THE PURPOSE OF THIS ESSAY IS TO REASSESS THE WORK OF ELIZABETH Madox Roberts and to identify her unique place as a specifically modernist writer. Critics and scholars of American literature have often been preoccupied with how Roberts fits under the rubrics of southern literature, southern women's literature, and agrarian/regional literature. While these categories have helped to align Roberts within the wide spectrum of American literature, they have prevented scholarly scrutiny of her work by those outside the purview of southern literary studies. By reevaluating Roberts within the context of modernism, specifically through her unique style that encompasses both voice and landscape, and in particular with the same structural device of the classic epic central to James Joyce and Ezra Pound, my aim is to illuminate the manifestation of modernist techniques in her writing and to broaden our understanding of Roberts's place in the American literary canon.

Elizabeth Madox Roberts was born in 1881 in Perryville, Kentucky, attended the University of Chicago from 1917 to 1921, lived her life primarily in Springfield, Kentucky, and wrote seven novels, two books of short stories, and three volumes of poetry. She died in 1941. In the mid-twentieth century, three critical volumes analyzed Roberts's life and writing, and after several decades, a resurgence of Roberts scholarship emerged in conjunction with the founding of the Elizabeth Madox Roberts Society. (1) Though she was a lifelong poet, she is primarily known now for her novels, specifically <i>The Time of Man</i> (1926), <i>My Heart and My Flesh</i> (1927), and <i>The Great Meadow</i> (1930). Critical reception of her work in Roberts's own time was overwhelmingly positive. <i>The Time of Man</i> in 1926 was a Book-of-the-Month Club novel, a position that Hemingway's <i>The Sun Also Rises</i> did not earn in that same year. Sherwood Anderson found <i>The Time of Man</i> "Very clear, fine and altogether charming." "I am humble before it," he added to his blurb printed on the dust jacket of the second edition of the novel. Robert Penn Warren claimed that "By 1930 ... it was impossible to discuss American fiction without reference to Elizabeth Madox Roberts" (xxi). Her international status was supported early on by Ford Madox Ford, who saw Roberts as one of the greatest writers of the 1920s generation. He often cited her, along with Ernest Hemingway, as a true modernist and ranked her with James Joyce, declaring that "for me Miss Roberts stands almost supremely alone" (286). (2) In his critical essay on Roberts, Ford claims that between <i>The Time of Man and My Heart and My Flesh</i>,

   a whole quality had been added to literature itself--as if
   literature itself had a new purpose given to it, as if what
   literature could do had been extended in its scope, as if the
   number of emotions that literature could convey had been added to,
   and as if the permanent change that every book must work upon you
   had been given a new region in which to exercise itself.
   ("Elizabeth Madox Roberts" 285)

Readers unfamiliar with Roberts might question Ford's statements and his critical positioning of her as a modernist. The most natural place to consider the validity of his claims is with <i>The Time of Man</i>, a coming-of-age story about Ellen Chesser, whose life is defined and in some ways determined by the land itself and by her own wandering about that land. In her notes on the novel, Roberts expressed the desire to frame "the wandering tenant farmer of our region [central Kentucky] as offering a symbol for an Odyssy [sic] of man as a wanderer, buffeted about by the fates and weathers" (Warren xxiv). Roberts had admired Joyce's <i>Ulysses</i>, which she described as a "monumental book" from which "We can never go back" (Slavick 35), (3) and she was profoundly indebted to Ezra Pound. Given these influences, I would claim that Roberts's Odyssean design accords with what Leah Culligan Flack identifies in Joyce and Pound as the "understanding of the <i>Odyssey</i> as a storehouse of poetic technique and of Odysseus, in an interpretation shaped by reading Joyce's <i>Ulysses</i>, as a cosmopolitan wanderer who embodied the ideals Europe needed to hold up in order to heal the wounds opened by the Great War" (105). In an effort to "make it new" herself, to apply Pound's famous dictum, Roberts transforms this epic structural device and pattern of wanderer distilled through <i>Ulysses</i> and <i>The Cantos</i> into a novel not about a cosmopolitan but about the daughter of tobacco tenant farmers in rural bluegrass Kentucky. The Chessers begin on the road looking for work, and the novel opens poignantly: "Ellen wrote her name in the air with her finger, <i>Ellen Chesser</i>, leaning forward and writing on the horizontal plane. Beside her in the wagon her mother huddled under an old shawl to keep herself from the damp, complaining, 'We ought to be a-goen on'" (9). Ellen's life is the road, and her lifelong struggle to find permanence amid the cycles of seasons and planting, farm-to-farm, is contrasted throughout the novel by her desire to know herself, to <i>write</i> her name--and her being--into the landscape itself.

Joyce and Pound dealt with the urge to signify amid the suffering of the modern world through the structural device of the epic, and Roberts uses the same structure to address the suffering of poverty and daily tenant farming, a struggle poignantly captured in the novel's titular passage with Ellen's defiant signification at once triumphant as well as tragic. When Ellen is working with her father Henry in the fields, he tells her: "No plow iron ever cut this-here hill afore, not in the whole time of man." Roberts then writes:

   "The time of man," as a saying, fell over and over in Ellen's mind.
   The strange men that lived here before our men, a strange race
   doing things in strange ways, and other men before them, and before
   again. Strange feet walking on a hillside for some purpose she
   could never think. Wondering and wondering she laid stones on her
   altar.

"Pappy, where do rocks come from?"

"Why, don't you know? Rocks grow."

"I never see any grow. I never see one a-growen."

