A Reassessment
Dorothy Richardson
Eva Tucker
This week Eva Tucker's selected extracts from Dorothy Richardson's Pilgrimage are broadcast on Radio 3. Pilgrimage is available in Virago Modern Classics, 4 vols, £3.50 each.
Dorothy Richardson was born in 1873, nine years before Virginia Woolf, the third of four daughters of parents who were able to bring them up to expect the good life. In 1893 her father went bankrupt, 'a stain impossible to expunge', according to the Victorian canon. In 1895 her mother committed suicide. Dorothy was left free early to go in search of her true self: free and adrift, with no support save her wits. She survived on them, as governess, teacher, dentist's receptionist, reviewer, translator, essayist, and finally as author of Pilgrimage, her 2,000 page autobiograph- ical novel. Few fictional heroines can be identified so closely with their author as Miriam Henderson with Dorothy Richard- son.
She survived, but she never recovered from the social disorientation. 'We all have different sets of realities' Miriam says to Michael Shatov. Shocked to the core, he replies, 'That, believe me, is impossible.' Like all those who reject or are rejected by their background, Dorothy Richardson suf- fered love/hate feelings for all it stood for. She spent her life trying to regain the paradise which had been her birthright. Conscious of the shortness of time, she liv- ed each moment to the full, her capacity for enjoyment unimpaired.
Her struggles against poverty, against the social constraints of being a woman, and against the conventional form of the novel were not ends in themselves but obstacles in the way of her search for the still point of the turning world. She was a deeply religious woman, aware that a recognition of spiritual values is part of the struggle for existence. She never stopped believing in God, though she failed to find a mode of worship entirely acceptable to her. She went on looking. Her life, like her work, was a pilgrimage.
She looked for a church that would give greatest scope to her as an individual. 'The only thing that isn't suspect is the in- dividuality', a credo she shared with Bloomsbury. They, however, paid homage to the individual in chorus, they flourished in each other's admiration. Dorothy Richardson had no one to reflect her glory. Unlike Bloomsbury, she did not beatify the intellect, though like them, she needed something that did away with the need for pretence. She could not give up her cons- cience to the preacher who as often as not sermonised 'from unsound premises until your brain was sick.' She was aware that there were 'distinguished minds who thought Darwin true', her friend and lover H.G. Wells (Hypo of Pilgrimage) among them. 'He was wrong about everything and yet while he talked, everything changed in spite of yourself.'
It was with the Quakers, whose full ac- ceptance of women endeared them to her, that she most nearly found the form she sought. Quite early she realised that 'if she were perfectly still, the sense of God was there,' a feeling borne out and enhanced by the Friends' silent Meeting for Worship. What was true about God, applied also to human relationships. 'Only in silence, in complete self-possession and on the inward- ness of being can lovers fully meet.' That she never took the decisive step of joining the Quakers is in keeping with her uncom- mitted way of life. She called herself a Tory anarchist, someone who wished to preserve the old decencies but wanted to do away with injustices. In other words, someone who was `attached for ever to the spacious gentle surroundings' in which she was born, but whom life had flung into the chaos beyond the pale of gentleness. These dif- ficulties are reflected in the leaps from the first to the third person in Pilgrimage. She was permanently divided from herself..It no longer made sense to believe that truth and love resided in any one particular faith or person.
She could be stirred by the ringing 'Nun danket alle Gott' of the Lutheran church in Germany (so much more powerful than the English 'Now thank we all our God' with its unnecessary pronouns). She could feel the perfection of life in a Catholic church 'That is why people go to church, for those moments with the light and all those things in the chancel. It means something.' She realised the transcendental significance of the Buddhist `0-mmmm', she could per- ceive that a Japanese flower arrangement is, 'like a sort of mathematics'. She very nearly married a Jew. On a secular level, she flirted with the Fabians (Lycurgans of Pilgrimage). But in the end she refused to, be circumscribed, the sky was the limit. 'It was one's own sky because one was 0 human being.'
Her failure to commit herself was at once her strength and her weakness. On the one hand, she was carried away on a cloud of ontological amazement, 'One might perhaps die of wonder if one could think hard enough over the fact of there being anything anywhere.' On the other hand, ontological greed, born of that early uprooting and the insecurity it brought, left her anchorless. 'It is only by the pain of re- maining free that one can have the whole world round one all the time.'
Dorothy Richardson made her writing her church, and, in spite of her need for silence, words were her faith. 'All that has been said and known in the world is it language; all we know of Christ is in Jewish words, all the dogmas of religion are words.... Whether you agree or not, language is the only way to express anything and it dims everything.' Her life was devoted to brightening the dimness. The tedium and longueurs of Pilgrimage, which there undeniably are, arise from her trying, too hard to verbalise the importance of non-verbal communication. Virginia Woolf, who owes her a considerable literal,' debt, condemns the 'damned egotistica] self' which obtrudes in the writing. But that is less than just. The wonder is not that Dorothy Richardson did not do better, but that she achieved so much by way of break' ing literary barriers. In 1931, when the bulk of Pilgrimage had been published, Jolla Cowper Powys wrote to her 'I think your not being allowed by England to devote yourself to your own work is the greatest literary disgrace of our time.'
Each lake of boredom in Pilgrimage is compensated for by a peak of irridesceat light. Miriam, like Mrs Dalloway after her moves, wrapped in metaphysical specula' tion, against a backcloth of London, scene, after scene unfolding, with each nuance 01 the changing day and season caught, as in series of Monet paintings. The essence 01 the pilgrimage is that it never -ends, but there are moments when seeker and sought are one. As she watched the flower dotted grass move by on either side of the small pathway, she felt an encroaching rah' iance, felt herself now, more deeply thall she would on the way home from church,' with the others, the enchanted guest otk spring and summer.'
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