This long (and unauthorised) excerpt from Anthony West’s 1984 biography of his father, H. G. Wells: Aspects of a Life, offers an account of Dorothy Richardson’s relationship and affair with Wells, as well as of her marriage with Alan Odle, that is most strenuously from the Wellsian perspective. Whether it tells us more about Richardson or West himself is for the reader to judge.
Between November 1906 and April of the following year, while my father’s Fabian battle was at its height, he managed to find the time for one of the strangest and most revealing of his affairs. It was with Dorothy Richardson, a woman he had known since his Worcester Park days. When I first met her as an adult, thirty years later, she made a very strong impression upon me as at once the most conceited and the least sensuous person of either sex that I had up to that time encountered. She carried herself and wore her clothes with a peculiar stiffness that suggested a dressmaker’s dummy or one of the human figures from an old-fashioned Noah’s Ark set. It was hard for me to believe that she could ever have been to bed with so lively a man as my father, but there it was—she had written an account of her traffickings with him, only thinly disguised as fiction, into her endless autobiographical stream-of-consciousness novel Pilgrimage, and he had never denied that the affair had taken place.
When she was a girl, Dorothy Richardson had been at school with Amy-Catherine Robbins. The two had been drawn together by fellow feeling. Both their young lives had been shadowed by a sense of coming trouble, and with reason: something had been going terribly wrong with the affairs of their fathers. Mr. Richardson’s troubles were typical of the period. They sprang from his passion to climb up the social ladder to a point at which he would be accepted as a gentleman. He was the only son of a prosperous small-town grocer, and his first act on inheriting his father’s business had been to sell out. This gave him thirteen thousand pounds, and with that much in his poke he settled down to live the life of a man of property while playing the stock market. Although he was technically underfinanced, he was comparatively lucky, and he managed to keep clear of the bankruptcy court for nearly twenty years. Being what he was, a typical family man of his epoch, he had never discussed money matters with his womenfolk, and his slow slide towards an irretrievable disaster, broken by episodes of illusory success, had been a-hell of uncertainty and apprehension for his wife and for his four daughters.
The two older Richardson girls had reached marriageable age as the waters had begun to close over Mr. Richardson’s head, and they had just made it to the altar before he went down for the last time. When it came to actually filing a petition, Mrs. Richardson, overwhelmed by the realisation of her worst fears for herself, and for the two girls still unmarried, went clean out of her mind. As the younger of the two was not yet out of school, it fell to Dorothy to become the madwoman’s personal nurse and attendant. After some weeks the two sons-in-law clubbed together to send “Mother” to the seaside in Dorothy’s care, in the hope that the peace and quiet of Hastings in the off season might calm her and bring her round. The move was futile, since rest was out of the question for Mrs. Richardson. She was deeply into an agitated depression, and she could neither sleep, nor stop talking, nor stay still. At the end of the first five days in their Hastings lodgings the madwoman had worn herself out, and she collapsed onto a bed. Her daughter, nearly as exhausted as she was, seeing her lying there apparently fast asleep at long last, took a gamble and slipped out to snatch some fresh air and a few moments to herself on the sea front. There she committed the folly of sitting down on one of the benches facing the waves, and was lulled to sleep in a moment. An hour later, when she ran back to the house where she had left her mother unwatched, it was to find that the poor troubled lady was dead: she had cut her throat with a bread knife.
Everybody had been very kind to Dorothy, but the general feeling that the dead woman should never have been left alone was inescapable. That nothing was said about it was the worst of condemnations. In the aftermath to this traumatic breakup of her family, Dorothy moved into central London to start a new life as the receptionist for a Harley Street dental partnership. Her employers were to pay her a pound a week.
As soon as she had settled herself into an attic room in a lodging house within walking distance of the job, she began to take steps to make her new life endurable. Her first move was to look up those of her former schoolmates who were living in and around the city. Before long she found her way to the snug little suburban villa in Worcester Park where Amy-Catherine Robbins was living with my father and undergoing the first stages of her transformation into Jane Wells. Jane had very vivid memories of what she had been through at the time of her own father’s suicide, and had no difficulty with entering into her hard-hit friend’s feelings. My father also, remembering the shadow that Joseph Wells’s back-yard tumble had cast on his youthful spirits, could also sympathise with her readily enough. Between them they made standing by Dorothy a project: she soon became a regular at their gregarious Sunday lunches, and often came out to Worcester Park on Saturdays to spend the night.
Dorothy’s biographer, Gloria Fromm, says that she soon won my father’s admiration, but I do not believe that this was so. When Jane and my father looked at Dorothy in those Worcester Park days it was to see the same thing, the numbed victim of a run of rotten bad luck. It took a long time for them to learn to see her as anything else because it took her the best part of sixteen years to recover from the shock of her mother’s death and to get herself off dead center. My father’s ability to understand what was weighing her down was undoubtedly much increased when his mother’s death in 1905 put him in possession of the diary in which she had recorded her reactions to the shattering experiences she had undergone at the time when her parents had died one after another in the Inn at Midhurst. The parallels between Sarah Neal’s ordeal and Dorothy’s weren’t that close, but the excess of misfortune that gave them both their tone was the common factor that told. Even so, it will have provided him with grounds for empathy and compassion rather than admiration. Ten years from their first meeting at Worcester Park she was still clinging to that not very dazzling receptionist’s job, and her one literary achievement had been getting an unsigned piece into The Outlook. There wasn’t really too much there for the youngish man who had just published Kipps, and who already had twenty novels and three collections of short stories to his name, to be bowled over by—she was, to be blunt, an object of his pity rather than anything else when they embarked on their brief, and dismally unsuccessful, affair in 1906.
The fiasco came about in the following way. When Dorothy began life on her own in London she felt that she was running certain risks. As soon as it was possible for her to do so, she set herself up with a male companion to protect her from the menaces to which she felt that she was exposed as an unattached girl. She didn’t have to look far for what she had in mind—providence had placed a certain Benjamin Grad, a young Russian Jew, in a bed-sitter one flight down from her attic room. As he was new to the country and had very little English, she was able to insert herself into his life as a mentor and guide in the simplest and easiest manner, instructing him in his new language and the local customs. Their relationship developed and presently took on another character, becoming a game of perpetual courtship in which neither suitor wished to succeed. To make sure that Grad should never ask her to deliver, Dorothy had told him at an early stage that being a witness to all that had led up to her mother’s madness and suicide had turned her against marriage forever, while he, after letting her know that he had spent a year as a patient in an insane asylum before leaving Russia, made it clear that so far as he was concerned, sex without marriage was unthinkable. They would have been able to go on playing this risk-free game ad infinitum but for the arrival on the scene of a young would-be actress, Veronica Leslie-Jones, a runaway from a county family. She broke in on them to declare an unholy passion for Dorothy, who found herself, much to her surprise, responding in kind. She caught herself wondering for the first time if she had not been denying herself something by planning to do without sex. She was half inclined to give her eager new friend what she seemed to want so badly, but hung back from consummation because she could not be sure that the girl’s demonstrative lesbianism was more than a performance—a matter of a person’s desire to seem dashingly and interestingly corrupt rather than the usual thing in order to impress. And beyond that it wasn’t, she rather suspected, Veronica’s femininity that she had responded to so much as to her sexuality and her eagerness. She wasn’t at all sure that a lesbian affair was what she had found herself wanting. Her difficulty was that she knew nothing, nothing at all, about that side of life. The point was one that only physical experience of the actual thing could clear up.
