For her sake, for art’s sake, for his own sake. Perhaps above all for his own sake. In her he had married a kind of escutcheon; she represented the finest grain of the finest stratum in England. What he shored up against disintegration was the life he had gained—a birthright he paid for by spooning porridge between Virginia Woolf’s resisting lips.
Proust is right to tell us to go to a writer’s books, not to his loyalties. Wherever Leonard Woolf is, there Virginia Woolf is not. The more Leonard recedes or is not present, the more Virginia appears in force. Consequently Quentin Bell’s biography—the subversive strength of which is Leonard—demands an antidote. The antidote is, of course, in the form of a reminder—that Virginia Woolf was a woman of letters as well as a patient; that she did not always succumb but instead could be an original fantasist and fashioner of an unaccustomed way of seeing; that the dependency coincided with a vigorous intellectual autonomy; that together with the natural subordination of the incapacitated she possessed the secret confidence of the innovator.
Seen through Leonard’s eyes, she is, in effect, always on the verge of lunacy. “I am quite sure,” he tells us in his autobiography, “that Virginia’s genius was closely connected with what manifested itself as mental instability and insanity. The creative imagination in her novels, her ability to ‘leave the ground’ in conversation, and the voluble delusions of the breakdown all came from the same place in her mind—she ‘stumbled after her own voice’ and followed ‘the voices that fly ahead.’ ” At the same time her refusal to eat was associated with guilt—she talked of her “faults”—and Leonard insists that “she remained all through her illness, even when most insane, terribly sane in three-quarters of her mind. The point is that her insanity was in her premises, in her beliefs. She believed, for instance, that she was not ill. . . .”
Seen through the books, she is never “ill,” never lunatic. Whether it was mental instability or a clear-sighted program of experiment in the shape of the novel that unhinged her prose from the conventional margins that had gone before is a question not worth speculating over. Leonard said that when mad she heard the birds sing in Greek. The novels are not like that: it is not the data that are altered, but the sequence of things. When Virginia Woolf assaulted the “old” fiction in her famous Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown, she thought she was recommending getting rid of the habit of data; she thought this was to be her fictive platform. But when she grappled with her own inventions, she introduced as much data as possible and strained to express it all under the pressure of a tremendous simultaneity. What she was getting rid of was consecutiveness; precisely the habit of premises. If clinging to premises was the sanity of her insanity, then the intent of her fiction was not an extension of her madness, as Leonard claimed, but its calculated opposite. The poetry of her prose may have been like the elusive poetry of her dementia, but its steadfast design was not. “The design,” she wrote of Mrs. Dalloway, “is so queer and so masterful”; elated, she saw ahead. She was an artist; she schemed, and not through random contractions or inflations of madness, but through the usual methods of art: inspired intellection, the breaking down of expectation into luminous segments of shock.
A simpler way of saying all this is that what she achieved as a stylist cannot really be explained through linking it with madness. The diaries give glimpses of rationalized prefigurations; a letter from Vanessa suggests moths, which metamorphosed into The Moths, which became The Waves. She knew her destination months before she arrived; she was in control of her work, she did what she meant to do. If the novels are too imaginatively astonishing to be persuasive on this point, the essays will convince. They are read too little, and not one of them is conceptually stale, or worn in any other way. In them the birds do not sing in Greek either, but the Greek—the sign of a masterly nineteenth-century literary education—shows like a spine. In the essays the control of brilliant minutiae is total—historical and literary figures, the particulars of biography, society, nationality, geography. She is a courier for the past. In Volume III of the Collected Essays, for instance, the range is from Chaucer through Montaigne through some Elizabethans major and minor, through Swift and Sterne and Lord Chesterfield, Fanny Burney and Cowper. She was interested also in the lives of women, especially writers. She studies Sara Coleridge, the poet’s daughter; Harriette Wilson, the mistress of the Earl of Craven; Dr. Johnson’s Mrs. Thrale; and Dorothy Osborne, a talented letter-writer of the seventeenth century. The language and scope of the essays astound. If they are “impressionistic,” they are not self-indulgent; they put history before sensibility. When they are ironic, it is the kind of irony that enlarges the discriminatory faculty and does not serve the cynical temper. They mean to interpret other lives by the annihilation of the crack of time: they are after what the novels are after, a compression of then and now into the simultaneity of a singular recognition and a single comprehension. They mean to make every generation, and every instant, contemporaneous with every other generation and instant. And yet—it does not contradict—they are, taken all together, the English Essay incarnate.
The autonomous authority of the fiction, the more public authority of the essays, are the antidotes to Bell’s Woolf, to Leonard’s Virginia. But there is a third antidote implicit in the whole of the work, and in the drive behind the work, and that is Virginia Woolf’s feminism. It ought to be said at once that it was what can now be called “classical” feminism. The latter-day choice of Virginia Woolf, on the style of Sylvia Plath, as a current women’s-movement avatar is inapposite and mistaken. Classical feminism is inimical to certain developing strands of “liberation.” Where feminism repudiates the conceit of the “gentler sex,” liberation has come to reaffirm it. Where feminism asserts a claim on the larger world, liberation shifts to separatism. Where feminism scoffs at the plaint of “sisters under the skin,” and maintains individuality of condition and temperament, liberation reinstates sisterhood and sameness. Where feminism shuns self-preoccupation, liberation experiments with self-examination, both psychic and medical. Classical feminism as represented by Virginia Woolf meant one thing only: access to the great world of thinking, being, and doing. The notion of “male” and “female” states of intellect and feeling, hence of prose, ultimately of culture, would have been the occasion of a satiric turn for Virginia Woolf; so would the idea of a politics of sex. Clive Bell reports that she licked envelopes once or twice for the Adult Suffrage League, but that she “made merciless fun of the flag-waving fanaticism” of the activists. She was not political—or, perhaps, just political enough, as when Chekhov notes that “writers should engage themselves in politics only enough to protect themselves from politics.” Though one of her themes was women in history (several of her themes, rather; she took her women one by one, not as a race, species, or nation), presumably she would have mocked at the invention of a “history of women”—what she cared for, as A Room of One’s Own both lucidly and passionately lays out, was access to a unitary culture. Indeed, Orlando is the metaphorical expression of this idea. History as a record of division or exclusion was precisely what she set herself against: the Cambridge of her youth kept women out, and all her life she preserved her resentment by pronouncing herself undereducated. She studied at home, Greek with Janet Case, literature and mathematics with her father, and as a result was left to count on her fingers forever—but for people who grow up counting on their fingers, even a Cambridge education cannot do much. Nevertheless she despised what nowadays is termed “affirmative action,” granting places in institutions as a kind of group reparation; she thought it offensive to her own earned prestige, and once took revenge on the notion. In 1935 Forster, a member of the Committee of the London Library, informed her that a debate was under way concerning the admission of women members. No women were admitted. Six years later Virginia Woolf was invited to serve; she said she would not be a “sop”—she ought to have been invited years earlier, on the same terms as Forster, as a writer; not in 1941, when she was al
ready fifty-nine, as a woman.
Nor will she do as martyr. Although Cambridge was closed to her, literary journalism was not; although she complains of being chased off an Oxbridge lawn forbidden to the feet of women, no one ever chased her off a page. Almost immediately she began to write for the Times Literary Supplement and for Cornhill; she was then twenty-two. She was, of course, Leslie Stephen’s daughter, and it is doubtful whether any other young writer, male or female, could have started off so auspiciously: still, we speak here not of “connections” but of experience. At about the same time she was summoned to teach at Morley, a workers’ college for men and women. One of her reports survives, and Quentin Bell includes it as an appendix. “My four women,” she writes, “can hear eight lectures on the French Revolution if they wish to continue their historical learning”—and these were working-class women, in 1905. By 1928, women had the vote, and full access to universities, the liberal professions, and the civil service. As for Virginia Woolf, in both instances, as writer and teacher, she was solicited—and this cannot be, after all, only because she was Leslie Stephen’s daughter. She could use on the spot only her own gifts, not the rumor of her father’s. Once she determined to ignore what Bell calls the “matrimonial market” of upper-class partying, into which for a time her half-brother George dragooned her, she was freed to her profession. It was not true then, it is not true now, that a sublime and serious pen can be circumscribed.
Virginia Woolf was a practitioner of her profession from an early age; she was not deprived of an education, rather of a particular college; she grew rich and distinguished; she developed her art on her own line, according to her own sensibilities, and was acclaimed for it; though insane, she was never incarcerated. She was an elitist, and must be understood as such. What she suffered from, aside from the abysses of depression which characterized her disease, was not anything like the condition of martyrdom—unless language has become so flaccid that being on occasion patronized begins to equal death for the sake of an ideal. What she suffered from really was only the minor inflammations of the literary temperament. And she was not often patronized: her fame encouraged her to patronize others. She could be unkind, she could be spiteful, she could envy—her friendship with Katherine Mansfield was always unsure, being founded on rivalry. Mansfield and her husband, the journalist John Middleton Murry, “work in my flesh,” Virginia Woolf wrote, “after the manner of the jigger insect. It’s annoying, indeed degrading, to have these bitternesses.” She was bitter also about James Joyce; she thought him, says Bell, guilty of “atrocities.” Her diary speaks of “the damned egotistical self; which ruins Joyce,” and she saw Ulysses as “insistent, raw, striking and ultimately nauseating.” But she knew Joyce to be moving in the same direction as herself; it was a race that, despite her certainty of his faults, he might win. By the time of her death she must have understood that he had won. Still, to be outrun in fame is no martyrdom. And her own fame was and is in no danger, though, unlike Joyce, she is not taken as a fact of nature. Virginia Woolf’s reputation in the thirty and more years since her death deepens; she becomes easier to read, more complex to consider,
To Charlotte Brontë, born sixty-six years before Virginia Woolf, Robert Southey, then Poet Laureate, had written, “Literature cannot be the business of a woman’s life, and it ought not to be.” No one addressed Virginia Woolf of Bloomsbury in this fashion; she was sought out by disciples, editors, litterateurs; in the end Oxford and Cambridge asked her to lecture before their women’s colleges. If the issue of martyrdom is inappropriate (implying as it does that a woman who commits suicide is by definition a martyr), what of heroism? Virginia Woolf’s death was or was not heroic, depending on one’s view of suicide by drowning. The case for Leonard’s heroism is more clear-cut: a saint is noble on behalf of others, a hero on behalf of himself. But if Virginia Woolf is to be seen as a heroine, it must be in those modes outside the manner of her death and even the manner of her life as a patient in the house.
If she is to be seen as a heroine, it must be in the conjuring of yet another of those Bloomsbury photographs—this time one that does not exist. The picture is of a woman sitting in an old chair holding a writing board; the point of her pen touches a half-filled page. To gaze at her bibliography is, in a way, to conjure this picture that does not exist—hour after hour, year after year, a life’s accumulation of stupendous visionary toil. A writer’s heroism is in the act of writing; not in the finished work, but in the work as it goes.
Vanessa’s son gives us no heroine: only this stubborn and sometimes querulous self-starving madwoman, with so stoic, so heroic, a male nurse. And when she runs away from him to swallow the Ouse, the heroism of both of them comes to an end.
_____________
Quentin Bell, Virginia Woolf: A Biography (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1972). Book review published in Commentary, August 1973.
1 Joan Russell Noble, ed., Recollections of Virginia Woolf by Her Contemporaries (William Morrow & Company, Inc., 1972).
2 From an unpublished letter in the Berg Collection. Quoted in The New York Times, June 14, 1973.
Diary-Keeping
Again these lyrical, allusive, and alluring names! Lytton, Carrington, Clive, Roger, Vanessa, Duncan, Leonard, Maynard, Gertler, Ka, Kot, Janet, Aldous, Bob, Arnold, Ottoline, Morgan, Logan, Katherine, Desmond, Murry, Nick, Saxon, Alix . . . Miniaturized by the Cyclops eye of hindsight, with the gold dust shaken out of them, one or two have broken out of legend to survive—E. M. Forster solidly and on his own, also the economist Keynes; the rest shakily and in shadow, reduced to “period” names: the polemicist Toynbee rapidly growing quaint, Aldous Huxley’s novels long ago turned problematical, Katherine Mansfield fallen even out of the anthologies, Sidney and Beatrice Webb fixed in Fabian caricature. The “men of letters”—Robert Trevelyan, John Middleton Murry, Desmond MacCarthy, Logan Pearsall Smith: how far away and small they now seem! And the painters, Vanessa Bell, Duncan Grant, Mark Gertler, and the art critics, Clive Bell and Roger Fry—lost molecules in the antiquity of modernism. And Saxon Sydney-Turner? Less than a molecule; a civil servant in the British Treasury. Lytton Strachey? A minor psychological historian given to phrasing both fustian and trite; he had his little vogue. Leonard Woolf? An ungainly writer and social reformer active in anticolonial causes, an early supporter of the League of Nations—who thinks of him as anything other than Virginia Woolf’s husband?
Merited fame, when it outlives its native generation (we may call this genius if we wish), is the real Midas touch. “Bloomsbury” means Virginia Woolf and her satellites. The men and women she breathed on shine with her gold. She did not know she was their sun, they did not know they were her satellites; but it is easy now, seventy years after they all seemed to glitter together, to tell the radiance from the penumbra. Even now—she is still ascending—she is not a genius to everyone; Lionel Trilling dismissed her, probably for her purported “subjectivity,” and the women’s movement claims but distorts her, for the same reason. Her genius does no one any good, has no social force or perspective, and—like most literature—is not needed: it is the intolerant genius of riddle. But not the sort of riddle-of-the-absurd that is left there, amorphous and mystical on the page. She will not fail to deliver. Her riddles are all concretely and dazzlingly solved by organization into ingenious portraiture. Hers is a beaklike and unifying imagination, impatient (unlike Forster’s) with muddle or puzzle; she will seize any loose flying cloth and make it over for a Jolly Roger. Identity discovered in flux is all. So the mystery of her own mother was deciphered through Mrs. Ramsay in To the Lighthouse; and so the stippled occasions of daily life are drawn into coherency through the device of a secret diary.
This first volume, covering the years of the Great War, tells of shortages and moonlit air raids, of strikes and huddling in cellars, of frustrations with servants and in-laws; it is also the period of the founding of the Hogarth Press, the acquisition of Monk’s House, and the publication of Virginia Woolf
’s earliest novels, The Voyage Out and Night and Day; it is the time when many of the remarkable essays that became The Common Reader were beaten out under the guise of journalism written against a deadline. All these matters amaze because they are familiar; we know them from a dozen other sources; we are already in possession of Virginia Woolf, after all—and yet how shocking to peer through her window at last, how astounding to hear her confirm everything in her own voice! A diary is a time machine; it puts us not simply on the doorstep but inside the mind, and yields to curiosity its ultimate consummation.
Yet Virginia Woolf’s diary is not (to stumble on that perilous word again) “subjective.” There are few psychological surprises. A Freudianly-inclined reader might be interested in the juxtaposition, in a single paragraph, of a memory of a childhood fear of “being shut in”; zoo animals that “grunt and growl”; and a visit to an “invalid” just emerged from a healthy childbirth. But there is no intent to record moods. Learning that Lady Ottoline Morrell keeps a diary, Virginia notes with light contempt that it is “devoted however to her ‘inner life’; which made me reflect that I haven’t an inner life.” By and large, this is an accurate enough description of her own diary-keeping. It eschews “feelings”; it is dense with happenings: visits, party-goings, walks, scenery and season, political meetings, concerts, conversations; the purchase of a wristwatch, a pen (the dipping kind), a glass bottle, new spectacles. It is built not on sensibility but on the pointillisme of chronicle.
Chronicle is the foundation, but the structure is all explicit portraiture, and each portrait is fixed, final, locked into its varnish forever. If she begins in murk, with hints and signs, she carries her inquisitiveness into graphic intelligibility.
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