The centerpiece of Deadlock is Miriam Henderson’s friendship with Michael Shatov, the Russian Jewish boarder Mrs. Bailey encourages to approach Miriam for English lessons. Miriam finds herself attracted intellectually and emotionally to Michael, though she decides, ultimately, to end their romantic relationship and to try to remain friends.
Michael Shatov’s counterpart in Dorothy Richardson’s life was Benjamin Grad. Grad was born in Smolensk and came to London around 1900. He boarded at the same house where Richardson lived, the one run by Mrs. Kezia Baker at 7 Endsleigh Street in Bloomsbury. Grad worked primarily as a translator of business documents and correspondence to and from Russian, German, French, and English. His relationship with Richardson mirrors that of Shatov in the novel.
Grad went on to marry Avice Judith Veronica Leslie-Jones, portrayed in Pilgrimage as Amabel, in 1907. They had one son, David, and remained friends with Richardson. The 1911 Census records Richardson as a visitor at the Grad’s house in Sussex.
Grad was an active member of the Zionist movement and traveled there at least once, in 1919. He became a popular speaker for Zionism and appeared in numerous meetings in Manchester, Liverpool, and other cities throughout the 1920s.
His business took him to the Continent on a regular basis and in June 1940, he was trapped as an enemy alien after the German invasion of France. He managed to avoid being sent to a concentration camp and Richardson sent him packages and letters through his son David. Grad died in Sussex in 1955; his wife Veronica died in 1967.
The following account of Grad’s early relationship with Richardson can be found in John Rosenberg’s book Dorothy Richardson: A Critical Biography (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1973).
… Meanwhile, she had also been attracted to the Jewish faith. This was, however, for the sake of a man. There arrived one day at Mrs. Baker’s a young man, several years younger than Dorothy, of distinguished appearance, with dark hair and beard, a strange foreign elegance of dress and a courtliness of manner unusual and rather touching in someone so young. This was Benjamin Grad, the son of a successful Jewish lawyer in Russia. He had been ill for a time in Basle, but had come on to London to continue his studies of language and philosophy.
He and Dorothy met and found they had many interests in common. She helped him with his English, and he in turn taught her his method of learning foreign languages. (‘He speaks most, and understands all, European languages, and possesses a Bible in each, the sole source, for several of them, of his knowledge, which does not include pronunciation.’) His method was to study a page of the Bible in the language he was learning, side by side with the corresponding page in a language he already knew. She proved an apt pupil, with a better ear than his for the languages she learned.
They read philosophy and literature. He introduced her to the work of certain Russian writers whom she had not yet discovered, and they discussed ‘the philosophers whom, reading, [she found] more deeply exciting than the novelists’. Learning languages, translating passages, gave her an insight into creative writing, whose mysterious process began to fascinate her; and at times it seemed that ‘everything in her life existed only for the sake of the increasing bunch of pencilled half-sheets’ of her translations.
Her critical faculties, and her dissatisfaction with most of the novels she read, increased with her interest in writing. And yet a novel could offer an entire individual world of experience, presenting reality, even sometimes history, in terms of human lives. Most novels, however, were mere collections of incidents and sentiments, excluding ‘the essential: first-hand life’.
She and Benjamin argued these and other points passionately, as they walked for hours round London. Her knowledge and quickness astounded him. In the Russian— Jewish world that he came from, a world where the Tsarist persecution was reaching its height in the pogroms, learning was exclusively a masculine preserve, and a scholar would often be supported by his wife with a stall or a pushcart in the market. But here was this Englishwoman questioning his intellect, telling him that what he called thinking was merely the collecting of facts and theories; whereas knowledge, for her, was ‘bought only by experience. All else is hearsay.’
Her prettiness as well as her intelligence moved him. Another friend wrote of her that ‘no one but me can now remember how pretty Dorothy was when I first met her— slender and pink and white, and her hair pure gold crushed back in wings each side of her face’. Benjamin began to fall in love with her.
She liked him, his company was pleasant on these walks, with the two of them rushing on faster and faster in the heat of some argument, but sometimes she grew ‘tired with thought and speech’, with all this talk and these ideas that were well enough as far as they went, but only stopped short of life, and distracted her from what was more important, from seeing things minutely: the streets, people’s faces.
