The Creators: A History of Heroes of the Imagination

by DANIEL J. BOORSTIN

  On Thursday evenings, guests gathered at about ten o’clock and stayed till two or three making conversation over whiskey, buns, and cocoa. The Bloomsbury Group—an anti-university of artists, critics, and writers from the universities—were notorious rebels against Victorian inhibitions in art, literature, and sex. By 1941, in wartime London the prim Times accused them of producing “arts unintelligible outside a Bloomsbury drawing-room, and completely at variance with those stoic virtues which the whole nation is now called upon to practise.” The Cambridge philosopher G. E. Moore (1873–1958) had taught them that “by far the most valuable things … are … the pleasures of human intercourse and the enjoyment of beautiful objects … the rational ultimate end of social progress.”

  Virginia Woolf became the presiding genius of the group. Among them everything was discussable and seems to have been discussed, including whom Virginia should marry. Dismissing other possibilities, she married Leonard Woolf, whom she described as “a penniless Jew.” At Cambridge he, too, had been a follower of G. E. Moore and a member of the elite Apostles. Woolf had entered the colonial civil service and served in Ceylon for eight years before marrying Virginia in 1912. They had no children, but otherwise this proved an idyllic match, with their shared passion for literature and ideas. Leonard gave up writing novels, but was a prolific editor and author of works of politics, philosophy, and memoirs. Unfailingly attentive to Virginia, he seemed eager to nurture a literary talent superior to his own. Vita Sackville-West noted Virginia’s dislike of “the possessiveness and love of domination in men. In fact she dislikes the quality of masculinity.”

  Leonard and Virginia moved out of the Bloomsbury salon and began new collaborations. She had not yet completed her first novel at the time of their marriage. In 1917 at their house in Richmond they founded the Hogarth Press, which consumed much of their energies in following years. Their first publication was Two Stories, one by Leonard, one by Virginia. They aimed to publish only experimental work, which included stories by Katherine Mansfield, T. S. Eliot’s Poems (1919), poems by Robinson Jeffers and E. A. Robinson, translations of Russian novelists, and Virginia’s own works. They did the typesetting and press work themselves with the occasional help of a friend. At the insistence of Harriet Weaver, the American patron of poets, and through the good offices of T. S. Eliot, the manuscript of Joyce’s Ulysses was submitted to them for publication. They were tempted, but found it beyond their capacities. They would have had to employ professional printers, and the ones they consulted objected that printing such a work would surely lead to their prosecution. Virginia was especially troubled because she and Joyce were pioneering on the same paths of exploring the self. But, as her nephew and perceptive biographer explains, “it was as though the pen, her very own pen, had been seized from her hands so that someone might scrawl the word fuck on the seat of a privy.” Joyce’s “smoking-room coarseness” must have revived the hovering phantom of The Angel in the House.

  While there were limits to Virginia’s defiance of convention, her Bloomsbury Group enjoyed tweaking the establishment with pranks in the undergraduate tradition. Most notorious was their Dreadnaught Hoax on February 10, 1910, planned by Virginia’s brother Adrian, to outwit the British Navy and its formidable security with a tour of the most secret vessel of the fleet. A forged telegram from the “Foreign Office” to the commander of the Home Fleet announced a visit of the “emperor of Abyssinia.” The Bloomsbury company, wearing blackface and costumes of imaginary Abyssinian nobility, arrived at Weymouth, were grandly welcomed and given a steam-launch tour of the fleet. Virginia herself, as aide to the emperor, wore actors’ black greasepaint, false mustache and whiskers, but found it hard not to burst out laughing when she ceremoniously shook hands with the admiral of the fleet, who happened to be her cousin. For the “Swahili” they were expected to speak, “Emperor” Adrian concocted phrases from pig Latin and half-remembered lines of Virgil. The London press had a field day, and the House of Commons discussed the matter on the floor. When the pranksters apologized to the first lord of the admiralty, he treated them as schoolboys and told them not to do it again. The press had been especially attracted to the bewhiskered young lady, “very good looking, with classical features,” reputed to be in the party, and Virginia gave them her story. Naval regulations were tightened, especially on telegrams, making it hard to repeat the joke and Virginia recalled, “I am glad to think that I too have been of help to my country.”

