Strangers

Book 433: Virago Modern Classics

by Antonia White

Genres: General Fiction; Classics; Coming of Age; Literary Fiction; Women's Fiction

Synopsis

With uncompromising clarity, in her careful, delicate prose, antonia White looks at the pains and joys of growing up, of falling in and out of love, the borderlands between love and loneliness, sanity and madness, belief and the loss of faith. First published in 1954, STRANGERS is here extended to include her autobiographical story, 'Surprise Visit'; together they present some of Antonia White's finest writing.

Release date: May 5, 2011

Publisher: Virago

Print pages: 181

Sample

The book for which Antonia White is best known, Frost in May (1933), is not merely an unusually vivid ‘school story’ set in a convent. It pits an emergent individual will against a highly
formalized discipline of behaviour and thought. There is a clash between Nanda’s developing aesthetic sense and the restrictive
intellectual authority of the Church (‘I don’t want poetry and pictures and things to be messages from God, I want them to
be complete in themselves’), between her strong emotional needs and the nuns’ disapproval of intimate friendships, and between
her self-conscious, anxious assimilation of a new faith and the habitual belief of the girls who are born Catholics.


Nanda, a nine-year-old convert when she enters in 1908 and a fourteen-year-old rebel when she leaves, may resist the convent
disciplines, but she is mentally concentrated and exercised by them. The three ‘sequels’ to Frost in May, written in the early Fifties, show the Nanda character (renamed Clara) passing unhappily through a series of enclosed worlds
which are travesties of the convent’s security: her own home, coloured by her scorn for her mother and her over-dependence
on her father’s approval; the country house of an aristocratic Catholic family, where the son and heir is accidentally killed
while under her care; the tatty claustrophobic love-nest in Chelsea (‘the Sugar House’) where her first puerile marriage fails to be consummated ; and the asylum, where she is taken by her father, after the violent exhilaration
of a brief love affair with a young soldier has tipped her over into insanity. Up to her incarceration, Clara is increasingly
possessed by lassitude, apathy, and ‘an overall sense of guilt, not localised, as if … for some mysterious sin she did not
remember having committed.’ The legacy of her father’s emotional demands and of the convent’s training is a fear that her
mental state may be a mortal sin: ‘this sense that something in her had died and already exhaled a faint odour of corruption.
A terrifying text slipped into her mind: “The lukewarm He shall spew out of His mouth.”’


The fictions are to a large extent autobiographical. Like Jean Rhys, and like Colette (whose novels and stories she translated),
Antonia White draws over and over again on the same key areas in her life: the convent, her madness, the asylum. She began
writing Frost in May in 1915 after her expulsion from the Convent of the Sacred Heart at Roehampton, but before she took it up again in 1933 there
had been a traumatic young-adulthood. Soon after her attempt to make a career as an actress, and her first marriage, she had
a mental breakdown and was in Bethlem Asylum for ten months. When she came out in 1923 she went through the humiliating process
of an annulment, married again, and lost her faith. She had a daughter by another man, her second marriage was annulled, and her father died feeling entirely disappointed in her. In 1930 she married Tom Hopkinson, by whom
she had a second daughter. (All this was ‘played out against a background of work’ as a copy-editor and journalist.) During
the 1930s there were frequent recurrences of what she referred to variously as ‘neurasthenia’, a ‘mental smash’, ‘accidie’,
or ‘the Beast’. She had four years of Freudian analysis (‘a pretty rigorous mental discipline’), was divorced from Hopkinson
in 1937, and returned to the Church in the early 1940s, a process recorded in the series of letters published in 1965 as The Hound and the Falcon (reissued in 1980 by Virago).


In these letters Antonia White refers ruefully to one of the side-effects of her mental history:

I’m bad about writing and have a definite jam in my mind about it which may be permanent. I have a superb collection of beginnings … When you consider I wrote the first two chapters of Frost in May when I was 16 and the rest when I was over 30 you’ll see how unresponsive and slow the machine is.


Her slow rate of creative work (as distinct from ‘ephemeral journalism’ of which she wrote ‘about 150,000 [words] a year’),
and her need repeatedly to recover certain crucial experiences, explains the range and nature of this volume of stories. Three
of them date from before the completion of Frost in May in 1933. Of these, ‘The House of Clouds’ (1928) anticipates the Bethlem section of Beyond the Glass (1954), which makes some additions, transpositions and changes (the ‘house of clouds’ becomes a ‘house of mirrors’) but which
is extraordinarily close to the pre-analysis version of almost thirty years before. ‘The Saint’ (1928) introduces several
of the characters and episodes of Frost in May, though it is written in the first and not the third person, and has a more comical, chatty tone than the novel. Only one
story dates from the ‘writer’s block’ period, a disturbing, callous little satire called ‘The Exile’ (1935). There are three
stories from the 1940s. One, ‘The Moment of Truth’ (1941) returns her to a marriage which is breaking up because of the wife’s
mental illness and the husband’s infidelity ; one, ‘The Rich Woman’ (1943) anticipates the treatment of her first marriage
in The Sugar House (1952). In the last story (not previously collected) the wheel comes full circle: ‘The Surprise Visit’ (1965) records a return
to Bethlem, now the Imperial War Museum. Antonia White did make such a return visit in 1941, and mentions it lightly in her
letters (‘I’ve seen my old cell with a case of shells in it and a radiator which we lunatics would have greatly appreciated!’).
But the need to recover the past stays with her. In the story, the woman who goes back succumbs to her memories of the place
and collapses into insanity as though the fifteen intervening years have not been, though her intention was to undertake the
visit ‘coolly and unemotionally, at the right, the scientific moment.’


