says Woolf’s biographer (amongst other things!), Hermione Lee, in her fine review in The Guardian to coincide with a new publication by Granta of The Diary of Virginia Woolf. In their original five volumes as edited by Anne Olivier Bell they each have a new introduction, the first by her daughter, Virginia Nicholson (others include Olivia Laing and Siri Hustvedt). They look very lovely indeed but are pricey at £30 a pop. I am content enough with my now a couple of decades old, not-so-well bound, much read, US trade copies – I think!
To quote Hermione Lee:
[…]The diary is an unmatchable record of her times, a gallery of vividly observed individuals, an intimate and courageous self-examination, a revelation of a writer’s creative processes, a tender, watchful nature journal, and a meditation on life, love, marriage, friendship, solitude, society, time and mortality. It’s one of the greatest diaries ever written […]
The Diary of Virginia Woolf review – The Guardian – Thu 22 Jun 2023
What Lee says are extraordinarily (a superlative suggestive of my very much not false modesty) ideas that I, too, have had, and said, and even written about. A “memory book” she calls Woolf’s diary – I love that.
The very opposite of angelic this ‘little’ England at the end of the Elizabethan period, as it hurtled towards the headless state – symbolically and actually with bloody precision – that it was to become in the 17th century – or as such it was seen from a Continental perspective: intemperate, delusional, diabolical this land – a veritable playground for the devil and his helpers.
And it is with this particular slant that Clare Jackson shades her terrific history of that turbulent period of Stuart dynastic power grabs and downfalls, civil wars, religious fervor and parliamentarian purges. Devil-Land: England Under Siege, 1588-1688 (Penguin, 2021) is neither a quick nor easy read, it has taken me ‘forever’ – or a few weeks at least; it is a book that demands concentration, but ultimately one is rewarded for the effort; for it is an endlessly thought provoking book – a sweeping, wonderfully written immersion into a violent, volatile epoch defined by all the intricate webs of subterfuge being spun within and without the borders of a ‘middling’ kingdom, a still only imagined ‘great’ Britain, and the reciprocated meddlings by the powerful absolute monarchies on the Continent. And always amongst each other – nobles, courtiers, clergy, diplomats, pamphleteers – intrigants, disputants are they all, having their say and rarely getting their way. One day’s friend is the next day’s foe. Today’s loyal subject is tomorrow’s rabble rousing republican. Lines of succession, familial loyalties and matters of fertility mean everything or nothing. Words, written or spoken out loud, vulgar or lyrical: long-winded, idle ‘talk’ exposed, rightly or wrongly, to be seditious; hushed gossip becoming loud and with conspiratorial intent – the next plot brewing. Crowns and heads are lost and crowns at least restored, in-between all means of civil and uncivil strife, religious and sectarian conflicts contested with zealotry and culminating with a bloodless coup – okay, Glorious Revolution has more oomph – and the reign of William of Orange.
It is any wonder the movers and shakers across the channel – above all, Habsburgs and Bourbons strewn all over the Continent – were at first bemused and then (literally) up in arms – at the antics of those intemperate ratbags on the other side of those narrow, treacherous waters to be crossed at one’s own peril; channeling in its capriciousness that very folk. Though, it must be emphasized, things weren’t exactly going down well in their own backyard either! To call foul (“REGICIDE!”) on the public execution of Charles I was a bit much when half of Europe lay in Schutt und Asche in the aftermath of the Thirty Years War.
It is left to be said, with the beginning of the 18th century the House of Stuart would be succeeded in an orderly, that is, a predetermined fashion (lessons had been learnt!), by that of Hanover, and the chaos of the ancient English parliamentary system and flirtations with republicanism gave way to one anchored in law and reconstituted under a united Great Britain, which, on the back of brutal colonial expansionism, quickly rose to become a globally dominating power. The devil may still have been at work on the island, but a devil to be taken seriously and his objectives clear. Besides, it was on the other side of the channel on a vast continent struggling with modernity, variations of – and alternatives to – absolutism and the rise of nationalism fervour, that his focus was to shift during the next centuries. Therein, of course, lay another story.
As a reader, however enmeshed I was in this tumultuous past, the contemporary had a way of insinuating itself upon my reception – the ghosts of a ‘glorious’ past tainted by nostalgia and nationalism, and exemplified by the hubris of Brexit; controversial and unsolved questions of devolution and more generally nationhood and identity (see, for instance, Scotland’s striving for independence, a non-functioning Stormont in Northern Ireland); the role of the monarchy (it just has to be Charles III doesn’t it!); the deficits of the Westminster parliamentary system (prorogation, serial PMs, etc.); the limits governments can place on individual freedoms (during the plague of 1665, restrictions included the closing down of taverns and play-houses – sounds familiar?). But these very here and now intrusions that flutter in and out during the long reading of Devil-Land – some of which I suspect were deliberately planted by Jackson – help to illustrate and focus the big picture on the tensions created in the relations between England and Europe, the personalities at its core, the interests being served, and how the parties could be now, as then, so near yet so far.
