Richard Miller (New  York:  Hill and Wang, 1975), p. 79. H.D., Collected Poems: 1912–1944 (New York: New Directions, 1983), p. 164. Friedman, p. 99.

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a different form’.87 Palimpsest ’s Hipparchia is a weaver. She is a weaver of words, a weaver of atmosphere, and she weaves and projects her own body image and glamour: the ‘web and web and web that was the illusion of Hipparchia’.88 She also, towards the end of her story, takes control of her life and her fate by constructing a life-narrative of her own superior to that constructed for her by the Fates, those ‘winding, spinning and destroying Sisters’. She casts off her memories of her life with both her lovers, ‘cutting them from consciousness like the last Fate with her great shears’.89 In the second section, Raymonde Ransome is also a weaver of words, but she finds herself powerless against the woven machinations of the woman who took her husband away, Mavis Landour: Mavis was a thread that ran on and on and through and through and to jerk that one highly coloured thread out of her life’s fabric meant ravelling edges, meant odd searing gash and tear in a fabric of London life that was as her very nerve and vein, fabric of her body.90

The tentative conclusion that Raymonde reaches at the end of her story is that she needs to escape the Mavis-spun web, and the perception-dulling dwelling in memory that she has been indulging in in London. She is trapped by another’s web spinning:  ‘everywhere a soft web of almost invisible fibres that was none the less (to her super-refined senses) there to trap her’.91 The heroine of ‘Secret Name’, the third section of Palimpsest, caught up in the society of rich Americans in Egypt, realizes both that the society women around her are weavers – spiders spinning little webs of intrigue and entrapment – and that she is too. She had been planning to spin a little web of illusion herself (a Hipparchian-glamour) in order to appear attractive to Captain Rafton, and is distracted by Mrs Wharton’s own spinning: the extraction of a promise to look after her daughter, Mary. The heroine thinks ‘fool, you let these women twist you round their fingers. You think yourself not one of them. Spider fool. You weave more devastating webs than any’.92 The characters in Palimpsest struggle to maintain control of their narratives, and the fight to understand the past and the present self ’s relation to the past is a fight to gain control of the spindle, shears or needle. At one remove from her characters is H.D., whose act of creation in writing Palimpsest is the assumption of authority as weaver and narrative controller. 87 88 89 90 91 92

Ibid., p. 250. H.D., Palimpsest, p. 38. Ibid., p. 93. Ibid., p. 143. Ibid., p. 242. Ibid., p. 280.

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In Pilgrimage, Miriam as fledgling writer confronts a similar dilemma. She wants to gain control of the thread, and to learn to construct her own narrative, and in so doing she turns to the writer Hypo Wilson, as exemplar and mentor. Hypo, as social persona but also as writer, makes shapes with words. He uses speech to ‘make a shapely thing of a chance meeting with a stranger’ (III, p. 346) and his words have the power to link together the separated theatrical scenes that his wife Alma is so busy making: ‘scenes, all threaded by the sound of Hypo’s voice’ (III, p. 344). The words ‘pattern’, ‘thread’ and ‘fabric’ recur in Pilgrimage when Miriam is thinking of Hypo. Her first reading of one of his books, in her room in London, picks out the phrase: ‘There is a dangerous looseness in the fabric of our minds’. She is so astounded by the effectiveness of this phrase that she thinks about each word in detail, beginning with ‘fabric’: Fabric. How did he find his words? No one had ever said fabric about anything. It made the page alive . . . a woven carpet, on one side a beautiful glowing pattern, on the other dull stringy harshness . . . (II, p. 407)

‘Fabric’ strikes Miriam as the perfect metaphor, not necessarily for the human mind, but for the page: the ‘beautiful glowing pattern’ of woven words on the side that presents itself, and the ‘dull stringy harshness’ of the construction, or backstage, of the text. It is striking that Richardson has Miriam so surprised at the use of the word ‘fabric’ that she embraces the metaphor of weaving as textual creation with such enthusiasm. As Kathryn Sullivan Kruger points out, ‘Weaving has long been a metaphor for the creation of something other than cloth, whether a story, a plot, or a world. [. . .] A whole network of terms exists in English contending that the written text is like a fabric – spun, woven, knitted, quilted, sewn, or pieced together’.93 In her use of a two-sided tapestry as a metaphor for the construction of a text, Richardson here anticipates Walter Benjamin’s reading of Proust, in which he places memory at the centre of the text, as the unity of the text:  ‘the intermittence of author and plot is only the reverse of the continuum of memory, the pattern on the back side of the tapestry’.94 There is also a similarity here to H. G. Wells’s description of Rebecca West’s writing: ‘She writes like a loom producing her broad rich fabric with hardly a thought of how it will make up into a shape, while I write to cover a frame of ideas’. Wells’s emphasis is on West’s spontaneous patterning versus his own clear

93

94

Kathryn Sullivan Kruger, Weaving the Word:  The Metaphorics of Weaving and Female Textual Production (Cranbury, NJ: Susquehanna University Press, 2001), pp. 23–30. Walter Benjamin, ‘The Image of Proust’, in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (London: Collins, 1973), p. 205.

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and careful structure, and the emphasis in Pilgrimage is also on Hypo Wilson’s skilful structuring. He presents a magical picture on one side, but, like a magic trick, if you look from the other angle you can see the workings of the trick.95 In proofreading Hypo’s work, Miriam finds herself enclosed by ‘the magic of the woven text’ (III, p. 251), the skilful construction, and beautiful effect of which she feels to be not only magical but ‘true’. Miriam’s admiration for Hypo as skilled weaver, however, is not unmixed with reservations. In a meditation on the difference between men and women, and her frustration at what she sees as ‘the hopeless eternal inventions and ignorance of men’ (III, p. 279) Miriam decides that: Men weave golden things; thought, science, art, religion, upon a black background. They never are. They only make or do; unconscious of the quality of life as it passes. So are many women. (III, p. 280)

Miriam’s preoccupation here is not only with gender differences (the artificiality of the intellectual production of men and of the women who imitate them), but with her central tenet that ‘being’ is more important than ‘becoming’: ‘Look after the being and the becoming will look after itself. Look after the becoming and the being will look after itself? Not so certain’ (IV, p. 362). Hypo Wilson may ‘weave golden things’ (and the adjective ‘golden’ is Miriam’s highest praise for something) but this busyness essentially leaves him ‘uncreated, without any existence worth the name’ (IV, p. 220). Science, art and religion are implicated in this masculine thrust of ceaseless becoming. In Oberland, Miriam includes literature in her list of these ‘golden things’, questioning whether these domains are in fact ‘humanity’s highest spiritual achievement’: ‘Art’, ‘literature’, systems of thought, religions, all the fine products of masculine leisure that are so lightly called ‘immortal’. Who makes them immortal? [. . .] Who has decreed that ‘works of art’ are humanity’s highest achievement? (IV, p. 93)96

Miriam never answers her own question, but the implication is that men are the ones who confer ‘immortality’ upon particular works of art, who establish

95

96

H. G. Wells, H.G. Wells in Love:  Postscript to an Experiment in Autobiography, ed. G.  P. Wells (London: Faber and Faber, 1984), p. 102. Miriam’s argument here would seem to be unusual. As Lucy Delap points out ‘It was argued again and again that if women could not produce a single ‘ “great” artist, poet, or composer, then they must be genuinely second-class citizens and deserved their lack of political rights. In response to this, many feminist writers did not challenge the concept of genius, or try to change the terms of what counted as “greatness”. Instead, they listed out eminent women, hitherto overlooked, who might qualify for inclusion in the conventional canon’. Lucy Delap, ‘The Superwoman: Theories of Gender and Genius in Edwardian Britain’, in The Historical Journal, Vol. 47 (2004), pp. 101–26, p. 115.

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canonicity, and glorify those works of art as the ultimate in achievement. If men are the producers of ‘works of art’, and women have their own, unrecognized, art of making atmospheres, then some balance is restored. However, Miriam cannot fit herself into either of these schemas. Her sense of ‘the utter astonishment of life’ as the essence of being cannot be expressed through a ceaseless becoming, or through the pattern making which is Hypo’s method of narrativity (III, p. 280). The feminine translation of this sense of ‘life’ into atmosphere, the feminine art which uses people as ‘material’ (III, p. 260) although she calls on Hypo to admire it, is not something she can herself do. If she married Michael Shatov, a Jew, Miriam says, she could not face having Jewish children: ‘I, being myself, couldn’t do anything with it; couldn’t be anything in relationship to it’. Hypo then turns her own metaphors back upon her, ascribing to Miriam both a state of being and the feminine art. ‘You’d be, through seeing its possibilities and making an atmosphere’. However, although Miriam places great importance on her own mode of being, she cannot turn that into art in what she sees as the feminine way. She retorts to Hypo: ‘I’ve told you I’m not one of those stupendous women’ (III, p. 260). The difference here between weaving and the creation of atmospheres is one of primacy. The men weave the cloth to begin with, and the women take that up and create a social garment from it: the worrying implication is that women can produce art only as a secondary instance, from the men in their lives, rather than art in and of itself. Apart from in her appreciation of H.D., Richardson’s weavers are all masculine:  Hypo Wilson (H. G. Wells), Marcel Proust, whose A la recherche she read in a random order, until ‘At last the whole hung and hangs, a tapestry all round me’, and Henry James.97 James himself, in ‘The Art of Fiction’ compared narrative creativity to a spider on a web, and Richardson praises in her letter to Eleanor Phillips James’s ‘leisurely meticulous weaving of the long sentences’.98 In fact, weaving as a form of narrative is consistently praised by Richardson, as when she equates James’s style to beautiful music, claiming that:  ‘So rich and splendid is the fabric of sound he weaves upon the appointed loom, that his prose, chanted to his punctuation, in an unknown tongue, would serve well as a mass – in D Minor’.99 Richardson’s tone of religious exaltation here is a little tongue in cheek, belying her position as, essentially, a critic of masculine forms

97

98

99

Letter from Dorothy Richardson to Bryher, n.d., c. January/February 1925, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. Letter from Dorothy Richardson to Eleanor Phillips, 3 December1948, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. Richardson, ‘About Punctuation’, pp. 990–6.

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of narrative. Miriam also critiques the ‘destructive’ tendency of masculine statement, when she listens to Hypo talk: She listened withheld, drawing the weft of his words through the surrounding picture, watching it enlivened, with fresher colours and stronger outlines . . . a pause, the familiar lifting tone and drop, into a single italic phrase; one of his destructive conclusions. His voice went on, but she had seized the hard glittering thread, rending it, and watched the developing bright pattern coldly, her opposition ready phrased for the next break. She could stay forever like this, watching his thought; thrusting in remarks, making him reconsider. (III, pp. 349–50)

This scene is the culmination of Miriam’s struggle to situate herself within her own imagined boundaries of masculine and feminine art. She may not be able to create ‘atmospheres’, but she can acknowledge them, can hold them in her mind as backgrounds to inform her own work. The thread of masculine speech can then be used merely to enhance: to lend definition and colour to a scene already present. It is a compromise which enables her to draw together her conceptions of feminine and masculine art without sacrifice to either the essential ‘something’ or the need for ‘patterns’ and structure. For Richardson and for H.D., the use of ‘weaving’ as a metaphor is problematic. There is always a struggle to gain control of the thread, to not allow yourself to be tangled, or to avoid a too obvious and reductive patterning. Both writers wish to keep control of their narrative thread, but also to keep a fluidity in their representations. The metaphor of weaving implies a fixative motion, but images juxtaposed or superimposed provides a fluidity: allowing the signified to be presented in all its variance. In Pilgrimage, two metaphors combine to make a hybrid aesthetic model for the visual representation of ‘Reality’. Multiple static images manifest and parade themselves in Miriam’s consciousness, and they are caught by her and woven into her pattern. In Revolving Lights, this happens when Miriam is thinking about the problem with literature as insufficiently representative art: ‘books about people are lies from beginning to end. However sincere, they cannot offer any evidence about life’ (III, p. 322), and she has an epiphany: a realization about how life can be evidenced. The epiphany is enabled by memory, by her sudden awareness of the past as present, ‘past happinesses close about her’: Fragments of forgotten experience detached themselves, making a bright moving patchwork as she watched, waiting, while she passed from one to another and fresh patches were added, drawing her on. Joy piled up within

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her; but while she savoured again the quality all these past things had held as she lived them through, she suddenly knew that they were there only because she was on her way to a goal. (III, p. 323)

The actual initial perceptions can be relived and experienced as present: their appearance in memory is as close as possible to the original experience. However the order of the events and their significance in a broader scheme is improvised by Miriam as she remembers, as if spontaneously. Each scene is a patch, and the masculine thread can be used as a temporary patterning device. In this, Richardson’s insistence on transience is similar to Walter Pater’s famous ‘Conclusion’ to his Renaissance. Pater’s ‘impressions unstable, flickering, inconsistent’ can only be fixed, become a ‘clear perceptual outline’ when grouped, when woven into ‘a design in a web, the actual threads of which pass out beyond it’.100 The design itself is limiting  – the threads continue off into other formations and are invisibly more than the ‘design’ allows for. This ‘design’, although it appears to fix the impression, is not the ultimate design, because the flood of transient impressions does not allow for such fixity. Instead what we have, in Pater’s impressionism, is a ‘strange perpetual weaving and unweaving of ourselves’.101 Hypo Wilson’s fixed woven patterns do not work as a template for Miriam’s own impressionistic life, because they do not allow for this constant making and remaking. H.D.’s weaving is also Paterian impressionism and is not the kind of weaving in which Richardson’s masculine writers engage: a way of making the complexity of life conform to a pattern. Rather it is, as Friedman observes, ‘women’s work: never done, perpetually undone and redone’.102 As Saunders points out, ‘the view of the self in process produces a text that is itself in process. The “perpetual weaving and unweaving of ourselves” is represented by a perpetual weaving and unweaving of texts’.103 In Pilgrimage, the patchwork is not finished until Miriam feels that no similar experiences are going to appear and add themselves to the pattern, until she has reached her ‘goal’. The chapter of her life must be over. The H.D. characters in Bid Me to Live and Palimpsest are also caught in a shifting pattern. Some new experience or new image can always come along and add itself to the existing structure and make it change its aspect. H.D. seeks a similar strategy to Richardson’s in the use of visual images, themselves static and

100 101 102 103

Walter H. Pater, Studies in the History of the Renaissance (London: Macmillan, 1873), pp. 208–9. Ibid., p. 210. Friedman, p. 20. Saunders, Self Impression, pp. 34–5.

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unchanging, but changing in their relation to each other. The difference is that where Richardson’s narrative model of the multiple image is horizontal, H.D.’s is vertical.

Cinematic form In the second section of Palimpsest, Raymonde Ransome, who is living in London and trying to repress her memories of the war and of personal betrayal, realizes that she must no longer ‘let go perception, let go arrow-vibrant thought’.104 She has a visit from a woman named Ermy, whose husband (Martin) has been ‘taken’ from her by one Mavis Landour, the same woman who took Raymonde’s husband (Freddie) from her, years before. This new angle of vision on a past experience changes it: an image of Ermy looking at herself in the mirror is superimposed with an image of Raymonde herself, looking at herself and looking at Ermy. The introduction of the mirror, as with the scene where Hipparchia sees Olivia looking in the mirror and herself looking in the water and the reflections of both, superimposed, creates yet more images to be superimposed and contrasted. The past, which was woven and fixed, is set in motion once again by the addition of a fresh ‘patch’, or, in H.D.’s terms, a new layer. Images are no longer, as Julia Ashton initially sees them, ‘all on one plane or parallel’, they are piled up and accumulating:105 Art wasn’t seen any more in one plane, one perspective, in one dimension. One didn’t any more see things like that. Impressions were reflected now, the salt had lost – they were overlaid like old photographic negatives one on top of another. Freddie on top of Martin.106

Raymonde’s realization is that modernity not only enables, but forces a kind of composite seeing. Not only ‘art’ but life is now seen from many angles all at once, with people only visible in relation to other people, and impressions never fixed but ‘reflected’: immaterial projections that change their meaning depending on what they are projected onto. In this realization, accumulated experience has depth: There were shrines beyond shrines, feet beyond feet, faces beyond faces. Faces overlaid now one another like old photographic negatives and faces

104 105 106

H.D., Palimpsest, p. 135. H.D., Bid Me to Live, p. 179. H.D., Palimpsest, p. 218.

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whirled on and on and on, like petals down, down, down as if all those overlaid photographic negatives had been pasted together and rolled off swifter, swifter, swifter from some well controlled cinematograph. Her mind behind her mind turned the handle (so to speak) for a series of impressions that devastated her with their clarity, with their precision and with their variety.107

There is a definite echo of early Imagism here, specifically of Ezra Pound’s ‘apparition of these faces in the crowd;/Petals on a wet, black bough’.108 The superimposition or vertical layering of images however, is cinematic. Because the impressions are varied, they are clearer and more precise than they had been before: multiplicity comes to stand for accuracy of representation. H.D. was fascinated by cinema. Palimpsest was published in 1926, just as H.D., Kenneth Macpherson and Bryher, who were all living together in Switzerland at the time, were beginning to think about starting their own cinematic projects. In the spring of 1927 their ‘POOL Group’ was launched, and in July 1927 they published the first issue of Close Up, a journal which described itself as ‘the only magazine devoted to films as art’.109 H.D. wrote for this journal, as did Dorothy Richardson. The POOL group began experimenting with film-making, and H.D. starred in several of these productions: the short films Wing Beat (1927), advertised as the film’s first equivalent of the ‘free verse poem’, Foothills (1929) and the feature length Borderline (1930) with Paul Robeson. In 1927 she wrote to Viola Jordan that she was ‘intensely interested’ in cinema: ‘I feel it is the living art’.110 For H.D., cinema provided an aesthetic model in which the signifying power of the still, posed body, the deliberate framing of a room and its people as tableau, and the superimposition of multiple angles of vision come into their own. As Rachel Blau duPlessis writes, all of H.D.’s novels written after the POOL group were formed (and she includes Palimpsest in this list) are written in a ‘cinematographer’s monologue’, with ‘visual patterns, dissolves, superimpositions and the cock-eyed vision of consciousness with its own distortions and angles’.111 Significantly though, what this cinematic writing achieves is not just the representation of a body and what it sees, but a representation that represents something else.

107 108 109 110

111

Ibid., p. 222. Pound, p. 49. H.D., Close Up, p. 8. Unpublished letter, quoted in Louis Silverstein’s H.D. Chronology, part three. duPlessis, p. 59

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In her article ‘Restraint’, for the August 1927 edition of Close Up, H.D. argues for simplicity of form and movement, for ‘one laurel branch, one figure sitting sideways, one gesture’ as signifier of a larger truth.112 The cinema must, she says, be careful not to stoop to over-stylized theatrical effects: as with Miriam’s disgust at the ‘Inspiration’ photograph, such ‘self conscious portraits [. . .] must be fore-ordained banality’. However, it holds within its medium the potential to reveal something ‘ecstatic’, ‘poetic’, ‘religious’:  ‘perhaps some little unexpected effect of a bare lifted arm might bring back (as it does sometimes in a theatre) all of antiquity’.113 When H.D. watches The Student of Prague, she feels that this effect has been achieved. The villain who wants to steal the student’s identity by taking away his mirror image is pictured towards the beginning of the film as standing at the top of a hill, beckoning to the hero. There are horses stampeding and there is about to be a riding accident, and the film cuts fairly rapidly, and repeatedly, between the posed and beckoning villain and the horses running. The villain, however, is not merely a one dimensional pantomime villain: That little man means much more than that. He isn’t an absurd little obvious Punchinello. He is a symbol, an asterisk, an enigma. Spell the thing backwards, he seems to be saying, spell it right side to or back side to or front or behind and you’ll see . . . his little leer means something. The horses filing again, in obvious procession, mean something. They are going to spell something, make a mystic symbol across short grass, some double twist and knot and the world will go to bits . . . something is going to happen.114

The pose of the beckoning man, the twisted tree behind him and the movement of the panicked horses are all symbols, hieroglyphs, picture writing. Each shot ‘spells something’ and ‘means something’. The ‘student’ himself, with his hunched posture, brooding under trees at the beginning of the film, is significant: ‘His visage, his form, the very obvious and lean candour of him spell something different. He is and he isn’t just this person sitting under a tree’.115 The ‘something’ that each figure signifies is ‘Reality’, ‘Beauty’, ‘light’, ‘the things we can’t say or paint’.116

112 113 114 115 116

H.D., ‘Restraint’, in Close Up, p. 111. Ibid., p. 111. H.D., ‘Conrad Veidt: The Student of Prague’, in Close Up, p. 120. Ibid., p. 121. Ibid., p. 123.

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In the plastic representation of these figures posed, tense, or gesticulating, something is also represented of the inner workings of consciousness. H.D.  argues in ‘Restraint’ that the representation of consciousness is possible only in film, using ‘intricate but simple fade-outs or superimposed impressions’. ‘Here’, she writes, ‘the camera has it over all other mediums’.117 The camera can capture both light and movement, two things which combined can evoke more completely than written language. This was an aim that the POOL group were to strive towards in their own film Borderline, which ‘was meant to function as a visual reproduction of the complex mental processes psychoanalysis claimed to explain’.118 The interior is projected outwards, through gesture, through framing and through mise-en-scéne. In Bid Me to Live, Julia becomes the evocative figure, and this is especially the case in the flat in Bloomsbury, the room that is a ‘frame’ for her relationship with Rafe. Within that frame, characters come and go, but bodily expression is most apparent when Julia and Rafe are alone. In the first scene in the flat, Rafe is making tea while Julia sits in bed and smokes. Rafe is leaving for the front, and Julia is in a daze. It is her gestures, and her movements, that evoke this state: Stepping on the blue square of carpet, before the low double-couch, their bed, she had pulled away from the endangering emotional paralysis. Sheets, a bed, a tomb. But walking for the first time [. . .] she faced the author of this her momentary psychic being, her lover, her husband. It was like that, in these moments. She touched paradise. [. . .] She was walking normally, naturally, she was walking out of the mood (paradise) toward the table; she was coming-to from drowning; she was walking out of aether.119

The movement of Julia from the bed to the middle of the room is symbolic. She leaves the nuptial bed to walk towards the upright active actor that is her husband: the daytime public version of Rafe. She is saving herself but gaining a new perspective on the room and on her relationship. The movement here, however, although a response to cinematic gesture and a tribute to bodily expression, is not as evocative as H.D.’s cinema as ‘universal language’. Each gesture and movement needs to be decoded for the reader. The reader can’t see the way in which Julia walks, the look on her face, the reluctance of her limbs to step forward, the gradual widening of her eyes. Instead we are given a deciphering, a decryption, an analysis of the symbolism of these inferred movements. Where cinema 117 118 119

H.D., ‘Restraint’, in Close Up, p. 112. Debo, The American H.D., p. 169. H.D., Bid Me to Live, p. 19.

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could present a body as hieroglyph, which in the audiences’ minds would ‘spell something’, H.D. has to present the spelling out, and make the reader work backwards towards the image. Instead of a description, for example, of Julia’s cigarette smoke winding up into the air, we are presented with a series of her interpretations of it as image as she watches it. Its ‘symbol’ is a ‘white flower’, a ‘glyph’ symbolizing the ‘khaki tunic’ that Rafe has yet to put on, which in turn symbolizes the leave-taking, potential death, certain horrors. In cinema the moving image can present, simply. In writing, the moving image is always already obscured by layers of encryption. Dorothy Richardson’s attempts to represent the wordless magic of movement using words were similarly frustrated. Her writing was frequently reviewed as cinematic. Richardson’s impressionism, one reviewer wrote, felt like the novelist was filming the inside of her protagonist’s mind: ‘turning a kinematograph camera on to each of his or her thoughts as they appear’.120 One ‘elderly male reviewer’ called Richardson’s work ‘ultra-modernist’:  ‘To read her novel after reading a Victorian romance is like listening to a Jazz-band after a symphony by Mozart [. . .] It is like watching a cinema show’.121 Bryher even reviewed the tenth ‘chaptervolume’ of Pilgrimage for Close Up: ‘What a film her books could make. The real English film for which so many are waiting. [. . .] Dawn’s Left Hand begins (as perhaps films should) in a railway carriage’.122 Bryher’s emphasis on the visuality of Pilgrimage, and insistence on its affinity to the new medium of film is in part a reflection of her own love of film, and the need to explain the presence of a book review in a journal supposedly devoted to ‘film art’. But the Pilgrimage instalment she was reviewing does indeed have many filmic moments, particularly when Miriam is in transit, in this instance as she climbs onto a tram: it offered the blessed refuge of its universal hospitality. Through the sliding door she escaped into the welcome of reflected light, into an inner world that changed the aspect of everything about her. When the tram moved off, the scenes framed by the windows grew beautiful in movement. The framing and the movement created them, gave them a life that was not the life of wild nature only. (IV, p. 265)

Once on the tram, Miriam’s observations of the interior evoke the atmosphere of the cinema. She is not describing the landscape she sees through the window,

120 121

122

Anonymous, ‘New Novels’ (review of Deadlock), in Observer (3 April 1921), p. 5 Anonymous, ‘Fiction: The Tunnel’ (review of The Tunnel ), in The Spectator, No. 4733 (15 March 1919), pp. 230–1. W. B. [Bryher], ‘Dawn’s Left Hand by Dorothy M. Richardson’, in Close Up, p. 209.

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however, she is responding to the atmosphere of the cinema house itself. The framing and movement of the scene seen may recreate nature as art, may lend significance to an ordinary landscape, but that in itself is not described.123 Oberland, the novel before Dawn’s Left Hand, is perhaps the most cinematic of the Pilgrimage series. In it, Miriam leaves the familiar London world of dentists, grey streets, omnibuses and bicycles in exchange for the sunlit and exotic mountains of Switzerland. It was published in 1927, at the same time as Richardson’s aesthetic interests were being worked out in the first of her ‘Continuous Performance’ columns for Close Up. The necessity to revisit cinema, to formulate theories about what exactly cinema does that is so special, so new, so aesthetically pleasing, at the same time as writing Oberland, resulted in the presentation of a new way of seeing. Towards the end of the eighth novel, The Trap, Miriam, in a conversation with a new friend, is asked what she would do if she was pensioned and therefore financially independent. Her answer is that she would ‘spend several years staring and then go round the world’ (III, p. 436). I read this ambition almost as a coda for the visual in Pilgrimage. In novels one to eight Miriam has indeed spent ‘several years staring’ with the monocular, static, power-hungry uncomfortable limited point of view that this infers, and she now wishes for movement. As Jean Gallagher points out, ‘staring’ is associated with a traditional ‘Cartesian subject:  coherent, stable, and occupying a relatively fixed position in relation to the visual object’. It implies a sustained concentration, which is at odds with the more multiple ‘distracted [. . .] newly fragmented and destabilized model of subjectivity appropriate to the alienated conditions of modernity’.124 This destabilized way of seeing, Gallagher writes, was associated with cinema, and with the mobile subject. The conversation here with her new friend, with its shared confidences, brings a sense of fulfilled seeing and knowledge to Miriam: ‘The light as she gazed into it was endless, multiplying upon itself; drawing her away from all known things’ but ‘it would not last. Already the strange moments were linking themselves with kindred strange moments in the past’ (III, p. 437). The kaleidoscopic, light-filled, multiplying vision, presenting a new knowledge, is brief. It is soon replaced by a recognition of snapshot moments, static and accumulating, like a photo album of memories. In order to keep experience turning, refreshing itself, this stasis must be avoided:  Miriam must become a mobile subject, 123

124

For a thought-provoking analysis of cinematic techniques in Dawn’s Left Hand, see Harriet Wragg, ‘ “Like a Greeting in a Valentine”:  Silent Film Intertitles in Dorothy Richardson’s Pilgrimage’, in Pilgrimages: A Journal of Dorothy Richardson Studies, No. 4 (2011), pp. 31–50. Gallagher, p. 409.

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enacting what Anne Friedberg calls the ‘mobilized virtual gaze’ of the still viewer watching a moving subject.125 Oberland also begins with a train journey. At first the train is uncomfortable and warm, but allows Miriam to sink ‘into herself, into a coma in which everything but the green-veiled oscillating light was motionless forever’ (IV, p. 16). The communion with self and the escape from externals is achieved through light and movement, and the closer to Switzerland Miriam gets, the more joyous her experience is. With the departure of her fellow travellers and the absence of surveillance comes freedom and light: ‘Now that it was empty and the blinds drawn up, the carriage seemed all window, letting in the Swiss morning that was mist opening here and there upon snow still greyed with dawn. Through the one she had just pushed up came life, smoothing away the traces of the night’ (IV, p. 20). The framed view of the landscape again brings a sense of ‘life’, communicated by the light streaming in through the windows. Miriam then sees her first mountains: 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 with the first keen vision. They closed in upon the train, summitless, their bases gliding by, a ceaseless tawny cliff throwing its light into the carriage, almost within touch; receding, making space at its side for sudden blue water, a river accompanying, giving them gentleness who were its mighty edge; broadening, broadening, becoming a wide lake, a stretch of smooth peerless blue with mountains reduced and distant upon its hither side. With the sideways climbing of the train the lake dropped away, down and down until presently she stood up to see it below in the distance, a blue pool amidst its encirclement of mountain and sky: a picture sliding away, soundlessly, hopelessly demanding its perfect word (IV, p. 21).

The magic possesses Miriam due to the unfailing motion. The movement of the train is reconfigured as the movement of the landscape: the mountains advance, 125

Anne Friedburg, The Virtual Window:  From Alberti to Microsoft (London:  The MIT Press, 2006), p. 31.

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glide by, broaden and ‘throw’ their light into the carriage as a projector projecting moving mountains would throw light at a screen perceived by a solitary and motionless viewer. David Seed points out that here, and elsewhere in Oberland, ‘The continuity of her gaze is ensured by the use of participial verb forms, which renders that gaze as a constant stream of visual events’.126 Language is being stretched to its limit in order to present as faithful a representation of the filmic movement as possible. The ability of film to present moving landscapes in this way, she writes in her film column, provides a magical uniqueness of vision: Those elements which in life we see only in fragments as we move amongst them, are seen in full in their own moving reality of which the spectator is the motionless, observing centre [. . .] In life, we contemplate a landscape from one point, or walking through it, break it into bits. The film, by setting the landscape into motion and keeping us still, allows it to walk through us.127

In using the train as a platform for the camera apparatus of Miriam’s eye, and the onward motion through Switzerland as a tracking shot, Richardson allows the landscape to move itself, and be perceived not as ‘fragments’, but as a glorious whole. The movement of the landscape, gliding past the ‘motionless, observing centre’ of the viewer, resolves the problematic vision of snapshots or ‘fragments’ and allows vision to regain its privileged position as conduit to knowledge, allowing things to be seen wholly, in ‘their own moving reality’.128 Miriam’s desire to find the ‘perfect word’ to describe this is abortive. Language, whether as captions or description, is flawed, and the mountains can only express themselves through this movement. A fellow passenger interrupts Miriam’s reverie to close the window and speak to her, and the magic disappears, leaving her with only ‘pictures framed and glazed’ (IV, p. 21), suddenly static. The ‘tawny’ light of the monochrome mountains as black and white moving image, seen framed through the window in one long tracking shot as ‘a picture sliding away, soundlessly’ is both a pure perception and encoded interpretation

126

127 128

David Seed, ‘British Modernists Encounter the Cinema’, in Literature and the Visual Media (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2005), pp. 48–73, p. 60. Richardson, ‘Narcissus’, in Close Up, pp. 202–3. As Lynne Kirby states, ‘Mediated by a framed glass screen, visual perceptions multiplied to form a mobile, “panoramic” perception, such that one could only see dynamically. The landscape became evanescent. Panoramic perception, in contrast to traditional perception, no longer belonged to the same space as the perceived objects: the traveler saw the objects, landscape, etc. through the apparatus moving him/her through the world’. It is the apparatus of the train (and by implication the projector) that produces the multiplicity of images that creates the panoramic effect that Miriam finds so wonderful. New perceptions are enabled by technological advances. Lynne Kirby, ‘Male Hysteria and Early Cinema’, in Male Trouble, ed. Constance Penly and Sharon Willis (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), pp. 67–86, 68.

