There used to be something called The Canon.
This was regularly used to blast iconoclasts who said terrible things at tea parties, such as ‘Surely Katherine Mansfield is as fine a writer as Proust?’
The Canon allowed no debate; it guarded the entry and exit points to the Hall of Fame and stood firmly behind t(T)he t(T)imes.
When not routing offenders in petticoats it fired warning shots over the heads of the uneducated. The Canon was admirably free from modern Existentialist Doubt. It knew who belonged and who didn’t belong.
No question.
‘Excuse me?’
‘Who said that?’
It was Virginia Woolf addressing The Canon.
In her famous exchange with Desmond MacCarthy writing in The Statesman as ‘Affable Hawk’, Woolf fought for her work and fought for her sex, when she laid claim to Sappho as a great poet and argued against a society that hoxes women. Hox is a racing word: it means to hamstring a horse not so brutally that she can’t walk but cleverly so that she can’t run. Society hoxes women and pretends that God, Nature or the genepool designed them lame.
Woolf had fact on her side when she wrote to an increasingly Irritable Hawk that a measure of economic independence, some privacy, some security, freedom to travel alone, freedom from domestic interruption, and a proper education, would release and redirect a woman’s creativity. As example, she was able to use the four great women novelists before her: Jane Austen, Emily Brontë, Charlotte Brontë and George Eliot. Like Woolf, each had obtained a portion of those otherwise male advantages. Like Woolf, none bore children.
Woolf worried about the childlessness from time to time, and suffered from the imposed anxiety that she was not, unlike her friend Vita Sackville-West, a real woman. I do not know what kind of a woman one would have to be to stand unflinchingly in front of The Canon, but I would guess, a real one. There is something sadistic in the whip laid on women to prove themselves as mothers and wives at the same time as making their way as artists. The abnormal effort necessary to produce a true piece of work is not an effort that can be diverted or divided. We all know the story of Coleridge and the Man from Porlock. What of the woman writer and a whole family of Porlocks?
For most of us the dilemma is rhetorical but those women who are driven with consummate energy through a single undeniable channel should be applauded and supported as vigorously as the men who have been setting themselves apart for centuries.
I do not want to think about Virginia Woolf as a would-be mother or a would-be lesbian or a would-be well adjusted nobody if only she had not been sexually abused as a girl. Much has been written about Woolf and much of that much is bulldust. Like T. S. Eliot and D. H. Lawrence, she has suffered from a crazed sub-Freudian approach to her work.
To some, Woolf is a martyr to maleness, to others, a non-practising Sappho. To some, her madness was a weakness, to others, it has been confirmation of her genius and a sign of her spiritual health (to be ill-adjusted to a deranged world is not breakdown). Psychological theories have their interest but to concentrate on the artist takes attention from the art. Virginia Woolf was a great writer, and for us as readers, the only honest undistorted focus is her work.
How to approach it? She is, I think, with the exception of The Waves, easy to read. That is, she is easy to read as it is easy to listen to Mozart, easy to look at Cézanne, easy to curl up with Dickens in an armchair by the fire. In Woolf there is much to enjoy in a straightforward open-handed way. Open any of her work at almost any page and you will find fine descriptive passages that have nothing to do with the watery impressionism of lesser writers. Hooked on a well-thrown line of words, is landed, a fine fat fish. She knows how to draw the world out, breaking the air with colour and the beat of life, and before we can truly admire it at our feet, the line is out on the water again, catch after catch, drawn from the under-depths, the shimmering world that slips through our hands.
The only resource now left us is to look out of the window. There were sparrows; there were starlings; there were a number of doves, and one or two rooks, all occupied after their fashion. One finds a worm, another a snail. One flutters to a branch, another takes a little run on the turf. Then a servant crosses the courtyard, wearing a green baize apron. Presumably he is engaged on some intrigue with one of the maids in the pantry, but as no visible proof is offered us, in the courtyard, we can but hope for the best and leave it. Clouds pass, thin or thick, with some disturbance of the colour of the grass beneath. The sun-dial registers the hour in its usual cryptic way. One’s mind begins tossing up a question or two, idly, vainly, about this same life. Life, it sings, or croons rather, like a kettle on a hob, Life, life, what art thou? Light or darkness, the baize apron of the under footman or the shadow of the starling on the grass?
