Several Strangers

by Claire Tomalin

  New York Review of Books, 1977

  2. Millionaire

  The Diary of Virginia Woolf. Volume I:1915-1919 edited by Anne Olivier Bell

  Writers are not expected to be happy. The penalties of their attempts on fame are often taken to be emotional disorder, gloom, lassitude. The surprise of this first volume of Virginia Woolf’s complete diary is that it brims with happiness; and it’s not just that she had an archangel in the house to spread his protective wings about her -indeed, her few tiffs with Leonard are caused by his concern that she should not attend too many parties or give up her servants too readily to her sister. Her happiness in these years seems to run through and through the entire fabric of her life: ‘But then I am happy… every virtue should be natural to the happy, since they are the millionaires of the race.’ The volume ends with the words, ‘I daresay we’re the happiest couple in England.’ It does look as though the routine they established – retreats to Sussex, months in London, the round of visits from friends, gossip, the garden and enjoyment of the seasons, discreet praise of one another’s work and then, more than anything, the work itself – contained almost every ingredient of happiness.

  She was not a night diarist; ‘casual half-hours after tea’ were her time. The entries are irregular, following certain ebbs and flows of mood and moves from Asheham to Richmond and back, catching up after a Garsington weekend, consciously selecting weighty topics at times – such as what her cousin H. A. L. Fisher, in the government, had to say about the last stages of the war – or settling down to consider her friends as gravely as an anatomist; but more often sweeping up ‘accidentally several stray matters which I should exclude if I hesitated, but which are the diamonds of the dustheap’. On occasion she grows querulous about a slight, or a fancied one; but beneath all there is a woman of force and self-confidence at work in these notebooks.

  Philip Morrell told her she was ‘heartless and terrifying’; some of her cruelties may arise from the very robust assertion of her own current state of health and achievement. She meditates a good deal on success and, although there are token remarks about her own lack of it, she knew her quality; it pleased her to be in demand as a reviewer and praised as a novelist. Success, she says, commenting coolly on the marital and professional failure of a friend, is ‘an attitude of mind – the way one looks at life’. Noticing a dead horse on the pavement, she sees the pathos from a characteristic angle: ‘to die in Oxford Street one hot afternoon, & to have been only a van horse’. In her enjoyment of her good fortune at not being a van horse, she sometimes sounds brutal: ‘I’m a little doubtful, when I find a cheap ready made young woman out of an office in Oxford and lodging in Harrow, enthusiastic about Robinson Crusoe.’ Seen through her own abundant leafiness, Katherine Mansfield and John Middleton Murry are ‘leafless trees’. Most chilling is a remark made on passing a long line of imbeciles on the towpath at Kingston:

  The first was a very tall young man, just queer enough to look twice at, but no more; the second shuffled, & looked aside; & then one realized that every one in that long line was a miserable ineffective shuffling idiotic creature, with no forehead, or no chin, & an imbecile grin, or a wild suspicious stare. It was perfectly horrible. They should certainly be killed.

  Brilliant, disquieting description; brave of the editor to leave this as it was written (though one would expect no less from an editor so exact and illuminating). Brave of Mrs Woolf too, to let the thought come, with the awareness of her own half-sister Laura shut up somewhere, as well as her own private affliction.

  Yet Virginia Woolfs diary is not her ‘friend’, as Katherine Mansfield’s journal was hers. Pressed by Ottoline Morrell, Virginia confessed to having no ‘inner life’. She is not much given to self-complicity and layings-bare, more inclined to the brisk and comic. Indeed there are many scenes of pure, almost dramatic comedy: an over-conversational Desmond MacCarthy eased out of the house with an expedient fib about the cook’s sister coming to stay; Beatrice Webb proposing a scheme whereby children’s building blocks should be ‘inscribed with the names of organizations so that in putting them together they would learn their civic duties’ (but why, Virginia asks herself, is there this ‘half carping half humorously cynical view which steals into one’s description of the Webbs’?). Or there is Ottoline, wonderfully complaining that no one really falls in love nowadays – except Bertie, whose choice is so often unfortunate -while Virginia mildly protests that romantic love is not the only kind, and the sensible Newnham socialist, Molly Hamilton, interposes helpfully that she loves the Independent Labour Party.

  Virginia can mock herself too, for her ‘suburban’ attitude in resenting unacknowledged letters and Christmas presents. She knows she is a snob, deplores her own malice when it produces a backlash, chides herself for pride in her own subtlety of mind. Only once or twice she seems blankly unaware of the absurdity of what she says: apropos Murry, ‘I don’t like couples where the husband admires the wife’s work immensely’, or her straightfaced account of Desmond MacCarthy and Leonard looking up the word f— together in the London Library and being ‘saddened’ to find the thumbprints of many earlier researchers on the page of the dictionary.

  The diary, so much more direct and condensed, is more enjoyable even than the letters. There is little about her work (and most of these remarks were published long ago in Leonard Woolf’s selection, A Writer’s Diary), much about the outward state of her life, walks and weather – bad, like being inside a balloon, she said, good in the autumn when they went for mushrooms or blackberries under the downs, or in May (‘teeming, amorous & creative’ month) when they might eat out with fallen apple blossom under their feet. At Easter in 1919 she wrote modestly about her reasons for writing the diary: ‘It loosens the ligaments.’

  What sort of a diary should I like mine to be? Something loose knit, & yet not slovenly, so elastic that it will embrace any thing, solemn, slight or beautiful that comes into my mind. I should like it to resemble some deep old desk, or capacious hold-all, in which one flings a mass of odds & ends without looking them through. I should like to come back, after a year or two, & find that the collection had sorted itself & refined itself & coalesced, as such deposits so mysteriously do, into a mould, transparent enough to reflect the light of our life, & yet steady, tranquil composed with the aloofness of a work of art.

  Happy prediction from a millionaire of the race.

  New Statesman, 1977

  3: Introduction to Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf

  Mrs Dalloway, Virginia Woolf’s fourth novel, offers the reader an impression of a single June day in London in 1923, culminating in an evening party given by the wife of a Conservative Member of Parliament in her Westminster house. The day is experienced through the eyes and the minds of diverse people, some but not all of them connected with the hostess’s life, past and present; most are well born and comfortably off, and, where the poor and wretched make appearances, it is chiefly in symbolic roles. The book is constructed round the events of the passing hours of the day, though with many excursions into memory; the language is finely worked, now ironic, now lyrical, and the narrative is handed like a ribbon from one character to another, so that we see the world from several different perspectives. Yet Clarissa Dalloway herself remains the pivot, even to the extent that the distressed young madman Septimus Warren Smith, a victim of the war, whom she never meets but only hears about, appears to her as some sort of alter ego. Septimus’s experience, and Clarissa’s feeling of affinity with him, are responsible for the most powerful passages in the book, its account of psychosis, its attack on the medical profession, the description of suicide, and the meditation on the meaning of death – all, it might seem on the face of it, curious subjects to find woven into the celebration of a cloudless summer day in town and a formal evening party in Westminster.

  Airy and haunting, it is a book that matches lightness with melancholy. Most of the strands that went into its composition can be clearly traced to their origi
ns in Virginia Woolf’s experience. She was forty when she began putting on paper the ideas that developed into Mrs Dalloway. This was in 1922. For her, the year had started in illness, a feared recurrence of her mental collapses of 1904 and 1913-15, and also a multitude of physical symptoms, including headaches and a persistent high temperature. Her husband Leonard told in his autobiography of accompanying her on a ‘long odyssey through Harley Street and Wimpole Street’ at this time; one specialist diagnosed diseased lungs, another inflammation of the heart, incurable and likely to prove fatal very shortly; a third discovered yet another incurable disease. The last Harley Street man they visited gave his three guineas’ worth of advice as he shook her hand in farewell: ‘Equanimity – equanimity – practise equanimity, Mrs Woolf.’ It was, no doubt, excellent advice, said Leonard, ‘and worth the three guineas, but, as the door closed behind us, I felt that he might just as usefully have said: “A normal temperature – ninety-eight point four – practise a normal temperature, Mrs Woolf.”’

  The Woolfs agreed to ignore Harley Street and follow the simple recommendations of their family doctor. She was to rest; and for three months Virginia did as she was told, with the result that both physical and mental collapse were avoided and her symptoms slowly cleared up. Her bed was moved into the sitting-room of Hogarth House, their Richmond home (they also owned Monk’s House at Rodmell in the Sussex Downs). Hogarth House was shared with two faithful if temperamental maids, Nelly Boxall and Lottie Hope. It also housed the clutter and machinery of their own publishing firm, the Hogarth Press, for which Virginia normally did typesetting; but now she lay and read by the sitting-room fire, wrote a little and received visitors. A favoured one was her worldly brother-in-law Clive Bell, whose name-dropping and tales of intimate aristocratic luncheon parties provided the frivolous but absorbing entertainment she craved, and made their contribution to the book beginning to form itself in her mind.

  In the spring she began to read Proust, whom she admired at once. Because she read him in French, she believed the foreign language shielded her from too direct an influence on her own writing; all the same, there is a Proustian glimmer about Mrs Dallo-way. Her phrase for his style, ‘as tough as catgut & as evanescent as a butterfly’s bloom’ (Diary, April 1925), could be applied as well to her own; though her scale is different, in Mrs Dalloway she sets her characters afloat on a glittering metropolitan social surface from which they plumb their deep separate pasts one after another. Proust’s great work kept her company over the next few years.

