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Pilgrimage #6
Deadlock
The thirteen magnificent novels that comprise Pilgrimage are the first expression in English of what it is to be called 'stream of consciousness' technique, predating the work of both Joyce and Woolf, echoing that of Proust with whom Dorothy Richardson stands as one of the great innovatory figures of our time. These four volumes record in detail the life of Miriam Henderson. Through her experience - personal, spiritual, intellectual - Dorothy Richardson explores intensely what it means to be a woman, presenting feminine consciousness with a new voice, a new identity.
- GenresClassics
308 pages, Cloth
First published January 1, 1921
2 people are currently reading
45 people want to read
About the author
Dorothy M. Richardson
71 books65 followersDorothy Miller Richardson
Richardson was born in Abingdon in 1873. Her family moved to Worthing, West Sussex in 1880 and then Putney, London in 1883. At seventeen, because of her father's financial difficulties she went to work as a governess and teacher, first in 1891 for six months at a finishing school in Germany. In 1895 Richardson gave up work as a governess to take care of her severely depressed mother, but her mother committed suicide the same year. Richardson's father had become bankrupt at the end of 1893.
Richardson subsequently moved in 1896 to Bloomsbury, London, where she worked as a receptionist/secretary/assistant in a Harley Street dental surgery. While in Bloomsbury in the late 1890s and early 1900s, Richardson associated with writers and radicals, including the Bloomsbury Group. H. G. Wells (1866–1946) was a friend and they had a brief affair which led to a pregnancy and then miscarriage, in 1907. While she had first published an article in 1902, Richardson's writing career, as a freelance journalist really began around 1906, with periodical articles on various topics, book reviews, short stories, and poems, as well as translation from German and French. During this period she became interested in the Quakers and published two books relating to them in 1914.
In 1915 Richardson published her first novel Pointed Roofs, the first complete stream of consciousness novel published in English. She married the artist Alan Odle (1888-1948) in 1917 – a distinctly bohemian figure, who was fifteen years younger than she. From 1917 until 1939 the couple spent their winters in Cornwall and their summers in London, and then stayed permanently in Cornwall until Odle’s death in 1948. She supported herself and her husband with freelance writing for periodicals for many years. In 1954, she had to move into a nursing home in the London suburb of Beckenham, Kent, where she died, forgotten, alone and ignored, in 1957.
Richardson was one of a select group of writers who changed the rules of prose fiction at the beginning of the twentieth century. With James Joyce in Ireland, Marcel Proust in France, William Faulkner in the United States and, in England, Virginia Woolf, Richardson invented a new form of writing. She can claim, with Proust and Joyce, to have been at the forefront of a revolution in literature. The first ‘chapter’ of her long work, Pilgrimage, was begun in 1912 - a year before the publication of the first volume of A La Recherche du Temps Perdu, two years before the first appearance of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and seven years before Woolf’s first experimental novel Jacob’s Room.
Richardson also published short stories in a variety of periodicals (a collection was published by Virago in 1989) and a handful of poems. She was the author of numerous articles in periodicals such as Adelphi and Vanity Fair. She began her literary career reviewing for the vegetarian journal, Crank. Between 1912 and 1921, she wrote a regular column, ‘Comments by a Layman’, for the Dental Record. She translated eight books into English from French and German. Between 1927 and 1933 she published 23 articles on film in the avant-garde little magazine, Close Up.
Richardson’s aesthetic was influenced by diverse currents of thought. She was part of the alternative, bohemian culture at the turn of the century that embraced vegetarianism, feminism and socialism. Olive Schreiner and Charlotte Perkins Gilman made an early impact on her work and one of her first reviews was of a book by the advocate for homosexual rights, utopian socialist, and Whitmanite poet, Edward Carpenter.
If you are interested, please join the Goodreads group on her that can be found here: https://www.goodreads.com/group/show/...
Richardson was born in Abingdon in 1873. Her family moved to Worthing, West Sussex in 1880 and then Putney, London in 1883. At seventeen, because of her father's financial difficulties she went to work as a governess and teacher, first in 1891 for six months at a finishing school in Germany. In 1895 Richardson gave up work as a governess to take care of her severely depressed mother, but her mother committed suicide the same year. Richardson's father had become bankrupt at the end of 1893.
Richardson subsequently moved in 1896 to Bloomsbury, London, where she worked as a receptionist/secretary/assistant in a Harley Street dental surgery. While in Bloomsbury in the late 1890s and early 1900s, Richardson associated with writers and radicals, including the Bloomsbury Group. H. G. Wells (1866–1946) was a friend and they had a brief affair which led to a pregnancy and then miscarriage, in 1907. While she had first published an article in 1902, Richardson's writing career, as a freelance journalist really began around 1906, with periodical articles on various topics, book reviews, short stories, and poems, as well as translation from German and French. During this period she became interested in the Quakers and published two books relating to them in 1914.
In 1915 Richardson published her first novel Pointed Roofs, the first complete stream of consciousness novel published in English. She married the artist Alan Odle (1888-1948) in 1917 – a distinctly bohemian figure, who was fifteen years younger than she. From 1917 until 1939 the couple spent their winters in Cornwall and their summers in London, and then stayed permanently in Cornwall until Odle’s death in 1948. She supported herself and her husband with freelance writing for periodicals for many years. In 1954, she had to move into a nursing home in the London suburb of Beckenham, Kent, where she died, forgotten, alone and ignored, in 1957.
Richardson was one of a select group of writers who changed the rules of prose fiction at the beginning of the twentieth century. With James Joyce in Ireland, Marcel Proust in France, William Faulkner in the United States and, in England, Virginia Woolf, Richardson invented a new form of writing. She can claim, with Proust and Joyce, to have been at the forefront of a revolution in literature. The first ‘chapter’ of her long work, Pilgrimage, was begun in 1912 - a year before the publication of the first volume of A La Recherche du Temps Perdu, two years before the first appearance of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and seven years before Woolf’s first experimental novel Jacob’s Room.
Richardson also published short stories in a variety of periodicals (a collection was published by Virago in 1989) and a handful of poems. She was the author of numerous articles in periodicals such as Adelphi and Vanity Fair. She began her literary career reviewing for the vegetarian journal, Crank. Between 1912 and 1921, she wrote a regular column, ‘Comments by a Layman’, for the Dental Record. She translated eight books into English from French and German. Between 1927 and 1933 she published 23 articles on film in the avant-garde little magazine, Close Up.
Richardson’s aesthetic was influenced by diverse currents of thought. She was part of the alternative, bohemian culture at the turn of the century that embraced vegetarianism, feminism and socialism. Olive Schreiner and Charlotte Perkins Gilman made an early impact on her work and one of her first reviews was of a book by the advocate for homosexual rights, utopian socialist, and Whitmanite poet, Edward Carpenter.
If you are interested, please join the Goodreads group on her that can be found here: https://www.goodreads.com/group/show/...
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Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
July 24, 2015
This is the sixth novel in the Pilgrimage series and for me it raises some more challenging issues. Richardson deals with race, empire and politics to some extent, although I think this may be the starting point for ongoing developments in later novels and Miriam is beginning to engage with a variety of ideas; her feminism also grows apace as well.
The bulk of Deadlock revolves around Miriam’s relationship with Michael Shatov, a Russian Jew. They become quite close and spend time at the British Museum where Shatov introduces Miriam to Russian literature. They discover a mutual love of philosophy and as they get closer marriage is clearer under consideration. Most of the misgivings are on Miriam’s side!
There are some interesting moments; such as the first time Miriam hears a phonograph and the descriptions of London are again quite vivid. However race and imperialism are central. There was little questioning of imperialism in late Victorian novels, but the development of the modernist novel combined with the effects of the war began a process of examination and questioning. There is a movement in this novel. Early in the novel Miriam and Michael argue about individualism and Englishness and Miriam tries to express what she means by being English in ways which are quite traditional. By the end of the meeting she is attending a socialist meeting and struggling with their ideas.