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in one. Miriam sees both with a ‘first keen vision’ and as if she has seen this sight before, with ‘recognition’ of the familiarity of scenes such as this seen in films or in picture postcards. There is an overwhelming array of detail. One of the early worries about train journeys, as with cinema, was the feeling that too much was being presented visually and that there was no time to process it. It was a worry that the primary impression was so strong that the secondary impress had no time to function, to select. Wolfgang Schivelbusch formulates this as a sacrifice of contemplation to ‘velocity’, stating that the ‘quantitative increase of impressions that the perceptual apparatus has to receive and to process’ overwhelmed the early train traveller.129 However, the quick succession of objects on the outside of the window frame is enchanting to Miriam. She feels pleasure in being overwhelmed by the ‘gigantic’ mountains and the fast moving lake, increasing in size and receding to the distance. Her increasingly modernist subjectivity embraces the velocity, and the rapid succession of impressions set into motion by the machine. Reviewers of Pilgrimage often characterized Richardson’s ‘method’ as the flashing by of multiple impressions, and thus distinctly modern in the way that a train ride was modern. One reviewer, for Punch, even compared this rapidity of impressions to watching a film: Miss Dorothy Richardson once more presents Miriam as a sort of receiver for innumerable impressions. [. . .] Literature, music, religion, travel, the struggle of competing civilisations  – like an internal cinematograph Miriam’s brain registers the momentary flashes in their dying sequence. Reaction under such conditions is out of the question.130

Despite this reviewer’s conviction that the registering of these ‘momentary flashes’ leaves no time for reflection or reaction, Richardson was adamant that the presentation of both film and impressionistic seeing allowed for reflection and reaction because they bypassed language. In Richardson’s film criticism, the film is characterized as corresponding to interiority. She refers to the ‘thoughtlike swiftness of movement made possible by film’,131 and places an emphasis on intimacy: ‘the film, as intimate as thought, so long as it is free from the introduction of the alien element of sound’.132 The succession of impressions, moving rapidly past the window, are processed with the same rapidity. The movement of the

129

130 131 132

Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the 19th Century (Leamington Spa: Berg, 1986), p. 57. Anonymous, ‘New Fiction’ (review of Revolving Lights), in Daily Telegraph (24 April 1923), p. 16 Dorothy Richardson, ‘A Thousand Pities’, in Close Up, 1927–1933, p. 167. Dorothy Richardson, ‘Continuous Performance’, in Close Up, 1927–1933, p. 161.

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train and of cinema keeps pace with the movement of Richardson’s processing of impressions. The double impression is unified. In the silent film, the action on the screen takes place simultaneously with the processing of it by the mind, in a kind of sanctuary space where spoken or written language can’t intrude.

Soporific cinema and the creative collaboration of art and audience The image of the cinema as a place of refuge is evoked time and again in Richardson’s film criticism for Close Up. In her very first column, in July 1927, she creates a version of the ‘small palaces’ as ‘a sanctuary for mothers, an escape from the everlasting qui vive into eternity on a Monday afternoon’. The memorable part of the picture shown is the breaking of waves on the shore: ‘a tide, frothing in over the small beach of a sandy cove, and for some time we were allowed to watch the coming and going of those foamy waves, to the sound of a slow waltz, without the disturbance of incident’.133 The rhythmic and soothing seascape becomes ‘beautiful in movement’ much as the seaside view through the window of the tram is ‘created’ by the movement of the tram and the framing of the window. Cinema brings a new conception of beauty: one which is not the ‘life of wild nature only’, but something more. In ‘Continuous Performance’, this something more is created exclusively by the unification of image in motion and music. The ‘tired women’ who frequent the north London picture house are in collusion with the film being shown, a collusion Richardson typifies as being different entirely from the actor/audience relations encountered at the theatre. Theatre fails because its players in ‘acting at instead of with the audience, were destroying the inner relationship between audience and players. Something of this kind, some essential failure to compel the co-operation of the creative consciousness of the audience’.134 Cinema’s alternative to this forced portrayal, without ‘disturbance of incident’, is to present scenes without speech, without comment, but with music as backdrop to create a co-operation between audience and film. Richardson insists on this: Such co-operation cannot take place unless the audience is first stilled to forgetfulness of itself as an audience. This takes power. Not force or emphasis

133 134

Ibid., p. 160. Ibid, p. 161.

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or noise, mental or physical. And the film, as intimate as thought, so long as it is free from the introduction of the alien element of sound, gives this co-operation its best chance. The accompanying music is not an alien sound. It assists the plunge into life that just any film can give, so much more fully than just any play, where the onlooker is perforce under the tyranny of the circumstances of the play without the chances of escape provided so lavishly by the moving scene.135

The creative consciousness of the audience is engaged, and is engaged because of the possibility of escape, of a ‘plunge into life’ provided by the music and the moving scene hushing the audience into a fertile stillness. The implication is that the audience become figuratively incorporeal, as the images presented to them become their own images. Here Richardson diverges from Stead’s view of cinema as ‘Life caught in the act of living’ with ‘no time for reflection’. Her emphasis is on the forgetfulness of self and immersion into ‘life’ (as an unreflecting ‘plunge’) as a prerequisite for engagement with a film. The creative consciousness of the audience is engaged, but it is engaged by an instinctual understanding of the film as something ‘as intimate as thought’. The film is primarily a medium for reflection. In Deleuze’s theory of cinema, ‘thought’ is essential to an understanding of film, but, equally significantly, so is a deeper, baser reaction: This is why Eisenstein continually reminds us that ‘intellectual cinema’ has as correlate ‘sensory thought’ or ‘emotional intelligence’, and is worthless without it. The organic has to correlate the pathetic. The highest form of consciousness in the work of art has as correlate the deepest form of the subconscious, following a ‘double process’ or two coexisting moments.136

If Eisenstein and Deleuze both emphasize the importance of a play of doubles between the conscious and the subconscious, other commentators were keen to vouch for a similar doubleness, if an untheorized, mysterious one. Kenneth Macpherson, the editor of Close Up, spoke about cinema in these terms in his very first editorial for the journal. Cinema has ‘something’ to it, something which is not easily defined: ‘Something more than relaxation of dope, or a blurring over of mind, I honestly feel that people got in some way the fact that here was something growing under their eyes, a sense of life and expectancy’.137 Close Up’s contributors consistently took this line. Robert Herring in ‘A New Cinema: Magic 135 136 137

Ibid. Deleuze, p. 159. Kenneth Macpherson, ‘As Is’, in Close Up, p. 36.

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and the Avant-Garde’ theorized the ‘something’ as a kind of magic, created by the light and movement. He also made clear that in his view the spectators of film were not passive, but rather active: These people respond to the spell. They are not drugged by light, as is so often said. That’s wrong. Only half-way. They are stimulated by it and able automatically to discount incident and player without noticing it, and accept instead without knowing it the drama of movement and pattern.138

As Laura Marcus points out, a great deal of the energies of the Close Up writers ‘was directed against cinema spectatorship as passive daydreaming, and against the use of cinema as a pallative’.139 This is not to say that the writers claimed unequivocally that passive spectatorship of film was impossible, but rather that an active spectatorship should be encouraged if cinema was to be appreciated fully. The potential of cinema to create unmediated representations of vision, to present inner life symbolically or to juxtapose ideas to create new meanings can be realized only if audiences are trained to read films. H.D.’s articles for Close Up also addressed the issue of soporific cinema. In ‘The Mask and the Movietone’ she admits to a certain blurring over of her own perceptions while watching film:  the atmosphere of the cinema itself and the movement of the film lulling the intellect to sleep: Then we sank into light, into darkness, the cinema palace (we each have our favourite) became a sort of temple. We depended on light, on some substrata of warmth, some pulse or vibration, music on another plane too, also far enough removed from our real artistic consciousness to be treated as ‘dope’ rather than accepted in any way as spiritual or intellectual stimulus.140

However, this lulling, she maintains, was not, as it first appeared, purely a doping effect, but rather film was a stimulus to some other active agent in the mind: not the conscious intellect, but the primitive unconscious. In this, she echoes Eisenstein’s theory of the double ‘emotional intelligence’ or ‘sensory thought’: The mask originally presented life but so crudely that it became a part of some super-normal or some sub-normal layer of consciousness. Into this layer of self, blurred over by hypnotic darkness or cross-beams of light, emotion and idea entered fresh as from the primitive beginning. Images, our

138 139

140

Robert Herring, ‘A New Cinema, Magic and the Avant-Garde’, in Close Up, p. 51. Laura Marcus, The Tenth Muse: Writing About Cinema in the Modernist Period (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 328. H.D., ‘The Mask and the Movietone’, in Close Up, p. 116.

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dolls, our masks, our gods, Love and Hate and Man and Woman. [. . .] Bits of chiffon became radiantly significant, tiny simple and utterly trivial attributes meant so much.141

Cinema speaks to the underlayer of the artistic consciousness that is usually buried, and thus enables a kind of communication without words (which belong to the conscious mind). The ‘creative collaboration’ between film, spectator and what Christina Walter calls ‘the visual attentive state that marks the spectator’s experience of film’ open up possibilities for communication with the unconscious in which ‘the spectator can access images of unconscious desire that exceed but condition personal experience’.142 In this, watching a film is like dreaming. Both operate through use of symbol, and both function as prelinguistic communication. In Bid Me to Live, Julia Ashton goes to the cinema with her second lover, Vane. She has escaped the stifling atmosphere of the Bloomsbury flat, now a frame for a relationship that has ended, and Vane suggests that they go and see a film: He was offering her pictures, he was offering another dimension, the actual black and white of screen-projection. But he was offering her other things to look at, vistas of blue sea, gulls. Pictures? It would be better to go anywhere than back to that room.143

Vane is not only offering an escape to the half-light ‘dope’ of the cinema house, he is offering a more complete escape, to a cottage in Cornwall. The images of the sea and the birds that H.D. imagines in her future become conflated with the images she expects she will see in the cinema. They will be beautiful, and they will offer her an escape from her hopelessly entangled personal affairs. When she goes into the cinema, and sees the drama of the car racing along the cliff roads, she does indeed feel for a moment as if she has escaped: ‘The car would swerve, would turn, it swerved, it turned, they swerved, they turned with it’. The contrast between the drama on the screen and her own drama, now comfortably remote, makes her feel free: ‘It was danger without. Inside she was clear, the old Greek katharsis was at work here, as in the stone-ledged theatre benches of fifthcentury Greece; so here’.144 However, as H.D.  describes in ‘The Mask and the Movietone’, the film has rather more to offer. The heroine appears on the screen, 141 142 143 144

Ibid., p. 116. Walter, p. 302. H.D., Bid Me to Live, p. 120. Ibid., p. 123.

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and through her gestures, her way of peering through a window and climbing marble stairs, something else is presented: There she was exactly incorporated, no screen-image. Here was Beauty, a ghost but Beauty. Beauty was not dead. It emerged unexpectedly in the midst of this frantic maelstrom. The spirit moved, gestured. The smoke from the thousand cigarettes was incense, breathed by ghosts-to-be, toward Beauty.145

H.D. is here referring to the ‘something behind something’ which both Eileen Gregory and Jean Gallagher trace back to Walter’s Pater’s influence on H.D.’s aesthetics. For the Romantics, Greek statues, posed and static, do ‘not so much exemplify sublimity and nobility of form as they convey revelations of the invisible and eternal’. Their artifice, their status as representation allows a way in for the observer to access the eternal, the divine, or ‘Reality’.146 As Gallagher points out, H.D. sees cinema in these same terms, searching for, and finding, the ‘unchanging Platonic essence beneath or beyond the surface of the cinematic image’.147 Stead’s criticism of cinema is that the ‘too stimulating’ procession of visual images leaves little space for conscious reflection, or abstract positioning of the thing seen as from a distance; Herring’s ‘stimulated’ audiences are able to read a film abstractly, albeit without conscious mediation. H.D. and Richardson create a middle ground between the passive and the active spectator. In Richardson’s discussion of ‘Captions’ in September 1927 she states that ‘the film has an unrivalled opportunity of presenting the life of the spirit directly, and needs only the minimum of informative accompaniment’.148 A direct immersion into the visual representations offered by film has the potential to bring the viewer to the direct apprehension of the ‘life of the spirit’: life as it is lived, perceptions as they are perceived, film as ‘intimate thought’. This is the ideal that Richardson hopes film will achieve, and that she explicitly links with the efforts of literature in a similar direction: Art and literature, Siamese twins making their first curtsey to the public in a script that was a series of pictures, have never yet been separated. In its uttermost abstraction art is still a word about life and literature never ceases to be pictorial [. . .] And if the direct giving of information in captions is the

145 146

147 148

Ibid., pp. 125–6. Eileen Gregory, H.D.  and Hellenism:  Classic Lines (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 41. Gallagher, p. 410. Richardson, ‘Captions’, in Close Up, p. 165.

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mark of a weak film, the direct giving of information in a play or novel is the mark of a weak novel or play.149

The film that Julia Ashton sees can represent ‘Beauty’ precisely because it is wordless. It is a ‘spiritual language’, the intimacy of which allows for a direct connection between the expressive combination of light and movement, projected onto a wall, and the artistic (un)conscious. Literature can be pictorial, but its reliance on words means that it is always already at one remove.

Interlude ‘To focus from a distance’: Solitude and coming to writing Both Dorothy Richardson and May Sinclair grew up in middle-class seclusion, in spacious houses with servants and luxuries. Richardson’s father had sold his business (inherited from his father), disassociated himself from trade and surrounded himself with all the trappings of middle-class life. Richardson’s childhood home in Putney for example, where she lived from 1883 until 1891, was, in her biographer Gloria Fromm’s words:  ‘frankly luxurious. It was brilliantly furnished and stocked, fully staffed with servants, and supervised down to the smallest detail by the great magician [Richardson’s father] who had waved his wand and made it all appear’.150 The first seven years of May Sinclair’s life were similarly privileged. In these early years, according to Suzanne Raitt, Sinclair ‘enjoyed the luxuries of affluent middle-class life in a large and well-appointed home, with an extensive garden lovingly supervised by the mother’.151 However, both of these homes collapsed. In the late 1860s, Sinclair’s father’s shipping business failed, and he became bankrupt. The servants had to go. Around 1890, Richardson’s father was also on the verge of bankruptcy, and their servants also were dismissed.152 The days of unconsidered beauty, luxury and ease, ‘supervised’ and maintained by another, were numbered for both novelists, and both novelists would be haunted by the apparition of this golden and unsustainable past throughout their lives.

149 150 151 152

Ibid., p. 165. Fromm, Dorothy Richardson, p. 12. Raitt, p. 20. Charles Richardson did not become bankrupt right away; he ‘managed to cling to solvency, by a hair, until 1893’. Fromm, Dorothy Richardson, p. 20.

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In 1891, Dorothy Richardson was seventeen, and fiercely independent. She left home to become a student teacher in Hanover. Sinclair, however, was too young to leave home when her family’s finances failed, and stayed with her family. Even when she was publishing her first works:  poetry; philosophy; criticism; translation and novels, she was doing so in order to financially support her mother, with whom she still lived. Both Sinclair and Richardson, then, had to become financially independent, and both had to do so against the odds. The journey towards independence, however, is not merely one of financial worries, it is a question of space. With no servants, and no responsible and wealthy parent to ‘supervise’ the domestic space, the two women found they needed to construct their own space. These frustrations surface in the novels of both writers; where is a woman to write, and when is she to write? How is she to preserve her spatial and intellectual freedom against the demands of domestic work, or of other people’s expectations of the woman at home? When May Sinclair’s mother died in 1901, the novelist finally had a space of her own, and she protected it fiercely. In 1907, she moved from rented rooms to her own flat, in Edwardes Square in Kensington. She revels in this move, writing to Sarah Orne Jewett: it is the funniest flat you ever saw, but it’s mine, & nobody but me can get into that bath. You don’t know what that means if you haven’t lived, as I have, for ten years in rooms – other people’s rooms. And there is joy & pride & general upliftedness in the possession of yr. own front door.153

The newly financially secure May Sinclair (she was by this time earning quite a bit of money from her writing) revels in having her own space, and specifically in possessing her own space. She has reached the destination she has been striving for all her life: she has no immediate family responsibilities, she has property and she has the space and time for writing purposes. Dorothy Richardson, by contrast, was never financially secure. The period of her life that she documents in Pilgrimage was one in which she moved continually: initially living in a shared bedroom as a student teacher in Germany, then in North London as a teacher again living at the top of the school building, then living in a bedsit room at the top of a boarding house in Bloomsbury (she does try to rent a flat with an acquaintance – their sleeping areas delineated by a curtain, but this proves unworkable). These living spaces are all run down, and her situation is always tenuous. Despite this, and despite the demands of her work as 153

Letter to Sarah Orne Jewett, 29 August 1907, in Raitt, p. 104.

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a dental secretary, Richardson does, in her room in an attic in Bloomsbury, find the space she needs. In Pilgrimage, Miriam’s first perceptions of her attic room at Mrs Bailey’s house are of peace and sanctuary. It is not a luxurious room, and it is small, but it is hers and it allows her to be herself: ‘Twenty-one and only one room to hold the richly renewed consciousness, and a living to earn, but the self that was with her in the room was the untouched tireless self of her seventeenth year and all the earlier time’ (II, p. 16). She is conscious that her life is going to be difficult, but her ‘self ’ is the same self she left home with, before travelling to Hanover; before accepting financial responsibility for herself; before the loss of her freedom. In fact, this room is better than the middle-class home she remembers with fondness: ‘No interruption, no one watching or speculating or treating one in some particular way that had to be met’ (II, p. 17). This solitude allows her an intellectual freedom she has never before encountered. Before she unpacks, she opens her copy of ‘The Voyage of the Beagle’, and notices, with joy, that the lines ‘had a fresh attractive meaning. Reading would be real. The dull adventures of the Beagle looked real, coming along through reality’ (II, p. 17). The room, and the solitude, enable Miriam’s reading, and ultimately the room enables her writing: her initial attempts at writing also take place in this attic room. When Richardson married in 1917, she gave up her solitude and lived with her artist husband half the year in Cornwall and half the year in London. Richardson felt that she needed to spend some time away from London. Cornwall was the site where she had written her first novel, Pointed Roofs, and London was the site where the series of roles, jobs and circles Richardson had inhabited since leaving home had happened, the subject matter of Pilgrimage. In her autobiographical sketch ‘Beginnings’, Richardson briefly summarizes these ceaseless events and roles, the ‘strange poses of an untrained dancer’ and her escape from them:154 until the not uncommon desire to focus from a distance takes one away from ‘everything and everybody’. And once again and the more powerfully for the intervention of instruction and of experience, one rediscovers what was known before these began their work of befogging and destruction. And one begins in 1908 to write.155

The removal of the writing self from the world is an attempt to reconnect with the childhood self, the self experienced at key patterning moments, and it stems from the desire to gather all the impressions gathered over a varied life and to see them anew: to ‘focus from a distance’. 154 155

Richardson, ‘Beginnings’, in Tate (ed.), Journey to Paradise, p. 112. Ibid., p. 113.

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Her poverty and the demands on her time from 1908 on, the majority of her writing life, are much worse than those she shows Miriam encountering in Pilgrimage. She has now to contend with the demands of domesticity, as well as the demands of earning a living. As Richardson puts it in a letter to Veronica Grad: ‘Imagine the drain of domesticity, (mutual & moral drain – for domesticity is a state of mind. [. . .] Has it ever been asked of an artist before? I doubt it’.156 Another letter to Koteliansky, twelve years later, describes her husband as ‘an utterly helpless man, who can neither cook, turn off a tap, shut a door or lay & light a fire’, and who therefore needs constant care.157 In a letter to Louise Theis, she describes her living arrangements thus: ‘Most of my time is spent in Cornwall in a shack which I run myself. Four months in town in a dilapidated tenement: ditto’.158 In this letter, Richardson also answers Theis’s question as to what constitutes the ideal conditions of work for a writer: Ideally, everything that favours collaboration between the conscious & the unconscious. The best conditions in my experience are winter solitude & inaccessibility. I mean solitude. Servantless, visitorless, &, save for a single agent, tradesmanless. Such conditions fell to my lot just once. Deliberately to seek them might be fatal. Short of this, the avoidance of anything that breaks the momentum of the unconscious once it is set going. Yet it is possible not merely to remain undisturbed by disturbances, but also to endure the devastating results of a constant breaking of this momentum without quite reaching despair. Ideal conditions are more easily obtained by men than by women. However provided with service, space, leisure, a woman will not entirely escape permanent preoccupations: with the welfare of her entourage, both animate & inanimate.159

Richardson, like Sinclair, emphasizes the need for absolute solitude:  no people at all should interrupt; no servants, friends or visitors. However, she ruefully recognizes that this is not possible. She was never inaccessible in London, despite the attic room, and she is now permanently living with her husband. 156

157 158

159

Letter from Dorothy Richardson to Veronica Grad, c. 3 July 1930, quoted in Hanscombe, The Art of Life, p. 140. Hanscombe’s transcript reads ‘Imagine the drain of something’, but a second look at the photocopy of the ms. confirms that Richardson has actually written ‘domesticity’. Letter from Dorothy Richardson to S.S. Koteliansky, 11 August 1942, British Library. Letter from Dorothy Richardson to Louise Theis, 5 October 1931, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. Ibid.

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These ideal conditions, then, which she found ‘just once’ when she was writing Pointed Roofs at the Beresfords’ cottage in Cornwall are rare and precious. This stay was immortalized in her short story ‘Seen from Paradise’, and her account of it in fictional form echoes several of the sentiments expressed in the letter to Theis. In the story, the couple who own the cottage in Cornwall are leaving for London, and the narrator suddenly conceives the idea of staying on alone. She approaches the couple with her idea, and both are dubious, but the man is especially unsure:  he is envious of the narrator’s upcoming solitude, and also ignorant of the domestic implications of this staying on alone. The narrator sees this reluctance as gendered. She realizes a ‘sense of the relative helplessness of men, of their dependence, however employed, upon all kinds of service, matters that for them were mysteries without magic’.160 The man who does not comprehend how comfortable domesticity is created is as ‘helpless’ as Richardson’s husband in the letter to Koteliansky, and also like ‘men’ in general, who find this ignorance liberating in their search for the ideal conditions for writing. The narrator however, sides with the man in this story. She insists that for her too ‘housekeeping was a repellent mystery’.161 The narrator’s next thought is one of ‘momentary panic’ as she remembers ‘the tradespeople, Sylvia’s daily palaverings at the front door’. The panic subsides as she realizes she can leave notes and payment in the porch: ‘I need exchange no word with a living soul’.162 She has found a way to attain the artistic autonomy and freedom from domestic labour that men take for granted. This is complete solitude: an extreme and artificial circumstance. However, it allows the narrator to write, and to see clearly, without distraction: ‘Everything available, all past experience seen, while I sat writing, for the first time as near, clear, permanent reality’.163 People and preoccupations get in the way of the contemplation of ‘reality’, and solitude enables access to it. However, this ideal is not often possible, and so Richardson must, as she writes to Theis, embrace a new and less privileged ideal:  one that is possible even when surrounded by people and preoccupations. Space and place can be ignored, Richardson insists, or tries to insist. The key is to be in touch with ‘reality’, which here is the ‘momentum of the unconscious’, and the act of writing itself ‘collaboration between the conscious & the unconscious’. The favourable conditions are any conditions that do not interrupt this communion with the innermost self; and there is a hopeful note here, against the emphasis of the odds 160 161 162 163

Richardson, ‘Seen from Paradise’, in Tate, p. 90. Ibid., p. 90. Ibid., p. 91. Ibid., p. 94.

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against which it struggles: it is possible to ‘remain undisturbed’, and more, it is possible to ‘endure’ this momentum being continually broken, and still produce fiction. Dimple Hill, the chapter-volume in which Miriam first tries to write, is significantly the story of an escape: Miriam leaves London, and seeks out a rural idyll. Miriam is enchanted by the idea of the Quaker family she is going to stay with as soon as she receives Michael Shatov’s suggestion that their farm would be an ideal retreat. She sees a vision of the family home: ‘Far away within the cool twilit deeps of her innermost consciousness, she went up a pathway towards a farmhouse within whose doorway stood a little group of grey-clad Quaker women, smiling a gentle welcome’ (IV, p. 430). The beautiful farmhouse, with its rural setting and ‘gentle’ silent family unit are desirable because they are linked in Miriam’s mind with childhood. She wants to go back to the pre-analytic, silently perceiving self, and she wants to be welcomed into a social unit that makes no demands on her. As David Stamm puts it, she is searching now no longer for ‘an uninhabited, unlimited space, but female company in a clearly defined sheltering home’.164 It seems odd that Miriam is searching for ‘female company’, as company is the very thing she is retreating from. However, the Quakers present a very different type of company: somewhere between the unassuming familiarity of her childhood with her sisters, and a spiritual quietness. What Miriam wants from these encounters is a form of non-verbal communication, and it is just this that she hopes for in her first evening meal with the family. She knows that Quaker communities value silence and contemplative space, and she wonders:  ‘would the meal run its course, apart from the necessary small courtesies, in silence?’ She is excited by this idea and is ‘eager to taste for the first time this perfection of social intercourse, eager to prove that her presence would introduce no disturbing element’ (IV, p. 456). The meal time offers a perfect moment for the collaboration of the inner world and the outer world for Miriam: the inner being recognized and held present, and communication happening without unnecessary outward display: Rich adventure [. . .] to go silently down the room with lowered eyelids, withheld and self-contained and therefore, as on the journey downstairs she had already discovered, in full possession of even the external goods of the present moment: of the room’s unseen perspectives, of what lay beyond 164

David Stamm, A Pathway to Reality:  Visual and Aural Concepts in Dorothy Richardson’s Pilgrimage (Tübingen; Basel; Francke, 2000), p. 38.

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them, seen in this morning’s sunshine and lying now, rain-sodden, in the shadowless purity of the storm-light. (IV, p. 456)

The perception of the present moment can be possessed and realized through the inner gaze. Miriam’s ‘lowered eyelids’ allow her to focus on the self, on her own being, and subsequently to have possession of ‘even the external goods’: the ‘room’s unseen perspectives’, and the light beyond. Eva Tucker says of Richardson’s first visit to a Quaker meeting house in 1901 that it was her ‘first experience of a sense of life and reality in a religious gathering. In the shared silence she was relieved of the tension between inner and outer self ’.165 Miriam’s first Quaker meeting is in Revolving Lights, and it is there she experiences a moment of ‘pure being’: ‘being in the silence was being in something alive and positive; at the centre of existence; being there with others made it stronger than when it was experienced alone’ (IV, p. 327). The external fact of the presence of others, able to be perceived if the eyes are turned inwards, makes the concentration of the inner gaze stronger in its contemplation of ‘being’, of ‘life and reality’. The Quaker family, Miriam thinks, will serve this purpose for her: to be present as a supportive structure, their own ‘being in the silence’ enabling Miriam’s ‘being’. As Tucker points out: To begin with, it was just this family closeness which gave her a sense of freedom: she not only had time to herself, it was benevolent time; not only was she alone with summer trees among the lobelias of childhood, she was among people who respected each other and, most importantly, whose ideas were not at variance with their way of life.166

However, the actual home of the Roscorlas is not exactly the way she projects it. Miriam’s desire for family life is in part modelled on her own family, with the patriarch outnumbered by a crowd of sisters. The Quaker family, however, includes brothers:  ‘Taking in, from the doorway, a long low-ceilinged room apparently full of men, Miriam had smiled ruefully to herself at the celestial joke. Sold, she was’. Her initial vision of the ‘gently smiling’ Quaker women, prompted by ‘the remembered quality’ of these women, has led her to the Roscorlas, where she expects to be carried ‘forward into the heart of peace’. Instead she finds herself in the ‘known world’, where she feels she has a responsibility to project a social self rather than merely focussing on her interior being (IV, p. 439). Miriam 165

166

Eva Tucker, ‘Dorothy Richardson and the Quakers’, in Pilgrimages:  The Journal of Dorothy Richardson Studies 1 (2008), p. 124. Ibid., p. 126.

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duly presents herself socially as ‘one of those women’ who are always ‘hospitably alert’ to the elder son, Richard Roscorla, and notes in him ‘the innocent blind satisfaction of the male who discovers in a woman, newly met, [. . .] a flattering echo of his own imaginings’ (IV, p. 441). The presiding woman Mrs Roscorla is also disappointing: her ‘embarrassing child-like expectancy’ that people will be amusing and entertaining making her ‘an immovable obstacle between oneself and the glowing light’ (IV, p. 462). Miriam then feels the need to perform her Quakerly communion with the inner light, with all the resources she has gained during her years in social London: ‘Recalling her eyes, she projected from them, in order to make them appear all-welcoming instead of half critically observant, an amiably meditative gaze suggesting one absent-minded, slow to take bearings’ (IV, p. 459). The ‘rich adventure’ of maintaining a focus on the ‘inner’ in company is not the success she wishes it to be. However, the return to childhood and innocence via the spiritual perception of idyllic gardens is more successful. Miriam leaves the house in order to reflect upon her surroundings. She is initially accompanied by Mrs Roscorla, but: when she had gone, the little garden, withdrawn into itself, unthreatened today by even the passing footsteps of a worker, became one with the garden at Babington and the Barnes garden, both of them empty and, as they had always seemed on Sundays, a little aloof. So that even when one went out to watch pater cut the sacred asparagus, before church, or, after church, carefully detaching a few peaches, one saw the whole garden in a single eyeful and from all angles at once, because the part one was in, belonging to itself and seeming to throw one off, sent one’s mind gliding over the whole, alighting nowhere. And it was at these times that all the different beauties were most apparent and most deeply bathed in unattainable light. Distance does not lend enchantment. It shows where it is. In the thing seen, as well as in the eye of the beholder. And I realized one of the Quaker secrets. Living always remote, drawn away into the depths of the spirit, they see, all the time, freshly. (IV, pp. 490–1)

The unattainable light is here once more, but this time it is a light which can be seen ‘in a single eyeful’ because of the distance Miriam has recently attained in her Quaker retreat. Living ‘drawn away into the depths of the spirit’, or achieving the spiritual distance from external and communion with internal, enables a fresh vision. The ‘different beauties’ can be threatened only by ‘the passing footsteps of a worker’. The presence of workers on the farm is continually disturbing to Miriam. The beautiful gardens and surrounding farmlands of Dimple Hill are corrupted, and

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the light within them shaded, by the realization that labour is necessary to its existence. Mrs Roscorla, in reminding Miriam that her stay is at a working farm ‘had subtly changed the outdoor scene by drawing across it the shadow of incessant labour’ (IV, p. 462). Again, in musing, Miriam returns to a consideration of childhood. Childhood gardens, with their beauty and order upheld by someone else, are safe spaces where the threat of labour does not intrude. One shock in childhood, Miriam remembers, was ‘the mere spectacle of the family in Barnes who did their own housework, and kept their garden in order’ and she remembers ‘shrinking from the idea of house and garden thus inhabited; loved with a horrible difference’ (IV, p 464). The sight of delphiniums similarly ‘stood for leisure and elegance, and called up a long-lost world whose gardens, taken for granted, never realised as exceptional, were full of lovely growth’ (IV, pp. 484– 5).167 Miriam’s childhood innocence of labour and what it means to labour was of course dispelled upon leaving home and starting work at the beginning of Pilgrimage, but one part of the strived for return to a pastoral childlike innocence is a denial of not only one’s own need to work (Miriam’s escape from the dental surgery, and her launching upon a continual holiday), but the very existence of work itself. Miriam’s continual reminders in Dimple Hill that the illusion depends upon machinery in the background, are thus resisted as far as possible. Miriam’s double self is here most apparent. Her declared purpose, on gaining her freedom is ‘I’m never going to think any more’, which statement calls up a vision: ‘in the far distance the sunlit scene, approaching’ (IV, p. 408). However, it is not that simple. Miriam cannot banish her critical mind, or the social and political theories she has acquired over the years. A neighbour dropping in to gossip about suffragettes and complain about militancy (‘I want a vote. [. . .] But I’m not going to scream for it’) makes Miriam both ‘weary’ and ‘angry’ (IV, p. 482). She cannot just dismiss the feelings that are roused in her, and her need to do battle, and finds herself ‘rooted in wrath. Unable to move until I  have expressed it. Back in my old world, my old rampant self ’ (IV, p. 483). Miriam here is trying her best to embrace Quaker ideologies, specifically the rejection of ideas and doctrines in order to attain a communication with an inner, deeper self. It is this renouncing of ideas that Richardson emphasizes in her first book, The Quakers Past and Present, published in 1914. She characterizes the quest of the Quakers as an attempt to find and be with ‘the divine light within the 167

Dorothy Richardson insisted, in a letter to Lita Rothbard (Hornick), in 1948, that gardens were not symbolic, at least to ‘young M.’. Instead, they are significant as ‘ultimates in their own right. Astonishers’. Perhaps the clearly stated symbolism of the delphiniums here is indicative of the older Miriam’s distanced and politically ‘corrupted’ perspective. Letter to Lita Rothbard, 20 December 1948, Kulchur Archives, Columbia University.

