9    The Argument of Art 1932–1938

Woolf wrote the first draft of The Pargiters in great excitement. This was the novel that would become The Years and she had a version of it finished by September 1934. It was enormous: 900 pages, about 200,000 words, and she knew it would have to be ‘sweated down’. But she was pleased with it.

The book was extremely ambitious: ‘I want to give the whole of present society’, Woolf wrote, ‘nothing less: facts, as well as the vision. And to combine them both. I mean, The Waves going on simultaneously with Night & Day.’¹ So this was a bringing together of all she had done so far, calling on the visionary qualities she had developed in The Waves to give meaning to the kind of realism she had used in her early novels. She was thinking back over her writing life, and back over her family life as well. This novel took her again to the dark rooms of Kensington, which become here the home of the Pargiter family at Abercorn Terrace. A mother lies dying slowly in the sick room upstairs; restless daughters wait for the kettle to boil. Then the novel skips forward into the twentieth century and finds the daughters moving off across London, selling the old house, making lives for themselves, facing choices about their homes, work, friends, politics. She would bring it right up to the present, gathering together ‘millions of ideas’: ‘a summing up of all I know, feel, laugh at, despise, like, admire, hate’.²

Woolf was taking on the tradition of historical fiction and turning it around. Her contemporaries John Galsworthy and Hugh Walpole were writing lengthy family sagas (The Forsyte Saga; the Herries novels) which sold in great numbers. Woolf too might have written this kind of history, and Hyde Park Gate alone suggested material enough for many volumes. But she chose instead to open up the genre for examination, and wrote a series of extracts which pretended to be from a continuous family history. Instead of pressing on through year after year, she isolated moments – from 1880, 1891, 1907, and so on – taking their temperature, giving a cross-section of life, catching the atmosphere very concisely ‘plumb in the centre’.³

At first she set up around these episodes a framework narrative which involved a novelist reading out extracts from her book and then using them to illustrate a lecture about women’s lives. In parody of the prolix saga writer, this novelist begins solemnly with an extract from volume five. It was a nice joke, but serious too. Woolf’s lecture-with-extracts format allowed for the meeting of fact and fiction, analysis and creativity, the voice of the critic and the novelist – all in the same book. It was a potent idea, but she changed her mind. She worried about the fiction being mixed up with a lecture; she didn’t want to be a writer of propaganda. And yet there were things she wanted to say. The question, as she posed it to herself, was how to give ‘intellectual argument in the form of art’.⁴

In the end Woolf separated out the ‘novel’ from the ‘essay’. The argument of the lecture did not disappear (it would come back, more intense and disturbing, in Three Guineas), but for now she was left with her scenes from a family history. The problem was that they threatened to get longer than the sagas she parodied. She turned for help to the masters of long novels, the Russians. She weighed Dostoevsky’s inclusiveness against Turgenev’s paring down. As she read Turgenev she could see him coming up against her own problems and finding ways, like her, to combine the factual elements of daily life with ‘the vision’.⁵ Turning back to her own draft, she cut and cut but still the novel grew. She packed it with details of the kind that had been filling her diary for years, from the headlines on newspaper placards and the character of the Bayswater Road, to the sound of pigeons (‘take two coos, Taffy; take two’) and the little customary lies that people tell every day. She caught the tone and texture of objects, buildings, chairs, coats, shoes, the scenery and props of each successive age. The Years is not often compared to the fun and games of Orlando but Woolf associated the two novels from the start. ‘In truth The Pargiters is first cousin to Orlando,’ she mused in her diary: ‘Orlando taught me the trick of it.’⁶ She had all the same sense of momentum and drama, wanting to make ‘agile leaps, like a chamois across precipices from 1880 to here & now’. As she raced through the first draft she was ‘incandescent’ with the thrill of it.⁷

Long accused of social narrowness, here she described lodging houses and charity work, the dirty man from Wandsworth, and (notoriously) the greasy Jew.⁸ With bracing, sometimes repellent honesty, bound to incite rather than allay her critics, she recorded prejudice and snobbery as part of the fabric of life. And for the first time she gave sustained voice to a servant, faithful Crosby. Woolf’s own relationship with servants had itself been a long-drawn-out saga, which reached a painful climax when she finally sacked her live-in servant Nelly in 1934 and started a new rhythm of life with daily helps.⁹ Her mixed feelings for Nelly shaped her portrait of Crosby. When Eleanor in The Years lets Crosby go and clears her room, she realizes with guilty horror the dinginess of the servants’ quarters in the basement. This was difficult material and Woolf wanted to tackle it.

