they seem monotonous

Only the men remaining, able to breathe in peace, each on his own centre in integrated morning mood, the party held together by the ceremonial furnishings of the table and securely apart by the impermanent nature of the gathering.

Dorothy Richardson, Dimple Hill, 1938



Design (perhaps by definition) seems to guarantee outcome
Better yet
Each outcome is intermediary – the very purpose of pattern is to be reassuring
And yet, since they are saturated with psychial ‘pastness’
Patterns cannot claim limitless purity
Patterns amplify reality because they both modulate and prophesy our perception of them
Where at first they seem monotonous they soon become monstrous
Then is all organization portenteous and narrative


Lyn Hejinian, A Border Comedy, 1997

according to a pattern drawn from a patchwork quilt

When you mention advertising of course you can't forget the way that Dorothy Richardson’s Pilgrimage comes, after a while, to begin a passage with a sentence about some person or event you have not encountered yet, speaking about the thing as if there is already a large context all around it and filling you with the desire to be up to speed with the rest of your compatriots who are now standing around you, holding a discussion you are excluded from.

It is as if they all have a Fiat!

There is, for example, the first sentence of Clear Horizon, 1935, the eleventh book, “Between herself and all that was waiting to flow in and settle upon this window-lit end of the great empty room, was the sense of missing Lionel Cholmley.” As if you knew Lionel Cholmley. You have never met Lionel Cholmley. Lionel Cholmley? Then there are three pages about Lionel Cholmley. Cholmley! He was worth knowing! Cholmley! He exits forever. “Having paid him tribute while pouring out her tea and getting back to the window-end of the long empty breakfast table, she bade farewell to Lionel Cholmley.” His radiation lingers – it is the idea of speaking without posing, intensified – “And instead of going to face down the room from the hearthrug, or to pose with the curve of the near-by grand piano, he remained in his place and said his poem as if he were a momentary spokesman, like a vocal testifier in a religious gathering, and, although his poem was heroic, his voice was only a little fuller and more resonant than usual, and quite free from recitational ‘effects.’ So that the poem prevailed …”

Soon afterwards, Miriam watches as a stranger rises in the crowd at a Lycurgan Society meeting, “slowly stammering out his simple words, annihilating the suave pseudo-Nietzsche on the platform,” and Amabel next to her says, “Mira! He’s real!” The man is not Lionel but he is a continuation; he is a Lionel-tentacle, and Amabel is the one who invents a new phrase for he is quite free from recitational ‘effects.’ The radiation is still there, spreading its ad of realness, so that soon (with the whole atmosphere presaging) Miriam will stop going to Lycurgan meetings and veer towards Quakers.

At the same time there is something buried, something muffled, as there was when her mother died and the book waved its hands obliquely, leaving open the possibility that you would not find out. That muffled-ness points to a world somewhere where everyone does things unexpectedly, for reasons you will never know (as though her mother had gone on holiday).

There’s a different form of radiation in Nanni Balestrini's Blackout, 1980, tr. Peter Valente, when the author springs some phrase on you and then repeats it on the next page surrounded by different lines and then maybe again in two pages until you realise it could occur in any place at all and still justify itself through radiant penetration. Honestly the poem has no way of saving itself from its lines. Nobody will veer anywhere; they are immediately present, because the line, “you persecute your persecutors with the truth” can occur after or before (as if on top of) the line, “meanwhile this occasion has unmasked all the petty tyrants who swore to me that they would eviscerate our friendship” (p. 26) or after or before the line “redirect your letters from Nice to Provence because tomorrow I’m leaving for France and who knows I may travel much farther” (p.27) until it is always unmoored – it always has the atmosphere of meaning something ... He put the poem together, says the editor, by “arrang[ing] the book’s text

according to a pattern drawn from a patchwork quilt with strips sewed at 45 degrees across a checkered base, developing a chart […] indicating which borrowed fragments would be placed in which numbered sections, in varying ratio depending on the cut.”

You are always waiting for a line-reappearance. It will be the same thing but in a new setting like a repeatable horror jewel. It is as if Lionel Cholmley kept coming back in as Lionel Cholmley, not as an anonymous stammering Lycurgan meeting man or as a Quaker or a statement from Amabel. What do monsters advertise, these M.R. James yūrei that stalk after you?

a conspiracy

He left the guests alone a moment,—the lady was not yet to be seen,—Malt sat on an ottoman,—the children had satirical looks,—in short, Impudence dwelt in this house as in her temple. Ridicule had no effect upon the old man, and he only countermanded what displeased himself, not what displeased others.

At length the rosy-cheeked wife of the physician flourished into the apartment,—as preparatory course or preamble of the dinner,—with three or four esprits or feathers in her cap,—with a dapple neck-apron,—in a red ball-dress, from which waltzing had taken out the color in which she had rouged,—and with a perforated fancy-fan.

(Jean Paul Richter, Titan, 1803, tr. Charles T. Brooks)




If only every one would stop for a moment and let the thing that was always hovering there, let it settle and intensify. But the whole of life was a conspiracy to prevent it. Was there something wrong in it? It could not be a coincidence the way life always did that … she had reached the little conservatory on the half-landing, darkened with a small forest of aspidistra.

