Don Quixote was driven mad by reading too many books. These romances filled his skull with such marvelous ideas, that they spurred him to set off on a series of ridiculous quests. Few of us voracious readers suffer quite so tragically from our flights of fancy. But we face lesser perils.
If you read and read and read, your mind will grow cluttered with a surfeit of words. Persist in this course, and eventually you’ll start writing book reviews and essays. As the extensive Dewey Decimal 800 Class of any library shows, this is a common and contagious ailment. Or perhaps you consider it a blessing — after all, you’re reading a book review right now, presumably of your own free will.
In Virginia Woolf’s case, writing book reviews and essays was an exceptional gift. She’s one of my favorite writers on books, alongside George Orwell, T.S. Eliot and Jorge Luis Borges.
If you have favorite book reviewers of your own, please tout them in a comment.
Virginia Woolf has the necessary skills of a book reviewer, along with rarer talents. She absorbs the distinct qualities of books she reads, and conveys them in clear, accessible prose. She enlivens this with her imagination and personality, she weaves in metaphors and opinions that make books we already know sparkle and dance afresh. She is a consummate writer, from her well-hewn sentences to the graceful shaping of her essays. And she has a dry, sharp with that she uses sparingly, with perfect aim.
Woolf grew up in a family attuned to history and culture, surrounded by the most learned Victorian minds. She grazed from childhood in her father’s vast library. But unlike her brothers, she was never sent to college, which she rightly resented. She felt keenly how women get excluded, both subtly and blatantly, from the temples of knowledge and power. In the end Woolf acquired all the fruits of learning; but maintained the independent views of an autodidact, and an outsider’s determination to question everything.
The Common Reader is Woolf’s first book of essays, all originally written from 1904—1924. She has one essay, ‘On Not Knowing Greek’, exploring Sophocles, Aeschylus, Euripides, Homer, Plato and Sappho: how alien their world is to a modern English reader, and why. Then she has twenty essays leafing through English literature, from Chaucer up to Joyce, with excursions to France and Russia. Also she has five essays about reading in general: essay writing, literary criticism, how styles have evolved over time — and, of course, the common reader.
Woolf pays particular mind to women writers, and she likes to uncover colorful writers forgotten by history. She’s always sensitive, and I found her notably astute on Montaigne, Austen, George Eliot, Chekhov and Conrad. I enjoyed every essay in The Common Reader; I learned and thought again throughout the book. But I know we all have too many books To Be Read, and too few hours in a day. I’ll share some excerpts below, so you can get a taste of Woolf’s literary essays (even if you never get around to exploring the book itself).
‘Defoe’
Most of us know one thing about Daniel Defoe — that he wrote Robinson Crusoe. Here Woolf further illuminates his style, and his place in the history of the novel:
Defoe was an elderly man when he turned novelist, many years the predecessor of Richardson and Fielding, and one of the first indeed to shape the novel and launch it on its way. But it is unnecessary to labour the fact of his precedence, except that he came to novel-writing with certain conceptions about the art which he derived partly from being himself one of the first to practise it. The novel had to justify its existence by telling a true story and preaching a sound moral. ‘This supplying a story by invention is certainly a most scandalous crime’, he wrote. ‘It is a sort of lying that makes a great hole in the heart, in which by degrees a habit of lying enters in.’ Either in the preface or in the text of each of his works, therefore, he takes pains to insist that he has not used his invention at all but depended upon facts, and that his purpose has been the highly moral desire to convert the vicious and warn the innocent. Happily these were principles that tallied very well with his natural disposition and endowments. Facts had been drilled into him by sixty years of varying fortunes before he turned his experience to account in fiction. ‘I have some time ago summed up the Scenes of my life in this distich’, he wrote:
No man has tasted differing fortunes more, And thirteen times I have been rich and poor.
