Rhythmic Modernism

the mimesis of life itself in the short fiction of D. H. Lawrence, Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf

Helen Rydstrand

A thesis submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

School of the Arts and Media Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences

February 2016

PLEASE TYPE THE UNIVERSITY OF NEW SOUTH WALES Thesis/Dissertation Sheet

Surname or Family name: Rydstrand

First name: Helen Other name/s: Ingrid Wicks

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School: the Arts & Media Faculty: Arts & Social Sciences

Title: Rhythmic Modernism: the mimesis of life itself in the short fiction of

D. H. Lawrence, Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf

Abstract 350 words maximum: (PLEASE TYPE)

There is now a growing body of scholarship exploring rhythm in literary modernism, as it becomes

increasingly clear how central the concept of rhythm is to early twentieth-century visions of the universe. Around this time, recent developments in the sciences increased the public’s awareness of a multitude of intangible natural rhythms that surround us, coinciding with a peak in the popularity of vitalist philosophy. This

meant that for some, rhythm came to be equated with the essence of life itself. Modernist writers looked for ways to respond to this new rhythmic paradigm, and attention to the question of rhythm in modernist literary culture shows that many writers considered textual rhythms to function mimetically – quite literally as mimicry of the rhythms of the universe.

This thesis examines this ‘rhythmic mimesis’ in the short fiction of three closely networked writers: D.H.Lawrence, Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf. In differing ways, Lawrence, Mansfield and Woolf each display a fascination with rhythm as a formal device and as a conceptual framework for understanding

the world. I situate this analysis of modernist short fiction in the context of an intellectual history of rhythm and mimesis, which I position as important strands of modernist cultural debate. Accordingly, my first chapter investigates this rhythmic paradigm as it appears in literary cultural discourse, especially in relation to the

romantic aesthetic philosophy of John Middleton Murry and the vigorous contemporary debates that took place over the relation between prose and poetry. The short story, as an exemplary modernist form and one often situated at the forefront of attempts to meld the capabilities of poetry and prose, provided these authors

with a ready medium for both formal and thematic experimentation with rhythm. The following three chapters detail the ways in which Lawrence, Mansfield and Woolf respectively respond to this intellectual and aesthetic context in both their nonfiction and short fiction. Whereas some classic accounts of modernism see it as a broadly anti-mimetic movement, close attention to the problematic of rhythm suggests that Lawrence,

Mansfield and Woolf were, on the contrary, vitally concerned with the representation of ‘life itself’.

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Abstract There is now a growing body of scholarship exploring rhythm in literary modernism, as it becomes increasingly clear how central the concept of rhythm is to early twentieth-century visions of the universe. Around this time, recent developments in the sciences increased the public’s awareness of a multitude of intangible natural rhythms that surround us, coinciding with a peak in the popularity of vitalist philosophy. This meant that for some, rhythm came to be equated with the essence of life itself. Modernist writers looked for ways to respond to this new rhythmic paradigm, and attention to the question of rhythm in modernist literary culture shows that many writers considered textual rhythms to function mimetically – quite literally as mimicry of the rhythms of the universe. This thesis examines this ‘rhythmic mimesis’ in the short fiction of three closely networked writers: D. H. Lawrence, Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf. In differing ways, Lawrence, Mansfield and Woolf each display a fascination with rhythm as a formal device and as a conceptual framework for understanding the world. I situate this analysis of modernist short fiction in the context of an intellectual history of rhythm and mimesis, which I position as important strands of modernist cultural debate. Accordingly, my first chapter investigates this rhythmic paradigm as it appears in literary cultural discourse, especially in relation to the romantic aesthetic philosophy of John Middleton Murry and the vigorous contemporary debates that took place over the relation between prose and poetry. The short story, as an exemplary modernist form and one often situated at the forefront of attempts to meld the capabilities of poetry and prose, provided these authors with a ready medium for both formal and thematic experimentation with rhythm. The following three chapters detail the ways in which Lawrence, Mansfield and Woolf respectively respond to this intellectual and aesthetic context in both their nonfiction and short fiction. Whereas some classic accounts of modernism see it as a broadly anti-mimetic movement, close attention to the problematic of rhythm suggests that Lawrence, Mansfield and Woolf were, on the contrary, vitally concerned with the representation of ‘life itself’.

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Contents Abstract i Acknowledgements iii Publications and presentations arising from the thesis iv Abbreviations v

Introducing rhythmic mimesis 1 Rhythmanalysis 3 Rhythm in modernist studies 8 Mimesis 15 The modernist short story 25 Rhythm and mimesis in Lawrence, Mansfield and Woolf 29

Chapter 1 Rhythm and mimesis in modernist literary culture 46 Romantic modernism and the rhythms of life 47 Rhythmic mimesis and modernist formal experimentation 63

Chapter 2 D. H. Lawrence’s cosmic rhythms 84 Rhythm in Lawrence’s metaphysics and aesthetics 85 Thermodynamic relationships 102 Rhythms of modernity 119

Chapter 3 Katherine Mansfield and the rhythms of habit 133 Life, rhythm and prose in Mansfield’s non-fiction 134 Impersonation and the rhythms of character 151 Ordinary rhythms and the short story 169

Chapter 4 Virginia Woolf, rhythm and the world as work of art 189 Rhythm and poetic prose in Woolf’s aesthetics 190 The worldly rhythms of consciousness 204 The rhythms of storytelling 219

Conclusion 236 Bibliography 239

iii

Acknowledgements First acknowledgement must go to my supervisor, Dr John Attridge, and to my co- supervisor, Professor Helen Groth. Both have been incredibly supportive and have provided ever-generous and insightful advice throughout the process of researching and writing this thesis. They have also offered and encouraged many opportunities for professional development throughout my candidature, for which I will remain very grateful. I am also sensible of my debts to Dr Sean Pryor for his reliably incisive comments on my work as reader for each of my Annual Progress Reviews, and to my friends in the Women’s Writing Group (Penelope Hone, Dr Baylee Brits, Kate Montague, Tamlyn Avery and Dr Jacinta Kelly) for both their rigorous critique and their camaraderie. I have been fortunate to be associated with UNSW’s Centre for Modernism Studies in Australia, which through regular seminars, reading groups and workshops, has offered a stimulating and collegial environment for writing a doctoral thesis. During my PhD I have also been lucky to work at UNSW’s Learning Centre, and I thank my colleagues there, particularly Dr Dominic Fitzsimmons, Dr Jamie Roberts and my fellow Peer Writing Assistants, for many enjoyable and edifying conversations about the mysteries of writing, academia, and universities. Friends are of course due a great deal of credit for getting me through this, with coffees, yoga-and-breakfast, hilarity, and with shared expertise and generous proofreading help. I give special thanks to Gabrielle Dixon-Ritchie, Christopher Oakey, Rohan Willard, Louise Cooney and Lisa Bernstein. Wholehearted thanks also go to my families (the Rydstrands, Wickses, Taylors and Oppermanns) for their belief in me and for many sustaining meals. Finally, my deepest gratitude goes to Mo, for everything and every day.

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Publications and presentations arising from the thesis

Publications ‘The Rhythms of Character in “Miss Brill”.’ In Sounding Modernism: Rhythm and Sonic Mediation in Modern Literature and Film, edited by Julian Murphet, Helen Groth and Penelope Hone. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2017. (In press.) ‘Ordinary Discordance: Katherine Mansfield and the First World War.’ In Katherine Mansfield and World War One, edited by Gerri Kimber, Todd Martin, Delia da Sousa Correa, Isobel Maddison and Alice Kelly. Katherine Mansfield Studies, 55-68. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014.

Conference presentations ‘Modernist aesthetics and antipodean nostalgia: Mansfield’s rhythm in theory and practice’, at Katherine Mansfield and Antipodean Modernism, UNSW, 2015. ‘Escaping the nation in D. H. Lawrence’s late stories: Rananim and the transnational impulse’, at Transnational Modernisms – the 2nd Australian Modernist Studies Network Conference, University of Sydney, 2014. ‘“The great universal laws of rhythm”: Tracing the Concept of Rhythm through the Modernist Little Magazines’, at The Idea of a Literary Review, Centre for Modernism Studies in Australia, UNSW, 2014. ‘“I chose the rise and fall of every paragraph to fit her”: Katherine Mansfield’s feeling for rhythm in ‘Miss Brill’, at Modern Soundscapes, UNSW, 2013. ‘“Deserts of vast eternity”: Rhythm, poetry and prose in “At the Bay”’ at Katherine Mansfield: Masked and Unmasked, Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand, 2013. ‘Brevity and Rhythm: Modernist Poetics in Katherine Mansfield’s “Prelude”’ at Moving Modernisms, University of Oxford, United Kingdom, 2012. ‘The Rhythm of the Sea in Katherine Mansfield’s “At the Bay”’ at Dis/Connections – Inaugural FASS Post-Graduate Conference, UNSW, 2012. ‘At the Borderline of Prose: The Shorter Virginia Woolf’ at Contact: Borders, Limits and Thresholds – School of English, Media & Performing Arts Postgraduate Symposium, UNSW, 2011. v

Abbreviations The following abbreviations are used throughout the thesis, and are given in parenthetical citations within the text.

D. H. Lawrence EME England, My England and Other Stories. Edited by Bruce Steele. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990. IR Introductions and Reviews. Edited by N. H. Reeve. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. LEA Late Essays and Articles. Edited by James T. Boulton. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. LDHL The Letters of D. H. Lawrence. Edited by James T. Boulton, George J. Zytaruk, Andrew Robertson, Lindeth Vasey and Margaret H. Boulton. 8 vols. Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1979-2000. PDHL The Poems. Edited by Christopher Pollnitz. 2 vols. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. PO The Prussian Officer and Other Stories. Edited by John Worthen. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987. RDP Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays. Edited by Michael Herbert. Cambridge University Press, 1988. SCAL Studies in Classic American Literature. Edited by Ezra Greenspan, Lindeth Vasey and John Worthen. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. STH Study of Thomas Hardy and Other Essays. Edited by Bruce Steele. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985. WL Women in Love. Edited by David Farmer, Lindeth Vasey and John Worthen. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987. WWRA The Woman Who Rode Away and Other Stories. Edited by Dieter Mehl and Christa Jansohn. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002.

Katherine Mansfield CLKM The Collected Letters of Katherine Mansfield. Edited by Vincent O’Sullivan and Margaret Scott. 5 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984- 2008. CWKM The Collected Works of Katherine Mansfield. Edited by Gerri Kimber, Vincent O’Sullivan and Angela Smith. 3 vols. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012. KMN The Katherine Mansfield Notebooks. Edited by Margaret Scott. Complete ed. 2 vols. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002. vi

Virginia Woolf CSFVW A Haunted House: The Complete Shorter Fiction. Edited by Susan Dick. 2nd ed. London: Vintage, 2003. 1985. DVW The Diary of Virginia Woolf. Edited by Anne Olivier Bell and Andrew McNeillie. 5 vols. London: Hogarth Press, 1977-1984. EVW The Essays of Virginia Woolf. Edited by Andrew McNeillie and Stuart N. Clarke. 6 vols. London: Hogarth Press, 1986-2011. LVW The Letters of Virginia Woolf. Edited by Nigel Nicolson and Joanne Trautmann. 6 vols. London: Hogarth Press, 1975-1980. MOB Moments of Being: A Collection of Autobiographical Writing. Edited by Jeanne Schulkind. San Diego: Harcourt, 1985.

Note: I have followed the editors of these volumes in letting stand the authors’ divergences from spelling, grammar and punctuation conventions, and have not cited these ‘sic’. Introducing rhythmic mimesis

Modernism is not the capricious outburst of intellectual dipsomania. It penetrates beneath the outward surface of the world, and disengages the rhythms that lie at the heart of things, rhythms strange to the eye, unaccustomed to the ear, primitive harmonies of the world that is and lives.1

Rhythm and mimesis are both to be found at the core of modernist thought. In the epigraph above, rhythm is invoked to capture the idea of an essential dimension of existence, though one that cannot be registered by the senses alone. It is a primordial force propelling the universe and underlying all life’s processes: at once metaphysical construct and actual phenomenon. The modernist movement, in turn, is defined as being inherently concerned with epistemic discovery – with bringing these intangible but vital rhythms out of obscurity and into art. This vision of a rhythmic universe and of modernism’s mimetic response to it together form the central interest of this thesis. The interlinking of rhythm and life evident above proves to be pervasive in the modernist literary culture of the early twentieth century. Around this time, recent developments in many of the sciences increased the public’s awareness of a multitude of natural rhythms that surround us, coinciding with a peak in the popularity of vitalist philosophy. For some, rhythm thus came to be equated with the essence of life itself. Although many classic accounts see cultural modernism as a broadly anti- mimetic movement, this thesis finds that many modernists were, on the contrary, profoundly invested in representing this deeper, rhythmic dimension of existence. Furthermore, attention to the issue of rhythm in modernist literary culture shows that many writers considered textual rhythms to function mimetically – quite literally as mimicry of the rhythms of the universe. In what follows, I investigate this ‘rhythmic mimesis’ in the short fiction of three closely networked writers: D. H. Lawrence, Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf. In different ways, each of these three authors displays a fascination with rhythm both as a formal device and as an appealingly protean concept that helps to make sense of the complex world in which they lived. This study excavates modernist

1 John Middleton Murry, ‘Art and Philosophy,’ Rhythm 1, no. 1 (1911): 12. Introduction 2

interests in a huge variety of ‘real’ and interconnected rhythms: bodily ones – vocal, organic, developmental, sexual, pathological; broader natural rhythms – circadian, seasonal, lifespan, generational, cosmological, astronomical; physical rhythms – vibrations, pulsations, waves and currents, whether thermodynamic, electrical, sonic, or material; social rhythms – everyday, communal, interpersonal, gendered; psychological or interior rhythms – intellectual or emotional, conscious or subconscious, healthy or unhealthy; and lastly, historical rhythms – both modern (urban patterns of labour, traffic and transport, as well as clock time and the measurable, mechanical or artificial in general) and ancient, primitive and ritual. The short story, as an exemplary modernist form and one often situated at the forefront of attempts to meld the capabilities of poetry and prose, provided Lawrence, Mansfield and Woolf with a ready vehicle for experimentation with rhythmic mimesis. This thesis grapples with two complex, even amorphous, concepts: namely, rhythm and mimesis. They demand careful handling and an attempt at clear explication. Accordingly, I begin the rest of this introductory chapter by outlining the concept of rhythm as I approach it in this thesis, first explaining its theoretical grounding in Henri Lefebvre’s notion of ‘rhythmanalysis’, before moving on to situate my own investigation within existing fields of modernist scholarship that engages both directly and indirectly with rhythm. Following this, I introduce my interpretation of the sometimes-contentious concept of mimesis, again in relation both to modernist literary scholarship, and to broader theoretical framings of the concept. These pivotal concepts established, the remainder of the introduction positions my engagement with the modernist short story in relation to foregoing theory and criticism of the form, before closing with a comparative introduction of Lawrence, Mansfield, Woolf, and their respective critical fields. Chapter 1 builds on the theoretical and critical foundation laid in this introduction to present an intellectual history of modernist attitudes to rhythm in relation to life and art. In this chapter, rhythm emerges in modernist discourse as a concept that straddles both religious and scientific thinking, as an invisible and abstract but real phenomenon that organises the universe. This metaphysical significance has a bearing on the aesthetic discourse of the period. I trace this rhythmic paradigm as it appears in literary discourse, especially in relation to the Introduction 3

romantic aesthetic philosophy of John Middleton Murry, who named himself Mansfield and Lawrence’s ‘critical counterpart’; the vigorous contemporary debates that took place over the relation between prose and poetry; and subsequent investigations of the role of rhythm in prose writing. I conclude this chapter with a survey of contemporary attitudes to the short story, thus establishing a frame of reference for the close readings presented in the remaining chapters, which deal with Lawrence, Mansfield and Woolf’s work respectively. Each of these three chapters is structured by the same logic. I first examine those of the author’s non-fiction statements that pertain to rhythm and mimesis, which are often united by an investment in the ideal of ‘life’. Second, I perform a series of thematically linked close readings, attuned to rhythm, of selections from each author’s short fiction. In Chapter 2, I illuminate Lawrence’s quite explicit vision of the cosmos and of human relations and development as rhythmic. In my exposition of his use of rhythmic mimesis in response to this vision, I also explore Lawrence’s moral determination to help his readers to recognise and attune themselves to this universal rhythm, for which purpose he again employs rhythm itself. In Chapter 3 I unearth the rhythmic implications of Mansfield’s profound and pervasive feeling for life, especially as it relates to her ideas about the rhythmic character of the ordinary, and its relation to transcendent aspects of experience. Finally, in Chapter 4 I reframe Woolf’s famous closely held belief in an invisible, artistic force that orders the world in rhythmic terms, suggesting that in her open interest in fusing the respective capacities of poetry and prose, she pursued the ideal of rhythmic mimesis. I examine how this unites her approach to representing consciousness, and her interrogations of the role of storytelling in human life.

Rhythmanalysis Rhythm is a difficult concept to contain through analysis; there is a danger of finding rhythm everywhere, and thereby draining the term of significance. In aid of its task of thinking through rhythm in the themes and formal qualities of the non-fiction writing and short fiction under study, this thesis draws on Henri Lefebvre’s late work, Rhythmanalysis (French 1992, English translation 2004). Lefebvre’s theory is particularly apposite for a study of modernist rhythm because he shares several concerns – such as nature and culture, the everyday, and the body – with the Introduction 4

modernist writers encountered in this research. He is eloquent on the challenges and attractions of the polymorphous concept of rhythm. As he writes,

Everybody thinks they know what [rhythm] means. In fact, everybody senses it in a manner that falls a long way short of knowledge: rhythm enters into the lived; though that does not mean it enters into the known. There is a long way to go from an observation to a definition, and even further from the grasping of some rhythm (of an air in music, or of respiration, or of the beatings of the heart) to the conception that grasps the simultaneity and intertwinement of several rhythms, their unity in diversity. And yet each one of us is this unity of diverse relations whose aspects are subordinated to action towards the external world, to such a degree that they escape us.2

Lefebvre, in some ways productively considered a late modernist thinker, puts his finger on what might have been so engaging about rhythm for authors like Lawrence, Mansfield and Woolf, who were drawn (if ambivalently) to an organic model of art. Through a huge variety of connections such as those Lefebvre makes between the body and to music, rhythm offers a way of understanding the relationship between ourselves, our world, and art, as natural and inevitable. He also demonstrates here how rhythm can be conceived as an intuitive, or corporeal sense rather than something that can be known in a conscious or intellectual way. This resistance to intellectual apprehension is another feature that can make it both harder to pin down and more compelling. Rhythm is so widely applicable because it is so simple. At the same time, it is complex because it is prone to paradox. As Lefebvre recognises, repetition is the core component of rhythm: ‘No rhythm without repetition in time and space, without reprises, without returns, in short without measure [mesure].’3 But he stresses that absolute repetition is impossible, that each repetition simultaneously creates difference. This paradox results in the two basic ways of conceiving of rhythm: as cyclical, which Lefebvre associates with nature, and as linear, which he links to the social, to human activity. Thus, even the simplest rhythm – say, a single regular drum beat – can be understood as both a matter of potentially limitless exact replication, in

2 Henri Lefebvre, Rhythmanalysis: Space, Time and Everyday Life (New York: Continuum, 2004), 77. Emphasis original. Unless otherwise noted, in quotations from Rhythmanalysis all italicised or bold text and unbracketed ellipses are original. 3 Lefebvre, Rhythmanalysis, 6. Addition is translator’s. Introduction 5

other words, as a cycle, and simultaneously as a linear progression, each iteration differentiated by its position in a series. This example demonstrates the intertwined, co-dependent relationship between these two categories. 4 Rhythm is both fragmentary and unified: it is at once the repetition of separate, distinct events and the thread that connects those iterations. Lefebvre also observes that the apparent natural spontaneity of rhythm also inevitably involves ‘measure, which is to say law, calculated and expected obligation’: the fact of rhythm in itself sets up an expectation of continuation.5 Rhythm is therefore both natural and artificial, or to put it another way, both an independent aspect of reality and a subjective interpretation. The distinction between the natural and artificial is also an issue of some importance to the production of art and, as will be seen, to the problem of mimesis. Lefebvre offers a set of terms that assist in grasping ‘the simultaneity and intertwinement of several rhythms, their unity in diversity’. These draw, as do many earlier modernist writers, on the lived experience of the human body:

Polyrhythmia? It suffices to consult one’s body; there the everyday reveals itself to be a polyrhythmia from the first listening. Eurhythmia? Rhythms unite with one another in the state of health, in normal (which is to say normed!) everydayness; when they are discordant, there is suffering, a pathological state (of which arrhythmia is generally, at the same time, symptom, cause and effect). The discordance of rhythms brings previously eurhythmic organisations towards fatal disorder.6

Polyrhythmia – the coexistence of multiple rhythms – is the most general, neutral category for grouping rhythms. In fictional texts, observing polyrhythmia helps to observe the ways that scenes, atmosphere, or social settings are conceived as both multitudinous and unified.7 The other two terms, eurhythmia – the balance of

4 Lefebvre, Rhythmanalysis, 8. This element of Lefebvre’s theory informs Laura Marcus’ argument on rhythm in modernist films focusing on everyday life in the city. Laura Marcus, ‘“A Hymn to Movement”: The “City Symphony” of the 1920s and 1930s,’ Modernist Cultures 5, no. 1 (2010). 5 Lefebvre, Rhythmanalysis, 8. 6 Lefebvre, Rhythmanalysis, 16. 7 Tobias Boes, ‘A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and the “Individuating Rhythm” of Modernity,’ ELH 75, no. 4 (2008). Boes demonstrates the use of Lefebvre’s concept of polyrhythmia to think through relations between time and place, arguing that Joyce’s The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man ‘moves […] towards a radical polyrhythmicality that achieves for narrative a similar breakthrough as Igor Stravinsky’s contemporaneous Le sacre du printemps did for music. A Portrait, divided as it is into numerous discontinuous sections, constantly displaces its protagonist from one environment (and thus also one rhythm) into another’ (771). Introduction 6

multiple rhythms, and arrhythmia – the imbalance of rhythms, often help to signal moral value or pathological situation (these become particularly apparent in Lawrence’s work). All three terms help to conceive of the world as made up of multiple, interacting rhythms. Lefebvre places a fourth term in opposition to eurhythmia: isorhythmia – the equivalence or identity of rhythms. He insists that the two cannot coexist, implying that the difference lies between the organic or natural and the artistic or artificial:

Under the direction of the conductor’s baton (his magic wand), a rhythm falls into place and extends over all the performers, however many there may be. It is therefore a remarkable isorhythmia. Whereas the living body presents numerous associated rhythms (and we must insist on this crucial point); hence a eurhythmia, when in the state of good health.8

According to Lefebvre, the deliberate amalgamation of rhythm (as in music, and perhaps literature) can be characterised as isorhythmic but not simultaneously as eurhythmic, which specifies the harmony of a multiplicity of rhythms. This might suggest that artistic rhythms must be understood as isorhythmic, or artificial. Yet elsewhere in the text Lefebvre argues that ‘the natural and the rational play only a limited role in the analysis of rhythms, which are simultaneously natural and rational, and neither one nor the other. Is the rhythm of a Chopin waltz natural or artificial?’9 He leaves the possibility open for art to be considered a natural rhythm, a view that resonates with those of the earlier modernist writers examined in this thesis. This paradox again raises the question of whether rhythm itself is a phenomenon to be discovered, or an interpretation of phenomena to be applied by the observer. This question is one that, albeit often implicitly, is often at issue in the non-fiction writings explored in the chapters of this thesis. Lefebvre supplies one more major concept for the investigation of modernist rhythmic mimesis undertaken in this thesis. Like the three authors under study here, Lefebvre sees artistic rhythm as having a connection to the rhythms of life, which he identifies as having an ethical function. This suggests a mimetic conception of artistic rhythm:

8 Lefebvre, Rhythmanalysis, 68. 9 Lefebvre, Rhythmanalysis, 9. Introduction 7

Musical rhythm does not only sublimate the aesthetic and a rule of art: it has an ethical function. In its relation to the body, to time, to the work, it illustrates real (everyday) life. It purifies it in the acceptance of catharsis. Finally, and above all, it brings compensation for the miseries of everydayness, for its deficiencies and failures. Music integrates the functions, the values of Rhythm…10

While Lefebvre focuses on musical rhythm specifically, his point may be taken to apply more broadly to the arts, particularly to literature. The crucial aspect of his account of rhythmic mimesis is that of the similarity, even replication, of the natural and social rhythms of the everyday, which are ‘illustrated’ by those of art. Applied to literature, this approach paves the way for a model of mimesis that is based not on visual verisimilitude, but on a more deeply based sense of the real, one that ‘enters into the lived’ rather than the known. In addition, Lefebvre’s conviction of the practical ethical value of this rhythmic mimesis resonates with Lawrence, Mansfield and Woolf’s shared belief in the deep importance of art, and their insistence that it relate at a profound level to both the everyday and to life itself. By according mimetic qualities to musical rhythm, Lefebvre illuminates the shared grounding of rhythm and mimesis in the paradoxical element of repetition. This thesis focuses on modernist writers who saw the mimetic work of art not as separate from the world it represents, but organically continuous with it.11 Rhythm’s capacity to hold in tension unity and fragmentation, similarity and difference, and the circular-repetitive and the linear-progressive parallels this paradoxical model of mimesis, in which the representation is also a part of that which is represented. Thus, my use of the term ‘mimesis’ to describe these three authors’ desires to represent their world does not only encapsulate their commitments to ‘truth’, the ‘real’ and above all ‘life’. It also helps to describe their formal approaches to this goal, which include attempting to mimic the rhythms of the natural and social world.12

10 Lefebvre, Rhythmanalysis, 66. 11 This attitude parallels assumptions, explored in more detail in Chapter 1, of the continuity between other oppositions such as the intellect and the intuition, individual and world, or the mundane and the numinous. 12 Lawrence, Mansfield and Woolf, along with many of their contemporaries, made links in their non- fictional writing between formal literary rhythm and representation of the lived experience or the rhythmic universe; instances of these are detailed in the chapters that follow. Introduction 8

Rhythm in modernist studies Lawrence, Mansfield and Woolf’s conceptions of the world as rhythmic are grounded in the intellectual context of their time. There is a small but growing body of recent research into the importance of rhythm to modernist literary culture, and this is the primary area of inquiry to which this thesis contributes. Three monographs have begun the work of charting the place of rhythm in modernism: Michael Golston’s Rhythm and Race in Modernist Poetry and Science (2007); William Martin’s Joyce and the Science of Rhythm (2012); and Kirsty Martin’s Modernism and the Rhythms of Sympathy: Vernon Lee, Virginia Woolf, D.H. Lawrence (2013).13 Golston’s book is a groundbreaking work in the field; while other scholars have examined the importance of rhythmic techniques or themes in the work of modernist writers, Golston’s is the first to link these in a detailed historical way with a broader intellectual interest in rhythm. He argues that many of the formal innovations that characterise modernist poetry were spurred by an intense period of scientific study of rhythm between 1890 and 1940. He names this sprawling, interdisciplinary field of research, which encompasses psychology, biology, gymnastics, and geology, among others, ‘Rhythmics’.14 The nature of public thought and feeling about rhythm around this time is made vivid in an 1894 essay by Thaddeus Bolton that Golston identifies as a bellwether for the field of Rhythmics. The essay’s outlook is expansive; as Golston puts it, Bolton describes the entire natural universe as syncopating ‘to mutually informing pulses that interweave the textures of time and space as well as the organisms that inhabit them’. Bolton suggests that these cosmic rhythms affect human consciousness as well as physiology, thus forming the basis of religions, cultures, and societies.15 Rhythmics proliferates in the following decades – by 1913, a ‘Bibliography of Rhythm’ could list over 200 titles.16 Bolton’s is the kind of perspective that informs the rhythmic aesthetics of the three authors under study, as well as those of Golston’s subjects, Ezra Pound and W. B. Yeats, for whom he notes, ‘rhythm bore

13 Laura Marcus’ current project on rhythm in a range of disciplines during the modernist period promises to make another significant contribution to this new field, and shares several interests with this thesis. See Laura Marcus, ‘Rhythm-Studies,’ blog entry on Theatrum Mundi, 5 November, 2013, http://theatrum-mundi.org/music-and-architecture-rhythm-studies/. 14 Michael Golston, Rhythm and Race in Modernist Poetry and Science (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 4. 15 Golston, Rhythm and Race, 14-15. 16 Golston, Rhythm and Race, 3. The bibliography, compiled by Christian Ruckmich, was published in The American Journal of Psychology, as was Bolton’s article. Introduction 9

ideological significance.’17 Golston’s book thus offers a partial model for this thesis – his focus is on modernist poetry, but the literary possibilities associated with this vision of a rhythmic universe had just as much traction with the movement’s prose writers. The other two significant works of new modernist rhythm studies do investigate the prose fiction of the period, though in differing ways. In Joyce and the Science of Rhythm, William Martin considers the relation between Rhythmics and modernist prose. He meticulously investigates the direct influence of late nineteenth- century rhythmic science on James Joyce’s aesthetics and fiction. A common notion of the relationship between the rhythms of the body and literary form is central to William Martin’s area of interest – he concentrates on Joyce’s novels A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) and Ulysses (1922) because, he argues, the ‘emergence of the interior monologue in these texts provides the perfect medium for describing how the periodic movements of the body structure the experience of space and time in a modern, industrial city’.18 Implicit in this argument is an equivalence between the rhythms of the body and those of the text. This points the way to the concept of rhythmic mimesis explored in this thesis. William Martin’s focus on Joyce’s direct engagement with scientific theories of his day is more concentrated than my own approach; I am less concerned with exactly what my authors read or otherwise encountered. Instead, I am more interested in the ways in which rhythm functions in their visions of the world, and how rhythmic mimesis operates in their aesthetics and their short fiction. Kirsty Martin’s approach differs somewhat to those of Golston and William Martin in that it engages less exclusively with the science of the modernist period. Instead, she develops a complex theory of sympathy, not as synonymous with pity or compassion, but as an ‘intuitive communion’ between people, one that is ‘both bodily and intimating transcendence’.19 She sees this idea of sympathy as shared by Lee,

17 Golston, Rhythm and Race, 4. As his title suggests, Golston’s book also examines the relationship between contemporary ideas about rhythm and race, particularly with reference to fascist politics. This lies outside the scope of this project, though its origin in ‘the idea that human physiology has something critical to do with the aesthetic imagination’ is one that recurs repeatedly in the literature on the relationship between ‘real’ and literary rhythms. Golston, Rhythm and Race, 1. 18 William Martin, Joyce and the Science of Rhythm (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 2. 19 Kirsty Martin, Modernism and the Rhythms of Sympathy: Vernon Lee, Virginia Woolf, D.H. Lawrence (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 1, 8. Introduction 10

Woolf and Lawrence, and contends that for these authors, ‘feeling for rhythm’ in another person can be seen as an important manifestation of this ‘bodily and abstract’ form of sympathy.20 This idea that rhythm is a reality that must be intuitively registered is a vital insight, and it raises the problem of perception versus interpretation highlighted above. Its intuitive character means that rhythm can also be used to subconsciously influence people. Kirsty Martin provides this important insight, proposing that rhythm ‘can create sympathy […] rhythm can draw us into synchronicity with each other’.21 Literary rhythm can therefore be put to rhetorical or didactic uses as well as mimetic ones. This troubling notion occurs to all three authors under study here, but is especially noticeable in Lawrence’s writing. Kirsty Martin grounds her conception of the rhythms of sympathy in historical theory of vitalism, since ‘rhythm relates to the patterns taken by energy’.22 She defines vitalism, which was widely influential during this time, as ‘the belief that there was a type of energy diffused in flesh, a type of vital spirit that creates and defines life’.23 Although vitalism lacked serious scientific credibility even then, Kirsty Martin emphasises the way that ‘vitalist tendencies’ interact with scientific ideas in modernist thought.24 Hence, although her work is firmly situated in theories of sympathy and emotion, Modernism and the Rhythms of Sympathy also engages with the scientific discourses of the turn of the twentieth century. William Martin and Kirsty Martin’s books together demonstrate the promise of investigating the importance of rhythm to modernist prose. However, neither considers in depth how ideas about rhythm interacted with ideas about prose in modernist aesthetics. These three critics’ work differs from earlier studies focusing on rhythm (some of which I address later in this introductory chapter) in that they ground their formal observations in a contemporary intellectual context. All three take the scientific context of the period as at least part of their conceptual grounding, and in this way

20 Martin, Rhythms of Sympathy, 27. 21 Martin, Rhythms of Sympathy, 27. 22 Martin, Rhythms of Sympathy, 27. 23 Martin, Rhythms of Sympathy, 24. 24 Martin, Rhythms of Sympathy, 25. This is by now a familiar observation. For example, Craig A. Gordon writes that much of ‘the power and influence of vitalism […] derives precisely from its scientific heritage.’ Craig Allen Gordon, Literary Modernism, Bioscience, and Community in Early 20th Century Britain (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 82. Gordon, in turn, cites Bruce Clarke, Dora Marsden and Early Modernism: Gender, Individualism, Science (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996), 28. Introduction 11

belong to a wider field of studies concerning the relationship between modernism, science and quasi-scientific discourse. Most of this larger group of studies is not concerned solely or explicitly with rhythm, but may nevertheless contribute to our developing understanding of the ways that this concept influenced the literary culture of the period. This branch of scholarship typically undertakes primary research into scientific texts of the period that have been influential in the broader intellectual culture of the day, and for modernism. This kind of task is beyond the scope of the present study. Instead, I draw on this growing literary-historical corpus to illuminate the correspondences between hugely diverse fields, and to portray a broader intellectual trend towards what we might call a ‘rhythmic paradigm’. In such a paradigm, not only is the concept of rhythm invoked as an explicatory figure, but its protean applicability also lends it a quasi-spiritual significance. Modern physics, and particularly thermodynamics, was particularly conducive to the development of this rhythmic paradigm. Rhythmic concepts run throughout the history of the science that became thermodynamics, notably from the development of the ‘wave theory of heat’ that Stephen G. Brush has explained formed the bridge between the caloric theory of heat (which saw heat as a fluid or gas that flowed from hotter to colder bodies) to thermodynamics between 1830–50.25 The wave theory of heat held ‘that heat consists in the vibrations’ of the ether.26 The mid- nineteenth century saw the establishment of modern thermodynamics and the mechanical theory of heat.27 Rhythm persisted through this transition, too, with James Clerk Maxwell’s electromagnetic theory (1866–73) suggesting ‘that heat radiation could be viewed as a special type of electromagnetic waves’.28 So by the early twentieth century, rhythm was embedded in some of the fundamental concepts of physics, or as Brush puts it, ‘explanations of phenomena were increasingly based on motion rather than on matter’.29

25 Stephen G. Brush, ‘The Wave Theory of Heat: A Forgotten Stage in the Transition from the Caloric Theory to Thermodynamics,’ The British Journal for the History of Science 5, no. 2 (1970): 145. 26 Brush, ‘Wave Theory of Heat,’ 147. 27 Brush, ‘Wave Theory of Heat,’ 147. 28 Brush, ‘Wave Theory of Heat,’ 147. 29 Brush, ‘Wave Theory of Heat,’ 148. Introduction 12

The field’s importance to the aesthetic culture of the period is attested to by the wealth of research into this aspect of modernist intellectual history.30 Gillian Beer’s nuanced essay, ‘Wave Theory and the Rise of Literary Modernism’ (1996), on how thermodynamics transformed and revitalised literary realism, demonstrates the significance of this field of science for literary rhythm studies. Waves are, of course, fundamentally rhythmic, and Beer explains that ‘By the late 1920s waves in motion are all the universe consists in’. She also notes that they were considered ‘probably fictitious’ – as likely existing only in the mind. 31 This perspective mirrors the modernist fascination with the relationship between reality and perception. Beer assumes that realism is pertinent to the modernist context and does not address the term as contested. Rather, she attaches it to a new conception of the real. First, she suggests, much as I do, that modernist writing is concerned with the representation of a kind of reality that cannot be apprehended by human senses, but which is attested to by scientific study: ‘Wave theory, acoustics, radiation, all seemed to indicate that our senses are contracted and that we are battered by continuous events beyond their registration: sound waves, air waves, the irreversible transformations of thermodynamic energy.’32 This helped to give realism ‘a new lease of life’ from the end of the nineteenth century, because ‘It is harder to deny an “out there” that is undifferentiated, or irresolute, or composed of “ondes fictives” than it is to challenge substantive phenomena.’33 Beer argues that modernist realism is ‘released from some of the constraints of mimesis’ in its new focus on the intangible and invisible, presumably using the term ‘mimesis’ here to refer to the aims and techniques of verisimilitude.34 However, as I explain in greater detail below, mimesis is a fitting term to describe the renovated approach to representing the real taken by the writers under examination here.

30 Some significant contributions to scholarship on modernism and physics include: N. Katherine Hayles, The Cosmic Web: Scientific Field Models and Literary Strategies in the Twentieth Century (Ithaca NY: Cornell University Press, 1984); Michael Whitworth, Einstein’s Wake: Relativity, Metaphor, and Modernist Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001); Bruce Clarke and Linda Dalrymple Henderson, eds., From Energy to Information: Representation in Science and Technology, Art, and Literature (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002); Anthony Enns and Shelley Trower, eds., Vibratory Modernism (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). 31 Gillian Beer, ‘Wave Theory and the Rise of Literary Modernism,’ in Open Fields: Science in Cultural Encounter, ed. Gillian Beer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 295. 32 Beer, ‘Wave Theory,’ 296. 33 Beer, ‘Wave Theory,’ 315. 34 Beer, ‘Wave Theory,’ 296. Introduction 13

Beer’s essay appears on a crest of investigations into the connection between thermodynamics (once know as wave theory) and modernist culture. The same year, Bruce Clarke’s Dora Marsden and Early Modernism: Gender, Individualism, Science (1996), made the case that Marsden and her London contemporaries employed ‘thermodynamic vocabularies of social energetics’ that ‘mingle with and eventually supplant the idioms of evolutionary vitalism’ in service of political critique.35 Clarke continues this interest in Energy Forms: Allegory and Science in the Era of Classical Thermodynamics (2001).36 Though he is not concerned with rhythm per se, in Energy Forms, Clarke demonstrates how new scientific theories could be co-opted to metaphysical applications. Taking the term ‘energy’ itself as representative of this, he observes how the concept ‘was transferred to physics from its theological and humanistic provenance’, but that these ‘prior layers of meaning did not vanish.’ Instead, ‘emotional and spiritual meanings were mingled with the letter and interpretation of physical concepts.’37 This parallels the renewed significance placed on rhythm that emerges in this thesis. Building on the research of the art historian Linda Dalrymple Henderson, Clarke explores modernist literary manifestations of the notion, held by many at the time, that the same universalised wave phenomena described by Beer was ‘broadly susceptible of metaphysical interpretations’, and that the various waves discovered by science ‘demonstrate at the physical level and so ratify the more rarefied but equally wavy mechanisms of psychic phenomena.’38 The discoveries of turn-of-the-century physics therefore led to a newly integrated conception of both the physical and metaphysical worlds. These discoveries also suggested that the nature of this reality itself was rhythmic. This rhythmic paradigm in modernist culture is not solely associated with physics, however. As is evident in the three rhythm-studies projects discussed above, other intellectual discourses can be seen as equally encouraging to the development of a rhythmic worldview. The variety of fields of study that may have responded or contributed to particular ideas about the nature of reality, and especially the prominence of rhythm to that reality, is potentially immense – I sketch only a few

35 Clarke, Dora Marsden and Early Modernism: Gender, Individualism, Science, 27. 36 Bruce Clarke, Energy Forms: Allegory and Science in the Era of Classical Thermodynamics (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001), 2. 37 Clarke, Energy Forms, 2. 38 Clarke, Energy Forms, 187. Introduction 14

representative examples here. The question of the nature of ‘life itself’ is what drove the period’s enthusiasm for vitalism. As Mary Ann Gillies puts it, the popularity of Henri Bergson’s vitalist philosophy lay quite simply in ‘the ways in which he engaged with the dominant issues of the day’, which she identifies as the ‘debates about the nature of life – both in the biological and the philosophical/spiritual senses.’39 Concern with the rhythms of life is also implicit in a shift to studying the lives of animals and plants in their natural environments following a questioning of the nineteenth century’s taxonomic approach.40 Shifting from static classification to the study of dynamic characteristics such as behaviour and relationships between organisms speaks of a potentially vitalist interest in what animates flora and fauna. This shift also opens up room for consideration of the rhythms of their existence – circadian rhythms, life cycles, and so on. In the form of light waves, the orbits of planets and galaxies, and the exponentially larger scales of time and space, rhythms also underlie the work of astronomy, which started to enjoy broad popularity between the wars. During this period new astronomical discoveries threw the much shorter rhythms of human lives, and even the Earth’s life, into relief.41 A great deal of research has also uncovered the important connections between modernism and those branches of knowledge that focus on human experience; these too are susceptible to rhythmic explanations and significances. As this project will show, the workings and relations of the human body, the processes of the mind and emotions, and the structures and development of communities, societies and cultures all lend themselves to rhythmic interpretation.42 All of these dimensions of the universe appear as rhythms in the short fiction of Lawrence, Mansfield and Woolf.

39 Mary Ann Gillies, Henri Bergson and British Modernism (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1996), 30. The prominence of vitalism and especially of Bergson in modernist culture is well established. See Frederick Burwick and Paul Douglass, eds., The Crisis in Modernism: Bergson and the Vitalist Controversy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992); Mark Antliff, Inventing Bergson: Cultural Politics and the Parisian Avant-Garde (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993); Omri Moses, Out of Character: Modernism, Vitalism, Psychic Life (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2014). I address Bergson’s relevance to this study in more detail in Chapter 1. 40 Christina Alt argues that Woolf, for one, preferred the new approach to studying nature. Christina Alt, Virginia Woolf and the Study of Nature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). See also Bonnie Kime Scott, In the Hollow of the Wave: Virginia Woolf and Modernist Uses of Nature (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2012). 41 Holly Henry, Virginia Woolf and the Discourse of Science: The Aesthetics of Astronomy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). 42 Paul Peppis, Sciences of Modernism: Ethnography, Sexology, and Psychology (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014); Gordon, Literary Modernism, Bioscience, and Community, 1, 3. Introduction 15

Finally, rhythm is a crucial aspect of another pivotal concept for modernist studies: that of the ordinary or the everyday. Indeed, Michael Sayeau argues that ‘the everyday is an especially though not exclusively modern concept’ because ‘periods of heightened intensity or complexity […] elicit a greater awareness of ordinariness, repetition, banality, and the like.’43 Liesl Olson highlights the presence of the ordinary in modernist literature in the patterns of language: ‘the ordinary can be a mode of organizing life and representing it; it is a style, best represented by the routine, and aesthetic forms such as the list, or linguistic repetition, both of which attempt to embody the ordinary, to perform it’.44 This accords with Lefebvre’s argument that the ‘everyday establishes itself’ through ‘its repetitive organisation’, and that such repetition is the fundamental prerequisite of rhythm.45 Yet rhythm is all but taken for granted in studies of the ordinary in modernism, and likewise, the relation between the two is yet to be addressed in rhythm studies. Everyday human lives, both individual and social, are made up of large and small rhythms: from waking and sleeping, eating habits, and routines of work, leisure and relationships, to yearly communal rituals, rites of passage in people’s lives, and national events. These rhythms are understood by Lawrence, Mansfield and Woolf as part of or inherent to ‘life itself’. Thus, rhythms of the ordinary frequently shape the short fiction under study. Throughout this thesis I develop and expound some of the many insights about such rhythms offered by existing studies of the ordinary in modernist literature.46

Mimesis In employing the term ‘mimesis’, I may appear to be going against the grain of many modernist literary studies. It is still a commonplace of the field that modernism as a whole was generally an anti-mimetic movement. Modernism’s rejection of mimetic

43 Michael Sayeau, Against the Event: The Everyday and the Evolution of Modernist Narrative (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 6. 44 Liesl Olson, Modernism and the Ordinary (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 6. Emphasis original. 45 Lefebvre, Rhythmanalysis, 6-7. 46 See also Bryony Randall, Modernism, Daily Time and Everyday Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007); Lorraine Sim, Virginia Woolf: The Patterns of Ordinary Experience (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010); Sara Crangle, Prosaic Desires: Modernist Knowledge, Boredom, Laughter, and Anticipation (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010); Sayeau, Against the Event: The Everyday and the Evolution of Modernist Narrative; Lisi Schoenbach, Pragmatic Modernism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). Introduction 16

aims seems to be a basic assumption in many authoritative introductory texts, such as the classic critical anthology Modernism: 1890-1930 (1976; 1991) edited by Malcolm Bradbury and James McFarlane. In their introduction, Bradbury and McFarlane position modernism’s ‘high aesthetic self-consciousness and non-representationalism’ as ‘the ultimate achievement of artistic possibility in the twentieth century, part of the progress and evolution of the arts towards sophistication and completion.’47 Later critics have offered more nuanced accounts of the place of mimesis in modernist aesthetics, but on the whole present modernism as an anti-mimetic movement, at least for certain central figures. Both Peter Nicholls and David Trotter note that by the end of the nineteenth century, mimesis had become bound up with ideas of democracy, crowds and social conformism. In a 1992 article focusing on Wyndham Lewis, Nicholls suggests that Wyndham Lewis’ modernism was motivated by ‘the problem of mimesis’.48 He argues that Pound, Joyce and Eliot all pursue a mimesis ‘defined in terms of intertextuality rather than by presupposing some relation between text and reality.’49 Based on this, Nicholls concludes that suggesting that their ‘modernism is simply anti-mimetic is to miss the complex roles which ideas of secondariness and imitation play here.’50 On the other hand, for Lewis, modernist literature’s most crucial role is in ‘showing the disastrous aestheticization of the real while in the same movement making of an “excessive” satirical style the instrument by which to drive a wedge between art and life’.51 It is a less prominent concern there, but in Paranoid Modernism (2001) Trotter discerns an ‘obstinate’ repudiation of mimesis among some modernists. Trotter cites T. E. Hulme’s diagnosis in 1914 of a trend of ‘violent revulsion, on the part of the adventurous in spirit, against both mess and mimesis’52 as an example of an ‘animus’-driven abstractionism – in Hulme’s words, ‘a desire for austerity and bareness, a striving towards structure and away from

47 Malcolm Bradbury and James McFarlane, eds., Modernism: 1890-1930 (London: Penguin Books, 1991), 25. Likewise, Christopher Butler points to ‘the growth of abstraction in painting, which involved the destruction of the conventions of 19th-century realism, to make a modernist art which denied any such aims at a subservient, even if virtuosic, transparency to the world.’ Christopher Butler, Modernism: a very short introduction (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 16. 48 Peter Nicholls, ‘Apes and familiars: modernism, mimesis and the work of Wyndham Lewis,’ Textual Practice 6, no. 3 (1992): 434. 49 Nicholls, ‘Apes and Familiars,’ 430. 50 Nicholls, ‘Apes and Familiars,’ 423. 51 Nicholls, ‘Apes and Familiars,’ 434. 52 David Trotter, Paranoid Modernism (Oxford & New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 3. Introduction 17

the messiness and confusion of nature and natural things.’53 Trotter is most interested in the vehemence of this position, and traces it in tandem with the development of psychological theories of paranoia, but it is worth noting Hulme’s rejection not simply of representation per se, but almost of the real world itself. Both of these studies point to a suspicion among certain modernists not merely of the aim of representation, but of the properness of a close connection between art and life, whether for ethical reasons, as Nicholls suggests of Lewis’ project, or ostensibly for purely aesthetic reasons, as Trotter’s Hulme affirms. However, there has also been a consistent thread of criticism that acknowledges the presence of a transformed notion of mimesis in modernist literary culture, rather than its complete elimination. Even Bradbury and McFarlane do qualify their position by describing art’s turn ‘from realism and humanistic representation towards style, technique, and spatial form’ as being ‘in pursuit of a deeper penetration of life.’54 So although it is not their central argument, in Bradbury and McFarlane’s exaltation of modernism’s formal innovations there remains the acknowledgement of the transformation rather than abandonment of mimesis. The issue of the continuing modernist fascination with life noted by Bradbury and McFarlane is a central critical point for this thesis. This perspective also informs more recent critical surveys of modernism. In the Cambridge Introduction to Modernism (2007), Pericles Lewis asserts that ‘by the early 20th century […] some artists began to pursue an art that no longer claimed to represent reality.’55 But Lewis goes on to draw a distinction between the radical abstraction pursued in the visual arts and the kinds of experiments made in literature, which he argues were always underpinned by ‘some implicit ideal of mimesis’.56 Lewis attributes this to the nature of language itself, pointing out that despite an increased focus on the formal qualities of language in modernist writing, ‘words tended, except

53 T. E. Hulme, ‘Modern Art and its Philosophy,’ quoted in Trotter, Paranoid Modernism, 3. 54 Bradbury and McFarlane, Modernism: 1890-1930, 25. 55 Pericles Lewis, The Cambridge Introduction to Modernism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 1. 56 Lewis, Introduction to Modernism, 4. Similarly, Halliwell is circumspect in admitting that ‘Modernism, with its abrupt turn away from existing styles of representation in all the arts, certainly delivered an unprecedentedly sharp jolt to the terms of the disputes which had been conducted around mimesis since the Renaissance’, a statement that leaves room for the development of new styles of representation. Stephen Halliwell, The Aesthetics of Mimesis: Ancient Texts and Modern Problems (Princeton & Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2002), 369. Introduction 18

in extreme cases, to maintain their referential function; in addition to being, they meant.’57 While this is a salient point, in this study I am concerned with a different conception of mimesis, one to which formal experimentation itself is of vital importance. The final chapter of Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature (German 1946; English translation 1953) is a touchstone in this area, though it lacks any definition of ‘mimesis’ or ‘realism’.58 The chapter focuses on Woolf ’s novel To the Lighthouse (1927). Auerbach argues that modernist authors like Woolf ‘prefer the exploitation of random everyday events, contained within a few hours or days, to the complete and chronological representation of a total exterior continuum’, and ‘they hesitate to impose upon life, which is their subject, an order which it does not possess in itself.’59 Thus, he contends, the modern author ‘submits, much more than was done in earlier realistic works, to the random contingency of real phenomena’ rather than forcing the narrative to proceed ‘rationalistically’.60 Auerbach suggests, then, not only that modernist writers are most interested in ‘life’, but also that they attempt to evoke it through their use of structure and choice of material. J. Hillis Miller puts it more directly when he argues that the idea of poetry as mimesis and the belief that ‘the structure of the poem should correspond to the structure of reality’ remained important even to ‘a “sophisticated modern poet” like [Wallace] Stevens.’61 But equally, Miller contends that ‘the notion that poetry is imitation was inextricably involved with the notion that poetry is also unveiling, uncovering, revelation, aletheia.’ That is, ‘reality, things as they are, is initially hidden. Language is what discovers things, that is to say, reveals them as what they are, in their being.’62 Both of these scholars link modernist formal experimentation directly to the aim of the mimesis of a hidden reality, or of an amorphous but heavily

57 Lewis, Introduction to Modernism, 4. 58 Jacob Hovind explains that ‘the absence of any programmatic definition of mimesis, however, is in fact essential to Auerbach’s critical project.’ Jacob Hovind, ‘Figural Interpretation as Modernist Hermeneutics: The Rhetoric of Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis,’ Comparative Literature 64, no. 3 (2012): 260. 59 Eric Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, trans. Willard Trask (New York: Doubleday Anchor Books, 1957), 548. 60 Auerbach, Mimesis, 538. 61 J. Hillis Miller, The Linguistic Moment: From Wordsworth to Stevens (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985), 5. 62 Miller, The Linguistic Moment: From Wordsworth to Stevens, 5-6. Introduction 19

significant conception of ‘life’. This view represents a strand of modernist literary culture – in many ways productively considered romantic – to which Lawrence, Mansfield and Woolf can each be aligned. Lawrence, Mansfield and Woolf are all deeply concerned with capturing this hidden reality: an all-but-intangible register of experience or existence, or as Woolf put it in her diary, ‘life itself going on’ (DVW 3: 229, 28 May 1929). All three authors are drawn, though not without some ambivalence, to the ‘notions of spontaneity and originality which underpinned the ideal of (lyric) expressivity’ that were largely rejected by major modernist figures like Pound, Joyce, Eliot and Lewis.63 Moreover, Lawrence, Mansfield and Woolf share an organicist vision of the relation between life and art: for them, art can in part be conceived as naturally continuous with the world, rather than as an artificial replication of it. Though equivocally adopted by each writer, their sense of continuity between world, artist and artwork has roots in the romantic version of mimesis as personal expression. In M. H. Abrams’ classic explanation, in the early nineteenth century the work of art ceased ‘to be regarded as primarily a reflection of nature, actual or improved; the mirror held up to nature becomes transparent and yields the reader insights into the mind and heart of the poet himself.’64 All three authors featured in this thesis wrestle in different ways with the question of the subject’s role in the making of art, manifested in modernism as the tension between personality and impersonality. Lawrence’s linguistic laboriousness, Mansfield’s strategy of impersonation, and Woolf’s embrace of a mediated form of stream-of-consciousness narrative (among other features) all offer a mimesis that is concerned with the subject. This emphasis on romantic expression adds complexity to my argument that they were also united by a mimetic motivation. However, as Stephen Halliwell argues, it is a mistake to think of mimeticist aesthetics as only one thing. He advocates instead the notion of a family of aesthetic perspectives, which can help to investigate internal structure, art’s potential for personal expression, or its representations of

63 Nicholls, ‘Apes and Familiars,’ 422. 64 M. H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition (New York: Oxford University Press, 1953), 23. Introduction 20

reality, whether actual or imagined.65 The mimesis I investigate in this thesis is primarily what Halliwell calls ‘outward-looking’, focused on the relationship between the work of art and ‘reality’, and leading to the aesthetics of ‘realism (at the strongest, of “truth”)’, the aesthetic values of which ‘will converge on, or even be identified with, “life values” as a whole’.66 However, this is inflected with the romantic attitudes outlined above. The mimesis pursued by Lawrence, Mansfield and Woolf may be understood as a hybrid of objective and subjective mimesis. As Frederick Burwick contends, the shift that Abrams describes above does not mean that ‘once the lamp began to glow the mirror was shattered’; the goals of expression and mimesis need not be considered mutually exclusive.67 This is particularly so when the relation between subject and world is conceived as fluid, or overlapping. Indeed, Gunter Gebauer and Christoph Wulf suggest that mimesis can be seen to resist fundamentally ‘a clear-cut split between subject and object’, such that the ‘individual “assimilates” himself or herself to the world via mimetic processes.’ 68 In this formulation, mimesis is conceived as a cognitive activity that forges a connection between subject and world, so that representation of either always includes the other. In this thesis, I work from a primary definition of literary mimesis as a form of mimicry, rather than simply as reflection or expression. Thinking of mimesis in terms of mimicry emphasises its performativity, the role of the body, and the creative process rather than the mimetic product. This accords with the dynamic concept of rhythm that informs the object and method of the variety of mimesis that interests me here. My definition of mimesis is grounded in modernist intellectual history: various statements made by the three authors on whose work I focus, as well as by

65 Halliwell, Aesthetics of Mimesis, 24. 66 Halliwell’s second approach, on the other hand, conceives of mimesis as the simulation or creation of a world in and of itself, perhaps bearing similarities to our own world, but not evaluated directly in relation to it. His explanation of the aesthetics attached to this conception describes the typically formalist aims of modernism: ‘fictional coherence or congruity’ which leads to ‘a purely formal, sui generis satisfaction.’ Halliwell, Aesthetics of Mimesis, 23. 67 Frederick Burwick, ‘The Romantic Concept of Mimesis: Idem et Alter,’ in Questioning Romanticism, ed. John Beer (Baltimore; London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 179. 68 Gunter Gebauer and Christoph Wulf, Mimesis: Culture, Art, Society, trans. Don Reneau (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 2. Nidesh Lawtoo deals with a similar conception of mimesis as a connecting force, but sees it as a less positive phenomenon. He identifies mimesis instead as ‘a disconcerting form of unconscious communication that troubles the boundaries of individuation […] that haunts “the mind of modernism” as a whole.’ Nidesh Lawtoo, The Phantom of the Ego: Modernism and the Mimetic Unconscious (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2013), 2. Introduction 21

several of their contemporaries. However, it also has a basis in the most foundational of criticism on mimesis, the Poetics, in which Aristotle’s definition of poetry as representation contains mimicry; he observes that ‘representation is natural to human beings from childhood’.69 This attitude recurs in a modernised form in Walter Benjamin’s essay ‘On the Mimetic Faculty’ (1933), which begins with the assertion that ‘Nature creates similarities. One need only think of mimicry.’ Benjamin attributes the ‘highest capacity for producing similarities’ to humans, suggesting that ‘perhaps there is none of [man’s] higher functions in which his mimetic faculty does not play a decisive role.’ Like Aristotle, Benjamin connects literary representation to the physical mimicry of people and things in dance or children’s play, describing it as the result of a ‘powerful compulsion […] to become and behave like something else’. Benjamin’s mimetic faculty is a quasi-biological trait that is susceptible to evolution or historical development.70 As Tyrus Miller suggests, Benjamin’s mimetic faculty ‘comes from the natural being of humans but also constitutes the basis of the human distinction from nature: the ability to appropriate natural forms by means of gesture, language, and concept.’71 Therefore, there is not only a strong tradition of thinking of mimesis as mimicry, but also of considering it as a natural behaviour rather than an artificial product. This perspective allows the work of art to be understood as both separate to and arising organically from reality. The concept of rhythmic mimesis offers a dynamic conduit between world, artist and art work: in the fiction and aesthetics of Lawrence, Mansfield, and Woolf, rhythm is an object of representation, and is also the method for its own representation. The stuff of ‘life itself’ – more fugitive aspects of experience like emotion and thought; interpersonal relationships; the kind of unstable relations to objects, place and scene or situation that we might summarise as atmosphere; and the underlying structure of the universe, apprehended by intuition – is often conceived as rhythmic. The psychic effects on the individual of these experiences are also frequently registered as rhythmic, which resonates with Gebauer and Wulf’s idea that

69 Aristotle, Poetics, trans. Richard Janko (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1987), 4. 70 Walter Benjamin, ‘On the Mimetic Faculty,’ in Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings, ed. Peter Demetz (New York: Schocken Books, 1978), 333. 71 Tyrus Miller, ‘Mimesis, Mimicry, and Critical Theory in Exile: Walter Benjamin’s Approach to the Collège de Sociologie,’ in Borders, exiles, diasporas, ed. Elazar Barkan and Marie-Denise Shelton (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 125. Introduction 22

mimesis ‘assimilates’ the individual with the world. Put another way, the human is understood as connected to their universe in part through the rhythmic resonances between their body, mind and spirit and the rhythms of the cosmos. Thus, in the work of the three authors under study, the expression of subjective experience always implies response to the world as well. The intertwined employment of rhythmic themes and linguistic structures in their short fiction is thought to continue this rhythmic relation. Existing theories of mimesis provide a basis for thinking of modernist rhythmic forms as mimetic, particularly of the fugitive kinds of experience sketched above. Benjamin argues that the human mimetic faculty is in modern times especially geared towards perceiving and creating ‘nonsensuous similarity’. He explains this concept with reference to a mythical ancient past when ‘the processes considered imitable included those in the sky. In dance, on other cultic occasions, such imitation could be produced, such similarity manipulated.’72 Here, Benjamin proposes that humans are able to mimic the operations of the cosmos – so that nonsensuous similarity may refer to abstract or intuited dimensions of experience. For Benjamin, what Miller refers to as ‘the secularized locations of the sacred – the mimetic faculty – within the modern’ are to be found in language,73 which

may be seen as the highest level of mimetic behaviour and the most complete archive of nonsensuous similarity: a medium into which the earlier powers of mimetic production and comprehension have passed without residue, to the point where they have liquidated those of magic.74

But the mimetic aspect of language is found in form, rather than semiotic content: ‘the coherence of words or sentences is the bearer through which, like a flash, similarity appears.’75 The emphasis here on the immediacy and transience of this mimesis (what he calls here similarity) recalls the emphasis on intuitive knowledge or understanding that, as will be seen throughout the thesis, and in the next chapter in particular, is especially prominent in the aesthetics of the romantic modernists under study here. Benjamin’s argument demonstrates how the modernist attention to

72 Benjamin, ‘On the Mimetic Faculty,’ 334. 73 Miller, ‘Mimesis, Mimicry, and Critical Theory in Exile: Walter Benjamin’s Approach to the Collège de Sociologie,’ 126. 74 Benjamin, ‘On the Mimetic Faculty,’ 336. 75 Benjamin, ‘On the Mimetic Faculty,’ 335. Introduction 23

literary form, of which rhythm is a crucial component, can be understood as motivated by a desire to mimic ‘life itself’. This concept of language’s formal capacity for the mimesis of intangible registers of reality also appears in places throughout Theodor W. Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory (1970). While Adorno’s attitude to mimesis is complex and a detailed analysis is beyond my scope here, it is worthwhile briefly noting some resonances in his theory with the conception of mimesis that I propose. Like Benjamin, Adorno emphasises the distinction of mimesis from conceptual concerns in art (such as plot or theme), defining the term as ‘the non-conceptual affinity of a subjective creation with its objective and unposited other’.76 He too emphasises the anthropological character of mimesis, its origin as mimicry, in a conception that leaves the artist’s role as a kind of medium for mimetic transference: in his model, the artist’s ‘ability to mimic […] sets free in him the expressed substance’.77 This is analogous to my idea of rhythmic art echoing the subject’s experience of rhythm. Adorno also joins Benjamin and, I argue, the three authors studied in this thesis, in positing the formal aspects of language as the primary conduit for mimesis. He argues that:

The efforts of modern prose writers like Joyce, who set discursive language aside or, to say the least, subordinated it to the idea of form to the point where the linguistic construction becomes undecipherable, might then be explained as attempts to move from communicative to mimetic language.78

While each writer takes a distinctive approach to the task, Lawrence, Mansfield and Woolf can all, like Joyce, be seen to experiment with the mimetic possibilities of literary form in terms of syntax and structure. Adorno argues that ‘thoroughly formed works’ should be seen not as ‘formalistic’, but as ‘realistic in the sense that they represent realizations of, among other things, truth content: they actualize or realize their spiritual essence instead of just denoting it.’79 Adorno’s references to ‘truth content’ and ‘spiritual essence’ can, I think, be roughly equated to the hidden or deeper reality pursued by the three key authors to this study; his insistence that ‘thoroughly formed’ works ‘actualize or realize’ this aspect of their mimetic objects

76 Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory (London; Boston: Routledge, 1984), 80. 77 Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 164. 78 Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 164. 79 Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 188. Introduction 24

also resonates with the concept of mimicry and identification discussed above. Adorno’s recourse to ‘truth content’ leads to the issue of the ethical dimension of mimesis, the history of which is as old as the concept. Mimesis has always been connected to ethical aims. Aristotle declares that ‘everyone delights in representations’, because ‘it comes about that they learn as they observe, and infer what each thing is’, and ‘learning is most pleasant’.80 Mimesis is thus established as a process or instrument for understanding the world. According to Abrams, with differing degrees and interpretations, this has been the case throughout the concept’s history. He observes that for Plato, ‘the question of art can never be separated from questions of truth, justice, and virtue.’ In the Defence of Poesy (1595), Philip Sidney suggested that ‘poets imitate not “what is, hath been, or shall be,” but only “what may be, and should be,” so that the very objects of imitation become such as to guarantee the moral purpose’, while for the romantics of the early nineteenth century, ‘The most important function of poetry is, by its pleasurable resources, to foster and subtilize the sensibility, emotions, and sympathies of the reader.’81 More recently, Gebauer and Wulf also regard their expanded understanding of mimesis as a cognitive activity, not just an aesthetic feature as having ethical value. They suggest that mimesis ‘makes it possible for individuals to step out of themselves, to draw the outer world into their inner world’.82 They reconceptualise mimesis as an act of imaginative empathy, arguing that it allows ‘an otherwise unobtainable proximity to objects and is thus a necessary condition of understanding.’83 This well- established association of mimesis with learning and understanding is prominent in many modernist authors’ writings. As will be seen in the chapters that follow, Lawrence, Mansfield and Woolf all express, if in differing terms, an ethical motivation for their writing. A more-or-less nebulous spiritual significance is attached to their sense of the universe as rhythmic, and all three authors share a sense that there is something valuable in the mimesis of this reality. This aspect is most prominent in Lawrence’s work – as Paul Poplawski attests, Lawrence ‘wrote with the express intention of influencing and affecting

80 Aristotle, Poetics, 4. 81 Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp, 9, 15, 103. 82 Gebauer and Wulf, Mimesis: Culture, Art, Society, 2. 83 Gebauer and Wulf, Mimesis: Culture, Art, Society, 2-3. Introduction 25

people, and of changing them – of changing their beliefs and desires, their attitudes and behaviour.’84 Hence, textual rhythm in these authors’ fiction (and sometimes non-fiction) sometimes performs a rhetorical or even, in Lawrence’s case, didactic function.

