a gallimaufry

‘Paris’, by Hope Mirrlees

Hope Mirrlees’ long poem, ‘Paris’, was published by the Hogarth Press in 1920. Virginia Woolf typeset it herself. Sandeep Parmar, in her introduction to the Collected Poems, describes this process as ‘incredibly frustrating’: not only was the poem technically difficult to set, but it was riddled with spelling mistakes (not all of which Woolf corrected) and Mirrlees was constantly revising it, even at proof stage. Woolf must have felt pretty murderous by the time the book was printed. When I worked as an editor, I occasionally dealt with authors who never stopped making changes, and ‘incredibly frustrating’ is a nice way of putting it. I sympathise with Woolf, while also marvelling: imagine having your poem typeset by Virginia Woolf!

Here is the beginning of ‘Paris’ (not really laid out properly, I’m afraid):

I want a holophrase

NORD-SUD

ZIG-ZAG
LION NOIR
CACAO BLOOKER

Black-figured vases on Etruscan tombs

RUE DU BAC (DUBONNET)
SOLFERINO (DUBONNET)
CHAMBRE DES DEPUTES

Brekekekek coax coax we are passing under the Seine

DUBONNET

The Scarlet Woman shouting BYRRH and deafening
St John at Patmos

Vous descendez Madame?

QUI SOUVENT SE PESE BIEN SE CONNAIT
QUI BIEN SE CONNAIT BIEN SE PORTE

CONCORDE

I can’t
I must go slowly

When I first read this, I was utterly bemused. What on earth is going on? I recognised a reference to Aristophanes’ comedy The Frogs, but really that wasn’t much help in understanding the poem. The Collected Poems includes Julia Briggs’s commentary on the poem and unless you are extremely well-versed in French cultural, social and political history, the French language, the Classics, the geography of Paris and the Bible, you will need it if you’re to understand what is going on in this poem. Without it, the poem veers towards unintelligibility for most of us. In fact, Mirrlees knew very well that her poem wasn’t easy because she included notes to it. She didn’t want to make it easy.  Her notes tell us, for instance:

Nord-Sud, one of the underground posters of Paris. Dubonnet, Zig-zag, Lion Noir, Cacao Blooker are posters. Rue du Bac, etc. are names of stations.

If we look at just the opening lines with Briggs to help us, what is going on? For starters, what’s a holophrase? Briggs writes:

‘holophrase’, a single word standing for a phrase, sentence or complex of ideas, and according to Jane Harrison [Mirrlees’ close friend and Classics scholar] characteristic of an early stage of language development [...] . ‘I want’ can also mean ‘I lack’. ‘Holophrase’ puns on ‘hollow phrase’.

So we begin with a need for words or ideas, an implication of a hollowness which requires filling. Then there’s a list of posters, which suggests that the poet is moving through space, specifically on the Paris métro: she’s going on a journey underground. She passes ‘under the Seine’. This reminds her of ‘Brekekekek coax coax’ (pronounced co-ax), the chant of the frogs who live in the river Acheron, which you must cross on your way to Hades. In The Frogs Dionysos, who is travelling to Hades to bring Euripides back from the dead because all modern tragedians are crap, is annoyed by the croaking of the frogs and asks them to stop, but they retort that the Muses, Pan and Apollo all adore their music and they will carry on, thank you very much. Is the poet also going on a quest under the earth, driven by dissatisfaction with contemporary arts?

Briggs tells us that ‘Vous descendez Madame?’ was what you said while trying to leave a crowded metro carriage if you were polite, and ‘Those who weigh themselves [up] often, know themselves well. Those who know themselves well, stay healthy’ was the motto on station scales. Amid the swirl of thoughts about Ancient Greece and art, these observations anchor us to the present and the concrete. They remind us that the poet is not only a consciousness but also a physical body moving through space. She alights at ‘Concorde’ –  both a reminder of strife (the Place de la Concorde was where the guillotine stood) and one of peace – concorde means ‘agreement’. Later on, after this opening extract, the poem makes direct reference to the date on which it claims to occur: 1st May 1919. At that time, peace negotiations were being held in Paris to settle the First World War, and Mirrlees refers directly to the war and the peace in her poem. This too grounds us in the present moment but situates it in the shadow of the past conflict.

‘Black figured vases on Etruscan tombs’ alludes again to death and the underworld (black-figure being a style of decoration which flourished in Greece in the 7th to 5th centuries). In the poem’s present there are too many new tombs and an overcrowded underworld. The ‘blackness’ of the painted and incised figures is taken up in the posters, for ‘Zig-Zag’ cigarettes were advertised with a picture of the head of an Algerian soldier, ‘Lion Noir’ was black shoe polish and Cacao Blooker is a Dutch make of drinking chocolate. The poem thus starts pulling in ideas of empire and colonialism, of a world beyond France, Paris, the métro.

In Revelation 17: 3–6 the Scarlet Woman is the Whore of Babylon who appears to St John, but she doesn’t shout ‘BYRRH!’ (Ahem, I initially thought this was an Ancient Greek adjuration!) Actually, Byrrh is, like Dubonnet, a fortified wine, and was advertised in Paris in 1919 by a poster of a woman dressed in scarlet, playing a drum and shouting. The woman looks soldierly, lewd, threatening. The poem has been dedicated to the Virgin Mary, but here the voice of sin and death, that of the Whore of Babylon, ‘deafens’ St John. Perhaps modern culture is challenging old culture but it’s complicated: women against men, advertising and commerce against religion and contemplation, noise against silence.

So what do we have so far? A quest provoked by a lack of words or ideas, by inadequate existing art forms. The quest begins with a descent into the underworld and then rises up onto the streets of Paris. We are shown a series of snapshots of a modern city as observed by the flâneur-poet, overlaid by layers and layers of history, infused with ghosts and ancient cultures. But of course, there is much more of it than these opening lines, you’ll have to read it yourself.

‘Paris’ as a whole is a poem packed with contrasts. Constantly referring to the past, it rejects and rejects and creates itself as a radical new form of poetry. It records fleeting impressions yet demands long, thoughtful analysis; it depicts a city open to everyone yet can itself only be deciphered by those with a privileged, educated background. (Or Julia Briggs’s notes!) It throws up into the air death and life, lasting (Greek vases) and ephemeral (metro posters), art and commerce, women and men, body and mind, the particular and the global, and wants them all. It’s the prototype Modernist poem. That’s what I think, anyway. At the moment. What about you?

(Illustrations: The old and the new in Paris: Eugène Atget, Cour, 7 rue de Valence, 1922, found here; Dionysos and members of his thiasos on a black-figure Attic vase in the Louvre, found here; Byrrh poster found here; photograph of the Tuileries taken in 1919 by Claude Moore, from the Presbyterian Archives Research Centre; found here)

Hope Mirrlees

A few weeks ago, feeling a bit coldy and a bit January, you know what I mean, I hunted down my copy of Lud-in-the-Mist by Hope Mirrlees and reread it. Should you find yourself in a similar state, I highly recommend it, and you don’t have to take my word for it: Neil Gaiman is quoted on the cover being very enthusiastic (‘The single most beautiful, solid, unearthy, and unjustifiably forgotten novel of the twentieth century ... a little golden miracle of a book’). I don’t think that it qualifies as ‘forgotten’ any longer, being both in print and fairly widely read, but it doesn’t command the same sort of attention as The Lord of the Rings. Nor does Mirrlees’s modernist poem Paris, which anticipated The Waste Land, receive much discussion when compared to Eliot’s work. Yet both Mirrlees’s novel and her poem are very original works. When I’d finished Lud-in-the-Mist I was inspired to find out more about her and also, belatedly, to read Paris, which I’d bought in a volume of collected poems a couple of years ago for my modernist reading project, yes that project which seems to have stalled somewhat. And then I felt moved to post about her, because there aren’t many people who manage to be called ‘the lost modernist’ and write a highly influential fantasy novel and erase themselves from literary history. So today I’m going to write the first of a little series of posts about her and her work.

