In 1931, the Welsh novelist, philosopher, and overall force of nature John Cowper Powys published in The Adelphi magazine a two-part assessment of Dorothy Richardson’s work based on the nine volumes of Pilgrimage that had been released up to then. The two articles were then combined and published in Dorothy Richardson, the first critical work on Pilgrimage issued in book form. With the help of Rebecca Mooney, I’ve put together some extracts from Powys’s book, leaving aside his more lyrical/mystical passages.
Like that of many another writer whose method of approach is too subtle to be fully grasped at first sight, like that of Wordsworth and of Paterand of Proust, the slow-moving, creative power of Dorothy Richardson has little by little come into its own. Dealing with the “imponderables” that mankind in the mass is so reluctant to appraise at their true value Miss Richardson’s unique genius is becoming a test for the self-weighing of modern minds. It is not that she has founded a school, for no one can imitate her; nor that she has become the idol of a coterie, for her readers are of many varieties of temperament and taste. It is rather that, like Montaigne, who had the same brand of egoism — with the difference that his is a superlatively masculine egoism — Miss Richardson has sunk a new shaft into a new stratum of material, and has thereby challenged all writers to follow, upon their own soil., a kindred method. And so integral to her own peculiar slant of vision is the particular kind of “artesian well” she has chosen to sink into the substance of reality, that numbers of her contemporaries, without either thought or desire to copy, are profoundly influenced by her.
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Her nine volumes are nine chapters of a universally significant psychic biography: the biography of a solitary human soul. Such is her subject-matter.
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What, then, has Dorothy Richardson done that puts her into a different category and makes her masterpiece a rival — along its own peculiar path — of these great world-famous productions?
This is the rub, the crux, the gist of the whole matter. Dorothy Richardson is our first pioneer a completely new direction. What she has one as never been done before. She has drawn her inspiration neither from man-imitating cleverness nor from narcissistic feminine charm but from the abyss of the feminine subconscious. Thus, in estimating the ultimate value of her Pilgrimage the task of appreciative criticism itself becomes an experiment in spiritual metempsychosis.
Let us whisper the truth. Without a hard, cold, clear analytical core of the most ferocious masculine reason existing, Dorothy Richardson herself would never have been able to articulare these things. All authentic human genius is, in some degree, bi-sexual; and it is only because she is the first consciously to turn the two elements upon each other in repricoal fury of psychological interpretation that her achievement is so startling, so important, and so new. All the way through this extraordinary book the abysmal difference between the soul of a man and the soul of a woman is emphasized and enlarged upon. Upon this “tragic tension,” as Keyserling well calls it, depends the whole method of Dorothy Richardson’s art. And it is because she has against her the entire weight of man-made civilization, or, as Spengler would put it, of our own particular man-made Faustian Culture, that it is so difficult to win for her, for her daring pioneer-genius, the recognition that we give so quickly and so easily to conventional charm and conventional masculine cleverness.
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Perhaps no writer has ever devoted so much attention to the “atmospheric” aspects of her backgrounds. The way the morning light falls upon furniture and bric-a-brac in rooms; the way the evening light falls from passage-windows upon staircases and woodwork; the way shadows fall and slide and drift and lift and sink upon roadways and pavements; the way lamps and tires and candlelight affect the psychic temper of a room; the way the greyness of a colourless sky impregnates the simplest things in a room, the very tea-cups on the table, the very wash-basin on an attic chest-of-drawers; the way the mistiness of an autumn afternoon glides throug the cracks and crannies of the most shuttered and cluttered boarding-house, bringing with it a smell of dead leaves, of leaves that have travelled far from the trees that shed them; the mystery of the rain is felt behind closed windows as the drops follow one another down the streaming panes; the way such rain is different from all other rain; all these things are part of the very essence of her revelation as to what women, in their subconscious nature, respond to day by day. And London itself! How different is this London, of a woman’s of profoundest consciousness, from the London of Dickens, or the London of Henry James, or the London of Galsworthy. And yet these books gather themselves about London and drink up the atmospheres of London as if they were humming-bird moths at a huge smoky flower.