"I never see one a-growen neither, but they grow all the same. You pick up all the rocks offen this-here hill and in a year there's as many out again. I lay there'll be a stack to pick up right here again next year." (87)

After more discussion about rocks, Roberts concludes the scene powerfully:

   All at once she lifted her body and flung up her head to the great
   sky that reached over the hills and shouted:

   "Here I am! ... I'm Ellen Chesser! I'm here!"

   Her voice went up in the wind out of the plowed land. For a moment
   she searched the air with her senses and then she turned back to
   the stones again.

   "You didn't hear e'er a thing," she said under her breath. "Did you
   think you heared something a-callen?" (89)

The tragic reality contained within Ellen's declaration of self, unheard among the virgin hills is one thing, and her triumphant defiance in the accusation to the stones--"Did you think you heared something a-callen?"---not only captures the heart of a brilliantly constructed character and voice, but resonates with what Paul Fussell describes as "one dominating form of modern understanding; that it is essentially ironic" (35). This irony enables and disables Ellen's discoveries and recoveries of self throughout her life.

Though <i>The Time of Man</i> was very popular with both general readers and academics, Roberts's fame has diminished since the mid-twentieth century. In the twenty-first century, she is generally anthologized and grouped with writers of the Southern Renascence, and there are clear reasons why this is appropriate. Roberts was a southerner, Kentucky born and raised, and the landscape of her novels is Kentucky; some might even say that her novels give Kentucky its identity. While creating a profound sense of place, Roberts's writing transcends the local, transporting us to the condition we call being human. She was also beloved of that group known first as the Fugitives and later as the Nashville Agrarians. (4) Robert Penn Warren, Allen Tate, and Donald Davidson praised her work quite highly. (5) Yet her writing was never limited by her region. Tate and Warren were clear that she was a writer first, who happened to be from Kentucky, but it has seemed easier to qualify Roberts strictly as a southern writer in the last few decades and to answer her academic neglect by trying to revive her in proximity to southerners or women writers. There have been a handful of very insightful readings of Roberts as a regionalist, but categorizing her solely in that way ignores her deeply modernist techniques and the ways she "made it new."

Defining Roberts as a modernist, possibly even a high modernist, will seem to many who have never heard her name nor read her novels quite a stretch of the literary imagination. H. R. Stoneback, a scholar of modernism, has admirably blazed the trail for us to discover what he calls the "intricate and fertile <i>terroir"</i> of "Roberts and Modernism" ("In a Station of the Modern" 91), but his thesis suggests that there is much work to do. So, what do we mean when we claim Roberts is a modernist? Stoneback's essay lays out a clear path on which to begin, and his focus is on Pound's presence throughout Roberts's correspondence and notebooks and his influence on her style. Roberts's admiration for Pound concentrates on her attention to his Imagist credo--specifically the way the <i>image</i> is "that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time" <i>(Literary Essays of Ezra Pound</i> 4); his criticism and illumination of nineteenth-century French Symbolists; and his demand for exactitude of language. Furthermore, Stoneback emphasizes Hugh Kenner's observation that "energy concentrated in exactness was a poetic resource" (Kenner 168) is one major aspect of Roberts's own style (Stoneback 92).

In her attempt at exactness, Roberts writes of her own writing: "I have striven for a concrete and immediate rendering of life" and "I have tried for organic rhythms, intrinsic with the images" ("On Poetry" 26). Kenner's statement on energy and exactness derives from his estimation of nineteenth-century natural sciences, which identified "a new order of descriptive exactness," and he finds this urge in a "poem's tensile energy" (168), especially in the literal and figurative spaces between words and meanings. On the "space" between words, Kenner argues that "The space was among the last written symbols to be invented" (90). Tension exists within the space where it alone creates meaning. When Pound--and I would claim Roberts--strike the spacebar more than once between words, they "gesture something intrinsicate to [their] feeling of how the lines sound and of how meanings are built up" (Kenner 90). Kenner's emphasis on tension between words and the fact of how "Poems cohere, as do fish, and yet are derivable from other poems" (169) resonates with Roberts's notes on the bridging of the seen and unseen, like the word and the space around the word:

   I believe that it is the high function of Poetry to search into the
   relation between mind and matter, in to the one-ness of flesh and
   thin air--spirit.... If I can, in art, bring in the physical world
   before the mind with a greater closeness--richer immediacy--than
   before, so that mind rushes out to the very edge of sense, then
   mind turns about and sees itself mirrored within itself. ("On
   Poetry" 26)

To trace the extent of Pound's influence on Roberts, one might consider her own notes currently archived in the Library of Congress. In one of her notebooks, for instance, Roberts transcribed a dozen of Pound's poems from <i>Personae, Exultations, Ripostes, Lustra</i>, and <i>Umbra</i>, (6) We also know she read Pound on Henry James and took extensive notes, transcribing passages directly from Pound's 1918 <i>Little Review</i> essay on James (later reprinted in <i>Literary Essays)</i>, and finally recording Pound's reading list. One of the more fascinating sections of notes is on Jules Laforgue and French Poetry (Box 8, Folder 1). The notes at first appear to be Roberts's own observations, but they are all transcribed from Pound's essay titled "Irony, Laforgue, and Some Satire." (7) Roberts typed out Laforgue poems in French from <i>Instigations</i> (7-15) and one in English--which is Pound's translation of "Pierrots" in <i>Personae</i>--and then she typed out his Corbiere intro and poems (<i>instigations</i> 19-26). Thus, like many modernists, Roberts grounded herself in James and the French symbolists, filtered through the mind of Ezra Pound.

What she learned from the Symbolists focuses on three aspects: the play of language, the degree to which language is "charged with meaning to the utmost possible degree" (Pound, <i>ABC of Readingh 36)</i>, and the way self-consciousness reflects and envelops the anxiety of self. Her education on Laforgue's poetry and his employment of Pierrot via Pound would be a serious introduction to the Symbolist aesthetic. Roberts had employed the Pierrot figure in her early pre-Pound poetry, (8) yet it is striking how after reading Pound on Laforgue, her newer playful poems adopted a more sinister Symbolist bent. It seems Roberts was influenced by Laforgue in the same manner as Eliot, who, according to Ronald Schuchard, turned Pierrot's "moonlit journeys into the Unconscious" into the "deluding emotional sentiments and distorted visions that the abhorrent sunlight inevitably turns into disillusionment and despair" (78). One of the poems Roberts had transcribed from Pound was "Pierrots III" which begins, "Comme ils vont molester, la nuit" (100). Laforgue's poem opens with reference to a mysterious "they" who go off "in the dark" to "molest / The statues" in the park--charged with the double-meaning of the opening line, <i>they go to molest the night</i>. The poem opens playfully and turns philosophical: "When they with Woman converse apart / They always seem to make a third, / Confuse tomorrow with yesterday, / And ask for <i>Nothing</i> with all their hearts!" (101, emphasis added). Laforgue's irony and humor aside, the poem's tension between mischief and terror centers on the night, an equally ambiguous and complex symbol.

Thematically and stylistically, Roberts achieves a similar effect in some poems in <i>Under the Tree</i>, published in 1922, the <i>annus mirabilis</i> of modernism. Though often categorized as children's poems, they contain, like those of Laforgue, complex philosophical dimensions at once playful as much as they are foreboding. The inward gaze and self-conscious despair--like one observes in Prufrock--is evident in Roberts's poem "In the Night," which begins with light: "The light was burning very dim" (60). During what is perhaps a nightmare or night terror, the speaker, presumably a child, wakes just in time to see a panther go under the bed and then tells us there is a "Something," capital "S," "waiting in the room" (60). This night terror poem replete with blood, a panther, and a creature with one eye "shining red" and bent teeth, ends: "I couldn't help it if they came, /I couldn't save myself at all, / And so I only waited there / And turned my face against the wall" (60-61).

The ominous rhyme "myself at all" and "against the wall" contains the sound-sense and philosophical depths of Laforgue, while ending with a despondency resonant of Eliot's final line in Prufrock--"Till human voices wake us, and we drown" (<i>Collected</i> 7). Roberts's poem magnifies a trinity of meaning. The first layer: "At all," a phrase we throw away without consideration of its metaphysical implication. We hear, <i>not at all</i>--would you mind if I had some wine? <i>Not at all</i>. Or <i>if at all</i>--it will only rain a little today, <i>if at all</i>. And the ominous <i>all in all</i>, suggesting all things have been considered and a direct echo of Scripture, "so that God may be all in all" (1 Cor 15:28). The second layer of her rhyme: the <i>self</i> meets this condition of <i>all</i>--"myself at all." After being terrified by nightmares and terrors, the speaker is finally met, as if face to face, with the consolation that there really is <i>nothing</i> she can do about <i>anything --nothing at all</i>. The All and Nothing with which she can do suggest a Something, capital "S," as evident in the opening of the poem, and "myself at all" is coupled with "against the wall," a phrase we use when cornered and ready to fight back. But Roberts deflates the phrase and our speaker simply turns her face--not her <i>self</i>, just the Prufr ockian face-and gives in to the fact that there is nothing she can do about it, at least for a while and maybe never. Finally, the third layer in Roberts's closing lines is under the rhyming sense of the first half of the lines: "I couldn't save" parallels "And turned my face," pivoting on the "t" "n" "s/c" and "f/v" sounds; we hear a third layer in the rhyme, <i>save face</i>. Like the sleight of Laforgue, Roberts turns the wordplay and dynamic meaning of a seemingly simple poem for children into a modernist complex. Far from pastoral, her so-called children's poems in <i>Under the Tree</i> contain the ironic and familiar admonition spoken by Death amid the pastoral landscape: there in Arcadia am I.

Though I have not found hard evidence in her notes, I suspect Roberts also read and read about Gustave Flaubert. Her emphasis in her own notebooks on the exact word, <i>le mot juste</i>, is everywhere, and her use of nouns, verbs, and prepositions is reminiscent of what Marjorie Perloff identifies in Flaubert: "The closer expression comes to thought, the <i>closer language comes to coinciding and merging with it</i>" (55). (9) Roberts's own emphasis is on language that could identify and define. She writes, "I find that I have tried for a poignant speech, as direct as cause and effect is direct" ("On Poetry" 25); and "We perceive that the mind is forever trying to possess physical things in all their fullness and beauty.... Poetry searches into this desire" (27). Roberts's statement resonates with the sense Jonathan Levin claims Gertrude Stein shares with Henry James, "the sense that literary language can foreground the potentially infinite play of meanings that precedes the formulation of any dominant meaning" (11). Her poetry and novels are full of complex language play, and her modernist education prepared her to discover her own unique approach to avant-garde techniques and perspectives.

                                II.

What Roberts does with her thoroughly modernist education is very much her own thing--unique among all the modernists, from Stein to Marianne Moore, Pound, Joyce, Eliot, and others--yet resonant with modernism at large. It seems clear from the archival record that Roberts's apprenticeship as a writer was deeply indebted to Ezra Pound's poetry and literary criticism, and her poetry is indebted to imagist and symbolist techniques. In Roberts's prose, however, she weds the poetic techniques of Pound with the prosaic complexity of Henry James. As noted above, Roberts not only read Pound on James, but she also took extensive notes on his essays. She acknowledged the importance of Henry James during the composition of her first novel and seems to have transformed numerous Jamesian techniques.

Given her attention to every detail in Pound's essays, one might also assume Roberts would have been aware of T. S. Eliot's "In Memory of Henry James," in the January 1918 edition of <i>The Egoist</i>, wherein Eliot illuminates a key stylistic technique in James that Roberts also employs. Pound's <i>Little Review essay</i> on James was a major milestone for writers who came of literary age in the 1920s, and it is clear from the record that Roberts read it closely and transcribed sections into her own notebooks. However, Eliot's article in <i>The Egoist</i> focuses on James's stylistic importance more succinctly than does Pound's longer essay. The characters in James, argues Eliot, "are each a distinct success of creation," and "The focus is a situation, a relation, an atmosphere" (2). The crux occurs when Eliot identifies James's "critical genius," which "comes out most tellingly in his mastery over, his baffling escape from, Ideas" (2). Kenner, in <i>The Pound Era</i>, expounds: "The mind unviolated by an idea holds converse with particulars ... the act of perception and the act of articulation inextricably one." As Kenner continues, I can only think of the genius of Roberts's lyricism; he writes, "The perceiving mind of [James's] <i>The American Scene</i> unites itself with that eloquent space around objects which impressionist painters have taught us to think inseparable from the objects" (18). The leap implies the tension of space between words as stated above and echoes Roberts's notes: "If I can, in art, bring in the physical world before the mind with a greater closeness ... then mind turns about and sees itself mirrored within itself" (26).

In order to understand the trajectory of Roberts as a modernist, we must consider the master Henry James, for James bequeathed to the post-World War I generation an entire world no longer attainable. Yet his achievement reached a new dimension of complexity, one that every serious writer in his wake would be forced to come to terms with and, if he or she were to last, assimilate. James and Roberts might seem an unlikely pairing at first glance, especially under the aegis of high modernists like Pound and Eliot. James had his Europe, his England, and Roberts had Kentucky, a very different habit of being. James gave us high walls and the wainscot; Roberts offered cabins and dirt floors. James penned aristocratic conversations in the mouths of princes strolling in garden alleys; Roberts captured hard-scrabble speech, Daniel Boone, the savagery of wilderness. James described the lawns and trees and fountains, the fashion and propriety of the moment; Roberts had the bluegrass, rugged farms, rows of large-leaved tobacco, and the short, rustic exchanges, in carefully rendered Kentucky dialect, of passersby. Yet Roberts's unique achievement of character, speech, and style set amid a peculiarly American landscape is exactly the kind of development Eliot and Pound imagined possible after the passing of Henry James.

Despite the differences between the two writers in medium and the numerous divergences of setting and subject, there are striking similarities worth considering. Roberts did admit in at least one letter to Monroe Wheeler that her story, which became <i>The Time of Man, </i> follows "something which Henry James might have done, but with what a different medium!" (Letter, July 29,1922). Parallels abound. One might consider, for instance, a familiar Jamesian plot: the education of a young woman, the complexities of marriage and betrayal, infidelity, and finally, the transatlantic dynamic central to much of James's universe. In Roberts's <i>The Time of Man</i> we have the education of a young woman, the complexities of marriage and betrayal, the infidelity of her husband, and the transience of earthly delights. There are also stylistic parallels. Roberts employs a certain psychological realism when Ellen Chesser finds herself rejected by her first lover:

   How, her tears were continually questioning her, how did she, Ellen
   Chesser, ever come to such a state of need that a person outside
   herself, some other being, not herself, some person free to go and
   come and risk accidents far from herself, should hold the very key
   to her life and breath in his hand? (220)

In <i>The Portrait of a Lady</i>, Isabel's broken spirit is captured in the fragmented history that defines Rome: "for in a world of ruins the ruin of her happiness seemed a less unnatural catastrophe." Isabel meditates on her own tragedy as defined through landscape: "Small it was, in the large Roman record, and her haunting sense of the continuity of the human lot easily carried her from the less to the greater" (423). Roberts transforms this self-onto-landscape/history projection present in Isabel into Ellen Chesser, who hears her father's phrase "time of man" as they shuck rocks from the fields: "No plow iron ever cut this-here hill afore, not in the whole time of man" (87). Ellen thinks of landscape, hills and distance, "fading into blue hazes and myths of faint trees.... The rocks fell where she laid them with a faint flat sound, and the afternoon seemed very still back of the dove calls and the cries of the plovers, back of a faint dying phrase, 'in the time of man.'" Finally, with this recognition, Ellen declares, "Here I am! ... I'm Ellen Chesser! I'm here!" (89). Shall we say, <i>The Portrait of a</i> [Kentucky] <i>Lady</i>, a subversion of the Jamesian woman that gives voice to the voiceless every-woman of the unnameable and innumerable places throughout the American landscape.