  (Photograph of Hope Mirrlees, uncredited and undated; found here)

‘obscure, indecent, and brilliant’ is how Virginia Woolf described Paris, which her Hogarth Press published in 1920 – it seems that Woolf typeset the poem herself. However, Woolf doesn’t seem to have liked Mirrlees personally, and nor did Katherine Mansfield. They found her ‘pretentious’. Woolf wrote of her:

a very self conscious, wilful, prickly & perverse young woman, rather conspicuously well dressed & pretty, with a view of her own about books & style, an aristocratic & conservative tendency in opinion, & a corresponding taste for the beautiful & elaborate in literature

and deplored at her propensity to change for dinner and match her stockings to the wreaths in her hair. (How I love that.)

Mirrlees knew but wasn’t really part of the Bloomsbury circle. She was born in 1887, to an aristocratic mother and extremely wealthy father, and studied first at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts and then read classics at Newnham College, Cambridge, during which she broke off an engagement, very probably to the much older illustrator H.J. Ford. Her father’s money meant that she never had financial worries, while her mother’s upper-class lineage was important to her sense of identity. She was extremely clever and also very beautiful. At Cambridge her studies were supervised by Jane Harrison (who is mentioned as J—H— in ‘A Room of One’s Own’) and she and Mirrlees had an intimate relationship, living together, collaborating on two translations from the Russian and referring to each other as the ‘elder wife’ and ‘younger wife’ (the ‘husband’ was Mirrlees’s teddy bear). Woolf was convinced they were ‘Sapphists’ but whether they were or not is unclear but it seems likely.

In 1913 Mirrlees took up residence in Paris, where she met Gertrude Stein, Andre Gide and Anna de Noailles; she was joined by Harrison in 1922 and they studied Russian together. By 1926 she had published Paris, three novels and, in collaboration with Harrison, two translations from the Russian. But then Harrison fell ill, dying of leukaemia in 1928. And it is as if the light was switched off. No more novels, nothing at all for forty years. Mirrlees converted to Catholicism, lost her looks, moved to South Africa. In her later life she returned to England and died in 1978; she never had another relationship as close as that with Harrison.

(Simon Bussy, Hope Mirrlees, c. 1919, private collection; found here)

Unsurprisingly, her work vanished from sight too. The original print run of Paris was tiny (175 copies), and it was not republished until 1973, when it appeared in the short-lived Virginia Woolf Quarterly. This version was significantly altered by Mirrlees to remove the ‘blasphemous’ passages, and again had a limited circulation. All her novels languished out of print until Lud-in-the-Mist was reissued in the United States in 1970 without Mirrlees’s knowledge, where it slowly built up a coterie of fans including Neil Gaiman. Mirrlees did nothing to promote her books or reputation and withdrew her co-operation from a planned biography of herself which might have increased interest in her work. And of course, she didn’t specialise, which never helps: her first two novels are, apparently, romans à clef, her third a fantasy; her first poem was avant garde, her later works much more conventional; and in 1962 she published the first volume of a biography of the antiquarian Sir Robert Cotton, which has been described as ‘eccentric’ (I’d love to read it) and which she never completed. All in all, Mirrlees seems to have done her very best to have a literary anti-career.

However, her moment is finally arriving. Championed by Julia Briggs, Paris is being reassessed as a ‘lost modernist masterpiece’. Lud-in-the-Mist remains in print and easily obtainable. A volume of collected poems, edited by Sandeep Parmar, has been published by Fyfield Books and Michael Swanwick has written a biography, Hope-in-the-Mist (published by Temporary Culture). There’s even a rumour that the other novels might be republished.

To write this post I’ve relied heavily on Sandeep Parmar’s splendid introduction to the Collected Poems and an article by Michael Swanwick I found at a site called Infinity Plus.

Next: Lud-in-the-Mist.

Hunger, by Knut Hamsun, translated by Sverre Lyngstad

A prey to the quirkiest fantasies, there I sat shushing myself, humming lullabies, perspiring with the effort to calm myself down. I stared out into the darkness – and never in [all] my born days had I seen such darkness. There was no doubt that here I found myself before a special kind of darkness, a desperate element which no one had previously been aware of. The most ludicrous ideas filled my mind, and every little thing frightened me. I am greatly absorbed by the tiny hole in the wall by my bed, a nail hole I come across, a mark in the masonry. I feel it, blow into it, and try to guess its depth. That was no innocent hole, not by any means; it was a very intricate and mysterious hole that I had to beware of.

The last novel I read for my project on reading modernist literature was Conrad’s Nostromo (1908); with a mighty leap even further away from the main body of modernist texts I have proceeded to 1890 and Hunger, an intense two-hundred-odd pages inside the mind of a starving writer roaming the streets of Kristiana, Norway. The less brattish spiritual brother of Dostoevsky’s Raskolnikov, Hunger’s narrator suffers increasing degradation, weakness, violent mood swings, hysterical outbursts against God and bystanders, yet – ever the writer – he observes himself dispassionately, with a sense of his own ludicrousness, and it’s this distance between the narrator and his experience, this touch of the ridiculous, which makes the record of his misery bearable to the reader. This one, anyway. The narrator is trapped in a vicious circle – he has not earned enough money from writing, so he is hungry; too hungry to write and earn any money, he grows hungrier.

The novel is narrated in the first person, mainly historic but lapsing at moments of high excitement into the present. At times we follow the narrator’s thought processes very closely but I don’t think this is ‘stream of consciousness’. The narrator's thoughts are punctured by (brief) descriptions of what he is doing and every now and again he will skip over a patch of time, perhaps saying that the whole afternoon passed in this way, for instance; we are not always ‘in the moment’. Rather it is a very powerful way of experiencing a character and one which, perhaps aided by the translation in modern English, still feels bold and experimental. Because the reader has only one, rather unhinged, viewpoint, reality feels more fluid than in most novels. The city itself often seems like an imagined city, a projection of the narrator’s confused and circuitous thoughts, the other characters like hallucinations with no independent reality.

Why is this man struggling on the brink of death? He is obviously educated and, as Paul Auster points out in the introduction to my edition, he could have spruced himself up and got a proper, paying job long before he sank to the point of trying to eat sawdust or pawn someone else’s manky old blanket – his suffering is somehow self-willed. Even at his lowest, his pride prevents him asking a wealthy friend for money, and on two occasions he receives money which he regards as immoral and immediately gives away. Purity is very important to him, as is degradation. In part this drive to suffer is surely connected with his identification of himself as writer: if he cannot survive by his writing then he has no purpose in life, he is nothing. Initially he sees himself as the victim of larger forces: God (not the narrator) is the author of all his misfortunes.

As I sat there on the bench pondering all this, I felt increasingly bitter toward God for his continual oppressions. If he meant to draw me closer to himself and make me better by torturing me and casting adversity my way, he was simply mistaken, that I could vouch for. And nearly crying with defiance, I looked up toward heaven and told him so once and for all, inwardly.