The modernist short story In this thesis, I suggest that the short story was considered a proper vehicle for the rhythmic mimesis pursued by Lawrence, Mansfield and Woolf. One reason for this is that the short story form highlights the ethical and social role of storytelling itself. The short story can be seen as having its origins in myth and folktales; it belongs to the ancient, universal human tradition of oral storytelling.85 Benjamin defines the story as both mimetic and as offering learning or understanding. Storytelling, he says, is ‘the ability to exchange experiences’,86 while the story’s crucial characteristic is that it ‘contains, openly or covertly, something useful’, and a storyteller is one who ‘has counsel’.87 The modernist short story can be conceived as a modern iteration of this storytelling tradition. Although Benjamin is somewhat dismissive of the short story, saying that it ‘has removed itself from oral tradition and no longer permits that slow piling one on top of the other of thin, transparent layers’ through multiple retellings, he does designate it as a modern, abbreviated form of storytelling.88 Furthermore, the rhythmic mimesis pursued by Lawrence, Mansfield and Woolf reinstates the orality and embodied performance of Benjamin’s storyteller. Rhythm’s mimetic and sympathetic capacities also parallel his idea that storytelling effects an actual transfer of experience itself.89 More than simply a recounting of narrative, the storyteller passes on experience itself, so that the act of storytelling is reimagined as an act of mimetic transference. This conception of the form runs counter to common arguments that the short story is more concerned with aesthetic effects than with content. Clare Hanson, for

84 Paul Poplawski, Promptings of Desire: Creativity and the Religious Impulse in the Works of D. H. Lawrence (Westport & London: Greenwood Press, 1993), xiii. 85 Charles E. May, The Short Story: The Reality of Artifice, Genres in Context (New York; London: Routledge, 2002), 1-2. 86 Walter Benjamin, ‘The Storyteller: Reflections on the Works of Nikolai Leskov,’ in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt (London: Pimlico, 1999), 83. 87 Benjamin, ‘The Storyteller,’ 86. 88 Benjamin, ‘The Storyteller,’ 92. 89 Benjamin, ‘The Storyteller,’ 87. Introduction 26

instance, contends that the short story is oriented ‘towards the power words hold, or release and create, over and above their mimetic or explicatory function.’90 Modernist short-story writers were clearly concerned with the formal aspects and capacities of language, but like Benjamin and Adorno, I suggest that this concern can be linked to a commitment to mimesis of a more essential kind of reality. The short story is also often theorised as inherently interested in the kind of personal expression and subjectivity discussed in the previous section. This can be understood as a type of mimesis. As Mary Rohrberger and Dan E. Burns argue, the short story ‘functions as a mirror, but what is reflected is not an image of waking reality, but an image of the human mind’.91 Certainly, the short fiction of the three authors considered here displays an interest in the role of perception and the nature of the subject, without omitting external reality. Benjamin vividly limns this conception of the relation of world, artist, and artwork: the process of storytelling ‘sinks the thing into the life of the storyteller, in order to bring it out of him again. Thus traces of the storyteller cling to the story the way the handprints of the potter cling to the clay vessel.’92 This attitude has affinities with romantic aesthetics; indeed, Charles E. May describes the modernist short story as a form ‘that combined the specific detail of realism with the poetic lyricism of romanticism’. 93 Thus, the modernist short story, in being concerned with the mimesis of fugitive registers of experience, may be linked to the aims of poetry. The idea that the short story of this period is characterised by a heightened poeticity or lyricism is frequently affirmed in the criticism. In 1941, H. E. Bates credited Mansfield, along with A. E. Coppard, with first introducing poetry into the English short story.94 In a much-cited article written over fifty years later, Eileen Baldeshwiler also associates modernist stories (including those of Mansfield,

90 Clare Hanson, ‘“Things Out Of Words”: Towards a Poetics of Short Fiction,’ in Re-reading the Short Story, ed. Clare Hanson (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1989), 24. 91 Mary Rohrberger and Dan E. Burns, ‘Short Fiction and the Numinous Realm: Another Attempt at Definition,’ Modern Fiction Studies 28 (1982): 12. 92 Benjamin, ‘The Storyteller,’ 91. I return to this essay below. 93 May, The Short Story: The Reality of Artifice, 16. 94 H. E. Bates, The Modern Short Story: A Critical Survey (Boston: The Writer, Inc. Publishers, 1941), 13-14, 124. Bates was not the first to see the modernist short story this way, however. Elizabeth Bowen, for one, had already proposed this. See Chapter 1 for more detail. Introduction 27

Lawrence and Woolf) with what she calls the ‘lyric’ short story.95 Again, Kerry McSweeney characterises Chekhov’s and Raymond Carver’s short fiction alike as having ‘more in common with lyric poems than with novels’ because they aim for compressed language and emotion and the capture of the moment.96 The usual explanation of the effect of a poetic or lyrical quality in the short story is that it allows for heightened emotional quality, or an enhancement of pure aesthetic pleasure. Yet as I show throughout this thesis, particularly in the first chapter, there are good reasons for seeing explorations of the modernist short story as sharing with free verse and the prose poem an interest in the particular mimetic possibilities of mixing poetry and prose. That is, many at the time saw this kind of hybridity as allowing the closer representation of the higher reality sought by authors like Lawrence, Mansfield and Woolf. This makes the modernist short story a pivotal object of study for the investigation of rhythmic mimesis in modernist literature. And yet, the short story has frequently been all-but omitted from the story of literary modernism. As Nadine Gordimer complained in 1968, the short story is generally regarded ‘as merely a minor art form […] When Chekhov crops up, it is as a playwright, and Katherine Mansfield is a period personality from the Lady Chatterley set.’97 This is exemplified by its near absence in classic surveys like Bradbury and McFarlane’s, in which influential short story writers or collections like Mansfield or Joyce’s Dubliners are mentioned only in passing.98 More recently, Pericles Lewis upholds this trend, and is particularly perfunctory in simply noting that ‘although the modernists also wrote short stories and novellas, the main modernist form of prose fiction is the novel’.99 Modernist studies is also typical of the broader discipline of English literary studies in routinely dismissing short fiction as experimental writing exercises in preparation for the production of longer masterpieces. The form’s role in

95 Eileen Baldeshwiler, ‘The Lyric Short Story: The Sketch of a History,’ in The New Short Story Theories, ed. Charles E May (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1994), 231. 96 Kerry McSweeney, The Realist Short Story of the Powerful Glimpse: Chekhov to Carver (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2007), 2-3. Similarly, the short story has lately also been considered, as Jochen Achilles and Ina Bergmann put it, ‘the liminal genre par excellence’. Jochen Achilles and Ina Bergmann, eds., Liminality and the Short Story: Boundary Crossings in American, Canadian, and British Writing, Routledge Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Literature (New York & Abingdon: Routledge, 2015), 4. 97 Nadine Gordimer, ‘South Africa,’ The Kenyon Review 30, no. 4 (1968): 457. 98 Bradbury and McFarlane, Modernism: 1890-1930, 177, 87, 424. 99 Lewis, Introduction to Modernism, 156. Introduction 28

this process cannot be discounted, but such a narrowly teleological attitude overlooks the unique kinds of innovation that may be achieved in these works. Indeed, despite retaining its enduringly marginal status in the criticism, the majority of scholars who concentrate on the modernist short story consider it to be the ultimate prose form of the modernist movement as a whole. This is because its formal qualities – its embrace of the economical, fragmentary, elliptical, episodic, and condensed – align with contemporary ideas in the early twentieth century about the nature of modernity, knowledge or consciousness and literature’s role of responding to them. Critical statements to this effect are numerous. Adrian Hunter, for example, describes the short story as ‘calibrated to the conditions and experience of modernity itself’, while Emma Liggins, Andrew Maunder and Ruth Robbins see the short story’s formal qualities as a generation’s reaction to the ‘totalising mode of representation’ that is the Victorian three-volume novel.100 For Dominic Head, the modernist short story, ‘far from being “small and lesser” in any technical sense, actually exemplifies the strategies of modernist fiction’. 101 Head also challenges the dominance in modernist short story criticism of Edgar Allan Poe’s famous ‘single effect’ principle, which emphasises the unifying effects of typical short story features. He instead underlines the dialogic effects of the fragmentary, episodic qualities that are particularly in evidence in the modernist short story, and argues that assimilating them into a unity principle defeats the ‘disunifying’ purposes of these techniques.102 The authors I focus on in this thesis all give voice to that well known modernist sense of rupture, fragmentation and disjointedness brought on by the War, media, faster transport and increasing urbanisation. Yet in each of them there remains a core belief in a unifying force behind it all. This necessitates reading their short fiction in such a way as to hold in tension their dedication to evoking that sense of unity as well as the more disruptive aspects of modern life. The short story’s relevance to modernism also has a more material grounding. Several critics have connected the short story to the growth in periodical publishing

100 Adrian Hunter, The Cambridge Introduction to the Short Story in English (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 46; Emma Liggins, Andrew Maunder, and Ruth Robbins, The British Short Story (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 160. 101 Dominic Head, The Modernist Short Story: A Study in Theory and Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 6. 102 Head, Modernist Short Story, 9-10. Introduction 29

from the 1890s. Including short fiction in these publications became increasingly standard, thus creating a public interest in and hence market for the form. Peter Keating attributes its rise in favour to the commercial advantages of publishing short fiction in these venues. Stories were cheaper to commission and easier to handle than serialised novels, and also suited a still-familiar belief among editors that periodical readers’ attention spans were too short for longer fiction.103 Mary Ann Gillies and Aurelea Mahood combine the aesthetic and materialist positions in their contention that the short story ‘played an important role in the rise of modernism’, while like Keating, crediting the Yellow Book especially with supporting emerging short-story writers and additionally highlighting the particular opportunities this afforded women writers of the time.104 Some of the most recent research into the modernist short story follows this direction, focusing on various aspects of the context of early twentieth-century modernity, such as women’s changing roles and status, the form’s relation to the First World War, and its status as a form positioned between high art and popular culture.105 In so doing, this scholarship contributes to the enterprise of ‘new Modernist studies’ in expanding the scope of the field beyond the major works of a few central figures like Eliot, Pound and Joyce.106 This thesis also contributes to this reshaping of our understanding of modernism. It does this by asserting the historical prominence of the ideal of rhythmic mimesis, by foregrounding the romanticist stream in modernist culture, and by highlighting the significance of the short-story form.

Rhythm and mimesis in Lawrence, Mansfield and Woolf While Lawrence, Mansfield and Woolf do not form an organised movement around the pursuit of rhythmic mimesis, close attention to their critical and fictional writing reveals a shared interest in the mimetic possibilities of rhythm. The three authors also

103 Peter Keating, The Haunted Study: A Social History of the English Novel, 1875-1914 (London: Fontana, 1991), 39-41. 104 Mary Ann Gillies and Aurelea Mahood, Modernist Literature: An Introduction (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007), 25-26. 105 Claire Drewery, Modernist Short Fiction by Women: The Liminal Katherine Mansfield, Dorothy Richardson, May Sinclair and Virginia Woolf (Abingdon: Ashgate, 2011); Ann-Marie Einhaus, The Short Story and the First World War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013); Kate Krueger, British Women Writers and the Short Story, 1850-1930: Reclaiming Social Space (Basingstoke & New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014). 106 Douglas Mao and Rebecca L. Walkowitz, ‘The New Modernist Studies,’ PMLA 123, no. 3 (2008): 737. Introduction 30

shared personal and professional connections with one another, and each acknowledged their artistic affinities (though this is balanced by mutual dismissal or critique). Mansfield forms the nexus of this network – she had intense and at times strained friendships with both Lawrence and Woolf. Mansfield and her husband John Middleton Murry met Lawrence and his wife Frieda in 1912 through Murry’s Rhythm magazine (which I discuss in more detail in Chapter 1). The two couples even attempted a semi-communal living arrangement in the Cornish countryside for a short but intense period in 1916, and their relationship dynamic alternated between animosity and devotion for the rest of their lives. The friendship between Mansfield and Woolf – who met in early 1917 through mutual friends – was a combination of supportive and competitive, founded on their shared experience as women writers with similar goals. Mansfield’s ‘Prelude’ was the second item to be published on the Woolfs’ Hogarth Press. While Lawrence and Woolf did not have a significant personal connection, they are linked both socially and professionally through Mansfield and Murry, as well as a number mutual friends such as Lady Ottoline Morrell, E. M. Forster, Bertrand Russell, and S. S. Kotelianksy, among others. In bringing together these three authors, this thesis adds to the diverse and growing body of criticism that features a pairing or all three of these authors. This corpus includes network studies considering the extent to which the literary and critical output of Lawrence, Mansfield and Woolf developed in response to their peers.107 As the more prominent of the three, Lawrence and Woolf especially are also compared in projects that read them together from many other perspectives, such as their philosophical or aesthetic affinities,108 their attitudes to modernity and political and social issues,109 their interests in the body,110 and their contributions to the

107 Notably, Angela Smith, Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf: A Public of Two (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999); Sydney Janet Kaplan, Circulating Genius: John Middleton Murry, Katherine Mansfield and D. H. Lawrence (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010). 108 Patrick J. Whiteley, Knowledge and Experimental Realism in Conrad, Lawrence, and Woolf (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univeristy Press, 1987); Paul Sheehan, Modernism, Narrative and Humanism (Cambridge & New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002); Beatrice Monaco, Machinic Modernism: the Deleuzian Literary Machines of Woolf, Lawrence and Joyce (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008). 109 Helen Wussow, The Nightmare of History: The Fictions of Virginia Woolf and D. H. Lawrence (Bethlehem, PA: Lehigh University Press, 1998); Youngjoo Son, Here and Now: The Politics of Social Space in D. H. Lawrence and Virginia Woolf (New York & London: Routledge, 2006); Carey Snyder, ‘Katherine Mansfield, D. H. Lawrence, and Imperialist Nostalgia,’ in Modernism and Nostalgia: Bodies, Locations, Aesthetics, ed. Tammy Clewell (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). Introduction 31

development of the modernist novel and narrative as well as their respective experiments in short fiction. 111 Evidently there is much to recommend the comparison of these three writers, even as they remain distinctive figures in modernist cultural and critical landscapes. In this thesis, I suggest that Lawrence, Mansfield and Woolf are united most fundamentally as thinkers and writers by a profound feeling for ‘life itself’, and an equally earnest desire to pay homage to, evoke and represent that phenomenon in their fiction. Moreover, I argue that they share a vision of ‘life itself’ as fundamentally rhythmic, and that they each pursue the ambition of echoing the rhythms of life mimetically in their writing. Existing scholarship on each author, especially on Lawrence and Woolf, points to both the centrality of rhythm to their visions, and also to their shared concern with evoking an ultimate kind of reality. I turn now to a review of the literatures that concern each author respectively, focusing on their positions in modernist criticism as a whole, relevant topoi in the scholarship on each author, especially relating to rhythm or mimesis in particular, and their status as writers of the modernist short story. D. H. Lawrence (1885-1930) has long been considered a complex and controversial writer, and one who has inspired both near-rapturous praise and virulent condemnation for both his style and ideas. Lawrence occupies a unique position in modernist culture: thanks to early championing by F. R. Leavis, he has been well established as a major modernist author since the middle of the twentieth century.112 Yet he is also a peripheral figure. Lawrence’s idiosyncratic politics and aesthetics, as well as his mostly itinerant life, leave him outside core British modernist

110 Patricia Moran, Word of Mouth: Body Language in Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1996); James J. Miracky, ‘Regen(d)erating the Modernist Novel: Literary Realism vs. the Language of the Body in D. H. Lawrence and Virginia Woolf,’ D.H. Lawrence Review 3 (2002); Gordon, Literary Modernism, Bioscience, and Community. 111 K. K. Sharma, Modern Fictional Theorists: Virginia Woolf and D. H. Lawrence (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1982); Mark Wollaeger, ‘Richardson, Woolf, Lawrence: The Modernist Novel’s Experiments with Narrative,’ in The Cambridge History of the English Novel, ed. Robert L. Caserio and Clement Hawes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012); Nora Lynne Bicki, ‘Modernist Discourses: Rereading the Short Fiction of Virginia Woolf, D. H. Lawrence, James Joyce and Katherine Mansfield’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, University of Illinois, 1993); Drewery, Modernist Short Fiction by Women; Krueger, British Women Writers and the Short Story. 112 Leavis’ interest in Lawrence’s work and philosophies was of longstanding: F. R. Leavis, D. H. Lawrence, Novelist (London: Chatto & Windus, 1955); F. R. Leavis, ‘“Lawrence Scholarship” and Lawrence,’ Sewanee Review 71, no. 1 (1963); F. R. Leavis, Thought, words, and creativity: Art and Thought in D. H. Lawrence (London: Chatto & Windus, 1976). Introduction 32

circles – whether the ‘Men of 1914’ or Bloomsbury groups – although he associated with various members of these groups during his career. In an era when many called for impersonality, formal restraint and the autotelic status of art, Lawrence’s ‘passionate moral purpose’, his convention-defying subject matter, and his often contentious attitudes to various literary and social issues, sometimes put him at odds with many of his contemporaries.113 An immensely prolific writer, Lawrence devoted a prodigious amount of energy to disseminating his ideas. By the time of his early death, he had published ten novels; ten volumes of shorter fiction, including both short-story collections and longer stories or novellas; nine volumes of poetry; and seven of non-fiction prose writing. More material continued to be published and republished after he died. But his large, diverse and challenging output is a good part of the reason that Lawrence studies is a correspondingly varied and extensive field. Lawrence is integral to this thesis because of his intense and forthright interest in the representation of ‘life itself’. Far more than either Mansfield or Woolf, Lawrence tried to articulate a personal philosophy in which a rhythmic paradigm underscores his thinking about the body, relationships, and the material universe. My work on Lawrence builds on those studies that investigate his interest in the relation between life and art. Lawrence’s intertwining metaphysical and aesthetic philosophies have been consistently fascinating for critics, especially their largely organicist or vitalist character.114 Anne Fernihough provides a lucid account of the complexities and contradictions of Lawrence’s beliefs, observing that Lawrence’s art criticism most fundamentally ‘concerns itself with the stance of the work of art towards reality itself’, a statement that indicates the fittingness of investigating Lawrence’s mimesis.115 Fernihough highlights how paradoxical this stance is in Lawrence’s thinking in her

113 Tony Pinkney describes him as ‘the most provocative of modernist authors’ and also as a ‘counter- modernist and meta-modernist’, Tony Pinkney, D. H. Lawrence, Harvester New Readings (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1990), 1-3. See also Debra Journet, ‘D. H. Lawrence’s Criticism of Modern Literature,’ D.H. Lawrence Review 17 (Spring 1984); Peter Preston and Peter Hoare, D. H. Lawrence in the Modern World (Basingstoke & London: Macmillan Press, 1989), vii; Jennifer Spitzer, ‘On Not Reading Freud: Amateurism, Expertise, and the “Pristine Unconscious” in D. H. Lawrence,’ Modernism/Modernity 21, no. 1 (2014). 114 E. W. Tedlock Jr., D. H. Lawrence, Artist and Rebel: A Study of Lawrence’s Fiction (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1963); Donald Gutierrez, ‘Vitalism in D. H. Lawrence’s Theory of Fiction,’ Essays in Arts and Sciences 16 (1987); T. Wientzen, ‘Automatic Modernism: D. H. Lawrence, Vitalism, and the Political Body,’ Genre: Forms of Discourse and Culture 46, no. 1 (2013). 115 Anne Fernihough, D. H. Lawrence: Aesthetics and Ideology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 4. Introduction 33

notion of his aesthetic of a ‘fractured organic’. Her term highlights his ambivalence about the relation of complete continuity between world and work usually associated with the ideal of the organic.116 Examining the connection between Lawrence’s organicist aesthetics and his personal religious beliefs helps to understand the combination of mimetic and didactic purposes to which Lawrence puts rhythm in his writing. As Paul Poplawski explains, after rejecting the Congregationalist Christianity of his childhood, ‘Lawrence starts to move toward a more “pagan” cosmic view’ that develops into a conception of a ‘Cosmic God’, which Lawrence comes to see as ‘a general structuring principle or pattern that operates throughout the universe, but manifests itself only through – that is, as the determinant of – the structure and purpose of individual living things.’117 I propose that the concept of rhythm – as a model of this ‘structuring principle or pattern’ that is thought of as uniquely connected to life and the natural world – helps to bring this important aspect of Lawrence’s metaphysical ideas into relation with his aesthetics. Poplawski’s observation that Lawrence ‘wrote with the express intention of influencing and affecting people, and of changing them’ is plainly evident in his work, and I borrow from Kirsty Martin’s conception of rhythmic sympathy in arguing that Lawrence uses rhythm throughout his oeuvre to achieve this goal.118 Lawrence wanted to change people by helping them to connect with this ‘Cosmic God’; that is, with the rhythm of the universe. Luke Ferretter highlights the importance of a feeling of connection to Lawrence’s definition of religion: ‘A religious experience is one of “linking up” or “making a new connection”, which brings the

116 Fernihough, D. H. Lawrence: Aesthetics and Ideology, 10. Another merit of Fernihough’s book is that she is direct and measured in her acknowledgement of the ethical problems with Lawrence’s organicist attitudes, noting Bertrand Russell’s famous remark that Lawrence’s views ‘led straight to Auschwitz’, which along with his manifest, if ambivalent, misogyny has led to much vilification of his work over the years. (Russell, quoted in Fernihough, D. H. Lawrence: Aesthetics and Ideology, 6. An early and still probably the best-known treatment of Lawrence’s misogyny is in Kate Millett, Sexual Politics (London: Hart-Davis, 1971), 237-93.) Fernihough suggests that while the ‘organic metaphor’ has indisputably unpleasant applications and implications in Lawrence’s work and in general (that is, a propensity for racism), she sees it as partially redeemed by its capacity to ‘lead to a retrieval of the material world’. Fernihough, D. H. Lawrence: Aesthetics and Ideology, 9. 117 Poplawski, Promptings of Desire, 49. See also Luke Ferretter, The Glyph and the Gramophone: D. H. Lawrence’s Religion (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), 6. 118 Poplawski, Promptings of Desire, xiii. Introduction 34

person fully to life.’119 This exposes the vital importance of rhythm in his writing: if the cosmos is structured according to a rhythmic principle, literary rhythm can bring the individual into this state of connection. There is also a scientistic rhetoric of reality at play in Lawrence’s thinking. Ferretter stresses a concept of deep reality in Lawrence’s religion, arguing that what is ‘sacred to Lawrence are things in which the heart of reality itself, that which is most real, is revealed and experienced in the ordinary’. 120 Though Lawrence is the most overtly religious of the three, this conception of an intimate alignment of the sacred with the real, which is always deeply embedded in the everyday, is also shared by Mansfield and Woolf. Investigations of rhythm in Lawrence’s fiction can be seen to grow out of these interests in his metaphysics or religious attitudes. Existing studies establish the way that rhythm bridges the author’s metaphysics and aesthetics, with a particular interest in psychology and relationships. For instance, in his 1968 doctoral thesis, ‘Rhythm in D. H. Lawrence’s Short Stories’, Thomas H. McCabe considers how ‘Lawrence’s characteristic stories are formally organized in terms of rhythm and that this rhythm is central to the meaning of his work.’121 McCabe is somewhat narrowly concerned with Lawrence’s representation of relationships between his characters as consisting in a rhythmic polar alternation of attraction and repulsion; he even defines as non- rhythmic those stories that do not display this precise dynamic. While this is certainly a crucial manifestation of Lawrence’s interest in rhythm, my analysis of his short fiction demonstrates the complex and diverse conceptions and applications of rhythm in this corpus, thus moving beyond McCabe’s definition. Like McCabe, Peter Balbert focuses on Lawrence’s moralistic use of rhythm to evoke character development, what Lawrence called an individual’s ‘passionate struggle into conscious being’.122 Poplawski shares this opinion, proposing that this rhythmic representation of human spiritual evolution also ‘subserves [Lawrence’s] metaphysics of creativity’;123 that is, it conveys his vision of an ‘organic communal development

119 Ferretter, The Glyph and the Gramophone, 3. Ferretter cites from Lawrence’s last book, Apocalypse (1929–30). 120 Ferretter, The Glyph and the Gramophone, 6. 121 Thomas H. McCabe, ‘Rhythm in D. H. Lawrence’s Short Stories’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, University of Wisconsin, 1968), 1. 122 Peter Balbert, D. H. Lawrence and the Psychology of Rhythm (The Hague: Mouton, 1974), 16. 123 Poplawski, Promptings of Desire, 104. Introduction 35

and progress’ across generations.124 Together with Kirsty Martin’s research, discussed above, these three studies provide insight into Lawrence’s religious feeling for rhythm and literature. Yet although its operation is implicit in all of them, none directly address the question of mimesis in Lawrence’s fiction, and most do not consider the peculiar manifestations of rhythm in the short stories. As a form that is more closely linked to the fable traditions, Lawrence’s short fiction provides an appropriate object for investigating his didactic ambitions for rhythmic mimesis. Thematically specialised studies do not in general consider Lawrence’s short fiction at length. McCabe’s project is therefore unique in that it unites an interest in rhythm with a focus on the short fiction, but he does not include discussion of the genre he considers itself. Despite the hugely diverse allocation of Lawrence’s creative energies (he also took up painting in his later years), and in particular his extensive experimentation with shorter fiction, he remains best known as a novelist, and most studies focus on this part of his oeuvre. Nevertheless, his short stories are often considered to be of more consistent quality. George Orwell is not alone in feeling that, while the novels are hard-going, ‘In the short stories his faults do not matter so much, because a short story can be purely lyrical, whereas a novel has to take account of probability and has to be cold-bloodedly constructed’. 125 Lawrence’s short fiction has always been considered a solid pillar of his status as a major modernist author; Leavis claimed that this part of his oeuvre alone entitled Lawrence to be considered a great writer.126 This attitude has resulted in the steady publication of about one book on his short fiction for each decade since Leavis’ comments, from the first study focusing just on the stories, by Kingsley Widmer in 1962, to the most recent monograph by Anna Grmelová in 2001.127 Despite this

124 Poplawski, Promptings of Desire, 107. 125 George Orwell, ‘“The Prussian Officer” and Other Stories,’ in The Critical Response to D.H. Lawrence, ed. Jan Pilditch (Westport & London: Greenwood Press, 2001). Originally published in the Tribune, 16 November 1945. 126 Leavis, D. H. Lawrence, Novelist, 246. 127 Kingsley Widmer, The Art of Perversity: D. H. Lawrence’s Shorter Fiction (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1962); Anna Grmelová, The Worlds of D.H. Lawrence’s Short Fiction, 1907-1923 (Prague: Charles University, The Karolinum Press, 2001), 15. In the meantime the following also appeared: Keith Cushman, D. H. Lawrence at Work: The Emergence of the Prussian Officer Stories (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1978); Janice Hubbard Harris, The Short Fiction of D. H. Lawrence (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1984); Weldon Thornton, D. H. Lawrence: A Study of the Short Fiction, Twayne Studies in Short Fiction (New York: Twayne, 1993); Martin F. Introduction 36

consistent interest, in the main these longer studies remain limited to providing a broad introductory survey of Lawrence’s short fiction, since each author seems to have shared Grmelová’s sense that there remains a ‘dearth of more systematic studies of Lawrence’s short fiction if compared with his long fiction.’128 My treatment of Lawrence’s short fiction in this thesis moves beyond this stage of criticism, by exploring the particular capacities the form might have offered to him. Katherine Mansfield (1888–1923) is often considered to be the pre-eminent short-story writer of British modernism. This is partly because she never completed a novel during her short life (although she began a number of times), but it is also because over the years many critics have agreed that she was responsible for significant innovations in the form. Though Mansfield did publish poetry, reviews, and collaborative editorials and translations, this status, as well as the ongoing interest in the short-story form that is evident in her non-fiction writing, makes her inclusion in this study essential. Even more than Lawrence, however, Mansfield has long been considered an outsider, a peripheral figure in the modernist canon – perhaps because she died young with a comparatively slight body of completed work, but also perhaps because she was from New Zealand, because she was a woman, and because she mainly wrote short stories. While her significance in New Zealand’s literary history has been long established, it is only over the past three decades that Mansfield has gradually become more widely recognised as a significant modernist author. Some prominent contemporaries did express admiration for her work, among them Eliot, who for a 1933 lecture series at the University of Virginia selected ‘Bliss’ as one of three exemplars of modern short fiction that are ‘of very great merit’, and Elizabeth Bowen, who identified Mansfield as the first to ‘ ideal reflector of the day’ However, Scholarly interest in the author began to grow during the 1980s and 1990s (coincident perhaps with an increase in critical attention to the short story in general), as evident from the

Kearney, The Major Short Stories of D. H. Lawrence: A Handbook (New York: Garland Publishing, 1998). I engage with these texts in more detail in Chapter 2. 128 Grmelová, Lawrence’s Short Fiction, 15. 129 T. S. Eliot, After Strange Gods: a primer of modern heresy (London: Faber & Faber, 1934), 35. The other two stories are Lawrence’s ‘The Shadow in the Rose Garden’ and Joyce’s ‘The Dead’. Elizabeth Bowen, ‘Stories by Katherine Mansfield,’ in Afterthought: Pieces about Writing, ed. Elizabeth Bowen (London: Longmans, 1962), 61. Introduction 37

increasing rate of publication of book-length studies on the author from that period onwards; by 1989 Mansfield studies was established enough to warrant the publication of a bibliography.130 In her 2015 revised handbook on Mansfield, Gerri Kimber finds evidence that Mansfield’s ‘personal brand of literary modernism’ is currently finding favour with critics in a comparison of Mansfield’s appearances in the 1999 and 2011 editions of the Cambridge Companion to Modernism. Kimber notes that in the earlier version Mansfield is mentioned only in passing, but that her treatment is considerably expanded in the updated volume.131 Yet Mansfield is still sometimes excluded from surveys of canonical modernism because her primary literary output was short fiction, rather than the more typically esteemed genres of the novel, poetry or drama. Indeed, as recently as 2010, both she and the short story appear only in the sidelines of the Cambridge Companion to Modernist Women Writers.132 This omission is somewhat surprising given the frequent suggestion that the short story was a particularly emancipatory form for women writers as well as a crucial form for modernism. 133 This demonstrates the still-uncertain place that Mansfield holds in the modernist canon, a fact that has a bearing on the kind of criticism that continues to be written on Mansfield. While fast growing, the body of critical work dealing with Mansfield is still appreciably smaller and narrower than is that on Lawrence. Scholarship has for many

130 B. J. Kirkpatrick, A Bibliography of Katherine Mansfield (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989). This increasing interest is apparent in the parallel growth in book-length studies published during this period, including: Kate Fullbrook, Katherine Mansfield, Key Women Writers (Brighton: The Harvester Press, 1986); J. F. Kobler, Katherine Mansfield: A Study of the Short Fiction, Twayne Studies in Short Fiction (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1990); Sydney Janet Kaplan, Katherine Mansfield and the Origins of Modernist Fiction (Ithaca & London: Cornell University Press, 1991); Saralyn R. Daly, Katherine Mansfield, Revised ed. (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1994); Jan Pilditch, ed. The Critical Response to Katherine Mansfield (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1996); Pamela Dunbar, Radical Mansfield: Double Discourse in Katherine Mansfield’s Short Stories (Basingstoke: Macmillan Press, 1997); W. H. New, Reading Mansfield and Metaphors of Form (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1999); Angela Smith, Katherine Mansfield: A Literary Life (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2000). 131 Gerri Kimber, Katherine Mansfield and the Art of the Short Story (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 1-2. Similarly, Peter Childs includes her in a list of more ‘familiar writers’, along with Joyce, Woolf, Lawrence, Yeats, Eliot and Conrad. He cites Charlotte Mew and Rebecca West as less studied modernists. Peter Childs, Modernism, The New Critical Idiom (London & New York: Routledge, 2000), 24. 132 Her most extended appearance is in relation to Woolf in Bonnie Kime Scott’s chapter on the novel form, which mentions Woolf’s famous jealousy of Mansfield’s writing, and states that ‘The Prelude’ (as Scott refers to Mansfield’s story) ‘set a standard for modernism.’ Bonnie Kime Scott, ‘Transforming the novel,’ in The Cambridge Companion to Modernist Women Writers, ed. Maren Tova Linett (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 21-22. 133 See my discussion in above section on ‘Modernist short story’, 28-29. Introduction 38

years tended to focus on Mansfield’s personality, relationships and experiences because, as Angela Smith rightly observes, ‘the narrative of the life is compelling.’134 This fascination informs some major studies in the field. In Katherine Mansfield and the Origins of Modernist Fiction (1991), Sydney Janet Kaplan traces connections between Mansfield’s fiction and ‘her intellectual and sexual development’.135 While Mansfield and Woolf are on equal footing in Smith’s Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf: A Public of Two (1999), and analysis is not directly focused on questions of biography, it does revolve around Mansfield’s relationship with a more prominent colleague, in that it explores the professional affinities that underlaid Mansfield and Woolf’s ambivalent friendship.136 Although I group Mansfield with two authors with whom she had personal connections (indeed, the very network examined by the aforementioned studies), this study has little to say about questions of personality, the respective life experiences of the authors, or their relationships. I do, however, draw on some major topoi in Mansfield studies that can be seen to have grown out of this interest in ‘the narrative of the life’: her idea or method of impersonation (often compared with the canonical modernist ideal of impersonality) and questions of subjectivity and psychology.137 However, these questions fold into that which I concentrate more substantially on: comparing the ways their writing can be seen to respond to wider cultural promptings.

134 Smith, Katherine Mansfield: A Literary Life, 5. The focus on Mansfield as a person is frequently attributed in part to the lasting effect of Murry’s ‘sanitized version’ of her, which resulted in a ‘cult of Mansfield’ and repelled many of their contemporaries. Smith, Katherine Mansfield: A Literary Life, 3-5. Some scholars also ascribe Mansfield’s marginal status to Murry’s editorial efforts, for example J. Lawrence Mitchell, ‘Introduction,’ in Katherine Mansfield and Literary Modernism, ed. Janet Wilson, Gerri Kimber, and Susan Reid (London: Continuum, 2011), 2. On the other hand, Kimber argues that Murry’s idealised Mansfield persona led to her having a better reputation in France than in Britain. Gerri Kimber, Katherine Mansfield: The View from France, European Connections (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2008), 19. 135 Kaplan, Mansfield and the Origins of Modernist Fiction, 5. Kaplan’s recent investigation of the literary critical network centred on Murry also employs what she terms ‘biographically informed literary criticism’: Kaplan, Circulating Genius: John Middleton Murry, Katherine Mansfield and D. H. Lawrence, 10. 136 Smith, A Public of Two. Mansfield’s links to a number of other writers are considered in the essays collected in Sarah Ailwood and Melinda Harvey, eds., Katherine Mansfield and Literary Influence (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015). 137 Recent essay collections on Mansfield bear witness to this continuing interest, containing sections on ‘Self, Voice and Other’ and ‘Biography/Autobiography’ in Janet Wilson, Gerri Kimber, and Susan Reid, Katherine Mansfield and Literary Modernism (London: Continuum, 2011), v-vi., and on ‘Biographical Readings and Fiction’, ‘Psychoanalytical Readings’, and ‘Autobiography and Fiction’ in Gerri Kimber and Janet Wilson, eds., Celebrating Katherine Mansfield: A Centenary Volume of Essays (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), vii-viii. Introduction 39

One marker of the less-developed state of Mansfield scholarship is that as yet, there are no extended studies of Mansfield’s engagement with rhythm, as there are of Lawrence’s and Woolf’s. The issue receives frequent comment though, such as in Kaplan’s remark that rather than organising her stories to a conventional plot, Mansfield’s stories centre on ‘mood, rhythm, and sensory impressions.’138 In addition, several threads currently being pursued in Mansfield criticism show there is a call for further investigation of this area. Attention has lately focused on two parallel aspects of Mansfield’s work: the influence of her love of music on her writing practice and aesthetic sensibility, and her complex use of voice in her fiction.139 This body of work often connects her ardent youthful study of the cello and her reputed gift for mimicry and performance with her frequent use of both musical metaphors and the notion of ‘impersonation’ to explain her writing process and aesthetics. Her association with Murry’s Rhythm magazine, its staff, and its successor publications,140 also highlights the pertinence of probing Mansfield’s engagement with the concept of rhythm. Mansfield’s profound conviction of art’s role of capturing ‘life itself’ has also been clear to many critics over the years, from Bowen’s admiration of the ‘living-and- breathing reality’ of Mansfield’s New Zealand characters to Smith’s illumination of her affinities with post-impressionism’s occupation with ‘the profound self, and with deep structures.’141 The combination of these established interests in music and voice, and a desire to evoke both everyday and deeper realities in her fiction compels the investigation of mimesis in Mansfield’s work.

138 Kaplan, Mansfield and the Origins of Modernist Fiction, 83. 139 See especially Sarah Sandley, ‘The Middle of the Note: Katherine Mansfield’s “Glimpses”,’ in Katherine Mansfield: In from the Margin, ed. Roger Robinson (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1994); Anne Besnault-Levita, ‘“– Ah, what is it? – that I heard”: Voice and Affect in Katherine Mansfield’s Short Fictions,’ in Katherine Mansfield and Literary Modernism, ed. Janet Wilson, Gerri Kimber, and Susan Reid (London: Continuum, 2011); Delia da Sousa Correa, ‘Performativity in Words: Musical Performance in Katherine Mansfield’s Stories,’ Katherine Mansfield Studies 3 (2011); Vanessa Manhire, ‘Mansfield, Woolf and Music: “The queerest sense of echo”,’ Katherine Mansfield Studies 3 (2011). 140 This connection has been examined by several studies, as part of the growing attention to the role of the little magazine in the development of modernist culture and individual careers: Angela Smith, ‘Katherine Mansfield and Rhythm,’ Journal of New Zealand Literature, no. 21 (2003); Faith Binckes, Modernism, Magazines, and the British Avant-Garde: Reading Rhythm, 1910-1914 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010); Peter Brooker, ‘Harmony, Discord, and Difference: Rhythm (1911-13), The Blue Review (1913), and The Signature (1915),’ in The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines, ed. Peter Brooker and Andrew Thacker (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). 141 Bowen, ‘Stories by Katherine Mansfield,’ 72; Smith, Katherine Mansfield: A Literary Life, 11. Introduction 40

In its detailed exploration of Mansfield’s use of rhythm in the context of a broader rhythmic modernist aesthetics, my thesis aims to help expand and diversify Mansfield studies. In addition to extending our understanding of Mansfield’s use of rhythm, in this project I start down some promising but as-yet unexplored or little- traversed avenues of investigation, such as Mansfield’s interest in the ordinary, and to a lesser extent her relationship with the sciences and quasi-scientific discourses like vitalism, both of which are currently expanding areas of modernist scholarship in general, as is evident above. 142 In this thesis, I also extend or reappraise the established tradition of exploring the motivation, methods and effects of Mansfield’s experimentation with prose. Her formal innovations are firmly established: in 1956 Bowen commented that Mansfield had altered ‘for good and all our ideas of what goes to make a story’, 143 while In its exploration of her pursuit of rhythmic mimesis, this thesis aims to explore an uncharted area of Mansfield’s formal innovations and to link them in new ways to her intellectual and artistic milieux. Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) is firmly positioned at the heart of the canon of British modernism. Scholarly attention to Woolf has been a constant over the years, but the feminist revisions of modernist literary history beginning in the 1970s helped to move her from the margins to the centre.145 By any standard, Woolf was a dynamic and productive proponent of modernism in England. She wrote nine novels between 1915 and 1941; hundreds of essays and reviews that appeared in relatively

142 Beginnings have been made regarding science and vitalism by David Trotter, ‘Modernism Reloaded: The Fiction of Katherine Mansfield,’ Affirmations: of the modern 1, no. 1 (2013); Eiko Nakano, ‘Katherine Mansfield, Rhythm and Henri Bergson,’ in Katherine Mansfield and Literary Modernism, ed. Janet Wilson, Gerri Kimber, and Susan Reid (London: Continuum, 2011). The spiritualist implications of some of these discourses are made apparent in Vincent O’Sullivan’s essay on Mansfield’s late interest in the teachings of Russian mystic George Gurdjieff: Vincent O’Sullivan, ‘Signing Off: Katherine Mansfield’s Last Year,’ in Celebrating Katherine Mansfield: A Centenary Volume of Essays, ed. Gerri Kimber and Janet Wilson (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). 143 Bowen, ‘Stories by Katherine Mansfield,’ 61. 144 Kaplan, Mansfield and the Origins of Modernist Fiction, 1. Other notable studies in this area include Suzanne Ferguson, ‘Genre and the Work of Reading in Mansfield’s “Prelude” and “At the Bay”,’ in Postmodern Approaches to the Short Story, ed. Farhat Iftekharrudin (Westport: Praeger, 2003); New, Reading Mansfield and Metaphors of Form; Julia van Gunsteren, Katherine Mansfield and Literary Impressionism (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1990). 145 Jane Marcus was a key figure in this critical shift. See Jane Marcus, ed. New Feminist Essays on Virginia Woolf (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1981); Jane Marcus, Virginia Woolf and the Languages of Patriarchy (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987). Introduction 41

conservative publications like the Times Literary Supplement as well as in smaller modernist magazines (some of the most important of these she also collected in her two books of essays, the Common Readers); and a biography of Roger Fry. She published one collection of short fiction during her lifetime, called Monday or Tuesday (1921). Since her death, several additional collections of short stories and essays have appeared, along with autobiographical works, and of course her diaries and letters.146 In addition, the Hogarth Press, which Woolf ran with her husband Leonard, was responsible for publishing several texts that became touchstones for modernist culture, among them Mansfield’s ‘Prelude’; Eliot’s The Waste Land; works by Bloomsbury friends like art critic Roger Fry, novelist E. M. Forster, and economist John Maynard Keynes; and several English translations of the works of Sigmund Freud.147 A great deal of Woolf criticism revolves around the intersecting issues of her concern with the role of perception and epistemology, her representation of the relation between subject and world, and experimentation with narrative form. The assertion that Woolf was pioneering in her representation of the inner life of her characters is a familiar one, as by now is the qualification that in attempting to evoke the experience of the subject, Woolf does not completely eschew the outside world. Some challenges include James Naremore’s suggestion that the perspective of the individual is always subordinated to the ‘the broad eddies and currents of life’,148 or Alex Zwerdling’s proposal that she is actually constantly concerned with the ‘complex relationship between the interior life and the life of society’.149 More recently, James

146 A Haunted House and Other Short Stories appeared in 1944, prepared by Leonard Woolf following Virginia’s death. A number of short stories relating to Woolf’s novel Mrs Dalloway (1925) were published as Mrs Dalloway’s Party in 1973: Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway’s Party: A Short Story Sequence, ed. Stella McNichol (London: Vintage, 2012). In 1985, Susan Dick edited the Complete Shorter Fiction, more recently republished as: Virginia Woolf, A Haunted House: The Complete Shorter Fiction, ed. Susan Dick, 2nd ed. (London: Vintage, 2003). A new scholarly edition of Woolf’s short fiction, co-edited by Laura Marcus and Bryony Randall, is currently in preparation for The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Virginia Woolf. 147 J. Howard Woolmer and Mary E. Gaither, A Checklist of the Hogarth Press, 1917–1938 (London: Hogarth Press, 1976). 148 James Naremore, The World Without a Self: Virginia Woolf and the Novel (New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 1973), 9. 149 Alex Zwerdling, Virginia Woolf and the Real World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 3. This interest also recurs throughout the essays collected in Gillian Beer, Virginia Woolf: The Common Ground (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1996). For Woolf’s exploration of material reality, see Bill Brown, ‘The Secret Life of Things (Virginia Woolf and the Matter of Modernism),’ Modernism/Modernity 6, no. 2 (1999). Relatedly, researchers have recently taken interest in the place Introduction 42

Harker refocuses this argument on issues of epistemology, suggesting that the many instances of Woolf’s characters misperceiving the world around them produces ‘a kind of fiction that lays bare the imperfection of one’s knowledge of the external world and of the inner life.’150 This hints at the ambiguous status of mimesis in Woolf’s aesthetics, specifically the question of how art can represent such an uncertain universe. But at the same time that Woolf interrogates the reliability of perception, she maintains a belief in an ultimate reality, as well as the conviction that this can be represented in literature. 151 There is a strong tradition in Woolf studies that acknowledges this consistent belief in a hidden coherence in the universe. For example, Naremore suggests that she saw ‘the aesthetic act, whether in the form of a party or a painting, as a means of apprehending an ever-present order which is concealed from us by our everyday lives.’152 Thus, it is in creativity that this deeper reality is revealed. Mimesis, for Woolf, must therefore take into account both the difficulties of knowing the world at the same time as revealing what she saw as its deeper truths. Many scholars have linked this complex vision to Woolf’s experimentation with narrative, and particularly her attempts to combine poetry with prose.153 One position links Woolf’s creation of poetic beauty in her writing to a self- conscious desire to present the world as aesthetically coherent – as analogous to a

held by the ordinary and the experience of boredom in Woolf’s thinking. See Sim, Patterns of Ordinary Experience; Sara Crangle, ‘The Time Being: On Woolf and Boredom,’ MFS Modern Fiction Studies 54, no. 2 (2008); Allison Pease, Modernism, Feminism, and the Culture of Boredom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012). 150 James Harker, ‘Misperceiving Virginia Woolf,’ Journal of Modern Literature 34, no. 2 (2011): 5. My emphasis. 151 This is one of the reasons that her views are frequently connected to romanticism, a perspective that is supported by the resonances between Woolf’s ideas and those of Lawrence and Murry (discussed in my first chapter, below). Ellen Tremper, Who Lived at Alfoxton? Virginia Woolf and English Romanticism (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 1998); Alexandra Harris, Romantic Moderns: English Writers, Artists and the Imagination from Virginia Woolf to John Piper (London: Thames & Hudson, 2010); Nicholas Roe, ‘Leigh Hunt, Charles Lamb, and Virginia Woolf,’ in Romantic Presences in the Twentieth Century, ed. Mark Sandy (Farnham & Burlington: Ashgate, 2012). 152 Naremore, The World without a Self, 74. 153 Woolf has remained a touchstone of modernist narrative experimentation, especially in relation to her embrace of poetry. Examples include William Troy, ‘Virginia Woolf: The Poetic Method,’ Symposium 3 (1932); E. M. Forster, Virginia Woolf (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1942), 16-18; Karen Kaivola, All Contraries Confounded: The Lyrical Fiction of Virginia Woolf, Djuna Barnes, and Marguerite Duras (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1991); Anne E. Fernald, ‘Virginia Woolf and Experimental Fiction,’ in A Companion to British Literature, Volume IV, Victorian and Twentieth- Century Literature, 1837-2000, ed. Robert DeMaria Jr., Heesok Chang, and Samantha Zacher (Chichester: Wiley Blackwell, 2014). Introduction 43

unified work of art.154 Thus, Woolf saw the fusion of prose and poetry as a way of combining the capacity for representing the ordinary with that of evoking this deeper unity. Scholarship on Woolf’s use of rhythm is generally situated within this context of her formal experimentation, though it has rarely been the main point of focus.155 Naremore pays more attention to rhythm than most, and even identifies it as a mimetic as well as an aesthetic element in her work. He notes the ‘love of hypnotic rhythms’ that distinguishes her prose style, and also ‘the way it seems to imitate the rhythm of whatever she is writing about’.156 To my knowledge, though neither is recent, two books have been published on Woolf’s use of rhythm. Both focus on rhythm as grounded in linguistic repetition, and see rhythm as a positive and cohesive force in world and text. In Virginia Woolf: The Echoes Enslaved (1973), Allen McLaurin denotes rhythm as an organic and meaningful type of repetition, while situating Woolf’s interest in it in relation to that of Fry and Samuel Butler.157 Somewhat anticipating Kirsty Martin’s conception of rhythms of sympathy, McLaurin explains Mrs Ramsay’s talent for identification with objects in To the Lighthouse as an ability to ‘get “inside” the repetition and thus transform it into a rhythm.’158 This notion of rhythm also resonates with Gebauer and Wulf’s presentation of mimesis as an act of cognitive assimilation with the world. Taking a combination of close phonemic reading and structuralist approaches, Kathleen McCluskey concludes Reverberations: Sound and Structure in the Novels of Virginia Woolf (1986) by suggesting that Woolf’s textual rhythms have a metaphysical or moral purpose. She describes Woolf’s use of repetition as a ‘charm’ that draws the reader ‘into the rhythms of the text’, creating ‘community or society’, and protecting against chaos: ‘disorder, separateness, and perhaps especially death’.159 McCluskey also finds Woolf’s rhythmic use of language to be mimetic as well as creative: the artist is ‘the creator of

154 Naremore, The World without a Self, 244. 155 Naremore, for example, refers to Woolf’s ‘poetic moods’ and her use of rhythm in the same breath. Naremore, The World without a Self, 17. 156 Naremore, The World without a Self, 17-18. 157 Allen McLaurin, Virginia Woolf: The Echoes Enslaved (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973), 101. This echoes, as I discuss in my first chapter, Forster’s distinction between rhythm and pattern. 158 McLaurin, Virginia Woolf: The Echoes Enslaved, 178. 159 Kathleen McCluskey, Reverberations: Sound and Structure in the Novels of Virginia Woolf (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1986), 125. Introduction 44

order and the “magician” who evokes the orders present in the language and the universe’.160 McCluskey’s argument thus resonates with arguments about Woolf’s use of poetry in her prose. This area is particularly salient in regards to Woolf’s short fiction, which more than either Lawrence or Mansfield’s pushes the boundaries between poetry and prose.161 Like Lawrence, Woolf remains best known as a novelist, and as such her short fiction remains understudied. This is in part due to Woolf’s own flickering attention to the form: only eighteen of the forty-six extant works of short fiction that she wrote were published during her lifetime – certainly a very small corpus when compared with her novels, essays and reviews. Only a handful of books have asserted the importance of attending to Woolf’s short fiction over the past three decades; the first book-length study of this body of work did not appear until 1989, and remained the only one until 2004. Its author, Dean R. Baldwin, suggests that Woolf contributed to the critical neglect of her short stories by ‘devoting very little of her analytical and critical energy to discussing the form. She espoused no theory of short fiction and seldom mentioned her stories at any length in her diaries or letters.’162 Baldwin’s claim has since been directly countered by Christine Reynier, who argues that Woolf actually attempts to define the modernist short story in some of her essays. Reynier claims that Woolf rejected the term ‘short story’ as inadequate for the kind of short fiction she was interested in, because it emphasises ‘the story-telling – something which may no longer be adequate when dealing with Modernist texts.’163 As is implicit in Reynier’s comments, criticism of Woolf’s short fiction in some respects tends to diverge from the studies discussed above that emphasise the unifying effects of her employment of poetic or rhythmic elements in her fiction. Critics of her short stories often propose instead that the brief and fragmentary nature of the short story makes

160 McCluskey, Reverberations: Sound and Structure in the Novels of Virginia Woolf, 126. 161 The generic indeterminacy of Virginia Woolf’s approach to short fiction is explored in the essays included in Kathryn N. Benzel and Ruth Hoberman, eds., Trespassing Boundaries: Virginia Woolf’s Short Fiction (Palgrave, 2004). It is also foregrounded by Nena Skrbic, who argues that these texts convey Woolf’s goals in writing ‘more concentratedly’ than do her novels. Nena Skrbic, Wild Outbursts of Freedom: Reading Virginia Woolf’s Short Fiction (Westport: Praeger Publishers, 2004), xviii. 162 Dean R. Baldwin, Virginia Woolf: A Study of the Short Fiction, Twayne Studies in Short Fiction (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1989), 3. 163 Christine Reynier, ‘The Short Story According to Woolf,’ Journal of the Short Story in English 41 (2003): 56. These essays are ‘On Re-Reading Novels’, ‘The Russian Point of View’, and ‘An Essay in Criticism’. See also Christine Reynier, Virginia Woolf’s Ethics of the Short Story (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). Introduction 45

it an apposite form for representing the disjunction of modern experience, and of modern conceptions of the mind.164 Attention to rhythm in Woolf’s short fiction helps to reconcile these apparently contradictory positions. Storytelling is certainly a problem for Woolf, and one that is uniquely explored in the short fiction. In contrast to Reynier’s suggestion that Woolf’s short fiction completely avoids storytelling, Head argues that it is characterised by ‘a formal disruption deriving from a tension between a conventional, ordered narrative style, and an all-embracing, multi-accentual alternative’.165 This question about the role of storytelling is an important one when considering the modernist short story, which can also be considered as paradigmatic of modernist fiction in its self-conscious poise between ancient and modern narrative forms. Woolf increasingly used the short story to think through such questions about the role of storytelling, and consequently the place of mimesis, in human culture and consciousness. This introduction has focused on establishing the current theoretical and critical context for this thesis; Chapter 1 returns to the intellectual context of the early twentieth century. As this next chapter shows, the ideal of rhythmic mimesis that Lawrence, Mansfield and Woolf pursued in their short fiction was connected to some pivotal problems in modernist culture, namely the clash between classicist and romanticist aesthetics and the shifting relations between prose and poetry.

164 As discussed above, this is the position taken in Head, Modernist Short Story. See also Skrbic, Wild Outbursts of Freedom, 8. 165 Head, Modernist Short Story, 108.

Chapter 1

Rhythm and mimesis in modernist literary culture

This chapter aims to establish an intellectual and aesthetic context for the strategies of rhythmic mimesis explored by Lawrence, Mansfield and Woolf in their short fiction. It sets out the ways of thinking rhythmically about the universe, people and literature in some of the milieux that surrounded these three writers during their careers. In doing so, it offers a new perspective on the importance of romanticism to modernist culture particularly regarding how the role of literature was conceived. It also uncovers a little-discussed current of interest in the function of rhythm in prose, and repositions the modernist short story against the broader context of the renovation of attitudes towards poetry and prose in the early twentieth century. The motivation for rhythmic mimesis arises from a still under-acknowledged thread of romanticism in modernist culture, which is closely aligned with the heightened sense of novelty and dynamic intellectual and social development that are the driving energies of modernism. In the first section of this chapter I outline the key themes of this philosophical context, traced largely through the critical writing of John Middleton Murry as Britain’s most prominent exponent of romantic modernism. This romantic modernist position is defined most broadly by, first, a conviction of the progressive destiny of humanity and of art’s essential role in that destiny and second, by the uniting of mundane and numinous dimensions of experience. These include an affirmation of the ethos of scientific discovery, which views the mysteries of the universe as puzzles to be solved rather than fundamentally unknowable. This way of thinking shifts those less empirically verifiable aspects of life from the domain of religious faith into the secular realm, and enshrines intuition as a reliable way of registering such intangible aspects of experience. Rhythm emerges as a protean concept able to encompass the complex but spontaneous organisation of the universe previously attributed to a divine power, or the ineffable qualities of a human being once called a soul or spirit. Rhythm, mimesis & modernism 47

The second half of the chapter turns from this consideration of broader aesthetic and metaphysical concepts to examine how such ideas about rhythm and reality influenced rhythmic experimentation in literary form. In the 1910s and 1920s there was much discussion of the distinctions between poetry and prose that arose with the explosion of interest in free verse and prose poetry. I recontextualise these debates in light of the romantic melding of the spiritual and the mundane or the heart and mind, and a pervasive but little acknowledged desire to represent this unity. To these discussions I link a slightly later burgeoning of interest in prose rhythms, and finally in the particular mimetic possibilities of the short story, the central focus of this study. Across all three areas of discourse (as well as in the non-fiction writing by Lawrence, Mansfield and Woolf), I find recurring assumptions of an innate link between literary rhythm and the ‘real’ rhythms of life itself. In modernist literature, rhythmic mimesis is like an echo, enacting a vital connection between a subject and its representation.

Romantic modernism and the rhythms of life Questions about the relations between the world and art, and between art and the world – that is, both art’s claims to represent the world, and its claims to shape it – are central to modernist aesthetics. Though it has been powerfully challenged in recent years, the view of the movement as classically informed, concerned foremost with form on its own terms rather than its relation to the world, remains dominant. This view is frequently associated with T. S. Eliot’s avowedly classicist position and Bloomsbury formalism, and particularly Clive Bell’s notion of ‘significant form’, which still loom large in most accounts of critical modernism. Eliot was far from alone in his espousal of a classicist viewpoint, and modernism’s attention to the potentialities of form is undoubtedly one of its most important features. However, the later prominence of Eliot in particular has obscured a competing strand of modernist thought and culture that saw the arts as having both a broader and deeper role in society. This alternative attitude was sometimes explicitly aligned with romanticism during the period, particularly in connection with the editor and critic John Rhythm, mimesis & modernism 48

Middleton Murry, who was its most prominent advocate.1 From about 1923, Murry and Eliot maintained a roughly five-year long debate over the respective values of romantic and classicist philosophies via their editorial essays in Murry’s Adelphi (1923–1955) and Eliot’s Criterion (1922–1939) magazines. Murry can also be seen to have a pivotal role in an intellectual history of rhythmic modernism. He began his career as an editor while still an undergraduate at Oxford University, by launching with his friend Michael Sadleir the little magazine Rhythm: Art, Music, Literature (1911–13). In his autobiography, Between Two Worlds (1935), Murry explains that the publication arose in part from discussions with a friend he made on a trip to Paris, the Scottish colourist painter J. D. Fergusson, in which rhythm was a recurring theme. Murry describes how Fergusson, who later became the magazine’s art editor, introduced to him the idea that rhythm ‘was the distinctive element in all the arts, and that the real purpose of “this modern movement” – a phrase frequent on F—’s lips – was to reassert the pre-eminence of rhythm’. Fergusson designated Murry’s role in this movement as being to ‘carry the new doctrine of rhythm into literature’.2 Especially given this early direction, Murry’s perspective is of added interest to this thesis because of his important professional and personal connections with all three authors under study, especially Mansfield and Lawrence, who he met primarily through Rhythm. Mansfield acted as a contributor and eventually co-editor and financial supporter of the magazine from spring 1912, and she and Murry married in 1917, maintaining a difficult but important romantic connection until her death. Rhythm was also the foundation of an often-fraught friendship between the editorial couple and the Lawrences, when Mansfield, in her editorial role, approached Lawrence to contribute writing to the journal. Late in his life and long after their deaths, Murry wrote that he always considered himself the ‘critical counterpart’ to Mansfield and Lawrence, and he was certainly a tireless promoter of their work throughout his life.3 As editor of Rhythm, its immediate reincarnation in the Blue

1 For further explorations of the relation of romanticism to modernism, see for example John Beer, Post-Romantic Consciousnesss: Dickens to Plath (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003); Harris, Romantic Moderns: English Writers, Artists and the Imagination from Virginia Woolf to John Piper; Mark Sandy, ed. Romantic Presences in the Twentieth Century (Farnham & Burlington: Ashgate, 2012). 2 John Middleton Murry, Between Two Worlds (London: Jonathan Cape, 1935), 156. 3 This phrase is from an entry in Murry’s journal from 1956, the year before his death. Quoted in Malcolm Woodfield, ‘Introduction,’ in Defending Romanticism: Selected Criticism of John Middleton Murry, ed. Malcolm Woodfield (Bristol: Bristol University Press, 1989), 2. Rhythm, mimesis & modernism 49

Review (1913), the short-lived and idiosyncratic collaboration between the three, the Signature (1914), the prestigious Athenaeum (which he edited from 1919–21), and thereafter the idealistic Adelphi (1923–48), he published their work often. Murry’s influence was not limited to this small circle. While his contribution to the modernist critical legacy has been overshadowed by that of Eliot, during the two years of his modernising crusade at the Athenaeum and the early stages of the Adelphi, Murry was a highly respected editor and literary critic.4 As editor for the Athenaeum, he also published work by Woolf, as well as by other significant modernist figures, including Eliot, Roger Fry, Lytton Strachey, Clive Bell, Bertrand Russell, E. M. Forster, and Ezra Pound. Beyond this important editorial role in modernist literary history, Murry’s own non-fiction writing, notably his editorials from Rhythm and the Adelphi, is pivotal to understanding the historical moment that this chapter describes. Taken together, his editorials articulate a nexus between a rhythmic metaphysics and romanticist aesthetic philosophy, showing one way to the formal and conceptual innovations of modernist literature. The romanticist tendencies championed by Murry – most fundamentally, the sense of an intrinsic and necessary connection between art and life – pervade modernist writing and thinking, including that of Lawrence, Mansfield and Woolf. Those contemporaries who declared their classicist allegiances are not immune to the influence of romantic thought, either. Indeed, when the critic and poet T. E. Hulme predicted a classical revival in the modern arts, he also acknowledged that the preceding romantic age would have left its mark, and traces of this influence are present in his own polemic against the values and aesthetics of romanticism.5 Some ideal of mimesis in art is a motivation among members of both camps. Instead,

4 For a detailed and even-handed account of the debate and competition between Eliot and Murry as editors and critics, see David Goldie, A Critical Difference: T. S. Eliot and John Middleton Murry in English Literary Criticism, 1919-1928 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998). For further exploration of Murry’s editorial work, see also Michael Whitworth, ‘Enemies of Cant: The Athenaeum (1919–21) and The Adelphi (1923–48),’ in The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines, ed. Peter Brooker and Andrew Thacker (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009); Marysa Demoor, ‘John Middleton Murry’s Editorial Apprenticeships: Getting Modernist “Rhythm” into the Athenaeum, 1919-1921,’ English Literature in Transition 1880-1920 52, no. 2 (2009). 5 For example, Hulme connects the use of ordinary language with classicism, overlooking that William Wordsworth’s declared preference for ‘incidents and situations from common life’ and the ‘language really used by men’ had also made it a central tenet of romanticism.⁠ Hulme, ‘Romanticism and Classicism,’ 64; William Wordsworth, ‘Preface to Lyrical Ballads, with Pastoral and Other Poems (1802),’ in The Norton Anthology of English Literature, ed. Stephen Greenblatt et al (New York: WW Norton & Company, 2006), 264. Rhythm, mimesis & modernism 50

classical and romantic modernisms are divided on two central and related questions: what role art plays in social and spiritual life; and what dimensions of experience may or should be represented in art. Generally, the classicist position maintains while art may represent the world, its role is restricted to the aesthetic realm, rather than performing a spiritual or social function. For example, in ‘Romanticism and Classicism’ (ca 1911–12), Hulme argues that in poetry the ‘great aim is accurate, precise and definite description’, and sees creating aesthetic pleasure as the central purpose of this description. Furthermore, he argues that ‘the root of aesthetic pleasure’ is located in the rarity of a ‘real communication’ of the artist’s ‘actual physical state’; that is, he links aesthetic pleasure directly to mimesis.6 Similarly, Eliot emphasises a near-autotelic conception of art, arguing in ‘The Function of Criticism’ (1923), perhaps his best-known interjection on the side of classicism, that ‘art may be affirmed to serve ends beyond itself; but art is not required to be aware of those ends, and indeed performs its function, whatever that may be, according to various theories of value, much better by indifference to them.’ 7 Eliot’s own values for artistic endeavour are implied by his attacks on romanticism in this essay: romantics, he laments, ‘are not, in fact, concerned with literary perfection at all’ which for him means that they are actually ‘not in fact interested in art.’ This definition of art as the product of technical mastery, and valuable primarily for its formal or aesthetic qualities, is frequently taken to typify modernism itself. Eliot’s standpoint has much in common with Bloomsbury formalism, as propounded by the painter and critic Roger Fry and the critic Clive Bell (also Woolf’s brother-in-law). Fry and Bell argue, like Eliot, for the essential independence of the work of art from the world. For them, art’s highest purpose is to stir ‘aesthetic emotion’, a pure and impersonal response, in the receiver.8 In his landmark essay, Art (1913), Bell proposes the influential concept of ‘significant form’, the idea that the essential quality of a work of art is inherent to its material form and independent of

6 Hulme, ‘Romanticism and Classicism,’ 68, 70. 7 T.S. Eliot, Selected Essays, 3rd ed. (London: Faber and Faber, 1951), 24. 8 Clive Bell, Art, ed. J. B. Bullen (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 7. Rhythm, mimesis & modernism 51

any mimetic reference.9 This anti-mimetic formalism was also propounded by Bell’s Bloomsbury affiliate Roger Fry. Fry’s 1917 Fabian Society lecture ‘Art and Life’, for instance, concluded that modern art ‘cuts out all the romantic overtones of life which are the usual bait by which men are induced to accept a work of art’.10 Political, social, spiritual or everyday aspects of the work, or ‘echoes of the emotions of life’, are considered auxiliary rather than integral to its value.11 Thus, Fry values works of art almost exclusively as aesthetic objects, or rather for the aesthetic emotion that they can provoke. Importantly for my concerns in this thesis, Fry’s review of Bell’s book, first published in The Nation in March 1914 extends the scope of ‘significant form’ to include not only the visual arts, but also literary rhythm.12 However, while formal aspects of the work of art are emphasised over its relationships to the outside world, in some respects Fry and Bell’s ideals of ‘significant form’ and aesthetic emotion relate to romantic ideals of art, in that they refer to a deeper register of mimesis. Fry explains that Bell holds ‘a pious belief […] that the aesthetic emotion is indeed an emotion about ultimate reality, that it has, therefore, a claim as absolute as the religious emotion has upon those who feel it’.13 This conception of artistic form having a near-spiritual significance because of its relation to an abstract register of reality marks, I suggest, a notable departure from Eliot’s classicist modernism. It is a feature that Fry and Bell’s formalism shares with Murry’s brand of romanticist modernism. The question of the proper place of religious feeling in art is a defining one. Both Hulme and Eliot emphasise the properness of the separation of these spheres of human experience, and indeed profess moral qualms about ideology that integrates the spiritual with the mundane. For instance, one of Hulme’s criticisms of romanticism is based on a quasi-scientific argument that religious belief is a natural instinct that is thwarted by the denial of the existence of god or heaven. This gives rise to the hubristic beliefs ‘that man is a god’ and ‘in heaven on earth.’ This leads to

