20C Authors

major writers, biographical notes, and literary criticism

major writers, biographical notes, and literary criticism

Victor Serge biography

September 22, 2009 by Roy Johnson

novelist, historian, revolutionary

Victor Serge (1890-1947) (real name Victor Lvovich Khibalchich) was born in Brussels, the son of Russian-Polish exiles. His father was an officer in the Imperial Guard who fled the country after the assassination of Alexander II in 1881. His mother was a Polish aristocrat and a teacher. Serge’s father found work as a teacher at the Institute of Anatomy in Brussels, and then moved to France where he became involved in the radical Russian emigre community. As a child he often went hungry, he never went to school, and his younger brother died at the age of nine. He began work at the age of 15 as an apprentice photographer, then went on to work as a designer and a typographist, learning this trade in an anarchist printing works. Serge suffered privation and hardship throughout his life and spent over ten years of it in prisons.

He was strongly influenced by the works of the Russian anarchist Kropotkin and became an active journalist and translator in the revolutionary press. In 1912 he was wrongly accused of participating in the Bonnot Gang, a group of bohemian bank robbers. Several of his comrades were executed: Serge was given a five year jail sentence in solitary confinement, followed by five year’s exile.

Freed in 1917, he went to Barcelona to work as a typographer, and also took part in the popular insurrection there. In 1918 he volunteered for service in Russia, but was arrested and imprisoned without trial in Paris, because of the ban on his staying there. Then he was exchanged for an officer of the French military mission being held in Russia.

The whole sweep of his life as a writer, intellectual, historian, and revolutionary is covered in his autobiographical Memoirs of a Revolutionary. This covers the period between 1900 and 1940 and includes his early affiliations with the anarchists, his participation in the Russian revolution, and his fight against Stalinism. But it is much more than just a historical chronicle. It follows his intellectual and artistic development, and his dealings with lots of the major figures of the Left during this period – Trotsky, Zinoviev, Radek, and Georgy Lukacs.

Arriving in Petrograd in February 1919, he joined the Bolshevik Party and worked on the executive of the Third Communist International with Gregory Zinoviev, travelling to Moscow, Berlin, and Vienna. Meanwhile he also worked as a journalist for L’Humanité and Le Monde in Paris.

In 1923 he took part in the communist insurrection in Germany. Around this time he became increasingly critical of Soviet government. He joined with Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman to complain about the way the Red Army treated the sailors involved in the Kronstadt Uprising. A libertarian socialist, Serge protested against the Red Terror that was organized by Felix Dzerzhinsky and the Cheka.

Following this he joined the Left Opposition group along with people such as Leon Trotsky and Karl Radek. Serge was an outspoken critic of the authoritarian way that Joseph Stalin governed the country and is believed to be the first writer to describe the Soviet government as ‘totalitarian’. Because of this, Serge was expelled from the Communist Party in 1928.

He was now unable to work for the government and over the next few years he spent his time writing Year One of the Russian Revolution (1930) and two novels Men in Prison (1930) and Birth of Our Power (1931). These books were banned in the Soviet Union but were published in France and Spain. He wrote in French: besides being the preferred language of Russian intellectuals of his generation, French assured him an international audience.

Susan Weissmann’s The Course is Set on Hope is the first full-length biography of Victor Serge. It draws on some of the recently-opened Comintern archives and shows Serge’s principled struggle to maintain socialist principles in his fight against the grip of totalitarianism. This covers the period from 1919 when Serge first went to take part in the Russian revolution, until his death in poverty and exile in Mexico in 1947.

In May 1933, he was arrested by the secret police (the GPU) and sentenced without trial to three year’s exile in the village of Orenburg in the Urals – an early outpost of what would become the Gulag Archipelago. Most of his colleagues in the Left Opposition that were arrested were executed, but as a result of protests made by leading politicians in France, Belgium and Spain, Serge was kept alive.

Protests against Serge’s imprisonment took place at several International Conferences. The case caused the Soviet government considerable embarrassment and in 1936 Joseph Stalin announced that he was considering releasing Serge from prison. Pierre Laval, the French prime minister, refused to grant Serge an entry permit. Emile Vandervelde, the veteran socialist, and a member of the Belgian government, managed to obtain Serge a visa to live in Belgium.

Serge’s relatives were not so fortunate: his sister, mother-in-law, sister-in-law (Anita Russakova) and two of his brothers-in-law, died in prison. All of his writings and personal papers were confiscated by the secret police. There have been several attempts made to have these released, especially after the fall of communism in 1989. They have still not been located.

The Case of Comrade Tulayev is without doubt Serge’s masterpeice, and the finest novel written about the Stalinist purges of the 1930s. A government official is shot at random by a disgruntled Moscow youth, and this sets in motion a repressive crack-down in search of a ‘political conspiracy’ which does not really exist but which gives the forces of repression an excuse to eliminate their rivals. The youth goes free, even though he confesses, whilst completely innocent officials are forced to ‘confess’ to crimes they have not committed. The story is closely related to Stalin’s organisation of the murder of Kirov, the popular head of the Leningrad party district.

He returned to France in 1936 and resumed work on two books on Soviet communism, From Lenin to Stalin (1937) and Destiny of a Revolution (1937). He also published several novels and a volume of poetry, Resistance (1938) about his experiences in Russia. there was a voluminous exchange of correspondence with Leon Trotsky, though the two oppositionists eventually agreed to disagree.

When the Germans invaded France in 1940, he left Paris and travelled to Marseilles, and in 1941 left on the same ship as Andre Breton and Claude Levi-Strauss. His destination was Mexico – the only place which would grant him a resident’s visa. As soon as he settled there he became the object of violent articles and threats to his life from refugee Stalinists – who had recently assassinated Leon Trotsky.

It is astonishing to realise that alongside all his political activities and his time spent as a historian and novelist, Serge also found time to write on literary theory. His Collected Writings on Literature and Revolution offer reflections on modernist literary theory, Russian experimental writing, and the nature of the relationship between literature and politics. It gathers together for the first time the bulk of his literary criticism from the 1920s to the 1950s, giving an invaluable contemporary account of the debates about the production of literature in a socialist society, the role of intellectuals, the theory of ‘proletarian’ literature, as well as assessments of Soviet writers: Mayakovsky, Gorky, Alexei Tolstoy, Alexander Blok, and the less well known Korolenko, Pilnyak, Fedin, Bezymensky, Ivanov, amongst others.

His last years were full of poverty, malnutrition, illness, police surveillance, slander and isolation. Yet he continued to publish novels such as Unforgiving Years, The Long Dusk and his masterpiece, The Case of Comrade Tulayev. His autobiography, Memoirs of a Revolutionary, was first published in the United States in 1945. He continued to write until he died of a heart-attack in Mexico City on 17th November, 1947.