(Dorothy Richardson, The Tunnel, 1919)

all things else

I'm laying together excerpts from various books I've read, as before, last year, and this might as well continue until the end of the month. Here -

Carmarthen hills are green and low
And therealong the small sheep go
Whose voices to the valley come
At eve, when all things else are dumb.

(Dudley G. Davies, Carmarthenshire, 1871 (?), from Anglo-Welsh Poetry 1480 – 1980, 1985, ed. Raymond Garlick & Roland Mathias)

In contrast to all the semantically encoded spaces discussed so far, it is possible for different characters to meet in a neutral space, even if they do not agree on its meaning. Here they need not adapt to each others' perception of lived space, since these sites are free of any semantic encoding which demands compromise. Indeed, neutral spaces differ from significant spaces precisely in that they do not allow her the sense of belonging or even of habitation. Instead they offer an ecstatic feeling of spacelessness and a momentary sensation of unity between self and world.

While Miriam views her own room as a place engendering a feeling of transcendence which heightens and accumulates impressions, i.e., the transcendence of recollection, neutral space involves an ecstatic transcendence into nowhere, which disperses and scatters thought and does not strive for transformative synthesis.

(Elisabeth Bronfen, Dorothy Richardson's Art of Memory: Space, Identity, Text, 1999, tr. Victoria Appelbe)

to disappear beneath slow sea-water

Put the point at the end of the sentence, said Dorothy Richardson. It is one of the writing precepts that she gives to Miriam in Pilgrimage, and she offered it genuinely, not fictionally, to someone in a letter, following her own advice more and more as the books go on, or so I think now as I'm rereading them, and up to volume twelve, Dimple Hill, the sentences becoming more Proustian in this structural sense, the winding roam that ends with a cap that expands into suggestiveness because it is exact and surprising: "Returned from their first glance at the scene as it showed from the house which before had been part of it and now, itself only a window, left it empty, a vast expanse ending in a wedge-shaped ridge low against the low sky, her eyes sped once more across the flats, now beginning to disappear beneath slow sea-water, and reached the misty ridge and found trees there, looking across at her from their far distance so intently that she was moved to set down the little old spoon raised to crack the shell of the egg whose surface, in the unimpeded light, wore so soft a bloom." Not the same observations as Proust, or for the same reason, but still the sentence-weight placed on the "soft bloom," on a little thing, the capper is aimed at tininess and faintness, a passing object: a flower, in him, a slick of sperm, or a yellow spot that no one else can find, though it revived him when he was dying, said Jean-Louis Vaudoyer, who allowed the other man to lean upon his arm at the Jeu de Palme where Vermeer's View of Delft, 1660-61, was on display in an exhibition "the profits of which were to go to areas of Flanders that had been laid waste by the war." Marcel Proust: a Life, Jean-Yves Tadié, tr. Euan Cameron, 2000. "Several times he came back to sit down on that 'circular settee' which Bergotte rolls off to die," said Vaudoyer. "But," writes Tadié, Proust "did not die in front of the View of Delft." It is strange that this sentence is there in the biography when everybody knows that Proust did not die in front of the View of Delft. Logically we know it, because Bergotte would not have been able to roll away in the same place if his creator had done so first. It is odd to imagine myself as someone who was desiring, sighing, longing to be informed very clearly that Proust did not suffer a fatal attack in the Jeu de Palme before he had written the word "end" in his manuscript, which, according to Céleste Albaret, was an event that occurred in the following year. And what does she mean, asks Tadié, when there are at least four versions of the final paragraph, none of which can be singled out as the one that ended with Fin? "[I]n which version was the word Fin placed at the end? Certainly before the fourth but after the third. It was when Proust had succeeded in inserting the image of giants, which may have taken the place of the 'êtres monstrueux,' that he stopped; it was both because he had achieved a rhythmical fullness, and also because of the effect, not dissimilar to silence in musical tempo, of the single dash (not a pair, as in the Clarac-Ferré edition) which precedes 'dans le temps.'"

If Tadié wants to tell me that Proust did not die in front of a Vermeer then he has an idea of me that does not fit my actual existence, or perhaps that information resolved an imbalanced feeling there in the paragraph for him and he assumed that I, too, would have been arrested by that imbalance and clumsiness, desiring, in its place, a "musical fullness," and so, to get us both through the experience safely, he installed that phrase even though we are on page seven hundred and forty-four in a book where the section titled 'Death' does not come until page seven hundred and seventy-five. Between the two pages Proust nearly has a bucket and a chicken thrown at his head and he goes to the Ritz for dinner more than once.

