Virginia Woolf – Page 7 – My Own RE:public

Church and crown

…and The Prayer Book Controversy of 1927-28.

Brought to my attention while listening to the Times Literary Supplement Freedom, Books, Flowers & the Moon podcast here is an essay by A.N. Wilson in the TLS (a free article if you’re lucky or with subscription) that starts and ends with Josiah Wedgwood IV, a descendent of the potter and a Labour Party MP from 1923 until his death in 1943. Clearly here a name known through the familiar colour and motif of Wedgwood porcelain, but to me also because I recall Virginia Woolf sharing some gossipy, interesting stuff of another variety regarding “Jos.” in her diary. What I can’t remember are comments about his passionate political commitments (and make herewith a note to myself to look into this – Leonard Woolf would have surely had sympathy with some of his opinions).

For Wedgwood was certainly a radical sort – leaving the Liberals behind him in the interest of a commitment to the working class fight, standing almost alone against the eugenics zeitgeist, ever alert to the dangers of fascism, supportive of Zionism, Indian independence – and, in respect to the Prayer Book controversy, opposed to Anglican matters of cleric, communion or anything else being disputed in the Houses of Parliament. It was not the substance of the 1928 Prayer Book revisions (foremost being that opponents saw in it an opening towards Catholic practices) that Wedgwood railed against (as an agnostic he presumably didn’t give a twig!), rather that as a matter it had no place in a secular establishment.

For the record: the bill brought forward was defeated two times in the House of Commons, soon thereafter the Bishops took matters into their own hands and the 1928 version was authorised after a fashion, the Church of England has its own governing Synod (1969) and must no longer seek parliamentary approval, and the infamous 1928 book and its 1662 precursor exist together; neither absolutely adhered to in practice amidst a variety of forms of worship.

And what concerns A.N. Wilson (Wiki informs: that he is a biographer of “the potter”, that his father was in fact managing director of Wedgwood – oh, and that he is Emily’s father!) is just how Protestant is Britain now, and that leads to curious considerations; including whether at the next Coronation Service the new monarch will swear an oath to uphold the Protestant Religion. And what can that possibly mean in a nation comprising so many beliefs and in an increasingly secular society?

Reading Woolf & Hearing Dante

Writing up my thoughts as I reread Virginia Woolf’s diaries, I turned for a browse back to Night & Day (1919), and I was overcome in some segments with the rhythm of Dante. Perhaps I am imagining it, but take the time here to experiment a little anyway – beneath are a couple of excerpts (a Kindle version) that I have broken up (rather willy-nilly!) in tercets ending with a quatrain as with some English translations of The Divine Comedy.

There was no reason, she assured herself,
for this feeling of happiness;
she was not free; she was not alone;

she was still bound to earth
by a million fibres; 
every step took her nearer home.

Nevertheless, she exulted
as she had never exulted before.
The air was fresher, the lights more distinct,

the cold stone of the balustrade
colder and harder,
when by chance or purpose

she struck her hand against it.
No feeling of annoyance with Denham remained;
he certainly did not hinder any flight

she might choose to make,
whether in the direction of the sky
or of her home; 

but that her condition was due to him,
or to anything
that he had said,
she had no consciousness at all.

Virginia Woolf. Night and Day Ch.XXIII (Kindle Locations 4335-4339).

He walked on upon the impetus
of this last mood
of almost supernatural exaltation 

until he reached a narrow street,
at this hour empty
of traffic and passengers.

Here, whether it was the shops
with their shuttered windows, 
the smooth and silvered curve 

of the wood pavement,
or a natural ebb of feeling,
his exaltation slowly oozed
and deserted him.

Virginia Woolf. Night and Day Ch.XXIII(Kindle Locations 4362-4364).

How they came to find themselves
walking down a street with many lamps,
corners radiant with light, 

and a steady succession of motor-omnibuses
plying both ways along it, 
they could neither of them tell;

nor account for the impulse which led them 
suddenly to select one of these wayfarers 
and mount to the very front seat.

After curving through streets
of comparative darkness, 
so narrow that shadows on the blinds

were pressed within a few feet of their faces,
they came to one of those great knots of activity
where the lights, having drawn close together, 

thin out again and take their separate ways.
They were borne on 
until they saw the spires of the city churches
pale and flat against the sky.

Virginia Woolf. Night and Day Ch.XXXIV (Kindle Locations 7346-7351).

Perhaps it is just this “stream of consciousness” flowing from Katherine & Ralph respectively, in which inner-contemplation is interwoven with the descriptive place as they wander through Kew Gardens or then together walking in the City at the end of the novel, when what is settled is clearly not, that causes me to wonder at this. But I seem to remember Dante was important to Woolf, and to the familial and social milieu of her Victorian youth, and coincidentally at the end of 1918 she is alerted to Tom Eliot’s allusions to Dante, and this at a time she was struggling with her revision of Night & Day.

Well, I meant to just browse, but in the end I read it through. Perhaps I agree with Katherine Mansfield’s insinuation (as VW interpreted her criticism anyway) that it was not a break-out work but rather a throw back – old-fashioned in other words! But with a century in-between and the luxury of being able to appreciate Woolf’s work in its entirety, I very much see Night & Day as Woolf’s bridge into the moderne. And the irritations that plagued her with regard to this book, and they were numerous, may well have resulted from an awareness of its failings; only a bridge when she could have been braver and taken an enormous leap like some of her contemporaries, including Mansfield. But I like the way she took, I like how her life intruded into her story – romance and friendship and not quite ménage à trois, the serious and shallow of both sexes and the occupations they chose, urban living and rural retreats, patriarchal legacies and generational conflicts. Very few lives change radically from one day to the next, so why should the writing of? And stylistically, the omniscient voice, whilst presented formally, has a way of “wandering” that suggests the more fragmented narratives to come (and a life’s journey, divine too in its way.)

We’re all in the same club…

the lonely hearts club…

Cover of the Beatle’s Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, Wikepedia, By Source, Fair use

Covid-19 knows not social status, not race nor creed, nor national borders. We are in this together -or so we are told. (Do I alone wonder at the limits of our proclaimed solidarity?) And amidst these strangest of days in which we have been hurtled, many of us may wonder at the times ahead – how long? what to do? – we ponder philosophical and political questions on freedoms and responsibilites – individual and collective, reappraised is the role of the oft maligned State, and we even look beyond: at the “who we are” that comes out when it’s all said and done. More than anything we contemplate what this will be like, this “staying at home”, this “minimising social interaction”. Olivia Lange writing on ‘How to Be Lonely’ at The New York Times, offers her thoughts, and some from Virginia Woolf:

But loneliness isn’t just a negative state, to be vanquished or suppressed. There’s a magical aspect to it too, an intensifying of perception that led Virginia Woolf to write in her diary of 1929: “If I could catch the feeling, I would: the feeling of the singing of the real world, as one is driven by loneliness and silence from the habitable world.” Woolf was no stranger to quarantine. Confined to a sickbed for long periods, she saw something thrilling in loneliness, a state of lack and longing that can be intensely creative.
The New York Times, Opinion, March 19 2020

To put this a little more in context, the Woolf quote is part of a lengthy and fragmented diary entry on Friday 11 October 1929; finding herself “surrounded with silence”, not in a physical sense but what she refers to as a pervasive “inner loneliness”. Reflecting on all her personal and professional good fortunes, the triumphs of family and friends, she wonders at the disquiet that haunts her, and which she can not quite grasp; but this time at least she will “Fight, fight. If I could catch the feeling…”

And as Virginia Woolf fought (for most of her life & until she could no more) the demon lurking in her head, guised as an empty void, so then should we all give it a go – be creative; find new ways of occupying ourselves, of communicating, of sharing not only our anxieties but also little kindnesses, and be patient and alert not only to our own needs but those of others. And, as Laing says at the end of her piece:

Love is not just conveyed by touch. It moves between strangers; it travels through objects and words in books. There are so many things available to sustain us now, and though it sounds counterintuitive to say it, loneliness is one of them. The weird gift of loneliness is that it grounds us in our common humanity. Other people have been afraid, waited, listened for news. Other people have survived. The whole world is in the same boat. However frightened we may feel, we have never been less alone.
The New York Times, Opinion, March 19 2020

And I would add – a good dose of well placed humour. Returning to Virginia Woolf – often overlooked in any short telling focusing on the scathingly brilliant and problematic personality legend would have us believe, is that Woolf often displayed, and especially in her diaries and private correspondence, an abundance of humour and warmth, an appreciation of human frailty and no mean measure of self-deprecation. Some laughter and an awareness of the very smallness of ourselves and greater humanity in the continuum of history may help placate our fears. And a recognition that more likely than not there are many who are a whole lot worse off than ourselves.

And music – personal comfort music for when times are tough, and that for me always includes the Beatles.