9 Bell, Art, 8. Bell defines his concept as follows: ‘lines and colours combined in a particular way, certain forms and relations for forms, stir our aesthetic emotions. These relations and combinations of lines and colours, these aesthetically moving forms, I call “Significant Form”; and “Significant Form” is the one quality common to all works of visual art.’ 10 Roger Fry, Vision and Design (London: Chatto & Windus, 1957), 15. 11 Roger Fry, ‘A New Theory of Art,’ in A Roger Fry Reader, ed. Christopher Reed (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 160. 12 Fry, ‘A New Theory of Art,’ 159. 13 Fry, ‘A New Theory of Art,’ 159. Rhythm, mimesis & modernism 52

his famous description of romanticism as ‘spilt religion’.14 Almost identically, Eliot describes those who believe in the importance of the ‘inner voice’ as ‘palpitating Narcissi’, who ‘believe that God and [themselves are] identical’.15 Hulme claims that the mixture of religion with other aspects of life will ‘mess up, falsify and blur the clear lines of human experience’.16 For both critics, religious beliefs also have a bearing on aesthetics. Eliot attributes what he perceives as a lack of interest in pursuing formal ‘perfection’ to the romantic’s denial of ‘the existence of an unquestioned spiritual authority outside himself’. 17 Hulme’s conviction that the religious does not belong in art, however, evolves not from the quest for formal perfection. Instead, it depends on a particular conception of mimesis as ‘accurate description’, which he tells us, ‘is a legitimate object of verse. Verse to [the romantics] always means a bringing in of some of the emotions that are grouped round the word infinite’.18 This complaint about romanticism’s emphasis on emotion and ‘the infinite’, or numinous, suggests that Hulme does not consider these categories as the legitimate object of accurate description. For Hulme, then, romanticism is guilty of abandoning the proper goal of mimesis, the representation of what he sees as the real – the material everyday. For the writers whose work is investigated in this thesis, the close nature of the relationship between the self and world is an issue of deep importance. Murry himself repeatedly explained his idea of this relationship in his essays throughout the 1920s, consistently placing enormous emphasis on the continuity of the self with the outside world. In ‘More About Romanticism’ (1923) Murry distinguishes between ‘primary’ romantics who deny the existence of outer reality or authorities, and the ‘secondary’ type that he endorses, who recognise the existence of the outside world and its unity with the individual’s inner world. 19 Similarly, he argues a few months later in ‘Romanticism and the Tradition’ (1924) that ‘a moment of immediate apprehension of the unity of the world’ is the creative impetus of the romantics of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: ‘They saw, or felt that they saw, that the great external

14 Hulme, ‘Romanticism and Classicism,’ 62. 15 Eliot, Selected Essays, 27-28. 16 Hulme, ‘Romanticism and Classicism,’ 62. 17 Eliot, Selected Essays, 26. 18 Hulme, ‘Romanticism and Classicism,’ 65. 19 John Middleton Murry, ‘More About Romanticism,’ The Adelphi 1, no. 7 (December 1923): 561-62. Rhythm, mimesis & modernism 53

world […] was a living thing, an organism, which they knew as they knew the life within them.’20 Typically, Murry positions this sense of a deep organic consonance between the individual human and the universe as a whole as an epistemic discovery, indeed as a crucial point of human development: ‘humanity must find rest, not in a fleeting moment of heightened consciousness, but in a change of consciousness itself.’ That is, the recognition of this consonance, according to Murry, must become permanent and universal. Furthermore, the notion of life itself is frequently implicated in the question of this intimate and complex relationship between subject and world. Murry, who is representative of the three other authors discussed in this thesis in this regard, sometimes defines ‘life’ as an ‘all-pervading unity’ of the universe, which includes the individual. In God: An Introduction to the Science of Metabiology (1929) for example, he argues that ‘this unity is a reality; and the true conviction which the subject of mystical experience receives of the existence of this reality is of incalculable value for Life.’21 He distinguishes here between life as mere ‘biological manifestation’, and the capitalised life as ‘complete inward coherence in accordance with the higher quality unity of the individual man’.22 In this definition, Murry seems to be referring to life more as process or the experience of the individual, distinguishing between the biological life of human as animal, and what he calls in this book the ‘metabiological’, what might otherwise be called the spiritual life. Murry, however, deliberately attempts to connect his ideas to scientific rather than religious language: he insists that this distinction between life and Life is ‘absolutely objective and truly scientific’, and insists on the ‘continuity of the biological and the metabiological’.23 This is certainly in stark contrast to Murry’s inclusive attitude towards the relation between religion and art. In ‘Romanticism and Tradition’, which was published in the Criterion at Eliot’s invitation in April 1924, he goes so far as to state that ‘Religion and Literature are branches of the same everlasting root.’24 This attitude is already in evidence a little over a decade earlier, in the manifesto-like editorials

20 John Middleton Murry, Defending Romanticism: Selected Criticism of John Middleton Murry, ed. Malcolm Woodfield (Bristol: Bristol Press, 1989), 139. 21 John Middleton Murry, God: An Introduction to the Science of Metabiology (London: Jonathan Cape, 1929), 147. 22 Murry, God, 148. 23 Murry, God, 148, 89. 24 Murry, Defending Romanticism, 132. Rhythm, mimesis & modernism 54

written for his first little magazine, Rhythm. Even the title of his ‘Aims and Ideals’, published in the magazine’s first issue in Summer 1911, gives the impression of a more ambitious and indeed idealistic notion of art’s role in society. This is followed through in the brief, boldly rhetorical language of the piece:

RHYTHM is a magazine with a purpose. Its title is the ideal of a new art, to which it will endeavour to give expression in England […] We need an art that strikes deeper, that touches a profounder reality, that passes outside the bounds of a narrow aestheticism, cramping and choking itself, drawing its inspiration from aversion, to a humaner and a broader field.25

This passage clearly demonstrates Murry’s alternative to both Eliot’s formalism and the more material mimesis propounded by Hulme. He sketches instead a vision of art that represents ‘a profounder reality’, a dimension of experience beyond that of the material, empirically verifiable world. He also explicitly rejects ‘narrow aestheticism’ that restricts the purpose of art to its own formal perfection. Of course, this passage also indicates a direct, if here enigmatic, alignment of the concept of rhythm with this art of profounder reality; I explore this dimension of Murry’s thinking in further detail below. Murry’s conviction of art’s deeper significance is embedded in his sense of participating in a progressive modern movement. Put another way, his romanticist beliefs align with what is typically considered the quintessential energy of modernism.26 Hulme mockingly pinpoints this ideal as a key aspect of the romantic attitude: ‘Here is the root of all romanticism: that man, the individual, is an infinite reservoir of possibilities; and if you can so rearrange society by the destruction of oppressive order then these possibilities will have a chance and you will get Progress.’27 Such belief in the possibility of the development of the individual, society, and indeed of humanity, is integral to modernist romanticism, and it is this conviction that underlies the certainty that art can play a role in this development. Murry’s philosophy plainly exemplifies this: his brand of romantic aesthetics is embedded in his sense of a necessity for deep cultural and spiritual change in his

25 John Middleton Murry, ‘Aims and Ideals,’ Rhythm 1, no. 1 (1911): 36. 26 Marshall Berman, All That is Solid Melts into Air: the Experience of Modernity (New York: Viking Penguin, 1988). 27 Hulme, ‘Romanticism and Classicism,’ 61. Rhythm, mimesis & modernism 55

historical moment, and his conviction that literature had an important role in this change. His position began to emerge more definitely when he took over the editorship of the Athenaeum in 1919, inheriting a publication that had put itself at the forefront of a widespread, optimistic movement which aimed to use the state of flux existing after the First World War to radically remodel social and economic structures. Murry saw the necessity and possibility for this change to transform the spiritual basis of his society; his first issue as editor announced an essay competition titled ‘Spiritual Regeneration as a Basis of World reconstruction’.28 That Murry saw the arts, and particularly literature, as having a key role in effecting this regeneration is evident throughout his critical work. Indeed, Malcolm Woodfield characterises Murry’s whole adult life as ‘a series of attempts to live a “life of Art” (which was undogmatic, personal, even mystical) reconciled with the sense of an end (which was institutional, “objective,” material) – or to reconcile the bifurcated aesthetic and moral directions of life.’29 The ‘spiritual regeneration’ of the Athenaeum essay competition was then an ongoing concern. It was to this end that he founded the Adelphi in 1923, as he writes later: ‘in another age, I do not doubt that I should have marched off with staff and scrip to spread the gospel in the highways; being set in the twentieth century, I launched a magazine to carry the good tidings.’30 In ‘The “Classical” Revival’ (1926), Murry can be seen engaging directly with the relationship between the arts and the atmosphere of the postwar period, with its well- documented, potent sense of irrevocable change. He claims that the period itself is inherently romantic, because ‘there is no order in modern experience, because there is no accepted principle of order’.31 This is based on definitions of classicism as a tendency towards organisation, and romanticism as rebellion against that organisation. This allows Murry to challenge the mimetic capabilities of classicism, though not on the grounds of its preoccupation with form. Rather, he sees classicist aesthetics as lacking congruity with the world it seeks to represent. It is on this basis that he challenges the classical revival that Hulme, among others, had talked of, dismissing a trend in mainstream literary culture towards what he calls ‘cynical’

28 Goldie, Critical Difference, 34. 29 Woodfield, ‘Introduction,’ 6. 30 Murry, God, 41. 31 Murry, Defending Romanticism, 179. Rhythm, mimesis & modernism 56

classicism as being borne of superficial disenchantment about the failures of the postwar reconstruction movement.32 He argues that the works of ‘serious’ classicists, writers like Eliot and Woolf who he says critically espouse ‘pro-classical velleities – for order and clarity and decorum’, ultimately fail in their own aims. 33 Murry attributes this failure to the deep mimetic motivations of serious writers: he suggests that such writers remain committed to representing their real experience of what he calls the ‘modern consciousness’, which classical, formal approaches are unable to encompass because the experience itself is inherently romantic.34 That is, for Murry, a properly classical work cannot fulfil its author’s mimetic ambitions in the chaos of postwar modernity; modernist mimesis must be romantic. The conception of the profounder reality held by the authors studied in this thesis can be traced to both spiritual and scientific ways of thinking. Murry actively sought to combine artistic or religious and scientific thought. This is apparent in ‘Romanticism and the Tradition’, where he predicts that ‘there will be a known harmony between the mysterious and as yet undiscovered reality which lies beneath the world of material phenomena and the reality of ourselves.’35 Here Murry expresses the expectation of an epistemic and even, to his thinking, scientific discovery in a prophetic tone that reveals its religious qualities. Such comparative exploration of science, religion and art is a recurring feature of Murry’s thinking. In ‘Towards a Synthesis’ (1927), he argues that the separation of faith and reason – in particular the Thomist philosophy that Eliot espoused – was no longer appropriate to his time given the ‘rejection’, since the Renaissance, of ‘the notion of the incomprehensibility of ultimate reality’.36 He posits that post-Renaissance European cultural history has established an opposition of art and science in place of the Thomist synthesis, and that this changes ‘the fabric of human experience’.37 Murry argues, though, that a synthesis akin to that of St. Thomas is necessary, and proposes reason as the ‘new synthesis’ of ‘intelligence’ and ‘intuition’, or ‘knowledge of the quantitative, and

32 For further discussion of this disillusionment, see Samuel Hynes, A War Imagined: The First World War and English Culture (London: Pimlico, 1992); Goldie, Critical Difference, 34-38. 33 Murry, Defending Romanticism, 179. 34 Murry, Defending Romanticism, 178. 35 Murry, Defending Romanticism, 141. Emphasis original. 36 Murry, Defending Romanticism, 191. 37 Murry, Defending Romanticism, 193, 92. Rhythm, mimesis & modernism 57

knowledge of the qualitative world’.38 Such attempts to hybridise science and religion are symptomatic of a desire for an explanation of the universe that provides a sense of higher meaning while remaining grounded in Enlightenment ideals of scientific discovery. The concept of rhythm provides one such explanation. Moreover, for some the recognition or discovery of this profounder reality is considered a stage in the narrative of human progress, and is influenced by scientistic appropriation of the theory of evolution. Murry is sometimes an extreme example of this view. He considered humanity to be on a path of spiritual as well as biological, social and cultural evolution. By the end of the 1920s, particularly in God, Murry was ready to offer his own ‘hypothesis of human evolution.’ 39 According to this hypothesis, Jesus Christ, along with Shakespeare and Keats, are properly to be considered examples of ‘a new kind of man, literally, scientifically; a new species of the genus homo’.40 This radical idea is based on what Murry understands as Jesus’ ‘apprehension in immediate experience of an all-pervading Unity’, which for Murry is the ‘undiscovered reality’, and ‘the perfection of his obedience’ to this unity.41 Thus, in God, Murry attempts to reconcile religion and science, equating ‘God’ with ‘organism’ as two ‘means of description’ of the same universal organisation, and asserting that ‘the so-called spiritual is absolutely continuous with the biological. There is no dividing line between them.’42 Here, Murry’s conviction about the existence of a profounder reality is plainly evident. The concept of rhythm can be seen to underpin and connect a variety of early-twentieth-century explorations of this ‘undiscovered reality’, especially ones that attempt to reconcile artistic and scientific ways of knowing. The ‘intuition’, popularised during this period by the work of Henri Bergson, was considered central to apprehending this ‘undiscovered reality’. Though it is not a major theoretical coordinate in this thesis, Bergson’s thinking forms essential context for both Murry’s later explicitly romanticist aesthetics, and indeed certain aspects of this thesis as a whole. Bergson’s ideas were immensely popular in the early decades of

38 Murry, Defending Romanticism, 194-95. 39 Murry, God, 118. 40 Murry, God, 111. Murry had already published books on Keats and Shakespeare (1925) and The Life of Jesus (1926). 41 Murry, God, 116. 42 Murry, God, 279, 41. Rhythm, mimesis & modernism 58

the twentieth century. In ‘An Introduction to Metaphysics’ (1903), Bergson explains intuition as ‘the kind of intellectual sympathy by which one places oneself within an object in order to coincide with what is unique in it and consequently inexpressible.’ This is contrasted to analysis, which he defines as ‘the operation which reduces the object to elements already known, that is, to elements common both to it and other objects.’43 For Bergson, intuition is a means of ‘possessing a reality absolutely instead of knowing it relatively’.44 As well as his theory of the primacy of intuitive knowledge, his notions of durée (duration), or experienced time, and the élan vital, a life force which animates and drives the universe, became touchstones for a wide variety of early twentieth-century thinkers and writers. From the first, these ideas received strong criticism from such quarters as the philosopher Bertrand Russell, and the nature of Bergson’s positive reception is perhaps indicated by the fact that he won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1927, a testament to the aesthetic appeal of his thinking rather than its rigour. However, despite the considerable criticism that Bergson received, those three ideas, along with other aspects of his work, had an immense influence on modernist culture. Murry’s first little magazine, Rhythm, is a clear example of this. The magazine was launched at the peak of Bergson’s popularity in the summer of 1911, and the philosopher’s intellectual presence is explicit from the very first issue.45 Bergson’s concept of the intuition informs Murry’s model of the role and methods of the artist. In ‘Art and Philosophy’, Murry uses this idea as the foundation for an aesthetic ideal, arguing that ‘We attain to the truth not by that reason which must deny the fact of continuity and of creative evolution, but by pure intuition, by the immediate vision of the artist in form.’46 Here, the formal characteristics of a work of art are equated with intuition, when Murry suggests that form is able to convey the kind of reality accessible only via the intuitive faculties.

43 Henri Bergson, Selections from Bergson (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1949), 4. Emphasis original. 44 Bergson, Selections from Bergson, 5. 45 See especially Murry, ‘Art and Philosophy.’ The atmosphere of the time around Bergson is sketched at Frederick Burwick and Paul Douglass, ‘Introduction,’ in The Crisis in Modernism: Bergson and the Vitalist Controversy, ed. Frederick Burwick and Paul Douglass (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 2-3. 46 Murry, ‘Art and Philosophy,’ 9. Rhythm, mimesis & modernism 59

Murry’s aesthetic applications of Bergson’s concept of intuition are associated with the importance of rhythm in his and his colleagues’ thinking. This correlation is developed in ‘The Meaning of Rhythm’ (June 1912), an essay co-written by Murry and Mansfield, who was by then serving as assistant editor for Rhythm. Counter- intuitively, the word ‘rhythm’ appears only twice in the whole essay: in the title, and as the final word of the piece, leading Faith Binckes to quip that the piece ‘didn’t attempt anything so rash as the definition its title promised’.47 Yet this selective use of the word does broaden its potential ‘meaning’ significantly. More obviously though, the essay aims to reclaim intuition as not merely the province of, as the authors put it, religious mania, pregnant women, and intellectual incompetence. Instead they advance intuition as a term that might replace the ‘democratic’ idea of inspiration, which they denounce because its implication of an external source for creativity denies the agency of the artist and the importance of personality, or individuality. Murry and Mansfield assert that ‘Intuition is a purely aristocratic quality. It is the power of divining individuality in other persons and other things. This divination brings with it a boundless admiration for the individuality divined.’48 There is an unabashed elitism about this definition, the substance of which reappears in Mansfield’s non-fiction writing throughout her life, as an appreciation for those who ‘know how to live’. Leaving this aspect of the argument to one side, however, this claim recalls Murry’s own admiration of Fergusson’s possession of a distinctive personal rhythm, ‘that essential living positive thing’.49 This suggests that it is Murry’s capacity for intuition that allowed him to discern this quality in Fergusson, and thus that the faculty for intuition is involved in the recognition of such abstract conceptions of rhythm. Murry and Mansfield insist on intuition as essential to the artist’s vocation: ‘only by this understanding […] does the artist create, for in this admiration alone does he realize himself. He recognizes his own absolute freedom in divining the freedom of others. He has found reality […]’.50 Notions of ‘finding’ reality and self-understanding are cross-pollinated here, so that self-expression and representation of the external world are apparently conceived as intertwined and

47 Binckes, Reading Rhythm, 115. 48 John Middleton Murry and Katherine Mansfield, ‘The Meaning of Rhythm,’ Rhythm 2, no. 5 (1912): 18. 49 Murry, Between Two Worlds, 156. 50 Murry and Mansfield, ‘The Meaning of Rhythm,’ 18. Rhythm, mimesis & modernism 60

interdependent processes. Thus they link the work of art directly to intuitive knowledge of an abstract register of ‘reality’, obliquely positing a kind of higher mimesis as an essential ideal for art. This strange but important essay is emblematic of an aesthetic position in which rhythm is identified with both life and art. As I will show, Lawrence and Woolf (though to different extents and employing differing terms) shared this position with Murry and Mansfield. In ‘The Meaning of Rhythm’, Murry and Mansfield use overtly rhythmic literary construction to rhetorically establish this conceptual connection. The essay as a whole lacks a clear logical organisation: instead its abstract concepts are presented in circular, repetitive, rhetorically-charged sentences in which concrete meaning is continually deferred. Sentences and clauses are interlocked, through a chain of alternating repetitions of key words like divine, individual, generosity, freedom, and reality. This undoubtedly careful rhythmic construction is maintained and intensified until the final, short paragraph of the essay, by which point Murry and Mansfield have reached an incantatory level of rhythmic determination:

Art and the artist are perfectly at one. Art is free; the artist is free. Art is real; the artist is real. Art is individual; the artist is individual. Their unity is ultimate and unassailable. It is the essential movement of Life. It is the splendid adventure, the eternal quest for rhythm.51

This closing passage stresses, with increased linguistic concision and rhetorical intensity, an intimate connection or even equivalence between the essence of ‘life’, art and the artist. Not only does the essay have a rhythmic rhetorical power of its own, especially in this paragraph, but its eddying structure also leads all previous discussion of these key words to a definition of rhythm, by landing as it does on a cryptic answer to the question raised in the article’s title. Unpacked, this passage points toward a mimetic model of art in which rhythm functions as both subject and method of mimesis. According to Murry and Mansfield, firstly, art and artist are one: that is, art is the natural expression or extension of the artist’s being, rather than an artificial product created by them. They posit this organic model of art – the unity of art and artist – as the ‘essential movement of Life’ itself, that is as equivalent to creation or in Bergsonian terms, creative evolution. They redefine this ‘essential

51 Murry and Mansfield, ‘The Meaning of Rhythm,’ 20. Rhythm, mimesis & modernism 61

movement’ in turn as the ‘eternal quest for rhythm’: rhythm is, as a fundamental quality of art, the way to and also the essence of the ‘profounder reality’ that Murry had identified in ‘Aims and Ideals’. Murry and his colleagues at Rhythm propounded the ideals of what Fergusson had termed the ‘modern movement’.52 These are set out in Murry’s early editorial writing for the magazine, which Binckes has convincingly argued should be classed as seminal modernist manifestoes.53 He repeatedly invokes a dynamic between universal rhythms and artistic rhythms. For instance, in ‘Art and Philosophy’, printed in mid- 1911 in the magazine’s first issue, Murry states that art:

is imperishable because through all the ages it is life; because the artist’s vision is a moment’s lifting of the veil, a chord caught and remembered from the vast world music, less or more, yet always another bond between us and the great divinity immanent in the world.54

Here, Murry’s metaphor emphasises an idea of human art as a minor iteration of a universal quality, which is rhythm. He also asserts the organic essence of art: this mimicry of the ‘vast world music’ is also a fragment of that music. This suggests a nuanced conception of mimesis, in which the subject is in some senses continuous with the mimetic product, that is the artwork. Even more directly, in ‘Aims and Ideals’, Murry promises to promote visual and literary art ‘which shall be vigorous, determined, which shall have its roots below the surface, and be the rhythmical echo of the life with which it is in touch. Both in its pity and its brutality it shall be real.’55 In this reiteration, Murry’s ideal of art as rhythmic mimesis is plainly expressed: art echoes, through rhythm, life itself. Here, the transcendent ‘great divinity’ is replaced by more earthly powers: human emotion, animal instinct and botanical imagery are bound together, suggesting primitivist influences.56 Many modernists also looked to rhythm to explain the essential qualities of individual people, the workings of human psychology, and thus ideal ways of living.

52 Murry, Between Two Worlds, 156. 53 Faith Binckes, ‘Lines of Engagement: Rhythm, reproduction, and the textual dialogues of early modernism,’ in Little Magazines & Modernism: New Approaches, ed. S. W. Churchill and A. McKible (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), 23. 54 Murry, ‘Art and Philosophy,’ 9. 55 Murry, ‘Aims and Ideals,’ 36. 56 Angela Smith and Peter Brooker have both noted Fauvist influences on the magazine. Angela Smith, ‘Fauvism and Cultural Nationalism,’ interventions 4, no. 1 (2002); Brooker, ‘Harmony, Discord, and Difference: Rhythm (1911-13), The Blue Review (1913), and The Signature (1915).’ Rhythm, mimesis & modernism 62

Murry arrived at this conception of rhythm early in his career. He writes in Between Two Worlds that around 1911, one of the ‘tremendous significances’ that he found in the word rhythm was sparked by his friend Fergusson: ‘His being had natural laws which it obeyed: mine had none. So rhythm came to mean for me that essential living positive thing – whatever it might be – which I was acutely conscious that I lacked and F— possessed.’ 57 A number of Murry’s contemporaries similarly saw an individual rhythm as a defining aspect of a person, or even of their very being or soul. The related idea that rhythm is an ‘essential living positive thing’ that one can or should possess or be in touch with is also common, as will be seen in forthcoming chapters. Murry is also typical of these writers in considering the arts, especially literature, to be rhythmically consonant with these human rhythms, and indeed to be morally compelled to express them. In ‘Romanticism and the Tradition’ (1924) Murry claims that to fully understand a work of art we must consider it ‘a manifestation of the rhythm of the soul of the man who created it.’58 At its most conventional level, this statement defines the ideal work of art as a kind of subjective mimesis, a personal expression of feeling, experience or being. But for Murry, the ‘soul’ is described in rhythmic terms. Further, as a ‘manifestation’ of this soul rhythm, a work of art is posited as a physical version or extension of that personal rhythm, a textual rendering; the rhythm of a literary work is considered continuous with the individual rhythm of its author. In ‘Romanticism and the Tradition’, Murry characterises such rhythmic expression as a religious and epistemological exercise. Having formulated the relationship between science and literature as a division of epistemic labour, he writes that the pursuit of the ‘undiscovered reality’, which was once the province of religion, has since the Renaissance been divided between science and literature: ‘Science took upon itself the fulfilment of the outward exploration, literature the fulfilment of the inward exploration of life’.59 Indeed, he redefines religion as a natural instinct, ‘a fundamental rhythm of man’s being […] which must be fulfilled in literature which is primarily an expression of that being.’60 In this way, rhythmic

57 Murry, Between Two Worlds, 156. 58 Murry, Defending Romanticism, 133. 59 Murry, Defending Romanticism, 145. 60 Murry, Defending Romanticism, 143. Rhythm, mimesis & modernism 63

mimesis is for Murry crucial to the project of human spiritual and even biological development. In this first section, I have used Murry’s voice to crystallise the romantic attitude towards the role and nature of art in modernist literary culture. This attitude can be summed up as a belief in the power and duty of literature to represent a deeper, less tangible dimension of reality, and that this representation has a crucial role in the progressive development of humanity. Thus, according to this perspective, mimesis is a way of creating knowledge by uncovering this deeper reality through art, in parallel to the activities of science. For Murry and many of his contemporaries, this reality is discovered by the intuition, and is frequently conceived as rhythmic, whether in reference to the individual human or the universe as a whole. I argue that this perspective leads to experimentation with rhythm in literature, particularly as a method for evoking the fugitive, barely tangible aspects of an individual’s relation to the world and others, as well as broader conceptions of the rhythmic organisation of existence. The second half of this chapter addresses the ways that such experimentation can be connected to this metaphysical and aesthetic philosophy. In particular, I situate the development of the modernist short story in relation to a widespread discourse on rhythm in prose and poetry. I argue that this discourse responds or relates closely to the desire to encapsulate a ‘profounder reality’. While discussion of the short story before 1930 is somewhat sparse, we can locate a kind of mediated reflection on the form in modernist re-evaluations of rhythm, prose and poetry.

Rhythmic mimesis and modernist formal experimentation The modernist interest in blending poetry and prose has something to do with those romantic paradigms that brought the mundane into closer relation with the spiritual or metaphysical. The explosion of experimentation with free verse and to a lesser extent prose poetry led to broad discussions of the respective natures of prose and poetry, and of the relationship between them.61 Prose and poetry could be defined formally, in terms of technical differences like rhythm, diction and typographical presentation. Or, they could be distinguished by less concrete conventions about their

61 Though the two may be considered interchangeable, I use the term ‘free verse’ rather than ‘vers libre’ throughout, except as appropriate in quotation. Rhythm, mimesis & modernism 64

respective domains in terms of subjects, aims or capacities. Chris Beyers suggests that many writers at the time leaned towards the latter, believing that ‘poetry operated on a different plane of consciousness and sought a different kind of understanding than prose did’.62 He argues that this attitude was carried over from the previous century, and that definitions of prose and poetry that follow ‘Thomas De Quincey’s distinction between the “literature of knowledge,” which informs its reader, and the “literature of power,” which moves its reader,’ remained influential for modernism.63 Beyers explains that this definition of ‘poetry as an exalted means of expression that moves its reader resulted in various writers deciding that prose works were poems’.64 Put another way, some writers were interested in finding ways to combine the two conventionally distinct kinds of literature in ways that better reflected understandings of the world or of human consciousness as indivisible unities. This perspective can be seen across a range of positions in the modernist critical canon. Without implying that Eliot nurtured secret romantic sympathies, a sense of the indivisibility of human experience does underlie his rejection of what he termed the ‘dissociation of sensibility’ in ‘The Metaphysical Poets’ (1921). In that essay he advocates a return to a seventeenth-century, pre-romantic approach to poetry, in which the disparate experiences of falling in love, reading philosophy, and even ‘the noise of the typewriter or the smell of cooking […] are always forming new wholes.’65 Accordingly, in ‘Prose and Verse’ (1921), his sceptical contribution to the Chapbook’s special prose poetry issue, Eliot positions the distinction between poetry as ‘the language of emotion and imagination’ and prose as ‘the language of thought and ratiocination’ as out of date.66 Rather, he maintains an argument put forward in ‘The Borderline of Prose’ (1917) – an earlier article on Richard Aldington’s prose poetry – that since the choice of subject matter is open, the ‘distinction between

62 Chris Beyers, A History of Free Verse (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2001), 57. 63 Beyers, History of Free Verse, 57. 64 Beyers, History of Free Verse, 57. 65 Eliot, Selected Essays, 287. Eliot’s championing of the intellect’s place in poetry echoes Ezra Pound’s 1917 review of Eliot’s own Prufrock and Other Observations. Pound argues in that piece for the immanence of emotion in intelligence, and praises the emotional value of Eliot’s rhythms. Ezra Pound, Literary Essays of Ezra Pound (Norfolk, Conn.: New Directions, 1954), 420-22. 66 This special issue, which consisted of three essays on the topic, by Eliot, Aldington and Australian writer Frederic Manning, substantiates Julia Nelsen’s claim that ‘especially during the modernist period, the prose poem has been used and understood as a means of questioning and rethinking the very notions of form and genre’. Julia Nelsen, ‘Modernist Laboratories: The Prose Poem and the Little Magazines,’ Letteratura e letterature Supp (2010): 47. Rhythm, mimesis & modernism 65

poetry and prose must be a technical distinction’.67 Yet in ‘A Note on Poetry in Prose’ (1921), his own essay for the Chapbook issue, Aldington defends the term and genre of the prose poem using a similar argument: that ‘human ideas, sentiments, perceptions, emotions, feelings, are not arranged in two separate categories labelled “prose” and “poetry,” but are interfused and interdependent.’68 To Aldington, this means that it makes sense to explore hybrid forms. Eliot and Aldington are representative of modernist discourse on poetry and prose in that while they disagree about the formal ramifications, they concur on the more fundamental issues of the mimetic aims of hybrid forms and on the indivisibility of the subject of that mimesis, the heart and mind. The shift in conceptions of poetry and prose can therefore be described as a loosening rather than a severing of the traditional bond between their formal and non-formal qualities. Many modernist writers were interested in the possibilities of some kind of fusion of poetry and prose, though they disagreed about the level at which this might occur or how it should be described. Hence, while Eliot consistently objected to the ‘technical’ intermixing of poetry and prose, he accepted the value of combining them on thematic or more abstract levels. This is evident in ‘The Borderline of Prose’, in which Eliot insists that the ‘the only absolute distinction to be drawn is […] that there is prose rhythm and verse rhythm.’69 He argues that Aldington’s prose poems ‘fail exactly because they seek to evade the technical distinction between two forms.’70 Yet in the same article he also admits the possibility of a ‘peculiar pleasure from seeing something done well in one form which we had thought necessarily confined to the other’.71 So for Eliot, Aldington’s poems are unsuccessful because they attempt to force a combination of the formal rhythms of prose and poetry, rather than infusing prose with the essence of poetry, which here is implicitly linked to subject matter. While insisting on the primacy of rhythmic distinction between them, Eliot also subscribes to the idea of prose and poetry each possessing an innate abstract essence,

67 T.S. Eliot, ‘The Borderline of Prose,’ The New Statesman (1917): 159. 68 Richard Aldington, ‘A Note on Poetry in Prose,’ The Chapbook, no. 22 (1921): 17. 69 Eliot, ‘Borderline,’ 158. 70 Eliot, ‘Borderline,’ 159. 71 Eliot cites Alexander Pope’s poem ‘The Rape of the Lock’ (1712) and Gustave Flaubert’s novel Madame Bovary (1856) as successful examples of such hybrid works. Eliot, ‘Borderline,’ 158. Rhythm, mimesis & modernism 66

thematic domain or aesthetic quality, though not to the narrow intrinsic connection of these to form. Free verse and prose poetry were frequently seen as poetic forms that engaged the rhythms of prose in order to get closer to expressing truth or reality. Discussion of free verse often focused on its affinity with prose via its use of rhythm rather than metre.72 Many modernist writers denied the technical distinction stressed by Eliot, and indeed argued to the contrary that verse and prose form should be seen as opposing ends of an infinitely gradated spectrum of rhythmic intensity rather than as two mutually exclusive categories. Lowell is typical in emphasising cadence, or longer rhythms, in a definition of free verse in her unsigned preface to the first Some Imagist Poets anthology (1915). There she describes it as ‘all that increasing amount of writing whose cadence is more marked, more definite, and closer knit than that of prose, but which is not so violently nor so obviously accented as the so-called “regular verse.”’73 Pound expresses a similar opinion in defining free verse as approach to poetry focused on ‘a sense of music that takes count of the “shape” of the rhythm in a melody rather than of bar divisions’.74 Beyers highlights how free verse poets such as Lowell and Alice Corbin Henderson (an assistant editor of Poetry) defended their form as being ‘closer to the essential nature of poetry than traditional verse’, suggesting that a break with rigid meter equates to a break with artificiality.75 In an article titled ‘The Influence of Free Verse on Prose’ (1919), the American critic and academic Walter Pritchard Eaton connects the free verse abandonment of metre in favour of cadence to a desire to incorporate a particular aspect of everyday reality, describing free verse as organised ‘on the basis of those seemingly haphazard metres into which English speech is

72 For example, in his preface to the 1916 anthology of Some Imagist Poets Aldington cites Aristotle’s statement that ‘prose is rhythmical without being metrical’, with the implication that the free verse favoured by the imagists bore affinities to prose, as a ‘verse-form based upon cadence’. Richard Aldington, ‘Preface,’ in Some Imagist Poets, ed. Amy Lowell (Boston & New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1916), xii, ix. 73 Amy Lowell, ‘Preface,’ in Some Imagist Poets, ed. Richard Aldington and H. D. (Boston & New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1915), vii. Harriet Monroe also rejects scientific attempts to ‘draw with more or less definiteness a line between the rhythms of prose and verse’. She instead places strict metrical verse opposite to ‘common journalese’ on a cyclical continuum, with many shades in between. Harriet Monroe, Poets & Their Art (Freeport, NY: Books for Libraries Press, 1967), 309-10. 74 Pound, Literary Essays, 421. Monroe likewise argues that both verse and poetic prose are characterised by a returning ‘curve’ of cadence.’ Monroe, Poets & Their Art, 290. 75 Beyers, History of Free Verse, 19. Rhythm, mimesis & modernism 67

forever falling, – on rhythm’.76 This suggestion that ordinary conversation of any language is naturally iambic was quite common, indeed according to Aldington, Aristotle had remarked upon this too.77 Eaton’s idea that free verse appropriates naturally occurring spoken rhythms suggests a belief that prose rhythms are thus in some respects more real, and also indicates his assumption that the mimesis of such rhythms is of some value. The idea of poetry taking on prose characteristics was widely held to be desirable as a way of bringing poetry closer to real life. Beyers argues that modernists such as Eliot and Pound advocated the introduction of ‘prose virtues’ into their poetry because they associated them with stylistic clarity.78 However, close attention to modernist commentary reveals the prevalence of the idea that prose qualities could provide greater mimetic capacity. In Pound’s ‘A Few Don’ts by an Imagiste’, first published in Poetry in March 1913, imagists insisted that ‘the natural object is always the adequate symbol’, and cautioned against mixing the abstract and the concrete,79 which as Michael Levenson observes, amounts to a ‘strict confinement of art to the physically and psychologically given; there is no superior realm to which this is inferior’.80 Echoing Wordsworth, Lowell added ‘the language of common speech’ and the ‘exact word’ to the imagists’ guiding principles a couple of years later.81 All of this makes it clear why Ford Madox Ford praised imagism as ‘realist’, concerned with the material and the everyday in a way previously associated with prose.82 Similarly, in ‘Prose and Verse’ (1921) Eliot links prose to life, seeing the adoption of these in poetry as part of the development of the form: ‘verse is always struggling, while

76 Walter Prichard Eaton, ‘The Influence of Free Verse on Prose,’ The Atlantic Monthly 124 (1919): 492. Eaton asserts that English ‘prose often falls into iambics […] and other metres as well, though not so often.’ Eaton bases this argument, as do many of his contemporaries, on scientific studies of rhythm: ‘The experiments of Dr. William Morrison Patterson at Columbia have clearly shown the tendency of men and women to break up any group of sounds into rhythms, and the English language, strongly accented as it is, peculiarly invites rhythmic arrangement.’ Eaton, ‘The Influence of Free Verse on Prose,’ 491. 77 Aldington, ‘Preface,’ xii. 78 Beyers, History of Free Verse, 59. 79 Pound, Literary Essays, 5. Emphasis original. 80 Michael Levenson, A Genealogy of Modernism: A Study of English Literary Doctrine, 1908-1922 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 110. 81 Lowell, ‘Preface,’ vi. Monroe, too, looked for ‘common speech’ in poetry: this is one of the reasons that she praises Aldington’s poem ‘Choricos’, which she claims to be the first imagist poem published. Monroe, Poets & Their Art, 317. 82 For discussion of Ford on imagism and impressionism as varieties of realism, see Levenson, Genealogy of Modernism, 107-08. Rhythm, mimesis & modernism 68

remaining verse, to take up to itself more and more of what is prose, to take something more from life and turn it into “play.”’ He suggests that in fact poetry should take on even more of the prosaic, that ‘the real failure of the mass of contemporary verse is its failure to draw anything new from life into art.’83 A strong appreciation for prose as itself an important art form is also evident among many modernists. Although some maintained a definition of poetry as a term designating high art, an insistence on the difficulty and importance of good prose is common. Aldington is one of the more direct exponents of using the term poetry to indicate ‘creation’ and ‘style’. 84 For him, poetry is creative, finely wrought and meaningful, while prose is mere craft, dull and ordinary. Thus, Aldington sees ‘poet’ as an honorific title, and the term ‘poetry’ a signifier of profound and excellent art, rather than a descriptor of a particular quality or category. By this criterion Aldington identifies Proust, James and Conrad as poets.85 On the other hand, for Eaton it is free verse’s adoption of prosaic qualities – both ‘the subjects of contemporary life in contemporary language, and in the natural rhythms of the speaking voice’ – that makes the form more engaging for readers of his time. He also predicts that this would in turn raise the general estimation of prose as an art form in its own right: ‘an enriching of prose, a renewed appreciation of its finer beauties and capacities’.86 Many had already expressed this renewed appreciation: in ‘A Few Don’ts’, Pound refers to ‘the unspeakably difficult art of good prose’, while Eliot alike insists on valuing prose on its own terms, stating that ‘If the writing of prose can be an art just as the writing of verse can be an art, we do not seem to require any other admission.’87 The notion that rhythm has various mimetic capacities is protean and widespread. One of the best-known expressions of this is Ezra Pound’s 1912 espousal of the idea of ‘absolute rhythm’ in poetry, ‘which corresponds exactly to the emotion or shade of emotion to be expressed. 88 Indeed, the assumption of an innate connection between an idea and its rhythmic expression was a significant motivation

83 T. S. Eliot, ‘Prose and Verse,’ Chapbook: A Monthly Miscellany, no. 22 (1921): 9. 84 Aldington, ‘A Note on Poetry in Prose,’ 17. 85 Aldington, ‘A Note on Poetry in Prose.’; Richard Aldington, ‘The Art of Poetry,’ Fortnightly 113, no. 673 (1923): 117. 86 Eaton, ‘The Influence of Free Verse on Prose,’ 494. 87 Pound, Literary Essays, 5; Eliot, ‘Prose and Verse,’ 9. 88 In ‘Prolegomena’, first published in February 1912 in Harold Monro’s Poetry Review. Pound, Literary Essays, 9. Rhythm, mimesis & modernism 69

for experimentation with poetry and prose. Eliot and Aldington alike insist on the connection between the concept behind the work of art and its formal manifestation. Eliot explains that ideas find ‘their proper expression’ in either prose or poetry (that is, in ‘prose rhythm’ or ‘verse rhythm’), ‘because they seem to have come to their author already clothed in that form’.89 So for Eliot, ideas come with either prose or verse rhythms attached. Though Aldington insists that poetry is not a formal category defined by metre, language, rhyme or typography, his assertion that it is instead ‘the vision in a man’s soul which he translates as best he can with the means at his disposal’ also implies a necessary link between idea and its formal expression.90 The notion, apparent in Aldington’s comment, that literary rhythm can express unique aspects of the writer’s personality or even being, had a lot of currency in modernist discussions of literary experimentation with genre. Pound praises Eliot’s poetry for his success in this regard, claiming that ‘Mr Eliot is one of the very few who have given a personal rhythm, and identifiable quality of sound as well as of style.’91 Likewise, Lowell declares that ‘we believe that the individuality of a poet may often be better expressed in free-verse than in conventional forms. In poetry, a new cadence means a new idea.’92 These echo Murry’s feeling, in relation to Fergusson, that an individual can have a personal rhythm that can be made manifest in art. The various rhythms of the body, especially the breath, figured as important measures for literary rhythms, and mimetically responding to them was held to assist in emotional expression too. In his recent book, Michael Golston uncovers ‘how theories of poetic rhythm during the Modernist period paralleled and in some cases were informed by contemporary theoretical and experimental work done on the rhythms of the human body.’93 Frederic Manning’s essay on ‘Poetry in Prose’ for the Chapbook’s 1921 special issue provides a paradigmatic instance of this. Though his attitude is in common with many of his contemporaries, Manning is idiosyncratic in explicitly following Plato and Aristotle in defining poetry ‘as mimesis, its object as

89 Eliot, ‘Borderline,’ 158. 90 Aldington, ‘Preface,’ xii. 91 Pound, Literary Essays, 422. 92 Lowell, ‘Preface,’ vii. 93 Golston, Rhythm and Race, 1. Golston observes that poets and critics had been thinking about the relation between the body and poetry since at least the mid-nineteenth century. He quotes Ralph Waldo Emerson arguing that ‘Metre begins with pulse-beat, and the length of lines in songs and poems is determined by the inhalation and exhalation of the lungs.’ Golston, Rhythm and Race, 47-48. Rhythm, mimesis & modernism 70

katharsis’.94 He proposes that ‘the rhythm of prose depends entirely upon breathing, [so] it reflects perfectly the physical distress of one labouring under any passion, or touched either by sorrow or joy. It may be completely mimetic.’95 By synthesising the classical definition of poetry as mimesis with the notions that human physiology has something to do with the accurate expression of emotion, and that prose is natural, Manning insists on the unique mimetic capacity of prose. Thus, Manning not only argues that rhythm has something to do with personal expression, but makes explicit what goes unspoken in the many discussions of free verse’s appropriation of prose rhythms: the idea that prose rhythms are in many ways closer to life. This conception of rhythm as a powerful mimetic tool is not constrained to personal emotional expression. It also applies to evoking the broader external universe. A vision of the material universe as rhythmic, and of the arts’ relationship to that universe as intimately connected through rhythm was popular during the early twentieth century. One very clear instance of this is found in ‘A Word About Prosody’ (1922), an editorial for the Chicago-based journal Poetry: A Magazine of Verse written by the magazine’s founding editor Harriet Monroe. Like Murry, Monroe invokes a variety of scientific endeavours to support a conception of the universe itself as unified by rhythms:

Rhythm is of course a universal principle, the very pulse-beat of life and of all the arts. From the amoeba to man, from the atom to the star, rhythm, or power moving regularly in time-beats, is a recognizable law which all creation must obey. The more closely modern science studies the universe – through microscope, telescope, or the naked eye and brain of man – the more astonishing and magnificent becomes this infinite harmony: an intricate weaving of small patterns within great ones, a march of ordered melody, outreaching human eyes and ears, outracing even the human imagination.96

There is a sense here that these cosmic, physical, thermodynamic and biological rhythms are meaningful or at least beautiful: they are harmonious, melodious, intricate – aesthetically arranged. Moreover, Monroe goes on to define the arts as

94 Frederic Manning, ‘Poetry in Prose,’ The Chapbook, no. 22 (1921): 11. 95 Manning, ‘Poetry in Prose,’ 15. 96 Monroe, Poets & Their Art, 285. Rhythm, mimesis & modernism 71

both imitative of and participating in the natural rhythms that are observed by science: ‘The arts are an effort to join in, to weave little imitation patterns, sound little imitation tunes.’97 In other words, she characterises artistic endeavours as intrinsically mimetic, indeed as actual mimicry of the natural rhythms she describes. Yet at the same time, by describing the relation between these two categories of rhythm as a ‘joining in’, Monroe suggests a continuity between world and work. Artistic ‘rhythm’ (here the term is used loosely, even symbolically) is but another ‘small pattern’ that interweaves with the ‘infinite harmony’ of universal rhythms. In Lefebvrian terms, Monroe’s naturally polyrhythmic universe is at once artistic or isorhythmic: the ‘infinite harmony’ suggests a unifying and, crucially, beautiful overall rhythm. At the same time, artistic rhythms are for her a natural part of the organic polyrhythmia of the universe. Monroe is representative of a little-acknowledged dimension of modernism in that she saw poetry as having an essential role in modernisation. In this way, she shared Murry’s embrace of the principle of progress in the arts and its importance for society and culture, if not his more idiosyncratic beliefs in its role in the metabiological evolution of humanity itself. Through Poetry, Monroe aimed to advance the art of modern poetry in both popularity and technique. John Timberman Newcomb argues that ‘More than any literary endeavour of its times, Monroe’s magazine challenged the prevailing notion that poetry had no business in urban- industrial modernity.’98 She saw her era as a scientific one, and scientists, engineers and inventors as the great American pioneers of the age. For this reason she saw it as supremely important both that the poet be in touch with the ‘spirit’ of the day, that science, mathematics, and machines, and for the tradition of poetry to be overhauled with the benefit of scientific research. Monroe’s interest in the possible benefits of a scientific approach to poetry centres on rhythmic developments. In ‘What Next?’ (1919), for example, she hopes that William Morrison Patterson’s work at Columbia University on measuring the rhythms of English would ‘aid the poet of the future to study the past with more

97 Monroe, Poets & Their Art, 285. 98 John Timberman Newcomb, ‘Poetry’s Opening Door: Harriet Monroe and American Modernism,’ in Little Magazines & Modernism: New Approaches, ed. Suzanne W. Churchill and Adam Mckible (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), 86. Rhythm, mimesis & modernism 72

knowledge, to rid himself of hampering and artificial restrictions, and to discover new possibilities of beauty in his art.’99 Although Monroe’s implied idea of the role of poetry and art is traditional, that is to create and convey beauty, she also believes that scientific knowledge can help poets to ‘discover’ new ways of fulfilling this role, as though beauty is a chemical element or a species of beetle. To this end, Monroe advocates a revolution in prosody – the rules of verse structure and metre – wherein the system inherited from the ancient grammarians and poets would be replaced by ‘a true science of speech-rhythms’.100 Monroe consistently saw this project as critically important because she believed in the benefits that a scientific approach might have for poetry. In ‘Rhythms of English Verse’ (1913), she maintains that the scientific study of poetic rhythm ‘is necessary in order to remove English poetic theory from the rack of ‘accentual’ prosody, and restore it to the great universal laws of rhythm, to which all music and the poetry of all languages must consciously or unconsciously conform.’ In this comment, Monroe’s belief in the need to actively investigate rhythmic engagement with ‘universal laws of rhythm’, that is the worldly rhythms she later outlines in ‘A Word About Prosody’. In this way she is representative of the modernist approach to literary rhythms: not only to see them as inherently mimetic of those of the world around, but also a central aim for the artist. An interest in the possibilities of prose rhythm appears in the late 1920s and 1930s, and can be seen to arise from the earlier discussions of poetry and prose linked to free verse and prose poetry. In 1927, the Bloomsbury novelist E. M. Forster delivered the Clark Lectures at Trinity College, Cambridge, which were published later that year as Aspects of the Novel. His penultimate talk and chapter focus on ‘Pattern and Rhythm’, both features he considers located mainly in plot, but also relating to characters and ‘any other element present’ in a piece of fiction. He admits the terms ‘pattern’ and ‘rhythm’ are both vague when applied to literature, but identifies them as important factors in the aesthetic pleasures of reading.101 Forster’s idea of pattern is visual – his examples are novels that he describes as hour-glass or

99 Monroe, Poets & Their Art, 212. 100 The new system Monroe espoused, in which old prosodic terminology would be replaced by musical terms, and represented diagrammatically with musical notation, is modelled on that of American poet and academic Sidney Lanier, set out in The Science of English Verse (1880). 101 E. M. Forster, Aspects of the Novel and related writings, ed. Oliver Stallybrass (London: Edward Arnold, 1974), 102. Rhythm, mimesis & modernism 73

chain shaped – and he argues that these patterns add to the ‘atmosphere’ or ‘mood’ of the book.102 On the other hand, he breaks rhythm in fiction into two categories, easy and difficult, which he illustrates with reference to music:

Rhythm is sometimes quite easy. Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, for instance, starts with the rhythm ‘diddidy dum’, which we can all hear and tap to. But the symphony as a whole has also a rhythm – which some people can hear but no one can tap to. This second sort of rhythm is difficult, and whether it is substantially the same as the first sort only a musician could tell us.103

Forster identifies easy rhythm as a source of beauty in the novel. He identifies this in the various recurring elements of Marcel Proust’s work, particularly in ‘the “little phrase” in the music of Vinteuil’, that help the book to ‘hang together’. Forster describes this cohesion as a looser, more flexible form of the rigid unity he ascribes to works constructed to a pattern.104 Difficult rhythm is a more abstract, or intuitively felt kind of rhythm; hesitantly, Forster posits that, while he cannot cite any parallels of ‘the rhythm of the Fifth Symphony as a whole’ in fiction, ‘it may be present.’105 His remark that only some people can hear difficult rhythm recalls Murry and Mansfield’s celebration of the intuitive artist in ‘The Meaning of Rhythm’. Most crucially though, Forster entertains the possibility that fiction may also be organised by a less definite kind of rhythm, which can be linked to the aim of evoking less tangible aspects of life. Forster displays not only a general aesthetic interest in rhythm in prose fiction, but the sense that rhythm enables fiction to connect with life and is therefore superior to pattern. He associates pattern in fiction with unity, rigidity and logic,106 arguing that its limitation is that ‘it shuts the doors on life and leaves the novelist doing exercises, generally in the drawing-room.’107 That is, for Forster pattern is a purely aesthetic addition to fiction, whereas rhythm has a certain kind of mimetic power through its affinity with ‘life’. This connection to life is based in his definition of

102 Forster, Aspects of the Novel, 103. 103 Forster, Aspects of the Novel, 112. E. K. Brown explicitly expands on Forster’s brief sketch of ‘easy’ and ‘difficult’ rhythm in chapters on ‘expanding symbols’ and ‘interweaving themes’ respectively, before examining Forster’s use of both in his novel A Passage to India (1924). E. K. Brown, Rhythm in the Novel (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1950). 104 Forster, Aspects of the Novel, 113. 105 Forster, Aspects of the Novel, 112. 106 Forster, Aspects of the Novel, 104. 107 Forster, Aspects of the Novel, 112. Rhythm, mimesis & modernism 74

rhythm as ‘repetition plus variation’, that is as a dynamic, developing feature rather than a static one.108 Thus, in the example he gives from Proust, he differentiates the recurrence of the ‘little phrase’ from a motif or ‘banner’ that accompanies particular characters and has a specific, set meaning, arguing that while a ‘banner can only reappear, rhythm can develop, and the little phrase [in Proust] has a life of its own’.109 This undoubtedly echoes statements such as Monroe’s about the power of literary rhythm both to create beauty and to evoke the rhythms of the world. The idea of rhythm having a life of its own is also integral to Forster’s idea of difficult rhythm, but it is life on a larger and less tangible scale. He tentatively proposes difficult rhythm in fiction as a feature that creates for the reader a sense of ‘Expansion. […] Not rounding off but opening out.’110 He returns to his musical analogy to illustrate his idea of difficult rhythm as something heard ‘that has never actually been played’: this effect, he suggests, is ‘achieved mainly (though not entirely) by the relation between the three big blocks of sound which the orchestra has been playing.’111 Forster argues that this rhythmic whole creates a sense of expansion, which can also be found in fiction. He proposes that Tolstoy’s War and Peace creates this effect: ‘as we read it, do not great chords begin to sound behind us, and when we have finished does not every item […] lead a larger existence than was possible at the time?’112 E. K. Brown takes up this idea in illustrating his interpretation of difficult rhythm – in Brown’s terms ‘interweaving themes’. Brown suggests that Woolf’s three- part novel To the Lighthouse (1927) interweaves the theme of the ‘splendour of life’ with melancholy and ‘decay, waste, death’, with the effect that ‘every item in the book, even Mrs. Ramsay’s darning, now leads for us a larger existence than was possible when we first knew of it’.113 Forster’s proposal that a rhythmic relation between parts of the work of fiction as a whole allows minor incidents, characters and even objects within the narrative to assume a ‘larger existence’, or perhaps a deeper significance, resonates with Murry’s much earlier ambition in Rhythm magazine of promoting art that ‘strikes deeper’. This kind of difficult rhythm may assist in expressing the less

108 Forster, Aspects of the Novel, 115. 109 Forster, Aspects of the Novel, 115. 110 Forster, Aspects of the Novel, 116. 111 Forster, Aspects of the Novel, 115. 112 Forster, Aspects of the Novel, 116. 113 Brown, Rhythm in the Novel, 65, 68-69. Rhythm, mimesis & modernism 75

tangible aspects of existence of human experience, whether categorised as physical or as spiritual in quality. Forster was by no means alone among his contemporaries in his interest in rhythm in prose and his connection of this rhythm to life; two other notable texts on prose point to a more widespread attention to the subject among critics associated with British modernism. One such text is English Prose Style (1928), which was written by poet and critic Herbert Read, whose journal Arts and Letters was one of the first to publish work by Eliot.114 The answer to the introductory question of this well-regarded primer, ‘what, in the abstract, is meant by Prose?’ places rhythm at the heart of the definition of prose itself.115 This distinguishes prose from poetry, Read asserts: poetry is creative expression, in which ‘both the thought and the word are Poetry’, so that the quality of poetry can be contained in a single word (his example is Shakespeare’s ‘incarnadine’). 116 Prose, by comparison, is for Read a form of constructive expression, ‘a structure of ready-made words’, which is why rhythm is so essential to it: for Read, prose ‘does not exist except in the phrase, and the phrase always has rhythm of some kind.’ Moreover, like Forster and many other contemporaries, Read connects the rhythm in prose to life itself; prose, he argues is ‘words as so much dead material given life, which life is rhythm.’117 This initial definition establishes the primary importance that Read places upon rhythm in prose. The text, which combines theorisation with more practical stylistic prescription, returns repeatedly to the role of rhythm throughout its chapters. A belief in the capacity of prose rhythm to mimetically convey thought is prominent both in Read’s book and in Modern Prose Style (1934) by Bonamy Dobrée. Dobrée was Professor of English Literature at the University of Leeds, and a close friend to both Read and Eliot.118 Dobrée claims that ‘the original prose writer’ has always aimed to ‘give objective reality to things, translate sight into sound’. In this, he

114 English Prose Style was a popular guide: it had gone through two editions and nine reprints by 1956. Read also authored Reason and Romanticism (1926), a book of criticism that contributed fuel to the debate on romanticism and classicism between Murry and Eliot by occasioning a review from Murry in the TLS, 8 July 1926, to which Eliot responded in his own review of Read’s book in the Criterion. Woodfield, ‘Introduction,’ 34. 115 Herbert Read, English Prose Style, New revised ed. (London: G. Bell and Sons, 1956), ix. 116 Read, English Prose Style, x. 117 Read, English Prose Style, xi. Emphasis original. 118 Like Read’s book, Modern Prose Style remained significant and was reprinted six times before a second edition was produced in 1964. Rhythm, mimesis & modernism 76

expressly links prose writing to mimesis. However, he also suggests that ‘the experimenter of today’ is interested in another, deeper kind of mimesis: they will want ‘to follow all the curious transitions of the mind, its evolutions, its twists, so as to give a closer illusion of reality.’119 To illustrate how this is done with syntactical experimentation, Dobrée turns at length to examples from John Rodker, John Dos Passos and Gertrude Stein. Dobrée argues that Stein in particular experiments with syntax in order to develop the hypnotic effect of being inside the mind of her characters. 120 He also notes approvingly that these three sample passages are stylistically plain, lacking metaphor or allusion, so that ‘we feel that we are being given reality, not a toy.’ A particular approach to rhythm is also key to this effect of unadorned reality, and Dobrée’s affiliation of prose with reality becomes clear as he goes on: ‘The musical phrase has given place to the drum-beat. It is an attempt to write prose untainted by poetry.’121 The modernist link between prose and reality is in some respects grounded in notions about the naturalness of everyday speech. Like Manning, Dobrée links the expression of the inner life – thought and feeling – with speech. He argues that in ‘modern writing’, there is much more flexibility in formal rhythms because written language had become closer to the spoken than it had previously been.122 Dobrée describes this shift as ‘a return to speech rhythms’, and as part of an attempt by modernist writers to develop ‘a style that will faithfully reflect their mind as it utters itself naturally.’123 Dobrée is describing a turn towards a mimesis that rests upon rhythm in pursuit of the representation of mind and voice, which are conflated. This interest in a connection between literary or artistic rhythm and a ‘real’ rhythm existing in people is a recurring one in modernist culture. This is seen in Murry’s conviction about rhythm encapsulating something otherwise ineffable about an individual’s being, or in Manning’s explanation of the value of prose poetry based on a link between physiological and emotional factors. For Dobrée, the interest in evoking the shape or passage of thought is a distinctively modern preoccupation; he suggests that writing has changed because ‘emotions have changed’, while writing also

119 Bonamy Dobrée, Modern Prose Style, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1964), 232-33. 120 Dobrée, Modern Prose Style, 240. 121 Dobrée, Modern Prose Style, 241. 122 Dobrée, Modern Prose Style, 214. 123 Dobrée, Modern Prose Style, 217. Rhythm, mimesis & modernism 77

changes culture – ‘the spirit of an age may not only be reflected in its prose, it may be, indeed it is, to some extent conditioned by it.’124 This modern interest is one, which as I show in the forthcoming chapters, is taken up in varying ways by Lawrence, Mansfield and Woolf. A self-conscious modernity is likewise apparent in Read’s book: like Dobrée, many of Read’s ideas about rhythm revolve around human thought and even the mind itself. Indeed, he proposes that ‘the whole subject of rhythm must be reconsidered in the light of gestalt psychology’, a theory of mind interested in how human brains process perceptions. He likens rhythm to a gestalt (a German word meaning ‘form, shape’), since the rhythm of either verse or prose can be seen as a unique entity that has ‘shape or form as one of its attributes’, though he echoes Forster’s aesthetic distinction between pattern and rhythm in stating that rhythm ‘is not an ideal form to which we fit our words’. Instead, for Read too, prose rhythm is a more natural, spontaneous phenomenon: ‘Rhythm is more profound than this. It is born, not with the words, but with the thought, and with whatever confluence of instincts and emotions the thought is accompanied.’125 Here, Read identifies the rhythm of pre-linguistic mental activity with that of prose, thereby proposing another kind of direct connection between rhythm and life. As he is writing in a guidebook to prose style, he also applies this theory to the technicalities of prose writing, focusing in particular on the paragraph. Read considers the paragraph to be a transcription of the rhythm of thought, and as such, the main unit of prose rhythm. That is, he suggests that a paragraph does not simply explore a single idea, it is ‘a plastic mass, and it takes its shape from the thought it has to express: its shape is the thought.’126 Read insists that the rhythm of each sentence ‘must be dissolved in a wider movement and this wider movement is the rhythm of the paragraph – a rhythm that begins with the first syllable of the paragraph and is not complete without the last syllable.’ 127 Read’s prescription indicates his conviction that there is a definite bond between subject and form. Dobrée seems to agree with Read’s idea that such rhythmic effects are a natural result of the chosen topic. Hence he avows that the ‘voice of sadness and utter resignation’

124 Dobrée, Modern Prose Style, 213. 125 Read, English Prose Style, 61. 126 Read, English Prose Style, 61. 127 Read, English Prose Style, 59. Rhythm, mimesis & modernism 78

he registers in the rhythm of Siegfried Sassoon’s novel Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man was not a conscious decision on the part of the author, but that ‘He could speak in no other way when he was saying that kind of thing.’128 It is apparent that each is advocating another iteration of Pound’s ‘absolute rhythm’ in poetry, which stipulates that every idea has an appropriate literary rhythm to express it. In this corpus of writing manuals there are traces of Murry’s certainty that literary rhythm can have an effect on the reader’s consciousness, as well as expressing the author’s mind. Dobrée repeatedly attributes the effective creation of atmosphere to the use of rhythm. Yet he suggests that such creation of atmosphere is achieved ‘not so much by presenting the reader with the atmosphere ready-made, as by giving him the objects and relying on his sensibility to evoke the atmosphere for himself’. The writer’s use of rhythm is ‘decisive’ in leading ‘the reader into the right state of receptive consciousness’ to achieve this.129 That is, as well as its more obviously mimetic function of expressing emotion or atmosphere, Dobrée believes that rhythm may play a subtler role of influencing the rhythm of the reader’s mind and thereby their imaginative response to a text, leading them to a mimetic response of their own. The modernist short story is a form that springs from the same interest in combining the perceived capacities of poetry and prose as free verse and the prose poem. It also exhibits the fascination with the mimetic potential of prose rhythm found in the three texts discussed immediately above. As will be seen in later chapters, these were central aims for the authors studied here. Mansfield explicitly framed her aesthetic experiments in terms of ‘a kind of special prose’ (KMN 2: 33), and Woolf also experimented continually with ways of infusing her prose with poetry. However, the short story itself receives somewhat less direct theoretical attention of its own in the early decades of the twentieth century. At this time it is discussed more often in less avant-garde publications like The Bookman and the pre- Murry Athenaeum than in the properly modernist little magazines.130 A survey of

128 Dobrée, Modern Prose Style, 74. 129 Dobrée, Modern Prose Style, 78. 130 While a search for ‘short story’ on the Modernist Journals Project site brings up a number of references to short stories printed in certain publications, or reviews of short-story collections, it does not uncover any commentary on the form itself. A similar search on the British Periodicals for 1910–30 produces the results discussed here. See last accessed 7 February 2016. Rhythm, mimesis & modernism 79

reviews and commentary on the genre from such periodicals shows that the short story was frequently a topic of conversation. But much of this debate was focussed on the form’s role in the literary marketplace – whether magazines were publishing the good stories, or whether writing a short story was a craft that could be taught by one of the many guidebooks being published (and fame thereby gained) or an art that must be instinctively felt.131 The form’s use of rhythm, its relation to poetry, or its mimetic capacities, are rarely mentioned in this body of popular criticism. Theoretical discussion tends to revolve around the question of whether the short story is defined only by its shortness or by some other quality.132 The question of the significance of the short story’s shortness is an enduring one in studies of the genre. These early twentieth-century discussions of it are versions of one of the earliest and still most famous definitions and celebrations of the genre, that of Edgar Allan Poe. Writing in an 1842 review of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Twice-Told Tales, Poe stipulates that a short story (which he calls a brief tale) must take no more than between half an hour and two hours to read in a single sitting. He insists on this stricture because he argues that ‘in almost all classes of composition, the unity of effect or impression is a point of the greatest importance.’133 Poe believes that while a short poem can induce ‘an exaltation of the soul’, the strength of the brief tale is to convey ‘truth’. He suggests that the novel is unable to achieve these higher aims because its length prevents the reader from emerging with a single clear, unified idea or emotion behind the work. While Poe’s particular kind of emphasis on unity and his clear-cut division between poetry and prose loses currency in the twentieth century, his idea that the short story can achieve unique communication of truth remained compelling. This shift away from the unity doctrine and from clear distinctions between poetry and prose is apparent in a 1927 defence of the modernist short story in The Bookman written by a C. Henry Warren. Warren attacks two common complaints

131 L.N., ‘The Present State of the Short Story,’ Athenaeum, no. 4317 (23 July 1910); Ward Muir, ‘A Short-Story Virtuoso,’ The Bookman 57, no. 342 (March 1920); Douglas Newton, ‘The Craft of the Short Story,’ The Bookman 61, no. 362 (November 1921); Edwin Pugh, ‘The Modern Short Story,’ The Bookman 65, no. 385 (October 1923). 132 A. St John Adcock, ‘The Art of the Short Story,’ The Bookman 42, no. 247 (April 1912); H. E. Rollins, ‘An American View of the Short Story,’ The Academy, no. 2196 (6 June 1914). 133 Edgar Allan Poe, ‘Poe on Short Fiction: “Review of Twice-Told Tales”,’ in The New Short Story Theories, ed. Charles E. May (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1994), 60. Rhythm, mimesis & modernism 80

about the form: that it is too ‘gloomy’, and that it is inconclusive. His response to these complaints turns first to mimesis: ‘If modern life hurts you, you cannot really be rid of that hurt by running away from modern life; your only hope of release is by coming to some understanding of it.’134 Warren champions the short story on the basis of its capacity to represent the unpleasant realities of modernity and thereby to perform a cathartic function. His response to quibbles about the short story’s tendency towards unsatisfying endings centres on what he regards as the form’s close relationship to poetry, a notable departure from Poe’s definition. ‘The short story is not necessarily the place for plot at all,’ Warren argues, because ‘the modern short story is more akin to poetry than to the novel.’135 From this, we may deduce that Warren sees this combination of poetry and prose characteristics in the short story as conducive to understanding something significant about modern life in order to achieve ‘release’. Strikingly, though he does not mention rhythm, Warren anticipates Dobrée’s argument that good writing enlists the reader in the imaginative work of literature. He refers to this work as ‘interpretation’, and argues that since ‘no living interpretation is possible where the reader does not do half the work with the writer, [the writer] has to evoke the imagination rather than supply it.’ 136 Warren’s implication is that the inconclusive or poetic qualities of the short story make it an apt form for performing this function of literature. He suggests that the story’s mimetic capacity helps its reader to understand and accept modern life. Warren’s connection of poetic affinity and inconclusiveness to a conviction of the modernist short story’s unique capacity for mimesis recalls how writers like Eliot, Pound or Aldington saw the benefit of importing ‘prose values’ into poetry. It also foreshadows one of the most frequently cited contemporary theoretical statements on the form, Elizabeth Bowen’s introduction to the 1937 Faber Book of Modern Short Stories, which includes stories from 1910 to the time of publication. Bowen, a notable writer of short fiction herself, characterises the short story of that period as a form in which ‘poetic tautness and clarity are so essential […] that it may be said to stand at

134 C. Henry Warren, ‘The Modern Short Story,’ The Bookman 71, no. 424 (January 1927): 236. Emphasis original. 135 Warren, ‘The Modern Short Story,’ 236. 136 Warren, ‘The Modern Short Story,’ 236. Rhythm, mimesis & modernism 81

the edge of prose; in its use of action it is nearer to drama than to the novel.’137 Bowen argues that the short story can ‘more nearly than the novel approach aesthetic and moral truth’ because it has neither the ‘longueurs’ nor the ‘conclusiveness’ of the longer form, and she associates this capacity for truth with poetry.138 ‘It can,’ she contends, ‘while remaining rightly prosaic and circumstantial, give scene, action, event, character a poetic new actuality.’139 That is, for Bowen, the shortness of the short story and its combination of the poetic and the prosaic can provide truth (including, like Warren, a moral dimension), and ‘poetic new actuality’: the representation of a kind of reality from which superfluous detail has been stripped. Bowen also makes explicit the idea, indirectly hinted at in Warren’s article, that the short story is a form particularly suited to the representation of modern life: she opens her introduction by claiming that ‘The short story is a young art: as we now know it, it is the child of this century.’140 Bowen suggests that the short story shares with the cinema a self-consciousness, a ‘discipline and regard for form’ and a concern with what Bowen terms ‘the disorientated romanticism of the age’ – a phrase that recalls Murry’s argument in ‘The “Classical” Revival’.141 Like many who have written on it since, Bowen considers the modernist short story (along with the cinema) to be a more fitting form than the novel for capturing the disjunctive and fleeting quality of modern life – what Baudelaire called ‘the ephemeral, the fugitive, the contingent’, and Marx described as that which ‘melts into air’. For Bowen, ‘the new literature, whether written or visual, is an affair of reflexes, of immediate susceptibility, of associations not examined by reason: it does not attempt a synthesis.’142 Bowen’s argument in favour of the short story’s capacity for capturing this recalls both Poe and Warren’s claims for a connection between brevity or inconclusiveness and mimesis: ‘Narrative of any length involves continuity, sometimes a forced continuity: it is here that the

137 Elizabeth Bowen, ‘Introduction: The Short Story,’ in The Faber Book of Modern Short Stories, ed. Elizabeth Bowen (London: Faber and Faber, 1937), 7. 138 Bowen, ‘Short Story,’ 15. 139 Bowen, ‘Short Story,’ 15. 140 Bowen, ‘Short Story,’ 7. 141 Bowen, ‘Short Story,’ 7; Murry, Defending Romanticism, 179. 142 More recently, Dominic Head continues this trend by claiming that the modernist short story both ‘encapsulates the essence of literary modernism, and has an enduring ability to capture the episodic nature of twentieth-century experience’. ⁠ For him it is not the ‘unity of impression’ that a modernist short story can provide, but the senses of fragmentation, disruption and transience, which are often considered key aspects of the experience of modernity. Head, Modernist Short Story, 1. Rhythm, mimesis & modernism 82

novel too often becomes invalid. But action, which must in the novel be complex and motivated, in the short story regains heroic simplicity.’143 That is, the short story’s brevity makes for a more truthful representation of reality. Modernist perceptions about the poetic affinities of the short story and its capacity for truth are also bound up in the notion of the ‘epiphany’, often considered a prominent feature of modernist experiment in the form. In the context of modernist fiction, the epiphany is commonly associated with James Joyce, and especially with his short story collection Dubliners (1914). In Stephen Hero, an unpublished precursor to Joyce’s first novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), a character defines the epiphany as a ‘sudden spiritual manifestation, whether in the vulgarity of speech or gesture or in a memorable phase of the mind itself’.144 Woolf called this the ‘moment of being’; it could be described as a sudden insight about a truth of the self or world, or a particularly intense feeling. The other feature that Joyce’s definition of the epiphany stresses is its embeddedness in the everyday: it is triggered by a ‘vulgarity of speech or gesture’ or a memory. Often the epiphany takes the place of a traditional conclusion to a story, of which Dubliners’ closing story ‘The Dead’ is a classic example. While this concept does not play a large part in my readings of the short fiction of Lawrence, Mansfield or Woolf in the chapters to follow, it bears mentioning here because its prevalence in criticism of the modernist short story indicates how commonly the form is associated with a special kind of truth or reality, although the reliability of the epiphany is often open to interpretation. The short story as an exemplary mimetic form can be seen to have arisen from the context of the modernist interests in prose and poetry and in formal rhythm. The form’s frequent association with poetry and the idea that this hybridity offers access to a higher register of reality, along with its status as being especially suited to representing modern experience, makes it an apposite lens through which to investigate the phenomena of rhythmic mimesis in modernist prose fiction.

