Tutorials

literary studies, cultural history, and study skill techniques

literary studies, cultural history, and study skill techniques

The Legacy

December 20, 2013 by Roy Johnson

tutorial, commentary, study resources, plot, and web links

The Legacy was a short story commissioned by the American magazine Harper’s Bazaar in 1940. However, without offering any explanation, they declined to publish it, despite angry letters of complaint from Virginia Woolf to the editor.

The Legacy – critical commentary

By the late 1930s Virginia Woolf’s period of literary experimentation was coming to an end, and she returned to a more traditional manner of presentation. After the highpoint of The Waves in 1931 she produced the more conventional The Years (1937), the biography Roger Fry, and her last novel Between the Acts (1940). She also produced far less short fiction and concentrated instead on essays and polemics such as Three Guineas (1938). So it is not surprising to find her returning to earlier conventions of the short story in her composition of The Legacy.

Certainly it sits alongside some of her other short fictions from the 1920s and 1930s in being a study in egoism and complacency, but she comes back to the strategy of the ‘surprise ending’ which dates back to the nineteenth century and writers such as Guy de Maupassant.

Of course an alert first time reader might not find the ending altogether surprising. After all, why would Angela have left her effects labeled as gifts for other people unless she was preparing for her own death? BM’s death too is foretold by a brief mention in the opening of the story – but we do not know his significance at that point in the story.

What we do know from the conventions of story plotting is that someone reading another person’s intimate diaries for the first time in fifteen years is likely to be in for something of a surprise revelation or shock to the system.

The highlight of this particular story is Woolf’s well-paced depiction of emotional disintegration as Gilbert Clandon plummets from smug self-regard into the agonies of unappeasable jealousy as he discovers the truth of Angela’s secret life – culminating in his realisation that she chose to follow her lover into death.

The Legacy – study resources

The Complete Shorter Fiction – Vintage Classics – Amazon UK

The Complete Shorter Fiction – Vintage Classics – Amazon US

The Complete Shorter Fiction – Harcourt edition – Amazon UK

The Complete Shorter Fiction – Harcourt edition – Amazon US

Monday or Tuesday and Other Stories – Gutenberg.org

Kew Gardens and Other Stories – Hogarth reprint – Amazon UK

Kew Gardens and Other Stories – Hogarth reprint – Amazon US

The Mark on the Wall – Oxford World Classics edition – Amazon UK

The Mark on the Wall – Oxford World Classics edition – Amazon US

The Complete Works of Virginia Woolf – Kindle edition

The Cambridge Companion to Virginia Woolf – Amazon UK

Virginia Woolf – Authors in Context – Amazon UK

The Cambridge Introduction to Virginia Woolf – Amazon UK

The Legacy – story synopsis

Gilbert Clandon, a prominent politician, is clearing away his wife’s effects following her sudden death in a road accident. He presents Sissy Miller, his wife’s secretary, with a brooch, and offers to help her in any way he can. She makes him a similar offer, which he interprets as the sign of a secret passion she has for him.

He then begins to look through his wife’s private diaries that she has left him as her personal legacy. He basks in a glow of satisfaction on reading the flattering entries she has written about him. As he reads on it becomes apparent that the childless Angela was trying to make an independent life for herself.

First she takes up charity work in the East End; then she befriends someone referred to by the initials BM, who is obviously a lower class radical with critical views on the upper class. Gilbert instinctively disapproves of him and is shocked to learn that she had invited BM to dinner on an occasion when Gilbert himself was giving a speech at the Mansion House.

As he reads on, Gilbert becomes incensed with retrospective jealousy and feels a shattering blow to his own ego. Finally, the diary records BM pressing Angela to make a decision, coupled with some sort of threat. Desperate to know the identity of BM, Gilbert telephones Sissy Miller and demands to know who it is. Sissy reveals that it was her brother, who committed suicide – and Gilbert realises that his wife Angela has done the same thing.

Virginia Woolf’s handwriting

“I feel certain that I am going mad again.”

Other works by Virginia Woolf

To the Lighthouse (1927) is the second of the twin jewels in the crown of her late experimental phase. It is concerned with the passage of time, the nature of human consciousness, and the process of artistic creativity. Woolf substitutes symbolism and poetic prose for any notion of plot, and the novel is composed as a tryptich of three almost static scenes – during the second of which the principal character Mrs Ramsay dies – literally within a parenthesis. The writing is lyrical and philosophical at the same time. Many critics see this as her greatest achievement, and Woolf herself realised that with this book she was taking the novel form into hitherto unknown territory.
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Orlando (1928) is one of her lesser-known novels, although it’s critical reputation has risen in recent years. It’s a delightful fantasy which features a character who changes sex part-way through the book – and lives from the sixteenth to the twentieth century. Using this device (which turns out to be strangely credible) Woolf explores issues of gender and identity as her hero-heroine moves through a variety of lives and personal adventures. Orlando starts out as an emissary to the Court of St James, lives through friendships with Swift and Alexander Pope, and ends up motoring through the west end of London on a shopping expedition in the 1920s. The character is loosely based on Vita Sackville-West, who at one time was Woolf’s lover. The novel itself was described by Nigel Nicolson (Sackville-West’s son) as ‘the longest and most charming love-letter in literature’.
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Kew Gardens is a collection of experimental short stories in which Woolf tested out ideas and techniques which she then later incorporated into her novels. After Chekhov, they represent the most important development in the modern short story as a literary form. Incident and narrative are replaced by evocations of mood, poetic imagery, philosophic reflection, and subtleties of composition and structure. The shortest piece, ‘Monday or Tuesday’, is a one-page wonder of compression. This collection is a cornerstone of literary modernism. No other writer – with the possible exception of Nadine Gordimer, has taken the short story as a literary genre as far as this.
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Virginia Woolf – web links