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individual soul’.168 In order to do this, a strict control needs to be placed upon the mind’s tendency to ‘wrath’, or ‘rampant’ argument: the first step towards union with it was a control of all creaturely activities, an abandonment of each and every claim of the surface intelligence – ‘notions,’ as the Quakers called them  – a process of retirement into the innermost region of being, into ‘the light,’ ‘the seed,’ ‘the ground of the soul,’ ‘that which hath convinced you’.169

If Miriam is to achieve ‘union’ with her ‘innermost region of being’, she must abandon her dearly held and fought for ‘notions’. Miriam herself is not particularly materialistic: she does not struggle to renounce food or money, as she has never had very much of either. However, her ‘surface intelligence’ is dear to her, and her critical faculties hard to ‘control’. This is the struggle, dramatized, between the two facets of the double impression. The pure perception of light, beauty and joy can never quite be realized before it is interpreted by the critical faculty. Miriam continually makes reference, for instance, to the difficulties of perceiving beauty while aware of the processes behind creating it. The sight of Alfred Roscorla ‘trundling a wheelbarrow’ causes Miriam to think of ‘the hive’ of the farm, and ‘the day’s demands’ that he is setting off to face. When he disappears: the scene was silent again. Uninhabited, unwitnessed, lonely beauty. Somewhere away down the far slope, the men were at work, part-of the world-wide army ceaselessly toiling through the centuries, without whom secure, smooth-lawned enclosures would never have come into being. Why were some exempt? Why such armies to support the exempted? Why, of these few, almost none worthy of exemption? Threatened by the approach of the doctrines of Lycurgan socialism, marching upon her embodied in the persons of those she had heard give voice to them, she closed her eyes. (IV, p. 445)170

The particulars of the external world, in this case the sight of a labourer on his way to work, are not easily banished. The ‘old rampant self ’, with its socialist

168 169 170

Richardson, The Quakers, p. 10. Ibid., p. 11. In The Quakers: Past and Present, Dorothy Richardson lays heavy emphasis on a Quaker ideology where ‘systems and doctrines are left behind and reason gets to work upon the facts of a man’s own experience’. She is ostensibly referring here to the Quakers’ departure from the established church, but Miriam’s use of the phrase ‘the doctrines of Lycurgan socialism’ makes it clear that all received ideas are, to Richardson, ‘doctrines’ which get in the way of an understanding of ‘the facts of man’s own experience’ (Ibid., p. 20).

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‘notions’, cannot easily detach and leave the even older childhood self to take for granted the ‘secure, smooth-lawned enclosures’. The memories of speakers heard in London, and ‘doctrines’ at the time enthusiastically embraced, are now threatening to Miriam’s sense of peace. The only way she can banish them is to close her eyes, and then try to recapture the visual details of the house in memory. Crucially, this vision, with eyes closed, is a vivid one. Miriam is ‘seeing the wide lawn, tree-guarded at its corners, overlooked only by the serene face of the old house that already she could sketch from memory’ (IV, pp.  445–6, emphasis mine). What is interesting here is that the struggle between the old self and the older childhood self, although prompted by the sight of Alfred Roscorla walking along the lawn, is then conceptualized as a struggle between inner visions, or mind pictures. It is not the presence of a labourer that makes the beauty of the surroundings dim, but rather the memory of him. Miriam’s technique for banishing disturbing thoughts is not to gaze externally, but to look within, at the picture of the house and garden that has been stored in memory. The struggle for primacy between aesthetics and politics is a struggle that takes place within memory here – one memory must be strengthened in order to banish another. When Mary Olivier moves to Morfe, she finds that her brother Roddy is unhappy, her father has become an alcoholic, and her mother is upset and homesick. Her family life is falling apart. Rather than trying to banish the uncomfortable realities of her day to day life, as Miriam does, she brings some of the past to Morfe. She closes her eyes, summons up a memory picture of her old Essex landscape, and projects it onto the hills: If you shut your eyes you could see the flat Essex country spread in a thin film over Karva. Thinner and thinner. But you could remember what it had been like. Low, tilled field, thin trees; sharp, queer, uncertain beauty. Sharp, queer, uncertain happiness, coming again and again, never twice to the same place in the same way. It hurt you when you remembered it. The beauty of the hills was not like that. It stayed. It waited for you, keeping faith. Day after day, night after night, it was there.171

The happiness, or ‘Reality’, that she had previously experienced is transferred onto the new landscape, and Mary finds that the transference has given it strength. This new landscape is so far removed from the one she was used to that communion with ‘Reality’ has become more easy, despite the worrying preoccupations of her domestic life: ‘Roddy’s uneasy eyes, Papa’s feet, shuffling in the

171

Sinclair, Mary Olivier, p. 179.

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passage, Mama’s disapproving, remembering face, [. . .] they couldn’t kill it’.172 Mary has developed a strategy for seeing her psychic visions even when most distracted by people and worry. However, she still cannot find a space to write. As Cheryl A. Wilson points out, Mary’s ‘actions are policed and limited within the domestic sphere’.173 Her mother disapproves of her reading and tells her not to do it downstairs, her reading of Shelley is curtailed by the simple expedient of first placing the book on a high shelf, and then, after this doesn’t work (she gets the servant to fetch her a stepladder), removing the volume from the library entirely. This is perhaps why Mary (and other Sinclair characters) only see their visions when they are outside: indoor spaces are invariably ‘policed’. Libraries are owned, created and curated by the male patriarch, who may deny or allow reading as he pleases, and the drawing room is ruled over by the mother figure, who decides what is and is not appropriate use of the space. As Wilson notes, this leads Mary to seek a number of alternate reading and writing spaces, generally ‘in upstairs chambers, reminiscent of the isolated prisons of her own Aunt Charlotte and of Jane Eyre’s nemesis, Bertha Mason’.174 In Sinclair’s 1910 novel The Creators, the main character Jane Holland is a writer and, like Mary, she instinctively retreats to upper floors and garret rooms to gain the solitude she needs. At the beginning of the novel, she has it: ‘There was defiance in her choice of that top floor in the old house in Kensington Square. To make sure her splendid isolation, she had cut herself off by a boarded, a barricaded staircase, closed with a door at the foot’.175 She tries to avoid people, whilst realizing that, as a novelist, she needs their external realities to feed her work. As her friend and fellow writer George Tanqueray says to her ‘People – people – people – we can’t have enough of ’em; we can’t keep off ’em. The thing is – to keep ’em off us’.176 This statement of George’s echoes several made in various letters to Sinclair by Ezra Pound: ‘Of course I am coming to tea tomorrow. but please tear off the March leaf of your calendar before you invite many more people’; ‘I wish to divorce you from London – at least for a reasonable space’.177 It is the acknowledgement of one artist that the demands upon another artist are too great.

172 173

174 175 176 177

Ibid., p. 179. Cheryl A. Wilson, ‘The Victorian Woman Reader in May Sinclair’s Mary Olivier : Self-Stimulation, Intellectual Freedom, and Escape’, in English Literature in Transition, Vol. 46, No. 4 (2003), pp. 365–81, p. 376. Ibid., p. 376. Sinclair, The Creators, p. 3. Ibid., p. 10. Letters from Ezra Pound to May Sinclair, 17 March 1909; 11 March 1911, Kislak Center.

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Sinclair also agrees with Richardson that a complete lack of interruption is more difficult for women than for men. They were both, in the early years of the twentieth century, grappling with lingering Victorian ideas about the sociability, availability and accessibility of women. As Amanda Anderson points out, it was ‘almost impossible for Victorians to imagine a positive, and disinterestedly critical, conception of feminine detachment’.178 The conflict between external commitments and artistic impulse rages in all the characters’ lives in The Creators:  the two minor characters who are also women writers have to choose between marriage and sociability, and writing. Nina (one of these) says as much to Jane Holland. ‘ “Look here,” she said. “I believe, if any woman is to do anything stupendous, it means virginity. But I  know it means that for you and me’.179 The emphasis throughout is on the complete irreconcilability of the twin nature of these writers: the higher mind and the natural beast. One thinks of Katherine Hinkson’s warning to Sinclair in 1902: that isolation may be ‘good for the work, but it is bad for the human creature’. This is particularly the case for women. There is no middle ground between the ‘virile’ genius ‘tacked on’ to these women, and any feminized, natural (or sexualized) way of being. You cannot be a writer, and be a wife. One or the other must be sacrificed; must be paid for. This is not just the demands of intellect versus the demands of the body. As Nina and Jane discuss: ‘ “I wonder,” said Jane, “how much George [Tanqueray] will have to pay?” ’. Nina replies: ‘Nothing. He’ll make his wife pay’.180 George Tanqueray does not choose. He does in fact sacrifice the woman he marries to a life of unfulfilment and loneliness while he continues to write, at the top of the house, away from her. He doesn’t, himself, suffer for this choice. Jane Holland, however, also chooses not to choose, and she does suffer. At the very beginning of the novel, Jane is ensconced in her apartment, overlooking Kensington Square. Her ‘splendid isolation’ would seem to be the perfect space in which to write. She has a ‘room of her own’ – several rooms in fact – and she has money, earned through her writing, as May Sinclair herself did when she went to live in Kensington in 1907. However, the isolation is not as splendid as she initially thinks. At the very beginning of the novel, she is not alone in her room; George Tanqueray is metaphorically and spiritually present: ‘He had his own place there, the place of honour and affection. His portrait (a mere photograph) was on her writing-table. His “Works” – five novels – were on a shelf by 178

179 180

Amanda Anderson, The Powers of Distance: Cosmopolitanism and the Cultivation of Detachment (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), p. 47. Sinclair, The Creators, p. 104. Ibid., p. 104.

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themselves at the head of her chair, where she could lay her hands on them’.181 Her inner sanctum is actually one which she shares, and which has space dedicated to her ‘master’: the writer she admires above all others, and the man who (the narrative intimates) she should marry. When Tanqueray declares that he has gone off and married someone else (Rose, chosen ‘because she was small and sweet and subservient’), the room reveals itself as less splendid and less isolated than it previously appeared.182 Jane Holland finds it difficult to find her ideal conditions for work because, as Richardson would have it, ‘a woman will not entirely escape permanent preoccupations: with the welfare of her entourage’.183 Her solitude had become unbearable. The room was unbearable; it was so pervaded, so dominated by her genius and by Tanqueray. Most of all by Tanqueray. There were things in it which he had given to her, things which she had given to him, as it were; a cup he drank out of, a tray he used for his cigar-ash; things which would remain vivid for ever with the illusion of his presence. She could not bear to see them about.184

She needs to get out of the room, and she does: the London season having ended, and ‘the terrible, converging, threatening multitudes of the clever little people’ having gone, she can walk around the Square, ‘no longer in peril, feeling herself obscure’.185 She does this several times, exorcising her love for Tanqueray. It is at the moment when the love does fade that suddenly her genius returns: She could not say how or at what moment the incredible thing happened, but of a sudden the world she looked at became luminous and insubstantial and divinely still. She could not tell whether the stillness of the world had passed into her heart, or her heart into the stillness of the world. She could not tell what had happened to her at all. She only knew that after it had happened, a little while after, something woke out of sleep in her brain, and it was then that she saw Hambleby. [. . .] He arose with the oddest irrelevance out of the unfathomable peace. She could not account for him, nor understand why, when she was incapable of seeing him a year ago, she should see him now with such extreme distinctness and solidity. She saw him, all pink and blond and callow with youth, advancing with his inevitable, suburban, adolescent smile. She saw his soul, the soul he inevitably would have, a

181 182 183 184 185

Ibid., p. 4. Ibid., p. 46. Letter to Louise Morgan Theis, 5 October 1931, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. Sinclair, The Creators, p. 89. Ibid., p. 105

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blond and callow soul. [. . .] She had never possessed so completely this virgin ecstasy of vision, this beatitude that comes before the labour of creation. She walked in it, restless but exultant.186

This is one of Sinclair’s moments of vision. Jane, in the Square, sees ‘Reality’, and it is reality that brings the vision of ‘Hambleby’, which will become the novel she is known for. The reason why the novel is so good, the narrator explains, is because the ‘idea’ comes when she has let go of all her earthly ties. Genius, Jane thinks, demands your full attention: ‘To love anything more than this thing was to lose it. You had to come to it clean from all desire, naked of all possession’.187 She briefly loves George Tanqueray, and it is only when she renounces this love that the vision comes. She must also be away from her room: the room in which he has left his mark. The world also, must retreat. The moment of ‘divine’ realization comes to the author when the world has stilled and become ‘luminous and insubstantial and divinely still’. Later in the novel, after Jane has married, she has more visions like this, each of which precipitate novels. Each one only comes when she has cast off her ties: when she delegates her exhausting and confusing housework to a housekeeper; when she orders the nurse to take her baby away from her study window, out of sight; when she leaves her husband and children at home in order to spend three months in Dartmoor. It is not the space she’s in, per se (she doesn’t need to escape her solitary ‘isolation’ in Kensington, or her study in the family home); it is rather the demands of external elements that need escaping. She must escape Tanqueray’s influence, doing the housework in her married home, and she must escape the maternal ties she feels for her child. She must not ‘love anything more than this thing’. Suzanne Raitt writes that ‘Sinclair believed that when a novelist was truly “creating”, as she called it, the world of the imagination rendered the material world irrelevant’.188 A  letter of Sinclair’s in 1905 describes how the ‘idea’ of a novel appears to her: it was only the other day that I  took the trouble to observe how a new novel comes & grows. I had been empty of ideas for a year & a half (chiefly through illness) & I  despaired as I’ve despaired dozens of times before of ever writing anything again. Then  – I  was on a mountain in Wales at the time (not that the mountain had anything to do with it) – when, 186 187 188

Ibid., pp. 107–8. Ibid., p. 113. Raitt, p. 124.

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suddenly, as if a door had been opened into some room, I saw the people, the characters that had been hidden away somewhere in the back of my brain, refusing to show up, that were mere nameless outlines foreshadowing rather than embodying the motif of the book – I saw them alive in the most living moments of their life, acting out their drama, with their souls, their emotions & thoughts, transparent to me without the medium of words.189

Raitt calls this a ‘parallel world in which [Sinclair] can observe without participating in the events of the characters’ lives’.190 It is a parallel world, and not one that Sinclair enters, but one which she can view from her position in the actual. It is a mystical projection: a slide show or film showing projected into the middle distance (purely visual:  ‘transparent [. . .] without the medium of words’; and spiritual: she sees their ‘souls’). It is, Sinclair insists, not the ‘mountain’ that causes this; her imagination is not enabled by her holiday space, or any rural idyll, but by a severance from the material world. It could in fact be argued that the material world retreats because she is away from her familiar surroundings, but any such prosaic escapist explanation is contrary to Sinclair’s purposes here. The true artist can create because they have access to a different plane; a mystical plane. Richardson’s writing practice is theorized in a very similar way: only instead of seeing her ideas projected just ahead of her, she finds them within herself, in precisely the ‘collaboration between the conscious & the unconscious’ that she emphasizes in her letter to Louise Theis. Miriam’s first successful conscious collaboration occurs in a Quaker meeting. She is away from London, and in a liminal space, but she feels what she calls her London self intruding as a ‘resistance from within’, ‘threatening, if for an instant her will relaxed, to drive her back amongst the distractions of the small cross-section of the visible world by which she was surrounded’ (IV, p. 499). Despite her frustration that ‘each effort to be still brought the outdoor world into her mind’ (IV, p. 500), Miriam does manage a brief moment of inner communion: 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 189 190

Ibid., p. 125. Ibid.

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outward flow pressed her downwards towards the next, nearer to the living centre. Again thought touched her, comparing this research to a kind of mining operation. (IV, p. 498)

This journey inside herself is ‘work’, ‘labour’ and ‘research’. Miriam is on a journey of exploration which is difficult and yet necessary: the ‘living centre’ of her being must be discovered, against all odds. Miriam is adamant here that the truth is to be found inside herself, inside her physical body even, as the journey is like mining, ‘for indeed it was not flight’ (IV, pp. 498–9). Yet the circles she follows do not narrow and focus down into a kernel, or core: the ‘living centre’ is bigger than the layers of her surface being. The deeper she goes, the more there is. The similarities between Miriam’s early attempts at self-communion here and her subsequent turn to writing are striking. In March Moonlight, Miriam describes her writing process as precisely such a journey into the inner, a journey stimulated by an external experience, but necessitating a metaphorical closing of the eyes: To write is to forsake life. Every time I know this, in advance. Yet whenever something comes that sets the tips of my fingers tingling to record it, I forget the price; eagerly face the strange journey down and down to the centre of being. And the scene of labour, when again I am back in it, alone, has become a sacred place. (IV, p. 609)

The process of writing is the same as that of communicating with the ‘inner light’, the ‘centre of being’ or the ‘living centre’, and this process is also a ‘forsaking’ of life, and of any awareness of the outside world. Once the writing is done, the writer emerges, and the world is again observed in all its beauty: as a space transformed by creativity. The space of writing here, the ‘little white table’ in Miriam’s Vaud bedroom, as with other writing tables of Miriam’s, is a figure for the self. As Miriam’s journey into herself, to discover her self, makes her more aware of the sacred nature of her body, so her forays into the centre of the self for writing purposes enables the site of writing to become sacred, to become an ‘everlasting possession’ (IV, p. 609). Both processes are also referred to as ‘labour’. Meditating in the Quaker meeting house is a ‘labour of journeying’, and writing, despite being an exciting creative act (‘eagerly’ embarked on, with ‘fingers tingling’) is also ‘labour’. Bryony Randall comments on this parallel, emphasizing the comic aspect of Miriam’s metaphors:  ‘What can Miriam know of the physical labour of mining? [. . .] Suggesting that writing is like driving a plough, or that silent contemplation is

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like hewing coal out of the earth, appears absurd’.191 However, in Randall’s argument, Miriam needs to identify her project, her research, as labour in order to establish an identity for herself as working writer. Her presence on the Roscorla farm, as a site of manual labour, or ‘masculine, outdoor work’ enables this: ‘One’s best writing, like the good experience of a Quaker meeting, and like physical labour, does not involve a clear smooth path but requires, involves, engagement with that which apparently contradicts, warps or undermines, but is in fact the sine qua non of the activity, be it hedge laying, attending a Quaker Meeting, pushing a plough, or pushing a pencil’.192 Miriam’s reaction to the threat of the sight (and site) of labour, discussed earlier, is one that she ultimately uses to her advantage. The problem of reconciling the pastoral innocence and instinctive self-knowledge with a more worldly, politically concerned, performative self-awareness becomes the catalyst for Miriam’s writing: she can both perform her new identity as a writer, and lose her outward gaze in deep introspection.193 This introspection, in both scenes, involves memory. In The Quakers Past and Present, Richardson invokes ‘the light of modern psychology’ (although she is no more specific than this) as a guide to this process: We have now at our disposal, marked out with all the wealth of spatial terminology characteristic of the science, a rough sketch of what takes place in our minds in moments of silent attention. We are told, for instance, that when in everyday life our attention is arrested by something standing out from the cinematograph show of our accustomed surroundings, we fix upon this one point, and everything else fades away to the ‘margin’ of our consciousness. The ‘thing’ which has had the power of so arresting us, of making a breach in the normal, unnoticed rhythm of the senses, allows our ‘real self ’ – our larger and deeper being, to which so many names have been given – to flow up and flood the whole field of the surface intelligence.194

Silence, contemplation, and concentration enable a vanishing away of ‘everything else’: of the ‘surface intelligence’, of the welter of extraneous impressions. 191

192 193

194

Bryony Randall, ‘Work, Writing, Vocation and Quakers in Dorothy Richardson’s Pilgrimage’, in Pilgrimages: A Journal of Dorothy Richardson Studies, No. 2 (2009), p. 54. Ibid., p. 55. Randall comments on Miriam’s performance of self-as-writer in her article for Pilgrimages. In March Moonlight, Richard Roscorla enters the room that has been specifically set aside for Miriam to write in, and she continues writing, for his benefit as a spectator: ‘Miriam sees herself as having done nothing less than become a writer during the period when she first stayed with the Roscorlas [. . .] It is thus crucial at this point that Miriam keeps writing (even if only mechanically) to maintain this new identity’ (Ibid., p. 50). Richardson, The Quakers, pp. 33–4.

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One impression is striking, and the other less striking impressions fade into the background. Both looking outward and looking within are similar  – the moment of illumination in an external view comes when an impression is fixed or arrested, like a freeze-frame of the incessant cinematograph. The moment of illumination in a Quakerly meditation is then a way of attaining a freeze-frame moment, by freezing the preoccupations of the mind. At the Quaker meeting house, Miriam’s attempts at an inner communion result in a journey into associative memory. The sound of rain outside the building makes her a ‘truant in the open’, and allows her to see: closing her eyes to the surrounding twilight, not the features of the scenes whose memory was the power that had drawn her forth to the gently clamorous sounds, but the corner of an unlocated meadow, rain-drenched and so near that she could perceive, as if she were some small field-beast in their midst, a forest of grass-blades.

The real introspective power she gains is not a Quakerly one, but instead, with a kind of truancy, she finds herself ‘using this unique depth within the depth of Sunday to exult in the memory of solitary joy’ (IV, p.  500). Perhaps, as Miriam is ultimately not a Quaker, but an artist, she does not need to entirely renounce the outside world, and indeed, cannot. Instead, if a communion with the deeper inner self can present the world as ‘arrested’ into freeze-frames, snapshots and manageable memory scenes, the inner and the outer can coexist as mutually supportive props to Miriam as artist. It is the same feeling Miriam has as she first approaches the Quaker dinner table:  ‘withheld and self-contained and therefore [. . .] in full possession of even the external goods of the present moment’ (IV, p. 456), only now translated into artistic terms. Shirley Rose writes that ‘ “the unchanging centre of being” and “our painfully evolving selves” ’ can indeed, in Richardson’s philosophy, both be reconciled to each other. The unifying principle, she states, is consciousness itself:  ‘the synthesizing activity of the consciousness absorbs through contemplation the continuity of experience as well as its essence’.195 In other words, a sustained communication, or ‘contemplation’ of the centre of being, allows for a universalized view of the evolving self:  a process which allows Miriam to see herself and her social persona as a continuous and evolving whole, connected to and yet not compromising the vital core of her self. This looking within, as

195

Shirley Rose, ‘Dorothy Richardson’s Focus on Time’, in English Literature in Transition (1880– 1920), Vol. 17, No. 3 (1974), p. 164.

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Miriam’s self-containment on her way to the dinner table shows, can occasionally be achieved within the present moment. However, this is not always possible, and increasingly, memory becomes Miriam’s primary source for material, as the most reliable way of synthesizing both internal and external selves, and seeing comprehensively. Mary Olivier’s reflections at the end of the novel centre increasingly on the ‘Reality’ inherent in the self as key to an understanding of the world. It is, she thinks, the most important thing, and it is always present: But if I  had to choose now  – knowing what reality is  – between losing Richard in the way I have lost him and losing reality, absolutely and for ever, losing, absolutely and for ever, my real self, knowing that I’ve lost it? . . . If there isn’t anything in it at all, losing my real self would be losing Richard, losing Richard’s real self absolutely and for ever. Knowing reality is knowing that you can’t lose it. That or nothing.196

Because her memory of Richard is present in her understanding of reality, she cannot truly lose him. She has processed the impression of Richard into a lasting possession, and can now do with him as she wishes. This is a possession of reality enabled by memory: the external event is contextualized and shaped, and subsumed into the inner self. It is the bridging of the gap within the double impression: an objective vision of a subjective reality. Both Sinclair and Richardson need to cut themselves off from external material ties in order to access the reality they wish to record. For both writers this means in large part escaping the demands of friends and families: demands for emotional attachment and for sympathy. For Richardson it also means escape from domestic duties, and from journalism and hack-work; for Sinclair it means escape from lovers and from family. Ultimately, however, the space that both require can be reached even without a complete escape from these demands. As Richardson notes: ‘it is possible not merely to remain undisturbed by disturbances, but also to endure the devastating results of a constant breaking of this momentum without quite reaching despair’. It is also important to both Sinclair and Richardson to insist that money, and ‘a room of one’s own’ are not necessary to the woman writer. They need to, as Jane Holland insists, ‘prove [. . .] that there isn’t any handicap’; that they have the resources within them.197 They perform a defiance of societal limitations, enacting the

196 197

Sinclair, Mary Olivier, p. 379. Sinclair, The Creators, p. 382.

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trials of Woolf ’s story of Jane Austen, writing in the ‘general sitting-room, subject to all kinds of casual interruptions’.198 Or, as Richardson put it in a letter to a friend: ‘Think of Dostoievski, writing on a corner of the kitchen table with the life of the household raging all round him. There’s no peace like that at the heart of a storm’.199

198

199

From Memoir of Jane Austen by James Edward Austen-Leigh (1870) in Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own and Three Guineas (Oxford: Oxford World’s Classics, 2015), p. 86. Letter to Bernice Elliott, 26 February 1946, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.

4

Memory, Distance, Perspective

Psychology and the novel-memoir: May Sinclair and Ford Madox Ford Virginia Woolf ’s fictional biographer in Orlando speaks of the difficulty of narrating life, or ‘nature, who delights in muddle and mystery’, with any coherence. Life appears as it is lived as a ‘thousand odd, disconnected fragments’ which must then be processed through memory if they are to be made sense of: ‘Memory is the seamstress, and a capricious one at that’.1 Both Ford Madox Ford and May Sinclair explore this issue through their novel-memoirs: memoirs that are novelistic in form, and novels which assume the guise of memoir. Ford’s reflections on his childhood, in Ancient Lights and Certain New Reflections: Being the Memories of a Young Man, and his novelistic and impressionist collection of memories of his friend, Joseph Conrad, both explore the role of memory in grouping and regrouping impressions as they were perceived into an artistic unity; his novel The Good Soldier is a study of the process of this kind of reorganization as it occurs in the mind of the narrator. May Sinclair’s own memoir of her time with an ambulance unit in the First World War, A Journal of Impressions in Belgium, similarly orders and reorders the impressions the author wrote in her day book, and examines their significance from a short distance of time. Her short novel Life and Death of Harriett Frean also plays out the theme of focussing from a distance. It features a narrator of Fordian unreliability, whose attempt to unravel and make sense of the events of her past from childhood through to the catastrophic choices made in adulthood is hampered by her inability to see events in their proper perspectives. The tragedy of the novel is that the protagonist cannot see what is so clear to the reader: that the 1

Virginia Woolf, Orlando: A Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), p. 48.

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decisions she made which seemed so right and ‘good’ at the time she made them, are, in retrospect, the building blocks of suffering. Ancient Lights, Ford’s account of his childhood and of the lives of his PreRaphaelite forebears, sets itself up as an impressionist memoir. The ‘Dedication’ warns that ‘This book, in short, is full of inaccuracies as to facts, but its accuracy as to impressions is absolute’. It aims to capture the ‘atmosphere’ of the twenty-five years it chronicles, not the factual details. In fact, Ford confesses to having for facts ‘a most profound contempt’; instead ‘I try to give you what I  see to be the spirit of an age, of a town, of a movement’.2 The present tense here is important. Ford is not simply packaging up his initial childhood and childlike impressions for the reader’s enjoyment:  he is presenting a mediated version, rounded at the edges, aestheticized through memory. As he says later in the memoir, ‘Nowadays it is very difficult to discern any new movement in any of the arts. No doubt there is movement, no doubt we who write and our friends who paint and compose are producing the arts of the future’.3 However, Ford says, if anything new and interesting is happening, it is difficult to tell, because we are still too close to the events to be able to see them in perspective. Robert Green reads Ancient Lights as a polemic against the ‘decay’ Ford found in modern politics and literature; a contrast between the ‘great figures of his childhood in the seventies and eighties’ and ‘what he saw as the pigmy literary world of 1911’.4 As a contrast to the lack of a discernable coherence in the arts at the beginning of the twentieth century, the Pre-Raphaelites were aware of their ‘movement’ even while it was in its infancy: they were creating shockwaves in the general public, and they were being accused of ‘blasphemy’.5 There is more going on here, however. Ford cannot discern the ‘movement’ of his own time, with its shared ideals and aims, its collective motion towards a common goal, and experimental similarity between artists and writers, because these things are only apparent from a distance of time. Ford’s stated aim is to ‘emphasise the lights and shadows of Pre-Raphaelite days by contrasting them with the very changed conditions that to-day prevail’.6 This is not in order to show up the present as being devoid of such romantic ‘lights and shadows’, but rather to examine the nature of memory, the way impressions change their aspect when considered 2

3 4

5 6

Ford Madox Ford (Hueffer), Ancient Lights and Certain New Reflections: Being the Memories of a Young Man (London: Chapman and Hall, 1911), p. xv. Ibid., p. 10. Robert Green, Ford Madox Ford:  Prose and Politics (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 1981), p. 63. Ford, Ancient Lights, p. xv. Ibid., p. 115.

