Now this is my kind of paradise . . . I'm truly not antisocial and I do love chatting with friends and very much like hanging out with like-minded people, but I have to say I am most happy as a solitary person. If I don't get my 'alone time' I feel crank, cheated and a little resentful. So when I finally got into the rhythm and flow of Dorothy Richardson's short story, "Seen from Paradise", I felt as if I was in the presence of a kindred soul. If you have a similar inclination (and even if you don't but just like a well-written and perceptive story) you have to go out and find this story to read for yourself. It now ranks up there as amongst my favorites in Infinite Riches.
Paradise? The editor in the introduction describes Richardson as having "slipped the leash" on conventional behavior. The woman in the story "expresses sheer joy at being alone, in a tale whose structure is as freewheeling as her thoughts." Yes, the structure is indeed freewheeling and it took me two reads to follow exactly where Richardson, and her character's thoughts were going. And once I did, I thought--yes, I can understand exactly where she is coming from.
I like Dorothy Richardson. Finally a modernist writer who I am eager to read more of. I am eager to read more Virginia Woolf, too, but the difference is that for some reason I feel less intimidated by Richardson than by Woolf. I'm not sure why--maybe I don't know enough about her. I had to go straight to my bookshelves in the hope that I owned something by her, but drat--not a single book of her work. I will soon rectify that. I know she wrote a sequence of novels called Pilgrimage (Virago published them in four volumes and my library just might have them). She was a gentleman's daughter but had to learn her own living from a young age because they had no money. Neither here nor there but I like her for this reason, too, she married a man fifteen years her junior. I mention it only because she sounds like a woman to follow her own mind, do as she pleased and live by her own rules. From the Wikipedia entry on Richardson:
"Richardson is also an important feminist writer, because of the way her work assumes the validity and importance of female experiences as a subject for literature. Her wariness of the conventions of language, her bending of the normal rules of punctuation, sentence length, and so on, are used to create a feminine prose, which Richardson saw as necessary for the expression of female experience. Virginia Woolf in 1923 noted, that Richardson 'has invented, or, if she has not invented, developed and applied to her own uses, a sentence which we might call the psychological sentence of the feminine'."
Yes, I think she is someone who definitely deserves to be read. In her story, one woman reflects upon how much she likes her solitude and being alone and how that solitude is soon to be shattered by the arrival of friends from London coming to stay with her in a cottage in Cornwall. Here's how it begins to give you a flavor of her writing style:
"'Just to let you know we are coming down on April 2nd. I can hardly believe it, though we've begun our terrific packing. Piles of books this time, besides all the rest. And we're bringing a tub plant, something Jim's brother knows all about and says blooms beautifully, to put at the side of the front door'."
"Five days. Then events; crowding. Beginning with the setting down of the tub plant. Alien. Flouting the old grey cottage. Beginning of its gradual transformation. Each step of which, in turn, whenever I come down, I shall be expected to applaud."
On first reading the story I found that if my mind wondered just the tiniest little bit I would lose the thread and be utterly lost. The second read was much more careful and thoughtful (how reading should always be, right?), and I could follow her train of thought and the shifts of thought, time and action. I was a little afloat and first thinking, oh no, another Grace Paley moment. While I liked Grace Paley very much, I have to say I love Dorothy Richardson--or at least this first taste. Even now as I reread sections to write my post I feel like I am taking something more away from the story--in a good way. Not with the frustration I often feel with modernist works.
Is the woman in the story Dorothy Richardson? Maybe. The woman is a writer.
"Only five more days in solitude that not for one instant has been loneliness. Fresh realization, from moment to moment, all the time. Everything available, all past experience seen, while I sat writing, for the first time as near, clear, permanent reality. An empty mind as I sat in the evenings by the fireside doing nothing, not needing to read or to think, just looking and seeing, taking in afresh the marvellousness of there being anything anywhere. Knowing, when I went to bed, alone in an empty house that was reported to be haunted, that I should sleep the night through, dreamlessly, waking only when the early light, gleaming through the small casements, gave me again the joy of the squat jars of geranium bloom, brilliant against the pale canary yellow of the little curtains. Summer in the wintry dawn."
When she knows her friends will be there in just five more days, she has those five days still. But the magic is broken. The solitude at an end as now those days will be filled with this new preoccupation.
I am at just this same place in my life. I so understand this story. She writes what I feel and think. It is not so strange really, but I can't help but feel that this is uncanny. How did she get inside my mind?
Next week, the last story, which is actually a novella by Rebecca West. I think I have a new collection picked out as my next read. Of course that can always change at the last moment, so I will share my choice in just a few weeks.
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I didn't get my New Yorker in the mail this week. Do you think the postman is reading it first? The May 4 edition has a story by Milan Kundera called "The Apologizer" which I am looking forward to reading. I have access to the digital edition, if all else fails, but I tend to read from my paper magazine. It's been years since I read any of Kundera's work, but I went through a phase where I read a number of books by him in quick succession. He has a new book coming out next month. Something to look forward to.