Henry Handel Richardson

Doris Lessing

Ethel Richardson decided to test the contention that it is easy to see when a book is written by a woman. She wrote Maurice Guest as a man, and proved her point. She has often been claimed as a great writer, and I think she is. For years I was asking Australians here what they thought of her, but they said 'Who?' When I went to Australia and asked read- ing people, they sometimes had heard of her. She is caught sight of in Literary Departments. The trouble is, her three major books are so unlike each other, and the same set of phrases will not do to describe them all. Each asks for a different kind of approach.

The easiest to come at is The Getting of Wisdom, about a girls' hoarding-school in Melbourne. She described it as a 'little book', written as a relief after the 11 years' slog of Maurice Guest, but surely her tongue was in her cheek. It is a coldly angry, contemptuous novel. She knew her Compatriots do not forgive criticism, and cut excelling people down to size — their own. I think she was doing what she had learned at school. 'Laura grew very sly . . . a regular little tactician.' She pocketed Injuries . . . played the spaniel to people she despised . . . "Laura began to model herself more and more on those around her; to grasp that the unpardonable sin was to vary au from the common mould.' This was the wisdom that had to be got at boarding- school, in order to survive. She had the dis- advantage of being a poor girl from a poor Country place, competing with richer girls. This and the violently emotional life of these schools is her subject. There is a small but unforgettable scene of the poor women teachers for whom to teach in this sixth-rate place at all was probably a defeat, reading Ouida and joking feebly about marrying the first man who asks them, but they know they will soon be old and alone and poor. H. G. Wells and others Called this novel a masterpiece. It belongs on the shelf with the classic school novels.

Her first novel, Maurice Guest, was a bold book then for man or woman writer. It is about erotic obsession. Reviewers were quite upset. It is set among music stu- dents in Leipzig in the 1890s. Most will be music teachers, but many are there because of the freedoms of bohemian life, an escape from the tedious proprieties of the time. Maurice is an ordinary young man, but he falls in love with Louise Dufrayer, an archetypal sex woman, lazy, sluttish, dis- honest, and unscrupulous, from moral inertia. She is a slave to the one real talent in the town, a 'genius' in the 19th-century manner. Women — naturally — do not see her fascination, but a man describes her like this:

Believe me, there is more thought, more eloquence, in the corners of a beautiful mouth — the upward look of two dark eyes — than in all women have said and done since Sappho.

Do you really think man asks soul of a woman — with such eyes and hands as those? There is only one place for him and that is on his knees before her.

This is said to Madeleine Wade, an Englishwoman who is all admirable quali- ties, a daylit woman, to whom everything Louise stands for is contemptible. Comedy; high comedy. And, social comedy too: there is a landscape thick with subsidiary charac- ters: landladies, warring prima-donna music teachers, tavern keepers, Americans `doing' Europe, girls wanting husbands, people who love the aromas of 'art' and who think the life of cafés and salons is what art is. And embedded in this, the relentless tale of self-destructive passion. Louise could easily be one of Dostoevsky's masochistic women. This novel has been claimed by many for the gallery of the great, and it belongs there. It is unput- downable, unforgettable, but if it is a good read no one could say it is an easy one, for it is too painful.

And now the three volumes of the Fortunes of Richard Mahoney. If tragedy is a great character brought down by inner weakness, then this is not a tragedy, yet it has the effect of one, because if the hero is not up to the role, he nevertheless stands in for England, Europe, the Old Country's values. This is Europe on trial and Richard Mahoney makes a poor showing. He is clever, book-loving, full of touchy pride and prickliness, and takes his stand on being a gentleman, not a claim to make Australians like him. Yet many do, and admire him too. What he yearns for is to be well-off and respected, to have cultivat- ed friends and properly brought-up chil- dren. Twice he succeeds, starting from nothing, but an inner enemy, invisible to him if not to others, forces him to depth- charge his own success. He ends up very poor, mad, and dependent on a wife whom he has always patronised for being too earthy and practical.

Lucky for him that she is. Mary Mahoney is one of literature's great women, though her qualities are not likely to be admired by feminists. She married her Richard, moth to star, aged 16, and for ever after subdued her needs and wishes to his. She loved him. That this author could create the awful Louise Dufrayer, and then Mary Mahoney, shows her range; and, too, the simple-minded Maurice Guest and the con- tradictory complexities of Richard Mahoney. This is another novel dense as a plum pudding, 19th-century in feel, slow- moving, contemplative, while we watch fates and destinies reveal themselves. People who enjoy Trollope would find themselves at home here: the same sense of quiet and patient irony, the same under- standing of weakness.

If one may read Maurice Guest to know what it was like to be part of the musical life of Germany in the 1880s, then The Fortunes of Richard Mahoney are as much a history of the early days of Victoria: the gold fields of Ballarat, the infancy of Melbourne, the small towns and villages just holding their own in the bush. And if we read Patrick White at least partly to find out what Australia is like now, then Richardson provides the same service for the past. They have a good deal in com- mon, for in both there is the same feeling, as if a hand were stretching out to encom- pass more than is possible for it. Australia the continent, the deep alienness of it, the difference of it, seems to mock Patrick White's people, and so it does the people of Ethel Richardson.

These wonderful novels, with the exception of The Getting of Wisdom (Virago, £5.99), are out of print. One has to marvel at the fortunes of writers and of books.

This figure of a mountain wizard Carries both furs and fan As if to show that timelessness Began where time began.

Mountain Wizard

Summer is winter, winter summer. Ah, what a knowing man.

Kakinomoto no Hitomaro (c. 659-712)

translated from the Japanese by Graeme Wilson

It is with great regret that we record the death, on 2 September, of Graeme Wilson, who for many years contributed masterly and delightful translations from Chinese, Japanese. Vietnamese and Korean poets, as well as his own work, to The Spectator. The poem printed above was one of his favourites. His translations, published last year under the title From the Morning of the World, are available from Collins Harvill at f12.