Art and Ardor

by Cynthia Ozick

  Of Robert Trevelyan, poet and classicist:

  . . . he manages to be more malevolent than anyone I know, under a cover of extreme good nature. He reminds me of the man with the pointed stick, who picks up scraps of paper. So Bob collects every scrap of gossip within reach.

  Of Beatrice Webb:

  She has no welcome for one’s individuality. . . . Marriage [she said] was necessary as a waste pipe for emotion, as a security in old age . . . & as a help to work. We were entangled at the gates of the level crossing when she remarked, “Yes, I daresay an old family servant would do as well.”

  Of Sidney Webb:

  . . . one could even commit the impropriety of liking him personally, which one can hardly do in the case of Mrs. Webb.

  Of Lytton Strachey’s fame:

  How did he do it, how is he so distinct & unmistakable if he lacks originality & the rest? Is there any reputable escape from this impasse in saying that he is a great deal better than his books?

  Of the painter Mark Gertler:

  He is a resolute young man; & if good pictures can be made by willing them to be good, he may do wonders. No base motive could have its way with him; & for this reason I haven’t great faith in him. Its too moral and intellectual an affair. . . . I advised him, for arts sake, to keep sane; to grasp, & not exaggerate, & put sheets of glass between him & his matter. . . . But he can think pianola music equal to hand made, since it shows the form, & the touch & the expression are nothing.

  Of Lytton’s brother James Strachey (whom Freud later analyzed):

  He has all the right books, neatly ranged, but not interesting in the least—not, I mean, all lusty & queer like a writer’s books.

  They parade by, these portraits, by the dozens, then by the hundreds; they cascade and grow orchestral; the diary, as she acknowledges, begins to comprehend its own meaning. The portraits are extraordinary not only for the power of their penetration, but for language as strong and as flexible and as spontaneous as that of any of the English masters, including Dickens. And they have the gift of seeing through the flummery of their moment: though Lytton Strachey is a more significant friend to the style of Virginia Woolf’s imagination than Leonard Woolf (whose comings and goings to reformers’ meetings crisscross these pages), though they converse in the bliss of perfect rapport, she judges him with the dispassion of posterity. Nearly all the portraits have this singular contemporary balance—contemporary, that is, with us.

  But she is also malicious in the way of the class she was born into. She calls the common people “animals,” “a tepid mass of flesh scarcely organized into human life.” Unlike the majority of her class, she mocked the war; but the celebrations that mark its end she ridicules as “a servants peace.” Of famine following massacre: “I laughed to myself over the quantities of Armenians. How can one mind whether they number 4,000 or 4,000,000? The feat is beyond me.” She has no piety or patriotism, but retains the Christian bias of the one, and the Imperial bias of the other. “I do not like the Jewish voice; I do not like the Jewish laugh,” she writes of Leonard’s sister, and the two visiting Ceylonese with whom Leonard is forming committees on colonial oppression she refers to as “persistent darkies.” In all these instances there may be the little devil’s-tail flick of self-derision; still, the spite stands. Though hospitality is constant, her sister Vanessa is not much on her mind, but she misses no opportunity to disparage Leonard’s family; and perhaps, one discovers, even Leonard himself. In an ominous sentence seemingly directed at a speech by the socialist theosophist Annie Besant, but more dangerously at the principled Leonard, she comments, “It seems to me more & more clear that the only honest people are the artists, & that these social reformers & philanthropists get so out of hand, & harbour so many discreditable desires under the guise of loving their kind, that in the end there’s more to find fault with in them than in us.” In all Leonard’s plethora of meeting after meeting, there is no way that “us” can be made to include Virginia Woolf’s husband.

  Yet, for all that, the social distaste and the portraits—those astonishing projections into the long view—are not what the diary is about, or for. Why does she keep it, and keep it up? How explain the compulsion to write nearly every day, from New Year’s Day 1915 until the onset of mental illness in February; then again from August 1917 unceasingly until December 1919? To write through bombings, flu, strikes, Leonard’s malaria, changes of residence (the Woolfs voyaged continually between London and the country), house-buying, hand-printing? Above all, to write while writing? It was a discipline she admits to wanting to be only a pleasure, but clearly she needed to do it. The reasons she gives are various: to interpret the thirty-seven-year-old Virginia to the “old Virginia” of fifty; or “my belief that the habit of writing thus for my own eye only is good practice” for writing well; and sometimes one sees how it is a “therapy journal” for writer’s depression, in which the terror of self-doubt is ministered to again and again by the furious craving for praise. Now and then a future reader twinkles in these private pages—why else would she meticulously speak of “my father Sir Leslie,” and is it for herself she notes that “almost always the afternoon is dry in England”? On occasion the diary serves as a pouch for leakings of unwritten essays—energetic readings of Byron and Milton. And of course it is nice to know that Virginia Woolf, catered to by two servants—how easy it was for her to have crowds of friends for dinner and tea and weekends!—once lost her underpants in the street in the middle of winter. (She lets this pass without comment; the sneer comes two entries later, when women get the vote.)

