As her subtitle suggests, she is particularly concerned with Sayers as a committed and dogmatic Christian and as a scholar—a scholar even of detective fiction, as she showed in her introduction to the well-loved Gollancz collection Great Short Stories of Detection, Mystery & Horror (1928). ‘I do feel rather passionately about this business of the integrity of the mind,’ she wrote to Victor Gollancz. There she felt unassailable. Emotionally and physically, however, she had a rough ride, with some compromises to make. Like many children of the manse (her father was Rector of Bluntisham-cum-Earith in Huntingdon) she had to make the best of oddly conflicting impulses. After a wretched entanglement with an elusive poet, John Cournos, she ‘chummed up’ with a car salesman and motorbike fitter who amused her, told her dirty stories, and left her pregnant. (Fortunately she had a cousin, Ivy Shrimpton, who made a living by fostering and teaching children.)
Then, in the 1920s, when she was reviving her interest in Old French literature and preparing to translate Tristan, she married Mac, a motoring journalist, who enjoyed a few drinks and a visit to the Holborn Empire and so did she. With him she took to good food and wine and majestically increased in weight. She was able to give up her slogan-writing job at Bensons, where she had worked successfully on the campaigns for Guinness and Colman’s mustard, and become a writer only.
But, distressingly enough, in the shadow of her success Mac diminished. From then on she managed her own life admirably, supported by loyal friends and taking on publishers, the press, the BBC, even the hierarchy when there was trouble over the broadcasting of her brilliant life of Christ, The Man Born to Be King.
She was one of the intellectuals entrusted by the Ministry of Information to encourage the nation at war, and she fearlessly accepted controversy. As a matter of fact, although she was argumentative, argument was not her strong point. (In The Mind of the Maker, for example, she claims that the process of artistic creation is threefold and so an analogy of the Trinity, without any evidence at all except that that was how she felt herself when writing.) What she had, as Frank Swinnerton puts it in The Georgian World, was ‘that inconvenient readiness of comment which flows from a mind lively and in good order.’
Speaking what she believed to be the truth she regarded as a duty. ‘She was influential,’ says Barbara Reynolds, ‘and other influential people took notice of what she said.’ This, of course, is true, but there were many strong-minded women, in sensible hats, on call at that time, and it is heartening to remember that Dorothy Sayers’s influence was due to an imaginary amateur detective who had ‘walked in complete with spats’ in 1920, and who was not at first meant to be taken seriously.
Barbara Reynolds is a cautious writer, devoted to her subject and, as the founder of the Dorothy Sayers Society, scrupulous over detail. Take the question of the almost too amiable chaplain of Balliol, Roy Ridley. He did, it’s true, wear spats and a monocle and did claim, to Sayers’s vexation, to be the original of Peter Wimsey. But she was quite wrong in saying she had never met him until after she had written her books, and Reynolds shows that she was wrong.
It is always a biographer’s job to look for the relationship between the life and the work, even though Sayers, like most authors, said that there wasn’t one. ‘None of the characters that I have placed upon this public stage has any counterpart in real life.’ Reynolds can only say that this is ‘disingenuous.’ After all, it is Lord Peter himself, in The Nine Tailors (by which time he’s become pretty serious), who says that the writer’s creative imagination ‘works outwards, till finally you will be able to stand outside your own experience and see it as something you have made, existing independently of yourself.’ Writers, he adds, are lucky.
Observer, 1993
BLOOMSBURY
A Way Into Life
Virginia Woolf, by Hermione Lee
More literary biographies are published than any other kind, presumably because writers like writing about writers. And they find readers who like reading them, although those readers are not seen at their best in the introduction to Hermione Lee’s new biography of Virginia Woolf. ‘I have noticed,’ says Lee, ‘that in the course of conversation about the book I would, without fail, be asked one or more of the same four questions: Is it true that she was sexually abused as a child? What was her madness and why did she kill herself? Was Leonard a good or a wicked husband? Wasn’t she the most terrible snob?’ Lee seems not to have been asked about Virginia Woolf’s parents or her sister Vanessa Bell, and certainly not about her novels. She does not complain about this, noting it down simply as part of the process of mythmaking. As a biographer she is calm, patient, strong, deeply interested and interesting. Although she does not believe that complete objectivity is possible, she will answer all the questions in their proper place.
