Havelock Ellis was a pioneering writer and researcher on the subject of human sexuality. Between 1914 and 1923, he published three volumes taken from his diaries that are full of commentaries on the literature and events of his time. The following appears under the date of July 14, 1919 in Impressions and Comments, Second Series: 1914-1920 (1921). Ellis had read one of the chapters of Interim that appeared in the literary magazine The Little Review in 1919.
I have been reading a fragment of Interim by Miss Dorothy Richardson whose impressionistic novels arouse the enthusiasm of many lovers of fine literature. Certainly it is delightful to read. There is such a beautiful surface to this writing, so smooth and yet so rich. I pass my hand over the texture of it with a delicious as it seems physical sensation. And one feels that there is here throughout so exquisite a sensibility to the inner world and the outer world. Every sensation, every emotion, every thought, that passes over the heroine, no matter how subtle or how trivial, the whole stream of consciousness, is noted with such precise discrimination, I feel as though the writer had brought to her task a new instrument of a high power—a microscope that reveals fresh details, a micrometer that cuts more finely, a thermometer that registers slighter variations. Other writers may reveal but it is by different methods, Conrad, for instance, by a splendid felicity of metaphor and simile, a poet’s art, as also in a different way is the art of Hardy. But Dorothy Richardson is not a poet. She is an artist, certainly, but an artist who has something of the scientific attitude, and her observation is marked by a delicate precision which is nearer to science than to poetry. We feel that the surface of Miriam’s soul is being explored before us in every little intimate fold and flock, by an investigator who 1s tender indeed yet ruthlessly exact. It is very fascinating.
Yet, I am inclined to ask myself, is it also very interesting ? I can read a few pages of it with a rare enjoyment. But is there anything in it to draw me on through a thousand or more pages? I crawl with satisfaction over this beautiful surface, and I am quite ready to believe that it is not merely surface but in real connection with a depth beneath. Yet that depth is not revealed to me by the artist. I have to divine it, even to create it, by my own efforts.
What diminishes my interest in work that is yet so fine, is my feeling that the artist is not in complete control of that work. She seems to have set out to tell us everything, to involve her whole art in the completeness of this record of one woman’s soul spread out through half a dozen volumes. We know how Miriam reacted to every plate of food and every drink set before her at dinner; we know how she felt all over her body when she sat in an uncomfortable chair ; we know exactly how the streets of London appeared to her sensitively discerning vision; we know what her blouse seemed like to her, and her night-dress. Yet we discover that whole vast tracts of consciousness, at least equal in importance to these, and sometimes of far greater importance, are shut out from our view. Miss Richardson has at every point submitted her scheme to an inner censorship made in the image of the conventional public. We see that she always has an eye on the Circulating Librarian, and as soon as she begins to detect the trace of a frown on his face she has changed her course. We are told in the most minute detail all that had happened at breakfast, and after breakfast we are told how Miriam went upstairs, and how she passed the little lavatory door, but we are not told why she passed that little door Just when we might have expected her to enter in. So, of greater and more significant events in personal life, which yet must needs be bound up inextricably with the intimate and the trivial. In Miriam’s bedroom, minutely and precisely as so many unimportant little details are set down, we only become the more conscious of the things that are not set down. In that room, we realise, Miss Richardson has been faced by the essential facts of Miriam’s physical and spiritual life, and she has failed to meet the challenge. She set out to present before us Miriam complete, and yet the things that matter are left a blank which the minuteness of the record itself serves to emphasise.
Now the realisation of such a blank might be impertinent, or in bad taste, before novelists who had not undertaken to set before us all the intimate details of life. We have no sense of failure before Fielding or Flaubert or Tolstoy. Their art involved the exclusion of all details that were not significant, though they never asked the world what details they might be allowed to count significant. But Dorothy Richardson’s method is different. It is a comprehensive method of recording even the faintest fluctuations on the stream of consciousness. It is more like the method of the Goncourts (and a little like the method of Proust), more subtle and more veracious than the method of the Goncourts. But the Goncourts were not afraid to set the essential things down. . They never came humbly to the world, or even the police, to ask what they might be allowed to set down, they preferred prosecution to that (remember La Fille Elise), and so their art, even though it may be in some respects inferior, is nearer to great and original art, which is always fearless.
No doubt it would be unpleasant to meet the condescending disapproval (which everything great and real must meet) of the superior person. One may be told that Dorothy Richardson perhaps bears in mind James Joyce, whose Ulysses appears alongside Interim in the same Little Review: he has written down what he desired to write down but only with the result that it is “expurgated” before it reaches the public. It would, they say, be impossible. But if one deliberately chooses a method which leads straight to the Police Court and then oneself stops short because the road seems impossible, one admits that one’s whole art is impossible. And for the great artist there is nothing impossible. He knows that if he cannot live up to the implications of his art then either his art is wrong, or he is. Here I find a new and exquisite instrument for art has been created, but it is guided by the hand of Mrs. Grundy.
That seems to be the reason why my admiration for Dorothy Richardson’s art is so considerable and my interest in it so small.