Let us go, then, exploring, this summer morning, when all are adoring the plum blossom and the bee. And humming and hawing, let us ask of the starling (who is a more sociable bird than the lark) what he may think on the brink of the dust-bin, whence he picks among the sticks combings of scullion’s hair. What’s life, we ask, leaning on the farmyard gate; Life, Life, Life! cries the bird, as if he had heard, and knew precisely, what we meant by this bothering prying habit of ours of asking questions indoors and out and peeping and picking at daisies as the way is of writers when they don’t know what to say next. Then they come here, says the bird, and ask me what life is; Life, Life, Life!
We trudge on then by the moor path, to the high brow of the wine-blue purple-dark hill, and fling ourselves down there, and dream there and see there a grasshopper, carting back to his home in the hollow, a straw. And he says (if sawings like his can be given a name so sacred and tender) Life’s labour, or so we interpret the whirr of his dust-choked gullet. And the ant agrees and the bees, but if we lie here long enough to ask the moths, when they come at evening, stealing among the paler heather bells, they will breathe in our ears such wild nonsense as one hears from telegraph wires in snow storms; tee hee, haw haw. Laughter, Laughter! the moths say.
Orlando (1928)
A work of art is abundant, spills out, gets drunk, sits up with you all night and forgets to close the curtains, dries your tears, is your friend, offers you a disguise, a difference, a pose. Cut and cut it through and there is still a diamond at the core. Skim the top and it is rich. The inexhaustible energy of art is transfusion for a worn-out world. When I read Virginia Woolf she is to my spirit, waterfall and wine.
Woolf is a fashionable icon nowadays but I do not know how many people actually read her. I do not know how many people have seen a Picasso, not a postcard, the picture. And of those how many, how many slid nothing in between themselves and the work, but looked at it honestly and let it speak? Nevertheless, Picasso is a household name if not a household god and Virginia Woolf is a screen queen.
The power of art is so immense that even its dilutions are homeopathic. Our mental baggage is mostly made up of things we haven’t read, haven’t heard, haven’t seen. And when we do read them, hear them, see them, it is often not as they are in their own right, but through the tiny chink of our own consciousness, a consciousness every day diminished by the battering inanities of the media.
Art is large and it enlarges you and me. To a shrunk-up world its vistas are shocking. Art is the burning bush that both shelters and makes visible our profounder longings. Through it we see ourselves in metaphor. Art is metaphor, from the Greek, meta (above) and pherein (to carry) it is that which is carried above the literalness of life. Art is metaphor. Metaphor is transformation.
Orlando is metaphor, is transformation, is art.
Published for her friend and sometime lover, Vita Sackville-West, Orlando was the book that brought Woolf conspicuous fame. The reading public misunderstood it but it charmed them. It is charming; it has the satisfaction of a romping plot, by turns serious and bizarre. Its historical sightlines are convincing but wild. Its central character, Orlando, is brave, funny, vulnerable and proud, and has the unusual advantage of being both a man and a woman, a new advantage in fiction, and one previously enjoyed in drama and opera by means of costume change only. Orlando changes her skin.
For Orlando, transformation is sex and sexuality. Orlando pushes through the confines of time, now in a petticoat, now with a cutlass. Love objects, male and female, are appropriately wooed and bedded but not according to the confines of heterosexual desire. The lover knows what it is to be the beloved. The beloved knows in her own body the power of the lover. The Orlando who holds Sasha in his arms is still the Orlando who holds Shelmerdine in hers. Woman to woman, man to man, is the sub-sexuality of Orlando.
These transformations are deliberate. They are saucy. They tease at the reader’s hidden doubts and delights in a language that offers the outrageous as perfectly natural if a little surprising.
And as all Orlando’s loves had been women, now, through the culpable laggardry of the human frame to adapt itself to convention, though she herself was a woman, it was still a woman she loved; and if the consciousness of being of the same sex had any effect at all, it was to quicken and deepen those feelings which she had had as a man. For now a thousand hints and mysteries became plain to her that were then dark. Now, the obscurity, which divides the sexes and lets linger innumerable impurities in its gloom, was removed, and if there is anything in what the poet says about truth and beauty, this affection gained in beauty what it lost in falsity. At last, she cried, she knew Sasha as she was, and in the ardour of this discovery, and in the pursuit of all those treasures which were now revealed, she was so rapt and enchanted that it was as if a cannon ball had exploded at her ear when a man’s voice said, ‘Permit me, Madam,’ a man’s hand raised her to her feet; and the fingers of a man with a three-masted sailing ship tattooed on the middle finger pointed to the horizon.
The First Edition of Orlando contains a number of photographs of Vita Sackville-West in various costumes, male and female, proclaiming herself as Orlando. The public, who had been expected to avert their gaze from Lady Chatterley and seal their lips against Radclyffe Hall’s Stephen Gordon, rushed arm in arm with Orlando. I do not think that transsexual escapades through time threaten the status quo less than cross-class adultery or lesbian love.
It was less obvious. Woolf wanted to say dangerous things in Orlando but she did not want to say them in the missionary position. The Well of Loneliness and Lady Chatterley’s Lover both suffer, as art, from tractarianism. I do not mean that art should have nothing to tell us, or that art should keep its hands clean. I do not want to reinforce the charge brought against Bloomsbury by the younger poets of the 1930s; that Woolf and Eliot et al fiddled with their syntax while the Western world blew up. Woolf is a writer of social change, although perhaps the kind of challenges she offers have not seemed relevant to men because they are not about them, at least not directly. Auden disliked Woolf’s writing without noticing that what she was most careful to avoid he would have done well to avoid himself. It is the problem of polemic.
Here is Woolf from ‘Four Women Novelists’.
In Middlemarch and Jane Eyre we are conscious not merely of the writer’s character, as we are conscious of the character of Charles Dickens, but we are conscious of a woman’s presence, of someone resenting the treatment of her sex and pleading for its rights. This brings into women’s writing an element entirely absent from a man’s, unless indeed he happens to be a working man or a negro, or who for some reason is conscious of a disability. It introduces a distortion and is frequently the cause of weakness. The desire to plead some personal cause or to make a character the mouthpiece of some personal discontent and grievance always has a distressing effect, as if the point at which the reader’s attention is directed were suddenly two-fold instead of single. The genius of Jane Austen and Emily Brontë is never more convincing than in their power to ignore such claims and solicitations …
D.H. Lawrence never could resist such claims and solicitations. He was a working-class man with a sermon to preach and whilst I am not one to withhold sympathy from soap-boxers, I know that when rant gets the upper hand, there is no room left for fine writing. And a fine writer was what Lawrence wanted to be, what he is, when he lets himself. Nobody now reads Lawrence for his rant, he is not the emancipating hero he was in his own time. Only an adolescent would read him for sex. We read him for his writing, the freshness and clarity of language that has survived his own time, his own preoccupations. A good test of art is that it should continue to work on us long after contemporary interest in its ideas or even its subject matter. Lawrence has not survived because he was a reformer, or a thinker, or an iconoclast, there are plenty of those, better than Lawrence, out of print and unread, and who can honestly say that they read Bertrand Russell for his prose? Lawrence has survived because he understood words in their own right, but if his thinking has dated, leaving more space around the language itself, Woolf has been too much in the news. There has been so much concentration on Woolf as a feminist and as a thinker, that the unique power of her language has still not been given the close critical attention it deserves. When Woolf is read and taught, she needs to be read and taught as a poet; she is not a writer who uses for words things, for her, words are things, incantatory, substantial. In her fiction, her polemic is successful because it is subordinated to the right of spells.
The art of Orlando is its language. Woolf never lets her words tire and slip. It is the taut line, the tightrope of language, that makes possible passages at once delicate and audacious. Control over her material means control over more than ideas and passions, to feel something acutely, to know something thoroughly is no guarantee of expression. The artist has a peculiar problem; the strength of emotion necessary to hold together any large piece of work, the heat needed to keep the material supple, can itself fight with the detachment and serenity demanded to make the highly personal voice of the artist into a voice that seems to speak to all. And speak to all, not through a megaphone at a distance, but close up, into the ear. Art is intimacy, lover’s talk, and yet it is a public declaration.
Orlando is an intimate book. It calls itself a biography with the same playfulness that Gertrude Stein enjoys in the Autobiography of Alice B. Toklos. In either case there is an immediate challenge to conventional genre-boxing but there is too, an invitation to believe. To accept what will follow as truth and as the kind of truth only possible between people who know each other well. The biography and the autobiography both pretend to honesty and frankness, offer to walk with the reader through unknown woods to sights not seen by other people. Both have the whiff of the bedroom about them even if they are not talking about sex. Voyeurism is a vice and a pleasure few of us can deny ourselves and because human beings are always curious and because human beings like to be in on a secret and because human beings are still not sophisticated enough or technological enough or dead enough yet to resist the lure of a good story, we can be taken in by someone who offers truth with a wink and says ‘I’m telling you stories. Trust me.’
Woolf’s intimate language, that invites confidences and suggests informality, a little tête-à-tête between the two of us, is in fact, highly wrought, highly artificial and resolutely outside the mimicry of Realism. The world she describes is an invented history, with certain key facts as stakes to support her imagination, but the reader should be wary of Orlando’s facts, they work too, like wartime signposts, innocently pointing the traveller in the wrong direction. ‘This way to Elizabeth the First’ really means ‘And there you will find Mrs Woolf hiding behind a tree.’
Art is enchantment and artists have the right of spells. I have talked already about Lawrence’s faltering, the pauses of incantation where the spell is broken and ordinary life pokes through uninvited. No writer is entirely secure, and everyone knows those dreary passages in Tennyson, in Dickens, in James Joyce, even in T. S. Eliot, who, like Woolf, was watchful, where the taut line of Otherness snaps, and the reader falls abruptly back to earth. The success of later Shakespeare is the success of spells, where every element, however uneven, however incredible, is fastened to the next with perfect authority. The enchanted world shimmers but does not waver. A Midsummer Night’s Dream is the first of his plays to accomplish this, The Tempest is enchantment’s apotheosis.
Woolf (like T. S. Eliot) was learned in the Elizabethans, knew how to use them, knew how to read Shakespeare for her own purposes. She knew that the smooth surface of Shakespeare’s mature work was the effective cover for jags of matter that lesser dramatists could not harmonise. She knew the dangers of forcing superficial connections and the disappointment of forging no connections at all. She admired the Renaissance for its efforts to grasp the unruly world whole and tame it through art. (It is perhaps not a surprise, that the Elizabethans were so interested in horsemanship, and that in England in the sixteenth century, we see the beginning of haute école.)
Orlando takes a broad canvas of four hundred years, much broader than the contemporary The Forsyte Saga, and brings it in to us, not on a series of tea-trays, but on a flying carpet. Woolf’s connections across time and space, through the inner and outer worlds of imagination and experience, are made brilliantly, vertiginously, with not a glance over the edge. Cities and peoples pass beneath us, in a moment we are in England, in another moment in Persia, then the carpet flies on, ignoring the claims of the clock. How does she make these connections? Preposterous though they are, they are effective. Why?
She does not do what Huxley and Wells do and tie up her puppets with clever knots. She does not do what Henry James does, and suggest connections that are not apparent. The Jamesian web is a very light one binding here and there without the reader being fully aware of it until he is truly caught. That is not Woolf’s method, nor does she borrow from Dickens and bluff her way through when she’s stuck. Dickens was a consummate bluffer, and that is, in itself, a very special gift, and those who do not have it by right, should take loan of it gingerly.
