Tag Archives: Virginia Woolf

Dearest Diary…

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People are mad about diaries.  They read them, write them, attend  “journaling” workshops, forget about diaries after a few entries, or  burn them (though “open burning” is illegal these days). Everyone loves a good tell-all diary, but there are also  travel diaries, weather diaries, grief diaries, sketching diaries, and creativity journals.

In my favorite episode of the ’80s sitcom Newhart, ‘Write to Privacy,” Stephanie, a rich, preppy blonde who works as a maid at Dick Lowden/Bob Newhart’s inn, finds her boyfriend’s diary and stomps on it to break the lock. Dick’s wife Joanna chides her but soon both are indignant about Michael’s candid criticism.  He writes that he sometimes wonders if Cupcake (his nickname for Steph)  is a nice person, and fulminates about Joanna’s perpetual perkiness.  The episode ends with their apology for violating Michael’s privacy. Steph loves him. She couldn’t live without him. They are my favorite comic couple.

Michael, Stephanie, and Dick/Bob on “Newhart”

We clamor to read famous people’s diaries and journals.  Memoirs are more popular, but diaries are more intimate.

Every day I read an entry from Samuel Pepys’s diary.  (You can read the diary online at https://www.pepysdiary.com/  ). In 1600 he began to write the diary and stopped 10 years later. He makes me laugh. He’s the kind of guy you’d like as a friend. And it’s fun to read about life in the 17th century.

The first author’s diary I read was The Diary of Anais Nin. Nin, a lyrical, meditative writer of surreal novels who grew up in France, Cuba, Spain, and New York, trained as a psychoanalyst, attended parties with famous artists and poets, and ran a small press. Her friends advised her to publish her diary.

And it truly is a magnificent diary.  She writes in Acapulco in 1947 (Volume 5): “I am lying on a hammock, in my room at the Hotel Mirador, the diary open on my knees, the sun shining on the diary, and I have no desire to write…. This is perfection. There is no need to portray, to preserve.  It is eternal, it overwhelms you, it is complete.”

I am a fan of Virginia Woolf’s novels and essays, but have not read her diaries.  Some years ago I read A Writer’s Diary, a selection from her diaries edited by Leonard Woolf. For now, that is enough.   I do, however, recommend her arch-rival Katherine Mansfield’s Letters and Journals, edited by C. K. Stead.  Mansfield is lucid, observant, lyrical, and has just the right amount of bitchiness.  We don’t read the diaries of saints.

.Then there’s something called a gratitude journal.  I’m a bit of a pessimist, so I can’t take this too seriously, but I do occasionally write “I’m grateful for…” in my planner. In Meg Mason’s novel, Sorrow and Bliss, which was shortlisted for the 2022 Women’s Prize, the cranky heroine writes a novel in a gratitude journal.  She’s as cross about gratitude journals as I would have been a few years ago. In fact, this novel is where I learned of their existence.

I’m trying, perhaps in vain, to be mellower these days.

A Woolfian “The Forsyte Saga”:  Virginia Woolf’s “The Years”

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It began with To the Lighthouse and Mrs. Dalloway – rapture! – and A Room of One’s Own. And then I read Virginia Woolf’s other novels and essays, the diaries (still in progress), and Leonard Woolf’s six-volume autobiography.

But why had I not heard of The Years?  The critics apparently hated it. Susan Hill attacks the critics in her introduction to the Vintage edition of The Years: “Open any of their books to see it dismissed in a few lines, accounted patchy at best, a poor thing, disappointing – though patronizingly, they often imply that it needn’t matter – even the greatest writers have off-days.”

I was very lucky a few years ago to come across this Vintage edition in a bookstore, because, as I said, I had never heard of it. Oddly, it has become my favorite of Woolf’s novels. And the Vintage has not one but two introductions, one by Susan Hill and the other by Steven Connor. 

