In her novel My American, Stella Gibbons goes into great detail when describing a journey home that is one long endurance test for her young writer Amy Lee.
Amy Lee experiences another kind of nightmare in the form of a horrible recurring dream about Hurrying People and daytime reminders of it.
A foretaste of the nightmare
Amy Lee is on the way to her father's funeral:
“She had cried so much in the last two days that her head felt empty and light. She was so dreadfully lonely! She peeped out of the window as the car moved along the Holloway Road, staring at the crowds hurrying past in the spring sunshine. So many people, in so many cities all over the huge world! and not one of them belonged to her or would know who you meant if you said, “Amy Lee.” For the first time in her life she wondered what was going to become of her.”
No wonder that she seeks comfort and compensation in her inner world.
The Hurrying People nightmare
The nightmare is first mentioned when Amy Lee has been living with the Beeding family for two years. Her parents are dead; she is often lonely, depressed and desolate. She has a reasonably good home with the Beedings, but despite their kindness this foster family is not enough. Perhaps having to hide her writing and her real self is another factor that contributes to the nightmare she occasionally experiences:
“Then she dreamed that the crowds in the streets could not see her, because they were all hurrying past her on their way back to happy homes. She dreamed she stood in front of them screaming: “I’m Amy Lee! Look, I’m Amy Lee!” but nobody saw her or stopped, and she awoke crying heart brokenly in the dark bedroom.”
Daytime reminders of the nightmare
Amy sees something that reminds her of her dream when she first encounters the unfamiliar busy streets with their crowds and heavy traffic near St. Paul's Cathedral on her way to a job interview:
“...these people were hurrying forward with their chins a little stuck out and their arms swinging smartly. They were like the Hurrying People in the dream she sometimes had, who could not see her even when she stood in front of them screaming out her name.”
Amy goes home after selling her first story – to the magazine for which she has been working:
“Homeward through the tired, hurrying crowds went Amy, just as she used to in that old dream of her childhood when the flock of hastening blank-faced strangers would not stop or notice her although she screamed her name at them and implored them with outflung arms.”
Fame is not enough to stop the nightmare
Amy Lee still thinks in terms of attracting the attention of the indifferent, hurrying people after she becomes rich and famous:
“At last the Hurrying People had been made to stop! Listen … I will tell you a story… and the Hurrying People who had haunted the dreams of her childhood faltered in their haste, turning curiously to hear what Amy Lee had to say. In every city in the world they stopped to listen to Amy Lee. “
Amy soon realises that seeing her name up in lights over a cinema and knowing that her name is recognised worldwide is not enough; it is no solution to the problem of loneliness caused by not having any direct recognition of her real self by the right people:
“Outside was the real world, covered with millions of people with homes and families, with their work troubles and their money troubles; millions of people loving and suffering and working under the blazing light of the sun as the Earth whirled round in space. And she knew nothing about any of these people, nor about the things they cared for. She did not like them and they did not like her. They liked her books (listen … I will tell you a story) but she was a nothing, a ghost in the sunlight.”
People may at last know Amy Lee's name, but not one single person in the entire world knows the real Amy and she has no real connection to anyone. No wonder that she feels alienated, cut off from the mainstream of life; she really is like a ghost in the world.
The end of the nightmare
When Amy is in America and in torment because her soulmate Bob is missing, she has the nightmare one last time:
“She lay down again and dozed uneasily for a little while, half-dreaming, half-remembering, the Hurrying People...and all the fears of her childhood, and while she was seeing them she forgot Bob. And then for a few blessed moments she would fall dreamlessly asleep—but always at intervals of half an hour or less, she started awake, again, trembling, and at once in the grip, without pause or mercy, of fear.”
Bob is found; Amy starts a new life with him in America and her nightmare comes to an end.
Stella Gibbons and the nightmare
Stella Gibbons mentions the nightmare several times and describes it in very convincing terms; this suggests to me that it is based on personal experience, perhaps from her early life.
Perhaps she too had felt desperate for acknowledgement and attention; perhaps she too had felt sidelined and invisible, left out in the cold and lost in the dark; perhaps she too had felt like a ghost in the world.
The basic Hurrying People scenario is familiar from other sources and contexts; it has some further and wider applications that will be covered in a future article.
This is a very apt quotation in the light of Amy Lee's door into her imagination:
