Woolf and Lamb, their time and ours, the artist and the art

In the early days of January, I set aside a few books to be regular companions through the year: a volume each of Virginia Woolf's diaries, essays, and letters, and The Charles Lamb Day Book, a quote-a-day volume drawn from the full range of Charles Lamb's work.

One day recently, reading both of those companion authors, I was brought up short—and not in a good way. I'm going to quote both below, in service of thinking about them, so if you'd rather the pleasantness of your Sunday morning not be broken, I'd suggest passing over this post.

In the Lamb entry for January 24, taken from a letter to Edward Moxom, appears the line,

I maintain it, the eighth commandment hath a secret special reservation by which the reptile is exempt from any protection from it; as a dog, or a n------, he is not a holder of property.

Neither Lamb nor Methuen, the publisher of this 1925 volume, elided the slur as I have done.

Then, in Woolf's diary entry for January 9, 1915, when she was almost thirty-three, I came across the following:

On the towpath we met & had to pass a long line of imbeciles. The first was a very tall young man, just queer enough to look twice at, but no more; the second shuffled, & looked aside; & then one realised that every one in that long line was a miserable ineffective shuffling idiotic creature, with no forehead, or no chin, & an imbecile grin, or a wild suspicious stare. It was perfectly horrible. They should certainly be killed.

The whole of this passage is disturbing and disheartening, but that last line is flat-out shocking. "Certainly," she writes. "Certainly."

What to do with this? I love Lamb and Woolf, as writers and, in many ways, as people. Like Henry James, they are writers whose work I have trouble separating from my knowledge of and interest in their lives. Their published works nestle in my mind alongside their letters, notebooks, diaries; biographies inflect, and, largely, increase my appreciation of their creations. I admire Woolf and Lamb, both for the work they created and for the way they played the hands life dealt them: Woolf's valiant struggle against mental breakdown; Lamb's abiding care for his mentally ill sister ("When she is not violent, her rambling chat is better to me than the sense and sanity of this world."), even after she murdered their parents. I would find it hard to know as much as we now do about these two, to have read as extensively in their work as I have, and not admire them. I could no more read their work now as something separate from their lives and characters than I could a letter from one of my siblings.

Which is not to say that I've ever been under the illusion that either is perfect. Woolf could be tone-deaf and ignorant to the point of cruelty on issues of class, and, despite her marriage to a Jew, made antisemitic comments in her writings. Lamb, meanwhile, laid bare his prejudices against a number of groups that differed from him—blacks, Jews, Quakers, Scots—in his essay "Imperfect Sympathies." Of Jews, he writes,

I should prefer not to be in habits of familiar intercourse with any of that nation. . . . Old prejudices cling about me.

Some people would credit Lamb for being frank about these views, but like many people today who pride themselves on "just asking the question" about supposedly taboo subjects, he shows an interest only in acknowledging those views, not in understanding their roots, questioning their validity, or moving beyond them.

That image of the contemporary "question raiser" is perhaps a good path to the question of why, if I already knew that Woolf and Lamb were flawed, these passages stopped me in my tracks. It's at least in part because of the way that #MeToo and other developments have brought the question of how we deal with art by bad people to the fore. And unlike so many ginned-up controversies, this one is both real and legitimately complicated. There are plenty of people who are interested in using the question solely as a straw man in service of dismissing the larger project of widening the circle of inclusion in society, but there are also plenty of people legitimately trying to answer the question. It's possible to conceive of a  wide range of answers that are valid, with the test of that validity ultimately being up to each person as they address each work of art. (For a really good discussion of this subject, I recommend the "What to Do with What's in the Box" episode of the Relentless Picnic podcast.)

Is it unfair to judge people like Woolf and Lamb by the standards of our era rather than theirs? Certainly. The past was terrible. I've never forgotten the opening lines of Simon Dickie's 2011 book Cruelty and Laughter:

Eighteenth-century Britons—or a high proportion of them—openly delighted in the miseries of others. Women as well as men laughed at cripples and hunchbacks. They tormented lunatics and led blind men into walls. Wife beating was a routine way of maintaining order within marriage—"an honest Englishman hates his wife" went the catchphrase. Types of violence that would now count as rape were almost mainstream sexual behaviors. Social hierarchies were part of God's plan, and those less favored were habitual figures of fun. Gentlement beat their servants and scoffed at the hungry peasants who crouched along the road outside very major town.  Yet social equals were no more likely to sympathize. Useless old women, village idiots, starving paupers, bastard bearers from the next parish—none of them attracted much sympathy from their own kind. Ridiculing and inflicting pain were everyday amusements, and powerful forces were defending them. Violence, intolerance, and schadenfreude were all tolerated as unavoidable side effects of British liberty, if not its very foundation.

Our own time features plenty of cruelty. Dickie, however, makes a strong case that on this measurement, at least, we've made some progress. (Similarly, I was shocked reading a scene in Little Dorrit last month in which Gowan, not a good man but far from a villain, reprimands his dog with. a blow to the head, then by striking him "severely with the heel of his boot, so that his mouth was presently bloody.")

By those standards, the casual racism I encountered in Charles Lamb's Day Book is nothing but a phrase—tossed off in a letter, barely the product of thought, far more an indication of the waters in which he swam than a personal deficiency. And even the staggering cruelty of Woolf's certainty in her diary is of its era—perhaps more bluntly expressed, but in keeping with a time when eugenics was on the march. Would we want to be judged in the future by the ways in which we reflect our own flawed society? Would we wish posterity to extend to us the forbearance of temporal understanding? We are inextricably of our time, even if we should, and, one hopes, do, try like hell to rise above it. (D. J. Enright: "It is not so much that one is out of sympathy with the age, it's the only age one has, as that the age is out of sympathy with itself. But then, the age is out of sympathy with itself.")

Yet the very reason we turn to artists in life is that we expect more. Not more in an explicitly moral sense, but more in the sense of seeing clearly—but the two are inextricable. As Iris Murdoch continually reminds us, seeing clearly is at the core of both morality and art. Is it strange that Woolf, wrapped up in the thinking of her time—and herself such a creature of the mind that she would struggle to conceive living with it damaged in a way that possibly limited thought—should fail to see the essential humanity of intellectally disabled people? No, not at all. But some people in her own time did. And we have come to expect more from her. She showed us, again and again, a mind of penetrating insight into human life and thought and being; she put that on the page like few others, in ways that remain thrilling a century later. Even her casual writing flashes with insight—the reason I was reading her journals in the first place was because they are full of memorable thoughts. So when she falls, it hurts.

What do we do with this kind of knowledge about artists? I don't have a prescription; this work of judgment is I believe fundamentally individual. When it comes to someone like Bill Cosby or Louis C.K., or in a different way Woody Allen, the answer is easy: I'm done. To enjoy their work required accepting a certain presentation of themselves and their worldview that was predicated on agreement that they were, while flawed, fundamentally good people. If they turn out to be, to varying degrees, monsters, that collapses completely.

Woolf and Lamb, on the other hand? It's more complicated. I'm not going to stop reading them, and I doubt I'll even stop admiring them, at least to a degree. There remains much to admire. And their work will, I am sure, continue to matter. But I will approach it with more skepticism. I'll question it more thoroughly. And, saddest of all, I'll wonder what might have been, had they been able to question themselves and their thinking more thoroughly. Art made by good people can be bad; art made by bad people can be good. But bad morality is usually rooted in a failure of understanding, and no art is ever the better for that.

Virginia Woolf takes criticism from E. M. Forster

I've read a lot of Virginia Woolf's letters and essays, but until this week I'd not spent any time with her diary. Now, having done so even to the smallest extent, I see that I'll have to make time to read through those many volumes eventually, too. Woolf is such an astute thinker and clear writer that almost any topic becomes interesting when it crosses her attention; merely flipping through what's available on Google Book Search (drawing on my typical keywords for that activity: lost, bookshelves, nonsense, drunk, hungover, party, forgotten) brought up a number of memorable passages.

The one I'll share today is from the end of October, 1919, right after the publication of her second novel, Night and Day. On October 30, she writes a bit about the response from friends and relatives:

If I could treat myself professionally as a subject for analysis I could make an interesting story of the past few days, of my vicissitudes about N. and D. After Clive’s letter came Nessa’s--unstinted praise; on top of that Lytton’s: enthusiastic praise; a grand triumph, a classic; and so on. Violet’s sentence of eulogy followed; and then, yesterday morning, this line from Morgan [Forster] “I like it less than The Voyage Out.” Though he spoke also of great admiration nand had read in haste and proposed re-reading, this rubbed out all the pleasure of the rest. Yes, but to continue. About 3 in the afternoon I felt happier and easier on account of his blame than on account of the others’ praise--as if one were in the human atmosphere again, after a blissful roll among elastic clouds and cushiony downs. Yet I suppose I value Morgan’s opinion as much as any.

I'm interested by her turn to a metaphor when she talks of taking Forster's criticism on board: it brought her down to earth, where we belong, but she won't pretend that being in the clouds hadn't been "blissful."

By the next day, she had already come to terms with it:

The doubt about Morgan and N. and D. Is removed; I understand why he likes it less than V.O.; and, in understanding, see that it is not a criticism to discourage. Perhaps intelligent criticism never is.