Victor Serge – web links

Victor Serge and The Novel of Revolution – an essay by Richard Greeman, Serge scholar and translator (1991).

Unforgiving Years – an extended book review by Roy Johnson of Serge’s last great novel (2009).

Men in Prison – a book review by Roy Johnson, originally part of an essay which appeared in Literature and History

The Cycle of Revolution: Men in Prison – an essay by Adam David Morton, part of his series relating literature to space, geography, and the city (2012).

Red Petrograd: Conquered City – an essay by Adam David Morton, part of his series relating literature to space, geography, and the city (2012).

The Case of Comrade Tulayev– an extended book review by Roy Johnson, (2010).

The Journey into Defeat: The Case of Comrade Tulayev– an essay by Adam David Morton, part of his series relating literature to space, geography, and the city (2012).

Midnight in the Century – extended book review by Roy Johnson (2010).

The Zero Hour: Midnight in the Century – an essay by Adam David Morton, part of his series relating literature to space, geography, and the city (2012).

Memoirs of a Revolutionary – an extended book review by Richard Greeman of Susan Weissman’s The Course is Set on Hope. Originally published in Issue 94 of INTERNATIONAL SOCIALISM JOURNAL, Published Spring 2002 Copyright © International Socialism.

Victor Serge Papers – Yale University archive

Revolutionary & Novelist – a biographical sketch (2009).

Victor Serge – an introduction to his work – brief notes on Serge’s major fiction and non-fiction (2008).

Victor Serge at Wikipedia – biographical notes, political ideas, works available in English, and web links.

Victor Serge and Socialism – an essay by Peter Sedgwick, first published in International Socialism (1st series), No.14, Autumn 1963, pp.17-23.

A Requiem for Paris: The Long Dusk – an essay by Adam David Morton, part of his series relating literature to space, geography, and the city (2012).

The City as Protagonist: Birth of Our Power – essay by Adam David Morton, part of his series relating literature to space, geography, and the city (2012).

On Victor Serge as Vagabond Witness – a review by Adam Morton of Paul Gordon’s Vagabond Witness: Victor Serge and the Politics of Hope (2013).

Victor Serge: A Political Biography – a review by Roy Johnson of Susan Weissman’s study of Serge’s politics as an intransigent Left Oppositionist (2013).

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Twentieth century literature
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Victor Serge web links

May 13, 2010 by Roy Johnson

a selection of articles, reviews, and resources

This collection of Victor Serge web links offers a selection of essays, book reviews, and articles related to the Russian novelist, historian, and revolutionary. Since his death in 1947, Serge’s work has been largely ignored outside a small coterie of enthusiasts, but his reputation has gradually spread internationally in the post cold war era.

Victor Serge and The Novel of Revolution – an essay by Richard Greeman, Serge scholar and translator (1991).

Unforgiving Years – an extended book review by Roy Johnson of Serge’s last great novel (2009).

Men in Prison – a book review by Roy Johnson, originally part of an essay which appeared in Literature and History

The Cycle of Revolution: Men in Prison – an essay by Adam David Morton, part of his series relating literature to space, geography, and the city (2012).

Red Petrograd: Conquered City – an essay by Adam David Morton, part of his series relating literature to space, geography, and the city (2012).

The Case of Comrade Tulayev– an extended book review by Roy Johnson, (2010).

The Journey into Defeat: The Case of Comrade Tulayev– an essay by Adam David Morton, part of his series relating literature to space, geography, and the city (2012).

Midnight in the Century – extended book review by Roy Johnson (2010).

The Zero Hour: Midnight in the Century – an essay by Adam David Morton, part of his series relating literature to space, geography, and the city (2012).

Victor Serge Papers – Yale University archive

Revolutionary & Novelist – a biographical sketch (2009).

Victor Serge – an introduction to his work – brief notes on Serge’s major fiction and non-fiction (2008).

Victor Serge at Wikipedia – biographical notes, political ideas, works available in English, and web links.

Victor Serge and Socialism – an essay by Peter Sedgwick, first published in International Socialism (1st series), No.14, Autumn 1963, pp.17-23.

A Requiem for Paris: The Long Dusk – an essay by Adam David Morton, part of his series relating literature to space, geography, and the city (2012).

The City as Protagonist: Birth of Our Power – essay by Adam David Morton, part of his series relating literature to space, geography, and the city (2012).

On Victor Serge as Vagabond Witness – a review by Adam Morton of Paul Gordon’s Vagabond Witness: Victor Serge and the Politics of Hope (2013).

Victor Serge: A Political Biography – a review by Roy Johnson of Susan Weissman’s study of Serge’s politics as an intransigent Left Oppositionist (2013).

More on Victor Serge
Twentieth century literature
More on biography

Victory

September 28, 2012 by Roy Johnson

tutorial, commentary, further reading, and web links

Victory (1915) was first conceived by Conrad as a short story to be called The Dollars. But like many of his planned fictions it expanded as soon as he started writing, and went on to become one of his longest novels. The original manuscript was much longer than the final work, which was first published in serial form in Munsey’s Magazine (New York).

Joseph Conrad

Victory – critical commentary

Narrative

Part I of the novel is introduced by an un-named outer narrator who recounts events largely passed on to him by Captain Davidson from his travels and knowledge of the region in which the novel is set. This type of indirect narrative strategy will be familiar to anyone who has read Conrad’s other works, such as Lord Jim (1900), Falk: A Reminiscence (1903), and Under Western Eyes (1911). It supplies what might be called the ‘back story’ to the events which will follow in Parts II-IV.

Readers are forced to conceptualise the portrait of Axel Heyst through the double filter of Davidson’s and the narrator’s point of view – whilst keeping in mind that both of these are fictional constructs created by Conrad himself.

But from Part II onwards, the outer-narrator disappears, and events are presented in a third person omniscient narrative mode. It is as if Conrad has forgotten his own original narrative structure and has reverted to the more traditional and flexible mode of story-telling. Davidson makes a credulity-straining re-appearance like some deus-ex-machina in the final pages of the novel – but the outer-narrator never re-appears.

In fact the last few pages of the novel are an account written in third-person omniscient mode of Davidson’s interview with a government official – so in logical terms Conrad does not supply any credible means by which this information is reaching the reader.

Even if the reader accepts this blurring of distinctions between a first and third-person narrator, there remain problems with the narrative logic. In Part I of the story Davidson is puzzled and curious regarding Lena, and a great deal is made of the fact that he doesn’t know what she looks like.

But either a third-person omniscient narrator must know what she looks like, or the disappearance of the un-named outer narrator needs to be explained.

More seriously, there is no plausible route (other than via a third person omniscient narrator) for information regarding Heyst’s and Lena’s feelings about each other, and their anxieties during the dramatic finale – since they are both dead at of the end of the novel.

