Laura’s version of Guest’s fantasies of moving audiences to tears has been developed by dint of weaving fantastic tales for her younger siblings. In a wider world she expects to find opportunities for further ranging; instead, she learns the hard way, that she has to compress herself into a smaller compass to mitigate the brilliance of her effects and to ingratiate where she intended to astonish. Mediocrity dashes over her like the sea and for long periods she is quite submerged, while the combined pressures for conformity weigh her down, coming perilously close to exhausting her energy. The only outward sign of this herculean struggle is a depressingly familiar one, a ‘Fair’ school report, which will have as its outcome a problematic career, about which the author gives no comforting reassurances. It is not as memorable a story as the suicide of a young music student, but in its very ordinariness it is more dreadful.
Laura’s intensity is the cause of most of her suffering, and it will also be her way of transcending it. Her anguish at the rudeness and coldness of her reception at the Ladies’ College causes her to capitulate at once, but her own passionate nature and innate sensitivity persist in disrupting the completeness of her capitulation. So she sniggers with the bigger girls, cringes to the staff, and is callous toward her juniors, but underdoes, overdoes and forgets to do all of these things constantly. The power and spontaneity of her feelings repeatedly confound her attempts at manipulation of the people around her, so that although a willing enough hypocrite, she makes but a poor one. However fervent her wish to cram herself into the common mould, she is too volatile to stay in it. The reader follows this sickening zig-zag, as Laura courts first one group and then another only to be eventually repulsed, wondering all the time whether her personality will survive, and finding the only hope in her clear-eyed satirical view of the very people with whom she is currying favour.
Richardson herself retold her experiences at the Presbyterian Ladies’ College (or PLC as the school is mostly known) in her account of herself when young, but the recapitulation only goes to show how the unselfconsciousness of the novel written thirty years before saves it from her rather pompous notions of importance, which lead to odd mistakes of taste. Her conscious preference was for grandeur, even the spurious grandeur of Hummel (for whose music her fingers were to remain too spidery) and the evanescent thrill of Longfellow, whom she preferred to Tennyson and, by implication, to other poets much greater than either. In these rather distorted notions, we may see the true reflection of Richardson’s provincialism, for in a country which is utterly philistine, people who are genuinely excited by the arts tend to distrust any art form which seems close to ordinary life and to adopt paranoid, overblown concepts of the artistic personality. Richardson’s adoption of Handel as her middle name reflects the kind of taste which found a performance of the Messiah a more meaningful and rewarding experience than any work of Mozart. Her own understanding of her achievement in The Getting of Wisdom reflects this same wrong-headedness. It is almost as if the clear-eyed, passionate child who was almost suffocated by educational authoritarianism sneaked out of her while her back was turned and wrote a perfect novel that the self-conscious adult had no power to understand.
‘I persist in thinking of it as a little book,’ she wrote in 1931, ‘though modern writers who give such short measure don’t agree with me.’ H. G. Wells, quite rightly, thought the book a masterpiece and it is one of the ironies of art that Richardson could not understand why he should. The concept of infinite riches in a little room is beyond one bred up on bombast.
Given the lack of grandiosity in Richardson’s intent, as she whiled away a wet summer in the Bavarian mountains by writing The Getting of Wisdom, it must nevertheless not be supposed for an instant that she was not carefully constructing a finished novel, but merely recounting some personal experiences. Her own career at the Presbyterian Ladies’ College was markedly different from that of Laura Rambotham. Ethel Richardson won first-class honours in Latin, English and history, and the senior pianoforte scholarship, and was the school tennis champion. It would be confusing the horse with the cart to point out that she suppresses these facts and gives a misleading account of her school career, for she is not engaged in writing a reminiscence. The Getting of Wisdom has its own artistic logic, characterised in this instance as in no other instance of her writing, as a fine control of emphasis and exact calculation of mood. It is the imperious operation of artistic tact which causes her to hold the soft pedal down in telling the story of Laura’s love affair with Evelyn—not that she held it down as successfully as she later imagined. The dreadful pain of adolescent infatuation grinds in every line, the more effectively because Richardson does not do for Laura what she had done for Maurice Guest, namely, explain and expound the nature of the feeling. Because of her posture of detachment, the abandonment of this small, passionate soul is more touching than all Guest’s operatic miseries. The cynical reader might suspect that voluptuous Evelyn kept her ‘Byronic scrap of humanity’ by her to feed her own sensual narcissism, because Richardson does not leap in and close the gap. The situation remains true to the amorphous and terrible emotional life of adolescents. The equally significant possibility also survives, that either Laura or Evelyn or both ought to have been lovers of women, if only such a possibility had been psychologically acceptable.
