Virginia Woolf – Page 5 – My Own RE:public

From page to stage (II)

Continuing with a topic I have recently been thinking about, I have come upon an interesting essay; inspired by a stage version of Mrs. Dalloway, it is a couple of years old but makes pertinent observations just the same, and not necessarily specific to Virginia Woolf. It reminds me of just how often I wonder at the fortitude or foolhardiness of some theatrical or cinematic adaptations from the literary moderne of a century ago, and whether some forms are just better left as they were intended. The conservative in me speaks.

Considering the 2018 experimental production at the Arcola Theater in London, Michael Cunningham’s “The Hours” and its film adaptation, Jo Glanville ponders, with reference to renowned Woolf biographer Hermione Lee, how adequate any adaptation of Woolf’s work can ever be, and especially here Mrs. Dalloway, composed as it is of a fragmentary flow of imagination and memory – unordered, even chaotic.

… Woolf evokes the very experience of being alive through a ceaseless poetic chain of thoughts, responses and memories as the narrative shifts between the world within and the world outside. In an essay on the novel, Hermione Lee quotes from Woolf’s correspondence with the painter Jacques Raverat while she was writing Mrs Dalloway. Raverat wrote that it was not possible to represent the way our minds respond to an idea or experience in a linear narrative. Woolf responded that it’s the job of a writer to go beyond ‘the formal railway line of sentence’ and to show how people ‘feel or think or dream […] all over the place’. How can an adaptation recreate that effect?…
Boundless, Unbound.com

Glanville doesn’t exactly answer the question she poses, and appears as sceptical as I tend to be, but nevertheless clearly admires the bravura in having a go, for better or worse, at transforming all the fleeting moments, shadings of emotions, muddled thoughts that make Mrs. Dalloway such a splendid work of literature, into a “real time” experience of sorts. When it’s all said and done, any attempt to capture the haunted past and let it mingle amongst the crowded present is very much in the spirit of Virginia Woolf. Perhaps an adequate enough reason after all. Bring them on – the reworkings, the inspired appropriations! The radical now raises her voice.

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.

& 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.

More from Mecklenburgh Square

Certainly a most talked about publication in the UK at the moment! Further to my previous post, BBC Radio 3 has also given Francesca Wade’s Square Haunting (amongst other things woman, classical & academic) consideration on their Free Thinking program or the “Goddesses of Academia” episode of their Arts & Ideas podcast.

And, yes, the Jane Harrison, Hope Mirrlees relationship which I remarked upon does indeed come up, as does her modernist poem “Paris” printed by the Hogarth Press in 1919. The British Library has digitized a first edition for all to see, and what a delight it is. Literary wise – why has Mirrlees been forgot? (perhaps because she forsook poetry for “the novel” and other interests) – and in terms of handwork – the Woolfs had only been doing this stuff for a couple of years (they bought a printing press in 1917) for goodness sake!

Interesting, is that Mirrlees’ poem spans just one day in Paris, portraying the vast, ever-changing cityscape and the tempo of a new modernity, all set against the dark shadows still cast by war and an uneasy peace. The much better known “one dayers” are a few years away – Joyce’s “Ulysses” in 1922 and Virginia Woolf’s “Mrs. Dalloway” in 1925.

Five Women & Mecklenburgh Square

Just published and brought to my notice by The Guardian, this interesting podcast from The Spectator (and embedded below) informs further on Francesca Wade’s just published first book Square Haunting (Faber, January 2020).

For the curious, the five eminent women are Virginia Woolf (writer, 1882–1941) Hilda Doolittle (or H.D. writer, poet 1886–1961), Dorothy L Sayers (writer, 1893–1957), Eileen Power (economist, historian 1889–1940) and Jane Harrison (classicist, 1850–1928), and the place is Mecklenburgh Square in Bloomsbury, London. Wade presumably explores the changing role of women at the beginning of the 20th century through these exemplary lives, and in doing so discovers shared aspects of their lives.

Jane Ellen Harrison, Newnham College (Augustus John)

Without referring to either book or podcast, off the top of my head I actually know of one obscure more than crossing of paths, being that between Woolf and Harrison. Virginia Woolf’s diaries (favourite often returned to reading of mine) reveal something of the relationship between her friend Hope Mirrlees and Mirrlees’ former tutor and then partner Harrison — their shared domestic and working lives and travels abroad. The Woolfs’ Hogarth Press in fact published Harrison’s memoirs in 1925.

Also, while Eileen Power may draw a blank with some (or many) I have actually come across Medieval English Nunneries in another context … but there must surely be more to tell, and I am looking forward to reading about it.