A Writer's Eye Part 11

Here's a picture composed of (1) the rooftoptall figure of Lenin, (2) two fashion models holding poses as untrembling as Lenin's, and (3) a photographer kneeling before the models in overcoat and beret in the act of clicking the cameraall on the vast stage of Hermitage Square in Leningrad. Cartier-Bresson's visual wit points up his observations like another source of light, human and portable.

They are his flawless black-and-whites, keyed to the most sensitive modulations, and in Russia how many grays he finds! All of them come into the small and beautiful "Village on the Sh.o.r.es of Lake Baika." Then he does without any grays at all in "Fishermen on a Frozen River," a double-page spread of infinite white cold, dotted with small, isolated, black silhouettes: 14 men and a dog.

Among the subjects: a standing sunbather, very white, with his feet on a Page 190 newspaper, face to the wall of the fortress of Peter and Paul, apparently in strange communion with his own black shadow; museum goers: the towering statue of Tsarina Anna, spiky as some giant Iron Maiden, being gazed up at by a lad with open mouth; dancers at the plastics factory in practice for a compet.i.tion, 150 in letters as large as the dancers' heads words of Lenin cover the wall beside them; washerwomen in Siberia dipping their clothes from a footbridge through a hole in the ice; a shepherd and his grazing flock in a Georgian meadow, some new iron and steel complex stretching the width of the sky behind him, like somebody else's mirage; a row of bundled up old women, bent over on their sticks, patiently waiting for something in the Cathedral at Pakov, above their heads an ancient painting of the Day of Judgment.

And the rows of housing complexes, rows of portraits of cosmonauts on h.o.a.rdings, rows of tractors, rows of computers, rows of human beings lined up for public occasions! They allow Cartier-Bresson to point out that impressiveness in number is subject to the humor that lies in repet.i.tion. Lined up along the row of computers in the petro-chemical factory is, he shows us, a row of potted plants in metal stands in supervisory positions: we catch a little Gallic mockery along with the Russian reiterations.

The Russians themselves, although exhibiting in great variety, much substance and charm, strike this viewer as utterly devoid of the gifts that equipped Cartier-Bresson to take their pictures; in their pictures it is he who seems to have his worldly bearings, rather than they. One feels he has used these, his unerring equilibrium, his recognition of the comic, and indeed his world-traveler's experience of the profundity of long despair, almost without their knowing concurrence, to let them show and suggest what their real daily life is.

For the actions we see them engaged in never seem to have much more spontaneity than, say, the open-heart surgery Cartier-Bressonwho does get in everywherehas photographed in an operating room in Georgia. Perhaps it would be thought just as inappropriate to all they do. It's good when he does come uponand recordthe lovely rare thing, such as dancing in the meadows at a picnic on Festival of Chemistry Day.

Best of all there is the father photographed on the sh.o.r.e of a lake in the mountains of Armenia, lifting up his little boy, who stands erect and smiling in his little fur hat in the palm of his father's hand. With its superb, giving gesture of one man's own pride, hope, promise, this is the photograph "about Russia" that most closely touches us.

Page 191 Pictures and Conversations By Elizabeth Bowen As if She Had Been Invited into the World:

New York Times Book Review 5 January 1975: 4, 20

Spencer Curtis Brown, Elizabeth Bowen's literary agent and friend of many years, writes in his affecting and helpfully informative foreword to this collection about the circ.u.mstances surrounding the appearance of Pictures and Conversations. Miss Bowen, who died on Feb. 22, 1973, had talked over this book with him, and he prints here some notes she made for her publishers before she began it. 151 She did not intend it to be an autobiography in the accepted sense. (It got its t.i.tle from Alice in Wonderland.) It was not to follow a time sequence, and "it will be anything but all inclusive." Rather, "the underlying themeto which the book will owe what it is necessary that a book should have, continuitywill be the relationship (so far as that can be traceable, and perhaps it is most interesting when it is apparently not traceable) between living and writing."

Instead of the "personal" (in the accepted sense) we were to be given the more revealing findings she herself could bring out of her life and her work, calling for the truer candor, the greater generositya work to do reader as well as writer honor.

Entering into her decision to write it was the unnervement factor. She had seen studies and a.n.a.lyses of herself and her work by others. "While appreciative of the honor done me and of the hard work involved, I have Page 192 found some of them wildly off the mark. To the point of asking myself, if anybody must write a book about Elizabeth Bowen, why should not Elizabeth Bowen?"

Then she became ill. She wrote into her last year for as long as she could, and the last words she was able to speak were to Curtis Brown: "I want it published."

