equally with joy and sorrow

The system of signals that you are being given has become, for the space of a few words, extremely clear, but, because the fiancée doesn't have a human presence outside that outline of a flag, your response is (I believe mine was) possibly more intellectual than emotional, assuming that the amount of intellect in a response can be reliably measured against the amount of emotion, which it probably can't. Yet I can write sentences like that and you probably know what I mean by them.

It seems uncanny to me, my ability to write these more or less gibberish sentences, but I am a reader who is in the habit of feeling uneasy whenever I come across one nebulous thing being compared confidently to another nebulous thing, as when people say, "The sight filled him equally with joy and sorrow," or when William Dalrymple in the Financial Times decides that the biographer whose work he is reviewing "has written a lovely admiring account of his life which is as full of joie de vivre as its subject." (A Man of Gifts, November 12, 2012)

William Dalrymple, then, has the power of discerning accurately the amount of joie de vivre in a book and the amount of joie de vivre in a human being (even more eerily, he does not seem to have ever met the subject of the biography in person; what's more his measurement is being made posthumously) and, oh God, he can compare them with pinpoint accuracy; what a science fiction story I think, sitting here gloomily in front of this banquet, what magical powers we mimic in our depressing lust for brevity, ease and certainty, if that is what it is, I think, rolling my head against the desk.

So I felt relieved when I was reading Porius by John Cowper Powys and as I crossed the boundaryline between pages 503 and 504 I saw that he is another one confronted by my own problem of things that can't be measured:

And it was accompanied by the rapid arrival upon the scene from the direction of Cader Idris of a wet, cold, clammy, straw-coloured mist, a most that was unmistakably of the kind that can only be described poetically, since any scientific description would require a lifetime of chemical analysis based on minute daily physiognomic observation.

I know it is not the same thing, since at least there is some hope of measuring the mist physically whereas joie de vivre is unphysical, but I am happy that he is being dazzled, confounded and crushed, as I am, by the idea of measuring anything at all unless it is extremely obvious in front of me, like the square of a frame around a painting, or the temperature of ice.

waiting for him

It is better if you don't fall in love inside a Mary Gaunt story at all, since the ones who experience love in person so often end up dying or in pain and the ones who have it in their imaginations are so often using it to cope with terrifying or miserable situations.

If you insist on falling in love in person then the author will anatomise your emotions and see that you are a network of selfishness or at least blindness until the reader suspects that Mary Gaunt, who keeps returning to the subject of romance as if she loves it and cannot keep away because she adores it so much, is secretly a pessimist who is warning you against real life romances because the imaginary ones are much more quick, complete, loving and satisfying. They don't take up a lot of time and you can get back to whatever it was that you were doing, eg, not getting burnt to death in one of her short stories, The Doctor's Drive.

In these cases (the imaginary romances) the author is sometimes only using your romance as a little nice touch of spice for the larger story, ie, won't it be sadder if this character gets burnt to death now that we know he has a fiancée "waiting for him so patiently"?

So that you might despise the fiancée, who is only a well-worn emotional tuggy-tactic being deployed in a nonreflective manner at a strategic moment, and you might wonder why you should care whether the protagonist will get back to marry her or not, if you even wonder about her at all, which you don't; you register the fact that the author is using a device that you've seen before, and you identify the response you are expected to have to it, and you understand that the stakes have been raised even if you don't believe a single word. The protagonist is no longer existing in the present moment only: he is being tied to a past and a possible future; the future might change, and so the meaning of this device is nothing more nor less than the entire universe with all the planets rolling around on strings of cosmic force forevermore until the Big Bang reverses itself, assuming that it ever existed, a huge area of subject matter all accessed through this word "fiancée."

Every corridor has been narrowed down to two in this story, life or death for the doctor, and to go one way will be a relief and the other way will be terrible. His death in this fire is not only a matter of flesh burning (a person being translated into the cooked state that has become the destiny of so much other meat, flesh of chickens for instance) and a life ending, it is also a matter of fairness and manners. If this person has been waiting for you "patiently" -- for a long time, in other words, or what seems to her like a long time, or at least a period of time when she could have been doing something interesting -- then your death is not only agonising to you, it is also rude to others, and you have penetrated all the elementary borderlands of courtesy until you are hurtling through the uncharted clouds like a free star or meteorite.

The fiancée is probably a coloured flag that has been stuck in the top of the idea so that you will notice it more clearly.

make a home for her up here among the mountains

Ends of the Earth by Mary Gaunt (1916)
Dave's Sweetheart by Mary Gaunt (1894)


Mary Eliza Bakewell Gaunt (1861 - 1942) "was one of the first women to sign the matriculation roll of the University of Melbourne," states the Australian Dictionary of Biography, but she never finished her degree and travelled around the world instead, visiting West Africa, China, Jamaica, Siberia and other locales, writing as she went, setting every story in Ends of the Earth in a different place, I think, starting with the Australian bushland, then going off to somewhere snowy, and ending on a Pacific island where a woman is being abandoned by her lover.

