‘… to give up this arduous game… of assembling things that lie on the surface…’
(Woolf describing the effort required to hold her mind together, in ‘Flying over London’, page 211)
‘Mental fight means thinking against the current, not with it.’
The Oxford World Classic edition of ‘Selected Essays by Virginia Woolf’, edited by David Bradshaw, brings together 30 of her essays, reviews and articles and groups them under four headings:
- Reading and Writing
- Life-Writing
- Women and Fiction
- Looking On
Summarising each of the essays was taking so long that I broke my review of the book up into multiple blog posts. This post summarises and comments on the ten essays contained in the fourth and final section of the selection, titled ‘Looking On’. Unlike the essays in the previous sections, which closely addressed the relevant topic heading, the volume’s editor, David Bradshaw, has deliberately chosen these ones to be more diverse in subject matter and approach. The essays are:
- Thunder at Wembley (1924) [the British Empire exhibition at Wembley]
- The Cinema (1926)
- Street Haunting: A London Adventure (1927) [a walk from her home at Hyde Park Gate to the Strand one winter evening as night was falling]
- The Sun and The Fish (1928) [a solar eclipse and visit to London Aquarium]
- The Docks of London (1931)
- Oxford Street Tide (1932)
- Evening Over Sussex: Reflections in a Motor Car (1942)
- Flying Over London [an imagined flight in a small plane over London]
- Why Art Today Follows Politics (1936)
- Thoughts on Peace in an Air Raid (1940)
I keep reading references to Woolf being an ‘intellectual’ which astonishes me because she hardly anywhere mounts clear, sustained arguments, with reasons and evidence to support her. Even when she is making a point – as in her essays criticising the Edwardian novelists and promoting her new version of literature, or discussing what a feminist literature might be like – what her essays are far more noticeable for their slow beginnings, their whimsical digressions, her easy distraction by the surface of things, objects and phrases, by her indirections and odd approaches, which sometimes barely make sense.
This is more than usually true of these ten descriptive and impressionistic pieces.
If there’s one common theme or thread linking all of them, and maybe all her writing as a whole, I think it’s her mental illness. In Street Haunting, Sun and Fish and Evening over Sussex she describes having multiple ‘selves’, which initially sounds cool and post-modernist but, I think, was an aspect of her mental illness.
You particularly feel the struggle it involved when she talks about the need to marshal all these selves back together, to create a unified personality to face society with. This isn’t a criticism, it’s the opposite: it’s sympathy. Both my kids have mental health issues and I struggle sometimes. Maybe that’s why I’m making too much of it as an issue…
Anyway, my interpretation is that her obsessive listing of everything she sees, on all her walks and travels, her distraction by endless streams of shiny details, was both a symptom of her problems but also a way of coping with them. When the inner world gets cluttered with multiple selves all shouting at you, you take refuge in the ever-changing world outside you to try and regain, and hang onto, some calm, something outside yourself. I take this to be the message made explicit in ‘Street Haunting’ and lurking, implicitly, beneath all the other pieces; maybe, beneath her whole oeuvre.
1. Thunder at Wembley (1924: 3 pages)
A brisk description of attending the 1924 Empire Exhibition at Wembley. It has an odd tone. She mocks the organisers for not making the vast concrete edifice which enclosed the exhibition, sealed off from the sky, for making the error of letting nature intrude here and there: a few trees, some birds. But the real feeling that comes over is Woolf’s lofty snobbish view of the crowds who are attending it. The words vulgar and mediocrity recur. She ironically comments that the exhibition would have been much better if the organisers had only kept all the people out. In the last paragraph she becomes delirious and has a vision of the end of the world.
The sky is livid, lurid, sulphurine. It is in violent commotion. It is whirling water-spouts of cloud into the air; of dust in the Exhibition. Dust swirls down the avenues, hisses and hurries like erected cobras round the corners. Pagodas are dissolving in dust. Ferro-concrete is fallible. Colonies are perishing and dispersing in spray of inconceivable beauty and terror which some malignant power illuminates. Ash and violet are the colours of its decay. From every quarter human beings come flying—clergymen, school children, invalids in bath-chairs. They fly with outstretched arms, and a vast sound of wailing rolls before them, but there is neither confusion nor dismay. Humanity is rushing to destruction, but humanity is accepting its doom.
What?
The Cinema (1926: 5 pages)
It starts out in the typically frivolous and gaseous style which makes Woolf’s essays such a trial to read.
No great distance separates [we moderns] from those bright-eyed naked men who knocked two bars of iron together and heard in that clangour a foretaste of the music of Mozart. The bars in this case, of course, are so highly wrought and so covered over with accretions of alien matter that it is extremely difficult to hear anything distinctly. All is hubble-bubble, swarm and chaos. We are peering over the edge of a cauldron in which fragments of all shapes and savours seem to simmer; now and again some vast form heaves itself up and seems about to haul itself out of chaos.
?
Woolf briefly describes the black-and-white newsreels of the day. She begins to be interesting when she says that one of the disconcerting features of film is that it shows what life is like when we’re not there and a world which has gone.
But that’s newsreels and factual movies. As to the development of fiction movies, lots of other arts stood ready to help. Of course Woolf has only one art in mind, her own specialist subject, literature. But the marriage of literature and film has been a disaster. Why? Because literature shows people from the inside, shows us their minds and thoughts and emotions, whereas movies can only show them as stock figures from the outside.
So we lurch and lumber through the most famous novels of the world. So we spell them out in words of one syllable, written, too, in the scrawl of an illiterate schoolboy.
I’m sure all Hollywood screenwriters were flattered by this description. On the other hand, I like this next bit which I totally agree with, that movies simplify complex human emotions down into stock gestures and expressions.
A kiss is love. A broken cup is jealousy. A grin is happiness. Death is a hearse.
In Woolf’s view film needs to free itself from a literalistic interpretation of content from another medium, books, and free itself to explore its own language and vocabulary.
It seems plain that the cinema has within its grasp innumerable symbols for emotions that have so far failed to find expression… Is there, we ask, some secret language which we feel and see, but never speak, and, if so, could this be made visible to the eye? Is there any characteristic which thought possesses that can be rendered visible without the help of words?
Interesting thought. Obviously there’s been a hundred years of movies since Woolf wrote but you feel her point is still valid. Film ought to consist of more than just popcorn-munching, Technicolour-fabulous summer blockbusters, surely it does have the potential to convey human experiences in an utterly novel and revolutionary way. And yet it has failed. The movies I see nowadays (2025) are crushingly banal and familiar, and the whole concept of a ‘film’ is bleeding out into the extravaganzas shown on Netflix et al. There are more films than ever before but at the same time, a strong sense of exhaustion and repetition.
As usual, Woolf invokes Shakespeare, her go-to guy for symbolising the peak of literary complexity i.e. multiple associations are triggered in the brain by his verse. But it’s precisely the multi-faceted and evanescent and subjective nature of the reader’s response, which is unique to literature and cinema’s tactic of showing a man on a screen talking fails to convey.
Instead, she repeats the thought: surely there are visual symbols, maybe accentuated with music, which could convey complex emotions in a purely filmic way.
That such symbols will be quite unlike the real objects which we see before us seems highly probable. Something abstract, something which moves with controlled and conscious art, something which calls for the very slightest help from words or music to make itself intelligible, yet justly uses them subserviently – of such movements and abstractions the films may in time to come be composed.
Then indeed when some new symbol for expressing thought is found, the film-maker has enormous riches at his command.
All this guessing and clumsy turning over of unknown forces points at any rate away from any art we know in the direction of an art we can only surmise.
She concludes with the thought that cinema has been born the wrong way round: it demonstrates tremendous sophistication of technology, engineering, design and logistics, but has no soul, no content, no emotional complexity worth the name.
The mechanical skill is far in advance of the art to be expressed.
This falls into the category of one of her Hortative Essays. In linguistics, hortative modalities are verbal expressions used by the speaker to encourage or discourage an action. In more common speech, hortative is an adjective meaning something which to encourages, urges, or calls to action. So in an earlier section of the book, ‘Life-Writing’, we read her essay claiming that the genre of biography was poised at the dawn of a new era, which would require hard work and commitment but would lead through to a new vision. Same here. In her opinion film is just at the start of an era of innovation and discovery.
I guess she was right, insofar as film was poised on the brink of introducing talkies (published in 1926, this whole essay is based on the experience of only silent movies) and continued to evolve at a rate of knots throughout the twentieth century. But whether it ever developed the symbols and methods to really convey the human soul, as she hoped, is very much to be doubted. Maybe in lots of rarer, indie or art or non-American movies. One for film buffs to discuss forever.
3. Street Haunting: A London Adventure (1927: 11 pages)
How beautiful a London street is…
After a long day cooped up in a room writing, what better release than going for a ramble across London. Evening is best and winter the best season when there is magic in the air. The lamplight gives the bustling passersby a spurious glamour.
This is all unusually high-spirited and positive for Woolf and she deploys some stylish phrases.
Here under the lamps are floating islands of pale light through which pass quickly bright men and women, who, for all their poverty and shabbiness, wear a certain look of unreality, an air of triumph, as if they had given life the slip, so that life, deceived of her prey, blunders on without them. (p.178)
Once or twice she is tempted to imagine the lives of the people in the houses and has to remind herself to stay on the surface of things, an observer, a wandering eye, as the characters in so many of her books.
The eye is not a miner, not a diver, not a seeker after buried treasure. It floats us smoothly down a stream; resting, pausing, the brain sleeps perhaps as it looks… Let us… be content still with surfaces only—the glossy brilliance of the motor omnibuses; the carnal splendour of the butchers’ shops with their yellow flanks and purple steaks; the blue and red bunches of flowers burning so bravely through the plate glass of the florists’ windows.
For some reason she pops into a shoe shop and is there when a dwarf enters, accompanied by two normal-sized adults. Woolf describes her preening over he normal sized foot but when she goes back out into the street and Woolf follows her, she finds all the other passersby infected with the grotesque.
(This all reminds me of the French poet, Charles Baudelaire, famous for his visions of strange passersby in the streets of Paris, and of the whole French nineteenth century intellectual cult of the flaneur, all of which was being written about seventy years before Woolf wrote this essay.)
