Virginia Woolf – Page 4 – My Own RE:public

Janet Malcolm

There are names in journalism that everyone knows – Janet Malcolm, who died on June 16 in New York City at 86 years of age, is one such. During her almost sixty years at The New Yorker, she wrote a multitude of pieces over an extraordinary range; some I have read but most I of course I have not – being (funnily enough!) once too young, and later, before the digital revolution, while the said esteemed publication came my way only sporadically.

Interesting, are the controversies commented on in The New York Times obituary – serving to remind of just how radically the print media and journalism has changed in the last decades – how trite Malcolm’s transgressions now appear and how prescient her ideas about what good journalism is and what it could and could not do.

Also, in the NYT obit, and as one forever on the watch for lurking wolves – hunting in pack for easy prey, with family in tow or home in the den – I note with delight the link to her great 1995 essay in The New Yorker; entitled “A House of One’s Own” and inspired by the Stephen/Woolf/Bell family house-hopping, correspondence and biographical works, including Quentin Bell’s famous Woolf biography, and culminating with conversations with Quentin and Anne Olivier Bell during a visit of her own to Vanessa’s Charleston home. Malcolm brilliantly explores the Stephen sisters’ coming of age and complicated relationship; with others and with each other and brings Vanessa out of the shadow of her more famous sister. She surprises with details of the familial animosities and inconsistencies that the protagonists left in their wake for the next generation to grapple with. But, in considering Angelica Bell’s bitter recriminations, what Malcolm also does in this essay is articulate her own personal theory of biography; one in which choices have to be made, circumstances rarely prevail and moral certitude anything but.

In what I have written, […]I have, like every other biographer, conveniently forgotten that I am not writing a novel, and that it really isn’t for me to say who is good and who is bad, who is noble and who is faintly ridiculous. Life is infinitely less orderly and more bafflingly ambiguous than any novel, […]and if we pause to remember that [they] were actual, multidimensional individuals, whose parents loved them and whose lives were of inestimable preciousness to themselves, we have to face the problem that every biographer faces and none can solve; namely, that he is standing in quicksand as he writes. There is no floor under his enterprise, no basis for moral certainty. Every character in a biography contains within himself or herself the potential for a reverse image. The finding of a new cache of letters, the stepping forward of a new witness, the coming into fashion of a new ideology—all these events, and particularly the last one, can destabilize any biographical configuration, overturn any biographical consensus, transform any good character into a bad one, and vice versa. […] Another biographer might have made—as a subsequent biographer may well make—a different choice. The distinguished dead are clay in the hands of writers, and chance determines the shapes that their actions and characters assume in the books written about them.
Janet Malcolm in The New Yorker A Critic at Large – June 5, 1995 Issue

Finally, The New York Review of Books, to whom Janet Malcolm also often contributed over very many years, kindly provide a peep into their archives (probably for a limited time) to celebrate a great journalist’s life. From their mail of June 17, 2021:

Free from the Archives:

Janet Malcolm, a longtime contributor to The New York Review, died yesterday at the age of eighty-six. Between 1981 and 2020, Malcolm published thirty-eight pieces in our pages, including the essay below, part of her career-long meditation on the hazards of writing about other people. “Almost from the start,” she writes, “I was struck by the unhealthiness of the journalist-subject relationship, and every piece I wrote only deepened my consciousness of the canker that lies at the heart of the rose of journalism.”

The Morality of Journalism
There is no such thing as a work of pure factuality, any more than there is one of pure fictitiousness. As every work of fiction draws on life, so every work of nonfiction draws on art.

25 June 2021: There have been numerous tributes to Janet Malcolm in the last days, but I would just like to mention one last one; an antipodean perspective that unites her with another that I have long, long, admired. Should one have read any of Helen Garner’s non-fiction works, it would surely not surprise that she would have been influenced by Malcolm, in style, in sensibility and in methodology. (It also should be said, both writers shared a talent for attracting controversy, and not shying from it, and that Malcolm was not uncritical of Garner on a book and its repercussions that received intense scrutiny in the Australian literary scene and beyond, and that this appears not to have affected Garner’s admiration.) Here in a Guardian tribute adapted from her introduction to the Australian publication of an essay collection entitled “Forty-One False Starts“, Garner says:

To open any one of her books at random is to find myself drawn back into that unmistakable sensibility, that unique tissue of mind, and to grasp how deeply I am indebted to her. […]
[…]I saw manifest [in her Plath biography,The Silent Woman] what I was at the time painfully trying to learn: the fact that beneath the thick layers of a writer’s self-censorship, of her fear of being boring or wrong, lies a whole humming, seething world waiting to be released. I learned from watching Malcolm in full flight that I could go much further than timidly nibbling at the edges of people’s peculiar behaviour. I saw that I could get a grip on it and dare to interpret it, to coax meaning from it. The tools were already in my possession. […] that in journalism, as well as in fiction, I could call upon the imagery, the spontaneous associations and the emblematic objects that I had learned to trust when I myself was groaning on the therapist’s couch.
Helen Garner on Janet Malcolm: ‘Her writing turns us into better readers’, The Guardian, June 24th 2021.

Doing the Bloomsbury Walk

This warm mid-June Wednesday (June 16th 2021), decreed this year to be “Dalloway Day”, is just the most perfect opportunity for a city stroll. Not the famous London walk from Westminster to Bond Street that Clarissa Dalloway made all those years ago to buy flowers for her party, but a virtual guided tour with Bonnie Greer through some of the haunts of Clarissa’s creator and her friends – and, what a radical bunch they were; more than queer, however one chooses to define the word, some were, like Duncan Grant, unabashedly taking the private into the public space – and making art out of it.

Each Dalloway Day, then, can be none other than an opportunity for a sometimes loud, but often reflective, celebration of Virginia Woolf and those in her orbit; artists all, who were inspired by their favorite haunts in a city coming to terms with the monumental intellectual and material changes of modernity – its tempo and its promises.

The many lives of St. Ives

As the G7 gathers for the first time since the wretched Covid-19 pandemic took grip, and dignitaries and media descend upon Cornwall to do whatever it is they do, it seems an appropriate time to pay a visit too, albeit only in one’s head – and that of Virginia Woolf.

In 2018, NYT had a very nice travelogue feature (the usual “subscriber access” proviso applies) entitled “In Search of Virginia Woolf’s Lost Eden in Cornwall”. I know, of course, from my own reading, how very much Woolf cherished the childhood Summers spent at “Talland House”; how those memories found their way into so much of her later writing – Jacobs Room, To the Lighthouse, The Waves. Mentioned in the above article; this letter written by Woolf’s father, Leslie Stephen, in the summer of 1884, describing the “pocket paradise” that the two year old “‘Ginia” was getting to know and explore.

St. Ives, Porthminster Bay, Cornwall, 1895

The above postcard image from 1895 is particularly poignant; although from the year after Virginia Woolf’s mother’s death, and the first Summer in Virginia’s young life that the Stephen family did not spend at “Talland House” (instead at Freshwater on the Isle of Wight), it still must be very illustrative of the St. Ives town and coastal landscape that so enriched her own memories of the time and later literary work.

A very good year

“Was 1925 Literary Modernism’s Most Important Year?” Such is the title of an essay by Ben Libman in the NYT, in which he begins with Virginia Woolf’s rather infamous opinion (The Diary of Virginia Woolf, Volume 2, August 16, 1922) of James Joyce’s Ulysses, and continues to make a case for the literary importance of 1925 over the more often championed 1922 – being the year in which Ulysses and T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land were published. A timely article; for, of course, with the passing of 95 years, on January 1st of this year, works copyrighted in 1925 entered the public domain.

Lidman contends that both as prose and lyric, the two aforesaid works did indeed signify a radical break with literary tradition, but they were also notoriously difficult; allusive, obscure, cantankerous. Ulysses, of course, was just plain notorious, scandalous it has to be said, a matter for the courts (of justice and public opinion).

And in 1925? Four books are published, and without fanfare or legal proceedings or grand ambition, that could be read by the mainstream (or what Woolf may have thought of as her ‘common reader’); Mrs. Dalloway, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, John Dos Passos’ Manhattan Transfer and Ernest Hemingway’s collection of short stories, In Our Time. Libman makes his case well, that it is these works of early modernism that have been, and will remain, the more enduring; for the stylistic innovations they initiated left a lasting legacy and profoundly influenced the literary form.

