The beauty of everything in this pure hard light: Dorothy Richardson’s Letters

Juliana of the [Blank] Garden blog recently posted an excellent article on Windows on Modernism: Selected Letters of Dorothy Richardson, still the only collection of Richardson’s letters available. She generously agree to let us reprint it here.


gloria g. fromm dorothy richardson

As you may know, I am trying to follow along #PilgrimageTogether, a group readalong of Dorothy Richardson’s Pilgrimage, hosted by Kim and Brad (more info here). I wrote about the first three chapter-novels here, and decided to do some additional reads about Richardson.

Windows on Modernism: Selected Letters of Dorothy Richardson, ed. Gloria G. Fromm (1995) comprises about 25% of the 1,800 letters written by Richardson that Fromm believed to have survived. Organized chronologically by decades, the collection includes an introduction, a chronology of Richardson’s life, a detailed index, and short biographical essays at the beginning of each part.

The letters, written from 1901 to 1952, are unabridged, and Fromm provides notes identifying some of the books, writers, and historical events mentioned by Richardson. About the notes, Fromm writes: “(…) my aim throughout has been to let Richardson’s voice be heard with a minimum of interference. By its very nature, a volume of selected letters carries the editor’s obvious imprint, though I have argued elsewhere that even editions offered as “complete” are not freestanding: they, too, bear the unmistakable marks of the editor’s hand, along with a rhetoric that often boasts editorial restraint (and purity). But there is no question that selecting letters has its own built-in temptations – to dominate, for example, by overcharacterizing and polemicizing the subject. It is this temptation in particular that I have tried hard to resist, wanting Richardson herself (rather than the editor) to occupy the commanding position here.”

The collection includes not only letters written by Richardson but also some written to and about her, such as the ones by Alan Odle and by John Cowper Powys. Fromm justifies her choice of letters as the ones which provide not only Richardson’s “full range of mind and talents“, but also a map of the connections between Richardson’s life and work, the material circumstances under which she wrote, as well as her opinions on her contemporaries, such as James Joyce, D. H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, Henry Miller, Patrick White, H. D., Amy Lowell, and E. M. Forster, among others.

I find particularly interesting to explore Richardson’s take on Woolf (to whom she was frequently compared). In a letter to Bryher, from 1937, she wrote about being asked to review The Years: “(…) I told them [the London Mercury] that V.W., enormously as I admire her work, does not deeply move me & that I felt it would be unfair for me to write about her & better to put the book in the hands of someone to whom she means a great deal.” 

Later, upon the publication of Between the Acts, Richardson provides a brief assessment of Woolf’s work, in two letters to Bryher. On August 4th, 1941, she wrote: “What upsets me, I think, in V. Woolf is a sort of, I mean the kind of disillusionment that somewhere in each book approaches paralysis. In the essays too, it is there, overshadowing each statement. Movement ceases, of mind & spirit. Less than usual in this last book, which in certain directions, particularly in the significant matter of what people draw from just being together, reveals the ripening of a perception that in The Voyage Out had not begun to dawn. One side of the trouble, of what at any rate so troubles those who enormously admire & yet deprecate her work, is, I believe, her docility, due perhaps to an upbringing in academic circles, to certain kinds of generalizations. The closing page of this last book reveals her reciting a lesson from an extremely dubious text-book. She obviously doesn’t herself believe it adequate, but has nothing, given her own so very specialist angle of vision, to substitute. All her avenues have the brief perspectives of the good Pagan, so that her adorable, wonder-working talents show, in the end, like peacocks in prison. Peacocks is the word. Because sometimes they strut & strike attitudes. But always with drooping wings. Still, in this book, she was escaping the burden of her heritage.”

On August 7th, 1941, Richardson adds: “The Woolf, for which, nevertheless, I am immensely grateful, fails to move me. Poetry moaning in a vacuum. Patronage, too, always, rather than vital concentration. Life seen, from a balcony, through a lorgnette. Nerves & brain, these only, operative. Small items betray. Birds, for example, are never to be heard “singing” at eight o’clock on a June morning. By that time, having much sung & grandly gorged, they are pottering, mostly keeping out of the sun by that time too high for their liking. And quiet they’ll keep until again it begins to slope. All her human figures, even Swithin & old Oliver, the nearest in this book to vital humanity are pastiches of her own unhappy ruminations rather than people thoroughly known. But she has a delicate petit-point stitch.”

