Some Thoughts on Virginia Woolf

Thinkin' ain't doin' me no good no

Thinkin' ain't doin' me no good no people

Thinkin' ain't doin' me no good no good

Joey Covington, Jefferson Airplane

Thanks to the liberating influence of Pierre Bayard (How to talk about Books you haven't Read), I am happy to confess to never having properly read Virginia Woolf. I have a vague recollection of, many moons ago, skimming through "The Waves". Since then I've had a couple of goes at "To the Lighthouse", each time getting stranded some third of the way through. But for all my inadequacies as a reader, like so many others, I cannot help being fascinated by the person of Virginia Woolf. Why? I'm sure it's because she presses so many of our socio-cultural buttons. Wonderfully well-connected, yet with unimpeachable bohemian credentials; unequivocally avant-garde, yet reassuringly upper-middle in manner and voice; intellectually brilliant, yet emotionally tragic; deeply serious, but enormous fun. Then there's that fantastic, and fantastically English, look. And the whole Bloomsbury thing. And the whole proto-feminist thing. And on you go.

One birthday, a couple of years ago, Carol got me a book entitled "Maisons d'Ecrivains", an album of atmospheric photographs taken of writers' homes, now turned into museums. [The "touch-the-relic" implications of these modern-day shrines probably deserve more detailed scrutiny, however...] The featured authors included Karen Blixen, Jean Cocteau, Lawrence Durrell, William Faulkner, Knut Hamsun, Ernest Hemingway, Hermann Hesse, Selma Lagerlöf, Alberto Moravia, Vita Sackville-West, Dylan Thomas, Mark Twain, W.B. Yeats, Marguerite Yourcenar. Quite a guest list! Each of the homes was fascinating in its own way, but if there was one place you might actually like to live, it was Monk's House, the Woolfs' cottage in Rodmell, Sussex. Charming, tasteful, comfortable, bohemian; all low ceilings, tall sash windows, exposed beams, green distempered walls, elegantly distressed furniture, original paintings, scattered books and cushions and flowers, Omega pottery, a wild expanse of semi-kept garden...an ideal context in which to receive Vanessa Bell, Clive Bell, Roger Fry, Duncan Grant, Lytton Strachey, Maynard Keynes etc., etc. Let's face it: Virginia Woolf is what we all would like to be, only more so. A Sunday-supplement embodiment of the highest aspirations of the middle class, floating carelessly above mere material concerns, gifted with rare sensibility and acute intelligence, at the forefront of the latest developments in literature and life, receiving as an equal and in unaffected good taste the artistic and intellectual giants of the age.

Actually no. No one in their right mind would want to be Virginia Woolf and she clearly wasn't. In fact it was fear of her own madness that drove her to suicide. The autumn before last we walked past Monk's House while over visiting family in Lewes. Thankfully in a way, the museum was closed, but we walked through the lovely village of Rodmell and on down to the river Ouse. Impossible not to be touched by the thought of the suffering Virginia Woolf filling her pockets full of stones in order to drown herself in the muddy waters. Suicide always seems an unbearably irretrievable misunderstanding. One of my best friends at university killed himself aged 20. He too was particularly gifted. Can one be too sensitive for this world? Possibly, but it seems to me that the suicide suffers from an irrational overconfidence in his own powers of judgement. Life may seem to be utterly bleak, unceasing misery and suffering stretching endlessly into a dark tunnel of pointlessness, but could it be that maybe, just maybe, I've missed something, that I don't know everything about my own life. The fact is we don't really know anything about our own lives, which remain utterly beyond our own ken. It could be said that, in a way, suicide is the ultimate vanity: the definitive promotion of Self above Life. Still, probably wise not to rush to any too easy judgement.

The truth is that it was hardly surprising if Virginia Woolf was a bit funny. Traumatised by the premature deaths of her mother and, shortly after, her half-sister, terrorised by her tyrannical and self-pitying father, molested by her half-brothers, stifled by the smothering conventions of her Victorian upbringing, Virginia Woolf's life was a triumph of courage over adversity. She was, however, subject to manic-depressive interludes and schizophrenic tendancies. It seems she killed herself in order to escape the growingly insistent voices in her head. Incredibly sad - and incredibly ironic - that an author whose literary art focuses on the essential instability of personality, should succumb to her own mental fragility. But in a way inevitable. Her ferociously honest insights into human nature and the fluctuating complexities of the seemingly simplest human relations could only have been won by unflinching self-observation. Difficult not to suspect that this rare capacity for self-understanding, amounting almost to a sixth sense, was a function of her condition, which was a function of her experience, which was a function of the people and events in her life, all of which in turn where influenced by her own inner state... and so on. This, I believe, is the core of Virginia Woolf's insight - that what we believe to be firm and solid in ourselves, our own personality, is in fact a nucleus of temperament around which certain influences more or less randomly coalesce. And as these influence-globules jostle with each other in the stream of life, so they are constantly influencing and being influenced, changing and being changed. This is not an abstruse literary notion: any remotely sincere self-observation will reveal how, talking with different people, we ourselves become different people. Which immediately begs the question: what am I? With unwavering intellectual integrity, Virginia Woolf devoted her life and her writing to a permanent confrontation with this question. Could this process have ultimately led to the disintegration of personality which finally killed her? It's difficult not to suspect that it was at least a contributory factor. She herself admitted: "Leonard (her husband) says I shouldn't think about myself so much, I should think about outside things."