For Fitzgerald, it is the tool of Symbolism. In the person of Jay Gatsby, he creates a legendary symbol for the transmutation of the American Dream into an American greed and the shattering consequences. How ‘Great’ is it anyway to wallow in the shallow? Dos Passos lays bare a Realism that dared not be, writes as a down and dirty cinéaste might, an editor of the streets of New York; an assembler with the sharpest scissors, cutting bare – only to expose. Or overexpose. He is the town crier, the publicist of the city; a truth-teller and a dissembler, refining the cut and paste long before Word. A fast and furious operator. Then, there is the papa of the modern minimalists; Hemingway saying out loud only that which must be said. What remains after paring back the trees to lay bare the wood? Either it is there to be found, or it’s just not there – or dead. Pay attention to what I say, not what I do not.

And, then, there is Mrs. Woolf, with whom Libman actually begins his argument, and who I quote (in some length; I hope not too much! I hope the link remains live!), because it is important.

[...] As the critic J. Hillis Miller once put it, the reader most often finds that she is “plunged within an individual mind which is being understood from inside by an ubiquitous, all-knowing mind.”

This is evident to us not from the novel’s immortal opening line — “Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself” — but from the one immediately following, which serves as a kind of mirror to the first, tipping us off that we must reread it as something other than objective assertion: “For Lucy had her work cut out for her.” Suddenly, with the lightly colloquial “cut out for her,” we are in the mind not of an omniscient narrator but of a character — Clarissa Dalloway, as the succeeding lines make clear. The reader ceases to think that she is being told what Mrs. Dalloway said about getting the flowers, and begins to think instead that Mrs. Dalloway is just remarking on that fact, as if to herself. And that changes everything. This narrative technique, known as free-indirect speech, was part of Woolf’s quiet revolution. [...] Woolf perfected this mode, coloring it with the anxiety of modern subjectivity. [...] [...] we have in “Mrs. Dalloway” the innovation of an enduring, deep structure — something like geometric perspective in painting, that contributes to the development of technique, rather than driving it up a dead end. - "Was 1925 Literary Modernism's Most Important Year?" by Ben Libman, in the NYT, March 20, 2021

I like Libman’s analysis very much, and I should say he also mentions, and quotes from, Woolf’s 1919 essay, “Modern Fiction” (linked to in my commentary to her diaries) in which, to my mind, though still only hinted of in her own work at that time, she articulates the most succinct case for her evolving literary philosophy and lays the foundation for the direction her writing is about to veer towards.

Woolf and Music

Following on from a previous post, and beyond The Waves, some (probably many!) others have been thinking and writing about the role played by music in Virginia Woolf’s work. And creating their own musical response.

In 2015, one of the guests on the Radio 3 program celebrating The Waves, the pianist Lana Bode, founded a collaborative concert project, Virginia Woolf & Music, with Dr Emma Sutton from the University of St Andrews. A project that happily appears to continue. Video clips and notes from previous concerts are available on the website; for instance, embedded below a 2016 concert at the Clothworkers’ Centenary Hall at the University of Leeds.

In this post at The Conversation, the aforesaid Emma Sutton gives an interesting, plainly written appraisal of classical music being an essential element in both Woolf’s creative thought processes and the literary form of her composition. Such a worthy read, and The Conversation being so fair, that I have republished Sutton’s piece to a page on my site.

Words never fail

Sadly, many things failed Virginia Woolf, but what very rarely did, were words.

Reminded by hearing Gillian Anderson’s recitation of Virginia Woolf’s suicide note, and remembering that from Juliet Stevenson, I want to record here the only surviving recording of Woolf’s voice. Recorded on this day in 1937 for a BBC program entitled “Words Fail Me”, listening to the surviving segment through all the noise and crackle of years gone by, one can still discern the so-admired and oft commented upon sonorous quality of her voice.

