by Susan Hill
Antiquarian booksellers, whose trade is in books but who rarely seem to read them, like it if a book is an ‘Association copy’ – so my first editions of the James Bond books would be worth a lot more if they were all signed by Ian Fleming and inscribed to me, but a lot less if anything was written in them by another. Most of our first edition children’s books have lost value in antiquarian eyes because they have names and addresses and even ‘If this book should chance to roam …’ inked inside and if I had known or cared about it, I would never have filled in the puzzles in my 1940s Rupert Bear annuals, or the crosswords in those very first issues of Eagle and Girl. But I did, and I am glad I did. That was what they were there for, just as the dot-to-dots were there to be joined up by my children, not for some future monetary gain.
I have a signed first edition of Virginia Woolf’s The Years. I wish she had thought to scribble in it, too.
Not all the books in this house are defaced, and none bears a bookplate. But they are well worn and well read, well used and well loved and sometimes well annotated – and if there are any dot-to-dots, I will have joined them up.
Who’s Afraid?
THERE ARE SOME in every room, on every shelf and bedside table, though the two main collections are kept together, the best in the alcoves beside the drawing-room fireplace, the rest next to Thomas Hardy in the Small Dark Den. That is 113 assorted books by or about Virginia Woolf, and a few on Bloomsbury in general, with a run of the sadly short-lived Charleston Magazine thrown in. Easy to remember where it all began but harder to explain why a youthful interest which accorded with my aspirations at the time should not only never have faded but have greatly increased over so many years. Where are such passions formed, not only for an author and their work but for everything surrounding them, their lives, family, friends, the places in which they lived, their psyches? Not that I am alone in this particular literary obsession. The Virginia Woolf and Bloomsbury industries have gathered momentum and grown to vast and international proportions over the last fifty years. But when I first came upon her, she was far less known and it is hard to appreciate that then, in 1958, she had been dead only seventeen years and there was not very much literature about her. Her novels were read, though often dismissed by writers of the realistic twentieth-century novel – the successors to those formed in the very same realistic mould against which Woolf herself had reacted.
Writers learn to write most of all by studying books by other writers – the best, the great ones. One or two become all-important to us and formative, though why they should speak more than the others do, who knows?
I had never heard of Virginia Woolf when I was starting to write my own first book, aged sixteen, and chanced upon A Writer’s Diary on the shelves of Coventry Public Library. I was hungry for anything that would not only teach me how to write novels but would tell me about how to be a writer, whatever I thought that meant, anything which would reveal the secrets of the writing life. It is hard to convey the excitement with which I read it.
A Writer’s Diary has been close at hand, usually beside my bed, for the fifty years since then. I have a first edition, well thumbed and annotated, and a couple of paperbacks. I was enthralled by this extraordinary woman and her work and I have been so ever since. She was unique, a genius, a rare and strange artist as well as an ordinary, thinking, feeling human being, and of course her writing life was like no other – yet it can stand for so many others.
I learned how each novel germinated and grew, how she worked, sometimes quickly, before slow, painstaking revision and how she wove life around her writing and wove writing into her life, how she thought of it night and day, the constant background to everything else, how anxious she became about it, how ill it could make her – all of it was revelatory to me as a beginner. It still is.
The diary introduced me to the woman and led me to her books, and the shock of discovering her style, the passionate observations of life and places and people, has never really left me. I pick up A Writer’s Diary every day, at random. It opens on her description of visiting Thomas Hardy, or on her ecstatic race across the final pages of The Waves, on the account of a lunch with Dame Ethel Smythe, on how hurt she is by a bad review in The Times, on Leonard’s opinion of To the Lighthouse, or how she cares that Lytton Strachey is getting more attention than her. It has so many moods, contains so much intelligence, opinion, feeling – and gossip. It is a record of the times through which she was living while writing. The whole of Bloomsbury is here, in swift, intimate pen sketches which reveal the people to us as well as many a lengthy biography. I do not like most of them as I like Virginia but they are endlessly interesting.
I have never exhausted A Writer’s Diary, and never will. It gave me what I needed at sixteen, and it continues to give. And it led me to the rest of the work – and that has to be its greatest gift of all.