Why, in that sentence, did I take the word "ice" away from the front of "bucket" and "hot" from the front of "chicken," which would have given them a clearer placement in the Ritz dining room? There must have been a reason. Now, as it is, the bucket might be a manure bucket and the chicken might be alive. The dying Proust is visiting a farm (how, with his asthma?); he is standing on the floor of a barn while a farm person, not looking where he is aiming, is cleaning buckets and chickens off the rafters. Probably there was straw as well but Tadié has not mentioned it. The owner of the farm sees the near miss and loses his temper at the farm person but Proust is charming, as he always was, a quality that Miriam analyses whenever she comes across it in another character during Pilgrimage. What does it mean, to say charming things? she considers. Why is it different in a man and in a woman? Chrisman never praises Ruskin for his charmingness* and nor was Laure charming. She was "pure, dissolute, dark, luminous." "I drank, I bathed in her radiant purity," wrote Jean Bernier, tr Jeanine Herman. L'amour de Laure, 1978. Do I ever know what to do with words? The difference between a live chicken and a cooked one lies between the words "warm" and "hot."


*"The ability to coo as gently as a dove was not a notable characteristic of Ruskin."

the most dissimilar to all

The effect on my feelings [...] I cannot better represent, than by supposing myself to have known only our light airy modern chapels of ease, and then for the first time to have been placed, and left alone, in one of our largest Gothic cathedrals in a gusty moonlight night of autumn. 'Now in glimmer, and now in gloom;' often in palpable darkness not without a chilly sensation of terror; then suddenly emerging into broad yet visionary lights with coloured shadows of fantastic shapes, yet all decked with holy insignia and mystic symbols; and ever and anon coming out full upon pictures and stone-work images of great men, with whose names I was familiar, but which looked upon me with countenances and an expression, the most dissimilar to all I had been in the habit of connecting with those names.

This imaginary friend is reporting his amazement. Knowing that the Ancient Mariner was amazed, shattered, shocked, adjusted, I'm wondering if this was the poet's vision of an ideal exchange, one party returning from a mind-blower and the other party listening humbly until they are transformed. The action of the Ancient Mariner is transmission. The fake friend tells Coleridge not to rest, the Mariner needs to "pass, like night, from land to land," and the Guest is not completed. "He went like one that hath been stunned." Friend Wordsworth venturing back from childhood. Richardson's Miriam, who has to leave home so that she can earn a living, notices, whenever she takes a holiday back to her old milieu, that she has been modified psychologically because she has adventured out. She knows that she has deepened. But she can't convey it to the others. Their experiences are different now, and her ability to communicate has developed a gap. She wishes people would read the work of Ralph Waldo Emerson. "These wonders are brought to our own door." (Emerson, Nature (1836)) John Clare, going out to glean the wood for his brain's nourishment, decides to retrieve the noise of a nightingale. That written transcription is not a poem to him. He never wants to publish it. The words he picks are the same ones that people before him have used when they wanted to show a reader the same bird, "tweet tweet" and "jug jug jug:" established words. What did he go to find? The German poet Annette von Droste-Hülshoff transmits her uncle's story and it is not her uncle's story. Born in 1797, four years after Clare, she died sixteen years before him. I don't wonder who killed those men in her Judenbuche (1842). I want to know where Johannes the doppelgänger went.

to selves

Am thinking now vaguely about swarms, "the immense, quivering mass" with "incessant ebb and flow;" the pressure of a person-swarm in Sarraute, the swarm of history in Ouologuem's Bound to Violence, the pessimism inherent in those swarms (the pressure never offering to stop: the swarm continues infinitely). A swarm of figures dies in the Iliad, somewhat (only somewhat because there are so many) sorted and named. The poet is dumb before the majority of the dead. Alice Oswald extracts the names and deaths for her book Memorial, an argument for the dignity of lists. The characters in Woolf's Waves are named too, marching, advancing, not swarming, even though they are conceived in a mass. Reading Dorothy Richardson's Selected Letters (ed. Gloria G. Fromm) I see the writer defending the word "personality" and refusing to use "individual," an utterance that is, to her, so remotely scientific that it does not have the wherewithal to indicate a person. She says she can't let go of aristocrats because at least they are not part of the mass: they are people. "Richardson's fundamental commitment was to neither sexes or genders but to selves," writes Fromm. "[I]t is a story of success that Richardson tells in Pilgrimage, a story of victory over great odds, a bid for selfhood." Her character Miriam navigates crowds and gatherings of people in London; in the mountains of Switzerland she wants to walk among the snowed trees "into their strange close fellowship that left each one a perfect thing apart." (Oberland.) What about Louis Marlow (really Wilkinson) who sorted the Powys sisters into his own Linnean categories?

In the sisters, inheritance of Powys physical characteristics is on the whole rather less strongly marked than it is in the brothers. Philippa, however, is as much a Powys in appearance and in herself as any of them. She is very like Bertie, though she has not quite the same emphatic resemblance to their father as he has. Bertie's elder daughter is thoroughly Powys, and his younger daughter, by his second marriage, is is very like the Powys sister who died in childhood: her little twin-brother astonishingly, and sometimes ludicrously, resembles his father's father. No Powys could be cuckolded without certain detection if the the cuckoldry resulted in the birth of a boy.

A strange construction of individualisms.

nevertheless

When I opened a Dorothy Richardson biography in the library yesterday without reading the name of the biographer and saw, near the bottom of the page on my right, the word "nevertheless," meaning that something was true, "nevertheless" another thing was also true in opposition to the first thing, then my heart exclaimed, "Fromm," and it was Fromm.