The Diary of Virginia Woolf (1)

Volume One: 1915-1919

My Copy of Volume One of The Diary of Virginia Woolf

Posting here today only to note that I have finally completed my rereading and personal reflections on the first volume of The Diary of Virginia Woolf, covering the years from 1915-1919 – and I must say it was an enthralling and intellectually stringent endeavour, that led me off on wide tangents on occasions. Volume Two will now follow; more condensed and at a speedier pace to be hoped.

So much more than an economical life

“Economics” as a discipline may ring dry and so,well… economical; that which remains once the human is removed from capital – a once succulent fruit; peeled, shredded, cut to the core. And the practitioners? The stars of any day seem often to be forgot, the theoretical paths taken rarely crossing and the enmity great. I actually do read some here and there, that is, somewhat economically – for instance, Krugman (because he is cranky and often says what I like) and other pieces of NY Times reporting and opinion, and Duflo & Banerjee. The Economist, I rather loathe – but it sometimes comes my way and I attempt to take what I can from stuff written by god knows who (they don’t tell you!), and in a language decipherable to but a few. Fairly regularly I browse the “Wirtschaft” pages of German media; the Suddeutsche Zeitung and sometimes the Frankfurter Allgemeine which is big on business (thankfully, not only) in a big way.

This is all to say, whilst I am not an absolute duffer, economics, and especially the business side, is not my thing. But John Maynard Keynes I do know, and I know him by way of the company he kept, and a piece by Jonathan Kirshner in The New York Times last December reminding of the publication one hundred years before of Keynes’ seminal work written in the aftermath of the Versailles peace conference, brings this back to mind.

…The book, “The Economic Consequences of the Peace,” turned out to be a phenomenon. It swiftly went through six printings, was translated into a dozen languages, sold over 100,000 copies, and brought world fame to its 36-year-old author, John Maynard Keynes…
…“Economic Consequences” is majestically written — Keynes was close to the iconoclastic Bloomsbury cohort of artists and writers, and his incisive, candid portrayals of the peacemakers (Georges Clemenceau, David Lloyd George and Woodrow Wilson) reflected the no-holds-barred influence of Lytton Strachey’s recently celebrated “Eminent Victorians.” The book was also wildly controversial for its assessments of the capacity of Germany to pay the reparations demanded by the victorious Allied powers…
Opinion, The New York Times, Dec. 7 2019

Bertrand Russell; John Maynard Keynes, Baron Keynes; Lytton Strachey
by Lady Ottoline Morrell, vintage snapshot print, 1915 NPG Ax140438
© National Portrait Gallery, London

Without having (yet) read the book, it seems clear Keynes prophesied that which would later be agreed by many in hindsight; the aggravating role the Treaty would play in creating an economic and social environment that would lead, and alone in the interests of satisfying extreme French reparation demands, to very bad places. And they did; a brief period of recovery was followed by political uncertainties, the market crash, a worldwide depression with all the accompanying societal and personal catastrophes, and which would ultimately facilitate the rise of tyranny and fascism in Germany and elsewhere.

I have just been writing a little about Lytton Strachey in my meanderings through Virginia Woolf’s daily life, as recorded by herself, and as it happens I am in the midst of a time (July, 1919) in which Eminent Victorians (various copies available at the Internet Archive) is being lauded as a resounding success, so Kirshner’s observation in respect to this book attracts my attention. Whether this attraction will run to reading either or both only time will tell, but in terms of the preoccupations of this extraordinary group of friends, where the lines are often blurred between (auto)biography and literature, and memoir-writing practiced with fervor as the true repository of truth, that, beyond the situational, theoretical and factual world of politics and finance, Keynes application of colorful brush strokes to his portraits of the movers and shakers of the time would hardly surprise. More determinedly then I now say: yes, two works, both a century old, that should be read.

& still more from Mecklenburgh Sq.

This must be it surely it! The TLS podcast Freedom, Books, Flowers & the Moon has a bonus episode (an Apple link is the best I can do) of their extended interview with Francesca Wade about book Square Haunting that I have previously blogged on. Nothing here that she hasn’t necessarily said elsewhere, but just another nudge in the direction of reading about this really interesting collective (of four people – women) that Wade has put together (in one place – a London square).

Until I read the book, one final thought, it occurs to me how often Virginia Woolf uses “haunting” and associated words – things like “my old haunts” or “something/somebody haunted by” and of course “haunted houses” – and there is a wonderful 1927 essay entitled Street Haunting (I would guess this inspires Wade’s book title) which I know from The Death of the Moth, and Other Essays a collection published in 1942 by Leonard Woolf after his wife’s death, and which takes us on a delightful walk of London – and at the haunting hour! (A beautiful 1930 US edition is at The British Library, and here digitally.) I will keep this in mind as an idea to be pursued further, because I think there is a lot more to be said about Woolf and the ghosts that haunted her, and those that haunt us all.

