SOURCE: "The Mind & Creative Habits of Elizabeth Madox Roberts," in … All These to Teach: Essays in Honor of C. A. Robertson, edited by Robert A. Bryan and others, University of Florida Press, 1965, pp. 237-48.

Elizabeth Madox Roberts (1881-1941) deserved and deserves more readers than she had or has for her twelve books: seven novels, two volumes of short stories, and three volumes of poetry. [In the Great Steep's Garden (poems, 1913), Under the Tree (poems, 1922), The Time of Man (a novel, 1925), My Heart and My Flesh (a novel, 1927), Jingling in the Wind (a satirical fantasy, 1928), The Great Meadow (a historical novel, 1930), A Buried Treasure (a novel, 1931), The Haunted Mirror (stories, 1931), He Sent Forth a Raven (a novel, 1935), Black Is My True Love's Hair (a novel, 1938), Song in the Meadow (poems, 1940), and Not by Strange Gods (stories, 1941).] Only two of these twelve were well received, and a third fairly well: The Time of Man, The Great Meadow, and Under the Tree. Readers now are better able to understand and appreciate her nine volumes of fiction, not only because of the illuminating books of Campbell and Foster, Rovit, and McDowell [Harry M. Campbell and Ruel E. Foster, Elizabeth Madox Roberts, American Novelist (1956), Earl H. Rovit, Herald to Chaos: The Novels of Elizabeth Madox Roberts (1960), and Frederick P. W. McDowell, Elizabeth Madox Roberts (1963).], but also because the vogue of the novel of violence and of the staccato style, so noticeable in the 1920's through the 1950's, is passing. Although her achievements were greater than was realized by her contemporary readers, her handicaps as literary artist were probably greater than she understood or was able to overcome.

It is the purpose of this essay to suggest a few of the strengths and weaknesses which justify this judgment. The briefest way to do this, perhaps, is to take a close look at her second novel, My Heart and My Flesh ["crieth out for the living God," Psalms lxxxiv: 2], on which Miss Roberts worked for sixteen months and about which she wrote her publisher (Viking) thirty-seven letters, only a few of which have been published. For the most part, the novel was composed on two water fronts: three-fourths of it by the Pacific in Santa Monica in the winter of 1926-1927 and the rest in Chicago in the spring and early summer of 1927. The last major parts to be rewritten before sending the manuscript away were the long symbolic prologue (which, to the uninitiated reader, is an unfortunately bewildering and mysterious introduction to the novel) and the passages dealing with music, one of the major motifs of the novel.

Although My Heart and My Flesh is not extraordinarily subtle, to the first readers the profoundly significant theme and philosophic implications were not fully clear or impressive. One reason is the vagueness of the long symbolic prologue, better omitted or read last even by the later reader; and another reason is the relatively small amount of external conflict and action in the narrative. Yet the close reader of 1927, particularly if he remembered The Time of Man, perceived that this second novel continued the theme of spiritual death and rebirth, but with the material circumstances of the leading character and the sequence of happenings reversed. In this respect My Heart and My Flesh is complementary to The Time of Man, with contrasting social class, tempo, and direction of movements, as Miss Roberts points out in a note left among her manuscripts.

The Time of Man is organized around the age-old journey motif, or, more noticeably, employs the American motif of extreme mobility, especially the Southern rural tradition of the wandering individual with a hungry heart, "down one road and up another and down again," "aways a-looken at everything in the world and expecting to see something more," "on and on, without end, going, day and night and day and rain and windy weather, and sun and then rain again, wanting things and then having things and then wanting," the eye never satisfied with seeing nor the ear filled with hearing. This first novel, featuring the peasant class, but only as poetic symbol, is a story of irregular additions, Ellen Chesser beginning with scarcely anything more than the breath of life and slowly adding, to quote a manuscript note of the author, "minute particle by minute particle … sounds, sights, friends, lovers, material possessions, memories, intuitions, defeat followed by renewal."

In contrast, her second novel, My Heart and My Flesh, though set in the same rural area, was designed as an experiment in reverse. It is as if she were now writing a novel, not about poor whites but about the patrician landowners mentioned in the first novel, the Wakefields and the MacMurtries, as she notes in a fragmentary letter written while she was just getting under way with the novel. But these landowners are now conceived of as in gentle decay, again symbolic of a great Southern social change of the nineteenth century. The accent is not on social change, however, but on individual character as affected by the way she reacts to drastic reverses. My Heart and My Flesh is a story of subtraction, the central character (Theodosia Bell) beginning with family prestige and property but already headed toward relentless loss until she is left with scarcely more than the breath of life, and she tries to destroy even that before she is resurrected. Among her notes Miss Roberts left an undated, revealing comment to herself about her method and intent in this second novel:

The method here was a steady taking away until there was nothing left but the bare breath of the throat and the simplified spirit. The work begins with a being who has been reared in plenty and security. She has the pride of family, of wealth (as such goes in the South of our country), a pride in being the honored and petted child of parents, a pride in personal charm and in popularity with friends and associates, and finally a pride in musical skill and in a boundless ambition to play the fiddle well. All these gentle conceits are gathered into the person of Theodosia.