That wanting was an act of pa.s.sionate good faith in the intuition of a lifetime, as I see it. (Here I must speak as her friend as well as her reader.) 152 She believed that what she had managed to set down in however small part would carry a strength to make known to her readers what was to have been the burden of the whole. Her fragment is all affirmation and she was right. Most of her readers will feel less pain in there being so little completed for the radiance of what is here: this is what would have filled the book we shall never see.

The book we do have fairly ripples with life.

We are meeting an enchanting little girl, the Elizabeth Bowen of age 7 recently transplanted from Ireland to England, in her prophetic relationship to the woman and the writer she was to become. We find it possible everywhere and time after time to make the jump.

The schools she was sent to nourished what was to become her life-long love affair with other people's houses, for, she says, "Never had I the misfortune to be educated in any building erected for that purpose." Digging, the leader of her schoolgirl companions, through walls and into foundations of some former rectory on speculation of secret pa.s.sages, quite naturally turned into writing stories about houses a little later. "For all that," she says, "it was the foreground I stood upon that possessed me. Underfoot, it lost nothing by being terra firma: actual and tangible, it remained magic."

One is made aware in these pages of the scattering of seeds due for later flowering into The Death of the Heart, The Little Girls, Eva Trout and other fiction.153 And well does one recognize this child. There is the same sense of expectation, the eagerness to join in, take part, that gives its special strength and delight to her writing. She was a prime responder to this world. It was almost as if she'd been invited here. Some great pleasure lay deep inside her great sophisticationand here she was, at the top of her form, arrived to do it honor: a romantic, of courseself-described. A romantic with a particularly penetrating power of observation, and a joyous sense of the absurd.

What she says about the Irish is as wonderful as what she has made Page 193 dramatically dear in stories. All share in inborn traits: belligerence ("poles apart from aggressiveness," "your belligerent person tends to sail through life in excellent spirits"). The pa.s.sion for virtuosity of all kinds. The ability to strike root wherever set down, a peculiarity of the Anglo-Irishwhich of course she is. And there is writing: "To that we have taken like ducks to water." But, she goes on to say, "Possibly, it was England made me a novelist," because with the move, there was to be "a cleft between my heredity and my environmentthe former remaining, in my case, the more powerful.'' "If you began in Ireland, Ireland remains the norm: like it or not." "What had to be bitten on was that two ent.i.ties so opposed, so irreconcilable in climate, character and intention, as Folkestone and Dublin should exist simultaneously, and be operative, in the same life-time, particularly my own."

"I am not a 'regional' writer in the outright sense"but she is another: "Since I started writing, I have been welding together an inner landscape, a.s.sembled anything but at random." Not people and places in their own ident.i.ties, but people and places that experience called up in her became her stories and novels. They represent her reactions to experience, her "beholding afresh."

Her understanding of a wide range of relationships might easily have been rooted in what she describes in her childhood nature as "outgoing." Later on, her grown-up generosity might have been a form of concentration almost psychic, and in her writing this may have become the novelist's gift of quick perception, and a working tool. Fascination with the outside world, in retrospect, and through the intensity of writing fiction, becomes sharp scrutiny. A highly conscious ability to imagine herself in another's place is a writer's power tooin her case, to precipitate a highly complex plot and a full house of vivacious characters.

Pictures and Conversations was important to Elizabeth Bowen. Published, it is important to her readers, for, fragment that it is, it is whole in its essence, which survives interruption to the page. That relationship between her life and her artand here I use, for her, the word she forbore to use for herselfshe has divined in its spontaneous and still mysterious source and has traced it part way at least toward its broadening stream. What is here holds a particular blessing for those who loved Elizabeth, for they will not be able to read any sentence of it without being brought the cadence of her voice and the glow of her company.

As autobiography (in the Bowen sense), the chapters will fall into natural Page 194 place beside the enchanting Seven Winters (for the first seven years of her life, the summers were spent in Bowen's Court, the winters in Dublin); the brilliant introduction to the republished Early Stories; and of course the book Bowen's Court here is the chronology, here in the house, the family, the native land, and the history: Elizabeth Bowen abides in that book, deeply in it, and while it was not designed to tell us of herself as apart from it, it joins in, all joins in together now.

There was to have been a new Bowen novel, too. We have its opening chapter. Ent.i.tled "The Move-In," it gets straight down to business with the arrival at a (somehow chosen) strange house of a carload of young people and a banging at the door. We are in at the systematic onset of outrage upon a house, of whose already existing, internal, outrages we are receiving hints in counterpoint.

