Pilgrimage - Honeycomb

📖 The Scoop

What happy intuition told the author of "Pilgrimage" to issue the book in these short installments? The process, you find as you read this volume, the third of the series, has been almost exactly timed to your capacity of assimilation. The sweetish-sour style and the strange, sensitive representations of a young English girl's impressions of her life are an acquired taste. "Pointed Roofs," with its flickering scenes of the German school where the girl goes as governess, was too insubstantial to stir the mind. "Backwater" might even have repelled you with its close sultry prison of the home to which she returns. But "Honeycomb" suddenly clarifies what the author is trying to do. Her idiom suddenly seems familiar, and the novel, slant at which she looks on life captures your imagination as a genuine artistic creation, and not as that trick which it might have seemed. The particular idiom and vision of this writer are the same as those of the makers of imagist verse. Miriam, the girl, sees the world as a stream of sensed pictures, in hard clear outlines, where the form is more significant than the content. In "Honeycomb" she is the governess in the English country house of a commonplace middle-class family. Nothing happens, outside of the children's lessons and a trip or two to town, except the arrival of quasi-smart people for a week-end. This is not, however, what happens to Miriam's vivid feeling. People, house, and furnishings dissolve together and then flow back to her in intense forms and colors, exciting or depressing the reflections of her brain. The story is of her quick impressions and the racing stream of her inner thoughts, her puzzles and desires. Her contact with people, with social forms, with everything around her are contacts with something alive, hurting her, doing something to her. It is not the objective facts that make up her life, but these intensely felt pictures of what goes on around her, and her own wondering mind, jumping from idea to idea as, restless and rebellious, it tries to burrow its way out of its squirrel-cage into reality. Nothing could be more uncannily real than these quick chains of thought which run through Miriam's mind. Once you have acclimated yourself, you find in this flow between sensed outer picture and inner reflection the very quality of experience, caught with a precision that makes you marvel. At least, it is the very fibre of sensitive youth, with its despair of happiness and its scorn of the grubbing world.It must have been passages like this that caused Wells to refer to Dorothy Richardson's novel as futuristic. Certain passages, like Miriam's walk on Regent Street, are pure imagism, exactly as the poets write it: "Flags of pavement flowing along-smooth clean gray squares and oblongs, faintly polished, shaping and drawing away-sliding into each other. . . . I am part of the dense smooth clean paving stone... gleaming under dark winter rain; shining under warm sunlit rain, sending up a fresh stony smell... always there... dark and light... dawn, stealing..." But "Honeycomb" is not verse masquerading as a novel. It is an honest narrative, searching, living-fantastic only to those who cannot feel these very modern ways of looking at the world. The author has simply had the audacity to tell her story of this sensitive girl, neither child nor woman, from the attitude and with the values that those gifted young poets feel who have made us recognize in their naive, cool vision of beauty, and in their sense of flowing life, new vistas of our own. This writer knows the cruelty of life as well as the high, clear, clean, fresh, fair things, for which her Miriam has so intense a love. I wonder if so completely feminine a novel as "Pilgrimage" has ever been written.--Randolph Bourne for "The Dial," Vol. 64.

Genre: Fiction / Coming of Age (fancy, right?)