Imagined Selves

Imagined Corners, Mrs Ritchie, Selected Non-Fiction

Willa Muir, Kirsty Allen

• Publisher: Canongate Books
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN:
  9780862416058
• eBook ISBN:
  9781847675910
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European Literary Collections
• Index: Literature

The collected novels and cultural commentary of one of Scotland's greatest literary talents and an early twentieth century feminist pioneer.
 
The author of two classic novels as well as numerous translations of Franz Kafka, Hermann Broch, and others, Willa Muir was one of the finest and fiercest intellectuals of the early twentieth century—even as she was overshadowed by her husband, the poet Edwin Muir. This volume gathers together some of her most important works, representing her many voices and lives, both real and imagined.
 
Muir's writing is rich with paradox: though she was obsessively Scottish in subject and style, she openly resented Scotland; though a trenchant champion of feminism, she voluntarily sacrificed her identity to that of the 'poet's wife'; and although she was a committed reformer, she never aligned herself with any political or ideological movement. These passionate dichotomies are intertwined in her writing, giving a particular power to her fiction and non-fiction alike.
 
This collection offers a sense of the diversity of Willa Muir's oeuvre, including both novels— Imagined Corners and Mrs. Ritche—as well as her provocative essays on gender, history, and culture. It makes possible the re-evaluation of her work and assures her of a deserved place in the Scottish literary canon.

IMAGINED CORNERS

Contents

BOOK ONE
Calderwick, 1912

BOOK TWO
The Glass is Shaken

BOOK THREE
Precipitation

CALDERWICK 1912

ONE

I

That obliquity of the earth with reference to the sun which makes twilight linger both at dawn and dusk in northern latitudes prolongs summer and winter with the same uncertainty in a dawdling autumn and a tardy spring. Indeed, the arguable uncertainty of the sun’s gradual approach and withdrawal in these regions may have first sharpened the discrimination of the natives to that acuteness for which they are renowned, so that it would be a keen-minded Scot who could, without fear of contradiction, say to his fellows: ‘the day has now fully dawned,’ or ‘the summer has now definitely departed.’ Early one September there was a day in Calderwick on which the hardiest Scot would not have ventured so positive a statement, for it could still have passed for what the inhabitants of Calderwick take to be summer. Over the links and sandy dunes stretching between the town and the sea larks were rising from every tussock of grass, twitching up into the air as if depending from invisible strings, followed more slowly by the heavy, oily fragrance of gorse blossom and the occasional sharpness of thyme bruised by a golfer’s heel. The warmth of the sea-water was well over sixty degrees and the half-dozen bathing coaches had not yet been drawn creaking into retirement by a municipal carthorse.

All this late summer peace and fragrance belonged to the municipality. The burgh of Calderwick owned its golf and its bathing, its sand and its gorse. The larks nested in municipal grass, the crows waddled on municipal turf. But few of the citizens of Calderwick followed their example. The season for summer visitors was over, although summer still lingered, and the burgh of Calderwick was busy about its jute mills, its grain mills, its shipping, schools, shops, offices and dwelling-houses. The larks, the crows and the gulls, after all, were not ratepayers. It is doubtful whether they even knew that they were domiciled in Scotland.

The town of Calderwick turned its back on the sea and the links, clinging, with that instinct for the highest which distinguishes so many ancient burghs, to a ridge well above sea-level along the back of which the High Street lay like a spine, with ribs running down on either side. It was not a large enough town to have trams, and at this time, the Motor Age being comparatively infantile, there was not even a bus connecting it with outlying villages: but the main railway line from Edinburgh to Aberdeen ran through it, and it had an extra branch line of its own. In short, Calderwick was an important, self-respecting trading community, with a fair harbour and fertile agricultural land behind it.

On this clear, sunny day in early September – a good day on which to become acquainted with Calderwick – a bride and a bridegroom were due to arrive in the town, the bridgroom a native, born and brought up in Calderwick, the bride a stranger. Human life is so intricate in its relationships that newcomers, whether native or not, cannot be dropped into a town like glass balls into plain water; there are too many elements already suspended in the liquid, and newcomers are at least partly soluble. What they may precipitate remains to be seen.

II

Of the various people who were to be affected by the precipitation, Sarah Murray was one of the most unconscious. She had her own problems, but these did not include any reference to the newly married couple. At half-past six she was still asleep, but the alarm clock beside her bed was set for a quarter to seven.