There is not a safe square inch in any of this chapter of preposterous conversation for a single character to move. The dangers signaled in the setting (a sort of lodge at road's end, in the stuffy heat of a July evening growing dark) are the deep psychological tensions that this highly contemporary situation is rapidly and impartially connecting up into an alarm system which the first touch will let loose.

"The Art of Bergotte," written at the request of Peter Quennell for a symposium and never published before among Elizabeth Bowen's own works, treats again, in another form, of the relationship that springs into existence and persists in growth between a novelist and his characters. Here the author is of course Proust and his character Bergotte another author. In the Bowen confrontation, we are guided through the kind of dream-construction that fiction is, a house full of inter-connecting rooms and crossing pa.s.sages, finally being stopped by its secret door.

"Notes on Writing a Novel" was a piece contributed to John Lehmann's Orion II in 1945. Later, Elizabeth Bowen says, she came not to like "their peremptory tone"but to this reader it seems the natural tone for a writer firing off working directions to herself from the thick of things. They are probing, unadorned and succinct to the point where they could almost serve as pa.s.swords between writers. They have the currency today, as far as I can see, of pure gold. "Plot is the knowing of destination." Its object is "the nonpoetic statement of a poetic truth.'' Characters, she thought, pre-exist for the novelist. "They are found. They reveal themselves slowly to the novelist's perceptionas might fellow-travelers seated opposite one in a Page 195 very dimly-lit railway carriage." Among things this taught me that I found most startling: "Nothing physical can be invented."

Curtis Brown has included the "Nativity Play" against the suggestion of some that he not do so "because it is so different from the work expected from Elizabeth Bowen." This seemed to him "a most excellent reason for including it. Herself a many-faceted person, her gifts were many-faceted, too . . . and I think she would have liked to know it was in print."

It was written for her friends and neighbors near Bowen's Court, who wanted a nativity play to perform with organ, chorus and trumpets, narrators and actors, in Limerick Cathedral. The treatment is very much her own, and when I read it first, in Ireland, it seemed to me very Irish. I see now how she made skillful dramatic use of the Irish country peoplein Mary and Joseph, the Shepherds, and the Children come to worship the Childin contrast to the Three Kings in their scene in the royal tent, who are austere philosophers and speak as intellectuals ("We three, who have come to a standstill"); and in contrast again to them used the heavenly members of the drama, ranks of Angels and Smaller Angels.

Even behind the wish to make a gift to the neighbors may there have lain another impulse? Elizabeth told, in Seven Winters, of the frequent reminders during her infancy from her mother of the unseen presence of angels and of her Guardian Angel, and of the picture on her nursery walls of "The Herald Angels." "My mother wished me to care for angels: I did."

Page 196 The c.o.c.katoos By Patrick White Life's Possibilities Are Those Very Things Once Felt As Dangers:

New York Times Book Review 19 January 1975: 4, 37

These are six stories (a few are short novels) to do with lives often driven or hopeless, but what they are ultimately about is what might have been. 154 They bring together the possibilities and the impossibilities of human relationships. They happen in Australia, Egypt, Sicily, Greece, where they go off like cannons fired over some popular, scenic riverdepth charges to bring up the drowned bodies. Accidentally set free by some catastrophe, general or personalwar, starvation, or nothing more than a husband's toothachePatrick White's characters come to a point of discovery. It might be, for instance, that in overcoming repugnancies they are actually yielding to some far deeper attraction; the possibilities of a life have been those very things once felt as its dangers. Or they may learn, in confronting moral weakness in others, some flaw in themselves they've never suspected, still more terrifying.

The common barriers of s.e.x, age, cla.s.s, nationality can in uncommon hands operate as gates, which open (for White's characters) to experience beyond anything yet traveled, hope of which may have beckoned from earliest years and gone ignored, only haunting dreams and spoiling the day at hand. Pa.s.sing us through these barriers is what Mr. White is doing in his writing.

All these stories are studies of ambiguities, of which the greatest is s.e.x. In Page 197 "A Woman's Hand," a long-married couple, traveling after the husband's retirement find themselves rather peculiarly put back in touch with two old friends out of their respective pastsa man for him, a woman for herrepresenting to each a different turn that had offered itself to their young lives. The wife's wifely solution is simple and disastrous (her bothersome guilt for her own inadequacy is set at rest if she can rearrange other people's lives): instead of letting these two make things awkward, why not marry the misfits off to each other?