  At this same period the Woolf household was greatly preoccupied with politics as well as with publishing, for in 1920 Leonard had agreed to stand as Labour candidate for the Combined English University Constituency (seven universities other than Oxford and Cambridge at that time returned two Members of Parliament). Leonard’s convictions put him on the left of the Labour Party, not as a revolutionary but what he called a ‘heretical socialist’, believing that society should be run for the benefit of consumers rather than for either capitalists or trade unions; he wrote a book to this effect, Socialism and Co-operation, and another, derived from his experiences as a colonial administrator in Ceylon, deeply critical of England’s imperial policies. His declaration of political faith, put out for the election of November 1922, blames the old men and old methods of the two main political parties not only for the First World War, but also for the troubles of Ireland and the Empire and the disastrous economic condition of the country. He wanted the Treaty of Versailles revised to be fairer to Germany, with the hope of building a united Europe; he wanted disarmament and recognition of the Soviet Union, and he supported the League of Nations; at home he proposed an educational structure which would give real equality of opportunity up to university level. Finally, he called for a more equitable system of taxation with a ‘specially graduated levy upon fortunes exceeding £5,000’. It is worth noting Leonard’s political creed, because Virginia undoubtedly shared his main views; she sometimes travelled with him to political meetings – to Manchester, for instance, in 1921 – and she also helped to organize regular gatherings of the Women’s Co-operative Guild at Hogarth House, and of the local Labour Party at Rodmell. She was, Leonard writes, not a thorough political animal certainly, but ‘the last person who could ignore the political menaces under which we all lived’. In the early stages of planning Mrs Dalloway, ‘ the Prime Minister’ was to be a leading character, to be contrasted with certain socially disruptive ‘Scallywags’.

  Leonard was no ‘Scallywag’, of course, but he took particular pleasure in standing against Virginia’s cousin, Herbert Fisher, a Liberal of the type he most detested, who served as Lloyd George’s Minister of Education, and whom the Woolfs knew socially. Virginia described Fisher as ‘a thin-shredded thread paper of a man, whose brain has been harrowed in to sandy streaks like his hair’; when he spoke he used words that were ‘cheerful’ and ‘colourless’, ‘slightly mannered & brushed up in conformity with some official standard of culture’ (Diary, April 1921). Evidently she and Leonard were at one in despising his distinguished emptiness – characteristic of Westminster, and the rulers of the Empire, in their view. But, although she believed there was a good chance of Leonard getting into Parliament, he lost the election, the Conservative and Liberal candidates being returned once again; Virginia’s views of such public men, only hinted at in the final version of Mrs Dalloway, were forcibly expressed much later in her pamphlet Three Guineas.

  Another visitor to the Woolfs in 1922 was T. S. Eliot. He came to read his newly composed Waste Land, singing, chanting and impressing Virginia with ‘its great beauty & force of phrase: symmetry; & tensity [sic]’ (Diary, July 1922); and doubtless with its bleak images of dead men, some of which are mirrored in Mrs Dalloway. The two writers also discussed Joyce’s Ulysses, which preceded Mrs Dalloway in taking a single day in June as its canvas. Eliot praised Joyce, Virginia disliked his work: a genius, she admitted, but pretentious, tricky and underbred, though she used the word ‘immortal’ of his final chapter, the famous interior monologue of Molly Bloom. Mrs Dalloway is a woman as different in style and experience as it is possible to be from Mrs Bloom; but it is hard not to think that, in giving expression to the flow of her thoughts, her creator showed she had learnt something from what she called Joyce’s ‘stunts’.

  As Virginia recovered from her headaches and fever, she returned to her own half-written third novel, Jacob’s Room. By the summer it was complete; the Hogarth Press published it in October, and it was immediately praised by Eliot, who told her it was ‘a remarkable success’, in which she had freed herself ‘from any compromise between the traditional novel and your original gift’.* It was her first full-length modernist work (although she had written unconventional short stories like ‘Kew Gardens’ and ‘The Mark on the Wall’), the first to take heed of the criticism and example of her closest and most admired colleague among contemporary women writers, Katherine Mansfield, whose stories were just achieving fame even as her health collapsed. Katherine never read Jacob’s Room or Mrs Dalloway – she died in January 1923, in France – but she would surely have approved and admired. And now, during this summer of 1922, which was divided between Rodmell, Richmond and visits to friends, Virginia embarked on several stories around the figure of Clarissa Dalloway, who had already made a brief appearance with her husband, the well-meaning but largely vacuous Conservative Member of Parliament Richard Dalloway, in her first novel, The Voyage Out.

  One of these stories, ‘Mrs Dalloway in Bond Street’, was completed and published in the Dial, an avant-garde American magazine, the following year. But the true Mrs Dalloway was not set in motion until the autumn, when the stories were abandoned in favour of a full-scale novel. At first there was no question of the madness and suicide themes. On 6 October she wrote two pages of notes as follows:

  Thoughts upon beginning a book to be called, perhaps, At Home; or At the Party.

  This is to be a short book consisting of six or seven chapters, ea
ch complete separately. In them must be some fusion. And all must converge upon the party at the end. My idea is to have some characters, like Mrs Dalloway, much in relief; then to have some interludes of thought or reflection, or moments of digression (which must be related, logically, to the next) all compact, yet not jerked.

  The chapters might be

  Mrs Dalloway in Bond Street

  The Prime Minister

  Ancestors

  A dialogue

  The old ladies

  County house?

  Cut flowers

  The party

  One, roughly to be done in a month; but this plan is to consist of some very short intervals, not whole chapters. There should be fun.*

  Of this plan, only the first and last chapters appear to have survived; and on the reverse side of the sheet are more notes, clearly relating to the proposed second section of the book on the Prime Minister: