Creed E-Book

Margiad Evans

• Herausgeber: Honno Press
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018

Beschreibung

Set in Chepsford, a fictional industrial Border town characterised by drunkenness and brawls, it takes suffering as its subject matter. Domestic life is unsettled by strong opinions on love and sin, while notions of religion and fate are debated with passionate intensity. At the same time as Margiad Evans draws a compelling portrait of Chepsford's violence and dissipation, her interest in the very process of writing and the possibilities and limitations of language are also inscribed in the novel. Her fiction is the result of 'translating what I have learnt into scribbled words on thin paper, pinned together with ordinary pins from a pink card'. Published in 1936, Margiad Evans's fourth and final novel.

Leseprobe

Contents

Title PageIntroductionIIIIIIIVVVIVIIAbout HonnoCopyright

CREED

Margiad Evans

With an introduction by Sue Asbee

WELSH WOMEN’S CLASSICS

Introduction

SUE ASBEE

Peggy Whistler (1909 – 1958) took ‘Margiad Evans’ as her pen name when she published her first novelCountry Dance(1932). The name expresses her sense of being ‘of the border’, rather than Welsh or English; it sums up her love for the countryside around Ross-on-Wye where her family lived from 1921, and which had a profound effect on her sense of identity and her writing. Evans wrote novels and short stories, as well as poetry and essays. She was also an avid journal and letter-writer and those manuscripts that survive provide a rich insight, alongside her published work, into her deep and mystical relationship with nature, the intensity and complexity of her feelings for the border-country, her family, her lovers, and the often turbulent and conflicting emotions all of these evoked. Her autobiographical fictionThe Wooden Doctor(1933) came afterCountry Dance,followed byTurf or Stone(1934)andCreed(1936).Autobiography(1943) is dedicated to her husband, Michael Williams; it describes in detail her relationship with nature, with many passages taken directly from her journals.A Ray of Darkness(1952), her last published work, is a remarkable account of the diagnosis and treatment of her epileptic seizures, the illness from which she eventually died in hospital on her forty-ninth birthday.

Creed,the last of Evans’s novels, is probably the most challenging and ultimately the most thought-provoking of the four. It does not offer an ‘easy read’, nor did Evans intend it to.Creedtakes suffering as its subject matter, and powerfully and dramatically it questions and debates notions of belief, fate, religion – and sin. The novel opens with a self-lacerating sermon by Ifor Morriss, a self-confessed drunken, disreputable, dishonest Welsh parson who, basing his sermon on a verse from the Book of Job, proclaims to the congregation his belief in the fundamental holiness of each individual, no matter what their wickedness. The effect on the congregation is profound (there are only nine of them): they are ‘aghast’. But one man in particular, Francis Dollbright, is outraged. He follows the parson home and denounces him as a blasphemer. Up to this point Dollbright has been, quite simply, an unthinking regular churchgoer, but the effect of this particular sermon on his imagination is extraordinary and profound. The more he dwells on it, the more intolerant and moralistic he becomes. As a matter of principle he resigns from his job because John Bridges, his employer, lives with another man’s wife. Dollbright’s wife, not unreasonably, complains that she can’t see ‘any connection between Mr Morriss’s sermon and working for John Bridges’ and readers might well feel much the same: Dollbright has been well treated for fifteen years in Bridges’ employment. But he remains intractable even though his resignation plunges himself and his wife into poverty. Questioning the parson’s religious views turns Dollbright’s idea of the order of things upside down, the ground shifts beneath his feet, and the feet of those around him.

UndoubtedlyCreedis intended to disturb and challenge its readers. Few of the novel’s characters are attractive, while the neighbourhoods which they inhabit, Chepsford and Mill End, are not, to put it mildly, pleasant locations. There is a church steeple, but it has no real significance or presence in the landscape, it is simply echoed by the mill chimney:

Down those steps a maddened lorry driver flung his wife, breaking both her legs; from this door a brawl started which finished half a mile away with one man hammering another’s skull upon the pavement; over this squalid pub, reeking, ill-lit, two brothers fought, and one died, for its possession.

