Moments of Being Read online

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Title Page

  Introduction by Hermione Lee

  Reminiscences

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  The Memoir Club Contributions

  22 Hyde Park Gate

  Old Bloomsbury

  Am I a Snob?

  Sketch of the Past

  Appendix A – Textual notes

  Appendix B – Editorial matter by Jeanne Schulkind from the first and second editions

  Preface to the Second Edition

  Editor’s Note

  Reminiscences

  The Memoir Club Contributions

  22 Hyde Park Gate

  Old Bloomsbury

  Am I a Snob?

  Sketch of the Past

  Index

  Copyright

  About the Book

  Virginia Woolf’s only autobiographical writing, outside her diaries and letters, is to be found in this collection of five pieces. Despite many biographies and studies of her, the author’s own account of her early life holds tremendous fascination – for its unexpected detail, the strength of its emotion, and its clear-sighted judgement of Victorian values.

  In ‘Reminiscences’ Virginia Woolf focuses on her mother’s death, ‘the greatest disaster that could happen’, and its effect on her father, the demanding patriarch who took a high toll of the women in his household. She surveys some of the same ground in ‘Sketch of the Past’, the most important memoir in this collection, which she wrote with deep feeling and supreme command of her art shortly before her own death. Readers will be struck by the extent to which she drew on these early experiences for her novels, as she tells how she exorcised the haunting presence of her mother by writing To the Lighthouse.

  The other three essays were composed to be read to the Memoir Club, a postwar regrouping of Bloomsbury, which exacted absolute candour of its members. Virginia Woolf’s contributions were not only bold but also original and amusing. She describes George Duckworth’s uncomfortable relations with his half-sisters, the Stephen girls; gives her own version of ‘Old Bloomsbury’; and, with wit and some malice, reflects on her connections with titled society.

  About the Author

  Virginia Woolf was born in London in 1882, the daughter of Sir Leslie Stephen, first editor of The Dictionary of National Biography, and of his second wife, Julia Stephen. Her sister was the painter Vanessa Bell. From 1915, when she published her first novel, The Voyage Out, Virginia Woolf maintained an astonishing output of fiction, literary criticism, essays, letters, diaries and biography. In 1912 she married Leonard Woolf, and in 1917 they founded The Hogarth Press.

  Virginia Woolf had a series of mental breakdowns in her childhood and early adulthood, and on 28 March 1941 she committed suicide.

  Jeanne Schulkind taught English Literature at the University of Sussex, where she completed a doctoral dissertation on Virginia Woolf, and she gave courses and lectures on Virginia Woolf for the University of London. Her interest in the Bloomsbury Group led her to the Courtauld Institute, where her studies included the art of Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant. She then taught History of Art at St Paul’s Girls’ School, London.

  Hermione Lee grew up in London and was educated there and at Oxford. She taught at the Universities of Liverpool and York, and is now the first woman Goldsmiths’ Professor of English at the University of Oxford. She is well-known as a writer, reviewer and broadcaster. Her books include a critical study of the novels of Virginia Woolf, a book on the writing of Elizabeth Bowen and a critical biography of Willa Cather. Her biography Virginia Woolf received international acclaim, has been translated into French, German and Korean, and won the 1997 British Academy Rose Crawshay Award.

  MOMENTS OF BEING

  VIRGINIA WOOLF

  New Edition

  Edited by Jeanne Schulkind

  Introduced and revised by Hermione Lee

  Introduction

  “MOMENTS OF BEING” was not Virginia Woolf’s title for this book, nor did she put together these five autobiographical essays, written over a thirty-three-year span, and none of them published in her lifetime. The phrase occurs in the last and longest of these autobiographical pieces, which Woolf called “Sketch of the Past”. It’s taken from the passage early on in the “Sketch” where she says that life seems to her to be divided between a great deal of ordinary, unimpressive, routine activity – what she calls ‘cotton wool, or non-being’ – and sudden violent shocks, ‘exceptional moments’, which function as a form of ‘revelation’. That leads her on to her ‘conception’ of writing, and her rather mysterious philosophy of life, ‘that behind the cotton wool is hidden a pattern’ and that all human beings are part of this universal ‘work of art’, which specific artists – Shakespeare, or Beethoven – may give expression to, but to which we all contribute: ‘We are the words; we are the music; we are the thing itself.’

