{"id":152513,"date":"2021-05-12T12:47:31","date_gmt":"2021-05-12T16:47:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=152513"},"modified":"2021-05-12T12:47:31","modified_gmt":"2021-05-12T16:47:31","slug":"more-pain-than-anyone-should-be-expected-to-bear","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2021\/05\/12\/more-pain-than-anyone-should-be-expected-to-bear\/","title":{"rendered":"More Pain Than Anyone Should Be Expected to Bear"},"content":{"rendered":"

In Re-Covered, Lucy Scholes exhumes the out-of-print and forgotten books that shouldn\u2019t be.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Photo: Lucy Scholes.<\/p><\/div>\n

I first came across the poet and short story writer Frances Bellerby\u2019s fiction when I was working on my Ph.D. My subject was sibling relationships in mid-twentieth-century British literature, and some dusty avenue of research led me to Bellerby\u2014a name I had not come across before and haven\u2019t since, bar this article on the treasure trove that is the Neglected Books website<\/a>\u2014quite a few of whose short stories feature brother-and-sister pairs. Ultimately, I didn\u2019t reference her work in my finished thesis, but neither did I forget some of the haunting images therein. Two children in the gloaming, the descending darkness bringing with it a premonition of war. The strange out-of-body experience of a child\u2014a reaction to witnessing a horrible accident\u2014that momentarily renders her unable to identify the scratched and bloody hand in front of her as her own, caught on blackberry brambles. Or simply the tableau of a cozy drawing room on a winter\u2019s evening, seen through the eyes of a child for whom it\u2019s usually out of bounds, a fire roaring in the grate, the heavy curtains drawn against the cold night outside, and a striking blue vase filled with brilliant bronze chrysanthemums.<\/p>\n

Returning to Bellerby\u2019s stories this year, I was relieved to discover that they\u2019re every bit as remarkable as I\u2019d remembered. All the more so, in fact, when I learned how the death of her beloved brother, Jack\u2014killed, age eighteen, in World War I\u2014influenced much of what she wrote. Sadly, Jack\u2019s death was only the first in a series of tragedies that blighted a life marked by considerably more pain and suffering\u2014both physical and psychological\u2014than anyone should be expected to bear, let alone spin into accomplished, poignant writing. As fellow poet Charles Causley wrote on the occasion of Bellerby\u2019s death, in 1975, she was \u201ca true original.\u201d <\/p>\n

Bellerby was born in Bristol in 1899. Her childhood was dominated by the socialist mission work of her father, the Reverend F. Talbot Parker. He, his wife, and their two children lived among the city\u2019s very poorest residents, where the Reverend felt his work was most needed. It was a spartan, isolated existence marked by self-sacrifice, the psychological effects of which reached far beyond Bellerby\u2019s youth. She married John Rotherford Bellerby, an economist-turned-activist, in 1929, though the couple separated after a decade or so. From then on, Bellerby lived alone\u2014initially at Plash Mill, a thatched cottage on the edge of Bodmin Moor in Cornwall that inspired much of her poetry, imbuing her work with that \u201cpowerful sense of place\u201d Causley so admired. Following serious illness\u2014she was diagnosed with cancer in both breasts, treated with a grueling thrice-weekly course of radiation only to be told it had been unsuccessful and she had only months left to live, before being saved by a double mastectomy\u2014she relocated to Devon in the early fifties, where she lived until her death. Bellerby had no children, though whether from choice or circumstance, it\u2019s unclear. Her unpublished notebooks hint that she suffered gynecological complications as a consequence of a freak accident in June 1930 that, in her own words, \u201cruined my adult life\u201d: a back injury sustained from an awkward fall that left her crippled. From this point on, pain was her ever-present companion. Add to this, if you can imagine it, the mental anguish caused by first her brother\u2019s death and, later, \u00a0in 1932, her mother\u2019s suicide, after which Bellerby wrote, \u201cI suffered and broke and died with her.\u201d<\/p>\n

