- E. B. Osborn, The Illustrated London News, 24 January 1920.
- Interim was described to me as a wicked case of literary Bolshevism, and that fell warning — by the most learned critic of the novel I know — together with the phonographed talk and many dashes on the first few pages, caused me to fight shy of it night after night. But it is an amazing piece of ultra-modern analysis of sub-motives and the subtlest emotions of the subter-woman which has yet been written outside the Slav universe. It will give Freud a bad pain in his umbilical ego and elsewhere, in spite of the fact that he was been dead some time. It kept me awake thinking hard — and feeling hard — until the grey light of a rainy, tearful dawning came flooding in.
- Country Life, 26 June 1920
- Miss Dorothy Richardson’s interesting experiment in literature still continues and seems no nearer to its triumphant conclusion. In Interim she gives us details of a few more months in the life of her heroine, Miriam Henderson, and though there is very little new atmosphere in this volume, her extraordinarily faithful account of Miriam’s outlook on life, which occasionally leaves us almost appalled by its fidelity to our own experience, is just as well done as ever. Of course, novel readers accustomed to see a woman from her cradle to her grandmotherhood in the course of one volume may find Miss Richardson’s method slow. Our only regret is that at the present rate of progress we, who are a few years older than she must inevitably have reached threescore years and ten some time before she does, and so never be able to see the end of her. This in a novelist seems rather a mean way of taking from the reader one his few advantages.
- Harold Hannyngton Child, Times Literary Supplement, 18 December 1919
- Miss Dorothy M. Richardson’s Interim warns the reader by its title to be patient. Not that any reader of this queer series of books is likely to be in a hurry to know what “happened” to Miriam Henderson. In the usual sense, precious little “happens” to Miriam; in another sense, more happens to that fortunate girl than to most people, because she is more continuously and intensely alive than most people. She is sensible to impression at every moment; and, if there should be nothing else for her, there is always the appeal to the senses. In the new book, for instance, there is always the golden light thrown on the boarding-house dinner-table by the gas, and the look of the shiny wall between the pictures. There lies the secret of Miriam’s appeal. Nothing seems to escape her. She is never dull or unaware; she never ceases to live and to respond to stimulus. And thus life, seen through her eyes and felt through her emotions, comes to be an exciting business, and the world (even when the world is momentarily restricted to a Bloomsbury boardinghouse and the kind of people that you would expect to find there) an infinite stretch of inexhaustible delights. We are well content to be, with Miriam Henderson, in the middle of it, without bothering to see whether she is going in any particular direction, and convinced that if ever she does “get” anywhere, she can never stop there. The idea of finality in life for Miriam is more absurd than the idea of finality in life for most of the half-alive people of whom the world of facts is composed.
All the same, the reader of Interim will need patience. The trouble is that, having finished the book, he will find himself asking whether he knows Miriam any better than he did before he read it. The book is all about Miriam, and about Miriam seen from the inside; and yet Miriam seems to have no more – definition for all this new study of her. To see that the clouds are moving, one must see them against something, that keeps still—the blue sky, hills, chimneypots. If there were no sky. and if the hills and the chimney-pots took to dancing, we should receive, indeed, the impression of movement, but of development, of direction, no sense whatever. And the backgrounds in Miss Richardson’s novels have a way of dancing. We cannot catch the relativity, and so cannot in any way measure Miriam. If we cared to be pompous about it, we could solemnly assure Miss Richardson that life is not mere movement; that human beings grow — that is, move in a certain, though an interrupted, direction; and that Miriam seems to be merely spinning. But this is no occasion for generalities. The point is a finer one. Let life be what it may, we are not learning all that we want to learn. about Miriam, because she and her settings are always on the move and we can find no fixed point to give us the standard. Patience then reminds us that the title of the book is Interim, and that the next volume is to be called Deadlock. Tt may be that when that deadlock is resolved, we shall understand the full importance of all the spinning that we watched before.
Meanwhile there is more than compensation, there is active enjoyment to be had in watching the whirl. We live from moment to moment, but every moment becomes exciting. In this intense realization of the moment lies Miriam’s charm — and Miss Richardson’s peculiar quality. Her sharpness in isolating the moment, in “getting” it clear and absolute, reminds us of Flaubert (though how Flaubert would puff and blow at some of her now familiar tricks of expression!). And her subtlety in linking Miriam’s thoughts onto the external details (so that you never know whether it is going to end with the golden light of the gas, or to go on thence to a flash of critical thought or a flush of intimate feeling) keeps the attention continually curious. It cannot be, the reader assures himself, that this mastery of the particular, exercised with all this keen sincerity, is not going to result in a finished picture (which need not be the picture of a finished thing). But what if it does not? The failure in itself would be interesting. The attempt is bringing much enjoyment on the way.
