A Painter at Her Easel

"A TRUE LETTER...should be as a film of wax pressed close to the graving of the mind." So, in 1907, 25-year-old Virginia Stephen--soon to become Virginia Woolf--began her first long letter to Clive Bell, her new brother-in-law. Yet what follows is one of the most awkward, befuddled, pretentious things she ever wrote. Rather than simply telling him she has gotten a telegram, she writes:

...A telegram...with its necessary knock and its flagrant yellow, and its curt phrase of necessary English--I know not which sense was more offended--hit me in the wing and I fell a heaped corpse upon the earth. The sense, if that can be said to have sense which has so little sound, was to discredit the respectability of a house in Fitzroy Square. And there you see me in the mud. Shall I argue that a mind that knows not Gibbon knows not mortality? or shall I affirm that bad English and respectability are twin sisters, dear to the telegram and odious to the artist?...

It was not only her first long letter to Bell, but her first such letter to any man outside her immediate family. She was desperate to impress her new relation, but was desperately unsure how to go about it. What is interesting is that she does not follow her own prescription and speak her mind, but relies instead on her artfulness to attract Bell's attention.

The letter, from the newly published first volume of Woolf's massive correspondence (over 3800 letters exist) is a good example of the extent to which Virginia was secure in her literary abilities and insecure in her dealing with people. In these letters one might expect that she would use her skill to express herself more clearly, but, invariably, it is precisely herself that she chooses not to express. She circles all about it, speaking of what she's done, whom she's seen, where she's been; but as to how all this affects her, what she feels--at that the reader can only guess.

Happily, although the letters exemplify the narrator's tendency to stay in the background, they also illustrate a novelist's eye for detail and ear for language. Here she writes gaily of her meeting with Henry James:

...We went and had tea with Henry James today...[He] fixed me with his staring blank eye--it is like a childs [sic] marble--and said "My dear Virginia, they tell me--they tell me--they tell me--that you--as indeed being your fathers daughter nay your grandfathers grandchild--the descendent I may say of a century--of a century--of quill pens and ink--ink--ink pots, yes, yes, yes, they tell me--ahm m m--that you, that you write in short." This went on in the public street, while we all waited, as farmers wait for the hen to lay an egg--do they?--nervous, polite, and now on this foot now on that...

Clearly these letters do convey a feeling of Virginia's personality, but it is conveyed only indirectly. In the early letter to Clive Bell, for instance, it appears that she has communicated more of herself--her shyness, her insecurity, her distrust of men--than, doubtless, she intends. To see the Virginia Woolf in them, these letters must be read between the lines. What she does not say is often more interesting than what she does.

THE PRESENT COLLECTION of letters--edited by Nigel Nicolson and Joanne Trautmann--covers the years up to Virginia's marriage to Leonard Woolf. The editors inform us that five more volumes will be published annually from 1975 to reproduce the rest of her correspondence. This first volume is of interest because it covers the years before the Bloomsbury group's heyday and Woolf's major fiction, years which generally receive little attention. It shows that Virginia Woolf was a writer long before Bloomsbury ever came into existence.

Woolf, who grew up in a literary household, always planned to be a novelist. Her father, Leslie Stephen, was a distinguished author of the 19th century literati. In fact, Virginia's first letter, written at the age of six, was attached to a brief note of her father's to her godfather, James Russell Lowell. Inscribed all in capitals, it goes:

MY DEAR GODPAPA HAVE YOU BEEN TO THE ADIRONDACKS? AND HAVE YOU SEEN LOTS OF WILD BEASTS AND A LOT OF BIRDS IN THEIR NESTS YOU ARE A NAUGHTY MAN NOT TO COME HERE GOOD BYE YOUR AFFECTe   VIRGINIA

As she grew up she became absorbed in the literature that surrounded her, virtually to the exclusion of everything that lay beyond. One thinks of her in her childhood as she portrays herself in one letter--sitting alone in the corner at a dance, reading Tennyson's In Memoriam. She exclaims, "I would give all my profound Greek to dance really well."

As the letter to Bell shows, Virginia was uncertain how to deal with men. In his biography, Quentin Bell (Clive's son) goes so far as to say she feared them, tracing this fear back to an incident in her childhood when a Ducksworth cousin abused her sexually. As Nicolson points out in his introduction, that theory seems unlikely in the light of these letters since some of the most convivial ones are addressed to this same Ducksworth. However, it is true that she preferred the company of women to that of men and that she expressed no interest in sex whatsoever. In the letter to Leonard that gave him hope that she would marry him she confessed, "As I told you brutally the other day, I feel no physical attraction in you. There are moments--when you kissed me the other day was one--when I feel no more than a rock."