Fragments of my childhood teachings came back to me, the cadences of the Bible rang in my ears, and I spoke softly to myself, cocking my head sarcastically. Wherefore did I take thought what I should eat, what I should drink, and wherewithal I should clothe this wretched bag of worms called my earthly body? Had not my heavenly Father provided for me as he had for the sparrows of the air, and had he not shown me the grace at pointing at his humble servant? God had stuck his finger down into the network of my nerves and gently, quite casually, brought a little confusion among the threads. And God had withdrawn his finger and behold! – there were fibres and delicate filaments on his finger from the threads of my nerves. And there was a gaping hole after his finger, which was God’s finger, and wounds in my brain from the track of his finger. But where God had touched me with the finger of his hand he let me be and touched me no more, and allowed no evil to befall me. He let me go in peace, and he let me go with that gaping hole. And no evil shall befall me from God, who is the Lord through all eternity...

The shreds of biblical text creep into the narrator’s syntax and, as he mutters to himself, seem to lull him into a state of calm (the next thing he does is try to write) despite the horrific damage he imagines God’s finger doing. I don’t think he ever quite rejects God, as Auster argues he does,  if only because the state of inspiration he experiences when writing does seem akin to a power outside himself. If anything, he remains fixated with him. At the end of the book he is writing a play entitled ‘The Sign of the Cross’, featuring a whore up to no good on the altar steps, and he also bursts into a despairing blasphemy claiming that potatoes are cabbages ‘in the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Ghost’. (This is perhaps comforting to we readers since we are the only witnesses to the narrator’s ramblings both mental and physical; we are placed in the position therefore of God.)

The horror of the narrator’s decline is leavened by his crazed lies, which are often very funny. He stops a woman in the street repeatedly to warn her she is losing her book (she has no book). Needing the pencil in the pocket of his pawned waistcoat, he boasts to the owner of the pawn shop that he used that very pencil to write his treatise on Philosophical Consciousness (in three volumes) and thus it has a sentimental attachment for him. In a marvellous episode he pretends to an old man that his landlord is Mr Hippolati, inventor of the electric hymn book, and the old man says he thinks he knows the Hippolati family, yes yes, it’s all true, at which point the narrator flies into a rage and accuses the old man of refusing to believe him. Most of the lies start to hide his embarrassment at his poverty, but they all become an exercise in power, the power of the imagination, the only power he has left.

Auster writes that the narrator ‘wants to fail’; perhaps he wants to escape his identity as a (failed) writer and torturing himself to the very brink of his physical and creative existence is the only way he can do it.

(Knut Hamsun looking saucy in 1890, the year he wrote Hunger; from here)

Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard, by Joseph Conrad

The two men, unable to see each other, kept silent till the lighter, slipping before the fitful breeze, passed out between almost invisible headlands into the still deeper darkness of the gulf. For a time the lantern on the jetty shone after them. The wind failed, then fanned up again, but so faintly that the big, half-decked boat slipped along with no more noise than if she had been suspended in the air.

‘We are out in the gulf now,’ said the calm voice of Nostromo. A moment after he added, ‘Señor Mitchell has lowered the light.’

‘Yes,’ said Decoud; ‘nobody can find us now.’

A great recrudescence of obscurity embraced the boat. The sea in the gulf was as black as the clouds above. Nostromo, after striking a couple of matches to get a glimpse of the boat-compass he had with him in the lighter, steered by the feel of the wind on his cheek.

It was a new experience for Decoud, this mysteriousness of the great waters spread out strangely smooth, as if their restlessness had been crushed by the weight of that dense night. [...] The main thing now for success was to get away from the coast and gain the middle of the gulf before day broke. The Isabels were somewhere at hand. ‘On your left as you look forward, señor,’ said Nostromo suddenly. When his voice ceased, the enormous stillness, without light or sound, seemed to affect Decoud’s senses like a powerful drug. He didn’t even know at times whether he were asleep or awake. Like a man lost in slumber, he heard nothing, he saw nothing. Even his hand held before his face did not exist for his eyes. The change from the agitation, the passions and the dangers, from the sights and sounds of the shore, was so complete that it would have resembled death had it not been for the survival of his thoughts. In this foretaste of eternal peace they floated vivid and light, like unearthly clear dreams of earthly things that may haunt the souls freed by death from the misty atmosphere of regrets and hopes. Decoud shook himself, shuddered a bit, though the air that drifted past him was warm. He had the strangest sensation of his soul having just returned into his body from the circumambient darkness in which land, sea, sky, the mountains, and the rocks were as if they had not been.

In his excellent introduction to the Oxford World’s Classics edition, Keith Carabine quotes Conrad as arguing that the creative artist must cast ‘a wide, a generous net, where there would be room for everybody; where indeed every sort of a fish would be welcome, appreciated and made use of’. This is exactly what he did when writing Nostromo, in fact the word ‘generous’ seems to me particularly appropriate in all its nuances to the character of the novel, which is large, covers perhaps fifty years (although two periods are focused upon), includes characters from most levels of society compassionately presented (in the main) and presents life as tragic and ridiculous but alleviated by certain impulses.

Costaguana is a fictional South American country with a turbulent history of coups and political violence. On its west coast lies the port of Sulaco, and outside Sulaco is the San Tomé silver mine owned by Charles Gould and preserved from the greedy hands of politicians through the judicial use of bribes. Wearied by the corruption and instability, Gould and his fellow ‘Europeans’ in Sulaco throw their weight behind Don Vicente Ribiera’s bid for presidential power as he represents, for them, the nation’s best chance of a moderate and prosperous future. After eighteen months Ribiera is overthrown by General Montero and flees to Sulaco on a mule, pursued by his bloodthirsty opponents. Ribiera’s friends in Sulaco cook up a daring plot to secede the province from Costaguana by using the annual shipment of silver from the mine, due to be delivered to Sulaco for export, to buy support from foreign investors. As the Monterists close in, they must also find a way of contacting the loyal General Barrio to come to their relief if they are not to be butchered.

This is the central plot of the novel and it is a proper thrilling story, I mean really I was on tenterhooks after the initially difficult beginning. But it’s not the thrilling story which has given Nostromo, published in 1904, its reputation as one of the great novels of the twentieth century. It’s such a rich and fascinating novel that I’ve found it hard to write about – to the point that it’s actually about six months since I read it. And writing ‘stale’ is never good, so this is going to be a rubbish post.

(Lima de Freitas, illustration for Nostromo, Limited Editions Club, 1961; found on Books and Vines where you can see his other illustrations for the book)

Conrad’s ‘generous net’ holds such characters as the patient and gentle Emily Gould, fiery, austere Antonia Avellanos (whom Conrad claims to have loved), gossipy Captain Mitchell and the loyal old soldier Don Pépé – I could go on boringly listing them, but suffice it to say they complex and psychologically convincing – even Señor Hirsch, the cringing trader (whom Carabine argues is anti-semitically portrayed and I tend to agree), is given sudden and convincing dignity by the manner of his death. Conrad writes in the omniscient third-person, but in fact dips so deeply into the mind of whichever character is providing the perspective that there seems virtually no barrier between them and the reader. Moreover, his even-handed portrayal of opposing viewpoints – regarding the use of the silver, secession, idealism, foreign investment – makes it impossible to gauge who is ‘right’ and whose judgement Conrad shares. Indeed, many of the themes raised in the novel – colonialism and its aftermath, the relation between developed and less developed countries, racial conflict, the tension between idealism and pragmatism for instance – have been played out through the twentieth century and continue to haunt us now.