This is a problem of narrative logic which affects many of Conrad’s major novels. Similar issues affect Chance, Lord Jim, and Under Western Eyes. Readers and serious critics of his work seem to accept these compositional flaws in exchange for the dramatic intensity of his stories.

Doubles

The central drama of the novel is provided by the battle of wills and war of nerves as Mr Jones and Ricardo invade Heyst’s secure retreat and corner him in an attempt to steal his ‘treasure’. Jones wants Heyst’s money (which doesn’t really exist), and Ricardo wants to steal Lena from him.

Yet Jones and Heyst are curiously similar. Both of them have been restless wanderers, detatched from society, and both have adopted a negative attitude to the world. Heyst wishes to escape into solitude, and Jones spends most of his time alone, nursing his febrile state of being. Jones has murdered Antonio, Pedro’s brother, and Heyst is (falsely) accused of ‘murdering’ his business partner Morrison when he sends him back to England.

In another sense they are the opposite of each other. Heyst is a robust, masculine figure whose physical presence is repeatedly emphasised. Jones on the other hand is thin, etiolated and feminised. He has ‘long, feminine eyelashes’, ‘beautifully pencilled eyebrows’, and he last appears ‘tightly enfolded in an old but gorgeous blue silk dressing gown’.

Victory – study resources

Victory – Oxford World Classics – Amazon UK

Victory – Oxford World Classics – Amazon US

Victory – Kindle eBook

Victory – DVD film adaptation at Amazon [Region 1]

Victory – eBook at Project Gutenberg

Complete Works of Joseph Conrad – Kindle £1.92

Victory – film details at International Movie Database

The Cambridge Companion to Joseph Conrad – Amazon UK

Routledge Guide to Joseph Conrad – Amazon UK

Oxford Reader’s Companion to Conrad – Amazon UK

Victory – plot summary

Part I

As a sudden gesture of generosity, the Swedish recluse Axel Heyst pays the shipping fine incurred by Morrison, an Englishman he has only just met. They then go into a business partnership trading in coal for the newly developed steamships. Morrison returns to England but dies there. Heyst is appointed general manager of the Tropical Belt Coal Company, and at first prospers. But the company goes into liquidation, and disillusioned with life in general Heyst becomes almost a hermit on the remote island of Samburan.

His colleague Captain Davidson passes on news of Heyst, then brings him in person to Schomberg’s hotel in Surabaya. When he returns to pick him up again, he learns from Mrs Schomberg that Heyst has run off with a young girl from a visiting all-female orchestra. When Davidson next visits Samburan, Heyst asks him to return Mrs Schomberg’s shawl with which she has aided their escape. Davidson returns the shawl but fails to learn anything further about the girl.

Part II

Heyst meets Lena playing in the orchestra at Schomberg’s hotel in Surabaya where she is being bullied by the leader’s wife and pursued by hotelier Schomberg. Heyst and Lena rendezvous in the garden at night where she pleads for his assistance and offers herself to him sexually. Schomberg is eaten up with jealousy regarding this liaison.

The two desperados Jones and Ricardo arrive at the hotel with their servant Pedro. They bully Schomberg into accepting their scheme for gambling on the premises. Ricardo eventually recounts their history to Schomberg – an account which involves deception, theft, and murder as the backdrop to their joint life as wandering gamblers. In order to get them out of his hotel, Schomberg tells them that Heyst has killed his business partner Morrison, stolen all his money, and is now a rich man living in vulnerable isolation on Samburan.

Part III

On Samburan Heyst recounts to Lena how he first set himself up on the island with his Chinese servant Wang. He also explains the powerful influence of his father, a writer-philosopher who has inculcated him with a defensive and rather negative attitude to life. When he also reveals to her his past business with Morrison, Lena tells him of the malicious lies Schomberg has been spreading amongst hotel guests. They discuss his pessimistic views and his inability to express the protective love he feels towards her.

Then Jones, Ricardo, and Pedro arrive at the island. Heyst gives them shelter, but immediately becomes apprehensive regarding their intrusion into his relationship with Lena. When his revolver disappears, he immediately suspects his servant Wang (which proves to be correct). Jones and Ricardo discuss the prospects for success in their venture to steal Heyst’s ‘treasure’.

Part IV

Ricardo sneaks around looking for Lena, then attacks her in the bungalow. She fights him off, then helps him to escape in order to protect Heyst. Meanwhile Wang, having witnessed the attack, announces to Heyst that he is leaving. Heyst holds inconclusive talks with Jones, who insists that Pedro become his servant. Heyst decides to look for Wang, whilst Jones plans to gamble with Heyst to secure all his money.

Heyst seeks Wang’s help, but it is refused. Heyst realises that he is powerless and is trapped. Ricardo arrives to invite Heyst to see Jones, who is feigning illness. Heyst urges Lena to escape to the other side of the island, then visits Jones, where he reveals the truth of their situation, including the presence of Lena. Since Jones is a profound misogynist, this turns him against Ricardo. When they return to Heyst’s bungalow, Jones shoots at Ricardo, but kills Lena who has remained to protect Heyst. At this very moment Davidson suddenly arrives. Jones tracks down Ricardo and kills him, then apparently commits suicide. Heyst creates a funeral pyre for himself and Lena by setting the bungalow on fire.

Principal characters

I	the un-named outer narrator
Axel Heyst	a Swedish former manager of the Tropical Belt Coal company
Morrison	the English owner of trading ship Capricorn
Wilhelm Schomberg	a German hotel proprietor in Surabaya (45)
Mrs Schomberg	his ugly, wooden-like wife
Captain Davidson	captain of the merchant vessel, the Sissie
Julius Tesman	trading agent in Surabaya
Lena	a beautiful violin player (20) (also called Alma and Magdalena)
Sgr Zangiacomo	leader of the all-female orchestra
Sgra Zangiacomo	his obnoxious and bullying wife
Mr Jones	a gambler and murderer
Martin Ricardo	his ‘secretary’ – a desperado
Pedro	a Colombian alligator hunter, their servant
Antonio	Pedro’s brother, who is shot by Jones
Wang	Heyst’s Chinese servant

Biography

Setting

The first part of the novel is set in Surabaya, a provincial capital in East Java. The remainder and majority of the events take place on the ficticious island of Samburan, which is located somewhere in the Malaysian archipelago.