He had spent eighteen months in Newgate and talked with thieves, pirates, highwaymen and coiners before he wrote the history of Moll Flanders. But to have facts thrust upon you by dint of living and accident is one thing; to swallow them voraciously and retain the imprint of them indelibly, is another. It is not merely that Defoe knew the stress of poverty and had talked with the victims of it, but that the unsheltered life, exposed to circumstances and forced to shift for itself, appealed to him imaginatively as the right matter for his art. In the first pages of each of his great novels he reduces his hero or heroine to such a state of unfriended misery that their existence must be a continued struggle, and their survival at all the result of luck and their own exertions. Moll Flanders was born in Newgate of a criminal mother . . . forced to earn her living as soon as she can sew, driven from place to place, making no demands on her creator for the subtle domestic atmosphere which he was unable to supply, but drawing upon him for all he knew of strange people and customs. From the outset the burden of proving her right to exist is laid upon her. She has to depend entirely upon her own wits and judgement, and to deal with each emergency as it arise by a rule-of-thumb morality which she has forged in her own head. The briskness of the story is due partly to the fact that having transgressed the accepted laws at a very early age she has henceforth the freedom of the outcast. The one impossible event is that she should settle down in comfort and security. But from the first the peculiar genius of the author asserts itself, and avoids the obvious danger of the novel of adventure. He makes us understand that Moll Flanders was a woman of her own account and not only material for a succession of adventures. . . . and, like all Defoe’s women, she is a person of robust understanding. Since she makes no scruple of telling lies when they serve her purpose, there is something undeniable about her truth when she speaks it. She has no time to waste upon refinements of personal affection; one tear is dropped, one moment of despair allowed, and then ‘on with the story’. She has a spirit that loves to breast the storm. She delights in the exercise of her own powers.
Defoe is famous for writing novels as if they were factual chronicles, and nailing his stories down with concrete details. This approach influenced all the novelists that came after him. Woolf, however, was especially drawn to Defoe by his precociously modern and feminist outlook — and we are, too. Many readers in the two centuries between Defoe and Woolf missed this entirely; all they saw was that Moll Flanders was no lady. They were irked that Moll lacked elegance and poise. Woolf recognized that she was something much rarer and more sublime in fiction: a credible and fully drawn heroine, a “woman of her own account”. Also Woolf, who got short shrift from her patriarchal society, respected Moll for seizing “the freedom of the outcast”.
I find myself liking and respecting Woolf, Defoe and Moll Flanders, all three. I’m glad Moll Flanders is already sitting on the TBR shelf in my bookcase, so that I can review it later this year. I look forward to adventuring with Moll.
Woolf has several original insights into Defoe and his works, but keeps returning to this feminist theme. You have to give the man mad props for writing the quote below, back in the neanderthal year of 1697:
From the evidence supplied by his essay upon the ‘Education of Women’ we know that he had thought deeply and much in advance of his age upon the capacities of women, which he rated very high, and the injustice done to them, which he rated very harsh.
I have often thought of it as one of the most barbarous customs in the world, considering us as a civilised and a Christian country, that we deny the advantages of learning to women. We reproach the sex every day with folly and impertinence; which I am confident, had they the advantages of education equal to us, they would be guilty of less than ourselves.
The advocates of women’s rights would hardly care, perhaps, to claim Moll Flanders and Roxana among their patron saints; and yet it is clear that Defoe not only intended them to speak some very modern doctrines upon the subject, but placed them in circumstances where their peculiar hardships are displayed in such a way as to elicit our sympathy. Courage, said Moll Flanders, was what women needed, and the power to ‘stand their ground’; and at once gave practical demonstration of the benefits that would result.
If this theme speaks to you, I unreservedly recommend Woolf’s 100 page manifesto, A Room of One’s Own. It’s a powerful and poetic meditation on Feminism, writing, history, patriarchal culture and education. I originally intended to address that book, too, in this diary. But it’s far too deep and subtle to untangle in just a few paragraphs, after a mere week’s consideration.
‘Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights’
Virginia Woolf loves and admires these novels. In A Room of One’s Own she rates her greatest women novelists of the 1800s: Austen, Eliot, Charlotte and Emily Brontë. Personally, I’d only have named the first two. But I read Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights in my youth — perhaps I failed to plumb their deeper spirits. Also, when it comes to Austen and Eliot, I’ve read a few of their novels (not just one from each), so they’ve had more opportunities to draw me in.