A man who comes on stage to play the role of instructor to a younger woman in such a situation as this is inevitably suspect. A legacy from the comic tradition of the past associates innocence with youth and experience with age, so that the hint of a transaction between one and the other calls up images of a decrepit dotard slavering after some fresh young thing. The affair between these two is often presented in that light, partly because that tradition exists, and partly because Dorothy’s dream self, the heroine of her interminable Pilgrimage, aged a good deal more slowly than she did throughout its action. The facts are that when they at length became lovers, my father was thirty-nine and Dorothy was thirty-two. The further suggestion is sometimes made that it was reckless of my father, and perhaps even deliberately cruel of him, to trifle with the affections of a brilliant young writer, all insight and sensitivity, in a way that could have broken her stride and jeopardised her career. It wasn’t quite like that. When the affair took place in 1906, Dorothy was more often perceived as being stuck than promising. The stiffness of backbone that had once been almost charming as part of a defiant perkiness in the face of adversity was beginning to suggest the onset of a premature rigidity. My father, and Jane also, who had both begun by going along with her in supporting her claim to be a somebody who was quite certain one day to be something, out of kindness, couldn’t help feeling that she was showing every sign of becoming a very ordinary old maid.
When she began to send my father unmistakable signals indicating the existence of her desire to change her condition, he was glad. He felt sure that she was doing the sensible thing at last. He didn’t for a moment flatter himself with the idea that he had moved her deeper passions—he couldn’t have entertained the notion even if he had wanted to, because she had made it plain that she was turning to him to find out something about herself. He was happy to oblige her, and not only because he enjoyed the act for its own sake. He hoped that she would find making love enjoyable because he believed that sexual experience was an essential part of growing up and maturing. He didn’t think that it was possible to be a complete person without it, and he was sure that a pleasant passage between them would mark the end of her unlucky years and the beginning of a much happier chapter in her life story . . .
When it presently became only too clear that she didn’t enjoy going to bed with him, and that he wasn’t being any help to her at all, he felt that he had made a mess of things and was contrite. The truth was, as he had to admit to her, that he had done her wrong. He had come to her when he was tired, and with his head full of other things. He had, in truth, though he wasn’t so unkind as to say as much, been fitting her in. During the six-month stretch in which they had had their seven or eight saddening meetings he had been up to his neck in the most intense phase of his enormously time-consuming and energy-draining tussle with Sidney Webb and the Fabian Old Guard; wrestling Tono Bungay into shape; carrying on an elaborate flirtation with Violet Hunt that had really amused and interested him; and doing much else beside. He hadn’t done his best for her. It was all his fault. She wasn’t, he told her, to blame herself on any account. Whatever had been wrong between them would almost certainly come right with custom and familiarity. They should give it more time, and when she came to him again it should be with less anxiety, and perhaps with lower expectations—although sex was one of life’s great pleasures, and although it was the source of a kind of happiness that irradiated and illuminated everything, it wasn’t anything transcendental or sacramental, it was the simplest and most natural of things: she was not to lose heart.
Dorothy was astounded by his lack of comprehension and horrified by his apparent suggestion that they should go on with the affair. It wasn’t that there had been some particular thing wrong between them, or any failure of tact or technique on his part. The trouble was, quite simply, that she hadn’t been able to endure any aspect of the thing itself—the act had proved to be even more profoundly distasteful to her than she had feared it might. What she had learned in bed with my father had been that she did not want sex with anyone—she wanted to remain untouched and unmoved. All she wanted was to get out, without acquiring the stigma that attaches itself to running away.
She got clear of my father in two stages. She first told him that she was pregnant to give herself an excuse for breaking off the physical relationship, and then that she had suffered a miscarriage. This enabled her to distance herself from him without seeming to be in flight. She took a six-month leave of absence from her miserable job, and went off to hide herself in the then untroubled and remote piece of Sussex countryside behind Eastbourne between Hailsham and Hurstmonceux, saying that she needed a complete rest after the physical ordeal that she had been through.
My father was never able to believe that Dorothy had been pregnant, let alone that she had suffered a miscarriage, and felt that her disengagement procedures involved something in the nature of overkill. But he made not the slightest effort to resist her decision to break off the meaningless affair. That was, as he saw it, pre-eminently a matter in which she had to be free to do as she pleased. What concerned him most was that she might run into practical difficulties once she had cut the umbilical cord connecting her with the dental partnership’s cash box. He had done his best to teach her the Barrie system for cooking up occasional pieces out of nothing at all, but she hadn’t the light touch needed to make a success of hack work for the dailies and had a positive nose for the unrewarding outlet, selecting as her markets such publications as Ye Crank, The Open Road, and The Dental Record. To help her with what he saw as her immediate problem, he came up with the suggestion that she should become his copy editor —he would send her his galley proofs when they were sent to him by the printers, and she would check them out, for the verbal repetitions that were his greatest weakness, and for such errors in style and grammar as had got past him. He had always found reading over his own work with an eye to such things the dullest of dull chores, and he would be endlessly grateful if she would undertake the labour for him. She would be paid, of course.