I am avoiding something. There was a time when I used to avoid unpalatable facts about people I admired. I don’t do that anymore. There is a passage in Deadlock which I have a real problem with; it runs as follows:
“Miriam sat frozen, appalled by the presence of a negro. He sat near by, huge, bent, snorting and devouring, with a huge black bottle at his side. Mr. Shatov’s presence was shorn of its alien quality. He was an Englishman in the fact that he and she could not sit eating in the neighborhood of this marshy jungle. But they were, they had. They would have. Once away from this awful place she would never think of it again. Yet the man had hands and needs and feelings. Perhaps he could sing. He was at a disadvantage, an outcast. There was something that ought to be said of him. She could not think what it was. Every time she sipped her bitter tea, it seemed that before she should have replaced her cup, vengeance would have sprung from the dark corner. Everything hurried so. There was no time to shake off the sense of contamination. It was contamination. The man’s presence was an outrage on something of which he was not aware. It would be possible to make him aware. When his fearful face, which she sadly knew she could not bring herself to regard a second time, was out of sight, the outline of his head was desolate, like the contemplated head of any man alive. Men ought not to have faces. Their real selves abode in the expressions of their heads and brows. Below, their faces were moulded by deceit. …
While she had pursued her thoughts, advantage had fallen to the black form in the corner. It was as if the black face grinned, crushing her thread of thought.”
I am aware that part of the point of the passage is that Miriam was finding Michael Shatov in some sense alien and in contrast here he is not; the juxtaposition is the point. I have read a couple of closely argued, complex and detailed articles by Richardson scholars which attempt to explain this and Richardson’s attitude to race and conclude Richardson is questioning attitudes to race. Here is an interesting passage from Shawn Loewen’s thesis;
“Miriam is not truly representative of the late nineteenth-century emancipated woman. Richardson has grafted the context of the 1920s onto her heroine of the past, allowing Miriam to be conscious of her racial assumptions in a way that would not have been possible at that time. Deadlock ultimately reveals how a pioneering writer of the early 1920s could still be profoundly influenced by imperialism even, as she was breaking away from its worldview. Like Miriam herself: Richardson could only perceive imperialism and its assumptions from the inside.”
Yet contrast this passage when Miriam is walking down the street with Shatov and he begins to sing in Russian, They are passing a group of English workmen;
“'Go 'ome,' she heard, away behind .. .'Blooming foreigner'; close by, the tall lean swarthy fellow, with the handsome grubby face. That he must have heard. She fancied his song recoiled, and wheeled sharply back, confronting the speaker, who has just spat into the middle of the pavement. 'Yes,' she said, 'he is a foreigner, and he is my friend. What do you mean?' The man's gazing face was broken up into embarrassed awkward youth. Mr Shatov was safely ahead. She waited, her eyes on the black-rimmed expressionless blue of the eyes staring from above a rising flush. In a moment she would say, 'it is abominable and simply disgraceful,' and sweep away and never come up this side of the road again. A little man was speaking at her side, his cap in his hand. They were all moving and staring. 'Excuse me, miss,' he began again in a quiet, thick, hurrying voice, as she turned to him 'Miss, we know the sight of you going up and down. Miss, He ain't good enough forya.”
This assumption of racial superiority extends to Michael Shatov, who is her friend. The juxtaposition of Shatov’s Jewishness to Miriam has been compared to that of Bloom in Ulysses to Stephen Dedelas. An interesting direction of thought. Loewen goes on to argue that Richardson at the same time challenges and endorses imperialism’s approach to race. Miriam at the same time seems to believe that foreigners should in some way assimilate into society, but also seems to believe they cannot. Feminism at this time still had issues with extending the ideas to all races, although Miriam does recognise at the end of the novel the unfairness of the seating arrangements in the synagogue in terms of men and women. She seems to struggle more with the contrast of her own growing sense of emancipation with the situation of the Jewish woman; as yet there is no link made to the struggles of women in other cultures. Shatov is a foil to Miriam’s thoughts here as he points out to her that many of her prejudices are unconscious.
This is a work in progress and Richardson has set many plates spinning; time will tell how she manages them all. I am still left with the unpleasant feeling I had when I read the quote above. I know Richardson saw each of these novels as chapters, so I will leave my conclusions on race until the end.
The bulk of Deadlock revolves around Miriam’s relationship with Michael Shatov, a Russian Jew. They become quite close and spend time at the British Museum where Shatov introduces Miriam to Russian literature. They discover a mutual love of philosophy and as they get closer marriage is clearer under consideration. Most of the misgivings are on Miriam’s side!
There are some interesting moments; such as the first time Miriam hears a phonograph and the descriptions of London are again quite vivid. However race and imperialism are central. There was little questioning of imperialism in late Victorian novels, but the development of the modernist novel combined with the effects of the war began a process of examination and questioning. There is a movement in this novel. Early in the novel Miriam and Michael argue about individualism and Englishness and Miriam tries to express what she means by being English in ways which are quite traditional. By the end of the meeting she is attending a socialist meeting and struggling with their ideas.
I am avoiding something. There was a time when I used to avoid unpalatable facts about people I admired. I don’t do that anymore. There is a passage in Deadlock which I have a real problem with; it runs as follows:
“Miriam sat frozen, appalled by the presence of a negro. He sat near by, huge, bent, snorting and devouring, with a huge black bottle at his side. Mr. Shatov’s presence was shorn of its alien quality. He was an Englishman in the fact that he and she could not sit eating in the neighborhood of this marshy jungle. But they were, they had. They would have. Once away from this awful place she would never think of it again. Yet the man had hands and needs and feelings. Perhaps he could sing. He was at a disadvantage, an outcast. There was something that ought to be said of him. She could not think what it was. Every time she sipped her bitter tea, it seemed that before she should have replaced her cup, vengeance would have sprung from the dark corner. Everything hurried so. There was no time to shake off the sense of contamination. It was contamination. The man’s presence was an outrage on something of which he was not aware. It would be possible to make him aware. When his fearful face, which she sadly knew she could not bring herself to regard a second time, was out of sight, the outline of his head was desolate, like the contemplated head of any man alive. Men ought not to have faces. Their real selves abode in the expressions of their heads and brows. Below, their faces were moulded by deceit. …
While she had pursued her thoughts, advantage had fallen to the black form in the corner. It was as if the black face grinned, crushing her thread of thought.”
I am aware that part of the point of the passage is that Miriam was finding Michael Shatov in some sense alien and in contrast here he is not; the juxtaposition is the point. I have read a couple of closely argued, complex and detailed articles by Richardson scholars which attempt to explain this and Richardson’s attitude to race and conclude Richardson is questioning attitudes to race. Here is an interesting passage from Shawn Loewen’s thesis;
“Miriam is not truly representative of the late nineteenth-century emancipated woman. Richardson has grafted the context of the 1920s onto her heroine of the past, allowing Miriam to be conscious of her racial assumptions in a way that would not have been possible at that time. Deadlock ultimately reveals how a pioneering writer of the early 1920s could still be profoundly influenced by imperialism even, as she was breaking away from its worldview. Like Miriam herself: Richardson could only perceive imperialism and its assumptions from the inside.”
Yet contrast this passage when Miriam is walking down the street with Shatov and he begins to sing in Russian, They are passing a group of English workmen;
“'Go 'ome,' she heard, away behind .. .'Blooming foreigner'; close by, the tall lean swarthy fellow, with the handsome grubby face. That he must have heard. She fancied his song recoiled, and wheeled sharply back, confronting the speaker, who has just spat into the middle of the pavement. 'Yes,' she said, 'he is a foreigner, and he is my friend. What do you mean?' The man's gazing face was broken up into embarrassed awkward youth. Mr Shatov was safely ahead. She waited, her eyes on the black-rimmed expressionless blue of the eyes staring from above a rising flush. In a moment she would say, 'it is abominable and simply disgraceful,' and sweep away and never come up this side of the road again. A little man was speaking at her side, his cap in his hand. They were all moving and staring. 'Excuse me, miss,' he began again in a quiet, thick, hurrying voice, as she turned to him 'Miss, we know the sight of you going up and down. Miss, He ain't good enough forya.”
