Writing Life : Early Twentieth-Century Autobiographies of the Artist-Hero [1 ed.] 9781781384794, 9781781381977

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Writing Life Early Twentieth-Century Autobiographies of the Artist-Hero

ENGLISH ASSOCIATION ST UDIES, 4

Mhairi Pooler

Writing Life Early Twentieth-Century Autobiographies of the Artist-Hero

LIVER POOL U NIVERSIT Y PR ESS THE ENGLISH ASSOCIATION

Writing Life First published in 2015 by Liverpool University Press 4 Cambridge Street Liverpool L69 7ZU Copyright © 2015 Mhairi Pooler The right of Mhairi Pooler to be identified as the author of this book has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication data A British Library CIP record is available print ISBN 978-1-78138-197-7 cased epdf ISBN 978-1-78138-479-4

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Contents contents

Acknowledgements vii Introduction: ‘The Very Complexion of the Mirror’ i. The Historical Horizon ii. Creative Autobiography

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1 The Writer Reading 22 i. Tradition and Inheritance: The Künstlerroman 25 ii. ‘Influence (Inflowing)’ 42 2 The Anxiety of Inheritance: Edmund Gosse’s Father and Son 53 i. Victorian and Modern 56 ii. Religion and Literature 63 3 The Art of Life: Henry James’s A Small Boy and Others and Notes of a Son and Brother 77 i. Making a Scene 84 ii. The Fostered Imagination 91 iii. ‘Convert, convert, convert!’ 98 4 A Twofold Experiment with Time: Siegfried Sassoon’s The Old Century, The Weald of Youth and Siegfried’s Journey 109 i. ‘Fictionalized Reality, Essayized Autobiography’ 113 ii. ‘Nostalgic and Breezy Reminiscences’ 122 iii. ‘England’s Young Soldier-Poet’ 129

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5 An Investigation of Reality: Dorothy Richardson’s Pilgrimage 140 i. The Art of Fiction 144 ii. Pilgrimage’s Progress 151 iii. Of Language, of Meaning, of Mr Henry James 161 Conclusion: Reading the Writer

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Bibliography 185 Index 195

Acknowledgements Acknowledgments

This book has been helped into being by the generosity of a number of organisations and people. The initial research was made possible by the support of the Adolphus Jack Scholarship from the University of Aberdeen, and for this I am very grateful. I should like to thank the Syndics of Cambridge University Library for permission to quote from archival material, Greg Zacharias at the Centre for Henry James Studies for his generous help in answering my questions and the English Association’s editorial panel for their faith in what this book could become. I am appreciative of permission from the Estate of George Sassoon to quote from the work of Siegfried Sassoon. An earlier version of parts of chapters four and five originally appeared in Siegfried’s Journal: Journal of the Siegfried Sassoon Fellowship and Pilgrimages: The Journal of Dorothy Richardson Studies respectively, and I am grateful to be able to incorporate that material here. I should also like to thank Rebecca Bowler for putting a letter into my hands from the Kulchur Archives at Columbia University Rare Book and Manuscript Library that I wouldn’t otherwise have found. I am particularly indebted to Hazel Hutchison for her continued friendship; without her guidance over the years and her encouraging reading of drafts of various chapters, this would be a very different book. My thanks are also due to David Duff, Jeannette King and Hilary Stobbs for reading portions of the manuscript as it developed and offering their valuable advice. Finally, my husband Jonas Hellbrandt deserves more than I can say for his love and patience during the writing process.

Introduction ‘The Very Complexion of the Mirror’ Introduction: ‘The Very Complexion of the Mirror’

There would be much to say, I think, had we only a little more time, on this question of the projected light of the individual strong temperament in fiction – the color of the air with which this, that or the other painter of life (as we call them all), more or less unconsciously suffuses his picture. I say unconsciously because I speak here of an effect of atmosphere largely, if not wholly distinct from the effect sought on behalf of the special subject treated; something that proceeds from the contemplative mind itself, the very complexion of the mirror in which the material is reflected. This is of the nature of the man himself – an emanation of his spirit, temper, history; it springs from his very presence, his spiritual presence, in his work, and is, in so far, not a matter of calculation and artistry.1 Henry James made these remarks in his essay ‘The Lesson of Balzac’. At first glance, the insistence on the author’s presence in his work may seem a surprising thesis from a distinguished theorist and practitioner of the carefully objective novel. On closer inspection, however, it becomes clear that James is celebrating technique which is intrinsically coupled to the authorial consciousness. The ‘presence’ described is something insubstantial, equated with the character of a mirror’s reflective surface, yet it defines the very quality of what the contemplative mind of the author can reflect. James is asserting, 1 Henry James, ‘The Lesson of Balzac’, Henry James: Major Stories and Essays (New York: Library of America, 1999), pp. 632–33.

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therefore, that an author’s artistic sensibility, however uncalculated its presence, can be read in the material text. Acknowledgment of the author’s presence or intention has been unfashionable in literary scholarship since the early twentiethcentury advent of New Criticism, and later in the century when Roland Barthes made his influential case for the death of the author. Taking inspiration from James’s viewpoint, this book offers a revisionary exploration of the relationship between an author’s life and art within a small yet suggestively representative group of early twentieth-century creative autobiographies. It is also the story of four literarily and personally interconnected writers – Edmund Gosse, Henry James, Siegfried Sassoon and Dorothy Richardson – and how and why they variously reimagine themselves as artistheroes in their autobiographical writing. As the term artist-hero implies, an important strand of this study is the contention that by adopting and, most importantly adapting the model of the German Romantic Künstlerroman for their autobiographies, these authors succeed in stabilising and giving meaning to the fragmented selfhood and problematised artistic personas that plagued so many of their contemporaries in the opening decades of the twentieth century as the Great War left the perceived stability of the Victorian age shattered in its wake. The artist protagonist of the Künstlerroman or ‘the portrait-of-the-artist novel’, which originated in Germany in the late 1700s, established a trend of the literary, musical or visual artist as an attractive literary hero. 2 By casting their autobiographical selves in this role, Gosse, James, Sassoon and Richardson shift the focus of their life stories towards art and its production and interpretation. At its simplest, the traditional Künstlerroman is the story of an artist’s development that tells how it came to be written. Essentially, it portrays the hero’s search to resolve the dislocation experienced in society between idea and reality, art and life, subject and object, and by so doing become an established artist. 3 The search characterises 2 See Maurice Beebe, Ivory Towers and Sacred Founts: The Artist as Hero in Fiction from Goethe to Joyce (New York: New York University Press, 1964), pp. 27–38. 3 My understanding of the German Romantic Künstlerroman derives from Herbert Marcuse’s study ‘Der Deutsche Künstlerroman’, Der Deutsche Künstlerroman, Frühe Aufsätze, 1. Band (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1978).

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the artist’s journey, highlighting a theme of personal rather than spiritual pilgrimage towards perfection that distinguishes the Künstlerroman. Each of the autobiographical texts examined in this study has at its heart the story of development towards artistic identity, each more or less consciously constructed like a novelistic chronicle. In writing the self anew as an artist-hero, each author implements the tools of his or her trade to construct the narrative of their apprenticeship as a writer. By appropriating key features of the genre to underpin their autobiographical narratives, Gosse, James, Sassoon and Richardson achieve a form of life writing that is equally a life story, artist’s manifesto, aesthetic treatise and modern ­autobiographical Künstlerroman.4 The examination of this mixed autobiographical form is embedded within a wider discussion of particular inheritances from the tradition of autobiographical writing, the importance of German Romantic ideas and the trope of generational difference and influence, particularly the figuratively conceived transmission from parent to child. As a result, this book considers a strand of early twentiethcentury writing that can be termed ‘creative autobiography’, subtly distinct from ‘straight’ autobiography, the autobiographical novel, ‘autobiografiction’,5 the nineteenth-century Bildungsroman and the modernist anglicised artist-novel. Rather than generically defining creative autobiography, however, this study considers its lineage and how the form itself can be read to reveal the authors’ artistic sensibility. In a well-known letter to his friend and fellow autobiographer Henry Adams, Henry James defended his decision to write his second volume of autobiography, Notes of a Son and Brother (1914), late in his life by referring to the vitality of his artistic sensibility: 4 These four authors are not the only English writers to use the Künstlerroman as a model for self-representation, but together they form a representative picture of the possible scope of the mixed genre, reflecting the progression from Victorian to modern conceptions of self and artisthood in the opening decades of the twentieth century. 5 ‘Autobiografiction’ is a term coined by Max Saunders in his study Self Impression: Life-Writing, Autobiografiction, and the Forms of Modern Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010) to connote the literary relationship between fiction and autobiography, although it was first used by Stephen Reynolds in an essay of the same name in 1906.

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writing life You see I still, in presence of life (or of what you deny to be such,) have reactions – as many as possible – and the book I sent you is a proof of them. It’s, I suppose, because I am that queer monster, the artist, an obstinate finality, an inexhaustible sensibility.6

James’s statement highlights the dichotomous nature of autobiographical self-representation in a book that records the reactions and life of the developing artist as perceived by the mature author. In describing himself as an ‘artist’, and excusing himself accordingly, James at once conceptually separates and unites the ‘queer monster’ and the man. The suggestion is that the autobiography writes a bridge between the past and the present, and the man and the artist, that tells the story of how he became the author able to write the work in question – a feature that is re-enacted by Gosse, Sassoon and Richardson. Despite comparable thematic concerns and structural trajectories, stylistically the autobiographical narratives considered here are conspicuously different and thus reveal individual portraits of the artist. Gosse is better known as a critic than a poet and yet Father and Son (1907), the account of his early life and relationship with his father is a work concerned with the power of literary art. Father and Son was something of a shock to readers when first published. It emphasises personal rather than public identity and intimate inner development, and as such can be read as ‘father’ to modern self-writing. Set apart from the other autobiographies considered here as the only singlevolume narrative, Gosse’s book is perched on the cusp of the twentieth century as an example of the scope for reinvention contained in the autobiographical tradition. Although even the most lax conception of the term ‘modernist’ could not stretch to include Gosse, the secular reworking of traditional spiritual autobiographical modes and the inwardness of the narrative’s focus combine to distinguish Father and Son from its Victorian counterparts. In the formal elements of the text we see Gosse re-evaluating his literary inheritance, just as he does on a thematic level in his relationship with his father, in order to account for his individuation as a man and a writer. The master of the long, densely written novel, Henry James wrote three volumes of autobiography shortly before his death in 1916 6 The Letters of Henry James, Vol. 2, ed. Percy Lubbock (London: Macmillan, 1920), p. 374.

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– very much in what is known, in terms of his fiction, as the style of his late, or ‘major phase’.7 Despite being works of a writer of the same generation as Gosse, A Small Boy and Others (1913), Notes of a Son and Brother and the unfinished The Middle Years, which appeared posthumously, are far more experimental in style than Father and Son. And yet, James also enacts the struggle with inheritances of all sorts. The label ‘experimental novel’ has been applied to James’s autobiographies by a number of critics. While they are not novels, or fiction for that matter, they are most certainly works of experimental art that chart the history of the author’s developing imagination, quite unlike the public confession his early readers expected. Siegfried Sassoon’s reputation as a writer is still dependent on his war poetry, produced largely between 1916 and 1918 – two years of ‘extreme stress of experience’.8 However, besides almost half a century of poetry writing after the Armistice, Sassoon also wrote two prose trilogies about his early life, one semi-fictional and one non-fictional autobiography. Compared with his provocative trench poems, both of these trilogies, written between 1928 and 1945, revert stylistically to an earlier, idealised pre-war England. Although the better-known Memoirs of George Sherston concerns this study to some degree, it is the later, what Sassoon called his ‘real’, autobiographical trilogy comprising The Old Century and Seven More Years (1938), The Weald of Youth (1942) and Siegfried’s Journey (1945) that constructs a surprisingly ambitious portrait of the poet. The now familiar phrase ‘stream of consciousness’ was first appropriated as a literary term to describe Dorothy Richardson’s multivolume, experimental autobiographical novel cycle Pilgrimage.9 The first volume, Pointed Roofs was published in 1915, and the last complete volume Clear Horizon in 1938, followed by the posthumous 7 For explanations of James’s late style, see for example: F.O. Matthiessen, Henry James: The Major Phase (New York: Oxford University Press, 1963); David Lodge, ‘Review: James’ Later Abstractness’, Novel: A Forum on Fiction, Vol. 7, No. 2 (Winter 1974), pp. 187–89; Ruth Bernard Yeazell, Language and Knowledge in the Late Novels of Henry James (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976). 8 Sassoon to Felicitas Corrigan, 17 May 1965. See Corrigan, Siegfried Sassoon: Poet’s Pilgrimage (London: Victor Gollancz, 1973), p. 85. 9 The phrase ‘stream of consciousness’ was applied to Richardson’s writing by May Sinclair in ‘The Novels of Dorothy Richardson’, The Little Review, Vol. 5, No. 12 (April 1918), pp. 5–6.

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appearances of the incomplete Dimple Hill and March Moonlight in the collected edition by 1967. The length and distinctive style of Richardson’s writing has led to Pilgrimage being less widely read than the work of contemporaries with whom she is usually compared, especially James Joyce and Virginia Woolf. Although her technical innovations have been somewhat overshadowed by those of her better-known contemporaries, Richardson’s real legacy is her use of traditional autobiographical models to underpin and support her pioneering attempt to render feminine consciousness and with it a unique portrait of the artist.10 Each of the works under discussion in this book is a response to the moment of its composition – to the new century, to the shock and devastation of the First World War, to the abounding experiments in self-expression or to the uncertainty of the interwar years. Equally, they meet the needs of each writer’s sense of his or her own past and journey to individual authorship, and their formal concerns call attention to the artistry of their composition. Even a preliminary appraisal of the differences between these texts facilitates some unexpected revelations, not least that the autobiographies of the delegates of the older generation, Gosse and James, are in fact fundamentally more innovative and less nostalgic than those of the younger generation, Sassoon and Richardson, whose texts have their roots planted deeply in literary tradition. Revelatory comparisons are only one feature of this authorial constellation, however. Essentially an historical study, inheritance chains weave this investigation together and are vital to the literary and personal interconnections between Gosse, James, Sassoon and Richardson. Gosse and James, who shared a long-lasting and significant literary friendship, act as father figures to Sassoon and Richardson respectively, albeit in different ways. H.G. Wells called Gosse ‘the official British man of letters’,11 a title that sums up his position of influence on the literary scene as well as suggesting an 10 While at points during this introductory discussion, I refer to Pilgrimage as Richardson’s ‘autobiography’ when referencing the texts of all four authors, this is to emphasise their shared features and not to ignore the fact that it is a fictionalised account. The extent and significance of Richardson’s fictionalisation is discussed in chapter five. 11 H.G. Wells, Boon, the Mind of the Race, the Wild Asses of the Devil, and the Last Tramp (1915; repr. London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1920), p. 76.

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authoritarian figure to be overthrown by a younger generation of writers. Yet Gosse’s essentially personal relationship with Sassoon is one in which the ‘father’ is also a valued literary mentor and critic. As an established critic and a close family friend, Gosse was an obvious choice as recipient of Sassoon’s early attempts at poetry, and his encouraging response established an affiliation that lasted until Gosse’s death in 1928. In contrast, the relationship between James and Richardson is purely literary but highly significant for the technical innovations of Pilgrimage. James is, according to Richardson’s protagonist, the author of ‘the first completely satisfying way of writing a novel’,12 but one who cannot help but make every novel ‘a conducted tour’ of the author himself.13 Praise and criticism in equal measure shape the impact of James on Richardson’s writing as she adapts his method of focalising a story through a single consciousness in her attempt to render her own reality. Harold Bloom’s concept of the ‘anxiety of influence’ is clearly at play in Richardson’s relations with James, although it is less obvious in Sassoon’s connection with Gosse, their dissimilarity making Gosse less of a ‘threat’. Bloom’s reading of literary history as a chain of influences to be used and overthrown has particular relevance for this study, concerned as it is with the role of familial and literary inheritance in developing authorship. Formative influences are explored by each author as they trace the origins of their artistic ability, and in particular what is read in childhood and youth is presented as an important feature of each author’s apprenticeship. Although all deeply entrenched in the historical moment of their creation in the years between 1907 and 1945, the autobiographies of Gosse, James, Sassoon and Richardson also sit on the fringes of the canonical literary movements associated with this same period. Gosse and James are usually considered representatives of the Victorian era, which nonetheless was at an end by 1907 when Father and Son first appeared; Sassoon’s prose was considered old-fashioned beside the 12 Dorothy Richardson, Pilgrimage Vol. 3 (London: Virago Press, 2002), p. 410. Hereafter, quotes from Pilgrimage are given with volume and page number. 13 Richardson to Eleanor Phillips, 25 January 1949. See Dorothy Richardson, Windows on Modernism: Selected Letters of Dorothy Richardson, ed. Gloria G. Fromm (Athens and London: The University of Georgia Press, 1995), p. 599.

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experiments of high modernism and the demands of a country on the brink of a second world war; and Richardson, although a proponent of what has come to be called the modernist novel, was accused of ‘unreadability’, and Pilgrimage’s unwieldy form has discouraged a wide readership. Yet, the crucial changes in English literature that resulted from the wider social, political and ideological upheaval at the end of the Edwardian period are anticipated (by Gosse and James), experienced (by Sassoon) and reflected (by Richardson) in both the subject matter and style of these autobiographical texts. The Historical Horizon Virginia Woolf’s famous statement that in December 1910 ‘human character changed’ is so often quoted in studies of the period that it has begun to sound like fact.14 Referring particularly to the impact of the exhibition Manet and the Post-Impressionists organised by Roger Fry for the Grafton Gallery in London, which ran from November 1910 to January 1911, Woolf detected a reciprocally influential relationship between social, ideological and artistic changes. She expands on her statement thus: All human relations have shifted – those between masters and servants, husbands and wives, parents and children. And when human relations change there is at the same time a change in religion, conduct, politics and literature.15 14 Virginia Woolf, ‘Character in Fiction’, The Essays of Virginia Woolf, Vol. 3: 1919–1924, ed. Andrew McNeillie (London: Hogarth Press, 1988), p. 421. (This essay, published in 1924, is derived from the earlier ‘Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown’.) Beside the statement’s obvious emphasis on change, Woolf’s selection of a specific date suggests the sense of suddenness associated with the onslaught of modernity in the opening decades of the new century. 15 Woolf’s statement may seem rather sweeping, but Gillian Cawthra’s pragmatic study of the relationship between cultural climate and linguistic style specifies the revision in literary style that accompanied the changes in conceptions of reality from the end of the nineteenth century to the first decades of the twentieth. Examining the length of sentences and words, the use of dialogue versus description and specific areas of syntactic usage in texts by authors from each period (e.g. Pater, Meredith, Lawrence and Joyce), Cawthra posits that although more work needs to be done before any definite theory can

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For most, Fry’s exhibition provided the first glimpse of the great intellectual ferment taking place on the continent during the British Edwardian period. The reactions provoked by the exhibition illustrate something of its impact. E.M. Forster, for example, confessed to Edward Marsh that ‘Gauguin and Van Gogh were too much for me’.16 But Woolf was not alone in sensing imminent change in the months that followed the exhibition. New happenings in music, theatre, dance and literature gave Sassoon’s friend Osbert Sitwell, a sense of ‘a retarded spring just beginning to blossom within our closed gardens’.17 Both Woolf and Sitwell wrote their assessments of the atmosphere of change they sensed from a distance of several years, 1924 and 1948 respectively. Observed through the upheaval caused by the First World War, these pre-war years no doubt seemed to anticipate this greatest of changes, and as Vincent Sherry writes: By the rule of associations, the Great War of 1914–18 locates the moment in which the new sensibility of English – and international – modernism comes fully into existence.18 In order to understand the opening decades of the twentieth century from our present position a full century after the First World War, we need to look both over and through the intervening years that include the events of 9/11 and the Second World War which have further shaped our thinking. According to Hans-Georg Gadamer’s position, this kind of historical consciousness is essential for any successful hermeneutic study of literary works: The task of historical understanding also involves acquiring an appropriate historical horizon, so that what we’re trying be formulated, changes in language are clearly ‘symptomatic of a change in Weltanschauung’. See Cultural Climate and Linguistic Style: Change in English Fictional Prose from the Late Victorian to the Early Modern Period (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1989), p. 92. 16 Letter to Edward Marsh, quoted in Christopher Hassell, A Biography of Edward Marsh (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1959), p. 168. 17 Osbert Sitwell, Great Morning (London: Macmillan, 1948), p. 235. 18 Vincent Sherry, The Great War and the Language of Modernism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), p. 6.

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writing life to understand can be seen in its true dimensions. If we fail to transpose ourselves into the historical horizon from which the traditionary text speaks, we will misunderstand the significance of what it has to say to us.19

By ‘horizon’, Gadamer means ‘the range of vision that includes everything that can be seen from a particular vantage point’. 20 Therefore, at the same time as maintaining the knowledge imbued by our present position, we must be aware of the horizon of the original readers in order to fully comprehend and appreciate an historically embedded text, all the while accommodating the questions which are prompted by this temporal gap between ourselves and the text. As readers, we must transpose our present consciousness into the historical horizon, and into the contemporary experience of the present and the past. Three of the authors examined in the following chapters concern themselves with the beginning of the First World War in one way or another. In the preceding years, James writes his autobiographies which reach back into a previous era to reveal the forces that fostered his artistic growth, in a sense drawing this past to a close; Richardson too begins to write, but in looking back she is considering her progress up to this historical moment as a beginning, one that will lead her to continue writing into the 1940s; and in Sassoon’s retrospective view, the ‘tragic turn of events which changed the world’ in 1914 set him ‘on the road to unexpected success’. 21 The fascination with memory that these texts enact would, in fact, seem to be representative of the response to the change and upheaval embodied in this period around the Great War. Jay Winter has remarked that the years between 1890 and 1920 span the first generation obsessed with memory in the modern period, a 19 Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, trans. and rev. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall (1975; repr. London and New York: Continuum, 2006), p. 302. 20 Gadamer, Truth and Method, p. 301. 21 Siegfried Sassoon, The Weald of Youth (1942; repr. London: Faber and Faber, 1944), p. 268. Although Gosse’s autobiography was written before the War, we hear his voice and his viewpoint in the literature it produced through his interaction with Sassoon during these most formative years of the younger poet’s career.

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generation he sees as focused ‘on memory as the key to the formation of identities’, national, social, cultural and personal. 22 Winter’s assessment provides a clue to the increased interest in life writing during the same period. The First World War may have become a marker of modernity in our perception of the twentieth century, as Vincent Sherry observes, but it also seems to have stimulated a need amongst writers and artists to consider the implications of what had gone before and how it enabled an understanding of the present. Modernity and memory are inextricably linked. As we see by comparing the two generations of writers represented by Gosse, James, Sassoon and Richardson, the war years are in fact a porous border, if they are one at all, and tradition and innovation in the art of memory exist on both sides. Experiments in life writing were not new in the early twentieth century, but they flourished. Suzanne Nalbantian in Aesthetic Autobiography: From Life to Art in Marcel Proust, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf and Anaïs Nin (1997) and Max Saunders in Self Impression: Life-Writing, Autobiografiction, and the Forms of Modern Literature (2010) have both conclusively demonstrated the extent to which life writing became a significant feature of experimental fiction in modernism. Focusing on ‘the transformation of autobiographical data into literary écriture’, Nalbantian’s study of modernist fictional life writing outlines a ‘new’ theory for what she terms ‘aesthetic autobiography’. 23 Despite asserting that her approach breaks with the perception of the genre as an ‘historical chain’, because she deals with works such as James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist and Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, which establish ‘an aesthetics of artistic transmutation’ above and beyond any possible self-revelation, Nalbantian nonetheless begins her study in the mid-nineteenth century. As such, the originality of her authors’ innovations is debatable. Saunders questions Nalbantian’s accuracy in referring to any of the works considered in her study as autobiography and proceeds to apply the label ‘aesthetic autobiography’ to late nineteenth-century impressionist ‘formal contractual 22 Jay Winter, Remembering War: The Great War Between Memory and History in the Twentieth Century (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2006), p. 18. 23 Suzanne Nalbantian, Aesthetic Autobiography: From Life to Art in Marcel Proust, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf and Anaïs Nin (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994), p. 42.

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autobiographies’ that innovatively foreground the aesthetic in rendering the life of the author, and that precede what he calls ‘modernist auto/biografiction’.24 Saunders argues that from the 1870s to the 1930s, autobiography ‘increasingly aspires to the condition of fiction’, and he goes on to explore how modernism engages with life writing beyond the loose categorisation of the autobiographical novel.25 Saunders is particularly concerned with the later years of this timeframe, demonstrating that despite the cult of impersonality commonly associated with high modernism, life writing was an increasingly important feature of the period’s literary innovations. The term ‘modernism’ is tricky to use without being accused of overgeneralising. James’s stylistic experimentations, Sassoon’s expression of a modern crisis of identity and Richardson’s position as the mother of the stream of consciousness novel have all resulted in these distinctive writers being referred to as ‘modernist’, showing the pluralism of the term. However, it is a helpful designation for purposes of differentiation to refer to particular trends, modes and concepts in the literature of the period from around 1910 (as Woolf would have it) until the Second World War. This book is not about modernism so much as it is about the literary tendencies that distinguish the shift between the Edwardian and modern – or Georgian – eras. While ‘Georgian’ was the contemporary choice of designation, it no longer refers to the period of King George V’s reign (1910–36) but specifically to the pastoral poetry published in the anthologies Georgian Poetry (1912–22), making it more helpful to speak of the ‘modern’ period, and the literary innovations so different from the Georgian Poets as ‘modernist’. 26 As such, this book’s concern is the author’s 24 Saunders, Self Impression, p. 76. 25 Saunders, Self Impression, p. 22. It is worth pointing out that while very careful with his terminology elsewhere, notably with the term ‘aesthetic autobiography’, Saunders, like so many other Anglophone critics, applies the term Künstlerroman imprecisely, assuming that any novel about an artist is automatically an artist-novel. Consequently, Saunders’s excellent study does not take account of the way in which the original German Romantic Künstlerroman model can be used to shape an author’s autobiography specifically as an apprenticeship narrative, regardless of the degree to which it is fictionalised. 26 In her essay ‘Character in Fiction’, Woolf differentiated between her own and the preceding generation by drawing a line between the ‘Edwardians’, like Wells, Bennett and Galsworthy, and those she refers to as ‘Georgians’, such as

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individual use of memory, literary tradition and style to engage with and resolve a characteristically modern concern: personal identity. Dennis Brown affirms that the interest in identity arose from a sense of self-fragmentation that permeated the early twentieth century due to ‘the general diffusion of social alienation, the rise of the psychoanalytic movement, the disorientation brought about by the shock of the Great War and the increasing experimentalism of almost all the contemporary artistic movements’. 27 In particular, the autobiographies of James and Sassoon and Richardson’s autobiographical novel sequence respond to but also challenge this climate. In her essay ‘Modern Fiction’, Virginia Woolf describes the shift in literary tendencies that she identified at the end of the Edwardian period and the contemporary changes in aesthetic values that she wished to see reflected in the writing of her contemporaries. In so doing she sets out a sort of manifesto for a new form of realism that would reflect changing consciousness: ‘Whether we call it life or spirit, truth or reality, this, the essential thing, has moved off, or on, and refuses to be contained any longer in such ill-fitting vestments as we provide’. 28 Dorothy Richardson shared this sentiment and, as she recorded in her foreword to Pilgrimage, the need for new vestments motivated her innovative style, what she calls ‘a stranger in the form of contemplated reality having for the first time […] its own say’. 29 Woolf lamented that while Edwardians such as H.G. Wells and Arnold Bennett spend so much energy writing about unimportant external details ‘life escapes: and perhaps without life nothing else is worth while’.30 Her plea expresses a sense of the inner life as the Joyce, Eliot and herself (p. 421). In 1935, Frank Swinnerton called his survey of the period The Georgian Literary Scene. The pastoral themes and overriding ‘realism’ that characterised the early volumes of Georgian Poetry, however, create unhelpful associations for the term ‘Georgian’. See Robert H. Ross, The Georgian Revolt: Rise and Fall of a Poetic Ideal 1910–1922 (London: Faber and Faber, 1967), pp. 260–61. 27 Dennis Brown, The Modernist Self in Twentieth-Century English Literature: A Study in Self-Fragmentation (London: Macmillan Press, 1989), p. 1. 28 Virginia Woolf, ‘Modern Fiction’, The Essays of Virginia Woolf, Vol. 4: 1925–1928, ed. Andrew McNeillie (London: Hogarth Press, 1994), p. 160. (The original essay, titled ‘Modern Novels’, was published in 1919. Woolf revised it and changed the title for inclusion in the Common Reader in 1925.) 29 Richardson, Pilgrimage I, p. 10. 30 Woolf, ‘Modern Fiction’, p. 159.

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true, knowable reality, and it replaces a concern with descriptions of how life is lived with how this daily existence is actually perceived. By calling for the representation of subjective, everyday experience in this way, Woolf suggests another reason for the increased concern with autobiographical material and forms. While autobiography was an enormously popular genre during the preceding decades, it had, very generally speaking, emphasised the instructiveness of the personal life for the reader. For Woolf, the inner life is instructive for the writer. Woolf argues that to really understand what life is like, the writer needs to look within, and so she postures: Is life like this? Must novels be like this? Look within and life, it seems, is very far from being ‘like this’. Examine for a moment an ordinary mind on an ordinary day. The mind receives a myriad impressions – trivial, fantastic, evanescent, or engraved with the sharpness of steel. From all sides they come, an incessant shower of innumerable atoms; and as they fall, they shape themselves into the life of Monday or Tuesday.31 While calling for a new approach, Woolf’s imagery is remarkably similar to Henry James’s description of ‘the atmosphere of the mind’ in his 1884 essay ‘The Art of Fiction’. These parallels indicate both the progressiveness of James’s theory of fiction and the innovations in representing consciousness – an essential aspect of modern life writing – already present in the late nineteenth century. James writes: 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 the chamber of consciousness, and catching every air-borne particle in its tissue.32 The inward-turning prose that Woolf advocates is a development of what James’s method of rendering consciousness perfected, yet by emphasising the ordinary and the trivial, Woolf’s essay calls for attention to be paid to everyday, personal reality. The autobiographical 31 Woolf, ‘Modern Fiction’, p. 160. 32 Henry James, ‘The Art of Fiction’, Henry James: Major Stories and Essays (New York: Library of America, 1999), p. 580.

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character of such a focus speaks for itself. As Harry Levin writes in relation to James Joyce: ‘The increasing demands for social and psychological detail that are made upon the novelist can only be satisfied out of his own experience’.33 The historical horizon in which Gosse, James, Sassoon and Richardson composed their autobiographies was one concerned with creative experimentation that was as much directed towards the self as a search for an art resistant to biographical interpretations. As Saunders puts it, rather than understanding modernism as ‘a discourse of impersonality’, we should think of it as ‘one in which the relation between autobiographical subjectivity and aesthetic objectivity is being reinvented’.34 Within such a horizon the potential for reading the author’s ‘spiritual presence’ in his or her formal choices and experiments is significant. Creative Autobiography While it is not my objective to provide an overview of autobiography theory, this study’s concern with genre does require a brief discussion of the perimeters within which the texts under consideration are understood.35 The designation ‘creative autobiography’, which best describes the nature of Gosse, James, Sassoon and Richardson’s works, blurs but, significantly, does not remove the boundaries between documentary and fictional delimitations. Subsequently, it suggests a unity between forms that is particularly pertinent for 33 Harry Levin, James Joyce: A Critical Introduction (1942; repr. London: Faber, 1968), p. 47. 34 Saunders, Self Impression, p. 23. 35 A helpful review of pre-1980 scholarship can be found in William C. Spengemann’s The Forms of Autobiography: Episodes in the History of a Literary Genre (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980) (pp. 170–245), and Suzanne Nalbantian includes a comprehensive discussion of theories developed since the 1970s in Aesthetic Autobiography (pp. 26–42). See also Charles Berryman, ‘Critical Mirrors: Theories of Autobiography’, Mosaic: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature, Vol. 32, No. 1 (March 1999), pp. 71–85. Trev Lynn Broughton’s recent four-volume anthology of autobiography theory, Autobiography: Critical Concepts in Literary and Cultural Studies (London and New York: Routledge, 2007), provides a valuable means of obtaining an overview of canonical critical approaches.

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autobiographical texts that borrow themes, tropes and structural principles from the tradition of the artist-novel. Autobiography is a creative genre that selects and structures material that is implicitly – or contractually, as Philippe Lejeune would have it – agreed between author and reader to be the truth.36 The content of autobiography is expected to be fact, while the form draws on the techniques of fiction writing – structuring events coherently and for effect, for instance, and representing the younger self as the protagonist whose experience is narrated by the older self. As studies of so-called autobiographical memory have unequivocally shown, however, remembering the past as it ‘really’ was is beset with difficulties. In How the Mind Forgets and Remembers: The Seven Sins of Memory, the psychologist Daniel Schacter has shown that ‘we reconstruct the past to make it consistent with what we know in the present’.37 The issues of memory distortion in autobiography are captured by Sassoon in a sketch he entitled ‘Prettifying the Past’ at the beginning of a volume of notes regarding the composition of The Old Century. In the image, a figure looks at a younger version of himself in a mirror and the caption queries, ‘Was I really like that? And does it matter if I was?’38 Sassoon’s questions underline the challenges of self-representation, the subjective nature of truth and the way in which the writer’s present consciousness shapes both of these. Memory, Sassoon suggests, anticipating Schacter’s findings, is inherently creative. Roy Pascal observes that, regardless of whether he or she is a scientist, statesman or poet, ‘the autobiographer is a bit of a novelist’.39 Similarly, in his influential essay on the genre, Burton Pike explains the inevitable amalgamation of truth and fiction in terms of relations between the author’s past and present: 36 Lejeune’s theory of ‘the autobiographical pact’ defines autobiography as the retrospective life story of the work’s author in which author, narrator and protagonist are identical. See ‘The Autobiographical Pact’, Autobiography: Critical Concepts in Literary and Cultural Studies, Vol. 1, ed. Trev Lynn Broughton (London and New York: Routledge, 2007), pp. 297–326. 37 Daniel L. Schacter, How the Mind Forgets and Remembers: The Seven Sins of Memory (London: Souvenir Press, 2003), p. 146. 38 The image is shown on the front cover of this book. 39 Roy Pascal, ‘The Autobiographical Novel and the Autobiography’, Essays in Criticism, Vol. 9 (1959), p. 134.

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Autobiography is not simply an attempt to retell one’s past life on a linear scale, but rather in effect a novel written in the present, with one’s past life as its subject. Not all fiction is autobiographical, but on this deeper level, all autobiography is fiction.40 While Pascal and Pike are both referring to the genre as a whole, the ‘bit’ of the autobiography that is a novel or fiction is especially significant when the autobiographer is a novelist or poet because it is the level on which he or she shows the reader the artistic skill that is the result of the life experiences depicted in the autobiography. The formal choices and techniques exhibit, implicitly rather than explicitly, the author’s abilities and, in the case of autobiographies composed late in life, they can showcase the culmination of a creative life. In effect, the autobiography of the writer is always to some degree about writing, because that is his or her profession, even if this is not yet the case in the past being depicted. In instances that tell the story of the past as the development of the self as an artist, such as demonstrated by the texts under discussion in this book, the author’s formal choices become a part of the subject matter. The qualifying adjective ‘creative’ acknowledges this feature of the material and the term ‘creative autobiography’ is thus intended to delimit texts of this particular sub-type. My understanding of creative autobiography is indebted to M.H. Abrams and Adeline Tintner and their studies of William Wordsworth and Henry James respectively. While discussing Wordsworth’s The Prelude, Abrams refers to the poem as ‘creative autobiography’, a term he appropriates by placing it in inverted commas, and which he goes on to define as: the more-or-less fictional work of art about the development of the artist himself, which is preoccupied with memory, time, and the relations of what is passing to what is eternal; is punctuated by illuminated moments, or ‘epiphanies’; turns on a crisis which involves the question of the meaning of the author’s life and the purpose of his sufferings; is resolved by the author’s discovery of his literary identity and vocation and the attendant need to give up worldly involvement for artistic detachment; and 40 Burton Pike, ‘Time in Autobiography’, Comparative Literature, Vol. 28, No. 4 (Autumn 1976), p. 337.

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writing life includes its own poetic, and sometimes the circumstances of its own genesis.41

This passage is worth quoting in full because it finely outlines the developmental trajectory that is the central subject matter of this study – a trajectory that bears resemblances in one way or another to a number of genres that converge and are reimagined in this conception of creative autobiography, in particular spiritual autobiography and the Künstlerroman. With this nexus of literary forms in mind, it is not much of a leap for Abrams to then compare The Prelude with Marcel Proust’s A la recherché du temps perdu. Wordsworth’s poetic autobiography, which Abrams also describes as ‘a fully developed poetic equivalent’ of the Künstlerroman,42 exerts particular influence over the structure and themes of each of the texts considered in this study. James and Sassoon explicitly point to the influence of The Prelude, or, as the subtitle reads, the ‘Growth of a Poet’s Mind’: in Notes of a Son and Brother, James describes his text as ‘the personal history, as it were, of an imagination’, and Sassoon refers to The Old Century as his ‘Growth of a Poet’s Mind autobiography’.43 The parallels in Gosse’s and Richardson’s texts are less deliberate, but as the individual discussions in chapters two and five show, they are nonetheless present. Because the Künstlerroman is not traditionally autobiographical – although it can be – Wordsworth’s use of the journey of artistic growth for his autobiographical poem makes it suggestive reading for the early twentieth-century autobiographers. Self-reflexivity is a characteristic of autobiography, but when combined with the tendency of the Künstlerroman genre to ‘include its own poetic, and sometimes the circumstances of its own genesis’, the emergent portrait is one of the artist in action. The self-theorising amalgamated genre is especially fitting for technically innovative writers like James 41 M.H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature (London and New York: Norton, 1973), p. 80. 42 Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism, p. 74. 43 Henry James, Notes of a Son and Brother and The Middle Years, ed. Peter Collister (Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press, 2011), p. 287. See also Sassoon to Tomlinson, 13 February 1938, in Siegfried Sassoon: A Memorial Exhibition (University of Texas at Austin: Humanities Research Center, 1969), p. 52.

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and Richardson, but it also provides a means for Gosse and Sassoon to draw attention to their literary skills. Abrams’s designation ‘creative’ is a means of indicating that the autobiography is about the creative process – thematically and stylistically. This dual emphasis inspires Adeline Tintner to conclude that ‘Henry James’s memoirs […] represent a new form of fiction, creative autobiography’.44 Her seemingly contradictory emphasis on fiction actually highlights the ‘experimental method’ of James’s autobiography, which, she says, requires it to be ‘seen in a perspective that includes Proust’s Swann’s Way […] and Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man’. While Tintner uses genre designations a little too loosely, her assessment underlines the need for a description of a mode of self-representation that encompasses both life and art. The self-theorising of creative autobiography calls attention to its own creation and therefore the author in the act of authoring, and in so doing encourages the reader to take notice of the material text. Two portraits of the writer emerge: that consciously constructed by the autobiographer and that reflected in the composition itself. Believing that a text is expressive of the writer’s self is a typically Romantic view not limited to life writing. Friedrich Schlegel wrote for instance that ‘Whoever is not able to find Goethe’s whole spirit in Wilhelm Meister will search for it elsewhere in vain’.45 Yet this assertion is not dissimilar from James’s early twentieth-century view that a text is suffused with its author’s ‘spiritual presence’. Nor is it far removed from Miriam Henderson’s announcement in the third volume of Pilgrimage: ‘I have just discovered that I don’t read books for the story, but as a psychological study of the author’.46 She continues: ‘It was true and exciting. It meant […] things coming to you out of books, people, not the people in the books, but knowing, absolutely, everything about the author’. Like James, Richardson’s contention, expressed enthusiastically through the character Miriam, evokes an idea that the author is knowable through his or her artistic expression. 44 Adeline Tintner, The Twentieth-Century World of Henry James: Changes in his Work After 1900 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2000), p. 121. 45 Friedrich Schlegel, ‘On Incomprehensibility’ [1800], Theory as Practice: A Critical Anthology of Early German Romantic Writing, ed. and trans. Jochen Schulte-Sasse et al. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), p. 122. 46 Richardson, Pilgrimage I, p. 384.

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The portrait of the author suggested by these comments is a very particular yet mysterious one arising from the emanations of the artistic mind in action. James refers to the author’s ‘spiritual presence’ obliquely as ‘something’ and ‘an emanation’, conjuring up the way in which we anticipate someone’s recognisable presence by the smell of their perfume or the sound of their footfall before we see them turn the corner in person. In other words, what is being suggested is an examination of the quality of the writing mind, intangible yet intelligible. Unexpectedly, this perception of literature is not as diametrically opposed to T.S. Eliot’s representatively modernist notion of impersonality as might at first be assumed. In his essay ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’, Eliot famously wrote: the more perfect the artist, the more completely separate in him will be the man who suffers and the mind which creates; the more perfectly will the mind digest and transmute the passions which are its material.47 This appeal for readers to separate the man from the artist and consequently to ‘divert interest from the poet to the poetry’ motivated literary criticism for much of the twentieth century.48 And yet in this statement Eliot promotes an appreciation of the creative process itself – the thorough transmutation of the passions into art. He asks us to turn our attention away from the writer to the writing in which the transmuted passions are evidence of the quality of the artistic consciousness. In fact, we are asked to consider the very complexion of the mirror – as does Sassoon’s figure in his sketch of the prettified past. The charm of creative autobiography is that it enables the author to confront the reflection in the mirror as well as the character of the reflective surface and to represent the one by means of the other. In effect, the author harnesses the ‘emanation of his spirit’. Reading through the lens provided by this mixed genre, a process I discuss in chapter one, focuses our attention on the way in which the content of the authors’ lives is represented rather than on the content itself. The resultant portraiture is, of course, highly 47 T.S. Eliot, ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’, T.S. Eliot: Selected Essays (1932; repr. London: Faber and Faber, 1961), p. 18. 48 Eliot, ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’, p. 22.

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individual, and chapters two to five examine how these autobiographers variously apply features of a shared form to express their individuality. Gosse’s conflict with his father is a kind of anxiety of inheritance that personalises issues of influence familiar from Harold Bloom’s reading of literary history. As Father and Son subverts traditional spiritual autobiography in favour of an artist’s apprenticeship narrative, so Gosse’s struggle against inheriting his father’s religious beliefs enables his eventual individuation. In A Small Boy and Others and Notes of a Son and Brother, James depicts an apprenticeship in the conversion of impressions into art. By closely paralleling the model of the German Romantic Künstlerroman, James shows that the complex art of life is also a reflection of his broader artistic programme. Chapter four then examines how Sassoon’s deeply entrenched divided self formally and thematically shapes his autobiographical trilogy as a poet’s journey from Romanticism to modernism. Although more explicitly Wordsworthian than James, his final undercutting of the Künstlerroman form is also more drastic, revealing the impact of war on artistic identity. In a more obviously modernist manner, Richardson’s fictionalised self-portrait explores the relationship between personal reality and aesthetic form. By comparing her technique with that of Gosse and James, chapter five reveals the extent to which Pilgrimage complementarily combines the traditional structures of spiritual autobiography and the Künstlerroman to supplement the limits of language’s ability to express the self. The techniques employed for these individual acts of portraiture become part of the story of writing life.

chapter 1

The Writer Reading The Writer Reading

Ralph Waldo Emerson has written, in ‘The American Scholar’, that one of the greatest influences on the spirit of the intellectual is ‘the mind of the Past’ as transmitted through all art forms, but most persuasively through the reading of books. Much like Virginia Woolf in ‘Modern Fiction’ almost a century later, Emerson’s awareness of the past leads him to exclaim: ‘Each age, it is found, must write its own books; or rather, each generation for the next succeeding. The books of an older period will not fit this’.1 From the point of view of the writer, creative rewritings through reading are only the first step in the process of writing anew for the present and next generations. Recently, The Henry James Review, contributing to the current critical interest in the culture, psychology and theory of reading, dedicated two issues to the topic ‘Reading James’.2 The multiple connotations of this theme – how we read James’s texts and James himself, as well as suggesting an image of the reading author – is indicative of a new direction in reading theories. No longer is it necessary to annex the author so that the reader might have her say validated, as was the purview of early reception theorists. The author’s own intra- and extratextual experiences of reading – both his or her own works and those of other writers – are now slowly being credited with providing a distinctive window into a literary work and, as such,

1 Ralph Waldo Emerson, ‘The American Scholar’, Essays and Poems by Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Peter Norberg (1837; repr. New York: Barnes and Noble, 2004), p. 53. 2 See The Henry James Review, Vol. 34, No. 3 (Autumn 2013) and Vol. 35, No. 1 (Winter 2014).

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as a newly sharpened hermeneutic tool. Put another way, the writer’s reading can enhance the reader’s reading.3 Reading the writer reading (evidenced, for example, by intertextual allusions, parallels or direct quotations) can provide insight into both the text and the creative process of its composition because we can see the writer borrowing, adapting or pointing to the whole field of his or her art. In the case of a writer’s non-fiction work, such as prefaces, essays, travel writing or autobiography (which should also be called literary), a further layer of complexity is added to this kind of meta-reading through the fact that the writer ‘speaks’ directly to the reader, often invoking a deliberate kind of reading through self-reflexive writing. James writes in his preface to The Ambassadors (1903), for example, ‘There is the story of one’s hero, and then, thanks to the intimate connexion of things, the story of one’s story’.4 The reader navigates these intimate connections when reading the novel, but is then encouraged, when reading the novel’s preface, to reflect on how exactly this reading occurs and what it reveals. In other words, different texts require different modes of reading but the ‘intimate connections’ that add a layer of implicit meaning to that verbalised by the text reveal a story of the author’s story, regardless of its genre. Particularly in the case of autobiography, the author’s reading commonly becomes a theme of the narrative itself. Reading is an essential part of the life story of the poet or novelist for, as Harold Bloom says, ‘Historically, we know how poets become poets and fiction writers become fiction writers – they read. They read their 3 For the purposes of this discussion, I am using ‘writer’ and ‘author’ interchangeably to refer to the creative writer as distinct from the critic. That writers read differently from non-writers is suggested by Susan Griffin in her introduction to the first of the volumes on ‘Reading James’ of The Henry James Review, when she observes that James: ‘read as a writer, so much so that, by 1899, he was, as he playfully admitted to Mary Augusta Ward, “a wretched person to read a novel – I begin so quickly and concomitantly, for myself to write it, rather,” an occupational hazard reconfirmed repeatedly’ (‘Introduction’, The Henry James Review, Vol. 34, No. 3 (Autumn 2013), p. 211). While this different kind of reading is left largely unexplained, the suggestion that reading and writing are interdependent creative acts is important, and I think has more practical ramifications than Griffin has space to acknowledge. 4 Henry James, The Art of the Novel (London and New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1962), p. 313.

