She was reading Freud for the first time, whose ideas on regression, ambivalence and the unconscious disturbingly coloured this retelling of her childhood. The “Sketch” coincided, too, with the writing of Between the Acts, much concerned with the painful gaps between social masks and secret selves, and with a story called “The Searchlight”, in which a woman in wartime London turns the searchlight or telescope of memory back onto a Victorian past. This woman is like Virginia Woolf, returning to St Ives in the 1880s as a consolatory, even therapeutic, escape from dark days: air raids, plans for suicide in case of invasion, the fall of France. “Sketch of the Past” is about how memory works and how autobiography – particularly a woman’s autobiography – is written. And it makes a searching description of herself as a writer: her impulses, her ‘conception’, her materials (some of which is returned here from fictional to autobiographical use, like the puddle Rhoda couldn’t cross in The Waves, or the marriage of the Ramsays in To the Lighthouse), her struggles and her satisfactions.
So Moments of Being is an evolving narrative about the process of ‘life-writing’. She uses the term herself in a passage in “Sketch of the Past” on how impossible it is to isolate the individual ‘subject of the memoir’ from the surrounding forces of heredity, environment, society, family and relationships, that hold it like ‘a fish in the stream’. “Reminiscences” and the Memoir Club essays display the subject in dramatic relation to such forces: family mourning as a constraint on natural behaviour, for instance, in “Reminiscences”, or, in “Am I a Snob?”, the effect of English class consciousness and class envy on a left-wing, upper-middle-class intellectual, with an appetite for coronets and a fascination for the landed aristocracy.fn10 “Sketch of the Past” analyses how such forces, or ‘invisible presences’, are to be dealt with by the life-writer. How describe the stream as well as the fish? What should the entry-point be: first childhood memories, or the history of the ancestors? Should the structure of a life follow chronology (as in most biography), or the involuntary, arbitrary action of memory? How, if at all, can the writing ‘I’ access the ‘I’ in the story? And, given the inhibitions and anxieties of most women who write their autobiographies, how much gets left out?
Woolf speaks movingly in “Sketch of the Past” of her belief that the intense experiences of the past ‘have an existence independent of our minds’. If we could only invent a way of tapping them, we would be able to ‘listen in to the past’: ‘I feel that strong emotion must leave its trace; and it is only a question of discovering how we can get ourselves again attached to it, so that we shall be able to live our lives through from the start’. Her way of doing this is by the most vivid possible process of ‘scene-making’. All these essays, not just “Sketch”, are full of brilliantly dramatised scenes, which range in mood from sharp comedy to violent despair and grief: Lytton Strachey pointing at the stain on Vanessa’s dress with the one word ‘Semen?’, thereby unleashing ‘a flood of the sacred fluid’ into hitherto repressed Bloomsbury conversation; Lady Sibyl Colefax hiding in the empty drawing room of Argyll House while her furniture is being auctioned; Julia Stephen clapping her hands, with a little spring forward, when she comes to the place in the street where Little Holland House, enchanted house of her youth, once stood; Leslie Stephen thumping his fist and shouting at his daughters over the weekly bills; the sisters sitting in the hot grass in Kensington Gardens reading poetry, after their mother’s death.
But this powerful scene-making is always doing battle against some resistance. That last scene, in which Virginia awkwardly tries to explain to her sister a sudden sense of intensified perception, and can’t find words to do so, is a moment of failed communication in the past, matched by an inability to find the right words for it in the present: ‘Nor does that give the feeling.’ And that memory is of a time when none of them were able to speak out truthfully during the ‘muffled dulness’ after their mother’s death: ‘A finger seemed laid on one’s lips.’ A great deal of this eloquent book is about inhibition, evasion and silence. The story of the move from Kensington to Bloomsbury, from childhood to adulthood, is of moving from censorship and secrecy to candour and free speech. (It’s also about the relief of substituting irony for sentiment, and sceptical intellectual discussion for lachrymose emotions.) She often remarks on how ‘reserved’ she and Thoby were, or how shy Vanessa was about herself, or how liable she herself is to embarrassment and shame. And she still finds it difficult to tell her story – snared, perhaps, by that embarrassment, and by that critical self-consciousness about sentiment. A great deal isn’t spoken of, or is hardly mentioned, in these autobiographies – her breakdowns, her brother Adrian, the death of Thoby, her beginnings as a writer, her friendships with women – and they break off before we find out anything about Leonard or her married life.