Virginia Woolf at Mantex
Biographical notes, study guides to the major works, book reviews, studies of the short stories, bibliographies, web links, study resources.

Blogging Woolf
Book reviews, Bloomsbury related issues, links, study resources, news of conferences, exhibitions, and events, regularly updated.

Virginia Woolf at Wikipedia
Full biography, social background, interpretation of her work, fiction and non-fiction publications, photograph albumns, list of biographies, and external web links

Virginia Woolf at Gutenberg
Selected eTexts of her novels and stories in a variety of digital formats.

Woolf Online
An electronic edition and commentary on To the Lighthouse with notes on its composition, revisions, and printing – plus relevant extracts from the diaries, essays, and letters.

Hyper-Concordance to Virginia Woolf
Search texts of all the major novels and essays, word by word – locate quotations, references, and individual terms

Orlando – Sally Potter’s film archive
The text and film script, production notes, casting, locations, set designs, publicity photos, video clips, costume designs, and interviews.

Women’s History Walk in Bloomsbury
Tour of literary and political homes in Bloomsbury – including Gordon Square, Gower Street, Bedford Square, Tavistock Square, plus links to women’s history web sites.

Virginia Woolf Society of Great Britain
Bulletins of events, annual lectures, society publications, and extensive links to Woolf and Bloomsbury related web sites

BBC Audio Essay – A Eulogy to Words
Charming sound recording of radio talk given by Virginia Woolf in 1937 – a podcast accompanied by a slideshow of photographs.

A Family Photograph Albumn
Leslie Stephen compiled a photograph album and wrote an epistolary memoir, known as the “Mausoleum Book,” to mourn the death of his wife, Julia, in 1895 – an archive at Smith College – Massachusetts

Virginia Woolf first editions
Hogarth Press book jacket covers of the first editions of Woolf’s novels, essays, and stories – largely designed by her sister, Vanessa Bell.

Virginia Woolf – on video
Biographical studies and documentary videos with comments on Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Group and the social background of their times.

Virginia Woolf Miscellany
An archive of academic journal essays 2003—2014, featuring news items, book reviews, and full length studies.

More on Virginia Woolf
Virginia Woolf – short stories
Virginia Woolf – greatest works
Virginia Woolf – criticism
Virginia Woolf – life and works

The Lesson of the Master

January 3, 2014 by Roy Johnson

tutorial commentary, study resources, plot, and web links

The Lesson of the Master was first published in The Universal Review for July-August 1888. It later appeared in the collection of stories which included The Marriages, The Pupil, Brooksmith, The Solution, and Sir Edmund Orme published in New York and London by Macmillan in 1892.

Lake Geneva

The Lesson of the Master – critical commentary

This is one of a number of tales which James wrote exploring the competing claims of devotion to the literary life and what would be required for marriage and family life. It should be no surprise to anybody who has read The Path of Duty, Crapy Cornelia, The Wheel of Time and A Landscape Painter that the conclusion inevitably turns out to be to remain single.

Henry St George is a successful novelist – but one who has not written anything of note for quite some time. Paul Overt, as his enthusiastic younger admirer, is hoping to learn something from him of a literary nature – but the lesson turns out to be one in life, not art.

St George warns Overt quite explicitly that marriage and the responsibilities it entails will hamper his efforts to achieve something of great artistic value. He even argues that he himself has fallen foul of the trap of worldly success. ‘I’ve had everything. In other words, I’ve missed everything.’ From a psychological point of view it is worth noting that even though his family life has been ostensibly successful, his wife prevents him from smoking and drinking.

Of course the major irony of the tale is that St George does not follow his own advice. When his wife dies, he rapidly snatches at the chance of marrying attractive and aesthetically inclined Marian Fancourt. But following the logic of his own arguments, he does not return to the altar of high art.

The second irony is that Paul Overt is deeply wounded at losing the woman he loved to the man he most admired. But he is compensated by what appears to be literary success. By choosing to remain single and exiling himself for two years’ productive work (on the shores of Lake Geneva) he thereby triumphs with a creative success.

