Bloomsbury Influences: Papers from the Bloomsbury Adaptations Conference, Bath Spa University, 5-6 May 2011 1443854344, 9781443854344

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Bloomsbury Influences

Bloomsbury Influences: Papers from the Bloomsbury Adaptations Conference, Bath Spa University, 5-6 May 2011

Edited by

E.H. Wright

Bloomsbury Influences: Papers from the Bloomsbury Adaptations Conference, Bath Spa University, 5-6 May 2011 Edited by E.H. Wright This book first published 2014 Cambridge Scholars Publishing 12 Back Chapman Street, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2XX, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2014 by E.H. Wright and contributors All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-4438-5434-4, ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-5434-4

TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgements ................................................................................. viii Introduction ............................................................................................... ix E. H. Wright Part I: Philosophy and Anxieties of Influence Chapter One ................................................................................................ 2 Critics and their Precursors: Theories of Influence in T. S. Eliot, Jorge Luis Borges and Harold Bloom Sarah Roger Chapter Two ............................................................................................. 16 Reassessing the Ethical Influence of the Bloomsbury Group Christopher Lewis Part II: Reinventions of Virginia Woolf: Sigrid Nunez, Ali Smith, Susan Sellers and Jeanette Winterson Chapter Three ........................................................................................... 30 “They Leave out the Person to Whom Things Happened”: Re-Reading the Biographical Subject in Sigrid Nunez’s Mitz: The Marmoset of Bloomsbury (1998) Bethany Layne Chapter Four ............................................................................................. 46 What a Lark! What a Plunge! Woooooooo-Hooooooo What a Fall What a Soar What a Plummet What a Dash: Virginia Woolf and Ali Smith Ian Blyth Chapter Five ............................................................................................. 56 Biographical Novels Turned Metaphysical Detective Stories: The Case of Susan Sellers’s Vanessa & Virginia (2008) Kirby Joris

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Chapter Six ............................................................................................... 68 A Reflection of My Own: Jeanette Winterson, Virginia Woolf and the Narcissism of Hommage Agata WoĨniak Part III: On the Periphery: Mansfield, Mirrlees, Bowen and Isherwood Chapter Seven........................................................................................... 88 Creative Friction: Lawrence, Mansfield and Murry as Bloomsbury’s Others Susan Reid Chapter Eight .......................................................................................... 110 “To Hell with the Blooms Berries”: Katherine Mansfield in Mansfield and the Work of C. K. Stead Gerri Kimber Chapter Nine........................................................................................... 126 Crossing the Ritual Bridge: Hope Mirrlees’s The Counterplot & Between the Acts Sandeep Parmar Chapter Ten ............................................................................................ 141 “The House was Empty”: The Ghost in the Short Fiction of Woolf and Bowen Annabel Wynne Chapter Eleven ....................................................................................... 157 “How Can I Know What I Think Till I See What I Say?”: Christopher Isherwood, E. M. Forster and the Creation of a Literary Identity Rebecca Gordon Stewart Part IV: Painting and Performance Chapter Twelve ....................................................................................... 176 Jeux (1913), Sometimes Known as “The Bloomsbury Ballet”: Vaslav Nijinsky’s Modernist Work Sue Ash

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Chapter Thirteen ..................................................................................... 191 “A Kiss is Love. A Broken Cup is Jealousy”: Adaptation Beyond Metonymy Jens Peters Chapter Fourteen .................................................................................... 205 “Nature Once More had Taken Her Part”: Recuperating Anon, the Common Voice and the Uncovered Theatre Shelley Saguaro and Lucy Tyler Chapter Fifteen ....................................................................................... 227 The Legacy of Vanessa Bell and the Heart of Brand Bloomsbury Hana Leaper List of Contributors ................................................................................ 245

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS First and foremost I would like to acknowledge with grateful thanks the input of the inimitable Professor Paul Edwards to this volume. Paul’s careful eye for detail and knowledge of this field has been invaluable to the editing process. Others who deserve mention include Professor Bill Hughes and Dr Chris Ivic for their kindness and support and for checking the introduction so thoroughly and Dr and Mrs Wright who have offered supportive listening ears. Thanks are also due to the conference team who helped set up and run the original event, these include Jo Howe, Sandy Joakim, Christopher Lewis and Dr Fiona Peters. Moving Stories and ShadyJane also deserve acknowledgement for their wonderful productions of “Vanessa and Virginia” directed by Emma Gersch and “Sailing On” devised by ShadyJane, which were performed at the conference.

INTRODUCTION E. H. WRIGHT Beginnings This volume presents a series of essays developed from papers originally presented at the Bloomsbury Adaptations Conference held at Bath Spa University on 5 and 6 May 2010. The conference aimed to explore the impact of the Bloomsbury Group and their contemporaries on successive generations of literary and visual artists, while also addressing the tricky questions of adaptation, influence and inspiration—a topic discussed in part by T. S. Eliot in his essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent” (1919) and by Harold Bloom in his numerous critical works on the topic. Bloom, a confirmed “Bardolator” (Bloom 2011, 8), has spent a lifetime exploring the effect of Shakespeare, among many other canonical writers, on subsequent generations, as well as in a theoretical discussion of the anxiety such influence causes in later poets. Bloom’s seminal work on influence, which I was reading as I saw an early performance of my play Vanessa and Virginia, gave rise to the initial idea for a conference exploring how the Bloomsbury Group has inspired contemporary writers, performing artists and painters. The play and the 2008 novel by Susan Sellers on which it was based, were in turn motivated by and founded on Sellers’ and my own academic research in the field of Woolf studies. The novel (its style and subject matter) and its dramatic adaptation were linked to letters, diaries, memoirs, paintings and biographies of the artist Vanessa Bell and her sister Virginia Woolf. Narrated in the second person (in both play and novel), the reader inhabits Vanessa’s consciousness as she moves in a series of animated pictures through her memories from childhood to the death of Virginia. In addressing herself to her absent sister, Vanessa reveals the central elements in her own life story while exploring her complex feelings for her literary sister. As a narrator (and as she was reputedly in life), Vanessa is scrupulously honest, so in selecting Vanessa as narrator Sellers not only explores the life of the less well-known sister, both artistically and personally, but also creates a storyteller whose words are more credible

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than the famously unreliable Woolf. Vanessa’s honesty reveals her flaws as well as her strengths, thus rendering her a more sympathetic and approachable figure than the austere recluse that she appeared to be in life. Biographical events—Bell’s sense of responsibility for the sexlessness of the Woolfs’ marriage, her doubt of her own ability, her relationship with Duncan Grant; her miscarriage, the loss of her eldest son and ultimately the loss of her second self in the suicide of Virginia—are all instances that gave Sellers the chance to sketch in the blanks of Vanessa’s real-life silence. As a Woolf scholar, Sellers is meticulous in her attention to facts and details, but through Vanessa’s voice she reminds the reader that “art is not life” (2008, 77)—the book is a novel not a monograph after all, the play is a theatrical production not a documentary. Though “the anxiety of influence”, to use Harold Bloom’s expression, could have overwhelmed Sellers’s own artistry, it does not. Instead Sellers, the ephebe, rises to the challenge of reinventing the voice of Vanessa and re-presenting the relationship between the sisters in a manner that draws upon, but does not imitate, Woolf’s writing style and takes structural inspiration from Bell’s post-impressionist paintings. If we push this idea further, perhaps we might say that in this way Sellers has reached, arguably, a Bloomsian apophrades. As Bloom claims, this final stage of his “six revisionary ratios” allows the writings of the original poet and the new poet’s work to become linked to the extent that their work becomes each other’s. As Bloom puts it, “The dead may or may not return, but their voice comes alive, paradoxically never by mere imitation, but in the agonistic misprision performed upon powerful forerunners by only the most gifted of their successors” (1997, xxiv). Sellers is the contemporary author who “holds” her work “open to the precursor” rather than passively leaving her text open, which would allow the precursor to overwhelm it (1997, 16, my emphasis). Sellers’s work has yet to stand the test of time, so to claim her as “the most gifted” successor of one of Britain’s “most gifted” writers and one of the most interesting painters of the twentieth century is perhaps a step too far. However, what is impressive about the novel is the lack of fear about taking these famous and influential women and transforming their work and their life-stories into a new fictional enterprise. Rather than deny her “origins” Sellers faces them and proves that “origins are of particular importance to strong writers.” (Bloom 1997, xxxiv). From these links between the work of Woolf and Bell and a twenty-first-century novelist, who is also a leading academic on their work, came the central premise of the conference. Thus, these expanded conference papers aim to establish whether subsequent generations of artists were indebted, either knowingly

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and deliberately or sub/un-consciously, to Bloomsbury and their contemporaries.

The Boundaries of Bloomsbury Before examining the topic of influence in a little more depth it is necessary to pause and outline the remit of these essays, which encompass more writers than would ordinarily be considered as “Bloomsbury”. The term “The Bloomsbury Group” has been widely used, with many qualifications, to describe the varied collection of writers, artists and thinkers who lived in and around Bloomsbury in the early twentieth century. Scholars, writers and artists, including those at the heart of the “group”, have sorted these individuals into “Old” and “New” Bloomsbury, central and peripheral Bloomsbury, insiders and outsiders. They have spoken about, as Susan Reid highlights, “meshes, nets and networks” (2014, 90) in an attempt to outline a shape for the group and their dynamics.1 The exact composition of the group is contentious. Leonard Woolf explains in his autobiography that the term was applied to a largely imaginary group of persons with largely imaginary objects and characteristics. I was a member of this group and I was also one of a small number of persons who did in fact eventually form a kind of group of friends living in or around that district of London legitimately called Bloomsbury. (Woolf 1964, 21)

Leonard Woolf goes on to list these people as Vanessa, Virginia and Adrian Stephen, Clive Bell, Lytton Strachey, John Maynard Keynes, Duncan Grant, E. M. Forster, Saxon Sydney-Turner, Roger Fry, Desmond and Molly MacCarthy and himself; and then later Angelica, Julian and Quentin Bell and David (Bunny) Garnett. He also considers it to have come into being after his return from Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) in 1911, but its beginnings were established much earlier in 1905 after his departure for a civil service position in Ceylon. The original collection of family and friends were centred upon the Stephen siblings and Thoby Stephen’s Cambridge friends: Lytton Strachey, Saxon Sydney-Turner and Clive Bell, the latter of whom, like Thoby, had not been elected to the prestigious “secret” Cambridge society, The Apostles. The Apostles and Cambridge also connected the younger group with a wider and slightly older circle of thinkers and writers: the philosopher Bertrand Russell, the economist John Maynard Keynes, the writer E. M. Forster and the philosopher G. E. Moore, whose Principia Ethica significantly influenced the group’s moral and ethical outlooks—appropriately, Chris Lewis explores Moore’s impact

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in his essay for this volume. Others peripheral to, but still an important part of, the wider literary scene in which they moved included Katharine Mansfield, Hope Mirrlees, Elizabeth Bowen, and even some of the young 1930s poets introduced to Bloomsbury by John Lehmann who worked for the Woolfs at The Hogarth Press. To broaden the reach of this conference, papers exploring the effect of their direct contemporaries on each other and subsequent generations were also accepted for inclusion, though I am painfully aware that these writers did not consider themselves as “Bloomsbury” and were in many ways either contemptuous of it, envious of it or intimidated by it. Thus, for the purposes of the conference the widest definition of Bloomsbury and its associates was used, though the central thematic line of influence runs through all of the essays presented in this volume.

Modernist Influences and Anxieties Bloomsbury and its milieu were indebted to a plethora of ancient and modern thinkers, writers, artists and performers for their output, some of whom were openly acknowledged in introductions and essays; while others were rejected as “covering cherub[s]” (Bloom, 1972, 11) who overshadowed their work and led, perhaps, to the “guilt of indebtedness” (Bloom 1997, 117). As Bloom argues: readings of precursor works are necessarily defensive in part; if they were appreciative only, fresh creation would be stifled […]. Fresh metaphor, or inventive troping, always involves a departure from previous metaphor, and that departure depends upon at least partial turning away from or rejection of prior figuration. (Bloom 1994, 9)

David Ned Tobin claims that Eliot rejected the influence of certain writers such as Tennyson and Kipling because he was “defensive” about their power over his own work. Tobin demonstrates how Eliot’s “profound familiarity” with Tennyson’s work in particular was “coupled with a need to distance it, evaluate it, sometimes misrepresent or belittle it—and finally come to terms with it”, all of which were “unmistakable signs of the ‘anxiety of influence.’” (Tobin 1983, 91). The fear of being “pipped to the post”, of being the successor, also haunted Virginia Woolf, who worried in 1920 that her efforts to revolutionize the novel were “probably being better done by Mr. Joyce” (Woolf 1978, 68–69). Joyce’s experiments were closer to her own than Eliot’s were to Tennyson and thus the desire to be different was arguably, for her, more pressing and more worrying. Though Woolf’s mastery of language and form meant that

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she shook off Joyce as a “covering cherub”, Vanessa Bell was not so fortunate. Bell’s work was arguably influenced and somewhat overshadowed in her lifetime by the work of her partner, lover and friend, Duncan Grant; and, as many modern art historians argue, by the work of the seminal Fauvists. Whether inspirational or threatening there were certainly a variety of significant moments where precursors (ancient and immediate, acknowledged and unacknowledged) made important changes to the work of this group. The First Post-Impressionist Exhibition in December 1910, for example, was a dramatic turning point for the artists Duncan Grant and Vanessa Bell. Compare the largely realist portraits: Saxon Sydney-Turner at the Piano (c. 1908) and Lytton Strachey (1909) by Bell and Grant respectively that were painted prior to the exhibition with Bell’s Studland Beach (c.1912) and Grant’s Dancers (c. 1910–11) painted afterwards. In both of the later paintings there is little attempt at realism, features are suggested or absent, colours blocked in boldly, shapes starker and more definite. Both of the later works clearly echo the paintings of Cézanne, Van Gogh, Gauguin, Picasso and Matisse which were exhibited at that exhibition. Of course this radical alteration in style has left them open to attack by contemporary critics such as Andrew Graham-Dixon, who argues that their “homages to Matisse and to the ideals of Fauvism […] distorted and emasculated precisely what they set out to elevate” (1999, 206). To many modern art historians the influence of their nearest precursors overwhelms their work and undermines their own aims. Not so for Virginia Woolf who, in her 1924 essay “Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown”, implied that the exhibition had altered the art of writing character in fiction by defining December 1910 as the moment when “human character changed” (Woolf 1924, 4). It was a sentiment echoed by Katherine Mansfield who later claimed to Dorothy Brett that these painters: “taught me something about writing, which was queer, a kind of freedom—or rather, a shaking free.” (Mansfield 1929, 423). Mansfield was also clearly influenced by the work of Antonin Chekhov and her short story “The Child Who Was Tired” is a plagiarized version of Chekhov’s “Sleepy”. However, her reading of Chekhov eventually led her to evolve his method to the extent that she reached a point of apophrades with her Russian counterpart. As an obsessive reader, Virginia Woolf was also clearly aware that her own writing owed much to the work of her predecessors, as well as her contemporaries such as Mansfield and Joyce with whose work Woolf’s has been linked. In the humorous introduction to her mock-biography, Orlando, she explicitly acknowledges her debt to several precursors, by claiming that certain elements of the novel can be

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attributed to the “many friends” who “have helped me in writing this book”: Some are dead and so illustrious that I scarcely dare name them, yet no one can read or write without being perpetually in the debt of Defoe, Sir Thomas Browne, Sterne, Sir Walter Scott, Lord Macaulay, Emily Brontë, De Quincey, and Walter Pater,—to name the first that come to mind. Others are alive, and though perhaps as illustrious in their own way, are less formidable for that very reason. (2008, 5)

Of course the discussion of influence and canonicity is not new, as W. Jackson Bate, Harold Bloom and Frank Kermode have demonstrated, and it was clearly a subject of interest in and around Bloomsbury. T. S. Eliot, for example, explored the issue in “Tradition and the Individual Talent” (1919) and in “What is a Classic?” (1944). Their theoretical consideration of influence, their fear of being overshadowed by certain precursors and their reaction against those who threatened or attacked their originality, and, conversely, their embracing and welcoming of others into their work, seems to fit with Harold Bloom’s six revisionary ratios (clinamen, tesserae, kenosis, daemonization, askesis, apophrades) whereby the later poet, in order to become a great or canonical poet, travels through six phases in which s/he imitates, challenges, revises and eventually embraces the precursor by opening his/her work to that of their predecessor.2 Certainly who and what influenced Bloomsbury and their contemporaries has been a central concern in discussion of their work, but tracing their influence on the generations that followed is more difficult? Was their success in so many fields overwhelming to subsequent generations? Did they in turn become Bloomsian “covering cherub[s]” against whom their artistic successors have struggled to differentiate themselves? The Modernists at the heart of the Bloomsbury Group clearly perceived themselves to be influential in their own lifetimes. For example, the skit performed at Charleston Farmhouse, Vanessa Bell’s country home, on 30 August 1936 entitled “A Hundred Years After, or, Ladies and Gentlemen,” recognized, albeit comically, the longevity of their work. The play complimented its audience by suggesting that their fame would continue into the future—even if the truth was somewhat distorted by the passing of the years. In this production, the confidence in their fame and their work, though amusingly distorted, is clear. Indeed, the prediction that Charleston would, one day, become a museum to the group has been fulfilled. “100 Years After” exemplifies the self-congratulatory nature of Bloomsbury, highlighting their self-confidence, as well as their awareness of segregation and their celebration of difference from the ordinary or

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average. It was arguably their sense of self-worth and the feeling that they were to be influential to future writers and artists that earned them the criticism of intellectual snobbery levelled at them by Ben Nicholson, Ethel Smyth, Katherine Mansfield, D. H. Lawrence and Wyndham Lewis, among others. Certainly a wide range of artists and writers have claimed to be the heirs of Bloomsbury and British Modernism more generally, or, at the very least, have plundered their precursors’ work to serve their own ends.3 The influence of these modernists is felt even in media in which they did not work. T. S. Eliot’s poetry, for example, has had an impact on the work of pop musicians, such as Win Butler, David Bowie and PJ Harvey, as well as painters such as Marylin Peck and Felix Wilkinson, who claim to take elements of his work to form their own.4 Other contemporary creatives rely on the life-stories of Bloomsbury figures for inspiration, such as novelists and playwrights: Susan Sellers, E. H. Wright, Amy Rosenthal, Vincent O’Sullivan, Sigrid Nunez and the theatre group, ShadyJane.5 The work of figures such as Eliot, Woolf, Bell, Grant, Fry, Mansfield and Forster is consequently not only “held open to the precursor” (Bloom 1997, 16), but also to the successor, who, if a talented artist (whatever their medium), will reach some kind of freeing creative synthesis with their precursors. They will possess the ideal blend of “difference and debt” (Ellis 2007, 1). But this blend is not so easy to achieve. The influence of these great Modernists can cause the same problems for contemporary writers or artists as their most illustrious predecessors caused them. Bate and Bloom warn that the central issue in dealing with these literary and artistic heavyweights is the question of originality, or as Bate asks: “What is there left to do?” (1991, 3, original emphasis). Eliot was acutely aware of the pressures on the artist of being the successor of a great poet who has seemingly created a finality in their art which excludes the possibility of originality in their heirs. “Not only”, Eliot argued, “every great poet, but every genuine, though lesser poet, fulfils once for all some possibility of the language, and so leaves one possibility less for his successors.” (2009, 66).6 Bate claims that this leaves the writer with a “loss of self-confidence as he compares what he feels able to do with the rich heritage of past art and literature.” (1991, 6–7). If previous generations write off, as Eliot suggests, certain possibilities in poetry and thus the ability to be original in certain specific ways, then, Eliot, Bate and Bloom argue, subsequent writers must face this obstacle of originality and either acknowledge and overcome it, thus becoming “strong” poets (Bate 1991, 80) whose work stands the test of time; or, succumb to self-doubt and become lesser poets,

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respectable, but not canonical. Indeed, both Bate and Bloom eventually ask whether originality is even necessary for a writer, and by extension any artist, to become canonical in their fields. Perhaps, Bate argues, originality is a “self-created prison” (1991, 133), a “misprision”, as Bloom calls it, which kills creativity (1997, 7). Instead, the successor should embrace the work of the previous generation, not misread it for his/her own benefit, nor “correct” the precursor’s perceived “mistakes”, nor even seek to be completely original. The later poet or artist should “hold […] his own work open again to the precursor’s work” so “that at first we might believe the wheel has come full circle, and that we are back in the later poet’s flooded apprenticeship, before his strength began to assert itself in the revisionary ratios. But now the poem is held open to the precursor, where once it was open” (Bloom 1997, 15–16). This is an active choice by the later artist which allows him/her to take control of their creativity. Rather than coasting along in the wake of the precursor the later poet accepts and absorbs the precursor’s work and thus becomes a strong contender for creative eternity. Certainly, as Bloom argues, “it takes some time even to see influence accurately.” (Bloom 1994, 522) and the successors of Bloomsbury have certainly been hard-pressed to find something unique to say in a unique idiom even if “strong” enough to accept their creative heritage. To some, Bloomsbury has become a Bloomsian “covering Cherub”—a set of gifted thinkers, poets, novelists and artists whose achievements have occasionally overshadowed their successors, or been rejected and “corrected” by them. “Repeatedly”, Bate claims, “we find that a cluster of genius in which an art is carried to the highest pitch is then followed by a dearth” of writers who give up on writing overwhelmed by previous achievements, “or else” writers who “manufactur[e] the past”, or are guilty of “searching, in compensation for novelty for its own sake.” (Bate 1991, 82). Is this true of the artists who followed in the wake of Bloomsbury? Woolf argued obliquely in her essay “The Leaning Tower” that her generation were the true artists, while the poets of the 1930s (among whom she lists Day-Lewis, Auden, Spender, Isherwood and MacNeice) wrote “politician’s poetry” (Woolf 2011, 272). She considered them to be lesser poets because they were enslaved by their political beliefs, desperate to reject their heritage and arrogant enough to presume they were cutting a new path, but not gifted enough or “strong” enough to produce anything lasting. To Woolf they offered “novelty for its own sake”, but to them they were providing tesserae, a “completion” and correction of where Bloomsbury had stopped short or gone wrong (Bloom 1997, 66). This, of course, would be Woolf’s perspective. Whether she is wrong or right is

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ultimately subjective, though the presence of these poets in collections of canonical British poetry suggests that she is wrong. However, this volume begins to show that the early twentieth century modernists in and around Bloomsbury have not overwhelmed the work of subsequent writers and artists, but have inspired, influenced and have themselves been transformed by later work. As T. S. Eliot argued in “Tradition and the Individual Talent”, “the past should be altered by the present as much as the present is directed by the past” (1999, 15).

The Essays In her opening essay for this collection, Sarah Roger explores the link between T. S. Eliot’s discussion of canonicity and influence in “Tradition and the Individual Talent” and the work of Harold Bloom using the theories of Jorge Luis Borges in “Kafka and His Precursors” as a bridge between the two. By linking the ideas of influence put forward by Eliot, Bloom and Borges, Roger demonstrates the complex interconnections that exist between authors, not only in influencing each other’s work, but also in shaping each other’s ideas about influence itself. This piece sets up many of the concerns explored more obliquely in subsequent essays which show specifically how the precursors and their successors have informed one another’s work. Christopher Lewis’s essay takes a philosophical approach and aims to reveal the contradictory ethical impulses which were present in the “original doctrine” (2014, 16) of the Bloomsbury Group, before the outbreak of war in 1914 provoked their firm allegiance to humanism and individualism. His philosophical discussion examines the causes of Bloomsbury’s early ethical ambivalence and suggests that the consolidation of their legacy in the late 20th and early 21st century has embraced Bloomsbury’s “ethical individualism” (2014, 20) while neglecting to consider the early adherence of Bell and Keynes to the neoPlatonic absolutes Truth, Beauty and Goodness. Lewis explores how the group’s ethical outlook was both a reaction against Victorianism and a pre-emptive vision of future ethical constructs. While Roger and Lewis examine the theoretical and philosophical questions of artistic and ethical influence, Ian Blyth, Bethany Layne, .LUE\-RULVDQG$JDWD:RĨQLDNDGGUHVVWKHLPSDFWRI9LUJLQLD:RROIRQH of Bloomsbury’s most significant figures, on the work of contemporary novelists Ali Smith, Sigrid Nunez, Susan Sellers and Jeanette Winterson. Ian Blyth muses, in a style reminiscent of Woolf herself, on the “likeness” between Woolf’s fictional and polemical writing and Ali Smith’s creative

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work. Blyth raises unresolved and potentially unresolvable questions about the moment where influence over, or being “like”, another writer becomes a matter for the specific reader, rather than a conscious decision by the writer to be “like” her precursor. Jeanette Winterson, on the other hand, RSHQO\ DFNQRZOHGJHV KHU GHEW WR :RROI DV :RĨQLDN GHPRQVWUDWHV forming a mutually beneficial bond between the two writers whereby Winterson keeps Woolf safe for posterity while Woolf provides Winterson with a literary mother in whose reflected glory she can bask. There is little evidence to suggest that Winterson’s debts to Woolf’s work have caused KHU DQ\ FUHDWLYH ³DQ[LHW\´ $V :RĨQLDN SRLQWV RXW :LQWHUVRQ¶V HJR allows her to assimilate, interrogate and reinvent Woolf’s experiments with poetic prose, feminism and gender fluidity, while modern media and Winterson’s use of it for self-promotion alter the question of canonicity and influence. Kirby Joris and Bethany Layne, on the other hand, highlight different biofictional interpretations of Woolf’s life in Nunez’s Mitz: The Marmoset of Bloomsbury (1998), a re-invention of Woolf’s Flush (1933); and Sellers’ Vanessa and Virginia (2008), a novel addressed in the second person from Vanessa Bell to her sister Virginia Woolf. In Sigrid Nunez’s novella Layne argues that Nunez’s liminal genre reclaims Woolf from the stereotypes that limit her legacy and extends Woolf’s own creative experiment with her comic biography, Flush. Kirby Joris also examines biofiction in connection with Susan Sellers’s novel Vanessa and Virginia, but complicates the genre by reading the book as an example of metaphysical detective biofiction. Joris argues that the story is an attempt to give Vanessa the chance to “find” her dead sister in the manner of an arm-chair detective, thus allowing the reader to understand both sisters individually as well as their relationship with each other. Joris also suggests that the novel gives both the author Susan Sellers and narrator Vanessa Bell the chance for Vanessa to destroy some of the myths created by Virginia about her character and to complete certain blank spaces in their life-stories. Thus, the successor (Sellers) blends fact with fiction in order to speculate on the lives of her precursors (Bell and Woolf) who provide not only the bare bones of the plot, but influence more subtly the language, style and structure of her writing. The bio-drama, bio-fiction and bio-poetry of Vincent O’Sullivan, Lorae Parry, Amy Rosenthal and C. K. Stead, all of whom fictionalize Katherine Mansfield and her milieu (who had an uneasy relationship with the Bloomsbury group) comes under scrutiny in the essays by Susan Reid and Gerri Kimber. Reid and Kimber discuss the relative merits, perils and pitfalls of transforming Frieda and D. H. Lawrence, Katherine Mansfield,

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John Middleton Murry and Ida Baker’s turbulent lives into art. Using Rosenthal’s On the Rocks, Parry’s Bloomsbury Women & The Wild Colonial Girl and O’Sullivan’s Jones and Jones, Reid illustrates how biodrama encourages an exploration of the turbulent relationships between the real-life characters on the periphery of Bloomsbury and demonstrates how their personal friction between themselves and Bloomsbury influenced their creativity. Gerri Kimber, on the other hand, examines the work of C. K. Stead whose critical work on Mansfield has spilled over into his creative work. Kimber analyses Stead’s novel Mansfield and two poems “Jealousy I” and “Jealousy II” in order to show, not only how Mansfield was both influenced and repelled by Bloomsbury, but also how the later writer, C. K. Stead, has been inspired by both Mansfield’s lifestory and her writing. While other critics deal with the impact of this literary movement on contemporary authors, Sandeep Parmar, Annabel Wynne and Rebecca Gordon demonstrate how the group’s nearest successors were affected by, and reciprocally influenced, the work of Bloomsbury. Sandeep Parmar, Hope Mirrlees’s biographer and an editor of her work, explores Mirrlees’s poem “Paris” (1919), which was published by the Woolfs at The Hogarth Press, and her 1924 novel The Counterplot in connection with the work of both Virginia Woolf and the classical scholar Jane Harrison. Parmar suggests that Mirrlees’s novel which contains a drama and was influenced by Harrison’s “tribal ritualism” (2014, 133), played a particularly important part in the composition of Woolf’s posthumously published novel, Between the Acts (1941). Annabel Wynne, considers the mutual haunting of Elizabeth Bowen and Virginia Woolf through a close-reading of Woolf’s “A Haunted House” (1921) and “The Lady in the Looking Glass: A Reflection” (1929) in connection with Bowen’s urban gothic short story “The Demon Lover” (1945). Wynne demonstrates not only how Woolf as the precursor left a mark on Bowen’s work, but also makes the case that Bowen, initially heralded in early reviews as a new Katherine Mansfield, influenced Woolf. Similarly, Rebecca Stewart traces the impact of E. M. Forster on his literary heir, Christopher Isherwood, whose autobiographical fiction bears the marks not only of Forster’s realist “truth”, but also Isherwood’s reading of Freudian psychoanalysis, which Stewart credits the Woolfs and Bloomsbury for publishing and promoting. Stewart’s essay demonstrates how writers can deliberately set out to use and adapt the work of those they admire; in Isherwood’s case he uses, adapts and then jettisons the work of experimental modernists in favour of the more controlled realism of E. M. Forster.

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The performing arts have also felt the impact of Bloomsbury aesthetics as Sue Ash, Jens Peters, Shelley Saguaro and Lucy Tyler suggest in their essays. Contemporary work by Serge Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes and its star Vaslav Nijinsky is explored by Ash who argues that while the Russian ballet influenced Bloomsbury, there was a mutual transaction specifically in the ballet Jeux which affected and was inspired by Bloomsbury’s gender fluidity and formal artistic experimentation in other mediums such as poetry and prose fiction. Jens Peters, on the other hand, discusses the challenges posed by adapting Woolf’s work for the stage. Peter’s essay teases out the difference between metaphor and metonymy and the struggle to delineate the detailed interiority of Woolf’s characters in mediums which require external representation. How can stage and screen represent the subtleties of the inner-life and the ambiguities in Woolf’s work in a visual way? Peters, using his own adaptation of Woolf’s The Waves as an example, posits the idea that the cruder metonymic tools should be replaced by the subtler more abstract forms offered by metaphor. In Shelley Saguaro and Lucy Tyler’s collaborative essay, the pageant performed by the villagers in Woolf’s Between the Acts is linked to “ecoperformance” (Bealer quoted in Saguaro and Tyler 2014, 207), a theoretical approach which explores the pressures placed on al fresco theatre by the natural world, as well as how and why it has become an important part of British culture. Woolf, according to Saguaro and Tyler, “offers a compelling example of outdoor theatre and its practitioners’ methodologies, which can be compared (and are useful) to a contemporary practice of the art form.” (2014, 214). The volume concludes with a piece that uses as its foundation interviews with artists working in the “Bloomsbury Tradition”. In this essay Hana Leaper demonstrates how Vanessa Bell has become England’s first “Old Mistress”, an inspiration to contemporary artists and artisans including The Singh Twins and Anna Frewster (founder of The Bloomsbury Letterhead Press), as well as artists directly descended from members of the group, such as Cressida Bell and Sophie MacCarthy. Leaper also notices how design houses such as Laura Ashley, Mulberry, Anthropologie and Sanderson have used Bell’s work commercially; not only direct reprints of certain designs, such as the Bloomsbury prints resurrected by Laura Ashley, but also how they have used “Bloomsbury” as a brand which sells a lifestyle linked to the group’s ethos. Thus, companies jettison the real work of the artist and adopt the “spirit” that they symbolize instead. Leaper notes that Bloomsbury is linked in the popular consciousness with “freedom”, “friendship”, “sexual deviancy and bohemian glamour” which appeals to the contemporary consumer (2014,

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243). Bell’s name, art and design work (along with other members of her milieu) have thus been transformed into a symbol, freely reinvented and reinterpreted, by companies for commercial purposes. Each contribution to this collection offers a new and sometimes surprising insight into the extensive effects of Bloomsbury and its wider artistic connections on its nearest and most recent successors. Naturally certain figures, forms and genres are absent in a volume dependent on the lottery of conference papers, though this does leave a window open for other scholars tracing the impact of the work, ethics and life-styles of early British-based modernists.

Works Cited Ackroyd, Peter. 1984. T. S. Eliot. London: Hamish Hamilton, Ltd. Bate, W. Jackson. 1991. The Burden of the Past and the English Poet. London: Harvard University Press. First published in 1970. Bloom, Harold. 1972. Yeats. Oxford University Press. First published 1970. ––. 1994. The Western Canon, NY, San Diego and London: Harcourt Brace & Company. ––. 1997. The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry. Second edition. New York: Oxford University Press. First published 1973. ––. 2011. The Anatomy of Influence: Literature as a Way of Life, Yale University Press. Eliot, T. S. 1999. “Tradition and the Individual Talent.” In Selected Essays. 13–22. London: Faber and Faber. First published in 1919. ––. 2009. “What is a Classic.” In On Poetry and Poets. 52–74. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. First published in 1944. Graham-Dixon, Andrew. 1999. A History of British Art. London: BBC Books. Ellis, Steve. 2007. Virginia Woolf and The Victorians. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ellmann, M. 2010. The Nets of Modernism: Henry James, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, and Sigmund Freud. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kermode, Frank. 2004. Pleasure and Change: The aesthetics of canon. New York: Oxford University Press. Leaper, Hana. 2014. “The Legacy of Vanessa Bell and the Heart of Brand Bloomsbury.” In Bloomsbury Influences, edited by E. H. Wright. 229– 246. Cambridge Scholars Publishing.

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Lewis, Christopher. 2014. “Reassessing the Ethical Influence of the Bloomsbury Group.” In Bloomsbury Influences, edited by E. H. Wright. 16–29. Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Mansfield, Katherine. 1929. The Letters of Katherine Mansfield, Volume Two, edited by J. Middleton Murry. New York: Alfred A. Knopf Inc. Parmar, Sandeep. 2014. “Plot and Counterplot: Hope Mirrlees and Virginia Woolf.” In Bloomsbury Influences, edited by E. H. Wright. 129–143. Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Peck, Marylin. 2004. The Waste Land Suite. Macmillan Education AU. Saguaro, Shelley and Tyler, Lucy. 2014. “‘Nature Once More had Taken Her Part’: Recuperating Anon, the common voice and the uncovered theatre.” In Bloomsbury Influences, edited by E. H. Wright. 207–228. Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Sellers, Susan. 2008. Vanessa and Virginia. Edinburgh: Two Ravens Press. Southworth, Helen. 2010. Introduction to Leonard and Virginia Woolf, The Hogarth Press and the Networks of Modernism, edited by Helen Southworth. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Tobin, David Ned. 1983. The Presence of the Past: T. S. Eliot’s Victorian Inheritance. Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press. Woolf, Leonard. 1964. Beginning Again: An Autobiography of the Years 1911-1918. London: The Hogarth Press. Woolf, Virginia. 1924. Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown. London: Hogarth Press. ––. 1978. The Diary of Virginia Woolf, Volume 2, edited by Anne Olivier Bell. London: Hogarth Press. ––. 2008. Orlando. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ––. 2011. “The Leaning Tower.” In The Essays of Virginia Woolf, Volume 6, edited by Stuart N. Clarke. 259–283. London: Hogarth Press. Wright, E. H. 2013. Vanessa and Virginia. London: Play Dead Press.

Notes 1

See B. K. Scott 1995, Ellmann 2010 and Southworth 2010. See Bloom 1997, 14–16 for a brief synopsis of each. 3 See, for example, the work of novelist Jeanette Winterson who claims links with Woolf and poet Tim Liardet who calls himself a “modernist poet”. 4 See http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/musicblog/2012/may/23/ts-eliot-poetry-popmusic, accessed 13 October 2013 and Peck 2004. Felix Wilkinson’s artwork was exhibited at the Bloomsbury Adaptations Conference and he kindly gave permission for us to use the front cover image for this collection. 2

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ShadyJane performed “Sailing On” at the Bloomsbury Adaptations Conference, 2010. See http://www.shadyjane.co.uk/shows-ensemble-sailing/. 6 It was an anxiety explored, as Bate notes, by other writers including Samuel Johnson and John Keats.

PART I PHILOSOPHY AND ANXIETIES OF INFLUENCE

CHAPTER ONE CRITICS AND THEIR PRECURSORS: THEORIES OF INFLUENCE IN T. S. ELIOT, JORGE LUIS BORGES AND HAROLD BLOOM SARAH ROGER Critics have devoted substantial attention to the theoretical works of T. S. Eliot and Harold Bloom, particularly Eliot’s “Tradition and the Individual Talent” (1919) and Bloom’s The Anxiety of Influence (1973, 1997). These texts are now viewed as part of the tradition surrounding concepts of the literary tradition and the influence of earlier writers upon later ones. Bloom’s contemporary Geoffrey Hartman, subsequent critics such as Gregory Jay and Graham Allen, and more recent critics such as William Schultz and Paul Fry have highlighted how Eliot serves as a point of origin for—and differentiation from—Bloom. Eliot proposes a pattern of influence that focuses on how the work of an individual writer fits within the preceding tradition, while Bloom proposes a pattern of influence that emphasises how the work of a later writer (usually a poet) surpasses the work of his precursors.1 There is a noteworthy, unexamined connection between these two writers via Jorge Luis Borges, whose writing illuminates the path of influence that runs from Eliot to Bloom. “Tradition and the Individual Talent” is a precursor for Borges’s “Kafka and His Precursors” (1951), and the connection between the two has been established by critics including James Atlas, José Luis Venegas, and Juan E. de Castro. Similarly, Daniel Balderston has shown Borges’s essay to be a precursor to The Anxiety of Influence. Although Borges has been discussed with respect to the writer he follows and the one whom he precedes, and although the links between Eliot and Bloom have been explored in depth, the connections between all three have not been considered. This study triangulates Eliot, Bloom, and Borges by analysing “Tradition and the Individual Talent” and The Anxiety of Influence before interposing “Kafka

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and His Precursors” between the two.2 By looking at all three theorists of influence together, a train of development appears from Eliot to Bloom by way of Borges, highlighting the points at which Eliot and Bloom connect and diverge, and revealing the spaces where their theories can be developed further.

“Tradition and the Individual Talent” Published in two instalments in September and December 1919 in the magazine The Egoist (and subsequently included in The Sacred Wood), “Tradition and the Individual Talent” addresses the relationship between a poet and the preceding tradition, focusing as much on the value of earlier works as it does on the contributions of later ones: One of the facts that might come to light in this process is our tendency to insist, when we praise a poet, upon those aspects of his work in which he least resembles anyone else. In these aspects or parts of his work we pretend to find what is individual, what is the peculiar essence of the man. […] Whereas if we approach a poet without this prejudice we shall often find that not only the best, but the most individual parts of his work may be those in which the dead poets, his ancestors, assert their immortality most vigorously. (Eliot 1928, 48)

This is not to say that, for Eliot, a poet must be wholly derivative of the preceding tradition: “To conform merely would be for the new work not really to conform at all; it would not be new, and would therefore not be a work of art” (50). To write something worthwhile, a poet must innovate with an eye to what has come before. When past and present are given equal weight in the creation of a work, the result is a text that fits seamlessly within—and contributes to— the poetic order: The existing monuments form an ideal order among themselves, which is modified by the introduction of the new (the really new) work of art among them. The existing order is complete before the new work arrives; for order to persist after the supervention of novelty, the whole existing order must be, if ever so slightly, altered; and so the relations, proportions, values of each work of art toward the whole are readjusted; and this is conformity between the old and the new. (50)

Eliot’s view of tradition as an ordered collection of monuments has implications for the poet and the reader, requiring in both an awareness of the literary tradition. The poet cannot create something of value if he does

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not have “a feeling [for] the whole of the literature of Europe from Homer and within it the whole of the literature of his own country” (49), while the reader must take a contextualised approach to reading in order to appreciate the new poet’s work. Both the writer and the reader must remember that literary works are not created, and do not exist, in a vacuum. The result of this “seemingly ahistorical awareness of a permanent and authoritative tradition” is that no improvements can be made to the literary tradition as a whole (Schwartz 2009, 17). Each work adds to the tradition without bettering it and without surpassing anything that has come before. This does not mean that there is no change, for each addition modifies the way that readers perceive connections between the tradition’s components: “Whoever has approved this idea of order, of the form of European, of English literature, will not find it preposterous that the past should be altered by the present as much as the present is directed by the past” (Eliot 1928, 50). Eliot considers the effects of this atemporal relationship between texts in the essay’s second half. Employing the analogy of the poet as catalyst, he argues that “the more perfect the artist, the more completely separate in him will be the man who suffers and the mind which creates; the more perfectly will the mind digest and transmute the passions which are its material” (54). The implications of this view are for the reader, who should endeavour to read poetry without attempting to understand the poet, such that the work stands only in relation to other works and not to the poet himself. This is a point of contention in Bloom’s and Borges’s subsequent theories about influence, which take divergent stances towards the experiences of the writer and the role of the reader.

The Anxiety of Influence Published more than fifty years after “Tradition and the Individual Talent”, Bloom’s The Anxiety of Influence argues that a writer (ephebe) feels a sense of anxiety when faced with the monumental, seemingly unsurpassable work of his precursor. To overcome this anxiety, the ephebe must swerve away from the preceding poet’s influence, returning to it only when his writing has become so strong that it appears that he has created the work of his predecessor, rather than the other way around. Unlike Eliot, Bloom places the work of the later writer ahead of the earlier one, as he believes in a constantly improving body of poetry. Eliot is Bloom’s precursor in two ways: in a direct way as advocated by “Tradition and the Individual Talent”, and in an antithetical way as

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advocated by The Anxiety of Influence. With respect to the latter (and in the spirit of his own theory), Bloom goes to great pains to differentiate himself from Eliot. Where Eliot advocates continuity in the poetic tradition, Bloom argues for an attempted rupture. Eliot stands for change without improvement, which requires a poet’s respect for—and participation in—the tradition. By contrast, Bloom has a revisionary view of poetry that privileges the individual who swerves away from that which has come before. Where Eliot emphasises tradition, Bloom prefers individual talent. Eliot wants the poet to be incorporated into the poetic order, while Bloom believes that poetry is personal and that the reward for creating an original work is the poet’s immortality. This is achieved at the expense of the precursor. To come up with this theory, Bloom seems to wilfully twist Eliot, a move that may be rooted in his “lifelong set-to” with his predecessor (Soderholm 2010, 104). Bloom’s writing reveals that he feels no fondness for his predecessor, demonstrating his opposition to Eliot’s theory by making personal that which Eliot believes should be impersonal: An obsessive reader of poetry growing up in the nineteen thirties and forties entered a critical world dominated by the opinions and example of Eliot. To speak out of even narrower personal experience, anyone adopting the profession of teaching literature in the early nineteen fifties entered a discipline virtually enslaved not only by Eliot’s insights but by the entire span of his preferences and prejudices. […] It is difficult to prophesy that Eliot’s criticism will prove to be of permanent value. (Bloom 1985, 1, 5)

Based on Bloom’s dislike of Eliot, it comes as no surprise that he wants to swerve away from that which has come before, and that he advocates for the ephebe (Bloom) to compensate for the shortcomings of the precursor (Eliot). In an attempt to improve upon his precursor’s theory, Bloom turns from Eliot in The Anxiety of Influence, swerving away by misreading Eliot’s work after the fashion Bloom proposes: And what is Poetic Influence anyway? Can the study of it really be anything more than the wearisome industry of source-hunting, of allusioncounting, an industry that will soon touch apocalypse anyway when it passes from scholars to computers? Is there not the shibboleth bequeathed us by Eliot, that the good poet steals, while the poor poet betrays an influence, borrows a voice? (Bloom 1997, 31, original emphasis)

Bloom focuses on the fact that Eliot’s theory advocates a traceable, tradition-oriented path from one poet to the next, but he ignores Eliot’s

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second tenet, which is that the poet must act as a catalyst who transforms the work of the tradition into something that is different (even if not better). In reading Eliot as such, Bloom reduces Eliot’s view to one that privileges tradition to the exclusion of individual talent—a perspective that conflicts with Bloom’s own idea that the later poet should improve upon the earlier one. It is at this point that Bloom tries to diverge from Eliot, yet it is also where the two critics converge. Where Eliot situates the precursor as the source Bloom situates the ephebe, whose work Bloom believes comes into its own when the earlier author appears to be indebted to the later one (rather than the other way around). As Fry explains, “Eliot’s first gambit is Bloom’s sixth, apophrades: the most ‘individual’ parts of the mature poet’s work ‘may be those in which the dead poets, his ancestors, assert their immortality most vigorously’” (221). The way Eliot and Bloom reach this conclusion may be different, but the end result is the same. For both, the strength of the new poet lies in the interplay between the ideas that separate him from, yet join him to, the preceding tradition. There are other similarities between the two critics. In turning the ephebe away from the precursor, Bloom implicitly requires the precursor to be someone worth swerving from. In Bloom’s case, this worthy precursor (although he does not admit it) is Eliot himself. Employing the linear approach to precursors that Eliot proposes, it appears that Bloom cannot shake Eliot’s presence. In “How to Live with the Infinite Regress of Strong Misreading” (2010), Fry traces the correspondences between the two, demonstrating how Bloom’s overarching structure—his six revisionary ratios—can be mapped onto Eliot’s theory of influence (221– 24). Despite Bloom’s desire to leave his precursor behind, he agrees with Eliot that poets cannot blindly follow the tradition that comes before, and that there is a reciprocal relationship between writers, whereby the later poet’s work influences readers’ assessments of the earlier poet’s work and vice versa. Eliot’s role as Bloom’s precursor is reinforced by the fact that even though Bloom rejects Eliot’s ideas, he mentions his predecessor seven times in The Anxiety of Influence: five times with reference to the relationship between Eliot and other poets, and twice revealing aspects of Bloom’s own relationship with Eliot. In one of these references (cited above, 31) Bloom provides a limited (and limiting) reading of Eliot that focuses on where the ephebe steals from his precursor, rather than how the ephebe’s theft catalyses the production of something new. In another, Bloom refers to Shelley, Borges and Eliot as part of the tradition of studying tradition that precedes him. When Bloom situates his own ideas

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with respect to theirs, he alludes to the fact that his theory is part of a tradition too: Shelley speculated that poets of all ages contributed to one Great Poem perpetually in progress. Borges remarks that poets create their precursors. If the dead poets, as Eliot insisted, constituted their successors’ particular advance in knowledge, that knowledge is still their successors’ creation, made by the living for the needs of the living. But poets, or at least the strongest among them, do not read necessarily as even the strongest of critics read. Poets are neither ideal nor common readers, neither Arnoldian nor Johnsonian. (Bloom 1997, 19)

Bloom mentions his precursors (Eliot and Borges) with reference to their roles as readers of the preceding tradition, but his interest in the reader is limited to the role of the poet as a reader—and it is only a passing interest, as is also the case for Eliot. By contrast, Borges emphasises the reader’s role in perceiving and shaping the tradition. This distinction invites a reconsideration of Eliot’s and Bloom’s limiting emphasis on the writer, their partiality for the Anglo-American literary tradition, the linear narrative they provide for the path of influence, and their focus on the writer at the expense of the reader. Some of these shortcomings can be circumvented by Borges’s theory of influence, and enlisting Borges as an interlocutor can help explain the relationship between Eliot and Bloom.

“Kafka and His Precursors” In “Kafka and His Precursors”, Borges explores the path of influence from the perspective of the reader. He says that writers he read subsequent to Kafka—but whose works were written earlier—seem to him to be reminiscent of Kafka. They also seem similar to each other in a way that would be impossible to intuit without reading Kafka first: If I am not mistaken, the heterogeneous pieces I have enumerated resemble Kafka; if I am not mistaken, not all of them resemble each other. This second fact is the more significant. In each of these texts we find Kafka’s idiosyncrasy to a greater or lesser degree, but if Kafka had never written a line, we would not perceive this quality; in other words, it would not exist. (236)

Starting with Zeno of Elea and moving through the works of Han Yu, Søren Kierkegaard, Robert Browning, Léon Bloy, and Lord Dunsany, Borges explores their Kafkian elements. In each, the later writer (Franz Kafka) draws out hidden qualities in the works of the earlier. This idea is

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reminiscent of Eliot’s assertion that “the past should be altered by the present as much as the present is directed by the past” (Eliot 1928, 50). It also anticipates Bloom’s concept of apophrades: The later poet, in his own final phase, already burdened by an imaginative solitude that is almost a solipsism, holds his own poem so open again to the precursor’s work that at first we might believe the wheel has come full circle, and that we are back in the later poet’s flooded apprenticeship, before his strength began to assert itself in the revisionary ratios. But the poem is now held open to the precursor, where once it was open, and the uncanny effect is that the new poem’s achievement makes it seem to us, not as though the precursor were writing it, but as though the later poet himself had written the precursor’s characteristic work. (Bloom 1997, 15– 16, original emphasis)

Unlike Eliot or Bloom, Borges is not interested in the way an ephebe perceives his precursor. He is concerned with how readers perceive the relationship between the two, and what the implications of this approach are for readers’ understanding of their works: In the critics’ vocabulary, the word “precursor” is indispensable, but it should be cleansed of all connotation of polemics or rivalry. The fact is that every writer creates his own precursors. His work modifies our conception of the past, as it will modify the future. In this correlation the identity or plurality of the men involved is unimportant. (2000b, 236, original emphasis)

Borges makes four claims that together move influence to the domain of the reader. First, he says that influence does not immediately imply conflict, as it does for Bloom. Second, he says that a writer creates his own precursors, a statement that may mean that each writer chooses those he will emulate or, more radically, that each writer is responsible for drawing something new out of the work of his precursors through the work he creates. Third, Borges shifts his focus towards the reader with the assertion that the writer’s work “modifies our conception of the past, as it will modify the future” (236, my emphasis). What matters is not just how one writer influences another, but also how writers influence readers. This perspective makes it possible for Borges to use his reading of Kafka to draw out related elements in authors whom Kafka never read and who have nothing in common with each other. Finally, Borges takes this idea to its logical conclusion by asserting that the writer’s identity and the things that make his work seem unique are insignificant when viewed from the perspective of the reader, for whom the writer is part of a composite

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tradition. Borges stretches this idea to absurd ends in the short story “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” (1940) where he imagines a world where “all works are the creation of one author, who is atemporal and anonymous,” an idea that echoes Eliot’s view that poetry “is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality” and, for the reader, “To divert interest from the poet to the poetry is a laudable aim” (Borges 2000c, 3–38; Eliot 1928, 58, 59). Borges is indebted to Eliot for the ideas underlying “Kafka and His Precursors”, a fact he acknowledges in a footnote following his claim that “[Kafka’s] work modifies our conception of the past, as it will modify the future” (236). This footnote points to the section of “Tradition and the Individual Talent” where Eliot says “Whoever has approved this idea of order, of the form of European, of English literature, will not find it preposterous that the past should be altered by the present as much as the present is directed by the past” (50).3 While Borges’s reference shows that he is in dialogue with Eliot, the wide range of critical interpretations of this connection suggests that his intentions are anything but clear. Nicholas Shumway says “with regards to tradition […] Borges and Eliot are in substantial agreement” (262–63). Patricia Novillo-Corvalán says Borges’s essay “posits a modification to the existing order of Eliot’s literary system of values”—a move that alters but reinforces the idea of a shifting literary order (60). Atlas says that Borges is offering a “satirical illustration of T. S. Eliot’s celebrated idea, although superficially in accordance with Eliot’s, where there is no such thing as originality.” Venegas takes this further, saying “Borges’s views […] can in fact be read as their ironic reversal, because Borges continuously undermined the traditional foundations that Eliot identified as the cornerstone of Western literature,” an interpretation de Castro supports with his belief that “Borges’s redefinition of tradition […] implies an inversion of Eliot’s core concept” (237, 221). This multiplicity of views reinforces Borges’s own, which privileges the reader’s interpretation—something each critic enlists in employing Borges to divergent ends. Where these critics tend to agree is with respect to the idea that Borges’s extension of Eliot is the product of his view of himself as a reader on the periphery. Many make claims to the effect that Borges uses his perspective as an Argentine to emphasise the irreverent role of the reader: Borges’s real subject in “Kafka and His Precursors,” as in so many of his critical essays, is the question of cultural transmission: what allows a work of art or philosophical doctrine to live on into the future, to cross other cultures and times. It is something that undoubtedly concerned Borges

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Chapter One living in “faraway” Argentina, and it is something he sees raised by the Kafka of “Kafka and His Precursors.” It is a “tradition” that Borges seeks to attach himself to in the only way possible: as its analyst or reader. (Butler 2010, 103–04)4

Borges’s marginal position means that he is not beholden to a view of the tradition as a set of monuments as is Eliot, nor is he threatened by it as is Bloom. Instead he is able to see tradition as a source of potential. Borges reinforces this view in another essay from 1951, “The Argentine Writer and Tradition”, where he argues that Argentine authors should make use of any themes and techniques that appeal to them, because the cultural patrimony of peripheral authors is that of the whole universe: Anything we Argentine writers can do successfully will become part of our Argentine tradition, in the same way that the treatment of Italian themes belongs to the tradition of England through the efforts of Chaucer and Shakespeare. (219)

Borges’s ideas about the role of the reader and writer are subsequently incorporated into the tradition by critics such as Gérard Genette, Umberto Eco, and Bloom, albeit in a modified form, as befits the approach Borges advocates (Butler 2010, 94–95). Bloom is particularly cautious when it comes to Borges’s methods, saying, “Cultural belatedness is never acceptable to a major writer, though Borges made a career out of exploiting his secondariness” (1997, xxv). Bloom objects to the way in which Borges openly steals from his precursors. However, this concern is not entirely warranted, for Borges is not quite stealing: “repetition in Borges is—as he shows most clearly in ‘Pierre Menard’—always the site of difference, of divergence” (Balderston 1998, 40). Borges manipulates the material he takes from many authors, as he does with Eliot’s “Tradition and the Individual Talent.” Borges’s acts of theft are examples of Bloom’s apophrades par excellence. Borges exploits his position as a reader first and an author second, using the texts he reads as primary sources of material. Although Bloom recognises the value of this approach, he still believes it cannot be the norm. Bloom says that, unlike Borges, most authors feel an anxiety towards their precursors, which means they must strive to differentiate themselves from those who came before. Demonstrating this point with his own writing, Bloom insists that—despite some similarities—he is not borrowing from Borges at the point where he believes his theory to be most original:

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I want to distinguish the phenomenon [apophrades] from the witty insight of Borges, that artists create their precursors, as for instance the Kafka of Borges creates the Browning of Borges. I mean something more drastic and (presumably) absurd, which is the triumph of having so stationed the precursor, in one’s own work, that particular passages in his work seem to be not presages of one’s own advent, but rather to be indebted to one’s own achievement, and even (necessarily) to be lessened by one’s greater splendor. The mighty dead return, but they return in our colors, and speaking in our voices, at least in part, at least in moments, moments that testify to our persistence, and not to their own. (1997, 141, original emphasis)

Bloom is attempting to have his precursors return in such a way that they are speaking in his voice rather than their own—an effort to distinguish himself from Borges that brings the connection between the three theorists together. In defining apophrades, Bloom refers to Borges, who in turn cites Eliot. Borges fits his theory within the order suggested by Eliot even as he modifies it from his perspective as a peripheral reader. Bloom subsequently reinforces the order established by Eliot and by Bloom’s unavoidable belatedness with respect to it, in the manner proposed by Borges. These circular connections highlight the productiveness of Borges’s emphasis on the role of the reader. By focusing on the reader instead of the writer, Borges’s theory allows influence to flow in improbable temporal (and geographical) directions: from Bloom to Eliot via Borges and back again. This is not the case in the theories that precede and succeed him. Eliot says influence always flows from earlier authors to later ones, while Bloom says there is a linear pattern of precursor and ephebe that can be traced down the canonical lines. By contrast, Borges’s argument suggests “there is no ‘natural’ line of descent possible here, only the constant reinvention of tradition” (Balderston 1998, 45). Borges facilitates this by undermining the canon, which Eliot is determined to preserve and Bloom implicitly honours. For Eliot, the reader is important only insofar as he perceives where the poet subscribes to and deviates from the tradition. For Bloom, the poet is the only reader that matters. For Borges, the reader continues the tradition. This interconnectedness between theories, even as they challenge and contradict each other, demonstrates the influence that the tradition continues to hold. The relevance of tradition can also be seen in the influence of the Bloomsbury group (the focus of this volume) on Borges and Bloom. Borges wrote about David Garnett, John Lehmann, Vita Sackville-West, Leslie Stephen, and both Leonard and Virginia Woolf. He was the first to translate the latter for a Spanish American audience,

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publishing Un cuarto propio [A Room of One’s Own] in instalments in 1935 and 1936 and Orlando: una biografía [Orlando: A Biography] in 1937 (Leone 2008a, 47).5 Borges made reference to Woolf more than a dozen times in essays and reviews, mentioning all but two of her novels. He also wrote a capsule biography of her for the Argentine magazine El Hogar, where he praised her writing for “the structure of its composition, which consists of a limited number of themes that return and combine” (Borges 1999, 174). The approach to writing that Borges identifies in Woolf is concordant with his own view that authors—especially peripheral and belated ones (which Woolf, as a woman, is for Borges)—should make irreverent use of the tradition by combining its elements in new ways. This is not to say that Borges embraced Woolf as an influence on his own work. He suggested that her writing was overly psychological, and there is debate among critics as to whether he intended to undermine her feminist project by subtly mistranslating her works. Borges is said to have only undertaken his translations of Woolf out of obligation to Victoria Ocampo, a mutual friend. The Bloomsbury group’s influence on Bloom is also present, if less pronounced. Although Bloom’s writing exhibits his preference for Shakespeare and Romanticism, Bloomsbury ideas in the guise of Bloom’s rejection of “Tradition and the Individual Talent” underlie The Anxiety of Influence. Bloom acknowledges the value of Bloomsbury in his literary criticism, and his prolific critical output includes works on Eliot, Woolf, and E. M. Forster. Woolf is also one of the authors included in The Western Canon, where Bloom refers to her as “the most complete personof-letters in England in our century” (434). Even though Bloom tries to swerve away from Eliot, his writing—and that of his Bloomsbury contemporaries—has left an impression on Bloom’s work. Looking at Eliot, Bloom, and Borges together reveals how a thought process about influence develops across all three. Eliot proposes a literary order in which room is made for new writers without disrupting the relationship between existing ones, and in which the best aspects of a poet’s work shine through in the poet’s acknowledgement of the tradition. Through his extension or ironic inversion, Borges builds on Eliot so that the later writer draws out the greatness of the earlier writer, which would otherwise not exist. Bloom takes this idea further still, suggesting that later poets can “achieve a style that captures and oddly retains priority over their precursors, so that the tyranny of time almost is overturned, and one can believe, for startled moments, that they are being imitated by their ancestors” (1997, 141, original emphasis). For Bloom, the preceding writer is indebted to the later one.

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When read in light of Borges, Bloom’s ideas do not seem to be a radical swerve away from Eliot so much as a natural progression—part of the shuffling of monuments that takes place each time something new is added to the tradition. Meanwhile, as an interlocutor for Eliot and Bloom, Borges does what he says a reader should do: he draws out new connections in texts that would not be perceived if it were not for the author who serves as the intermediary, just as Kafka does for so many others in Borges’s essay. Although Bloom does not engage with Eliot at length, using Borges as a conduit allows readers to evoke a connection between them—and it offers readers an opportunity to enrich Eliot’s and Bloom’s theories in the manner of “Kafka and His Precursors”.

Works Cited Aizenberg, Edna. 1992. “Borges, Postcolonial Precursor.” World Literature Today 66 (1): 21–26. Allen, Graham. 1994. Harold Bloom, A Poetics of Conflict. New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf. Atlas, James. 1981. “A Man of His Words.” The New York Times. 25 October. Balderston, Daniel. 1998. “Borges: The Argentine Writer and the ‘Western’ Tradition.” In Borges and Europe Revisited, edited by Evelyn Fishburn, 37–48. London: Institute of Latin American Studies. Bloom, Harold. 1985. “Introduction.” In T. S. Eliot, edited by Harold Bloom, 1–7. New York: Chelsea House. —. 1995. The Western Canon. London: Papermac. —. 1997. The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry. 2nd edition. New York: Oxford University Press. Borges, Jorge Luis. 1999. “Virginia Woolf.” In The Total Library: NonFiction 1922-1986, edited by Eliot Weinberger. Translated by Esther Allen, 173–74. London: Penguin. —. 2000a. “The Argentine Writer and Tradition.” In Labyrinths, edited by Donald Yates and James E. Irby. Translated by James E. Irby, 211–20. London: Penguin. —. 2000b. “Kafka and His Precursors.” In Labyrinths, edited by Donald Yates and James E. Irby. Translated by James E. Irby, 234–36. London: Penguin. —. 2000c. “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius.” In Labyrinths, edited by Donald Yates and James E. Irby. Translated by James E. Irby, 27–43. London: Penguin.

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Butler, Rex. 2010. “Re-Reading ‘Kafka and His Precursors’.” Variaciones Borges 29: 93–105. de Castro, Juan E. 2007. “Jorge Luis Borges Rewrites T. S. Eliot.” In The International Reception of T. S. Eliot, edited by Elisabeth Däumer and Shyamal Bagchee, 215–25. London: Continuum. DeWald, Rebecca. 2012. “A Dialogue … about this Beauty and Truth: Jorge Luis Borges’s Translation of Virginia Woolf’s Orlando.” In Contradictory Woolf: Selected Papers from the Twenty-First Annual International Conference on Virginia Woolf, edited by Derek Ryan and Stella Bolaki, 243–49. Clemson: Clemson University Digital Press. Eliot, T. S. 1928. “Tradition and the Individual Talent.” In The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism, 47–59. London: Methuen. Essay first published in 1920. —. 1941. “Tradition and the Individual Talent.” In Points of View, 23–34. London: Faber and Faber. Essay first published in 1920. Fry, Paul H. 2010. “How to live with the infinite regress of strong misreading.” In Reading, Writing and the Influence of Harold Bloom, edited by Alan Rawes and Jonathon Shears, 217–39. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Hartman, Geoffrey. 2007. “The Sacred Jungle: Carlyle, Eliot, Bloom.” In Criticism in the Wilderness: The Study of Literature Today, 42–62. 2nd edition. New Haven: Yale University Press. Jay, Gregory. 1983. T. S. Eliot and the Poetics of Literary History. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Press. Leone, Leah. 2008a. “Borges and A Room of One’s Own.” Woolf Studies Annual 15: 47–66. —. 2008b. “La novela cautiva: Borges y la traducción de Orlando.” Variaciones Borges 25: 223–36. Novillo-Corvalán, Patricia. 2008. “James Joyce, author of ‘Funes el memorioso’.” Variaciones Borges 26: 59–82. Schultz, William R. 1994. Genetic Codes of Culture? The Deconstruction of Tradition by Kuhn, Bloom, and Derrida. New York: Garland. Schwartz, Sanford. 2009. “Eliot’s Ghosts: Tradition and its Transformations.” In A Companion to T. S. Eliot, edited by David E. Chinitz, 15–26. Oxford: Wiley Blackwell. Shumway, Nicholas. 1986. “Eliot, Borges, and Tradition.” In Borges, the Poet, edited by Carlos Cortinez, 260–67. Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press. Soderholm, James. 2010. “The Blooming of Harold.” In Reading, Writing and the Influence of Harold Bloom, edited by Alan Rawes and Jonathon Shears, 94–98. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

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Venegas, José Luis. 2006. “Eliot, Borges, Tradition, and Irony.” Symposium 59 (4): 237–55.

Notes 1 With reference to the author, both Eliot and Bloom prefer “poet” while Borges uses “writer” [escritor]. For all three, the writer is gendered male. Following their lead and for the sake of agreement, I use “poet,” “writer,” and “author” interchangeably and also gender the writer male. Bloom uses “ephebe” to refer to the later writer whose work he is examining in relation to the precursor—a term that I borrow here. 2 This study focuses on one work by each of Eliot, Bloom, and Borges without trying to offer a picture of their ideas more broadly. Influence is an abiding preoccupation for Bloom throughout his career, and it is a recurring theme for Eliot and Borges. A comprehensive study could look at a wider range of works, among them Eliot’s “Philip Massinger” (1920), Borges’s “The Argentine Writer and the Tradition” (1951), and the three other volumes in Bloom’s tetralogy of influence— A Map of Misreading (1975), Kabbalah and Criticism (1975), and Poetry and Repression (1976). 3 Borges refers to “Points of View (1941), 25–26,” a page range that begins with “We have seen with many such simple currents soon lost in the sand; and novelty is better than repetition” and ends with “We say: it appears to conform, and is perhaps individual, or appears individual, and may conform; but we are hardly likely to find that it is one and not the other.” Over the split between the two pages to which Borges refers is the paragraph that ends with “the past should be altered by the present as much as the present is directed by the past” (Eliot 1941¸ 25–26). 4 For similar statements, see Aizenberg 1992, 24, and Novillo-Corvalán 2008, 60. 5 For more on Borges’s translations of Woolf and his opinions of Woolf more broadly, see Leone 2008b, 223–36, and DeWald 2012, 243–49.

CHAPTER TWO REASSESSING THE ETHICAL INFLUENCE OF THE BLOOMSBURY GROUP CHRISTOPHER LEWIS There appears to be a consensus among critics that the Bloomsbury Group may be regarded as the British pioneers of the present ethical paradigm— the first “individuals in a world in which individualism [was] threatened daily” (Johnstone 1952, 444). From a present-day perspective the outline of a late 20th and early 21st century subject-centred ethic of self-fulfilment is readily visible in Bloomsbury’s individualism and the broadly humanistic values which they espoused during and after World War One.1 Yet while consolidating this affirmed influence critics have simultaneously effaced a markedly anti-humanist tendency in Bloomsbury ethics prior to 1914. Those members of the Bloomsbury Group who were acquainted with G. E. Moore at Cambridge, and who frequented the Saturday evening meetings of “the Apostles”—I will primarily be treating the writings of Clive Bell and John Maynard Keynes here—frequently appealed to the transcendent Platonic Forms of “Beauty and Goodness” (Bell [1922] 1975, 379) in an attempt to anchor the subject of their new aesthetic “religion”2 in an objective reality. There thus lurks a subtle antinomy in Bloomsbury’s pre-war speculation about the status of ethical and aesthetic properties; a dissonance between subjectivist and objectivist interpretations of value. In various instances we find that Bell and Keynes treat the subject as being ethically and aesthetically autonomous (productive of properties such as “beauty” and “goodness”), at the same time that the capitalised terms “Beauty” and “Goodness” are conceived as permanent and unchanging conditions of reality, received though not produced by the subject.3 The principal aim of this essay is to examine the neglected objectivism of Bloomsbury’s “original doctrine” in more detail, and to suggest that our inheritance of Bloomsbury values has been altogether one-sided (Keynes [1949] 1975, 63). I wish to be clear at this stage that I do not seek to

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invalidate the claim that Bloomsbury’s ethical outlook can be broadly defined as humanist in character; this is clearly an accurate interpretation of Bloomsbury’s post-1914 ethical commitments. Rather, my aim here is to expose the conflicting impulses in Bloomsbury’s ethical thought prior to the outbreak of war in 1914, and to indicate the relevance of this to our ongoing appraisal of their cultural legacy. World War One had a profound influence on Bloomsbury’s ethical commitments. Virginia Woolf’s lamentation (in a diary entry of June 1916) that “Bloomsbury is pretty well exploded” belies the sense in which the war actually galvanised the Bloomsbury Group’s cultural significance as the voice of opposition; for while the war scattered the friends of Bloomsbury from their “commune” (Edel 1979, 205) in Brunswick Square, it also helped to clarify the key characteristics (if not quite requirements) of Bloomsbury membership. Pacifism, founded upon the principled defence of personal autonomy, was the key characteristic of Bloomsbury membership during the war, and in his anti-war pamphlet Peace at Once (1915) Clive Bell provided the rationale for Bloomsbury’s pacifism by giving precedence to the interests of the individual over those of society as a whole—“A nation has no reality apart from the individuals that compose it” (19)—thereby demonstrating Bloomsbury’s allegiance to some form of humanist ethics.4 Jonathan Atkin provides evidence to suggest that most members of the Bloomsbury Group reacted against the Great War on similar grounds, and (no doubt due to the pronounced nature of their anti-war polemics) most critics have focused on their pacifism and defence of personal autonomy when attempting to define the essential characteristics of Bloomsbury’s ethical position. However, a closer look at Bloomsbury’s ethical theorising before World War One reveals that a significant shift in emphasis occurred around 1914. Bloomsbury’s defence of personal autonomy during the war was a secondary feature of their individualism, amounting more to a defensive retreat into social and political discourses at a moment when worldly events conspired to subordinate the interests of the individual to those of the nation. As Keynes notes in “My Early Beliefs” (1949), there occurred in 1914 a “falling away from the purity of the original doctrine” (63). The original doctrine of the Cambridge Apostles was far more self-orientated than the wartime defence of personal autonomy, as Keynes indicates: Nothing mattered except states of mind, our own and other people’s of course, but chiefly our own. These states of mind were not associated with action or achievement or with consequences […] The appropriate subjects of passionate contemplation and communion were a beloved person, beauty and truth, and one’s prime object in life were love, the creation and

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The personal orientation, and the emphasis which is placed on character over consequence, shows that the primary concern at this stage was with “self-realization”—gained through the pursuit of self-knowledge and sincerity to one’s own nature—rather than the political status of the individual, thereby implying more of a concern with authenticity than autonomy.5 Despite the shift in emphasis which occurred around 1914, the precedence which both the original doctrine and the anti-war writings give the individual (or self) would seem to validate Todd P. Avery’s claim that the Bloomsbury Group presided over the historical shift from hierarchical “moral” structures to inter-personal “ethical” practices (1998). Using Gilles Deleuze’s distinction between “ethics, which is to say, a typology of immanent modes of existence” and “morality, which always refers existence to transcendent values” (Avery 1998, 301), Avery argues that the Bloomsbury Group are culturally significant for the reason that they “replaced” the traditional hierarchical conception of “morality” with a “planar order” which gave “ontological precedence” to the “individual’s ‘way of existing’” (302). At first glance this explanation appears convincing, but the interpretative framework which Avery supplies is undermined by another troublingly irreconcilable aspect of Bloomsbury’s original ethical doctrine. Alongside the “ethical” impetus in the original doctrine of the Bloomsbury Group, we also find, with equal clarity, a “moral” impetus, as long as we define the moral in the strict terms provided by Deleuze as always referring existence to transcendent values. The best example of this is perhaps Clive Bell’s invocation of a transcendent reality for which art is the mode of conveyance, in “Post-Impressionism and Aesthetics” (1913): The wisest philosophers of all ages have believed in the existence of a reality of which the physical universe is but the appearance […] let us suppose, then, that behind the world of appearance lies a world of reality. Consider art […] We are transported to a fabulous and unfamiliar world with laws and logic of its own, where certain combinations and relations are perceived to be right and necessary, although by the rules of the world we have left they are nothing of the sort. We bow to a new order because we are inhabiting a new universe. As the saying goes, we have been carried out of ourselves. Whither have we been carried? I believe we have been carried into the world of reality. ([1913] 1988, 428)

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Having distinguished between the world of appearance and reality, a page later Bell suggests that the artist’s transcendent ability to apprehend “pure form” may, if we are suitably receptive, “ferry us to the shores of another world” (429). The “ecstatic”6 or transcendent function of art, a “removal” or “displacement” from the natural order of things, “a standing outside oneself” (Klein 2003, 237), which here gets its first full treatment, becomes more explicitly endowed with religious significance a year later in Art: Art is the most universal and the most permanent of all forms of religious expression, because the significance of formal combinations can be appreciated as well by one race and one age as by another, and because that significance is as independent as mathematical truth of human vicissitudes. On the whole, no other vehicle of emotion and no other means to ecstasy has served man so well […] art is the one religion that is always shaping its form to fit the spirit, the one religion that will never for long be fettered in dogma. (Bell [1914] 2010, 145)

Here Bell clearly intends to approximate the meaning of the Latin “UHOLJLǀ” to its disputed etymology as “that which binds” (Klein 2003, 627).7 According to this view the ethical significance of art is that it enables the self to transcend an entrenched subjectivity so that it might be unified with an objective reality. Art—conceived by Bell as the common language of peoples regardless of “race” or “age”—is thus endowed with profound moral significance, heralding the possibility of universal brotherhood. Bell’s writings on art immediately prior to World War One demonstrate that one member of Bloomsbury at least had not always simply given precedence to the individual in ethical matters. Bell is here concerned with the individual’s mode of being only insofar as it can be reconciled with objective values (“Beauty” and “Goodness”), which are conceived as permanent and unchanging conditions of a transcendent reality. The resemblance which Bell’s “Metaphysical Hypothesis” ([1914] 2010, 33) bears to the Platonic metaphysic, structured as it is around a “chasm” separating “the merely apparent essent here below and the real being somewhere on high” (Heidegger 1959, 106), is further compounded by his adoption of the Platonic vocabulary of “Form” to describe the essential characteristic of significant art. Indeed, his description of the “moment of aesthetic vision” (Bell [1914] 2010, 33) in Art almost seems modelled on the enlightenment of the prisoner in Plato’s simile of the cave.8 Keynes further confirms that the aesthetic basis of the Bloomsbury

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“religion” certainly bore “some sort of relation [to] neo-platonism” (1949, 54). The original ethical doctrine of the Bloomsbury Group was thus composed of two seemingly incompatible theses: a form of ethical individualism which (by treating the self as an autonomous sphere of valuation) endowed the individual with a self-defining freedom in ethical matters, and a form of transcendent aestheticism which subordinated the individual to objective ethical and aesthetic standards. This should raise doubts about the application of Deleuze’s terminological distinction between ethics and morality to Bloomsbury. If the central criterion of the moral is that it always refers existence to transcendent values then we must understand Bloomsbury’s aestheticism as moral, rather than ethical; such are the narrow definitional parameters which Deleuze provides. In truth, however, Bloomsbury did indeed regard themselves as overthrowing “morality,” though to understand this we must look to a different definitional sphere: the distinction between morality/immorality rather than that of ethics/morality. Bloomsbury opposed post-Enlightenment social morality, and considered themselves immoral in doing so. This may be brought out by considering the Apostles’ opposition to the “outward restraints of convention” and the “inflexible rules of conduct” (Keynes [1949] 1975, 62) which they associated with the Benthamite tradition and Keynes’ contention that “We were, that is to say, in the strict sense of the term, immoralists” (61). This may help to clear up a terminological confusion. When Keynes writes that he and the rest of the Cambridge Apostles “accepted [G. E.] Moore’s religion […] and discarded his morals” (52) he clarifies the sense in which, while hostile to the pedantry of social morality, certain members of the Bloomsbury Group were highly disposed to the “religious attitude” which T. E. Hulme had advocated in “A Notebook” (1994, 444), for the reason that it provided an objective basis for ethical and aesthetic values. Keynes writes: We were among the last of the Utopians, or meliorists as they are sometimes called, who believe in the continuing moral progress by virtue of which the human race already consists of reliable, rational, decent people, influenced by truth and objective standards, who can be safely released from the outward restraints of convention and traditional standards and inflexible rules of conduct, and left, from now onwards, to their own sensible devices, pure motives and reliable intuitions of the good. ([1949] 1975, 62)

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The distinction between “objective standards” and the “outward restraint of traditional standards” is highly significant, for Keynes’ hostility towards the regulative impositions of social morality is here legitimated by “reliable intuitions of the good.” Moral knowledge is, in this way, conceived as resulting from direct personal intellection of the absolute; by means of “reliable intuitions” the individual circumvents the arbitrary conventions of a particular society to discern the objective and universal standards of “Beauty” and “Goodness.” By placing Bloomsbury’s original doctrine within a broader philosophical and historical context, it becomes clear that the contrast between a social and a universal morality, and the puzzling amalgamation of the individual with the absolute, is characteristic of the period. In The Two Sources of Morality and Religion (1935) Henri Bergson also distinguishes between social or “static morality” ([1935] 1977, 269)—a “mechanism” (55) which “ensures the cohesion of the group by bending all individual wills to the same end” (266), functioning by means of “obligation” and external “pressure” (269)—and what he calls “a dynamic morality” (269), which “transfigure[s]” (212) the social mechanism and raises its sights to “the idea of universal brotherhood” (78). The transfiguration of static, social morality into dynamic, universal morality is (in a similar manner as we observed with Bloomsbury) a work beholden to the enlightened individual who first removes himself from the natural order to enter into dialogue with the absolute. For Bergson, the passage from social to universal morality rests upon the “mystic experience” (248) of one who has “open[ed] their soul to the love of humanity” (99), and thereby transcends the “mechanism” of their particular society. For Bell, it is worth reminding ourselves, it is the artist’s ability to apprehend “pure form” which can “ferry us to the shores of another world” ([1913] 1988, 429). In both cases the individual (understood as possessing an intuitive transcendent capacity to know the objective nature of “reality”) occupies a privileged position. Placed within a broader context, what strikes the contemporary reader of Bloomsbury as a confusion of objective and subjective criteria may be understood as having an internal coherence which is peculiar to the period: for Bloomsbury and Bergson the knowledge of ultimate “Beauty” and “Goodness” is dependent upon the “mystic” or “ecstatic” removal of the self from the static mechanism of society. In this way, individualism becomes temporarily bound with transcendent moral aspirations; objectivity is thought to be accessible through the “reliable intuitions” of the subject. The comparison with Bergson helps to illustrate the peculiar

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rationale behind Bloomsbury’s early philosophical speculation, but it is possible to get closer to an understanding of how and why this came about. The specific origin of Bloomsbury’s ethical ambivalence is G. E. Moore’s Principia Ethica (1903); a text so influential in shaping the philosophic disposition of the Cambridge Apostles that it is often referred to as “the Bloomsbury Bible.” Principia Ethica contains a similar tension between objectivist and subjectivist interpretations of value. While chapters 1 to 5 are largely comprised of meta-ethical arguments for an objective interpretation of ethical value—here Moore argues that “‘good’ denotes an ultimate, unanalysable predicate […] some real property of things” ([1903] 1960, 140)—in chapter 6, “The Ideal”, Moore suggests that “personal affection” and “the appreciation of what is beautiful” (188) are the greatest goods of human life, concluding that the only things that can be said to have “intrinsic value” are “states of consciousness” (190). Such states of consciousness are undoubtedly to be understood in subjective terms, thereby compromising the appeal to objectivity in chapters 1 to 5.9 The irony is that, for Keynes at least, it was this last chapter of Moore’s great work which had the most “unworldly” effect even though, philosophically speaking, it acted to restore ethical value to the individual ([1949] 1975, 59).10 The internal tension between objectivist and subjectivist interpretations of value situates the ethical thought of Moore and Bloomsbury in the broader tide change that was occurring in European philosophy around the turn of the century. In his 1894 review of Husserl’s The Philosophy of Arithmetic (1891), the German logician Gottlob Frege had called for a reevaluation of the humanist contention that man is “the maker of all meanings” by declaring that there had occurred a “confusion of the subjective with the objective” in contemporary philosophy (Levenson 1984, 90). Moore’s project, in chapters 1 to 5 of Principia Ethica, may be seen as the specifically ethical response to Frege’s call “for the sun of truth to penetrate the fog which arises out of the confusion of psychology and logic” (Levenson 1984, 90). The young Bloomsbury Apostles clearly inherited the same concern from their intellectual mentor. Fearing the trivialisation of ethical and aesthetic value at the hands of a subjectivist interpretation, Moore and his disciples had originally sought an objective foundation with which to guarantee the significance of ethical and aesthetic properties. The outbreak of war in 1914 must ultimately be read as the moment when Bloomsbury’s meta-ethical speculation about the objective nature of ethical properties gave way to more normative concerns about personal autonomy in times of national emergency, ultimately provoking their

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allegiance to a coherent form of humanist ethics. Prior to the war, Bell and Keynes could only be said to fit partially within the definitional parameters of humanist ethics—affirming “the idea of autonomy” while disregarding “the belief that ‘man is the measure of all things’ and the maker of all meanings” (Sheehan 2002, 6)—yet after 1914 we find that the emphasis which Bell placed on personal autonomy implies that the individual is indeed to be treated as the measure of all things, the maker of all meanings. This, properly speaking, is the origin of humanist Bloomsbury. Providing we lay a marker down in 1914, separating their original ethical doctrine and their later humanist ethics, we may now be able to provide a more complete picture of the historic significance of Bloomsbury’s early philosophical speculation. The Bloomsbury Group occupied the boundary between two antagonistic worldviews in the early years of the 20th century. Historically speaking, the conceptual conflict which marked these years may be seen to result in a shift from “morality” to “ethics,” or we may describe it as an overthrow of the “religious” paradigm by the “humanist”; and it is underpinned by a shift away from objectivist towards subjectivist interpretations of value in the philosophical works of the period. The overall process may be described, in Charles Taylor’s terms, as a “centring on the self” (1991, 4). A close survey of the formative period of Bloomsbury’s ethical theorising reveals the pressures and vacillations to which theorists and philosophers were susceptible at a moment when “older moral horizons” (3) were finally and decisively vanquished. The significance of the Bloomsbury Group during this period is not simply that they “replaced” the older moral horizons with an ethical commitment to the autonomy of the individual (although this accurately describes the shift which occurred in their ethical commitments around 1914), but that they attempted to negotiate a position between the two extremes. The emphasis which they placed on self-realisation, and personal autonomy, was underpinned by a concern to establish broader “horizons of significance” within which to situate the self (Taylor 1991, 66). Apprehensive of the trivialisation of value which was implied by a godless world (and therefore a groundless self), it is likely that they would have endorsed Bergson’s view that “each distinct god is contingent, whereas […] the godhead in general, is necessary” ([1935] 1977, 200). The unique—and some might say paradoxical—configuration of Bloomsbury’s original ethical doctrine is the result of: 1) a personal ethic of selfrealisation, to be gained through passionate contemplation, aesthetic experience and the pursuit of knowledge; 2) a correlative opposition to the regulative duty-orientated programme of post-Enlightenment social

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morality; and 3) a preoccupation with establishing objective criteria for determining ethical and aesthetic values. This would seem to provide us with effective coordinates for a reappraisal of Bloomsbury’s cultural and ethical legacy. Of these interlocking motivations behind Bloomsbury’s original doctrine, we can immediately observe the first two as resonating with contemporary values in the West. This is reflected in the much-publicised affinity which contemporary British society is thought to have with Bloomsbury’s bohemian “experimentations” in lifestyle (Nicholson 2002, xvii).11 Considering the emphasis which they placed on self-realisation, the connections which Avery draws between Bloomsbury’s ethical concerns and “some of the major themes of philosophical/theoretical postmodernism” would appear to be valid (1998, 294). But Bloomsbury cannot, contrary to Avery’s suggestion, be made to fit without remainder into the traditions of Foucault or Deleuze, for whom the self is a “threshold […] between multiplicities”, groundless and elusive (Deleuze and Guattari 2004, 275). The most distinctive feature of Bloomsbury’s original doctrine is that, while giving precedence to the individual, it firmly emphasised the dialogical conditions in which the self exists: the self is only deemed to be “ethical” in as far as it is receptive to “demands that emanate from beyond the self” (Taylor 1991, 41). My reference to the philosophical work of Charles Taylor here is conscious and purposeful, for Taylor occupies a conservative position in late 20th century ethical theory, which appears to reflect the temper of Bloomsbury’s early ethical speculation more accurately than the work of Deleuze or Foucault.12 The key point—which it has been the purpose of this essay to illustrate—is that, while they certainly accelerated the ethical emancipation of the individual from the rigid structures of postEnlightenment social morality, the Bloomsbury Group also made a concerted effort to anchor the self in an objective reality so as to prevent the trivialising consequences of a subjective interpretation of value. From a present-day perspective, Bloomsbury’s concern to establish objective foundations for value inevitably appears as a strained echo from an older moral epoch,13 but it is crucial to our understanding of their cultural legacy that we acknowledge this tendency in their early ethical speculation. It links Bloomsbury with other modernist writers such as T. S. Eliot, Wyndham Lewis, Ezra Pound, Rainer Maria Rilke, Thomas Mann and T. E. Hulme,14 all of whom perceived “the dark side of individualism” (Taylor 1991, 4) and were deeply concerned “to articulate something beyond the self” (88), and it implies that they ought not to be regarded simply as the godparents of the “me generation.”

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Works Cited Atkin, Jonathan. 2002. A War of Individuals: Bloomsbury Attitudes to the Great War. Manchester University Press. Avery, Todd P. 1998. “Ethics Replaces Morality: The Victorian Legacy to Bloomsbury.” English Literature in Transition, 1880-1920. 41 (3): 294–16. —. 2006. “‘Above Life’: Hulme, Bloomsbury, and Two Trajectories of Ethical Anti-Humanism.” In T. E. Hulme and the Question of Modernism, edited by Edward P., 169–186. Comentale and Andrzej Gasiorek. Aldershot: Ashgate. Bell, Clive. (1912) 1988. “The English Group.” In Post-Impressionists in England, edited by J. B. Bullen, 349–351. London: Routledge. —. (1913) 1988. “Post-Impressionism and Aesthetics.” In PostImpressionists in England, edited by J. B., 421–428. Bullen. London: Routledge. —. (1914) 2010. Art. Milton Keynes: Lightning Source. —. 1915. Peace at Once. Manchester and London: The National Labour Press, Ltd. 18 (7). —. (1919) 1993. “The Artistic Problem.” In A Bloomsbury Group Reader, edited by S. P. Rosenbaum, 102–106. Oxford: Blackwell. —. (1922) 1975. “Affable Hawk.” In The Bloomsbury Group: A Collection of Memoirs, Commentary and Criticism, edited by S. P. Rosenbaum, 377–379. London: Croom Helm. Bergson, Henri. (1935) 1977. The Two Sources of Morality and Religion. University of Notre Dame Press. Deleuze, Gilles. 1993. “Ethics without Morality.” In The Deleuze Reader, edited by Constantin V. Boundas, 73–74. New York: Columbia University Press. Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Félix. 2004. A Thousand Plateaus. London: Continuum. Edel, Leon. 1979. Bloomsbury: A House of Lions. London: The Hogarth Press. Ezard, John. 2004. “Bohemian culture ‘is now the norm.’” The Guardian. 2 June. http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2004/jun/02/arts.guardianhayfest ival2004. Accessed 13 July 2013. Goodwin, Craufurd D. 2011. “The Bloomsbury Group as Creative Community”. History of Political Economy 43 (1): 59–82. Guignon, Charles. 2004. On Being Authentic. London: Routledge. Heidegger, Martin. 1959. An Introduction to Metaphysics, translated by Ralph Manheim. New Haven-Yale University Press.

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Hulme, T. E. 1994. “A Notebook.” In The Collected Writings of T. E. Hulme, edited by Karen Csengeri, 419–456. Oxford University Press. Johnstone, J. K. 1952. “The Philosophic Background and Works of Art of the Group known as Bloomsbury.” Unpublished PhD Thesis, University of Leeds. Keynes, John Maynard. (1949) 1975. “My Early Beliefs.” In The Bloomsbury Group: A Collection of Memoirs, Commentary and Criticism, edited by S. P. Rosenbaum, 48–68. London: Croom Helm. Klein, Ernest. 2003. Klein’s Comprehensive Etymology Dictionary of the English Language. Bingley: Emerald. Levenson, Michael H. 1984. A Genealogy of Modernism. Cambridge University Press. Moore, Geoffrey. 1955. “The Significance of Bloomsbury.” The Kenyon Review 17 (1): 119–129. Moore, G. E. (1903) 1960. Principia Ethica. Cambridge University Press. Nicholson, Virginia. 2002. Among the Bohemians: Experiments in Living 1900–1939. London: Penguin. Plato. 1970. The Republic, translated by Benjamin Jowett, edited by R. M. Hare and D. A. Russell. London: Sphere Books. Sheehan, Paul. 2002. Modernism, Narrative and Humanism. Cambridge University Press. Taylor, Charles. 1991. The Ethics of Authenticity. Harvard University Press.

Notes 1

In “The Significance of Bloomsbury” (1955) Geoffrey Moore stated that “One cannot properly grasp the significance of Bloomsbury without knowing more about its general cultural ideas and activities” (125) and his call for a holistic approach has, over subsequent decades, become orthodox among Bloomsbury critics and followers. It is now widely acknowledged that the Bloomsbury Group “was a political, social and general cultural force was well as a literary one” (121) which has left a lasting impact on British culture and society. It is worth noting, however, that in recent years speculation about the legitimate heir to Bloomsbury’s social and ethical innovations has been divided: on the one hand, “the prominence of social scientists in their midst” has led Craufurd D. Goodwin to conclude that they “were concerned above all with large questions of economic public policy” (2011, 74) and on the other, Virginia Nicholson has emphasised that theirs was first and foremost a “domestic revolution” foregrounding their “experimentations” in personal lifestyle as the principal inheritance of contemporary British society (2002, xvii). But underpinning such speculation there is a consensus that the Bloomsbury Group played a crucial role in shaping contemporary British values.

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Both Bell and Keynes refer to the aesthetic “religion” which they derived from G. E. Moore’s Principia Ethica (1903) on numerous occasions. In “The English Group” Bell speaks of a “spiritual revolution which proclaims art a religion” ([1912] 1988, 351). See also Bell’s Art (1914) and Keynes’ “My Early Beliefs” (1949). 3 The argument which occurred between Clive Bell and George Bernard Shaw in the pages of the The New Republic and the New Statesman in early 1922— following Bell’s criticism of Shaw’s Back to Methuselah as the work of a “didactic” ([1922] 1975, 371)—demonstrates Bell’s neo-Platonism well. Here Bell argued against Shaw’s “hideous fatalism” in suggesting that Darwinian theory “makes a nonsense of ‘Beauty, Intelligence, Honour’” (372); effectively replying that “Beauty and Goodness” are themselves absolutes and are in no way dependent upon the existence of God: “it is not beautiful or good things but Beauty and Goodness themselves which are perceived” (379). 4 In Modernism, Narrative and Humanism (2002) Paul Sheehan cites the essential characteristics of humanism as: “the idea of autonomy” and “the belief that ‘man is the measure of all things’ and the maker of all meanings” (6). While Peace at Once explicitly demonstrates Bell’s commitment to personal autonomy, it remains implicit that the individual is to be regarded as an autonomous sphere of valuation (the “maker of its own meaning”). 5 The principal distinction to be made here is between the different recipients of an ethical imperative; while the discourse concerning personal autonomy is directed towards the body politic, self-authentication is an imperative issued at the level of the individual for whom autonomy has already been guaranteed. In On Being Authentic (2004) Charles Guignon conveys the sense in which the ethical imperative here is to “realise” oneself: “it is only by expressing our true selves that we can achieve self-realization and self-fulfilment as authentic human beings” (6). 6 In “The Artistic Problem” Bell further describes the role of the artist as “commemorat[ing] the moment of ecstasy” ([1919] 1993, 103). 7 Ernest Klein writes: “UHOLJLǀ prop. means ‘that which one goes over again in thought’. There is less probability in the etymology […] according to which UHOLJLǀ would mean ‘that which binds’, fr. UHOLJƗUH, ‘to bind up, bind together’” (2003, 627). 8 Consider first Bell: “in the moment of aesthetic vision he sees objects, not as means shrouded in associations, but as pure forms. It is for […] pure form that he feels his inspired emotion. Now to see objects as pure forms is to see them as ends in themselves” ([1914] 2010, 33). And now Plato: “At first, when any of them is liberated and compelled suddenly to […] look towards the light […] he will be unable to see the realities of which in his former state he had seen the shadows; and then conceive someone saying to him that what he saw before was an illusion, but that now, when he is approaching nearer to being and his eye is turned towards more real existence, he has a clearer vision,—what will he reply?” (1970, 296–97). 9 Moore does seek an escape from the subjectivism which his last chapter implies, arguing that the subject may access objective—or “non-natural” ([1903] 1960, 112)—moral properties by means of the occult faculty of “intuition” (92).

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According to this idea, the subject intuits what is good/bad, beautiful/ugly as unchanging aspects of an objective reality, but such a manoeuvre is unconvincing, for the reason that it is seemingly unable to account in any meaningful way for (or, indeed to adjudicate) moral disagreement; implicitly allowing for a situation in which different conscious subjects intuit contrary moral facts or principles for determining action. 10 For a more comprehensive account of Moore’s influence on Bloomsbury, see Paul Levy’s G. E. Moore and the Cambridge Apostles (Oxford University Press, 1981); Tom Regan’s Bloomsbury’s Prophet: G. E. Moore and the Development of His Moral Philosophy (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1986); and Avery 2006. Avery’s article is particularly pertinent, for it demonstrates the sense in which the modernist inheritors of Moore’s philosophy read Principia Ethica selectively, and in doing so, effectively read two entirely different books. While Hulme took inspiration from Moore’s attempt to establish an objective basis for value, Bloomsbury aligned more readily with the humanist sensibilities expressed in Chapter 6 “The Ideal.” Part of the purpose of the present essay, however, is to reveal the sense in which Bloomsbury also inherited Moore’s concern to establish an objective footing for ethical and aesthetic values. 11 Virginia Nicholson’s Among the Bohemians: Experiments in Living 1900-1939 (2002) outlines the debt which contemporary British society is thought to owe her grandparents’ innovations in lifestyle, and in an interview with The Guardian of June 2004 she further emphasised the cultural importance of Bloomsbury: “In a way, we’re all Bohemians now. We can conduct relationships with people from any social class without fear of ostracism, while deploring oppressive, stratified societies … We take it for granted that society is fluid, that informality will prevail” (Ezard 2004). 12 In The Ethics of Authenticity (1991) Taylor criticises certain variants of postmodern theory (specifically those of Derrida and Foucault) for disseminating a groundless (and therefore impoverished) notion of selfhood across Western cultures in the late 20th century. 13 As numerous philosophers report, moral relativism—the view that moral values are relative to certain contingencies of time and place—is the dominant metaethical position in the West today. 14 Taylor himself cites “Rilke, Eliot, Pound, Joyce, Mann” (1991, 89) as writers who were concerned “precisely to articulate something beyond the self” (1991, 88). I would add Bell and Keynes to this list.

PART II REINVENTIONS OF VIRGINIA WOOLF: SIGRID NUNEZ, ALI SMITH, SUSAN SELLERS AND JEANETTE WINTERSON

CHAPTER THREE “THEY LEAVE OUT THE PERSON TO WHOM THINGS HAPPENED”: RE-READING THE BIOGRAPHICAL SUBJECT IN SIGRID NUNEZ’S MITZ: THE MARMOSET OF BLOOMSBURY (1998) BETHANY LAYNE Sigrid Nunez’s novella Mitz: The Marmoset of Bloomsbury (1998) occupies an intriguing generic position. As a biography of Leonard Woolf’s pet marmoset, it is most obviously interpretable as a re-visioning of Flush (1933), Virginia Woolf’s attempt to imagine the life of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s spaniel. But it is also possible to read Mitz as a biography of Woolf herself, an exploration of how her life might have looked between 1934, when the Woolfs adopted Mitz from Victor and Barbara Rothschild, and 1938, “the last year of peace”, when the marmoset died (Nunez 2007, 138). Nunez’s novella thus straddles two different modes of engagement: the adaptive, which engages with Woolf’s work, and the biographical, which engages with her life. Woolf famously criticised the biographical mode for its tendency to “leave out the person to whom things happened”. Reconsidering memoirs while writing her own in “A Sketch of the Past” (1939–40), she complained that “they say: ‘This is what happened’; but they do not say what the person was like to whom it happened. And the events mean very little unless we know first to whom they happened.” (2002b, 79). In writing the lives of others, the effect was much the same: “people […] collect a number of events, and leave the person to whom it happened unknown.’” (83). Woolf feared, then, that the (auto)biographical subject was liable to become lost in the accumulation of facts. As an example of the hybrid genre of biofiction, which David Lodge has characterised by its use of “the novel’s techniques for representing

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subjectivity rather than the objective, evidence-based discourse of biography”, Mitz has greater licence to excavate and imagine the subject than is appropriate or possible in conventional life writing. While biofiction is a contemporary phenomenon which has, as Lodge observes, become increasingly popular over the last ten years (2007, 8), its antecedents are perceptible in Modernist developments in life writing by Woolf, Harold Nicolson, and Lytton Strachey. Indeed, Lodge’s definition of biofiction very nearly echoes Woolf’s description of Nicolson’s experimental work Some People in her essay “The New Biography” (1927). Like Nicolson, the writer of biofiction is able “to use the novelist’s art of arrangement, suggestion, dramatic effect to expound the private life”, developing “a method of writing about people […] as though they were at once real and imaginary” (Woolf 1960, 155). Biofiction might also be said to retrospectively fulfil the promise Woolf recognised in Strachey’s Elizabeth and Essex, a failed attempt to combine historically verifiable fact with invented fact which “show[ed] us the way in which others may advance” (1943, 124). In Flush and Orlando, Woolf herself demonstrated that “a little” (or a lot of) “fiction mixed with fact can be made to transmit personality very effectively” (1960, 154). In Mitz, Nunez treads a path laid by Woolf, Nicolson, and Strachey, creating a work that is “not only a biography but also a work of art” (Woolf 1943, 123). Biofiction may accurately be described as an intrinsically liminal genre, and Mitz’s borderline status is compounded by its adaptive qualities. Adaptation is here defined as a close intertextual affiliation which enables “a more sustained engagement with a single text or source than the more glancing act of allusion or quotation, even citation, allows” (Sanders 2006, 4). Mitz’s “sustained engagement” with Flush mirrors that of Robin Lippincott’s Mr. Dalloway (1999) and John Lanchester’s Mr Phillips (2000) with Mrs Dalloway, but its generic status is complicated by the introduction of Woolf as a fictional character, and by its dialogic engagement with a broad range of intertexts in addition to the source text. In what follows, I shall explore how Mitz engages with Flush, Woolf’s letters, and her diaries to challenge limited popular perceptions of the biographical subject, while at the same time emphasising the textuality of “the person to whom things happened”. Whereas conventional biographies by Quentin Bell and Hermione Lee are predominantly occupied with Woolf’s life, and adaptive works by Phillips and Lanchester with her work, Nunez’s intertextual biofiction enables her to present the biographical subject as inherently textual. Nunez thus combines her two generic modes, the adaptive or intertextual and the biographical, by demonstrating how the “fiction” gives rise to the “bio”.

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Mitz also contributes to the continued resuscitation of its source text, Flush, as an important work illuminating Woolf’s interest in life writing focalised through a non-human consciousness. Historically, Flush has attracted limited serious attention from Woolf scholars, and Craig Smith notes the irony that “Woolf’s most popular book during her lifetime […] has subsequently become her most neglected” critically (2002, 348). He cites as evidence the three columns devoted to Flush versus the nineteen given over to Orlando in Mark Hussey’s critical digest, Virginia Woolf A to Z, and asserts that most studies which acknowledge Flush do so only in passing (347). For Anna Snaith, such relative neglect is indicative of the incompatibility of popular presentations of Woolf, namely “the tenacity of her reputation as ‘highbrow’”, with Flush’s “reputation as frivolity” (2002, 619). In short, there is a perceived incongruity in a “major modernist innovator” embarking on the ostensibly minor pursuit of exploring an animal’s subjectivity (Smith 2002, 348). Such incompatibility was noted in contemporary reviews of Flush in The Granta and The Daily Telegraph, to which Nunez alludes in Mitz. The narrator observes that “[a]nother reviewer wept crocodile tears: as a serious writer Mrs Woolf was now dead” (40), referring indirectly to a diary entry in which Woolf recorded that “the Granta said I was now defunct. Orlando Waves Flush represents the death of a potentially great writer” (1982, 186). Nunez also cites Rebecca West’s biting dismissal of the novel as “a joke that should never have left the room where it was born” (40). This opinion is recorded rather more mildly by Woolf in her diary: “Less jubilant, on account of Rebecca West’s criticism that: F[lush] is not one of my best &c” (1982, 183–4). Nunez adopts a dual-pronged approach to the re-engaging of the writer’s reputation with that of the text. Firstly, she troubles “Flush’s reputation as frivolity”, recasting it as a significant experiment in life writing from an animal’s perspective which her own novella reprises and extends. This attitude reflects the renewed scholarly interest in Flush evident in recent articles, new editions of the novel by Oxford University Press (1998), Penguin (2000), and Persephone Books (2005), and the scholarly edition by Linden Peach forthcoming from Cambridge University Press. Secondly, Nunez’s intertextual engagement with the diverse traces of a “Contradictory Woolf” problematises Woolf’s “reputation as a highbrow”, along with other monolithic representations. These include the Leavisinspired view of a delicate authoress at sea in the world of politics (Gordon 2005, 13); the vision of Woolf as a creative genius; the image, fostered by A Writer’s Diary, of one whose life was wholly occupied by work (Lee 1996, 107), and the enduring preoccupation, encouraged in part by Vanessa and Clive Bell, with her so-called frigidity and its impact on

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her marriage (Lee 1997, 244). By acknowledging Woolf’s humour, along with her political engagement, her inspiration, her industry, and her sexuality, Nunez admits “frivolity” as one facet of her complex representation of the subject. In Mitz, Woolf’s interest in “the actuality of an animal’s consciousness” manifests itself in Virginia’s artistic fascination with the marmoset (Wylie 2002, 117): She wondered about Mitz as she had wondered about the cats and dogs she had known all her life. What was it like to be an animal? How did the world look through a dog’s eyes? What did cats think of us? Without such wonder, it is doubtful Virginia ever would have written Flush. Now it was Mitz’s walnut of a head she wished to crack. Did marmosets dream? Did they remember? Did they regret? What did marmosets want? (Nunez 2007, 59–60)

Through her own imaginative attempts to crack “Mitz’s walnut of a head”, Nunez examines the extent and the limitations of Woolf’s efforts to penetrate what Dan Wylie refers to as the “unbridgeable outsideness” of animal subjectivity (2002, 117). On the one hand, the “empathic […] merging” with the canine consciousness enabled by Woolf’s free indirect discourse is accentuated by the comparative distance maintained by Nunez for much of her own narrative (Itner 2006, 6). When Mitz bites the Woolfs’ dog, Pinka, Nunez’s narrator states that “[i]t was not a hard bite. It was a very small bite made by very small teeth and had not really hurt Pinka. Nevertheless it was a bite and must be protested. Pinka threw back her head and howled” (22). But for the observation that the bite “must be protested”, which suggests a degree of narrative access to the animal’s mind, Nunez confines herself to those details which can be empirically observed: Mitz’s small teeth and bite; Pinka throwing back her head and howling. This contrasts sharply with Nunez’s textual analogue, the moment in Flush wherein “the door of the four-wheeler shut on Flush’s paw”: He “cried piteously” and held it up to Miss Barrett for sympathy. In other days sympathy in abundance would have been lavished upon him for less. But now a detached, a mocking, a critical expression came into her eyes. She laughed at him. She thought he was shamming: “… no sooner had he touched the grass than he began to run without a thought of it”, she wrote. And she commented sarcastically, “Flush always makes the most of his misfortunes—he is of the Byronic school—il se pose en victime”. But here Miss Barrett, absorbed in her own emotions, misjudged him completely. If his paw had been broken, still he would have bounded. That dash was the

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Chapter Three answer to her mockery; I have done with you—that was the meaning he flashed at her as he ran. (63)

Here, the empirical observation that Flush “cried piteously”, a counterpart to “Pinka threw back her head and howled”, is enclosed within quotation marks, indicating that the words are not the narrator’s, but Elizabeth Barrett’s. Further quotation marks interspersed throughout this passage physically delineate Barrett’s view of the incident, essentially that “Flush always makes the most of his misfortunes”, from the narrator’s authoritative interpolation. “Miss Barrett […] misjudged him completely,” the narrator states, an adversarial engagement founded on the narrator’s own assumption of privileged access to the animal’s interiority. Notably, Flush’s “I have done with you” is not distinguished from the narrative voice through quotation marks or similar punctuation, bolstering the illusion of seamless merging with the animal’s consciousness. By increasing the level of narrative distance in a related passage, Nunez highlights the sustained interplay between narrative voice and animal subjectivity in Flush. Conversely, there are other moments in Mitz which serve to highlight the limitations of Woolf’s representation of canine consciousness. In the penultimate chapter, which is itself reminiscent of the “Time Passes” section of To the Lighthouse, the narrator directs the readers to “forget this English village” where Virginia and Leonard lie sleeping (128). She then transports the audience to Mitz’s native South America, echoing the passage in Flush in which the spaniel recalls “forests and parrots and wild trumpeting elephants” via his sense of smell (36). Woolf uses the dog’s heightened olfactory perceptions to highlight its difference from the human, stating that The human nose is practically non-existent. […] Yet it was in the world of smell that Flush mostly lived. […] Confessing our inadequacy, then, we can but note that to Flush Italy, in these the fullest, the freest, the happiest years of his life, meant mainly a succession of smells. (124–5)

Whereas the narrator of Flush confesses herself unequal to representing her subject’s happiest years, the narrator of Mitz vividly evokes the jouissance the marmoset derives from its rich sensory landscape: “[a] world of damp heat and downpours, of opalescent mists and nights of thickest darkness and stillness broken at dawn by the cries of monkeys and birds” (128). The question of species is, perhaps, of significance here: since monkeys and humans are related in their physiological makeup, a monkey’s consciousness might be depicted more easily than that of a dog.

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Indeed, following Mitz’s capture, Nunez vividly imagines a “third passage” for the enslaved animal that is focalised largely through the marmoset’s consciousness. While Flush’s abduction by dog thieves provides a textual analogue for this scene, the neglect and offhand abuses visited upon Flush in Whitechapel are overshadowed by the systematic brutality of Mitz’s captors, which appears doubly shocking in light of contemporary attitudes towards animal cruelty. The description of these experiences provides the narrator with increased scope for imaginative empathy. She writes that a “panic such as [Mitz] had never known came over her inside that box. Uselessly she clawed at the bottom, the sides, the top. There was not enough air—yet her lungs seemed full to bursting” (129). Mitz experiences the journey as “one long dark delirious night” (132), punctuated by the recurrent question of “how much time had passed” (129–31). While in Flush, certain distinctions between the dog and the narrator “remain intractable, untranslatable” (Wylie 2002, 122), namely their differing olfactory perceptions, here the narrative voice merges with the subject’s freely and without restraint. Mitz and the narrator ask, as in one voice, “how much time had passed? How much time remained?” (131). Nunez thus contributes to the renewed interest in Flush by using her own pet biography to critically examine the extent and the limitations of Woolf’s representation of animal subjectivity. This re-negotiating of perceptions of Flush as a purely frivolous work is one way in which she combats the perceived incongruity between the writer’s reputation and the text’s. She also, as previously suggested, uses her novella to challenge monolithic representations of Woolf as a historical figure. Rather than representing Woolf as an exclusively serious writer of whom Flush was not worthy, her dialogic engagement with Woolf’s work enables a multifaceted subject to emerge from a diverse range of texts. By characterising Mitz and Virginia as “[t]wo nervous, delicate, wary females”, Nunez examines the “Q. D. Leavis-influenced impression […] of Woolf as the delicate madwoman of Bloomsbury” (Shannon 2005, 154). One exemplification of Woolf’s ethereal fragility is provided by Ralph Partridge, an assistant at the Hogarth Press, in his Portrait of Virginia Woolf. He recalls how, when setting type, Woolf resembled “a dishevelled angel—her bare feet shuffling about in bedroom slippers in a nightdress with a great tear down the side, and a dressing gown vaguely thrown over it, but her mind far, far away from her mechanical task.” (quoted in Bell 1972, 96). In Mitz, Nunez recalls such presentations by describing Virginia as “a skittish person—hardly less skittish than Mitz herself—easily startled by

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any loud noise or sudden movement” (41). Similarly Mitz, like Virginia, “could take only so much. Too many soirees frayed her nerves and gave her a headache” (90). By establishing these whimsical connections between the delicate writer and the nervous marmoset, Nunez satirises the prevalent image of Woolf at one of the low points of her reputation in the 1930s. Lyndall Gordon explains how with “the rise of dictators, followed by the Second World War, she came to appear a frail, batty lady author, out of touch with the brutal world of politics” (2005, 13). This vision is exemplified in Quentin Bell’s biography, which describes how to many in the thirties, Woolf appeared “oddly irrelevant—a distressed gentlewoman caught in a tempest and making little effort either to fight against it or to sail before it” (1972, 185). By situating her novella in the approach to the Second World War, and by engaging with the version of the subject perceptible behind the text of Three Guineas, Nunez explicitly re-engages her subject with “the brutal world of politics”. The effect of this is to show up the previously cited views of her ethereal detachment as misrepresentations. When the Woolfs and the Rothschilds dine together in the opening chapter, set in 1934, the narrator observes that “[c]onversation was mostly serious that night and kept coming round—as was no doubt the case at many another dinner table—to the same topic […] the possibility of war” (13). By the end of the novella, in 1938, the Woolfs are watching the last stages of appeasement, able to “think of nothing but war” (116). Throughout, Virginia is presented as deeply engaged with political developments, charting with horror the “tempest” in which she is caught. Towards the end of the novella, the narrator asks, What do you do when you know all you’ve got for the price of disgrace is another six months or a year? If you are Leonard or Virginia Woolf, you throw yourself into your work. They had their own trenches: they buried themselves in books. (121).

While this escape into work could be viewed as a strategy of wilful ignorance, validating the aforementioned views of Woolf’s artistic detachment, this is complicated by Nunez’s engagement with one of the “books” in which Virginia “buried [her]self”. Drawing on diary entries from the beginning and the end of 1931, Nunez traces the genesis of Three Guineas, the text Woolf referred to as “my war book” (1953, 163): It had begun as a sequel to A Room of One’s Own […]. In the sequel she planned to discuss education and professions for women. But now, with the threat of fascism and war always present, she began thinking of it also as her “war pamphlet”: a meditation upon the reasons for war and what

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might be done to prevent it. Virginia believed that fascism, the pursuit of war, and the oppression of women were all connected, and in Three Guineas she meant to show how. (100–101)

To borrow from Quentin Bell, this passage uses Woolf’s diaries and the text of Three Guineas to reconstruct a subject who not only “fight[s] the tempest”, but “sail[s] before it” by attacking its root causes. Nunez thus takes the recuperation of Woolf as a politically engaged figure enabled by the publication of her complete diaries, and uses it to trouble the image of a “distressed gentlewoman” prevalent in the 1930s. Virginia’s attack on fascism itself contrasts with a previous, darkly comedic scene in which she and Leonard salute a band of Stormtroopers while caught in a Nazi rally in Bonn. The description is based heavily on a passage in Leonard Woolf’s memoirs, which recall how when they saw Mitz, the crowd shrieked with delight. Mile after mile I drove between the two lines of corybantic Germans, and the whole way they shouted ‘Heil Hitler! Heil Hitler!’ to Mitz and gave her (and secondarily Virginia and me) the Hitler salute with outstretched arm. (1981, 191)

(Quentin Bell suggests a reason for this favourable reception: the marmoset’s “striking likeness to the late Joseph Goebbels”) (1972, 189). In her diaries, Woolf confessed to reciprocating the salute: “They cheered Mitzi. I raised my hand” (1982, 311). Similarly, in the novella, Virginia “smiled back meekly at the smiling crowd, she lifted her arm: Heil Hitler! Numbness in her legs, hands, and face. Sweat tickling her ribs” (71). Nunez thus vividly suggests the risks faced by a Jew and a detractor of fascism in Germany in 1935, reminding readers of the figure of vulnerability implicit in the text of Three Guineas. Confronted with such a threat, Virginia is forced to appear to contradict her political views, just as Woolf wrote that “[w]e become obsequious—delighted that is when the officers smile at Mitzi—the first stoop in our back” (1984, 311). Nunez portrays Virginia as, variously, “a fragile mind in a fragile body” (37), a vigorous political commentator, and as one willing to sacrifice her principles for the sake of self-preservation, the latter representation in turn contradicted by her reminder that the Woolfs intended to gas themselves in the event of Nazi invasion. Nunez thus enacts a dialogic contestation of simplistic popular representations of Woolf, instead illuminating the different facets of her subjectivity that emerge from her diverse texts. Nunez similarly engages with diverse textual traces to reconstruct Woolf’s working habits, representing both her ecstatic flashes of

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inspiration and the “donkey work” which followed (Woolf 1984, 133). Virginia’s moment of illumination for Between the Acts is portrayed as “the eerie and rapturous feeling that something was about to be communicated to her, as from another world” (112). Having “held her breath” and “closed her eyes”, she hears “a muffled music, like distant horns; a soft rising and falling,” before “her mind took flight: people, houses, streets, landscapes, weather, seasons, friendships, patterns, fates, passions, necessities—A new novel” (112). This is interpretable as an intertextual echo of Woolf’s description, in “A Sketch of the Past”, of a walk in Tavistock Square during which “I made up––as I sometimes make up my books––To the Lighthouse; in a great, apparently involuntary, rush”. Woolf emphasises the accrual of associative ideas as “one thing burst into another. Blowing bubbles out of a pipe gives the feeling of the rapid crowd of ideas and scenes which blew out of my mind, so that my lips seemed syllabling of their own accord as I walked” (2002b, 92–93). Further evidence for Woolf’s “mind [taking] flight” may be found in her diaries: “Professions for Women” is, for instance, “conceived” in its entirety “while having my bath” (1953, 165). Stephen Daldry’s film adaptation of The Hours, released five years before the republication of Mitz in 2007, did much to popularise this image of Woolf as a poetic visionary. The film prompted Hermione Lee to complain that “I wish that the idea of “creativity” didn’t consist in an inspirational flash, of the first sentence leaping to the novelist’s mind, shortly followed by a whole book.” (2005, 55). While, as demonstrated above, Woolf’s ecstatic flashes of inspiration are well-documented, the constraints of Daldry’s single-day narrative precluded their accurate situating within a context of years of industry. This is imbricated with what Karen Scherzinger refers to as “the problem of writing creatively about creativity” (2008, 182), the representation of a writer’s industry being at odds with the construction of an engaging narrative. Woolf herself highlighted this problem in Orlando, in which the writing subject leaves the biographer with nothing to do but “recite the calendar, tell one’s beads, blow one’s nose, stir the fire, look out of the window, until she has done.” (2006, 236). The problem, however, with presenting only the inspirational flash is that it suggests that the act of writing is rapid and effortless as opposed to gradual and arduous; while the ideas may appear in a “rapid crowd” they must still be committed to paper with great labour and patience. Too great an emphasis on the moment of inspiration thus risks disengaging the subject from the process of writing, thus representing Woolf as a poetic visionary detached from her own creative output.

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Republished in the wake of The Hours, Mitz provides a valuable point of contrast to the over-emphasis, perceived by Hermione Lee, on Woolf’s moments of inspiration. By engaging with a broader range of intertexts than Daldry’s single-day narrative, itself based on Michael Cunningham’s novel, Nunez is able to represent the “sober drudgery” that went hand-inhand with creative inspiration (Woolf 1984, 133). Her narrator states that Flush was conceived as “a relaxation—something to cool a brain that had seethed and bubbled over during the feverish labour of competing The Waves” (39), echoing a diary entry in which Woolf notes how she “fled, after The Waves, to Flush”, wanting “simply to sit on a bank & throw stones” (1982, 332). However, as the narrator subsequently observes, Flush “soon turned into what all book writing always turns into: work, work, work” (39), as evidenced by another diary entry in which Woolf records “trying to re-write that abominable dog in 13 days, so as to be free—oh heavenly freedom—to write The Pargiters” (1982, 139). Whereas Daldry’s film represents an atypical day, in which Woolf embarks upon Mrs Dalloway after discovering the first sentence in her sleep, Nunez’s narrator emphasises that the Woolfs habitually “wrote from nine-thirty until one”, attributing their prolific output to this daily industry rather than the inspirational flash: “The Woolfs had spent so many mornings of their lives in this way that by 1934 they had written more than a score of books between them” (16). Again this detail emerges from one of Nunez’s suggested intertexts, Leonard Woolf’s memoirs, in which he states: “I have never known any writer work with such concentration and assiduity as [Virginia Woolf] did” (1964, 81). Finally, Nunez pre-empts Alison Light in demonstrating how the Woolfs’ creative machinery was oiled by domestic service: “for if they had had to do their own shopping and cooking and tidying, how much time would have been left for reading and writing and publishing?” (18). Light provides a categorical answer to this question: “without all the domestic care and hard work which servants provided there would have been no art, no writing, no ‘Bloomsbury’” (2007, xvi). For Nunez, as for Light, the situation of Virginia’s creativity within a framework of steady labour leavened by domestic service contests “a romantic view of art which imagines it to be the product of lonely genius” (Light 2007, xvi). Instead, Nunez makes what Alan Bennett calls “the habit of art” central to her portrayal of the subject. By framing Virginia’s occasional moments of inspiration within the “Monday or Tuesday” world of “work, work, work” (39) she insists upon her ownership over her creative output, giving the biographical subject full credit for the incremental creation of her published texts.

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Nunez’s emphasis on her subject’s industry could easily have produced the same effect as Leonard Woolf’s selections from Woolf’s diary, summarised in a contemporary review by Henry Green as “one long agonised cry from someone who was breaking herself with overwork” (1992, 179; Lee 1997, 107). By including only those entries that related directly to Woolf’s profession, A Writer’s Diary created the illusion that her life was solely occupied by her work. This illusion was compounded by the main text of the volume numbering 365 pages, suggesting a “year” in which, to quote Green, “she does not […] once mention laughter” (180). Reference to Quentin Bell’s biography implies that this was a misleading representation: “the new friends whom Virginia made in the ’thirties […] did not carry away with them the impression of an old and gloomy authoress, frustrated in her work […]. At Monk’s House and at 52 Tavistock Square the prevailing sound was still one of laughter” (1972, 210). Elizabeth Bowen, one of Woolf’s “new friends” of the thirties, recalls her laughter vividly: “consuming, choking, delightful, hooting” (1970). Nunez makes allowance for her subject’s light-heartedness by tempering her portrayal of an industrious Virginia, itself an intertextual construct, with reference to some of the subject’s more whimsical aspects as they emerge from her complete diaries. These include Woolf’s mention of “the Zet crawling from one chair to the other, picking at L[eonard]’s head” (1982, 267), which Nunez’s narrator suggests was a nightly occurrence: “Mitz would find something and examine it for a long, suspenseful moment before popping it into her mouth. Leonard no longer has to worry about dandruff, [Virginia] announced to astonished friends” (41). The novella also makes reference to an amusing anecdote in Leonard Woolf’s memoirs detailing his method for enticing the jealous marmoset down from a tree: “I got Virginia to stand with me under the tree and I kissed her. Mitz came down as fast as she could and jumped on my shoulder chattering with anger” (1967, 188). In Mitz, the marmoset is similarly enraged by “[s]eeing Leonard put his arm around Virginia” and “nuzzle Virginia’s cheek”, a “trick” which, the narrator suggests, “worked every time” (33). As well as tempering the portrayal of Virginia’s professional diligence, the last of these intertextual references also complicates the popular presentation of Woolf as “a chaste, chill, sexually inhibited maiden: Virginia the virgin” (Lee 1997, 244). This stubborn characterisation has its roots in a letter from Vanessa Bell to her husband following the Woolfs’ marriage, in which she wrote that they “seemed very happy, but are evidently both a little exercised in their minds on the subject of the Goat’s coldness”. Bell stated that she “consoled” Leonard Woolf by suggesting

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that her sister “had never understood or sympathised with sexual passion in men” (1998, 132). Hermione Lee and Jane Dunn agree that “the version of their marital sex-life put about by Vanessa and Clive […] perpetuated the legend of Virginia’s frigidity” (Lee 1997, 244), ultimately forming “a pervasive attitude towards Virginia and sexuality” (Dunn 1996, 186). This attitude is evident in Gillian Freeman’s biofiction But Nobody Lives in Bloomsbury (2006), in which Virginia is described unequivocally as “a sexual coward” (52). By extending the criteria for intimacy to include nonsexual displays of affection, Nunez attributes to Virginia an active physical life. Aside from the aforementioned embracing and nuzzling, Nunez makes reference to nicknames which recur in Woolf’s diaries between 1915 and 1936 (Lee 1997, 541). “To her husband”, the narrator observes, Virginia “was Mandril (A mandril is a large, ferocious baboon)” (36). As noted by Lee, such “pet names” and “animal games” testify that this is “not an a-sexual marriage, but one which thrives on affectionate cuddling and play” (1997, 333). Nunez also has Leonard recall with great affection his first glimpse of Virginia as described in Leonard Woolf’s memoirs. Her narrator states that “just as Virginia was, at this moment, that beautiful young woman of 1912 again, Leonard was again that ardent young man who declared, “It would be worth the risk of everything to marry you.” (97). Nunez thus uses intertextual engagement to undermine the popular preoccupation with the sexual dimension of the Woolfs’ marriage, presenting a couple who sleep “in their separate rooms” yet remain “closer than they had ever been” (127, 108). In the sole piece of criticism on Mitz, Drew Patrick Shannon states that “Nunez perhaps wisely avoids trying to figure Woolf out, but achieves a sense of authenticity by quoting liberally” (2005, 157). Shannon’s indexing of authenticity to liberal quotation is, however, problematic, not least because Nunez’s citations have the potential to lend false validity to her more speculative re-creations. To borrow from “The Art of Biography”, it is their co-existence with verifiable facts that gives Nunez’s “invented facts” a dangerous air of authority (Woolf 1943, 123); the juxtaposition fosters the impression “that anything might be true” (Hagström 2009, 41). Rather than viewing Nunez’s quotations as the vehicle of authentic biographical insight, this article has focussed on the interpretative interventions enabled by her selections from Woolf’s work. Her sustained engagement with Flush contributes to the ongoing resuscitation of that work as a significant part of Woolf’s oeuvre, a resuscitation evident in recent editions, both critical and popular, and in political and eco-critical readings of the text by scholars including Smith, Snaith, and Wylie. At the same time, her dialogic reference to Leonard

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Woolf’s memoirs and Woolf’s letters and diaries problematises simplistic popular versions of Woolf herself. Nunez reveals Flush to be serious as well as whimsical, while simultaneously admitting whimsy to her diverse representation of the subject. She thus symbolically reengages the writer’s reputation with that of the text by offering a nuanced understanding of both. With this in mind, what might Mitz reveal about the potential, as well as the limitations, of biofiction? As a mid-point between biography and fiction, biofiction must, as I suggested at the outset, negotiate a mixed generic legacy. This is compounded in Mitz by Nunez’s explicit engagement with Flush, which demands that she balance biography’s investment in a recoverable, extra-textual subjectivity with adaptation’s focus on the text. Yet even those works of biofiction which choose not to foreground a specific source text have an internal tension, which is reflected on the level of nomenclature. Just as Cora Kaplan has argued that “the “bio” in biofiction […] references a more essentialised and embodied element of identity, a subject less than transcendent but more than merely discourse” (2007, 65), the “fiction” suggests precisely the opposite: that subjectivity emerges from the text. Biofiction is thus situated at the locus of broader debates between faith that the sign refers to a recuperable extratextual referent, and a commitment to the textuality of the text. It is evident from the previous analysis of Mitz that the only form of subjectivity recoverable in biofiction is that which is an effect of the text. Thus Nunez’s alternately inspired and industrious Virginia is a textual construct composed of moments in Woolf’s complete diaries, Leonard Woolf’s memoirs, and “A Sketch of the Past”. It is this intertextual dialogism that enables biofiction to achieve a more theoretically sophisticated engagement with the subject than “straight” biography allows. Although literary biography’s grounding in the archive produces a critically informed engagement with the writer’s life, biography as a genre has an inescapable investment in a recoverable extra-textual subject. Conversely, while Mitz’s intertextual engagement with Woolf’s memoirs and diaries reminds readers of the body behind her novels, Mitz resists attempting to recuperate that body. Instead, recognising that extra-textual subjectivity is always already lost, it replaces the body with a tissue of quotations, and thereby embraces the textuality of the self. To return to my opening suggestion that the antecedents of biofiction may be found in Modernist experiments in life writing, a similar strategy is observable in Flush. In focussing on the Brownings, Woolf chose subjects whose embodied images as “passionate lovers—in curls and side-whiskers, oppressed, defiant, eloping” were perceived to have eclipsed their work,

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being “know[n] and love[d] by thousands […] who have never read a line of their poetry” (1932, 202). In Flush, her intertextual engagement with the Brownings’ letters ensured that their writing was central, indeed integral, to their representation as biographical subjects. This is intensified in Mitz, in which the intertexts are not solely epistolary but encompass a cross-section of Woolf’s oeuvre. Such dialogic engagement foregrounds Woolf’s subjectivity as arising from her texts, the “bio” as arising from the “fiction”. Nunez thus unites the dual strands of her generic heritage, the adaptive and the biographical, by making Woolf’s writing fundamental to the presentation of “the person to whom things happened”.

Works Cited Bell, Quentin. 1972. Virginia Woolf: A Biography, Volume Two, London: Hogarth. Bell, Vanessa. 1988. The Selected Letters of Vanessa Bell, edited by Regina Marler. Wakefield, Rhode Island and London: Moyer Bell. Bowen, Elizabeth. 1970. BBC/TV Omnibus, 18 January. Dunn, Jane. 1996. Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell: A Very Close Conspiracy. London: Pimlico. Freeman, Gillian. 2006. But Nobody Lives in Bloomsbury. London: Arcadia Books Ltd. Green, Henry. 1992. “Review of A Writer’s Diary.” In Surviving: The Uncollected Writing of Henry Green, edited by Matthew Yorke, 179– 181. London: Chatto and Windus. Gordon, Lyndall. 2005. “‘This Loose, Drifting, Material of Life: Virginia Woolf and Biography.” In Woolf in the Real World, edited by Karen V. Kukil, 11–18. South Carolina: Clemson University Digital Press. Hagström, Annika J. 2009. “Stasis in Darkness: Sylvia Plath as a Fictive Character.” English Studies 90: 34–56. Itner, Julia. 2006. “Part Spaniel, Part Canine Puzzle: Anthropomorphism in Woolf’s Flush and Auster’s Timbuktu.” Mosaic: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature 39: 181–96. Kaplan, Cora. 2007. Victoriana: Histories, Fictions, Criticism. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Lanchester, John. 2001. Mr Phillips. London: Faber. Lee, Hermione. 1996. “Biomythographers: Rewriting the Lives of Virginia Woolf.” Essays in Criticism 46: 95–113. —. 1997. Virginia Woolf. London: Vintage. —. 2005. Virginia Woolf’s Nose: Essays on Biography. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press.

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Lippincott, Robin. 1999. Mr. Dalloway. Louisville, Kentucky: Sarabande Books, Inc. Lodge, David. 2007. The Year of Henry James: The Story of a Novel. London: Penguin. Nunez, Sigrid. 2007. Mitz: The Marmoset of Bloomsbury. Brooklyn, NY: Soft Skull Press. Partridge, Ralph. 1956. Portrait of Virginia Woolf. BBC Home Service, 29 August. Sanders, Julie. 2006. Adaptation and Appropriation. London: Routledge. Scherzinger, Karen. 2008. “Staging the Author: Representing the Author in Colm Tóibín’s The Master and David Lodge’s Author, Author! A Novel.” The Henry James Review 29: 181–96. Shannon, Drew Patrick. 2005. “The Lightly Attached Web: The Fictional Virginia Woolf.” In Woolf in the Real World, edited by Karen V. Kukil, 153–158. South Carolina: Clemson University Digital Press. Smith, Craig. 2002. “Across the Widest Gulf: Nonhuman Subjectivity in Virginia Woolf’s Flush.” Twentieth Century Literature 48: 348–61. Snaith, Anna. 2002. “Of Fanciers, Footnotes, and Fascism: Virginia Woolf’s Flush.” MFS Modern Fiction Studies 48: 614–36. Woolf, Leonard. 1964. Beginning Again: An Autobiography of the Years 1911–1918. London: Hogarth. —. 1967. Downhill All The Way: An Autobiography of the Years 1919– 1939. London: Hogarth. Woolf, Virginia. 1953. A Writer’s Diary. Edited by Leonard Woolf. London: Hogarth. —. 1943. “The Art of Biography.” In The Death of the Moth and Other Essays. 119–26. London: Hogarth. —. 1932. “Aurora Leigh.” In The Common Reader: Second Series, 202– 13. London: Hogarth. —. 1984. The Diary of Virginia Woolf: 1936–1941, Volume Five, edited by Anne Olivier Bell and Andrew McNeillie. London: Hogarth. —. 1982. The Diary of Virginia Woolf: 1931–1935, Volume Four, edited by Anne Olivier Bell and Andrew McNeillie. London: Hogarth Press. —. 2002. Flush: A Biography. London: Vintage Classics. —. 1960. “The New Biography.” In Granite and Rainbow. 119–45. London: Hogarth. —. 2006. Orlando. London: Penguin. —. 2002b. “A Sketch of the Past.” In Moments of Being: Autobiographical Writings, edited by Jeanne Schulkind, 78–160. London: Pimlico. Wright, Alison. 2007. Mrs Woolf and the Servants. London: Penguin.

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Wylie, Dan. 2002. “The Anthropomorphic Ethic: Fiction and the Animal Mind in Virginia Woolf’s Flush and Barbara Gowdy’s The White Bone.” Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 9: 115–31.

CHAPTER FOUR WHAT A LARK! WHAT A PLUNGE! WOOOOOOOO-HOOOOOOO WHAT A FALL WHAT A SOAR WHAT A PLUMMET WHAT A DASH: VIRGINIA WOOLF AND ALI SMITH IAN BLYTH It was early evening, in what would have been the first week or so of April 1999, and myself and three other postgraduate students caught the bus from St Andrews to Dundee to go to the bookshop that used to be on the north-east corner of the south side of City Square (a branch of the now defunct Edinburgh booksellers and stationers, James Thin). We were heading there because we had heard that Ali Smith was going to be reading from her second collection of short stories, the wonderfully titled Other Stories and Other Stories, which had been published on the last day of the previous month. Arriving at the bookshop with plenty of time to spare we found that our worries about securing a good spot to stand were, to put it mildly, unfounded. The attendance at the reading was on the scale of what is generally referred to as “on the small side”. Aside from Ali Smith herself, and Kate Atkinson who had travelled with her, plus the two people who worked in the shop, the audience numbered a total of four. Us. During the reading (just the one story, although I cannot now recall which one it was), the seven of us who weren’t Ali Smith listened as intently and clapped as enthusiastically and un-self-consciously as we could. Afterwards we all talked, less self-consciously I’m sure than we had listened and clapped. There were murmurs of appreciation, and mentions of a possible invite for a reading in St Andrews later that year, or perhaps the next. And then we went our respective ways. I had first encountered Ali Smith’s writing five years before this, when “Text for the Day” won the 1994 Macallan/Scotland on Sunday short story

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competition. Of course, I realise now that if anyone could take in her stride a reading at which four people show up, and no books are sold (I had bought mine the week before, and had already lent it to one of the others to read), it would be the author of a story in which a character gives away her own considerable collection of books, one page at a time, tearing these out and leaving them behind wherever she happens to be when she has finished reading them: There are poems in gutters and drains, under the rails laid for trains, pages of novels on the pavement, in the supermarkets, stuck to people’s feet or the wheels of their bikes or cars; there are poems in the desert. Somewhere where there are no houses, no people, only sky, wind, a wide-open world, a poem about a dormant grass-covered volcano lies held down half-buried in sand, bleaching in the light and heat like the skull of a bird. (Smith 1998a, 29–30)

I’m sure it was something to do with the “otherness” of this that drew me in. The slight hint of the anarchic it had, the couldn’t-give-a-damn-ness of it all. And it has proved to be one of those stories that sticks with you, that pops up unexpectedly days, weeks, years later. Unforgettable. “Text for the Day” was reprinted the following year in Ali Smith’s debut collection, Free Love and Other Stories (1995), but I must admit, I didn’t buy a copy of this at the time. Nor did I go out and get Like, her first novel, when it was published in hardback in 1997. But I did buy the paperback of Like, some time in June 1998, one of those copies left over at the end of a bookshop reading at which the author signs her name and the book is returned to the shelf (I’ve often wondered how many people were there on that occasion; my copy of Hotel World is the same). It would have been about this time, reading Like, that the first inklings of some connection with Virginia Woolf (on whom I had just started a PhD) must have occurred. I have a feeling it all sprang from that word, “like”, and the slight charge of something or other it carried with it. “‘Chloe liked Olivia …’”, Woolf’s semi-fictional narrator in A Room of One’s Own discovers while reading Life’s Adventure by the seemingly fictional Mary Carmichael (who some have argued is based upon Marie Carmichael—that is, Marie Stopes, writing under a thinly-veiled pseudonym—whose novel Love’s Creation was published in 1928). “Do not start. Do not blush”, Woolf’s narrator adds. “Let us admit in the privacy of our own society that these things sometimes happen. Sometimes women do like women” (Woolf 1942, 123). I remember thinking of this episode in A Room of One’s Own when reading in Like of Ash hearing Shona telling the story of two female tennis players at Wimbledon. “It says here they got married

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and everything […] I mean, she said, can you imagine? With another woman? I was staring at my book, not looking up from my book and my ears were burning, I could feel them reddening, and a small voice from somewhere inside my throat before I could stop it was saying, well, maybe, maybe they like each other” (Smith 1998b, 216–17). It is there once again on the penultimate page of the novel, that word, when Ash places an ear on Amy’s chest to listen to her heart: What does it say? she said. It’s like, like—I said, and I stopped, I couldn’t think what else it was like, it was Amy’s heart, it wasn’t like anything else. But she misunderstood me; that’s good, she said, like, that’s a good word, and she looked so pleased I didn’t want to spoil it so I didn’t. (Smith 1998b, 342)

To make use of a musical analogy, the more I read of Like, the more it began to feel as if the novel were a series of variations or improvisations upon the theme of “like”, and the more it began to feel that these somehow or other harked back to or had emerged from Woolf’s use of the same word in A Room of One’s Own, although the question of whether or not this was done intentionally has proved to be a much harder one to untangle (for a fuller discussion on the subject of “like” and Like, see Blyth 2013). But all the same, whether they were intentional or not, apparent similarities between Ali Smith’s writing and Virginia Woolf’s did seem to have an intriguing habit of cropping up. It was safe to say that something was going on. Like the narrator in A Room of One’s Own, who is chased by “a Beadle” after inappropriately straying from “the gravel” to walk upon “the turf” (1942, 9), and who is then refused entry to “a famous library” on the grounds that she an unaccompanied woman not “furnished with a letter of introduction” (12), Ash in Ali Smith’s Like is kept at arm’s length from much of Amy’s Cambridge. When she first arrives there, she is struck by the idyllic unreality and underlying exclusivity of it all: “I had stepped off the bus on to a different planet”, “A Midas Town”, “The Virgin Shine of the place”, “There were willows. They were weeping. There were signs up saying Keep Out and Members Only. There were cows grazing in the distance by another beautiful bridge. Somewhere a perfect church bell was ringing. I was finding it hard to breathe” (Smith 1998b, 230). Ash gets a job in the university library, but she forgets that she is not supposed to casually wander over and speak to the fellows there, even when the fellows are women like Amy. “Wrong. The wrong language, the wrong place”, she realises on one occasion. “The wrongness of it settled round me as one of them adjusted her seating, one of them pressed a napkin to

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her mouth, one of them lifted her cup, another of them waited a moment then carried on talking as if I wasn’t there” (251). “Don’t you work in the library?” one of Amy’s students asks her soon after this. “Do they let you come to the lectures if you’re just someone who works in the library?” (269). Ash’s response to all of this—her studied indifference, her assertions of freedom—recalls Woolf’s narrator’s reflections on her own experiences of “Oxbridge” at the end of chapter one: “I thought how unpleasant it is to be locked out; and I thought how it is worse perhaps to be locked in” (Woolf 1942, 37). Likewise, in Three Guineas, another of Woolf’s semi-fictional narrators contemplates whether or not to send a guinea to a women’s college much like Amy’s: “If I send it, what shall I ask them to do with it? Shall I ask them to rebuild the college on the old lines? Or shall I ask them to rebuild it, but differently? Or shall I ask them to buy rags and petrol and Bryant & May’s matches and burn the college to the ground?” (1943, 60). The narrator of Three Guineas decides against the incendiary option. Ash, when she discovers that there is “Not a word, not a thought, not a syllable” about her in the written record of Amy’s life, has no such compunctions: I hadn’t enough money so I was charming to the man behind the counter and he gave me a gallon in a plastic flask, said I could come in and pay him on my way home. I’m so stupid, I said, I never look at the gauge, this is always happening to me, and I’ll need some matches. A lethal combination, eh, he joked […] At the base of the cairn I used the big books off her desk, the dictionaries, the primers. I piled them all up against the inside of the door. All the Proust off one shelf, all of Woolf’s expensive hardback diaries off another, I hefted them across the room and I threw in some random novels, books I knew she particularly liked. Hiroshima Mon Amour, A Lover’s Discourse, I splashed petrol up the door, shook the last of it over them. As I shut the window after me the room and the night exploded into light. (Smith 1998b, 304)

Looking back, Ash sees “the sky was lit up behind me. The sight of it. The smell on the wind. The charred pages. The historic place of burning. I’d done that, me.” “That’d get into her diary, then,” she adds, “if nothing else did” (305). The thing is, I’m pretty sure that these are not deliberate allusions to Woolf’s works. And in the case of the passage from Three Guineas in particular, the chance that this is a deliberate allusion is significantly lessened by the fact that Ali Smith has said that she did not read Three Guineas until very recently, several decades after she had written Like (personal communication 2011). But that said, I still remember thinking at

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the time that all of this felt, as it still does today, somehow familiar. As if it were somehow, in some way or other, “like” Virginia Woolf. In order to understand what this might mean, let us turn back to A Room of One’s Own, and to the tale of Life’s Adventure. “I think that something of great importance has happened”, the narrator says of Mary Carmichael’s novel. “For if Chloe likes Olivia and Mary Carmichael knows how to express it she will light a torch in that vast chamber where nobody has yet been.” Now, I think it is safe to say that what Woolf’s narrator has in mind here is not the kind of torch Ash or the narrator of Three Guineas were thinking of (or at least I do not think that this is what she means); but rather, I would say that she is thinking of a torch that can show the way, that can open up vistas, that brings light to what she calls “those serpentine caves where one goes with a candle peering up and down, not knowing where one is stepping” (Woolf 1942, 126). By this stage of the narrative, Woolf’s narrator has traced the history (or lack of it) of women’s writing from the time of Shakespeare to the present day (that is, the late-1920s), and she is now looking ahead to the writers who will follow, the novelists of the future. “Give her another hundred years,” she concludes, “let her speak her mind […] and she will write a better book one of these days. She will be a poet, I said, putting Life’s Adventure, by Mary Carmichael, at the end of the shelf, in another hundred years’ time” (Woolf 1942, 142). A reasonably safe prediction perhaps (although art forms can and do degenerate, as well as evolve), but tellingly prescient nonetheless. And it was, of course, not the supposedly fictional Mary Carmichael (see above), but the not always entirely real Virginia Woolf who lit the torch and opened up these unexplored places, many of whose serpentine depths not even she had the time nor the opportunity to peer all of the way into. But Virginia Woolf did at least show the way. It’s now 2013, and by Woolf’s (or her narrator’s) reckoning we have another decade and a half still to go. Granted, “the professors”, or at least some of them, are still “angry” (Woolf 1942, 48 and passim); and in various sections of contemporary society there are those who continue to do their best to at least give out the impression that we remain “under the rule of a patriarchy” (50); but even so, the signs are already surely very hopeful. There are any number of writers working today (or who were active in the intervening eighty or so years) who might be thought of as being influenced by and/or writing “after” Virginia Woolf. The list is as varied as it is extensive, and in singling out Ali Smith here I am not trying to say that she is the “inheritor” of Woolf’s legacy, or that she is in some quantifiable sense more “Woolfian” than the rest of her peers. No. To be honest it is more a matter of personal preference. The simple fact of the

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matter is that Ali Smith is a writer whose work I admire, and she is a writer who has always, somehow, “reminded” me of Virginia Woolf. And yet, we must ask, what does this consist of, what is this feeling? What does it mean when I say that I feel that a writer like Ali Smith is somehow or other “like” Virginia Woolf? Or even, more to the point, in what sense can it be said that Ali Smith is like Woolf’s (or her narrator’s) vision of the supposed novelist of the future? In a sense, I suppose, the answer lies not in any similarity between these two writers, but in the difference. Or rather, in what we might call the similarity of their difference. As Jeanette Winterson, another writer whose work I admire, and another whose writing is often compared with Woolf’s, remarks: “Virginia Woolf was keenly aware of what she had inherited but she knew that her inheritance must be put to work. Every generation needs its own living art, connected to what has gone before it, but not a copy of what has gone before it” (Winterson n.d.). Consider, for example, these lines from the opening page of Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway (her fourth novel, although for our purposes it is the second of her so-called “modernist” novels, following on from Jacob’s Room in 1922): What a lark! What a plunge! For so it had always seemed to her, when, with a little squeak of the hinges, which she could hear now, she had burst open the French windows and plunged at Bourton into the open air. How fresh, how calm, stiller than this of course, the air was in the early morning; like the flap of a wave; the kiss of a wave; chill and sharp and yet (for a girl of eighteen as she then was) solemn, feeling as she did, standing there at the open window, that something awful was about to happen. (Woolf 2000a, 3)

And now these, from the opening of Ali Smith’s second novel, Hotel World: Woooooooohooooooo what a fall what a soar what a plummet what a dash into dark into light what a plunge what a glide thud crash what a drop what a rush what a swoop what a fright what a mad hushed skirl what a smash mush mash-up broke and gashed what a heart in my mouth what an end. What a life. What a time. What I felt. Then. Gone. (Smith 2001, 3)

If two texts are placed side by side like this, patterns will emerge. The temptation in such a case might be to pick out certain parallels, and to read

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into these all manner of significances. Both novels, for instance, take place on a day in June: it is “a cold day” in Hotel World (Smith 2001, 9); in Mrs Dalloway it is “fresh as if issued to children on a beach” (Woolf 2000a, 3). There is a certain correlation in the style and the structure, the language and the imagery in these passages (albeit Woolf’s is more conventionally punctuated, comparatively speaking—everything, of course, always being relative to that to which it is being compared). Both Woolf and Ali Smith make use of a compelling sense of rhythm, a dynamic musicality. Above all, there is an enthusiasm to the writing. It is “fringed with joy” (Woolf 2006, 7), with a belief in the possibilities of language, in the limitless potential of particular words strung together in a very particular order, in the energy and the importance of fiction, in its need to be different, to do things “differently” (as the narrator in Three Guineas had wished the women’s college to do). And there’s the crux: that question of “difference”, of doing things “differently”. In looking at the ways in which these two passages are apparently “like” one and other, so the argument goes, what gets overlooked are the elements which make them uniquely and instantaneously recognisable as the work of “Virginia Woolf” or “Ali Smith”. What this means, in other words, is that I came to realise that when I said that I thought that Ali Smith was a writer very much in the mould of Virginia Woolf, I did not mean Virginia Woolf as she was in the 1910s, 1920s and 1930s, but Virginia Woolf as she might have been had she been writing in the 1990s, 2000s and 2010s. The comparison that emerges from a reading such as this is not one of “like for like”, and nor should it be, but it is one in which some kind of impression emerges that Virginia Woolf and Ali Smith are writers who have a good deal “in common”. It is there for instance in their shared sense of the instabilities of gender, in the manner in which so much can be made to happen with a simple change of pronoun. Think of Orlando awakening in Constantinople: “He stretched himself. He rose. He stood upright in compete nakedness before us, and while the trumpets pealed Truth! Truth! Truth! we have no choice left but confess—he was a woman” (Woolf 1928, 126). And think also of Anthea’s first proper sight of Robin, in Girl Meets Boy: He was the most beautiful boy I had ever seen in my life. But he looked really like a girl. She was the most beautiful boy I had ever seen in my life. (Smith 2007, 45)

It is there in the allusiveness or so-called “intertexuality” of their texts. If you flick through Ali Smith’s novels, you will see that Shakespeare is still there—as are “Keets and Yeets”, or is it “Kates” and “Yates”? (Smith

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1998, 251)—but so now are also Dana and Dusty Springfield: “all kinds of everything”, to quote from one of the quotations that appear at the start of Like (Smith 1998, 1). It is there, most of all, in the sense of change that is to be found in their novels and stories. Cityscapes in particular will change a lot in eighty or a hundred years, as will books. To repeat: “Every generation needs its own living art” (Winterson n.d.). And if an art form doesn’t change, if it doesn’t evolve, it will die. Question: what is your favourite book? Answer: the next one. And so it always has been, and so it always will be. “For books continue each other”, Woolf writes in A Room of One’s Own, “in spite of our habit of judging them separately” (Woolf 1942, 120). They continue, that is, but they do not (or rather, we would prefer it if they did not) unthinkingly follow, simply do again what has been done before, so many times. “We are not pleading merely for courage and sincerity”, Woolf wrote in “Modern Fiction”, “we are suggesting that the proper stuff of fiction is a little other than custom would have us believe it” (Woolf 2008, 9). And what was other and different in the 1920s is a different other and an other different today. And this I would argue applies not just to fiction alone, but to the way in which fiction reflects upon and reacts to “the real world”, and to “life”. Consider, for example, these words from Peggy in the “Present Day” chapter of The Years: ‘Here,’ she began again, ‘here you all are—talking about North—’ He looked up at her in surprise. It was not what she had meant to say, but she must go on now that she had begun. Their faces gaped at her like birds with their mouths open. ‘… How he’s to live, where he’s to live,’ she went on. ‘… But what’s the use, what’s the point of saying that?’ […] ‘What’s the use?’ she said, facing him. ‘You’ll marry. You’ll have children. What’ll you do then? Make money. Write little books to make money… .’ She had got it wrong. She had meant to say something impersonal, but she was being personal. It was done now however; she must flounder on now. ‘You’ll write one little book, and then another little book,’ she said viciously, ‘instead of living … living differently, differently.’ (Woolf 2000b, 371)

Peggy would like Amber/Alhambra in The Accidental, with her oh-sothorough and oh-so-effective method of clearing houses, rebooting lives. Or the post-Amber Eve at the close of the same novel. Or Ash. Or the post-Ash (or post-ashes) Amy whom we meet in the first half of Like. Outsiders every one of them. Delete all. Restart. Begin once again. But not

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the same. Something new. Something “unexpected”, as Ash tries to explain to Shona (Smith 1998, 217). But let us leave the final words to another outsider, Anthea in Girl Meets Boy, a story, like so many of Virginia Woolf’s and Ali Smith’s (and as is reflected in the chapter titles of Hotel World), of the past, the present, the present historical, the future in the past, the perfect, the future conditional—always. And that’s the message. That’s it. That is all. Rings that widen on the surface of a loch above a thrown-in-stone. A drink of water offered to a thirsty traveller on the road. Nothing more than what happens when things come together, when hydrogen, say, meets oxygen, a story from then meets a story from now, or stone meets water meets girl meets boy meets bird meets hand meets wing meets bone meets light meets dark meets eye meets word meets world meets grain of sand meets thirst meets hunger meets need meets dream meets real meets same meets different meets death meets life meets end meets beginning all over again, the story of nature itself, ever-inventive, making one thing out of another, and nothing lasts, and nothing’s lost, and nothing ever perishes, and things can always change, because things will always change, and things will always be different, because things can always be different. (Smith 2007, 159–60)

And there you have it. This is not Virginia Woolf. And this is not Ali Smith writing “under the influence of Virginia Woolf”. But it is Ali Smith engaging in a creative and innovative manner with the world around her, just as Virginia Woolf engaged in a creative and innovative manner with the world of the 1910s, 1920s and 1930s. It is a manifesto of sorts. It is something “new”. And it is a style and a sentiment and a celebration of words, of fiction, of difference, which I cannot help feeling that Virginia Woolf would have approved of, concurred with and, well, yes, why not, liked.

Works Cited Blyth, Ian. 2013. “Simile and Similarity in Ali Smith’s Like.” In Ali Smith (Contemporary Critical Perspectives), edited by Monica Germanà and Emily Horton, 23–34. London: Bloomsbury. Smith, Ali. 1998a. “Text of the Day.” In Free Love and Other Stories, 19– 30. London: Virago. First published in 1995. —. 1998b. Like. London: Virago. First published in 1997. —. 2001. Hotel World. London: Hamish Hamilton. —. 2005. The Accidental. London: Hamish Hamilton.

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—. 2007. Girl Meets Boy. Edinburgh: Canongate. Winterson, Jeanette. n.d. “Virginia Woolf Intro.” http://www.jeanette winterson.com/pages/content/index.asp?PageID=249. Accessed 30 April 2013. Woolf, Virginia. 1928. Orlando: A Biography. London: Hogarth Press. —. 1942. A Room of One’s Own. London: Hogarth Press, First published in 1929. —. 1943. Three Guineas. London: Hogarth Press. First published in 1938. —. 2000a. Mrs Dalloway. Edited by David Bradshaw. Oxford: Oxford University Press. First published in 1925. —. 2000b. The Years. Edited by Hermione Lee and Sue Asbee. Oxford: Oxford University Press. First published in 1937. —. 2006. To the Lighthouse. Edited by David Bradshaw. Oxford: Oxford University Press. First published in 1927. —. 2008. “Modern Fiction.” In Selected Essays, edited by David Bradshaw, 6–12. Oxford: Oxford University Press. First published in 1925.

CHAPTER FIVE BIOGRAPHICAL NOVELS TURNED METAPHYSICAL DETECTIVE STORIES: THE CASE OF SUSAN SELLERS’S VANESSA & VIRGINIA (2008) KIRBY JORIS “These fragments I have shored against my ruins” (Eliot 1998 [1922], 42)

Fictionalised depictions of real authors and artists are certainly popular and the Bloomsbury group in particular has provided writers with plenty of suitable material. Focus has fallen most frequently on Virginia Woolf who has figured as a character in several novels published in the last thirty years, such as The Shadow of the Moth: A Novel of Espionage with Virginia Woolf (1983) by Ellen Hawkes and Peter Manso; The Hours (1998) by Michael Cunningham; Mitz: The Marmoset of Bloomsbury (1998) by Sigrid Nunez; But Nobody Lives in Bloomsbury (2006) by Gillian Freeman; Vanessa and Virginia (2008) by Susan Sellers; The White Garden: A Novel of Virginia Woolf (2009) by Stephanie Barron and, most recently, A Book for All and None (2011) by Clare Morgan. Among the most interesting of these fictionalised impressions of the life of Woolf and her milieu is Susan Sellers’s Vanessa and Virginia (2008). The novel is at heart a metaphysical detective story in which Vanessa Bell, the narrator, endeavours to pierce the mystery of Virginia Woolf’s character and their enigmatic sibling relationship. Sellers subtly mixes fact with fiction, just as the painter Vanessa and the novelist Virginia did in their respective Bloomsbury arts. Indeed, Woolf was clear that in biographical writing the “granite-like solidity of fact” should be tied to the “rainbowlike intangibility” of fiction (Woolf 1994, 473)—a challenge that Sellers seems to have taken up. Vanessa and Virginia is a quest whose ending—if there is any ending at all—is not as clear-cut as it first appears. Using Patricia Merivale’s and Susan Elizabeth Sweeney’s seminal work

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Detecting Texts: The Metaphysical Detective Story from Poe to Postmodernism (1999) as theoretical background, this essay transposes the specific themes found in metaphysical detective fiction onto Sellers’s impressionistic novel, such as “the defeated sleuth, whether he be an armchair detective or a private eye; [...] the purloined letter; […] the ambiguity, ubiquity, eerie meaningfulness, or sheer meaninglessness of clues and evidence; […] the missing person, […] the double, and the lost, stolen, or exchanged identity; [...] the absence, falseness, circularity, or self-defeating nature of any kind of closure to the investigation.” (Merivale and Sweeney 1999, 8). All of the elements listed in this definition of the metaphysical detective story are paralleled in Sellers’s novel. Vanessa and Virginia could qualify as a “fictional autobiograph[y],” defined by Dorrit Cohn as a “novel where a fictional narrator gives a retrospective account of his life, and not one thought to be based on the author’s life.” (Cohn 2000, 30). However, the term “autobiography” implies that the form of the book should resemble that of a traditional autobiography, which is not exactly the case in Sellers’s novel, since it is also interpersed with moments taking place in the protagonist’s present. Nor is Sellers projecting her own life onto that of her main character, although her personal interests may inadvertently emerge.1 Instead the novel presents the fictionalised Vanessa Bell reviewing her life and confessing her sins, defects and frailties in a written piece of work which she considers truthful and that revolves around her relationship with her deceased younger sister Virginia Woolf. As Vanessa makes clear, she is not composing a “work of fiction” but is rather busying herself with “an attempt to discern the truth” (Sellers 2008, 31). In writing her own story, she brings a new perspective to the dramatic events that peppered her life as an influential member of the Bloomsbury Group, all the while considering herself far less talented and popular than Virginia: “I do not have your talents,” she laments when she realises that her sister has found a “way of penetrating to the truth” (14) in her writing. Vanessa is actually looking for a missing person by writing this version of events, she is trying to find the “real” Virginia (hence the second-person narrative voice), but she is also searching for herself, the person she was before she became “caught up in [Virginia’s] world of make-believe” (9)—a kind of victim of her sister’s erratic behaviour and myth-making. The real-life Vanessa frequently worried that her sister had “since early youth […] made it her business to create a character for me according to her own wishes and has now so succeeded in imposing it upon the world that the preposterous stories are supposed to be true because so characteristic.” (quoted in

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Garnett 1995, 22). This accusation is confirmed by Woolf in a letter to Duncan Grant: “indeed one of the concealed worms of my life has been a sister’s jealousy—of a sister I mean; and to feed this I have invented such a myth about her that I scare know one from t’other” (quoted in Garnett 1995, 22). In Sellers’s novel, Vanessa is thus trying to define her relationship with her sister; understand her sister; and reclaim herself from her sister. By taking up her pen and reinterpreting the events, Vanessa endeavours to keep track of herself by impressing on the reader her own version of herself and Virginia, although her memories are, as she admits from the start, “tangled” when she tries to “peer back through the alleys of the past” (Sellers 2008, 2 and 35–36). In Daniel Dennett’s words, “Our fundamental tactic of self-projection, self-control, and self-definition is not spinning webs or building dams, but telling stories, and more particularly connecting and controlling the story we tell others—and ourselves—about who we are.” (Dennett 1992, 418). Sellers’s narrator seems hesitant and is constantly on the lookout, endeavouring to spot Virginia, the person lost from sight. Vanessa is, according to Merivale and Sweeney’s definition of metaphysical detective stories, an “armchair detective” (1999, 4), that is, a detective who is accustomed to solving mysteries without leaving his/her house, rather like Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple, physically passive but mentally active. By “peel[ing] away the layers of memory” (Sellers 2008, 42), Vanessa offers her version of events, a personal interpretation, an impression, filled with doubts, uncertainties and inaccuracies, as evidenced by the narrator herself when she cannot accurately remember details of her life: “I do not remember; that time is hazy in my mind” (80). This may be because, as Vanessa herself states, she is “old now,” her fingers “twisted with arthritis” (45). In that sense, Vanessa and Virginia could also be regarded as a “narrative of the last days,” since it “shows the central person engaged in reviewing a life which is drawing to its close” (Schabert 1990, 103), a key feature in biographical novels which usually “prefer to concentrate on the later periods of human life,” and very often represent a “person’s last, self-encompassing act.” (Schabert 1990, 37). However, that Vanessa’s narrative of her own life stops with the end of her sister’s and thus avoids the further twenty years that Vanessa lived, suggests that the story is about Vanessa finding Virginia, not about Vanessa’s life in a biographical sense at all. The impossibility of remembering everything and putting all the pieces back in order, in the years from Virginia’s birth to her suicide, amounts to the detective’s failure, an aspect very much at work in metaphysical detective biofictions in general2 and in Sellers’s novel in particular.

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The form of Vanessa’s tale seems similarly problematic: Is it a letter? A diary? A memoir? It seems to be all these things. Our inability to fix the genre of the fictionalised Vanessa’s story dovetails with the “textual constraint” expounded by Merivale and Sweeney in the characteristics that they outline for metaphysical detective stories (Merivale and Sweeney 1999, 8), for the text itself becomes an object of wonder, difficult to define in itself.3 The generic indeterminacy of the text composed by Vanessa is reflected in the nature of Sellers’s novel as a whole, for it is itself a hybrid work belonging to what Linda Hutcheon has called “historiographic metafiction” (Hutcheon 1988, 105), not only because, according to Hutcheon, “the protagonists of historiographic metafiction are [more often than not] anything but proper types: they are the ex-centrics, the marginalized, the peripheral figures” (113–114), but equally because those works self-consciously blend fact and fancy and rely on a narrative construal of the past. As Hutcheon highlights, the “past really did exist, but we can ‘know’ that past today only through its texts.” (128). Vanessa and Virginia is arguably exemplary in this respect, as the recent interest in Virginia Woolf’s sister reflects Dennis Kersten’s assertion that biographical fiction pays particular attention to the “underrepresented ‘minor’ characters” in the shadow of great writers (Kersten 2011, 44). Sellers’s narrative highlights that a “subsidiary” life can “take […] centre stage” (Kersten 2011, 44), which is necessary to the story’s “equilibrium” (Sellers 2008, 133), while the “‘great’ life story [functions] as a frame” (Kersten 2011, 45). Yet this story is really about the relationship between sisters; that Woolf was arguably more famous than Bell in their life-time seems immaterial, with the exception of the moments where her jealousy becomes central. Sellers shows how Kersten’s assertion can be undermined if the focus on both subjects is not on their artistic status, but their personal connection. In Sellers’s novel, Virginia, as the fictionalised Vanessa explains, is “in the centre of the picture […] painted in a different palette” because she is Vanessa’s sister, not because she is Virginia Woolf (Sellers 2008, 6). Vanessa is thus “simultaneously inside the portrait, a mark on the canvas, and outside it, the artist” (133). Vanessa and Virginia as a metaphysical detective story shows that biofictions, as Lynette Felber explains, are “less interested in plot (the proairetic) than an in-depth exploration of character and motivation (the hermeneutic).” (Felber 2007, 834). This suggests that because personality (“the hermeneutic” which can never truly be known) is privileged over facts (“the proairetic”), the (re-)discovery will always only be partial and subjective, especially when the main witness (Virginia) is missing. As a result, Vanessa’s epistle/diary entry is not only significant as a

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reassessment of her relationship with her sister, but also as a search for her own identity, and not simply as a tale of Bloomsbury events. As the narrator makes clear, she has to “sit with my emptiness, find a way of reconnecting” (Sellers 2008, 153). “[T]hrust into an investigative role” (Black 1999, 92) for which she has no prior qualification, Vanessa wishes to uncover the truth about her own behaviour towards Virginia as well as the truth about her sibling’s behaviour towards her so that “the scraps of [her] life” will “coalesce into a whole” (Sellers 2008, 97). Indeed, the person she is arguably trying to save is herself. The difficulty lies in the fact that if she is “going to complete this picture” she needs “to disregard [her] feelings” (93). Unlike conventional detective fiction in which the detective and criminal are rarely related, Vanessa’s metaphysical detective story is complicated by her intense emotional connection with her sister. Vanessa’s retrospective examination, painful but essential if she wants to get in touch with Virginia and reclaim herself, compels the narrator to take a new look at herself, to put her most profound feelings and ideas down in writing in order to turn over a new leaf and make up a new page in her story—literally and figuratively speaking, for she is “trying to leav[e] the past behind” (Sellers 2008, 42) by “fill[ing] the blankness by creating my own patterns” (128). This is exactly what is often at work in metaphysical detective stories, since “to understand the relationship between author and detective, the character must have a full understanding of who he is before he can hope to understand the other character of the novel.” (Natti 2004). In other words, Vanessa as an incongruous confessing detective must disentangle the threads of her own narrated self before she can solve the case she has undertaken: the resolution of the enigma called Virginia. Just like an impressionistic painter is able to portray various and varied expressions of the same face, Vanessa the writer is aware that “[t]he truth has many sides to it, many changing shapes and forms” (Sellers 2008, 137). Her case is therefore only one possibility carried out in a metaphysical detective story which shows that “how the detective views the case is entirely subjective […] [and] this subjective search yields no objective answer, but only the beginning of another subjective search. […] In metaphysical detective fiction there are no objective answers because objectivity is non-existent.” (Natti 2004). By Vanessa’s own admittance, the truth is never easy to delineate because she is subjective.4 The term “metaphysical” therefore exemplifies the topic correctly, for it shoulders a most significant warning, that all comprehension of the past, of truth and reality can only be fragmentary and evasive; it can only ever be “beyond our understanding” (Sellers 2008, 19).

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Vanessa the painter-turned-writer is trying to immortalise the most significant moments of her existence, but she has too often been accustomed to donning a mask or having a mask thrust upon her. Because the narrative closely resembles a “dear diary” entry, she is often convinced that what she is writing is the truth and the absence of the intended reader who cannot reply helps give weight to this belief. After all, why lie if nobody will ever read the story anyway? Yet, as Bruce Wilshire avers, “even a diary must be intended by the writer as readable by others—even if ‘not to be read’” (1982, 234). Since Woolf’s letters and diaries were read by others even before publication, Vanessa is perhaps aware that though she holds the reins of her narrative, she may need to don yet another mask, just in case. Perhaps this is why she destroys her “diary/letter” at the end of the novel; for either way, if truthful the narrative is too painful to share with other eyes and if shielded by a mask the narrative is untruthful and therefore unworthy of being read. The story related by Vanessa resembles a living painting, a skilful portrait of a sister by her elder sister, intimate, but impressionistic. A truthful depiction of Vanessa’s perspective, subject to the blurring and distortion of Vanessa’s consciousness. Vanessa naturally uses the vocabulary of painting to draw her portrait in which descriptions of pictures actually painted by the historical Vanessa Bell are used to examine and illuminate the characters and events of this intriguing real-life story. The somewhat intense and sometimes strained relationship between the two sisters is often expressed through an amalgamation of the pictorial and the written. Vanessa tries “to picture what went on inside [Virginia’s] head” (Sellers 2008, 17), she reconstructs her feelings for others in her paintings such as her jealousy of Bunny which she puts into his portrait, or the portraits of Virginia Woolf in which she portrays the writer’s face with a featureless patch of paint. The paintings withhold information as well as give it away, although they are also evocative of the real-life Virginia’s character and the instability of any search for the real face. The fictionalised Vanessa states of her sister’s portrait: “I have failed. I pick up my knife and scrape the paint clear […]. This time your expression is a blank. I set my brush aside. I have painted what you are to me” (Sellers 2008, 108). Vanessa uses painting to express her feelings about her sister, but at the same time Virginia remains an enigma and her sister’s written account mirrors the painting so that, Vanessa avers, “No matter how hard I work, I cannot replace what I have lost” (128). Using visual imagery and the structure of pictorial moments, Vanessa describes her tale as a quest through the “kaleidoscope of memory” (44 and 137). Vanessa tries to fit the story together in order to find the solution to the mystery and present

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an overall view of the relationship. These pictures are not dated, they are not documentary material, they are her visual memories, that can only “convey the aura of these days” (Sellers 2008, 5)—intangible, amorphous, metaphysical. Thus, “what has happened” in the life of these sisters can only be described by Vanessa as “beyond our understanding” (19). It seems that inklings of truth in Sellers’s novel, as in the majority of metaphysical detective stories, can only transpire in written form. To stop composing is tantamount to a loss of meaning, a loss of identity, for Virginia keeps existing for Vanessa only via an elaborate and narrated story written by somebody other than the great writer she was. Writing is not the ultimate means to conceal and escape reality, but rather to try and unearth (or update) it. Writing is the only means at Vanessa’s disposal if she wants to communicate with her out-of-sight and out-of-reach recipient. The novel is therefore a request (to remember the past correctly) while remaining an inquest that is relational, personal, essential and therefore metaphysical. The failure of the detective through whom “the mystery remains unsolved and the text incomplete” (Merivale and Sweeney 1999, 10) means that Vanessa’s investigation remains open to other possible interpretations, other conclusions. Vanessa as the detective figure in the novel cannot interpret the clues correctly or solve the mystery, as she herself admits: “The eye of the past winks at me, a reminder that its mysteries remain unsolved” (Sellers 2008, 61). The term “metaphysical” exemplifies the issue in a most compelling way, for it works as a significant warning, namely the fact that any understanding of the past, of truth and reality can only be fragmentary and therefore unattainable. The main point of this kind of metaphysical story is not to grasp a person thoroughly, but rather to evoke her. As a reversed mirror of a traditional detective novel that always ends with the resolution of a mystery, Vanessa and Virginia “adds to a mystery rather than resolving it.” (Merivale and Sweeney 1999, x). In other words, there will never be any real closure to the investigation either in the novel or about its main subject—the relationship between the Bloomsbury sisters. Although, technically speaking, the book does not close with a question mark, the end of Vanessa and Virginia is nevertheless not a culmination to which the reader could apply an elementary “The End,” for the reader is left wondering about what happened in real life. As it is, Vanessa and Virginia is much more than a clever contemporary adaptation of the relationship between Bloomsbury artists Vanessa Bell and her younger sister Virginia Woolf. It is above all one version among many others of the life of Virginia Woolf and her circle, an interpretation, a rendition that cannot constitute the whole, unbiased and absolute truth. Therefore, in Vanessa and Virginia,

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although Vanessa as the first-person narrator endeavours to pierce the mystery of her dead sister and the enigma that enshrouded their relationship, the quest for Virginia Woolf’s story remains an open case, never to be closed. Moreover, even if Vanessa wishes to debunk the myths surrounding her sister, Vanessa’s inquest is too much of an internal investigation to culminate in a happy ending. The failure to understand Virginia when she was still alive is unresolved since the writer who was Virginia Woolf cannot testify nor answer the narrator’s questions. Virginia remains a missing person, thus “destabilizing the subject’s [Virginia’s] identity.” (Savu 2009, 25). Unlike a private detective, Vanessa is partial and biased, for she is involved, too involved perhaps, in the life she relates. So, the epistolary and confessional form of the novel contributes to a questioning of the accepted truth as it has been passed on to posterity, but also to the development of the subjective truth inherent in all tales, the investigation being mapped out around evidence, suspicions and unrehearsed twists and turns, and a profound sense of loss. As Vanessa writes, “There is nothing left. I decide to fill the blankness by creating my own patterns. No matter how hard I work, I cannot replace what I have lost” (Sellers 2008, 128). This sense of loss is emphasised at the end of the novel, when Vanessa decides to destroy the story—and, by extension, the memories—of her life. This self-defeating closure is the most powerful feature of this metaphysical detective story: There, it is done. I tie the pile of pages together and go into the hall to put on my jacket and boots. I walk to the river and kneel down on the bank. I untie my parcel and dip the first sheet in the water. The words blur. I wait until the paper is soaked so that it will not be blown away by the wind, then let it go. The current snatches it from my fingers and rushes it downstream. I take the next page from the pile. When the last one has been released I make my dedication. This story is for you. (Sellers 2008, 181)

This ending is self-defeating because by drowning the pages of her narrative, Vanessa somehow admits that her own story is not worth being kept intact. This voluntary act of destroying the story the narrator has taken great pain to assemble ultimately testifies to the impossibility of a successful ending to the inquest. Earlier on, Vanessa had admitted that a picture is complete when the “threads tie the whole” (47). By reversing the action in the last page of Sellers’s novel, Vanessa acknowledges even more profoundly that she can no longer “hold the pieces of my life in place” (77) and that she “cannot bear the thought of life without [Virginia]” (87). When the sisters were younger, the “loops of [Vanessa’s]

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letters spin the thread that connects” her to Woolf (51). Now the epilogue significantly reminds the reader of another aspect of the Stephen sisters’ relationship, that is Woolf’s suicide by drowning in 1941 and the “pact” the two of them make in Sellers’s novel (149). Throughout the novel Vanessa repeatedly alludes to her sister’s demise, trying to “picture what went on inside your head” (17, 64, and 147). The destruction of the story of the two Bloomsbury sisters somehow crushes the investigation carried out by Vanessa—the words become blurred like Woolf’s face in Bell’s painting. The failure of the detective as perceived by Merivale and Sweeney is thus here to be noticed, for “the mystery remains unsolved and the text incomplete.” (1999, 10). Susan Sellers compares the two sisters, from the title and the book cover of the novel onwards: “Vanessa” and “Virginia”: the same initials, the same last letter. These could have be the first names given to twins, Virginia being Vanessa’s “natural ally in [her] dealings with the world” (Sellers 2008, 4). In Merivale and Sweeney’s description of metaphysical detective stories they note the prevalence of double identities, a theme which pervades Sellers’s novel. Their doubling makes the relationship between the sisters seem complementary, each needing the other; each with a shared sense of childhood sorrow; similar, though not the same, in appearance, their faces “inexact replicas of each other, as if the painter were trying to capture the same person from different angles” (Sellers 2008, 4). But there is also danger in their close resemblance as each envies the other’s artistic gifts and Vanessa is conscious, as the older sister, of “the frustration, the desire to catch up and topple me” (4). As Sellers’s narrator remembers, she has often felt as though Virginia and herself were seeing “the world through the same pair of eyes [but] wearing different glasses” (170). The alternation between passages focusing on Virginia and those focusing on Vanessa allows for this particular reading of the exchanged identity. The image on the front cover picks up on this doubling, for it depicts two girls who are nearly identical, looking out of what looks like a rain-tainted window, or maybe it is a painting, or a dream vision of what could have been, of what awaits them on the other side of the mirror. They appear to be reaching up for light or air, the younger sister trying to reach as high as the older. Is there water at the top? Are they drowning? Do they need to be rescued? The sense of mystery is more than compelling both in the paratext and in the novel proper and parallels Vanessa’s portrait of her relation with and to her sister: “There was an arrogance in our complicity. We had no external reference but each other, no guide to direct us, no check on our imaginings and delusions”

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(14). The reader’s imagination is similarly roped in, appraising the real-life evocations by Sellers and their fictionalised counterparts. Vanessa and Virginia is an inquest in quest of the Bloomsbury women beyond the artists, it attempts at reconstructing the events and reconstituting a personal history so as to pierce the mystery of a personality. This paper chase, intertwined with the willingness to understand life through an attractive and original narrative framework and find out what may have really happened by filling the gaps, allows the reader to become a privileged witness to this woman-hunt. Woolf is being tailed in a tale that her sister is trying to unsuccessfully disentangle. The reader follows the investigation, navigating between the pretences, the clues that maintain their curiosity while they are forced to acknowledge that credulity and incredulity are the two sides of the same coin. Vanessa and Virginia does not seek certainty, for Virginia is depicted as a blurred and mysterious character. In that sense, her personality is progressively shaped but always vacillates between an interpretation of events that wishes to be reliable because it sketches attested facts about a real-life person and the perception that the past can, ultimately, only be remodelled, reshaped because it is dependent on memory. Consequently, the trail must remain intact, always to be explored because it is never possible to be conclusive. The ultimate revelation is left latent, imperceptible. In this unceasing quest for Virginia Woolf, the reader is, like the narrator Vanessa, a detective eager for truth; but although Virginia is within reach, she cannot help but escape. Not content with echoing the oneiric character of the closing pages of Vanessa and Virginia, this shows that “the confusion [the detective] creates is greater than his detective talent. Rational thinking and a clear mind are blocked by his inner conflicts and his pointless quest for meaning” (Kugler 1999, 19), which implies that the “attempt to discern the truth” (Sellers 2008, 31) will always be no more than an attempt, as Vanessa predicts, no matter how steadfast her affirmations that the story is not a work of fiction. As the famous biographer Leon Edel wrote, one ought to track down “the complexities of being without pretending that life’s riddles have been answered.” (quoted in Nadel 1984, 118). Perhaps it is also, as indicated by Sweeney, that a metaphysical detective story “suggests, in fact, that all our investigations are doomed to remain only cases of supposition, mere stories ‘in place of this,’ narratives that try, in vain, to substitute for the mysterious, irreducible, stubbornly unknowable world outside us. And this is why our investigation […] cannot possibly be closed.” (Sweeney 1999, 265). Virginia resists arrest, while Vanessa, too, remains a “question to

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which [we] despair of ever being able to find an answer” (Sellers 2008, 22).

Works Cited Ackroyd, Peter. 1993. The Last Testament of Oscar Wilde. London: Penguin Books. First published in 1983. Black, Joel. 1999. “(De)feats of Detection. The Spurious Key Text from Poe to Eco.” In Detecting Texts: The Metaphysical Detective Story from Poe to Postmodernism, edited by Patricia Merivale and Susan Elizabeth Sweeney. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Cohn, Dorrit. 2000. The Distinction of Fiction. Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press. Dennett, Daniel. 1992. Consciousness Explained. London: Allen Lane. Eliot, T.S. (1922) 1998. “The Waste Land.” In The Waste Land, Prufrock and Other Poems. Mineola N.Y.: Dover Publications. Felber, Lynette. 2007. “The Recalcitrant Sleuth. Trollope and the Metaphysical Detective Sequence Novel.” In The Journal of Popular Culture, 40(5): 831–848. Garnett, Angelica. 1995. Deceived with Kindness. London: Pimlico. Hutcheon, Linda. 1988. A Poetics of Postmodernism. History, Theory, Fiction. London and New York: Routledge. Kersten, Dennis. 2011. “Travels with Fiction in the Field of Biography. Writing the Lives of Three Nineteenth-Century Authors.” Unpublished Ph.D Thesis, University of Nijmegen. Kugler, Matthias. 1999. Paul Auster’s “The New York Trilogy” as Postmodern Detective Fiction. Hamburg: Diplomarbeiten Agentur. Merivale, Patricia and Sweeney, Susan Elizabeth. 1999.“The Game’s Afoot: On the Trail of the Metaphysical Detective Story.” In Detecting Texts. The Metaphysical Detective Story from Poe to Postmodernism, edited by Patricia Merivale and Susan Elizabeth Sweeney. 1–24. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Nadel, Ira Bruce. 1984. Biography. Fiction, Fact and Form. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Natti, Todd. 2004. “The Text is Suspect. The Author, the Detective and the Subjective in Auster’s City of Glass.” http://www.crimeculture. com/Contents/Articles-Spring05/Auster.html. Accessed 23 August 2013. Savu, Laura E. 2009. Postmortem Postmodernists. The Afterlife of the Author in Recent Narrative. Cranbury: Associated University Presses, 2009.

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Schabert, Ina. 1990. In Quest of the Other Person. Fiction as Biography. Tübingen: Francke. Sellers, Susan. 2008. Vanessa and Virginia. Edinburgh: Two Ravens Press. Sweeney, Susan Elizabeth. 1999. “‘Subject-Cases’ and ‘Book-Cases’. Impostures and Forgeries from Poe to Auster.” In Detecting Texts: The Metaphysical Detective Story from Poe to Postmodernism, edited by Patricia Merivale and Susan Elizabeth Sweeney. 247–269. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Wilshire, Bruce. 1982. Role Playing and Identity. Indiana University Press. Woolf, Virginia. 1994. “The New Biography.” In The Essays of Virginia Woolf, Volume 4, edited by Andrew McNeillie. 473–480. London: The Hogarth Press. First published in 1927.

Notes 1

Sellers is a renowned Woolf scholar and General Editor of The Cambridge University Press Scholarly Edition of Woolf’s works. She also has distinctly feminist interests linked to her work on and translation of Hélène Cixous. Sellers also admits to a degree of personal connection with her subject matter when she discussed her relationship with her own sisters which, she suggests, provided her with a particular insider understanding of the sibling rivalry between Vanessa and Virginia Stephen (this point was made at the post-show talks following performances of the adaptation by E. H. Wright at The Riverside Studios in London in April 2013). 2 See, for example, Peter Ackroyd’s The Last Testament of Oscar Wilde (1983), which ends with the death of the metaphysical detective Oscar, who has not been able to solve the mystery of his own life told in retrospect and who does not have the final word in his own testament. 3 See Merivale and Sweeney 1999, 8. 4 See Sellers 2008, 46, 44 and 76.

CHAPTER SIX A REFLECTION OF MY OWN: JEANETTE WINTERSON, VIRGINIA WOOLF AND THE NARCISSISM OF HOMMAGE AGATA WOħNIAK You are a looking-glass world. You are the hidden place that opens to me on the other side of the glass. I touch your smooth surface and then my fingers sink through to the other side. You are what the mirror reflects and invents. I see myself, I see you, two, one, none. I don’t know. (Winterson 2001b, 174) To talk about my own work is difficult. If I must talk about it at all I would rather come at it sideways, through the work of writers I admire, through broader ideas about poetry and fiction and their place in the world. (Winterson 1996, 165)

Recent years have seen a re-establishment of Virginia Woolf’s fiction as a major source of inspiration for contemporary writers, as evident in the publication of such novels as Michael Cunningham’s The Hours (1998), Monica Ali’s Brick Lane (2003) and Ian McEwan’s Atonement (2001) and Saturday (2005), all of which, albeit in a variety of ways, engage with Mrs Dalloway (1925). Ali Smith has also acknowledged Woolf as a precursor and it is difficult not to see the influence of The Waves (1931) on her lyrical Hotel World (2001). Pat Barker is even more indebted, with her Regeneration trilogy (1991–95) returning to the topics of madness and the social repercussions of World War I as explored in Woolf’s fourth novel. Her third work, Jacob’s Room (1922), has been re-written by Barker in her most recent Toby’s Room (2012), which is also a powerful reflection of the contemporary interest in Woolf’s biography, demonstrated not only in Cunningham’s The Hours and its film adaptation directed by Stephen Daldry (2002), but also, more recently, in Susan Sellers’ Vanessa and Virginia (2008). The title of the high priestess of this Woolfian

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“renaissance” nevertheless belongs to Jeanette Winterson, whose work has consistently reworked Woolfian themes and engaged not only with such novels as Orlando (1928) and To the Lighthouse (1927), but also with Woolf’s essays. But whilst Winterson’s reliance on Woolf’s oeuvre has been widely recognised among literary critics, not enough emphasis has been placed on the connection between the former’s self-invention and self-promotion and what bears the signs of a typical literary hommage. The following article constitutes an attempt to rectify this omission and to reevaluate Winterson’s apparent tribute to her great precursor. Winterson has made a significant contribution to the revival of Woolf’s popularity among writers and readers alike. In her essay collection, Art Objects (1995), she restored the Modernist writer’s reputation as one of the greatest British authors and rectified an impoverished image of Woolf as a frail “Bloomsbury madwoman” (1996, 97). What is more, she bemoaned the fact that Woolf’s feminism took pride of place in critical work on her fiction, drawing attention away from its purely literary merits (70). Celebrating Woolf’s work with religious devotion, Winterson called the Modernist author “the most complete” of her literary precursors (131)1 and placed herself in the tradition of women writers described by Woolf as “‘inheritor[s]’” and “‘originator[s]’” (163) who are joined in a common, sisterly effort to bring about the rebirth of Shakespeare’s sister. Accordingly, “all her [Winterson’s] fictions may be said to belong to a specific kind of novel: that claimed by Virginia Woolf for the woman writer of the future” (Onega 2006, 12), her task outlined in A Room of One’s Own (1929): The book has somehow to be adapted to the body, and at a venture one would say that women’s books should be shorter, more concentrated, than those of men, and framed so that they do not need long hours of steady and uninterrupted work. (Woolf 1998, 101)

Onega asserts that Winterson composes her fiction in fulfilment of these requirements, for not only is her style poetic and “concentrated”, but her novels are also brief and “crucially concerned with physicality and the human body” (2006, 13). Through her choice of sex as one of her main themes, as well as her sexually-liberated female characters, such as Villanelle in The Passion (1987), Doll Sneerpiece and Sappho in Art & Lies (1994), and Louise in Written on the Body (1992), Winterson recalls the figure of Mary Carmichael, whose mission it would be, according to Woolf, to “go without kindness or condescension, but in the spirit of fellowship, into those small, scented rooms where sit the courtesan, the harlot and the lady with the pug dog” (Woolf 1998, 115). Winterson even

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repeats her predecessor’s famous appeal for the woman writer to “[break] the sequence” (119), thus firmly establishing herself as the inheritor of Woolf’s literary vision: “Break the narrative. Refuse all the stories that have been told so far […], and try to tell the story differently—in a different style, with different weights” (Winterson 2001b, 53). Winterson does much more than complete the tasks set out by Woolf for the female author of the future. Her identification with the Modernist writer leads her to re-write and transform Orlando to an extent unparalleled in contemporary British fiction, for no other major novelist has made Woolf’s single literary work the foundation of his or her oeuvre. In many ways, Winterson’s vision of Orlando as the source of “[a]ll the things we have come to take for granted from modern fiction” (2005a, 16) could be employed to describe her own novels. The similarities between Woolf’s writing—and especially her mock-biography—and Winterson’s fiction are so numerous, in fact, that to list and analyse them all would require a lengthy study. The present article can, therefore, only mention a few. It is hardly surprising that Woolf’s magic realist work has become Winterson’s primary precursor text. For an author whose main preoccupation is romantic love, and who “happens to love women” herself (1996, 104), Orlando must have appealed tremendously. Not only does Woolf openly discuss lesbian relationships, but her novel has been famously described by Harold Nicolson as “the longest and most charming love letter in literature” (2004, 186), an embodiment of her fascination with Vita Sackville-West. Winterson’s view that Realism is “essentially anti-art” (Winterson 1996, 30–31) and her insistence on the imagination as the basis of literary creation (133) have also contributed to her appreciation of Orlando—one of the most imaginative Modernist novels. Furthermore, much of Winterson’s fiction has been classified in the genre of magic realism, Orlando being one of its earliest examples. Finally, the contemporary novelist believes that “the pursuit of artists” is “to disguise and distort or obscure their identity or invent a completely different role” (Francone 2005), a vision which presents literary creation as a transformation and extension of the self. This artistic credo recalls not only Woolf’s fictionalisation of Vita, but also the way in which “the terms of history become Orlando’s terms, and finally even history itself becomes Orlando’s story” (Gilbert 1993a, xxvii). In many ways, Woolf’s novel provides the contemporary writer with “the fixed point” which “is only the base camp—the journeys out from there are what interests” (Winterson 2001b, 215). These journeys are numerous and varied—early-nineteenth-century Venice in The Passion,

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1600s London in Sexing the Cherry (1989), the virtual world in The PowerBook2 (2000) (to name but a few). What happens in these fantastic locations is, to a large extent, a re-inscription of the events depicted in Woolf’s novel, for Winterson’s characters not only travel through time (in Sexing the Cherry and The PowerBook), but also share Orlando’s androgyny, dressing up as both men and women, which is one way of breaking through the boundaries of their own identities and going beyond “the confines of heterosexual desire” (1996, 67). Recalling Orlando’s experience as both man and woman, cross-dressing offers Winterson’s characters the opportunity to see life through the eyes of the other sex and thus experience it in its fullness. Like the vibrant figures of Woolf’s mockbiography—such as the Russian princess, Sasha, the Archduchess/ Archduke Harriet/Harry and Marmaduke Bonthrop Shelmerdine—all of whom pose a challenge to gender stereotypes, Winterson’s women tend to be far from “feminine”, as opposed to her male characters, who often display that feminine quality in excess. It would be hard to envision a less ladylike persona than the murderous Dog Woman—a giantess boasting but a few broken teeth, her face covered with smallpox scars that “are home enough for fleas” (1989, 19). As Jane Haslett’s argument makes clear, the heroine of Sexing the Cherry is one of the most daring representations of a woman in Winterson’s fiction, for “[i]n the grotesque body of Dog Woman, Winterson has incorporated all the misogynist features of a female body imaginable” (2007, 43), her character’s physique representing “everything the female body is not supposed to be” (42; Haslett’s emphasis). Nevertheless, it is also “a fabulously invincible body” (43). Its power becomes starkly clear when contrasted with the Napoleonic soldier and chef, Henri (The Passion), who—although endowed with a male body—is conventionally much more feminine. Not only does he never kill another man during the eight years he spends in the French army, but he “can’t pick up a musket to shoot a rabbit” (Winterson 2001a, 28). The object of his passion, Villanelle, is another androgynous being, though her androgyny is, as Haslett suggests, much bolder and more “complex” (2007, 43) than the Dog Woman’s, for Villanelle has a truly queer body, which, although largely female, bears the webbed feet of the male Venetian boatmen (44–45). According to the critic, “Villanelle’s webbed feet can be read as a metaphor for male genitalia, and Villanelle’s body can be seen as hermaphroditic” (46). Consequently, unlike Orlando, whose male and female identity—though placed within the same body—are temporally separated by a week-long period of transformative sleep, and who has to leave the physical confines of one sex in order to be biologically included in another, Villanelle has crossed the boundary not

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only both ways but simultaneously, dissolving it in the process. By extending Woolf’s politics of undoing gender difference to the body, Winterson has thus given voice to contemporary taboos on the subjects of transsexualism and hermaphroditism.3 In other words, both writers respond to the social issues of their own time, Woolf questioning what she saw as an artificial division between masculinity and femininity, Winterson challenging the binary opposition between male and female. Sonya Andermahr observes that although the contemporary writer’s emphasis on the body is also present in The PowerBook—a series of tales whose protagonist and creator is the gender-shifting Ali(x)—its characters are simultaneously disembodied, for the action of the novel takes place in cyberspace (2005, 116). A re-writing of Orlando, Winterson’s work here re-inscribes Woolf’s mock-biography into the field of information technology—another sign that Winterson does not merely copy her Bloomsbury ancestor, but establishes herself as her contemporary reincarnation. Like the eponymous hero/heroine of Orlando, who is also a writer, Ali(x) inhabits different times, places and genders, changing his/her sex along the way. However, unlike his/her fictional predecessor, who “changes her skin” (Winterson 1996, 67), Ali(x)’s androgyny is safely positioned within the bodiless virtual world. This could be seen as either Winterson’s shying at literary experiment—a conclusion which does not sit well with the novelist’s reputation as a literary explorer and challenger of forms—or, much more justifiably, as her attempt to go beyond gender by eliminating the body (Andermahr 2005, 117)4. This move appears much bolder than Orlando’s physical transformation, for the contemporary novelist makes her characters not merely change but also shed their skins: “Take off your clothes. Take off your body. Hang them up behind the door. Tonight we can go deeper than disguise” (Winterson 2001b, 4). And yet, Winterson’s work is only the logical completion of Woolf’s own argument in Orlando, for the Modernist writer’s observation that, after his transformation into a woman, “in every other respect, Orlando remained precisely as he had been” (1993, 98) suggests not only that “sexually defined selves and roles are merely costumes and thus readily interchangeable” (Gilbert 1993a, xix; my emphasis), but also that the nature of the self is independent of biological sex. Such a vision of the relationship between identity and gender points to the Postmodernism of Orlando, as does its blurring of the boundary between fact and fiction in the form of magic realism. By emulating and developing these features throughout her oeuvre, and by joining them with numerous other references to her precursor’s work, Winterson creates an image of herself as the fully feminist Postmodernised Virginia Woolf.5

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Although Winterson’s explicit reliance on Woolf’s novel makes it difficult to accuse her of harbouring “anxiety of influence” (Bloom 1997), her development of Woolf’s ideas to the point of their logical conclusion—which the Modernist author had not reached herself— suggests that she suffers from the “anxiety of repetition”—of reproducing the glories of the past without adding anything new. Winterson’s engagement with Woolf’s work can thus be seen as an example of T. S. Eliot’s model of tradition,6 which reconciles originality with influence, and is supported by Winterson’s own views on intertextuality, which seem to replicate those of Ezra Pound and his fellow Modernist: the calling of the artist, in any medium, is to make it new. I do not mean that in new work the past is repudiated; quite the opposite, the past is reclaimed […] It is re-stated and re-instated in its original vigour […] The true artist is connected. The true artist studies the past, not as a copyist or a pasticheur will study the past, those people are interested only in the final product, the art object, signed sealed and delivered to a public drugged on reproduction. (Winterson 1996, 12; my emphasis)

What “make it new” signifies, then, is the re-writing of the past in such a way as to make it appear contemporary and fresh—as original as it was at the time of its publication. That Winterson achieves this with respect to Orlando is perhaps best demonstrated in her transformation of Woolf’s novel through the discourse of computer technology in The PowerBook. Characters such as Ali(x) show the reader the relevance of Woolf’s mockbiography to the culture of the virtual world, where anything is possible, especially as one of Ali(x)’s invented names is revealed to be “Orlando” (2001b, 237).7 Ali(x)’s occupation as an e-writer, the fact that both characters symbolize a multitude of identities and genders, and, finally, numerous other references to Woolf’s novel throughout The PowerBook further identify Winterson’s protagonist as Orlando’s mirror-image. The multiple lives led by Orlando are thus revealed as the antecedents of the virtual selves “experienced” by the hero/heroine of The PowerBook and, by extension, the many users of the Internet who join chatrooms as someone other than themselves. Finally, Winterson’s resurrection of Woolf’s protagonist in her androgynous and bisexual characters points to Orlando as anticipating the increasingly cross-gendered nature of contemporary society, where the differences between men and women, especially within gay communities, are becoming increasingly less marked. In other words, Winterson is saving Woolf for posterity as a prophet of contemporary times.

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The novelist’s engagement with Woolf and Eliot does not prevent her, however, from disregarding the Modernist ideal of impersonality. Reading Winterson’s fiction reminds one of the Bloomsbury author’s famous description of a man’s writing: “a shadow seemed to lie across the page. It was a straight dark bar, a shadow shaped something like the letter ‘I’” (Woolf 1998, 130). The “I” appears under various disguises, manifesting itself through language, characterisation and plot. As Brian Bouldrey remarks, “Winterson has made a career of placing herself at the center of her text”. Not only is the author of The Passion “fascinated by selfportraiture in other artists” (2000), but her own work frequently revolves around the figure of its creator, the plot functioning as a “cover version” of Winterson’s own life (Winterson 2009).8 The author is also heavily present in the writer’s self-conscious leitmotifs and maxims, reiterated by Winterson’s characters. The authoritative nature of such “refrains” (Andermahr 2009, 28) as “I’m telling you stories. Trust me” (Winterson 2001a, 5), “There is no love that does not pierce the hands and feet” (2001b, 79) and “There’s no such thing as autobiography there’s only art and lies” (1995, 69) is a manifestation of what Andermahr has described as “the god-like authorial voice of nineteenth-century fiction” (2005, 119), the maxims imposed by none other than Winterson herself. Thus, unlike her characters, who “represent almost exemplary postmodern selves— fragmented, contingent, discursively constructed”, this elevated authorial figure “seems to exhibit few doubts about identity or anything else” (119), putting her own universal truths into the mouths of her fictional marionettes, regardless of her disdain for Realism. The author’s voice thus hovers over the plot in a manner resembling, to borrow Virginia Woolf’s image, “some giant cucumber [which] had spread itself over all the roses and carnations in the garden and choked them to death” (Woolf 1998, 80). The ubiquity of the author within Winterson’s work is mirrored by the writer’s presence in the media world, a large number of interviews with Woolf’s legatee—especially since the publication of Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? (2011)—revolving around her biography. She has also authored her own website, which is filled with her views on a variety of subjects, contains a photo gallery, animations inspired by her fiction, links to newspaper profiles and interviews with the writer, as well as 263 articles written by her9. Winterson has also been criticised for her unashamed self-admiration, as when she named herself “her favourite author writing in English” and nominated her own novel, Written on the Body (1992), as book of the year (Pritchard 1995). To make matters worse, in 1995, the author published an essay collection which promoted her own literary method10 whilst diminishing the work of her contemporaries,

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whom she accused of writing “printed television” (Winterson 1996, 175– 76).11 In short, Winterson has taken full advantage of the various tools available to a writer for the purpose of self-invention and selfadvertisement. That controlling the reception and interpretation of her fiction is one of Winterson’s goals is also evident in the fact that her frequent public statements merely repeat the same facts about her life and the same selection of her views on literature, as if she desired her readers to retain certain information about her. As a result of this media activity, Winterson’s work is necessarily filtered through the novelist’s own self-invented image. A significant part of this public identity is her overt association with Virginia Woolf, and the role that this identification has played in the reception and interpretation of Winterson’s fiction is still to be fully appreciated. The contemporary writer’s emphasis on her intertextual relationship with the Bloomsbury author can be seen as fulfilling a variety of functions in relation to Winterson’s view of herself as well as the construction of her literary reputation. And although Winterson’s self-admiration and self-promotion have been vaguely connected to her explicit identification with her predecessor,12 the implications of their interrelatedness and the various methods that Winterson employs to establish a merger between herself and Woolf have not been thoroughly analysed. What is more, the available models of influence—including Bloom’s agon, the object relational hommage, the post-structuralist concept of intertextuality and T. S. Eliot’s ‘tradition’—fail to take writerly self-promotion and self-invention sufficiently into account. Consequently, it is necessary to come up with a model of influence that would shed more light on Winterson’s engagement with her Bloomsbury precursor and which could help to explicate the intertextual relationships established by other contemporary writers, whose reputations are no longer made solely through their own work but are aided by the mass media in an age obsessed with the individual self. I will argue that an appropriate model can be found by turning to psychoanalytic writing, specifically the work of Heinz Kohut, founding father of selfpsychology, whose reputation rests, to a large extent, on his groundbreaking study of narcissism. Kohut defined primary narcissism as a state in which the new-born baby experiences the mother as one with itself, since “the I–you differentiation has not yet been established”. Consequently, the infant’s “expected control over the mother and her ministrations” resembles “the concept which a grown-up has of himself and of the control which he expects to have over his own body and mind” (1986, 63). The mother’s care is inevitably flawed, however, which disrupts this early narcissistic

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bliss, prompting the baby to re-create the early state “(a) by establishing a grandiose and exhibitionistic image of the self: the grandiose self; and (b) by giving over the previous perfection to an admired, omnipotent (transitional) self-object: the idealized parent imago”. The term grandiose self signifies “the child’s solipsistic world view and his undisguised pleasure in being admired” (1971, 25), whilst the idealised parent imago is a self-object “to whom the child can look up and with whom he can merge as an image of calmness, infallibility and omnipotence”. The other kind of self-object that the child needs is the so-called “mirroring selfobject”, his or her role being that of “respond[ing] to and confirm[ing] the child’s innate sense of vigour, greatness and perfection” (Kohut and Wolf 1986, 177). Both functions are usually performed by the parent. Although disguised as literary hommage, or as an example of T. S. Eliot’s model of tradition and its relation to individual talent, Winterson’s relationship with Woolf might be read as an elaborate form of intertextual narcissism, reflecting the Kohutian split of “the original position” (Kohut 1986, 63) into the grandiose self, supported by the mirroring self-object, and the idealised parent imago, with whose greatness the ego identifies. If Winterson’s unconcealed self-admiration is an embodiment of the Kohutian “I am perfect” of the grandiose self, then her hommage to Woolf, performed at such length in Art Objects, can be seen as a reincarnation of the child’s attitude to its idealised parent imago: “You are perfect”. As stressed by Kohut in The Analysis of the Self (1971), even though these attitudes are “antithetical”, they “coexist”, for the subject idealising its imago experiences himself or herself as part of it: “You are perfect, but I am a part of you” (1971, 27). What is more, since the imago is a self-object, it is “experienced as part of [the] self” (Kohut and Wolf 1986, 177). That Winterson the writer perceives herself as part of Woolf is evident in the way she positions her own work in relation to her Modernist precursor, stressing its place within Woolf’s literary legacy. In addition, Winterson’s fiction—by re-writing some of Woolf’s main preoccupations—is a resurrection and a recollection of certain aspects of Woolf’s work, a more literal rendition of “I am a part of you” and a rendition suggesting the contradictory nature of the statement. Since the contemporary author’s novels reactivate Woolfian themes and methods, Woolf’s work forms a part of Winterson’s, as demonstrated in the “material” way in which any text contains references to another. This double, contradictory containment is most vividly reflected in the implicit structure of The PowerBook. Although the central, unifying figure behind the work, and the real author of the stories which Ali(x) both creates and inhabits, is Winterson herself, Ali(x)’s “true” name is revealed to be

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Orlando.13 This could, on the one hand, imply that The PowerBook’s true author is, in fact, Virginia Woolf, and that it is she who contains her much “smaller” descendant, Winterson. At the same time, Ali(x)’s “real” name and Winterson’s numerous references to Orlando signify The PowerBook’s containment of its literary predecessor, whose omnipresence in Winterson’s novel threatens to break it apart, the text being in danger of bursting at the seams. Winterson thus resembles the female chemist in Sexing the Cherry, who precariously holds her Dog Woman “alter ego” and “patron saint” (1989, 142) inside her, the novel, even here, recalling Woolf’s mock-biography, this time by referring to Orlando’s desire for “‘[l]ife and a lover’” (Woolf 1993, 130): When I’m dreaming I want a home and a lover and some children, but it won’t work. Who’d want to live with a monster? I may not look like a monster any more but I couldn’t hide it for long. I’d break out, splitting my dress […] ‘You’re pretty,’ said my father, ‘any man would want to marry you.’ Not if he pulled back my eyelids, not if he peeped into my ears, not if he looked down my throat with a torch […] He’d see her, the other one, lurking inside. She fits, even though she’s so big. (Winterson 1989, 144– 45; my emphasis)

Like the contemporary reincarnation of the Dog Woman, Winterson contains the powerful figure of Woolf—one of the greatest women writers in the English literary tradition—her writing filled to the brim with Woolfian concerns, ideas and views. Like Jordan’s mother, Woolf barely fits, not merely because “she’s so big”, but because Winterson’s reliance on her precursor’s oeuvre is so great. In other words, the contemporary novelist’s “ingestion” of her ancestor resembles the self’s introjection of its idealised parent imago, which is transformed into “a structure of the psychic apparatus” (Kohut 1986, 65). As well as “containing” her Bloomsbury precursor through her absorption of Orlando in her fiction, Winterson presents herself as a looking-glass image of the Modernist author, much as the Cambridge scholar in Jacob’s Room, Erasmus Cowan, “hold[s] up in his snug little mirror the image of Virgil” (Woolf 1976, 39). In this way, Winterson simultaneously establishes her literary ancestor as a mirror to her own greatness. That this is one of Woolf’s functions is evident in Winterson’s vision of British literary history, for she presents her own contemporary cultural and literary milieu as a reflection of Victorian times, against which the Modernist writer composed her experimental novels. Winterson observes that:

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For Winterson, an ugly Victorianism pervades late-twentieth-century fiction as well. Like Gertrude Stein and Virginia Woolf, the contemporary writer has to fight against her readers’ suspicion of “deep emotions” (50) and the transformative power of art, most people—according to Winterson—desiring only to see themselves and their world reflected in the fiction that they read (83). The majority of writers comply with this wish, producing fiction that is “printed television” (175–6). In this way, they merely replicate the work of the previous generations, for—as far as Winterson is concerned—even Postmodernism was affected by “‘mirror of life’ longings” and even an experimental writer like Muriel Spark is dismissed as a “Realist” (42). The most recent literary period which has managed to challenge the view that literature is a reflection of reality is then Modernism, with whose methods the novelist identifies and which is described as “a poet’s revolution” filled with “play, pose and experiment” (30). Significantly, such a self-serving vision of “the literature of my own language” (41) finds virtually nothing of any literary importance between Winterson’s own work and that of her Modernist precursors, rendering her connection to Woolf—whom she celebrates as “the most complete” of her “private ancestors” (131)—much more direct. By stressing this direct relationship with Modernism, Winterson paradoxically renders her fiction more original, since very few post-Modernist writers—or so Winterson avers—have actively engaged with this literary period (176). Interestingly, whilst Woolf invented her literary legacy partly to ensure her own survival by creating a line of descendants for herself, Winterson—in a typically reversed mirror likeness of this action—has invented herself backwards. The contemporary writer’s emphasis on her connection with her idealised parent imago performs many other narcissistic functions. By identifying herself with Woolf, Winterson increases her own profile as a writer and influences the way readers and critics approach and interpret her work. Winterson’s emphasis on her continuation of Woolf’s literary experiment (Patterson 2004) also encourages scholars to look for similarities between the work of the two authors and to note the elaborations and differences which give credit to the contemporary novelist for her development of the past—a tendency which the present study also demonstrates. Furthermore, by stressing her relationship with one particular precursor, Winterson has focused critical and readerly

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attention on the Woolfian qualities of her writing, thus potentially diminishing her connection to other female authors, especially those working within the conventions of a later Postmodernism. Her emphasis on Woolf’s influence on her fiction is, nevertheless, sufficient to place Winterson’s work within the feminist tradition, leaving the author free to pursue her policy of resistance to labels. The narcissistic nature of Winterson’s approach to her Bloomsbury precursor is most evident in the section of Art Objects which Winterson devotes to her hommage. As she admits in the last chapter of the essay collection, “[t]o talk about my own work is difficult. If I must talk about it at all I would rather come at it sideways, through the work of writers I admire” (1996, 165; my emphasis). Thus, when Winterson objects to “a crazed sub-Freudian approach to [Woolf’s] work” (63), stating that “a writer’s work is not a chart of their sex, sexuality, sanity and physical health” (97), she is arguably referring not only to a tendency in Woolf scholarship, but also to the widespread and often hostile media focus on her own sexual life in the 1990s in an attempt to re-shift public attention towards her fiction. Winterson’s concern for the reception of Woolf’s literary legacy can thus be seen as a screen for her own difficulties, the contemporary author using her ancestor to “provide a function for the self” (St. Clair 1996, 155), which is the fundamental task of the self-object. Similarly, as regards Winterson’s praise, her hommage focuses on Orlando and The Waves—the two novels with which her oeuvre has the most in common. The titles that her work had not engaged with as directly—the High Modernist Jacob’s Room, Mrs Dalloway and To the Lighthouse14—are not even mentioned. Winterson also, unsurprisingly, chooses those aspects of Orlando and The Waves in which they most resemble her own fiction—“lesbianism, cross-dressing, female power” (Winterson 1996, 50), imagination and a poetic use of language, manifested through “exactness” (79), rhythm (76), and emotional “excess” (98). In this way, she is indirectly praising her own novels, whose reception was particularly hostile around the publication of Art Objects, a time when the contemporary writer was in need of a strong mother figure who could defend her method against attack. By emphasising those features of Woolf’s fiction which her work shares with it, Winterson is also presenting herself as a looking-glass reflection of her precursor, however adamant she may be that “[w]e cannot look for the new Virginia Woolf” (177). Thus, she praises Orlando for “exploit[ing] the weak-mindedness of labels” (50), a feature which marks not only Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit (1985), but Winterson’s whole career as a novelist and public figure. Woolf is also celebrated as the most

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perfect artist among the Modernists, for, unlike Joyce and Eliot, she is truly “connected” (1996, 12), not just to the literary past (92), but to the physical world around her (84). This vision of the Bloomsbury author’s work mirrors Winterson’s description of herself, for she states that “[she] cannot do new work without known work” (172) and that “[her] connections are to the earth under [her] feet and the words that fill both hands” (163). Winterson’s use of words is, of course, that aspect of her writing on which she particularly prides herself, stressing her “fidelity to words” (Pritchard 1995), her “love-affair […] with language” (Winterson 1996, 155), and “the passion that I feel for [it]” (168). It is hardly surprising, therefore, that she places special emphasis on Woolf’s poetic style, her appreciation demonstrating how literal the mirroring can become: “Unlike many novelists, then and now, [Woolf] loved words. That is she was devoted to words, faithful to words, romantically attached to words, desirous of words” (75). Last but not least, Winterson’s interpretation of Orlando as a “Trojan horse” with whose help “Woolf smuggled across the borders of complacency the most outrageous contraband”15 (50) is immediately brought to mind upon reading Winterson’s portrayal of her own method two years later: “It’s … a smuggling, a kind of contraband, wanting to get something across frontiers, places where it’s not normally allowed” (Bilger 1997). In other words, Winterson is employing language to simultaneously merge herself with her idealised parent imago and to both reveal her work as a lookingglass reflection of Woolf’s fiction and to present her precursor as a mirroring self-object attesting to her own “greatness and perfection” (Kohut and Wolf 1986, 177). Winterson’s blurring of the boundary between herself and Woolf has its problems, however. Although she frequently exhibits profound understanding of Woolf’s work and emphasises her poetic craftsmanship, imagination and sense of humour—qualities often neglected by both readers and critics—she also distorts Woolf’s literary legacy, especially when she projects herself onto her precursor. This method of identification betrays the narcissism of Winterson’s hommage most clearly, for it reveals the true “I” behind her literary tribute. Woolf thus becomes not only “what the mirror reflects” but also what it “invents” (Winterson 2001b, 174), as demonstrated by Winterson’s introduction to the 2004 edition of The Waves: Virginia Woolf lived from intensity to intensity. There were lit-up days when she could see everything, days where nothing was hidden, where secrets became only a code that needed the light to fall on them to be read. (2004, vii)

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This appreciation of Woolf’s creative engagement with the world conceals one of the most significant passages in Written on the Body: “Written on the body is a secret code only visible in certain lights” (1992, 89; my emphasis). Projection leading to distortion is also evident in Winterson’s vision of her precursor as “an experimenter who managed to combine the pleasure of narrative with those forceful interruptions that the mind needs to wake itself” (Winterson n.d.). Whilst both Woolf’s and Winterson’s fiction could certainly be called experimental and their respective narrative methods recognised as employing “forceful interruptions”, not many readers or critics have regarded Woolf’s work (perhaps with the exception of Orlando) as filled with “the pleasure of narrative”. This last feature is, by contrast, one of the key elements of Winterson’s own writing, the novelist celebrated as a brilliant storyteller. A similar process of projection and what could be termed as the “selfinvention” of one’s precursor occurs in Winterson’s discussion of Orlando and Gertrude Stein’s Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933),16 since her appreciation not only boasts a quote from The Passion, but stresses the Wintersonian storytelling element in both novels: The biography [Woolf] and the autobiography [Stein] both pretend to honesty and frankness […] Both have the whiff of the bedroom about them even if they are not talking about sex. Voyeurism is a vice and a pleasure few of us can deny ourselves and because human beings […] are still not sophisticated enough or technological enough or dead enough yet to resist the lure of a good story, we can be taken in by someone who offers truth with a wink and says ‘I’m telling you stories. Trust me.’ (1996, 71; my emphasis)17

Winterson’s mirroring method is also employed here, visible in the author’s description of her own work towards the end of Art Objects: The reader, like the writer, has to work, and as long as work remains a four letter word, the average reader will not understand why they should struggle through their leisure time […] one answer is to set a trap for the reader’s attention. To catch it with something that glitters: the lure of a good story […] As a pedlar, I know how to get a crowd round when I unpack my bag, and if one person buys The Dog Woman, and another, a pair of webbed feet […], then I am glad of my wares, or should I call them my bewares? Beware of writers bearing gifts. Might we be back at the Trojan horse? I’m telling you stories. Trust me. (188–89; my emphasis)

Winterson’s tribute to Woolf is thus revealed as an hommage to the self, for the Modernist writer’s work is frequently employed as a mirror

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“reflecting” Winterson “at twice [her] natural size” (Woolf 1998, 45) as well as a powerful source of identification—in short, as a self-object used to “provide a function for the self” (St. Clair 1996, 155). What is more, Winterson’s merger with her precursor—established through introjection, projection and mirroring (which is frequently the consequence of the other two)—influences not only the way that Winterson’s work is read and interpreted, but also the scholarly and readerly perception of Woolf’s fiction. Consequently, it is Winterson who is the more powerful element of this intertextual dyad, depicting Woolf’s work through her own language and directing the appreciation of readers and critics towards specific elements of Woolf’s work. “Beware of writers bearing gifts”, Winterson says (1996, 189), and as she perceives both her own novels and Woolf’s mock-biography as “the ultimate Trojan horse” (49) whose “belly” conceals powerful, socially subversive messages (50), it becomes evident that the author in all her disguises is not merely the focus of Winterson’s work, but that she has concealed herself in the literary tribute to the earlier writer. The contemporary novelist’s self-invented “I” thus not only governs the reception of her own oeuvre, but casts its long shadow over Woolf’s literary legacy, “as if some giant cucumber had spread itself over all the roses and carnations in the garden and choked them to death” (Woolf 1998, 80).

Works Cited Andermahr, Sonya. 2005. “Cyberspace and the body: Jeanette Winterson’s The.PowerBook.” In British Fiction of the 1990s. Edited by Nick Bentley. 108–122. London, New York: Routledge. —. 2009. Jeanette Winterson. New British Fiction. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Anon. 1995. “Review of Art Objects: Essays on Ecstasy and Effrontery.” Kirkus Reviews, 15 December. https://www.kirkusreviews.com/bookreviews/jeanette-winterson/art-objects/. Accessed 5 September 2013. Bilger, Audrey. 1997. “Jeanette Winterson, The Art of Fiction No. 150.” The Paris Review, Winter. http://www.theparisreview.org. Accessed 13 July 2013. Bloom, Harold. 1997. The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry. 2nd edition. New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bouldrey, Brian. 2000. “Have It Your Way / Readers write their own endings in an interactive fantasy.” San Francisco Chronicle, 26 November. http://www.sfgate.com. Accessed 13 July 2013.

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Francone, Vincent. 2005. “An Interview with Jeanette Winterson.” Rain Taxi Review of Books, Summer. http://www.raintaxi.com. Accessed 13 July 2013. Freely, Maureen. 2000. “God’s Gift to Women.” The Observer, August 20. http://www.guardian.co.uk. Accessed 13 July 2013. Gerrard, Nicci. 1994. “The Ultimate Self-produced Woman: Jeanette Winterson lost God and found her tongue.” The Observer, June 5. http://go.galegroup.com.ezphost.dur.ac.uk. Accessed 13 July 2013. Gilbert, Sandra M. 1993a. “Introduction to Orlando, by Virginia Woolf.” xi–xl. London: Penguin. —. 1993b. Notes to Orlando, by Virginia Woolf. 233-264. London: Penguin. Haslett, Jane. 2007. “Winterson’s fabulous bodies.” In Jeanette Winterson: A Contemporary Critical Guide. Edited by Sonya Andermahr. 41–54. London, New York: Continuum. Indiana, Gary. 1996. “Review of Art Objects: Essays on Ecstasy and Effrontery.” Artforum International, 22 June. http://www.thefreelibrary .com. Accessed 13 July 2013. Karpay, Joyce Y. 2003. “‘This fountain and spray of life’: Virginia Woolf’s polysemous influence on three generations of women novelists.” Unpublished PhD dissertation. Univ. of South Florida. Kohut, Heinz. 1971. The Analysis of the Self: A Systematic Approach to the Psychoanalytic Treatment of Narcissistic Personality Disorders. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. —. 1986. “Forms and Transformations of Narcissism.” In Essential Papers on Narcissism. Edited by Andrew P. Morrison. 61–87. New York, London: New York University Press. First published 1966. —. and Ernest S. Wolf. 1986. “The Disorders of the Self and their Treatment: An Outline.” In Essential Papers on Narcissism. Edited by Andrew P. Morrison. 175–196. New York, London: New York University Press. First published 1978. Nicolson, Nigel. 2004. Portrait of a Marriage. London: Phoenix. Onega, Susana. 2006. Jeanette Winterson. Contemporary British Novelists. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Patterson, Christina. 2004. “Of Love and Other Demons.” The Independent, May 7. http://go.galegroup.com.ezphost.dur.ac.uk. Accessed 13 July 2013. Pritchard, William H. 1995. ‘“Say my name and you say sex.”’ The New York Times. March 26. http://www.nytimes.com. Accessed 13 July 2013.

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St. Clair, Michael. 1996. Object Relations and Self Psychology: An Introduction. 2nd ed. Pacific Grove, CA: Brooks/Cole. Winterson, Jeanette. n.d. Virginia Woolf intro. http://www.jeanettewinter son.com. Accessed 5 September 2013. —. 1989. Sexing the Cherry. New York: Grove Press. —. 1995. Art & Lies: A Piece for Three Voices and a Bawd. London: Vintage. First published 1994. —. 1996. Art Objects: Essays on Ecstasy and Effrontery. New York: Vintage. First published 1995. —. 2001a. The Passion. London: Vintage, 2001. First published 1987. —. 2001b. The PowerBook. London: Vintage. First published 2000. —. 2004. “Jeanette Winterson on The Waves.” Introduction to The Waves by Virginia Woolf, vii–x. London: Vintage. —. 2005a. “Top Ten Books.” In Lighthousekeeping. London: Harper Perennial. —. 2005b. “P.S. From Innocence to Experience: Louise Tucker talks to Jeanette Winterson.” In Lighthousekeeping. London: Harper Perennial. —. 2009. “In Praise of the Crack-up: A novelist peers through darkness to find glittering gems in writing and art.” Wall Street Journal, October 17. http://online.wsj.com. Accessed 13 July 2013. Woolf, Virginia. 1976. Jacob’s Room. London: Granada. First published 1922. —. 1993. Orlando. London: Penguin. First published 1928. —. 1998. A Room of One’s Own. Oxford: Oxford University Press. First published 1929.

Notes 1

“My books are a private altar. They are a source of strength and a place of worship. I see no reason to refuse to bend the knee. What woman writer writing now can pass by A Room of One’s Own (1929)? But for me, when I read my copy signed in purple ink, there is an extra power. Here she is and here she was, of private ancestors, the most complete” (Winterson 1996, 131). 2 The title of the original Jonathan Cape edition (2000) contains a dot after the article (The.PowerBook). 3 For a more detailed discussion of this subject see Haslett 2007, 45–53. 4 On the other hand, Winterson also paradoxically “insists on the materiality of the body and its desires at every turn”. Coupled with her disembodiment of her characters in The PowerBook, this strategy is designed to enable the author to “[write] sexuality beyond gender” (Andermahr 2005, 117). 5 Woolf’s treatment of time and her deconstruction of the genre of biography are also Postmodernist features. Whilst the former is demonstrated in Winterson’s use

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of time travel and her view of time as “eternally present” (Winterson 2001a, 62; 1989, 100), the latter—along with Gertrude Stein’s revolutionary treatment of autobiography in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933)—inspired the contemporary writer’s fictionalisation of herself in her semi-autobiographical Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit (1985). 6 The model is famously presented in Eliot’s “Tradition and the Individual Talent” (1919). See Sarah Roger’s essay in this edition for further discussion of Eliot’s essay in connection with the work of Jorge Luis Borges and Harold Bloom. 7 “In the liquid forest, I was the only solid thing and already my outline was beginning to blend with other outlines that were not me. I said my name again and again—‘ORLANDO! ORLANDO!’” (Winterson 2001b, 237). 8 Nowhere is this more evident than in Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, whose plot is a re-writing of Winterson’s own childhood and whose main character is called Jeanette. The “cover version” (Winterson 2009) occurs in other novels as well, for, as Andermahr points out, not only does Winterson identify “with the various child personae in her fiction”, such as Silver in Tanglewreck (2009, 46), but “the adult Winterson” is also to be found in her novels “through her various alter egos, doppelgangers and mouthpieces” (43). 9 This is the number of articles present on the website on 10 August 2013. 10 Gary Indiana describes Winterson’s arguments in Art Objects as “egregious selfpromotion being offered as oracular wisdom” (1996). Similarly, another reviewer criticises Winterson for “propound[ing] aesthetic theories that, stripped to their essence, are nothing so much as celebrations and justifications of her own work” (Anon. 1995). 11 Winterson’s outbursts of arrogance are not restricted to the 1990s. For instance, in an interview published as an appendix to the 2005 edition of Lighthousekeeping (2004), Winterson hoped that “I am a good writer”, following the statement with the assertion that “[i]f not, everybody’s been conned for the last twenty years” (2005b; my emphasis). 12 Winterson’s famous proclamation of herself as the reincarnation of Shakespeare’s sister in BBC’s The Late Show (1992) has been perceived as yet another sign of her unrestrained arrogance and/or self-promotion. See for instance, Nicci Gerrard’s Observer profile, “The ultimate self-produced woman” (1994), Maureen Freely’s “God’s gift to women” (2000) and Joyce Karpay’s PhD dissertation (2003), which refers to Winterson’s appearance on The Late Show as “an aggressive public relations move” (131). 13 See Winterson 2001b, 237. 14 After the publication of Art Objects, Winterson returned to To the Lighthouse in Lighthousekeeping (2004). 15 Winterson here makes a direct allusion to Orlando, where Woolf uses the metaphor of “a traveller” illegally carrying “a bundle of cigars in the corner of his suit case” (Woolf 1993, 183) to refer to Orlando’s “smuggl[ing]” of the idea of lesbian love “past the literary censors of the age” in her poem (Gilbert 1993b, 259). As Orlando admits, “she was extremely doubtful whether, if the spirit [of the age]

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had examined the contents of her mind carefully, it would not have found something highly contraband” (184) (Woolf 1993, 183; my emphasis). 16 Stein is also used narcissistically by Winterson. See Winterson’s discussion of the Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas in “Testimony against Gertrude Stein” (1996, 45–60).

PART III ON THE PERIPHERY: MANSFIELD, MIRRLEES, BOWEN AND ISHERWOOD

CHAPTER SEVEN CREATIVE FRICTION: LAWRENCE, MANSFIELD AND MURRY AS BLOOMSBURY’S OTHERS SUSAN REID Every natural crisis in emotion or passion or understanding comes from this pulsing, frictional to-and-fro, which works up to culmination. (Lawrence 1987, 486) It is the effort and the struggle, it is the perpetual warfare, it is the shattering and piecing together—this is the daily battle, defeat or victory, the absorbing pursuit. (Woolf 2009, 180)

The centenary of Virginia Woolf’s birth was largely unmarked in Britain except for “a fiendish attack on Bloomsbury in The Times”, which led Nigel Nicolson to conclude that while “Bloomsbury-hating” had become “a national sport […] indirectly it was a tribute to them” (Nicolson 1987, 7–8). Little had changed by the end of the century when the curator of the Tate exhibition “The Art of Bloomsbury” found it “quite startling, the hatred they provoke” (Kennedy 1999). Nicolson—whose mother Vita Sackville-West “was not entirely accepted by Bloomsbury, but […] was allowed in as Virginia’s friend”—acknowledges “a not undeserved reputation for exclusivity. They seemed to draw a circle round themselves” (Nicolson 1987, 17, 22). His notion of a “circle”, though endorsed by J. K. Johnstone (1978), has been challenged—by Quentin Bell’s assertion that “Bloomsbury had no centre or any regular or indeed any definable shape” and by S. P. Rosenbaum, who found the term “circle” too restrictive, preferring the “looser notion of ‘Group’” (Rosenbaum 1995, x, 3)1—with subsequent studies of modernism teasing out more nuanced structures of meshes, nets and networks, and extending into the circulation of influence and ideas through modernist magazines.2

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In the latter context, Jane Goldman has observed that “Bloomsbury thrived on dissent and disagreement” (Goldman 2009, 435). But so too did selfstyled outsiders D. H. Lawrence, Katherine Mansfield and John Middleton Murry, who clashed with the “Bloomsberries” as well as with each other. To what extent, then, did conflict shape modernist writing as well as the group dynamics of its exponents? For a while, in this fractious milieu, Murry became a focal point of dissent as “the best-hated man of letters in the country”, for once uniting the views of Lawrence, who called him “an obscene bug sucking my life away”, and Woolf, who considered him “the one vile man I have ever known” (Kaplan 2010, 1). Such instances of “Murry-hating” might also be construed as an indirect tribute (in Nicolson’s terms) which reflects the extent of Murry’s influence, an idea that Sydney Janet Kaplan explores in a pioneering study concerned “to pay attention to the ways that modernist literary history looks different when Murry is at its centre” (9). Her model of “circulating genius” focuses on “Murry’s interactions with Mansfield and Lawrence, with Woolf and Eliot more on the periphery”, while Kathryn Simpson’s suggestive study of a “gift economy” between women writers considers the influence on Woolf of “priceless” “extra-Bloomsbury talk” with Mansfield (and others) at a turning point in her career (Simpson 2012, 177). Both scholars re-map influence in productive ways, while also positing currents of same-sex desire between writers. However, recent bioplays go further still in dramatising how the dynamics and complexities of a web of love-hate relationships underpin the creative processes of writers like Lawrence and Mansfield. Creative friction can thus be seen as both a shaping tension in relationships between literary modernists and an integral part of the writer’s material and craft. For example, Amy Rosenthal’s On the Rocks (2008) culminates with Lawrence’s finished manuscript of Women in Love (1920), seemingly a by-product of what the play depicts as his stormy relationships with the Murrys and the Bloomsbury Group, but which is “all about the men” (2008, 109). While Lawrence scholar Fiona Becket points to a “frictional aesthetic” at work in Women in Love, such “that any critique of personal relations developed by Lawrence depends on representations of conflict which return us inevitably to questions of language, meaning and the contexts for speech” (2002, 62), Rosenthal returns us to the creative process itself and its biographical origins. Her subtext is thus a complicated network of influence and love triangles paralleled in Lorae Parry’s Bloomsbury Women & The Wild Colonial Girl: A Play about Katherine Mansfield (2010), which as its title suggests is a play all about the women. Here Parry draws out the mutual attraction and hostility

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between Mansfield and Woolf, but also evokes an unexpected doubling of Woolf and Ida Baker (Mansfield’s companion). Both plays thus expose the interdependencies and similarities which elide any perceived divisions between inside/outside Bloomsbury. The bio-play genre provides an apt though troubling vehicle for a reexamination of the Bloomsbury Group’s influences and inspirations, both past and present. By depicting “a uniquely uneasy blur of fact and fiction” (Dempster 2011), the bio-play raises questions about “truth”, similar to those which Woolf addressed in her essays on biography and which are always at work in performance, which, as Richard Schechner suggests (following Aristotle), “is an illusion of an illusion, and as such, might be considered more ‘truthful’, more ‘real’ than ordinary experience” (Schechner 1988, xix). In his definition, performance extends beyond the confines of the theatre, taking place anywhere and all the time, since: people [are] always involved in role-playing, in constructing and staging their multiple identities. By means of roles people [enact] their personal and social realities on a day-to-day basis. (x)

In their bio-plays, Rosenthal and Parry stage performances of the writer performing as a writer; thus art mirrors life, but life also mirrors art, in a circular concept theorised by Victor Turner as a nexus of social and aesthetic drama.3 The result, I will argue, is the dramatisation of paradigms of a creative friction at work between modernist writers and in play in their writing, which complicates and extends scholarly notions of influence and artistry, of friendship and same-sex desire at the margins of the Bloomsbury Group.

Cornish Granite and The Rainbow Amy Rosenthal’s On the Rocks was first performed at Hampstead Theatre in a part of London the Murrys and the Lawrences had inhabited at various times and which Mansfield, according to Woolf, continued to haunt after her death in January 1923. The setting of Rosenthal’s play, however, is Cornwall, “near the tiny granite village of Zennor” (Rosenthal 2008, 8). This “biographical play multiplied fourfold” (Fisher 2008) depicts the brief attempt of D. H. and Frieda Lawrence, Katherine Mansfield and John Middleton Murry to establish a literary commune, far away from the authorities who had banned and burned Lawrence’s novel, The Rainbow (1915).4 Set in April–May 1916, against the background of the First World War, On the Rocks is all about conflict. It begins by mocking Russell Square as the antithesis of the rural idyll the characters envisage and then

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depicts the breakdown of that idyll amidst the realities of leaking roofs, Lawrence’s constant phallic references and Mansfield’s writer’s block. To some extent, then, Bloomsbury is only a collective symbol of opposition in the struggle of four individuals against the world, a convenient diversion of the conflict between and within themselves. The experiment in Cornwall is one in a series of attempts by Lawrence to find his “Rananim, the magic island of my dreams” (Rosenthal 2008, 31), where he envisages living with Frieda: Look, why can’t we live as a community, with other friends, who love us, and who understand us? Then we can go apart and be our own free selves with other people—and come back to each other renewed. (15)

A year earlier, Lawrence had written to Lady Ottoline Morrell that “I want you to form the nucleus of a new community which shall start a new life amongst us” and that “Garsington must be the retreat where we come together and knit ourselves together” (Lawrence 1981, 271, 295).5 But having subsequently quarrelled with Morrell and her lover, Bertrand Russell, Lawrence now envisages a counterpoint to all that Bloomsbury represents. To entice the Murrys to join him, Lawrence holds out the promise of “Country Life […]. You’d not get that in Russell Square”, “London vanishes in a puff of smoke—Bohemia and Bloomsbury are extinct” (Rosenthal 2008, 35, 19). The Murrys also mock Russell Square as a place with “Too many poets—And not enough hens” (26) in a scene in which a distracted Lawrence cremates their meal of chicken. There is also an offstage visit (by Mansfield and Frieda in Act 2) to Morrell’s gentrified retreat at Garsington Manor, which in the summer of 1916 became a place where writers and artists would combine farming with their conscientious objections to the Great War. These included Bloomsbury stalwarts Clive Bell and Lytton Strachey, as well as Gerald Shove—“a woefully inefficient keeper of poultry [who] successfully killed off half the hens” (Seymour 1998, 319)6—and, briefly, Richard Murry, younger brother of John Middleton Murry. In Rosenthal’s play, Mansfield reports back from a visit to Garsington that “the house is full to bursting and the gardens are simply swarming with conscientious objectors—Ottoline’s in her element, of course” (Rosenthal 2008, 94).7 This prompts an outburst from Lawrence: Oh, for fuck’s sake, shut up. […] Do you think I want to hear about these people? Sitting in pear trees and praying for air-raids for entertainment, sipping good champagne and playing parlour games while a generation blazes to death? Christ, it’s only when one’s properly away from that sort

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Maynard Keynes would admit, much later, in his own memoirs that Lawrence’s criticisms of the Bloomsbury Group may have contained “just a grain of truth”: I can see us as water-spiders gracefully skimming, as light and reasonable as air, the surface of the stream without any contact at all with the eddies underneath […] this thin rationalism skipping on the surface of the lava, ignoring both the reality and the value of the vulgar passions, joined to libertinism and comprehensive irreverence. (Rosenbaum 1995, 97)

But regardless of justification, conflict seems to have fuelled Lawrence’s creativity. In On the Rocks, as in Lawrence’s novel Women in Love, Morrell (fictionalised as Hermione Roddice) is the focus of disapproval, at least until friction arises between the Lawrences and the Murrys. Lawrence’s idea had been that the two couples would create a “balance” (Rosenthal 2008, 14), but the irony that Rosenthal’s play dramatises so effectively is that Lawrence is more intent on conflict—the infamous outbreaks of violence between Frieda and Lawrence, the latter’s desire for blood brotherhood and wrestling with men, and his determination to “see phallic objects in trees, in the running brooks, in stones and in everything” (72). For Lawrence, this provides the raw material for his most acclaimed novel, Women in Love. On the Rocks is a play, then, which is also concerned with creativity— from the drafting of letters to the drafting of books, it is concerned with writers who “have to write” (Rosenthal 2008, 80) and it questions the boundary between “fact” and “fiction”. The letters which Mansfield wrote to her friends about the goings-on at Higher Tregerthen have a melodramatic flavour that Rosenthal embraces in her comic dramatisation: “I want to talk about the Ls, but if I do don’t tell Kot and Gertler for then it will get back to Lawrence & I will be literally murdered” (Mansfield 1984, 261). But also, as Monica Latham points out, “In Rosenthal’s play, letter writing functions in the same way as fiction: a letter can change its trajectory to incorporate outside suggestions” (Latham 2011, 308). While Rosenthal transformed real-life letters into the dialogue of her play, Mansfield also mined real-life events in her own fiction, including her night in war-torn France with Francis Carco depicted in “An Indiscreet Journey”. As Rosenthal has her remark of this episode: “Well, it’ll make a story” (50).

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The biographical content of On the Rocks is readily recognisable to scholars, although at least one critic was left “wondering whether it adds much to existing knowledge. […] What remains in doubt is the play’s wider application” (Billington 2008). The crux of this, and other criticisms of the play, relates to doubts about the genre, dubbed by Michael Billington as “the bio-boom”, despite being at least as old as Shakespeare’s first history play, and reinvigorated by Bloomsbury’s attack on old ways of writing biography. Lytton Strachey’s Eminent Victorians (1918) famously set out to “lay bare” or “expose” rather than to impose or propose (Strachey 2003, 6)—a self-authored “quote” which in turn exposes Strachey’s method to be at least as artistic as it was documentary and renders his literary masterpiece an unreliable source for modern biographers.8 Virginia Woolf, who did much to blur the boundaries between biography and fiction in her own work, including Orlando (1928) and Flush (1933), was nonetheless critical of the art of “the new biography”, warning of two types of truth inherent in “the truthful transmission of personality”—“truth as something of granite-like solidity and personality as something of rainbow-like intangibility”—and the problem of welding “these two into one seamless whole” (Woolf 2009, 96). Subsequently she warned that art and biography are “two kinds of fact [that] will not mix; if they touch they destroy each other” (120). So is this the case with On the Rocks? Of course Rosenthal is not attempting to write biography—first and foremost her drama seeks to entertain. Yet we might say the same of bestselling biographies, from Strachey’s Eminent Victorians to Claire Tomalin’s more recent contributions. According to Will Self “ours is a golden age for literary biographies”, since there is much in the lives of writers that “makes good copy”—“the literary life, with its flexible working hours, its intermittent rewards and its solitary cast, positively invites the writer to get up to all kinds of mischief” (Self 2002, 47). This works doubly for Rosenthal as a writer who makes mischief with the literary lives of others—in fact writing On the Rocks cured her of own writer’s block. Although she draws extensively upon the documentary record, she also “takes a few enjoyable liberties […]—the wrestling match, for example, is projected backwards from the novel [Women in Love]” (Taylor 2008). Her play’s title, On the Rocks, is indicative of the relationships between the characters, but it also acknowledges a conflict between the factual setting of her drama, amidst the granite rocks of Cornwall, and her fictional interpretation of historical facts. Indeed, the publicity poster for a production at the Court Theatre in Christchurch, New Zealand (2010) shows the four main characters leaping from the rocks into

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space, which seems an appropriate image for Rosenthal’s use of the facts as a jumping-off point or a leap into the unknown. No-one can know what it was like to be in that Cornish community, so what Rosenthal presents us with is a version of the “truth”. Like Woolf, her concern is with character. Although Rosenthal has been criticised for failing “to take us very far into the passionate sincerity of Lawrence’s soul” (Taylor 2008), Billington notes that “In some ways the most intriguing performance comes from Nick Caldecott, who implies that the fastidious critic Murry felt a quasierotic enthralment with the insatiable Lawrence” (Billington 2008). Rosenthal’s reading back from Women in Love is at once the most interesting and the most reductive aspect of her play—while it seems neat to keep the action between two couples to match Lawrence’s novel, the real-life jealousies and love triangles extended far beyond this frame. In effect, of course, Morrell is a virtual fifth person in the Cornish commune—just as she provides a fifth character, Hermione Roddice, in Women in Love. Although physically absent, Mansfield keeps her in touch through the letters which inform the action of Rosenthal’s play—and the two women bond over their disapproval of Frieda. Morrell would later become involved in a love triangle with the Murrys and, for a while, she suspected Mansfield of an affair with Bertrand Russell. However, despite Frieda’s jealousy of Morrell suggested in Rosenthal’s play (a violent scene between Lawrence and Frieda is triggered, according to Frieda: “because I insulted his beloved Lady Ottoline, because he likes so much to be her lapdog and creep beneath her dirty skirts” [Rosenthal 2008, 65]), there is no factual evidence of any sexual attraction between Lawrence and Morrell. His interest in (and loyalty towards) her may have owed something to her social status, but initially it was catalysed by her relationship with Russell, a character lacking from Rosenthal’s cast. In 1915, Russell had participated in another “one of the crises” of Lawrence’s life which led to his withdrawal to Cornwall (Lawrence 1981, 321), and their failed relationship provides another important parallel with the difficulties of male friendship suggested in Women in Love. Thus while Rosenthal’s play provides an engaging and perceptive insight into how creative friction shaped Lawrence’s art, opening up a liminal space between performance and biography, there is inevitably much more for the literary biographer and critic to explore.

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“All about the men” The underlying reason for the growing conflict between the characters in Rosenthal’s play is identified by Frieda, when she questions Lawrence’s animosity towards Murry: What has he done? How did he so offend you? What is it that you ask of these men to be always disappointed? Is it love? Is it sex? (103)

Frieda places Murry in a series of men who have been unwilling or unable to satisfy Lawrence’s expectations of friendship: Jessie Chambers’ brother […] And George Neville also, then your friend McCleod, Arthur McLeod in Croydon, and I saw it all myself of course with Bunny Garnett! (104)

Later she also has cause to feel jealous of the Cornish farmer William Henry Hocking, complaining that Lawrence is: “Always with William Henry, always helping in the fields” (120). But initially Lawrence seeks Murry as his muse (despite the fact that Murry’s partner Katherine is suffering from writer’s block) because: he and I, we kindle each other—spark ideas between us—he makes me think. He makes me want to write. […] I swear to God, I’d start again, if he were here. (15)

Beyond this, however, through a hilarious re-enactment of the wrestling scene from the “Gladiatorial” chapter in Women in Love, Rosenthal implies that Lawrence wants something more from Murry and this scene becomes as central to her play as it is in Lawrence’s novel. Her assumption that the two couples in Women in Love are based on the Lawrences and the Murrys is consistent with Murry’s own assertion that: The theme, or at least the germ of it, was the relation and the situation between the four of us. Yet I have to confess that […] I was really astonished when, one day, Frieda told me that I was Gerald Crich. (Murry 1936, 411)

Yet Mark Kinkead-Weekes finds this astonishment “not at all surprising […] since Lawrence put nothing into the character that resembles him” (Kinkead-Weekes 1996, 330) and, indeed, Lawrence scholars in general place less emphasis on Murry’s impact on Lawrence than Murry himself was wont to do.9 Kinkead-Weekes’s list of “possible real-life ‘sources’ of

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Gerald—given all that misleads in the phrase” corresponds with Frieda’s list of Lawrence’s close male friends—Chambers, Neville, Garnett and Hocking—with the addition of coal magnate Philip Barber, whose biography supplies some key details for Gerald’s fictional life. But there is another name we might add to this list, since Lawrence had been very close to Bertrand Russell during 1915, writing that “I wish you would swear a sort of allegiance with me” and reporting to Morrell (Russell’s mistress) that “We have almost sworn Blutbruderschaft” (1981, 307, 363). During this period, Lawrence experienced what Paul Delany describes, in terms that foreshadow the themes of Women in Love, as his: Messianic phase—the time he imagined himself a prophet called to save England, and to build a new Jerusalem on the ruins of the old—[this] lasted nine months, from late January to late October 1915 and was closely linked with his intimacy with Bertrand Russell. (Delany 1979, 64)

Together they planned a series of lectures on ethics and immortality, but by the autumn their relationship was on the rocks and Lawrence wrote to Russell: “Let us become strangers again, I think it is better” (1981, 392). Instead, Lawrence launched the short-lived Signature magazine, together with the Murrys, as a vehicle for “The Crown” (1915), a philosophical piece informed by his collaborations with Russell and which in turn informs Women in Love.10 Russell went on to give the lectures alone and to publish Principles of Social Reconstruction (1916), his first widely read book and the one that would establish his influence over the Bloomsbury Group as a social thinker distinct from G. E. Moore.11 The exchange of views between Russell and Lawrence was thus formative for both men.12 But Russell was also responsible for another pivotal episode in Lawrence’s life in 1915, when he introduced him to Maynard Keynes in Cambridge, an encounter which transformed Lawrence’s thinking about homosexuality: It is wrong beyond all bounds of wrongness. I had felt it slightly before, in the Stracheys. But it came full upon me in K. [Keynes], and in D.G. [Duncan Grant]. And yesterday I knew it again, in B. [Birrell] […] Truly I didn’t know it was wrong till I saw K. that morning in Cambridge. It was one of the crises in my life. (Lawrence 1981, 321)

In this letter, Lawrence also writes of a recurrent “dream of beetles”, an image of corruption that appears in Women in Love and inspired, in part, by the corruption he perceives in members of the Bloomsbury Group. Quentin Bell would later interpret Lawrence’s reaction as sexual rivalry over Bunny Garnett though later still he revised his view in light of

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another of Lawrence’s letters which exhibits a more general distaste for homosexuality:13 Yesterday at Worthing, there were many soldiers. Can I ever tell you how ugly they were: ‘to insects—sensual lust.’ I like sensual lust—but insectwise, no—it is obscene. I like men to be beasts—but insects—one insect mounted on another—oh God! (1981, 331)

The line between homosexuality and close male friendship is something that Lawrence wrestles with in Women in Love—which as Rosenthal has Frieda explain is, despite its title, “all about the men” (Rosenthal 2008, 109).14 While the novel’s suppressed “Prologue” sets Birkin’s “passion of desire for Gerald Crich” in the context of an acknowledgement that “it was for men that he felt the hot, flushing, roused attraction which a man is supposed to feel for the other sex” (Lawrence 1997, 493, 501), the final version of Women in Love is more ambiguous about the relationship between the two men. The novel’s repression of “unmanly” emotion—“They burned with each other, inwardly. This they would never admit” (33)—resonates with an attitude towards homosexuality that Russell felt he shared with Lawrence: Lawrence has the same feeling against sodomy as I have; you [Morrell] had nearly made me believe there is no great harm in it, but I have reverted; & all examples I know confirm me in thinking it sterilising. (quoted in Clark 1975, 261)

Kaplan rightly warns against ignoring “the way homophobia operates to disguise original sources of desire” (Kaplan 2010, 48), and while her argument concerns Lawrence’s relationship with Murry—drawing at some length on how Murry’s writings strongly imply Lawrence’s homosexuality—we might also interpret the same forces at work in Lawrence’s relationship with Russell.15 According to Ronald Clark, Lawrence based his character Bertie Reid in “The Blind Man” on Russell—though Kinkead-Weekes disagrees.16 The story, which depicts a love triangle, culminates in a strange scene in which the eponymous blind man, Maurice Pervin, presses “the fingers of the other man upon his disfigured eye-sockets” (Lawrence 2006, 50). For Maurice, this act represents “the passion of friendship”, but for Bertie it is unbearable, “his insane reserve [is] broken in” (51). Reflecting Lawrence’s perception of Russell, the fictional Bertie is locked inside a mental and visual world that resists the dark forces of Lawrence’s imagination. There are strong parallels, too, between “The Blind Man” and Women in Love, in

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which we might also interpose Russell as Gerald in a love triangle with Hermione, based on his real-life lover Morrell, and Birkin as Lawrence’s mouthpiece.17 Although Morrell’s portrayal as Hermione does not reflect a real sexual relationship with Lawrence, the novel may yet reflect a love triangle involving the actual lovers, Morrell and Russell, which allows for what Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick describes as homosocial bonding between men. Taking account of Lawrence’s relationships with Bloomsbury’s men in particular may thus extend our understanding of his contestation of the boundaries between heterosexuality and homosexuality, a personal and creative conflict in which he seeks, but often fails, to elide the fluidity suggested by Sedgwick’s notion of a continuum. The homoeroticism depicted by Rosenthal in On the Rocks, though less nuanced, nonetheless conveys some of the comedy and the pain of Lawrence’s conflicted feelings about men.

All About the Women Lorae Parry’s play, Bloomsbury Women & The Wild Colonial Girl, first staged in Bloomsbury in 2008, explores the nature of Mansfield’s relationships with women, primarily with her faithful friend Ida Baker (nicknamed L. M.) and with her literary rival Virginia Woolf. Parry describes how, in the process of writing the play, she, “inevitably, like Mansfield, became a ‘selective camera’” and as a result of this focus “the other Bloomsbury women have become a montage of photos and voices” (Parry 2008).18 The “Production Notes” explain that: While the play was written to be performed by two actresses, it can be performed by three. If played by two, the actress playing Virginia and LM differentiates the two characters with small items of clothing. (Parry 2010, xi)

The script carefully ensures that the parts of Woolf and L. M. do not overlap, but there is an intriguing moment near the end of the play when “the actress playing LM and Virginia slowly takes off her LM shawl in view of the audience and puts on a garment of Virginia’s” (33). This stage direction powerfully evokes the extent to which the Bloomsbury insider and outsider overlap in their complementary roles as Mansfield’s friends and suggests a strange doubling in their mirroring of different aspects of Mansfield’s personality. In this way, Parry adds a further dimension to Vincent O’Sullivan’s doubling of Mansfield and L. M. in his play Jones and Jones (1989).19

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L. M. is another “wild colonial girl”, although the inclusion of only one in the title of Parry’s play suggests perhaps that Mansfield and L. M. merge into a single identity and/or that Mansfield becomes one of the “Bloomsbury Women”. Rhodesian-born Baker was sent to school at Queen’s College, London, where she met Mansfield, fresh from New Zealand, in 1903. Like the young Mansfield, Baker was a musician— studying as a professional violinist at an academy, where she adopted the name of Lesley Moore (abbreviated to L. M.), an androgynous hybrid of Mansfield’s brother’s first name and Baker’s mother’s maiden name. Even more of an outsider than her friend, Baker describes in her memoirs how Mansfield deliberately kept her apart from other circles: Katherine kept her relationships separate, and this will explain those occasions when I was not included in her social life, to meet and be a part of her friends and acquaintances […] We both knew how uncomfortable I should have been if caught up in the wrong situations. (L.M. 1972, 235)

In Jones and Jones, O’Sullivan depicts what the wrong situation might have been like in a scene in which “Ida sits by herself and eats” while Mansfield, Morrell, Murry, Russell and Strachey discuss her shortcomings. Lawrence, another outsider, presents her with a flower: “Here. In case you’re as bored as I am with this lot. […] You don’t seem to fit into all this lot, Ida. You’re too solid for them” (O’Sullivan 1989, 61).20 Parry’s play, however, quotes Woolf’s description of “A munition worker called Lesley Moore … another of these females on the border land of propriety, and naturally inhabiting the underworld”, and later Woolf refers to her as “the Monster LM” (Parry 2010, 15, 22). Indeed, there is something monstrous about the relationship between Mansfield and Baker, with suggestions of the “madwoman in the attic” in Mansfield’s concealment of her companion, who in fact inhabited “a minstrel’s gallery” above Mansfield’s studio at Church Street in London in the spring of 1917 (L. M. 1972, 102). Touchingly, Baker continued to conceal her own identity when she published her memoirs as Katherine Mansfield: The Memories of LM, though here she discloses that as Mansfield’s tuberculosis worsened, she vented her feelings on Baker and sometimes resembled a “fiend” (122). By contrast, Parry quotes Mansfield’s self-presentation as “at heart a distraught creature with no time for anything for the moment” (Parry 2010, 29). Parry’s play, then, focuses on Mansfield’s regret rather than the behaviour that caused it—her “selective camera” thus elides Mansfield’s cruelty and self-absorption and, also, her barbed humour. Her letters and notebooks chronicle examples of Baker’s greed—including an amusing

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observation of how “bananas turn absolutely livid with terror on her plate” (M. Scott 1997, 203). This reflects a fear that Baker is devouring her, much as she perceives that Frieda is consuming Lawrence, writing to Morrell from Cornwall that Lawrence “is hidden away, absorbed, completely lost, like a little gold ring in that immense german [sic] Christmas pudding which is Frieda” (Mansfield 1984, 267). Aside from any Freudian associations of eating with sexual appetite,21 another doubling, of Frieda and L. M. as the despised foreigners/outsiders, emerges quite clearly from Mansfield’s letters (though not from Parry’s play) when she compares her irritation with Baker with “the feeling Lawrence had (before he was so mad) that Frieda wanted to destroy him … I have just that!” (Mansfield 1987, 89). In part such feelings reflect Mansfield’s craving for solitude, which Woolf recognised: I visited Katherine … it struck me she is of the cat kind; alien, composed, always solitary and observant. And then we talked about solitude, and I found her expressing her feelings as I have never heard them expressed. (Parry 2010, 23)

As with Lawrence, conflicting needs for company and solitude are a source of recurrent friction, particularly in Mansfield’s relationship with L.M., who has a habit of turning up uninvited when she feels she might be needed—“I asked her not to come and I didn’t want her to and then she wires me ‘leaving’” (25). Yet Mansfield ultimately acknowledges her repressed need for Baker when she says: “But try and believe and keep on believing without signs from me that I do love you and I want you for my wife” (29). Not surprisingly, then, there has been some speculation about the nature of the relationship between Mansfield and her faithful companion. This is addressed early in Parry’s play when L. M. explains: “There was never anything of that sort at all. I didn’t even know what lesbianism was” (4), but this statement is undermined almost immediately by Mansfield’s account of her early infatuation with another outsider, the Maori girl, Maata: “I want her as I have had her —terribly—this is unclean I know but true” (8). Angela Smith asserts that Mansfield was bisexual, a bond she alleges was shared with Woolf although “other liminal experience is even more significant for them”, their childlessness and illnesses (Smith 1999, 11). Smith the critic, like Parry the dramatist, underlines the parallels between Mansfield’s two friends from very different backgrounds, developing the idea that:

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While both Woolf and Mansfield were literally foreign to each other, in terms of nationality and upbringing, they were also familiar; in recognizing the affinity between themselves they were also recognizing the foreigner within, and acknowledging a kind of doubling. (29)

But Parry’s play goes further in positing sexual tension between them in a scene which Robert Fraser describes as follows: Mansfield and Woolf’s last parting, when the rivalry, the emotional, artistic and possibly sexual tension between them, is palpable. Afterwards, Mansfield […] moves upstage and turns her back to the audience while Virginia speaks of their friendship and Mansfield’s beautiful eyes: a dramatic turn that epitomizes the tug of war between attraction and repulsion at the heart of the play. (Fraser 2011, 126)

As the play draws to a close, Woolf talks of being haunted by Mansfield— “I could see her before me so exactly and the Room at Portland Villas” (Parry 2010, 34)—and as Smith observes, it seems particularly significant that Woolf wrote these words in her diary five years after Mansfield’s death, when she was writing Orlando, her biographical novel of ambiguous sexuality (Smith 1999, 27). Parry’s play also covers the more established terrain of their literary rivalry: “We have got the same job, Virginia, and it is really very curious and thrilling that we should both, quite apart from each other, be after so very nearly the same thing” (Parry 2010, 24). But Mansfield also envies her apparent independence: How I envy Virginia: no wonder she can write. There is always in her writing a calm freedom of expression, as though she were at peace—her roof over her, her own possessions around her, and her man somewhere in call … what have I done that I should have all the handicaps, plus a disease. (19)

Mansfield’s desire for Woolf’s advantages underlies her dream of an idealised home, called “The Heron”, not referenced in Parry’s play about women, perhaps since it is named for her beloved brother and she envisaged sharing it with two important men in her life—her husband and his younger brother, Richard. Kaplan argues that the Murrys’ “dream of ‘The Heron’ is their counterpoint to Bloomsbury and Garsington” (Kaplan 2010, 87)—it even includes the “Heron Press”, a printing press to parallel the Woolfs’ Hogarth Press. But further, Kathryn Simpson has argued that Woolf used the Hogarth Press as what Lewis Hyde has theorised as “a protected gift-sphere” within

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an economy of gift-giving which cemented her relationships with women and the marketplace (Simpson 2012). This included encouraging Mansfield to re-work The Aloe into something that could be printed in a small private edition, resulting in Prelude (1918), the second book to be published by the Hogarth Press. Simpson, like Antony Alpers, suggests this may have been in return for Mansfield’s idea that inspired Woolf’s story “Kew Gardens” (although Smith disagrees). It may also have been an attempt by Woolf to cement her relationship with the Athenaeum, where Murry was at the helm. But Mansfield was not altogether grateful for Woolf’s “gift”, just as she was not always grateful for what she calls Baker’s “gift of herself” (Parry 2010, 13). Yet we might interpret “The Daughters of the Late Colonel”, one of Mansfield’s greatest stories, as a gift, in part, to Baker: “Shall I read it to you? It’s about you” (27).22 In common with Rosenthal, then, Parry is concerned with the conflicts and sexual tensions that underlie creativity. Like Rosenthal, too, she has done her homework and weaves together material from letters, journals and fiction as if to illustrate C. K. Stead’s assertion that while Mansfield’s “writing is of considerable variety, yet it is all of a piece” (Stead 1977, 14). However, with Murry’s hagiographical editing of his wife’s writing in mind, Stead also warns us that: The material has, it must be admitted, the fascination of a kitset which can be assembled in different ways to produce instant—and genuine—art. (Stead 1977, 14)

His comment applies also to Parry’s play; a collage which ends with a final slide showing Mansfield’s signature, although the audience may well doubt that “Mansfield could have been prevailed upon to sign this plucky and well-made play” (Fraser 2011, 127). In part, there is a problem of having to “leave out”, which Parry acknowledges— “There is no one truth about any life. One always needs to choose, to leave out” (Parry 2008, 18)—but there is also the temptation that Anna Jackson identifies in her analysis of Mansfield’s life-writing that “because the text is autobiographical it is hard not to read the text itself as representative of the writer’s life, and more than that, her ‘self’” (Jackson 2010, 78). The open-endedness of Mansfield’s so-called diaries seems to invite writers to consider her as a “case”, an enigma of “hundreds of selves” (M. Scott 1997, 204), to be variously solved, tried or diagnosed (Burgan 1994). Accordingly, Cathy Downes’s play The Case of Katherine Mansfield (1995)—in which “Every word spoken was written by Katherine Mansfield” (Downes 1995, ii)—obeys Mansfield’s invocation to “take the case of Katherine Mansfield”, which opens and closes this dramatisation

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of Mansfield’s life. There are many ways we might choose to think about Mansfield’s choice of the word “case” beyond its obviously medical or legal associations—perhaps as a container, such as the body she would soon leave behind, or as a linguistic case, suggesting part of a whole— even before considering its context, which Kathleen Jones has interpreted as “sarcastic” (Jones 2011, 10). In her biography of Mansfield, Jones decides not to treat Mansfield as an isolated “case”, but interweaves her story with that of John Middleton Murry so that we might understand more about both of her subjects. So too the plays by Parry and Rosenthal, and the critical studies by Kaplan, Simpson and Smith, recognise that we will understand more by looking at interrelationships and how these influenced the creativity of their subjects. Drama, in particular, is a useful vehicle to explore conflict. However, as the examples considered here have shown, the bio-play may also be reductive in conflating truths of granite-like solidity with the shifting rainbow of personality, in presenting one version of “self” in the face of Mansfield’s “hundreds of selves” or Schechner’s “multiple identities”. And yet the attempt to connect “Three processes: life—fiction—drama” in one medium is especially apt for an exploration of Bloomsbury’s influences, as Woolf’s literary career attests (Woolf quoted in Wright 2012, 302). *** To some extent the Bloomsbury Group anticipated the productivity of bio-drama; individually, in the development of the biographical genre, and collectively, in performing private theatre as well as by rehearsing their memoirs together at regular meetings of the Memoir Club from 1920 to 1956. And yet the Bloomsbury Group discussed everything except their own work—the Memoir Club formalised an emphasis on the personal and also tended to “leave out”, as Leonard Woolf has observed: I think that in our reminiscences what we said was absolutely true, but absolute truth was sometimes filtered through some discretion and reticence. (quoted in Rosenbaum 1995, 154)

Lawrence and Mansfield were less fortunate, perhaps, in having their memoirs filtered by others and particularly, in the first instance, by Murry, who “clouded the issue of […] artistry and served to keep the public focused, instead, on […] personality” (Jackson and Jackson 1988, 3–4). But bio-drama can provide a powerful means of refocusing on the artistry of these writers and on their performances as writers. In particular, the complexity of the conflicts and the doubling between characters in the

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plays by Parry and Rosenthal helps us to re-examine the creative friction between writers, in terms of the sexual tensions and rivalries that mediated their art and to re-define, once again, our notions of Bloomsbury and of modernism. As Nicolson suggests, even “fiendish” representations of Bloomsbury underline the Group’s continuing importance and we should continue to think hard about how and where to draw the perceived battle lines. Indeed, in positioning themselves as Bloomsbury’s others, Lawrence, Mansfield and Murry externalised inner conflicts which were fundamental to their literary creativity, while sharing something of Woolf’s perception of writing as “the daily battle” (Woolf 2009, 180).

Works Cited Alpers, Antony. 1980. The Life of Katherine Mansfield. New York: Viking. Becket, Fiona. 2002. The Complete Critical Guide to D. H. Lawrence. London and New York: Routledge. Bell, Quentin. 1986. Bloomsbury. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson. ––. 1995. Bloomsbury Recalled. London: John Murray Ltd. Bergonzi, Bernard. 1986. The Myth of Modernism and Twentieth-century Literature. Brighton: Harvester Press. Billington, Michael. 2008. Review of On the Rocks. The Guardian, 2 July. http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/2008/jul/02/theatre.reviews3. Accessed 22 July 2013. Burgan, Mary. 1994. Illness, Gender, and Writing: The case of Katherine Mansfield. Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press. Clark, Ronald W. 1975. The Life of Bertrand Russell. London: Jonathan Cape and Weidenfeld & Nicolson. Delany, Paul. 1979. D. H. Lawrence’s Nightmare: The writer and his circle in the years of the Great War. Hassocks: Harvester Press. Dempster, Sarah. 2011. “Will Hattie Jacques be the last to get the BBC biopic treatment?” The Guardian, 15 January. http://www.guardian.co. uk/tv-and-radio/2011/jan/15/hattie-jacques-bbc-biopic. Accessed 10 July 2013. Donaldson, G. 1986. “‘Men in Love?’: D. H. Lawrence, Rupert Birkin and Gerald Crich.” In D.H. Lawrence: Centenary essays, edited by M. Kalnins, 41–67. Bristol: Bristol Classical Press. Downes, Cathy. 1995. The Case of Katherine Mansfield. Wellington, NZ: The Women’s Play Press.

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Ellmann, Maud. 2010. The Nets of Modernism: Henry James, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, and Sigmund Freud. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Fisher, Philip. 2008. Review of On the Rocks. http://www.britishtheatre guide.info/reviews/onrocks-rev. Accessed 8 July 2013. Fraser, Robert. 2011. Review of Lorae Parry, Bloomsbury Women & the Wild Colonial Girl. In Katherine Mansfield Studies 3: 125–27. Freud, Sigmund. 1953. “Melancholia from Extracts from the Fliess Papers.” In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume One, edited and translated by J. Strachey. London: The Hogarth Press. Goldman, Jane. 2009. “Desmond MacCarthy, Life and Letters.” In The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines: Britain and Ireland 1880–1955, Volume One, edited by P. Brooker and A. Thacker, 128–35. Oxford: Oxford University Press. —. 2009. “Bloomsbury Modernism.” In The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines: Britain and Ireland 1880–1955, Volume One, edited by P. Brooker and A. Thacker, 428–35. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Jackson, Anna. 2010. Diary Poetics: Form and style in writers’ diaries, 1915–1962. New York and Abingdon: Routledge. Jackson, D. and F. B. Jackson, eds. 1988. Critical Essays on D. H. Lawrence. Boston: G. K. Hall. Johnstone, J. K. 1978. The Bloomsbury Group: A study of E. M. Forster, Lytton Strachey, Virginia Woolf, and their circle. New York: Octagon. Jones, Kathleen. 2011. Katherine Mansfield: The story-teller. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Kaplan, Sydney Janet. 2010. Circulating Genius: John Middleton Murry, Katherine Mansfield and D. H. Lawrence. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Kennedy, Maev. 1999. “Bloomsbury Comes in from the Cold.” The Guardian, 25 June. http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/1999/jun/25/maev kennedy. Accessed 6 August 2013. Kinkead-Weekes, Mark. 1996. D. H. Lawrence: Triumph to exile 1912– 1922. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ––. 1968. “The Marble and the Statue: The exploratory imagination of D. H. Lawrence.” In Imagined Worlds: Essays in some English novels and novelists in honour of John Butt. Edited by M. Mack and I Gregor. London: Methuen. 371–418. Latham, Monica. 2011.“On the Rocks: Women (and Men) in (and out of) Love”. In Etudes Lawrenciennes, 42: 281–317.

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Lawrence, D. H. 1981. The Letters of D. H. Lawrence: 1913–16, Volume 2, edited by G. J. Zytaruk and J. T. Boulton. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ––. 1987. Women in Love. Edited by D. Farmer, J. Worthen and L. Vasey. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. First published in 1920. ––. 2006. “The Blind Man.” In England, My England. 37–51. Teddington: Echo Books. First published in 1924. Mansfield, Katherine. 1977. The Letters and Journals of Katherine Mansfield: A Selection. Edited by C.K. Stead. London: Penguin. ––. 1984. The Collected Letters of Katherine Mansfield: 1903–1917, Volume One, edited by O’Sullivan, V. and M. Scott. Oxford Clarendon Press. ––. 1987. The Collected Letters of Katherine Mansfield: 1918–1919, Volume 2, edited by O’Sullivan, V. and M. Scott. Oxford Clarendon Press. ––. 1996. The Collected Letters of Katherine Mansfield: 1920–1921, Volume 4, edited by O’Sullivan, V. and M. Scott. Oxford Clarendon Press. ––. 1997. The Katherine Mansfield Notebooks, Volume 2, edited by M. Scott. Canterbury and Wellington, NZ: Lincoln University Press and Daphne Brasell Associates Ltd. M., L. [Ida Baker]. 1972. Katherine Mansfield: The memories of LM. New York: Taplinger Publishing Co., Inc. Murry, John Middleton. 1936. The Autobiography of John Middleton Murry: Between two worlds. New York: Julian Messner, Inc. Nicolson, Nigel. 1987. “Bloomsbury: the myth and the reality.” In Virginia Woolf and Bloomsbury: A centenary celebration, edited by J. Marcus, 7–22. Basingstoke: Macmillan. O’Sullivan, Vincent. 1989. Jones & Jones. Wellington, NZ: Wellington University Press. Parry, Lorae. 2010. Bloomsbury Women & the Wild Colonial Girl: A play about Katherine Mansfield. Wellington, NZ: The Women’s Play Press. ––. 2008. Bloomsbury Women & the Wild Colonial Girl. Conference programme for the Katherine Mansfield Centenary Conference, Birkbeck, University of London. www.nzsa.co.uk/KM%20Conference %20Booklet.doc. Accessed 22 July 2013. Roberts, Neil. 2007. D. H. Lawrence: “Women in Love” (Literature Insights). Penrith: Humanities Ebooks. Rosenbaum, S. P. 1987. Victorian Bloomsbury. Basingstoke: Macmillan. ––. 1995. The Bloomsbury Group: A collection of memoirs and commentary. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

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Rosenthal, A. 2008. On the Rocks. London: Oberon Books. Schechner, Richard. 1988. Performance Theory. Abingdon and New York: Routledge. Self, Will. 2002. Feeding Frenzy. London: Penguin Books. Scott, B. K. 1995. Refiguring Modernism, Volume 1. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. 1985. Between Men: English literature and male homosocial desire. New York: Columbia University Press. Seymour, Miranda. 1998. Ottoline Morrell: Life on a grand scale. London: Hodder and Stoughton. Simpson, Kathryn. 2012. “Virginia Woolf’s Bloomsbury.” In Virginia Woolf in Context, edited by B. Randall and J. Goldman. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Smith, Angela. 1999. Katherine Mansfield & Virginia Woolf: A public of two. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Southworth, Helen. 2010. Introduction to Leonard and Virginia Woolf, The Hogarth Press and the Networks of Modernism, edited by Helen Southworth. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Strachey, Lytton. 2003. Eminent Victorians. Edited with introduction and notes by J. Sutherland. Oxford: Oxford University Press. First published in 1918. Taylor, Paul. 2008. Review of On the Rocks. The Independent, 3 July. http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/theatre-dance/ reviews/on-the-rocks-hampstead-theatre-london-859027.html. Accessed 22 July 2013. Woolf, Virginia. 2009. “The New Biography.” In Virginia Woolf: Selected essays. Edited by D. Bradshaw. Oxford: Oxford University Press. First published in 1927. Wright, Elizabeth. 2011. “Bloomsbury at Play.” In Woolf Studies Annual 17: 77-108. ––. 2012. “Woolf and Theatre.” In Virginia Woolf in Context, edited by B. Randall and J. Goldman. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Notes 1

J. K. Johnstone argues that Forster, Strachey and Woolf formed a circle, which shared “essential agreement” based on the philosophy of G. E. Moore and the aesthetics of Roger Fry (Johnstone 1978, 375). Bernard Bergonzi countered that Johnstone “was mistaken in attributing to Bloomsbury a theoretical rigour that it never really possessed” (Bergonzi 1986, 6). 2 See B. K. Scott 1995, Ellmann 2010 and Southworth 2010.

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See Richard Schechner’s illustration—using comparative examples of Gerald Ford’s 1975 political crisis and Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet—of how “social and aesthetic drama coincide in Victor Turner’s four-part model of social drama as 1) breach, 2) schism, 3) redressive action and 4) re-integration” (Schechner 1988, 211–13). 4 See Paul Delany for an account of the twin blows to Lawrence of the prosecution of The Rainbow and the Great War (Delany 1979, 155–67, 18–20). 5 Morrell was unconvinced about Lawrence’s “Rananim” project, but nevertheless she offered the Lawrences the use of a cottage at Garsington, a plan that foundered on practical difficulties mostly raised by the Lawrences, including a dispute about building costs. 6 Miranda Seymour notes that Shove also “tried to form a union for less work and higher wages” and that “Farmworkers have seldom sounded so lazy and incompetent as the conscientious objectors of Garsington proved to be” (Seymour 1998, 319). It would seem that the community at Garsington was also beset with the animosities and squabbles that troubled Lawrence’s experiment in Cornwall. 7 As Bergonzi observes, “Bloomsbury’s relations with Ottoline and Garsington were close but ambiguous, and its true rural extension was not in Oxfordshire but in East Sussex” (Bergonzi 1986, 5). However, Virginia Woolf remarked that “when the history of Bloomsbury came to be written […] a chapter or at least an appendix would have to be devoted to her” (Rosenbaum 1987, 6). 8 In his introduction to the Oxford edition of Eminent Victorians, John Sutherland notes that “There is, I think, no modern biographer of Manning, Nightingale, Arnold, or Gordon who trusts Strachey as a reliable source, or has any other good word for him than that he writes brilliantly (that, of course, might have been praise enough for Strachey)” (xiv). 9 Neil Roberts concurs that “Gerald Crich […] does not resemble Murry at all” (Roberts 2007, 13). 10 See Kinkead-Weekes 1968, 393. 11 See Rosenbaum 1987, 202–3. Like Morrell, Russell had an ambiguous relationship with the Bloomsbury Group. He named only Roger Fry as a Cambridge friend in his Autobiography (Rosenbaum 1987, 194). 12 Lawrence made detailed comments on Russell’s draft lectures, which helped his own ideas to crystallize, while Keynes attributed some of Lawrence’s mysticism to Russell’s final lectures (Rosenbaum 1987, 202–3). 13 See Bell 1986, 75–6 and Bell 1995, 222. 14 See Donaldson, 1986. 15 Kaplan 2010, 178–81. 16 See Clark 1975, 265 and Kinkead-Weekes 1996, 479. 17 Gerald is probably a composite character, some of whose characteristics correspond with Russell, including elements of the sexual predator, a “fatal halfness” which privileges the mind, and the angst of the “Industrial Magnate” chapter which suggests Russell’s despair on taking leave from Cambridge in May 1915.

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The play features additional voices of men as well as women, from outside as well as inside Bloomsbury: John Middleton Murry, Leonard Woolf, Lady Ottoline Morrell, Dorothy Brett, Lytton Strachey, D. H. Lawrence, Dora Carrington, Bertrand Russell, Mark Gertler, Maata Mahupuku, Edith Bendall, and Arnold Trowell. 19 As O’Sullivan explains in Scene One, Mansfield (who was very fond of nicknames) decides on “secret names” for her and Ida Baker: “I shall call you Jones […] And you’re going to call me Jones too” (O’Sullivan 1989, 13). 20 Baker’s solidity also earned her the unkind nickname of “The Mountain”; although Mansfield came to rely on her friend’s “granite-like solidity” she frequently regretted a lack of “rainbow-like intangibility”, to paraphrase Woolf (2009, 96). 21 For example, Freud likened eating disorders to “a melancholia occurring when sexuality has been underdeveloped […] Loss of appetite is in sexual terms loss of libido” (Freud 1953, 200). See also Burgan regarding Mansfield, food and body image (Burgan 1994, 21-39). 22 Although the depiction of the two daughters has been interpreted in various ways, Mansfield wrote to William Gerhardi that she “bowed down to the beauty that was hidden in their lives” (1996, 249).

CHAPTER EIGHT “TO HELL WITH THE BLOOMS BERRIES”: KATHERINE MANSFIELD IN MANSFIELD AND THE WORK OF C. K. STEAD GERRI KIMBER On 15 August 1917 Katherine Mansfield wrote to Ottoline Morrell: “To Hell with the Blooms Berries. Dont [sic] you think one really must run away as soon as possible and as far as possible—” (Mansfield 1984, 326). A year later, she was still talking disparagingly of the Bloomsbury set: “I don’t care a whistle for them all. I feel I would get into the very middle of a Bloomsbury tangi1 and remain untouched” (Mansfield 1987, 210). Mansfield was acquainted with most members of the Bloomsbury group. She spent time at Garsington, flirted with Bertrand Russell, weekended at the Woolfs’ house Asheham, which included long literary conversations with Virginia, and holidayed with Dorothy Brett. Yet, there was always a sense of not quite belonging: The red geraniums have bought the garden over my head. […] But why should they make me feel a stranger? Why should they ask me every time I go near: “And what are you doing in a London garden?” They burn with arrogance and pride. And I am the little Colonial walking in the London garden patch––allowed to look, perhaps, but not to linger. […] they positively shout at me. […] She is a stranger—an alien. She is nothing but a little girl sitting on the Tinakori hills & dreaming […] Im-pudence! (Mansfield 2002, 166)

This essay will examine how the life and work of New Zealand’s most iconic dead writer, Katherine Mansfield (1888–1923), is reflected in the critical writing and fiction of C. K. Stead, New Zealand’s most eminent living writer, with a career spanning more than 50 years. Stead set his novel Mansfield during three years from 1915–1918, the period when Mansfield connected with members of the Bloomsbury group for the first

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time, found her true voice as an author, was still in “reasonably good health”, and which was, as he points out, “the time of her most intense engagement with an extraordinary cast of characters on the English literary scene”.2 I will also consider two poems by Stead: “Jealousy I” and “Jealousy II”, based on episodes in Mansfield’s life. The three tables [Figs 1, 2 and 3] provide examples of how Stead uses Mansfield’s writing to construct his novel and that of Woolf and Mansfield to construct the two poems. In 1973, following his Katherine Mansfield Menton Fellowship, Stead wrote his first major critical article on Mansfield, which would eventually become the introduction to his edition of her letters and journals. It is replete with facts and figures concerning Mansfield’s literary output, many not widely known at the time, together with an appraisal of her husband John Middleton Murry’s editorial role in the publication of her writing after her death. Stead’s article is generous in its praise of the wife, whilst for the most part coolly critical of the husband. Stead’s commentary confirms Murry’s manipulating editorial role: “He transcribed, edited, and wrote commentaries tirelessly but in a way which encouraged a sentimental, and sometimes falsely mystical, interest in her talent” (21). He notes Murry’s hagiographic tone, which tended to stress Mansfield’s spirituality, her beauty, her suffering and other-worldliness, a misleading emphasis found since in articles, biographies and memoirs of Mansfield in France;3 and this same sycophantic tone is to be found in the London literary journal, the Adelphi, edited by Murry from 1923 to 1930. In the immediate aftermath of her death, Murry started printing several pieces of Mansfield’s work in every issue, and this editorial policy continued for two years. As Stead wryly notes: “his late wife was for some years the most regular contributor” (21). Stead discusses Murry’s moral right to publish so much, “ignoring her instruction to ‘tear up and burn as much as possible’” (21), but acknowledges the ambiguity of Mansfield’s final instructions concerning her papers: “destroy all you do not use” and “destroy … all you do not wish to keep” (22). Stead believes that “In these ambiguities, Murry might have found a sort of justification for his own procedure” (22). Stead’s own choice for his selection from the journals and letters was to be “guided principally by the wish to represent Katherine Mansfield’s writing at its best rather than to give a balanced biographical portrait” (24). He defines this “best” as when “the writing is least deliberate, when it flows easily and naturally, governed by feelings and observation rather than by any apparent calculation of its effect” (24). He notes his own resistance to passages of “sensibility”: “her emotion is often less genuine

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when she is being ‘sensitive’ than when she is being […] satirical, or bullying, or simply plain and factual” (24). Stead’s favourite Mansfield is “robust” and “anarchic”, with an ingrained comic talent, “deeply committed to no social forms and niceties (in this she remained indelibly the colonial), seeing Nonsense everywhere (Male Nonsense especially), and enjoying her ability to represent it inflated to bursting point” (26). As he astutely notes: “There was nothing mystical about her that antibiotics would not have cured” (27). In this first, early piece of Mansfield criticism by Stead, his admiration for her, both as a personality and as a writer is evident, although he is never unaware of her faults and weaknesses. Her early death meant her talents were largely unfulfilled but they were, he believes, nevertheless “superior to those of all her contemporaries except Lawrence” (27). In Stead’s next major article on Mansfield, entitled “Katherine Mansfield: The Art of the Fiction”,4 he makes his own personal assessment of Mansfield’s fiction and comes up with new terminology with which to assess it. Her experiments “taught us the fiction as distinct from the narrative, and it is in that sense that she is an innovator” (30). She would forego “narrative” as such, and in its place would develop something altogether more modern, a coherence without the need for conventional narrative links, beautifully realised and executed in her stories “Prelude” (1917), and “At the Bay” (1921). Even Frank O’Connor, one of her fiercest critics, called these stories “masterpieces and in their own way comparable with Proust’s breakthrough into the subconscious world” (34). In the short story “Je ne parle pas français” (1918), Mansfield discovered the more technically complex method Stead calls “circumlocution” (41), where she “establishes a central point of reference and then moves in circles about it, going back and forward in time” (42). This method would be repeated in “The Daughters of the Late Colonel” (1920) and “A Married Man’s Story” (1921). In this article Stead also addresses the question of Mansfield as a “colonial” and/or a “New Zealand” writer. For Stead, her childhood physical environment manifests itself constantly in her writing, as does the fact that her New Zealand background—her “colonial” heritage—marks her out as a writer. She is detached, unmarked by established convention, caring little for social niceties and with “only intelligence and instinct to guide her” (30). From her earliest writing, once she was established in Europe, would come the collection In a German Pension (1911), in which Stead sees a mixture of violence and humour, not so much anti-German, as anti-male. At the age of 22, Mansfield’s satirical and analytical skills are impressively developed.

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The publication of Claire Tomalin’s biography of Mansfield in 1987 brought Stead to the defence of Mansfield as a colonial—and, for him more significantly—a New Zealand writer, in a review essay entitled “Katherine Mansfield’s Life”.5 Stead points out: “Mansfield spent half her life in New Zealand. Tomalin gives one tenth of her book to those years” (Stead 2002, 43). He views Tomalin’s focus on Mansfield’s adult and literary life as unsatisfactory, in that it removes attention from those things in her origins which explain much of her oeuvre: “She always saw herself as an outsider—“the little colonial”; and a large proportion of her most highly regarded stories are set in New Zealand” (43). Stead looks squarely at the question of whether she is “a New Zealand writer” at all, and comes to the conclusion that she must be, by default, since “she is not any other kind of writer”. He continues: She had no regional or metropolitan attachment, nor class allegiance, nor dialect, to place her among British writers. Yet the New Zealandness is hard to pin down. It has been laid over, concealed—deliberately. This is an essential part of Mansfield which I think Tomalin doesn’t appreciate; but it has been neglected by other biographers as well. (44)

Taking the subtitle of Tomalin’s biography, “A Secret Life”, Stead suggests that Mansfield’s New Zealand heritage and inspiration are part of this secret life, not always foregrounded in her fiction, but nevertheless present as a topographical and inspirational undercurrent. He goes on to discuss one of Mansfield’s early and less well-known New Zealand stories, “The Woman at the Store” (1912), which demonstrates one of her principal narrative themes—that of the woman as victim—combining this with “a harsh regional realism” (44), which foreshadows a specific genre of New Zealand realist fiction of the 1930s and 1940s. Stead quotes Elizabeth Bowen, asking: “Did she, by leaving her own country, deprive herself of a range of associations, of inborn knowledge, of vocabulary?” (45), and is disturbed that this subject is not raised anywhere in Tomalin’s biography. Stead’s critical response to the centenary of Mansfield’s birth in 1988 is an essay entitled “Katherine Mansfield and T. S. Eliot: A Double Centenary”. As he points out, these two writers were born within three weeks of one another, so it is also Eliot’s centenary, and their lives, as expatriates, occasionally overlapped.6 It is easy for Stead to conjure up the similarities in their personalities, both, for him, encapsulating “a curious combination of theatricality and secretiveness” (Stead 1989, 150). Their families were well-to-do, their fathers financially supportive, their mothers sensitive, if distant. “For both, the landscapes of childhood remained more

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vivid and significant than those of their adopted country” (150). Stead also defines their differences, which are striking, Eliot being elusive, unadventurous and timid, turning to orthodox religion as he grew older, whereas Mansfield was a bold adventurer, “a high-spirited pagan for whom the notion of art had replaced traditional religion as the source and receptacle of the highest truths and the finest achievements of mankind” (151). The most marked differences for Stead, however, are in their literary output; both were enormously gifted, but whereas Mansfield’s achievements grew consistently with the passage of time, cut short only by her untimely death, Eliot’s early brilliance “became progressively frozen under layers of Catholic-puritan angst” (151). In addition, literary history binds them in the sense that 1922, which produced James Joyce’s Ulysses and Eliot’s The Waste Land, was also the year of Mansfield’s most significant collection, The Garden Party and Other Stories. In 1989, Stead gave the John Garrett Lecture at the University of Canterbury, New Zealand, taking as his theme “Katherine Mansfield as Colonial Realist”, evidently harking back to concerns from his review of Tomalin’s biography, namely the notion of Mansfield as a “colonial” writer. Stead acknowledges that, “The balance between maintaining living contact with the literary tradition, going back in our case at least to Shakespeare, and ‘making it new’ on our own ground, has been the difficult task of New Zealand writers” (Stead 2000, 38). In Mansfield’s writing, he feels, there are easily overlooked moments, which catch “the sense of a gap between the local reality and the imported model, which is what so much of the post-colonial experience is all about” (40). One such story is “The Doll’s House” (1921), where the toy house and its toy occupants represent the artificiality of the colonial society, while the little lamp seems “real”. So the child Else’s last words, “I seen the little lamp” (Mansfield 2012, 420), are a recognition that has “symbolic significance for the development of post-colonial literature” (Stead 2000, 41). Thus far, Stead’s approaches to Mansfield have all been literarycritical and quite separate from his on-going work as poet and fiction writer, but in 1996 the two came together for the first time in the poems “Jealousy I” and “Jealousy II”. In “Jealousy I”, Stead’s voice is Mansfield’s voice—as she plays over in her mind the events of a dinner party which had in reality taken place on the night of 14 May 1920—T. S. Eliot and his wife had just been to dinner with the Murrys.7 [See Fig. 1]. Stead is here intertwining his two favourite literary personalities, and creating a poem from Mansfield’s own impressions of the evening, recorded in a letter to Sydney and Violet Schiff. Many of Mansfield’s original words are reproduced in the poem, and this is the technique Stead

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would go on to employ in his novel Mansfield, using diary entries and letters, even an actual story, “Psychology” (1920), to recreate events, to give his novel a “ring of truth”. The jealousy in this poem is multi-layered; Mansfield’s jealousy of Murry for having been in England when she was away ill in the South of France; jealousy, too, of Murry’s ease with Eliot and especially with his wife, Vivien; and jealousy of Vivien herself, and the horror that she had been in Mansfield’s bedroom before and that Murry might perhaps have developed a more intimate relationship with her. “Jealousy II” is written from the point of view of Virginia Woolf, Mansfield’s literary sparring partner, and again, a similar technique is used, though in this instance, there is more conjecture, and several different Woolf sources are employed. [See Fig. 2]. Here it is Woolf who is jealous of Mansfield’s writing, her personality, her vibrancy. Mansfield is recorded by many of her contemporaries as having a gift for impersonation, which she incorporated into her work through the myriad of characters presented there. Ida Baker, Mansfield’s school-friend and companion remarked: “There was a bell-like quality in her rich low voice and her singing was a high, pure soprano […] She was a born actress and mimic, and even in her ordinary everyday life took colour from the company she was in” (Baker 1971, 233). Leonard Woolf concurs: By nature, I think, she was gay, cynical, amoral, ribald, witty. When we first knew her she was extraordinarily amusing. I don’t think anyone has ever made me laugh more than she did in those days. She would sit very upright on the edge of a chair or sofa and tell at immense length a kind of saga, of her experiences as an actress […] [T]he extraordinary funniness of the story was increased by the flashes of her astringent wit. I think that in some abstruse way Murry corrupted and perverted and destroyed Katherine both as a person and a writer […] Her gifts were those of an intense realist, with a superb sense of ironic humour and fundamental cynicism. (Woolf 1964, 204)

This description of Mansfield by a contemporary who knew her well, underlines how her humour attracted Woolf’s husband and how this in turn led to Woolf’s insecurity and jealousy (seen in Stead’s poem) at the very mention of her name, not just as a writer, but as a woman and a potential rival. Discussing the genesis of these poems, Stead notes: The two Jealousy poems are unusual in that they (the first especially) stick so close to their sources. “Jealousy I” exercises my talent as a poet, not by inventing anything, but by cutting down what’s there in the record to its essentials and making it, consequently, dramatic. It catches the Mansfield voice––but also the neurotic Vivien Eliot voice––and KM’s horror at her,

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In 2004, Stead returns once more to Mansfield for inspiration in his creative endeavours, this time producing the acclaimed novel, Mansfield, spanning three years from 1915 to 1918 during the Great War, and chronicling the lives of Mansfield and her circle at this critical time. Reviewing the novel in England, Hermione Lee stated: C. K. Stead is trying to do to Katherine Mansfield what Colm Toibin has just done to Henry James in The Master or Michael Cunningham to Virginia Woolf in The Hours: to take a short section of a great writer’s life, extrapolate its essence from biographical information and primary sources, and turn it into a vivid, immediate fictional narrative which daringly enters into the famous subject’s inner life. (Lee 2004, 27)

In his 2004 article, “Men and Mansfield in Mansfield”, Stead explained his choice of time parameters for the novel; first because it was during this period that Mansfield began to see clearly the sort of fiction she wanted to write—which would take her back to New Zealand and her family for inspiration; second, her tuberculosis had not yet been diagnosed and she was still in reasonable health; and third, during this period the cast of characters actively in her life reads like a who’s who of the earlytwentieth-century literary scene. After 1918, when she started to become ill and spent more and more time away from England, her interaction with these people diminished mainly conducted through letters. Finally—and most importantly—these are the War years and, Stead says, “Mansfield is really a war novel” (Stead 2008, 135). The novel follows closely what we know of Mansfield’s movements during this time. Stead’s modus operandi was that “nothing in the novel should conflict with what is known. What I was interested in exploring, however, was the area beyond what is known” (Stead 2008, 132). Each chapter is written from the point of view of one of the main characters and is titled with that character’s name. Of thirteen chapters, seven are written from Mansfield’s point of view, with the symmetry of two at both the beginning and the end of the novel. Other characters represented with a

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chapter are Leslie Beauchamp (Mansfield’s brother), John Middleton Murry, Dora Carrington, Frieda Lawrence and Frederick Goodyear (significantly given two chapters). Both Leslie Beauchamp and Frederick Goodyear were killed in action in France, and Stead centres much of the book on their individual stories and experiences as they interact with Mansfield’s. In addition to the main war theme, Stead notes, “Mansfield is a novel about relationships. It’s about Katherine’s struggle to find love and companionship; and about her effort to balance the duties and demands of human attachments against the consuming ambition to write what she called “a new kind of fiction”” (Stead 2008, 133). Five male characters are foregrounded: the brother Leslie, the loved friend Fred Goodyear, soon-tobe-husband Murry, the lover Francis Carco, and the intellectual Bertrand Russell. The novel represents Mansfield’s relationship with each. For Stead, there is the “whiff of incest” (Stead 2008, 135), about the relationship between Mansfield and her brother, which he depicts as intense during the brief time Leslie is over from New Zealand, preparing for war, and staying with his elder sister. Mansfield is obsessed with him whilst alive and even more so once he is dead. His death eventually becomes the catalyst she needs to turn her thoughts back to New Zealand, searching for creative inspiration in her homeland and memories of their childhood. Stead accords Murry only one chapter. Discussing the novel, he says Murry was “well meaning but not really up to the task. She was too brilliant for him to match, and too demanding for him to satisfy” (Stead 2008, 137). With Bertrand Russell, Stead employs Mansfield’s own story “Psychology”, written at almost exactly the same time as their short-lived intimacy, and transforms it into part of the book’s plot, since, “the incident it describes is a perfect illustration of what the newly fashionable Freudian psychology would have called repression and sublimation” (141). Concerning Mansfield’s relationship with Frederick Goodyear, Stead has very little to go on in the way of factual record, so he relies on “hints” and letters, and then uses guesswork. The use of Goodyear as a character reinforces the theme of war, and Lee admires Stead’s choice: It was a cunning move to bring her friend Fred Goodyear (a minor figure in the biographies) into the centre of the picture. Goodyear, an English friend of Murry’s, seems to have been in love with Katherine, and wrote her some critical letters about her contempt for other people and her need to “reunite” with humanity. Stead imagines him in the horrors of the Front (where he lost both legs, and died) receiving a long letter from Katherine which spells out her need not to let “false notes” creep in, “better honest

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Chapter Eight about what I see around me”. It’s the novel’s most interesting invention, bringing the realities of the war right into the centre of the story, and emphasising the tough self-knowledge, as a writer, which underlay all Mansfield’s contradictory, often wilful performances. (Lee 2004, 27)

Stead is careful not to use much direct quotation from Mansfield’s letters and journals, which he has said would allow her voice to take over, replacing his own. But he allows himself to invent a long letter from her to Goodyear,9 which is in itself a brilliant exercise in ventriloquism. Mansfield’s affair with the writer Francis Carco (1886–1958), forms an important episode in the novel. Carco, who was born in Noumea, always liked to claim his “South Sea” connection with Mansfield. During the First World War he became Corporal Carco (holding the same rank as “le petit caporal” in Mansfield’s story “An Indiscreet Journey” (1915)), working as a postman to a military baker’s unit, near the front. Mansfield was disaffected with Murry during the winter of 1914–15. At the beginning of 1915 her brother Leslie, now in England as a soldier, lent her money, which enabled her to visit Carco in the war zone in north-eastern France. After three nights she suddenly returned to London and Murry, disillusioned, but with plenty of copy. Nevertheless, she retained the Carco relationship—long enough to make use of his apartment in Paris, on the Quai aux Fleurs overlooking the Seine, where she wrote “An Indiscreet Journey”,10 an account of her visit to Gray. [See Fig. 3]. There is a mystery here: why the affair and then its abrupt termination? Stead has Mansfield fall briefly in love with Carco, a love that is not reciprocated and therefore the reason for the departure. Claire Tomalin suggests Carco had given her more than just “copy” for her stories, and that possibly she “had contracted syphilis after her visit to Carco at the front” (Tomalin 1987, 226n). On this matter Stead, in his commentary on his novel, brings the crucial question back from medical speculation to psychological probability: Katherine was living the “free life” and that meant “free love”. Lacking the pill and antibiotics which protected the new free women of the 1970s and 1980s, she suffered damaging consequences—unintended pregnancies, venereal disease (which in turn lowered her resistance to TB). But one thing that neither the pill nor antibiotics could have protected her from— any more than they protected the new free women of the pre-AIDS era— was falling in love. As I represent her, the adventure with Carco had engaged deeper emotions and this had not been part of the plan. (Stead 2008, 145–6)

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The novel Mansfield is dominated by Mansfield’s relationships with men. Stead reveals that in her letters she reacts very differently to men than to women, and that there are nearly always sexual overtones in her correspondence with the former. She was an incorrigible flirt—a fact which attracted both men and women, including Virginia Woolf (as Stead notes in the poem “Jealousy II”). The connection between Mansfield and Eliot, as outlined above, is an important one in Stead’s creative writing. Significantly, Mansfield begins with an encounter between the two authors, walking home together after a dinner party. In his 2001 novel, The Secret History of Modernism, Stead has one of his characters, Samantha, write about the same encounter.11 In conversation, Stead recalls that whilst writing The Secret History of Modernism, he thought, as he prepared this section on Mansfield and Eliot that “there was a whole novel in there”.12 Concluding her review of Mansfield, Lee considers it not altogether successful, since she feels that Mansfield’s own voice—in her letters and journals—is so much more powerful than anything recreated as a fictional account. Alberto Manguel however, writing in The Spectator, viewed the novel differently: Cannibal chef C. K. Stead has served us the most delicious, exquisitely prepared, delicately spiced Katherine Mansfield dans son jus that one could ever wish for, and the gourmet in me is immensely grateful. If we are to have biographies, fictional biographies at that, let them all be like this three-star novel, done to a turn. I came away from Stead’s Mansfield (precisely subtitled “A Novel”) feeling that I now understood something of “how it’s done”, or at least of how Mansfield succeeded in doing that which made even the lofty Virginia Woolf jealous: “the only writing I have ever been jealous of,” the author of Mrs Dalloway once confessed. (Manguel 2004, 44)

What is certain is that Stead understands the inner workings of Mansfield’s craft more than most. As Manguel notes: “[Stead] does not copy or merely report: he translates that which we know or intuit of her thoughts and feelings into the language of story, so that the jottings of her documented voice in journals and letters become a moving, comprehensible, convincing fictional narrative” (44). Mansfield knew, or was acquainted with, so many people now regarded as stars of twentieth century literature, Stead’s problem must surely have been who to leave out. In Manguel’s words, we have the “the timid and yet priggish T. S. Eliot, the inspired and violent D. H. Lawrence, the kind and scatterbrained Lady Ottoline Morrell, the randy and politically engaged Bertrand Russell, the lovesick and intelligent Carrington” (44), to name but a few.

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It might have been thought that one whose interest in Mansfield had been mainly academic and literary-critical would end up writing little more than a thinly disguised biography. But although Stead has been a notable critic, poetry and fiction have always taken precedence, and Mansfield reads fluently as a novel, to be appreciated just as easily by someone with no previous interest or knowledge of Mansfield, while also holding the attention of the most critical of Mansfield scholars. In reflecting on his role, both as Mansfield critic, whilst at the same time using her life as inspiration in his creative endeavours, Stead reflects: My critical judgements are always strictly critical; and I distinguish that way of discerning KM from the imaginative recreation of her in fiction, where one must try to get inside her head and her feelings rather than stand critically apart. There’s a sense in which the critic, too, must try to “get inside”––but it feels, as I write, a different kind of mental exercise. I think the best illustration of “being Mansfield” is the letter I invent written to Goodyear in Mansfield, which I think sounds very convincing. If some researcher turned up with that as a new discovery I don’t think anyone would suspect it was a fake––would they?13

Stead’s most recent collection of poems, The Yellow Buoy (2013), contains two Mansfield poems, “Isola Bella” (previously published in The New Yorker) and “Cornwall, May 1916”, which suggest it is not a subject he is yet ready to put behind him, that we may perhaps look for more, and if so, certainly with keen anticipation.

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Figure 1 [All spelling mistakes/errors sic]

“Jealousy I” (1996) (Katherine Mansfield, April 1920)

‘This furniture’s changed since you came back.’

The Elliots have dined with us tonight. They are just gone—and the whole room is quivering. John has gone downstairs to see them off. Mrs E’s voice rises “Oh dont commiserate Tom; he’s quite happy.” I know its extravagant; I know, Violet, I ought to have seen more—but I dislike her immensely. She really repels me. She makes me shiver with apprehension … I don’t dare to think of what she is ‘seeing’. From the moment that John dropped a spoon and she cried: “I say you are noisy tonight—whats wrong”—to the moment when she came into my room & lay on the sofa offering idly: “This room’s changed since the last time I was here.” To think she had been here before. I handed her the cigarettes saying to myself: “well you won’t find it changed again”. Isn’t that extravagant. And Elliot, leaning towards her, admiring, listening, making the most of her—really minding whether she disliked the country or not … I am so fond of Elliot and as he talked of you both tonight I felt a deep sympathy with him. You are in his life like you are in mine. Don’t think that it Is impertinent. Oh, I could explain and explain that. But this teashop creature. M. comes up after they are gone, and he defends her. He tells me of a party he gave here & how she came & was friends with him & how he drank to get over the state of nerves she had thrown him into. “I like her; I would do the same again.” I feel as tho’ I’ve been stabbed.

I shivered. When had she been here before?

Letter to Sydney and Violet Schiff, 14 May 1920 (Mansfield 1996, 11).

Tonight the T. S. Eliots to dine— John has just gone down to see them off. Tom’s an angel— but Vivien how I detest her! ‘My husband’ She brays— ‘Oh don’t be sorry for him!’ And when John dropped the spoon: ‘You are noisy tonight my dear. What’s wrong?’ (Tom leaning towards her attentive admiring.) Later in my room sprawled on a sofa she drawled

When John returns and defends her I feel I’ve been stabbed. How could it be? and with that teashop creature! (Stead [1996] 2009, 281-2)

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122 Figure 2 “Jealousy II” (Virginia Woolf, January 1923) Katherine believed I despised her as a colonial or so she told Ottoline— and it’s true I wrote after our first supper together ‘She stank like a civet cat that had taken to street-walking.’ It wasn’t just the perfume— there was something hard clever inscrutable.

The dinner last night went off: the delicate things were discussed. We could both wish that ones first impression of K. M. was not that she stinks like a—well civet cat that had taken to street walking. In truth I’m a little shocked by her commonness at first sight; lines so hard & cheap. However, when this diminishes, she is so intelligent & inscrutable that she repays friendship (Woolf 1977, 58). I’ve plucked out my jealousy of Katherine by writing her an insincere-sincere letter [...] So I’ve had my little nettle growing in me, and plucked it as I say (Woolf 1978, 80).

Later I was in love with her but she would have none of that.

K. M. (as the papers call her) swims from triumph to triumph in the reviews; save that squire doubts her genius—so, I’m afraid, do I (Woolf 1978, 87).

Now she’s dead and I can confess in my journal ‘Hers was the only writing I was ever jealous of.’

I have been dabbling in K. M.’s stories, & have to rinse my mind—in Dryden? Still, if she were not so clever she couldn’t be so disagreeable (Woolf 1978, 138).

Oh yes but there’s more and I won’t write it. She was the one who could make Leonard laugh.

So what does it matter if K. M. soars in the newspapers, & runs up sales sky high? Ah, I have found a fine way of putting her in her place. The more she is praised, the more I am convinced she is bad. After all, there’s some truth in this. She touches the spot too universally for that spot to be of the truest blood (Woolf 1978, 171).

I caught us once in a mirror— Katherine with her mask-face dark eyes quick wit Leonard on fire admiring and I long-faced lugubrious superfluous. No that I couldn’t forgive— not ever. (Stead [1996] 2009, 281-2)

Katherine has been dead a week [...] When I began to write, it seemed to me there was no point in writing. Katherine won’t read it. Katherine’s my rival no longer [...] And I was jealous of her writing—the only writing I have ever been jealous of. This made it harder to write to her; and I saw in it, perhaps from jealousy, all the qualities I disliked in her (Woolf 1978, 227). If she’d lived, she’d have written on, & people would have seen that I was the more gifted—that wd only have become more apparent (Woolf 1978, 317). But K.M. always said affectionate admiring things to me, poor woman, whom in my own way I supposed I loved (Woolf 1978, 318). When we first knew her she was extraordinarily amusing. I don’t think anyone has ever made me laugh more than she did in those days. (Woolf 1964, 204).

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Figure 3 They spent the night talking (a great deal), making love (effortlessly, cosily), and, she supposed, sleeping, though it was never more than a half-sleep. She had not been mistaken about Carco. He was so at ease, natural, clever, entertaining. There was something feminine about him—not just his small neatly rounded body, his long curly eyelashes and soft wavy-brown hair, his particularity about washing and scenting himself and doing his hair, and the fine bangle he wore on his arm. In his personality he was not what she thought of as a “Pa-man”—one whose strong masculinity could make her love him against all the odds including her better judgment. But he was a man, one who knew how to please her in pleasing himself. (Stead 2004, 31)

There was a fire in our room and a tiny lamp on the table. The fire flickered on the white wood ceiling. It was as though we were on a boat. We talked in whispers overcome by this discreet little lamp. In the most natural way we slowly undressed by the stove. F. swung into the bed. Is it cold, I said. “No, not at all cold. Viens ma bebe, don’t be frightened. The waves are quite small.” His laughing face & pretty hair, one hand with a bangle over the sheets, he looked like a girl. But seeing his puttees, his thin black tie & the feel of his flannelette shirt—& the sword, the big ugly sword, but not between us, lying in a chair. The act of love seemed somehow quite I, incidental, we talked so much. It was so warm & delicious lying curled in each others arms, by the light of the tiny lamp le fils de Maeterlinck, only the clock & the fire to be heard. A whole life passed in the night: other people other things, but we lay like 2 old people coughing faintly under the eiderdown, and laughing at each other and away we went to India, to South America, to Marseilles in the white boat & then we talked of Paris & sometimes I lost him in a crowd of people & it was dark & frightening, & then he was in my arms again & we were kissing. (Here he is. I know his steps.) (Mansfield 2002, 12)

Works Cited Baker, Ida. 1971. Katherine Mansfield: The Memories of LM. London: Michael Joseph. Kimber, Gerri. 2008. Katherine Mansfield: The View from France. Bern: Peter Lang. Lee, Hermione. 2004. “Capturing the Chameleon.” The Guardian, 29 May, 27. Manguel, Alberto. 2004. “Leaving Fingerprints Behind.” The Spectator, 5 June, 44. Mansfield, Katherine. 1911. In a German Pension. London: Stephen Swift. —. 1984. The Collected Letters of Katherine Mansfield, Volume 1, edited by Vincent O’Sullivan and Margaret Scott. Oxford: Clarendon Press. —. 1987. The Collected Letters of Katherine Mansfield, Volume 2, edited by Vincent O’Sullivan and Margaret Scott. Oxford: Clarendon Press, —. 1994. The Collected Letters of Katherine Mansfield, Volume 4, edited by Vincent O’Sullivan and Margaret Scott. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

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—. 2002. The Katherine Mansfield Notebooks, edited by Margaret Scott. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. —. 2012. The Edinburgh Edition of the Collected Fiction of Katherine Mansfield, 2 volumes, edited by Gerri Kimber and Vincent O’Sullivan. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Stead, C. K. 1964. The New Poetic: Yeats to Eliot. London: Hutchinson. —. 1981a. “Katherine Mansfield: The Letters and Journals.” In The Glass Case: Essays on New Zealand Literature, 20-28. Auckland: Auckland University Press. —. 1981b. “Katherine Mansfield: The Art of the Fiction.” In The Glass Case: Essays on New Zealand Literature. 29-46. Auckland: Auckland University Press. —. 1986. Pound, Yeats and the Modernist Movement. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. —. 1989. “Katherine Mansfield and T. S. Eliot: A Double Centenary.” In Answering to the Language: Essays on Modern Writers. 149–161. Auckland: Auckland University Press. —. (1996) 2009. “Jealousy I” and “Jealousy 2.” In Collected Poems 19512006. 281–82. Manchester: Carcanet Press. —. 2000. “Katherine Mansfield as Colonial Realist.” In The Writer at Work. 38–42. Dunedin: University of Otago Press. —. 2001. The Secret History of Modernism. London: Harvill. —. 2002. “Katherine Mansfield’s Life.” In Kin of Place. 39–48. Auckland: Auckland University Press. —. 2004. Mansfield. London: Harvill. —. 2008. “Men and Mansfield in Mansfield.” In Book Self: The Reader as Writer and the Writer as Critic. 132–46. Auckland: Auckland University Press. —. 2013. “Isola Bella” and “Cornwall, May 1916.” In The Yellow Buoy: Poems 2007–2012. 41–42. Auckland: Auckland University Press. Tomalin, Claire. 1987. Katherine Mansfield: A Secret Life. London: Viking. Woolf, Leonard. 1964. The Autobiography of Leonard Woolf. London: Hogarth Press. Woolf, Virginia. 1977. The Diary of Virginia Woolf, Volume 1, edited by Anne Olivier Bell. London: Hogarth Press. —. 1978. The Diary of Virginia Woolf, Volume 2, edited by Anne Olivier Bell. London: Hogarth Press.

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Notes 1

A tangi is a Maori funeral. Stead in conversation with Gerri Kimber, 29 August 2008. 3 For a detailed analysis of Mansfield’s reception and reputation in France, see Kimber 2008. 4 Originally published in The New Review in 1977. The article arose from a lecture delivered at University College, London, in January 1977. 5 First published in London Review of Books, November 1987. 6 Stead is also an expert on T. S. Eliot. See his books: The New Poetic: Yeats to Eliot (London: Hutchinson, 1964), and Pound, Yeats and the Modernist Movement (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1986). 7 See letter to Sydney and Violet Schiff, 14 May 1920 (Mansfield 1994, 11). 8 Email to Gerri Kimber, 4 May 2013. 9 See Stead 2004, 193–7. 10 The story was never published in Mansfield’s lifetime, appearing in the posthumous collection Something Childish and Other Stories in 1924. 11 See Stead 2001, 161. 12 Stead in conversation with Gerri Kimber, 29 August 2008. 13 Email to Gerri Kimber, 4 May 2013. 2

CHAPTER NINE CROSSING THE RITUAL BRIDGE: HOPE MIRRLEES’S THE COUNTERPLOT & BETWEEN THE ACTS SANDEEP PARMAR In 1923 Virginia Woolf wrote to Hope Mirrlees that she found Mirrlees’s praise for her writing “a great comfort”. Woolf added: “I grow more and more dissatisfied with my contemporaries. None of them seems able to carry the thing through—for the most part because they will not or cannot write I think. But this won’t apply to you.” (Woolf 1980, 3). Woolf’s opinion of Mirrlees’s abilities as a writer was expressed less flatteringly to close friends and in her diary—although the Hogarth Press had published what is now regarded as one of the earliest examples of British modernist poetry, the day-long flâneur poem Paris in 1920, it would appear that Woolf never considered Mirrlees to be a seriously good prose writer. And even though Paris had desperately undersold (to the point that several copies were pulped), Woolf admired Mirrlees’s poem, calling it “obscure, indecent, and brilliant” (Woolf 1977, 385) and urged Mirrlees in 1923 to send a play she had apparently been writing for the Hogarth Press to publish. This play has never turned up and instead it seems very likely that Mirrlees incorporated it (in a highly experimental move) into her second novel, The Counterplot, published in 1924 by Collins. After the draft manuscript of Paris was submitted to the Woolfs in 1919, Mirrlees and her partner, the classical scholar Jane Harrison, travelled through southern Spain in the early months of 1920. Mirrlees began The Counterplot later that year and rewrote it at least three times before publishing it four years later. The following is an attempt to explore how Mirrlees’s second novel, with its clear debt to the writings of Jane Harrison, whom Woolf greatly respected, might have influenced Woolf’s final novel Between the Acts.

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The Counterplot Thickens In the spring of 1924, at a tea party given by the widowed Lady Prothero in Bedford Square, Mirrlees confided in Sir Herbert Stephen—a lawyer and cousin of Virginia Woolf—that her second novel, The Counterplot, had become a “bestseller”. Sir Herbert replied that if she chose to sue the paper that printed the notice and therefore put her “in the same category with [the prolific and popular novelist] Gilbert Frankau” that “an intelligent Jury would give [her] £5000 damages.”1 Clearly Mirrlees’s excitement about her novel’s mass appeal was at odds with her sense that the label “bestseller” would debase its artistic merit in the eyes of Bloomsbury’s elite. After considering the matter further, Sir Herbert decided it best to buy the book but—at Mirrlees’s polite insistence—he promised never to actually read it. As a consequence of the combined lukewarm reception—in terms both of sales and reviews—to her earlier literary efforts, her first novel Madeleine: One of Love’s Jansenists and Paris, the prospect of having written a bestselling novel and the subsequent acclaim appears to have been more than her nerves could bear. But instead of retreating from literary visibility, Mirrlees left Paris where she had been living with Harrison, to seek treatment for a nervous condition in London. There, she found that not only Bloomsbury, with which she was already on very familiar terms, but the “shires”, too, were “buzzing” over her new novel. Hope’s letters to her mother just after the publication of The Counterplot are riddled with bits of overheard or repeated conversation and excerpts wrung from reviews and letters that either damn or exalt her novel to the heights of genius. We learn superficially from Hope that Lytton Strachey’s sister Marjorie roundly admired it; that Bunny Garnett and Raymond Mortimer found it “DESPERATELY interesting”; and that Duncan Grant’s sister was so appalled by the “terrible” book (for which she blamed the influence of Jane Harrison) that she was afraid to have it in the house lest her brotherin-law read it.2 Mirrlees’s combined horror of and hunger for praise is in part a result, unsurprisingly, of a desire to be seen as an equal by her contemporaries—specifically Virginia Woolf. To some readers of Mirrlees’s second novel it might appear that she trumped herself on several counts with The Counterplot: the novel exposes its subject, the female author, in the fatal act of being intellectually highbrow, and as I will argue here, it is the foregrounding of the novel and the novelist’s own literary aspirations that ultimately affirm the turgid and unthinking English middle-class culture in which The Counterplot is conceived. It is set in the years immediately after World War I in

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England’s eastern counties; the novel’s protagonist, Teresa Lane, is the eldest living child of a part-Spanish Catholic (in Mirrlees’s terms: pious and superstitious) mother and a London-born father who enjoys the smell of manure, pigs and wide vistas; he is an avid “round-faced” golfer who is warmly sidelined by family dramatics. Teresa’s elder sister, Pepa, much to her mother’s disappointment, married an atheist Cambridge don with whom she had borne two children before dying prematurely two years before the novel begins. The younger adult members of the Lane family, Concha and Arnold, are both hopelessly and vacuously upper middleclass: Concha, Teresa observes, runs after young men like “a tabby-cat in perpetual season”, is abundantly youthful and in fact “normal”, unlike herself (22). Even her very name (“concha” is Spanish for “shell”) indicates the superficiality of her character and intellect, as well as the outward value of her physical beauty. Arnold, the prized son, served in the war and returned only to become, in his sister Teresa’s eyes, “ordinary” and “Philistine” (40). His role as the spoiled young gentleman sees him invite his like-minded friends for weekends of snooker and bridge to Plasencia, the Lane family home, which is set up high on a hill in a village near Cambridge, bordered with an exquisite and well-tended garden, that, like the fortress walls of the Spanish city Plasencia, at once protect the family from the world outside and imprison them in a hotbed of eccentricity, resentment and tension. The house itself is a living organism—Teresa describes it as an old ark in slowly rising waters that is waiting to come loose from its foundations and float out of life. Like Plasencia, the Lane family is also in flux since the death of Pepa; her memory permeates the novel with that particular fragrance of tragic and unconsecrated death, which portends the passing of one era into the next. As Teresa is meditating on her sister Concha’s budding sexuality, she recalls the beginning of one of Cervantes’s Novelas Exemplares, which tells of the impulse that drives young men, although they may love their parents dearly, to break away from their home and wander across the world, ‘nor can meagre fare and poor lodging cause them to miss the abundance of their father’s house; nor does travelling on foot weary them, nor cold torment them, nor heat exhaust them.’ And, added Teresa, rich in the wisdom of a myriad songs and stories, they are probably fully aware, ere they shut behind them the door of their home, that some day they, too, will discover that freedom is nought but a lonely wind, howling for the past. (22)

As Mirrlees’s title suggests, the novel hinges on a fascination with working out the counterplot to the main plot of life: that is, birth, life and

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death. And throughout the novel, Teresa Lane is fascinated by the present being always transmuted into the past (she remarks that each birth replaces a death), not only in the case of the family dissipating through marriage and eventually death, but more generally the quickening of modern postwar life, the changing and bending of class borders, manners, the diffuse nature of middle-class existence and, finally and crucially, the new generation’s loss of religious feeling. The maturing of the Lane children into adulthood and their increasing dissimilarity from each other, reflects the changing attitudes of modern England—family loyalty and sacrifice are given up for the dual pleasures of consumption and consummation—as evidenced by Concha’s eventual decision in the novel to go against her mother’s wishes and marry a wealthy aristocratic Protestant in the spirit of “modern”, upwardly mobile love. Concha’s disregard for the religious traditions of her part-Spanish ancestry and her rejection of Victorian class attitudes (she marries above her station) are brought into an odd unity, showing how Englishness is construed as “primitive” in the face of the new century. But Concha is not Mirrlees’s heroine; Teresa Lane’s fascination with the past takes up the central dramatic point of the novel, which is the Lane family’s resistance to individual (as opposed to tribal, communal and traditional) life, and an underlying anxiety that individuality is doomed to be “nought but a lonely wind, howling for the past.” (Mirrlees 1925, 22) In the same year that Woolf wrote to Mirrlees asking for her play, Jane Harrison gave Woolf a copy of Ancient Art and Ritual, which Harrison had written a decade earlier. We know from Woolf’s diaries that her awareness of Harrison’s work and her admiration for the elder woman’s scholarship pervades Woolf’s thinking at various points in her writing. And, owing to the nature of Mirrlees’s relationship with Harrison and their close intellectual bond, it is undoubtedly also the case with Mirrlees that Harrison’s ideas about Greek ritual and art directly influence The Counterplot’s figuring of aesthetic and religious concerns. According to Harrison’s book, art becomes the ritual through which life and its processes are understood, where its anxieties and secret fears are symbolically represented and thereby diminished. Ritual is the bridge between art and life and both art and ritual transposes and transubstantiates human life into a unified, divine counterplot. And as Mirrlees’s chronological plot progresses it is drawn increasingly into the “counterplot”, which is quite the opposite of the life cycle of the individual, it is instead the mythic fabric of the tribe: sex, religion, and the ghosts of dead ancestors.

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It is not just the common source of Jane Harrison’s tribal ritualism that unites The Counterplot with Woolf’s final novel Between the Acts; what is striking about them both is the presence of a performed play—of an audience of neighbours watching allegory in the gardens of English country houses and most especially the preoccupation of both novels with reflecting the audience in the performance. Mirrlees’s novel is transfigured in its final hundred pages to a play, what Mirrlees refers to as a “key”, an auto-sacramental (or morality play) set in the medieval Seville of Pedro the Cruel. The play, written by Teresa and involving nuns and a procuress who plots against their virginity, mirrors the actual situation at Plasencia and is performed in its garden for neighbours and friends, including the working-class Women’s Institute members who have been invited out of a sense of the Lane’s obligation to the uneducated poor. Teresa’s double in the auto-sacramental, Sister Pilar, is rivalled for male attention by Sister Assumcion. Ultimately Pilar—in a course of action too complex to detail here—succumbs to lust and jealousy, is “ravaged” by a Spanish knight, but finds her faith strengthened by a knowledge of the love and pleasure she must from thereon forever sacrifice. Pilar’s embracing of the communally-lived religious life is a rejection of her own desire, and of the plot of individual life. But to what end does the individual give up the heroism of romantic love and lust? The play within Mirrlees’s novel is watched by Teresa’s family the Lanes—who seem not to recognize themselves as characters therein or at least would not dare admit it—and as it ends there is general confusion, annoyance, or indifference among the gathered audience. Her attempt to explain the inner workings of the family drama in the disguise of an autosacramental has not resolved any of the relationships that inspired Teresa’s act of writing—the central question of how to mitigate one’s individualism in the face of social pressure to marry and give up intellectual life. And moreover, Teresa’s parochial English audience is speechless from embarrassment at the play’s end, either from their lack of understanding of the play’s philosophical reasoning or from being scandalized by the content (it is, after all, rather indelicate of her to deflower a nun in the family garden). And while it certainly is an innovation in the novel’s form—duly noted by The Counterplot’s reviewers—to include a fulllength play, it is the play that undoes the only character aspiring to rise above her station to become an artist, something grand, professional, even perhaps in the realm of genius. In the novel, the play’s performance drives Teresa to admit her own longing for romantic love to David Munroe, who is himself subsumed within the sacrificial plot of the tribe, a religious life, and is en route to joining the brotherhood of priests. She exclaims:

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“David! What’s it all about? Don’t you see? … here’s you, here’s me. Plasencia’s up there where we’ll be having tea and smoking cigarettes. Oh, it’s a plot! it’s a plot! Don’t be taken in … why, it’s mad! You’re not going to become a priest!” (332–333)

Teresa realises finally, through her attempt to bring to the surface the secret desires of the counterplot that has ordered life in Plasencia so unappealingly, that her unwillingness to take part in the plot of “life” (birth, life, death) originates in a fear of expressing that desire. David Munroe’s response, that “there’s nothing so grand as sacrifice—to offer up youth and love to God”, brings Teresa’s plot and counterplot together, shattering individuality by confirming the unchangeable order of an unheroic ideal (333). Somehow by fusing art with life through the ritual, Teresa fails to arrive at the truth, which is her necessary participation in the mundane living world, in marriage, birth and death, that which she had denied by compressing the present into the structure of an exalted and heroic past. The precarious place of women aspiring not only towards art but to exemption from ordinary middle-class lives is clearly in evidence in both of Mirrlees’s novels. Only what is remarkable about The Counterplot is that it goes a step further than Madeleine by absorbing its audience into the main action and by giving voice to their ambivalence to art. That the similarities between Teresa and Hope’s families are so stark—the Lane family is quite obviously based on the Mirrleeses—might account for Hope’s own anxieties about it being read, appreciated, or being discovered (she would, as a Catholic convert, many years later disown the novel as she had disowned her avant-garde poem Paris for its blasphemy). The ironic implication of The Counterplot’s commercial success is that the reader may actually take pleasure in the novel’s tearing down of the banners of intellectualism and moral superiority, the failure of the heroine who is Mirrlees herself and the type of high culture she aspires to represent.

Between the Acts of Heroism Critical interpretations of Between the Acts, written by Woolf in the final years of the 1930s in the run up to the Second World War and published posthumously in 1941, have drawn useful links between the theories of Jane Harrison and the novel’s simultaneous handling of past and present, the figure of the artist and dramatic performance. Patricia Maika interprets the novel’s central character, the playwright Miss La Trobe, who stages a brief history of England from prehistory to the present day, as Woolf’s

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own ideal image of the artist’s androgynous and “porous mind”, one that allows for the collective consciousness of the assembled spectators’ full participation.3 Martha Carpentier’s reading of Woolf’s novel relies on her sense that modernism’s archetypal characters (and their dimensions of power) are the preserve of myth: she cites Eliot’s review of Joyce’s Ulysses in 1923 in which he praises the author’s “manipulat[ions]” of a “continuous parallel between contemporaneity and antiquity.” (quoted in Carpentier 1998, 2). Carpentier asserts that “myth did not merely supply allegories for modern experience; rather myth, as felt and lived by the modern writer, could provide an antidote to the sterility of modern life.” (1998, 2). Jane Marcus and Bonnie Kime-Scott go beyond this to consider Woolf’s familiarity with and respect for Jane Harrison’s discoveries about the functioning of ritual in ancient Greek society as central to Woolf’s criticism of patriarchy and nationalism within the novel, and Karen Schneider has rightly pointed out that Between the Acts picks up where Three Guineas left off in its critique of an increasingly patriotic and fascistic England in the face of war. However, it is Julie Stone Peters who, I think, gets to the heart of Harrison’s ritual pattern which overlays Woolf’s final novel. Peters writes: Ritual was, then, in its origin, a kind of proto-drama, taking the form of mimetic dances and containing an “element of make-believe.” This element did not, however, involve an “attempt to deceive, but a desire to re-live, to re-present” (Themis 43). Rather than being a mere imitative copying of life, it was a conjunction of acting, making, and doing that was essentially performative: a magic invocation of the object of desire, a creation of the event through its pre-enactment, and a collective discharge of pent-up emotion. (Peters 2008, 16; my emphasis)

Peters refers here to Harrison’s discovery that at the origin of classical tragedy—those performed at the Great Dionysia of ancient Athens in theatres solely dedicated for this religious purpose—is the savage root, the magical ritual that is in all senses practical. Without going too deeply into the precedents for this kind of thinking, some of Harrison’s ideas are an extension of the ethnographic primitivist paradigms found in the writings of Max Muller, E. B. Tylor and even J. G. Frazer, who was Harrison’s contemporary and with whom she sometimes clashed. The mimetic action of ritual—the war dance, the invocation of the Year-Daimon—gradually separated itself from its communal function of “pre-enactment” into the subsequent hero worship of epic and myth and indeed drama. This division, according to Harrison, happened very quickly and without trace, or nearly, as she discovered by analysis of artefacts that clearly point away

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from the Apollonian to the Dionysian, and here we see Nietzsche bubbling up into her thinking about pre-civilization. As Harrison writes in Ancient Art and Ritual (written in 1913 and revised in 1918): In the old ritual dance the individual was nothing, the choral band, the group, everything, and in this it did but reflect primitive tribal life. Now in the heroic saga the individual is everything, the mass of the people, the tribe, or the group, are but a shadowy background which throws up the brilliant, clear-cut personality into a more vivid light. (159)

What Harrison has to add about the project of the artist living in a modern era complicates this. Here is a quotation from her conclusion to Ancient Art and Ritual: Modern life is not simple—cannot be simple—ought not to be; it is not for nothing that we are heirs to the ages. Therefore the art that utters and expresses our emotion towards modern life cannot be simple; and, moreover, it must before all things embody not only that living tangle which is felt by the Futurists as so real, but it must purge and order it, by complexities of tone and rhythm hitherto unattempted. (232).

Harrison does not suggest what that “hitherto unattempted” method is, but she valorises music as the nearest of the modern arts to achieve it. This “living tangle” that must be understood and expressed through the complex pattern of the past is of course an annunciation of a certain modernist literary agenda and exactly what Hope Mirrlees wished to do in all of her early writing. Mirrlees prefaced the French translation of The Counterplot, (Le Choc en Retour) which appeared in 1925, by responding openly to the anxieties of her readers who presumably felt the characters in the novel correspond to those in the play as a means for the author to reveal their true inner desires. Although she makes clear that Teresa, Concha and the Lanes all have their “twin” in the auto-sacramental, she attributes this to Teresa’s subconscious and not the author’s own: for Teresa the play emerges from “an almost physical need to simplify, to reduce to the essential the chaos of everyday life with its little tangle of insignificant events and the shifting mass of superfluous figures.” (II). This sentiment reappears almost verbatim in Jane Harrison’s memoir, which the Woolfs published in 1925: “My gifted friend Hope Mirrlees has written a wonderful novel, Counterplot, in which she shows that only in and through the pattern of art, or it may be of religion, which is a form of art, do we at all seize and understand the tangle of experience which we call Life.” (11). That’s “life” with a capital “L”, in Harrison’s terms the

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lived experience, the conscious and the necessarily modern web carefully unpicked for the reader. Although Woolf had published Paris, written a lukewarm review of Mirrlees’s first novel Madeleine and read The Counterplot (praising it to Mirrlees and then panning it privately in letters to friends) Mirrlees’s influence on Woolf’s writing is rarely considered, largely I am sure because of the former’s relative obscurity. Julia Briggs, a scholar of both Woolf and Mirrlees, was among the first to suggest that the structure of Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway and the syntax of Jacob’s Room may have been inspired by Paris. Indeed, it is not surprising that when Paris was republished in the early 1970s, it appeared in bowdlerized form (blasphemy excised) in the short-lived publication The Virginia Woolf Quarterly. And yet the critical comparisons between both writers, which began with an odd and singular volume by R. Brimley Johnson entitled Some Contemporary Women Novelists in 1920 to the New Statesman in 1924 where Woolf’s novels were seen as superior to Mirrlees’s, seem to have stalled. Therefore I will offer a reading of Between the Acts as a permuting of Harrison’s ideas through the example of Mirrlees’s Counterplot. Woolf’s novel comprises one day in June 1939, like The Counterplot, and the focus of the novel is the staging of a village play (inspired in part by E. M. Forster’s “Abinger Pageant” of 1934) in an ancestral, rural English house named Pointz Hall. It becomes clear immediately through a description of the house, its outbuildings and features as well as its situation within the surrounding area, that Pointz Hall is a mock-ancient stage, complete with a 13th-century barn that stands in for the temple of Dionysus. This manor house is not stately, nor is it the ancestral home of the current owners—the point made here repeatedly is, similar to the Lane family in Plasencia, that they are not quite local, and in some ways outsiders compared to the village’s age-old, esteemed residents. In both cases this raises the question of aspiration beyond the middle-class to gentry, and as with the Lanes, the Olivers have an ambiguous ancestral lineage involving bought portraits of genteel strangers lending the house a false aristocratic glamour. There have been many extensive and effective readings of the novel’s plot as a summing up of repressive social and political conventions—this private house is invaded by neighbours who each watch a highly allegorical representation of English history, including scenes mocking Elizabethan and Restoration drama. The residents of Pointz Hall are Isa and Giles, frustrated poet, housewife and mother and her reluctant businessman husband, as well as the elder widower Giles’ father Bartholomew and his widowed sister, the religious and naïve Mrs

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Swithin. The appearance of the highly sexual and provocative Mrs Manresa, an older woman who confesses to the desire of removing her stays and rolling around in the grass, intrigues Giles and Bartholomew, lending tension to Isa’s already ambivalent role in her marriage. Central to Between the Acts is the problem of art and life and whether the play— written by Miss La Trobe, a rootless lesbian figure of a near androgynous nature—will bring about some kind of personal revelations to the assembled guests. What these revelations are, and indeed what Miss La Trobe (like Teresa) wishes to convey goes precisely back to the question of ritual and its service as a bridge between art and life. Between “the acts” of war the novel is set, that is true, but more importantly it is what happens between the acts of drama, of life, that is the essential motivation for Miss La Trobe. Consider this epigraph to The Counterplot from the Spanish writer Miguel de Unamuno: “Every supposed restoration of the past is a creation of the future, and if the past which it is sought to restore is a dream, a thing but imperfectly known, so much the better.” Ritual, in Mirrlees and Harrison’s understanding, restores to us in art the collective experience of present life and without it art is rendered ineffectual. Set amid the scenes of Miss La Trobe’s play are the reverberations, aural and sensual, of the dying strains of the play itself and the characters subsequently repeat and are locked into the action even as they break for tea during the interval. Miss La Trobe’s fear that the play’s interval has disrupted the building up of emotion in her audience is only solved by recorded music, by song, the choral element of her production: At that the audience stirred. Some rose briskly; others stooped, retrieving walking sticks, hats, bags. And then, as they raised themselves and turned about, the music modulated. The music chanted: Dispersed are we. It moaned: Dispersed are we. It lamented: Dispersed are we, as they streamed, spotting the grass with colour, across the lawns, and down the paths: Dispersed are we. (59)

The communal experience, what Harrison would have seen as the ritual’s “collective discharge of pent up emotion”, is taken up by the audience— which is itself a remnant of the ritual tribe and, subsequently of the ancient Greek chorus—as the action stops. But what use is plot anyway? Isa Oliver observes, as the play is unfolding with some obscurity: “Did the plot matter? She shifted and looked over her right shoulder. The plot was only there to beget emotion. There were only two emotions: love, and hate. There was no need to puzzle out the plot. […] Don’t bother about the plot: the plot’s nothing.” (56) Or, that is, the plot’s purpose is to unify the

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tribe by way of emotion, which is the ritual bridge. Therefore the audience, as Bartholomew Oliver asserts, has their own role to play, and their role is vital, if the play is to be a success. Not quite in the way that the audience intends, Miss La Trobe’s final action of turning several mirrors onto the seated assembly promotes the audience from a kind of ancient chorus, singing between the acts, to actors themselves, examining the artifice of their lived reality in inscrutable plots—and perhaps even counterplots of love, hate, and peace. Having watched amused the predictable historical plot of English history (from Queens to stereotypes of British life), in the final act it is the audience’s own counterplots—their desires, jealousy, anxieties, complicity even in the impending war—that unnerves them. It is, simply put, in this moment that each member of the tribe sees herself individually in their own communal, unheroic saga. The Reverend Streatfield in Woolf’s novel makes this clear: “A few were chosen; the many passed in the background. […] we are members one of another. Each is part of the whole. […] We act different parts; but are the same. […] Dare we, I asked myself, limit life to ourselves? May we not hold that there is a spirit that inspires, pervades”. (118-119) Patricia Cramer tells us that whilst writing Between the Acts, Woolf was reading the anthropologist Ruth Benedict’s Patterns of Culture and that Woolf was greatly influenced by Benedict’s analysis of group psychology in “primitive” cultures (Cramer 1993, 167). Woolf’s interest in the emotional and psychological life of the individual within society’s pressures, laws and traditions, must shape the retelling of national history in the garden of Pointz Hall. It is Benedict’s contention that “society and the individual are not antagonists”, but continuous and complementary expressions of shared desire that brings into focus the role of the individual in an anti-heroic society of communal tradition (Benedict, 251). But, as Cramer points out, war and heroism in the years before the outbreak of the war were very much on Woolf’s mind: “We have now been hard at it hero-making. The laughing, heroic Tommy—how can we be worthy of such men?—every paper, every BBC rises to that dreary false cheery hero-making strain… It’s the myth making stage of war we’re in.” (Cramer 1993, 180). Just as Teresa Lane in Mirrlees’s novel is obsessed with her own heroic plot and personal mythmaking (set against the socially mandated counterplot of sex, marriage, death), Miss La Trobe attempts to antagonise the assembled guests at Pointz Hall into recognising their own individual repressed desires, submerged under history, national identity, community loyalty. Henry Nevinson’s much earlier book of the same title, Between the Acts, is an interesting counterpoint to Woolf’s inherent claim that the psychological drama of life is staged on the race memory of tradition.

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Nevinson’s 1903 autobiography of sorts (republished by Duckworth in 1912 as part of their Readers’ Library series and surely known to Woolf) makes this argument about the heroic autobiographer: autobiography is necessarily a matter of intervals, and I think the great writers of it are often at their best when they forget for a moment the leading part they themselves have played in their own history, and tell us of other characters which have moved upon the distant stage and, but for them, would have been forgotten for ever. (1912, vii)

The purpose of art—drama, the novel, autobiography—is to be a means to recall that society itself is made up of individuals who necessarily share a joint animus towards living. Where this is complicated by hero-making is when the needs of the individual must be subverted to the interests of the tribe or when the nationalist motivations of the tribe are exemplified by a composite, invented heroic figure, as with Woolf’s criticism of the soldier. And certainly Woolf and Mirrlees, writing between the acts of war and favouring matriarchal models, would have been brought to question the function of art in a society that prioritises tradition and community over the sage outsider/artist like Teresa Lane or Miss La Trobe. In order to merge the plot and counterplot of life so that society might direct and control for political purposes the actions of its citizens it would appear that one needs a communal narrative—a narrative of national or traditional heroism that is sacred above all personal histories. But Jane Harrison foresees much earlier than Woolf the perils of a society that considers itself heroic, that is founded on the narrative of the individual and exploits, as empire too exploits, the powerlessness of the masses. A heroic society is almost a contradiction in terms. Heroism is for individuals. If a society is to go on at all it must strike its roots deep in some soil, native or alien. The bands of adventurers must disband and go home, or settle anew on the land they have conquered. They must beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning-hooks. Their gallant, glorious leader must become a sober, home-keeping, law-giving and law-abiding king; his followers must abate their individuality and make it subserve a common social purpose. (Harrison 1918, 162–3)

Woolf’s haunting refrain, “Dispersed are we”, does not mean to advocate what Harrison refers to as a “common social purpose” exercised over individual desire. The traumatic repetition of loss, anticipating war and the ensuing casualties as well as the breakdown of a community, is itself a feature of the ritual drama and its pathos. The novel’s characters disperse back into their own convoluted individual subplots: Isa and Giles, Mrs

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Manresa, Lucy and even Miss La Trobe are mostly unchanged by the (to use Harrison’s phrase again) “collective discharge of pent-up emotion”. But why has art presumably failed to resolve the present, as Teresa Lane hopes to, by raising it up in the framework of the past? In Between the Acts we see Mirrlees’s model of failed heroism—subsumed into the endless mortal plot of human life—performed and made ineffectual as garish nationalist propaganda in a newly heroic era fated to the destruction of war. If reprieve from the repetition of historical models—of the unfailing plot of the tribe—does not rest in the realizations of individuals (the spectators in the garden faced by mirrors) then Woolf argues that it exists in art, the bridge between the plot and counterplot. The role of art, of the novel, too, is to take up the lost tribal function of the ritual. Praising Elizabethan drama for its ability to spring straight and unashamedly into the present, Woolf suggests in her 1927 essay “Poetry, Fiction and the Future” that contemporary poetry has failed in this regard: Poetry has remained aloof in the possession of her priests. She has perhaps paid the penalty for this seclusion by becoming a little stiff. Her presence with all her apparatus—her veils, her garlands, her memories, her associations—affects us the moment she speaks. […] She gives us instead lovely lyric cries of passion; with a majestic sweep of her arm she bids us take refuge in the past; but she does not keep pace with the mind and fling herself subtly, quickly, passionately into its various sufferings and joys. Byron in Don Juan pointed the way; he showed us how flexible an instrument poetry might become, but none has followed his example or put his tool to further use. We remain without a poetic play. (Woolf 1994, 434)

Woolf goes on to posit in one of her many critical estimations of the English novel’s value that modern prose is democratically cannibalistic (Woolf herself calls the novel a “cannibal” form, i.e. composed of previous examples) and that as the novel evolves, so, too, will its generic and genetic hybridity. Woolf goes on to express her longing for a novel that is “dramatic” and that like a play in performance has “the explosive emotional effect of the drama” that “draw[s] blood” from its readers (Woolf 1994, 438). Between the Acts is not this novel, any more than The Counterplot is. Neither brings about the desired change by turning the artist’s mirror on its viewer and dredging up their subconscious desire. Both novels’ love stories are ill-fated, or at least no better than at the novels’ start, and the coming of war in Woolf’s novel, with its accompanying revival of patriotism, is not dulled by a bit of goodhumoured fun at the expense of Elizabethan or Victorian fantasies of Empire. The myth of Don Juan Tenorio, who becomes Byron’s Don Juan and is Harrison’s Eniautos-Daimon bringing in life and fertility, is a

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ghostly presence in Mirrlees’s novel: not only the ghost of her recently dead father, and the furrows in tradition implied by that loss, but also of unacknowledged fecundity and desire. Woolf’s dead spirits in Between the Acts are the presiding gods, Miss La Trobe is their priestess, but the inescapable ambivalence of the novel towards lasting change reinvests itself in a kind of terrible, pessimistic regularity. However, at the end of Woolf’s novel there is some hope: the curtain rises on Isa and her husband Giles, who finally speak to each other for the first time in the novel, though we never hear what they say. The swirling birds that were the shadowy warplanes of the coming Blitz are settled into a long summer evening and we end the novel with the pluripotency of speech, of action, of anxiety. Like Mirrlees’s The Counterplot, Between the Acts begins again with this incongruity of repetition: we, collectively, are confronted with and poised somewhere on that bridge between art and life in the ritual of today, yesterday and tomorrow so that we might work out how to survive the mythic counterplot which works against the death plot.

