Virginia Woolf

THE WOOLFS CONTINUED to alternate between Monk’s House and Tavistock Square, a week or two at a time in each. In the country Virginia would walk the Downs, and cook a little (she baked good bread), and play skillfully with bowls on the lawn. She also took lessons to improve her French, and opened an exhibition of Roger Fry’s paintings. She wrote, and she read. Her reading was prodigious. Most authors, when deeply engaged in writing a new book, as she was with The Pargiters, rarely give themselves time to read anything not related to it. But Virginia on returning from a long walk would take up Timon of Athens, the biography of an eighteenth-century parson, David Copperfield for the sixth time, or the Bible, for its language, not its doctrine. In addition to the manuscripts submitted to the Hogarth Press, there were books by friends like Ethel Smyth or Stephen Spender, on which she would comment, candidly, and usually end with the propitiatory sentence, “But pay no attention to this,” knowing that they always would. She found it difficult to judge contemporaries. They were like people singing in the next room, too loud, too near. “Hence my unfairness to [D. H.] Lawrence,” she wrote. “How can you put him into the very great? To me he’s like an express train running through a tunnel—one shriek, sparks, smoke and gone.” Nor did T. S. Eliot escape her censure. The Woolfs went to a performance of Murder in the Cathedral: “I had almost to carry Leonard out, shrieking.”

For Angelica’s birthday in 1935 she staged the only performance of her only play, Freshwater, a comedy about Mrs. Cameron, the photographer, and her friends in the Isle of Wight. She had first drafted it in 1923, and now wrote a second version, which was performed in Vanessa’s studio in Fitzroy Square to an audience of eighty friends. Julia Cameron’s role was taken by Vanessa, her husband’s by Leonard, and Ellen Terry’s by Angelica. Other parts were allotted to Duncan Grant, Adrian Stephen and Julian Bell. Virginia was the producer and prompter.

Further interruptions were caused by political tensions at home and abroad. Hitler was now the German chancellor, and had murdered some of his closest associates. Mussolini invaded Abyssinia. The Labour Party was split on what attitude to take. Virginia attended, as a reluctant and scornful spectator, its annual conference at Brighton, where the pacifist George Lansbury was squashed by Ernest Bevin, “like a snake who’s swallowed a toad.” She could not bring herself to think that these people or their debates could add an ounce to human happiness, but there was no avoiding them, now that Leonard was deeply involved. Kingsley Martin (editor of the left-wing New Statesman) was a constant self-invited guest, and the radio in London and in the country was tuned to every news bulletin. To please Leonard, she canvassed support for an anti-Fascist exhibition, probably unaware that it was Communist-inspired, and even wrote an article for the Marxist Daily Worker. But when she was approached to succeed H. G. Wells as president of PEN, the international society of authors which was much concerned with human rights, she exploded: “I flicked my hand, as a Greek woman flicks a bug off her child’s head,” she wrote to Ethel. “Conceive their damned insolence! Ten dinners a year, and I to sit at the head of this puling company of back-scratchers, and administer balm!”

Pinka died, the spaniel immortalized as Flush, but Mitz the marmoset lived on. With Vanessa spending half the year at Cassis, and her son Julian teaching in a remote university in China, it was to those two that Virginia addressed her most entertaining gossip, hopping from twig to twig like Jane Austen in her letters to her sister Cassandra. She resembled a pianist, playing with her right hand the lighter notes (her letters) and with her left the more somber (her diary), and it is by means of this antiphony that we can follow with unparalleled intimacy the progress of The Years. In the letters she described her struggle as if it were little more than an irritating cough that she could not shake off: in her diary, she was a woman in labor.

She had begun the book, when it was called The Pargiters, in 1932, and in nine weeks wrote sixty thousand words, every one of which she scrapped. She was alternately elated and profoundly depressed. At one moment her brain felt like “a Rolls-Royce engine, purring its 70 miles an hour,” and at the next she was writing “feeble twaddle.” Typical diary entries were: June 10, 1935: “Working very hard. I think I shall rush these scenes off.” June 11: “Yet I cannot write this morning.” September 12: “Never have I had such a hot balloon in my head as rewriting The Years because it’s so long and the pressure is so terrific. But I will use all my art to keep my head sane.” She was fifty-three, the year of her menopause, and Leonard was anxious. In March 1936 she wrote, again in her diary: “I must very nearly verge on insanity. I think I get so deep in this book I don’t know what I am doing. Find myself walking along the Strand talking aloud.” And about the book itself: “Such twilight gossip, it seemed, such a show-up of my own decrepitude.” Next morning, it seemed not quite so bad: “On the contrary, a full bustling-like book.” Weeks later, “I have never suffered, since The Voyage Out, such acute despair on re-reading.” In April 1936 Leonard feared that she might suffer a complete mental collapse and took her to Cornwall for a fortnight. Virginia put the proofs aside for two months before starting to correct them, and then she cut out “enormous chunks,” amounting to 250 pages. Even after such drastic surgery, it was still the longest of her books.

