virginia woolf
Recently read some Virginia Woolf for the first time. Never got round to it before for a couple of reasons: the whole Bloomsbury Group comes across as snobbish and unpleasant, and Woolf is someone you're constantly told you should read, and santiago therefore avoided her for this reason.
It was fascinating to read Woolf for the first time, especially coming to her with some ready prejudices. Both the inbuilt distaste for the Bloomsbury Group, and a more recent wariness derived from John Carey's The Intellectuals and the Masses. Now Carey's book really is a strong recommendation, he examines through various literary figures how early twentieth-century intellectuals regarded the 'masses' as worthless, subhuman, even dangerous. There are some writers who you're not surprised at all to find holding quite dubious views: Ezra Pound and Virginia Woolf for instance. Others are perhaps more unexpected: George Bernard Shaw and H G Wells among them. But in case you start to think that all European writers of the early twentieth-century were potential fascist sympathisers (or actual in Pound's case), Carey's book has a hero. That hero is the writer Arnold Bennett.
Without getting into unnecessary detail Arnold Bennett is shown as a writer of genuinely populist, democratic, and imaginatively sympathetic qualities. He was clearly more attuned to working- and middle-class aspirations and values than the other writers featured, and was consequently despised by most of them. Virginia Woolf seems to have been especially strident in her dislike.
Having been persuaded by Carey's argument to read Bennett, and having discovered him to be humane and intelligent, it was a compelling reason to delay reading Woolf a little longer. But of course it wasn't the intention of The Intellectuals and the Masses to stop people reading authors like her. Nor is Virginia Woolf an unreflective snob making an uninformed snap judgement, however wrong she may be. And this is why reading her for the first time was so fascinating. She frequently seems to be expressing an opinion that she knows there may be no evidence to uphold.
Most obviously, in Modern Fiction, Woolf attacks Arnold Bennett among others as a 'materialist', which she believes to be undesirable. She writes, "...Mr Bennett is perhaps the worst culprit of the three [Arnold Bennett, John Galsworthy, and H G Wells], inasmuch as he is by far the best workman." A little later she defines what she means by 'materialist' and why she feels it's a bad thing, "...they write of unimportant things [...] they spend immense skill and immense industry making the trivial and the transitory appear the true and the enduring." She is clearly aware of Bennett's ability, but the main evidence she adduces for his weakness is to claim he's too assiduous in detailing minutiae. This from an author who can spin an essay out of the fleeting thoughts that cross her brain while staring at the wall (The Mark on the Wall) is a slightly contrived position.
But all this said her writing is intelligent, clear, and much more humane than you might imagine. And that, so far, is sticking with essays. Today (Saturday 2 June) offered a chance to read about five or six pages of a new purchase, Woolf's novel The Waves, and they're a great five or six pages.
It's kind of fascinating coming to a writer you're resistant to, much of whose worldview is repellent to you, and seeing them win you round to their work. In some ways, while less comfortable than reading people you're ideologically attuned to, there's something very satisfying about that. A similar experience came from reading Kipling's short stories for adults. Of course, however much you congratulate yourself it's the writer doing most of the work. Despite themselves good writers, good artists overcome their own prejudices to sympathise and resonate with people and situations normally outside of their experience or sympathy. Maybe that's why we keep coming back to it. Art makes us better. We're made to understand things we have no experience of. Not a kind of abstract, externally factual understanding you might get from the news. Not the kind of sentimental, self-indulgent sympathy that makes you feel like you're doing good just by being sympathetic. More a sympathy that's like looking out through the eyes of the subject. Art makes us better.
It was fascinating to read Woolf for the first time, especially coming to her with some ready prejudices. Both the inbuilt distaste for the Bloomsbury Group, and a more recent wariness derived from John Carey's The Intellectuals and the Masses. Now Carey's book really is a strong recommendation, he examines through various literary figures how early twentieth-century intellectuals regarded the 'masses' as worthless, subhuman, even dangerous. There are some writers who you're not surprised at all to find holding quite dubious views: Ezra Pound and Virginia Woolf for instance. Others are perhaps more unexpected: George Bernard Shaw and H G Wells among them. But in case you start to think that all European writers of the early twentieth-century were potential fascist sympathisers (or actual in Pound's case), Carey's book has a hero. That hero is the writer Arnold Bennett.
Without getting into unnecessary detail Arnold Bennett is shown as a writer of genuinely populist, democratic, and imaginatively sympathetic qualities. He was clearly more attuned to working- and middle-class aspirations and values than the other writers featured, and was consequently despised by most of them. Virginia Woolf seems to have been especially strident in her dislike.
Having been persuaded by Carey's argument to read Bennett, and having discovered him to be humane and intelligent, it was a compelling reason to delay reading Woolf a little longer. But of course it wasn't the intention of The Intellectuals and the Masses to stop people reading authors like her. Nor is Virginia Woolf an unreflective snob making an uninformed snap judgement, however wrong she may be. And this is why reading her for the first time was so fascinating. She frequently seems to be expressing an opinion that she knows there may be no evidence to uphold.
Most obviously, in Modern Fiction, Woolf attacks Arnold Bennett among others as a 'materialist', which she believes to be undesirable. She writes, "...Mr Bennett is perhaps the worst culprit of the three [Arnold Bennett, John Galsworthy, and H G Wells], inasmuch as he is by far the best workman." A little later she defines what she means by 'materialist' and why she feels it's a bad thing, "...they write of unimportant things [...] they spend immense skill and immense industry making the trivial and the transitory appear the true and the enduring." She is clearly aware of Bennett's ability, but the main evidence she adduces for his weakness is to claim he's too assiduous in detailing minutiae. This from an author who can spin an essay out of the fleeting thoughts that cross her brain while staring at the wall (The Mark on the Wall) is a slightly contrived position.
But all this said her writing is intelligent, clear, and much more humane than you might imagine. And that, so far, is sticking with essays. Today (Saturday 2 June) offered a chance to read about five or six pages of a new purchase, Woolf's novel The Waves, and they're a great five or six pages.
It's kind of fascinating coming to a writer you're resistant to, much of whose worldview is repellent to you, and seeing them win you round to their work. In some ways, while less comfortable than reading people you're ideologically attuned to, there's something very satisfying about that. A similar experience came from reading Kipling's short stories for adults. Of course, however much you congratulate yourself it's the writer doing most of the work. Despite themselves good writers, good artists overcome their own prejudices to sympathise and resonate with people and situations normally outside of their experience or sympathy. Maybe that's why we keep coming back to it. Art makes us better. We're made to understand things we have no experience of. Not a kind of abstract, externally factual understanding you might get from the news. Not the kind of sentimental, self-indulgent sympathy that makes you feel like you're doing good just by being sympathetic. More a sympathy that's like looking out through the eyes of the subject. Art makes us better.
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