About the comparisons between her work and Woolf’s, Richardson wrote, in a letter to John Cowper Powys, in April 1940: “Comparisons between V.W. & D.R., as far as I have met them to date, have been made only by those who, with such good reason, adore V.W. & have therefore consisted in presenting her in terms of her virtues, minus their defects, & poor D.R. in terms of her defects alone. Actually, both in virtues & defects, we are alien to each other. Primarily, I think, because V. for all her femininity, is a man’s, almost a male, writer. No offense meant.”

Her insightful reading of Woolf as ‘a man’s writer’ (which Richardson cleverly links to features of class privilege and class prejudice – which, in turn, she encodes as ‘male’ for being a projection of a male-dominated status quo) is reiterated in a letter to Henry Savage, from 1951: “(…) V. Woolf, via Leslie, was a diluted male, wobbly & irrelevant.

On a larger scale, Richardson seems to identify the canonizing of women writers as a feature of their embrace of male-dominated systems of culture, class, and power. As she wrote to P. Beaumont Wadsworth, in May 1920: “The only connection I feel between V. Woolf & Jane Austen (& nearly all the lady writers, Eliot, Hobbes, Ward, Cholmondely [sic], all I think except Charlotte, is a certain snobbishness.”

Richardson’s gender categorizations are deeply linked with her assessment of class and power in the patriarchal society of her time, and she projects such categorizations to the way she reads literature – as well as to the way she conceives of her own writing project. Gender, to her, seems to be as inseparable from class and power as it is from literary form, technique and point of view. To Henry Savage, she wrote in 1950: “(…) I am not “literary” Henry. Never was. Never shall be. The books that for you, perhaps for most men, come first, are for me secondary. Partly perhaps because they are the work of men, have the limitations, as well as the qualities of the masculine outlook. Men are practitioners, dealing with things (including “ideas”) rather than with people, obliged on every level to do rather than to be; feebler than women in their sense of being, & knowing almost nothing of women save in relation to themselves.

Later, in a letter to Savage, from 1951, she adds: “Monstrously, when I began, I felt only that all masculine novels to date, despite their various fascinations, were somehow irrelevant, & the feminine ones far too much infl.[luenced] by masc.[uline] traditions, & too much set upon exploiting the sex-motif as, hitherto, seen & depicted by men.

While it may be possible to counter Richardson’s binary gender view, and, in particular, her view of the ‘feminine’, as features of the very system she is criticizing, it’s interesting to notice how she later tries to refine her take on the subject, to allow some space for complexity and ambivalence. In a letter to Henry Savage, in April 1950, Richardson wrote: “Standing out from your last letter remains, for me, a central question: “Why know women?” Does not the answer depend upon what one means by “women?” Do not many men regard her as an object of pleasure, incidentally a biological contrivance, and/or a household necessity? And do not all men, in speaking of her, necessarily draw the self-portrait by which one may classify them? (…) The matter is of course complex, every human creature being to some degree bi-sexual.”

In terms of the authors she was compared to, Richardson’s take on Henry James is also interesting. In a letter to E. B. C. Jones, from September 1921, she wrote “(…) that all Henry James books are conceived & written in the vasty deep – he a large pale motionless octopus with huge eyes, suddenly throwing out huge tentacles – that yours are, too, but you are not & now never will be, in danger of motionless octopusity; that the difference between you is that his vasty deep was a tank, & he never knew it, yours began as a tank, but is full of holes through which the ocean flows. All this is no more meant as an insult to the magnificence of H.J. than it is as a “compliment” to yours.

Letter from Dorothy Richardson to S.S. Koteliansky | From 32 Queen’s Terrace, London | 8 August, 1934
Letter from Dorothy Richardson to S.S. Koteliansky, sent from 32 Queen’s Terrace, London, 8 August, 1934. Image from Dorothy Richardson: An Online Exhibit (http://dorothyrichardsonexhibition.org/).

The image of the ‘octopus’ is recaptured in a later letter, written to Henry Savage, in September 1948: “(…) For me, James’ style, simple & direct in his early work, is, there, James himself. The later, acquired, much as he acquired Europe, consists in carefully cultivated convolutions of statement. High priest he was, of nearly all the orthodoxies, resembling for me, a sophisticated octopus in a tank he mistook for the universe. Even The Ambassadors, mostly reality, nearly all reality, because embodying his own experience, is drama in a resounding box, where no star shines & no bird sings. Humanity, pitifully adrift in vacuo. A humanist he, yet without love for humanity, sheltering himself from people with urbane gesturings & solely verbal expressions of good will. I can’t now read him, but he was a joy, for all one’s repudiations, on the first meeting. (…) Oct 2. P.S. Dear dear! Have just found this letter unposted. Glancing through, I realise unfairness to James. He was a sensitive, of course, vastly impressionable & splendidly able to record his impressions. Had, too, certain keen solicitudes. But no bourne.” 