I do not love all of her novels. I have never got on with The Waves, which always reminds me of the sort of highbrow radio play they used to broadcast on Radio 3, and the charm of Orlando passes me by. But I re-read Jacob’s Room, The Years, and her masterpiece, To the Lighthouse, frequently and – test of great novels – find something new in them each time. As I grow and change, and my experience of life has increased, so those three novels appear slightly different, in the light of the time that has passed.
On the whole, I prefer to keep a writer out of their work. I do not feel that I myself or my life bear much relation to mine, nor would I ever expect someone who liked my books necessarily to like me. But with Virginia Woolf it is different. I am drawn to her, though I think it probable that we would have found nothing to say to one another. I picture any encounter as rather like the one I had with Edith Sitwell. But Woolf was one of those fathoms-deep people. The more one reads her fiction and even more, her diaries, letters and essays, the more one discovers what made her tick, how she thought, what she stood for, why she wrote as she did, why her life was as it was. And, like ripples in a pond, interest in her does widen out to those around her, Leonard in particular, and also her sister, Vanessa Bell, and the Charleston set. The very male, ratiocinative, intellectual atmosphere of Bloomsbury, and especially of the Apostles, is not attractive. I have no biographies of Strachey, G.E. Moore, Keynes, et al. on my shelves but plenty of books about the Omega Workshops, Charleston, Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant’s paintings. I think Woolf is often misrepresented – so much is made of her frequent ill-health and fragile mental state and the agonies writing seemed to put her through that the more practical person is forgotten. But when she and Leonard started their own publishing firm, the Hogarth Press, they bought a printing press which she learned to operate; she fulfilled orders, packed the parcels and tied them with string, liaised with whoever they got in to help them in the office downstairs and with the person who went out to sell their books.
I knew one of those ‘sales reps’. George (Dadie) Rylands was a young man when he went to work for the Woolfs and he left after a short time to take up a Fellowship at King’s College Cambridge, where he remained for the rest of his long life. By the time I met him, at one of the Stratford-upon-Avon international Shakespeare conferences which he usually attended, he was in his seventies, cherubic of face, with soft, rather pink, skin and a fluff of white hair. There was something strangely child-like about Dadie, a sort of impish innocence.
He was a wonderful talker, full of jokes and giggles, and he would talk about Virginia if you wanted him to, though I daresay he got tired of all the Bloomsbury pilgrims to his rooms in King’s. I used to look at him, as I also looked at William Plomer, another friend of the Woolfs, in bemusement that here they were, chatting to me, and there they had once been, chatting to Virginia. I suppose it is only the ‘danced with a man who danced with a girl who’d danced with the Prince of Wales’ syndrome, but it meant a lot. I have a snapshot of Dadie in Stratford with my daughters, taken so that they, too, would join in towards the end of that line of dancers.
When I sat my fin
als it was in the University of London Examination Halls in Gordon Square, the same Gordon Square in which Virginia had lived for so many years, round which she had walked so many times. It was good to remember that and feel the link, as I was answering the Modern Literature Paper question about her. I’m sure she helped.
But what if I had to choose only a dozen titles from my Woolf collection to last me for the rest of my life, whether that is a day, a week, or the thirty-three years needed to take me to my century? Almost everything must go. What am I to keep to see me through? Virtually every single book of academic literary criticism about Woolf would have to go. This is no time for critics. But a good biography is worthy of its place and I will keep two. Quentin Bell was Virginia’s nephew, and so his biography is written from within her world. It is brief, it is affectionate but unprejudiced, and he wrote most beautifully. I have several other biographies here. Lyndall Gordon’s is excellent, Hermione Lee’s, too, but I think I will keep one which marries her life and her work, her mind and her writing and her emotions, by perhaps the best of the women who have written about Woolf: Julia Briggs’s Virginia Woolf: An Inner Life. (American scholars have been to blame for most of the sillier flights of fancy and a fair old load of rubbish, too, about her state of mind and even her unconscious.)
John Lehmann was one of the young people who worked for the Woolfs in the basement room which was the nerve centre of the Hogarth Press, and his account of Virginia Woolf and her World is as good a short introduction to just that as you could find. His book was one of a valuable series published by Thames and Hudson and now all out of print, but I have a good selection of them. They have not been bettered as clear and straightforward accounts of writers in the context of their lives and times, and all with well-chosen illustrations.
Here is a book not about Vanessa Bell but by her, Sketches in Pen and Ink: A Bloomsbury Notebook, the nearest she came to writing an autobiography. It is a series of gracefully written pieces originally written for the informal Memoir Club which flourished among the Bloomsbury set from 1920. Vanessa Bell did not write very much, she communicated most of what she wanted to say via her paintings, but these short pen portraits are a delight and somehow distil the essence of the life lived by the Stephens sisters (as they were before marriage), their family and friends.
Only eight left? I will squeeze Leonard Woolf’s own autobiography into a single huge volume, then, which leaves me seven of Virginia. Jacob’s Room, Mrs Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, The Years, A Writer’s Diary, one volume of the Common Reader and the Selected Letters. That’s all? That’s all.
But I have the essence of her here. If I re-read every one of the dozen over and over again I will still not have exhausted or fully understood the strange, mysterious, fascinating woman that is Virginia Woolf.
But what if I could have only one?
I can get it down to two, Mrs Dalloway and To the Lighthouse.
You choose for me, please.
The Dregs?
WHAT IF I were left with only the books I call ‘the dregs’. I have been rounding them up today. How did any of them get here? Who bought them, and when, and why on earth? Were they given to one of us or abandoned here by a visitor? Some are clearly witness to a passing phase in the life of a member of the family. Here is a book called How to Train your Aggressive Dog. But we have never had an aggressive dog. Chinese Herbal Medicine for Everyday Ailments? I flirted with homeopathy years ago, never with Chinese herbalism, but I am doubtless full of misinformation and prejudice about it so I suppose I should read it and learn. But then, what is an ‘everyday ailment’? Who bought this stuff about how to get rich or to be a tycoon, or the autobiographies of those terrifyingly wealthy people in the Dragons’ Den? Am I really going to be left only with books about how amateurs have taken over the internet or whether capitalism is dead? I know where the scattering of horse books came from, the guides to dressage and showjumping and stable management, but now that we only have Border Terriers I would not find Breeding Golden Retrievers of use. Imagine having nothing to read in the house but cookery books.
I have always been interested in the weather so books about clouds, the wrong sort of snow and a history of English weather do not count as dregs any more than do Anthony Holden and Amarillo Slim and Al Alvarez’s brilliant books about poker. You do not have to play poker – though I once did – to find the psychology of those who spend their days and, even more, their nights at it interesting, or the history of the World Series in Las Vegas as glamorous as that of Hollywood. Those do not go into the box marked dregs, just on the shelf marked ‘Random’.
Non-books do, though. Small hardbacked books bought in the run-up to Christmas or Valentine’s or Mother’s Day are non-books. They are about Everything Being Rubbish or how to microwave a budgerigar or where to go before you die, or why Slough is the armpit of the universe; they are little anthologies of love poems or things read at funerals or cartoons about politicians. Non-books breed, too. Books about Everything Being Rubbish breed others the same or, contrariwise, books about Everything Being Wonderful; old-fashioned recipes from Grandma’s kitchen breed Grandpa’s allotment tips. No one is expected to sit down and read a non-book from cover to cover but they come in handy for Boxing Day, when people lie idly in front of the fire flipping through them and laughing maddeningly and reading bits out to the assembly who read out bits from their own non-books in turn. After Christmas, their place is the charity shop but, as such books are often rather small in stature, they manage to hide themselves in the cracks between normal books and so go unnoticed, sometimes for years. Often, when they come to light again, so much time has passed that they’ve been transformed into items of nostalgia, like old annuals, and can be brought out and read aloud in a different tone of voice altogether. They remind us of the first Christmas with our in-laws, or the one when the cat shinned up the festive tree and brought it crashing down, Christmases in the 1970s. I have a book that reminds me of the time I was staying with friends for Christmas and had flu. Someone brought me a tray on which was a teeny tiny Christmas dinner, with a minute portion of everything, including a teaspoon of the pudding in which someone had carefully concealed one charm, and a thimbleful of wine. That Christmas was many years ago and the friend gave me a copy of Shakespeare’s sonnets, bound in leather and no bigger than two postage stamps. Was that a non-book? I don’t know, but I wish I could find it again.
