Carlyle’s House: Newly discovered pieces by Virginia Woolf

      These pieces are like five-finger exercises for future excellence. Not that they are negligible, being lively, and with the direct and sometimes brutal observation, the discrimination, the fastidious judgement one expects from her… but wait: that word judgement, it will not do. Virginia Woolf cared very much about refinement of taste, her own and her subjects’. ‘I imagine that her taste and insight are not fine; when she described people she ran into stock phrases and took rather a cheap view’ (‘Miss Reeves’). This note is struck often throughout her work, and because of her insistence one has to remember that this woman, aged 28, took part in a silly jape, pretending to be one of the Emperor of Ethiopia’s party on a visit to a British battleship; that she and her friends went in for the naughty words you would expect from schoolchildren who have just discovered smut; that she was sometimes anti-Semitic, capable of referring to her admirable and loving husband as ‘the Jew’. This was rather more than the anti-Semitism of her time and class. The sketch here, ‘Jews and Divorce Courts’, is an unpleasant piece of writing. But then you have to remember a similarly noisy and colourful Jewess in Between the Acts, described affectionately: Woolf likes her. So, this writing here is often unregenerate Woolf, early work pieces, and some people might argue they would have been better left undiscovered. Not I: it is always instructive to see what early crudities a writer has refined into balance – into maturity.

      None of that lot, the Bloomsbury artists, can be understood without remembering that they were the very heart and essence of Bohemia, whose attitudes have been so generally absorbed it is hard to see how sharply Bohemia stood out against its time. They are sensitive and art-loving, unlike their enemies and opposites, the crude business class. E. M. Forster, Virginia Woolf’s good friend, wrote Howards End, where the battle between Art and the Wilcoxes is set out. On the one hand the upholders of civilisation, on the other, Philistines, ‘the Wilcoxes’. To be sensitive and fine was to fight for the survival of real and good values, against mockery, misunderstanding and, often, real persecution. Many a genuine or aspiring Bohemian was cut off by outraged parents.

      But it was not only ‘the Wilcoxes’, crass middle-class vulgarians, but the working people, who were enemies. The snobbery of Woolf and her friends now seems not merely laughable, but damaging, a narrowing ignorance. In Forster’s Howards End two upper-class young women, seeing a working person suffer, remark that ‘they don’t feel it as we do’. As I used to hear white people, when they did notice the misery of the blacks, say, ‘They aren’t like us, they have thick skins.’

      With Woolf we are up against a knot, a tangle, of unlikeable prejudices, some of her time, some personal, and this must lead us to look again at her literary criticism, which was often as fine as anything written before or since, and yet she was capable of thumping prejudice, like the fanatic who can see only his own truth. Delicacy and sensitivity in writing was everything and that meant Arnold Bennett and writers like him were not merely old hat, the despised older generation, but deserved obloquy and oblivion. Virginia Woolf was not one for half measures. The idea that one may like Arnold Bennett and Virginia Woolf, Woolf and James Joyce was not possible for her. These polarisations, unfortunately endemic in the literary world, always do damage: Woolf did damage. For decades the arbitrary ukase dominated the higher reaches of literary criticism. (Perhaps we should ask why literature is so easily influenced by immoderate opinion?) A fine writer, Arnold Bennett, had to be rejected, apologised for, and then – later – passionately defended, in exactly her own way of doing things: attack, or passionate defence. Bennett: good; Woolf: bad. But I think the acid has leaked out and away from the confrontation.

      A recent film, The Hours, presents Woolf in a way surely her contemporaries would have marvelled at? She is the very image of a sensitive suffering lady novelist. Where is the malicious spiteful witty woman she in fact was? And dirty-mouthed, too, though with an upper-class accent. Posterity it seems has to soften and make respectable, smooth and polish, unable to see that the rough, the raw, the discordant, may be the source and nurse of creativity. It was inevitable that Woolf would end up as a genteel lady of letters, though I don’t think any of us could have believed she would be played by a young, beautiful, fashionable girl who never smiles, whose permanent frown shows how many deep and difficult thoughts she is having. Good God, the woman enjoyed life when she wasn’t ill; liked parties, her friends, picnics, excursions, jaunts. How we do love female victims, oh how we do love them.

      What Virginia Woolf did for literature was to experiment all her life, trying to make her novels nets to catch what she saw as a subtler truth about life. Her ‘styles’ were attempts to use her sensibility to make of living the ‘luminous envelope’ she insists our consciousness is, not the linear plod which is how she saw writing like Bennett’s.

      Some people like one book, others another. There are those who admire The Waves, her most extreme experiment, which to me is a failure, but a brave one. Night and Day was her most conventional novel, recognisable by the common reader, but she attempted to widen and deepen the form. From her first novel, The Voyage Out, to the last, the unfinished Between the Acts – which has for me the stamp of truth: I remember whole passages, and incidents of a few words or lines seem to hold the essence of let’s say, old age, or marriage, or how you experience a much-loved picture – her writing life was a progression of daring experiments. And if we do not always think well of her progeny – some attempts to emulate her have been unfortunate – then without her, without James Joyce (and they have more in common than either would have cared to acknowledge) our literature would have been poorer.

      She is a writer some people love to hate. It is painful when someone whose judgement you respect comes out with a hymn of dislike, or even hate, for Virginia Woolf. I always want to argue with them: but how can you not see how wonderful she is … For me, her two great achievements are Orlando, which always makes me laugh, it is such a witty little book, perfect, a gem; and To the Lighthouse, which I think is one of the finest novels in English. Yet people of the tenderest discrimination cannot find a good word to say.