She could not start her book, she says, as Quentin Bell started his twenty-four years ago: ‘Virginia Woolf was a Miss Stephen.’ She begins instead with Virginia Woolf’s own obsession with ‘life writing’ and with the relation between the inmost personality—‘the wedge-shaped core of darkness’—and the daily hard-working self. The biographer is bound by facts, but must go ahead, like the miner’s canary, to test the air for falseness and out-of-date conventions. Hermione Lee herself is certainly on the lookout for falsifications, but her real concern is to restore order, dignity, and sympathy. Her book, marvellously informative as it is about food, money, houses, clothes, pets, doctors’ prescriptions, and the complexities of love and sexual jealousy, is still a heroic life of Virginia Woolf, and perhaps even more so of Leonard.
‘Virginia Woolf and her contemporaries are poised on the edge of the revolution which has turned biography into the iconoclastic gossipy art form it is now, when the only taboo is censorship,’ Lee writes. Failure to make money is of course also a taboo, and literary figures wait like bundles of washing for regular collection (‘reassessment’) every ten years or so. Lee’s publishers absent-mindedly, or perhaps recklessly, say that this is the first major Life for twenty years, ignoring James King’s (rather dull) Virginia Woolf in 1994, Phyllis Rose’s Woman of Letters (1978), John Mepham’s Virginia Woolf: A Literary Life (1991), and Lyndall Gordon’s in 1984, not to speak of Louise Desalvo’s Virginia Woolf: The Impact of Childhood Sexual Abuse in Her Life and Work and Jane Dunn’s A Very Close Conspiracy: Vanessa Bell and Virginia Woolf (1990)—but here we are out with the auxiliaries, with the dizzying circles of intimate and less intimate friends and relations and their emotional baggage trains. Meantime, six volumes of letters and five volumes of diaries have been published, and last year Woolf herself emerged from copyright.
Why do people want to read so much about her? Not, it seems, to identify with her, rather to feel how much she was ‘other.’ As a child, a journalist’s daughter, I felt most clearly the distinction between the undemanding Georgian world I lived in and the world of Bloomsbury. My world was Hampstead, muffin men, autumn leaves, Peter Pan at Christmas, the Poetry Bookshop where Walter de la Mare, W. H. Davies and Eleanor Farjeon read aloud our favourite verses (for this was the last era when poets and the general public were on easy terms with each other). Bloomsbury was brilliant, poetryless, Cambridge-hardened. In comparison, we knew we were homely.
But Bloomsbury has been the survivor. Noël Annan, asked in 1990 for an assessment, described its position on the stock exchange of culture. ‘Stracheys reached a high between the two wars, but suffered a catastrophic decline in the 1950s and 1960s and have never totally recovered their one-time value…On the other hand, Forsters have proved to be remarkably firm right up to the 1980s, although they have eased somewhat since then. Woolfs were bought by discerning investors in the 1920s, but it was not until the company diversified with the publication of the [Quentin Bell] biography…that the stock went through the roof.’
He gives Michael Holroyd the credit for introducing these people (in his Lytton Strachey, 1967) as living, disturbing, suffering human beings. The Georgians, however, also suffered—they rotted a
way in the trenches, loved, hated, and sometimes could not pay the rent—but although Edward Thomases have stayed in favour, Walter de la Mares (in spite of Theresa Whistler’s fine biography) and John Masefields have sunk, it seems, almost too low for recovery.
But Hermione Lee has not written this book because Woolfs have gone through the roof. She mentions an attack of ‘archive faintness’ at the thought of the vast reserves of material that would make it possible to recover what Virginia Woolf said, felt and did pretty well every day of her life. Like some other researchers, she has felt almost ashamed to interview the still living friends and acquaintances who have obliged so often already with their reminiscences of this one famous woman, ‘as though the rest of their lives counted for nothing.’ But Lee’s book is not only very good but very necessary.