His Russian-Jewish character, his warmth and distinctive intellect delighted her, but also made a barrier between them. Just as, in her time at the Hanover school, she had found the life in Germany more vivid than any she had ever known before, and yet it had made her aware of her own essential Englishness and difference, so it was now with Benjamin. She wrote in Pilgrimage of this difference, that ‘there were things in England with truth shining behind them. English people did not shine. But something shone behind them. Russians shone. But there was nothing behind them.’
…
Benjamin Grad was now deeply in love with her. She couldn’t encourage him : she thought they were different in too many ways. He was generous and patient, however, and their life went on much as before. They were both still at Endsleigh Street, involved to some extent in the life of the house with its constant stream of boarders, among them a series of Canadian doctors, one of whom was interested in her and turned up again in her life some years later.
She and Benjamin still read and translated together, and had their long walks of impassioned discussion, and went on to lectures and meetings as before. He was ardently Zionist, and she too supported this cause. He still hoped that she might return his love. He met some of her friends, and impressed them with his natural dignity, goodness and intelligence. She knew that in his own quiet way he was as wilful as she, and his fixed ideas made him more stubborn. If they were to marry, she would have to be the one to make concessions. She would find herself committed to his way of life, his earnest intellectualism and the patriarchal Jewish family pattern. There could be no half measures in marrying him : she would have to be converted to Judaism, which, like Catholicism, she saw as a ‘world of “thou shalt not’”.
However, she was moved by his unworldliness, which put him at the mercy of people. It brought out her strong protective instincts. She wrote of him, as Michael in Pilgrimage: ‘There are ways in which I like him and am in touch with him as I never could be with an Englishman. Things he understands. And his absolute sweetness. Absence of malice and enmity.’ She now believed she loved him, and she gave him her ‘provisional pledge’.
But something had been making him uneasy, and he finally admitted to her that in the year he spent in Basle before coming on to England, he had suffered a breakdown and had been in an institution. The revelation, far from putting her off, made her feel even more protective. She was moved by his distress, and to please him she went to see a woman of whom he had heard, an Englishwoman, formerly a Christian, who had married a Jew and been converted to Judaism. Dorothy, talking to this woman and seeing how sequestered a life she led, realized that she couldn’t take on such a r6le. She would have to break out of the enclosure, and the marriage would end in disaster.
Benjamin loved her so much that he would have given way and abandoned his faith, but she couldn’t accept such a sacrifice. Still they went on meeting, and walking round London, and arguing and talking as always. Through being in love, she had been herself more freely with him than with anyone before; and as she wrote later : ‘What matters is the illumination coming during this time of being in love. Even when the lovers are mistaken in each other . . . the revelation remains, indestructible.’
Intellectually too he had helped her to broaden her outlook. The translation he had taught her was satisfying work, and at best it was even creative, with the translator working in two different worlds and having to bring the text to life within new frames of reference. She described translating as ‘a fascinating job … an affair of three processes. First a literal rendering of the whole text to ensure incursiveness. Then, putting the original out of sight, and rewriting in good English, involving frequent finding of equivalents for the untranslatables. Then the whole laid aside for at least a few days (should be months) and at last the ultimate rescript.’
From translation, she moved on to writing a story, her first, and she sent it to the magazine Home Chat. It was returned ‘without thanks’. But a year or two later she wrote a sketch, more personally felt, ‘The Russian and his Book’. She sent it to The Outlook, and it was accepted and published anonymously in the edition of 4 October 1902.
Always in her life until now, when it came to a choice between one special person and the world outside personal involvement, the impersonal world proved the stronger. It seemed to be going that way once again. London and her life there, her freedom and her untrammelled view of things, meant more to her than Benjamin. It was ‘only by the pain of remaining free’ that one could ‘have the whole world round one all the time’.
She finally broke off the engagement to Benjamin. He left Endsleigh Street, and she was on her own again, feeling a mixture of sadness and relief. She wrote wryly of her unhappiness at this time : ‘Always I failed to achieve, try as I would, a complete despair.’ Benjamin continued to turn up at intervals in her life, still hoping she might change her mind; and she was glad not to lose him entirely.