“My swirling wants. Your frozen lips.”
. - excerpt
from A Valediction Forbidding Mourning by
Adrienne Rich, from The Will To Change , New York, W.W. Norton: 1971
If you write only three novels
it is well to make all of them masterpieces.
Let no feeling or experience go to waste..
That’s how it was for
Henry Handel Richardson (1870-1946), the author of Maurice Guest (1908), The Getting
of Wisdom (1910) and the trilogy known collectively as The Fortunes of Richard Mahony (1917 - 1930). Richardson's
first novel was Maurice Guest, a study of erotic obsession and the nature
of art. In
retrospect, its publication in 1908 was not well-timed. The English-speaking
world’s admiration for the genius of German music and the cachet of attending a
German univerisy were about to be obliterated by two world wars. Reprinted in the series of Virago Modern
Classics in 1981,. and again forgotten but still, one of the great novels of the 20th
century.
Leipzig in the 1890s
was to musicians what Paris was to visual artists. The new Leipzig Gewandhaus
was.the crown jewel of the city's
conservatory system. Daily life for a
music student might be a grinding round of
lessons and practicing, home a
shabby rented room, the food overcooked boarding house food, but the
history! J.S. Bach was buried in the
Thomaskircke where he had once been cantor, and in recent decades the Mendelssohn
siblings, Felix and Fanny . young composer-prodigies., and the married couple
ofRobert and Clara Schumann had lived and worked there. Richard Wagner, had
been born in Leipzig and the cult of the composer had elevated him to something
close to a deity.
Into this febrile
atmosphere comes Maurice Guest, a provincial Englishman who has abandoned his career as a teacher to
study music, with support from his skeptical
parents. The contrast with his childhood home, "one of those
cheerless, middle class homes across which never passes a breath of the great
gladness, the ideal beauty of life: where thought never swings itself above the
material interests of the day gone,the day to come, and existence grows as
timid and trivial as the petty griefs that intersperse it"
Among the Germans,
British, and Americans, each one hoping to experience the alchemy that transforms talent into greatness, is one
Australian, Louise Dufrayer. When Maurice sees Louise at a music lesson, she seesm the embodiment of everything exotic and bohemian that has been lacking in his life. He is immediately besotted and, as loses touch with the inner core of his being. And although Maurice gradually realizes the smallness of his musical talent in comparison to his dreams, his emotional intelligence is often acute and its loss as erotic obsession overtakes him is a tragedy. Of his relationship with an American girl, he thought " “Johanna had
not touched him deeply;she had left him as cool as he had no doubt left her;
neither had found the key to the other.” Further, about Johanna's relationship with her sister Ephie Cayhill, one of Maurice's classmates, he comes to realize her attitude “had a touch
of the masculine about it: it had existed only as long as it could guide and
subordinate;it denied its object any midget attempt at individual life; it set
up lofty moral standards, and was implacable when a smaller, frailer being
found it impossible to live up to them."
One of the pleasures of reading Muurice Guest is that all the characters are richly drawn as Maurice. An aspect of Richardon's greatness is her ability to portray emotional intelligence in her characters convincingly, not just as an authorial attribute. When we meet Louise Dufrayer, she is in love with the composer/pianist Schlisky, a man convinced of his own greatness but with a weakness for erotic dalliance. When he abandons Louise for an American heiress, she turns to Maurice in a moment of despair, an action she comes to revil and, sadly, Maurice with it. “She had gone into
this intimacy deliberately, with open eyes, knowing that she cared for him only
in a friendly way. She had believed,
then, that that the gift of herself would mean little to her, while it would
secure her a friend and companion. And
then, too - she might as well be quite
honest with herself – she had cherished a romantic hope that a love that
commenced as did this shy, adoring tenderness, would give her something finer
and more enduring than she had hitherto known.
Wrong, all wrong from beginning to end!
It had been no better than those loves which made no secret of their aim
and did not strut about draped in false sentiment.” (p. 452) During one of their harrowing confrontations, in reply to Louise, Maurice says, “How can you say
that? - And yet I think I know what you
mean. It's like a kind of rage that
comes over one – Yes, I've felt it too.” (p. 409).