“Reminiscences” starts with an inability to speak (‘I can say nothing of that time’), and is full of negatives and refusals: the children refusing to answer Leslie’s call, Julia never speaking about her first love, Leslie tortured by the thought that he never told Julia that he loved her, Julia not telling Stella she was ill, Stella hiding her grief in ‘ordinary words’, Vanessa’s dumbness – ‘she stood before him like a stone’ – in the face of Leslie’s bullying. And the narrative keeps shying away from its real subject, Vanessa, as if it’s almost impossible to write her. The Memoir Club essays expose a history of censorship and silences with gleeful candour, yet, at the same time, with tantalising evasiveness (notably on sexual matters). And “Sketch” is as much about the challenge of writing autobiography as it is about the past. It begins, insistently, with ‘difficulties’, it digresses and deviates and keeps breaking off, it tries out all kinds of metaphors for the past, and it constantly tries to speak the unspeakable: ‘I could spend hours trying to write that as it should be written’ . . . ‘I cannot describe that rapture’ . . . ‘I do not suppose that I have got at the truth’ . . . ‘The word is not the right one – but I cannot find one that is.’ Characteristically, this is a daringly experimental new kind of life-writing, in which the process, with all its problems, becomes part of the story.
The problems tangle up most densely around the figure of Virginia Woolf’s long-dead mother, whose character, influence and death have already been returned to over and over again in fiction and diary entries and letters, in an attempt to exorcise and lay to rest this powerful ghost. Every time Woolf describes Julia Stephen she says she can’t do it, whether in the choked-up, formal rhetoric of “Reminiscences” – ‘you will not find in what I say . . . any semblance of a woman whom you can love’ – or in the complex investigation, in “Sketch”, of ‘why I find it now so curiously difficult to describe both my feeling for her, and her herself’. She can never come to a conclusion, as she so badly wanted to do in her novels: ‘For there she was’ (Mrs Dalloway); ‘I have had my vision’ (To the Lighthouse); ‘That’s done it’ (Between the Acts). The death of the mother, that she found so hard to deal with in the novels – as a silent gap in The Voyage Out, in unbearable brackets in To the Lighthouse, coldly distanced in The Years – can never be settled. She describes it three times in her diaries, three times in these memoirs, always slightly differently.fn11 The repetitive, inconclusive return to the mother’s death is at the heart of this remarkable adventure in life-writing, where the past can never be solved or tidied away, the subject can never be finished with. As she said of her mother in “Reminiscences”, in a haunting phrase that balanced the absence of the dead against the presence of memory and narrative: ‘Where has she gone? What she said has never ceased.’
Hermione Lee
2002
fn1 Jeanne Schulkind, “Introduction”, Moments of Being, 1985, p. 18.
fn2 “De Quincey’s Autobiography”, The Second Common Reader, The Hogarth Press, 1932; “Thomas Hardy’s Novels”, The Essays of Virginia Woolf, ed. A. McNeillie, The Hogarth Press, 1994, Vol. IV, p. 509.
fn3 VW to Victoria Ocampo, 22 Dec 1934; VW t
o Ethel Smyth, 24 Dec 1940, The Letters of Virginia Woolf, ed. N. Nicolson and J. Trautmann, The Hogarth Press, 1975–80, Vol. V, p. 356, Vol. VI, p. 453.
fn4 Sue Roe, Writing and Gender: Virginia Woolf’s Writing Practice, Harvester, 1990, pp. 43, 45. See also Francois Defromont, “Mirrors and Fragments” in Rachel Bowlby, ed., Virginia Woolf, Longmans, 1992; Daniel Ferrer, Virginia Woolf and the Madness of Language, Routledge, 1990, trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby; Shari Benstock, “Authorizing the Autobiographical” in The Private Self, Routledge, 1988, for Lacanian/Freudian readings of Moments of Being.
fn5 Barbara Claire Freeman, “Moments of Beating”, Diacritics, 27: 3 (Fall 1997), p. 69; Ferrer, pp. 27, 46; Roe, p. 68.
