Re: Notes from the river bottom

cecilia, i think the other essay you are trying to
recall is not an essay, but a short story titled 'an
unwritten novel'.

the narrator is on a train and a lower-middleclass
woman is seated opposite her. the narrator (who is a
writer) imagines the woman's life.

it's a tour de force story. quite experimental for
it's time. it's collected in the 1944 volume 'a
haunted house', and also in the very excellent
'complete short fiction of v.w.', edited by susan
dick.

cecilia, thanks for the lessing--it was perfect--and
thanks for the website with the woolf essays. i
noticed it contains 'letter to a young poet' which i
haven't found.

kim

--- Cecilia Baader <ceciliabaader@yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> --- 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
=== message truncated ===

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Received on Tue Jul 8 13:45:10 2003