Hypertrophy

Development — By W. Bryher

This book is described as a novel; we should prefer to call it a warning. It is a solemn account of the dreadful fate that befell a young person for whom, at the age of four, ‘the morning was wistful with the half-expressed desire: “If only I could have lived in an age when something happened.”’ For this egg, imp, sprite, darling of a pigmy size, there are no such things as newborn blisses; her days passed, we are told, unpleasantly free from danger, and ‘she could never remember a time when she had not wanted to go to sea.’ Not in a sieve, with her feet on a piece of pink blotting-paper, nor on a door-mat with a white cotton umbrella for a sail, but in a fishing ship that moved ‘bird-like,’ dear reader, among ‘waves, dented blue or curved racing green.’

Well, well, it is sad to consider what sentimental old creatures we must appear to the infants of to-day, timidly page 230 asking them if they believe in children, much as thirty years ago they used to ask us if we believed in fairies. Children, indeed! Except for, between the age of five and seven, an unfortunate little affair over the ownership of a tricycle, a misunderstanding which might have culminated in disaster had not the Olympians intervened, there is no visible evidence that the heroine of ‘Development’ did not bid farewell to the childish state with her first bottle.

‘Actual existence,’ says the author, ‘is too complicated to do more than puzzle a child of eight. Nancy, in fact, was not aware that it existed.’ She found the ‘Iliad’ a great deal more to her taste, and such was her knowledge of life in Troy that ‘she could see it, feel it, till her days passed in a crashing of bronze, a clatter of sandals, till to have seen the sun-browned body of a warrior catch the light at the corner beneath the heavy perfection of his harness …’ would have surprised her a great deal less than the common things of day. Moments that she could spare from her books she passed in one or another museum in Florence and elsewhere, and we catch a wistful glimpse of her drawing aside the veil of years from the whole of antiquity, and cruelly, ruthlessly, throwing over charming Achilles for the fresher fascinations of modern-hearted Hannibal.

‘The train reeking of Europe rattled on.’ Our heroine at ten is on her way to Egypt. ‘Italy was wonderful, but Naples was still Europe, and Egypt meant Africa.’ What more is there to be said? Let these words suffice: ‘Of all Egyptian history nothing had impressed her sailor mind so much as the expedition to Punt, and was not the tomb of Hatasu herself on the other side of the river? Then there was Rameses, the epic of Pentaur, on the great Karnak wall.’ And so it goes on and on—this absurd autobiography of a poor little stuffed owl, with its beak or its nose in the air. It is all very well for W. Bryher to say that ‘her impressions poured into the white and rounded vase’ of her Nancy's imagination, page 231 ‘hot and clamorous with sweetness.’ Even if we knew what such a statement meant we should refuse to believe a word of it. It is not meet for little children to dig their sand-pies among the tombs, and Nancy at fourteen is an awful example of what such indulgence may end in. ‘From the delicate bloom of peach the spirit of childhood flushed to the tenderness of a wild rose, it was ready to be one with dream.’

And then her shadowy parents emerged and thrust her into prison for three years where the girls wore white blouses, and were taught drill and nothing by elderly idiots who would not even understand her desire ‘to keep her art free from any taint of school.’ Follows another and a longer voyage to the beloved South of her childhood, and antiquity is recovered before the frescoes of the bullring and the cup-bearer. With the poetry of Verhaeren and Mallarmé and a touch or two of de Régnier, her mental bewilderment, to call it by no harsher name, is complete. Nancy recognizes that she is a writer born.

But here we would notice a strange lament on the part of the heroine that she is not a boy. She deplores her long draggled skirt, the fact that, as a girl, she can only ‘write books woven of pretty pictures seen from a narrow window’; that she is sheathed in convention. There is also a nonsensical account of a female tea-party. But there is no longer any need for girls to wear draggled skirts or to sit at narrow windows or to scream and twitter; they have been running away to sea for years—the excuse will not serve. And although we are told she possesses ‘the intellect, the hopes, the ambitions of a man, un-softened by any feminine attribute,’ what could be more ‘female’ than her passion for rummaging in, tumbling over, eyeing this great basket of coloured words? That she can find no use for them; that, lovely as they are, she has nothing to pin them on to, nothing to deck out in them; that la bonne Littérature, in fine, has not bid her bind her hair, is no great marvel. She has been to a page 232 feast of languages ever since she was old enough to beat a spoon on the table.