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    Rhapsody
    Rhapsody
    Rhapsody
    Ebook253 pages2 hours

    Rhapsody

    By Dorothy Edwards

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    Extremely controlled studies of constrained desire, loneliness, and incomplete relationships, these tales fostered Edwards' development of a nonrealist world of imagery and symbolism in her own language. The ten stories of Rhapsody, together with the three previously uncollected pieces added to this edition, are utterly distinctive in voice and sensibility. At least three of the Rhapsody stories—"A Country House," "Days," and the brilliant, enigmatic "A Garland of Earth"—are small masterpieces sure to by enjoyed by a whole new generation.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherParthian Books
    Release dateOct 1, 2007
    ISBN9781908946447
    Author

    Dorothy Edwards

    Dorothy Edwards dreamt up 'My Naughty Little Sister' whilst on a family holiday in 1950. Dorothy based the character on her younger sister, Phyllis, and went on to write five books about her naughty little sister with wide acclaim. Dorothy became a household name and her stories were read and loved across the globe. She became a fixture of a radio show in the 1950s called Read with Mother and she also wrote for Playschool and Jackanory. Dorothy died in 1982, aged 68.

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    • 4/5
      "I am killing myself because I have never sincerely loved any human being all my life. I have accepted kindness and friendship, and even love, without gratitude and given nothing in return." -- The suicide note of Dorothy Edwards, and the thing that caught my eye.

      I read 'The Conquered' for class, and then decided to read more of her work. This is one writer I don't think you can truly understand without understanding that that was lying behind all her work -- a coldness, a holding back, an inability to give of herself... Many, most, all? of the characters of these short stories are this way. The stories are very perfectly formed; they make me think of sculptures very carefully and deliberately carved in ice. I think they will haunt me. They require thought, and unpacking, and even several reads, before you understand them. And they are well worth it.

      I didn't enjoy them, as I usually do, by connecting with the characters -- Dorothy Edwards' work didn't lend itself to that. It was the ice sculpture perfection that intrigued me; the ideas that will haunt me, not the characters.

    Book preview

    Rhapsody - Dorothy Edwards

    Contents

    Author Bio

    Foreword

    Editorial Note

    RHAPSODY

    A COUNTRY HOUSE

    THE CONQUERED

    TREACHERY IN A FOREST

    CULTIVATED PEOPLE

    SUMMER-TIME

    SWEET GRAPES

    A GARLAND OF EARTH

    A THRONE IN HEAVEN

    DAYS

    LA PENSEUSE

    MUTINY

    THE PROBLEM OF LIFE

    Foreword by Christopher Meredith

    Cover Image The Pianist by Ceri Richards

    LIBRARY OF WALES

    Copyright Info

    Author Bio

    Dorothy Edwards was born in 1903 in Ogmore Vale, a small mining community in Mid Glamorgan. Her father, an ardent socialist and Independent Labour Party leader, was the local school headmaster. After a scholarship to Howell’s School for Girls, Llandaf, she took a degree at Cardiff University in Greek and Philosophy, but literature was her passion and soon after graduating her short stories began to appear in magazines and journals. These were collected in Rhapsody (1927), along with several previously unpublished stories written during the nine months Edwards spent in Vienna and Florence. Her novel Winter Sonata (1928) followed shortly afterwards. She spent the following years trying to supplement her mother’s meagre pension by writing stories and articles for magazines and newspapers, and doing some extra-mural teaching at Cardiff University, but she never undertook full-time employment. After a brief period spent living in London with acquaintances from the Bloomsbury circle, Edwards committed suicide on a Cardiff railway line in 1934. A note left in her pocket at the time of her death read: ‘I am killing myself because I have never sincerely loved any human being all my life. I have accepted kindness and friendship and even love without gratitude, and given nothing in return.

    Foreword

    Dorothy Edwards is one of the most remarkable and remarkably neglected authors in the English language of the early twentieth century. Though she was celebrated briefly in her lifetime, after her suicide at the age of thirty-one in 1934, her two books, Rhapsody of 1927 and the novel Winter Sonata of 1928, went out of print. The Virago reprints of the mid-eighties, with thoughtful introductions by Elaine Morgan, were crucial acts of rescue, but Edwards deserves more.