Read closely, Eliot's observation of James, of his escape from ideas, solidifies the link to Roberts's writing. In <i>The Portrait of a Lady</i>, James gives us Isabel Archer, courted by Lord Warburton, whose "words were uttered with a breadth of candour that was <i>like the embrace of strong arms</i>--that was like the fragrance straight in her face" (99; emphasis added). In <i>The Time of Man</i>, when Ellen is courted by Tarbell, "The steady flow of his talk still <i>beat about her and warmed her body</i> out of its loneliness" (271; emphasis added). James: a voice like strong arms; Roberts: talk that beats about to warm a body. In James, Isabel thinks of Lord Warburton's person and discovers that character becomes "a collection of attributes" that "demanded a different sort of appreciation" (94). When she thinks of Caspar Goodwood, she imagines him expressing "for her an energy," one who seems "to be the stubbornest <i>fact</i> she knew" (104; emphasis added). If character in James is a collection of attributes--as Fact, an escape from Idea--then character in <i>The Time of </i> Man resembles Stone--the quintessence of Facts. This is evident early in <i>The Time of Man</i> when Ellen places "stones on her altar" (87) and meditates on the phrase, <i>the time of man</i>. Readers witness it again when she stands over a gra<i>vestone</i> and shouts to the sky, "He's Judge Gowan in court, a-sitten big, but I'm better'n he is. I'm a-liven and he's dead. I'm better. I'm Ellen Chesser and I'm a-liven" (102). This pattern manifests itself in Ellen's soon-to-be husband who becomes a product of Ellen's mind, which then sinks into stones. Jasper's "voice trembled a little with its own fixity and hardness, but it erected a strong tower" (308). The tower of Jasper's voice is merely a collection of attributes from the landscape, the distance looming: "The tower of St. Lucy stood up out of the hills, the crosses standing evenly, as fragile as air, stone turned fine and thin" (251). Then, when Jasper entrusts Ellen to keep money for him (251), the "dignity of the great stones would pass into her being" (274), forever caught up with St. Lucy's stones rising out of earth and Jasper's voice, "a strong tower."

In many ways, Roberts creates anew the Jamesian principle of character as "a collection of attributes," energy, character as Facts. For stones are the facts of place in Roberts's novel; they are indeed the measure of mind and Man. In his final work <i>The American Scene</i>, James's hero "is the scene, inhabited space" (Kenner 17), an attempt at evoking the <i>deus loci</i> or spirit of place. Roberts's transformation of James lies in her ability not only to portray space but to bring alive the very spirit of place, manifested through Ellen's experience with the earth itself: "Her body and mind were of the earth, clodded with the clods; the strength of her arms and her back and her thighs arose out of the soil" (260-63). Place in Roberts becomes a matter of fact: "The bell at St. Lucy rang from the mid-morning but its tones beat upon the outside of the dust. A little while the bell flowed onto the outer faces of the clods but it could not pierce the inner part and it fell away, scarcely missed when it went" (263). Roberts achieves that flash of mind and place that James's final vision in <i>The American Scene</i> yearned for but never quite accomplished.

                                III.

One of the most striking attributes of Elizabeth Madox Roberts's prose is her lyrical approach to both personality and place, dressing not only the landscape but also the voices of her characters in what feels more poetic than prosaic. It seems Roberts discovered a new version of realism, echoing James but with a unique combination of landscape, character, and speech with--like the Symbolists and later Imagists--the constant attention on language, meaning, exactitude, the musical phrase, and the ironic understatement. There is an escape in Roberts--as in James--from <i>ideas</i>, built upon particulars: Roberts writes the condition of existence as dependent upon space and objects, charged with what Kenner calls "tensile energy" (168). Yet the difference between tension in James and in Roberts is that the latter offers identity, a self, complicit not just with space but with place, a particular landscape. Let us consider again the opening of <i>The Time of Man:</i> "Ellen wrote her name in the air with her finger, <i>Ellen Chesser;</i> leaning forward and writing on the horizontal plane. Beside her in the wagon her mother huddled under an old shawl to keep herself from the damp, complaining, 'We ought to be a-goen on'" (9). Both writers are concerned with time, with the modern anxiety of signification, and Ellen's act of writing on the plane in the air--not into the earth--exemplifies this anxiety poignantly. In <i>The American Scene</i>, time rolls back upon itself; in Roberts, especially in <i>The Time of Man</i>, time present and time past open the isolated self into self amid landscape, identity and place caught up with perception of self through the mantra: "We ought to be a-goen on."

During the composition of <i>The Time of Man</i>, Roberts expressed to Monroe Wheeler the following:

   The story runs like this: A level of clods and dusts ... and
   furrows. Then a mind plays. Comes a flash of mind, and under the
   influence one of the clods becomes aware of itself and the world
   around and the mesh and the beauty and wonder of the sky. But the
   play of this mind comes to an end through a sort of disaster, ...
   and the emerged clod goes back.... I have attempted something
   which Henry James might have done, but with what a different
   medium! (Letter, 29 July 1922)

Her description in her letter to Wheeler of <i>mind</i> and <i>flash</i> is akin to what Levin describes in James as his characters' "endless unfolding of perception" (117). In <i>The Poetics of Transition</i>, Levin argues that James's "characters and his narrative voice do not simply develop or evolve through the course of a novel; rather, the process of development utterly overtakes the narrating and the narrated selves." Levin posits that James--and I would argue Roberts, especially given her description of flash, mind, and disaster--"is frequently drawn to scenes which exceed either a character's or even the narrator's understanding of events, staging the literal disruption of surface that marks any transition" (118). Roberts transforms James's poetics of transition through her integration of perception and place. And we might adopt Kenner's formula above and say that "the act of perception and the act of articulation" in Roberts is embodied in the way landscape defines, forms, influences, and comes alive in character.

