Review: Pointed Roofs

Pointed Roofs by Dorothy M. Richardson
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Mary Olivier, a Life was such an extraordinary experience, I had to find out more about the 'stream of consciousness' method, first by actually reading through May Sinclair's essay that made the use of the term famous in 1918, in the journal The Egoist, all issues of which are available online. Sinclair says Richardson plunges deep into reality, in the tradition of French writing by the de Goncourts brothers and Marie Claire, and of course Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. The main thing was to hold her voice to the expression only of main character Miriam's fragmentary views, eschewing the role of the all-knowing Author; part of this game, it seems, was to let go, too, of drama and scene and character as such. "It is just life going on and on. It is Miram Henderson's stream of consciousness going on and on."

Not that the writing is formless; Richardson is a master of the image, showing us intense joy in the use of the senses, as when depicting human figures, landscapes, or interiors:

Mademoiselle, preceding her up through the quiet house carrying the jugs of hot water, had been her first impression on her arrival the previous night. She had turned when they reached the candle-lit attic with its high uncurtained windows and red-covered box beds, and standing on the one strip of matting in her full-skirted grey wincey dress with its neat triple row of black ribbon velvet near the hem, had shown Miriam steel-blue eyes smiling from a little triangular sprite-like face under a high-standing pouf of soft dark hair, and said, “Voila!” Miriam had never imagined anything in the least like her. She had said, “Oh, thank you,” and taken the jug and had hurriedly and silently got to bed, weighed down by wonders. They had begun to talk in the dark. Miriam had reaped sweet comfort in learning that this seemingly unreal creature who was, she soon perceived, not educated—as she understood education—was the resident French governess, was seventeen years old and a Protestant. Such close quarters with a French girl was bewildering enough—had she been a Roman Catholic, Miriam felt she could not have endured her proximity. She was evidently a special kind of French girl—a Protestant from East France—Besanon—Besanon—Miriam had tried the pretty word over until unexpectedly she had fallen asleep.

These extended sentences of description are worth pulling out and examining, endlessly, to writers who care to cultivate their craft.

And there is, after all, conflict and drama; it's just that it has to be deduced -- Fraulein Pfaff is more sensual than she lets on, and Pastor Lahmann does evidently enjoy Miriam's company, and he his.

Sinclair makes the point that Richardson enables us readers to capture Miriam's joy in the experience of life, despite its evident meaninglessness. There is a substantial, a thing...life and its force? The very love of it all? that dwells alongside Miriam, even as she chews her bread, and that will not allow sorrow to blot it out.

There is, in such hyperrealism, a mystical answer to the dilemma of absurdism, existentialism, and nihilism that so dominates the work of Beckett and Pinter and so forth. It is the hard-nosed attention to reason and feeling within, the generating motor of the sentences and brushstrokes of art. My favorite part of Pointed Roofs is a bit of writing against religion, reminiscent of very similar passages in Mary Olivier: A Life, and of course hinting at the proto-feminist pantheism of Emily Dickinson, captured so artfully throughout the film A Quiet Passion.

She felt safe for a while and derived solace from the reflection that there would always be church. If she were a governess all her life there would be church. There was a little sting of guilt in the thought. It would be practising deception.... To despise it all, to hate the minister and the choir and the congregation and yet to come—running—she could imagine herself all her life running, at least in her mind, weekly to some church—working her fingers into their gloves and pretending to take everything for granted and to be just like everybody else and really thinking only of getting into a quiet pew and ceasing to pretend. It was wrong to use church like that. She was wrong—all wrong. It couldn’t be helped. Who was there who could help her? She imagined herself going to a clergyman and saying she was bad and wanted to be good—even crying. He would be kind and would pray and smile—and she would be told to listen to sermons in the right spirit. She could never do that.... There she felt she was on solid ground. Listening to sermons was wrong... people ought to refuse to be preached at by these men. Trying to listen to them made her more furious than anything she could think of, more base in submitting... those men’s sermons were worse than women’s smiles... just as insincere at any rate... and you could get away from the smiles, make it plain you did not agree and that things were not simple and settled... but you could not stop a sermon. It was so unfair. The service might be lovely, if you did not listen to the words; and then the man got up and went on and on from unsound premises until your brain was sick... droning on and on and getting more and more pleased with himself and emphatic... and nothing behind it. As often as not you could pick out the logical fallacy if you took the trouble.... Preachers knew no more than anyone else... you could see by their faces... sheeps’ faces.... What a terrible life... and wives and children in the homes taking them for granted....

View all my reviews