characters assert their individuality and independence. Elise in Imagined Corners consciously sacrifices her ‘respectability’ on the altar of freedom and, consequently, lives a life of banishment and exile; Elizabeth Shand’s rejection of Scotland and of men is a somewhat revolutionary renunciation of her roots and her marriage; and Annie Ritchie’s pursuit of a meaningful identity in Mrs Ritchie drives her to practise the most horrifying and domineering tyranny.
The institution of marriage is rendered virtually meaningless and moribund by the force of this necessarily strident and assertive individualism; Muir paints an overwhelmingly pessimistic picture of the relationship between men and women. Hector and Elizabeth’s relationship, for example, is the product of a purely primitive and physical attraction and is utterly devoid of any emotional or intellectual communion. Each of them is in love with an ideal partner and a model marriage; and not with a realistic sense of self and other. Their entire relationship is apparently built upon a rôle-play of social constructs.
Johnny and Annie’s marriage in Mrs Ritchie is also born out of deceit and disguise. The young Annie Rattray’s mask of gently wooing womanhood utterly blinds Johnny to the terrifying harridan within—and ultimately traps him into the baleful hell of a loveless and soul-destroying marriage.
[T] he warmth, the answering, absolving tenderness that he was entreating remained locked away and inaccessible, locked up like the prim, clean house and to the door that guarded it Johnny Ritchie could not find the key.
The only apparently positive and mutually fulfilling union within these two novels is Elise and Karl’s undoubted love match—but this relationship has, significantly, been consigned to a mythical past before Imagined Corners actually begins. And the reader gradually learns that even the liberated and independent Elise has been a reluctant muse and mother to her beloved Karl.
Her vitality, he had said, was all he needed to provide him with vegetative material on which to feed … Women were like grass, he said; they were the fundamental nourishment … Anonymous nourishment, thought Madame Mütze, remembering how she had objected to the description.
Muir was only too aware of the painful and frustrating invisibility which was implicit in ‘nourishing’ a poet.
Muir’s own artistic creativity and the trail of her narrative occasionally become submerged beneath a tide of professional psychologising. Mrs Ritchie was justifiably criticised by various contemporary reviewers for its spate of abstract theorising and its disconcerting resemblance, in places, to a psychological ‘case study’.
Dislike untouched by the humour that turns it to satire or by the humanity that gives the miscreant at least the semblance of a sporting chance, is a dangerous emotion for the artist; and the acrimony shown here towards the subject is not of the kind that vivifies creation. In spite of the careful photography of the details, the lingering thoroughness of the dissection, the result is nearer to science than to art, and not to the more vital form of science.4
And yet this justifiable criticism ought not to blind the reader to the powerful and profound story which lurks behind the almost overly academic analysis. The alienatingly unsympathetic portrayal of Annie Ritchie in the novel’s later pages is amply counterbalanced by the earthily attractive figure of Bet Reid and the sensitively delineated character of Sarah Annie. The novel also offers an uncompromisingly and uncomfortably explicit indictment of the rationale and the horrifying reality of the Great War. Muir always described the 1914 war as ‘the great shock in my adult life … which knocked me to pieces for a while’;5 and Mrs Ritchie embodies her abhorrence of the false incitements by which men and nations are driven into conflict.
What made it ghastly was the systematic organization of warfare under the banner of Bunk, making chaps fight for Bunk called patriotism or Bunk called God. A man could fight and be reconciled to his enemy and quit fighting; but Bunk could go on fighting for ever and ever. Amen … A man could use his fists, or even a bayonet, a bomb, or a rifle, but Bunk used big guns and tanks and poison-gas. A man could kill his enemy and be quit of him, but Bunk preached immortality and kept alive a mob of vengeful ghosts.
Muir’s own voice and vision are never far beneath the surface psychologising, politicising and philosophising of her fiction. She was utterly incapable of dissociating herself from her critique of the actions and the actors in her fiction. By the same token, versions of herself and of her life populate each of her novels to such an extent that autobiography and fiction become inseparable; we are brought face-to-face with the author through her writings. Imagined Corners is a virtual retelling of Muir’s Montrose childhood and portrays the author in the combined Elizabeths; a later and unpublished novel entitled Mrs Muttoe and the Top Storey is an undiluted record of the three happy years which the Muirs spent in Hampstead in the early 1930s; and The Usurpers, a 1950s novel about her post-war experiences with the British Council in Prague, is almost libellously factual.
There might even be a certain desperation in this relentless mirroring and expression of her own life and personality. Willa Muir’s adult life was haunted by a fear of the anonymity of the ‘poet’s wife’; of being merely the willing catalyst to Edwin’s creativity; of being silenced by his greatness. It was a fear without resentment; she loved him passionately, completely and enduringly. But occasionally, and especially in her later years, she was wistfully regretful about the conscious sacrifice of her own claims to literary eminence.
I am a better translator than he is. The whole current of patriarchal society is set against this fact, however and sweeps it into oblivion, simply because I did not insist on shouting aloud: ‘Most of this translation, especially Kafka, has been done by me. Edwin only helped.’ And every time Edwin was referred to as the translator, I was too proud to say anything; and Edwin himself felt it would be undignified to speak up, I suppose. So that now, especially since my break-down in the middle of the war, I am left without a shred of literary reputation. And I am ashamed of the fact that I feel it as a grievance. It shouldn’t bother me. Reputation is a passing value, after all. Yet it is now that I feel it, now when I am trying to build up my life again and overcome my disabilities: my dicky back-bone for instance. Because I seem to have nothing to build on, except that I am Edwin’s wife and he still loves me. That is much. It is more in a sense than I deserve. And I know, too, how destructive ambition is, and how it deforms what one might create. And yet, and yet, I want to be acknowledged.6
It is a tragically modest request, and one which her lifetime never granted. The publication of this collection of her writings is the first real recognition of her qualities as a writer and as an intellectual. We can at last re-evaluate her work and assure her of her deserved place within the Scottish canon.
And yet we must beware the natural and proprietorial urge to nationalise her. Paradoxical personalities are resistant to simple classifications. Her Scottish pedigree and her alliance with the writers of the Scottish Renaissance should not blind us to her internationalist qualifications. Nor should we glibly slot her into the ‘feminist’ category, simply because she was a woman writer with a female agenda. She was, throughout her lifetime, denied her literary independence and individuality; now her reputation deserves its autonomy.
This volume is a celebration of the life and work of Willa Muir.
Kirsty A. Allen
1. Willa Muir in a letter to Violet Schiff. Dated from Montrose, 25 November 1924. From the collection of Muir/Schiff correspondence in the British Library, London.
2.