Ha, what a town! What a vital, wicked, boisterous town, which beneath its vigorous life, conceals a black current of despair and misery, and what people! Wild, vehement, laughing, whose two hands are generosity and vice, and whose eyes are weapons! (p.17).

Chepsford is Evans’s depiction of iniquity, and in this novel her love of nature predominantly takes the form of weather: relentless rain and wind.

Seventy years afterCreedwas published and fifty years after Evans died her loving, affectionate sister Nancy remembered the novel with disdain, pulled a face and said that she had never wanted to read a book about a second-hand clothes seller. Nancy was thinking of the character Mrs Trouncer, ‘very much like a mottled toad without the beautiful eyes. Her breath was dank as if her lungs were marsh plants’ (p.27). Nancy failed to notice or else didn’t appreciate her sister’s extraordinary use of imagery and deft use of plain language. For example, although the description of Dollbright’s country walk is a gothic and romantic expression of the extremity of his state of mind which lies firmly within a tradition of nature writing, Evans’s acute observations lift the passage beyond common-place prose. Dollbright walks beside the river, which

seemed to be pouring a ceaseless volume of water into a tunnel. The trees shivered as if no sun had ever touched them. The reeds and grasses were secret as a jungle. The wind was the only breath upon creation. The earth nursed it close, then it bounded from the lap and ran along the rim rapping a regiment of drums. Then it died, and the air drooped like a black flag from the heights (p.136).

Within a convention this may be, but the use of personification is unusual and imaginative. The movement of water, wind, earth and air presents a tangible sense of atmospheric conditions as well as implicit sound effects from the ‘ceaseless volume’ of water and the implied rustle of reeds and grasses. The military image develops the sound qualities, concluding with a drooping black flag, which lends the air oppressive weight. Evans’s prose is rhythmic and poetic throughout; often the effects are deliberately far from beautiful, but they are as striking as they are fresh, and that is one of the novel’s great strengths.

Perhaps Evans was responding to Nancy’s criticism at the time of writing, when she wrote this self-defensive moment into her fiction:

There are many I know who by this time will have picked up this book and put it down again. Having opened it, perhaps, read a page or two, they will pass their usual comment: ‘Why write about such people?’ I wish they would read to the end. Maybe they would find a line of their own likeness, though no one is in my mind as I draw it. I own thatIam here (pp.130-31).

That passage encapsulates one fractured realist convention, a moment of broken contract between writer and reader, for the third-person narrator has stepped out of the frame, owned that this‘I’is the writer speaking directly to us, momentarily ignoring or forgetting the fiction. Readers are invited to see themselves in ‘such people’ as if this is a morality tale, yet in the next moment the speaker denies that her characters come from life. Boldly she then re-asserts her own presence in the work: ‘I own thatIam here’.

Evans is present in her text in a number of ways. On the face of it,Creedis a third-person narrative, but intrusive authorial interventions in the text, like the one quoted above, problematise the whole notion of author and narrator, raising questions as to whether this is a first- or third-person account, or if indeed that simply changes from time to time in the text. The novel begins in the third-person: ‘Ifor Morriss was the Welsh parson of a large parish some three or four miles out of Chepsford’….It was winter, and turned out to be a wet night’. And the narrative continues in that vein. The narrator is omniscient, party to characters’ private thoughts and conversations. That is, until the description of Mill End, at the bottom of Chepsford with narrow streets, ‘the rattle of lorries…hissing of steam, and the churning of engines’ (p.13) – a place of factories and production – when suddenly the narrative voice intrudes in the first person: ‘This is Walls: when I live there I wonder whose eyes penetrate my windows’ (p.14). That is a surprising and cryptic sentence, and much later we discover that a character in the novel, Benjamin Wandby, ‘used to walk on stilts…proper ones, a yard high’. He looks into second-floor windows to discover folks’ secrets with flour on his face, a top hat, and long trousers to cover the stilts (pp.41-42). This grotesque, nightmare figure stalks through Chepsford: ‘People were very angry because they never heard me coming; even when I was watching them they didn’t always see me. I was a lad on those stilts, I can tell you! I saw plenty of queer things’ (p.41). Readers may or may not make connections between that odd first-person remark, with its suggestion of the conditional and the present tense – ‘when I live there I wonder whose eyes penetrate my window’– and the stilt walker, mentioned in passing much later in the novel, who does exactly that.