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from a certain distance in time, and to experiment with the shaping of narrative through retrospect: perception mediated as it is registered, and then mediated again when it is arranged as art. Ford describes the necessity for arrangement from a temporal distance as a modern one. In the Victorian period the whole could be seen from in its midst, but now, with the shocks of modernity incessantly disrupting our sense of the vast universe and our place within it, a new strategy is needed: Christina Rossetti’s nature was mediæval in the sense that it cared for little things and for arbitrary arrangements. In the same sense it was so very modern. For the life of to-day is more and more becoming a life of little things. We are losing more and more the sense of a whole, the feeling of a grand design, of the co-ordination of all Nature in one great architectonic scheme. We have no longer any time to look out for the ultimate design. We have to face such an infinite number of little things that we cannot stay to arrange them in our minds, or to consider them as anything but as accidents, happenings, the mere events of the day. And if in outside things we can perceive no design but only the fortuitous materialism of a bewildering world, we are thrown more and more in upon ourselves for comprehension of that which is not understandable and for analysis of things of the spirit.7

Ancient Lights shows Ford in the act of being ‘thrown’ in on himself, his attempts to analyse where he came from, and where he is now. In working through his impressions of the past, selecting, ordering and giving them new significance, Ford is engaged in a psychological quest for understanding of the self. As Sara Haslam writes, Ancient Lights is not only a presentation of an aspect of history, but for Ford himself it is a ‘search for his past’; an ‘attempt to come to understand the gaps between his past and present self ’.8 The past self, the ‘small boy’ with ‘very long golden hair, a suit of greenish-yellow corduroy velveteen with gold buttons, and two stockings of which one was red and the other green’, is a remote figure, comical and endearing, but inhabiting a space very distant from the space the narrator inhabits.9 In narrating his childhood through the mediating consciousness of his adult self, Ford is creating himself as fiction; he is ‘looking for a coherent story, an explanatory narrative for himself, as subject, in a rapidly altering world’.10

7 8 9 10

Ibid., p. 62. Haslam, p. 9. Ford, Ancient Lights, p. 70. Haslam, p. 21.

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May Sinclair’s A Journal of Impressions in Belgium takes a similar line to Ford’s Ancient Lights in its preface. Its very first lines contain an admission of inaccuracy: This is a ‘Journal of Impressions’ and nothing more. It will not satisfy people who want accurate and substantial information about Belgium, or about the War, or about Field Ambulances and Hospital Work, and do not want to see any of these things ‘across a temperament’. For the Solid Facts and the Great Events they must go to such books as Mr. E. A. Powell’s ‘Fighting in Flanders,’ or Mr. Frank Fox’s ‘The Agony of Belgium,’ or Dr. H. S. Souttar’s ‘A Surgeon in Belgium,’ or ‘A Woman’s Experiences in the Great War,’ by Louise Mack. For many of these impressions I can claim only a psychological accuracy; some were insubstantial to the last degree, and very few were actually set down there and then, on the spot, as I  have set them down here. This is only a Journal in so far as it is a record of days, as faithful as I could make it in every detail, and as direct as circumstances allowed. But circumstances rarely did allow, and I was always behindhand with my Journal [. . .].11

Every aspect of the book that the reader has in their hands is deconstructed. The title of the book is itself undermined: this is not really a journal because most of its entries were written after the day they purported to be written on; these impressions are not very good impressions because they were ‘insubstantial’ (faultily processed) at the time they were received, and anyway they may have changed in the time that elapsed between the receiving of the impression and its setting down. This anxiety as to the freshness or validity of the impression, which Charlotte Jones characterizes as a ‘fundamental instability of narrative authority’; ‘a dislocation of experience and representation’, is what makes the book impressionist.12 Karolyn Steffens calls this feature of impressionist writing ‘belatedness’: the Impressionist is always belatedly reconstructing experiences and impressions for the reader, rendering remembered stimuli filtered through memory and language. Significantly, this belated reconstruction of life appears to the reader with all the vividness and force of the event itself – it cannot appear belated.13

11 12

13

May Sinclair, A Journal of Impressions in Belgium (London: Macmillan, 1915), p. iii. Charlotte Jones, ‘May Sinclair’s Impressions of War’, http://maysinclairsociety.com/may-sinclairsimpressions-of-war/ Karolyn Steffens, ‘Freud Madox Ford:  Impressionism, Psychoanalytic Trauma Theory, and Ford’s Wartime Writing’, in War and the Mind:  Ford Madox Ford’s Parade’s End, Modernism,

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A Journal of Impressions is just this kind of impressionist memory-text, with impressions set down as if they are freshly impressed, but actually having been through the mediation of time and distance. Sinclair’s use of the present tense, and her frequent switches from first to second person are attempts to convey immediacy; ‘all the vividness and force’ of the impression as it appeared to her at the time. Sinclair’s only positive statement in this preface is her insistence on the validity of the ‘psychological accuracy’ of her impressions. Whatever else she has not done in the volume, she has explored and translated her own psyche. Sinclair was fascinated by psychology, and psychoanalysis. She joined what was to be one of the first psychoanalytic institutions in the UK, the Medico-Psychological Clinic in London from its very inception (just before the First World War). She promoted their work and wrote pamphlets, gave large subscriptions of money, and was a member of the Board of Management.14 The Ambulance Unit that she went to Belgium with was put together by Hector Munro (‘the Commandant’), who was one of the directors of the clinic. She was reading psychology and psychoanalysis prolifically at the time war was declared. A Journal is thus influenced by the discourses she was surrounded by, and becomes a way for her to examine her own psyche in the light of her new discoveries. The Sinclair-narrator writes at the beginning of A Journal of her nightmares before she leaves home, of battlefields and bodies in pieces; she writes of her desire to be in the middle of whatever danger she can find, her jealousy when other members of the corps are nearly killed, and her desire for self-sacrifice in the name of duty. She explores her attitudes towards danger as a manifestation of the death drive, which was first identified by Sabina Spielrein in 1912 as the ‘death instinct within the sexual instinct’: Self-preservation is a ‘static’ drive because it must protect the existing individual from foreign influences; preservation of the species is a ‘dynamic’ drive that strives for change, the ‘resurrection’ of the individual in a new form. No change can take place without destruction of the former condition.15

The Sinclair-narrator repeatedly iterates that she wants, more than anything, to sacrifice herself to save someone else; she wants to be destroyed so that other

14 15

and Psychology, ed. Ashley Chantler and Rob Hawkes (Edinburgh:  Edinburgh University Press, 2015), p. 40. See Raitt, pp. 135–9. Sabina Spielrein, ‘Destruction as the Cause of Coming into Being’ (1912), in Journal of Analytical Psychology, Vol. 39 (1994), pp. 155–86, pp. 173–4.

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more heroic people can live. She seeks out that ‘divine danger’ which other people (who she then resents as ‘lucky’) seem able to find with ease, but which she herself finds elusive.16 On the eve of the Ambulance Unit’s journey to Bruges, to follow the Belgian Army in retreat, she is asked by the Commandant if she can pack his belongings as well as packing her own. She notes that the Commandant has a copy of Freud’s Psychopathology of Everyday Life in his possessions, and she manages to pack it away in his over-full bag. She doesn’t quite manage to fit everything in the bag however, and gives up temporarily to go downstairs and talk to Mrs Torrence, who she warns about the fact that lot of refugee children will want to get into the ambulance with them. As there is no room for refugee children, Mrs Torrence has to go and make sure they don’t attempt to come along. ‘I do not envy her her job’, thinks the Sinclair-narrator.17 Next, she spends some final hours with a wounded man she has been nursing, and is appalled at the thought that she will soon have to leave him, that there will be ‘nothing more that I shall ever do for him’; ‘This thought is not prominent and vivid; it is barely discernable; but it is there, a dull background of pain under my anxiety for the safety of the English over there at the Couvent de Saint Pierre’.18 She then has one more thing to do: she must go to the Couvent itself and warn the sisters that the Germans are coming. She cannot find the Couvent for some time: The boulevards all look the same in the blackness, and I turn up the one to the left. I run on and on very fast, but I cannot see the white flag with the red cross anywhere; I run back, thinking I must have passed it, turn and go on again. There is nobody in sight. No sound anywhere but the sound of my own feet running faster and faster up the wrong boulevard. At last I know I have gone too far, the houses are entirely strange. I run back to the Place to get my bearings, and start again.19

She eventually finds the Couvent and manages to impress upon the sister that she meets the urgency of the situation: ‘Very soon, down the south-east road, the Germans will be marching upon Ghent. And I cannot realise it. The whole thing is too improbable’.20

16 17 18 19 20

Sinclair, A Journal, p. 97. Ibid., p. 232. Ibid. Ibid., p. 233. Ibid., p. 235.

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The Sinclair-narrator does not want to leave Ghent, in part because it is the scene of her self-sacrifice in nursing, which she clings to; because it is an admission of defeat (the Belgian army are retreating, and they must follow them, even in retreat), and because she doesn’t want to face up to the fact that Ghent is in danger and people will die. This reluctance to leave is manifest in her inability to finish packing the Commandant’s bags, her relief that it is Mrs Torrence and not her who must stop refugee children from escaping with them, her anxiety about leaving her patient, and her inability to find the Couvent. She does not want to tell the sisters in the Couvent that danger is imminent, because that communication will bring home the fact to herself. The scene of running up and down the streets exactly parallels a scene in Freud’s Psychopathology of Everyday Life, in which Freud tells of an experience of his own when he got hopelessly lost in an area of town that he knew quite well because his unconscious mind did not want him to arrive there: I had in my mind’s eye an unusually vivid picture of a shop-window in the Inner Town in which I was sure I had seen boxes of the kind. I could not, it is true, recall the name of the street, but I felt sure that I would find the shop if I walked through the town, since my memory told me I had passed it on countless occasions. To my chagrin I had no success in finding the shopwindow with the strong-boxes, though I walked all over the Inner Town in every direction.21

Freud realizes that the reason for his failure to find the shop was that his unconscious mind was avoiding the neighbourhood of the ‘M. family’, as it had done since their falling out and ‘total estrangement’: ‘On my walk through the town in search of the shop-window with the strong-boxes I had passed through every street in the district but this one, which I had avoided as if it were forbidden territory’.22 Freud is careful here to point out that his ‘aversion’ was not to the strong-box manufacturers, but to his old acquaintance, and that it was ‘transferred’ to the neighbourhood as a whole.23 Sinclair’s narrator, similarly, has no aversion to the nuns in the Couvent, rather she is afraid that telling them that the Germans are coming will make the Germans really come. She associates telling the nuns this truth with having to accept the truth herself, and therefore

21

22 23

Sigmund Freud, The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. James Strachey, Vol. VI (1901) (London: The Hogarth Press, 1960), p. 137. Ibid., p. 137. Ibid., p. 138.

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having to leave Ghent in retreat, something which she admits is inimical to her nature: ‘I do not take kindly to retreating’.24 Sinclair’s deliberate naming of the book that she packs at the beginning of this forgetting and avoiding sequence as a ‘fat scarlet volume’ of Psychopathology of Everyday Life signals the way in which the evening’s events are to be read. The knowing reader sees avoidance strategies in every one of Sinclair’s actions, even the protracted scene when she returns from warning the Couvent about the approaching Germans and tries for several more hours to finish putting the Commandant’s possessions in his bag. She writes all this as a reflection on her psyche, and as a kind of self-analysis: the effect of the retreat from Ghent of the mind of the ‘secretary-reporter’ is a Freudian case study. Towards the end of the book, when she has been sent home, she even reflects on how well she is reflecting on the processes of her mind: We are approaching England. I can see the white cliffs. And I  hate the white cliffs. I  hate them with a sudden and mysterious hatred. More especially I  hate the cliffs of Dover. For it is there that we must land. I should not have thought it possible to hate the white coast of my own country when she is at war. And now I  know that I  hate it because it is not the coast of Flanders. Which would be absurd if I were really going back again. Yes, I must have had a premonition.25

The whole of A Journal of Impressions in Belgium is an examination of the mind in the moment, as seen through the distance of time, and how that mind copes in that moment with extreme stress, a ‘war experience [. . .] so intense and complex that it requires distance and analysis’ in order to be processed and understood.26 The time lapse is integral to this project much as ‘remembering’ and ‘working-through’ is integral to psychoanalysis:  the temporal distance allows ‘time to become conversant’ with resistances set up by the mind as barriers to understanding.27 War, with its extremes of circumstance, becomes a rich source for auto-psychological enquiry. As Leslie de Bont writes in her excellent essay

24 25 26

27

Sinclair, A Journal, p. 242. Ibid., p. 288. Leslie de Bont, ‘ “I hate soldiering”: Ford, May Sinclair, and War Heroism’, in War and the Mind: Ford Madox Ford’s Parade’s End, Modernism, and Psychology, ed. Ashley Chantler and Rob Hawkes (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015), p. 146. Sigmund Freud, ‘Remembering, Repeating and Working-Through’, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. XII (1911–1913), p. 155.

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on Ford and Sinclair’s war writings, with both writers, ‘war heroism becomes an adventure of the mind, of the self, its neuroses and its unconscious mechanisms’.28 Ford Madox Ford was more suspicious of psychoanalysis than Sinclair. His first nervous breakdown in 1904 and his subsequent treatment in ‘a series of sanatoria in Austria’ gave him little faith in the profession.29 As de Bont notes, he uses the language of psychoanalysis again and again in his fiction, but it is often with a characteristic ‘distrust’ of the words and forms ‘traditional psychoanalysis’ takes.30 He privileges instead self-analysis through writing as a means of discovering what memories have informed the adult self. Ancient Lights is one such text: Ford knew that the root of his problems lay deep within his nature; he intuited that he needed to bring it out. This he has shown in his reconstruction of these traumatic memories in narrative. He was to be restricted to these attempts at ‘self-analysis’, for in his treatment he received no analysis.31

Haslam is here referring to what Ford describes as his earliest memory: he comes across a box in a studio room full of doves, and he looks at them with ‘surprise’ and ‘wonder’. His grandmother comes in and is angry that he has disturbed them, telling him that mother doves, if disturbed like that, will eat their young. The child Ford is consumed with guilt and believes himself to be a murderer. This memory, he says candidly, has made him who he is today: ‘it certainly rendered me timid, incapable of self-assertion, and as it were perpetually conscious of original sin’.32 The positioning of this memory at the very beginning of the volume of reminiscences sets the tone for the whole. Ford is looking at who he is today, then looking at his early memories, and making connections between the two. The novel-as-memoir is also a fertile site for self-reflection and psychological probing. Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier is an impressionist masterpiece: a fictional version of this kind of working through memory in order to understand the self-in-process. It is, however, a flawed and partial self-analysis. The narrator Dowell has taken it upon himself to tell the story of his and his wife Florence’s relations with Leonora and her husband, Captain Edward Ashburnham, as well as the friends and lovers and relations of each of these figures. He tells us, however, 28 29

30 31 32

de Bont, p. 142. Ashley Chantler and Rob Hawkes, Chantler, ‘Introduction’, in War and the Mind:  Ford Madox Ford’s Parade’s End, Modernism, and Psychology, ed. Ashley Chantler and Rob Hawkes (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015), p. 5. de Bont, p. 145. Haslam, p. 24. Ford, Ancient Lights, p. viii.

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that he is singularly unqualified for this task: ‘I know nothing – nothing in the world – of the hearts of men’.33 He knows only that he must write down the disastrous events that occurred between the couples much as ‘human beings who have witnessed the sack of a city or the falling to pieces of a people’ must write ‘just to get the sight out of their heads’.34 The narrative is thus presented as an attempt to come to terms with trauma; to aestheticize and impose order on a series of messy life happenings.35 The narrator talks us through his narrative choices: I don’t know how it is best to put this thing down – whether it would be better to try and tell the story from the beginning, as if it were a story; or whether to tell it from this distance of time, as it reached me from the lips of Leonora or from those of Edward himself.36

The choice here is between presenting a complete and ordered tale, with everything placed in premeditated perspective, or to present the process by which the narrator comes to that position where the tale is a whole thing. He chooses the latter (indeed he cannot, at this stage, choose the former), and decides to set down his impressions as they occur to him now, whether in chronological order, order of significance, or not. The text becomes memory in process: the reader watches the arranging and rearranging of events as Dowell processes those events in his memory. Dowell tries to present his impressions as they were when he initially had them. This attempt is often no more than a gesture towards an impossible fidelity, however. His wife Florence is regularly described as ‘poor dear Florence’,37 and her beauty and charms dwelt upon, but every attempt to render her as she appeared to his innocence is undercut by an acidic aside: And her complexion had a perfect clearness, a perfect smoothness . . . Yes, that is exactly how I remember her, in that dress, in that hat, looking over her shoulder at me so that the eyes flashed very blue – dark pebble blue . . . And, what the devil! For whose benefit did she do it? For that of the bath attendant? of the passers-by? I don’t know.38 33 34 35

36 37 38

Ford, The Good Soldier, p. 12. Ibid., p. 11. May Sinclair published her own experiment with unreliable narration Tasker Jeavons:  The Real Story in 1916, a year after the appearance of Ford’s The Good Soldier. The irony of the title is that of course, like Dowell’s story about the Ashburnhams, Sinclair’s Furnival does not and will never know the ‘real story’ of Tasker Jeavons. Ibid., p. 15. Ibid., p. 16. Ibid., p. 22.

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This pattern recurs. He presents Florence as she appeared to him in the moment, he interjects with the bitterness he feels at the time of writing, and then he performs a weary gesture of defeat: he is still processing the meaning of her betrayal, and the writing of her character is that processing. By the time he comes to narrate his wife’s death he has decided that she was merely ‘a personality of paper’. He has, he claimed, not given her a thought since her death, or if he has, only in order to write about her, or ‘figure her out [. . .] as I might do about a problem in Algebra’.39 Throughout his presentation of Florence, these two impressions struggle with each other. She is continually ‘poor Florence’, as she was to him at the time he is narrating, but she is also the evil betrayer of his subsequent reflections. He has decided, before he begins his tale, that she is a bad person, but that he can still treasure the memory of his innocence: If for nine years I have possessed a goodly apple that is rotten at the core and discover its rottenness only in nine years and six months less four days, isn’t it true to say that for nine years I possessed a goodly apple?40

The presentation of character is problematized by the attempt to narrate the first impression received, which Dowell maintains is not only a valid impression, but has always been, in all his dealings with people so far, ‘correct enough’ for his purposes.41 The first impression, however, is necessarily overlaid with subsequent impressions, so that for the reader, as Haslam notes, all the novel’s ‘character patterns are unpredictable, changing as one level of knowledge is placed upon, or ranged against, another’.42 Dowell’s presentation of the characters of the Ashburnhams, for example, is even more complex than his presentation of his wife. He does not make up his mind whether Leonora is a good person or a bad person until the very end of his narrative (she is a ‘normal woman’ who has been made by circumstances into ‘a woman very wicked [. . .] the villain of the piece’),43 and he never decides precisely how he feels about Edward. At the beginning of his story he shows them as he saw them when he first met them: a ‘model couple’, with his ‘warm good-heartedness’ and her ‘extraordinarily fair and so extraordinarily the real thing’.44 By the end of the story they have become more complex, and the contradictions within their characters and within the actions they variously took, have been sifted and classified. The text as memory 39 40 41 42 43 44

Ibid., p. 83. Ibid., p. 12. Ibid., p. 102. Haslam, p. 44. Ford, The Good Soldier, p. 153. Ibid., p. 13.

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has done its work of putting everyone in their proper perspectives, with impression layered over impression until a many-angled picture has been achieved; in what Max Saunders calls superimposition: The structural principle of the novel is to superimpose all the subsequent information about Edward’s long sequence of adulteries, with the resulting moral squalor and human wreckage, making up a composite portrait of him, without effacing the first impression (which is itself vibrantly selfcontradictory [. . .]).45

Dowell’s attempt to revive the first impression, and to study how it has been overlayered by subsequent impressions, is a psychoanalytical endeavour. In what Freud calls psychoanalysis’s ‘first phase’ in his essay ‘Remembering, Repeating and Working-Through’ (1914), emphasis was placed on the importance of capturing the traumatic moment in its original state: ‘persistently endeavouring to reproduce the mental processes involved in that situation’.46 In the second phase, the psychoanalyst focussed instead on what the ‘free association’ of the patient’s mind revealed about the memory that doctor and patient were trying to uncover, and in the third phase, the analyst ‘gives up the attempt to bring a particular moment or problem into focus. He contents himself with studying whatever is present for the time being on the surface of the patient’s mind’.47 The memory that is being ignored will then come ‘into focus’ of its own accord. Dowell’s circumnavigations of his trauma and his upset at the trauma of others are then analytical avoidances. In alternately bringing up his initial impressions of events and then despairing of ever capturing them sufficiently and talking instead of his current cynical view of events, impressions of society in general, his earlier life, and his reflections on the process of writing, he is actually circling closer and closer to the essence of the moment, or moments, he is trying to capture: the whole world for me is like spots of colour on an immense canvas. Perhaps if it weren’t so I should have something to catch hold of now. Is all this digression or isn’t it digression? Again I don’t know.48

Dowell’s memories are effaced and imperfect, and he can’t quite catch hold of them. In fact, his memories are imperfect because his awareness of them in the moment was imperfect. As Haslam says of this passage:

45 46 47 48

Saunders, Ford Madox Ford, Vol. I, pp. 406–7. Freud, ‘Remembering, Repeating, and Working-Through’, p. 147 Ibid., p. 147. Ford, The Good Soldier, p. 17.

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his narrative is supposed to join the dots, to show the multiple relationships between the places and the people that he has seen and known. It doesn’t do that for the reader until the very last minute (and maybe not at all on the first reading [. . .]). It doesn’t do that for Dowell at all.49

He does not even realize that he desires Edward and Leonora’s ward, Nancy Rutherford, until he says aloud, just after Florence’s death, that now he might marry her: ‘It is as if one had a dual personality, the one I being entirely unconscious of the other’.50 What he therefore needs to do is to remember, repeat (narratorially), and work through the aspects that he can remember. Once he does that, the whole will become clear. If The Good Solider were imagined as a first draft of a story, a working through of all the elements that needed to be worked through, the second draft could potentially be more like the tale told ‘from the beginning, as if it were a story’.51 Freud develops the ideas he articulated in ‘Remembering, Repeating and Working-Through’ in his post-war book Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920). In this text, he discusses trauma in terms of an assault upon the mind of overwhelming sensory data:  data which needs to be assimilated and ordered, but cannot be. Ordinarily there is a kind of ‘shield’ on the mind which allows these impressions to be processed as they are received, but in cases of severe shock, this buffer breaks down. In analysis then the task is to perform the job of the shield retrospectively, ‘mastering the amounts of stimulation which have broken in and of binding them, in the psychical sense, so that they can then be disposed of ’.52 As Christina Britzolakis points out, this practice mirrors ‘the microstructure of the literary “impression” itself ’: the perception enters the mind, is processed imperfectly, and then must be processed again through memory.53 Despite the fact that Dowell has not yet processed his impressions of events, we are invited to trust his knowledge of them and his interpretation of motives. He refers continually to conversations he has had with Leonora and with Edward, and the times they have described to him exactly what happened in their relationships when he was not around. He sometimes even, to establish the objectivity of his impressions and the considered balance of his narrative, allows himself to doubt the statements of his witnesses. Edward for example tells Dowell that he had never thought of being ‘unfaithful’ to Leonora until the 49 50 51 52

53

Haslam, pp. 10–11. Ford, The Good Soldier, p. 73. Ibid., p. 15. Sigmund Freud, ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’, in The Pelican Freud Library, ed. Angela Roberts and Albert Dickson, Vol. xi. (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1953–77), p. 301. Britzolakis, p. 7.

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‘Kilsyte case’ (in which he was prosecuted for kissing a nursemaid on a train) made him realize he was capable of such a thing:54 ‘Edward maintained that it had put ideas into his head’, Dowell tells us, before remarking ‘I don’t believe it, though he certainly did’.55 We are led to believe that all the elements of the story for which Dowell was not actually present have been told to him by the characters who were, and that he, after the event, has been sorting and classifying these confidences and judging the veracity of them as impressions. However, at other times, Dowell betrays how little he has been told and how much he is relying on his own impression of what other people’s impressions must have been in order to tell his story. When Edward falls in love with Maisie Maidan, for example: He discovered himself watching doorways with impatience; he discovered that he disliked her boy husband very much for hours at a time. He discovered that he was getting up at unearthly hours in order to have time, later in the morning, to go for a walk with Maisie Maidan. [. . .] He was losing weight; his eyes were beginning to fall in; he had touches of bad fever. He was, as he described it, pipped.56

The discoveries that Edward made, and the result of this inner turmoil on his physical appearance, are unlikely to have been told to Dowell, by either Edward or Leonora. In fact, it seems that all Edward did tell Dowell was that he was ‘pipped’. The detail, the colour, has been added by the narrator. Elsewhere in the narrative, in fact, Dowell says that never ‘in all the years that I have known him did I hear him talk of anything but these subjects’: ‘Martingales, Chiffney bits, boots; where you got the best soap, the best brandy [. . .]’.57 Edward Ashburnham is presented here as a solid, silent, bluff type of English gentleman who would not confide his deepest and rawest emotions to a comparative stranger. If Dowell were himself an impressionist, he would doubtless say, with Ford, that the adding of colour does not make the overall impression less true, but the opposite. What we have in The Good Soldier is Dowell’s impressions of events, and each impression is a true one inasmuch as it is absolutely, truthfully and faithfully Dowell’s impression. They may be contradictory, but then human character is contradictory, and each aspect of character is, as Saunders writes, ‘equally true, equally inescapable’.58

54 55 56 57 58

Ford, The Good Soldier, p. 104. Ibid., p. 105. Ibid., pp. 114–15. Ibid., p. 24. Saunders, Ford Madox Ford, Vol. I, p. 407.

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Dowell’s impressions of the events that he has had described to him are extremely vivid. Edward tells him of the night that he and Nancy had sat and talked under the stars, and he tells his story well: ‘the fellow talked liked a cheap novelist. Or like a very good novelist for the matter of that, if it’s the business of a novelist to make you see things clearly’.59 With this nod to Conrad’s preface to The Nigger of the Narcissus, Dowell establishes the validity of his received impressions. They have been told to him by a man who might as well have been a novelist, and we are, after all, reading a novel. He goes on to describe the scene as presented to him: the ‘very black night’; Nancy dressed in ‘cream-coloured muslin’; the lights of the casino shining on the couple’s faces. He then adds his own element, the presence of Florence, who ‘came creeping up’. This was not in Edward’s version; it is part of the reshaping Dowell has done after the event; when he ‘pieced it together afterwards’.60 However, it is now a part of the whole impression: a melding of Edward’s impression and Dowell’s own: Anyhow, there you have the picture, the immensely tall trees, elms most of them, towering and feathering away up into the black mistiness that trees seem to gather about them at night; the silhouettes of those two upon the seat; the beams of light coming from the Casino, the woman all in black peeping with fear behind the tree-trunk. It is melodrama; but I can’t help it.61

The rearrangement of impressions through memory creates a kind of novelistic ‘picture’ even when that is not the intention. It is through a distance in space and time, then, that the chaotic and bewildering series of sometimes contradictory impressions are sorted and framed; that they make an artistic whole. Sinclair, in her preface to A Journal of Impressions, defends the lack of detail about the work of the Corps in the field in her book. She could not write this with any accuracy, psychological or otherwise, because she did not witness it. She writes about the heroism of the Corps elsewhere:  in The New Statesman, for example, in December 1914, she writes of the deeds done by the chauffeurs attached to the ambulance corps, both the ones that she witnessed and the ones that she heard about. She has no compunction here in telling the story of Smith, a chauffeur who joined the Corps after she had left, and who she ‘never really saw’. She tells of his rescuing a wounded man under fire, and adds colour to the impression as if she had seen the event: ‘Smith stood his ground imperturbably’; 59 60 61

Ford, The Good Soldier, p. 76. Ibid., p. 76. Ibid., p. 77.

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‘Smith did not so much as duck his head’.62 Her reluctance to do in A Journal what she has happily done elsewhere sets it apart from her other writing on the war. The articles can be propaganda, but the book is an experiment in narrative perspective. She also claims in the preface that she did not tamper with her impressions after they were received. They are set down, she says, in all their ‘imperfection or absurdity’ and are not tainted with knowledge, ‘discreet reflections’, subsequently gained.63 These claims are disingenuous. Sinclair’s narrator comments on her impressions continually. She breaks from her present-tense narrative to intersperse a little new ‘discreet reflection’; she marvels at how well she has remembered certain events and situations; and she worries whether she has recalled the facts of events with any accuracy at all. In doing so, she makes a novelistic picture as much framed and altered as Dowell’s picture of the three figures in the garden in the dark, only she will not admit to it. May Sinclair’s A Journal is written in diary form, despite the fact that the entries were not originally ‘actually set down there and then, on the spot, as I have set them down here’.64 The faux-diary structure is a way of imposing order on her narrative without arranging the story thematically, because to attempt such a reordering would be to admit agency to the authorial plotter. Ford’s Dowell expresses a similar anxiety: I have been casting back again; but I cannot help it. It is so difficult to keep all these people going. I tell you about Leonora and bring her up to date; then about Edward who has fallen behind. And then the girl gets hopelessly left behind. I wish I could put it down in diary form. Thus: On the 1st of September they returned from Nauheim. Leonora at once took to her bed. By the 1st of October they were all going to meets together [. . .].65

Dowell’s disorganization when it comes to narrative plotting, or the arrangement and interpretation of impressions, contributes to the illusion that what we are getting is the initial impression, with no subsequent tampering. The organization of a narrative in the form of diary entries does the same. We assume that we are being shown impressions that were received at most a few hours ago, and that there has been little time for reflection or the reworking of these impressions. However, in Sinclair’s A Journal, this is not the case:

62 63 64 65

May Sinclair, ‘Chauffeurs at the Front’, The New Statesman (26 December 1914), pp. 295–6, p. 296. Sinclair, A Journal, p. iv. Ibid., p. iii. Ford, The Good Soldier, p. 142.

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We pass through Bruges without seeing it. I have no recollection whatever of having seen the Belfry. We see nothing but the Canal (where we halt to take in petrol) and more villages, more faces. And more troops.66

The phrase ‘I have no recollection whatever of having seen the Belfry’, so startling in the middle of the narrator’s usual chronological procession of impressions, reads as though the narrator, much later, is struggling to remember the full details of her journey through Bruges. Did she see the Belfry or not? She thinks not. In the manuscript draft of A Journal, this phrase is actually inserted as an afterthought, half-way down the page, with an arrow indicating that it should come in between ‘We pass through Bruges without seeing it’ and ‘We see nothing but the Canal [. . .]’.67 Shortly after this is the first instance of a switch from first person to second person. Sinclair’s narrator realizes that she is out on the road with little protection, and that ‘the enemy may be anywhere’: A curious excitement comes to you. I  suppose it is excitement, though it doesn’t feel like it. You have been drunk, very slightly drunk with the speed of the car. But now you are sober. Your heart beats quietly, steadily, but with a little creeping, mounting thrill in the beat. The sensation is distinctly pleasurable. [. . .] It is only a little thrill, so far (for you don’t really believe that there is any danger), but you can imagine the thing growing, growing steadily, till it becomes ecstasy. Not that you imagine anything at the moment. At the moment you are no longer an observing, reflecting being; you have ceased to be aware of yourself; you exist only in that quiet, steady thrill [. . .].68

The continued present tense and the sudden change of pronoun are efforts towards, respectively, experiential and emotional immediacy, a way of rendering the personal, intimate, mystical experience. Sinclair switches her pronouns regularly from this point on, often when she wants to highlight the emotional shock of a particular impression. This passage is also a good example of Sinclair’s attempt to render the impression as it was received, with no interference from subsequent reflection. She does not manage it: the Sinclair-narrator who is experiencing, in the present tense, a pleasurable apprehension of danger, is cut across by the Sinclair who has thought about the experience later and decided that if one lived in a dangerous situation for a long time, one would attain ecstasy: ‘you can imagine. [. . .] Not that you imagine anything at the moment’. 66 67 68

Sinclair, A Journal, pp. 11–12. A Journal of Impressions manuscript. Kislak Center. Sinclair, A Journal, p. 12.