This assumption of racial superiority extends to Michael Shatov, who is her friend. The juxtaposition of Shatov’s Jewishness to Miriam has been compared to that of Bloom in Ulysses to Stephen Dedelas. An interesting direction of thought. Loewen goes on to argue that Richardson at the same time challenges and endorses imperialism’s approach to race. Miriam at the same time seems to believe that foreigners should in some way assimilate into society, but also seems to believe they cannot. Feminism at this time still had issues with extending the ideas to all races, although Miriam does recognise at the end of the novel the unfairness of the seating arrangements in the synagogue in terms of men and women. She seems to struggle more with the contrast of her own growing sense of emancipation with the situation of the Jewish woman; as yet there is no link made to the struggles of women in other cultures. Shatov is a foil to Miriam’s thoughts here as he points out to her that many of her prejudices are unconscious.
This is a work in progress and Richardson has set many plates spinning; time will tell how she manages them all. I am still left with the unpleasant feeling I had when I read the quote above. I know Richardson saw each of these novels as chapters, so I will leave my conclusions on race until the end.
June 28, 2016
When I started to read this, the sixth of the thirteen volume series of novels that Dorothy Richardson titled ‘Pilgrimage’, I thought that little had changed in the life of Miriam Henderson, and that this might be the point at which I ran out of things to say.
I was both right and wrong.
In many ways this book is the same as the books before it, catching Miriam’s life in London, catching her relationships with the people around her, and focusing on certain experiences that shape her thinking. But, because her life is evolving, her thinking is evolving, there is just enough difference to keep things interesting.
And the writing is still lovely.
The opening finds Miriam still comfortably settled in Mrs Bailey’s boarding house.
“Miriam ran upstairs narrowly ahead of her thoughts. In the small enclosure of her room they surged about her, gathering power from the familiar objects silently waiting to share her astounded contemplation of the fresh material. She swept joyfully about the room ducking and doubling to avoid arrest until she should have discovered some engrossing occupation. But in the instant’s pause at each eagerly opened drawer and cupboard, her mind threw up images. It was useless. There was no escape up here. Pelted from within’ and without, she paused in laughter with clasped restraining hands the rest of the evening must be spent with people . . .”
Her situation is the same but I came to realize that something intangible had changed; she had passed through that undefined, unnamed point in life when you cease to a newcomer to grown-up living and simply become one of the grown-ups.
I saw that in her life and home and in her life at work.
And, because she was the same Miriam I met in the first volume of Pilgrimage -she was sensitive, she cared, but she lacked emotional understanding – she had a few ups and downs.
Her sisters were both in a seaside town; where Eve had been encouraged to open a shop, and Harriett and her husband had followed to run a boarding house. When Miriam visited she found it hard to understand why Eve was happy with what she saw as so little or why Harriett was staying in a less that happy marriage for the sake of her child.
She was bored with her job, and she resented that it took so much time away from the things she really wanted to do. When she spoke out about a book she was reading – a book on the inequities of employment – she was shocked to be dismissed. It really didn’t occur to her that anyone might think she was talking about her own situation and take offence.
But they were not at the centre of this book, because there was a significant development in Miriam’s life.
Mrs. Bailey had a new lodger, a Russian Jew named Michael Shatov, and Miriam, who was known to be bookish, was asked to help him improve his English. This possibility engaged her in a way that her work never could, and they became friends immediately; happily discussing literature, politics, philosophy and many of the issues of the day.
Their conversations about Russian literature were fascinating, and they pointed to a particular book that might have had a significant influence on the development of Dorothy Richardson’s writing.
” ‘There is in this book the self-history of Tolstoi. He is Lavin, and Kitty is the Countess Tolstoi. That is all most wonderful. When we see her in the early morning ; and the picture of this wedding. There is only Tolstoy for those marvellous touches. I shall show you.’
‘Why does he call it Anna Karenina ‘ asked Miriam anxiously.
‘Certainly. It is a most masterly study of a certain type of woman.’
The fascination of the book still flickered brightly; but far away, retreated into the lonely incommunicable distance of her mind. It seemed always to be useless and dangerous to talk about books. They were always about something else If she had not asked she would have read the book without finding out it was a masterly study of Anna. Why must a book be a masterly study of some single thing ? Everybody wisely raving about it …”
It felt significant that Miriam agreed to go out walking with Mr Shatov – in the last volume of her story she had been reluctant to walk with Mr Mendizabal – and it was. There relationship grew as they attended lectures, visited museums, and ate out together. Miriam blossomed and Mr Shatov became Michael.
That was lovely to watch.
Sadly though that wouldn’t last. Michael became Mr Shatov again, and by the end of this volume it became clear that he and Miriam might continue to be friends, but no more than that. Maybe because Miriam couldn’t accept his belief that a woman could be content as a wife and a mother. Maybe because she came to realise that Judaism encompassed a faith as well as a culture and a way of life. Or maybe there were other reasons .
Dorothy Richardson’s writing continued to be as opaque as it was beautiful.
There was a hint of something in Mr Shatov’s past. There was a passing mention that Miriam continued to visit her friend Alma and her writer husband, Hyppo Wilson. There was a reference to a cycling accident. Life went on, but this book was focused on a particular side of Miriam’s life.
This was the story of the meeting of two minds, and wide-ranging dialogues that followed.
In many ways I think this the most conventionally written of the Pilgrimage sequence of novels that I have read so far. There is a clear story arc, there are wonderfully vivid descriptions, and the conversations illuminate the characters so well. But there's more that that, and I am aware that I have almost begun to take Dorothy Richardson's way of writing take for granted; forgetting that other writers rarely shift perspective, tense, or style as naturally and as cleverly as she does; forgetting that she has taken care to remain with the consciousness of Miriam Henderson; forgetting just how innovative, just how modern she was ....
I am appreciating the threads that run through this sequence of books now.
I love the conviction that I can see underpinning those dialogues. And seeing how the world around me has changed in between reading this book and writing about it how I wish that more people were reading, thinking and talking as Miriam and Michael did.
I have to say as well that this book holds some of the loveliest and most distinctive passages of writing I have ever read. Many of them catch London and Miriam's relationship with her home. One of them catches her first encounter with a new-fangled gramophone quite brilliantly.
Writing that catches life like that like that will stay with me.
At the end of the last book I was apprehensive that these books were becoming difficult; but at the end of this book that thought was gone.
I was both right and wrong.
In many ways this book is the same as the books before it, catching Miriam’s life in London, catching her relationships with the people around her, and focusing on certain experiences that shape her thinking. But, because her life is evolving, her thinking is evolving, there is just enough difference to keep things interesting.
And the writing is still lovely.
The opening finds Miriam still comfortably settled in Mrs Bailey’s boarding house.
“Miriam ran upstairs narrowly ahead of her thoughts. In the small enclosure of her room they surged about her, gathering power from the familiar objects silently waiting to share her astounded contemplation of the fresh material. She swept joyfully about the room ducking and doubling to avoid arrest until she should have discovered some engrossing occupation. But in the instant’s pause at each eagerly opened drawer and cupboard, her mind threw up images. It was useless. There was no escape up here. Pelted from within’ and without, she paused in laughter with clasped restraining hands the rest of the evening must be spent with people . . .”
Her situation is the same but I came to realize that something intangible had changed; she had passed through that undefined, unnamed point in life when you cease to a newcomer to grown-up living and simply become one of the grown-ups.
I saw that in her life and home and in her life at work.
And, because she was the same Miriam I met in the first volume of Pilgrimage -she was sensitive, she cared, but she lacked emotional understanding – she had a few ups and downs.
