Something Old

 Not everything worth reading is hot off the press. In this section, we recommend "something old" that is still well worth reading. "Something Old" can mean anything from a venerable and antique classic to a good book first published four or more years ago.

“MARY OLIVIER – A Life” by May Sinclair (first published 1919)

           

I am going to write this commentary in two parts. I will begin by considering May Sinclair’s novel Mary Olivier – A Life as it struck me when I read it and before I looked up what any academic or commentator had to say about it. This is what I think real criticism should always do – give a considered personal response to the text itself. Only then, in reflections outside the text, will I talk about the novel’s context and genesis, as well as noting what others have had to say about it.

For years, two copies of Mary Olivier – A Life had sat, unread, on my shelves. One was a first edition from 1919 and the other a reprint from 1949, the blurb of which described the novel as “the late May Sinclair’s masterpiece”. I was already aware that May Sinclair (pseudonym of Mary Amelia St Clair, 1863-1946) was a prolific novelist, most active between the 1890s and 1920s, that she was much admired by intellectuals, and that she was a very active first-wave feminist. It was this last fact that made me take the novel off the shelf and read it. I had recently read and reviewed for this blog another novel by a first-wave feminist, Olive Schreiner’s The Story of an African Farm, and had found that, in its melodrama and overt didacticism, it did not live up to its (former?) reputation. Did Mary Olivier live up to its reputation? I had heard that it was May Sinclair’s best-known work (I have other of her novels on my shelves). But was it, as I had read somewhere, a “forgotten masterpiece”?

So this is the novel I read and this is how I reacted to it.

Beginnning in 1865 and ending in 1910, Mary Olivier covers the life of a woman from the age of two to the age of 47. The text is divided into five sections, being Infancy (1865-1869); Childhood (1869-1875); Adolescence (1876-1879); Maturity (1879-1900) and Middle-age (1900-1910). We note at once that the eponymous Mary was born in the same year as the author and has the same (real) first name as the author, and we suspect there might be an autobiographical element to this novel. We also note that the author’s dating of “Adolescence” might now seem a little strange, as “Adolescence” takes Mary only from the ages of 13 to 16, so perhaps the author really means early adolescence, or even puberty.

In one sense, the novel is plotless. It simply takes the events of Mary’s life in the order in which they happen, and in the process depicts a particular family. Mary Olivier is the youngest of four siblings, having three older brothers, Mark, Dan and Roddy. The family is middle-class, ostensibly headed by Papa with Mama as his helpmeet, and with a small staff of servants. Papa sells ship insurance. As readers in 1919 would have been aware, and as we are now even more aware, Mary’s formation takes place in a very Victorian world.  When Mary is an infant, the grown-ups are talking about John Bright and Mr Gladstone. When she is a child, the Franco-Prussian war is going on. In this world, it is assumed, even in middle-class families, that young women do not need a formal education beyond the most elementary levels. When Mary, as a young adult, goes to a dance, she is, like all the other young women, chaperoned and obliged to fill in a dance card committing her to dancing with young men in a set order.

So the period details are noted, but they are not the focus of the novel and they do not overwhlem it.

Many things happen in Mary’s family over the novel’s 45 year span, but they are always presented in terms of how they affect Mary’s consciousness and mental formation. In infancy and younger childhood, Mary hears bits of whispered conversations between adults, not understanding them and not knowing why her parents are concerned about poor Aunt Charlotte. Instead, the emphasis is on childish quarrels over who owns the cat and on games and on physical sensations. Mary looks up to the males in her family, especially Mark, whom she hero-worships. But by the time she is nine, she is aware that her mother does not want her to read too many books or to become an intellectual.

When Mary is an adolescent, she begins to be more critical of adults and of her elder brothers. The admired Mark goes off to be a soldier, Mary has romantic ideas of him serving in the army in India, and right up to adulthood he remains the family member to whom she can most relate. But her brother Dan gets turned out of his office job for reasons that the adolescent Mary does not understand. Also, at the age of 14, Mary is sent away to a girl’s school, again for reasons she does not understand.

