CHRISTMAS BOOKS
Virginia Woolf
By RICHARD HUGHES CYRIL CONNOLLY was himself one of those critics who began in the Thirties to question the established reputations of Virginia Woolf and Bloomsbury's " mandarins " generally : writing in 1938*, moreover, he could not then have been under the spell of the first impact of the book, for it had been published seven years earlier : yet even he described Virginia Woolf's The Waves as "a masterpiece " : called it this ' . . . group of five or six huge panels which celebrate the dignity of human life and the passage of time . . . one of the books which come nearest to stating the mystery of life, and so, in a sense, nearest to solving it."
Re-reading The Waves in 1953; in a different world altogether and in a period when Virginia Woolf's reputation is under- standably in more general eclipse, the present writer still feels no desire to quarrel with Connolly : the book is indeed a cele- bration (in the sacramental sense); and a profound statement, in terms at the same time elegiac and lyrical—the work of a woman of genius. It is a masterpiece in the strict sense (the piece of work which admitted a mediaeval journeyman among the " masters ").
Virginia Woolf, then, was the, last great English novelist of her age . . . if she was a novelist at all. For convenience we call The Waves a novel : but is it one ? About most of her other work (except perhaps Orlando) the difficulty is not so formidable. To a greater or lesser extent the elegiac and lyrical tones are always present, but in each of these books a story develops out of personality and the changes in personality which time wreaks; and this is typically " The Novel," even though the tones and the form of presentation may be unusual. Some of these books, moreover, are novels of a superior order. But The Waves—her' " masterpiece "—this flower of the English language is unlike any other flower of , the alglish language. Does it belong then to some nameless genre which it began and ended? Can we even be certain whether to call it prose or poetry? In this volume j- of extracts from his wife's diaries Mr. Woolf has included a number of appraisements and impressions of her contemporaries (the eyes, however, in that remarkable, very beautiful face saw so clearly and her satiric wit was so devas- tating that those of us who met her must wait till we are dead, it seems, before we can safely be told what she thought of us); but for the most part he has chosen passages for their bearing on these very questions. the nature of her creative impulse and her work. Now that we can see her mind from within, then, as well as from outside, are we any nearer to an answer whether she was essentially poet or novelist ?—The fact is that in this book we find much light on the question but no answer : we find only what we ought to have known, that Nature even in compounding genius shows no signs of appreciating these classifications we so love !
We learn, for example, that her method of composition was essentially poetic. Trelawny once found Shelley scribbling, and Shelley told him : " When my head gets heated with thought it boils, and throws off words and images faster than I can skim them off." Most of her work seems to have been written in a similar state of heated inspiration. Her " mind agape and red-hot from writing "—in various forms this phrase recurs frequently. This state of mind did not necessarily produce in her a Shelleyan facility : " I can't scribble fast enough to bring it all to the surface," that mood was rare with
* Enemies of Promise, pp. 62 and 63.
t A Writer's Diary. Being extracts from the Diary of Virginia Woolf. Edited by Leonard Woolf, (Hogarth Press. 18s.)
her: more often (and particularly when writing The Waves) it induced sweat and effort " because of the concentration " : yet always " writing is the profound pleasura■ being read the super- ficial ": there was always this uncurling of the hedgehog-mind, so that its vulnerable, surfaces were temporarily exposed, this heated ecstasy, in composition. Indeed, she seems to have had to restrict her hours of composition or the heated brain raced like an engine with a slipping clutch. Revision, on the other hand, was horrible to her, and yet (this again is characteristic of the poet) she did not shirk it. She had a profound conscious- ness of living form, of balancing part against part, of flow and pause, and spared no effort, however hateful, to hammer the metal before it cooled into the desired shape.
Again, Gautier has defined the poet as " one for whom the visible world exists " : or, as an old Welsh anthracite-miner once put it: " The poet sees, and he sees, and he sees—till he's blind with seeing." Surely there have been few English writers in whom the sense of sight has been so acute, so hyper- sensitive. It is wrong to accuse her of " overloading her pages with imagery ": rather (as we learn from the dietics) it is the intense reality to her of the visible world which must constantly compel the dull-eyed reader also to see, to see all the time—to see " till he's blind with seeing." In her diary she wrote : " The look of things has a great power over me.. .. But what a little I can get down into my pen of what is so vivid to my eyes, and not only to my eyes; also to some nervous fibre, or fan-like mem- brane, in my species." The imputation of " unreality " in her writing, then, means only this, that most of us really believe in abstractions—for us the visible world does not exist, and we recoil instinctively from a conviction that it does.
