Cagey Subconsciousness

The most "abominably unknown" contemporary writer, according to Ford Madox Ford, is Dorothy Richardson, a 56-year-old, myopic Englishwoman. During the past 23 years she has published eleven volumes (eight in the U. S.) of a lifework called Pilgrimage. Ford ranks her with Proust, James Joyce, and Virginia Woolf as an inventor of the "stream of consciousness" technique, believes her obscurity is due to critics' and readers' distaste for distinguished writing.

Last week Dorothy Richardson's completed Pilgrimage was published in the U. S. (Knopf, 4 vols., $3 ea., $10 per set), and U. S. readers could see for themselves why Dorothy Richardson will probably continue to be the most abominably neglected modern writer.

Influenced by Henry James, Miss Richardson set out to write the first realistic novel probing the subconscious thoughts of a woman, a bold, original work that should be the feminine counterpart of Joyce's Ulysses and Proust's Remembrance of Things Past. Its fatal flaw showed from the start: a reticence as amazing as Proust's and Joyce's candor. Her heroine, Miriam Henderson, is the daughter of a bankrupt upper middle-class family, restless, chauvinistic, anti-American, who leaves home when she is 17, teaches in girls' schools in Germany and London, is a governess, then secretary to a firm of literary dentists, who introduce her to their London intellectual set. When she writes about the way sunlight falls across a room, about the mannerisms of the minor characters who drift in & out of the plotless, amorphous story, Dorothy Richardson is both eloquent and clear. But writing about Miriam's tormented relations with men, who repel and fascinate her, she is so obscure that the reader is left guessing. In the four volumes of Pilgrimage sex never once rears its ugly little head. Every critical experience in Miriam's life occurs off stage, between books.

Joyce and Proust made valuable contributions to modern psychology by their "stream of consciousness." Dorothy Richardson, reducing the stream to a trickle, merely furnishes psychologists with another hard case to work on.

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