143 Bowen, ‘Short Story,’ 7. 144 James Joyce, Stephen Hero, ed. Theodore Spencer, John J. Slocum, and Herbert Cahoon (New York: New Directions, 1963), 211. For an influential argument on the importance of the epiphany to the modernist novel, see Morris Beja, Epiphany in the Modern Novel (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1971). Rhythm, mimesis & modernism 83

Throughout modernist discussions of poetry and prose, formal rhythms and the short story, we find reverberations of the kind of revolutionary, progressive zeal that also defines Murry’s general romantic aesthetic philosophy. That is, the certainty that experimentation with form can help to express the reality of the rhythmic universe and of the moral imperative – the positive development of human society – for pursuing that mimetic goal. This kind of energy also animates Lawrence’s metaphysical and aesthetic philosophies. Lawrence’s conceptualisation of the universe and humanity’s relationship to it as rhythmic, and of art’s mimetic relationship to both of these is the most fully developed and consistently articulated of the three authors under study in this thesis. It is for this reason that I turn next to a survey of Lawrence’s non-fiction corpus, which helps to illuminate not only his own short fiction, but also to develop our understanding of this thread of modernist thinking in relation to rhythmic mimesis.

Chapter 2

D. H. Lawrence’s cosmic rhythms

D. H. Lawrence’s rhythmic vision of the universe pervades his short stories. His conceptions of personal development, human relationships, the structures of modern society, and our place in the cosmos, all come down to rhythm. As did Mansfield and Woolf, Lawrence strove to mimetically convey this rhythmic paradigm in theme, structure, and syntax. But Lawrence differed from them in the stridency of his moral convictions. While all three authors saw rhythmic mimesis as inherently valuable, only Lawrence attempted to build these convictions into a comprehensive worldview and consistently wrote works aimed at showing people how to live in accordance with it. In this chapter, I argue that there is a direct relationship between Lawrence’s rhythmic conceptions of the universe and his approach to formal rhythms in his short stories. In so doing, I build on the small body of scholarship that has already recognised the significant interest with rhythms present in Lawrence’s thinking and writing by investigating its particular manifestation in his short fiction, and by placing this dimension of his work more firmly in the context of a widespread modernist disposition towards rhythmic mimesis. I begin this work by examining a selection from the enormous body of Lawrence’s non-fiction writing, highlighting the conceptual thread of rhythm that runs throughout this corpus, from his metaphysical formulations to his declarations on literary form. The second section of this chapter turns to Lawrence’s short fiction, reading Lawrence’s presentation of the individual and their relationships with other people and the cosmos in terms of a thermodynamic aesthetic. In addition, I show how Lawrence’s conception of the individual’s ‘passionate struggle into conscious being’ is connected to his model of the cosmos as governed by non-human rhythm (WL: 486). This section is repeatedly concerned with questions of voice, and with psychological rhythms as they interlink with worldly rhythms and the inhuman cosmos. The third and final section of this chapter expands on these examinations of human rhythms to analyse how rhythm Lawrence 85

operates in stories which do not concentrate on interpersonal relationships, but engage rather with key issues of social modernity, namely gender roles and relations, and family and capitalism. Looking at these stories through the lens of rhythmic mimesis can assist in unpicking Lawrence’s typically ambivalent attitudes to social and technological modernity, tradition, and the ideal of progress.

Rhythm in Lawrence’s metaphysics and aesthetics Theoretical, critical and polemical writing was integral to Lawrence’s literary practice from the very outset of his career. In his essays, he both developed and applied his ideas on rhythm and mimesis. In March 1908, while employed as a pupil teacher at Nottingham High School and studying at Nottingham University College, Lawrence presented a paper entitled ‘Art and the Individual’ to the small ‘Debating Society’ in his home town of Eastwood, revising it later that year to send to a friend in Liverpool (STH, xli-xlii). He was still working on essays at the end of his life: in January 1930, Lawrence finished preparation of his book of Assorted Articles, pieces originally written for newspapers and magazines. The book was published a month after his death that March (LEA, xxxiii). Throughout his writing career he published reviews, essays and books on topics as various as literature and art, psychoanalysis, philosophy, Mexican culture and mythology, his travels, a variety of social and political issues, and even (under the pseudonym Lawrence H. Davison) a school history textbook. All of this writing is infused with his distinctive personal metaphysics, which exhibits a career-long preoccupation with mimesis and rhythm. This first section will examine the twin threads of rhythm and mimesis in Lawrence’s writing on his metaphysics and subsequently in his statements on art and literary form. There are three central aspects of Lawrence’s metaphysics that are concerned with rhythm, all of which are inflected with his particular kind of moral urgency: first and foremost, he sees the universe itself, as a whole, as founded on, or characterised by, rhythm. Secondly, Lawrence considers human relationships to be characterised as rhythmic, energetic relations. Finally, he imagines the mechanism of natural history as rhythmic, and human activity as its imitation. Though similar to Harriet Monroe’s scientistic observation, explored in the previous chapter, of the prevalence of rhythms in nature, for Lawrence rhythm becomes an organising force of almost religious Lawrence 86

significance. In his essays, he repeatedly expresses his metaphysical vision in terms that use rhythm to link the bodily with the cosmic. For example, in ‘The Reality of Peace’ (1917), Lawrence declares that:

There is a great systole diastole of the universe. It has no why or wherefore, no aim or purpose. At all times it is, like the beating of the everlasting heart. What it is, is forever beyond saying. It is unto itself. We only know that the end is the heaven on earth, like the wild rose in blossom. We are like the blood that travels. We are like the shuttle that flies from never to forever, from forever back to never. We are the subject of the eternal systole diastole. We fly according to the perfect impulse, and we have peace. We resist, and we have the gnawing misery of nullification which we have known previously. (RDP: 27)

This vision of the universe as being regulated by the eternal, alternating rhythm of a beating heart makes a direct connection between the vitalist concept of an essential, generative life force and the materiality of the human body. This juxtaposition of the organic materiality of the body with the massive scale of the universe brings the ordinary into direct relation with the religious. Lawrence thereby makes a moral argument about this rhythm: he suggests a link between a person’s existential state and their relative concordance – whether eurhythmic or arrhythmic – with the natural rhythm of the universe. This cosmic vision plainly aligns Lawrence with those modernists who Omri Moses argues ‘insisted on bringing people […] into greater continuity with the mutable world of which they are a part.’1 His description of humanity as the ‘blood’ in this eternal heart implies at once our intimate, indeed physically contiguous or even continuous, connection to this universal rhythm, and the subordinate relation of humanity to the cosmos. Both the vitalist foundation of this image and the sense of the moral urgency of humanity’s rhythmic concordance with the universe remained integral to Lawrence’s thinking, and is often intertwined with the concept of energy. These features appear again in the 1925 essay ‘Him With His Tail in His Mouth’, in which the pumping of ‘blood’ in ‘The Reality of Peace’ is replaced with a ‘deeper flow of life and life-energy’. Lawrence argues that ‘There is such a thing as life, or life-energy. We know, because

1 Moses, Out of Character: Modernism, Vitalism, Psychic Life, 8. Lawrence 87

we’ve got it, or had it. It isn’t a constant. It comes and goes.’ Here, Lawrence invokes a vitalist idea of ‘life-energy’ as a rhythmic phenomenon (which ‘comes and goes’), one which he again characterises as a moral necessity: ‘This we know, now, for good and all: that which is good, and moral, is that which brings us into a stronger, deeper flow of life and life-energy: evil is that which impairs the life-flow’ (RDP: 310). In addition to providing this explicit indication of Lawrence’s moral investment in his notion of a rhythmic universe, this passage presents another prominent aspect of his thinking on rhythm, and one which is clearly influenced by the science and vitalist philosophy of his day. Likewise, the relations between people and between people and things are characterised, for Lawrence, by rhythmic flows of energy. In this, Lawrence can be seen to transmute thermodynamic concepts about the transfer of heat and energy into his own metaphysics. In his chapter on ‘Dana’s Two Years Before the Mast’ in his 1925 collection, Studies of Classic American Literature, Lawrence characterises the essence of life as a dynamic, rhythmic interrelation between people:

What is the breath of life? My dear, it is the strange current of interchange that flows between men and men, and men and women, and men and things. A constant current of interflow, a constant vibrating interchange. That is the breath of life. And this interflow, this electric vibration is polarised. There is a positive and a negative polarity. That is a law of life, of vitalism. Only ideas are final, finite, static, and single. All life interchange is a polarised communication. A circuit. (SCAL: 109)

Lawrence’s use of this electromagnetic metaphor to describe the origin of life in relationships links his ontology to the scientific and technological developments of his time. This also aligns his interests with those of his contemporaries. David Trotter, for example, has recently shown how Katherine Mansfield’s fiction may be reconsidered in relation to the new scientific theories about energy, and electricity in particular, which were then gaining cultural currency.2 Trotter, however, reads this electrical metaphor as one of fragmentation and disjunction, in opposition to a

2 Trotter, ‘Modernism Reloaded: The Fiction of Katherine Mansfield.’ See also Clarke and Henderson, From Energy to Information; Justin Sausman, ‘From Vibratory Occultism to Vibratory Modernism: Blackwood, Lawrence, Woolf,’ in Vibratory Modernism, ed. Anthony Enns and Shelley Trower (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013); Martin, Rhythms of Sympathy. Lawrence 88

vitalist notion of ‘primitive harmonies’, while it is clear from Lawrence’s usage that for him, this electrical current, or interchange – the ‘breath of life’, is one of connection.3 From early on in his writing career, Lawrence uses rhythmic terms to understand the evolution of life and in particular of humanity, both biological and cultural. This is closely intertwined with his attitude towards the function of art, and thus to the didactic element of his own literary practice. In his ‘Study of Thomas Hardy’ (finished in late 1914, but unpublished until after his death), Lawrence represents human production or creation, and more generally, all ‘work’, as the repeated imitation of an original, energetic generation of life, which is also/has become an ongoing rhythmic state. He writes that humanity

can at will reproduce the movement life made in its initial passage, the movement life still makes, and will continue to make, as a habit, the movement already made so unthinkably often, that rather than a movement, it has become a state, a condition of all life; it has become matter, or the force of gravity, or cohesion, or heat, or light. (STH: 40)

Here we find Lawrence again blending the rhythms studied by science into his own vitalist metaphysical theories. All the examples of ‘life’ provided here are inhuman and apparently unliving, concepts from physics rather than biology, but all are at base rhythmic, defined by either attraction or repulsion and in the case of heat and light, characterised by waves. The exception is perhaps matter, but its grouping under the same umbrella defines it here as another manifestation of this repeated ‘movement’. In addition, envisioning generation as a ‘habit’ of movement connects this vitalist notion of ‘life’ to the routine actions of the everyday. Indeed, Lawrence argues that ‘work is the repetition of some one of those re-discovered movements, the enacting of some part imitated from life, the attaining of a similar result as life attained’ (STH: 41). So work itself is thus represented as the fulfilment of a mimetic drive: the imitation of ‘life’, conceived as a repeated ‘movement’, or rhythm. The result of human work, that which is produced or created, is also described as equivalent to that of the inhuman, cosmic life force. So Lawrence understands human activity as linked, via rhythm, firstly to fundamental laws of physics, and also to an overarching goal of the evolution of life

3 Trotter, ‘Modernism Reloaded: The Fiction of Katherine Mansfield,’ 24. Lawrence 89

towards a state of individual perfection. He further suggests, in this same early theoretical text, that this repetitive action, which in one way might be conceived as a cyclical rhythm, in fact forms a (linear) progression: the evolution of life, of which he sees humanity as the pinnacle. He posits that a progressive differentiation of life forms is a ‘condition’ of life, and perhaps its ‘Purpose’. He imagines life beginning as an amorphous singularity, ‘a great Mass’, before the initial ‘movement’ of life led to its evolving ‘ever more distinct and definite particular forms […] as if it were working always to the production of the infinite number of perfect individuals’ until these ‘wonderful, distinct individuals, like angels, move about, each one being himself, perfect as a complete melody or a pure colour’ (STH: 42-3).4 Thus, for Lawrence, cosmic and human rhythms are intricately connected, and human rhythms are morally significant in the context of the ideal of evolutionary progress, which he conceives broadly: the cultural is implicated in the biological. This romantic belief in humanity’s capacity, even its destiny, for development is at the heart of Lawrence’s didactic goals in his fiction, and the rhythmic character of this notion of development underpins his use of rhythm to achieve them. The importance of rhythm to Lawrence’s metaphysics, and especially the connection he makes between this cosmic vision and human activity means that the rhythm of the work of art therefore takes on a special significance. Lawrence’s notion here of human creativity as a reproduction of a rhythmic cosmic action parallels in many ways similar statements by his contemporaries, for example, Harriet Monroe’s idea, discussed in the previous chapter, that the arts are a human ‘effort to join in’ with the universal rhythm.5 The remainder of this section on Lawrence’s non-fiction examines the way this pairing of rhythm and mimesis in Lawrence’s metaphysics – that is, the idea of work as a mimicking of cosmic generation of life itself – informs his theoretical and critical writing on literature. Lawrence’s rhythmic metaphysics are therefore closely intertwined with his aesthetic theories. Rhythmic mimesis is implicated in the often-discussed topic of

4 Two recent monographs take up Lawrence’s unorthodox and ambivalent attitude to evolutionary theory: Ronald Granofsky, D.H. Lawrence and Survival: Darwinism in the Fiction of the Transitional Period (Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2003); Jeff Wallace, D. H. Lawrence, Science and the Posthuman (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 105. 5 Monroe, Poets & Their Art, 285. Lawrence 90

Lawrence’s organicism. 6 This aspect of Lawrence’s aesthetic theory is often characterised as an idea of life and art as identical. As Donald Gutierrez explains it, Lawrence ‘espouses an organicist theory of the novel. It is one that views art not as modelled on or mirrored in life, but as being itself life, vitality, aliveness raised to the highest pitch registrable.’7 The concept of rhythm is integral to and helps us to appreciate the complexity of this theory, perhaps most famously expressed in a review essay on Thomas Mann, in which Lawrence condemns his style by association with that of Flaubert:

And even while [Flaubert] has rhythm in style, yet his work has none of the rhythm of a living thing, the rise of a poppy, then the after uplift of the bud, the shedding of the calyx and the spreading wide of the petals, the falling of the flower and the pride of the seed-head. There is an unexpectedness in this such as does not come from their carefully plotted and arranged developments. Even ‘Madame Bovary’ seems to me dead in respect to the living rhythm of the whole work. While it is there in ‘Macbeth’ like life itself. (IR: 211-12)8

In this passage, Lawrence makes an explicit and prescriptive association between organic rhythms – the life cycle of a poppy, in this case – and the desired ‘rhythm’ of fiction, which for him is lively or lifelike, and is quashed by strict style. This statement prefigures Forster’s later argument, explored in the previous chapter, of the distinction between what Forster calls ‘pattern’ (here encapsulated by the structurally stylised literature of Mann and Flaubert) and ‘rhythm’, with Lawrence coming to the same conclusion that rhythm imparts ‘life’ itself, rather than mere aesthetic pleasure, and is thus inherently more valuable. This oft-cited passage is in one sense a manifesto for a kind of rhythmic mimesis. Gutierrez argues that Lawrence’s is not a mimetic model of art, nor a ‘symbolist heterocosmos of a higher autonomous reality’. Instead, he suggests, Lawrence’s theory ‘is one that incorporates the rhythms of growth, fruition, and decay, and the biological force of natural phenomena, including vital human beings,

6 See, for example, Tedlock Jr., D. H. Lawrence, Artist and Rebel: A Study of Lawrence’s Fiction; James B. Sipple, Passionate Form: Life Process as Artistic Paradigm in the Writings of D. H. Lawrence (New York: Peter Lang, 1992); Jack Stewart, ‘Lawrence’s Ontological Vision in Etruscan Places, The Escaped Cock, and Apocalypse,’ D.H. Lawrence Review 31, no. 2 (2003). 7 Gutierrez, ‘Vitalism in D. H. Lawrence’s Theory of Fiction,’ 70. 8 This review was first published in Murry and Mansfield’s Blue Review in July 1913. Lawrence 91

as exemplars for the novel.’9 While Gutierrez’s description of Lawrence’s literary attention to natural rhythms is convincing, and he is correct in explaining Lawrence’s conception of the relation between world and work as one of organic continuity, this does not preclude the act of mimesis, when conceived as an act of mimicry rather than of reflection. Here, the paradoxical aspect of the concept of rhythm – its simultaneous capacity for both unification and fragmentation as a whole made up of a series of parts – provides a way in which to grasp how Lawrence understands the relationship between world and art (or indeed nature and culture). In addition to his emphasis on actual liveliness in the above passage, Lawrence is describing an imitative relation: ‘like life itself’, as Gutierrez himself suggests when he describes natural rhythms as ‘exemplars’ for fiction. Through the right kind of literary rhythms, Lawrence indicates, the novel (or work of art more generally) can evoke and mimic the essence of such spontaneous, natural, ‘real’ rhythm as that described in the poppy. The rhythm of artistic work is then, like all human work, an ‘enacting of some part imitated from life,’ thereby reaching in the work of art itself, ‘a similar result as life attained’. This is therefore a process-based model of mimesis. For Lawrence, the human body is frequently a mimetic medium between the cosmic rhythms of ‘life’ and literary rhythms, via the work of inscription itself as imitation. His veneration of the corporeal is undoubtedly one of the most striking aspects of all Lawrence’s work, including his writing on writing. Anne Fernihough identifies this aspect of Lawrence’s art criticism as a point of contrast to the transcendent aesthetic ideal of the autonomous work of art often associated with modernism, represented by Clive Bell’s ‘significant form’; she argues that Lawrence instead privileges ‘the (“feminine”?) viscosity and contingency of day-to-day living […] the material and the bodily.’10 Lawrence’s interest in the body is certainly always linked to the everyday, as Fernihough suggests, but also implicates the metaphysical, as seen in a 1913 review in which he reflects on the body’s involvement in creativity: ‘I look at my hands as they write and I know they are mine, with red blood running its way, sleuthing out Truth and pursuing it into eternity, and I am full of awe for this

9 Gutierrez, ‘Vitalism in D. H. Lawrence’s Theory of Fiction,’ 70. 10 Fernihough, D. H. Lawrence: Aesthetics and Ideology, 4-5. Lawrence 92

flesh and blood that holds this pen.’11 (IR: 203) This example clearly illustrates why Fernihough would also observe that although ‘he never ceases to denounce idealism and “the ideal”, Lawrence constantly risks reifying the body into what is merely another transcendental category.’12 Here, the work of writing and the materiality of the body are the instruments of art’s more transcendent ambitions, much as in ‘The Reality of Peace’ discussed above, his image of the universe is modelled on human biology. Therefore, while Lawrence’s interest in the body may be considered an iteration of his organicist model of art as identical to life, discussed above, again this relation is mimetic, in the sense that inscription is work. The role of subjectivity is also enmeshed in Lawrence’s fascination with the physical process of writing – in the same review, only the year before his espousal of the ‘inhuman’ in the ‘carbon letter’, he also declares that the ‘time to be impersonal has gone’ (IR: 203). There are notable parallels between these statements and Murry’s explicitly romantic position, discussed in the previous chapter, in particular its resistance to the classicist modernist ideals of impersonal and autotelic art. This sense of subjectivity and of writing as work extends to the struggle for expression. The mimetic link between Lawrence’s rhythmic vision of the universe and its literary application, or between his rhythmic metaphysics and aesthetics, is again evident in his much quoted ‘carbon letter’.13 In it, Lawrence explains his ambition to explore not the individual’s development within the social realm, or even the psychological aspects of human experience, as is traditionally the subject of the novel, but rather the individual’s impersonal role in the universe, or in other words, their place in its rhythmic organisation:

I only care about what the woman is – what she is – inhumanly, physiologically, materially – according to the use of the word: but for me, what she is as a phenomenon (or as representing some greater, inhuman will), instead of what she feels according to the human conception. (LDHL 2: 183)

11 This is from Lawrence’s manifesto-like review (published in the March 1913 number of Rhythm) of the anthology of Georgian Poetry, 1911-12, which includes one of his own poems, ‘Snapdragon’. 12 Fernihough, D. H. Lawrence: Aesthetics and Ideology, 3. 13 Written to Edward Garnett in June 1914 in response to Garnett’s criticism of his new novel, The Rainbow (LDHL 2: 182-84). Lawrence 93

The sentiment here can be read as a restatement of the underlying conception expressed in the image of the cosmic ‘systole diastole’ in ‘The Reality of Peace’, in that here too Lawrence emphasises the subordination of the individual to the universe, and their place as a component of a larger rhythm, in the context of his desired subject in fiction. Later in this same letter, Lawrence explains how this functions in the novel:

Again I say, don’t look for the development of the novel to follow the lines of certain characters: the characters fall into the form of some other rhythmic form, like when one draws a fiddle-bow across a fine tray delicately sanded, the sand takes lines unknown. (LDHL 2: 184)

The centrality of rhythm to Lawrence’s thinking on form is overt here, in his reference to the Chladni figure, an experiment in which sand is scattered on a plate which is then made to vibrate, causing the sand to form symmetrical and increasingly intricate patterns: what Lawrence refers to as ‘lines unknown’.14 So rather than following the traditional narrative arc of character development, Lawrence here indicates his interest in representing, in the form of his novel and his representation of character, his vision of the individual as a material phenomenon that is subject to rhythmic physical forces in the same way as the grains of sand in a Chladni figure. This alignment of literary form with the idea of physical vibration recurs throughout Lawrence’s aesthetics. He describes art as a rhythmic or vibratory medium of communication in his earliest extant essay, ‘Art and the Individual’ (1908), in which he writes that Tolstoy, Poe, Maupassant, Ibsen and Gorky all saw art as a means of emotional expression: ‘Their sole object is to set vibrating in the second person the emotion which moved the producer; and this seems to be the mission of Art’ (STH: 140). Lawrence disagrees with Tolstoy that literary language should be transparent, or ‘intelligible’, arguing that literature must use more than ‘simple prose’ to communicate emotion. The young Lawrence associates Art with unspeakable emotional or spiritual truth, what he calls ‘the primordial silences which hold the secret of things, the great purposes, which are themselves silent’, which ‘simple prose’ fails to express: ‘there are no words to speak of them with, and no thoughts to think

14 Lawrence may have used this experiment to demonstrate sonic vibration during his time as a teacher in Croydon. C. P. Ravilious, ‘Lawrence’s “Chladni Figures”,’ Notes and Queries 20 (1973). Lawrence 94

of them in, so we struggle to touch them through art’. He argues that rather than the transparent, ‘simple prose’ advocated by Tolstoy, expression of these silent ‘secrets’ and ‘great purposes’ is achieved through attention to artistic form: words ‘have to “pair like lovers, and chime in the ear”; they must “progress in cosmic fellowship” – they must, in short, have form, style’ (STH: 140). Lawrence is here arguing for self- conscious literary style as necessary for emotional expression, and for it to be understood by the reader; that is, literary style should create an emotional vibration, which passes between producer and receiver. Many years later, in ‘Why the Novel Matters’ (1925), Lawrence defends the novel in terms that combine this concern with vibratory communication and form and his particular model of the relation between life and art:

The novel is the one bright book of life. Books are not life. They are only tremulations in the ether. But the novel as a tremulation can make the whole man-alive tremble. Which is more than poetry, philosophy, science or any other book-tremulation can do. (STH: 195)

In this celebration of the genre (in which Lawrence ambiguously includes the Bible along with the works of Shakespeare and Homer), Lawrence explicitly identifies fiction, rather than poetry, as having the capacity to rhythmically capture the essence of ‘life’ itself. While he emphasises a separation between literature and life, as he does in the Mann review above, he also insists on the capacity of the novel to almost physically move the reader, to communicate life in rhythmic terms, as a ‘tremulation’ which causes a corresponding vibration in the receiver (that is, the reader of the novel). In this, Lawrence’s literary theory and metaphysics again intersect with science through rhythm, in its invocation of the already-outmoded contemporary theory that electromagnetic radiation travelled through a medium called the ether. This is another instance in which we see Lawrence thinking in cosmic or physical terms about relationships between people, art and life. Moreover, he argues that this can teach the reader how to live: ‘to be alive, to be man alive, to be whole man alive: that is the point. And at its best, the novel, and the novel supremely can help you. It can help you not to be dead man in life’ (STH: 197). Thus while the novel is not life itself, it can engender it. Lawrence’s belief in the moral purpose of literature is evident here, as by extension are his didactic aims in his own writing. Lawrence 95

He saw the literary communication of individual experience as being of particularly urgent moral importance for his time, and rhythmic technique as central to its achievement. This is apparent in his Foreword to Women in Love (1919), which he describes as ‘a record of the writer’s own desire, aspirations, struggles: in a word, a record of the profoundest experiences in the self’ (WL: 485). Lawrence argues that it is essential to include this ‘passionate struggle into conscious being’, or ‘struggle for verbal consciousness’ in art, because it is ‘a very great part of life’ (WL: 486). Moreover, Lawrence explicitly asserts a direct organic link between this ‘struggle’ and his stylistic rhythm:

In point of style, fault is often found with the continual, slightly modified repetition. The only answer is that it is natural to the author: and that every natural crisis in emotion or passion or understanding comes from this pulsing, frictional to-and-fro, which works up to culmination. (WL: 486)

This aspect is one of the most distinctive and frequently discussed features of Lawrence’s style. Grmelová describes it as a ‘permanent striving for the most accurate signifier, what is often called repetition with variation, or using the same signifiers for expressing different signifieds, words floating in their meanings,’ and argues that it ‘is a consequence of his effort to verbalise what he feels cannot be verbalised.’15 For her, this aspect of Lawrence’s linguistic rhythm is an almost unintentional or unavoidable trace of his effort to express – the detritus of his ‘struggle’. But in the passage above, Lawrence actually makes two statements about his ‘continual, slightly modified repetition’ that suggest a mimetic motivation: firstly, that it comes naturally to him, that is, it is an instinctual personal style of expression, and so is an authentic reflection of his voice. Secondly, he suggests that it is in fact more generally mimetic: that this style actually echoes how thought and feeling work. That is, the ‘continual, slightly modified repetition’ is the medium of expression rather than its by-product. Thus, literary rhythm is formulated as a mimetic medium, for emotional and intellectual expression. This helps us to make sense of why Lawrence, a writer who criticised Flaubert and Mann for their ornate and artificial styles, would also proclaim, in ‘The Spirit of Place’ (1925), that ‘Art-speech is the only truth’ (SCAL: 14). Fernihough argues that

15 Grmelová, Lawrence’s Short Fiction, 36. Lawrence 96

this conception creates a split between ‘art-speech’ and the world by ‘asserting its own materiality’; that is, by calling attention to language’s mediating effect. She terms Lawrence’s resulting theory of art’s relation to the world as the ‘fractured organic’ because of its avoidance of the normally totalising conception of the organic.16 For Lawrence, mimesis is not achieved through transparent, grammatically polished ‘simple prose’. While on the one hand Lawrence’s linguistic technique is self- consciously artful, at the same time it is this very ‘repetition with variation’ that may enable, through the rhythm thereby created, the communication of a complex idea or a subtle aspect of experience. This is another way of describing Lawrence’s dialectic model of art’s relation to the world: as both continuous with and distinct from one another. The tension between a totalising vision and one of plurality permeates Lawrence’s thinking on both existence and aesthetics. On the one hand, his espousal of an art that is closely linked to, or parallels organic life, as in the image of the poppy, is often seen to suggest a unified vision of existence. Yet he also repeatedly argues the opposite, that in fact a sense of unity or ‘oneness’ is artificial. For example in ‘Climbing Down Pisgah’, he rejects the idea of writing books in order to provide readers with ‘a sense of wholeness’ or ‘oneness’, whether with ‘all men’, ‘all things’, ‘our cosmos’ or with ‘the vast invisible universe’. This is because, he argues, ‘The moment you attain that sense of Oneness and Wholeness, you become cold, dehumanised, mechanical, and monstrous’ (RDP: 225). Thus for Lawrence, a holistic model of the universe is unnatural rather than organic. He makes a similar argument in his essay on Walt Whitman, in which he asserts that the American poet’s ideology of unity is more mechanical than organic. The method he uses to make this claim demonstrates Lawrence’s interest in the didactic as well as the mimetic capacities of linguistic rhythm. Taking a line of Whitman’s own verse, from Leaves of Grass, ‘I AM HE THAT ACHES WITH AMOROUS LOVE’, he repeats it in the essay four times in full, and a further six times in part. In contrast to other uses of rhythm (examples of which from other essays will be analysed below), here this rhythmic repetition becomes parodic. He uses linguistic rhythm to propel his argument about the

16 Fernihough, D. H. Lawrence: Aesthetics and Ideology, 10-11. Lawrence 97

mechanical quality of Whitman’s perspective by linking the line of poetry to a steam train:

CHUFF! CHUFF! CHUFF! CHU–CHU–CHU–CHU–CHUFFFF! Reminds one of a steam engine. A locomotive. They’re the only things that seem to me to ache with amorous love. All that steam inside them. Forty million foot-pounds pressure. The ache of AMOROUS LOVE. Steam- pressure. CHUFF! (SCAL: 149)

Lawrence’s use of onomatopoeia, chopped syntax and repetition to mimic the sound and rhythm of a steam train here comically undercuts Whitman’s philosophy by creating an ironic, dissonant identity between the desiring/unifying subject of the poem and the image of an engine. Mimetic rhythms are thus employed for rhetorical purposes here, and Lawrence reconceptualises the organic as plural and the mechanical as unitary. Lawrence celebrates the free verse form for what he sees as a capacity for just this kind of plurality, along with an ability to capture the present moment. He argues in ‘Poetry of the Present’ (1919), his contribution to the florescence of opinion on free verse in the first two decades of the twentieth century, that in poetry of ‘the instant present’,

There must be mutation, swifter than iridescence, haste, not rest, come-and- go, not fixity, inconclusiveness, immediacy, the quality of life itself, without dénouement or close. […] There is no rhythm which returns upon itself, no serpent of eternity with its tail in its own mouth. There is no static perfection, none of that finality which we find so satisfying because we are so frightened. (PDHL 1: 647)

This passage reiterates a couple of important concepts already encountered above: first and foremost, the ideal expressed among his comments on Mann and Flaubert, of literature containing ‘the quality of life itself’, here identified as a non-cyclical, but rather linear or progressive rhythm, which is never complete but always in flux. While Lawrence seems to suggest that this inconclusive form enables holistic expression of ‘the instant, whole man’, this is couched in terms that emphasise internal plurality and even chaos: Lawrence 98

It is the soul and the mind and body surging at once, nothing left out. They speak all together. There is some confusion, some discord. But the confusion and the discord only belong to the reality, as noise belongs to the plunge of water. (PDHL 1: 647-8)

For Lawrence, the loosened formal constraints offered by free verse’s renunciation of strict metrical rhythms allows the representation of his view of the messy, discordant, chaotic reality of the individual. That is, here Lawrence argues for a link between loosened or reconceptualised rhythms in poetic form and accurate subjective expression. Lawrence placed great value on rhythm’s capacity for mimesis and subjective expression in fiction. This is evident in his 1927 review of John Dos Passos’ novel Manhattan Transfer. In the review, he describes Dos Passos’ novel as using rhythm, in this case ‘an endless series of glimpses of people […] as they turn up again and again and again,’ to represent a particular quality or view of early twentieth-century life in a modern metropolis. New York is presented through ‘a confusion that has no obvious rhythm, but wherein at last we recognise the systole-diastole of success and failure’ (IR: 309). Here again Lawrence uses the trope of the heartbeat to convey what he regards as a fact of life broadly defined, a linear, endlessly alternating rhythm; in this case, of recurring faces in the crowd, and of the modern, capitalist motif of success and failure. Lawrence stresses that the novel’s formal rhythm parallels that of life:

The book becomes, what life is, a stream of different things and different faces rushing along in the consciousness, with no apparent direction save that of time, from past to present, from youth to age, from birth to death, and no apparent goal at all. (IR: 310)

Again in the first few words of this sentence we find Lawrence’s paradoxical mimetic model of art’s relation to life: the book in question is not life but it becomes like it. This passage defines life as rhythm in multiple ways: from a subjective perspective, that is the experience of travelling through life as mediated by the consciousness, so that the book’s linguistic rhythm mimics those of the mind. It is also the arc of human life, which parallels that of the story. A comparison of this passage to Lawrence’s earlier review, of Thomas Mann, expands the sense in which Lawrence felt that fiction may, through rhythm, imitate life. Or rather, it expands our understanding of Lawrence 99

Lawrence’s definitions of the life that it may represent, revealing a connection between his organic and abstract senses of the word (the life cycle of a poppy) and the everyday experience of living in a modern city (a series of things and faces). This review also provides an insight into Lawrence’s rhetorical uses of linguistic rhythm: here he uses rhythm in his own language to convey his notion of the rhythmic vision expressed in Dos Passos’ novel, repeating a series of antitheses and repetitions to develop the sense of an endless linear rhythm, to support his interpretation of the other author’s vision of the nature of modern existence. Lawrence continually employs techniques and themes of rhythm instrumentally. In his essays, textual rhythm frequently serves a rhetorical purpose, while in his stories its mimetic application supports his broader didactic motivations in literature. As Kirsty Martin argues, he exploits rhythm’s ability to create sympathy by bringing people ‘into synchronicity with each other’.17 Like his fiction, Lawrence’s essays are notable for, and difficult because of, their ‘continual, slightly modified repetition’: of individual words and phrases, proliferation of synonyms, and reiteration of claims in gradually broadening scope. Lawrence’s use of repetition in these pieces often functions as a nakedly rhetorical strategy, creating an oratorial, even incantatory quality, just as Murry and Mansfield do in ‘The Meaning of Rhythm’, discussed in the previous chapter. This strategy is pronounced in this excerpt from ‘Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine’ (1925):

Life is more vivid in the dandelion than in the green fern, or than in a palm tree. Life is more vivid in a snake than in a butterfly. Life is more vivid in a wren than in an alligator. Life is more vivid in a cat than in an ostrich Life is more vivid in the Mexican who drives the wagon, than in the two horses in the wagon. Life is more vivid in me, than in the Mexican who drives the wagon for me. (RDP: 357)

This line of argument has manifestly little in the way of rationality to recommend it. Rather, it is the rhythm created by Lawrence’s almost obsessive use of anaphora and

17 Martin, Rhythms of Sympathy, 27. Lawrence 100

the consequent cumulative fervency that carries the argument, making an emotional, or even physiological appeal to the reader rather than a logical one. What this example shows then, aside from Lawrence’s racism and classism, is his trust in the capacity of rhythm to get his readers into sympathy with his beliefs. This belief in rhythm’s synchronising potential is also applied to his short stories, which particularly in the latter years of his career, served as parables for Lawrence’s idiosyncratic moral vision: of the importance of conformity not to social conventions but to the rhythms of the natural world. That is, rhythm is employed in the celebration and promotion of rhythm itself. This combination of tension and alignment between form and content is found throughout Lawrence’s fiction, and also in some of his essays. This is well illustrated with an example from his ‘Translator’s Preface to Cavalleria Rusticana’ (1928), a work by nineteenth-century Sicilian author Giovanni Verga. Here, Lawrence explains how linguistic rhythm is used in Verga’s prose to recreate the rhythm of intense mental or emotional experience, while using this same technique himself to illustrate it:

It is a psychological fact, that when we are thinking emotionally or passionately, thinking and feeling at the same time, we do not think rationally: and therefore, and therefore, and therefore. Instead, the mind makes curious swoops and circles. It touches the point of pain or interest, then sweeps away again in a cycle, coils round, and approaches again the point of pain or interest. There is a curious spiral rhythm, and the mind approaches again and again the point of interest, repeats itself, goes back, destroys the time sequence entirely, so that time ceases to exist, as the mind stoops to the quarry, then leaves it without striking, soars, hovers, turns, swoops, stoops again, still does not strike, yet is nearer, nearer, reels away again, wheels off into the air, even forgets, quite forgets, yet again turns, bends, circles slowly, swoops and stoops again, until at last there is the closing in, and the clutch of a decision or resolve. (IR: 172)

The emotional mind is imagined as a bird of prey, with Lawrence using a combination of linguistic repetition and circuitous, densely punctuated syntax to describe the animal’s, and thereby the mind’s movements. In this passage, Lawrence is at one level simply explaining what he sees as Verga’s achievement in the source text: that of mimicking the rhythms of thought or experience in prose. But he is also using Lawrence 101

linguistic rhythm himself both to illustrate his point about Verga’s prose, and to mimic the way he believes thought operates in particular circumstances. So in one sense there is an alignment between form and content here, in that Lawrence is using rhythm in order to talk about rhythm. But in another sense, there is a disjunction, because while Lawrence is describing the movement of emotional or passionate thought via rhythmic prose, he is doing so at a remove: so that this rhythmic representation is self-consciously artistic and also functions as a rhetorical device. It is therefore apparent how rhythmic mimesis here, as in Lawrence’s fiction, may serve ulterior motives. In this case, Lawrence is making a case for the value of Verga’s style in particular as well as the use of linguistic rhythm for mimetic purposes, and indeed even the mimesis of consciousness more generally. In his fiction, rhythmic mimesis also serves Lawrence’s broader instrumental ambitions, that is to communicate to his readers the imperative of living ‘in time’ with the universe and what that entailed. In this way Lawrence’s rhythmic mimesis serves a moral purpose. I turn now to a selection of six short stories from throughout Lawrence’s oeuvre. All six stories explore the relationship between human rhythms, whether emotional, biological, social or technological, and cosmic, physical or natural ones. The presence of multiple rhythms, or what Lefebvre calls ‘polyrhythmia’, is a prominent aspect of Lawrence’s stories, and one which correlates with his reasons for celebrating free verse, that is, as a form which allowed for chaotic multiplicity and incompletion – a characteristic often attributed to the modernist short story as well. But Lawrence also uses the juxtaposition of rhythms, particularly natural versus mechanical ones, for didactic purposes, specifically to indicate ways of living that diverge or coincide with cosmic rhythms. For this reason, Lefebvre’s concept of eurhythmia, or ‘Rhythms unite[d] with one another in the state of health, in normal (which is to say normed!) everydayness’, and its opposite, arrhythmia, ‘when [rhythms] are discordant, [and] there is suffering, a pathological state (of which arrhythmia is generally, at the same time, symptom, cause and effect)’, help to identify and think through Lawrence’s didactic motivation in his fiction.18 We might almost roughly divide these two kinds of relations between rhythms – of more neutral

18 Lefebvre, Rhythmanalysis, 16. Lawrence 102

multiplicity, and, for Lawrence, the possibility of morally implicated harmony or discord – by mimetic and didactic motivations. Analysis of the selected stories is divided into two sections. The following section brings together three of Lawrence’s short stories in which he presents his idea of rhythmic experience, emotion or relationships, through thermodynamic metaphors. The final section then examines Lawrence’s engagement with the rhythms of modernity: industrial, technological and social.

Thermodynamic relationships Lawrence uses thermodynamic, corporeal metaphors to explore crises ‘in emotion or passion or understanding’ within or between people, or between people and the universe in a number of short stories throughout his career. This section brings together three such stories: ‘Odour of Chrysanthemums’ and ‘The Prussian Officer’ (both 1914), and Sun (1928). Lawrence’s stories provide evidence of Bruce Clarke’s argument that ‘at the turn of the twentieth century, the new spectrum of radiant energies […] were immaterial phenomena broadly susceptible of metaphysical interpretations.’19 In the stories considered below, the body is subject to a variety of physical rhythms, whether internally or externally generated: pulsations of blood in the heart and veins, friction or irritation of the skin and temper, and sensations of heat, all analogise Lawrence’s idea of the internal ‘pulsing, frictional to-and-fro, which works up to culmination’ (WL: 486), or ‘a constant vibrating interchange’ (SCAL: 109) between people or between the individual and their universe. ‘Odour of Chrysanthemums’, widely considered one of Lawrence’s finest early works, is a short story that presents a vision of the world and life as polyrhythmic, that is, as an intricate, interdependent combination of different kinds and varying levels of rhythms: natural, artificial or mechanical, social, biological, emotional, energetic. Lawrence’s understanding of emotion, interpersonal or artistic communication and even the nature of existence itself as vibratory or rhythmic is explored through this interweaving of different rhythms, and especially through attention to the physiological experience of strong emotion on the part of the story’s protagonist. This text is at once a tightly delineated ‘slice of life’ story – focusing on

19 Clarke, Energy Forms, 187. Lawrence 103

the feelings of one woman around the events of a single evening – and at the same time uses interconnections between rhythms to explore her as ‘a phenomenon’, that is to connect this woman’s personal experience to that of her community, to the cycle of life and death, and to Lawrence’s ‘systole-diastole’ of universal rhythm. Lawrence employs rhythmic literary form to achieve this, notably the symbolism of the flowering of the chrysanthemum, and a repeating interplay between clock time and the protagonist’s physiological experience of emotion. ‘Odour of Chrysanthemums’ arose from a perceived need for the authentic representation of broader categories of experience at the beginning of the twentieth century. Lawrence sent it to the English Review in December 1909 in response to Ford Madox Ford’s editorial calling for high-quality short fiction in ‘the new realism’, which would give voice to the working class of early twentieth-century Britain.20 ‘Odour of Chrysanthemums’ was eventually published in that magazine, after multiple stages of corrections, in June 1911, before being again rewritten multiple times for inclusion in The Prussian Officer collection in 1914 (PO: l-li). The story combines and implicitly compares the natural, social and mechanical rhythms of everyday life in an early twentieth-century mining village in the English Midlands. Most notably, it also examines the rhythms of the interior life of a miner’s wife as they interact with these other rhythms. The story is a close observation of the fluctuating feelings and thoughts of Elizabeth Bates over the course of an evening as she waits for her husband, a collier at the local mine lately given to drinking to excess, to return home from work. When he doesn’t come, she begins to worry that some accident has occurred in the mine, which is finally confirmed late in the evening, and the story closes after she and her mother-in-law have finished laying the body out. As Volker Schulz points out, the revelation of the death of the protagonist’s husband is not the central climax of the story, but is rather a precursor to that of Elizabeth’s realisations about their relationship and thereby about her own relation to life itself.21 These external events serve as scaffolding for Lawrence’s exploration of the rhythms of

20 Harris, Short Fiction of D. H. Lawrence, 25-26. See Ford Madox Ford, ‘Editorial: The Functions of the Arts in the Republic, I. Literature,’ The English Review 1, no. 1 (1908); Ford Madox Ford, ‘Political and Diplomatic: I – The Unemployed,’ The English Review 1, no. 1 (1908). 21 Volker Schulz, ‘D. H. Lawrence’s Early Masterpiece of Short Fiction: “Odour of Chrysanthemums”,’ Studies in Short Fiction 28, no. 3 (1991): 365. Lawrence 104

embodied emotional experience, and the relation of the individual to others and to the universe. The chrysanthemums themselves locate the immediate events of the story, which have their own rhythm, within larger and longer rhythmic scales: both the cycle of life and death (for Elizabeth and her husband) and by association with the flowers, the inhuman rhythms of nature. The centrality of the cycle of life and death to this story is well recognised in the criticism, and many readings observe the crucial role played by the titular flowers as a symbol of this cycle.22 The flowers’ symbolism for Elizabeth herself is made explicit in her oft-quoted remark to her children that the flowers don’t smell beautiful to her, because of their connection to her unhappy married life: ‘“It was chrysanthemums when I married him, and chrysanthemums when you were born, and the first time they ever brought him home drunk he’d got brown chrysanthemums in his button-hole”’ (PO: 186). The natural cycle of the plant’s flowering season is intertwined with the rhythm of the woman’s married life, which is to say her social role; that they are again in flower when her husband is killed continues this series. The rhythmic symbol of the chrysanthemum illuminates the way that rhythms are both discovered and created by their perceiver, since the flower is shown to be meaningful to a character within the story because of its rhythmic recurrence. In this way, Lawrence simultaneously employs and interrogates this symbolism and also the signification of rhythm itself. While many critics have made note of the chrysanthemum’s recurrence, and especially its fusion of life and death, this has been without explicit acknowledgement of its rhythmic complexity. For example, Grmelová observes the contribution of this intertwining to the unified effect of the story, and their conflation of life and death, so that ‘the relationship of natural, social and human, as the flowers rather ominously prefigure, is tragic for her’.23 Schulz shares this assessment of their symbolism, suggesting that ‘the chrysanthemums have represented, from the very start, decay […] and they have been “markers” of the death-in-life marriage of Mr. and Mrs. Bates.’24 Thus, the flowers, which might usually be seen as symbols of life, growth and

22 See for instance, Schulz, ‘Lawrence’s Early Masterpiece,’ 367-68; Kearney, Major Short Stories, 8; Grmelová, Lawrence’s Short Fiction, 64. 23 Grmelová, Lawrence’s Short Fiction, 65. 24 Schulz, ‘Lawrence’s Early Masterpiece,’ 368. Lawrence 105

beauty, as they are by Annie, Elizabeth’s daughter (‘the child put the pale chrysanthemums to her lips, murmuring: /”Don’t they smell beautiful!”’ [PO: 186]), simultaneously suggest the reverse movement of death and decay. But this connection of the flowering cycle of the plant with the significant events of an ordinary woman’s life also subordinates these personally significant experiences to the indifferent cycles of nature: it allows Elizabeth be a ‘phenomenon’, to ‘fall into the form of some other rhythmic form’, even as the story is deeply concerned with her individual, embodied emotional experiences. Elizabeth’s physiological and emotional rhythms are also mapped against the social and mechanical rhythms of life in her village. The ‘slice of life’ spanned by ‘Odour of Chrysanthemums’ is clearly delineated by the narrator’s recurring reference to the clock time (it is updated eight times), beginning at half-past four in the afternoon, when Elizabeth begins to expect her husband home for tea. (PO: 184) It is half-past ten that night when someone comes to tell her that her husband’s body is being carried to the house, but later, when the body has been laid in the parlour and Annie has been woken by the sound of men’s voices, Elizabeth tells the little girl that it is ten o’clock (PO: 192, 196). This close attention to the passage of clock time throughout the bulk of the story indicates an allegiance to empirical realist precision, while also firmly locating this story within the modern era of industrialised labour, in which the cycle of the day is marked not merely by natural signifiers of time such as the position of the sun, but by mechanical measurement. Yet the repetitive reference to this detail also reinforces Elizabeth’s gradual emotional trajectory throughout the story, from irritation to anxiety to grief. The fact that she gives her daughter an inaccurate time at the end destabilises the status of empirical truth enjoyed by this detail throughout the rest of the text, rendering the category of time subjective. The regular mechanical rhythm formed by these references to the clock time is juxtaposed and intertwined with the continuum of Elizabeth’s bodily experience of her emotions over the evening. The linear progression of this emotional rhythm is complicated by the repetitious description of Elizabeth’s physiological sensations, especially centred around her heart, but also her blood and womb. While the name for the emotion changes, the physiological experience of it is similarly described. This is emotion conceived primarily as a physical, almost electric phenomenon, which Lawrence 106

anticipates Lawrence’s later thermodynamic vocabulary focussing on heat and energy. The first mention of Elizabeth’s heart comes as she is putting the children to bed, angry with her husband who has failed to come home: ‘The mother looked down at them, at the brown silken bush of intertwining curls in the nape of the girl’s neck, at the little black head of the lad, and her heart burst with anger at their father, who caused all three such distress’ (PO: 188). As the evening wears on, the progressive changes in Elizabeth’s emotional and mental state are represented by reference to sensations of her blood and heart. After eight o’clock, when her anxiety has led her to go out to find out where her husband is, his co-worker’s lack of knowledge of Walt’s whereabouts precipitates another intense, almost mechanical coronary sensation: ‘At this suddenly all the blood in her body seems to switch away from her heart’ (PO: 190). Here the word ‘switch’ likens the flow of blood to that of electricity. While waiting at home alone, this sensation is caused again by the sound of the winding- engine at the entrance to the mine, which she first connects to her fears for her husband, but also consciously attributes the mechanical sound to the industrial, social rhythm of the business-as-usual workings of the coal mine: ‘Again she felt the painful sweep of her blood, and she put her hand to her side, saying aloud, “Good gracious! – it’s only the nine o’clock deputy going down,” rebuking herself’ (PO: 191). The interdependence of mechanical and physiological rhythms in this story underscores the electric quality of Elizabeth’s emotional experiences. This combination of physiological and mechanical, linear and cyclical rhythms also serves a narratological and didactic purpose in that it leads cumulatively to that crisis in emotion and understanding for both protagonist and reader. Elizabeth’s transition from anxiety and fear to grief and shame is portrayed in the next iteration of this sensation, in conversation with her mother-in-law: ‘“Is he dead?” she asked, and at the words her heart swung violently, though she felt a slight flush of shame at the ultimate extravagance of the question’ (PO: 191). When someone comes to warn her that her husband’s body is being brought, the moment of shock is also represented through the heart’s response: ‘“They’re bringin’ ‘im, Missis,” he said. Elizabeth’s heart halted a moment. Then it surged on again, almost suffocating her’ (PO: 193). At last, at the same time that she has come to a realisation of their mutual isolation from each other throughout their marriage, and of their ultimate separation Lawrence 107

in the gap between life and death, Elizabeth is also filled with an almost impersonal feeling of compassion towards her husband, yet again described as an overwhelming physical sensation in the heart: ‘And all the while her heart was bursting with grief and pity for him. What had he suffered? What stretch of horror for this helpless man?’ (PO: 198). This final instance of the five repetitions of these intense sensations in the protagonist’s body is embedded within a long passage that anticipates Lawrence’s later appreciation of Verga’s technique, as described and demonstrated in the ‘Translator’s Preface’ (1928) discussed above, in that it is focused entirely on tracing the spiralling repetition of Elizabeth’s thoughts as they move from the sight of her husband’s dead, naked body, to consider their ultimate isolation from each other, their children, and her new sense, inspired by the material reality of the lifeless body itself, that the man who lies dead before her is other than what and who she had always thought him to be. This epiphany about the failings in her marital relationship is thus figured as equally an epiphany about the true nature of existence and is born of a coeval matrix of rhythms, not only emotional and physiological, but also mechanical and social. Lawrence’s use of literary rhythms to mimetically explore this nexus of worldly rhythms suggests an investment in what he calls in a contemporaneous essay the ‘mission of Art’: to ‘set vibrating in the second person the emotion which moved the producer’ (STH: 140). ‘The Prussian Officer’ directly explores this interest in the capacity of rhythm to establish what Kirsty Martin calls ‘sympathy’ between individuals, or in other words, to interpenetrate bodies and to affect emotions.25 In this way, the story further demonstrates Lawrence’s interest in thermodynamic models of feeling, both emotional and physiological. As in ‘Odour of Chrysanthemums’, in ‘The Prussian Officer’ Lawrence explores emotion as not only a physiological experience but also as a rhythmic, indeed thermodynamic phenomenon. In this story, though, this ‘pulsing, frictional to-and- fro, which works up to culmination’ (WL: 486) is interpersonal rather than internal. Emotional energy, figured as heat, is transmitted between the bodies of the story’s two polarised protagonists. ‘The Prussian Officer’ is, then, a study of a dysfunctional, or arrhythmic example of a ‘constant vibrating interchange’ of highly charged

25 Martin, Rhythms of Sympathy, 27. Lawrence 108

emotional energy between the eponymous officer and his orderly (SCAL: 109). Lawrence again utilises the rhythmic repetition or ‘expanding symbol’ of a motif involving the bodily sensation of emotion, in this case irritation and heat. These sensations represent the increasing intensity of the relationship between the two men due to their mutually defensive response to the possibility of genuine attraction and connection (whether sexual or otherwise) between them. The text may be seen as a cautionary tale that dramatises the negative consequences of restrictive social norms regarding masculinity and homosociality, particularly within the rigid cultural structures of the military. For Lawrence, these norms unnaturally block the flow of this ‘interchange’ of energy between people, and thus of the essence of life itself – they impede the ‘struggle into conscious being’, or authentic connection with life and the universe. ‘The Prussian Officer’ holds a significant place in Lawrence scholarship: the collection as a whole and this story in particular are often considered important in terms of the development of his metaphysical and aesthetic theories. Published near the outbreak of the First World War, Lawrence originally titled this story ‘Honour and Arms’, but it and the collection as a whole were renamed at the last moment and without consultation, possibly to capitalise on public feeling about the war with Germany, by Edward Garnett, Lawrence’s editor and literary mentor between 1911 and 1914. Lawrence’s title for the collection was The Fighting Line. Garnett also reordered the stories in the volume, and Martin F. Kearney suggests that these revisions destroyed Lawrence’s own carefully balanced arrangement, which Kearney speculates had been designed to promote vitalist themes.26 Similarly, Keith Cushman suggests that it is in the writing of this story that Lawrence first properly articulated his dualistic vision of life, since its final version predates both the main vehicle for its explication, his Study of Thomas Hardy and the novel in which it is more famously explored, The Rainbow.27 This latter aspect of the story is a prominent one, which underpins Lawrence’s representation of the polarised rhythmic relation between the two characters.