Further instability is provided by Conrad’s daring use of structure. At first, the skipping back and forth in time is confusing – and in fact tripped Conrad up too – there seem to be so many coups and unpleasant generals – but after fifty pages or so the narrative seems to settle and become clearer. Then, at the moment of greatest excitement, when everything hangs in the balance, Conrad ‘cuts’ to fifteen years later and Captain Mitchell telling a visitor to the Occidental Republic of all the dramatic events which occurred after the pivotal conversation between Dr Monygham and Nostromo. We thus ‘miss’ all the most exciting events. How ‘truthful’ Mitchell’s account can be, so late in the day it is told and so entwined with myth and self-congratulation it has become, is obviously impossible to judge. In fact, his descriptions of straightforward heroism are really at odds with what Conrad has been showing us. We have seen characters beset by doubt, self-interest, fear; reacting to the moment and indeed sometimes unintentionally acting against each other, changing their minds, seeking moral certainty in vain. We have also seen, and will continue to see, the gap between people’s thoughts and actions, and even more particularly, between reputation and actuality, as far as that can be ascertained in this novel. Reputation indeed acts as an extra viewpoint in the novel; its ramifications are felt in the actions of Nostromo and Monygham. In this use of structure and character to deny an authoritative point of view, Conrad surely anticipates modernist concerns with fragmentation and individual perception, albeit in a more conventional style.

The plot of Nostromo, taken by itself, could be the plot of an adventure novel; the triumph of Material Interests and the European faction a celebration of colonial values. Conrad never allows this. Certainly the Monterists are a hideous bunch without a redeeming feature among them, but Conrad gives more than enough hints that granting foreign companies such power as the Sulacans do will weaken the Occidental Republic and that the majority of the poor can expect no alleviation of their lot in a capitalist society. Nor will secession abolish the unease between the ethnic groups, whose differences are most starkly delineated in their economic states. The end is famously derided and does strike one as melodramatic after the rest of the novel but although I didn’t much care for it I think it is of a piece with Conrad’s continual even-handedness, generosity, cutting away of certainties – life does encompass the melodramatic after all, and it is to what the corrupted hero Nostromo has been reduced.

(Photograph of Joseph Conrad, copyright Hulton Getty; found here)

Injustice, fairy tales ... and more on Merle

Guilt is dripping from the eaves here. There’s a pile of books and a muddle of other ideas waiting for me to write about them, but suddenly time is in short supply. I gave myself a bout of food poisoning (didn’t manage to give it to anyone else, just as well I’m not a Renaissance prince heh heh) which hasn’t helped. So here’s a little gallimaufry to salve my conscience regarding this neglected web-log, and Nostromo I promise faithfully to write about you very soon.

(Claude Cahun, Que Me Veux-Tu? [What Do You Want From Me?], 1928, from here)

• Terry Castle on two modernist couples, Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore, Gertrude Stein and Alice Toklas, in the London Review of Books (December 2007). In her review of a catalogue of Cahun’s work and Janet Malcolm’s biography of Stein and Toklas (Two Lives), Castle touches on the question of collaboration in creative work, the two couples’ wildly different experiences of the Second World War (Cahun and Moore carried out an extraordinary two-woman Resistance in Jersey while Stein and Toklas lived in some comfort in France) and the nature of biography. (Via Lauren Elkin on Twitter.)
• ‘When did bigotry get so needy?’ – A few weeks ago a Belgian court rejected Mbutu Mondondo Bienvenu’s claim that Tintin in the Congo contains racist stereotypes and should either be withdrawn from sale or prefaced with an explanation that it was written in an earlier era with different mores. I have never read the book, so I can’t comment about it, but China Miéville has written a blistering attack on the judgment: his dissection of the responsibilities free speech entails is sharp and entirely to the point.
• Five hundred German fairy tales have been ‘rediscovered’ – At around the same time as the Grimms were collecting their folk tales, another German, Franz Xaver von Schönwerth, was amassing a similar horde, but after one unsuccessful edition in the 1850s his work languished in obscurity until recently, when a researcher started working on von Schönwerth’s archives. Some of the tales have been forgotten (as far as these things are forgotten) for 150 years; others are familiar but unlike the Grimms von Schönwerth appears to have resisted the urge to polish them up. The Guardian reported it here and have posted one of the tales, ‘The Turnip Princess’, here.

Merle fans: last Saturday peace and goodwill at last embraced the chicken coop. However, Merle’s clemency coincided with a bout of illness, a blocked crop. After several days of treatment (I syringed olive oil down her throat, not something to be undertaken lightly believe me, although I understand olive oil is good for the skin so Merle and I should be radiant by now, and then I massaged the lump, she did enjoy this) all was well and although she’s not laying she’s bouncing about again now. The ladies are all confined to the run now that we’re planting vegetables and they

Rhonda has revealed herself to be not at all the timid creature I’d imagined; persistent in trying to weasel past Merle to get to food which Merle did not wish to share, Rhonda further proved herself by standing up to our neighbour’s dog when he ran into the run and giving him a fright. She likes doing little sprints up and down the run and climbing on things. Rita, however, is much more shy and dreamy, hanging back when there’s food. We found that two of the toes on one of her feet are bent round as if she has severe arthritis; perhaps they were broken when she was a chick. They don’t cause her any obvious pain, but perhaps they account for her shyness. I sneak her extra treats when the others aren’t looking.

(Rhonda demonstrates how to scare off a beagle)

The Golden Bowl, by Henry James

I have finished The Golden Bowl! It has taken a while. In fact, on the bus to my Flemish class this morning, a (Belgian) woman leaned over and asked me if I’d ‘finished the Henry James’ (I am recuperating with Jane Eyre), who knows but perhaps the entire bus had been willing me to get through it. Feel free to congratulate me in the Comments. It’s been a long time since I last read such a, for me, challenging novel. Rewarding? Absolutely, though I would get more from rereading it, but can’t face that quite yet.

Amerigo, an impoverished (impoverished in an aristocratic way rather than a not-having-enough-to-eat way) Italian prince, is betrothed to the American heiress Maggie Verver; a little unexpectedly Maggie’s old friend Charlotte arrives in London to attend the wedding. Charlotte had a love affair with Amerigo just before he met Maggie, but Charlotte is not rich and Amerigo believes his love could not survive poverty, so they parted. Charlotte persuades Amerigo to accompany her shopping to find a gift for Maggie and in a poky little Bloomsbury antique shop they discover the golden bowl. It appears massy and is finely wrought, but the gold is gilding and underneath it is made of crystal. After much discussion they leave without buying it, either for Maggie or for each other – Amerigo maintains it has a flaw and Charlotte cannot afford it. Crucially Maggie does not know of this expedition, nor of their previous involvement.

The married pair spends a couple of years in America where Maggie gives birth to a son, and all seems idyllic. Back in England, Maggie feels guilty that she is so happy when she has ‘abandoned’ her father, now prey to husband-seeking women, and she persuades him to have Charlotte to stay. Charlotte protects him and makes him so comfortable that he proposes to her and, after some discussion and referring to Maggie and Amerigo for their consent, she accepts. There is no suggestion of love here, but Adam and Charlotte are fond of each other’s company and each benefits greatly from the alliance. But Charlotte does not tell him of her affair with Amerigo – how could she?

Now that the two couples are living within streets of each other, it is easy for Maggie and Adam to fall back into their old, close relationship – and for Charlotte and Amerigo into theirs. The golden bowl itself reappears later in the novel and is crucial to the plot; it is also symbolic of the relations between the two couples. Commenting upon the action like a Chorus are Colonel and Mrs Assingham. Fanny Assingham knows of Charlotte and Amerigo’s previous affair and quickly discerns that is has been resumed, but she is a friend of all parties and thus caught between them. She likes to gloss her friends’ actions generously, believing their motivations to be noble; her husband is relentlessly cynical and interprets every action in the worst possible light.