It would therefore appear that the tale illustrates the validity of St George’s argument that the artist must sacrifice normal human relations for the sake of artistic success – as Henry James was to do himself. The artist must forego the

full, rich, masculine, human, general life, with all its responsibilities and duties and burdens and sorrows and joys – all the domestic and social initiations

At times in the story it is difficult to escape the feeling that James is talking to himself about these conflicts of interest which he explored in so many of his tales. But the weakness in the position St George takes is that his concepts of artistic success are wrapped up in so many abstract and metaphysical notions and expressed in large scale over-generalisations. He complains that he has done everything in life except

The great thing … the sense of having done the best — the sense, which is the real life of the artist and the absence of which is his death, of having drawn from his intellectual instrument the finest music that nature had hidden in it, of having played it as it should be played. He either does that or he doesn’t — and if he doesn’t he isn’t worth speaking of. And precisely those who really know don’t speak of him. He may still hear a great chatter, but what he hears most is the incorruptible silence of Fame.

Now the tale might be offered in a light-hearted spirit of fun (Leon Edel says the subject is ‘treated largely as a joke’) but it isn’t really possible to take entirely seriously an argument which is based on such ethereal suppositions. James is performing the literary equivalent of sleight of hand by appealing to this level of artistic achievement without making any effort to demonstrate its substance.

The Lesson of the Master – study resources

The Complete Works of Henry James – Kindle edition – Amazon UK

The Complete Works of Henry James – Kindle edition – Amazon US

Complete Stories 1884—1891 – Library of America – Amazon UK

Complete Stories 1884—1891 – Library of America – Amazon US

Tales of Henry James – Norton Critical Editions

The Lesson of the Master – Hesperus Classics

The Lesson of the Master – eBook formats at Project Gutenberg

The Cambridge Companion to Henry James – Amazon UK

Henry James at Wikipedia – biographical notes, links

Henry James at Mantex – tutorials, biography, study resources

The Lesson of the Master – story synopsis

Part I Young author Paul Overt arrives at a country house weekend summer party hoping to meet the celebrated writer Henry St George. He is slightly shocked by his wife Mrs St George, who announces that she once made her husband burn a ‘bad’ book. Overt believes he can recognise literary and artistic ‘types’, and is surprised that St George looks so conventional. St George has also not written anything of merit for quite some time.

Part II At lunch Overt sits opposite St George, who appears to be flirting with pretty young Marian Fancourt, to whom Overt is afterwards introduced by her father. She tells him how much she admires his books and reveals that St George is critical of his own work and wishes to meet Overt whose writing he has read. They meet St George in the house, where Overt continues to persuade himself of the older man’s virtues, despite the fact that it is clear he has not read Overt’s work. There is then a walk in the park, where Overt accompanies Mrs St George, who he later learns is not in good health.

Part III After dinner Overt is joined in the smoking room by St George, who praises Overt’s writing, confesses his own declining powers, and recommends not having children. He reveals that his wife forbids him to smoke and drink. St George invites Overt to dinner at his own country house, and then they share their enthusiasm for Marian Fancourt, who St George urges him to pursue.

Part IV Overt meets Marian Fancourt at an art exhibition in London. They make further arrangements to meet, and are joined by St George, who has invited here there. St George takes her away to drive through Hyde Park, leaving Overt puzzled and a little envious. Nevertheless, next Sunday he visits Marian at home in Manchester Square , where they compare notes on St George, and Overt is so impressed by her artistic and literary appreciation that he falls in love with her. As he is leaving Manchester Square he sees St George arriving at the house. When Overt visits her again the following Sunday she tells him that St George will not be seeing her again.

Part V Overt eventually goes to dinner at St George’s house in Ennismore Gardens, after which he is invited to stay for conversation in the windowless library and study. St George once again claims that he has prostituted his own talent for financial gain, and that his wife and children are an impediment to his reaching an artistic high point. He claims that material and domestic success has prevented him from achieving his true potential. When the subject of Miss Fancourt crops up, St George argues that Overt must give her up if he wishes to be a successful writer. Overt claims that such is his wish.

Part VI Fired with enthusiasm, Overt leaves England and goes to stay on Lake Geneva to work on his next book. On receiving news of the death of Mrs St George, he is puzzled by her husband’s appreciative catalogue of her qualities and good offices. Overt thinks of returning, but stays away for two years to finish his novel. When he returns to London however, he learns that Miss Fancourt is due to marry St George. Overt feels he has been duped by both of them, but when he visits a party at Manchester Square St George claims that he has been entirely consistent in his views – and has given up writing. Overt goes home to an uncertain future, but when his book appears in the autumn it is a success.

The Lesson of the Master – characters

I	the occasional outer narrator
Paul Overt	young author of Ginistrella
Henry St George	celebrated author of Shadowmere
Mrs St George	his wife
General Fancourt	ex India army officer
Marian Fancourt	his intelligent and attractive daughter

Henry James’s study

Other works by Henry James

The Aspern Papers (1888) is a psychological drama set in Venice which centres on the tussle for control of a great writer’s correspondence. An elderly lady, ex-lover of the writer, seeks a husband for her daughter. But the potential purchaser of the papers is a dedicated bachelor. Money is also at stake – but of course not discussed overtly. There is a refined battle of wills between them. Who will win in the end? As usual, James keeps the reader guessing. The novella is a masterpiece of subtle narration, with an ironic twist in its outcome. This collection of stories also includes three of his accomplished long short stories – The Private Life, The Middle Years, and The Death of the Lion.
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The Spoils of Poynton (1896) is a short novel which centres on the contents of a country house, and the question of who is the most desirable person to inherit it via marriage. The owner Mrs Gereth is being forced to leave her home to make way for her son and his greedy and uncultured fiancee. Mrs Gereth develops a subtle plan to take as many of the house’s priceless furnishings with her as possible. But things do not go quite according to plan. There are some very witty social ironies, and a contest of wills which matches nouveau-riche greed against high principles. There’s also a spectacular finale in which nobody wins out.
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Henry James – web links

Henry James at Mantex
Biographical notes, study guides, tutorials on the Complete Tales, book reviews. bibliographies, and web links.

The Complete Works
Sixty books in one 13.5 MB Kindle eBook download for £1.92 at Amazon.co.uk. The complete novels, stories, travel writing, and prefaces. Also includes his autobiographies, plays, and literary criticism – with illustrations.

The Ladder – a Henry James website
A collection of eTexts of the tales, novels, plays, and prefaces – with links to available free eTexts at Project Gutenberg and elsewhere.

A Hyper-Concordance to the Works
Japanese-based online research tool that locates the use of any word or phrase in context. Find that illusive quotable phrase.

The Henry James Resource Center
A web site with biography, bibliographies, adaptations, archival resources, suggested reading, and recent scholarship.

Online Books Page
A collection of online texts, including novels, stories, travel writing, literary criticism, and letters.

Henry James at Project Gutenberg
A major collection of eTexts, available in a variety of eBook formats.

The Complete Letters
Archive of the complete correspondence (1855-1878) work in progress – published by the University of Nebraska Press.

The Scholar’s Guide to Web Sites
An old-fashioned but major jumpstation – a website of websites and resouces.

Henry James – The Complete Tales
Tutorials on the complete collection of over one hundred tales, novellas, and short stories.

Henry James on the Internet Movie Database
Adaptations of James’s novels and stories for the cinema and television – in various languages. Full details of directors and actors, production features, film reviews, box office, and even quizzes.

More tales by James
More on literature
More on the novella
More on literary studies
More on short stories

The Letters of James and Alix Strachey

July 9, 2009 by Roy Johnson

Bloomsbury meets Freud and psycho-analysis

James Strachey was the younger brother of Lytton Strachey and one of the first people in England to train in and practise psychoanalysis. He translated Freud’s work, and as a member of the Bloomsbury Group was instrumental in promoting it via publications with the Hogarth Press. The Letters of James and Alix Strachey is a record of the almost daily correspondence he exchanged with his wife Alix whilst she was being psychoanalysed as part of her training by Karl Abraham in Berlin.

It’s an interesting one-year slice of two lives which encompasses social and cultural life in Germany and the UK in the early 1920s, the foundations of Freudianism in the UK, and a rich tapestry of European modernism from two of its inside practitioners who were very keen to be au fait with the latest cultural and intellectual developments. The letters are prefaced by an introductory essay which places psychoanalysis in a historical context and explains James and Alix Strachey’s position in the Bloomsbury group – into which they both fitted well, both in terms of their unorthodox sexual proclivities and their intellectual achievements.

James’s letters are rich in Bloomsbury gossip and title-tattle as he entertains Alix whilst she endures the dire north German food in Pension Bismark:

Adrian [Stephen] is said now to be in the most awful condition & threatens to shoot himself. Karin will remain until he gets through his final exam… If he shoots himself in our sitting-room it’ll not only spoil the carpet but also damage our professional careers—so I suppose I shall have to avert it. —Loppy & Maynard are still said to be on the point of marriage. The divorce is expected to be consummated in October.

Alongside translating Freud, he reports on visits to the Ballet Russe, meetings with Gerald Brenan, Arthur Whaley, John Maynard Keynes and Lydia Lopokova, Dora Carrington, Lou Andreas-Salome, David Garnett, and his brother Lytton Strachey.

Alix reports to him from deep within the psychoanalytic pressure cooker which was Berlin in the 1920s, providing interesting details on all the rival camps and splits which went on between Freud, Adler, Jung, Rank, and Reich.

From a scientific point of view it’s interesting to note that both of them, whilst eagerly pioneering psychoanalysis as practitioners, freely admit to each other that they don’t understand it all, and they see much quackery in their now-famous contemporaries.

There are plenty of opinions ventilated which even for 1924 are politically incorrect to a degree which might surprise today’s Bloomsbury enthusiasts. Alix writes to James on a political contretemps with Egypt: “its a pity all blacks (including the Irish) can’t be gently sunk in the bottom of the sea. For what good are they on earth.” And she is just as forthright when replying to an enquiry from him about their romantic separation: “If & when I come back bursting with vaginal libido, I’ll keep myself going with candles & bananas … if that is partly what is on your mind.”

Within a few years of her being there, the whole of the psychoanalytic movement had broken up in Germany, harassed by the rising Nationalists, and had dispersed to America and the UK. James and Alix continued to work as practising analysts, translating major works, and taking a major role in promoting The Standard Edition of Freud’s works. This volume concludes with a fascinating account this long and complex process – as well as addressing the criticisms of hasty and flawed translations which continue to surround the works.

This volume provides both an interesting insight into a corner of Bloomsbury which is not so welll known, and at the same time a fascinating glimpse into European culture at what turned out to be a critical period.

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Perry Meisel and Walter Kendrick (eds), Bloomsbury/Freud: The Letters of James and Alix Strachey 1924-1925, New York: Basic Books, 1985, pp.360, ISBN 0465007112

More on biography
More on the Bloomsbury Group
Twentieth century literature

The Letters of Leonard Woolf

July 5, 2009 by Roy Johnson

politics, life, and literature – 1900 to 1969

Leonard Woolf was one of the longest living (1880-1976) and the most distinguished members of the Bloomsbury Group. He was a writer, a publisher, a political activist, a proto environmentalist and animal lover, a loyal friend, cantankerous employer, and a devoted husband. What’s not so well known about him is that in fact he had two ‘wives’ – the second technically married to somebody else – who happened to be his business partner. The Letters of Leonard Woolf is a definitive selection from his voluminous correspondence, which begins at Cambridge, with letters to his lifelong friend Lytton Strachey, and fellow apostles G.E.Moore and Saxon Sydney-Turner.

The manner of these early writings is surprisingly arch, full of classical references and undergraduate Weltschmerz – though no doubt this reflects the turn-of-the-century social mood amongst such a privileged elite. All of this was to change very suddenly when after doing badly in the Civil Service exams, he went to work as a colonial administrator in Sri Lanka – then called Ceylon. There he plunged into the practical affairs of running the Empire – and making a big personal success of it. It’s interesting to note that the florid rhetoric of the earlier letters is replaced by a straightforward reporting of events, and a frank expression of his feelings. His fellow Brits began to seem like something out of a bad novel:

The ‘society’ of the place is absolutely inconceivable; it exists only upon the tennis-court & in the G.A.’s house; the women are all whores or hags or missionaries or all three; & the men are … sunk.The G.A.’s wife has the vulgarity of a tenth rate pantomime actress; her idea of liveliness is to kick up her legs & to scream the dullest of dull schoolboy ‘smut’ across the tennis court or the dinner table,

There are many interesting disclosures as he reveals himself to Lytton Strachey, his only confidant, who was 9,000 miles away. Woolf though that sexual desire was a ‘degradation’ – an attitude which casts light on his two later sex-free relationships. “I am really in love with someone who is in love with me. It is not however pleasant because it is pretty degrading, I suppose, to be in love with practically a schoolgirl”.

He’s also fairly unsparing in his comments on people who were later to become his famous fellow Bloomsburyites – though it has to be remembered that he had known them since they were all undergraduates together. On reading E.M.Forster’s Where Angels Fear to Tread he thinks ‘It’s …a mere formless meandering. The fact is I don’t think he knows what reality is, & as for experience the poor man does not realise that practically it does not exist’.

I detest Keynes, don’t you? Looking back on him from 4 years I can see he is fundamentally evil if ever anyone was.

When he arrived back in England on leave in 1911, is was with the vague notion of marrying Virginia Stephen, an idea that Lytton Strachey had put into his head. And marry her he did – even though Virginia refused to allow his family to the wedding and made it quite clear that she felt no physical attraction to him.

The letters are presented in separate themes which correspond to successive periods in his life – Cambridge, Ceylon, marriage to Virginia, manager of the Hogarth Press. It also has to be said that this is a rigorously scholarly production. Each section of his life has an essay-length introduction; there’s a family tree, chronological notes; biographical sketches of the principal characters, explanatory footnotes, photographs, and a huge index.

Writing as a publisher, there are some wonderfully humane letters to his actual and would-be authors, explaining the iniquities of the book trade. He was of course sealing with writers of the stature of Freud and T.S.Eliot. There’s also an extended letter to one of his best-selling authors, Vita Sackville-West (his wife’s one-time lover) which should be required reading for anyone who wants to know how the world of selling books works – even today.

He also had his finger on the pulse of the BBC and its patronising attitude to the public in a way that still rings true:

That the BBC should be so reactionary and politically and intellectually dishonest is what one would expect and forgive, 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.

Politically, he was spot on throughout all the tensions and ambiguities of the inter-war years. Anti-Imperialist, Ant-Fascist, and supportive of the Russian revolution whilst critical of the Stalinism which caused its corruption.

One of the most interesting features of his later life is that he spent more than thirty years of it in love with another man’s wife. She lived with Leonard during the week and went back to her husband at the weekend. The husband even became Leonard’s business partner.

This is somewhat brushed under the carpet by the editor. He chooses fairly anodyne letters to Trekkie Parsons, and you would need information from other sources such as their collected correspondence (Love Letters) to realise how serious the relationship was.

It was serious enough that Leonard made Trekkie his executor and legatee in a will which was disputed by the Woolf family after his death. It was in court that the revelation (or claim) was made that they were never more than good friends.

One wonders, and boggles. But the fact is that Leonard Woolf was a great letter writer – though always seeming to be writing with the public looking over his shoulder. His correspondence should be read alongside the magnificent Autobiography, but even then you need to realise that there’s more to the story of a person’s life than the tale told by its protagonist.

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Frederic Spotts (ed), The Letters of Leonard Woolf, London: Bloomsbury, Oxford: Oxford Paperbacks, 1992, pp.616, ISBN: 0747511535

More on Leonard Woolf
Twentieth century literature
More on the Bloomsbury Group

The Letters of Lytton Strachey

July 4, 2009 by Roy Johnson

life, loves, letters, plus Bloomsbury gossip

Lytton Strachey, like his close friend Virginia Woolf (strongly featured here) was a prolific letter writer. Theirs was an age which largely preceded the telephone, and in early twentieth-century England there could be up to three postal deliveries per day. This selection from The Letters of Lytton Strachey covers the whole of his adult life – from meeting Leonard Woolf as Apostles at Trinity College Cambridge in 1899 to his premature death in 1932.

The letters reveal him as an even more complex character than that which emerges from the majority of Bloomsbury memoirs and biographies. He was, as Paul Levy succinctly puts it in his introduction, “a political radical who was born into the ruling class, a member of the intellectual aristocracy who cherished his contacts with the aristocracy of blood, a democrat who did not always trust the people, and one of the original champagne socialists.”

Most of the early letters are to his lifelong friend Leonard Woolf, with whom he kept up a regular correspondence all the time Woolf was working as a colonial administrator in Sri Lanka (then Ceylon). We see the formation of the Bloomsbury Group when “The Goth [Adrian Stephen] is ‘at home’ on Thursday evenings”, and there are some slightly unexpected appearances and connections – such as his brother James Strachey’s affair with Rupert Brooke, and Lytton Strachey’s flirtation with the explorer George Mallory, who was to disappear on Everest in 1924.

He is certainly a mass of contradictions in his private life: one minute fluttering like an elderly aunt about a minor ailment or swooning with rapture over a young messenger boy, then next minute talking about ‘raping’ one of his friends or discussing the techniques of coprologists with his brother James in stomach-churning detail.

He’s also two-faced to an extraordinary degree – writing scathing critiques of John Maynard Keynes and Rupert Brooke in letters to third parties, then toadying up to them directly and even asking them to come on holiday with him.

His correspondence during the war years reveals him as far more politically radical than he is usually given credit for. He was not only a conscientious objector on principle, but he even wrote pamphlets critical of the way the government was handling the war.

The letters are presented and annotated in the most scholarly fashion – with full biographical notes on all the people mentioned, and all nicknames and obscure allusions spelled out. Indeed, the notes are occasionally longer than the letters they seek to explain.

Suddenly in mid volume the correspondence takes on an amazing animation and inventiveness when he meets Dora Carrington, who was to become the central figure in the rest of his life. First (and very briefly) she was his lover, and then they set up their famous menage a trois when Strachey fell in love with Ralph Partridge – and Carrington married him, whilst remaining in love with Strachey.

Whenever separated from Carrington, he wrote her long letters describing the various weekend house parties he attended. The portraits of Ottoline Morrell and Margot Asquith and their like are mischievous and bitchy, and although he censors himself on personal matters, he is not averse to pungent comment on others:

everything is at sixes and sevens – ladies in love with buggers and buggers in love with womanisers, and the price of coal going up too. Where will it all end?

There are all sorts of interesting details: Strachey’s sharp eye and collector’s nose for modern painting (Derain and Modigliani); Maynard Keynes altering the clocks to one hour ahead of summer time; Strachey’s strong opinions that Queen Victoria was ‘a martyr to analeroticism’ and Bernard Berenson ‘has accumulated his wealth from being a New York guttersnipe’.

However, he seems at his most comfortable when in the midst of his Bloomsbury contemporaries, as a letter written from Vanessa Bell’s house at Charleston suggests:

the company in this house is its sempiternal self. Duncan and Vanessa painting all day in each other’s arms. Pozzo [Keynes] writing on Probability, on the History of Currency, controlling the business of King’s , and editing the Economic Journal. Clive pretending to read Stendhal. Mary writing letters on blue note-paper, the children screaming and falling into the pond.

The final bunch of letters, to his last lover, Roger Senhouse, reveal his taste for sado-masochism (crucifixion, blood-letting) but also his extraordinary generosity towards friends. His late financial success led to some self-indulgence, but he seems to have spent far more on other people than on himself. Though not for long. A falsely diagnosed stomach cancer cut him down at the age of fifty-two. His soul-mate Dora Carrington committed suicide a few weeks later.

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Paul Levy, The Letters of Lytton Strachey, London: Penguin Books, 2006, pp.698, ISBN 0141014733

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The Letters of Vita Sackville-West and Virginia Woolf

June 15, 2009 by Roy Johnson

love, literature, and friendship Bloomsbury-style

The title of this book is letters to Virginia Woolf – but this is so misleading, that I have changed it for the title of this review. This is a fully reciprocated exchange between these two writers – both of letters and affection. And as in many love affairs the power passes from one to the other and back again. Their relationship began in 1923 around the time that Hogarth Press was publishing Vita Sackville-West’s improbably titled novel, Seducers in Ecuador.

Their early letters are friendly and flattering, with just a touch of flirtation which gives a hint of Things to Come. But once the deed is done, the flattery is replaced by practical arrangements for meeting up, plus a fear that their secret might have been uncovered by Clive Bell. The amazing thing is that for all the sexual pluralism and bisexuality of the Bloomsbury group, they went to a lot of trouble to preserve the semblance of respectability.

The second phase of the affaire is largely Vita’s travelogue as she journeys to join her husband Harold Nicolson in Tehran where he had been posted to the British Legation by the Foreign Office.

When she gets back to the UK, it’s a good thing we have editorial commentary, because you would not guess from the content of the letters that she had transferred her romantic affection to Dorothy Wellesley, just as later, whilst protesting in every letter how much she missed and was very much in love with Virginia, she was also in love with Mary, wife of South-African poet Roy Campbell – an affair which in true Bloomsbury style, she eventually tells Virginia all about.

There’s no detail of what or how much went on in physical terms between them, but to make up for this there is plenty of intelligent comment on the profession of literature passing between these two women who were after all both commercially successful authors. Virginia asks Vita about the difference between poetry and prose:

I don’t believe there is any, with all due respect to Coleridge … All too often the distinction leads people to think they may mumble inanities which would make them blush if written in good common English, but which they think fit to print if spilt up into lines.

In addition, we get all sorts of quaint period details: Hillaire Belloc buying 2,000 bottles of wine at twopence halfpenny a bottle [for younger readers, that’s one penny in today’s money]; six-day cycle racing in Berlin; Vita cutting down an oak tree for fuel during the General Strike; buying an island in the South Seas for five pounds; and Virginia engaged in the joys of early motoring:

Off for our first drive in the Singer: the bloody thing wouldn’t start. The accelerator died like a duck – starter jammed … At last we had to bicycle in and fetch a man from Lewes. He said it was the magnetos – would you have known that?…

Vita’s letters from Tehran are rich and entertaining, and she is much given to Proustian ‘reflections’:

I have come to the conclusion that solitude is the last refuge of civilised people. It is much more civilised than social intercourse, really, although at first sight the reverse might appear to be the case. Social relations are just the descendants of the primitive tribal need to get together for purposes of defence; a gathering of bushmen or pygmies…

In the middle of all this, both women were writing and publishing at a prodigious rate: Vita’s long award-winning poem The Land and her two travel books, Passenger to Tehran and Twelve Days: Virginia’s Mrs Dalloway, The Common Reader, and To the Lighthouse.

The publication of Orlando made them both famous (“The percentage of Lesbians is rising in the States, all because of you”). Yet despite this, you can sense Virginia’s gradual withdrawal, hurt by Vita’s repeated ‘infidelities’ with other women. In the end, the older, less sexually experienced, and more talented woman retreated into her safer world of the intellect.

They continued to meet and correspond through the 1930s, but the sparkle had gone out of things. Vita moved on to relationships with BBC radio producer Hilda Matheson and others, and Virginia became the love object of pipe-smoking lesbian composer Ethel Smyth.

Despite Vita’s snobbery, her emotional cruelty and hauteur (“the BBC – which I look on as my pocket borough”) in the end I warmed to her sheer exuberance, her energy and inventiveness, her intelligence and creative impulse. This is a wonderfully stimulating record of exchanges between oustanding personalities which has quite rightly become a classic of its kind.

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Louise de Salvo and Mitchell A. Leaska, The Letters of Vita Sackville-West to Virginia Woolf, London: Macmillan, 1985, pp.473, ISBN 1853815055

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The Liar

March 9, 2013 by Roy Johnson

tutorial, commentary, study resources, plot, and web links

The Liar first appeared in Century Magazine in May—June 1888. It was later collected with other tales in the volume entitled A London Life (1889).

The Liar – critical commentary

The portrait of Clement Capodose

Perhaps the most striking feature of this story is the image that lies at the heart of the drama. Lyon has painted a portrait of the Colonel which is simultaneously an accurate representation of a vigorous and handsome man, but which also reveals the truth of his corrupt character as a compulsive liar. His personality is built upon deceit and fabrications.

Both the Colonel and his wife are complicit in the deception behind his public persona, and they are appalled when it is revealed by the painting. The Colonel vents his anger by slashing the negative image of himself with a knife. James draws our attention to the psychological implications of this act by describing it as ‘a sort of figurative suicide’.

The story appeared in 1888, and two years later Oscar Wilde used the same image, intensified even further by far more serious moral corruption, for the dramatic finale of The Picture of Dorian Gray. It has since entered popular cultural consciousness as a symbol of moral decay and self-destruction.

The hidden world

There is also an echo of another late nineteenth-century psychological classic in the image of the public and private entrances to Lyon’s St John’s Wood home. It is very similar to the house with studio attached occupied by the doctor in Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, which was published two years earlier. Servants guard the public entrance and monitor visitors; but the private entrance is accessible from the rear garden, and it is this door which Harriet Pearson uses when she arrives to proposition Lyon. She claims to be an artist’s model, but the Colonel’s account of her suggests that she is closer to being a prostitute.

She claims to know Lyon, and says to him, very ambiguously, ”You know, you ‘ave ‘ad me’. The Colonel claims to know this woman from the past, and suggests five shillings will be sufficient to ‘protect’ himself from her – a sum which he ostensibly means will get rid of her, but which could also be her fee as a prostitute. Lyon enthusiastically agrees to chip in five shillings of his own.

It is almost as if the two men are ‘sharing’ the same woman – which is rather similar to their relationship with Everina Brant. Lyon has been in love with her, but she has eventually chosen to marry the Colonel. A psycho-analytic interpretation of the story with this state of affairs in mind would point to the homo-erotic undertone at work here. Lyon is unconsciously more interested in the Colonel than in his glamorous wife.

The unreliable narrator

In their comments on James’s short stories, both Wayne Booth and Richard Hocks argue that the true liar of the story is the narrator Oliver Lyon himself. Their argument is that as a former suitor to Everina, Lyon is jealous that the more handsome Capodose has gained her affection, and he has transferred his animus onto the portrait he paints, producing an image to which his own corruption as added. This view has some merit, but even if we take Lyon as an example of the ‘unreliable narrator’ we are left with two problems of interpretation.

The first is that since Lyon is our prime source of information, we cannot be sure about the veracity of Capodose’s lies. Is he a compulsive liar or not? We only have Lyon’s word for it. The second problem is that we as readers can not know if his portrait is an accurate reflection of the sitter or not. We do not have any other sources of information with which to triangulate the ‘truth’ of these matters.

The Liar – study resources

The Complete Works of Henry James – Kindle edition – Amazon UK

The Complete Works of Henry James – Kindle edition – Amazon US

Complete Stories 1884—1891 – Library of America – Amazon UK

Complete Stories 1884—1891 – Library of America – Amazon US

The Liar – Classic Reprint edition

The Liar – Read Books paperback edition

The Liar – eBook formats at Gutenberg

The Cambridge Companion to Henry James – Amazon UK

Henry James at Wikipedia – biographical notes, links

Henry James at Mantex – tutorials, biography, study resources

The Liar – plot summary

Part I. Society artist Oliver Lyon is a guest at a country house party. He recognises an attractive woman to whom he once proposed marriage, but who is now married to Colonel Capodose. The Colonel recounts tall tales from his days in India and thanks Lyon for a portrait of his wife which was so admired that he gave it to an influential friend as a present. However, when Lyon speaks to Mrs Capodose later she tells him that they sold the painting.

The Colonel also warns Lyon about a haunted room in the house which frightened a fellow guest a few days earlier, but in conversation with his host Lyon is later told there was no such guest.

Part II. Lyon paints the portrait of Sir David, the head of the family, who reveals that Colonel Capodose is in fact a compulsive liar. Lyon wonders how Mrs Capodose can possibly tolerate such behaviour in her husband without shame, but when he tries to tease information out of her she insists that she has nothing but high praise for the Colonel.

Lyon begins to look more kindly on the Colonel’s vice, since it is not practised to harm anyone or to gain any advantage. Moreover, he doesn’t lie all the time, and is well liked socially.

Lyon returns to London, and goes to visit Mrs Capodose. He meets her young daughter and wonders if lies are a factor in their family life. He paints the girl’s portrait and begins to convince himself that there is ‘bad blood’ in her veins. He also hopes that Mrs Capodose will eventually admit that she made a mistake in refusing his offer of marriage.

Part III. Lyon finally paints a portrait of the Colonel, into which he puts all that he truly thinks of him. At one sitting they are interrupted by a young woman who offers herself as an artist’s model. After she has been turned away Colonel Capodose explains that she is nothing but a trollop who has been pursuing him.

The summer holidays intervene, during which Lyon travels back on impulse to London to make changes to the portrait. There he stumbles unseen upon the Colonel and his wife inspecting the painting. She is distraught because it reveals ‘the truth’ about her husband, and the Colonel himself is so inflamed he plunges a knife into the canvas to destroy the painting.

Lyon is gratified that his estimate of the Colonel has been confirmed by their reactions, and he returns to his holiday. He writes to Mrs Capodose, and she replies admitting that they had called to his studio to see the painting.

When they all meet up again after the holidays the Capodoses blame the destruction of the painting onto the artist’s model who called. Lyon is astonished at Mrs Capodose’s complicity with her husband in such an outrageous lie, and wonders why she doesn’t show some small sign of acknowledging the truth, based on their former relationship. But she does not, and he is forced to admit to himself that she truly loves the Colonel and has compromised her own moral values to match his.

Principal characters

Oliver Lyon	a successful portrait painter
Sir David Ashmore	his distinguished sitter
Colonel Clement Capodose	a handsome ex-military man
Everina Brant	a society beauty, his wife
Harriet Pearson	an artist’s ‘model’

Henry James’s study