Horace Gregory’s 1967 book Dorothy Richardson: An Adventure in Self-Discovery remains one of the best introductions to Richardson and Pilgrimage. In his 1971 memoir The House on Jefferson Street, Gregory recalled his first acquaintance with Dorothy Richardson and her husband Alan Odle in London in the 1930s.
Through Bryher and H. D., Marya [Gregory’s wife, the poet Marya Zaturenska] and I were invited to have tea with Dorothy Richardson and her husband, Alan Odle, at their rooms in Queens Terrace, St. John’s Wood. Queens Terrace was in a dreary neighborhood, almost a slum; the dry summer had burnt its grasses and had left the smell of yellow dust hanging in air. I had heard that St. John’s Wood once had an art school at its center, but by 1934, the art school had become a memory of things past; many of its students had marched off to war against the Kaiser, and had not returned. At Queens Terrace, it looked as though the young and able-bodied had left that part of the world forever. The Terrace buildings seemed ready to fall to ashes: one might well imagine that winter winds rushed through them, and that summer suns had baked their rafters black. Certainly, they were precarious living quarters.
Feeble as the tenements looked, they did not seem very old. They resembled smirched and sallow Victorian teenagers, afflicted with rickets. They were probably built near the end of Victoria’s reign, the evil work of contractors bent on making money in a hurry. This was the kind of housing for the “underprivileged” that gave substance to William Morris’s brand of Socialism and had been cited as evidence in Bernard Shaw’s prophecies of the British Empire’s decline and fall.
After crossing an area of yellowed grass and leaves, I sounded the knocker on the half-opened door at 32—it had probably been left ajar to welcome us. At the knock Odle, on enormously long legs, leaped downstairs. The color of his skin was chalk-white; his long nose and jaw cast green shadows against his thin cheek and neck. As he stood before us, with a long and bony forefinger raised in greeting, he reminded me of an early Renaissance Angel of the Annunciation.
With exaggerated deference, he introduced himself, and said that Miss Richardson was lying down, but would be up in a few moments to join us at tea. He would serve the tea things in the living room upstairs. The room was divided by a wide-paneled screen, whose half-circle enclosed us at the table, and around one edge of it came Odle, moving sinuously, with a well-filled tray. A short time later Dorothy Richardson herself quietly emerged from behind the screen. Beside her husband, she seemed short and stout. Behind glittering, rimless eyeglasses, her hazel eyes shed good will and benevolence.
There was one feature of her appearance that struck us as odd. Her great mass of Anglo-Saxon golden hair had been gathered into a coarse, fish-net-woven, green snood, held fast by a green ribbon, tied in a bow beneath her chin. No doubt, the snood saved time in dressing her hair, but the bow beneath her chin gave her the look of wearing an invisible Victorian bonnet. (Though we saw her several times that summer, she was never without it.) It was obviously efficient in keeping her hair close to her head: her wearing it and her lack of concern for stylish dress made her seem curiously masculine.
Though kindly in her speech—and one had the impression she seldom felt the need of raising her voice—her conversation had a Johnsonian ring, and I suspected that she set herself out to shock us by saying that her favorite books were Little Lord Fauntleroy and The Girl of the Limberlost. She believed that both revealed interesting and little known aspects of the American psyche. For instance, little Lord Fauntleroy’s passionate attachment for all things English was so very American! I refused to rise to her bait, and Odle intervened by remarking that he loved crime and had been wholly fascinated by Sanctuary.
Odle’s observation was in very nearly perfect counterpoint to his wife’s commentary: it was in the balance of Faulkner against Frances Hodgson Burnett; Odle entranced by American sadism, lawlessness, and savagery, and Miss Richardson intrigued by whatever she had seen of American innocence and childishness.
She then spoke of her meeting Hemingway in Paris, and of her being charmed by In Our Time, while he, in turn, had expressed his admiration for the early books of her Pilgrimage. This, I thought to myself, was a natural liking and affinity, for both had made an art of writing refreshed conversational prose —prose at an opposite pole from the writings of Virginia Woolf and Lytton Strachey. She had noted that in Paris Hemingway spent far less time than his compatriots did in the cafes of Montparnasse; he was too busy at his typewriter. She thought his adolescent emotions peculiarly American, which she had also discovered in the novels of Sinclair Lewis. Although she stopped short of saying so, it was clear enough that she thought of them as agile, gifted children.
Before we left Queens Terrace, Odle invited us to join them for drinks on an evening next week in a Baker Street night club.
Alan Odle had earned a precarious living as an artist, contributing caricature sketches of London’s bohemia to Vanity Fair. His pen and ink drawings were reminiscent of the flowering, billowing style of Beardsley’s illustrations, and before he married Miss Richardson, he had worn velvet jackets, and had kept late hours talking and drinking at the Cafe Royale, on Regent Street. Like Miss Richardson, he had made an “escape” from a suburban middle-class family. Yet he lacked her strength and self-discipline in coming to grips with daily living. He was far too much of a “gentleman” to be bohemian, and too much of a free spirit to tolerate suburban respectability. His vaguely salacious drawings were not naughty enough to draw the attention of censorship, and not good enough in their own right to redeem their naughtiness. 1 believe Miss Richardson’s care and protection of Odle showed a maternal, and, perhaps, Puritanical bent, for she hoped, I think, to reform his more careless habits, and to modify his childish tendencies toward Satanism. The poverty in which they lived represented her ideas of thriftiness, for she put her money in savings banks to provide funds for Alan after her death.
The following week, at nine o’clock, we were in the street made famous by Sherlock Holmes. I had the impression of passing many storefronts. The street seemed as empty and as edged with fear as an urban scene in one of Chirico’s early paintings. We found the number given to me by Odle. I pressed a button and a door swung open revealing a flight of carpeted stairs. Up we walked to enter a barn-like room, furnished with deep-pile carpet, small, round tables, and black, leather-covered club chairs, easy to sink into, and a difficult seat from which to rise again. Miss Richardson and Odle were waiting for us, an open pack of Gold Flakes on the table between them, a pitcher of water and two small glasses of whiskey within reach.
Seated here, Dorothy Richardson seemed more in her element, and primed for conversation, than at Queens Terrace. Here, she was mistress of a larger scene by virtue of a flow of talk. Here she seemed to resume the monologue of her many-volumed Pilgrimage, which told of her hard-won independence, of Beethoven and Bach, of the trials of translating Proust, of mischievous turns in the character of Gide, of the merits of Goethe, particularly in his novels: names floated up and down the firmament of her talk as if they were angels on Jacob’s Ladder, bearing flaming or extinguished torches. It was talk the like of which was seldom heard anywhere, least of all in New York of the 1930s. (I was to read later in her letters that H. G. Wells, Havelock Ellis, and May Sinclair, all remarkable talkers themselves, had left their impress on the ranges of her conversational style.) She was poor and part of her earnings came from her translations, commissioned by publishers, of German and French fiction. Her only “sin against the light” was her belief that her translations (which were at best no more than glorified hack-work), were not a waste of energies that should have been given to Pilgrimage. Her temperament seemed very Anglo-Saxon: her convictions leaned neither to Mosley right nor to Communist left, but to deeply-rooted Toryism, colored pink by a tincture of anarchist feeling. Dorothy Richardson and Dame Edith Sitwell (whom I met some twelve years later) were, I thought, among the last of English eccentrics. In their boldness, in their lack of concern for public opinion, both were effective. They had behind them—though neither participated in it—England’s violent suffragist movement, which, in moments of self-doubt, probably strengthened their ability to speak with authority and decision.