Alyse Gregory (1884-1967) is one of the many as yet unrecognized
American women modernists of the early twentieth century who
unfortunately suppressed her ambitions in order to fulfill the
role of the ideal wife according to the precepts of nineteenth
century “true womanhood.” Her second novel, King Log and Lady
Lea (1929) candidly discusses the options available to women
at the time. It opens with a marital breakfast scene which
introduces the reader to Mary and Richard Holland. Mary, who
recognizes that after two years of marriage “her experience had
closed in about her and was contained only in the figure of her
husband” [p.4], likens herself to a “wounded gull shot while
flying over a swamp” [5] – the same bird that years later would
lend its name to the title of Gregory’s diary. In spite of this
self-knowledge, willing to forsake her writing, betray her
well-developed artistic tastes, and sacrifice her peace of mind,
Mary throws all her intellectual and vital energy into ensuring
her husband’s well-being. In order to afford him some
distraction from the quiet life of the country, she invites
Celia, a young woman he had known before his marriage, to spend
a few days with them. The amorous triangle that ensues and the
final tragic death are narrated by Gregory with psychological
insight and poetical intensity.
Gregory had made her position as to modernist experimentation
clear in her reviews for the Dial, of which she had been
Managing Editor till her marriage to Llewelyn Powys. She wanted
language to be “simple and selective,” capable of expressing a
clear thought, and she objected, for example, to what she saw as
a lack of “dignity, simplicity, and restraint” in H. D.’s prose
[1].
King Log and Lady Lea does not always achieve the
simplicity and restraint that Gregory sought, veering, at times,
dangerously close to melodramatic sentimentality, but the
invisible narrative voice, strictly channeled through the
consciousness of the characters, is distanced and controlled in
spite of the torments of agitation that Mary, Richard or Celia
occasionally surrender to. Gregory is sufficiently in command of
the narrative to allow for subtle moments of comical insight,
such as when Celia praises Mary’s playing the piano, and
Richard, who had never considered his wife in any way talented,
is surprised – and feels “his own importance enhanced in
consequence” [29]. New York, where part of the novel takes
place, and the countryside are also portrayed as experienced by
the characters: for example, we are not told that Richard ran up
the steps as he pursues Celia toward the end of the novel, but
that “The tracks above as he took the last step up the curb
seemed to descend upon his head, the pavement to rise up like a
perpendicular plane” [181]: thus the city participates in the
human drama that unfolds on its streets. Similarly, in one of
the many scenes in the country, nature is made into an active
element in the minimal plot: “When would the first yellow irises
come, and the pickerel weed, they [Mary and Celia] wondered,
hoping that both would be together to view them, for each drew
away with fear from the thought of separation” [85].
As Anthony Head in his sensitive introduction to the Sundial
edition of this novel states, there is “an undeniably personal
nature” in the events that Gregory recounts in King Log and
Lady Lea. However, the novel cannot be considered a model
for Llewelyn Powys’s Love and Death: an Imaginary
Autobiography (1939); Gregory’s novel is not a Proustian
reclaiming of “the significance of past life through creative
reordering,” which is how Peter Foss presents Powys’s novel
[2]. Rather, Gregory is attempting to exorcize – and
imaginatively compensate for – a very recent past and its
impending reiteration. The novel can be read as an attempt to
come to terms with the anguish that her husband’s infidelities
caused her but also as an attempt to justify her tolerance of
Powys’s insensitive behavior – and to imaginatively explore the
possible results of a woman leaving her husband.
