Dorothy Richardson discussion
Remembrances of D. R.
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Jonathan wrote: "Wonderful - thank you. And thank you too for the fantastic reviews you have been posting of her work."Yes, thank you!
Glad to have you here on gr, Neglectedbooks. Your blog has been both inspiring and a great resource for those of us dedicated to the Neglected and BURIED books.
Nathan "N.R." wrote: "Glad to have you here on gr, Neglectedbooks. Your blog has been both inspiring and a great resource for those of us dedicated to the Neglected and BURIED books."Thanks for the kind words. I have gotten some good leads from the Buried Books group. Can't promise to be a frequent GR-er, though. I struggle to find time for the site I have, but like to keep a dialogue going with other fans of the less-read.
Jonathan wrote: "Wonderful - thank you. And thank you too for the fantastic reviews you have been posting of her work."Thanks for setting up this group, Jonathan! Excellent resource. I have definitely caught the DR bug and will try to post a few other things I've come across that don't really fit into posts on the Neglected Books page.
I just finished March Moonlight yesterday, and the post on The Tunnel will go up tomorrow. I intend to cover the rest in the next couple of weeks.
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Vincent Brome, “A Last Meeting with Dorothy Richardson,” The London Magazine 6 (June 1959) - Part 1The February wind was driving across the pitch-black road as I forced my way towards a house whose name would be indistinguishable in the dark. The roar of the sea increased the babble of the wind, and five minutes later I walked up and down peering at the few gates, reading the names braille-fashion. The letters HILLSIDE presently appeared to my touch. Crossing a short path, almost at the door the wind thrust me against it. I knocked and waited; knocked again and waited. A glimmer of light came from a front window, and encouraged by this, I seized the knocker and hammered to make it heard above the wind. No reply. Stumbling to the window I peered through a crack in the curtains.
The sight was extraordinary. An old lady with a pile of yellowing hair, a shawl and a short knitted skirt was pacing up and down with almost military precision, her hands clasped around her, holding the shawl in position, her eyes fixed, her gait that of an automaton. Watching for perhaps a minute the ritual never failed or faltered. Precisely at the end of four strides she turned on her heel and paced back, her eyes fixed straight ahead, her lips slightly moving as though in colloquy with another. The illusion was heightened by a sudden gesture of one hand, a pause and an upward tilt of the head as if someone not there, someone taller than herself, had momentarily intervened. Then the pacing began again.
I hesitated and at last knocked on the window. A moment later I rapped sharply. The pacing remained unbroken. I went back to the door and hammered on it, but the wind swallowed every lesser sound and in desperation I tugged sharply at the door-handle. It turned and the door opened. The force of the wind carried the door and myself crashing into the hall scattering some papers and a hat, but the effect was salutary. Another door opened and there she stood, thickset, silent, with something of the concentrated power of sculpture in her bearing. Strands were blowing loose from the mass of yellowing hair across a broad forehead; her eyes were absent and full of pain; head bent and listening. A flash went across the features difficult to interpret. I might have been something materialized on the wind from another world. She did not speak but I paused in the door. I said, ‘I’m Mr Brome ... don’t you remember....’
Suddenly she did and like a skin dropped at will she was another person, brisk, masculine, taking charge of the situation. The room we entered was a pleasant room in an ordinary villa, but books accumulated in accidental piles on the floor, on chairs and tables, and made any movement perilous. The mantelpiece was cluttered with unframed sketches, picture postcards, and faded reproductions fixed to the wall with drawing pins. There were two small armchairs, not opposite, but in line with one another, expressing a powerful ‘prejudice’ later to be discovered. A small table near the window carried a typewriter. From there she had written me many letters, some typed, some in that bold, dashing handwriting which at 77 conveyed a masculine strength and made beautiful a commonplace set of references. She would take a sheet of foolscap, turn it sideways and write across the whole length until the finished page sometimes resembled a medieval manuscript in its stylized perfection. [...]
She spoke with the same precision as she wrote. I had always regarded Dorothy Richardson with reverence. According to that law which requires an author to be disappointing beside his or her work, I had come prepared for disillusionment, but I quickly became aware that I was in the presence of a personality no less remarkable than her work. It was hard to believe that this woman with the big head and the bearing, in repose, of a Buddha, had once been a dentist’s receptionist, or that her powers of writing beautifully organized sentences of tremendous power and complexity, began with the most practical, down-to-earth contributions to a dental journal, but during the next few days I reconciled many conflicting elements in her character.
We talked at length. She was still writing part of yet another volume of Pilgrimage. From a page a week she had fallen away to a paragraph, and from a paragraph to a few sentences. She had always written slowly. Each paragraph was, to her, a unique aesthetic problem; but if she remained, in her seventy-eighth year, in touch with the thought and literature of many parts of Western Europe, there was no questioning her failing powers. [...]
The following day we climbed a steep hill to lunch. She used a stick and became a little breathless, but continued to talk spasmodically. One side of her personality thought like a man. She had a logical brain of enormous range, she could employ the vocabulary of a philologist, and she spoke in quick clipped phrases, but once, on that short climb to the restaurant, she seemed to lose her way among the words. It was as if the normal division of man and woman in any human being, had been intensified in her. She was strong minded, glass-clear, vigorous in exposition, until something came up from the depths to throw a cloak of feminine softness and suddenly she spoke the language of essence and being. Perhaps her plunge into the feminine psyche in Pilgrimage was brilliant because she was able to bring male precision into female subtleties. Or perhaps the clouds drifting in were the beginnings of those painful mental confusions which later made it difficult to penetrate the world of delusions in which she sometimes came to live.
I can see her now on that cold windy day, sturdily breasting the hill with the coat buttoned up to her chin, a stick digging deeply at the road, exuding a determination to dominate whatever old age brought against her, and occasionally uttering a sentence short from concealed breathlessness and mental discipline. We ate a commonplace lunch, drank water and I felt her watching the person who had come all the way from London to the extremity of Cornwall to talk with what she referred to as ‘a servantless old crank approaching her seventy-eighth year.’ Twice I found myself looking into her large eyes and if they remained expressionless, I had the impression that insights of a very special kind were powerfully at work.
Over atrocious coffee we spoke of the stream of consciousness novel, and for the first time there were intervals when her eyes became absent and she was no longer there. They were few on that first day, but I was very conscious of a person living a life of self-imposed isolation, withdrawing into the deeper places of consciousness where she was accustomed to spend so much of her time. Abruptly she came out of her reverie and said, ‘Stream of consciousness is a muddle-headed phrase. It’s not a stream, it’s a pool, a sea, an ocean. It has depth and greater depth and when you think you have reached its bottom there is nothing there, and when you give yourself up to one current you are suddenly possessed by another.’
What prompted her to write Pilgrimage, I asked. It was, she said, ‘... an attempt to find a feminine equivalent of the masculine realism of people like Balzac, Bennett and Wells. I began it in 1913 and quickly got the sense that I was on a fresh pathway—a most exhilarating sense. But as excitement and the size of the book grew, the chances of publication diminished. It looked as if it was going to be too long and too complicated. I had not read Proust but of course I knew Henry James. I had serious qualifications about Henry James. However, he was a pioneer in the kind of novel I wanted to write.’
We spoke of the lack of punctuation in the early volumes of Pilgrimage. ‘A mistake,’ she said. ‘I felt later like apologizing to my readers. A reputation for creating unnecessary difficulties is very difficult to live down.’ Her readers were still limited in number she thought and when I quoted Coleridge—‘Every original writer must create the taste by which he is appreciated’— she said nothing, but conveyed the impression that she would not commit herself to any such claim. Immediately lunch was over she insisted on paying for her own, and strode off with considerable vigour.
We met again in her study for tea. Suddenly she told me the ritual of the parallel chairs. Marriage, she said, was endangered by that ‘iron confrontation’ which placed the wife sitting opposite the husband year in, year out. Every possible device to escape that kind of continual proximity which could, in the long run, choke, had to be employed. As we sat down alongside each other, I noticed that she was smoking more—almost chain smoking.
We spoke again of Pilgrimage. Spelling out minutiae moment by moment, she said, might become an artistic interference with the natural condensation which made everyday life tolerable. The worst agonies of self-consciousness were overwhelmed in everyday life by the compression of external events. The experienced moment slipped by. One could not hold on to and enlarge the moment as it actually happened. To represent life, it seemed as though the artist must reconcile these two elements as they were reconciled in life, but it ‘left one balanced on a perilous decision.’
To take a single second, subject it to microscopic inquisition, and peer at the wonderful organisms undetected by the normal eye, was to see the nuance, the tendril, the amoeba, the very stuff of creative life, but life had movement, and an appalling confusion of speeds were intrinsically part of the moment itself. Striking the perfect balance between movement and minutiae was impossible. Echoes must pass from one to the other, detail must be implicit in movement, and the sudden deep plunge had to occur out of time with the illusion of remaining in it. Sub-aqueous depths could become too fascinating. One remained too long probing in the hope that one day, some inner pattern of psychic significance would at last fuse in the imagination. Strong psychic elements were presently clear in her make-up. She was capable of experiencing curious premonitions, states of heightened perception when places forbidden to the normal senses seemed suddenly luminous to her. She talked at length of the mystery of time in which the dead were no longer dead and of that very special exhilaration which came from experience remembered, controlled and recaptured more vividly than was possible with the distracted present. She had known it sometimes writing Pilgrimage.
Vincent Brome, “A Last Meeting with Dorothy Richardson,” The London Magazine 6 (June 1959) - Part 2… But she was very different from Proust.1 Dorothy Richardson conveyed what she regarded as a mystical element in women which transformed reality and experience in a manner unrealized in Proust’s work. She underwent similar struggles with style, and occasional passages had a cathedral complexity, but her approach to writing varied according to mood. A phrase, a scene, a name, might be the symbol to concentrate her powers. From it related images multiplied, people began to talk and think aloud, a whole world came into focus, and with it, the exaltation of escaping from time. It was a heightened world: words were more potent, colours more vivid, wraiths invested with a different reality. There were many fusions, many imaginative triggers, but sometimes she stepped down effortlessly from one world to another. She would feel herself surrendering to the consciousness of what seemed to be another person, to look out on that brilliant world, awaiting the final metempsychosis ... until all signs of self-consciousness vanished and she was no longer herself; and then disconcertingly, it seemed to her that this other world had identities with a buried self dimly apprehended in states of reverie. Her plunge had become a plunge into her own unconscious. But once surrendered she could move freely in the mysterious pools of the feminine psyche and as she moved, write.
Coming to the end of a description which, in the original, was fascinating, her voice dropped, and she spoke suddenly of extra-sensory perception. Then she said, ‘There must be something else. There must be.’ Only later did I realize that she meant something beyond death. The next morning I found her sitting at the small table where she worked—in fact a kitchen table—looking out as people passed, and I discovered that introspection had not destroyed her love of people. In the evening of the same day she fell into a reverie so deep that she came back to everyday consciousness with some surprise to find me there. Twice she spoke of a kind of implied that she had attempted—was it to communicate and with what had she tried to communicate? Each time she came to the brink of definition and withdrew again. And then the phrase was repeated: There must be something else. Tortured conflict between a brilliant logical brain resisting psychic temptations to detect, in the apparent nothingness, signs of a still loved person, was quickly masked by a sudden access of authority, a return to the masculine woman with the formidable intellect.
On the second day we spoke of the relative powers of insight into character of the novelist, the psychologist and sociologist. It arose from Wells’s1 belief that science, in the long run, would give a more precise picture of human nature than the novelist. We spoke of superficial resemblances between the work of the scientist and the novelist. Both observed and recorded their phenomena, both selected fragments for experiment, both made imaginative leaps and checked back the result with reality; the scientist in actual physical fact, the novelist in terms of verisimilitude.
The one characteristic where resemblance became identity, she believed, was with the imaginative leap. In both worlds, imagination played the paramount part, and it was impossible to say whether one was of a higher order than another. If the scientist primarily occupied himself with ‘taking physical matter to bits and persuading it to behave abominably or reasonably,’ the novelist used quite different ‘material’ in the human personality, but the psychologist and biologist also dealt with human beings. The biologist she felt ‘would never really find the nature of personality in the endocrine glands’ because the combined assaults of environment, thought and other indefinable elements, qualified endocrinology out of all recognition. ‘If a biologist came to me with a perfect blueprint of the brain and demonstrated that by stimulating this or that lobe he could induce a requisite experience, I should ask him where consciousness occurred in his diagram, and would he please define it for me.’
