Introduction  

In Patterns on the Sand, Elisabeth Gordon, the representative of the Old American South in the novel, softly recites these two lines by the Unionist poet Oliver Wendell Holmes, doing so with barely a trace of bitterness. It is one of many poignant moments where Gamel Woolsey, whose second novel is here at last published for the first time, conveys her recognition that myths of grandeur and memories of defeat cannot sustain the present and that desire, illness, death, war – or simply inescapable fate – control our lives. Just as the War Between the States had to be fought, but could never have been won by the Seces­sionists, so we all, Woolsey tells us, have to fight our own losing battles. 

  Gamel Woolsey was born in Aiken, South Carolina, on 28 May, in the last years of the nineteenth century, a time and a place where the ravages of the Civil War still haunted even those who had not known the pre-war “vanished order”, to use Henry James’s phrase. Woolsey was secretive about – among other things – her exact date of birth, and Gerald Brenan, her companion of many years, could only engrave May 1899 on her tombstone. A passport issued in 1923 indicates she was born in 1897 and, judging by other evidence, this does seem to be the more likely date. She was christened Elizabeth Gammell Woolsey, after her mother, and known as Elsa, but would later simplify her name to Gamel Woolsey. The Gammell’s were an old Charleston family, with connections in the best circles, but were happy to give their eldest daughter in marriage to the recently widowed banker William Walton Woolsey, a northerner of undisputed pedigree, who had settled on Breeze Hill Plantation near Aiken. His sister, Sara Woolsey, was the acclaimed Susan Coolidge, author of the What Katy Did novels, while his son, John, was to be the judge who absolved James Joyce’s Ulysses of charges of obscenity.

  In 1909, Gamel and her older sister Marie were sent as boarders to Ashley Hall, a school for young ladies that had just opened in Charleston. After the father’s death in 1910, his widow moved back to Charleston with her daughters and Gamel continued her schooling as a day student till 1913, when she graduated. Gamel was an active member of Ashley Hall, participating in the yearly theatrical produc- tions, co-founding the literary magazine Cerberus – the first issue, which came out in December 1912, was edited by her – writing poems and stories and drawing illustrations for the magazine. After gradua­tion, she studied art with Alfred Hutty of Woodstock, a well-known painter in Charleston, and a member of the Charleston Renaissance of the early twenties. He introduced Gamel to the Woodstock art colony in the Catskills, a place she would come to value as a retreat from the turbulence of her emotional life, and where she was dubbed “our poetess” by the painter Hervey White.

  Life in Charleston at the beginning of the twentieth century was still rigidly bound by social conventions, known as the Code. The treat­ment of women by the established social order was commented on by many critics: to cite but one, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, author of the story ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’, had published in 1898 Women and Economics, a study of the role of women in society where, examining the prospects of the young woman, she exclaims indignantly: ‘Marriage is the woman’s proper sphere, her divinely ordered place, her natural end. It is what she is born for, what she is exhibited for. It is, moreover, her means of honourable livelihood and advancement. But – she must not even look as if she wanted it!’ Gilman is even more irate when writing on the girl’s preparation for marriage, and highly critical of the mother’s role in the preservation of ignorance: ‘With very few exceptions, the mother gives her daughter no warning or prevision of what life holds for her, and so lets innocence and ignorance go on perpetuating sickness and sin and pain.’

  Gamel Woolsey, living with her mother and sister at 63 Meeting Street – a prime location – suffered the restrictions it imposed on women but surely also found some joy in its distractions, for in Patterns on the Sand she allows her protagonist to enjoy being success­ful and admired at social gatherings: at one dance, Sara is ‘carried away in this intoxication of lights and airs and movement that she seemed to be herself the dancers and the dance.’ From her gradua- tion at Ashley Hall till she left North Carolina, Woolsey filled her time with art classes and poetry, and inevitably found herself participating in the normal occupations of the young women of Charleston: that is, looking forward to balls and other social events and then dissecting them endlessly over interminable cups of tea and, more importantly, waiting for the right man to come along and carry her off. This is the listless world she captures so brilliantly in Patterns on the Sand, as when Sara and Elisabeth ‘sipped their hot tea and talked rather dreamily’ about a coming entertainment. Henry James described this world punctiliously in The American Scene (1907): he recognized that in Charleston ‘sadness and sorrow’ dominate over all other feelings and, in the heat of the noon, he saw that, there, ‘resignation might sit in the shade or swing without motion in a hammock,’ in a ‘dim dream that things were still as they had been.’

