In April 1939, after having been warned by her sister, the painter Vanessa Bell, that if she waited any longer she would “soon be too old,”1 Virginia Woolf began her notes towards an autobiography, which she called “Sketch of the Past.” She was fifty-seven, and she had been writing a biography of Roger Fry for just over a year. “As it happens that I am sick of writing Roger’s life, perhaps I will spend two or three mornings making a sketch,”2 Woolf noted at the outset of this attempt at autobiography, to be written in the gaps, as it were, of her other work: initially, from April to July 1939. After Roger Fry: A Biography appeared in 1940, and an almost year-long break from the autobiography, Woolf took up the “free page”3 of the “Sketch” again from June to November 1940, in the spare time around writing her last novel, “Pointz Hall,” which she worked on in the mornings and which became Between the Acts (1941).
Woolf had written very different fragments of her life before, in the four chapters of family “Reminiscences” written in her mid-twenties and addressed to Vanessa’s first child, Julian Bell, begun before he was born; and in the three wry and convivial pieces she had written to read aloud at the Bloomsbury “Memoir Club” in the 1920s and 30s.4 She had also been writing a diary for many years, especially from 1917 onwards. She had long intended to use the diaries as a source for writing her autobiography. “Oh yes, I shall write my memoirs out of them, one of these days,”5 she noted of her diaries (in the diaries themselves) in 1927. In 1938, again in the diaries, she mused on what her intention was in writing “these continual diaries”: “Not publication. Revision? A memoir of my own life? Perhaps. Only other things crop up.”6 In June 1939, having begun her “Sketch of the Past,” Woolf writes in the diary that “perhaps if I go on with my memoirs […] I shall make use of it.”7 She very nearly lost the twenty-four volumes of the diaries when the Woolfs’ London flat at 37 Mecklenburgh Square, where they had only just moved all their things from their previous London house, 52 Tavistock Square, in 1939, was bombed in October 1940. Coming to London from Monk’s House in Rodmell, East Sussex, where she and her husband Leonard had been largely based since the onset of the Second World War, Woolf salvaged the diary volumes from the mess of “litter, glass, black soft dust, plaster powder”: “a great mass for my memoirs.”8
But Woolf never wrote these memoirs in full as she had intended to, and the diaries were not really put to use in her “Sketch”: a provisional, improvisatory, “distracted and disconnected”9 account of her formative memories and years, leading up to, and only just moving beyond, the turn of the twentieth century. So provisional, in fact, does the “Sketch” appear, that at one point Woolf even tells us how she has retrieved it from her waste-paper basket, after deciding to take the autobiography up again in June 1940: “I had been tidying up; and had cast all my life of Roger into that large basket, and with it, these sheets too.”10 She had been looking for the “Sketch” to refresh herself from the “antlike meticulous labour” of correcting the proofs of her now-finished biography of Fry. “Shall I ever finish these notes,” Woolf asks herself, “—let alone make a book from them?”11 The war was pressing in. “Every night the Germans fly over England; it comes closer to this house daily.”12
In her “Sketch,” Woolf did not use the content of her diaries, but she did use all her experience of writing in the form of the diary, to attempt a tentative, experimental, and ongoing account of her life, which announces its own innovations as they occur to her. Not least among these innovations in 1939 is Woolf’s use of the present time of writing as a “platform,” making her memoir oscillate between diary and autobiography. Woolf had always been suspicious of the fixed, immobile stances of many biographies and autobiographies, in her many scattered remarks on life-writing in her essays and elsewhere, as her biographer Hermione Lee notes.13 A good biography “is the record of the things that change,” Woolf wrote, “rather than of the things that happen.”14 Reviewing a biography of Christina Rossetti, Woolf was wary of, but also beguiled by, how it seemed closed off from the outside world: “Here is the past and all its inhabitants miraculously sealed as in a magic tank,” she wrote, with the “little figures […] rather under life size.”15 In her “Sketch,” Woolf avoided the lure of finality and completeness, aiming instead to create a truthful impression of how the present always casts a shadow over portraits of the past.
Throughout her “Sketch,” Woolf kept on returning to “the little platform of present time on which I stand,”16 from which she now looked back. The constant reversion to the present tense does not give the “Sketch” extra clarity: sometimes, quite the opposite, as it highlights fractures in its composition and the muddle of the actual. The autobiography, written in the breaks from the Fry biography, even gives a snapshot of the chaos of the writer’s desk. “I look up at my skylight,” Woolf writes, “—over the litter of Athenaeum articles, Fry letters—all strewn with the sand that comes from the house that is being pulled down next door—I look up and see, as if reflecting it, a sky the colour of dirty water. And the inner landscape is much of a piece.”17 Woolf follows this by recording that the painter Mark Gertler had dined with her the night before, and had declaimed on the “inferiority of what he called ‘literature’; compared with the integrity of painting. ‘For it always deals with Mr and Mrs Brown,’—he said—with the personal, the trivial, that is; a criticism which has its sting and its chill, like the May sky.”18
In setting out her early memories in the “Sketch,” Woolf herself initially aimed for a painterly purity, as she describes, in almost hallucinatory detail, scenes which have remained in her mind over the long gap of years. Trying to find some order among “the enormous number of things I can remember”19 and “the number of different ways in which memoirs can be written,”20 she sets down her first memory, of sitting on her mother’s lap and of her mother’s dress, “of red and purple flowers on a black ground.”21 This leads to another memory, “which also seems to be my first memory, and in fact it is the most important of all my memories”: 22
If life has a base that it stands upon, if it is a bowl that one fills and fills and fills—then my bowl without a doubt stands upon this memory. It is of lying half asleep, half awake, in bed in the nursery at St Ives. It is of hearing the waves breaking, one, two, one, two, and sending a splash of water over the beach; and then breaking, one, two, one, two, behind a yellow blind […] If I were a painter I should paint these impressions in pale yellow, silver, and green. There was the pale yellow blind; the green sea; and the silver of the passion flowers.23
The preeminence Woolf gives this shimmering memory, although it is an image of flux, is slightly at odds with the provisionality elsewhere so important to her “Sketch”—perhaps suggesting that above all, in the present of 1939, she wants this to be her most important memory, with its light and water contrasting with another very early, disturbing memory just a few pages later, of her half-brother Gerald Duckworth exploring her “private parts,” against her will, “once when I was very small.”24 “I remember resenting, disliking it—what is the word for so dumb and mixed a feeling? It must have been strong, since I still recall it.”25
Woolf is the first to question her own memories and how she has reordered them in setting them down on the page. She notes how some memories can be “more real than the present moment,”26 and how she can “reach a state where I seem to be watching things happen as if I were there.”27 Yet she knows that “as an account of my life they are misleading, because the things one does not remember are as important; perhaps they are more important.”28 Woolf writes of how large parts of her life are defined by what she calls “non-being”29—the humdrum, unremarkable, daily stuff of life, “a kind of nondescript cotton-wool”30 which surrounds everything, including the “moments of being”31 which stand out by contrast in retrospect, and which Woolf enshrines in her “Sketch.” The fluidity of her sense of the past and how well she remembers it is also noted by Woolf. “The past only comes back when the present runs so smoothly that it is like the sliding surface of a deep river,” she writes. “Then one sees through the surface to the depths.”32 She finds that the past, glimpsed in this way, gives greater meaning to the present, which sometimes “presses so close that you can feel nothing else.”33 Perhaps she was complaining of the war-time present of 1940, “marooned” in Rodmell “by the bombs in London,”34 as she wrote in her diary.
The “Sketch” was left unfinished, with its last dated entry in November 1940. On March 28, 1941, Woolf left an undated letter for Leonard on the table in the sitting-room, alongside one for Vanessa, before walking out towards the River Ouse, where she left her stick on the bank, put a heavy stone in her coat pocket, and drowned herself. She had been worried about becoming ill again, and she knew that she might become a burden for Leonard and Vanessa. In her letter to Leonard, she made it very clear that her decision was hers alone and not any fault of his: “Nothing anyone says can persuade me […] No one could have been so good as you have been. From the very first day till now. Everyone knows that.”35 Turning the page she wrote, finally, “Will you destroy all my papers.”36 Of course Leonard, in the end, did no such thing.
