The ‘I’ and the ‘She’
This essay by Dorothy Richardson biographer Gloria Fromm appeared in a 1966 issue of Miron Grindea’s literary magazine ADAM International Review devoted to Proust and Dorothy Richardson under Fromm’s maiden name, Gloria Glikin.
‘I am deep in the magic of Proust’s flowering morass’, Dorothy Richardson wrote to her young friend Owen Wadsworth in December 1922. She had received from him, a few weeks before, the newly translated Swann’s Way, and in her own distinctive manner had not opened the volumes at once. She liked to ‘have a book about for a while, maturing,’ before she approached it. But as soon as she began to read Proust’s novel, Dorothy Richardson knew its spell, and gave herself up to the ‘experience and adventure’ of an ‘overwhelming’ work of art.
During the next eight years, as the succeeding volumes — in both French and English — came to her from friends aware of the remoteness of Cornwall where she lived most of the time, Dorothy Richardson read them ‘forwards backwards upside down!’ In 1925, expressing her thanks for a windfall of five volumes, she described to the novelist Bryher how she had cut them ‘piecemeal, leaving them all over the room, and read them in the same way, taking up the first handy volume and opening at random’. In 1928, she reported that her ‘third serious reading … of two volumes at a time, one from each end, [had] nearly reached the middle’.
Dorothy Richardson was reading A la recherche, in other words, as she wished her own Pilgrimage to be read: opened anywhere, and immediately involving a reader who knew nothing of it. She herself was the kind of reader who did not need Proust’s assurances in Du Cote de chez Swann [Swann’s Way] that ultimately his novel would be seen to have the structural unity a Frenchman’s should. For her, the riches of a single page of Proust’s text were enough. And for her, too, as it turned out, A la recherche became more disappointingly Gallic than she found she could accept. Le temps retrouvé [Time Regained], ‘with its circumscribed, trop voulu [too much desired] philosophy of the Semelles de Plomb [leaden soles],’ led her to comment — many years afterward, when a tired and often impatient — that she could ‘no longer enjoy (Proust’s) company’.
But in the 1920’s she had not only been enraptured by Proust, and convinced that he ‘lived in light’. She had also seen, along with a few critics, the relationship of her own fiction to his, and perceived as well-with the sharpness of her analytic mind-the nature of the fundamental difference between them. Instead of writing ‘through consciousness,’ she observed, Proust was writing ‘about consciousness, a vastly different enterprise’. Strangely enough, it was Dorothy Richardson who wrote ‘through’ the consciousness of a third person, and Proust who chose the first-person narrative method for his great novel.
Behind their separate choices, however, lay a common ground of motive and purpose, bringing Dorothy Richardson and Proust closer together than she ever remarked. Both had double aims as writers: art and self-portrayal; and to fulfill these ends they enclosed their novels in the kinds of narrative frame that throughout their apprentice work they had sought. In finding the method of fiction suited to their autobiographical intentions, Dorothy Richardson and Proust appear to have also learned that the very process of discovery was the theme of their art.
In their early writings (Les Plaisirs et Les Jours and the sketches Dorothy Richardson contributed to The Saturday Review), a variety of experimental voices can be heard presenting material with which Dorothy Richardson and Proust were personally involved. But she rarely used the first person form, as if she felt it could not give the reader the sense she wanted him to have — of participating directly in an experience. When Proust, in turn, told a story in the third person, the tale inevitably rang hollow.
In Jean Santeuil, the problem Proust faced is evident. The ‘I’ of the Introduction, the novelist C, and Jean — all reflecting certain aspects of Proust himself, whether in idealized desire or in actuality — are dangling threads he was unable to tie into an aesthetic relation and to keep tied. Dorothy Richardson dramatized her particular dilemma in the twelfth ‘chapter-volume’ of Pilgrimage [Dimple Hill]. She described her heroine, Miriam Henderson, setting down the first long narrative she had ever written, and then thrusting the pages aside, rejecting them because they contained merely a ‘confession’ with neither form nor focus. Miriam was learning, however, the two distinct yet related lessons that had prepared Dorothy Richardson for the writing of Pilgrimage; and at the end of the novel — like Proust’s Marcel — she would be ready to produce the work just reaching its close.
From a reading of The Ambassadors by Henry James, Dorothy Richardson had first discovered that the point of view from which to narrate a novel could lie within a growing consciousness. Then from her many translations into English of foreign texts, and from the Quakers with whom she had lived for a while, Richardson learned how to project her heroine as an independent version of herself — the autobiographical she’ and to teach her heroine the same lesson: an impersonal narrative, like’ discovery about oneself’, could be highly personal as well; indeed it could have both an objective existence and a subjective identity. With these lessons fully absorbed, Richardson was able to bring Pilgrimage into being.
A la recherche is believed by some critics to have emerged from Proust’s reading of Ruskin and from his quarrel with Sainte-Beuve. Proust said he knew Ruskin’s autobiography by heart and had even begun to translate it. In Praeterita — as if it were waiting for him — Proust was able to observe how Ruskin had composed his book, with a technique ‘based upon memory’ (Walter Strauss points this out in Proust and Literature, p. 221). But equally important to his novel was Ruskin’s account of the way in which he had discovered his ‘vocation’. Proust might also have seen — as the analytic and subjective reader he was — the two faces of Ruskin in Praeterita: the one which Ruskin met when he turned back, and the one which a reader meets. These two can never be quite the same- as Proust would have been the first to perceive, given his singular awareness of the double nature of man, of all that he sees and all that he tries to know. So Proust was soon to argue with vehemence against Sainte-Beuve: the artist had two distinct selves; and the one which showed itself in life was not the one that produced a book.
Here Dorothy Richardson would have disagreed. Although she felt that the artist, while he creates, is ‘more than himself’, ‘that more she insisted — was ‘within him as well as without’; and in her opinion, neither the artist nor anyone else could be separated from the man. But Proust needed to believe his argument. He went on to create a novel that contains his portrait of the essential artist- self-the self that Sainte-Beuve, he thought, was too shallow to grasp-and to establish a controlling critical authority of his own to draw that portrait. This was a knowledgeable and penetrating authority who might point out the aesthetic significance of his own background and experience, judge these morally, and at the same time function as autobiographer turning back to meet himself in a novel. He could exercise complete control as well, because for him- the older man regarding the development of his younger self-the future was the past. Thus, Proust had come to dramatize the out- come of his search for control of his life and art. His novelistic ‘I’ is a unique version at once of Sainte-Beuve, Ruskin, and himself.
Proust’s ‘I’ does not lead us away from ‘the realm of autobiography’ — as M. Martin-Chauffier says it does — but rather towards it, in the way that Dorothy Richardson’s ‘she’ does-for the purpose of clarifying both the creator and the creation. By using the third person form, the author of Pilgrimage seemed able to view herself, in the person of her heroine, with the impersonality she desired and believed was of value to others as well. Feeling removed and remote, she found it possible to reveal about herself and her family what she otherwise never divulged; and she could be simultaneously ‘judge, jury, witness, and defendant’. Proust, in turn, was able to examine the young self of his Narrator in a similar way, and to disclose complex emotional states otherwise inexpressible. At the same time, both Dorothy Richardson and Proust could exercise the control over their subjective and revelatory material that enabled them to produce sustained works of fiction.
Her choice of a narrative form was less subtle than Proust’s. But she was very much like him in knowing what she wanted to do, and in searching relentlessly and with a comparably strong will for the way to do it. Both of them found that the means to artistic achievement lay in putting on ‘other eyes’ for self-examination, for discovery, and for disciplined confession.