  The round of social activities, promoted by Woolsey’s many aunts from her mother’s side who felt a family responsibility to marry her off well to a scion of good Charleston stock, came to a sudden end when Woolsey contracted tuberculosis in 1917. Although she recov­ered, she would suffer from recurring bouts of the illness whenever she was under emotional stress well into her thirties. By 1922, aspiring to more than Charleston could offer, Woolsey had moved to New York; she settled in bohemian Greenwich Village and set about trying to publish her poetry. The Literary Review Supplement of the New York Evening Post published ‘Faith at Forty Second Street’ on 3 June 1922, a poem which shows her confident, playful, and at home in Manhattan. It was there that she met Rex Hunter, a journalist from New Zealand, whom she married in 1923. But the marriage did not last long, for by 1927 Woolsey was sharing an apartment at 5 Patchin Place, the legendary Greenwich Village cul-de-sac, with her step- brother John.

  It was while she was living in Patchin Place that Woolsey met Llewelyn Powys, a British writer married to the American writer Alyse Gregory, managing editor of the Dial, the most prestigious literary and art magazine of the time. The lasting friendships that eventually ensued have been well-documented by the protagonists through their letters and diaries. Both Powys and Gregory were older than Woolsey and by the time they had married Gregory was hardly of a child- bearing age. Powys, who also suffered from tuberculosis, was attracted to Woolsey by, among other things, her wistful demeanour and her own history of ill-health. He had long wanted a child, and Wool­sey attempted repeatedly to satisfy his wish. However, she suffered two terminations for health reasons and probably one miscar­riage before she put an end to a relationship that was making all three participants extremely miserable. By this time, Powys and Gregory had moved to Dorset in England – the heart of Powys territory – where they were living in a small cottage on the White Nose cliff. Gamel had joined them to try yet again to bear Llewelyn a child but by the spring of 1930 she had determined to return to America; her love and regard for Alyse and the awareness of the older woman’s pain had grown stronger than her desire to please Llewelyn.

  It was at this point, in July 1930, that Gerald Brenan, an as yet unpub­lished writer of the Bloomsbury circle, arrived in East Chaldon, the nearby village, anxious to meet Theodore Powys, Llewelyn’s brother. In A Personal Record, he tells how he saw Woolsey searching for flints; although she was still weak from another bout of tuber­culosis brought on by the termination of a pregnancy the previous summer and crushed by her need to leave Llewelyn, she struck him as immensely beautiful and desirable, her ‘slow lethargic movements and sad, dreamy expression’ gave her ‘an air of gentleness and resigna­tion.’ Brenan – who was on the look-out for a wife to mother his child by a servant-girl in Spain – confesses that ‘since my mind was always running on whom I would marry, it occurred to me that she might be the person.’

  Woolsey saw Brenan as the knight in shining armour that her love of Arthurian legends and her Charleston upbringing had made her yearn for; like Sara in Patterns on the Sand, Woolsey hoped for ‘some­thing’ or ‘someone’ that would carry her off into a new life. And she accepted Brenan’s proposal. Their first months were not happy; Powys’s jealousy sparked similar feelings in Brenan and the anxiety caused by the change in her circumstances brought on another episode of tuberculosis from which Woolsey recovered slowly in a sanatorium in Norfolk. Once she was strong enough, they travelled to Italy where, on the steps of the church of Santa Maria d’Aracoeli in Rome, they performed their own wedding ceremony – Woolsey had never obtained a divorce from Hunter and so could not marry Brenan legally. By 1935 they were living in southern Spain, in Churriana, a small village outside Málaga, with Miranda, Brenan’s daughter. In those times it was possible to live on less in Spain than in England, and Brenan, during his long previous sojourns in the country had come to love it and its people. Also, they were both afraid of the rumblings of war in Europe and – ingenuously misreading the political turbu­lence and labour agitation – thought that Spain would be a safe haven.

  When the Spanish Civil War broke out in the summer of 1936 they found themselves in one of the worst places to be. Málaga was Repub­lican, and the rebel forces of General Franco were close by. Although Woolsey and Brenan did not fear the rebels – they assumed that the British flag flying over their home would save them from enemy bombs – they did not stay to see Málaga taken. By September letters and money were not coming through and they were forced to make a trip to Gibraltar. Once there, they were cut off from Málaga and, unable to return, made their way to England; they did not return to their Churriana home till 1952. It was there that Woolsey died in 1968, of cancer.

