VALERIE SHAW

The secret companion When he produced A Writer’s Diury in 1953 Leonard Woolf’s aim was to present ‘an unusual psychological picture of artistic production from within’ by selecting from his wife’s journals passages which would throw light on her ‘intentions, objects, and methods as a writer.’ The result was a concentrated and often moving record of intense artistic effort, but there were glimpses too of Virginia Woolf thinking about other things than the writing process. The final entry alone seems to mock attempts to distil her comments on her writing:

Suppose I selected one dominant figure in every age and wrote round and about. Occupation is essential. And now with some pleasure I find that it’s seven; and must cook dinner. Haddock and sausage meat. I think it is true that one gains a certain hold on sausage and haddock by writing them down.

Now that the diaries are to be published complete it will be possible to see all of the ‘mass of matter unconnected with Virginia Woolf’s writing’ in which Leonard Woolf’s chosen extracts were originally embedded; inevitably, this is going to mean sacrificing the attractive brevity of A Writer’s DMry along with a good deal of its poignancy, but it will all be worthwhile if what it leads to is a fuller appreciation of Virginia Woolf’s informal writings.

Before 191 5, when Volume I of The Bury of Virgiiniu Woorf opens, she had already kept what the editor calls ‘essay-joumals’ which were used more to practise writing skills than to record daily events and thoughts. Later, however, with her first novel ready for publication, the impulse to transform her observations into literary prose seems to have been replaced by a less self- conscious desire to note down what each day brought. On 2 January 1915 she writes, ‘This is the kind of day which if it were possible to choose an altogether average sample of our life, I should select’, and goes on to describe how she and Leonard ‘both settle down to our scribbling’, read the papers after lunch and ‘agree that there is no news’, take the dog for a walk, and settle in for an evening’s reading. Written after tea, and as she said ‘written indiscreetly’, t h i s diary is full of the habitual, even if for Virginia Woolf that included visits from exotics like Lytton Strachey. One day succeeded another, perceptions and experiences required no justification beyond their having happened, and so there was no need here to shape material into artistic form. The style of the diary has a quality of ease which makes perfectly plausible Virginia Woolf’s

The Diory of Virgnio Woolf Volume I : 1915-1919. Edited by Anne Olivier Bell. The

Books ond Portraits: Some Further Selections + the Literory md Bopaphical Writings of Hogarth Press. €8.50.

Wrgnio Wool/. Edited by Mary Lyon. The Hogarth Press, f5.50.

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wide-eyed amazement when told that Ottoline Morrell too kept a diary, ‘devoted however to her “inner life”; which made me reflect that I haven’t an inner life’.

Like anybody’s diary, Virginia Woolf’s was at the mercy of mood and circumstances, but it would certainly not have lasted long had her life been all mystical inwardness as some readers of her fiction still suppose. True, the diary did provide relief from too much jangling outwardness by occupying in-between moments when ‘one can’t settle to read, & yet writing seems the proper channel for the unsettled irritable condition one is generally in’. The 1917 Club often made her feel t h i s way, but she could always ‘solace [her] restless- ness . . . upon this book’. But if escape from the buzz of intellectual voices were all that was involved in the keeping of this diary it would be hard to say more for it than that it confirms familiar ideas about Virginia Woolf’s need for pockets of private time, and provides further details of the intricate relation- ships criss-crossing the numerous social groups she belonged to. Far more details, indeed, than any outsider, even the keenest literary historian, could honestly find interesting; Virginia Woolf herself was thankful to be on the inside and thus immune from the hypnotic fascination ‘Bloomsbury’ exerted even then over ‘the sane and the insane alike’. Anyway, a wide and demanding social circle was not new to her in 1915; she had always had, and was never to lose, audiences for her wit in company, and for the blend of gaiety, thoughtful- ness, and mischief-making in her letters. What really was new was a larger and less predictable audience of anonymous readers whose responses would test her professional, not just her personal, talents.

Throughout this period Virginia Woolf was writing book reviews, several of which are included in Mary Lyon’s useful collection Books and Portraits. Though ‘divided whether one likes to have books or to write fiction without interruption’ , Virginia Wmlf obviously found deadlines stimulating :

When I have to review at the command of a telegram, & h4r Geal has to ride off in a shower to fetch the book at Glynde, & comes & taps at the window about 10 at night to receive his shilling & hand in the parcel, I fell pressed & important & even excited a little.