    The ten stories of Rhapsody, together with the three previously uncollected pieces I’ve added to this edition, are utterly distinctive in voice and sensibility. At least three of the Rhapsody stories – ‘A Country House’, ‘Days’, and the brilliant, allusive and enigmatic ‘A Garland of Earth’ – are small masterpieces. All of them are extremely controlled studies of constrained desire, loneliness and incomplete relationships.

    Themes and motifs recur with subtle variations. Even personal names sometimes recur from story to story. These echoes and variations underline the author’s interest in music and musical form – and music itself is one of the motifs. For Edwards, music represents art, but also the possibility of sexual passion which is otherwise largely unstated but is everywhere a powerful undercurrent.

    The stories have a strange minimalism. Their landscapes contain few elements and there are no crowd scenes. This contributes to a dreamlike sense that everything signifies and connects. There’s something of the atmosphere of dark fairytale, and Edwards alludes to fairy-tales directly several times. In almost all of Edwards’ writing there’s a powerful sense of irony at work. Although her vision is essentially pessimistic, she has a feel for the comic potential in the human predicament. You can see her ironic pessimism at work in ‘Rhapsody’ and ‘A Country House’. In both these an outsider threatens to break up a marriage, and in both a passion for music, shared by the outsider and the would-be escaper, is the barely disguised metaphor for their longing. The story-structures and some of the symbolism are strikingly similar, but almost everything else is different.

    In ‘Rhapsody’ the narrator, Mr Elliott, is an observer drawn into the strange ménage in which Mr Everett engineers a replacement for his dying wife by advertising for a tutor for his son. Everett can barely wait for his son to go away to school and his wife to die so that he can possess his violin-playing Antonia completely. It’s Everett who is rhapsodic about music, much of it only in his head, and it emerges that the title of the story is bitterly ironic. His pursuit of a heightened state, aesthetic or sexual, far from taking him into some oblivious innocence, leads him into cruel and destructive emotional manipulation.

    On the other hand, in ‘A Country House’ the narrator is an older husband who becomes jealous of Richardson, the engineer whom he hires to install an electricity generator at his house as a gift of light for his young wife. Music again becomes the public statement of the private longings of engineer and wife. The motifs of energy and music once more coincide. The country house of the title is pretty much Bluebeard’s castle (alluded to directly elsewhere in the book), the outward representation of the closed fortress of the narrator’s self. Obscurely, the husband fights to reassert his control over his property – his home, his wife and his own self.

    The key to the difference in thrust of these two stories is in their narrative techniques. The observer-narrator, Elliott, of ‘Rhapsody’, is faintly disapproving of the outrageous, fey Everett, and our sympathies are against the outsider Antonia and the manipulative husband. But the increasingly crazed protagonist- narrator of ‘A Country House’ soon has us rooting for the power of music and some kind of passion, and against his claustrophobic possessiveness. The two stories taken together show that no kind of moral superiority is being asserted for art or a life of the senses. The apparently simple tales develop extraordinary complexity.They display a pessimism typical of Edwards. Those who can form some kind of emotional bond only seem to be able to do so by hurting others. Shared innocence, it seems, is impossible. The characters who come closest to being admirable tend to be the loneliest ones. The fine closing story, ‘Days’, treats the theme particularly subtly.

    The taut quality of Edwards’ work depends a great deal on her stylised language, which often has an essayed awkwardness. In her dialogue, contractions such as ‘I’m’, ‘you’re’ are relatively rare. Attributions (‘said Mr Wendover’ etc.) are often painstakingly included. The effect is to make the dialogue seem deliberate and unreal, as in an apparently over-simplified story intended for children. This reinforces the tale-like quality, but it also acts in an ironic tension with the ruthless and often unstated emotional games playing out between characters.

    Outside the dialogue, there’s often a sense of apparently logical development which gets stranger, less logical and more compelling with rereading. For instance, ‘A Country House’ opens like this:

    From the day when I first met my wife she has been my first consideration always. It is only fair that I should treat her so, because she is young. When I first met her she was a mere child with black ringlets down her back and big blue eyes. She put her hair up to get married. Not that I danced attendance on her. That is nonsense.