By the last page she had decided that Robinson and D.H. Lawrence were not as whole as Woolf and James Joyce (two teams of two, one boy one girl, and I became distracted, for what if, in this book and in no other place, symmetry was necessary, and all arguments should consist of symmetry first and foremost and could this biography of Dorothy Richardson be the mental door to a place where all good things are symmetrical, all faces exactly the same right & left, etc?) – they were not as whole because they couldn't keep "life" out of their books, they kept muddling art with life, whereas Woolf and Joyce had detached themselves purely and determinedly into "art." The second team had made a greater commitment and a more important sacrifice: that was the biographer's conclusion.

The distribution of success and failure is clear but is it illuminating?

Richardson and Lawrence's muddying-with-life usually comes in the form of apparent impatience – they want to push against things and argue – and Woolf and Joyce have placed themselves away from that physical punch-up mode, therefore Lawrence and Richardson have roughly-formed books, pulling away into lumps of lecture or hatred, while Woolf and Joyce have artly-formed books, integrating their arguments coherently, without the blasting, ranting irritation. Whatever feeling they have, they like you to think that they're putting it to work. Whereas Lawrence and Richardson are willing to give you the impression that they are worked by their feelings.

And Woolf might have been thinking along similar lines to Fromm when she said that Richardson was flawed because she wrote from one self-boundaried perspective, that of Miriam Henderson. She was not universal and she did not have a wide view.

I believe it is good to have these lumps of hate and gnashing in books. I am in favour of Lawrence and Richardson. I do not think that they are inferior.

Lawrence and Richardson trusted themselves to the veracity of their lumps, and Lawrence at least was a believer in the "under-consciousness so devilish" (as he said of the United States) and in the eviction of all under-consciousnesses from their chrysalis cases: "many a dragon-fly never gets out of the chrysalis case: dies inside." And he will get out.

To remove the lumps because they are lumps would mean submission to the alien thing called art that they do not entirely trust. They have seen that it can be wielded against them. The biographer says that they have not achieved a coherent art, but they have eyed tidiness and decided against it. That is not art, for them.

So I was in an argument with Fromm, and I wanted to bring up Margaret Grainger, the editor who wrote the introduction for The Natural History Prose Writing of John Clare, in order to say, "Here is somebody who does not write symmetry or "nevertheless," and I prefer her –" but then I would be creating a two-team system, like Fromm, and I would be putting one person against another and ticking off their differences, like Fromm, "The two women wrote introductions, nevertheless Grainger was …" and I would be Frommian, as I was when I wrote the paragraph beginning with "Richardson and Lawrence's muddying …" – absolute pure Frommianism, my God.

the character of an austere moralist

Fromm puts Richardson in a group with one hand and takes her out with the other: she is not like Christina Stead; she is not like Robert Musil and she is not like John Cowper Powys. "And different as they were from each other, it was their difference from a good part of the rest of the world that brought them together in the first place." Of course I'm wrong at the end of my last post and the essayist isn't summarising the author for people who haven't read Pilgrimage; why would she think she was doing that?

Still the question. Why try to construct this fantasy of a group to which she might belong? I don't have an answer. It's in Fromm's mind somewhere. She imagines a group; she asks herself if the person she is discussing belongs inside that group or out of it. Richardson's husband Alan Odle is not simply tall and thin, he is different from other tall, thin people. "[E]xtremely tall, shockingly thin, cadaverously pale, and exceedingly courteous." Then there is another fact, which she presents as a contrast, "but his brown eyes glowed with intelligence." So removing him step by step into a group of his own.

In spite of the decadent surface, Alan Odle had the character of an austere moralist.

If I am told that Dorothy Richardson is not like Robert Musil then I am being teased with the prospect of her being like Robert Musil. Simultaneously I am reassured that she is not Robert Musil. She escapes. Should it be characterised as an escape? I don't know. Fromm seems tantalised by the way things could have been. Richardson's books "speak the dissenting language of a separatist" but Woolf, her contemporary, "was admitted into the company of the master prose stylists of the late nineteenth century" when she was re-evaluated into the 1960s and '70s, and so she has entered the canon. Powys preferred Richardson to Woolf. Why, when other people did not? Because "the ears of a few readers are attuned to a different music not heard by the rest of their generation," Fromm says. Powys is inside a group of people with attuned ears.

As Duchamp constructed or selected his objects he wrote notes to himself about the "infra-thin." Does that fit here?

It would be better to try to go into the infra-thin interval which separates 2 'identicals' than to conveniently accept the verbal generalisation which makes 2 twins look like 2 drops of water.

Mudpuddle in the comments has made me realise that John Clare's narrative voice never groups him with the farm labourer class he was born into. His poems are endless leisure.