  Jeanne Schulkind, who first transcribed and edited these autobiographical pieces in 1976, chose the title to emphasise Woolf’s alternation between two levels of being. Schulkind saw that as the link between the autobiography and the fiction, which she read as quests towards ‘moments of being’ when the physical, social self is transcended and ‘the individual consciousness becomes an undifferentiated part of a greater whole’.fn1 She drew a comparison between the “Sketch” and Woolf’s essay on De Quincey, where Woolf says: ‘To tell the whole story of a life the autobiographer must devise some means by which the two levels of existence can be recorded – the rapid passage of events and actions; the slow opening up of single and solemn moments of concentrated emotion.’ (And Schulkind may also have been thinking of Woolf’s 1928 essay on Hardy, where she borrows Hardy’s title ‘moments of vision’ to describe the ‘sudden quickening of power’ in his novels when ‘a single scene breaks off from the rest’.)fn2

  The title “Moments of Being” sums up very well the intense emotions, the shocks, the rushes of involuntary memory that “Sketch of the Past” is so much concerned with. But it feeds exclusively into the interiorised, sensitive, aesthetic, even mystical side of Woolf’s posthumous reputation. There are many other aspects to this collection – social comedy, ruthless self-analysis, elegy, satire, family plot, caricature, autobiographical theory – which “Moments of Being” doesn’t cover. The volume might have carried different associations if its title had been (to take some of the other phrases from these essays) “Am I a Snob?”, “Writing my Memoirs”, or “Good God! Here I am again!”

  And the whole history of this volume has been an odd one. If five autobiographical essays by (say) Joyce, or Lawrence, or Eliot, unpublished in their lifetime, and containing sensational new material about their childhood and family life, had been posthumously published, a tremendous fuss would have been made of it. But Woolf’s reputation in this country has always been extremely mixed. When Moments of Being first came out, published by a small university press, and again when it was reissued by The Hogarth Press in 1985, with a very significant seventy-page typescript version of the “Sketch” added in, no great stir was caused. And while the arguments over Woolf boiled on in the ’80s and ’90s – feminist heroine, child-abuse victim, Bloomsbury snob, modernist genius? – this volume fell quietly, and lamentably, out of print. Yet it is of the utmost importance for anyone interested in Woolf – or in autobiography, or in women’s lives, or in late nineteenth-and early twentieth-century English society. It makes an absorbing, dramatic narrative, tragic, funny, historically rich, and profoundly revealing. It is an indispensable tool for her biographers and critics; it has changed the way her life story is read,
and it throws a strong illuminating light on her fiction.

  Alongside the developing interest in, and the professional editing of, Woolf’s many different kinds of overlapping, genre-busting writings – essays, letters, diaries – these autobiographies have come to seem more and more central and important. And they are just the sort of writing she was most interested in herself. She loved reading – and writing – ‘lives of the obscure’; she had a passion for marginal, undervalued literary forms like journals and memoirs. She was preoccupied, all through her writing life, with how a woman might write her own life story, when there were so few historical precedents and so little encouragement. How would a woman’s writing of her life be different from a man’s? Why were there no female autobiographers like Rousseau? Why were women, on the whole, inhibited and self-censoring? She was always writing to her women friends telling them to write their autobiographies. ‘Very few women yet have written truthful autobiographies. It is my favourite form of reading.’ ‘There’s never been a woman’s autobiography. Nothing to compare with Rousseau. Chastity and modesty I suppose have been the reason.’fn3 In her feminist essays, A Room of One’s Own and Three Guineas, she thinks hard, and painfully, about the representation of women’s lives. Her fiction returned over and over again to the telling of a woman’s life story, from Rachel Vinrace in her first novel The Voyage Out, trying to describe how she spent her days to the young novelist Terence Hewet, to the imagining of the secret interior lives of Mrs Dalloway and Mrs Ramsay, to the liberating fantasy-life of Orlando, and last to Isa’s private unutterable thoughts, hidden in a notebook disguised as an account book, in Between the Acts, the novel Woolf was writing at the same time as her own unfinished autobiography.