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There are several alternate versions of the events narrated in A Journal of Impressions in Belgium, and the most significant of these are the three extracts entitled ‘From a Journal’, which were published in the English Review in May, June and July 1915. These extracts can be read as a first draft of A Journal, with each day passing more rapidly, and with less digression than the finished book. For example, after the mystical experience, the ‘curious excitement’ on the road from Bruges to Ghent, the article moves straight back to an account of the journey and the sights seen. The fleshed out A Journal version has several pages inserted here, beginning with remarks made in levity to the trained nurse Mrs Torrence, an analysis of Mrs Torrence’s character, her professional achievements and her attitude towards danger. The Sinclair-narrator then uses her idea of Mrs Torrence’s immense bravery as a springboard for her reflections on her own bravery, or lack thereof: I conceive an adoration for Mrs. Torrence, and a corresponding distaste for myself. For I  do know what fear is. And in spite of the little steadilymounting thrill, I remember distinctly those five weeks of frightful anticipation when I knew that I must go out to the War; the going to bed, night after night, drugged with horror, black horror, that creeps like poison through your nerves; the falling asleep and forgetting it; the waking, morning after morning, with an energetic and lucid brain that throws out a dozen war pictures to the minute like a ghastly cinema show, till horror becomes terror [. . .].69

Mrs Torrence is introduced in the book version of A Journal as a trigger for self-analysis. The Sinclair-narrator reflects on her bad dreams and her hallucinations, and tries to decide whether these make her a coward or not. She then remembers one specific evening: the evening when the Commandant asked her to come out to the war. She said yes because he accused her of being afraid, and although she admitted to being afraid, the accusation was too much for her to stand: ‘The gage is thrown down on the scullery floor. I pick it up. And that is why I am here on this singular adventure’.70 She then tells us that ‘for the next three kilometres, I meditate on my cowardice’, and then we are back within the text of the original English Review article, being shown the landscape: ‘A church spire, a few roofs rising above trees. Then many roofs all together. Then the beautiful, grey-white foreign city’.71 69 70 71

Ibid., p. 14. Ibid., p. 15. Sinclair, A Journal, p. 16; ‘From a Journal’, English Review (May 1915), p. 171.

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This passage is inserted into the story for several reasons: it provides necessary contextual information, it performs self-analysis, and it gives a truer and more rounded impression than the original. Long car journeys are characterized often by reflections on the past, with random memories surfacing which, as impressions, mingle with the impressions being received of the landscape, your travelling companions, your reflections upon their motives. Sinclair is doing here what Ford says that impressionism should do: give ‘a sense of two, of three, of as many as you will, places, persons, emotions, all going on simultaneously in the emotions of the writer’; to convey the multiplicity of impressions past and present, that ‘when he is in one room, that he is in another, or when he is speaking to one person he may be so intensely haunted by the memory or desire for another person that he may be absent-minded or distraught’.72 The manuscript of A Journal is heavily revised in this section, the car ride from Bruges to Ghent, including a scored-out aside that the Sinclair-narrator is only in the car, and in the ‘front seat’, because ‘the reporter must have a chance of seeing things, or there will be no copy for the papers’. The other substantial changes are mainly tenses and factual errors: ‘crept’ becomes ‘creeps’ in the memory of the dream, and ‘four weeks’ becomes ‘five weeks’.73 The manuscript also reveals that some footnotes were added later in the writing process. The first footnote, when the narrator wonders why Janet McNeil was there on the trip (‘She very soon let us know why’) is entirely absent.74 Others are very different in the manuscript from their polished versions in the book. One footnote appears when the narrator is describing a certain mystical feeling that she has had, where she suddenly takes on ‘the coolness and the courage and the strength of a hundred War Correspondents and of fifty Red Cross Ambulances’. This ‘accession of power and valour’ gives her ‘a sudden immense lucidity’: ‘And on the top of it all there is a peace which I distinctly recognize as the Peace of God’.75 Sinclair decides that this needs a footnote, and this footnote is rather longer in the manuscript than it is in the published text. The manuscript version reads: This only means that, whether you attend to it or not (you generally didn’t), yr.subconsciousness was never entirely free from the fear of Uhlans – of Uhlans in the flesh. The reaction of yr. psyche against its fear is your indifference to its fear. The ‘place of God’ is – well, it’s the peace of God, the only not 72 73 74 75

Ford, ‘On Impressionism’, p. 263. A Journal manuscript. Kislak Center. Sinclair, A Journal, p. 28. Ibid., p. 107.

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illusory part of the phenomenon. The funny thing is that the Germans hadn’t got into Ghent – yet. We weren’t anywhere near the last extremity.76

The published version reads: This only means that, whether you attended to it or not (you generally didn’t), as long as you were in Belgium, your sub-conscious was never entirely free from the fear of Uhlans – of Uhlans in the flesh. The illusion of valour is the natural, healthy reaction of your psyche against its fear and your indifference to its fear.77

Sinclair’s initial instinct is to give full and complete information, including a short explanation, which will be familiar to readers of Mary Olivier, of how she feels that psychology, religion, and philosophy overlap in her own ‘moments of vision’. The ‘peace of God’ is the only real thing:  it is ‘Reality’ and it is the ‘Thing-in-Itself ’ of Sinclair’s novels and philosophical writings. It is the same feeling that both Nicky and Michael experience, in Sinclair’s First World War novel The Tree of Heaven, when they are in France, under fire: ‘Actually you lay hold on eternal life and you know it. [. . .] You get the same ecstasy, the same shock of recognition, and the same utter satisfaction when you see a beautiful thing’.78 The other information she wishes to give is the irony of the situation she was in, being afraid of Uhlans and of the approaching Germans when actually they were perfectly safe where they were. The published version cuts out both these two explanations. The first because it is idiosyncratic: the published version, with its emphasis on the ‘natural’ and ‘healthy’ is more of an appeal to a universal psychology (‘you too would feel this way’); and the second because the later reflection that there was no need to be afraid distracts from the validity of the initial impression. The Sinclair-narrator was afraid, and that is where the emphasis should fall. Sinclair did not write up her memories in full in her Day-Book, she notes, because she did not have the time: But when you had made fast each day with its note, your impressions were safe, far safer than if you had tried to record them in their flux as they came. However far behind I might be with my Journal, it was kept. It is not written ‘up,’ or round and about the original notes in my Day-Book, it is simply

76 77 78

A Journal manuscript. Kislak Center. Sinclair, A Journal, p. 107. May Sinclair, The Tree of Heaven (New York: Macmillan, 1918), pp. 396–7.

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written out. Each day of the seventeen had its own quality and was soaked in its own atmosphere; each had its own unique and incorruptible memory, and the slight lapse of time, so far from dulling or blurring that memory, crystallized it and made it sharp and clean.79

Sinclair’s use of the word ‘atmosphere’ perfectly echoes Ford’s stated intention in Ancient Lights to ‘get the atmosphere’ of his subject.80 She also maintains that the temporal distance between the impress of the impressions and their transcription makes them actually clearer and truer. The unique ‘atmosphere’ of each day is easier to discern from this distance. It is not that the quality of the impression has changed, but rather that memory enables it to be seen more clearly. Despite Sinclair’s assurance here that the ‘slight lapse of time’ between the receiving of the impression and its transcription actually makes the impression more ‘sharp and clean’, narrating through memory is never a complete aesthetic solution: memory can be unreliable.

‘Post-war Freudianity’: Trauma, repression and detachment For an author such as Ford, already engaged with the aesthetic struggle to represent an unrepresentable modern world, the war presented a new challenge: memory, which previously had been a useful way of ordering and making sense of impressions, was suddenly more unreliable than ever. The shell-shocked soldier (Ford had amnesia in much the same way that Tietjens does in Parade’s End, even forgetting his own name) no longer has complete access to this processing function, and any attempt to process through memory is ‘disrupted by the gaps of the traumatised subject’.81 Also, as Charlotte Jones argues, any attempt to impose narrative unity on a representation of the world at war was frustrated by the sheer scale of destruction and death in the First World War. In Ford’s writing in particular, ‘it is not just the shell-shocked soldier that evidences the mind’s inability to process the war; the whole situation appears utterly unintelligible’.82 In Ford’s essay ‘Arms and the Mind:  A  Day of Battle’, written from the front, another barrier to war representation is highlighted: ‘I have asked myself continuously why I can write nothing – why I cannot even think to myself anything 79 80 81 82

Sinclair, A Journal, p. iv. Ford, Ancient Lights, p. xv. Jones, p. 135. Ibid., p. 132.

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that to myself seems worth thinking!  – about the psychology of that Active Service of which I have seen my share’. ‘With the Pen’, Ford goes on, ‘I used to be able to visualize things’, but when it comes to the war the visualization fails and its representation in words fails too.83 The ‘numbing’ preoccupations of war: the tasks that need to be done, and the responsibility felt towards those tasks, make it impossible for the mind to receive impressions with any vividness, and if you don’t process these impressions in the first instance, you cannot remember them. Ford’s effort to remember a line of wounded men he sees, a sight which a normal mind might have impressed upon itself as striking and pitiable, is a failure. It was not registered at the time, and ‘they are as dim in my memory as forgotten trees’.84 War makes the impressionist project more difficult, but also highlights its importance. As Karolyn Steffens points out, war forces ‘the Impressionist goal of immediacy to bear the traces of traumatic working through’.85 In The Tree of Heaven, Sinclair returns again and again to the difficulty of communicating war experience. The children’s uncle Morrie goes out to the Boer War, and on his return he tells the family stories about his experiences, trying to make them see: ‘He couldn’t touch them; he couldn’t evoke one single clear image in their minds; there was no horror he could name that would sting them to vision, to realization. They had not been there’.86 The family do try to ‘realize’ the war, but it is too far away. Even when they try to imagine the landscape of South Africa, the image of the war is insubstantial, superimposed upon a geographical terrain which is also insubstantial because never seen: ‘It simply hung, or lay as one photographic film might lie upon another’.87 They read the newspapers dutifully, but still only manage to see mental images that are ‘flat and grey like the pictures in the illustrated papers; the very blood of it ran grey’.88 Morrie needs to be able to communicate his traumatic memories to his family in order that he can process them himself, but their refusal to see denies him catharsis. Throughout H.D.’s prose works, too, memory is associated with guilt and with trauma. The recent past, for all of H.D.’s autobiographical heroines, is one of war, miscarriage, betrayal and grief. Despite memory being so important to the characters’ ideas of their selves, then, it is also dangerous. Thus Hipparchia, having run away with Verrus, is only happy when she is ‘half drugged with summer 83

84 85 86 87 88

Ford Madox Ford, ‘A Day of Battle I: Arms and the Mind’ (dated ‘Written of the Ypres Salient, 15th Sep. 1916’), in War Prose, ed. Max Saunders (Manchester: Carcanet, 1999), p. 36. Ibid., p. 39. Steffens, p. 43. Sinclair, The Tree of Heaven, p. 81. Ibid., p. 77. Ibid.

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and with subtle fragrance’;89 Raymonde embraces the London which ‘blurred over too alert perception’, and resists the call to memory posed by Ermy and her similar life experiences;90 and the heroine of ‘Secret Name’ wants to paper over her intellectual past and embrace the romance of her stay in Egypt: ‘The whole paper-doll situation would be ruined if she were, even for a moment to spoil this onrush of violet, if she were to prod into its graciousness with solid truth’.91 Julia Ashton, in Bid Me to Live, realizes that in a way she is ‘frozen – protected, so that the actuality of the fact Rafe-Bella didn’t really get through’. She writes in her notebook: ‘I am not ghost, not even moon-maiden. Touch not your lyre, nor seek to wake what lies forgotten’.92 The three heroines of Palimpsest, and Julia Ashton of Bid Me to Live, all avoid clear seeing and live their lives in a self-made web of fantasy, detachment, and wilful blindness. It is in Asphodel, however, that the repression of recent memory, and its damaging effects, is most thoroughly explored. Hermione, Asphodel ’s heroine, is war-shocked. She is estranged from her husband and pregnant from her affair with Cyril Vane. She is trapped, lonely, and confused, and does not know what she is going to do with herself and her baby until Beryl takes her in hand.93 In the final scene of Asphodel Hermione sits in conference with Beryl, a child-woman with unsettling blue eyes who has sent the car for her and who wants to help her. She gives Hermione a taste of luxury, which frees her spirit, momentarily: ‘I have found perfection, have fallen into a beautiful chair, have sat throned yet at peace’.94 Beryl also wants, however, intellectual companionship. Hermione feels that this is one thing she cannot give, desiring as she does the half-world of forgetfulness and shadows:  ‘Hermione wanted to get out, get away, hold on to her web of gauze, continue the melting loveliness into her own room, take it back with her to spread it like thin honey over the plain wheat-bread of her plain days’.95 Beryl persists, however, her ‘blue eyes, evil eyes’ searching Hermione’s own and: calling her out of that nebulous world into which she had so softly fallen, blue eyes were dragging her ashore as one drags the mercifully almost dead

89 90 91 92 93

94 95

H.D., Palimpsest, p. 57 Ibid., p. 135. Ibid., p. 269. H.D., Bid Me to Live, pp. 55–6. In Asphodel, the husband (Richard Aldington) is Jerrold Darrington, and the Cecil Gray figure is Cyril Vane. Beryl is Bryher. H.D., Asphodel (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1992), p. 175. Ibid., p. 176.

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to land, blue eyes were working their horrible first aid and were calling, calling to something in Hermione that was lost, that was forgotten.96

The eyes are evil because they are forcing Hermione to look back over her recent past, but they are also helping Hermione by enabling her to access something ‘forgotten’:  her pre-war memories, and her pre-war self. These memories can be recovered only if the recent past is revisited, made sense of and banished. Hermione accordingly revisits the pain of the war years, in a series of flashbacks. She thinks of wounded soldiers sitting on benches in Richmond Park, and herself pregnant, with her first (subsequently miscarried) baby. She thinks of her husband in khaki, of her miscarriage and of her husband’s lover. It is Beryl’s presence that somehow makes her think of these things, when she has been determined not to: ‘Why did the girl draw these things out of her, things that came automatically, a sort of superior intellectual psycho-analysis, going on and on she wanted to drift’.97 The psychoanalysis works. Hermione finds that once she has got across the ‘chasm’ of the recent past, the ‘pre-chasm’, pre-war world is once more accessible to her. These are the memories that she had lost, and her sorting through of her wartime memories has enabled both types of memory to be translated into possessions. Beryl has enabled this artistic transformation of memory, with her intellectual searching, but also with her provision of comfort to the Hermione who hasn’t known comfort for many years. Beryl’s house is spacious, luxurious and as such provides a freedom from worry that enables Hermione’s mind to gain perspective: beauty and seclusion and the trees going past the open car window all in proportion. Paintable. Things seen in perspective become things to be grappled with. Art. Isn’t art just re-adjusting nature to some intellectual focus? The things are there all the time, but art, a Chinese bowl, a Chinese idol, a brass candle-stick make a focus, a sense of proportion like turning the wheel of an opera glass, getting a great mass of inchoate colour and form into focus, focussing on one small aspect of life though really it is only a tiny circle, a tiny circle. You get life into a tiny circle by art.98

Hermione can now focus from a distance. She can transform her memories, both recent and far past, into art, because she has gained perspective. Asphodel,

96 97 98

Ibid., p. 183. Ibid., p. 185. Ibid., p. 175.

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Palimpsest and Bid Me to Live are all exercises in just that: patterning and weaving memories into an aesthetic whole. Any trauma if it is repressed and is not ‘worked through’ is damaging. In 1922, at the height of what Dorothy Richardson called ‘post-War Freudianity’ (I, p. 12), May Sinclair published a slight novella called Life and Death of Harriett Frean. The protagonist, Harriett, leads what seems on the surface to be a calm and boring life. She never marries and spends many years looking after her elderly and sick mother. The surface of Harriett’s mind appears to be calm and unruffled even to herself; in her dying moments, she can claim that she has always ‘behaved beautifully’.99 She is, May Sinclair explained in an interview, ‘incredibly blind and with a wizened soul’; she is an adept at repressing uncomfortable or traumatic memories, and this repression blights her life.100 The novella is the study of a psyche, and owes much to Sinclair’s reading of psychoanalytic theory; T. S. Eliot read it as ‘the soul of man under psychoanalysis’.101 When the child Harriett Frean disobeys her parents and goes walking in the lane at the back of her house she sees a man who, when he sees her, ‘stepped back and crouched behind the palings, ready to jump out’. She is frightened, and runs to her mother spotted ‘coming down the garden walk’. Her mother too is frightened: ‘somehow you knew it wasn’t your naughtiness that made her cry. There was something more’.102 This is the first traumatic event in Harriett’s life, and her parents’ reaction to it will prove instructive in the way she herself processes trauma: her mother tries not to show her fear, and instead directs Harriett’s attention to the beauty of the red campion flowers she has picked. Both parents then become engaged in rewriting Harriett’s memory. She must not associate the lane with the intimidating man, but with the beauty of the red campion that grows there. Her father tells her that she would receive no punishment for straying into the lane against orders because ‘People are punished to make them remember. We want you to forget. [. . .] Forget ugly things’.103 Her mother subsequently takes Harriett out again and again into the lane to pick flowers ‘so that it was always the red campion she remembered’.104 The ‘something more’ that frightened her mother is eventually made clear to Harriett. Three years later ‘Annie, the housemaid’ tells her that ‘something had happened to a little girl there’, and then years 99 100

101 102 103 104

May Sinclair, Life and Death of Harriett Frean (London: Virago, 1980), p. 157. Willis Steell, ‘May Sinclair Tells Why She Isn’t a Poet’, in Literary Digest International Book Review, Vol. 2 (June 1924), p. 559. T. S. Eliot, ‘London Letter: The Novel’, in Dial, 73 (September 1922), pp. 329–31, p. 330. Sinclair, Harriett Frean, p. 19. Ibid., p. 21. Ibid., p. 22.

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later her friend Connie Hancock explains in more comprehensive terms what has happened: A secret . . . Behind the dirty blue palings . . . She shut her eyes, squeezing the lids down, frightened. But when she thought of the land she could see nothing but the green banks, the three tall elms, and the red campion pricking through the white froth of the cow-parsley; her mother stood on the garden walk in her wide, swinging gown; she was holding the red and white flowers up to her face and saying, ‘Look, how beautiful they are’.105

The complete inability that the older Harriett has to see, in memory, the image of the hiding man is due to the careful positioning of another memory over the disturbing one: a Freudian screen memory. Screen memories, in Freud’s words, owe ‘their preservation not to their own content but to an associative relation between their content and another which is repressed’.106 In this case however the screen memory is not Harriett’s own, but has been deliberately manufactured by Harriett’s parents. She is taught to repress all memories of ‘ugly things’ and to replace them with beautiful memories, and this attitude towards the memory, and even the acknowledgement of unpleasant impressions, stays with her her whole life. The ostensibly forgotten memory, of man as threat, and bad behaviour and disobedience as precursors to frightening experiences also stays with Harriett her whole life. The memory which is screened, as Freud says, has not ‘slipped away’ but has ‘exercised a determining influence’ on the whole of the subject’s ‘later life’.107 Life and Death of Harriett Frean is thus set up from the very beginning as a drama about the unreliability of memory, with the ‘forgotten’ bad memory exercising one influence, and the remembered lesson about the necessity to repress anything ‘ugly’ exercising another. As a young woman, Harriett rejects the love of her friend Robin, because he is engaged to be married to her other friend Prissie. He doesn’t love Prissie, but Harriett maintains that taking Robin away from her would ‘kill her’: ‘there are some things you can’t do. We couldn’t. We couldn’t’.108 Harriett’s father confirms her in her resolution, and she manages eventually to forget her qualms. Subsequently Prissie succumbs to paralysis, and Robin becomes more of a carer than a husband. Throughout all this drama Harriett keeps aloof. She has

105 106 107 108

Ibid. Freud, The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, p. 43. Ibid., p. 46. Sinclair, Harriett Frean, p. 53.

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made her ‘beautiful’ gesture, and she represses all thought of Robin and Prissie together: When she thought of Robin and how she had given him up she felt a thrill of pleasure in her beautiful behaviour, and a thrill of pride in remembering that he had loved her more than Priscilla. Her mind refused to think of Robin married.109

The blueprint for Harriett’s life, which was set up in the early childhood experience and the subsequent lessons in repression, manifests here. Harriett’s early training in only accepting the ‘beautiful’ thing and her skill in burying unwanted ‘ugly’ things continues when Prissie becomes ill. When Harriett visits the couple she is disturbed by the visible manifestations of Prissie’s illness and tries not to see it.110 After Prissie’s death and Robin’s remarriage, she visits again, and is shocked to see him grown old and irritable. She decides that he is a different person, and not her responsibility; her ‘mind refused, obstinately, to connect the two Robins and Priscilla’.111 Even when it is brought home to her that her own actions caused Prissie’s illness, which is psychosomatic, and the unhappiness which has ruined Robin, she refuses to acknowledge the truth of this: Was it true that she had sacrificed Robin and Priscilla and Beatrice to her parents’ idea of moral beauty? Was it true that this idea had been all wrong? That she might have married Robin and been happy and been right? ‘I don’t care. If it was to be done again to-morrow I’d do it’.

Harriett’s patterns of behaviour have been set in childhood, and she cannot escape them. She cannot even use the illuminating powers of memory to re-see and understand her past experiences because her parents have taught her to discount and repress anything ugly. The same pattern occurs in two other instances. In one she dismisses Maggie, her housemaid, for falling pregnant. Maggie’s child dies after she sends it out to be nursed by ‘a woman in the country’, and she comes back to Harriett asking to be taken back on.112 Harriett feels a moment of remorse (‘It was I who did it when I sent him away’), in what Suzanne Raitt calls a ‘partial recognition of her own psychic reality’, but her friends convince her, as she wishes to be convinced, that it was not her fault.113 She very quickly manages to repress this guilt too: ‘She had 109 110 111 112 113

Ibid., p. 59. Ibid., p. 61. Ibid., p. 112. Ibid., p. 119. Raitt, p. 251.

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forgotten. The image of Maggie’s baby was dead, hidden, buried deep down in her mind’.114 She represses too the knowledge which comes to her late in life that her father was not the perfect man she thought him to be, but had in fact caused the financial ruin of her friend’s father, Mr Hancock. In all the ‘ugly’ moments of Harriett’s life, the mind is described as ducking, dodging and burying information as if trying to evade being impressed by the impression; upon hearing this story about Mr Hancock, ‘Her mind swerved from the blow’.115 These repressed memories are still present, however, and inform Harriett’s behaviour throughout her life. Harriett is unable to process her impressions consciously, and so memory can only do its work when she is unconscious. At the end of the novella, she is given anaesthetic for an operation. She is more afraid of the anaesthetic than she is of the operation itself, because she has heard that under its influence, when your conscious mind is under, ‘you said things. Shocking, indecent things. But there wasn’t anything she could say. She didn’t know anything . . . Yes. She did. There were Connie’s stories. And Black’s Lane. Behind the dirty blue palings in Black’s Lane’.116 Her childhood memory of the hiding man surfaces just precisely because she does not want it to. Actually, when she is under the anaesthetic, rather more than that surfaces: She knew that the little man they called the doctor was really Mr Hancock. They oughtn’t to have let him in. She cried out, ‘Take him away. Don’t let him touch me’; but nobody took any notice. ‘It isn’t right,’ she said. ‘He oughtn’t to do it. Not to any woman. If it was known he would be punished.’ And there was Maggie by the curtain, crying. ‘That’s Maggie. She’s crying because she thinks I killed her baby.’ The ice-bag laid across her body stirred like a live thing as the ice melted, then it settled and was still. She put her hand down and felt the smooth, cold oil-skin distended with water. ‘There’s a dead baby in the bed. Red hair. They ought to have taken it away,’ she said. ‘Maggie had a baby once. She took it up the lane to the place where the man is; and they put it behind the palings. Dirty blue palings. . . . Pussycat. Pussycat, what did you there? Pussy. Prissie. Prissiecat. Poor Prissie. She never goes to bed. She can’t get up out of the chair’.117 114 115 116 117

Sinclair, Harriett Frean, p. 141. Ibid., p. 132. Ibid., p. 156. Ibid., pp. 157–8.

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Every repressed memory returns to the forefront of Harriett’s mind as if she is in analysis. The memories are jumbled: the doctor is confused with Mr Hancock, who is then confused with the hiding man; the baby is killed behind the palings, in the primal scene of fear in Harriett’s life; and the childhood rhyme that so delighted her as a child becomes reworked into a rhyme about Prissie’s misfortunes (significantly her sexual misfortunes as well as her physical ones: she can never go ‘to bed’ with her husband). Here, finally, is the acknowledgement of Harriett’s repressed memories, of their formative influence in her life and her decisions. This acknowledgement brings her release: she dies, feeling ‘like a very little child’, cleansed and renewed.118 The ending of Life and Death of Harriett Frean is interesting when read alongside Dorothy Richardson’s 1930 short story ‘Ordeal’. This story is about the preparation for death of the protagonist Fan Peele, who is about to embark on some unspecified dangerous surgery and is thus taking leave of her life. She does so by taking stock of her life’s impressions, through memory, and ends with a similar release to Harriett’s. Fan is escorted by a friend, Agatha, to the nursing home, and is left there. She has not told her husband Tom that she is undergoing surgery, as ‘if Tom had known, his suffering presence would have been in the room with her’. She is left in an ‘undivided solitude’, a freedom from complicated social maneuvering and from ‘all the tensions of her own life’.119 The story is primarily a celebration of life, as Fan’s seclusion in the room at the nursing home allows for a ‘blissful expansion of being’, and a realization that ‘in bright daylight the afternoon lay before her, endless – the first holiday of her adult life . . .’; a ‘holiday from responsibility’.120 This is an incongruous use of the word holiday, which Claire Drewery compares with the holidays in two other Richardson short stories, ‘Journey to Paradise’ and ‘Tryst’. In all three stories, Drewery writes, ‘the holiday becomes a metaphor for liminality and combines a sense of freedom with the possibility of a final transition into non-being’. In ‘Ordeal’, by extension, the ‘characteristic incursion into liminality reveals, albeit briefly, a respite from socially ordained roles and domestic responsibility’.121 However, the sense of freedom is won only at great cost. Fan’s liminal status lies in her position on the threshold of life and death, as well as in the liminal space of the room in which she waits to be taken to surgery. The shadow of 118 119 120 121

Ibid., p. 159. Richardson, ‘Ordeal’, in Tate, p. 72. Ibid., p. 73. Drewery, p. 53.

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death also means that Fan’s perceptions of the people around her have changed. A week before this, she remembers, while she was ‘getting through the days and playing her part’, she occasionally became more aware than previously of the presence of others: And how at times with an effort she had forced herself out of her trance, dropped her own cancelled life, and felt each life about her, sharply, disinterestedly, seeing each one in its singleness to be equally significant; been aware of a strange, sure wisdom within her that seemed capable of administering the affairs of everyone she knew, guiding each life without offence. Had realised at one moment with an overwhelming clarity how it is that the character of an individual operates more securely, upon those who have known him, after he is dead.122

Fan sees the lives of her friends and family ‘sharply’, but with disinterest, as if her own proximity to death allows her a more objective vision of the importance (or unimportance) of life. Every person in her life is ‘equally significant’, and her detached position allows her to ‘administer’ and ‘guide’ each life: to change events, or even to play God. Her realization that ‘the character of an individual operates more securely [. . .] after he is dead’ is double-edged. On the one hand, Fan is reflecting that she herself is going to die soon, and her character will finally be realized by her loved ones, and on the other she is claiming a power of interpretation over the characters she has met in her own life: once a person is removed, and has ceased to change, they can be summarized, and can operate ‘more securely’. The messy human lives become concrete and gain an efficiency. The nurses she encounters at the home are also seen clearly, with a detached and ironic observation: She felt herself a guest being passed from hand to hand without release – being entertained. And indeed, for a moment, by each fresh face and fresh immediately revealed personality she was entertained. But she could not flatter herself into believing that these entertaining officials were themselves entertained. For them each visible hair on her head did not, as did theirs for her, stand out, a single separate mystery.123

Fan is detached from herself, as she watches herself being ‘passed from hand to hand’, and she is detached from the people she encounters. Just one glance is enough to ‘reveal’ their whole personality, everything about their lives exposed for the cynical amusement of the disembodied Fan watching the show. It is the 122 123

Richardson, ‘Ordeal’, in Tate, p. 72. Ibid., p. 69.

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perceived proximity to death that creates this detachment, and it brings with it a profound realization of the ‘mystery’ of hair, or the incommunicable strangeness of life in general. As Drewery notes: ‘Only now is a rapprochement between the social functions she has performed as a woman throughout her life, and her individual sense of self, possible, and this occurs in a liminal period of reflection and intense self-identification’.124 In the liminal space of the hospital room, and with a perceived gap of time between life as it was lived and this moment before oblivion, impressions which have previously been obscured by repression (in Harriett’s case), or sheer busyness and lack of time for reflection (in Fan’s case) can be seen with due clarity. Memory works its magic in the last instant.

‘Disinterested contemplation’: Dorothy Richardson’s March Moonlight and the ‘middles’ In March Moonlight, Miriam becomes a writer. However, the central theme of the novel is not the turn to writing itself, but memory as the ideal method for self-realization. The very beginning of March Moonlight has Miriam sitting and reading a letter from a woman named Jean, met in the canton of Vaud in Switzerland. Miriam’s relationship with Jean is, as Joanne Winning persuasively argues, ‘a continuation of the subtextual representations of lesbian desire throughout Pilgrimage’.125 Miriam, on first meeting Jean, ‘felt in equal measure a desire for close acquaintance and a fear lest the desire be realized’ (IV, p. 565), but the relationship is quickly formed, and becomes a profound one: ‘The moment we found ourselves together, time stood still’ (IV, p. 567). Jean is conceived as a mystic woman, who understands the golden beauty of life, who can communicate without words, and who stands for Miriam as her ‘clue to the nature of reality’ (IV, p. 612).126 However, Jean is never present in the text. The whole of Miriam’s trip to Vaud is represented instead through memory, or as Winning puts it: Jean’s story is told through a series of reflective recollections after Miriam’s return to England from the winter spent in Vaud; Jean is present in the text

124 125 126

Drewery, p. 52. Winning, p. 147. Jean Radford has suggested that Jean represents Miriam’s coming to her own individual brand of Christianity: the end of her pilgrimage: ‘in religious terms “Jean” reads as the embodiment of human love which most nearly approaches God’s love for human beings’ (Radford, p. 42). Maren Linett also holds this view, calling March Moonlight ‘a deeply Christian novel’ (Linett, p. 71).

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only in the pleasurable nuances of memory and, at intervals, through the missives she sends to Miriam from Les Lauriers.127

Jean exists in the text only in the form of her own words, written to Miriam, and in the form of Miriam’s memory pictures of her. The disorientation and fragmentation of March Moonlight is foregrounded with the very first lines, of a letter from Jean to Miriam: ‘My dear, dear Dick, Behold me in a chaise-longue in the shadiest part of the Lauriers garden’. Miriam’s stay in ‘Les Lauriers’ in Vaud has not yet been mentioned, and she has never, until this point, been referred to as ‘Dick’ in Pilgrimage. The fourth paragraph, however, reveals the context of Miriam’s letter-reading: ‘Miriam finds her eyes upon Sally’s chestnut tree’ (IV, p. 555).128 The deliberate lack of explanation here, the constant tense shifts and modulation from first person to third person and back again characterize the whole of March Moonlight. The first two chapters of March Moonlight were published in Life and Letters by Robert Herring in 1946 (in three parts – the longer first chapter was divided and published in two parts), and they are easily read as consecutive chapters. Later chapters are more fragmentary and unpolished, racing from place to place and character to character, as if in a frantic effort to bid farewell to everyone encountered in Pilgrimage, and to reach the point in Richardson’s own life when she sat down to begin writing her novel. This fragmentation is, in part, due to its unfinished nature, as ‘a pile of white paper’ that sat on Richardson’s desk untouched and eventually ‘turned yellow – without Dorothy noticing, it would seem’.129 The first chapter is a long series of reminiscences of Vaud and of Jean conducted, apparently, from the safety and seclusion of Miriam’s sister Sally’s house. In the second chapter, the balance shifts, and Miriam is once more present, observing Sally’s domestic life and the characters of her children. The two chapters are complementary, with the first focussing on reality from Miriam’s memory space, and the second looking at memory from the position of Miriam’s real present. As Gloria Fromm states: In them there is complete control in the way in which Dorothy caught the intricate movement of Miriam’s mind, interweaving at the same time three physical places: Vaud of the recent past, Dimple Hill and Sussex of the more distant past, and her sister Sarah’s home of the present, where she has come 127 128 129

Winning, p. 147. Sally is Miriam’s sister Sarah. Fromm, p. 377.