The image of the “resounding box” also appears in a previous letter to Henry Savage, from August 1948: “(…) To-day, meaning roughly your & my days, so many, in fact most, writers have been so consciously & laboriously literary, that in reading them-& the reading may be joy-one is so fascinated by what they are doing, technically, by tracing exactly how they get their effects, that one is tempted to paraphrase Emerson’s “What you are speaks so loudly that I cannot hear what you say” into “What you so cunningly, & successfully, are doing is so impressive, interesting, tiresome, tedious, stultifying, that meaning, what you are saying, or trying to say, is secondary.” And sometimes to add “You have really nothing to say, or are keeping back what, if anything, you want to say, in the interest of a cunning way of saying it.” This I feel most strongly in regard to Henry James; for whom Europe was too much. His style, fascinating at a first meeting for me can only be, very vulgarly, described as a non-stop waggling of the backside as he hands out, on a salver, sentence after sentence, that yes, if the words had no meaning, would weave its own spell. So what? one feels, reaching the end of the drama in a resounding box, where no star shines & no bird sings.”

Richardson is often compared to Proust and, given the fact that his twelve-volume narrative shares with her Pilgrimage a focus on the process of memory, time, consciousness, and the continuance of the past in the present, it’s interesting to read Richardson’s take on his work. She seems to imply that, while consciousness can be read as the object of A la recherche du temps perdu, in Pilgrimage, it is to be read as the subject of the narration. Upon the publication of the first Scott-Moncrieff translation of A la recherche du temps perdu, for instance, Richardson writes, in a letter to Beaumont Wadsworth, in 1922: “I am deep in the magic of Proust’s flowering morass. There are ways in which he outdoes everyone. Oh the sublime simple perfection of his art, even in translation, (n.b. an almost perfect translation) the design, the detail, all one; the whole of him in every part. To read him is a thousand things at once, all overwhelming. Rapture, stupefaction, experience & adventure running abreast in the van. I feel at present that I shall read again go & again; shall always be reading & everytime in a different way. He is not, as has been said, writing through consciousness, but about consciousness, a vastly different enterprise & one which allows him to let himself completely & write, as he wishes.”

Richardson’s comments on her method (‘the inward way’, or ‘the representation of life-as-experience’, as she once described it, given her dislike of the trendy term ‘stream of consciousness’), are also illuminating, particularly in comparison to Joyce (to whom she was frequently linked). In May 1919, in a letter to Beaumont Wadsworth, she wrote: “In James Joyce I recognise one who uses [my: canceled] the same method as I, more strictly beautifully & perhaps to a wider end – that I don’t know. I have not read Ulysses. In actual writing I find that certain states of being are favourable & others unfavourable to a composition demanding a complete concentration. In these states I can visualise & select & shape swiftly & easily.” Later, in April 1923, she wrote to Wadsworth: “Yet [to present] nothing but immediate experience spells the titanic failure of Joyce. It is the great & abiding problem of all those who take the inward way, this business of getting something tremendously there as it were unawares. I haven’t solved it. But a recognition of it all the time is necessary in order to avoid total wreckage of the sense of direct experience.” On Joyce, Richardson later wrote, in a letter to Henry Savage, from 1951: “(…) The representation of life-as-experience is another matter, now with us. Joyce remained hampered by the handcuffs firmly fixed in youth by the Jesuits.

Throughout the collection, Richardson is always incisive in her criticism of the term ‘stream of consciousness’ – such as in a later letter to Henry Savage, from January 1949: “I was glad of the opportunity of steering these infants away from that lamentably meaningless metaphor “The Shroud (!) of Consciousness” borrowed some thirty years ago, by May Sinclair from the epistemologists, (who have long since abandoned it) to describe my work, & still, in Lit. crit. pursuing its inane career.”

Richardson’s comments on literary criticism in general tend to be sharp. In a letter to Compton Mackenzie, in November 1919, apropos of  a review of one of his books, she writes: “Of course the official custodians of Literature, & the L.M. [London Mercury] is so excellently that, cannot be expected, with their eyes, quite properly, at the backs of their heads, to see what is happening under their noses; but surely they might edify their public with something short of solemn pronouncements on single chapters of current life work. They are looking for the bread of past Miracles & find only the precious stones of the temple that is still a-building. Please do not turn from your business to make any acknowledgment of this sympathetic growl.”

