Lionel Trilling’s review of the Alfred A. Knopf edition of Pilgrimage appeared in the Summer 1939 Kenyon Review, and remains one of the most critical and least sympathetic assessments of the work. It’s worth reading today perhaps more as an artifact of a particular time and mindset than as a piece of criticism.
I very much dislike this work but this is a judgment which, for two reasons, I set down with considerable diffidence. One reason is that the drama of its career is disarming. In 1913 Miss Richardson entered upon what she conceived, and with some justice, to be a pioneering task, and for a quarter-century her monumental novel has grown almost underground — twelve parts or “chapters” which by their manner abrogate any chance of popularity and which have had to live upon the courage of their author and the admiration of a very small group. The second reason for diffidence is that the author puts forward her work as specifically feminine and as a challenge to the masculine intellect by which, she implies, it will not be understood. “By every word they use,” says her heroine, “men and women mean different things.” One cannot with a wholly easy mind condemn anyone’s serious labor of twenty-five years, nor can one with entire confidence undertake to criticize a work of which it is a premise that the critic cannot quite comprehend it. And yet, with due respect for its courage and insofar as a man may judge it at all, I must say that Pilgrimage, of all the ambitious works of our time, is the least fruitful and the least charming.
It is not quite possible to separate Miss Richardson’s theory of the novel from her theory of femininity. She tells us in the Foreword to her now completed work that when she first began to write in 1911 she accepted the tradition of the followers of Balzac and Arnold Bennett, the tradition of objective realism. But this form of realism with its assumption that one could hold up to life a mirror whose glass was colorless and without distortion was a masculine realism and soon proved itself inadequate. Miss Richardson gave up the attempt and turned to the method which she thereafter employed, a subjective realism which involved an admitted psychological coloring and the restriction of the point of view to a single character whose interior monologue, variously rendered, gives all that the reader knows of the experience in which the character is involved. With this method she follows the career of Miriam Henderson through some thirteen years of struggle with herself, her family, poverty and men.
To her method Miss Richardson gives an ultimate credence; she conceives it to be the true and ineluctable form of the novel and in its support she quotes Goethe who, in Wilhelm Meister, had written: ’‘In the novel, reflections and incidents should be featured; in drama character and action. The novel must proceed slowly and the thought-processes of the principal, figure must, by one device or another, hold up the development of the whole.” This, clearly, makes a sound distinction between the novel and the drama, but quite as clearly it is a distinction of degree. For Miss Richardson, however, it is as an absolute, and it rationalizes her assumption that experience is only discourse and that the monologous response to an event is the event itself.
In this Miss Richardson believes she is in good company, for, as she tells us, shortly after she began to write, her path, which she had thought to be a lonely one, “turned out to be a populous highway.” There was Virginia Woolf (so I interpret Miss Richardson’s dark reference to a woman “mounted upon a splendidly caparisoned charger”) ; there was Joyce (for presumably he is the man who is druidically spoken of as “walking with eyes devoutly closed, weaving as he went a rich garment of new words wherewith to clothe the antique dark material of his engrossment”) ; from France came news of Proust; and there had for some time been Henry James.
Now among all these writers there is indeed the affinity of techniques which do hold up the action for the sake of the thought-process of the principal figure. But however close Miss Richardson may stand to Virginia Woolf, there is between her novel and the work of the three masculine writers a very real and important difference. One might describe that difference technically—remembering that Joyce in Ulysses by no means uses the point of view of a single individual but of many individuals and then again relatively impersonal points of view; that the spectator in James is frequently divorced from the main action; that frequently Proust abandons the narrator’s preoccupation with himself for a minute concern with other characters; whereas Miss Richardson never for a moment leaves the focus, the point of view, the judgment of her Miriam Henderson. In the work of the three men the thought-processes of the principal figures do indeed hold up the action—but do not obliterate it. We cannot forget that Ulysses is a dramatic story driving with perfect integration towards a dramatic resolution. We cannot forget in preoccupation with their method how many great scenes there are in Proust and that James cried to himself, “Dramatize! Dramatize!’’ and took his own advice. But of Pilgrimage I think it is true that there is not a single moment of tension.
So much for technique, and in what we may call philosophical result the difference is most profound. In Joyce, Proust and James, no matter how dominating or suffusing may be the point of view of the single spectator, it never destroys the world. The world stands clear and objective; it never becomes the mind of the spectator, nor are we led to suppose that the mind of the spectator is the world. Of Pilgrimage the very opposite is true. Miss Richardson’s novel is not written by means of the spectator but for the sake of the spectator. The mind of her suffering and observing heroine serves not our purpose but her own. In her mind she dissolves the world, and nothing, we come to feel, has life apart from her thinking about it; people inhabit the world only in dependence upon her and when she ceases to think of them they cease to exist for us. In short, we have a supreme egoism which peers curiously into life only in order to justify itself.
At this point we come, I fear, to Miss Richardson’s feminism. It is not all of feminism but it is not a new feminism. It is, shall we say, Jane Eyre’s feminism exaggerated, the feminism of superior intelligence, virtue and insight, all kept hidden, a delightful secret weapon. It is the feminism of seeing through men, of the enhancement of a female personality by the secret understanding of the male. Miriam Henderson reprobates men for being “separated mind and body”; but her own response to men is wholly mental and in the minute examination of her feelings not a moment of passion or sexuality is recorded. She hates the idea of men being attracted to women as women (“consciously attracted and won by universal physiological facts rather than by individuals themselves”) ; it is her personality that must be affirmed, her personality as a woman, special and precious and suffering in a world in which men have faults, being men, but never difficulties. And when she does not get this special and impossible affirmation she manages to see through each of the men that fail her, to understand them lovingly, tenderly, destructively, until at the end of the story she stands in splendid isolation, unmated but universally admired, now on the point of writing a novel.
Surely there is not needed any explanation of such an attitude. It is an attitude all too possible for any woman who, valuing herself and her talents, is pushed aside from a complete life because of her sex. But humanly speaking, without distinction of sex, it does not seem a good or fruitful form of aggression nor is it, I believe, the most useful to women as women if we may judge from the quality of being that emerges from Pilgrimage. A kind of emotional solipsism cannot be the answer to the many contradictions under which women live. And speaking from the literary point of view, it has in this case produced a literary manner private without being personal, arbitrary without being original, making a demand upon the reader which is not rewarded, as demands of equal difficulty are rewarded by the three men we have spoken of, in the reader’s enhanced sentiment of reality.