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to recover from the flu. The effect is of a symphonic orchestration of different times and places and experiences.130

Miriam’s turn to memory as the primary focus of her method of self-realization is dramatic: the ‘symphonic orchestration’ of visual memory constructs a version of Miriam that is completely reliant on the past in order to experience the present. In this first chapter of March Moonlight, Miriam remembers the time she spends watching Jean, gathering impressions of her and of the other guests in the chalet, recalling all her stored memory portraits from this time. Jean’s portrait is particularly striking: ‘Every memory of rejoining Jean evokes her flushed face lit by the radiance her downcast lids were powerless to veil’ (IV, p.  567), and the snapshot of one guest is not merely strong enough to keep recurring, but is dramatically lit: ‘Always, when I think of her, I shall see her as she looked when the sound of [her sons’] boots was heard, the light on her raised face’ (IV, p. 557). However, the letter from Jean that opens March Moonlight contains a reference to a mutual friend, a bishop encountered at Les Lauriers, that Miriam cannot contextualize: ‘it seems so sad that now, when he feels himself capable of enjoying life like other men, he can’t allow himself to do so because of his religious convictions’ (IV, p. 555). Miriam’s initial processing of the events at Vaud, it turns out, is fragmentary and misleading: Then what can Jean mean? What veil, if she were here to be questioned, would she gently withdraw to reveal, to an eye she trusts but sometimes finds blind, the truth she is so swift to perceive? (IV, p. 558)

Miriam runs through the scenes of chalet life that she has stored in memory, re-viewing the events with a renewed perspective, and discovers that she has indeed been, comparatively, ‘blind’. Jean and the bishop had all the while been becoming emotionally involved, despite the inevitable ‘barrier’ (IV, p. 563) of the bishop’s profession. ‘And I saw nothing. My picture of him was almost himself as he wished, or thought he ought, to be [. . .] Light falls now upon those two small incidents, giving them vivid life’. Miriam’s customary relentless observation has fallen short, and the ‘light’ can only fall upon her observations when they have been stored, retrieved and reconsidered. It is Jean’s ability to create a ‘vivid picture’ (IV, 559) for Miriam in her letters that enables her to see the events she had witnessed very differently. The limitations of Miriam’s point of view are never more clearly expressed, and an attempt is made here, in the last chapter-volume,

130

Ibid., p. 371.

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to reconcile the gap between what Miriam sees and what others see: Jean’s alternative perspective, presented and assimilated as a retrospective view. The second chapter of March Moonlight establishes Miriam as staying in her sister’s house, convalescing after an illness. She goes downstairs and sits with her sister’s children, but is still more present in her memory space than in the space of the dining room. Sarah’s daughter Marian, Miriam feels, perceives this, with her ‘intuitive perception of that world as occupying, even at the moment, more of the aunt’s attention than the one where illness had temporarily stranded her’ (IV, p.  584), and Miriam ‘could believe the child actually discerning, where it lay sharply engraved upon the aunt’s consciousness, the experience of those final moments upstairs’ when Miriam read Rachel Mary’s letter.131 Miriam is so present in her memory space that she imagines the ‘engraving’ of it to be actually visible outside of herself.132 She also feels that her memory pictures are present in the room with her. When the two children leave her alone temporarily, she uses the absence of observing others to do her own observing, projecting her memories into the room: ‘she stood upright and watched, in the distances substituting themselves for the sheltering wall, the little figure of Rachel Mary going busily about’ (IV, p. 585). The memory of Rachel Mary’s characteristic movements is clearly visible in, and even beyond, the spaces of the room: a film clip, projected onto the ‘sheltering wall’ and creating on that wall the illusion of depth, of ‘distances’. The spatial and visual past continues to be the primary focus of Miriam’s contemplations. Again, memory is figured as present to her: not merely ‘engraved’ and projecting, but completely surrounding her. The presence and spatialization of memories has been a key trope throughout Pilgrimage, but it is in March Moonlight that memory is explicitly foregrounded as the most effective way of seeing. Miriam continues to feel that all of her previous observations, and reflections, have not been completely satisfactory: I’ve been reflective only in my own interest, and heedless. Laying up a past that one day will smite unendurably. Will begin to smite if I pursue the pathway so suddenly opened last night. Towards the past. Inexhaustible wealth. Inexhaustible remorse. Why do they say distance lends enchantment? Distance in time or space does not lend. It reveals. [. . .] if one could fully forgive oneself, the energy it takes to screen off the past would be set free. (IV, p 607) 131 132

Rachel Mary is the Quaker sister of Richard Roscorla with whom Miriam stays in Dimple Hill. The word ‘engraved’ simultaneously calls to mind both the imprint of a stylus on a wax tablet, and the framed engraving Miriam admired so much in Mr Hancock’s office with its ‘quiet, sharp cheering lines’ (II, p. 49).

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The London life is finally and conclusively defined here as a ‘past’ life, which has been ‘laid up’ throughout Pilgrimage’s, and Miriam’s, perambulations. There is also guilt here: Miriam has just returned from a visit to Amabel and Michael, and has been confronted with the consequences of her decision to bring them together, as Amabel tells her:  ‘Marriage is awful. I  mean just what I  say’ (IV, p. 604). The effort to neatly group the past, by arranging the cast of her life into neat framings, has been unsuccessful, and now this past (and by implication all the other ties, loyalties and experiences that Miriam has embraced and then escaped) is being repressed. This is not new. The whole structure of Pilgrimage, with its beginning at the point of leaving home and only references to childhood available in fragments, has been analysed as an exercise in selecting and repressing unwanted memories. Miriam’s ‘bee-memory’, for example, is so unusual for a first, defining memory that it is tempting to read it as a Freudian screen memory:  ‘instead of the memory which would have been justified by the original event, another memory is produced which has been to some degree associatively displaced from the former one’.133 Memory, always so important to Miriam as ‘inexhaustible wealth’, is tainted with ‘inexhaustible remorse’, but can be reclaimed. Left unexplored, the submerged, bad memories, such as the death of Miriam’s mother, are dangerous. The default reaction here is to create an illusory present, in which the threatening presence of painful memories is denied: ‘unforgiven, we scuttle away into illusions’ (IV, p.  607). However, illusions can be shattered, and memories can surface:  Miriam’s accidental, and subconscious, repeated Freudian stumbling upon ‘Teetgen’s Teas’ in London brings up the repressed memory of her mother’s death and its possible import: ‘Why must I always think of her in this place? [. . .] I am meant to go mad. If not, I should not always be coming along this piece without knowing it, whichever street I take’ (II, p. 136). Submerged memories (as in the writing of H.D., Ford and Sinclair) are dangerous. Hypo Wilson advises Miriam in Revolving Lights that distance is necessary for the practice of writing, saying that she will be able to write her experiences, given time:  ‘You’re too near. But you will. Save it up. You’ll see all these little excursions in perspective when you’re round the next corner’. However, Miriam is contemptuous: ‘Oh, I hate all these written-up things: “Jones always wore a battered cricket cap, a little askew” ’ (III, p. 377). The danger, as Miriam sees it, is that

133

Sigmund Freud, ‘Screen Memories’, in Collected Papers Vol. V, ed. James Strachey (London: The Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-analysis, 1957), pp. 47–69, p. 52. For an in-depth discussion of screen memories in Pilgrimage, see Carol Watts.

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temporal distance from events could homogenize them, and the variety of information gathered about a person, the variety of visual selves witnessed, could be reduced to one misleading snapshot: ‘It’s the “always wore.” Trying to get at you’. Because of this danger, the gallery space conception of memory is all-important. Any memory images selected to represent something must represent it fully, and therefore must be multiple:  ‘innumerable [. . .] all telescoping into each other, criss-cross. Filmesque’.134 The memories here are not only ‘filmesque’ in the capturing of movement, but also in the montage effect of juxtaposed images, some still and some moving. With self-forgiveness, and full self-realization via memory, the ‘energy’ currently used as a screen, as ignorance and self-deception can be directed towards something else. The something else is the practice of writing, enabled by the ‘wealth’ of experience acquired throughout Miriam’s adult life. On the way to Dimple Hill, with the place on her mind, the experiences that present themselves are ‘Dimple Hill scenes’. In searching for material for an article (what Richardson calls a ‘middle’), in her early efforts towards writing experience, Miriam reviews the visual material she has been storing up: ‘One after another the scenes passed before me, each with its unique claim. Impossible to choose’ (IV, p. 610). Memory is then unavoidably connected to the practice of writing, in Miriam’s mind. To write is to remember, and to record remembrances. Miriam’s thoughts about memory and writing are not merely theoretical in March Moonlight, they are based upon her own actual writing practice. In one scene, Miriam reminisces about the first journalistic sketches she produced, and her effort to understand and characterize her own writing practice in producing these. When reflecting upon the success of one ‘middle’ based on a recalled ‘Dimple Hill scene’, Miriam tries to theorize her preoccupation with writing as based upon image recall. Her editor, Mr Godge: warns me that there is not a living to be made from sketches like Auction ‘because they take too much thought.’ What does he mean by thought? Imagination? Not in the sense of making up. Imagination means holding an image in your mind. When it comes up of itself, or is summoned by something. Then it is not outside, but within you. And if you hold it, steadily, for long enough, you could write about it for ever. (IV, p. 613)

Writing, then, is enabled by a steady visual memory: by having possession of an inner image, whether ‘summoned’ as associative memory (or Proustian involuntary memory), or appearing of its own accord. What makes writing possible is

134

Letter to Peggy Kirkaldy, 25 August1929, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.

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the ability to hold on to one image ‘steadily’ enough, and ‘for long enough’. Carol Watts writes that this metaphor ‘is a rather static conception, which the narrative has itself long surpassed’.135 However, this disparity between the moving, whirling world and the stillness and concentration needed in order to capture as much as possible is precisely the point. Miriam stresses the difficulty and necessity of holding the image ‘steadily, for long enough’, implying that the image itself is a moving one, and prone to sudden movements, changes and disappearances. It is anything but static. This ‘holding an image in your mind’ seems to have been Dorothy Richardson’s own writing practice, particularly at the beginning of the series. Gloria Fromm points out that, in the manuscript draft of Pointed Roofs, Richardson appears to be literally striving to see what her heroine sees. In the scene where Pastor Lahmann removes Miriam’s glasses, thus reducing her vision and her power, Richardson’s handwriting ‘takes on a radically different appearance’. From this Fromm infers that Richardson must have removed her own glasses in order to see the image more clearly, as Miriam would be seeing it:  ‘Both of them are looking at the same time at the blurred image of Lahmann’.136 The taking off of Richardson’s glasses enables the image to be held in her mind, steadily and with a certain clarity. Richardson’s first chapter-volume of Pilgrimage and Miriam’s writing of ‘middles’ thus share a writing process. The article referred to in this section of March Moonlight, ‘Auction’, has a real-life counterpart. Dorothy Richardson wrote, as one of her first ever published pieces, a ‘middle’ called ‘A Sussex Auction’, which she sent to the Saturday Review from her chalet in Châteux d’Oex and which was published in June 1908.137 She published several similar pieces, all set in and around the Quaker household, in the Saturday Review, including ‘Strawberries’, ‘Peach Harvest’, ‘Across the Year’ and ‘Welcome’. ‘A Sussex Auction’, with its direct representation of two Quaker farmers (Alfred and Richard Roscorla in Pilgrimage), dwells instead of on the Auction itself, on the visual display of the crowd and the feeling evoked in them by the auction. Richardson’s preoccupation with the visual glory and pervasive presence of the scenery is highlighted, even in this formative piece: The passage of the clouds across the wide sky, the pageant of the afternoonlight, the flight of birds over the rolling meadow-land, the kindly grey downs

135 136 137

Watts, p. 77. Fromm, p. 70. For the circumstances surrounding the writing of this article, and Richardson’s subsequent return to Sussex, see Fromm, p. 59.

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in the distance are all unnoticed. Except perhaps by the girls who hover round the margin of the moving group. But they, too are in bondage. Even those among them who are as yet detached enough to see and feel the beauty of the day, whose perceptions are as yet unentangled, undimmed, see only in proportion as the shadow of fate draws alluringly on.138

The action of the auction itself, and the drama of acquisitiveness, is what creates the ‘bondage’ and entanglement which blocks the sight of beauty from the eyes of the farmers. The narrator, however, sees this, and wishes to highlight its importance in the scene. Fromm writes that Richardson ‘tried to be both participant and observer, to achieve a form of distance that paradoxically made for closeness. She wanted to implicate her reader by conveying a sense of immediacy, a sense of the experience taking place in the present, and she wanted also to be the agent of transmission’.139 The narrator in ‘A Sussex Auction’ is a part of the crowd of bidders, and yet apart, much as the women who ‘hover round the margin’ of the auction are both involved and ‘detached enough’ to see clearly. What Fromm calls the ‘sense of the experience taking place in the present’ is also apparent in this sketch. What starts as a past-tense, third-person description of a typical auction quickly becomes a present-tense account of one particular auction. Miriam, similarly, needs the multiple focus of presence within a scene and enough detachment to focus the scene. Carol Watts writes that ‘Miriam must be both inside and outside, part of life and yet its spectator, simultaneously, in order to write’.140 Both Richardson and Miriam are concerned with the role of spectator within and yet on the margins of a crowd, but crucially, with the ‘inner’ and ‘outer’ as consciousness and external reality, not just placement within the scene. How does one record, not the scene itself, but the scene as perceived by someone with a rich, mediating consciousness? In the earlier manuscript fragments of March Moonlight, Richardson struggles to articulate the inherent desire to do something new with the point of view, and the visual, in ‘A Sussex Auction’. She has Miriam thinking about her own piece, ‘Auction’, in these terms:  ‘It was reality focussed, walking alone, walked in, with all the observant astonishing the unconscious detailed observation belonging to adventure, unnoticed at the time, but returning in concentration to surprise & delight & instruct & illuminate one’s

138 139 140

Dorothy Richardson, ‘A Sussex Auction’, in The Saturday Review (13 June 1908), p. 755. Fromm, p. 61. Watts, p. 72.

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whole being’.141 The narrator is indeed observant, but whether this is ‘astonishing’, ‘unconscious’ or ‘detailed’ appears to be troubling Richardson. What is clear to her, however, is that the piece was not constructed to be like this, but became a piece focussed on ‘detailed observation’ of ‘reality’ due to an un-thought-out impulse. This impulse to record the minute and seemingly insignificant details of a scene is surprising, and illuminating in its apparent success. Miriam, in the unpublished fragment, then wonders how she has achieved this effect: Result of disinterested contemplation? And that is why, while writing Auction, I suddenly knew what Hypo meant when he said you don’t know what you think until you begin to write, realised that within the close concentration needed to translate anything into words, your thought, touching living reality, becomes itself alive; viable. Almost all my writing before Auction was conscious, knowing all the time exactly what it was doing & why.142

The phrase ‘disinterested contemplation’ recalls Matthew Arnold’s famous advocation of disinterestedness in his essays on culture and understanding, and his claim that modernity is so vast and so overwhelming that the only way to comprehend it is to distance oneself and find ‘the true point of view from which to contemplate this spectacle’.143 Miriam, in realizing that her good writing has been enabled by ‘disinterested contemplation’ is echoing Arnoldian bewilderment in the face of the modern and the cosmopolitan. Her understanding of Hypo Wilson’s advice, that ‘you don’t know what you think until you begin to write’, is changed subtly into a reaffirmation of her own theory that, in order to write, you must journey deep into yourself, to find and communicate with ‘living reality’. Reality, in Richardson’s striking metaphor, is within the self, and thought, which is liminally not quite outside and not quite within, must concentrate itself, journey inwards in order to become alive. ‘Auction’, Miriam thinks, is more true because it comes from within, rather than from arresting perceptions from outside as they are perceived. A journey inwards and out again is necessary for representation: perceptions can never be merely caught and transcribed. The journey within also liberates the writer from a surface preoccupation with questions of 141

142 143

Dorothy Richardson, March Moonlight MS, Folder 193, Box 9, General Collection, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. Ibid. Matthew Arnold, ‘On the Modern Element in Literature’, in The Complete Prose Works of Matthew Arnold, Vol. 1:  On the Classical Tradition, ed. R. H. Super (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1960), p. 20. For an insightful discussion of Arnold’s aesthetic disinterestedness see Amanda Anderson, pp. 91–118.

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technique or style. Richardson echoes this many years later, in a letter to Bernice Elliot: Aunt-like, I pass on to you a piece of advice you are probably not at all in need of, given to me, some quarter of a century ago, by the editor of the Saturday Review in welcoming my first sketch, which also was a farmhouse incident:  never write without a real impulse, without first having been moved to record.144

The impulse is what enables the writing to touch ‘living reality’, but paradoxically, the writing is also enabled by ‘disinterested contemplation’. It is this distance that allows the narrator of ‘A Sussex Auction’ to both be a part of the crowd watching the bidding, and to note the crowd’s reactions, and the beauty of scenery simultaneously. ‘Welcome’ also illustrates the desire for distance and closeness, and Richardson’s struggle to realize this, particularly well. It is thematically characteristic in that it deals with a train journey, with scenery in motion and with Richardson’s current preoccupation of how to translate images into language. The unnamed character and the process of travelling and of thought in motion are represented in the second person, and for the most part, in the present tense: The tones and phrases, the thoughts and the pictures of the last few weeks had found you helpless; and as you made your way across the terminus they still hung and danced like gnats round your head [. . .] you unfolded your paper and put off the moment of release [. . .] you argued with your columns. They led you from formula to formula. You pierced each one, rejecting and substituting, applying with feverish rapidity group after group of fresh values, playing with the sense of holding your world from fifty points of view at once and all the while, behind you, the great gateway was opening . . . Still you bandied thoughts until at last when your eyes were drawn to the windows you were shamed and unfit, able only to peer and catalogue. [. . .] You must withdraw your useless eye and let the train swing on and the dream flow by. You must deal with your prison of words, with the dust and din. [. .] In and out winds the little train until the moving picture slows down and is still and you may go out and breathe the gorse-sweet air. [. . .] The barriers are gone, the way opens clear to the heart and centre of which the wide scene now so safely yours for the coming weeks is but a lavish setting.145 144

145

Letter from Dorothy Richardson to Bernice Elliot, c. 3 November 1937, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. Dorothy Richardson, ‘Welcome’, in The Saturday Review (18 May 1912), pp. 620–1.

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Memory is present from the very first line, as ‘tones’, ‘phrases’, ‘thoughts’, and ‘pictures’ surround, haunt and buzz around the protagonist. However, despite the obvious sense of freedom and anticipation of the refuge waiting at the end of the train journey, any thoughts of this, or pure appreciation of perceptual beauty, are deliberately banished by a preoccupation with newspaper reading, with the reductive nature of words as thought, of a ‘feverish’ compulsion to make meaning out of multiple points of view. This ‘prison’ is then so restrictive that even when ‘you’ glance outside, the beauty of the landscape in movement is not perceptible. What is perceptible, even beyond the haze of a struggle with language, is the snapshot image of the final destination: ‘All through the journey it had stood dim and clear and dim again  – the old brown house on the crest of the hill at the end of the grass lane’. It is striking that, in this story of 1912, Richardson uses the metaphor of a ‘moving picture’ for her view from the framing of the train window, and yet it is not a privileged view, as it becomes in Dawn’s Left Hand in 1931. Instead, the moving picture, framed by the train window, is something that cannot be seen: not due to its own lack of power, but to the ‘useless eye’ of the protagonist and their preoccupation with a remembered mental image, which acts as a barrier between the internal and external. It is the ‘old brown house’ itself that the story is really about, that Richardson leads the reader to the door of: ‘No challenge stands at the gate, no fear, no shadow of reproach. The door is open. You may press forward now, childlike, in a hungering certainty’.146 The ‘welcome’ of the title is the welcome of the space itself, the site of childhood and of memory, not the welcome of one person to another. The house in question is of course the Roscorlas’ in Pilgrimage, with its ‘serene face’ (IV, p. 446), but the end of ‘Welcome’ is also a version of the idealized Quaker welcome that Miriam imagined before she sets off for Dimple Hill: ‘she went up a pathway towards a farmhouse within whose doorway stood a little group of grey-clad Quaker women, smiling a gentle welcome’ (IV, p. 430). In ‘Welcome’, significantly, the figures are absent, and the protagonist’s perception of the scenery is the focus. At the beginning of Richardson’s writing life, in all her Sussex sketches, she is preoccupied with capturing both still and moving images. As Mr Godge, the editor of ‘the Friday’ in March Moonlight says, with relation to Miriam’s Dimple Hill sketches: ‘If you can describe people as well as you can describe scenes, you should be able to write a novel’ (IV, p. 613).

146

Ibid., p. 621.

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Miriam, thinking these issues through on her train journey to Dimple Hill, reacts to this advice with unease: But it is just that stopping, by the author, to describe people, that spoils so many novels? A copse sails by, bringing escape, absence within its glimmering depths. Now open country. Sweet air, elastic; perceptible even within the Londonimpregnated carriage. Lowering the half-opened window, she sits down to attend to a hovering statement now come into the open to answer this man’s evident belief in the importance of novels. Novels are irrelevant (IV, pp. 613–14).

As with the protagonist in ‘Welcome’, Miriam is on a train, enclosed in a ‘London-impregnated carriage’, struggling with words, thoughts, and statements. The scene of the train carriage and the view of the scenery gliding past is in the present tense, as in ‘Welcome’, and Miriam sitting, does so in the third person, despite the surrounding narrative being rendered in the first person.147 This is reminiscent of the attempt at immediacy in several of Richardson’s Sussex sketches, with action described in the present tense, and thoughts conducted directly as monologue. The passage here is not only Miriam’s musings about writing, but written in a way that suggests her (and Richardson’s) early prototypes. Miriam’s question about whether the overt description of people is detrimental to novels is answered here by the narration, which, tongue in cheek, turns her attention to the scenery. Unlike the protagonist in ‘Welcome’, Miriam can see the scenery outside the window, despite her preoccupation with the ‘prison of words’.148 The ‘copse’ sailing by brings ‘escape’ from this prison, and a suggestion of ‘absence’ in ‘depth’: the very depth and distance that is Miriam’s reason for being on the train, escaping to her Dimple Hill retreat. The struggle is over here: the background, so powerful as to inform Miriam’s thoughts, and to suggest release and freedom, is necessary to the contemplation of any ‘hovering statement’ which makes itself known. Miriam’s contemplation continues with a consideration of what exactly novels are irrelevant to, and this she does not decide here. Instead, she repeats her 147

148

The phrase ‘she sits down’ appears in the midst of extended interior monologue, in which Miriam refers to herself as ‘I’. ‘He [. . .] tells me to write only when moved to do so’ (IV, p. 613), swiftly followed by a second person thought, ‘And if you hold it, steadily, for long enough, you could write about it for ever’ (IV, p. 613), in which it is unclear whether Miriam is addressing herself or using ‘you’ to mean ‘one’. Shortly after the narrative states ‘she sits down’, Miriam returns to her first person thoughts: ‘Perhaps novels are important. Whenever anyone sneers at them I am moved to defend’ (IV, p. 614). Richardson, ‘Welcome’, p. 621.

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previous assertion that to write a novel would mean ‘spending enormous pieces of life away from life’, and that ‘perhaps novels are important. Whenever anyone sneers at them I am moved to defend’ (IV, p. 614). A contemplation of the scenery breaks in once again, and continues to inform, or take on characteristics of, Miriam’s thought: Green meadows, low-lying. Red-brown Herefords, with ghost-white masks, all seated, serenely chewing. Every line of their confident great shapes rebuking contempt for anything or anybody. (IV, p. 614)

People who sneer at novels are not worth considering, the cows seem to tell Miriam. Their placid, rural and ‘serene’ shapes are a comic image, acting as ridicule for Miriam’s own earnest line of questioning, as well as ‘rebuking’ the earnestness of other people’s high-minded and contemptuous artistic judgements. They represent to Miriam the feeling that she already has, that she must not involve herself with the distinctions and prejudices of others, that these are ridiculous, irrelevant and do not concern her. The scenery here both influences Miriam’s thought (the sight of the cows, looking serene) and acts as a screen for her internal monologue (the ‘line’ of their ‘shapes’ becomes, in Miriam’s projection, an active agent, rebuking). The question Miriam is considering is answered by Richardson here, and it relates to Miriam’s previous ideas about the novel: ‘the torment of all novels is what is left out’ (IV, p. 239). What is left out of novels, Miriam suggests, is scenery, or what she sees in herself as her ‘love of backgrounds’ (IV, p. 361). This motif of the perceived lack in male novelists is a recurring theme. It is Richardson’s conception of the ‘enclosed resounding chamber’ of James in the 1939 foreword (I, p. 11), and the ‘magic circle’ that is Richardson’s view of Proust’s restrictions.149 In Pilgrimage, Miriam takes up the refrain, with relation to one Russian novelist, but ultimately to all male writers: ‘Turgenieff. Perfection. But enclosed, as all great novelists seem to be, in a world of people. People related only to each other. Human drama, in a resounding box. Or under a silent sky’ (IV, p. 416). There are too many people, and there is not enough space. The ‘resounding chamber’, ‘resounding box’ and ‘magic circle’ of male writers means that their portrayal of people is insubstantial somehow: the background needs to be incorporated in order for people to be perceived in their proper context, or proper relations. One of Richardson’s dilemmas, in the writing of Pilgrimage, was how to get the backgrounds in, with their due importance, whilst focussing on them from within Miriam’s consciousness. 149

Letter to Peggy Kirkaldy, 22 August 1928, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.

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It was a task that became easier as Miriam became older. Richardson writes to E. B. C. Jones in 1921 that: It has been “horrible” to refrain from objective descriptions of her family [. . .] & surroundings. The people & surroundings that come later are clearer because you see her seeing them, for the first time, & share her impressions such as they are.150

As Miriam matures and becomes more conscious of her surroundings and the way in which they shape her being, it is possible to show surroundings: but only through Miriam’s impressions. It is only because Miriam is conscious of her own relation to her surroundings that they can be incorporated in what is essentially a record of a consciousness moving through space. According to Miriam, male novelists, such as James and Proust, do not credit surroundings with the power to shape or inform a consciousness: to them, a background is merely a background. Michael Shatov, Miriam muses, thinks in this way too: in speech he describes people ‘as they appeared to him: delocalized, people in a void’ (III, p. 504). However, it is not that the backgrounds are left out, but that they are not given their due importance: But in all the books about people, even in novelettes, the chief thing they all left out, was there. They even described it, sometimes so gloriously that it became more than the people; making humanity look like ants, crowding and perishing on a vast scene. Generally the surroundings were described separately, the background on which presently the characters began to fuss. But they were never sufficiently shown as they were to the people when there was no fussing; what the floods of sunshine and beauty indoors and out meant to these people as single individuals, whether they were aware of it or not. (III, p. 243)

The ‘vast scene’ of the surroundings should not be merely a ‘background on which presently the characters began to fuss’, the characters in novels should be, but are not ‘shown as being made strong partly by endless floods of sunshine and beauty’ (III, p.  243). Elisabeth Bronfen writes that, to Miriam, ‘fiction’s primary concern is with surroundings, with the phenomenal world, and not with “human drama”; with the character’s or author’s standpoint in relation to these surroundings and not with explanatory facts’.151 However, the emphasis is not merely on point of view, Miriam’s own personal ‘standpoint in relation 150 151

Letter from Dorothy Richardson to E. B. C. Jones, 12 May 1921, British Library. Bronfen, pp. 216–17.

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to these surroundings’, but instead is twofold. Miriam as Romantic insists on the importance of a mystical communion with the phenomenological world: the two-way process of a character’s relationship with their surroundings, where the background informs the character as much as the character informs the landscape. This is made possible because of the transformative power of light, and of aesthetic beauty: those ‘endless floods of sunshine and beauty’ that make people strong. The relationship between the character and landscape is perhaps ‘left out’ of novels because it is not as important to other people as it is to Miriam. She continually rails against the perceived blindness of other characters in Pilgrimage in this respect. At the dental surgery, for example, she becomes impatient of the inane speech of the dentist and patient: ‘Could she not see, could not both of them see that the quiet sheen of the green-painted window frame cast off their complacent speech?’ (II, p. 250). When Miriam is stopped on the street by the dark figure of a man, her rage is not at his assumption that a woman alone must necessarily be a prostitute or ‘loose’ woman, but at his blindness: ‘Couldn’t the man see the look of the square and the moonlight?’ (II, p. 96). And on holiday, she feels that nobody is seeing their surroundings quite in the right way: ‘Do you realize? Do you realize you’re in Brussels? Just look at the white houses there, with the bright green trees against them in the light’ (II, p. 42). All of these examples have two things in common. They all feature ‘light’ as an aestheticizing influence, and they all display Miriam’s feeling that the beauty of certain backgrounds should not only inform people’s feelings, but also prohibit certain behaviour. Dorothy Richardson herself was continually bemoaning other people’s inability to see. In a letter to Bryher from Les Hirondelles in Switzerland, she comments on the recent Spring exodus of holiday-makers: For days the sports-birds have fled, shrieking, down to Italy. How, with curses on their lips, are they going to SEE , when they have passed, through that gold-laced tunnel, from our now misty black & white, to the colour of Italy?152

The wrong kind of behaviour, in this case a British railing against the weather, blocks the right kind of appreciation of beauty. If they cannot see, and participate in the ‘misty black and white’ of Switzerland, then they will not be able to appreciate either the ‘colour of Italy’. 152

Letter to Bryher, 8 April 1924, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.

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Richardson portrays Miriam as deliberately open-eyed and aware of the backgrounds of her life, and the sense of them as participating in her life. The pointed roofs of Hanover, the streets of London, the mountains and skies of Oberland, the rooms and cafes which she inhabits, the Sussex countryside, the writing table that establishes itself as the centre of her life are not the backdrop to Miriam’s bildungsroman, they inform it: they create Miriam’s consciousness. Because of this importance, these backgrounds imprint themselves more readily in memory than other events or sights. Miriam is even aware of this process as it happens. While on holiday at the Brooms’, for example, Miriam registers a memory as it forms itself as memory: ‘This still air passing into her spirit, the great trees standing in it, thick with coloured leaves upon the spread of misty grass, stamping their image, would remain when the rest of the holiday was forgotten’ (III, p. 445). She seems to sense the metaphorical ‘stamping’ of the image of the trees, the colour and the mist and knows that the image is now ‘written indelibly’ in memory (III, p. 503). The sights of Switzerland, in particular, are noted as they register themselves. In Oberland, Miriam looks with fresh eyes on ‘the Switzerland that had brought them both here, and now suddenly came back, enhanced, a single unbounded impression that came and was gone, that was the face of its life now begun in her as memory’ (IV, p. 78). She sees Switzerland in retrospect, even as she is there:  the ‘single unbounded impression’ has the unity of recalled images because it is in the process of being recorded and thus recallable. The chasm between the two parts of the double impression has been bridged.