Although it is generally assumed that the novel is based on
Llewelyn Powys’s relationship with Gamel Woolsey, Gregory’s
letters home reveal that she was already busy rewriting her
first draft in September 1927 – and feeling fairly optimistic
that it would be much more successful than She Shall Have
Music, her first novel [3]. The direct inspiration
for King Log and Lady Lea would have been Powys’s
affair with Betty Marsh, a young woman he had known before he
married Alyse Gregory; Powys did not meet Woolsey until after
their return to Patchin Place in November 1927. In an undated
letter to Malcolm Elwin, Gregory explains how, soon after her
marriage to Powys, she had agreed to Betty’s visit, thus
establishing a precedent for the later relationship with
Woolsey. She had always valued her independence and solitude and
by giving her husband the liberty he sought gained a certain
measure of freedom for herself – a license she would never take
advantage of. Although in King Log and Lady Lea she
examines the consequences of conjugal freedom, the novel is more
fictional than autobiographical. If, as Jacqueline Peltier in
A Woman at her Window rightly points out, descriptions of
Celia coincide with the descriptions of Gamel Woolsey in The
Cry of a Gull, this is because Gregory would continue
rewriting her novel till it was published at the end of 1929,
incorporating characteristics of the woman who was indeed to
become one of her closest friends.
The question of a lesbian relationship is inevitably raised by
King Log and Lady Lea; Rosemary Manning remarked on this
possibility, but dismissed it, saying “That her [Mary’s]
relationship with Celia is lesbian is hinted at, but is
unimportant. The story’s power is in the alliance of these two
women against the man they both love”
[4].
I agree with Manning that this is not a significant issue in
the novel, which is much more than an examination of female
friendship. The themes of the novel focus on fear of the natural
processes of life: ageing – particularly for women – and death;
on the total solitude of human beings that is never fully
assuaged even by the beauty and variety of nature; and on the
impossibility of real communication and interpenetration with
others – achieved in nature but rarely by humans. It is also
about the sexual life-force of women that post-Victorian society
strove to deny, and the lack of understanding between human
beings and particularly men and women.
Gregory does not focus exclusively on how female friendship
empowers women in her attempt to understand human behavior; her
capacity for psychological insight and her admiration for
Freud’s theories does not allow for a simple resolution to the
human triangle created by Richard. Mary does not want to hurt
her husband by leaving him suddenly; although she recognizes
that her life had folded in on itself after marriage and that
she had lost – and misses – the independence of mind and action
that she had previously enjoyed, on some level, she still loves
Richard and pities him. Celia’s allegiances, however, have
turned exclusively to Mary and, through Celia, Gregory captures
the fears, insecurities, and jealousies that plague all
relationships. Pity and jealousy lead to a series of fraught,
almost melodramatic scenes that culminate in a tragic street
accident. Mary’s sense of obligation to Richard, and her
inability to fully confide in Celia because she sees her as
thirteen years younger and so a rival on the sexual arena come
close to destroying the women’s friendship. And yet Gregory ends
the novel on an optimistic note; a tune spiritedly played by an
Italian band offers Mary a promise of fullness of life, and – we
hope – a renewal of the bonds of friendship.
The title, King Log and Lady Lea, might appear puzzling:
Gregory confided in her mother that it did not fully please her
but that she had not been able to come up with anything better.
The phallic log – representing felled virility – and the fallow
lea of the title dispel any hints of a lesbian focus to the
novel, and concentrate on the sterile male/female relationship.
King Log could be a reference to Aesop’s Fable of “The Frogs who
Desired a King,” alluding to women’s presumed need of a master,
as expressed by Herr Hugo von Stirner in his cameo appearance in
chapter nineteen of the novel. But Gregory herself gives us
another possible interpretation: she prefaced the first edition
of the novel published by Constable in 1929, with two
quotations, the second a variant of the nursery rhyme:
London bridge is broken down,
Dance over my Lady Lea;
London bridge is broken down,
With a gay ladye.
Lady Lea – sometimes spelt Lee – has been variously identified,
but could be Lady Margaret Wyatt, a childhood friend of Anne
Boleyn who accompanied the doomed queen as she awaited her fate
in the tower. In that case, and Gregory’s erudition was
far-reaching, the reference could be to the loyalty of women’s
friendships.
The other quotation, the first four lines of Shakespeare’s
Sonnet 41, “Those pretty wrongs that liberty commits” seems to
exonerate infidelity as a trifling misdemeanor. Although the
betrayal in King Log and Lady Lea is committed by
Richard, it is Mary who, true to social prejudices, feels
guilty. She takes responsibility for having invited Celia, for
being older and therefore of less interest to Richard, for
enjoying her newly-found female friendship with Celia, for being
angry at Richard’s callous behavior. At no point does her
husband even entertain the thought that he has done wrong; he is
incapable of seeing the events from her point of view or of
understanding how he has hurt and offended both her and Celia –
nonetheless, Gregory, by her sensitive portrayal of Richard’s
tormented mind, makes him into an amiable character whose
predicament rouses the reader’s compassion. Mary’s obligation
was to construct and safeguard his faith in his virility and in
his social and artistic talents; the moment she strays from this
path, his sense of identity is shattered: he finally sees
himself as “a figure puerile and insignificant. . . . To whom
could he cling? Who was there to comfort him? . . . He was a
Philistine, a failure” [18]).
King Log and Lady Lea
rehearses imaginatively the opinions on marriage that Gregory
expressed in her diaries and, more publicly, in articles
published in literary journals in the early twenties and in
Wheels on Gravel, a collection of essays that came out in
1938. “The Dilemma of Marriage,” an article in the New
Republic on 4 July 1923, is a radical statement against
monogamous marriage and the unequal treatment of women in a
nation that had just recently, in 1920, given women the right to
vote. Gregory, who had fought for suffrage, and who by this time
was living with Powys, but not yet married to him, audaciously
affirms that “It is hardly an exaggeration to say that most
monogamous marriages are compromises based upon mutual illusion,
and maintained by fear” [15]) – and fear is one of the essential
components of all the relationships in King Log and Lady Lea.
By 1938, when she published Wheels on Gravel, which
includes an essay of the same title, her views had been tempered
by her experiences with Powys and by time itself, although she
continued to believe in the polygamous nature of humankind and
in the positive aspects of polygamy. To add weight to her
argument she turned to Nietzsche, whose Dionysian joy of life
she struggled to make her own, a joy she projects onto Mary:
“Life means for us constantly to transform into light and flame
all that we are or meet with”[5].
However, Gregory – as is Mary – is fully aware of the tension
created by the need for tenderness and security as opposed to
this need to live adventurously. She insists that a woman who
loses the love of her husband/companion to another woman should
not feel belittled, for such a loss bears no “stigma of
dishonour” [76], and the suffering caused by feeling “her own
worth annulled” and seeing herself “shorn of every charm” [75]
can be combated by “intelligence – intelligence and more
intelligence” [77]. And yet, as she had written in Wheels on
Gravel, “Women create the illusions in which men thrive and
themselves perish in the illusions they create” [63]. In her
earlier, imaginative, recreation of the theme, the women do not
perish: Richard’s obvious infidelity stirs Mary to reflect on
how and why she has transformed herself from the independent,
fearless woman she had been before her marriage, to virtual
non-existence: “she had nearly vanished altogether” [41] as she
says of herself. But at a critical moment in their relationship,
Mary reflects that “If he no longer loved her she had nothing to
lose in being herself” [49].
The carefully prepared and designed Sundial edition of King
Log and Lady Lea makes this novel by Alyse Gregory available
after many years to the general public, and together with
Hester Craddock, her third novel, published by Sundial Press
in 2007, should do much to affirm Gregory’s position as a
modernist writer of stature. King Log and Lady Lea, a
study of infidelity and the struggle to overcome fear of
solitude, is still valid today and probably more likely to
attract readers than the later novel.
Barbara Ozieblo
NOTES
[1]
Alyse Gregory. “A Poet’s Novel.” The Dial,
November 1927, 417-19.
[2]
Peter J. Foss. “The Proustian Equivalent: A Reading of Love
and Death. Powys Journal. Vol. 7, 1998, 131
[3]
Gregory’s letters to her mother are held in the Beinecke Library
of the University of Yale.
[4]
Rosemary Manning. “Alyse Gregory: A Biographical Sketch based on
her Published and Private writings.” Powys Review. No. 3,
1978, 90.
[5]
Alyse Gregory. Wheels on Gravel. London: John Lane The
Bodley Head, 1938, 73.
The Powys Society Newsletter, No 71, November 2010
Available from
The Sundial Press
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