by Henry Green
Whether anyone so close to Virginia Woolf may be the best person to make a choice is open to doubt. To select is to use art. This therefore is the picture we are, so to speak, officially meant to see of her. But then you may object, that is true of any editor. Also, as one can infer, there are the many still living, for whom it would be too frank to be confronted by her wit and comment. Nevertheless, it must be admitted, one is left with a great sense of the unsatisfied. There is so much more that only our children will read, the blessed fortunate creatures.
Because there are few women who occupied the position Virginia Woolf assumed in her lifetime. She says here somewhere that she can’t bear what, in her own day, was written about Bloomsbury, and indeed thought, at one moment, to do her own guide to it. But she cannot be blamed if she was singled out as she was. Not so much the brilliance of her husband and friends, as her own genius, isolated her in a limelight all her own. It is to her credit that she seems to despise this. Nevertheless we can, in this volume, watch her fame rise, and then, in her own estimation, wane. She takes a pleasure in both, as is perhaps natural in the self-comforting of a diary. For it appears she can never get away from herself. But then who can?
As Mr Woolf warns us in the preface, she writes of her diary that ‘one gets into the habit of recording one particular kind of mood – irritation or misery, say – and not of writing one’s diary when one is feeling the opposite’. Here again is the caveat, noticed earlier in this review, that what we have in this volume may only be one side of her. The trouble is, it is impossible to guess how true these extracts are to all but that one side.
For what we are given is a long chronicle of one book after another written in longhand, then the fair copy typed, then her husband’s entirely just praise, the real agony of proofs next, and at last publishing day with, after a few hours, the astonished delight and admiration of her friends and relations and finally of the reviewers. And all this in great agony of spirit, with repeated instructions to herself not to mind the criticism which is hardly ever given (or, if so, which she barely respects) and then the girding of the loins, and the starting of what for her is the new nightmare, the next compulsion, the new book. In between whiles she keeps on assuring herself that she is happy. But, as perhaps her nature was in these 365 pages, she does not I think once mention laughter.
The labour that went to all this is stupendous. Her habit seems to have been to write all morning, in the first years as little as fifty words, later as many as one thousand, though it is true she calls this ‘Two pages’ which, depending on how she filled her manuscript book, might mean still fewer words. After lunch, at least an hour’s walk. She is very close to her sister Mrs Bell, and if she is in Sussex, she may visit there in the afternoon, or go over to another neighbour, Lord Keynes. Two or three games of bowls seem to have been the one relaxation. Then more writing between five and seven. After dinner serious reading, planned sometimes, in this diary, for weeks in advance, and often from the original Greek. Then bed at ten-thirty. And always, it seems, awake again between three and four in the morning, when she seriously appraises where she has got to in her work. The only interruptions in all this are the agonising headaches which come again and again and which incapacitate her for two weeks, or the influenza, perhaps twice a year, which drags her down seriously. And she was really happy, these extracts make one feel, only when she was working.
And if the novel she was doing turned sour on her, got stuck, there were other tasks handy such as criticism. She was always ‘resting’ her mind with other literary labours. That this was successful is shown by the fact that she left twenty-two books behind her, quite apart from the diaries. But it does not lessen the strain understandably evident in the present volume.
Indeed this sense of strain reaches almost intolerable heights during the writing of The Years; Night and Day, at the beginning of her life’s achievement, had been hard enough, but it was as nothing to the tortures she endured in creating the first named. After close on three years’ labour at this book she writes, ‘I can only, after two months, make this brief note, to say at last after two months’ dismal and worse, almost catastrophic, illness . . . I’m again on top. I have to rewrite, I mean interpolate, and rub out most of The Years in proof.’ And, at that stage, the novel, which many consider her best, was 950 pages long. A record of hard work and guts that is beyond praise and which measures up to her stature.
Then, at the urging of friends, and his nearest relatives, she took on the biography of her great friend Roger Fry, who had died not long before. A harder task it would be almost impossible to imagine. One of the Stracheys told her straight out that it was impossible. And here is Virginia Woolf sketching a small part of the biography in this entry:
Suppose I make a break after H.’s death (madness). A separate paragraph quoting what R. himself said. Then a break. Then begin definitely with the first meeting. That is the first impression: a man of the world, no professor or Bohemian. Then give facts in his letters to his mother. Then back to the second meeting. Pictures: talk about art: I look out of the window: His persuasiveness – a certain density – wished to persuade you to like what he liked. Eagerness, absorption, stir – a kind of vibration like a hawkmoth round him. Or shall I make a scene here – at Ott’s? Then Cple [Constantinople]. Driving out: getting things in: his deftness in combining. Then quote letters to R.
The first 1910 show.
The ridicule. Quote W. Blunt.
Effect on R. Another close-up.
The letter to MacColl. His own personal liberation.
Excitement. Found his method (but this wasn’t lasting. His letters to V. show that he was swayed too much by her).
Love. How to say that he never was in love?
Give the pre-war atmosphere. Ott. Duncan. France.
Letter to Bridges about beauty and sensuality. His exactingness. Logic.
In this entry she seems to give a glimpse of the technique of construction towards which she was now driving, within three years of her death, with all her powers. Quite apart from the amazing grasp which she displays in the above – the carrying of the complete projection in the head, a capacity, a state of command which may only come from long application – there is what she calls the ‘four-dimension’ approach. See how she creates depth in the portrait of Fry, or rather in the portrait as it was then, at that moment in her book; by the death, what Fry himself said, then her first meeting with him, then his letters to his mother, then her second meeting and so on. Here, before one’s eyes, is built the sure scaffolding of a work of art.
Even more certain are the few sketches we are given, such as the Doctor from Lewes, who, after the consultation, stays to chat and omitting her, invites Leonard Woolf to the local chess club, and she would have so liked to have gone! Again the altogether brilliant account of travelling by night in the train, the Nicolsons and the Woolfs to Richmond, Yorks, to see a total eclipse of the sun, soon after dawn. Anyone who reads this was with them, must feel they were in the same compartment that night and had stood, at the moment, dismayed on the particular moor. This is also true of her setting down of what she saw of the blitz on London. Her command of what she sees can only be called uncanny.
It is for a later generation to guess at the position Virginia Woolf is to hold. It will be another two decades, as with all work done in the twenties and thirties, before any clear idea will emerge as to whether she will continue to be read. All we can tell the very young now, is that she had a profound effect on her time. And that we believe that, in 1941, a great woman and a great writer died, leaving in her work, as true artists do, a great part of herself behind her so freshly set down with endless, excruciating and exhausting labour.
THE COMPLETE PLAIN WORDS
(Published in The London Magazine, 1954)
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A review of The Complete Plain Words by Sir Ernest Gowers (H.M. Stationery Office).
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Some years ago the Treasury asked Sir Er
nest to write a guide to the use of English in the Civil Service. In 1948 Plain Words came out. No fewer than 300,000 copies were sold, an astonishing total. Then in 1951 he followed up with The ABC of Plain Words, which sold 130,000 copies. Now we have the present volume which we are warned is a combined edition, revised and rearranged.
He explains in his Prologue that the book is ‘intended primarily for those who use words as tools of their trade, in administration or business’. In the last sentence of the book he says that the ideal in writing this sort of English should be in ‘thinking as wise men do, and speaking as the common people do’. For most of his 200-odd pages Sir Ernest can only show how impossible this is in practice.
As early as page eight he gives us ‘A Digression on Legal English’. It lasts for but six pages and is a brilliant short essay on the difficulties of Parliamentary draftsmen, in which this most distinguished retired Civil Servant begs us very reasonably not to ridicule the verbiage under which so much of our lives is now led. For instance ‘An application for squashing a New Towns Order turned on the true antecedent of a thereto’; and more often turned against the citizen, no doubt, when it came before the Judge. He persuades us that it is impossible to draft these legal documents in any other way, but then that, of course, is what the lawyers are for; to, so to speak, translate for us, as there are accountants to explain Income Tax.
And so Sir Ernest goes on to tell Civil Servants how to explain why we, the public, cannot always do what we want. How best they can write their usually negative letters is the narrow main theme of his book. At any rate the public, more concerned with the avoidance rather than the evasion of our myriad laws, comes into touch with the Civil Service mostly when it applies for some permission which would only be applied for when there was a danger of it being disallowed.
As any writer knows, it is more difficult to write correspondence in the negative than the affirmative. Yet the Civil Servant has to find how to say ‘no’ politely and then give the reasons. As he is a servant of the public these reasons must be intelligible to what may be a half-educated enquirer. How easy by comparison the similar task in commerce.
In productive engineering (manufacturing for instance) nearly all the letters must be in the affirmative. To say ‘no’ to a customer is quite a decision, as it can be to the Civil Servant to say ‘yes’ But Sir Ernest must be right when he suggests that much of the obscurity of the language used in correspondence by Civil Servants comes from the wording of the Acts of Parliament which guide them. An analogy can be made in Engineering. The specification, that is the brief description in technical terms of what it is proposed to supply the customer, is often unintelligible to the layman. And this specification really stems from the Patent Specification, a legal document giving immunity for a number of years to the inventor in order to prevent a competitor copying his ideas. The following is an extract from a Patent Specification:
In accordance with one feature of the present invention, the improved mechanism for transferring bottles or like containers from one operating machine to another includes a table having a peripheral slot in the top thereof, a container conveyor moving in a horizontal plane and comprising a sprocket chain mounted beneath the top of the table for driving a number of conveyor sections, each conveyor section having an arcuate recess in its periphery to receive the periphery of the next adjacent conveyor section and having a hollow pivot stud extending downwardly through the peripheral slot in the table top, the stud being closed at the top and adapted to slip over the top of a vertically extending elongated pivot pin carried by the sprocket chain to establish a driving connection between the sprocket chain and the conveyor section.
It may well be that every trade is developing a private language of its own. The Treasury apparently thought the Civil Service was beginning to do so. And this is how Sir Ernest Gowers sets out to correct the situation.
There is a great deal that is admirable in the three sections that follow, The Elements, Correctness and The Choice of Words, occupying some 118 pages and much of it elementary but nevertheless exact.
Only when we get to the second half of the book can it be said that difficulty begins, namely, in The Handling of Words.
It is a brave man who enters there. So much is merely a question of taste. But in these remaining 100-odd pages there is much to give one pause.
Thus Sir Ernest writes ‘Like must not be treated as a conjunction. So we may say “nothing succeeds like success” but (in English prose) it must be “nothing succeeds as success does”.’ In this case the author’s alternative seems intolerable and what he seeks to alter far preferable.
Again he says ‘if the subject is singular the verb should be singular’, then gives the following example of how this should be done: ‘The Secretary of State together with the Under Secretary is coming’. Would it not be simpler if Sir Ernest had thought of ‘The Secretary of State is coming with the Under Secretary’.
As a last example, Sir Ernest writes ‘It is usually better not to allow a pronoun to precede its principal. If the pronoun comes first the reader may not know what it refers to until he arrives at the principal.
‘ “I regret that is not practicable in view of its size, to provide a list of agents.” (18 words).
‘Here, it is true, the reader is only momentarily left guessing what its refers to. But he would have been spared even that if the sentence had been written:
‘ “I regret that it is not practicable to provide a list of the agents; there are too many of them.” (20 words).’
But surely in Sir Ernest’s version it could be inferred that the official concerned might be hinting, in fact, there were too many agents. Surely something like the following could be better:
‘There are so many agents that I regret it is not practicable to provide a list.’ (16 words).
Perhaps writers ought not to review books. They only, if interested, see another way of doing it. (And not, Sir Ernest, ‘if interested they see another way to do them’.) On reading his book one thinks he might prefer the latter, which was, of course, invented by your reviewer.
And then, when aged fifty or over, some of us have a nostalgia for the old form of words. A letter from a Civil Servant about one of the remaining Defence Regulations would seem odious to many if it were too explicit. And how could it be explicit since no one understands these Orders anyway, tied up in legal language as they are.
There are many who prefer being stopped in a fog by a net with an unbreakable mesh. How much better this than running nose-on into a lamp-post, South Bank style.
Also in commercial correspondence there is a danger if we changed the phraseology, which is admittedly meaningless, that we should not understand what we all mean at all. ‘We are much obliged to you for your favour of the 15th inst.’ when changed to ‘We have your letter of Tuesday last’ would read to many an old hand like a threat.
As though two paragraphs further on we should expect to see some such brutal phrase as ‘put the matter before our solicitors’ instead of that old delightful wording ‘be compelled to place the matter in other hands’.
So it is, in the end again, all a matter of taste. But careful, scholarly and often witty as Sir Ernest Gowers’s book remains, it is not, one feels, for readers of The London Magazine.
IMPENETRABILITY
(Unpublished, 1954)
We go about our daily lives, in great cities, thinking entirely about our personal affairs; perhaps every now and again sparing a thought for our partners, that is, the person we live with, and of course with even greater guilt, of our children. After a time, in married life, it becomes the other partner’s fault that they have married one, but the only child, or, as chance may have it, the many children, have had no choice, they are ours, and this is what fixes the guilt on us.
I was in Moscow in 1938 and I saw men lying in the gutter who looked dead and who, my guide assured me, were dead drunk. I passed on. I had seen the same in the streets of Caen, Normandy, Franc
e, where as a child my parents took me so that we could taste meat, butter and cream again after the near starvation the Germans had put upon us in Britain in the 1914–18 war. I had passed on again. And when my father sent me to Paris to learn French in 1923 I once more saw a man lie senseless in the gutter. This time I stopped behind a plane tree. At least two priests passed by without it seemed a glance. I myself had gone past as had several other citizens, who had not stopped as I did. Then eventually, while I watched, two working-class women halted in the Boulevard Raspail and gossiped over the inanimate figure. Then one bent down and turned him over. Satisfied, I can only think, that he was still alive and drunk, she moved off with her companion, as I did likewise. One so seldom learns the end of things in life.