A Little History of Literature (28 page)

Ulysses
, as Joyce's title signals, connects with Homeric epic: the very starting point of Western literature. But on the face of it, the alignment seems all wrong. The novel is about (insofar as one can ever use that over-simplifying word ‘about’) one day (16 June 1904) in the life of a Jewish clerk in Dublin – another black-suited desk-slave, like those streaming over London Bridge. Leopold Bloom is married to a woman, Molly, whom he loves, but who he knows is flagrantly unfaithful to him. Not much happens in the day, which is much like every other day – no Troy is sacked, no Helen is abducted, no great battles are fought. But at every point
Ulysses
breaks new ground in literature. On one level (the level largely responsible for the book's long banning in Ireland) it breaks with the old ‘decent’ inhibitions of fiction – Bloom, for instance, is described on the lavatory. There is the occasional use of four-letter words and vivid descriptions of erotic fantasies. The last section of
Ulysses
, ‘Penelope’ (named after the undyingly faithful wife in the
Odyssey
), records what is going on in Molly's mind as she slips into sleep. There is, for many pages, no punctuation – it's a kind of stream of subconsciousness. Our minds, Joyce's novel insists, are where we really live, and at every stage the novel explores new ways of making sense of the strange conditions in which all human beings, however ordinary, find themselves.

Like Eliot, Joyce makes heavy demands on the reader. You need to be well read, or have a well-annotated text, to catch the intricate allusions in
The Waste Land
or thread your way through the linguistic and stylistic trickeries of
Ulysses
. But no literature is more worth the effort.

The father-figure behind the great modernist triumph of 1922 was Ezra Pound – ‘
Il miglior fabbro
’ (the greater artist), as Eliot calls him in the dedication to
The Waste Land
. It was Pound who broke down Eliot's first drafts of the poem, creating its daringly new and disjointed shapes. It was Pound, in his role as modernist mentor, who dragged W.B. Yeats out of the nostalgic ‘Celtic Twilight’ of his early and middle period and made him confront the present state of Ireland with a new, hard style and poems like ‘Easter, 1916’, reflecting on the bloody Irish uprising and the brutal British repression.

Pound's own poetry found its inspiration in exotic places. He was fascinated by oriental literature and language in which the pictorial and the textual were merged into a single unit. Was it possible to ‘crystallise’ words into images as the Chinese pictogram did? He succeeded better than anyone in the effort. One of his poems, ‘In a Station of the Metro’, began as an extended description of the Paris underground. He boiled it down to something as short, brilliant and pictographic as a fourteen-syllable Japanese haiku. You could get it inside a Christmas cracker.

It was not merely modernism on offer to the reader in 1922. At its strongest, the movement was a powerful expression of minority taste in an overwhelming mass culture that was wholly indifferent or violently hostile to what writers like Eliot, Pound, Woolf and Yeats were doing. But time has a way of sifting out the good from the bad. Who now remembers Robert Bridges, the poet laureate in 1922 (he would hold the post from 1913 to 1930)? There were a thousand purchasers of his volume-length 1929 poem,
The Testament of Beauty
, for every one reader of
The Waste Land
, when it was published almost simultaneously in little magazines in Britain and America. Bridges' poem is in the waste-paper basket of literature.
The Waste Land
survives and will be on posterity's bookshelf for as long as poetry is read. The year 2022 will be a great anniversary.

CHAPTER
29

A Literature of her Own

W
OOLF

‘On or about December 1910’, Virginia Woolf famously (and not entirely seriously) said, ‘human character changed’. It was then that ‘Victorianism’ finally came to a close and the new era, modernism, began. The actual moment Woolf specified was when a controversial Post-Impressionist art exhibition opened in London. Woolf was very definitely ‘post-Victorian’ – an uneasy successor to an age whose values and prejudices were obstinately outliving their historical period.

Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) wrote from within a famous milieu (roughly, a group of like-minded intellectuals) known as the Bloomsbury Group. She was a central member of the group and forcefully articulated many of its leading ideas. She was intellectually powerful and very much her own woman. But without the support of that milieu she would never have been the writer she was. For one thing, the ‘Bloomsberries’ (as outsiders have belittlingly called them) had, for their time, advanced views on the ‘woman question’. Women in Britain would not get the vote until eight years after 1910, the date ‘human character changed’. (In
the USA it was slightly earlier.) Even then, insultingly, only women over thirty were allowed to vote, being considered too emotionally unstable to handle the responsibility until that age. For the record, Virginia Woolf was twenty-eight years old in 1910. Not yet ready to put her ‘X’ on the ballot paper – or so the man's world thought.

We cannot seriously discuss Woolf without bringing into the picture two other elements. One, already mentioned, is the Bloomsbury Group in the 1920s. The other is the great reformation in critical thinking about literature which came about with the emergence of the ‘Women's Movement’ in the mid-1960s, which took her up as a figurehead writer. It did wonders for her sales. During her lifetime, Woolf's works sold only in the hundreds. Had she not owned the firm that printed them (the Hogarth Press), she might well have had difficulty getting even those hundreds published. Her work is now everywhere available in hundreds of thousands of copies and everywhere, in the English-speaking world, studied.