This technique of occasionally (and surprisingly) dropping the narrator’s omniscient voice and using ‘I’ is interesting. Evans was living in rural Herefordshire when she was working onCreed, apparently isolated from the debates of contemporary novelists and poets like Virginia Woolf and T. S. Eliot who were interested in exploring the limitations and the possibilities of language, of finding new ways of representing identity, memory, time, and the present moment in their writing. Nevertheless such preoccupations can also be traced in Evans’s work. Such difficult but exciting concepts don’t sparkle or advertise themselves on the surface of Evans’s writing but they are all present in one way or another, providing evidence of deep thought about her craft. The short but cryptic preface toCreeddemonstrates this. She asks how a writer can capture each moment, as nobody ‘has ever seen any complete thing instantaneously….All we see is one thing moving upon another. And in trying to render them, we rely too much on juxtaposition for their fidelity’. She uses the image of a picture of a boat which ‘floated’– or appeared to – creating the illusion of overcoming the limitations of two-dimensional representation. That is what she tries to achieve in her writing:

The reality of my manuscript is myself translating what I have learned into scribbled words on thin paper, pinned together with ordinary pins from a pink card, while the early day shines through the blind, as through an eggshell, and the dog in the stable raves at the chink of dawn under the door. (p.xviii)

By reminding us before we begin reading her story that it is an artefact, mere words on paper, she draws our attention to the process of writing fiction. She recreates the very moment she completes her preface by describing the light coming through the blind, the sound of the dog barking, and finishes it with the idea of constant change: ‘What I offer you as reading is real, though I outstrip every page and at the end am different’.

There is another moment inCreedwhich may help to understand what Evans meant by ‘real’. When the narrator interrupts a scene between Dollbright and his wife as they go to bed, the illusion that their relationship is real is deliberately destroyed, reminding us that this is fiction. It is only thewritingof the story that can possibly be ‘real’. This time, as the third-person narrative shifts into the first-person, Evans makes a comment that reflects on her own practice: ‘This is an odd way to tell a story – a bad way. It splutters like a lamp with water in the oil’ (p.56). This self-referential intrusion is another indication of Evans’s interest in the craft of creating fiction; her evident appreciation of the limitations of language and the conventions available to her echoes those of her much better known contemporaries. The intervention ‘This is an odd way of telling a story – a bad way’ predates T. S. Eliot’s lines from his poem ‘East Coker’ (1940): ‘That was a way of putting it – not very satisfactory:/ A periphrastic study in a worn-out poetical fashion. Leaving one still with the intolerable wrestle/ With words and meanings’.

Reading Evans’s journal entries contemporary with the writing ofCreed, it is evident she had significant emotional difficulties to cope with over those long months. Her father was dying, indeed died, in the room above hers while for three weeks she was on her own in the house, taking care of him. It was not an easy death and it haunted her long after the event. He was an alcoholic, and in his illness he continued to drink: ‘Whisky again,’ she writes in her journal, ‘He mumbles in his sleep: he holds horrible conversations with his loud dreams, I hear the rain, the crack of skylight, and his unearthly tones’; ‘his mouth is the mouth of a dying man: it falls open like a grave. His arm lying outside the bedclothes and his poor curled fingers are scraggy as a dead fowl’s foot’. Descriptions of the fictional alcoholic Mrs Trouncer inCreed –the whisky bottles hidden under her mattress and the horror of her delusions – may stem from Evans’s own experiences of her father’s addiction. But Peggy Whistler loved her father, while there is nothing loveable about Mrs Trouncer:

On her bed, in the dark, Mrs Trouncer was lying with crossed feet, in a ghastly stupor. Filled like a bloated sponge she was less asleep than steeped in reeking fumes. The sparks of consciousness exploded, madly amazed, fiery atoms too feeble to bring reason to the dizzy senses. Tomorrow she would lie there still, puffing out her lips and tugging at her ears, her yellow gaze fixed on her ultimate terror – death. (pp.29-30).

