Philip Littell was the book editor for The New Republic magazine in its early years. He was something of a latecomer to Pilgrimage, first reading it in 1921 and started with the then-latest volume, Interim. His response to the book in his regular column, “Books and Things,” demonstrates a remarkable openness to Richardson’s approach and style, particularly for a man of this time. “Miriam Henderson, the heroine of Miss Dorothy Richardson’s Pilgrimage—hers is the life I have led,” he writes, “she is the woman I’ve been, for several hours a day during the vivider part of a week.” His essay is also a good description of the mental adjustments a reader has to make in getting used to Richardson’s style.
Books and Things
The New Republic, 27 April 1921, p.267
Although I have relinquished all hope of having either been a diver in deep seas or trafficked for strange webs with Eastern merchants, I am no longer quite as I once was that I may not share with Leda the sensation of giving birth to Helen of Troy. For lately I had an experience which, if nor quite so momentous as this last, has been as little expected and nearly as unsexing. To my surprise I have discovered that once upon a time, long before the war, I taught German girls English in a girls’ school at Hanover. It was in North London that I helped with the smaller girls in a school kept by the Miss Pernes. For several months I acted as governess to two children in a well-to-do English family living in the country not many hours from London. A year or so later, say in the middle nineties, while lodging on the top floor of a house just off the Euston Road, I acted as secretary to a dentist in Wimpole Street, to a considerate man with a scientific turn of mind, as dexterous as an American dentist and not facetious at all. Miriam Henderson, the heroine of Miss Dorothy Richardson’s Pilgrimage—hers is the life I have led, she is the woman I’ve been, for several hours a day during the vivider part of a week. Did Teiresias feel like this, I wonder, when he looked back to remember how he too had once been a woman?
Of course, however, this identification of myself with Miriam is far from complete really, since the recurrent feeling which has been not least among my surprises while reading Pilgrimage, this odd and oddly repeated shock of discovery that men are of a sex different from mine and women of the same sex, is obviously beyond the pale of Miriam’s own experience. If ever her womanhood took her by surprise, how much the less Miriam she! For the best of other reasons, too, I stop short of identifying my daily self with hers. During many hours, far too many for pleasure, my mind is on the lookout for shortcuts, which prove on acquaintance tastelessly algebraic and schematically gray, I keep fussing with concepts worn smooth, arranging them and rearranging, trying to impose I upon them an alien coherence and form. This I do with an ulterior purpose sometimes, at others just to escape the boredom of seeing them fall into one of the same old patterns. Seldom indeed do I catch my consciousness at its greatest ardor, when the details of the phenomenal world become as acutely visible as those queer figures who take their stand ahout one’s bedside when one lies between sleep and waking, and who stare so hard before they join hands and dance in a ring. By how much Miriam’s inner life is different from mine, so much is it richer and more vehement. She is always alive. Her afferent nerves are always busy. The things she remembers or imagines are aw vivid to her as each of the many things she hears and sees. The intense extended world of her consciousness is a world of sensations and perceptions that strike upon her in an unbroken rush of sharp minutiae.
Some little time was needed, halt a volume perhaps, before I could reach the heart of peace in the travelling whirlpool of Miriam’s perceptions. For a hundred pages or two I was certain that she would break down before long, that she was in for an illness and a weary convalescence. I blamed all her friends for not taking her temperature. These were groundless fears. Miriam is normal when her nerves are exasperated. Men and women and landscape, weather and times of day, the falling of early light or late upon city streets, her nerves report and describe these things in her own hallucinated way, they seem to have no existence of their own outside her vigilant nerves, and to exist more intensely because of this limitation. When she is dead beat and almost numb, she lives a series of vivid pictures of numbness. And in spite of all the fever and the fret Miriam never feels her continual perceptiveness as a task or makes an effort to go on perceiving. She cannot help taking her patient snapshots of her world as it flows past or over her. Her only way of escape from the enormous difficulty of dealing with men and women is to take their pictures. This she does as naturally, as inevitably, as a blank wall welcomes shadows.
But absurd though it be to say, as I did say in my first paragraph, that I identified myself with Miriam, whose senses are so acute, whose consciousness is colored and not drab, who is a woman and not a man, yet this absurdity does measure the degree of my credence. My belief in Miriam is absolute. I believe in her existence, her poverty, her hunger, her courage, her touchiness, her chronic hyperaesthesia, her gift of seeing and of telling herself what she sees. There are few characters in fiction whose happiness 1 have so much desired, few I think less likely to achieve happiness. Even if Miriam grew rich, she would not outgrow her inability to enter or leave a peopled room without taking thought. In no matter what freedom from material cares she would still find, as often as she had to deal with other human beings, that her reflexes were far too few. Happiness will never be hers, but she will be less unhappy after discovering an activity that will enable her, will compel her, to do something with her impressions. Music? Possibly, for she has a talent that way, but were I a friend of Miriam’s I should urge her rather to divert the stream of her thinking into a novel, a novel about as spacious and crowded as Pilgrimage, by Dorothy Richardson.
Next autumn Mr. Knopf will publish Deadlock, the sixth volume of Pilgrimage. The five volumes he has already published are called Pointed Roofs, Backwater, Honeycomb, The Tunnel and Interim. Four times in the first twenty pages of Pointed Roofs does Miss Richardson make what one might call an author’s comment upon Miriam. Nowhere else, so far as I’ve noticed, does she deviate by so much as a millimetre from her method, that already famous method which shuts us up in Miriam’s consciousness, where everything is presented to us with as much form or as little as it happens to take there, with as many references as happen to be sticking to it when it comes to the surface or with as complete an absence of reference. Interim was the volume I began with, and at first I thought the method teasing, but later, going hack to Pointed Roofs and reading all five books in their order, I found myself liking the method better and better, surrendering to it unconditionally. wondering whether any novelist had applied it with equal strictness before. Its only drawback is that it leaves one wondering, foolishly, how Pilgrimage can ever come to an end. Not with Miriam’s death, which she won’t be there to describe, although perhaps she had a glimpse of it when she imagined the death of Flora, the maidservant at the Miss Pernes: “When she died she would wait quietly with nothing to do, blind and wondering. Death would take her into a great festival — things for her for herself. She would not believe it and would put up her hands to keep it off. But it would be all round her in great laughter, like the deep roaring and crying of a flood.”