Category: Literature

Dear Mrs. Woolf …

As a sort of prelude: How small England is (or was) it often seems to me. And, I am not talking geography, rather the closeness amongst many of a certain class. Perhaps that holds for all social and economic classes, and I suppose it could hardly surprise given our compulsion to acquiesce to the norms we are encouraged to think of as predetermined, but one cannot deny the bleedin’ obviousness of it when it comes to that socioeconomic group that includes the ‘great and good’ – or at least the broadly defined English (and British) literati. The entanglements of people and paths crossed every which way can make one quite giddy at times.

From where comes this musing? In the last days I have mentioned David Runciman and his new podcast. Now I know a bit about Runciman (who seriously has a hereditary dingsbums!), mostly from the LRB, and I knew he was married to the writer, Bee Wilson, and I also actually knew that to be past tense (not a pun on his podcast!), because Wilson wrote about it here. (She also writes a lot of good stuff for the LRB and elsewhere – mostly about food in a wide ranging, cultural sense, but not only.)

I could of course not help but be delighted by the enthusiasm David Runciman exhibits for Virginia Woolf in his podcast. Whether he has always been so enamored I have no way of telling, but his marriage to Bee Wilson did indeed bring him within a few degrees of Woolf, and certainly less than the six of.

To get to the point then: Bee Wilson and her sister Emily are the daughters of the Elizabethan scholar Katherine Duncan-Jones who died last year (which I posted on here, at that time also having been moved by familial relationships), and her mother was Elsie Duncan-Jones. Now, it was as the young Cambridge student, Elsie Elizabeth Phare, that she was there in the room at Newnham College on the evening of 20th October 1928 when Virginia Woolf delivered to the Arts Society the first of the two lectures (the other was a week later at Girton College) that were to form the backbone of “A Room of One’s Own” published the next year.

E.E. Phare later reviewed the evening for the student magazine, Thersities; the following passage from the Newnham College website celebrating their 150th anniversary last year offers some further insight.

When Woolf addressed Newnham students at the Arts Society, she discussed the consequences to the lack of spaces for women to learn, write and their lack of  access to knowledge, or write. Poet and Newnham undergraduate E.E. Phare wrote a review of Woolf’s talk in the Newnham student magazine Thersities. Phare highlighted that for Woolf ‘the reasons why women novelists were for so long so few were largely a question of domestic architecture; it was not, and is not so easy to compose in a parlour,’ where women could very easily be interrupted. Woolf also ‘exhorted her audience to write novels and send them to be considered by the Hogarth Press, which she had founded with her husband Leonard Woolf in 1917. If Newnham students were to submit work, they should not try to adapt themselves to the prevailing literary standards which are likely to be masculine, but… should remake the language so it becomes a more fluid thing and capable of delicate use.’ [2]

[2] E.E. Duncan-Jones (Phare) 1926, ‘Mrs Woolf Comes to Dine’  in Ann Phillips (ed) A Newnham Anthology (Cambridge University Press, 1979) p. 12 [originally in Thersities].

Newnham College, University of Cambridge, 150 Years Website

Unfortunately, neither the above foot-noted anthology nor another academic tome in which Phare’s review is included can be got to by me – the first, because of (in)accessibility; the second, cost factor(!). Given the influential reach of Woolf’s talk to a room full of young women all those years ago in Cambridge, surely this would be an interesting addition to the public domain.

This tweet from Emily Wilson a few days ago led to some new information (for me anyway): that not only was her grandmother present on that evening but that it was, in fact, she who invited Virginia Woolf to Newnham. I had always presumed that Woolf was there at the invitation of Pernell Strachey. (Certainly she and Leonard stayed the night with Strachey.)

Following is a link to the revealing essay by Ann Kennedy Smith on her website.

Not Afraid of Virginia Woolf: Elsie Duncan-Jones at Cambridge

And, as I have, you now too have read the piece, and know that “Elsie’s confidence in inviting Virginia Woolf to Newnham was characteristic of the determination she would demonstrate throughout her life. She was born in Devon in 1908 into a working-class home, in which neither parent had received education beyond elementary level…”.