As with all speculative minds, urgency was often just the thing to release definiteness, and being told on Tuesday night to have a piece on Henry James done by Friday both concentrated the mind and salved the conscience mar- vellously: ‘as I rather grudge time spent on articles, & yet cant help spending it if I have it, I am rather glad that this is now out of my power’. Complain as she might about ‘hack work’ distracting her from her fiction, if the flow of books from TLS suddenly stops she is equally upset, tartly noting ‘I’m “rejected by the Times”.’ Seeing Leonard with two books from The Nation only rubs a sore

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point sorer, and it becomes a matter of pride to race on with her novel so that she can boast ‘If I continue dismissed, I shall finish within a month or two’.

Although Virginia Woolf looked on her reviews and novels as rivals for her time and attention, it really makes more sense to see them as closely connected facets of her developing professionalism. Looking back, it is possible to find a profound relationship in which the reviewing was vital to her awareness of the ‘gulf between writing & publishing’, her growing, though always precarious, self-confidence as a writer, and her justification of what was as much an instinct as a rationally chosen career. Admitting how ‘specialised’ she had become by 1919 could be alarming, but admit it she must: ‘My mind turned by anxiety, or other cause, from its scrutiny of blank paper, is like a lost child - wandering the house, sitting on the bottom step to cry’. The pathos of the simile might not have pleased Carlyle, but he would have applauded the same thought expressed difterently elsewhere in the diary; ‘Happiness - what, I wonder constitutes happiness? I daresay the most important element is work.’

Keeping this diary was an essential part of the process by which Virginia Woolf made herself a worker with words, and it is significant that the diaries, essays, and reviews are recognisably the work of the same person. Naturally, the diaries are less polished, but they have the same anecdotal immediacy, the capacity to express considered judgments with all the freshness of unpremedi- tated remarks, and above all the caring delight in language that distinguish Virginia Woolf’s best criticism. There is an overall effect of intimacy which is often surprisingly absent from her letters, and this is not because variety of tone is missing, but because changes of tone are unified by a single voice; in the letters, a different mask seems to be put on with each change of tone. Perhaps Virginia Woolf’s scepticism about the possibility of true communication between people was most oppressive when she wrote letters, producing at times the same kind of brittle archness that also tends to spoil the talks she prepared for ostensibly intimate audiences like the Memoir Club. Writing to Jacques Raverat in 1924 she defined the problem candidly:

The difficulty of writing letters is, for one thing, that one has to simplify x) much, and hasn’t the courage to dwell on the small catastrophes which are of such huge interest to oneself; and thus has to put on a kind of unreal personality . . . and then, being a writer, masks irk me.

But there was no call to be anything other than natural with two audiences - herself and her reading public. With both she was free to talk about what she found important without being afraid that she was compromising either the truth of her feelings or factual truth. In the diary she was free not even to try relating events that were ‘mainly of a spiritual nature’ and therefore beyond

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analysis; on the other hand, in her criticism she could attack simplified interpretations of facts :

A student of letters is so much in the habit of striding through the centuries from one pinnacle of accomplishment to the next that he forgets all the hubbub that once surged round the base; how Keats lived in a street and had a neighbour and his neighbour had a family - the rings widen infinitely.

Many of Virginia Woolf’s critical essays read like chapters of imaginative biography which catch the subject in characteristic moments of ordinariness, and it is small wonder that she recognised the value of diaries to the type of literary history she believed in. During the period covered by this volume of her own diary she wrote an article on Pepys, arguing that it is because it is private without being self-absorbed that his account of ‘all the infinite curiosities, amusements, and pettinesses of average human life’ has enduring worth: ‘It was not a confessional, still less a mere record of things useful to remember, but the storehouse of his most private self, the echo of life’s sweetest sounds without which life itself would become thinner and more prosaic.’

It was partly the unpretentiousness of journals like Pepys’s or letters like Horace Walpole’s that appealed to Virginia Woolf, who was later to regret that wireless and telephone left the letter-writer nothing to write about but extremely private matters - ‘and how monotonous after a page or two the intensity of the very private becomes!’ She deplored notebooks like Gide’s, calling them ‘hybrid books in which the writer talks in the dark to himself about himself for a generation yet to be born’. What she admired and cultivated in herself was the impersonality she found in Henry James who could share his overwhelming love of life generously with friend after friend yet still keep back ‘something incommunicable’ and remain ‘the alien in our midst, the worker who when his work is done turns even from that and reserves his confidence for the solitary hour’. Virginia Woolf could be describing her own most cherished dream when she pays tribute to James’s achievement :

.

There they stand, the many books, products of ‘an inexhaustible sensibility’, all with the find seal upon them of artistic form, which, as it imposes its stamp, sets apart the o b j a thus consecrated and makes it no longer part of ourselves.