The entire drama of <i>The Time of Man</i> relies upon the manifestation of landscape as a character attribute that is continually disrupted in its own discovery of itself. Beginning on page one, following the act of Ellen writing her name on the plane of landscape, her mother's complaint is a reminder that perception dominates and often determines the outcome of self as imagined through the place, which her mother's nagging anxiety voices: this is not the place for the Chessers; move on down the road. Over the course of Ellen's life, caught up with numerous tragedies and triumphs, moving from one farm to the next, and the incremental development of self in identification with each place, Ellen does attain a significant measure of agency, rooted in and flourishing from the very landscape around her. Though she remains a wanderer, she does find a sense of self, even if that self seems at times to exist just beyond the horizon like a mirage, always receding. One poignant scene stands out: moving across country with her cow as companion, Ellen looks back at the mountains behind her, "shapes dimly remembered and recognized," and "With the first recognition of their fixity came a faint recognition of those structures which seemed everlasting and undiminished within herself, recurring memories, feelings, responses, wonder, worship, all gathered into one final inner motion which might have been called spirit" (237).

Ellen's development throughout the novel is fluid, and though she achieves moments of epiphany, discoveries of self, those discoveries are folded back into the drama of her life. In her notes, Roberts imagined the epic pattern of the novel as following stages which begin with "A Genesis," in which the land first "rejects" Ellen but then "She grows into the land" and "Expands with all the land," which leads to "The first blooming" (xxv). After she is rejected by one lover, Trent, she then finds Jasper, and they have several children together. But Jasper has an extramarital affair, Ellen's youngest child Chick dies, and Jasper is later accused of barn-burning, forcing the family to flee. This is when Ellen withdraws, "sinking back into the earth," and Roberts's notes conclude with her "Flowering out of stone" (xxv). In James, Levin identifies the "omniscient narrative voice" as "perpetually reflecting on the limits of any singular understanding of the events that constitute a novel's or story's action" (119). Roberts avoids over-narrating her characters, yet she retains James's "irreducible temporality," which, Levin claims, the "New Critical emphasis on form" seemed to miss (119). Likewise, Roberts's complexity of character development and the unfolding of place and perception of self, particularly her claim that the ending of <i>The Time of Man</i> suggests some type of "Flowering," is perplexing if we expect a formal ending to Ellen's life. On the contrary, Roberts's novel is uniquely modernist in its ambiguity. Ellen does not find home, nor does she lay claim to her own property in the end. Her final place is the road, and her "Flowering out of stone" is a manifestation of what Stoneback calls, in the context of Hemingway and Faulkner, "the haunting paradigm of place and placelessness," the unique pattern amid modernist novels, particularly those subsumed under the epic device utilized by Joyce and Pound--and here we could point from Ellen Chesser in <i>The Time of Man</i> to Lena Grove in <i>Light in August</i>--of "freedom and motion ... or deracination and the lost authentic place, of the constant quest for and pilgrimage to the hoped-for numinous place" ("Freedom and Motion" 216). Thus, through the voices of her children and the paradigm of place and placelessness, Ellen indeed has her flowering out of stone, those quintessential facts of being. During the climax of the novel's trifold tragedies--Jasper's adultery, Chick's death, the family's flight--Ellen remembers the graveyard epiphany, "with a sudden flash of bright, pictured light a hill grave where the sun had poured over a white marble shaft and where she had sung of life with a great shout" (362). The "flash of bright, pictured light" recalls Roberts's comparison of her story to James, "a flash of mind," aware of itself and woven into the fabric of place.

Finally, Ellen's flowering blossoms in the voices of her children and in the poetry of those voices, in her unique dialogue style, what Mark Lucas calls "narrative polyphony." The final scene of the novel provides the reader with a deeply layered image of the wanderer, or the wandering family, and the naivete or innocence of the children strikes an ironic tone as Ellen's family flees under cover of darkness. There is something of Laforgue's Pierrot here as well under the light of the moon with the children's lighthearted dialogue:

   Then Nannie began to talk about the sky, ... "They are wide apart
   tonight, the stars, and they're a few, only bright ones."

   "It's the moon sets the stars off and away like that, if you ever
   noticed," another said.

   "I heared it said one time that all the stars have names. Wouldn't
   it be a thing to do now, to walk out of a night and to say,
   'there's this one an there's that,' a-callen by name?"

   "You could learn that in books," Dick said, ... "I got a heap of
   books to read and ne'er a one have I read yet but two or maybe
   three. You could never read all the books in the world, I reckon,
   ... But the wisdom of the world is the dearest thing in life,
   learnen is, and it's my wish to get a hold onto some of
   that-there." (393-94)

The moonstruck children cannot conceive of the severity of the charge laid against their father as a barn-burner, nor can they comprehend their own poverty. Instead they echo their mother's awe as a child in the concepts of <i>time</i> and <i>man</i> and her life-affirming shout to the stones as they gaze beyond to the mysterious night sky. Ellen's children are thoroughly modern, seeking the unseen, the mysterious depths of life in the darkness and dust-bound books they imagine reading one day.

Their conversation no longer contains exchanges as they continue; each child begins to talk over the other as Roberts renders the endings of their sentences with ellipses:

   "I don't know. A far piece from here."

   "God knows!"

   "Some better country. Our own place maybe. Our trees in the orchard. Our
      own
   land sometime. Our place to keep...."

   "In them you'd find the answers to all the questions you'd ever ask and
      why
   it's so ...

   "I wonder how deep it goes and whe'r it's got an end and what the
   end is like...."

   "And nohow I couldn't bear to settle down and not...."

   "How blue it is, even of a night, and a little whiter round the
   moon, but deep in, as far as you can see...." (394)

The novel closes with a meditation on the moon and its mysterious depths, under which the narrator describes how the family "went a long way while the moon was still high.... They asked no questions of the way but took their own turnings" (395). In her own notes, Roberts emphasized Ellen's disappearance into the elements through her children's voices at the end of the novel ("The Time of Man" 9.6).

Ellen, our lady of the moon, subsumed by the landscape as etched in the moonlight and framed by the voices of children, embodies the distinct spirit of place while also resisting definition by that place. The closing of Roberts's novel completes a circle, back on the road, and remains, to adopt Levin, in the "irreducible temporality" of the circuits and seasons of earth, the tragedies and triumphs of the human heart: like the rivers that "run into the sea; yet the sea is not full; unto the place from whence the rivers come, thither they return again" (Eccl 1:7). Or to put the matter in a different light, Ellen herself completes the final act of the poet in the end of the novel. She becomes, in Eliot's words from "Tradition and the Individual Talent," "the shred of platinum," leaving no trace: "the more perfect the artist, the more completely separate in him [or her] will be the man [or woman] who suffers and the mind which creates; the more perfectly will the mind digest and transmute the passions which are its material" (7-8). In her modernist novel, Roberts offers a testament to modernist aesthetics while creating the very character of modernism itself: her name is Ellen Chesser.

                               *****

I would like to acknowledge Misericordia University's Faculty Research Grant Program for their support of my research and the writing this essay.

MATTHEW NICKEL

Misericordia University

                            Works Cited

Campbell, Harry Modean, and Ruel E. Foster. <i>Elizabeth Madox Roberts: American Novelist</i>. Norman: U of Oklahoma P, 1956.

Davidson, Donald. <i>The Spyglass: Views and Reviews, 1924-1930</i>. Ed. John Tyree Fain. Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt UP, 1963.

Davidson, Donald, and Allen Tate. <i>The Literary Correspondence of Donald Davidson and Allen Tate</i>. Ed. John Tyree Fain and Thomas Daniel Young. Athens: U of Georgia P, 1974.

Eliot, T. S. <i>Collected Poems: 1909-1962</i>. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1963.

--. "In Memory of Henry James." <i>The EgoistS.l</i> (1918): 1-2.

--. "Tradition and the Individual Talent." <i>Selected Essays</i>. 1932. NY: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1964. 3-11.

Flack, Leah Culligan. '"The news in the Odyssey is still news': Ezra Pound, W. H. D. Rouse, and a Modern <i>Odyssey." Modernism/ modernity</i> 22.1 (2015): 105-24.

Ford, Ford Madox. <i>The Correspondence of Ford Madox Ford and Stella Bowen</i>. Ed. Sondra J. Stang and Karen Cochran. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1993.

--. "Elizabeth Madox Roberts by Ford Madox Ford." <i>Critical Essays</i>. Ed. Max Saunders and Richard Stang. Manchester: Carcanet, 2002. 285-87.

--. <i>Letters of Ford Madox Ford</i>. Ed. Richard M. Ludwig. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1965.

--. <i>The March of Literature</i>. 1938. Normal, IL: Dalkey Archive P, 1994. Fussell, Paul. <i>The Great War and Modern Memory</i>. London: Oxford UP, 1975.

James, Henry. <i>The Ambassadors</i>. 1903. Ed. Leon Edel. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1960.

--. <i>The American</i>. 1877. Ed. Roy Harvey Pearce and Matthew J. Bruccoli. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1962.

--. <i>The American Scene</i>. 1907. New York: Horizon P, 1967.

--. <i>The Portrait of a Lady</i>. 1881. Ed. Leon Edel. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1963.

Kenner, Hugh. <i>The Pound Era</i>. Berkeley: U of California P, 1971.

Laforgue, Jules. <i>Essential Poems & Prose of Jules Laforgue</i>. Trans. Patricia Terry. Boston: Black Widow P, 2010.

Levin, Jonathan. <i>The Poetics of Transition: Emerson, Pragmatism, & American Literary Modernism</i>. Durham: Duke UP, 1999.

Lucas, Mark. " <i>The Time of Man</i> and <i>As I Lay Dying</i>: A Comparative Reflection." The 19th Elizabeth Madox Roberts Conference. Shaker Village, KY. April 22, 2017. Conference Paper.

McDowell, Frederick P. W. <i>Elizabeth Madox Roberts</i>. New York: Twayne, 1963.

Perloff, Marjorie. <i>21st-Century Modernism: The "New" Poetics</i>. Oxford: Blackwell, 2002.

Pound, Ezra. <i>ABC of Reading</i>. 1934. New York: New Directions, 2010.

--. <i>Instigations of Ezra Pound: Together with an Essay on the Chinese Written Character by Ernest Fenollosa</i>. New York: Boni and Liveright, 1920.

--. <i>Literary Essays of Ezra Pound</i>. New York: New Directions, 1968. Roberts, Elizabeth Madox. <i>The Great Meadow</i>. New York: Viking, 1930.

--. Letter to Monroe Wheeler. Glenway Wescott Papers. Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. MSS 134, Series I, Correspondence, Box 95, Folder 1419.

--. "On Poetry." <i>Elizabeth Madox Roberts: Essays of Discovery and Recovery</i>. NY: Quincy & Harrod P, 2008.

--. <i>The Time of Man</i>. 1926. Lexington: UP of Kentucky, 1982.

--. "The Time of Man." nd. TS with notes. Box 9, folder 6. Elizabeth Madox Roberts Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, DC.

Schuchard, Ronald. <i>Eliot's Dark Angel: Intersections of Life and Art</i>. New York: Oxford UP, 1999.