Whereupon my ‘class’ argument comes tumbling down like a house of cards; mitigated only by the fact that Elsie Duncan-Jones was the recipient of some good fortune and was able through her intelligence and strength of character benefit from the opportunities presented to her and rise above the hurdles put in her way; establishing the foundation from which her descendants have been able to cement their place amongst the cultural elite.

Bon voyage

On hearing last week that a digitized version of Virginia Woolf’s personal copy of her first novel The Voyage Out is now freely available, I read around the many reports including at the BBC (a Radio 4 news report had been my first source), and linked to a timely article by Mark Byron from the University of Sydney (where the original resides) in The Conversation. This article I have now republished here.

Here now is the link to the University of Sydney library – with a well formatted web version of Woolf’s book; also available for download as pdf. The accompanying description alerts one to Woolf’s revisions in Chapter 16 (pp.249-267 [web-tool/pdf 262-284] with typed paste-ins on pages 254 and 256) and Chapter 25 (pp.398-432 [411-445] with a number of deletions) in preparation for the book’s US publication in 1920.

Original copy published by Duckworth & Co., London, 1915.
My own 1991 Penguin paperback

A glance to her diary is informative in this regard. Virginia Woolf writes on 28th November 1919, that two parties are interested in both The Voyage Out and Night and Day and their publication appears likely, and a footnote confirms that to be the case – with George H. Doran of New York becoming Woolf’s first American publisher [see The Diary of Virginia Woolf Volume 1]. Then, the on 4th February 1920 she writes:

The morning from 12 to 1 I spend reading the Voyage Out. I’ve not read it since July 1913. And if you ask me what I think I must reply that I don’t know – such a harlequinade as it it is – such an assortment of patches – here simple & severe – here frivolous & shallow – here like God’s truth – here strong & free flowing as I could wish. What to make of it, Heaven knows. The failures are ghastly enough to make my cheeks burn – & then a turn of the sentence, a direct look ahead of me, makes them burn in a different way. On the whole i like the womans mind considerably. How gallantly she takes her fences – & my word, what a gift for pen & ink! I can do little to amend; & must go down to posterity the author of cheap witticisms, smart satires & even, I find, vulgarisms – crudities rather – that will never cease to rankle in the grave. Yet I see how people prefer it to N. & D. – I don’t say admire it more, but find it a more gallant & inspiriting spectacle.

The Diary of Virginia Woolf Volume Two (1920-1924)

Woolf’s tone in the private space of her diary suggests, irrespective of the blush, some pride in her younger self. Remember, as “Melymbrosia”, her book first started taking form as early as 1907, and remember, too, as Virginia surely would have, her severe mental illness during many of those preceding years. That Virginia must be respected.

At the Internet Archive is a copy of the Doran first edition, and it appears to me those corrections suggested by Woolf’s annotations in this newly ‘found’ treasure were adopted only in part – the paragraphs she suggests in Chapter 16 were indeed included (quite how, and what if anything was omitted only a more thorough look on my part will reveal) but those in Chapter 25 that she (?) suggested be deleted seem to remain in full in the US publication. This latter is particularly interesting; I could imagine Woolf mulling over whether Rachel’s feverish state may be interpreted as something close to her own mental agonies over the years. Leaving aside the veracity of my hypothesis and Woolf’s intentions, I have always found Rachel’s torment through those days and nights extraordinarily vivid. It must have been lived. Virginia lived through it. Rachel did not.

Virginia’s book has made quite a ‘voyage’ of its own. Presumably beginning in a room of her own (though the writing and editing of her first novel predates her actually having a room of her own – that did not come her way until 1919) in London and/or Sussex, onwards to her literary estate and its executors, somehow turning up in a bookshop in Lewes from whence it was sold in 1976 – were they mad, or was this simply a failure to predict the market potential? – to an Antipodean university, whereupon it was promptly (?) lost into the cavernous depths of the science section – were THEY mad? An ABC report explains the chain of events up until the book’s reemergence in 2021. To which we can only say: god bless literate, curious and alert Metadata Service Officers!