Joseph Conrad’s writing

Manuscript page from Heart of Darkness

Other works by Joseph Conrad

Lord Jim (1900) is the earliest of Conrad’s big and serious novels, and it explores one of his favourite subjects – cowardice and moral redemption. Jim is a ship’s captain who in youthful ignorance commits the worst offence – abandoning his ship. He spends the remainder of his adult life in shameful obscurity in the South Seas, trying to re-build his confidence and his character. What makes the novel fascinating is not only the tragic but redemptive outcome, but the manner in which it is told. The narrator Marlowe recounts the events in a time scheme which shifts between past and present in an amazingly complex manner. This is one of the features which makes Conrad (born in the nineteenth century) considered one of the fathers of twentieth century modernism.
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Heart of Darkness (1902) is a tightly controlled novella which has assumed classic status as an account of the process of Imperialism. It documents the search for a mysterious Kurtz, who has ‘gone too far’ in his exploitation of Africans in the ivory trade. The reader is plunged deeper and deeper into the ‘horrors’ of what happened when Europeans invaded the continent. This might well go down in literary history as Conrad’s finest and most insightful achievement, and it is based on his own experiences as a sea captain. This volume also contains ‘An Outpost of Progress’ – the magnificent study in shabby cowardice which prefigures ‘Heart of Darkness’.
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Oxford World Classics offers the best editions of Conrad’s work. They are largely based on the most accurate versions of the texts; and they feature introductory essays, a biography, explanatory notes, textual variants, a bibliography of further reading, and in some cases missing or deleted chapters. They are also terrifically good value.

Nostromo (1904) is Conrad’s ‘big’ political novel – into which he packs all of his major subjects and themes. It is set in the imaginary Latin-American country of Costaguana – and features a stolen hoard of silver, desperate acts of courage, characters trembling on the brink of moral panic. The political background encompasses nationalist revolution and the Imperialism of foreign intervention. Silver is the pivot of the whole story – revealing the courage of some and the corruption and destruction of others. Conrad’s narration is as usual complex and oblique. He begins half way through the events of the revolution, and proceeds by way of flashbacks and glimpses into the future.
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Joseph Conrad links

Joseph Conrad at Mantex
Biography, book reviews, study guides, videos, web links,

Joseph Conrad at Project Gutenberg
A major collection of free eTexts

Joseph Conrad at Wikipedia
Biography, major works, further reading, and web links

Joseph Conrad at the Internet Movie Database
Adaptations for the cinema and television – in various languages

Works by Joseph Conrad
HTML texts, digital scans, and eTexts versions

The Joseph Conrad Society (UK)
Conradian journal, reviews. and scholarly resources

Hyper-Concordance of Conrad’s works
Locate a word or phrase – in context

More on Joseph Conrad
Twentieth century literature
More on Joseph Conrad tales

Vile Bodies

March 11, 2018 by Roy Johnson

tutorial, study guide, commentary, web links

Vile Bodies (1930) was Evelyn Waugh’s second novel, published as a follow-up to the success of his first – Decline and Fall (1928). It uses the same formula of presenting a farcical and deeply satirical portrait of the 1920s and the Wild Young Things who became the upper-class celebrities of the decade. It also features other aspects of modern society which help to fuel the culture of fashionable excess – tabloid journalism, artificially cultivated publicity, and the cinema.

first edition – design by Evelyn Waugh

Vile Bodies – commentary

Narrative presentation

The most interesting thing about the narrative is the manner in which so much of it is presented via short and very rapidly changing scenes. The effect is almost like the abrupt editing of cinema film to produce ‘jump cuts’ – and probably reflects the influence of moving pictures at that time. It is a style perfectly suited to the frivolous and erratic behaviour of the characters in the story.

Waugh was setting out to capture the irresponsible and anarchic behaviour amongst the youthful offspring of a privileged elite in the 1920s – which in America was labelled ‘the Jazz Age’. This featured mis-spent wealth, reckless self-indulgence, warped ambitions, greed, and sexual libertinism – all fuelled on a heady mixture of alcohol and (some) drugs. It was also a culture in which Evelyn Waugh had plenty of first hand experience.

Indeed, crass and unprofessional film production becomes one of the objects of satire towards the end of the novel. And Waugh takes great delight in presenting the two people who own the production company (Mr Isaacs and Colonel Blount) as interested in little else except trying to get rid of what is obviously a financial loss-maker by selling the business on to somebody else.

Waugh treats newspaper journalism in a similar fashion – concentrating on the frivolous and inconsequential parts of popular newspaper gossip columns. The upper-class journalists merely record the names of so-called celebrities who have been ‘seen’ at fashionable events in society. And if they are stuck for news, they invent it. When Adam becomes ‘Mr Chatterbox’ on the Daily Excess, the paper is being sued by various celebrities for libel, and who therefore cannot be mentioned. (This is almost one hundred years before the Leveson Enquiry into phone hacking and the ethics of the British press.)

Adam spices up the flagging column with a series of ‘Notable Invalids’ – well known people who are deaf, bald, disabled, one-legged, and certified insane. When he has exhausted this line of entertainment, he begins to invent celebrities who do not actually exist. He creates the society beauty Imogen Quest and fills his column with her spectacular successes and designer clothes. Eventually she becomes so popular that the editor of The Daily Excess Lord Monomark wants to meet her. Adam is forced to despatch the Quest family to Jamaica the same day.

Waugh had worked as a journalist for Lord Beaverbrook, the Canadian-born owner of the Daily Express – and he used the joke about journalists inventing what we now call ‘fake news’ in his later novel Scoop (1938).

The ending

There are two curious features in the conclusion of the novel. The first is the fact that all the farcical goings-on of the plot are brought to an abrupt stop by the declaration of war. For a book published in 1930, the reader is forced to wonder ‘What war is that?’ The text does does not refer to the war of 1914-18, and the Second World War was still a decade away. It turns out to be an imaginary war, which does not sit easily with the essentially realistic mise en scene of the remainder of the novel.

The antics of the Bright Young Things might be comically exaggerated, but they are set in a credible world of London and the home counties – of Mayfair, Shepherd’s Market, Fitzrovia, and Manchester Races. But a war which had not taken place is a different fictional – and moral – universe altogether.

The second curiosity is the abrupt shift in tone – from frivolous satire to an almost apocalyptic vision of battleground Europe – largely constructed of images derived from the trench warfare of 1914-1918. It has often been remarked that Evelyn Waugh’s rather painful divorce from his first wife (who was also called Evelyn) occurred during the composition of Vile Bodies. This may be a reasonable biographical explanation for the sudden change of mood, but it does not repair the damage done to the novel’s structural coherence.

Vile Bodies – study resources

Vile Bodies – Penguin – Amazon UK

Vile Bodies – Penguin – Amazon US

Evelyn Waugh: A Life Revisited – Amazon UK

Evelyn Waugh – by Henry Lamb

Vile Bodies – plot summary

Returning from France, Adam Fenwick-Symes has the manuscript of his autobiography seized and burnt by the border customs officers. His publishers give him a new contract, but with crippling conditions. He cancels his engagement to Nina Blount, but then wins a thousand pounds in a hotel bar, so he renews the engagement.

He puts the money on a horse racing bet with a ‘Major’ who promptly disappears with the money. Adam goes to a fancy dress party where he meets Nina. They ‘go on’ afterwards to continue their revelries, staying with a girl who turns out to be the Prime Minister’s youngest daughter. The party-goers at Number 10 Downing Street are all reported in the morning newspapers.