Yesterday I went to a drawer I open only a couple of times a year because it contains nothing but a pile of hooks for suspending Christmas tree baubles, the spare bagatelle balls, and a box of matches, which was what I came in search of. But behind the matches were three very small books. One was an illustrated manual of knots, the second a collection of jokes made by President Ronald Reagan, and the third was called Inspirational and Uplifting Quotations from the Scriptures. I have absolutely no recollection of having seen any of these books before, nor a clue who bought or brought them, let alone why, though the knots might come in handy. Books about things like knots are all the rage again, now that there is a vogue for the 1940s and 1950s and facsimiles of manuals for Boy Scout signallers, and the like. Supposing one were stuck here for a year with only these three for intellectual stimulation and mental nourishment?
Or with:
The Schoolgirls Pocket Book 1956 (though this does
contain useful things to learn by heart)
Red Grouse and Moorland Management
How to Construct a Questionnaire
Ecce Romani Book 2: Rome at Last (I could brush up on my
Latin)
Psychology and Policing
Handbook of Festivals for the Jewish Family
The Cult of the Virgin Mary
Sue Barton. District Nurse
Ein hoff chwaraeon (A Ladybird Book. I could learn Welsh)
A Simple Guide to Filling in Your Tax Return (1987)
Whatever kind of person would emerge after a year with only the above for company?
&n
bsp; Not Met
THE OLDIE MAGAZINE has for years had a column called ‘I Once Met’. I wonder how famous one has to be to appear in it as a ‘not met.’ I got into an index under that guise. To my amazement, when I first flipped through the index to Anthony Powell’s autobiography before reading it, I came upon my own name. Hill, Susan. Novelist. (Not Met.)
Here is the long shelf in the sitting room devoted to the books of another heroine, Elizabeth Bowen. (Not Met.)
Bowen is a novelist who has come into her own in the last ten years, having gone into and emerged triumphantly from the limbo that awaits all writers when they die. Indeed, she had been falling into that limbo during the last years of her writing life, which was a disgrace; a greater disgrace is that, although her critical reputation has never been higher and there are some good new commentaries on her work, the novels sell relatively few copies and many are now out of print. Bowen is not known as well as she should be. I wonder why.
It may be to do with the clotted and slightly artificial style in which she sometimes wrote. Her novels are not like blancmange, they do not slip down easily; but the reward for tackling the prickly thicket of her prose is very rich and she is not very hard, not obscure, not irritatingly convoluted. If you can read Henry James, Bowen is a walk in the park.
I have biographies of her by Patricia Craig, Victoria Glendinning and Hermione Lee, as well as the more recent academic studies, and I could not part with any of them as each has its own view which complements and balances the others. Glendinning’s is perhaps the best ‘Life’, though there might now be room for a new one because Bowen was one of those novelists whose life and times, the people and the places she knew well, really are relevant to her fiction, really do illuminate one’s understanding of it. She was Anglo-Irish and that informs much of her work. I have two favourite novels and one is The Last September, about a great family and its house in the Irish countryside in 1918, at the height of the Irish War of Independence, and the novel brings those events, those times and places, more vividly home than any number of histories. But it is not a history, it is fiction, facts have been transmuted into art. It has an atmosphere about it which wraps the reader round. The family, their visitors, the older generations and the younger, are central to the novel, but perhaps the house itself is even more so. Places and their significance were extremely important to Bowen, in the way that they were to Hardy. Landscapes are much more than simply backdrops to events, houses have character in the way that human beings do – families fall apart in many of them, and, as Hermione Lee puts it, ‘landscapes of dereliction are made to illustrate states of mind’.