She goes on to lay out her understanding of his criticism: Night and Day is too formal for him, and "none of the characters . . . is lovable." Forster, she writes, "requires, a far greater degree of lovability in the characters." It's a need that a reader can sense animating Forster's own work--he generally seems to want us not just to care about, but to like his characters.

In coming to terms with his criticism, Woolf acknowledges both its validity and its fundamental inappropriateness: Forster had looked for a different book than what she'd written. But, a critic herself and an incredibly perceptive reader, Woolf refuses to let herself dismiss Forster wholly; you sense that this thought will stay lodged somewhere in her creative brain, the grain of sand that might later help form a pearl. She concludes the entry, not with condemnation, but with praise:

Morgan has the artist’s mind; he says the simple things that clever people don’t say; I find him the best of critics for that reason.

Few writers have ever read as well as Woolf; I wonder how many took criticism like as well as this?

Some half-formed thoughts on Virginia Wool on Lord Chesterfield and the eighteenth century

In 1927, Virginia Woolf wrote a short essay on Lord Chesterfield's letters to his son. If you're not familiar with the letters, here's a thumbnail: they consist of a witty, elegantly conversational program of instruction in how to become a gentleman and be successful, largely through social graces and dissembling. Here, for example, is Chesterfield at his most amusingly detailed:

In your person you must be accurately clean; and your teeth,hands, and nails, should be superlatively so; a dirty mouth has real ill consequences to the owner, for it infallibly causes the decay, as well as the intolerable pain of the teeth, and it is very offensive to his acquaintance, for it will most inevitably stink. I insist, therefore, that you wash your teeth the first thing you do every morning, with a soft sponge and swarm water, for four or five minutes; and then wash your mouth five or six times. Mouton, whom I desire you will send for upon your arrival at Paris, will give you an opiate, and a liquor to be used sometimes. Nothing looks more ordinary, vulgar, and illiberal, than dirty hands, and ugly, uneven, and ragged nails: I do not suspect you of that shocking, awkward trick, of biting yours; but that is not enough: you must keep the ends of them smooth and clean, not tipped with black, as the ordinary people's always are. The ends of your nails should be small segments of circles, which, by a very little care in the cutting, they are very easily brought to; every time that you wipe your hands, rub the skin round your nails backward, that it may not grow up, and shorten your nails too much.

And here he is in a slightly more abstract mode:

There are people who indulge themselves in a sort of lying, which they reckon innocent, and which in one sense is so; for it hurts nobody but themselves. This sort of lying is the spurious offspring of vanity, begotten upon folly: these people deal in the marvellous; they have seen some things that never existed; they have seen other things which they never really saw, though they did exist, only because they were thought worth seeing. Has anything remarkable been said or done in any place, or in any company, they immediately present and declare themselves eye or ear witnesses of it. They have done feats themselves, unattempted, or at least unperformed by others. They are always the heroes of their own fables; and think that they gain consideration, or at least present attention, by it. Whereas, in truth, all they get is ridicule and contempt, not without a good degree of distrust: for one must naturally conclude, that he who will tell any lie from idle vanity, will not scruple telling a greater for interest. Had I really seen anything so very extraordinary as to be almost incredible, I would keep it to myself, rather than by telling it give anybody room to doubt, for one minute, of my veracity.

Woolf's essay, like nearly all her essays on other writers, is generous, perceptive, and even, by the end, deeply empathetic as she imagines Lord Chesterfield's unexpressed disappointment that his son's career turned out noway so glittering as he'd foreseen. But what caught my attention particularly today was her early setting of the scene. I'll quote it at length because its internal development is so nicely linked, sentence by sentence:

When Lord Mahon edited the letters of Lord Chesterfield he thought it necessary to warn the intending reader that they are “by no means fitted for early or indiscriminate perusal”. Only “those people whose understandings are fixed and whose principles are matured” can, so his Lordship said, read them with impunity. But that was in 1845. And 1845 looks a little distant now. It seems to us now the age of enormous houses without any bathrooms. Men smoke in the kitchen after the cook has gone to bed. Albums lie upon drawing-room tables. The curtains are very thick and the women are very pure. But the eighteenth century also has undergone a change. To us in 1930 it looks less strange, less remote than those early Victorian years. Its civilisation seems more rational and more complete than the civilisation of Lord Mahon and his contemporaries. Then at any rate a small group of highly educated people lived up to their ideals. If the world was smaller it was also more compact; it knew its own mind; it had its own standards. Its poetry is affected by the same security. When we read the Rape of the Lock we seem to find ourselves in an age so settled and so circumscribed that masterpieces were possible. Then, we say to ourselves, a poet could address himself whole-heartedly to his task and keep his mind upon it, so that the little boxes on a lady’s dressing-table are fixed among the solid possessions of our imaginations. A game at cards or a summer’s boating party upon the Thames has power to suggest the same beauty and the same sense of things vanishing that we receive from poems aimed directly at our deepest emotions. And just as the poet could spend all his powers upon a pair of scissors and a lock of hair, so too, secure in his world and its values, the aristocrat could lay down precise laws for the education of his son. In that world also there was a certainty, a security that we are now without. What with one thing and another times have changed. We can now read Lord Chesterfield’s letters without blushing, or, if we do blush, we blush in the twentieth century at passages that caused Lord Mahon no discomfort whatever.

There's unquestionably some kicking against the Victorians—her parents' generation, still around and in the way—here, with which I can to some extent sympathize. When I view her preference for the eighteenth century in that context, I think I understand it better: we see our immediate predecessors' blind spots and hypocrisy up close and writ large, and—crucially—far more clearly than they do. Earlier ancestors, on the other hand . . . well, our relation to them is more gentle, less vexed. We see their failings at just enough distance that we forgive them; we wish they had known better, and we tell ourselves we somehow would have had we been in that position, but none of it presses against us and our own attempts to establish identity and correct the world with the same force that more recent generations' mistakes do.

What's particularly interesting in this passage today, however, isn't even so much the generational conflict (though the struggle between Bloomsbury and the lingering Victorians is never not interesting) as Woolf's statements of the present day's uncertainty. The eighteenth century was "settled and circumscribed." "Masterpieces were possible." "It knew its own mind; it had its own standards." There was security and certainty, "a security that we are now without."

Though I would be willing to grant that there may be a kernel of truth here—any era that produces epics and rediscovers the Greeks seems more likely to be solid than one marked by World War I—at the same time, that's not the impression I've ever had of the eighteenth century. Cyril Connolly called the first half of it "a transitional age full of a certain beautiful clumsiness"; I think of it as an era of a slight, but important opening up, at least in the world of letters, with all the insecurity that would almost necessarily accompany it. Samuel Johnson is my touchstone here: a truly self-made man who found a place for himself in the burgeoning world of print, which demanded (and, at least to an extent, rewarded) a constant supply of new material. The picture you get of that world from Johnson's writings—and even from Boswell's own journal, as despite coming from money and position he approached life as if it were an act of creation and he needed to make his own way—is of a far from settled civilization. Johnson was certain of one thing, heaven, and he proclaimed with certainty on many others, but his own career and its restless inquiry suggest a complicated world that Woolf's description of a self-satisfied, static era doesn't really support.

At the same time, isn't it always the case that the present feels unsettled, usually in an unprecedented way? Don't we feel that now? The golden age was never so golden as we remember; in fact, there was never a golden age at all. Yet knowing that never seems to make the ground beneath our feet feel any more solid.

Henry James, Virginia Woolf, Stephen Crane, and Christmas at Brede

There's so much I could share from Leon Edel's Henry James: A Life--and in fact, if you follow me on Twitter, you'll find plenty gleaned from it over the past ten days--but today I'll stick to two bits. The first is brief: a parody by Virginia Woolf of Henry James in conversation:

My dear Virginia, they tell me, they tell me, they tell me, that you--as indeed being your father's daughter, your grandfather's grandchild, the descendant, descendant of a century--of a century--of quill pen and ink, ink, in pots, yes, yes, yes, they tell me ahmmmm, that you, that you, that you write in short.

Wonderful, isn't it? As my Twitter friend Marly Youmans points out, however, it would be interesting to see a similar parody by James of Woolf's conversation. Though we know her lively personal voice from her letters, journals, and even her essays, I don't have a great sense of what she was like in conversation, to say nothing of what her conversation with this representative of an older generation, a friend of her parents, would be like.

The second story is more extended, a tale of amateur theatricals and drafty, possibly haunted manors. It occurs in December of 1899, when Stephen Crane, deep into the process of dying of tuberculosis, had recently moved to Brede House with his paramour, Cora Taylor. The move was not a good idea:

At Brede, Crane too sat daily in the tower, trying to write tales in order to provide money for the improvident Cora. James was fascinated--and pained--by the spectacle of the Cranes. They were living out his tales--about old english houses in need of repair let to Americans; about ambitious American women with a "past"; about talented writers struggling to do the successful thing in order to dress their wives and pay for food and rent. The situation at Brede had also a touch of the eerie, as in James's ghostly tales. There was a legend that Brede had an ogre, a consumer of children; he had ultimately been done to death with a wooden saw. There were said to be underground passages which served generations of smugglers. But aside from its ghosts, its drafts, its creaking boards, its tree-consuming fireplaces, Brede was clearly the last place in the world for a malaria-ridden consumptive to spend a cold damp English winter. Wells remembered Crane as "profoundly weary and ill." Cora Crane did not notice--what everyone else saw--that he was destined to be very soon one of the ghostliest of Brede's ghosts.

