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Advertisement for Deadlock. - The Times Literary Supplement, 24 February 1921
- Writing of Miss Dorothy Richardson’s Interim, we anticipated that the next volume of Miriam Henderson’s biography might show her progressing instead of spinning. Deadlock is now published, and our anticipation proves true. There is progress in mere fact: Miriam falls in love with Mr. Shatov, a Russian Jew, and becomes engaged [??] to him. More important than that, there is progress in her being. For the first time in all this long story we find Miriam brought into experience of a new kind and reacting to it in a way that is now, although it is quite consistent with what we know of her before. The deadlock scorns to arise not from the impossibility of a poison so self-centred as this becoming a lover or a wife to any man, but from the fundamental difference in attitude to woman’s nature and place in life which must separate not only Miriam Henderson from Michael Shatov, but the English girl from the Jewish man. Perhaps Revolving Lights will tell us what happened. In Deadlock there are episodes raid passages of richer beauty than in any of the previous books in the series. What we call the depths of the being are moved in Miriam as they have not been moved before —just enough at all events, to rescue her from the charge of being one of those people whose sensitiveness is so acute that their own impressions and feelings blind them to any effect which their actions may have on other people. Miriam docs at last peep out of her preoccupation with herself.
- If the scope of the book is a little wider and deeper than that of its predecessors, the method and the characteristics are the same as they were. Ono or two of Miss Richardson’s tricks are growing on her. Chapter 6 is all but unintelligible, partly because of her arbitrary dealings with inverted commas, partly because she will not take the trouble to master one of the standing difficulties of narrative, which is to give the reader the plain facts without letting them get in the way of their significance to the characters. And her indulgence in the parenthesis has so grown upon her that she can write sentences like:
It was then, she thought, at the moment he was bathed in the unceasing beauty of the surroundings and immersed within it, in inextinguishable associa¬tion with the students of the photographs, poised blissfully irresponsible in a permanent boundless beguilement, himself the most untouched of all. the most smoothly rounded, and hastily surrendered with his deep-singing, child-like confident face, that he had been touched and shaped and sent forth.
She will work a good phrase to death, too, like Shatov’s “singing brows.” But side by side with these weaknesses we get flashing thoughts on men (as distinct from women) and on women (as distinct from men), on books, on life. We get, newly presented, Miriam’s refreshing wonder that anything or anybody should exist—the wonder at the mere fact of being which underlies her passion for London, where so many things and people aro in being. And we got further insight into the mind of a young woman who, though sometimes indubitably annoying, is a strange and interesting person.
- Richard King, The Tatler and Bystander, 16 March 1921
- The Semi-Asphyxiating Atmosphere of the Everyday.
- Miss Dorothy Richardson, the novelist, has an extraordinary gift of creating in her stories that semi-asphyxiating atmosphere of the Everyday — which is the every day, day in, day out—until at last something happens, as it always does. Nothing happens — or, rather, very rarely — in her books. She seems invariably to leave off just when those ordinary dramatic incidents of most people’s lives — love, marriage, death — punctuate the monotony of existence. Most of our life’s adventures are adventures of thought. Externally, we may live as the parish pump lives—solid, fixed, something to be taken for granted and not examine when we happen to pass that way. Yet, internally, we may, as it were, be setting forth to discover the summit of Mount Everest. Thank God, no matter how much our actions are weighted down by the laws of man and tradition, our thoughts are free to roam where they will, ever in search of unknown territory, ever on the look out for those joys which sometimes we only feel dimly without ever being able to articulate. When one comes to think of it, what strange, unuttered—sometimes unutterable—thoughts have passed through our minds even during those days when nothing seemed to have happened but the dreary repetition of life’s monotonous routine! And that is Miss Richardson’s special genius — she reflects in her books just those thoughts which so seldom inspire actions, but which are really the thoughts by which alone we seem to live — as apart from some mechanical automa on in human guise. Her method is not, perhaps, the method of easy popularity, but it is a very effective method— when you are in the proper mood to understand it. While reading her stories one never turns the pages anxiously wondering what is going io happen to her characters. Very little ever does happen to them — so far as dramatic incidents are concerned. But, though their lives seem to be as monotonous as a long London street in a November fog, we know them at last as well as we know each house in that dull street — if it happens to be the street in which we live. In Deadlock, she has given us a kind of minute mental study of a girl living the outwardly dull life of a denizen of a second-rate boarding¬house.
