"Loch Ness swallowed Mrs. Hambro. She was wearing pearls."
A doctor gave me a penetrating gaze through the telephone wires some while ago and asked me Was I sure I had no desire to be a literary critic? I was sure, and said so, but he did not believe me, and he said so. Now, this is more of a pretext than a story, but even so it is hard for me not to want to tell it in a way that makes a field of farmers take up their sickles and charge at him, bellowing, for my honor. But to keep a loose grip on truth, not to say a stranglehold, I must make clear that this was not posed as part of some standard well-woman physical exam (though perhaps it should be; this is a trouble that touches many women: suppressed & seething lit-critical impulses, our generation’s Problem-that-has-no-name.)
No, but it was a natural enough question, in context, to hear from someone who knows me a little and understands me less. The answer is of course No, like I say: because critics are answerable to truth and editors and I am answerable only to Me. I want all the power, none of the responsibility; all the freedom, none of the binding cords, not even for the pleasurable drama of bursting free from my voluntary bonds and breaking the rules I let be set upon myself.
(Do you know, if I were Virginia Woolf, I would amend that sentence because “let” and “set” rhyme, and only the ill-bred ruffians and the jumped-up shopkeepers of the world would leave an assonance alone? but I am not Virginia Woolf. more on that anon.)
He did not believe me, I don't think, because I didn’t bother to do a good sales job on the arrogance and domineering pride of the amateur, which I am one of; on the labored (and necessary) humility of the professional, the burden and the tædium of it all to one not born to tell the truth, as I was not. But I have been thinking ever since, off and on, of what differential diagnosis you might run on a person to wind up with Dissatisfied Critic at the end of it and what alternate maladies were privately ruled out before he put this accusation on me. I will never go to medical school, me. but if you are going there, or have already been, ask somebody for me. won’t you? what if he was wrong and I have a troubled Spleen, or an apoplectic spasm just biding its time? These things are easy to confuse with the literary and the critical impulses.
But this is all just a way of avoiding apologies for having been Away for a time. and do not dare to tell me you haven’t noticed! When not prostrate with complicated neck agonies, I have been spending my time fighting with Virginia Woolf and getting very angry at her cowardice in refusing to fight back, except slyly and behind my back, usually in her diary. Just when I am ready to destroy her, but DESTROY her, she becomes very unhappy and really decent, and pity stays my hand. A co-dependent cycle of some sort is what I think this is.
We are just alike in the inessentials; very often she explains them better than I do, but she careens wildly from being just right about something, hanging an opinion off of herself like a single bell-flower on a hyacinth cluster, pendant and lucid, then wrong and smug and simply unbearable, like some feather-like object (a feather, perhaps? she would know, and feel superior about the knowing) blown indiscriminately by the scheming Winds up to the heavens and into the ditches. Not, of course, that the intellect is blown anywhere, hers or mine: we decide, we are responsible, the Winds we call for do not answer to us. One thing that strangles me into mumbles & groans (not silence; never silence) regarding Virginia Woolf is she summons up in me a dormant, nearly dead, vestigial reflex to sexist rhetoric. She speaks to an allergy, a sensitivity, an inflamed portion of my sensory apparatus I did not know existed or was flawed in this way. The more careful I try to be, the worse it gets. You see there: ‘She summons up in me,’ as if it is her fault! That is the trouble, is it does feel like her fault. But I know better. But so did she! And so on. Usually I am more vigilant than this, but usually I never have to be; I resisted the implantation of this particular rhetorical instinct pretty violently and I can honestly boast that I don’t have much of it to repress. But Virginia—Virginia—VIRGINIA—
and you see again, calling her by her first name. Who am I to do that, except someone just as clever as she was, better qualified than most people to judge her for that reason, but all the same not her friend, not possessed of any special rights of intimacy. How do I dare speak about her this way? How can I stop?
—well, let it be for the moment. We are, as I was saying, alike in the inessentials. What about the essentials? Is genius an essential? She distinguished between minor genius and the other kind, at times, and never cared to force her younger self into consistency with her older one, and neither do I, so I am happy to call Genius an inessential and not quarrel over which of us has more of it, or who has a better kind. Go ahead and think me minor & her major, I am too proud to mind. She was productive and prolific in a way I have never been and never will be. On the other hand, she had to guess from a writer’s hand-cramp at what a “servant’s hand” might (“must”) feel like, when it got tired from working, whereas I have done actual labor all my life though never more of it than I absolutely had to, so I do not have to wonder whether the fatigue from drawling & fussing over assonances is quite as fatiguing as scrubbing floors and sweeping fireplaces all day, since I have done both and recommend none of them, except for the fact of having done it, which is good for both you and the floors.