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predecessors and they learn what is to be learned’.5 Bloom’s debt to Emerson is notable, illustrating his own line of inheritance through reading. In the autobiographies of Gosse, James and Sassoon, and in Richardson’s autobiographical novel sequence, what has been read is conscientiously recorded as a means of portraying early influences and stages of development on the path towards individual authorship. In these works, reading can be seen as both enacting and representing a self-motivated literary apprenticeship as the protagonists learn from their predecessors. In his eminently quotable manner, Emerson describes the creative process thus: ‘First we eat, then we beget; first we read, then we write’.6 Pictured this simply, the writer reading reflects a silkworm transforming what it consumes into a new and valuable form, not unlike Emerson’s metaphor for the conversion of experience into art in ‘The American Scholar’. Much like the silkworm’s end product, what the author takes from other texts into his or her own work need no longer be recognisable. In the form and style of the creative autobiographies considered here, the authors each demonstrate the mastery to which the apprenticeships depicted were tending. Consequently, the texts are each, in their individual ways, distinctive hybrids of old and new, tradition and innovation, past and present. The autobiographer enacts a reassessment of the past through the eyes of the present, this is a requirement of the genre after all, but in these creative autobiographies about the developing writer, this enactment is formal as well as thematic. The writing life starts out as a reading life, the one shaping the other until the autobiographical act sees the authors constructing their pasts as readable texts that, like the Künstlerroman, tell the story of becoming a writer. Whether or not Gosse, James, Sassoon and Richardson were directly influenced by specific examples of the Künstlerroman, the paradigm of that genre provides a highly illuminating construct for opening up new ways of understanding their autobiographies. This chapter maps out the development and specifics of the Künstlerroman form in order to introduce and explain key concepts and vocabulary used in the studies of individual texts in the chapters that follow. 5 Harold Bloom, ‘Interview: The Art of Criticism No. 1’, The Paris Review, No. 118 (Spring 1991). 6 Quoted in Robert D. Richardson, First We Read, Then We Write: Emerson on the Creative Process (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2009), p 7.

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Tradition and Inheritance: The Künstlerroman Siegfried Sassoon’s allegorical prelude to The Old Century and Seven More Years contains suggestive allusions to the volume’s various influences, but it also discreetly marks out the author’s transformation of these for his own ends. He writes, for example: Many a half-hour’s pilgrimage we made from our house to Watercress Well, which after having been one of my ‘favourite places to go to’, now becomes a symbol of life itself in an opaque and yet transparent beginning.7 The transformation of a walk into a pilgrimage recalls John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678), but by symbolising the goal of those early excursions as the starting point of a greater journey into life, Sassoon consigns any influence Bunyan’s text may have had to a past prior to the true beginning of his own journey. Biblical imagery, also recalling Saint Augustine’s Confessions (397–400 AD) and later spiritual autobiographies, abounds in this prelude, and is treated similarly. The image of ‘a sower in his sackcloth apron’ scattering seeds across the ploughed land explicitly recalls ‘someone out of the Bible – Abraham, perhaps – and two of his sturdy sons’.8 The scene is more picturesque than spiritual. Whether the allusions to specific works are deliberate is of secondary importance, for what they achieve is an awareness of the wide field of heritage which the author can plough and replant for his own purposes. Evocations of a Wordsworthian unspoiled natural childhood dominate Sassoon’s prelude: the ‘cressy shallows’ into which the well overflows; the whisper of woodland branches that surround it; the ‘breezy meadow’ crossed on the walk home; the rivulet left to commune in ‘the wordless language of water and roots and stones’.9 These allusions are far more purposeful, as Sassoon’s use of Wordsworth’s subtitle in his description of his ‘Growth of a Poet’s Mind Autobiography’ signifies. This prelude’s suggested comparisons with Wordsworth’s The Prelude, and thereby with a 7 Siegfried Sassoon, The Old Century and Seven More Years (1938; repr. London: Faber and Faber, 1967), p. 24. 8 Sassoon, The Old Century, p. 25. 9 Sassoon, The Old Century, p. 24.

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Romantic endeavour that Abrams called a ‘poetic equivalent’ of the Künstlerroman, purposefully link the narrative that follows with Romantic ideas of the developing imagination. Significantly, Sassoon does not challenge the importance of these allusions as he does with Bunyan and the biblical imagery. In the last paragraph, for example, Sassoon records his boyhood self asking: ‘What will the seeds be like when they come up?’ Posed in allegorical language, the question introduces an image of organic growth that prefigures his narrative probing into the source of his own poetic individuality. The child’s question alludes to Wordsworth’s key image of ‘seed-time’, which the earlier poet notably employs in his reflections on the significance of his early years in the Lakes: ‘Fair seed-time had my soul, and I grew up / Foster’d alike by beauty and by fear’.10 In a characteristically Romantic turn, the question and the attendant allusion show Sassoon looking to his childhood and youth to explain his later development as a poet – to the source of what fostered his imagination. Customarily, autobiographers use prefaces, forewords or preludes to clarify the nature of their text, and in his prelude, Sassoon hints at the historical and imaginative scope of The Old Century and the two volumes that follow – it is no ordinary memoir, or war memoir as we might expect from the author of the George Sherston trilogy, but the story of poetic development. Sassoon’s prelude opens up the limits of the genre he will use through its multiple allusions to other texts to include fiction, non-fiction and poetry, and its use of metaphorical prose-poetry introduces the protagonist’s voice as that of a poet. While assigning a single genre to such a text restricts how it can be read, identifying particular generic characteristics that are apparent in the form and content of the narrative illuminates the text’s historical roots but also the author’s ambition in reshaping this history for his current purpose. The tropes and motifs woven into Sassoon’s prelude – of a journey from childhood to poetic individuality, of the fostered imagination, of a dual self, of self-reflexive wondering and actual wandering – are also essential to the narratives of Gosse, James and Richardson. These have their roots in the Bildungsroman and Künstlerroman form and the half-century of German literature between the appearance of Goethe’s Die Leiden des Jungen Werthers in 1774 and that author’s 10 William Wordsworth, The Prelude; or, Growth of a Poet’s Mind, ed. Ernest De Selincourt (1805; repr. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970), I, lines 305–06.

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death in 1832, a period that exerted its influence on the thought and literature of many western nations for at least two generations. In particular, the appearance of Goethe’s Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre in 1795–96 had a profound influence on both the novel genre and the vogue of the artist-hero in fiction. It is therefore not so surprising that Richardson should have quoted from this very novel in her foreword to Pilgrimage to show that Goethe had already defined the subjective novel more than a century before she herself set upon her so-called ‘fresh pathway’ in 1913.11 The passage she quotes is taken from the discussion in book five, chapter seven of Wilhelm Meister on the differences between a play and a novel, in which it is concluded that: In the novel, reflections and incidents should be featured; in drama character and action. The novel must proceed slowly and the thought processes of the principle figure must, by one device or another, hold up the development of the whole.12 The emphasis on the novel form’s unhurried, quiet, inward development of characters certainly pre-empts the slow unfolding of Miriam Henderson’s consciousness across the multiple volumes of Pilgrimage. The reliance of the plot’s development on the principle character’s thoughts may be represented differently by Goethe, but is not conceptually far removed from the stream of consciousness mode attributed to Richardson. The influence of Goethe’s novel on German, and indeed European, literatures cannot be overstated.13 In Germany, Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre was, as Marshall Brown calls it, ‘a breakthrough text’ both in terms of its impact on novel writing and developing theories of 11 Richardson, ‘Foreword’, Pilgrimage I, p. 10. 12 Richardson, Pilgrimage I, p. 11. 13 Maurice Beebe has commented that although Werther did a lot to establish the popular conception of the artist type in literature, it was far less important in the founding of the portrait-of-the-artist-novel than Wilhelm Meister, ‘a novel in which the hero turns out to be no artist at all’ (Ivory Towers and Sacred Founts: The Artist as Hero in Fiction from Goethe to Joyce (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964), p. 27). The process of Wilhelm Meister’s self-development through a series of ‘reflections and incidents’ may not lead to ultimate success as an artist, but it is nonetheless motivated by the desire for aesthetic culture.

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fiction.14 Goethe’s seminal novel traces the inner development and changing fortune attendant on Wilhelm Meister’s quest for success in the theatre and, eventually, his reconciliation with the demands of society. By ultimately choosing the stability and social usefulness of a medical career, Wilhelm achieves a level of fulfilment and socialisation representative of the late eighteenth-century Humantitätsideal, with its emphasis on the ‘whole man’ that results from the aspirations of personal development, and which is comparable to the more enduring idea of Bildung or self-cultivation.15 The concept of Bildung is not easily translatable due to its several etymological as well as cultural connotations in German. For this important reason, the genre designation Bildungsroman is most successfully applied untranslated to English-language novels of the type. Initiated by the critic Karl Morgenstern in his lectures and essays from the 1820s, the term Bildungsroman refers to a novel that, like Wilhelm Meister, charts the formation, or self-education, of a central character as he proceeds to a certain level of perfection, whose attainment marks the end of the story.16 Imprecise translations have led to some confusion with other similar novel types, such as the Entwicklungsroman – the novel of development – or the Erziehungsroman – the novel of education. Both of these types have basic characteristics that distinguish them from the Bildungsroman. The novel of development is ‘a chronicle of general growth rather than a specific quest for self-improvement’,17 while the novel of education 14 Marshall Brown, ‘Theory of the Novel’, The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, Vol. 5: Romanticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 263. 15 In light of the novel’s conclusion, it is somewhat ironic that the ideal gradually lost its currency due to its lack of practical application and its dissociation from the social and political realm. For an outline of the idea’s weaknesses, see H.B. Nisbet’s ‘Review of ‘Verteufelt human’? Zum Humantitätsideal der Weimar Klassik, ed. Volker C. Dörr and Michael Hoffmann (Belin: Schmidt, 2008)’, The Modern Language Review, Vol. 104, No. 4. (October 2009), pp. 1165–67. 16 Although coined by Karl Morgenstern, the term Bildungsroman only became common currency after its use in Wilhelm Dilthey’s Das Erlebnis und die Dichtung, first published in 1905. 17 This is Penny Brown’s description of the subgenre in The Poison at the Source: The Female Novel of Self-Development in the Early Twentieth Century (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1992), p. 2. Other helpful discussions of the

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centres on the protagonist’s schooling and the specific influence of a tutor or pedagogical ideal. If the term must be translated, the Bildungsroman can be most accurately referred to as the ‘apprenticeship novel’ as it pays tribute to Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjarhe, the archetypal Bildungsroman and the route by which the genre came to Britain – appropriating Thomas Carlyle’s original translation of Lehrjahre as ‘apprenticeship’. While ‘apprenticeship’ does not equate directly to ‘Bildung’, it indicates its ideal purpose of self-cultivation, and together the two concepts create a third possibility which we see enacted in the subgenre of the Künstlerroman. This fusion aligns self-development with the development of professional skills through aesthetic cultivation or education. Frederick C. Beiser explains that the notion of ‘aesthetic education’ provides a more accurate account of the Romantic ideal of Bildung, because the Romantics considered education to be the ‘highest good’ and art to be ‘the chief instrument of education’.18 As a feature of the Romantic novel of an artist’s development, Bildung as apprenticeship is enacted through formative experiences related to art and exposure to the art form for which the protagonist is destined. The budding painter in Ludwig Tieck’s Franz Sternbalds Wanderungen (1798) supplements his training under the religious and realistic Albrecht Dürer with encounters with Italian painting on his travels, inspiring him to find a method able to combine the two diverse influences. Franz Sternbald’s apprenticeship as a painter thus leads him towards an individual conception of his art. In the creative autobiographies of Gosse, James, Sassoon and Richardson, self-cultivation through exposure to art is thematised chiefly in terms of the books that were read in early life and which thus influence the developing imagination of the artist-hero. Although other interests in music or visual art play a role in individual aspects of the formation of artistic identity, literature takes precedence for subtle distinctions between these similar subtypes can be found in Susanne Howe, Wilhelm Meister and his English Kinsmen (New York: AMS Press, 1966) and Randolph P. Shaffner, The Apprenticeship Novel: A Study of the ‘Bildungsroman’ as a Regulative Type in Western Literature with a Focus on Three Classic Representatives by Goethe, Maugham, and Mann (New York, Berne, Frankfurt and Nancy: Peter Lang, 1984). 18 Frederick C. Beiser, The Romantic Imperative: The Concept of Early German Romanticism (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 2003), p. 93.

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the developing writers. Reading is therefore a significant theme of the creative autobiographies, linking them specifically to the Romantic tradition and replacing the role played by formal education in English nineteenth-century novels of moral and social development, for example David Copperfield and Jane Eyre. Each of the authors considered in this study marginalises the details of his or her formal education in favour of what is learned from reading, Richardson the only one to recall her schooling favourably. Ultimately, like Sternbald, they too move beyond their early influences to find an individual style. Essential for the Bildungsroman is the protagonist’s conscious goal to cultivate himself through his experience, not to be cultivated or educated by others. This emphasis on self-development can be traced back to the idea, current in German thinking in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, that living is an art to be learned in youth as a kind of apprenticeship towards perfection. Wilhelm von Humboldt’s theory of Bildung is a chief source of such ideas, but his thinking also captured and channelled something of the spirit of his age – what Thomas Mann referred to as the ‘finest characteristic’ of the typical German, ‘his inwardness’.19 Writing to his friend Friedrich Schiller in February 1796, Humboldt describes how he envisages humanity striving for self-cultivation that would ultimately direct its actions through new understanding: And if we think of a human being, who is solely engaged with his self-cultivation, all of his intellectual activity must finally lead to the realisation of, i.) a priori, the ideal of humanity, ii.) a posteriori, an image of humanity in reality. When both are conceived in their purest and most complete forms, he should, by comparing them, derive practical guidelines and maxims. 20 19 In the same lecture, Thomas Mann observed: ‘It is no accident that it was the Germans who gave to the world the intellectually stimulating and very humane literary form which we call the novel of personal cultivation and development’. Quoted in W.H. Bruford, The German Tradition of Self-Cultivation, ‘Bildung’ from Humbolt to Thomas Mann (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), p. vii. 20 Humboldt to Schiller, February 2 1796, Der Briefwechsel zwischen Friedrich Schiller und Wilhelm von Humboldt, ed. Siegfried Seidel (Berlin: AufbauVerlag, 1962), p. 23 (my translation).

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In Humboldt’s vision, individual improvement begins in thought but should result in action, and to conceive of Bildung as a kind of apprenticeship is not wholly removed from this original ideal. The goal of the apprenticeship at the hands of the world to reconcile self and society, self-fulfilment and the demands of integration into a particular social milieu, was central to the Bildungsroman genre. In the subgenre of the Künstlerroman, self-cultivation is concerned with the perfection of artistic skill and, resulting from the Romantic ideal that conceived of art as a powerful educative force, the ability to use that skill to aid humanity’s education in turn. Thus, the artist is seen, as Beiser puts it, ‘as the very paragon of humanity’. Characteristically, the protagonist at the end of Novalis’s Heinrich von Ofterdingen (1799), becomes aware that from the lips of the poet ‘comes the higher voice of the universe’. 21 By the beginning of the twentieth century this idealised conception of the artist figure had lost much of its potency, making deeply significant the adaptation of the Romantic artist-novel by authors searching for a rewarding mode of self-representation. While Wilhelm Meister deals with the conflict between the calls of art and life, it remains the archetypal Bildungsroman in general rather than specifically artistic terms. Despite this, the dictionary of the Brothers Grimm, begun in the 1850s, refers to one of the first usages of the term Künstlerroman, in Friedrich Schlegel’s seminal essay on Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre. 22 M.H. Abrams also refers his definition of the Künstlerroman to its parent genre, noting: [a]n important subtype of the Bildungsroman is the Künstlerroman (‘artist-novel’), which represents the growth of a novelist or other artist into the stage of maturity in which he recognises his artistic destiny and masters his artistic craft. 23 Thus, it is the literary responses to Wilhelm Meister that generate a subgenre of the Bildungsroman in the form of the artist-novel. In 21 Novalis, Henry von Ofterdingen, trans. Palmer Hilty (Long Grove: Waveland Press, 1990), p. 167. 22 Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, Deutsches Wörterbuch, Vol. 5 (Leipzig: Verlag von S. Hirzel, 1873), p. 2711. 23 M.H. Abrams, A Glossary of Literary Terms (1941; repr. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1981), p. 121.

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Emersonian terms, the younger generation read and were influenced by Goethe’s novel, but then wrote their own improved versions. On its initial publication in Germany, Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister provoked a strong response, most famously and influentially from Schiller and Novalis, who both saw in it a combination of ‘the everyday real with the unusual and mysterious’ that ultimately falls short of actual fusion. 24 In a letter to Goethe, Schiller remarks on the lack of any real ‘poetic boldness, because, as a novel, it is always attempting to accommodate Reason’. 25 How he envisages this accommodation is open to interpretation, but the comment draws attention to the novel’s self-conscious attempt to combine its ideological content with a carefully crafted structure. In his review for the literary journal the Athenäum, Friedrich Schlegel highlights this feature when he points out that Goethe’s novel ‘not only judges itself, but describes itself’. 26 As Jane V. Curran points out, the act of reading is a recurrent theme in Wilhelm Meister, and one that purposefully alerts the reader of the novel to the benefits of reading and, I would add, criticism. 27 The novel’s discussion of the difference between drama and narrative provides a critique of its own form while also proposing terms that would become relevant to its fictional descendants like Richardson’s Pilgrimage. Schlegel’s review ‘On Goethe’s Meister’ (1798) provided a further critical touchstone in response to Wilhelm Meister, and established in turn a theory of the novel genre, painting it as the ultimate form of Romantic narrative. The self-theorising stance of Goethe’s novel suggests an art about art that we find carried over into the creative autobiographies of Gosse, James, Sassoon and Richardson. As a direct response to Wilhelm Meister, and as means of righting the wrongs he perceived in the socialised outcome of Goethe’s novel, Novalis wrote his own version of a true artist’s journey into creativity. Novalis’s Heinrich von Ofterdingen, a fusion of novel, fairy tale and 24 Brown, ‘Theory of the Novel’, p. 265. 25 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Briefwechsel mit Friedrich Schiller, ed. Ernst Beutler (Zurich: Artemis-Verlag, 1950), p. 443 (my translation). 26 Friedrich Schlegel, ‘Über Goethes Meister’, Characteristiken und Kritiken I (1796–1801), ed. Hans Eichner (München: Verlag Ferdinand Schöningh, 1967), p. 134 (my translation). 27 Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship: A Reader’s Commentary (Rochester: Camden House, 2002) pp. 311–12.

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poem, is one of the most representative of German Romantic texts. Heinrich’s ‘education’, as he goes in search of the blue flower of his dreams, doubles as his poet’s apprenticeship. After initially enthusing about Wilhelm Meister, Novalis changed his opinion dramatically. In a letter to Ludwig Tieck from February 1800, Novalis expressed his change of heart, calling Goethe’s novel ‘a Candide directed against poetry’. 28 In comparison with Novalis’s own poetic ideology, Wilhelm Meister’s submission to social pressures at the expense of his art reveals a pragmatism that is essentially anti-Romantic but, as Maurice Beebe observes, by emphasising what he was not, he helped to establish the nature of the true artist. 29 The social function Goethe would seem to associate with the artist’s role in terms of the guidance and objectification that his particular vision can offer his audience, is a product of his association with Weimar Classicism during the period of the novel’s composition. The goal of individual wholeness precludes any overspecialisation, leading Wilhelm Meister to see the poet as ‘at once a teacher, a prophet, a friend of gods and men’.30 The association of the Künstlerroman with German Romanticism arises not only from the parallel between Goethe’s dates (1749–1832) and those attributed to Romanticism in Germany (1790s–1850s) but more specifically from the multitude of responses to Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister amongst the Romantic writers and their adaptation and improvement of the theme of the developing artist and the role of art as education. Unlike the other upholder of Klassik literature, Schiller, Goethe was admired by the Early Romantics (who included the Schlegel brothers, Novalis and Ludwig Tieck), who, even if they disagreed on the value of the ending, considered Wilhelm Meister a masterpiece of the new novel genre able to do justice to the synthesis of literary forms, poesy, prose, philosophy and rhetoric, that distinguished 28 Novalis, Briefe und Werke, Band 1 (Berlin: Lambert Schneider, 1943), p. 441 (my translation). Despite this change of heart, which is a means of carving some imaginative space for his own artist-figure, Novalis’s debt to Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister is significant, as Wilhelm Dilthey has shown in Das Erlebnis und die Dichtung: Lessing, Goethe, Novalis, Hölderlin (1905; repr. Leipzig and Berlin: B.G. Teubner, 1929), pp. 321–32. 29 Beebe, Ivory Towers and Sacred Founts, p. 33. 30 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, trans. Thomas Carlyle (1824; repr. Aegypan Press, 2007), p. 79.

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Romantic writing, as outlined, for example, in Friedrich Schlegel’s well-known Athenäum Fragment number 116.31 Herbert Marcuse correlates the advent of the Künstlerroman with the disruption of the unity of art and life, that is, with the identification – or awakening individuality – of the artist as a being distinct from his conventional surroundings.32 Marcuse associates this new vision of the artist with the Sturm und Drang period’s concept of genius and with possibilities revealed by the teachings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau for an artistic personality to react against society’s conventions, to establish an exceptional and experientially intense lifestyle. New ideas of genius and the imagination distinguished the artist figure from the rest of society, while the developing theory of the novel legitimised and energised a form previously considered prosaic, creating a climate in which the artistnovel could flourish. Heinrich Heine’s designation Kunstperiode (the age of art)33 would be a more appropriately descriptive term for this influential period of German aesthetic literature stretching between two European revolutions and encompassing Sturm und Drang, Weimar Classicism and Romanticism. Besides embracing the achievements of each of these movements, Heine’s term emphasises the period’s concern with the relationship between art and life and the growing autonomy of the artist figure. The faculty of imagination that distinguished the artist from the burgher was a concept cherished and elaborated upon by German and British proponents of the Romantic movement alike. The poet’s 31 Only romantic poesy, Schlegel writes, can ‘act as a mirror of the entire world that surrounds it, and become an image of the age’ (Theory as Practice, pp. 320–21). Then, in ‘Letter on the Novel’, also published in the Athenäum in 1800, Schlegel declares the novel ‘a romantic book’, the Romantic form per se (Theory as Practice, p. 193). 32 Marcuse, ‘Der Deutsche Künstlerroman’, pp. 20–21. Gero von Wilpert’s literature encyclopaedia names Heinse’s Ardinghello (1787) as the beginning of the Künstlerroman genre (curiously dated before Goethe’s novel), while in her entry on the genre in The Literary Encyclopedia, Petra Rau assumes that it was initiated by Mörike’s later novella Maler Nolten (1832). See Gero von Wilpert, Sachwörterbuch der Literatur (1955; repr. Stuttgart: Alfred Kröner, 1989). 33 The term is coined in Heine’s 1828 essay, ‘Die deutsche Literatur von Wolfgang Menzel’, in Heinrich Heine, Sämtliche Schriften 1. Band (München: Hanser 1968), p. 453 f. See also the discussion of the ‘Kunstepoche’ in Inge Stephan et al., Deutsche Literature Geschichte (Stuttgart: Metzler, 2001), pp. 182–83.

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particular insight, once transposed into art and made accessible to the world, served to illuminate, or educate, those who are ‘blind’, making, as Maurice Beebe puts it, ‘the one who sees more important than what is seen’.34 This distinction between ordinary intelligence and the special insight of artistic genius sets up an inevitable opposition between the general populace and the artist, which he or she is tasked to resolve through art. In the German tradition, the Romantics experienced these distinctions as personally problematic, causing a tragic rift within the artist, as dramatically depicted, for example, in the goldsmith René Cardillac in E.T.A. Hoffmann’s Das Fräulein von Scuderi (1819). In Hoffmann’s tale, the quality of the jeweller’s creations marks out Cardillac as a great artist, but it is also the reason he cannot part with his customers’ orders, causing him to murder them in order to recover his works of art. Although Cardillac’s inability to separate himself from his works is pathological, he portrays a type of Romantic conception of the power of art and the artist’s struggle to merge his talent with the demands of everyday society. The artist-hero’s sense of separation from the rest of society places a conflict between life and art at the heart of the artist-novel, similar to the important contrast between reality and imagination referenced by Schlegel in his review of Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister. Marcuse describes the narrative journey as a quest to overcome a fundamental division in the artist’s being and in his relationship with the world, ‘binding the disunity in a new unity, bringing together the opposites of spirit and sensuality, art and life, artist and environment’.35 This central conflict underpins Wilhelm Meister’s chronicle, however successful or unsuccessful the outcome, and it reverberates as a motif in artist-novels down the years, juxtaposing the individual intensity of the artist figure with the collective, somewhat more banal, demands of socialisation. Throughout Franz Sternbalds Wanderungen, for example, Franz struggles against ‘the stream of worldly affairs’,36 a conflict that is also familiar to Nick Dormer in James’s The Tragic Muse (1889–90). Ultimately, Wilhelm Meister fails as an artist because in the conflict between the call of his art and the call of society, society is the more dominant. 34 Beebe, Ivory Towers and Sacred Founts, p. 26. 35 Marcuse, ‘Der Deutsche Künstlerroman’, p. 16 (my translation). 36 Ludwig Tieck, Franz Sternbalds Wanderungen, ed. Algred Anger (1798; repr. Stuttgart: Reclam, 2007), p. 86 (my translation).

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While auto/biography was considered too restrictive to be a characteristic of the traditional Künstlerroman, the Romantic author’s personal experiences of difference and isolation from conventional society are reflected in those of the artist-hero. In Maurice Beebe’s opinion, novels in ‘the portrait of the artist’ tradition ‘can be seen in much the same manner as the writer’s letters, diaries, notebooks, prefaces, or memoirs’.37 This may not be the case in early Romanticism, but it does point out that the issues concerning the artistic experience channelled into these works about art and the artist were personally motivated, both then and later. Typically, the quest to resolve the demands of creative drive and everyday duties, most often depicted as a journey, takes the protagonist from the innocence of childhood or youth, through a series of setbacks, adventures and crises towards experience, ideally regaining the happiness of the original state of innocence but with a new self-awareness and understanding. This kind of resolution is typified by the end of another example of a Künstlerroman inspired by Wilhelm Meister, Tieck’s Franz Sternbalds Wanderungen, when Franz experiences ‘a new love for art’ and a renewed conviction to dedicate himself to his work at the end of his journey.38 More than this, Tieck’s fragmentary final section of the book portrays an almost spiritual experience. Franz exclaims: ‘the past has become the present […] hope and faith are unified in the most beautiful alliance’, and his childhood and youth are there again, but made new by his present understanding of their significance.39 Franz then experiences the dualisms of the world dissolve in the ‘magic interconnectedness of everything in the universe’.40 The spiral 37 Beebe, Ivory Towers and Sacred Founts, p. 4. 38 Tieck, Franz Sternbalds Wanderungen, p. 397 (my translation). 39 This passage from Tieck’s fragmentary continuation of the novel can be found in Richard Alewyn’s ‘Ein Fragment der Fortsetzung von Tiecks Sternbald’, Jahrbuch des Freien Deutchen Hochstifts (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1962), p. 61 (my translation). 40 Alewyn, ‘Ein Fragment der Fortsetzung von Tiecks Sternbald’, p. 62 (my translation). Tieck’s obvious struggle to complete his novel suggests the difficulty that a dissociated artist figure like Franz has in resolving his own needs with the requirements of wider society. In the end, the conflicts are resolved idealistically but not necessarily practically. In light of this, some reactions to Tieck’s text bear mentioning, and compare interestingly with reactions to Goethe’s novel. In a letter to Theodor von Hippel from 1805, E.T.A. Hoffmann calls Tieck’s Sternbald ‘this true artist book’, and urges him

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pattern of development contained in this ending characterises the narrative trajectory of the genre. Hugo von Hoffmannsthal’s description of the same design is precise even while it encompasses the notion of process or development more generally; he notes that: ‘Every development moves in a spiral line, leaves nothing behind, reverts to the same point on a higher turning’.41 ‘Development’ is the key word here, conceptually projecting movement upwards as well as forwards. The spiral movement stylistically displays the larger thematic development in an artist’s account of the growth of his own mind, as we find in the narratives of Gosse, James, Sassoon and Richardson. The title given by Wordsworth to book 11 of The Prelude, ‘Imagination, How Impaired and Restored’, exemplifies how this motif can function both thematically and structurally in the artist’s narrative. The final ‘book’ before the conclusion tells of the poet’s return to the imaginative insight of his childhood and youth with a new, mature understanding: Thus moderated, thus composed, I found Once more in Man an object of delight Of pure imagination, and of love; And, as the horizon of my mind enlarged, Again I took the intellectual eye For my instructor, studious more to see Great Truths, than touch and handle little ones. Knowledge was given accordingly; my trust Was firmer in the feelings which had stood The test of such a trial; far clearer My sense of what was excellent and right.42 Moderated and composed, the traveller not only reaches the end of his journey but also a new perspective on its beginning. Wordsworth’s example highlights the difference between how the spiral is depicted to read it as soon as possible (see the notes to Franz Sternbalds Wanderungen, p. 524 (my translation)). Coleridge, it seems, was not so enamoured, writing to J.H. Green in 1817: ‘I do not very much like the Sternbald of our friend’ (notes to Franz Sternbalds Wanderungen, p. 530). 41 Quoted in Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism, p. 184. 42 Wordsworth, The Prelude, XII, lines 53–63.

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in a novel and in an autobiography (even one in the form of a poem). In the artist’s creative autobiography, the new self-awareness and understanding is not a feature of the story, but is enacted by the discourse itself – by the autobiographical act. The mature reflection on the past is the task of the autobiographer and not the artist-hero who is his younger self, usually separated by several decades. While the end of the book may reach the beginning of a career, the protagonist is not nearly as mature as the narrator and attention is routinely drawn to this by the self-reflexive narrative voice and demonstrated by the compositional skill. To reiterate the key point, emphasis on development, conceivable as an artistically oriented Bildung, distinguishes the Künstlerroman from other similar narratives about artists.43 The essential difference between a novel about an artist and the Künstlerroman is more than just a matter of translating the German term into English, but derives from this accent on development, which is manifest as artistic self-cultivation. The Wanderungen, or travels, frequent in the titles of Bildungs- and Künstlerromane – also in Goethe’s sequel Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre (1821) – emphasises the essential link between the journey or quest motif and the theme of self-development.44 The titles of Richardson’s Pilgrimage and Sassoon’s Siegfried’s Journey and Sherston’s Progress adopt this crucial motif, with the added spiritual connotations drawn from the tradition of spiritual autobiography and the echoes of Pilgrim’s Progress. Although, as Abrams observes, the Christian design of life as a pilgrimage remains recognisable in such titles and texts, it has been converted by the artistic imagination into a motif with both structural and thematic connotations. The process or history of development through stages of gradual self-knowledge is represented as a journey of self-development or self-cultivation. 43 Roberta Seret goes so far as to assert a distinction between an artist-novel that features a fully formed artist and the Künstlerroman in which importance is placed on the formation of the artist. See Voyage into Creativity: The Modern Künstlerroman (New York and Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1992), p. 5. While she fails to point to it directly, Seret’s formal distinction would seem to result from the Künstlerroman’s close ties to its parent form the Bildungsroman and its emphasis on a process of development, or more precisely Bildungsweg. 44 The translation of Wanderungen or Wanderjahre as ‘journeying’ or ‘journeyman years’ relates to the German tradition of the apprentice craftsman’s journey around the country to learn about and practice his craft under different masters prior to becoming a master craftsman himself.

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Such reconfiguration refocuses the author’s self-expression, enabling him or her to represent the private life only in so far as it relates to art without forgoing narrative integrity or compromising the autobiographical pact. The autobiographer can also justifiably conclude the narrative with the beginning of his career. The goal of the journey’s search for meaning is the resolution of the conflicts that drive the narrative and motivate the artist-hero on his quest – resolution most often found, as Abrams’s puts it in his definition of creative autobiography, in ‘the author’s discovery of his literary identity and vocation and the attendant need to give up worldly involvement for artistic detachment’.45 As the examples of the four authors considered in this study reveal, however, their journeys’ resolutions are as individual as their experiences, and do not always result in a life in the ivory tower. We see Gosse severing all ties to his father and his religion; James striking out alone for Europe on an actual journey, that is, plunging into the world; Richardson ceasing her searching and beginning to write; and Sassoon returning from a journey to America to a country at peace in which the identity of the soldier poet, his identity, has lost much of its resonance. The echoes of Goethe’s apprenticeship novel, traceable from its appearance in Germany in the late eighteenth century to the present day in novels of development in most western literatures, provide a particularly relevant and persistent example of the cosmopolitan spread of a literary tradition. In turn, these echoes were disseminated amongst their national contemporaries. Goethe’s own notion of Weltliteratur, ‘a network of communication among intellectuals and people across national frontiers’, is of interest in this context of crosscultural influence.46 As Hoffmeister explains, Goethe anticipated a social function for literature that, through the mediation of authors like himself in periodicals, translations and memoirs, would cross the frontiers of prejudice erected by the Napoleonic Wars in Europe – between Germany, Britain and France in particular – creating a common market of ideas that would lead to greater understanding, first amongst intellectuals but eventually amongst peoples. The popularity and lasting impact of Wilhelm Meister would seem to have 45 Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism, p. 80. 46 Gerhart Hoffmeister, ‘Reception in Germany and Abroad’, The Cambridge Companion to Goethe, ed. Lesley Sharpe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 232.

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gone some way to realising this ideal. Some of the most influential thinkers of the British Romantic period were significantly inspired by ideas they received from reading German literature. The widely read Sir Walter Scott was a self-professed German enthusiast, for example, while no other English Romantic writer occupied himself as fully with German aesthetics and criticism as did Samuel Taylor Coleridge.47 With Thomas Carlyle’s translation of Wilhelm Meister in 1824, Goethe’s novel became widely accessible to British readers, although Coleridge had read it in the original German as early as 1813.48 In the preface to his translation, Carlyle dwells on the novel’s success in Germany but remains sceptical of its English reception: Since the year 1795, when it first appeared at Berlin, numerous editions of ‘Meister’ have been printed: critics of all ranks, and some of them dissenting widely from its doctrines, have loaded it with encomiums; its songs and poems are familiar to every German ear; the people read it, and speak of it, with an admiration approaching in many cases enthusiasm. That it will be equally successful in England, I am far indeed from anticipating.49 The notably different tastes and ways of thinking of German and British audiences also caused Sarah Austin to question the reception of her Fragments from German Prose Writers 20 years later, although she remarks that ‘a curiosity concerning the matter and form of German literature is greatly increased and increasing’ amongst the British public at the time of writing her preface in 1841.50 47 See for example, the section entitled ‘The Importation of German’ in Leslie Stephen, Studies of a Biographer, Vol. 2 (London: Duckworth and Co., 1898), pp. 32–75, as well as René Wellek, Confrontations: Studies in the Intellectual and Literary Relations between Germany, England, and the United States during the Nineteenth Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1965), p. 9, and Horst Oppel, Englisch-deutsche Literaturbeziehungen 2: Von der Romantik bis zur Gegenwart (Berlin: Erich Schmidt Verlag, 1971), p. 31. 48 Howe reports an entry in Crabb Robinson’s unpublished journals from 1813 that describes finding Coleridge ‘in raptures over Wilhelm Meister though he thought the conclusion bad’ (Wilhelm Meister and his English Kinsmen, p. 73). 49 Thomas Carlyle, ‘Preface’ to Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, p. 6. 50 Sarah Austin (ed. and trans.), Fragments from German Prose Writers (London: John Murray, 1841), p. vi.

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Carlyle’s translation of Wilhelm Meister played an important part in popularising German literature in both Britain and America, no doubt assisted by his numerous influential international friendships. Susanne Howe’s study Wilhelm Meister and his English Kinsmen describes the particular inspiration Goethe’s novel provided for British novelists into the early twentieth century, in works such as Somerset Maugham’s Of Human Bondage and H.G. Well’s Tono-Bungay. As the positive image of German scholarship grew throughout the nineteenth century, as recounted in Gisela Argyle’s overview of allusions to Germany in English fiction, so the apprenticeship model became increasingly popular among British novelists.51 The Künstlerroman, however, has not been clearly distinguished from its parent genre after the Romantic period in English literature, due to assumptions that it is simply a version of the Bildungsroman with an artist as protagonist, regardless of whether the narrative is self-theorising, contains its own poetic or is motivated by the ideal of aesthetic Bildung, structured around the spiral return, and resolved by the protagonist’s attainment of an individual artistic identity. Therefore, by the time English writers of the modern generation revisit the form in works from Sons and Lovers (1913) to To the Lighthouse (1927) it is a diluted, far less specialist version of the genre without the strong features of the artistic apprenticeship journey that dominate works like Heinrich von Ofterdingen and Franz Sternbalds Wanderungen. For this reason, Gosse, James, Sassoon and Richardson’s reversion to this particular Romantic genre, albeit in individual ways and to varying degrees, is striking. However, German ideas and texts more generally interested and influenced British and American writers in waves throughout the nineteenth century. Patrick Bridgwater’s study of Anglo-German Interactions in the Literature of the 1890s highlights the prominence of German ideas in English literature into the Edwardian period. Reviewing the impact of German literature and thought on such influential figures as Walter Pater, Oscar Wilde and George Moore, Bridgwater argues that the 1890s mark the end of the extensive period of Anglo-German literary relations. With the outbreak of the First World War, ties were even more thoroughly severed between these political enemies. Mutual trust across Europe fell victim to the 51 See Germany as Model and Monster: Allusions in English Fiction, 1830s–1930s (Montreal and Ithaca: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2002).

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fighting so that after 1918 even cultural relations between nations needed to be reconstructed across the board, not only between Britain and Germany. The gradual ‘Europeanizing process’ that Samuel Hynes observes amongst more open-minded intellectuals in Britain in the pre-war years – a growing appreciation of French art, Russian ballet and German music, for example – was arrested by the outbreak of war, when the influence of German culture began to take on a sinister hue. A different kind of war was then waged in the intellectual realm, as Hynes notes: ‘the war against Kultur was a widespread effort, with official support, to eliminate German influences from English cultural life, and to denigrate German accomplishments’.52 When Richardson’s Pointed Roofs appeared in 1915, its protagonist’s enthusiasm for German culture and the novel’s sympathetic portrayal of life in the German city of Hanover undoubtedly played a part in the book’s limited sales. However, as we can see from the rash of anglicised artist-novels and novels featuring artist figures appearing during and between the wars, transmuted traces of German culture had already taken hold in the creative imagination. Despite being condemned as a ‘megalomaniac’ in letters to The Times,53 with his Wilhelm Meister, Goethe had already established himself as a formative figure in British novel writing. ‘Influence (Inflowing)’ In each of Gosse’s, James’s, Sassoon’s and Richardson’s autobiographical texts, the apprentice writer’s reading functions as a means of positioning him or herself within a wider literary tradition, identifying and rejecting influences that have shaped their imagination and skill so that he or she may create the work that we, in turn, are reading. Tracing an author’s influences is not a straightforward or 52 See Samuel Hynes, A War Imagined: The First World War and English Culture (London: Random House, 1991), p. 67. 53 Samuel Hynes mentions these letters, but does not give a precise date. He does, however, mention that they appeared ‘at the same time’ that Will Dyson’s cartoons ridiculing German civilisation were on show in London in 1915 (A War Imagined, p. 68). In other words, such opinions were already rife in the first years of the War.

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reliable task, and the blurred boundary between direct effect and independent variations of a universal theme or model have to be taken into account. As regards the specific example of Henry James, Daniel Fogel has remarked that although he ‘would not argue for any particular attribution of influence’ to ‘a man as widely read as Henry James’, James would nonetheless ‘have felt the concept and design of the spiral return as a pervasive aspect of the thought of his age’.54 Fogel’s observation suggests that too much reading dilutes any one influence, and yet that prevalent ideas will seep into a writer’s imagination one way or another, perhaps because, as Virginia Woolf generously claims: ‘influences are infinitely numerous; writers are infinitely sensitive’.55 James’s 1865 review of Wilhelm Meister for the North American Review proves his knowledge of Goethe’s novel if not its impact on his later reimagining of his own artistic journey. The inheritance of ideas need not be pinpointed to any single text, although the legacy of Wilhelm Meister is well documented enough to irrefutably establish its cultural currency. E.M. Forster offers yet another view of influence and how it functions when he notes a fundamentally important distinction between being impressed and being influenced by a work, in his short essay ‘A Book That Has Influenced Me’. The book that has most influenced him is not one of his ‘three great books’ – Dante’s Divine Comedy, Gibbon’s Decline and Fall and Tolstoy’s War and Peace – because they are ‘monuments’ and as such complete in themselves.56 To be impressed, Forster writes, is not to be influenced, ‘it is to be extended’. Influence is exerted rather by books ‘for which we are ready, and which have gone a little further down our particular path than we have yet got ourselves’.57 The room left for development by books that stimulate and show what is possible, but do not overawe, works their influence on the apprentice writer. Dorothy Richardson passionately protested attempts by scholars or critics to suggest that she had been influenced by her 54 Daniel Mark Fogel, Henry James and the Structure of the Romantic Imagination (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1981), p. 4. 55 Quoted by Gustaaf van Cromphout in Emerson’s Modernity and the Example of Goethe (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1990), p. 8. 56 E.M. Forster, ‘A Book That Has Influenced Me’, Two Cheers for Democracy (1951; repr. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972), p. 223. 57 Forster, ‘A Book That Has Influenced Me’, p. 225.

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contemporaries in ‘the new method’,58 as she referred to the so-called stream of consciousness mode, such as Woolf, Joyce and Proust, with whom she was regularly compared. In a letter from 1948 she declared: Apart from its very limited interest, comparable to the parlourgame of formal logic, I deplore the search, in literary criticism, for influences & relationships. The influence (inflowing) of one author upon another can operate only if within each is a similarity of spirit, producing the recognition.59 Influence is not denied, but it is carefully qualified. It would seem to be the efforts of literary critics that Richardson deplores rather than ‘influences & relationships’ as such. The modification of ‘influence’ by the bracketed addition of ‘inflowing’ is intriguing, suggesting as it does an organic flux, even a kind of osmosis between like-minded spirits. The influence of a similar writer would seem to pose less threat to the notion of originality, as there is less that can be taken on or altered. It is, after all, the sense of a threat to her own originality that causes the defensive tone in Richardson’s remarks. Rebecca Bowler concludes that Richardson’s issue with the notion of influence is a defence of the very idea of genius and ‘the creative impulse’.60 The uncontested inflowing of influence would thus be acceptable only between two writers of genius, recognisable to them alone and not appreciable by literary critics, who, as she says elsewhere, are apt to make great writers all alike through their constant desire to compare one to the other and understand them only in relation to each other.61 Richardson’s innovative and challenging writing was by no means always well received by her earliest critics, which might explain some of her ire on the subject as well as her need to have her individuality appreciated. 58 Letter to Sylvia Beach, December 1934, in Richardson, Windows on Modernism: Selected Letters of Dorothy Richardson, ed. Gloria G. Fromm (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1995), p. 282. 59 Letter to Lita Hornick, 20 December 1948. Kulchur Archives, Columbia University. Rare Book and Manuscript Library. 60 Rebecca Bowler, ‘Dorothy Richardson’s Letters to Critics: Sabotaging the Canonical Narrative of Modernist Influence’, paper delivered to the Dorothy Richardson society conference, July 2013. 61 In a letter to Bryher, Richardson ‘curses’ the ‘comparers & influence finders & levellers, brains without minds’ (Windows on Modernism, p. 568).

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Anxiety for originality is key to Harold Bloom’s understanding of influence as a paradigm of literary historical transference through conflict – exemplified, for example, in the case of Novalis’s reaction to Wilhelm Meister. Although The Anxiety of Influence (1973) focuses on the case of the poet, and the triad of works published in the 1970s outlining Bloom’s ideas focus particularly on the Romantic poets, his approach has special significance for the study of creative autobiography, not least because of the interconnectedness of conflict and genealogy in his vision of poetic influence, which is recognisable in the process of individuation through differentiation that marks the artist narrative. In Bloom’s argument, ‘poetic history is indistinguishable from poetic influence’, each major writer clearing imaginative space for him- or herself by ‘misreading’ his or her predecessors.62 When an author’s reading (or ‘misreading’) of his or her predecessors is a profound enough experience, ‘a kind of falling in love’, the resultant anxiety leads the author to defend his or her own writing against this overwhelming influence.63 In light of this theory, Richardson’s youthful enthusiasm for James’s novel The Ambassadors, as depicted in The Trap, the eighth volume of Pilgrimage, can be read as the reason for her later numerous detractions. But it is no doubt also the reason why she acknowledges his ‘far from inconsiderable technical influence’ in her foreword to Pilgrimage.64 James in his turn had enacted a comparable ‘wilful revisionism’, as Bloom calls it,65 of an influential forefather, Nathanial Hawthorne. In 1880, James published an essentially affectionate study of Hawthorne, demonstrating his deep knowledge of his work, and 62 Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 5. 63 Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence, p. xxiii. 64 Pilgrimage I, p. 11. However, Richardson is noticeably less defensive when admitting Henry James’s influence on her style while rejecting the influence of her contemporaries, especially Proust, despite ‘the sublime simple perfection of his art’ (Windows on Modernism, p. 64). In the same letter in which she describes the search for influence as a parlour game, she writes: ‘My early, & still persistent, delight in H.J. was modified always by the sense that his novels are “enclosed”, are dramas shut in a resounding resounding box’ (Richardson to Lita Hornick, 20 December 1948). I would suggest that this variance is rooted in the distance and the difference she perceives between James’s work and her own, so that it poses little threat to her sense of her own originality. 65 Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence, p. 30.

