Everyman magazine ran a series of articles titled “How Writers Work” in the fall of 1931. In its 22 October issue, Louise Morgan visited Dorothy Richardson and Alan Odle at their very modest cottage in St. John’s Wood in London (near Lord’s Cricket Ground and what would later become the Beatles’ Abbey Road studio.
There are two innovators in English prose of this century—James Joyce and Dorothy M. Richardson. Whatever happens to the other writers of our day, these two will survive because they have not only done something new with the English language, but have opened up entirely new areas of discovery to the human mind. It would be difficult to say which of them has wrought the greater achievement. But there is one sharp difference between them. James Joyce is acclaimed on two continents, and Dorothy Richardson is, as she says without malice or regret but with a kind of matter-of-fact good humour, “entirely forgotten,” though she is at the height of her powers.
It is strange that this woman, who is one of the most vital and creative human beings living, one of the few women of genius the world has produced, should come and go in London without the smallest comment. There are, of course, those who know her work intimately, and to these she is an incomparably productive and fascinating writer. But the majority of readers hardly know her name, and have never met that colossal, terrifyingly alive, unforgettable character which she has added to the small group of the immortals in literature—Miriam Henderson. She has written nine chapter-volumes of Pilgrimage, the story of Miriam, and the tenth, Dawn’s Left Hand, is appearing shortly from Messrs. Duckworth. This firm, by the way, deserves the grateful thanks of all lovers of literature for the disinterested way in which it has continued to publish Miss Richardson’s work in spite of the fact that it has done so almost invariably at a loss.
Dorothy Richardson has lived the sort of life that would have long since killed any but the dedpest-planted and hardiest genius. She is married to Alan Odle (pronounced Odell) an artist whose beautiful work is as little known as are her books. They spend eight months of the year in a shack in the lee of a great cliff that stands four-square to the sweep of the Atlantic. She does, besides the necessary journalism, all their housework and cooking. For the four summer months they come to London, where they live in a dilapidated tenement within walking distance of Lord’s. Here again she does the housework, though occasionally in the evening they go out for “a crumb round the corner ”
The major part of her life then has been taken up with the everyday things that most of us on our complacent vanity think do not matter. She has missed all the inestimable advantages of seeing the latest plays, hearing the freshest scandals, commenting on the newest fashions and fads.
And yet to dash away from an office buzzing with the political and literary news of the moment and to come into her presence is like waking out of a heated, fantastic dream to the reassurance and freshness of reality. To describe this quality of her personality, which instantly makes one aware of the things that matter, would be to describe also what she has done for English literature.
The first impression one has of her is of colour. She has masses of fair hair, coiled flat round and round her head, and her pale skin has a golden tinge. She wears neat, moulded clothes that give her compactness, and her sleeves are always cut short for convenience in work. When she speaks, the sense of colour, warm honey-golden colour, is accentuated. And when she is really interested, her thought radiates through her, filling her face with glowing light. The effect is almost magical; there is something more than human in this golden incandescence. As she talks, instinctively she uses her hands and bare arms in gestures that have a Duse-like quality. Her hands and arms are nobly shaped, and the beautifully modelled, strong fingers bear no trace of toil.
“We love London,” she said. “We both have London in our bones. When we first arrive, though both of us are enchanted with the prospect of meeting friends, we lie low and tell no one. We just go about staring. We cruise round on omnibuses, drinking it all in. In Cornwall, with the rain battering on the roof and a gale threatening to rip us from our foundations, we read of London fogs and imagine ourselves wandering in the strange world they create. Sometimes we wring our hands and tear our hair for the missed picture shows. Not only the Royal Academy winter shows, but the little exhibitions, especially of French old masters, and modern work…. In Cornwall we have nothing—no wireless, no gramophone, no nothing. Want them. All the people there have wireless, every one of them. Every cottage and bungalow has its pole. We hated these poles that suddenly sprang up everywhere. Till we noticed that often, those within our sight had, morning and evening, a bird at the top, rejoicing in his height. There are no trees. So now they are ‘bird-poles’ and we don’t mind them.