Menna, Mrs Trouncer’s daughter, like Evans herself, is condemned to listen to the suffering: ‘from her room she heard the moans and sea whispers, which continued all the night. It was a house of awful sights and shades which might stain the walls with the filmy silhouettes of appalling postures and deathly collapses’ (p.30).

The journal entries from the period when Evans was writingCreedare tormented, often as emotionally charged as her fiction writing. She was in a passionate relationship with another woman, Ruth Farr; at the same time she was consumed by unrequited love for her publisher, Basil Blackwell, a man old enough to be her father, fond enough to give her the beautiful leather-bound journal in which she endlessly wrote to articulate, understand, and dramatise her life. It is no accident then thatCreedis so emotionally highly charged. The characters Benjamin Wandby and Francis Dollbright are equally capable of lacerating themselves; for different reasons theirs too are tormented minds.

ButCreed’sviolence and intensity has a literary forebear over and above any lived experience, and it comes from Evans’s fascination with Emily Bronte. There is a curious dedication after the title page: ‘To Flo from Lil’. This formalises the handwritten inscription inside the 1934 copy ofThe Wooden Doctorwhich Evans gave to her sister Nancy. They shared a number of nicknames and adopted different personas for their own amusement, so on the fly-leaf ofThe Wooden DoctorEvans refers to herself and Nancy by no less than four different names: first the book is from Florrie to Lil; then from Charlotte to Emily, and last, to Sian Evans from her sister Margiad. ‘Emily’ and ‘Charlotte’ refer to two of the Bronte sisters, and are followed by the inscription ‘in honour of Nancy and Peggy’s expedition to London 1934’. Interestingly Margiad casts herself as Charlotte and her sister as Emily, while it was actually Emily Bronte who haunted Margiad throughout her life. Illness prevented her from writing the book she planned about Emily, but her essay ‘Byron and Emily Bronte’ was published inLife and Letters Today(June 1948). There she argues that the two poets were ‘affinities’ with ‘extraordinary similarity of diction…even to the constant use and close-set reiteration of certain terse and ordinary words – words which they invest with a vehement and vindictive purpose almost unique in letters’. Evans’s argument is based mainly on Bronte’s poems, not specifically her novelWuthering Heights, which nevertheless she considers a masterpiece. But her interest in Byron and Bronte’s use of language and ways in which they invest words with ‘vehement and vindictive purpose’ suggests her own register inCreed, which challengesWuthering Heightsin its relentless savagery.

Bellamy Williams and Menna Trouncer’s destructive love affair of contradictions, rejections and jealousies may lack the motivating force within Evans’s narrative that Catherine Earnshaw and Heathcliff’s has within Bronte’s, but it is still powerful. It rests less convincingly but just as destructively on Menna’s promise to her mother ‘to be with her anywhere’ (p.126) even though, as Menna tells Bellamy, her whisky-sodden mother would ‘rather put a light to me when I was asleep and burn me up than see me with you’ (p.126). Mill End collectively considers their relationship to be a ‘sort of fatal attraction mingled with tragedy’ (p.117), and no wonder, as the image of Menna rouses Bellamy ‘to hunger and furious rage’, and they ‘fought like tigers, with every cracking sinew’ (p.119). When they finally spend the night together, unable to resist temptation and Mrs Trouncer’s ultimatum, inauspiciously ‘Bellamy’s bedroom was cold as death, with a sweat of damp on the low ceiling’ (p.163). The description of him sleeping while Menna watches is extraordinary. As the light of dawn illuminates his face,

It seemed to rise from him, to break through the skin, like the loosened spirit lifting in the air. It might have been burning from some jet within the head which seemed to sleep in concrete, wrought and sealed in a statue. The hair fell back from the blank forehead and the neck lay like a fallen pillar (p.164).

This powerful portrait of life in death is achieved through the image of a broken concrete statue and the simplest of language: Bellamy’s body is observed not as a whole, but in parts; these parts are not ‘his’, but become ‘the skin’, ‘the head’, ‘the hair’, and ‘the neck’. Waking, he cries out ‘in terror’ because he has wasted precious time with Menna by sleeping. His remark after he tells her repeatedly that he loves her may fall short of the force and simplicity of Cathy’s ‘I am Heathcliff’ inWuthering Heights, but amounts to much the same thing: ‘Iwishyou grew on me. I wish there were no flesh between us’ (p.164). This unrealistic desire, together with the death of Menna’s mother the following morning, ensures that though they may marry, their future holds no more promise than Catherine’s and Heathcliff’s. InCreedonly the unmarried couple, John Bridges and Barbara Cater, lead a peaceful co-existence.

Florence Dollbright’s breast cancer, crucial to the resolution of her husband’s religious crisis, is cruel but it generates moments of kindness and sympathy in the savagery of the novel. Florence has female friends and neighbours. Long before Dollbright is told, Emily Jones feels the ‘hard, seemingly movable substance’ in Florence’s flesh and sobs with her as she insists that it must have medical attention. Margaret Wandby sits with her, the landlady of the public house sends pasties and Emily brings pears, declaring ‘you’ve got real courage, my dear’ (p.89). Barbara Cater, who lives in sin and reads literary theory, sends a silk dressing jacket as a gift and a note wishing her a speedy recovery. When Florence puts the jacket on ‘the wisps of her grey hair twined on the silk; her appearance was strangely clumsy and bedizened’, but she straightens her neck proudly and says ‘Well!’ (p.89). Her fear of the operation to come and the description of her admittance to hospital are sensitively drawn, from her perspective as well as from her husband’s. The kindness of the matron, the nurse, and the chatter of the other women in the ward eventually lift fear and responsibility from her as she lies in the cold bed, ‘She had only to be still. Living and dying were not her works’ (p.95). The delicacy of Evans’s writing touch comes in moments such as Florence gazing at scarlet geraniums through the wires of a bird-cage; or from her longing for the bunch of violets denied to her, and her purchase of bottle of scent. Florence is shielded from the malignancy of her cancer, as was common practice at the time; it is her husband who has to bear the truth, and it is he who has the last words of the novel as he defies and challenges God: ‘From your millions you have lost me, and all your aeons will never bring me back’ (p.178).

Evans lived her life on an emotional precipice, and turbulent feelings applied no less to her writing. Working onCreedshe wrote in her journal: ‘How I am tormented by not being able to get at my book, by words, similes, phrases of indefinable beauty which mock me like the skys and are blotted out by my fingers’. She was, perhaps, too close to the work to fully appreciate her own remarkable achievement in this passionate, unconventional and fascinating novel.

Further Reading

Evans, M., [1932] (2005)Country Dance, Cardigan: Parthian Books (Library of Wales)

Evans, M., [1933] (2005)The Wooden Doctor, Aberystwyth: Honno Press

Evans, M., [1934] (2010)Turf or Stone, Cardigan: Parthian Books (Library of Wales)

Bohata, K., and Gramich, K., (2013)Rediscovering Margiad Evans: Marginality, Gender and Illness, Cardiff: University of Wales Press

Caesar, K., (2012)Margiad Evans: Body, Book and Identity: an analysis of the novels and autobiographical texts, Milton Keynes: Open University

Dearnley, M., (1982)Margiad Evans,Cardiff: University of Wales Press

Lloyd-Morgan, C., (1998)Margiad Evans,Bridgend: Seren

I BEGIN to write, relying on the force and fine senses of each moment. That will be my strength. Nobody has ever seen any complete thing instantaneously. Such a vision would mean a pause, which there is not. All we see is one thing moving upon another. And in trying to render them, we rely too much on juxtaposition for their fidelity, and the reality of each separate point. That may be order; it is not creation.

