The Tunnel (1919) by Dorothy Richardson, the fourth book in the Pilgrimage series, is what I will write about here. There are always interesting things in these books.
1. Our autobiographical heroine is now in London, working in
a dentist office and living in a little room in St. Pancras. The genre of the novel is “young woman in the
city.” The previous novels, where Miriam
was a teacher in Germany, a teacher in North London, and a governess, were all
false starts, but Richardson, and thus presumably Miriam, will work as a
secretary – office manager, maybe – for the dentists for ten years, so maybe
this roman is finally going to start fleuving.
Three false starts in the first three novels is just one
more reason why Richardson is neglected.
Patience testing.
2. Richardson’s
method continues to be relentlessly interiorized, inside Miriam’s head all the
time, and fragmented, with lots of the usual writing that connects scene to
scene missing. The reader is tossed into
the pool headfirst, over and over again.
A mass of material results – lots of extraordinary social detail, like
all of the stuff where Miriam learns to ride a bicycle, and lots of
questionable but at least provocative thinking from young Miriam. I have been wondering, though, how it is all
being shaped by Richardson. Really, if
it is shaped. My prejudice is that all
else equal, shaped is more artful than unshaped.
Both Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf reviewed The
Tunnel in 1919. Both were, at that
point, the authors of one book each, so this is early, before their major
works. But I assume they were both
better readers than I am, and both vote that Richardson’s novels are unshaped.
Mansfield: “Only we feel that until these things are judged
and given each its appointed place in the whole scheme, they have no meaning in
the world of art.”
Woolf: “We want to be rid of realism, to penetrate beneath
it, and further require that Miss Richardson shall fashion this new material
into something which has the shapeliness of the old accepted forms.”
These are both positive, if skeptical, reviews. Many thanks to Neglected Books for collecting
these reviews among so much other useful material.
3. In real life,
Richardson reconnected with a high school friend around this time (1894 if I am
dating the time of the novel correctly).
The friend was recently married to a young writer who turned out to be
H. G. Wells. I mean, he always was, but
in 1894 he had not yet published a novel, just a mass of short stories and
newspaper writing, so he was not yet, you know, H. G. Wells. Anyway, this sounds so unlikely to me, but it
happened, and if it happened it went into Pilgrimage, so there is some
fascinating stuff about Miriam hanging around with the Wells circle.
One way Pilgrimage is perhaps shaped is as a portrait
of the artist as a young woman, and much of that theme is developed in the
“Wells” chapter. For example:
[T]he business of the writer was imagination, not romantic imagination, but realism, fine realism, the truth about ‘the savage,’ about all the past and present, the avoidance of cliché . . . what was cliché? . . . (Ch. 6, 122 ellipses in original)
Rows and rows of ‘fine’ books; nothing but men sitting in studies doing something cleverly, being very important, ‘men of letters’; and looking out for approbation. If writing meant that, it was not worth doing. (Ch. 6, 130)
To write books, knowing all about style, would be to become like a man. Women who wrote books and learned these things would be absurd and would make men absurd. (Ch. 6, 131)
Many great lines in Chapter 6.
I’ll save #4 for tomorrow.
Zola and Gissing tomorrow.