Bellerby\u2019s first published work appeared in the Bristol Times and Mirror<\/em> in the early twenties. In 1927, she took a staff job as the drama critic in the paper\u2019s London office, though her tenure there was short-lived. She published Shadowy Bricks<\/em>, an educational tract written in the guise of a novel set in a fictional rural progressive school, in 1932. Not long before, Bellerby\u2019s husband had founded The Neighbours, a small volunteer organization for general social welfare\u2014\u201cone of the many idealistic though highly theoretical attempts at that time by middle-class intellectuals to awake a social conscience at the plight of the poor,\u201d explains Bellerby\u2019s editor Robert Gittings in his introduction to the 1986 Enitharmon Press edition of her Selected Poems<\/em>\u2014and he harnessed her literary talents in service of spreading the word about their cause. Of Shadowy Bricks<\/em>, the TLS<\/em>\u2019s critic noted that if it hadn\u2019t been for the Bishop of Liverpool\u2019s enlightening introduction, \u201cwe might have read on some considerable way before realizing that we were being instructed.\u201d<\/p>\n

Although her first collection of short stories, Come to an End<\/em>, was published in 1939, it wasn\u2019t until she\u2019d separated from her husband that Bellerby began producing her best work. According to Gittings, she \u201cnever considered herself a novelist\u201d; nevertheless, it was the favorable reviews and sales of Hath the Rain a Father? <\/em>(1946)\u2014a novel that draws heavily on her childhood, in particular her relationship with her father\u2014that encouraged her to publish her first collection of verse, Plash Mill <\/em>(1947).<\/p>\n

Bellerby remains best known\u2014if remembered at all\u2014for her poetry, of which she published three further volumes, as well as two more short story collections: The Acorn and the Cup <\/em>(1948) and A Breathless Child <\/em>(1952). Copies of these are relatively hard to find, so I had to content myself with reading the Enitharmon Press edition of Selected Stories <\/em>(1986), chosen and edited by Jeremy Hooker. When one surveys the breadth of her career in this single volume, what stands out is the guile and grace with which she depicts a child\u2019s-eye view of the world. \u201cIt has always seemed to me much stranger that we should forget than we should remember, early childhood,\u201d Causley reports Bellerby once remarking. Not that these are stories of innocent childhood idylls. On the contrary, death is ever present, a curtain that\u2019s about to fall, smashing the known world to smithereens in the process. She pinpoints the true terror of such moments so precisely, preserving, as if in aspic, that second in which everything changes and nothing is ever the same again. This, perhaps, is what helps her avoid any sentimentality; as another critic in the TLS <\/em>praised, \u201cshe keeps a certain healthy core of hardness and objective observation in her writing.\u201d<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

One of the most memorable and dazzling examples of this destruction is \u201cThe Cut Finger,\u201d a story in which five-year-old Judith has her worldview rearranged twice over. The first instance deals in wonderment and joy; the second, devastation and despair. The story opens with Judith\u2019s mother asking whether she\u2019d enjoy a winter trip to the coast\u2014Judith\u2019s ailing father needs the sea air. The child replies in the affirmative, calm almost to the point of disinterest, but really, she\u2019s \u201castounded and overwhelmed\u201d by what\u2019s more a revelation than an invitation:<\/p>\n

It was too new to be accepted with equanimity, too far outside her experience actual or imaginative. It had never been realised by Judith that the seaside continued beyond the golden stretch of summer holidays. Yet now all in a moment she had to grasp that it was possible to go there when tangerines, tinsel and holly were still realities.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The second of these Damascene moments occurs once the family is ensconced in their new lodgings. Sent outside one afternoon to play alone in the garden, Judith accidentally cuts her finger. Tiptoeing into the still house, she spies her father resting on the sofa in the sitting room. \u201cPoor Daddy,\u201d she thinks innocently, as she climbs the stairs in search of her mother, \u201che must <\/em>be tired for he wasn\u2019t even reading.\u201d But awaiting her aloft is a scene that destroys \u201cthe whole familiar world and scattered in ruthless confusion all her trusted values\u201d: her mother, \u201cface downwards, crying<\/em> \u2026\u2009\u201d This ellipsis marks a rending in the fabric of Judith\u2019s world. She creeps away, back into the now twilit garden, skulking like a wounded animal, replaying the \u201cappalling\u201d scene: \u201cThis cherishing omnipotence writhing face-downwards on a bed, sobbing into the pillow\u2014so that the whole world, yes, the whole established world, had been blown sky-high and come hurtling down in fragments anyhow, anywhere.\u201d That these two opposing moments bookend the story provides a formal elegance that further elevates the power of the piece, but Bellerby often uses elusive but integral structural mechanisms to convey meaning in her stories. \u201cHer verse demonstrates, to a remarkable degree, the closeness of the observer to the observed. With great subtlety, experience is seen to be freshly re-created, renewed, and transmitted unerringly to the reader,\u201d wrote Causley\u2014praise that also applies to her prose.<\/p>\n

In both \u201cPre-War\u201d and \u201cThe Carol,\u201d for example, a carefully positioned em dash signifies a sudden dissolution of life itself. In the former, twelve-year-old Roger and his nine-year-old sister, Anne, climb up onto the roof of their house, where he affixes a flag-flying toy soldier to the stones, under which he carves their initials and the date: 1\/1\/11. \u201cI\u2019m going to leave something here that\u2019ll stay for ever,\u201d he tells Anne. \u201cYears and years on other people will be living here, another vicar of this parish and his wife and their sons and daughters, and one of the sons, perhaps with a kid sister, will climb up here like we have, perhaps on some New Year\u2019s Day, and then he\u2019ll find\u2014this!\u201d The prospect of this unspecified future in which she and her brother play no part suddenly overwhelms Anne, and like the little girl blackberrying in \u201cPoor Martha\u201d\u2014a scene from which I described at the beginning of this essay\u2014she, too, endures a strange sense of physical dislocation. \u201cDown there all was just as usual,\u201d she thinks looking out around them, \u201cbut up here nothing was as usual, nothing at all\u2014\u201d<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, in \u201cThe Carol,\u201d a young man seemingly visiting his childhood home after some unspecified absence is suddenly confronted by his own death. As he mooches about his bedroom, whistling the same carol that\u2019s been stuck in his head for years, his eye is caught by a snapshot in which he\u2019s wearing a uniform: \u201cNoticing written words at the foot of the photograph, he read: \u2018Killed in Action at Givenchy, Aged 18, August 8th, 1915.\u2019 This gave him a tremendous shock\u2014\u201d This revelation is immediately followed by a line break, the tumbling final sentence of the story suddenly switching to the point of view of his grieving mother:<\/p>\n

So when his mother, hearing, as she often did, the softly whistled carol, ran upstairs and opened the door to look in, the room was, as usual, empty.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

*<\/p>\n

The date of the boy\u2019s death matches that of Bellerby\u2019s brother, Jack. Impatient to do his bit, Jack had enlisted at eighteen\u2014though gave his age as twenty-two\u2014and was blown to pieces only months later. Before he left for France, he apparently told his father that he knew he would be killed, but that it was a better fate than returning maimed. As Gittings explains, Bellerby \u201calways regarded this death \u2018which I saw through tears, as absolute perfection\u2019 in the light of a triumphant fulfilment of his own wish.\u201d Not that this offered her any comfort. Instead, she describes Jack\u2019s death as having broken her and her parents\u2019 lives apart, a view she reiterates in the story \u201cWinter Evening,\u201d in which a woman, thinking back long after the fact, declares that the war \u201csplintered her brittle world.\u201d With this knowledge in mind, the fear expressed by the sister in \u201cPre-War\u201d becomes uncannily prophetic; the absence she visualizes is that of her brother\u2019s impending death.<\/p>\n