The south west wind how pleasant in the face
It breathes while sauntering in a musing pace
I roam these new ploughed fields and by the side
Of this old wood where happy birds abide
And the rich blackbird through his golden bill
Litters wild music when the rest are still
Now luscious comes the scent of blossomed beans
That oer the path in rich disorder leans
Mid which the bees in busy rows and toils
Load home luxuriantly their yellow spoils
The herd cows toss the molehills in their play
And often stand the strangers steps at bay
Mid clover blossoms red and tawney white
Strong scented with the summers warm delight

(Beans in Blossom)

waddling with distended craw

I want, when I see Blaine Hill say that the last post reminds him of Macbeth, to write a sentence about Dorothy Richardson that ends with the words "like John Clare," but what would the rest of the sentence look like, that's my question to myself; how should I connect that slight faint feeling that they are somehow sympathetic, to the firmness or thoughtfulness of a sentence? The impression is not firm or thoughtful.* I begin to work out the amount of time I will have to spend talking about the ways in which they are not alike before I will feel entitled to say, "in this respect they are similar."

What is the connection, really: it's only the aheroic sublime that she observes in shabby wallpaper, and the sublime ditto that he finds in ruts or wind, and their mutual stubborn decision to record time passing over these things.

The crib stock fothered – horses suppered up
And cows in sheds all littered-down in straw
The threshers gone the owls are left to whoop
The ducks go waddling with distended craw
Through little hole made in the henroost door

(from Clare's Winter Evening)


But the dark yellow graining of the wall-paper was warm. It shone warmly in the the stream of light pouring through the barred lattice window. In the further part of the room, darkened by the steep slope of the roof, it gleamed like stained wood. The window space was a little square wooden room, the long low double lattice breaking the roof, the ceiling and walls warmly reflecting its oblong of bright light.

(Richardson: The Tunnel)

Opening Windows on Modernism: the Selected Letters of Dorothy Richardson (ed. Gloria G. Fromm) I read this sentence, "And perhaps the Australian outsider, Christina Stead, also bears comparison to Richardson, if not in her political commitment, then in the disposition of her unconventional life;" and I see that it is only there because Fromm wants to place Richardson in a group, even one that does not, she says, function usefully: "sui generis […] But this is a company of originals." Leah Dickerman, one of the essayists I read a few days ago in Kurt Schwitters: Color and Collage, had the reverse of Fromm's dissimilarity problem: she was arguing against other commentators who have tried to downplay Schwitters's influence on Robert Rauschenberg, hoping to manufacture (the other commentators, not Dickerman) a state of heroic separation where the American artist can thrive freely.

So you have a fret over the debt that one artist should pay to another or be seen to pay to another, and at the other end of the struggle you have the desire to place people in a contextual group (Fromm), a desire that comes from a simple question: how do you summarise Richardson for people who haven't read her?

But then why are they reading her letters?


* This post of mine is not a reflection on Blaine Hill's comment, only on the thoughts I had afterwards.

leap and sizzle, making the cauldron bubble like boiling silver

I think over Powys' criticism of Woolf on the grounds of "Life Itself" and wonder if it is a) legitimate because the gap between Life Itself and life-in-fiction is a phenomenon that she often considers on the page and here is someone willing to situate her on one side or the other, but b) illegitimate because I have already seen her decide that she is making art, not life.

It would be intellectually dishonest of her to pretend that a book is "Life Itself;" that's her belief.

But tantalised, she's tantalised. "Let us again pretend that life is a solid substance, shaped like a globe, which we turn about in our fingers," says Bernard at the end of The Waves; "Let us pretend that we can make out a plain and logical story –" she'll concede that perfect possession of life is impossible: "Whatever sentence I extract whole and entire from this cauldron is only a string of six little fish that let themselves be caught while a million others leap and sizzle, making the cauldron bubble like boiling silver, and slip through my fingers." Or: "Out rush a bristle of horned suspicions, horror, horror, horror — but what is the use of painfully elaborating these consecutive sentences when what one needs is nothing consecutive but a bark, a groan?"

The question that she asks of herself is, how should life be misrepresented?

She has already judged Edgeworth, who can't achieve the detachment that she wants from him.* She is uneasy in the face of Margaret Cavendish, "diffused, uneasy, contorted," as well as charmed by her; in the Cavendish essay she comes back and back around the other writer's inability to measure her capacities and be guided by them. "It was from the plain of complete ignorance, the untilled field of her own consciousness, that she proposed to erect a philosophic system that was to oust all others." So there needs to be cool estimation and measurement ...

She invents other modes of symmetry or patterning. She reasserts order. It will be her own order, which she has made, in order to measure and assess and weigh, and also to contain the awareness that measurement is not possible: "How impossible to order them rightly; to detach one separately."

When she is dissatisfied with Richardson's Tunnel she will say that the other author does not measure and asses, "sensations, impressions, ideas and emotions glance off, unrelated and unquestioned;" but Richardson is willing to risk the Cavendish judgement where Woolf is not; she will write from "the untilled field of her own consciousness." She will risk not being witty. A reviewer in Full Stop who has read Viviane Forrester's "strange little book about Virginia Woolf," says that aesthetes prefer wit, therefore literature will be judged for its lightness – Richardson will not do it – and she will drive herself against the sensible realisations of Woolf, about art and life – she will go into the tantalisation – like someone driving their boat down the whirlpool plughole –


* I think he's more aware of romance than she says.

on where we wanted to go

Why should I compare David Ireland to Virginia Woolf, I ask myself, when there's nothing in common between them, and the difference is so obvious, so absolutely gaping and open, like a chasm or pit; why should they be brought to the same area – because I had his two books in my head and then I read hers; that's why – it was the chronological proximity of my reading. Taking a non-fiction hardback off the shelf at UNLV a few days ago I discovered that the North American author (whoever they were, I'm not sure) had read a number of Australian books and come away feeling puzzled because the authors seemed not to arrange an ambition for themselves and move after it in pursuit; instead they circled around an idea that they did not directly reveal or, perhaps, she suspected, understand. Then the book would end.