My feeling is that Dorothy invented her story of her fight to get out of my father’s clutches to give some coherence to her picture of her general situation at this time. As a consequence of her series of fiascos with him she was putting a lot behind her, and in a hurry. She was saying goodbye to more than sex, my father, and the dental practice; she was breaking up her settled London life and offloading her old friend Benjamin and her new friend Veronica as well. The tigerish Miss Leslie-Jones was effective in making her accelerate her disengagement. She made an initiative early in June that scared Dorothy half out of her wits by its urgency and its persistence: they were to become lovers without further ado because Veronica had been made miserable by the defection of her male bed companion of the moment. Dorothy held her at bay for a few days and then developed a counterproposal. She suggested a triangular mystic marriage: all three kindred spirits, Dorothy, Veronica, and Benjamin, should become one on the spiritual plane while Veronica and Benjamin were united legally on the lower level of the physical. They would then be able to cohabit without scandal, and produce the children who would be just as much Dorothy’s in spirit as they would be Benjamin’s and Veronica’s in the flesh . . . When she had planted this seed in their minds—they had neither of them even considered each other until she put her idea to them—Dorothy skedaddled, taking refuge from all pressures by going into retreat in the heart of her new-found Eden in East Sussex. She came back to town briefly in October to attend the marriage she had invented, and then distanced herself from it by going off to Switzerland for a long holiday. When she returned it was not to her familiar world of London digs and bed-sitters, but to this tranquil backwater. She was taken in as a parlour boarder by a Quaker family called Penrose. Mrs. Penrose ran the house, and her two sons ran the small holding as a truck garden. They made Dorothy one of the family and she stayed with them for the next four years.
The reality of this performance was something that she was never to admit to. She told my father that she had gone into her retreat to recover from the consequences of her miscarriage, and she seems to have let the Penroses know that her medical advisor had told her that her only chance of averting a nervous breakdown lay in taking a complete rest in peaceful surroundings. My belief is that the one story is as untrue as the other, and that her use of the two stories gave her a clue to a strategy for avoiding that confrontation indefinitely. She would make up another story, a much longer one, that would show her actions in a completely different light. She would make telling it her life and her livelihood. She would become a novelist like my father, but her novel would not be mere fiction, as his novels were. Her novel would be both her art, and her life in art. It would describe, thought by thought, the development of a dedicated artist whose medium was prose, and it would show how every phase in that unfolding had been, despite all outward seeming, determined by the interactions between a unique sensibility and an irresistible aesthetic imperative.
The leading facts of the professional life that resulted from the adoption of that strategy are impressive: she expanded her essay in self-examination into something in the nature of a super-novel running to twelve volumes. Eleven of these were issued as entities complete in themselves, but the twelfth never saw independent publication as a novel. It made its first appearance as the final section of the fourth volume of the 1938 collected edition. This was said to present the completed work, but that was not the case. Pilgrimage never was to be completed. Although she began work on a thirteenth section, she was never able to really get it going. What she had managed to do, in the twelve volumes, and in twenty-four years of writing time, extending from 1912 to 1936, was to cover the sixteen years of her own actual existence between the years 1891 and the end of 1907. The significance of the break-off date hardly has to be underlined. Her eleventh volume, Clear Horizons, which centers on a wholly incredible account of the final stages of her affair with my father, comes to a formal conclusion. Credible or no, the thing has a beginning, a middle, and an end. But its successor, Dimple Hill, while running to novel length, never looks like going anywhere, and finally just peters out. Dorothy’s inability to give it shape and a climax finally exhausted Duckworth’s monumental patience. They were happy to hand its indeterminate mass over to Dent, feeling pretty sure that Dorothy never was going to manage to find her way out of it. Dent’s editors were confident that they would be able to show her how to solve her problem, but they didn’t know their woman. After two years of getting nowhere they seized the hour, announced to her that she had brought her entire project to a triumphant conclusion, and brought down the blade of the guillotine. They wouldn’t, they told her, lose any time by giving Dimple Hill independent publication, the book would draw much more attention if it came out as what it was obviously intended to be, the final section of the fourth volume of the great work.
Dorothy’s objections to this arbitrary proceeding were not spirited, and her complaints to her friends had a pro forma ring to them. She may well have been relieved—Dent’s editors had, after all, let her off the hook by giving her a perfect excuse for never actually coming to grips with whatever it had been that she was running away from in that far away August. It was, of course, too bad that her stride had been broken just as she was coming to the crux that would have made everything clear, but there it was, that was the sort of thing that inevitably happened now that publishing had become such a crudely commercial business. She had at least one thing to console her— nobody could say that she hadn’t tried to make her statement.
When my father saw the first section of the great work, Pointed Roofs, in 1915, it filled him with doubts about what was to follow, and what was to become of Dorothy. She had been talking the book throughout the eight years that had gone by since her disappearance into East Sussex, and some of her ideas had been interesting. She was going to address herself to the perfectly valid point that there could only be one character in a novel—or indeed in any piece of fiction that wasn’t a collaboration. She was going to face up to the limiting fact, and make an advantage of it, by writing a novel of the interior life of a single character who would have to be herself. The whole of the action would be concerned with the development of her perceptions of the exterior world, and her deepening understanding of them. He had wondered if she was aware that her great discovery was a truism, something that every writer who has ever thought about what he was doing has always known, but he had hoped, against the odds, that the novel she intended to build on it might, nonetheless, work out. And there, after eight years of talk, was Pointed Roofs. My father knew what its basis had been. In 1891, when she had been halfway through her eighteenth year, Dorothy had gone out to take up a post as a pupil-teacher in a finishing school for middle-class girls in the German town of Hanover. She had not liked the girls in the school, who had been the children of army men, minor officials, professional people, bankers, and successful businessmen, and she had not been able to get on with her employer. Soon after her arrival it had become apparent that she did not have the right qualifications for the job, and that she had no gift for teaching. Within six months she had been fired and sent home. My father had known what it was to face classes as an untried teacher, and, knowing Dorothy, he could guess at what had actually happened. She would have condescended to her pupils as she was in the habit of condescending to him, treating them as her inferiors in culture and in intelligence, and they would have refused to take it from her. Germany, in the days of which she had been writing, at the beginning of the nineties, had been the most class-conscious and precisely layered society in Europe, and those girls would have gone after her relentlessly until they had succeeded in placing her exactly at her proper level. If she had let fall as much as half a sentence that might have led them back through her father’s shell of humbug to that grocer’s shop! A bankrupt’s daughter! A girl from a shopkeeping family! The mobbing of a white crow would have been nothing to it. And if she had come across with that, she would have had something —but that would have meant facing up to the simple salient fact of the case, that she hadn’t, however excusably or understandably, measured up. She hadn’t been able to bring herself to peel the scar tissue of that old wound, so what she had served up in place of the truth of the experience was a sunny little vignette of the thing as it hadn’t quite been. Was the whole Pilgrimage going to turn out to be like that—so much consolatory fabulation? He hoped not, for her sake.