Nina suggests that Adam ask her father for money to enable them to get married. Adam travels out beyond Aylesbury where the absent-minded Colonel Blount gives him an elaborate lunch and a cheque for one thousand pounds. Adam and Nina drive out and stay overnight at a pub in Arundel. In the morning, Nina point out that the cheque has been signed with the name ‘Charlie Chaplin’.

Gossip journalist Simon Balcairn wants to get into Margot Metroland’s party, but she refuses to admit him. Instead, he gets horsewhipped by the angry father of a girl he has written about. Lady Metroland gives her party, where she tries to recruit young girls for her nightclubs in South-America. Balcairn gatecrashes the party disguised in a false beard, but he is found out and expelled. He files completely invented stories about the guests to his newspaper, then commits suicide.

Adam replaces Balcairn as Mr. Chatterbox on the Daily Excess. He writes about famous people who are disabled, and then begins to invent ficticious celebrities. He meets ‘Ginger’ Littlejohn at Manchester Races and puffs him as a rich colonial in his column. They go to a party held in a tethered hot air balloon and then go on to a dingy night club. There are lots of complaints in society about the reckless behaviour of the Younger Generation.

Adam goes off to see Colonel Blount again. A cheap historical film is being shot at the house. Blount deliberately misunderstands Adam again, and thereby avoids giving him any money. Adam is fired from his job on the paper.

Adam and friends drive out to see some motor races. They stay at a boarding house and leave without paying. Amidst much confusion at the race, Adam meets the drunk Major, who claims he has got Adam’s winnings – at odds of thirty-five to one. The Major borrows money from him then disappears again. Miss Runcible drives a racing car whilst drunk, crashes it, and is taken to a nursing home.

Next day Nina announces that she is going to marry Ginger. The Young Things meet at the nursing home where Agatha Runcible is recovering. A party starts up in her room. When Nina has dinner with Adam, it makes Ginger jealous – so Adam offers to sell Nina to Ginger for £100. Agatha dies.

Nina returns from her honeymoon and Ginger is recalled to his regiment. She takes Adam to her father’s house for Christmas. Colonel Blount shows boring extracts from his film at the vicar’s house and causes an electrical power failure. He tries to sell the film company to Adam. Suddenly, war is declared.

During the war Nina returns to Ginger. As a soldier Adam is fighting in France. He meets the drunken Major. They share confiscated Champagne with one of Lady Metroland’s nightclub hostess girls, who has become a camp follower.

Vile Bodies – principal characters

Adam Fenwick-Symes	a young would-be writer and journalist
Nina Blount	Adam’s fiancee, a spoilt and frivolous young woman
Colonel Blount	Nina’s father, a confused and confusing country gent
Lottie Crump	the dipsomaniac landlady of Shepheard’s Hotel
The Drunken Major	a confidence trickster and n’er do well
Ginger Littlejohn	a friend of Adam’s and rival for Nina
Simon Balcairn	an aggressive young journalist who commits suicide
The Honourable Agatha Runcible	a drunken and raffish young woman who kills herself in a racing car
Mrs Melrose Ape	an American evangelist with a troupe of girl followers
Lady Metroland	(a recurrent figure in Waugh’s novels)
Mr Isaacs	owner of The Wonderfilm Company

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Virginia Woolf a critical memoir

June 27, 2009 by Roy Johnson

critical study – plus personal memoir

Virginia Woolf A Critical Memoir was the first extended study of Virginia Woolf’s work to be written in English. It appeared in 1936, whilst Woolf was still alive, shortly after the publication of her last major work, The Waves. The author Winifred Holtby was herself a novelist (best known for South Riding) a journalist, a radical feminist, and lifelong friend of Vera Britten, who wrote about their relationship in Testament of Friendship.

Holtby takes what at the time was a fairly conventional approach to literary criticism, which was to read what was known of the author’s biography into the fiction as a way of explaining it. Thus the parent figures in both The Voyage Out and To the Lighthouse are assumed to be portraits of Woolf’s own mother and father; and the recurrence of sea imagery in her work is seen as simply a reflection of her childhood holidays in Cornwall. There’s a certain amount of truth in this approach, but fortunately it does not hinder her exploration of deeper issues.

In fact the surprising thing – which makes this study so readable – is that Holtby had already identified all Woolf’s main themes and innovations, even though she was writing at the same time as some of the work was still appearing.

She discusses the main works – summarising the story, commenting on ‘well-rounded’ characters, and identifying the ‘moments of being’ for which Woolf is now famous. She also relies on huge chunks of quotations from the text, and is often so carried away with enthusiasm that her own commentary blends into Woolf’s narratives in a way which sometimes makes it difficult to see where one ends and the other begins.

Night and Day is seen in comparison with Jane Austen and judged to be the lesser for it – but for reasons which Holtby sees as political. She rightly identifies the short experimental fictions A Haunted House, Monday or Tuesday, and A String Quartet as works marking a major breakthrough in Woolf’s technique, and she offers a stunningly insightful reading of this transition.

It’s occasionally surprising to remember that she had met Virginia Woolf, and was writing at a time when both of them were commercially successful authors. Holtby’s prose style is eloquent and fluid, and she becomes almost rhapsodic when describing Woolf’s achievement as a literary critic:

She has, moreover, an almost perfect taste. Few critics have ever been more alert to detect humbug, the spurious, the second rate; few have been more generously and freely appreciative of real merit, even if it appears under strange disguises. Taste for her is a natural gift, never blunted by the adolescent ignorance, the commercial pressure, the confusion of aim and distractions of fashion, to which so many critical judgements are subjected.

She deals with Mrs Dalloway and To the Lighthouse in the same chapter, largely it seems on the grounds that they deal with the issue of Time in complementary ways.

She ends, fortunately for us, with The Waves, for not long after having written it Winifred Holtby died at the age of only thirty-seven. This is a remarkable book for its time, and still eminently readable now – seventy years after it first appeared.

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Winifred Holtby, Virginia Woolf: A Critical Memoir, London: Continuum, 2007, pp.206, ISBN 0826494439

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Virginia Woolf a writer’s life

November 7, 2009 by Roy Johnson

a biography as seen through her major works

What does this biography have that the many others don’t? Well, Lyndall Gordon claims that Virginia Woolf a writer’s life was written to counteract the prevailing orthodoxy of Virginia Woolf being depicted as a tormented and unhappy artist – just as she was by Nicole Kidman in The Hours. What Gordon wants to offer as an alternative is a portrait of a sensitive young woman who was provoked into ‘madness’ on three occasions, lived a happily married life, and when she was on top form converted her life experiences into works of experimental fiction.

The book also has substantial portraits of the other people who were important in her life – her father, Leslie Stephen, her mother Julia Duckworth, and her sister Vanessa Bell. Lyndall Gordon makes no bones about blending factual documentary evidence with fictional constructions, and talking about To the Lighthouse as if it were Woolf’s account of her parents rather than a fictional construct loosely based upon them. And she takes the novels in any order, to suit her purpose.

This haphazard approach is quite deliberate and conscious. She defends it as a fresh method: “The way she [VW] experienced life does not accord with the usual kind of linear chronology”. But it is indulged to such an extent that long passages of what purports to be a biographical study are no more than critical commentaries on To the Lighthouse and The Voyage Out after the manner of an undergraduate study guide. This approach reaches its nadir when her reading of The Waves as portraits of Leonard Woolf, Lytton Strachey, and so on lasts for an uninterrupted fifty-two pages, stretching over two chapters.

She focuses strongly on the issue of Woolf’s early mental illness – much of it ascribed to the loss of her mother, and she makes hardly any mention of her attachment to mother-substitutes such as Violet Dickenson.

The lack of chronological rigour and logic has important consequences. In discussing her ‘madness’ for instance, the years 1904, 1915, and 1941 are singled out as the worst – with no cognizance of the fact that they also represent the start of her career as a writer, the date of her first published novel, and the end of her career, when she was writing in the full possession of all her creative powers.

As a writer of literary biographies, Lyndall Gordon is keen to promote the notion that Woolf had similar motivations. She wonders why she is not recognised as a biographer, but looks down her nose at Orlando and Flush, and regards Roger Fry a ‘dutiful’ work – when in fact it is one of the weakest and most superficial of all Woolf’s writing.

Her attitude to Woolf’s intimate life is a combination of coyness and naivety. She skates over the sapphism and imagines that life with Leonard was very romantic, ignoring the fact that she only agreed to marry him in the first place on the understanding that she found him physically repulsive. Yet her account of their early years makes it read as if the sexual content was that of an X-rated B-movie.

When the external evidence piles up to prove that this was not the case, where does she turn for evidence to examine the case further? Well, the fiction of course. So instead of looking at the fairly well documented facts, she presents instead several pages of commentary on Leonard Woolf’s novel The Wise Virgins.

She also shares the naive views expressed by Leonard regarding the randomness of sexual desire – unable to explain why one might be enamoured of a love object whose social and intellectual qualities seem undistinguished. And she doesn’t want to countenance either Vita Sackville-West or the Orlando which was the true consummation of that relationship.

For one thing she can be commended. She has obviously read all the extant drafts of the novels, and offers a reading of them which comments on the changes, deletions, and shifts of emphasis as Woolf worked towards her final versions.

But apart from writing Three Guineas, you would not have a clue about the events of her life in the 1930s – apart from the absurd claim that she was more romantically in love with Leonard than ever.

So, for whom will this book be of any use? Well, it can be ignored as a conventional biography – because you will learn so little about Woolf’s life from it. But it does have critical analyses of her major writings, so it might be helpful to undergraduates or general readers trying to come to terms with some of the highpoints of literary modernism.

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Lyndall Gordon, Virginia Woolf: A Writer’s Life, London: Virago, rev edn 2006, pp.431, ISBN 1844081427

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Virginia Woolf an introduction

October 7, 2011 by Roy Johnson

a sketch of her life – an appreciation of the novels

Virginia Woolf An Introduction is yet another study that combines a biography with comments on her major writing. There have been several biographies of Virginia Woolf in the last few decades. John Lehmann’s illustrated memoir is still very popular. Quentin Bell’s official biography is detailed and scholarly but in common with other accounts by Bloomsbury insiders (he was her nephew) it contains sins of omission to protect relatives and friends. Lyndall Gordon’s A Writer’s Life bases much of its account of Woolf’s life on her fiction, supposing much of it to be thinly veiled autobiography. The weaknesses in these productions mean that Hermione Lee’s more serious recent study is now regarded as the ‘standard’ biography.

So what does a new account by Alexandra Harris have to offer – published as it is very quickly on the heels of her award-winning Romantc Moderns? Well – it turns out not to be a biography in the conventional sense, but an introduction to Woolf and her work in general, compiled from readings of her novels, diaries, and letters, strung together in a chronological sequence.

The first few chapters deal with life in the Stephen household at Hyde Park Gate and Talland House, but once Woolf starts writing it is the prodigious flow of her creative work which forms the spine of the narrative – from her first book reviews and the early major task of The Voyage Out through to the last flourish of Between the Acts.

For readers new to Woolf it performs the useful function of emphasising the amazing scope of her work – for she was expressive and accomplished in all the literary genres with which she engaged. Her diaries are as interesting as Kafka’s; she excelled in the novel; her short stories are amongst the most advanced experiments in modern literature (with the possible exception of some by Nadine Gordimer); her essays and literary criticism will stand comparison with the work of any professional literary critic; and even her letters are worth reading – though she tends to recycle the same anecdotes to multiple correspondents.

As an introduction to Woolf’s major novels, it’s very successful. Harris’s impassioned account of Orlando is guaranteed to make anyone who has not read the novel dash out and buy it immediately. But at times she becomes so caught up with giving an account of the novels that her commentary becomes an act of interpretation. She switches from biography to literary criticism.

One minute for instance she might be dealing with well known details of the biography, and then at the merest mention of the book Woolf is currently writing, the narrative slides off into plot summary and a discussion of its characters as if they inhabited the same world. This will probably seem very attractive to general readers, encouraging them to engage with the fiction. But it’s likely to irritate any serious Woolf enthusiasts.

The pace is not always even. There are occasional lurches forward in chronology which are quite disconcerting. Whilst discussing the early writing in 1910, she suddenly invokes Rhoda in The Waves, which wasn’t written until twenty-one years later.

Quite surprisingly, there is very little about the lifestyle bohemianism of the Bloomsbury Group, even when it is directly relevant. Her descriptions of Virginia’s relationship with Leonard Woolf give the impression of a blissfully idyllic marriage. You wouldn’t guess from her account that it was virtually a mariage blanc. All the rich gossip and fruity anecdotes are available elsewhere of course, but the picture of Bloomsbury life that comes across is distinctly pasteurised.

One of the most interesting chapters is her last, in which she traces the development of Woolf’s posthumous reputation. Leonard Woolf, acting as executor and publisher at the Hogarth Press, slowly released the letters, diaries, and essays (only recently completed) in well edited scholarly editions. And as he did so, Woolf’s critical stock rose accordingly to the point where she is now regarded as one of the great modernists of the early twentieth century.

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Alexandra Harris, Virginia Woolf, London: Thames and Hudson, 2011, pp., ISBN: 0500515921

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Virginia Woolf an MFS reader

August 26, 2009 by Roy Johnson

academic essays on Woolf and her major novels

For those who may not know, MFS is not some sort of DIY building material, but Modern Fiction Studies, a prestigious academic journal, and Virginia Woolf an MFS reader is a compilation of essays on Virginia Woolf drawn from its archives going back over the last half century of its publication. The chapters are arranged in three thematic sections, each arranged chronologically according to the text under consideration.

It’s a book written by university teachers, designed to be read and (they hope) quoted by other teachers in the books that they write as part of seeking career promotion. That’s the nature of academic life today. In some instances it produces valuable results: for the main part it results in worthless dross. This system is the root of both the main strength and the weakness of this book.

Brenda Silvers’ introductory essay huffs and puffs about the adoption of Virginia Woolf into popular culture – but it’s mainly hot under the collar about Edward Albee’s play (Who’s Afraid..) and its possibly disguised gay theme. She also goes in for some quite bogus generalizing on the interpretation of photographs:

Woolf’s photographs [she means photographs of Woolf] in general … prove frightening to their viewers.

That will be news to the many people who buy and admire her portrait wherever it is on sale.

Susan Friedman offers an account of The Voyage Out which sees Rachel Vinrace as an example of Woolf’s ‘Common Reader’ – someone unprejudiced by formal academic experience and unburdened by the authority of criticism. This is quite a useful way of matching Wool’s theory with her fiction.

Charles Hoffmann traces the development of Mrs Dalloway from a short story (Mrs Dalloway in Bond Street) to a full length novel following the connections between notebooks, manuscripts, and drafts which are scattered in various collections on both sides of the Atlantic. This is an approach to literary scholarship which has the advantage of being unencumbered by lots of ‘theory’ and is rooted in the practicality of literary texts.

Tammy Clewell has a thoughtful piece on death, mourning, and grief in Jacob’s Room and Mrs Dalloway. This argues with persuasive supporting evidence that Woolf was promoting more radical views on these topics than is commonly supposed. She does not want her readers to relax any opposition to the barbarous mass slaughter behind every war memorial and slogans such as ‘their names shall live forever’:

In relation to these postwar forms of memorialization, Jacob’s Room stands out precisely for what it withholds: the text offers no faith in religious immortality, no applause for individual heroism, no celebration of male comradery, no stoical acceptance of fate, no aesthetic smoothing over of the war’s human cost of any kind.

The best-written essay in the collection (and unsurprisingly the most frequently quoted by others) is Karen deMeester’s on ‘Trauma and Recovery in Mrs Dalloway‘. This argues that Woolf gives accurate expression to the condition of psychological trauma – particularly of course in the case of Septimus Warren Smith, who has seen through the horrors upon which his society is based. But even more bravely, deMeester argues that Clarissa Dalloway is a social coward, because although she sees the same truths as Septimus, she chooses to re-unite with the world which has caused the horrors in the first place. As Peter Walsh says of her:

she frittered her time away, lunching, dining, giving these incessant parties of hers, talking nonsense, saying things she didn’t mean, blunting the edge of her mind, losing her discrimination

It’s not often one sees Peter Walsh (a lightweight figure) quoted with such approval. But he has a point – and so does deMeester.

Urmila Seehagiri desperately wants to offer a racial and post-colonial reading of Woolf’s work, and she digs and digs, hoping to come up with some suitable material. To the Lighthouse yields the fact that Lily Briscoe has ‘little Chinese eyes’; Woolf took part in the Dreadnought Hoax and attended the Ballets Russes. No distinction is made between fictional and biographical evidence. When To the Lighthouse is addressed in detail, broken teacups are the signal for an extended account of the history of the tea trade with India and China. Then, via a detour into the theories of art held by Roger Fry and Clive Bell, she concludes that Lily Briscoe’s ‘little Chinese eyes’

attain the ‘ultra-primitive directness of vision’ that Fry attributes to East Asian cultures, and her arrangement of forms is liberating because it is autotelic. Privileging the completion of Lily’s painting over mending broken familial structures, Woolf creates a racially differentiated model for modern English subjectivity that holds itself separate from patriarchal and imperialist hierarchies.

Many of the other essays suffer from this very dubious critical method. A single word or short phrase is seized upon; a tenuous connection with another text (fiction, biography, or theory) is made; and a literary critic’s comment upon some apparently similar phenomenon is noted. The flaw is that a logical and positive connection between the starting and finishing point is taken for granted without any critical examination or supporting evidence. The connections between these elements are at best loose, and more often mere fugitive verbal associations.

And that, I’m afraid, is the state of literary criticism in the university today. Some good solid textual scholarship, holding out against a tide of convoluted windbaggery masquerading as ‘critical theory’. Can you understand the last quote above?

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Maren Linnet, Virginia Woolf: An MFS Reader, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009, pp.443, ISBN 0801891183

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Virginia Woolf and Cubism

December 28, 2014 by Roy Johnson

the development of literary and visual modernism

Virginia Woolf and Cubism might seem at first a rather odd conjunction, but in fact her literary experimentation was taking place at exactly the same time as the pioneering movement in modern visual art, and it had very similar objectives. Picasso’s great breakthrough masterpiece Les Demoiselles d’Avignon was painted in 1907, and the development of his cubist works along with those of Georges Braque were created from 1910 onwards into the 1920s. This is the same period during which Woolf established herself as one of the most important figures of literary modernism.

Picasso said ‘I paint forms as I think of them, not as I see them’ which resulted in objects and sitters portrayed in a fragmented manner, from a number of different perspectives, in a series of overlapping planes – all of which the viewer is invited to recompose mentally to form a three-dimensional image, rendered on a two dimensional surface (though there were also a few cubist sculptures).

Virginia Woolf composed in a similar fashion by analysing her subject and reconstructing it from the fragments by which it was perceived, often overlapping, and in particular from a mixture of time periods which combine the fictional present with the past – often within the same sentence of her narrative.

How fresh, how calm, stiller than this of course, the air was in the early morning; like the flap of a wave; the kiss of a wave; chill and sharp and yet (for a girl of eighteen as she then was) solemn, feeling as she did, standing there at the open window, that something awful was about to happen; looking at the flowers, at the trees with the smoke winding off them and the rooks rising, falling; standing and looking until Peter Walsh said, “Musing among the vegetables?”—was that it?—”I prefer men to cauliflowers”—was that it?

Mrs Dalloway is walking in Westminster and the first world war is over, but her appreciation of the fresh morning in June evokes memories of her youth at Bourton and the man who was in love with her, who failed to marry her, but who she will meet later on in the day.

Woolf like her exact contemporary James Joyce, sought to represent human consciousness not as a linear and well-organised set of reflections on distinct topics, but as a vibrant and kaleidoscopic jumble of thoughts, often having little connection with each other. The artistry of her rendition was to provide the links between them via the selection and arrangement of details – just as the painter chooses the fragments of an object which the viewer reassembles into the object as a whole.

