Woolf as essayist

 

Few novelists have a great gift for the essay. Usually the essays of the professional novelist, the Martin Amis type, have a between-work air. Among the Brits, the great essayist-novelists are Lawrence, Woolf and Pritchett. I have been in love with Jimmy Joyce since highschool, and consider Ulysses the summit – but he was no essayist. Nor is this a gift distributed largely among great poets. Wallace Stevens’ essays are read only in as much as they refer to the real work. Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop wrote beaucoup prose, but it, similarly, is parasitic to the work.

 

 But even if you subtracted the fiction from  Lawrence, Woolf and Pritchett, their essays would enroll them among the great writers.

Woolf in her essays retains her novelist’s gift for describing the body – in fact, her description of, say, Hazlitt is of a more concentrated, pictorial strain than she usually devotes to the characters in her novels, who go from the voice to the body. Her Hazlitt (in her essay on Hazlitt in the Common Reader, series 2) comes out of his own works as a posture, a stance,  a character. He is a shoe-gazer, your typical emo, with a genius for his particular division of life, which inserts itself with some difficulty into the usual intellectual divisions of labor. For he is neither philosopher nor literary critic nor pamphleteer, although he has parts of all three.  Plus Woolf catches that something reminiscent of the incel. This is there in Hazlett, but there is something a touch, well, snobbish here,  Woolf passing on that class contempt from which Hazlitt suffered in his life and afterlife:

 

“We see him as Coleridge saw him, ‘brow- hanging, shoe-contemplative, strange’. He comes shuffling into the room, he looks nobody straight in the face, he shakes hands with the fin of a fish; occasionally he darts a malignant glance from his comer. ‘His manners are 99 in 100 singularly repulsive’, Coleridge said. Yet now and again his face lit up with intellectual beauty, and his manner became radiant with sympathy and understanding. Soon, too, as we read on, we become familiar with the whole gamut of his grudges and his grievances. He lived, one gathers, mostly at inns. No woman’s form graced his board.”

 

This is the kind of thing that reminds us that Virginia Woolf was, first and foremost, a Stephen, the daughter of Leslie Stephen of the National Biography,  the heiress of a line that incorporated  the collective memory of the whole tribe of allowable writers – a kind of noblesse de clercs. All of the romantics suffered, from the point of view of the  high bourgeois Victorian vision, from “unfortunate” sex lives – from the incestuous Byron to, what was worse, the declasse Hazlitt. The Hazlett of Liber Amoris, the closest English lit gets to Rousseau’s Confessions, damned him by describing a passion for a servant – the kind of thing no aspiring functionary in the literary world could tolerate. Byron, at least, ran off with women with titles, and Shelley with a wealthy man’s daughter. But a servant in a boarding house – well, it was all very well to do it, but then to write a book about one’s unsuccessful courtship of same – well, that went beyond scandal into tawdriness.

 

Leslie Stephen wrote his own essay on Hazlitt, which shares certain judgments with his daughter. Especially about Hazlitt’s penchant for indelicacy:

 

“Indeed he takes the public into his confidence with a facility which we cannot easily forgive. Biographers of late have been guilty of flagrant violations of the unwritten code which should protect the privacies of social life from the intrusions of public curiosity. But the most unscrupulous of biographers would hardly have dared to tear aside the veil so audaciously as Hazlitt, in one conspicuous instance at least, chose to do for himself. His idol Rousseau had indeed gone further ; but when Rousseau told the story of his youth, it was at least seen through a long perspective of years, and his own personality might seem to be scarcely interested. Hazlitt chose, in the strange book called the "New Pygmalion," or "Liber Amoris," to invite the British public at large to look on at a strange tragi- comedy, of which the last scene was scarcely finished.”

 

That Hazlitt must, indisputably, be included among the romantic generation’s worthies was a problem for those who wanted to merge literature and respectability.

 

Woolf did not – although a part of her was always returning to her father’s voice.  Interestingly, in Woolf’s essay, she mentions that Hazlitt was  the object of malignant persecution--Blackwood's reviewers called him "pimply Hazlitt", though his cheek was pale as alabaster.”

 

The pimple shows up in another of Woolf’s views, although one that was not put down in an essay. Rather, it first appears in her diary entry about reading Joyce’s Ulysses  which she had take up out of a certain duty to the modern novel – and a certain envy of the competition: “I . . . have been amused, stimulated, charmed interested by the first 2 or 3 chapters–to the end of the Cemetery scene; & then puzzled, bored, irritated, & disillusioned as by a queasy undergraduate scratching his pimples.” The pimples move from the undergraduate to a serving boy in her letter to Lytton Strachey: “Never did I read such tosh. As for the first 2 chapters we will let them pass, but the 3rd 4th 5th 6th–merely the scratching of pimples on the body of the bootboy at Claridges.” In fact, all of Woolf’s criticisms about Joyce are swaddled in the kind of snobbishness that anti-Woolfians can’t forgive.

 

 Joyce’s origins – about which Woolf knew little, except that they were Irish and had never been mentioned in the National Biography series edited by her father – figure overwhelmingly in her response to the book.

 

I think that Yeats’ line about the art that arises from one’s struggle with one’s self applies in particular to Woolf, who struggled with the masculinist ideology of the Stephen type which was definitely in her head, an illness,  and with class feelings that were entangled with the masculinist ideology as well, which she worked out to her satisfaction (and mine – but I think I am in minority in that opinion) in Three Guineas.  It is what made her the most complete literatus of the canonical writers of the English 20th century.