Woolf’s method of connection is association. English is an associative language. I do not mean merely that our language is thick with the possibility of puns, something that foreigners, struggling with English, hate, but that images multiply out of the words themselves. Take as an example, the famous speech in Antony and Cleopatra – ‘The barge she sat in, like a burnish’d throne’, or Tennyson’s The Lady of Shalott, or Edward Lear’s nonsense poems, or Tristram Shandy. Whatever you think of Ezra Pound, the push of Imagism was to take a hard, sharp word and let it do its full work. Imagism was a battle cry against cloudy language. Where language is cloudy, there can be no bright connections, there can be only the dull, mechanical repetitions of theme or the forcing of ideas, perhaps in themselves extravagant, but unlit. Joseph Conrad’s novels have things about them that are interesting but as language they are not interesting. Conrad was a Pole who prided himself on his impeccable and proper English usage. He never understood that the glory of English is in its entirely improper gallops. Its untidiness disturbed him because he did not know how to use it. He never guessed at the wild freedom that is the privilege of the disciplined artist. Conrad, the disciplined pedant, the Salieri of letters, wanted and wrote a fixed English where every word has its own neat meaning and leads neatly and logically passage by passage through his pay-at-the-door show house.
Woolf used the associative method, which is a poet’s method, because it suited her temperament and because it suited her material. Like any novelist, she wanted to use the broad space to handle much matter. She knew the pleasures of the rummaging-den, the piling in of stuff, the fight to make the chaos into an honest order and not a dead and empty catalogue. Unlike many novelists, then and now, she loved words. That is she was devoted to words, faithful to words, romantically attached to words, desirous of words. She was territory and words occupied her. She was night-time and words were the dream.
The dream quality, which is a poetic quality, is not vague. For the common man it is the dream, if at all, that binds together in a new rationale, disparate elements. The job of the poet is to let the binding happen in daylight, to happen to the conscious mind, to delight and disturb the reader when the habitual pieces are put together in a new way. Above all, credulity is not strained. We should not come out of a book as we do from a dream, shaking our heads and rubbing our eyes and saying, ‘It didn’t really happen.’ In poetry, in drama, in opera, in painting, in the best fiction, it really does happen, and is happening all the time, this other place where, as strong and as compelling as our own daily world, as believable, and yet with a very strangeness that prompts us to recall that there are more things in heaven and earth and that those things are solider than dreams.
They may prove solider than real life, as we fondly call the jumble of accidents, characters and indecisions that collect around us without our noticing. The novelist notices, tries to make us clearer to ourselves, tries to set the liquid day, and because of this we read novels. We do hope to see ourselves, as much out of vanity as for instruction. Nothing wrong with that but there is further to go and it is this further that only poetry can take us. Like the novelist, the poet notices, focuses, sharpens, but for the poet that is the beginning. The poet will not be satisfied with recording, the poet will have to transform. It is language, magic wand, cast of spells, that makes transformation possible.
The poet has an ear that runs in harness with her mind. When Woolf writes she is listening as well as thinking. Rhythm underpins her thought. Rhythm subjects her thought to a discipline more than intellectual. For the poet, words are ideas. An ill-chosen word, a badly written paragraph can escape in the general slackness of the novel in general but in first-rate fiction as in true poetry, there is no escape. Any slackness at once draws attention to itself and if you look at an embarrassing paragraph in a splendid piece of work you will find that it is not the thought at fault. It is the language. This is a very curious thing.
If we admit that language has power over us, not only through what it says but also through what it is, we come closer to understanding the importance of poetry and its function in a healthy society.
If we admit that language has power over us, not only through what it says but also through what it is, we will be tolerant of literary experiment just as we are tolerant of scientific experiment. A writer must resist the pressure of old formulae and work towards new combinations of language. Woolf can gallop English. She can ride her hobby-horse as hard as Uncle Toby. She can speed the rational world to a blur and halt in a second to make us see for the first time a flower we have trodden on every day. She is not afraid of beauty. She is as sensitive to the natural world as any poet and as physical in response as any lover. She is not afraid of pain. The dark places attract her as well as the light and she has the wisdom to know that not all dark places need light. She has the cardinal virtue of critical courage, sifting her ideas and her impressions through a fine riddle of words, until the clumsiness and the uncertainties drop away, leaving her with word and thing, rare and rich. This work she does as she travels longer and longer distances, hoping we will follow, hoping that she can keep the course. Sometimes she goes too fast or takes a high fence badly. She is unhorsed. She gets back on. Those who do go with her know that her reward, and theirs, is more than a gallop on a fine day, though out of a regiment of foot soldiers, that would be enough. Those who go with her know that the name of her horse is Pegasus. Virginia Woolf has a gift of wings.