Going with the flow

Ferdinand Mount

VIRGINIA WOOLF: AN INNER LIFE by Julia Briggs Penguin/Allen Lane, £30, pp. 528, ISBN 0713996633 ✆ £26 (plus £2.25 p&p) 0870 800 4848 What if a writer is more interesting than the stuff he or she writes? Worse still, what if she isn’t (let’s leave the men out of this) but the reading public mistakenly thinks she is?

Virginia Woolf was alert to this problem, if that’s what it is, because she was alert to most things she was reading. In reading Byron, she said, it was always ‘difficult to be certain whether we are looking at a man or his writings’. While analysing Aurora Leigh for the Yale Review, she noted that the Brownings’ love story attracted more attention than their poetry -— and then she got hooked herself: ‘I lay in the garden and read the Browning love letters, and the figure of their dog made me laugh and I couldn’t resist making him a Life.’ Hence Flush, which naturally turned out to be a runaway success with a nation of doglovers. Woof, Woolf.

But this will not do if we are to cement Virginia Woolf into the modern pantheon. If she really is ‘the greatest of all British women writers’, as it says on the dustjacket of Julia Briggs’s new book, then we must concentrate our minds on the dedicated artist and iron-willed feminist and not let our attention stray to the gossipy, bitchy, serpentine, snobbish, occasionally raucous, intermittently anti-Semitic, quintessential Bloomsberry. If Woolf is to be canonised as the patron saint of gender studies, then we may countenance her affair with Vita Sackville-West (though perhaps raising an eyebrow at its more skittish upper-class moments), but we must airbrush anything which suggests that now and then she took a more favourable view of marriage and conventional life. For example, when Leonard stopped her from going to Paris to comfort her grief-stricken sister whose son Julian had just been killed in Spain: ‘Then I was overcome with happiness. Then we walked round the square love making — after 25 years we can’t bear to be separate. It is an enormous pleasure, being wanted: a wife.’ You would need a stony heart too not to be touched by her reflection a decade later on their decision not to have a child (mostly Leonard’s and taken on very dodgy medical advice): ‘A little more self-control on my part, and we might have had a boy of 12, a girl of 10. This always makes me wretched in the early hours.’ Julia Briggs is too conscientious and fairminded a biographer not to let us see these sides too, but for the most part she sticks to her mission, which is to show us Virginia Woolf not only in a room of her own but on her own in it. Although evidently a highly sociable person, Briggs tells us, ‘it was what she did when she was alone, walking or sitting at her desk, for which we now remember her’. An odd formulation this, one which would go without saying for almost any memorable writer whether male or female, from Pascal to P. G. Wodehouse, from Jane Austen to George Eliot, but which somehow does need to be asserted in the case of Virginia Woolf, as though there would otherwise be something shaky or blurred in the case for her greatness, as though even after taking Mrs Woolf out of Bloomsbury we were still worrying whether it would be possible to take the Bloomsbury out of Mrs Woolf.

This is a Virginia with little or no Lytton or Carrington or Duncan or Maynard or Saxon. The Stephens and the Stracheys hardly get a look-in. We start with Virginia, at the age of 21, just after the death of her father, walking along the down by the edge of the sea at Manorbier, Pembrokeshire, wanting to write ‘a book — a book — but what book?’ There right at the beginning of her career we may sniff a clue to both the splendours and the poverty of Woolf’s writing. Other people start out wanting to write a book about Venice or the discovery of sex or the trade union movement. Virginia Stephen just wants to write a book.

Professor Briggs’s method is to take us through the books she did write, devoting roughly a chapter to each: how they were composed, the wearisome series of drafts they went through, their critical reception and their sales. We are told what Leonard thought of each one, what Morgan thought, what Tom Eliot thought. At the end of each chapter the dust-jacket by Vanessa Bell is reproduced — the principal appearance by the sister who in most portraits of Virginia plays such a key role.

This resolutely literary approach to Virginia’s life has both an enhancing and an unsettling effect. Julia Briggs brings out Woolf’s sterling qualities: her courage in dealing with her recurrent overwhelming depressions, her determination to do her very best and not to let her work slip down towards mediocrity as she defined it, her soldiering on in both life and letters.