In Women\u2019s Fiction and the Great War <\/em>(1997), Nathalie Blondel argues that Bellerby spent the rest of her life replaying this grief in her fiction. \u201cPeople live double lives\u201d in Bellerby\u2019s stories, Blondel explains: they exist in the land of the living while also \u201cdwelling in memories of the dead.\u201d Like Sabine Coelsch-Foisner\u2014who, in her chapter on women\u2019s writing in the first half of the twentieth-century in The British and Irish Short Story <\/em>(2008), argues that \u201cBellerby\u2019s stories typically convey a halt in the continuum of life and verge on the unspeakable\u201d\u2014Blondel highlights how Bellerby demonstrates this linguistically: \u201cthe estrangement of the bereaved from the world of the living is imaged through their estrangement from language itself.\u201d<\/p>\n

The impact of her brother\u2019s death manifests most explicitly in these stories that make direct reference to the war, but grief filters into many of the other pieces, too: \u201cCome to an End,\u201d in which a father struggles to tell his son that the boy\u2019s little sister has been killed in an accident, or \u201cSuch an Experienced House,\u201d another unexpected ghost story, in which a musically gifted child creeps downstairs one night to find out who\u2019s playing the piano so beautifully, only to be confronted with an apparition of herself at the keys. As Hooker makes clear, Bellerby\u2019s stories are, \u201cin many cases, fictional transformations and projections of the experiences which shaped her life.\u201d He goes further, arguing that she\u2019s \u201ca haunting writer because she herself was haunted by what she had suffered and seen, and sought to understand,\u201d something that also helps to explain her interest in phantasmagoria.<\/p>\n

Bellerby is one of the six women short story writers that Coelsch-Foisner discusses, but she\u2019s the only one whose work is out of print today. The rest\u2014Virginia Woolf, Katherine Mansfield, Sylvia Townsend Warner, Jean Rhys, and Elizabeth Bowen\u2014aren\u2019t just discussed in academic volumes like that in which Coelsch-Foisner\u2019s chapter appears, they\u2019re some of the most famous white women writers of the first half of the twentieth century. Bellerby, meanwhile, is all but unknown. She didn\u2019t publish prolifically like Woolf or Townsend Warner; nor did she move in the right literary circles, like Bowen; nor still, burn briefly but brightly, like Mansfield. In many ways, Rhys is her nearest counterpart. Not only did both women live in relative anonymity and isolation\u2014and, even more of a coincidence, not that far from each other, first in Cornwall and then in Devon\u2014the two were also unhappy and desperately lonely. \u201cDesolate. Desolate. Desolate. Frightened, broken, alone,\u201d reads a heartbreaking entry in one of Bellerby\u2019s notebooks from the sixties, when circulatory trouble left her further incapacitated and in additional pain. The difference, of course, is that Rhys was plucked from obscurity and given the chance at a blazing second act: despite her ongoing battle with alcoholism, she published her best and most famous novel, Wide Sargasso Sea<\/em>, in 1966, after a hefty twenty-seven-year silence. Bellerby, meanwhile, enjoyed no such late-in-life rejuvenation. As happens with many writers, she faded away, and so did her work. Yet her resilience\u2014although not such a flashy story\u2014deserves our acknowledgement and admiration. She continued to write and publish poetry until the bitter end. Gittings writes that a newly printed copy of Bellerby\u2019s final volume, First-Known and Other Poems<\/em>\u2014which was dedicated to her long-dead mother\u2014was put into its author\u2019s hands only two days before she died.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Lucy Scholes is a critic who lives in London. She writes for the\u00a0<\/em>NYR Daily,<\/em>\u00a0the<\/em>\u00a0Financial Times,<\/em>\u00a0The New York Times Book Review,\u00a0and\u00a0<\/em>Literary Hub, among other publications. Read earlier installments of\u00a0Re-Covered<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Frances Bellerby remains best known\u2014if remembered at all\u2014for her poetry. Her remarkable stories depict with guile and grace a child\u2019s-eye view of the world.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1670,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[46439],"tags":[67827],"class_list":["post-152513","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-re-covered","tag-featured"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nMore Pain Than Anyone Should Be Expected to Bear by Lucy Scholes<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Frances Bellerby remains best known\u2014if remembered at all\u2014for her poetry. 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