Re: Notes from the river bottom

--- James Rovira <jrovira@drew.edu> wrote:
> Oh, lord, you read much Woolf at all and her snobbery was inescapable.
> I'm thinking, in particular, of a very useful essay of hers -- "Modern
> Fiction" or "On Modern Ficiton." She describes a middle class woman she
> saw once on a train (if I'm remembering this right), the story she
> imagines about her, the inner life she would represent -- all in a very
> nice, graphic, easy to understand illustration of the difference between
> 19th century fiction and her own (and Joyce's and a few other writers).

I just checked the essay out, because I half-remembered the woman on the
train, and didn't remember drawing that conclusion from her. I think you
must be combining two essays, because all "Modern Fiction" mentions is the
"common mind," not the woman on the train.

http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks02/0200771.txt

Do you remember which one it must be? I confess that it is years since I
have read all of Woolf's essays, but I never felt that she deserved her
reputation for snobbery. In fact, in the URL I've supplied above, there's
a fine essay entitled "Middlebrow" in which Woolf spells out precisely how
she feels on the subject. God, yes, she was an intellectual snob, but a
social one?

I'm not so sure about that.

There was an excellent Doris Lessing essay in the Guardian not too long
ago on this very subject. Let me find it. Ah:

Sketches from Bohemia

A newly discovered notebook by Virginia Woolf sheds fresh light on her
apprenticeship as a writer, writes Doris Lessing. It also reveals an
unpalatable streak of snobbery and anti-semitism

Saturday June 14, 2003
The Guardian

These pieces are like five-finger exercises for future excellence. Not
that they are negligible, being lively, and with the direct and sometimes
brutal observation, the discrimination, the fastidious judgment one
expects from her . . . but wait: that word "judgment" - it will not do.
Virginia Woolf cared very much about refinement of taste, her own and her
subjects'. "I imagine that her taste and insight are not fine; when she
described people she ran into stock phrases, and took rather a cheap view"
("Miss Reeves").
This note is struck often throughout her work, and because of her
insistence one has to remember that this woman, in February 1910, took
part in a silly jape, pretending to be of the emperor of Abyssinia's party
on a visit to a British battleship; that she and her friends went in for
the naughty words you would expect from schoolchildren who have just
discovered smut; that she was to some extent anti-semitic, capable of
referring to her admirable and loving husband as "the Jew". The sketch
here, "Jews", is an unpleasant piece of writing. But then you have to
remember a similarly noisy and colourful Jewess in Between the Acts
described affectionately - Woolf likes her. So this writing here is often
unregenerate Woolf, early work pieces, and some might argue they would
have been better left undiscovered. Not I: it is always instructive to see
what early crudities a writer has refined into balance - into maturity.

None of that lot, the Bloomsbury artists, can be understood without
remembering that they were the very heart and essence of Bohemia, whose
attitudes have been so generally absorbed it is hard to see how sharply
Bohemia stood out against its time. They are sensitive and art-loving,
unlike their enemies and opposites, the crude business class. EM Forster,
Woolf's good friend, wrote Howards End , where the battle between Art and
the Wilcoxes is set out. On the one hand the upholders of civilisation, on
the other, philistines, the "Wilcoxes". To be sensitive and fine was to
fight for the survival of real and good values, against mockery,
misunderstanding and, often, real persecution. Many a genuine or aspiring
Bohemian was cut off by outraged parents.

But it was not only "the Wilcoxes", crass middle-class vulgarians, but the
working people who were enemies. The snobbery of Woolf and her friends now
seems not merely laughable, but damaging, a narrowing ignorance. In
Forster's Howards End , two upper-class young women, seeing a working
person suffer, remark that "they" don't feel it in the same way - as I
used to hear white people, when they did notice the misery of the blacks,
say, "They aren't like us; they have thick skins."

With Woolf we are up against a knot, a tangle of unlikeable prejudices,
some of her time, some personal, and this must lead us to look again at
her literary criticism, which was often as fine as anything written before
or since, and yet she was capable of thumping prejudice, like the fanatic
who can see only his own truth. Delicacy and sensitivity in writing was
everything and that meant Arnold Bennett, and writers like him, were not
merely old hat, the despised older generation, but deserved obloquy and
oblivion. Woolf was not one for half measures. The idea that one may like
Bennett and Woolf, Woolf and James Joyce was not possible for her. These
polarisations, unfortunately endemic in the literary world, always do
damage: Woolf did damage. 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, has 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 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 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 the living
the "luminous envelope" she insists our consciousness is, not the linear
plod she perceived writing like Bennett's to be.

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 it. 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
judgment you respect comes out with a hymn of dislike, or even hate, for
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 her 1909
notebook is a little sketch, called "A Modern Salon", about Lady Ottoline
Morrell, who played such a role in the lives and work of many of the
artists and writers of her time, from DH 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 a purer air". And,
"she comes from a distance, with strange colours upon 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 of it. 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 the hostilities confronted is in her sketch in the 1909 notebook
of 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 it or be it." And then the
wasp's swift sting: "I had to remember that one is not full 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.

© Doris Lessing, 2003
 

Like Lessing, I find myself forgiving of her foibles.

Best,
Cecilia.

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Received on Tue Jul 8 13:15:52 2003