He did not have to wait long before Dorothy was to give him further confirmation of his dark view of her literary prospects. Lodgings were her identifying determinants. The rooming houses that constituted her natural habitat shaped her life. Her first lodgings had produced Benjamin Grad for her, and with him, her first intimate relationship with a man. Another, and more important intimacy, followed on the publication of Pointed Roofs. It had caused some talk, and it looked as if it was going to earn its advance. It might even bring in as much as twenty pounds more than the thirty pounds she had already received. Emboldened by this prospect she had moved up a notch, from the seven shilling-a-week room in a house on the outskirts of St. John’s Wood that she was then occupying, into much nicer accommodation, costing all of sixpence a week more, in Queen’s Terrace, just off the Marlborough Road. She was still up under the leads on the attic floor, but to make up for that she wasn’t obliged to go out if she wanted a cooked breakfast—the landlady “did” that meal for her lodgers in the basement kitchen. She now started to go down there as a regular thing, and there, almost every morning, she would find the tenant of the big front room on the first floor that the landlady called The Studio, eating his daily kipper and reading his copy of The Times.
Alan Odle was very close to going under at this stage, barely surviving on a tiny allowance paid to him weekly by his bank-manager father. He was earning virtually nothing, and, in Robert Ross’s phrase, just managing to keep his head under water, by dint of stretching every penny and sticking religiously to a daily routine. Breakfast was his one daily meal, and after he had eaten that kipper, and washed down a couple of slices of toast and marmalade with tea from the landlady’s brown pot, he would fast until the evening, spending the long hours of daylight in his room puttering with whatever he might have on his drawing board. Once it was dark he would put on his high-camp artist’s rig out and go down to put in an appearance at the Domino Room in the Café Royal, the place that he truly believed to be the nerve center of London’s literary and artistic life. He had it firmly in his mind that as long as he maintained a visible presence in that room as a member in good standing of one of its sets, he would be taken seriously as an artist.
Odle’s pathetic act was convincing no one. It was only necessary to look at him as he made one of his entrances into the Domino Room to see that he was locked into the worst of all things in the arts, a fly-blown fashion. In his art-school days, when he should have been fighting shy of the exhausted convention of the new that had done for the nineties, he hadn’t been looking for anything fresh. He had been slavishly working through Aubrey Beardsley’s legacy of images looking for tricks to steal even his personal style had come from Beardsley’s prop hamper. It was the old story of the century, a repetition on another level of that of Dorothy Richardson’s father. Alan Odle had been determined to be as unlike his hard-driving, hardworking, and relentlessly scrupulous male parent as he could be, and had seen art as the quick road to that end. He had gone in for decadence of the fin du siecle variety to round out the anti-bank performance. He had been able to get away with his wholly unoriginal line while he was all bounce, promise, and beauty, but he had fallen off a shelf in his early twenties—possibly as a result of drinking too much absinthe too often. His faun-like good looks went, virtually overnight, and once they were gone his camping ceased to be amusing. The bills to be paid for his lack of originality and insufficiency of talent rapidly became past due. When Dorothy first came across him as he ate his morning kipper he had been undergoing the painful experience of being dropped for four rather horrible years. He had been given a moment of false hope not long before their encounter, when a man called Henry Savage had asked him to take the post of art editor of a magazine he was starting, The Gypsy—but this had proved to be a device for getting some artwork out of him for nothing. He was so near the bottom that some of the false friends of his palmy days were starting to do him small favours out of pity, and he was beginning to be glad of them.
It was the hopelessness of Odle’s situation that drew Dorothy to him. He was, like her father, a born loser, and like him, a fainéant, pretending to be an artist where her father had pretended to be a gentleman of means, and like her father, he was plummeting downwards in his fall. She could help him because she knew the ropes in the shabby genteel world of the downstart. She had learned every trick in the book about penny pinching and getting by on next to nothing a year. She resolved to help him to adjust to failure. She began with his food, telling him that he could not expect to survive on a diet of tea, kippers, and toast, alone. He was to eat other, more nourishing things from time to time. His health, she warned him, was something he could no longer afford to neglect: to fall ill in lodgings was to be done for. He teased her by sticking to his diet for a time, but she came in on him like the tide and slowly but surely wore down his resistance and made him her dependent.
At the end of two years she discovered something about him that told her a great deal: he was living in fear that he was going to be called up. This did not make her think of him as a coward in the conventional sense, but it made her feel almost certain that his camping was largely an act. Had he been your straightforward bread-and-butter homosexual, she decided, he would have no more reason to fear conscription than a bank robber to dread a chance of employment in a bank. The armed forces were by a hallowed tradition the happy hunting grounds of the persuasion. She divined that Odle was in reality just as averse to sexual entanglements with men as with women. She was correct in coming to this conclusion. He had tried swimming in the homosexual mainstream while he still had his looks, but although he had enjoyed peacocking around and being courted, he had always found delivering on the expectations his behaviour had aroused distasteful. He had not enjoyed the physical bit at all, and had ended by wrapping himself up in his poverty as if it were a cloak, shying away from bed with anyone, male or female. They were two of a kind, and might club together without risk.
Dorothy’s last lingering doubts that some residue of masculine forcefulness or hunger for domination might be lurking within Alan were finally removed when he went before a medical board in July 1917. After the examining doctor was done with him, he had not only the C3 rating that exempted him from military service but also a note addressed “To whom it might concern” certifying that the condition of his lungs made him unfit for regular work of any kind. This did the trick. If Alan Odle was truly in such a state, he could be no threat to her—the probability was that he would be her dependent for as long as he might last. When they were married, two months after he had undergone that medical examination, she was forty-four, and he had just turned twenty-nine.
When my father met the newly married pair a little later, he saw at once that what Dorothy had obtained by the union was the appearance of the condition without its physical reality. If that was what she wanted, well and good, but the more he thought of it, the more likely it seemed to him that it would be fatal to her declared literary ambition. If she was willing to go that far with counterfeiting in her actual life, her great novel of self-exploration was almost certain to be a sham in which she would be explaining away her inventions and evasions. Time would show whether she had the courage to deal with the actualities of the arrangement she had made, but he did not think that the prospects looked good. He did not believe that Dorothy could afford Alan Odle. She had told him the story of Alan’s allowance from his father. The Bank Manager had undertaken to let him have a pound a week for as long as he was willing to send in a weekly letter applying for it. This was the sum total of his regular income. The newlyweds had been in some doubt as to whether the Bank Manager would go on coming across with that pound now that his son was married, and that was why there had been no announcement in The Times. They were keeping it from Mr. Odle. My father guessed that it might come to cadging before long. He remembered the way in which Dorothy had invariably refused to listen to him when he gave her tips on how to liven up her hack work—he had told her how she could easily bring in a comfortable three or four hundred a year if she would only learn her trade. But she had told him that she could not bring herself to do it. He knew just what line she would take when the time came—she would beg with the martyred air of someone willing to sacrifice anything, even her pride, in loyalty to her absolute dedication to the highest aesthetic principles.