This is the longest (86 pages) and in some ways the most sinister of Mr. White's stories treating of the realities and the unrealities of developing human relationships. It is highly symbolic, presided over by peac.o.c.ks. (According to fable, a peac.o.c.k's flesh is incorruptible, which made it a symbol of the Resurrection; here it a.s.sumes the meaning of liberation from captivity.) In this story, too, the irony lies most clearly in the fact that the true and guiding relationships of our livesfor whatever inhibiting reasonsmay never achieve the reality credited the ones that are acknowledged and binding but remain superficial and daunting.

"The Full Belly," a short novel laid in Athens during the German Occupation, takes us deep into the humiliations and terrible intimacies of starving to death as a family: the excruciating pressures of competing unselfishness, the demanding self-sacrifice. Aunt p.r.o.no radiates a "kind of hectic gaiety" as they dine off boiled dandelions. Aunt Maro takes to her bed, declining ever to eat or drink again: "Remember the children. Who am I to deny them food?" The young boy in question is a musical prodigy, with his ticket to Paris still at the bottom of his handkerchief drawer; he goes on practicing ("play to me, Costika,'' says the determined martyr, "music is more nourishing than food") and sees everything "with a vividness which only sickness or hunger kindles." Away from the house, there are the temptations coming out of doorways and the cautionary sights lying in the gutters; one old woman greedy for a boy's hand in her bosomshe'd give him a fresh egg; the next old woman lying dead in her decent dress with her emptied purse beside her and her shoes already taken from her feet.

Hunger and shame merge into a single monster. A terrible scene in front of Aunt Maro on her dying day spoils her victory for her: the boy and Aunt p.r.o.no come to desperate grappling over the plate of sacrificial rice lying untouchable before the icon, struggling together, smashing the plate and losing it all; then Costa is down on the carpet. "If only the few surviving grains. Sometimes fluff got in. Or a coa.r.s.e thread. He licked the grains. He Page 198 sucked them up. The splinters of porcelain cutting his lips. The good goo. The blood running. Even blood was nourishment."

"Five-Twenty" is the time a certain car pa.s.ses in the traffic line every afternoon. The scene is a front porch where sits an aging and childless married couple, a man, now an invalid in a wheel chair and imperious as ever, and his wife, a plain woman whose marriage has been one long deprivation of love, which she has taught herself to handle as best she can; she finds it easier now, being a nurse. She fastens on the 5:20 car as something to watch for and point out: it makes her day. Inevitably, the strands converge. It happens down on the garden path, after the husband leaves her a widow. A flower garden like hers, that's been overtended, and a love like hers, that's gone unnourished too long, may burst out alike into the overwhelming and monstrous.

The characters in most of these stories are men and women whose predicaments are rooted in their pasts, to whom fresh pressure is put by the predicaments of growing old. In "The Night the Prowler," we are plunged into the world of a 17-year-old girl whose state of being has everything to do with today. When Felicity is raped, she hadn't been afraid; she'd even hoped something real and revealing might be going to occur, but the rapist is a failure and pathetic. She sees that her conventional parents, in the shock of what's happened, think mostly of themselves and that the conventional boy she's been about to marry is relieved to get his ring back, and enters into a secret life of her own. Beginning by breaking in and wreaking havoc on a house near hers and like hers, she goes on the loose into the city night with its derelicts, drunks and hoods. She remains alone, roaming the park kicking at lovers, accusing and punishing all the world, shouting up at G.o.d "for holding out on me," calling out only to others like herself for guidance, so they can give each other "the strength to face ugliness in any form," which might offer some kind of revelation. She herself becomes the night the prowler. As we see her ''whirling in the air above her head a bicycle chain she had won from a mob of leather-jackets," she is like some saint-to-be of the Troubled Young. This story, with all the rawness of today in it, is not without its old progenitors. Felicity's progress through the scarifying world of Sydney nightlife is also a path of self-mortification. She is divested of that pride too; when she comes in the final scene to an abandoned house and finds there a naked, diseased, dirty, solitary old man lying on a mattress at point of death, she has her revelation. It is a stunning story.

A middle-aged Australian couple is on holiday, in "Sicilian Vespers,"

Page 199 when the husband gets stuck in their hotel with toothache. Ivy would will herself to feel the pain for him; she believes in the efficacy of love, but suspecting her husband (with his "honest un-Sicilian eyes") believes in it only theoretically. She doesn't confess it to him: "She did not want to damage his affection for her: it was too precious." She is held back in her life, too, by a ghost out of her girlhood riding with her stillfather. There seems nothing for it but a deliberate act of adultery with a repugnant American (another hotel guest). In the Cathedral of San Fabrizio, she drags him from the crowd into a side chapel and down onto the marble floor.

If nearly all the stories do end up on the floor, it is, after all, the natural place for humiliation, degradation, l.u.s.t, despair and hunger to reach their limit. "The c.o.c.katoos" does not.i.t ends with a smell of cake.

A flock of wild c.o.c.katoos makes a descent upon a residential neighborhood, alighting first at one house, then another, arousing jealousies, coveting, intent to murder, and other things, even causing a husband and wife who haven't spoken for years in the same house to break silence"trapped into comforting each other," they fall into bed "with laughing mouth on mouth." The characters are wayward, rather than driven. Pa.s.sions fly thick and fast but in a neighborhood level, like the c.o.c.katoos themselves, selecting the house they'd like to visit and making their choice of feeding places, setting up no more than a neighborhood commotion.

"The c.o.c.katoos," the only story here that's a comedy, is also the only one in which the s.e.xual aggressor is a man. As Mick (the husband who doesn't speak to his wife) sits straddling the lady who lives down the street (it's Busby LeCornu, who waits for him every day leaning on her gate, and the only time he puts on a hat is to walk through it), they exchange these wordsthe subject of course, is the c.o.c.katoos: "'See here Busby . . . I didn't tell you about me birds to have you seduce um away from me.'

"She sighed from within the crook of her arm. 'I don't see why we can't share what doesn't belong to either of us.'

"He was already getting back into his clothes. 'The wife would be disappointed,' he said."

Page 200 The Letters of Virginia Woolf, Volume II Edited by Nigel Nicolson and Joanne Trautmann The Letters of Virginia Woolf:

New York Times Book Review 14 November 1976: 1, 10, 12, 14, 16, 18, 20

"Life would split asunder without letters," Virginia Woolf wrote in Jacob's Room, the high point in this period of her working life. During itbetween 1912 and 1922she wrote 600 of those saving letters. They are published now as Volume II in the projected six being edited by Nigel Nicolson and Joanne Trautmann.

By now, the traumas of her growing upall those family deathsare behind her (though never to be forgotten). So is the casting about for the kind of friends she can share her life withnow she knows. She has just married Leonard Woolf.

She writes Lytton Strachey from their honeymoon in Spain; they are walking, talking, and: "My G.o.d! You can't think with what fury we fall on printed matter, so long denied us by our writing! I read 3 new novels in two days: Leonard waltzed through the Old Wives Tale like a kitten after its tail."

They come home to Asheham, the house in Suss.e.x"the best place in the world for reading Shakespeare"where: "All the morning we write in two separate rooms. Leonard is in the middle of a new novel . . . but as the clock strikes twelve, he begins to write Page 201 an article upon Labour for some pale sheet, or a review of French literature for the Times, or a history of Co-operation.

"We sew [sic] articles all over the worldI'm writing a lot for the Times too, reviews and articles and biographies of dead womenso we hope to make enough to keep our horses."

Two milestones were shortly pa.s.sed in Virginia's life without her awareness, the publication of her first novel, The Voyage Out, and the move to Hogarth House. It was to aid in her recovery from this most severe period of insanity that Leonard cast about for a plaything "sufficiently absorbing to take her mind off her work."

"Have you heard about our Printing Press?" Virginia writes to Margaret Llewelyn Davies. "We're both so excited that we can talk and think of nothing else, and I think there's a chance of damaging the Webb influence irretrievably (which is my ambition in life)."

The hand-press, bought in a shop off the street, fitted onto the Woolf's dining room table, and they were teaching themselves how to work it from a 16-page pamphlet that came with it. (A school of printing in Fleet Street had turned them down: they were the wrong age and the wrong cla.s.smiddle in both, as Leonard wrote in Beginning Again.

"We want to start on something very short and very sublime," Virginia writes Lady Robert Cecil. This is exactly the way we want the story of the Hogarth Press told. "I see that real printing will devour one's life," she writes Vanessa, and later goes on: "After 2 hours work at the press, Leonard heaved a terrific sigh and said, 'I wish to G.o.d we'd never bought the cursed thing!' To my relief, though not surprise, he added, 'Because I shall never do anything else.' You can't think how exciting, soothing, enn.o.bling and satisfying it is. And so far we've only done the dullest and most difficult partsetting up notice."

"We find we have only 50 friends in the worldand most of them stingy," she writes Lady Ottoline Morrell. 155 "Could you think of any generous people?" She enlists Vanessa's help with the covers. The binding equipment turns up from Cousin Emma Vaughan, though she, with her obsessive concern for German prisoners, naturally had to offer it to a camp of these first.

"Two Stories"Leonard's "Three Jews," Virginia's "The Mark on the Wall," with woodcuts by Dora Carringtonwas printed in an edition of 150 copies, of which the stingy friends bought only 135. In 1918, "Prelude,'' a 60-page bookwas printed on a bigger machine, borrowed, and bound Page 202 with their own hands in an edition of 300 copies. It had been rejected by all publishers up to now, but Virginia thought Katherine Mansfield "had a much better idea of writing than most." In May 1919, the Hogarth Press was to issue three bound books together: Virginia's "Kew Gardens," John Middleton Murry's "The Critic in Judgment," and Eliot's ''Poems"; and Virginia was breaking off a letter with "I must go now and boil some glue."

The Hogarth Press, Asheham and the circle of Bloomsburyform the real background of the letters. World War I was going on, but we are grateful (knowing that she was to be lacerated by the next world war) to find Virginia comparatively immune. She was spared the great personal losses so many of the English suffered: Leonard was exempt for physical reasons, as were a number of their friends; others were conscientious objectorstwo of them, not by chance being Duncan Grant and David Garnett, were farmed out with Vanessa at Charleston. When air raids over London and Suss.e.x got to be a habit, so did the Woolfs' sitting in the cellar; mainly this was boring, with only the servants to talk to. The pinch was noticed when it came to b.u.t.ter and tea and the importing of good paper for the Press.

We are in Bloomsbury when it was young, when the creative juices were running high and there was a heady current of daring in the air. Seen through the eyes of one who helped make it, Bloomsbury is restored to us briefly here, a society every bit its own, brightly conscious of itself, civilized, unsentimental, liberally disposed, not only led by, but thrilled by, their intelligence, young artists and writers wandering in and out of one another's houses in a sort of home-made state of grace. We see the Bloomsburies themselves in their own earliness, before they take on the blur of time and reminiscence: "Nessa left the room and reappeared with a small parcel about the size of a large slab of chocolate. On one side are painted six apples by Cezanne. Roger [Fry] very nearly lost his senses. I've never seen such a sight of intoxication. He was like a bee on a sunflower."

Mr. Nicolson's policy of editing the letters is to include everything. There is no order but the chronological. The effect is one of profusion like a s.p.a.cious Edwardian flower bowl being constantly added to out of the advancing garden, useful little zinnias stuck in with the great peonies, spires of delphinium, and the night stock as they come into bloom. The method is appropriate to Virginia Woolf. Side by side may be letters helping Vanessa find a cook, paying her respects to Thomas Hardy for his whole lifetime, sharing whatever she's reading with Lytton ("I read the book of Job last Page 203 nightI don't think G.o.d comes well out of it"), supplying Vanessa with a new list of names for her coming child ("I like a name that has the look of a clear green wave"), asking money for a fund for Eliot so he can get out of the bank, rea.s.suring a young man she's never met, David Garnett, who's apologized for his escapade of breaking into Asheham with a few of his friends, while the Woolfs were away, and making away with the food: "As a matter of fact, we are not at all annoyedIt seems a very sensible thing to do . . . it's a relief to find it was you. . . . Leonard is reading your poems [in ma.n.u.script], and says they are the best return you could make for the raid.''

Mr. Nicolson in his introduction remarks, "She gives only part of herself to anybody." Moved primarily by natural courtesy, one imagines, she used her gift of the light touch more often than not. But these beautiful, spontaneous letters never underestimate the seriousness of experience, or betray her sense of its magnitude. What she gives in her letters comes from her awareness of the other person, the part of herself, it seems to me, that matters in the other's circ.u.mstances. This sensitivity in giving is Virginia Woolf's particular mark: it can guide her to speak from an extraordinary depth of candor. To Saxon Sydney-Turner, friend of her brother Thoby who had died young, she can write: "I've a feeling that I want somehow to give you back or that some one else should give you back what you lost in Thoby. For I've often thought that you were the one person who understood about himI mean that his death meant almost more to you and me than to anyone, and I think we shared together some of the worst things. I know anyhow that you helped me thenand often I've known that we both kept him with us, though we did not talk of him."

Just before a violent period of her illness was coming on, she wrote to Margaret Llewelyn Davies about being ill before in a letter that seems to all but lay bare the very mystery of what she suffers. "And I wanted to say that all through that terrible time I thought of you, and wanted to look at a picture of you, but was afraid to ask! You saved Leonard, I think, for which I shall always bless you, by giving him things to do. It seems odd, for I saw you so little, but I felt you had a grasp on me, and I could not utterly sink. I write this because I do not want to say it, and yet I think you will like to know it."

Mr. Nicolson relates that Virginia and Leonard, after the first months, did not often sleep together. He sounds confident, if one wants to stop there. The tenderest letter in the book, the most directly declaring, is a brief Page 204 one written to Leonard after they had been married for four years, on one of the rare occasions when they were separated. 156 Be that as it may, what her readers have always known from her writing is that a need for intimacy lies at the very core of Virginia Woolf's life. Besides the physical there are other orders of intimacy, other ways to keep life from splitting asunder. Lightly as it may touch on the moment, almost any letter she writes is to some degree an expression of this pa.s.sion, of which the eventual work of art was The Waves.

So richly present is Vanessa Bell in these letters written to her and about her (Vanessa's outnumber the rest) that it seems odd to realize we never hear her speak in her own voice (obviously, not at all like Virginia's), never read her side of the correspondence, when even her handwriting is brought close to our eyeswith "the quality of a great sheep dog pawa sheep dog which has been trotting sagaciously through the mud after its lambs all day long." This painter sister was closer even than a sister; Virginia would now and then speak of herself as Vanessa's child, "your first-born." It is possible that Virginia was seeking the maternal in everyone she loved, Leonard included; but in Vanessa she found it.

There's a touching corollary. "I like myself as a child," she writes Vanessa; the letter comes from Cornwall, scene of their childhood visits, where the lighthouse, of To the Lighthouse, stands. She writes Saxon, too: "I think how I was a nice little girl here, and ran along the top of the stone walls, and told Mr. Gibbs after tea that I was full to the chin. . . . Do you like yourself as a child? I like myself, before the age of 10, that isbefore consciousness sets in." (Compare this with Mrs. Vallance's thoughts in the starlit garden in Mrs. Dalloway's Party, the little sequence recently published, but written in these days.)157 Vanessa really wanted to hear nothing from her but the latest gossip, Virginia was fond of telling her. "Let me see what I have in my bag for you." Samples: "I got her [Violet d.i.c.kinson] to tell me a series of death bed scenes of the Lyttleton familythe poor old Bishop Arthur L. was pestered to death by them. 'Now you're practically dead, Arthur, you must collect yourself and tell us what you see. Don't you feel anything like immortality coming on?'"

"Janet Case still more or less bedridden . . . though she was writing an article upon illegitimacy in Sweden for a newspaper. Downstairs, Emphie was playing very badly on the violin to a party of wounded soldiers. The house is crowded with photographs of old pupils, deceased parents and the Page 205 Elgin Marbles . . . Does this convey any of the spirit of Hampstead to you?"

"I think there is a good deal of the priest, it may be of the eunuch, in [Logan Pearsall Smith] . . . He thought it very delightful to extract the flower of Urn Burial, 6 words long, and print it by itself in an exquisite little volume, to carry in the breast pocket, like a scent bottle. He has several of these sentences always on his person, and reads them aloud in a high nasal chant. . . ."

It is most often when she shoots darts at the aristocracy that malice appears; and springing from a rather exceptional insight, it still has a quiver to it. "The other day," she tells Vanessa, "we went to tea with Nelly Cecil, and met old Beatrice Thyme, who is more like a sunburnt tinker who has just had a mug of beer than ever, notwithstanding the death of her mother and nephew. She was as black as a rook, with one very large b.u.mble Bee, carried out in pearls and sapphires, attached to her throat. She is going to live in lodgings over St. Johns Wood post office, in order to economise; she uses margarine instead of b.u.t.ter, and wears no underclothes. She spends all her time reading family letters, and tying them up in bundles, as they are too many to burn, and all perfectly dull. Nelly is going to economise by living in Henry James' flat. It is wonderful how entirely detached from sanity the aristocracy are; one feels like a fly on a ceiling when one talks to them."

Vanessa sometimes provides the subject herself of gossip around London, but criticism of her is not to be tolerated from holier-than-thou Cousin Dorothea Stephen. Virginia sent her this letter: "Your view that one cannot ask a friend who has put aside the recognised conventions about marriage to one's house because of outsiders and servants seems to me incomprehensible. You, for example, accept a religion which I and my servants, who are both agnostics, think wrong and indeed pernicious. Am I therefore to forbid you to come here for my servants' sake? . . . I could not let you come here without saying first that I entirely sympathise with Vanessa's views and conduct. If after this, you like to come . . . by all means do; and I will risk not only my own morals but my cook's."

The reckless moment.i.t lasted hardly longer than thatwhen Virginia and Lytton Strachey were engaged to marry is forgotten now and they have settled into what Cyril Connolly has called "a Solomon-Sheba relationship," which was to last until Strachey's death. Her letters to him, brilliant as Page 206 they are, are the only ones in which we might see a touch of self-consciousness. Virginia didn't write drafts for letters, but she may have taken a little more trouble with Lytton's, to make them flash in his face.