That passage is worth sharing for its details (the ogre! secret passages!), but also for the sense it gives of Edel's approach to that sort of detail, and his ability to weave it into effective, even novelistic prose. I can imagine a less confident biographer hovering over that last line, considering removing the reference to ghosts; it stayed, and it makes the paragraph.

From there, Edel shares the story of the near-disastrous theatricals:

H. G. Wells has told the story of the great Christmas-week party Cora organized to welcome the year 1900. The guests were asked to bring their own bedding. There were few furnished bedrooms in Brede House and Cora created a dormitory for the ladies and another for the men. There was an acute shortage of toilets. Crane tried to organize American-style poker games which his English guests did not take seriously. On Christmas Eve a play was given in the local school house written in part by Crane, who asked James, Conrad, Wells, Gissing, and others to add a few words to the script, making it the most "authored" play of the century. It was about the Brede ghost--the child-eating ogre who was sawed in half. . . . The party had a painful finale at just about the hour when Henry James, in nearby Lamb House, was invoking the "gruesome" year of 1900 in his letter to Rhoda Broughton. [Ed.: "This dreadful gruesome new year, so monstrously numbered."] Eight miles away Cora was waking up Wells. Crane had just had a lung hemorrhage. Wells's final memory of the party was a ride into the drizzle at dawn on a bicycle in search of a doctor.

In his recent biography of Crane, Paul Sorrentino offers a bit more detail about the play and the party:

The principal, and only, performance of the play--titled The Ghost--took place [in the Brede schoolhouse] on December 28. Newspaper reviews suggesting it was an original musical comedy written by distinguished authors prompted Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree, a leading actor-manager in English theater, to inquire whether it might be performed after A Midsummer Night's Dream at Her Majesty's Theatre in London. [A. E. W.] Mason quickly told him no.

On the evening of December 29, a three-day celebration climaxed with a gala ball replete with elegant waltzes, a "quadrille of the Lancers," a country barn dance, and a game devised by H. G. Wells that consisted of racing on broomsticks. The guests reveled late every night throughout their stay, then would feast the next morning on a brunch of bacon, eggs, sweet potatoes, and beer. The weather, unfortunately, was not cooperative. Snow, severe thunderstorms, and icy roads prevented many local residents from seeing The Ghost and made travel to Brede Place hazardous. The omnibus transporting guests often got stuck in the mud, forcing them to get out and push. Crane himself seemed out of sorts. When he tried to teach some of the men poker, they chatted idly instead of paying close attention to the rules. "In any decent saloon in America," he complained, "you'd be shot for talking like that at poker." Abruptly he left, sulking. During the ball, he sat silently in a corner of the huge fireplace in the hall, bewildered by the frenetic pace of his life. He knew he was dying. After everyone had gone to bed, he tried unsuccessfully to hide from Cora the fact that he had just had a severe lung hemorrhage. Distraught, she awakened Wells, who, having once been diagnosed with tuberculosis, understood the gravity of the situation and cycled seven miles in freezing rain to bring the local physician, Dr. Ernest B. Skinner.

What I'm not entirely clear on is how much sense the other guests had of Crane's condition. Surely at least those who were close to him knew he was tubercular, but did they realize more than Cora how far along he was? Either way, it's hard to escape a Masque of the Red Death sort of feel when you read about the party. Crane would be dead before six months were out.

And so is James, again, now that I've turned the last page and closed Edel's book. In a world where Colm Toibin has so brilliantly, empathetically imagined James's inner life, Edel's biography feels perhaps less revelatory than it should. The necessary opacity of the honest biographer's art can't quite match up to a brilliantly rendered fictional account, so we leave Edel's book feeling we know James less well than we expected. That, however, is an unfair critique, and one that will fade with time as my memories of Edel's facts and Toibin's fiction quietly meld. Edel did achieve the remarkable: he helped us to know a man who let very few people know him, let us get close to a man who preferred to keep us at a pen's distance.

Books at the bus stop

It's not fair to winter to blame it for our woes, but woes we have and winter we have, so I'll fall in line and let it take the blame. Blogging has suffered along with overall morale. But today . . . today we saw sun, and temperatures such that a coatless walk to the library at lunch brought no Boswell-style self-recriminations for impulsiveness. So perhaps hope is reasonably in order?

That said, I'm still a bit behind-hand in almost everything, so I'll place-hold for a few more days. I spent much of last week falling under the spell of Winifred Holtby's 1936 novel of English village life and government, South Riding, on the recommendation of Proustitute and Rohan Maitzen. Dog-eared pages remind me that I intend to write properly about it soon, but for now I'll just share a pleasant moment: as I was standing at the bus stop reading the novel--which I think it's fair to say is all but unknown in the States--another of the regular habitues of my stop saw it, and, smiling, said, "It's not common to come across another Winifred Holtby fan."

To top off this brief, cheering moment of transit communion, a few days later he lent me Vera Brittain's book about her friendship with Holtby, Testament of Friendship. And as I flipped through it, a passage in Carolyn Heilbrun's introduction brought things back around to the writer who has probably drawn my thoughts most frequently through the winter, Virginia Woolf:

Holtby admired the work of Virginia Woolf, still, of course, in progress when Holtby died [in 1939]. Her criticism is notable for being the work of a contemporary woman; it is considerably more intelligent than most of the Woolf criticism produced before 1960. Holtby, for example, recognized, as no one was to do again for many years, that Jacob's Room was a war book: "It is as much a war book as The Death of a Hero or Farewell to Arms; yet it never mentions trenches, camps, recruiting officers, nor latrines. It does not describe the hero's feelings on the eve of battle; not an inch of barbed wire decorates its foreground. . . . She could not know in what terms Tommies referred to their sergeant-major nor what it feels like to thrust a bayonet through a belly. What she did know, what she could imagine, was what life looked like to those young men who in 1914 and 1915 crossed the Channel and vanished out of English life forever."

And now I want to go read some of Holtby's criticism . . .

Virginia Woolf, meet John Dortmunder

As the snow blows and blows outside, making me glad to have stacks of unread books surrounding me, let's take one last dip into Hermione Lee's Virginia Woolf before I leave it behind. In an undated, unpublished manuscript, Woolf described watching police cars chase a thief in the Tottenham Court Road, then reflected:

What does it feel like to be chasing a criminal? What does he say about it when he gets home and takes off his heavy boots and jacket? In all modern fiction there is not account of this that convinces one that the writer knows.

Well, if Westlake's Dortmunder is any guide, what he does when he gets home is goes to the fridge and gets a beer, Then, when May asks what went wrong, he says, "I don't want to talk about it, May." Then Andy Kelp tells her. At length.

Woolf and her publishers

My two-week immersion in the world, work, and (as much as possible) mind of Virginia Woolf has come to a close, as I reached the necessarily sad, even heart-wrenching end of Hermione Lee's biography this morning. I can't imagine anyone doing a better job of grappling with--and, to the extent possible, helping us to understand--the complicated, difficult, brilliant personality of Woolf, and how it fueled her work. I have no doubt that for the rest of my life, as I read and re-read Woolf's novels and essays and letters, Lee's portrait, and all of Woolf's contradictions, admirable and doubtful qualities, will be firmly in my mind.

Today, I thought I'd call out a couple of minor instances when, as someone who works in book publishing, I had great sympathy for Woolf's publishers. Because the Woolfs' own Hogarth Press was her primary publisher, the difficulties of working with Woolf--which included the range of her work, which could make it difficult to market; the uncertainty about when and what would be the next book; and the severe emotional strain that accompanied the completion of a book, and thus complicated the proofing stage--were mostly kept in house. The same for the increasingly outmoded and inappropriate cover art created by Woolf's sister, Vanessa Bell: insisting on a particular cover is all fine and good if you're the publisher as well as the author, but taking such a plan to an outside publisher would surely have led to frantic meetings and copious amounts of worry.

In the United States, however, Woolf's publisher for many years was Donald Brace (whose firm, now part of the HBJ etc. borg, still holds the rights to Woolf's books), and while he seems to have been accommodating, and even grateful to be her publisher, traces of his struggles do turn up in Lee's book. There's a simple one, which plagued both the US and UK editions of Orlando: Woolf's inclusion of the subtitle "A Biography," combined with her place as a writer of both fiction and nonfiction, ensured it would be mis-shelved in many bookstores--and, as biography tends to be shelved by subject rather than author, mis-shelved in a way that almost guaranteed no one would find it.

That, however, is a minor problem: the moment reviews start appearing, even a mis-shelved book will ultimately find its readers. What elicits more sympathy from me for Brace is hearing of the delays. Figuring out what books you'll publish in a given season--and which you can't quite count on enough to announce them yet--is always tough, and when you've got an author who is simultaneously as prolific and as prone to rewriting as Woolf was, it can be incredibly difficult. Here's Lee on the back-and-forth with Brace about The Years, the book of Woolf's that seems to have had the most painful gestation:

In April 1934 she told [Brace] that the book would not be ready for a year. . . . In November 1934, as she began to revise, she told Brace it would need a lot of work and would now probably not be ready until the autumn of 1935. But by autumn she was writing again to say that it was too long, and taking too long, and still needed revising. The following April, 1936, Leonard explained that although the book was now in proof, she was unwell, and publication must be put off until the autumn. Brace, who had now seen proofs of thee first part, wrote forbearingly: "It isn't surprising that this long and carefully planned book should have tired her out." In July he was asking if he could make November a tentative publication date. But by then it was still not ready to send off, and in the end was not published until March 1937 in England and April 1937 in America.

Oh, how I feel for Brace when I think about that inquiry from July! How careful I imagine he was not to seem too pushy, but how very much he would have wanted, and needed, to know whether he could count on the book being in stores for Christmas. And the lines Lee quotes from his earlier letter feel so familiar: that is exactly how you write to an author--in meticulously labored-over sentences--in support, even as their delays are making your life, and business, more difficult.

The honor of being Virginia Woolf's publisher, of course, would compensate for a fair amount of strain, and justify a fair amount of flexibility that one might not be willing to offer another author. Nonetheless, I expect there was many a night when Brace got home from the office and wanted nothing more than a quiet drink, and the company of a good book whose author he had nothing at all to do with.

Virginia and Vanessa

I've time for only a very quick post today, again drawing on Hermione Lee's biography of Virginia Woolf. Lee is particularly good on Virginia Woolf's relationship with her sister, Vanessa Bell, making their combination of intimacy, love, need, jealousy, and competitiveness suitably complicated and wholly convincing. What caught my eye today was the following, from a letter Virginia wrote to Vanessa on February 20, 1922 after an afternoon spent with Vanessa where she must have let her jealousy--of Vanessa's lovers, children, Paris life, art--show:

Yes, I was rather depressed when you saw me--What it comes to is this: you say "I do think you lead a dull respectable absurd life--lots of money, no children, everything so settled: and conventional. Look at me now--only sixpence a year--lovers--Paris--life--love--art--excitement--God! I must be off." This leaves me in tears.

In a short paragraph, Woolf transforms her distress, no less painful for knowing that it's in some sense poorly founded, into a joke on her own absurdity--yet it's a joke that manages nonetheless to convey to her sister that the pain is real.

I'm rolling along happily with the biography, interrupted only by piano practice and work. Yet as good as it is, I'm having to fight the temptation that strikes any reader of a compelling biography of a writer: to take a break and re-read that writer's own work. There's a copy of Jacob's Room on the side table, calling to me . . .

Virginia Woolf, naturalist

Hermione Lee's biography of Virginia Woolf displays all her many strengths as a biographer: a seemingly insatiable appetite for research, an ability to synthesize huge numbers of disparate and complicated sources, an eye for a telling anecdote (and the ability to tell it, or get out of the way and let her sources tell it), and, most important, a powerful desire to understand. Again and again in this biography Lee offers us different possible Virginia Woolfs, different ways to read or understand particular actions, statements, or decisions. She has opinions, certainly, but while she clearly wants to end up with a coherent portrait, she's nearly as concerned with simply making sure that we understand the limitations of our definite knowledge. A biographer's art is necessarily speculative and interpretive; the better ones remind us of that regularly.

As Lee acknowledges on the first page, Woolf is a daunting figure for a biographer, if for no other reason that that there's been so much written about her, by her friends, family, and acquaintances, initially, and then by scholars in the decades since her death. In addition--and probably most important and most daunting--there are the thousands and thousands of pages of her own writing, particularly the essays, letters, and diaries, in which she presents, analyzes, and refracts her own personality and mind as they change over the years.

At the same time, those thousands of pages are a biographer's dream: they contain so many wonderful nuggets of insight, humor, aphorism, analysis, and character that choosing what to leave out is surely nearly as hard as figuring out what to draw on. Lee makes excellent use of the material, and in doing so she's all but cemented a hitherto vague conviction on my part that I will eventually need to read all of Woolf's writing--not just the novels and the handful of essays I've read and gone back to over the years, but the letters and diaries, too.

What caught my eye today was a small group of diary entries that Lee highlights, from 1917 to 1919, when Woolf took up diary writing again in earnest after a break in the early years of the war. She and Leonard were living in their country house at Asheham, and, as Lee explains,

To start with, as if a great soloist were getting back into shape with simple exercises, she put down brief, exact nature notes, suppressing the "I" of self ("went mushrooming") and becoming merely a mirror, a recorder, of wartime rural life.

Lee draws out a batch of those entries:

Swallows flying in great numbers very low and swift in the field.

The field full of swallows, & leaves broken off in bunches, so that the trees already look thin.

Found the same caterpillar--dark brown with 3 purple spots on either side of the head--that we found last year. We took him home . . . The caterpillar has disappeared. There is a purple smudge on the window sill, which makes it likely that he was crushed.

I waited for him [Leonard] in a barn, where they had cut mangolds which smelt very strong. A hen ate them.

The days melted into each other like snowballs roasting in the sun.

Elsewhere, Woolf refers to the "tragedy" of the smushed caterpillar.

Woolf's notes don't have quite the assurance of a true naturalist like Thoreau--you get the sense that Woolf still feels outside of nature in a way that Thoreau, at his most engaged, seems not to have--but they do share a keenness of eye, and a simplicity of description that lets natural objects be what they are, only later to be turned into ideas or symbols or metaphors. If Woolf's diary of that period is full of jottings like those, I think that volume is where I'll have to start reading.

Thoreau, of course, was also more analytical. Woolf was observing in order to limber up to write; Thoreau wrote to record, analyze, and understand. In his journal for January 22, 1859, he records an encounter with some caterpillars that highlights the difference. He spots some thin lines in the ice on the pond, and initially he thinks they're cracks:

But observing that some of them were peculiarly meandering, returning on themselves loopwise, I looked at them more attentively, and at length I detected at the inner end of one such line a small black speck about a rod from me. Suspecting this to be a caterpillar, I took steps to ascertain if it were, at any rate, a living creature, by discovering if it were in motion. It appeared to me to move, but it was so slowly that I could not be certain until I set up a stick on the shore or referred it to a fixed point on the ice, when I was convinced that it was a caterpillar crawling slowly toward the shore, or rather toward the willows. Following its trail back with my eye, I found that it came pretty directly from the edge of the old or thick white ice (i. e. from where the surface of the flood touched its sloping surface) toward the willows, from northeast to southwest, and had come about three rods. Looking more sharply still, I detected seven or eight such caterpillars within a couple of square rods on this crystallization, each at the end of its trail and headed toward the willows in the exact same direction. And there were the distinct trails of a great many more which had reached the willows or disappeared elsewhere. These trails were particularly distinct when I squatted low and looked over the ice, reflecting more light then. They were generally pretty direct toward the shore, or toward any clump of willows if within four or five rods. I saw one which led to the willows from the old ice some six rods off. Slowly as they crawled, this journey must have been made within a few hours, for undoubtedly this ice was formed since midnight. Many of the lines were very meandering, like this: --



and apparently began and ended with the thin ice. There was not enough ice to support even a caterpillar within three or four feet of the shore, for the water was still rapidly rising and not now freezing, and I noticed no caterpillars on the ice within several feet, but with a long stick I obtained quite a number.

Thoreau--after drawing those very Tristram Shandy-like squiggles--goes on to delineate the three types of caterpillar he gathered, note that they "All curled up when I rescued them," and then to speculate on how they got trapped on the pond in the first place. The thoughts lead him to a mini-rhapsody:

Undespairing caterpillars, determined to reach the shore! What risks they run who go to sleep for the winter in our river meadows!

Virginia Woolf may demonstrate and unexpected openness to nature; Hermione Lee may be a wonderfully perceptive biographer of powerfully intelligent writers. But if a biographer of the caterpillar is ever needed, I think Thoreau's your guy.

Woolf on Forster

A relatively recent re-reading of Howard's End, followed by Damon Galgut's fictional imagining of E. M. Forster's life, Arctic Summer, has left me with Forster on the brain lately. So I was pleased to encounter this brief sketch of Forster in Hermione Lee's biography of Virginia Woolf, from Woolf's diary for 1919:

Morgan is easily drowned. . . . He is an unworldly, transparent character, whimsical and detached, caring very little I should think what people say, & with a clear idea of what he wishes. I dont think he wishes to shine in intellectual society; certainly not in fashionable. He is fantastic & very sensitive; an attractive character to me, though from his very qualities it takes as long to know him as it used to take to put one's gallipot over a humming bird moth. More truly, he resembles a vaguely rambling butterfly; since there is no intensity or rapidity about him. To dominate the talk would be odious to him.

As Lee puts it, "His tentativeness made her tentative," though that wouldn't keep them from developing a genuine, if at times strained, appreciation for each other's work.

The tentativeness Woolf describes dominates the portrait of Forster that emerges from Damon Galgut's novel, and it's easy to understand, given Forster's situation as a closeted gay man bound to a difficult mother. The novel is much more about the life, and the man, than the work, though Galgut does a far from poor job at the difficult work of uniting them, and the fiction's focus on the difficulties, and necessity, of connection becomes all the more poignant when seen in a context where so much can't be said, or acknowledged. That enforced silence reaches its painful climax when Forster's Egyptian lover dies, and Forster can do little but record the event in his diary.

That moment, and its pain, came to mind when, flipping through Forster's biography of his aunt, Marianne Thornton, I hit upon this passage:

Anyone who has waited in vain for a beloved person will understand what she felt. A wound has been inflicted which no subsequent reunion quite heals. The insecurity against which we all struggle has taken charge of us for a moment--for the moment that is eternity. The moment passes, and perhaps the beloved face is seen after all and the form embraced, but the watcher has become aware of the grave.