Published in 1904, this was James’s final novel. Volume One is told first from Amerigo’s viewpoint, then in turn from Adam’s and Charlotte’s, with chapters devoted to the workings of the mind of their friend, Mrs Assingham; Volume Two almost entirely from Maggie’s. Whether James’s style changed because he started dictating his novels, I do not know, but certainly his syntax in this novel is complex, lengthy, turning in on itself and always seeking to qualify or nuance; it is ideal for interior monologues. If Miriam in Pointed Roofs sometimes found that language failed her, James believes that heaping up his rich vocabulary phrase upon phrase will communicate anything he requires. This creates an effect both intense and layered with ambiguity. However, it is also tightly controlled and consciously artificial – it is not an attempt to mimic the processes of thought themselves.

The syntax and the ambiguity are what make this novel challenging to read. Despite his prolixity, James leaves much unsaid. In this world, where descriptions such as ‘fine’ and ‘beautiful’ and ‘extraordinary’ are bandied about by everyone to the point of meaninglessness, fear of vulgarity prevents characters from naming things, so they skirt around them or discuss them only obliquely. (Maggie is even afraid of experiencing jealousy because it is a vulgar emotion.) Yet there is also a sense that naming things makes them more real, and so it is often better not to. This is most clearly demonstrated in the second volume when Maggie and her father have a series of conversations about their errant spouses without ever mentioning the affair, each hoping the other does not know and can be protected.

Everyone displays an astonishing capacity for disguising selfishness as unselfishness to themselves as well as others. Charlotte and Amerigo are convinced that because they are so clever and secretive about their love affair, they cannot be hurting their spouses:

‘And really, my dear’, Charlotte added, ‘Fanny Assingham doesn’t matter.’

He [Amerigo] wondered again. ‘Unless as taking care of them [Adam and Maggie].’

‘Ah,’ Charlotte instantly said, ‘isn’t it for us, only, to do that?’ She spoke as with a flare of pride for their privilege and their duty. ‘I think we want no one’s aid.’

She spoke indeed with a nobleness not the less effective for coming in so oddly; with a sincerity visible even through the complicated twist by which any effort to protect the father and the daughter seemed necessarily conditioned for them. It moved him, in any case, as if some spring of his own, a weaker one, had suddenly been broken by it. These things, all the while, the privilege, the duty, the opportunity, had been the substance of his own vision; they formed the note he had been keeping back to show her that he wasn’t, in their so special situation, without a responsible view. A conception he could name and could act on was something that now at last, not to be too eminent a fool, he was required by all the graces to produce, and the luminous idea she had herself uttered would have been his expression of it. She had anticipated him, but since her expression left, for positive beauty, nothing to be desired, he felt rather righted than wronged. A large response, as he looked at her, came into his face, a light of excited perception, all his own, in the glory of which – as it almost might be called – what he gave her back had the value of what she had given him. ‘They’re extraordinarily happy.’

Oh Charlotte’s measure of it was only too full. ‘Beatifically.’ [...]

‘I’m not afraid.’

He wondered for a moment. ‘Not afraid of what?’

‘Well, generally, of some beastly mistake. Especially of any mistake founded on one’s idea of their difference. For that idea,’ Charlotte developed, ‘positively makes one so tender.’

‘Ah but rather!’

‘Well then there it is. I can’t put myself into Maggie’s skin – I can’t, as I say. It’s not my fit – I shouldn’t be able, as I see it, to breathe in it. But I can feel that I’d do anything to shield it from a bruise. Tender as I am for her too,’ she went on, ‘I think I’m still more so for my husband. He’s in truth of a sweet simplicity – !’

The Prince turned over a while the sweet simplicity of Mr Verver. ‘Well, I don’t know that I can choose. At night all cats are grey. I only see how, for so many reasons, we ought to stand toward them – and how, to do ourselves justice, we do. It represents for us a conscious care –’

‘Of every hour, literally,’ said Charlotte. She could rise to the highest measure of the facts. ‘And for which we must trust each other – !’

‘Oh as we trust the saints in glory. Fortunately,’ the Prince hastened to add, ‘we can.’ With which, as for the full assurance and the pledge it involved, each hand instinctively found the other. ‘It’s all too wonderful.’

Firmly and gravely she kept his hand. ‘It’s too beautiful.’ [...]

‘It’s sacred,’ he said at last.

Unfortunately, they deceive themselves: they may wish to protect their spouses but their affair can only hurt them, even though they believe it gives them a special duty of protectiveness; and Maggie and Adam are not to be patronised as sweetly simple. Most poignantly, Charlotte cannot ultimately trust the Prince despite their pledge in the quote. Confronted by Maggie, he must end the affair, but cruelly he refuses to tell Charlotte why. This is a sacrifice he makes to Maggie to show his goodwill to her, but it means that Charlotte never knows whether he has broken with her because he no longer loves her or because his wife has forced him to. The repeated images of her at the end of the book as being caged or led around by her husband on a silken rope are heartbreaking, although Amerigo claims that she will make a new life for herself in America, whence she is bound with her husband at the end of the book, neither of them ever to return to England.

Adam is a wealthy collector of antiques and he is assembling the choicest pieces he can find in Europe to form a museum back in America. He cannot enter a room without exploring it for treasures and in fact he decides that he will propose to Charlotte after taking her to witness his purchase of ancient Damascene tiles; the ostentatious expenditure of a large sum in front of her in fact forms a part of the proposal itself (to him, anyway – we do not know how Charlotte feels about it). The text is saturated with the language of commerce and the way it is deployed suggests that both Charlotte and Amerigo have been ‘bought’ as fine examples of their kinds. Even Adam’s grandson, the Principino, is more like a beautiful little doll than a real child. Yet Adam and Maggie agree that they have not paid the price of their marriages – because indeed they have not: they have not changed in their relations to each other and expect to carry on as before with their spouses fitting around them. In fact, James highlights the unhealthy closeness of their relation by comparing father and daughter to a married couple throughout the novel.

Maggie’s trajectory through the novel is from innocence to experience. Early on, she rejects the compliment that she is ‘good’ by pointing out that, rich and happy, she has never been tried. Her trial comes when she first suspects there is something between her husband and stepmother and is tormented by fear that she is right and fear that she has a loathsome imagination. Appealed to, Fanny Assingham cheerfully lies and denies that any such relation exists, and Maggie actually experiences relief when the antiques dealer inadvertently betrays the lovers to her. At all costs she must keep the knowledge from her father because he must not be hurt (presumably on her account rather than Charlotte’s), but she must end the affair. So she too starts lying. Strangely, she is now having ‘the time of her life – she knew it by the perpetual throb of this sense of possession, which was almost too violent either to recognise or to hide’ – meek Maggie, who is always ‘little’ Maggie, with her ‘little’ sense of justice and her ‘little’ ways, to everyone else, whose very name is a diminutive, is enjoying the exercise of power and knowledge. But she is merciful to Amerigo, whom she still loves, helping him retain his self-respect, and she pities Charlotte and, even as she participates in withholding from her the truth – that she knows of the affair – tries to soften her suffering. Perhaps sharing Charlotte’s agony is the closest she can permit herself to acknowledging her own pain. In all this protecting her father is paramount, but yet she is prepared to let him sacrifice himself for her and her marriage, by taking Charlotte far away and never seeing his beloved daughter and grandson again. (Of course, in this Maggie too is making a great sacrifice.)

This is from the final leave-taking of the four main characters:

‘It’s all right, eh?’

‘Oh my dear – rather!’

He [Adam] had applied the question to the great fact of the picture, as she [Maggie] had spoken for the picture in reply, but it was as if their words for an instant afterwards symbolised another truth, so that they looked about at everything else to give them this extension. She had passed her arm into his, and the other objects in the room, the other pictures, the sofas, the chairs, the tables, the cabinets, the ‘important’ pieces, supreme in their way, stood out, round them, consciously, for recognition and applause. Their eyes moved together from piece to piece, taking in the whole nobleness – quite as if for him to measure the wisdom of old ideas. The two noble persons seated in conversation and at tea fell thus into the splendid effect and the general harmony: Mrs Verver and the Prince fairly ‘placed’ themselves, however unwittingly, as high expressions of the kind of human furniture required aesthetically by such a scene. The fusion of their presence with the decorative elements, their contribution to the triumph of selection, was complete and admirable; though to a lingering view, a view more penetrating than the occasion really demanded, they also might have figured as concrete attestations of a rare power of purchase.

 (Henry James painted by Jacques-Emile Blanche in 1908, not long after the publication of The Golden Bowl, from the National Portrait Gallery, Washington DC; photograph of Henry James from here; it was actually taken c. 1863 so years before the writing of The Golden Bowl but it is such a great and theatrical picture I wanted to include it as a counterweight to the painting which misses the full force of that penetrating gaze.)

Pointed Roofs, by Dorothy Richardson

Miriam wondered again and again whether her companions shared this sense with her. Sometimes when they were all sitting together she longed to ask, to find out, to get some public acknowledgment of the magic that lay over everything. At times it seemed as if could they all be still for a moment – it must take shape. It was everywhere, in the food, in the fragrance rising from the opened lid of the tea-urn, in all the needful unquestioned movements, the requests, the handings and thanks, the going from room to room, the partings and assemblings. It hung about the fabrics and fittings of the house. Overwhelmingly it came in through oblongs of window giving on to stairways. Going upstairs in the light pouring in from some uncurtained window, she would cease for a moment to breathe.

Whenever she found herself alone she began to sing, softly. When she was with others a head drooped or lifted, the movement of a hand, the light falling along the detail of a profile could fill her with happiness.

It made companionship a perpetual question. At rare moments there would come a tingling from head to foot, a faint buzzing at her lips and at the tip of each finger. At these moments she could raise her eyes calmly to those about her and drink in the fact of their presence, see them all with perfect distinctness, but without distinguishing one from the other. She wanted to say, ‘Isn’t it extraordinary? Do you realize?’ She felt that if only she could make her meaning clear all difficulties must vanish. Outside in the open, going forward to some goal through sunny mornings, gathering at inns, wading through the scented undergrowth of the woods, she would dream of the secure return to Waldstrasse, their own beleaguered place. She saw it opening out warm and familiar back and back to the strange beginning in the winter. They would be there again to-night, singing.

Pointed Roofs is so full of beautiful passages like the one above it is impossible to resist quoting them just for the sake of it. Published in 1915 but based on Dorothy Richardson’s six months teaching at a school in Germany in 1890, it received mixed reviews: the Observer called it a ‘Fine New Novel’, adding, ‘the whole is clear with a clarity as keen as the gables of the charming “pointed roofs”’ and the New York Times Book Review recognised a ‘remarkable’ achievement, while the Saturday Review Literary Supplement declared: ‘The book is a charted dissection of an unsound mind. It lays bare the workings of a sick imagination...’ (All reviews quoted from the Dorothy Richardson website.)

(Dorothy Richardson and classmates at Southborough House, Putney, c. 1890; from the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Room, Yale University; can you guess which one is Dorothy? Click on the photograph to enlarge it)

In order to alleviate her family’s financial troubles, Miriam Henderson accepts a job as an English teacher in Fräulein Pfaff’s finishing school in Hanover for German and English girls. Her work turns out to be less than arduous: reading English with the German pupils and accompanying them on outings and errands. As winter warms into spring and then summer, so Miriam settles into the gentle domestic rhythms of the school, but always observing and questioning.

The book is narrated in the third person but exclusively from Miriam’s point of view, so that it could have been written in the first person. The prose flickers easily from perception to thought or emotion and back again, as you might see in the passage which opens this post. It creates a sort of intellectual or intellectualised sensuality. Here, one hot afternoon, the school is taking tea:

Funny German dresses, thought Miriam, funny . . . and old. Her mind hovered and wondered over these German dresses – did she like them or not – something about them [...] that made these German dresses utterly different from anything the English girls could have worn. What was it? It was crowned by the Bergmanns’ dresses. It had begun in a summer dress of Minna’s, black with a tiny sky-blue spot and a heavy ruche round the hem. She thought she liked it. It seemed to set the full tide of summer round the table more than the things of the English girls – and yet the dresses were ugly – and the English girls’ dresses were not that . . . they were nothing . . . plain cottons and zephyrs with lace tuckers – no ruches. It was something . . . somehow in the ruches – the ruches and the little peaks of neck.

A faint scent of camphor came from the Martins across the way, sitting in their cool creased black-and-white check cotton dresses. They still kept to their hard white collars and cuffs. As tea went on Miriam found her eyes drawn back and back again to these newly unpacked camphor-scented dresses . . . and when conversation broke after moments of stillness . . . shadowy foliage . . . the still hot garden . . . the sunbaked wooden room beyond the sunny saal, the light pouring through three rooms and bright along the table . . . it was to the Martins’ checked dresses that she glanced.

It was intensely hot, but the strain had gone out of the day; the feeling of just bearing up against the heat and getting through the day had gone; they all sat round . . . which was which? . . . Miriam met eye after eye – how beautiful they all were, looking out from faces and meeting hers – and her eyes came back unembarrassed to her cup, her solid butter-brot and the sunlit angle of the garden-wall and the bit of tree just over Fräulein Pfaff’s shoulder. She tried to meet Mademoiselle’s eyes, she felt sure their eyes could meet. She wondered intensely what was in Elsa’s mind behind her faint hard blue dress. [...] Once or twice she felt Fräulein’s look; she sustained it, and glowed happily under it without meeting it; she referred back contentedly to it after hearing herself laugh out once – just as she would do at home; once or twice she forgot for a moment where she was. The way the light shone on the housekeeper’s hair, bright brown and plastered flatly down on either side of her bright white-and-crimson face, and the curves of her chocolate and white striped cotton bodice, reminded her sharply of something she had seen once, something that had charmed her . . . it was in the hair against the hard white of the forehead and in the flat broad cheeks with the hard, clear crimson colouring nearly covering them . . . something in the way she sat, standing out against the others . . .

Miriam’s impressions are principally visual and this gives a painterly quality to the writing, most particularly in the description of the housekeeper. In contrast to the precision of her observations, her thoughts are messy, wandering. Richardson’s use of the ellipsis mimics the way that the thoughts trail off, pause, circle back, switch to something fresh. Miriam is unable to decide what it is that really differentiates the German dresses from the English, what it is that the housekeeper reminds her of or even which particular quality of the housekeeper it is – the way her hair reflects the light in combination with the curves of her bodice, the contrast of the brown hair against the white forehead and crimson cheeks, the attitude in which she sits – which strikes up the echo in her memory. She cannot find a conclusive interpretation for what she sees, resists it perhaps, preferring the open-ended. The right words don’t exist or she just can’t find them.

(‘Hannover Marktkirche met Rathaus’, undated photograph but probably taken around the time the novel is set; from here)

The novel proceeds in episodes – a musical evening, writing letters home on a Saturday morning, the school hairwash (Miriam is disgusted to find that an egg is used in place of shampoo), an encounter on the stairs, a snatched moment playing the piano, a trip to a café. This structure matches the prose style to create something close to lived experience, its fragmentary nature and constant state of flux. Focusing as it does on the day-to-day, it makes ordinary life beautiful and important.

