The semi-opaque envelope
Julian Jebb
The Diary of Virginia Woolf, Volume IV, (1931-'35) Edited by Anne Olivier Bell (Hogarth Press £15) Three years ago on the Campus of Berkeley University in California there was a series of bloW-up photographs for sale of the following personalities: Marilyn Monroe, James Dean, Arthur Rimbaud, Jean Harlow, Sylvia Plath, Che Guevara and Virginia Woolf. There they were, the Icons of a dying youth-culture, designed to decorate the walls of students' rooms, fur- nished otherwise with expensive sound reproduction equipment, digested accounts of Trotsky's life and thought, a large mat- tress and the odd ethnic rug.
The figures had two things in common: each had died young or by their own hand and all of them were beautiful. Surely of those who made up this morbid and eccen- tric gallery it would be the fastidious, high- minded and serious novelist who would be most astonished at seeing herself among such company, though she might not have been displeased.
In 1969 I directed a documentary for BBC Television about Virginia Woolf. The Project was blessed by her widower, Leonard, who was still alive and I received great encouragement and help from her nephew Quentin Bell who was writing her biography at the time, and from his wife Olivier, the editor of her diaries of which this is the penultimate volume. Even as short a time as a dozen years ago it would have been impossible to predict the crazy ascendency of Virginia's reputation from that of a respected literary critic and poetic novelist into the martyred mega-star of feminism, a schizoid saint whose heighten., ed sensibility drove her to suicide. Nor is it Just to blame the cult of Bloomsbury on the Bells — Quentin's biography is a model of objective and entertaining writing while his Wife's edition of the diaries is already justly hailed as a monument of "comprehensive scholarship and one of the great source books of intellectual life in England during the present century.
Virginia has been impersonated at least twice on the West End stage; she has become the object of adoration, contempt, hero-worship, and ridicule. She is a myth whose ghost, in the memorable phrase of Alan Bennett, haunts the changing rooms of the London Library. Bloomsbury has become a sort of straggling Bayreuth and many intemperate and self indulgent acts have been sanctioned in the name of 'per- sonal relationships', of which she is cited as a leading prophetess.
The three most important things about Virginia Woolf were her imagination, her intellect and the astonishing industry with which she exercised them. The present volume of her diaries will give little sustenance either to the woozy hype- mongers nor to her more critical admirers. She has finished The Waves which she realises is her most ambitious book. She takes stock of herself, recognises that at last she is famous — rich almost, and to her sur- prise, happier than ever before in her life. She starts working on three different books, Flush, Three Guineas and The Years. The latter gives her the most trouble, and although it was to be her first best seller, it remains a contrived and self con- scious book, where her worked-for naturalism is never accommodated by in- adequate powers of characterisation.
The small change of her life in London and Sussex is described with an irritable and irritating lack of vividness. Ever speedy to detect vanity, evasiveness, hypocrisy and dullness in her acquaintances, she is also cruelly frivolous about her friends.
The charge of malice against Virginia is perhaps too familiar to pursue, but her quite spectacular lack of balanced apprecia- tion of her fellow men, her astonishing laziness of perception or observation about her friends' characters needs to be em- phasised. Most of the ten people I inter- viewed for my documentary film are men- tioned in this volume and a glance at Mrs Bell's compendious and witty index gives some idea of what Virginia thought worth recording about these people, whose de- votion to and delight in her remained un-
dimmed thirty years later.
So: Duncan Grant is 'severely malicious . . . acrimonious . . . testy . . .irritating, an- noying . . . snaps viciously . . .' Raymond Mortimer has a 'shallow, sandy mind' and is 'not liked'. Both Elizabeth Bowen and Lord David Cecil are dismissed as 'pumping up veracities'. These remarks are, it is true, selections and sometimes the weary yet fevered small-mindedness of her judgments are tempered by corrective second thoughts. More importantly it is unlikely that Virginia ever thought that her Diaries (or indeed herself and those she wrote about) would come under such wide and detailed scrutiny; and one must remember the fact that her remarks are made in pass- ing and no doubt they do not represent the mature or lively appreciation which she would have given to a piece about them in- tended for publication. But this considera- tion does not alter the fact that reading the litany of fault-finding is cumulatively ex- asperating and ultimately boring.
`Why all this criticism of other peo- ple? Why not some system which in- cludes the good? What a discovery that would be — a system that did not shut out.'
A reader coming upon this quotation written in October 1932 would be tempted to hope that it was a piece of timely self ex- amination, prompted perhaps by an appall- ed re-reading of her own diary. Not a bit of it: it comes at the close of a markedly Sus- tained and intelligent criticism of D. H. Lawrence. The pot's blackness is, as it were, mightier than the kettle's.
On the whole 'the flight of the mind' is slower; 'the semi-transparent envelope' through which she perceived life and transformed it into art has become opaque. There are some pedestrian accounts of tours in Italy, France and Greece — a rather better analysis of Irish life and pat- terns of talk prompted by a visit in 1934. In- terestingly one of the best set pieces of character drawing in the volume is elicited by meetings with Shaw; for some reason he excites in her a benevolent and acute obser- vation which extends to what anyway reads like a hilariously accurate account of how and what he said. She shows much of the judiciousness so sadly lacking when she is dealing with the living in summaries of character and achievement when close friends like Lytton Strachey and Roger Fry die. Loss and its attendant grief bring out a balanced and humane generosity. For the rest one can respectfully admire the passion with which she pursued both her im- aginative and critical writing as one can be genuinely charmed by the comic anxiety she feels about her appearance — self conscious she may have been, but physically vain she was not.
As ever, the finest pieces of writing are about the creative process itself. This volume contains the already famous entry orginally published in Leonard's selection, A Writer's Diary about finishing The Waves: Here in the last few minutes that re- main, I must record, heaven be prais- ed, the end of The Waves. I wrote the words 0 Death fifteen minutes ago, having reeled across the last ten pages with some moments of such intensity and intoxication that I seemed only to stumble after my own voice, or almost after some sort of speaker (as when I was mad) I was almost afraid, remembering the voices that used to fly ahead . . . I have netted that fin in the waste of water which appeared to me over the marshes out of my win- dow at Rodmell when I was coming to an end of To The Lighthouse.
It is for this accurate and ecstatic prose which Virginia Woolf will always be honoured and so much of her blinkered whining will be forgiven.
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