The two David Irelands were like that, I thought: this circling around a large unstated balloon (through a mosaic of small scenes) and the ending would be a conclusive destruction.

But he tells you that direction itself is a treacherous idea, and the suspicion he feels towards any purposed motion is one part of his satire; purpose will be thwarted, it's the way of the world. "The Boatman and I were concentrated absolutely on where we wanted to go. We had no mind left over to escape each other. Back and forth we went from side to side, left right left right in perfect time, getting no farther forward; each, for the sake of a tiny inconvenience, wishing the other had never existed." Those are the last lines of The Unknown Industrial Prisoner.

Completeness and intellectual working-through are problems in Woolf's work, according to John Cowper Powys in his 1931 monograph on Dorothy Richardson. It is a strength in Richardson that she doesn't do that, he says. "She takes her place in the great role of thinkers who, like Heraclitus and Goethe and Nietzsche are intent on Life Itself, in its mysterious flowing stream, rather than any human hypothesis of its whence and whither."

the different delicate textures of the nuts of meat

Wrongness – I thought: wrongness somehow: there are thoughts in this book that are not – they are not ... what are they not? -- I was trying Rebecca West's second novel, The Judge (1922), the story of a young secretary who meets a charismatic man and his mother, of whom: "everything about her threatened that her performances would be too strange."

Philip E. Ray has argued* that readers would be less likely to misdiagnose the Judge if they stopped thinking of it as exaggerated naturalism and began to look at it instead as a piece of self-consciously Gothic literature, with its isolated house, piratical seducer ("terrifying strength and immensity"), and the naive heroine Ellen Melville who is coaxed out of her home and away into danger after her parent dies, like Emily St. Aubert in The Mysteries of Udolpho.

Ellen doesn't suffer from Emily's "intensity of anguish," not even after her fiance commits a crime at the end of the book; she "broke into sobs" but that's nothing compared to Emily's struggle against dissolution, which she loses and wins and loses and wins over hundreds of pages.

Emily checked the tears, that trembled in her eyes. [...] Her tears were concealed, but St. Aubert heard her convulsive sobs. [...] Emily dried her tears and attempted to speak. [...] Emily, having turned away to hide her tears, quitted the room to indulge them. [...] Emily felt tears swell into her eyes, and then resentment checked them. [...] Valancourt ... learned from the flood of tears, which she could no longer repress, the fatal truth.

Emily is like Samuel Richardson's Clarissa, so fine-tuned that she needs to liquidate herself.

She resurrects, however. "Emily checked her tears, and followed her father to the parlour."

West's heroine cuts her sobbing short when the author wants style and reason to reassert itself: the tears do not stop Ellen speaking, she immediately offers an explanation for her fiance's behaviour, and soon she is thinking in Poetry: "But surely this was far too much to ask of her, who had learned what life was; who knew that, though life at its beginning was lovely as a corn of wheat, it was ground down to flour that must make bitter bread between two human tendencies." West reverts to Style: a tic: she retreats into it: a farce.

"I do mean to commit suicide, though I am getting my tea!" she snapped. [...] It was only because of all the things there are to eat this was a dreadful world to leave. She thought reluctantly of food; the different delicate textures of the nuts of meat that, lying in such snug unity within the crisp brown skin, make up a saddle of mutton; yellow country cream, whipped no more than makes it bland as forgiveness; little strawberries, red and moist as a pretty mouth; Scotch bun, dark and rich and romantic like the plays of Victor Hugo; all sorts of things nice to eat, and points of departure for the fancy.

Dorothy Richardson warned us against literature like this: charming, attractive, assertive, assured of the reader's complicity.

* The Judge Reexamined: Rebecca West's Underrated Gothic Romance (1988)

stag-headed men, winged lions

Will, will ... and now I'm re-reading E.R. Eddison -- the second of the Zimiamvia books -- whose characters have a more basic and elevated sense of will; they are kings and ladies waging war bravely, and very ruthlessly and gaily, staring calmly at death; and they are a little like Malory but less fallible, much less fallible, because the fall in this fantasy world, the end of this one form of the social order, is not the collapse of a loving clique. It is betrayal by someone whose utter nature is betrayal, as we have known ever since he was introduced, and the person he betrays knows it too, and ditto the betrayer’s sidekick, his family, other members of the nobility, the people he has made treaties with -- nobody trusts him -- and so you cannot say that it is a shock. And yet Eddison makes a similar point to Malory, that what he calls "beatitude" can't survive in the world as it is. His fantasy world "is like the sagatime, there is no malaise of the soul." So he said in a letter. "A very unearthly character of Zimiamvia lies in the fact that nobody wants to change it."