She woke up five minutes before the alarm clock was due to go off, and stretched out her hand to put on the silencer, as she did every morning. By a quarter past seven she was on her way downstairs to the kitchen, stepping softly to avoid disturbing the minister, whose door she had to pass. If a celestial journalist, notebook in hand, had asked her what kind of a woman she was she would have replied, with some surprise, that she was a minister’s sister. Throughout the week she was mistress of his house, and on Sundays, sitting in the manse pew, she was haunted by a sense of being mistress of the House of God as well.

She found Teenie, the maid, watching a tiny kettle set on the newly lit kitchen range.

‘Put that damper in a bit, Teenie,’ she said, ‘you’ll have us burnt out of coal.’

Teenie turned round and burst into tears.

‘I canna thole it, Miss Murray,’ she sobbed, smudging her face with a black-leaded hand. ‘I’ll have to give notice. Tramp, tramp, tramp half the night, up and down, up and down, and him roaring and speaking to himself; I havena sleepit a wink. I canna thole it.’

Sarah lit the gas-ring and transferred the kettle to it.

‘You’re needing a cup of tea, and so am I. Whisht now, Teenie; whisht, lassie. You must have slept a wee bit, for he was quiet by half-past three.’

‘It’s no’ just the sleeping, Miss Murray, it’s the feel of it. I canna thole it any longer; I just canna thole it.’

Teenie’s voice wavered and the sobs rose again in her throat. Her eyes had deep black rings under them.

‘The kettle’s boiling. Get down the cups, Teenie.’

Sarah’s voice was firm. They sat down on either side of the table and drank the tea in silence. Together they lifted their cups and set them down, and whether it was the sympathy arising from common action that brought Teenie more into line with her mistress, or whether the strong warm tea comforted her, she was much calmer when the teapot was empty.

‘Don’t give me notice this morning, Teenie,’ said Sarah abruptly. ‘It’s not easy, I know, but if we can hold out a bit longer…. And I don’t want a strange lassie in the house while he’s like that. He knows you, Teenie, and you get on well enough with him, don’t you?’

‘Oh ay,’ said Teenie. ‘When he’s himsel’. But whenever it begins to grow dark, Miss Murray, I canna explain it, but it just comes over me, and I’m feared to go upstairs when he’s in his room. And his feet go ding-ding-dinging right through me. And it’s the whole night through, every night the same, and I canna sleep a wink, not even after he’s quiet.’

‘You’ll go to your bed this very afternoon…. I’ll see to that…. I’ll get the minister to take him out. And, shall we say, try it for another week and see what you think? I don’t want to lose you, Teenie, after two years.’

Teenie flushed.

‘I ken you have it worse than me. But I canna thole it for much longer.’

‘Another week?’

‘We’ll try it,’ said Teenie, getting up.

‘We’ll try it,’ echoed in Sarah’s mind. She had never yet admitted that there was anything she could not stand up to; she believed that persistent attention, hard work and method could disentangle the most complicated problem, and she despised people who did not apply themselves. Her brother the minister, the Reverend William, she could not despise, for he was unremitting in his duty, although his duty seemed to her at times a queerly unpractical business. Still, all men were queer and unaccountable. But even the worst and wildest of them were not so unaccountable as her younger brother Ned, whose conduct was driving Teenie into hysterics and forcing Sarah herself to realize that human energy is not inexhaustible. She was tired, her head ached, and the mere thought of Ned exasperated her. Besides the way he carried on during the day he was wasting the gas every night in a sinful manner, and even after he was in bed she could not go to sleep until she had peeped through the crack of his door to see that the gas was turned off. William’s salary could not stand it. It was all so unreasonable. What made him do it? What on earth made him do it?

But from this question, against which she had battered herself in vain for months, her mind now turned resolutely away. If there was any meaning at all in life Ned was bound to come to his senses again. Of course.

‘We’ll give it another week, then, Teenie. Mr Ned’s bound to get better. I must say I don’t see how he could get any worse.’

Sarah smiled wryly, and even the effort of smiling strengthened her returning faith in the reasonableness of life. She gave herself a shake and set about the business of the day.