Virginia Woolf’s copy of her first novel was found in a University of Sydney library…

What do her newly digitised notes reveal?

A Sydney librarian recently discovered a misfiled lost gem in the stacks: Virginia Woolf’s own copy of her first novel, with handwritten notes for revision. An expert explores what they tell us.
— Read on theconversation.com/virginia-woolfs-copy-of-her-first-novel-was-found-in-a-university-of-sydney-library-what-do-her-newly-digitised-notes-reveal-210135

What a find! Herewith only a place holder – I will return with more to say.

It’s raining in California

In this recent post, I referenced Joan Didion’s telling of an episode in which she was unable to get out of her head Ezra Pound’s famous, ‘not quite’ haiku, imagist poem:

In a Station of the Metro

The apparition of these faces in the crowd:
Petals on a wet, black bough.

- Ezra Pound, Poetry magazine (1913)

And Didion then pondering what her momentary obsession with these lines could have possibly meant, and me wondering, of course, along with her – but not immediately reflecting back to first principles and thinking about what exactly it was Pound was thinking about in the first place anyway! Very bright girl that she was, I dare say Didion would have had an interpretation – in the sense of Pound in Paris circa. 1913 – at hand, but, however clever, it would not necessarily have been one that would account for her sudden fixation on Pound’s words in her present. In fact, I understand her musing on the ‘petals’ being representative of ‘the aimlessness of the bourgeoisie’ to be her own diagnosis of that fixation in that moment. To that end, I belatedly note that she goes on to say:

[in Los Angeles in 1968 and 1969…] A demented and seductive vortical tension was building in the community.

Didion, Joan. The White Album: Essays (pp. 41-42). Open Road Media. Kindle Edition.

It surely can not be a coincidence that Didion describes the tension she perceives in society (that later in the essay she then believes to break) as ‘vortical’, nor that it was to Ezra Pound’s poetic experimentations (and artistic flights of fancy) during a particular period that Joan Didion was drawn in her search of an adequate means to describe the California ‘state of mind’ in those years. Her choice may not be so surprising, and very much in accord with Pound’s thinking at the time: that it is possible to make art (and write poetry) composed from an essence, a ‘vortex’; built upon, layer upon layer, enabling the representation of many facets, many people – of a state in the union or observed at a Paris metro station, for instance. The following essay appeared in the Fortnightly Review in 1914 :

Vorticism.
This article first appeared in the Fortnightly Review No. 96 [n.s.], 1 September 1914, pp461–471.

Pound not only explains the circumstances and place from which “In a Station of the Metro” arose – his walking around about the La Concorde metro station in Paris – and the intellectual imperative – how he could encapsulate all the fleeting moments (all those ‘beautiful faces’) adequately, but also how later he was able to resolve his creative struggle.

[…]The “one image poem” is a form of super-position, that is to say, it is one idea set on top of another. I found it useful in getting out of the impasse in which I had been left by my metro emotion. I wrote a thirty-line poem, and destroyed it because it was what we call work “of second intensity.” Six months later I made a  poem half that length; a year later I made the following hokku-like  sentence:–

“The apparition of these faces in the crowd:
Petals, on a wet, black bough.”

I dare say it is meaningless unless one has drifted into a certain vein of thought.5 In a poem of this sort one is trying to record the precise instant when a thing outward and objective transforms itself, or darts into a thing inward and subjective.

This particular sort of consciousness has not been identified with impressionist art. I think it is worthy of attention.

“Vorticism” by Ezra Pound in the Fortnightly Review

Extending the Vorticism definition as applied to the visual arts, where the emphasis is on the layers of mechanical and structural framework that obscure stillness at its center, Pound was imagining a poetry that got to that still core – a stripping away of the layers to expose the essence. And, in the process, redefining his position on Imagism. Pound relates all this in a very convoluted way, with flashes of the avant-garde and mathematics which I couldn’t swear that I absolutely kapiert.

