writers writing about woolf

[felinejumper]

I meant to put this piece—Katharine Smyth: Forgetting Virginia Woolf— with a short little roundup of other things. Instead, I found myself accidentally found myself writing all of these words! It's deeply reassuring to see public meditations on the intoxication of discovering Virginia Woolf and wiggling around to find your own voice in all that fuckin' glory. Everybody with Woolf feelings has had this period of massive overdosing on her, and are now very indulgent towards my wide-eyed year-long obsession: at lunch with my brother's girlfriend's aunt & uncle, I went on as I do, and both of them nodded solemnly. "Have you read The Waves? That's my favorite," he asked, and "The Years is mine," she said, and I was just overcome at the sensation of: these people, I've met them twice, they could understand something about me. While also being, in Woolfian fashion, keenly aware of how temporary that is.

I am reminded of Parul Sehgal's NYTimes article about the flurry of 'rediscovery' of women writers. It's primarily about a new story of Sylvia Plath's, and a variety of other women writers from mid century that are finally getting their due. The 'due', in this case, is both appreciation for their actual work and attending to biography as well. taking the entirety of their lives into account:

There is as much to learn in these writers’ private lives as in their published work—especially since there have been precious few models of women writers we can look to. In fact, read through these newly published letters and diaries, and you will see almost every writer I’ve named idolizing or wrestling with just one woman: Virginia Woolf. Sontag wrote in a journal with a picture of Woolf pasted on the front; Plath was horrified by her example‐not so much Woolf’s suicide but her childlessness; it was not a sacrifice she was willing to make.

A friend and I mutually agreed that our reaction to this was "Well, I journal about Woolf all the time, I too am on the path to Lucia Berlin heights!" And returning to the Smythe article, as well:

I rejoiced when [Woolf] showed weaknesses to which I could relate—how soothing, the discovery that her disdain for Joyce was partly rooted in her insecurity!—and even disparaged the idea she was a genius, convinced by our kinship that we must be not-geniuses together. (Returning to her magnificent oeuvre with an additional decade of experience has shown me the folly of that particular conceit.)

The last thing I'm chewing on is Smyth playing with ideas from Harold Bloom's The Anxiety of Influence.:

“No one can bear to see his own inner struggle as being mere artifice,” Bloom writes, meaning that one would not write a poem if one believed creative desire to be simply a product of poetic influence and not the fervent imagination. As a result, he suggests, a misreading must occur, a reaction against the very poetry that affects the poet most [emphasis mine] and which he calls the clinamen, or poetic misprision:

Poetic Influence—when it involves two strong, authentic poets—always proceeds by a misreading of the prior poet, an act of creative correction that is actually and necessarily a misinterpretation. The history of fruitful poetic influence . . . is a history of anxiety and self-serving caricature, of distortion, of perverse, willful revisionism without which modern poetry as such could not exist.

First of, yes, definitely. It feels relevant to an issue I have where I have gotten okay at leaving comments on writing I like (and even really like) but am completely incapable of leaving comments on the things I love (obsess over? consume? exalt?). I would like those authors to know that their work is effective and appreciated and meaningful. I am wondering if this is partially because it incites such a strong emotional/intellectual reaction that I am swamped by my own acknowledged but unstoppable misreading; how could I possibly comment on "I loved your prose" or "this particular line was so evocative" when I am instead already twisting it into a shape that fits inside me? How could I vocally appreciate a work-of-art that makes me feel like I'm scrambling to shove all my guts back inside me, how did they get out onto the page like this, these are mine—it is impossible to stand outside of that feeling.

Smyth deals with this, actually, in the next line.

But what happens if we have no wish to misread the very literature that influences us most? If we (when pressed) must admit that we see no real need for improvement upon the original? If we want nothing more than to have written the very words committed to the page by another almost a century before?

To which I will merely point myself, and you, my loyal reader, in the direction of Jorge Luis Borges' "Pierre Menard, Author Of The Quixote" (pdf), which is inutterably good and also, please god, can someone twice as smart explain all of it to me.

While I'm on this late night Woolf bender, let me also point you to a write-up of Stephanie Paulsell's work on Woolf as a "generative religious thinker.".

“After the funeral for her friend Ottoline Morrell,” Paulsell writes, “[Woolf] bemoaned ‘the lack of intensity’ in the service and the ways in which symbols of British power, in the form of medals on the clergyman’s robe and the presence of the Union Jack in the sanctuary, undermined the solemnity of the occasion and the sacredness of the space. What did any of this have to do ‘with Ottoline, or our feelings?’ she asked when she reflected on the day in her diary. And when she read a bishop’s empty musings on heaven in the newspaper, she despaired at how unequal the representatives of religion were to the task of articulating religious hopes and desires. ‘The duty of heaven-making,’ she wrote, needs more than a bishop can bring to it: ‘it needs time and concentration. It needs the imagination of a poet.’” [emphasis mine]

I'm particularly attached to this excerpt, as political and artistry charge. It reminds me, perhaps in another act of acute misinterpretation, of Janelle Monáe and the pairing of "So Afraid" / "Americans" off Dirty Computer, a song pairing I love to an almost unbearable degree for its reflection of private fears and public strength. And Woolf: "the duty of heaven making." And the charge of all of us doing it that she lays down in A Room of One's Own? Chloe likes Olivia! Fill up the shelves! Make the Republic of Heaven real, here, today! (whoops wrong book)

Anyway: I like all these writers writing about Woolf, it makes me feel sane and seen and understood in a remarkably novel way, and they have a knack for delineation that I haven't developed yet but would like to learn; and I like that all of my reading input right now is both incredibly good and not at all dissuading me from writing, myself. Albeit with many more emdashes than a year or two ago.