  Her own experiments in memoir writing are startlingly candid – up to a point. These essays give vivid, explicit accounts of some parts of Virginia Woolf’s life. Here is the story of the Stephen family, its ancestry, its class, its social context, down to every tiny, telling detail of the fixtures and fittings – the biscuit tin shaped like a barrel in the dining room, the silver salver deep in visiting cards on the hall table, the stained pattern of leaves on her half-sister’s writing table. She builds in, stroke by stroke and brick by brick, a whole architecture of houses, rooms, landscapes and habits, within which she places the personal stories. And though these stories overlap, recur and fragment, they can be itemised, like chapter headings or scenes in a play: The characters of her parents. The shocks and sensations of early childhood. The split between St Ives and Hyde Park Gate. The uncomfortable relations between the Stephen and the Duckworth children. The tragedy of Julia Stephen’s early death and of Leslie Stephen’s terrible grieving, which turned his children against him. His tyrannising over a succession of women – Julia, her daughter Stella, Vanessa, Virginia. The children’s resistance. Stella’s shocking early death. The claustrophobic lives of the teenage Vanessa and Virginia. The suffocating, aggressive, over-intimate demands of their half-brother George Duckworth. The characters of Thoby and Vanessa. Virginia’s breakdown after her father’s death. The move from Kensington to Bloomsbury. The growing intimacy with Thoby’s young Cambridge male friends, which became ‘Bloomsbury’. The change in decor, freedoms, behaviour, family relations, above all in conversation. And framing, or filtering into, these narratives of the past, there are passages about the present: the memoir club; her relations to high society; her life in wartime; her writing of these autobiographies.

  These autobiographies – especially “Sketch of the Past” and “22 Hyde Park Gate” – have been made use of for very different – sometimes competing – accounts of Virginia Woolf’s life and writing. Her memories and stories of being touched and fondled by her half-brothers, told here in detail for the first time (though there are some comic, evasive references to George Duckworth’s behaviour in her letters) provide crucial evidence for the version of her life which explains her as the victim of childhood sexual abuse. In particular, two pages of “Sketch” are repeatedly singled out for intensive analysis, where she is explaining her ‘looking-glass shame’ by drawing on a memory of Gerald Duckworth exploring her body, when she was very young, linked to a dream of a ‘horrible face’ looking over her shoulder in the glass. Psychoanalytical readings of these passages apply Freud’s idea of the screening of unconscious memories, or Lacan’s theory of the ‘mirror-stage’ of psychic development, when the child begins to structure an identity through awareness of division and separation. It’s argued that Woolf is ‘trying to tell the truth about the body’ in these essays by ‘tapping the unconscious mind for memories which the conscious mind has screened’.fn4 Whether Woolf has been screening out, and is now trying to access, ‘forced exposure, masturbation, and/or penetration of the female genitals’, or ‘the primal scene of parental sex’, or the trauma of the mother’s death, or the ‘pre-Oedipal moments of oneness with her mother’s body’, psychoanalytical approaches all emphasise a process of repression and an experience of trauma.fn5 But there is a division between readers who see these autobiographies as evidence of psychic disability, or as powerful expressions of political anger. Some read “Sketch”, in particular, as a narrative of displacement and fragmentation, where representation is always under threat, the self is passive or absent, and the text is full of gaps and deferrals: as if the whole process of this writing was tending towards breakdown.fn6 Other more realist readers see these memoirs as angrily ‘showing the injustice of patriarchal domination’, and ‘the social construction of sexual difference within the bourgeois Victorian household’.fn7