On the third day she seemed tired and a new restlessness was apparent behind the strong lines of the face. She sat in her study with her legs apart, her hands on her thighs and her body leaning forward to concentrate the full power of her personality.
On the last night it was almost as if she did not want me to go. She spoke strangely. As it grew late, she put on her shawl, drew it closely round her and took a few preliminary steps in her pacing.
I left at 11 o’clock. A powerful temptation assailed me to slip back and look into the window again. But it seemed to me that in whatever sacrilege might consist, this would come close to it.
Storm Jameson, in ADAM International Review Vol XXXI, Nos. 310-11-12, 1966:Dorothy Richardson was one of my two earliest passions in literature. The other was D. H. Lawrence. I outgrew, or grew away from, much of Lawrence, but Dorothy Richardson remains with me -- and when I feel that my brain is getting slack or flabby, I read a few pages (very often of The Tunnel, but of any of the others have the same effect) as a tonic, an object lesson and a whip.
The extraordinarily sharp visual memory which allows her to evoke a scene, streets, faces, vivid detail, and her controlled intensity of emotion, triumph over what in her books is dated. She is the chronicler and painter of a vanished age, but she is also the ageless observer of human beings at their least guarded.
Richard Church, in ADAM International Review Vol XXXI, Nos. 310-11-12, 1966:It is over thirty years since I had dealings with Dorothy Richardson, when Kotelianski and I conspired to issue jointly between Dent's and the Cresset Press the whole of her magnum opus in a uniform edition contained in a box cover. I think this helped to bring to a wider public the significance of her remarkable essay in the stream-of-consciousness fashion in fiction. She was as much a pioneer as Proust, her contemporary.
In person she was an old-fashioned figure and might have been the keeper of a Bayswater boarding house. She had a mass of hair done up into a bun at the back, and tended toward hats that sat on top of her like a tower. She was reserved in manner, but fundamentally appreciative of anything done towards the promotion of her work, to which she was wholly devoted.
Rose Isserlis Odle (DR's sister-in-law), in ADAM International Review Vol XXXI, Nos. 310-11-12, 1966:Of her pet themes, one was confrontation. She held that marriages fell asunder because of the constant face-to-face attitude--whether at meals, by the fireside, or at a restaurant where the sight of fresh faces was obscured. In her sitting-room, chairs were invariably side by side. Ever, it was the human impact that counted with her. When awe was expressed at the magnitude of the universe, coupled with a belittling of man, she countered with the belief that the human consciousness, being aware of this cosmic scene, enlarged, not diminished, man.
Dorothy Richardson
Books mentioned in this topic
The Tunnel (other topics)March Moonlight (other topics)
Pointed Roofs (other topics)
Pilgrimage: Backwater (other topics)
The Heart to Artemis: A Writer's Memoirs (other topics)
Authors mentioned in this topic
Richard Church (other topics)Storm Jameson (other topics)
Bryher (other topics)
"When I want to remember England, I think of your books." This was, I believe, the beginning of the first letter that I wrote to Dorothy Richardson. I had learned in Paris that writer sometimes responded if apprentices wrote to them and her prose had been a part of my life for years. I knew the people in her pages, the girls in Pointed Roofs were like my companions at Queenwood; I was passionately interested in the Miss Pernes of this world, I had met families like the Corries and the Orlys, whereas characters in the novels of Virginia Woolf or Aldous Huxley, the two idols of the time, were in general unknown to me, or personal whom I should have disliked. It was Miriam’s determination to win independence at all costs that had gone straight to my heart, when I had first read Backwater and that I feel as strongly to-day, almost forty-five years afterwards. She and Colette have been among the few writers whom I have read with equal pleasure from youth to age. I added various rumours that I had heard about her to the letter: that she never went out at night, that she often opened a window to stare at the street outside, that a famous male novelist wrote the stories under her name. (All proved untrue.) I composed my page as carefully as if it were the first chapter of a novel and received, as reward, an invitation to tea. I think it must have been the summer of I923 because she spent the winters in Cornwall.
