Many mornings begin with a kind of divination. I look into A Writer’s Diary to see what Virginia Woolf was writing or thinking about (or both). I find companionship there. Not with her brilliance, I can’t pretend to that, but with her sense of both the dailiness of life and also the overlay of transcendence on the quotidian. I love to follow the topography of her sentences. I love the fluidity of her narratives. John and I are reading To the Lighthouse aloud by our fire most evenings and I often find myself laughing as one long passage, taking us inside Mrs. Ramsay’s mind and memory, has us following her impressions of one house guest or her difficult husband, engaging in deeply philosophical meanderings, anyway, that one long passage ending on a downbeat, as she remembers a kettle or an unfinished chore. Or Mr. Ramsay, waiting for attention.
Many years ago I read Quentin Bell’s biography of Virginia Woolf, in two volumes. I’ve read other biographies of her as well — the ones by Julia Briggs and Hermione Lee are favourites — and books in which she is either central to the narrative or else a ghost haunting the story — I loved Michael Cunningham’s The Hours and Olivia Laing’s To The River — but I come back to Bell’s book(s) because he was her nephew and has interesting insights into both events and her character. It’s affectionate, discreet, and humane. The set I have was found at Macleod’s in 2012. It feels like a degree of separation: Quentin Bell signed the first volume and he knew Virginia….
So, those divinations: what do I learn? What did I learn today? That in 1933, she recorded comments on an article about her in Granta saying that she was now defunct as a writer, “…that Orlando, Waves, Flush represent the death of a potentially great writer.” Think about that for a moment. How easily a comment can be made and how deeply it settles into the self, the mind, the heart. It kept her awake at night.
But let me remember that fashion in literature is an inevitable thing; also that one must grow and change; also that I have, at last, laid hands upon my philosophy of anonymity…The thing is to free one’s self; to let it find its dimensions, not be impeded.
I sit at my desk and realize that I was also awake last night, thinking about anonymity, the quiet months that follow the first few heady weeks after a book’s publication. (The Art of Looking Back came out in May.) John and I often talk about these later years, how we didn’t expect to feel quite so, well, shelved as writers. Both of us have manuscripts we’ve tried to place* with publishers and the response has been silence. The old courtesies — a letter, even a form letter, a phone call — don’t appear to be the currency any longer. Mostly I’m philosophical — and in any case, I’ve been turning my attentions elsewhere, preparing to return to university next year, and to deepen my knowledge and practice of textile work. It feels like the right thing to do, and the time to do it, while my body and soul are still functional.
We often talk about these later years. We have the luxury of having written books we’re still proud of. We have a family we love, a cherished place on earth we’ve known for almost half a century, trees we planted coming into beautiful maturity — the Japanese maple turning as I write, the copper beech rising above the wire fence to keep deer away, my parents’ ashes scattered around its base. I have to admit I am treasuring the mornings I wake without that old urgency to find my way into a novel, an essay. No ideas hovering, and no prospect of them on the horizon. Will this continue? I can’t say. On October 30th, 1936, this, another divination?
I do not wish for the moment to write out the story of the months since I made the last mark here. I do not wish, for reasons I cannot now develop, to analyse that extraordinary summer. It will be more helpful and healthy for me to write scenes; to take up my pen and describe actual events; good practice too for my stumbling and doubting pen. Can I still “write”? That is the question, you see. And now I will try to prove if the gift is dead, or dormant.
The summer was extraordinary in many ways: cool mornings in the lake, with mergansers and trout; the voices of my grandchilren outside at dusk; setting the table for dinners of lamb, prawns, prime rib, pancakes; filling bags with apples and making pies with their goodness; fresh blackberry ice cream; deer crossing the grass like gods. I haven’t written anything for a year. I don’t miss it. My pages are these ones, entries of a sort, my fingers my doubting pen, my life the actual events.
* And of course it would be more useful at this point to have an agent but alas, silence from the dozens I’ve contacted over the years. Silence, or surprise: “We couldn’t sell a book like this.”
