Precious Stream
Virginia Woolf. By Dorothy Brewster. (George Allen and Unwin, 20s.) Virginia Woolf. By A. D. Moody. (Oliver and Boyd, 5s.)
IN July, 1923, David Garnett reviewed in The Dial, New York, Jacob's Room, a new novel by Virginia Woolf. He touched on those problems about her writing which have beset all the legions of subsequent critics. 'Virginia Woolf seems to me the most interesting.. of the younger writers now living as well as the best of them, but her work is so individual that another writer can learn little from it, and I very much doubt if she will have a direct influence upon her contemporaries.' The crux of the problem has always been to define that individuality. Both' this spring's new additions to the immense corpus of books about Virginia Woolf (same title, totally different content) are inevitably occupied with aspects of it. The phrase 'stream of conscious- ness,' a cliché blunted by excessive use, has been a convenient evasion. What did Virginia Woolf herself mean by it?
'Let us record the atoms as they fall upon the mind in the order which they fall, let us trace the pattern however disconnected and incoherent in appearance which each sight or incident scores upon the consciousness.' Taken literally this is manifest nonsense. Even if such a pattern could be contained in a book, the reader would very soon tire of it. No. A more positive approach is to watch her technical development through Monday or Tuesday, the experimental sketches published in 1921, through Jacob's Room, to Mrs. Dalloway (1925) which grew out of an article 'Mrs. Dalloway in Bond Street,' published in that same issue of The Dial. Virginia Woolf, who was very conscious of her own artistic development, considered that in writing Mrs. Dalloway she had come to the technical discovery which made possible the achievement of the later novels. Hence the exceptional value of the autograph manuscript of Airs. Dalloway (originally The Hours) which has just been purchased by the British Museum and is now on exhibition there. The preliminary version of the book was worked out between October, 1922, and July, 1923. Theo on June 27, 1923, she began the full-scale draft contained in this manuscript. It was the most important stage in the writing of the book: 'Of course, I've only been feeling my way into it—UP till last August anyhow. It took me a year's groping to discover what I call my tunnelling process, by which I tell the past by instalments as I have need of it. This is my prime discovery so far.'
For Virginia Woolf writing was a process as
Painful as it was for Flaubert. On October 15, 1923, she recorded in her diary : 'I am now in the thick of the mad scene in Regent's Park. I find I write it by clinging as tight to fact as I can, and write perhaps fifty words in a morning.' After completing the second draft the opening section of Mrs. Dalloway was rewritten. The new begin- ning provides a taut narrative structure and co- ordinates the whole book, transforming it from an esoteric and highly complicated work into an enjoyable and readable one. By this stage in the Writing the technical certainty is marked by the consistent use of the conjunction 'for' to intro- duce the passages of reflection or recollection. It is upon these that her method depends. There are also, interspersed in the text of the novel, articles and reviews of the period. They illustrate Virginia Woolf's `quick change method,' of alternating often in the same morning between fiction and criticism. Among them is `Joseph Conrad,' the essay originally commissioned on his death (August, 1924) by The Times Literary Supplement. There are three drafts of the opening which work progressively and painfully to the ultimate effect of a mysterious arrival and departure. In the last of them, for example, `forty years ago' is changed to the more remote long Years ago.' This essay was reprinted in The Common Reader which came out as Virginia Woolf intended just before Mrs. Dalloway, in April, 1925. She wished to establish the connec tion between her approach to fiction and to criticism. Dr. Brewster's Virginia Woolf is admirable in containing both these aspects of the author within ne manageable book. But her approach is tactual rather than critical. She employs the Phrase `stream of consciousness,' without ever defining it. She summarises an enormous range of information about the novels, but does not distinguish between the technique of early and later works. The chief difficulty appears to be the oppressive weight of past criticism. Dr. Brewster's very familiarity with her subject turns out to be an obstacle to easy reading. Her text is full of quotations (quite rightly) of Virginia Woolf, and (quite wrongly) of other critics. Since Dr.. Brewster is so honest a writer (references to her sources incorporated in the text), the result is a mosaic. We would perhaps have preferred a more digested product. The method is at its most confusing in the introduc- tion, which consists of biography substantiated by details from the novels. It tends to blur the distinction between what Virginia Woolf intended literally and what she was satirising.
On two points the book is especially informa- tive: on Virginia Woolf's interest in and use of the methods of Russian fiction, and on her approach to the feminist question. But facts upon facts obscure the plan of the book so that quite unjustifiably it appears capricious. The tightly- packed material nevertheless makes it excellent for reference. One small inaccuracy : `Mrs. Dalloway in Bond Street' appeared in July, 1923, not May as Dr. Brewster has it.
Mr. A. D. Moody's book is more readable. He limits his scope to deft analysis of the novels. His pace is calm. But a random selection of his critical terms reveals why the approach is at once stimulating and one-sided : `engaged,' `committed,' centrifugal fragmentation of culture.' That shouts the school of Melbourne and Vincent Buckley. It makes way for an excel- lent introductory chapter, with a clear explana- tion of the so-called Bloomsbury group, in- fluenced by G. E. Moore and reacting against the Victorian Establishment.
Such `high seriousness' is a welcome antidote to that damaging criticism of Virginia Woolf, confined to eulogising her fine style, which so intensely annoys Mr. Moody. But it makes him a little impatient of her fantastic works, A Room of One's Own, Orlando. And he cites as if in condemnation the statistics of her sales up to 1945 `if everyone was reading "this difficult modern novelist," it was mostly where she , was least difficult and hardly a novelist.' More serious is his distortion of Mrs. Dalloway. In his eager- ness to sum up Clarissa Dalloway as a symbol of a degenerate and decaying culture he wrenches the book out of shape. Under these circum- stances the final-sounding judgment `it is a minor 'and imperfect' novel' becomes a little suspect. The publisher made things much worse in the blurb by deciding, with the certainty of musical notation, that Mr. Moody's book has placed Virginia Woolf among the minor modern novelists.
A more reasonable allowance for uncertainty comes in Mr. Moody's last chapter `Reputation, Critics, Achievement.' For we cannot yet be certain of the answers to the problem posed in 1923 by David Garnett. Her individuality as a writer commands close attention. Her intensity sometimes repels. And what of her influence? It seems possible that some modern French writers —Robbe-Grillet, Marguerite Duras and particu- larly Nathalie Sarraute—are developing some of Virginia WoOlf's techniques. But meanwhile it remains far more satisfactory to read her than read about her.
JENNY LEWIS
We regret that in the review of Cinnamon Shops, by Bruno Schulz, in our issue of March 29, the • name of the translator—Celina Wieniewska—was omitted.
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