—But that is not essential either! and anyhow, Woolf had more physical suffering and deprivation at intervals than I have yet had, excepting what my spine does to me, and she did work hard at writing and she was barred from most occupations in her youth, so that is not a competition I ought to enter into if I am wise. Working herself up into a mad froth of delightsome metaphors and sentences both angular and curvilinear at surprising times, shaped to please and to disguise a lack of depth or the feared appearance of a lack of depth, like the thinnest of polished flooring over a missing or rotten substructure, which insecurity in her had to do with old childhood resentments and intellectual deprivations and “Cambridge” the envied and despised, and in me has nothing to do with anything (yet it persists)—there is an essential, and look! we are alike in it! have I been wrong about everything?
no, because Temperament is the Empress of all things and, though the reasons for it are perfectly plain and probably biographically unavoidable, Virginia Woolf had a temperament that led her to make a fetish of Reality, a word whose meaning to her I have not yet discovered, although at times I think she says Reality where I would say Eternity; that led her to place Jane Austen on a strange and separate pedestal in the hall of authors because serene detached divinity seemed good to her as an attitude to take, and furious asymmetrical unresolved passionate anger seemed to her a jagged flaw in the heart of a hard clear gem. She was wrong about what is beautiful and what is ugly, about what is perfect: what is worse to be wrong about, than that? Of course she had good reasons, I know she had good reasons.
(—Would I have said that perfection is better than imperfection, before I started fighting with Virginia Woolf? I absolutely would. What does this mean? Is unprincipled inconsistency the flaw at the heart of MY gem? Do I need a new setting? or only a new metaphor?)
—My personal opinion in my capacity as unlicensed psychoanalyst is that because VW spent so much youthful time disguising and decorating and beautifully controlling her furious hatreds & hateful furies, as she details so blazingly well in parts of Moments of Being, she got out of the habit of thinking analytically about them: and calm recollection, like keen observation, wears the disguise of dispassionate analysis well, but is not that thing.
—Because of this, she seems at times unable to read passion expressed in finished literature,—expressed, not merely represented from a wry distance,—unable to read it as anything but a blot, a lapse, an offensive accident; as if Charlotte Brontë would not have found a rock to bash her heart against no matter what kinder, freer time she was born into. This is not what I believe: I believe she would have. I believe that a Charlotte Brontë free to fling her body over the hills along with her heart & gallop off into the horizon instead of gazing at it, who traveled to lands besides Belgium and did it unchaperoned and in comfortable clothes, who got out from under the heavy hand of her strange & sorrowful father early or never had him, would have been happier: but not happy, not calm, never not setting her beloved Self at war with unbeloved Reality. Would she have written better books? I do not know, not like Virginia Woolf thinks she knows: but she would have finished her last one, her Emma, which might have been the greatest. And as to patriarchy’s effects, which god knows Virginia Woolf knew better and felt more closely than I do—the strangest thing, to me, in Charlotte Brontë, is the absence of self-hatred, the lack of self-disgust. You feel for it with your hands all through Jane Eyre, like a child locked in a closet feeling for the doorknob, but it never comes, is never there, only a smooth surface. Is it possible to build a house so, without any doorknobs? Do the doors open of themselves, then, have you only got to pound on them until they yield? The triumphant masochism of the martyr who knows her cause is just, who will submit up to a point and no further, who will bend almost down to the ground but never ever all the way, who will give up her life before she gives up her grudges—these are barely legible qualities to Virginia Woolf, who gently tolerates the “elementary” characters, the “grim and crude” — and there she is right— “comedy,” to get to what she bafflingly calls the “poetry,” her word for beauty, sublimity; Woolf who praises Wuthering Heights over Jane Eyre because—because!—”there is no “I” in Wuthering Heights.” She sees and names the “overpowering personality” of writers like Charlotte Brontë, the “untamed ferocity perpetually at war with the accepted order of things which makes them desire to create instantly rather than to observe patiently.” She knows what it is she is looking at. Only, these things are not virtues to her. Imagine that. Imagine it! To see, and believe you see from a great height, and to appraise, and to set a wrong and insulting valuation on it all!
no wonder I am fighting with this terrible woman all of the time. and this after reading no more than five or six percent of her total output, at a generous estimate.
but I admit that To the Lighthouse is a good book.
more later.