If Virginia Wmlf avoided merely talking to herself about herself it was because her own inexhaustible sensibility was allied to a Jamesian ideal of artistic impersonality. In the diary, her preoccupation with ‘the final seal of artistic form’ is pervasive in her distinctive ability to turn random and fragmentary events into little dramatic scenes. At any moment she can bring into play the ‘scene-making’ which she said was her natural way of remember- ing the past and making it ‘representative, enduring’.

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London and Sussex, between which the Woolfs divided their time, are the two main settings, with Richmond as the working base. In the city there are exhilarating sprees; riding on top of a bus, scouring the town for chocolate, and then doing the rounds of the bookshops, ‘amused to find that the lust after books revives with the least encouragement’, and tempted into ordering an edition of Congreve she probably cannot afford. And when the ‘seductive magic’ of the booksellers has worked so well that she does not have 5s 6d left to pay the watchmender, then there are always coloured tapers to be picked up in a Soh0 street market where ‘the stir & colour & cheapness’ thrill her. These are what Virginia Woolf calls ‘field days’, and her love of London suffuses the diary as it does novels like Mrs Dalloway and The Years.

Mudie’s, the London Library, and the 1917 Club are her ‘three usual points’ for getting in touch with London again after an absence, and each has its own atmosphere. The ‘air of the 18th century’, which she associates with shops where she can eavesdrop on conversations about books, changes when she reaches the Club: ‘ ‘‘Have you heard of Ka’s engagement?” To Hilton? I asked. “No, to Arnold Forster”’. No sooner has she heard the rumour than she is spreading it, knowing it may not be true, hoping it isn’t, and recording her own opinion in Austenesque language: ‘I am glad she should marry, though she bade fair to be a marked spinster, but marriage with W.A.F. will be merely a decorous & sympathetic alliance.’

It would be wrong to dismiss Virginia Wwlf‘s enjoyment of gossip as a regrettable blemish, though it certainly did cause a lot of trouble; her next call this day was to Gordon square where she found a very cross Clive Bell:

‘You’ve wrecked one of my best friendships’ he remarked; ‘by your habit of describing facts from your own standpoint-’

‘What you call God’s Truth’ said Nessa. ‘One couldn’t have an intimacy with you & anyone else at the same time - You

‘You put things in curl, & they come out afterwards’ Mary murmured from the

What is really interesting about this is not the incident itself but Virginia Woolf’s way of depicting it; the break in Clive’s first sentence which heightens the melodrama of his accusation, the bald quotation of Venessa’s follow-up, and the final flare into metaphor with the ‘shadow’ of Mary’s sympathetic silence, these are all novelist’s tricks which characterize the speakers at the same time as implying authorial judgment.

This was yet another freedom the diary allowed; friendships could be assessed without being endangered. Unlike Mrs Dalloway, Virginia Woolf was not reluctant to say of people ‘they are this or they are that’ and it was with a certain amount of relish that she settled down after an illness early in 1919 first

describe people as I paint pots.’

shadow of her sympathetic silence.

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to list and then to analyse her friends. This was no cold dissection however, bound up as it was with her increasing concern with middle age and its effects on longstanding friendships. In any case, affection always triumphed in the end, and by November Virginia Woolf was wondering, ‘But why do I always like people & so throw out my judgments? It is true that I always do.’ Reading the diary, there is of course no difficulty in taking such alternations and swings as they come, but perhaps they point to one of the problems in the fiction, where Virginia Woolf does not always manage to align the reader’s sympathies with the judgments she wants to elicit. If discovering that feeling and judgment often run counter to each other is one of the acceptable little ironies that makes life intriguing, then it is also one of the ways to recognise the difference between fiction and life.

At various points in this volume Virginia Woolf considers the anomalies between art and life, notably in a long entry where she virtually writes her own review of the diary so far. At first chagrined by its ‘rough random’ style, then pleased to find that it ‘has a slapdash & vigour, & sometimes hits an unexpected bulls eye’, she finally decides that she can trace some increase of ease in her professional writing to these casual half hours spent ‘loosening the ligaments’ by writing at such a speed that there can be no lingering over her choice of words. Not only this; for all its haphazardness, the diary suggests new possibilities of form: ‘I might in the course of time learn what it is that one can make of this loose, drifting material of life; finding another use for it than the use I put it to, so much more consciously & scrupulously, in fiction.’ At this stage she gets no closer to defining the form her diary might attain than the fantasy of a deep old desk into which she could fling lots of odds and ends ; she would then come back one day and find them mysteriously transformed ‘into a mould, transparent enough to reflect the light of our life, & and yet steady, tranquil composed with the aloofness of a work of art.’ What she does know for sure is that this will never happen if she ‘plays the part of censor’ and writes the diary tightly with too close an eye on its style. The next four volumes are needed before her success in this aim can be judged, but clearly a new awareness of herself as diarist is emerging when later in the same year she again reads the journals over, finds the last better reading than the first, and takes this as proof ‘that all writing, even this unpremeditated scribbling, has its form, which one learns.’