  So Woolf’s memoirs have become an arena for debate in feminist theory. But problems arise from treating Moments of Being as a whole, unified piece of evidence about Woolf’s inner life, or as a continuous narrative to be mined for factual information and links to the novels. This is a peculiar, fragmentary book, whose five essays tell an overlapping story in different ways, with different motives, and over a long period of time. “Reminiscences”, written in 1907 and 1908, is addressed to her sister Vanessa’s first child, Julian Bell, and was begun before his birth. It sets itself in the long-running Stephen family tradition of memoirs written for the next generation – like Leslie Stephen’s anguished memories of Julia, known by his children as the ‘Mausoleum Book’.fn8 It is written out of Virginia’s equally intense feelings about Vanessa, who had married Clive Bell in 1907 – jealousy, competitiveness, bereavement, a sense of having been displaced. Its motive is to reclaim Vanessa as her own. It is a literary exercise (being written at the same time as her drafting and redrafting of her first novel), which mixes her emotions for her sister with the story of their parents, her own childhood, the deaths of Julia and Stella, and Vanessa’s situation in the family after Stella’s death. Though it reads formally and conventionally, almost as a pastiche of a family memoir, and though there are many things it can’t or won’t mention, it is also an experimental piece of writing, a mixture of autobiography, memoir and love letter.

  Utterly different in tone are the three pieces written to be read to the ‘Memoir Club’, two from the early 1920s and one from 1936. The Memoir Club was founded by Molly MacCarthy in 1920 as a post-war regrouping of the network of friends which came out of Cambridge in the 1900s and became known as the Bloomsbury Group. The idea was for an autobiographical paper to be read by one or two of the group at each meeting. In her Diary for 18 March 1920, Virginia Woolf expressed deep mortification at having ‘laid her soul bare’ to the Club, with a ‘chapter’ that was greeted at first with ‘loud laughter’ and then with ‘uncomfortable boredom’ from the male members of the audience. ‘Oh but why did I read this egotistical sentimental trash!’fn9 Whatever this ‘chapter’ was – and it doesn’t survive – she had embarrassed herself by its candour and emotion. On 5 December 1920, however, she reports having been ‘fearfully brilliant’ at the Club, and a few months later on being congratulated by Maynard Keynes for her ‘Memoir on George’. Clearly she had decided, after her earlier discomfitu
re, to give her memoirs of the family home, the doings of George and the beginnings of Bloomsbury, as entertainment rather than confession. There is plenty of dark material in these essays, but the tone is jaunty, comical and ruthless. In the first few paragraphs, we get a family idiot, a woman who has poisoned her husband by mistake, an old man who spouts tea and sultanas through his nostrils, and a son who has been eaten by a shark. Woolf was famous for her conversation and her letters, sparkling with caricature and anecdotes. These essays live up to her reputation: they make an ironic, colourful, conversational performance out of the difficult past. The naughty French farce she is taken to by mistake at eighteen lends its tone of high jinks and sexual bravado to these essays, which are full of ridiculous scenes – the bizarre vision of Holman Hunt, the gloomy first appearance of Thoby’s young Cambridge friends, the backstage scenes of squalor and disarray at Lady Sibyl Colefax’s once-grand house. This comic dramatising of her life allows for mixed motives to have play – part nostalgia (‘Old Bloomsbury’ called up the ghost of Thoby Stephen), part competitiveness (her private life is set against the fame of Maynard Keynes or Lytton Strachey), part revenge (her successful middle-aged audience are reminded of themselves as boring, self-absorbed young men), part self-criticism (she is quite as sharp about her own snobbery as any of her critics can be) and part self-defence.

  To turn from the Memoir Club essays to the “Sketch of the Past” is like turning from her letters to her diaries – or her novels. “Sketch” begins what might have been a full-scale autobiography, had she lived. (She had begun to revise it and to type it up, as if working on a novel.) It was written in fits and starts, from April to July 1939 and then from June to November 1940. It was structured, not by chapters, but by dates, using the present ‘as a platform’ from which to view the past, moving between May 1895 and May 1939, or June 1940 and July 1897. The exercise was partly ‘by way of a holiday from Roger’: as an antidote to the ‘drudgery’ of writing her biography of Roger Fry, which she had begun, at the request of his widow, in 1938, and was revising through 1939, finding it a ‘grind’, frustrated by the need for discretion, the tyranny of chronology, and the clash between ‘facts’ and ‘vision’. Many years of thinking about the limitations of biography – which had already produced Orlando, a dazzling biographical spoof – underlay this see-saw between her writing of an ‘official’ Life and a private life story.