As the novel progresses, Mary is constantly re-assessing her views on her elders and piecing together what was really happening when she was too young to understand. The whispered conversations about Aunt Charlotte turn out to relate to aunt’s mental instability and her paranoid fear that people are plotting against her. There is the suggestion (delicately hinted at by the author) that much of this has to do with Charlotte’s sexual frustration, or even sexual abuse. Charlotte eventually goes mad and has to be incarcerated. Mary’s brother Dan turns out to be totally unsuited to the bureaucratic life that was planned for him, longs to be a farmer, never gets the chance, and becomes a sot. Her other brother Roddy emigrates to Canada, isn’t able to make a go of things, returns home very sick, and dies. There is the drumbeat of death in this novel, as even the admired Mark dies of an accident before the novel is over.

Yet the most important influences on Mary’s life continue to be her parents.  Although she is sometimes afraid of her father, the child Mary sees him as the unquestioned authority figure, with all the powers of paterfamilias. As she says:

 “Papa walked in the garden in the cool of the evening , like the Lord God. And he was always alone. When you thought of him you thought of Jehovah.”(Chapter 7, section 4). Yet in her early twenties, Mary notes her father’s ageing and weakness and psychological flaws: “Papa stood in the doorway. He looked round the small dining-room as if he were still puzzled by its strangeness. Papa was not what he used to be. A streak of grey hair showed above each ear. Grey patches in his brown beard. Scarlet smears in the veined sallow of his eyes. His bursting, violent life had gone. He went stooping and shuffling The house was too small for Papa. He turned in it as a dog turns in its kennel, feeling for a place to stretch himself.” (Chapter 20, section 4)

This stern father figure has faltered in his career, causing the family to leave London and settle in the country. He has become an alcoholic, and he dies of apoplexy a little over halfway through the novel. But, such is the primal formation of childhood, Mary has a persistent sense of her father’s influence even after he is dead. She dreams that at “the foot of the bed she saw her father standing… He looked at her with a mocking, ironic animosity, so that she knew he was alive…” (Chapter 21, section 8). The “mocking, ironic animosity” seems in part the father’s contempt for the young woman’s intellectual aspirations.

Apart from Mark, the males in Mary’s family prove to have feet of clay, yet they have more power given to them than Mary has. However, the influence of her controlling Mama proves to be more persistent than the influence of her father. At first Mama is simply the anxious mother telling her little girl to be obedient, accept her place in the world, and observe accepted social norms. But as Mary grows, Mama becomes more controlling and more manipulative, constantly attempting to negate Mary’s desire to develop her mind and seek intellectual company. Part of this, it would seem, relates to Mama’s awareness of her own lack of power in a male world and hence her envy of Mary’s intellect. To Mary, Mama confesses as she is dying, towards the end of the novel: “I suppose I – I didn’t like your being clever. It was the boys I wanted to do things – not you… I was jealous of you, Mary. And I was afraid for my life that you would find it out.” (Chapter 30, section 4) Yet Mary comes to realise that her mother has been the most important person in her life – for good or ill. It is assumed that Mary, as the only daughter of the family, will take on the role of nurse whenever somebody is sick. She nursed the ailing Roddy when he returned from Canada – and when her widowed Mama is dying, she has to nurse her. In fact, when she is in her 30s, choosing to nurse her mother costs her the opportunity to marry a man, which she had long desired to do.

There are men in Mary’s life, but they turn out not to be the people Mary at first thought they were. There is the Frenchman Maurice Jourdain, more than a decade her senior, who fires her intellect when she is a young adolescent. Only years later does Mary learn that she had been sent to school at the age of 14 because her parents were wary of Jourdain’s influence on her, and thought his interest in her was unhealthy (read – almost pedophilia). When Jourdain comes back into her life years later, Mary finds he is not the great intellectual she thought him to be. She thinks “There had been two Maurice Jourdains, the one who said, ‘I’ll understand. I’ll never lose my temper’; the one with the crystal mind, shining and flashing, the mind like a big room filled from end to end with light. But he had never existed.”   (Chapter 24, section 3)

There is the avuncular Mr Sutcliffe who lent her books when she was in her teens. Again, it is only years later that she learns he had a romantic interest in her adolescent self which almost threatened his marriage. For some twenty pages, in the last section of the novel, May Sinclair dangles before us the prospect that Mary will find happiness with an intellectual soul mate, Richard Nicholson, who admires her poetry, helps to get some of it published, and shares her interest in Greek drama. But the happiness is illusory, Mama has to be nursed and Richard wanders off to marry somebody else.