My father’s instinct was sound. Within a few years the Odles had settled down happily to what was essentially an eleemosynary existence. It was migratory in character and hinged on movements between London and Cornwall. They spent their summers in the city and their winters in a seaside holiday place in order to benefit from the off-season rates for accommodation at both ends of the line. Both in town and by the sea they went through the motions of earning their daily bread, but most of their income came from thinly disguised handouts. Alan Odle, whose work was virtually unnegotiable on the open market, sold the odd drawing now and again to an acquaintance or old friend, and he was occasionally given commissions by publishers of borderline erotica who wished to give their so-called luxury editions the look of hard-core pornography without its actionable substance. But these jobs came in the main from bohemian amateurs on the arty fringes of the grubby business as a result of persistent lobbying by Dorothy and her friends, and the pay, if it actually came to that, wasn’t as a rule enough to cover the cost of the materials used. Odle had, too, the born loser’s nose for a sinking ship. His two major projects in the years between the wars came to nothing when their publishers to be went under, leaving him unpaid. Dorothy herself was not much luckier. Her Pilgrimage caused a good deal of talk at the outset, but interest in it in literary circles wasn’t sustained there, and never spread beyond them. Few of its volumes sold out their pitifully small first printings, and there was rarely anything to come after the advance, even when Duckworth prudently reduced her advances from fifty to thirty pounds. They would soon have been right out of their depth if it hadn’t been for Dorothy’s copy-editing fees from my father, and for the more direct subventions that came their way, from 1923 onwards, from a woman writer who was the daughter of England’s richest shipowner. Bryher, who was then married to Robert McAlmon and living in Paris, came across the early parts of Pilgrimage in Sylvia Beach’s book shop, and, possibly because she had herself just been trying to do something very much like it, found it infinitely promising. On her next visit to London she sought Dorothy out to tell her so. When she came to the Odles’s rooms in St. John’s Wood she was appalled by what she saw, and what she deduced from it—the ambience spoke so clearly not only of the mean shifts they had to resort to, to stay alive, but also of the poverty of their human contacts.
Bryher was not one to appreciate the lodging-house way of life, and knew deprivation when she saw it. She told Odles that they ought to see more of the world, and a few weeks later, when in the ordinary way they would have been disappearing into North Cornwall for the winter, they were off to Paris and Switzerland with money for a six month’s stay. Bryher had given it to them, under the kindly pretence that it was a loan.
In the short run this led to some splendidly comic scenes in which Dorothy tried to impress such friends of Bryher’s as Ernest Hemingway with a performance as a major literary figure, and, in the long, to the sort of dependency that my father had seen lying in wait for her as a consequence of her marriage. The loan that had financed the trip had very soon been recognised as the gift it had always been, and before long Dorothy fell into the habit of sending Bryher periodic situation reports that were in fact begging letters. Bryher had money and a warm heart, and she soon taught Dorothy that she could always be counted on to produce a cheque or a banker’s order in exchange for a suitably “plucky” account of the latest setback or disappointment that had befallen the poor Odles—Dorothy developed, and with quite remarkable celerity, the arts of the practiced sponger.
Dorothy’s experiences of Bryher’s generosity led her to take a poor view of my father’s performance in this department, and toward the end of 1924 she saw fit to show him how he could bring it into line with her expectations. He received a letter from her which surprised him a good deal. An old friend of Alan Odle’s, a poet, was dying in misery. It would be a splendid gesture on my father’s part if he were to come up with the “few hundred pounds” that would be all that it would take to give “the old man” a last few months in comfort at some seaside resort such as Brighton or Hove before he died.
My father’s reaction to this letter has to be considered in relation to the fact that the poet in question was one of the more noisome in the cast of unsavoury characters who had walking on parts in Wilde’s tragedy. He was a latecomer to that affair, the literary con man T. W. H. Crosland, who had attached himself like a leech to Lord Alfred Douglas in its exceedingly unpleasant aftermath. He had not only produced the text of Oscar Wilde and Myself, the nauseating vilification of Wilde that Douglas had published-as his own, and justified as his way of getting even for what his former lover had said of him in De Profundis, he had also masterminded Douglas’ bitterly pursued campaign to ruin Wilde’s friend, and my father’s, the gentle and amiable Robert Ross. This had not been a simple matter of smearing Ross by planting a few nasty stories about him here and there, it had been an elaborate Balzacian scheme involving the forgery of incriminating documents, and the subornation to perjury of two ex-convicts, and it had been designed to force the police to bring Ross into court to face charges very similar to those that had been Wilde’s undoing. It had ended in court appearances by Crosland and Douglas, who were charged with publishing criminal libels. My father, who had been brought into that case as a character witness for the prosecutor, Robert Ross, had not enjoyed this experience, and felt that he had owed it largely to Crosland’s Iago-like proceedings. It will be seen why Dorothy’s letter led him to write a reply of the kind that is sometimes called a stinker. Did it not occur to her, he began, when she was making her suggestion that he should spend a few hundred pounds on making things nice for the dying Crosland, that the pitiful dodderer on whose behalf she was soliciting this outlay was, at the age of fifty-six, two years his junior? Had she never heard that his well-simulated heart attacks had notoriously been part of his standard operating procedure for getting ready cash out of Douglas throughout the period of their connection? Didn’t she realise that he’d tried the same dodge on at least a dozen people in recent years? And, finally, hadn’t it struck her as a trifle odd that if Crosland had really been dying when she visited him in his rooms in London in August, he could still be in a condition to be moved to Brighton or anywhere else in mid-December? Would she please, please, try not to be quite such an idiot? He had incautiously put a trump into her hand. Crosland, untrustworthy and aggravating to the last, had not been shamming when that August visit to his rooms had taken place. He died very shortly after Dorothy had received my father’s angry letter. She took the opportunity he had given her, and wrote to tell him how disgusting she thought it had been. It showed not only that he was heartless, but also that he was no gentleman. Poor Crosland had been Douglas’ devoted friend.