Nothing could be more spontaneous than Virginia Woolf’s account of finding, falling for, and buying Monk’s House in Rodmell; but then her style always does seem most able to combine rapidity and control when she is describing the rural phases of her life. The diary she kept at Asheham contains many word-pictures in the tradition of R u s h and Dorothy Wordsworth, and it was simply by looking around her and saying exactly what she saw that she

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e;nulated Pepys’s ‘intercourse with the secret companion who lives in every- body, whose presence is so real, whose comment is so valuable.’ This is the diary’s real purpose, and Virginia Woolf’s political apathy even during this wartime period does not finally seem strange at all. Every now and then Leonard’s political activities are noted, but with little comment; when she does probe her feelings about organised social reform Virginia Woolf usually finds much to distress, irritate, and offend her. Most of the time she was honest enough not to indulge in the guilt many people think she should have felt more deeply, and was content to leave Leonard to develop his talents while she got on with strengthening hers; ‘By rights of importance I should remark that today L. was asked to stand for Parliament. I haven’t yet turned my mind that way. A natural disposition to think Parliament ridiculous routs serious thought’ - this, only after a blow by blow account of the scenes in the Club and Gordon Square, quoted earlier, has been given.

No, this is still very much a writer’s diary. There is little here that is not somehow connected with the business of becoming a writer. And this is not because of introspection which, despite the myth that has grown up around her, is far from being God’s truth about Virginia Woolf. Rather, it is because her vigorous sense of the ordinary, so evident in the diary, is paradoxically the source of her fiction’s specialness. Wealth of detail was what she recognised as the characteristic strength of the English novel and perhaps envied the nineteenth-century writer: ‘it may be a merit that personality, the effect not of depth of thought but of the manner of it, should be absent. The tuft of heather that Charlotte Bronte saw was her tuft; Mrs Gaskell’s world was a large place, but it was everybody’s world.’ The resources of Victorian realism were no longer available, Bennett and Galsworthy had spoiled what was left of them, and only in her criticism could Virginia Woolf show just how nostalgic she was for the old conventions. The alternative was not to wallow in personality, but it was a kind of loneliness. In a letter to Gerald Brenan shortly after Mrs Dallowuy appeared, she confessed how insecure divided reaction to her novels made her feel, and went on to include all writers of her generation:

It is the penalty we pay for breaking with tradition, and the solitude makes the writing more exciting though the being read less so. One ought to sink to the bottom of the sea, probably, and live alone with one’s words.

Virginia Wmlf could have done just that in her diary, and sunk without trace taking her words with her. Fomately, the stimulus of being read and discussed was stronger than the impulse to hide, and she went on taking the risk of being misunderstood. Meanwhile, she had the diary; there she could confront each new experimental problem raised by her fiction-writing and still be a nineteenth-century realist to her heart’s content, telling each day’s story,

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mingling comedy with melancholy as she described the people and places that made up her world, and creating what was, among many other things, both her Cranford and her Art of the Nouel.

THE VICTORIAN CRITIC AND THE IDEA OF HISTORY Carlyle, Arnold, Pater Peter Dde A sense of history and concern for the meaning of history dominated English thought in the nineteenth century; Dale is concerned with this historicising as it affected Victorian theories about the nature of poetry and art. Examining the critical writings of Carlyle. Arnold and Pater. he finds them preoccupied with the impermanence of moral and intellectual systems and of the artistic values that depended upon them. In adjusting the absolutes of earlier periods to the new historicism the Victorians helped to usher in twentieth-century formalism. f9.45

THE PROBLEMATIC SELF Approaches to Identity in Stendhal. D H Lawrence, and Malraux Elizabeth Brody Tenenbaum In this book Tenenbaum examines three writers who demonstrate in different ways the impact of Romanticism on characterisation in the novel. Sensitive to psychology as well as to literary art, Ms Tencnbaum provides a new perspective on three major novels: Thr Red and the Black, Women in Love, and Man's Fate. €7.00

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