But Briggs cannot altogether exclude the other, more frivolous and wilful Virginia, whose sudden bursting in gives us quite a shock, since we have been given so little warning of her existence: the Virginia who says ‘I do not like the Jewish voice, I do not like the Jewish laugh’; the Virginia who walking along the towpath shudders as she has to pass a long line of imbeciles — ‘It was perfectly horrible. They should certainly be killed’; the Virginia who wearies of her serious feminist friends going on about the massacre of the Armenians — ‘I laughed to myself over the quantities of Armenians. How can one mind whether they number 4,000 or 4,000,000?’; the Virginia who cannot see what her sister sees in Clive Bell, ‘that funny little creature twitching his pink skin’, before herself making up to the funny little creature, now her brother-in-law, and being disappointed that he doesn’t kiss her. We are spared here the stream of complaints about the vulgarity and stupidity of the lower orders that fill her diaries, although Briggs does mention that when Woolf’s annoying but devoted cook, Nelly Boxall, went into hospital for a kidney operation, Virginia instantly advertised for a replacement in Time and Tide.

Briggs sometimes excuses her subject’s more startling callousnesses as a sign that she is about to go mad again. The treatment here of this subject, admittedly a very difficult one, is not entirely consistent. We are given first to understand that its origin is largely inherited. Virginia’s father was a depressive. Her half-sister Laura spent most of her adult life in an institution. Her cousin, J. K. Stephen, the heroic scholar and athlete, went mad and cut his throat. Within the family Virginia herself had been notorious as a child for her uncontrollable rages — ‘Goat’s mad’, the cry would go up.

At other times, though, Briggs toys with Laingian ideas of the dysfunctional family being the cause of supposed insanity (goat=scapegoat), and even with the notion that ‘the very practice of her art required her to adopt a position as a critic and outsider, even as “mad”, if the society she criticised defined its particular prejudices as “sane”’. This is surely to brush aside Virginia’s own agonised accounts of the horrors of her condition and to caricature the robust and plainspoken quality of her critiques of society — usually appreciated as such by those who might not necessarily agree with them.

Nor will it do to blame Leonard Woolf, as her more fanatical admirers like to do. She herself constantly repeated that the ‘twist in her head’ came from way back. And it was with Leonard’s unflagging help that, after her catastrophic breakdown and overdose of Veronal in 1913, she managed to keep on anything resembling an even keel for nearly 30 years until her final breakdown and suicide. It is hard to imagine how any companion of either sex could have done more to make her life seem worth living than Leonard did. And she knew it and said it.

Julia Briggs makes me think better of Virginia Woolf as a person — in her own style gallant, sympathetic, stoical — while leaving, perhaps without meaning to, a trail of fresh clues as to why I find most of her novels in some way unsatisfying, especially those which are widely regarded as landmarks of modernism.

As a diarist Woolf is unputdownable. Yes, she is sometimes horrible. So are most of the diarists and memoirists we continue to read, from Pepys and Saint-Simon to Chips Channon, Harold Nicolson and Alan Clark. As an essayist she is magnificently plain and thumping, now and then almost Johnsonian — she loved Samuel Johnson and borrowed from him the title for her collections of reviews — ‘I rejoice to concur with the common reader’. Her writings in the women’s cause are the best possible advertisement for feminism: vigorous, good-humoured and irresistible. No writer of non-fiction could be less affected or less bowed down by theory.

What a contrast with her approach to fiction, which she embarks on festooned with slogans and banners. The time had come to abandon ‘this appalling narrative business of the realist’. Future novelists would leave the description of reality more and more out of their stories, taking a knowledge of it for granted. She told Katherine Mansfield, whom she alternately loved and loathed, despised and envied, ‘What I’m at is to change the consciousness and so to break up the awful stodge’ — the materialist, earth-bound fiction of the dreadful Arnold Bennett and the unspeakable H. G. Wells. ‘We believe that we can say more about people’s minds and feelings. Well then, it becomes less necessary to dwell upon their bodies.’ This dematerialising not only represented the future of art for her, it also accorded with her own instinctive preference. Even when young she had now and then expressed distaste for the flesh, most notoriously only seven weeks after getting married when she wrote to Molly McCarthy, ‘Why do you think people make such a fuss about marriage and copulation? I find the climax immensely exaggerated.’ She was not yet 50 when she remarked that she hated ‘the slow heaviness of physical life and [I] almost dislike people’s bodies, I think, as I grow older.’ What she valued in fiction was the flow. Style, she told Vita, was simply a matter of rhythm and should flow like a wave; ‘as it breaks and tumbles in the mind, it makes words to fit it’. She was always pleased with herself when she had written a long passage on the run, whatever the nervous cost to her afterwards: ‘I shall never forget the day I wrote The Mark on the Wall — all in a flash, as in flying.’ In finishing the second draft of The Waves, she boasted of ‘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’.