The other characters in the book are elusive, filtered through Miriam’s consciousness. Many of the girls are not really individualised, they exist only as a few recorded impressions. Miriam is highly sensitive to whether or not they like her; she tries to read their behaviour for signs but not always very successfully, given her surprise at the affection her pupils show her at the end when she is about to leave the school. Central to life in the school is of course the headmistress, Fräulein Pfaff. Generally she presents a calm, pious, almost maternal façade, impossible to read, but some episodes witnessed by Miriam crack it open. Once she shocks Miriam by screaming angry taunts at the servant, Anna, and firing her. After a powerful thunderstorm which terrifies most of the girls, Miriam believes she regards her briefly as an equal: ‘It was as if they had embraced.’ She shares Miriam’s admiration for the lovely rich girl, Ulrica, and has a vitriolic hatred of ‘relations’ between men and women, to the extent that when she finds Miriam and one of the masters in conversation she appears disgusted.

(A very pointed roof; ‘Hannover Potthof’, undated print by ‘Bruck’; from here)

Setting the novel in a girls’ boarding school necessarily places female concerns at its heart. Pointed Roofs is essentially domestic in scope, and as a finishing school producing young ladies who are to be suitable middle-class wives, Fräulein Pfaff’s establishment is modest in its educational ambitions. Indeed, Fräulein Pfaff reveals as much in her outburst against the ‘impurity’ of talking about men – ‘Like a dawn, like a dawn for purity should be the life of a maiden. Calm, and pure and with holy prayer’ – and talks hysterically of ‘cleaning’ the school of ‘vile’ influences. But Miriam is a feminist, horrified at the contempt of the German masters to girls’ education, driven to contrast this school with the one she attended (based on Southborough House, a progressive school where Richardson was a pupil) which valued women’s intelligence and scholarship. When she fancifully toys with the idea of marrying a German, she is secretly repelled by the dutiful hausfrau figure she conjures up as her future.

So Dorothy Richardson takes women and women’s education as her subject matter and the consciousness of an individual woman as her vehicle (but also her subject), inventing a new form in which to do so. There are shades of Villette here, but the tone is much lighter and often humorous. Should anyone have managed to wade this far through my post, then go immediately from here and buy a copy. If you enjoy the work of Virginia Woolf or Katherine Mansfield, you will love this. Really. Dorothy Richardson ought to be much more widely read. I feel strongly. I may campaign.

Dorothy Richardson

I was intending to tackle the modernists chronologically, as far as possible. But I was too impatient to wait for myself to complete the reading list, which would have indicated where to start and excitedly plunged right into Pointed Roofs, the first book or chapter of Dorothy Richardson’s thirteen-novel record of the life of Miriam Henderson, Pilgrimage. Pointed Roofs, begun in 1913 and published in 1915, is considered the first stream-of-consciousness novel in English, preceding both Ulysses and Mrs Dalloway; in fact, Virginia Woolf wrote this of it (quoted on the back of my Virago Modern Classics edition):

There is no one word, such as romance or realism, to cover, even roughly, the works of Miss Dorothy Richardson. The chief characteristic is one for which we still seek a name. She has invented a sentence we might call the psychological sentence of the feminine gender...proving that the novel is not hung on a nail festooned with glory, but, on the contrary, walks the high road, alive and alert, and brushes shoulders with real men and women...

Yet Richardson is not nearly as well known as James Joyce or Woolf, despite Virago reissuing Pilgrimage and a collection of her short stories as Modern Classics. Indeed, her work has languished out of print for a while, although print on demand seems to be working in her favour and the Virago editions are in print again, albeit at weirdly high prices. I wonder why she is so much more obscure than most of her contemporaries.

Difficulty may be one reason; length may be another, one which discouraged even other modernist writers. When it was originally published, Katherine Mansfield was less than enthusiastic about Richardson’s work, criticising the novels The Tunnel and Interim as lacking proportion, ‘leav[ing] us feeling...that everything being of equal importance to her, it is impossible that everything should not be of equal unimportance’, and complaining that Richardson ‘seems deliberately to set [her mind] a task, just for the joy of realizing again how brilliant a machine it is’. In A Literature of Their Own Elaine Showalter expresses similar reservations, writing that ‘Richardson’s art is afraid of an ending’, and seems to find her resistance to structure problematic. It is possible, therefore, that Richardson’s magnus opus, taken as a whole, did not succeed, or at least her intentions for it were not always understood.

Showalter also claims that Richardson might have been ‘the Gertrude Stein of the English novel if she had been more self-promoting and more affluent’. I think that’s an important point. Undoubtedly, women novelists have struggled to gain the same level of recognition as their male counterparts; without a talent for publicity or influential friends, obscurity has been a real threat to them. Other, better-known modernist women writers did have support. Mansfield was posthumously championed by John Middleton Murry. Jean Rhys was rediscovered by Diana Athill at André Deutsch in the 1960s. Woolf was a central figure in a highly influential artistic and intellectual coterie, and ran her own publishing house. So it would appear, at least initially, that being the female author of an experimental and lengthy work of fiction (and I can think of no other, can you?) was not enough to establish Dorothy Richardson in the popular canon. (I don’t count academics, they’ve been writing about her for years of course.)

So who was Dorothy Richardson? She was born in Abingdon, near Oxford, in 1873, the third of four sisters in a middle-class family. Later the family moved to London, where Dorothy attended a progressive school named Southborough House. Their fortunes had already proved to be somewhat precarious, and when Dorothy was seventeen they suffered a disastrous reversal after her father’s speculations failed. This prompted Dorothy to seek employment and her first appointment was at a German school. She then worked as a teacher and governess in England. On holiday with Dorothy in 1895, her mother Mary committed suicide by cutting her throat with a kitchen knife; Dorothy found her.

Richardson gave up teaching and moved to Bloomsbury where she lived on an attic on a pound a week earned through secretarial work. She had an affair with H.G. Wells which resulted in a miscarriage in 1907. This drove her close to a breakdown and she may have started writing in reaction to this. Indeed, Showalter sees her literary efforts as an attempt to produce an ‘anti-Wells’ novel, one which opposed his masculine realism. She began with short pieces and reviews published in small periodicals and the Saturday Review before embarking on Pilgrimage, which was her life’s work.

In 1917, at the age of forty-four, Richardson married an artist named Alan Odle, fifteen years her junior. The marriage seems to have been a happy one, the couple having shared views of art and literature. They spent their winters in Cornwall and summers in London, Richardson all the while working on Pilgrimage which she published book by book up to the eleventh one, Clear Horizons (1935). In 1938 Dent published Pilgrimage in four volumes, including a twelfth ‘chapter’, Dimple Hill. The final, unfinished chapter, March Moonlight, was published by Dent (and Alfred Knopf in the US) in 1967. Richardson had died in a nursing home in Kent in 1957, Odle in 1948 in Cornwall to which they had retired permanently in 1939. (Further information on Dorothy Richardson can be found at the Dorothy Richardson website.)

(Adrian Allinson, Portrait of Alan Odle and Dorothy Richardson, undated, from the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University, which also has some great photographs of Richardson)

Richardson was political, exploring the intellectual groups of early-twentieth-century London – from the Primrose League to groups of Russian anarchists – and supporting women’s suffrage, including visiting imprisoned suffragettes in Holloway. She actively helped refugee German writers in the 1930s. Her father often called her his ‘son’ – he may have been quite a dominating figure in her life – and Richardson’s life suggests that she resisted the expectations of a woman in turn-of-the-century England. Gillian Hanscombe, in the Virago introduction, suggests that Miriam’s pilgrimage in the novels is partly a journey towards resolving the question of whether that resistance represents a failure or a triumph. Hanscombe also gives a wonderful description of Richardson in later life provided by a niece of Odle’s:

In middle age Richardson still had a golden heap of very long hair, piled on the top of her head; she had a ‘massive’ face, dark brown eyes, a clear skin, and pince-nez balanced on her nose, because she was ‘always reading’. She created the impression of being tall, because she was ‘so stately’. [...] Dorothy talked the most [of her and Odle] and late into the night; she seemed never to do ‘anything ordinary’ and had a voice ‘like dark brown velvet’. She spoke very slowly indeed and was ‘immensely impressive as a person’. Her life seemed to be arranged ‘very very carefully’ and she was ‘not at all spontaneous in her actions’. She could ‘only work on a certain image of herself’ which was ‘very cerebral’. It was hard for her to deal with ordinary people. Although she and Alan were very affectionate with each other, they ‘didn’t touch’. [...] Dorothy [...] was ‘very plump, with white creamy arms and very beautiful hands’; ‘as she spoke she would screw up her eyes and slightly purse her mouth and everyone would listen’.