Her sisters were both in a seaside town; where Eve had been encouraged to open a shop, and Harriett and her husband had followed to run a boarding house. When Miriam visited she found it hard to understand why Eve was happy with what she saw as so little or why Harriett was staying in a less that happy marriage for the sake of her child.
She was bored with her job, and she resented that it took so much time away from the things she really wanted to do. When she spoke out about a book she was reading – a book on the inequities of employment – she was shocked to be dismissed. It really didn’t occur to her that anyone might think she was talking about her own situation and take offence.
But they were not at the centre of this book, because there was a significant development in Miriam’s life.
Mrs. Bailey had a new lodger, a Russian Jew named Michael Shatov, and Miriam, who was known to be bookish, was asked to help him improve his English. This possibility engaged her in a way that her work never could, and they became friends immediately; happily discussing literature, politics, philosophy and many of the issues of the day.
Their conversations about Russian literature were fascinating, and they pointed to a particular book that might have had a significant influence on the development of Dorothy Richardson’s writing.
” ‘There is in this book the self-history of Tolstoi. He is Lavin, and Kitty is the Countess Tolstoi. That is all most wonderful. When we see her in the early morning ; and the picture of this wedding. There is only Tolstoy for those marvellous touches. I shall show you.’
‘Why does he call it Anna Karenina ‘ asked Miriam anxiously.
‘Certainly. It is a most masterly study of a certain type of woman.’
The fascination of the book still flickered brightly; but far away, retreated into the lonely incommunicable distance of her mind. It seemed always to be useless and dangerous to talk about books. They were always about something else If she had not asked she would have read the book without finding out it was a masterly study of Anna. Why must a book be a masterly study of some single thing ? Everybody wisely raving about it …”
It felt significant that Miriam agreed to go out walking with Mr Shatov – in the last volume of her story she had been reluctant to walk with Mr Mendizabal – and it was. There relationship grew as they attended lectures, visited museums, and ate out together. Miriam blossomed and Mr Shatov became Michael.
That was lovely to watch.
Sadly though that wouldn’t last. Michael became Mr Shatov again, and by the end of this volume it became clear that he and Miriam might continue to be friends, but no more than that. Maybe because Miriam couldn’t accept his belief that a woman could be content as a wife and a mother. Maybe because she came to realise that Judaism encompassed a faith as well as a culture and a way of life. Or maybe there were other reasons .
Dorothy Richardson’s writing continued to be as opaque as it was beautiful.
There was a hint of something in Mr Shatov’s past. There was a passing mention that Miriam continued to visit her friend Alma and her writer husband, Hyppo Wilson. There was a reference to a cycling accident. Life went on, but this book was focused on a particular side of Miriam’s life.
This was the story of the meeting of two minds, and wide-ranging dialogues that followed.
In many ways I think this the most conventionally written of the Pilgrimage sequence of novels that I have read so far. There is a clear story arc, there are wonderfully vivid descriptions, and the conversations illuminate the characters so well. But there's more that that, and I am aware that I have almost begun to take Dorothy Richardson's way of writing take for granted; forgetting that other writers rarely shift perspective, tense, or style as naturally and as cleverly as she does; forgetting that she has taken care to remain with the consciousness of Miriam Henderson; forgetting just how innovative, just how modern she was ....
I am appreciating the threads that run through this sequence of books now.
I love the conviction that I can see underpinning those dialogues. And seeing how the world around me has changed in between reading this book and writing about it how I wish that more people were reading, thinking and talking as Miriam and Michael did.
I have to say as well that this book holds some of the loveliest and most distinctive passages of writing I have ever read. Many of them catch London and Miriam's relationship with her home. One of them catches her first encounter with a new-fangled gramophone quite brilliantly.
Writing that catches life like that like that will stay with me.
At the end of the last book I was apprehensive that these books were becoming difficult; but at the end of this book that thought was gone.
December 9, 2015
Perhaps my favorite of the sequence so far. Not least because of Miriam's increasing engagement with feminism and with the cutting edge of then-contemporary philosophy. Oh and it is, at times, also very funny.
She was quite ready and looked about for entertainment for the remaining moments. Actually; a book lying open on Mr. Leyton's table, a military drill-book of course. No. What was this. Wondrous Woman, by J. B. G. Smithson. Why so many similar English initials ? Jim, Bill, George, a superfluity of mannishness ... an attack of course ; she scanned pages and headings ; chapter upon chapter of peevish facetiousness ; the whole book written deliberately against women. Her heart beat angrily. What was Mr. Leyton doing with such a book .? Where had it come from ? She read swiftly, grasping the argument. The usual sort of thing ; worse, because it was colloquial, rushing along in modern everyday language and in some curious way not badly written. . . .
Because some women had corns, feminine beauty was a myth ; because the world could do without Mrs. Hemans' poetry, women should confine their attention to puddings and babies. The infernal complacent cheek of it. This was the kind of thing middle-class men read. Unable to criticise it, they thought it witty and unanswerable. That was the worst of it. Books of this sort were read without anyone there to point things out. ... It ought to be illegal to publish a book by a man without first giving it to a woman to annotate. But what was the answer to men who called women inferior because they had not invented or achieved in science or art ? On whose authority had men decided that science and art were greater than anything else ? The world could not go on until this question had been answered. Until then, until it had been clearly explained that men were always and always partly wrong in all their ideas, life would be full of poison and secret bitterness. . . Men fight about their philosophies and religions, there is no certainty in them ; but their contempt for women is flawless and unanimous. Even Emerson . . . positive and negative, north and south, male and female .... why negative? Maeterlinck gets nearest in knowing that women can live, hardly at all, with men, and wait, have always been waiting, for men to come to life. How can men come to life ; always fussing ? How could the man who wrote this book ? Even if it were publicly burned and he were made to apologise ; he would still go about asquint .... lunch was going to be late, just to-day, of course. . . .
" I say:'
" What do you say," responded Miriam without looking up from her soup. Mr. Leyton had a topic ; she could keep it going with half her attention and go restfully on, fortifying herself for the afternoon. She would attack him about the book one day next week…
She was quite ready and looked about for entertainment for the remaining moments. Actually; a book lying open on Mr. Leyton's table, a military drill-book of course. No. What was this. Wondrous Woman, by J. B. G. Smithson. Why so many similar English initials ? Jim, Bill, George, a superfluity of mannishness ... an attack of course ; she scanned pages and headings ; chapter upon chapter of peevish facetiousness ; the whole book written deliberately against women. Her heart beat angrily. What was Mr. Leyton doing with such a book .? Where had it come from ? She read swiftly, grasping the argument. The usual sort of thing ; worse, because it was colloquial, rushing along in modern everyday language and in some curious way not badly written. . . .
Because some women had corns, feminine beauty was a myth ; because the world could do without Mrs. Hemans' poetry, women should confine their attention to puddings and babies. The infernal complacent cheek of it. This was the kind of thing middle-class men read. Unable to criticise it, they thought it witty and unanswerable. That was the worst of it. Books of this sort were read without anyone there to point things out. ... It ought to be illegal to publish a book by a man without first giving it to a woman to annotate. But what was the answer to men who called women inferior because they had not invented or achieved in science or art ? On whose authority had men decided that science and art were greater than anything else ? The world could not go on until this question had been answered. Until then, until it had been clearly explained that men were always and always partly wrong in all their ideas, life would be full of poison and secret bitterness. . . Men fight about their philosophies and religions, there is no certainty in them ; but their contempt for women is flawless and unanimous. Even Emerson . . . positive and negative, north and south, male and female .... why negative? Maeterlinck gets nearest in knowing that women can live, hardly at all, with men, and wait, have always been waiting, for men to come to life. How can men come to life ; always fussing ? How could the man who wrote this book ? Even if it were publicly burned and he were made to apologise ; he would still go about asquint .... lunch was going to be late, just to-day, of course. . . .
" I say:'
" What do you say," responded Miriam without looking up from her soup. Mr. Leyton had a topic ; she could keep it going with half her attention and go restfully on, fortifying herself for the afternoon. She would attack him about the book one day next week…
August 10, 2025
Jarring and challenging. Miriam tries to understand (and rationalize?) her antisemitism, but her racism gets in the way. I believe Richardson knows exactly what she's doing in the scene with Miriam, Shatov and the Black man in the tearoom.
Read
September 22, 2020Perhaps more engaging than any of the other volumes, Deadlock brings Miriam up to a level of comprehension and assertion of self that she has not previously achieved. This is both professional, in the sense that she refuses to be employed any longer by people who are taking advantage of the conditions of her employment, and personal in that she engages more and more deeply with Michael Shatov while simultaneously delineating with ever-increasing clarity her understanding of the differences and distinctions between men and women. But, as the title suggests, at the end of this stage in the narrative, Mariam is still at a deadlock.
October 22, 2017
This sixth volume in the Pilgrimage series was sort of a diary with lots of intelligent discourse going on. One cannot miss the brilliant subtlety and a nervous vitality. Gaps in narrative is a thing perfected either knowingly or unknowingly. The lodge gets a new Russian- Jew and they immediately hit it off with Miriam. This is how I like to describe the whole Pilgrimage series . . . But there was a coming in and out. . . . Just think around that and see I have described the whole series.
Look at how Deadlock begins… “Miriam ran upstairs narrowly ahead of her thoughts. In the small enclosure of her room they surged about her, gathering power from the familiar objects silently waiting to share her astounded contemplation of the fresh material.” Isn’t it funny how Miriam is always getting into rooms…here she seems to have been competing with her thoughts. The author intentionally throws you into stream of consciousness. How can one compete with her thoughts in the physical realm?
It is amazing that people thought Miriam who was bookish was the best person to assist Shatov with his English. Look at Shatov trying to lead her on…. "I am most interested in philosophy," he said, glowering warmly through his further, wide-open eye. "It was very good to me. I found myself most excited after our talk of yesterday. I think you too were interested?" of course Miriam was neither here nor there… "Yes, wasn't it extraordinary?" Miriam paused to choose between the desire to confess her dread of confronting a full-fledged student and a silence that would let him go on talking while she contemplated a series of reflections extending forward out of sight from his surprising admission of fellowship…. Meanwhile his eagerness to rekindle without fresh fuel, the glow of yesterday, confessed an immaturity that filled her with a tumult of astonished solicitude.” (She played hard to get)
Here Dorothy M. Richardson (D.M.R) tries to tackle a very sensitive topic on race and how she came out might perhaps leave a sour taste in peoples mouth…but then again is it Miriam or Dorothy to blame?
D.M.R relishes the concept of not attaching any importance to herself or having any future influence but rather is intuitive…addressing the very soul of her readers. It is difficult to classify her in to the conventional literary forms; she was giving herself. This is not an easy thing. In the words of Wilson Follet…
“The effort to "place" her, she would almost necessarily construe as an effort to dispose of her altogether, and on the cheapest terms — to reject her on the one ground on which she offers herself, while accepting her on grounds wholly foreign to her mind and purpose.”
We have to come to a thrilling and life-giving apprehension of the author's personality. By reading you can easily tell what was going on in her life. For example I could tell you that Miriam being bookish was attracted to men who could hold intelligent conversations. A widely read man was a nice challenge for Miriam any day and on any topic. Be it astronomy, metaphysics, religion, psychology, you name it. She seemed to understand all the European languages and their avarices.
There is a huge discussion in this installment about novels and fiction. It seems to conclude that what to read should be fictional novels or maybe to be politically correct - fiction (removing the novel). Here is how Follet captures the definition of a novel “the novel is already so inexpugnable that a clever historian could infer its existence without ever having heard of it, as astronomers calculate the mass of an invisible star to explain the behaviour of visible bodies.”
I will therefore refer to it as works - Such reads on fiction should not be understood easily. In other words what the author intends when doing such works is for the reader too think they got it while they still are a mile away. It is unbelievable that DMR is pointing us to her work and insisting that it is a work of fiction while all along I thought it was sort of an autobiography of her life portrayed through Miriam.
Those topics that people do not want to touch are handled meticulously dealt a thorough upper-hand left stroke of a south paw.
Intelligent conversations…
Misapplication of the term infinite – “If the earth is to be called petty, then the stars must be called petty too. They may not even be inhabited. Perhaps they mean the movement of the vast system going on for ever, while men die. The indestructibility of matter. But if matter is indestructible, it is not what the people who used the phrase mean by matter. If matter is not conscious, man is more than matter. If a small, no matter how small, conscious thing is called petty in comparison with big, no matter how big unconscious things, everything is made a question of size, which is absurd. But all these people think that consciousness dies. . . .”
On humanity - "Humanity does not change," they say. It is the same as it was in the beginning is now and ever will be. . . . The men make sly horrible jokes together . . . the Greeks had only one wife; they called it monotony. . . . the Queen can never ride on an omnibus.”
Shatov on Emerson - "Well, I always feel, all the time, all day, that if people would only read Emerson they would understand, and not be like they are, and that the only way to make them understand what one means would be reading pieces of Emerson."
When discussing Tolstoy – “Why must a book be a masterly study of some single thing?”
Individualism – "I agree to a certain extent that it is impossible. A man is first himself. But the peril is of being cut off from his fellow creatures."
On the subject of the time-expanding swiftness of thought. - "A system," pursued the voice, "very generally corrects the fallacy of the preceding system, and leans perhaps in the opposite direction."
Materialism - "The correlation between physical and mental gives an empirical support to materialism."
Talking about Emerson alluding to Dante? – “Emerson would have hated me. But he thinks evil people are necessary. How is one to know whether one is really evil? Suppose one is. The Catholics believe that even the people in hell have a little relaxation now and again.”
Translations and comparison of languages
“the Russians themselves knew what they were like. "There is in Russia except in the governing and bourgeois classes almost no hypocrisy." What was kinetic. . . . And religion was an "actual force" in Russia!”
This is how English can be frigid –
“the English don't gesticulate . . . but he used no gesticulations; he was aware; that was a deliberate attempt to be English. But his whole person was a gesture, expanding, vibrating. "You mean by intonation only the intonation of single words, not of the whole?" "Precisely, Correctness of accent and emphasis is my aim. But you imply a criticism," he fluted, unshaken by his storm. "Yes. First you must not pronounce each word quite so carefully. It makes them echo into each other. Then of course if you want to be quite English you must be less emphatic." "I must assume an air of indifference?"
"An English audience will be more likely to understand if you are slower and more quiet. You ought to have gaps now and then." "Intervals for yawning. Yew shall indicate suitable moments. I see that I am fortunate to have met-hew. I will take lessons, for this lecture, in the true frigid English dignity."
“the irony of the French or the plebeianism of Germans and Scandinavians,”
“Reading and discussion would reveal ignorance of English literature.”
“typical German arrogance.”
"Of course clerks don't make much, unless they have languages. He ought to learn one or two languages."
“Russian is most beautiful; it is perhaps the most beautiful European language; it is, indubitably, the most rich."
"Certainly it is richer than English, I shall prove this to you, even with dictionary. You shall find that it occur, over and over, that where in English is one word, in Russian is six or seven different, all synonyms, but all with most delicate individual shades of nuance .... the abstractive expression is there, as in all civilized European languages, but there is also in Russian the most immense variety of natural expressions, coming forth from the strong feeling of the Russian nature to all these surrounding influences; each word opens to a whole apercu in this sort .... and what is most significant is, the great richness, in Russia, of the people-language I there is no other people-language similar; there is in no one language so immense a variety of tender diminutives and intimate expressions of all natural things. None is so rich in sound or so marvelously powerfully colorful. . . . That is Russian. Part of the reason is no doubt to find in the immense paysage; Russia is zo vast; it is inconceivable for any non-Russian. There is also the ethnological explanation, the immense vigour of the people."
“the immense range of English was partly due to its unrivalled collection of technical terms, derived from English science, commerce, sports,”
Russian authors - Tolstoy.- “He has a most profound knowledge of human psychology; the most marvelous touches. In that he rises to universality. Tourgainyeff is more pure Russian, less to understand outside Russia; more academical; but he shall reveal you most admirably the Russian aristocrat. He is cynic-satirical."
“... a French translation of a Russian book revealing marvellously the interior, the self-life, of a doctor, through his training and experience in practice. It would be a revelation to English readers and she should translate it; in collaboration with him; if she would excuse the intimate subjects it necessarily dealt with.”
"The French sing their language. It is like a recitative, the tone goes up and down and along and up and down again with its own expression; the words have to fit the tune. They have no single abrupt words and phrases, the whole thing is a shape”
“He used to talk incessantly, as if the whole table were waiting for his ideas. And knew everything, in the most awful superficial newspaper way. They have absolutely no souls at all. I never saw an American soul. The Canadians have. The Americans, at least the women, have reproachful ideals that they all agree about. So that they are all like one person; all the same effect.”
. .
Quotes
“Darwin was bad, for men.”
“it was the business of women to be the custodians of manners. . . . Their "sense of good form, and their critical and selective faculties." Then he had no right to be contemptuous of them. . . .”
"People grieve and bemoan themselves, but it is not half so bad with them as they say" . . .
“Time is let out on usury.”
"It is a serious mistake to regard enlightenment as pessimism."
"A happy childhood is perhaps the most fortunate gift in life."
“. . . there is a dead level of intelligence throughout humanity.”
'All expectation of gratitude is meanness and is continually punished by the total insensibility of the obliged person'
"It is not what people may be made to see for a few minutes in conversation that counts. It is the conclusions they come to, instinctively, by themselves."
"You could not possibly have a better book for style and phraseology in English, quite apart from the meaning."
“. . . Where did women find the insight into personality that gave them such extraordinary prophetic power?”
“to have the freedom of London was a life in itself.”
Bias
“... It ought to be illegal to publish a book by a man without first giving it to a woman to annotate”
“It would never occur to an English doctor to write for the general public anything that could shake its confidence in doctors. Foreigners are different. They think nothing of revealing and discussing the most awful things. . . . Doctors have to specialize when they are boys and they remain ignorant all their lives." …This Is not only for doctors. You have touched the great problem of modem life. No man can, today, see over the whole field of knowledge. The great Leibnitz was the last to whom this was possible."
“Mm. Perhaps the Russians are more simple; less . . . civilized." "Simplicity and directness of feeling does not necessarily indicate a less highly organized psychological temperament."
“. . . don't take up ... a journalistic career on the strength of being able to write; as badly as Jenkins.”
"The greatest Ideas are always simple; though not in their resultants. This dream however, has always been present with Jews."
"Facts are invented by people who start with their conclusions arranged beforehand."
"What is Christianity? You think Christianity is favourable to women? On the contrary. It is the Christian countries that have produced the prostitute and the most vile estimations of women in the world. It is only in Christian countries that I find the detestable spectacle of men who will go straight from association with loose women Into the society of innocent girls. That I find unthinkable."
“With Jews womanhood has always been sacred. And there can be no doubt that we owe our persistence as a race largely to our laws of protection for women; all women. Moreover in the older Hebrew civilization women stood very high. You may read this. Today there is a very significant Jewish wit which says that women make the best wives and mothers in the world."
“first outbreak of American literature was unfortunately feminine.”
“However clever the man might be, his assumptions about women made the carefully arranged and solemnly received display of research, irritatingly valueless.”
“Justice is a woman; blindfolded; seeing from the inside and not led away by appearances; men invent systems of ethics, but they cannot weigh personality; they have no individuality, only conformity or non-conformity to abstract systems;”
Metaphysics
“Theology does not deny the problems of metaphysic, but answers them in a way metaphysic cannot accept."
Good writing
“Sarah said people ought always to wear hats, especially with evening dress . . . picture hats, with evening dress, made pictures.”
“Christ was the first man to see women as individuals." "You speak easily of Christianity. There is no Christianity in the world. It has never been imagined, save in the brain of a Tolstoy. And he has shown that if the principles of Christianity were applied, cIvIlizatlon as we know it would at once come to an end."
"What is Emerson?" - "He is an American," "It is the most perfect English that you could have. He is a New Englander, a Bostonian; the Pilgrim Fathers; they kept up the English of our best period. The fifteenth century."
"A compress or hot fomentations, hot fomentations could not do harm and they might be very good."
How to write good fiction - But they were about the sea; and the fifth form ... "a noble three-bladed knife, minus the blades". . . .
How to read a book – “But if one never found out what a book was a masterly study of, it meant being ignorant of things everyone knew and agreed about; a kind of hopeless personal ignorance and unintelligence; reading whole books through and through, and only finding out what they were about by accident, when people happened to talk about them, and even then, reading them again, and finding principally quite other things, which stayed, after one had forgotten what people had explained.”
Instinctive Nervous Reaction - "That is an illusion, the strength of life in you that cannot, midst good health, accept death.
On employment – “In the train I saw the whole unfairness of the life of employees. However hard they work, their lives don't alter or get any easier. They live cheap poor lives in anxiety all their best years and then are expected to be grateful for a pension, and generally get no pension.”
Stream of consciousness
“But perhaps the things that occur to you suddenly for the first time in conversation are the things you have always thought, without knowing it . . .”
Astronomy
“The sky looked intelligent.”
“Perhaps they mean the movement of the vast system going on for ever, while men die. The indestructibility of matter. But if matter is indestructible, it is not what the people who used the phrase mean by matter. If matter is not conscious, man is more than matter. If a small, no matter how small, conscious thing is called petty in comparison with big, no matter how big unconscious things, everything is made a question of size, which is absurd. But all these people think that consciousness dies. . . .”
Look at how Deadlock begins… “Miriam ran upstairs narrowly ahead of her thoughts. In the small enclosure of her room they surged about her, gathering power from the familiar objects silently waiting to share her astounded contemplation of the fresh material.” Isn’t it funny how Miriam is always getting into rooms…here she seems to have been competing with her thoughts. The author intentionally throws you into stream of consciousness. How can one compete with her thoughts in the physical realm?
It is amazing that people thought Miriam who was bookish was the best person to assist Shatov with his English. Look at Shatov trying to lead her on…. "I am most interested in philosophy," he said, glowering warmly through his further, wide-open eye. "It was very good to me. I found myself most excited after our talk of yesterday. I think you too were interested?" of course Miriam was neither here nor there… "Yes, wasn't it extraordinary?" Miriam paused to choose between the desire to confess her dread of confronting a full-fledged student and a silence that would let him go on talking while she contemplated a series of reflections extending forward out of sight from his surprising admission of fellowship…. Meanwhile his eagerness to rekindle without fresh fuel, the glow of yesterday, confessed an immaturity that filled her with a tumult of astonished solicitude.” (She played hard to get)
Here Dorothy M. Richardson (D.M.R) tries to tackle a very sensitive topic on race and how she came out might perhaps leave a sour taste in peoples mouth…but then again is it Miriam or Dorothy to blame?
D.M.R relishes the concept of not attaching any importance to herself or having any future influence but rather is intuitive…addressing the very soul of her readers. It is difficult to classify her in to the conventional literary forms; she was giving herself. This is not an easy thing. In the words of Wilson Follet…
“The effort to "place" her, she would almost necessarily construe as an effort to dispose of her altogether, and on the cheapest terms — to reject her on the one ground on which she offers herself, while accepting her on grounds wholly foreign to her mind and purpose.”
We have to come to a thrilling and life-giving apprehension of the author's personality. By reading you can easily tell what was going on in her life. For example I could tell you that Miriam being bookish was attracted to men who could hold intelligent conversations. A widely read man was a nice challenge for Miriam any day and on any topic. Be it astronomy, metaphysics, religion, psychology, you name it. She seemed to understand all the European languages and their avarices.
There is a huge discussion in this installment about novels and fiction. It seems to conclude that what to read should be fictional novels or maybe to be politically correct - fiction (removing the novel). Here is how Follet captures the definition of a novel “the novel is already so inexpugnable that a clever historian could infer its existence without ever having heard of it, as astronomers calculate the mass of an invisible star to explain the behaviour of visible bodies.”
I will therefore refer to it as works - Such reads on fiction should not be understood easily. In other words what the author intends when doing such works is for the reader too think they got it while they still are a mile away. It is unbelievable that DMR is pointing us to her work and insisting that it is a work of fiction while all along I thought it was sort of an autobiography of her life portrayed through Miriam.
Those topics that people do not want to touch are handled meticulously dealt a thorough upper-hand left stroke of a south paw.
Intelligent conversations…
Misapplication of the term infinite – “If the earth is to be called petty, then the stars must be called petty too. They may not even be inhabited. Perhaps they mean the movement of the vast system going on for ever, while men die. The indestructibility of matter. But if matter is indestructible, it is not what the people who used the phrase mean by matter. If matter is not conscious, man is more than matter. If a small, no matter how small, conscious thing is called petty in comparison with big, no matter how big unconscious things, everything is made a question of size, which is absurd. But all these people think that consciousness dies. . . .”
On humanity - "Humanity does not change," they say. It is the same as it was in the beginning is now and ever will be. . . . The men make sly horrible jokes together . . . the Greeks had only one wife; they called it monotony. . . . the Queen can never ride on an omnibus.”
Shatov on Emerson - "Well, I always feel, all the time, all day, that if people would only read Emerson they would understand, and not be like they are, and that the only way to make them understand what one means would be reading pieces of Emerson."
When discussing Tolstoy – “Why must a book be a masterly study of some single thing?”
Individualism – "I agree to a certain extent that it is impossible. A man is first himself. But the peril is of being cut off from his fellow creatures."
On the subject of the time-expanding swiftness of thought. - "A system," pursued the voice, "very generally corrects the fallacy of the preceding system, and leans perhaps in the opposite direction."
Materialism - "The correlation between physical and mental gives an empirical support to materialism."
Talking about Emerson alluding to Dante? – “Emerson would have hated me. But he thinks evil people are necessary. How is one to know whether one is really evil? Suppose one is. The Catholics believe that even the people in hell have a little relaxation now and again.”
Translations and comparison of languages
“the Russians themselves knew what they were like. "There is in Russia except in the governing and bourgeois classes almost no hypocrisy." What was kinetic. . . . And religion was an "actual force" in Russia!”
This is how English can be frigid –
“the English don't gesticulate . . . but he used no gesticulations; he was aware; that was a deliberate attempt to be English. But his whole person was a gesture, expanding, vibrating. "You mean by intonation only the intonation of single words, not of the whole?" "Precisely, Correctness of accent and emphasis is my aim. But you imply a criticism," he fluted, unshaken by his storm. "Yes. First you must not pronounce each word quite so carefully. It makes them echo into each other. Then of course if you want to be quite English you must be less emphatic." "I must assume an air of indifference?"
"An English audience will be more likely to understand if you are slower and more quiet. You ought to have gaps now and then." "Intervals for yawning. Yew shall indicate suitable moments. I see that I am fortunate to have met-hew. I will take lessons, for this lecture, in the true frigid English dignity."
“the irony of the French or the plebeianism of Germans and Scandinavians,”
“Reading and discussion would reveal ignorance of English literature.”
“typical German arrogance.”
"Of course clerks don't make much, unless they have languages. He ought to learn one or two languages."
“Russian is most beautiful; it is perhaps the most beautiful European language; it is, indubitably, the most rich."
"Certainly it is richer than English, I shall prove this to you, even with dictionary. You shall find that it occur, over and over, that where in English is one word, in Russian is six or seven different, all synonyms, but all with most delicate individual shades of nuance .... the abstractive expression is there, as in all civilized European languages, but there is also in Russian the most immense variety of natural expressions, coming forth from the strong feeling of the Russian nature to all these surrounding influences; each word opens to a whole apercu in this sort .... and what is most significant is, the great richness, in Russia, of the people-language I there is no other people-language similar; there is in no one language so immense a variety of tender diminutives and intimate expressions of all natural things. None is so rich in sound or so marvelously powerfully colorful. . . . That is Russian. Part of the reason is no doubt to find in the immense paysage; Russia is zo vast; it is inconceivable for any non-Russian. There is also the ethnological explanation, the immense vigour of the people."
“the immense range of English was partly due to its unrivalled collection of technical terms, derived from English science, commerce, sports,”
Russian authors - Tolstoy.- “He has a most profound knowledge of human psychology; the most marvelous touches. In that he rises to universality. Tourgainyeff is more pure Russian, less to understand outside Russia; more academical; but he shall reveal you most admirably the Russian aristocrat. He is cynic-satirical."
“... a French translation of a Russian book revealing marvellously the interior, the self-life, of a doctor, through his training and experience in practice. It would be a revelation to English readers and she should translate it; in collaboration with him; if she would excuse the intimate subjects it necessarily dealt with.”
"The French sing their language. It is like a recitative, the tone goes up and down and along and up and down again with its own expression; the words have to fit the tune. They have no single abrupt words and phrases, the whole thing is a shape”
“He used to talk incessantly, as if the whole table were waiting for his ideas. And knew everything, in the most awful superficial newspaper way. They have absolutely no souls at all. I never saw an American soul. The Canadians have. The Americans, at least the women, have reproachful ideals that they all agree about. So that they are all like one person; all the same effect.”
. .
Quotes
“Darwin was bad, for men.”
“it was the business of women to be the custodians of manners. . . . Their "sense of good form, and their critical and selective faculties." Then he had no right to be contemptuous of them. . . .”
"People grieve and bemoan themselves, but it is not half so bad with them as they say" . . .
“Time is let out on usury.”
"It is a serious mistake to regard enlightenment as pessimism."
"A happy childhood is perhaps the most fortunate gift in life."
“. . . there is a dead level of intelligence throughout humanity.”
'All expectation of gratitude is meanness and is continually punished by the total insensibility of the obliged person'
"It is not what people may be made to see for a few minutes in conversation that counts. It is the conclusions they come to, instinctively, by themselves."
"You could not possibly have a better book for style and phraseology in English, quite apart from the meaning."
“. . . Where did women find the insight into personality that gave them such extraordinary prophetic power?”
“to have the freedom of London was a life in itself.”
Bias
“... It ought to be illegal to publish a book by a man without first giving it to a woman to annotate”
“It would never occur to an English doctor to write for the general public anything that could shake its confidence in doctors. Foreigners are different. They think nothing of revealing and discussing the most awful things. . . . Doctors have to specialize when they are boys and they remain ignorant all their lives." …This Is not only for doctors. You have touched the great problem of modem life. No man can, today, see over the whole field of knowledge. The great Leibnitz was the last to whom this was possible."
“Mm. Perhaps the Russians are more simple; less . . . civilized." "Simplicity and directness of feeling does not necessarily indicate a less highly organized psychological temperament."
“. . . don't take up ... a journalistic career on the strength of being able to write; as badly as Jenkins.”
"The greatest Ideas are always simple; though not in their resultants. This dream however, has always been present with Jews."
"Facts are invented by people who start with their conclusions arranged beforehand."
"What is Christianity? You think Christianity is favourable to women? On the contrary. It is the Christian countries that have produced the prostitute and the most vile estimations of women in the world. It is only in Christian countries that I find the detestable spectacle of men who will go straight from association with loose women Into the society of innocent girls. That I find unthinkable."
“With Jews womanhood has always been sacred. And there can be no doubt that we owe our persistence as a race largely to our laws of protection for women; all women. Moreover in the older Hebrew civilization women stood very high. You may read this. Today there is a very significant Jewish wit which says that women make the best wives and mothers in the world."
“first outbreak of American literature was unfortunately feminine.”
