Book 1. Pointed Roofs: Leon Edel on Learning How to Read Pilgrimage

 

In his book The Modern Psychological Novel, Leon Edel shares a level of candor uncharacteristic for a critic in admitting his difficulty in reading Pilgrimage at first — and the remarkable break-through that in a passage about Miriam Henderson’s pince-nez in Chapter IX of Pointed Roofs.

From The Modern Psychological Novel, Grosset & Dunlap (1964):

Let us look at Dorothy Richardson’s Pointed Roofs, the first volume or “chapter” of her twelve-volume Pilgrimage. About the entire work there are extremes of opinion —some readers find it unreadable and “impossible” while others speak of it with high emotion. Whether we are able to read it or not we must accept its “pioneer” place in the history of the twentieth-century novel. Miss Richardson set herself a difficult experiment, perhaps more difficult in a technical sense than Proust’s: like her French contemporary she placed the reader in the mind of a single character, and with great tenacity of purpose held to her difficult task until it was completed. The twelve “chapters” deal exclusively with the pilgrimage of Miriam Henderson’s mind from adolescence to middle life.

At this point in the inquiry it seems to me that I can best discuss the entire question of the reader’s relation to the novel of subjectivity by drawing upon my own experience in the reading of Pointed Roofs. I read it first two decades ago and found I could develop no interest in Miriam Henderson and her emotional adventures in the German boarding-school to which she goes to teach the English language. The volume indeed discouraged me from reading any of its successors, and it seemed to me that the great defect of the book was that Dorothy Richardson had selected too dull a mind for her experiment. Returning to Pointed Roofs after two decades, I found once more that my interest lagged. The author was involving me in a world of chirping females, and I had to force myself to absorb the contents of each page. The heroine struck me as immature and wholly without interest. I had begun by imagining her in the first pages as a rather prim Victorian type, perhaps twenty-five, who had just packed her new Saratoga trunk and was being escorted with Victorian decorum to her first job, on the Continent, in a German school at Hanover. The sense of her being an older person despite her youthful behaviour seemed confirmed when after about fifty pages: “Miriam sat up stiffly—adjusted her pince-nez—and desperately ordered the reading to begin again.”

It was, however, difficult to relate this Miriam of the pince-nez to the Miriam constantly being revealed in the book, a creature of variable moods, now measured and grave, now mercurial. I had read some fifty pages when I suddenly encountered this startling (to me) sentence: “She knew her pince-nez disguised her . . . , and she was only seventeen and a half.” Miriam, wearing her Victorian pince-nez is not yet eighteen! (She turns eighteen and puts up her hair for the first time in the opening pages of the second volume, Backwater.) Thus, my whole judgment of the first volume had been coloured by an erroneous impression produced by the pince-nez, the Saratoga trunk, the * ‘grown-up” airs assumed by Miriam and my failure to note earlier clues to her exact age.

In a conventional novel I would have known Miriam Henderson’s age from the start. I would have understood clearly those moods of late adolescence, the chirping scenes of the opening pages which had reminded me of the novels of Louisa May Alcott, the general ecstatic quality of some of the passages of her internal monologue. But the picture was blurred ; I was reading the novel with an unfocused vision. What was more, even after it was clear to me that Miriam was not yet eighteen, the full effect of this revelation did not sink in promptly. It was a gradual process, requiring a slow focusing of my own mental pince-nez. Looking back across the pages to rediscover my experience as a reader, I found the scene, the important scene, in which the book quite suddenly changed in my hands from a lifeless dead weight of paper and print, to a living thing, from a work I was intellectually absorbing, and finding tedious, to a work charged with feeling and life. It occurred when I began to re-read certain sections of the book in the light of my newly acquired picture of Miriam.