I intermittently catch the BBC Radio 3 cultural program “The Essay”, and are often surprised by its content, but it actually took an article in the Frankfurter Allgemeine to alert me to these episodes (still available as I write on Sounds) about the circumstances surrounding the 1768 murder in Trieste of Johann Joachim Winckelmann – considered to be one of the first practitioners of what we would now call art history and archaeology. I say that, but it is more. The cultural historian, Seán Williams, is also telling the wider narrative of a celebrity “gay life” (and death) during the Enlightenment – what could be done and what not, where and with whom – and how it has been interpreted in the afterlife, both in respect to Winckelmann but in the myth building around cultural icons.
Johann Joachim Winckelmann (1717–1768) by Anton Raphael Mengs ca. 1777 (The Met object ID 437067)
Winckelmann interests me. He turns up in this blog post, in which I touch upon newer research and reconstruction methods in polychromy that supports the view that the artifacts of antiquity were very colorful indeed; running counter to the monochromatic orthodoxy which had first arisen during the Renaissance but the certainty about which began to crack during the Neoclassical period of the 18th century – a cultural movement and time of which Winckelmann was a “mover and shaker”. Under nearer scrutiny, traces of pigment were being observed for the first time on objects, and even Winckelmann (albeit belatedly) changed his stance. But, by the 20th century, and for whatever reason – racism, the aesthetic of fascism it has been suggested – all the scholarship and practical methodology of the 18th century was being rejected in favor of the marble white, purity narrative, and prevails still in the contemporary consciousness. The latter is hardly surprising when the artifacts and fragments on display in the museums of the world mostly have very little pigment remaining, and labels are not always explanatory.
As I say, Johann Joachim Winckelmann interested me anyway, but Sean Williams’ radio essay has added an extra dimension. (Here, in his own words, a short accompanying text.)
On the run, I make note of this! Perhaps Deutschland’s most prestigious award & for those who have campaigned for Salman Rushdie – loudly & quietly & for so long – to be imagined only expirations of relief (sub-text: better late than never!) – given voice by (rare) unanimity amongst the Feuilletons…
Essays are a favorite ‘filler’ if you will – ideal reading material when time is limited, on train or plane, when sleep escapes. And, there can’t be much better than those from Joan Didion who so magnificently chronicled the America of the sixties through to the new millennium. And (courtesy Amazon Prime), that is to whom I have flown of late. And, as coincidence would have it, in the form of her legendary collection, “The White Album”, from which this NYT piece last week springs, and in which the writer and academic, Timothy Denevi, is inspired by the release by the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum of the Jean Stein Personal Papers that includes an audio recording of an interview Didion and her husband, John Gregory Dunne, gave to Jean Stein in 1971.
The first and title essay of the collection has almost legendary status; in the first instance for its opening sentence: “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.” (An oft quoted statement that has come to profoundly mean anything – or nothing at all!) But, more generally, for its sweeping panorama of the social and cultural landscape of the sixties and seventies told through diverse narratives – I mean, the whole kit and caboodle are touched upon: Vietnam, Black Panthers, Manson, The Doors, Joplin, and so forth, and including of course dead Kennedys. And it is on this latter, specifically the circumstances behind why we find Didion watching Robert Kennedy’s funeral on television at the Royal Hawaiian Hotel in Honolulu in June 1968, and that seemingly corresponding to an appalling mental health diagnosis revealed in this opening section of her essay, that has evidently been speculated upon by a faction out there in literary nirvana that could be labelled (Denevi does so) as Didionologists. Now, I haven’t ever given too much thought to the whys and wherefores of her brief mention of being in Hawaii at this time, but presumably for the über Didion fan there must be more to the story.
And they were not wrong it seems. For, in considering the interview with Stein, it is clear from Denevi’s article that it was there in the glaring light of Hawaii in that first week of June 1968 that Joan Didion became overwhelmed by the darkness engulfing her country, became acutely aware of its cemented inequalities and lack of cohesion and, as observed by her in Hawaii, the delusional state of her fellow country men and women – their obsessions; their consumerism; their opportunism and an extreme self-possession: JFK, MLK, RFK – well, WTF, not my problem.
A whole nation was in the midst of a breakdown and belonged on the couch. Hardly to be wondered that it was there that Didion soon landed on her return to Los Angeles. Nor that, upon reflection and with or without a clinical diagnosis, she would have found her symptoms unsurprising.
[…] By way of comment I offer only that an attack of vertigo and nausea does not now seem to me an inappropriate response to the summer of 1968.
Didion, Joan. The White Album: Essays (p. 15). Open Road Media. Kindle Edition.
Dunne and Didion revealed in the Jean Stein interview the profound affect Bobby Kennedy’s murder had upon them, and how they saw it as the culmination of years of societal disturbance, what Dunne called “the final unraveling of a very dark tapestry”.
Unfortunately, Stein’s audio tapes are not available on-line so I can only give credence to Tim Denevi’s version, but a very thoughtful, well-informed one it appears to be. He may not be one of those above mentioned -ologists, but he is obviously an admirer of Didion and well-versed in the cultural time that she has come to personify. A really interesting read, to which I would only add two further vignettes from the essay.
Firstly, towards the end of that horror year, one cold rainy morning, Didion was driving between Sacramento and San Francisco on her way to report on the latest campus “revolution” when a line from Ezra Pound’s “In a Station of the Metro”: Petals on a wet black bough began pulsating in her head. At the end of the day she considers whether “[the petals] represented the aimlessness of the bourgeoisie…”. An interesting interpretation. A very famous line for sure, but she doesn’t say whether it may had been planted there by a particular episode, the state of society in general or at least as she saw it or her state of mind – these last two being the sort of same thing anyway. This perhaps something else for the Didionologists!
And, then, in August 9 1969, Didion is in a swimming pool in Beverley Hills when she hears about the murders at the Tate Polanski house on Cielo Drive. Contradictory, seemingly bizarre, reports and rumours spread like wild-fire. Everyone is appalled, but …
I remember all of the day’s misinformation very clearly, and I also remember this, and wish I did not: I remember that no one was surprised.
Didion, Joan. The White Album: Essays (p. 42). Open Road Media. Kindle Edition.
Towards the end of the essay, Joan Didion writes that many in Los Angeles believed this day to be the abrupt end of the sixties. She says: The tension broke that day. The paranoia was fulfilled.
One should need not say, but I will: With A Room Of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf laid the foundation to a way of thinking, not just about women’s writing, but what it is to be a woman in a man’s world and what it means to be represented in a man’s version of history, that has influenced generations through to the present. Here, in conversation with three who may very well count themselves as beneficiaries of Woolf’s legacy, is Melvyn Bragg’s contribution to the continuing exploration of how a couple of lectures to a roomful of young women in Cambridge almost a century ago evolved into a defining document for the ambitious modern woman – Woolf’s unique contribution to the greater quest for emancipation and equality. (Embedded below from Spotify.)
Melvyn Bragg & guests discuss the influence of Virginia Woolf’s famous essay.
From my childhood I remember a large red tome embossed with crowns. I also remember its name (or think I do): Coronation Cavalcade. Having come across it during a juvenile rummage around, I remember thinking it to have been published in commemoration of the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II in 1953; this probably suggested to me by reliable sources, and I have no reason to believe that was not so. It was chock a block full of black and white photos from that day but also from the young Queen’s childhood and formative years, and there were lots of words too on that shiny paper once favored for such books. There was only one color plate: a frontispiece of the newly crowned monarch in her coronation regalia. (It may well have been like this one.)
There was a fold out royal genealogy attached to the inside cover to which my mother had neatly inked in further unions (she didn’t live to see the procession of dissolutions!) and progeny. My mother was of the Queen’s generation and very much a royalist. Not a silly, fawning sort, mind, but a traditionalist just the same. (And, she did have a sort of ‘queen’ look and disposition: there were hats and gloves and handbags, she loved horses and dogs and the Anglican Church…) What she did not have in common with the Queen was a long life. What happened to that book I don’t know, or even whether I am misremembering all I have just said.
So this day, the Coronation Day of King Charles III, was spent in a state of trying to rise above a surge of sentimentality – and not succeeding , instead being swept along in the moment, nourished with tea and scones and the temptation of nostalgia. The public spectacle was awesome (despite the inclement weather, and what I thought to be my original word play on “…long may he reign [sic] over us…” ) but I was most moved by the very personal emotions that the event stirred – memories and childhood, people and places lost.
The Coronation invitation and an official portrait of the newly crowned King Charles III and Queen Camilla (www.royal.uk)
A couple of weeks have now passed. What remains (other than a renewed penchant for the much maligned scone)? This newly cast Royal Family – modest now in number, with a more modern agenda – has been dutifully going about their business. Looking good. Doing what they do. Only Time will decide whether the House of Windsor and its hereditary monarchy will continue in its constitutional role in British life. My own Re:publican sympathies are not to be denied, but the ancient isles must decide their own fate. And, that, something which they do with exceptional regularity one has to say!
…So asks the Dowager Countess in an early episode of Downton Abbey. Any idea I may have had that it was only my own rather idiosyncratic family that was so amused at the time – not only by the question itself but by Maggie Smith’s impeccable deadpan delivery – that it remains to this day an oft used geflügeltes Wort, seems to have been misplaced; as demonstrated in the LRB clip below.
Rosemary Hill very nicely contextualizes the tentative nearing of the upper classes and the masses – by way of the pesky upper-middle-classes dabbling about in things called ‘jobs’! – at the beginnings of the last century. One may quibble, but there is much for the discerning viewer to take from the oft maligned Downton Abbey.
Notes and Queries 1879-11-29: Vol 12 Issue 309
On the right is the puzzled question out of Staffordshire in Notes and Queries to which the convoluted reply is included in the video. (From the Internet Archive.)
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