So much for her private ordeal. The “sickle side of the moon” (words that we adapted for the title of the fifth volume of her letters) was her social and family life which she never neglected even when her spirits were lowest. She did not conceal from her friends the suffering that the book caused her, but her hints were self-reproachful, never self-pitying. To Dadie Rylands, “It is wholly worthless.” To Ethel, “a hopeless bad book. Verbose, foolish.” To Vanessa, “this long weary dreary book.” To Ottoline, “long and dreary.” To Ethel again, “I don’t know or care if it’s the worst book or the best.” To Janet Case, “very bad.” And to Vita, “I should be delighted to tie a stone to it, and drop it into the Atlantic.”

She was steeling herself to accept the criticism she expected by anticipating it herself. Nobody, surely, could think quite so badly of it as she did. Then came the moment when she must show it to Leonard. As always, he must be her first reader. She relied entirely on his judgment whether to publish the book or scrap it. In her diary for November 3, 1936, she described the scene:

On Sunday I started to read the proofs. When I had read to the end of the first section, I was in despair: stony but convinced despair. I said, This is happily so bad that there can be no question about it. I must carry the proofs, like a dead cat, to Leonard and tell him to burn them unread. This I did. [She then goes for a short walk through Holborn.] I was no longer Virginia, the genius, but only a perfectly insignificant yet content—shall I call it spirit? a body? And very tired, Very old. [Various social engagements intervene.] We went home, and L. read and read and said nothing. I began to feel acutely depressed. . . . Suddenly L. put down his proof and said he thought it extraordinarily good—as good as any of them.

In fact, Leonard was exaggerating. In one of his autobiographical volumes, Downhill All the Way, he confessed: “I knew that unless I could give a completely favourable verdict, she would be in despair and would have a very serious breakdown. . . . The verdict which I gave her was not absolutely and completely what I thought about it. I praised the book more than I should have done if she had been well.” He does not say why he found it disappointing. His imprimatur was sufficient. She returned to the proofs, revised them extensively once more, and three weeks later was still confident: “It seems to me to come off at the end. Anyhow to be a taut real strenuous book: with some beauty and poetry too. A full packed book. Feel a little exalted. Nor need I care much what people say.”

The Years was published in March 1937, five years after its conception. The days of waiting were dull, cold torture to her, but all except very few of the reviews were superlative. She was not, as she had expected, ridiculed. On reading Basil de Selincourt’s review in The Observer, she thought, with delight, of other people reading it. She was not a failure. People would talk about her book, praise it, buy it. She was as happy as a first novelist who buys the Evening Standard, opens it in the underground, and finds her book glowing on an inner page. Then she could be cast down by a single mildly hostile notice like Edwin Muir’s in The Listener “All the lights sank,” she wrote on perusing it, “my reed bent to the ground. Dead and disappointing—so I am found out, and that odious rice-pudding of a book is what I thought it—a dank failure.”

She had been nervous that people would expect another cloudy, lyrical book like The Waves, and would be disappointed that the narrative of The Years was more conventional, direct. She told Stephen Spender that this time she wanted to catch the attention of the general reader. But nobody could have written The Years, as de Selincourt said, who had not already written The Waves. Ostensibly it was about a family, the Pargiters, who began in a Victorian house like Hyde Park Gate in the 1880s, and we follow their branching, fraying lives until the year of the book’s publication. It is in part autobiographical. We are given a taste of Virginia’s experience in the First World War, under bombardment in London, and of the major themes that concerned her, like the subordination of women and her agnosticism. Take this passage describing the funeral of Mrs. Pargiter, as her daughter listens to the vicar pronouncing a benediction over the open grave:

“We give thee hearty thanks,” said the voice, “for that it has pleased thee to deliver this our sister out of the miseries of this sinful world.” “What a lie!” she cried to herself. “What a damnable lie!” He had robbed her of the one feeling that was genuine.

That was the defiant Virginia speaking. We also hear Virginia the poet. She, who had never written a line of poetry in her life, could devote an entire page of her novel to rain, not as Hardy would have done it, expositorily, but like Spenser, evocatively. There is a touch of Bloomsbury too. The second-generation Pargiters are unafraid to discuss sex, war, cruelty, the poor, the rich, youth contrasted with age, permanence with change, but they were less adventurous than Bloomsbury. They did not voyage out.