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Now the remarkable thing is that the heroine of Miss Richardson’s great work has an identity so real that it is only comparable to the identity in ourselves of which we alone are aware. This remains true even though most of her being, even though all of her being, be drawn from the interior of Miss Richardson’s consciousness of herself.”
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The creation of Miriam Henderson has sent these books forth, through the English-speaking world, “numbering the intellects,” and a whole new way of taking life is revealed here for those who have the wit to catch its drift. They [Richardson’s books] are much more than a novel; much more than a study in feminine psychology. They contain the seed of a new philosophy of the senses, indeed of a new philosophy of life.”
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Dorothy Richardson, to the most devoted appreciation, offers no such ‘purpose,’ no such hope of a rational ’rounding off,’ no such mounting-up to an architectural denouement.” He goes on to say this is a strength and indeed “her genius” because “that is the nature of all women. Women represent the eternal growth of life itself. And of life, as we know, there is necessarily no end. The only end of the pilgrimage of Miriam that one can contemplate with equanimity is Miriam’s own death.”
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After all it is possible that the astonishing “verisimilitude” she evokes is far less based upon real remembered actuality than seems to appear. It may easily be her realistic artfulness that makes everything seem … “for remembrance.” Certainly if they were only nice, refined, selected transcripts of life that come up — like the little green growths adhering to a sod of earth above a gleaming shade — when she sinks into her subconscious being, there would not be half this convincingness. That is the answer to the fastidious ones and the vicious ones who are so often shocked as they turn her pages. It is just these unweeded, unraked-over lumps of raw sod, that give to her magical wild-flowers their overpowering fragrance. Certainly she is one of the master-realists of ourCertainly she is one of the master-realists of our tongue; and if there were not so many passages that the frivolous could call ‘dull’ this realism would not work its gradual, its insidious, its saturating spell upon our minds.”
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One grand advantage does the peculiar proud-humbleness of this writer give her above her sophisticated contemporaries — above Virginia Woolf, above the Sitwells, above Aldous Huxley. It enables her to retain her strong, fresh, exuberant, child-like zest for the old simple great things in philosophy and literature. She has not any need, as so many of us seem to have in these jaded days, to stir up her response to life by all manner of tricky “originalities.” There is a certain obstinate, humorous, massive, deliberate naivete about her approach to life that is not in the least degree ashamed of appearing pedantic. In this matter she is a true disciple of the wise Goethe. And it is just this refusal to play tricks with her natural intelligence that enables her authentic originality to sprout forth spontaneously, at its own sweet will, and that gives it, when it does so, that calm, magical, oracular quality that makes one think of those Pre-Socratic “ logoi ” of the old, great, natural philosophers, from whose vision of truth the direct, concrete, feminine insight has not been yet squeezed out by any dry, syllogistic, super-masculine Aristotle.
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In many ways, hard to define, [in Oberland] Miriam found herself “grown-up.” Not for nothing, with that background of untraversed snow, does she — characteristically enough — burst out into a eulogy upon soap! With an almost Nietzchean detachment, in that high cold air, she watches her chance-given companions; and here, in her re-bound from a chance-roused argument she articulates, crystallizes, holds up in relief between the white snow and the cold sky, her “anti-man” conclusions. Directly opposite to Nietzsche’s male-invalid attacks upon women are these austere matriarchal thoughts. Man’s works of art—composed for the praise of other men and all about “meanings” in life and “purposes” of life, in place of Life Itself are they the only things in existence that will be “immortal”? From those high snows, in her renewed defiance of the “philosophies of men, came back to her, stronger than ever in that frozen silence, the old feminine battle-cry of her free soul. “It was as if all her life she had travelled towards this radiance and was now within it, clear of the past, at an ultimate destination.”