Gallery spaces: Memory and metaphor in Richardson and H.D. Memory has been commonly conceptualized, throughout history, as a writing process. In Aristotle’s ‘On Memory and Reminiscence’, the site of memory is figured as a wax tablet, on which forms of perception stamp themselves. The initial perception, ‘phantasm or mental image’, is imprinted as a signet ring imprints soft wax: leaving a facsimile copy of the image on the ‘wax slab’ of memory.153 As David Farrell Krell puts it: ‘what we see, hear, smell, taste, feel, or even think are the signets, the styluses, the protruding edges of stamps and seals, the 153

David Farrell Krell, Of Memory, Reminiscence, and Writing: On the Verge (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), p. 16.

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cutting edge of our experience’.154 The metaphors used here are striking in two ways: firstly because they are so strikingly similar to Jesse Matz’s concept of the double impression, as a perception creating an actual ‘impress’ – a pressure put upon a malleable surface in order to leave a mark – and secondly because they constitute a mixture of iconography and typography. The signet ring has a visual design on it, a picture which can produce copies of itself, but at the same time, the image of the wax tablet is one of a blank space for writing.155 David Farrell Krell theorizes iconography and typography as being necessarily conjoined: And just as protoperception seemed to relate closely to touch, so did both time and images touch on memory – as a signet ring touches sealing wax. Yet typography alone failed to resolve the ontological aporia of memory. [. . .] Typography therefore issued onto iconography. The phantasm or imprint is an icon of the absent thing. Yet the icon can function only by virtue of some motion by which we can eventually either see the icon under its own aspect or ‘read’ it as referring to an other. With this reference to reading we find ourselves on the verge of engrammatology: the typos is an engram, an inscribed or incised letter, element, or portrait, purporting to be an icon.156

The imprint, whether word or icon, is encoded, a sign standing for the signified: not quite the signified itself. In Aristotle’s wax tablet image, and its subsequent elaboration by Socrates, there is a distrust of words as complete signifiers of the thing itself. The image impressed upon the memory, when the original is absent, becomes an icon, which is altogether more satisfactory as a representation of that original. However, in Aristotle’s argument, the icon still needs to be read, to be interpreted: which act of reading implies, again, typography. The wax tablet as a space for either a ‘signet’ or a ‘stylus’ is taken up, in varying forms, by subsequent philosophers. Augustine, for example, conceives of memory as ‘words conceived on the basis of the images of these things’, implying an interpretative process of engrammatology before memories of images are fixed; Descartes states that ‘the sensus communis has a function like that of a

154 155

156

Ibid., p. 14. Krell explores this double possibility through his etymological analysis of the word ‘typos’: ‘The word ho typos probably derives from – and at all events is related to – the verb typtō, “to beat, strike or smite,” in the sense for example of striking a coin. (The Greek word for hammer is hē typas, hē typis.) In Homer the noun typos refers to a blow or to the beat of horses’ hooves, and by extension to the effects of such a blow or applied pressure: ho typos may be the impression made by a signet ring, the stamp on a coin, and an imprint or trace of any kind. It may be a figure worked in relief, a carved or modeled image’ (Ibid., p. 23). The hammer beat, or blow, can strike out both letters and images. Ibid., p. 47.

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seal, impressing on the fancy or the imagination, as though on wax, those very figures and ideas that come uncontaminated and without bodily admixture from the corporeal senses’, insisting on the ‘uncontaminated’ nature of pure perception and the possibility of its literal transcription.157 Sigmund Freud’s Mystic Writing Pad significantly uses a very similar metaphor, introducing layers of perception and memory, as Edward Sampson notes: ‘the surface layer is open and permeable to the reception of incoming materials; it remains forever fresh however, only by virtue of the erasure that occurs each time the surface is lifted from its wax underbase’.158 Freud’s emphasis though, is on the faint traces of writing still to be seen on the wax under certain lights, which symbolize the ‘permanent – even though not unalterable  – memory-traces’ of the initial perceptions.159 Neuroscientists and psychologists today, as Krell notes, use as their metaphors: ‘ “registration” or “encoding,” “retention” or “storage,” and “retrieval.” ’160 The registering of impressions implies an ordered system of fixing memory:  the memory is registered, accounted for, catalogued; the phrase ‘encoding’ implies a change of state, with the perception no longer a pure perception, or a pure image, but something coded, transcribed, altered, impressed. Jacques Derrida uses Freud’s Mystic Writing Pad to argue for the change of state inherent in this registering of impressions, or grammatology. In Derridean thought, the writing that constitutes memory ‘supplements perception before perception even appears to itself ’.161 As Nicola King writes in Memory, Narrative, Identity: Remembering the Self, the concept of memory, let alone any attempt at understanding the process of memory, requires metaphor: When people try to articulate the ways in which they remember, metaphor seems inevitable: one person will talk in terms of photographs, or of videotape; another will describe a ‘black box’ inside her containing traces of all the events she has ever experienced. [. . .] all those metaphorical accounts of memory indicate that it cannot be thought or represented except in terms of something that already determines how we conceive of it.162

157 158

159

160 161 162

Ibid., p. 54, p. 58. Edward Sampson, ‘Foundations for a Textual Analysis of Selfhood:  The Deconstruction of the Self ’, in Texts of Identity, ed. John Shotter and Kenneth J.  Gergen (London:  Sage Publications, 1989), p. 10. Sigmund Freud, ‘A Note Upon the “Mystic Writing-Pad” ’ (1925), in Collected Papers, Vol. V, ed. James Strachey (London: The Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-analysis, 1957), pp. 175– 80, p. 176. Krell, p. 87. Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), p. 224. Nicola King, Memory, Narrative, Identity:  Remembering the Self (Edinburgh:  Edinburgh University Press, 2000), p. 9.

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Towards the end of Pilgrimage, as Miriam turns to writing in order to make sense of her collected memories, the problem of conceptualizing memory gains prominence. She turns, once again, to visual metaphors. After visiting the Wilsons in their home for the first time, Miriam’s mind is ablaze with the memories of the evening, comparing this to ‘the feeling after a dance’: ‘your mind full of pictures and thoughts, and the evening coming up again and again, one great clear picture in the foreground of your mind’ (II, p. 129). The morning-after memory of a Shakespeare play is a ‘richly moving picture’ (II, p. 177), and staring into the fire brings memories as a ‘flood of images’ (II, p. 298). Memories, the ‘visible past’ (II, p. 318), are available to be ‘gazed’ at, or consumed ‘in a single glance’ (II. p. 214); they are also continually referred to as ‘visions’ or ‘scenes’, ‘scenes from all the levels of her life, deep-rooted moments still alive within her’ (II, p. 334). Recent memories are not only separate scenes, but part of a contained, internal vastness, present to Miriam at times as: ‘the whole panorama of one’s recent life as it lay spread out in one’s consciousness’ (IV, p. 279). These memories are ‘alive’, but not always easy to access, as when Miriam feels ‘the pain of trying to get back into the moment of the first vision of spring, the perfect moment before the thought came that spring [. . .] was over’ (II, p. 403); they are stored ‘within’, inside the ‘abyss’ of the inner self: ‘She glanced into the open abyss at her own form staring up from its depths, and through her brain flew, in clear record, decisive moments of the past; herself, clearly visible, clothed as she had been clothed’ (III, p. 74). Memories are viewable only in certain lights: ‘the rosy light shone into far-away scenes with distant friends. They came into her mind rapidly one by one, and stayed grouped in a radiance, sharper and clearer than in experience’ (II, p. 406). The similarity here between Miriam’s memories showing ‘sharper and clearer than experience’ and Sinclair’s insistence that her impressions of war-time Belgium, mediated by time, are more ‘sharp and clean’ than they were in the moment, is striking. Similarly, Richardson’s and Sinclair’s presentations of the ‘primary perception’ as epiphany is echoed by the insistence in Pilgrimage that memories too are enabled by light: ‘The scenes she watched opened out one behind the other in clear perspective, the earlier ones remaining visible, drawn aside into bright light as further backgrounds opened’ (III, p. 78). Memories are also referred to explicitly as recorded in different media, or conceptualized as technological instruments, for example in Miriam’s memory of the ‘green squares’ of London ‘telescoping away behind unforgotten, still visible’ (II, p.  425); the eyes ‘all taking photographs’ in Interim (II, p. 376); the ‘bright moving patchwork’ of memories in Revolving Lights, and the experience ‘engraved upon the aunt’s consciousness’

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that Marian (Miriam’s niece) perceives in March Moonlight (IV, p. 584). Upon her return from her holiday in Switzerland, Miriam feels she cannot explain the experience to her friends: an attempt to do so would be ‘Piecemeal, everything piecemeal. What Oberland meant apart from people no-one would ever know’ (IV, p. 140). Attempts at spoken communication would reduce the experience to snapshots, piecemeal moments presented in misleading juxtapositions. The revelatory experience of going ‘round the world’ can never be shared, but does have its lasting effect, a new, cinematic way of seeing that, having been realized, will always be available: The memories accumulated since she landed were like transparent film through which clearly she saw all she had left behind; and felt the spirit of it waiting within her to project itself upon things just ahead, things waiting in this room as she came up the stairs. (IV, p. 141)

Here the remembering self is a projector, and the memories themselves the film: the memories can be projected upon the external realities of everyday life, and perception itself can be changed by memory in this way. Miriam’s choice of aesthetic metaphors: telescopes, paintings, film clips, patchworks, landscape vistas, photographs and so on reflect the aesthetic experiments she has drawn on throughout Pilgrimage, and visual memory thus refers back to the framework for visual sensibility which she has built up in her experiences since leaving home in Pointed Roofs. H.D., again, conceptualizes memory in a very similar way to Richardson. For her, memories are sometimes in the mind: ‘the crystal ball of her past, all the memories shut up in one small spherical surface, her own head, to be watched going round and round and round’,163 and sometimes images projected against floors and ceilings: Memory in her thought was all about her. The very plaques of the floor marble she had trod on (a slight foot curling under at its sudden impact) were square on square of beautiful spaced flowering. Memory would serve to plant square on square of exact proportion and of colour on the floor she had last stepped on, wandering in her wraith-like and disembodied ecstasy (some hours since?) toward a silver flood that had threatened to shut down on her, to prison her, tomb-like in some Egyptian coffin. Memory would paint over apprehension, lotus-vision, with actual image.164

163 164

H.D., Palimpsest, p. 172. Ibid., pp. 53–4.

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Ford, too, in his memoir Joseph Conrad, sees memories projected onto the façades of the present. At the moment when he becomes aware of Conrad’s death, strikingly, he sees a remembered scene layered over the wall next to him: The writer exclaimed: Look! Look! . . . His companion unfolded the paper. The announcement went across two columns in black, leaded caps . . . SUDDEN DEATH OF JOSEPH CONRAD. They were demolishing an antiquated waiting-room on the opposite platform, three white-dusty men with pickaxes: a wall was all in broken zigzags. [. . .] There descended across the dusty wall a curtain of moonlight, thrown across by the black shadows of oak trees. We were on a verandah that had a glass roof. Under the glass roof climbed passion flowers, and vine tendrils strangled them. We were sitting in deck chairs. It was one o’clock in the morning. Conrad was standing in front of us, talking.165

The memory which projects itself is alive in vivid detail:  the sharpness with which the present-day wall in the process of being demolished is seen is continued in the recollection-seeing. The flowers, the roof, the time and the trees are all seen with a perfect clarity. Memories are often more real-seeming than any visual perception of the actual present world. For H.D.’s Raymonde, memories are distracting and dangerous:  ‘Faces, people, London. People, faces, Greece. Greece, people, faces. Egypt’; stopping to contemplate the past is like pulling up, out of the mind, ‘a net squirming with an enormous catch of varigated squirming tentacled and tendrilled memories’.166 The tentacled unsettling memories threaten to escape their net. For Raymonde to gain control of them, she must build a better net, or construct a kind of viewing tank: the memories must be made safe by artistic arrangement, or encoding. For Hipparchia too, gaining narrative control of her memories of Greece and artistically arranging her past is the first stage towards owning her future. Her memories of Greek islands are beads to be strung on a thread. She is ‘the one fated to recall the islands, to string them, thread them, irregular jagged rough-jewel on a massive necklet, no frail woman-ornament, nor one to be bartered for fresh continents, but to be laid simply at an altar, she officiating to re-sanctify it’.167 In this practice, she makes all her memories accessible, relatable to one another, and yet distinct. Each scene is a separate bead, but each bead is a part of one artistic whole. In Pilgrimage too, as Harriet Wragg 165 166 167

Ford, Joseph Conrad, p. 33. H.D., Palimpsest, p. 223. Ibid., p. 56.

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points out, the unifying thread between Miriam’s disparate visual metaphors for memory is that ‘in each image it is essential that all of her memories are visible at once’.168 Miriam’s inner memory space is not so much a wax tablet impressed with information, or a computer chip encoded with data, but a gallery space, with portraits, landscapes and even film clips, displayed in this virtual space, surrounding her, and able to be recalled in the same fashion that a work of art is viewed. The collection of memories in this space are both written and visual, and are fixed: unchanging and always present. Memories are durable; ‘rich deeps of experiences that would never leave her’ (III, p. 363): it is all written in the book of consciousness. Written indelibly. Because one can look to and fro, from one thing to another, and each remains in place, presenting always one face, like a photograph. (III, p, 503)

Here we have the text-image paradox once more: the memories may be ‘written in the book of consciousness’, in Richardson’s metaphor for durability, but each one is also an unchanging entity, ‘like a photograph’, a snapshot of a moment in time. The whole gallery space can be taken in at a glance, or a particular memory can be approached for a closer viewing (‘one can look to and fro’). This gallery space is sometimes conceptualized as an inner space, accessible by looking ‘within’, into the ‘open abyss’ of her self, at another self who is in there, surrounded. However, it is just as often an external, projected gallery space, with the actual physical Miriam gazing outwards at scenes projected, which come before her and surround her. Access to this stored memory requires a certain mode of being, as Richardson makes explicit in Revolving Lights: ‘she was once more in that zone of her being where all the past was with her unobstructed; not recalled, but present, so that she could move into any part and be there as before’ (III, p. 322). The past is present as a kind of haze, with ‘the whole of her happiness close about her’ (III, p. 323), and is not only a physical space that can be travelled towards, but is so vivid that memories can be experienced again, rather than just ‘recalled’. Miriam, as Ford in his projected memory of Conrad, can ‘be there as before’. Bryony Randall comments on this passage, with its relation to the ‘Bergsonian suggestion that the past is real, has never ceased to exist, and in remembrance we enter entirely into the past in order to make our selections among it’.169 The past is real to Miriam, and she can make her selections: zooming in on one portrait,

168 169

Wragg, p. 38. Randall, Modernism, Daily Time and Everyday Life, p. 61.

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landscape or moving figure for closer examination. However, Randall continues, Richardson diverges from the Bergsonian view, as she extends the idea of the past as present to one of past as spatial. Bergson ‘continually rails against what he calls the “spatialisation” of time’, and this is exactly what Richardson does.170 A more helpful comparison is perhaps between Richardson’s theory of memory and Gilles Deleuze’s commentary on Bergson. In Cinema 2, Deleuze clarifies that ‘the past’ is not an actual space, whilst still spatializing it in his metaphor of the ‘sheets’ of the past: The past is not to be confused with the mental existence of recollectionimages which actualize it in us. It is preserved in time: it is the virtual element into which we penetrate to look for the ‘pure recollection’ which will become actual in a ‘recollection-image’. The latter would have no trace of the past if we had not been to look for its seed in the past. It is the same with perception: just as we perceive things where they are present, in space, we remember where they have passed, in time, and we go out of ourselves just as much in each case. Memory is not in us; it is we who move in a Beingmemory, a world-memory.171

The past is akin to the ‘virtual’ gallery space in which Miriam moves, selecting aspects of the ‘sheet’ to transform into ‘recollection-images’ – the pictures, film clips and tapestries on the walls. This active process of selection and creation is then the model for Pilgrimage: the transformation of aspects of the sheet of the past into specific, concrete images – using, of course, the visual technologies and arts that are uppermost in Miriam’s consciousness as convenient metaphors for this process. In Richardson’s theory of memory, however, there is only one sheet. She has one whole past, just as she emphasizes that she possesses, underneath, one unchanging self: ‘I am myself and nothing changes me’ (II, p. 136). The characters in each of the three sections of Palimpsest have access not only to their own memories, but to the memories of their counterparts in the other sections. Ancient Greece, post-war London and modern-day Egypt (but also Ancient Egypt) are not confined to their separate sections, but superimposed one on the other. This makes it even more difficult for the characters to select and to frame their experiences, as their experiences are the experiences of ages. The heroine of ‘Secret Name’ brings together these pasts, which Hipparchia and Raymonde only circle. In her brief flirtation with Captain Rafton, her happiness makes her laugh and she becomes one with the past: ‘The laughter in her throat 170 171

Ibid., p. 62. Deleuze, p. 98.

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was Greek, was Egyptian. She was uttering a sound, a song that Greek and Egypt would equally recognise’:172 Her laugh again unexpected to herself, rang out. Uncanny, unreal, of Graeco-Egypt, emotional, unreticent, yet totally of London, and drift of mist about closed drawing rooms with curtains drawn, on faces of women. Faces of London, of New York, faces Egyptian or Greek [. . .] The laughter merged and made one all the selves, the self of the slave locked into the silver barred and shimmering intellect, the slave more langorous, yet still locked into the pleasure terraces of some Asiatic or Egyptian city, the other, the slave that held, a solid link, her everyday self, enslaved to both these others.173

The heroine of ‘Secret Name’ is referring to her own divided self, but also to the memories of Hipparchia and Raymonde Ransom. She sees the faces of Greek women and Egyptian women, and she sees a drawing room from her own past, in a misty London very similar to Raymonde’s misty London drawing rooms. Each self, divided, is partial:  the intellectual self, sensual self and the rational everyday self. However, ‘Secret Name’ brings together the three narratives in a resolution of unity, with memory of pasts unexperienced as the common thread between the three heroines: Hipparchia the Greek intellectual, Raymonde the sensual and ‘Secret Name’ the ‘slender balancing pole’ between the two extremes. A comprehensive, panoramic view of the past brings the artistic unity which is needed for unity of selfhood.174 Art itself also provides a model for the cohesion of the self, and the bringing together of the three disparate aspects of self. In Raymonde’s memory of Botticelli’s Primavera , it is the figures of the three Graces that she dwells upon: ‘But you know all the pictures. I think of them all, I still claim fealty to the eternally over-worked Botticelli Spring. It has some sort of veil across it. You can almost pull it aside and see them dancing. Back of the Botticelli there is another Botticelli.’ Raymonde saw the Primavera as she must always see it. It was a window, simply, through which one stood and gazed; the wonder of the Botticelli was simply that those creatures stood so static. Still and undeviating in their eternal gesture. Raymonde said, ‘artificial. Highly sensual’. Her words came to her from somewhere. Words that meant just nothing at 172 173 174

H.D., Palimpsest, p. 299. Ibid., pp. 301–2. Ibid., p. 297.

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all but that had to be spoken. People in Botticelli moved in a mist, moved in some region of super-sensuous beauty.175

The three dancing figures are the three aspects of Raymonde’s personality (Ray Bart the poet, Raymonde the woman, and the mediator with no name). They are also the three characters of Palimpsest. In visualizing them static, framed and stylized ‘in their eternal gesture’, Raymonde is clinging to an idea of herself as whole, unchanging, and artistically coherent. The veil over the Botticelli is what makes the picture static: it is the first layer of the painting. If the veil is lifted, Raymonde implies, the picture will move and the second layer of the painting will become visible. The painting itself has depths. In Pilgrimage, paintings are often described as three dimensional. They can be travelled into, and in the travelling, new meaning is discovered. The paintings at the Brooms’ house have long perspectives and as such are reminders of the one, ever-present past: their distances are adapted to hold aspects of a situation as memory. One landscape in particular has this function: Miriam pulled up in front of a large oil-painting over the sofa; its distances, where a meadow stream that was wide in the foreground with a stone bridge and a mill-wheel and a cottage half hidden under huge trees, grew narrow and wound on and on through tiny distant fields until the scene melted in a soft-toned mist, held all her early visits to the Brooms before they had discovered that she did not like sitting with her back to the fire. (II, p. 300)

The pictorial space holds the ghost-like echoes of pleasant social happenings in the domestic space. Miriam repeats this formulation to herself the next morning when she again finds herself in front of the painting: ‘The brown and green landscape caught her eye, old and still, holding all her knowledge of the Brooms back and back, fresh with another visit to them’ (II, p. 302). The ‘back and back’ of the stream as it ‘wound on and on’ is also the back and back of memory. The ‘old and still’ painting also becomes fresh as its memory vistas are renewed with a new visit: a new event being collected and waiting to become memory. The ‘back and back’ of certain types of images, Gilles Deleuze argues, is used in cinema to indicate a memory space: Depth of field creates a certain type of direct time-image that can be defined by memory, virtual regions of the past, the aspects of each region. This would

175

Ibid., pp. 146–7.

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be less a function of reality than a function of remembering, of temporalization: not exactly a recollection but ‘an invitation to recollect.176

It is the ‘depth of field’ that invites a contemplation of memory, as if viewing deep perspectives triggers a desire for retrospective, with the image becoming a metaphor for its associated desire to recollect. The painting at the Brooms’ becomes such a metaphor, and is extended, by Richardson, into a representational metaphor for memory, and for narrative coherence. The painting’s metaphoric association with the past enables Miriam, fresh from viewing it, to sort and classify her memories herself, as if they too are paintings:  ‘she found the nearer past, her years of London work set in the air, framed and contemplable like the pictures on the wall, and beside them the early golden years in snatches, chosen pictures from here and there, communicated, and stored in the loyal memory of the Brooms’ (II, p. 312).177 Elisabeth Bronfen characterizes Miriam’s ‘contemplative space’, the solitary space in which she can see and think clearly, as a space of distance in which sorting and classifying can take place:  ‘Miriam has recourse to such distanciation whenever she seeks to transform the contingencies of existence into a coherent, comprehensible narrative. For in the distanced position of contemplative space, lived space can be transformed into an image at the moment of perception, and thus be preserved in memory’.178 Miriam privileges the Brooms’ house as a unique space, where contemplation is possible even in company, but even at the Brooms’ it is necessary to be alone in order to see in perspective. A metaphorical escape into the world of the ‘brown and green’ landscape painting enables Miriam to create her own contemplative space, within the distances of the framed picture. We also find in the recurring trope of snatches of time as framed and ‘contemplable’ paintings a clue to Miriam’s ideas as to the progression of time. Days, as Bryony Randall notes, are continually conceived in terms of physical objects with ‘spatial characteristics’. The day ‘can surround Miriam as if it were a room that she enters; it can also enclose her as if it were a kind of fabric or clothing’.179 In one striking metaphysical image, Miriam moves towards a new day as if it were a framed picture that she can travel into: The old familiar presence was there in the hush of the night, dissolving the echoes of the day and promising, if she stayed long enough within it, the 176 177

178 179

Deleuze, p. 109. Samuel Taylor Coleridge uses the archaic word form ‘contemplable’ in his ‘Notes on Jeremy Taylor’, in The Literary Remains of Samuel Taylor Coleridge Vol. III (London: William Pickering, 1838), pp. 203–391, p. 320. Bronfen, p. 68. Randall, ‘Dailiness in Dorothy Richardson’s Pilgrimage’, p. 68.

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emergence of to-morrow, a picture, with long perspectives, seen suddenly in the distance, alone upon a bare wall. She stood still, moving rapidly into the neutral zone between the two days, further and further into the spaces of the darkness, until everything disappeared, and all days were far-off strident irrelevances, for ever unable to come between her and the sound of stillness and its touch, a cool breath, passing through her unimpeded. (III, p. 165)

This mystical feeling enables Miriam to feel enough detachment from her day, and from the sense of time in itself, to see the future as something ‘contemplable’, framed and distinct against the wall. The depth of the landscape paintings she admires is present in this imaginary excursion:  ‘long perspectives’ promising a day with innumerable possibilities, a space which she can enter and explore. However, she does not enter, but instead imagines herself at once staying ‘still’ and penetrating deeper into the liminal space of the gallery: the darkness, and the gap between the two days, in which events or ‘echoes’ from either day cannot touch her. Bronfen calls this realization of temporal, pictorial distance ‘the rendering of time as metaphorical space’, saying that Miriam’s phrases here ‘emphasise the fact that abandoning temporality immediately leads to an experience of space, which indicates an actual space, as well as an imaginative intimation of the depth of reality’.180 Bronfen is right to insist on this actuality:  Miriam’s traversing of space here is a literal movement into the gap between the days, with the ‘depth of reality’ figured in much the same way as the depths, distances and distant objects of physical painting can be literally moved into by Miriam’s consciousness. Pilgrimage is full of references not only to the reality of the past in the present, and the spatial presence of the past, but the wholeness of the past around her. An example is Miriam’s remembrance of spring in Deadlock, which she conceptualizes as ‘a vivid encirclement of her being by all the spring scenes she had lived through, coming and going, the sight and scent and shimmering movement of them, as if she moved, bodiless and expanded, about in their midst’ (III, p. 175). The space of memory, containing all the spring scenes previously experienced, is a method for creating ‘unity’: for making sense of separate experiences. Richardson’s decision to figure the past as a physical presence, as crucial to identity formation and to an individual’s experience of the present, makes visual memory a crucial factor in any effort to understand Pilgrimage.

180

Bronfen, p. 189.

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In H.D.’s memoir of her childhood years, The Gift, the past is also very much present. Crucial memories, such as the word game playing, an evening ritual heralded by the appearance of ‘the cardboard box of yellow squares’ are whole, perfect, and still ‘living’ even many years after they have happened:181 The cuckoo clock would not strike; it could not, because the world had stopped. It was not frozen in time, it was like one of Papalie’s water-drops that he had brought down from the mountains or from a trip to the Delaware Water Gap, in a jar. It was a drop of living and eternal life, perfected there; it was living, complete, not to be dried up in memory like pressed moss.182

H.D. presents the child Hilda’s experience of the perfect scene in the light of memory: the preservation of it as living memory affects her representation of its significance in the moment. The Hilda-child can perceive of this moment, even while it is taking place, as a complete and rounded memory like a ‘water-drop’ because of her power of pictorializing the narrative of her life. She feels sorry for the ‘university boys’ she sees at the theatre because they do not know, as she does, ‘how to look at pictures or to see things in themselves and then to see them as if they were a picture’.183 The procession of the theatre troops through the streets was ‘the very dawn of art, it was the sun, the drama, the theater, it was poetry – why, it was music, it was folklore and folksong, it was history’.184 The sudden perception of all arts in one art becomes a perception of all of life as a kind of art, where ‘the details of the parade came into another perspective, everything came true. [. . .] The street came true in another world’. After this realization, every scene she experiences at home and in her childhood home of Bethlehem is experienced as art: ‘when we got home everything was like that. If you take down one side of a wall, you have a stage’.185 The artificiality of art; the arrangement and distribution of messy and chaotic life into an ordered stageplay or a balanced tableau, makes reality somehow more true. This truth, in turn, allows the real to become a whole, complete and living memory to be carried through life, always present. Conceptualizing memory through metaphor allows for comprehensive access to those memories. If memories are only available to consciousness as fragmentary or ‘snapshot’ images, then although they are limited they are contained and

181 182 183 184 185

H.D., The Gift (London: Virago, 1984), p. 10. Ibid., pp. 10–11. Ibid., p. 17. Ibid., p. 18. Ibid.

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self-distinct. If they are then encoded as framed images then the conceptual leap of imagining the mind as a gallery of such images is instinctive and logical. If a precious family moment is conceived of as a ‘scene’ in a play, then all such scenes can be assembled coherently into acts. If, too, a remembered event takes the form of a film clip, it is always readily available for viewing. The mind must simply find the clip that is required and project it out. All these metaphors are ways of confirming possession of the relevant memories: of storing them as permanent data in the mind, and of ensuring their availability as raw material for art.

Conclusion: ‘Proust and Proust and Proust. Forwards, Backwards, Upside Down’

In the years leading up to 1922, Dorothy Richardson had been hearing a lot about Proust’s novels, and she was intrigued. She wrote to her friend P. B. Wadsworth in November of that year, knowing that he had the money and the resources to get hold of them for her: ‘I want if I can beg borrow or steal them those books of Prousts’.1 He sent her the first two, and the very next month she writes again: I am deep in the magic of Prousts [sic] flowering morass. There are ways in which he outdoes everyone. Oh the sublime simple perfection of his art, even in translation, (n.b. an almost perfect translation) the design, the detail, all one; the whole of him in every part. To read him is a thousand things at once, all overwhelming. Rapture, stupefaction, experience & adventure running abreast in the van. I feel at present that I shall read again & again; shall always be reading & every time in a different way.2

Richardson does indeed read Proust ‘again & again’. In 1924 she tells H.D. and Bryher that she is rereading Proust: ‘I read nothing else’.3 In the Spring of 1925, she tells Wadsworth about her ‘joy’ in the ‘overwhelming experience’ of reading the whole of Proust in French: ‘And still I read’.4 In 1926, again to Bryher, she writes: ‘Proust is here for the third time & being re-re-re-read from A. to Z’.5 In 1927, to P. B. Wadsworth, she writes: ‘Still Proust. I’m reading the eleven volumes for the umpteenth time & have him nearly by heart’,6 and then in the 1

2 3 4 5 6

Dorothy Richardson to P. B. Wadsworth, 11 November 1922, Berg Collection, New  York Public Library. Dorothy Richardson to P. B. Wadsworth, December 1922, Berg Collection, New York Public Library. Dorothy Richardson to Bryher, n.d. c. December 1924, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. Dorothy Richardson to P. B. Wadsworth, c. 10 April 1924, Berg Collection, New York Public Library. Dorothy Richardson to Bryher, n.d. c. November 1926, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. Dorothy Richardson to P. B. Wadsworth, n.d. c. 16 February 1927, Berg Collection, New York Public Library.

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same year, to H.D.: ‘Reading? The Morning Post and Proust and Proust and Proust. Forwards Backwards Up Side Down’.7 Between 1922 and 1927, she is obsessed and seems to read little else. She reads Proust, again and again, year after year. Proust’s project is similar to Richardson’s in several ways: the limited point of view, the impressionist approach to perception and its representation, the time-shifts, and the turn to memory at the end of the novel as the final aesthetic solution to the difficulties of narrating a series of complex and contradictory impressions. As Saunders puts it, ‘In A la recherche, the focus of the narrative shifts. While it starts by narrating epiphanies, the narrative becomes the search for a way to understand them, which turns out to be the method of recreating them as art’.8 This is Pilgrimage’s structure too. While memory has been present as a theme in both Richardson and Proust from the very beginning of both bodies of work, in the final volumes of both Pilgrimage and A la recherche, memory takes centre stage as an organizing structure: the means by which impressions are processed and understood; and a means of patterning and reordering the account already presented. For Richardson, this retrospective and retroactive patterning meant that Proust’s novels could be read in any order: I cut all those 5 vols piecemeal, leaving them all over the room, and read them in the same way, taking up the first handy vol. and opening at random. At last the whole hung and hangs, a tapestry all round me. It is I see now the tapestry of James – only immeasurably deeper and richer and though threadbare in patches it does what J.  ¼ tap. necer does. Lets through the light.9

The structure of A la recherche, as revealed through memory, allows the events narrated to become spatialized, to hang around Richardson in much the same way that her own memories do. She makes a connection between Proust’s narrative and Henry James’s ‘quarter tapestry’, and decides in favour of Proust’s, which is simultaneously ‘deeper’ because processed through memory, and illuminating because it shows a character informed by their surroundings and not imprisoned in an ‘enclosed resounding chamber where no plant grows and no mystery pours in from the unheeded stars’ (I, p.  11). The memories of the Proustian text are not only spatialized, they are personal. In Proust, as in Richardson, ‘the

7 8 9

Dorothy Richardson to H.D., n.d. March 1927, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. Saunders, Self Impression, p. 99. Dorothy Richardson to Bryher, n.d. c. January/February 1925, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. The typographical errors are in the original: Richardson is using a typewriter.

