New intimacy with Virginia Woolf

Press, 13 July 1985, Page 20

New intimacy with Virginia Woolf

Virginia Woolf: A Writer’s Life. By Lyndall Gordon. Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1984, 283 pp, Ulus, notes, biog. sources, index. $45 approx.

(Reviewed by

Joan Curry)

Virginia Woolf wrote to a friend that she . “must be private, secret, as anonymous and submerged as possible in order to write.” And in spite of thousands of published letters, five fat volumes of her diary, and many books describing her life and times, she remains an elusive figure when you think about the part that matters: Virginia Woolf the writer. Many people approach Virginia Woolf warily, if not disparagingly. Her novels, they say, are precious, unreadable, and have no plot. Her diaries, they say, are exhaustive and exhausting, her letters pretentious rubbish. Her essays and articles are full of cranky reasoning. And, they say, Virginia Woolf herself, together with her Bloomsbury friends, were pains in the neck. Some of their contemporaries thought them arrogant. Bloomsbury, of course, didn’t give a toss what other people thought. Nevertheless Virginia Woolf would probably have approved of attempts to increase the intimacy between writer and reader. She cared little for academic analysis, but sought the approval and understanding of the common reader. As well, she was intensely curious about other people’s lives herself and rarely missed a chance to probe beneath the surface of those she met in order to build up sketches and portraits. Lyndall Gordon points out that “Virginia Woolf saw biography as a portrait, not a compendium of facts. Her subject had to be composed like a work of art. Memories and facts were essential but, in the end, were only a guide to questions.”

Memories and facts were indeed essential to Virginia Woolf’s career. The facts she acquired from books and from her father, whose teaching she later summed up: “To read what one liked because one liked it, never to pretend to admire what one did not — that was his only lesson in the art of reading. To write in the fewest possible words, as clearly as possible, exactly what one meant — that was his only lesson in the art of writing.” The child did not, of course, go to school. Memories formed the basis for all her creative work and one of the commendable aspects of this clear and sensible book is the attention Lyndall Gordon pays to the links between Virginia Woolf’s life and work. She remembered the beat of waves on a Cornish beach and harnessed their rhythms for at least two of her novels. She remembered, obsessively, those

close to her who had died and probed for the truth about them for their fictional portraits. To become a writer Virginia Woolf had first to shrug off a stuffy Victorian background that allowed boys to develop and achieve while keeping girls quiet, sheltered and ignorant. She once described a phantom figure she called the “angel of the house” who was sympathetic, charming, unselfish, conciliatory, who lived in Victorian houses, an idealised woman who was held up as a model for all obedient girls to emulate. This “angel” had to be challenged and destroyed: “If I had not killed her, she would have killed me, as a writer.” Virginia Woolf as a writer was versatile. In the long years of apprenticeship she spent a lot time prosaically on articles and reviews as well as on fiction. Always she was concerned with form, with style, and above all with rhythm. “Could I get my tomorrow morning’s rhythm right — take the skip of my sentence at the right moment.” She wanted to create a new kind of novel, a form that ignored traditional treatments of character, time and events, but concentrated on the hidden experiences that deflect people’s lives. Lyndall Gordon has demonstrated this experimental approach with particular reference to “The Waves,” a difficult book for readers accustomed to logically progressive sentences, biographies which are marked by life’s accepted milestones such as birth, marriage and death. The book was written to the rhythm of waves building, rolling, breaking, and the reader must submit or give up. Lyndall Gordon has made “The Waves” and its author easier to understand in this thoughtful book.