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in Notes of a Son and Brother he records how affected he was to hear of the author’s death, revealing the influence this New England predecessor had on his literary imagination. By linking the memory of Hawthorne’s passing with the recollection of a conversation in Rome some years later between himself and an expatriated friend about the older author’s ‘treatment of the Roman scene’, and how he in fact ‘represented everything I had early known we must have none of’, James positions himself in his autobiography as the more cultivated American writer with a knowledge and awareness of Europe, which is lacking in Hawthorne.66 Yet the very American-ness of his predecessor’s work was in itself a significant influence. He writes that Hawthorne’s writing was charged with a tone that was ‘ever so appreciably American; which proved to what use American matter could be put by an American hand’.67 Not only does James reflect on how his own writing was to develop from the moment he heard ‘that news’ of Hawthorne’s death, he positions himself as Hawthorne’s natural heir. In light of James’s comments, we can sketch a chain of influence stretching back from Richardson, through James, to Hawthorne. The familial imagery of Bloom’s theory in his conception of the precursor-father and new or developing poet-son invokes both the notion of the modernist autobiographer as the rebellious child jostling for position and recognition in the new century, and that of the autobiographer as parent of the new, ‘fictionalized’ autobiographical self. James frequently uses the vocabulary of familial intimacy to describe the relationship between an author and his work, and in so doing he perpetuates the conception of the artist as a parent of his own work. For example, in his preface to The Tragic Muse, James writes: ‘as I now read the book over I find the circumstance[s] make, in its name, for a special tenderness of charity; even for the finer consideration hanging in the parental breast about the maimed or slighted […] child’.68 The familial, or Oedipal, imagery used by Bloom recalls the conflict between Wilhelm Meister and his father’s expectations at the start of Goethe’s novel, which drives him initially to leave home and 66 Henry James, Notes of a Son and Brother and The Middle Years: A Critical Edition, ed. Peter Collister (Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press, 2011), p. 322. 67 James, Notes of a Son and Brother, p. 323. 68 James, The Art of the Novel, pp. 80–81.

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join the acting troupe, a theme echoed in Gosse’s Father and Son, and to a lesser extend in James’s autobiographies. The theme of familial expectations that need to be overthrown by the would-be artist is prominent in the Künstlerroman genre more generally, as reflected in Marcuse’s description of the narrow, conventional environment to which the protagonist awakes, in order to begin the process of becoming an artist.69 While a charge of reductionism can be levied at such an interpretation, this picture of the autobiographical act and its historical context proves surprisingly illuminating. The writer’s reading is as much about establishing his own individuality as about learning from the past, and in the textual representation of the same this self and its past becomes something to be read in turn. Reading the creative autobiographies of Gosse, James, Sassoon and Richardson as modern adaptations of the German Romantic Künstlerroman serves to highlight the propitious confluence of form and subject matter at a significant historical moment. Reimagining the autobiographical self as an artist-hero during a period in which self-fragmentation and questions of the knowableness of the individual self were increasingly prevalent concerns throughout the arts, requires the reader to engage with questions about the relationship between art and life, as well as between tradition and innovation in the execution of art. Each of the authors under consideration here draws attention to their own awareness of the limits of the genre in which they write – autobiography and novel – as well as to the tradition to which this very self-reflexivity is responding. In creating themselves anew in this self-conscious way, the authors take control of both their life experience (during an interesting historical period) and their art (which is necessarily reacting to this period). The adaptation of a traditional mode like the Künstlerroman during a time of literary experimentation and change foregrounds the issues of genealogy and conflict inherent in autobiographical content in a way that is especially productive to this revision of the autobiographical form. As just one example, in Henry James’s autobiography, we find marked parallels with the Künstlerroman genre which pre-empt the problems that have occupied critics when considering how to best define the texts. Adeline Tintner calls James’s autobiographical 69 Notably, Penny Brown also asserts that ‘the conflict of generations’ is one of the ‘typical ingredients’ of the Bildungsroman (Poison at the Source, p. 2).

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trilogy the ‘perfect example of a “novel”’ in which ‘all progress is devoted to the growth and development of a single consciousness of the writer’.70 In his introduction to the first collected edition of James’s trilogy, Frederick Dupee explains his difficulty in choosing the title Autobiography for this volume: ‘Neither “Memoirs” nor “Reminiscences” will do for a work which is so subjective, so purposeful, and so well-organized as this one is’.71 The anomalous decision to fix on a single genre for these complex works while noting the very elements that make such an exercise tricky is perhaps historically motivated, as Dupee was writing in the 1950s, prior to the surge of autobiography theory in the ’60s and ’70s, during which period issues of genre definition became a common theme. Nonetheless, the obvious care taken with the epithet ‘autobiography’ indicates an awareness of the multiple complexities surrounding the genre in general and James’s texts in particular, regarding both the author’s intent and the reader’s expectations. Carol Holly writes that the critics first reviewing James’s autobiography had inherited the nineteenth century’s faith in the genre’s ability to record the evolution of the autobiographer’s soul, and therefore welcomed A Small Boy and Others for the light it would shed on the origins and development of a novelist of consciousness.72 Being in fact far closer to inward-looking and impressionistic twentieth-century life writing, James’s autobiography was not the public confession of the critics’ expectations. In Notes of a Son and Brother, he writes: I am fully aware while I go, I should mention, of all that flows from the principle governing, by my measure, these recoveries and reflections – even to the effect, hoped for at least, of stringing their apparently dispersed and disordered parts upon a fine silver thread.73

70 Adeline R. Tintner, The Twentieth-Century World of Henry James: Changes in his Work after 1900 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2000), p. 121. 71 Frederick Dupee, ‘Introduction’, Henry James, Autobiography (1956; repr. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), p. x. 72 See Carol Holly, ‘The British Reception of Henry James’s Autobiographies’, American Literature Vol. 57, No. 4 (December 1985), pp. 574–75. 73 James, Notes of a Son and Brother, p. 287.

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This notion of the ‘effect’ of his record is significant; it is echoed in an appeal he makes to his childhood friend Thomas Sergeant Perry in a letter from January 1914, a few months before the publication of this second volume: I found I positively had to simplify and economise statement, space, coherency etc. […] and I think you will applaud my effect; so that all I ask of you is not publicly to question or disintegrate my chronology, […] but simply to let my fusion of the whole period pass and kindly stay your hand from giving it away.74 By requesting his friend’s discretion as to his artistic license with the past, James reveals the primacy of coherence and literary effect over ‘truth’. The past is consciously reconstructed – incidents strung upon a fine silver thread – both in spite of and in line with the ambiguity of memory’s reliability. James’s conscious play with the perimeters of the genre creates an intentionally blurred distinction between the claims of fact and fiction, leading critics to compare the ­autobiographies with The Prelude, and with the writing of Joyce and Proust.75 While Richardson’s Pilgrimage is pointedly fictionalised, equating the autobiographies of Gosse, James and Sassoon directly with the novel form is unproductive. If these authors had wished to write a novel about themselves they would have – and indeed Sassoon did so in his memoirs of George Sherston. The critics who recognised 74 Virginia Harlow, Thomas Sergeant Perry: A Biography and Letters to Perry from William, Henry, and Garth Wilkinson James (Durham: Duke University Press, 1950), p. 344. 75 Despite the self-theorising that takes place in James’s texts, it was not until the 1960s that critics gave the autobiographies the attention that these ‘works of art of the maturest Jamesian vintage’ really deserve (Dorothea Krook, The Ordeal of Consciousness in Henry James (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967), p. 352). In ‘The British Reception of Henry James’s Autobiographies’, Carol Holly notes that Krook’s observations mark a significant shift in critics’ approach to the autobiographies. Since then, several critics have argued for a reassessment of James’s autobiographies to be read on a par with his fiction. Besides Holly and Krook, see also Tony Tanner, Henry James and the Art of Non-Fiction (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1995); Richard Poirier, ‘Man and Boy: Henry James’s Memoirs of Childhood’, Guardian (17 April 2002); Tintner, The Twentieth-Century World of Henry James.

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James’s autobiographies as ‘works of art’ were far from oblivious to this all-important distinction, and yet the specific means by and for which the author has spliced the model of the German Romantic Künstlerroman and autobiography together remain unexplored and so too its consequence for our understanding of the author as an artist figure within a line of tradition extending from the German Romantic period to British modernism. The general tendency for less rigid categories in English amongst the forms of the novel of development, especially during the modernist period, has led critics to overlook the significance of its particular usage in autobiography. There are noteworthy structural parallels between the Künstlerroman and the mode of introspective autobiography popular in the Victorian period from which Gosse and Richardson in particular draw to shape their self-representation. Nineteenth-century autobiography extended the spiritual autobiographical tradition of earlier centuries, leading to a number of biblical tropes becoming standard features of the genre; for example, pilgrimage, crisis and conversion. George P. Landow explains that, for Victorian autobiographers: the generic tradition presented a curious paradox: that autobiography, apparently the most personal and individual of literary genres, is in fact a highly conventional, even prescriptive form, and that its generic conventions shape our ways of thinking about the most private aspects of our lives.76 The prescriptive form that originates with either Saint Augustine’s Confessions or John Bunyan’s Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners (1666), depending on which critic you believe,77 shapes autobiography as a journey through difficulties to a point of conversion and 76 George P. Landow, Victorian Autobiography: The Tradition of Self-Interpretation (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986), p. 2. 77 For Avrom Fleishman, Saint Augustine is the father of autobiography, and his Confessions the source of generically characteristic tropes, or ‘figures’ which can be traced in autobiographies down the centuries to the modernist era. See Figures of Autobiography: The Language of Self-Writing in Victorian and Modern England (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 1983). Landow, on the other hand, disputes how familiar English writers would have been with Confessions, considering the spiritual autobiographies of the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to be most influential in the development of English forms of the genre.

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resolution that is not unlike the trajectory of the artist’s development in the traditional Künstlerroman. The artist’s journey is aesthetically as well as personally motivated, however, and this distinction is essential for the consideration of Gosse’s, James’s, Sassoon’s and Richardson’s texts. For while the educative intention of the Romantic poet is comparable to that of the Victorian autobiographer, who considered that life writing is morally instructive,78 the Künstlerroman presents a treatise on art that significantly shapes the emphasis of the self-representation. Though it can be argued, in line with John N. Morris in Versions of the Self: Studies in English Autobiography from John Bunyan to John Stuart Mill, that Romantic interiority is itself rooted in the spiritual tradition, the early twentieth-century autobiographies studied in the following chapters conceptualise the lines of inheritance from Romanticism and Victorianism as separate, drawing on the one to inform and support the other. As Landow explicates, autobiography ‘focuses less on narrative employment than on explicit interpretation’,79 a distinction that is modified but not erased by the application of the Künstlerroman in contrast to the novelised form of autobiography that developed as the nineteenth century progressed. Gosse, James and Sassoon make a point of writing autobiography, and Richardson, despite fictionalising her narrative, draws even more fully than Gosse on spiritual autobiographical modes in Pilgrimage, as discussed in chapter five. These autobiographies each maintain allegiance to the central precept of the genre by being presentations of their author’s life, yet in their mode of representation they ask to be read as creative works that exhibit their author’s individual artistic sensibility and concern with aesthetic composition and interpretation. What we find is that, rather than questioning the usefulness of genre classifications, the combination of the two forms – autobiography and the Künstlerroman – reaffirms the role played by recognisable genre characteristics in inferring meaning beyond the sum of their parts; and this is the case even for Richardson, who questions the application of standard genre designations for Pilgrimage. Each of the four authors mixes aspects of the Romantic Künstlerroman into .

78 See Linda H. Peterson, ‘Autobiography’, The Cambridge History of Victorian Literature, ed. Kate Flint (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), p. 244. 79 Landow, Victorian Autobiography, p. 4.

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their autobiography in their own way, constructing the self as an artist-hero on a quest for technical artistry and individuality, as the following chapters analyse in detail. The pliability of generic forms, shaped and reshaped by the individual author’s needs to contain the multitudes of the human experience and the complexity of selfhood, displays these authors’ skills and their understanding of their art, making these an essential part of their autobiographies. It also displays the artistic sensibility, James’s ‘complexion of the mirror’. The formal choices of the creative autobiographer when writing the story of his or her apprenticeship are critical because acquiring literary skill through reading and practice is part of the autobiographical content, and the ability to apply these as a mature writer forms an implicit part of the final resolution of the Künstlerroman narrative trajectory. In his discussion of Romantic genre mixing, David Duff observes that the type of combination he calls ‘smooth-mixing’, in which a synthesis between interdependent forms achieves the effect of ‘organic unity’, reflects a view of Romantic art also expressed in Coleridge’s definition of imagination, wherein ‘creative success is measured by a writer’s ability to balance and unify “discordant qualities” and thereby produce a harmonious artwork’.80 We can understand the creative autobiographers’ use of genre as a comparable reflection of creative success and therefore of the imagination. The manifestation of imagination in the unified quality of the work of art recalls James’s concept of the ‘spiritual presence’ of the author in the text, and as such suggests that a careful reading of the autobiographers’ supplementary use of the Romantic genre reveals a multifaceted portrait of the artist.

80 David Duff, Romanticism and the Uses of Genre (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), pp. 178–79.

chapter 2

The Anxiety of Inheritance Edmund Gosse’s Father and Son The Anxiety of Inheritance

The first line of Father and Son describes the book’s subject on an epic scale: This book is the record of a struggle between two temperaments, two consciences and almost two epochs. It ended, as was inevitable, in disruption.1 In these terms, the narrative depicts a personal struggle between two individuals that is representative of a larger struggle between belief systems and even historical periods. This is the author’s overall scheme, but in the preface a somewhat different picture of the book’s intention is introduced. Between the lines of his declaration that this is a ‘scrupulously true’ record of religious and educational conditions of a bygone era and ‘a study of the development of moral and intellectual ideas’ during childhood, the preface implies that this is also to be the autobiography of an author. The contemporary ‘ingenious’ and ‘specious’ forms of fiction are remarked upon, demonstrating an awareness of genre perimeters, while readers’ expectations are acknowledged in the declaration of truthfulness that at first glance nods towards the autobiographical pact. Criticism of other ‘sentimental’ works of autobiography serves to differentiate the intentions of the author, generating a tone that suggests the succeeding narrative is in fact the work of a knowledgeable, self-reflexive writer. 1 Edmund Gosse, Father and Son, ed. Michael Newton (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), p. 5.

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However, Gosse stands apart from the other three authors examined in this book, for Father and Son is not a multivolume discussion of art and its author is not a typical creative artist figure. Gosse can better be described as a man of letters, and as such his autobiography reads as a work about reading and its transformative power during the early years, or apprenticeship period, of his life. A number of critics do refer to Father and Son in passing as a type of Künstlerroman, but their analysis fails to pinpoint the ways in which Gosse applies aspects of this form to his synthesised genre of biography and autobiography. 2 The mature author uses his childhood perspective to inextricably weave his autobiography into a biography of his father, creating a unique vehicle for the narrative of his progression towards a literary life that is shown to depend upon and arise out of the relationship between father and son. Its very differences make Gosse’s narrative significant, for his unusual genre mixing generates a number of themes and motifs that resonate throughout this book: generational difference and influence; inheritance; the role of reading in shaping authorial individuality; and a concept of autobiography as ‘fathering’ (or ‘mothering’) the self. Gosse’s memoir of his early life in a household of extreme Calvinists known as the Plymouth Brethren recounts the results of an austere upbringing on his developing inner life. After his mother’s early death, the young Gosse is left in the sole care of his father, the naturalist Philip Henry Gosse, who, despite his scientific work, ‘was born to fly backwards’, as his son writes.3 Gosse himself, conversely, ‘could not help being carried forward’, and the vocabulary in this comparison between father and son points to the question of the influence of heredity and environment that informs Gosse’s representation of his mental and emotional struggles against his father. While Gosse is, according to his father’s beliefs, born into the service of God, his own experience of religion is anything but natural, and it is in his covert reading of poetry, novels and Shakespeare that his mind 2 William Siebenschuh remarks that Father and Son ‘is clearly a portrait of the artist of sorts’ (Fictional Techniques and Factual Works (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1983), p. 47); and Max Saunders writes that it ‘can be seen as a precursor of the modernist Künstlerroman’ (Self Impression: Life-Writing, Autobiografiction, and the Forms of Modern Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), p. 150). 3 Gosse, Father and Son, p. 5.

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eventually finds an instinctive home. The struggle between father and son is a struggle between old and new, belief and scepticism, science and literature, played out against a specific historical backdrop infused with new ideas about evolution. A concept of inheritance underpins the narrative’s form in a number of intriguing ways. On the one hand, it complements the significance of origins and family background in the autobiographical genre; on the other, Gosse’s anxiety about inheriting his father’s beliefs and cast of mind shapes his use of genre. His dawning interest in literature, which is a rebellion against his father’s religious strictures, is reflected in Gosse’s genre mixing as he undercuts key features of spiritual autobiography in favour of elements from the Künstlerroman. The most important borrowings are seen in the centrality of self-cultivation through reading and the development of individuality through differentiation. According to Ursula Mahlendorf, an essential part of the creative process is: to allow parts of the self to struggle against each other or parent figures or peer figures, to free and differentiate themselves from old selves and to establish new constellations in resolution of the conflict.4 The struggle of son against father is thus a reflection of creativity in action, and although, as Gosse declares in his opening statement, the struggle between two temperaments ends in disruption, this aspect of the story is actually contradicted by the discourse – that is, by the text itself, which stands as the output of the thematic creative process. The concern with creativity and individuality won through conflict shows Gosse enacting a version of Harold Bloom’s theory of literary lineage, described as a ‘battle between strong equals, father and son as mighty opposites, Laius and Oedipus at the crossroads’. 5 The struggle against his father for artistic individuation reiterates the inevitable conflict between generations and ideas, making Bloom’s concept of the anxiety of influence a particularly pertinent 4 Ursula R. Mahlendorf, The Wellsprings of Literary Creation, An Analysis of Male and Female ‘Artist Stories’ from the German Romantics to American Writers of the Present (Columbia: Camden House, 1985), p. 7. 5 Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (1973; repr. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 11.

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means of understanding the forces that shape Gosse’s self-portrait in Father and Son. While Gosse’s central concern with the father-son relationship recalls the familial vocabulary used by Bloom, the domestic, ancestral source of the struggle, the inevitability of the father’s influence on the son and the backdrop of Darwinian ideas all foreground a concept of problematised inheritance. In Gosse’s case, the dominant influence to be overthrown is his father’s and his anxiety derives from this closeness, and the presumption that he will inherit his views and continue his religious ministry. The connotations are personal rather than professional, shifting the emphasis of Bloom’s paradigm away from Gosse’s writing and onto his life. Contextually, Gosse’s position as a prominent figure in society during the last decades of the nineteenth century and until his death in 1928 is representative of the establishment against which writers of the Edwardian and modern generations reacted as they sought to distance themselves from strictures associated with the Victorian age. H.G. Wells’s depiction of Gosse as ‘the official British man of letters’ emphasises the sense of authority with which he was viewed, even as it strengthens the impression of an establishment for younger writers to reject. This chapter considers the multifaceted nature of the theme of inheritance by describing how Gosse’s personal anxieties regarding the influence of his father reflect the historical and literary rebellion enacted by his text. Victorian and Modern In 1910, the same year that Virginia Woolf pinpoints as the moment of social and cultural change, Gosse was instrumental in establishing an ‘Academic Committee of English Letters’ under the sponsorship of The Royal Society of Literature. Initially, 40 writers were to be invited to join, one of whom was H.G. Wells.6 Gosse had invited Wells to join the committee on several occasions to no avail. In response to one such attempt, Wells had written: ‘I adore you and [Henry] James but I am bitterly, incurably, destructively against 6 For more on the committee’ and Gosse’s role in the selection of members, see Ann Thwaite’s Edmund Gosse: A Literary Landscape (Stroud: Tempus, 2007), pp. 456–57.

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Literary Academies’,7 expressing characteristic Edwardian distaste for a Victorian tendency towards formal institutionalisation, as represented by the notion of an ‘academy’. Wells’s letter included a sketch of two moustachioed gentlemen in discussion with a caption that reads: ‘Sir Wm. Robertson Nicoll arranging who shall exist in English literature with Mr. Edmund Gosse’. Regardless of any humorous intent, Wells’s view of Gosse as a determiner of the literary canon demonstrates the position Gosse held as a ‘father’ of early twentieth-century writing, and as such as one of the forces to be overthrown by the new generation in an ironic echo of Gosse’s own rebellion against his father. Writing in ‘Modern Fiction’ a few years later, Woolf identifies Wells as just such a dominant influence to be deposed in turn. In denouncing his materialism – ‘the great clod of clay that has got itself mixed up with the purity of his inspiration’ – she observes that Wells and his contemporaries ‘spend immense skill and immense industry making the trivial and the transitory appear the true and the enduring’.8 Although Woolf’s plea for writing to take account of the inner life seems on the surface to be removed from all Gosse stood for in his public role, in fact in calling for work based upon the author’s ‘own feeling and not upon convention’, she touches on a quality in Father and Son that complicated Gosse’s reputation as a bastion of Victorian literary propriety, as early reaction to its publication reveals. After reading the copy of Father and Son sent to him by Gosse on 30 October 1907, just five days after it had been published, Henry James wrote to his friend: F. & S. is extraordinarily vivid and interesting, beautifully done, remarkably much done, & deserving to my sense to be called – which I hope you won’t think a disparagement of your literary & historic, your critical achievement – the very best thing you have ever written.9 7 H.G. Wells, The Correspondence of H.G. Wells, Vol. 3, ed. David C. Smith (London: Pickering and Chatto, 1998), p. 292. 8 Virginia Woolf, ‘Modern Fiction’, The Essays of Virginia Woolf, Vol. 4: 1925–1928, ed. Andrew McNeillie (London: Hogarth Press, 1994), pp. 158, 159. 9 James to Gosse, 10 November 1907, in Selected Letters of Henry James to Edmund Gosse 1882–1915: A Literary Friendship, ed. Rayburn S. Moore (Baton Rouge and London: Louisiana State University Press, 1988), p. 230.

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This kind of enthusiasm was typical of the response Gosse received from his friends, but James’s letter also expressed an important reservation: Your wonderful detachment will, I daresay, in its filial light incur some animadversion – but this is to my mind the very value & condition of the book; though indeed there are perhaps a couple of cases – places – in which I feel it go[es] too far: not too far, I mean, for truth, but too far for filiality, or at least tenderness. What James calls Gosse’s ‘wonderful detachment’ refers in fact to the portrayal of his personal struggles with his father’s extreme tendencies and religious beliefs, a portrait uncommonly candid for the time. James’s critique pits filiality against truth, suggesting that the one ought to temper the other, and that any such tampering with fact is within the author’s rights. James’s concern proved characteristic of the controversy that surrounded the public appearance of Father and Son. As a personal account written for public consumption, Father and Son embodies a fundamental shift in readers’ expectations of life writing that reflected the change in sentiment between Victorian and modern eras: that is, away from an historical perspective on the individual life, towards a more inward looking self-revelation. As Phyllis Grosskurth explains: ‘The typical Victorian autobiographer was acutely aware of his audience. A mutual complicity shaped the genre, and language became a screen to shelter the vulnerable egos of writers and readers alike’.10 Having dispensed with such a screen, Gosse’s narrative seemed shockingly frank. The portrayal of a small child suffering under his father’s will paints his faith as ‘strenuous’ and even ‘fanatical’, regardless of their affection for one another.11 Despite being an immediate success, Father and Son was criticised for this frankness, as the opening lines of the review in the Times Literary Supplement demonstrate: The author of this book has no doubt settled it with his conscience how far in the interests of popular edification or amusement it is 10 Phyllis Grosskurth, ‘Where Was Rousseau?’, Approaches to Victorian Autobiography, ed. George P. Landow (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1979), p. 28. 11 Gosse, Father and Son, p. 41.

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legitimate to expose the weaknesses and inconsistencies of a good man who is also one’s father.12 Evan Charteris, writing less than two decades after its first appearance, observes that to a later generation, the criticism of Gosse’s ‘anatomising’ of his father in print in Father and Son seems ‘whimsical and irrelevant’, reading like ‘the last sputter of the old guard still standing for panegyric rather than truth as a staple of biography’.13 Emblematic of the duality at the core of Father and Son, the freshness of approach for which Gosse’s work received praise was also the grounds upon which it was criticised. From Virginia Woolf’s perspective, ‘Gosse’s masterpiece and his portraits suffer from his innate regard for caution’, which she blames on the period in which he wrote.14 Yet, according to Harold Orel, the ‘high praise’ received by Father and Son, which he calls a ‘self-serving document’, came only from those ‘who believed that at last the mask of Victorian piety had been ripped away, revealing humbug and hypocrisy’.15 Gosse intended his book to be ‘a call to people to face the fact that the old faith is now impossible to sincere and intelligent minds’,16 but just how radical or conservative this innovation is considered depends on the historical horizon of the reader. Avrom Fleishman, for example, writing in the 1980s, calls Father and Son ‘The most comprehensive rewriting of traditional autobiography at the turn of the century’.17 As an example of the changes between nineteenth- and twentiethcentury autobiographical writing, Gosse’s Father and Son holds a key position in the development of the genre as a whole. The respectability of the autobiographical genre grew over the nineteenth century as the literary mode that could express ‘the highest form of truth’.18 12 The Times Literary Supplement (14 November 1907). 13 Evan Charteris, The Life and Letters of Sir Edmund Gosse (New York and London: Harpers & Brothers, 1931), p. 303. 14 Virginia Woolf, ‘Edmund Gosse’, The Essays of Virginia Woolf, Vol. 5: 1929–1932, ed. Stuart N. Clarke (London: Hogarth Press, 2009), p. 251. 15 Harold Orel, Victorian Literary Critics (London: Macmillan, 1984), p. 177. 16 Gosse to Viscount Knutsford, 15 January 1908, in Charteris, Life and Letters of Sir Edmund Goss, p. 308. 17 Avrom Fleishman, Figures of Autobiography: The Language of Self-Writing in Victorian and Modern England (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 1983), p. 300. 18 Grosskurth, ‘Where Was Rousseau?’, p. 30.

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In this spirit, Anthony Trollope begins his 1883 autobiography by stating: That I, or any man, should tell everything of himself, I hold to be impossible. Who could endure to own the doing of a mean thing? Who is there that has done none? But this I protest:– that nothing I say shall be untrue.19 Even writing in 1907, Gosse feels the need to assert in the preface to Father and Son that ‘the following narrative, so far as the punctilious attention of the writer has been able to keep it so, is scrupulously true’. 20 Gosse’s statement, however, reveals the position his autobiography assumes spanning the fissure between the Victorian penchant for public discourse and the twentieth-century interest in intimate revelation; because not only does Gosse emphasise the need for authenticity, he parenthetically recognises that any such truthfulness can only be pursued within the confines of the author’s subjectivity and he goes on to comment on the instances of his ‘tampering with precise fact’. The ‘agony’ of the Victorian age, as Gosse identified it in his evaluations of Lytton Strachey’s Eminent Victorians, resided in a rupture between public and private, ‘between the large formal gesture and the intimate actuality’. 21 Although the text is in part a biography because Gosse sets out to portray the figure of his father, Father and Son dispenses with the large formal gestures of historical portraiture in favour of intimate actuality arising from his own subjectivity. Gosse is at pains to point out to the reader that the narrative concerned with his parents ‘is not another memoir of public individuals’, but rather ‘a record of a state of soul’. 22 In his introduction to Father and Son, Peter Abbs notes that the enormity of ‘the kind of courage Gosse required to write the work’ is difficult for us to envisage now, in an age ‘where private lives are ready material for vicarious public consumption’. 23 19 Anthony Trollope, An Autobiography (1883; repr. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2008), p. 4. 20 Gosse, Father and Son, p. 3. 21 Peter Abbs, ‘Introduction’, Gosse, Father and Son: A Study of Two Temperaments by Edmund Gosse (London: Penguin, 1983), p. 12. 22 Gosse, Father and Son, pp. 11–12. 23 Abbs, ‘Introduction’, p. 11.

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Father and Son, like all autobiography, straddles two historical horizons: that of the writing self at the beginning of the twentieth century, and of the written self during the Victorian period. As a means of heightening his theme of two opposed temperaments and two epochs, Gosse plays up the distinction between his old and young selves, as well as that between himself and his father, frequently drawing attention to the temporal and experiential distance travelled in the intermittent years. He opens remarks with phrases such as: ‘In these twentieth-century days’, and makes comparative observations to highlight all that has changed, for instance: ‘If we were suddenly transplanted into the world of only fifty years ago, we should be startled’. 24 If we adjust Hans-Georg Gadamer’s terms to relate to the writer rather than the reader, we can assert that the autobiographer must transpose himself into the historical horizon of his own past if he is to recount it in its ‘true dimensions’. 25 Yet, in order to shape the memories into a comprehensive and relevant narrative, the autobiographer brings his present awareness to bear on his past, creating the impression of two voices at play in the text – or as Wordsworth experiences it in The Prelude, ‘two consciousnesses’. 26 With Gosse’s addition of a third consciousness, that of his father, he forced his readers to adjust their expectations of a self-revelatory text. By revealing his father as well as himself autobiographically with such intimate actuality, Gosse seemed to have abandoned the mutual complicity between the autobiographer and his audience, and this despite the fact that Father and Son was initially published anonymously. Saunders points out that the particularity of the early life recorded in Father and Son was so distinct from the high-profile figure Gosse became that it was sufficient camouflage to protect his identity, which would not have been the case had he included any details of his adult life. 27 Publishing anonymously reveals more about Gosse’s issues with self-confidence as a writer, I think, than about 24 Gosse, Father and Son, pp. 60, 39. 25 Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, trans. and rev. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall (1975; repr. London and New York: Continuum, 2006), p. 302. 26 Wordsworth, The Prelude, II, 33. 27 See Self Impression, pp. 108–64 for Saunders’s discussion of the role of anonymity in self-writing.

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his attempt to maintain the screen of propriety, for he revealed his identity to his friends, such as Henry James, and those who showed an interest in the book, and once it was well received he attached his name to it. 28 While critics like Harold Orel emphasise Gosse’s presentation of his father’s coldness and fanaticism, they fail to acknowledge that Gosse makes an effort to clarify that such a view was not held by his childhood self, whose affection and admiration for his father reflect Bloom’s assertion that influence begins with an intense falling in love. In the wake of his mother’s death, for example, Gosse asserts that he and his father became ‘great friends’, spending all of their time together: ‘He and I together, now in the study among the sea-anemones and star-fishes; […] now under the lamp at the maps we both loved so much, this is what I see: – no third presence was ever with us’. 29 The shared activities and interests of father and son spill over into the boy’s desire to imitate his father’s work, which in ‘the secular direction’, as Gosse distinguishes it, took the form of ‘preparing little monographs on sea-side creatures, which were arranged, tabulated and divided as exactly as possible on the pattern of those my Father was composing for his “Actinologia Britannica”’. 30 Imitation is presented as a means of admiring and learning from the source of his influence, and Gosse’s portrayal of the strength of his father’s influential role intensifies the experience of his eventual rebellion and individuation. In the religious direction, his father’s influence is equally strong. But while Gosse consciously writes himself apart from his father’s beliefs, once again there is a clear distinction made between his adult perspective and the acceptance of his childhood self. Gosse’s difference from his father is exhibited in the mode and act of writing this distinction.

28 Charteris records that ‘the first edition was sold out immediately and was followed by four impressions within twelve months’ (Life and Letters of Edmund Gosse, p. 307). 29 Gosse, Father and Son, pp. 49, 56. 30 Gosse, Father and Son, p. 98.

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Religion and Literature The German philosopher Georg Misch published his assessment that the origins of Western autobiography are to be found in antiquity in 1907, the same year that Father and Son appeared.31 However, Saint Augustine’s role as the father of the genre is still upheld by many critics. The influence of his Confessions on succeeding works leads William Spengemann to trace ‘a single evolving tradition that arose in the early Middle Ages’.32 Similarly, Avrom Fleishman writes that ‘Augustine stands at a watershed in Western autobiography because he begins the active employment of the full range of Christian life models and classical literary devices’ that have been recognisably used by succeeding autobiographers for their own ends.33 John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress also feeds into this stream of inheritances. The exact origin of these devices pales in significance beside the use to which they have since been put in life writing. In Pilgrimage, for example, Richardson adopts a traditional quest motif beginning in the garden of childhood and journeying towards epiphany and the eventual conversion that results in independence and self-knowledge. Gosse’s use of these same devices is particularly noteworthy because, unlike Richardson, he does not intend for them to bestow any spiritual significance on his life story – quite the contrary. Fleishman outlines six motifs, what he calls ‘Augustinian figures’, that chart the Christian life design employed in Confessions. He then traces these biblical motifs and the different forms they take in autobiography from Thomas Carlyle to Virginia Woolf. The first figure, from which the life journey begins, is ‘Natural Childhood’, a state of innocence that is closely followed by the ‘Fall and Exile’. Typically conveyed through momentous personal experience that results in a kind of expulsion from the garden of innocence into the desert of experience, this second figure leads 31 Misch writes that ‘the channel for all the essential tendencies of autobiography was cut in the ancient world, and Augustine’s work is not a beginning but a completion’ (A History of Autobiography in Antiquity, Vol. 1, trans. E.W. Dickes in collaboration with the author (1907, repr. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1950), p. 17). 32 William C. Spengemann, The Forms of Autobiography: Episodes in the History of a Literary Genre (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980), p. xiv. 33 Fleishman, Figures of Autobiography, p. 55.

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into ‘Wandering-Journey-Pilgrimage’. These three options each have slightly different connotations but they all lead inevitably to the fourth figure of ‘The Crisis’, which can be spiritual or intellectual and emotional, a metaphorical ‘illness’ or calamity. The fifth figure of ‘Epiphany and Conversion’ usually forms the climax of the narrative progression in which meaning is re-established – or Christ appears, transfigured – before the final stage of ‘Renewal and Return’ comes within reach.34 For Heather Henderson, Augustine’s use of the archetypal story of Genesis – ‘forbidden fruit, […] transgression, fall and exile’ – places his own sins in ‘a universal context, making them part of the divine design of human history’.35 Augustine’s theft of forbidden pears, for instance, causes him much spiritual distress. This motif is mirrored by Gosse succumbing to the ‘wheedling’ female servants and indulging in a slice of the Christmas pudding explicitly prohibited by his father.36 Gosse recalls how his ‘conscience smote [him] violently’ as a result of this transgression. In general, the wider significance lent to personal experience by these culturally recognisable motifs explains their presence in later secular autobiographies. But while Henderson’s recognition of the archetypal story of Genesis is pertinent, for Gosse its significance actually narrows his scope, as he associated his religious background with tradition, which it is his prerogative to overturn. He declares that the most memorable aspect of the Christmas pudding episode is not his own sin, for he had been tempted and is not to blame, but the violent response it elicits from his father, who flings the ‘idolatrous confectionary’ into the ashes of the dust pile in the garden. As we see in Father and Son, the reworking of the typological plan creates an additional layer of ironic implication to his struggle against the life his evangelical parents believe is preordained for him. Father and Son invokes the Augustinian figures from the start, but inverts them and in some instances reduces them to comedy. While the image of a ‘garden of childhood’ does not actually occur in the Confessions, as Fleishman makes clear, it has become characteristic of the autobiographical genre courtesy of the Genesis model summoned 34 See Fleishman, Figures of Autobiography, pp. 58–69. 35 Heather Henderson, The Victorian Self: Autobiography and Biblical Narrative (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989), p. 3. 36 Gosse, Father and Son, p. 69.

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by the other figures and secularised by Wordsworth’s association of childhood with the natural world. Gosse’s childhood state of innocence is purposefully dissociated from an idyllic garden image, however. The vocabulary he employs at the end of chapter one only recalls an Edenic state by highlighting how different was his own experience: This, then, was the scene in which the soul of the little child was planted, not as in an ordinary open flower-border or carefully tended social parterre, but as on a ledge, split in the granite of some mountain.37 The contrast of this barren mountainside with the role of nature and garden imagery in Sassoon’s prelude and the memories of actual childhood gardens in The Old Century and throughout Pilgrimage is severe. In his alteration of the traditional mode of representing childhood, Gosse insists on the uniqueness of his situation. In the following chapter, Gosse records ‘one or two shocks’ that result in a momentous change – recalling the Fall – that, rather than expulsion from an ideal state, force upon him ‘the consciousness of self’.38 What he calls ‘a series of minute and soundless incidents’, which were ‘second in real importance to none in my mental history’, result in revealing to the boy his father’s fallibility for the first time and, as Fleishman points out, this is experienced not as a loss, but as a gain – the gain of ‘a companion and confidant in myself’.39 Gosse makes the figure of the fall about losing faith in his father rather than in religion. A far more serious loss of innocence occurs not long afterwards, however, when he witnesses his mother’s illness and death, and a large portion of the tragedy is the increased loneliness of the small boy in the world of his father’s strict adult ideas. Thus, exile in the wilderness is not presented as a fall, but as a continuation and intensification of what has always been. In childhood, Gosse wants to believe in his status as one of the elect, bestowed upon him by his father in his role as minister of the local Brethren community. He notes that ‘in my tenth year, the imitative faculty got the upper hand, and nothing seemed so 37 Gosse, Father and Son, p. 12. 38 Gosse, Father and Son, p. 22. 39 Gosse, Father and Son, pp. 21, 24.

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attractive as to be what I was expected to be’.40 While no longer a god-like figure, his father nonetheless retains his authority with his son until the very last page of the book. Undergoing a ‘Conversion’, and public baptism, is therefore recorded as ‘the central event of my whole childhood’, because everything ‘since the earliest dawn of consciousness seemed to have been leading up to it. Everything, afterwards, seemed to be leading down and away from it’.41 This climactic event is presumed to be such by the young boy rather than by the autobiographer, whose portrayal of the process reveals distinctly human rather than spiritual proceedings. He describes his father ‘playing the part of stage manager’, manoeuvring the situation from beginning to end to achieve his goal and convince the congregation of his son’s worthiness. There is an element of fear in his father’s motivation that suggests it is impure. Gosse records that his father wished to ‘secure’ him into a sanctified life before he reached puberty to make sure once and for all that, as his mother had wished on her death bed, the boy would be dedicated to the Lord. Notably, the fulfilment of his father’s wish relies equally on young Gosse’s childish ability to make believe, which the autobiographer highlights to undercut any hint that true faith may have played a part. Contrary to the turmoil and questioning leading up to Augustine’s conversion in book eight of Confessions, Gosse’s well-honed imitative faculty enables him to convince the members of the congregation that he is ‘another infant Samuel’ because he is able to mimic his father’s rhetoric, and to ‘testify my faith in the atonement’ with surprising fluency.42 However, the boy’s immaturity and the inevitable pride of being singled out for special treatment at such a young age result in an altogether secular conclusion to the scene, as Gosse writes: I would fain close this remarkable episode on a key of solemnity, but alas! if I am to be loyal to the truth, I must record that some of the other little boys presently complained to Mary Grace that I put out my tongue at them in mockery, during the service in the Room, to remind them that I now broke bread as one of the Saints and that they did not.43 40 Gosse, Father and Son, p. 101. 41 Gosse, Father and Son, pp. 106–07. 42 Gosse, Father and Son, pp. 104, 105. 43 Gosse, Father and Son, p. 110.

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What is remarkable is the fact that these events occurred at all; from the perspective of the autobiographer at the beginning of the twentieth century, they represent a bygone era. Of universal significance here is the inevitability of spiritual pride and boyish one-upmanship that contrasts sharply with ‘the light of full certainty’ that infuses Augustine’s heart, signifying his conversion.44 Pragmatic moments such as this intersperse the spiritual endeavours throughout the narrative, undercutting any religious significance they might be expected to hold, and which the equivalent episodes certainly held for Saint Augustine. In the final episode of the narrative, a consciously sought combination of the ‘Epiphany’ and ‘Return’ figures, the pragmatic outcome is repeated with a sense of finality. The scene Gosse describes as ‘the highest moment of my religious life, the apex of my striving after holiness’ occurs one summer afternoon, in which ‘an immense wave of emotion’ swept over his soul in anticipation of the ‘great final change’ when, he hopes, Jesus will appear to take him to Paradise: I waited awhile, watching; and then I had a little shame at the theatrical attitude I had adopted, although I was alone. Still I gazed and still I hoped. […] Presently the colour deepened, the evening came on. From far below there rose to me the chatter of the boys returning home. The tea-bell rang, – last word of prose to shatter my mystical poetry.45 The details of daily life that intrude on the scene’s religious fervour function to make spiritual fanaticism faintly ridiculous, and his reality contrast poignantly with that of the other boys. As a result, Gosse recalls that the hoped-for epiphany reveals an absence rather than a presence, so that in his heart ‘the artificial edifice of extravagant faith began to totter and crumble’. As his father’s beliefs are shown once and for all to be insufficient in effect, the autobiographer identifies this turning point not as a return but a leave-taking, after which he and his father ‘walked in opposite hemispheres of the soul’. Fleishman and Henderson both refer to Father and Son as a parody of spiritual autobiographical forms, an impression left by the 44 Augustine, The Confessions of Saint Augustine, trans. and ed. Albert Cook Outler (Mineola: Dover, 2002), p. 146. 45 Gosse, Father and Son, p. 172.

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‘precise inversion’ of the figures employed in that tradition.46 While there is no element of satire in Gosse’s account, the term emphasises the text’s cultural critique and his self-conscious crafting of his story. In contrast to the role that imitation plays in the story of his childhood development, the way that Gosse manipulates form to tell his story ultimately rejects the idea of mimicry and something of the value of inherited forms. In Bloom’s terms, having swerved away from the precursor’s poem – in this case, the religious form associated with his father – the poet ‘antithetically “completes” his precursor, by so reading the parent-poem as to retain its terms but to mean them in another sense’.47 Gosse reworks the traditional figures, replacing their meaning with something more suitable to his sense of individuality by introducing elements of the Künstlerroman into his narrative. Most notable amongst these is the concept of Bildung in the form of self-cultivation through reading. In comparison to the committed way that we see James and Sassoon use the Romantic model, however, Gosse’s genre mixing is only partial, and as a result his apprenticeship stresses the art of reading rather than writing, with intriguing consequences for how we perceive him as an author.48 A parody requires familiarity with its original, and the well-read Gosse litters his text with allusions, quotes and parallels to the Bible, and numerous works of literature both religious and secular that reveal him to be acutely aware of a wide range of texts and literary methods. For William Siebenschuh, Gosse’s greatest achievement is ‘the degree to which he is able to add the power of literary art without seriously compromising the book’s impact as an attempt at truth and not fiction’.49 This is the essence of Gosse’s genre mixing; literary elements are used to show the skill and knowledge towards which the child will develop in adulthood. Characterisation, not only of his father but of memorable members of the congregation and the housekeeper Mrs Marks, and dramatised scenes such as 46 Fleishmann, Figures of Autobiography, p. 301. 47 Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence, p. 14. 48 The one mention of Gosse’s youthful attempts ‘to versify’ is included towards the end of Father and Son as a means of demonstrating how involved he had become with literature and the extent to which it was fused with the experience of religion in his immature mind: ‘I wrote a tragedy in pale imitation of Shakespeare, but on a Biblical and evangelistic subject’ (p. 171). 49 Siebenschuh, Fictional Techniques and Factual Works, pp. 34–35.

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that of his baptism and the expected epiphany are used throughout Father and Son in the employ of scrupulous truth. Symbolism is also employed, not least in the title itself, which foregrounds so many levels of ­significance for the interpretation of the text. The very use of symbolism is an act of defiance against his father for whom ‘nothing was symbolic, nothing allegorical or allusive in any part of Scripture’.50 By supplementing the failed spiritual autobiography with a literary one, Gosse enacts Bloom’s concept of the rebel poet’s ‘completion’ of his precursor. But nowhere is it made explicit that this is an artist’s narrative; Gosse instead frames the story of his childhood with a preface and an epilogue which suggest that this is the outcome of his literary apprenticeship beyond the book’s conclusion. What the main text shows is the power of reading in his early years to free him from his present by opening an alternative world in his imagination, and this is ultimately literature’s value in the text. Father and Son charts a journey from childhood to youth as recalled in maturity; it portrays conflict with family, a search for individuality, and a final move away to the city and a new, independent life. But this story is mingled with another – that of Gosse’s reading, at times paralleling, at times shaping, at times usurping the main events. His reading resembles his situation in early childhood and shapes the cast of his young mind for, having learnt to read early, material was limited. In place of fairy tales or fiction – which was forbidden in all forms – the young boy had access to natural history, geography, works of travel writing and, in particular, ‘The Penny Cyclopaedia’. Such scientific and fact-based material correlated with his parents’ firm denial of the value of the imagination. But despite his parents’ denial of the power of imagery, in his own early reading of the Bible, Gosse experiences the ‘extraordinary beauty of the language’ as his ‘initiation into the magic of literature’.51 This description conveys the secrecy surrounding his love of literature, and Peter Abbs remarks that ‘Gosse found in literature a refuge from the chilling demands of his puritanical background – Father and Son is, in large measure, the record of that momentous personal discovery’.52 The discovery of language’s potential power is a personal, almost clandestine initiation 50 Gosse, Father and Son, p. 41. 51 Gosse, Father and Son, pp. 41, 53. 52 Abbs, ‘Introduction’, p. 15.