In this essay Woolf contrasts humanistic writers (like Austen and Tolstoy) with passionate Romantics (the Brontës). Many Romantic writers fall into mawkishness, but Woolf believes the Brontës have the power and authenticity to carry it off.
The writer has us by the hand, forces us along her road, makes us see what she sees, never leaves us for a moment or allows us to forget her. At the end we are steeped through and through with the genius, the vehemence, the indignation of Charlotte Brontë. . . . She does not attempt to solve the problems of human life; she is even unaware that such problems exist; all her force, and it is the more tremendous for being constricted, goes into the assertion, ‘I love’, ‘I hate’, ‘I suffer’.
For the self-centred and self-limited writers have a power denied the more catholic and broad-minded. Their impressions are close packed and strongly stamped between their narrow walls. Nothing issues from their minds which has not been marked with their own impress. They learn little from other writers, and what they adopt they cannot assimilate. Both Hardy and Charlotte Brontë appear to have founded their styles upon a stiff and decorous journalism. The staple of their prose is awkward and unyielding. But both with labour and the most obstinate integrity, by thinking every thought until it has subdued words to itself, have forged for themselves a prose which takes the mould of their minds entire; which has, into the bargain, a beauty, a power, a swiftness of its own. Charlotte Brontë, at least, owed nothing to the reading of many books. She never learnt the smoothness of the professional writer . . . we read Charlotte Brontë not for exquisite observation of character — her characters are vigorous and elementary; not for comedy — hers is grim and crude; not for a philosophic view of life — hers is that of a country parson’s daughter; but for her poetry. Probably that is so with all writers who have, as she has, an overpowering personality, so that, as we say in real life, they have only to open the door to make themselves felt.
“Overpowering personality” cannot be assessed objectively. It is a subjective force which will attract some readers, leave some unmoved, and repel others. Having read 26 Woolf essays, I find her an exceptionally receptive and judicious critic, who has read widely and considered hundreds of facets of different books — so, in this and every case, I respect her opinion. However you personally respond to the Brontës’ charms, I think Woolf’s central argument is persuasive: these novels were built around the Brontës’ blazing personalities, and those weird voices are what raise the novels to greatness, or doom them to obliquity.
I’m happy to discover that Woolf mirrors my own method of reviewing books — or, more fairly, I mirror hers, as she both precedes and exceeds my own less polished essays. I keep chipping away at my own book reviews, above all, because they stretch me so as a writer. When I enter into the spirit of someone else’s book, I must reach to grasp words and ideas outside my own comfort zone. Virginia Woolf excels at this. Her essay on the alien world of the Greeks is the most alien and stark in A Room of One’s Own, as she paints in prose the bright Mediterranean sunlight of that frank and fatalistic culture. In this Brontë essay, Woolf taps into her own Romantic yearnings, and sweeps us into her enthusiasm. Whether or not you’re enchanted by the Brontës’ visions, Woolf shows you their magic from the inside.
Wuthering Heights is a more difficult book to understand than Jane Eyre, because Emily was a greater poet than Charlotte. When Charlotte wrote she said with eloquence and splendor and passion ‘I love’, ‘I hate’, ‘I suffer’. Her experience, though more intense, is on a level with our own. But there is no ‘I’ in Wuthering Heights. . . . It is as if [Emily] could tear up all that we know human beings by, and fill these unrecognizable transparencies with such a gust of life that they transcend reality. Hers, then, is the rarest of all powers. She could free life from its dependence on facts, with a few touches indicate the spirit of a face so that it needs no body; by speaking of the moor make the wind blow and the thunder roar.
‘Modern Fiction’ (1919)
Woolf wrote her ‘Modern Fiction’ essay 97 years ago, but the points she made still apply to novels getting published today. Many authors try to portray realism through a photographic attention to sensory details, and to portray modernism through the chic brands and products of their moment. But this materialist method misses the spirit which animates great novels. The books that work hardest to appear contemporary are the ones that most quickly fall out of date. The freshness that flows in living books comes more from a writer discerning what’s most real and meaningful in human experience, and discovering for themselves original ways of seeing and painting that vitality.
Furthermore, most writers read a lot of contemporary novels and reviews, so they’re thoroughly versed in which qualities critics are praising and readers are buying. Whether writers echo trendy tropes deliberately or unconsciously, it’s easier to imitate fashionable formulae than it is to craft a more personal and original style of storytelling. Another impediment against charting their singular path is that, after putting in the work to find it, a writer may discover the public doesn’t care for it — while the tested formulae will more easily find a market, and critics already comprehend those styles.
While Woolf’s insights here apply especially to novels striving to be up-to-the-minute, they also speak more generally to how writers aim for a sparkling realism, and how often they miss the heart of it.
Admitting the vagueness which afflicts all criticism of novels, let us hazard the opinion that for us at this moment the form of fiction most in vogue more often misses than secures the thing we seek. Whether we call it life or spirit, truth or reality, this, the essential thing, has moved off, or on, and refuses to be contained any longer in such ill-fitting vestments as we provide. Nevertheless, we go on perseveringly, conscientiously, constructing our two and thirty chapters after a design which more and more ceases to resemble the vision of our minds. So much of the enormous labour of proving the solidity, the likeness to life, of the story is not merely labour thrown away but labour misplaced to the extent of obscuring and blotting out the light of conception. The writer seems constrained, not by his own free will but by some powerful and unscrupulous tyrant who has him in thrall, to provide a plot, to provide comedy, tragedy, love interest, and an air of probability embalming the whole so impeccable that if all his figures were to come to life they would find themselves dressed down to the last button of their coats in the fashion of the hour. The tyrant is obeyed; the novel is done to a turn. But sometimes, more and more often as time goes by, we suspect a momentary doubt, a spasm of rebellion, as the pages fill themselves in the customary way. Is life like this? Must novels be like this?
Look within and life, it seems, is very far from being ‘like this’. Examine for a moment an ordinary mind on an ordinary day. The mind receives a myriad impressions — trivial, fantastic, evanescent, or engraved with the sharpness of steel. From all sides they come, an incessant shower of innumerable atoms; and as they fall, as they shape themselves into the life of Monday or Tuesday, the accent falls differently from of old; the moment of importance came not here but there; so that, if a writer were a free man and not a slave, if he could write what he chose and not what he must, if he could base his writing upon his own feeling and not upon convention, there would be no plot, no comedy, no tragedy, no love interest or catastrophe in the accepted style, and perhaps not a single button sewn on as the Bond Street tailors would have it. Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end. Is it not the task of the novelist to convey this varying, this unknown and uncircumscribed spirit, whatever aberration or complexity it may display, with as little mixture of the alien and external as possible? We are not pleading merely for courage and sincerity; we are suggesting that the proper stuff of fiction is a little other than custom would have us believe it.
It is, at any rate, in some such fashion as this that we seek to define the quality which distinguishes the work of several young writers, among whom Mr James Joyce is the most notable, from that of their predecessors. They attempt to come closer to life, and to preserve more sincerely and exactly what interests and moves them, even if to do so they must discard most of the conventions which are commonly observed by the novelist. Let us record the atoms as they fall upon the mind in the order in which they fall, let us trace the pattern, however disconnected and incoherent in appearance, which each sight or incident scores upon the consciousness. Let us not take it for granted that life exists more fully in what is commonly thought big than in what is commonly thought small. Any one who has read The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man or, what promises to be a far more interesting work, Ulysses, now appearing in the Little Review, will have hazarded some theory of this nature as to Mr Joyce’s intention [Woolf had read the first third of Ulysses when she wrote this essay]. On our part, with such a fragment before us, it is hazarded rather than affirmed; but whatever the intention of the whole, there can be no question but that it is of the utmost sincerity and that the result, difficult or unpleasant as we may judge it, is undeniably important. In contrast with those whom we have called materialists, Mr Joyce is spiritual; he is concerned at all costs to reveal the flickerings of that innermost flame which flashes its messages through the brain, and in order to preserve it he disregards with complete courage whatever seems to him adventitious, whether it be probability, or coherence, or any other of these signposts which for generations have served to support the imagination of a reader when called upon to imagine what he can neither touch or see. The scene in the cemetery, for instance, with its brilliancy, its sordidity, its incoherence, its sudden lightning flashes of significance, does undoubtedly come so close to the quick of the mind that, on a first reading at any rate, it is difficult not to acclaim a masterpiece. If we want life itself, here surely we have it.
Woolf has read Joyce closely, and she comprehends much of the power and invention in his watershed Ulysses. From one reading of its opening chapters, she gathers much of what Joyce was crafting in his epic, and just how special and new his achievements therein were. It is somewhat astonishing that Woolf saw so far into Ulysses, before she even swam in the deeper later chapters of it.
Virginia Woolf had three advantages in her exploration of Joyce’s work-in-progress. She, like Joyce, had read widely and deeply. So she knew the history of literature as well as all its recent fashions. She could see just where the walls of past achievement had reached, and where and why Joyce was ripping beyond them. Woolf was a very sensitive and percipient reader, so she felt most of the currents flowing through Joyce’s work, and where they were leading. Most importantly, Woolf had been engaging in similar experiments in her own novels, and would soon be inspired by Ulysses to go much further. She, like Joyce, was attempting to capture the lived experience of passing moments in a stream-of-consciousness style. In her later novels (Mrs Dalloway, To the Lighthouse and beyond) she would chart similar psychological waters to those Joyce explored in Ulysses, and others besides that he never would get to. If there were any other readers grasping Joyce’s ground-breaking work this strongly in 1919, you could surely count them on one hand.
Woolf continues in this essay, observing flaws in Joyce’s work. She may have revised her opinions later, after she read the whole of Ulysses and had time to digest it further. I plan to look at all her literary essays eventually, and I’m hoping I can find a more comprehensive assessment of Ulysses in her later pieces. In this essay, Woolf’s criticisms of Joyce’s work-in-progress show us some of his limitations, and some of Woolf’s too. She complains that “the emphasis laid, perhaps didactically, upon indecency” is alienating. Joyce may have been provoking on purpose, but he was also and more importantly ripping away artificial limits that prevented the Edwardian novel from looking squarely at life. Life can be indecent, and a bold writer must at least look into that dirt. Though Woolf doesn’t say so explicitly in this essay, she also judged Joyce from her upper-class perch; she was something of a snob, and often thought the working classes incapable of creating works of genius.
I think Woolf has at least one cogent critique of Joyce’s writing — but I only say that, because she notes a flaw in his work that I have long intuited myself. She says that in reading Joyce, we have a
sense of being in a bright yet narrow room, confined and shut in, rather than enlarged and set free, [we feel] some limitation imposed by the method as well as by the mind. Is it the method that inhibits the creative power? Is it due to the method that we feel neither jovial nor magnanimous, but centred in a self which, in spite of its tremor of susceptibility, never embraces or creates what is outside itself or beyond?
Woah there, easy stallion. Who am I to judge James Joyce, who was certainly a genius, and wrote one of the most original ands influential novels ever (Ulysses)? I’m not remotely qualified to find fault with his work, as he achieved so many things therein that I haven’t yet begun to appreciate. I’m not sure how qualified even Virginia Woolf is to stand in judgment over him. And yet, we must presume. It’s only by making frank analyses that we can better grasp all that Joyce attempts or achieves.
Woolf expresses here a feeling I’ve had, better than I could myself. The way I see it is, when I read Joyce he makes me marvel continuously, and he shows me myriad pieces of life as I know it; he also takes me repeatedly beyond my previous ken. And yet, he also feels like a professor, determined to know every answer, and feed them to me a little faster than I can follow, until I completely submit to his brilliance. Whereas Shakespeare has all that brilliance too, wrapped around with far more kindness and joy. And whenever I put Shakespeare down, I’m not left marveling at his perfectly constructed answers, but instead at his vast echoing questions, that keep spilling out into brave new possibilities. Joyce read all the words in the OED, but Shakespeare just invented new words whenever he wanted to. Joyce worked strenuously to construct a complex philosophy — while Shakespeare knew that, however large an edifice Joyce might construct, there were still more things in heaven and earth than Joyce could ever dream of.