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individual psyche, rather than any external chronology, is construed as the privileged site of temporality’.10 Ford was also captivated by Proust’s approach to narrative. As Andrew Frayn notes, ‘He claimed to have been inspired to write the Parade’s End series by the death of Proust on 18 November 1922, the day Ford and Stella Bowen were scheduled to meet him’. This coincidence made an impression on Ford, and his subsequent work, particularly Parade’s End, exhibits a Proustian influence:  ‘memory, psychology, and time became focal points for Ford, although compared to Proust’s work there is a conspicuous lack of cake’.11 Frayn is referring here to the famous ‘madeleine’ episode, which appears at the very beginning of the first volume of A la recherche, Du côté de chez Swann, in which Proust’s narrator, upon tasting the small cake and his cup of tea, has a sudden feeling of happiness. He feels that this happiness must be connected to a memory, but he struggles to make that memory surface. Memory is thus figured in Proust’s work from its very inception, but, significantly, it is involuntary memory that is foregrounded here. Voluntary memory, Proust maintained, ‘belongs above all to the intelligence and the eyes’, and is incomplete and misleading: ‘but if an odour or a taste, re-encountered in totally different circumstances, unexpectedly reawakens the past in us then we can sense how different this past was from what we thought we could remember, like a painter working with false colours’.12 The impressions which were not overly processed by the intellect when they were registered are more pure and more truthful: they are the closest one can get to a realization of the primary impression. But because they were not translated by the ‘intelligence’ they are also difficult to access: The drink has called it into being, but does not know it, and can only repeat indefinitely, with a progressive diminution of strength, the same message which I cannot interpret, though I hope at least to be able to call it forth again and to find it there presently, intact and at my disposal, for my final enlightenment. I put down the cup and examine my own mind. It alone can discover the truth. But how? What an abyss of uncertainty, whenever the mind feels overtaken by itself; when it, the seeker, is at the same time the dark region through which it must go seeking and where all its equipment will avail it nothing. Seek? More than that: create.13

10 11 12

13

Danius, p. 92. Frayn, p. 176. Marcel Proust, interviewed by Elie-Joseph Bois, Le Temps, 13 November 1913; trans. by Roger Shattuck, in Proust (London: Fontana, 1974), p. 169. Marcel Proust, Swann’s Way (London: Vintage Classics, 2005), p. 52.

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Proust explores the gaps between the primary perception, its impression on the mind, and its retrieval through memory: the modernist concern in which, as Sara Danius puts it, ‘the continuity between categories of perceiving and categories of knowing is progressively suspended’.14 He finds a solution:  the chasm between the primary perception buried in the mind because not consciously interpreted, and the seeking present-day mind, can be bridged by creation. The intellect must now process and interpret the perception, if it is to be reclaimed. The beginning of Proust’s last volume sees the narrator back in his childhood town of Combray, and with his childhood crush Gilberte. The sight of certain scenes, bridges and footpaths that the young narrator had been familiar with stirs memories, and prompts him to tell Gilberte that the first time he had seen her in this scenery, he had loved her. ‘She replied: “Why didn’t you tell me? I had no idea. I loved you too. In fact I flung myself twice at your head” ’.15 The narrator does not remember this, but does remember Gilberte making a gesture at him which he had taken at the time as one of contempt, and gradually is made aware that the two are thinking of the same moment, but interpreting it in very different ways. The narrator, in his childhood, had received the impression and interpreted it imperfectly, and had also failed until this moment to revisit and reinterpret the impression: he had ‘been incapable of understanding this, having failed to recapture the impression until much later in my memory’;16 ‘and so I was obliged, after an interval of so many years, to touch up a picture which I knew so well’.17 There is a tension in this final volume between the truth of the moment, which is ‘fragmentary, secret, unpredictable’,18 and the ‘touching up’ of events in retrospect. Proust’s final novel thus begins with a construction remarkably similar to that with which Richardson’s final novel begins: the revisiting of faulty impressions and their ‘repairing’ or artistic reworking through memory. Memory is the solution to imperfect registration of impressions, but it is also fallible: later in the novel Gilberte’s imperfect memory (or self-conscious mismemory) means that she presents her flight from Paris to Tansonville in two very different ways at different times, ‘retrospectively in a very different light’; and in each version, tailored for the different political situations of each moment 14 15 16 17 18

Danius, p. 193. Marcel Proust, Time Regained (London: Vintage Classics, 2000), p. 4. Ibid., pp. 4–5. Ibid., p. 7. Ibid., p. 70.

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of presentation, her motives are absolutely irreproachable.19 M. de Charlus, too, previously considered by the narrator to be ‘the best-informed of men’ turns out to be wrong about several events.20 The narrator also realizes that he knows M. de Charlus imperfectly and that he has misread and falsely encoded several of his impressions of the man. These initial impressions he corrects, in a series of complex digressions, as he simultaneously narrates his impressions of M. de Charlus’s conversation in a street in Paris. The war, too, makes memory unreliable, as ‘one of the ideas most in vogue was that the pre-war days were separated from the war by something as profound, something of apparently as long a duration, as a geological period’.21 As in the work of Richardson, Ford, H.D. and Sinclair then, the past is difficult to retrieve, and even more difficult to interpret and rearrange into a narrative composition; but this difficult process is not only necessary to understanding the initial impression, it is necessary to the creation of understanding itself. Whereas Proust’s involuntary memories are always elusive, and his voluntary memories misleadingly encoded, Richardson, H.D., Sinclair, and Ford were all more optimistic about the availability of memory, and they all had their own ways of retrieving it. For all four writers this process was, as for Proust, a process of ‘creation’ as much as it was one of retrieval: When I write, everything vanishes but what I contemplate. The whole of what is called ‘the past’ is with me, seen anew, vividly. No, Schiller, the past does not stand ‘being still’. It moves, growing with one’s growth. Contemplation is adventure into discovery; reality. (IV, p. 657)

For all four writers, too, it was an ‘adventure’ that required solitude, and a physical and temporal distance from the impression that the writer was trying to retrieve and recreate. Ford cannot write about his war-time experiences while he is at the Front, nor can he write about them immediately after his return. He writes many essays and short memoirs about his war experience, but each one of them is unsatisfactory, and it takes him until 1922, and the death of Proust, to begin Parade’s End, as ‘so devastating and disrupting an experience takes time to assimilate, master, and reconstruct’.22 The emphasis that both May Sinclair and Dorothy Richardson lay upon middle-age as the time at which accumulated

19 20 21 22

Ibid., p. 79. Ibid., p. 70. Ibid., p. 45. Saunders, Ford Madox Ford, Vol. II, p. 196.

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memory is available for reshaping and restructuring is reflected in Bergson’s theory of duration (and duration’s ‘snowball’ effect on memory): My memory is there, which conveys something of the past into the present. My mental state, as it advances on the road of time, is continually swelling with the duration which it accumulates: it goes on increasing – rolling upon itself, as a snowball on the snow. Still more is this the case with states more deeply internal, such as sensations, feelings, desires, etc., which do not correspond, like a simple visual perception, to an unvarying external object. But it is expedient to disregard this uninterrupted change, and to notice it only when it becomes sufficient to impress a new attitude on the body, a new direction on the attention. Then, and then only, we find that our state has changed. The truth is that we change without ceasing, and that the state itself is nothing but change.23

It takes a significant moment for the individual who has been building up their past around them to realize what they have access to. H.D., in her several roman à clef versions of the getting together, breaking-up and re-alliance of her couples always presents one such significant moment towards the end of the narrative. Hermione, in Asphodel, war-shocked and hiding in a half-light world so she can escape self-examination, talks to her ex-lover Darrington and sees that he has managed to come to terms with his past. His smile, and his prompting, enables her to finally get to a point where she can look back and see her past beyond the ‘chasm’ of the war: He remembered the violets. He remembered everything. They remembered far and far back as if the years of terror (five was it?) never had been, had been some fulsome nightmare. Clear out of the years of terror the past rose, rose and cleft the years of terror like white lightning, a black storm cloud. The past, images of the past that had all the time been there, that had been buried under the stench of lava and molten metal, of guns and broken trenches, of earth mounds that were graves, the very substance of volcanic furious, the past, all the past had been there, all the time, white, in clear images, people, things, all the people, all the things.24

For H.D., the chasm between the pre-war and the wartime and post-wartime world is not simply a conversational affectation, as it is for Proust’s society people; rather it is a frightening psychological abyss. The past has always been with her, but she has been repressing memories of the First World War and with it all

23 24

Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution, trans. by Arthur Mitchell (London: Macmillan, 1914), p. 2. H.D., Asphodel, p. 195.

Conclusion

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of her earlier past. Suddenly, with the clearing of that blockage, her memories are all available: ‘clear images’ that she can work with. Similarly the tragedy of Gwenda, at the end of The Three Sisters, is not so much that she has renounced her love of Rowcliffe and is trapped at her father’s house with no hope of escape in sight, it is that ‘She was too young to draw joy from the memory of joy’;25 she is not old enough, or artistically mature enough to make anything of her circumstances yet. The end of Mary Olivier sees Mary in similar circumstances: a renounced love, a dead mother and a living to make, but she is older and has the resources to cope. The very last line of the novel emphasizes her completeness within herself: she may not always have contact with ‘Reality’, or be happy in the same way, but ‘If it never came again I should remember’.26 The letter that Richardson wrote to Ruth Pollard in 1944, at the age of seventy, resonates with this. If the middle-aged Richardson, writing about her young self, found that she could see the events of her life in a truer perspective, how much more so the elderly Richardson who felt herself to be at the end of her life: the whole of one’s life, finished and complete, comes into one’s hands for rerealisation. And this past sometimes described as reared up and staring one in the face is misrepresented on being called ‘unalterable’. The whole of its ceasing to be a chronological sequence, composes itself after the manner of a picture, with things in their true proportions and relationships. Many are completely transformed.27

In Richardson’s short story ‘Excursion’, published a year later in 1945, the ‘Gran’ character meditates on the expanded consciousness she has found in her old age, and comes to a similar conclusion. People, on the whole, are: Unable to discover their wealth until they are old and ‘wandering in their minds’. Life makes artists of us all? No longer seeing experience chronologically, we can compose it, after the manner of a picture, with all the parts in true perspective and relationship. Moving picture. For moments open out, reveal fresh content every time we go back into them, grouping and regrouping themselves as we advance.28

The almost word for word repetition of the image of the composed ‘picture’ indicates Richardson’s preoccupation with and belief in this as a true representation 25 26 27

28

Sinclair, The Three Sisters, p. 370. Sinclair, Mary Olivier, p. 380. Letter from Dorothy Richardson to Ruth Pollard, 20 February1944, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. Richardson, ‘Excursion’, in Tate, pp. 102–3.

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of age and memory as clarifying distance. The difference here is that the picture is not composing ‘itself ’, rather, ‘we can compose it’. Here the emphasis shifts from the autonomy and importance of preserving impressions, to the power of the artist to compose, select, and order.29 The perceptions themselves, as initially viewed, mean very little. It is only when, from a physical and temporal distance, the artist takes them in hand and ‘composes’ them, that art is created. Or, even, that anything meaningful is created. The text-image paradox can be resolved by middle-age: memories inscribed as images can be translated, and re-inscribed as text. The need for this distancing, from the self and from the socially-defining outer world, has been enacted, in miniature, throughout Pilgrimage, but, crucially, the moment at which Miriam turns to writing is the moment in which she removes herself as completely as possibly from both the physical world, and the temporal world, enacting her sense of herself solely through memory. All the other multimedia ways of seeing can thus be focussed. Miriam’s ‘self-distancing’, Katz states, ‘lets her recognize her own identities and achieve the double stance’ which for her is the central tenet of literary impressionism.30 Perception can be represented only retrospectively, or, as Jean Radford puts it, ‘the past can only be known through the present, it is constantly reread, reinterpreted through the present’.31 The past is continually in flux, and can be understood only through the continual focalization, rereading and reinterpretation of the similarly in flux present. Similarly, the present perception itself can only be understood through the past. In Matter and Memory, Bergson emphasizes how perception itself can never be ‘pure’, because it is always perceived in the light of previous perceptions in the form of memory: memory […] covering as it does with a cloak of recollections a core of immediate perception, and also contracting a number of external moments into a single internal moment, constitutes the principal share of individual consciousness in perception, the subjective side of the knowledge of things.32

Memory is already present within perception, and therefore is doubly necessary to a retrospective understanding of that perception as it was perceived. In Deleuze’s reading of this phenomenon, the interpretation and reworking of the 29

30 31 32

Note that Richardson here democratizes the concept of the artistic composition of life, implying that through a creative reworking of memory, everyone can become an artist. Katz, p. 157. Radford, p. 69. Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory (1896), trans. by Nancy Margaret Paul and W. Scott Palmer (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1911), p. 25.

Conclusion

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past is likened to a dream with ‘no longer one recollection-image’ but ‘a number of images’, and this multiplicity becomes even more apparent when viewing, or creating, art: Perhaps, when we read a book, watch a show, or look at a painting, and especially when we are ourselves the author, an analogous process can be triggered: we constitute a sheet of transformation which invents a kind of transverse continuity or communication between several sheets, and weaves a network of non-localizable relations between them.33

The reading process, or act of seeing, is an act of creation, almost as much as authoring. In this reading, visual triggers which are already in a Bergsonian sense memory images, connect back to other memory images. These memory images communicate with each other, across their several sheets, and in so doing, allow woven narrative structure to be created. Visual art as well as written words are essential to this creation of narrative, and it is distance, and imagination, that allows not only the formative memory images themselves to be viewed, but also their networks. Proust’s narrator, midway through the final volume of A la recherche, trips over an uneven paving stone and has a sudden involuntary memory – surfacing but taking a while to be fully grasped, like the madeleine memory – of standing on uneven paving stones in Venice. This memory then prompts a flood of other realizations:  a memory of standing in the Prince de Guermantes’s house, but clearer than the original perception (‘freed from what is necessarily imperfect in external perception’); the ‘thought that there is a vast difference between the real impression which we have had of a thing and the artificial impression of it which we form for ourselves’ (i.e. the primary perception and the secondary impress); and that every ‘insignificant’ impression was at the time ‘surrounded by, and coloured by the reflexion of, things which logically had no connexion with it and which later have been separated from it by our intellect’.34 He then decides that this moment, this sudden surfacing of ‘a veritable moment of the past’ is the means by which he will become an artist: A moment of the past, did I say? Was it not perhaps very much more: something that, common both to the past and to the present, is much more essential than either of them? So often, in the course of my life, reality had disappointed me because at the instant when my senses perceived it my

33 34

Deleuze, p. 123. Proust, Time Regained, pp. 220–1.

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imagination, which was the only organ that I possessed for the enjoyment of beauty, could not apply itself to it, in virtue of that ineluctable law which ordains that we can only imagine what is absent. And now, suddenly, the effect of this harsh law had been neutralised, temporarily annulled, by a marvellous expedient of nature which had caused a sensation – the noise made by both the spoon and by the hammer, for instance – to be mirrored at one and the same time in the past, so that my imagination was permitted to savour it, and in the present, where the actual shock to my senses of the noise, the touch of the linen napkin, or whatever it might be, had added to the dreams of the imagination the concept of ‘existence’ which they usually lack, and through this subterfuge had made it possible for my being to secure, to isolate, to immobilise – for a moment brief as a flash of lightning – what normally it never apprehends: a fragment of time in the pure state.35

This passage is often cited as constituting a key moment in the Proustian journey. As Sara Danius says, it is as close as the novel gets to a ‘climactic denouement’.36 The awkward boy who didn’t understand the rude gestures of the girl who fancied him has become the self-conscious artist, outside his material, selecting and shaping. The doubleness of the literary impression, as well as the distance between the double impression and its remembrance, is solved in one momentous vision:  a ‘fragment of time’ as it really was (and really is) can be recaptured without mediation because there is a similar ‘something’ behind the moment that is being recaptured and the present moment. ‘Reality’ (and Proust in this is echoing Richardson’s and Sinclair’s concepts of that indefinable ‘something’) is ‘common’ to both past and present, and ‘much more essential than either of them’. Proust can now see these networks – the commonality of sounds and perceptions, and the something that lies beneath them all, he can access them, and he can artistically rearrange them. This then is the end point of the literary impressionist project: in embracing distance and memory as the solution to the ‘bewilderment in the face of the present’, Marcel Proust, as well as Dorothy Richardson, Ford Madox Ford, H.D., and May Sinclair are transforming literary impressionism into something quintessentially modernist:  not time regained, but time reshaped.

35 36

Ibid., pp. 223–4. Danius, p. 93.

Works Cited

Works by Dorothy Richardson, Ford Madox Ford, H.D. and May Sinclair Richardson References to volumes of Pilgrimage are displayed in parenthesis throughout. Richardson, Dorothy, Pilgrimage I (London: Virago Press, 1979). Richardson, Dorothy, Pilgrimage II (London: Virago Press, 1979). Richardson, Dorothy, Pilgrimage III (London: Virago Press, 1979). Richardson, Dorothy, Pilgrimage IV (London: Virago Press, 1979). Richardson, Dorothy, ‘About Punctuation’, in Adelphi, (1 April 1924), pp. 990–6. Richardson, Dorothy, ‘Autobiographical Sketch’, in Authors Today and Yesterday, ed. Stanley J. Kunitz (New York: The H.W. Wilson Company, 1934), pp. 562–4. Richardson, Dorothy, Continuous Performance articles in Close Up, 1927–1933: Cinema and Modernism, ed. James Donald, Anne Friedberg and Laura Marcus (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999). Richardson, Dorothy, John Austen and the Inseparables (London: William Jackson Ltd, 1930). Richardson, Dorothy, Journey to Paradise: Short Stories and Autobiographical Sketches, ed. Trudi Tate (London: Virago Modern Classics, 1989). Richardson, Dorothy, The Quakers: Past and Present (London: Constable, 1914). Richardson, Dorothy, ‘The Rampant Metaphor’: notes towards an unfinished article, Dorothy Richardson Collection, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. Richardson, Dorothy, ‘A Sussex Auction’, in The Saturday Review (13 June 1908). Richardson, Dorothy, ‘Welcome’, in The Saturday Review (18 May 1912), pp. 620–1.

Ford Critical Writings of Ford Madox Ford, ed. Frank MacShane (Lincoln, Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, 1964). Ford, Ford Madox, Ancient Lights and Certain New Reflections: Being the Memories of a Young Man (London: Chapman and Hall, 1911).

234

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Ford, Ford Madox, ‘A Day of Battle I: Arms and the Mind’ (dated ‘Written of the Ypres Salient, 15 September 1916) in War Prose, ed. Max Saunders (Manchester: Carcanet, 1999). Ford, Ford Madox, The Good Soldier, ed. Martin Stannard (London and New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1995). Ford, Ford Madox, Henry James: A Critical Study (New York: Albert and Charles Boni, 1915). Ford, Ford Madox, ‘Impressionism – Some Speculations’, in Poetry: A Magazine of Verse, ed. Harriet Monroe, Vol. 2, No. 5 (August 1913). Ford, Ford Madox, Joseph Conrad: A Personal Remembrance (London: Duckworth, 1924). Ford, Ford Madox, The March of Literature (Illinois: Dalkey Archive Press, 1998). Ford, Ford Madox, ‘Mr Conrad’s Writing’ (1923), in Critical Essays, ed. Max Saunders and Richard Stang (Manchester: Carcanet, 2002), p. 228. Ford, Ford Madox, ‘On Impressionism’, in The Good Soldier, ed. Martin Stannard (London and New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1995). Ford, Ford Madox, Parade’s End (London: Penguin, 2012). Ford, Ford Madox, ‘Sologub and Artzibashef ’, in Outlook, No. 35 (26 June 1915).

H.D. H.D., articles on cinema in Close Up, 1927–1933: Cinema and Modernism, ed. James Donald, Anne Friedberg and Laura Marcus (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999). H.D., Asphodel (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1992). H.D., Bid Me to Live (1960) (London: Virago, 1984). H.D., Collected Poems: 1912–1944 (New York: New Directions, 1983). H.D., The Gift (London: Virago, 1984). H.D., Palimpsest (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1926). H.D., Tribute to Freud (Boston: David R. Godine, 1956).

Sinclair Sinclair, May, ‘Chauffeurs at the Front’, in The New Statesman (26 December 1914), pp. 295–6. Sinclair, May, The Creators: A Comedy (London: Hutchinson and Co., 1910). Sinclair, May, The Dark Night (London: Jonathan Cape, 1924). Sinclair, May, A Defence of Idealism: Some Questions & Conclusions (London: Macmillan, 1917). Sinclair, May, The Divine Fire (Toronto: William Briggs, 1904). Sinclair, May, A Journal of Impressions in Belgium (London: Macmillan, 1915).

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Sinclair, May, ‘From a Journal’, English Review (May 1915). Sinclair, May, Life and Death of Harriett Frean (London: Virago, 1980). Sinclair, May, Mary Olivier: A Life (London: Virago Press, 1994). Sinclair, May, ‘The Novels of Dorothy Richardson’, in The Egoist, Vol. 5, No. 4 (April 1908). Sinclair, May, The Three Sisters (London: Virago Press, 1984). Sinclair, May, The Tree of Heaven (New York: Macmillan, 1918). Sinclair, May, ‘Two Notes: I. on H.D. II. On Imagism’, in The Egoist, Vol. 2 (1 June 1915).

Archival material I have made extensive use of Dorothy Richardson’s letters, which are to be found in the following archives: British Library. Dorothy Richardson Collection, General Collection, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection, The New York Public Library.Kulchur Archives, Columbia University. Lilly Library, Indiana University. National Library of Ireland. Pattee Library, The Pennsylvania State University. Woodson Research Center, Fondren Library, Rice University, Houston. Letters to Bryher from Richardson and letters from H.D. to Bryher are to be found respectively in the Bryher Papers and the H.D. Papers, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. The manuscript of Dorothy Richardson’s March Moonlight is also in the Dorothy Richardson Collection, General Collection, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. May Sinclair’s manuscripts and typescripts, and the letters I have quoted from, are all to be found in the May Sinclair Papers, Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Book and Manuscript Library, University of Pennsylvania. One unpublished letter from H.D. was quoted in Louis Silverstein’s H.D. Chronology, part three. http://www.imagists.org/hd/hdchron3.html

Other works cited Aiken, Conrad, Review of Body and Raiment, and Profiles from China by Eunice Tietjens, in Poetry: A Magazine of Verse, Vol. 15, No. 5 (1920), p. 274. Alpers, Svetlana, The Art of Describing: Dutch Art in the Seventeenth Century (Chicago: John Murray, 1983).

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Index Aldington, Richard 30 Aristotle 208–9 Arnold, Matthew 201 atmosphere 1, 14, 26–8, 35, 48, 57, 66, 78, 98, 106, 122, 125–6, 132–3, 139–40, 164, 183 Augustine 209 Austen, Jane 162 author, negation of 11, 18, 26–30, 204, 206 personality of 29–30 Averroes 81 backgrounds 90, 113, 126, 205–8, 211 Balzac, Honoré de 20–1, 28 Beethoven, Ludwig van 70 Benjamin, Walter 123 Bennett, Arnold 21 Beresford, J. D. 31 Bergson, Henri 15, 214–15, 230–1 bodies 9, 43, 46, 66, 91, 95–6, 99, 108–15, 120, 122, 129, 132, 154, 158 Botticelli, Sandro 216–17 Braque, Georges 2 Brontë, Charlotte 153 Bryher 17, 33, 112, 117, 121, 125, 129, 132, 185 n.93, 207, 223–4

Egerton, George 8 Eisenstein, Sergei 138, 139 Eliot, T. S. 187 Emerson, Ralph Waldo 74 Flaubert, Gustave 6 Ford, Ford Madox Ancient Lights 9, 13, 163–6, 171, 183 ‘A Day of Battle’ 183–4 The Good Soldier 9, 14, 34, 163, 171–8 Henry James 11, 21, 25–6 ‘Impressionism’ 18 Joseph Conrad 32–5, 55–6, 60, 163, 213 The March of Literature 19–20, 22, 25, 27, 35 ‘Mr Conrad’s Writing’ 23 ‘On Impressionism’ 18–19, 27–8, 30, 44, 52–3, 181 Parade’s End 9, 11, 17, 35–45, 61, 183, 225, 227 ‘Sologub and Artzibaslef ’ 43 framing 12, 34, 96, 98–101, 105–9, 117, 129, 131–7, 140, 177–8, 197, 203, 215, 217–19, 221 Freud, Sigmund 47, 169–70, 174–5, 187–8, 197, 210

Chekhov, Anton 58 cinema 3, 4, 9, 12–13, 29, 32, 94, 96, 128–42, 159, 160, 180, 198, 212, 217 Conrad, Jessie 33–5 Conrad, Joseph 8–9, 17–18, 23, 28, 32–4, 54, 60, 163, 177, 213 Crane, Stephen 8, 18

gardens 46, 65–8, 80, 86–7, 106, 111, 114, 119, 142, 149–50, 150 n.167, 152 Geley, Gustav 12, 81–3 Gogh, Vincent van 107, 109 Grand, Sarah 8 Gregory, Horace 114

Darwin, Charles 144 Deleuze, Gilles 15, 138, 215, 217–18, 230–1 Derrida, Jacques 107, 210 Descartes, René 4, 209 Dickens, Charles 20–1 Dostoevsky, Fyodor 162

Hardy, Thomas 8 Hartmann, Karl Robert Eduard von 81 H.D. Asphodel 9, 185–7, 228–9 Bid Me To Live 9, 94, 99–105, 108–9, 116–17, 119–20, 127–8, 131–2, 140, 142, 185, 187, 228

246

Index

The Gift 220–1 ‘The Mask and the Movietone’ 139, 140–1 Palimpsest 9, 94, 101–3, 109–14, 117–22, 127–9, 184–5, 187, 212–13, 215–17, 228 ‘Restraint’ 130–1 ‘The Student of Prague’ 96–7, 130–1 ‘Tribute to Freud’ 117 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 80, 83–4 Hemingway, Ernest 17 Husserl, Edmund 93 James, Henry 1, 8, 11, 18, 21–8, 39, 53–4, 56, 59–60, 125, 205–6, 224 Joyce, James 2, 17, 20, 57, 71 Kant, Immanuel 12, 80–2 Kaye-Smith, Sheila 88 Lawrence, D. H. 100, 108 light electric 116–17 as mystic experience 12, 23, 41, 45, 61, 65–71, 73–4, 76–7, 86, 106, 114–16, 130, 149–51, 158, 207, 211, 229 Low, Barbara 47 Maeterlinck, Maurice 12, 73–7 Mansfield, Katherine 3, 8–9, 53–4 McAlmon, Robert 120 metaphors 1, 4, 7, 12–15, 29, 93–142, 158, 199, 203, 208–21 Monroe, Harriet 18 Moore, G. E. 83 Nietzsche, Friedrich 2, 93–4 objectivity 2–6, 11, 17–61, 64, 82, 161, 175, 192, 206 painterly impressionism 1, 54 painting 1, 4, 6, 12, 14, 94–6, 99–100, 102–9, 111, 118, 212, 217–19, 231 Pater, Walter 8, 127, 141 photographs 3, 4, 12, 46, 94, 103, 111, 113–17, 135, 160, 210–12 Picasso, Pablo 2 Plato 80–2, 141 Pound, Ezra 3, 8, 95, 129, 153

Proust, Marcel 8, 10, 20, 123, 125, 198, 205–6, 223–32 psychoanalysis 47, 131, 163–93 psychology 79, 159, 163–93, 225 realism, literary 7–8, 18–32, 35–6, 44, 59, 64, 97 Richardson, Dorothy ‘About Punctuation’ 75 ‘Autobiographical Sketch’ 64 Backwater 54, 66–7, 88, 90 Clear Horizon 5, 12, 45, 97, 100–1, 124, 205, 211 ‘Continuous Performance’ 133, 136–8 ‘Continuous Performance VIII’ 32 Dawn’s Left Hand 61, 110–11, 124, 132–3, 203, 205, 212 Deadlock 13, 46–8, 50, 60, 63, 72, 74–7, 95, 108, 117–18, 211, 219 Dimple Hill 97, 147–52, 157–8, 160, 196 n.131, 203, 205 ‘Excursion’ 229 ‘Foreword’ to Pilgrimage 21, 26–8, 53, 187, 205, 224 ‘The Garden’ 67–8 Honeycomb 29, 49, 54–6, 98, 103–6, 114–15 Interim 46, 52–3, 116, 123, 211, 217–18 John Austen and the Inseparables 104 March Moonlight 61, 73, 76, 91–2, 97, 105, 158–9, 193–208, 212, 227 Oberland 124, 133–6, 208 ‘Ordeal’ 191–3 Pointed Roofs 18, 20, 28, 31, 46, 51–2, 54, 144, 146, 199 The Quakers Past and Present 88–9, 150–1, 159 ‘The Rampant Metaphor’ 98 Revolving Lights 47–9, 51–2, 69, 71, 76, 94, 118, 123–7, 148, 197–8, 206, 211, 214 ‘A Sussex Auction’ 200–2 ‘A Thousand Pities’ 136 The Trap 22–4, 27–8, 76, 81–2, 133, 206, 208, 214 The Tunnel 24, 41, 46, 55, 58–9, 71, 76, 98–9, 106–8, 116, 144, 197, 207, 211, 215 ‘Welcome’ 202–4

Index Robeson, Paul 129 romanticism 20, 141, 207 Rossetti, Christina 165 Russell, Bertrand 83–6 Savage, Henry 20 Schopenhauer, Arthur 12, 80–3 Schwegler, Albert 80 Shelley, Percy Bysshe 70–5, 153 silence 72–9, 81, 147–8, 159 Sinclair, May ‘Chauffeurs at the Front’ 177–8 The Creators 12, 68, 153–7, 161 The Dark Night 12, 86–7, 91 A Defence of Idealism 12, 83–7, 91 The Divine Fire 68 ‘From a Journal’ 180–1 A Journal of Impressions 9, 13–14, 163, 166–71, 177–83, 211 Life and Death of Harriett Frean 8 n.32, 14, 163–4, 187–91, 193 Mary Olivier 9, 12, 64–5, 69–71, 73, 75, 78–80, 89–92, 152–3, 161, 229 The New Idealism 12, 85 ‘The Novels of Dorothy Richardson’ 11–12, 54, 63–6, 70 The Three Sisters 12, 68, 72–3, 78, 87–8, 90 n.81, 229

247

The Tree of Heaven 12, 182, 184 ‘Two Notes’ 71 socialism 151–2 Socrates 209 Spinoza, Baruch 80–1 statues 94, 99, 104, 109–10, 112, 141 stream of consciousness 11–12, 63–5 subjectivity 1–2, 4–7, 11, 17–61, 64, 67, 133, 136, 161, 230 Thackeray, William 20 theatre 4, 123, 130, 137, 140, 220 Turgenev, Ivan 205 Underhill, Evelyn 12, 79, 88, 90–1 war 3, 11, 14, 35–45, 99, 101–2, 120–1, 128, 131–2, 163, 166–71, 177–87, 211, 227–8 weaving 11, 13, 24, 120–8, 187, 194 Wells, H. G. 22 n.21, 123, 125 West, Rebecca 123 Whitehead, Alfred North 84 Woolf, Virginia 1–4, 6, 8, 10, 20, 39, 57–9, 162–3 writing spaces 13, 91–2, 142–62, 208, 229–30