* * * * * *

When Woolsey met Brenan, she was awaiting the publication of Middle Earth (1931), her first collection of poems, and was complet­ing a novel, One Way of Love. The publishing history of this novel discouraged her from attempting another novel for many years: although Victor Gollancz accepted it and had the proofs ready by February 1932, he was suddenly overcome with fear that the sexual content of the novel could bring on the wrath of the censors, and broke his agreement with Woolsey. The novel was eventually published by Virago in 1987, and in 1988 Virago brought out Woolsey’s account of the early months of the Spanish Civil War in Malaga, Death’s Other Kingdom. The publication of this sensitive and subtle memoir by Longman in 1939 had gone almost unnoticed: the Spanish war was over, and readers in England were understandably more interested in what was happening elsewhere. Woolsey did attempt to publish her second novel, Patterns on the Sand, in 1947, but was too easily put off by the first rejection she received – as would happen with a volume of poems she sent to Faber & Faber some years later.

  The straightforward exposition and minimalist plot of Patterns on the Sand tempted Kenneth Hopkins, who published Woolsey’s poetry after her death, to consider it an autobiographical novel. However, Brenan was categorical in his disagreement; he wrote to Hopkins in October 1977 that the ‘novel [One Way of Love] about her [Gamel’s] visit to London was autobiographical whereas the later one about life in Charleston was not, though it describes the scene she grew up into.’ In Patterns on the Sand Woolsey does not refer back to her father’s plantation, but rather to the social life she knew in Charleston and creates a protagonist, Sara, who is a trespasser in Elisabeth’s higher social sphere. Woolsey herself had access to the best of Charleston through her mother’s family, but intellectually she never identified fully with them; she imaginatively transformed this perception of being an outcast into Sara’s envy of the ‘feeling, so marked in all of them, of belonging to a closed community.’

  Although Woolsey wrote in the third person, thus giving a sense of omniscient authorship, the voice that comes through is Sara’s. Nothing occurs in the novel without Sara’s presence; even the gossip the reader hears is what she would have known or overheard – as when Miss Land­less and Mrs Soane discuss Richard and Rush over their teacups. Just as their conversation approaches men’s unspeakable acts, Mrs Soane lowers her voice and the scene moves back to the young people innocently engaged in singing spirituals. Sara’s story is that of the outsider allowed into the company she covets thanks to her good sing­ing voice and to Elisabeth’s patronage. Woolsey does not dwell on Sara’s musical talent – and neither does Sara. That the girl had to abandon her study of music for lack of funding does not become a tragedy in her life; it is barely acknowledged as the root of Sara’s dissatis­faction, and her voice, rather than opening a professional future before her, becomes merely a passport to better society. But it does not automatically bring the benefits that should have accrued: Sara is not courted by rich, handsome suitors of impeccable family credentials. In fact, it seems that Rush and William, Elisabeth’s brothers, consider her off-bounds: ineligible for matrimony because of her social origins and, as their sister’s friend, unreachable for passing pleasures. These two young men jauntily declare they are not of the marrying sort and it is clear that they centre their lives outside the social community of Charleston, lives about which the women, particularly the young women intent on matrimony, can only speculate in their ignorance. Mrs Warren accounts for Felicia Landless’s unfortunate marriage to Rush’s father with the words: ‘She wouldn’t listen to anyone – I don’t suppose she had any idea what a man could be like.’ And Sara with a ‘curious anxiety’ enquires ‘But didn’t her family warn her?’ The moment is not devoid of dramatic irony – part of a subtle commentary on the workings of society that runs through the novel.

  Woolsey’s narrative voice is laconic in its description of the young women’s vapid lives and in its suggestion of stereotypical southern languor, while the imagery, drawn from nature, gives the text a rich, sensual colourfulness. The novel opens with Sara presented to the reader as a ‘lady in a millefleurs tapestry’, an image that is achieved by the rose-coloured blossoms of the Queen’s Necklace (brugmansia) framing the protagonist as she leans out of her window. Thus Woolsey sets the scene for a medieval romance, perhaps a platonic love affair between the lady of the castle and the knight in shining armour. She also introduces the pure love that dwells only in the land of folk tales with her description of the young woman who boasts ‘the darkest hair and darkest eyes’. However, the one-dimensional medieval and folk tale images Woolsey projects – and thus the concepts of pure, uncompli­cated by sex, they-all-lived-happily-ever-after love – are immedi­ately shown to be illusory: the girl steps away from the window and reveals herself as tall, strong, and ‘breathing the bright air of her own place and time’. Sara’s story is that of her sexual awakening, the only adventure that society allows a young woman – as long as it is strictly controlled by established conventions – and so it is sadly appropriate that the image of a princess imprisoned in her tower estab­lished in the opening paragraph, controls the novel. Woolsey, in the first paragraph, sets up the contrapuntal vibrations that she will play upon: the opposition between the world of dreams and desires and the down-to-earth reality of a young woman’s life in early twentieth-century Charleston, South Carolina, where the aftermath of the War between the States is still vividly present and where social life is controlled by the Code.

  The American Civil War despoiled the southern states, ruining the plantation economy that had created a system of social differences and brought wealth and leisure to a small minority. The ex-slaves and their children provide a backdrop to the novel that is integrated into the lives of Elisabeth and Sara but is not significant in itself; in Aunt Mehalah, Woolsey recreates the proverbial Mammy who passes on her love of spirituals as well as her superstitious fears to her young charges. But Woolsey, in spite of the romantic strain that marks all her writing – and which Brenan disparaged – is vividly aware of the contra­dictions of the pre-War legend and she does not idealize plantation high society. Although she had left the South and did not partici­pate in the Charleston Renaissance, her novel shares the Southern spirit that moved her contemporaries, DuBose Heyward or Josephine Pinckney: acutely conscious of the slow decomposition of its mythical splendour, and of the social and racial differences which almost fifty years after the Civil War still prevailed, Woolsey faithfully captures the “Southern qualities” of her locale. While we can recognize the out­line of a Blanche or an Amanda in some of the characters (particularly in Miss Ila), there is none of the tragic nostalgia for an impossible past that marks Tennessee Williams’s heroines.

  By the forties, when Woolsey was writing Patterns on the Sand, a greater consciousness of racial discrimination was beginning to be shaped in Charleston by the anti-racist court decisions of Judge J. Waties Waring, her uncle. However, Woolsey, who had grown up with coloured servants, was writing about an earlier decade and she speaks of the “darkies” with an air of plantation familiarity. Although she always flinched at injustice and dreamily identified with the poor, at no point does she speak out against slavery or the unequal relation­ships of blacks and whites: in Patterns on the Sand, class boundaries can be infiltrated, but racial boundaries are firmly set – not as in DuBose Heyward’s Mamba’s Daughters (1929).

  The language and imagery Woolsey uses in Patterns on the Sand constantly remind the reader that she was, first and foremost, a poet. It is her mastery of words that allows her to create a ‘pointillist canvas of dream surfaces which serve to heighten the impression of Sara’s unfulfilled, vague desires.’ Nature, from the beginning, plays a signifi­cant part in the novel; Sara’s surrender to the act of love is expressed in terms that evoke Walt Whitman’s – or Kate Chopin’s – depictions of sexual encounters: ‘The garden was silent. On the shore the tide was going out and the sea was falling slowly and softly.’ Woolsey was, of course, after her disappointment over the publication of One Way of Love, afraid of rousing the wrath of the censors so that it is hardly surpris­ing that she has recourse to flower gardens and the elements in her descriptions of sexual encounters.

  The sensuality of the vegetation, the gardens and the forests of Charleston and its outlying islands provide a framework for Sara’s yearnings and conspire to mitigate the violence that is introduced in the first chapter. Although the Civil War had destroyed the myth of the South, life moves on, the seasons come and go, and the past becomes a part of the present as this tightly-structured novel moves towards its resolution, startling in its implications and yet strangely satisfying. In a poetic coda, Woolsey recognizes the essential, natural movement of the tides ‘bearing the great white sailing ships ... back to the sea, to the unknown islands, the unvisited shores.’ Thus she implies that the past, the present, and the future are intricately connected. Near the end of her life, she confessed in a letter to her friend Phyllis Playter that the past was ‘both my castle and my prison’. And yet Woolsey broke with the past on more than one occasion, and dared move forward and explore other possibilities that presented them­selves to her. Patterns on the Sand can be read as a novel of what her life could have been if she had not had the courage to move to New York as a young woman. It is also a novel which shows how difficult it is to escape from the constrictions imposed by society and how the past, although it has to be acknowledged, must also be surpassed.

                                  Barbara Ozieblo,

                              University of Malaga, 2011

The manuscript of Patterns on the Sand was discovered by Barbara Ozieblo in the Kenneth Hopkins Collection at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas at Austin, during her time there as a Visiting Research Fellow in 2000.