A long time ago I went with an artist to look at an exhibition of pastels. I have forgotten all the pictures except one. It was not beautiful, not odd, not original. The subject was a boat lying silkily on a calm lake. But the boatfloated: it was united with the water, not joined to it. That was reality. The reality of my manuscript is myself translating what I have learned into scribbled words on thin paper, pinned together with ordinary pins from a pink card, while the early day shines through the blind, as through an eggshell, and the dog in the stable raves at the chink of dawn under the door.

What I offer you as reading is real, though I outstrip each page and at the end am different.

MARGIAD EVANS.

CHIEF CHARACTERS

FRANCIS DOLLBRIGHT—An ironmonger’s clerk

IFOR MORRISS—A parson

JOHN BRIDGES—Owner of the ironmongery

BENJAMIN WANDBY—A lodger at Dollbright’s

BELLAMY WILLIAMS—A mill hand

FLORENCE DOLLBRIGHT—Francis’ wife

MARGARET WANDBY—Benjamin’s sister

GWEN TROUNCER—A wardrobe dealer

MENNA TROUNCER—Her daughter

and others

I

IFOR MORRISS was the Welsh parson of a large parish some three or four miles out of Chepsford. Here is a list of his public sins. He was dishonest; he was irreverent towards the formula of the Church; he got drunk; he knew disreputable people; he sent his money spinning the wrong way round.

He had good reason to reproach himself for his way of living. It came to his ears that certain of his parishioners were meditating a complaint to the bishop. Therefore he paid many visits during one week asking people to appear at church the following Sunday evening. This request was prompted by reasons as subtle as his own beleaguered character.

It was winter, and turned out to be a wet night. After all his efforts only nine of his parishioners and one man from Chepsford were in the church. When the time came to preach, Ifor Morriss went up into the pulpit, lighted the candles and looking down on the people, started a glib text, hesitated, stammered and was overcome by sincerity. The blood rushed into his head and his ears; he waved his hands as if to put back a force. But the spirit of Truth tormented him.

‘I am going to pray.’

Kneeling he bent his forehead on his wrists. After a few minutes, he arose and announced in a firm tone:

‘Job, the nineteenth chapter and the twenty-fifth verse: “for I know that my Redeemer liveth and that he shall stand at the latter day upon the earth.” ’ He stared frenziedly, not knowing, what he might say in this bare mood, but the surge was too strong for him and he burst into unpremeditated speech.

‘My father was a minister on the shores of Bala. He died at night in its violent waters because he would not shirk a call from the other side. Thus was his faith, his desire, his whole ambition—to be an exact tool of God. He was a stony, rigid believer, an inexorable teacher who inflicted religion on me like a punishment. I was forced to regard sinners as “lost”—I sayregardand notthink, for there was no thought in it. I had no more of religion than the sting of its tail; as a boy suffers the rod I suffered my father’s faith, and bore only the stripes. I had no religion, I say; only fear, the fear of being cast out from the hope of reward and the meek bliss which my father promised to the obedient in the name ot his relentless inspirer. Only fear. Do you know what that means? Do you know what it is to have your judge come upon you like lightning, to blast you? Do you know what it is to be flat to the earth and be afraid to lift your face? To breathe in submission to an appalling hereafter, to see Hell beyond death and death at hand? To pray without hope and without comfort? To live on the margin of damnation in the torment of impotence; and to have your defencelessness hurled at you daily?

‘I know. But with growth came the inevitable subterranean suspicions, the unuttered doubts, and at last a cowardly outward acceptance, which was a shell around a withered belief. Yes indeed, my faith rattled within me like a dried-up kernel which I ought to have spewed up and buried, but I was afraid. What enlightened me? You shall hear. There were one or two books in the Bible which I was ordered to study sparingly—this book of Job among them—because my father discerned in it a reasonable insurrection, and the lines of profound reflection. I did not read it with intelligence until I was nearly twenty, and then I shuddered in the dark at its power!