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Woolf’s reflections on life-writing in her “Sketch of the Past” mirror the discoveries of the other writers in Portraits from Life, revealing the importance of the time of the writing of autobiography, the unreliability of memory, the search for the shape of a life, and the ways that life-writing is always concerned with other people. The ethics of depicting these others unsettled Woolf, as they haunted all the other writers in this book. In her biography of Roger Fry, she wished to “tell all,” yet she also felt a deep respect for privacy. As the daughter of Leslie Stephen, editor of the Dictionary of National Biography, Woolf instinctively resisted the proprieties of Victorian biography—as Lytton Strachey, whose biography she had also considered writing when she was beginning Roger Fry, had done in Eminent Victorians (1918). But even in the late 1930s, Woolf found that pressure from Fry’s family made full disclosure of Fry’s life impossible. Writing about real people, using their real names, was, Woolf discovered, very difficult.
When each of the novelists in the portraits in this book wrote about themselves and others in their memoirs or autobiographies, they often risked more than in their explicitly fictional texts. While their autobiographies were in many ways another kind of ultimate fiction, they all felt the difference between writing an autobiography and writing novels. Sometimes this difference can seem wafer-thin; yet the difference is there nonetheless. As H. G. Wells wrote in Boon, distancing himself from his pseudonym who so violently savaged an ageing Henry James: “Bliss is Bliss and Wells is Wells. And Bliss can write all sorts of things that Wells could not do.”37
Nowhere are the different risks in autobiographies more apparent than in their portrayal and potential exposure of others. Even in the most seemingly uninhibited account of a life, there are individuals about whom the autobiographer will feel protective, and who are often, because of this, invisible in the autobiography. This protective social side of a genre often seen as introspective, egotistical, and confessional, is perhaps a feature of autobiography most apparent to novelists, used as they are to the relative freedom of masks and personae. The shielding hand of the writer or artist, as in Parmigianino’s Self-Portrait, is often not self-defensive so much as wary of causing others unnecessary pain.
In the twentieth century, one can trace a steady increase in candor in autobiography—especially in terms of sexual relationships. During the period of Portraits from Life, in the first half of the twentieth century, the relationship between candor and privacy was in a radically transitional phase. Some writers felt the impulse to reveal everything, but could only get halfway towards this aim. Others remained wary and essentially private about many things. While Wells and Edith Wharton wrote unpublished, more candid accounts of their sexual relationships that they knew would eventually join their public autobiographies, the other figures in these portraits offer masterpieces of tact, evasion, and discretion. “I never comment on anybody,”38 Ford wrote to his mother in 1919; and in this light the imaginative gloss and omissions of his reminiscences can also be seen as a form of protection of those intimate with him.
In many of the cases here, autobiography was first conceived almost as a creative holiday: sometimes embarked upon due to the breakdown of imagination, sometimes begun cynically to provide financial relief with minimal effort, sometimes begun as a form of wider life-therapy. Woolf began her “Sketch,” as she tells us, “in fits and starts by way of a holiday from Roger.”39 This also happened to be soon after she met Freud in Hampstead for the first time in 1939—and while, unusually, Woolf began her project as a break not from fiction but from biography, she is not alone in her vision of autobiography as being potentially reinvigorating. But the frequently longed-for therapeutic side of autobiography seldom operates as simplistically as is often hoped; and once begun, the task of autobiography often becomes much more uncomfortable, implicatory, and engrossing than envisaged.
Each of the seven writers in Portraits from Life, once they had started, wrote their own lives—in part or in full—more than once; and they often planned to write more autobiography than they eventually did, even when they wrote their lives very fully. Each self-portrait often stimulates another attempt, as the writer becomes simultaneously more practiced as an autobiographer, while also more conscious of the insufficiencies of any one version of a life.