Every one of her stories has a romantic relationship in it somewhere, many of them only happening in a character's head, some of them very tiny and perhaps only a line but the infallible presence of this theme gets surreal after a while with all these different settings, one character in danger of burning to death, another character in danger of freezing to death, and yet both of them finding time to think sentimentally about the beloved one, so (message): no matter where you go and no matter what happens to you, you will find yourself contemplating a significant other, "his little sweetheart waiting for him so patiently till he could make a home for her up here among the mountains," as if a god of monogamy is hovering in the sky over the entire world, touching the earth with a finger sometimes and at other times with a felty thumb.

Then you have Dave's Sweetheart, which was the first book she published, and the romantic theme is there too as you can tell from the title even if you haven't read it, but romance, in both books, is divided into two types, the one that takes place in the imagination and the one that takes place in person.

A Gaunt romance works out best for the character when it is inside their head and they can call it up when they need it then forget it when the moment is over, but in the flesh, when the person is standing in front of them and behaving independently, there will be trouble, one person will be in love and the other will not, or the job of being in love will get boring, and there will be no coinciding between them.

This misunderstanding is usually not resolved or healed and in some cases it is fatal. "'I'll send down four men with a stretcher for the body,' said the Commissioner."

that place in the world which she was always longing for

Kirkham's Find by Mary Gaunt (1897)

Now that I'm writing about this book I wonder if was right when I said that Mr Hogarth's Will was the book that Dale Spender liked more than most other books. Kirkham's Find is superficially similar and I might have mingled them. Spence and Gaunt both want the reader to agree that a woman who works for her living is a right and good person. They sweeten the deal by throwing in a husband at the end. Husband is a decent gent. The man and the woman have both done the right thing and they are each other's reward.

They both end with this dangling QED.

(Decency is an aspiration in these books, Phoebe in Kirkham's moving into a dirty cottage and battling it, "she was a strong, active young woman, not afraid of work, and with a good fire, lots of hot water and plenty of soap, things soon began to assume a different aspect," fighting in spiritual combat against the lazy cottage next door -- decency here is an extrapolation of non-complacency and struggle. Battlers are decent. (Bells ringing in Australian minds: the Little Aussie Battler.) The Chisholm book about Female Immigration is a record of the same tentacular ideas being extended onto fleshy people. Chisholm assumes that they should be so extended: she does not expect anyone in her audience to disagree. And the ground is watered for her by books like this, though not these books in particular; she came before them. Their minds run into one another and the idea reappears with a new moustache or a hat. Am I right when I see egalitarianism here, with these people telling you that you might not be able to be titled or rich or formally educated, but anybody can be decent, even if you are "the manager of a butter factory" (Gaunt) -- yet, a question, whose vision of egalitarianism is this?)

Spence's book's desire to be conventional is sharper: it starts with a piece of come-hither drama when two sisters lose everything and a man is not allowed to marry the woman he loves or else he will lose everything too. Gaunt doesn't have that; the women in her story are poor but the family has enough money to keep them alive. They are discontented, that is the problem. Their selves are starved.

Beside Nancy's sparkling eyes and fresh complexion her sister's pale face looked sallow; her dark hair, though abundant, was dull in hue; her heavy brown eyes were too deep-set, and her whole face wore a sad and discontented air which alone would have spoiled far greater beauty than she possessed. Her figure was good and she was tall, and had she had but that place in the world which she was always longing for, there would have been many to call the eldest Miss Marsden a handsome woman.

Phoebe's problem is multi-pronged (she has no money, she has a passive-aggressive and hostile family, she is getting older) but essentially she needs to be content.

(She is in the same situation as Louie Pollit is, in The Man Who Loved Children, needing to get away from her family for the sake of her soul, and the Marsden father mollycoddles himself like Sam.)

She goes after independence stoically and firmly and Gaunt follows her methodically and slowly from one action to another, watching her as she approaches each problem.

First there is the keeping of a few hives in converted crates, then the slow organisation of honey-selling -- which means that she has to catch lifts into Ballarat with her monstrous father -- then the gradual accumulation of money and hives with the assistance of "a quaint American bee journal" named Gleanings in Bee Culture by A.I. Root who lived in Medina, Ohio, where the local school's football team is still known as The Battling Bees.

Everything happens chronologically slowly inside the world of the story, even the mail is slow, gold prospecting is slow, bee-accumulation is slow; the few fast things are not worthwhile (Nancy marries a rich man for quick money), only gradual steady motion is trustworthy, though even then the ending is ambiguous ("Phoebe, dear, you really are marrying the wrong man," says one of Phoebe's other sisters and the author may not think that she is wrong), the world is not perfect, Gaunt herself demonstrating the steadiness principle with the matter of her writing, the style proceeding at an even pace, nothing flashy, just making its way on, adding the few extra words that will make the meaning more than clear ("dull in hue," when she could have left it at "dull," colloquial trust overpowered by the desire to have the reader utterly possess and cohabit with the writer's intention), not stinting, and going onwards for its reward.