    Immediately interesting is that positioning of ‘always’ at the end of the first sentence rather than between ‘has’ and ‘been’. This apparent slight awkwardness gives the opening all its tension. It twangs with a sense of insistence. There’s some anxiety established in the voice by that last word. Edwards’ second sentence contains a non sequitur. Why should someone’s being young make it ‘fair’ that you behave considerately towards them? More worryingly, does this mean that the narrator would feel no need to make his wife his first consideration if she weren’t young? ‘Not that I danced attendance on her’ too seems a non sequitur. It doesn’t follow the previous two sentences, and if it refers back to the first, why is it in the past tense? ‘That is nonsense’ is an alarmingly over-insistent rebuttal. The rest of the paragraph continues with twists and surprises of this kind in a brilliant fashion. There’s a sense that the narrator, in his over- insistence, is seeking to silence a doubt and is answering a voice in his head. This is writing that demands that we read the dislocated psycho-logic of the narrator while paying attention to the impersonal control of the author.

    Whether obviously in character or not, Edwards frequently employs such awkwardnesses and dislocations in her fiction which allow the emotional subtext to emerge. Obliqueness, irony, or understatement are almost constantly at work.

    *

    At first sight, nothing of Edwards’ life appears in her fiction. She was born in Ogmore Vale; her father was a teacher; she took a degree in Greek and Philosophy in Cardiff; she was a red-hot south Wales socialist and became a Welsh nationalist; she took Welsh lessons when this was a deeply unfashionable thing to do; she lived most of her short adult life in Rhiwbeina; she lived for a while in Austria and Italy; she was briefly lionised by the English literary press; she visited and eventually stayed, as sort of live-in baby-sitter, with the writer David Garnett and his wife Ray; she hovered on the fringes of Bloomsbury; she came back to Cardiff and her widowed mother, and somewhere near Caerffili in 1934, she threw herself under a train. Apart from the desperate loneliness suggested by her suicide note, nothing of this comes out in the work – it seems. Yet all this was crucial to making her the writer she was and I’d say is important to an understanding of her work. Her fictional world, often nominally ‘England’, is largely an invented emotional space. Houses, townscapes and landscapes become dreamlike representations of inner states. Her work is informed by her reading in several literatures, particularly Russian, and coloured by the Anglo-centric cultural hegemony of her day. The result is something tough and original, somewhere between Chekhov and Beckett.

    Elaine Morgan described Edwards as ‘an outsider all her life’. She was a linguist, a musician, an intellectual who could pass for posh in south Wales, where she identified with but wasn’t part of the working class at perhaps its toughest moment. But she certainly didn’t count as a bourgeoise in Bloomsbury, and her stories are full of outsiders, people who arrive briefly in apparently amiable places, get caught on emotional barbs, and then retreat. The cosmic loneliness apprehended in her fiction is there in cultural terms in her own life. Her stories also frequently deal with relationships between older men and younger women in which neither side has a monopoly on suffering, and several such relationships seem to have been significant in her own life.

    But, though Edwards sometimes said that she intended to write about Wales (just as the author George Morn in ‘Days’ ‘began to write about the scenes and districts around his old home only when he was already over forty’), she showed little interest in autobiography or verisimilitude. It seems to me that she pursued, with extraordinary tenacity, getting the stories emotionally true and formally complete. In doing this she seemed to follow Emily Dickinson’s famous injunction: ‘Tell all the truth but tell it slant.’ This may shed some light on why she cut the interesting story ‘La Penseuse’ – published here for the first time – from Rhapsody. ‘La Penseuse’ would have stood out as being the only story in Rhapsody with a female protagonist. Though it isn’t autobiographical, it could be the case, dealing as it does with its protagonist’s relationship with learning and culture, that it was a little too close to the author. There may be other reasons for the cut, but Edwards is all the more impressive an artist for deciding to keep it slant. We need a reprint of Winter Sonata and a critical biography to do her full justice, but for now, this book contains, for the first time, all of Edwards’ complete short fiction.

