Honeycomb opens with Miriam Henderson stepping off a train at a dark English country station late one March evening in 1895. Many of the chapters in Pilgrimage begin with Miriam setting off for or arriving at some place, reinforcing the sense of a journey implicit in the title. Having spent the months since leaving Edgeworth House school at the end of Backwater cooped up in the small house in west London that has been loaned to her family by Bennett, the fiance of her sister Sarah, she is grateful to taking on a new position as governess to the two children of the Corries. Mr. Corrie is a successful lawyer, a Q. C. (Queen’s Counsel) prosecuting high-profile cases in London, commuting each day from their large villa outside London, and his wife is a kind but superficial and somewhat crass woman of leisure.
Honeycomb covers a similarly brief time as Pointed Roofs and Backwater, about four months, from March to June, plus a brief episode at the end in the fall of 1895. Whatever Miriam aspires to become, by the end of Honeycomb, it is clear that it will not involve teaching. Although May Sinclair was to write, in her famous review published after the publication of Honeycomb, that “In this series there is no drama, no situation, no set scene. Nothing happens,” a survey of the chapters in the book do, in fact, demonstrate not only that things do happen but that Richardson did provide some structure to her work and did not simply let one continuous stream of consciousness (to use the phrase applied by Sinclair):
- Miriam arrives at Newlands
- Her first day and her introduction to the Corrie’s children and household
- A day in which Miriam thrills to a late snow
- Her second week at the Corries
- A day in London accompanying Mrs. Corrie on a hat-shopping trip
- A short, rapturous walk Miriam takes while Mrs. Corrie visits with a friend
- Miriam takes a quick trip to London to shop for a wedding present with a potential suitor
- Miriam walks into town and a scrappy bull-dog follows her back to the house
- A weekend in May, during which Miriam wearies of the Corries and their friends
- Miriam returns home to attend the dual wedding of her sisters Sarah and Harriet
- Miriam accompanies her mother to Hastings, hoping the rest will improve her mother’s depression
It won’t qualify as a cliffhanger, admittedly, but clearly there is some shape and direction here.
Honeycomb shows Miriam still overcoming tremendous naïveté. She stumbles upon Mr. Corrie’s private study, a “curious soft brown room” that fascinates her, and she fantasizes about him using the space to engage in profound thinking: “… she would say, ‘What do you think about everything?’ Not so much to hear what he thought, but because some of his thoughts would be her thoughts.”
In contrast, she quickly realizes that, although a woman with impeccable taste in clothes and the ability to maintain a beautiful and orderly house, Mrs. Corrie is vapid and uncultured. The two children were spoiled and immature: “For years life had been for them just what it was to-day — breakfast in bed, chirping at their mother from the dressing-rooms where they slept, and scolding at Stokes as she waited on their toilet….” They were used to an hour or two of the most superficial teaching –usually just reading from Rollo books — and being allowed to spend most of the day riding their ponies and running about in the yard. By her second week, she concludes that “it was impossible and would always be impossible to make two hours of application anything but an irrelevant interval in their lives.”
And the Corries’ friends, who frequently come out from London for weekends, are well-off, on top of the latest society gossip, and utterly philistine. “What sort of place is Balone to stay in?” Mr. Corrie asks one just returned from France. “Why do you call it Balone?” the friend demands, and informs him that the correct pronunciation is “Balloyne.” “Oh, Lord, they mean Bologne,” Miriam realizes [Of course, what they’re all referring to is Boulogne, the French Channel port.–Ed.]. For her, their wooden ears are symptoms of a general deafness to the world:
What did it matter, after all, the right pronunciation ? It did matter; not that Balone was wrong, but the awfulness of being able to miss the right sound if you had once heard it spoken. There was some awful meaning in the way English people missed the right sound; all the names in India, all the Eastern words. How could an English traveller hear hahreem, and speak it hairum, Aswan and say Ass-ou-ann ? It made them miss other things and think wrongly about them.
As grows increasingly apparent in Pilgrimage, some of Miriam’s most significant experiences are those that take place as she sits by herself in a room. The many quiet nights at the Corries’ give her time to indulge even more in one of her favorite pastimes, reading. After going through dozens of popular novels while staying at Edgeworth House, her taste in books has grown a little more sophisticated: “If it was finished and the interest gone when you know who married who, what was the good of reading at all?” Instead, her enthusiasm for Ouida’s work grows:
That was why Ouida put those others in the shade, not, not, not because her books were improper. It was her, herself somehow. Then you read books to find the author ! That was it. That was the difference . . . that was how one was different from most people. . . . Dear Eve [one of Miriam’s sisters]: I have just discovered that I don’t read books for the story, but as a psychological study of the author . . . she must write that to Eve at once; to-morrow. It was rather awful and strange. It meant never being able to agree with people about books, never liking them for the same reasons as other people. . . . But it was true and exciting. It meant . . . things coming to you out of books, people, not the people in the books, but knowing, absolutely, everything about the author. She clung to the volume in her hand with a sense of wealth.