(Alan Odle sounds most eccentric in appearance: ‘in fact over six feet tall, [he] was very thin, with  waist-length hair wound around the outside of his head. He never cut his hair and rarely his fingernails, but since he had “beautifully long elegant fingers”, the image he presented was not an unattractive one.’)

Miriam Henderson, through whose consciousness Pilgrimage is filtered, is apparently at least partly based on Richardson herself; certainly her life closely resembles the author’s up until her marriage to Odle, and that is the justification for all this biographical information. Still, this post has run on long enough so I will save discussion of Richardson’s purpose in Pilgrimage for another post.

(Edited to add: Many thanks to Martin Steenson of Books and Things and author of The Life and Work of Alan Odle for pointing out two errors in this post.)

(Photograph of Dorothy Richardson (1917) taken from Keele University’s Dorothy Richardson website, a great resource; photograph of Alan Odle by E.O. Hoppé (1916), found here)

Modernism reading list

After weeks of faffing about I have finally come up with a preliminary reading list for my modernist project. There are many utterly valid reasons why I haven’t done this before. I’ve been away in England again for my mother’s birthday – I won’t embarrass her by writing how old she is, this being the internets and public, but she is very very old and it was a ‘significant’ birthday. I’ve started back at my Flemish classes, which are four mornings a week and encroach rather upon time for writing here. And the weather is depressing and murky, so I’ve spent more time lying on the sofa eating cheese and reading children’s books than I have thinking about modernism.

I am limiting the works I’m reading to 1900–45 (ish). I’ve tried to find at least one title for each author, but I don’t know whether they’re always ‘the best’ or the most representative; if anyone can give me some recommendations I would be a happy woman. There’s no time frame for this, I can read modernist texts until I shrivel up like an old bat and my eyes fall out, so if I get obsessed with an author I can just carry on devouring as much of their work as I fancy.

Oh and secondary reading – no idea where to start with that. All suggestions welcomed.

(Ford Madox Ford, James Joyce, Ezra Pound and John Quinn, undated; from here. Who is John Quin?)

 

British, Irish and American

W.H. Auden, Selected Poems

Djuna Barnes, Nightwood, maybe something else?

Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot, Happy Days, Endgame

Elizabeth Bowen, The House in Paris

Basil Bunting

Joseph Conrad, Under Western Eyes

e.e. cummings, Selected Poems

H.D., HERmione

T. S. Eliot, The Wasteland, Four Quartets

William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying

F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

Ford Madox Ford, The Good Soldier

E.M. Forster, Howard’s End

Robert Frost

Ernest Hemingway, For Whom the Bell Tolls

Henry James, The Golden Bowl

David Jones, In Parenthesis

Peter Jones (ed.), Imagist Poetry

James Joyce, Ulysses

D.H. Lawrence, The Rainbow

Malcolm Lowry, Under the Volcano (yes, I know it was 1947 but hey)

Mina Loy

Katherine Mansfield, Collected Stories

Marianne Moore

Olive Moore, Spleen (she was mentioned on Obooki's Obloquy and looked intriguing)

Anaïs Nin, Under a Glass Bell

Ezra Pound

Kathleen Raine, Poems 1935–1943 (included really because I have it and haven’t read it yet)

Jean Rhys, After Leaving Mr Mackenzie

Dorothy Richardson, Pilgrimage

Gertrude Stein, Three Lives

Wallace Stevens

Dylan Thomas

William Carlos Williams

Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse, The Waves

William Butler Yeats

 

Continental European

Anna Ahkmatova

Guillaume Apollinaire

Ivan Cankar

Constantine P. Cavafy

Knut Hamsen, Hunger

Franz Kafka, The Trial

Robert Musil, A Man Without Qualities

Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

Luigi Pirandello

Marcel Proust, In Search of Time Past

Rainer Maria Rilke

Italo Svevo, The Conscience of Zeno

Ernst Toller

Paul Valéry

(Anna Ahkmatova in 1924; from here)

Define your terms

My lovely A-level history teacher used to drum it into us: ‘Define your terms’, and I should have thought about this before I started cobbling together my reading lists. Reading Bruno Bettelheim, who has a very definite idea of what constitutes a fairy tale, forced me to consider whether or not I agreed with him, and I did not. It also made me pause in mindlessly noting down titles from university reading lists ('oooh, I'd like to read that!') and wonder what exactly a modernist literary text is. So I’ll try to define that too, or a working version of it anyway.

I think a fairy tale must contain an element of magic – a flying carpet, an enchanted sleep, a witch or a talking frog – but the protagonist should be human. It should not be too long – perhaps an evening’s reading or telling at most. It must clearly be a story, not something which has ever been believed to be true or sacred, and this is one of the things which distinguish it from a myth. Myths form part of a coherent world view, and usually feature gods or superhuman heroes. ‘Cupid and Psyche’ compared with ‘East o’the Sun and West o’the Moon’ illustrates well the difference between a myth and a fairy tale.

Many fairy tales were originally oral, like folk tales (but folk tales lack the human protagonist plus magical element). However, some of the best-loved Western fairy tales were written in the nineteenth century by Hans Christian Andersen. According to Bruno Bettelheim, Charles Perrault was pretty free when he wrote down his versions of fairy tales – for instance, his story of Cinderella, the one with which most of us are most familiar (fairy godmother, pumpkin coach, glass slipper) is quite different from all the other versions of Cinderella, suggesting he invented quite a lot rather than simply recording what he had heard. I haven’t read much about it yet but there seems quite a tension between tales written down, including those collected by the Grimms and others, and oral tales, which interests me. How far did the collectors ‘shape’ the tales? How does writing a tale down change its nature? So, in my definition fairy tales may be oral or literary in origin.

(Pieter Coecke van Aelst, St Jerome in his Study, oil on panel, c. 1530; the Walters Art Museum, Baltimore; St Jerome looks as if he has been trying to define modernism too)

It’s quite a wrench to jump to modernism... For this I had to trawl a few books and internet sites, and found that there is no single definition of a modernist literary work. There are characteristics, which perhaps can be summed up as a revolt against traditions and the conservative values of realism, all of which are perceived as inadequate to express the modern world. Certainties and religion are rejected in favour of subjectivity, relativity and individualism. What we perceive is what actually is – there is no single viewpoint, no single truth.

Modernist texts are often experimental in form as writers attempt to capture reality or perception in a new way. Linear narratives are often fragmented and many authors cultivate a deliberate obscurity; readers are required to make an effort to understand or possess a certain sort of education.

I suspect that both these definitions are partial and weak because my knowledge of both areas is so feeble, but I hope they’ll do for now, I can revise them as I go along. (Or conveniently forget about them.) I have guests coming for a week so it’ll be a little while before I have time to come here again. Meanwhile, I’d love to know how you define fairy tales or modernism, it would be a great help. Also, later Henry James: modernist or not?