Just finished Julia Briggs's Virginia Woolf: An Inner Life. Finally, finally, I think Woolf got the biographer she deserved, one who really understood what she was about, one that didn't want to turn her into a victim of abuse, a mad woman in the attic, a feminist symbol, or something other than what she saw herself as: a writer.
Woolf left so much material about her own life and her thought processes—volumes of diaries, reams of letters, numerous essays—that, even though there is always an element of self-censorship in that kind of writing (Woolf was probably conscious of the fact that her husband Leonard was most likely to read her diary), they leave a fairly good impression of what she must have been like as a person. None of the biographies I've read (James King's, Hermione Lee's, Louise DeSalvo's, Roger Poole's, or Mitchell Leaska's ) adequately convey that. Or rather, they're more concerned with Woolf as anything but a writer, from the outside in. James King's biography, for instance, was almost an account book of things she did and places she went, people she saw, and things that happened to her, with very little sense of what she thought about them, or how they might have worked their way into her writing. But none of the biographies I've read talk about her writing in the depth that Briggs does. Briggs considers her from the inside out.
As the best criticism does, her analysis of Woolf's themes and technique and concerns make me want to revisit her fiction and see what I was missing the first time around. It's an understatement to say that Woolf is not an easy novelist to read and I've never quite been able to get through either To the Lighthouse or Mrs. Dalloway. Of her books, my favorites are the later ones: Orlando, The Years, Between the Acts, and of course, The Waves, which I think is possibly the most poetic book ever written. Orlando is such a delightful romp and so many scenes from it have stuck in my head even years later. Such a charming love letter. I find Woolf's criticism intriguing but dull, although that probably says more about my dislike of litcrit than it does about her acuity as a critic or her writing ability, because her extended essays, Three Guineas and A Room of One's Own are extremely powerful, I think. Woolf seems to be at her best when she's striking off on her own, leaving convention behind in both subject matter and style.
That's really what she was all about: finding a new style, a new way to write novels, capturing the interior on paper. And this is what Briggs's biography excels at conveying. She takes not only what was going on in the exterior of Woolf's life, but what we know through her diaries and letters was going on inside her, and pours it into the funnel of Woolf's writing to give us some idea of how the ingredients, once mixed, were baked into a book. That's a really inelegant metaphor, but it's what I picture going on in Woolf's mind: facts and ideas and thought swirling around until they're combined in new ways and pouring out of her onto the page, in that delightful mad "gallop" she delighted in when any book was going well.
For me, as a writer, this was fascinating. We all approach the task so differently, describe it differently, have different rituals, different sources of inspiration, and it's always instructive to see how other writers work, especially the ones who push the margins the way Woolf did. Her books are so different that I often have a hard time imagining how she goes from the inspiring image—the fin skimming the surface of the water—to the final product, in this case, The Waves. Briggs has done the donkey work of weeding those thought processes out of the reams of material from Woolf's diaries and letters, where they're often obscured by gossip and observations of daily life and brought the focus back to the day-in, day-out donkey work of writing: the adrenalin rush and/or the drudge of writing every day, of mercilessly revising, of alternately loving and hating what you've written, of moving the work physically from holograph to typescript to printer's proofs to bound book (which was much more immediate for Woolf since so much of her work was published by the Woolfs' own Hogarth Press), the elation or terror of reviews, and the let-down and exhaustion and depression that so often follow such a huge effort.
Makes you wonder why we do it, doesn't it? Especially when the pay's so bad.
But the major shortcoming in the biographies I've read before this one is they way they've treated her suicide, because in an odd way, it always made sense to me. After reading her diaries and letters, I don't know how anyone could fail to understand just how much Woolf loved London, how much she loathed and feared war, having already lived through one, how terrifying the thought of invasion was to her (and it seemed so inevitable in the early years of WW II), how despairing she was about the state of the world and mankind and the continual battering of her beloved London. Briggs picks up on this too. I never thought Woolf was going mad in the sense of heading for another nervous breakdown like the ones she had before. She was, instead, depressed, and simply couldn't face the horror of a world war again. Here's Briggs:
Although her [Woolf's] worst breakdown had begun a year before the First World War, for Woolf it had always been linked with the war, and it may be that, in some mysterious way, mass murder, hatred and cruelty create a palpable psychic atmosphere that presses upon the sensitive, driving them towards those darker aspects of outer or inner life that we normally resist or dismiss. As the guardians and interpreters of culture, artists are or become peculiarly receptive, or vulnerable to their times. Though Woolf did not believe in a personal God, "A Sketch of the Past" shows that she did believe in some kind of "world soul" embodied in beauty, form and meaning, and transmitted by great artists: "all human beings—are connected with this; . . . the whole world is a work of art; . . . we are parts of the work of art . . . we are the words; we are the music; we are the thing itself." But if we are the words and the music, we must also participate in evil creations—in bombs, concentration camps and gas chambers.
This probably sounds like a load of crap to Post-Modernists but it rings true to me. It's the making that unites, not just the admiration or appreciation of beauty, but the cultivation of it that's somehow wound up in the joy of life. When that's gone—worse, when people are actively destroying it—one might as well put stones in one's pockets and walk into the river.
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