  But all these useful reasons, pretexts, needs—her eye sidelong on us, more directly on her own intelligence—are not to the point, and especially do not explain the explosions of portraiture. “I might in the course of time [she tells herself in a meditation on the “kind of form which a diary might attain to”] learn what it is that one can make of this loose, drifting material of life; finding another use for it than the use I put it to, so much more consciously & scrupulously, in fiction.” That was April 1919. Two months earlier, she had already made that find, but failed to recognize it. On February 5, adopting the tone of a governess, she scolds, “What a disgraceful lapse! nothing added to my disquisition, & life allowed to waste like a tap left running. Eleven days unrecorded.”

  Life allowed to waste, and still she did not see what she meant. The following October 7, during a railway strike that “broke in to our life more than the war did,” the riddle begins to unravel: “Is it [the diary] worth going on with? . . . I wonder why I do it. Partly, I think, from my old sense of the race of time ‘Time’s winged chariot hurrying near’—Does it stay it?”

  In the end she knew what she meant, and what keeping the diary was for. It was literally a keeping—not for disclosure, but for “staying,” for making life stay, for validating breath. Her diary, though it is a chronicle and a narrative, is all the same not intended solely for a “record.” A record is a hound padding after life. But a diary is a shoring-up of the ephemeral, evidence that the writer takes up real space in the world. For Virginia Woolf, as these incandescent streams of language show, the life she lived and the people she knew did not become real until they were written down.

  _____________

  The Diary of Virginia Woolf, Volume One: 1915–1919, edited by Anne Olivier Bell, Introduction by Quentin Bell (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1977).

  Published in The New York Times Book Review, October 2, 1977.

  Morgan and Maurice: A Fairy Tale1

  Possibly the most famous sentence in Forster’s fiction is the one that comes out of the blue at the start of Chapter Five of The Longest Journey: “Gerald died that afternoon.” The sentence is there with no preparation whatever—no novelistic “plant,” no hidden tracks laid out in advance. Just before the turning of the page we have seen Gerald resplendent in his sexual prime, “with the figure of a Greek athlete and the face of an English one,” a football player of no special distinction
but the fact of his glorious aliveness. Then, without warning, he is “broken up.”

  The suddenness of Gerald’s death has been commented on almost too often by Forster seminarians; it is, after all, a slap in the reader’s face, and must be accounted for. Asked about it in a 1952 interview (it was then forty-five years since the book had first appeared), Forster would only say, “It had to be passed by.” An insulting answer. Forster is a gentleman who never insults unintentionally; he also intends to shock, and he never shocks inadvertently. Shock is the nearest he can come to religious truths. If you are reading a Forster story about a vigorous young man and happen, in the most natural way, to forget for just that moment how Death lies in ambush for all of us, Forster will rub your nose in reminders. How dare you forget that Death is by, how dare you forget Significance? Like those medieval monks who kept a skull on their desks, Forster believes in the instructiveness, the salubriousness, of shock. He believes that what is really important comes to us as a shock. And like nature (or like religion bereft of consolation), he withholds, he is unpredictable, he springs, so as to facilitate the shock.

  That is in the fiction. His own life seemed not like that. He endured the mildest of bachelor lives, with, seen from the outside, no cataclysms. He was happiest (as adolescents say today, he “found himself”) as a Cambridge undergraduate, he touched tenuously on Bloomsbury, he saw Egypt and India (traveling always, whether he intended it or not, as an agent of Empire), and when his mother died returned to Cambridge to live out his days among the undergraduates of King’s. He wrote what is called a “civilized” prose, sometimes too slyly decorous, occasionally fastidiously poetic, often enough as direct as a whip. His essays, mainly the later ones, are especially direct: truth-telling, balanced, “humanist”—kind-hearted in a detached way, like, apparently, his personal cordiality. He had charm: a combination of self-importance (in the sense of knowing himself to be the real thing) and shyness. In tidy rooms at King’s (the very same College he had first come up to in 1897), Forster in his seventies and eighties received visitors and courtiers with memorable pleasantness, was generous to writers in need of a push (Lampedusa among them), and judiciously wrote himself off as a pre-1914 fossil. Half a century after his last novel the Queen bestowed on him the Order of Merit. Then one day in the summer of 1970 he went to Coventry on a visit and died quietly at ninety-one, among affectionate friends.

  That was the life. That none of this was meant to be trusted, not, certainly, to be taken at face value—least of all the harmonious death—suddenly came clear last year, when the British Museum let it be known it was in possession of an unpublished Forster novel, written in 1913, between the two masterpieces Howards End and A Passage to India; and that the novel was about homosexual love. Biographically, the posthumous publication of Maurice is the precise equivalent of “Gerald died that afternoon.” (Trust the fiction, not the life.) It was to be sprung on us in lieu of a homily, and from the grave itself—another audacious slap in the face.

  But literary shock, especially when it is designed to be didactic, has a way of finally trivializing. The suddenness of Gerald’s death presses so hard for Significance that Significance itself begins to give way, and wilts off into nothing more impressive than a sneer. Forster, prodding the cosmos to do its job of showing us how puny we are, is left holding his little stick—the cosmos has escaped him, it will not oblige. Gerald’s death may surprise, but the teaching fails: death qua death is not enough. We must have grief to feel death, and Forster did not give us enough Gerald to grieve over. We were never allowed to know Gerald well, or even to like him a little; he is an unsympathetic minor character, too minor to stand for the abyss. Shock does not yield wisdom on short acquaintance.

  Maurice is meant to convey wisdom on longer acquaintance: here is a full-scale history of a homosexual from earliest awakening to puzzlement to temporary joy to frustration to anguish, and at last to sexual success. In Maurice it is society Forster prods, not the cosmos; it is one of Forster’s few books in which death does not reverberate in any major way. But like the cosmos in The Longest Journey, society in Maurice eludes Forster’s stick. In Howards End it did not: he impaled English mores in the house-renting habits of Mr. Wilcox, and wrote of the money-and-property mentality in such a way as to dishevel it permanently. Howards End is, along with Middlemarch thirty-odd years before, the prototypical English Wisdom Novel—wisdom in the category of the-way-things-really-are, the nest of worms exposed below the surface of decency. Maurice is even more ambitious: it appears not merely to attack and discredit society, but to outwit it. How? By spite; by spitting in the eye of conventional respectability; by inventing a triumphant outcome against the grain of reality and (then) possibility. “A happy ending was imperative,” Forster explained in a message that accompanies the novel in the manner of a suicide note (and is, in fact, styled by him a “Terminal Note”); like a suicide note it represents defense, forethought, revenge—the culmination of extensive fantasizing. “I shouldn’t have bothered to write otherwise. I was determined that in fiction anyway two men should fall in love and remain in it for the ever and ever that fiction allows.”

  The key words are: in fiction. Maurice, in short, is a fairy tale. I don’t choose this term for the sake of an easy pun, or to take up the line of ribaldry, and certainly not to mock. I choose it because it is the most exact. Maurice is not merely an idyll, not merely a fantasy, not merely a parable. It is a classical (though flawed and failed) fairy tale in which the hero is stuck with an ineradicable disability. In the standard fairy tale he may be the youngest of three, or the weakest, or the poorest and most unlikely—in Maurice’s instance he is the oddest, and cannot love women. In the prescribed manner he encounters sinister advice and dissembling friends and gets his profoundest wish at the end, winning—as a reward for the wish itself—the hand of his beloved. The essence of a fairy tale is that wishing does make it so: the wish achieves its own fulfillment through its very steadfastness of desire. That is why fairy tales, despite their dark tones and the vicissitudes they contain so abundantly, are so obviously akin to daydreams—daydreaming is a sloughing-off of society, not an analysis of it. To wish is not to explain; to wish is not to reform. In real life wishing, divorced from willing, is sterile and begets nothing. Consequently Maurice is a disingenuous book, an infantile book, because, while pretending to be about societal injustice, it is really about make-believe, it is about wishing; so it fails even as a tract. Fairy tales, though, are plainly literature; but Maurice fails as literature too. In a fairy or folk tale the hero, even when he is a trickster, is a model of purity and sincerity. What is pure and sincere in him is the force of his wish, so much so that his wish and his nature are one. But Maurice as hero has a flaw at the center of him; he is conceived impurely and insincerely.

  This impurity Forster himself appears to concede. “In Maurice,” the Terminal Note explains further, “I tried to create a character, who was completely unlike myself or what I supposed myself to be: someone handsome, healthy, bodily attractive, mentally torpid, not a bad business man and rather a snob. Into this mixture I dropped an ingredient that puzzles him, wakes him up, torments him and finally saves him.” The impurity, then, is the ingredient of homosexuality dropped into a man who is otherwise purely Mr. Wilcox, lifted temperamentally intact out of Howards End: a born persecutor whom fear of persecution “saves” from the practice of his trait.

  But whatever Forster’s hope for Maurice was, this is not the sensibility he has rendered. It is impossible to believe in Maurice as a businessman or a jock (in Cambridge vocabulary, a “blood”). He is always Ricky of The Longest Journey (which means he is always Morgan Forster) got up in a grotesque costume—The Sensitive Hero as Callous Philistine—and wearing a wobbly wig. Whenever Maurice is most himself, the prose gives a lurch: it is Forster remembering, with a mindful shudder, to throw in a liter of mental torpidity here, a kilo of investment shrewdness there. But all that is artifice and sham. Forster loves mu
sic; Maurice is ignorant of it; consequently Maurice’s self-knowledge occurs partly through Tchaikovsky. Forster at school recoiled from games and fell in love with Hellenism; Maurice has “physical pluck” and is an indifferent scholar (his “Greek was vile”); consequently on Prize Day he delivers a Greek Oration. No matter how Forster sidesteps it, Maurice keeps coming out Forster. After a while the absurdity of the effort to coarsen Maurice—to de-Morgan him, so to speak—fatigues; Forster’s pointless toil at this impossibility becomes, for the reader, an impatience and an embarrassment. It is embarrassing to watch a writer cover his tracks in the name of exploring them. Purporting to show a hard man turn soft under the pressure of alienation from the general run of society, Forster instead (and without admitting it) shows a soft man turn softer—so soft he slides off into the teleology of the fairy tale. This falsification is the real impurity of the novel. Its protagonist falls apart at the marrow, like a book left outdoors overnight in the rain. Maurice cannot hold because Maurice is made of paper and breaks like dough at the first moist lover’s squeeze.

  One suspects Forster knew this. How could he not? He had already published three nearly perfect minor novels and one extraordinary major one. He had already created the Schlegels and the Wilcoxes. Written in his own handwriting across the top of the British Museum’s typescript of Maurice, and put there possibly as late as 1960, were the Delphic words: “Publishable, but is it worth it?” The ambiguity is typical. Is the reference to the homosexual theme—or to the level of craftsmanship? That Forster was distinctly capable of detecting a falling-off from his own standard we know from his account of Arctic Summer, a work he abandoned midway because of “fiction-technicalities.” Comparing the texture of his unfinished novel with the “density” of A Passage to India, he explained, “There must be something, some major object toward which one is to approach. . . . What I had in Arctic Summer was thinner, a background and color only.” If he was able to sense the thinness of one novel and then let it go, why did he preserve Maurice, which he must surely have perceived as at least equally thin? In 1960, the date of the Terminal Note, thirty-three years had already passed since Forster’s invention (in Aspects of the Novel) of the terms “flat” and “round” to describe the differences between characters in novels. A flat character is always predictable; a round character is not. Maurice is neither flat nor round, but something else—a ghost—and Forster must have known it. How could he not? What made him want to hang on to a protagonist so dismally flawed? The answer may be in the “something, some major object toward which one is to approach.” In Maurice it is painfully easy to see what that major object is: sex, overt and unfudged. Forster preserved the approach but did not arrive. “There is no pornography,” the Terminal Note scrupulously reports. So much the worse for Maurice. He is there—he was put to paper neither flat nor round—only for the sake of the sex scenes; and the sex scenes are hardly there at all. Maurice—neither flat nor round—is the ghost of undepicted, inexplicit coitus, of the missing “pornography.”