fn6 See Linda Anderson, Women and Autobiography in the Twentieth Century, Harvester, 1997, p. 74; Benstock, pp. 25–29; Roe, p. 57.
fn7 Kennedy Fraser, Ornament and Silence, 1996, 109; Sidonie Smith, “Identity’s Body”, in Autobiography & PostModernism, ed. Kathleen Ashley et al, University of Massachusetts, 1994, p. 277.
fn8 See Christopher Dahl, “Virginia Woolf’s Moments of Being and Autobiographical Tradition in the Stephen Family”, Journal of Modem Literature, June 1983, Vol. 10, no. 2; pp. 175–96.
fn9 The Diary of Virginia Woolf, ed. Anne Olivier Bell, Vol. II, p. 26.
fn10 See Sonya Rudikoff, Ancestral Houses: Virginia Woolf and the Aristocracy, SPOSS, 1999.
fn11 See Hermione Lee, Virginia Woolf, Chatto & Windus, 1996, 80, pp. 130–1.
Reminiscences
Chapter One
YOUR MOTHER WAS born in 1879, and some six years at least must have passed before I knew that she was my sister, I can say nothing of that time.fn1 A photograph is the best token there is of her appearance, and the face in this instance shows also much of the character. You see the soft, dreamy and almost melancholy expression of the eyes; and it may not be fanciful to discover some kind of test and rejection in them as though, even then, she considered the thing she saw, and did not always find what she needed in it. But certainly it would be mere fancy to conceive that this was other than unconscious at that age. For the rest, a mother who gazed in her face might feel her heart leap at the endowment already promised her daughter, for she was to have great beauty. And in this case the mother would also feel tender joy within her, and some bright amusement too, for already her daughter promised to be honest and loving; already, as I have heard, she was able to care for the three little creatures who were younger than she was, teaching Thoby his letters, and giving up to him her bottle. I can imagine that she attached great importance to the way in which Thoby sat in his highchair, and appealed to Nurse to have him properly fastened there before he was allowed to eat his porridge. Her mother would smile silently at this.
Our life was ordered with great simplicity and regularity. It seems to divide itself into two large spaces, not crowded with events, but in some way more exquisitely natural than any that follow; for our duties were very plain and our pleasures absolutely appropriate. Earth gave all the satisfaction we asked. One space was spent indoors, in the drawing room and nursery, and the other in Kensington Gardens. There were a number of little warfares, and sometimes Nessa and Thoby fought with us and sometimes they were our friends. I remember too the great extent and mystery of the dark land under the nursery table, where a continuous romance seemed to go forward, though the time spent there was really so short. Here I met your mother, in a gloom happily encircled by the firelight, and peopled with legs and skirts. We drifted together like ships in an immense ocean and she asked me whether black cats had tails. And I answered that they had not, after a pause in which her question seemed to drop echoing down vast abysses, hitherto silent. In future I suppose there was some consciousness between us that the other held possibilities. But though shot occasionally by stormy passions, when sympathies seemed to waken beyond the reach of circumstances, the great satisfaction was to be had from impersonal things. There were smells and flowers and dead leaves and chestnuts, by which you distinguished the seasons, and each had innumerable associations, and power to flood the brain in a second. There were long summer evenings, with white moths abroad; and bright winter evenings when the fire-wood could be cut into shape. “The others” were not brothers and sister,fn2 but beings possessed of knives, or enviable gifts for running or carving; and your mother, partly because she did not seem to hold these views as completely as we did, was the first to disturb me from my contentment. Another influence was even then astir in her, the influence of an affection only to be gratified by people. No hole dug in the gardens however deep, so that it was possible to extract clay of a malleable quality from it, gave her all that she needed. Dolls did not satisfy her. At present, until she was fifteen indeed, she was outwardly sober and austere, the most trustworthy, and always the eldest; sometimes she would lament her “responsibilities”. Other children had their stages, and sudden gifts and failings; she seemed to draw on steadily, as though with her eye on some far object, which attained, she might reveal herself. She was very silent, and the only peculiar tastes which she seemed encouraged to show were those that people called out; she cried when Thoby went to school, and she minded more than the rest when your grandmother declared with some passion and humour, as I think, that she could never trust a single one of us again; had we not gone hunting for a dead cat against her commands? But beneath the serious surface only legitimately broken by such affections, there burnt also the other passion, the passion for art. She drew indeed under the care of a Mr Cook, but talk of art, talk of her own gifts and loves, was unknown to her. What did she think then? For with her long fingers grouping, and her eye considering, she surely painted many pictures without a canvas. Once I saw her scrawl on a black door a great maze of lines, with white chalk. “When I am a famous painter—” she began, and then turned shy and rubbed it out in her capable way. And when she won the prize at her drawing school, she hardly knew, so shy was she, at the recognition of a secret, how to tell me, in order that I might repeat the news at home. “They’ve given me the thing – I don’t know why.” “What thing?” “O they say I’ve won it – the book – the prize you know.” She was awkward as a long-legged colt.