Multiple versions also occur because memory is constantly rewriting the script. If, in fiction, imagination is actively courted and fused with memory, the project of autobiography is often to attempt to transcribe memories which have not been tinted by the imagination in this way. And of course this is impossible. Each time a memory is recalled, it is to some extent rewritten in the mind, even before it is rewritten on the page. Autobiography often stimulates a very conscious act of memory that is the opposite of the unconscious, involuntary memory identified by Proust. One of the proofs of autobiography and reminiscence is that memory can be stimulated in an active way, aided and abetted by props, spurs, and documentary materials such as photographs, diaries, and old letters, just as much as memory also works autonomously by association or by accident, triggered off by places, smells, or tastes, as with Proust’s madeleine. But the fickle nature of memory also begs many questions, which are highlighted when memories are written down in autobiographies. Writing of her mother, Woolf notes, “how difficult it is to single her out as she really was; to imagine what she was thinking, to put a single sentence into her mouth! I dream; I make up pictures of a summer’s afternoon.”40
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Taken together, the portraits in this book, in the very widest sense, ultimately throw the most searching light not on the inevitable intertwinings of fact and fiction, the unreliabilities of memory and imagination, or the endless dance between past and present, so much as revealing, sadly and starkly, the nature of the human life cycle. While every autobiography is unique, as with any single life, this group portrait also highlights the opposite: how each of these writers’ stories, on a much larger level, is the same story. In this reading, quite unlike in the realm of fiction where the writer can fix everything exactly as he or she wishes, and assumes the hubristic role of creator, autobiography always becomes the quest to understand the quirks of fate, and the randomness of destiny.
Woolf, in her “Sketch,” notes how her instinct for writing, she thinks, is an attempt to make sense of, to find order in, perhaps to control, the moments of shock when the outside world often violently breaks into her life, giving a flashing illumination of a “pattern.” “I would reason that if life were thus made to rear and kick, it was a thing to be ridden,”41 Woolf writes:
I feel that I have had a blow […] it is a token of some real thing behind appearances; and I make it real by putting it into words. It is only by putting it into words that I make it whole; this wholeness means that it has lost its power to hurt me; it gives me, perhaps because by doing so I take away the pain, a great delight to put the severed parts together. Perhaps this is the strongest pleasure known to me.42
Part of the impulse to write fiction comes from the sense of power it grants its author, giving coherence, even mastery, to experience. For writers of autobiography, the search for a pattern amidst the sometimes overwhelming fullness of life is also inevitable. But it can be harder to grasp finally, with the same tight grip as in fiction. H. G. Wells, at the close of his third autobiography, the posthumous H. G. Wells in Love, after years of obsessive life-writing, came to the realization that destiny, or fate, is the subtext of all autobiography. In the “Note on Fate and Individuality” written in 1935 and put at the end of H. G. Wells in Love by Gip Wells in his role as editor of his father’s autobiography, H. G. wrote:
It is impossible, I find, to write autobiography with as much sincerity as I have sought, telling of limitations, frustrations, intrinsic failure and accepted defeats, without the picture beginning to take on more and more the quality of a fated destiny, without feeling more and more plainly how close one’s experiences have come to those of a creature of innate impulses, caught by circumstances and making an ineffectual buzzing about it like a fly on a fly-paper.43
Wells wrote that he rejected this view of predestination with every bone in his body, vehemently asserting free will—“some flies (a little sticky perhaps and hampered) do somehow get away from the fly-paper of circumstance.”44 But the image bothered him. As Gip notes, this ending of the “Postscript” to H. G. Wells in Love “survived all of the subsequent revisions virtually unchanged and was still present as the peroration in the final typescript. But my father had drawn a pencil line through it, both in the contents table and in the text of that last typescript, so he may have wished to exclude it for some reason.”45 Wells eventually gifted these views on fate to a fictional character instead, as Gip writes: “Meanwhile, almost the whole of this ‘Note’ was put into the mouth of the mythical Steele in The Anatomy of Frustration.”46
Perhaps something like this thought occurs to all writers of autobiography—that what we thought was entirely our own narrative, our own decisions, words, reactions, and thoughts, has actually been penned, at least in part, by someone (or something) else. The tension in this realization often keeps autobiographers trying continually to make sense of the life-stories they have both chosen and been given: until, finally, they run out of time.