WOMEN HAVE NO STAR

Press, Volume LXXIII, Issue 22111, 5 June 1937, Page 17

WOMEN HAVE NO STAR

It was said so casually. It is said so casually. For at least another fi\re years longer, if Hitler and friends have a bit of luck, it will be said so casually: just a take-it-for-granted aside in conversation. Women writers are good, sometimes even sensationally good. They win prizes, and lull the livers of the reviewers. But they haven’t any stars. First-rate second-raters. ... “Susan Miles,” I suggested. This was a shot at a neat angle, because almost nobody who is anybody has ever heard of Susan Miles or read “Rlind Men Crossing a Bridge ; a nd as she apparently. refuses to write another novel, critics are in a difficulty about taking up then little bow and arrows and making Cock Robin of the crystalline beauty of that odd and haunting book. This time, however, I was up against a redoubtable reviewer, who shot me a keen glance, and said. Buna Men Crossing a Bridge—yes, good, very good,” and then added gently, “Neurotic.” , It might have been true, too, 1 could recall passages in th ® n ° v ®} which were more from the odd tnan the eveh of life. My controversialist not foeman —scored the next P °“Men like L. H. Myers and E. M. Forster have the quality in their novels that women never quite reach. It’s a kind of serenity, breadth of vision.” “Stella Benson.” “No, neurotic too. They all are. “A woman writer’s life is certain to make her neurotic. Unless she s so massively thick of hide that its impossible for her to be any good at all. In that case, she wouldn t have the acute perceptions which go to make a really fine book. You don’t allow for conditions.’ “The conditions aren’t under discussion. It’s the results that count. The-results aren’t quite the same as the work of the best men writers. Victory Behind Defeat And again, I thought, it might be true. Grant Myers his serenity, Forster the one and only .f~ d with which has ever been written, with out a trace of sentimentalism, on the colour question: a book whose very simplicity haunts you with the piercing belief. “These things happened. They must have happened, I know and feel, as I read them, that they are exactly true, too, the neurotic strain in the writ ings of women; perhaps that is a d - feat with victory somewhere behind it, visible through the ranks of the disordered sentences. Perhaps the over-wrought, over-taut vision ol the woman writer, at her very best touches a humanity and an insigh which the serene male has not because he has never been obliged to look at life with a perpetual crick in his neck, like Lot’s poor lady. It will be interesting, in a generation, to hear the relative merits of the writers summed up. I believe it will be found that women have been the more truly representative of their period, more sensitive, with quicker eyes and more humble hands. Stella Benson, for instance, was always humble enough to know how a beetle felt about things, or a dying puppy, or a s'Hy httle sad person like the man in The Poor Man"; and small though these individualities may seem, they add up much nearer to the sum of a decade than do the big bull-frog figures, puffed out by the wind of a moment. Not that it commences, this woman-writer query, with the work of the twentieth century. Greeks were at one time very cross about Sappho, and later she was enshrined; and whichever mode one prefers, temper, or embalming and homages, enough of the broken bits remain to piece her together. There she stands, under the pines’ “downpouring slumber,” and with her wild larkspur round about her feet: a pleasing figure to women, and to me a slightly amusing one, there is so much sheer she-devil obstinacy in her refusal to be entirely burned entirely blotted out, entirely reft of beauty. That’s the thing about women: they are persistent. The English could lose all of Joan of Arc except her heart and her tradition; the Greeks, and the world of letters, could lose all of Sappho except her fragments and her tradition; and there she stands, the exalted founder of a long line of very queer little poets, ending to-day in Ruth Fitter, whom somebody or other has declared to be the mostimportant poet since Housman, and y/ho is, with or without Housman to starboard, clearly a poet of the first rank, a clear, visionary, distinct, and sometimes humorous poetic ingThey Die Young

Stella Benson’s poems, collected and published after her death , came into my hands the other day. She isn’t the pure, that is, the abstracted, poet that Ruth Fitter is; but where among other writers of the twentieth century is the equal of her unstriving humanity? Her verses stick in the mind, with the haunting quality of old ballads; but there’s a clearer, finer point to them than the searollings and ship-swingings of such poets as, for instance, Masefield. And suddenly she laughs, or as suddenly lets the mercy of Kwan-Yin speak from golden i'.ps, or “sows the dawn with birds.” Of course they have a curious custom, these women writers and poets, of dying young, or else of writing very little. Stella was in her early thirties when she chose to expire; Winifred Holtby—a sound novelist and ia good tactician—not much older; Katherine Mansfield, thirty-two or three when she plucked the nettle. And others of them remain for me sempiternally childish figures. I never imagine Emily Dickinson, that odd little poet, as more than about 15 years of age, and gifted with the preternatural vision which might come to an adolescent; and Charlotte Mew, who died quite old and extremely poor, remains at a springtime age, about the same age as the brown and frightened girl in her poem, “The Farmer’s Wife.” Once Only And there are the one-poem women. Everybody knows Amy Lowell’s “Patterns.” For a poem of that sort, it’s probably one of the most attractive ever written. But who knows by heart another poem of Amy Lowell’s? Now and again, paper-chasing about the best American magazines one runs across similar traces and wonders just where

Questions, Not Answers (SPECIALLY WHITTEN FOB THE PEESS.I [By ROBIN HYDE.]

the trail will be lost. And why it is lost. I think, for the same reason that so much of the novelwriters’ work is neurotic, and the same reason that women writers die young or remain static at an early stage of development. The mere effort of ceasing to be a woman—lacking in artistic expression—is so great and usually joined with so much difficulty and opposition that a long summer is infrequent and an Indian summer almost impossible. Of course there are one-book woman novelists who keep on writing. There was an early Rebecca West who had, in “Return of the Soldier” and even more in that tiny grey-covered book, “Letter to My Grandfather,” a quality of beauty which is completely absent from her later books, “The Harsh Voice” and "The Thinking Reed.” The former is commonplace; the latter, a beautiful corpse in faultless evening dress. As Enobarbus remarked, “But why, why, why, why?” Yet the bad of it—the lost battles with health, circumstance, humour, commonsense —shows up as insignificant beside the real, if chancy, good of the literary work that women have done. Some of it’s lost, some buried, some embalmed; which is worse. I rather think the embalmers are doing a job with Jane Austen and the Brontes. Either women are too blindly rejected or too overwhelmingly accepted, and neither state suits their peculiar style of beauty. But coming across a lost good thing can be a thrill. “The Child’s Day” Everyone knows (dimly) Olive Schreiner’s “Story of a South African Farm,” and a good many read and admired her book “Dreams.” “Good, of her period, was a label I heard applied, and it might be just, if these two books were all. But there’s another one, “From Man to Man.” Poor Olive. She spent twenty-odd years trying to get this book off her chest, and it just wouldn’t. The reasons are patent for anyone to see. She was so swept away by a tide of noble-minded, single-minded, lonely convictions. Her own visions were burning in her like a signal fire on a great hilltop. She simnly couldn’t trek back to earth. She created two characters, women: one the simple, deeply sensitive and perceptive, but dependent type of woman, who c e whole life was bound up in the fortunes of love; the other, a woman of mind. The first, if the words could be pruned from around her shapeliness, is an almost oerfect character, of fact, not of fiction. The second was so much Olive Schreiner that she couldn’t escape from the tumult of her own ■thoughts. The book was unfinished, like Stella Benson’s “Mundos” (but much more chaotic), when the writer died. “I think it’s the most womanly book that was ever written,” Olive wrote; and she was not far out. But the perfect thing, the jewel in the heap, is not the main part of this book, but its 60-page prelude, called “The Child’s Day.” This was inspirational. “I just sat down and wrote it,” Olive comments. It is, taken as a long short story or a short novelette, one of the loveliest things in prose that I have seen written by any woman. There is a touch of Katherine Mansfield about it—in this writer, who was old and demodee before Katherine ever met her Waterloo in Middleton Murry; but it has an even stranger imagination, even truer reach back to the places of childhood. Whether it .s widely read or not probably doesn't matter, though Olive Schreiner longed for her twenty-years-lon£ book to take women up and show them a far horizon. But, just as Amy Lowell must always have thought, “Anyhow, I wrote ‘Patterns,’ ” and Pauline Johnston could say if she liked, “It was I who wrote ‘The Pain,’ ” Olive Schreiner’s odd and belated little ghost could think, if at all disconsolate over the change of styles and the passing of other things, “Well, thank goodness, I put in that Prelude. ... I was very doubtful about it at the time, but ‘now also I see.’ ” Challenging, Failing The novelists and the poets aren’t the only ones who show a twinkle of challenge against this “Women have no star” convention. Diarists and letter-writers? All the way down from Lady Mary Wortley Montagu to Marie Bashkirtseff and K.M.; and they’re still crushing the grapes to get the last drop of juice out of the second mentioned. There are, too, those little Chinese and Japanese ladies who are carrying on such intriguing Platonic flirtations with good Arthur Waley . . . Shonagon, who saw the moonlit water fly up in crystal chips as the bul- , lock-carts splasHed through, and Murasaki, who was so jealous of Shonagon And the great women travellers and travel-writers: Gertrude Bell, Forbes, not great by any means, but as exciting as the majority of performing-flea journalists now skipping uneasily over the globe, Freya Stark, a dozen others, chatting with Arabs in their black tents, cajoling Thibetan monks out of their lifelong silences. (Probably the monks were only waiting their chance to become garfulous. Tact and gossip are two of women’s great natural assets. Boswell could never have dealt with Dr. Johnson if he hadn’t been something of an old woman in breeks.l I don’t think very much of women writers as wits. Like Edith Sitwell, they are apt to glitter too much, more reminiscent of needles and silver nail polish than of the good old-fashioned stiletto. And there isn’t, so far as one can remember at a hasty backward glance, any woman who could pass for a philosopher. Virginia Woolf, Rebecca West, Stella Benson, all laid a finger on the fringe of philosophy; but there is too much of speculation in their work, not enough of the calm and lofty air of abstraction. They are questions, not answers, as yet. That’s it. I think I like the mind when it can still question: that way are eluded both stolidity and despair. Also, if you listen long enough, you can hear from some of their pages a rung, the first note of the answer.