Supplementing the above, I make note of Pound’s essays “Vortex” and “A Few Don’ts” (Imagism) at the Poetry Foundation – whether either make the ideas any clearer is debatable, but … and, here is a copy of the legendary 1914 BLAST with the original Vorticist manifesto – which will absolutely NOT. But as historical documentation fascinating just the same.

Both movements and their manifestos were short lived (a feud being one reason behind their demise – Pound vs. Amy Lowell) but even after more than a century it remains worthwhile to consider the ways in which practitioners of different art forms synthesized and co-operated in an effort to create an art, a language, to adequately explain the dynamic acceleration of change in society.

continue reading …

Salman Rushdie – Friedenspreis des Deutschen Buchhandels

Salman Rushdie – Friedenspreis des Deutschen Buchhandels
— Read on www.friedenspreis-des-deutschen-buchhandels.de/alle-preistraeger-seit-1950/2020-2029/salman-rushdie

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…

In her own words

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.

Annie’s story …

One could I suppose wonder whether there comes a point where all the small and greater stories of any one life have been told – memories revisited and retold, enough secrets divulged. Should such a point of saturation exist (a hypothetical I may well argue against), it seems that, in the case of Annie Ernaux, it has not yet been reached.

Das andere Mädchen (2022) and Der Junge Mann (2023) pub. Suhrkamp

Corresponding with an excellent magazine piece (subscription) by Rachel Cusk in The New York Times last weekend, I had coincidentally borrowed two slight – very slight – installments in that aforesaid life; both published in translation only quite recently in Germany.

In Das andere Mädchen (L’autre fille, NiL Éditions, 2011), Ernaux gives life to the no-memory-of a sister she didn’t have; for the death from diphtheria of she named Ginette predated her own birth. Written (mostly) in a mini Briefroman form addressed to this at first unknown sister – and always aware of the irrationality of this exercise – that no-memory becomes essential to her real memories: of discovering as a ten year old, and only through chance, of Ginette’s existence, and the realization that Ginette’s death is for Annie existential (her parents only intended to have one child); of her parents who never spoke of their loss; of their fear of losing another; of their expectations for Annie, the replacement. It is almost as if her whole childhood was lived in the haunting shadow of another.

L’autre fille (only sixty or so pages) has not been translated into English. (Perhaps due in this instance to the smaller French publishing house rather than Gallimard?) A translation note unto myself: Given that the book builds on that overheard conversation which ends with Annie’s mother stating that Ginette was “viel lieber als die da”, that is, “much more lovable/better/preferable as [Annie]”. I can only say: good luck with that one!

Did I say: slight, very slight? Now, Der Junge Mann, is really very slight – about thirty pages, each formatted, shall we say, ‘opposite of condensed’. In the French original, Le jeune homme, Éditions Gallimard, 2022, this life fragment (you see I am grappling with what terminology to apply to these Ernaux-esque episodes!) was written in the last year of the last millennium and revolves about Annie Ernaux’s relationship with a thirty year younger student called only A. – Ernaux was in her mid-fifties – that has presumably not long ended. (Here, at UK Vogue – surprisingly! – is an excerpt.)

The age difference matters – not only in the public space (no, the French are not immune to the dictates of societal norms) but also in their private interactions; to paraphrase: i would like you to have my baby, he says at one point … well, that is just not going to happen, her obvious reply. (Though, she who had two children in her twenties and had never contemplated anymore, did find herself idly wondering what, with all the new technology and stuff, that would be like!) And age is often a determinate of the power balance. In this relationship, had the age difference been the other way round, the young man (then no longer young – even for a bloke !) would have had more options in which to exercise power (and at the same time without eliciting the glares of disapproval afforded an older woma), but against the norm here it is clear that Annie is control. She instigated this thing and she will end it.