But is flow enough? If the flow is making up its own words as it crashes and splashes across the page, may it not come perilously close to gush? In the last ten pages of The Waves it is not Virginia’s voice but Bernard’s that is supposed to be washing over us. But he speaks/thinks in this weird, attitudinising, implausible fashion which is like no human being ever born but like someone inventing a character for themselves in an interminable Bloomsbury afterdinner game. The other five characters speak in just the same way, thus hopelessly blurring the intended distinctions between them, Susan the earth mother, Jinny the man-mad and so on. Julia Briggs is by no means blind to this blurring, recognising that in Mrs Dalloway, for example, the experiences of the neurotic Septimus Warren Smith seem surprisingly similar to those of the other characters who are better adjusted to the world around them. But she does not pause to inquire whether this swimmy, samey quality may not have a deadening effect on the work as a whole. Indeed for an avowedly literary biography the book is remarkably abstinent in its critical evaluation, which in a way is refreshing but cannot help leaving unproven Woolf’s claims to greatness as a novelist.

Since character and narrative are delib erately broken down and homogenised into a continuous poetic flow, the reader is bound, in the absence of the normal diversions, to become attentive to the uneven quality of that flow, at times sparkling and dancing but at other times, far too frequently, whipping itself into a foamy, scummy sort of texture. The opening page of The Waves — the description of dawn breaking over the sea — contains half a dozen extended similes: a wrinkled cloth, the breath of a person sleeping, sediment in an old wine bottle, a woman raising a lamp, flames leaping from a bonfire. By itself each is rather stale and unprofitable. Together they produce a messy smudge.

There is, I think, a paradox about modernism which Woolf seems unaware of: the more you make soup of the old bones of plot and character, the more materialistic, the more naturalistic even you have to be, not less. Compare the last ten pages of Ulysses with the last ten pages of The Waves, Molly’s soliloquy with Bernard’s. Compare Bloom’s day with Mrs Dalloway’s. Both writers are trying to think themselves into a very different sort of person’s head. But while the tumbling stream of thoughts in Ulysses is so coarse, so abundant, so immediate as to overwhelm disbelief, in Mrs Dalloway you never quite manage to forget that this is Mrs Woolf ventriloquising a woman she would have run a mile from at a cocktail party.

Woolf initially dismissed Ulysses as ‘an illiterate, underbred book, the book of a self-taught man, and we all know how distressing they are’. She could not understand why Great Tom Eliot thought it on a par with War and Peace. Although she thought of herself as in some sense in competition with Joyce and noted on his death (just before her own) that he was about a fortnight younger than she was, she always found his ‘indecency’ and ‘sordidity’ too offputting to learn much from. Ditto with D. H. Lawrence. They were incredibly proud in Bloomsbury of being able to say semen and shit and bugger in mixed company, but when it came to creative writing they retreated into a gentility that would have appeased E. M. Forster’s aunts.

The counter-example of Orlando, so wicked, so light-footed, so ingenious, showed how much she could have done with the novel form, but she was caught in this pseudo-poetic slipstream which at its worst has no more purchase on the imagination than those Omega workshop tables and screens painted in their tremulous whorls and stripes which infest the shrines of lower Bloomsbury. Far from it helping her reputation to detach her novels from her diaries, essays and letters, the closer they stick together the better their chances of survival. In the same way, I think it is better to stick the whole Virginia back together and remember a woman brimming with wit, malice, common sense, imagination and caprice rather than to worship a plaster saint for a godless age.