    Fashions for rereadings according to various theories have helped critics to rediscover her from time to time, but I believe that Dorothy Edwards is a great deal more than an interesting literary case. She’s an important, utterly original modernist. Whichever way you read her, she’s the extraordinarily accomplished author of powerful and suggestive fictions.

    Christopher Meredith

    Editorial Note

    The last three stories in this collection appear here for the first time in book form. Two of them – ‘Mutiny’ and ‘The Problem of Life’ – were published shortly after Dorothy Edwards’ suicide in 1934 in the magazine Life and Letters Today numbers 9 and 10. They were almost certainly intended to be part of the new collection of stories she was working on at the time of her death.

    Research by Claire Flay has revealed that ‘La Penseuse’ was written between about 1925 and 1927, and that Edwards had considered including it in Rhapsody but in the end decided to keep it out. I’ve silently emended some errors and inconsistencies in the typescript for this, its first ever publication.

    I’m extremely grateful to Claire Flay for her help in assembling this material and to the University of Reading Archives, which houses a collection of Dorothy Edwards’ papers.

    CM

    RHAPSODY

    Last summer, on the very first day I returned from Egypt for my summer vacation, I made a new and interesting acquaintance. I reached London at about three o’clock, and had to wait about until a six o’clock appointment with my firm, and because I was too tired to do anything else in the meantime, and feeling also a little depressed and lonely, I turned into a café and sat there drinking tea and reading a magazine. At about four a man walked in and sat at the table in front of mine. He was short and thin, with very straight fair hair and pale blue eyes, and he was perhaps about forty years of age, though he looked very young. His face wore a curious expression, as if he were listening all the time to something intensely illuminating but scarcely audible, or as if he were experiencing some almost intolerably sweet emotion, and he seemed to be imploring you ‘Please don't interrupt me for a moment; it will soon be over.’

    I noticed him particularly as he ordered tea and poured it out for himself, and I remember thinking what a neat and well-ordered personality he must be.

    Then I went back to my magazine, and, when next I looked up, he was standing at my side, trying to attract my attention by saying in a very polite voice, ‘Pardon me, could you tell me what time it is?’

    The fact of his not knowing the time was so much out of harmony with the conception I had formed of his ‘well- ordered personality,’ and I was so muddle-headed after my rather sensational magazine story, that I did a very rude thing. I said, ‘But haven’t you a watch?’

    He put two fingers into his watch-pocket and said, ‘No. I lent it to my little boy this morning. It has been a great inconvenience all day.’

    ‘It is a quarter to five,’ I said hurriedly; and then, to make up for my rudeness, I offered him a cigarette, and asked him if he would not sit down at my table. He accepted my invitation very politely, and sat down.

    ‘It is most unpleasant being without a watch,’ he said seriously. ‘I am so anxious not to miss my train, which goes at 5.40, because my wife is an invalid. There was no means of ascertaining the time at the concert this afternoon, and I regret to say that I came out of it earlier than necessary, because I thought it was later than it actually was. That is why I have some time to spend here.’

    ‘Yes. That is awfully annoying,’ I said.

    ‘However,’ and his expression of intolerable bliss returned, ‘I heard a great deal.’

    ‘You are fond of music?’ I remarked.

    ‘Yes,’ he answered. ‘I never have the opportunity to hear very much now. It is impossible for me to come to town in the evening, because I cannot get home the same night. I can never go to the opera, for instance, though I am very fond of Mozart. My wife is an invalid, so that I do not like to leave her for very long. She used to play, but our tastes were dissimilar in many ways, and now she cannot play at all.’

    ‘And do you not play?’ I asked.

    ‘Alas, no!’ he answered. ‘I can finger out the notes in a very clumsy way, but though that gives me pleasure, I am sure it causes great anguish to everyone anywhere near, and it annoys my wife terribly, because her technique was always excellent. I can see you are sympathising with me,’ he added almost gaily. ‘I suppose you can play beautifully. Is that so?’

    I laughed too. ‘No,’ I said. ‘I am very fond of music, though. I quite understand how you must miss it.’

