In 1933, an amateur bibliographer named John Gawsworth asked ten contemporary British writers to contribute a short essay on their work for his book Ten Contemporaries: Notes Toward Their Definitive Bibliography. Dorothy Richardson’s piece is less about her work and far more about her childhood, and it illuminates some of the experiences and themes that will be familiar to readers of Pilgrimage. It also contains a glancing mention of teen-age love of “some unknown god,” the first instance I’ve seen of Richardson expressing anything close to traditional romantic feelings.
Being born in Berkshire should mean early acquaintance with woods and hills and rivers. It meant these things for me. Long before their names were known to me they had given that first direct knowledge which instruction and experience can amplify and deepen but can never outdo. I had noted the play of light through a wood and the astonishing presence of flowers and ferns upon its floor where open spaces were clear of undergrowth—guests, like myself, of the giant trees and the light and the vast quietude; had visited a hilltop and discovered that the world went on beyond it; had noted along the river-bank, the strange independent plants that knew neither home nor kindness, and the flow of that river, on and on, away, homeless and free.
Berkshire was also a vast garden, flowers, bees and sunlight, a three-in-one, at once enchantment and a benevolent conspiracy of awareness turned towards a small being to whom they first, and they alone, brought the sense of existing. Alternating with South Devon, sea, rock-pools, cowries sea-wet and heavy in the hand with an infinite preciousness; gift of the sea that extended outwards forever and had no further shore. Just as a window in an Oxford chapel, I believe Oriel, seen when I was six years old, extended within itself forever, so that at once one escaped those who mysteriously had brought one to this opening into reality and proceeded alone, on and on, into that window, knowing it had no end.
Berkshire, of course, was many other things, including home and its inhabitants and a thousand inexhaustibles many of them named. But it was these other, nameless things that then made the stronger impression. And it was because the sudden sweeping away of them all, soon after Oriel window, made way, at least for another sea, that heart-break was presently healed. A Sussex sea, a populous town. Strangers impinging, the sense of a vast company of people by no means all of one mind. The dawning, amazing realisation of illiberality, in thought and feeling, hitherto unappreciatedly absent amongst the adults inhabiting my home. And in exchange for the first little school attended between my fifth and sixth years and merely enormously increasing the number of inexhaustibles, and revealing “people” as fellow-guests in wonderland (either unaware of their state and therefore hateful, or aware and therefore themselves inexhaustible and comfortably not to be troubled about) another school. Competition, dimly sensed, and rivalry, and their destructiveness. Boys, envisaged collectively, negatively objectionable. One fell in love, from a distance, with a nose, a pair of eyes, the chin-line, seen in profile, of some unknown god, young, but nearer to omniscience and omnipotence than, by this time, one could admit his elders ever to be. Yet there was a shadow of uncertainty. For the sound of a voice, heard by chance, would either hurl a god from his throne or cure, for a while, life’s most incurable ills.
My eighth year brought London, in the form of a spacious suburban house whose garden restored a lost eternity. Tennis, boating, dancing. School, meaning only languages, music, drilling, and song and, always haunted by the shadow of misgiving, the fascination of “the wonders of science.” School competed even holidays, competed, almost successfully with other worlds, for ten years. Leaving was heart-break, discovered as the heart-break of losing chosen friends. From this pain, only the writing of words, preferably rhymed, could bring relief.
So far plain sailing. But what, in a brief sketch, may be said of any of our lives from seventeen onwards? Bare skeleton of facts. Ceaseless conflict of adolescence, the harsher for the sudden removal of all props. Isolation, going forth into the world unarmed, to make a living unprepared. Teaching, abroad, at home, in school and in family. Each a brief and fascinating and horrible experience. Strange poses of an untrained dancer. At last, London, clerical work, “freedom.” The Quest. Love, all sorts, art, all sorts, religion, all sorts, all saying in chorus, “Lo here, and Lo there.” But is not all this experience written in a million volumes by a million writers? Thought, about everything. The beginnings of the divided mind. Recognition of the universality of the alternative interpretation. Of the difference between knowledge and knowing, confirmed by the voice of experience when it turns with a grin and says “I told you so”; and so forth, for years, until the not uncommon desire to focus from a distance takes one away from “everything and everybody.” And once again and the more powerfully for the intervention of instruction and of experience, one rediscovers what was known before these began their work of befogging and destruction. And one begins in 1908 to write, having already served one’s apprenticeship in the pages of a vivid, if obscure, anarchist monthly. And what one writes is welcomed by the kindly editor of the Saturday Review.
And one hovers between London and the country, feeling each enhanced by the process. And discovers Cornwall and makes it the land of one’s adoption.
And the war finds one with the first chapter written of a long, long book, and the second begun, and the third in shape, one is therefore, when the time comes, incensed in being classified as a post-war writer altogether.
From Ten Contemporaries: Notes Toward Their Definitive Bibliography by John Gawsworth. London: Joiner and Steele, 1933, p.195-198.