about the site

the author

titles

first lines

essays

translations

acknowledgments

abraxas press

Note on Ridge Mill  

This, as you can see, is a story about a woman, an artist, who marries a farm-machinery mechanic and lives in rural isolation with him.  It’s obviously an odd match but she says she likes the isolation and they do romantic things like bathing by moonlight in a brook.  She seems to like ‘the bare farm sheds where the signposts stood, / the gale-tormented thorn, the parched hill’, since they provide subjects for her paintings.  To the husband she changes his house into ‘a real home which he mutely [sees] / transmogrified by her louche colours’.  If she makes things look ‘lurid’, even the brook in her paintings, that’s because she’s different, an artist, and he’s happy with that.  He assumes her silence to mean that she’s as content as he is.  Then her paintings change.  Everything in them is savage, red: ‘torn, bloody, unrecognisable ... Fields red, unfarmed. / Thorn angered by red snow’.  The trouble is that the husband hasn’t read the ‘story’ they’ve been living.  Every life is like a narrative, and if we can’t, or won’t, read our own as we live it, we could be missing out.  Our reality might be far from what we think it is.  Facing it might be painful.  Not facing ourselves might even be a Sartrean existential sin, signifying that we’re not authentically living at all, if you believe that sort of thing.  I wouldn’t say this myself.  But it’s clear that people don’t face some bits of life in order to avoid the truth of it.  When his wife leaves, after he has silently ignored the screams in her painting, her pain and the truth about their marriage cannot any longer be disregarded.

Alan Marshfield

top of page                                                                        Ridge Mill