He lists lovely things in the fantasy world but not the real one (when his characters are in the real one):

Hedgehogs in little coats he beheld as household servants busy to bear the dishes; leopards, foxes, lynxes, spider-monkeys, badgers, water-mice, walked and conversed, or served the guests that sat at supper: seals, mild-eyed, moustachioed, erect on their hind flippers and robed in silken gowns, brought upon silver chargers all kinds of candied conserves, macaroons, fig-dates, sweet condiments and delicate confections of spiceries; and here were butterfly ladies seen, stag-headed men, winged lions of Sumer, hamadryads and all the nymphish kind of beck and marsh and woodland and frosty mountain solitude and the blue caves of ocean: naiad and dryad and oread, and Amphitrite’s brood with green hair sea-garlanded and combs in their hair fashioned from drowned treasures of gold.

And wants to enchant you with precision, which opposes him to the "always" that Dorothy Richardson was criticising in that quote a few posts ago. The always in his work is a now. Now there is a hedgehog. Now there is a hawk and it is hovering over a field where there are poppies. Now there is a diamond on a column. And seems to grasp hold of this presence so desperately, with these rows of notations, like gravestones passing by me as I read. So that it is like walking through a cemetery.

Richardson, on the other hand, wants to integrate a beautitudinous frame of mind into the world as it is, or perhaps I'll say that the fantasy is just better disguised in her book and not naked; Eddison's books with their longing on display are naked in that sense but not naked in other ways; the characters are invulnerable. They’re inclined to the fastidiousness that is a sign of will in Richardson as well, that casually hyperattentive ability to feel that a certain XYZ is right and therefore it must occur. One man, Lessingham, released from a dungeon, tells a servant to take his shirt away and burn it, because a shirt that he has worn in a dungeon is not a shirt that should exist. This is in the middle of a thousand other things that are going on and you’d think they were more important than the shirt but the detail of that shirt is necessary to his well-being – not just thrown away but eliminated. And these wills are holistically perpetual, and they need to endure as they are for the authors' peace of mind.

(How can I guess that? Because they both reinforce them so often, and they are both so aware that they are fragile events that need to be protected. The real world, in Eddison's book, exists in a zoo-cage bubble that can be popped with a hairpin, but the reader knows that this is the opposite of the truth. It is the book itself that can be closed away, and that will exist only in the memories of the people who have experienced it.)

In Villette though (going back to that), the invulnerable will is in danger of being melted and that is deeply exciting, not bad nor good but both and neither -- which in Eddison would be an unambiguous disaster, I think you can say, after reading that letter -- the will, in Vilette, is embattled from the inside of the body it lives in – it – may – concede to the outside – and then – some miracle -- the fall is not a fall but a swooping-up. (Will, character, and worldly pressure, are going to war in that book.)

alone, I grew calm

It might be simpler to say that perception in Dorothy Richardson's work is aligned with will, though this will never shows its real character to anyone outside the human being whose exercise is its life; to others it can be understood as stubbornness or as intelligence. It never tries to control or force anyone because it is the most undictatorial will in the world, and you could even call it anti-dictatorial, for freedom and calm are two of the conditions it is working for, and dictators are never free or calm.

Miriam knows that her job is perfect because it absorbs her intelligence and attention without asking her to be in command. The wage is enough to keep her living independently and that is what she wants. More money would be fine but not supremely important. It's not worth the price.

(This will is clear about its priorities, which translate themselves into all areas, so that the money-feeling, when she applies it to the women's independence movement -- this is in the very early 1900s -- becomes disquiet and conflict, because, a woman who has the vote, will she be distracted by the requirements of command, and drawn away from her essential absorption in the world, a problem that Richardson sees afflicting men, who are too tempted by grand sentences and falseness when they write -- their style -- she believes -- the elegant, forceful, exciting style and appealing contrived plottishness -- is a peacock symptom, "lollipops for children," and the only way to write closer to the world as it is, is to avoid it ...)

I have seen the form of a will like this in characters before, I tell myself; and think of Louie in The Man Who Loved Children, who practises her self-determination without knowing why (anticipating that it will be useful), and Lucy Snow in Villette, who is watching everyone from a position apart, and aware of being apart, and feeling in herself the work that she does to defend that apartness, since it is her nature -- "Once alone, I grew calm, and collectedly went to work" -- but Miriam in Richardson's book is the one who invents an articulate purpose for the Lucy-like nature, though this higher calling is internal, and rescues no one except her; and is unable to rescue them.

