"It’s me, me; this is me being alive" - Dorothy Richardson's Backwater - words and phrases that fretted dismally at the beauty of the scene

The pointed roofs of Pointed Roofs (1915), the first volume of Pilgrimage, Dorothy Richardson’s roman fleuve, were in Hanover, abroad, and inherently rewarding for our teenage heroine Miriam, even if teaching English to German girls was not, in the end, for her.  But in the next volume Miriam is teaching again, this time in “a proper schooly school” north London suburb, a Backwater (1916), where everything is worse.

It would be cold English pianos and dreadful English children – and trams going up and down that grey road outside.  (Ch. 1, p. 198 in the collected edition)

Which is about right.  The children are not that bad.  The loss of serious German music is a disaster.

At this point, and in Backwater even more than in Pointed Roofs, Richardson’s novel is a Kunstlerroman, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Woman, with numerous curious resemblances to Joyce’s novel, also published in 1916.  Both novels are highly, entirely interior, with some passages moving to some kind of stream of consciousness, if that is a helpful term.  Chapter II, one long party scene, or Chapter V, where Miriam tries to fall asleep, especially impressed me as being as dense as the later chapters of Joyce’s novel.

Richardson should get some of Joyce’s credit for the “epiphany,” too (all Joycean parallels are coincidental, artists working on similar problems and coming to similar conclusions).  What else is this but an epiphany:

She tried once or twice deliberately to bring back the breathless moment standing still on a stair.  Each time something of it returned.  ‘It’s me, me; this is me being alive,’ she murmured with a feeling under her like the sudden drop of a lift.  (III, 245)

There we have, I suspect, the metaphysics of Pilgrimage in a few words.  Reality that is more real, or at least better written.

Here we see Miriam, an 18 year-old schoolteacher, becoming a writer, as she watches fog move across the lawn:

Several times she glanced at the rich green, feeling that neither ‘emerald,’ ‘emerald velvet,’ nor ‘velvety emerald’ quite expressed it.  (IV, 247)

There follow more shade-and-light effects, one source of Ford Madox Ford calling Richardson an “Impressionist.”  Then a bit so good I can’t resist:

The back door, just across the little basement hall, scrooped inwards across the oilcloth, jingling its little bell, and was banged to.  The flounter-crack of a raincloak smartly shaken out was followed by a gentle scrabbling in a shoe-box, - the earliest girl, peaceful and calm, a wonderful sort of girl, coming into the empty basement quietly getting off her things, with all the rabble of the school coming along the roads behind.  (IV, 247)

Richardson’s prose provides many rewards.  Miriam, in the novel, is training her taste in fictional prose:

Miriam returned to her book.  The story of Adèle had moved on through several unassimilated pages.  ‘My child,’ she read, ‘it is important to remember’ – she glanced on, gathering a picture of a woman walking with Adèle along the magic terrace, talking – words and phrases that fretted dismally at the beauty of the scene.  Examining later chapters she found conversations, discussions, situations, arguments, ‘fusses’ – all about nothing.  She turned back to the early passage of description and caught the glow once more.  But this time it was overshadowed by the promise of those talking women.  That was all there was.  She had finished the story of Adèle.  (II, 232)

Brutal, but a good critic, with admirable taste, taste like mine.  Mostly.  “Cheese – how could people eat cheese?” (II, 238).  Someone get Miriam to Neal’s Yard, quick.

The reading theme expands near the end of the book, when Miriam sabotages her teaching, binge-reading wholesome and then trashy novels rather than working on her teacher’s certification.  But she is no teacher, and in the next novel she moves to another of the four professions allowed to women of her class at the time (teacher, governess, nurse, supreme monarch of the British empire).  A comparison with George Gissing’s The Odd Women (1893), published at the time Backwater is set, would be fruitful.  The odd women in that novel learn typing and dictation so they are not trapped by draining jobs or worse husbands.  Of course, if I think of Stephen Dedalus again, I see what Miriam should be doing: going to college and reading better books.  Now I have to keep reading the Pilgrimage novels just to see what happens once she starts reading better books.