- Katherine Mansfield, The Atheneum, 9 January 1920
- Interim, which is the latest slice from the life of Miriam Henderson, might almost be described as nest of short stories. There is Miriam Henderson, the box which holds them all, and really it seems there is no end to the number of smaller boxes that Miss Richardson can make her contain. But Interim is a very little one indeed. In it Miriam is enclosed in a Bloomsbury boarding-house, and though she receives, as usual, shock after shock of inward recognition, they are produced by such things as well-browned mutton, gas jets, varnished wallpapers. Darting through life, quivering, hovering, exulting in the familiarity and the strangeness of all that comes within her tiny circle, she leaves us feeling, as before, that everything being of equal importance to her, it is impossible that everything should not be of equal unimportance.
- Elia W. Peattie, Chicago Tribune, 28 August 1920
- Alfred A. Knopf, a publisher of courage and imagination, has not hesitated to do his part in fanning into a flame the as yet flickering fire of Dorothy M. Richardson’s popularity. Her series of stories entitled Pilgrimage are issued by him in America, the fifth now appearing as Interim. In this the somewhat pallid yet intensely human adventures of Miriam Henderson’s life are carried along, if not to the general delight of the public, yet, undoubtedly, to the satisfaction of J. D. Beresford, May Sinclair, and H. G. Wells, all of whom, the publisher avers, read Miss Richardson’s books.
It would seem, in reading Miss Richardson’s work, that, having taken an ultra-impressionistic view of Ibsen, her idea was to follow him, not closely, but by means of methods which appear to her similar. Complete relaxation of the mind — of the very much informed and trained mind — may, perhaps, describe the process. But here is Miss Richardson’s description of Ibsen’s Brand, which, with obvious differences, applies equally well to her own books:
Each line was wonderful; but all was in darkness. Presently on some turned page something would shine out and have a meaning. It went on and on. It seemed to be going toward something. But there was nothing that any one could imagine; nothing in life or in the world could make it clear from the beginning, or bring it to an end. If the man died, the author might stop. Finis. But it would not make any difference to anything. And so on and so on.
Indeed, Dorothy M. Richardson is past mistress of the art of “so on and so on.” In countries where there is a leisure class, or where there is a group of talented cognoscenti to whom “medium” is as highly valued as “interest” — in brief, in the fortunate country which claims Miss Sinclair, Mr. Wells, and Mr. Beresford — she will be valued as the original, meticulous, and extraordinarily courageous expositor of her own personality and of the gloriously facile art of story-writing.
- W. Douglas Newton, The Sketch, 21 January 1920
- My Dear Peter — I hate to be Carpentier-ed by a book. Always seems to me that the human mind should rise superior to what a Literary Supplement can describe as 71/2 by 5, 293 pp., 7s. n. Up to this week Anno Domini, I could have sworn that nothing by 5, of any amount pp., to any sum s.d., could master my tenacious spirit. But Dorothy Richardson has won. In the third round she had me on the mat while somebody counted clearly and without error the numerals from 1 to 10.
Recently a little lady with a bobbed mind and Marconi stays said to me, “You haven’t read Dorothy Richardson!” in just that tone of voice. I knew at once that the grey matter under my parting had not been having its proper nutriment. I hied me (I’m, as you know, scratch at hie) to where the pp.’s foregather and borrowed Interim. In the first round with it, this came along, and please read it solid, that’s how it is writ: “Grace turned up the gas. M-m darling she murmured with timid gentle kisses, I’m so glad you have come. So am I. … I’ve worn this blouse all the week; oh bliss hot water. Sit on the rocking chair while I ablute….” I went down before that for six, and only by getting into clinch did I stay the round.
Beginning cautiously after reading somebody else for a day, I lasted well in the second round until flush-hit with this: “Oh Miriam — Yes; wasn’t it awful? and then a feeble voice like a chant — a-a-a-ah-oo-oo-oo-oo kom, and hailpemee — Oh Meester
Bell, kom, oh I am freezing to death, what a pity what a pity—and then a silence. She fed rapidly, holding them all silently eager. . .”Read that bit carefully; it is Miriam telling an anecdote while eating and being interrupted. The bell alone saved me after the shock of it. The third round! Well, it was made up of several chapters like this, with a whole book to follow. It wasn’t that I was unsympathetic, I simply was not strong enough, so I went down and took the count. Well, what would you have done? It is rather like trying to read Irish stew, isn’t it?