So Richardson has two points to make about this kind of will: 1., it is the most precious thing in the world, and 2. it is useless.

alone and unchanged, however surrounded and accompanied

Reading the first of Knausgård's six volumes I remember John Pistelli's post about the similarities to Richardson's Pilgrimage (Anthony linked to it on twitter) and feel uneased by the comparison -- not the details of the comparison, simply the fact that the comparison exists -- seeing, strongly, the two writers placing themselves distinctly in separated isolation, and their views of themselves different, Richardson serious about her "joy," diagnosing a tragic abdication of people from the challenge of joy and believing that it is her duty not to abdicate from joy (not questioning that assumption but trusting it) ; and therefore working, working with a conscious effort to maintain her own access, having a plan for it, avoiding marriage because of it, living and walking in places where she hopes she will find it -- whereas Knausgård describes himself as a haphazard clown who has the vaguest ideas about anything that he might want, and almost no plan to get it, feeling desires instead of plans; he would like to be cool ("cool" is his word, in the translation by Don Bartlett) but he is ordinary; he does everything that he doesn't want to do; he is "feminine" when he wants to be masculine, he cries when he doesn't want to cry, he is a bad musician when he wants to be a talent, he capitulates to people, he has studied art but he can't tell you why he likes a painting ("It was a fantastic picture, it filled me with all the feelings that fantastic pictures do, but when I had to explain why, what constituted the "fantastic" I was at a loss to do so" -- where Richardson will tell you how she comes to appreciate a piece of music); his little success in journalism is an accident and he junks it by being cocky, then he knows that he has been cocky: his cockiness is revealed to him: and his humiliation is constantly revealed to him and refreshed with a new event as if this is Fawlty Towers and he is Basil, "I was getting drunk too often, and I did not flinch from harassing someone once I got the idea in my head," also with Basil Fawlty's pettiness: "Usually something to do with their appearance, or small, silly mannerisms that I might have observed."

Richardson meanwhile perceiving transcendent vigour or insight in "small, silly mannerisms," and the transcendence of the world is up to the person who is perceiving it, that's her belief : anything is some sort of gateway, even a bit of light; and there is a question of things having or not having a hold -- "Immediate things had lost their hold" -- whereas the hold-having for Knausgård has dissolved with childhood; it is impossible now, he is too adult. The petty emotions in her can flow into a whole, and are restructured by their relationships: "But even as she felt this jealousy's deep-seeking manipulations, the vision of Amabel alone and unchanged, however surrounded and accompanied, sent it to its death [...] Released, she could seek those to whom she belonged."

She has what you could call a better self. She can be rescued, she can rescue herself, but he can't, and here is part of his clown atmospheric in My Struggle, the impossibility of self-rescue, and the undisciplined disappointment of that.

joy

When I think back on that trip to LACMA I believe that I think of paintings in the way that I experience books; the recognition of similar aspects, the white collar in Rembrandt's Portrait of Martin Looten (1632) being in the same family as the black space in Giovanni Battista Cremonini's Christ Nailed to the Cross (c. 1595), for in both of them you see the colour denying the other colours around it, and emphasising them by denying them, or, if you want to look at it another way, by herding them into pens and prisoning them there, or by imprisoning themselves; the white not going outside its own nature, and the black not going there either, but both staying in their dazzling corrals, so that everything outside the corral is a seething jungle by comparison, and subtle, like a jungle, coursing around with tiny wildlifes.

As I was talking to an artist on Monday evening about Robert Walser's The Robber, he said that it had something in common with Richardson's Pilgrimage, in that both authors were interested in the phenomenon of solitary joy.

someone to explain the picture to me

We saw some of those eyeballs at LACMA last weekend, all of them falling or flying around on their pink balloon strings, or bouncing out of soupbowls of blood; and the blood was very vivaciously heaving in evenly matched waves of careful lines, which were unmistakably pretty in their sweetiepie colours. There was one long vertical sheet-shaped piece dotted with these votive pictures (sometimes corpses, sometimes bells), like a page of little stickers. "After gazing admiringly at many scenes, all of a romantic nature, I was seized by a longing to write a verbal equivalent of the painting,' says Longus in his preface to Daphnis and Chloe – which is not what I've done; he doesn't describe the painting or praise it in the body of his story, he is breathing it or attempting to breathe it out as prose. "So I found someone to explain the picture to me, and composed a work in four volumes as an offering to Love and the Nymphs and Pan; and as a source of pleasure for the human race."

He says he's doing it to honour the aspects of life that the painting itself honours. So there is pleasure for him in giving honour. Dorothy Richardson in her Pilgrimage books is concerned because the novels she reads (this is ventriloquised through the character of Miriam) don't do honour to Life. It drives her mad – "It simply drives me mad" -- when an author tells you that a character "always" does something just-so. "Jones always wore a battered cricket cap, a little askew," is her example. "You know the whole thing is going to be lies from beginning to end."

(Her imaginary author is trying to mask his static "always" by waving active details in front of it: a "battered" cap has moved through various experiences, and the "askew" angle is humanly careless. She's right, the sentence she's invented would be degrading to any author who wrote it. Why? Because it's trying to hide what it is. And stabs itself in the back. And doesn't seem to know itself, or be aware of itself, or recognise itself; it's a stranger to itself. Which is a haunting vulnerability when you see it in someone, and you wonder what to say to them.)

Then I wonder, were the eyeballs "all" flying or falling around, or have I written an "always"? Thinking about it. Some were being carried by birds, that counts as flying, some were sailing through picture space – that counts as flying too – and the rest were toppling out of the blood-bowls, as far as I can recall. All of the disembodied eyeballs that I can remember were genuinely flying or falling. There were also kidneys and hearts but eyeballs were the favourite. Why eyeballs?