... having been breathed out

For a suicidal person like Anne Sexton to have survived to the age of forty-five, seems to me an achievement, a triumph. Virginia Woolf, living to the age of fifty-nine, is even more extraordinary. Suicides are always judged as if they were admissions of defeat, but one can take the viewpoint that their having lived as long as they did is an accomplishment of a kind. Knowing herself suicidal as a very young girl, Virginia Woolf resisted—made heroic attempts to attach herself to the exterior world—as did Anne Sexton—as do we all. Why not concentrate on the successes, the small and large joys of these lives, the genuine artistic accomplishments? After all, anyone and everyone dies; the exact way can’t be very important.

—Joyce Carol Oates, from a journal entry

Yeah, this, for sure. There’s also the phenomenon whereby a life that ended in suicide (at whatever age) is portrayed in retrospect as nothing but angst and grief. Not only is the suicide viewed as an admission of defeat, but the whole life is collapsed into a cautionary tale seen through the filter of that defeatedness, and anything that doesn’t fit that model–any sense of humor, agency or times of stability or happiness the person may have had–are erased from their portrait.

In the case of Woolf specifically, I think we also need to consider the historical moment in which she–a self-described Sapphist with recurring bouts of mental illness, married to a Jewish man–chose to die. In March 1941 England was fresh from the sustained bombing raids of the three-month Battle of Britain, and the US was still nine months from joining the war. Hitler had planned to invade Britain in October 1940 and then pushed back the date until Spring 1941, and in March the threat of invasion still loomed. Woolf’s entire family and social circle would have been targeted for death camps on multiple counts, had such an invasion succeeded. And the city of London, one of the great loves of her life, was still in the midst of being ravaged by the Blitz. Despite how Woolf’s life and death have been cast in retrospect, one hardly needs to be “delicate” or “fragile” to succumb to fear or grief at such a moment–or to attempt, however desperately, to regain some fragment of agency in the face of such grim dangers.

But Virginia Woolf’s sexual squeamishness, which plays a part in the deflections and self-censorship of the novels, is combined with a powerful, intense sensuality, an erotic susceptibility to people and landscape, language and atmosphere, and a highly charged physical life. “Frigid” seems a ridiculously simplistic description of this complicated, polymorphous self.

—Hermione Lee, Virginia Woolf

I’m re-reading the section of Lee’s biography spanning 1913, for Strachey-related reasons, and remembering why I love it so much. Lee’s nuanced yet unflinching understanding and refusal to oversimplify her subjects, even when easy labels present themselves, is consistently inspirational to me.

Because I also have a long-term interest in fleshing out some workable, historically respectful version of Woolf’s sexuality for my eventual Virginia/Vita/Irene story, I am squirrelling away this kind of insight for future reference. The bit about the complicated, polymorphous self is very key to my love of Woolf and my understanding of her own self-conception, and this kind of… decentralized, non-genitally-centered but experientially intense eroticism is I think very compatible with the character arcs I have in mind.

I thought to myself, as Lytton was talking, Now I will remember this & write it down in my diary tomorrow. And as I thought that, everything melted to mist. People don’t say things, except in biographies. True, Lytton was smooth & mild & melancholy beyond his wont; but with intimates, when talk is interesting, one sentence melts into another; heads & tails merge; there is never a complete beast.

—Virginia Woolf in her diary, Wednesday 15 February 1922

Now is life very solid or very shifting? I am haunted by the two contradictions. This has gone on for ever; will last for ever; goes down to the bottom of the world—this moment I stand on. Also, it is transitory, flying, diaphanous. I shall pass like a cloud on the waves. Perhaps it may be that though we change, one flying after another, so quick, so quick, yet we are somehow successive and continuous, we human beings, and show the light through. But what is the light? I am impressed by the transitoriness of human life to such an extent that I am often saying a farewell.

—Virginia Woolf, A Writer's Diary

Proust so titillates my own desire for expression that I can hardly set out the sentence. Oh, if I could write like that! I cry. And at the moment such is the astonishing vibration and saturation and intensification that he procures–there is something sexual in it–that I feel I can write like that, and seize my pen and then I can’t write like that. Scarcely anyone so stimulates the nerves of language in me: it becomes an obsession.

—Virginia Woolf in a letter to Roger Fry, 6 May 1922

But what could be more absurd? It is, in fact, on the stroke of six; it is a winter’s evening; we are walking to the Strand to buy a pencil. How, then, are we also on a balcony, wearing pearls in June? What could be more absurd? Yet it is nature’s folly, not ours. When she set about her chief masterpiece, the making of man, she should have thought of one thing only. Instead, turning her head, looking over her shoulder, into each one of us she let creep instincts and desires which are utterly at variance with his main being, so that we are streaked, variegated, all of a mixture; the colours have run. Is the true self this which stands on the pavement in January, or that which bends over the balcony in June? Am I here, or am I there? Or is the true self neither this nor that, neither here nor there, but something so varied and wandering that it is only when we give the rein to its wishes and let it take its way unimpeded that we are indeed ourselves?

—Virginia Woolf, from "Street Haunting"

Dear Mrs Woolf
(That appears to be the suitable formula.) I regret that you have been in bed, though not with me—(a less suitable formula.)

—Vita Sackville-West, from a letter to Virginia Woolf dated 18 August 1933

The hour should be the evening and the season winter, for in winter the champagne brightness of the air and the sociability of the streets are grateful. We are not then taunted as in the summer by the longing for shade and solitude and sweet airs from the hayfields. The evening hour, too, gives us the irresponsibility which darkness and lamplight bestow. We are no longer quite ourselves. As we step out of the house on a fine evening between four and six, we shed the self our friends know us by and become part of that vast republican army of anonymous trampers, whose society is so agreeable after the solitude of one’s own room. For there we sit surrounded by objects which perpetually express the oddity of our own temperaments and enforce the memories of our own experience. That bowl on the mantelpiece, for instance, was bought at Mantua on a windy day. We were leaving the shop when the sinister old woman plucked at our skirts and said she would find herself starving one of these days, but, “Take it!” she cried, and thrust the blue and white china bowl into our hands as if she never wanted to be reminded of her quixotic generosity. So, guiltily, but suspecting nevertheless how badly we had been fleeced, we carried it back to the little hotel where, in the middle of the night, the innkeeper quarrelled so violently with his wife that we all leant out into the courtyard to look, and saw the vines laced about among the pillars and the stars white in the sky. The moment was stabilized, stamped like a coin indelibly among a million that slipped by imperceptibly. There, too, was the melancholy Englishman, who rose among the coffee cups and the little iron tables and revealed the secrets of his soul — as travellers do. All this — Italy, the windy morning, the vines laced about the pillars, the Englishman and the secrets of his soul — rise up in a cloud from the china bowl on the mantelpiece. And there, as our eyes fall to the floor, is that brown stain on the carpet. Mr. Lloyd George made that. “The man’s a devil!” said Mr. Cummings, putting the kettle down with which he was about to fill the teapot so that it burnt a brown ring on the carpet.

—Virginia Woolf, "Street Haunting," from The Death of the Moth

A conversation in Antidiogenes chat inspired me to dig up this essay, and man, the paragraph above is just fucking spectacular. The way it twists and wanders, mimicking the essay’s subject (the joys of rambling around London streets), and yet is always under perfect control. The way it evokes so precisely the investment of experience into objects, and the way the paraphernalia of our everyday lives then haunts us, surrounds us, both comforting and oppressive.

Just. The SENTENCES. I am torn between rapture and despair.

It seems that a profound, impartial, and absolutely just opinion of our fellow-creatures is utterly unknown. Either we are men, or we are women. Either we are cold, or we are sentimental. Either we are young, or growing old. In any case life is but a procession of shadows, and God knows why it is that we embrace them so eagerly, and see them depart with such anguish, being shadows. And why, if this and much more than this is true, why are we yet surprised in the window corner by a sudden vision that the young man in the chair is of all things in the world the most real, the most solid, the best known to us—why indeed? For the moment after we know nothing about him.

Such is the manner of our seeing. Such the conditions of our love.

—Virginia Woolf, Jacob's Room

I feel sure I’ve tumbled this passage before, but now I can’t find it. One of my absolute, all-time favorite collections of words. The last two to three sentences are among my top contenders for the tattoo I will probably never get.

And these ideas are also relevant to the plotting stuff I was doing last night on the next Unreal Cities story [NB this would've been A hundred hours, and I was not wrong]. Basically it doesn’t get any better than this, as far as I’m concerned.