The scarlet letters
Peter Conrad
The Question of Things Happening. The Letters of Virginia Woolf, Volume II: 1912-1922 edited by Nigel Nicolson and Joanne Trautmann (Hogarth Press £9.50) The things that happen in Virginia Woolf's letters are leasing houses, employing and mollifying servants, reclaiming purloined books and tea pots, delousing dogs and juggling ration books. Her correspondence, like that of Henry James, reveals her to be a busy, astute worldling, preoccupied with the material complications of existence—those ragged fringes of existence which, like him. she scrupulously omits from her fiction. Her life, as she bids for properties at auction, folds and staples copies of Hogarth Press publications, or organises an annuity to release Eliot from his drudgery at the bank, is as energetically prosaic and as peopled as her fiction is wanly, vacantly poetic. Those who knew her complain about the contradiction between the invalid sensitive plant of critical cliche and the tattling, uproarious woman they enjoyed, but the fault is not that of criticism. It is Virginia Woolf's own: imagination obliged her, she felt, to turn herself from one thing into the other, from the teasing, gossiping hostess into the tremulously vulnerable poetess. Art she identified with her illness, which disqualified her from participation in society, and during her periods of insanity her letters cease.
The letter from which the editors have extracted their title, The Question of Things Happening, explains the paradox. Night and Day is, she says, created by disembodiment and evacuation: in contrast with the garrulity of the letters, her novels must be about 'the things one doesn't say' ; in contrast with her own blatantly emotional nature, deeply affectionate but jealous and treacherous, her novels must question 'the reality of any feeling'. Because in her own life things are 'happening, normally, all the time', her novels must treat things which do not happen, absences, implications, deaths in parenthesis. She burdens art with her mental afflictions, but denies it the comical resources of her temperament which the letters indulge. Art, as with James, is not a substitute for life, but penance for a life too jauntily social. James made art from the refinement of gossip into psychological detection, and Virginia Woolf uses an image suggesting his caged heroine living through the telegrams she transmits: envying Duncan Grant and Vanessa Bell their access to scurrilous information, she likens them to 'the young women at the telephone exchange, with the wires ringing little bells round them, as loves, divorces, and copulations and insanities blaze out in London'.
But she abstracts herself from these social pleasures, writing to Ottoline Morrell that the solitude of Asheham 'has a very spiritual effect upon the mind. No gossip, no malevolence, no support from one's fellow creatures,' though this angelic abstention is interrupted by Carrington, who inaugurates a marathon of tale-telling which Virginia calls 'a bath of the flesh'. Even gossip is a privilege of rude sensual health, which she must deny herself: socially a joy, aesthetically an infraction.
James's telegraphist watches the world through the bars of her cage. Virginia too cages people, capturing them behind bars or glass. In Manchester she is enchanted by the zoo, where an Indian buffalo suffers from ingrown toenails; at Brighton she spends hours in the aquarium watching indolent soles and torpedo-like mackerels. Her habit of assigning animal names to her correspondents diminishes them into pets, creatures who can be loved but whom she need not trouble to understand since, like animals, they can have no inner existence comparable to hers: 'Ka' Cox is Bruin, or a cockatoo, Leonard a mongoose, Forster a mole, the Strachey housekeeper an elephantine mouse. Vanessa a dolphin. Ottoline a dapper mackerel. 'She ought to be put in a tank,' Virginia says of Ottoline. Elsewhere she remarks that Marjorie Strachey, like Jacob Flanders in his rock pool, treats society as an aquarium: 'the human race are to her as fish—we swim past, divided by glass plates'. But her attitude is the same: people are as strange to her as the dogs and cats whose annual promiscuity she refers to in one letter or as the moles Leonard catches at Asheham. She is after all the biographer of a dog, the BrowningsFlush. For her, animals may be people, but people are only animals.
A letter to Vanessa, written after a visit to the Victoria and Albert Museum, marks descriptive narrative (which Virginia's own fiction subverts) as a burden of acquisitiveness: 'I see I shall have to write a novel entirely about carpets, old silver, cut glass and furniture. The desire to describe becomes almost a torment; and also the covetousness to possess. I don't think this has much to do with their artistic value though'. Possessions fetter the spirit. Art offers instead an ideal emptiness. Hence the deserted houses and empty rooms which are the settings for her fiction: the house haunted by ghostly lovers in an early story, the Ramsay home abandoned to time, Poyns Hall stranded between the acts, Jacob's room containing the possessions which survive him, the theoretical 'room of one's own' which is the space of personal freedom. Isabella Tyson's 'mind was like her room', which is empty except for a looking-glass. Even the furniture is notional. These mental habitations are equipped with Platonic tables like Mr Ramsay's, which only materialises when you are not there to see it. Isabella's secrets are the recesses of a piece of furniture: 'she was full of locked drawers, stuffed with letters, like her cabinets'.
The letters, consequently, are much concerned with interior decoration, which is the mind's transformation of a domestic setting into a cranial cave. Virginia's reflective rooms constitute what she calls, in a prose-poem about the decorative quirk of 'The Mark on the Wall', 'a world not to be lived in'. In an ebullient mood she writes to Vanessa 'I must now go and paint the house bright yellow'. Ottoline cannot be invited because the Omega Workshop chair-covers are unpresentable. The rooms of others are repellent secretions of their personalities: the Arnold-Forsters' flat is acidulous lemon and stark black, Elena Richmond's room a costive chamber in 'blue the colour of bad ink, and brown the colour of musty chocolate'. The Hogarth Press transfers the preoccupation with decor to book-making: the letters ask advice about marbled covers, types of paper, and special inks for printing woodcuts.
As this conscience about embellishment implies, Virginia Woolf's modernity is merely a literary recovery of the late nineteenth-century crafts movement. The press at Hogarth House is the successor to Morris's at Kelmscott. Virginia jokingly prides herself on craft rather than art lo telling Vanessa that 'there's nothing in writing compared with printing'. Her relationship with her sister was her most loving and also her most competitive, and it led her to mimic the mechanics of Vanessa's art. When someone remarked how tiring Vanessa must find her hours at the easel, Virginia indignantly purchased a tall desk and wrote standing at attention like a painter. Roger Fry, in a review mentioned in these letters, compared her writing with the juxtaposition of 'ideas, sYMbolised by forms' practised by French painters like Survage, declaring that
'I like
intensely such sequences of ideas Presented to me in Mrs Virginia Woolf's prose, and as yet I have a rather strong distaste for Survage's visual statements'. However, it is not painting which apes literature: the reverse is the case. The 'solid objects' coveted by Virginia's characters are the blunt shapes of cubism; the wondering phrases which open The Waves—Bernard sees a ring quivering in a loop of light, Susan a slab of pale yellow encountering a purple stripe describe the abstract designs of post-Impressionist painting. Virginia Woolf's imagination is visual, and one of the revelations of the letters is the extent to which this specialisation of sense may derive from her envious reverence for her sister.
Previous page