26 Kearney, Major Short Stories, xiv-xxv. 27 Cushman, Lawrence at Work, 170. Lawrence 109

Lawrence’s dualist metaphysics, as first detailed in his Study of Thomas Hardy (written in 1914 but unpublished until after he died), describes the universe as based upon an alternation between movement and stasis, or ‘the Will-to-Motion and the Will-to-Inertia’, that is, on a thermodynamic rhythm: ‘These cause the whole of life, from the ebb and flow of a wave, to the stable equilibrium of the whole universe, from birth and being and knowledge to death and decay and forgetfulness’ (STH: 59). These two opposing categories are elaborated with a bevy of related pairs: on the side of Will-to-Motion, Lawrence places the masculine, Knowledge, ‘the Son’, mind, spirit, thought. Will-to-Inertia is aligned with the feminine, Nature, ‘the Father’, body, soul, and feeling. Yet he stresses that these oppositions are in some senses arbitrary, and ‘the same, when seen completely’ (STH: 60). Another name in Lawrence’s vocabulary for ‘the dual Will’ is ‘Love’ and ‘the Law’, and it is these that he uses in the application of his dualism to aesthetic theory. For Lawrence, this conception of the nature of existence has a direct bearing on the materiality of art, and he argues that artistic form is the rhythmic product of the relation between these polarised categories: ‘Artistic form is a revelation of the two principles of Love and the Law in a state of conflict and yet reconciled: […] active force meeting and overcoming and yet not overcoming inertia. It is the conjunction of the two which makes form’ (STH: 90). This theory of artistic form in essence prefigures Lawrence’s later understanding of life as the ‘constant vibrating interchange’, as a person’s relation to others and to the universe. The rhythmic or thermodynamic relation between the two main characters in ‘The Prussian Officer’ is therefore established in part in the characters’ representation of these two opposing theoretical tendencies – the ‘Will-to-Motion’ and the ‘Will-to- Inertia’. Lawrence sets up this opposition early on in his physical portrayals of the characters: the officer is described as having ‘reddish-brown, stiff hair, that he wore short upon his skull. His moustache also was cut short and bristly over a full, brutal mouth. […] a man who fights with life. His fair eyebrows stood bushy over light blue eyes that were always flashing with cold fire.’ By contrast, the orderly is ‘swarthy, with a soft, black, young moustache. There was something altogether warm and young about him. He had firmly marked eyebrows over dark, expressionless eyes, that seemed never to have thought, only to have received life direct through his senses, Lawrence 110

and acted straight from instinct’ (PO: 2-3). Thus, the officer has been made to manifest the will-to-motion, while the orderly stands for the will-to-inertia. But rather than existing together in a ‘state of conflict and yet reconciled’, each man is in his own way determinedly self-contained and resists an authentic complementary relationship. Indeed, the capacity of the other to stimulate an emotional or sub-emotional response in him is experienced as an existential threat by each man, and the vehemence of this defensive response is shown to result in brutal violence and eventually their deaths. For the officer, the orderly’s vibrant and natural corporeality is dangerous in its confrontation of his own unnatural self-control:

the influence of the young soldier’s being had penetrated through the officer’s stiffened discipline, and perturbed the man in him. He, however, was a gentleman, with long fine hands and cultivated movements, and was not going to allow such a thing as the stirring of his innate self. (PO: 4)

Likewise, the orderly is wary of becoming emotionally involved in any way with his master: ‘the youth instinctively tried to keep himself intact: he tried to serve the officer as if the latter were an abstract authority, and not a man. All his instinct was to avoid personal contact, even definite hate’ (PO: 5). But both men are alike unable to restrain themselves from developing a passionate response to the other. The officer’s defensive reaction involves seeking to intimidate and punish his servant:

In spite of himself, the captain could not regain his neutrality of feeling towards his orderly. Nor could he leave the man alone. In spite of himself, he watched him, gave him sharp orders, tried to take up as much of his time as possible. Sometimes he flew into a rage with the young soldier, and bullied him. (PO: 4)

Similarly, his orderly’s attempt to remain emotionally neutral is increasingly unsuccessful: ‘But in spite of himself the hate grew, responsive to the officer’s passion’ (PO: 5). This is an example of what McCabe describes as Lawrence’s interest in rhythmic ‘relations of attraction-repulsion’ between characters – that is, in which the current of relational energy between people (in Lawrence’s formulation) alternates between these two opposite impulses. 28 In this case, this alternation might be

28 McCabe, ‘Rhythm in D. H. Lawrence’s Short Stories,’ 64. Lawrence 111

imagined to be so swift that it registers as increasing friction and tension, which results in a violent combustion from each man. Lawrence evokes this increasing tension between and within his characters through the repeated motif of friction, heat, fire and combustion, much as he does in depicting Elizabeth’s emotional trajectory in ‘Odour of Chrysanthemums’. The officer, for example, is attributed with the feeling or state of irritation seven times, a word that implies annoyance or slight anger, but also the causation of pathological inflammation in the body, and in biology, the stimulation of an active response in an organism, cell or organ.29 The level of this response in the officer gradually intensifies throughout the story: at first, the orderly’s presence simply ‘irritate[s]’ the officer (PO: 3, 4). This grows until he is described as ‘madly irritable’, and ‘irritably insane’ (PO: 4, 5), reaching a point of crisis as a state: he becomes ‘mad with irritation’, and finally, in the scene which ends in his savage kicking attack on the orderly, he is ‘in an agony of irritation, torment, and misery’ (PO: 5, 6). These feelings of irritation imply a dovetailing of physical and emotional experience; they are as physiological as they are psychological. Thus friction caused by violent rhythm of oscillation between attraction and repulsion can be seen to lead to the sensation of excessive bodily heat and eventually to combustion: the officer is also ‘incensed’ (PO: 6), and a ‘hot flame ran in his blood’ (PO: 4), and later, in a direct conflation of the psychical and the bodily, his hands ‘seemed to be full of mad flame’ (PO: 6). The highly charged physical interaction of the assault transfers these fiery sensations to the orderly, first foreshadowed in his angry reaction to the officer’s first physical aggression: ‘Once he flung a heavy military glove into the young soldier’s face. Then he had the satisfaction of seeing the black eyes flare up into his own, like a blaze when straw is thrown on a fire’ (PO: 5). Violence and its motivating emotions of hate, rage or a less definite passion, are thus presented as thermodynamic vibrations that can be transmitted to another, in this case bringing the two men into a tempestuous ‘sympathy’. This recurring motif of thermodynamic transfer, embedded as it is in rhythmic concepts, itself forms a rhythm that is integral to the story’s structure. The orderly is impelled to extreme violence by uncontrollable emotional responses to the older

29 Original meaning in English: to excite or provoke. OED Online, s.v. ‘irritate,’ last accessed 7 February 2016, http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/99861?result=3&rskey=ym8qMO&. Lawrence 112

man, which are again represented as the result of thermodynamic transference. In the events leading up to his murder of the officer, following his own assault, the orderly’s emotional response to the other is also described as the bodily sensation of heat – it is a ‘flash’ through his body (PO: 11, 12), his ‘heart was like fire in his chest’, and the feeling itself is repeatedly portrayed as a flame, which, like a jolt of electricity, has a corresponding physical reaction: ‘Again the flash of flame went through the young solider, seeing the stiff body stoop beneath him, and his hands jerked.’ Finally, while watching the officer drinking, the orderly combusts, ‘And the instinct which had been jerking at the young man’s wrists suddenly jerked free. He jumped, feeling as if he were rent in two by a strong flame’ (PO: 14). When he has strangled the officer to death, he looks with both horror and satisfaction at the blood coming out of the dead man’s eyes and nose, since while he regrets the damage to his body, ‘He had hated the face of the captain. It was extinguished now’ (PO: 15). Here, the ‘it’ which the orderly believes is extinguished is both the personality of the captain (abstracted as his face), and the fire of their mutual enmity, the thermodynamic transfer of negative emotional energy between them. This extreme vibration is presented as not only transmittable between the two men, but as a threat to retaining self-control, coherence and even existence. The orderly’s obsession with this threat after his beating and humiliation by the officer is illustrated through the repeated return to his mind of the image of his master’s hand shaking when accepting a cup of coffee the morning after the kicking. This image is taken by the orderly as confirmation of the other’s existence, which somehow nullifies his own:

He clung to his sensation – that the captain did not exist, so that he himself might live. But when he saw his officer’s hand tremble as he took the coffee, he felt everything falling shattered. And he went away, feeling as if he himself were coming to pieces, disintegrated. (PO: 10)

Here, the vibration of nervous energy that moves the officer’s hand is transmitted to and amplified in the orderly; he is emotionally and mentally shaken by this sign of life, that is, of energy, to the point of feeling that he is breaking apart. Thus what might typically be interpreted as a sign of weakness in his opponent is instead experienced as a challenge to the orderly’s being. Here, the relation between the two Lawrence 113

men, the ‘constant vibrating interchange’, has become a violent pulsation, or shock wave, with the power to shatter the individuals involved. This is perhaps due to their mutual resolve to resist this relation – the officer ‘was not going to allow such a thing as the stirring of his innate self’, and the orderly who tried to ‘keep himself intact’ (PO: 4, 5). Thus the rigidity of their beings leaves them vulnerable to destruction by the shock waves caused by their violent encounter. This disintegrating shock wave continues to affect the orderly even after the officer’s death, and is again symbolised via heat, in this case that emanating from the sun. The remainder of the story chronicles the orderly’s brief and deranged flight after the murder, and his subsequent death apparently from heatstroke and dehydration, and in this section of the story, the sun is repeatedly invoked as representing the everyday life from which he is now isolated. The thermodynamic radiation from the sun continues the disintegration of the orderly’s sense of self, so that he feels that ‘the sun, drilling down on him, was drilling through the bond’ (PO: 20) between his various selves, signifying his separation from the normal world and the fragmentation of his self. This relocation of the orderly’s counterpart in a destructive ‘vibrating interchange’ to the sun transfers or broadens the orderly’s problem with relationality to a cosmic dimension – that is, his (and the officer’s) inability to enter into an authentic relation is not only interpersonal but also a question of connection to the universe, or what Lawrence would later call the resistance to the ‘perfect impulse’ that leads to ‘the gnawing misery of nullification’ (RDP: 27). While the result of this interaction for the two men is undoubtedly disastrous, there is some suggestion that in light of Lawrence’s vision of characters as ‘phenomena’, or as falling into ‘some other rhythmic form’, these deaths are not important – they are the casualties of an inhuman conflict, with reconciliation achieved in their mutual destruction. ‘The Prussian Officer’ thus develops what we might call the thermodynamic model of emotion explored in ‘Odour of Chrysanthemums’ in terms of relationships of the individual to both other people and to the universe as a whole. Both of these usually intangible categories of experience are thus rendered as emanating from physical phenomena – from vibrations and rhythms of various kinds. Lawrence’s use Lawrence 114

of the sun as a cosmic agent for this anticipates and contrasts with his much later invocation of that celestial body in Sun. Sun (1926–28) continues this interest in a thermodynamic model of individual and relational experience, with an expanded focus on the human’s relation to the inhuman universe. This story has an unusual composition history; it was first published in a shorter version in the autumn 1926 issue of New Coterie and in September the same year in a limited, autographed standalone edition, but in April 1928 was rewritten in response to an offer from American publisher and collector Harry Crosby to purchase the manuscript. The original manuscript had been destroyed by this time, so Lawrence copied it from the New Coterie edition, expanding it in the process and describing it as the ‘really complete’ version.30 Sun contains the most direct treatment of Lawrence’s long-held belief in the moral urgency of our eurhythmic synchronicity with the universe, or in his own earlier terms, of flying ‘according to the perfect impulse’ of the ‘great systole diastole’. As such, Lawrence’s didactic uses of literary rhythms come to the fore to a far greater extent than in ‘Odour of Chrysanthemums’ and ‘The Prussian Officer’. Sun tells the story of a woman’s relocation from New York to Sicily, and in particular of her adoption of the daily habit of sunbathing. This new habit is shown to have both therapeutic results for Juliet’s physical and mental health, and transformative effects on her personality, or rather, her surrender of this aspect of her self, and embrace of her role as an inhuman, material, ‘phenomenon’. Broadly, this change is shown to be wrought by the alteration she makes to her daily routine, by which Lawrence accords a critical significance to the everyday itself in the constitution of being. Within the daily rhythm of her new habit, Juliet is shown to benefit from another kind of rhythm, the absorption of thermodynamic energy, in the form of the heat and light of the sun. The story gives weight to the everyday throughout the story, and in particular to habit or routine activities, not only for one’s quality of life in general, but even the state of one’s deeper self. Through this, modern, urban living is portrayed as

30 Crosby published this version in a limited deluxe edition in October 1928, but the earlier version, which was also included in the 1928 collection The Woman Who Rode Away, was standard until the Cambridge edition of 1995. Here I refer to the ‘really complete’ version. (WWRA: xxx-xxxii) Lawrence 115

unnatural, mechanical and conducive to pathological arrhythmia, evident in the first scenes of the story, which describe Juliet’s parting from her husband in New York:

So, they looked at their sleeping son, and the father’s eyes were wet. But it is not the wetting of eyes which counts, it is the deep iron rhythm of habit, the year-long, life-long habits: the deep-set stroke of power. And in their two lives, the stroke of power was hostile, his and hers. Like two engines running at variance, they shattered one another. (WWRA: 19)

Here, the narrator’s didactic tone is uppermost, authoritatively asserting the primacy of underlying thermodynamic rhythms over sentiment – it is a fundamental arrhythmia in Juliet and her husband’s thermodynamic relation that, like that of the officer and the orderly in ‘The Prussian Officer’, damages them both. Lawrence combines this sense of the way that the ‘constant vibrating interchange’ between people can go wrong with the concept of habit. The destructiveness is aligned with mechanical, industrial imagery that suggests modern rhythms of living, particularly their life in the iconic metropolis of New York, surrounded by other engines, has interfered with more natural, wholesome or spontaneous rhythms. This was not an uncommon idea at the time, as Golston explains: ‘The general idea […] was that the circumstances of modernity compromise or even destroy organic human senses of rhythm; that the recovery of such senses of rhythm is essential to the maintenance of a healthy civilization; and that poetry can assist in and even motivate such a recovery.’31 Hence what heals Juliet, whose immersion in these artificial rhythms has apparently made her both physically and mentally unwell, is her adoption of a new daily habit, of sunbathing. The habitual character of this activity is emphasised by anaphora, with two successive paragraphs beginning with the same words (which in themselves describe habitual repetition), the same action: ‘Every day she went down to the cypress tree’; ‘Every day, in the morning towards noon, she lay at the foot of the powerful, silver-pawed cypress tree, while the sun strode jovial in heaven.’ At the same time, the practice is assigned the status of almost religious discipline; it becomes a ‘secret ritual’ through which Juliet is absorbing knowledge of the cosmos (that is, its thermodynamic energy), until ‘she knew the sun in every thread of her body’

31 Golston, Rhythm and Race, 10. Lawrence 116

(WWRA: 23). This embodied form of knowledge also connotes the carnal sense of the verb, thus intertwining the everyday, the cosmic, and the carnal. From the first, Juliet’s sunbathing is presented as a combination of solar energy, biological rhythm and sexual experience, while Lawrence’s accentuation of linguistic rhythms emphasises the rhythmic quality of this experience, or encounter, and hints at an almost religious exaltation:

She slid off all her clothes, and lay naked in the sun. And as she lay, she looked up through her fingers at the central sun, his blue pulsing roundness, whose outer edges streamed brilliance. Pulsing with marvellous blue, and alive, and streaming white fire from his edges, the sun! He faced down to her, with blue body of fire, and enveloped her breasts and her face, her throat, her tired belly, her knees, her thighs and her feet. (WWRA: 21)

While the first sentence quoted here provides a prosaic description of Juliet’s actions, in which she prepares to follow her doctor’s prescription to take daily sunbaths, from the second sentence given here, the diction shifts. Lawrence begins the sentence with ‘and’, which here signals, via oratorical diction, a shift to what Con Coroneos and Trudi Tate term the ‘fabulous-symbolic mode’ of Lawrence’s later ‘novelettes’.32 Coroneos and Tate argue that in these texts, Lawrence turns away from the naturalism of his earlier stories (such as those treated above, though ‘The Prussian Officer’ might be seen as a precursor to this style in its heavily symbolic characterisation). This enables his narrative to move ‘with ease between levels of significance and information, effortlessly integrating the most occult concepts with everyday gossip’.33 In this case, this mode also entails what might be called a poetic intensity, achieved via Lawrence’s trademark ‘continual, slightly modified repetition’. This is perceptible in the third sentence especially, in its combination of polysyndeton and the anastrophic, revelatory climax in ‘the sun!’ This intensity is continued in the parallelisms of the final sentence, where the listing of Juliet’s body parts is at once

32 Con Coroneos and Trudi Tate, ‘Lawrence’s Tales,’ in The Cambridge Companion to D. H. Lawrence, ed. Anne Fernihough (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 112. 33 Although Coroneos and Tate are here referring to those of Lawrence’s later ghost stories such as ‘The Border-Line’ or ‘Glad Ghosts’ which maliciously or insensitively portray friends like John Middleton Murry or Lady Cynthia Asquith, this integration of the occult, broadly understood as the mystical, and the everyday is also evident in Sun, not least at the level of shifts in diction such as this. Coroneos and Tate, ‘Lawrence’s Tales,’ 112. Similarly, Harris notes Lawrence’s shift towards fable and satire, and also his use of Biblical allusion and language in his later short fiction. Harris, Short Fiction of D. H. Lawrence, 9-11, 133-34, 279 n. 41. Lawrence 117

physiologically fragmentary (foreshadowing her subsequent surrender of the personal), and mystically inclusive in its sense of the omnipresence of solar energy and hence the immensity of the inhuman universe. Here, the twice-repeated description of the sun as ‘pulsing’ recalls Lawrence’s cardiovascular image of the universe as a ‘great systole diastole’ (RDP: 27) at the same time that the sun’s masculine personification, repeated and developed throughout the story, characterises Juliet’s sensation of the sun shining on her body as a physical embrace. Juliet’s spontaneous embrace of bodily sensation is thereby cast as an almost ecstatic experience, with both sexual and spiritual implications. In this passage then, Lawrence uses linguistic rhythm to mimic the physical rhythm of waves of solar radiation, perceived by Juliet as ‘pulsing’ heat and light, but also, and through this very mimicry, for didactic purposes – that is, to create ‘sympathy’ with the reader, to compel them to ‘feel with’ the rhapsodic rhythm of the prose and hence with its moral impulse. In Sun, then, Lawrence celebrates sexuality as both natural and health-giving, and through this, venerates the corporeal aspect of human experience.34 For him, this significance is attached to the body’s potential for rhythmic concordance with the cosmos, and all of this is bound up in the quite explicit portrayal of Juliet’s practice of sunbathing as an erotic encounter: the ‘desire sprang secretly in her, to be naked to the sun’ (WWRA: 20), she looks for a private place where she can ‘have intercourse with the sun’ (WWRA: 21), she ‘offer[s] her bosom to the sun’ and ‘give[s] herself’ to it (WWRA: 21), and in time, ‘with her knowledge of the sun, and her conviction that the sun was gradually penetrating her to know her, in the cosmic carnal sense of the word, came over her a feeling of detachment from people’ (WWRA: 23, emphasis original). Yet this congress with the sun also reawakens Juliet’s more conventional sexual appetite, conveyed through the description of her womb as a flower gradually opening in response to the sun’s warmth. The first object of her desire is a local Sicilian peasant who is portrayed as an animalistic, human embodiment of the sun,

34 While Lawrence significantly makes this claim for female sexuality in particular, it is equally notable that his model for female sexuality is one of passivity and submission (note also the suggestion that one reason for Juliet’s ill-health is her struggle with her husband for power), and one which is conditioned by the male gaze. While this aspect of Lawrence’s thinking is both complex and problematic, in this story as in many others, it falls outside the scope of the present study to pursue it in further detail. Lawrence 118

with whom Juliet imagines intercourse would be purely physical: ‘With him, it would be like bathing in another kind of sunshine, heavy and big and perspiring: and afterwards one would forget’ (WWRA: 37). Recalling Lawrence’s earlier argument that the ‘breath of life’ is a ‘constant vibrating interchange’ between bodies, the sexual attraction between Juliet and the peasant explicitly echoes her ‘intercourse’ with the sun: ‘they looked into each other’s eyes, and the fire flowed between them, like the blue, streaming fire from the heart of the sun’ (WWRA: 29). Thus, sexuality, and more broadly interpersonal human relationships, are posited as not only governed by thermodynamic phenomena, as in ‘The Prussian Officer’, but also as parallel or perhaps ancillary to the individual’s connection to the cosmos. This awakening coincides with her shedding of the personal, which Lawrence repeatedly connects with modern pathology: like the captain in ‘The Prussian Officer’, Juliet ‘had always been mistress of herself, aware of what she was doing and held tense in her own command.’ But unlike that ill-fated captain, Juliet’s new habit of sunbathing has allowed her to embrace a new mode of living, centred on her relation to the mysterious energies of the inhuman universe:

She herself, her conscious self, was secondary, a secondary person, almost an onlooker. The true Juliet lived in the dark flow of the sun within her deep body, like a river of dark rays circling, circling dark and violent around the sweet, shut bud of her womb. (WWRA: 26)35

When Juliet’s husband Maurice does arrive, he is unsure how to relate to her, since ‘He was used to her as a person. And this was no longer a person, but a fleet sun- strong body, soulless and alluring as a nymph, twinkling its haunches’ (WWRA: 33). Nevertheless, he is pleased with this transformation, since he had found her previous, ‘pale, silent’, New York self oppressive, equating Juliet’s former unhappiness with ghostliness, or disembodiment: ‘Thank God,’ he thinks, ‘that menacing ghost woman seemed to be sunned out of her now’ (WWRA: 35). Yet now Maurice, with his ‘grey city face’ and ‘precise table manners’, represents the unnaturalness of modern living, to the point that he almost does not exist for Juliet: ‘Being so sunned, she could not see him, his sunlessness was like a nonentity’ (WWRA: 36).

35 The ‘dark rays’ of the sun featured in popular physics of the period; see Beer, ‘Wave Theory,’ 312. Lawrence 119

In this context, Lawrence’s conclusion to the story might in one sense be read as an admission of the impossibility of maintaining this apparently ideal state of being. In the end, Juliet turns with some ambivalence from the primal sexual promise of the peasant, accepting instead a continuing relation with her ‘etiolated’, ‘city-branded’ husband, and through him, with modern society:

And the flower of her womb went dizzy, dizzy. She knew she would take him. She knew she would bear his child. She knew it was for him, the branded little city man, that her womb was open radiating like a lotus, like the purple spread of a daisy anemone, dark at the core. She knew she would not go across to the peasant: she had not enough courage, she was not free enough. (WWRA: 38)

This ostensible defeat is illuminated by reference to Lawrence’s progressive ideal of human development; he argues elsewhere that while modern western culture ‘must make a great swerve in our onward-going life-course now, to gather up again the savage mysteries’, ‘this does not mean going back on ourselves.’ Doing so, he warns, leads even to physical illness (SCAL: 127-8). Indeed, in the passage above, Juliet does believe that her body itself, the repository of the newfound ‘cosmic carnal’ knowledge highlighted above in the repeated phrase, ‘she knew’, is responding to her husband rather than to the peasant. Hence, this choice, while also attributable to restrictive social convention, is nevertheless painted as the one that will allow her to ‘fly according to the perfect impulse’. This is reinforced by the quite melancholy sense of inevitability associated with both the repetition of ‘she knew’, as well as Lawrence’s use of the fabulous-symbolic mode, signalled again by the initial ‘and’, which invests the prose with a certain religious sonority. That is, Sun is a ‘moral tale’ that not only asserts the primacy of the body, and sexuality in its espousal of Lawrence’s rhythmic, thermodynamic model of human experience and relations, but that also presents his progressive model of natural and human history.

Rhythms of modernity As is evident in the previous section, attention to rhythm in Lawrence’s short fiction also points up the ambivalence in his engagement with early twentieth-century modernity. Lawrence was attuned to the concerns, substance and possibilities of modern life in subtle ways that are not often acknowledged by critics. David Trotter’s Lawrence 120

description of the most famous of Lawrence’s characters, Connie Chatterley, as ‘modern literature’s most fully rendered techno-primitivist’, highlights the paradoxical nature of Lawrence’s response to questions of the relation between the modern and the primitive or traditional.36 As seen in my above reading of Sun, while Lawrence vehemently denounces the rhythms of modernity as detrimental to everyday life, individual wellbeing, and human relationships both with one another and with their universe, he nevertheless regards progressive evolution of the universe as inevitable and essentially positive. That is, while espousing a reintegration of natural rhythms into everyday life, at the same time he does not advocate a wholesale return to what he sees as the primitive either. The following pair of readings forms the final section for this chapter. Together, they investigate this ambivalence in two stories from different stages of Lawrence’s career: the wartime study of changing gender and power dynamics, ‘Tickets Please’ (1918) and ‘Rocking-Horse Winner’ (1926), a critique of modern consumerism and capitalism. Through an ambivalent representation of a tramway and its female conductors, ‘Tickets Please’ interlinks two anxieties about early twentieth-century modernity: generally, the effects of the technological revolution on society and the natural environment, and more particularly the changes in gender roles and relations brought about by the First World War. The story was written in November 1918 and first printed in the Strand in April 1919, before being collected in England, My England and Other Stories in 1922. While Bruce Steele states that this story ‘merely alludes’ to the First World War, there are compelling reasons to consider this backdrop crucial to the thematic rhythms of the story itself (EME: xix-xx). Like ‘Odour of Chrysanthemums’, this story is set in the coal-mining region of the English Midlands in which Lawrence grew up, and the increasing environmental effects of this industry on the district are of concern. But the story more closely interrogates changing gender roles and relations, through the story of a brief sexual relationship between two colleagues: Annie Stone, who is employed as a tram conductor during the wartime labour shortage, and the chief ticket-inspector, John Thomas Raynor. This relationship is shown to be conditioned by the war, as are the unstable gender

36 David Trotter, ‘Techno-Primitivism: Á Propos of Lady Chatterley’s Lover,’ Modernism/Modernity 18, no. 1 (2011): 162-63. Lawrence 121

dynamics explored in the story. As in ‘The Prussian Officer’, power and sexual attraction are linked, and both are conceived and evoked rhythmically: thermodynamic energy governs relations in ‘Tickets Please’, as it does in all three stories treated above. Specifically, an electric current runs throughout the story, symbolically linking technological modernity and the ‘strange current of interchange’, or ‘electric vibration’, between people. The story’s ambivalent concern with the rhythms of modernity is framed from the outset through a close attention to the tram itself, and to its industrial setting. The opening paragraph of ‘Tickets Please’ follows the Ripley-Nottingham tram route that ran through Lawrence’s hometown of Eastwood, opening in 1913 (EME: xxxiv). The tram itself is the locus of multiple rhythms of everyday modernity: the mechanical rhythms of its workings; its utilisation of electricity, itself a rhythmic phenomenon; the timetable it runs to, and the ebb and flow of the numbers of passengers it holds throughout the day and the week; and the oscillating journey each tram makes back and forth from terminus to terminus, punctuated by the stops it makes along the way. This tram is a symbol of up-to-date, industrial progress: a product of modern technological advancement (electricity, the motor, steel production) that travels on a linear rhythm heading bravely forward in time, full of colliers, through towns equipped with canals, railways, cinemas, clocks and factories, through the landscape of the production of electricity – the coal mining region of England’s Midlands. Yet the tram’s trajectory, localised and curtailed as it is by the materiality of this very landscape and its own steel tracks, is also bound to a cyclical repetition, as the rhythmic structure of the story’s first paragraph makes clear. This first paragraph is an example of how Lawrence’s mimetic and didactic aims dovetail in his overt use of heightened literary rhythm. In this passage, Lawrence uses linguistic cadence to evoke the rhythm of the tram’s journey through the countryside between its terminuses – especially the sense of its speed and traversal of rising and falling terrain. This whole passage is structured around the oscillating rhythm of the outbound and inbound route of this single-line tramway. This motion is emphasised by the three-part structure of the paragraph, which starts out with a very long sentence describing the tram’s journey from Nottingham to its terminus in Ripley. This sentence is 117 words, exactly the same number as the last sentence of Lawrence 122

the paragraph, which describes the return trip along the very same tracks. The middle part of the paragraph is a two-sentence lull in the town of Ripley: a pause before the downward swing of the pendulum:

There is in the Midlands a single-line tramway system which boldly leaves the county town and plunges off into the black, industrial countryside, up hill and down dale, through the long, ugly villages of workmen’s houses, over canals and railways, past churches perched high and nobly over the smoke and shadows, through stark, grimy, cold little market-places, tilting away in a rush past cinemas and shops down to the hollow where the collieries are, then up again, past a little rural church, under the ash trees, on in a rush to the terminus, the last little ugly place of industry, the cold little town that shivers on the edge of the wild, gloomy country beyond. There the green and creamy-coloured tram-car seems to pause and purr with curious satisfaction. But in a few minutes – the clock on the turret of the Co-operative Wholesale Society’s Shops gives the time – away it starts once more on the adventure. (EME: 34)

The dominant experience here is of unceasing, forward movement: while the outbound sentence contains few verbs, most of those used signify dynamic movement – ‘boldly leaves’, ‘plunges’, ‘tilting away in a rush’ – and are in the present or continuous tenses, emphasising ongoing development or progress. On the other hand, the sentence is awash with prepositions, some repeated – off into, up, down, through, past, under – these features, too, underscore the onward, linear passage of the tram through space, and through the specific time and place in the English Midlands region. In some ways this rhythmic evocation is a celebration of the energy of technological modernity, as well as its potential for connecting people and places. However, the references to its routine journey as bold and ‘the adventure’ are perhaps blackly ironic in their similarity to language used to draw in volunteers to fight in the First World War, which by the time this story was written had resulted in huge loss of life. Moreover, the tram is also presented as a vector of industrial modernity, in that its passage through its geographical context, both physical and human, uncovers a multitude of negative adjectives such as ‘ugly’, ‘little’, ‘cold’ and ‘chilly’, and particularly pairs of descriptors conveying the environmentally destructive effects of the local industry: ‘grimy’/’sordid’, ‘black’/’gloomy’, ‘smoke and shadows’ and ‘ash Lawrence 123

trees’. Thus while literary rhythm is on the one hand geared towards mimicry of the mechanical movement of the tram and its passengers’ excitement in its velocity, on the other, Lawrence’s ‘continual, slightly modified repetition’ of bleak adjectives serves as commentary on the ramifications of the technological modernity that it represents. This ambivalent combination of mimesis that is undercut by social critique is continued in the final sentence of the paragraph. While the tram covers the same ground each time, the first and last sentences in this opening paragraph have some notable differences in rhythm. The final sentence in the passage is focussed on the cyclical repetitiousness of the tram’s routine of outbound and inbound journeys:

Again there are the reckless swoops downhill, bouncing the loops: again the chilly wait in the hill-top market-place: again the breathless slithering round the precipitous drop under the church: again the patient halts at the loops, waiting for the outcoming car: so on and on, for two long hours, till at last the city looms beyond the fat gas works, the narrow factories draw near, we are in the sordid streets of the great town, once more we sidle to a standstill at our terminus, abashed by the great crimson and cream-coloured city cars, but still perky, jaunty, somewhat dare-devil, green as a jaunty sprig of parsley out of a black colliery garden. (EME: 34)

While in a way this sentence explores the everyday through the feeling of tedious repetition and routine, the sentence itself constitutes a development in the series – as Lefebvre explains it, ‘Not only does repetition not exclude differences, it also gives birth to them; it produces them.’37 The sentence also contrasts qualitatively with the first one in that it emphasises the rhythmic alternation of stopping and starting of the tram rather than a continuous rush along the track. Here, Lawrence’s mimesis of ‘real-world’ rhythms shares formal characteristics typically associated with poetry, with several features creating an affective focus on routine and rhythm through both sense and sound. Most striking is the anaphora of ‘again’, and that colons are used unconventionally to divide the first third of the sentence into short clauses in a way that establishes a verse-like segmentation. This syntactic structure in turn accentuates an a/b alternation between these clauses, in which speedy, uncontrolled downhill

37 Lefebvre, Rhythmanalysis, 7. Lawrence 124

movement is punctuated by pauses, as well as corresponding phonic repetitions, such as reckless/breathless and wait/waiting. The remainder of the sentence abandons this highly regulated cadence, but retains the stress on the continuance of this everyday repetition and its tedium in phrases like ‘so on and on, for two long hours’ and ‘once more’. This opening paragraph thus establishes a strange affective blend of excitement and tedium around the tram through its rhythmic mimesis of the experience of riding it: its velocity, its stops and starts, its traversal of the rising and falling terrain, and the oscillating movement of the route as a whole. Through this affective juxtaposition, the passage develops a deeply ambivalent attitude towards the progressive project of modernity as represented by the tram. This anxiety about technological modernity mirrors and establishes the central concern in ‘Tickets Please’ about changing gender roles and relations due to the war, embodied in the figures of the female tram conductors. At the beginning of the story, these ‘girls’ are presented as masculine, but quite admirable New Women – bold, tough and somewhat sexually liberated. They are ‘fearless young hussies. In their ugly blue uniforms, skirts up to their knees, shapeless old peaked caps on their heads, they have all the sang froid of an old non-commissioned officer’, and their departure from timid femininity is illustrated by being ‘perfectly at ease’ with a tram-full of rowdy miners. The mock-heroic introduction of the story’s protagonist, Annie Stone, is exemplary of the text’s ironically-tempered admiration of these young women: ‘She is peremptory, suspicious, and ready to hit first. She can hold her own against ten thousand. The step of that tram-car is her Thermopylae’ (EME: 35). The comparison of the tram-car step to the ancient ‘hot gates’ prefigures this story’s thermodynamic linkage of social and technological modernity, which is most fully developed through the motif of electricity (EME: 238, n. 35:36). In ‘Tickets Please’, Lawrence’s thermodynamic model of human emotion and relations first appears when Annie meets her workmate John Thomas by chance at the Statutes fair and they begin a brief sexual relationship. Annie succumbs to her attraction to John Thomas despite her prior wariness towards him due to his routine of seducing the ‘tram-girls’ then discarding them when they begin to expect the relationship to develop. This attraction is cast as a thermodynamic exchange of energy. In the extraordinary space of the fairground, electricity circulates as erotic Lawrence 125

possibility; it is a smell in the air. Despite the constraints of wartime, at the fair ‘the ground was muddy as ever, there was the same crush, the press of faces lighted up by the flares and the electric lights, the same smell of naphtha and [of new-]fried potatoes, and of electricity (EME: 37, editor’s addition). Throughout this scene, Lawrence uses a range of thermodynamic motifs to portray Annie’s growing attraction to John Thomas: there is an emphasis on sharing warmth – they ‘warmed up to the fair’, John Thomas is repeatedly described as ‘warm’, and also in warm tones: he is ‘ruddy’ and has a ‘red, clean hand’ (EME: 37). John Thomas is not the only one who feels hot; when they go on the merry-go-round, Annie chooses ‘the inner horse – named “Wildfire”’ (EME: 38). A link is made between this sexual attraction and electricity, via a resonance, in part of verbal sibilance, with what is referred to as ‘excitement’. While John Thomas is showing off on the merry-go-round and she is riding ‘Wildfire’, Annie ‘was afraid her hat was on one side, but she was excited.’ In this story, as in Sun, Annie’s sexual desire – her excitement – is cast as a sign of health: ‘She was a plump, quick, alive little creature. So she was quite excited and happy.’ The parallel between sexual excitement and electricity in the scene is made most apparent when the couple is in the cinema at the fair, the projector malfunctions, and ‘pitch darkness falls’. At this point,

John Thomas drew Annie towards him […] she knew he wanted to kiss her on the lips […] But the light sprang up, she also started electrically, and put her hat straight. […] Well, it was fun, it was exciting to be at the Statutes with John Thomas. (EME: 38)

Given the prevalence of this type of motif in the short fiction already analysed above, as well as Lawrence’s later insistence that human relations, indeed ‘the breath of life’ itself, are a ‘strange current of interchange’ or an ‘electric vibration’, Annie’s electric movement, and what she identifies as the feelings of fun and excitement – that is, of physical attraction, are here characterised as a thermodynamic phenomenon. In the final scene of ‘Tickets Please’, this thermodynamic model of emotions and interpersonal relations is shown, as in ‘The Prussian Officer’, to include the struggle for power. However, in this story the power struggle is between the sexes, rather than a master and servant, in that it positions a group of women against a single man, who is a conspicuous and perhaps absurd symbol of phallic masculinity – Lawrence 126

the chief ticket-inspector, ‘always called John Thomas, except sometimes, in malice, Coddy’ (EME: 36). When Annie too eventually finds herself rejected by John Thomas, she decides to seek revenge, uniting with five other tram-girls who share the experience. They corner him in their waiting room one evening to mischievously confront him over his promiscuity by forcing him to choose one of the girls to marry, but the encounter descends into a violent attack. This scene is frequently read as an allusion to the violent deaths of Pentheus and Orpheus at the hands of the maenads (EME: 238, n. 43:3),38 but can also be seen as a fulfilment of the aim that Lawrence had earlier declared to Edward Garnett, that in his fiction, ‘the characters fall into the form of some other rhythmic form’ (LDHL 2: 184). In this case, this rhythmic form is that of waves of energy or even electricity: the tram-girls attack John Thomas in a series of repeated and escalating actions, again much as the violence escalates between the officer and the orderly in ‘The Prussian Officer’:

He turned his head away. And suddenly, with a movement like a swift cat, Annie went forward and fetched him a box on the side of the head that sent his cap flying, and himself staggering. He started round. But at Annie’s signal they all flew at him, slapping him, pinching him, pulling his hair, though more in fun than in spite or anger.

This passage shares the same basic pattern with the following one: John Thomas makes a non-confrontational movement, at which Annie hits him on the head, triggering a sudden defensive movement from him and a concerted attack from all six women – but in the second example, their attack has a more serious intent:

He went forward, rather vaguely. She had taken off her belt, and swinging it, she fetched him a sharp blow over the head, with the buckle end. He sprang and seized her. But immediately the other girls rushed upon him, pulling and tearing and beating him. (EME: 42-3)

After this, the women are described repeatedly as rushing on John Thomas, pushing or pulling or striking him with increasing ferocity until he is on the floor. Having achieved this, they are then described multiple times as kneeling or hanging on him to keep him down. Here Lawrence’s stylistic repetitiousness is used to help develop an

38 See also Richard P. Wheeler, ‘“Cunning in his overthrow”: Lawrence’s Art in “Tickets, Please”,’ D.H. Lawrence Review 10 (Fall 1977): 247. Lawrence 127

electrically charged atmosphere in which the women’s actions are the frenzied result of excess nervous energy, which is made clear when afterwards half of them begins to giggle uncontrollably.39 For the most part unnamed during the assault, the ‘girls’ are an impersonal energetic force, and like Annie and John Thomas’ attraction, a thermodynamic phenomenon rather than a group of individual people. Like the electricity that drives the technological and industrial modernity depicted in the tram’s journey, the women’s violent seizure of social power is represented as aberrant and destructive. When John Thomas struggled against them, ‘the girls threw themselves upon him with unnatural strength and power, forcing him down’ (EME: 43). Richard P. Wheeler highlights the overt gender anxieties embedded in this scene, describing it as a transparent dramatisation of castration anxiety, and suggesting that ‘As the individual girls dissolve into a pack bent on attack, the benevolent masculine appropriations of the early scenes give way to the maddened assault on the masculinity of John Thomas.’40 If conceived as allegory, this story promotes the idea of innate masculine ascendancy: John Thomas, ‘cunning in his overthrow’, reclaims his position of masculine power by choosing Annie, whose response, appropriately, is to ‘let go of him as if he had been a hot coal’ (EME: 44). Wheeler observes that this response ‘crumbles the paradoxical foundation of attack and appeal upon which the assault rests’; by acquiescing to the tram-girls’ demand that he choose one of them, John Thomas succeeds in fracturing their unity and thereby dissipating the power of their combined purpose and emotional energy.41 After this, he is dangerous and negatively charged, repelling the women, who ‘moved away from contact with him as if he had been an electric wire’ (EME: 45). While the women’s dominance is certainly the main focus of the story’s anxiety about changes in gender roles and relations, John Thomas is not without blame. It is after all the consequence of his pattern of promiscuous behaviour, and particularly his refusal, like the officer and the orderly in ‘The Prussian Officer’, to engage in an authentic and intimate relation with Annie, who he had ‘really liked, more than usual […] she melted into his very bones’ (EME: 38).

39 For a recent argument exploring giggling as a violent release of energy, see Trotter, ‘Modernism Reloaded: The Fiction of Katherine Mansfield,’ 27-33. 40 Wheeler, ‘Lawrence’s Art in “Tickets, Please”,’ 244, 47. 41 Wheeler, ‘Lawrence’s Art in “Tickets, Please”,’ 244, 42. Lawrence 128

Lawrence’s concern with the effect of modernity on the authenticity of human relations also underlies ‘Rocking-Horse Winner’, a ghost story in which capitalism is portrayed as an unnatural rhythmic force that disrupts or supplants material, biological and social rhythms. Unlike the other stories examined above, in ‘Rocking- Horse Winner’ the main kind of rhythm that Lawrence’s prose evokes is a non- material, abstract one: the indefinite exponential increase of capital, and the obsessive insatiability that accompanies it, is a supernatural rhythm that flies counter to the ‘perfect impulse’ of the ‘great systole diastole’ of the cosmos, and as such is a deathly rhythm: one that leads to the ‘gnawing misery of nullification’ (RDP: 27). The story was written in response to a request from Lawrence’s friend Lady Cynthia Asquith for a piece to include in her 1926 anthology Ghost-Book: Sixteen New Stories of the Uncanny, after she had turned down his first offering, ‘Glad Ghosts’, because it was too long and ‘unpublishable alas’.42 But Lady Cynthia evidently agreed with Lawrence that ‘Rocking-Horse Winner’ was ‘more suitable, and spectral enough’ for inclusion (LDHL 5: 400, 25 February 1926). The story engages playfully with the ghost story genre, depicting society’s preoccupation with wealth and status as unnatural or unhealthy by aligning it with the supernatural. It focuses on an upper-middle-class family in which the parents’, and especially the mother’s, embrace of this preoccupation is the cause of constant financial pressure. This atmosphere of obsession with money leads their son, Paul, to develop a secret superstitious gambling ritual involving his rocking horse. Paul’s ritual enables him to exponentially increase his wealth from a ten-shilling gift from his uncle to a fortune of eighty thousand pounds, but his fixation on generating capital makes him increasingly anxious and unhealthy, until he eventually dies of a ‘brain fever’. Thus, in a shift from a more traditional moral stance, Lawrence’s critique of this aspect of society revolves around the conviction that such abstract economic or social structures obstruct real, which is to say material, human connections to the cosmos. In this way, like Sun, ‘Rocking-Horse Winner’ is a Lawrentian exemplary story, in what Coroneos and Tate call the ‘fabulous-symbolic mode’: shifting between the supernatural and the everyday to develop a critique of modern capitalist and

42 The latter comment perhaps refers to that story’s depiction of a kind of supernaturally inspired swingers’ gathering, as well as the fact that Lady Cynthia felt it contained a portrayal of herself (WWRA: xxxiii-xxxv). Lawrence 129

consumerist culture.43 That is, Lawrence again uses rhythmic mimesis – in this case, the rhythmic representation of non-material rhythms, the ghostly rhythms of capitalism – with a didactic motivation. These supernatural rhythms take two main literary forms in the story: in Paul’s superstitious yet productive rocking-horse ritual itself; and in the notion of possession, developed through the motif of impossibly immaterial sound – a disembodied whisper in the family home, which becomes the ‘soundless noise’ of Paul’s rocking-horse ride. The mock-sacramental ritual itself is the story’s central mystery or ambiguity; while it is clearly marked as fantastical, an imaginative if disturbed child’s game, the ritual is nevertheless effective in that does help Paul to quite quickly generate immense wealth without actually producing anything. His gambling partner, the family’s gardener Bassett, repeatedly avers that ‘It’s as if he had it from heaven’ – the simile here indicating that this is not a universe in which this possibility is a given (WWRA: 236, 237). Paul develops his ritual of frenetically riding his rocking horse until he ‘knows’ the winning horse after his mother tells the child that wealth is created by luck (and notably not by labour). She is, of course, proved right, and much of the story’s critique of capitalism lies in the horror of this production of something from nothing – that is, of capital’s abstract and hence unnatural growth. The rocking horse itself symbolises the mechanism of this pattern of increase: an expensive mechanical imitation of a living creature, which despite its oscillating movement, remains a static object that neither progresses nor changes. Paul’s continued obsession with the rocking horse is presented as a symptom of stagnation in his mental and emotional development – like the horse, he neither grows nor progresses normally. Likewise, the exponential increase in Paul’s fortune correlates with his decreasing mental and physical health, until after a spell of gambling losses, he ‘hardly heard what was spoken to him, he was very frail, and his eyes were really uncanny’ (WWRA: 241). In this way, Lawrence links a focus on financial gain to death. The employment of the ghost-story genre in ‘Rocking-Horse Winner’ is crucial to the achievement of Lawrence’s didactic goal: it strengthens its critique of capitalism because it aligns it directly with the unnatural, rather than a looser comparison.

43 Coroneos and Tate, ‘Lawrence’s Tales,’ 112. Lawrence 130

The most prominent ghostliness in ‘Rocking-Horse Winner’ is developed through sonic rhythms, firstly in the form of the uncanny presence of a voice that no body generates. Throughout the story, the preoccupation with material possessions and social status is associated with possession in the supernatural sense, and this is first introduced in a recurring, whispered phrase:

There was never enough money. The mother had a small income, and the father had a small income, but not nearly enough for the social position which they had to keep up. […] And so the house came to be haunted by the unspoken phrase: There must be more money! There must be more money! The children could hear it all the time, though nobody ever said it aloud. (WWRA: 230, emphasis original)

Avarice, or even simply the accumulative drive of capital itself, is thus represented as a haunting presence; the whispered phrase is at once the voice of the mother’s financial anxiety, and by extension, of the consumerist culture from which her compulsion springs. In other words, the disembodied whispering is the audible or tangible yet unspoken articulation of family tension and societal pressure. As Fernihough, among others, has argued, ‘Lawrence continually warns […] against the dangers of abstracting from the body’.44 It is this belief in the spiritual necessity of embodied existence that underpins the story’s critique of the desire for wealth. Thus, as Paul’s drive to accumulate wealth increases, he too becomes possessed by the capitalist demon. However, Lawrence’s constant stress on the primacy of the body is motivated by a more fundamental concern with the material, which is apparent in the other instance of uncanny sonic rhythm in the story. As Paul’s health worsens, his mother grows increasingly concerned about him, until she finally discovers him performing his ritual – riding his rocking horse – in the middle of the night, in the scene that precipitates his physical and mental collapse:

Noiselessly she went along the upper corridor. Was there a faint noise? What was it? She stood with arrested muscles outside his door, listening. There was a

44 Fernihough, D. H. Lawrence: Aesthetics and Ideology, 14. See also Paul Poplawski, ed. Writing the Body in D. H. Lawrence: Essays on Language, Representation, and Sexuality (Westport: Greenwood Press, 2001). Lawrence 131

strange, heavy and yet not loud noise. Her heart stood still. It was a soundless noise, yet rushing and powerful. Something huge, in violent, hushed motion. What was it? What in God’s name was it? She ought to know. She felt that she knew the noise. She knew what it was. Yet she could not place it. She couldn’t say what it was. And on and on it went, like a madness. (WWRA: 242)

The ominous description of the noise emitted by Paul’s frenzied riding as ‘soundless’ is a paradox that echoes the disembodied whispering that initiated the child’s angst about money. Here again, then, obsession with money is figured as an unnatural rhythm; this soundlessness points to an audial phenomenon that is somehow generated other than by sonic vibration. In addition, this ‘soundless noise’ reinforces the arrhythmic quality of the boy’s ill-health. Paul is, or his behaviour is, not ‘sound’ in the adjectival sense of being without damage, injury or disease; for the noise to be soundless denotes its pathological character. Thus, Lawrence here warns not only against abstracting from the body, but also from the physical more broadly. In addition to this comment on rhythmic materiality, linguistic rhythm in the passage given above also mimetically portrays the escalating intensity of the mother’s emotions as well as, by inference, the approaching crisis of Paul’s madness. Her approach and retreat from conscious recognition of the noise as the reverberation of her own obsession, captured in the alternation here between questioning and progressively increasing certainty, forms what Lawrence later called the ‘curious spiral rhythm’ of emotional or passionate thought (IR: 172). Her tragic complicity in her son’s destruction is clinched in the tableau vivant revealed by electrical illumination:

Then suddenly she switched on the light, and saw her son, in his green pyjamas, madly surging on his rocking-horse. The blaze of light suddenly lit him up, as he urged the wooden horse, and lit her up, as she stood, blonde, in her dress of pale green and crystal, in the doorway. (WWRA: 242)

Here the mother’s epiphany, symbolised in their shared clothing in the colour of money, is enabled by electricity – a thermodynamic wave of energy that illuminates her son’s madness and its origin in the reflection of her own obsession with money, to the detriment both of their relationship and his health. Harris identifies the story’s final critique as being of solipsism, or the lack of acknowledgement or authentic Lawrence 132

interchange with the other.45 Attention to the rhythms in this story in turn helps to illuminate the interrelation of the interpersonal, social and also cosmic dimensions of this critique. This reveals that ‘Rocking-Horse Winner’ refutes solipsism also in the sense of positing the human as most fundamentally an impersonal, material phenomenon rather than primarily as an individual ego. This chapter’s investigation of the role of rhythm in the relation between form and content in Lawrence’s short fiction illuminates the connections between his metaphysical theories and his engagements with science, especially concepts arising from thermodynamics, and issues of the modern world. Of the three authors under study in this thesis, he was the most purposefully engaged in expounding a rhythmic conception of the universe. He is also conspicuous in his attempts to mimetically convey that conception in his fiction. Moreover, he most distinctly saw his role as a writer as having profound moral significance; thus, his use of rhythm in his writing aims to show people how to live, indeed to change them fundamentally. All this makes Lawrence’s oeuvre a good place to start in this study of rhythmic mimesis. In the next chapter, the mapping of this more overt example of rhythmic mimesis helps to locate this literary phenomenon in the work of an author whose personal philosophy and aesthetics are less programmatically set forth. Though she did not generate volumes of essays propounding her vision, like Lawrence, Mansfield thought constantly about the nature of life and its relation to art, and for her too, a form of rhythmic mimesis became key to expressing her own vision of the world.

45 Harris investigates this in three main categories: social (financial greed), familial (mother-son relationship), and psychological (both psychic and physical masturbation). Harris, Short Fiction of D. H. Lawrence, 226.

Chapter 3

Katherine Mansfield and the rhythms of habit

Katherine Mansfield possessed a passionate reverence for a conception of life in which the mystical or cosmic sense converges with the life of the natural world and of everyday routine. In Mansfield’s thinking, life is also always predicated on subjectivity and the relationship between individual and world. This malleable concept of life is bound up in rhythm and together these are fundamental to her aesthetics. An interest in the rhythms of the ordinary runs throughout Mansfield’s short fiction, where she explores daily habit and routine, not just in domestic settings but in the ways that characters and relationships are revealed through habitual patterns of thought, speech, and action. Rhythms also combine polyrhythmically, or are altered and continue arrhythmically, to evoke the experience of the ordinary, its persistence and pervasiveness. In Mansfield’s stories, as in Lawrence’s, rhythms convey existential states of both natural health, and pathological disconnection from life. Her stories can also be seen to dramatise a tension between aesthetic models that view art as artificial and separate and those that see art’s rhythms as existing in organic unity with those of the external world. Though her style is not didactic, Mansfield too believed in the ethical value of literature; she saw the task of the writer as lying in the expression of some truth, or the representation of reality. Mansfield was constantly concerned with literary form and technique. This chapter investigates the distinctive ways that Mansfield makes use of textual rhythm to express her multi-faceted understanding of and passion for life in her fiction. As in the previous chapter, I turn first to Mansfield’s non-fiction discussions of life and literature. Selecting from both her personal and professional writing, I unpick the rhythmic implications of her attitudes to art and reality, with a particular focus on her longstanding interest in combining poetic and prose capabilities in what she referred to as ‘special prose’. In the second section, I begin my analysis of the rhythms of Mansfield’s short fiction with a focus on her expression of a notion of rhythmic subjectivity or personality through rhythmic mimesis – her imaginative technique of Mansfield 134

‘impersonation’. Her understanding of character is deeply rooted in the habits of the mind, its ingrained rhythms of thought as well as of speech. This interest in habit and routine informs the final section of this chapter, where I examine how Mansfield explores the concept of the ordinary through rhythm in the form of routine and its disruption. I focus my examination of the rhythms of the ordinary where they are particularly manifest in her fiction – at the level of structure.

Life, rhythm and prose in Mansfield’s non-fiction Mansfield’s oeuvre does not include a large amount of formal, published writing on aesthetics, unlike Lawrence or Woolf, who produced a prodigious amount of criticism and theory in addition to their fiction. She is generally acknowledged to have been a very conscientious practitioner and a careful reader of many other writers, both predecessors like Shakespeare and Dickens, and contemporaries such as Woolf and Joyce. But while Kaplan argues that she should be considered a principal initiator of British modernism, she also notes that Mansfield was not a ‘systematic theorist’.1 Similarly, as Clare Hanson observes, Mansfield explicitly distanced herself from Murry’s ‘intellectual’ approach to professional literary criticism, arguing that intellectual reasoning cannot reach the ‘whole truth’ or ‘the artist’s truth’.2 Yet this is not to say that Mansfield never thought theoretically about her art; as Gerri Kimber and Angela Smith put it, her ‘intelligence and imagination [were] vigorously interacting’ (CWKM 3: xxv). She did make sustained critical engagements with various literary issues that occupied her contemporaries too. Indeed, Jenny McDonnell argues compellingly that the many reviews that Mansfield wrote for the Athenaeum in 1919 and 1920 actually amount to her ‘manifesto for the kind of literary fiction that she deemed necessary’ for her time.3 But this engagement does occur most often in Mansfield’s personal writings: in her letters and notebooks,

1 Kaplan, Mansfield and the Origins of Modernist Fiction, 1. 2 Mansfield did this in a letter to Murry on his essay collection The Evolution of an Intellectual (CLKM 3: 145-6, 8 December 1919). Clare Hanson, ed. The Critical Writings of Katherine Mansfield (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1987), 1. 3 Jenny McDonnell, ‘“Wanted, a New Word”: Katherine Mansfield and the Athenaeum,’ Modernism/Modernity 16, no. 4 (2009): 730-31. Mansfield co-wrote ‘The Meaning of Rhythm’ and ‘Seriousness in Art’ in 1912 with Murry in her role as assistant editor of Rhythm. While they are a small part of Mansfield’s overall body of work, they are even more overt than the reviews that McDonnell refers to in their occupation of the space of the modernist artist’s manifesto. ‘The Meaning of Rhythm’ is examined in the first chapter of this thesis. Mansfield 135

where she constantly discusses others’ writing and develops her own positions on contemporary literary aesthetics. Unlike Lawrence, Mansfield does not articulate a detailed, rhythmic vision of the universe or indeed make any direct statements about this. However, she shares with him and with Murry a passionate concern with the relationships between the individual and the world, and between art and world, and for her, too, rhythm is the crux of these relationships. Throughout the non-fiction writing surveyed in this section, Mansfield maintains both an almost spiritual veneration of ‘Life’ and a steadfast dedication to its literary expression. Mansfield repeatedly expresses veneration for ‘Life’ itself, her own desire to be completely attuned to it, and a profound appreciation of others who share this same value. Unlike Lawrence and Murry, Mansfield lets her definition of life go largely unstated, but like both of them, the references she does make to it are frequently expressed in organicist terms that are imbued with almost spiritual feeling. It is often held up as a transcendent or exalted category, an antidote to trivial social frustrations, as it is in this 1920 letter to her friend, the Bloomsbury hostess and patron of the arts, Lady Ottoline Morrell:

Ottoline, I adore Life.4 What do all the fools matter and all the stupidity. They do matter but somehow they cannot touch the body of Life. Life is marvellous. I want to be deeply rooted in it – to live – to expand – to breathe in it – to rejoice – to share it. To give and be asked for Love. I know you understand this for you are thrillingly alive – but few people do. (CLKM 3: 183, 20 January 1920.)5

There are some clues here as to Mansfield’s underlying understanding of life. As a body, it has an organic materiality, though also a mystical dimension, since ‘the body of Life’ might evoke the Christian term ‘Body of Christ’. More than that, life is also something that one can be ‘deeply rooted in’ – a phrase that recurs in Mansfield’s writing – a medium from which living things grow, which is again organic material, though not animate but generative. It is also a medium, or a space, that can be

4 Mansfield often uses additional emphasis in both her personal and published writing. In quotes from Mansfield’s oeuvre, italic and underlined text is original unless otherwise noted. 5 By contrast, in a letter to Sydney Schiff, Mansfield summarily dismisses George Santayana for having an inadequate connection to life: ‘Santayana on Dickens was a revelation to me – of Santayana. It showed how little he is really attached to Life. He has the ideas of a child of ten’ (CLKM 4: 330, 3 December 1921). Mansfield 136

‘breathed in’: not just air that is breathed, but an atmosphere that can be experienced. Thus Mansfield desires here to ‘rejoice’ in and ‘to share’ more than the everyday happenings or even the special events of the period between birth and death, but rather a deeply-felt appreciation for both the phenomenon of ‘Life’ and the experiencing of it in both an organic and a transcendent sense. Her confidence to Lady Ottoline that she is one of the few people to share this understanding and appreciation is another recurring theme in Mansfield’s letters; she sees this quality as both rare and one that is a central condition for the artist. It is this that leads her to tell their mutual friend S. S. Koteliansky in 1922 that Lawrence ‘is the only writer living whom I really profoundly care for’, and that ‘even what one objects to is a sign of life in him. He is a living man’ (CLKM 5: 217, 4 July 1922). Both the man himself and his writing are bound up in this assessment; it is Lawrence’s capacity to both profoundly experience and appreciate life and also to convey it in literature that Mansfield values:

When he mentions gooseberries these are real red, ripe gooseberries that the gardener is rolling on a tray. When he bites into an apple it is a sharp, sweet, fresh apple from the growing tree. Why has one this longing that people shall be rooted in life. (CLKM 5: 217)

Here, Lawrence’s writing and Lawrence’s living are intertwined. Mansfield’s reference to gooseberries relates to a short story of Lawrence’s – ‘The Shadow in the Rose Garden’ – and the crux of Mansfield’s judgement is that they are real, and this realness is bound up in details like colour and materiality. But in the next sentence it is not immediately apparent whether Mansfield is still talking about writing. At this point she switches to focus instead on Lawrence’s own heightened awareness of sensory experience: the flavour and texture of the apple, which is here a locus of vitality, as a product of ‘the growing tree’. She suggests that Lawrence is able to sense and also capture in writing the essence of life in these everyday details. Elsewhere, this is presented as knowledge or understanding, of life in general and between people especially. For example, in ‘The Meaning of Rhythm’, she and Murry explain the Bergsonian term ‘intuition’ as the artist’s ‘utter understanding’ and appreciation of people and things.6

6 Murry and Mansfield, ‘The Meaning of Rhythm,’ 18. Mansfield 137

Furthermore, her following remarks in this same letter show that for Mansfield, this kind of heightened sensuality constitutes an active participation in the act of living. She deplores being passively carried along through life: ‘nearly all people swing in with the tide and out with the tide again like heavy seaweed. And they seem to take a kind of pride in denying life. But why? I cannot understand’ (CLKM 5: 217). Mansfield’s metaphor for the unexamined life, of swinging in and out with the tide, is certainly rhythmic, but contrasts to Lawrence’s idea that the resistance of the universal rhythm, the ‘great systole diastole’, causes existential suffering. While having a similarly moral motivation, Mansfield’s remark emphasises the importance of the individual’s active engagement with experience rather than a model of self-surrender. In a letter written at the height of her maturity as a writer, and little more than a year before her early death, Katherine Mansfield wrote to her brother-in-law, the younger artist Richard Murry, with advice about what she saw as the crucial aspect of art:

But what I do believe with my whole soul is that one’s outlook is the climate in which ones art either thrives or doesn’t grow. I am dead certain that there is no separating Art & Life. And no artist can afford to leave out Life. If we mean to work we must go straight to Life for our nourishment. There’s no substitute. But I am violent on this subjeck [sic]. I must leave it. (CLKM 4: 148, 10 December 1920)

Mansfield first seems to describe art and life as being indivisible, but her following comments complicate this, showing a deep response to life to be her ideal for art. For her, art should contain, be inspired by, or made from life. This can be understood as a commitment to mimesis: the reflection of life in art. This statement does, however, leave unanswered the question of what Mansfield means by ‘life’; her capitalisation of the term, along with that of ‘art’, highlights the elevated status that Mansfield accords them, and suggests that her idea of life is of greater significance than either only the biological or the everyday sense. In Mansfield’s letters, the ability to appreciate and value ‘Art’ is homologous with the capacity for appreciating sensual experience in terms of attachment to ‘Life’. This is apparent in her evaluation of French people in a 1922 letter to her friend, the painter Dorothy Brett: Mansfield 138

But oh, how they know how to live! And there is always the feeling that Art has its place, is accepted by everybody, by the servants, by the rubbishman as well as by all others as something important, necessary, to be proud of, Thats what makes living in France such a rest. If you stop your taxi to look at a tree the driver says ‘en effet cet’ arbre est bien jolie’ and ten to one moves his arms like branches. (CLKM 5: 95, 9 March 1922)

Here, knowing ‘how to live’ includes both valuing art and admiring nature, and no clear distinction is made between these activities. Moreover, Mansfield’s affectionate example of her perception of a classlessness in France’s national aptitude for aesthetic appreciation hints at her understanding of the link between art and life, in that it describes a mimetic act: the taxi driver imitates the tree that he admires. The way that living, valuing art, appreciating nature, and imitation are bundled together in this passage suggests that mimesis might be central to Mansfield’s definition of art itself, as well as to the expression of a deep feeling for living. Rhythm underpins this mingling of the categories of life and art. Mansfield’s earlier work with Murry for Rhythm magazine helps to illuminate this, since as Angela Smith argues, Mansfield’s engagement with the ‘cultural politics’ of Rhythm remained important throughout her career. 7 The blurred boundaries between Mansfield’s sense of the personal capacity for living and the artist’s ability to convey that experience, together with the belief that this capacity is rare, echo the argument made a decade before in ‘The Meaning of Rhythm’ (1912), discussed in the first chapter of this thesis. In this manifesto-like article, Mansfield and Murry close with the assertion that the ‘unity’ of art and the artist is both ‘the essential movement of Life’, and ‘the splendid adventure, the eternal quest for rhythm.’8 In other words, rhythm is explained as the ‘movement of life’, that both (true or ideal) art and the artist share or seek. While this terminology is largely absent from Mansfield’s later, more informal musings on this theme, the clear continuities in thinking between the early essay and the letters in terms of her particular relation of life and art support the utility of rhythm as a key concept in understanding Mansfield’s mimetic aesthetics. Rhythm likewise connects the everyday with the numinous in Mansfield’s thinking. It is clear from the examples given above that Mansfield was equally

7 Smith, ‘Katherine Mansfield and Rhythm,’ 102. 8 Murry and Mansfield, ‘The Meaning of Rhythm,’ 20. Mansfield 139

interested in the kind of ‘profounder reality’ that Rhythm set out to explore in 1911, and for her, these two dichotomous categories of human experience can be grouped together under that umbrella.9 This is apparent in a 1915 letter to Koteliansky in which she asks him:

Do you, too feel an infinite delight and value in detail – not for the sake of detail but for the life in the life of it. I can never express myself (and you can laugh as much as you please.) But do you ever feel as though the Lord threw you into eternity – into the very exact centre of eternity, and even as you plunged you felt every ripple that flowed out from your plunging – every single ripple floating away and touching and drawing into its circle every slightest thing it touched. (CLKM 1: 192, 17 May 1915)

In this evocative passage, Mansfield strives to conceptualise a material connection between the everyday and the numinous: infinite time is reconfigured as liquid space into which one plunges bodily.10 Moreover, it is through rhythmic metaphor – ripples being a series of small waves, an undulation of matter – that the small, apparently inconsequential things in everyday life are here drawn into the realm of ‘profounder reality’, signalled clearly by her dabbling in religious language in this passage. ‘Details’ such as the colour and shape of Lawrence’s gooseberries are thus imbued, for Mansfield, with mystical significance. The act of observation is also implied in the idea of ‘detail’, meaning this comment also bears on Mansfield’s idea of being a truly ‘living’ person, and on her values for literature. The question of the role and nature of the subject has remained implicitly central in all the examples from Mansfield’s nonfiction surveyed here so far, and does throughout her writing as a whole. Mansfield’s definition of life is evidently centred, much more than is Lawrence’s, on the experience and capacity of the individual. As such, she is also constantly fascinated by the problems of representing personal

9 Murry, ‘Aims and Ideals,’ 36. 10 The passage echoes, for example, ‘Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey, On Revisiting the Banks of the Wye during a Tour. July 13, 1798’: ‘While with an eye made quiet by the power/ Of harmony, and the deep power of joy,/ We see into the life of things.’ William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lyrical Ballads, with a few other poems, ed. Michael Schmidt (London: Penguin, 2006), 110. It also recalls Bergson’s assertion that ‘We estimate the talent of a novelist by the power with which he lifts out of the common domain, to which language had thus brought them down, feelings and ideas to which he strives to restore, by adding detail to detail, their original and living individuality.’ Henri Bergson, Time and Free Will: an Essay on the immediate data of consciousness, trans. Frank Lubecki Pogson (London: Swan, Sonnenschein, 1910), 164. Mansfield 140

experience and of knowing or understanding the other. At times, Mansfield believes that the material or everyday ‘details’ of life hold the key to understanding the ‘profounder reality’ of life and others and that, as posited with Murry in 1912, the intuition aids in interpreting such information. But she retains a strong sense that, on some level, existence is essentially mysterious and the self, mutable. This aspect of her personal philosophy is a frequent subject in Mansfield criticism; Nancy Gray, for example, comments on precisely this tension in Mansfield’s fiction, between the desire for a ‘true’ self, consistent and knowable and a reality of the changeable, complex multiplicity of self.11 Mansfield expresses her sense of this mystery about others to Lady Ottoline in 1921:

How strange talking is – what mists rise and fall – how one loses the other & then thinks to have found the other – then down comes another soft final curtain… But it is incredible, don’t you feel, how mysterious and isolated we each of us are – at the last. I suppose one ought to make this discovery once & for all but I seem to be always making it again. (CLKM 4: 252, 24 July 1921)

This passage explores two distinct but interrelated aspects of human experience. Knowledge, in particular of the other, is here a kind of intermittent and incomplete vision, which cannot penetrate the ‘mists’ of language, while the unknowable other is thus depicted as at least partly out of view, and the subject as incurably separate and solitary. Moreover, this knowledge of the solitude of subjectivity and the unknowability of the other is temporary: the ‘discovery’ must be remade repeatedly. This belief in the underlying mystery of life has a direct impact on Mansfield’s aesthetics. In the above letter, Mansfield goes on to lament that this experience of the self and of human relationships is not more often explored in literature and to wonder how it can be achieved, telling Lady Ottoline that ‘It seems to me that writers dont acknowledge it half enough. They pretend to know all there is in the parcel. But how is one to do it without seeming vague?’ (CLKM 4: 252, 24 July 1921) This desire to represent mystery as part of human experience is one motivation for Mansfield’s literary experimentation. As Kaplan puts it, Mansfield insists on ‘ineffability as a necessary component of the modernist aesthetic gesture’ because she sees subjectivity

11 Nancy Gray, ‘Un-Defining the Self in the Stories of Katherine Mansfield,’ in Katherine Mansfield and Literary Modernism, ed. Janet Wilson, Gerri Kimber, and Susan Reid (London: Continuum, 2011), 79. Mansfield 141

as being in some ways ultimately unknowable and incommunicable. That is, for Mansfield this sense of mystery – of the uncertain efficacy of human communication – is a real and important aspect of life that paradoxically must be expressed in literature. Perhaps counterintuitively, this desire to express the fugitive, intangible aspects of experience is her reason for espousing a particular iteration of literary realism. Mansfield aimed at the mimesis of life itself throughout all her fiction. She considered herself a realist, but as seen above in her letter to Koteliansky about ‘detail’, she saw the mundane (both the everyday and the earthly) as intrinsically connected to the ‘profounder reality’ of the psychological, subjective or mystical. This was a position carefully considered early on, as is evident in a notebook rumination from around 1908 on her method, in which she distinguishes between ‘partisans of analysis [who] describe minutely the state of the soul’ and ‘partisans of objectivity’ such as herself, who instead ‘give us the result of the evolution sans describing the secret processes’ (KMN 1: 156). This does not mean, however, that what Mansfield here refers to as the ‘soul’ is left out, or denied; instead, ‘They convey the state of the soul through the slightest gesture – i.e. realism, flesh covered bones, which is the artists method for me’ (KMN 1: 156). Moreover, Mansfield rejects models of subjectivity that separate the soul and the body – or, to extrapolate, the numinous and the mundane. For her, these categories are interfused:

Yet I cannot take the simile of the soul and the body for the bone is no bony framework. Supposing ones bones were not bone but liquid light – which suffuses itself, fluctuates – well and good, but the bones are permanent and changeless – .˙. – – that fails. (KMN 1: 156)

While Mansfield decides that her metaphor here is infelicitous, her idea that the material entails a mystical quality is clear, especially seen in the context of her celebration of ‘detail’ above. This recalls similar arguments from Murry and Lawrence; for example, the idea of the core material of the body being fluctuating ‘liquid light’, or energy, recalls Lawrence’s recurring invocation of a thermodynamic model of human experience and his insistence that ‘the breath of life’ is a ‘constant vibrating interchange’. Mansfield 142

Mansfield considers conveying this vision of life as a combination of the mundane and the ‘profounder reality’ to be a major aim of fiction. In a remark that strikingly recalls Walter Benjamin’s description of the storyteller as one who ‘has counsel’, she writes to Murry in 1920 about the short stories of her most prominent influence, Anton Chekhov: ‘They are true. I trust him. This is becoming most awfully important to me – a writer must have knowledge – he must make one feel the ground is firm beneath his feet’ (CLKM 4: 73, 17 October 1920). This remark can be taken to mean that the writer must be able, as she elsewhere says that Lawrence is, to convey a sense of the materiality of experience, but also that this firm ground must include a deeper knowledge or wisdom about life. Rebecca Bowler describes this notion of a realism that encompasses a ‘profounder reality’ as a ‘double impression’; that is, in Mansfield’s own writing, impressionism – ‘Mansfield’s passion for recording the aesthetic’, is balanced with Symbolism – her insistence that every detail ‘must have meaning.’12 This parallels what Mansfield explains to Brett as her two stages in the creative process: ‘seeing-and-feeling and grasping’. She tells Brett that ‘I know that when I write stories if I write at the seeing-and-feeling stage they are no good & have to be scrapped. I have to go on almost squeezing them in my hands if you know what I mean until I KNOW them in every corner and part’ (CLKM 4: 296, 15 October 1921). For Mansfield, then, the simple realist aim of recording, or sensory apprehension and re-presentation, is not the ultimate aim of art. It is instead the communication of ‘knowledge’ or what she and Murry earlier called ‘utter understanding’ of the intuition. Mansfield often describes the imaginative process she uses in order to ‘grasp’ her subject as involving an intensely sympathetic becoming, an impersonation of her characters and objects described in her fiction. Mansfield’s oft-discussed imaginative practice of impersonation could otherwise be described as a form of mimicry. That is, she sees the creative act, which she says must capture more than can be seen or felt, as essentially mimetic. Most famously, she writes to Brett in 1917 that ‘When I pass the apple stalls I cannot help stopping and staring until I feel that I, myself, am changing into an apple, too’. This imaginative mimetic process is creative as well, because it also leads her to feel ‘that at

12 Rebecca Bowler, ‘“The beauty of your line – the life behind it”: Katherine Mansfield and the Double Impression,’ Katherine Mansfield Studies 3 (2011): 92. Mansfield 143

any moment I may produce an apple, miraculously, out of my own being like that conjuror produces the egg’. She describes this moment of creation further, as being one ‘when you are more duck, more apple or more Natasha than any of these objects could ever possibly be, and so you create them anew’ (CLKM 1: 330, 11 October 1917). There is an echo here of Lawrence’s conception of human work and especially art as a rhythmic mimicry of the creative impetus of ‘Life’. Mansfield’s conception of the creative process as one of impersonation is repeated in a 1920 letter to Murry regarding her story ‘The Stranger’, which describes how she uses this approach in developing the atmosphere of a scene as well as characters or objects:

Ive been this man been this woman. Ive stood for hours at Auckland Wharf. Ive been out in the stream waiting to be berthed. Ive been a seagull hovering at the stern and a hotel porter whistling through his teeth. It isn’t as though one sits and watches the spectacle […] one IS the spectacle for a time. (CLKM 4: 97, 3 November 1920)

In this later example, Mansfield describes ‘impersonating’ not just an apple or a character, but a ‘spectacle’, which is notably conceived as a unity of multiple distinct perspectives or subjectivities. Kaplan explains this process as ‘transformed subjectivity’, a merging of self and object that parallels Murry’s later idea in ‘Romanticism and the Tradition’ that the great writer is not objective as in the typical modernist celebration of impersonality and objectivity, but rather has a ‘quality of soul that is profound and, because it is profound, is universal.’13 Mansfield’s idea of impersonating the spectacle bears similarities to Lefebvre’s explanation of the work of rhythmanalysis. Lefebvre’s rhythmanalyst observes natural or social ‘bundles, bouquets, garlands of rhythms’, coming to ‘listen to them as a whole and unify them by taking his own rhythms as a reference: by integrating the outside with the inside and vice versa.’14 That is, there is an affinity between Mansfield’s technique of imaginative ‘impersonation’ and Lefebvre’s model of the rhythmanalyst’s conscious relation between their own bodily (subjective) and external (objective) rhythms. The comparison with Lefebvre also highlights the two-way exchange of personality in Mansfield’s ‘impersonation’. Not only does the perceiver take on the

13 Kaplan, Mansfield and the Origins of Modernist Fiction, 180-82. Murry, Defending Romanticism, 133- 34. 14 Lefebvre, Rhythmanalysis, 20. Mansfield 144

qualities or rhythms that are observed, but these are understood with reference to their ‘own rhythms’ or person – in feeling that she has ‘been’ all the actors in her scene, Mansfield also suggests that the spectacle as a whole is herself, too. Thus sensitivity to and the incorporation of rhythms into the process of impersonation and creation might be seen as critical to Mansfield’s literary practice. Mansfield sees impersonation as essential to getting at ‘the life in the life’ of things, writing in the 1917 ‘apple’ letter to Brett discussed above that ‘I don’t see how art is going to make that divine spring into the bounding outlines of things if it hasn’t passed through the process of trying to become these things before recreating them’ (CLKM 1: 330). This is also why, she says, she believes in what she here refers to as ‘technique’ – the careful control of literary form and an almost scientific attitude to formal experimentation as a developing field of knowledge. Mansfield was constantly engaged in trying to develop a literary form that would suit the mimesis of life itself and, for her, this seems to have meant a variety of poetic prose. This conception of formal literary technique is one that Mansfield returns to frequently in her letters and notebooks. Both excitement and apprehension about it are behind a 1921 letter to her brother-in-law, Richard Murry, in which Mansfield discusses the possibility that prose could mimetically portray a ‘living mind’:

But you know Richard, I was only thinking last night people have hardly begun to write yet. Put poetry out of it for a moment & leave out Shakespeare – now I mean prose. Take the very best of it. Aren’t they still cutting up sections rather than tackling the whole of a mind? I had a moment of absolute terror in the night. I suddenly thought of a living mind – a whole mind – with absolutely nothing left out. (CLKM 4: 165, 17 January 1921)

This passage expresses a typically modernist sentiment in its sense of the potential for new artistic experiment and its significance. Moreover, it shows that Mansfield thinks of art as not just an aesthetic pursuit, but also an epistemological one. Thus, she implicitly suggests here that prose is the medium that is best equipped to capture not simply a whole mind, but a ‘living’ one. This suggests a sense that prose might have particular adaptability to expressing the vitality of life. She had previously expressed Mansfield 145

similarly exuberant feelings about prose to Lady Ottoline, whom she tells in a 1919 letter that she ‘adores English prose’, and that ‘I do believe that the time has come for a “new word” but I imagine the new word will not be spoken easily. People have never explored the lovely medium of prose. It is a hidden country still – I feel that so profoundly’ (CLKM 2: 343, 19/26 July 1919). In both instances, prose is identified as a medium that is fit for experimentation, and that offers unexplored possibilities for both beauty and the representation of truth. In part, this suggestion foreshadows Lawrence’s 1925 argument that the novel alone can capture or respond to the ‘whole man-alive’ (in ‘Why the Novel Matters’, discussed in the previous chapter), but Mansfield’s letter also foreshadows Forster’s argument (discussed in Chapter 1) in Aspects of the Novel, that prose rhythm is able to mimetically convey life itself. In Mansfield’s case, this argument about the particular rhythmic capabilities of prose is not directly stated. But she does move from this musing on prose’s ability to capture the whole, living mind, to explain to her brother-in-law how she attempts to achieve this in ‘Miss Brill’: by using linguistic rhythm to evoke character:

In Miss Brill I chose not only the length of every sentence, but even the sound of every sentence – I chose the rise and fall of every paragraph to fit her – and to fit her on that day at that very moment. After Id written it I read it aloud – numbers of times – just as one would play over a musical composition, trying to get it nearer and nearer to the expression of Miss Brill – until it fitted her. (CLKM 4: 165, 17 January 1921)

Much is often made of Mansfield’s dedicated study of the cello in her adolescence and musicality does recur in metaphors, like this one for the creative process, throughout her nonfiction writing. In another instance of this, she confides to her notebook that when inspired about art she often feels dissatisfied with all her previous writing, because ‘Musically speak[ing] it is not – has not been – in the middle of the note – you know what I mean?’ (KMN 2: 137) Taken more loosely, this metaphor points to Mansfield’s continued application to her craft in general, but attending more closely to its semantic origins highlights a stress on tonal and rhythmic precision, just as it does in the passage above regarding ‘Miss Brill’. By Mansfield’s own account, in this story she uses linguistic cadences to develop character; how this is achieved will be investigated more closely in analysis of the story itself in the following section. Here I Mansfield 146

want to draw attention to Mansfield’s declared focus not just on evoking Miss Brill’s voice, but on ‘the expression of’ her, and of ‘fitting’ the sound and cadence of her text to the character, so that the story as a whole is imbued, or indeed impersonated, with Miss Brill at the level of form. That is, Mansfield uses rhythm to mimic something intrinsic to the ‘whole mind’ or the ‘life in the life’ of Miss Brill, not just the more conscious verbalisation of her personality. This is not to say that Mansfield was not concerned with the power of vocal mimesis. As I show below, Miss Brill’s voice is certainly central to that story, and there are several instances in Mansfield’s letters in which she refers to the care she has taken to get the voices of characters to ‘fit’, as she describes it above. Indeed, Anne Besnault- Levita argues that voice is in fact Mansfield’s main method of indicating character: ‘they always have a “voice” that in her writing is often associated metonymically with the “self”’’.15 Mansfield is always fastidious about the technical rendering of vocal character and there are a number of letters in which she worries about particular spelling, typographical or word choices being correctly retained in published form. For example, in 1921 she writes to her literary agent, J. B. Pinker, explaining her reasons for misspelling certain words in ‘At the Bay’ in order to mimic more precisely the sound of a child’s voice, and also for their typographical presentation:

There are several words which appear to be spelt wrong – i.e. emeral for emerald, ninseck for insect and so on. These words are not in inverted commas, so the typist may just think its wanton ignorance on my part. But my hand on my heart I mean every spelling mistake! It interferes with the naturalness of children’s’ or servants’ speech if one isolates words with commas or puts them in italics. Thats my reason for leaving them plain. (CLKM 4: 286, 29 September 1921)

When Mansfield cites ‘naturalness’ as the desired effect, she refers both to the representation of a particular quality of the character’s speech and to the reader’s experience of it. That is, Mansfield apparently aims for a more typically realist effect, of a text that provides as acoustically immediate a recording of the unconventional

15 Besnault-Levita, ‘Voice and Affect in Katherine Mansfield’s Short Fictions,’ 90. Mansfield 147

cadences of children’s or working-class speech as possible.16 Yet these carefully evoked vocal rhythms are the kind of ‘details’ that Mansfield earlier declared to be so full of ‘life’ in the special sense that runs throughout her nonfiction writing: they point to the ‘profounder reality’ as well as to a superficial one. This implies that these vocal rhythms might point to deeper personal rhythms. Moreover, such deliberate rendering of the speech of these characters indicates a subtle encoding of information about social power, as dictated by age and social class. Mansfield’s fiction is frequently imbued with this implicit ethical motivation. While, contrary to Lawrence, she deliberately eschewed didacticism in her writing, as Hanson puts it, Mansfield believed that ‘the “true” artist’s work would make an ethical “impression”’.17 Together, this indicates that Mansfield’s everyday ‘details’, which are so closely connected to her transcendent sense of life, also encompass social dynamics, thus reconciling her ethical motivations with her more romantic ideals regarding art’s purpose. Thus, while she was often drawn to poetry, or poetic expression, Mansfield was most interested in prose and, particularly, in the short-story form. Mansfield did write poetry throughout her life, though Kimber and Smith suggest that as her career progressed these increasingly functioned as preparatory work for prose pieces (CWKM 3: 3). It seems to be at moments of great emotion, notably in response to the tragic early death of her younger brother Leslie in the First World War, that Mansfield considers turning to poetry; yet in that case, too, she decides on prose. In an oft-quoted passage in her notebook, she writes to Leslie that she feels ‘always trembling on the brink of poetry. […] But especially I want to write a kind of long elegy to you – – – perhaps not in poetry. No, perhaps in Prose – almost certainly in a kind of special prose’ (KMN 2: 32-3, 22 January 1916). The result of this determination is generally considered to be The Aloe, eventually published as ‘Prelude’ in 1918 and followed by ‘At the Bay’ in 1922, which are both discussed below. The idea of ‘special prose’ here clearly refers to a prose that is nearly poetry, or that takes on poetic qualities, centring mainly on the lyrical expression of emotion. In the line immediately below this, she writes that she wants ‘to keep a kind of minute

16 Fiona Morrison, ‘Modernist/Provincial/Pacific: Christina Stead, Katherine Mansfield and the expatriate home ground,’ JASAL: Journal of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature 13, no. 2 (2013): 5. 17 Clare Hanson, ‘Introduction,’ in The Critical Writings of Katherine Mansfield, ed. Clare Hanson (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1987), 11. Mansfield 148

note book – to be published some day. That is all. No novels, no problem stories, nothing that is not simple, open’ (KMN 2: 33). In this, Mansfield is engaged in an issue that was central to the poetics of her day: that of the definitions of poetry and prose and distinction between them, and more implicitly, their respective values as forms of literature. In early 1918 Mansfield and Murry together experimented with prose poetry, with Mansfield writing to Murry to report that ‘I wrote 4 of those “Poems” for our book. Ive discovered the form & the style, I think. They are not in verse nor vers libre – I cant do those things – They are in Prose – ‘ (CLKM 2: 204, 30 May 1918). Keiko Mizuta argues that these experiments must have responded directly to the debate about the prose poem outlined in the first chapter of this thesis, pointing to manuscript evidence that shows Mansfield considering the differing effects of the two forms.18 This is a definition of poetry that is self-consciously (note Mansfield’s inverted commas around poems) divorced from verse form, and can be achieved in prose – recalling arguments such as Herbert Read’s that suggest that the quality of poetry may inhere in a single word, while prose, as he puts it, ‘does not exist except in the phrase, and the phrase always has rhythm’.19 That is, perhaps Mansfield felt that prose was better and could have more life in it because it is inherently rhythmic. It is plain that like Murry and Lawrence, Mansfield saw art as having a broader social, even spiritual purpose, and form as having significance beyond the aesthetic. She was cognisant of the possibilities of literary rhythm not only for mimetic evocation of character, but to create what Kirsty Martin calls ‘sympathy’ in the reader of a text. This awareness is apparent in her 1920 Athenaeum review of Three Lives, in which she acknowledges that ‘Miss Gertrude Stein has discovered a new way of writing stories.’ Notably, Mansfield’s sense of this innovation is predicated on the particular responses that linguistic rhythm can evoke in the reader:

We confess we read a good page or two before we realized what was happening. Then the dreadful fact dawned. We discovered ourselves reading in syncopated time. […] ‘Melanctha’ is negro music with all its maddening

18 Keiko Mizuta, ‘Katherine Mansfield and the Prose Poem,’ The Review of English Studies 39, no. 153 (1988): 81, 75. 19 Read, English Prose Style, xi. Mansfield 149

monotony done into prose; it is writing in real rag-time. Heaven forbid Miss Stein should become a fashion!20

While Mansfield’s dismissive closing remark here does have culturally conservative and racist undertones, she might also be expressing anxiety about the power of such rhythms to subconsciously influence thought and feeling. This is the same capacity that Lawrence takes advantage of in his more didactic moods and, while Mansfield’s writing lacks the crusading zeal of Lawrence’s, she too uses rhythmic mimesis for rhetorical purposes, namely in service of social critique. Thus, while she is not exactly enthusiastic about Stein’s book, she recognises its innovation, primarily in its use of rhythm to affect the reader. Mansfield’s opening reference to Stein’s discovery of a ‘new way’ to write stories is clearly reminiscent of another of Mansfield’s critical pieces, a comparative review of three short-story collections from earlier in the same year titled ‘Wanted, a New Word’. This article is at the centre of McDonnell’s claim that Mansfield’s Athenaeum reviews as a group form her literary manifesto and, indeed, she argues that ‘its discussion of the short story form is in keeping with a recurring feature of [Mansfield’s] review column: the endorsement of the short story rather than the novel as the genre most adaptable to literary experimentation in the postwar world.’21 Mansfield’s aesthetic allegiances regarding the short story are expressed most plainly when in late 1921 she wrote to Brett of her contempt for a man who had asked her for a more traditional story to include in an anthology: ‘he said the more “plotty” a story I could give him the better. What about that for a word? It made my hair stand up in prongs. A nice “plotty” story, please. People are funny’ (CLKM 4: 311, 2 November 1921). This disdain for less innovative fiction, as well as for the kind of commercialism that may have inspired the man’s request, indicates that while McDonnell’s argument is perhaps a little insistent given that no such explicit claim is made by Mansfield, she did feel strongly about the short story as a serious art form. These two reviews reveal Mansfield considering not just the ‘lovely medium of prose’, but the short-story form in particular – the fact that she attempts this at all makes her unique among the authors examined in this thesis. ‘Wanted, a New Word’

20 Katherine Mansfield, ‘Some New Thing,’ Athenaeum 4720 (1920): 520. (15 October 1920) 21 McDonnell, ‘“Wanted, a New Word”: Katherine Mansfield and the Athenaeum,’ 734. Mansfield 150

begins with an enigmatic reflection on the nature of the new form with which she herself experimented:

Suppose we put it in the form of a riddle: ‘I am neither a short story, nor a sketch, nor an impression, nor a tale. I am written in prose. I am a great deal shorter than a novel; I may be only one page long, but, on the other hand, there is no reason why I should not be thirty. I have a special quality – a something, a something which is immediately, perfectly recognizable. It belongs to me; it is of my essence. In fact I am often given away in the first sentence. I seem almost to stand or fall by it. It is to me what the first phrase of the song is to the singer. Those who know me feel: “Yes, that is it.” And they are from that moment prepared for what is to follow. […] What am I?’22

Though finally vague, this statement does provide some insight into what possibilities ‘the lovely medium of prose’, and particularly shorter prose fiction, held for Mansfield. The form she is thinking of is not simply a short story in the ‘plotty’ or narrative-driven sense that she disparages in her letter to Brett. Neither is it insubstantial preparatory work for a more ‘serious’ project, as suggested by words like ‘sketch’ or ‘impression’, and nor is it simple and moralistic, as is perhaps implied by ‘tale’. But it is in prose rather than poetry, and though short, it is a complete work of art. There is a definite resonance between Mansfield’s idea in this passage of this new form having a ‘special quality’ and her earlier notebook reference to the ‘special prose’ that she would use to write her brother’s elegy, which together suggests that for Mansfield this short fiction must be emotionally or poetically charged. Moreover, the connection already identified between the ‘new word’, a phrase already used in the letter to Lady Ottoline the previous year, and her observation of Stein’s discovery of a ‘new way’ of story-writing founded on rhythm suggests that Mansfield’s final, cryptic clues could refer to this feature. Linguistic rhythm may be ‘given away in the first sentence’ and has clear connections to ‘the first phrase of the song’. This section on Mansfield’s ‘special prose’ has explored her implicit engagements with rhythm and mimesis in relation, first and foremost, to her reverence for ‘Life’. This may be understood in organicist terms, but primarily through her deeply felt appreciation for people who she sees as being truly ‘living’,

22 Katherine Mansfield, ‘Wanted, a New Word,’ Athenaeum 4704 (1920): 831. Mansfield 151

knowing ‘how to live’: as able to share in her reverence for life and art. Intertwined in this are her continuing interests in the nature of the experiencing self, and the relation between her deeper conception of life and the everyday, both the mundane, and an ethical response to the social. These attitudes motivate Mansfield’s approach to literature, specifically her dedication to mimesis via the imaginative process of ‘impersonation’ and her distinctly modernist fascination with what she once referred to as ‘the lovely medium of prose’ and especially the short-story form. The remaining sections of this chapter therefore examine how these attitudes to life and literature are reflected in Mansfield’s short fiction. The following section looks at this in terms of her use of rhythm to achieve mimesis of the ‘living’ mind – through voice and evocation of character. The final section investigates Mansfield’s innovations in the short-story form, with which she appears to have been far more concerned than contemporaries like Lawrence, in terms of her experimentation with poetry and prose, and rhythmic structure.

Impersonation and the rhythms of character Mansfield’s lifelong interest in the nature of the self and its relation to the world and to others informs her technique of ‘impersonation’. This impersonation is a kind of imaginative mimicry; it is fundamentally mimetic in both goal and process. Furthermore, this impersonation centres on rhythm – based on an idea, shared with Murry, that people possess a unique, innate rhythm, which may be evoked mimetically through literary rhythms including the reproduction of characters’ voices.23 In ‘Miss Brill’, Mansfield uses rhythmic mimesis in order to sympathetically portray the depth of her subject’s loneliness and to expose the social structures that lead to it. Similarly, ‘Je ne parle pas français’ uses subtle ironic tension within the voice of the first-person narrator in order to deliver social critique – in this case, of shallow modern literature and literary types. Both stories are concerned with authentic personal connection to ‘Life’, as is the third story analysed here, ‘The Daughters of the Late Colonel’, in which the story as a whole is structured around the mental rhythms of two middle-aged sisters. The intertwined focus in this story on the inner lives of two intimately connected characters suggests an understanding of

23 Murry, Between Two Worlds, 156. Mansfield 152

subjectivity as fluid and communal. Together, these stories demonstrate how Mansfield’s employment of linguistic and structural rhythms for mimetic purposes also aims to deepen our understanding of the subtle cadences and confluences of inner and outer experience. In this, she contributes to the broader ontological and aesthetic conversations surrounding rhythm in her time. Mansfield is one of the prose ‘experimenter[s] of today’ that Bonamy Dobrée argued would want ‘to follow all the curious transitions of the mind, its evolutions, its twists, so as to give a closer illusion of reality.’24 Like Lawrence, Mansfield saw rhythm as the tool for literary representation of the mind. More than Lawrence, however, she explores mental habits as key to subjectivity and thus to the presentation of character. As such, her stories are frequently rhythmically structured to bring out this aspect of mind. As already suggested above, the title character of ‘Miss Brill’ is conceived rhythmically: as a musical composition in which the cadence of the protagonist’s voice and the story in general are integral to her evocation. Written in November 1920, the story was first published in the Athenaeum that same month and collected in The Garden Party and Other Stories in 1922. Mansfield seems to have thought of this story in musical terms from its conception. She wrote to Murry that ‘Last night I walked about […] – and lamented there was no God. But I came in and wrote Miss

Brill instead, which is my insect magnificat, now & always’ (CLKM 4: 109, 13 November 1920). This statement relates the story to the ‘Magnificat’, an ancient Christian hymn attributed to the Virgin Mary, which celebrates God’s mercy to the weak and humble, the allusion perhaps suggesting Mansfield’s desire to ‘magnify’, or elevate the importance of a subject often skimmed over in literature. She wrote to Murry again a week later to say ‘I am very glad you liked Miss Brill. I liked her, too. One writes (one reason why is) because one does care so passionately that one must show it – one must declare ones love’ (CLKM 4: 116, 21 November 1920). Mansfield’s desire to pay tribute to ordinary, marginalised women is expressed in the writer’s effort to give Miss Brill a voice through careful modulation of technical rhythm. As J. F. Kobler observes, ‘the story is so completely the language with which Miss Brill

24 Dobrée, Modern Prose Style, 232-33. Mansfield 153

records her world’, yet Mansfield’s religious reference in her letter to Murry also hints at deeper philosophical motivations.25 In ‘Miss Brill’, Mansfield invokes the familiar rhythm of human routine to economically portray the eponymous character’s life. The story describes, through free indirect discourse, Miss Brill’s solo Sunday afternoon ritual, which is to attend a public concert in a park. Although it is a routine activity, Miss Brill takes an active interest in everything around her, noting the weather, the flowers, the music, and watching people avidly. The pace of her thought is quick, lively and controlled, with sentences tending to be short, or tightly punctuated, and beginning with conjunctions, or words and phrases that seem to indicate a response (‘Yes, she really felt like that about it’ [CWKM 2: 251]), as though she is holding up one half of a conversation in which she hopes to entertain her interlocutor, her animated diction supported by exclamation marks throughout as she repeatedly reiterates her enjoyment. However, the intimation that her bright tone covers a pervasive melancholy is evident from the first word of the story, which begins ‘Although it was so brilliantly fine’, the negative conjunction undermining all the asserted pleasantness that follows (CWKM 2: 250). The echo of Miss Brill’s name in the adverb connects her persona to this illusory quality. This bifurcation of Miss Brill’s voice can be productively understood as ‘arrhythmic’ – the two currents of cognition are discordant and perhaps even bordering on the pathological. The doubleness that characterises Miss Brill’s voice is accentuated by a pattern of comparison that organises the text. The suggestion that Miss Brill is attempting to divert herself from her loneliness is strengthened by her mental habit of describing things to herself using amusing or fanciful similes. She describes the conductor of the band as ‘a rooster about to crow’, girls as ‘little French dolls’, a toddler’s mother as ‘a young hen’. As Miss Brill observes the crowd around her, a relation of opposition is set up between the ‘couples and groups’ who are passing by, and those who sit on the benches with Miss Brill, watching the concert. The passers-by are dynamic, and connected with the rhythmic flow of ‘Life’ through youth and growth, children and flowers. In contrast, those sitting with Miss Brill are static, or life-less: ‘odd, silent, nearly all old, and from the way they stared they looked as though they’d just come

25 Kobler, Study of the Short Fiction, 64. Mansfield 154

from dark little rooms or even – even cupboards!’ (CWKM 2: 252) Miss Brill does not consciously align herself with this latter group until the close of the story, but her spatial contiguity in itself is enough to produce an immediate echo for the reader. This failure of self-recognition is repeated when Miss Brill observes a chance meeting between an older woman and a male acquaintance. The woman is

wearing the same ermine toque she’d bought when her hair was yellow. Now everything, her hair, her face, even her eyes, was the same colour as the shabby ermine, and her hand, in its cleaned glove, lifted to dab her lips, was a tiny yellowish paw.

Although Miss Brill’s perception of the woman is dehumanising – she is morphed into an animal, and given the metonymic epithet ‘ermine toque’ – she is a clear counterpart to Miss Brill herself, down to the old fur garment she wears and her response to the man’s rebuff (CWKM 2: 252). Miss Brill fancies that the music responds to and echoes the woman’s emotional state, at first comforting with gentle tones and then, as she leaves, covering her hurt under a smile, echoing her determined cheerfulness by playing ‘more quickly, more gaily than ever’. Miss Brill, too, avoiding conscious identification with the rebuffed woman, alters her diction to match this change of rhythm and makes a series of rapid, fiercely cheerful exclamations: ‘Oh, how fascinating it was! How she enjoyed it! How she loved sitting here, watching it all!’ (CWKM 2: 253) The analogical pattern is again reprised in Miss Brill’s notion of the scene at the public concert being a theatrical production in which she too is acting: ‘Even she had a part and it came every Sunday. No doubt somebody would have noticed if she hadn’t been there; she was part of the performance after all’ (CWKM 2: 253). By developing a fanciful, glamorous image of herself, and of her life as artistically ordered, Miss Brill gives meaning to her routine existence, and redresses her feelings of insignificance and isolation. At the same time, irony embedded in the free indirect discourse simultaneously acknowledges her self-deception. As she imagines the audience as a theatrical company, singing together, she creates for herself a feeling of belonging and purpose:

And then she too, she too, and the others on the benches – they would come in with a kind of accompaniment – something low, that scarcely rose or fell, Mansfield 155

something so beautiful – moving.… And Miss Brill’s eyes filled with tears and she looked smiling at all the other members of the company. Yes, we understand, we understand, she thought – though what they understood she didn’t know. (CWKM 2: 253-4)

This passage brings out the tension in Lefebvre’s statement about the values of artistic rhythm. On the one hand, the passage apparently demonstrates how the aesthetically ordered rhythms of art provide compensation for the ‘miseries of everydayness’ with beauty, meaningful rhythms and human unity. On the other, it ironically foreshadows Miss Brill’s more painful confrontation with her real situation. In describing an apparently life-affirming experience, this passage in part syntactically echoes two others from earlier in the story, which instead connote the undercurrent of pathos that runs throughout the text. Miss Brill approaches and retreats from recognition of this twice: in the first paragraph of the story, a connection is made between the autumnal chill in the air and Miss Brill’s melancholia: ‘And when she breathed, something light and sad – no, not sad, exactly – something gentle seemed to move in her bosom’ (CWKM 2: 251). This configuration is repeated and expanded in her description of the music: ‘And what they played was warm, sunny, yet there was just a faint chill – a something what was it? – not sadness – no, not sadness – a something that made you want to sing’ (CWKM 2: 253). Like the day, the music is sunny but with a faint chill, an ineffable ‘something’, which she refuses to identify as sadness and which is conflated with beauty, movement, and the body by syntactic resemblance. Thus rhythm, both biological and artistic, can be registered as converging the inner and outer worlds. At the same time, it is these rhythms, not the artificial ones created by Miss Brill, which provide access to ‘profounder reality’. Miss Brill’s denial that this ‘something’ is sadness is unravelled by the cruel comments she overhears a young couple make about her. This moment forces to the surface the feelings that Miss Brill had been suppressing with upbeat mental rhythms. The consequent disruption of her weekly routine – that she doesn’t buy her usual treat on the way home from the concert – is representative of the dissolution of her defensive habit. Thus the rhythm of ordinary human routine functions metaphorically as both symptom of and remedy for loneliness. As with much of Mansfield’s work, this story is motivated by what she calls a ‘cry against corruption’. It Mansfield 156

is at once a passionate decrying of social injustice, yet simultaneously, a critique of personal inauthenticity. Miss Brill’s eager observation of life going on around her veers into a bright artificiality that includes a deliberate othering of those – like the ‘ermine toque’ – with whom identification is painful and which in fact serves to reinforce her isolation. Another kind of personal inauthenticity is more fiercely attacked in ‘Je ne parle pas français’, written while Mansfield was living in the south of France in 1918. The story first appeared as a standalone volume, printed privately by Murry’s younger brother Richard in 1919, and was subsequently collected (and bowdlerised) in 1920 in Bliss and Other Stories (CWKM 2: 136, n. 1).26 As in ‘Miss Brill’, the story’s social critique is achieved through the rhythmic construction of character voice; in this case, this centres on the figure of the modern artist. ‘Je ne parle pas français’ is told in the first person by a self-obsessed Parisian writer, pimp and gigolo named Raoul Duquette. He is more concerned with his own appearance and reputation as a promising young writer than with the art of writing itself. The story that Raoul tells revolves around the titular phrase, uttered by a woman referred to only as Mouse, who has run away to Paris with an English writer named Dick Harmon with whom Raoul had previously been infatuated. Once they have arrived, Dick quickly abandons Mouse, leaving only a rather pathetic note of apology saying that he feels guilty about leaving his mother in England. Raoul at first offers to help Mouse, but never goes back to meet her; in part, the story is about this act of callousness. At first glance, ‘Je ne parle pas français’ is a parody of the avant-garde writer, centred on the absurd pretensions of the narrator. But as evident from the comments discussed in the previous section of this chapter, for Mansfield the role of the artist is profoundly significant; in a letter to Murry she referred to the writing of this story as arising from a ‘cry against corruption’, born of ‘an extremely deep sense of hopelessness’ (CLKM 2: 54, 3 February 1918, emphasis original). Thus, its critique aims deeper; for Mansfield, Raoul’s modern pretension has serious ethical consequences, because of art and the individual’s important duty to life. The character of Raoul is, like Miss Brill, conceived rhythmically: as an alternating rhythm, a flickering between artificial pose and genuine emotional

26 The Collected Works contains the original, complete version. Mansfield 157

response. Kaplan highlights the story’s presentation of the narcissism inherent in the ironically self-deprecating pose of the modern artist. For Kaplan, the story’s deepest irony lies in Mansfield’s choice to tell the story in Raoul’s voice: she suggests that Mansfield’s critique of this narcissism includes herself. 27 Kaplan’s reading is perceptive, but incomplete, in that she sees Raoul as failing to recognise his own ‘moral failure’. In fact, Raoul’s pose nihilistically includes being callous and untrustworthy.28 That is, Mansfield criticises Raoul and his ilk not merely for being heartless, but for acting with self-conscious heartlessness as an aesthetic choice, with the idea of making himself important by rejecting ethical norms. On a different level, as W. H. New argues, Mansfield’s use of multivalent irony in this story can be seen as a theoretical exploration of language, ‘to examine the ironic mode itself for its psychology, its formal metaphoric implications.’29 With this and Mansfield’s oft-stated dedication to higher teleological ideals for her art in mind, this reading focuses on the moments when Raoul’s ironic persona wavers. The multiple kinds of irony in the story are all achieved through rhythmic oscillations in tone and register in the narrator’s voice: Raoul’s intentional adoption of the ‘ironic mode’, the irony of his posed callousness, and the final irony of Mansfield’s use of modern experimental prose to castigate the pretensions of modern art. The artificiality of Raoul’s character is produced primarily by his continuous oscillation between modes of speech. This pattern of duplicity begins in the very first line of the story, which opens with the statement, ‘I do not know why I have such a fancy for this little café’ (CWKM 2: 112). But this is quickly revealed to be disingenuous, since the rest of the story is an extended, indulgent and circuitous confession of exactly why Raoul keeps returning to the dingy little café: he hopes to see Mouse there. Raoul goes on to tell the story of the epiphany he experienced the first time he was in this café; for this, he assumes a ‘storytelling’ voice, using the impersonal ‘one’ rather than ‘I’, and introducing a mawkish flight of fancy in which ‘One would not have been surprised if the door had opened and the Virgin Mary had come in, riding upon an ass, her meek hands folded over her big belly.…’ But this

27 Kaplan, Mansfield and the Origins of Modernist Fiction, 184-87. 28 Angela Smith concurs with this reading, referring to Raoul’s ‘chic cynicism’: Smith, Katherine Mansfield: A Literary Life, 22. 29 New, Reading Mansfield and Metaphors of Form, 92. Mansfield 158

voice is undercut by an abrupt change of tone as he directly addresses the reader, reverts to ‘I’, and congratulates himself on his own writerly prowess:

That’s rather nice, don’t you think, that bit about the Virgin? It comes from the pen so gently; it has such a ‘dying fall’. I thought so at the time and decided to make a note of it. One never knows when a little tag like that may come in useful to round off a paragraph. (CWKM 2: 114)

As Raoul interrupts his own narrative voice, the contrast created between the two registers also broadens the ironic distance between the narrator’s voice and the author’s. This move serves to parody both the writing in the first paragraph, as well as the writer who apparently thinks it good, and draws attention to the narrator’s artfully constructed voice and persona and, thereby, to Mansfield’s own impersonation of Raoul. Raoul’s narrative persona also flickers like this in the ‘epiphany’ itself. It is an overtly self-conscious epiphany: Raoul has been setting it up since the beginning of the story, preparing the scene in the dingy cafe as something significant. But the retrograde structure of the story displaces the epiphany: for the first-time reader, it is out of context, and is thus a meaningless anticlimax:

But then, quite suddenly, at the bottom of the page, written in green ink, I fell on that stupid, stale little phrase: Je ne parle pas français. There! It had come – the moment – the geste! And although I was so ready, it caught me, it tumbled me over; I was simply overwhelmed. […] Just for one moment I was not. I was Agony, Agony, Agony. (CWKM 2: 114-5)

The ‘moment’ is hard to sympathise with at this stage of the story, as the reader can have no idea yet why the phrase ‘je ne parle pas français’ would produce such a response. Raoul’s story is out of order: we have come in at the end so that the big moment, which should have been built up to by the rest of the plot, is hollowed out, empty of significance. Here, Mansfield appears to be using Raoul to parody superficial modernist writing through the by-then clichéd short-story figure of the epiphany. Raoul’s mediocrity as a writer is plain in his representation of this avowedly profound and genuine emotional experience using the crude repetition of the capitalised word ‘agony’, which directly undercuts his claim that ‘for one moment I was not’, that is, that the experience temporarily strips him of ego. Mansfield 159

The apparent bathos is amplified by Raoul’s representation of his immediate intellectual response to the epiphanic moment, in which he again switches abruptly between narrative registers:

Then it passed, and the very second after I was thinking: ‘Good God! Am I capable of feeling as strongly as that? But I was absolutely unconscious! I hadn’t a phrase to meet it with! I was overcome! I was swept off my feet! I didn’t even try, in the dimmest way, to put it down!’ And up I puffed and puffed, blowing off finally with: ‘After all I must be first-rate. No second-rate mind could have experienced such an intensity of feeling so … purely.’ (CWKM 2: 115)

Here, Raoul directly undermines his own claim to authentic, life-changing feeling. In this vocal alternation, he self-deprecatingly relates his immediate intellectual response to his own intense feeling, his ‘sudden spiritual manifestation’, in such a way as to form quite a definite, even graphic connection between this ego-stroking about the authenticity of his feelings, and masturbation. Furthermore, the fact that his thoughts in this passage are set apart in quotation marks serves to establish an ironic distance between his current narrative temporality and his earlier thoughts, which are overtly pompous. Thus, when writing the story of his cafe epiphany at a later date, Raoul carefully represents himself, or at least his former self, as narcissistic. Yet Mansfield does not completely dismiss the possibility of the epiphany, that is, of genuine understanding or emotional truth. The repetition of the titular phrase that occasions Raoul’s bathetic ‘moment’ can be seen as forming a rhythm that gradually brings the reader into ‘sympathy’ with Raoul, or perhaps rather with Mouse. Raoul repeats it twice in immediate succession after recounting his café epiphany (CWKM 2: 115), but it only begins to make sense to the reader when Raoul describes Dick and Mouse arriving in Paris. Mouse is introduced in a way that begins to load the phrase with emotional weight: Raoul tells us that while making ‘the effort of her life to control her preposterous excitement, she said, wringing my hand (I’m sure she didn’t know it was mine), Je ne parle pas français’ (CWKM 2: 125). It becomes finally clear exactly why seeing the phrase written down on a bit of blotting paper in a sordid café could actually have a strong emotional effect on Raoul, when Mouse repeats it after Dick has abandoned her alone Mansfield 160

in Paris. She says to Raoul, who offers to help her adjust to her new life, ‘“Yes, you’re very kind. Yes. Do come to-morrow. I shall be glad. It makes things rather difficult because –” and again I clasped her boyish hand – “je ne parle pas français”’ (CWKM 2: 133). This is the story’s genuine epiphany for the reader: with this repetition of the titular phrase, the story refocuses onto the circumstances of Mouse, her loneliness and the social strictures and norms to which she, as a woman, is especially subject. She feels that she cannot return to her upper-middle class friends and family because they believe her to be married and the fact that she isn’t will damage her reputation, or at least represent a loss of face. Instead she is alone in a foreign city, with a limited amount of money and possibly no respectable way of earning more. When Mouse says that she doesn’t speak French, she is also indicating that she doesn’t have the knowledge and skills required to make an independent life for herself. Her vulnerability therefore dramatises the dangers of denying women education and independence. The deliberate nature of Raoul’s callousness is again represented through vocal rhythms, by a swerve in register immediately following Mouse’s repetition of her signature phrase. This time, the switch appears to be a deliberate effort to avoid empathy, and to instead shape his persona as indifferent and sophisticated:

Not until I was half-way down the boulevard did it come over me – the full force of it. Why, they were suffering … those two … really suffering. I have seen two people suffer as I don’t suppose I ever shall again.… And … ‘Good- night, my little cat,’ said I, impudently, to the fattish old prostitute picking her way home through the slush.… I didn’t give her time to reply. (CWKM 2: 133)

The authenticity of Raoul’s initially empathetic response is denoted here by representation as stream of consciousness, demarcated via repeated punctuation with ellipses. However, this is pulled up short with a return to a self-consciously modern vocal aesthetic, both corrupted and artificial, a transition achieved by the ‘literary’ anastrophe of ‘said I’, the egotistic adverb ‘impudently’, and the image of urban degeneration coupled with casual misogyny. The unappealing cynicism of this switch contrasts sharply with the reader’s moment of understanding and thereby elevates his Mansfield 161

initial empathetic response to the suffering of others as genuine. As in Lawrence’s ‘The Prussian Officer’, one of the story’s strongest criticisms is of the character’s refusal of authentic relation with another person. Yet throughout the story, Raoul self-consciously presents himself as self-absorbed and lacking in empathy, with a paradoxical mixture of pride and shame in his behaviour, which is clearly evident in his comment on the fact that he never went back to see Mouse: ‘It wouldn’t be me, otherwise’ (CWKM 2: 133). Mansfield’s authorial critique is thus at another remove; she questions the morality of the performance of self and, indeed, the act of ‘impersonation’ that constitutes the writing of fiction. In this story, Mansfield undertakes a thorough investigation of questions surrounding consciousness and the nature of the self through one of the most direct examples of her technique of ‘impersonation’. This is achieved through the alternating rhythm of Raoul’s narrative voice: its oscillations between literary affectation and self-consciously ironic commentary, genuine feeling and an attitude of brittle cynicism. This critique is double-edged, as Kaplan rightly points out: ironically, it is through artistic performance or impersonation that Mansfield critiques the character’s self-consciously performative or artificial character, thereby implicating herself.30 She wrote to Murry that in this story: ‘I have gone for it, bitten deeper & deeper & deeper than ever I have before’ (CLKM 2: 56, 4 February 1918). He agreed with her and anticipated Kaplan’s argument that the story’s critique is self- reflective, writing back, ‘here you seem to have begun to drag the depths of your consciousness […] The world is shut out. You are looking into yourself.’31 Mansfield’s language in her above remark recalls Murry’s 1911 Rhythm editorial calling for ‘brutal’ art, that ‘strikes deeper, that touches a profounder reality, that passes outside the bounds of a narrow aestheticism’.32 This resonance highlights how in ‘Je ne parle pas français’, Mansfield’s attack on the ‘narrow aestheticism’ represented by Raoul’s narcissistic playing of the role of jaded urban artist constitutes an attempt to go deeper, to confront the ideals and desires on which she has based her career and identity as a writer. At the same time, the story’s self-reflective critique of the artist’s

30 Kaplan, Mansfield and the Origins of Modernist Fiction, 184-87. 31 John Middleton Murry, The Letters of John Middleton Murry to Katherine Mansfield, ed. C. A. Hankin (Auckland: Hutchinson, 1983), 115. Emphasis original. 32 Murry, ‘Aims and Ideals,’ 36. Mansfield 162

temptation of getting caught up in performance is balanced by glimpses through Raoul’s artifice into genuine emotional experience. Through these glimpses, ‘Je ne parle pas français’ insists that art nevertheless has an important role to play. Written less than a month after ‘Miss Brill’, ‘The Daughters of the Late Colonel’ continues the former’s concern with the inner lives of older, unmarried women. Like both ‘Miss Brill’ and ‘Je ne parle pas français’, the story turns on a moment of epiphanic revelation. It was completed on 13 December 1920 and first published in the London Mercury in May 1921, then included in the 1922 collection The Garden Party and Other Stories (CWKM 2: 283, n. 1). ‘The Daughters of the Late Colonel’ extends and complicates the representation of consciousness evoked in both ‘Miss Brill’ and ‘Je ne parle pas français’; in particular it investigates in some detail the questions of how the mind is shaped by experience and how it relates to those of others. The story as a whole mimetically conveys the habitual mental rhythms of Josephine and Constantia, two middle-aged sisters who have lived their whole lives with their dominating father, the Colonel, who has just died. The whole piece revolves around portraying the psychological effects of both familial and societal patriarchal oppression of these two women. That is, the two sisters are shown to be psychologically disabled by the bullying they have received from their father and by the social structures that restrict their lives by binding them to him. Both women are portrayed as vague, timid, and, especially in the final scene, somehow mentally restricted, unable to imagine an alternate life for themselves. The sisters’ thoughts, feelings and relationship are mimicked using a combination of free indirect discourse and structural experimentation. These formal features work together to present an associative, non-linear general model of thought and memory, and also a model of the sisters’ personalities: how they think in particular. Their imaginative capacities are shown to be both constructed and constrained by what Lawrence refers to in Sun as the ‘deep iron rhythm of habit, the year-long, life-long habits’ that establish interpersonal relations and personality. The combination of this narratological technique with a non-chronological structure allows the story to mimic the way the mind organises impressions, how it works by association rather than logically and chronologically. Mansfield explained Mansfield 163

in a New Year’s Day letter to Richard Murry in 1921 that the story ‘just unfolds and opens’ and, in a later letter to William Gerhardi, that the whole piece was designed to lead up to the final scene of the sisters’ near-epiphanies (CLKM 4: 156, 1 January 1921).33 This description, evoking as it does the unfurling of a flower’s petals and thus recalling Lawrence’s description of the opening poppy as a model for the lifelike rhythm of art, similarly suggests that Mansfield too conceived of the story’s structure as natural, rather than artificial or contrived, and given that its stated focus is the sister’s tentative moment of realisation, it seems likely that this natural unfolding is of the passage of their thought. Thus, rather than telling the sisters’ life story chronologically, including the father’s death, ‘The Daughters of the Late Colonel’ instead enters into an everyday temporal sphere as experienced by its protagonists, beginning in medias res with the sentence ‘The week after was one of the busiest weeks of their lives’ (CWKM 2: 266). In addition, the story’s twelve fairly episodic sections do not follow external events, but instead, as Smith puts it, the story ‘waver[s] from one section to another’, tracing the sisters’ conversations, mental tangents and memories, using techniques such as ellipsis and analepsis to portray the associative logic of thought.34 Mansfield’s technical innovation allows for the mimetic representation of the mind’s associative experience of time. Both her use of free indirect discourse and such structural innovations are especially integral to section VIII, which revolves around a tangent of thought that Josephine follows about their nephew, Cyril, taking the form of two successive flashbacks. Crucially though, these flashbacks are narrated in the same free indirect register and in the same simple past tense, interfusing the past and the present of the story. This is particularly noticeable in the sisters’ discussion about who to give their father’s watch to, which is spread across sections VII–IX. This episode begins with a conversation in section VII about which of their father’s possessions to send to their brother in Ceylon as a memento. Section VIII begins, ‘Josephine made no reply. She had flown off on one of her tangents. She had suddenly thought of Cyril. Wasn’t it more usual for the only grandson to have the watch?’

33 For details of Mansfield’s letter to Gerhardi, see note 36, below. 34 Smith, Katherine Mansfield: A Literary Life, 16. Mansfield 164

Following this musing, the first analepsis returns to the day the sisters received a note from their nephew to say he wouldn’t be attending his grandfather’s funeral:

Dear boy! What a blow his sweet, sympathetic little note had been! Of course they quite understood; but it was most unfortunate. ‘It would have been such a point, having him,’ said Josephine. ‘And he would have enjoyed it so,’ said Constantia, not thinking what she was saying. (CWKM 2: 275)

The temporal leap here is unannounced, as the exchange the sisters had had at the time of receiving the note is narrated in the same grammatical tense as the free indirect representation of Josephine’s thoughts: that is, ‘said Josephine’, rather than ‘Josephine had said’, as in the line above regarding the ‘blow’ that Cyril’s note ‘had been’. The next line returns briefly to Josephine’s free indirect thoughts in the present, flowing on from the remembrance about Cyril’s note, after which follows a further analepsis, to her remembered speech on a previous visit of Cyril’s at an unspecified time in the past:

However, as soon as he got back he was coming to tea with his aunties. Cyril to tea was one of their rare treats. ‘Now, Cyril, you mustn’t be afraid of our cakes. Your Auntie Con and I bought them at Buszard’s this morning. We know what a man’s appetite is. So don’t be ashamed of making a good tea.’ (CWKM 2: 275)

The subtlety of the transitions between these temporalities in the text blend together present and remembered experience. This establishes a mental environment in which linear temporality, as symbolised by the watch, is suspended and multiple events are grouped together by association, which in this case is centred on Cyril. This blending of temporalities, in conjunction with the use of free indirect discourse in these passages helps to limn the associative passage of Josephine’s thoughts. Moreover, the use of these techniques in this sequence of scenes also undermines models of subjectivity as hermetic or even separate. In this story, third- person narration blends characters’ thoughts, blurs time periods, and merges thought with dialogue. During the second flashback to Cyril’s visit, the consciousness through which the scene is narrated gradually becomes Cyril’s, until the episode continues in section IX, when the three of them go in to visit the Colonel and the father has Mansfield 165

become the grandfather. Auerbach describes this technique as a ‘multipersonal representation of consciousness’, in which the perspectives of multiple characters are collected with the aim of more closely approaching realistic representation of the subject: that is, the context that has shaped Josephine and Constantia. 35 This understanding of subjectivity as in some ways communal is reinforced in the narration’s abrupt return, signalled only by a line break, to Josephine and Constantia’s discussion about the watch in the ‘present’ of the story, the days following the Colonel’s death, and also to an apparently more neutral third-person narrator:

‘What an esstrordinary thing!’ said old Grandfather Pinner. ‘What an esstrordinary thing to come all this way here to tell me!’ And Cyril felt it was.

‘Yes, I shall send Cyril the watch,’ said Josephine. ‘That would be very nice,’ said Constantia. ‘I seem to remember last time he came there was some little trouble about the time.’ (CWKM 2: 277- 78)

As well as the free indirect merging of Cyril’s perspective into the narration above and thereby into Josephine’s consciousness, since it was from her perspective that this analepsis was begun, the brief exchange between the sisters above reveals the synchronicity of their mental habits. The last verbal exchange between them in the present of the story was about sending the watch to their brother Benny, after which Josephine becomes silent as she flies off on the ‘tangent’ just discussed. But Constantia is not at all confused by the phrasing of Josephine’s decision, which like Miss Brill’s inner voice, answers an unasked question. While the conversation in which they discuss giving the watch to Cyril instead may have been elliptically omitted, Constantia’s remark, perhaps an authorial joke about the narrative’s disruption of conventional representations of time, points to the sisters’ closely entwined experiences and their shared perspectives, or even overlapping subjectivities. Put another way, their mental rhythms are parallel, running along the same habitual tracks of memory and attitude.

35 Auerbach, Mimesis, 546. Mansfield 166

The sisters’ relationship is therefore a representation of mind as deeply interconnected with others and with the outside world: they are, if not quite interchangeable as individuals, very closely connected – almost of one mind. This relationship is perhaps the most charming aspect of the story, despite a sense that it is developmentally stunted, and locked into childhood habits of interaction. This sense of the sisters’ close connection is achieved not via first-person narration as with Raoul Duquette, but via both their dialogue with each other and the use of free indirect discourse that shifts unannounced between perspectives. Thus, Mansfield again impersonates her characters, representing them via their own voices, which here functions as a method for exploring the boundaries of the self, or the scope of consciousness. The sisters’ mental and domestic habits most obviously bear the mark of their lifelong domination by their father. The Colonel is a malevolent ghost in the story, present in the lasting distortion of their mental rhythms, rather than through actual remembrances: with the exceptions of the moment of his death and Cyril’s excruciating teatime visit, the reader does not ‘see’ him. The sisters share a serious and irrational fear that they will again be the victims of his wrath, even after his death: they worry together that they will be in trouble for burying him, and he haunts his belongings to the extent that they run from his room in fright – but also in rebellion, because Constantia locks the door of his wardrobe so that he cannot escape (CWKM 2: 271-3). They begin to properly realise that he no longer has power over them when they are interrupted from a routine conversation about whether to dismiss their ill-tempered servant by the music of an organ grinder, who they would once have had to move on to placate their father. Their realisation that they are now free of such considerations becomes linguistically mingled with the rhythm of the barrel-organ’s music:

The organ grinder might play there all day and the stick would not thump. It never will thump again, It never will thump again, played the barrel organ. What was Constantia thinking? She had such a strange smile; she looked different. She couldn’t be going to cry. ‘Jug, Jug,’ said Constantia softly, pressing her hands together. ‘Do you Mansfield 167

know what day it is? It’s Saturday. It’s a week to-day, a whole week.’ A week since father died, A week since father died, cried the barrel-organ. And Josephine, too, forgot to be practical and sensible; she smiled faintly, strangely. On the Indian carpet there fell a square of sunlight, pale red; it came and went and came – and stayed, deepened – until it shone almost golden. (CWKM 2: 280)

Here, the musical rhythm of the barrel-organ reifies the possibilities of the future by substituting a new, emancipatory mental rhythm for the women’s habits of thought and related domestic dynamics. The new rhythm is passed from one woman to the next, their shared experience of this moment of realisation mirrored in their ‘strange’ smiles. The music of the barrel-organ is an external, artistic rhythm that initiates a shared epiphanic moment for the two women, highlighting the fundamental change that has occurred in their everyday lives and further disrupting their intellectual and discursive routine. This realisation of their newfound freedom from their father briefly loosens their emotional and mental routines. It inspires them to consider what else could have happened in their lives, what life is really like, who they are without the noise and bustle of everyday life, and to edge towards the possibility of a more fulfilling life for themselves in the future. That the street music initiates this moment recalls Lefebvre’s argument that ‘Musical rhythm […] has an ethical function’, which he says is to both illustrate and purify ‘real (everyday) life […] in the acceptance of catharsis’.36 Accordingly, the barrel-organ in the passage above illustrates the rhythm of the everyday in two ways: both the sisters’ now-past life of catering to their father’s demands, and the continuing social, urban everyday represented by the street musician. This is heightened by the fact that the music emanates from a mechanical source, which at the time was often considered more a form of banal noise pollution rather than an exalted art form. Yet, in its beauty and organic spontaneity, and connected as it is with the short-lived appearance of the sun in their dismal apartment, the musical rhythm also promises life itself: ‘A perfect fountain of bubbling notes shook from the barrel-organ, round, bright notes, carelessly scattered’ (CWKM 2: 280). This recalls

36 Lefebvre, Rhythmanalysis, 66. Mansfield 168

Mansfield’s oft-repeated reverence for both life and art and her sense of their deep connection, as well as Lawrence’s representation in Sun of his protagonist’s delivery from her unhealthy life-long habits by her immersion in the thermodynamic rhythms of the sun. While artistic rhythm is thus shown to offer existential hope to the women, the force of habit in the form of ingrained social niceties dissipates the moment of revelatory possibility. They can briefly sense this possibility while the barrel-organ is playing, but falter when it comes to carrying on the new rhythm by articulating this feeling to each other and themselves, slipping instead into well-worn habits of politeness, timidity, and vagueness:

She [Constantia] went over to where Josephine was standing. She wanted to say something to Josephine, something frightfully important, about – about the future and what.… ‘Don’t you think perhaps –’ she began. But Josephine interrupted her. ‘I was wondering if now –’ she murmured. They stopped; they waited for each other.

The decline from this near-breakthrough to the abrupt end of the story is swift and deflating: both sisters attempt to articulate their new hope for the future at the same moment, but the mutually self-effacing, awkward and truncated dialogue that ensues re-establishes the status quo of their mental habits, implying that the bright possibilities momentarily glimpsed by both of them will remain always out of reach:

A pause. Then Constantia said faintly, ‘I can’t say what I was going to say, Jug, because I’ve forgotten what it was … that I was going to say.’ Josephine was silent for a moment. She stared at a big cloud where the sun had been. Then she replied shortly, ‘I’ve forgotten too.’ (CWKM 2: 282)

Here, the sisters are in one sense synchronised. They have had the same epiphanic experience and, when each tries to verbalise it, they each revert to the same pattern of conversation. But to use Mansfield’s own phrase, a ‘final curtain’ has come down between them and they are mutually unable to connect at this higher level. In these final lines, the sisters are shown to remain mentally shackled, unable to articulate or Mansfield 169

even remember their brief feeling of hope for their future. Like Mouse in ‘Je ne parle pas français’, they lack the tools to create new lives for themselves.37 In its building and then abruptly faltering rhythm, this final scene also raises again the question of the relationship between selves. The sisters are presented as at once deeply connected, as their minds follow parallel rhythms, and yet unable to make the final direct connection. Thus, in ‘The Daughters of the Late Colonel’, Mansfield evokes character by mimicking what Dobrée called ‘all the curious transitions of the mind’, in particular the way that mental rhythms or habits construct identity. This in turn forms the unified artistic rhythm of the story as a whole. This section has already demonstrated how pivotal are notions of habit and the ordinary to Mansfield’s work. In the following section, I continue to trace this thread in relation to her innovations with rhythmic structure in the short story.

Ordinary rhythms and the short story When Mansfield’s contributions to the short-story form are listed, her early development of a ‘plotless’ form is often foremost among them. This section accordingly takes up Mansfield’s interest in the possibilities of the short-story form itself, especially her use of rhythm as an alternate structuring method to conventional plot, one which allows the evocation of atmosphere and other fugitive aspects of everyday experience. Mansfield uses structural and linguistic rhythms in ‘An Indiscreet Journey’ to present the triumph of the ordinary over the disruption of war. The emotional complexities of ‘The Man Without a Temperament’ are achieved by its being structured around a rhythmic motif. Finally, in ‘Prelude’ and ‘At the Bay’ Mansfield creates a polyrhythmia of voices and natural rhythms to evoke the life of a family in a single day. ‘An Indiscreet Journey’ also displays the interest in the everyday rhythms of routine and habit found in ‘The Daughters of the Late Colonel’, but rather than domestic space and women’s oppression, this earlier story responds to the horror and waste of the First World War. In it, Mansfield represents the lived experience of

37 Mansfield herself felt this way about the story’s conclusion. She responded to novelist William Gerhardi’s praise for the story with the explanation that contrary to many critics’ responses to the piece, she had intended to pay tribute ‘to the beauty that was hidden in [the sisters’] lives’ and that ‘All was meant, of course, to lead up to that last paragraph, when my two flowerless ones turned with that timid gesture, to the sun. “Perhaps now.” And after that, it seemed to me, they died as truly as father was dead’ (CLKM 4: 249, 23 June 1921). Mansfield 170

wartime as both a continuation of everyday life and a radical departure from it, using literary rhythms to mimic the rhythm of the everyday and its disruption. Although it remained unpublished until after Mansfield’s death, first appearing in 1924 in Something Childish and Other Stories the story deals directly with wartime experience. It was written in 1915 shortly after its author’s foray into the war zone in France for an assignation with Francis Carco, on whom she later partially based the character of Raoul Duquette (CWKM 1: 451). After the war, Mansfield reacted strongly against literature that she felt had failed to respond to its profound implications for European society and culture. In a 1919 letter to Murry she indicates the extent to which she felt that this collective trauma had changed their world:

Speaking to you Id say we have died and live again. How can that be the same life? It doesn’t mean that Life is the less precious [or] that the ‘common things of light and day’ are gone. They are not gone, they are intensified, they are illumined. (CLKM 3: 97, 16 November 1919)

This sense of profound rupture with the antebellum world is one that Mansfield shared with her contemporaries; Pericles Lewis identifies ‘the sense of a radical discontinuity between the pre-war and the post-war worlds’ as the ‘greatest force contributing to the development of modernism after the war’.38 Yet in the quotation above, Mansfield also highlights the continuity of the everyday. Several critics have noted that this intensification and illumination of the everyday by the cataclysm of war pervades some of Mansfield’s best-known works, particularly those set in the New Zealand of her youth, such as ‘Prelude’ or ‘The Garden Party’.39 In contrast, examination of ‘An Indiscreet Journey’ shows how early Mansfield had apprehended this dimension of the war and tried to evoke it in her fiction. ‘An Indiscreet Journey’ stands out from the vast majority of war stories being published at this time in both its ethical scepticism about the war and its innovative approach to the representational problems arising from it. The story is based on a trip that Mansfield took only seven months into the four-year war, and was written at a

38 Pericles Lewis, ‘Inventing literary modernism at the outbreak of the Great War,’ in London, Modernism, and 1914, ed. Michael J. K. Walsh (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 150. 39 Examples include Christine Darrohn, ‘“Blown to Bits!”: Katherine Mansfield’s “The Garden-Party” and the Great War,’ MFS Modern Fiction Studies 44, no. 3 (1998); Gerri Kimber, A Literary Modernist: Katherine Mansfield and the Art of the Short Story (London: Kakapo Books, 2008), 66. Mansfield 171

time when most writing about the war was inspired by patriotic feeling, and idealistic notions of duty and heroism. According to Samuel Hynes, this positive early attitude to the war even extended to the idea that ‘war would purify and cleanse’ England of an excessive Edwardian hedonism that had consumed its simpler rural past.40 The vast majority of war stories being published in the popular presses at this time, according to Emma Liggins, Andrew Maunder and Ruth Robbins, were generally traditional in form and often propagandist in content, upholding notions of heroic British masculinity, German barbarism and even divine favour.41 An example of the latter is ‘The Bowmen’ by Arthur Machen, published in September 1914, which tells of British soldiers being rescued by the ghosts of mediaeval warriors and which many contemporary readers apparently believed to be a true story.42 Another variety of popular wartime short stories are those penned by ‘Sapper’, who wrote many gritty tales of heroism and adventure in combat, and considered the war beneficial to British masculinity.43 These positive attitudes are challenged by Mansfield’s early eyewitness account of the atmosphere in the war zone; ‘An Indiscreet Journey’ disrupts the classically masculine tradition of war literature, first and foremost by eliding the scene of battle: although the proximity of the battlefield is palpable in this story, the violence itself is not described. ‘An Indiscreet Journey’ is, then, as Gerri Kimber has noted, a particularly early example of modernist literature that questions the mainstream principles on which the war was fought.44 The story approaches the problem of representing this unprecedented reality through the ordinary and its disruption, thus presenting a vision of a reality at once continuous with, and radically different to, the world that had been.45

40 Hynes, A War Imagined, 11-13. 41 Barbara Korte and Ann-Marie Einhaus, ‘Short-Term Memories: The First World War in British Short Stories, 1914-39,’ Literature & History 18, no. 1 (2009): 55. 42 Liggins, Maunder, and Robbins, The British Short Story, 134-35. 43 Liggins, Maunder, and Robbins, The British Short Story, 136, 40. ‘Sapper’ was the pen-name of H. C. McNeile, so named because of his affiliation with the Royal Engineers. 44 Kimber, Mansfield and the Art of the Short Story, 65. Many dissenting treatments of the war in short- story form, such as the collection by Richard Aldington, Roads to Glory (1930), or Radclyffe Hall’s Miss Ogilvy Finds Herself (1934), were not published until many years after the war. For a fuller account of these collections, see Liggins, Maunder, and Robbins, The British Short Story, 141, 51. 45 This may be seen as another iteration of the ‘curious disjunction’ that Angela Smith identifies in the story’s imagery and narrative voice. Angela Smith, ‘Katherine Mansfield at the Front,’ First World War Studies 2, no. 1 (2011): 68. Mansfield 172

Mansfield’s interest in the war’s vexed relation to the ordinary is not unusual among her modernist contemporaries. Liesl Olson observes that many ‘modernists fixate on this tension between the war and everyday life; the “before and after” of the war emerges as a major modernist subject’.46 Olson is interested in the questions raised about the ordinary by war: ‘How, these modernists ask, does ordinary experience continue? What happens to routine and habit when a violent disruption like world war intrudes?’47 Olson argues that ‘Woolf depicts the war by depicting the everyday […] in spite of the war, so that the war’s devastations are pervasively felt’, a strategy that also applies to Mansfield’s in ‘An Indiscreet Journey’.48 Mansfield’s ethical interrogation of the war is supported by the figuration of the ordinary through rhythm. Thus, Mansfield’s use of literary rhythm to explore and represent the ordinary may be considered one of her fundamental affinities with the modernist movement. The structural and linguistic rhythms of ‘An Indiscreet Journey’ mimic the regularity of the everyday and its arrhythmic disruption by the war, thus presenting the conflict as unnatural and destructive, yet finally and horrifically subsumed into the ordinary. The story is fundamentally structured around a fragmentary rhythm, rather than plot; the unnamed first-person narrator describes her journey into a restricted war zone in France to meet her lover, referred to only as ‘the little corporal’, and brief scenes of their time there together, closing without resolution or significant event. The overarching rhythm of the text is dictated by its division into three episodic sections. These sections have in common the shape of their narrative arc. In each of these sections, the expectation of a particular event is established before the narration is truncated abruptly when the event arrives, the episode ending without resolution. The first and second sections revolve around being reunited with the little corporal, and the last around sampling a plum-based liqueur called mirabelle. The repetition of this underlying narrative structure, in which the final consequences of the event remain unknown, enacts the combination of monotony and anxious anticipation that characterises war itself. In line with this broader structure of narrative repetition,

46 Olson, Modernism and the Ordinary, 28. 47 Olson, Modernism and the Ordinary, 28. 48 Olson, Modernism and the Ordinary, 28. Mansfield 173

individual scenes and series of events also recur across each episode, notably in the quotidian social space of the French café. A repeated return to the familiar scene of the café establishes what Lefebvre might call a eurhythmic normality, into which the war intrudes disruptively. The narrator visits three cafés, one in each section of the story. The descriptions of the first two bear striking similarities. The ‘buffet’ in ‘X.Y.Z.’ that the narrator stops in for lunch on her journey is described as:

A green room with a stove jutting out and tables on each side. On the counter, beautiful with coloured bottles, a woman leans, her breasts in her folded arms. Through an open door I can see a kitchen, and the cook in a white coat breaking eggs into a bowl and tossing the shells into a corner. (CWKM 1: 441)

This configuration of details is reprised in the café of the second section, in which the narrator waits to dine with the little corporal:

Into the middle of the room a black stove jutted. At one side of it there was a table with a row of bottles on it, behind which Madame sat and took the money and made entries in a red book. Opposite her desk a door led into the kitchen. The walls were covered with a creamy paper patterned all over with green and swollen trees – hundreds and hundreds of trees reared their mushroom heads to the ceiling. (CWKM 1: 446)

In both cases, Mansfield highlights the jutting stove, the green on the walls, the door leading to the kitchen, a female manager behind a row of bottles, staff going about their work (like cracking eggs or bookkeeping), as well as small, inconsequential ‘details’: the way one woman leans at her counter, the colour of another’s accounts book. The ordinariness of the café as a social space is encapsulated not just in the mere presence of such mundane details but also in their similarity, that is in the predictable rhythm of ordinariness established by their repetition. For Mansfield, we know that such ordinary details are inextricably linked with ‘eternity’. This paradoxical junction between the rhythms of everyday routine and the vast expanses of infinite time constructs the lived experience of wartime. Linguistic rhythm is also used to represent the affective experience of the ordinary, in particular the feelings of boredom and idle anticipation. As Sara Crangle observes in her Mansfield 174

chapter on modernist investigations of boredom, ‘time is the primary companion of the bored, a time defined by a particularly stagnant present, one divorced from past and future, monstrously inverted, infinite.’49 In the second section, the narrator sits alone in the café while she waits for the little corporal:

The clock ticked to a soothing lilt, C’est ça, C’est ça. In the kitchen the waiting-boy was washing up. I heard the ghostly chatter of the dishes. And years passed. Perhaps the war is long since over – there is no village outside at all – the streets are quiet under the grass. I have an idea this is the sort of thing one will do on the very last day of all – sit in an empty café and listen to a clock until – . (CWKM 1: 446)

Though the period that the narrator spends waiting in the café is measured by the regular ticking of the clock, she feels the time extend preternaturally in a way that is universally familiar. This scene configures the affective experience of ordinariness rhythmically, through the sound of the ticking clock (and by reference to the routine chore of dish-washing). Yet it is imbued simultaneously with a sense of looming apocalypse. The dishes make a ‘ghostly chatter’, and the narrator imagines a future in which the everyday life of the village has been erased and the end of the world has come. Thus, the cafés in this story combine both continuous and disruptive rhythms. The normality of each café is suspended by the ubiquitous and disruptive presence of soldiers, living emblems of the conflict. In the first café, war is analogised as a disruptive vibration of the air itself. ‘War and noise’ are placed in opposition to the commonplace phrase ‘peace and quiet’ and the violent, disturbing quality of war is represented by a group of soldiers so large and loud that the narrator exclaims ‘Heavens! what a noise. The sunny air seemed all broken up and trembling with it’ (CWKM 1: 441). Likewise, the second café is disrupted not by the mere presence of soldiers, as the first few who enter fit seamlessly into the rhythm of the café (they know Madame and pass the time playing cards and teasing the waiting-boy), but by the discordant rhythms of one injured, shell-shocked soldier, who has just had bandages removed from his eyes. This soldier stands as an embodiment of the destructive, disturbing and pervasive rhythm of the war, his mental and physical pathology manifested through linguistic repetition:

49 Crangle, Prosaic Desires, 75. Mansfield 175

In his white face his eyes showed, pink as a rabbit’s. They brimmed and spilled, brimmed and spilled. […] His comrades watched him a bit, watched his eyes fill again, again brim over. The water ran down his face, off his chin on to the table. He rubbed the place with his coat-sleeve, and then, as though forgetful, went on rubbing, rubbing with his hand across the table, staring in front of him. And then he started shaking his head to the movement of his hand. He gave a loud strange groan and dragged out the cloth again. ‘Huit, neuf, dix,’ said the card-players. (CWKM 1: 447-8)

The wounded soldier’s weeping, suggestive of both physical and psychological trauma, is portrayed as a repetitive action and through linguistic repetition. The reiteration of the words ‘brimmed’ and ‘spilled’, combined with the anadiplosis centred on ‘fill again, again brim’, establishes an ongoing rhythm. This sense of the permanent disturbance of this soldier’s personal rhythm (his everyday life) is supported by Mansfield’s multiplication of synonymous descriptors of his repetitive neurotic movements: rubbing and mopping and shaking and rocking, juxtaposed against the regular rhythm of the card-players’ counting. Trauma is thus figured rhythmically through gesture, a physical exhibition of the arrhythmia of the soldier’s inner life, which is in turn mimicked in the story’s prose. As the human manifestation of the damage caused by war, this wounded soldier, both disturbed and disturbing, functions arrhythmically in the scene, interrupting the ordinary activities of eating, drinking, flirting, working and talking, in which the café’s other occupants are engaged. Yet the others soon return to their prior occupations, showing how, as Lisi Schoenbach suggests, recourse to habit can be conceived as ‘a response to the intensity of modern life’, a way of dealing with crisis.50 The final, inconclusive scene of ‘An Indiscreet Journey’ seems to gesture towards society’s shared responsibility for this destruction, as well as, wryly, to the human inclination to fixate on the trivial. This third section differs from the preceding pair in that the café itself is sketched with less detail, though a Madame is again present. Crucially, in this final scene, the female, civilian narrator has become implicated in the disturbance created by the war, when the group of soldiers that she is with is berated by Madame for coming to her café after their curfew in their absurd quest for mirabelle, risking serious punishment for everyone involved. Thus, while

50 Schoenbach, Pragmatic Modernism, 20, 28. Mansfield 176

Mansfield expressed a profound sense that this event had created an irrevocable rupture with the past, she nevertheless retained a belief in the persistence of the ordinary. This persistence of the ordinary appears as appalling and yet expressive of the wider natural rhythm of life. ‘The Man Without a Temperament’ explores the interruption of ordinary rhythms too, in this case a suspension of life in all its senses caused by serious illness. Mansfield wrote the story, originally to be titled ‘The Exile’, very quickly in January 1920 while staying in Ospedaletti in Italy, in response to her ‘misery’ at having decided that Murry ‘had no more need of our love’. It was first published that spring, in Art and Letters, and republished in Bliss and Other Stories later that year (CWKM 2: 209, n. 1). The story is focalised through the ambivalent perspective of a husband who is caring for, but feels imprisoned by, his tubercular wife in a hotel in southern Europe. Robert Salesby dutifully fetches warm clothing for his wife Jinnie and keeps a watchful eye on her medical condition, but barely engages with her as a person, while a variety of syntactic and symbolic rhythms combine to suggest that her death will be at least partly a moment of emancipation for him. Jinnie’s illness functions as an unnatural arrhythmic force in her and especially Robert’s lives: it has removed them from the everyday social world, and they dwell instead in the uncannily liminal space of the foreign hotel. The sense of Robert’s imprisonment in this ‘exile’ from life, his feelings of ennui and perhaps impatient anticipation of his wife’s death, permeate the story. Robert’s position is presented as one of ethical and emotional imprisonment in a state of limbo, with his feelings of impatience at this situation evoked most clearly through a gestural tic of marking time by continually turning a signet ring he wears, the habit in turn being mimetically achieved through linguistic repetition:

He stood at the hall door turning the ring, turning the heavy signet ring upon his little finger while his glance travelled coolly, deliberately, over the round tables and basket-chairs scattered about the glassed-in verandah. He pursed his lips – he might have been going to whistle – but he did not whistle – only turned the ring – turned the ring on his pink, freshly washed hands. (CWKM 2: 199) Mansfield 177

His detachment both from everyday life and from this alternative is conveyed in this opening paragraph, in which he stands in limbo, in the transitional space ‘at the hall door’ of a hotel dining room. The motion is established as a ‘signature’ habit as it is repeated four times more as the story progresses and conveyed in almost identical syntax. Repeated four times in this paragraph alone, the gesture belies Robert’s cool, deliberate glance, instead implying impatience. The glassed-in verandah suggests enclosure; this motif of enclosure, or imprisonment, is also echoed throughout the story, so that he is positioned as a prisoner, waiting out his sentence. Images suggesting imprisonment are also often paired with Robert’s restive movement. For example, at afternoon tea he puts his letters in his pocket and ignores the papers, refusing to engage with the outside world. Instead, ‘he turned the ring, turned the signet ring on his little finger and stared in front of him, blinking, vacant’ (CWKM 2: 201). After Robert and Jinnie return from their afternoon ‘turn’, she begins to cough and he becomes impatient to get her up to the room and her medicine: ‘Salesby stood in the cage, sucking in his cheeks, staring at the ceiling and turning the ring, turning the signet ring on his little finger.…’ (CWKM 2: 206). The representation of the lift as a cage, in which he stands as he turns the ring, strengthens the conflation of the ring with imprisonment: it becomes a shackle at which he chafes. The appearance of this rhythmic representation of habit in relation to Jinnie connects this imprisonment to her and her illness. After dinner, ‘…They are the first to leave the dining-room. She rises, gathering her shawl and he stands aside, waiting for her to pass, turning the ring, turning the signet ring on his little finger’ (CWKM 2: 207, ellipsis original). This example turns on the double meaning of pass, so that it functions almost as an open declaration that Robert is standing by, marking time by turning his ring until his wife dies. Moreover, in the last paragraph of the story, ‘She turns his signet ring’ (CWKM 2: 209, my emphasis), thereby forming a final and direct connection between her and his sense of imprisonment. Her role as his captor is further emphasised by her habit of beginning sentences with the word ‘Oh’: she starts this way no less than twenty-seven times throughout the text. This vocal mannerism is of course a gasp for breath, an exclamation of emotion and a sign of her physical and psychological fragility and thus a constant reminder of his obligation to her. It also functions as a visual echo of the ring that encircles him. Mansfield 178

Jinnie’s emotional and physical dependence on Robert is equated with being his keeper, and clock time is used rhythmically as another signifier of his detention. When Jinnie is too weak to walk as far as Robert, he leaves her his watch so that she can keep track of how long he is gone, her role as a prison warden strengthened by his noting, as he returns, that she is ‘on the look-out’ (CWKM 2: 206). The watch’s desirability as an object of power is evident in her delight in having it: ‘And she clasped the watch, the watch, watch, the darling watch in her fingers’ (CWKM 2: 204). The repetition of the word ‘watch’ dissolves its denotative status as a referent for the object, allowing its verbal sense, of surveillance, to creep in. The controlling, and regulating aspect of clock time is suggested again when, on his walk alone, Robert’s reverie of their past lives in London is broken into by the sound of a clock striking, reminding him of the reality of his present. Jinnie’s illness pervades the story, so that it becomes a part of Robert’s enclosure. The other couples in the hotel operate as the protagonists’ mirror images. The ‘Honeymoon Couple’ are happy, healthy and youthfully in love – the young husband is ‘dressed ‘English fashion’’, while his new wife returns from their fishing expedition sweating and flushed, as though febrile. In the elderly couple, the Countess and the General, Robert and Jinnie’s roles are reversed, with the Countess patrolling her disabled husband’s needs. When Robert and Jinnie go for an afternoon walk, the lush garden is described in corporeal terms that recall the implied mortality of a Caravaggio still life:

The sun was still high. Every leaf, every flower in the garden lay open, motionless, as if exhausted, and a sweet, rich, rank smell filled the quivering air. Out of the thick, fleshy leaves of a cactus there rose an aloe stem loaded with pale flowers that looked as though they had been cut out of butter; light flashed upon the lifted spears of the palms; over a bed of scarlet waxen flowers some big black insects ‘zoomed-zoomed’; a great gaudy creeper, orange splashed with jet, sprawled against a wall. (CWKM 2: 203)

The tropical fecundity evoked in this passage also hints at decay, sickness, and contagion, the corruption of flesh. When shortly after this, Robert escapes his diseased wife to take a ‘constitutional’, as she puts it, her illness pursues him in the sound of coughing: ‘At a fountain ahead of him two hags were beating linen. As he Mansfield 179

passed them they squatted back on their haunches, stared, and then their ‘A-hak-kak- kak!’ with the slap, slap, of the stone on the linen sounded after him’ (CWKM 2: 205). Furthermore, Jinnie’s illness is compounded with death, decay and the uncanny, such that Robert’s emotional and social obligation to her is not only a jail sentence, but also a kind of limbo, in which they dwell outside the world of the living and outside of life. Jinnie herself is not only repeatedly linked to sickness, but is moribund and wraithlike; she is contiguous with death and the eschatological. Jinnie’s association with the monstrous is prefigured, in the paragraph before she enters the narrative, by another hotel guest’s affected fear of a large creeping plant on the other side of the glass from her usual seat: ‘Sometimes she even pointed at it, crying: “Isn’t that the most terrible thing you’ve ever seen! Isn’t that ghoulish!”’ (CWKM 2: 199) When Jinnie first appears in the story, she is heard and sensed rather than seen – Robert does not look at her as she approaches, with the effect that she appears disembodied, while his listening as she approaches implies the dread of one haunted:

Now he was still, now from his eyes you saw he listened. ‘Hoo-e-zip-zoo-oo!’ sounded the lift. The iron cage clanged open. Light dragging steps sounded across the hall, coming towards him. A hand, like a leaf, fell on his shoulder. A soft voice said: ‘Let’s go and sit over there – where we can see the drive. The trees are so lovely.’ (CWKM 2: 199)

In addition, her shawl is a ‘grey cobweb’, her voice is faint and airy, her hands and bosom thin, and when she drinks her tea she has ‘a brush of bright colour on her cheek-bones’ (CWKM 2: 200, 201). This connection of Jinnie with death is most obvious in the final section of the story; when Robert comes in from the balcony, she is already in bed. Jinnie’s sleep is a metaphorical death – she resembles a corpse, laid out for a funeral, and the moonlit room itself an otherworldly space:

The moon – the room is painted white with moonlight. The light trembles in the mirrors; the two beds seem to float. She is asleep. He sees her through the nets, half sitting, banked up with pillows, her white hands crossed on the sheet. Her white cheeks, her fair hair pressed against the pillow, are silvered over. (CWKM 2: 208) Mansfield 180

When she awakes in the night she is linked with the undead and with vampiric parasitism: when she first speaks, Robert thinks ‘Good Lord! She is talking in her sleep’, but she wants him to kill a mosquito, with which she is associated both contiguously and conceptually. Mansfield complicates the invalid’s guilt about her dependence with monstrous innuendo. Jinnie feels ‘such a fiend’, and asks if Robert minds being got out of bed ‘dreadfully’ and ‘awfully’ – both contemporary colloquial submodifiers indicating extremity, and both with etymological roots meaning ‘fear’, ‘apprehension’, or ‘terror’, as of the supernatural. She also asks if he minds ‘being out here’ with her, that is, exiled from life itself. The domestic ordinary (for example, their routine in London) is thus antithetically connected with health, growth, and the natural order. The husband’s response is also dependent on polysemy for its emotional complexity: ‘“Rot!” he whispers’ (CWKM 2: 209). In the popular vernacular of the day, he has described her qualms as nonsense, while more literally, he uses the verb in its imperative form, thus encapsulating the ambivalence he has been displaying throughout the story, torn between his emotional and physical care for his wife, and his resentment of and disgust at her disease. This story brings to the fore Mansfield’s ongoing fascination with arrhythmia – with pathological or malign rhythms – which contrasts from the passionate affirmations of life found in her letters. Such rhythms also appear, of course, in ‘An Indiscreet Journey’, but they can also be detected in ‘Miss Brill’ and ‘The Daughters of the Late Colonel’, where they manifest as arrhythmic mental rhythms. Given her long battle with terminal illness, it might be tempting to make recourse to ‘the narrative of the life’ to explain this. But Mansfield’s concern with human suffering predates her own diagnosis – she told Murry that from early on, ‘an extremely deep sense of hopelessness’ was a key motivation for her writing. As is already evident from foregoing readings in this chapter, it is one that runs a thread throughout her oeuvre – her ‘cry against corruption’ (CLKM 2: 54). ‘Prelude’ and ‘At the Bay’ together most fully present Mansfield’s rhythmic vision of the ‘profounder reality’: of interlocking rhythms of everyday human life and the inhuman natural world. They are also most clearly the outcome of her 1916 determination to write ‘a kind of long elegy […] in a kind of special prose’ to her younger brother, who was killed in the First World War; in her 1956 introduction to a Mansfield 181

selection of Mansfield’s stories, Bowen writes that in them, the ‘day-to-day receives the full charge of poetry.’51 The idea of these stories as formally paradigmatic among Mansfield’s work is common among critics: Kaplan refers to ‘Prelude’ as ‘the true beginning of her conscious sense of a new shape for prose fiction’, Suzanne Ferguson agrees with Mansfield that their form is innovative – of her ‘own invention’.52 More recently, Delia da Sousa Correa identifies the significance of rhythm to this innovation in her argument that ‘At the Bay’ is the most developed example of ‘Mansfield’s musical modernism’; that it ‘is highly musical in its structure and language’.53 ‘Prelude’ arose from what Mansfield initially saw as a novel titled The Aloe, drafted between March and May 1915 and reworked, after her brother’s death, in February 1916 (CWKM 1: 517-19, n. 1). Then, following an invitation from Virginia Woolf to publish a story on the new Hogarth Press, the piece was revised again in mid-1917. The final version of ‘Prelude’ appeared in July 1918, and was republished in Bliss and Other Stories in 1920 (CWKM 2: 92-3, n. 1). ‘At the Bay’ has a far speedier and more straightforward composition history: it was written between August and September 1921 and first printed in the London Mercury in January 1922 before being collected in The Garden Party and Other Stories, published the following month (CWKM 2: 371, n. 1). These two episodic pieces are the most closely related in terms of theme and style of a loose set of stories, also including ‘The Doll House’ and other smaller pieces that remained unpublished during Mansfield’s lifetime, set in the New Zealand of the author’s youth and focussing on the Burnells, who are based on her own family.54 ‘Prelude’ and ‘At the Bay’ share not only their characters and New Zealand setting, but also an atmospheric indefiniteness, a plotless and episodic structure that is governed by rhythm, and an exploration of childhood, family relationships.

51 Bowen, ‘Stories by Katherine Mansfield,’ 69. 52 Kaplan, Mansfield and the Origins of Modernist Fiction, 103. Ferguson, ‘Genre and the Work of Reading in Mansfield’s “Prelude” and “At the Bay”,’ 36. 53 Delia da Sousa Correa, ‘Katherine Mansfield and Music: Nineteenth-Century Echoes,’ in Celebrating Katherine Mansfield: A Centenary Volume of Essays, ed. Gerri Kimber and Janet Wilson (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 85. 54 These minor sketches are ‘That Woman’ (1916, CWKM 2: 3-4) and one that is given the title ‘Have you seen my cosmias dear?’ (1922) by the editors of the Collected Works (CWKM 2: 484-486). Mansfield 182

Mansfield’s letters regarding these stories make clear how important they were to her and again illustrate the mimetic motivation and method that underpins them. While ‘Prelude’ was in press with Hogarth in late 1917, Mansfield explains, in the same letter to Brett in which she describes her imaginative becoming of the apple or duck, that she doesn’t know how to describe the story’s form, because ‘As far as I know its more or less my own invention’. Her ambition for the work is an interwoven evocation of atmosphere, place and people. As she tells her friend, in ‘Prelude’, she wanted to evoke the transient beauty of early mornings in New Zealand: ‘I tried to catch that moment – with something of its sparkle and its flavour.’ This desire to capture not only the experience of those moments in a particular place but their impermanence and mystery is extended to her ambition regarding the characters, based on her own family:

And just as on those mornings white milky mists rise and uncover some beauty, then smother it again and then again disclose it. I tried to lift that mist from my people and let them be seen and then to hide them again […] I don’t feel anything but intensely a longing to serve my subject as well as I can. (CLKM 1: 331, 11 October 1917)

This letter, with its resonances with later non-fiction writing such as her 1920 ‘Wanted, a New Word’ article about a new form of short fiction, and her 1921 letter to Lady Ottoline about the ‘mists’ that alternately obscure and reveal another, shows plainly how constant these interests in both literary form and epistemology were for Mansfield. These two stories are also prime examples of Mansfield’s mimetic approach to fiction. A later letter to Brett regarding ‘At the Bay’ reiterates her deep personal motivation in writing it, as well as her sense of fiction-writing as a process of impersonation, of mimesis:

It is so strange to bring the dead to life again. Theres my grandmother, back in her chair with her pink knitting, there stalks my uncle over the grass. I feel as I write ‘you are not dead, my darlings. All is remembered. I bow down to you. I efface myself so that you may live again through me in your richness and beauty.’ And one feels possessed. […] And, too, one tries to go deep – to speak to the secret self we all have – to acknowledge that. (CLKM 4: 278, 12 September 1921) Mansfield 183

Mansfield’s strong sense of her family members living through her in her fictional characters says a lot about her understanding of subjectivity as fluid in relation to others. It also demonstrates how she thought of her writing as an extension of herself, recalling her and Murry’s 1912 argument in ‘The Meaning of Rhythm’ that ‘Art and the artist are perfectly at one’, as well as her ideas about artistic creativity generating life itself.55 Her final aim, of speaking ‘to the secret self we all have’, links this personal memory and particular impersonation to the universal and parallels her earlier sense that all of ‘eternity’ is implicated in the ‘details’ of everyday life. As in the stories discussed above, Mansfield achieves this impersonation of not only character but of relationships, situations, and atmospheres, through textual rhythm: careful mimicry of vocal cadence and the evocation of character, place, and moment through narrative rhythms. This rhythmic impersonation of characters, as in the stories examined in the previous section such as ‘Miss Brill’, is achieved via fitting the cadence of the prose to the character, and through free indirect discourse. This is in evidence in the second section of ‘At the Bay’, which opens from the impatient, highly-strung perspective of Stanley Burnell. That Stanley takes everyday life as a challenge is immediately obvious from the pace of the language used to mimic his approach to his pre-work swim. He ‘flung down’, ‘rushed through’, ‘staggered up’ and ‘raced for dear life’ from his house into the sea, finally ‘exulting’ in being the first man in the water for the day, almost all in one long, fluid, breathless sentence (CWKM 2: 344). His thought and speech consists of short, rapid sentences in which every verb is active, peppered with exclamation marks, irritable questions, and mild cursing. In Bergsonian terms, Stanley lives entirely in the ‘external world’ and not for himself – he is goal-oriented and lives by clock time, rushing to catch the coach into town for work. His brother- in-law, Jonathan Trout, annoys Stanley because he is ‘an unpractical idiot’ (CWKM 2: 345). When Stanley has rushed away, feeling cheated because Jonathan had beaten him to the water, the reader is left in Jonathan’s mental space. His attitude to life could hardly be more at variance with Stanley’s, and this is reflected in an immediate shift in the pace and energy of language. Both words and sentences are longer and

55 Murry and Mansfield, ‘The Meaning of Rhythm,’ 20. Mansfield 184

many of his verbs passive: Jonathan ‘stayed a little longer’, he ‘floated, gently moving his hands like fins and letting the sea rock’ him. In contrast to Stanley’s preoccupied bluster, Jonathan subscribes to an understanding of life as rhythm: he believes that ‘to take things easy, not to fight against the ebb and flow of life, but to give way to it’, or to complete the Bergsonian analogy, to dwell in the experience of pure duration, is the best way to live. Meanwhile, his enjoyment in the sensation of the water, his pleasure in the experience of living, is reflected in his idea that the waves crashing on the beach make a ‘joyful’ sound (CWKM 2: 345). But Jonathan’s early morning swim ends unhappily, too; when he gets out he realises he has stayed in too long and his muscles cramp with cold, suggesting that his passive attitude to life is perhaps as problematic as Stanley’s hyper-active one (CWKM 2: 346). The juxtaposition of these two characters through the rhythms of the prose in which they are presented also offers a model of personality that is rooted in rhythm. It suggests that individuality can be considered fundamentally a matter of personal rhythm. As already apparent from the above example of Stanley and Jonathan, both ‘Prelude’ and ‘At the Bay’ are focalised through several distinctive character consciousnesses, creating an alternating rhythm of voices and perspectives. The polyrhythmia of this alternation of voices creates the family space, the inner life of each individual interacting with and reflecting the routines, moods and cares of domestic life. For example, the voice of Stanley’s second daughter, Kezia Burnell rings clear in the narration of her sections as well as in her direct speech, in the simple sentences and words, occasionally muddled grammar and childish imitation of adult phrases, as in the following passage from ‘Prelude’:

Kezia liked to stand so before the window. She liked the feeling of the cold shining glass against her hot palms, and she liked to watch the funny white tops that came on her fingers when she pressed them hard against the pane. (CWKM 2: 59)

Kezia’s character is evoked in these sentences through rhythm, primarily the three repetitions of childlike expression of enjoyment in ‘liked’, but also in the implication of habit – standing at the window feeling the cold glass and looking at her fingertips is clearly a regular pleasure for her, suggesting that she is one of those who knows ‘how to live’. Kezia’s mother Linda Burnell’s voice also has its own distinct cadence. In Mansfield 185

‘Prelude’ her whimsical temperament is also captured through free indirect discourse, describing her imaginatively sensual experience of a poppy pattern on wallpaper and her private, paranoid feeling that objects in her life (medicine bottles, fringes on cushions) are alive, watching her and smiling privately. Her feeling of dread about these eerily animate objects is evoked overtly through linguistic rhythm, in an ominous, drum-like repetition of ‘THEY’: ‘THEY were there […] THEY knew […] THEY saw […] THEY wanted something’ (CWKM 2: 68). These strange musings are juxtaposed against the scene of Linda’s mother, Mrs Fairfield, washing up and putting away breakfast dishes with pragmatic satisfaction; her mental rhythms are composed of maternal memories and practical observations about their new environment (CWKM 2: 69). By thus ‘impersonating’ a series of family members in ‘Prelude’, a structural strategy repeated in ‘At the Bay’, Mansfield mimics not only the characters themselves but creates a polyrhythmia of voices, establishing a sense of the family dynamics that exist between them. Therefore, Mansfield’s ‘impersonation’ also includes rhythmic structuring of the two stories, a polyrhythmia not just of character ‘voices’ and their social relations, but spectacle as a whole, created through the interaction of various other kinds of rhythms: artificial, everyday and natural. Lefebvre’s conception of how natural ‘cyclical repetition’ and the ‘linear repetitive’ of the everyday are interconnected helps to think through the convergence of domestic routine and natural cycles in the lives of Mansfield’s characters.56 These alternate models of rhythm also underscore a tension in the story between the artificial and the natural, or mimetic: that is, between those rhythms that are self-consciously artistic and those that attempt to mimic rhythms from the natural world. Each story is organised linearly into numbered sections and, while each started out its publication career with twelve parts, Mansfield separated the final paragraph of ‘At the Bay’ into a thirteenth section for the original American edition of The Garden Party collection (CWKM 2: 372, n. 5). This late editorial intervention highlights the function of these sections: rather than helping to establish clear chronological order, they contribute to the fragmentary and episodic form of each story. They also force to the surface the tension between the aesthetic theories that see art as an organic mimicry of the world and those that consider art as

56 Lefebvre, Rhythmanalysis, 8. Mansfield 186

an artificial creation. Interwoven or juxtaposed against these artistic or artificial rhythms and against the human rhythms in each story are longer cyclical rhythms of nature: the life cycle of the ‘aloe’ plant in ‘Prelude’ and the sound and changing moods of the constant rhythm of the sea in ‘At the Bay’. The enormous ‘aloe’ plant for which the story was first named is the signature motif of natural rhythm in ‘Prelude’. It dominates a garden bed in the middle of the driveway at the Burnells’ new house and Linda tells Kezia that it blooms only once every hundred years (CWKM 2: 73). 57 The length of this botanical life cycle, exceeding as it does normal human generations, gives it an enduring, other-worldly, almost mystical place in the polyrhythmia of the story, in contrast to the shorter cycles of the rest of the garden and to the human rhythms of family life. For Linda, the otherness of the aloe’s life cycle – its rhythmic presence – enables an imaginative expression of her desire for escape from the everyday and especially from her familial roles. The aloe’s flower stem becomes, for the reluctant wife and mother, the mast of a ship that can carry her away:

She dreamed that she was caught up out of the cold water into the ship with the lifted oars and the budding mast. Now the oars fell striking quickly, quickly. They rowed far away over the top of the garden trees, the paddocks and the dark bush beyond. Ah, she heard herself cry: ‘Faster! Faster!’ to those who were rowing. How much more real this dream was than that they should go back to the house where the sleeping children lay and where Stanley and Beryl played cribbage. (CWKM 2: 87)

This passage uses linguistic repetition both to evoke the rhythmic movement of the imagined rowing (‘quickly, quickly’) and to signal the emotional urgency of Linda’s desire to escape (‘Faster! Faster!’). Thus the imaginatively enriched plant is not only the object of Linda’s escapist fantasy but a symbolic vessel of imagination, and the richness and complexity of the rhythms of the inner life. Also, in the comical juxtaposition of Linda’s fantasy and subsequent contemplation with Mrs Fairfield’s plans for jam-making, the aloe is a symbol for the coexistence of the sublime and the ordinary.

57 The aloe is probably actually an agave, more commonly known as the ‘century plant’. Mansfield 187

In ‘At the Bay’, natural and artistic rhythms are even more closely entwined. The story is rhythmically structured around the motif of the sea, which returns at successive intervals throughout the day, outlining the temporal space of the story while simultaneously establishing a cycle that continues outside and beyond the narrative space. This is one way in which rhythm assists in the achievement of modernist mimesis as described by Auerbach: as based on that ‘confidence that in any random fragment plucked from the course of a life at any time the totality of its fate is contained and can be portrayed.’58 The use of the sea – an immense and indifferent natural phenomenon – creates a rhythmic structure which, like the aloe in ‘Prelude’, puts the shorter cycles of human life into relief. Not only does the repeated return to the sea in this story punctuate and shape the rhythm of the text, but its anthropomorphism also forms an ambivalent connection between human routines, emotions and experience, and rhythms of the inhuman universe. In the story’s first section, which depicts the world empty but for a lone shepherd and his flock, the pre- dawn sea is indistinct under a mist and sighs sleepily. When the sun rises and breaks through the mist, it becomes a ‘leaping, glittering sea’, which is so bright that it hurts the eyes. When we revisit it at midday, it has lost this frenetic early-morning energy and is flopping lazily in the heat. In the final paragraph of the story, late at night, the rhythm of the sea is once again rendered through sound alone. Mansfield’s final edit of this paragraph into a thirteenth section, for the American edition of The Garden Party, places greater emphasis on the indifference of natural cycles to human concerns and lives:

‘Then why in God’s name did you come?’ stammered Harry Kember. Nobody answered him.

XIII A cloud, small, serene, floated across the moon. In that moment of darkness the sea sounded deep, troubled. Then the cloud sailed away, and the sound of the sea was a vague murmur, as though it waked out of a dream. All was still. (CWKM 2: 371)

58 Auerbach, Mimesis, 547. Mansfield 188

In the original British edition, in which the final paragraph follows directly on from Linda’s sister Beryl Fairfield’s conversation with the disreputable Harry Kember, the final paragraph seems to relate more directly to the scene between the two almost- lovers than does the version above. Instead, the above portrayal of Beryl’s unsettling encounter with Harry is complicated by this editorial change. In the earlier version, the ocean seems to echo Beryl’s mental and emotional state, the incident mentally brushed over as the moonlight returns. In the above version, however, the sea is just the sea, utterly uninvolved in human concerns. In both ‘Prelude’ and ‘At the Bay’, then, the merging of human rhythms of the mind, emotions and the everyday with slower or longer rhythms of inhuman nature highlights the temporary quality of human existence while simultaneously imbuing the everyday with significance – these are Mansfield’s ultimate ‘hymns’ to the transient beauty of life. As this chapter has shown, the concept of rhythm operates implicitly in both Mansfield’s understanding of the self and her conception of life as an intricate blend of the biological, ordinary, and transcendent. These are both evoked through rhythmic literary techniques. Although her contributions to literary modernism are often located in her formal innovations, tracing the concept of rhythm through Mansfield’s body of work calls attention to her philosophical motivations for such innovation. This chapter demonstrates how the pursuit of mimesis of a deeper register of existence lies at the heart of Mansfield’s literary practice. As will be shown in the following chapter, Mansfield’s veneration of life itself and constant fascination with the mimetic possibilities of what she calls ‘special prose’ was shared by Woolf, whose conception of the universe is predicated on a rhythmic vision of aesthetic unity.

Chapter 4

Virginia Woolf, rhythm and the world as work of art

Virginia Woolf had a strong and persistent feeling that life and the universe are equivalent to a work of art, in having an order existing beyond the appearance of things and that makes of apparently chaotic existence an aesthetic whole. She called this natural but artistic order a hidden ‘pattern’. Because the concept of rhythm can be regarded as both natural and artificial, Woolf’s idea of ‘pattern’ can be usefully equated with rhythm. It is therefore possible to argue that Woolf shared in Lawrence and Mansfield’s conception of rhythm as a phenomenon that underpins the functioning of the universe. Woolf, too, saw the task of the writer as being to express what they see as the truth about the world, so her fiction expresses a tension between mimetic representation and self-conscious artistry. Given her model of the world as work of art, Woolf was also deeply interested in perception and the role of consciousness in apprehending reality. Woolf’s subtle outlook on the relationship between nature and artifice, the ordinary and the transcendent, is reflected in her interest in combining prose and poetry. Though Mansfield shared this interest in ‘special prose’, Woolf was engaged in the modernist discussions of the relationship between prose and poetry investigated in Chapter 1 more directly than either of the other two authors under study. In this final chapter, I argue that Woolf’s notion of the world as a work of art can be productively understood in terms of rhythm, and I investigate the particular ways that Woolf seeks to represent this vision using rhythms in her short fiction. To this end, I follow the structure of the two preceding chapters, in opening with an analysis of the concepts of rhythm and mimesis as they are to be found in Woolf’s essays and reviews. In the second section I explore Woolf’s distinctive use of literary rhythm to mimic voices and the rhythms of consciousness, and thus to explore the subject’s relation to the world. In the closing section of this chapter, and indeed this thesis, I explore the ways in which Woolf uses the short story to interrogate storytelling itself. These two significant aspects of Woolf’s short-story corpus – her Woolf 190

approach to voice and storytelling – make plain her commitment to her own form of rhythmic mimesis.

Rhythm and poetic prose in Woolf’s aesthetics As the six volumes of her essays attest, Woolf was a prolific literary reviewer and essayist. Her non-fiction is marked by an unmistakable voice, one which continually probes the histories of English literature and culture, and which is deeply engaged in assessing and shaping their development in her own time. Andrew McNeillie opens his introduction to the first of these volumes with the assertion that ‘Virginia Woolf was arguably the last of the great English essayists’ (EVW 1: ix), yet in the intervening decades Woolf’s non-fiction, like her short fiction, has continued to receive little scholarly attention when compared to her novels.1 This opening section delves into this rich body of work, highlighting the rhythmic concepts in Woolf’s vision of the universe and subsequently their influence on her modernist prose aesthetics. Particularly when grouped with those of contemporaries like Lawrence and Mansfield, these essays demonstrate the influence of the modernist fascination with rhythm on Woolf’s thinking and writing. Woolf’s most direct discussion of rhythm is in a 1905 essay titled ‘Street Music’, first published in the National Review. In it, she anticipates attitudes to the concept that others like Harriet Monroe and John Middleton Murry would articulate several years later. In this way, a developing modernism can be seen in some of Woolf’s earliest professional writing. Laura Marcus observes that the essay ‘chimes with many of those perceptions of art that we now define as “modernist”: the “primitivism” of the appeal to the savage within; the suggestion that all art aspires to the condition of music; the breaking down of the distinction between the dancer and the dance.’2 The essay expresses a sense, more implicit elsewhere in Woolf’s work, that rhythms permeate and shape every part of life, from the workings of the universe to those of

1 In the most recently published book focused exclusively on Woolf’s essays, Katerina Koutsantoni considers only those volumes that Woolf herself prepared for publication, and not the considerably larger corpus brought together in the six-volume collection. Leila Brosnan’s book is more inclusive but, being published before the final two volumes of the essays (in 2009 and 2011), is unavoidably incomplete. Brosnan compares Woolf’s more ‘commercial’ reviews and commissioned articles with the essays prepared for private publication. Katerina Koutsantoni, Virginia Woolf’s Common Reader (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009); Leila Brosnan, Reading Virginia Woolf’s Essays and Journalism: Breaking the Surface of Silence (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1997). 2 Marcus, ‘“A Hymn to Movement”: The “City Symphony” of the 1920s and 1930s,’ 33. Woolf 191

the body, and from the daily habits of individuals to the organisation of society at large. Rhythm is understood as a universal phenomenon or experience, one that connects people to each other and to the world around them, and that affords a ‘primitive’ and authentic form of embodied language. The idea of rhythm as a common language underpins Woolf’s assertion that ‘though many are deaf to tune hardly any one is so coarsely organised as not to hear the rhythm of its own heart in words and music and movement’ (EVW 1: 30). This assertion emphasises a mimetic equivalence between biological rhythms and those of the arts. It is on this basis – the ability of rhythm in the arts to influence people, both physically and psychologically – that Woolf whimsically suggests using music to solve a range of social issues. She argues that ‘a band at the centre of the wild discord of cabs and carriages would be more effectual than any policeman; not only cabman but horse would find himself constrained to keep time’, and also that if ‘philanthropists would bestow free music upon the poor […] it is probable that all crime and quarrelling would soon be unknown, and the work of the hand and the thoughts of the mind would flow melodiously in obedience to the laws of music’ (EVW 1: 31-32). This argument is grounded in a sense that musical rhythm, and by inference, artistic rhythm in general, can generate a mimetic response in the receiver, that is a reciprocal mimicking of rhythm. Beneath their whimsicality Woolf’s ideas about the connections between artistic rhythms and the everyday bear significant similarities to Lefebvre’s argument that these rhythms have ‘an ethical function’ regarding the everyday, both as mimesis and thereby through catharsis, in their ‘relation to the body, to time, to the work’. 3 ‘Street Music’ reveals rhythm’s centrality to a convergence of vitalism, ordinary and modern life, and artistic creativity and form in the young Virginia Stephen’s thinking. It also indicates the ethical significance that she placed, if half-mockingly, on the arts. The argument of ‘Street Music’ is subtly complicated by an ironic tension in Woolf’s tone, which is established by oscillation between an apparently serious, romantic idealism about the capacities of rhythm, and the deliberate absurdity of her practical proposals for its application. The mock-seriousness of those proposed improvements is emphasised by the recurring juxtaposition of exaggerated emphasis

3 Lefebvre, Rhythmanalysis, 66. Woolf 192

on the wild, pagan, chaotic and perhaps even demonic ‘dangers’ associated with music and particularly rhythm, with banal, supercilious social commentary, as in the following paragraph transition:

It will be the god of music who will breathe madness into our brains, crack the walls of our temples, and drive us in loathing of our rhythmless lives to dance and circle for ever in obedience to his voice. The number of those that declare, as though confessing their immunity from some common weakness, that they have no ear for music is increasing, though such a confession ought to be as serious as the confession that one is colour blind. (EVW 1: 30)

The final sentence of the first paragraph, which employs fantastic imagery evoking occult terrors, abruptly contrasts with the first sentence of the following paragraph, which reverts to a mild, conversational observation of a trend in Woolf’s own society. This juxtaposition characterises a prudish resistance to music and art as rooted in hysterical and absurd fears. Elena Gualtieri observes that ‘Street Music’, along with Woolf’s other published essays of this period, is ‘well-written in a conventional, Edwardian way, with sentences rolling smoothly after each other, exemplifying the kind of “suavity” and concentration on the surface of writing which Woolf was quick to condemn in other essayists.’4 This reading ignores the irony produced by the tension highlighted in the passage quoted above; indeed, the essay might be said to mock that suave, well-written essay style, along with the middle-class pomposity of the older generation’s tendency to take up causes for social improvement, a criticism that resurfaces in both ‘Modern Fiction’ and ‘Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown’, discussed further below. Woolf makes fun of everything: the sententious essay style of society’s improvers, prudish and conventional repression of artistic expression, and even the naivety of the idealistic vision of the possibilities of art that she largely espouses. At the same time, this tonal tension helps to bring the ordinary and the numinous aspects of rhythm into relation with one another. Woolf’s self-conscious, even self- deprecating stance toward the romantic idealisation of creativity and spirituality can be found throughout her writing, such as in her part-mocking, part-celebratory portrayal of the modern artist in the short story ‘Solid Objects’ (1920).

4 Elena Gualtieri, Virginia Woolf’s Essays: Sketching the Past (New York: St. Martin’s, 2000), 29. Woolf 193

Woolf’s argument that society, art and individuals would gain practical, creative and spiritual benefits from developing greater sensitivity to rhythm rests on the rather Lawrentian basis that it amounts to an attunement with the universe. In a passage reminiscent of Monroe’s later description of the arts as ‘an effort to join in’ with the rhythms of the universe, Woolf makes a direct link between a universal music and that made by people:

We all know that the voices of friends are discordant after listening to beautiful music because they disturb the echo of rhythmic harmony, which for the moment makes of life a united and musical whole; and it seems probable considering this that there is a music in the air for which we are always straining our ears and which is only partially made audible to us by the transcripts which the great musicians are able to preserve. In forests and solitary places an attentive ear can detect something very like a vast pulsation, and if our ears were educated we might hear the music also which accompanies this. (EVW 1: 31)

Woolf’s ideal ‘attentive ear’ prefigures the rhythmanalyst’s sensitive reception of the rhythms of the world as imagined by Lefebvre. Lefebvre’s rhythmanalyst ‘will listen to the world, and above all to what are disdainfully called noises, which are said without meaning, and to murmurs [rumeurs], full of meaning – and finally he will listen to silences.’5 In Woolf’s passage, human music is presented as the audible echo of an all- but intangible universal rhythm or ‘vast pulsation’, a concept with a pronounced similarity to Lawrence’s ‘eternal systole diastole’; she explicitly presents artistic rhythm as a transcription of a natural or cosmic rhythm that is almost mystical in its inhumanity. The fundamental seriousness of this core argument regarding rhythm in ‘Street Music’ is evident in the way that it echoes throughout her career. Woolf’s isorhythmic vision of a cosmically unifying aesthetic phenomenon is more famously expressed over thirty years later in her late memoir, ‘A Sketch of the Past’, in which she explains her idea ‘that behind the cotton wool is hidden a pattern; that we – I mean all human beings – are connected with this; that the whole world is

5 Lefebvre, Rhythmanalysis, 19. Woolf 194

a work of art; that we are parts of the work of art’ (MOB: 72).6 Woolf’s sense of what Murry called the ‘profounder reality’ that exists beyond the ‘cotton wool’ of daily life is again paralleled with human creative endeavour, arguing that ‘Hamlet or a Beethoven quartet is the truth about this vast mass that we call the world’. Woolf suggests here that the world is a complex and beautiful work of art and perhaps also that these example works of art are, as she had suggested in ‘Street Music’, a mimetic echo of the universal ‘music in the air’. In light of her friend E. M. Forster’s earlier assertion that pattern ‘shuts the doors on life’,7 the fact that this later vision is of an underlying pattern could be seen to emphasise the artificial nature of Woolf’s universal ‘work of art’. However, she insists that where the world is concerned, ‘there is no Shakespeare, there is no Beethoven; certainly and emphatically there is no God; we are the words; we are the music; we are the thing itself’ (MOB: 72). The notion of humanity as a whole collaboratively forming a work of art implies an idea of natural, spontaneous generation, which in turn links human-made works of art directly to life itself. The distinctive parallels between this statement and Woolf’s earlier idea of the ‘vast pulsation’ also suggest that unlike Forster, Woolf does not distinguish between pattern as artificial and rhythm as real and vital. Or perhaps rather, she does not distinguish between artificial and real or vital, and like Mansfield, Woolf sees art as intimately connected to life. Woolf demolishes the distinction between mimetic aesthetics and formalist ones by claiming that the truth of reality is aesthetic, thereby implying that formal experimentation can have mimetic effects. For Woolf, the sense of a unified world is created through artistic expression. She describes her first realisation of her holistic philosophy as ‘a sudden violent shock’ out of the ‘cotton wool’ or ‘non-being’ of everyday life, with an image that recalls both Lawrence’s model of the ideal novel as an opening poppy and Mansfield’s desire to be ‘rooted in life’:

I was looking at the flower bed by the front door; ‘That is the whole’, I said. I was looking at a plant with a spread of leaves; and it seemed suddenly plain that the flower itself was a part of the earth; that a ring enclosed what was the

6 Written in 1939-40 as a break from writing a biography of her friend Roger Fry, ‘A Sketch of the Past’ was first published in Moments of Being in 1976, and after a more polished typescript of the text came to light in 1980, in the 1985 second edition of the same. (MOB: 6, 61-3) 7 Forster, Aspects of the Novel, 112. Woolf 195

flower; and that was the real flower; part earth; part flower. It was a thought I put away as being likely to be very useful to me later. (MOB: 71)

Woolf explains that this shock gave her a feeling of satisfaction at having understood something important about the world, and she links this glimpse of understanding or ‘moment of being’ explicitly with the creative act.8 For her, such an experience ‘is or will become a revelation of some order; it is a token of some real thing behind appearances; and I make it real by putting it into words. It is only by putting it into words that I make it whole’ (MOB: 72). That is, it is the process of art, in Woolf’s case the representation of an experience in words, that reifies ‘reality’ and in particular, her sense of the world as a unified whole. Thus, for Woolf, the relationship between reality and art could be described as a pendulum that swings both ways: reality is created by its mimesis, much as for Mansfield, her imaginative impersonation of the apple leads to the feeling that she could produce an apple out of her own being. Accordingly, Woolf’s commonly acknowledged manipulation of literary form itself to put such experiences or realisations into words (along with the ‘cotton wool’) can be described as mimetic. In ‘Street Music’, Woolf predicts that rhythmic attunement with the ‘vast pulsation’ of the universe would lead to an improvement in the art of writing, both poetry and prose, which she argues is ‘chiefly degenerate because it has forgotten its allegiance’ with music, which she has described as an ‘echo of rhythmic harmony’. She goes on: ‘We should invent – or rather remember – the innumerable metres which we have so long outraged, and which would restore both prose and poetry to the harmonies that the ancients heard and observed’ (EVW 1: 31). Woolf declares the necessity of literature’s rhythmic mimesis of natural or primitive ‘harmonies’ of the world. Much as Lawrence did later, Woolf here conceives of the engagement with rhythm in life and literature as a panacea for the ills of civilised modernity, a path back to a more authentic, primitive harmony with the natural world. This sense of prose’s concern with the rhythms of the real runs throughout Woolf’s non-fiction writing, as does her desire to convey her notion of the artistic

8 Alex Zwerdling links Woolf’s conception of a hidden pattern to Freud’s idea of the ‘oceanic feeling’ – the emotion of oneness with humanity and nature which underlies all religious faith. One of the areas in which Zwerdling identifies this feeling is the cadence of Woolf’s prose – her characteristically long sentences function as ‘an instrument of coherence that refuses to compartmentalize or exclude, a verbal expression of the ideal of human unity.’ Zwerdling, Woolf and the Real World, 279-81. Woolf 196

unity of existence. For example in a diary entry from 1928, she decides that ‘I mean to eliminate all waste, deadness, superfluity: to give the moment whole; whatever it includes. Say that the moment is a combination of thought; sensation; the voice of the sea’ (DVW 3: 209-10, 28 November 1928). Woolf’s reference to ‘the moment whole’ has an evident kinship to her description, a decade later, of her childhood realisation about the flower and the earth being part of the same ‘whole’. In this case too, Woolf emphasises the subject’s relation to or apprehension of the world in thought and sensation. Yet as in ‘Street Music’, which revolves around the notion of the universe’s ‘vast pulsation’, here she also highlights an external natural rhythm as fundamental to existence. ‘The voice of the sea’ conjures both the sonic rhythm of the waves washing the shore and the cycles of the natural world in general, so that ‘the moment whole’ is understood as doubly composed of rhythms – as affected by rhythm and as part of a rhythm. She goes on to insist on the necessity of avoiding what Mansfield dismissively called ‘a nice plotty story’ in order to truthfully represent this rhythmic moment:

Waste, deadness, come from the inclusion of things that dont belong to the moment; this appalling narrative business of the realist: getting on from lunch to dinner: it is false, unreal, merely conventional. Why admit any thing to literature that is not poetry – by which I mean saturated? […] The poets succeeding by simplifying: practically everything is left out. I want to put practically everything in; yet to saturate. (DVW 3: 209-10)

Her determination to ‘give the moment whole’ and her criticisms of narrative realism as ‘false, unreal’ and lifeless together indicate her assumption that mimesis of a particular kind is the fundamental aim of her art. Much as Mansfield had, Woolf meditates here on the kind of ‘special prose’ (in Mansfield’s words) needed to authentically convey the experience of the moment. While Woolf never wrote verse in the conventional sense and does not consider herself a poet, it is clear here that for her, poetry’s capacity for (or definition as) dense significance is key to achieving her mimetic aims. Woolf joined many of her contemporary critics in observing and promoting the drawing closer of poetry and prose in literature, in her case on the basis of their combined mimetic power. This is evident in a 1916 review of a collection of essays by Woolf 197

decadent and symbolist poet, critic and editor Arthur Symons, in which Woolf responds to his underlying beliefs about poetry and prose. She observes that Symons’ criticism is fundamentally affected by his great ‘passion for beauty’, and notes that ‘all through his volume there is an evident […] exaltation of poetry as the most inspired form which literature can take’ (EVW 2: 69-70). Woolf goes on to intimate that Symons’ view is old fashioned, suggesting that her own contemporaries are ‘impatient with beauty’, and that instead, ‘modern poetry seems more and more to glance at prose and make trial of the methods of prose’ (EVW 2: 70). Here she anticipates T. S. Eliot’s 1921 claim, writing on prose poetry in the Chapbook, that ‘verse is always struggling, while remaining verse, to take up to itself more and more of what is prose, to take something more from life and turn it into “play.”’9 Woolf insists on the serious mimetic aims of this modern experimentation:

It springs rather from the belief that there is a form to be found in literature for the life of the present day – for a life lived in little houses separated only by a foot or two of brick wall; for the complicated, intense and petty emotions of the drawing room; for the acts and sights of the streets, and for the whole pageant of life without concealment of its ugly surface. (EVW 2: 70)

This corroborates Mansfield’s belief that a new form or ‘a new word’ is needed, though Woolf expresses a stronger sense of the historical specificity of this need. Like Eliot, and most of their contemporaries, Woolf associates prose language with the prosaic – the realities of modern everyday experience – and therefore prose is seen as the form best suited to capturing this reality.10 Woolf imagines the new form as a hybrid of prose and poetry, uniquely able to approach the ugliness of the everyday with the same level of artistic ambition as that usually found in poetry: it is ‘neither the speech of the poets nor the speech of actual life, but it, too, is the result of that “crystallisation in which direct emotion or sensation deviates exquisitely into art”, as Mr Symons puts it’ (EVW 2: 70). So for Woolf, modern literature must at once continue the poetic tradition’s deeper aims of reproducing feeling, yet break with it by

9 Eliot, ‘Prose and Verse,’ 9. 10 More explicitly, Woolf comments in an essay on ghost stories titled ‘Across the Border’ (1918) that ‘probably some degree of reality is necessary in order to produce fear; and reality is best conveyed by prose’ (EVW 2: 218). Woolf 198

abandoning the dedication to beauty demanded by predecessors like Symons and thus dismantling one aspect of the border between poetry and prose. Woolf praises this very approach in a piece on Siegfried Sassoon’s war poetry, published in 1917. In this review, she defines poetry as language that represents those more significant categories of experience, here referred to as ‘moments of insight’, but particularly commends Sassoon’s inclusion of ordinary and familiar details in his poems, arguing that these allow for the expression of such moments as a whole. The metaphor she uses is again strikingly similar to her childhood ‘moment of being’ as later described in ‘Sketches of the Past’:

To call back any moment of emotion is to call back with it the strangest odds and ends that have become somehow part of it, and it is the weeds pulled up by mistake with the flowers that bring back the extraordinary moment as a whole. (EVW 2: 121)

Here, poetry’s ‘moments of insight’ are presented as flowers, while prosaic details such as familiar advertising slogans are likened to weeds, the two as indivisible as the plant and the earth of her childhood memory. Woolf accordingly praises Sassoon’s ‘power as a realist’, specifying that it is ‘realism of the right, of the poetic kind’ (EVW 2: 120). She sees this poetic realism as having an ethical dimension, too, claiming that it is these ordinary details that force the reader’s full apprehension of the reality of war, and thus instil a hatred of it. Woolf celebrates the capacity of Sassoon’s poetry to at once communicate profound aspects of experience – direct emotion or sensation – and to situate these within the ordinary world. However, Woolf’s enthusiasm for combining the strengths of poetry and prose was not boundless; in some respects, she maintained a traditional attitude towards the role and definition of poetry. In the 1919 review ‘Is this Poetry?’, both Virginia Woolf and her husband Leonard seem to evaluate two poetry collections, by Murry and Eliot, based on an expectation of certain orders of readerly experience. 11 Emphasising the intuitive, emotional and the aesthetic, Virginia writes that ‘poetry – this of course is an individual experience – suddenly bestows its beauty without

11 Leonard wrote the half of the article that deals with Eliot’s book, so that the Woolfs thus shared the awkwardness of reviewing two books they themselves had published through the Hogarth Press, in a journal – the Athenaeum – then edited by Murry, that is, one of the poets under review. (EVW 3: 57, n. 1) Woolf 199

solicitation; you possess it before you know what it contains’ (EVW 3: 55). Murry and Eliot’s rights to be considered poets in the ‘true’ sense of the word are questioned with respect to the aims of their works. Both poets’ work might be termed too intellectual for the Woolfs’ tastes. Murry’s appears to fall foul on account of an essayistic quality, and in Eliot’s case an experimental, ‘scientific’ approach is seen to get in the way of poetic feeling, and his work is accused of being ‘perilously near the pit of the jeu d’esprit’ (EVW 3: 56). All of this suggests a continued expectation of deep and genuine emotion from poetry. Read alongside her celebration of modern poetry’s employment of prose methods in the Symons review, and the compliments given to Sassoon’s inclusion of prosaic details, this joint review helps to indicate the limitations to Woolf’s appreciation of the blending of poetry and prose. Woolf saw the benefit of blending poetry and prose as consisting in the fusion of the poetic affinity with emotion, psychology, and sensation with prose’s superior capacity to represent reality. Together, these texts illuminate not only Woolf’s generic assumptions and values. They also reveal her understanding of the role of literature as a whole. They show how essential she considered the emotional and sensuous aspects of literature to be, and also her embrace of mimesis as goal and method. Woolf continued to speculate that prose and poetry would need to be fused in order to respond to the complexity of both the modern world and modern mind, but also a deeper or more ‘important’ aspect of human existence. Her attitude to this is most thoroughly developed in ‘The Narrow Bridge of Art’, first published in August 1927 as ‘Poetry, Fiction and the Future’, having been adapted from a paper read to the Oxford University English Club in May the same year. Here, she argues that prose, rather than poetry, is suited to capturing the ‘monstrous, hybrid, unmanageable emotions’ that occupy the minds of her generation (EVW 4: 429). This new kind of prose would be hybrid too, though: it would ‘have something of the exaltation of poetry, but much of the ordinariness of prose’ (EVW 4: 435). The chief advantage of prose, again, is this relation to ordinariness, and to the ugliness that Woolf sees as newly integral to modern experience. Yet she notes that conventional prose is unable to ‘say the simple things which are so tremendous’, because it has ‘dispensed with the incantation and the mystery, with rhyme and metre’ – hence the merit of infusing it with poetry (EVW 4: 436). But Woolf emphasises that this poetic prose should be Woolf 200

‘stained deep purple’, rather than containing only ‘patches’ of poetry (EVW 4: 437). Woolf’s vision of a successful fusion of poetry and prose is, much like Lawrence’s description of Verga’s prose, symbolised by the rhythmic movement of a bird: her ideal hybrid prose would be ‘capable of rising high from the ground, not in one dart, but in sweeps and circles, and of keeping at the same time in touch with the amusements and idiosyncrasies of human character in daily life’ (EVW 4: 438). The heightened rhythms of this prose thus communicate the deeper registers that underlie everyday life. The romantic essayist Thomas De Quincey may be considered an important influence on Woolf’s conception of the advantages of fusing poetry and prose, as her essays show evidence that his writing was an ongoing example for her. In particular, Woolf’s writing on De Quincey illuminates her connection of rhythm in both conceptual and formal senses to the blending of poetry and prose. In a 1906 article on De Quincey’s autobiography, which belongs to the same intellectual period as ‘Street Music’ of the previous year, Woolf describes his prose as being analogous to ‘an organ booming down the vast and intricate spaces of a cathedral, because there is an obvious relation between De Quincey’s use of language and a musician’s use of sound’ (EVW 1: 367). Woolf explains this rhythmic, musical aspect of De Quincey’s prose as being the result of an internal response to aesthetic or emotional experiences, which she conceptualises rhythmically: she goes on to posit that ‘beautiful sights and strange emotions created waves of sound in his brain before they shaped themselves into articulate words, and thus suggested words that reproduced sound as well as meaning’ (EVW 1: 367-68). This passage directly links the physical rhythmic phenomenon of sound as vibration with the cadences of prose and the expression of emotional or aesthetic experience. These mental ‘waves of sound’ also imply what we might call a synaesthetic relationship between experience and rhythm, and that linguistic rhythm can mediate the mimesis of diverse registers of experience. A later essay on De Quincey helps to define Woolf’s own attitudes towards the combination of prose and poetry more precisely. This later work also shows an awareness of the topicality of her exploration of poetic prose in De Quincey’s work. In ‘Impassioned Prose’ (1926), Woolf expresses her admiration of the poetry in his prose in spite of her awareness that ‘the critics’ are united in the belief that ‘nothing is Woolf 201

more reprehensible than for a prose writer to write like a poet’ (EVW 4: 361). Woolf agrees that a ‘purple passage’ can interfere with the immersive quality of the reading experience. Her description of poetic language intruding on prose again links linguistic rhythm directly to evoking emotion: ‘the temperature rises, the rhythm changes, we go up with a lurch, come down with a bang, and wake, roused and angry’ (EVW 4: 361). Yet she nevertheless argues that poetry has the capacity to explore elements of the human experience that are simply not accessible via non-poetic prose: the emotional and sensual, which she describes as ‘all that side of the mind which is exposed in solitude […] its thoughts, its rhapsodies, its dreams’ (EVW 4: 362). For her, De Quincey is a born visionary, a man with a poetic sensibility, yet not a poet; as she puts it, he lacks ‘the fire and the concentration’ to write in verse. Thus, she explains the earlier writer’s development of what he referred to as ‘modes of impassioned prose’ as an attempt to express that which was ‘the most real part of his own existence’: his dreams and waking visions (EVW 4: 363). This again recalls Woolf’s later description of the moment of her realisation about the flower and the earth as being ‘a token of some real thing behind appearances’, which she aspired to put into words. Likewise, heightened rhythm is a crucial feature of Woolf’s own prose style, one that helps to effect the balance between emotional expression and the experience of the ordinary, or the flowers and the weeds that make up the ‘moment whole’. Woolf’s definition of this ‘real thing’ and her approach to putting it into words are further illuminated in ‘Modern Fiction’ and ‘Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown’, two of her most frequently cited essays. In ‘Modern Fiction’ (1919), the reaction against Edwardian sensibilities that began to surface in the satirical moments of ‘Street Music’ is refocused on the writers of the generation preceding hers. Woolf’s main charge against the authors she calls the Edwardians, represented by H. G. Wells, John Galsworthy, and especially Arnold Bennett, is that they are ‘materialists’. To her this means that they focus on trivial, superficial facets of life and thereby fail to capture what she sees as the most important aspect of human experience: ‘life or spirit, truth or reality, this, the essential thing’ (EVW 4: 160). Woolf’s offering of this set of terms as synonymic alternatives makes it clear that ‘life’ – her favoured word for this ‘essential thing’ – is more than the merely ordinary or everyday. Rather, for Woolf, as Woolf 202

for Mansfield, this highly charged definition of ‘life’ encompasses both the experiences of ‘an ordinary mind on an ordinary day’ and her famous conception of the ‘semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end’ (EVW 4: 160). Woolf insists that the author’s role is to find a way to express this deeper aspect of human experience within prose fiction, while avoiding the ‘appalling narrative business of the realist’. Addressing her contemporary, the modernist author, she proposes an alternative:

Let us record the atoms as they fall upon the mind in the order in which they fall, let us trace the pattern, however disconnected and incoherent in appearance, which each sight or incident scores upon the consciousness. Let us not take it for granted that life exists more fully in what is commonly thought big than in what is commonly thought small. (EVW 4: 161)

Here it is evident that Woolf is interested not simply in ordinary life, but in the effect it has on the consciousness. Moreover, for her, this effect forms a ‘pattern’, which is reminiscent of her idea of De Quincey’s ‘waves of sound’, that can be ‘traced’ or copied – that is, mimicked – in writing. This famous passage is profitably read against Lawrence’s metaphysical aesthetic: while both see the world as rhythmically mimicked in their writing via the medium of the artist, where Lawrence focuses on the inhuman, and art in his conception accordingly responds to the material, the physical or physiological, Woolf is primarily concerned with the human as experiencing consciousness. Her conception of life is epistemic – that is, always constructed by what can be apprehended by the subject. Thus, for Woolf, the world is represented through mimesis of the experiencing of it. ‘Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown’ (1924) demonstrates how central what Woolf calls human nature is to her conception of life itself. The essay appeared in a number of versions between 1923–24, first as ‘Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown’ in a number of periodicals in late 1923. After being presented to the Cambridge Heretics in May 1924, it was extended and republished as ‘Character in Fiction’ in the Criterion in July, then again as ‘Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown’ as a Hogarth Press pamphlet in October (EVW 3: 436-37). In it, Woolf responds to criticism from Arnold Bennett that her generation of authors could not create ‘real’ characters. Woolf uses Bennett’s definition of ‘real’, as in ‘lifelike’ or convincing, to set out her own, which revolves Woolf 203

instead around concepts of deeper truths about humanity. To illustrate this, she conjures up a character, a decidedly ordinary woman named Mrs Brown: ‘Mrs Brown is eternal, Mrs Brown is human nature, Mrs Brown changes only on the surface’. Woolf criticises Bennett and his contemporaries for missing the deeper possibilities and, it would seem, deeper role of literature by focusing only on the social and material dimensions of human existence: ‘They have looked very powerfully, searchingly, and sympathetically out of the window; at factories, at Utopias, even at the decoration and upholstery of the carriage; but never at her, never at life, never at human nature’ (EVW 3: 430). This equation or interweaving of life and human nature indicates that while Woolf acknowledged the importance of social, economic, and industrial factors to character, she sought to look beyond these for a more enduring quality. It suggests also how closely bound up in the human experience is her conception of life. That is, as for Mansfield, for Woolf, life is a dynamic process. Woolf considered fiction that aims at the mimesis of the external world via its reception by consciousness as born of her historical and cultural moment. This comes out in ‘How it Strikes a Contemporary’, first published in 1923 in the Times Literary Supplement, then collected in the first Common Reader in 1925. There, she grapples with the strengths and flaws of modern fiction. She argues that her contemporaries outshine earlier writers in representing physical experience, and ‘above all, the sense of the human being, his depth and the variety of his perceptions, his complexity, his confusion, his self, in short’ (EVW 4: 239). But she finds the work of her contemporaries less satisfying than that of their predecessors, because they are no longer confident about ‘the relations of human beings towards each other and towards the universe’ (EVW 4: 239). Woolf attempts to explain the more difficult characteristics of modernist fiction in terms of authors’ changing attitudes towards knowledge and reality:

The most sincere of them will only tell us what it is that happens to himself. They cannot make a world, because they are not free of other human beings. They cannot tell stories because they do not believe that stories are true. They cannot generalise. They depend on their senses and emotions, whose testimony is trustworthy, rather than on their intellects whose message is obscure. (EVW 4: 240) Woolf 204

Woolf again returns to ‘senses and emotions’, the terms to which she anchors De Quincey’s ‘impassioned’ or poetic prose, and at the same time insists on sincerity, truth and trustworthiness as core values for literature. So the experimental fiction that we now call modernist is, for Woolf, motivated by a combination of subjective expression and an ethic of faithfulness to representing the world as it is. This passage thus points to the parallel avenues of inquiry that I follow in the subsequent analysis of selections from Woolf’s short fiction: her exploration of subjectivity through her varied use of voice, and of the act of storytelling itself. Woolf saw the short story as a particularly apposite vehicle for such explorations. Writing about her daily habit of writing short ‘sketches’ as part of her composition process for ‘The Moths’, eventually to become The Waves, Woolf maintains, ‘I am not trying to tell a story. Yet perhaps it might be done in that way. A mind thinking. They might be islands of light – islands in the stream that I am trying to convey: life itself going on’ (DVW 3: 229, 28 May 1929). Here, Woolf depicts short stories as intermittent glimpses into a consciousness. Also, she again links the subject almost, but not quite, interchangeably with life. Representing the rhythms of consciousness functions as a conduit for the mimesis of ‘life itself’, and the short story is conceived as a moment that illuminates those rhythms.

The worldly rhythms of consciousness Because of Woolf’s sensitivity to the mediating role played by the consciousness in apprehending the world, many of her short stories centre almost exclusively on representing the inner rhythms of subjectivity as they are shaped by outside forces. As shown above, Woolf seems to have conceived of consciousness as a rhythm: a fluid ‘pattern’ created by worldly experience, which may be traced through language, that is, through the voice. Many critics have noted the importance of voices in Woolf’s fiction, and in particular their multiplicity; for example, according to Dominic Head, the ‘juxtaposition, even the fusion, of disparate voices […] is one of Woolf’s major contributions to the development of modern fiction.’12 Christine Reynier describes the complex interactions of voices in Woolf’s fiction as ‘polyphonic’, arguing that in Woolf’s version of the modernist aesthetic ideal of impersonality, ‘the authorial voice

12 Head, Modernist Short Story, 95. Woolf 205

becomes an anonymous or collective voice, “the common voice singing out of doors”, the voice of a multiple self and multiple selves’.13 In this sense, the motivation of Woolf’s depiction of voices as both internally and externally polyphonic can be likened to Mansfield’s impersonation, in that each strives to express a more complex and dynamic notion of the self. This section explores some ways that Woolf’s short fiction shows the world, in the form of objects, environments and other people, to leave rhythmic traces in the mind, to influence and infiltrate the voice. Woolf’s interest in the relation of the subject to their world and to others also necessarily encompasses questions about knowledge, and these recur throughout the analysis that follows. Below, I analyse three short stories that share this interest. In ‘Moments of Being: Slater’s Pins Have No Points’, Woolf traces the rhythm of the focalising character’s thoughts, exploring through voice the permeability of the subject to the external world, especially in relation to other people, and simultaneously undermining rational or intellectual approaches to knowledge. ‘The Evening Party’ is even more fundamentally concerned with voice as modes of linguistic communication and of the boundaries of the self, innovatively intermingling stream of consciousness with polyphonic dialogue. Completing this section, ‘The Mark on the Wall’, like ‘Moments of Being’, investigates epistemological concerns by closely tracing the rhythms of its protagonist’s thoughts in response to outside stimulus, which in this case is a material object, rather than other people. The narrative of ‘Moments of Being: “Slater’s Pins Have No Points”’ (hereafter ‘Moments of Being’) is structured by internal rhythms of thought and feeling, as they respond constantly to the external world of objects and others. The text, which Woolf described to Vita Sackville-West as ‘a nice little story about Sapphism’, was first published in the American magazine Forum in January 1928 (LVW 3: 397, 8? July 1927; CSFVW: 299). The narration is focalised through a single distinct consciousness: that of a young woman named Fanny Wilmot, as she gradually comes to a conscious recognition of the sexual attraction that exists between her and her piano teacher, Miss Julia Craye. ‘Moments of Being’ begins when a flower that had

13 Reynier, Virginia Woolf’s Ethics of the Short Story, 24. Reynier contrasts this to T. S. Eliot’s model of impersonality as propounded in ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’, which she describes the author’s voice as ‘being emptied out and disappearing’. Reynier’s conclusion is shared by John Beer, who argues that Woolf’s concept of impersonality involves ‘transcending personality, while including all its elements, by greater comprehension within a given group.’ Beer, Post-Romantic Consciousnesss, 117. Woolf 206

been pinned to Fanny’s dress falls to the floor, occasioning a search for the pin. Julia surprises Fanny with the titular phrase, ‘Slater’s pins have no points’, leading Fanny to ponder the older woman’s life, and in particular why she has never married (CSFVW: 209). Fanny constructs a fanciful and incorrect idea of her teacher’s life, seemingly naively misunderstanding the dynamic between them until Julia kisses her in the final lines of the story. Repetition is key to Woolf’s representation of Fanny’s thoughts, as she takes up and mentally repeats ideas and certain remembered phrases as she returns again and again to the burning question of why Julia has remained unmarried. The kiss is therefore a ‘twist’ only at the surface of the story; Woolf repeatedly foreshadows this climax through hints embedded in Fanny’s own internal monologue that suggest her intuitive or subconscious awareness of the reality of the situation. The story’s rhythmic structure is geared around mimesis of the emotional state and mental processes of its central character. Fanny’s tone throughout the story can be interpreted as nervous with both apprehension and anticipation, an effect created largely through linguistic rhythm, in particular the repetition of various phrases. While the way that ‘Moments of Being’ is structured in accord with the rhythms of Fanny’s thought and feeling recalls Mansfield’s ‘Miss Brill’ and ‘Daughters of the Late Colonel’, in its repetition of such phrases and Fanny’s anxious cogitation, it also resonates with Lawrence’s idea that ‘when we are thinking emotionally or passionately, […] the mind makes curious swoops and circles’ around a preoccupation, returning to it repeatedly until it is resolved somehow. Lawrence describes this mental movement as ‘a curious spiral rhythm’, which can be mimicked in fiction through linguistic rhythms (IR: 172). The suggestion that Woolf is interested in representing the inner life is far from a new one. For example, Baldwin notes that although the text is six pages long, its external action (a flower falling from Fanny’s dress, her hunt for and finding of the pin that secured it, and the kiss) could only take up two minutes altogether at most, and might easily be described in a single sentence.14 In another example focusing on this story in particular, Masako Nasu argues that the story is concerned with what she terms the ‘internal realism’ of Fanny’s thought processes. Nasu proposes ‘Moments of Being’ as a turning point in

14 Baldwin, Virginia Woolf: A Study of the Short Fiction, 52. Woolf 207

Woolf’s writing career, at which the author shifted from a singular focus on internal realism to consider ‘the universal aspects of the human mind’: its subconscious or unconscious. 15 While each of these observations is correct, they elide Woolf’s attention to the relationship between the subject and the outside world, whether a link between physical action or objects, or response to other people. The repetition of certain phrases throughout the text establishes a rhythmic structure for ‘Moments of Being’. This allows for the representation of Fanny’s heightened emotional state, and also of the tension between her conscious confusion and her subconscious, intuitive understanding of the attraction between herself and Julia. An important example of this repetition is of a comment made by the principal of Fanny’s music college, Miss Kingston, that ‘The Crayes were none of them married’, which appears almost verbatim as a non sequitur in Fanny’s wandering thoughts about Julia three times throughout the story (CSFVW: 209). The first repetition builds Miss Kingston’s remembered comment, along with the search for the pin that has dropped to the floor and Julia’s comment about it, into a confused musing on Julia herself: ‘Perhaps then, Fanny Wilmot thought, looking for the pin, Miss Craye had said that about “Slater’s pins having no points”, at a venture. None of the Crayes had ever married. She knew nothing about pins – nothing whatever’ (CSFVW: 210). There is no logical reason that remaining unmarried would impede Julia’s knowledge of the literal object, but Baldwin’s suggested Freudian reading, in which pins function as phallic symbols, helps to recognise Fanny’s subconscious acknowledgement of Julia’s homosexuality in this passage.16 Syntactic rhythm plays a central part in the story in mimicking thought, indeed its very disconnectedness and incoherence, as well as in communicating feeling even to the point of creating rhythmic sympathy. There is a similar cognitive dynamic at play in the third and final repetition of Miss Kingston’s statement about marriage:

[Julia] had her hands on [the fallen carnation]; she pressed it; but she did not possess it, enjoy it, not altogether.

15 Masako Nasu, ‘Can We Appreciate her “Moments of Being”? - A Stylistic Analysis of Woolf’s Short Fiction’ (paper presented at the Annual Conference of the Poetics and Linguistics Association (PALA), 2010), 1. 16 Baldwin points to the Woolfs’ Hogarth Press having published Freud’s work in England as an indication of Virginia Woolf’s familiarity with such ideas. Baldwin, Virginia Woolf: A Study of the Short Fiction, 54. Woolf 208

None of the Crayes had married, Fanny Wilmot remembered. She had in mind how one evening when the lesson had lasted longer than usual and it was dark, Julia Craye had said, ‘It’s the use of men, surely, to protect us’ smiling at her that same odd smile, as she stood fastening her cloak, which made her, like the flower, conscious to her fingertips of youth and brilliance, but, like the flower too, Fanny suspected, inhibited. (CSFVW: 211)

Fanny’s confused identification with the carnation that Julia is holding, combined with the repetition of the phrase about marriage, again hints at her partial awareness of the attraction between herself and Julia. The last sentence given here is long and grammatically disordered, adding clause after clause until it lands on the final, summary description of Fanny’s emotional state: ‘inhibited’. The sentence itself is also rhythmically inhibited, as it traces the ‘pattern’ of Fanny’s approach and withdrawal from acknowledging the attraction between her and Julia. This kind of linguistic rhythm, evoking the vibrating sensation of nervous confusion and the associative development of thought, extends throughout the story and takes up a number of phrases. For example, Julia’s remark above about ‘the use of men’ is also repeated twice more, and subsequently creates the impetus for two more paragraphs, which both begin with a paraphrased variation of that comment, followed by Fanny’s reflection on what clues it provides about Julia’s unmarried status (CSFVW: 211). The entire story is structured around Fanny’s preoccupation with gaining understanding of the other, as well as her confused feelings surrounding the attraction between them. Fanny’s adoption and repetition of phrases uttered by others, and especially those that become embedded in free indirect discourse, also presents a model of the individual consciousness as constantly permeable to external sources. This is apparent in the infiltration of Fanny’s internal monologue by Miss Kingston’s voice:

Miss Craye was left badly off, Miss Kingston was afraid, at her brother’s death. Oh, they used to have such lovely things, when they lived at Salisbury and her brother Julius was, of course, a very well-known man: a famous archaeologist. It was a great privilege to stay with them, Miss Kingston said (‘My family had always known them – they were regular Salisbury people,’ Miss Kingston said). (CSFVW: 209) Woolf 209

The vocal presence of Miss Kingston in this passage is signalled with the attribution ‘Miss Kingston said’, but its repetition in relation to phrases both within and outside quotation indicates the pervasiveness of her infusion into Fanny’s voice. Embedded in the free indirect discourse that conveys Fanny’s thoughts are her remembrance, absorption and reflection of her Principal’s voice, effected by the transferral of vernacular and conversational phrasing such as Miss Kingston being ‘afraid’ that Miss Craye was left badly off, or that ‘of course’ Julius was well known, as well as the inclusion of vocal exclamations like ‘oh’. In passages such as this one, the ‘polyphonic voice’ undermines the singularity of Fanny’s subjectivity, emphasising instead a fluidity between inner and outer worlds. The connection between subject and world is further strengthened in ‘Moments of Being’ by a rhythmic synchrony of physical and mental action. Fanny’s hunt for the fallen pin is repeatedly tied to her reflections on the character and life of her piano teacher, so that the physical search merges with the imaginative quest for the key to understanding the other: ‘Fanny Wilmot thought, looking for the pin’; ‘thought Fanny Wilmot, as she looked for the pin’ (CSFVW: 210); ‘Fanny Wilmot reflected. (Where had that pin fallen?)’ (CSFVW: 212). In the final page of the story, Fanny’s search for the ‘key’ to understanding Julia is apparently over: ‘Fanny Wilmot saw the pin on the carpet; she picked it up. She looked at Miss Craye. Was Miss Craye so lonely? No, Miss Craye was steadily, blissfully, if only for a moment, a happy woman’ (CSFVW: 214). The material world is thereby woven into the mental rhythms of Fanny’s spiralling pursuit of understanding. Yet despite Fanny’s visual recognition here of what may be the ‘moment of being’ of the story’s title, her investment in the intellectual effort of explaining the other and making sense of the dynamic between them is shown to continue to obstruct her understanding of the situation. The discrepancy between Fanny’s incessant (and misguided) imagining of Julia’s past and the increasingly obvious romantic interest on Julia’s side results in a growing ironic tension in the story. There are many instances prior to the final twist that suggest Fanny’s intuitive anticipation or awareness of the sexual tension between her and Julia, such as her imaginatively ascribing to Julius Craye, Julia’s unknown dead brother (or her masculine counterpart), ‘the look his sister often had, that lingering, desiring look’, which Fanny weakly attributes to abstract aesthetic pleasure Woolf 210

(CSFVW: 210). This imputation is especially suspect in light of another remembered moment when ‘Fanny positively blushed under the admiration in her [Julia’s] eyes’ (CSFVW: 211). The paragraph following Fanny’s observation of Julia’s bliss, above, shows her ongoing adherence to her rationalising approach to understanding the situation between them. The bulk of this paragraph is made up of a single long sentence, consisting of an extended list of images that Fanny creates to stand for Julia’s life and character, which together depict a dutiful, solitary and frugal woman, an embodiment of nunlike chastity. The paragraph is studded with the repetition of the verb ‘saw’, at first used to indicate imaginative understanding. However, this meaning is abruptly undermined in the shift from this paragraph to the next, in which the verb’s semantic function also shifts, from metaphorical to literal:

She saw Julia – She saw Julia open her arms; saw her blaze; saw her kindle. Out of the night she burnt like a dead white star. Julia kissed her. Julia possessed her. (CSFVW: 214)

This denouement can be seen as a fictional illustration of Woolf’s earlier claim that the ‘testimony’ of the ‘senses and emotions’ is more trustworthy than the ‘obscure’ messages from the intellect, as Fanny’s immediate experience of the real woman in front of her, and her own nervous excitement in Julia’s admiration of her, are shown to be truer of the situation than her reasonings and imagined narratives (EVW 4: 240). ‘Moments of Being’ interrogates the supposed singularity of subjectivity in two ways. It presents, through linguistic rhythms, the voice of an individual consciousness that is inflected with the voices of others. Additionally, this voice is internally multiple, capable of simultaneous contradictions in understanding and knowledge. In this way, Woolf presents a polyrhythmic model of consciousness or subjectivity, which may be compared to the psychoanalytic notion of repression, where what is ‘repressed’ can be seen as ever-present in rhythm. ‘The Evening Party’ once again presents a model of the subject as permeable and interrelated with others, by more radically ‘recording’ the rhythmic effects of the world on consciousness. Susan Dick estimates that ‘The Evening Party’ was written around the same time as the stories included in the Monday or Tuesday collection of 1921, noting possible references to the story in a 1918 letter from Woolf to her sister Woolf 211

Vanessa Bell, and in a note she made in 1925 (CSFVW: 291-92). However, ‘The Evening Party’ remained unpublished until Dick’s 1985 collection of Woolf’s shorter fiction. Recalling Woolf’s comment in her diary that ‘people have any number of states of consciousness: & I should like to investigate the party consciousness’ (DVW 3: 12, 27 April 1925), the story deals with the sensual, emotional and interpersonal experiences of attending a social gathering. It is at the same time a self-conscious and playful exploration of the boundary between poetry and prose – indeed, the intermingling of these categories seems almost to parallel the story’s representation of the fluid boundary between self and other. It begins with a stream of consciousness narration of the journey to the house at which the party is being held. Shortly after the speaking subject has entered the party, the mode of writing shifts, and the rest of the evening party is evoked only through conversation: alternating voices, like a dramatic script without stage direction or indication as to who speaks. The text is demarcated as speech with quotation marks, but is entirely lacking narratorial introductions such as ‘she said’. However, these two distinct sections of the text intermingle in other ways: in the stream of consciousness preamble to the party, some sentences appear to address a companion and thus to mimic speech, while scenic description or even narratorial asides also creep into what is punctuated as speech. The story’s experimentation with voice tangles both inner and outer categories of voice (thought and speech) but also destabilises narrative conventions for representing these categories. Through this experimentation with text and the role of the narrator, ‘The Evening Party’ also self-consciously explores the connections between thought, speech and writing. The opening paragraphs of the story immediately establish its concern with the fluid and transient experience of the subject and its permeable relation to the world in terms of the senses and emotions. These two paragraphs use indirect interior monologue, which as Anna Snaith observes, play to Woolf’s concern with ‘the movement from public to private – the relationship between inner and outer.’17 This technique evokes the subtle interrelation of the subject’s inner and outer worlds, as represented by thought and conversation, through a mixture of markedly ‘poetic’

17 Anna Snaith, ‘Virginia Woolf’s Narrative Strategies: Negotiating between public and private voices,’ Journal of Modern Literature 20, no. 2 (1996): 135. Emphasis original. Woolf 212

diction, impressionistic scene description, and implied dialogue: ‘So on the bark of the apple tree the moths quiver drawing sugar through the long black thread of the proboscis. Where are we? Which house can be the house of the party?’ (CSFVW: 90) In this example, and throughout the two paragraphs, selective and occasionally fanciful description of the world through which the subject is passing is interrupted by a practical thought, or perhaps a question or comment voiced out loud though unannounced. As in ‘Moments of Being’, linguistic and grammatical rhythms evoke the various emotions associated with approaching the party, as well as limning the subject’s physical movement. For example, the narrator’s simultaneous sensuous enjoyment of the evening, and their excitement and slight apprehension about the social occasion appears in their request, twice-voiced, that their companion hold back before continuing to the party. First, they ask ‘Ah, but let us wait a little!’ and a little later in their journey, ‘Ah, – round the corner, in the middle, there where the door stands open – wait a moment. Let us watch the people’ (CSFVW: 90). As Bryony Randall argues, these aspects of the ‘party consciousness’ – pleasure in watching other people, and the mixture of excitement and nervousness a party can inspire – are the story’s central mimetic objects. 18 In the second instance, the middle clause rhythmically evokes the stages of their physical progress through its incrementally rising cadence, so that the dashes on either side suggest both physical and mental hesitation at the threshold. More subtly, the rhythms of the story’s first paragraph in particular develop the sense of a link between natural or worldly rhythms and literary ones, as well as those of thought. Hence, a simile comparing the rise and fall of a cloak lifted by the wind to the ebb and flow of the sea metaphorically mirrors the cadence of the prose, in which punctuation enjoins the reader to pause:

letting it sink and droop as the sea now swells and brims over the rocks and again withdraws. – The street is almost empty; the blinds are drawn in the windows; the yellow and red panes of the ocean liners cast for a moment a spot upon the swimming blue. Sweet is the night air. (CSFVW: 90)

18 Bryony Randall, ‘Virginia Woolf’s Idea of a Party,’ in The Modernist Party, ed. Kate McLoughlin (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013), 102. Woolf 213

As well as forging overt links to poetic conventions and aims of creating beauty, the rhythm of this passage aims to evoke worldly rhythms. Here, the unconventionally placed dash at the beginning of the sentence, together with the unusual use of semicolons, clearly regulates the cadence of the passage rather than its semiotic logic, so that the rhythmic image of the sea is syntactically matched by clauses that build in length before again withdrawing to the short last sentence given above. Moreover, this grammatically prescribed cadence shares a similar syntactic structure and hence internal rhythm with the second sentence of the paragraph, which begins, ‘– The moon is up; the sky open; and there, rising […]’ (CSFVW: 90). These rhythmic echoes develop an experience of the beauty of the evening for the reader. Especially given Woolf’s roughly contemporaneous essays celebrating the mimetic potential of the integration of prose and poetry, these heightened rhythms must also be seen as motivated by not only aesthetic goals but also the aim of evoking something of the human experience. The presentation of worldly experience as rhythmic is even more fundamental to the second, longer section of the story: the party is essentially comprised of a series of conversations, as the narrating subject meets and talks with a number of different people. The section signals its interest in voice, speech, and conversation as communication between individuals with the first line of dialogue: ‘Come into the corner and let us talk’ (CSFVW: 91). At the same time as announcing a shift in the mode of discourse, this phrase maintains rhythmic continuity with the previous, stream of consciousness narration: with its direct second-person address and especially the words ‘let us’, it echoes speakerly sentences from the first part of the story, though these are not demarcated as speech by conventional punctuation. The characters are more voice than anything else: only three are named, and this does not include the central subject; none of them is described; and any information about them as people and in relation to each other must be gleaned from what is said in conversation. The people encountered are therefore not most important as characters per se, but function rather as ‘the atoms [that] fall upon the mind’ (EVW 4: 161): components in an overall rhythm of voices, which perhaps together form the ‘party consciousness’. More simply, the dialogue of which the section is wholly composed may be seen as an alternating rhythm, as interlocutors take turns to speak. That the Woolf 214

rhythm of dialogue is uninterrupted by a narrator’s voice introducing speakers or attributing speech sets it up as a textual transcription, or written recording, of the patterns of conversation as experienced by the receiving subject. Thus the section that deals with the party portrays the evening as being defined by acoustic rhythm, using rhythm of its own to mimic this experience. The story’s dual purpose of undermining the boundary between prose and poetry and of evoking the auditory experience of the party resurfaces in the conversations traced in the second section. While conversation is presented in general as an alternating rhythm, some exchanges are so rhythmically heightened that they are pressed towards the travestying of poetic language. In one example, a Mr Nevill struggles to recall what he has read that was written by the central subject, asking ‘You write stories? It’s not poetry that you write?’ (CSFVW: 94), in a mischievous reflection on the text’s own blurring of the genres. Their ensuing conversation about literature veers into the incantatory, until one speaker is brought to a mock-religious confession of her feelings for unfashionable writers:

‘Ah, if you feel that, let us talk of the dead. Lamb, Sophocles, de Quincey, Sir Thomas Browne.’ ‘Sir Walter Scott, Milton, Marlowe.’ ‘Pater, Tennyson.’ ‘Now, now, now.’ ‘Tennyson, Pater.’ ‘Lock the door; draw the curtains so that I see only your eyes. I fall on my knees. I cover my face with my hands. I adore Pater. I admire Tennyson.’ (CSFVW: 94)

This instance of elliptical linguistic repetition fuses everyday speech with the heightened status of poetry, while at the same time it satirically underlines the near- religious idolisation sometimes attached to canonical authors. On the other hand, the interlocutors’ speech is reduced to key words or phrases, underlining the acoustic essence of verbal communication, so it can also be seen to rhythmically mimic both the sound of the conversation as it might be overheard at a crowded, noisy party, or to capture the conceptual rhythm, the distilled essence of the discussion in a few salient words. Woolf 215

As the previous quotation suggests, ‘The Evening Party’ also explores questions of literariness. In addition to undermining the distinction between thought and speech, Woolf’s narrative innovations intermingle spoken and written forms of language, calling attention to the story’s own status as text. The most startling instance of this is found in the last page of the story, in which the speaker (assumed to be the same subject who narrated the opening section) slips into a more narrative or stream of consciousness mode. They explicitly refer to the act of writing, even as the text remains formatted as dialogue:

‘O please (Yes, yes, I wrote, I’m coming) Please, please – Damn you, Helen, interrupting! There she goes, never again – pushing through the people, pinning on her shawl, slowly descending the steps: gone! The past! the past! – ’ ‘Ah, but listen. […]’ (CSFVW: 95)

While the ambiguity of the parenthetical aside is unresolvable, its unique reference to writing as well as its use of the simple past tense typically adopted in simple storytelling modes reflexively confuses speech with writing, while the description of the departing woman’s progress reads as narration rather than dialogue. In this way, Woolf directly undermines the story’s claim to or appearance of transparent mimesis of the scene of the party. As this reading makes clear, this unusual story crystallises the inextricable relations between Woolf’s interests in the permeable and rhythmic nature of consciousness, the possibilities of blending poetry and prose, and the relation between the world and the work of art. In ‘The Mark on the Wall’, Woolf’s exploration of the rhythms of consciousness focuses on perception and epistemology. Woolf’s first published short story, it has attracted a large portion of the relatively small amount of critical attention that Woolf’s shorter fiction receives. Perhaps this is to do with the sense, expressed by Helen Simpson in her 2003 introduction to the Vintage edition of the Complete Shorter Fiction, that the story ‘holds, glancingly, everything which fascinated [Woolf]’, noting first how it ‘follows in a few pages the fluid associative movement of the mind’ (CSFVW: vii). ‘The Mark on the Wall’ appeared along with Leonard Woolf’s ‘Three Jews’ in Two Stories, the first publication of the Woolfs’ Hogarth Press, in July 1917. It was then republished in a slightly revised form in a standalone edition in 1919, and Woolf 216

included in Monday or Tuesday in 1921 (CSFVW: 290). Like ‘Moments of Being’ and ‘The Evening Party’, ‘The Mark on the Wall’ revolves largely around mimicking the effects of the external, or material world upon the mind. As in those stories, in this earlier work rhythm links world, mind and text. Often described as a hybrid of the essay and the short story, ‘The Mark on the Wall’ investigates storytelling as both a product of the rhythms of thought and an epistemological tool. The text is similar to ‘Moments of Being’ in that it is principally concerned with tracing the rhythms of ‘an ordinary mind on an ordinary day’ in response to its environment (EVW 4: 160). Beginning in past tense and in an anecdotal tone, it is centred on a superficially banal experience: ‘Perhaps it was the middle of January in the present year that I first looked up and saw the mark on the wall.’ For the entirety of the story, the mental rhythm of the unnamed first-person narrator revolves around the question of the identity of this mark, ‘a small round mark, black upon the white wall, about six or seven inches above the mantelpiece’ (CSFVW: 77). After the first paragraph, the remainder of the story is told in the present tense, the contrast indicating the piece’s deliberately constructed illusion of the immediacy of thought. This is a story that self-reflexively attempts to mimic inner life. All told, the narrator returns to the question of the mark six times throughout the story, interrupted by a series of associative digressions. This establishes a rhythm that again recalls Lawrence’s idea of the ‘curious spiral rhythm’ of the mind as it repeatedly approaches a preoccupation until the problem is somehow resolved (IR: 172). In ‘The Mark on the Wall’, this occurs when a second character enters and identifies the mark as a small snail. This alternation between digression and speculation about the mark is one broadly structural way that the story mimics the rhythms of thought. ‘The Mark on the Wall’ is also a celebration of this inner life, depicting the narrator amusing themselves with their own thoughts during an idle moment. Although it shares that ‘curious spiral rhythm’ of cognition with ‘Moments of Being’, the thoughts of this narrator are spurred by what seems to be an object rather than by other people, thus exploring another way in which the world – including its nonhuman aspects – shapes subjectivity. Therefore, this story pursues what Woolf later referred to as ‘all that side of the mind which is exposed in solitude […] its thoughts, its rhapsodies, its dreams’ (EVW 4: 362). In that essay, Woolf argues that Woolf 217

poetic prose – largely defined by rhythm – is necessary to capture this dimension of human experience, which she connects to the emotional and sensual. Hence, in ‘The Mark on the Wall’, heightened syntactic rhythms are used to evoke the narrator’s fluctuations in attitude and emotion. This example particularly highlights how these rhythms evoke both ideas and the thinker’s emotional response to them:

Why, if one wants to compare life to anything, one must liken it to being blown through the Tube at fifty miles an hour – landing at the other end without a single hairpin in one’s hair! Shot out at the feet of God entirely naked! Tumbling head over heels in the asphodel meadows like brown paper parcels pitched down a shoot in the post office! (CSFVW: 78)

Here, the repeated exclamatory punctuation establishes a disjointed, frantically emphatic pace that expresses both the narrator’s perception of life itself as bewilderingly fast and rather undignified, and also her agitated feelings about that notion. The separation of this passage into a series of ungrammatical fragments develops a cumulating urgency, lending the effect of unmediated representation of spontaneous associative thinking. However, this is belied by the sentence that follows shortly after, in which the narrator comments on their own use of language to evoke the speed and rhythmic character of life: ‘Yes, that seems to express the rapidity of life, the perpetual waste and repair; all so casual, all so haphazard.…’ This passage thus highlights two more key features of the story, its oft-noted philosophical concerns, and its engagement with its own storyness. The story’s epistemological interests are well noted. Holly Henry argues that in this story, as well as in ‘Solid Objects’ and ‘Kew Gardens’, Woolf explores the questions that most interested her friend, the philosopher and mathematician Bertrand Russell and his teacher and collaborator, Alfred North Whitehead: that is, ‘what can be known of the material world.’19 In a similar vein, Sim observes that ‘Woolf often presents facts as an obstacle to the subject’s awareness and knowledge of things’.20 Partly because of these overt philosophical concerns, discussions of ‘The Mark on the Wall’ often consider its relation to the essay form. Henry, for example, describes it as ‘neither simply short story nor only polemical essay’, while Baldwin suggests that ‘The Mark on the Wall’ diverges from the essay in its rejection of

19 Henry, Woolf and the Discourse of Science, 76. 20 Sim, Patterns of Ordinary Experience, 36. Woolf 218

‘logical’ progression. He contends that instead, its movement is ‘imaginative; the links between parts are imagistic and thematic’, and that through this structure, the story re-enacts or creates for the reader the experience it describes; in other words, he argues, as I do, that the story is mimetic.21 Indeed, given the rhythmic character of this structure as explicated in the paragraphs above, Baldwin’s idea that the experience is actually recreated for the reader also recalls Kirsty Martin’s argument about rhythm’s capacity to create a sympathetic, or mimetic response in the receiver. In light of common descriptions of the story as essayistic or polemical, the sympathetic possibilities of rhythm could here be employed rhetorically, to guide the reader into ‘thinking with’ the narrator – much as Lawrence’s own actual essays were found to do in the second chapter of the present study. ‘The Mark on the Wall’, though somewhat ironically, positions storytelling as a way of investigating these philosophical questions, and this in combination with its concern to rhythmically mimic the passage of thought suggests that storytelling itself is intrinsic to such thought. Although the piece is not concerned with the kinds of events expected in a conventionally-plotted story, Baldwin also points out that its structure is in some ways traditional: it consists of a ‘dramatic movement rising to a climax and rapid denouement as the object is finally identified’.22 This dramatic movement is largely constructed from the series of digressions that make up the bulk of the story, the tracing of which may be seen as what Woolf called a record of ‘the atoms as they fall upon the mind in the order in which they fall’. As a formal feature common to storytelling and the essay as well as oratory, the digression highlights the ways that these genres arise from and relate to the associative passage of thought. The digressions taken in the story borrow from a variety of narrative forms. These include what the narrator calls a ‘historical fiction’, an image of Shakespeare sitting and thinking in an armchair on a summer evening, and allegory, in the conjuring up of a retired Colonel with an obsession over whether the barrows on the South Downs of England are the remains of tombs or camps. One of the story’s more direct engagements with epistemological questions, this allegory is used to illustrate the

21 Henry, Woolf and the Discourse of Science, 78; Baldwin, Virginia Woolf: A Study of the Short Fiction, 14. Similarly, Susan Dick describes the story as a fictional reverie, characterised by ‘shifts of perspective and lyrical prose’, which she likens to De Quincey’s autobiographical essays (CSFVW: 1). 22 Baldwin, Virginia Woolf: A Study of the Short Fiction, 14. Woolf 219

unstable relationship between ‘facts’ and knowledge – as the narrator puts it, ‘nothing is proved, nothing is known’ (CSFVW: 79, 80-81). This allegory in particular ironises telling stories as a way of knowing the world, mocking the retired Colonel making up stories to explain the barrows, and indeed the narrator also making up a story about a ridiculous Colonel in response to a mental association prompted by considering the shape of the mark on the wall. Finally ‘The Mark on the Wall’ itself is self-ironised, as a story that undertakes an ambivalent investigation of storytelling as epistemology.

The rhythms of storytelling Like many of her contemporaries, including Mansfield, Woolf famously eschewed or complicated traditional story rhythms: beginnings, middles and ends, climaxes and denouements, plots and events – all of these are largely absent from or transformed in her fiction. Instead, Woolf insists that the role of the novelist is simply to convey life itself. Central to Woolf’s idea of life is her sense that it is, unlike the neat organisation of many tales, ‘not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged’, that it is instead chaotic, complex and mysterious (EVW 4: 160). Consequently, her short stories are organised by different kinds of rhythms, which imitate those in the world in various ways, including, as evident from the analysis above, the rhythms of characters’ consciousness. Yet her short fiction also insistently presents characters who tell stories to themselves or others, who make up scenes in order to understand something about their world, as Fanny Wilmot does in ‘Moments of Being’ in her attempt to interpret her piano teacher, and as does the unnamed narrator of ‘The Mark on the Wall’ in trying to discover the identity of that eponymous mark. Often, these storytellers are shown to be off-track in their imaginings; in the latter especially, this kind of search for knowledge is connected to reductive attempts to control the world through facts and simple explanations. However, the frequency of its appearance in stories such as these, which so closely trace the rhythms of consciousness, indicates that perhaps the urge to tell stories is itself to be considered intrinsic to those rhythms. Through readings of ‘Kew Gardens’, ‘In the Orchard’ and ‘The Searchlight’, this final section further investigates the ways that Woolf abandons, alters and embraces storytelling in her short fiction. Perhaps more than any other of her fictional works, ‘Kew Gardens’ may be seen as an illustration of Woolf’s vision of ‘life itself’ as a unifying aesthetic phenomenon, Woolf 220

a pattern that is hidden behind everyday appearances. This reading thus mainly accords with Naremore’s theory that Woolf saw ‘the aesthetic act […] as a means of apprehending an ever-present order which is concealed from us by our everyday lives.’23 One of her best known short stories – Baldwin names it as her ‘first great work of fiction’ – ‘Kew Gardens’ was first published by Hogarth Press in May 1919, illustrated with woodcuts by her sister Vanessa Bell (CSFVW: 291).24 The text does not tell a story in the traditional sense; instead, it presents a representative sample of the rhythms of life on a summer’s day in the botanical gardens in London, composed of the plants and animals that live in a particular flower-bed, and brief snatches of the conversation of four pairs of human characters as they pass it. Woolf’s idea ‘that the whole world is a work of art’ or a ‘vast pulsation’ is evoked through the story’s rhythmic structural and linguistic forms that are used to evoke a polyrhythmia of human voices, and a broader interweaving of human and natural rhythms (MOB: 72; EVW 1: 31). In its overt employment of textual rhythms to evoke a rhythmic vision of an aesthetically unified world, ‘Kew Gardens’ investigates a tension between mimetic and formalist aesthetics. The thematic fabric of ‘Kew Gardens’, its evocation of Woolf’s idea of the hidden pattern, is woven in large part from the series of distinctive voices that pass near the flower-bed. As Lorraine Sim observes, pointing to the story’s inclusion of the thoughts and dialogue of each of the four pairs of characters that pass the garden bed, the polyvocality of ‘Kew Gardens’ is one of its salient features. 25 This vocal polyrhythmia illustrates the enormous differences in human experiences of the world, even between those who live in the same city and point in history. The four pairs of characters are carefully balanced in terms of gender, age, class and relationship, with two heterosexual couples and two pairs of same-sex companions. The first characters we meet are a married couple, accompanied by their children, who are thinking about and discussing the past experiences that led them to this moment in their lives. Mirroring the first couple, the last characters to pass the

23 Naremore, The World without a Self, 74. 24 Baldwin, Virginia Woolf: A Study of the Short Fiction, 18. 25 Sim argues that the story should be considered an exploration of ‘epistemological perspectivism [that] illustrates the many ways in which ordinary activity can be experienced and familiar objects seen, thereby questioning their status as ordinary and known.’ Sim, Patterns of Ordinary Experience, 57. Woolf 221

flower-bed are two young people at the beginning of their courtship, sharing a sense of the fundamental inability of language to express the truth of their feelings. This last couple signifies the unknown future as they exit the story and are ‘dissolved in the green-blue atmosphere’, their inevitable progress through time encapsulated in the young man’s direction of his lover’s path: ‘but he bore her on’ (CSFVW: 89). Woolf’s succession of character voices forms an alternating rhythm that points indefinitely into both past and future, making these eight characters representative of humanity as a whole. This is achieved through the evocation of each pair of characters through distinctive vocal and dialogic rhythms, which as a group forms the story’s artistic polyrhythmia of voices. For example, the rhythm of the dialogue between the second pair, two men, is lopsided or arrhythmic (following Lefebvre’s definition of this term as denoting discord and pathology): the older of the two delivers a rambling, fantastic and incoherent monologue, while his stoic younger companion remains almost completely silent. Even more strikingly, the conversation of the pair of ‘elderly women of the lower middle class’ who follow the men is introduced as a rhythmic collaboration:

After they had scrutinised the old man’s back in silence for a moment and given each other a queer, sly look, they went on energetically piecing together their very complicated dialogue: ‘Nell, Bert, Lot, Cess, Phil, Pa, he says, I says, she says, I says, I says, I says –’ ‘My Bert, Sis, Bill, Grandad, the old man, sugar, Sugar, flour, kippers, greens Sugar, sugar, sugar.’ (CSFVW: 87)

The description of the women’s conversation as something that they cooperatively ‘piece together’ identifies it as a collaborative creative work; as Sim observes, this exchange’s ‘rhythmic and repetitive qualities recall a domestic ditty, chant or song.’26 The overtly selective narration of the women’s conversation adumbrates their everyday routines and their positions in social networks ranging in scale from family groups to class structures, but more basically, it foregrounds their linguistic patterns.

26 Sim, Patterns of Ordinary Experience, 56, 57. Woolf 222

Indeed, as in the discussion of canonical authors in ‘The Evening Party’, the second speaker’s words are divided into lines resembling verse, further emphasising the rhythmic aspects of ordinary speech. Here, Woolf again puts vernacular speech into direct conversation with poetic convention, thus attaching to the women’s gossipy dialogue the aesthetic significance of a work of art, a model which may also describe the approach to vocal rhythms in the story as a whole, recalling Woolf’s own expression in her later memoir, that in her idea of the world as art work, ‘we are the words; we are the music; we are the thing itself’ (MOB: 72). Therefore, what is most important about the characters’ voices to the story overall is the rhythm established by the repetition and variation between them, more than any specificities about the lives or personalities of the individual characters who own them. Indeed, at the end of the story, the narrator emphasises the acoustic and emotional qualities of those voices: ‘Voices, yes, voices, wordless voices, breaking the silence suddenly with such depth of contentment, such passion of desire, or, in the voices of children, such freshness of surprise; breaking the silence?’ In the story’s final image, these voices are reframed as individually insignificant within the city, another microcosm of the world, imagined principally as a place of unceasing and interrelated rhythms of mechanical movement and sound:

But there was no silence; all the time the motor omnibuses were turning their wheels and changing their gear; like a vast nest of Chinese boxes all of wrought steel turning ceaselessly one within another the city murmured; on the top of which the voices cried aloud and the petals of myriads of flowers flashed their colours into the air. (CSFVW: 89)

This summative image of the modern world is one of a complex intermingling of rhythms, natural, human and mechanical. This vision is not confined to the final passage of the story, however. The rhythms of humanity are presented as interwoven with those of the natural world throughout the story, via an intermittent return to the flora and fauna of the flower-bed. The narration in ‘Kew Gardens’ turns repeatedly from the speaking human characters as they walk through the garden to describe the silent and deliberate progress of a snail as it negotiates the obstacles of dead leaves, loose earth and other insects in its path. While the story’s repeated focus on the snail’s-eye-view Woolf 223

of the world does present yet another, more radical perspective on the world, it also adds another rhythmic dimension to the story’s polyrhythmia. The narrator’s minute description of not just the snail’s environment but also its ponderous movement is repeatedly contrasted to the pace of human life, for example in the sentence immediately before the two men appear: ‘Before he had decided whether to circumvent the arched tent of a dead leaf or to breast it there came past the bed the feet of other human beings’ (CSFVW: 86). This dimension of the story bears comparison to Mansfield’s use of the decisively inhuman natural rhythms of the aloe plant and the ocean in ‘Prelude’ and ‘At the Bay’ respectively (as discussed in Chapter 3). The snail’s personal rhythm is, like the aloe and the ocean, on a completely different scale to that of humans, as it both moves at ‘a snail’s pace’, and its life cycle is much shorter than ours. While the ratio of comparison is different, since like Mansfield’s natural rhythms, Woolf’s comparison of human daily life to that of the snail has a similar effect of diminishing human significance in the universe. The narrative’s constant return to the snail and the flower bed also serves to point up the artificiality of the story, which counterintuitively can be interpreted as the mimesis of Woolf’s vision of deeper reality. Dominic Head points out that ‘Kew Gardens’ contains ‘four passages of natural description to balance the appearance of the four couples, and the human (H) and natural (N) elements are symmetrically arranged (N-H-N-H-H-N-H-N).’ Put another way, the overall structure of the story can be understood as an alternating rhythm that represents the rhythmic relation of humanity and nature, as in the example of the snail. For Head, this precisely organised structure is the centre of the story’s ‘symbolic presentation of humanity as a single entity, and as an entity which is merged with the natural environment.’27 In this way, ‘Kew Gardens’ may be seen as an attempt to mimetically express Woolf’s idea of the world. This is enhanced by the way that the careful rhythmic construction of the story highlights its own artificiality, since Woolf’s vision of the world is as an aesthetically ordered whole, a ‘work of art’ or a ‘vast pulsation’. Michael Whitworth observes that in Woolf’s later novel The Waves (1931), characters’ ‘words are waves that “fall and rise” to a rhythm: ideally their rhythm is sympathetic to the world they describe, but

27 Head, Modernist Short Story, 99. Woolf 224

there is a constant danger that they will become “artificial” and “insincere”’.28 This tension between mimetic and formalist rhythm is already present in ‘Kew Gardens’. In some respects, the deliberate balance of the rhythms in the short story can be described as self-consciously isorhythmic, a term which Lefebvre links only to artistically created rhythms, and describes as mutually exclusive with organic eurhythmia such as that which exists in the body: ‘Under the direction of the conductor’s baton (his magic wand), a rhythm falls into place and extends over all the performers, however many there may be. It is therefore a remarkable isorhythmia.’29 In ‘Kew Gardens’, Woolf takes on the role of the conductor in her construction of the whole as an unmistakably deliberately unified rhythm. Her approach differs in this regard from Mansfield’s in ‘Prelude’ and ‘At the Bay’, which are similarly structured around an interrelation of the rhythms of human life and those of non-human nature, but lack the evident meticulous arrangement of Woolf’s story. Yet in Woolf’s case, given her expression of an idea of the world or life as being a collaborative ‘work of art’, this tendency towards formalism can in fact be seen as an effort to reveal the ‘real thing behind appearances’: her aesthetic, or isorhythmic, reality (MOB: 72). The story’s much-noted affinity with poetry can also be seen to contribute to the mimesis of Woolf’s vision of the world as artistic whole, not just in terms of imagery, but also its heightened linguistic rhythms. Baldwin is among those critics who stress the poetic qualities of ‘Kew Gardens’, arguing that it takes the short story form ‘to the edge of lyric poetry’, and likening much of Woolf’s imagery, such as the ‘mechanical bird’ and the ‘shattered marble column’ of butterflies (CSFVW: 89), to that of the metaphysical poets of the seventeenth century.30 For Baldwin, this poetic quality has a unifying effect: he calls the text a ‘prose poem of audacious images and flights of fancy that unite in a grand harmony’,31 and argues that Woolf’s employment of elaborate conceits reflects her desire to make a whole of the fragmented world. Woolf’s heightened linguistic rhythms also fulfil a unifying and mimetic function in

28 Michael Whitworth, Virginia Woolf, Authors in Context (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 181. 29 Lefebvre, Rhythmanalysis, 68. 30 Baldwin, Virginia Woolf: A Study of the Short Fiction, 15, 16. This comparison of course aligns ‘Kew Gardens’ with the critical interests of T. S. Eliot, particularly his stress upon the desirability of uniting the intellectual and the emotional in poetry, which does resonate with Woolf’s interest in the possibilities of poetic prose. 31 Baldwin, Virginia Woolf: A Study of the Short Fiction, 18. Woolf 225

their invocation of the pervasiveness and affinities between rhythms. This is evident in the very first sentence of the story:

From the oval-shaped flower-bed there rose perhaps a hundred stalks spreading into heart-shaped or tongue-shaped leaves half way up and unfurling at the tip red or blue or yellow petals marked with spots of colour raised upon the surface; and from the red, blue or yellow gloom of the throat emerged a straight bar, rough with gold dust and slightly clubbed at the end. (CSFVW: 84)

This long sentence uses syntactic rhythms to evoke the energy of life in the rhythms of growth in the flowers of the garden. The sentence as a whole uses syntactic repetition to express the sense of rhythmic connection between parts of the flower- bed. It is composed of a parallelism in which both clauses begin with the same form of syntactic inversion, where the subject and object have switched places. This inversion allows not only for the seamless addition of extended description of the subject, its shapes and colours, but also for the rhythmic evocation of an upward movement in the image described (the stalks rising from the flower-bed, and the bar emerging from the flowers’ throats). This is especially notable in the first clause, in which the use of the present participle forms of the verbs helps to evoke the continuous, dynamic growth in the plants. In addition, the unbroken rhythm created by the lack of punctuation within this clause further accentuates the coherence both of the individual plants, and of the garden bed as a whole, recalling Woolf’s anecdote about her childhood realisation ‘that the flower itself was a part of the earth’ (MOB: 71). Thus, in ‘Kew Gardens’, Woolf’s poetic devices may be seen as not only metaphysically unifying but mimetic. ‘In the Orchard’ belongs, with ‘Monday or Tuesday’ and ‘Blue and Green’, to the most formally experimental category of Woolf’s short fiction. Rather than telling a story in the usual sense, it repeatedly describes a single, brief everyday scene in which a character, Miranda, who has fallen asleep while reading in an orchard, stirs and makes a banal exclamation. It was first published in April 1923 in Eliot’s Criterion and was reprinted later the same year in New York-based little magazine, Broom (CSFVW: 295). Even more than ‘Kew Gardens’, it breaks with conventional narrative rhythm, replacing it with a broadly tripartite rhythm structure of increasing Woolf 226

concision and abstraction, in which each part also has its own distinctive cadence as well as a contrasting narrative mode. Moreover, ‘In the Orchard’ not only presents a vision of the world as polyrhythmic, but through this doubly rhythmic structure, Woolf’s typical interest in perspectivism and epistemology can be seen. This story thereby particularly highlights the question of whether rhythm is properly a phenomenon to be discovered or an interpretation of the world to be created by the perceiver. The structure of ‘In the Orchard’ breaks with traditional story rhythms; although Woolf herself referred to the piece as a ‘story’ (CSFVW: 295), its focus is on mimesis – evoking life itself by radical avoidance of the ‘appalling narrative business of the realist’ (DVW 3: 209). Broadly, the story is instead organised around the repeated description of a scene, which lends ‘In the Orchard’ to a rhythmic reading, as does its notable focus on the everyday. Each of the three sections begins with the phrase ‘Miranda slept in the orchard’ and ends with her exclaiming, ‘“Oh, I shall be late for tea!”’, along with several other less precise repetitions (CSFVW: 143-45). This amounts to an attempt ‘to give the moment whole’; rather than narrating a series of events, it presents the same uneventful moment three times in different ways. Unsurprisingly, this unusual structure is often the focus of scholarship on the story. Baldwin, for example, comments that it makes ‘no pretense at telling a story or even making a point, at least in the conventional senses’, instead describing it as a ‘composite sketch’ of the scene from different perspectives, and tentatively comparing it to imagist poetry, partly because of its ‘attempt to render a concrete object in words’.32 Similarly, for Skrbic, the text is a ‘Steinian anti-story’ which in some ways ‘resembles a liturgy because it depends on an unvarying response; on the other [hand], its quasi-synthetic arrangement of fragments is analogous to a cubist collage.’33 Both the idea of the ‘composite sketch’ and the ‘cubist collage’ highlight the story’s construction of an aesthetically unified whole from disparate parts. Each of these three parts contributes its own unique rhythm to the polyrhythmia of the whole, while representing a perspective of the world that itself highlights the

32 Baldwin, Virginia Woolf: A Study of the Short Fiction, 24, 27. He also applies this description to ‘Monday or Tuesday’ and ‘Blue and Green’. 33 Skrbic, Wild Outbursts of Freedom, xv, 11. Woolf 227

polyrhythmic. These three ways of seeing are contrasted without any hint of a final authorial judgment of the truth of any of them. As well as creating an artistic unity, the three contrasting rhythmic perspectives attempt to provide a more complete, polyrhythmic representation of the moment. The first section offers a vertical, or hierarchic, model of the world, ascending from Miranda ‘through the various layers of sight and sound’. 34 As the narrative perspective pans upwards, distinct aspects of the world are evoked through audible rhythms – that is, sonic waves. The level above Miranda herself, sleeping on a chair, is everyday human society, represented by the clamorous voices of schoolchildren reciting the multiplication table in unison, intercut with the inarticulate yell of the local drunkard. At a liminal point between earth and heavens, the ‘very topmost leaves of the apple-tree’, are the cultural and historical ties of religion, encapsulated in musical rhythms: the sound of the church organ playing ‘Hymns Ancient and Modern’. The cycle of life and death surpasses the claims of religion and culture; symbolised by the sound of church bells ringing in thanksgiving for six recent local childbirths, the reverberations of which are carried higher still than the sound of the organ. Completely detached from human concerns, or even those of individual living things, is the natural world, represented by the wind: ‘Above everything else it droned, above the woods, the meadows, the hills, miles above Miranda lying in the orchard asleep. It swept on, eyeless, brainless, meeting nothing that could stand against it, until, wheeling the other way, it turned south again’ (CSFVW: 143-44).35 The wind is rendered as a relentless ebb and flow of energy, and thus signifies the capricious rhythms of indifferent and invisible physical forces that organise the universe, in comparison to which an individual human like Miranda fits inside ‘a space as big as the eye of a needle’. This final level of existence especially highlights how this first rhythmic perspective of the moment in the orchard has much in common with Lawrence’s vision of the universe as a vastly intricate agglomeration of rhythms, which are all subordinate to the rhythm of life itself.

34 Baldwin, Virginia Woolf: A Study of the Short Fiction, 27. 35 This recalls a more famous model of blind, indifferent nature in the ‘Time Passes’ section of To the Lighthouse (1927). Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse, ed. Stella McNichol and Hermione Lee (London: Penguin, 2000), 146-47. Woolf 228

By contrast, the middle section is focalised through Miranda’s consciousness, and rather than symbolic sonic rhythms, is characterised by attention to rhythms of the body and physical movement, including labour. This section depicts the same scene as the first, but the rhythms of the moment are described from Miranda’s perspective via free indirect discourse, as if they are a part of her, in a way that conflates the physical and the imaginative. The sounds encountered in the previous section are again invoked, and their collective representation of ‘life itself’ confirmed, vis-à-vis Miranda’s imaginative experience of them: ‘when the shout of the drunken man sounded overhead, she drew breath with an extraordinary ecstasy, for she thought that she heard life itself crying out’ (CSFVW: 144). This sense of subjective inclusiveness is stylistically generated by repetition of polysemic phrases that suggest Miranda’s vital interpenetration with the world around her, such as ‘Miranda went on’, and ‘she continued’. Perhaps more obviously, this dynamic inclusiveness is effected by the section’s long, expansive sentences, and reinforced by a prevalence of present participles (being, galloping, moving, crying, riding, flying, chopping, herding, coming):

Naturally she was being married when the organ played the tune from Hymns Ancient and Modern, and, when the bells rang after the six poor women had been churched, the sullen intermittent thud made her think that the very earth shook with the hoofs of the horse that was galloping towards her (‘Ah, I have only to wait!’ she sighed), and it seemed to her that everything had already begun moving, crying, riding, flying round her, across her, towards her in a pattern. Mary is chopping the wood, she thought; Pearman is herding the cows; the carts are coming up from the meadows; the rider – and she traced out the lines that the men, the carts, the birds, and the rider made over the countryside until they all seemed driven out, round, and across by the beat of her own heart. (CSFVW: 144)

In the first, long sentence of this quotation, the rhythm of Miranda’s heart – also heard as the ‘sullen intermittent thud’ of her pulse as she lies with her ear to the ground – merges with the rhythms of the world around her and with her thoughts. Her own heart becomes for Miranda like Lawrence’s ‘great systole diastole’, a heartbeat that drives the universe (RDP: 27). Not only is the organ music for her, the Woolf 229

ringing of the church bells even becomes her own heartbeat and in turn merges with the imagined sound of a horse that is being ridden towards her. This is only intensified in the following sentence, where heightened syntactic rhythm, beginning with a series of metrically similar clauses, dovetails with Miranda’s notion that the rhythms of work and life around her both originate and converge on her own body. Throughout this section, words or phrases like ‘made her think that’ and ‘seemed’ emphasise the way this rhythmic experience of the world is filtered through Miranda’s consciousness, and mediated by the rhythms of her body. In the final section, a condensed, concrete literary mode reduces the scene to its simplest material components, and simultaneously to a purely aesthetic whole, to which rhythm remains important. This vision furthers the destabilisation of the epistemic claims of storytelling begun by the language of subjective uncertainty in the middle section. This increased narrative uncertainty is immediately signalled in the first sentence, the grammar of which most recalls the Steinian quality that Skrbic identifies, and in which the verifiability of what had been basic facts of the scene in the previous versions is undercut: ‘Miranda slept in the orchard, or was she asleep or was she not asleep?’ (CSFVW: 144) This last version of the scene is also noticeably condensed compared to the previous sections: it is only one short paragraph long, and the sentences are also shorter. Each sentence offers a discrete image, syntactically echoing an image of geometric neatness and balance by creating the effect of a linguistic jigsaw puzzle in which each part fits together to create a unified pattern: ‘Each apple-tree had sufficient space. The sky exactly fitted the leaves’ (CSFVW: 145). Similarly, the scene is explicitly sketched as a whole composed of interrelated energies, forces or rhythms: the ‘uprush of the trees’ is balanced by the quicker, lateral movements of thrush and sparrow on the orchard floor, while ‘the whole was compacted by the orchard walls’. Miranda, too, becomes an aesthetic object rather than a subject. She is decentred and abstracted, her words relegated to a parenthetical aside and her body becoming a ‘purple streak’ across the corner of the orchard, just as James and Mrs Ramsay become a ‘triangular purple shape’ in Lily Briscoe’s painting in To the Lighthouse.36 The final version, then, most clearly shows the scene in the orchard as a work of art, in a move similar to the final paragraph of ‘Kew Gardens’ in

36 Woolf, To the Lighthouse, 58. Woolf 230

which the final image shows all the elements of the garden, and the wider world outside it, as interrelated parts of an aesthetically ordered whole. These three distinct versions of the same fictional scene clearly aim to investigate the kind of perspectivism that Sim highlights in relation to ‘Kew Gardens’. In the case of ‘In the Orchard’ especially, the radically differing perspectives explored reveal diverse polyrhythms, so that this perspectivism also questions whether rhythm is a pre-existing phenomenon to be discovered, or a subjective experience to be created out of randomly occurring elements.37 The inconclusive structure of this story leaves this question ‘put’, as Mansfield expressed it to Woolf in a letter (CLKM 2: 320, 27 May 1919). As is evident from the preceding readings, despite her assertion that her generation of writers ‘cannot tell stories because they do not believe that stories are true’ (EVW 4: 240), Woolf explored the act of storytelling all throughout her career. This is especially the case in her short fiction, in which she frequently uses metafictional frames to investigate its epistemic uses: in stories such as ‘Moments of Being’ or ‘The Mark on the Wall’, discussed above, or ‘An Unwritten Novel’ (1920), in all of which making up stories forms part of the focalised character’s mental rhythms, and is used to help explain someone or something. The final text to be examined in this chapter, ‘The Searchlight’, examines the act of storytelling from another angle. This text revolves around the verbal and physical act of recounting a story for an audience.38 This piece seems to have been important or intriguing to Woolf: as a number of critics have meticulously documented, she reworked it numerous times in the decade preceding the Second World War, always centring on a brief anecdote drawn, in an altered form, from the autobiography of Sir Henry Taylor, who had been a friend of Woolf’s great-aunt, the Victorian photographer Julia Margaret Cameron.39 It was never published during her lifetime, though; Leonard Woolf included it in the posthumous collection A Haunted House and other stories in 1944.

37 This opposition is one of Lefebvre’s ‘indispensible’ conceptual oppositions in the rhythmanalytical project. Lefebvre, Rhythmanalysis, 9. 38 This scenario also structures ‘Gipsy, the Mongrel’ (1940), the ‘dog story’ that was commissioned by Woolf’s American literary agent but remained unpublished (CSFVW: 304). 39 J. W. Graham, ‘The Drafts of Virginia Woolf’s “The Searchlight”,’ Twentieth Century Literature 22, no. 4 (1976); Laura Marcus, ‘“In the Circle of the Lens”: Woolf’s “Telescope” Story, Scene-Making and Memory,’ in Dreams of Modernity: Psychoanalysis, Literature, Cinema, ed. Laura Marcus (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 221-23. Woolf 231

In ‘The Searchlight’, a group of friends watch a searchlight sweeping the London sky from the balcony of a club, as part of a peacetime drill. Its light is caught by a ‘bright disc’, perhaps a small mirror in a handbag, reminding one of the group, Mrs Ivimey, of a story she was told by her great-grandfather about his youth, which she then relates to her friends. Through Mrs Ivimey’s performance, Woolf presents storytelling as a rhythmic inheritance, a cultural and biological link between generations, as Mrs Ivimey almost becomes the characters of her tale through the act of mimesis. In this text then, storytelling is a rhythmic social phenomenon rather than a feature of thought. Therefore, as well as being a story about stories, in its engagement with the long, global history of oral folktale traditions, ‘The Searchlight’ also explores notions of cultural and familial heritage. Mrs Ivimey’s mimetic gestures analogise the textual mimesis enacted by ‘The Searchlight’ as a whole. As Laura Marcus argues in relation to another variant of the text, the ‘transmission’ of memories or scenes, ‘within the frame of the story […] models that of their transmission from writer to reader’.40 In fact, in Mrs Ivimey’s storytelling, the transmission of memory is at another remove as she retells an anecdote once told to her. Her story tells how as a youth, her great-grandfather-to-be sees a couple kissing at a farmhouse far off in the distance through a telescope, which inspires him to run all the way from his own lonely vantage point to the farm. There he meets the girl he saw, who is later to become Mrs Ivimey’s great-grandmother. Her performance of this tale is mimetic: she physically imitates the gestures of her characters, who also happen to be her ancestors. She is repeatedly described in the act of impersonation, making movements ‘as if’ performing a particular action, for example: ‘leaning over the balcony […] as if she were looking out over the moors from the top of a tower’; or ‘She made another quick little movement with her fingers as if she was twirling something’ (CSFVW: 265). This insistent repetitiousness in the linguistic representation of Mrs Ivimey’s mimicry (especially the simile-denoting ‘as if’) highlights the inherently rhythmic quality of mimesis (as a kind of repetition with variation), which parallels the rhythm of human ancestry that unites Mrs Ivimey with her great-grandparents.

40 Marcus, ‘Woolf’s “Telescope” Story,’ 228. Marcus is referring specifically to an example in a variant of the ‘telescope story’ set at Freshwater, but this equally describes Mrs Ivimey’s story. Woolf 232

Textual rhythms serve to evoke both Mrs Ivimey’s verbal rhythms, and the rhythms of her subjects’ embodied experience. When she describes what her great- grandfather saw through the telescope as he focused it on the farmhouse, this mimetic rhythm is intensified: ‘He focussed it so that he could see … each tree … each tree separate … and the birds … rising and falling … and a stem of smoke … there … in the midst of the trees’ (CSFVW: 265). Henry identifies this as a mimetic technique when she observes how the passage mimics the visual effect of looking through a telescope, where each object is seen in isolation. She writes that the textual rendering of Mrs Ivimey’s narration forces the reader to ‘physically pause as the sentence is focused through the mechanisms of the ellipses and repetitions of the words “focussed”, “each” and “lower”’.41 What she doesn’t emphasise is the way that this textual rhythm, as well as ‘limit[ing] the reader’s view to only one tree at a time, then the birds, then the farmhouse’, also tracks the physical and temporal rhythms of the experience, the gestures of twirling the focussing knob of the instrument and the momentary pauses as the gaze of the telescope is shifted. The biological, familial link between the generations is enacted by the retelling of the story. A rhythmic motif associated with Mrs Ivimey’s great-grandmother in particular highlights, as Marcus puts it, ‘the question, always absorbing to Woolf, of how we might “become” our ancestors’42: the narrator of ‘The Searchlight’ introduces Mrs Ivimey as ‘a well set-up, middle-aged woman, with something blue over her shoulders’ (CSFVW: 264). Similarly, Mrs Ivimey describes the girl that the boy sees through his telescope as ‘wearing something blue upon her head’ (CSFVW: 265). This emblematic connection between the generations is crystallised in the final moment of Mrs Ivimey’s story, represented in a tableau vivant in which she mimes her great- grandmother-to-be’s amazed response to the appearance of the young man:

A shaft of light fell upon Mrs Ivimey as if someone had focussed the lens of a telescope upon her. (It was the air force, looking for enemy air craft.) She had risen. She had something blue on her head. She had raised her hand, as if she stood in a doorway, amazed. ‘Oh the girl … She was my – ‘ she hesitated, as if she were about to say

41 Henry, Woolf and the Discourse of Science, 54-55. 42 Marcus, ‘Woolf’s “Telescope” Story,’ 231. Woolf 233

‘myself’. But she remembered; and corrected herself. ‘She was my great- grandmother,’ she said. (CSFVW: 266)

From the way that the searchlight illuminates Mrs Ivimey’s final impersonation of her foremother with the glare and drama of theatrical lighting, it is plain that artistic mimesis offers one answer to Marcus’ question about becoming our ancestors. Just as Mansfield wrote of bringing her family members back to life in ‘At the Bay’, Mrs Ivimey’s impersonation of her forebears allows for a momentary fusion of their identities. Mrs Ivimey’s mimesis also effects a telescoping of time between the original events and each retelling of the story. The anecdote itself – the brief chain of events described by Mrs Ivimey – functions as a symbol of connection between generations and across a century. Her great-grandfather’s story is both a romantic tale told to her as a little girl, and thus an object of imaginative identification, and an apparently real episode in her family history, a reminder of the contingency of her own existence, and thereby of the reader’s. As Mrs Ivimey says, ‘if there hadn’t been a telescope, […] “I shouldn’t be sitting here now!”’ (CSFVW: 264) This connection is reinforced by elements that are repeated throughout the text, such as when, in both her description of her own visit to the tower and the scene she sets for her great-grandfather’s story, Mrs Ivimey remarks that ‘a stone fell from the tower’ (CSFVW: 264, 265). Such repetitions unite the ‘now’ of Mrs Ivimey’s performance with the past, not only the occurrence of the original event, but also the occasion in which her great-grandfather told the story to her, and the more recent visit she made to the tower. At the same time, those same repetitions within and without Mrs Ivimey’s tale juxtapose the rhythms of human life against those of the longer, collective wavelength of generations, and indeed of cosmic time. Henry connects this conception of time to developments in the science of Woolf’s time, arguing that the telescope in the story functions as ‘a time machine of sorts, in that looking out into space always marks a looking back in cosmological time’.43 The telescope is therefore ‘a device that allows for a simultaneous co-existence of past and present’, an understanding that parallels early twentieth-century theories of how light traverses the universe, in particular

43 Henry, Woolf and the Discourse of Science, 54. Woolf 234

Einstein’s model of space as curved. 44 Henry compellingly contends that such developments in cosmology and telescopic technologies changed the way Woolf and her contemporaries viewed humanity’s position in the universe. These advances led to ‘a human decentering and re-scaling’, so that Mrs Ivimey’s ancestral origin story is ‘silhouetted against the backdrop of the abysses of space.’45 Thus the act of recounting a story can be conceived as a link in a rhythmic chain of storytelling, not just of Mrs Ivimey’s story in particular, but of an instance in the social history of storytelling as a whole. The parallel optical technologies of the searchlight and the telescope together are also instruments of the paradoxical senses of randomness and fate that is at the heart of the story. Just as the searchlight happens to provide the impetus for Mrs Ivimey to tell her story, the telescope is the tool that allowed for the random meeting of two people who would go on to become her ancestors. The searchlight in particular emblematises the arbitrary nature of narrative, as Mrs Ivimey explains when she is at a loss to explain what happened to the man that her great-grandfather had seen kissing the girl who would become her great-grandmother, ‘“The light,” she added, gathering her things about her, “only falls here and there”’ (CSFVW: 266). The searchlight seems on the one hand purposeful, a force for aesthetic order in that it illuminates just the ‘here’ of the moment of storytelling on the balcony, and the ‘there’ – the crucial moment in the lives of her own ancestors. But this final remark also recalls Woolf’s description of the sketches she was writing for ‘The Moths’ (around the time the ‘telescope story’ was first drafted) as ‘islands of light – islands in the stream that I am trying to convey: life itself going on’ (DVW 3: 229). That is, her colloquialism can be taken in its more usual sense, to suggest the arbitrariness of the glimpses shown in this story and others, and the way that we use stories to stave off chaos. Finally, ‘The Searchlight’ gives rise to a model of intergenerational history as rhythmic. Mrs Ivimey’s impersonations are a performance of family connection, as Lefebvre’s thinking on the rhythms surrounding gesture helps to illuminate. Lefebvre points out that not only are gestures rhythmic expressions of various parts of the

44 Henry, Woolf and the Discourse of Science, 55. 45 Henry, Woolf and the Discourse of Science, 56. Woolf 235

body, but these are established by what he refers to as dressage, or training, through a series of repetitions of the movement, as well as patterns of practice, fine-tuning and reward.46 Dressage or training may itself be considered rhythmic, as the replication of certain gestures, movements or behaviours are passed down from trainer to trainee. Family or social traits such as gestures, accents and manners, which in ‘The Searchlight’ are enacted by Mrs Ivimey’s mime performance, can also be considered dressage in this way, a kind of conditioning of belonging and non-linguistic communication.47 The retelling of family stories, indeed the traditions of storytelling as a whole, may be conceived similarly: as a social rhythm that is passed between people and unites generations across time. ‘The Searchlight’ is an especially fitting text with which to end my discussion of rhythmic mimesis in the modernist short story. By mimetically dramatising the act of storytelling, it gathers together several threads that I have been exploring throughout this thesis. Most fundamentally, it returns us to the conceptual contiguity of rhythm and mimesis, and their shared origin in the paradoxical logic of repetition. Mrs Ivimey’s retelling of her great-grandfather’s story is an act of mimesis, and an iteration in a rhythm of such retellings. It also reminds us of a recurring thread throughout this thesis, namely the juxtaposition of human rhythms against those of nonhuman nature, always with the effect of shifting focus from the anthropocentric view of the universe. Finally, the reflexivity of ‘The Searchlight’ allows us to reflect on how the short story (as much if not more than any other literary genre) can be understood as itself existing within this kind of rhythm, one that both exceeds and unites human history. By examining Woolf’s experimentation with ways of representing the intricate relationship between the self and the world, and her interrogation of the act of storytelling, this chapter has exposed the rhythmic character of Woolf’s vision of the world, and the centrality of rhythm to the strategies she used to express it. In other words, this chapter has shown how Woolf’s late, famous expression of her notion of the world as aesthetically structured is linked to her much earlier idea of a ‘vast pulsation’ that can be heard in solitary places through the concept of rhythm.

46 Lefebvre, Rhythmanalysis, 38-39. 47 Lefebvre, Rhythmanalysis, 40-41.

Conclusion

In the early twentieth century, the concept of rhythm offered a compelling narrative that could explain everything from a person’s everyday habits, to the relation between people, to the workings of the universe itself. Due to this capacity for such various application, rhythm could also lend otherwise disparate, even chaotic, dimensions of existence a sense of coherence and meaning. Mimesis too can be understood as an activity that seeks understanding, which is achieved through identification. As a quality that can be abstracted from its material context, rhythm was seen to suit this fundamental aim of mimesis by allowing direct correspondence between that which is represented and its representation. By charting the ways that three modernist authors attempt to mimic the many interacting rhythms of the universe through literary rhythms, this thesis has illustrated the pre-eminence of rhythmic mimesis as an ideal for modernist literature. As shown in Chapter 1, rhythmic mimesis emerges from an intellectual matrix that includes romanticist aesthetics and contemporary inquiries into the possibilities of fusing prose and poetry. The association of rhythm with the intangible, fugitive aspects of life runs throughout these intersecting realms of modernist discourse. Equally persistent is the assumption that art’s role is to capture these rhythms. This thesis has revealed the many correspondences between this wider modernist context and the aesthetics and short fiction of D. H. Lawrence, Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf. Their aims are largely similar, but naturally each of these three authors pursues their own brand of rhythmic mimesis. Lawrence’s use of rhythm supports the essentially religious aims of his writing. Chapter 2 demonstrates how Lawrence’s short fiction can be understood in relation to the idea that the cosmos is propelled by a kind of ultimate rhythm. While Mansfield’s feeling for ‘Life’ also involves a spiritual reverence, her idea of the transcendent significance of the ordinary is more prominent, a feature that is evident throughout the analysis undertaken in Chapter 3. Finally, as seen in Chapter 4, though Woolf shares this interest in the ordinary, and the sense of the world as rhythmically organised, she sees these worldly rhythms as art-like – making human perception, interpretation and Conclusion 237

creativity more central to her metaphysical vision. Despite these differences in focus between Lawrence, Mansfield and Woolf’s understandings and uses of rhythm, throughout the thesis mutual concerns with subjectivity, human relationships, and the relation between the human and the universe become apparent. Each, in differing ways, is concerned with the subject in terms of their relationship to the world or to life. While Lawrence declares that his interest in the individual is grounded not in how they feel or think, but in what they are ‘as a phenomenon’ in relation to the rhythms of the cosmos (LDHL 1: 182-84), Mansfield and Woolf both take the rhythms of consciousness and character as one of their primary objects of mimesis. Mansfield’s work is characterised by a fascination with the cadence of voices and mental habits as rhythms that establish personality and define lives, yet like Lawrence, she is consistently concerned with the importance of personal authenticity and of the individual having a deep connection to life. Woolf is equally involved in exploring the rhythms of thought and feeling, though not so much as they establish character, but rather as they reflect the subject’s perception of and engagement with the world. Her short fiction presents the rhythms of consciousness as constantly permeable to the voices and rhythms of the outside world. Likewise, as a concept simultaneously embracing difference and unity, rhythm is critical to each writer’s conception and representation of human relationships. Lawrence’s idea of the dynamic between people as thermodynamic disrupts conventional ideas of the basis of social connections, by reconstituting our connections to one another as manifestations of physical vibration. He insists that it is on this basis, not personal ones, that we may achieve authentic connection with one another. While his scientistic presentation of the idea differs markedly from Mansfield and Woolf’s, again these three authors are essentially in concert. Mansfield interrogates the foundations of social relations, presenting relationships between two or more individuals (such as siblings, couples, and families) as a polyrhythmia of thought, feeling and habit. At the same time, through this construction of human relationships, Mansfield is able to explore the limits of communication – ‘how mysterious and isolated we each of us are – at the last’ (CLKM 4: 252, 24 July 1921). Woolf’s work is also involved in an inquiry into the possibility of truly knowing Conclusion 238

another. Her notion of the individual’s relation to others is enmeshed in her engagement with the multiple rhythms of consciousness, not just in terms of the permeability mentioned above, but also in our recourse to narratives to explain others, our conscious misperceptions, and the possibility of reliable intuitive knowledge. This thesis has made clear that Lawrence, Mansfield and Woolf share a vision of the individual, indeed of humanity, as insignificant in relation to the universe as a whole. Lawrence expresses this idea most explicitly, in his image of humans as blood that is pumped by a cosmic systole diastole. But this kind of relation is apparent in Mansfield’s work too, particularly in her visionary masterpieces, ‘Prelude’ and ‘At the Bay’, in which human rhythms are dwarfed by those of non-human nature: respectively, the long-living aloe and the sea. And, in her idea ‘that the whole world is a work of art; that we are parts of the work of art’ (MOB p. 72), Woolf too emphasises our subordinate role in the universe. Thus all three writers see humans as individually insignificant components of a larger rhythm, thus rejecting the anthropocentric paradigms of Western religion. Yet Woolf’s expression of this attitude in particular highlights the way that understanding this relation as rhythmic also offers consolation through the sense it conveys of aesthetic unity and purpose. Finally, in arguing that the short story is uniquely suited for rhythmic mimesis, this thesis has demonstrated how such formal attributes, far from divorcing aesthetics from conceptual content, are essential to modernist meaning-making. The formal and conceptual importance of rhythm has been uncovered in some of the most significant short fiction to emerge from the modernist movement. In this way, the thesis offers a new way to read not just these texts, or indeed the literary projects of Lawrence, Mansfield and Woolf, but modernist short stories in general, and indeed even modernist fiction as a whole.

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