One by one these things are taken from her to the upbuilding of her understanding and the growth of tolerance and wisdom through suffering. Each of these is lost and more. Lover, pride in ambition and the fiddle hand, pride in family, and at length the house in which her family had dwelt—all of these go from her. Friends are lost. Stability is lost and she gives herself in loveless passion. Food is taken from her and health goes. Finally half crazed or more by her condition she lives a brief hell of confusion and despair, warmed and fed by only the stupid lover and his passions. Sunk to the degradation of the nether hell, she lived thus for a winter.

It is the story of a woman who went to hell and returned to walk among you.

Out of the icy waters of the frozen pond where she had gone in spirit and determination, being ready to make the last dash from the door that would sweep her into the water to drown, she experienced a resurrection. Spirit asserted itself over the necessities of death. She prepared an orderly departure from her hell, informed by judgment or the knowing and thinking, the associative entity of her being. She went from the aunt's farm and let chance find a way for her again among living men. In the end is the rare lover, the maker of fine cows, the adoring voice among the distant barns singing, or the hand that led her about over the pasture to show her the cattle and the mind to offer her companionship and a shared living among these excellent things.

These contrasting terms, "addition" as applied to The Time of Man and "subtraction" as applied to My Heart and My Flesh, like all opposites, are relative and reciprocal terms. Neither one has meaning except as it is related to the other. Both Ellen in the first novel and Theodosia in the second lost; both gained. Both reacted to their experiences in such a manner as to gain strength and wisdom. This is the main point the novelist keeps making: the significance is not the precise thing which happened to the characters but how they reacted to what happened to them. Throughout her writing career Miss Roberts kept suggesting the polarities of experience (as did one of her favorite writers, Jules Laforgue), the cooperation of opposites, life's contradictions, the dualism between election and damnation which is a part of the American Puritan tradition.

My Heart and My Flesh introduces several related themes. It may be considered a study in the decay of gentility, the fall of the House of Bell, miscegenation and incest, the transformation of adolescence into maturity, the mysteriousness of memories, the presentness of the past, the capacity to prevail through endurance as if man's first duty were to live, the effects upon character of various reactions to suffering where there is not the will to suffer (as there is in some Hemingway novels), or catharsis achieved through suffering when aided by sensitivity to phenomenal nature and responsiveness to simple human affection—all themes which were to recur often in her eight remaining books. Two other parallel themes, however, seem nearer the central intent of the author. One is a longing for the identification of spirit, or a yearning to discover a reality beyond fact (what life essentially is, so elusive, so bewildering), an intense search for the permanent underlying so much change. Like Ellen in her first novel, Theodosia is "aways alooken at everything in the world and expecting to see something more." Theodosia was always "looking more deeply within, parting thought and thought, parting the semi-dark which lies between," to use the author's words. The title of the novel features this search: "My heart and my flesh crieth out for the living God." This is the theme stressed in the first half of the book, and it is made appealing by the haunting pathos of Theodosia's absolute aloneness, her mother dead, her father a lecherous and conscienceless reprobate, her grandfather impoverished and defeated by the decay of the world he loved, one lover jilting her and another burned up accidentally. This near-desperate search for the meaning of life is dramatized for the reader about a third of the way through the novel by an image of lonely Theodosia before a waning fire in the bedroom of her dying grandfather: "When all the subtractions were made, the naked man was left.… There should be a soul there somewhere, she thought, and she searched into the withered leavings of crippled body and quavering voice. When she had found this entity in her grand-father she would, she thought, be able to identify it within herself." This haunting search is intensified by Theodosia's primary mode of self-expression (the violin) and also by the associative imagery of the highly symbolic prologue, about which more will be said shortly. Theodosia is in somewhat the same mood as Pascal was three hundred years before: "When I consider the brief span of my life, swallowed up in the eternity before and behind it, the small space that I fill, or even see, engulfed in the infinite immensity of spaces which I know not, and which know not me, I am afraid, and wonder to see myself here rather than there, for there is no reason why I should be here rather than there, now rather than then" [Pensées]. The more clearly central theme, however, as has been mentioned, is the age-old one of withdrawal and return, or death and rebirth, which was to be a recurring theme in her later writing and the central one in her seventh novel, Black Is My True Love's Hair. Professors Campbell and Foster comment on the frequent recurrence of this theme in Miss Roberts' books and also its prominence in the Old Testament, one of the strong influences on Miss Roberts: in the stories of Noah, for instance, Jonah, Joseph, and especially Job. Theodosia dies and is recreated. She answered affirmatively Job's echoing question: "If a man die, shall he live again?" None of the American naturalists (Crane, Norris, or Dreiser) would have depicted this new birth, even if they could understand it, because they did not believe in being born again. Theodosia survives, not because of her physical fitness or accident or luck, but because of her moral progress in working toward the will to live as a dignified and divine human being. The two simple but great influences in effecting this therapy, in bringing about this resurrection, are sensitivity to rural nature and responsiveness to unsophisticated true love, the ego having established a working relationship with the non-ego. From a letter which Miss Roberts wrote to Louise McElroy in Springfield, Kentucky, when she was just getting a good start on this novel, we know that these two themes (search for a reality beyond fact, and death and rebirth) were at the heart of her intention: "I have tried to develop some essence," she wrote her friend, "such as we may call 'the human spirit.' … It is a story of a woman … who went to hell and came back, who was impaled on the very topmost and last and most excruciating pinprick of suffering and privation. By moving all accessories I hope to make live a spirit, a most inner essence, a will-to-live. It is a large problem, a difficult undertaking perhaps, but necessary."

Miss Roberts mistakenly thought she could help communicate this double theme by experimenting with an ambitious narrative technique in the prologue, beyond her full mastery, but interesting; and now with the benefit of her notes clear enough. This thirty-three-page, over-subtle prologue is a fantasy employing associative imagery, and the cosmic consciousness of Luce (symbolically "light"), ranging over time past, time present, and hinting at time to come. This long stream-of-consciousness introduction is supposed to represent timelessness and omniscience, as the main part of the novel, coming to us through Theodosia, represents transiency. As she wrote to Harriet Monroe, she intended this symbolic prologue to serve as the introduction to a whole cycle of novels she had already in mind, and indeed her fourth novel, The Great Meadow, does serve as an introduction to the House of Bell, here in her second novel falling. Luce lives in Mome (which represents Covington, Kentucky, where Miss Roberts went to high school), whereas the world of Theodosia is probably in Washington County, Kentucky. Among the Library of Congress papers is a long manuscript called "The Book of Luce," showing Miss Roberts' lifelong fascination with this method of treating symbolically whole cycles of time. Professors Campbell and Foster aptly compare this intriguing prologue in her second novel to the prelude of a symphony. By the time the reader gets to the end of the prologue he has left the infinite consciousness of Luce and is supposed to be entering the finite, sensitive consciousness of Theodosia. In a note, Miss Roberts says of her technique: "The mind here to be entered is the mind of the woman, Theodosia. The process begins with a Knower, an Observer, Luce, a sensitive onlooker. The narrative moves slowly into Theodosia's mind, beginning in the mind of Luce, seeing Theodosia first from the outside, moving more closely and intently into her experience until it becomes identical with her consciousness."

Other interesting characteristics of Miss Roberts' style here and elsewhere are her abundant use of symbolism, her use of music as a major motif, her strange attraction to dreams as a means of deepening meaning (not immediately clear to the hasty reader of My Heart and My Flesh), surrealistic dialogue, her large use of appropriate folklore, and her lyric prose. Her use of symbols throughout her writing, influenced by her liking for Laforgue, Corbière, and Virginia Woolf, is too pervasive for treatment here. Three years before her first novel she had written a note of advice to herself which might be taken as the aptest possible motto for all her work: Cultivate, she says, "the way of symbolism working through poetic realism."

The symbolic use of dreams is illustrated vividly in this novel by Theodosia's four blurred and prescient dreams on the night her lover burned up, and more suggestively by the dream … [Roberts's] publisher objected to and got her to modify a little: one she has in a moment of nodding as she is becoming nauseated at her repulsive father's recollections of lechery; she saw a parade of vague haggard women in the midst of whom her naked father appeared, blown up into a gigantic symbol of excessive sexual vitality.

As with her symbolism, Miss Roberts' large use of appropriate folklore can only be suggested here. It pervades all her books and provides the title of her most elusive book, Black Is My True Love's Hair. In the novel we are discussing she uses folk speech, Negro work songs, proverbial sayings ("See them-there hens out eaten grass in the rain? When you see hens out in the morning eaten grass in the rain, that's a sure sign hit'11 rain all day"), folk health practices (like drinking hog's blood), and folk songs.