In a letter to E.B.C. Jones, from September 1921, she wrote about the reviews of her own books: “The voices of my reviewers now are an almost unanimous groan of ennui. Some of them shriek with rage & disgust at the awful unending greyness. That there are those who also find something else is the one, outside, thing that keeps me going.”

It can be interesting to explore whether and how Richardson’s way of reading books as ‘self-portraits of their authors’ reflects her own literary project in Pilgrimage. Commenting on the subject, she wrote to Henry Savage, in September 1948: “Every novel, of whatever date & kind, is a conducted tour &, inevitably, a self-portrait of the author, even when keep he [sic], as Flaubert so consistently aimed at keeping, (thereby adding to the portrait its sharpest outline) out of sight.” She will reiterate this idea later, in another letter to Savage, from 1950: “All books are conducted tours &, incidentally, self-portraits of the conductor.”

For me, the letters where Richardson comes most alive are the ones in which she writes about her friends’ works and writings. To Bryher, in 1923, she wrote: “Of course you take your poetry seriously & it’s the queerest thing that you’re not musical. Because it’s the cadence & rhythm that is half your poems. Perhaps you are so musical that you can’t hear “made” music. Yours is wild. You must have heaps more stored up. Heaps. Your queer little voice, which is giving me a great deal of thought, is more audible, so far, there than in your prose. At least the side of it I mostly hear. It is all the other sides that make me think, the sides where perhaps reside those vast disagreements which are to arise between us.”

To E. B. C. Jones, in 1928, Richardson writes: “I like your letters, so much. Something hard & clear in them, sea under shadow of rock, with more rock gleaming through its colour – Your sentences go on indefinitely after they are finished.

To H.D., in April 1924, Richardson wrote: “You withdraw yourself into the gloom of night, set a sudden darkness about our little path & straightway make it rich with the browns & golds of those adorable pictures, & set your poems gleaming & flashing all about them; lightning, summer lightning seen by daylight on bright. Lightning that flowers before the eyes of a puffin bewitched. They move me, all of them, to my last fervour. We read them last night & again this morning. And we thank you ever so much for all these blessings.” And later, in the Fall of 1924: “I like your letters to mature. They come with a sharp freshness-keen; as of morning on a cliff-edge. Edges threaded by song. They ripen, drawing the sun. And take on the quality & scent, yes, scent-of amber. In the end they embalm themselves & keep. Remain.”

Given the wide range of writers with whom Richardson corresponded (John Cowper Powys, Winifred Bryher, H. D., E.B.C. Jones, Ruth Suckow, H.G. Wells, Hugh Walpole, Sylvia Beach, among others), Windows on Modernism can be an essential read not only for those who study her oeuvre, but also for literary historians in general. However, lay readers (like myself) can also find illumination and delight in Richardson’s snapshots of her everyday life.

I’ll leave my favourite excerpts here:

In a letter to Alan Odle, written from Cornwall, in September 1916: “The garden is full of the songs of birds & grasshoppers. Just below, a little steep lane goes blazing in the hot sun down to the porth, a width of white sand shut in by towering brown cliffs. Far out is the frilled edge of the sea. The cliffs look sleepy in the glare. You can just hear the crying of the sea-gulls & see them hovering like snowflakes above the edge of the tide. The sea is wet & misty-no line where it joins the sky.”

To Beaumont Wadsworth, in August 1919: “Take heart. Beyond the Pit, the palsy & paralysis of youth, are the green slopes, the stars & sunlight, the dreams & dancing of old age.”

To Bryher, in the Fall of 1923: “The beauty of everything in this pure hard light is utterly distracting.” Later: “I’m writing in a hot room after a Chalet Marie supper, immediately after. The pudding invades my style. It invades everything.“

To John Cowper Powys, in November 1935: “Sheltered we are, & quiet under weather with our slate roof. But bricks & mortar are chilly & damp-holding. And so is earth. We miss the turmoil of the elements. Give me wood, built on sand & wind-encircled. We are surrounded, here, suburban almost, & feel gloves growing on our hands & veils on our minds. Our furnishings are refeened & philistine. ”

To Henry Savage, in October 1952: “Myself, just upon 80, I still feel astonishment over the fact, consciously discovered, in solitude, at the age of three, of there being anything, anywhere, & still look forward.

This collection was a fascinating read, and one I recommend, in particular, to everyone who is taking part in #PilgrimageTogether.

What are you finding about your journey so far?

Yours truly,

J.


Girl Reading a Letter in an Interior Peter Vilhelm Ilsted
Girl Reading a Letter in an Interior, by Peter Vilhelm Ilsted, 1908.

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