To Be the Outsider: On Olive Moore's "Spleen"
Olive Moore | Spleen | Dalkey Archive Press | 1930, 1996 | 133 Pages
The British writer Olive Moore is one of the great forgotten figures in literary history. While still in her twenties, she published three novels and a book of essays in the five year span between 1929-1934. A prolific bout of brilliance, she seemed to establish herself as a watershed figure in literary modernism, taking up a spot in the pantheon alongside Virginia Woolf, Djuana Barnes, and Dorothy Richardson. But, much to the literary world's bemusement, Olive Moore never published again. She simply vanished.
Her novel Spleen, originally published in 1930, is announced on its cover as “among this century’s most original and provocative novels of ideas.” Yet Olive Moore remains a writer all but unknown. The Dalkey Archive began publishing her collected works in the early 1990’s, but she remains on the outskirts, rarely referenced by literary critics or academics. As The Dalkey Archive says, she is the “best-kept secret of British literature.”
Spleen is considered Moore’s best novel and rightly so. Like all of her work, it manages to be both experimental and readable, morbid and beautiful. Told through a blurred, jumbled chronology, it is the story of Ruth, a British woman living on a remote Italian island with her severely disabled son. Arriving with her newborn baby Richard, Ruth is perceived by the local residents as “not a little mad and very determined”; an “Englishwoman who was never seen to handle her own child, but gave it to others to wash and feed and showed distaste when they caressed it.” Richard has a disability which means he does not recognise Ruth and cannot communicate. Her pregnancy was unwanted. “She was horrified at the possession of herself by this thing.” Ruth does not accept the idea that women have innate maternal instincts. “They like pretending that all women are born mothers. They like pretending that because women have to be mothers, born or not.” But when her baby is born and she is told of his condition, her reaction is stark.
She was sobered and appalled. It was terrible to her. It was as though in a drunken stupor one man had hit another, and they came and said to him: he is dead.
Believing Richard’s disability was caused by her antagonistic feelings towards him in the womb, Ruth blames herself. As penance, she goes into self exile with the baby. Leaving her wealthy husband, she voyages to an unnamed island in the Gulf of Naples, spending the next twenty two years in isolation. Richard’s extreme disability and Ruth’s unfeeling, selfish disregard are deeply uncomfortable and hard to reconcile. It’s been suggested Moore is using disability as a modernist technique, to disrupt typical patterns, a way of re-centring the narrative expectation. I think Moore is working in the extremities of moral character for a reason, choosing symbolism over realism. By giving birth to Richard, Ruth has a reason to escape what is a comfortable lifestyle. She chooses to self imprison. It is an affirmation of her outsiderness, granting her further permission to take against life and remove herself from it. Richard is evidence in Ruth’s rally against hope. Her cruelty is intentional, why shouldn’t women be hideous? Why not reject it all, even being a mother. She understands the world to be unjust and herself deserving of punishment.
Ruth is complex, forthright, and the perfect combination of intelligence and bellicosity. Content to be the outsider, she is willfully unusual. At times her attitudes appear progressive, but often they are embittered and sharply offensive. She is frustrated by the myth of a so-called “pre-ordained” female character, yet believes women to be feeble and inferior to men. “Had it been left to men,” she says, “centuries of creation would have produced something more vital, more exciting.” Her politics are a puzzle. When War arrives in 1914, her rebuke of its violent absurdity is dazzling and profound.
It seemed a matter of hundreds of thousands of tons of high explosives against hundreds of thousands of men who had nothing whatsoever against each other, and were being ladled, thrown-in, fed into the slaughter with such a lip-service of brave sounding finality as to turn the onlooker to stone: to something tearless and without sound, so cold, so premeditated, so inexorable was the hourly slaughter of men who had nothing whatsoever against each other.
Towards the end of Spleen Ruth wonders if her punishment was in fact necessary. She is aware of a new kind of woman, “keen eyed, fleshless, arrogant.” She admires their independence and bravado but imagines “she would grow old and leave the world exactly as she found it.” It is typical Ruth, the quintessential existentialist, unable to find purpose or meaning beneath the stinging black shards of her argument. On returning to London after her husband's death, she looks out at crowded streets with “everybody being so splendidly brave about nothing, about nothing at all.” A family catches her eye. “The man looked carved: the woman dried: the child bled: the dog inflated.” Despite the despair, her prose is somehow lifting.
Olive Moore’s real name was Constance Vaughn. Thanks to recent discoveries by research student Sophie Cavey, we now have a fuller picture of her life. We know she worked for a British industry magazine called Scope, writing and interviewing in its pages for many years. Her autobiographical entry to Authors Today and Yesterday in 1933 says “There is little to tell you, or that matters about me. I am by nature solitary and contemplative, very happy, very morose.” Perhaps it is her recalcitrance, or her complex, circuitous prose that has prevented Olive Moore gaining the acclaim she deserves. But to any reader who puts language and inventiveness above all else, she will always be considered as one of the very best.