Random gossip
A.N. Wilson
The Sickle Side of the Moon: The Letters of Virginia Woolf 1932-1935 Ed. Nigel Nicolson and Joanne Trautmann (Hogarth £12.50) Letters not addressed to oneself are the most compulsive form of reading; but, When the steam-kettle has done its work, or the drawer has been rifled, the results are almost invariably disappointing. With luck, one will stumble on an outstanding overdraft or a love affair. But for the most part it is a matter of dinners and illnesses; the tedious business of every day. Virginia WooIfs letters, cleverer and more brittle than an average haul, still bear out this general rule. We can now Pore over them for as long as we like: even post-cards from Athens reading merely: 'Love from Leonard and Virginia. This is where we are, not much like Gower Street.'
She has reached the age of 50. Mildly salacious enjoyment can be derived from her continued Sapphic interests. She Clutches Elizabeth Bowen's hand over the wishing well at Bowen's Court and writes to Mrs Nicolson: 'Well, what d'you think we wished (I must say plainly and frankly, my one wish is to make you jealcnis)'. She is enchanted to meet Mrs Nicolson's old flame Violet Trefusis: 'I quite see why you were so enamoured — What seduction!' And she is thrilled to be asked to pose for a nude portrait by Ethel Walker: 'She is 73 that is the only thing against her'. Many of the pages in this volume are devoted to her intense correspondence with 'my old uncastrated Wild cat' Ethel Smyth. ('In strict confidence Ethel used to love Emmeline (Pankhurst) — they shared a bed.) A meeting with Rebecca West produces the exclamation, 'Oh what a joy to grapple With her hairy arms', and she indulges a mild crush On Joyce Wethered, the female golf champion — 'the soul of Pan in a woman's body'. Yet Mrs Nicolson remained her firmest attachment, even though she passes, in the three years covered by this collection, to the point Where Mrs Woolf 'can't really forgive her for growing so large: with such tomato cheeks and thick black moustaches'. Of course, buried beneath the prurience, sniggering, illness and publishing chores which shaped her days, there is a bottom of common sense in Virginia Woolf which shines out in aphorism. 'Let us flatter ourselves', she wrote to Lord David Cecil, 'that it needs real intelligence to see the point of Scott against the tide — much more than to see the point of Hopkins with it', That shows she was on the side of the angels. So too, does her terse question, on hearing that a friend has been appointed to a University lectureship: 'Why teach English?' So, too, when she advises her sister: 'The truth is that doctors know absolutely nothing, but as they are paid to advise, have to oblige'. Wisest of all, 'love seems to me to queer all pitches'.
In a more savagely cut edition, these pearls would shine more brightly. As it is, the appetite of the addicts equals the avarice of publishers, and the letters must flow through six volumes. For the most part they are too ephemeral, too private, to be worth it. They are spirited, not great letters. They do not describe a wide variety of people or experiences and they are not really very observant. They bristle with fantastical descriptions: of eating octopus, 'oily lengths like rubber tires' (sic) or of Cyril Connolly and his firSt wife, 'a less appetising pair I have never seen out of the zoo'. But her mind never focusses on anything for long enough to make her gossippy observations worth a second reading.
Nowhere is this more obvious than in her reflections on books. 'Sometimes I think heaven must be one continuous reading. Its (sic) a disembodied trance — like intense rapture' . But what was she reading? What did she think about it? A life of Parson Wenn, apparently, In the letters of Rose Macaulay one would have two pages of intelligent comment. Pr again, `to sit alone and read the Bible is like drawing into a sunny submarine hollow between deep waves'.
It is a relief, after such gush, to turn to the chatter with which she amused her relations. 'I'm afraid this is very random gossip'. But in family letters — designed to be read twice or three times and then thrown away — that hardly matters. The clearest thing to emerge from this volume is what a good aunt and 'sister she was. There is nothing here which could interest any but the most hardened nosy Parker. But what a joy to have been Vanessa Bell or her children in the 1930s and to receive one of these bulging, gabbling, inchoate epistles with breakfast in the morning.
Previous page