Virginia Woolf’s Birthday

Celebrating the 138th anniversary of the birth of Virginia Woolf (born 25th January, 1882)! Would she be flattered or embarrassed at the attention posterity has granted her? Who knows, but …

Woolf has been an interesting part of my reading life for some years now, but in recent times I have been thinking about her more than ever. And re-thinking her contribution to literature and her legacy, and discovering aspects to her life and her writing that were previously unbeknownst to me. The following 2014 video featuring her biographer Hermione Lee, is therefore a find and a treat on this day.

Lee focuses in her lecture on how Woolf’s shifting, slanting representation of fragmented time in her fiction, encapsulated as it is in memory, is often framed with some temporal precision – dates and seasons are important. An obvious example is Mrs. Dalloway; set on a Wednesday in mid-June 1923, and perhaps less obvious; the time span suggested in Night and Day where a Sunday evening in October must be 1911, and winter turns to spring. And actual historical events are indicative; Lee refers for instance to the mention of a general election and suffrage bill in The Voyage Out, dating the narrative to 1910.

Given my familiarity with her diaries, and the continued scrutiny I apply to them, I recognised well Woolf’s preoccupation with questions of mortality, her own and that of others, her predilection to relate her present with specific dates in days gone (often the deaths of the near and dear, family and friends), and how these memories found their way into her literary works. And I was always amused by her simple arithmetical doodlings, which I interpreted as resulting from a weakness in mental arithmetic but may well have been Woolf’s idiosyncratic way of measuring time gone (and remaining); of balancing her book of life.

Virginia Woolf Birthday Lecture, Hermione Lee, University of London, 2014

This video has inspired even more thought – I swear every time I am about to move on to other things, something else relating to the Woolf comes my way! Virginia Woolf may not have thought much of H.G. Wells, but she was as interested in the vagaries and possibilities of time travel as he – just in another, less mechanical, more mysterious manner. When I think about how, in much of Woolf’s writing, time ebbs and flows and overlaps and turns back on itself, I wonder whether it is not Woolf’s non-mechanical approach that better captures the essence of relative time, and that in some ways is more compatible to the precepts of modern science. [I remind myself here to look into a certain French philosopher called Henri Bergson – mentioned in response to a question in the last minutes of the video.]

Sussex blooming…

not as royal, but better cultivated!

Diving in and out of Virginia Woolf’s diaries and biography anew, I have been attentive to her intense relationship with place. The homes of her childhood and younger years are never far away; returning as fragmented memories, misplaced, reimagined and memorialised in her writing – think about the Stephen family’s “Talland House” and childhood summers in St.Ives and the Ramsay’s summer house on the Isle of Skye in To the Lighthouse. Or the walks she took and places she went as related in many a diary entry, then reimagined and true to the time in the city as seen through the eyes of Mrs. Dalloway or any Pargiter.

Charleston, West Firle, in East Sussex. Antiquary -CC BY-SA 4.0

And for Woolf, Sussex is a very special place. Here, at the time of her marriage in 1912, she found in “Asheham House” near Beddingham sanctuary from the distractions of London, but still near to “Charleston Farmhouse”, the Firle home of Vanessa and her complicated family and their seemingly endlessly brilliant string of guests. Distractions it seem had a way of following her, and were perhaps never quite as unwelcome as often would have it!

The modest Monk’s House – Oliver Mallinson Lewis, Oxford, United Kingdom CC BY-SA 2.0

Later, in 1919, she and Leonard purchased “Monk’s House” in the village of Rodmell which would remain until her death her (their) constant retreat. The walks, the garden, the weather, the famous “writing shed” – that room of her own, all the visiting and being visited upon; as much as the profound inner life and intellectual musings – and the gossip! – it is the every day, often the mundane, as lived in her rural sanctuary that bring her diaries to vivid life, just as flowers come to bloom.

By the way, Asheham is no more, but an afterlife was granted it by grateful Woolfs – the romantic Leonard getting the better of the cerebral self in an autobiographical aside and a spirited Virginia imagining a ghostly couple bound for eternity in a short story entitled A Haunted House, first published by Hogarth in Monday or Tuesday in 1922, and later in a collection published by Leonard in 1944. Who was this ghostly pair? Perhaps the shades of their very selves, the Woolfs, viewed from a distant future; forever young, forever in this place.