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into something akin to an occult mystery, and as such it distinguishes him from his parents. Gosse pointedly notes the absence of mysticism in their faith, and in his father especially, ‘the cultivation of a rigid and iconoclastic literalness’.53 A comparable level of secrecy surrounds his discovery of Shakespeare, a reading experience that usurps the story of his development in relation to his father. Initially encountered at school, and therefore outside of his father’s purview, Shakespeare comes to represent the magical power of literature for the young Gosse, who at 15 came under ‘the full spell of the Shakespearean necromancy’, by which he implies the plays’ ability to become ‘real’ in his young mind.54 This creative power of the imagination stands in direct opposition to his father’s very literal thinking, causing the eventual anticlimactic, failed Epiphany. While he was not yet conscious of being in direct revolt against his father and his faith, as the mature autobiographer observes, by the end of the narrative he felt the ‘temptation’ posed by literature as something real and strong. The final chapter sees Gosse saving his money to buy editions of the poets – Coleridge, Keats, Shelley, Wordsworth and all of Shakespeare – which were kept out of his father’s sight so as not to cause trouble. His voracious reading, combined with what he calls his ‘still almost infantile innocence’, enabled ‘Jesus and Pan’ to hold sway together in his mind,55 and under the influence of his heightened, necromantic imagination, he waits excitedly that summer afternoon for Jesus to appear to him and take him to Paradise. But the Lord does not come, and instead the anticipated ‘great final change’ manifests itself quite pragmatically: ‘the apex of my striving after holiness’ sees the downfall of ‘the edifice of extravagant faith’,56 and with the ringing of the tea-bell Gosse figuratively steps away from a childhood bound to his father’s faith and into an independent future, as the epilogue then outlines. The epiphanic moment he hoped would end in a return to Paradise instead reveals the power of the imagination. Gosse’s application of the figure of return opposes that in the Confessions, for he moves away from his father and religion towards a secular, 53 Gosse, Father and Son, p. 41. 54 Gosse, Father and Son, p. 161. Gosse uses the term ‘necromancy’ in the wake of describing his particular devotion to The Tempest. 55 Gosse, Father and Son, pp. 166, 171. 56 Gosse, Father and Son, p. 172.

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intellectual life in service to the imagination, while Augustine is reconnected with his mother and gives up his professorship to fully embrace a spiritual existence. Gosse’s vocabulary when describing his engagement with literature is noteworthy because it draws attention to the magical quality his younger self associated with the experience of reading and, as such, the way in which it replaces the significance removed by the parodying of the autobiographical figures. His first impression of Virgil, for example, reveals ‘a miracle’ when he realises ‘the incalculable, the amazing beauty which could exist in the sound of verses’.57 Gosse frequently uses the word ‘revelation’ in relation to his experiences of literature and in such moments he undergoes a form of epiphany that establishes a deep devotion to the power and beauty of language, an emotion that is notably absent from the scenes that are meant to be religiously meaningful. When hearing his father recite Virgil for the first time, he is suddenly aware of verse as an otherworldly power, and ‘the magic of it took hold of my heart for ever’. Religious faith is exchanged for literary beauty or, as Michael Newton points out, for a ‘“pagan” spirit’ that is ‘a sense of life, energy, and the free reign of the instincts’.58 Aestheticism dominates Gosse’s reading experience and shapes his view of literature, associating beauty with passionate feeling. We see another example of a replacement of spiritual with literary significance at the beginning of chapter five, when Gosse describes the impression made on him by the sea after he and his father relocate from London to Devon. Making explicit reference to Wordsworth’s view of ‘the impact of nature on the infant soul’ in The Prelude, Gosse associates what he describes as his ‘impregnation with the obscurely-defined but keenly-felt loveliness of the open sea’ with a form of rebirth in his ninth year which replaces the figurative barren garden of his earliest childhood.59 Gosse gives the impression that with his literally widening horizons something inside himself was also able to unfurl for the first time, and by consciously romanticising his experience of the sea and naming The Prelude directly, Gosse encourages the reader to see the natural scenery as sustenance for his 57 Gosse, Father and Son, p. 96. 58 Abbs, ‘Introduction’, Gosse, Father and Son (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), p. xxi. 59 Gosse, Father and Son, p. 59.

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imagination, and the young boy as a potential poet. The significance of the impression made by the sea is enhanced by its comparison with Romantic literature; not only was it an unforgettable experience, but it is made to stand for all that the natural world represents for Wordsworth in The Prelude. By relocating the depiction of this relationship between nature and inner development to the fifth chapter of his narrative from its characteristic opening position, Gosse enhances the earlier absence. Reading imaginative literature is personally motivated in Father and Son, and as such it is presented as a form of Bildung, for he actively seeks out books. Self-cultivation is shown to dominate the young boy’s patchy education in his early years, as Gosse writes: ‘The subjects in which I took pleasure, and upon which I possessed books, I sedulously taught myself’.60 And, by way of expressing the subsequent limits of his knowledge, he quotes from Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh, ‘I brushed with extreme flounce / The circle of the universe’. The frequency with which the autobiographer quotes from and alludes to imaginative literature demonstrates his knowledge of poets and novelists who were as yet unknown to his younger self, further infusing his present status as a literary man into the presentation of his past. But the tendency towards quotation has another significant function; it is a means of replicating the Romantic synthesised genre, advocated by Friedrich Schlegel, which merges poetry with prose. The heavy use of quotation serves to poeticise the everyday as Novalis aims to do in Heinrich von Ofterdingen. In the case of Gosse’s rather bleak childhood, the autobiographer’s poeticising is a means of making the very tone of his language and form of his narrative rebel against the religious strictures imposed by his father. This poetic infusion at times also increases the text’s self-theorising quality, as when, at the end of the first chapter, Gosse outlines his authorial intention not to write ‘another memoir of public individuals’, by rephrasing lines from Robert Browning’s ‘One Word More’ to explain that rather than a public record in which ‘men saw them, praised them, and thought they knew them!’ this is a study of ‘the other side, the novel / Silent silver lights and darks undreamed of’.61 The content of the quote helps him make his point 60 Gosse, Father and Son, p. 95 61 Gosse, Father and Son, p. 12.

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about the type of record he is constructing, commenting on the public nature of biography. And the fact that this comment is made through poetry reinforces the creativity of his alternative record. On the one hand, this is because the modification of Browning’s lines shows his familiarity with the quoted poem as well as the extent to which literature has shaped and become a part of his adult thinking. On the other hand, the quotation implies that his unique blend of autobiography and biography reveals ‘the other side’, subtle, psychologically intriguing shades of individual personality that are uncommon in public record. The tone and method of the narration demonstrates that literature ultimately undermines religion in Gosse’s adult scheme of values, and it could even be asserted that his engagement with imaginative literature conveys his real ‘Conversion’, into a faith based on the power and significance of aesthetics. By the close of the narrative, Gosse in effect becomes an ideal reader – the critic – foreshadowing his adult life. And although his sense, in the final chapter, of just how far he has come from his earliest experiences causes him to remark on the lack of relevance for his own life of Wordsworth’s ‘hallowed proverb’, ‘the child is father of the man’,62 Gosse’s youthful Bildung laid the foundations for a life involved with literature that eventually allowed him to write Father and Son. Virginia Woolf wrote of Gosse that ‘he is a critic for those who read rather than those who write’, because ‘like all critics who persist in judging without creating he forgets the risk and agony of childbirth’.63 The view that Gosse was not an artist, but rather a commentator on art, is emphasised by the role literature plays in Father and Son: reading is revelled in for its own sake and while the quotations are not his own work, he absorbs them into his text and makes them speak for him. For Gosse, the role of critic and biographer is not inferior, as it seems to be for Woolf, and his engagement with imaginative literature is whole-hearted. Any preliminary glance at a list of Gosse’s publications shows the dominance of criticism, biography and literary history in his oeuvre, although he also wrote some poetry. He was to become an extremely versatile writer whose opinion mattered, and this is the persona that Father and Son projects in place of the creative artist. The connection between the represented childhood and 62 Gosse, Father and Son, p. 156. 63 Woolf, ‘Edmund Gosse’, p. 253.

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eventual individuation is made especially clear in the preface and epilogue which border the main narrative. This paratextual frame self-reflexively explains the consequences of the experiences of childhood, portraying them as the force that drove him to find meaning in literature. In the epilogue, he sets up a series of polarities, for instance, that enhance how evangelical religion stands opposed to his aestheticism: ‘all the exquisite pleasures and soft resignations of the body, all that enlarges and calms the soul, are exchanged for what is harsh and void and negative’.64 But despite assertions such as this, the structural frame narrative further emphasises Gosse as critic rather than artist, as the paratext, typically supplied by an editor or publisher, takes on a shaping and ordering role. In the epilogue, as in the preface, Gosse attempts to direct our reading of Father and Son, pointing out his themes and in one case insisting that it is the father rather than the son who ought to be foregrounded as the narrative concludes. However, as throughout the text, the father is brought into focus through the eyes of the son, the differing perspectives enhancing the reader’s impression of both. Notably, most of the quoted material in the epilogue is from his father’s letters. The theme of rebellion through reading is continued into the epilogue, which relates how the final break with his father at 21 is also in a sense caused by reading. While away at school and afterwards, Gosse is submitted to what he calls his father’s ‘inquisition’ by letter – missives he receives daily, each one containing a ‘string of questions about conduct’ and a ‘series of warnings’.65 These letters become increasingly uncomfortable reading for the youth and over time the pressure builds up until ‘my forbearance or my timidity gave way’ and it spills over in an outward rebellion against his father in a dramatic scene that starkly contrasts the anti-climactic conclusion of the main narrative.66 The final letter from his father, written in response to this ultimate clash of temperaments, is then quoted extensively, forming ‘the epigraph’ of the book. Consequently, individuality and thoughtfulness sound in Gosse’s final note, pointing his reader towards a modern, personal understanding of selfhood. He sums up his response to his father’s final letter as follows: 64 Gosse, Father and Son, p. 183. 65 Gosse, Father and Son, pp. 177, 173. 66 Gosse, Father and Son, p. 183.

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when such defiance is offered to the intelligence of a thoughtful and honest young man with the normal impulses of his twenty-one years, there are but two alternatives. Either he must cease to think for himself; or his individualism must be instantly confirmed.67 The book we have just read testifies that of course Gosse chose individualism. As Saunders puts it, the book ‘ends when the narrator stops defining himself as a son’.68 The anxiety of inheritance comes into its own in the epilogue, in which it becomes clear that the young Gosse’s main influence does not, despite his avid reading, derive from individual authors or texts but from his father. Significantly, the only text besides scripture and theology that Gosse explicitly rejects is his father’s final letter. No misreadings of literary texts are mentioned, and so we can assume that these pose no real threat to his own writing – or to his developing individuality. Instead, his father fulfils the role characteristically played by literary precursors in Bloom’s understanding of the process of creative individuation. The love and admiration of Gosse’s early childhood, including a period of studied imitation, gives way to doubt and finally to complete rejection in order to preserve his individuality. The narrative does not shy away from the numerous similarities between the boy and his father, but it is these that intensify his sense of anxiety as he approaches adulthood. There is an interesting moment in the text in which the similarity of father and son is even reduced to ‘a case of pure heredity’,69 a passing observation that calls attention to Gosse’s ability to comprehend and appreciate the evolutionary theories of his father’s scientific contemporaries, ideas his father rejected because of his literal interpretation of the Bible. However, although the environmental conditions of his childhood play an important role in both his mental and physical development, it is not upon biological transmission that Gosse dwells. Rather, his attempts to distance himself from his father express concern about the inheritance of forms of cognition that he considers restrictive. Essentially, difference and similarity are shown to coexist in a kind of Coleridgean concept of polarity. Gosse’s need to differentiate himself from his father – which arises in large part 67 Gosse, Father and Son, p. 186. 68 Saunders, Self Impression, p. 152. 69 Gosse, Father and Son, p. 122.

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from his anxiety about inheriting beliefs and attitudes that would turn him into a version of his father – makes the conflict between the two ultimately positive, resulting in individuation. In this way, Father and Son transmutes a Darwinian notion of evolution into an implicit statement about success through conflict. The auto/biographical representation of the past results in a ‘fathering’ of the self – and, textually, of the figure of his father – which complements the subject matter embodied by the title Father and Son. This trope of the parent-child relationship establishes a pattern that manifests in numerous ways in Gosse’s text: in the relationship between tradition and innovation played out in the use of genre that amends what he inherits, and in the conflict between the past and the present, and the inheritance and rejection of ideas between generations that is expressed by the narrative. The pattern is also detectable in the other autobiographies examined in this book, but has a particularly personal role to play in Henry James’s case. He too depicts his development in relation to his family, as the title Notes of a Son and Brother illustrates, although, perhaps schooled by Gosse’s example, ‘filiality’ and ‘tenderness’ shape James’s text. The Oedipal nature of Bloom’s theory of the father-son struggle suggests an essentially destructive relationship that ideally results in the metaphorical death or invalidation of the ‘father’. Yet the generational conflict between father and son in Gosse’s and James’s autobiographical writing – be it religious (Gosse) or philosophical (James) – is in both cases essentially creative, giving birth to a new secular thought and a sense of individuality. The dual relationship of antithesis and continuity contained in the concept of generational movement is represented by a fruitful process of dialectic, which in turn suggests the generating of something new, a third option, a figurative child perhaps that is both offspring and parent of the writer.

chapter 3

The Art of Life Henry James’s A Small Boy and Others and Notes of a Son and Brother The Art of Life

‘To look back at all is to meet the apparitional and to find in its ghostly face the silent stare of an appeal’.1 By reflecting on the act of reflection, this statement at the beginning of chapter eight of A Small Boy and Others encapsulates the nature of Henry James’s autobiographical writing. The ‘apparitional’ past suggests the indistinct distance between old age and youth as well as the fantastical quality of memory. James’s statement characteristically indicates his awareness of the thematic and stylistic issues in the interweaving of fact and fiction, memory and imagination inherent in life writing. In his volumes of autobiography, James consciously constructs the encounter between his youthful self and the aging writer he has become, using all the narrative skill of his long experience. Not only do we find the author’s own past spliced with the writing present, in his retrospection old Europe confronts young America, and two diverse traditions and generations are interwoven. Consequently, the diversity of James’s writing career frames the story of his childhood and youth, indicating to the careful reader the extent to which the one shaped the other. A Small Boy and Others and Notes of a Son and Brother trace the development of the young James’s imagination from early childhood, focusing in the first volume on his significantly haphazard education, and in the second on familial and personal interactions during 1 Henry James, A Small Boy and Others, ed. Peter Collister (Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press, 2011), p. 78.

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his teenage years. The perspective from which the memories are experienced is at once that of the small boy or youth and the mature artist: a continuous self, complexly both subjective and objective. Chapter three of A Small Boy opens on a note that is typical of James’s tone in both volumes: ‘But I positively dawdle and gape here – I catch myself in the act; so that I take up the thread of fond reflection that guides me through that mystification of the summer school’.2 The mature author is observing his childhood self as he in turn observes the world. The author’s ‘dawdling and gaping’ echoes that of the small boy, but by asserting his awareness of this fact, by catching himself in the act, he takes control of the narrative. James’s fascination with ‘point of view’, and with what he calls in ‘The Art of Fiction’ the ‘atmosphere of the mind’, is present as much in the content as in the narrative technique of these two volumes.3 The ‘drama of […] consciousness’ is the fundamental Jamesian theme which, by the time he comes to write his autobiography, becomes increasingly focused on a single consciousness, his own.4 The result is a narrative technique interweaving author, narrator and subject, the drama revolving around their single consciousness as well as the conscious construction of it. A distinguishing characteristic of the artistic persona thus created is the quality and sensitivity of the imagination, the development of which is the central concern of all three autobiographical volumes, but especially the first two which I will focus on in this chapter. The Middle Years, the final volume begun during the turbulent years of the First World War, is a different sort of narrative to the preceding two volumes, and not only because it remains unfinished. 2 James, A Small Boy and Others, p. 26. 3 James, ‘The Art of Fiction’, Henry James: Major Stories and Essays (New York: Library of America, 1999), p. 580. Leon Edel describes James’s ‘predilection for maintaining a consistent viewpoint or level of awareness through which the reader is given the facts of the story’ by explaining that ‘very early in his career he had discovered the trick of making the characters reveal themselves with minimal intervention of the author’ (The Psychological Novel, 1900–1950 (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1955), pp. 35–36). 4 I am adopting the phrase ‘drama of consciousness’ from James’s preface to Roderick Hudson, in which he declares the centre of the novel’s interest to be the drama of Roland Mallet’s consciousness, adding, ‘and the drama is the very drama of that consciousness’ (The Art of the Novel, Critical Prefaces with an Introduction by Richard P. Blackmur (London and New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1962), p. 16).

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James wrote to his nephew Harry on 7 April 1914 that although he would probably ‘penetrate a certain number more pages of retrospect and reminiscence’ in the months or years ahead, it would be ‘quite disconnectedly from these two recent volumes [A Small Boy and Notes], which are complete in themselves and of which the original intention is now a performed and discharged thing’.5 There is the sense that having taken the story of his childhood to the brink of his career as a writer in Notes of a Son and Brother, he had completed the ambition to depict his tale of the growth of the artist’s mind. Paul John Eakin has suggested that because ‘the autobiographer portrays himself as the champion of the small boy in the years when he had nothing to show’, it can be inferred that beyond the point of attaining an artistic career, ‘James felt that further autobiographical narrative was superfluous’.6 However, there is a further reading of this conclusion, which is that in line with the conditions of the Künstlerroman model, James’s autobiographical narrative had reached the end of its figurative journey with the attainment of his anticipated vocation. Rather than fulfilling further demands of his original narrative of artistic development, The Middle Years seems to have been an attempt to allay some of the turbulence and uncertainty which James experienced at the outbreak of the First World War by looking once again to his own past in order to assert order over the present. He wrote in a letter on 8 August 1914: ‘I hold we can still […] make a little civilization, the inkpot aiding, even when vast chunks of it, around us, go down into the abyss’.7 The emphasis here on ‘make’ suggests James’s impression of writing’s ability to construct a desired reality, so that in beginning a third volume of autobiography, James would seem to be evoking ‘civilized’ Victorian London and the stability and refinement he perceived embodied in figures like George Eliot and Alfred, Lord Tennyson, both of whom he records meeting. Despite the glimpses of nostalgia generated by his material in all three volumes, the manner in which it is conveyed is noticeably 5 James to Harry James III, Henry James Letters, Vol. 4: 1895–1916, ed. Leon Edel (Cambridge: Belknapp and Harvard University Press, 1984), p. 806. 6 Paul John Eakin, Fictions in Autobiography: Studies in the Art of Self-Invention (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), p. 123. 7 James to Mrs Alfred Sutro, The Letters of Henry James, Vol. 2, ed. Percy Lubbock (London: Macmillan, 1920), p. 402.

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modern, and in this sense James’s autobiographies are particularly representative of historical and stylistic intersections in the first decades of the twentieth century. Distinct from the Romantic thrust of his content is the style of self-representation, which positions him as a forefather of later experimental twentiethcentury writing, but which is also essential for his rendering of the writer’s individual consciousness.8 This chapter considers the story of James’s apprenticeship that is embedded within his densely textured language and form by teasing these apart to let in a little revealing light. William Goetz has written that ‘Along with the novels of Proust and Joyce, James’s autobiography can be taken as belonging to the modern genre of the artistic Bildungsroman, the subjective study of the artist’s consciousness’.9 This is a highly suggestive assessment of James’s autobiographical trilogy, and yet, beyond citing the subjectivity of the narration and its focus on childhood and adolescence, Goetz draws no further parallels between James’s texts and the Künstlerroman – the subgenre his comment invokes. James insists in his autobiographies that he is writing ‘the history of my fostered imagination’ and ‘the personal history, as it were, of an imagination’,10 thereby declaring a distinctly Wordsworthian ambition that is not 8 James’s writing tends to be aligned with varying periods and styles depending on the date of composition of the text being analysed and an individual critic’s particular argument. Malcolm Bradbury and Richard Ruland, for example, claim that in his late writing, James ‘became a severe challenger of his own earlier realism and an experimental Modernist’ (From Puritanism to Postmodernism: A History of American Literature (New York: Penguin Books, 1992), p. 218). This is by no means an exceptional opinion of James’s late works. Daniel Mark Fogel, on the other hand, reads James’s novels as belonging to ‘a characteristically and generally Romantic genre’ (Henry James and the Structure of the Romantic Imagination (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1981), p. 2). Richard A. Hocks sees James’s imagination as Coleridgean (Henry James and Pragmatistic Thought (1964; repr. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1974), pp. 10–11). However, as my analysis of the autobiographies demonstrates, in these texts in particular, James is looking both backwards to the Romantics and forward to the possibilities of modernist narratives, merging the two to his own quite modern ends. 9 William R. Goetz, Henry James and the Darkest Abyss of Romance (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1986), p. 35. 10 James, A Small Boy and Others, p. 97; James, Notes of a Son and Brother and

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only the thematic heart but also the structuring model of these nonetheless decidedly modern texts. The very word ‘fostered’ recalls Wordsworth’s declaration in The Prelude that he ‘grew up / Foster’d alike by beauty and by fear’.11 While James used the Künstlerroman model for the novels Roderick Hudson (1875) and The Tragic Muse, in neither case is he as faithful to the German Romantic original as in his autobiographical trilogy with its sharp focus on the apprenticeship of the artist and its concern with its own production, as the following discussion will reveal.12 The focus on imagination and its development in James’s autobiographies points to two important features that are central to the Künstlerroman genre: artistic individuality and its genesis. The concept of the ‘fostered imagination’ is key to both volumes. The environment and experiences that nurtured his inner life work as a kind of framework for the narrative, which thematically pursues answers to questions traditionally raised by writers of the Künstlerroman genre regarding the source of genius and the all-pervasive relationship between the artist and the world, between art and life. As Wendell Stacy Johnson writes in relation to Wordsworth in The Prelude, ‘the filial poet looks to a fathering past to discover his roots’.13 A pertinent example of the importance accorded his surroundings can be found in chapter four of Notes of a Son and Brother, in which James records his early friendship with the painter John La Farge. The impact of this relationship is intensified, James suggests, by the circumstances in which they meet: not only James’s own youthful malleability, but the physical setting of Newport, Rhode Island. He highlights the exceptional light effects – what he calls ‘that distilled old Newport light’ – that enhanced the very possibilities for creating ‘picture and story’.14 He recalls the natural surroundings, The Middle Years: A Critical Edition, ed. Peter Collister (Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press, 2011), p. 287. 11 Wordsworth, The Prelude, I, 305–06. 12 It is curious that this distinction in James’s work between a novel about an artist and a Künstlerroman has not been made more readily before now, considering his interest in the figure of the artist in such a substantial portion of his fiction. 13 Wendell Stacy Johnson, Sons and Fathers: The Generational Link in Literature 1780–1980 (New York: Peter Lang, 1985), p. 23. 14 James, Notes, p. 75.

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emphasising the sense of ‘boundless empty’ space that we see repeated in La Farge’s paintings.15 The experience of place cannot be untangled from more transcendent experiences; rather, James suggests, it moulds them. Despite his focus on place and space, there is a lack of conspicuous chronology, especially in A Small Boy, when charting a course through the different stages of his education that emphasises James’s concern with the development of his inner life. The absence of many temporal facts and figures was one of the main points of comparison made by contemporary reviewers distinguishing James’s style from that of Gosse’s Father and Son, or even Joseph Conrad’s Personal Record (1912). Both of these records ‘share a certain clarity and correctness missing in James’s autobiographical account’. An early reviewer in the Atheneum magazine noted, for example, that ‘in contrast to James, Gosse directs the reader’s attention not to the process of reminiscence but to the experience of the past this process recovers’.16 Comparably, M.H. Abrams notes of The Prelude that ‘Wordsworth does not tell his life as a simple narrative in past time but as the present remembrance of things past’.17 The evocation of a ‘former self’ experienced as coexisting with ‘the altered present self’ in Wordsworth’s poem presents a similar complexity to that of James’s narrative technique. The encounter between these ‘two consciousnesses’ is the substance of the artist’s autobiography as it traces the journey from innocence to experience – towards becoming an artist. In his preface to The Tragic Muse, James asserts that the conflict between art as ‘a human complication and a social stumbling block’ and ‘the world’ strikes him ‘as one of half-dozen great primary motives’.18 James’s own experience of this critical division between art and the world as depicted in his autobiographies deviates interestingly from that of the Romantic artist, however. While the distinction between self and others is a crucial theme in the narrative, James emphasises 15 James, Notes, p. 87. 16 Both reviews are quoted in Carol Holly, ‘The British Reception of Henry James’s Autobiographies’, American Literature, Vol. 57, No. 4 (December 1985), p. 579. 17 M.H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature (New York and London: Norton, 1973), p. 75. 18 James, The Art of the Novel, p. 79.

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the constructive role played by physical impressions, and thus by the material world, in his developing creativity. As in his novels and tales, the experiential, sensory impressions gleaned from the physical world are valued as the sustenance of consciousness. James never rejects the outer world in favour of his characters’ inner lives; rather, the two aspects of human experience are inextricably linked, a phenomenological perspective that lies at the core of his worldview. While not quite the same as the notion of the ‘worldly affairs’ that plague the likes of Franz Sternbald, James’s emphasis nonetheless distinguishes his artist-protagonist in the autobiographies from the characteristic Romantic artist – not least because his engagement with the physical world derives as much energy from civilisation as from nature. James’s esteem for the material world is a very specific deviation, however, and in his autobiographical sequence a quest for unity within himself as man and artist, between his life and his writing, forms the basis of his artistic endeavour. One selected scene depicts the small boy’s dawdling and gaping, which is a trope that comes to define his entire later life: I at any rate watch the small boy dawdle and gape again, I smell the cold dusty paint and iron as the rails of the Eighteenth Street corner rub his contemplative nose, and, feeling him foredoomed, withhold from him no grain of my sympathy. He is a convenient little image or warning of all that was to be for him […]. For there was the very pattern and measure of all he was to demand: just to be somewhere – almost anywhere would do – and somehow receive an impression or an accession, feel a relation or a vibration. He was to go without many things, ever so many – as all persons do in whom contemplation takes the place of action.19 In portraying this particular memory, James selects and creates a scene that at once details a significant experience while standing as an image that is relevant for his present writing self. In merging the perspective of the boy and the master author, James layers formal and thematic elements into a single scene. Not only does his childhood penchant for ‘gaping’ remain throughout his life, this image of the boy peering through the railings functions as a motif of the artist’s position as a careful and curious observer of life, making an implicit statement 19 James, A Small Boy and Others, pp. 24–25.

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about the quality of the artistic mind. In the midst of partaking of his young self’s sensations, James objectifies the boy as an image of something more universal than his own experience. The sweeping view of the artist’s condition is reached through reliving the relatively simple and precise physical sensation of standing at the railing, thus insisting on a close connection between experience and contemplation. Throughout the two volumes, the verbs ‘to watch’ and ‘to see’ are James’s favoured means of bringing the two selves of autobiographer and his subject onto the same page, while the ‘appearance’ or ‘spectacle’ of the surroundings frequently captures the attention of them both. The maintenance of a dual perspective from past and present and the self-reflexivity inherent in the process of reminiscing mean that the reader would seem to be watching the very act of writing, of emptying the ‘ragbag of memory […] into these pages’, as James puts it. 20 Woven into the story of authorship is a sustained awareness of how not only these texts, but also these selves – narrator, protagonist, but also author – will be read. The relationship between the author and his work is more prominent in the autobiographies even than in James’s famous prefaces to the New York edition of his works. While the prefaces are self-reflexive in relation to the novels and tales they precede, in the autobiographies the very act of reminiscing and reflecting becomes a part of the narrative – the story of self-development. Thus, his decision to construct the story of his early life as a kind of artist novel quite literarily embeds both the writing and written selves in a ‘thrilling tale’, as he calls the whole ‘process of production’ in the preface to Roderick Hudson. 21 Making a Scene The process of producing the autobiographies was ‘a delicate enterprise’, as Frederick Dupee writes in his introduction to the collected edition: ‘and the reading of it requires a concentration exceptional even for a work of the later Henry James. The style is late late James and has its peculiar features’. 22 Much has been made of the 20 James, A Small Boy and Others, p. 59. 21 James, The Art of the Novel, p. 4. 22 Frederick W. Dupee, ‘Introduction’, Henry James, Autobiography (1956; repr. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), p. xiv.

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linguistic intricacy of James’s style during and after the 1890s; the abstractions, extensive parenthesis, unusual metaphors and complex syntax characteristic of James’s writing in the last two and a half decades of his life are considered by F.R. Leavis, for example, to represent ‘a disproportionate amount of “doing”’. 23 Paul Theroux’s comment that James’s autobiographies ‘tell us very little of the man and, couched in his late and most elliptical style, are among his least readable works’ embodies a frequent reaction to these highly complex texts. 24 But such assessments are misguided and fail to appreciate the intricate connection between style and subject matter that marks James’s work, perhaps most particularly in his autobiographies. As an aside in an essay entitled ‘The Trouble with Autobiography’, Theroux’s assessment demonstrates a familiar tendency to expect personal confession and historical clarity from autobiography, failing to see the necessity of the style for James’s special focus on the act of perception and its development. The focus on the act of perception requires a method of expression that realistically conveys this function without detracting from the objects of perception, be these sensations, impressions or physical things. James tells his story while simultaneously conveying its perceiving consciousness. There are interesting similarities between the method of narration in A Small Boy and that employed more experimentally in What Maisie Knew (1897). The story of a young girl in a dangerously adult world is portrayed through James’s combined use of point of view and the dramatic scene. In his Preface to What Maisie Knew, James writes: To that, then, I settled – to the question of giving it all, the whole situation surrounding her, but of giving it only through the occasions and connexions of her proximity and her attention; 23 F.R. Leavis, The Great Tradition (1947; repr. Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1966), p. 188. David Lodge makes a note of the fact that there is ‘comment on style in nearly all criticism on James’ (Language of Fiction: Essays in Criticism and Verbal Analysis of the English Novel (London: Routledge, 1966), p. 189). For a detailed analysis of James’s ‘late style’, see Seymour Chatman, The Later Style of Henry James (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1972). 24 Paul Theroux, ‘The Trouble with Autobiography’, Smithsonian (January 2011), www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/The-Trouble-With-Autobiography. html.

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writing life only as it might pass before her and appeal to her […] so that we fellow witnesses […] should feel in strong possession of it. 25

Here he describes his technique of showing the action solely from Maisie’s perspective and the form of ‘occasions’, or scenes, that this restriction invokes. The calculated limitations of the centralised perspective in conjunction with the dramatic scene render an internal and an external view of the subject. The dramatic scene is ‘compressed, not illustrative: it presents, rather than represents. It is objective, contained in itself, self-evident’, as Sergio Perosa notes. 26 The adult content of the story (divorce, adultery, greed and negligence) is deceptively mellowed because it is viewed through the veil of Maisie’s innocence. Maisie’s nature, in conjunction with her increased comprehension of her parents’ and step parents’ motives, has a two-fold function: it helps the reader to understand the emotional corruption at the heart of the story by presenting its effects on the child, and it echoes the very process of understanding, thus uniting two vital aspects of the novel’s subject matter. Likewise, in A Small Boy, the boy’s perspective selects and limits what the reader is shown, even while the narrating author remarks on this very limitation. Describing how his malaria affected his family’s travels through Europe, for example, James writes: This condition, of the intermittent order, hampered our movements but left alternate days on which we could travel, and as present to me as ever is the apprehended interest of my important and determinate state and of our complicated prospect while I lay, much at my ease – for I recall in particular certain short sweet times when I could be left alone – with the thick and heavy suggestions of the London room about me, the very smell of which was ancient, strange and impressive, a new revelation altogether, and the window open to the English June and the far off hum of a thousand possibilities. 27 Not only does this single, complex sentence explain the family’s 25 James, The Art of the Novel, p. 145. 26 Sergio Perosa, Henry James and the Experimental Novel (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1978), p. 49. 27 James, A Small Boy and Others, p. 218.

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situation and their physical location in London, it also describes the intensity with which James relives minute details of past states of consciousness. The multiple commas, the parenthesis and the abstract noun ‘suggestions’ are characteristic traits of James’s late style. The correlation between James’s language and his presentation of perception also reveals his particular understanding of consciousness. In the phrase ‘thick and heavy suggestions of the London room’, the roles of abstract and concrete references are switched. ‘Thick’ and ‘heavy’ are physical descriptions but in this context they refer to the abstract ‘suggestions’ of the room rather than any material aspect. While only a brief example, this phrase demonstrates the materiality of James’s conception of something as intangible as consciousness. Meanwhile, the whole sentence demonstrates the equal significance of the physical and mental aspects of experience inherent in the drama of consciousness. By articulating experiences, or aspects of experiences, that his childhood self would have been unable to verbalise, James the narrator is presenting the superiority of the artist’s consciousness towards which the small boy is developing. All the encounters with relations, with places and things are presented as they are remembered from the perspective of childhood or youth and qualified by the conscious process of selection exerted by the skilled and experienced author. James the narrator writes in the first person, referring to his childhood self in the third person, distinguishing the two perspectives, which are nonetheless interwoven. The temporal and experiential split perceived between the adult and childhood selves creates the narrative’s drama in a story that after all gives precedence to internal action. As we have seen with the description of the child’s ‘dawdling and gaping’ through the iron railing of a New York street, some of the autobiography’s main themes emerge when the two perspectives – of subject and narrator – fuse, and in so doing qualify one another. At such moments, James seeks to show how the artist’s imagination was fostered. The focal points of the boy’s experience, charted by the autobiographer, function as seeds that flower into the art of his later life, thereby binding the two consciousnesses, young and old, together. Each incident depicted in the course of the narrative is included to ‘make [James’s] point of when and how the seeds were sown that

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afterwards so thickly sprouted and flowered’. 28 This imagery nods towards the autobiographical figure of the garden of childhood, but in acknowledging the future ‘flowering’ of the ‘seeds’, James also implies the development towards fulfilled maturity, which is more specific to the narrative of the artist’s journey. The child’s dawdling and gaping becomes the author’s hunger for ‘impressions’ and ‘vibrations’ only attainable by sacrificing action for contemplation. Such interconnection between form and content – between the decision to include particular events and their thematic relevance to the whole constructed narrative – provides a loose linearity as it depicts the boy’s growing consciousness to replace the more conventional need for a factually chronological structure. The selected incidents chosen for inclusion in the narrative are all related to that central premise of understanding one’s own consciousness, which motivates the text’s movement between cause and effect. James notes, by way of a hint to his readers about the book’s intention, that: it seems to him, as he even now thus indulges himself, an education like another: feeling […] that no education avails for the intelligence that doesn’t stir in it some subjective passion, and that on the other hand almost anything that does so act is largely educative. 29 Here the educative role of experience itself is stressed, in line with the unique view of schooling held by Henry James Sr. and inflicted on his two eldest sons in particular. While the schools James attends change repeatedly, visits to the theatre and to art galleries remain a constant. An emphasis on experience over traditional schooling, though not at its expense, ‘humanised and socialised’ Henry James Sr.’s children, as his son describes.30 He desired that ‘everything that should happen’ to them, ‘every contact, every impression and every experience’ should form the ‘soluble stuff’ of their particular education. The links which James constructs between the art he observes, how that art makes him perceive his environment and how the echoes in material reality subsequently stimulate his growing 28 James, A Small Boy and Others, p. 86. 29 James, A Small Boy and Others, p. 25. 30 James, A Small Boy and Others, p. 174.

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awareness of art’s wider ontological significance, are essential to his autobiographical endeavour. The theme of interconnected life and art reaches a climax in chapter 25 of A Small Boy, where James’s depiction of walks through Paris and its galleries results in his youthful recognition of this very relationship. The child gapes at the buildings and the paintings, often overwhelmed by them, feeling himself ‘happily cross that bridge over to Style constituted by the wondrous Galerie d’Apollon, drawn out for me as a long but assured initiation’. 31 The Louvre’s Galerie d’Apollon is depicted as the source of James’s aesthetic education from which his ‘intense young fancy’ drank, its influence echoing down the years but then only ‘vaguely felt’. Significantly, the gallery is also the setting for ‘the most appalling yet most admirable nightmare’ of his life, in which he is pursued by, and finally turns the tables on, an ‘awful agent’. 32 Initially terrified by the ‘creature or presence’, James describes himself in his dream as acting on impulse to take control and bar the door against him, thus ‘surpassing him for straight aggression and dire intention’ and diminishing the source of his fear. The fact that this ‘dream-adventure founded on the deepest, quickest, clearest act of cognition and comparison’ takes place in the gallery that affected him so much as a child is no coincidence. James inserts this experience from his later life into the narrative of his childhood to highlight the significant influence of both the hallucinatory dream and the ‘young imaginative life’ in the gallery on his development as an artist. The child observer in the gallery is transformed in the dream into an adult participant, active rather than passive, turning the tables on his fears. But, this is the outcome of a journey, the result of a developmental process by both man and artist. Quite late in Notes of a Son and Brother, while describing a long-held desire to record the story of his own life, James recalls his initial encounter with himself as what he calls ‘the man of imagination’.33 In his characteristically intricate manner, James portrays this encounter as a climatic realisation, a kind of coming into being of selfhood:

31 James, A Small Boy and Others, p. 275. 32 James, A Small Boy and Others, p. 277. 33 James, Notes, p. 287.

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His description of having to draw ‘the man of imagination’ forth ‘from within’ illustrates the self-motivated process of his cultivation as an artist, and as such alludes to the idea of Bildung. But the process is not an easy one that can be granted him from without; the phrase ‘nothing less’ emphasises the extremity of the act of metaphorically giving birth to the artistic self. The artist, presented in the third person as a separate entity, had been inside him all along, but he had not been properly aware of himself as such. With this new awareness – the result of his developing imagination – he is able to unify the dual aspects of himself, man and artist. As is typical of the Künstlerroman genre, a resolution is most often found, as Abrams puts it, in ‘the author’s discovery of his literary identity and vocation’.34 James’s encounter with himself as an artist leads to a resolution that is a more modern adaptation of this characteristic trajectory, as we shall see. Several episodes in the course of A Small Boy and Notes serve to chart the small boy’s passage from innocence to experience but always in respect to the mature author’s focus on his developing artistic consciousness. The dual perspective of young boy and old man keeps the spiral dialect present in both narratives, suggesting at once the distance between innocence and experience and the movement from one state to the other. At times the narrator is very conscious of the distance the small boy has to travel; he looks back, for example, at his childhood enthusiasm for a particular theatrical spectacle from ‘the high ground of an age that has mastered tone and fusion’, revealing the play in fact to have been ‘comparatively garish and violent’.35 The interest and excitement that surrounds the childhood trips to the theatre translate into a lifelong fascination with ‘scenes’ and their representation. However, not only does James 34 Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism, p. 80. 35 James, A Small Boy and Others, p. 249.

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present direct connections between the theatrical scenes he witnesses as a child and his later literary constructions, he relates how these aesthetic interests are observed in daily life even before they affect his creative imagination. One incident in particular was ‘so preposterously to “count”’ for him, on a visit to relations where he overhears a seemingly trivial remark made by his aunt.36 She tells his cousin not to ‘make a scene’ and the application of the term ‘scene’ in this everyday context is an ‘epoch-making’ revelation to the young James, who all of a sudden becomes aware that ‘the great thing, the immense illumination, was that we could make [scenes] or not as we chose’. This passage self-reflexively reveals its own significance by recounting James’s discovery of the method he is applying. This particular example explicates that the art he witnessed as a child, and which affected his perception of the world around him, directly influenced his creative processes as an adult. In his fiction, James uses the dramatic scene to structure the presentation of the action, containing and limiting what is narrated in relation to the centralised perspective of the point of view. The Prefaces to What Maisie Knew, The Awkward Age (1898–99) and The Tragic Muse record the novelist’s attempt on these occasions to integrate ‘principles of the stage-play’, as he describes his presentation of Nanda Brookenham’s situation.37 In the Preface to The Tragic Muse, he records wanting to create scenic conditions in ‘as near an approach to the dramatic as the novel may permit itself’, a desire that has ‘haunted’ him ‘from far back’.38 As far back, that is, as his childhood, as he records in A Small Boy: ‘I was greatly to love the drama, at its best, as a “form”’.39 The Fostered Imagination In Notes of a Son and Brother, James records a further episode of great significance for his developing artistic consciousness, one which, as a result of his increased age at the time it occurs, is depicted more directly as part of his progress towards authorship. James first 36 James, A Small Boy and Others, p. 152. 37 James, The Art of the Novel, p. 115. 38 James, The Art of the Novel, p. 90. 39 James, A Small Boy and Others, p. 86.

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met the painter John La Farge in 1858 when his family returned from a sojourn in Europe to settle in Newport. James records that it was here that his youthful imagination came ashore in America after his experience of Europe, and where his trepidation that ‘appearances’ would ‘run short’ on ‘the native scene’ was corrected by his encounter with La Farge in the art studio of William Morris Hunt.40 The need for ‘appearances’ is an important one, signifying an early concern with the visual that explains the draw of the figure of the painter that La Farge embodies for James. James’s reference to La Farge as ‘quite the most interesting person we knew’ is often quoted, but in what he goes on to say of his friend, there is evidence of his true importance for James. La Farge, he writes, opened up to us, though perhaps to me in particular, who could absorb all that was given me on those suggestive lines, prospects and possibilities that made the future flush and swarm.41 His friend showed him a possible and rich future for himself as an artist. La Farge is ‘the type – the “European”, and this gives him an authority for me that it verily took the length of years to undermine’, James writes.42 In trying to express how La Farge ‘was to count in my earliest culture’, James resorts to an image of himself drinking from a fountain, of a relationship between ‘subject’ (himself) and ‘dispenser’ (La Farge) that he claims cannot be defined or explained by normal or even scientific measures. With this image James presents the figure of the European painter as a vital source of inspiration and influence from which he nurtures himself. In describing his friend, James’s language becomes effervescent: La Farge, he says, is ‘a rare original’, a ‘cluster of bright promises’ majestically ‘crowned’ by his intellectual prowess and exquisite taste – he was, James writes, ‘an embodiment of the gospel of esthetics’.43 In the tone of these descriptions there is a suggestion of the heightened feeling that Bloom theorises as the initial source of great influence. In James’s language we read a gushing enthusiasm that sounds a little 40 James, Notes, p. 53. 41 James, Notes, p. 67. 42 James, Notes, p. 69. 43 James, Notes, p. 71.

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like the language of love. The emotion in his expression indicates how deeply he feels about all that he gained from La Farge. La Farge’s most important influence is to awaken in James the possibility of using language instead of a paintbrush to achieve the same representative ends. Initially disappointed at his own lack of talent as a painter, James records that while in La Farge’s company he experienced: ‘the dawning perception that the arts were all essentially one and that even with canvas and brush whisked out of my grasp I still needn’t feel disinherited’.44 The ‘luxury of a friend and senior with a literary side’ opened doors in his imagination with the introduction to French writers such as Balzac and Mérimée, causing him to wonder pertinently a page later, ‘mightn’t it become possible that Mérimée would meanwhile serve for me?’ The search for his own significance in the examples and impressions gleaned through this formative relationship stresses the individuality of the artist’s mind which James’s autobiographical narrative strives to reveal. Like the artist-hero of a Künstlerroman, James is finding his identity through experiencing himself as an artist, in relation to his family and friends, but more importantly as an individual; it colours all of his represented worldview, his past, his inheritance, his influences. A burgeoning literary interest and talent allows the young James to feel an important distinction from his brother William comparable to an aspect of the Künstlerroman genre that is not subject to textual specification in his narrative. Traditionally, conflict with the outside world that manifests in a sense of the artist-hero’s difference from ‘others’, especially from the everyday bürgerliche, leads to a form of personal crisis that can only be resolved through the development and success of an individual artistic identity, as we see enacted in Father and Son. For James too, the process of individuation is depicted in Notes by way of his relations with his father and brother. Any real rivalry with his brother William, however, remains muted in his autobiographical account, even while his sense of familial ‘otherness’ shines through.45 44 James, Notes, p. 79. 45 In respect of this thread in James’s narrative, it is notable that he had begun his autobiographical project in the wake of William’s death with the intention of composing a ‘family book’, as he explained to his nephew in a letter of November 1913 (see note 51 below). After several attempts, this became a personal autobiography, but the title of the second volume, Notes of a Son

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In the case of relations with his father, James’s sense of otherness is particularly clear. Henry James Sr.’s ideology stood, his son says, as ‘a temple’ in the centre of family life, and is shown to be as tangible a part of James’s youthful environment as any of the numerous locations in which they lived. James notes: ‘“Father’s Ideas” […] pervaded and supported his existence, and very considerably our own’.46 His representation shows that the things which ignited his imagination were exactly those which his father’s ‘schemes of importances seemed virtually to do without’.47 James’s own ‘so differing, so gropingly “esthetic” […] mind’ meant that he ‘gaped imaginatively […] to such a different set of relations’.48 As a result of this essential dissimilarity from his father’s interests and way of thinking, James observes that he felt from the first ‘a kind of implied snub’ to the worth of his own ideas, which hints at a feeling of inferiority connected to the very nature of his individuality. In light of his response to Gosse’s perceived lack of filial feeling and tenderness in Father and Son, James’s representation of his formative relations with his father may reveal contrasts, but is essentially uncritical. There is even a sense that James is protective of his father’s reputation. A degree of his own inferiority certainly dominates James’s descriptions of their intellectual interactions in his youth, and yet from the vantage point of chronicler in later life he chooses, for example, to reduce the number of times the family travelled to Europe and with it the impression of his father’s restlessness and lack of planning. The family’s lengthy sojourn in Europe in the late 1850s is described in the final chapters of A Small Boy and the opening chapters of Notes, but James Sr.’s decision, unpopular with his children, to return to Europe between October 1859 and September 1860 is omitted from James’s chronicle. James’s biographer, Fred Kaplan, writes of William’s and Henry’s and Brother, retains something of the author’s original intention, presenting himself in relation to his family. Fred Kaplan remarks in his biography of James that ‘William somehow seemed to [Henry] superior, partly because of age but also because of energy, sociability, and talent’ (Henry James: The Imagination of Genius, A Biography (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), p. 20). 46 James, Notes, p. 127. 47 James, Notes, p. 136. 48 James, Notes, pp. 131, 136.