Dorothy and her husband, the artist Alan Odle, were then living in a small apartment in St. John’s Wood. It was a narrow, drowsy, still almost Victorian street where only the scarlet of a pillar box broke the grey of the pavement and the sky. Miriam (and she was Miriam) was just as I had expected to find her, with a stiff blouse and a mass of gold hair piled on the top of her head. It seemed inevitable that we should meet. A big table, sinking under the weight of Alan's books and drawings, almost filled the room (I was told later that it had once cracked in two), and he sat behind it, smoking and smiling, always ready to rescue Dorothy or turn the conversation if it bothered her, and otherwise watching visitors or the way the light fell on the door, with his brown, draughtsman’s eyes. A fireplace almost filled the wall behind Dorothy’s chair. They had pinned a row of postcards along its top, mostly of gargoyles from Notre Dame, and faded as these had become through smoke and fog, they were so essential a part of the decoration that I have never forgotten them.
I felt no surprise. I wondered only if people who perceived things in a certain way met at a given moment those of a like experience. It was not that we agreed about many matters, I was a generation younger and differently sensitive to my age, but I felt an immense respect for the way that she had fought literally for our liberty. “Nobody has written as you have about London,” I began, remembering how her characters had been my friends when I had gone on dreary errands during the war.
Dorothy stopped that conversation at once. “So you have been in New York! I have relatives in America, did you like it there?"
“Yes, but, oddly enough, it seemed more old fashioned than here."
“And are there some opportunities for seclusion?"
Seclusion was a point about which I did not agree with Miriam. I had been alone for seven years and I needed to be with people.
“It's a little more difficult than in London but it’s possible.”
“Perhaps that is why the young Americans whom I meet so anchorless. As if no country nor thought could claim them. Restless, without hold of earth.”
That is why I like them, I longed to say, they are not strangled with traditions; but I knew my place, it was not for an apprentice to argue with his master and I wanted to know more about Dorothy herself. “When is your next book coming out?" I asked.
“There are so many distractions,” Dorothy shrugged shoulders, “the cooking, shopping, letters…."
The characteristic sentence plunged me at once into that attic in Tansley Street that she had described so often. The stranger whom she had invited, not from curiosity but kindness, her hope that a postcard or a note might announce the postponement of the visit and leave her to her solitude with Alan, the certainty that one side of her was watching me as a representative of the young while the other was far away with her own thoughts, made me feel that I was in the book myself however much I might disagree with some of its philosophy. “You must hurry your publishers,” I urged “we are waiting so impatiently,” and she laughed, with indulgence but also, I think, some pleasure.
We were silent for a time. Only a rudimentary instinct that it were prolonged too far, departure would be necessary, impelled any of us to break it. I tried to tell her what Backwater had meant to me during the darkest days of the war, “I could grow again, I could grow . . .” and she told me the story of how her first book had been written. I often think of it now when writers complain to me about lack of security and time.
Dorothy had been loaned a cottage in Cornwall and had lived there on ten shillings a week while she wrote Pointed Roofs. The purchasing power of ten shillings then was equivalent perhaps three pounds to-day but it had to cover fuel, light, food and, as she particularly insisted, paper. She went without meals for two days to save the half crown that was necessary to post the manuscript to a publisher. She had hoped that it might help the mass of underpaid women workers whose life she had shared, she had no idea that she had invented “continuous association” and she was afraid that by being labelled as experimental she had driven away the audience she wanted. It was the deep drive under a bleak youth that had created the modern novel. I do not think that even in her old age she realised her achievement. The philosophical discussions in Pilgrimage seem old fashioned, but never Miriam nor her characters. We meet them in shops, trains and offices and they still use the same phrases. There is no better English social history of the years between 1890 and 1914 than in her books. Perhaps for this reason she has often a higher reputation on the Continent, and strong links with the new French school and writers like Robbe-Grillet and Butor, than in her native land. I think that the will be rediscovered once we dare to look again at our immediate past. Meantime she is “a writer's writer” and I know of many artists who read through Pilgrimage, as I do, every few years.