Woolf’s cubism is a shifting narrative viewpoint – flashes of a person’s character as seen by other people, of shifting periods of time, and changing locations and characters, the connections between which are not explicitly revealed. The result is a narrative often described as a mosaic of fragments – which is precisely the effect for which Woolf was striving.

The similarities between a literary technique and its equivalent in painting are not at all accidental. Woolf was surrounded by painters – from her sister Vanessa Bell, to Bell’s lover Duncan Grant, and most importantly the painter and art theorist Roger Fry, whose biographer she became. It was Fry who organised the important exhibition of modern post-Impressionist painters at the New Grafton Galleries in 1910, at which Virginia Woolf famously said that ‘human character changed’.

In her study of this subject Sarah Latham Phillips offers a detailed reading of Jacob’s Room in the light of these ideas, then of Mrs Dalloway and some of the experimental short stories Woolf produced between 1917 and 1932. She makes a reasonable case for the mould-breaking story ‘Kew Gardens’ (1918) having been influenced by her sister Vanessa’s cubist painting The Conversation (which is reproduced here in full colour).

She also sees similarities between Woolf and cubist painters in their selection of everyday objects from the world around them as the raw materials of their art. For the painters, the newspaper, the glass and wine carafe on a bistro table; for Woolf the hustle and bustle of the London streets, or their exact opposite – the silent ruminations of a woman sitting in an empty room, reflecting upon ‘The Mark on the Wall’.

This pamphlet-sized publication comes from the Bloomsbury Heritage series of essays and monographs published by Cecil Woolf in London. These are scholarly productions which range over neglected or hitherto undiscovered topics in Bloomsbury culture – such as unpublished manuscripts, ceramics, gardens, bookbinding, personal reminiscences, painting, houses, and even anti-Semitism. The publisher Cecil Woolf is the nephew of Leonard and Virginia Woolf, and his publications do the Bloomsbury tradition honour.

Sarah Latham Phillips, Virginia Woolf as a ‘Cubist Writer’, London: Cecil Woolf, 2012, pp.43, ISBN 978-1-907286-29-2

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Virginia Woolf and the Arts

August 1, 2010 by Roy Johnson

essays in literary, media, and cultural studies

As editor Maggie Humm points out in her introduction to this huge collection of scholarly studies on Virginia Woolf and the Arts, Woolf spent her entire life surrounded by creative people of all kinds. Her father was an internationally renowned writer (on belle lettres and moutaineering), her sister was a painter, and her friend Roger Fry both a critic and an artist. Virginia Woolf visited contemporary exhibitions, travelled to museums abroad, and participated in aesthetic debates via her prolific output of essays and journalism.

The essays are grouped under headings of Aesthetic Theory, Painting, Domestic Arts, Publishing, Broadcasting and Technology, Visual Media, and Performance Arts. At their best they illuminate the fact that Virginia Woolf had original opinions and novel forms of expressing them on a variety of subjects, ranging from human behaviour to painting, urban and domestic life, social history, and the relationship between memory, consciousness, and time.

They cover topics such as Woolf’s depiction of aesthetic creation via painting (To the Lighthouse), Woolf and race [without touching on her anti-Semitism], Woolf and the metropolitan city, and Woolf and realism. Each essay is self-contained, with its own set of endnotes and bibliography of further reading.

At their worst (particularly those dealing with aesthetics and literary theory) they are little more than overblown meditations, dragging apparent meanings out of words (more/Moor/moor) where quite clearly none were intended – like schoolboy puns. They also indulge in settling of scores with other ‘critics’, rather than focusing on authentic literary criticism.

Fortunately, the collection improves as it progresses. The most interesting and effective essays are the least pretentious and the least to do with modern literary criticism in all its silliness. For instance Diane Gillespie on ‘Virginia Woolf, Vanessa Bell, and Painting’ and Benjamin Harvey on Woolf’s visits to art galleries and museums.

Though even amongst the sensible essays there are disappointments. A chapter on ‘Bohemian Lifestyles’ is not much more than a description of Woolf’s relationships with her sister Vanessa, Vita Sackville-West, and Katherine Mansfield. It doesn’t explore any truly radical behaviour – such as Vanessa’s ability to live comfortably alongside her ex-husband and his lover, her own ex-lover and his current (gay) lover, and to conceal from her own daughter the true identity of her father for almost twenty years.

But there are plenty of good chapters – one on ‘Virginia Woolf and Entertaining’, another on Woolf’s sesitivity to gardens, and an especially interesting study of ‘Virginia Woolf as Publisher and Editor’ which spills over quite creatively into the Hogarth Press promotion of Russian Literature.

This leads logically enough into a chapter on ‘Virginia Woolf and Book Design’ which is like a shortened version of John Willis’s full length study Leonard and Viginia Woolf as Publishers: The Hogarth Press 1917-1941. Patrick Collier has a good chapter on Woolf and journalism, which I wish had included consideration of her early reviews for the Manchester Guardian and The Times Literary Supplement in the period 1904-1915.

Pamela Caughie also has an interesting chapter on Virginia Woolf and radio broadcasting that cleverly points out the contradictions in Woolf’s attitude to the BBC – keen to embrace the new technology it offered in the 1920s, but perceptive enough to realise that its early Reithean paternalism was hopelessly middlebrow – a view she shared with her husband Leonard, who put his finger on an attitude which is still prevelent today:

That the BBC should be so reactionary and politically and intellectually dishonest is what one would expect … knowing the kind of people who always get in control of those kind of machines, but what makes them so contemptible is that, even according to their own servants’ hall standards, they habitually choose the tenth rate in everything, from their music hall programmes and social lickspittlers and royal bumsuckers right down their scale to the singers of Schubert songs, the conductors of their classical concerts and the writers of their reviews.

The essays at the latter end of the collection remind us just how au courant Virginia Woolf was with contemporary technology. She took photographs, broadcasted on the radio, and wrote about London’s underground, the telephone, the cinema, and even flying (without having done so). The irony here is that the critics explaining her avant-garde behaviour and interests are themselves locked into a mode that is terminally old-fashioned (the academic essay) almost to the point of being moribund.

This is a huge and very impressive production, but one thing struck me about it – apart from its equally huge cost. Many of the essays take a long time to make a simple point. They circle around the object of enquiry with endless qualifications and even self-refutations, all made in the spirit of ‘interrogating’ their subject. It’s as if we are being offered ‘thinking aloud’ instead of considered arguments and conclusions. Having said that, the audience at which this Woolf-fest is aimed (lecturers and post-graduates) will not want to miss out on a collection that does include studies that link Woolf to many other forms of culture beyond literature alone.

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Maggie Humm (ed), The Edinburgh Companion to Virginia Woolf and the Arts, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010, pp.512, ISBN: 0748635521

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Virginia Woolf a critical memoir

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a sketch of her life – an appreciation of the novels

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Virginia Woolf and Cubism

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