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disgruntlement at this further uprooting, reporting William’s remark: ‘We are to be torn from our friends and our fatherland once more’.49 In a letter to Thomas Sergeant Perry, however, James explains his decision to ‘lump the Europe together’ so as not to ‘complicate the effect of disjointedness more than I needed’.50 But then he continues, seemingly as an afterthought: ‘it seemed to represent my dear Father as too irresponsible and too saccadé in his generous absence of plan & continuity’. James’s artistic decision to exclude the episode from his account serves to veil his father’s inconsistencies. However significant and marked the process of individuation may be in James’s narrative, as in the almost conciliatory nature of his father’s portrait, it never results in outright crisis. Having set out to write a ‘Family Book’ in the aftermath of William’s death, and with the blessing of his sister-in-law, James’s narration maintains a degree of sensitivity to his family’s reputation.51 However, avoiding any extended engagement with family dramas in his text also enables James to uphold the real purpose behind his personal record: to convey his own ‘artistic ideal’.52 Therefore, contrasting influences bubble under the surface of the narrative until the point of resolution in the encounter with himself as a ‘man of imagination’. As the word ‘fostered’ suggests, the influences that shape his developing imagination do so by creating a nurturing environment as opposed to the barren ledge of Gosse’s experience. Composing his autobiographies towards the end of his life as a British resident and a recognised master of fiction, James’s 49 Kaplan, Henry James: The Imagination of Genius, p. 40. 50 James to Perry, 11 January 1914. See Virginia Harlow, Thomas Sergeant Perry: A Biography and Letters to Perry from William, Henry, and Garth Wilkinson James (Durham: Duke University Press, 1950), p. 344. 51 In a letter to his nephew, William’s son Harry, of 15–18 November 1913, written in response to some concerns expressed at the liberties he was taking with some of William’s letters in his projected memoirs, James gives an account of the autobiography’s origins. In conversation with William’s widow Alice, he was given the ‘impulse’ that ‘determined the spirit of my visions’, noting further: ‘We talked again, and still again, of the “Family Book”, and by the time I came away I felt I had somehow found my inspiration’ (The Letters of Henry James, Vol. 2, p. 358). 52 James makes this claim in the same revealing letter to his nephew, again in defence of the artistic licence he took with some of his material (The Letters of Henry James, Vol. 2, p. 359).

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retrospection of his youthful ambitions to position himself as an American author, Hawthorne’s natural heir, creates a noteworthy junction between two seemingly diverse authorial positions and literary traditions. James’s dual literary inheritance comes to him not only through his time in Europe and his father’s interest in and friendship with Transcendentalists like Emerson, but through his own prolific reading – especially of Dickens, Balzac and Hawthorne – and later through his literary connections, for example with William Dean Howells, champion of the American realist novel.53 The autobiographies clearly suggest the felt difference between the Old World and the New World, the one rich, dusty and decadent, and the other still very much in creation – a fact that itself became a theme for American writers.54 In his tale ‘The Madonna of the Future’ (1873), for instance, James’s American artist proclaims: ‘We are the disinherited of art!’55 And he continues: ‘We are condemned to be superficial! […] The soil of American perception is a poor little barren, artificial deposit’. In terms of finding his own position as a writer within these two lineages, James’s autobiography implicitly and metaphorically echoes literary America’s attempt to position itself in relation to Europe, and more particularly Britain – adopting some aspects, rejecting others, and all the while seeking to establish themes, and a tradition, of its own. In Wendell Stacy Johnson’s words, ‘revolution versus filial’ reflects the American experience as a whole.56 In Notes of a Son and Brother, the autobiographer highlights Hawthorne’s influence on his younger self, in particular the revelation his work imparted that ‘an American could be an artist, one of the 53 Henry James Sr. comments that his son was ‘a devourer of libraries’. Quoted in Edel, Henry James: The Untried Years, 1843–1870 (London: Hart-Davis, 1953), p. 94. 54 Malcolm Bradbury and Richard Ruland observe of the beginning of the nineteenth century: ‘The history that Americans possessed was, like it or not, in large part European […]. There was no clear American aesthetic, no patronage, no developed profession of letters, no certain audience’ (From Puritanism to Postmodernism: A History of American Literature (New York: Penguin Books, 1992), p. 62). 55 Henry James, ‘The Madonna of the Future’, The Tales of Henry James, Vol. 2: 1870–1874, ed. Maqbool Aziz (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978), p. 205. 56 Johnson, Sons and Fathers, p. 187.

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finest, without “going outside” about it’.57 This realisation, combined with the draw of European culture represented in a figure like La Farge, enables James to portray himself as an artist able to meld the two streams of inheritance. In Hawthorne, James writes of the thinness of American culture, which he senses to be the result of ‘the absent things in American life’, echoing the language of the artist in ‘The Madonna of the Future’: Th[e] moral is that the flower of art blooms only where the soil is deep, that it takes a great deal of history to produce a little literature, that it needs complex machinery to set a writer in motion. American civilization has hitherto had other things to do than to produce flowers, and before giving birth to writers it has wisely occupied itself with providing something for them to write about.58 Together with William Dean Howells, James perceived himself to be the future of the American novel, albeit nourished by the ‘soil’ of the Old World. And while Howells saw James as ‘the leader of the new American school’, he conceded that he was ‘too dependent on aestheticism and on Europe’ to become the great American novelist Howells’s hoped for.59 Consequently, Howells took James to task about the very paragraph from Hawthorne quoted above, and James’s letter in response sheds light on his eventual choice to settle in Europe: I sympathize even less with your protest against the idea that it takes an old civilization to set a novelist in motion – a proposition that seems to me so true as to be a truism. It is on manners, customs, usages, habits forms, upon all these things matured and established, that a novelist lives.60 Thus, James’s thoughts on Hawthorne and the American artist display his conception of the writer’s need for tradition that can be assimilated and transcended. The recurrence of his favoured ‘soil’ trope in these diverse texts – the short story, the critical biography 57 James, Notes, p. 322. 58 Henry James, Hawthorne (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1880), p. 3. 59 Quoted in Bradbury and Ruland, From Puritanism to Postmodernism, p. 206. 60 James to Howells, 31 January 1880, The Letters of Henry James, Vol. 1, p. 72.

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and the autobiographies – creates a web of imagery that closely links his self-representation with his fictional and critical observations of the figure of the artist. ‘Convert, convert, convert!’ James’s knowledge of the German language and culture was gained through first-hand experience during the family’s time in Europe, but his awareness of German literature was also enriched on home soil.61 The popularity of translations of prominent writers such as Goethe, Schiller, Novalis, Tieck and Hoffmann in the United States in the the years before James’s birth in 1843 allows us to assume a certain degree of exposure.62 Very early in his career, in July 1865, James reviewed a new edition of Carlyle’s translation of Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship and Travels for the North American Review. His opinion of ‘Goethe’s great novel’ is by no means entirely positive, but he concludes nonetheless that the novel ‘is the product of a great mind. […] a specimen of the grand manner’.63 The interest of 61 Chapter two of Notes describes James’s experience of time spent in Germany in 1860 as well as his reading of ‘the supreme German classics’ (p. 23). For an extended discussion of the influence of Germany on James, see Evelyn A. Hovanec, Henry James and Germany (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1978). 62 Van Wyke Brooks records these authors amongst the Germans most translated and read in New England during the 1840s. See The Flowering of New England, 1815–1865 (1936; repr. Cleveland and New York: The World Publishing Company, 1946), p. 192. More specifically, the New England of James’s childhood was swept by a ‘German mania’, as the North American Review reported in 1840. In an essay entitled ‘Thoughts on Modern Literature’ for the very first volume of The Dial in 1840, Emerson claimed that German thought ‘from the poetic to the scientific, religious and philosophical’ was ‘at last the paramount intellectual influence of the world, reacting with great energy on England and America’. The attention to German literature was initiated to a large degree by the popularity of Thomas Carlyle and, arguably, was increased by his connection with Henry James Sr. and in particular by Emerson’s enthusiasm for Goethe. James belonged to the generation that succeeded and inherited this German mania from his father’s generation, and as such his own feelings towards the tradition are somewhat ambiguous. 63 ‘Carlyle’s Translation of Wilhelm Meister’, North American Review, Vol. 101, No. 208 (July 1865), p. 285.

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James’s review does not lie in the assessments of the young reviewer, however; far more pertinent is the familiarity with Goethe’s famous novel that it reveals. To prove definitively that James was influenced by his reading of Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister or any other example of the Romantic Künstlerroman written in its wake is unnecessary. The thematic and structural parallels between his autobiographies and the Künstlerroman themselves open up fruitful avenues for thinking about James’s self-image as an artist, and one particularly significant aspect of this is his understanding of the faculty of imagination. Not only is the imagination a distinguishing feature of what it means to be an artist, as James writes in many of his essays about fellow authors, but the artist’s output is directly proportionate to its type and quality. In the Romantic Künstlerroman, the importance of the faculty of imagination relates directly to the quality of the artist figure portrayed, as suggested by Novalis’s criticism of Wilhelm Meister, in which the protagonist turns out not to be a true artist, as a ‘Candide against poetry’. Comparably, in ‘The Art of Fiction’, James writes that ‘no good novel will ever proceed from a superficial mind’,64 suggesting the need for depth in a writer if his work is to flourish. An essential goal of James’s fiction is the representation of consciousness, a process that Charles Feidelson relates to James’s Romantic conception of imagination: James is conceiving of ‘imagination’ as the total activity of the mind, not as a special psychological state […]. ‘Imagination’, on this view, is essentially the coming-into-being of the significant forms of consciousness and life, self and world – the ontological image-ination, as it were of reality.65 Making real the ‘forms of consciousness and life’ is also the substance of his autobiographical act. In writing the ‘history of [a] fostered imagination’, James is not only examining the ‘vague processes’ of his education, he is literally turning himself ‘inside out’. Bringing the unseen into the realm of the seen is the artist’s task – as dramatised in his many ghostly tales, and as outlined in ‘The Art of Fiction’. By 64 James, Henry James: Major Stories and Essays, p. 592. 65 ‘James and the “Man of Imagination”’, Literary Theory and Structure, ed. Frank Brady et al. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1973), p. 336.

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reading James’s language carefully, we catch the artist in the act of turning things inside out for the reader, using his pen to reveal to the mind’s eye what is otherwise unseen. James’s conception of the artist’s role in revealing or bringing into being what is unseen chimes with the Romantic view of the artist as a kind of seer or prophet whose ‘special faculty – the imagination’, as Maurice Beebe puts it, ‘permitted him to perceive deeper truths than those less visionary’.66 In ‘The Art of Fiction’, it is this role as illuminator for those who do not see the significance in the world around them that sets the artist apart for James: ‘It is an incident for a woman to stand up with her hand resting on a table and look out at you in a certain way […] If you don’t see it […] this is exactly what the artist […] undertakes to show you’.67 Such visionary perception both complicates and assists the artist’s sense of a distinct identity. Throughout the autobiographies, James highlights his sensitivity to impressions that pass others by and which fuel his drive towards authorship by demanding to be transformed into something. The German Romantics experienced the opposition between the seemingly supernatural projections of artistic creation and the everyday world as a conflict that narratives such as Heinrich von Ofterdingen and Franz Sternbalds Wanderungen attempt to resolve through the power of the imagination. Ernst Behler has noted that the ‘most important characteristic of the new concept of poetry’, which he identifies as the outcome of the German ‘romantic revolution’, ‘has to be seen as a special form of unity shaped by the power of the imagination’.68 But it is this very goal of unity between opposites that comes to define an artist’s quality – and proficiency. However well imagination is able to unify self and world in terms of its power to process impressions and reshape them into items of 66 Maurice Beebe, Ivory Towers and Sacred Founts: The Artist as Hero in Fiction from Goethe to Joyce (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964), p. 26. 67 James, Henry James: Major Stories and Essays, p. 583. 68 Ernst Behler, ‘The German Romantic Revolution’, English and German Romanticism: Cross-Currents and Controversies, ed. James Pipkin (Heidelberg: Carl Winter Universitätsverlag, 1985), p. 74. René Wellek describes the Romantic poets’ ‘central creed’ as: ‘the great endeavor to overcome the split between subject and object, the self and the world, the conscious and the unconscious’ through the imagination (Confrontations: Studies in the Intellectual and Literary Relations between Germany, England, and the United States during the Nineteenth Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1965), p. 4).

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textual significance, its unification with the world is dependent upon the artist’s skill in his or her chosen art form. Put another way, how well the artist communicates his vision makes the difference between a positive or indifferent reception. For this reason, the formative journey into creativity from apprenticeship to mastery is of such significance because it shapes the protagonist into a true artist – or, as in the case of Wilhelm Meister, shows this goal to be an illusion. James’s idea of and for artistic imagination shares this Romantic visionary ideal, for in the first two volumes of autobiography the imagination would seem to be an active quality, working to resolve the struggle between passive and active modes of being. We sense a degree of envy of his brothers’ more active lives in Notes of a Son and Brother in particular – William studying in Harvard and Germany and Wilky and Bob fighting in the Civil War, which James was kept out of due to an ‘obscure hurt’ inflicted while helping to extinguish a fire.69 But significantly, it is the abundance of impressions available to his brothers which James is most aware of missing. He describes William as ‘planted out’ in the world as a ‘reflector of impressions’, which he can absorb at home through numerous cherished letters.70 And James is only able to experience the war in ‘a more indirect and muffled fashion’, as he describes it, thereby suggesting that he was able to relive his brothers’ experiences indirectly – through his imagination.71 The process of absorbing impressions and converting them into art is central to James’s ‘schemes of importances’ as a writer. In ‘The Art of Fiction’, he asserts that ‘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 into revelations’.72 The source as well as the personal significance of 69 James, Notes, p. 240. 70 James, Notes, p. 346. 71 James, Notes, p. 226. James’s choice to include some of William’s letters in his autobiography suggests the extent to which his brothers’ experiences in some respect became his own. 72 James, Henry James: Major Stories and Essays, p. 580 (emphasis added). This statement echoes Goethe’s notion of metamorphosis. Wilhelm Dilthey observes that until he completed Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre in 1796, Goethe’s poetic creations derived directly from his personal experiences, that he transformed his lifeblood into his art (Das Erlebnis und die Dichtung: Lessing,

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this conception of imagination’s power of conversion is explained in his autobiography. In James’s account of his childhood and youth, the ‘impressions’ that are so important as the substance of the mature author’s imagination are mainly derived from sensual, lived experience. He recalls a ‘highly-coloured and remarkably active life’.73 Nonetheless, the two areas of human experience – what is lived and felt and what is seen and perceived – are not always distinguishable in his narrative; as he says, ‘the house of life and the palace of art became so mixed and interchangeable’.74 They are, however, interchangeable for an important reason. In chapter 16 of A Small Boy, James makes this definitive statement: As I reconsider both my own and my brother’s early start […] it is quite for me as if the authors of our being and guardians of our youth had virtually said to us but one thing, directed our course but by one word, though constantly repeated: Convert, convert, convert!75 Understood in relation to James’s focus on what fostered his imagination, this statement provides a clue to the source of his artistic genius and the substance of his autobiographical act. To convert one thing into another, sensory impressions into thoughtful understanding and the subsequent ideas into art, is the core of his education as he presents it in A Small Boy. In ‘The American Scholar’, Emerson portrays the ‘strange process’ of transfiguring life as an organic process in which ‘experience is converted into thought, as a mulberry leaf is converted into satin’.76 For James, the process has an alchemical nature, its significance not perceived by his childhood self: ‘I taste again in that pure air no ghost of a hint […] that the precious metal was the refined gold of “success”’.77 The process of converting life into art, achieved in Goethe, Novalis, Hölderlin (1905; repr. Leipzig and Berlin: B.G. Teubner, 1929), pp. 241–42). 73 James, A Small Boy and Others, p. 242. 74 James, A Small Boy and Others, p. 280. 75 James, A Small Boy and Others, pp. 173–74. 76 Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essays and Poems by Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Peter Norberg (1837; repr. New York: Barnes and Noble, 2004), p. 57. 77 James, A Small Boy and Others, p. 174.

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James’s career, is the substance and form of autobiography. Abrams writes of The Prelude: the events of Wordsworth’s life are imposed deliberately, in order that the design inherent in that life, which has become apparent only to his mature awareness, may stand revealed as a principle which was invisibly operating from the beginning.78 James’s A Small Boy similarly imposes a pattern on his childhood by carefully selecting incidents that illuminate the issues that are of concern to his mature perspective. Incidents such as the ‘scene making’ and the Galerie d’Apollon nightmare are the ‘seeds’ that ‘flowered’ into the substance of his art. Such patterns reveal a further dimension of the spiral pattern underlying the autobiographical narrative. The old, experienced author reviews the innocent perspective of his childhood, uncomplicated by knowledge and adult experience, using his highly developed consciousness to instate order and meaning. The spiral motif suggests direct parallels between the innocence and intuitive perception of childhood and the particular insight available to the artist’s imagination and attained with the journey’s resolution. The depiction of childhood is therefore more than reminiscence; the autobiographical act serves to redefine the present self as an artist and to shape an awareness of personal identity as such. James’s study of his childhood applies both faculties of memory and imagination in order to recapture and shape the development of his consciousness into a narrative that reveals the views and struggles of the mature artist. His method of reflecting simultaneously on his childhood self and on the act of reflection captures the essence of the self-theorising Künstlerroman, as described by Friedrich Schlegel, even while it presents an individual interpretation of the genre. By writing his experiences as a narrative of artistic development, that is, by applying the faculty of the imagination to his own life, James attempts to bridge the same divide sensed by the German Romantic authors between opposite states of being: self and other, observation and action, past and present. The resolving and unifying aspect of the imaginative faculty is apparent when James insists on the convenience of ‘the sphere of the objective’ for the encounter with 78 Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism, p. 76.

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‘the man of imagination’ he realises is himself. The conversion of the imaginative into a representable object seems contrary to the notion of the subjective literary faculty of imagination that transforms the external world into the sphere of art. But, as in the case of the implications of his language, James grants equal significance to the internal and the external here – the physical and the mental aspects of experience of which he is conscious. James’s autobiographies are as much about art as they are about life, but this is not quite the end of the story. The parallels between James’s personal narrative and the Künstlerroman model are revealing; they demonstrate the significance for his later mastery which the author finds in the experiences of his early years, exposing motifs that elucidate what he wants his readers to see in and of his artistic individuality – and of himself. For James was decidedly wary of exposure to the public eye, even while he courted publicity for his writing. This important and complicated distinction between the public and the private self is the concern of many of James’s fictional artists, who suffer misunderstanding at the hands of overzealous critics and biographers in stories such as ‘The Figure in the Carpet’, ‘The Real Right Thing’ and ‘The Middle Years’. Significantly, the search for clues about the ‘real’ author in his work is to be distinguished from what James considered to be the unavoidable presence of the author in the text, that ‘spiritual presence’ that is an ‘emanation of his spirit, temper, history’, as he describes it in ‘The Lesson of Balzac’. This ambiguous presence haunts his own texts dealing with the issues of authorship, including the autobiographies themselves.79 George Withermore, the commissioned biographer in James’s tale ‘The Real Right Thing’, notes, before his vanity gets the better of him, that ‘The artist was what he did – he was nothing else’, and therefore ought not to be reduced to a ‘distinguished name’.80 Interestingly, what attracts a critical reader like Virginia Woolf to James’s autobiographies is precisely the fact that ‘they are more 79 A prime example of this can be found in the story ‘The Middle Years’, which I have discussed in ‘The Tale of the Author’s “Middle Years”’, Henry James and the Poetics of Duplicity, ed. A. Duperray and D. Tredy (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholar Publishing, 2013), pp. 153–62. 80 Henry James, Stories of the Supernatural, ed. Leon Edel (London: Barrie and Jenkins, 1971), pp. 556, 553.

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exactly Henry James, and give more precisely his tone and his gesture’ than do his works of fiction.81 The distinguished name used by Woolf to describe what the texts ‘more exactly’ contain is quite the opposite to a reduction; rather it implies the addition of ‘author’ to ‘man’. Tone and gesture are portrayed in these texts: in the style carefully developed by the author to represent the drama of consciousness; in the form that purposefully steers the journey of his development towards authorship. By focusing on what it means to be an artist, James’s use of the traditional Künstlerroman model draws attention to the topic of art and its creation, allowing him to circumvent uncomfortable self-revelations. However, a crucial truth about James’s ideal artist figure – but equally about his personal experience as a writer day to day – comes to light in his autobiographies courtesy of two important differences from the traditional genre that are in line with his own historical moment. First, unlike Heinrich von Ofterdingen’s penchant for a dream-reality or the narrator’s fear of the overwhelming influence of the here and now in Franz Sternbalds Wanderungen, James does not neglect the physical world of the everyday in the presentation of his developing imagination; rather he interacts with it and all that it entails on both a stylistic and a thematic level. In his use of language, which reverses references of the material and the abstract, James demonstrates the significance of this view of ‘the world’, of ‘life’. A cherished memory of his time with La Farge, for instance, is described as being imbued with ‘something as rare and deep and beautiful as a passage of old poetry […] in the vagueness of rustling murmuring green’ and ‘flitting hovering possibilities’.82 The language conveys the quality of the memory – the vagueness of the ‘something’ is as suggestive as the ‘hovering possibilities’: neither is solid, but the thing that is inexpressible is more roundly described as it corresponds in kind to other deep and beautiful, nameable things, such as a passage of old poetry. The challenge of rendering increasingly relativistic points of view required James to develop increasingly complex narrative techniques and language that was able to express what is to all intents and purposes beyond words. In 81 Virginia Woolf, ‘The Old Order’, The Essays of Virginia Woolf, Vol. 2: 1912–1918, ed. Andrew McNeillie (London: Hogarth Press, 1987), p. 168. 82 James, Notes, p. 83.

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a letter to his brother in 1907, William James complained about the increasing complexity of style he encountered in The American Scene (1905–06), which led Henry: to avoid naming it straight, but by dint of breathing and sighing all round and round it, to arouse in the reader […] the illusion of a solid object, made (like the ‘ghost’ at the Polytechnic) wholly out of impalpable materials, air, and the prismatic interferences of light, ingeniously focused by mirrors upon empty space.83 James’s use of language materialises empty space and makes solid objects illusionary, William objects, interchanging mental and physical connotations. While challenging for the reader, this use of language reveals James’s quite concrete perception of the intangible, as well as the spirit of the material world, all the while laying emphasis on expression itself as a carrier of artistic meaning. Emphasis on visual perceptions of the world around him consistently describe, and represent, his appreciation of the physical world, and of reality in its broadest sense. ‘Vision, and nothing but vision, was from beginning to end the fruit of my situation amongst them’, he writes of his Harvard period.84 James’s references to and descriptions of his own consciousness frequently employ visual, spatially conceived images, for example, when he writes of his design to become as ‘literary’ as possible: I had begun to see much further into the question of how that end might be gained. The vision, quickened by a wealth […] of new appearances, became such a throbbing affair that my memory of the time […] moves as through an apartment hung with garlands and lights.85 Thoughts and impressions are described in a painterly way: the ‘golden light of promise’; the ‘local chiaroscuro’ of Harvard.86 The 83 Quoted by F.O. Matthiessen in The James Family: A Group Biography (1947; repr. New York: Vintage Books, 1980), p. 341. 84 James, Notes, p. 326. 85 James, Notes, p. 376. 86 James, Notes, pp. 378, 323.

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relevance of this particularity of visual perception to the author’s style and method is perhaps a familiar topic, yet for our understanding of the story of the young artist’s interaction with the material world, the autobiographer’s emphasis on what and how he saw, and then how he transformed this, remains noteworthy. The second notable deviation from the traditional Künstlerroman mode is the fact that A Small Boy and Notes of a Son and Brother are works of autobiography, not fiction, so that despite similarities to a creative genre, their essence remains the record of a life. James emphasises ‘life’ throughout both volumes as ‘doing’, as active participation, so that although the initial connotation of the autobiographical genre is a story of events, this functions to shift the emphasis of the Künstlerroman elements towards an artistic life, or action. The frequently used verb ‘to do’, both with regard to what I have been discussing here and in James’s inference in the texts, implies production as well as more general action. James’s combination of autobiography and the self-theorising Künstlerroman serves to reveal the artist in the act of writing as well as in the act of living. The term ‘creative autobiography’ in fact reverses Friedrich Schlegel’s musing that ‘Romantic Poesy’ is so suited to the expression of the whole spirit of an author that ‘many artists who intend to only write a novel, provide us instead with a portrait of themselves’.87 In James’s case, the portrait of the author has provided us with a story about the whole spirit of art that comes from experience. Malcolm Pender has suggested that the Künstlerroman ‘tries to delineate the shape of what it cannot portray – the creative processes – by portraying what it can – the artist in his social setting’.88 Rather than resorting to such a substitution, however, James the autobiographer portrays how closely entwined are life and art. The Bildungsreise at the heart of James’s autobiographical volumes bears witness to and enacts the conversion of the small boy’s dawdling and gaping into the aesthetic manifesto of the mature master. By very subtly destabilising the traditional genre with his slight deviations 87 Friedrich Schlegel, Charakteristiken und Kritiken I (1796–1801), ed. Hans Eichner (Paderborn and München: Verlag Ferdinand Schöningh, 1967), p. 182 (my translation). 88 Malcolm Pender, The Creative Imagination and Society: Aspects of the German-Swiss ‘Künstlerroman’ in the Twentieth Century, Scottish Papers in Germanic Studies Vol. 5 (Glasgow, 1985), p. 1.

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from the traditional model, James casts himself as an artist-hero aware of the constructed nature of personal and public identity, and he skews the focus of his narrative away from self-confession towards art. As such, the Künstlerroman has provided the author with the means of reframing the increasingly problematic autobiographical premise of a knowable self, allowing him to pursue his quest clothed in the armour of poetic relations. The complexity of James’s autobiographical endeavour is immense. The portrayal of individuality sketched through his important relationships with John La Farge, his father and brothers eventually leads to the nub of this undertaking, which is to reveal himself as an artist both in and through his text. The blurred boundaries between fact and fiction that underlie the autobiographical act and the author’s awareness of its multifarious tradition become thematically important in this revelation of authorship. In the case of Siegfried Sassoon’s autobiographical prose, any such intertwining of fact and fiction is complicated by his inherent sense of a divided self which manifests textually as two separate, differently motivated trilogies. Despite shared Romantic influences and the adaptation of traditional structures, the generational shift reflected in the differences between James’s and Sassoon’s autobiographical endeavours is striking. The violent experience on the Western Front that forms Sassoon’s artistic individuality dramatically expands James’s theme of art converted from ‘life’ in a way that is characteristic of this younger generation.

chapter 4

A Twofold Experiment with Time Siegfried Sassoon’s The Old Century, The Weald of Youth and Siegfried’s Journey A Twofold Experiment with Time

Some months before the completion of the first volume of what he referred to as his ‘real autobiography’,1 The Old Century and Seven More Years, Sassoon wrote to his friend H.M. Tomlinson outlining his autobiographical endeavour: My conception of this Growth of a Poet’s Mind autobiography was – and is – to begin like that (with the keynote struck in the prelude […]) and gradually widen out as the material widens and becomes more close to the authentic experience of a self-understanding person. Up to 1914 it is a story of inexperience and retarded maturity […]. It is a prelude to experience. I never woke up properly until 1914. 2 This statement reveals several essential points about the poet’s autobiographical intentions: it aligns his efforts with the tradition of Prelude-like autobiographical accounts of the developing poet, also evoked by Henry James; it stresses the stylistic attempt to parallel the mode of narration with the consciousness of the developing self; it 1 Siegfried Sassoon, The Weald of Youth (1942; repr. London: Faber and Faber, 1944), p. 70. 2 Sassoon to Tomlinson, 13 February 1938, Siegfried Sassoon: A Memorial Exhibition, catalogue compiled by David Farmer (University of Texas at Austin: Humanities Research Center, 1969), p. 52. The Old Century was finally published in September 1938.

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positions the book’s prose-poetry prelude as the ‘keynote’ and in so doing suggests that the first two volumes in particular, which chart his life until 1914, are essentially a story; and it emphasises the impact of the outbreak of the First World War on this developing poetic consciousness. The unmistakable divide between ‘before’ and ‘after’ the War establishes his wartime experiences as an axis around which all of his development revolves. The statement says all of these things, but perhaps its most important message, expressed between the lines, is the author’s obvious awareness of the artistic value of his new work. In recounting his early years for a second time, Sassoon kept his focus squarely, as he wrote in his notebook while composing The Old Century, on ‘the story of my effort to become a famous poet’.3 Despite being straight autobiography rather than fiction, Sassoon’s second foray into prose writing is more creatively ambitious than his earlier novels and marks a high point of his literary output. The quality of the prose, the self-reflexive focus on writing that makes literary art a principal theme of the narrative, and the unexpected reimagining of the poet’s journey in the final chapters of the last volume, Siegfried’s Journey, all justify such an assessment. The Romantically composed and motivated narrative nonetheless takes account of its historical horizons. Like Gosse and James, Sassoon’s autobiography takes inspiration from a number of traditional forms, including Wordsworth’s poetic autobiography, the German Romantic Künstlerroman and spiritual pilgrimage, tinkering with these to best support the story of a voyage towards poetic success undertaken in the years leading up to and then during the First World War, a story composed during the years of the Second World War. The opposition and movement between innocence and experience suggested in his description to Tomlinson provides a framework within which we can understand all three volumes of Sassoon’s real autobiography, The Old Century and Seven More Years, The Weald of Youth and Siegfried’s Journey. This chapter shows that while the spiral movement of the poet’s journey from innocence to experience and back remains intact, the significance traditionally associated with the ‘reawakening’ at the end of the journey is left open to interpretation in what is ultimately a modernist conclusion 3 This notebook, and all of the unpublished material quoted in this chapter, is held by Cambridge University Library. MS Add. 9852/7/1/1.

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and a response to the artist-hero’s experience of war. However, just as James reworked aspects of the traditional form without undermining its significance for his overall scheme, we shall see that Sassoon’s final undercutting of the Künstlerroman’s resolution offers a thoughtful statement about poetic identity in an age of change and upheaval that actually reasserts the genre’s continued relevance. The progress from a state of innocence to one of experience is reflected in the autobiographical trilogy by the poet’s output, and hence it underlies his sense of identity as he moves from ‘budding bard’ in childhood to one of Edward Marsh’s ‘Georgian poets’ in pre-war London, to a ‘soldier-poet’ during the Great War and ultimately to the role of autobiographer. The self-awareness of the autobiographical act fashions links between these different identities and a sense of individual selfhood which the text itself, in its form as a trilogy, shows can be both disparate and cohesive. Unlike James’s autobiographical trilogy, Sassoon’s three volumes are all essential to his story of apprenticeship. The division between innocence and experience, and the movement from one to the other, is more marked and catastrophic in Sassoon’s case than a characteristic Künstlerroman narrative trajectory, or even than Gosse’s final ‘disruption’. The outbreak of the First World War functioned as a symbolic as well as a literal schism in Sassoon’s experience. It affected his outward life by summoning him to leave his beloved Kentish Weald and fight in the trenches of northern France, changing the landscape of his familiar world irrevocably, as he records in the fictional memoirs of George Sherston. Equally, it deeply affected his inner life, which he proceeded to illustrate in the real autobiographical trilogy. Although notably different from James’s autobiographical account in experience, style and tone, the links between artistic vocation and personal identity and worth are central to both writers – as is the experiential divide between observation and action which they understand as intrinsic to the creative personality.4 How the two authors weight these opposing 4 While Sassoon was not influenced by James’s style, he was certainly inspired by his persona. In Siegfried’s Journey, Sassoon notes the ‘invisible presence’ of Henry James often ‘at my elbow’ while on his lecture tour of America. His affinity with James during the writing of his final volume in 1943 is suggested in a letter to Sir Geoffrey Keynes, in which he describes escaping upstairs to ‘bury my head in H. James’s letters, in which I have arrived at

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states of observation and action, however, reveals the kind of artist they perceive themselves to be. As will become increasingly clear as we examine Sassoon’s trilogy in more detail, he perceived action as experience, in contrast to James, for whom action is production. For Sassoon, observation results from action, while for James observation is in fact a form of action. As the above statement to Tomlinson already hints, Sassoon’s ‘birth’ into consciousness as both a poet and a man is directly related to the action of the First World War, to his action in the war, as well as to the shock it caused to civilisation as he knew it after 1914. Compared with James’s focus on the quiet growth of imagination, Sassoon’s maturity is forced upon him by his violent interaction with the material world – by ‘the tragic turn of events which changed the world’ and which also ‘set him on the road to unexpected success’.5 To refer to Sassoon as a poet of action is not to detract from his thoughtfulness or his quieter observations; it is simply to illustrate the nature of his art, which engages profoundly with his personal experience. Divisions pervade the narrative thematically, structurally and in terms of genre use, all of which derive from but also serve to illustrate Sassoon’s sense of a critically divided self, his ‘two-fold experiment with time’, which is fundamental to his identity.6 The polarities of innocence and experience, pre-war and wartime, observation and action, function neatly to structure the narrative trajectory of the three books, although the dividing line of 1914 occurs only at the very end of volume two, and is therefore not central. The reasons for this are various; on the one hand, this 1914’, a significant date for both writers (Sassoon to Keynes, 19 August 1943. MS Add. 8633 A91). While there is no evidence that Sassoon ever met James in person, even in the company of their mutual friend Gosse, the letter to Keynes continues with the comment that he has grown ‘so fond of the old boy that I feel almost as if I’d known him’. 5 Sassoon, The Weald of Youth, p. 268. 6 Siegfried Sassoon, Siegfried’s Journey 1916–1920 (1945; repr. London: Faber and Faber, 1983), p. 109. Sassoon’s pleasure at being called ‘rather Byronic’ by Glyn Philpot, the painter of his portrait (Siegfried’s Journey, p. 51) is significant, because not only does Byron embody the romantic poet-hero, an adventurer as well as a writer whom Sassoon’s self-representation as a divided figure seems to emulate, but G. Wilson Knight refers to Byron as a ‘poet of action’. See the lengthy study of Byron’s writing in Poets of Action (London: Methuen and Co., 1967).

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design allows nostalgia for a pre-war era on the brink of a second world war to dominate the narrative in contrast to the focus in the Sherston trilogy, of which Sassoon dedicated two volumes to the war years. On the other hand, in the second account of his life, he wanted to emphasise his identity as a poet rather than a soldier and he therefore gives more space to all of his formative experiences. While the War ‘woke him up’, his poetic apprenticeship begins, as his prelude indicates, in earliest childhood. Sassoon’s notebooks reveal the care he took in composing his narrative in order to convey to the reader not just what but how he experienced things. When preparing Siegfried’s Journey, for instance, he notes that ‘one must get material graded and arranged in proportion to its significance, the opportunities it offers for good writing, and its spontaneous appeal to my remembering process’.7 In reimagining his early years for a second time, Sassoon shifts the weight of significance to his pre-war experience. The second and third reasons listed here indicate the importance Sassoon assigns to the style and appeal of his material, not just for the reader but for himself. These are self-consciously constructed texts that engage with as well as demonstrate the art of writing. The enjoyment of writing permeates the trilogy in which he seems to be flexing his literary muscles – though always checked by his finely honed sense of irony. ‘Fictionalized Reality, Essayized Autobiography’ At the beginning of his diary dated January 1921–July 1922, Siegfried Sassoon inscribed a quote from Goethe: ‘In no way do we get a greater revelation of ourselves than by contemplating ourselves in what we have written down in the far-off past’.8 The decision to include this particular insight as an epigraph suggests Sassoon’s own sense of how his writing contained – or could contain – a true expression of himself at a given point of his life. Sassoon’s paratext 7 MS Add. 9852/7/1/1/4.5. Sassoon heads this page of his notebook ‘Construction Reconsidered’. 8 Rupert Hart-Davis leaves this quotation out of the published Diaries 1920–1922, although he does include quotations of Conrad and Sir John Davis (p. 23). The Goethe quotation is in Sassoon’s original notebook. MS Add. 9852/1/17.

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in this diary is directed at an older, wiser, reading self – it includes a dedication: ‘To myself when I shall have ceased to care about the present’ – indicating an awareness of the use to which his diaries might be put in years to come in composing a portrait of the writer. Inside the journal on 26 March 1921, like a self-fulfilling prophecy, Sassoon recorded his desire to write a novel in ‘five, ten, fifteen or twenty years hence’ which would ‘be as natural as life itself. A Tess created from my own experience!’9 Though not novels like Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles (1891), Sassoon’s prose masterpieces are most certainly created from his own experiences, and they return to what he had written down in the far-off past in his diaries in order to substantiate his self-revelation. When composing both prose trilogies about his life, Sassoon treated his diaries like storage boxes out of which he would take particular experiences and place them, in some instances almost unaltered, into the new surroundings of his present text. Sassoon’s ‘assiduous diarising’, as he called it,10 provided his narration with direct access to the voice of the past – his past, which he was then able to recreate in as natural a tone as possible. The Sherston trilogy benefits most notably from this practice because it recounts a period during which Sassoon kept a diary more diligently than was the case for the real autobiography.11 However, in Siegfried’s Journey, 9 Siegfried Sassoon, Diaries 1920–1922, ed. Rupert Hart-Davis (London: Faber and Faber, 1981), p. 53. Max Egremont notes that remarks jotted down in 1917 while in France were later seen by Sassoon as ‘one of the origins of his Sherston books and their themes of futility, pathos, irony (learned from Hardy)’ (Siegfried Sassoon: A Biography (London: Picador, 2005), p. 123). 10 Cf. Sassoon to Michael Thorpe, 12 August 1966, Letters to a Critic, intro. and notes by Michael Thorpe (London: The John Roberts Press, 1976), p. 13. 11 There are pages in Sherston’s Progress that are lifted directly from the diaries Sassoon kept in 1918. Included in a section of the novel entitled ‘Sherston’s Diaries’, the material from the diary is not embedded into the narrative but keeps its original form. It is perhaps this method of direct transplant that leads Paul Fussell to suggest that this practice signified Sassoon’s ‘fatigue’ with his prose project by 1930 (The Great War and Modern Memory (1975; repr. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 100). While this may have been the case, the differences in the novelised entries are of interest for the reader of the real autobiographies. If we compare the diary entry from 28 February 1918 (Diaries 1915–1918, ed. by Rupert Hart-Davis (London: Faber and Faber, 1983), p. 218) to its corresponding entry in Sherston’s Progress (The Complete Memoirs of

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material from his diaries is skilfully interwoven into the narrative, providing details of time, place and opinions that intermittently form the foundation of the autobiographer’s memories of the same. On 11 November 1918, Sassoon recorded hearing the news of the end of the War in his diary in the following simple manner: I was walking in the water-meadows by the river below Cuddesdon this morning – a quiet grey day. A jolly peal of bells was ringing from the village church, and the villagers were hanging little flags out of the windows of their thatched houses. The war is ended. It is impossible to realise.12 Chapter ten of Siegfried’s Journey opens with a neatly recomposed version of this scene: Walking in the water meadows by the river below Garsington on the quiet grey morning of November 11th, I listened to a sudden peal of bells from the village church and saw little flags being fluttered out from the windows of the thatched houses on the hill. Everyone had expected to hear that the Armistice was signed; but even now it wasn’t easy to absorb the idea of the War being over. The sense of relief couldn’t be expressed by any mental or physical gesture. I just stood still with a blank mind, listening to the bells which announced our deliverance.13 The details are very similar, although Sassoon locates the area of his walk using Lady Ottoline Morell’s manor in the autobiography George Sherston (1937; repr. London: Faber and Faber, 1972), p. 591), we see that by reusing his diary entries, Sassoon emphasises the differences between himself and his alter-ego, most notably that Sherston isn’t a writer or poet. The language of the novelised version is smoothed out, and it excludes Sassoon’s original self-questioning about his poetry and its inspiration. If anything, it shows Sherston as a memoirist struggling to convey how things were, and therefore the process of reusing the diaries draws attention to the act of writing about experience, that is, to the art of rendering life. 12 Sassoon, Diaries 1915–1918, p. 282. This is the final entry included in the published diary, but the editor has truncated it substantially, so that one must refer to the original manuscript in order to compare the rest of the scene to that in Siegfried’s Journey. 13 Sassoon, Siegfried’s Journey, p. 97.

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rather than the nearby village of Cuddesdon because that is where the narrative has him staying. What is typical of how Sassoon reworks the material from his diaries is his embellishment of the sentence ‘It is impossible to realise’ in a manner more characteristic of his represented younger self. The additional observations on the situation also result from the autobiographer’s later reflections on this momentous event, and this is carried into the remainder of the scene in London, in which the diarist’s observations of his dining companions on the evening of that same November day are smoothed out. The remark in his diary: ‘They were all very excited and silly and shallow’ becomes ‘They were, most of them, rather silly and excited, and “much moved”’.14 Despite such adjustments, the voice of 1918 can still be heard in the 1942 text, which highlights his purpose in revisiting the original material. Although the genre designations of Sassoon’s prose are quite straightforward – the Sherston trilogy is semi-autobiographical fiction, the second trilogy is autobiography – any detailed discussion of either one throws up a variety of genre-related questions. In the Sherston trilogy, the ‘novelistic distortions’, as Robert Graves described Sassoon’s method in Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man, produce the simplification and coherence that create the book’s satisfying hermetic world.15 By providing Sherston with no immediate family besides Aunt Evelyn, for example, Sassoon removes the issues connected to his family life apparent in The Old Century. The blurring of fact with fictional elements intentionally creates a Bildungsroman-style narrative, while its inclusion of the outbreak of the First World War adds contemporary – and, of course, personal – verisimilitude and relevance. In the real autobiography, any blurring of genre perimeters has an extra layer of complication to contend with as it must also take account of the Sherston trilogy, especially at points when they cover the same ground. And, though designated ‘real’ by the author, the term is essentially used for means of comparison. While prone to self-reflexive comments, the narrator of the ‘real’ autobiographical trilogy is not setting himself up as a truth teller, as for instance when he remarks: ‘While attempting to compose an outline of my own mental history, I have sometimes been interrupted 14 Sassoon, Siegfried’s Journey, p. 98. 15 Quoted in Egremont, Siegfried Sassoon: A Biography, p. 361.

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by the nudging suspicion that I am not recording the past as it really was’.16 Coupled with a laxity about distinguishing fact from fiction at particular intervals in his narrative, Sassoon’s self-referential style purposefully problematises the traditional perimeters of the autobiographical genre by questioning his own writing process. The fact that The Old Century and The Weald of Youth are reworking some of the period fictionalised in Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man is both an opportunity for theorising and a stumbling block for his latterly conceived self-representation as a poet rather than a sportsman. Chapter five of The Weald of Youth opens with a passage explaining the problems the narrator has in not wanting to trespass on Sherston’s territory, in which he plays with the believability of his fictional creations: There he is, intensively pondering on his chances of winning the Heavy Weight Race down in Sussex a few weeks hence. And there is Aunt Evelyn, tinkling ‘The Harmonious Blacksmith’ on the drawing room piano and wishing, in her heart of hearts, that point-to-point races had never been invented. There, likewise is the Weald of his youth, its heart-holding distances finding gradual forgetfulness in twilight.17 The scene thus introduced goes on to toy with the possibility of weaving Sherston’s story into that of the autobiography as the narrator imagines Aunt Evelyn ‘coming into the garden with my mother’ as a means of enabling him to bring the two versions of his life story together for a moment. The narrator then concludes: ‘Having thus ushered out my dilemma (which was a collision between fictionalized reality and essayized autobiography) I can now proceed’.18 The intertextual references at once confuse and clarify the genre issues that the author senses prowling the rim of his text. In this bout of Brechtian epic theatricality, Sassoon throws the perimeters of fiction and reality into question, highlighting the artistry behind both narratives and undermining any supposition of unequivocal ‘reality’ in the ‘essayized autobiography’. An undertone of irony 16 Sassoon, The Old Century, p. 245. 17 Sassoon, The Weald of Youth, pp. 70–71. 18 Sassoon, The Weald of Youth, p. 73.

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remains attached to the genre designations here. Both ‘fictionalized reality’ and ‘essayized autobiography’ are over complicated, tonguein-cheek descriptions that make light of the need for any such terms, especially when the porous boundaries between genres are so readily a part of the autobiography itself. At the end of his trilogy, Sassoon reflects on the autobiographical act and his own method of resolving the disparity he notes between ‘being alive’, and ‘memorizing it long afterwards’.19 He writes: We read the past by the light of the present. […] I myself am inclined to compare the living present to a jigsaw puzzle loose in its box. Not until afterwards can we fit the pieces together and make a coherent picture out of them. This final phrase recalls Hans-Georg Gadamer’s thesis that the ‘implicit presupposition of historical method […] is that the permanent significance of something can first be known objectively only when it belongs to a closed context’. 20 The primacy of Sassoon’s historical consciousness extends beyond his awareness of contextual significance to strengthen his position and his understanding of himself as an autobiographer, and an artist. Not only is he the developing artist in the text, he is the craftsman building an objective vision out of the puzzle pieces of his experience. All of the self-theorising generated by the genre issues surrounding the writing of creative autobiography would seem to circle back to the heart of the material this kind of text is attempting to convey – developing artistry. In fact, the final picture of the artist is produced through this interweaving of content and form as it reveals both the constructed image of himself in the diegesis and the timbre of his artistic consciousness in the autodiegetic voice. Characteristically, two voices interweave throughout the autobiographical trilogy as if to maintain awareness of the gap between the narrator and his younger self so that the distance he has travelled becomes clear. One particular scene in The Old Century illustrates the juxtaposition of the childish view inhabited by the narrator and 19 Sassoon, Siegfried’s Journey, p. 223. 20 Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, trans. and rev. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall (1975; repr. London and New York: Continuum), p. 297.