As many have suggested, the greatest love story in Pilgrimage is that of Miriam’s passion for London. And when she accompanies Mrs. Corrie on a hat-shopping trip to London, she is perfectly happy to be politely ejected for an hour when Mrs. Corrie stops for tea and gossip at a friend’s Mayfair flat. She seizes the chance and experiences a rapturous thrill as she walks toward Regent Street:
Wide golden streaming Regent Street was quite near. Some near narrow street would lead into it.
Flags of pavement flowing along — smooth clean grey squares and oblongs, faintly polished, shaping and drawing away — sliding into each other. … I am part of the dense smooth clean paving stone . . . sunlit; gleaming under dark
winter rain; shining under warm sunlit rain, sending up a fresh stony smell . . . always there . . . dark and light . . . dawn, stealing . . .Life streamed up from the close dense stone. With every footstep she felt she could fly.
There will be many more such walks before the series is through.
While Richardson felt that — as she once wrote an inquiring reader — that “the handing out of direct information is . . . excluded” in her writing, she does firmly, if obliquely, set the time frame of Honeycomb with a reference to Oscar Wilde’s first trial, on his charge of criminal libel against the Marquess of Queensbury, Alfred Douglas’ father:
“What is it ? ” said Miriam, shaking and flushing. ” Don’t tell me, don’t tell me,” cried her mind, “don’t mention it, you don’t know yourself what it is. Nobody knows what anything is.”
“I couldn’t tell you!” cried Mrs. Corrie.
“Why not?” laughed Miriam.
“It’s too awful,” giggled Mrs. Corrie.
“Oh, you must tell me now you’ve begun.”
“It’s the most awful thing there is. It’s in the Bible,” said Mrs. Corrie, and fled into the house.
This glancing treatment seems almost blatant, though, in comparison to how Richardson dealt with what must have been the most traumatic event in her own life. Horace Gregory summarizes the facts in his Dorothy Richardson: An Adventure in Self-Discovery (1967):
It was agreed that for her mother’s health, Dorothy and she were to go into lodgings at Hastings. There was again the persistent illusion that “sea-air” was good for invalids no matter what was wrong with them, and it was hoped that Hastings with its esplanade and bandstand and pavilion would life the depression that had settled over Mrs. Richardson’s mind. . . . On November 30, 1895, at Hastings, Dorothy Richardson took a short morning walk away from her lodgings. On her return she learned from her landlady that her mother had committed suicide by cutting her throat with a kitchen knife.
It’s hard to imagine a more horrific experience for a young woman, and the knowledge that the suicide took place while she had left her mother alone must have produced a crushing sense of guilt.
It’s also hard to imagine that any reader would have a clear understanding of the event from the way Richardson describes it in the last two pages of Honeycomb. Returning to the lodging from a visit to a homeopathic practitioner, Miriam’s mother tells her that “God has deserted me. . . . He will not let me sleep. He does not want me to sleep. . . . He does not care.” Just two paragraphs later, we read:
The bony old woman held Miriam clasped closely in her arms. “You must never, as long as you live, blame yourself, my gurl. She went away. Miriam had not heard her come in. The pressure of her arms and her huge body came from far away. Miriam clasped her hands together. She could not feel them. Perhaps she had dreamed that the old woman had come in and said that. Everything was dream; the world. I shall not have any life. I can never have any life; all my days.
I had read Gregory’s book before starting Pilgrimage, but even with that forewarning it took me a second reading of the last chapter of Honeycomb to realize that this was how Dorothy Richardson placed in the life of her fictional counterpart, Miriam Henderson, what must have been a violent and life-searing memory. Though some critics argue that Pilgrimage itself was how Richardson expunged her sense of guilt, I can’t agree. George Thomson’s Notes on Pilgrimage identifies a total of two references to Miriam’s mother in the entire series (in truth, there are a couple dozen). More telling, though, is the fact that there are no references to Richardson’s mother in the nearly-700 pages of her letters, spanning over four decades, collected in Windows on Modernism. One cannot help but wonder if what she expunged was the memory itself.