The particular scene that performed the curious change in my relationship to the book occurs when Miriam, in* a mood of elation, is singing to herself that she will be going to visit “Pom-pom-pom-er-ania” and bursts into the school hall there to discover the Swiss Pastor Lahmann near the window. ”You are vairy happy, mademoiselle,’* he says to her. She responds in a way to which we have become accustomed : she likes men, but they also frighten her. She likes the pastor’s “comforting black mannishness” and at the same time is so put off by him that she blandly denies she is in a happy mood. The pastor quietly talks to her and remarks among other things that he has a fondness for the English verse:

“A little land, well-tilled, A little wife, well-willed, And great riches.*’

Miriam seemed to gaze long at a pallid, rounded man with smihng eyes. She saw a garden and fields, a firelit interior, a little woman smiling and busy and agreeable moving quickly about . . . and Pastor Lahmann—presiding. It filled her with fury to be regarded as one of a world of little tame things to be summoned by little men to be well-willed wives. She must make him see that she did not even recognize such a thing as *’a well-willed wife.” She felt her gaze growing fixed and moved to withdraw it and herself.

But the pastor quite suddenly changes the subject.

“Why do you wear glasses, mademoiselle?”

The voice was full of sympathetic wistfulness.

“I have a severe myopic astigmatism,” she announced, gathering up her music and feeling the words as little hammers on the newly seen, pallid, rounded face.

“Dear me … I wonder whether the glasses are really necessary. . . . May I look at them? … I know something of eyework.”

Miriam detached her tightly fitting pince-nez and, having given them up, stood with her music in hand anxiously watching. Half her vision gone with her glasses, she saw only a dim black-coated knowledge, near at hand, going perhaps to help her.

“You wear them always—for how long?”

“Poor child, poor child, and you must have passed through all your schooling with those lame, lame eyes … let me see the eyes . . . turn a little to the light . . . so.”

Standing near and large he scrutinized her vague gaze.

“And sensitive to light, too. You were vairy, vairy blonde, even more blonde than you are now, as a child, mademoiselle?”

“Na guten tag, Herr Pastor.”

Fraulein Pfaff’s smiling voice sounded from the little door.

Pastor Lahmann stepped back.

Now the book was alive for me, not only because there had been a moment of drama, an encounter between an adolescent English girl and a benign and paternal Swiss pastor, but because in some way some quality of feeling had disengaged itself from the pages—or been disengaged within me. What had performed this extraordinary change, so that now I could see Miriam, see the schoolroom, hear the pastor’s accent, feel sorry for her nearsightedness and her uneasiness with men? I turned to other passages. Everywhere now Miriam was real, palpable ; formerly dull pages warmed into new interest and new life. I went back and started the book from the beginning. Now I was able to read it through with no sense of tedium. Delicate shades of feeling were there, and moments of the heroine’s experience—sunsets, a storm, the very sense of Hanover’s streets, the rigidities of Fraulein Pfaff, the music in the evenings, the tremulous awarenesses of the young girls in the school—all this which had seemed inconsequential before now had validity, even though the book had no story and nothing happened that was not part of the ordinary events in a girls’ school, such as the girls washing their hair, or talking about their boyfriends.

What had happened? It was important to understand. And as I searched the memory of my own reading it seemed to me that I had somehow begun by struggling against Dorothy Richardson: she had wanted me to enter into the mind of a young adolescent—a female adolescent—and I had not been able to do this. I could not adopt the one “point of view” she offered me, an angle of vision that required more identification than I — as indeed many of her male readers—could achieve. It is doubtless much easier for a man to enter into the mind of Daniel Prince going to a rendezvous with an actress than the mind of a moody young English girl in a German girls’ school. The episode with Pastor Lahmann, however, had offered me the key. And as I studied it closely I saw that what had happened here was that through Miriam Henderson’s angle of vision of the pastor I had finally entered the book. She had made me aware of him, and it was with him I could identify myself. So that while we see him only as Miriam sees him, it became suddenly possible for me, the male reader, to feel myself standing in front of this blonde English girl and inquiring into her near-sightedness. The alchemy of this was that—as Proust observed, “since it is in ourselves that they are happening”—Miriam now became real for me and remained real. At last I could experience her as Dorothy Richardson doubtless wanted me to : a near-sighted English girl translated between a certain March and July from Victorian London to a German school, experiencing the strangeness of the German world, swinging between euphoria and depression, reaching out with the heightened sensitivity of adolescence to her environment, experiencing assaults of feeling in her relationships with the girls in the school, uncertain of her feelings about men. The general effect of the book—and the feelings I had contributed to my re-reading of it—seemed to have brought me close to the reality Dorothy Richardson had sought to create.