    He was delighted. He began to hum the little Minueto from Don Giovanni ecstatically in a whisper. Suddenly he said, ‘But, though you do not play, you will go to hear everything this season while I shall hear nothing.’

    I was so anxious to take away some of his envy that I answered sorrowfully, ‘Yes, but even if it were possible to go to concerts every day, it is very dull wandering about by oneself in between for a whole three months.’

    He was all compassion. ‘You have no friends here? Perhaps you do not live in London?’

    It seemed a pity to talk about me, but I had made it inevitable.

    ‘I have a job in Egypt – Alexandria,’ I said. ‘I am home for three months, and there is nothing particularly to do now except go to theatres. I do not know what I shall do in August.’

    ‘It is a pity you do not play,’ he said, appearing not to have listened to what I said. ‘You will be sorry some day. When I was a boy I had a sister who played everything for me, and then my wife was a beautiful pianist, so I never practised myself. Now, of course, I can’t begin playing scales with an invalid in the house. Perhaps you sing, though?’ he added suspiciously.

    I blushed a little. ‘I used to have a bit of a voice,’ I admitted.

    He drummed on the table with his little finger. Then suddenly he stopped, and a most cunning expression pirouetted across his face. He looked up and said casually, ‘Perhaps, if you are indeed without engagements, you would care to spend a few days with me. We are going away in a fortnight’s time, so that it would have to be before then.’ And a little less casually he added: ‘Do you think you could possibly sing unaccompanied?’ and really there was a most pathetically imploring expression in his eyes.

    So I said yes at once, and promised to stay with him the very next week. Then I had to remind him of the time, and, flinging his card down on the table, he scurried away, waving his new grey gloves in an ecstatic farewell. And I was left, somewhat to my own astonishment, with an engagement on my hands. However, I continued in that mood of loneliness when one is quite ready to take a passionate interest in the affairs of any stranger, so the next week I went down to see him. He lived in the country, some way out of London. He seemed altogether delighted to see me, and even more delighted to see some music under my arm. With great restraint he did not mention the music, only he put it reverently on the hall- table. Then we went in to tea. His wife was rather disappointing. She lay on a sofa presiding over the tea- table, though Everett himself actually poured out the tea. She was a dark, thick-set woman, with large, heavy white hands. Her face bore the marks of much physical suffering, so that she looked older than her husband, though I suppose she was about the same age, and she wore an expression which was neither complaint nor resignation, but something quite different from either. I liked her at once, though of course she did not strike my imagination as her husband did.

    ‘George said you were finding England lonely,’ she said.

    I smiled, thinking that I had been represented to her simply as an object of compassion.

    ‘Oh, not very seriously,’ I said. ‘Only I had been looking forward to getting here, and forgot that there would be no one to meet me. Your husband found me in the middle of that mood. Now I am quite reconciled to being at the centre of the earth instead of at its outskirts.’

    ‘Yes,’ she said slowly. ‘I never go to town now.’

    Everett said excitably, ‘Please have a cress sandwich. I grow them myself in boxes on the window-ledge.’

    It was exceedingly pleasant to be welcomed with such enthusiasm, even though I knew the cunning that lay beneath it. Mrs Everett seemed glad to see me too. I suppose she saw few people, as they lived in the country. I found them both very interesting. It was curious how, whenever Everett mentioned music, he looked at her a little apprehensively, and she almost imperceptibly frowned. I wonder if she had awakened one day to find that he had married her because she was a beautiful pianist, and perhaps she took a dislike to music from that day?

    During tea their little son came into the room. He was a nice little chap, with dark eyes like his mother’s. He shook hands with me shyly and said to Everett: ‘Please, father, will you lend me your watch again tomorrow?’

    ‘Oh yes, Vincent, certainly,’ said his father, with great attentiveness.

    ‘Why do you want it?’ asked his mother heavily.

    ‘Well, the truf is,’ said he, ‘I showed it to Dick last week, and he told another little boy that I had one, so I had better show it to the other little boy tomorrow.’

    ‘All right,’ said his mother; ‘go and play now.’

    ‘You won’t forget, father?’ said Vincent.

    ‘No,’ said Everett. ‘I cannot give it to you now,

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