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the adult reflection on the same. The scene depicts an occasion on which the young Sassoon contemplates his experiments in decorating his poems with a tricky silver ink. When his brother Michael kicks the table leg, causing the ink to smudge, young Sassoon punches him on the nose and the book falls to the floor. The boy’s point of view, with its remembered details of childish significances, shifts to an adult perspective as the narrating older self comments on the quality of his younger self’s artistic endeavours as he appears to look over the latter’s shoulder at the notebook lying on the floor, remarking that the handwriting reveals, ‘a transition from the serene simplicity of childhood to something un-controlled, self-conscious and wilfully lugubrious’. 21 This observation is obviously too sophisticated and objective to be that of the boy. Following on, a change from past to present tense is used to show the shifting, dual perspective of the two consciousnesses: ‘The first stanza of “A Vision of Death” was badly smeared, but it is still decipherable’. 22 The two versions of the self, one past and one present, necessarily present in autobiographical narration become representative of self-development – from then till now. Questions about individuality are inherent in the very act of self-consciousness, but in creating a narrative out of such experience, the author necessarily divides himself between writer and written subject. The text, in turn, becomes the stuff of identity – the artist-hero as the author’s written representative, or textual double. The concept of the divided self has particular importance for Sassoon’s self-representation. When considering the significance of his autobiographical works towards the end of his life, Sassoon wrote: ‘My main object in the Old C and W of Youth was to show the contrast between my poetic and my outdoor selves’. 23 Sassoon’s perception of himself as a divided being is not only temporal, as is characteristic for autobiography, it is also experiential. The autobiography shows that from childhood he is aware of two distinct parts to himself: the social, active sportsman at home in the world of ‘commonplace actualities’, and the solitary, observant, day-dreaming would-be poet. 24 The ‘outdoor self’, the simplified sportsman, is embodied in the figure 21 Sassoon, The Old Century, p. 157. 22 Sassoon, The Old Century, p. 157 (emphasis added). 23 Sassoon to Michael Thorpe, 14 March 1967, Letters to a Critic, p. 21. 24 Sassoon, The Old Century, p. 271.

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of George Sherston, but both natures manifest in the more complex poetic self of the autobiography. Curiously, however, the centrality of the divided self in Sassoon’s self-representation is not contradictory to the notion of a whole self. Rather, it can be understood as the basis, or motivation, for the figurative journey of development towards such a point. The divisions and contrasts that are entrenched in the narrative and in the experience it depicts reciprocally enhance one another, constituting an interrelation of polar contraries as opposed to a series of paradoxes. The traditional artist-hero suffers from a sense of himself divided between the demands of his art and the duties of daily life, a conflict which the journey towards better self-knowledge and ability seeks to resolve. We have seen, in the case of Gosse, that conflict can result in renewed individuation and, in the case of James, that the opposition felt between life and art can be resolved by transforming the one into the other – in effect, merging the two. But in the case of Sassoon, the conflict is not a circumstantial or a philosophical dilemma; it is who he is. Maurice Beebe writes: an underlying assumption in the artist-novel is that creative man is a divided being, man and artist, a historical personage who merely serves as the medium through which the creative spirit manifests itself. The man is a human being of normal appetites and desires […]. The artist is a free, detached spirit which looks down on the man from a distance and is concerned not so much with the consumption of life as with the transcendence of life through creative effort. 25 Beebe’s description could have been written about Sassoon’s self-portraiture. In her study of literary creation, Ursula Mahlendorf shows that the divided self is an inherent feature of the creative individual. Referring to modern psychoanalytic theory of creativity, which agrees with the Romantic view of the artist as distinct from ‘others’ because he maintains ‘an alternative to his normal identity structure at each level of his psychogenic development’, Mahlendorf asserts that the artist struggles to avoid having two identities. 26 Thus, 25 Maurice Beebe, Ivory Towers and Sacred Founts: The Artist as Hero in Fiction from Goethe to Joyce (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964), p. 6. 26 Ursula R. Mahlendorf, The Wellsprings of Literary Creation: An Analysis of

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beyond the narrative of the artist’s self, which engenders the duality of an artist-hero on a textual level, the author, or the autodiegetic narrator of an autobiography, is himself a divided personality as a result of the very need for creativity, which distinguishes him from others. As a study of the divided artist-hero, Sassoon’s personal narrative proves an intriguing example, not least because his sense of inner division arises out of, or can be linked to, multiple sources. Beebe’s and Mahlendorf’s descriptions suggest that it is the consequence of his artistic temperament, and Sassoon presents himself with a tendency to compartmentalise contrasting interests and aspects of himself from childhood, but this is then magnified by his traumatic experience during the First World War. Chapter 11 of Siegfried’s Journey opens with a statement representative of Sassoon’s portrayal of his divided nature. He writes: ‘After three weeks of pilgrimages to poets, post-Armistice parties, and other diversions, it was natural that the pendulum should swing back to the outdoor element of my two-fold experiment with time’.27 That the equal draw of the social whirl of literary London and the outdoor life of fox hunting in the country are ‘natural’ show the conflicts and contradictions of his twofold nature as the constant defining characteristic of his youthful self. Divisions and contrasts function on stylistic and thematic levels in each volume of the autobiography, making the divided self multireferential, as both a literary trope and a personal experience. Structural oppositions exist in the narrative perspective of a remembered past and a writing present and the associated tones of spontaneity and contemplation. These are enhanced by the choice of setting in pre- and post-war England and the related contrast of country and urban life. In a manner unusual for the Künstlerroman trajectory, adhered to for most of the narrative, Sassoon depicts his poetic apprenticeship in two stages, each one relevant to one part of his divided self. In The Old Century and The Weald of Youth, self-education through avid reading nurtures the would-be poet, while in Siegfried’s Journey, active participation in the War is shown to sharpen the senses of the sportsman, eventually joining forces with the earlier stage of apprenticeship to generate a poetic output Male and Female ‘Artist Stories’ from the German Romantics to American Writers of the Present (Columbia: Camden House, 1985), p. 2. 27 Sassoon, Siegfried’s Journey, p. 109.

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that draws on both the imagination and the senses. Absorbed into the trilogy in such a way, the historical context of the War does not overwhelm the literature produced in its shadow. Consequently, if considered in isolation, Siegfried’s Journey is a book about war, but it is not a war book in the way that Sherston’s memoirs are. This is a tricky distinction that has long concerned critics of First World War literature, frequently resulting in historical rather than literary critical assessments of texts like the Sherston trilogy, and misreadings of the real autobiography. 28 Sassoon has been called a dull traditionalist by reviewers of The Old Century and The Weald of Youth, accused of avoiding the turmoil of the present, prior to and during the Second World War, in which he was writing. Yet, the reasons for his determined nostalgia arose out of this very turmoil. Sassoon’s own historical consciousness was nothing if not acute, and the background of both the period of his life covered in the autobiography and that of the writing present impact upon the way he composed all three volumes. The shifting historical context shapes the tone, setting and narrative technique of each volume individually while, at the same time, it reflects the protagonist’s developing consciousness. ‘Nostalgic and Breezy Reminiscences’ In 1937, Sassoon noted his markedly creative aspirations for The Old Century: What I want is – not the recovery of facts so much as the recovery of feeling […]. Everyone will know that the nostalgia is in the 28 Fussell refers to Sassoon’s two prose trilogies as ‘a series of six volumes of artful memoirs’, giving a false impression that The Old Century and Seven More Years follows on from Sherston’s Progress as a consecutive volume (The Great War and Modern Memory (1975; repr. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 91, emphasis added). Similarly, the emphasis on the texts’ historical context leads Bernard Bergonzi to assume that the value of the ‘later and purely autobiographical’ volumes – he is referring in particular to Siegfried’s Journey – lies in how it ‘usefully supplements the Sherston trilogy, though not always to the advantage of the latter’ (Heroes’ Twilight: A Study of the Literature of the Great War (1965, repr. London and Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1980), p. 164).

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remembering voice – not in the experiences as they really were. Memory set to music – The narrator is eloquent; transfiguring his past – his lost youth. 29 The important word in this statement is ‘transfiguring’. Recalling the Jamesian insistence on the centrality of ‘conversion’ in the artistic process, Sassoon’s image of changing the past through memory and imagination encourages a reading of The Old Century as a purposefully fashioned story that captures the spirit of memory as its reality. Something of the atmosphere of E.M. Forster’s Howards End (1910) pervades the first two volumes of Sassoon’s autobiography, its breezy Edwardian afternoons, Margaret Schlegel’s love of knowledge for its own sake, the sense of encroaching change – urbanisation and unrest – held at arm’s length. Written by Sassoon’s post-war friend, Howards End encapsulates the intellectual and social mindset of the years just before the Great War. The Old Century, and more particularly The Weald of Youth, which is set during the same immediately pre-war years, recreates an atmosphere of the pre-war idyll embodied in Forster’s novel. The world of Howards End is an endangered one, as the latent violence of the plot suggests, and as Helen Schlegel’s comments in the novel’s final scene articulate. The conversation between the sisters in the garden at Howards End reads prophetically: ‘I hope it will be permanent,’ said Helen, drifting away to other thoughts. ‘I think so. There are moments when I feel Howards End peculiarly our own.’ ‘All the same, London’s creeping.’ She pointed over the meadow – over eight or nine meadows, but at the end of them was a red rust. ‘You see that in Surrey and even Hampshire now,’ she continued. ‘I can see it from the Purbeck downs. And London is only part of something else, I’m afraid. Life’s going to be melted down, all over the world’.30 29 Quoted in Robert Hemmings, Modern Nostalgia: Siegfried Sassoon, Trauma and the Second World War (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2008), p. 119. 30 E.M. Forster, Howards End (London: Penguin, 1989), p. 329.

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Forster’s foresight is echoed in The Old Century and The Weald of Youth by the interruptions of Sassoon’s narrating older self. These intersperse the nostalgic idyll of his childhood and youth and nod towards an awareness of a darker future. A picture of the ‘Edwardian summer’ is generated by the setting in Sassoon’s childhood home in Matfield, Kent with its large garden and surrounding countryside, where he is encircled by his mother’s painting, aware of his uncle Hamo Thornycroft’s sculpting and the drama of his musical but errant father. The world of his pre-war existence is portrayed as that of privileged English country life embodied in his childhood home, Weirleigh, where his main occupations include fox hunting, playing cricket and versifying under trees. As he writes to Max Beerbohm in 1939 about The Weald of Youth, he is writing a ‘book of nostalgic and breezy reminiscences of 1908–14’.31 This notion was distasteful to some reviewers, however. Malcolm Muggeridge’s review, for instance, called The Old Century ‘old-fashioned’, ‘an anaemic fairy story – something belonging to a remote past with no bearing on the so ominous present’.32 In a letter to Geoffrey Keynes, Sassoon responded to this review by defending the benefits he considered his nostalgic reflections would have for his readers: Anyhow I fancy that The Old Century is doing a good bit of work during this beastly crisis, in the way of providing sensitive people with a spot of ‘peace of mind’. It is a refuge from killing care and grief of heart isn’t it?33 The suggestion is that the writing of the volume had bestowed a similar effect on Sassoon.34 31 Siegfried Sassoon, Letters to Max Beerbohm and a Few Answers, ed. Rupert Hart-Davis (London: Faber and Faber, 1986), p. 83. Notably, Sassoon dedicated The Old Century to Beerbohm, who painstakingly proofread early drafts of the book. 32 Malcolm Muggeridge, ‘Poet’s Memories: Mr Siegfried Sassoon’s Autobiography’, Daily Telegraph (20 September 1938). 33 Sassoon to Geoffrey Keynes, 21 September 1938, MS Add 8633 A57a. It is worth noting that when Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man was published, it was praised for its evocation of an extinct way of life, suggesting that in 1928 the public were more willing to receive a fictional, pre-war memoir than was the case a decade later. 34 Robert Hemmings proposes a reading of Sassoon’s autobiographies as a kind of

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The prelude to The Old Century indicates that Sassoon crafted this atmosphere not only to escape the ominous present of the 1930s but in support of his Künstlerroman-like narrative trajectory, for the atmosphere encapsulates the innocence of the unformed poet. The prelude’s final allegorical note directs the reader in the purpose of the succeeding work: ‘What will the seeds be like when they come up?’ Recovered in my clear memory of that spring morning, the words now seem like part of a parable. And the purpose of this book is to tell whither the water journeyed from its source, and how the seed came up.35 The journey of the water from its source and the springing up of the seeds recalls the Romantic autobiographical intention familiar from A Small Boy and Others, in which James wanted to depict: ‘when and how the seeds were sown that afterwards so thickly sprouted and flowered’.36 Sassoon’s use of the flowering seeds motif may not be consciously included to recall James’s text, but this shared image proves a similar artistic aim, and a shared source in the ‘Natural Childhood’ of spiritual autobiographical tradition and more specifically its Romantic rendering in Wordsworth’s The Prelude with its image of ‘seed-time’. The seed image embodies the notion common in apprenticeship narratives that the fulfilment of later life can be found in an artist’s earliest influences. In a characteristically Romantic turn, Sassoon, like Gosse and James, looks to his childhood and youth to explain his later development as a poet and in so doing provides a structural as well as an imaginatively sound reason for emphasising the pre-war atmosphere and experiences. psychoanalytic discourse in which his nostalgia is ‘a response to a particularly modern absence of origin’, that he sees embodied particularly in Sassoon’s ‘persistent return to an imagined and reimagined paradisal childhood’, which he can never attain or work through ‘because it was never really there in the first place’ (Modern Nostalgia, p. 154). While Sassoon’s determined nostalgia is clearly a response to trauma, and the fear of another looming war, it is also an essential part of his artistic scheme, extending the romanticised figure of Natural Childhood as far as possible so as to contrast starkly with the coming Exile. 35 Sassoon, The Old Century, p. 25. 36 James, A Small Boy and Others, p. 86.

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But the prelude also highlights another Romantic feature that is carried over into the first two volumes of Sassoon’s narrative and which is absent from Gosse and James: namely the analogy of the poet’s development with the changes he witnesses in the natural world around his childhood home. Sassoon depicts his boyhood self unfolding organically in a rural dream world uninterrupted by formal schooling for more years than was common. As if to underscore the importance of this scheme, the years during which he is eventually sent to boarding school are recounted in a separate section of the book, under the heading ‘Seven More Years’. Sassoon’s emphasis on the influence of his natural surroundings in his prelude recalls Wordsworth’s, whose ‘beloved Vale’ is echoed by Sassoon’s Weald of youth, ‘something deeply loved, something which the unmeasurable timelessness of childhood had made my own’.37 This description emulates Wordsworth’s mature reflections on the significance of his early years in the Lake District: Fair seed-time had my soul, and I grew up Foster’d alike by beauty and by fear; Much favor’d in my birthplace, and no less In that beloved Vale to which, erelong, I was transplanted.38 Comparatively, when Sassoon writes ‘From that so intensely remembered source all my journeyings now seem to have started’,39 he suggests that nature is the original spring from which all his later potential flowed. The influence on the artist of growing up in rural surroundings increases in significance in apprenticeship narratives set after the Industrial Revolution, as the contrast between rural and urban surroundings becomes ever more marked. The natural world plays a vital role in German models like Novalis’s Heinrich von Ofterdingen and Tieck’s Franz Sternbalds Wanderungen, both of which are set in a pre-industrial era to this end. Thus it is a particularly Wordsworthian Romantic element that underpins Sassoon’s prelude and the prominence of place in the succeeding volumes. The opening 37 Sassoon, The Weald of Youth, p. 277. 38 Wordsworth, The Prelude I, 305–09. 39 Sassoon, The Old Century, p. 24.

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lines of The Prelude juxtapose a sense of the freedom of the countryside with the captivity of city life; a gentle breeze that has blown over green fields is greeted as a long-lost friend by ‘a captive’, ‘coming from a house / Of bondage, from yon City’s walls set free’.40 The setting of The Old Century and The Weald of Youth in the Weald of Kent, and later Cambridge and London, reflects Wordsworth’s contrast, making it support the narrative’s trajectory from innocence towards experience. Implicit in the Romantic parallels in the opening volume in particular is the possibility of attaining a whole, knowable personal identity perceivable as a linearly ripened entity. As Wordsworth states in The Prelude, the memories of childhood, ‘Invigorating thoughts from former years’, are revisited in order to assist in bettering the adult self, that he ‘Might fix the wavering balance of my mind’, and thus be spurred on ‘To honorable toil’.41 Even while Wordsworth recognises the ‘otherness’ of his younger self and is conscious of ‘myself / And of some other Being’ as ‘Two consciousnesses’,42 he is still depicting his childhood self as ‘father’ of his adult self. While the temporal divide between childhood and adulthood is emphasised by the objectification of a younger self in the autobiographical act, as we have also seen in the cases of Gosse and James, the emotional and experiential ties between the two selves depicted in the narrative of progress create the impression of a whole and knowable identity. The term ‘knowable self’ is used most frequently to describe the Romantic ambition of communicating the self through literary works. As Mary Corbett writes of Wordsworth’s composition of The Prelude, ‘The presence of his signature, the narrative unfolding of his history, inscribes this text as belonging to Wordsworth, who becomes “knowable” to his readers and inseparable from this text as a function of […] self-representation’.43 Sassoon, it seems, reworks the same period of youth, this time without an alter-ego like George Sherston, in order to construct and reveal himself, the poet, in his text. The portrait that resulted from his endeavours still adheres to 40 Wordsworth, The Prelude I, 6–7. 41 Wordsworth, The Prelude I, 648–53. 42 Wordsworth, The Prelude II, 32–33. 43 Mary Jean Corbett, Representing Femininity: Middle-Class Subjectivity in Victorian and Edwardian Women’s Autobiographies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), p. 40.

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this self-representation’s decision to overlook his Jewishness and his homosexuality, aspects of himself and his ancestry with which he struggled. In the final volume of his autobiographical trilogy, however, Sassoon challenges the conception of textually transmitting a ‘real’ self by engaging with ideas of a constructed artistic persona. Robert Hemmings notes that the Romantic model of autobiography was characteristically deployed between the wars as ‘an appealing counterbalance to the fragmentation of modernity’.44 However, Sassoon’s trilogy only indulges in this comforting model of wholeness for two-thirds of its duration. Siegfried’s Journey has a notably different atmosphere and thematic. Less poetically nostalgic, it portrays a more mature, experienced protagonist than the one cycling across the Weald of Kent in the summer of 1914, brimming with patriotic notions, in the final pages of The Weald of Youth. Having ‘woken up’ in 1914, as he remarked to H.M. Tomlinson, Siegfried’s Journey depicts an experienced soldier, and an increasingly experienced poet. Sassoon is depicting his development towards selfhood and a fully fledged artistic identity, which in the opening chapters of Siegfried’s Journey he would seem to have achieved. Sassoon adapts the motif of spiral movement from innocence to experience through a trial or crisis to a renewed sense of self-knowledge to suit his personal experience. Interestingly, it is not the trenches of the Western Front that he aligns with the traditional notion of the crisis, as one might expect. In terms of his poetic development, his time in France is the beginning of a period of renewal and confidence – a second stage of apprenticeship – which contrasts with the stagnation he experiences after moving to London in The Weald of Youth, when he frequently feels ‘unable to write a line of poetry’.45 This earlier phase represents Sassoon’s period of struggle, although he suffers another period of unproductivity in the immediate post-war years. Therefore, when Siegfried’s Journey opens in 1916 in the middle of his war experience, it begins with a period of success that saw the publication of Sassoon’s poetry collection The Old Huntsman in 1917, and the appearance of Counter-Attack the following year. These collections of poetry generate the identity of the soldier-poet – a persona that, Siegfried’s Journey shows, became increasingly problematic for Sassoon. As such, the journey that 44 Hemmings, Modern Nostalgia, p. 24. 45 Sassoon, The Weald of Youth, p. 209.

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begins in The Old Century with the stated intention of telling ‘how the seed [of poetic ambition] came up’ is completed, and the divided self that dominates the first two volumes is significantly unified under the title ‘soldier-poet’, at least metaphorically, and for a little while. ‘England’s Young Soldier-Poet’ As a subtitle to Siegfried’s Journey, Sassoon includes the dates 1916–1920, thereby anticipating two significant points about the volume’s content: beginning two years after The Weald of Youth ended in 1914, it excludes a certain amount of the protagonist’s experience; and by ending two years after the Armistice in 1918, it includes a certain amount of his post-war experience. The dates shift some of the focus away from his war service, and by opening while Sassoon is back in England to recuperate from his injuries, the volume can instead consider the effects the War has so far had on his writing. By excluding descriptions of his time on the Western Front and later in Egypt, Sassoon avoids some of the difficulties he experienced in uniting his activities as a soldier and a poet – and he sidesteps the narrative territory he has apportioned to Sherston. In his 1918 diary, in thoughts recorded under the heading ‘Difficulties’, Sassoon notes: ‘One cannot be a good soldier and a good poet at the same time’.46 Requiring vastly different ways of thinking and behaving, these feel like two opposite states of being: ‘Soldiering’, Sassoon observes, ‘depends on a multitude of small details; one must not miss any of the details. Poetry depends on wayward moods and sudden emotions’. The same point is made in the first chapter of Siegfried’s Journey, transferring remarks from 1918 to his situation in the summer of 1916, but rather than depicting his difficulties as a result of his divided nature, he paints them as circumstantial: At the front I had managed to keep my mind alive under difficulties, and had done some writing when we were away from

46 Sassoon, Diaries 1915–1918, pp. 270–71. The heading ‘Difficulties’ is only in the original manuscript, not the published version of the diary.

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the line. But it wasn’t easy to be a poet and a platoon commander at the same time.47 Therefore, it is with relief that, exempt from further participation in the battle of the Somme, he is able to ‘work off some of the poetry bottled up in me, which I should have a chance to pour out in tranquil surroundings’. His language is intriguing as it suggests that the poetry is already there, inside him, formed as a natural response to his experiences. The reference to ‘tranquil surroundings’ is also worth dwelling on for a moment as it is an echo of Wordsworth’s dictum that poetry originates ‘from emotion recollected in tranquility’,48 and as such serves to deliberately align his newly developed method of writing trench poetry with an established and traditional poetics – and himself as a poet comparable to Wordsworth. Being a good soldier has made him a better poet. The opening chapters of Siegfried’s Journey recount a gradual change in the style and content of his poetry that began in the first months of 1916 ‘with a few genuine trench poems, dictated by my resolve to record my surroundings’.49 With the poem ‘Died of Wounds’, he hits upon what he calls a ‘a laconic anecdotal method of writing’ that was ‘on a higher plane of effectiveness’ from anything he had previously composed. More effective, that is, at expressing his ‘passionate feeling about the agonizing episode described’. By directly recording what he has seen and heard, his method indirectly expresses his immense emotional response to the war. The transcribing of actual experience marked out a new sort of poetry that, while familiar to us today, was uncomfortable to many of Sassoon’s contemporary readers. The public reaction to what were considered anti-war poems can be summarised by Edmund Gosse’s review of The Old Huntsman in 1917, in which he described the poems’ ‘bitter anger’ and the ‘savage, disconcerting silhouettes drawn roughly against a lurid background’, while ‘respectfully acknowledg[ing]’ Sassoon’s ‘honesty and courage’.50 The mixture of horror and praise was typical. 47 Sassoon, Siegfried’s Journey, p. 5. 48 ‘Preface to Lyrical Ballads’, Romanticism: An Anthology, ed. Duncan Wu (1994; repr. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), p. 514. 49 Sassoon, Siegfried’s Journey, p. 17. 50 Gosse, ‘Some Soldier Poets’, Some Diversions of a Man of Letters (London:

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The two preceding volumes had related Sassoon’s struggles to find an individual poetic voice amongst the pervasiveness of ‘ideas’ of something or other, of ‘magic’ and ‘ecstasies’ that define his childhood conception of poetry and being a poet.51 In The Old Century, he writes: ‘I associated poetic sensations with a rapturous and almost silly solemnity which didn’t fit in well with everyday life’.52 Just as this dreaminess is paralleled by the book’s atmosphere, the shift in tone between The Weald of Youth and Siegfried’s Journey reflects the vital change in the artist-hero’s consciousness and creative output after his experiences during 1916. There is an increased realism and directness in the language of Siegfried’s Journey that parallels the transformation in Sassoon’s poetic style evidenced in the vocabulary of ‘Died of Wounds’. This is the opening stanza: His wet white face and miserable eyes Brought nurses to him more than groans and sighs: But hoarse and low and rapid rose and fell His troubled voice: he did the business well.53 The description of the dying man is unequivocal, and the mention of ‘nurses’ conveys a glimpse of the business of war as well as the business of dying. The impersonal and very physical results of the fighting captured in this poem contrast starkly with the kind of thing Sassoon had been writing just a year earlier. The opening stanza of the 1915 poem ‘Absolution’, for example, might acknowledge the destructiveness of war with a line like ‘War is our scourge’, yet its lyricism and essentially optimistic stance (the line continues: ‘yet war has made us wise’) express, Sassoon notes in Siegfried’s Journey, ‘the typical self-glorifying feelings of a young man about to go to the Front for the first time’.54 The emotional and poetic development Heinemann, 1920), p. 282. Sassoon quotes these passages from the review, written for the Edinburgh Review (October 1917) in Siegfried’s Journey, p. 28. 51 Sassoon, The Old Century, p. 87. 52 Sassoon, The Old Century, pp. 158–59. 53 Siegfried Sassoon, Collected Poems 1908–1956 (1947; repr. London: Faber and Faber, 2002), p. 25. 54 Sassoon, Siegfried’s Journey, p. 17. In his review of The Old Huntsman, Gosse notes the ‘gallantry’ of Sassoon’s 1915 poems compared with those in the 1917 volume (‘Some Soldier Poets’, p. 282).

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embodied in the contrast between these two opening stanzas is the essence of the final autobiographical volume. The combatant writers of this so-called trench poetry were termed ‘soldier-poets’, a compound name that united the divided parts of Sassoon’s personality, man and artist, and made a virtue of their juxtaposing properties. Soldier poetry was initially a term applied to a different brand of war poetry from that which Sassoon began writing in 1916. The neat inversion of the previous ‘poet-soldier’ categorisation by the editor of the Poetry Review, Galloway Kyle, for his designation of the authors of the popular and patriotic 1916 anthology Songs of Fighting Men, created a romanticised myth of the warrior poet as hero that, by placing ‘soldier’ in front of ‘poet’, emphasised the fighting man before the writing man.55 The increasingly widespread use of the term explains Sassoon’s frequent application of it to himself in Siegfried’s Journey, but its origin is perhaps one reason for his irony in doing so.56 It is nonetheless significant that his poetic success was the direct result of his war experiences and the poetry that reported these. This process is mirrored in his interwar prose, in which his personal experience proves to be a fruitful and successful source of material – something, notably, that Gosse first brought to his attention. For though Gosse may have struggled to appreciate Sassoon’s new style of poetry, he saw the creative potential that an amalgamation of the tendencies of the sportsman and poet could have for his writing before it was recognised by Sassoon. As early as 1912, Gosse had encouraged Sassoon in the direction of more realistic writing. He had written to him on receipt of some of Sassoon’s early poems: ‘Try your hand at some objective theme. You must not spend all your life among moonbeams and half-tones’.57 And it was Gosse who 55 See Paul Norgate, ‘Wilfred Owen and the Soldier Poets’, The Review of English Studies, New Series, Vol. 40, No. 160 (November 1989), p. 517. 56 Other reviewers besides Gosse, such as Virginia Woolf in her 1918 review ‘Two Soldier-Poets’, applied the term to Sassoon. For Woolf, the soldier is more dominant than the poet, as she writes: ‘it is difficult to judge him dispassionately as a poet, because it is impossible to overlook the fact he writes a soldier’ (The Essays of Virginia Woolf, Vol. 2: 1912–1918, ed. Andrew McNeillie (London: Hogarth Press, 1987), p. 269). 57 Gosse to Sassoon, 30 June 1912. See Evan Charteris, The Life and Letters of Edmund Gosse (New York and London: Harper and Brothers, 1931), p. 331.

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suggested Sassoon write something like Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man a decade before he thought of it himself, as Sassoon records in Siegfried’s Journey: ‘He suggested that I might draw on my sporting experiences for typical country figures – the squire, the doctor, the parson, and so on’.58 The conversion of direct life experience into art encouraged by Gosse – the value of which Sassoon discovered for himself during the war – echoes James’s artistic manifesto. Looking back over his career towards the end of his life, Sassoon wrote: ‘I have often wondered, how much I might have done had more material for writing about come my way, for I needed the stimulus of experience’.59 It is no wonder then that Sassoon’s real autobiographical trilogy marks a creative high point. How we think of Sassoon the poet cannot but be influenced by the well-known persona of the ‘soldier-poet’. While Siegfried’s Journey is very much about the process of developing such a poetic persona, his increasing disillusion with the Great War made maintaining it progressively more complicated. The increasing difficulty of sustaining the sense of heroism that initially gave meaning to his exploits in the trenches is replaced to some extent by the rebellious heroics the protagonist Sassoon associates with writing his famous protest against the war – ‘A Soldier’s Declaration’ – ‘a course of action which not only asked for trouble but insisted on creating it for myself’.60 How he recounts the sense of heroism and its association with his public image as a ‘soldier-poet’ affecting the developing self after the Armistice in the later chapters of Siegfried’s Journey, however, complicates but also illuminates the reader’s conception of the ‘real’ Siegfried Sassoon. By the time Sassoon embarked on his lecture tour of America at the beginning of 1920, he was a well-known personality at 58 Sassoon, Siegfried’s Journey, p. 100. Sassoon’s relationship with Gosse was clearly influential, if distinguished by a generational divide. Sassoon’s notes on his autobiographical composition refer to ‘the history of my friendship with Gosse as a charming literary idyll of the old and the young author’, and he includes a reminder to point out that his relationship with Gosse ‘was beautifully distinct and separate from the […] muddle of my life as a whole’. See MS Add. 9852/6/4. 59 Sassoon to Thorpe, 12 August 1966, Letters to a Critic, p. 16. 60 Sassoon, Siegfried’s Journey, p. 50. The Declaration was read before the House of Commons on 30 July 1917 and printed in The London Times the following day.

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home, billed on his tour as ‘England’s Young Soldier-poet’ and portrayed in American reviews of Counter-Attack as ‘a stark and startling apparition from war stricken England’.61 The introduction to the first American edition of Counter-Attack, written by Robert Nichols, paints a vivid picture under the heading ‘Sassoon the Man’ of a figure with ‘the air of a sullen falcon’ who spoke of soldiers ‘with a rapid, tumbling enunciation and a much-irked desperate air filled with pain’.62 Sassoon notes that this introduction ‘though obviously overdoing it’, ‘invented a formidable figure’ that was made ‘full use of by the reviewers’. While obviously discomfited by this portrayal, the narrator injects an ironically toned sense of accomplishment at having finally achieved the success and acclaim as a poet for which he had been striving in the first two volumes of the autobiography. In going past the point of ‘completion’ characteristic of the traditional artist narrative, the final chapters of the final volume make significant comment on Sassoon’s sense of artistic identity, and the historical context that played such a vital role in its construction. In the post-war years, the persona of the ‘soldier-poet’ lost much of its resonance, and by continuing his narrative into this territory Sassoon questions the validity of such a label and its meaning for his poetic output. In Notes of a Son and Brother, James’s realisation of himself as ‘a man of imagination at an active pitch’ provided the resolution and end point of his development towards artistic identity. While relevant in its own right, The Middle Years reads as unessential to the narrative journey of the autobiographies as a whole. Similarly, the chapters at the end of Siegfried’s Journey that chart his lecture tour of America in 1920 are seemingly incongruent and superfluous to the requirement of the artist narrative, which appeared in the first two volumes to be the trilogy’s controlling idea. It is consequently interesting that while the war poetry reads as a sudden burst of poetic confidence after years of hesitancy – and is presented as such in Siegfried’s Journey – towards the end of his life Sassoon insisted that he did not find his ‘real poetic voice’ until the mid-1920s. In a letter to Edmund Blunden written towards the end of 1954, Sassoon reflected on the significance of his war poems, saying: 61 Sassoon, Siegfried’s Journey, p. 169. 62 Sassoon, Siegfried’s Journey, p. 167.

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Once they were rockets sent up from the trenches. Then they became warnings against war. Now they seem merely a scrap of literary history – not being impressive as poetry in the way Wilfred [Owen]’s are.63 Having become a better poet as a result of the war (and this is a point he verifies in several different places, most notably in his autobiographies), the scraps of literary history that in themselves are not impressive as poetry because they are in fact still rockets sent up from the trenches, are records of his apprenticeship as a poet. The war poems, as much as the world of war, shaped him as a poet, not just as a soldier-poet. In a self-interview for Vanity Fair that Sassoon wrote in the summer of 1920 while in America, we catch a contemporary glimpse of the magnitude of the issues surrounding what is in fact a long sought-after poetic identity. The interview mimics the hyperbole of the press’s depiction of the war and its heroes, while mocking civilians’ unrealistic expectations of the returning warrior poet. More specifically, Sassoon mocks the depiction of himself given in the introduction to Counter-Attack. In Siegfried’s Journey, he notes having written ‘a deplorably facetious spoof interview with myself, a preposterous parody of Robert Nichols’ presentment of me as a dynamic personality’.64 Sassoon entitled the interview ‘A Poet As He Really Is’, and included the subtitle: ‘The Standard and Definitive Interview With Siegfried Sassoon’. These designations suggest, even while they parody, the concept of a definable, graspable poetic identity. The ironic core of the self-interview lies in the suggestion of an authoritative view of the warrior poet that will compound popular imagination, while in fact emphasising, through the very exaggeration of these expectations, the seemingly unbridgeable fault lines between those who experienced the war on the front lines and those at home. In the tone of the interview, a subtext is written that refutes all attempts by the press or the public to comprehend the real legacy of the war for the individual soldier, and the fact that 63 Sassoon, The Selected Letters of Siegfried Sassoon and Edmund Blunden, 1919–1967, Vol. 3, ed. by Carol Zeman Rothkopf (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2012), p. 79. 64 Sassoon, Siegfried’s Journey, pp. 181–82.

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this emerges through the irony and humour of the piece comments implicitly on the poet’s struggle to communicate his experiences and their personal implications. However, even while mocking and exaggerating, Sassoon is revealing some of the experiences that led to his soldier-poet persona. In answer to a question about his reactions to the war, he replies: Even when I was gassed for the ninth time I felt a better man for it. And all my friends agreed with me that it would be a supreme experience to be killed outright, provided that one had written a sufficient number of noble and publishable letters to one’s relatives at home. Yes, we shall need another war soon.65 The tone captures the resentment towards civilians and their view of the literature of war, which was sharpened in the post-war environment of America, a nation whose experience of the war had been so different to his own. But the sarcasm is also directed at himself, and his own youthful consciousness of heroic martyrdom for which he was later to chide himself in his memoirs when, for example, in Siegfried’s Journey he interrupts a passage quoted from his wartime diary with the aside ‘Do stop writing for effect like that’.66 The layers of illusion and disillusion, and the contradictions that complicate Sassoon’s self-portrait for the reader in Siegfried’s Journey, purposefully undermine the possibility of an authentic, unified and knowable identity which the Romantic autobiographical model of the opening volumes set out to attain. At the end of Siegfried’s Journey, Sassoon records a moment of epiphany in which he realises that on his return to England, ‘he had come to the end of the journey on which he had set out when he enlisted in the army six years before’.67 On arrival in Southampton, no interviewers had awaited ‘England’s Young Soldier-poet’ because, as he states, ‘that object of public interest had ceased to exist’. Without the War and its immediate aftermath, that persona becomes increasingly ineffective, and, like the poems themselves, a scrap of literary history. In his notebook, Sassoon remarks that the point at which to conclude the final volume most effectively must be this moment which ‘found 65 Sassoon, ‘A Poet As He Really Is’, Vanity Fair (August 1920). 66 Sassoon, Siegfried’s Journey, p. 42. 67 Sassoon, Siegfried’s Journey, p. 224.

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me feeling rather unrewarded of success’.68 The effect is to reveal the nature of his success. The skill and sophistication with which the autobiographer looks in on himself and the creative process shows just how far Sassoon had developed beyond the anger, irony and brevity of the trench poems that made his name as a poet. His secular use of the Augustinian figure of ‘the Return’, which reiterates the spiral movement’s return to its point of origin, indicates that the trilogy’s ending in fact depicts Sassoon’s own new beginning. The moment of clairvoyant insight at the end of the trilogy might suggest the meaning and order imposed on lived experience by hindsight and autobiographical memory, but it is also a significant reflection on the impact of historical context on self-representation. It suggests that the Romantic representation of a perfected artist figure is all very well as an ideal but it is unsustainable under the pressures of the personal traumas of war and the wider social and cultural splintering that the Great War unleashed. Sassoon’s divided self retains more value by remaining unresolved, although once again this is only implied, not uttered. There is the suggestion at the end of the narrative, just as in the spoof interview, that the real meaning results as much from what remains unarticulated as what the writer puts down in so many words. The concept of ‘the poet as he really is’ remains the illusion of his audience, but is also readable in the subtext created by the disruption of genre and tradition that is inferred by the inclusion of the American chapters. Sassoon’s narrative progresses beyond his first successes as a published poet and the initial acceptance of a soldier-poet persona to include some of his post-war experience because the reality of this particular historical moment outweighs the demands of aesthetics – both in terms of the expression of his own experience, and also more broadly. This insight creates the tone of the Vanity Fair interview and, one could argue, it is also Sassoon’s reason for destabilising his Prelude-like narrative in the final volume of his autobiography. Despite the romanticism necessary for an honest representation of his recollection of youth and pre-war existence, the record of the impact of the First World War in Siegfried’s Journey disallows the Romantic concept of a complete artistic selfhood to stand as his final word, just as it enhances it by comparison. The fractured self of the chameleon poet is itself a kind of artistic resolution, albeit a dissatisfying one. 68 MS Add. 9852 7/1/1/4.5.

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It portrays ‘the authentic experience of a self-understanding person’ Sassoon described in his letter to H.M. Tomlinson. In the end, it is the journey, culminating in the actual journey to America, and enacted in the writing of the text itself, that carries the weight of the autobiographical search for meaning. Sassoon sustains a pattern of dualities and divisions in his writing that represents and structures his perceived reality, especially in his observation of the temporal gaps in his own self-image and those sensed in the world around him. The divide between the hard-won sense of a personal identity and an accredited, self-perpetuating public persona reflects something of the inherent twofold personality of the man and the artist. In the narrative’s engagement with the public persona, the private self is both obscured and illuminated, and the burden of interpretation and disentanglement is handed over to the reader in a way that deftly pre-empts notions of the author’s position as a constructed figure. As Sassoon ponders in chapter two of The Weald of Youth, it seems reasonable to ask how a mind which understood so little of itself at the time can be analysed and explained by its owner thirty years afterwards! The problem is indeed perplexing, and suggests much heavy work in store for the reader of the present chapter.69 This reading of Sassoon’s autobiographical trilogy proposes that the final problematisation of the Künstlerroman trajectory in fact provides the traditional model with a new lease of life. By undercutting his own controlling idea, Sassoon’s narrative structure functions to stylistically enhance the central issues of personal and public identity. The resultant significance carried by the form of the artist’s apprenticeship story creates a self-reflexive undertone to the supposed self-revelation that exposes the constructed nature of artistic identity through language. Much like poetry, the structure of the text embodies equal meaning to the words, so that Sassoon’s ‘factual’ prose works invite literary interpretation and even poetic comparisons. The fact that language and literary tradition are both used by the poet to make this ultimate statement – both explicitly and implicitly – reaffirms the essential connection between language 69 Sassoon, The Weald of Youth, p. 27.

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and meaning as well as the relevance of tradition in a climate in which embracing their disruption had become a measure of artistry. In Pilgrimage’s unswerving focus on the inner life of its protagonist, which disallows any self-reflexivity or extradiegetic acknowledgment of genre issues, a more affected disruption between language and meaning is experientially conveyed. While chronologically earlier than Sassoon’s autobiographical trilogy (although Richardson was still working on the unfinished final volume of her cycle, March Moonlight, into the 1950s), Richardson’s Pilgrimage is more aware of the pulse of literary change between the Victorian and modern ages, has more singular ties to past traditions and modern disruptions and, as a result, more radically concludes the development of artistic self-representation in the first decades of the twentieth century. Set before the First World War, though for the most part composed during and after it, Richardson’s narrative has no nostalgic pull towards the past. Pilgrimage bursts with fresh ideas and techniques that, ironically, were to establish a new tradition in the form of the stream of consciousness novel, all the while raising self-perpetuating questions about language’s ability to communicate reality.

chapter 5

An Investigation of Reality Dorothy Richardson’s Pilgrimage An Investigation of Reality

In a letter to Rebecca West, H.G. Wells wrote from on board the SS Adriatic in 1921: ‘If I have much more of this bloody steamship, I shall begin to write like Dorothy Richardson’.1 Despite its tonguein-cheek tone, Wells’s comment calls attention to the particularity of Richardson’s style as well as her reception, even amongst fellow authors, as a difficult and often frustrating writer. The description of a tea party attended by Richardson’s protagonist Miriam Henderson in Honeycomb, the third volume of Pilgrimage, published in 1917, exemplifies some of the reasons for this reception: Drawing off her gloves, she felt as if she could touch the flowing light. … Flowing in out of the dawn, moving and flowing and brooding and changing all day, in rooms. Mrs Kronen was back on her settee sitting upright in her mauve gown, all strong soft curves. ‘That play of Wilde’s …’ she said. Miriam shook at the name. ‘You ought not to miss it. He – has – such – genius.’ Wilde … Wilde … a play in the spring – someone named Wilde. Wild Spring. That was genius. 2 The scene, like the whole of Pilgrimage, is conveyed solely through Miriam’s point of view, interspersing her impressions of her surroundings, in this case her hostess’s sun-lit room, with a rendition of her thoughts. Much of the content of this passage is communicated 1 Quoted in Heather Ingman, Women’s Fiction between the Wars: Mothers, Daughters and Writing (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1998), p. 145. 2 Richardson, Pilgrimage I, p. 413.

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through punctuation, literary techniques and an awareness of how language works: the ellipses indicating pauses in which Miriam dwells on the quality of the name Wilde; the italics conveying, in combination with the dashes, the speaker’s intonation but also the way in which the name is savoured in Miriam’s mind. The shift from reported speech to free indirect discourse conveys the way in which the name Wilde sparks Miriam’s imagination, combining the pleasure she is taking in the arrival of spring at the beginning of the passage with the thought of attending the theatre. Language then becomes part of her momentary delight as she uses the homonym ‘wild’ to qualify her sensation of spring so that the concept itself, and its perfect depiction of her present sensations, becomes the thing of genius. The way in which Miriam latches onto the name Wilde indicates her youthful ignorance of the man and his writing even while her enthusiasm for language – also demonstrated by her description of the light – hints that she is more able to appreciate literary genius than her hostess, whose intonation implies that her admiration of the latest play is a social requirement. Richardson’s style demands this sort of careful reading as Miriam’s story is revealed only through what she is able to perceive at any given stage of her maturity, recalling Henry James’s description of his creation of Maisie Farange in his preface to What Maisie Knew – ‘giving it all […] through the occasions and connexions of her proximity and her attention’. A reviewer of the first volume, Pointed Roofs, observed: ‘The book somehow reads as if the reader did not exist’, because ‘no allusion [is] explained or incoherence apologized for’.3 But this is the inevitable result of Richardson’s method, for, as she later explained, Miriam’s ‘early vagueness’ accounted ‘for the sacrifice of direct information’ in the first volumes.4 The reader must embed herself in Miriam’s consciousness in order to comprehend the story. However, adapting James’s method of focalisation to autobiographical fiction featuring an artist-hero creates a degree of complexity that distinguishes 3 Review in the Sunday Observer, quoted by Gloria G. Fromm in Dorothy Richardson: A Biography (Athens and London: University of Georgia Press, 1994), pp. 79–80. 4 Richardson to E.B.C. Jones, 12 May 1921, in Dorothy Richardson, Windows on Modernism: Selected Letters of Dorothy Richardson, ed. Gloria G. Fromm (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1995), p. 49.

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Pilgrimage. In one response to queries about how to define her work, Richardson described it as ‘an investigation of reality’ as opposed to either autobiography or a novel.5 Pilgrimage’s reality is the representation of a woman’s everyday experience but, rather than emulating nineteenth-century realism, its intense stylisation explores the relation of lived reality and aesthetic form, drawing attention to a new art of fiction. As the protagonist’s fascination with language in the early volumes suggests, Richardson’s largely autobiographical focaliser eventually becomes a writer in and of a purportedly fictional narrative written with the intention of creating a new kind of ‘feminine realism’ in order to accurately communicate her consciousness. The shifting tone and scope of each volume, which reflects Miriam’s increasing maturity, is one indication that these intricate narrative layers are underpinned by the design of the journey of self-discovery as an artist, characteristic of the Romantic Künstlerroman. But Miriam’s journey is also a pilgrimage that is structured at various stages around the six Augustinian figures of autobiography also adopted by Gosse. Structurally, at least, Richardson’s ‘investigation of reality’ is not entirely new. Pilgrimage owes as much, if not more, to autobiographical traditions, as do the texts of Gosse, James and Sassoon already discussed. As Avrom Fleishman has observed, Pilgrimage may be exceptional amongst novels, but it is ‘firmly in place in the autobiographical tradition’, with stronger ties to its ‘predecessors than any other modern self-writing’.6 The novel sequence charts Miriam’s developmental years across the turn of the century, closely following Richardson’s own experiences from 1890 until she began writing the first volume of Pilgrimage, Pointed Roofs. Composition continued for several decades during the first half of the twentieth century, infusing the narrative with modernity. The simultaneity of past and present, tradition and innovation, informs both the form and the content of Pilgrimage. In unravelling the layers of tradition and innovation that Richardson has employed for her unique portrait of the female artist, this chapter 5 Dorothy Richardson to Lita Hornick, 20 December 1948. Kulchur Archives, Columbia University. Rare Book and Manuscript Library. 6 Avrom Fleishman, Figures of Autobiography: The Language of Self-Writing in Victorian and Modern England (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 1983), p. 428.