It may perhaps tell the reader something about Dorothy Richardson’s make-up that she was still fighting this battle, and sticking to her guns, when I went to see her in 1949, twenty-five years later. When she told me her story’ of this ancient conflict she painted the same picture for me that she was presently to urge upon her American biographer, Gloria Fromm, of a falling-out that was entirely creditable to her, and wholly discreditable to him. It was, she said, revelatory of a mean streak that had unhappily been close under my father’s skin. He had behaved, oh, very badly indeed, when she made her appeal to him on poor Crosland’s account. She stood up to him and told him what he had to be told, about the things that gave away his lack of breeding. Jane should have done it, but she had never had the nerve to stand up to him, she had been afraid of him. So he had never become used to it. He didn’t like it when people faced him. She had been taking a terrible risk when she did so, because she had known that standing up to him might mean the end of her copy-editing—and that would have hurt! It had taken her all her courage. and waiting for the axe to fall had been a strain too. He hadn’t replied to her letter —she supposed that he had been too ashamed of himself to do so— and she’d been left in doubt for nearly two months before his next manuscript had come to her to be worked on. He had been like that, inconsiderate. He hadn’t, she was sorry to have to say, quite possessed the instincts of a gentleman. There had always been, lurking in the background, something of the draper’s assistant, something that was not altogether fine. You could never tell what might bring it out.
While she was telling me this my mind went back a decade, to the early thirties, and to a dinner party at which we had both been present. It is described, very much from Dorothy’s point of view, in Gloria Fromm’s sedulous but, in my opinion, uncomprehending biography.
At the end of the summer, she once again came face to face with the “arch-manipulator” of her young life. Just before she and Alan left London for Cornwall, they spent an evening at H. G. Wells’s home in Regent’s Park. Also present were the Baroness Budberg, who was introduced as Moura, and Wells’s son Anthony West…. Anthony was something of a shock, she said, “looking tense & glowering far away at the back of himself’ where she was sure he had withdrawn to “escape coercion of one sort or another.” She hoped his young wife would help to draw him out. At the moment, however, it seemed to Dorothy that he could hardly speak—in her opinion because of the “attempts” that must have been made on his life. She felt she knew at first-hand what such attempts were like.
Dorothy had been at her outrageous worst on that occasion. She had begun by treating my wife, who had already been given two “one-man” shows in West End galleries and was well into her professional career, as if she was some dubiously talented miss just out of the schoolroom, and by speaking to me as if I was an idiot child showing encouraging, and quite unexpected, signs of beginning to understand simple sentences and even a few of the longer words. When she’d done her best to put us down, she had settled to an evening of teasing my father for the naiveté of his shallow views on literature and any other subject that came up. Odle didn’t have too much to say, but it was clear that he was enjoying the fun. They were both out to show their audience, consisting of Moura, my wife, and myself, that they weren’t fooled by my father for a moment, and that they were doing an “amusing” piece of slumming by sitting down to table with the philistine pigmy who thought himself a giant, and who knew all about everything without understanding any of it.
At one of Dorothy’s particularly exasperating sallies I found myself compelled to turn to him in incredulity, to see if he was going to let her get away with it. He met my eye, and with a glance told me that he understood my feelings, that he wished me to know that the situation was in his control, and that, despite appearances, everything was as he had expected it to be. To prove to me that it was so, he presently introduced a new subject with an apparently artless inquiry: had Dorothy had any news lately from her American friend, the wizard of Devonshire Place? She took the bait and plunged instantly into a breathless account of a wonder, performed the previous summer by the faith healer William Macmillan, rendered in the classic terms of the “unsolicited testimonials” in the old-style patent-medicine advertisements. Her man had, it appeared, taken up the case of a poor paralysed woman who had been through the hands of twelve Scottish doctors, as many Harley Street specialists, and the great Lord Horder himself, in the space of six years, only to be told by each and every one of them, that “medical science” was powerless to help her, and that her condition was “absolutely incurable.” It had taken Macmillan less than a week to get her back on her feet and walking again. Dorothy told my father that he could laugh at her story if he liked, but she knew that her wonder worker was genuine. He had saved her eyesight for her that winter. She had been sure that it was going, but he had put the condition right with six weeks of treatment. What exactly had her trouble been asked Moura. Dorothy wasn’t sure. But your eye man must have told you, prompted my father. She hadn’t, she admitted, consulted an eye doctor, and really couldn’t say what it had been. But Macmillan had known, and he had cured her, and that was all that she needed to know. Macmillan was a brilliant psychologist, and if he didn’t have any of the usual qualifications, he did have valid intuitions, and that was what counted.
When Moura and the Odles had gone home at last, and my wife had gone over to “Mr. Mumford’s,” the mews flat down at the end of the back garden where we were spending the night, I had asked my father what the point of Dorothy was. He had considered me for a moment, and then told me that he thought of her as an extreme example of a type. With the possible exception of her husband, she was the most completely de-socialised human being he had come across outside of a mad-house. She was an exaggerated caricature of solipsism in action. Alan Odle had been made for her—the one was mirror on the wall to the other, invariably giving the right answer to the one really important question—and even then it wasn’t the extremity of their self-regard that made them so remarkable, it was their isolation.
My father told me that night that he had been encountering people of the same breed as the Odles, suffering with varying degrees of intensity from their disabling conviction of their superiority to the generality of mankind, ever since the days when he had seen Morris drowning out the voices he didn’t wish to listen to with his hand bell in his Hammersmith boathouse. It had seemed to him then that what had ailed Morris and his coterie had been their feeling that they were doing the rest of the human race a favour merely by being alive. He’d been studying the patterns of self-flattery and self-delusion of their like with a fascinated repulsion ever since. The Odles were the specimens of the breed that he was closest to and knew best. He’d come to think of them as the exemplars of a social pathology—the thing that had begun with the cult for the compensatory self-worship of Byron, become epidemic with the propagation of the Goethe myth, and then endemic as the anemia of the children of middle-class new money, thinning their blood with the master idea that living without working and beautifully being one’s own very special and lovely self was the highest human aim.
The Odles had never had the feeling that they owed the community anything, or that they had any reason to take part in its collective life. They existed in the certainty that they had been set apart from all common things by their terrible destiny. They were people of culture, and it was their duty to the sacred cause of art to stay clear of the degrading vulgarities of the marketplace, and to have nothing to do with the mind-coarsening stupidities of the world of getting and spending. In their eagerness to secure immunity from such contagions they had embraced ignorance, and in their dread of being poisoned by received ideas they clung to a world view conceived entirely in terms of their own limiting preconceptions and prejudices. They believed devoutly in the venality of the press, in the mediocrity of all politicians, and the second-rateness of the political game, in the greed and stupidity of all businessmen and traders, the deadening influence of science and the scientific outlook, and the menace of bigness as such. They had a particular horror of everything to do with the United States, the possibilities of easy money that it seemed to offer apart, a feeling so far beyond words that it could as a rule only be expressed by the wisp of a breath drawn sharply through closed teeth. All experience but their own, and that of the chosen few who, as they did, lived for art, was vulgar and without real meaning, and so was all “mere” action and activity. They were above that sort of thing, entirely.