- The Manchester Guardian, 18 March 1921
- In Deadlock, the sixth volume of her feminine epic, Miss Richardson continues the analytic chronicle of her heroine Miriam Henderson’s sensations and emotion in her beloved London. Miriam is still the lady secretary of the reticent Mr. Hancock, the Harley Street dentist, but the fine effulgence of her varying feelings for her enigmatic chief, detailed in Honeycomb, has now faded into white ash; and the sacred flame of the vestal’s shrine here leaps up and illuminates “the little dark, frock-coated figure” of the mild but determined Mr. Shatov, the Russian Jew lodger in Mrs. Bailey’s Bloomsbury boarding-house. It is all wonderfully well done, the picture of their walks and talks in streets and parks, of their deep, intellectual converse in ’buses and tea-shops, with Miriam acting as cicerone, alive to the thousand implications in the “dear, funny little man’s” attitude, tones, and sensibilities concerning her English world and the English girl beside him. To grasp the full import of all Miriam’s fluctuations and hesitations, it needs, of course, not only that unerring sense of atmospheres and relationships which Miss Richardson rightly denies to blundering men, but the specific feminine faculty for sensing all the flux of feeling conveyed in the handling of a sugar-tongs or the unfurling of a masculine umbrella. The subtle, involved chronicle of Miriam’s critical moods, in communion with Mr. Shatov, is broken by some delicious episodes of a less sacred character, such an her visit to her family at Brighton, and this is a welcome concession to our human frailty, for when she returns to Bloomsbury and Mr. Shatov we are bidden, finger on lip, to assist at the most solemn transfiguring of all human experiences — the birth of the sacred flame in Miriam’s heart. We watch in hushed silence for that flame to mount and soar, but, alas! Mr. Shatov’s past, his Judaistic traditions, his erring views upon women, all combine to damp the shrine.
- Deadlock is the result. And the volume closes in ambiguous feminine gloom. But, let us add, Miss Richardson’s board is spread yet again with such a pro¬fusion of delicious things that no reader, not even the most misguided of men, need turn empty away. She has humour, feminine humour of course, to tempt our palates.
- The Spectator, 26 March 1921
- In some people Miss Dorothy Richardson’s curious style of writing, or rather the curious mental habit which necessitates that style, produces a feeling of irritation. But no one could read even one of her books — each one a chunk from the experiences and thoughts of Miriam Henderson—and disregard her. For the thing which Miss Richardson creates in each of the books is as actual as the paper, inks, and boards by whose medium it is conveyed to the reader. Presumably there are some people from whom Miriam’s abnormal sense perceptions and attitude of mind are so remote that they would be unable to make contact with the book at all, but, abnormal as she is, most people share in certain moods and under certain circumstances a great many of Miriam’s feelings. To such—probably the majority of readers—the perusal of the book amounts to a sort of vicarious living. While we are reading Deadlock the dim boarding-house over which Mrs. Bailey presides, the reading-room at the British Museum, the dentist’s house in Wimpole Street, and the half obscuring cloud of chance reflection in which they are enveloped become more real than the actual circumstances with which we may be surrounded. But there may be yet some readers who are not acquainted with Miss Richardson’s photographing of the actions and interactions of unusual mental states with exceedingly commonplace outward events and the bewildering cinema-like habits her photographs have of “fading out” into a set of dots across the page and turning into something quite different. For their benefit we will quote an example of the method. Mrs. Bailey is the kind, ineffectual landlady of a Bloomsbury boarding-house. A Russian student has come to the house who wants English lessons. Mrs. Bailey, desiring to keep any money that may be going in the family, so to speak, turns to Miriam, her only scholarly boarder, but Miriam does not feel keen to give lessons to a man who is accustomed to first-rate teaching — after all, she is not a teacher. Miriam is walking upstairs:
“Mrs. Bailey in the hall, her excited conspirator’s smiles as she communicated the news of Mr. Rodkin’s friend and the lessons, as if nothing were changed and one were still always available for association with the house; her smiling calculating dismay at her refusal, her appeal to Mr. Rodkin, his abstracted stiff-jointed emergence into the hall with his newspaper, his brilliant-eyed, dried-up laugh, his chuckling assertion, like a lawyer, that he had promised the lessons and Shatov must not be disappointed; the suspicion that Mrs. Bailey was passing the moments in fear of losing a well-to-do newcomer, an important person brought in by her only good boarder; the wretched sense of being caught and linked up again in the shifts and deceptions of the bankrupt house; the uselessness; the certainty that the new man, as described, would be retained only by his temporary ignorance and helplessness, the vexatious thought of him, waiting upstairs in the drawing-room in a state of groundlessly aroused interest and anticipation, Mr. Rodkin’s irresponsible admiring spectator’s confidence as he made the introductions and vanished whilst the little dark frock-coated figure standing alone in the cold gaslight of the fireless room was still in the attitude of courteous obeisance; the happy ease of explaining to the controlledly waiting figure the impossibility of giving lessons on one’s own language without the qualification of study . . . the change in the light of the cold room with the sound of the warm deep voice, the few well-chosen struggling words; scholarship; that strange sense that foreigners bring, of knowing and being known, but without the irony of the French or the plebeianism of Germans and Scandinavians, bringing a consciousness of being on trial, but without responsibility. . . . The trial would bring exposure. Roading and discussion would reveal the ignorance of English literature…. The hour of sitting accepted as a student, talking easily, the right phrases remembering themselves in French and German, would not come again the sudden outbreak of happiness after mentioning Renan; . . . how had she suddenly known that he made the Old Testament like a newspaper? ‘Parfaitement; j’ai toujoura fort intenssi dans la philosophic.‘
- This is the manner of the book. What a pity it is that Miss Richardson does not add to it an appendix, a little “argument” which will tell the story of the book, so that wo do not miss her vague felicity and accuracy by having to hunt amid her impressions for structural facts!
- Now a word for lovers of Miss Richardson’s work. Deadlock is a melodrama. Something actually happens to Miriam! No less than her falling in love with the said Shatov and he with her; but whether they are to marry or not is still uncertain. There is a new book, Revolving Lights, in preparation. In that or in the next book we may possibly learn the issue, but if we do not, strangely enough, the probabilities are we shall not become impatient.
- May Byron, The Bookman, April 1921
- Upon opening Deadlock we know that we shall be surprised, annoyed, or gratified, according as Miss Richardson’s art affects us — but also that we shall never be bored. One cannot father Miss Richardson’s style on any other writer, ancient or modern. It is a mass of intricate detail, apparently uncoordinated, but eventually attaining a definite result of “atmosphere.” One word will set in train a sequence of semi-related thoughts, all which are scrupulously set down, as though they affected the colour and quality of the plot. They don’t. There is little or no sense of perspective: “the least shall seem unto thee as the greatest.” Groping in a mist of parenthesised statements, one runs into “those obstinate questionings” so dear to this author — “What were Jews?” — ”What is life?” — ”What is obscenity?” — or the baffling ”Why?” which stands as a stumbling-block to faith. Out of this disjointed debris, a story of sorts may be exhumed, fragmentarily. Miriam Henderson, the heroine of previous Richardson work, lives in a London boarding-house, and acts as a dentist’s secretary. She and Shatov, a little Russian Jew, fall in love with each other. Shatov offers to renounce Judaism for her sake, but we leave her unable to decide, because Shatov has a “past.” There is so much ability in this book (despite dreadful sentences like “she rapped avertedly towards Miriam”) — so much interesting discussion — so much intimate realisation of human thought, however desultory — above all, so much variation from the usual type of novel, that one must ultimately commend it. Even those most bewildered by its audacious originality would confess that, in Miriam’s own words, ”there’s a dead level of astounding . . . something” in it.
- Una Hunt, The New Republic, 8 February 1922
- There is intense excitement in reading this novel, a bewildered speed that is blocked and deviated like running a race in the dark, the obscurity is so crowded and dangerously intelligent, the patches of light—like open doors — so vivid that they dazzle the sense of distance there are sudden bumps into objects that seemed far away, steps down into nothingness, accidental touch of cool beautifully carved surfaces, a helpless fumbling in the air for an elusive something, a clue, that seemed within easy reach — but somehow, breathlessly, the race is won and you find that you have collected amazing treasures on the way — treasures that are fragmentary and detached but with a curious articulated rhythm like a chain of beads looped and twisted between nervous fingers, with gaps where the bark have been pushed apart, and then a cascading richness when they are allowed to slide down the string together in sharp scintillations of cut crystal, the smooth inscrutability of jade and cloudy amber, and the dull luster of metals deliberately oxidized.