When I try to see her I see more distinctly how our lives are pieces in a pattern and to judge one truly you must consider how this side is squeezed and that indented and a third expanded and none are really isolated, and so I conceive that there were many reasons then to make your mother show herself a little other than she was. We lived in a state of anxious growth; school, reports, professions to be chosen, marriage for the elders, books coming out, bills, health – the future was always too near and too much of a question for any sedate self expression. All these activities, too, charged the air with personal emotions and urged even children, and certainly “the eldest”, to develop one side prematurely. To help, to do something was desirable, not to obtrude diffident wishes, irrelevant and possibly expensive.
So your mother, whose sight seemed in some ways so clear, took it upon her to be what people call ‘practical’ though a generous talent for losing umbrellas and forgetting messages showed that nature sometimes delighted to laugh at the pretence. But the power which was not feigned and was probably recognized by those who trusted her, was what I call variously sagacity, and common sense, and more rightly perhaps, honesty of mind. She might not see all, but she would not see what was not there. Stories, shallow though they seem, and I cannot be sure that to other eyes they will show what they show to mine, float upon the surface and must be made to illustrate this flying narrative. One August night, very much later in date, when your grandmother was dead we walked in the garden at Ringwoodfn3 Your grandfather sat indoors alone, and might at any moment call us in to play whist with him as usual; and the light and the cards and the shouting seemed to us that night too crude and close to be tolerable. So we walked in the shade, and when we heard him come to the window and call we stood silent. Then he came out on to the lawn, and peered round him and
called us each by name. But still we persisted, and at length he went in and left us to walk alone. But as we knew from the first perhaps, such joy is not for mortals; we wandered without delight, and at last went in and found him impressive, consciously but truly impressive, old, solitary and deserted. “Did you hear me call?” he said, and I was silent, and so was Adrian; your mother hesitated, and then said “Yes”.
But this shows her quality in a tragic light; exposed to the fiercest strain. In earlier years it was most often the characteristic laughable token by which we knew her; “Old Nessa’s honesty” or “The Old Creature is so matter-of-fact” or “She means well”. For sometimes she clung to truth too tenaciously, too simply; and we, flippant or sometimes insolent, persecuted her with horrid titles, ‘Saint’, and so on; for children so soon as they have any wit to direct are apt to use it cruelly. But there were then days of pure enjoyment – I conceive them at St Ives most readily,fn4 when your mother trotted about on various businesses, considering the characters and desires of dogs very gravely, skilfully contriving butterfly nets, under your Uncle Waller’s tuition,fn5 accepting his law as the divine law, painting in water-colours, and scratching a number of black little squares, after Ruskin’s prescription.fn6 She played cricket better for the same reasons, with her straight forward stroke, calculated to meet all emergencies; and began by means of such fidelity and outward simplicity to win respect for herself from those tyrants and demigods who ruled our world; George, Waller, and Madge Symonds.fn7 She was a happy creature! beginning to feel within her the spring of unsuspected gifts, that the sea was beautiful and might be painted some day, and perhaps once or twice she looked steadily in the glass when no one was by and saw a face that excited her strangely; her being began to have a definite shape, a place in the world – what was it like? But her natural development, in which the artistic gift, so sensitive and yet so vigorous, would have asserted itself, was checked; the effect of death upon those that live is always strange, and often terrible in the havoc it makes with innocent desires.