I listened to my father’s explanation of the Odles with mixed feelings. In it I felt that I could recognise fragments of things that I had met with before. Most of his state-of-the-nation novels, of which Tono Bungay and Kipps are the types, include somewhere within them fiercely expressed attacks on the softness and inconsequence of the privileged children of the small winners in the social lottery, the men and women who, like Dorothy Richardson’s father, had taken the inherited fruits of the upward struggles of their parents and cashed them in so that they could live like the gentry, without toiling or spinning, as comfortably as their modest unearned incomes would allow.
As my father had talked on. sticking to the pretence that Dorothy and Alan Odle were his subjects, I found it increasingly obvious that I was going to have to ask him the question why sooner or later: what had this most peculiar evening been all about? He surely couldn’t have arranged it for his own pleasure or for mine. When I finally nerved myself to put it to him, what came out was my guess at the answer to the riddle, the suggestion that he wanted me to take Dorothy and Alan as a warning of what playing the artist could do to you. He looked at me from under his eyebrows with his head tilted a little forward in a way he had, and for a moment I was afraid that he might be going to lie to me. But if he considered the possibility, he very soon abandoned it.
“Yes,” he said, “that’s pretty much what I had in mind.” This exchange marked the start of an era of frankness and plain speaking between us in which we achieved something like intimacy, and in which I learned a great deal about him that led me to love and respect him even more than I might have been naturally inclined to do. It was not, unhappily, to last for very long, and it ended badly, in the way that I have already described in giving my account of his last illness.
… in the following year [1949], when chance took me into the neighbourhood of her Cornish home for the summer, I looked up Dorothy Richardson in the hope that she might be inclined to either modify or add something to the unflattering portrait of my father as someone silly and obtuse that she had drawn in the latter part of Pilgrimage. She was then in her seventy-sixth year, and her age, the austerities of wartime, and the loss of her husband eighteen months earlier had all combined to pull her down. Alan Odle had gone out for a morning stroll one day in the middle of February 1948, a month after keeping his sixtieth birthday, and had dropped dead at the roadside before he had put more than a few hundred yards between him and their front door.
Dorothy had been dumbfounded by the abruptness with which he had been taken off, and still more so to find that she was the one who had been left alone. After a short period, in which she took refuge from the unacceptable fact in silence, she emerged to establish a substitute presence for Alan in her existence by plunging into the task of making an inventory of his drawings and designs. She had always thought of him as a generously creative spirit, and it astonished her to find how little there was to his oeuvre. One portfolio after another that was supposed to hold either a season’s or a year’s work, or the near realisation of some major undertaking for this private press or that, had proved to have virtually nothing in it. She had no alternative but to conclude that either Alan Odle had been a dedicated idler with a costive talent or the portfolios had been systematically stripped by thieves over the years. Understandably, she preferred to embrace the second of these possibilities, and, as understandably, she dropped the task of putting the disappointing legacy in order. In its place she assumed another, on which she was still theoretically engaged when I sought her out. At the time she was at pains to keep up her pretence that Pilgrimage was still a work in progress, and that her writing was leaving her very little free time. I could choose whether I would rather come in to take tea with her or look in for an hour or so after dinner —she never broke into her working rhythms by taking time out of her working hours for social lunches.
So it was as we talked over the tea things—in a setting closely resembling that of Adrian Allinson’s marvellous double portrait of the Odles as they were in the middle thirties —that she told me that what she had actually been doing for the past several months was to crawl back through Pilgrimage as it had been printed up in Dent’s collected edition, searching that text for such printer’s errors as might have escaped her attention and the eyes of its proofreaders. I do not know in just what spirit I asked if she was finding herself pleased with what she was having to read so closely as a piece of writing, but I was glad that I had done so, since she instantly told me that she was astonished to find how really good it was. “Sometimes,” she said, “it just makes me crow with pleasure.” She was, she went on, beginning to understand why the novel had been so highly thought of by so many people when Duckworth first brought it out. This was something she had not really understood before—she had, she now realised, created a work of art almost inadvertently as a consequence of her absolute determination to give an entirely honest account of the development of a single mind; she didn’t believe that anyone else had come as close as she had to a solution of the problem of the point of view, not even Proust.
My father, she went on, patting my arm to show that she meant no offence, even though she had to speak her mind, had never even begun to realise that there was such a problem. This was because he had believed that there was such a thing as science, and that it had a voice that he could borrow. He had known that there was something lacking in his make-up that gave his own voice a hollow tone. The trouble had been that he did not believe in himself. That was because he had no proper interior life. He had not wished to look into himself, and to explore his own being, because if he did so he would be brought up against the fact of that deficiency. It was because he knew himself to be a hollow man that he had made so much of science. He had used scientific knowledge as spirits at séances used the megaphones provided for them by mediums, to compensate for the lack of resonance of their voices. It was his awareness that she possessed what he so completely lacked that had made him so dependent upon her, and so demanding of what she had to give. He had wanted to live through her, and he would have sucked her dry if she had not had the courage to break away from him. It had been a hard thing for her to do, because there had been the pathos of something half-grown and tender about him. In their most intimate moments their relationship had been that of mother and child, and it had been agony for her to turn her back on his pleadings for what was basically comfort and protection. But she had been forced to do it. She would not have survived had she weakened.
People were apt to take him for a thinker who was interested in ideas, but he had once told her that she thought too much and that she was messing up her mind by entertaining too many’ new ideas. He had never been as open-minded or as intellectual as she had, and he had often turned to her for fuller explanations of concepts that were too difficult-for him in the forms in which he had encountered them. He had once told her—it had been jokingly, of course, but he often expressed his deeper feelings in that fashion because he shrank from open displays of his real emotions—that if he were to be allowed to have only one of the many women who had figured in his life to share in a rerun of it, she would have to be his choice. He had said this because he knew in his heart that she had understood him, and the irresolvable conflict between his instinctive and emotional real self and his assumed rational identity, better than anyone else.
It occurred to me while I was listening to all this that it was something that she had been through so often in her mind that she had come to believe in it as the reality of that experience of the winter and spring of 1906—1907 in which she had spent some scattered hours with my father trying, and failing, to achieve a few moments of purely physical harmony. I diverted the flow of her recollections and she was soon telling me how appallingly my father had behaved at the time of ‘poor Crosland’s” death, and how she had been forced to stand up to him once again about that. We parted amiably on the understanding that I would come to have tea with her again later in the week.