  Despite her lively sense of humor Virginia’s life was one long bout with “madness,” a vague, emotion-laden label then attached to all sorts of mental illnesses, especially those of women. In Virginia’s own circle, cases of madness were familiar. Thackeray’s wife, the mother of Leslie Stephen’s first wife, had been a victim. Her half-sister Stella had been pursued by a “mad” cousin. The wife of Virginia’s close friend, the painter and critic Roger Fry, was said to be going mad, and had just been committed to an asylum when Virginia joined the tour of Byzantine art in Constantinople that Fry had organized in 1911. Some may have thought Fry himself should be committed for championing the works of Cézanne and others in the first Postimpressionist Exhibition in November 1910.

  Virginia Woolf’s first signs of mental illness, at the age of thirteen, came just after her mother died in May 1895. She had a “breakdown” that summer, when she heard “horrible voices” and became terrified of people. All her life she was haunted by fears of recurrence of her madness and of the painful treatment that she suffered. For example, in June 1910, soon after the Dreadnaught Hoax, she fell ill with the “acute nervous tension” that later afflicted her whenever she neared the end of writing a novel. For the “complete rest” that her doctor recommended, she was incarcerated in Miss Thomas’s private nursing home at Burley Park, Twickenham, known as “a polite madhouse for female lunatics.” There two months of penal “rest cure” kept her in bed in a darkened room, eating only “wholesome” foods, while Miss Thomas limited her letters, her reading, and her visitors. Of course she was kept from all London society. After a bad bout in 1913 Leonard feared she would throw herself from the train on their return from the country, and she did attempt suicide with a mortal dose of Veronal, from which she was barely saved by a stomach pump.

  Friends wondered that with Virginia’s constant threats of suicide, Leonard too did not go mad during her two years of “intermittent lunacy.” In 1915 one morning at breakfast she suddenly became excited and incoherent, talking to her deceased mother, with spells of violence and screaming, ending in an attack on Leonard himself. She was taken to a nursing home, then to their new home at Hogarth House where they expected to install their printing press. Under the care of four psychiatric nurses, she gradually became lucid and rational, and by the end of 1915 was as much back to normal as she would ever be.

  But she never fully recovered, and her “madness” would bring on her death. In late March 1941 Leonard had taken the despondent Virginia to Brighton to consult a doctor in whom she had confidence. Having recently finished Between the Acts, she wrote to her publisher saying she did not want the book to be published. On a bright cold morning she wrote two letters, one to Leonard, the other to her sister, Vanessa. She explained that she was once again hearing voices and was sure she would never recover. She would not go on spoiling Leonard’s life for him. “I feel certain,” she wrote Leonard, “I am going mad again. You have given me the greatest possible happiness.… I don’t think two people could have been happier till this horrible disease came. I can’t fight any longer.” She took her walking stick and walked across the meadow to the River Ouse. Once before she had made an unsuccessful effort to drown herself, and this time she had taken the precaution of forcing a large stone into the pocket of her coat. As she walked into the water to her death, her regret, she had already explained to her friend Vita, was that this is “the one experience I shall never describe.”

  …

  Virginia Woolf’s whole experience had driven her inward. To w
rite about the affairs of the world, the struggles for power and place, or the grand passions, she had little to go on. Her world, a friendly critic put it, was the little world of people like herself, “a small class, a dying class … with inherited privileges, private incomes, sheltered lives, protected sensibilities, sensitive tastes.” Instead of pretending to know people whom she had never known, she accepted her limits, and explored the mystery within. She had the advantage over other pilots on the stream of consciousness of a clear critical style that helped her describe where she was going. And where her predecessors had failed to go.

  She had no patience with those who only looked outward, chronicling mere externals. Her literary manifesto, “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown,” replied to Arnold Bennett’s strictures on her for being “obsessed by details of originality and cleverness.” He had insisted that “the foundation of good fiction is character-creating and nothing else.” The Edwardian novelists whom she now targeted—Arnold Bennett, H. G. Wells, and John Galsworthy—“laid an enormous stress upon the fabric of things. They have given us a house in the hope that we may be able to deduce the human beings who live there.” Such novelists had abandoned their mission.

  Look within and life, it seems, is very far from being “like this.” Examine for a moment an ordinary mind on an ordinary day. The mind receives a myriad impressions—trivial, fantastic, evanescent, or engraved with the sharpness of steel. From all sides they come, an incessant shower of innumerable atoms … so that if a writer … could write what he chose, not what he must … there would be no plot, no comedy, no tragedy, no love interest or catastrophe in the accepted style, and perhaps not a single button sewn on as the Bond Street Tailors would have it. Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged; but a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end. Is it not the task of the novelist to convey this varying, this unknown and uncircumscribed spirit, whatever aberration or complexity it may display, with as little mixture of the alien and external as possible?

  James Joyce and T. S. Eliot were on a new track, but they had “no code of manners.” “Their sincerity is desperate, and their courage tremendous; it is only that they do not know which to use, a fork or their fingers. Thus if you read Mr. Joyce and Mr. Eliot you will be struck by the indecency of the one, and the obscurity of the other.”

  After two early novels in conventional style, she began her own experiments with Jacob’s Room (1922), about a young man killed in the World War. T. S. Eliot applauded, “you have freed yourself from any compromise between the traditional novel and your original gift.” Others objected that the book had no plot. In Mrs. Dalloway (1925), her first accomplished novel in the style she would bring to life, nothing momentous “happened.” Its opening pages, like Molly Bloom’s reflections at the end of Ulysses, would become a classic of “stream of consciousness.” For a single day we share the consciousness of the fashionable wife of a member of Parliament as she is planning and hosting a party.

  Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.

  For Lucy had her work cut out for her. The doors would be taken off their hinges; Rumpelmayer’s men were coming. And then, thought Clarissa Dalloway, what a morning—fresh as if issued to children on a beach.

  What a lark! What a plunge! For so it had always seemed to her when, with a little squeak of the hinges, which she could hear now, she had burst open the French windows and plunged at Bourton into the open air. How fresh, how calm, stiller than this of course, the air was in the early morning; like the flap of a wave; the kiss of a wave.…

  We follow her thoughts and feelings through all that June day’s trivia, from her shopping for flowers to greeting the guests at the party, which ends the book.

  Mrs. Dalloway’s reminiscent experience recalls her encounters with a former suitor who for the last five years has been in India, flavored with gratification and regret at her chosen life. The specter of death interrupts her party with news of the suicide of a young man, a victim of wartime shell shock, who had seen “the insane truth” and hurled himself from a window. We are not led down a narrative path but only share staccato “moments of being.” Constantly reminded of the mystery of time, even on a single day, we are reminded too of the elusiveness of “our self, who fish-like inhabits deep seas and plies among obscurities threading her way between the boles of giant weeds, over sun-flickered spaces and on and on into gloom, cold, deep inscrutable; suddenly she shoots to the surface and sports on the wind-wrinkled waves; that is, has a positive need to brush, scrape, kindle herself, gossiping.”

  To the Lighthouse (1927), reflections of quiet family holidays on an island in the Hebrides, is often considered her best work. We follow the interrelations of the consciousness of the central figure, the charming, managing Mrs. Ramsay, wife of an egocentric professor of philosophy, their eight children, and miscellaneous guests, who include a woman painter and a mawkish young academic. The first section, “The Window,” fills more than half the book with “moments of being” on one summer day. The second, “Time Passes,” admits the outer world by noting the death of Mrs. Ramsay and a son killed in the war, revealed in the sad abandonment of the once-cheerful holiday house.

