BOOKS
Who's afraid of her?
Philip Hensher
VIRGINIA WOOLF by Hermione Lee Chatto, £20, pp. 892
Probably more is known about Virginia WooIfs life than of just about any other English writer. Perhaps only Boswell rivals her in the sheer quantity of documentary material which treads through a writing life, day by day, hour by hour. Growing up in a literary household, spending her entire adult life surrounded by obsessive letter- writers, diarists and gossips, and, not least, being an awe-inspiringly self-obsessed per- son, great piles of papers concerning her have been surfacing since her death, and probably haven't come to an end yet. Perhaps — a pleasing thought — the diaries of the two women she eaves- dropped on and dismissed as 'fat white slugs' in 1941 are still to come to light; perhaps the two girls she listened to in the ladies' lay at the Sussex Grill in Brighton on the same day — 'common little tarts' — are still around, and would like to let us know what they thought of the horse-faced, snobbish woman they encountered 55 years ago.
But even sticking to the writings of cousins and sisters and aunts, of friends and acquaintances and enemies, the biographer soon comes up against the problem of what to leave out, and, in this apparently most enviably biographable of writers, against the problem of how much to include of what Vanessa said to Duncan about what Lytton said about Virginia. Quickly, one begins to realise that Hilary Spurling, who, writing a life of Ivy Compton-Burnett, had nothing to go on but 50 years of invitations to tea parties, had, in some ways, the less difficult task of the two.
We really know far too much about Woolf, we know what she was wearing the first time she met Madge Garland — 'what could only be described as an upturned Wastepaper basket on her head'. We know how much money she had, and how she earned it, year by year — nearly £3,000 M 1938. We know when she had her ears pierced (1928, with Vita for moral support) and, God help us, what she used for sani- tary towels (she made her own out of Kapok).
Most of this is set down in Woolfs letters and diaries, going on for page after page about herself. 'I do not often talk so much about myself,' she wrote to one biographer, lying through her teeth. Her egotism was such that she often forgot that people out- side her immediate circle might have other things to occupy their minds than the tiny details of her life. When Lytton's mother told her in adult life that she recalled see- ing her as a child with her mother on an omnibus, it seemed reasonable to Woolf to ask 'Which omnibus?', to the amazement of Lady Strachey. Freud, the old fox, knew enough about her to bring her a flower when they met in 1939. It was a narcissus.
Insecurity was Woolf s great driving force in life, what drove her to ceaseless self-examination; and, though it's easy for a biographer who never knew her to make sympathetic noises, her self-doubt surfaced in what must have been extremely unpleasant ways. She was a snob of almost psychopathic proportions, for instance, maintaining her sense of self-worth by a ferocious loathing of the lower classes. Snobbish about her husband — 'how I 'I wish you'd not send those things to my troops in the front line, Madam. They are extremely bad for the health.' hated marrying a Jew' — about her biogra- pher, Winifred Holtby — 'she learned to read, I'm told, by minding the pigs' — and even, what only the maddest of snobs. would bother with, being quite often snob- bish about the servants, and relishing, when they are off sick, 'the absence of lower classes', she is a perfect example of some- one who became successful by the simple means of being perfectly beastly about any- one she felt superior to.
Plenty of writers are horrible people, of course, and it's something that doesn't mat- ter if they are good writers. But Woolf s novels must, I suppose, be responsible for putting more people off serious modern fiction than any other writer. They are truly terrible books, written in a language never spoken by any human being, and written, I suppose, only by Meredith, or Elinor Glyn:
Am I not, as I walk, trembling with strange oscillations and vibrations of sympathy, which, unmoored as I am from a private being, bid me embrace these engrossed flocks?
I think it was Tom Shone who rightly pointed out that Woolf cannot describe anything without telling the reader what to think of it. What is the moon like? 'Sub- lime.' How do the birds come descending? `Lovelily.' What is a bird like? 'Beautiful, fabulous.' This isn't description, this is cheerleading. No wonder the more half- witted of Woolfs admirers go along with her, and describe her books, too, as sub- lime, lovely, beautiful and fabulous. There is never an ordinary sensation in Woolf; no one ever thinks 'that's quite a nice dress' or 'what a comfy chair'. Rather, a beef stew, a scarf, a shower of rain are routinely greet- ed with ludicrously got-up ecstasy, quite false to ordinary experience and designed, not to explain anything, but to demonstrate the writer's extraordinary sensitivity.
Her vaunted modernism is a matter of externals; of imposing hard, inflexibly eccentric forms on ordinary materials. Let us have a novel consisting of the mono- logues of six characters; let us have a death-bed scene consisting of a subordinate clause; let us . have two parallel and unconnected stories in the same novel. These ostentatious experiments do not enlighten us about the subjects of the novel; they direct us back only to the grandly dispensing figure of the novelist, seeing how many times she can use the adverb 'slowly' in The Waves, or in what newly ridiculous way she can tell a commonplace story. Her best novel, I suppose, is The Years, in which she seems to begin to perceive the value and point of naturalism, and, by the beginnings of hard work, to achieve it. Hermione Lee thinks that, because the book's political argument is not explicit, it's 'a kind of crippled text'. I think that's why it's any good, that for once it doesn't bully the reader. But, as a whole, her awful, poetic effusions are inferior to the elegant and serious work of her despised Arnold Bennett.
One of the problems with Woolf's work, as Hermione Lee's quite interesting biogra- phy demonstrates, is that it was never edit- ed. Printing her own novels at the Hogarth Press, she had only Leonard to rely on as a critical reader. And he wasn't much good, or wasn't allowed to be much good. When he read The Waves, he remarked, 'It is a masterpiece, and the best of your books.' Startlingly similar to his opinions of Jacob's Room — 'a work of genius' — of To the Lighthouse — 'a masterpiece' — and, for that matter, to Virginia's opinion of her own work — 'Dear me, how lovely some parts of The Lighthouse are!' — it wasn't a lot of use as a suggestion as to how it might be improved.
Anyway, here we have the latest in a long line of biographies, and it's too much to hope that it will be the last. Hermione Lee is a critic and not, especially, a biographer. Sometimes the thematic element takes precedence over the biographer's duty of constructing a story, with the result that we find ourselves reading about events in the 1920s before the first world war has been gone through. She's pretty good on the most appealing aspect of Bloomsbury, the practical-joking side which led half a dozen ne'er-do-wells to dress up as the Emperor of Abyssinia and his entourage and achieve a state visit to HMS Dreadnought. I never knew, incidentally, that the original plan was to dress up as German cavalry officers and mount a bogus invasion of Alsace- Lorraine; if they'd succeeded, all those books on the origins of the first world war might have read quite differently. She doesn't over-do all those arguments about whether Woolf was sexually abused as a child, whether her marriage was ever consummated, whether she had a lesbian relationship with Vita Sackville-West or Ethel Smyth, which seem so fascinating to rival biographers.
But on the whole, though perfectly read- able, perfectly conunendable to any reader who wants once more to plunge into Vanessa and Duncan and Lytton and Ottoline and the rest of the dreary crew, or for any would-be biographer in search of tempting subjects — I don't think, though it seems unlikely, that Saxon Sydney- Turner's been done yet — for the rest of us, it may be safely passed over. If one compares the mountain of biographical writing about Virginia Woolf with the bibliography on one of her discoveries, Henry Green, we may see the result of a writer chiefly interested in promoting her- self, and that of a writer — a considerably better one — who only wished to write.
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