Instead of a social life, the young Virginia had her books. When she was not reading she was writing, at a peculiar four-foot desk, at which she stood to work, like a painter at an easel. "When I see pen and ink," she wrote to Lady Robert Cecil, "I can't help taking to it, as some people do to gin." This was her exercise and her liberation.

WRITTEN in the pre-telephone age, her letters were, understandably, preoccupied with news, and when there was no news, with gossip. Virginia adored gossip. She was fascinated by the details of existence--the comings, the doings and the goings--and writes about them at length. On one occasion, though, even she finds it tedious: "This is the sort of thing I have to write to you about. There is nothing else to do."

Virginia's correspondence eased her loneliness. Much of it seems to have been written only to get letters in return. Desperate for affection, often in the most childish way, she created pet names for all her correspondents. Her cousin Emma Vaughan was variously "Toad", "Todkins", and "Toadlebinks"; her sister Vanessa was "Dolphin", "Sheepdog" or just "Nessa"; her brother Thoby was "Gribbs", "Grim", "Herbert", or "Thobs"; and she signed herself just about anything: "Billy Goat", "Goat", "Goatus Esq.", "Wallaby", "Kangaroo", "Apes", and so forth. Over half the letters in this volume are addressed to Violet Dickinson, a six foot two spinster aunt who seems to have served as Virginia's foster mother. In these, Virginia's childishness reaches its pack:

...remembering all this, I feel myself curled up snugly in old mother wallabies [sic] pouch. My little claws nestle round my furry cheeks. Is mother wallaby soft and tender to her little one? He will come and lick her poor lean mangy face. When you are at your worst do you think of Mrs Lyttleton, Mrs Crum, or me. Think this out. When you wake in the night, I suppose you feel my arms round you.

Although generally affectionate, Virginia could also be quite harsh. The blind observance of formality, which she considered the definition of idiocy, particularly tried her patience. For example, when relatives came to visit her dying father and offer her their sympathy she fumed to Violet Dickinson, "Relatives swarm. I liken them to all kinds of parasitic animals really I think they deserve no better. Three mornings have I spent having my hand held and my emotions pumped out of me."

But she never mentions the things that really bother her. Her mother died when Virginia was 13. The woman who came to take Mrs. Stephen's place in the household, Virginia's half-sister Stella, died two years later. When she was 22, her father passed away; two years after that, her brother Thoby died of typhoid fever. Virginia only spoke of the last death, and even her reference to that was fortuitous. Violet was very ill with the same disease and in order to conceal Thoby's death from her, Virginia made up cheerful prognostications and a few stories about him. This went on for a month before Violet heard the grim truth and the game was up. Virginia did not mention Thoby again until long afterwards.

Readers who examine these letters for evidence of Woolf's fits of insanity will be disappointed. There are only the slightest variations in style and tone. Generally the onset of her breakdowns (she had two during the years this volume of her letters covers) was marked by a particular bitchiness in Virginia. As she recovers, her letters are extraordinary for their clarity and maturity. She emerges from each breakdown refreshed, with a new power of vision. After one summer-long madness she writes to Violet,

You will be glad to learn that your Sparroy [Virginia herself] feels herself a recovered bird. I think the blood has really been getting into my brain at last. Its [sic] the oddest feeling, as though a dead part of me were coming to life.

And later,

I do think I may emerge less selfish and cocksure than when I went in and with greater understanding of the troubles of others.

The present volume of letters ends with her engagement to Leonard Woolf, a name she was at first unable to spell. (In letters to friends announcing her engagement, she calls him Leonard "Wolf.") According to Virginia, Leonard found her writing the best part of her. She repeated gleefully his promise that "if I cease to write when married, I shall be divorced."

By that time, she was already an accomplished writer. Her reviews had been published in the Guardian, the Times Literary Supplement, and elsewhere. She had published no fiction, although she had been working on her first novel for six years. Little that is in her letters contributes to an understanding of that first work, The Voyage Out. The editors make a case for certain parallels in characterization and action (the death of both Rachel and Thoby, for instance) but such parallels, especially when compared to those in Woolf's later novels To the Lighthouse and The Years, are quite tenuous.

What makes reading these letters worthwhile is the style in which they are written. She moves easily from one detail to the next, with no connection except an ampersand (which the editors wisely eliminated in favor of the less obtrusive "and"). Like her handwriting (which was wretched) her style was completely unstudied. It was simply the way the words came out. Nicolson, who heard her speak when he was a child, says the letters give quite an accurate representation of her conversation. One reason she charted the vicissitudes of character in her novels was that her style was flexible enough to do so. By the end of this volume of her letters, one realizes why Woolf wrote as she did. This was the style closest to her heart, embodying her personality--quick, sharp and radiant.