People—as well as clouds and trees and china plates—were part of the visible world to her. What she jotted down first after a meeting with George Moore was : " He has a pink foolish face; blue eyes like hard marbles; a crest of snow- white hair; little unmuscular hands; sloping shoulders; a high stomach; neat, purplish, well-brushed clothes. . . . " and so on. But—and this is odd—in comparison with this hypersensitive eye her ear was apathetic. The world of her books is an almost soundless world. In the diaries we see the rooks, beating up against the wind, their wings " slicing as if the air were full of ripples and ridges and roughnesses "—but they never caw. We see George Moore—Lady Cunard—Lord Donegan: we are told what they say—but we never hear them say it. In the novels her people speak but they have no voices (so we are never quite sure whether they are speaking or thinking). This same comparative dullness of the ear appears in the texture of her style : it is veryprhythmical—that is to say, the rhythms are rather thumped, they tend to be monotonous or where the monotony is brciken the breaking is simple, obvious. (This, then, would seem after all to preclude us from calling her a poet; in a poet it would be intolerable.) Another important point : most of her work seems to evince no desire for compres- sion, for extreme distillation. Again this is not necessarily even a weakness in a prose-writer, but in a poet it would be annihilating. Form without compression may be beautiful, but it is the beauty of clouds not of poetry.
Is she a novelist, then? Arnold Bennett complained that she " could not create characters which survive." To the extent that this is true it is because (as has been hinted earlier) she was more concerned with personality than she was with character. The distinction is clear : I am a person, you are all characters : Mr. Jones's friends are aware of his character, only Mr. Jones himself can be aware of his personality. Primarily the people in her novels are seen as persons, through their own eyes : only secondarily from outside, by each other, as characters. Every great novelist, of course, is interested in personality as well as in character—the difference in her work is one of emphasis rather than of kind. But it is an important difference. Taken with what has been said already it means that whereas most novels consist of characters set in a world where abstract ideas primarily are real, hers consist of persons set in a visible world which, primarily, is real. Yet she proved that personality can engender a story just as character can: so the difference is not necessarily a disqualification of a novelist. But is something so unusual as very nearly to be one.
In most novelists' diaries one finds notes of people met, seen as possible characters; incidents related, as the possible germ of stories. But not here—where the only professional notes of the kind are visual. Her stories, then, were drawn like a spider's thread out of het own stomach. For character can be observed, but personality cannot except in oneself : every novel of personality is in an entire sense autobiographical, every person in it a facet of the author. Thus she was Rhoda— but also Susan and Jenny, Louis, Bernard and Neville . . . she was Mrs. Dalloway and she was Septimus Smith : twins of her mind's womb: only Dr. Holmes—that mere character— running up the stairs with the unforgivable word on his lips, was of alien (and prophetic) birth.
It is understandable—quite apart from the normal fluctua- tions of fashion—that Virginia Woolf's reputation is today rather lower than intrinsically it deserves. For one thing (as Forster has pointed out) as well as being a woman of genius she was an English lady, thus her novels are mostly about ladies and gentlemen and today taboo is strident that we should forget that ladies and gentlemen in the English sense ever existed —or remember them only as grotesques, not persons. Indeed, Between the Acts—one of her finest works—is the last elegy on that world, written as it fell in fragments: written in the Kentish countryside while the Battle of Britain was being fought over her head. But more fundamentally, we live today in a world where reality is deemed more and more to be the prerogative of abstractions: the visible today is merging into the dun of the gloaming, we are losing the delight of the eye (as we have long lost the delight of the nose). It is an age too when personality (as the word is used here) is publicly at a discount, for we are striving towards group-consciousness at the expense of self-consciousness, as if that were something higher rather than the primitive thing shared with the animals from which self-consciousness had only at any time very partially emerged.
" What is to become of all these diaries, I asked myself yesterday. If I died, what would Leo make of them ? He would be disinclined to burn them; he could not publish them. Well, he should make up a book from them, I think, and burn the body. I think there is a little book in them. . . ."—There is indeed ! A book that will be read with fascination by any- one who respects her work or who, more generally, is interested from whatever angle in the nature of literary creation. More- over even those who are totally out of sympathy with writing and living of her kind may find a dose of it a useful corrective to the Genius of the Age. It is sensible of dogs to eat an occasional blade of grass.
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