On the first floor the Reverend William Murray, awakening slowly as he always did, was also strengthened by faith, but not by faith in the reasonableness of life. His faith grew out of the peace which surrounded him in that half- suspended state between sleeping and waking wherein his spirit lingered every morning, freed from the blankness of sleep and not yet limited by the checks and obstacles of perception. His eyes were shut, and his vision was not prejudiced by the straight lines of roof and walls; his ears were shut, and in their convulsions there reverberated only the vibrations of that remote sea on which he had been cradled, unstirred by desire or regret, at one with his God. Slowly, almost reluctantly, his spirit returned to inform his body, ebbing and shrinking into the confines of consciousness. He lay still, scarcely breathing, trying to prolong the transitory sense of communion with the infinite; but his awareness spread out in concentric rings around him, and he knew himself as William Murray, lying in bed in the manse of St James’s United Free Church, Calderwick. Even then he did not open his eyes. His thoughts would presently follow him and rise into their place, the first thoughts of the morning which were sent to him as a guidance for the day.

During the past fortnight his first thoughts had been more and more conditioned by the existence of his brother Ned, and on this morning too it was with an indefinite but pervading sense of reference to Ned that the thought came to him: yonder there is no forgiveness, for there is no sin. It was an immediate crystallization of experience, and he felt its truth. In that other world forgiveness was superfluous, for there was no sin. There was neither good nor evil…. That startled his newly awakened consciousness. He opened his eyes and got up.

The thought persisted, however, as he shaved. No sin; that was the state he was striving to attain, a life wholly within the peace of God. But neither good nor evil? That meant the suspension of all judgment as well as of all passion. Yet he was uplifted by the mere idea that the peace of God was neither good nor evil…. To know all is to forgive all, someone had said. He stared at his own reflection in the mirror. How much better simply to accept without forgiveness! Could he meet Ned on that plane perhaps he could cure the boy’s sick spirit….

‘Ned’s still asleep,’ said Sarah, as she poured out tea, this time China tea from the silver teapot. ‘I’m going to leave him till he wakens. It was half-past three when he put out the gas.’

William said nothing. He looked so absent and so pleased that Sarah could not resist giving him a tug.

‘Teenie’s threatened to go, William, if this lasts much longer. It’s got on her nerves.’

‘Teenie? Oh, surely not. Tell her to keep her heart up; I don’t think it’ll last much longer. I think …’

He paused. It was difficult to explain to Sarah.

‘I have an idea,’ he went on, ‘but I haven’t quite thought it out. Still, I believe …’

Sarah felt so irritated by the way his spoon was wandering round and round in his teacup that she knew her nerves were sorely stretched as well as Teenie’s.

‘William, it mustn’t go on!’ she said. ‘In the first place, we’ll be ruined. What with the gas, and a fire on all day in his room – we can’t do it much longer. If he doesn’t come to his senses soon we’ll have to – to send him away.’

Her words were indefinite, but as she and William looked at each other neither doubted what was meant. William stopped stirring his tea. With unexpected force he said in a loud tone: ‘No! That would be inhuman. That would be unchristian. What can you be thinking of, Sarah?’

Sarah covered her eyes with her hands.

‘I’m so tired! You don’t hear him at night, but he’s just over my head, and the tramping up and down, up and down’ (unconsciously she echoed Teenie’s words) ‘drives through and through me.’

William rose from the table to bend awkwardly over her.

‘My poor Sarah, my poor lassie. Of course you’re tired, but bear up just a little longer; we’ll do it yet. He’s our own brother; he’s bound to be all right.’

God never forsakes his people, he was thinking to himself.

Sarah dropped a tear on his hand and looked up.

‘Could you take him for a walk this afternoon? I’ve promised Teenie an afternoon in bed, and I think I could do with a rest myself.’

‘I’ll take him out this afternoon,’ William’s voice was confident. ‘It’s only Friday, I can finish my sermon to- morrow. But can’t you take a rest now?’

‘No; I have to get flannelette and stuff for the Ladies’ Work Party, from Mary Watson’s.’

Teenie could give Ned his breakfast when he came down, she was thinking. He was nicer to Teenie than to his own sister….

Before letting herself out Sarah mentally rehearsed her various errands and the number of yards of flannelette she needed. She never simply went out on impulse, nor did she expect to be surprised by anything in the streets. She could have predicted what was to be seen at any hour of the day. It was now ten o’clock, and as if noting the answer to a sum she observed that the baker’s van was precisely at the head of the street and that the buckets of house-refuse were still waiting by twos and threes at the kerb for the dust-cart. She would have been disturbed had things been otherwise. It was a satisfaction to her that everything had its time and place;...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Introduction
• IMAGINED CORNERS
• MRS RITCHIE
• MRS GRUNDY IN SCOTLAND
• WOMEN: AN INQUIRY
• ‘WOMEN IN SCOTLAND’
• About the Author
• Copyright