Sexual tension tightens every page of The Getting of Wisdom, if not as subtly as it does every page of a novel by Jane Austen, yet with a stimulating degree of restraint. The mistresses of the school, except for poor Miss Chapman, the only born teacher among them, are all living on the edges of heterosexual fulfilment, which they may be supposed to have missed, while the older students, ‘whose ripe, bursting forms told their own tale’, are obsessed by their eventual sexual function and invariably talk boys and smut, from which Laura would instinctively recoil if only she were not so desperately eager to be accepted. Then there are the crushes, poor little Chinky’s for Laura, which effectively ruins her young life and leaves Laura disgracefully cold, and Laura’s for Evelyn, which almost squeezes her heart dry on its first encounter. The intensity of the emotional life of schoolgirls has inspired other novels, most notably perhaps, Olivia by ‘Olivia’, who was actually Dorothy Bussy, the translator of Gide into English. There is an important difference however, between the hothouse where Madame Julie, Bussy’s version of the remarkable Madeleine Souvestre, forced her young women to intellectual and affective maturity and the dreary suburban seminary where middle-class nonconformist Laura was sent to school. Laura’s was not the stimulating environment offered to upper-class girls at Les Ruches (called Les Avons in Bussy’s novel) where her sensitivity would have flourished under the delicate attentions of elegant, sophisticated, worldly and cultivated women. Mrs Gurley is a common martinet and her subordinates are simply representatives of the limited, empty-headed world beyond the school. The leitmotif of their banal exchanges chimes regularly through the schoolgirl chatter; whether it is Miss Zielinsky sniffling over Ouida, Miss Snodgrass sneering at her because she is a foreigner, Miss Day snapping and barking, or Mrs Gurley oppressing Miss Chapman, their behaviour serves to remind us that women who taught in the 1880s did so because they had no choice. They were almost always of a lower social class than most of their students, untrained, perfunctory and dissatisfied. The only person who makes any contribution to Laura’s intellectual development is the visiting teacher, Miss Hicks, who does so by accident as she is rating another pupil. It is to Laura’s credit that she decides that she does not want a ‘real woman’s brain: vague, slippery, inexact, interested only in the personal aspect of a thing’, which is incapable alike of concentration or intellectual curiosity. However, she is given no further help in transcending the sex of her brain, nor is the justice of Miss Hicks’s anti-feminist statement ever queried. After meeting Miss Hicks, we hear the last of her. Thereafter the teaching at PLC is represented by remarks which are either unkind, unnecessary, irrelevant or all three.
Henry Handel Richardson
pretended to be amazed when PLC refused to admit her as a guest when she passed by in 1912, on her trip to gather background material for her magnum opus, The Fortunes of Richard Mahony. In vain she insisted that her damning portrait of private schooling for girls was meant merely to amuse. She herself had hated her brief experience as an unwilling schoolteacher, and her first hero, Maurice Guest, was a runaway schoolteacher. Her attitude towards the whole question was far more rancorous than light-hearted, and justly so. Her contemptuous treatment of the school where she had done so well cannot be dismissed as a mere comic device, for the school is the instrument whereon the soul of Laura Rambotham is strung out for the torture, and although she is a little girl, her suffering is not less important for that. It takes a peculiarly sadistic sense of humour to grin cheerfully at the picture of the new girl going from one teacher to another trying earnestly to find out what she should be doing, only to be rebuffed sarcastically, apathetically and downright rudely by first one and then another, to the accompaniment of dutiful titters from her wretched peers.
In later life, Richardson was wont to make extraordinary claims for Laura Rambotham, calling her ‘a girl with a difference’, ‘a writer in the making’ whom ‘the taint of her calling’ marked off from the rest of her schoolmates. If The Getting of Wisdom is a bildungsroman about the making of an artist it is clearly inferior to A Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man, which appeared seven years later, and even to A Portrait of the Artist As a Young Dog, for the concept of art which it develops is entirely superficial. Nevertheless in 1940, Richardson was to claim in an article which she wrote for the Virginia Quarterly Review, that Laura, ‘by dint of sad experience…discovered, unaided, the craft of realistic fiction’. In fact Laura was aided by the boarders’ Literary Society, which gave her very good advice and forced her to take it by the most effective means, peer-group pressure. She already knew what was required, for the recipe was the same as that which she had unwittingly used in her lies about the curate: she had invented what could have happened and simply had not. All she had to do was to transfer her skill at libel to the field of declared fiction, and all she learned was how to tell a likely story, at a time when such narrative had lost its hold upon English fiction. If we are to understand the greatness of The Getting of Wisdom, we must realise that Laura is potentially any twelve-year-old girl, as unique in her undeveloped potential as all other little girls. Because she comes from a fatherless household in a small town she comes late into the socialisation process. Like a little wild creature brought into a parlour, she dashes herself against the obstacles to her self-realisation set up by Godmother and Mrs Gurley, and most cunningly, by her peers. Ultimately the tale is a hopeful one, for we leave Laura wary and toughened, but still full of growing.
Richardson did not continue in her modern, concentrated, ironic vein. By 1912, she had finished the first draft of the first volume of a trilogy, The Fortunes of Richard Mahony, considered by most people to be her most important, because it is her most ambitious work. To be sure, there is wonderful writing in the trilogy, but the canvas that it sketches remains unfilled; her foreground characters are carefully delineated in a convention that was lifeless by the turn of the century, and her central character, based upon her father, cannot carry the weight she places on his shoulders. Richardson’s Australian epic remains her chief claim to fame, because the Australians, who are the only people who study it, share the common misconception that breadth equals profundity, especially when it is accompanied by seriousness of tone and turgidity of style. Richardson herself looked back on The Getting of Wisdom through the glass of her study of the artist as tormented freak of nature, The Young Cosima, published in 1939. Nevertheless, despite the fact that the great lady herself would disagree, the enduring truth is that The Getting of Wisdom is Richardson’s only great book, precisely because the subject is like the rest of us, ordinary, and therefore deeply important.
Wisdom is the principal thing; therefore get wisdom: and with all thy getting get understanding.
Proverbs iv, 7
I
The four children were lying on the grass. .
‘…and the Prince went further and further into the forest,’ said the elder girl, ‘till he came to a beautiful glade—a glade, you know, is a place in the forest that is open and green and lovely. And there he saw a lady, a beautiful lady, in a long white dress, that hung down to her ankles, with a golden belt and a golden crown. She was lying on the sward— a sward, you know, is grass as smooth as velvet, just like green velvet—and the Prince saw the marks of travel on her garments. The bottom of the lovely silk dress was all dirty——’
‘Wondrous Fair, if you don’t mind, you’ll make that sheet dirty, too,’ said Pin.
‘Shut up, will you!’ answered her sister, who, carried away by her narrative, had approached her boots to some linen that was bleaching.
‘Yes, but you know Sarah’ll be awfly cross if she has to wash it again,’ said Pin, who was practical.
‘You’ll put me out altogether,’ cried Laura angrily. ‘Well, as I said, the edge of her robe was all muddy—no, I don’t think I will say that; it sounds prettier if it’s clean. So it hung in long, straight, beautiful folds to her ankles, and the Prince saw two little feet in golden sandals peeping out from under the hem of the silken gown, and——’
‘But what about the marks of travel?’ asked Leppie.
‘Donkey! haven’t I said they weren’t there? If I say they weren’t, then they weren’t. She hadn’t travelled at all.’
‘Oh, parrakeets!’ cried little Frank.
Four pairs of eyes went up to the bright green flock that was passing over the garden.
‘Now you’ve all interrupted, and I shan’t tell any more,’ said Laura, in a proud voice.
‘Oh, yes, please do, Wondrous Fair! Tell what happened next,’ begged Pin and Leppie.
‘No, not another word. You can only think of sheets and parrakeets.’
‘Pease, Wondous Fair,’ begged little Frank.
‘No, I can’t now. Another thing: I don’t mind if you call me Laura, today, as it’s the last day.’
She lay back on the grass, her hands clasped under her head. A voice was heard, loud, imperative.
‘Laura, I want you. Come here.’
‘That’s mother calling,’ said Pin.
Laura kicked her heels. The two little boys laughed approval.
‘Go on, Laura,’ coaxed Pin. ‘Mother’ll be angry. I’ll come, too.’
Laura raised herself with a grumble. ‘It’s to try on that horrid dress.’
In very fact, Mother was standing, already somewhat impatient, with the dress in her hand. Laura wriggled out of the one she had on, and stood stiffly and ungraciously, with her arms held like pokers from her sides, while Mother, on her knees, arranged the length.
‘Don’t put on a face like that, miss!’ she said sharply, on seeing Laura’s air. ‘Do you think I’m making it for my own pleasure?’ She had sewn at it all day, and was hot and tired.
‘It’s too short,’ said Laura, looking down.
‘It’s nothing of the kind,’ said Mother, with her mouth full of pins.
‘It is, it’s much too short.’
Mother gave her a slight shake. ‘Don’t you contradict me! Do you want to tell me I don’t know what length you’re to wear your dresses?’
‘I won’t wear it at all, if you don’t make it longer,’ said Laura defiantly.
Pin’s chubby, featureless little face lengthened with apprehension.
‘Do let her have it just a tiny bit longer, mother, dear, dear!’ she pleaded.
‘Now, Pin, what have you got to do with it, I’d like to know!’ said Mother, on the verge of losing her temper over the back folds, which would not hang.
‘I’m going to school tomorrow, and it’s a shame,’ said Laura, in the low, passionate tone that never failed to exasperate Mother, so different was it from her own hearty fashion of venting displeasure. Pin be
gan to sniff, in sheer nervous anxiety.
‘Very well, then, I won’t do another stitch to it!’ and Mother, now angry in earnest, got up and bounced out of the room.
‘Laura, how can you!’ said Pin, dissolving. ‘It’s only you who make her so cross.’
‘I don’t care,’ said Laura rebelliously, though she was not far off tears herself. ‘It is a shame. All the other girls will have dresses down to the tops of their boots, and they’ll laugh at me, and call me a baby;’ and, touched by the thought of what lay before her, she, too, began to sniffle. She did not fail, however, to roll the dress up and to throw it into a corner of the room. She also kicked the ewer, which fell over and flooded the floor. Pin cried more loudly, and ran to fetch Sarah.
Laura returned to the garden. The two little boys came up to her; but she waved them back.
‘Let me alone, children. I want to think.’
She stood in a becoming attitude by the garden gate, her brothers hovering in the background. Then Mother called once more.
‘Laura, where are you?’
‘Here, mother. What is it?’
The Getting of Wisdom Page 2