The pull between the controlling writer, digging up her past as though she were her own analyst, and the unredeemed, ‘untreated’
self in the fiction, unable to make coherent shape of, or distance herself from her state of mind, is characteristic. It’s
a strain which is both risky (the story may fail to get itself written at all) and fruitful, in that it informs the best of
Antonia White’s work: Frost in May, ‘The Moment of Truth’, ‘The House of Clouds’ and its matching section in Beyond the Glass. It reflects a temperamental quality: there is, she says, ‘something in my nature which is touchy, harsh and, to many people,
repellent. For myself that harsh streak is the only thing I value in myself and the thing that gives me any hope of some day
doing some good work.’ Analysis has strengthened that quality: ‘The net result of this is that I do know a little about myself,
as one might know a little about the engine of a car, and roughly what I can and cannot expect of the machine.’ But it’s also
a noticeable attribute of one kind of woman’s writing: the same shaping of dangerously unstable material is found in Virginia
Woolf’s treatment of Rachel’s delirium in The Voyage Out (1915) and of Septimus’s madness in Mrs Dalloway (1925), in Jean Rhys’s rendering of a kind of self in Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), and in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s baroque monologue of growing ‘madness’ in The Yellow Wallpaper (1892).


All Antonia White’s stories have a susceptibility to material details which emerges in the lighter pieces simply as sharp
decoration: the scum on the tea-cup and the ‘white ring round the iris’ of Miss Hislop’s eyes in ‘The Exile’ ; the smell of
the nurse and the vulgar statuette on the Cottage Hospital mantelpiece in ‘Strangers’ Aunt Rose’s mildewed clothes and the
dusty furnishings of her tiny flat in Vienna. In the more disturbing stories details become alarming, unreliable. The husband’s
swinging dressing-gown on the wall of the ship’s cabin, or the sea-spider brought to the dinner-table by the sinister Mme
Berrichon in ‘The Moment of Truth’ turn themselves into elements of a hostile universe. Flowers, furnishings, clothes and
ornaments all act as parts of Belle Chandler’s ‘plot’ against the younger girl in ‘The Rich Woman’. In ‘The House of Clouds’,
a remarkable and distressing document, objects are dislocated, overbearing, either as participants in Helen’s delusions (‘She
could see birds flying across the sky, not real birds, but bird-shaped kites, lined with strips of white metal that flew on
wire’) or as tools of an inexplicable persecution:


The nurses caught and dragged her along a passage. The passage was like a long room ; it had a shiny wooden floor with double
iron tracks in it like the tracks of a model railway.


A young man with a signet ring on his finger was bending over her, holding a funnel with a long tube attached. He forced the
tube down her nose and began to pour some liquid down her throat.


In all the stories a twofold pain is felt. One aspect of this is the battle between an individual will and a stronger authority.
As in Frost in May, the girl or woman pushes herself against what restricts her (the convent rules, the asylum’s crude constraints, the husband’s
supervision, the ‘rich woman’s’ coercion) to the point of self-destruction or self-abnegation. The other aspect is, as the
volume’s title indicates, a sense of strangeness. ‘ “Why look at me as if I were an enemy?” ‘the husband says to Charlotte
in ‘The Moment of Truth’. ‘“Not an enemy. A stranger,” she said wearily.’ That alienation between couples (also the subject
of ‘Strangers’) is a symptom of a more profound estrangement between the self and the environment it must inhabit: hence the
emphasis in Antonia White’s work on institutions like hospitals and convents. ‘“I can’t inhabit the present any more”’, Charlotte
says. It’s a predicament enacted by the characters in the stories and by the writer of them, who must spring on herself a
series of ‘surprise visits’ into her own past to see what she ‘can and cannot expect of the machine’.


Hermione Lee, York 1980

Quotations are taken from the Virago editions of Antonia White’s four novels and from The Hound and the Falcon, Virago 1980.


ON the stone floor inlaid with coats of arms, only a few couples were dancing, yet the hall was filled with the lisping of feet.
The music was as insistent as the band striking up when a man falls from a trapeze.


‘Hardly anyone is dancing,’ said Charlotte to the unknown man beside her, ‘yet whenever I put out my hand, I touch someone.’
But the stranger seemed not to have heard her. All his attention was taken up with the piece of string which he was twisting
into elaborate bends. At first she was hurt because he was ignoring her. Then she realized . . .