Published in 1937, The Years is more fluid and insightful even than her masterpieces of the 1920s.  It is an ambitious family saga, as absorbing as The Forsyte Saga, only written in Woolf’s running style, poetic, flowing, fragmented, whimsical, describing brass tea kettles and Picadilly with equal verve.  Told from multiple points-of-view, it charts the lives of three generations of the  Pargiter family, from 1880 to the late 1930s.

 The ideal introduction to The Years would be nonverbal:  a family tree.  Dozens of characters appear, disappear, and reappear at different stages, most coming together in the end at a family party. 

But I am fondest of the Abercorn Terrace Pargiters, the bristly Colonel Pargiter and his wary family.   At the center is his daughter Eleanor, a kind, distracted young woman who manages the household while her mother is dying. She also does charity work and more or less keeps track of her siblings, the youngest of whom, Rose, is seven or eight.  There are many comic scenes where Eleanor does the accounts.  She wonders aloud:  what is eight times eight?

Like Eleanor’s multiplication, the offspring of the branches of the family are multitudinous. There are cousins, aunts, uncles, parents, widows, spinsters, housewives, Victorians, Edwardians, and more.  Eleanor is our rock:  she stays with her father at Abercorn Terrace until he dies.  And then she is free.  In her seventies, she joyfully travels to India. 

A profession cannot define Virginia Woolf’s characters, but it may give you an idea of the broad spectrum of their interests: Eleanor’s brother Edward teaches at Oxford, their sister Rose becomes a suffragette (and goes to jail), kind cousin Kitty from Oxford becomes Lady Lassdale, and Sara, a whimsical single woman, lives in a flat in a slum and spends most of her time with  her best friend, a gay man (whom many think she should marry, despite his sexuality, because of their close friendship).

At the party at the end of the novel, we can see that the third generation is different, though.  Why are they so wretched? What does this represent? Peggy, a bitter doctor, hates the uselessness of the human race, the constant marriages and reproduction, even the repetitive conversation.  The women of the earlier generations lacked her educational opportunities, but that does not matter:  she dislikes them and is, strangely, the unhappiest person in the room.  Her brother, North, a war veteran and poet-farmer, just home from Africa, is also estranged because London does not embrace him, and his family is kind but vague.  At the end of the party, he meets a girl, and that changes things. He will marry and reproduce…  Peggy pulls herself together.

A significant number of women in the book are single, and they flourish, like Eleanor, who in her seventies is the life of the party.  And Sara, a radical in her rather strange solitude, chooses to defy her class and llive in a noisy, poor neighborhood that is unacceptable to anyone except her bohemian sister, Maggie, who lived with her until she married.

The sentence below will show you what it is like to read The Years.

.. “The swarm of sound, the rush of traffic, the shouts of the hawkers, the single cries and the general cries, came into the upper room of the house in Hyams Place where Sara sat at the piano.”

EDITIONS: The Vintage edition with its beautiful cover and two introductions is excellent, but I also recommend the Wordsworth, which has an introduction and footnotes!!! The cover is not ideal, but it’s the content that matters.

Reading in the Adirondack Chair

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Not an Adirondack chair but the same spirit.

We used to have webbed cloth lawn chairs, which were uncomfortable for reading, but the Adirondack chair is perfect. I sit there drinking “blue” tea (the color of the teabag wrapper) and slouching to avoid the too-friendly bees.  And do you know you’re supposed to talk to the bees?  I learned the latter from a novel by Elizabeth Goudge.

Here’s what I recommend: Michael Dorris’s A Yellow Raft in Blue Water (1987), a family saga about three generations of Native American women.  Written in the present tense, it is told from the points-of-view of three women, Rayona, who runs away from home, her mother, Christine, who grew up in the sixties and worried about her male friends’ Draft numbers, and finally Rayona’s grandmother, Ida.  On the first page: “We play solitaire on the sliding deck pulled across the foot of the electric bed….  [Mom’s] round face is screwed into a mask of concentration, like a stumped contestant on “Jeopardy” with time running out.” 