She had never been ‘more excited over a book’, but just as she neared the end of the draft, there was a blow.¹⁰ Roger Fry fell over on 7 September 1934 and died two days later. Woolf sensed all the ‘substance’ going out of her world.¹¹ Fry’s aesthetics had been a deep, sustained influence on her writing, and his friendship had been a tonic to her. He always exuded energy and talked passionately about the arts. In the sad months after Lytton’s death, the Woolfs had found it a great relief to go travelling in Greece with Roger and his sister, spurred on by Fry’s gift for making the best of life. With his death, another voice had stopped. ‘Oh how we’ve talked and talked – for 20 years now’, Woolf told Ethel sadly.¹²

She was moved by Fry’s funeral and the solidarity of those gathered in his memory. It was the feeling of connection she had written about after Percival’s death in The Waves. Though she rejected the overblown rituals of Victorian mourning that had seemed so dishonest to her as a child, she always felt the need to mark endings and pay tribute. Lytton Strachey had defied convention by asking not to have a funeral, which seemed to Woolf to leave only a dissipated silence. Fry’s funeral, all done in music, seemed a better answer to those questions Woolf never stopped asking about how significant moments should be marked in a secular age.

With Fry gone, and the death of another friend, Frances Birrell, in the New Year of 1935, Woolf felt surrounded by ghosts. People were starting to write about the end of Bloomsbury. Part of it was gone. In January there was a high-spirited party in the old style, with a performance of Freshwater, the comic play about their Victorian ancestors that Woolf had first written in the early 1920s and now revised for the occasion. There was Vanessa as Julia Margaret Cameron and Adrian as Tennyson, striding around reciting things. Everyone laughed, but they were aware of absent friends. By chance someone came to return one of Fry’s paintings in the middle of the rehearsal. Sad and haunted, Woolf noted in her diary: ‘Roger’s ghost knocked at the door.’¹³ Sometimes she felt posthumous herself. Students were writing their theses on her; Stephen Tomlin came to sculpt her face and cast her in bronze. She had to keep telling herself that she was only just starting out. At intervals she vowed in her diary that she would ‘go on adventuring, changing, opening my mind & my eyes, refusing to be stamped & stereotyped’.¹⁴

‘How the ghost of Roger haunted us!’ Fry had been one of Woolf’s closest friends and his ideas about art had a profound influence on her writing. (Roger Fry, jacket design for Cezanne, A Study of His Development by Roger Fry, London, 1927)

She wanted nonetheless to honour and defend her past. For years she had been thinking about ways to write portraits of her friends, and now she was called on as Bloomsbury’s biographer. The Strachey family had wanted her to write about Lytton, though somehow they hadn’t liked to ask her. Fry’s family was more forthcoming with the invitation, handing over piles of letters, wanting her opinions, setting out what should and shouldn’t be included. So in 1935, as Woolf started to rewrite The Pargiters, another book was already coming into view and the biographer’s long process of reading, collecting, and interviewing went on in the background as she wrote her fiction. The same questions came up in both. How do public lives relate to the private? How much can be said? Could she, for instance, write about the love affair Fry had once had with Vanessa? Fry’s family said ‘no’, in contrast to Vanessa’s insistence on truth. Woolf felt some of the old frustration at the hushing up and covering over. She wrote this repression into her fiction, where people open their mouths to say things and then get stuck halfway.

She dashed through a first ‘wild re-typing’ of her novel and then slowed down for a second revision.¹⁵ She paced herself and enjoyed it, typing up her changes every morning and packing her afternoons full with other people and other projects. As a counter to their awareness of getting older and the loss of friends, she and Leonard were very active. They did ambitious trips in their new car; there were new friends like Elizabeth Bowen, and Virginia warmed to the strange, striking Sitwells. She was more intimate now with T. S. Eliot. She never felt much at ease with her brother Adrian, but she enjoyed being an aunt to his daughters Ann and Judith, now growing up and going off confidently to university. The qualities of Mitzi, Leonard’s new pet marmoset, were more dubious, but having arrived in a sickly state from the Rothschild estate, Mitzi quickly learned the ways of Bloomsbury sociability and was always on the scene.

In her diary for 15 October 1935, Woolf listed the things she had done since getting back from Monk’s House ten days before. We get a shorthand cross-section of a working week:

Seen: Janie, Walther; Joan Easedale; Nessa. Clive. Helen. Duncan. been to Richmond Park (saw snake by the Serpentine) Concert. Saw Morgan & Bob & Eth Williamson. Asked to speak at some lunch. Read all early R. letters. noted them. also library books: also Keats: also MSS.

It doesn’t take much filling out of the abbreviations to sense the variety and busyness here. Janie Bussy and François Walter had come to discuss an anti-Fascist organization; she was assembling her material for the Fry biography; she was reading, as ever, through the manuscripts of possible books for the Hogarth Press. This is all in addition to ‘forging ahead’ with The Years, and it counts as a time of ‘calm full complete bliss’.¹⁶ Woolf was happy because the novel was going well. She wrote the last line of the second draft in December. ‘The main feeling about this book is vitality, fruitfulness, energy,’ she concluded in her diary. ‘Never did I enjoy writing a book more.’¹⁷

The disaster began soon after she wrote that last line. A headache started, and her images for the novel turned from vitality to disease. To be rid of it would be like having a ‘bag of muscle […] cut out of my brain’.¹⁸ She hated reading back through it, and laboured over her corrections in despair. Leonard made her stop in May for a holiday and took her to Cornwall, as he had done at previous times of crisis. But the ritual pilgrimage did not save her from collapse. It was the worst since the breakdown of 1913. She lost weight fast and couldn’t sleep. Back at Monk’s House for the summer, she tried to do half an hour at a time on her proofs – 600 pages sitting in an accusatory unread pile – but she struggled to achieve even that. It seems probable that the menopause exacerbated this breakdown; certainly it brought physical symptoms that weakened her. She had long wondered whether this would be a dangerous time, and it was. But for her the end of a novel was always a dangerous time as well, and both took their toll on her health. She was back to short walks, rest, and disciplined eating.

Edith Sitwell recording a poetry reading in March 1927. Woolf and Sitwell were never close but they admired each other at a distance. (Fox Photos/Getty Images)

In the autumn she could gingerly attempt the proofs again and she kept at it. She went grimly to the end before taking the whole pile to Leonard. She felt like a cat bringing in a dead mouse. She asked him to burn it and arranged to cover the wasted printing costs from her savings. Leonard asked her to wait until he had read it. The pressure on him was enormous: everything depended on what he thought. She watched for signals as he read. At last, on 5 November, he put the book down in tears and pronounced it remarkable. To Virginia this seemed like a miracle: ‘the moment of relief was divine’.¹⁹ With catastrophe averted, they went out together to Lewes to see the great Bonfire Night parade. The Years was to be published after all. Woolf prepared herself not to mind the reviews. Whatever they said, she had finished the book and survived. She paused to acknowledge the achievement in her diary: ‘I hand my compliment to that terribly depressed woman, myself, whose head ached so often: who was so entirely convinced a failure; for in spite of everything I think she brought it off.’²⁰

Because this book brought Woolf close to suicide, because it was connected with the politics of the mid-1930s and with its ferocious non-fiction counterpart Three Guineas, and because its formal patternings have more to do with breakage and disconnection than with visionary wholeness, The Years is usually talked about in sober terms. Critics emphasize the failure and suffering of the characters, as well as the failure and suffering of their author. They note a complete contrast to The Waves: a move from the inner world to the outer, and from lyricism to a complex realism. It is the least read and least taught of Woolf’s novels; its general readers are few and far between.

And yet in Woolf’s lifetime it was the fastest-selling of her books and the only one to reach the bestseller lists in America. She explicitly said that she wanted to attract the general reader, almost in recompense for the obscurity of The Waves – and because she did after all think ‘the common reader’ was important. We should remember as well the ‘vitality’ and ‘fruitfulness’ she thought characterized the novel.²¹ Her turn to ‘facts’ was prompted by her ‘infinite delight’ in them, and her pleasure in recording some of that great storehouse of daily observations she had been making for forty years.

She allowed her facts, in places, to be extremely beautiful, revealing her aesthetic pleasure in ordinary things. The book has a glimmering quality about it, a sense of significance we can’t quite grasp. Its characters try to articulate their visions of ‘a different life’, ‘another world’.²² The search for some underlying pattern continues here: ‘Who makes it?’ asks Eleanor. ‘Who thinks it?’²³ Woolf wanted both the past and the future to be palpable, and she even thought of calling the novel Dawn. She censored this romantic impulse, but the new day dawning over London at the close brings an obscure, uplifting hope as Eleanor watches a young couple on the threshold of their home and their lives. Where the last line of The Waves is a call to battle against death, The Years ends with the sky brightening over the city, bringing ‘beauty, simplicity and peace’.²⁴

But this is also a dark book that readers have long found troubling. Its moments of beauty are mixed up with disfigurement, prejudice, powerlessness, claustrophobia. Lyricism is often purposely curtailed, leaving awkward gaps and repetitions. Almost every page is marked by some failure of communication. People mishear and misunderstand each other; ideas are passed on like Chinese whispers, getting distorted along the way. At the final party Eleanor looks around at people talking and wonders how often we really listen to each other.

The novel is in part about this distraction and inattentiveness, which Woolf noticed all around her in the 1930s. Europe was heading towards crisis and everyone was talking about it, but what was actually to be done? Politics distracted her from writing; her writing distracted her from politics. She took several newspapers and read them compulsively; she thought carefully about her pacifism, she talked daily with Leonard, whose life was now devoted to politics. Yet in a moment of characteristic self-scrutiny she noted that while talking with Maynard Keynes in 1934 about the situation in Germany, she was actually thinking all the time about her novel. As the situation escalated in the mid-1930s she became increasingly involved with campaign groups and worried over whether she might be doing more. But fundamentally her novel was her political work. As she would say during the war, ‘thinking is my fighting’.²⁵

She was surrounded by people who were challenging her position. Leonard found pacifism increasingly unrealistic. The young men she knew through her nephew Julian and the Hogarth Press manager John Lehmann were all committed to an active fight against Fascism. They were also mobilizing literature for the cause: Auden, Spender, Isherwood all saw their art working in the service of politics. They respected Virginia Woolf, their great literary forebear, but they disagreed with her. She responded with a complicated mixture of generosity, anxiety, and detachment. They seemed to her egotistical, overrating their importance. Stephen Spender, for example, told her that the Communist Party officials rather hoped he would die tragically and be their Byron. Woolf suspected that too much of this hero hunting was going on.

Woolf’s nephew Julian Bell with his friend John Lehmann, who worked for the Hogarth Press and bought Virginia’s share of it in 1938. (Private Collection)

The most testing relationship was with Julian himself. She wanted a close friendship with him, but she refused to be his literary mentor and found it impossible to praise his poetry. True she didn’t like it, but she might have lied. Instead she rejected in an offhand way a long essay on Roger Fry over which Julian had taken great care. This in turn strained her relationship with Vanessa. No one wanted this awkwardness, so why keep causing it?

Part of it was defensiveness. Julian’s insistence on action made Woolf uneasy. She caricatured herself as the unworldly poet, but would then suddenly assert her political engagement. In June 1936 she sent Julian a jokey but acid description of the mood at Charleston, pretending to side with him against Vanessa and Duncan’s passivity: ‘There they sit, looking at pinks and yellows, and when Europe blazes all they do is screw up their eyes and complain of a temporary glare in the foreground.’²⁶ Was this hypocrisy? Wasn’t she sitting too? Yes, but she was writing. Was that enough? When she used the image three years later in Between the Acts the dynamics had shifted. Giles rages at the passivity of his family as they sit around looking at the view, but it is quite clear that he is impotent as well. His anger does not achieve anything and the villagers who peacefully act out their play in the old tradition while it’s still possible seem perhaps to be doing something more worthwhile than him.

So even in her last novel Woolf was still opposing herself to Julian, but by this time he was dead. He joined the International Brigade against Franco in 1937 and was killed that July. Vanessa was distraught. Her children were unconditionally the centre of her life, and this was a loss from which she would never recover. Virginia stepped in as a devoted support for her sister, and she kept trying to understand why Julian had gone to Spain at all. Without him, the future seemed ‘lopped: deformed’.²⁷

Julian Bell and Roger Fry playing chess at Charleston, painted by Vanessa Bell. There were loving discussions between the generations of Bloomsbury, but there were also disagreements. Julian argued against the pacifism of his parents and many of their friends, calling for military action against Fascism in the 1930s. (Vanessa Bell, Roger Fry and Julian Bell at Charleston. King’s College, Cambridge © Estate of Vanessa Bell, courtesy Henrietta Garnett)

In the midst of this sadness Woolf was thankful for her own life with Leonard. Several times Leonard had to see specialists about his health, leaving her to pace up and down outside the consulting rooms imagining the worst. When he was given the all-clear, she was overwhelmed with relief, as she had been after the crisis of The Years. They had both had their trials and been granted reprieves. They walked around Tavistock Square ‘love-making’ as they had done twenty-five years before.²⁸ She felt a rush of vitality, as if making up for the time she had lost to illness and to the long grind of her novel.

She used this energy to write the book-length essay Three Guineas, in which she considered the economic and political roles of women and proposed profound structural shifts in social organization that might be more effective than bombs in the fight against Fascism. It was radical but subtle, it was fierce yet indirect. It was long and involved precisely because Woolf mistrusted the bald statements of propaganda. She saw the problems of the present as intractably linked with the behaviour of the middle classes, of both genders, in private and in public, over the past hundred years. Three Guineas suggested that Hitler was only the most violent manifestation of a form of tyranny in which all patriarchal society was complicit.

Many of Woolf’s friends thought Three Guineas an embarrassment and an aberration. Yet it was not a sudden outburst. Woolf saw it as a continuation of A Room of One’s Own, so it reached back to the 1920s and far beyond that to the repressions of Hyde Park Gate. It was shaped by her continuing conversations with Ethel Smyth, and it was something she had been preparing for all through the 1930s as she amassed cuttings from newspapers, manifestos, memoirs – a massive store of exhibits that she held up for examination as she put contemporary society on trial. The pressure of argument had been building in her for years and now it poured out ‘like a physical volcano’.²⁹

Woolf’s conceptual sweep took in family relations, education, law, church, and government. As in The Years she showed that domestic spaces are powerfully political, and she followed their dynamics out of the front door into public life. She printed in her book a series of photographs of men in their uniforms: a wigged lawyer, dons processing, a bishop in his mitre. Encountered in the law court or university, these are figures of unchallenged power, but encountered in Woolf’s book they look plain ridiculous. Woolf was holding the judges up to judgment and liberating the ‘outsider’ (who has no uniform) from the inhibiting attitude of hushed reverence.

Like the characters in her fiction, Woolf was feeling towards a different way of doing things. It would require new social relations and new voices. It could not be definitively articulated, but a beginning could be made. Having stated her case, Woolf closed the book with relief. When people asked for her opinions now, she could refer them to Three Guineas. She felt released from a burden and free to think of something else. It was the feeling she gave to Peggy Pargiter near the end of The Years:

She had not said it, but she had tried to say it. Now she could rest; now she could think herself away under the shadow of their ridicule, which had no power to hurt her, into the country. Her eyes half shut; it seemed to her that she was on a terrace, in the evening; an owl went up and down, up and down; its white wing showed on the dark of the hedge; and she heard country people singing and the rattle of wheels on a road.³⁰