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. I want to protest that surely it should not be ‘the dreadful novels of Virginia Woolf’, ‘silly Orlando’ but rather ‘I don’t like Orlando, I don’t like To the Lighthouse, I don’t like Virginia Woolf.’ After all, when people of equal discrimination to oneself adore, or hate, the same book, the smallest act of modesty, the minimum act of respect for the great profession of literary critic should be ‘I don’t like Woolf, but that is just my bias.’
Another problem with her is that when it is not a question of one of her achieved works, she is often on an edge where the sort of questions that lurk in the unfinished shadier areas of life are unresolved. In this collection is a little sketch called ‘A Modern Salon’, about Lady Ottoline Morrell, who played such a role in the lives and work of many artists and writers of the time, from D. H. Lawrence to Bertrand Russell. We are glad to read what Woolf thinks, when so many others have had their say. Woolf describes her as a great lady who has become discontented with her own class and found what she wanted in artists, writers. ‘They see her as a disembodied spirit escaping from her world into purer air.’ And, ‘She comes from a distance with strange colours on her.’ That aristocrats had, and in some places still have, glamour, we have to acknowledge, and here Woolf is trying to analyse it and its effects on ‘humbler creatures’, but there is something uncomfortably sticky here; she labours on, sentence after sentence, until it seems she is trying to stick a pin through a butterfly’s head. There were few aristocrats in the Bohemian world of that time: it is a pity Ottoline Morrell was such a bizarre representative. A pitiful woman, she seems now, so generous with money and hospitality to so many protégés, and betrayed and caricatured by many of them. They don’t come out very well, the high-minded citizens of Bohemia, in their collision with money and aristocracy.
It is hard for a writer to be objective about another who has had such an influence – on me, on other women writers. Not her styles, her experiments, her sometimes intemperate pronouncements, but simply her existence, her bravery, her wit, her ability to look at the situation of women without bitterness. And yet she could hit back. There were not so many female writers then, when she began to write, or even when I did. A hint of hostilities confronted is in her sketch here of a visit to James Strachey and his Cambridge friends. ‘I was conscious that not only my remarks but my presence was criticised. They wished for the truth, and doubted whether a woman could speak or be it.’ And then the wasp’s swift sting: ‘I had to remember that one is not fully grown at 21.’
I think a good deal of her waspishness was simply that: women writers did not, and occasionally even now do not, have an easy time of it.
We all wish our idols and exemplars were perfect; a pity she was such a wasp, such a snob – and all the rest of it, but love has to be warts and all. At her best she was a very great artist, I think, and part of the reason was that she was suffused with the spirit of ‘They wished for the truth’ – like her friends, and, indeed, all of Bohemia.
Tolstoy was always in trouble with the censor and the Czar’s police. He was expected by the common people and the liberal opposition to take a stand – and he did – on every kind of humanitarian issue, from famines mishandled by the government, to persecutions by an arbitrary and often cruel regime. He was known as much as a social critic and moralist as an author. ‘There are two czars in Russia,’ pronounced one liberal spokesman, ‘and the other is Tolstoy.’ He was described as the conscience of the world. The Kreutzer Sonata, published in 1889 when Tolstoy was 61, caused instant scandal. The censor was going to ban it but a compromise was reached by allowing an edition too expensive for ordinary people. Not that banning Tolstoy did much good: his works were copied out by disciples and distributed in hundreds of copies. Samizdat was not invented by the Soviets. (Samizdat was the illegal distribution of works banned by the Communist Party.) Because of Tolstoy’s moral authority it was not possible to ignore it or pretend that these unappetising views were of no importance. In the United States the US Postal Service banned the mailing of newspapers serialising The Kreutzer Sonata. Theodore Roosevelt said that Tolstoy was a sexual moral pervert. The nascent women’s movements were furious: this was the time of the New Woman. Chekhov, who revered Tolstoy, defended the book because of its aesthetic virtues and because, he said, the whole subject needed discussion. The emotional reactions to the novel have always been inordinate, but something written at white heat must provoke incandescent reactions. Reading it now I think people will feel first of all, curiosity – what was all that fuss about? – and then almost certainly, disquiet, dismay, and incredulity that anything so wrongheaded could be written by a favourite author: War and Peace, Anna Karenina, Resurrection.
Reading it now something has to strike you. The tale originated in a true story, which was in all the newspapers, and used by Tolstoy for polemic purposes. A husband did kill his wife from jealousy, but the tale as told by Tolstoy makes you ask, ‘Wait a minute, but what, in fact, did this erring wife do?’ Nothing much, even according to the stricter modes and morals of that time. A furore of suspicion and rage is built on atmosphere, glances, possibilities