Is it possible to "think" your way to a true understanding of self? I would say almost certainly not. Associative thought is the very stuff out of which we construct our protean "personality". To seek to use that tool as a means to self-knowledge is like a dog trying to bite its own tail. Virginia Woolf's contemporary and fellow modernist, T.S. Eliot, wrestled with these same questions of the nature of human identity. He reaches similar conclusions about the heterogeneous nature of consciousness - "I know only a heap of broken images" or "These fragments I have shored against my ruin" (The Waste Land). But he goes further, pointing the way to a whole other dimension of understanding, through the abandoning of self in the direct experience of transcendental reality - "The awful daring of a moment's surrender". Was this ultimate experience of meaning denied to Virginia Woolf?

Reading "Moments of Being", a collection of her memoirs, it becomes clear that she certainly had intimations of this "other" reality. The editor, Jeanne Schulkind, spells out the point in an extremely helpful introduction:

...the individual in his daily life is cut off from 'reality' but at rare moments receives a shock. These shocks or 'moments of being' are not, as she imagined as a child, simply random manifestations of some malevolent force but 'a token of some real thing behind appearances'. The idea of a privileged moment when a spiritually transcendent truth of either personal or cosmic dimensions is perceived in a flash of intuition is, of course, a commonplace of religious experience and in particular of mystical traditions of thought...

Virginia Woolf formulated her own thinking as follows:

From this I reach what I might call a philosophy; at any rate it is a constant idea of mine; that behind the cotton wool is hidden a pattern; that we - I mean all human beings - are connected with this; that the whole world is a work of art. "Hamlet" or a Beethoven quartet is the truth about this vast mass that we call the world. But there is no Shakespeare, there is no Beethoven; certainly and emphatically there is no God; we are the words; we are the music; we are the thing itself.

The pantheistic twist she gives to this idea points, I think, to the source of her despair. "God" is not an old man in a beard telling you you have to be good, but rather a way of expressing the sacred idea of different levels of meaning, different levels of reality. A "Moment of Being" is the intrusion of a higher into a lower level of reality. Abandon the idea of levels and everything is equally significant or equally senseless, depending on your mood. A dangerous situation for someone as susceptible as Virginia Woolf. [I also believe there is an inherent danger in the whole process of converting experience into words, especially in the case of experience of, for want of a better expression, a higher order. The ineffable is all too easily pulled down to the level of the literal, precious insight reduced to dust. We like the words, they give us a sense of control, but the real experience has been betrayed and we are left with an empty formula. Writers (and bloggers) beware.]

These, then, are a few thoughts on and around the subject of Virginia Woolf. Despite the Get-out-of-jail-free card I hold in the shape of Pierre Bayard, I am conscious of an inner teacher with a red biro writing "give examples!", "refer to the text!" I firmly resolve to return to the works. If I haven't stuck with them, it's probably because a) having got the basic point of stream-of-consciousness, the novels seem like so many variations on the same theme, and b) the necessarily introverted style involves, well, too much thinking of self, not enough outside things. That this is a rugby player's objection I am well aware. Are rugby players secretly afraid of Virginia Woolf?

[Postscript: My latest Virginia Woolf craze was kicked off by reading Mrs.Woolf and the Servants by Alison Light. I enjoyed it for the usual rather shameful class-conscious reasons. The basic point is an obvious one: for all their avant-garde intellectualism, Virginia Woolf and all her trendy friends were unable to shift for themselves. They needed servants to cook, clean and deal with all the everyday practicalities of life. The constant dependence on, and close proximity to these unintellectual, practical souls was a source of permanent stress. In Virginia Woolf's case they knew all her business in general and her history of mental illness in particular, a situation she sometimes felt almost unbearable. The book is basically an attack on snobbery and the undervaluing of seemingly humble lives. The implication is that VW couldn't have indulged her fine-madamy thoughts if she'd had to scrub her own floors and do her own laundry. Probably true, but I'm not quite sure where that leaves us - that writers and intellectuals aren't as important as they (and their readers) like to think they are, perhaps? Quite possibly, but there's a whiff of the re-education camp to this whole argument. The other question is: how emancipating is a feminism which depends on the drudgery of others - a relevant point in the modern dual-income world with its nannies and its home helps. Actually, VW's feminism was rather more subtle than the modern unreflected "parity-with-men" call. She believed that women should strive to be "non-participants in the Great Patriarchal Machine". Equal, but different.

Bitten by the bug, I went on to read "Moments of Being", a collection of VW's memoirs. I really enjoyed the bright, energetic, slightly gossipy style of "Reminiscences"- about her childhood and her mother, "A Sketch of the Past" covering her childhood and adolescence, but written much later in 1939, "22 Hyde Park Gate" - her later adolescence and the move to Bloomsbury, "Old Bloomsbury" about the Bloomsbury set, and finally the self-ironic "Am I a Snob?" The introductory essay by Jeanne Schulkind is particularly useful.

I then had a go at Lyndall Gordon's "Virginia Woolf - a Writer's Life". Wonderfully subtle and insightful, if a trifle over-written, it gives an intuitive sense of the subject's ambitions and dilemmas. Biography is a tricky genre - the wood can easily get lost for the trees as you hack your way through a detailed chronology without really getting a feel for the person. But I left this book with what I felt was a genuine understanding of what made VW tick.

I also saw "The Hours" when it came out. I seem to remember we laughed inappropriately and left early. Nicole Kidman was probably a bad idea.

Finally there's the film "Orlando" by Sally Potter, based on VW's novel of the same name. It's a few years since I saw it, but I remember it for its visual sumptiousness and its coy exploration of chameleon identity and sexuality in space and time. On the recommendation of my old Literature and Film lecturer from Leuven University I have a copy of the DVD. I could watch it again or, er, read the book even.]