One of her objects, although not at all the only one, is to place the half-Victorian Virginia in her right context of twentieth-century feminism. Virginia’s own explanation, early arrived at, was that her father-dominated upbringing at 22 Hyde Park Gate was an image for her of the noisiness and infantilism of a male-organized society and the tyranny of the state. She said this charmingly in A Room of One’s Own and more forcefully and raggedly in Three Guineas (which was originally called ‘On Being Despised’). Leslie Stephen, her father, although he held, or said he held, that women should be as well educated as men, found the money for his sons’ education but not for his daughters’. (Lifelong resentment led Virginia to refuse every academic honour offered to her and even an invitation to deliver the Clark lectures). After his second wife’s death his demands for sympathy were monstrous, he was insatiable, and she knew and said that if he had lived much longer she would have been obliterated. None of this is in doubt, but Lee describes, better than anyone else has been able to do, what a complex business it truly was. Virginia loved her father, and she had inherited from him a Victorian nonconformist conscience painfully detached from its God. She tried to exorcise him, but he escaped her, just as Mr Ramsay, at the end of To the Lighthouse, steps ashore, ignoring his son and daughter, with his brown-paper parcel in his hand. At the age of fifty she still shook with anger at the thought of his emotional blackmail and his obtuseness to music and painting. ‘Virginia wrote and rewrote her father all her life,’ says Lee, but she also read and reread him. She was drawn back, against the grain, to the honesty of his books and their courage.
Lee accepts that Leslie Stephen, first editor of the Dictionary of National Biography, ‘chanting and groaning on his way up to his study,’ was at the root of Virginia’s erratic radical politics. But she also makes a convincing connection between her feminism and her concept of biography. Perhaps (as Stephen Spender suggested) because she felt her own experience was too limited, she was unashamedly interested in other people’s lives, women’s in particular, hidden, obscure lives. What was the way into them? Among her correspondents, after Three Guineas came out in June 1938, was a woman called Agnes Smith, a factoryworker who lived near Huddersfield. She was out of a job, managing on fifteen shilling a week. She asked what was the use of telling women to become ‘outsiders’ and refuse to manufacture arms, when so many of them would be glad to be paid to manufacture anything? Virginia answered this and Agnes Smith’s subsequent letters, always admitting that she belonged to a privileged social class and wrote from among them and addressing herself to them. But the ‘unnarrated lives’ that she wanted to bring into brilliant clarity were not documentary, they were imaginary. She envisaged a point where fiction and history met, or could be believed to meet. One of the best-loved passages she ever wrote is the story, in A Room of One’s Own, of Shakespeare’s young sister—who never existed—and her pitiable expedition to London—which never took place.
What we cannot tell is how this idea might have worked out in the autobiography that, in one way or another, she had been writing ever since she left the nursery. She did not feel able to live long enough to finish it. We cannot tell either what she would have said about this wonderfully fluid, imaginative, but strictly researched book, where every chapter has its own pattern, as though the biographer was following Virginia Woolf’s own advice to herself ‘to get down into the depths, and make the shapes square up.’
Prospect, 1996
Breathing Together
A Very Close Conspiracy: Vanessa Bell and Virginia Woolf, by Jane Dunn
I associate these close conspiracies of sisters with ‘long’ families in many-storeyed and—railinged London houses. It was a primitive form of association, with all the morbidity and natural strength of true Victorianism.
Come and kiss me.
Never mind my bruises,
Hug me, kiss me, suck my juices—
This is what Lizzie cries out to Laura in Christina Rossetti’s Goblin Market. ‘Eat me, drink me, love me’—and Laura is brought back from the edge of death, ‘for there is no friend like a sister.’ D. G. Rossetti’s drawing Golden Head by Golden Head illustrates the closeness, this time with a suggestion of magic.
