`Some Rickety and Ramshackle Fabric'

I’ve had to learn how to read Virginia Woolf – not the novels, which I suspect I will never appreciate, but her essays. I unfairly held the tedium of the fiction against her nonfiction, which was small-minded and foolish. There’s much about Woolf I continue to find unattractive -- her snobbery and exaggerated self-regard -- but in the best of her essays she self-consciously extends the tradition of Montaigne, Johnson and Hazlitt.

Other writers, those to whom she is sympathetically disposed, bring out the best in Woolf. Friday night, after trying to watch a movie that long ago lost what little charm it once possessed (Shaft, if you must know), I opened The Essays of Virginia Woolf Vol. IV: 1925-1928, published in 1994 by her own Hogarth Press, and happened upon this, from 1925:

“Like the ripening of strawberries, the swelling of apples, and all other natural processes, new editions of Dickens – cheap, pleasant-looking, well printed – are born into the world and call for no more notice than the season’s plums and strawberries, save when by some chance the emergence of one of these masterpieces in its fresh, green binding, suggests an odd and overwhelming enterprise – that one should read David Copperfield for the second time.”

Journalists make a fetish of writing effective “leads” (or “ledes,” to use trade argot) – that is, the opening sentence or several sentences of a story, column or review. Some writers who pride themselves on crafting dazzling leads routinely abandon the subsequent story, leaving what resembles the set-up of a joke without a punchline, or vice versa. Woolf writes wonderful leads, like the one above, without neglecting the rest of the essay. Here’s another, from 1924, titled “Joseph Conrad”:

“Suddenly, without giving us time to arrange our thoughts or prepare our phrases, our guest has left us; and his withdrawal without farewell or ceremony is in keeping with his mysterious arrival, long years ago, to take up his lodging in this country. For there was always an air of mystery about him. It was partly his Polish birth, partly his memorable appearance, partly his preference for living in the depths of the country, out of ear-shot of gossips, beyond reach of hostesses, so that for news of him one had to depend upon the evidence of simple visitors with a habit of ringing door-bells who reported of their unknown host that he had the most perfect manners, the brightest eyes, and spoke English with a strong foreign accent.”

Woolf affectingly reminds us how exotic Conrad, surely among the supreme English novelists, has always remained, and how unlike Thackery or Wells his novels have always read. At its best I love Conrad’s prose, which was so dear to Faulkner. Of it V.S. Naipual wrote: “And there are the aphorisms. They run right through Conrad’s work, and their tone never varies. It is the same wise man who seems to be speaking.” Conrad taught us to expect wisdom when we read Nostromo or Heart of Darkness, and he seldom disappoints. Woolf singles out the earlier work – Youth, Lord Jim, Typhoon, The Nigger of the `Narcissus’ – for emphatic praise. Here’s another gem from Woolf, from 1926 -- the lead from her review of a new edition of George Eliot’s letters:

“George Eliot lies flattened under the tomb that Mr Cross built over her, to all appearances completely dead. No writer of equal vitality as a writer so entirely lacks vitality as a human being. Yet when the solemnity of the tomb is violated, when her letters are broken into fragments and presented in a volume of modest size, they reflect a character full of variety and full of conflict – qualities that sort ill with the calm composure of death.”

I see veiled glints of self-identification in Woolf’s sentences. Cross was Eliot’s second husband, 20 years her junior. Woolf’s repetition of “tomb” echoes the final sentence of Middlemarch. Included in this fourth volume of her essays are the contents of The Common Reader. In the two-paragraph title essay, Woolf acknowledges her debt to Samuel Johnson, from whom she borrowed her title and thesis. Here, in its entirety, is “The Common Reader,” including it generous lead:

“There is a sentence in Dr. Johnson’s `Life of Gray’ which might well be written up in all those rooms, too humble to be called libraries, yet full of books, where the pursuit of reading is carried on by private people. `…I rejoice to concur with the common reader; for by the common sense of readers, uncorrupted by literary prejudices, after all the refinements of subtilty and the dogmatism of learning, must be finally decided all claim to poetical honours.’ It defines their qualities; it defines their aims; it bestows upon a pursuit which devours a great deal of time, and is yet apt to leave behind it nothing very substantial, the sanction of the great man’s approval.

“The common reader, as Dr. Johnson implies, differs from the critic and the scholar. He is worse educated, and nature has not gifted him so generously. He reads for his own pleasure rather than to impart knowledge or correct the opinions of others. Above all, he is guided by an instinct to create for himself, out of whatever odds and ends he can come by, some kind of whole – a portrait of a man, a sketch of an age, a theory of the art of writing. He never ceases, as he reads, to run up some rickety and ramshackle fabric which shall give him the temporary satisfaction of looking sufficiently like the real object to allow of affection, laughter, and argument. Hasty, inaccurate, and superficial, snatching now this poem, now that scrap of old furniture without caring where he finds it or of what nature it may be so long as it serves his purpose and rounds his structure, his deficiencies as a critic are too obvious to be pointed out; but if he has, as Dr. Johnson maintained, some say in the final distribution of poetical honours, then, perhaps, it may be worth while to write down a few of the ideas and opinions which, insignificant in themselves, yet contribute to so mighty a result.”