When he sends her an essay for his forthcoming Eminent Victorians, she writes him of her admiration for ". . . how you weave in every sc.r.a.pmy G.o.d what sc.r.a.ps!of interest to be had, like (you must pardon the metaphor) a snake insinuating himself through innumerable golden rings(Do snakes?I hope so.)"

She needed a little time to adjust to his fame, which blazed up when the book appeared. "I think fame has changed him, as love might," she writes to Vanessa. "He is immensely appreciative, even tender; jumps up and seizes withered virgins like Vernon Lee, and leaves them gibbering with ecstasy." A little later, "He's doing a grand season, with Cunards, Asquiths, and all the rest; completely happy; still, he a.s.sures us his soul is untouched; and I think it probably is."

An envy she recognizes in herself, mocks, but continues to feel enters into this and into other letters. But she had something to be envious about in other writers: not their work, but their time, She had reason for envy, in the unfairness of life which robbed her, with abominable suffering, of years of the work she pa.s.sionately wanted to do, as well as of the children she and Leonard had both wanted to have. (And in reading the letters, we cannot do her the disservice of ignoring what falls between them when the continuity breaks off and the gap appears like a black fissure in bright landscape.) Recovery was always slow. She wrote to E. M. Forster, in 1922: "Writing is still like heaving bricks over a wall . . . I should like to growl to you about all this d.a.m.ned lying in bed and doing nothing, and getting up and writing half a page and going to bed again. I've wasted 5 whole years (I count) doing it; so you must call me 35not 40and expect rather less from me. Not that I haven't picked up something from my insanities and all the rest. Indeed, I suspect they've done instead of religion. But this is a difficult point."

Virginia Woolf did not use a letter to a friend as a vent for her constant preoccupation with her writing in progress. Her self-discoveries, a.n.a.lyses, her elations and fears, her devastating suffering over every one of her books in turn, all went into the privacy of her diaries, which she had started during this period and was to keep up for the rest of her life. But a pa.s.sing remark makes a flash in the air sometimes ("I daresay one ought to invent a completely new form [of the novel]" she says to the beginning David Garnett).

Page 207 It is significant that when she most generously and ardently spoke her mind on writing itself, it was to the young. The marvelous letter she wrote to Gerald Brennan, a young man, new friend, whose letter she was answering on Christmas Day, 1922, comes just at the last of this book. It reads in part: "One must renounce, you say . . . Ah, but I'm doomed! . . . It is not possible now, and never will be, to say I renounce. Nor would it be a good thing for literature were it possible . . . The human soul, it seems to me, orientates itself afresh every now and then. It is doing so now. No one can see it whole, therefore. The best of us catch a glimpse of a nose, a shoulder, something turning away, always in movement. Still, it seems better to catch this glimpse, than to sit down with Hugh Walpole, Wells, etc., etc., and make large oil paintings of fabulous fleshy monsters complete from top to toe . . . I mean, life has to be sloughed: has to be faced: to be rejected; then accepted on new terms with rapture. And so on, and so on; till you are 40, when the only problem is how to grasp it tighter and tighter to you, so quick it seems to slip, and so infinitely desirable it is.

". . . One must renounce, when the book is finished; but not before it is begun. . . . I was wondering to myself why it is that though I try sometimes to limit myself . . . to the things I do well, I am always drawn on and on, by human beings, I think, out of the little circle of safety, on and on, to the whirlpools; when I go under."

Page 208 Selected Letters of William Faulkner Edited by Joseph Blotner Selected Letters of William Faulkner:

New York Times Book Review 6 February 1977: 1, 2830

William Faulkner's wife and daughter had said he "would not have wanted such a volume. His personal letters were never remotely intended for publication," and Faulkner himself had written (to Malcolm Cowley): "I don't like having my private life and affairs available to just any and everyone who has the price of the vehicles it's printed in." Thus Joseph Blotner writes in his Introduction to this volume. "So a book of selected Faulkner letters was a logical next step."

The logic has shifted from Faulkner's to Blotner's, but while I suppose we can have little doubt that this fierce guardian of his privacy would have abominated the publication of his letters, we can doubt too that he would have been much surprised at its being done anyway. Publishing personal letters of a genius gone to his grave is a human act of man. And plainly, in Blotner's case, even a reverent act.

Therefore it is good to have the book done by an editor and a publisher who cared about Faulkner the man as well as Faulkner the artist. It's been a.s.sembled with taste, the responsible, devoted, and thorough job we would expect from Faulkner's biographer.