“However clever the man might be, his assumptions about women made the carefully arranged and solemnly received display of research, irritatingly valueless.”
“Justice is a woman; blindfolded; seeing from the inside and not led away by appearances; men invent systems of ethics, but they cannot weigh personality; they have no individuality, only conformity or non-conformity to abstract systems;”
Metaphysics
“Theology does not deny the problems of metaphysic, but answers them in a way metaphysic cannot accept."
Good writing
“Sarah said people ought always to wear hats, especially with evening dress . . . picture hats, with evening dress, made pictures.”
“Christ was the first man to see women as individuals." "You speak easily of Christianity. There is no Christianity in the world. It has never been imagined, save in the brain of a Tolstoy. And he has shown that if the principles of Christianity were applied, cIvIlizatlon as we know it would at once come to an end."
"What is Emerson?" - "He is an American," "It is the most perfect English that you could have. He is a New Englander, a Bostonian; the Pilgrim Fathers; they kept up the English of our best period. The fifteenth century."
"A compress or hot fomentations, hot fomentations could not do harm and they might be very good."
How to write good fiction - But they were about the sea; and the fifth form ... "a noble three-bladed knife, minus the blades". . . .
How to read a book – “But if one never found out what a book was a masterly study of, it meant being ignorant of things everyone knew and agreed about; a kind of hopeless personal ignorance and unintelligence; reading whole books through and through, and only finding out what they were about by accident, when people happened to talk about them, and even then, reading them again, and finding principally quite other things, which stayed, after one had forgotten what people had explained.”
Instinctive Nervous Reaction - "That is an illusion, the strength of life in you that cannot, midst good health, accept death.
On employment – “In the train I saw the whole unfairness of the life of employees. However hard they work, their lives don't alter or get any easier. They live cheap poor lives in anxiety all their best years and then are expected to be grateful for a pension, and generally get no pension.”
Stream of consciousness
“But perhaps the things that occur to you suddenly for the first time in conversation are the things you have always thought, without knowing it . . .”
Astronomy
“The sky looked intelligent.”
“Perhaps they mean the movement of the vast system going on for ever, while men die. The indestructibility of matter. But if matter is indestructible, it is not what the people who used the phrase mean by matter. If matter is not conscious, man is more than matter. If a small, no matter how small, conscious thing is called petty in comparison with big, no matter how big unconscious things, everything is made a question of size, which is absurd. But all these people think that consciousness dies. . . .”
July 20, 2010
This episode in the series is chiefly concerned with Miriam's relationship with a Russian Jew named Michael Shatov, who meets her at her boarding house. Together they go to the British Museum so he can introduce her to Russian literature, and they attend lectures on metphysics. Eventually they discover they're in love, and kiss. There is a brief interruption of intense disappointment when Shatov confesses some obstacle, a secret pertaining to another woman? However, Miriam forgives him; nonetheless his Jewishness stands as a substantial obstacle for both of them. In the last chapter, Miriam visits an Englishwoman who has converted, in order to marry a Jew, and comes away even more confused and reluctant than ever.
As usual, the plot is of very little importance, and the details of observation are all. Here's an example of the kind of writing I like best from Richardson - a description of listening to a phonograph for the first time. I transcribe it at length, because I think you need the whole sweep of it:
The musings on metaphysics, on nationality versus individualism, and the joy that arises out of editing others' work, I find less engaging. There was one incident which was quite interesting, although obliquely told as usual - Miriam gets caught up in reading a book on the inequities of employment, rants to her dentist Hancock about it, and gets herself sacked from her job as dentist's secretary. She is eventually brought back into the fold, but it completes the work of distancing her from Hancock that her earlier crush began.
Onward.
As usual, the plot is of very little importance, and the details of observation are all. Here's an example of the kind of writing I like best from Richardson - a description of listening to a phonograph for the first time. I transcribe it at length, because I think you need the whole sweep of it:
Miriam waited, breathless; eagerly prepared to accept the coming wonder. A sound like the crackling of burning twigs came out into the silence. She remembered her first attempt to use a telephone, the need for concentrating calmy through the preliminary tumult, on the certainty that intelligible sounds would presently emerge, and listened encouragingly for a voice. The crackling changed to a metallic scraping, labouring steadily round and round, as if it would go on for ever; it ceased and an angry stentorian voice seemed to be struggling, half-smothered, in the neck of the trumpet. Miriam gazed, startled, at the yawning orifice, as the voice suddenly escaped and leapt out across the table with a hout - 'Edison-BELL RECORD!' Lightly struck chords tinkled far away, fairy music, sounding clear and distinct on empty space remote from the steady scraping of the machine. Then a song began. The whole machine seemed to sing it; vibrating with effort, sending forth the notes in a jerky staccato, the scarcely touched words clipped and broken to fit the jingling tune; the sustained upper notes at the end of the verse wavered chromatically, as if the machine were using its last efforts to reach the true pitch; it ceased and the far-away chords came again, fainter and further away. In the second verse the machine struggled more feebly and slackened its speed, flattened suddenly to a lower key, wavered on, flattening from key to key, and collapsed, choking, on a single, downward-slurring squeak --
"Oh, but that's absolutely perfect," gasped Miriam.
"You want to set it slower, silly; it all began too high."
"I know, la reine, he knows, he'll set it slower all right."
This time the voice marched lugubriously forth, with a threatening emphasis on each word; the sustained notes blared wide through their mufflings; yawned out by an angry lion.
"My word," said Harriett. "It's a funeral this time."
"But it's glorious! Can you make it go as slowly as you like?"
"We'll get it right presently, never fear."
Miriam felt that no correct performance could be better than what she had heard, and listened carelessly to the beginning of the third attempt.
The musings on metaphysics, on nationality versus individualism, and the joy that arises out of editing others' work, I find less engaging. There was one incident which was quite interesting, although obliquely told as usual - Miriam gets caught up in reading a book on the inequities of employment, rants to her dentist Hancock about it, and gets herself sacked from her job as dentist's secretary. She is eventually brought back into the fold, but it completes the work of distancing her from Hancock that her earlier crush began.
Onward.
October 6, 2024
Another interesting character based novel about Miriam Henderson and her speaking out as an independent young woman whose views should count.
Miriam meets Mr Shatov, a Russian staying at Mrs Bailey’s boarding house. They enjoy each other’s company, discussing literature and philosophy. Miriam introduces Mr Shatov to the British library and the works of Emerson. They discuss the art and process of translation and how poorly translating pays. Miriam drinks beer for the first time with Mr Shatov’s encouragement. Miriam becomes more assertive with her employers, pointing out she should not be expected to do extra work with no monetary compensation.
Miriam finds herself asserting her independence to Mr Shatov. She believes there is a fundamental difference in attitude to woman’s nature and place in life that separate Miriam from Mr Shatov. Underlying that difference is Miriam being an English woman and Mr Shatov being a Jewish man.
The sixth book in the ‘Pilgrimage’ thirteen novel series. Readers who have enjoyed the first five books in the series should find this book a very worthwhile, satisfying read.
This book was first published in 1921.
Miriam meets Mr Shatov, a Russian staying at Mrs Bailey’s boarding house. They enjoy each other’s company, discussing literature and philosophy. Miriam introduces Mr Shatov to the British library and the works of Emerson. They discuss the art and process of translation and how poorly translating pays. Miriam drinks beer for the first time with Mr Shatov’s encouragement. Miriam becomes more assertive with her employers, pointing out she should not be expected to do extra work with no monetary compensation.
Miriam finds herself asserting her independence to Mr Shatov. She believes there is a fundamental difference in attitude to woman’s nature and place in life that separate Miriam from Mr Shatov. Underlying that difference is Miriam being an English woman and Mr Shatov being a Jewish man.
The sixth book in the ‘Pilgrimage’ thirteen novel series. Readers who have enjoyed the first five books in the series should find this book a very worthwhile, satisfying read.
This book was first published in 1921.
October 25, 2008
excellent...
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