I just finished Virginia Woolf’s The Years, another family saga about three generations, only this has a multitude of characters. We follow the complex web of the Pargiters from 1880 to the 1930s. One of Woolf’s most traditional novels, but my favorite.

I hope you’re enjoying your summer reading and have a good weekend!

What Do I Really Think of Virginia Woolf?

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Virginia Woolf

“What do I really think of Virginia Woolf?” I asked myself in 2018 during a snowstorm.

I asked myself, because the city was deserted. I was sitting in a nearly empty restaurant, reading The Complete Works of Virginia Woolf on an e-reader. I was happily perusing The Common Reader, On Being Ill, and The London Scene. That morning I had actually seen a portrait of Woolf at the nearly empty National Portrait Gallery.

I used to love everything about Virginia Woolf. In my twenties, I thought I’d never read anything more brilliant than Mrs. Dalloway and To the Lighthouse. I do love most of her books. But in 2018 I went from ecstasy to disillusion and even disapproval while I read her partly-autobiographical second novel, Night and Day. I was irritated by the snobbery and classism, by the patronizing attitude of Katharine Hilbery, the patrician  heroine. To be fair, she does change during the novel. But I resolved that in future I would only read Woolf’s nonfiction, having a hunch her novels may not have been as astonishing as I’d thought.

Last week I overcame my petulance over her snobbishness during a breathless rereading of her vibrant novel, Between the Acts. Once my favorite book by Woolf, it was posthumously published in 1941. Although it is Modernist and experimental, it is entirely accessible to the common reader: the characters’ voices are seamlessly interwoven in a traditional narrative that highlights a domestic drama. And the history of England is commented on by a Greek chorus of villagers during a charming village pageant. The pageant is held on the grounds of Pointz Hall, owned by the Oliver family–for only 120 years.

Woolf knew a little about homespun theater, and the pageant reflects her experience. In 1922, she attended the rehearsal of a play by a women’s theater in London, which was written by a friend and directed by the famous Edy Craig. Woolf’s play, of course, has very different content: it is a history of England, told through verse, song, allegory and ribald dialogue. Like the play Woolf saw in London, this one is wirtten and directed by a woman, here the anxious Miss Latrobe. Woolf shares with us not only the comic performance of the play, but the reactions of the sharply-etched characters in the audience between the acts. In this odd novel, Woolf analyzes the subtle threads that bind the characters together, as the play portrays a changing England.

Poetry and verse permeate the narrative. We become well-acquainted with the central characters, the Oliver family, who live at Pointz Hall. Isa, the bored wife of Giles Oliver, secretly writes poetry, and walks around muttering verse to herself. Giles, a stockbroker who would have preferred to be a farmer, feels he has sacrificed everything to support the family, and is aware that Isa has a crush on someone else (it is, ironically, a gentleman farmer). And Giles is irritated when their wild neighbor, Mrs. Manresa, drops in for lunch with an unprepossing friend from London, William Dodge. Giles wonders, “What for does a good sort like the woman Manresa bring these half-breeds in her trail?”

The two older Olivers are as important in their way. Giles’s father Bartholomew laments the modern movement of history away from the civliization and etiquette of his youth; but his sister, the much more vivid Mrs. Swithin, sees the world from an entirely charming, whimsical perspective. In the following lyrical passage, we hear her thoughts about history.

But it was summer now. She had been waked by the birds. How they sang! attacking the daw like so many choir boys attacking an iced cake. Forced to listen, she had stretched for her favorite reading–an Outline of History–and had spent the hours between three and five thinking of rhododendron forests in Piccadilly; when the entire continent, not then, she understood, divided by a channel, was all one; populated, she understood, by elephant-bodied, seal-necked, heaving, surging, slowly writhing, and, she supposed, barking monsters; the inguanodon, the mammoth, and the mastodon; from whom presumably, she thought, jerking the window open, we descend.

What a lovely book! And now I will reread Virginia Woolf. Yes, she is a snob, but she understood the changes in history, and recorded the changes as well as the feelings and thoughts of her characters. And so I now have both the fiction and nonfiction to read.

Virginia Woolf’s Niece & A Shelf Arrangement Diary

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I am reading and loving The Diary of Virginia Woolf, Volume Five, 1936-1945.  In college I read A Writer’s Diary, edited by Leonard Woolf, and admired this short fascinating volume.  She writes so elegantly:  she could make a notebook of scribbled website urls look interesting.  Thus I must share an amusing quotation from an entry which mentions my favorite book, War and Peace.

On January 11, 1936, Woolf recorded her niece’s short visit.  “Ann popped in suddenly after lunch; bare legs, socks, tousled hair; wanted to borrow the second vol. of War & Peace for Judith who’s had her tonsils out.”

Do nieces read War and Peace these days?  Perhaps secretly. At my house a visit from a niece would go more like this:  “Ann popped in suddenly after lunch; patched jeans, no socks, disheveled hair; wanted to borrow Peyton Place because she needed a trashy read after a chemistry midterm.”

Peyton Place, War and Peace–same number of syllables–I must be a genius!

I gave away two of my four copies of War and Peace, my favorite novel, because they were oversized and hurt my wrists to hold!

MY SHELF ARRANGEMENT DIARY!

Speaking of diaries, here is a Diary of a Shelf Arranger.

Years ago all my books fit in one bookcase.

Then my husband and  I “colonized” a run-down neighborhood by buying a cheap house.  The house was big and cold, and we wore jackets and fingerless gloves inside, but at least we had room for books.  In our love of collecting books, we drove all over the midwest and haunted used bookstores (including The Haunted Bookshop in Iowa City) , library sales (we once went to one in Winona, Minnesota), and Borders everywhere.  All those old library books with mylar covers and tacky stickers on the spine!  And a copy of Barry Unsworth’s Sacred Hunger for 50% off!

Years later, we have so many books.  And most have that  “worn-out old-book” look because they were already ancient when we bought them.

So should I arrange them in the style of  favorite used bookstores?  Or would that be too formal  for home life?

Here are a couple of methods I’m considering:

1. Shelf all the Folio Society books together (they do this at Jackson Street Booksellers in Omaha).  The FS volumes are tall and oversized and look better together.   But if I put them together, I’ll break up my Thomas Hardy collection. Turns out I have the FS version of Tess of the D’Urbervilles, illustrated with woodcuts by Peter Reddick. Did I buy it at  Jackson Street Booksellers?  I’d forgotten I had it.  I also have a Modern Library paperback of Tess, a 1950s Heritage Press edition with illustrations, and a Penguin Hardcover Classic.

Should I start a separate Tess section?

2. Create a Thomas Hardy section.  I HAD NO IDEA WE HAD SO MUCH THOMAS HARDY UNTIL I SHELVED ALL OUR BOOKS. A Penguin paperback and an Everyman’s Library hardback of The Woodlanders;  two Signets (one my husband’s) and an Oxford paperback of Jude the Obscure; three paperback copies and a Heritage Press hardback of my favorite, The Master of Casterbridge; Selected Poems and Collected Poems; and a few  Pocket Book collections of short stories with minuscule print  We also have a battered copy of The Well-Beloved holding up one of our windows.

3.  If I Create a Thomas Hardy section, I have to create a Dickens section, a Jane Austen section, a John Updike section, etc. 

4.  But wouldn’t it be better to go by centuries?  Shakespeare and Milton, 18th century, first half of 19th century, second half of 19th century, first half of 20th century, etc.  That’s the way I think of books–in terms of centuries!

5.  Put all the Library of America editions together.  That probably wouldn’t work, though.  I don’t have that many.

 I haven’t implemented any of these yet.   Any suggestions?  After I shelve them, I want to catalogue them…on index cards.