The dwarf had started a hobbling grotesque dance to which everybody in the street now conformed…
So she sees two drunk men pass by both leaning on a small boy, a stout woman dressed in shiny sealskin, a feeble-minded boy sucking the silver knob of his stick, an old man squatting on a doorstep as if suddenly overcome by the absurdity of the human spectacle – the randomness of these people seen in the street reminds me very much of all the background people who appear in her wandering-round-central-London novel, Mrs Dalloway.
In shops windows she sees good which spark fancies. Sofas and furnishings allow you to create and decorate a fantasy home of your own. When you wave that away, a glimpse of pearls in a jewellers’ window prompts visions of herself at a grand party in Mayfair, in June, looking out over the darkened streets while back in the main room the Prime Minister describes some political crisis to Lady So-and-So.
Why this continual turnover of fantasies? Because nature made human beings with ‘instincts and desires which are utterly at variance with his main being, so that we are streaked, variegated, all of a mixture’.
I’ve commented on how the same dozen or so ideas recur across Woolf’s oeuvre. Here she mentions the idea of multiple selves which features in the mature novels and Orlando.
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? (p.182)
Then she comes to the neighbourhood of second hand book shops and for a couple of page sings the delights of exploring the strange detritus of sold-off libraries and dead men’s collections, the eternal hope that you will take down some little treasure and be transported by dashing narratives or wonderful poetry, and all those travellers to far-off lands. But there’s no end to books and so after this cosy interlude in a warm second-hand bookshop, it’s back out into the streets.
She passes two women complaining about how selfish ‘Kate’ is, then they’re gone and she never finds out more. Two men discussing racing tips under a lamp-post. Thousands of other commuters, freed from work and thronging from the Strand over Waterloo bridge, who she fondly fantasises are themselves fondly fantasising about being ‘great cricketers, famous actresses, soldiers who have saved their country at the hour of need.’
When you stop and read that you realise how essentially childish her view of other people is. Those aspirations – ‘great cricketers, famous actresses, soldiers who have saved their country at the hour of need’ – are the aspirations of the Famous Five. Real people who are worried about money, worried about their marriages, their children about work, don’t enter in, they are too real, sordid, vulgar. None of her imagined people ever think about sex because that is crude and vulgar. The fantasy must be kept pure, romantic, chaste and childish.
Coming into the Strand she feels her conscious mind telling her she has to do something. What was it? Oh yes, the spurious aim of buying a pencil with which she justified this evening stroll in the first place. That’s one self, the practical self. But another self steps in and says Why can’t we just enjoy ourselves and ramble where we wish? Multiple selves in conflict. You can see why she was interested in Freud’s dynamic model of the mind, and why the Hogarth Press was to publish his complete works in a definitive English translation. You can also hear a ghost of her lifelong mental problems: the voices in her head, conflicting and arguing.
From a psychiatric point of view it’s telling that the only way she can manage the voices is to transcend them with another image, with the sight of the wide cold black River Thames. And memory. Memory which we saw so important in coping with a task in Memories of a Working Women’s Guild and Leslie Stephen, The Philosopher at Home: A Daughter’s Memories. We get a deeper understanding that backing away from the clamorous present and retreating into distant memories is not so much a cop-out as a psychological coping mechanism.
This becomes really obvious when she remembers leaning over the parapet last summer and being happy. Maybe if she goes to the same place now she can regain that mood of calm.
We see it through the eyes of somebody who is leaning over the Embankment on a summer evening, without a care in the world. Let us put off buying the pencil; let us go in search of this person—and soon it becomes apparent that this person is ourselves. For if we could stand there where we stood six months ago, should we not be again as we were then—calm, aloof, content? Let us try then…
But the attempt fails. A young couple are smooching nearby, the air is cold, a tug with two barges slowly passes under the bridge, she can’t regain that last-summer mood. She draws the conclusion that:
It is only when we look at the past and take from it the element of uncertainty that we can enjoy perfect peace.
To be honest, I don’t understand what that means. Finally, she arrives at a stationery shop where she can buy the pencil which was the pretext for this trek and this essay. As soon as she enters she realises she’s interrupted an argument between the old couple who own it. They break up and the old buffer tries to find her a pencil but keeps making mistakes amid the many shelves and boxes, until his wife comes back into the shop and silently indicates the correct box. Even then, Woolf lingers in order to enjoy the experience of the couple slowly calming down until, eventually, full peace is restored.
The old man, who would not have disgraced Ben Jonson’s title-page, reached the box back to its proper place, bowed profoundly his good-night to us, and they disappeared. She would get out her sewing; he would read his newspaper; the canary would scatter them impartially with seed. The quarrel was over.
Now, either you think that last sentence is beautifully imagined or, like me, you find it too pat. In fact the entire episode feels too neatly rounded and complete to be a depiction of real life, which is always more edgy and incomplete than this little fable.
When she exits back onto the street, it is completely empty and she walks home through the silver city which triggers another reflection on the idea of multiple selves.
Walking home through the desolation one could tell oneself the story of the dwarf, of the blind men, of the party in the Mayfair mansion, of the quarrel in the stationer’s shop. Into each of these lives one could penetrate a little way, far enough to give oneself the illusion that one is not tethered to a single mind, but can put on briefly for a few minutes the bodies and minds of others. One could become a washerwoman, a publican, a street singer. And what greater delight and wonder can there be than to leave the straight lines of personality and deviate into those footpaths that lead beneath brambles and thick tree trunks into the heart of the forest where live those wild beasts, our fellow men?