Characteristically, Miss Roberts couldn't find a title conveying precisely the right thematic implication. Some of the titles she considered before settling on My Heart and My Flesh are: "L'Abondante," "The Abundant Woman," "Plenitude," "Behind Green Pastures," "Field Lovers," "Proud Fields," "Without a Name," "The Glittering Sword" (from Job), "The Sparks Fly Upward" ("Man is born unto trouble as the sparks fly upward," Job), "The Chronicle," "The Season's Return," and "Full Circle." No subject occurs so often in her thirty-seven letters to her publishers about this novel. These are fascinating letters because they tell so much about her intent as literary artist. There is room here for only a third of one of these letters, addressed to Mr. Huebsch of Viking and now in the publisher's files:

August 7, 1927

Dear Mr. Huebsch:

I have worked on titles all week and have written three full pages of them only to scratch most of them out after a little. The difficulty is this. A title throws an emphasis somewhere and this book is already complete in itself. I see it lie out before me continually as a complete design. There are only a few ideas that I seem willing to stress. One is the person, the woman involved. Another is the land.

Many thanks for the suggestion, "As the Sparks Fly Up-ward." It is indeed all the things you say of it. It throws an emphasis on the idea of trouble, however, and seems to me to throw the design out of plumb a little. It is good, though, and I lean toward it. My ideal title would center to the woman and her abundance as a sensitive body and mind. It would be such a word as the French adjective abondante used as a noun L 'abondante, and I have cast about to try to find an English equivalent, but there is not any. "The Abundant Woman" and all such are rejected. "The Time of Man" gets in the way of any title with "woman" in it. Such an idea as this word would convey is exactly what I want. It would cover the abundance of the woman's trouble or sorrow and her discipline. It would include her as a lover and a living spirit. It is a great title and I wish the book might go into French so that it might be used.…

I wish I had the musician's privilege of merely numbering my work. A title is an impertinence.…

Though not popular, My Heart and My Flesh is a significant novel, as is most of Miss Roberts' fiction. Why, then, was it (is it) not more popular? Here are half a dozen suggested reasons.

1. Miss Roberts was too much concerned with man in general and too little with individual man. After her first novel, she let a veil come between herself and the coarse-grained world. Because of her unmarried, somewhat shy, and solitary nature, she lived and wrote as one removed from life in action. Like one of her favorite writers, Virginia Woolf, she lived in an ambiance of ideality, to borrow a phrase coined by Elizabeth Bowen. Rovit considers her second novel more like a case history than the presentation of a struggling individual.

2. In most of her fiction there is too little external action and possibly too little internal tension, especially physical tension. The internal action is probably intense, but more like a severe and unremitting headache and heart-ache than a shock, and readers in her day wanted to be shocked. Theodosia, for instance, suffers acutely, but she is an enduring sufferer rather than a defiant one; until the end, she undergoes rather than acts. The reader misses the appeal of overt, urgent struggle.

3. Like most of her other fiction, My Heart and My Flesh is a novel of erosion and rebuilding in an age when we were experiencing an epidemic of violence, whether in international war, labor disputes, or gangsterdom, and when the novel of violence was understandably in vogue. My Heart and My Flesh is devoid of overt violence. In fact, there is in it too much humble acceptance and too little rebellion, ranting, and disillusionment for the American public of the 1920's. As in the novel of violence, Miss Roberts reveals our animality, but unlike most specialists in this genre she also reveals the human capacity for self-sacrifice and love. A novel like My Heart and My Flesh takes time to show the process of the development of character, whereas the novels we preferred when Miss Roberts was writing are those beginning near the climax (like a short story or drama) and featuring strenuous and dangerous action, not growth. As Professor Frohock points out, the plot of the novel of violence is like that of a drama more than the conventional novel: it is concerned with mounting tension, climax, and then resolution of tension.

4. McDowell thinks the chief weakness of her second novel is the lack of forceful "subsidiary characters and setting" to reinforce the theme.

5. The carefully modulated sentences, her poetic diction and imagery, and her successful attempt at symbolism through poetic realism were out of harmony with the staccato style of the Hemingway school and also the rhetorical exuberance and vehemence of Faulkner. This, let us hope, will come to be to her honor and glory. My Heart and My Flesh is poetic in a period when the content and the mood of the strenuous novels we bought were not suited to poetry.

6. Miss Roberts' unmastered technical experiments (especially in this her second novel, in the fantasy Jingling in the Wind, and in Black Is My True Love's Hair) hindered public understanding. Without a little help, the average reader does not fully comprehend her aims in most of her novels, except The Time of Man and The Great Meadow. With only a small amount of help, however, provided by recent studies, her rich experimentation can be understood and appreciated.

One could mention half a dozen commendable features equally compelling. Miss Roberts deserves, and probably will come to receive, more favorable attention than she experienced when living. She is better than our literary historians have discovered yet.