Woolf's Essay Revisions

            Virginia Woolf tinkered with her essays after their initial publication, often publishing a revised version in a transatlantic magazine just weeks after the first version came out in England or America. She put together several of her reviews of an author to construct an overall view of the work, and we can see the result in overview essays of the novels of Meredith, Conrad, and Hardy. A further polishing was exerted on essays that made it into one of the two collections she published during her lifetime, The Common Reader (1925) and The Common Reader: Second Series (1932). Her revisions are always granular, changing individual words and phrases, but they also often eliminate, substitute, or change the emphasis of whole sections and switch out the rhetorical figure of an ending from a metaphor to a bit of dialogue, for example. The revision almost always improves the piece of writing or changes it into an entirely different but equally happy animal.

            One exception that stood out for me was “How Should One Read a Book?” which in its journey from a talk given at a girls’ school in 1926 (the version published in Yale Review that October) to its publication in The Common Reader: Second Series in 1932 loses a good deal of its particularity, candor, and charm.

            The first version of “How Should One Read a Book?” has us imagine ourselves in a library. Woolf advises reading a book “as if one were writing it.” Thus we will be alert to the differences between writers’ worlds. How does Defoe get his verisimilitude? By being precise, by dropping in “some little unnecessary fact," and keeping attention away from style. Austen, on the other hand, gives us background (say about Emma’s father) and then immediately shows us him, letting his words confirm the background, and then shows him through another’s eyes. Hardy’s character will be seen against the background of nature and destiny; “he is cumbrous, involved, metaphorical.”

Great writers “require us to make heroic efforts in order to read them.” Reading is “arduous and exhausting.” But the kinds of books she spent a lot of time reviewing, “biographies and memoirs, all the hybrid books which are largely made up of facts” restore us. From biographies, though, we expect facts, not the kind of pleasure the novelist gives.

We have to have “an immense reserve of imaginative energy “to read poetry, which gives no “gradual introductions” to its “violent, opposite, unrelated” world. We need “a rash, an extreme, a generous state of mind” to read poetry rightly. The devices of poetry make us “read with the senses, not with the intellect, in a state of intoxication.” Poetry brings “the sudden conviction, the sudden recollection” as if we had already said what Shakespeare is saying.

 Of course we also compare and judge; our sympathetic reading stops when the book is finished. Some time after, the book comes complete to the mind. How do we decide if it’s good or bad? We have to compare with what we’ve read and ask questions: is the period a factor? Is it a translation? When we’ve made a judgment we can look at those others: “Every book…has the right to be judged by the best of its kind.” We get “nothing whatsoever except pleasure from reading,” she says, and then suggests, no, we get civilization.

In the revision, the library setting of the original is a vague assumption. Reading a book as if we were writing it becomes “Do not dictate to your author; try to become him.” The comments on Defoe, Austen are Hardy are diluted into a few phrases of generalities. The section on biographies is one place where she expands and improves on the original. The difficulties of reading are smoothed over, as is the direct impact of poetry. Finally, she replaces the conclusion about reading and civilization with a limp imagined conversation between “the Almighty” and Saint Peter about heaven having nothing to offer souls that show up carrying books.

I can only imagine that Woolf thought the readership of The Common Reader essay would be more general, or even that in her address to the schoolgirls she had condescended and needed to erase that impression. She does not condescend. In pieces written for the Working Women’s Guild or for school addresses, Woolf shows herself incapable of condescension.

I have ignored an intermediate stage of revision of this essay written as a preface to a bookseller’s publication in 1931 recommending titles of book to read. And all I can say is, if you have only read “How Should One Read a Book?” in the version published in The Common Reader, you owe it to yourself to chase down the original.

Reading Silko

            When I finally read Ceremony it was a disappointment. The book conveys the disorientation and mental anguish of Tayo, the Laguna Pueblo Indian at its center. He feels guilt because he reneged on two promises to his family—really to his uncle Josiah, since there is little love between him and the aunt, Josiah’s sister, who grudgingly took Tayo in to save the honor of the family when her sister was impregnated by a Mexican and she left the baby. Tayo promised his uncle he would take care of his cousin Rocky (the aunt’s son), but Rocky died on a forced march to a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp. Earlier Tayo had promised his uncle to take care of his cattle, since it was always understood that Rocky would leave the reservation to excel in college and then make a success in the white world. But Tayo got talked into enlisting by Rocky.

            There are larger guilts in the air and earth and the past. The action takes place in the area where uranium was mined for the Manhattan Project and not far from where the first atom bomb was tested; Tayo’s grandmother saw the flash and never knew exactly what it was. The Japanese come off better than the Americans in Tayo’s experience: his fellow soldiers are order to shoot Japanese prisoners, and though Tayo cannot bring himself to participate, he sees his uncle Josiah among the doomed Japanese. On the other hand, though they death-march their captives to a POW camp, the Japanese do not shoot them.

            Tayo’s army experience is even more complex. Like the other reservation Indians in the war, he enjoys the respect and other perks accorded servicemen while they are in uniform. But they are fighting for a land that has already been stolen from them, and once out of uniform, they feel the same old bigotry as before. All this Silko conveys during the first part of the book, which is painful. I thought more than once about the fallacy of imitative form.

            In the ceremony part of the book the writing is better but the matter gets fantastic. The ceremony begins with the medicine man Betonie’s instruction of Tayo and continues as Tayo rounds up Josiah’s cattle, led by Betonie’s vague instructions about the Pleiades. Tayo also finds a beautiful woman, also somehow connected with the Pleiades, and an instant love bond is formed between them. Eventually Tayo completes the ceremony by resisting violence with other Indians he perceives as being agents of the witchery in the world. That witchery has been, according to the book’s origin stories, responsible for creating the Europeans and their invasion of America. I don’t believe in magic, but that’s not the real obstacle for me here, any more than it is in The Tempest or in Homer. The problem is the wish-fulfillment romance and its embarrassingly sentimental treatment.  

Reading White Noise

            My first Don DeLillo book is White Noise, which got him a National Book Award. It’s an album of popular culture and American materialism. Characters repeat the clichés used in newspaper and TV reports of murders, natural disasters, plane crashes, and other dire events. DeLillo inserts catalogues of product names in a parody of consumer culture that is as funny and also as grim as Heller’s parody of the idiocies of war and the army in Catch-22. The family whom we follow through the narration of Jack Gladney is a diorama of characters whose closest approach to any spiritual existence is their awe-struck spectating at sunsets caused by a chemical spill that evacuated their little Midwestern town and that may be slowly killing Jack.

            He runs a department at the local college devoted to Hitler studies, though he’s never learned German. His fifth wife (counting twice the one he divorced and later remarried), Babette, teaches a course in standing, sitting, and walking, and she also volunteers as a reader for a blind man; what she reads him are the tabloids from the local market checkout counter. Jack’s son Heinrich enjoys reminding his family and friends about all the disasters that can plague modern life. He also plays chess by mail with a condemned mass murderer in prison.

            In this world where all their physical needs are met and where they are pleased consumers, both Jack and Babette suffer from an overpowering fear of death. To allay it, Babette has been willing to sleep with the maker of a drug supposed to quiet that part of the brain where fear of death resides. Jack decides to find and kill this man—perhaps the killing itself will affirm Jack’s life and address his fear of death. He will also confiscate the man’s supply of his drug. Jack’s plan goes awry and he takes his victim to a hospital after they have injured each other. There, in a comic scene, they are nursed by a German nun who taunts Jack with his simpleminded conviction that she must be a believer because she is a nun.

            Jack and Babette’s life resumes. In the last chapter their youngest child, Wilder, miraculously rides his toy tricycle through many lanes of both directions of freeway traffic. This scene is not witnessed by Jack and, unlike the rest of the book, is not told from his viewpoint. The children, and especially Wilder, who never talks, are the only countervailing force to the numbing materialism of the book’s world. Jack and Babette like to have the children around, and Jack sometimes watches the younger ones sleeping for half an hour at a time. But no one ever articulates this idea of the sleeping or pre-vocal child being opposed to the usual aspect of their world, filled as it is with talk—media-driven, half-informed, pseudoscientific, academically pretentious, rife with advertising language.