No love for Mary, then… but in the closing pages she reaches the conclusion that happiness comes from within her, and not from other people. This may be intended as an assertion of a woman’s autonomy – very much a theme of some feminism -  but it sounds painfully like a consolation prize, or even self-justification.

Counterpointing everything I have so far discussed, however, is the novel’s account of Mary’s intellectual, as distinct from emotional, formation. If she is subjected to social and familial conditions over which she has little control, she does at least rebel in her ideas. As a child she has a child’s conception of Christianity: “When you were frightened in the big dark room you thought about God and Jesus and the Holy Ghost. They didn’t leave you alone a single minute. God and Jesus stood beside the bed, and Jesus kept God in a good temper, and the Holy Ghost flew about the room and perched on top of the linen cupboard, and bowed and bowed, and said ‘Rook-ke-heroo-oo!  Rook-ke-heroo-oo!”  (Chapter 6, section 2)

But her youthful reading about classical gods leads her to reflect : “There were such a lot of gods and goddesses that at first they were hard to remember. But you couldn’t forget Apollo and Hermes and Aphrodite and Pallas Athene and Diana. They were not like Jehovah. They quarrelled sometimes, but they didn’t hate each other; not as Jehovah hated all the other gods. They fitted in somehow. They cared for all the things you liked best: trees and animals and poetry and music and running races and playing games. Even Zeus was nicer than Jehovah, though he reminded you of him now and then. He liked sacrifices. But then he was honest about it. He didn’t pretend that he was good and that he had to have them because of your sins. That was the nicest thing of all.”    (Chapter 9, section 3)

From this point on, she has a running battle with her parents about religion. At the age of 13 she defies her father when he is shouting at his sister Lavinia for being a Unitarian. When she is 14, she is expelled from the girls’ school to which she has been sent because of her “infidelty” (i.e. being an unbeliever or “infidel”) in refusing to say Christian prayers. So it continues.

Mary has that late adolescent sense that real life is somewhere else: “Nothing could take from her her belief in happiness hiding behind certain unknown doors.” (Chapter 20, section 6) In her case, however, this means seeking for the ideal. So she dreams of her ideal intellectual companion who “had the soul of Shelley and the mind of Spinoza and Immanual Kant” (Chapter 24, section 4) and she follows a regime of reading “Heine… Goethe’s Faust…Sappho…Darwin’s Origin of Species… Schopenhauer… Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung…” (Chapter 24, section 7). She declares to her brother Mark “I want the thing. Reality, Substance, the Thing-in-itself,” which she relates to some form of idealism [that is, philosophical rationalism] (Chapter 25, section 4). Certainly Mary’s intellectual quest is a sign of her intellectual strength, even if her reading list contains things that were the standard and expected reading of nineteenth century agnostics. But the idealism, the separation from concrete, physical realities, has its negative side. In her late 20s Mary, for the first time, begins to understand that much of her philosophising has been evasion “She had spent most of her time in the passionate pursuit of things under the form of eternity, regardless of their actual behaviour in time. She had kept on for fifteen years trying to find out the reality – if there was any reality -  that hid behind appearances themselves. She had cared for nothing in them but their beauty, and its exciting play on her emotions. When life had brought ugly things before her she faced them with a show of courage, but inwardly she was sick with fear.”    (Chapter 27, section 11)

After reading this novel, I was left with the sense of a life thwarted. There is much ratiocination. Mary thinks about religion and philosophy and poetry and reads the appropriate books for a budding intellectual of her time. But so often this seems a way of covering over an emotional void. Apart from hero-worship of her brother Mark; apart from some late adolescent “crushes” and relationships with men that go nowhere; Mary has no real emotional connection with anybody except her mother. Her life is circumscribed. She grows to middle-age unfulfilled, uncertain, still questing and with no firm ground to stand on.