“The result of living for years in that country is that when you find yourself in Surrey, for instance, you want to clean up the landscape. Lovely as it is in its particular way, with its rich, softly-wooded hills, it seems cluttered and frilly and generally overloaded with detail after the bareness of the Cornish coast and hinterland. It’s all clean lines. It’s not a painter’s but a draughtsman’s country. The massed effect of trees around a house can almost be like poisonous weeds. You can’t see, can’t hear, and can’t breathe for these masses of soft trees that close in on you, that hold the darkness. We love the Cornish people, too, and they like us. They no longer regard us as furriners, but as parishers that stop along o’ while. These Cornish folk are so old, so aristocratic. They are never surprised at anything; they never stare. You can be as queer as you like there, and they never appear to notice. They have an instinctive acceptance of things. And how charming they are, irresistibly charming. They speak you fair. We don’t like to see the squint-eyed old cottages with their silent, inviolate walls and square deep-set windows giving place to bungalows. There’s something wrong about being always on the level; not having the two Worlds of upstairs and down. There’s a sort of slackness about it, a sort of hugger—much of a muchness—mugger.”
“What is your day in Cornwall like?”
“Alan works all morning when there are commissions, sometimes in the afternoon, too. My morning is various, as the chief meal occurs at midday and the traditions set up by summer visitors bring all the tradespeople to the door several times a week In the afternoon, after his self-imposed task of washing-up, Alan is driven forth for the walk he fortunately loves and that is really necessary to balance his sedentary occupation.
“Then I become ‘housy’ and the room we work in is transformed for tea. Lamps and stoves and oil-cooker behave their best with daily attention. Coal must be cracked and wood broken – firewood is not supplied. Then comes the great festival of the day. We draw our chairs up to the fire. There is the London daily paper, and we read it straight through from the births to the last advertisement. We put in a good deal of time at tea, from an hour and a half to two hours. Books? I read Goethe last winter for the first time. I was smitten with amazement to find how modern is Wilhelm Meister there is a description of the novel for instance, that refers to the novel of today in all. its modernist modernity. And we talk. You can talk down there outside space and time, and if we don’t as it were ring the bell, we go on forever. But the shock of discovering that it is five o’clock in the-morning can’t happen too often. It throws the whole day out of gear.”
“When do you write?”
“After tea. We sit round the lamp at the main table till supper-time and work for a varying time. After supper every evening we play draughts. For twelve years we’ve played draughts after supper. We’re so equal that the game usually ends in a draw. It’s a life completely cut off from the world. Sometimes for days on end we are shut in with the din of the elements. The gales come for our shack head-on. It’s like being on board ship. The roof is corrugated iron, and the rain arid wind batter on it, and all we can do is pray that the rafters will hold. The place seems to cower under it. The noise is so tremendous at times that we have to do this (she cupped her mouth in her hands) to be heard across the room. A ship’s captain told us once that he’d seen nothing outside the tropics like the storms we sometimes have. One record gale, lasting four days, ended with darkness, thunder and lightning, and hailstones as, large as walnuts. Five hundred panes of glass were broken in the parish. Then a day of perfect summer stillness. Blue. Larks going up. (All the winter small flowers are to be found amongst the dune grasses.) Only on the beach will there be any traces of the storm. Our golden dunes will be covered with a thick coating of dirty grey dried spume. Those beautiful seaweeds, long thongs with ribbons at the end, are smashed and torn to bite. There are hundreds of dead anemones along the tide-line, dead seagulls, that have been dashed by the wind against the cliffs and rocks, and once we saw two young seals, flung up on the sand, swollen and dead. There is perpetual contrast. Din of sea on rocks, rain on roof; wind howling, shrieking, battering—we know what sailors mean by ‘great guns’— and then peace. A stillness in which you can listen out across the world.”
“Did you write your first chapter-volume of Pilgrimage in Cornwall?”
“Yes, the Beresfords (the novelist, J. D. Beresford, and his wife) lent me a cottage. It was haunted, by the way. An old chapel converted. The first time I was alone in the house, with the back door locked, I heard somebody stirring sauce in a pan in the kitchen. It was a violent, realistic, near sound. I heard the impatient bang of the spoon on the pot at the end. When I went down to the kitchen, there was nobody there. I was enchanted. ‘Here it is, at last!’ I said to myself. Later, when I told the Beresfords, they looked at each other, and told me how they had found a German friend who was sensitive to that sort of thing and had been left alone for an hour, sitting in the garden because she couldn’t endure the influences in the house. The only other sign of the ghost was that every night at exactly the same hour, nine o’clock, there would come a thud below the floor at intervals. It would sound nearer and nearer until it got to the middle of the floor, and then stopped. My only contact with humanity was the weekly visit of the woman who brought my supplies. My method of feeding was simple. I bought some tongue in a glass, and, when I was hungry, cut myself a slice. There was bread and an occasional herring. Once the woman cooked me a chicken. It was wonderful! I never saw a newspaper, and never read a word. I just sat about and was happy the whole time. It was utter bliss-utter, absolute undiluted bliss from morning to night. Suddenly the world had dropped away. But never had humanity been so close. Everything took on a terrific intensity”
“Would you call those ideal conditions for working?”
“Ideally, everything should favour collaboration between the conscious and the unconscious. Deliberately to seek ideal conditions might be fatal. They have fallen my lot just that once, while I was writing Pointed Roofs. Winter solitude and inaccessibility. I mean solitude. Servantless, visitorless, and except for a single agent, tradesmanless. Short of this, the avoidance of anything that breaks the momentum of the unconscious once it is set going. Yet it is possible not merely to remain undisturbed by disturbances, but also to endure the devastating results of a constant breaking of this momentum without quite reaching despair. Ideal conditions are more easily obtained by men than by women. However provided with service, space, leisure, a woman will not entirely escape permanent preoccupations with the welfare of her entourage, both animate and inanimate. These preoccupations, plus solicitude, are asset as well as tax, of course. They are, nevertheless, the main reason why nothing short of a dehumanized solitude will serve the woman at work. And they are, also of course, the secret of the relatively small amount of first-class art produced by women not only in the very domestic past, but at any time. All they produce is produced in the teeth of demands from which most men for good or ill, are free.”
“And is the production itself different too?”
“The woman-consciousness is, I think, an utterly different type, and has been but little expressed. Most women writers exploit sex or sex-humour and have an eye on the interest of the male reader. I put Jane Austen as an artist up in the sky above everybody, but even she exploits her sex-humour. Those are not my phrases. They belong to John Cowper Powys, who has just published an essay on my work. He understands the woman at work. The Brontes ‘exploit their sex-eroticism.’ That’s another phrase of his. My phrase for what the woman-consciousness tries to express is, I suppose, ‘life in its own right at first hand.’”
“When did you first become aware of what you wanted to express?”
“I had put down a mass of stuff, and used none I of it. I must make a monstrous confession. I was feeling that everything that men had written to date, was somehow, irrelevant. Amongst the novelists my men-gods had been Conrad and James. They stood very high in my sky. But for years I felt that in a special way there was unsatisfactoriness, an irrelevance about all of them….
“When I first began writing Pilgrimage I Intended to take on in the usual way. Then in Cornwall, in solitude, when the world fell completely away, and when I was focussing intensely, I suddenly realized that I couldn’t go on in the usual way, telling about Miriam, describing her. There she was as I first saw her, going upstairs. But who was there to describe her? It came, to me suddenly. It was an extraordinary moment when I realized what could and what could not be done. Then it became1 more and more thrilling as I saw what was there. And hopeless of making it clear. When I sent what I had done to Beresford, he said ‘It’s an amazingly interesting experiment, so far; it’s time now to let something happen. When the book was finished it was sent to a publisher who returned it because he ‘failed to discover, what it was about.’ I had already realized the impossibility of publication but I knew I must go on.. You get a moment of feeling committed. Together with the curious impersonal joy. it brings is that feeling of hopelessness, the kind you have when you are trying to describe a landscape or anything that moves you deeply. So I hid the returned MS. in a trunk. And nothing further would have been done—sending a book to a publisher is like sending a portion of your interior to the Home Office Analyst— had hot Mr. Beresford, persuaded me to let him send. it to Edward Garnett who liked and classified it as ‘feminine impressionism.’ Finally it was published.”
Does anything at all of Dorothy Richardson’s magic come through these living words of hers nailed to a dead sheet of paper? I doubt it. One needs to hear the vibrations of her voice that seem to set infinite waves of sound in motion, to see her fine gestures … to feel the magnetic power that flows from her like a palpable thing. She can endow the meanest object with significance and even with majesty. A teacloth, a street-cry, a new hat, may start her off on a philosophical discussion, or draw from her a vivid bit of lyrical description or a witty human story. Her power of talk is endlessly fresh, varied,1 entertaining, provocative, informative, inspiring…. And through.it all runs her phenomenal vitality, her immeasurable, irresistible good humour, the benign good humour of the creature that knows itself close to life.