- It is, like the four volumes [?] of the Pilgrimage Series, another instalment of the life of Miriam Henderson, or rather of the mind of Dorothy Richardson, for it is as self-revealing as the work of George Moore, but with the difference of an honesty that compels an answering sincerity from you, that strips you bare and then cuts down inside; the sharp quick slashes really show you to yourself, a trifle anatomically perhaps, the network of nerves and muscles unerringly exposed, the arteries neatly pinched by damps — there is no blood — it is all rigidly unemotional but with the tensity of an operation. Everything that happens to anyone is carefully skipped or barely hinted at, you only get the after-effects, a consistent technique that is immensely interesting. The dear directness of the early volumes, a style exactly expressing the promising angularity of the very young Miriam Henderson, has become involuted into a style as intricate as the woman is complex with her life reconstructed after the shock which we infer at the end of The Tunnel. Some of the sentences are like English translations of a German version of Henry James in his late period. The whole world is seized by tentacles of observation, of sense appreciation, clutched and sucked in, intellectualized with the hard gusto of the self-protective egoist.
- At first the young Russian Jew who comes to the boarding-house is only another, a more foreign mind, to be used as tinder to kindle sparks of interest in Miriam, but he is so warm and appealing that there is the inevitable softening of sympathy and we have the shock of knowing that Miriam is in love. In the lonely maternal way that is inevitable for her she glows with love and we are actually allowed to sec the incandescence. It is difficult to tell whether the “deadlock” comes from his being a Jew. or from the difficulty of marriage for an intense individualist, “Rut alone again with him, the troubled darkness behind her would return with its maddening influence. She was fleeing from it towards its darkest centre.” Those are the words with which the books ends!
- Philosophy and criticism stream in and our as they do through the mind of an experimental thinker, brilliantly suggestive, inconclusive. Miriam’s mind is elastic, not pliable, it cannot be bent and woven into a pattern, it bounces like a rubber ball, apparently haphazard in its striking and flying off from idea to idea, but logical, in the direct feminine way, for it is always the quality of the surface she hits that determines the angle of the bounce.
- There is immense sincerity in the misuse of adjectives in their dictionary meanings, a free association use of them for their expressiveness, which is vividly modern and exhilarating. The nouns and adjectives seem so delightedly surprised nt their unexpected encounters, so satisfied and human about it, as if they had been longing for years to meet. The connection is a trifle brittle at times but on the whole exact, inevitable, “his singing lifted eyebrows,” “the determined asphalt of the path.”
- There is unmistakable genius in the fidelity of observation, and the statement is as direct and subtle in its feeling for relative values as the interior of a room painted by Vermeer. What is very rare with such fidelity, an illumination of the inner meaning of places and thing. London, the London of the lonely person, the companionship of the spirit of the place, is revealed with a queer detached poignancy which solaces, but leaves the city still immense, apart, brooding. One of the most remarkable description is of the cloak room of the British Museum!
- The technical difficulties of moving the human body from place to place are sublimely ignored, even change of scene must be inferred, a reshift of characters assumed. Through a wild mental confusion that assails one at first, like the changes in a dream, persons metamorphose, they don’t get there, they merely are there and go on talking without any explanation or beginning; it is entirely the reader’s business to find out why and who they are, and he dues find out after a stumble or two. They are often quite irrelevant characters—from the point of view of rhe conventional novel—indicated through their effect upon Miriam, the buck stays always inside her personality. “Miriam unwillingly searched her curious effect of making in the atmosphere about her a cold, delicate, blue and white glare.— There was something faintly horrible about the narrowness of her escape from dowdiness to distinction.” It is a dream technique with the same apparent irrelevance masking a profound significance, revealing at the end, in words tossed with a flash, hitting quivering like the blades of a knife thrower, making a gleaming frame, defining the outlines of a nervously smiling face backed against the wall, Dorothy Richardson’s face,—which may be extraordinarily like your own.
- It is an experience rather than a book.