On my reading, all of literature provides a cure for mental illness by allowing us to escape from our troubled selves into other, more completed and so simpler, more manageable lives.
She sings the praises of her big ‘adventure’ in the streets of London and this triggered a memory of Three Guineas with its angry attack on how women in her lifetime and for all British history before her, had been legally, socially and financially excluded from public life, from all the professions, from business, from paid work, from any independence. And so had to make from the tiny incidents of their cramped lives what satisfaction and adventures that they could.
And one last thought: any writer, male or female, can describe the lovely, warm comfort of arriving home but, given the Enid Blyton interpretation I’ve given to much of the narrative, I couldn’t help the ending feeling like the cosy rounding-off of a reassuring children’s story.
As we approach our own doorstep again, it is comforting to feel the old possessions, the old prejudices, fold us round; and the self, which has been blown about at so many street corners, which has battered like a moth at the flame of so many inaccessible lanterns, sheltered and enclosed. (p.187)
4. The Sun and The Fish (1928: 5 pages)
This is the most peculiar essay in the selection.
Exordium: The introduction tells us that memory works by yoking together two, sometimes random elements i.e. we remember things best when they’re associated with something else memorable.
[A] sight will only survive in the queer pool in which we deposit our memories if it has the good luck to ally itself with some other emotion by which it is preserved. Sights marry, incongruously, morganatically… and so keep each other alive.
This appears to be the justification for the collocation of the two memories which follow.
Memory 1: On 29 June 1927 Leonard and Virginia Woolf travelled with a party of friends to Bardon Fell in Yorkshire, where they stood on the ridge at dawn with thousands of others to witness a total eclipse of the sun. That is a rational, factual account of the event, but Woolf’s account is delirious. She compares the watchers to participants in the prehistoric ceremonies at Stonehenge and then gives a vivid description of the eclipse itself, during which the entire world loses colour and laments its death. Fear and anxiety lest the sun never returns. I’ve been reading D.H. Lawrence alongside Woolf, and this essay is more or less the only which one which has the psychological intensity of Lawrence. Maybe because it’s the only place in any of her works where the narrator is scared.
This was the defeat of the sun then, and this was all, so we thought, turning in disappointment from the dull cloud blanket in front of us to the moors behind. They were livid, they were purple; but suddenly one became aware that something more was about to happen; something unexpected, awful, unavoidable, The shadow growing darker and darker over the moor was like the heeling over of a boat, which, instead of righting itself at the critical moment, turns a little further and then a little further; and suddenly capsizes. So the light turned and heeled over and went out. This was the end. The flesh and blood of the world was dead and only the skeleton was left. It hung beneath us, frail; brown; dead; withered… (p.191)
Memory 2: But weirder is to come because Woolf links the eclipse memory to a visit she made to London Zoo and, in particular, to the Aquarium. This again makes it seem nice and logical when it is anything but. Instead it’s a fantasia on the life and being of fishes, in their watery tanks, and the sense of them being far more at home in their element than we poor, helpless, pink animals are on ours.
The fish themselves seem to have been shaped deliberately and slipped into the world only to be themselves. They neither work nor weep. In their shape is their reason. For what other purpose, except the sufficient one of perfect existence, can they have been thus made, some so round, some so thin, some with radiating fins upon their backs, others lined with red electric light, others undulating like white pancakes on a frying pan, some armoured in blue mail, some given prodigious claws, some outrageously fringed with huge whiskers? More care has been spent upon half a dozen fish than upon all the races of mankind.
And having exhausted this strange vision, the essay finishes with the abrupt line:
The eye shuts now. It has shown us a dead world and an immortal fish.
5. The Docks of London (December 1931)
In 1931 Woolf published The London Scene, a collection of six essays published individually in ‘Good Housekeeping’ magazine, over the course of a year. They were not published as a collection until long after her death. According to Wikipedia, the title was not chosen by Woolf but comes from the 1975 republication of five of the essays. Originally the essays were referred to as ‘Six Articles on London Life’.
The first of the six essays was The Docks of London. It records a guided tour Woolf was given round the docks on a Port of London Authority launch on 20 March 1931.
Compared to the eclipse fantasia it is a model of sense and description. She describes coming up the Thames from the Kent end, coming across ruined warehouses and reeking waste dumps and barges full of the city’s refuse, a pub and a few trees in this wasteland, then turning a corner and coming across the beautiful Greenwich Hospital buildings, up and round and so arriving at the Tower of London.
She cuts to a description of a cargo ship being unloaded with careful regulated industry and all its goods being stored in a low unadorned warehouse. She lists the bizarre items sometimes found stashed amid all this imported goods: a snake, a scorpion, a lump of amber, a basin of quicksilver. Among a pile of elephant tusks the customs officers have found older browner ones which they think come from mammoths. Virginia is finding out about the big world of work, and the imperial trade which her pampered life relies on for its luxuries and perquisites. She learns the great principle:
Trade is ingenious and indefatigable beyond the bounds of imagination. (p.196)
Everything is weighed and graded. A use is found for everything. Nothing is wasted. She savours the ‘dim sacerdotal atmosphere’ of the wine vaults. In the precision and dexterity of the work, the endless movement of the cranes, the unloading and stacking and packing and storing, she sees beauty. This feels like an awakening for young Virginia into the world of real work and the appeal of doing a job well, the subject of so many Rudyard Kipling stories.
She ends with the slightly unexpected thought that it is we, the consumers, who dictate all this energy, day in day out, all year round. It is we with our taste for shoes, furs, bags, stoves, oil, rice pudding, candles, that dictate what crops are grown, what animals are reared, what minerals extracted, what is brought here to the world’s largest port. So that:
One feels an important, a complex, a necessary animal as one stands on the quayside watching the cranes hoist this barrel, that crate, that other bale from the holds of ships that have come to anchor. (p.198)
6. Oxford Street Tide (1932: 4 pages)
The garishness and gaudiness of the great rolling ribbon of Oxford Street has its fascination. (p.199)
This was the second piece in her ‘Six Articles on London Life’ series, published in the January 1932 issue of Good Housekeeping. As you might expect, it’s about shops. In her day, as now, Oxford Street didn’t have the best shops, in fact it was looked down on for its bargains and sales. ‘The buying and selling is too blatant and too raucous’.
What stood out for me was the differences. In 1932 one could find barrows parked selling fresh tulips, violets, daffodils; see magicians make bits of paper unfold into clever shapes on bowls of water; sell live tortoises which are kept in litters of straw.
She gives a blizzard of sense impressions: placards selling endless editions of newspapers; a whole brass band; omnibuses grazing kerbs; buses, cars, vans, barrows streaming past. The old aristocracy were dukes and earls who built grand town houses along the Strand. The new, commercial, aristocracy build department stores along Oxford Street which dole out music and news, welcome you in to their high and airy halls, thickly carpeted and with the magic of lifts. (The notes tell us that the American Harry Gordon Selfridge opened his department store on Oxford Street in 1909.)
You can’t help noticing how flimsy these new stores are, concrete walls and metal floor bases. When you see other buildings being demolished so quickly and thoroughly, you realise these stores, to large and showy, with such modelled facades, are less solid and enduring than a labourer’s stone cottage from the time of Elizabeth I.
Then again, that’s the appeal. ‘The charm of modern London is that it is not built to last; it is built to pass.’ The owners of the citadels of consumer capitalism must:
persuade the multitude that here unending beauty, ever fresh, ever new, very cheap and within the reach of everybody, bubbles up every day of the week from an inexhaustible well. (p.202)
It is vivid and wrily comic, and she doesn’t mention Shakespeare once!
7. Evening Over Sussex: Reflections in a Motor Car (1942: 3 pages)
Despite the title, it’s a very static, ghostly impression of Sussex, which she prefers to imagine at dusk, as night falls and the stars come out and the busy fret of the day disappears and you see the country in its essentials, as it was in days past. She gives a vivid poetic description of the county but then feels unhappy, conflicted. It is too beautiful, too big to contain, to master and this triggers her characteristic psychological reaction or problem, of feeling divided into multiple selves.
It is well known how in circumstances like these the self splits up and one self is eager and dissatisfied and the other stern and philosophical.
She has to struggle with herself, to force herself to sit still and take in what’s in front of her. While these two selves argue about how to cope with beautiful scenery, a third self, observes to herself how happy both the other selves were when they were driving around in a motor car, just to see the never-ending stream of sights. Although when they were quiet and happy, the conscious self was in fact unhappy at the thought that everything is transient, everything passes out of sight and memory so fast as you zoom around the country.
This is, in other words, an essay about Virginia coping with her mental health issues and struggling to maintain an even keel. Compare ‘Street Haunting’, where she similarly struggles with the voices in her head and tries to find some way of calming them. Her mental illness is never very far from the surface.
Then there appears a fourth self, an ‘erratic and impulsive self’, interrupts the others with an unexpected perception, pointing out a light hovering in the sky. Only after some moments of confusion does her rational self realise it’s a car’s headlights coming over the brow of a hill, but this visionary self takes it as a portent of the future, of a distant future when Sussex will be full of magic gates and electric light.
In the final paragraph she tells us she assembles her many selves, as official presider over them, and tries to reckon up the sights they have all seen. But this is a surprisingly thin list and almost immediately describes ‘disappearance and the death of the individual’. That’s a bit shrill, isn’t it?
David Bradshaw’s notes tell us this wasn’t published during her lifetime but in the posthumous collection Death of the Moth and Other Essays. Is it an indication of how she was ‘declining’ into mental illness? Or does its candour about the struggle of managing multiple selves suggest a new art, a new style which she might have explored and expanded?
8. Flying Over London (6 pages)
The notes tell us this essay was only published in 1950. Reading the book’s notes builds up the impression that Woolf wrote a huge amount, that gathering together all the essays and fugitive pieces published in numerous outlets, from classy Vogue to transient student magazines, has taken decades to track them all down and been a labour of love for Woolf scholars.
It opens with a strikingly fanciful analogy, comparing the planes lined up at the aerodrome to giant grasshoppers, ready to spring into the air. She is self-consciously aware that ‘a thousand pens have described the sensations of leaving earth’ and you can’t help feeling how dogged she is by a self consciousness so intense that it is consciousness of multiple selves. Woolf is crippled by selves-consciousness.
Anyway, she makes the original observation that, when the plane takes off it’s not so much that the land falls away as that the sky falls upon you, immerses you. A lifetime of judging all objects in your field of view by their static appearance at ground level is swept away by this radical new perspective. ‘Land values’ have to be swapped for ‘air values’.
She wonderfully describes being in the air, amid the clouds, where perspectives and orientation disappear and this reminds me of the extended passage describing looking up at the clouds in ‘On Being Ill’.
And yet, as the previous essay has made clear, there is always another self in Woolf, tugging and restraining all her attempts at spontaneity. She knows it. ‘So inveterately anthropomorphic is the mind’ that she imagines the plane is a boat, and then imagines it, as in some Victorian poem, sailing towards a harbour:
And there we shall be received by hands that lift themselves from swaying garments; welcoming, accepting. (p.207)
Don’t you think that’s very Pre-Raphaelite, the hands that lift from swaying garments? I’m sticking with my impression that, despite the so-called modernism of her deploying a dreamy kind of stream-of-consciousness and jumping between characters’ points of views in her books, deep down – in fact not very deep down at all – Woolf has an essentially Victorian sensibility, Keats and Tennyson and Christina Rossetti, everything must be elegant and decorous and just so.
She sees the Thames as the Romans saw it, as paleolithic man saw it, reprising the theme of prehistoric London found in Mrs Dalloway and especially Between the Acts where Mrs Swithin is reading H.G. Wells’s Outline of History which starts with just such prehistoric descriptions of dinosaurs in what were to become London landmarks. But then things suddenly take a dark turn.
It was the idea of death that now suggested itself; not being received and welcomed; not immortality but extinction. (p.208)
She sees a flight of gulls and thinks how alien they are, where only gulls are, is death. ‘Life ends; life is dowsed in that cloud… That extinction now becomes desirable… And so we swept on now, up to death’ Why? Again you have the strong sense of a woman fighting her own psychological demons.
The pilot’s head suddenly reminds her of Charon, the ferryman across into the realm of the dead, and she claims the mind is proud of extinction ‘as if it deserved extinction, extinction profited it more and were more desirable than prolongation on other terms by other wills.’ Usually the experience of flying in a small plane is one of exhilaration. For Woolf it brings flooding thoughts of death. She wants to die, and die she soon would, at her own hand.
The pilot turns into a flame of death and she imagines dying together with him. ‘Extinction! The word is consummation’. But there’s a lot more. We’re only half way through. She vividly imagines flying into cloud, being immersed in the ever-changing shapes and colours.
All the colours of pounded plums and dolphins and blankets and seas and rain clouds crushed together, straining – purple, black, steel.
It’s as if John Keats went for a plane ride. Here’s a stanza from John Keats’s poem Ode to a Nightingale:
O, for a draught of vintage! that hath been
Cool’d a long age in the deep-delved earth,
Tasting of Flora and the country green,
Dance, and Provençal song, and sunburnt mirth!
O for a beaker full of the warm South,
Full of the true, the blushful Hippocrene,
With beaded bubbles winking at the brim,
And purple-stained mouth…
The technology and the subject and the continual changing of scene may be from the 1920s but the sensibility dates back a hundred years, to the 1820s, an impression confirmed by lots of details of phrasing like when she says that when they emerge from the clouds and see ‘the fairy earth’ beneath them.
The voice I hear this passing night was heard
In ancient days by emperor and clown:
Perhaps the self-same song that found a path
Through the sad heart of Ruth, when, sick for home,
She stood in tears amid the alien corn;
The same that oft-times hath
Charm’d magic casements, opening on the foam
Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn.
I wonder if she’s just been reading ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ and that explains why the sensibility and even specific phrases of Keats spill over into this fantasia?
One way of thinking about Woolf’s writing is that she had to adopt different techniques to shake herself out of her madness, out of being dominated by the voices in her head. The ‘Street Haunting’ essay describes one technique, which was to go to a place where she had been calm and try to recapture that feeling. A cruder one is to change the subject to something which focused all her selves into a unity, such as her feminist scorn of men. This lines up all the voices into unanimity. Here’s something the squabbling voices can all agree upon.
I think this is why, after the fantastical passages which have seen her mind split into multiple levels and ages and perspectives, she brings everything back with the tried-and-tested technique of taking the mickey out of pompous rich men in the City of London.
There were blocks in the city of traffic sometimes almost a foot long; these had to be translated into eleven or twelve Rolls Royces in a row with city magnates waiting furious; and one had to add up the fury of the magnates; and say – even though it was all silent and the block was only a few inches in length, how scandalous the control of the traffic is in the City of London. (p.211)
This is feminism as therapy, submerging her squabbling selves and the multifarious observations which threaten to overwhelm her conscious mind, into the reassuring, all-pulling-together mode prompted by the activity of mocking rich men. Ha ha ha, silly little men. Oh, I feel much better now.
The narrative goes on to describe flying over the East End and seeing good working people wave up at them, flying over Oxford Street where everyone is too busy with bargain hunting to acknowledge them, onto Bayswater with its deadening rows of identical houses and then does something odd. She claims to see a door in one house open, and to see into a flat, and to see a particular woman and… you realise it has all been a fiction. Then I woke up and it was all a dream.
And a glance at the notes indeed confirms that Virginia Woolf never went up in an airplane. The entire thing is a fiction. It is a bold and strange fiction, and candidly reveals some of the ramifications of her mental illness and yet… I couldn’t help feeling disappointed that it was utterly fictional.
In fact she tries to make a joke of it. The last paragraph is a rare attempt by Woolf at explicit humour. After she’s given a vivid description of coming in to land and bumping over the grassy airfield, she goes on:
As a matter of fact, the flight had not begun; for when Flight-Lieutenant Hopgood stooped and made the engine roar, he had found a defect of some sort in the machine, and raising his head, he had said very sheepishly, ”Fraid it’s no go today.’ So we had not flown after all.
Contemporary flying reviews
- Sagittarius Rising by Cecil Lewis (1936)
- The Last Enemy by Richard Hillary (1942)
- Going Solo by Roald Dahl (1986)
- First Light by Geoffrey Wellum (2002)
9. Why Art Today Follows Politics (1936: 3 pages)
Surprisingly maybe, this very short piece was first published in The Daily Worker newspaper in 1936. Woolf opens the piece, as so often, by candidly explaining the terms of its commission:
I have been asked by the Artists International Association to explain as shortly as I can why it is that the artist at present is interested, actively and genuinely, in politics.
I think her views on this subject are not much worth considering, since she had made a career out of ridiculing, mocking and ignoring conventional politics as irredeemably male. Bit late in the day to change her tune.
What struck me most about this essay was the way that, when she came to consider examples of classic artists, the very first name she came to was John Keats and the very first ‘work of art’ his poem, Ode to a Nightingale. This, for the umpteenth time, confirmed my sense that underneath her modernist tricks and strategies, Woolf remained, in her core sensibility, an unreformed Victorian Romantic of the purest kind, oblivious of the radical art being created in Bolshevik Russia or Weimar Germany, of symbolist or Expressionist or Surrealist poetry, but again and again and again and again, judging everything by the purest, most conservative, arch-Romantic figure of John Keats.
As to the essay, I found it pompous, self-satisfied twaddle. This is because of her narrow, blinkered, restricted and wildly unrealistic notion of what an Artist is and what Art is, something pure and untainted by Society which aspires to the perfection of a Shakespeare. Instead of a much more realistic sociological view of ‘art’, which sees it being produced by a huge array of people, working in all kinds of fields, at multiple levels.
It is a fact that the practise of art, far from making the artist out of touch with his kind, rather increases his sensibility. It breeds in him a feeling for the passions and needs of mankind in the mass which the citizen whose duty it is to work for a particular country or for a particular party has no time and perhaps no need to cultivate.
This notion of the artist as a special superior and privileged personage, blessed with more sensibility than the average person, feels, to us today, I think, absurd. Artists in all fields may have been trained to a level of specialist knowledge in particular fields and techniques but this doesn’t make them ‘superior’ to everyone else. Plus we have had too many examples of artists who were very superior, refined and sensitive but who still wrote books and poems against the Jews, say, or in favour of Stalin or Mussolini.
Between Woolf’s narrow, conservative values and our own times stands the dire history of the twentieth century which ought to have disabused anyone of these Victorian notions of the Superiority of Art.
She’s on firmer grounds when she leaves off her notions of art and takes a more sociological view of the pressures modern artists come under. This echoes, repeats or invokes the notion of multiple voices which we’ve encountered her struggling with in earlier essays. Here she gives them external form as types or groups or classes of people who are perpetually haranguing the modern artist, including:
- the voice which cries: ‘I cannot protect you; I cannot pay you. I am so tortured and distracted that I can no longer enjoy your works of art’
- the voice which asks for help: ‘Come down from your ivory tower, leave your studio and use your gifts as doctor, as teacher, not as an artist’
- the voice which warns the artist that unless he can show good cause why art benefits the state he will be made to help it actively – by making aeroplanes, by firing guns etc
- the voice which artists in other countries have already heard and had to obey, the voice which proclaims that the artist is the servant of the politician, of a Hitler, Stalin or Mussolini
So, in the face of all these voices shouting at him, no wonder the modern artist is forced to take part in politics, and decides to form or join societies like the Artists International Association.
And that’s what she was commissioned to explain, and she has just explained it. You can see how it’s still written from a position which mocks and scorns all these external voices, the voices of society, and tries to preserve the separateness and aloofness of the artist, the high artistic calling she learned in her father’s library in the last years of Queen Victoria’s reign.
10. Thoughts on Peace in an Air Raid (1940: 4 pages)
Written in August 1940, for an American symposium on current matters concerning women.
As she writes in London, Germans are flying overhead dropping bombs trying to kill her. This is the same situation with which George Orwell starts his famous essay, The Lion and the Unicorn. The difference is that Woolf is a woman and a feminist. Therefore she is aggrieved that women on both sides of the fighting are not given guns or any material means of helping. Sure they can make guns and munitions and serve food and protect the children. But there’s another way. They can use their minds. (This is always a doubtful tactic in Woolf whose mind was liable to stray and loses its place far more than the average person, as all her writings show.)
But she sticks to her feminist message. The whole Establishment tells women they are fighting Hitler because he is the embodiment of aggression, tyranny, the insane love of power. And yet she quotes Lady Astor in a speech saying:
Women of ability are held down because of a subconscious Hitlerism in the hearts of men.
It’s the same point she made in the ferociously powerful feminist tract, Three Guineas. So I understand that the challenge is how to get rid of this subconscious Hitlerism in the hearts of men, but I didn’t understand what she was proposing to do.
She makes a detour to describe how training to become a soldier and readiness to fight appears to be instinctive to many men. How can this instinct be eradicated? Well, imagine if the government told all women that childbearing would be banned for most of them, and restricted to a tiny handful i.e. sought to abolish a fundamental instinct of women, what luck would it have? Not much. So trying to make young men more peace-minded is the same kind of challenge.
We must help the young Englishmen to root out from themselves the love of medals and decorations. We must create more honourable activities for those who try to conquer in themselves their fighting instinct, their subconscious Hitlerism. We must compensate the man for the loss of his gun.
What does this mean in practical terms? She repeats the same ideas in a slightly different formulation.
If we are to compensate the young man for the loss of his glory and of his gun, we must give him access to the creative feelings. We must make happiness. We must free him from the machine. We must bring him out of his prison into the open air.
These ‘We must…’ sentences could be written on till infinity but won’t change anything and so have no meaning except as expressions of fine feelings.
Comment 1: the failure of feminism
Like so many of the feminist articles and essays I read every day in the Guardian, New Statesman, London Review of Books, The Atlantic, The Conversation, the New York Review of Books, even in the Financial Times and sometimes in the Economist, Woolf laments that (some/quite a few) men are violent, in thrall to ‘the subconscious Hitlerism in the hearts of men’, and calls for a wholesale transformation of human nature.
Go on, then. Transform human nature. In fact I’ve been reading the same lament, and hearing it from feminist friends and girlfriends and wives and daughters for over 40 years, tens of thousands of articles, documentaries, films, plays and so on calling for a radical overhaul of human nature to try and make men less toxic and more like women.
How is the project to radically transform human (male) nature going? Well, according to the thousands of articles lamenting the election of Donald Trump or bewailing the rise and rise of Andrew Tate, it is going backwards, which is impressive. I don’t mean I applaud Trump the know-nothing bully or the poisonous snake Tate, far from it. It’s just impressive that the feminist cause seems to be going backwards.
And I’m not especially singling out feminism. Although everyone knows that they are being exploited by huge corporations and multinational banks, that every service in their lives is ripping them off, yet somehow, magically, more and more voters are turning to an essentially right-wing solution, rather than what seems to me the more obvious need for a string of left-wing policies to rein in excess wealth, excess pay and excess control of corporations over our lives. (Just think of all the privatised water companies paying their shareholders huge dividends while filling our rivers with sewage.)
Same with global warming and the environment. Although everyone knows about it now, and governments are taking steps to invest in renewable energy and diversity power grids, on the cultural level society seems to be taking against the green and environmental policies we desperately need.
What I’m trying to do is understand and report what people are actually like instead of what high-minded progressives would like them to be like.
So back to Woolf, I know she’s a patron saint for feminists, but, tome, she’s also a kind of patron saint of feminist fantasy. I mean her narrow, blinkered, limited, upper-middle-class experience of life excluded her from understanding the great majority of population in her time and my thesis is that, in following her, in adopting her voice and tone, latterday feminists make the same mistake – of not understanding human nature in all its squalid horribleness and of simply wishing toxic masculinity away, without any practical plans to deal with it. To repeat, her solution is:
If we are to compensate the young man for the loss of his glory and of his gun, we must give him access to the creative feelings. We must make happiness. We must free him from the machine. We must bring him out of his prison into the open air.
Like so many progressives, she thinks that if only we could give our enemies a reading list of classic literature – and in particular make them read more Keats and Shakespeare – we could magic the problems of managing human nature away.
My position is simply that it’s much harder than that.
Comment 2: preparing for war
Eighty-five years after Woolf wrote this piece, the British government and fleets of commentators are all worrying about how to encourage more young Englishmen to cultivate their fighting instinct and join the British Army which, like the armies of all European nations, need to be significantly increased to counter the threat from Putin’s Russia.
Telling men to cultivate their finer feelings is not really an adequate strategy for coping with Putin’s Russia or Xi Jinping’s China, just ask the young men of Ukraine. Why are there always wars and the threat of wars? The feminists I knew at university and subsequently all had one answer: it’s men’s fault. It’s toxic masculinity. There. Done. Understood. Sorted. Dismissed.
Except it isn’t sorted, it’s never sorted. All the essays in the world – no matter how high minded and correct and lovely in their sentiments and wishes – can change human nature with its endless lust to fight the enemy and destroy the planet.
Credit
‘Selected Essays of Virginia Woolf’ was published by Oxford World Classics (OWC) in 2008. Most but not all of the essays can be found online. The OWC introduction can be read on Amazon.
Related links
- Collected Essays of Virginia Woolf on Planet Gutenberg (a different selection)
- The Virginia Woolf Society
Related reviews
- Virginia Woolf reviews
Books & Boots 