The question remains: was this for Ernaux simply an arrangement of convenience (for her )? One that fulfilled not only her physical needs – for sexual intimacy and the rituals and familiarity of a partnership – but, importantly, her intellectual needs as a writer whose sharpest tool was that of memory? In that respect A. offered a convenient conduit to her past. He was from a similar working class provincial milieu (she says that, but Ernaux’s experience, born in 1940 and growing up in the immediate decades after, surely were substantially different to a young man born, say, in 1970?); as she did, he, too, is studying in Rouen with the minimum of resources and an uncertain future. Observing him at a place she once was, had a way of stimulating feelings and emotions that she had thought long left behind. The most startling of these the abortion that she had as a student, and in the hospital to be seen from A.’s window. The book ends with the end of the relationship and Annie having written down the trauma of that experience, published the next year in France as L’événement and written about by me in this post.

These works continue Annie Ernaux’s excavation of her person and her past; with each shifting the perspective of the story we thought we knew that came before. I would be surprised if they were to be the last.

English translations of Ernaux’s work are available through Seven Stories in the U.S. and Fitzcarraldo in the U.K.

May 14 2023: Some days later, prompted by a discussion elsewhere, I have found myself making a connection between Annie’s story about her sister (in L’autre fille) and that other which told about her abortion as a young woman (inspired during the time frame covered in Le jeune homme and explicitly written about in L’événement). Both of these forms of absence, have, it seems to me, moved Ernaux to reflect upon what is left behind in the gaps of unrealized, or not wholly so, lives. I have often talked about Ernaux’s writing of her own life, but perhaps, here, the imperative was to write and memorialize two ‘lives’ that were, to various degrees fleeting, but, nevertheless, profoundly influenced the course of her life.

What’s in a name

RSC production – Garrick Theatre, London, 2023

With Shakespeare on my mind of late, I take special note of the Royal Shakespeare Company production of Maggie O’Farrell’s best-selling novel Hamnet; recently premiered in Stratford and on its way to London in the autumn; and well reviewed, though both The Guardian and The New York Times, while mostly complimentary, suggest varying degrees of sentimentality. Oh, how I hate not being able to see these things!

Did anyone not like O’Farrell’s book? I dare say there were some. There are also some out there without a heart or, at least, to whom sentimentality is always an unreliable emotion: perhaps the theatrical production goes there, the book does not – unless one mistakes grief writ large for such.

I, then, was one of the most, or many, who enjoyed Hamnet – a lot really. I think it a fine work of the imagination; an example of one way through which a very good writer can grasp an idea that is, in itself, not absolutely original in terms of historical reading and scholarship but, by giving it an absolutely original emotional slant and a peculiar narrative twist, craft it into something quite ‘novel’.

Hamnet. Hamlet. What’s in a name? All or nothing at all? If one will, one can say “the name” is nigh on an anagram of “Hamnet” – or the other way around – save the duplicating of one pesky vowel – “the man”, who would have thunk it, is a perfect fit. But in good company with the Bard who, as with his contemporaneous creatives, all constantly inconsistent with their orthography; and Hamnet and Hamlet differ too by only one – this time a consonant; required only that it be only once lazily or hastily transcribed or mumbled quiet or loud. Still constant is the creeping duplicity. And duality – of people, of place – Hamnet or Judith, upon Avon or Thames.

Anne. Agnes. What’s in a name? And, when it is she who is the guiding light, the star of the ensemble here assembled? For so she is; it is filtered through the cloak of mystery in which the free-spirited Agnes is draped, that we encounter the spirit of the living Hamnet. Through Agnes’ eyes, Hamnet becomes more than just another boy-child lost to a past before history was made, barely more than an apparition; briefly there, then forever gone. Instead, his essence is captured and revealed; in death now channeled through a mother’s love and grief. But, it’s not just Hamnet that Agnes gifts us, but all the strangeness (and stagey-ness) of Elizabethan England, and the myriad of players cavorting in her fabled landscape – their talents, their habits, their secrets. Well be it that another wrote the words, and duly credited, but Agnes it is who provides the rhythm along with which the story beats and soars.

And the man? What of that other not named? He, the conjurer of words and stories destined for an immortality of sorts? A man with two lives, or as many lives as his quill and posterity has granted. Here, though, just a mortal husband and father. For this story, Agnes’ version is enough.

A longer interview with Maggie O’Farrell with The Observer is here on the The Guardian website.