Although it was more clairvoyance than simple narrative, the book was an immediate success with a public that had come to regard Virginia Woolf’s novels with the same awe that the next generation paid to Henry Moore’s sculptures. In England its sales restored the Woolfs’ finances, which after the long interval since the success of Flush had started to wobble again. In America, as a reward for Donald Brace’s infinite patience with Virginia’s constant postponements, it sold twenty-five thousand copies in two months, and for weeks remained on top of the fiction best-seller list. As Mitchell Leaska, himself an American, has remarked, “She was left with the grotesque fact that her most certain failure had become her greatest popular success.”

The long process of correcting the proofs of The Years coincided with the start of two other major projects in Virginia’s literary life—her biography of Roger Fry, which his sisters had begged her to undertake, and her polemic, Three Guineas. She enjoyed the polemic, for which she had begun to collect material, more than the biography, since there was no restriction on what she wanted to say about men and war, but with Fry there were personal problems of discretion: he had been Vanessa’s lover; Clive had been accused of plagiarizing his ideas. And the amount of information about him was overwhelming. “You can cut a novel by 250 pages, but how do you cut a life?” “The facts,” she wailed to Vita, “the swarm of facts. How can anyone lift a pen among them!” But she was committed by her promise to the sisters. Somehow she would have to indicate his love affairs without stressing them, for even Bloomsbury would not accept a treatment of sex in biography which became customary forty years later. To Ethel she wrote, “How does one square the relatives? How does one euphemise 20 different mistresses? But Roger every day turns out more miraculous.”

She slowly recovered her health after the ordeal of The Years, and was able to alternate her literary work with other obligations, just as Leonard managed to combine progress with his magnum opus After the Deluge with control of the Hogarth Press. When Margaret West, the most satisfactory of their managers, died in 1937, their burden was doubled. Virginia was still the main reader of manuscripts submitted to them, and traveled their books on publication. As the press became better known, and Virginia herself its star author, inevitably the flood of unsolicited prose and poetry increased. “Every boy and girl who can buy a fountain pen and a ream of paper,” she told Janet Case, “instantly writes a novel, ties it up and sends it to us.” But she found time to write articles for the weekly journals, and gave one broadcast in the BBC series “Words Fail Me.” The tape of her talk, which she called Craftsmanship, is the only substantial recording of her voice that survives. It had a singsong quality, a rise and fall in intonation, with emphasis placed in unexpected places, as in “civilization.” It was known as the Bloomsbury voice.

The abdication of Edward VIII in December 1936, before he had even been crowned, thrust aside for a few days every other consideration, personal and public. Virginia was excited to be living through an event which would be discussed for centuries to come. She did not much care for the monarchy. As a girl, she had stood in the street while Queen Victoria’s carriage rolled by, but that was her nearest encounter with royalty. When George V died, she thought the public’s grief “for a very commonplace man” excessive. To her it was a curious survival of “barbarism, emotionalism, heraldry, ecclesiasticism, sheer sentimentality and snobbery.” Of Edward VIII she wrote, from hearsay, that he was “a cheap second-rate little bounder, whose only good points are that he keeps two mistresses and likes dropping into tea with the wives of miners,” when there was only one current mistress, Wallis Simpson, and only one cup of tea with a miner’s wife.

When the king’s affair became public knowledge, Bloomsbury’s attitude was one of liberal indifference. Why shouldn’t he marry anyone he wants? But when they realized that the very existence of the monarchy, not just the fact of one monarch, was involved, they slightly changed their tune. This “insignificant little man” was moving a pebble that could precipitate an avalanche. So let him keep Wallis as his mistress, and when he tires of her, take another. “But apparently,” Virginia noted in her diary, “the King’s little bourgeois demented mind sticks fast to the marriage service,” in order to make Wallis respectable at the cost of losing his throne.

On Abdication Day, December 10, 1936, she took a bus to Whitehall, where a shuffling crowd awaited the news. By chance she met Lady Ottoline there, and, inspired by the same reflections, they looked up at the window from which Charles I had stepped onto the scaffold. “I felt I was walking in the 17th century with one of the courtiers, and she was lamenting not the abdication of Edward but the execution of Charles.” They hailed a taxi. The driver said, “We don’t want a woman that’s already had two husbands, and an American, when there are so many good English girls.” Vox populi. Then they saw a newspaper van drive past bearing on its poster the one word ABDICATION.