And perhaps it was May Sinclair’s intention for us to see Mary this way. Perhaps her aim was to show the effects on an intelligent woman of a patriarchal society in which women could not get a higher education and had few opportunities to travel on their own. (Mary spends almost the whole of her life in the London, then the country, residences of her family.) Mary Olivier could be read as a “case” and the novel’s schema (infancy – childhood – adolescence – maturity – middle-age) is intended to show the unfulfilled potential of a woman who is not permitted to exploit her talents to the full. And yet the particulars of Mary’s life are so specific that it is hard to see her in these generic terms.

One thing I am certain of, though. Even if there are consciously intellectual conversations in Mary Olivier, the author does not preach. Whatever social messages there may be, they are implied. In this respect Mary Olivier is far superior to Olive Schreiner’s The Story of an African Farm. Schreiner TELLS. Sinclair SHOWS.

At which point I switch to what background research tells me, and what others have said about this novel.

Reflections outside the text:

I read Mary Olivier in my copy of a dust-jacket-less first (1919) edition, in which I found a small slip of paper, obviously part of the original publisher’s blurb, which described the novel as “A woman’s life, her thoughts, sensations and emotions directly presented, without artificial narrative or analysis, without autobiography.” [Emphasis added].

Although the novel is written in the third-person, this last claim is quite simply untrue.

Only after reading this novel did I consult literary manuals (and the internet!) and discover that Mary Olivier is indeed highly autobiographical. May Sinclair was the only daughter in a family with three boys, all older than her, and two of whom died relatively young. One of the deceased was the brother she hero-worshipped. She had a feckless father and a dominant and possessive mother. In her early 40s, she had a chance to marry – which she really wanted to do – but felt she had to continue caring for her sick, widowed mother, so the marriage never took place. All this squares with the life of Mary in the novel. Also the author’s family moved, as the Olivier family in the novel does, from London to the country (Devon in the case of May Sinclair’s family). Might I add that the resigned and, dare I say, self-justifying, tone that I detected in the final pages of the novel probably reflected Sinclair’s own resignation when, at the age of 56, she wrote this novel?

Additional information tells me that May Sinclair was influenced in writing Mary Olivier by having read and reviewed early works by Dorothy Richardson, and the two of them were among the first to popularise William James’ term “stream-of-consciousness”. Also Sinclair latched on to the early writings of Sigmund Freud. So some stream-of-consciousness fed into the novel (though, I must say, not as much as in later practitioners of this form!) as did some Freudian ideas on the persistence of primal childhood formation in adult experience. For the record, Sinclair, an ardent first-wave feminist and friend of the Pankhursts, increasingly took up ideas that would now be considered rather cranky, with an intense interest in psychics and the paranormal. Some of her later writings deal with these things, but her writing career was cut short in the later 1920s when she began to suffer from Parkinson’s disease, and she wrote nothing in the last 15 years of her life. She died, aged 83, in 1946.

In his much-admired survey The English Novel (published in 1954), Walter Allen tartly dismisses May Sinclair in one line as “a pioneer in a kind of psychological fiction later women novelists were to do better.” When I looked up Paul West’s survey The Modern Novel (published 1963), I found West gave Sinclair more consideration. He said “she had the intelligence to write a masterpiece”, but concluded that she never did so, because  her novels “always seem to be on the edge of revelation, but never quite fulfil themselves.” I would endorse this view on the evidence of Mary Olivier alone. But I think Paul West overdoes it when he describes Mary Olivier as “a game of Beggar-My-Neighbour played with cards marked Incest, Oedipus, Infantilism, Drink, Rapture and Madness”. This suggests that the novel is nothing more than a schematic, fictionalised collection of Freudian concepts. Some of the things West lists do indeed make their appearance in the novel, but it is far more nuanced than West suggests and does present us with believable characters, not just walking ideas.

In contrast with Allen and West, some postings refer to May Sinclair as the most significant English woman novelist between George Eliot and Virginia Woolf. Again, having read of her works only Mary Olivier, I think this is probably true – and in a way I feel more affinity for Sinclair than for Woolf; for unlike Woolf, she did not suffer the dreaded infection of Bloomsbury social snobbery.

Forgotten masterpiece? Yes, quite possibly Mary Olivier is.