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will explore a very different picture of inheritance from that displayed in Siegfried Sassoon’s autobiographical trilogy, one which can be read through close attention to form and style rather than content. As forefathers of Richardson’s text in terms of style and structure, James and Gosse provide a rich seam of comparisons that enable a valuable reading of Pilgrimage as an artist’s narrative. The patterns that emerge from a comparative reading confirm that the ‘something in the air’ that initiates so many literary innovations in autobiographical writing in the opening decades of the century passes from one generation to the next, from Gosse and James to Richardson, without the seismic break that Richardson herself assumes in her foreword to Pilgrimage when she writes that in the composition of the first volume she had ‘a sense of being upon a fresh pathway’.7 The most obvious variance between Pilgrimage and the autobiographical writing of Gosse and James, besides length, is its fictionalisation. Joanna Winning writes that ‘since fictionalising her life was the aim’, and the text presents her own image of herself as an author, Richardson kept the hard facts about her real identity secret during the years of public interest in her work.8 However, in an interview given towards the end of her life, she confirmed: ‘My novel [Pilgrimage] was distinctly autobiographical. Hypo was [H.G.] Wells, Miriam in part myself’.9 With the appearance of Gloria Fromm’s biographical work on Richardson after her death, the extent to which Pilgrimage was autobiographical was finally revealed. Fromm notes that for Richardson’s contemporary readers ‘it was difficult to tell just how much of the author was embodied in Dorothy Richardson’s late-Victorian and Edwardian heroine’, confirming further that it was Fromm’s own 1963 essay in PMLA that first ‘showed that Pilgrimage 7 Richardson, Pilgrimage I, p. 10. 8 Joanne Winning, ‘“‘The Past’ is with me seen anew”: Biography’s End in Dorothy Richardson’s Pilgrimage’, Writing the Lives of Writers, ed. Warwick Gould and Thomas Staley (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1998), p. 215. 9 Vincent Brome, ‘A Last Meeting with Dorothy Richardson’, London Magazine (June 1959). Wells also confirms his part in Pilgrimage: ‘I am Hypo in her “Miriam” novels’ (H.G. Wells in Love: Postscript to an Experiment in Autobiography, ed. G.P. Wells (London: Faber and Faber, 1984), p. 61). However, Wells adds: ‘Dorothy’s precision and innate truthfulness have deserted her in her account of her love affair with “Hypo” in Dawn’s Left Hand’ (p. 64). He goes on to outline time they spent together, contradicting some of Richardson’s portrait.

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was indeed an autobiographical novel’.10 Gillian Hanscombe has also noted that ‘Richardson commented often that a writer should write only about what she (or he) knows best; and since her own life was what she knew best’ that is what she wrote about.11 By fictionalising her life, Richardson makes the act of writing an intrinsic part of her story. The Art of Fiction The generic ambiguity of Pilgrimage is part of its appeal as it expands the possible intersections of life and art. When explaining her intentions in her foreword, Richardson writes that in embarking on the composition of Pilgrimage she was writing an ‘equivalent’ of the novels she saw around her, many of which were produced ‘by biographical and autobiographical novelists’. However, she rejected the term ‘autobiography’ for her books and was initially sceptical about the designation ‘novel’ for, as she notes, ‘I did not then know what was beginning to happen to “the novel”’.12 But, as an autobiographical novel sequence, Pilgrimage more pointedly displays the art of fiction than the other creative autobiographies considered so far. The self-theorising in Pilgrimage is largely directed at the novel, as Miriam’s thoughts on the genre cause the reader to reflect on the author’s own creative skill. Reading Ibsen’s Brand (1865), for instance, leads Miriam to assert, ‘That is why Ibsen is superior to novels; because it is not quite about the people or the thoughts’.13 While this assessment stands opposed to the narrative we are reading, which is solely about Miriam and her thoughts, it encourages us to reflect for a moment on the act of reading and the extent to which Pilgrimage really is a novel.14 In her foreword, Richardson had acknowledged 10 Fromm, Dorothy Richardson: A Biography, pp. xv, xvii. 11 Gillian E. Hanscombe, ‘Dorothy Richardson Versus the Novel’, Breaking the Sequence: Women’s Experimental Fiction, ed. Ellen G. Friedman and Miriam Fuchs (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), p. 86. 12 Richardson to Hornick. 13 Richardson, Pilgrimage II, p. 384. 14 Karin Littau observes: ‘A modernist text does not allow the reader to forget that he or she is reading, because its innovative stylistic devices are designed to disrupt the illusion, and with it any possibility for identification’ (Theories of

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the ‘far from inconsiderable technical influence’ of James’s fiction as well as the impact of reading Goethe’s discussion of the novel form in Wilhelm Meister, so that even if she would rather her texts not be associated with the conventional realist novel, her reading of the genre shapes her writing.15 Miriam’s avid and critical reading during the course of Pilgrimage means that literature of all genres and periods weaves its influence through the narrative, calling attention to what is new and what is familiar in the text itself in equal measure. Contradictions and paradoxes abound in the text – not unlike the case of Sassoon – thanks to the protagonist’s immaturity. The emphasis on reading as Bildung, however, highlights a developmental pilgrimage towards self-awareness that eventually concludes in authorship, and with a mature authorial voice that has created the narrative of growth. Gloria Fromm observes that ‘without the built-in privileges of an H.D., a Gertrude Stein, or a Virginia Woolf, Dorothy Richardson read and thought her way to genuine intellectual distinction and creative originality’.16 Apprenticeship is a dominant trope in Pilgrimage – a book that concerns itself with its own and its author’s creation – as Miriam also reads her way to maturity in her search to find out ‘Something fundamental that applies to the whole mass of what [her friend] Michael calls novelistic writing’.17 Richardson’s choice to fictionalise her story is significant. The transformation and ordering of lived experience into a careful selection of scenes is by no means exclusive to the art of fiction – we have seen Gosse, James and Sassoon doing exactly that in their ‘real’ autobiographies – but what distinguishes Richardson’s process is the persona of the author that it generates. Hanscombe remarks in her introduction to Pilgrimage that Richardson very consciously perceived herself to be a writer of novels and not of autobiography,18 and this is at Reading: Books, Bodies and Bibliomania (Cambridge: Polity, 2006), p. 76). In Richardson’s case, the illusion of Miriam’s reality is intended to be sustained by her style, not disrupted, and yet the reader’s attention is still called to the nature of the text as a book, albeit a book that is about reality. 15 Richardson, Pilgrimage I, p. 11. 16 Gloria G. Fromm, Foreword to Windows on Modernism: Selected Letters of Dorothy Richardson, ed. Fromm (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1995), p. 2. 17 Richardson, Pilgrimage IV, p. 616. 18 Hanscombe, Introduction, Dorothy Richardson, Pilgrimage Vol. 1 (London: Virago, 2002), p. 5.

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the heart of Pilgrimage’s fictionalisation. James and Sassoon – and Gosse, to a certain degree – established themselves as artists through a whole body of writing in many genres, whereas the volumes of Pilgrimage are the culmination of Richardson’s life’s work as an artist. Besides this, she considered her sketches and essays ‘hack-work’ endured largely to make a living.19 Hans-Georg Gadamer writes that experience ‘acquires a wholly new status when it is expressed in art’, 20 and so, however narrowly or broadly we define ‘art’, it transforms the reader’s impression of self-writing by association. The new narrative mode established in Pilgrimage provides a sort of paradigm for the artistic expression of feminine consciousness that enabled Richardson’s life story to transcend the merely personal. The fictionalisation of Pilgrimage foregrounds a theme of the production and interpretation of art that James and Sassoon principally achieve in their autobiographies through the intradiegetic discussion of or allusions to their other works. Richardson, the author, comes to exist through the text’s composition, writing herself into a single entity with her protagonist Miriam, and thus into the text as the narrative ends. The final chapter of the final volume, March Moonlight, sees her (Miriam/Dorothy) sitting down to write the first volume, Pointed Roofs, in much the same way as Roland Barthes says that Marcel Proust’s narrator is ‘not he who has seen and felt nor even he who is writing, but he who is going to write’.21 The interconnection of reading and writing in Pilgrimage, which suggests themes of creation and interpretation, generates a formal self-reflexivity that establishes it as an artist’s apprenticeship narrative. Miriam moves, for example, from questions about the validity of the novel that result from her reading of Ibsen in volume five to a moment in volume 13 in which she is left alone ‘with the realisation of a bond, closer than any other, between myself and what I had written’.22 The self-reflexivity generated by the way Richardson embodies Miriam’s ideas in how Pilgrimage is written is most noticeable in 19 Richardson to Sylvia Beach, December 1934, Windows on Modernism, p. 281. 20 Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, trans. and rev. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall (1975; repr. London and New York: Continuum, 2006), p. 53. 21 Roland Barthes, ‘The Death of the Author’, Image Music Text, trans. by Stephen Heath (London: Fontana Press, 1977), p. 144. 22 Richardson, Pilgrimage IV, p. 611.

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what can be called her art of consciousness. May Sinclair’s now famous use of the phrase ‘stream of consciousness’, in her 1918 review of the first three volumes of Pilgrimage, described her impression of the narrative’s lack of drama, in which: ‘Nothing happens. It is just life going on and on. It is Miriam Henderson’s stream of consciousness going on and on’. 23 As a metaphor for the continuous flow of psychological content, the phrase is apt enough, but for the way in which Richardson herself conceived of consciousness and how her narrative, seen as a whole, renders this, it was inadequate. Richardson does not envisage or experience human consciousness as a flow moving off from one moment to the next, but as something stable and expansive, as she explains: The only satisfactory definition of a man’s consciousness is his life. And this, superficially regarded, does seem stream-line. But his consciousness sits stiller than a tree […] its central core, luminous point, […] tho [sic] more or less continuously expanding from birth to maturity, remains stable, one with itself thruout [sic] life. 24 In Pilgrimage, Miriam experiences moments of contemplation in which ‘an opening inward eye’25 reveals the breadth of reality that lies behind the immediate world and which forms a core sense of being – a ‘strange unfailing self’26 – in which all of her past is accessible and as real as the present. As Shirley Rose asserts, in speaking of the consciousness as Richardson conceives of it, ‘we require metaphors that indicate expansion without movement or change’. 27 A spatial conception of consciousness is typical of Miriam’s inner reality more generally, however, allowing the simultaneous 23 May Sinclair, ‘The Novels of Dorothy Richardson’, The Little Review, Vol. 5, No. 12 (April 1918), p. 6. 24 Richardson, Authors Today and Yesterday [1933] quoted in Shirley Rose, ‘The Unmoving Centre: Consciousness in Dorothy Richardson’s Pilgrimage’, Contemporary Literature, Vol. 10, No. 3 (1969), p. 368. 25 Richardson, Pilgrimage IV, p. 299. 26 Richardson, Pilgrimage III, p. 208. Variations on this description of an unchanging self are scattered throughout the volumes. 27 Rose, ‘The Unmoving Centre’, p. 369. Rose’s article provides an excellent overview of Richardson’s understanding of consciousness and its representation in Pilgrimage.

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existence of many levels of experience. In Honeycomb, for example, she writes, ‘When May came, life lay around Miriam without a flaw. She seemed to have reached the summit of a hill’ from which she can see ‘from horizon to horizon, sunlit and flawless, past and future’. 28 This sense of space has depth as well as breadth, enabling her to excavate the levels of her being, as when she describes how ‘The disgrace sat only in the muscles of her face […] Deeper down was something cool and fresh – endless garden’. 29 As Miriam matures, such awareness becomes more articulate so that, when under the influence of Quakerism in the twelfth volume, she practices ‘the labour of journeying, down through the layers of her surface being’, what is described as ‘a familiar process’ until she is deep enough to be ‘nearer to the living centre’.30 That ‘something’ becomes recognisable as the ‘living centre’ of her being, but the process remains familiar. Because Miriam experiences her consciousness as expansive – enhanced by the imagery of open spaces like ‘endless garden’ – and deep, the passage of time is not conceived of or presented as linear. Each aspect of her experience and her self exists simultaneously and is not divided by meaningless partitions into past, present and future. Instead, as Hanscombe describes, ‘the subjective experience of time becomes the framework within which reality exists and the corresponding task of fiction becomes the conscious bringing into relationship of meaningful moments’.31 Repetition of phrases and images function in the text to link essential moments in the past with those in the present, and stabilise what might otherwise become a directionless swill of impressions with few external details to contextualise or explain what is happening. A scene in The Tunnel explains how Miriam transcends spatialised time: 28 Richardson, Pilgrimage I, p. 424. 29 Richardson, Pilgrimage I, p. 425. 30 Richardson, Pilgrimage IV, p. 498. 31 Hanscombe, Introduction, Pilgrimage I, p. 6. The similarity of Richardson’s notion of time to Henri Bergson’s concept of durée is marked and has been frequently discussed by critics, even though Richardson insisted that she ‘was never consciously aware of any specific influence’ (Shiv K. Kumar, ‘Dorothy Richardson and the Dilemma of “Being versus Becoming”’, Modern Language Notes, 74 (June 1959), p. 495).

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In the instant before her mind had slid back, and she had listened to the muffled footsteps thudding along the turf of the low cliff above her head […] she had been perfectly alive, seeing; perfect things all round her, no beginning nor ending … there had been moments like that, years ago, in gardens, by seas and cliffs. […] But the moment she had just lived was the same, it was exactly the same as the first one she could remember.32 Such moments have a multilayered function in the novel sequence as a whole. Particular memories form a web that holds together all the significant experiences of her ‘strange unfailing self’, but the fact that these memories are familiar, both to Miriam and the reader due to the repetition, weights their significance. The passage continues by describing the memory of one particular moment experienced in the garden of Miriam’s childhood home, as she stood alone as a small child between banks of flowers in the sunshine, hearing the drone of bees. This particular memory recurs several times during the course of Pilgrimage, and though on first appearance its real significance for Miriam is not verbalised, it comes to denote her very first experience of self-awareness and individuality: 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 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.33 Not only the memory itself but also the fact that it returns to her unbidden creates its importance. In Deadlock, this memory is returned to frequently as a means of refocusing herself after her relationship with Michael Shatov falls apart: When she was alone, she moved, thoughtless, along a pathway that led backwards towards a single memory. […] the summer 32 Richardson, Pilgrimage II, pp. 212–13. 33 Richardson, Pilgrimage I, p. 317.

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morning of her infancy, a permanent standing arrested, level with the brilliance of flower-heads motionless in the sunlit air; no movement but the hovering of bees.34 Besides the obvious structural importance of recurrent images, like this so-called ‘bee-memory’, their repetition attracts the reader’s attention to the author’s conscious evaluation of the patterns of her protagonist’s development. The fact that this memory is accessed when she is alone significantly echoes her solitude in the remembered scene, for it is only when alone that she comes into possession of her true self. That solitude is idealised in this memory is one of the reasons she seeks to maintain it, at all costs. The link between consciousness and self-knowledge is highlighted by Richardson’s suggestion of an essential connection between thought, or the quality of consciousness, and identity. As Miriam ponders in Revolving Lights: ‘Contemplation is freedom. The way you contemplate is your temperament’.35 Concepts and experiences of consciousness and identity are woven together by memory in Pilgrimage, reaching a sort of climax in the final volume as Miriam knowingly inhabits her vocation as an author of the personal past: While 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.36 William James, the progenitor of the phrase ‘stream of consciousness’ in its original context in The Principles of Psychology, describes consciousness as ‘an amalgam of all that we have experienced and continue to experience’,37 a fusion, that is, of past and present awareness, as Richardson suggests. The experience of a whole accessible self exists parallel to the process of development that is at the core of Miriam’s pilgrimage towards her artistic vocation. Miriam’s sense of her ‘own unchanging 34 Richardson, Pilgrimage III, p. 197. 35 Richardson, Pilgrimage III, p. 282. 36 Richardson, Pilgrimage IV, p. 657. 37 Quoted in Edel, The Psychological Novel, 1900–1950 (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1955), p. 19.

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reality’ permeates the text so that the process of development is enacted in order to fully apprehend already existent being. However, her thoughts on this dialectic are only clearly formulated towards the end of her journey in Clear Horizon: Being versus becoming. Becoming versus being. Look after the being and the becoming will look after itself. Look after becoming and the being will look after itself? Not so certain. Therefore it is certain that becoming depends upon being. Man carries his bourne within himself and is there already, or he would not even know that he exists.38 The dialectic of ‘being versus becoming’ motivates Miriam’s pilgrimage and is the basis for the seemingly contradictory expression of stability and movement that informs her notion of consciousness. Pilgrimage’s Progress As the concern with ‘being versus becoming’ demonstrates, change and stability are not mutually exclusive in Pilgrimage for the narrative moves forward, if not always in a straight line. Miriam’s progress towards self-awareness is represented as a pilgrimage driven by external experiences and by flashes of insight. In order for the narrative structure to reflect this development without relying on a traditional linear cradle-to-grave trajectory, Richardson adapts the Augustinian autobiographical figures concerned with personal growth to complement the web of moments of being. The traditional notion of a pilgrimage functions as a questing both physical and spiritual for something of great moral or religious significance. The same dual structure is found in the Romantic artist’s journey, in which a series of adventures is underpinned by and runs parallel to the artist-hero’s inner development. By structuring Miriam’s twofold evolution towards artisthood around the Augustinian or biblical stages of progress distilled by Avrom Fleishman as the Edenic garden, the Fall and Exile, journeying, the Crisis, Epiphany and eventually returning to Renewal, Richardson formulates her journey as a kind of spiritual pilgrimage. 38 Richardson, Pilgrimage IV, p. 362.

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The internal and the external forces driving Miriam forward run parallel to each other, but they also circle each other. In the opening volume, circumstances force Miriam to go to Germany as a teacher, but her own desire to learn and develop makes her improve her piano playing once there, and in the rest of the narrative the significance of her time in Hanover comes back to her when she plays music. The constant return to an earlier state but with greater understanding evokes the Romantic ‘spiral return’ journey from innocence to experience and back to a newly aware state, although in Pilgrimage this is not a single occurrence. Fleishman has noted that Richardson masters the Augustinian figures of autobiography to such an extent that she reuses them ‘again and again to structure the individual parts of her work as well as the larger whole’.39 The conception of an enriched rather than a changed self that results from this application resolves Richardson’s seeming paradox of development and permanence, and the image of the spiral also sits more comfortably with her vision of an expansive rather than a stream-like consciousness. A series of smaller spiral movements make up Pilgrimage’s larger journey. In The Tunnel, for example, Miriam realises that ‘because I am free I am the same person as I was when I was there, but much stronger and happier because I know it’.40 The movement, or sense of progress, between each instalment is highlighted by the different settings of the individual volumes. If the country or county does not change from one volume to the next, then Miriam changes her accommodation in London, and obtains new acquaintances and influences that way. A number of literary allusions to Bunyan, Dante, the Bible, Thomas à Kempis and Jacob Boehme amongst others suggest the spiritual nature of Miriam’s pilgrimage. The religious works that Miriam reads, and with which her author is clearly familiar, infiltrate her thinking and when she finally sits down to begin writing the text that will be the first chapter-volume of Pilgrimage, they influence its form. Quakerism in particular appeals to Miriam’s increasing desire for quiet contemplation, and in the twelfth volume, Dimple Hill, she even lives for a while with a Quaker family. By indicating the influence of spiritual autobiographical significances in her rendition of personal reality, Richardson’s writing challenges the prescriptive 39 Fleishman, Figures of Autobiography, p. 430. 40 Richardson, Pilgrimage II, p. 215.

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loss of meaning and faith attributed to the experiments of modernism by theorists such as György Lukács.41 Richardson’s structuring principle is, in some respects, more conservative than that of Gosse in Father and Son. However, examining how the autobiographical figures used in Pilgrimage compare with those in Father and Son reveals the difference between Richardson’s literary programme of self-representation and those of her immediate predecessors. The superficial differences between the two texts are obvious and numerous, even beyond the issues of length, style and fictionalisation. But the motifs of spiritual autobiography that appear inverted in Gosse’s Father and Son are recognisable in Pilgrimage in something closer to their original form, particularly the childhood garden, the journey as pilgrimage and the Epiphany. Seemingly at the opposite end of the life writing spectrum from Father and Son, Richardson’s first volume, Pointed Roofs, in fact appeared only eight years after Gosse’s masterpiece. Yet, despite the vast distances travelled by creative autobiography in the opening decades of the new century, the presence of Augustinian figures in these two texts points to a shared heritage used to aid the representation of very different personalities. Although Pointed Roofs begins Miriam’s story with her imminent expulsion from her childhood ‘garden’ as she sets off for Germany and independence at the age of 17, the memories of an Edenic garden embodying a state of innocence, peace and security persist throughout the unfolding narrative in the bee memory and in the language Richardson uses to describe her inner space. Bound in flashes of memory, the image of the garden is a trope that refers back to a state before her father’s bankruptcy and her mother’s suicide forced her out into the world alone and, as such, is made all the more poignant by its proximity to the figure of Exile. As in Sassoon’s prelude to The Old Century, the natural world of the garden encapsulates an idyllic, pre-trauma state. The repeated presence of the same garden in Richardson’s sketches and short stories underscores its importance in her perception of her own development. The autobiographical sketch ‘Beginnings’ (1933) 41 In ‘The Ideology of Modernism’, for instance, Lukács refers to the ‘utter meaninglessness of man’s world’ and the ‘destruction of literature’ that he sees reflected in modernist writing. See The Novel: An Anthology of Criticism and Theory 1900–2000, ed. Dorothy Hale (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006), pp. 411, 412.

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describes her birthplace in Berkshire as ‘a vast garden, flowers, bees and sunlight’, while the garden of their later London family home ‘restored a lost eternity’.42 The episode in the garden that becomes the recurring bee memory in Pilgrimage is recreated in the short story ‘The Garden’ (1924), which is narrated from the point of view of a child and emphasises the sense of ‘dark and cold’ outside the garden, into which the adult self in Pilgrimage is forced to venture.43 The child observes ‘Pretty pretty flowers. Standing quite still, going on being how they were when no one was there’.44 The naïve perspective captures an experience of wonder at existence that is recreated in the bee memory. The state of innocence being associated with the garden in the story leads to the garden being represented throughout Richardson’s writing as a site of real, undiluted selfhood and the guiding principle of her pilgrimage. In ‘Beginnings’, for example, the vast Berkshire garden is described as ‘at once enchantment and a benevolent conspiracy of awareness, turned towards a small being to whom they first, and they alone, brought the sense of existing’.45 The Edenic garden motif in Pilgrimage contrasts starkly with the ‘ledge, split in the granite of some mountain’ into which the soul of the young Edmund Gosse is planted.46 Gosse’s narrative subsequently shows him striving to escape his beginnings, while we can read Miriam’s pilgrimage as a quest to regain (and maintain) her early enchanted state of awareness, as suggested in a scene in Revolving Lights: The mere mention of a name sent her back to the unbearable happiness of that last school summer, a sunlit flower-filled world opening before her, the feeling of being herself a flower, expanding in the sunlight. She could not regard it as the past. All that had 42 Dorothy Richardson, ‘Beginnings’, Journey to Paradise: Short Stories and Autobiographical Sketches, selected by Trudi Tate (London: Virago Press, 1989), pp. 110, 112. 43 Dorothy Richardson, ‘The Garden’, Journey to Paradise: Short Stories and Autobiographical Sketches, selected by Trudi Tate (London: Virago Press, 1989), p. 23. 44 Richardson, ‘The Garden’, p. 21. 45 Richardson, ‘Beginnings’, pp. 110–11. 46 Edmund Gosse, Father and Son, ed. Michael Newton (1907, repr. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), p. 12.

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happened since was a momentary straying aside, to be forgotten. One day she would suddenly come upon it, as she did in her dreams.47 The dream world that Miriam hopes to come upon in reality has biblical connotations of paradise regained, but it is also reminiscent of Heinrich von Ofterdingen’s dream of a blue flower, the search for which takes him out into the world on his journey of poetic (and self-) development. The Romantic quality of Richardson’s garden motif connects its significance with the beginning of a journey, grounding her imagination in the natural world and the particular innocent awareness of childhood, just as James and Sassoon do with their images of germinating and flowering seeds. Miriam’s identification of herself with the opening of the flowers in the garden recalls Wordsworth’s phrase ‘glory in the flower’, and therefore by association suggests that her own sense of loss is compensated for to some extent by ‘years that bring the philosophic mind’ – the years of experience that make up the journey back to poetry, and the ability to write down the journey, in the looping movement of the spiral.48 While Gosse’s journey is specifically tied to the relationship with his father and his own religious understanding, Richardson’s journey is entirely personal and connected to her apprenticeship as an author, so that its depiction can employ as much spiritual significance as she deems necessary without the fear of submitting to false beliefs. The journey trope in Pilgrimage can be aligned more 47 Richardson, Pilgrimage III, pp. 334–35. 48 William Wordsworth, ‘Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood’, Romanticism: An Anthology, ed. Duncan Wu (1994; repr. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), p. 554. In her letter of 20 December 1948 to Lita Hornick, Richardson disparages symbolic readings of the garden in Pilgrimage, and pointedly rejects the suitability of Wordsworth’s view of the developing child for feminine experience, saying: ‘No woman, however gifted, could have brought herself to write The Intimations of Immortality. For upon the growing girl with half a chance the shades of the prison-house (whatever her miseries) do not close in’. The implication is that just as time is not divided into past, present and future, so the experiences of the past do not pass away and Miriam’s reliving of the bee-memory therefore keeps ‘the shades of the prison-house’ at bay. Nonetheless, Miriam’s access to the garden and all it entails is only ever very briefly sustained, and her sense of its loss permeates the text even if it does not destroy her capacity for wonder.

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specifically with that of the Künstlerroman genre, as the Romantic undertones suggest. By citing Goethe’s manifesto on the novel versus drama in Wilhelm Meister in her foreword, Richardson alerts the reader to her awareness of the genre as well as to its German roots and its theoretical innovations in terms of representing individual development. It is worth noting that Richardson records coming across the passage in Wilhelm Meister that outlines the novel’s reliance on its characters’ thoughts with a sense of relief in the wake of explaining the limitations she finds in Henry James’s influential method. In so doing, she insinuates that Goethe’s model is more beneficial to her formal innovations than any English text. Significantly, German culture, especially music, and what she sees as the characteristic German response to culture, provide a model for Miriam’s own ambitions, especially in Pointed Roofs, set in Germany, in which Bildung is instituted through the school environment in which she teaches and her dawning awareness of the possibilities of artistic cultivation. At the school in Hanover, Miriam observes the English students: learning, picking up from these wonderful Germans. They did not do it quite like them though. They did not think only of the music, they thought about themselves too. Miriam believed she could do it as the Germans did. She wanted to get her own music and play it as she had always dimly known it ought to be played and hardly ever dared.49 Although the concept of Bildung is never named, it is intimated as a guiding principle from the very start of the novel sequence. The recognition of, and participation in, highbrow culture, especially music and literature, as first witnessed in Germany, comes to distinguish Miriam from others in her own mind. The Künstlerroman model fits Pilgrimage’s central theme of individual selfhood developing towards literary representation more precisely than the model of spiritual autobiography, yet by weaving the two together Richardson endows her apprenticeship journey with a wider significance that is not necessarily defined but which supports Miriam’s sense of her own uniqueness. Scattered references to the feeling that she is in a novel draw 49 Richardson, Pilgrimage I, p. 45.

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attention to a perceived link between writing and reality, which is enhanced when Miriam begins to work as a writer. In Deadlock, for instance, she feels she can justify and understand past difficulties ‘so long as she can sit at work’ and lose herself in memories of ‘all the circumstances of her life’, reflecting on them ‘as if narrated from the fascinating life of someone else’.50 As a tool for both self-understanding and self-transformation, Miriam’s sense of herself as a writer provides her with the energy to tackle ‘any sort of life’ once ‘the paper-scattered lamplit circle’ that is her desk ‘was established as the centre of life’.51 While Miriam experiences numerous moments of particular insight or revelation in the course of the long narrative, this scene in Deadlock portrays one such moment that serves to bring the entire narrative trajectory into focus. Miriam sees her progress across the years, ‘the desperate graspings and droppings’ put into perspective by this instance of insight. The moment is made potent not simply by the realisation of writing’s power to capture her reality, but by the way in which it can centre all of her experience in a single moment – ‘an everlastingly various joyful coming back’. As such, the artist’s spiral development is repeatedly endowed with the significance of the figure of Epiphany and Conversion. The moments of insight in the text become revelatory epiphanies set into a system of inner as well as outer development. The epiphanic moment became a particular feature of modernist literature having been coined by James Joyce in an early draft of A Portrait of the Artist (1916): By an epiphany he meant a sudden spiritual manifestation whether in the vulgarity of speech or of gesture or in a memorable phase of the mind itself. [Joyce] believed that it was for the man of letters to record these epiphanies with extreme care, seeing that they themselves are the most delicate and evanescent of moments.52 While Joyce uses the word ‘spiritual’, his description diverges from the religious conception of epiphany as a moment of divine revelation 50 Richardson, Pilgrimage III, p. 133. 51 Richardson, Pilgrimage III, p. 134. 52 James Joyce, Stephen Hero: Part of the First Draft of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man [1904–06], ed. Theodore Spencer, rev. ed. John J. Slocum (London: Cape, 1969), p. 216.

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‘when the soul of the recipient is filled with something from outside the self’.53 Rather than an externally motivated incident of communication with the divine, Joyce’s notion of an epiphany concerns the personal transformation of the ordinary; as Ashton Nichols explains, this is in fact closer to the original Greek term phainein, meaning ‘to show’ or ‘to cause to appear’, than to the Christian sense.54 Richardson’s use of epiphanic moments falls somewhere in between: they are internally motivated but they also bestow upon Miriam a kind of privileged sight that distinguishes her from others. In one such moment in Revolving Lights, for example, Miriam’s insight enables her to compare how others are left ‘unaware’ by their experiences: ‘They never stopped, never dropped their preoccupation with people and things that happened to notice the extraordinariness of the world being there and they being on it’.55 While not defined as religious, it is nonetheless implied that the sense of wonder attached to Miriam’s insights is a blessing, enabling her to see more and further ‘into the life of things’, to use Wordsworth’s phrase from a comparable moment in his poem ‘Tintern Abbey’.56 Not unlike the Romantic figure of the poet, Miriam’s privileged sight – equivalent to the Romantic imagination – differentiates her from others, but also enables her as an artist, not least because, as Eveline Kilian has explained, the moments become her most important mode of aesthetic expression.57 There is an interesting intersection in the use Gosse and Richardson make of the figure of epiphany. While Gosse anticipates an epiphany 53 Ashton Nichols, The Poetics of Epiphany: Nineteenth-Century Origins of the Modern Literary Moment (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1987), p. 13. 54 Nichols, Poetics of Epiphany, p. 5. 55 Richardson, Pilgrimage III, p. 324. 56 Wordsworth, ‘Lines Written a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey’, Romanticism: An Anthology, p. 416. 57 The parallel between the Romantic and the modernist literary application of the epiphanic moment is evidenced in Pilgrimage particularly by this link between privileged insight and artistic imagination. Eveline Killian’s Momente innerweltlicher Transzendenz: die Augenblickserfahrung in Dorothy Richardsons Romanzyklus Pilgrimage und ihr ideengeschichtlicher Kontext (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1997) provides a thorough investigation of the function of the epiphanic moment in Pilgrimage as well as the concept’s historical context.

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and the final confirmation of his conversion through the Lord’s appearance to him at the end of his narrative, only to be confronted by the ordinary ringing of the tea-bell, Richardson intersperses moments throughout her text in which Miriam’s everyday reality opens up before her mind’s eye to reveal unexpected significances. One such moment causes her immediate surroundings to blend ‘in an unforgettable whole; her past life gleaming about her in a chain of moments’.58 The positioning of Gosse’s (anti-)climatic moment may be more typical of the traditional trajectory of a spiritual autobiography, but Richardson’s contrasting, often unanticipated, moments are more meaningful to her protagonist – they sanctify her daily reality by allowing her to access her past and with it her sense of unchanging identity. Miriam’s moments of special insight stabilise her inner journey, but Richardson also uses them to pace her revelations in order to shift the climax and resolution of the pilgrimage into the realm of artistic development in the final volume, March Moonlight. While, as Fleishman points out, Richardson uses the autobiographical figures to structure the individual volumes of Pilgrimage, there is also an overarching sequence that, although it gets somewhat lost in the long narrative’s vast sprawl, has increasing influence as the story begins to circle back to the point of its own conception. In Dimple Hill, the last complete volume, the circumstances for both a Crisis and a Conversion are indicated. Following something of a breakdown, Miriam leaves London to seclude herself with a family of Quakers on a Sussex farm. Typically, the figurative ‘illness’ of the traditional Crisis is only hinted at in the text, and Miriam’s attraction to Quakerism is not quite strong enough to initiate a complete Conversion. However, the volume’s spiritual thematic is highlighted by the opening image of a cathedral that ‘cast its shelter and its spell’ on the surrounding town,59 and Miriam’s concluding confession that despite returning to her own life, she longs to stay amongst the Quakers. In Dimple Hill, Miriam has flashes of realisation that indicate a sense of the culmination of her experiences and their assigned significances, for example when she sits alone in the garden which in her mind becomes linked to those important gardens of her childhood: 58 Richardson, Pilgrimage III, p. 255. 59 Richardson, Pilgrimage IV, p. 403.

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the little garden, withdrawn into itself, unthreatened to-day 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.60 This garden is linked to the other gardens of her experience, emphasising the spiral movement of her personal development, passing a point of significance that transfers and adds to its familiar relevance at each turn of the gyre. Ultimately, Miriam’s contact with the Quakers provides her with new tools to conclude or resolve earlier questions and issues, and these replace the need for religious conversion. When she wonders, for example, during a meeting, why it should only be Quakers who employed ‘this method of approaching reality’, there is the suggestion that she will carry their centred stance, which leaves her feeling ‘poised between the inner and outer worlds’, out into the secular world.61 In contrast to Gosse’s final rejection of religious faith, Richardson willingly melds aspects of it into her life. Gosse’s and Richardson’s different applications of the tropes of spiritual autobiography reflect the diverse nature of their individual quests. Gosse’s search for spiritual confirmation is thwarted by the fanatically high level of his expectations generated by his father’s faith and his own naïve mimicry of the same. In contrast, Richardson’s search is for a personally motivated experience of her own spiritual nature. As such, Gosse’s use of the tropes represents his factual or objective approach to religion, and their inversion represents his ultimate disappointment. Richardson’s more traditional treatment, on the other hand, would seem to indicate the success of her personal quest for significance, paradoxically dissociated from any final alignment with organised religion but resolving modernist concerns with fragmentation and lack of meaning. Gosse’s method undercuts any easily associated significance or preordained meaning and replaces it with questions and an impression of independent thought. The presence of the spiritual tropes in Pilgrimage however, sustains meaning, even if this is ultimately generated from within rather than by the divine. The comparison between these two usages reveals that Richardson’s novel uses traditional autobiographical 60 Richardson, Pilgrimage IV, p. 490. 61 Richardson, Pilgrimage IV, p. 497.

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motifs to support its core meaning, while Gosse’s autobiography employs literary effects to replace the meaning he removes along with the significance of spiritual tropes. Of Language, of Meaning, of Mr Henry James In her foreword, Richardson writes: ‘when [my] work is danced upon for being unpunctuated and therefore unreadable, [I am] moved to cry aloud. For here is truth’. Because, she continues, ‘Feminine prose […] should properly be unpunctuated, moving from point to point without formal obstructions’.62 Central to this protest is the portrayal of consciousness, of female consciousness specifically, and the problem of fitting traditionally masculine lingual forms of expression to this uncharted territory. Richardson’s innovative, ‘unreadable’ linguistic style stands in stark contrast to her simultaneous use of traditional motifs and thematic patterns. But style is as closely connected to truth for Richardson as it is for Henry James. On reading James’s The Ambassadors in The Trap, Miriam is moved to declare: ‘Style was something beyond good and evil. Sacred and innocent’.63 Richardson had already championed the cause of unpunctuated, or at least loosely punctuated, prose in her short essay ‘About Punctuation’, which appeared in the Adelphi in April 1924. Suggesting that the rules of punctuation are a relatively recent addition to written language, she rebuffed the criticism of her style which, according to Fromm, she considered to be the root of her problematic reputation.64 In the first editions of volumes four and five in particular, Interim and The Tunnel, ‘Richardson introduced new layout, punctuation and notations for reported speech that were unlike anything that she used in any other volume of Pilgrimage’, as John Mepham writes.65 The fifth section of chapter one in the first edition of Interim, for instance, is a single, very long paragraph running for some ten pages, including extensive dialogue between 62 Richardson, Pilgrimage I, p. 12. 63 Richardson, Pilgrimage III, p. 410. 64 See Fromm, Dorothy Richardson: A Biography, p. 307. 65 John Mepham, ‘Dorothy Richardson’s “Unreadability”: Graphic Style and Narrative Strategy in a Modernist Novel’, English Literature in Transition (1880–1920), Vol. 43, No. 4 (2000), p. 449.

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Miriam and her friends, with each utterance bracketed by dashes, and only irregular use of other punctuation. Even a short excerpt from this section demonstrates the reader’s challenge: I can see Grace – she drove on carrying them with her, ignoring the swift eyes upon the dim things settling heavily upon her heart – gazing out of the window in the little room where I was supposed to be holding a German class – Yes I know Miriam darling, but now you know me you know I could never be good at languages – – You’re my pupil – – It seems absurd to think of you as a teacher now we know you chuckled Florrie.66 Despite making no mention of the particularly feminine quality of such prose, Richardson’s essay applauded the charm of unpunctuated ancient manuscripts for ‘the slow attentive reading demanded’, which gives ‘the faculty of hearing […] its chance’ until ‘the text speaks itself’.67 This impression of the text becoming a voice is precisely the aim of her narrative technique in Pilgrimage, through which the reader can ‘hear’ the protagonist’s thoughts but also what a text’s style can articulate. Richardson’s comments in her essay suggest that it is the reader rather than the author who is likely to fail in the face of an unpunctuated, or unconventionally punctuated, text like the 1920 version of Interim that requires special concentration. In Virginia Woolf’s words, Richardson, ‘Invented […] a sentence […] of a more elastic fibre than the old, capable of stretching to the extreme, of suspending the frailest particles, of enveloping the vaguest shapes’.68 Woolf famously calls this technique ‘a woman’s sentence’, a phrase that has attracted notable critical attention, even while its application remains rather vague. The description of ‘a more elastic’ sentence is in fact more helpful, because Richardson’s distinctiveness 66 Dorothy Richardson, Interim (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1920), pp. 34–35. The comparison between the layout of this section in the later collected edition of Pilgrimage is remarkable, and highlights the unconventionality of the original text, as discussed in detail below. 67 Dorothy Richardson, ‘About Punctuation’, The Gender of Modernism: A Critical Anthology, ed. Bonnie Kime Scott (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1990), p. 415. 68 Virginia Woolf, ‘Romance and the Heart’, The Essays of Virginia Woolf, Vol. 3: 1919–1924, ed. Andrew McNeillie (London: Hogarth Press, 1988), p. 367.

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lies in her ability to stretch syntactical units almost to breaking point in order to render non-verbal experiences. Sentences fitting this description were already apparent in Pilgrimage’s earlier volumes, but are especially noticeable in the more radical developments begun in The Tunnel and fully apparent in Interim. Miriam’s impressions of Mr Hancock’s photographs of stained glass in The Tunnel are expressed in one such sentence: There was something in this intense hard rich colour like something one sometimes saw when it wasn’t there, a sudden brightening of all colours till you felt something must break if they grew any brighter – or in the dark, or in one’s mind, suddenly, at any time, unearthly brilliance.69 In Richardson’s attempt to get at the essence of Miriam’s experience of colour, the frail particles of past impressions are gathered together and suspended in a line behind the dash. The sentence loops between abstract and concrete impressions, alternating between too few and too many commas, and ending somewhat inconclusively in terms of both grammar and sense. Woolf’s account of language stretched wide to catch the frailest particles and vaguest shapes recalls her essay ‘Modern Fiction’, as well as conjuring James’s description in ‘The Art of Fiction’ of ‘a kind of huge spider-web of the finest silken threads suspended in the chamber of consciousness, and catching every air-borne particle in its tissue’.70 Richardson’s assessment of James’s punctuation in her essay attempts to emphasise the differences between their respective styles. She writes: ‘to the utmost James tested, suspending from the one his wide loops, and from the other his deep-hung garlands of expression, the strength of the comma and the semi-colon. He never broke a rule’.71 However, the picture of wide suspended loops of language belies an underlying similarity that goes beyond the shared rendition of consciousness. Although Richardson rejected suggestions of any stylistic kinship with James as the opinion of ‘one of those who look for derivations and relationships, primarily, 69 Richardson, Pilgrimage II, p. 107. 70 Henry James, ‘The Art of Fiction’, Henry James: Major Stories and Essays (New York: Library of America, 1999), p. 580. 71 Richardson, ‘About Punctuation’, p. 416.

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always missing essentials’, as she remarked to Henry Savage,72 the revelations that result from a comparison are well worth risking such a judgment. There is a notable element of ‘the anxiety of influence’ in Richardson’s protestations, especially in light of the praise she quite freely allows James’s writing in other places. Miriam’s reading of The Ambassadors, for instance, leads her to make her well-known announcement that James had ‘achieved the first completely satisfying way of writing a novel’, continuing effusively that ‘There was something holy about it. Something to make, like Conrad, the heavens rejoice’.73 The effect that James’s novel has on Miriam as both a reader and a future writer is profound, despite any later reservations Richardson may have expressed.74 There are references in The Trap to ‘the book that had suddenly become the centre of her life’, she feels it ‘draw her again with its unique power’, while the opening chapter becomes ‘part of her own experience’.75 Beyond comparisons to broader definitions of ‘impressionism’ and distinctions from ‘realism’, likenesses between Richardson and James are most interesting on a basic textual level. While similar critical reviews of their work are not remarkable in themselves, the fact that both writers have been accused of excessive complexity or ‘unreadability’ illuminates a shared quality in their prose. Reviews of Pilgrimage grew less favourable with the publication of The Tunnel and Interim; their distinctive style, as Fromm observes, ‘could therefore be made fun of, as Henry James’s novels had been not long before’.76 Yet, far from being easily equivalent, Richardson’s literary relationship with and assessment of James is complicated and contradictory. 72 Richardson to Henry Savage, 18 September 1948, Windows on Modernism, p. 589. 73 Richardson, Pilgrimage III, p. 410. 74 Although The Ambassadors is not named directly, there is plenty of evidence that this is the book Miriam is reading, as she names both the characters, Waymarsh and Maria Gostrey. Leon Edel has remarked that this failure to name the book is, in fact, ‘a defect in the internal monologue’ as it is hard to believe that neither the title nor the author’s name would once enter the heroine’s mind, ‘for she fondles the volume and thinks much about it’ (The Psychological Novel, p. 33). 75 Richardson, Pilgrimage III, pp. 407–08. 76 Fromm, Dorothy Richardson: A Biography, p. 119.

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Notably, John Mepham points out, when preparing the 1938 collected edition of Pilgrimage, Richardson cleaned up many of the abnormalities of her most experimental volumes. Mepham writes that ‘Interim in particular was drastically re-set, without explanation or comment, so that modern readers tend to have no idea of the extent of Richardson’s earlier stylistic experimentation’.77 To compare even the opening page of the text of a first edition of Interim with that in the 1938 (and 1967) collected editions of Pilgrimage reveals marked differences. The 1920 text, for example, divides the chapters into numbered sections, the very first of which has no paragraph breaks and uses no quotation marks, relying instead on excessive dashes. This edition contains many irregularities, however, with some chapters using a more familiar narrative layout and marking of dialogue. The later text dispenses with the numbered sections, replacing them simply with double-spaced gaps to indicate a break in the narrative, while the opening section uses both regular paragraphing and speech markers. The clarity added by these concessions is notable, especially when the narrator omits indications of who speaks. A passage from the 1920 text reads: Bring her in scolded Mrs. Philps from the dining-room door. Grace took her by the arm and drew her along the passage. I’m one mass of mud. – Never mind the mud, come in out of the rain, scolded Mrs. Philps backing towards the fire, you must be worn out. – No, I don’t feel tired now I’m here, oh what a heavenly fire.78 Here, Miriam’s arrival at her friends’ house is a continuous flow compared with the standard edition, which reads: ‘Bring her in,’ scolded Mrs Philps from the dining-room door. Grace took her by the arm and drew her along the passage. ‘I’m one mass of mud.’

77 Mepham, ‘Dorothy Richardson’s “Unreadability”’, pp. 449–50. 78 Richardson, Interim, p. 9. Mepham also notes that Richardson likewise made changes between the 1919 text serialised in the Little Review and the first book edition, which he attributes to ‘hesitation, indecision, perhaps even panic’ (‘Dorothy Richardson’s “Unreadability”’, p. 461).

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‘Never mind the mud, come in out of the rain,’ scolded Mrs Philps backing towards the fire, ‘you must be worn out.’ ‘No, I don’t feel tired now I’m here; oh, what a heavenly fire’.79 Besides the addition of paragraphing and quotation marks to distinguish the dialogue, this later version also includes more regular commas that pace the scene more conventionally. Richardson’s changes regulate not only the characters’ exchange but also Miriam’s impression of the rush of arrival in a familiar place, so that the reader’s ease is achieved at the cost of the immediacy of the scene. Some irregularities in layout are retained in the later version of the book, however, suggesting that Richardson was not prepared to overly standardise her text.80 Richardson’s emphasis on unusual style led Woolf to find the unconventionalities of the preceding volume, The Tunnel, a ‘disappointment’ because they keep the reader ‘distressingly near the surface’.81 She begins her review by observing that Richardson’s method ‘demands attention, as a door whose handle we wrench ineffectively calls our attention to the fact that it is locked’. Interim’s style was not a sudden, radical departure, but a further stage in a process of experimentation that began most pointedly in The Tunnel, a fact supported by any number of examples.82 The suggestion of the pointlessness of prominent method in Woolf’s judgment ironically matches an observation made by Miriam herself in The Tunnel: If books were written like that, sitting down and doing it cleverly and knowing just what you were doing, and just how somebody else had done it, there was something wrong, some mannish cleverness that was only half right.83 79 Richardson, Pilgrimage II, p. 291. 80 Chapter eight, for example, moves between regular paragraphing and short fragmented sections of as little as a single line separated by single-spaced gaps. 81 Virginia Woolf, ‘The Tunnel’, The Essays of Virginia Woolf, Vol. 3: 1919–1924, ed. Andrew McNeillie (London: The Hogarth Press, 1988), p. 11. 82 That Richardson made progressively more changes to the original texts when she revised them for the collected edition also emphasises a stylistic evolution. See George H. Thomson, The Editions of Dorothy Richardson’s Pilgrimage: A Comparison of Texts, http://www.eltpress.org/richardson. 83 Richardson, Pilgrimage II, p. 131.