We met again several times in the course of my holiday, usually over her teacups, but once over one of those ration-stretching meals that she used to take every so often at the small boardinghouse close to her cottage. The experience of getting to know her was a curious one, deeply coloured by the moment. In the European theatre the war had come to a flat end, giving very few people anything like a sense of victory. It was as if it had gone a long way off to die. The letdown was to be felt with a peculiar poignancy in places like that in which Dorothy was living, of which one had an ancient acquaintance.
I had known her village as a child, at the age when summers seem to last forever. It forms part of the landscape which provides the background of sensation to John Betjeman’s cliff top and beach poems of adolescence. The tide of war had swept over it to leave behind the usual wrack of mysteriously intended enclosures hemmed in by rotting barbed wire, vandalized temporary hutments, and dilapidated pieces of worn-out heavy equipment, such as concrete mixers and earth movers. Through this military slug trail the true spirit of the place manifested itself with haunting insistence, offering one stimulus after another to the recollection of childhood happiness. It was not possible to respond to any one of them without reviving the insistent thought that in those lost years something had gone terribly wrong in the world that must never be allowed to happen to it again. It was not just that so much more had been broken, wasted, and spoiled, this time than last, it was the warning proffered by the manner of its ending, in those two unthinkably destructive explosions, that if there was to be another trial of total war, the increase in the loss of lives and the wastage of laboriously created things would be so much greater that it could mean an end to living and creating as we understood such things. This is, of course, to take a subjective view of what was in the wind in those years, but I believe that it can, nonetheless, fairly be said to reflect the national mood of the time, and the general feeling throughout western Europe, that the world could no longer afford to run the risks entailed in letting a general war happen every so often, and that both men and nations would have to find more sensible ways of living together than those which we had grown up to think of as natural and inescapable.
My teas with Dorothy took me into another mental country. Her flight from the reality of Alan Odle’s death into the text of the collected edition of all the volumes of her serial novel constituted more than a mere duplication of her flight into Sussex from the problems of her London life of 1907. This time she was trying to get right out of the world of common experience in order to start life all over again inside her own fantasy.
Dorothy was, though I wasn’t aware of it then, going through a period of intense mental activity in which she was suffering from confusions of thought that brought her close to the condition in which her mother had done away with herself. This was a prelude to the lapse into senility that lay not far ahead of her, but that was not obvious. She still seemed to be her immensely and confidently talkative self, and the only hint she offered that anything might be going wrong was given by a heightening of her tendency to end by talking about herself no matter what subject had started her off.
It was clear that she had experienced the war, but as clear that she had done so in her own way. Its focal point had been in Ealing while she was there, and in Constantine Bay when she had left London for Cornwall. She was convinced that her Cornish retreat had been the pivot on which the Allied effort had turned in the last year of the fighting in Europe. It had been there, on her doorstep, all around Padstow, that the army of liberation had been concentrated. She was marginally aware that what had been going on had troubled the even flow of a great many lives, and to bring it home to me what extraordinary departures from the normal the general disruption had enforced she told me how, one day towards the end of the conflict, she had gone into a café in Padstow with Alan, and not finding a table free, had taken seats at a table at which a young soldier was sitting alone. He had turned out to be the son of a couple that she and Alan had known in earlier years but with whom they had long been out of touch! There had been so many such happenings while the war was going on, occurrences so unlikely as to defy all rational explanation. One was compelled to believe that there had been a temporary lowering of the barriers between the worlds of the normal and the paranormal.
And it had not ended with the war. Her friend Mac, the faith healer, had achieved some of his most remarkable cures in the previous eighteen months, even though he was a tired man. . and she could not forget the strangely quizzical and appealing look that Alan had given her just before he left the cottage in which they had then been living for the last time. He had turned in the doorway before he had walked out to his death to ask her, in a peculiarly meaning tone, if it was not unusually cold. It was as if he had known something . . . The scientists for all their talk about having the answer to everything had no explanations for such moments when their rules broke down.
As Dorothy maundered on after this fashion I spent part of my time marvelling at what there could have been in my father’s make-up that had made it possible for him to put up with her patronising condescensions for so long, and the other part in growing almost fond of her and her unerring instinct for the wrong end of any stick. When I left Cornwall at the end of that summer I fully intended to keep in touch with her, but it was my fate to be out of the country for the next several years. When I returned I was sorry to find that she had died while I was away. At the beginning of the fifties her manner towards those she judged to be her inferiors had become too overbearing to be borne with, and she began to run into practical difficulties that made it impossible for her to go on living by herself. Her relatives had felt compelled to uproot her from the Cornish niche in which she felt that she had come to belong, in order to place her in a South London nursing home where they would be able to visit her more easily. She went under protest, and survived the move for little more than three years, for most of which she seems to have been largely inaccessible.
It would be hard to say how dotty she actually became, since those who had her in their care had been so poorly briefed for the particular job that they were able to take her claim to have been a novelist for part of a pattern of delusions. When she took to telling her attendants that my father would soon be visiting her, and that she was going to let him know how disrespectfully they were treating her so that he would see to it that she was paid the attention due to her as somebody special, her threatenings were taken for part of the pattern. Poor old thing, they said to each other, on her good days she knows Wells has been dead for donkey’s years just as well as the rest of us. When she died, in 1957, she had outlived him by just over a decade.
I have given all this space to someone whose real role in my father’s life was that of a personal copy editor rather than a love, or even friend, partly because the relationship illuminates a certain aspect of his character, and partly because her use of it as the basis for a private mythology provides a perfect example of how it is with fabulists— those people who deal with unacceptable truths, by modifying them again and again until they have been transformed into more negotiable material. I wished to make it plain, by showing just what Dorothy did in the way of substituting her daydreams for her experience of life, that what I am saying that my mother [Rebecca West] did as a matter of settled habit is neither so very unusual nor, given her circumstances, all that hard to understand.
The essential differences between the two women are, of course, very marked. But they are differences of scale rather than of kind, on a par with those that distinguish the drawing-room soloist from the prima donna who can fill and dominate the largest opera houses. But just as those two examples have singing in common, so Dorothy and my mother have their compulsion to improve the truth, and to persist in its improvement, between them. I would not for a moment suggest that their both being women has anything whatever to do with it—the transformation of the truth was the name of the game where the self-images of Gissing and Bland were concerned, and my father’s Autocracy of Mr. Parham is a very direct critique of his own tendencies in the field. My only purpose in stressing the large part that fabulation has played in the lives and works of these two women has been to justify my contention that neither should be accepted as a reliable source for information about my father’s character or behaviour. Recent biographers who have done so have been led far astray. It is my experience that neither woman can be trusted absolutely in anything that is in the nature of autobiography. and that both are at their least trustworthy in matters having to do with my father. They reveal themselves in their statements, but little else.