Only connect, because while all connections will be severed someday, their strength is the bulwark that keeps that knowledge in check, keeps our unknown yet inescapable fate from overwhelming our very existence.

Bloomsbury

I'm continuing to be enchanted with the correspondence between George Lyttelton and Rupert Hart-Davis. What's caught my eye today is a passage from a letter from Lyttelton of December 18, 1956:

I have just finished the Strachey-Woolf letters. Not fearfully good are they? Good things here and there of course, but Strachey is often trivial and V. W. often shows off, and on the whole one sees why many people spit at the name of Bloomsbury. And I suspect they would spit even more if all the names were given. Neither had any humility, and I am more and more blowed if that isn't the sine qua non of all goodness and greatness. The trouble is that if you are very clever and don't believe in God, there is nobody and nothing in the presence of whom or which you can be humble. For instance, Milton and Carlyle, for all their arrogance, were fundamentally humble, don't you think? Here endeth the epistle of George the Apostle.

As the self-deprecating final sentence suggests, Lyttelton's closing position (Which, in the case of Milton, at least, surely we can question? "Justify the ways of God to man" smacketh not of humility, no?) seems to be more rhetorical or even intellectual than religious: Lyttelton elsewhere confesses himself to be not particularly religious, an admirer of The Book of Common Prayer but a waverer when it comes to actual belief:

And "believe' is too big a word to use about life after death. I vageuly feel, I occasionally hope, but that is all. That great man Judge Holmes surely hit the nail when he said 'I see sufficient reasons for doing my damndest without demanding to know the strategy or even the tactics of the campaign.'

But I'm getting distracted (surely blogging's most forgivable sin?) from the main point: Strachey-Woolf and Bloomsbury.

Any time Bloomsbury comes up in the essays, letters, memoirs, and whatnot of writers whose lives overlapped with it, I find myself feeling grateful to be from a later era and a different country: oh, the baggage Bloomsbury brings! All evidence suggests that they were just as cliquish and self-absorbed as their opponents say they were, but at this remove that matters less than their wholehearted devotion to the arts. I know plenty of people who can't stomach Virginia Woolf's novels--which I find still wholly alive, fresh, and moving today--but even they tend to acknowledge the fierce perceptiveness of her essays and reviews. Leonard Woolf, meanwhile, ought by all rights to be essentially a tragic figure but instead ends up an impressive one: picturing him working the binder on the earliest Hogarth Press books brings shivers of admiration. And Strachey . . . oh, how Eminent Victorians still bites and burns.

That said, Lyttelton isn't wholly incorrect in his verdict about the Strachey-Woolf volume. When I wrote about it a couple of years back, I acknowledged that the letters are "a bit mannered." That said, I think they're more interesting than Lyttelton gives them credit for being. As I wrote back then, they give

less the sense of guardedness or caution than they do of performance, of two people who, even as they dashed off notes, tried to bring all their intellect and wit to bear. What we lose in intimacy we gain in fun and insight; these are closer to, say, the composed, circumspect letters of E. B. White than they are to the endearing gushings of a Mitford sister.

Anyone who's gotten to watch two born skeptics--of formidable intellect--attempt to impress each other knows there's real pleasure to be had there. A meeting of the minds (let alone souls) it's not, but when the minds are such as these, feints, parries, and pas de deux are perfectly fine.

Lyttelton touches on Bloomsbury again in his next letter:

I have followed up the Strachey-Woolf letters by reading Clive Bell on his friends. He questions the existence of 'Bloomsbury' as a one-time centre of culture, but, however hard to define, it was surely recognisable all right. . . . Does anyone doubt that V. W. and L. S. and Co were exclusive, and fastidious, and highbrow, and contemptuous of past greatness, and mutual admirers, and if that isn't Bloomsbury, what is?

Perfectly true. Each of those characteristics has its dark side, no doubt, but given what we got from Bloomsbury, I'll gladly plump for the better part--of such confidence and ego are movements made.

Woolf the critic

I’ve embarked on a slow read through Virginia Woolf’s essays, a task that I expect will take a long, pleasant time. The essays consist mostly of book reviews, primarily written for the Times Literary Supplement, but Woolf was not one to confine herself to writing in a straightforward fashion about the book at hand: rather, the best of her reviews are miniature studies or appreciations of the writer at hand, drawing on (and expecting at least passing familiarity with) the broader intellectual, cultural, and literary context in which the writer worked. Lest that make them seem rarified, I pass on, in agreement, this assessment from Andrew McNeillie’s introduction to the first volume:

[S]he made of the personal essay, the review, the biographical study, the commemorative article, an art of her own. That art is characteristically brilliant and robust. . . . If it is also an art tending to presuppose an acquaintance with literature that the majority could not begin to have had time to acquire, it is none the less democratic in spirit: uncanonical, inquisitive, open, and unacademic. . . . What is more, it is an art expressed in a fluent, witty and unwaveringly demotic prose.

Woolf the critic is so generous, close-grained, and attentive to even the smallest successes or achievements that it’s hard for me to see how any serious writer on literature could fail to take her as a model; if we all wrote with even half of Woolf’s sympathetic attention, the world of books would be a better place.

Beginning critics can take from Woolf not just an approach, but also heart: her first published piece, written for the Guardian, a clerical paper, shows none of her individuality and soon-to-be-characteristic broad perceptiveness. A review of William Dean Howells’s The Son of Royal Langbrith, published in 1904 when Woolf was but twenty-three, it consists almost entirely of a run-through of the novel’s plot, like this:

But the son has contrived to make a hero of the father, and a church and a village library are proofs of the munificence of the dead man. We are soon let into the secret, however, which is the property of the widow, one Dr Anther, and two others—that the public-spirited Royal Langbrith is a grotesque myth; he was in reality a scoundrel who got his wealth by appropriating the inventions of another.

And so forth. It’s all clearly and concisely laid out—which any reviewer who’s tried to explain a plot knows is not an easy task—but like nearly all plot summaries it’s essentially inert, revealing enough information to ruin the drama of the book without conveying any of that drama to the reader.

And yet, within a few years, Woolf would routinely be offering readers such incidental gems at this consideration of the value of literary biography, from a review of a life of Laurence Sterne:

It is the custom to draw a distinction between a man and his works and to add that, although the world has a claim to read every line of his writing, it must not ask questions about the author. The distinction has arisen, we may believe, because the art of biography has fallen very low, and people of good taste infer that a "life" will merely gratify a base curiosity, or will set up a respectable figure of sawdust. It is therefor a wise precaution to limit one's study of a writer to the study of his works; but, like other precautions, it implies some loss. We sacrifice an aesthetic pleasure, possibly of first-rate value—a life of Johnson, for example—and we raise boundaries where there should be none. A writer is a writer from his cradle; in his dealings with the world,in his affections, in his attitude to the thousand small things that happen between dawn and sunset, he shows the same point of view as that which he elaborates afterwards with a pen in his hand. It is more fragmentary and incoherent, but it is also more intense. To this, which one may call the aesthetic interest of his character, there are added the various interests of circumstance—here and how he was born and bred and educated—which all men share, but which are of greater interset as they affect a more original talent.

The voice has emerged, confident and memorable, and Woolf would keep writing in that style for the rest of her life, even as her fiction became more impressionistic and inward-looking. It makes six volumes of essays seem not a challenge, but a gift.

"You now have Siegfried's life on your hands!", or, The Perils of the Reviewing Life

What better way to close out a week that saw the publication of a new issue of the Quarterly Conversation than to offer up a couple of tidbits about the perils of reviewing?

First, a wonderfully catty letter that Lytton Strachey sent to Virginia Woolf on February 21, 1917:

That wretched woman, the Lady O[ttoline] Morrell writes to me as follows--"Do you think you could write to Virginia, & ask her if she could get Sassoon's book of Poems, and if she would review it kindly. . . . I think if he heard that his work had 'Promise' it might make him want to Live--to do things in the Future. But it is all ghastly and he can hardly bear it. Shall I shoot Lloyd George?"

It is indeed "all ghastly", and probably you could hardly bear it. but you see that you now have Siegfried's life, to say nothing of Lloyd George's, on your hands. I suppose you don't as a rule review what they all "poetry". Perhaps if you wrote to Richmond [editor of the TLS] suggesting that the bloody book should be noticed, it would suffice. Or what?--Let me know so that I may send some reply to that creature, who is now I think almost at the last gasp--infinitely old, ill, depressed, and bad tempered--she is soon to sink into a nursing-home, where she will be fed on nuts, and allowed to receive visitors (in bed).

I like to think I always take my responsibility to an author seriously when I write about a book, but good god--to have not just the fate of his book but his very life placed on your shoulders! That's pressure!

And it looks as if it worked--at least so far as getting her to review the book: she wrote a piece for the Times Literary Supplement titled "Mr. Sassoon's Poetry" on May 31, 1917, and another called "Two Soldier-Poets" in 1918. Whether she came through with sufficiently fulsome praise I won't know until I dig up the appropriate volumes of her essays . . . but whatever her verdict, the notice seems to have been sufficient to achieve Ottaline Morrell's ends: Sassoon found a way to hold on for a few more years, dying in 1967 at the age of 81.

Anthony Powell, so far as I know, never told any stories of such grave weight being placed on his reviews, but he did acknowledge the frustrations of churning out reviews in an interview that ran in the Paris Review in 1978:

INTERVIEWER

Do you still do any reviewing?

POWELL

Yes, I do two pieces a month for the Daily Telegraph.

INTERVIEWER

You don't find it a chore?

POWELL

On the contrary, I find it extremely stimulating. I get two really pretty serious books a month--and I must say they're extremely good at trying to give me something that I like--and I really think it's rather good for you to have to review, say, a book about the organization of the Roman Army in the first half of the month and then the life of Christina Rossetti in the second. So far from being bad for you, I think it's very educative and it really makes your mind work. In fact, as I said before, I'm really rather lost now if I don't have something like that that I've got to do. . . . But of course there are demoralizing forms of literary journalism, and I've done my stint of reviewing five novels in a column and so on. You know how it is: Your friends say, “Are you mad saying this terrible book is quite good?” But you can't week in, week out keep saying this is all absolute rubbish.

Ah, the benefits of being a blogger: I'm never so pressed for space or copy as to be forced to praise inferior books. If something turns out to be rubbish, I can just reshelve it in silence and spend my time instead telling readers of books they might actually enjoy.

"Of course my objection to letters is that they were all written in the 18th Century, an age I find unlovable," or, Lytton and Virginia

While in the library recently to pick up a volume of Virginia Woolf's essays, I spied a volume of her correspondence with Lytton Strachey that the Hogarth Press published in 1956. Tempted by its manageable slimness--it's not even two hundred pages long--I plucked it from the shelf, and I've been pleasantly rewarded for the decision as I wandered through it this weekend.

The correspondence is, while unquestionably friendly, at the same time a bit mannered; as Leonard Woolf and James Strachey note in their introduction,

[I]t occasionally gives an impression of self-consciousness--even of stiltedness--which was very far indeed from being usual in their letters. The fact was, no doubt, that each was a little wary of the other: in writing to each other they were always on their best behaviour, and never felt so much at ease as they did in their dealings with people whom they admired or respected less.

The resulting letters, however, give less the sense of guardedness or caution than they do of performance, of two people who, even as they dashed off notes, tried to bring all their intellect and wit to bear. What we lose in intimacy we gain in fun and insight; these are closer to, say, the composed, circumspect letters of E. B. White than they are to the endearing gushings of a Mitford sister.

Take, for example, this passage from a letter sent by Strachey on January 3, 1909. He had recently moved for a time to Rye, in Sussex,

spending the time since in a semi-stupor, among mists and golfers, so that by this time I'm feeling so much a la hashisch that I can hardly imagine that anywhere else exists. however, by an effort of will I can just bring to my mind a dim vision of Bond Street, the Heath, and a Square or two.

After some savage reflections on the idiocy of the local lawyers and clergy ("all golfers as well") and some reflections on Merimee, he notes,

Talking of Great Authors, I've seen Henry James twice since I came, and was immensely impressed. I mean only seen with the eye--I wish I knew him! He appeared at his window as I passed the other day--most remarkable! So conscientious and worried and important--he was like an admirable tradesman trying his best to give satisfaction, infinitely solemn and polite. Is there any truth in this? It has since occurred to me that his novels are really remarkable for their lack of humour. But I think it's very odd that he should have written precisely them and look precisely so. Perhaps if one talked to him one would understand.

It's unclear whether Strachey thinks James does or doesn't look like he ought to based on his novels; at a century's remove, he seems perfect for them, almost to the point of parody.

Woolf didn't address the question of James in her reply, but she did mention him in a letter of October 22, 1915:

I should think I had read 600 books since we met. Please tell me what you find in Henry James. I have disabused Leonard of him; but we have his works here, and I read, and can't find anything but faintly tinged rose water, urbane & sleek, but vulgar. . . Is there really any sense in it? I admit I can't be bothered to snuff out his meaning when it's very obscure.

More fun is the closing of her letter, which was written during a recuperation from one of her many bouts of poor health:

Nurse now thinks I must stop writing. I tell her I'm only scribbling to a relative, an elderly spinster, who suffers from gout, and lives on scraps of family news. "Poor thing!" says nurse. "Arthritis it is", I remark. But it won't do!

In another letter, sent from Richmond on July 25, 1916, Woolf offers an account of the difficulties of composition that ought to cheer any slow-working author:

My industry has the most minute results, and I begin to despair of finishing a book on this method--I write one sentence--the clock strikes--Leonard appears with a glass of milk.

Then there's this, from a letter she sent on October 12, 1918:

I'm extremely sorry to hear distressing accounts of your diseases. . . . However, you must consider that boils, blisters, rashes, green and blue vomits are all appointed by God himself to those whose books go into 4 editions within 6 months. Shingles, I can assure you, is only a first instalment; don't complain if the mange visits you, and the scurvy, and your feet swell and the dropsy distends and the scab itches--I mean you won't get any sympathy from me.

Later in the letter, she turns, as in most of the letters, to books:

I read the Greeks, but I am extremely doubtful whether I understand anything they say; also I have read the whole of Milton, without throwing any light upon my own soul, but that I rather like. Don't you think it very queer though that he entirely neglects the human heart? Is that the result of writing one's masterpiece at the age of 50? What about your masterpiece?

Strachey didn't answer the question, perhaps because he knew that he'd already published his masterpiece: Eminent Victorians was at that time a mere five months old.

The letter wherein Strachey gave his first indications that he was kicking around ideas for kicking around the Victorians ("They seem to me a set of mouthing bungling hypocrites, but perhaps really there is a baroque charm about them which will be discovered by our great-grandchildren."), sent on November 8, 1912, quickly spins off into wonderfully vibrant visions of the future of literature:

I should like to live for another 200 years (to be moderate). The literature of the future will, I clearly see, be amazing. At last it'll tell the truth, and be indecent, and amusing, and romantic, and even (after about 100 years) be written well. Quelle joie!--To live in those days, when books will pour out from the press reeking with all the filth of Petronius, all the frenzy of Dostoievsky, all the romance of the Arabian Nights, and all the exquisiteness of Voltaire! But it won't only be the books that will be charming then.--The people!--The young men! . . . even the young women! . . .

In this age that seems to prefer professions of doom for the world of literature, Strachey's optimism, so gleefully expressed, is bracing.

Early in the correspondence, Woolf wrote to Strachey, "Really, if you go on writing, you will vitiate John Bailey's stock phrase, 'the art of letter writing is dying out--'." We should all be so lucky as to have such a correspondent; I'm fortunate enough to have a couple--and with Strachey's industry as my example, I'm off to put pen to paper. It's best not to enter the holiday season in arrears.

Woolf on Hazlitt, or, The art of complicated admiration

I praised Virginia Woolf's essays last week, but I can't let the topic go without drawing attention to the brilliance of her essay on William Hazlitt, himself one of our greatest essayists. Found in Woolf's The Common Reader, the essay opens like this:

Had one met Hazlitt no doubt one would have liked him on his own principle that "We can scarcely hate anyone we know." But Hazlitt has been dead now a hundred years, and it is perhaps a question how far we can know him well enough to overcome those feelings of dislike, both personal and intellectual, which his writings still so sharply arouse. For Hazlitt--it is one of his prime merits--was not one of those noncommittal writers who shuffle off in a mist and die of their own insignificance. His essays are emphatically himself. He has no essays and he has no shame. He tells us exactly what he thinks, and he tells us--the confidence is less seductive--exactly what he feels.

Good god, can you get a better opening to an essay? Acknowledging uncertainty while nevertheless making confident, declarative statements; balancing oppositions; and, in a few short lines, beginning to give a real sense of the tumultuous, strange, divided personality about whom you're writing--this, it seems to me, a Hazlitt fan, is about as good as it gets.

And Woolf backs it up: her essay shifts easily between biographical detail and literary analysis, showing how, in this prickly, principled man ("He had quarrelled with all his old friends, save perhaps with Lamb"--but, we should remember, almost no one quarrelled with Lamb, the gentlest of souls.) person and idea weren't so separable as the ancients would have had it, the former fully subservient to the latter:

[H]e was a man of divided tastes and thwarted ambition; a man whose happiness, even in early life, lay behind. His mind had set early and bore forever the stamp of his first impressions.

Woolf continues,

And Hazlitt felt with the intensity of a poet. The most abstract of his essays will suddenly grow red-hot or white-hot if something reminds him of his past. . . . [H]ow violently we are switched from reason to rhapsody--how embarrassingly our austere thinker falls upon our shoulders and demands our sympathy!

Yes--and yet that's exactly what I love in Hazlitt: his essays are not the product of Wordsworth's "emotions recollected in tranquility"; they are instead tranquility forever troubled by the bubbling under of those emotions--and that bubbling under, that admixture of the personal and the impersonal, is what makes him feel so much our kin, our contemporary, at shining moments our friend.

And Woolf gets that, even as she also catalogues Hazlitt's faults. How rare that ability is--how I wish I had more of it--to truly, rather than grudgingly, appreciate the merits of one whose faults you also find glaring. Woolf evinces it time and again in her essays, and that alone is enough reason to seek them out.

But while you're at it, seek out, if you've not, Hazlitt, whose voice rings out as strong for us a century after Woolf as it did for her a century after his death. If I've not convinced you yet, perhaps the conclusion of her essay will:

When he lay dying a hundred years ago in a lodging in Soho his voice rang out with the old pugnacity and conviction: "Well, I have had a happy life." One has only to read him to believe it.

Read Woolf's essays, read Hazlitt's essays--start with "The Indian Jugglers" or "The Fight", both of which can be found on On the Pleasure of Hating--and next Thanksgiving you'll have one more reason to be grateful.

Virginia Woolf the essayist

Many's the reader who has been put off by Virginia Woolf's fiction. Her style--in one sense like a looser, more deliberately experimental Henry James--is simultaneously occluded and jumbled, James's reticence and obsessive circumspection replaced with a sort of jumble-sale approach to consciousness that relies on the reader to pluck from a flowing stream the burning brand that will show forth the point. Patrick Kurp--not one to pull punches--has called her fiction "effete, self-regarding, and beside the point." Cyril Connolly called her characters,

lifeless anatomical slices, conceived in all the same mood, unreal creatures of genteel despair.

Anthony Powell, in his journals, called The Waves "twaddle," writing that it had

all the artificiality of a Compton-Burnett background, without any of the wit, willingness to grapple with real human problems, general grasp of novel-writing material

Having filled that side of the balance to overflowing, I will put on the positive side of the ledger merely my own appreciation of Woolf's fiction, which, exercising the host's prerogative, I will deem sufficient. Like the aforementioned Henry James, she is not for every day, but there are times--when one is feeling introspective, quiet, uncertain, even slightly fuddled, say---when no one else will do.

What is odd (and what is, ridiculously deep into this post, the point) is that her voice in her essays is utterly different, so straightforward, clear, and declarative--a point that even her detractors would, I suspect, have to concede. (As, to his credit, Patrick Kurp has graciously done.) Woolf's essays, the majority of which, it seems, were written as book reviews, and thus to some extent in the moment and on deadline, are remarkable for their clarity and authority. Woolf displays a quality that I greatly prize--perhaps to my peril--in an essayist: an ability to make a declarative aesthetic statement about a writer that one can't help but nod along to, even if somewhere in the mother board of one's brain the logic circuits are screaming.

Take this passage, from a piece on De Quincey from the September 16th issue of the Times Literary Supplement:

A prose writer may dream dreams and see visions, but they cannot be allowed to lie scattered, single, solitary upon the page. So spaced out they die. For prose has neither the intensity nor the self-sufficiency of poetry. It rises slowly off the ground; it must be connected on this side and on that. There must be some medium in which its ardours and ecstasies can float without incongruity, from which they receive support and impetus.

To which the attentive reader finds himself insisting upon exception after exception . . . but only on reflection, for at first blush--and in some sense forever--Woolf is right and pithily apt there.

Or this, less questionable, on Jane Austen:

She knew exactly what her powers were, and what material they were fitted to deal with as material should be dealt with by a writer whose standard of finality was high. There were impressions that lay outside her province; emotions that by no stretch or artifice could be properly coated and covered by her own resources.

Lest I simply go on forever drawing out examples of Woolf's acuity, I'll turn to my old favorite Thomas Hardy and declare him the home stretch of this post. Woolf writes:

Some writers are born conscious of everything; others are unconscious of many things Some, like Henry James and Flaubert, are able not merely to make the best use of the spoil their gifts bring in, but control their genius in the act of creation; they are aware of all the possibilities of every situation, and are never taken by surprise. The unconscious writers, on the other hand, like Dickens and Scott, seem suddenly and without their own consent to be lifted up and swept onwards. The wave sinks and they cannot say what has happened or why. Among them--it is the source of his strength and of his weakness--we must place Hardy. His own word, "moments of vision," exactly describes those passages of astonishing beauty and force which are to be found in every book that he wrote.

Having been primed to question Woolf's assertions, I expect you found plenty at least to raise an eyebrow at in that passage. (Dickens unconscious of his effects? Really?) At the same time, however, I think Woolf is basically right; the more one learns about Hardy, specifically, the more his successes begin to seem like the product of an alchemy that was likely unfathomable even to him.

To close, I can't resist sharing a passage from Woolf's diary about her first meeting with Hardy (outside, that is, her natal crib, as Hardy was acquainted with her father), collected in the indispensable Thomas Hardy Remembered:

There was not a trace anywhere of deference to editors, or respect for rank, an extreme simplicity: What impressed me was his freedom, ease, & vitality. He seemed very "Great Victorian" doing the whole thing with a sweep of his hand (they are ordinary smallish, curled up hands) & setting no great stock by literature; but immensely interested in facts; incidents; & and somehow, one could imagine, naturally swept off into imagining & and creating without a thought of its being difficult or remarkable; becoming obsessed; & living in imagination.

Hardy signed a copy of Life's Little Ironies for Woolf . . . though he spelled her name "Wolff," "wh. I daresay had given him some anxiety."

"The licit gratification of certain instincts which we are wont to treat as outlaws," Or, Virginia Woolf on supernatural fiction

{Photo by rocketlass.}

In Volume 1 of Virginia Woolf’s collected essays, her piece on Henry James's ghost stories, about which I wrote last week, is followed by another look at the topic of the supernatural in fiction. It was first published in the TLS a few years before the James essay, on January 31, 1918, as a review of The Supernatural in Modern English Fiction, by Dorothy Scarborough. The broader view taken in this essay allows Woolf to spin out some thoughts on the role of scary stories in general, which, though far from groundbreaking, are worth sharing:

Crude fear, with its anticipation of physical pain or of terrifying uproar, is an undignified and demoralizing sensation, while the mastery of fear only produces a respectable mask of courage, which is of no great interest to ourselves, though it may impose upon others. But the fear which we get from reading ghost stories of the supernatural is a refined and spiritualized essence of fear. It is a fear which we can examine and play with. Far from despising ourselves for being frightened by a ghost story we are proud of this proof of sensibility, and perhaps unconsciously welcome the chance for the licit gratification of certain instincts which we are wont to treat as outlaws.

As in her essay on James, Woolf here is primarily concerned with the fact that the objects of our fears--and the susceptibilities that accompany them--change with time. "Although," she writes, "we are quick to throw away imaginative symbols which have served their turn, the desire persists," then, returning to James, she continues,

If you wish to guess what our ancestors felt when they read The Mysteries of Udolpho you cannot do better than read The Turn of the Screw.

Experiment proves that the new fear resembles the old in producing physical sensations as of erect hair, dilated pupils, rigid muscles, and an intensified perception of sound and movement. But what is it that we are afraid of? We are not afraid of ruins, or moonlight, or ghosts. Indeed, we should be relieved to find that Quint and Miss Jessel are ghosts, but they have neither the substance nor the independent existence of ghosts. The odious creatures are much closer to us than ghosts have ever been. The governess is not so much frightened of htem as of the sudden extension of her own field of perception, which in this case widens to reveal to her the presence all about her her of an unmentionable evil. The appearance of the figures is an illustration, not in itself specially alarming, of a state of mind which is profoundly mysterious and terrifying. . . . The horror of the story comes from the force with which it makes us realize the power that our minds possess for such excursions into the darkness; when certain lights sink or certain barriers are lowered, the ghosts of the mind, untracked desires, indistinct intimations, are seen to be a large company.

One thing that I find interesting in Woolf's analysis is the lack of any acknowledgment of the Great War, which as she wrote was still inexorably mowing down the youth of her generation and driving unprecedented interest in spiritualism. Though she writes that, "the great increase of the psychical ghost story in late years . . . testifies to the fact that our sense of our own ghostliness has much quickened," she never mentions the legions of war dead, or the way that the war's senseless carnage put paid to any number of tidy narratives about king and country, honor and duty, faith and heaven--or the barrier between life and afterlife.

What's perhaps even more interesting is that, nearly a century on, the approach Woolf describes--the psychological approach--remains the preferred form of the ghost story. Even Stephen King, who is never shy about his willingness to go for the gross-out if need be, roots his horror in the everyday, post-Freud fear that we can never fully know our own minds, and that our knee-jerk response to any supernatural manifestation is that we must be going insane, that it just might be a product of our own disturbed consciousness. And despite all the breakthroughs and discoveries of the century just past, science has neither liberated us from such fears nor provided a newer, more convincing bogeyman to replace them; unhappily awake in our beds at 3 a.m., we are all still our own worst nightmares.

Virginia Woolf on Henry James's ghost stories, or, "Surely there are facts enough in the world to go round."

A pleasant discovery I made while reading Martin Scofield’s introduction to The Ghost Stories of Henry James on Wednesday was that Virginia Woolf wrote on that very topic. A few minutes in the library--faced with that endlessly entrancing shelf of the many, many volumes of her letters, diaries, and essays--and I had it before me: a brief piece written for the Times Literary Supplement of December 22, 1921.

In the essay, Woolf makes many of the same points I did in Wednesday’s post, the obvious ones about the fine line between Jamesian inner consciousness and the bodiless manifestations of the supernatural--but as in all her essays, she makes her points in a forthright, clear, and memorable fashion. So she writes, of a relationship that, in James’s story “The Friends of the Friends,” continues after death:

And yet--does it make very much difference? Henry James has only to take the smallest of steps and he is over the border. His characters with their extreme fineness of perception are already half-way out of the body. There is nothing violent in their release. They seem rather to have achieved at last what they have long been attempting--communication without obstacle. But Henry James, after all, kept his ghosts for his ghost stories. Obstacles are essential to The Wings of the Dove. When he removed them by supernatural means as he did in The Friends of the Friends he did so in order to produce a particular effect. The story is very short; there is no time to elaborate the relationship; but the point can be pressed home by a shock. The supernatural is brought in to provide that shock.

Elsewhere, she outlines perfectly how James--and, for that matter, his contemporary Edith Wharton--uses the supernatural most effectively:

Henry James’s ghosts have nothing in common with the violent old ghosts--the blood-stained sea captains, the white horses, the headless ladies of dark lanes and windy commons. They have their origin within us. They are present whenever the significant overflows our powers of expressing it*; whenever the ordinary appears ringed by the strange. The baffling things that are left over, the frightening ones that persist--these are the emotions that he takes, embodies, makes consoling and companionable.

Those are the benefits offered a writer by the supernatural, but Woolf also dwells on the risks. Ann Radcliffe could scare our ancestors with her Mysteries of Udolpho because

they were our ancestors; because they lived with very few books, an occasional post, a newspaper superannuated before it reached them, in the depths of the country or in a town which resembled the more modest of our villages, with long hours to spend sitting over the fire drinking wine by the light of half a dozen candles.

We, on the other hand--and add nearly a century of advances in communication and in horrors to your reckoning as you read this--

breakfast upon a richer feast of horror than served them for a twelvemonth. We are tired of violence; we suspect mystery. Surely, we might say to a writer set upon the supernatural, there are facts enough in the world to go round. . . . Moreover, we are impervious to fear. Your ghosts will only make us laugh, and if you try to express some tender and intimate vision of a world stripped of its hide we shall be forced (and there is nothing more uncomfortable) to look the other way. But writers, if they are worth their salt, never take advice. They always run risks. To admit that the supernatural was used for the last time by Mrs. Radcliffe and that modern nerves are immune from the wonder and terror which ghosts have always inspired would be to throw up the sponge too easily. If the old methods are obsolete, it is the business of a writer to discover new ones. The public can feel again what it has once felt--there can be no doubt about that; only from time to time the point of attack must be changed.

That determination, that confidence in the infinite suppleness and capacity of art to elicit whatever feelings it sets its sights on, makes me appreciate even more the unexpectedly sly humor with which Woolf structured her essay: from that general statement of principles, she moves, story by story, through James’s ghost stories, noting their achievements, deficiencies, and differences (“the enticing game of pinning your author to the board by detecting once more traces of his fineness, his subtlety, whatever his prevailing characteristics may be, is rudely interrupted” by his changes of approach). Then, having convinced herself that James’s ghosts, “remain always a little worldly. We may feel clumsy in their presence but we cannot feel afraid,” she writes,

What does it matter, then, if we do pick up The Turn of the Screw an hour or so before bedtime? After an exquisite entertainment, we shall, if the other stories are to be trusted, end with this fine music in our ears, and sleep the sounder.

Nearly a century later, The Turn of the Screw having lost none of its power, that passage can’t help but make you smile, no? An hour of reading later,

We are afraid of something, perhaps, in ourselves. In short, we turn on the light.

Henry James, she writes,

has conquered. That courtly, worldly, sentimental old gentleman can still make us afraid of the dark.

{Photo by rocketlass.}

Leonard, Lev, and the servants

After Tuesday's post about Lev Grossman's Believer article about Leonard Woolf, fantasy, and modernism, Ed Park (who was Grossman's editor for the piece) sent me to a post on Grossman's new blog where he offers some background to the article. It's worth reading the whole post, in which, among other things, Grossman reveals that the article's origin lies in a conversation with his mother from nearly twenty years ago. But what stood out for me was this admission:

I’m pretty tired of writing these truncated little 650-word nuglets for Time. It felt good to type knowing that I didn’t have to stop when I came to the end of the little box.

I've always wondered about that, about how someone as talented and well-read as Grossman adapts to hammering out the briefest of summaries week after week.There's an art to it, unquestionably; writing short and on deadline can in its way be as difficult as writing long. But I'm not surprised to find that it can also be frustrating, especially as more and more online options emerge, with their--theoretically--unlimited word counts.

Grossman's adept use of the material of Leonard Woolf's volumes of memoir having tempted me to seek them out, I returned to my bookshelves to see what I could learn about them. Anthony Powell, no friend of Bloomsbury, wrote of the first volume, Sowing, for the Daily Telegraph in 1966 (when, almost unbelievably, Woolf was still alive), that

The narrative of the early years which culminated in Cambridge is extraordinarily well done. . . . Woolf writes in an incisive, rigorous rose, suited to his own uncompromising view of life. He gives the reader a clear idea of his own upbringing and what he was like as a boy. . . . At the same time one has the feeling that the author's at times almost brutal directness conceals a good deal of sensitiveness that has suffered in the past some hard blows.

From there he moves to analysis of Bloomsbury that seems indisputable even for a reader who, like me, is more inclined to appreciate the circle:

Accordingly, like others of the group, he found, in what was perhaps a certain basic lack of self-confidence, support in becoming a member of Bloomsbury; that community which had about it something of a small religious sect in the attitude of its adherents towards each other and to the outside world.

All of which, in the disjointed way that blogs are, with the reader's forbearance, on occasion allowed to be, leads me to share a moment from Alison Light's book Mrs. Woolf and the Servants (2008). The whole book is fascinating--I can't recommend it too highly--but the moment that most stood out for me came in this account of the summer of 1929, when the Woolfs had just purchased a rural cottage:

With Nellie away, Annie came in the mornings and made lunch, often leaving a pie for Virginia to cook for dinner. By three o'clock the Woolfs were alone--a complete and utter novelty. It is worth emphasizing. They had never been alone before in their own home. Thus the life of the British modern couple was inaugurated.

They had been married for seventeen years at that point.

As I washed the dishes tonight after a long day at the office, I'll admit to having temporarily dreamed of a life with servants, but Light reminds me that such a life is far, far from the right one for me.

"What strange intoxication was it that he drew from books?"

From "The Pastons and Chaucer," by Virginia Woolf:

[S]ometimes, instead of riding off on his horse to inspect his crops or bargain with his tenants, Sir John would sit, in broad daylight, reading. There, on the hard chair in the comfortless room with the wind lifting the carpet and the smoke stinging his eyes, he would sit reading Chaucer, wasting his time, dreaming--or what strange intoxication was it that he drew from books? Life was rough, cheerless, and disappointing. A whole year of days would pass fruitlessly in dreary business, like dashes of rain on the window-pane. There was no reason in it as there had been for his father; no imperative need to establish a family and acquire an important position for children who were not born, or, if born, had no right to bear their father's name. But Lydgate's poems or Chaucer's, like a mirror in which figures move brightly, silently, and compactly, showed him the very skies, fields, and people whom he knew, but rounded and complete. Instead of waiting listlessly for news from London or piecing out from his mother's gossip some country tragedy of love and jealousy, here, in a few pages, the whole story was laid before him. And then as he rode or sat at table he would remember some description or saying which bore upon the present moment and fixed it, or some string of words would charm him, and putting aside the pressure of the moment, he would hasten home to sit in his chair and learn the end of the story.

I think most people who have briefly encountered Virginia Woolf's novels think of her prose as suffering from a lack of forthrightness, a wispiness--that, trapped by her efforts to reconstruct the tattered patterns of human thought, her writing never quite gets anywhere, leaving us where we started, in the undifferentiated fog of consciousness. And, despite being a Woolf fan and ready to defend her against such charges, I do understand how a reader who makes but casual acquaintance with her work could feel that way: her fiction is far from immediately welcoming, offering few of the comfortable footholds we have come to expect as we ease into a novel.

But her nonfiction, oh, that's a different story. Clear, balanced, precise, full of rich description and memorable scenes, yet, at its best, nearly as surprising in its approaches and conclusions as her fiction. The passage above comes from the opening essay in The Common Reader (1925), and its springboard was a six-volume collection of fifteenth-century letters of the Paston family. The Pastons lived on a manor that had been bought from a son of Chaucer, and from that--and Margaret Paston's continual complaints about her son's neglect of his duties in favor of his reading--Woolf spins out a detailed, lively vision of a lonely existence in "the most desolate part of England," where there is but a single road, with a hole in it "big enough to swallow a carriage," where the chimney smokes and the drafts wail, where

Tom Topcroft, the mad bricklayer, has broken loose again and ranges the country half-naked, threatening to kill any one who approaches him.

The desolation of her scene deliciously set, she brings on Chaucer--and, oh, if we've fallen into a habit of taking for granted the joy and escape found in reading, by the time Sir John is ensconced in his library as if in a fortress Woolf has made it impossible for us to do so any longer.

She moves on to do the same for the charms and surprises and humor of Chaucer:

To learn the end of the story--Chaucer can still make us wish to do that. He has pre-eminently that story-teller's gift, which is almost the rarest gift among writers at the present day. Nothing happens to us as it did to our ancestors; events are seldom important; if we recount them, we do not really believe in them; we have perhaps things of greater interest to say, and for these reasons natural story-tellers like Mr Garnett*, whom we must distinguish from self-conscious story-tellers like Mr Masefield**, have become rare. For the story-teller, besides his indescribable zest for facts, must tell his story craftily, without undue stress or excitement, or we shall swallow it whole and jumble the parts together; he must let us stop, give us time to think and look about us, yet always be persuading us to move on.

Having been myself in the clutches of a great storyteller--Dorothy Dunnett--all weekend, with that I will close this and return to sitting on my back steps with my book. What better way to spend these last few hours of sunny weekend daylight?