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Richardson’s – and Miriam’s – purpose, however, is that writing something necessarily new without considering how others, especially men, had done it, frees her method from this trap of conscious cleverness. The assumption that appearance undermines the significance of a text’s content is a characteristic response to overtly stylised prose, and one that James suffered from equally. However, in ‘The Art of Fiction’, James writes that his method, like that of a painter, ‘attempt[s] to render the look of things, the look that conveys their meaning’.84 Style for James is a means of rendering rather than subordinating meaning, as Richardson’s foreword implied it is for her too. Despite this shared belief, Richardson’s unflattering remarks about what she considered James’s overly conscious style are numerous. For example, in a letter to Henry Savage, she wrote: His style, fascinating at a first meeting for me can only be, very vulgarly, described as a non-stop waggling of the backside as he hands out, on a salver, sentence after sentence, that yes, if the words had no meaning, would weave its own spell.85 The suggestion that James’s emphasis on style makes up for something lacking in his meaning is interestingly hypocritical considering the struggles Richardson herself had to have her style recognised for its significant connection with her content. It is likely that her assessments were influenced to some degree by H.G. Wells’s contentious opinion of James’s writing, bearing in mind Wells’s initial impact on her thinking. Although she eventually also sees Wells as a literary opponent, their personal connection was such that his public falling out with James – notably over Wells’s remarks on James’s literary method – could not have softened her towards the older writer. Wells’s account of James’s style in ‘Of Art, of Literature, of Mr Henry James’ in his 1915 pseudonymously published Boon, is undeniably echoed in the judgments made by Richardson two decades later. Wells writes: Having first made sure that he has scarcely anything left to express, he then sets to work to express it, with an industry, a 84 James, ‘The Art of Fiction’, p. 581. 85 Richardson to Savage, 25 August 1948, in Windows on Modernism, p. 588.

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wealth of intellectual stuff that dwarfs Newton. […] He brings up every device of language to state and define.86 Repeatedly, Richardson refers to James as ‘a sophisticated octopus in a tank he mistook for the universe’.87 The echo of Wells’s well-known description of James as a caged hippopotamus attempting to pick up a pea is notable. Richardson’s assessments of James also suggest that she was not amenable to reading James’s work as carefully as she would have had her own work read. The insinuation is that her own style carries more meaning because it presents something new and untried in the form of represented female consciousness, yet the syntactical looseness evidenced for instance in Interim strives to encapsulate a cerebral life similarly communicated in James’s tightly formed sentences. An example of one sentence from Notes of a Son and Brother demonstrates how James’s prose seeks to render subtle, sometimes scarcely definable mental activities and to qualify the words used in the context of a single sentence. Describing his reactions to the Civil War and his inability to take part, James writes: My appreciation of what I presume at the risk of any apparent fatuity to call my ‘relation to’ the War is at present a thing exquisite to me, a thing of the last refinement of romance, whereas it had to be at the time a sore and troubled, a mixed and oppressive thing – though I promptly see, on reflection, how it must frequently have flushed with emotions, with small scraps of direct perception even, with particular sharpnesses in the generalised pang of participation, that were all but touched in themselves as with the full experience.88 The tendency to explain the presence of a particular word or turn of phrase within the fabric of the sentence is typical of James’s very careful use of language and his awareness of its only tentative relationship to the meaning he intends. By qualifying his use of the words ‘“relation to” the war’ with inverted commas and an 86 H.G. Wells, Boon, the Mind of the Race, the Wild Asses of the Devil, and the Last Trump (1915; repr. London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1920), p. 107. 87 Richardson to Savage, 18 September 1948, Windows on Modernism, p. 589. 88 James, Notes of a Son and Brother, pp. 196–97.

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expression of caution, James makes clear that the reactions he is about to describe are of a particular or delicate nature, which may not come across without explanation. In this example, he writes from the perspective of the reflecting autobiographer while trying to do equal justice to his past thoughts and opinions through qualifying phrases introduced by a dash and carefully placed commas. Despite different subject matter, an example from Interim demonstrates a comparable wariness of the relation between words and the particular impression they are intended to give when rendering thought: … Man is a badly made machine … an oculist could improve upon the human eye … and the mind wrong in some way too … logic is a cheap arithmetic. Imagination. What is imagination?89 Rather than explaining her caution, Richardson uses italics so that the reader must pick up the emphasis placed on the word and intuit its function. Richardson’s tendency to show rather than tell her reader all that her sentences are not quite able to verbalise is reflected in their concrete appearance on the page. The more subtleties a sentence is required to reveal, the more disjointed its form and punctuation become. The ellipses reflect the pauses in Miriam’s pondering, while the short one-word sentence suggests a quick jump to a new idea, one that is then stressed with italics to demonstrate the weight she places on the word ‘imagination’ and what it might mean – as the question then supplements. Compared with James’s firmly structured sentence, which attempts to carry the reader along the lines of the narrated thought in order to make his meaning as clear as language possibly can, Richardson leaves the reader to fall through the gaps in her sentences as if to show her experience of the limitations of linguistic representation. The difference here from the gaps for which James’s prose is known is this physical quality which Richardson provides by writing them into the text. The lack of specification in James’s style is deliberate and reveals a significant aspect of his understanding and use of language. The ‘blanks’ in James’s style, as Peter Brooks observes, ‘both contain and efface central meaning’.90 The point of the ‘something or other’ 89 Richardson, Pilgrimage II, p. 408. 90 Peter Brooks, Realist Vision (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005), p. 189.

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that haunts John Marcher in James’s tale ‘The Beast in the Jungle’ is that it is something and not nothing. The ‘thing’ that James does not quite describe in recounting his reaction to the Civil War is similarly an important sensation, despite the lack of specificity. In not minutely describing the content of the idea, James nods to his awareness of the uncertainty in the relationship between language and absolute meaning. Both James’s and Richardson’s methods reflect thought patterns as if they were being enacted before the reader’s eyes. While James tries to get as much help from language and linguistic rules as possible to convey his sense, Richardson indicates her dissatisfaction with the correlation between the sign and the signified by loosening the syntactical bonds of her prose. Pilgrimage is littered with assertions such as ‘the words belonging to underlying things were far away, only to be found in long silences’, or ‘Silence is reality. Life ought to be lived on a basis of silence where truth blossoms’.91 Even though the suggestion that truth is only expressed through silence is a self-defeating position for an author, such assertions go some way to explaining Richardson’s visually significant textual layout. Miriam’s repeated articulation of ‘the awfulness of discovering the way words express almost nothing at all’ is in part motivated by not being understood as she would like by her friends – especially Hypo.92 We can read Miriam’s recognition of language’s fluctuating ability to communicate her unchanging, intimate self in Richardson’s ever more disjointed expression. More significant than the link between thematic content and expression in Pilgrimage is the weight of meaning carried by the form – of both individual sentences and the narrative more generally. It is arguable that form in Pilgrimage functions as it does in poetry. In his ‘Notes on a Poetry of Release’ the poet W.S. Graham champions the very material out of which a poem is constructed, an awareness without which the poet becomes a futile figure: A poem is made of words and not of the expanding heart, the overflowing soul. […] It is easy to mistake a poem for a different thing with a different function and to be sad when it does not put out what it is not. In the end then are those still words on the paper and arranged half-victim to the physical outside, 91 Richardson, Pilgrimage III, pp. 181, 188. 92 Richardson, Pilgrimage III, p. 369.

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half-victim to my Morality’s origins, out of this dying and bearing language.93 The struggle experienced by the poet between the external requirements of language on the page (which Richardson dispenses with) and its internal, or personal relevance (with which Richardson’s method seeks to replace the external form) is reflected in Pilgrimage. The language may seem to be dying – incapable of carrying the weight of silent significances – but for the author it is all there is, and it must bear meaning, even if the sense it conveys is its own frailty. By criticising James’s artistic vision as restricted to a ‘perforated tank’, Richardson suggests something crucial about her own art. Fromm remarks in her biography’s epilogue that, in being too wrapped up ‘in the interplay between [herself] and the world’, Richardson ‘could not remove [her] eyes from [her] own reflection mirrored in the world’.94 In comparison, James’s complete dedication to his art for its own sake – causing him, as he recounts in his autobiographies, to give up so much other experience – provides his autobiography with a topic of creative development beyond its own textual borders. As the substance of Richardson’s life’s work, Pilgrimage can only be about itself. Despite the text’s internal ambitiousness, a realisation of this thematic limitation creates a sense of anxiety that pervades Richardson’s criticisms of other authors. In Bloom’s terms, Richardson’s critique of James’s style sees her transforming her purposeful ‘misreading’ of her precursor into ‘revisionary insights’ of her own work.95 By limiting James’s influence to a youthful fascination, Richardson attempts to clear space in the literary landscape for her own method of representing consciousness, thus emphasising its originality.96 Richardson’s desire 93 W.S. Graham, ‘Notes on a Poetry of Release’, The Nightfisherman: Selected Letters of W.S. Graham, ed. Michael and Margaret Snow (Manchester: Carcanet, 1999), pp. 379–80. 94 Fromm, Dorothy Richardson: A Biography, p. 396. 95 Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (1973; repr. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 10. 96 Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s application of what they call Bloom’s ‘patriarchal’ model of literary genealogies stresses the added fear felt by the female author in the arena that necessarily pits ‘sons’ against ‘fathers’: ‘The “anxiety of influence” that a male poet experiences is felt by a female poet as an even more primary “anxiety of authorship” – a radical fear that she cannot

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to write a ‘female equivalent’ of ‘masculine realism’ purposefully sets her work in direct opposition to that of her male precursors, implying that a different measure is needed for its interpretation. To judge Pilgrimage solely as fiction does a disservice to its attempt to mediate life and, just as a disservice is done to Gosse’s, James’s and Sassoon’s autobiographies by judging them solely as non-fiction, it inhibits levels of the text’s significance. Eva Tucker writes of Pilgrimage that ‘remembered experiences glow with new value as they are filtered through the prism of the writer’s imagination’,97 suggesting that to a very particular degree there is a reciprocally beneficial relationship between the subject matter and the artistic form it takes. The small everyday experiences that form the basis of Richardson’s text are not rejected but are enlivened by the narrative arrangement, and by the significance they are given due to the reaction they generate inside Miriam. James’s ‘conversion’ of life into art, on the other hand, enacts a fuller transformation that produces works in his vast oeuvre that are no longer tied to his own daily affairs. Even in his autobiography, the minutiae are dispensed with in favour of incidents and reflections that are alchemically transmuted into a history of the imagination. James emerges from the fray as the successful artist who does not despair of his tool, language, even when the burden of complexity he lays upon it would seem too heavy to bear. At the end of March Moonlight, on the other hand, Miriam/ Dorothy has arrived at the point at which she will begin writing Pointed Roofs, thus turning the issues of language and authorship she has already explored back on themselves. There are purposeful contradictions at work in Richardson’s method. Miriam notes that she reads books for the portrait of the author they reveal – ‘I have just discovered that I don’t read books for the story, but as a psychological study of the author’. This enthusiastic, significant declaration by the still slightly naïve Miriam would suggest that the autobiographical nature of a text is irrelevant to how much the reader can hope to comprehend of create, that because she can never become a “precursor” the act of writing will isolate or destroy her’ (The Mad Woman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (1979; repr. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), pp. 48–49). 97 Eva Tucker, The Enchanted Guest of Spring and Summer: Dorothy Richardson and Pilgrimage (Penzance: The Hypatia Notebooks, 2003), p. 14.

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the author. Richardson extends this judgment in her short essay on reading Finnegan’s Wake, ‘Adventure for Readers’, when she asserts that ‘every novel, taken as a whole, shares with every other species of portrayal the necessity of being a signed self-portrait’.98 The author’s signature, which she sees ‘clearly inscribed across his every sentence’, is therefore inherent in his very choice of words. In several letters, Richardson uses a comparable description of James’s novels, for instance: ‘Every novel is a conducted tour & everything turns upon the vision of the conductor’.99 So, while Richardson, in her attempt to write a new kind of realism, tries to keep her own voice out of her novel and leave it in the hands of her ‘fictional’ protagonist, the strongly autobiographical nature of the text, which in itself undermines her stance of authorial ‘silence’, is supplemented by her unique style. Richardson’s use of language, particularly her punctuation, demands an unusual level of concentration from the reader. If silence really were preferable to insufficient language, her stylisation would be in vain. The difficulty of Richardson’s style foregrounds the text’s formal features, highlighting the authorial presence that the firm focalisation through her protagonist’s point of view wants to avoid. Miriam’s annoyance at the constant authorial interruptions that break into the flow of her reading and enjoyment of a novel make this issue a thematic concern of her own apprenticeship as a writer. While reading Joseph Conrad’s Typhoon, Miriam decrees that he will have to ‘go to purgatory; or be born again as a woman’ because of the ‘sudden smooth male voice’ with which he interrupts the story.100 This contradictory feature of Pilgrimage – enacting the authorial absence its heroine both desires and tries to circumvent in her ‘psychological’ reading of the author through a complex narrative and linguistic technique that draws attention to issues of style – arises from the formal experimentation that is the result of the express desire to break with supposedly inadequate literary precursors like James, even while engaging with them in order to move beyond their 98 Dorothy Richardson, ‘Adventure for Readers’ [1939], The Gender of Modernism: A Critical Anthology, ed. Bonnie Kime Scott (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1990), p. 426. 99 Richardson to Eleanor Philips, 25 January 1949, Windows on Modernism, p. 599. 100 Richardson, Pilgrimage III, p. 276.

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scope. The traditional motifs and structures employed by Pilgrimage supplement the meaning that language cannot always convey on its own, and in so doing Richardson actually implicitly acknowledges the value of her forefathers’ forms. The comparisons that can be drawn between Richardson’s experimental prose and forms of poetry due to the significance of silences, of gaps, of punctuation and line divisions, and of the appearance of the language on the page suggests that, not unlike Sassoon’s unvoiced modernity, the extra-verbal significance succeeds in reasserting a connection between language and meaning, or style and truth. Importantly, the gaps that contain such implications can only exist between, and because of their distinction from, words. The fundamental contradiction of Pilgrimage, then, is the comment it makes on the implicit meaning of language through the medium of its limits. The perfection of language usage would seem to be an attempt to transcend the very limits prescribed by aesthetics. The complication of James’s language is repeated but reconceived by Richardson. However, it is as if Richardson has taken James’s quest rather further than her linguistic ability, or perhaps language itself, can realise. In straining to represent Miriam’s inner world as truthfully or, better said, as realistically as possible, Richardson puts her own lived experience that ‘silence is reality’ down in words. In thus straining beyond the borders of verbal communication, the elastic nature of Richardson’s sentences becomes increasingly vital. Rather than tightening the linguistic web of sign and signification as James does, Richardson increasingly loosens it in order to maintain, paradoxically, the personal, unnarrated stance that is her literary rendering of consciousness. The final pages of March Moonlight indicate the vision of the artist figure that Richardson’s narrative generates. Written in the first person, as if to meld author and protagonist once and for all, the last volume retains the inconclusiveness of an unfinished draft, but nonetheless presents an image of a solitary artist figure. In the final scene, Miriam observes that ‘Fully to recognize, one must be alone. Away in the farthest reaches of one’s being’.101 The need to recognise at all has been established in the course of the narrative as a defining feature of artistic vision, a way of seeing that, like the moments of epiphany, pierces beyond appearances with the ‘opening 101 Richardson, Pilgrimage IV, p. 657.

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inward eye’. Solitude is required for the artist to create, as Miriam has concluded several times before. Here, in the final instance, however, this observation is more loaded. Miriam has preserved her solitude against all odds – she has rejected marriage proposals and differentiated herself from her friends – and as such has won the right to write. And, by writing in the first person about the conditions in which she is writing – ‘While I write, everything vanishes but what I contemplate’ – the moment of the text’s and of Miriam’s birth is enacted.

Conclusion Reading the Writer Conclusion: Reading the Writer

‘The best part of a writer’s biography is not the record of his adventures but the story of his style’, according to Vladimir Nabokov.1 In the case of each of the authors discussed in the preceding chapters, the conception of the artist they wish to convey is encoded into the style and form of the narrative itself. This does not mean that the author has ‘become’ the text, however, as Roland Barthes would have it, but rather the text has become a means through which the reader can commune with the author in the act of authoring. Gosse’s revision of the archetypal Christian story of progress as a literarily self-conscious narrative reveals him in the role of critic as artist. James converts his impressions – the stuff of his consciousness – into art, and his ‘making’ with the inkpot equates his productive participation in ‘life’. Inherent in Sassoon’s personal mythologising is the construction of an artistic persona that is both an amalgam of his divided self and a newly created entity that supplements ‘the poet as he really is’. The construction of the artist that is reflected in Gosse’s resolution of conflict, James’s representation of entangled knowing and seeing, and in Sassoon’s formal inversions and manipulations, is visible in Richardson’s linguistic style. In the very layout of her words and punctuation on the page, something of the original thought processes of the protagonist, her alter-ego and therefore, we posit, herself, are shown. The story of style has become the story of the artistic sensibility – the nature of the artist him- or herself. As Michael Polanyi states, ‘A work of art bears the mark of its creator. 1 Vladimir Nabokov, Interview with Vogue, 1969, Strong Opinions (London: Penguin, 1973), pp. 154–55.

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Name a major painter or sculptor, poet or playwright, of the past centuries, and his manner will readily come to the mind of many lovers of his art’. 2 In these final pages I want to consider how it is that art reveals the artist, and why the literary form of creative autobiography is especially apposite for this revelation, both enacting and becoming that disclosure. The creation of art presupposes a spectator and, in the case of literature, a reader is written into the text.3 Even in cases like Richardson’s Pilgrimage which take no account of a reader’s need for certain information in order to make sense of the diegetic situation, communication is all. The readings in the preceding chapters show meaning to have been activated in the encounter between the consciousness of the author and that of the reader. Indeed, this way of approaching the text is positively invited by the increasingly self-reflexive, self-conscious nature of Gosse’s, James’s, Sassoon’s and Richardson’s texts in their engagement with the issues of a knowable artistic persona. All four authors pre-empt and complicate so-called post-structuralist ideas about the constructed Author and his relation to the text’s meaning. Barthes has written that in contrast with traditional assumptions of the Author as an antecedent of his book, the modern scriptor is born simultaneously with the text, is in no way equipped with a being preceding or exceeding the writing, is not the subject with the book as predicate; there is no other time than that of the enunciation and every text is eternally written here and now.4 But the texts discussed here show that the birth of the ‘scriptor’ in the texts’ very existence does not preclude the biographical, contextual situation of its construction, which is one with the content and key to its form. Texts about developing authorship that not only 2 Michael Polanyi and Harry Prosch, Meaning (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1977), p. 102. 3 This supposition is common in reader response theory, but it is also phenomenologically evident that the objects of the text do not have full existence without the participation of consciousness. 4 Roland Barthes, ‘The Death of the Author’, Image, Music, Text, trans. Stephen Heath (London: Fontana Press, 1977), p. 145.

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judge themselves, but describe themselves, project a different set of ‘importances’. They ask to be read with an eye to their literary and historical horizons. Reducing the Author to the creator in the moment of writing is perhaps especially problematic in the case of autobiography, in which the concept of a flesh-and-blood author is inherent. In this case, the Author with an uppercase ‘A’ as an idea is distinguished from the author as the source of the text. The enunciated persona of the artist, as we have seen, is a construct separate from both the narrating and the narrated selves and from the ‘implied author’ or the flesh-and-blood author. It is the enunciated persona that is created in conjunction with the reader, but it is not the texts’ final purpose or effect. William Goetz observes, for example, that James does not make ‘the particularly modernist assumption that the act of writing, by itself, can produce only a fictional version of the author’.5 James and Sassoon in particular are very aware of the reader’s search for a ‘knowable’ persona and in self-consciously manipulating this awareness they seek to maintain control of the texts’ subject matter. The reader they allow for, or ‘encode’ into their texts by writing in gaps and blanks that require filling, is as much an authorial construction as the Author persona. Barthes’s removal of the Author together with the ‘temporality’ and ‘nourishment’ that the Author provides for the text, leaving the ‘empty process’ of ‘enunciation’ to function ‘perfectly without there being any need for it to be filled with the person of the interlocutors’, falls short of explaining the many levels of communication operating within an autobiographical text. In this instance, Barthes’s position offers a simplification rather than a sophisticated solution to the issue of artistic identity and textual meaning. The process of reading – the cognition of the literary work of art – engages with what the medium signifies, and thus the intended implications written by the author. Whether this intended meaning agrees with the reader’s final understanding is beside the point. The author’s purpose is still embedded in the style and form, in the very semantic units used to write the pages read. Virginia Woolf writes about reading as follows: ‘We must receive impressions, but we must relate them to each other as the author intended; and we can only 5 William R. Goetz, Henry James and the Darkest Abyss of Romance (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1986), p. 31.

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do his bidding by making ourselves acquainted with his method’.6 Within the context of the contemporary understanding of artistic consciousness, the term ‘impressions’ is highly significant. Referring to the very processes of consciousness, impressions read or written are the substance of James’s literary art, as they are the motivation for Richardson’s. It may still be considered old-fashioned or naïve to allow for authorial intention or relevance, but in assessing the author’s method, which is what we do when we actively read, we process his ‘impressions’ as well as our own. In their individual ways, this is what Gosse, James, Sassoon and Richardson expect – or even intend – us to do. The recognition of the ‘allied arts of writing and reading’, which Richardson remarks on in her essay on the experience of reading Finnegan’s Wake, is a common feature with which early twentiethcentury literary language is imbued. How the authors under discussion understood the art of self-revelation and its significance remains crucial to our present-day understanding of the same. ‘Art has no tests external to art’, writes Polanyi: Its making and acceptance must therefore be ultimately grounded on the decision of its maker, interacting, it is true, with both tradition and the public’s present inclinations, but nevertheless interacting by and through the maker’s own judgments.7 Or, as Miriam Henderson would have it, style is truth – a statement that is a modern revision of John Keats’s declaration that beauty is truth. The art itself reveals the truth of its creator and its creation. The charm of the creative autobiographical genre is precisely the discussion it generates between author and reader about the role and value of aesthetic judgments. While carefully avoiding the extreme position contained in Comte de Lautréamont’s statement that ‘judgments on poetry are worth more than poetry’,8 the prerequisite for critical interpretation is evident in the shared theme of reading – specifically of Bildung – in all four autobiographical texts. 6 ‘On Re-reading Novels’, The Essays of Virginia Woolf, Vol. 3: 1919–1924, ed. Andrew McNeillie (London: Hogarth Press, 1988), p. 339. 7 Polanyi and Prosch, Meaning, p. 103. 8 Quoted in Giorgio Agamben, The Man without Content, trans. Georgia Albert (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), p. 40.

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The significance of the understanding generated by the texts lies in how these insights into the value of art transfer to our evaluation of the writing itself, rather than in any wider social function it might perform. The centrality of the theme of the developing artist figure and their subjective relationship to their artistic output procures this self-referentiality. As in E.M. Forster’s notion of influence from books ‘for which we are ready’, the understanding ideally gleaned from the critical engagement with a text creates its value for the reader. In the creative autobiographies of Gosse, James, Sassoon and Richardson, this understanding, or meaning, is produced by the very medium of the text and its aim would therefore seem to be an appreciation of literature itself and the complexity of its production and evaluation. What we glean in reading these texts is an impression of the artist and his or her art, quite distinct from a knowable persona. In combining an understanding of the author’s own historical horizon with an awareness of the criticism that has ensued in the temporal gap between our present and the early twentieth century, this more sophisticated conclusion emerges.9 We understand that Richardson’s two requirements for creativity – wonder and solitude – are versions of the merged innocence and experience of the final position of the artist’s Bildungsreise, or quest for perfection. The spiral journey from innocence through experience to a new form of knowledge preserves and recognises the benefits of childish wonder and openness even while generating acceptance of the need for the artist figure to be separated from the world as an observer. We see that the homecoming of Sassoon’s soldier-poet at the end of Siegfried’s Journey acknowledges a similar duality in himself of past and present awareness – the innocence of the childhood, pre-war past and the knowledge of the post-war present. In James’s case, we understand that the autobiographical volumes bear witness to and enact the transformation, or conversion, of the small boy’s dawdling and gaping into the aesthetic manifesto of the mature 9 William Siebenschuh draws attention to the need for a symbiotic awareness of past and present positions when he writes that ‘autobiographical form is obviously tied closely to an author’s and a culture’s assumptions about identity; and our assumptions about identity have changed dramatically since Gosse’s day’ (Fictional Techniques and Factual Works (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1983), p. 149).

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master. Such insights into the figure of the artist are generated by the authors’ textual self-revelations even if they are not articulated in black and white. Schlegel’s musings in his Fragment number 116 suggest something similar when he writes that multigeneric ‘Romantic Poesy’ is so suited to the expression of the whole spirit of an author that ‘many artists who intend to only write a novel, provide us instead with a portrait of themselves’.10 Creating meaning out of the gaps and blanks – that is, out of the implied sense inherent in the structure of the quest for artistic self, the use of the Künstlerroman genre, as well as the ellipses, allusions and the things that are left unwritten – projects meaning onto the story of the authors’ lived experience by demonstrating the creative process. The adaptation of the artist quest model thus re-enlivens the possibility of representing a self whose very existence, in a period haunted by language’s inability to utter truth, is questionable. Likewise, through genre mixing, that is through the amalgamation of imagination and memory, subjectivity is reinvigorated with universal significance. The gaps and blanks, which are essential to the form and style of the text, function like symbols, enabling the reader to recognise something else in their place. The last sentence of March Moonlight articulates a question which builds on the significance of the moment of literary self-creation that concludes the whole sequence of Pilgrimage at the same time as evoking a sense of open-endedness. Miriam/Dorothy posits her reaction to a friend’s very different life: ‘If Jean’s marriage with Joe Davenport brought her a child, should I feel, in holding it, that same sense of fulfillment?’11 Thus, the final image is of the artist holding someone else’s child. The link between authorship and motherhood is left as an alternative form of the biological female role that Miriam rejects along with the union of marriage. Richardson’s portrait of Miriam simplifies the image of the female artist. By leaving certain events of her own life that complicate the picture of female creative solitude – the miscarriage of Wells’s baby, and her eventual marriage – at the very perimeter of her narrative, Miriam can stand as a symbolic rather than biological mother. In writing as the symbolic 10 Friedrich Schlegel, ‘Athenäum Fragmente’, Charakertistiken und Kritiken I (1796–1801), ed. Hans Eichner (Paderborn and München: Verlag Ferdinand Schöningh, 1967), p. 182 (my translation). 11 Richardson, Pilgrimage IV, p. 658.

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‘mother’, Richardson positions herself outside the father-son battle for prominence amongst literary traditions. Despite the restriction of her focus within the boundaries of this one – albeit long – text, the final scene of her book insists that she has written something new that demands to be judged by different, and as yet indefinable, standards. The constellation of texts studied in this book provides a picture of the development of creative autobiography’s potential in the opening decades of the twentieth century. The four authors present a view of the shifting understanding and experience of the writer’s life as Victorian certainty was left behind in the past. Father and Son stands as a kind of gateway allowing us a view in both directions, towards the objective confidence of the past and the possibilities of the subjective modern age. But, despite the reassurance provided by the adaptation of the Künstlerroman, James, Sassoon and Richardson, following so closely in Gosse’s wake, each open up the conclusions of their narratives to a sense of uncertainty and open-endedness. The increasing length of these autobiographical sequences – James’s two and a half volumes, Sassoon’s six volumes and Richardson’s thirteen – and their incompletion testify to the interconnectedness of living and writing; if one were to end, so would the other. By incomplete, I am referring to the unfinished The Middle Years and March Moonlight, as well as to Sassoon’s final displacement of form in Siegfried’s Journey. Length and incompletion can be seen as supplementing the formal gaps and blanks by both restating and questioning the value of the writing life. Writing life denotes the lived experience of a writer, the creative experience of writing and the act of composing a narrative about these experiences. Written into such texts are the layers of significance between the author’s revisiting of past experience, the conversion into text, and the reader’s subsequent aesthetic experience of the work as a means of comprehending what it is about the past that the text conveys. That much of these authors’ reminiscence is concerned with aesthetic development suggests that the experience gleaned by the reader, which in turn becomes a part of their aesthetic development, echoes that of the author. The theme of reading and writing that is so essential for the journey of artistic development manifests extradiegetically, so that the text itself mediates this experience of Bildung which is transferred back onto the reader. In the narrative form, the reader finds a map enabling a ‘re-enactment’ of the author’s journey.

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In assessing the role of the reader in the production of the work’s meaning, we also assess the autobiographer’s role in the same, albeit intra-diegetically. The preceding chapters have sought to demonstrate that autobiographical writing is as much a work of art as is fiction or poetry. We perceive art as imbued with meaning because it has been consciously constructed to impart significance of some kind. This distinguishes our perception in the field of literary criticism from that employed in other areas of experience. Polanyi’s consideration of meaning in literature leads him to ponder why it is that ‘works of art continue to be honored as “true” even though they tell us stories that we clearly understand are not true’.12 Literary art continues to convey the impression of truth because the Romantic figure of the artist as seer casts a long shadow. But it is also the case that, once written down, a text continues to ‘speak’ across the years, asserting its meaning anew with each reading. Gosse, James, Sassoon and Richardson all take on the role of literary critic to varying degrees in their assessment of their own formative reading, in the self-reflexive stance of the autobiographer and in the act of ‘reading’ the past. Within their creative autobiographies, criticism merges with creativity, generating an inherent philosophy of art which asserts and questions the issue of the author’s intentionality that haunts texts of self-representation. The value of literary tradition and inheritance is its function as a ‘teacher’ and, when united with the innovations of the individual writer, its importance becomes its function as a progenitor of art and artists. However, as we have seen, tradition is also the reader’s crutch, against which we can measure changes in style and form. Hegel stated in the first decades of the nineteenth century that: The philosophy of art is a greater need in our day than it was in days when art by itself as art yielded full satisfaction. Art invites us to intellectual consideration, and that not for the purpose of creating art again, but for knowing philosophically what art is.13 Bearing in mind Gadamer’s ‘appropriate historical horizon’, it seems possible to assert that in the years around the First World War, and 12 Polyani and Prosch, Meaning, p. 83. 13 G.W.F. Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Arts, Vol. 1, trans. T.M. Knox (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), p. 11.

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in the succeeding decade required for reassessment of that crisis, the need for intellectual consideration of art within its self-conscious production was even greater still. Past modes were thus transformed to fit new expressions by writers of creative autobiographies drawing attention to the very processes of personal creativity. Despite the shared experience between author and reader mediated by the text, the dual purpose to both reveal and conceal the poet as he or she really is remains a common feature of the creative autobiographies of Gosse, James, Sassoon and Richardson, and of the genre generally. The conflict between revelation and concealment is a feature that suggests that what is shown in these texts is something far more subtle than a self-portrait of the artist, or a theoretical construction – it is a portrait of the artist’s consciousness, his or her creative spirit, to be read in what he or she says about him- or herself, but also in the very style and method of that writing. It is the artistic ‘doing’ that remains to be gleaned from our reading of the text, so that the author’s insistence on a life of action – as production – has invaluable consequences. The aesthetic judgments encoded by the author within the text serve to make the artwork itself significant. Therefore, the ‘creative’ aspect is the vital component of these autobiographies and the reason that I have emphasised the authors’ adaptation of the mixed genre. As such, the represented consciousness lying on the page in black and white can be resurrected by the reader through the act of interpretation, the same act performed by the autobiographer in his or her ‘reading’ of the past. The reading of these creative autobiographies reveals the texts themselves to be not simply examples but acts of authorship – the literary deeds that reveal the ‘complexion’ and success of the author’s creative process and its subjective significance.

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Index Index

9/11 9 Adams, Henry 3 American Civil War, The 101, 168, 170 apprenticeship 3, 7, 24, 29–31, 33, 41, 52, 54, 68, 69, 80–81, 101, 111, 113, 121, 128, 135, 145, 155, 156, 173 see also Bildung apprenticeship narrative 12n25, 21, 29, 39, 125, 126, 138, 146 Armistice 5, 115, 129, 133 artist figure 31, 33–35, 42, 50, 54, 99, 105, 137, 174, 180 artist-hero 2, 3, 27, 29, 35, 36, 38, 39, 47, 52, 93, 108, 111, 119, 120–21, 131, 141 151 artist-novel 3, 16, 31, 35, 42, 120 Athenäum 32, 34 Augustine, Saint 50n77, 63, 64, 66, 67, 71 Confessions of St Augustine, The 25, 50, 63, 64, 66, 70 Augustinian figures 63–64, 137, 142, 151–52, 153, 157, 159 Aurora Leigh 72 autobiography 3–4, 6n10, 12, 14, 15–20, 23, 38–39, 47–48, 50–52, 54, 59–60, 61, 63, 63n31, 73, 82, 85, 103, 107, 110, 116–18, 119, 121, 128, 142, 144, 152–53, 156, 159, 160, 177–78, 182 aesthetic autobiography 11–12

creative autobiography 3, 15–21, 38, 39, 45, 107, 118, 153, 177, 182 spiritual autobiography 18, 21, 38, 55, 69, 153, 156, 159 theory of 15–17, 15n35 Victorian autobiography 4, 50–51, 58–60 autobiographical pact 16, 16n36, 39, 53 Balzac, Honoré de 93, 96 Barthes, Roland 2, 146, 176, 177, 178 Bennett, Arnold 12n26, 13 Bergson, Henri 148 Bildung 28–31, 38, 41, 68, 72, 73, 90, 145, 156, 179, 182 Bildungsreise 107, 180 Bildungsroman 3, 26, 28–29, 30, 31, 41, 80, 116 Bloom, Harold 7, 21, 23–24, 45, 46, 55–56, 62, 68, 69, 75, 76, 92, 171 Blunden, Edmund 134 Boehme, Jacob 152 Brand 144 Browning, Robert 72–73 Byron 112n6 Carlyle, Thomas 29, 40, 63, 98n62 translation of Wilhelm Meister 29, 40, 41, 98 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 37n40, 40, 52, 70, 75, 80n8

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Conrad, Joseph 82, 113n8, 164, 173 Personal Record 82 Typhoon 173 Dante 152 Divine Comedy 43 Dickens, Charles 96 David Copperfield 30 Dilthey, Wilhelm 28n16, 33n28, 101n72 divided self 21, 108, 112, 119–21, 129, 137, 176 Edwardian 8–9, 12, 12n26, 13, 41, 56–57, 123–24, 143 Edwardian summer 124 Eliot, George 79 Eliot, T.S. 20 ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ 20 Emerson, Ralph Waldo 22, 24, 32, 96, 98n62, 102 ‘The American Scholar’ 22, 24, 102 ‘Thoughts on Modern Literature’ 98 Eminent Victorians 60 Entwicklungsroman 28 epiphany 17, 63, 64, 67, 69, 70, 71, 136, 151, 153, 157–59, 174 Erziehungsroman 28 father-son motif 6–7, 46–47, 54–56, 57, 58–59, 62, 75–76, 94–95, 127, 182 First World War, The 6, 9, 10–11, 13, 41–42, 78, 79, 110, 111–13, 116, 121–22, 129–37, 139, 183 Forster, E.M. 9, 43, 123–24, 180 ‘A Book That Has Influenced Me’ 43 Howards End 123–24 Fry, Roger 8, 9

Gadamer, Hans-Georg 9–10, 61, 118, 146, 183 Galsworthy, John 12n26 garden motif 63, 64–65, 71, 88, 148–49, 151, 153–55, 159–60 genre mixing see mixed genre Georgian 12–13, 12n26 Georgian Poetry 12, 13n26 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 19, 26–28, 32–33, 35, 38–42, 43, 46–47, 98–99, 101n72, 113, 145, 156 Die Leiden des Jungen Werthers 26 Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre 19, 27–29, 31–33, 35, 36, 39–40, 42, 43, 45, 99, 145, 156 Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre 38 Gosse, Edmund 2, 3, 4, 5, 6–8, 10n21, 11, 14, 18, 19, 21, 24, 26, 29, 32, 37, 39, 41, 42, 47, 49, 50–51, 53–76, 82, 94, 95, 110, 111, 120, 125–26, 127, 130, 132–33, 142, 143, 145–46, 153, 154, 155, 158–59, 160–61, 172, 176, 177, 179, 180, 182, 183, 184 Father and Son 4, 5, 7, 21, 47, 53–76, 82, 93, 94, 153, 182 ‘Some Soldier Poets’ 130 Gosse, Philip Henry 54 Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners 50 Grafton Gallery 8 Graham, W.S. 170–71 Graves, Robert 116 Great War, The see The First World War Hawthorne, Nathanial 45–46, 96–98 H.D. (Hilda Doolittle) 145 Hegel, G.W.F 183 Heine, Heinrich 34 Henry James Review, The 22, 23n3 historical horizon 8–10, 15, 59, 61, 110, 178, 180, 183

index History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, The 43 Hoffmann, E.T.A 35, 36n40, 98 Das Fräulein von Scuderi 35 Hoffmannsthal, Hugo von 37 Howells, William Dean 96, 97 Humanitätsideal 28, 28n15 Humboldt, Wilhelm von 30–31 Hunt, William Morris 92 influence 3, 7, 18, 21, 22, 24, 25, 27, 42–46, 54, 56–57, 62, 89, 91–93, 95–96, 98n62, 105, 126, 145, 152, 171, 180 anxiety of 7, 21, 45–47, 55–56, 75–76, 164, 171, 171n96 inheritance 3, 4, 6–7, 21, 24, 25, 43, 51, 54–56, 63, 75–76, 93, 96–97, 143 James, Henry, 1–21, 22–23, 24, 26, 29, 32, 35, 37, 39, 41, 42, 43, 45–50, 51, 52, 56, 57–58, 62, 76, 77–108, 109, 110, 111, 112, 120, 125, 126, 127, 133, 134, 141, 142, 143, 145, 146, 155, 156, 161, 163, 164, 167–70, 171, 172, 173, 174, 176, 177, 178, 179, 180, 181, 182, 183, 184 The American Scene 106 ‘The Art of Fiction’ 14, 78, 99, 100, 101, 163, 169 The Awkward Age 91 ‘The Beast in the Jungle’ 170 ‘The Figure in the Carpet’ 104 Hawthorne 97 ‘The Lesson of Balzac’ 1–2, 104 ‘The Madonna of the Future’ 96, 97 ‘The Middle Years’ 104 The Middle Years 5, 78–79, 134, 182 Notes of a Son and Brother 3, 5, 18, 21, 46, 48, 76, 77–79, 81, 89, 91–97, 101, 107, 134, 168 ‘The Real Right Thing’ 104 Roderick Hudson 81, 84

197

A Small Boy and Others 5, 21, 48, 77–91, 94, 102–03, 107, 125 The Tragic Muse 35, 46, 81, 82, 91 What Maisie Knew 85, 91, 141 James Sr., Henry 88, 94, 96n53, 98n62 James, William 93, 94–95, 101, 106, 150 Jane Eyre 30 journey motif 3, 6, 18, 21, 25, 26, 32, 36, 38–39, 41, 43, 50–51, 63–64, 69, 79, 82, 88, 89, 101, 103, 105, 110–11, 120, 125, 126, 128–29, 136, 138, 142, 151–52, 153, 155, 156, 180, 182 Joyce, James 6, 11, 13n26, 15, 19, 44, 49, 80, 157–58 Portrait of the Artist, A 11, 19, 157 Keats, John 70, 179 Kempis, Thomas à 152 Künstlerroman 2, 3, 18, 21, 24, 25–42, 47, 50–52, 54, 55, 68, 79, 80, 81, 90, 93, 99, 103, 104, 105, 107–08, 111, 121, 125, 138, 142, 156, 181, 182 Kunstperiode 34 La Farge, John 81–82, 92–93, 97, 105, 108 Lautréamont, Comte de 179 Maler Nolten 34n32 Mann, Thomas 30, 30n19 Marsh, Edward 9, 111 memory 10–11, 13, 16, 49, 77, 84, 103, 123, 149–50, 153, 181 autobiographical memory 16, 137 Mérimée, Prosper 93 Misch, Georg 63 mixed genre 20, 52, 54, 55, 68, 181, 184 modernism 8, 9, 11, 12–15, 21, 59, 153 Moore, George 41 Morell, Ottoline 115

198

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Pater, Walter 41 Perry, Thomas Sergeant 49, 95 pilgrimage 3, 25, 38, 50, 64, 110, 142, 145, 150, 151–52, 153, 154, 159 Pilgrim’s Progress, The 25, 38, 63 Plymouth Brethren 54 Polanyi, Michael 176, 179, 183 Proust, Marcel 18, 19, 44, 45n64, 49, 86, 146 A la recherché du temps perdu 18 Swann’s Way 19

March Moonlight 6, 139, 146, 159, 172, 174, 181, 182 Pilgrimage 5–6, 7, 8, 13, 19, 21, 27, 32, 38, 45, 49, 51, 63, 65, 139, 140–75, 177, 181 Revolving Lights 150, 154, 158 The Trap 45, 161, 164 The Tunnel 148, 152, 161, 163, 164, 166 Romantic period and Romanticism 19, 21, 25–41, 50, 51, 52, 72, 80, 100, 107, 110, 120, 127, 183 and Edmund Gosse 41, 47, 71–72, and Henry James 41, 47, 68, 80n8, 80–83, 99–103, 108 and Siegfried Sassoon 26, 41, 47, 68, 108, 110, 112n6, 125–27, 136, 137 and Dorothy Richardson 41, 47, 151–52, 155–56, 158, 158n57, Romantic Poesy 34n21, 107, 181 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 34 Royal Society of Literature, The 56

reader response theory 177n3 reading, theme of 22–23, 30, 32, 42, 45, 47, 52, 54, 55, 68, 69–73, 74, 75, 96, 121, 144–45, 146, 162, 173, 178–79, 182–84 Richardson, Dorothy 2, 3, 4, 5–6, 7, 8, 10, 11, 12, 13, 15, 18, 19, 21, 24, 26, 27, 29, 30, 32, 37, 38, 39, 41, 42, 43–45, 46, 47, 49, 50, 51, 63, 139, 140–75, 176, 179, 177, 179, 180, 181–82, 183, 184 ‘About Punctuation’ 161, 163 ‘Adventure for Readers’ 173 ‘Beginnings’ 153–54 Clear Horizon 5, 151 Deadlock 149, 157 Dimple Hill 6, 152, 159 ‘The Garden’ 154 Honeycomb 140, 148 Interim 161–66, 168, 169

Sassoon, Siegfried 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7–8, 10, 11, 12, 13, 15, 16, 18, 19, 20, 21, 24, 25–6, 29, 32, 37, 38, 39, 41, 42, 47, 49, 51, 65, 68, 108, 109–39, 142, 143, 145, 146, 153, 155, 172, 174, 176, 177, 178, 179, 180, 182, 183, 184 ‘Absolution’ 131 ‘A Soldier’s Declaration’ 133 ‘A Poet As He Really Is’ 135–36 The Complete Memoirs of George Sherston, 5, 49, 111, 113, 114, 115n11, 116, 122 Counter-Attack 128, 134, 135 Diaries 113–16, 129 ‘Died of Wounds’ 131 The Old Century 5, 16, 18, 25, 26, 65, 109–10, 116–19, 121–29, 131, 153 Sherston’s Progress 38, 114n11, 122n28

Nabokov, Vladimir 176 New Criticism 2 Nichols, Robert 134, 135 Novalis 31, 32–33, 45, 72, 98, 99, 126 Heinrich von Ofterdingen 31, 32, 41, 72, 100, 126 Of Human Bondage 41 Owen, Wilfred 135

index Siegfried’s Journey 5, 38, 110, 111n4, 113, 114–16, 121–22, 128–37, 180, 182 The Weald of Youth 5, 110, 117, 121–24, 126, 127, 128, 129, 131, 138 Schiller, Friedrich 30, 32, 33, 98, 150 Schlegel, Friedrich 19, 31, 32, 34, 35, 72, 103, 107, 181 ‘Fragment 116’ 34, 181 ‘Über Goethes Meister’ 32 Second World War, The 9, 12, 110, 122 Shakespeare, William 54, 70 Shelley, Percy Bysshe 70 Sinclair, May 5n9, 147 Sitwell, Osbert 9 soldier poet 39, 111, 128–39, 180 Songs of Fighting Men 132 Sons and Lovers 41 spiral pattern 36–37, 41, 43, 90, 103, 110, 128, 137, 152, 155, 157, 160, 180 Stein, Gertrude 145 Stephen, Leslie 40n47 stream of consciousness 5, 12, 27, 44, 139, 147, 150 Sturm und Drang 34 Tennyson, Alfred, Lord 79 Tess of the D’Urbervilles 114 Tieck, Ludwig 29, 33, 36, 36n40, 98, 126 Franz Sternbalds Wanderungen 29, 35, 36, 41, 100, 105, 126 Tomlinson, H.M. 109, 110, 112, 128, 138 Trollope, Anthony 60

199

Virgil 71 War and Peace 43 Ward, Mary Augusta 23n3 war poetry 5, 131–33, 134 see also soldier poet Wells, H.G. 6, 13, 56–57, 140, 143, 167–68, 181 Boon 6, 167 Tono-Bungay 41 West, Rebecca 140 Wilde, Oscar 41, 140 Woolf, Virginia 6, 8, 9, 11, 12, 13–14, 22, 43, 44, 56, 57, 59, 63, 73, 104–05, 132n56, 145, 162–63, 166, 178–79 ‘Character in Fiction’ 8, 12n26 ‘Edmund Gosse’ 59, 73 ‘Modern Fiction’ 13–14, 22, 57, 163 ‘The Old Order’ 104–05 ‘On Re-reading Novels’ 178–79 ‘Romance and the Heart’ 162 To the Lighthouse 11, 41 ‘Two Soldier Poets’ 132n56 ‘The Tunnel’ 166 Wordsworth, William 17–18, 21, 25–26, 37, 61, 65, 70, 71–72, 73, 80–81, 82, 103, 110, 125, 126–27, 130, 155, 158 ‘Lines Written a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey’ 158 ‘Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood’ 155 The Prelude 17, 18, 25, 37–38, 49, 61, 71–72, 81, 82, 103, 109, 125, 127, 137