I have surrendered up my spirit

My Margiad Evans Reading Project, part three

The frontispiece which Evans created (as Peggy Whistler, the birth name with which she signed all her illustrative work) for her 1933 novel The Wooden Doctor depicts her protagonist and narrator, Arabella, in uneasy sleep. Her small dog nestles at her back. Jug and wash bowl are at hand. But a shadow lies across her body: a twisting, biting fox, the novel’s persistent motif.

Daughter of an abusive alcoholic father and an emotionally-absent mother, adolescent Arabella becomes passionately attached to the family’s Irish doctor when he brings her calmly through an episode of illness. She will spend the ensuing years battering that passion on the closed doors of her impervious ‘Wooden Doctor’.

O clair de la lune.
Mon ami Pierrot,
Prête moi ta plume,
Pour écrire un mot.
Ma chandelle est morte,
Je n’ai plus de feu,
Ouvre moi ta porte,
Pour l’amour de Dieu.

Margiad Evans

An unhappy sojourn at school in France does irrevocable damage to Arabella’s ties of family and conscience. Banished, with a slandered reputation, to her home in the Welsh Marches once more, she develops chronic attacks of abdominal pain; agonies which she visualises as a fox ‘scratching and rending to get out,’ and which naturally gain her the Wooden Doctor’s attention and personal care. Diagnoses prove incorrect, invasive examinations are inconclusive. The question of a psychosomatic cause is raised but never answered. She is told that she must live with the pain, that she will grow out of it. Thus, pain and love are alike. Alike, they devour her.

People whom I knew only by sight brought me flowers and books; they came upstairs and talked fluently. I smiled at them gratefully, but all the time I wanted them to go away and leave me to soothe the rampant fox, the cruel exacting fox that no kindness, no presents, no knowledge could placate.

Margiad Evans

No other writer makes me feel as Margiad Evans does. Reading her is a beautiful, troubling experience. There are long, bucolic interludes in The Wooden Doctor that lull the mind and senses, standing in strong contrast to the growing awareness that Arabella is becoming unconsciously ever more fox-like: wild and nocturnal; scavenging pieces of other people’s stories to feed her own; hunting contentment.

Evans’s second novel is a compact work, its language crisp and unerring. In her telling, abasing physical and emotional pain become transcendent. Unrequited love for her Wooden Doctor casts Arabella as fighting-fierce, but as trapped as the fox she feels inside her. In the ongoing episodes of enervation and excitation, Evans conjures something strange and tempestuous. How astonishing, then, to realise that her work is largely autobiographical.

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