  So with the lamps all put out, the moon sunk, and a thin rain drumming on the roof a downpouring of immense darkness began. Nothing, it seemed, could survive the flood, the profusion of darkness which, creeping in at keyholes and crevices, stole round window blinds, came into bedrooms, swallowed up here a jug and basin, there a bowl of red and yellow dahlias, there the sharp edges and firm bulk of a chest of drawers. Not only was furniture confounded; there was scarcely anything left of body or mind by which one could say, “This is he” or “This is she.” Sometimes a hand was raised as if to clutch something or ward off something, or somebody groaned, or somebody laughed aloud as if sharing a joke with nothingness.

  The last section, “The Lighthouse,” reports the painter Lily Briscoe’s final success in a painting, “making of the moment something permanent.” “In the midst of chaos there was shape; this eternal passing and flowing (she looked at the clouds going and the leaves shaking) was struck into stability. Life stands still here.” Fulfilling Mrs. Ramsay’s promise, after petty squabbles and despite Mr. Ramsay’s misgivings, the remnants of the family finally reach the Lighthouse.

  Having admitted time to interrupt the inward life of the Ramsay family, Virginia Woolf then plays with time as the interrupter of consciousness in Orlando (1928). In October 1927 she was suddenly taken by the idea, which first interested her as a dinner-table joke, of tracing the literary ancestors of her lover Vita Sackville-West. The product was “a biography beginning in the year 1500 and continuing to the present day called Orlando: Vita; only with a change about from one sex to another. I think, for a treat, I shall let myself dash this in for a week.” And she explained to Vita how the idea had captured her—“my body was flooded with rapture and my brain with ideas.… But listen; suppose Orlando turns out to be Vita.” She could think of nothing else, and wrote rapidly.

  Just as To the Lighthouse had been fashioned of her own youth, Orlando, from items already noted in Virginia’s diary, turned out to be an adventure in consciousness through time. A beautiful aristocratic youth from the Elizabethan court lives on until October 11, 1928, through various incarnations. As King Charles’s emissary to the Court of the Sultan in Constantinople, suddenly and unaccountably—

  The sound of the trumpets died away and Orlando stood stark naked. No human being, since the world began, has ever looked more ravishing. His form combined in one the strength of a man and a woman’s grace.… Orlando had become a woman—there’s no denying it. But in every other respect, Orlando remained precisely as he had been. The change of sex, though it altered their future, did nothing whatever to alter their identity.… Orlando herself showed no surprise at it. Many people … have been at great pains to prove (1) that Orlando had always been a woman. (2) that Orlando
is at this moment a man. Let biologists and psychologists determine. It is enough for us to state the simple fact; Orlando was a man till the age of thirty; when he became a woman and has remained so ever since.

  But let other pens treat of sex and sexuality; we quit such odious subjects as soon as we can.

  On finishing the book she had her usual spell of doubts, and thought that it too was not worth publishing.

  To the Lighthouse had made her a writer whom the literati had to know, and now Orlando, a simple fantasy, could reach others. While the earlier book had sold less than four thousand copies in its first year, Orlando sold more than eight thousand in its first six months. Leonard called Orlando the turning point in her career, for Virginia Woolf could now support herself as a novelist.

  Though tempted to write another Orlando, she did not take the easy path. She continued to experiment, sometimes cryptically, with streams of consciousness. The Waves (1931), which some call her masterpiece, is a contrived interweaving of selves—six not very extraordinary people from childhood through middle age, telling their own thoughts about themselves and others. Self-revelations are divided by passages of lyrical prose on how the rising and declining sun transforms the landscape and the waves. Again there is a haunting interruption at word of the death of a young friend in India.

  She deferred to the Orlando audience again with Flush (1933), which purported to enter the animal consciousness in a biography of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s spaniel. Virginia Woolf was not a dog lover, but she liked to imagine herself as an animal—a goat, a monkey, a bird, and now a dog, and then wonder what this would have done to her self.