Slavick, William H. "Taken with a Long-Handled Spoon: The Roberts Papers and Letters." Stoneback and Florczyk14-39.

Stoneback, H. R. "Elizabeth Madox Roberts: Regionalist & Agrarian Visions & Revisions--In the Lowlands and 'On the Mountainside.'" Stoneback and Florczyk 67-89.

--. "Freedom and Motion, Place and Placelessness: On the Road in Hemingway's America." <i>Hemingway and the Natural World</i>. Ed. Robert E. Fleming. Moscow, ID: U of Idaho P, 1999. 203-19.

--. <i>The Hillfolk Tradition and Images of the Hillfolk in American Fiction Since 1926</i>. Diss. Vanderbilt University, 1969.

--. "In a Station of the Modern ('Ah, How I Love Pound!'): Roberts & Pound--Post-Symbolism, Imagism, Melopoeia, Phanopoeia, Logopoeia, and Mo(o)re." Stoneback and Florczyk 90-110.

--. '"Strange Caterwauling': Singing in the Wilderness with Boone & Audubon, Elizabeth Madox Roberts & Robert Penn Warren." <i>South Carolina Review AO A</i> (2007): 141-52.

Stoneback, H. R., and Steven Florczyk, eds. <i>Elizabeth Madox Roberts: Essays of Reassessment and Reclamation</i>. Nicholasville, KY: Wind Publications, 2008.

Warren, Robert Penn. "Elizabeth Madox Roberts: Life is from Within." 1963. Roberts, <i>The Time of Man</i> xxi-xxxiii.

(1) The first three volumes dedicated to Roberts are Harry Modean Campbell and Ruel E. Foster, Elizabeth Madox Roberts: American Novelist (1956); Earl H. Rovit, Herald to Chaos (1960); and Frederick P. W. McDowell, Elizabeth Madox Roberts (1963). The Roberts hiatus lasted then roughly from the late 1960s until the late 1990s. Numerous scholars have continued to make new discoveries and connections. Of note: William H. Slavick, who has worked diligently to promote Roberts, her poetry and unpublished material; H. R. Stoneback, who first wrote about Roberts in his dissertation at Vanderbilt in the 1960s and who has been the force behind the Roberts renascence for more than two decades in dozens of essays, keynotes, lectures, and in his role as Honorary President of the Elizabeth Madox Roberts Society; and Jane Eblen Keller, at work on the official Roberts biography, forthcoming (2019) from the University Press of Kentucky.

(2) In The March of Literature, Ford lists Roberts with Katherine Anne Porter and Caroline Gordon as "those chief ornaments of Southern writing" (829); in a letter to Stella Bowen (January 3, 1927), he describes how he "immensely admire[s]" Roberts's book (The Correspondence285); in a letter to Hugh Walpole (December 2, 1929), Ford notes that Roberts and Hemingway are two of the best writers of their generation (Letters of Ford Madox Ford 191).

(3) In a letter to Maurice Lesemann, Roberts writes, "In Ulysses prose breaks into two divergencies. We can never go back of this monumental book. Prose has been moving toward a new form for ten years or more, and here it is" (Slavick 35).

(4) This topic is discussed at length by Stoneback in "Elizabeth Madox Roberts --Regionalist & Agrarian Visions & Revisions: In the Lowlands and 'On the Mountainside'" and in '"Strange Caterwauling': Singing in the Wilderness with Boone & Audubon, Elizabeth Madox Roberts & Robert Penn Warren."

(5) Tate wrote to Davidson in 1929: "Our true Southern novelist at present is Elizabeth Roberts" (Literary Correspondence 245). In March 1930, Davidson wrote a review of Roberts's The Great Meadow, complimenting her ability to write about country people not because they "happen to be the fashion," but because "she is doing the perfectly natural and inevitable thing, which has come spontaneously out of herself as a natural-born Kentucky person" (Spyglass A7).

(6) Some of these were: "La Fraisne" (Lustra); "Cino" (Umbra); "Alba," "Villonaud for this Yule," "A Villonaud: Ballad of the Gibbet," "Praise of Ysolt" (Personae); "Grace Before Song" (A Lume Spento); "Lo Vidi Donne Con La Donna Mia" (Sonnets and Bailate of Guido Cavalcanti).

(7) First published in Poetry 11.2 (Nov. 1917) and later reprinted in Literary Essays of Ezra Pound.

(8) In her first book, In the Great Steep's Garden (1915), Roberts frames the flower-poem "Columbine in the Hills" on the Commedia dell'arte--Columbine is Pierrot's wife and the mistress of Harlequin. Roberts's use of this is quite apparent in the poem--it is not an iceberg subtext--and in a letter to Louise McElroy, dated December 1915, Roberts even offers a brief lesson on Pierrot and Columbine. In an unpublished poem from the same time period, Roberts deals with Pierrot as jester and joker, the clown with baggy pants, dancing and singing and kicking his heels toward the sky.

(9) Perloff s 21st-Century Modernism: The "New" Poetics (2002) identifies differences between Stein and Eliot, finding that "the noun or noun phrase was obviously central to Eliot ... and even more so to Pound" (64), and that for Stein value was placed on verbs, adverbs, and most importantly prepositions (64-65). Roberts gives weight to verbs and prepositions in the manner of Stein, particularly in the opening to The Great Meadow: "1774, and Diony, in the spring, hearing Sam, her brother, scratching at a tune on the fiddle, hearing him break a song over the taut wires and fling out with his voice to supply all that the tune lacked, placed herself momentarily in life, calling mentally her name, Diony Hall" (3).