It goes well beyond sales figures. Feminist criticism has been especially instrumental in altering the way we now read and value Woolf's works. She herself wrote what became one of the founding texts of literary feminism,
A Room of One's Own
(1929). In this treatise she argues that women need their own space, and money, in order to create literature. They can't reasonably do it on the kitchen table, after they've cooked the evening meal for the man of the house and the children have been safely put to bed. (This is how the Victorian novelist Elizabeth Gaskell, known as ‘Mrs Gaskell’, wrote her fiction. No one nowadays, incidentally, calls our author ‘Mrs Woolf’.)
A Room of One's Own
is infused with flaming anger, and a determination that the sheer unfairness of the inequalities which have unbalanced literature for thousands of years must be put right. The woman's voice must no longer be silenced. This is how Woolf puts it:

The phrase ‘mute and inglorious Jane Austen’ alludes to Thomas Gray's ‘Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard’. Wandering and pondering, looking at the gravestones, Gray thinks how many of those buried there had poetic talents equivalent to his, but did not have the social advantages and privileges to bring those undeveloped gifts to fruition. Yes, says Woolf, but writers like Thomas Gray could get through. If she had been ‘Thomasina Gray’, unless she were abnormally lucky she too would have been ‘mute and inglorious’.

The Bloomsbury Group included among its most notable members the novelist E.M. Forster (Chapter 26), the art critic Roger Fry, the poet Rupert Brooke (Chapter 27), and the most influential and radically new-thinking economist of the twentieth century, John Maynard Keynes. Few milieux have had more ‘ideas’ circulating among them.

The group's principal propagandist was Lytton Strachey. It was he who proclaimed their founding principle: that they were not, repeat not, Victorians (even though all of them had been born and raised during that monarch's long reign). For the Bloomsbury Group the ‘Eminent Victorians’, as Strachey sneeringly labelled them in his famous book of that title, existed only to be mocked and repudiated. But, most importantly, got out of the way.

The Bloomsberries regarded the First World War as the death throes of Victorianism. It was tragic that so many millions had to die, but it was ‘closure’ and made it possible for literature and the world of ideas to have a wholly new start.

What, then, did ‘Bloomsbury’ stand for? ‘Civilisation’, they might have replied. ‘Liberalism’ might well have been another answer. They subscribed to a philosophy that originated with John Stuart Mill and was reformulated by the Cambridge philosopher, G.E. Moore. Essentially its basic idea was that you were free to do anything so long as it did not damage, or infringe upon, the
equivalent freedoms of some other person. It's a beautiful principle, but extremely hard to put into practice. Some would say impossible.

Woolf's life was a mixture of privilege (there was always a servant to clean that room of her own – the servant's interesting biography was published in 2010) and chronic mental suffering. She was born the daughter of a distinguished man of letters, Leslie Stephen, and his equally cultivated wife. The young Virginia Stephen was brought up in fine London houses in the area around London's Bloomsbury Square in central London. That particular square is one of the beauties of the city. Woolf particularly loved it on rainy days when, as she put it, the black, sinuous trunks of the trees looked like ‘wet seals’. Bloomsbury itself is also the centre of London's intellectual powerhouse, containing as it does a number of university colleges, the British Museum and, in Woolf's day, a cluster of major publishing houses.

Woolf did not attend university and did not need to. She came into adulthood extraordinarily well read, and well connected with the finest minds of her time. She was writing almost as soon as she could hold a pen in her hand. But even in her childhood it was observed that her mind was troubled. She had her first nervous breakdown when she was just thirteen. Such breakdowns would happen again during her life – finally, fatally.

Aged thirty she made a marriage of mutual convenience with the social thinker (another Bloomsberry) Leonard Woolf. As part of their liberalism the group tolerated previously prohibited kinds of human relationship. Forster and Keynes were gay (at a period when it was criminal). Woolf's passion was reserved for her samesex relationship with Vita Sackville-West – a fellow writer and creative gardener at her fine country home at Sissinghurst, in Kent. The Bloomsbury Group believed that ‘art’ could be applied to everything in life – even horticulture.

The relationship between Woolf and Sackville-West was no secret, even to their respective, and similarly open-minded, husbands. It is commemorated in one of Woolf's finest, and most readable works,
Orlando
, a fantasy biography of Vita's family over the centuries with a central character whose sex changes with
passing lifetimes. Sackville-West's son, Nigel, called it ‘the longest and most charming love-letter in literature’. It was not addressed to Leonard.

Independence was all-important to Woolf – with regards to conventional morality, social restrictions, and the London literary world. She and her husband founded the Hogarth Press publishing firm in 1917, its offices a stone's throw from Bloomsbury Square. She could now write and publish as she pleased. She had begun publishing full-length fiction in 1915 with
The Voyage Out
. Thereafter novels came at regular intervals. They were subtly imbued with her feminist principles but, above all, they were ‘experimental’, doing things that were new in English literature. The technique with which her writing is most famously linked has been called (not by her) ‘stream of consciousness’.

This is how she described it in an essay of 1925 (‘gig lamps’ are the headlights on a horse-drawn carriage illuminated at night):

Capturing that ‘halo’ was Woolf's major endeavour in fiction. Note how she does it in the wonderful opening of her novel,
Mrs Dalloway
. It's the story of a single day in the life of Clarissa Dalloway, the middle-aged wife of a Conservative Member of Parliament, who has planned a party that evening. She is setting out from her house near the Houses of Parliament, alongside chiming Big Ben, to collect some summer flowers to decorate her living room. It is a lovely June morning and she is waiting to cross the road. She feels strangely happy, having just recovered from a life-threatening bout of influenza. A neighbour passes her as she stands at the side of one of the busiest thoroughfares in London, but she doesn't notice him: