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Virginia Woolf's only autobiographical writing is to be found in this collection of five unpublished pieces. Despite Quentin Bell's comprehensive biography and numerous recent studies of her, the author's own account of her early life holds new fascination - for its unexpected detail, the strength of its emotion, and its clear-sighted judgement of Victorian values.
- Virginia Woolf's 'A Sketch of the Past' EMILY DALGARNO There was a small looking-glass in the hall at Talland House. It had, I remember, a ledge with a brush on it. By standing on tiptoe I could see my face in the glass. When I was six or seven perhaps, I got into the habit of looking at my face in the glass.
- Virginia Woolf's 'A Sketch of the Past' EMILY DALGARNO There was a small looking-glass in the hall at Talland House. It had, I remember, a ledge with a brush on it. By standing on tiptoe I could see my face in the glass. When I was six or seven perhaps, I got into the habit of looking at my face in the glass.
- A premise the capacity of the writer to create a mirror effect and has made use. “A Sketch of the Past” can be read. The “Sketch” is the product of Woolf’s consciousness and capacity to invest in affective. 64 ANA CLARA BIRRENTO elements which, in turn, allow the reader to feel that space as a knowable.
This essay, which I read from the collection Moments of Being, consists of nearly 100 pages of Woolf’s recollections of childhood, recorded journal-entry-style in 1939-40. It introduces Woolf’s concept of “moments of being” and of “non-being,” the latter being the cotton wool in between the important stuff of life/memory. Interesting for organization (or lack thereof); for the layering of time, then and now; and for Woolf’s list-making. It was also unfinished at the time of her death, and somewhat lacking in narrative structure. The editors of this collection make some points about it not being up to VW’s standards for publication, but as this is the first I’ve read of her work, I can’t comment on how not-up-to-standards I find it.
“A Sketch of the Past” is a series of memories of Woolf’s childhood, related when the author is nearly sixty. She begins by worrying over the format of these memoirs, then throwing up her hands to begin with “the first memory.” The form ends up being a sort of journal, with dated entries and a few comments on current events (the coming war). This layered-time effect allows commentary on both the past and the writing-present.
Woolf’s “moments of being” stand in contrast to what she calls “moments of non-being.” I understand these to be the memorable or remembered moments versus those not remembered, or not memorable–which are not necessarily the same thing. Woolf asks, “Why have I forgotten so many things that must have been, one would have thought, more memorable than what I do remember? … Often… I have been baffled by this same problem; that is, how to describe what I call in my private shorthand — ‘non-being.’ Every day includes much more non-being than being.” She likens non-being to cotton wool, or the everyday padding of what is remembered (or, what she wants to write about). She then goes on to call her moments of being “scaffolding in the background” of the real work of her storytelling: these are people, or characters. (The idea of moments of being, or characters, as the central work of storytelling is another concept for potential annotation.) “A Sketch of the Past” proceeds to study characters: Woolf’s mother, father, and a few siblings.
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For school, I wrote an annotation on Woolf’s list-making. Several lengthy lists help to accrue either scenes, descriptions or themes in Woolf’s remembering. Certainly, details are part of how she enlivens her storytelling (the flowers on the mother’s dress and the yellow blinds in the nursery, both on the essay’s first page). Sometimes it is the solitary nature of a detail that gives it its power, as with Mr Wolstenholme, who “when he ate plum tart he spurted the juice through his nose so that it made a purple stain on his grey moustache”–it is the nature of this man that “he had only one characteristic,” she says, even as she names others. This cue to the singularity of this detail, along with its vibrant colors and specificity, strengthens it. But when such details are presented in list form, I find them compelling in new ways, greater than the sum of the listed parts.
At the sentence and paragraph level (or list level!) I found things to admire here. But a somewhat archaic style and lack of narrative arc, a certain rambling quality, made this essay hard for me to engage with. I’m not especially excited about this author, lauded though she be.
Final verdict? I am new to Woolf but at this point I find her inarguably skilled, but not terribly to my tastes at present.
Filed under: book reviews | Tagged: essays, memoir, nonfiction, objects |
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Friday Facts #125 - Achievements. From it all I gathered one obstinate and enduring conception. That nothing is to be so much dreaded as egotism. Nothing so cruelly hurts the person himself; nothing so wounds those who are forced into contact with it.—Virginia Woolf, writing about her relationship with her father in “A Sketch of the Past”
Having posted so much lately on scenic narrative, I do penance by featuring Virginia Woolf, a most reflective writer. Toward her I feel a kinship, which for some time struck me as odd. Then I realized that, in her deep art, her delicate nature, and her spiritual sensibility, she had replaced my boyhood idol Ernest Hemingway. What bookends to have as literary heroes! He, killed by his egotism and his rage, she killed by her sensitivity and her pain.
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I admire his courage and his artistry as a young writer; I lament the shameful boor he became. I write that feeling like a son striking against his father, because when I was a lonely and pained adolescent his stoic myth gave me hope and his stories artistic delight. As a teen I read everything I could by and about him, and first saw the link between outlook and art. As an adult I feel that his efforts to grow as an artist, and perhaps to deepen his tragic view of life, were doomed by the prison of image he’d constructed.
Barely having dipped into Woolf to the same extent, I nonetheless find the depth of her artistry breathtaking, and am in awe of the resonant hints of spirituality I find in her work, especially in her concept of “moments of being” that she discusses in “A Sketch of the Past,” collected in Moments of Being. Ever since I read that long, unfinished essay I’ve been thinking about it—how dominated she was by her father, how she lost her mother so young, how she was molested and bullied by her cretinous stepbrothers, how her account still feels modern. In it Woolf makes her famous statement that although she reads many memoirs, most are failures because they are mere narratives of events and “leave out the person to whom things happened.”
Here she is on her parents’ dysfunction:
Every afternoon we ‘went for a walk’. Later these walks became a penance. Father must have one of us go out with him, Mother insisted. Too much obsessed with his health, with his pleasures, she was too willing, as I think now, to sacrifice us to him. It was thus that she left us the legacy of his dependence, which after her death became so harsh an imposition. It would have [been] better for our relationship if she had left him to fend for himself. But for many years she made a fetish of his health; and so—leaving the effect on us out of the reckoning—she wore herself out and died at forty-nine; while he lived on, and found it very difficult, so healthy was he, to die of cancer at the age of seventy-two. But, though I slip in, still venting an old grievance, that parenthesis, St. Ives gave us all that same ‘pure delight’ which is before my eyes at this very moment. The lemon-colored leaves on the elm tree; the apples in the orchard; the murmur and rustle of the leaves makes me pause here, and think how many other than human forces are always at work on us. While I write this the light glows; an apple becomes a vivid green; I respond all through me; but how? Then a little owl chatters under my window. Again, I respond.
Here she writes on the early blows of losing her mother and then a sister to death:
My mother’s death had been a latent sorrow—at thirteen one could not master it, envisage it, deal with it. But Stella’s death two years later fell on a different substance; a mind . . . extraordinarily unprotected, unformed, unshielded, apprehensive, receptive, anticipatory. That must always hold good of minds and bodies at fifteen. But beneath the surface of this particular mind and body lay sunk the other death. 1tb storage for mac. Even if I were not fully conscious of what my mother’s death meant, I had for two years been unconsciously absorbing it through Stella’s silent grief; through my father’s demonstrative grief; again through all the things that changed and stopped; the ending of society; of gaiety; of the giving up of St. Ives; the black clothes; the suppressions; the locked door of her bedroom. All this had toned my mind and made it apprehensive; made it I suppose unnaturally responsive to Stella’s happiness, and the promise it held for her and for us of escape from that gloom; when once more unbelievably—incredibly—as if one had been violently cheated of some promise; more than that, brutally told not to be such a fool as to hope for things; I remember saying to myself after she died: ‘But this is impossible; things aren’t, can’t be, like this—the blow, the second blow of death, stuck on me; tremulous, filmy eyed as I was, with my wings still creased, sitting there on the edge of my broken chrysalis.
On how she gained insight into foreign pleasures and strangers:
Once, after we had hung about, tacking, and hauling in gunard after gunard, dab after dab, father said to me: ‘Next time if you are going to fish I shan’t come; I don’t like to see fish caught but you can go if you like.’ It was a perfect lesson. It was not a rebuke; not forbidding; simply a statement of his own feeling, about which I could think and decide for myself. Though my passion for the thrill and the tug had been perhaps the most acute I then knew, his words slowly extinguished it; leaving no grudge, I ceased to wish to catch fish. But from the memory of my own passion I am still able to construct an idea of the sporting passion. It is one of those invaluable seeds, from which, since it is impossible to have every experience fully, one can grow something that represents other people’s experiences. Often one has to make do with seeds; the germs of what might have been, had one’s life been different. I pigeonhole ‘fishing’ thus with other momentary glimpses; like those rapid glances, for example, that I cast into basements when I walk in London streets.
On how fiction and memoir feed upon and devour memories:
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Expansion - europa universalis iv: cradle of civilization for mac. Further, just as I rubbed out a good deal of the force of my mother’s memory by writing about her in To the Lighthouse, so I rubbed out much of [my father’s] memory there too. Yet he obsessed me for years. Until I wrote it out, I would find my lips moving; I would be arguing with him; raging against him; saying to myself all that I never said to him; how deep they drove themselves into me, the things it was impossible to say aloud. They are still some of them sayable; when [Woolf’s sister] Nessa for instance revives the memory of Wednesday and its weekly [bank account] books, I still feel come over me that old frustrated fury.
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But in me, though not in her, rage alternated with love. . . . ‘You must think me,’ he said to me after one of these rages—I think the word he used was ‘foolish’. I was silent. I did not think him foolish. I thought him brutal. . . .
Woolf died by her own hand before she made of this memoir a literary work equal to her fiction. It feels like a draft still searching for its structure, and ends abruptly. But what a memoir, and the very model for those who believe memoir must, as they say, “interrogate memory.” “A Sketch of the Past” is better for my money than another classic memoir, the gorgeously written Speak, Memory, since, lamentably, I find Vladimir Nabokov’s cold-fish persona in it repulsive. Woolf, in contrast to the guys, seemingly stands naked before her readers, a wounded creature working to understand her life, and life itself, with true courage and great artistry.
Next: Woolf’s concept of “moments of being” from “A Sketch of the Past.”
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- A wonderful portrait of Woolf, Richard, and I like the contrast with Nabokov.
- I loved this post more than I can say. Simply beautiful. You describe Woolf so well and the quotations are wonderful. However, I think you could be a little more gentle with Hemingway and Nabokov. I think Hemingway may have been unwell and his short stories alone have made me very happy. Nabokov’s style means that one has to forgive him anything in my humble opinion- but on the other hand you use them very well to flag up something about Woolf. Her illness did make her to do odd things sometimes- apparently she once saluted at a Hitler rally- but when it comes to the way she wrote you have highlighted her wonderful talent. Woolf once criticised Mr Birrell’s literary criticism for treating books as if they might turn in to people- perhaps when we read memoir we should pretend it is fiction and do the same thing as she would have done- concentrate on originality/style/beauty etc. Many thanks and Merry Christmas, John.
- Richard, John certainly speaks for me when he says I love this post more than I can say. I loved your voice opening up the piece, speaking of penance (which Woolf speaks of too) and giving us your personal reflections on Woolf and Hemingway–“typically” thoughtful, intelligent, honest and interesting. Reading the wonderful selections you chose, I felt deeper myself (for a moment at least, if not a moment of being!). Woolf is so beautiful and brilliant in her mind and writing. It’s as if some of her voice and sensibility rubs off on me when I read her in Moments of Being, making me experience my own life more fully, richly, reflectively. How wonderfully she captures her reaction to the deaths of her mother and sister when she was just thirteen and fifteen. Her feelings and image of herself after Stella’s death as just having emerged from her chrysalis, “tremulous, filmy eyed as I was, with my wings still creased,” is heartrending! I loved too how she speaks of being able to construct an idea of a sporting passion from her fishing incident, and how one can grow from such a seed something that represents other people’s experience. One feels in reading her that desire (and ability) to understand and encompass others and experience itself. Finally, what a perfect image you chose in the photograph — the still river with the geese, bringing to mind how she waded into a river with stones in her pockets. All in all, such a fine and thoughtful post, Richard. I feel well fed by it!
- Richard, this is perhaps my favorite post of yours so far. I appreciate your words about Hemingway and can imagine you with a pencil, writing and erasing and writing again, until the man in you won out over the boy. The passage you included from Woolf about the non-rebuke rebuke she received from her father right at the end of her fishing experience while her blood was still up, was searing. I cringed reading it, remembering immediately a time when my younger brother, upon viewing several tall glass vases full of sea shells in my home, shook his head and murmured something about the greediness of people taking so many shells from the beach. Even though the shells in question were fragments that had to be turned just so in order to look complete in the glass, I never again picked up a shell on any beach.
- Thanks, Beth. It was a very interesting anecdote to me, too, because of her effort to portray her difficult father in a rounded way.
- A beautiful post, Richard. Build a lot 3 mac download.
- I think one could make the case that Ernest punished himself, and others, as much as he did out of inner demons of self doubt and self loathing, as much as (if not more than) egotism. I feel that would be more fair assessment. Like you, I put EH on a pedestal early in my life, then cycled up and down through periods of adoration and contempt. I have written a piece about it–“Ernest and Me.”I have settled on the rather banal conclusion that on the surface at least he lived a magic life, but was also a tragic figure–and maybe most important for literature, a great writer,
- Others have said, better than I could, what I felt reading this post. Thanks, Richard. I will be thinking about your way of contrasting the deaths of Hemingway and Woolf for a long time.And I had the very same thought about the photo that Paulette described above. Mflare keygen mac.
- Thanks, Shirley. I am glad to know so many are reading or have read Woolf. She was a discovery I more or less made on my own, kind of like Rilke was, and those are very special.
- Somehow I missed this post the first time around. I just finished A Sketch of the Past, then turned around and reread it. I agree. Loved it.
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