Virginia Woolf, segment from Words Fail Me, BBC, April 29, 1937

The radio essay was adapted to the written form as “Craftsmanship”; collected by Leonard in the posthumous volume The Death of the Moth and other Essays (1942). There, I notice that her essay is dated as 20th April, 1937, so perhaps she wrote it up cleanly the week before, or her dating (or Leonard’s) went awry. One can presume the BBC is correct.

This and other anomalies surrounding this and other recordings and transcripts are written about here by S.N. Clarke from the Virginia Woolf Society of Great Britain.

Riding the Waves

Much has been said and written about Virginia Woolf’s 1931 novel The Waves, and as the 90th anniversary of its publication approaches, BBC Radio 3 featured on Sunday (& perhaps only available for a limited time) a programme focusing on the musical, lyrical attributes of this, perhaps her moodiest, most experimental work.

To begin with, I was intrigued by Woolf’s novel having been the inspiration behind Steve Harley’s “Riding the Waves” from 1978. That was a long time ago, and listening to it now there is a familiarity; whether because of a recognisable turn of phrase or the rhythms of Cockney Rebel I am not sure – a definite Woolf connection I remember absolutely not.

Riding the Waves, Steve Harley and Cockney Rebel

As Harley readily admits, he takes the words out of Woolf’s mouth, or rather from the pages of her novel, but it is a warm tribute to a long dead female writer who quite obviously touched the soul of a young vagabond minstrel in the wayward 70s.

Different is Max Richter’s composition XVI. The Waves: Tuesday (from Three Worlds: Music from Woolf Works, Deutsche Grammophon, 2015) that brought to an end Wayne McGregor’s 2015 ballet “Woolf Works” for The Royal Ballet. A beautiful contemporary piece that fuses elements from the classical with electronic acoustics to capture the essence of the novel – and Virginia Woolf’s life. Listen well; imagine the ebb and flow of tides, the waters lapping and seeping through sand and upon rocks, clouds scuttling across the sky above. Just like the characters in her novel as they traverse time, waves are forever in motion – rising and falling, drawing near and receding into the distance. Becoming but a memory of their former self … only to reassemble and reemerge again. A haunting reminder of time past and the promise of rebirth. Richter’s musical meditation re-imagines the rhythm of nature and life.

XVI. The Waves: Tuesday

And the prologue? Tuesday. Written in her famous hand on the upper right hand corner of that final note; known to touch even the most hardened amongst us. Beautifully spoken by Gillian Anderson, perhaps capturing the sonorous quality of Woolf’s voice that also has its place in legend.

Before she was dead she was very alive – & very often ill

Last year, Olivia Laing suggested in a piece for the NYT that, as we navigate the trials and tribulations that the Covid pandemic is demanding of us, we should take heed from Virginia Woolf when it comes to matters of illness; use these uncommon times of seclusion to sharpen our perception and turn loneliness into a creative force. And at the The New Yorker at about the same time, Evan Kindley pondered that famous one day which we have been gifted to share with Mrs. Dalloway as she steps out into the June sunshine and savors the vibrating life of the city; coming as it did after years of war and grief and illness. Of all these things Woolf was so very well acquainted.

Reading these pieces at the time, I wondered whether only the most privileged would have the luxury of time and resources to spend in such moments of profundity. And, how many of us could accept the hardships bestowed upon us, certain of our day in the sunshine? Now though, on reflection, I think my hesitation was based on a very narrow and materialistic view of what creativity is and from where it comes, and ignores its diversity in forms of expression and reception. An inner life and an imagination have we all – and it is affordable for most. And an imagined future has a sort of reality; one that spans each fleeting moment and affords a myriad of possibilities.

Writing up my notes on Woolf’s diary recently, I was prompted to reread her 1926 essay “On Illness”, which was received without much enthusiasm for publication by T.S. Eliot, and having thought about her death in the last days, the trials of her physical well – and not well – being during her life time are never far away.

In this spirit of reflection, I liked very much this piece in The Conversation by Cardiff University lecturer, Jess Cotton; she writes of how after a year of pandemic and difficult conditions for teachers and students alike, and now with some reason for optimism, Mrs. Dalloway provides one way to rediscover the simple joys and pleasures of life – a way that does not deny nor is vengeful, rather that looks inward; mining all the moments and memories that allow one to regret and to mourn, and then move on. (The essay may also be read here.)