2018's Reading III

My reading for 2018 included the six volumes of the Hogarth Press/Harcourt Brace Jovanovich edition of The Essays of Virginia Woolf, the first four volumes edited by Andrew McNeillie (1986, 1987, 1988, 1994) and the last two by Stuart N. Clarke (2009, 2011). Of these several million words, most are reviews. Before she achieved fame for her novels in the late twenties, reviewing was the journeyman work she and eventually Leonard did that kept them, if not in bread and cheese (she had a small inheritance), at least able eventually to keep several houses and to start the Hogarth Press.

            She started reviewing for the Times Literary Supplement and other London magazines in her early twenties, in 1904, and TLS was always her main platform, though when she became well known, American magazines paid her much more for her pieces. At the time of his retirement, she wrote in her diary that TLS editor Bruce Richmond had taught her “a lot of her craft” including “how to compress; how to enliven; & also…to read with a pen & notebook, seriously.”

            Over the years, Woolf reviewed many memoirs and letters by women, and she was drawn to those of strong and smart women, not only the famous ones such as Elizabeth I and Lady Elizabeth Holland, who kept the famous guests in her salon, including Macaulay, under her control with raps of her fan, but also women of obscure or straitened circumstances, such as Charlotte Bury, lady-in-waiting to George IV’s Queen Caroline, forced to make her living by serving a woman who often made Bury feel she was humoring a madwoman. Many of these books were assigned rather chosen by her, but in reviewing them she had an advantage. “I almost always like memoirs,” she told an editor late in her career. And in reading over the lives and letters of such women, Woolf formed her own ideas about women’s writing. Reviewing Dorothy Osborne’s letters to William Temple, she writes “the women letter writers were the true forerunners of the women novelists.” She saw great letter writers—men and women—as not only suppressed novelists but also frustrated essayists. Madam de Sévigné “would probably have been one of the great novelists” and writes with “unconscious naturalness.”

            Eventually her ideas began to be theorized in free-standing essays. Women’s socialization has always involved observation and analysis of character, she argues in “Women and Fiction.” Gradually she brings together the ideas about space, solitude, and freedom from grinding poverty that underlie A Room of One’s Own as well as Three Guineas, ideas which can be found first in reviews and then in essays and speeches. In one talk she says, ”The cheapness of writing paper is, of course, the reason why women have succeeded as writers before they have succeeded in the other professions.” The line might have gotten a startled laugh from her audience; I expect she anticipated such a reaction, but she was only slightly exaggerating. And in any case she was not averse to the startling and sweeping: “On or about December 1910, human character changed,” she writes in “Mr. Bennett [Arnold Bennett the novelist] and Mrs. Brown” [a woman she sits across from in a train, names, and invents a narrative about]. “Is it easy, is it possible, for a good man to be an Archbishop?” she asks, archly. Or, again, “How are we to account for the fact that we remember him [Shelley] as a great poet and find him on opening his pages a bad one?” And she pronounces: “One always lies when one speaks in public.” Her prejudices are often on display, as well as the desire to shock. She had a powerful contempt for the academic treatment of literature, and a perennial condescension toward Americans, just to pick a pair.

            She reviewed a lot of fiction, most of it bad and written by authors now forgotten. “Of course Mr. [Joseph] Hergesheimer gives us pleasure,” she writes, “but so do bright fires, oysters, and clean sheets.” But she acknowledges the educative power of bad books in the slow process of developing a mature taste (“How Should One Read a Book?”). Her touchstones among modern English novelists were Hardy, James, Meredith, and Conrad. She was reading the Russians during the first decades of her reviewing, and took Russian language lessons, and she adds Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Chekhov, and Turgenev to the list of writers against whom she measures new fiction. Eventually she writes essays about fiction and what seems to be lacking there; namely, some attempt to capture fleeting life and “a myriad impressions…an incessant shower of innumerable atoms” that form it.

            Her own essays take some time to acquire the extraordinary freedom of her fiction. But when they do, no subject daunts her. She tackles the description of delirium, from the inside, in “On Being Ill.” Later she writes a review of two biographical works at a time when she is ill with influenza again, and she incorporates her delirium. In “Gas,” she essays a description of being anesthetized at the dentist’s. She cheerfully accepts a thousand dollars from an American magazine to write a fantasy about an America imagined by someone who’s never been there. When she was twice frustrated by mechanical problems in the DeHavilland Moth that was supposed to take her flying, she imagined “Flying Over London.” “Evening over Sussex: Reflections in a Motor Car,” which begins with her regret at her inability to do justice to the beauty of the moment, immediately shifts from the transience of its beauty to the transience of the observers, who have gone over the road in a moment “and are already forgotten….Others come behind us.”

            She begins with only a mixed respect for the essay form. She thinks that, despite Montaigne, the English may be said to own the essay because of its peculiar popularity among them. “You can say in this shape what you cannot with equal fitness say in any other” about “the immortality of the soul, or the rheumatism in your left shoulder.” But she comes to see that that the essay has its own “particular perfections,” and she echoes Johnson in pronouncing the essays of Addison “perfect.” She granted that the writing of an essay was a literary effort, while writing reviews she more than once compared to carpentry and cabinetmaking. Her practice makes moot any reservation she may have had about the form. Just to pick one example, I believe that in “Street Haunting: A London Adventure” she far surpasses the great flâneurs Baudelaire and Poe, those men of the crowd, “irresponsible…anonymous trampers” who write about roaming the city. On the winter streets of London she gathers the odd—a dwarf with beautiful feet in a shoe shop, two blind men with one boy between them as guide—and she speculates that her true talent may be in letting go of inhibition and being carried by the crowd, an observer without a will. Looking in at windows, she gets in a deadly blow at the mystique of “shopping”: “Let us choose those pearls, for example, and then imagine how, if we put them on, life would be changed.”