Maurice Guest has been compared to
Stendhal’s Sentimental Education and Flaubert's Madame Bovary.
As a naturalist novel it is a great one; Antonia White thought it was and urged it on other writers, and Doris Lessing did as well. Although Richardson
writes in the sometimes veiled terms required by convention in her time, she portrayed
the varieties of sexual love, homosexuality, troilism, sadism, intense female bonding the love of
a woman for a homosexual man.,
things a middle class woman was not supposed to know about, much less comprehend. But Richardson was one of the tribe of humans
who say courageously. “Nothing human is alien to me.”
Henry Handel
Richardson was the pen name of the Australian novelist Ethel Florence Lindesay
Richardson. She chose the name of an
Irish male restive as her pen name for the usual reasons, and for decades, Henry Handel Richardson was
assumed to be a man. The British writer Iris Murdoch was a distant
relative.
Richardson was born
at Melbourne in 1870. Her father was a
recent immigrant from Edinburgh where he had trained as a doctor, but he had
come to Australia to make his fortune in the gold mines of Victoria, which he
did, allowing him to become a prominent figure in Melbourne society. But,as
Richardson in her masterful trilogy The Fortunes of Richard Mahony, that
success was to be short-lived. In
1878, when Ethel was eight years old, Walter Lindesay Ruchardson began to
exhibit the early signs of cerebral
syphilis, likely caught on the shipboard journey from Scotland, and he died
four years later, having gone through interests in philosophy to astrology and
spiritualism, to end in insanity.
Mary Richardson was
left destitute and become a rural postmistress.
Six decades later when Henry Handel Richardson published the memoir Myself
When Young, she could write, “I can't say we grieved over his death.” But her father's life and the bush towns she
grew up in became the inspiration for Richardson’s novels. She had a younger
sister, , and both girls were lively and also precocious musicians. Ettie, as
she was then called, composed songs and cantatas and was generally agreed to be
a brilliant student. When the girl
reached 18, her mother resigned her post in order that she might take girls to
Europe, so that Ethel might become a concert pianist.
Between 1889 and
1892, Ethel Richardson studied music in
Leipzig, abandoning that career because the required public recitals traumatized her, in a way that she had been
unprepared for. Richard came to
understand human psychology through the new work then being published by Krafft-Ebing
and Freud and through the plays of Ibsen and Strindberg.
To place Richardson's
writing - and especially her debut with Maurice
Guest - in a way that highlights its radical departure from conventional
fiction, ….Her English-language peers lagged behind her. D.H. Lawrence's notorious novels Sons And
Lovers (1930, Women In Love (1920) and Lady Chatterly's Lover
(1928) were still well in the future and as for James Joyce, the only thing he
had published was a book of poems, Chamber Music in 1907. I do not want to reinterpet literature through hindsight but
it is hindsight that has enabled critics to elide Richardson's revolutionary
story-telling by ignoring her originality.
Her truest peers were among the Scandinavians. Cora Sandel.
Two of August Strindberg's plays are worth considering. In Miss Julie (188), he....and in The
Ghost Sonata (1907) a naïve but artistically-inclined student is bedazzled
by the glamor of bohemian student life.
Her second novel, The Getting
of Wisdom,
(1910) was set in a Melbourne boarding school for girls. Unlike other well-known novels about
adolescence like Jean Webster’s Daddy-Long-Legs (1912), Richardson's
girls are boisterous, they have crushes
on older men, and in her portrait of a schoolgirl's first passion and emotional
devastation Richardson was a writer of painful emotional honesty Richardson returned to Australia only once
in 1912, when she had already published two novels. While in Leipzig she had met her future
husband, a Scottish student of German literature, who later became a professor
at London University. In 1932, the
American Sinclair Lewis, the recipeint in 1930 of the Nobel Prize for
Literature nominated Richardson for the Prize.
She died at age 76 in 1936.
Images:
1. Jan Toorop - Desire and Satisfaction, 1893, Musee d'Orsay, Paris.
2. Jan Toorop - Expulsion From Paradise, 1893, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
3. Rupert Bunny - The Yellow Scarf - Henry Handel Richardson, c.1910, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra.