The sisterly alliances were defensive and protective against family pressure and, if necessary, against the outside world. The groupings, of course, varied. In the Benson family the two sisters, with only a year between them, were in a strong position, bridging the gap between the older boys and Fred, with the strange little Hugh, in the nursery. The five Strachey sisters remained close enough until at last Pippa (the Angel Standby, as her mother called her) found herself, somewhat resentfully, left as ‘the daughter at home.’ Octavia Hill, the ninth of eleven children, kept her elder sister Miranda (or ‘Andy’) close to her to the very end. From family to family the same handicaps had to be faced—the fascinating, demanding father (perhaps wounded himself, as Edward White Benson was by the loss of his eldest son), the hard-pressed but miraculous mother, an inheritance of black melancholia, financial ups and downs, inquisitive relations, cruel and totally unexpected early deaths. All these things lay in wait for the Stephen sisters, and, in addition, while their brothers were given an expensive education, they were not. This was in spite of Leslie Stephen’s declared principle ‘I chiefly hold that women ought to be as well educated as men.’ As well as this setback, which they might well have expected to escape, Vanessa and Virginia had the fortune or misfortune to be deeply in love with each other. ‘I’ve been in love with her since I was a green-eyed brat under the nursery table, and so I shall remain in my extreme senility,’ wrote Virginia in 1937 when she counted on living long, for there was a great deal still left to write.
Marriage, of course, was the chief threat, a new conspiracy that might fatally weaken the old one. It was surely not until Vanessa married Clive Bell that Virginia discovered some of her own painful disadvantages of temperament. The pact made in childhood that she would be a writer, her sister a painter, seemed almost to insure them against competition, but Virginia was plagued by self-reproaching jealousy, and with it an acute and delicate version, in fact the agnostic version, of the Evangelical conscience. In the December of 1927, for example, she enters ‘a severe reprimand’ in her diary for ‘the habit of flashy talk’:
Nessa’s children (I always measure myself against her and find her much the largest, most humane of the two of us) think of her now with an admiration that has no envy in it; with some trace of the old childish feeling that we were in league together against the world; and how proud I am of her triumphant winning of all our battles; as she makes her way so nonchalantly, modestly, almost anonymously, past the goal, with her children round her; and only a little added tenderness (a moving thing in her) which shows me that she too feels wonder, surprise, at having passed so many terrors and sorrows safe…
This, from one point of view, is Jane Dunn’s subject matter. She is writing the history of a relationship, and it must have been a very difficult thing to do. In the first place the sources have been gone over so often, though she is not disheartened by this. The families, she says, have helped her ‘as if I had been the first rather than the five-hund
red-and-first researcher to stumble through their pasts.’ Secondly, the incidents and even the time sequence are not important to her in themselves. This means that events may be repeated to show them in a different light, or even left out altogether. After the first four chapters, Jane Dunn tells us she has ‘pursued themes in their lives, as for instance the tension between the demands of life and their art, and so weave back and forth through time and place.’
In spite of the careful division of spheres—Vanessa maternal, painterly, inarticulate, triumphant in the bed, the nursery and the kitchen, Virginia sexless, imaginative, language-loving, elegant, wild, famous—Jane Dunn looks at the two of them as a unity. There was ‘an essential reciprocity.’ They were conspirators in the true sense of breathing together. But the oneness was composed of sympathies and antipathies that she traces very far back. Vanessa, challenged by a naked six-year-old Virginia in the bathroom, admitted that she loved her mother best, and Virginia ‘went on to explain that she on the whole preferred her father.’ This is one of the central arguments of the book—that Vanessa became more and more like her mother, and scarcely knew what to think when Virginia restored or recreated Julia Stephen in To the Lighthouse. Virginia, on the other hand, with the motherly sister before her eyes, had to write her parents out of herself or perish. ‘I used to think of father and mother daily; but writing Lighthouse laid them in my mind.’
One of Jane Dunn’s achievements is to show the change in the relationship when Julian Bell was killed in Spain and Vanessa, up till then always the protector, healer and rescuer, was herself in need of healing. Virginia gave up every other concern to be with her, and Vanessa recalled ‘lying in an unreal state hearing Virginia’s voice going on and keeping life going as it seemed when otherwise it would have stopped & later every day she came to see me here.’ Jane Dunn suggests that it was now at last that Vanessa forgave her sister for her ill-timed flirtation with Clive Bell. But the two of them must, even so, have felt profoundly uneasy. ‘It was discomforting to have the pattern of a lifetime reversed.’ But still the conspiracy held.
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