Works Cited Benedict, Ruth. 1934. Patterns of Culture. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Bowlby, Rachel. 1988. Feminist Destinations. Oxford: Blackwell. Briggs, Julia. 2006. Reading Virginia Woolf. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Carpentier, Martha C. 1998. Ritual, Myth, and the Modernist Text: The Influence of Jane Ellen Harrison on Joyce, Eliot, and Woolf. Amsterdam: Gordon & Breach. Cramer, Patricia. 1993. “Virginia Woolf’s Matriarchal Family of Origins in Between the Acts.” In Twentieth Century Literature, 39 (2): 166– 184. Harrison, Jane Ellen. 1918. Ancient Art and Ritual. London: Butterworth. —. 1925. Reminiscences of a Student’s Life. London: Hogarth Press. —. 2010. Themis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Maika, Patricia. 1987. Virginia Woolf’s Between the Acts and Jane Harrison’s Con/spiracy. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. Mirrlees, Hope. 1925. The Counterplot. New York: Knopf. —. 2011. The Collected Poems of Hope Mirrlees, edited by Sandeep Parmar. Manchester: Carcanet. —. The Hope Mirrlees Papers, Newnham College Archives, University of Cambridge.

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Peters, Julie Stone. 2008. “Jane Harrison and the Savage Dionysus: Archaeological Voyages, Ritual Origins, Anthropology, and the Modern Theatre.” In Modern Drama 51 (1): 1–41. Woolf, Virginia. 1990. Between the Acts. London: Hogarth Press. —. 1994. “Poetry, Fiction and the Future.” In The Essays of Virginia Woolf: 1925–1928, Volume 4, edited by Andrew McNeillie and Stuart Clarke. London: Hogarth Press.

Notes 1

Letter from Hope Mirrlees to Emily Lina Mirrlees, 29 March 1924, Hope Mirrlees Papers, Newnham College Archives, University of Cambridge, 2/1/3. 2 Ibid. 3 See Maika 1987, 11–15.

CHAPTER TEN “THE HOUSE WAS EMPTY”: THE GHOST IN THE SHORT FICTION OF WOOLF AND BOWEN ANNABEL WYNNE In the letter that she wrote to Leonard Woolf on 8 April 1941 shortly after the suicide of Virginia, it is clear that Elizabeth Bowen not only held Virginia Woolf in high esteem as a writer, but also thought of her with great affection: As far as I am concerned, a great deal of the meaning seems to have gone out of the world. She illuminated everything, and one referred the most trivial things to her in one’s thoughts. To have been allowed to know her and love her is a great thing. (Bowen 1999a, 221)

This is shown further in an interview adapted from the BBC television programme, Omnibus, and reproduced in the 1972 book, Recollections of Virginia Woolf, in which Bowen recalled Woolf’s criticism of her novel Friends and Relations: “It’s rather spoilt for me at times, although I did enjoy it, because I feel you’re like someone trying to throw a lasso with a knotted rope.” […] I still say to myself, “Now, be careful, don’t let that rope knot!” […] I don’t think her lasso ever went into knots. (1972, 48)

Woolf’s criticism mattered enough that it stayed with her long after Woolf’s death. Not only were Woolf and Bowen aware of each other, they knew each other and were fond of each other as individuals and as writers. Both quotations show that Bowen had “internalized” Woolf to some extent, referring not only “the most trivial things” to what she thought Woolf would have said, but also the mechanics of her writing. As a friend and as a writer, Woolf haunted Bowen, just as Katherine Mansfield had

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haunted Woolf, but the textual hauntings of these writers was reciprocal. In a letter to Vita Sackville-West on 18 October 1932, in which she was arguably trying to incite feelings of jealousy in Sackville-West, Woolf wrote: “Anyway, my Elizabeth [Elizabeth Bowen] comes to see me, alone, tomorrow.” (Woolf 2003, 315). This possession of “Elizabeth” is prefigured in Mrs Dalloway (1925) seven years previously. When Peter Walsh visits Clarissa Dalloway, their meeting is brought to an end when Mrs Dalloway’s daughter, Elizabeth, enters the room and Clarissa greets her as “my Elizabeth” (53). Additionally, when Peter Walsh recalls the situation, he describes Elizabeth as “handsome” (61), which was a common physical description of Bowen by those who knew her, rather than, for example, “attractive” or “beautiful”.1 This similarity in description of the real and the fictional Elizabeth suggests that Elizabeth in Mrs Dalloway is in some ways Elizabeth Bowen.2 To Woolf, Elizabeth Bowen, like Elizabeth Dalloway, was a representative of the younger generation who had freedoms and opportunities that she and her sister were denied in their Victorian adolescence. Bowen was one of the “new women” who were able to love, work and travel more freely, and who felt less inhibited by the wings of the “angel in the house” (Woolf 2008, 141) and by the male “I” (Woolf 1993, 90). By casting her fictionally as the daughter, Bowen is a ghostly presence in the novel reminding Woolf of the future, just as Woolf’s voice echoed in Bowen’s consciousness reminding her to write without “knots”. In her biography of Bowen, Victoria Glendinning claims that she “is what happened after Bloomsbury; she is the link which connects Virginia Woolf with Iris Murdoch and Muriel Spark.” (1977, 1). Bowen, Woolf, Murdoch and Spark are linked in part by their interest in the supernatural, but it seems that Bowen and Woolf were not only interested in ghosts for their own sake but in their greater representational meaning. In examining what it means to be a haunted character in the short fiction of Woolf and Bowen, it becomes clear that the ghost represents not the restless spirit of a long dead stranger or relative, but the denied spirit of the living person, haunted by a past trauma or the deadness of an unfulfilled life. In order to show the ways in which Bowen and Woolf used ghosts in their work, it is important to understand what we mean by the term “ghost” and what it means to be “haunted”. The Oxford English Dictionary defines a ghost as “the soul or spirit” or as an “immaterial part of man, as distinct from the body or material part” and as “the soul of a deceased person”.3 Therefore, to be haunted is to have the ghost visible and for it to be “appearing in a visible form, or otherwise manifesting its presence”.4 These definitions set the ghost as a being which is separate from the person who is being

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haunted, and on the surface it can seem that this idea of the ghost as a supernatural being is one that Bowen and Woolf employed.5 However, if we allow for the more metaphorical idea of a ghost, which is within the same definition: “the seat of feeling, thought, and moral action” and as “a shadowy outline or semblance”, then the significance of the ghost in Woolf and Bowen’s work becomes more subtle. If a ghost is a shadow, then it is part of the being that it haunts, rather than a separate being in itself. A traditional “ghost” often bears no relation to the person who is haunted and is frightening because of its alien externality. However, a ghost that is a shadow of the person who is haunted is not a character in its own right and exists not in opposition to the character, but as a signpost back to the character. Some of the techniques that Woolf and particularly Bowen employ in their short fiction create a tension which appears to be predicated on the preoccupations and motifs of the traditional ghost story, but instead opens out the internal conflicts of a “haunted” character. In his discussion of archetypes, Jung defines the shadow as being “the negative side of the personality” which the conscious mind of a person who is not self-aware denies in order to be able to tolerate themself in day to day life.6 Jung argues that: “To be conscious of [the shadow] involves recognizing the dark aspects of the personality as present and real” (91). This can be a difficult and frightening prospect and one which many of Bowen and Woolf’s characters actively try to avoid. However, as Jung’s discussion of the shadow shows, “Closer examination of the dark characteristics—that is, the inferiorities constituting the shadow—reveals that they have an emotional nature, a kind of autonomy.” (91). As is evident in Woolf and Bowen’s work, however much one attempts to hide one’s “shadow-truth” from oneself, it can still insist on being revealed. Jung’s construct of the shadow, when applied to the fiction of Bowen and Woolf, allows what may at first appear to be a conventional ghost in the form of a separate physical presence, to be seen as a manifestation of the shadow-side of the protagonist. Revealing the “shadow” side of a character through the conventions of the ghost story is of course not extraordinary or unusual in itself, but the point here is that when Bowen and Woolf employ these techniques, they not only create ghosts of their characters, but of each other; Bowen creating a ghost of Woolf and vice versa. In both Woolf’s short story, “The Lady in the Looking Glass: A Reflection” (1929) and Bowen’s story, “The Demon Lover” (1945), we see female protagonists in houses which appear to be haunted. The prospect of the house containing an entity independent of its occupants or owners is introduced at the beginning of both stories through

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personification. In Woolf’s story, Isabella Tyson’s drawing-room has “its passions and rages and envies and sorrows coming over it and clouding it, like a human being.” (Woolf 2003a, 215). The room contains “cabinets which now lived their nocturnal life before one’s eyes.” (216). Kathleen Drover, in Bowen’s story, returns from the countryside to her Kensington home during World War Two to collect some items. She turns her key in “an unwilling lock”, notices the “bruise in the wallpaper” and the “clawmarks” (Bowen 1999a, 661) left on the floor by the piano as it was taken away to storage. Kathleen wants “to see how the house was” (661), as if it were a person. In both cases, presenting the house in this way begins to create a supernatural atmosphere which feels strange, uncanny and haunted and it seems as though the houses are not entirely within the control of the women who own them. This contributes to a feeling of uncertainty for the reader, and in both stories we are quickly aware of some “other” presence watching the protagonists. In “The Lady in the Looking Glass” this raises questions about the identity of the narrator; the narrator appears to be the protagonist, so it comes as something of a surprise when the narrator starts to “see” Isabella who is the owner and sole occupant of the house. The narrator takes on a slightly sinister “ghostly” presence as she watches Isabella unselfconsciously pick flowers and go in and out of the house and garden, apparently unaware of this other “person” watching her from her drawing-room sofa. In “The Demon Lover”, Kathleen Drover enters her hall and is met by a letter which has only just been placed on the hall table, even though no-one else has had access to the house that day. On the surface, the letter appears to have been written by Kathleen Drover’s ex-fiancé, who had been pronounced “missing, presumed killed” (664) twenty-five years before, in World War One. Because of the impossibility of the letter and the unpleasant sense of Mrs Drover being watched, the story immediately begins to feel supernatural. Even though Mrs Drover’s “ghost” is not present in the house in the same way as Isabella Tyson’s, both entities have penetrated the houses of these women and are presented to the reader as watching the protagonists in an unearthly way. In her 2011 essay Gina Wisker reads haunting in Woolf’s fiction as the traces of the lives that have previously lived in the same space: [If] the notion of haunting is extended to the return of the repressed, the influential, the lovingly lost, the imprinting on important places of important events and people, then the central question […] “what lasts?”, as well as haunted lives and houses are immediately seen as central to her work. (4)

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In Woolf’s “A Haunted House” (1921) the reader, partly having been guided by the story’s title, is led to believe they are witnessing a space haunted by ghosts. At first glance, it appears to be the tale of “a ghostly couple” (116) walking from room to room, searching for their “treasure”. It seems that both they and the living occupants of the house are aware of sharing the space. Bowen was also interested in the traces left behind by previous lives and saw little distinction between the living and the dead, regarding them as cohabitants. Rather than the dead being departed, Bowen frames them as the absent living. In her World War Two novel, The Heat of the Day, she remarks that: “The wall between the living and the living became less solid as the wall between the living and the dead thinned” (Bowen 1998, 92). London is not haunted by the dead, but by the shared existence of souls in the same space. In Woolf’s story, the “ghosts” are merely visiting a place invested with happy memories; a place invested with the lives they lived. In this sense they are “re-living” the past, and this continuation of experience that Woolf presents in “A Haunted House” means that there is no concrete them and us, or here and now. Even though the ghosts are people “from hundreds of years ago” (116) and that “Death was the glass; death was between us” (116) it does not feel that way; it seems that what separates these entities is time rather than life and death. Occupants become merged, until the joy of the ghost couple is also the life being currently lived in the same space. The buried treasure of the lives of the ghosts is also the life being accumulated by its current occupants, and their treasure is the sleeping children. Woolf and Bowen haunt each other because whilst a “ghost” being used to represent a haunting past or the repressed side of a character is not especially unusual, the idea of this haunting being the accumulation of both the past and the present, of continued existence imprinting on new experience and merging together in a shared space, is arguably peculiar to them. In this sense, all of the occupants of Woolf’s haunted house are ghosts, building up life in a space they frequently retrace, enabling them to be ghosts in their own lives, as well as in the lives of those who may occupy the space in the future. In a review written four years after Woolf’s death, about the collection of Woolf’s stories entitled A Haunted House, Marguerite Young writes: Not only is Mrs. Woolf’s house haunted, but it is itself an apparition, a mystery. All the men and women in the world are ghosts, and the world is also ghostly, a partial statement. (150)

This idea of the “ghost” as being the accumulated experience of the self in one location, merging with the accumulated experience of previous occupants in the same location, extends the “shadow” idea of haunting

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because it proposes not only that spaces hoard traces of previous human experience, but that this is an ongoing process being continued by the current occupants. This means that the current “self” living in that space will not only imprint their experience onto occupants of the future, but will haunt themselves by leaving behind traces of the person they were yesterday, to be found by the new person they find themselves to be tomorrow. Woolf merges occupants from different time periods, which not only suggests the merging of different souls, but of the continued and constantly changing experience of the individual. It is this definition of the “ghost” that Woolf and Bowen were most interested in; it was the way in which they haunted each other, and which features in the haunted houses of their stories. This interest in the link between houses and the people who live in them was expressed by Bowen on 31 July 1935 in a letter to Woolf: It is impossible to believe that the people discovered in rooms sitting stiffly about as dolls in a dolls-house attitudes are not to be sold with the house, and to remember that it is not necessary to ask oneself whether one likes them. I had no idea so many houses could be so macabre and horrifying. (quoted in Bowen 1999a, 211)

To some extent in Bowen and Woolf’s work, and certainly in these stories, houses are the people who live in them, the house represents them, so if a character is living in an apparently haunted house, or if a house is presented as having a side to it that the character cannot control or perhaps denies is there at all, then it follows that the same can be said of its occupant. In her 1921 essay “Henry James’s Ghost Stories” Woolf argues that James’s most successful “ghost” stories, are the ones that do not employ ghosts in the conventional way: Henry James’s ghosts have nothing in common with the violent old ghosts—the blood-stained sea captains, the white horses, the headless ladies of dark lanes and windy commons. They have their origin within us. They are present whenever the significant overflows our powers of expressing it; whenever the ordinary appears ringed by the strange. (324)

Woolf states that: “we must be made to feel that the apparition fits the crisis of passion or of conscience” (324), clearly linking the ghost to the psychology of the person who is being haunted and rejecting crude Gothicism. Similarly, in the preface that she wrote for Sheridan La Fanu’s Uncle Silas in 1947, Bowen states that, “Henry James inspired, and remains at the head of, a whole school of moral horror stories […] Our

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ancestors may have had an agreeable dreadful reflux from the idea of the Devil or a skull-headed revenant, popping in and out through a closed door: we need, to make us shiver, the effluence from a damned soul” (1999a, 112), again tying the idea of a ghost to the psychology of the person being haunted. Similarly, in the preface that she wrote for The Second Ghost Book, Bowen discusses the extent to which ghosts have “evolved” in the twentieth century. Having previously been limited to castles, crossroads and cloisters, now they “do well in flats” while “telephones, motors, planes and radio wave-lengths offer them selfexpression” showing that the form a ghost takes is inextricably linked to the environment and especially the person who it haunts, and so therefore must have its origin in the haunted person themselves. “Often the ghosts are nemesis,” Bowen continues, “dragging buried guilt up, harping on broken faith, or driving mortal offence home.” (1962, 103). So, as far as Woolf and Bowen were concerned, rather than being an entity separate from the haunted person, the ghost is actually representative of a part of that person, and the reader’s fear when reading these stories is predicated not on the threatening Radcliffian figure of “the headless ladies of dark lanes and windy commons” but of something “unnamed, of something, perhaps, in ourselves.” (325). If then, as Wisker points out, Woolf insists that “the most interesting and important stories using the supernatural have their origins in the behaviour of living people. Ghost stories are a mirror held up to versions of our lives,” (9) we can see that Woolf’s Isabella Tyson and Bowen’s Kathleen Drover are both haunted not by the supernatural, but by their own psychic shadows. Both Kathleen Drover and Isabella Tyson are characters about whom little is known in terms of intimate detail. “One could not say what the truth about Isabella was” (216) remarks the ghostly narrator as she watches Isabella. The difference between the factual truths and emotional truths of a person’s life are foregrounded soon afterwards: “As for facts, it was a fact that she was a spinster; that she was rich; that she had bought this house and collected with her own hands—often in the most obscure corners of the world and at great risk from poisonous stings and Oriental diseases—the rugs, the chairs, the cabinets” (216). While this gives us facts about Isabella’s life, it feels more like an inventory than an intimate insight. Bowen describes the comings and goings of Kathleen Drover, who is collecting personal items from her home, and she gives a “sketch” of the inside of the house, but we are not told exactly which personal items or what they mean to her, thus denying us the detail that would bring us closer to Mrs Drover. This difficulty in getting to the core of the person, who perhaps is a stranger to it themself, is addressed by Woolf in her

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memoir “A Sketch of the Past”: “People write what they call ‘lives’ of other people; that is, they collect a number of events, and leave the person to whom it happened unknown.” (2002, 83). The portrait Woolf paints of Isabella Tyson deliberately lacks the intimacy that a private vignette of a solitary afternoon could convey. We “see” more of Isabella Tyson than Kathleen Drover because in Woolf’s story all we see is Isabella; we are given descriptions of her comings and goings in her home that afternoon and are told how her personal space is furnished and contents of her letters are suggested to us. However, Woolf still deliberately “sketches”—we are never told the actual content of the letters. In both cases this absence of intimacy with the character, and the sketchiness of their personalities, suggests that the detail that makes up personal knowledge is also something which eludes the women themselves, rendering these women ghosts in their own lives. That we do not get to the core of these women is, in part, due to the empty house; for both women, their house is both theirs and slightly removed from them. If the “haunting” of a house is inextricably linked to the person who lives in it, so much so that the house can be said to represent the occupant and become a symbol of their psyche, then both of these women are haunted by a stark emptiness. Isabella Tyson’s “house was empty” (215), the hall is described as being still and unchanging and the drawing room contains “things that never happen, so it seems, if someone is looking” (215), thus the presence of both Isabella and the narrator seem uncanny. Kathleen Drover is also in her own home, but she does not currently live there and it has been “shut up” (661). It contains little furniture, is poorly ventilated so that “dead air came out to meet her as she went in.” (661), while the bedroom that she goes into to retrieve her items is an “empty room” (664) in the “hollowness of the house” (664) and the table on which she first sees the letter is an “empty table” (664). If we regard the houses as representing the women who live in them, then what haunts them is their own emptiness. Isabella is described by the objects that she owns; her house is full to the brim with things, and yet it is empty and she remains unknown. The narrator alludes to personal relationships recorded in Isabella’s letters, but the letters are from the past and the impression we get of Isabella at the time of the story is of someone who is alone. It is the surface of life with which she has busied herself and even as we watch her she is collecting flowers—cutting them away from their roots—for the purposes of decoration. Kathleen Drover’s house has had most of the furniture removed. Even though it is described as a place in which “the years piled up”(664), it lacks the warmth of a loving family home filled with happy memories and Mrs Drover finds herself both

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literally and emotionally in a hollow place, which “cancelled years on years of voices, habits and steps” (664). She has submitted to social expectations and thus, in obtaining her security and sense of identity through her marriage, she has suppressed her real self. When she cannot draw for support on her false identity, she feels empty and her house has “cracks in the structure” (661). Just as the empty houses of Isabella and Kathleen are symbols of the women themselves, so too are their reflections. In “The Lady in the Looking-Glass: A Reflection”, the narrator views Isabella through her reflection in the hall mirror; she is being viewed not “in the flesh” but at a point removed from her reality and as a reversed “mirror image” from which she periodically “vanishe[s]” (216). That the narrator sees Isabella as an abstraction of reality suggests that things may not be what they seem. The mirror therefore starts to become less an object of whimsical vanity and more an object invested with weighty verisimilitude; this apparently innocent and common household item becomes something for Isabella to be wary of, perhaps something for her to avoid, its danger lying in the power to tell the cold hard truth about appearance. In Isabella’s case, this is a dangerous truth, because the truth about her appearance is that there is nothing else to behold. The narrator observes that “in the looking-glass things had ceased to breathe and lay still in the trance of immortality” (216) which not only has the effect of making the narrator seem like an observant ghost just before the unexpected entrance of Isabella, but also gives a general sense of lifelessness, of a lack of progress and process, and of a “static” atmosphere, which is reflected in Isabella. This idea of being watched by one’s own reflection also appears in Bowen’s essay, “Mirrors are Magic”: “Never is one quite alone in a mirrored room” (2008, 204), suggesting, in a similar way to Woolf, that mirrors watch the person reflected and that there are traces of oneself left behind from which one is unable to permanently hide. In her “A Sketch of the Past” (1940) Woolf discusses this unnerving power of reflection. Recalling the shame and fear that she felt when regarding herself “in the glass in the hall” (82), Woolf links this to the unbearable nature of personal trauma. To look at oneself in the mirror requires honesty, and if the honesty includes—in keeping with Jung—an unbearable shadow, then the mirror has the ability to fragment one’s self-image. She goes on to describe a dream: I dreamt that I was looking in a glass when a horrible face—the face of an animal—suddenly showed over my shoulder. I cannot be sure if this was a dream, or if it happened. Was I looking in the glass one day when something in the background moved, and seemed to me alive? (83)

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When Bowen describes looking in a mirror, she writes that “your face or mine takes on an air of transience, ghostliness almost—what is this face but one of the countless many which glimmered, here, for a moment, then went their ways?” (202). Like the “horrible face” that Woolf describes, Bowen talks about being met by a “shadowy gaze” (202). When we look our reflection full in the face, we can also see behind us, to the things that follow us around. Isabella Tyson, viewed through a mirror by the narrator, avoids the looking-glass, and the opening line of the story, which is repeated at the end, becomes menacing: “People should not leave lookingglasses hanging in their rooms” (215). At the end of the story Isabella looks at her own reflection to find that there is “nothing. Isabella was perfectly empty.” (219). In “The Demon Lover”, the house is musty and dark and the light is “refracted” (662), making it difficult to see anything with absolute clarity. In common with the few other pieces of furniture, the mirrors are covered in a film of dust, making it difficult for them to reflect anything, but when Mrs Drover reads the impossible letter, she feels “so much the change in her own face that she went to the mirror, polished a clear patch in it and looked at once urgently and stealthily in.” (662). The shock of the letter impels her to look at herself in order to affirm both her existence and the passage of time, and thus she starts to unlock the process of seeing the truth in herself. When she looks in the mirror she is “confronted” (662) by a “middle-aged woman”, a word that suggests she is at odds with the image in the glass and that regarding her own reflection is an uncomfortable experience. Consumed by her fear of the “ghost”, Mrs Drover thinks: “You have no time to run from a face you do not expect” (665), and yet does not realize that this equally applies to the startled reaction she has to her own reflection. At the end of the story, when she is trapped in the taxi with her kidnapper as driver, she is flung forward in the vehicle “till her face was almost into the glass” (666), again being compelled to regard herself at the moment of truth. The revelation that both Isabella Tyson and Kathleen Drover experience when they see the truth of themselves is the pointlessness of their lives, the emptiness of wasted time and the associated self-deception. It is a revelation which involves looking straight into the eyes of the ghost that haunts them both, which is unbearable; and for both women, looking directly at their own reflection results in the destruction of their self-image. When they both finally see themselves for who they really are, they see the self-betrayal involved in the creation of a false self. The false self may be more acceptable to conventional society and is unlikely to be challenged, but for Isabella and Kathleen it lacks personal integrity and depletes the true self

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that is hidden by it. In both of these women, the true self refuses to hide any longer and demands to be seen, thus creating a frightening and daunting sense of fragmentation, which is haunting for Isabella and Kathleen. For both Isabella and Kathleen, the truth about their haunting is precipitated by the opening of a letter. In “The Lady in the Looking-Glass” the narrator, whilst viewing Isabella’s reflection, describes the letters from Isabella’s past. These letters are kept in cabinets and are “tied with bows of ribbon, sprinkled with sticks of lavender or rose leaves” (216). Even though these may be “long letters of intimacy and affection”, they also contain “the traces of many agitations […] of upbraidings for not having met […] terrible final words of parting” and are “letters of jealousy and reproach” (216). It is immediately after this that the room “became more shadowy and symbolic; the corners seemed darker, the legs of chairs and tables more spindly and hieroglyphic” (217). Describing Isabella’s furniture as “hieroglyphic” suggests that meaning is becoming harder to decode because not only are hieroglyphics another language, but the characters used in that language are different from the characters used in English. This creates a gap between representation and meaning which shows it is becoming more difficult for the reader to understand Isabella in any intimate sense, or to access anything other than the surface image. Woolf chooses the word “hieroglyphic” because it is a writing system which uses pictographic representations, which reflects the idea that Isabella has used the aesthetic to cover up, even replace, her real self. The association of hieroglyphs with ancient Egypt also adds a sense of history to the atmosphere, emphasising the idea of time passing and the merging of past and present selves. After this description of the letters, the room immediately takes on a dark, shadowy and foreign feel, denying the reader a glimpse into the depths of Isabella and rejecting the reader’s gaze. In forming this rejection, Woolf arguably makes the reader an extension of the mirror that Isabella avoids. However, this rejection does not seem wholly effective, as the darkness it brings triggers the delivery of new post: Suddenly these reflections were ended violently and yet without a sound. A large black form loomed into the looking-glass; blotted out everything, strewed the table with a packet of marble tablets veined with pink and grey, and was gone. But the picture was entirely altered. (217)

Similarly, in “The Demon Lover,” at the moment that Mrs Drover sees the letter on the hall table, “the trees and rank lawns seemed already to smoke with dark”, obscuring what Mrs Drover needs to see but wishes to avoid.

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For both characters there is an intimate connection between the reflections and the arrival of the post. Surface reflection of Isabella is ended by the delivery of new letters, which lead to her having to regard her true reflection. Mrs Drover’s false self is challenged by the arrival of the letter; she feels compelled to see herself reflected immediately after opening it and when she tries to deny the truth of herself her face is forced into reflection at very close quarters. The physical way in which Isabella’s letters are described also implies a sombre significance and a sobering truth; the letters are “marble tablets” that lie “on the marble-topped table”, suggesting not only a coldness in the property of the paper but also in its effect on the reader. Her letters are “tablets graven with eternal truth” that are “cut deep and scored thick with meaning” (217) which, together with the sculptural and solid properties of marble, adds to the feeling of permanence and incontrovertibility in the words they contain and thus the truth can no longer be denied. These letters are not flimsy or simple to dispose of, but show a solid and heavy truth that is not easily dismissed. At the end of “The Lady in the Looking-Glass”, the narrator once again views Isabella in the looking-glass, but she is “so far off at first that one could not see her clearly.” (219). However, as she comes more into the room, and closer to the newly arrived letters, her image becomes more clearly focused and her presence “alter[s] the other objects” (219), implying that Isabella herself is an object—just another aspect of the furnishings. This again supports the portrayal of her as being concerned only with the surface of things and the idea that she is presenting a decorative image of herself even when she is alone in her own home. Isabella does not seem to welcome the post, for when she sees the letters on the table she “stopped dead. She stood by the table. She stood perfectly still.” (219). Bowen’s description of Mrs Drover’s reaction is hauntingly similar: “She stopped dead and stared at the hall table” (662). The letters are communications from Isabella’s shadow, just as Mrs Drover’s impossible letter is a message from what she has denied. The Oxford English Dictionary definition of “ghost” includes: “An impression of a signature made by folding the paper over while the ink is still wet.”7 If applied to the letters of Isabella and Kathleen, the letters become bound up in the definition of the word “ghost”; they are ghostly communications from the parts of themselves that Isabella and Kathleen have left behind while they have been spending their adult lives constructing and living their false selves. Thus the “signature” that leaves an impression is the shadowy imprinting of past experience onto the “paper” and Isabella and Kathleen do this “while the ink is still wet”, thus demonstrating that it is a

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process which is continually happening and that it is this ghost of their “signature”—an aspect of themselves—that is haunting them. Further, as I have suggested, we can apply this not only to these two characters, but to Woolf and Bowen themselves, who have left their own “impression of a signature” on each other’s work, creating ghosts of themselves in the process. There are many points of similarity in the portrayals of Isabella and Kathleen which demonstrate the reciprocal haunting of these two writers; for example, their sense of past and present experience merging in the same location, not only in terms of that merging being the previous experience of the self, but also in terms of a merging of separate souls who have occupied the same space. Also, the language and expression used to describe pivotal parts of the narrative is sometimes startlingly similar. Not only is the description of the women at coming across their post striking in its similarity, but so is the deliberately specious impression of supernatural haunting presented by both writers. “No human eye” (661) watched Mrs Drover as she enters the hall where the letter awaits; while Isabella’s letters are “tablets” that cannot be related “to any human purpose” (217), thus deliberately giving the impression, in very similar language, of a supernatural force which is only later revealed to be the shadows of the women themselves. Finally, the root of their hauntings is shown by the nature of their letters. Isabella’s letters “were all bills” (219) and she has no wish to open them. If the letters are communications from Isabella’s shadow, an unwillingness to address these bills reflects her prolonged unwillingness to create abundance with her emotional and intellectual currency. If she is unable to address, and ultimately pay, these bills, then the result will be more and more letters and an escalation of the associated debt. Isabella has spent a long time turning away from the “bills” that she has run up by not being herself, and she is now met with a debt (the truth of her wasted life) which she has to pay in full. Kathleen Drover, having run up similar emotional bills, is met with a debt that she can no longer ignore and will have to pay in full, “at the hour arranged” (662). Woolf and Bowen were undoubtedly haunted by each other’s personalities and writing and this reciprocal haunting was assisted by a genuine liking and respect for each other. They were also both fascinated by the process of writing and what it could potentially achieve in terms of representing true and individual human interior experience. They had a shared interest in narrative concepts such as the self; how literature can properly represent and communicate the experience of the individual; and the elements of human interaction that endure. One of the ways they both explored these ideas was by inverting the traditional idea of the ghost and

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making haunting a personal and internal, rather than a supernatural, experience. In doing this they clearly show not only a similarity in concepts and ideas such as using ghosts to represent the shadow side of a protagonist, or making the nature of an individual’s internal life the pivot on which the narrative turns, but also how they haunt each other, leaving traces of themselves and their continued existence in each other’s work.

Works Cited Bowen, Elizabeth. 1962. “Preface to The Second Ghost Book”. In Afterthoughts. Pieces about Writing. 101–104. London: Longmans, Green and Co. Ltd. —. 1972. Transcription from an interview for BBC Omnibus. 18 January 1970. In Recollections of Virginia Woolf, edited by Joan Russell Noble. 47–52. London: Peter Owen Limited. —. 1998. The Heat of the Day. London: Vintage. —. 1999a. “The Demon Lover”. In Collected Stories. 661–666. London: Vintage. —. 1999b. The Mulberry Tree: Writings of Elizabeth Bowen, edited by Hermione Lee. London: Vintage. —. 2008. “Mirrors are Magic”. In People, Places, Things. Essays by Elizabeth Bowen, edited by Allan Hepburn. 201–205. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Glendinning, Victoria. 1977. Elizabeth Bowen: Portrait of a Writer. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson Ltd. —. 2009. Love’s Civil War. Elizabeth Bowen and Charles Ritchie: Letters and diaries from the love affair of a lifetime. London: Simon & Schuster UK Ltd. Jung, Carl. 1998. “The Shadow.” In The Essential Jung, edited by Anthony Storr. 91–93. London: Fontana Press. Laing, Kathryn. 2001. “Virginia Woolf in Ireland: A Short Voyage Out.” The South Carolina Review. 34 (1): 180–187. Wisker, Gina. 2011. “Places, People and Time Passing: Virginia Woolf’s Haunted Houses.” Hecate. 37 (2): 1–26. Woolf, Virginia. 1988. “Henry James’s Ghost Stories.” In The Essays of Virginia Woolf: 1919-1924, Volume 3, edited by Andrew McNeillie. 319–326. London: The Hogarth Press. —. 1992. Mrs Dalloway. London: Penguin. —. 1993. Woolf, Virginia, “A Room of One’s Own” In A Room of One’s Own and Three Guineas. 3–103. London: Penguin, 1993.

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—. 2002. “A Sketch of the Past.” In Moments of Being: Autobiographical Writings, edited by Jeanne Schulkind. 78–160. London: Pimlico. —. 2003a. “The Lady in the Looking-Glass: A Reflection.” In The Complete Shorter Fiction, edited by Susan Dick. 215–219. London: Vintage. —. 2003b. “A Haunted House.” In The Complete Shorter Fiction, edited by Susan Dick. 116–117. London: Vintage. —. 2003. Congenial Spirits: Selected Letters of Virginia Woolf, edited by Joanne Trautmann. London: Pimlico. —. 2008. “Professions for Women.” In Selected Essays, edited by David Bradshaw. 140-145. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Young, Marguerite. 1945. “Fictions Mystical and Epical. ‘A Haunted House’ by Virginia Woolf; ‘The Leaning Tower’ by Katherine Anne Porter.” The Kenyon Review. 7 (1): 149–154.

Notes 1

In a diary entry dated 29 September 1941, Charles Ritchie described Bowen as “handsome”. See Glendinning 2009, 24. 2 Even though the friendship between Bowen and Woolf was not forged until the 1930s, Bowen’s first collection of short stories, Encounters, received a favourable critical reception when it was published in 1923, and it is therefore likely that Woolf would have been aware of the collection. Some reviewers compared Bowen’s stories to those of Katherine Mansfield, and in the Preface that she wrote for the re-publication of Encounters in 1949, Bowen comments on this: “I first read Bliss after I had completed my own first set of stories, to be Encounters— then, exaltation and envy were shot through, instantly, by foreboding. ‘If I ever am published, they’ll say I copied her.’ I was right.” (Bowen 1999b, 120). This critical comparison between Bowen and Mansfield would have particularly interested Woolf. Further, as Kathryn Laing points out in her 2001 essay in The South Carolina Review, “[Bowen] had more immediate access to many of the same social and literary contacts as Woolf, who became both an inspiration and mentor for the younger Bowen. Readily admitting this, Bowen declared: “We, in our twenties during the ‘20s were not only the author’s most zealous readers, but, in the matter of reputation, most jealous guardians. Her aesthetic became a faith; we were believers”” (See Laing 2001, 183). Clearly Bowen and Woolf were aware of and interested in one another. 3 “ghost, n.”. OED Online. September 2013. Oxford University Press. http:// www.oed.com/view/Entry/78064?rskey=vHhOgy&result=1. 4 Ibid. 5 See Woolf’s stories “The Mark on the Wall” (1917) and “Kew Gardens” (1919). See Bowen’s stories “The Cat Jumps” (1934), “The Happy Autumn Fields” (1941), “The Cheery Soul” (1942) and “Pink May” (1945), amongst others. 6 See Jung 1998, 91–93.

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“ghost, n.”. OED Online. September 2013. Oxford University Press. http:// www.oed.com/view/Entry/78064?rskey=vHhOgy&result=1.

CHAPTER ELEVEN “HOW CAN I KNOW WHAT I THINK TILL I SEE WHAT I SAY?”: CHRISTOPHER ISHERWOOD, E. M. FORSTER AND THE CREATION OF A LITERARY IDENTITY REBECCA GORDON STEWART Forster was the only living writer whom [Christopher Isherwood] would have described as his master. […] In Forster he found the key to the whole art of writing […] A Forster novel taught Christopher the mental attitude with which he must pick up the pen. (Isherwood [1976] 2001, 105)

Christopher Isherwood’s career spanned almost seven decades, and in that time he wrote many novels, screenplays, short stories, novellas and “autobiographical” works. Of all these the best known are the stories that were eventually collected as The Berlin Novels. The character pieces contained within Goodbye to Berlin (1939) are all narrated by “Christopher Isherwood”, the namesake narrator that has led to many of Isherwood’s works being viewed as autobiographical. Blurring the distinction between autobiography and fiction, Isherwood in fact created and re-created his fictional and indeed at times fantastical imagined world, forming a literary mythology in which the distinctions between “fact” and “fiction” are blurred and deliberately confused. Sometimes the narrator, “I”, is identified as Christopher Isherwood, sometimes he is given a transparent pseudonym; sometimes the narrator is a fictional “I”, and at other times Christopher Isherwood appears as a character to be discussed in the third-person. But whichever voice is speaking, there is a feeling of autobiography that permeates his writing, in particular those narrated by the namesake character that appears in works such as Lions and Shadows (1938), Goodbye to Berlin (1939) and Christopher and His Kind (1976). In an analysis of Isherwood’s literary process of self-construction, it becomes apparent that his writing style and the ways in which he presents

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himself in his art are clearly influenced by the works and literary theories of E. M. Forster, as well as the modernist traditions created by writers such as T. S. Eliot and the psychoanalytical theories of Sigmund Freud. Indeed, Isherwood’s process of constructing both his “autobiographical fictions”, those narrated by “I”, and “fictional autobiographies”, those narrated in the third-person, is evidently based on his understanding of psychoanalysis,1 which was significant to the art, fiction and essays of the Bloomsbury Group in the early part of the twentieth century. Looking at the manner in which Isherwood adopted what he classes as Forster’s “tea-tabling” style, as well as the way in which he personalised Freudian psychoanalysis in order to present a literary process of selfreflection, self-understanding and self-construction, this essay focuses on an evaluation of the ways in which Isherwood’s writing matures and changes. As a young writer, Isherwood was affected by his admiration for Forster’s writing, for Forster’s ability to construct a sense of “truth” in his fiction. Although Isherwood’s use of “realistic” narratives and specifically the manner in which he presents a process of self-analysis that is both formed by and performed as a process of his writing continues throughout his literary career, it is his early novels and juvenilia that I am focusing on here. I am specifically engaging with the way in which Isherwood’s writing style matures as he modifies this to incorporate a pseudo-scientific realism. This realism is latterly adopted by Isherwood to construct an attempted “objectivity” as he constructs his literary identity, which can be seen for example in the narrator’s claim in Goodbye to Berlin of “I am a camera” (Isherwood [1939] 1992, 243), a statement often focused on by Isherwood’s critics, who accuse this individual of being unable to interact with his fellow characters, merely recording what he witnesses.2 Isherwood responded to this and denied that his namesake should be read with reference to this statement, claiming it is only a moment in this Christopher’s life. However, the objectivity implied by this camera-like pose is vital to the way in which Isherwood attempts to present himself, and he clearly adopts the role of a “documentary writer” in many of his later works. This objectivity and emphasis on realism as central to his writing style is largely absent from Isherwood’s juvenile literary experiments. Whilst at Repton College and Cambridge University, Isherwood and his lifelong friend and co-conspirator Edward Upward had created fantastical tales that culminated in the creation of the village of Mortmere. A large number of these stories have been lost, in particular those penned by Upward, who destroyed many of his manuscripts as he became more and more disillusioned as a writer. However, several fragments have been collected

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in The Mortmere Stories (1996) and Upward published The Railway Accident and Other Stories in 1969: these stories provide us with examples of the fantasies created by Isherwood and Upward. These early literary “games” played by Isherwood and Upward can be related to the modernist writing that was prevalent in the early parts of the twentieth century. This is true also of Isherwood’s first published novel All the Conspirators (1928); within this novel there is clear evidence of an attempt at modernist literary experiments, which Isherwood virtually abandons in his writing of The Memorial (1932). It is this second novel that reveals most clearly the early stylistic influence of Forster’s writing on Isherwood, although there are also marked examples of this in All the Conspirators. Notably, Forster read and admired The Memorial in 1932 and hence invited Isherwood to meet with him, sparking a lifelong friendship and giving Isherwood the opportunity to meet his literary hero. As we return however to examine Isherwood’s first published novel and the early literary experiments he produced with Upward, Isherwood’s literary focus is more evidently on the fractured narratives found in the works of writers such as T. S. Eliot and James Joyce. Modernism is a movement spanning several decades, although “high modernism” was prevalent post-World War One and dominant in The Waste Land and Ulysses in 1922 (Abrams 1999, 167). It is a central tenet of modernism that the complexities of modern life should be reflected in a fractured art. In his juvenilia and first novel it is possible to observe Isherwood practising such modernist styles as disjointed timelines, fragmented narratives, discontinuous plots and a focus on non-realistic drama. In particular, the narratives of Mortmere follow in the traditions of modernist literature, as well as including many examples of Gothic images and melodramatic settings, and it is in the modernist tradition of reading that Mortmere must be appreciated. An example of the ways in which Isherwood and Upward constructed their narratives in keeping with modernist writing is evident in the incident in which the story “The Railway Accident” derives its name. This accident is described: Coaches mounted like viciously copulating bulls, telescoped like ventilator hatches. Nostril gaps in a tunnel clogged with wreckage instantly flamed. A faint jet of blood sprayed from a window. Frog-sprawling bodies fumed in blazing reeds. The architecture of the tunnel crested with daffodils fell compact as hinged scenery. Tall rag-feathered birds with corrugated red wattles limped from holes among the rocks. (Upward 1972, 61–62)

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The imagery created is one that focuses on the “unreal” elements of the incident to an almost comical extreme, therefore desensitising the reader to the disaster. This passage acts like an anaesthetic to the real horror of the apparent accident, which we latterly understand is representative of the catastrophic inner-world of Edward Hearn’s mind. There is no trace of sanctimony here and the dissociative prose seems to seduce us into looking on this disaster removed, as indeed the principal characters are. This detachment can be witnessed in Shreeve’s brief analysis of the accident with flippant disregard for the death and damage caused to others: “‘Another thirty seconds in that carriage and we should have been … well. It makes you think’” (62). The above short excerpts provide evidence of the angular phrases and love for the sinister and the strange that both Isherwood and Upward adopted in this early fiction created whilst they were at Cambridge in the 1920s. As Katherine Bucknell surmises in her introduction to The Mortmere Stories, these narratives mark Isherwood and Upward’s aspiration “to launch themselves as serious literary artists” (Isherwood and Upward 1994, 9). Indeed, although Isherwood evidently turned his back on the style of writing used in his Mortmere fantasies, he maintained that he was always “grateful” for the way in which these “games” removed his puritanical inhibitions. This “game” was one that he continued to utilise in his works and, in his eyes, allowed him to mature as a writer. In a letter to Edward Upward in 1949, Isherwood defined the play-instinct that he had acquired and continued to adopt in his writing as “the glee, the insane Mortmere-anarchic element in all experience, however ghastly” (21), and it is this “glee” in the “ghastly” that allowed Isherwood to create eccentric characters from the underbelly of society, such as Mr. Norris and Sally Bowles. Whilst at Cambridge, Isherwood and Upward adopted symbolism and constructed fractured narratives not only to amuse each other and strengthen their friendship, but also to confirm their conspiratorial solidarity as Literary “Anti-Others”, as Highbrow minorities fighting against the society of Cambridge, against what they classed as the “Poshocracy” (Isherwood [1938] 1977, 74). Taking on the literary roles of Edward Hynd and Christopher Starn, the self-imaged “pornographers” that narrated many of their stories, Upward and Isherwood created numerous narratives, many of which remained unfinished. In his own “Introductory Dialogue” contained in Mortmere Stories, Isherwood, writing in 1925 or 1926, speaks of the impenetrable nature of their writing:

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“Afterwards in the blocked adit they dug out the deerhorn pick and intact bones of releasing finger claws-curved like the hunting-spider. Life writhed through fronds, and thunder and the eclipse were the results of our wishes or errors.” The next sentence I had to reject as too obscure: “They have cast from the mould in the buried pumice the impotence of the trapped Pompeian.” (33)

Although the full version of this story, entitled “Tale of a Scholar”, has been destroyed, this introduction, written by Isherwood only a year or two after the story itself was penned, demonstrates the obscure language and structure adopted in these narratives. This brief introduction also highlights the ways in which Isherwood, even as he is creating the narratives, is already beginning to move away from this style and finding much of it unworkable. When Isherwood left Cambridge, having performed his exceedingly revolutionary act of giving deliberately facetious answers in his Tripos, he begins to move away from these escapist and fantastical narratives in search for a new literary voice. Although Lions and Shadows is a narrative that largely omits Isherwood’s early education, despite its subtitle of “An Education in the Twenties”, he does focus on his time at Cambridge, his friendship with Upward, named Chalmers in this text, and specifically talks of the artistic and creative process that went into the creation of the Mortmere fantasies. This novel is the first of Isherwood’s narratives to be published with the adoption of his namesake narrator and hence arguably represents his first “autobiography”, although, even in this early publication, evidence suggests that he is playing with the autobiographical form in order to construct a literary identity. Engaging with the “game” that he and Chalmers had played in order to escape from Cambridge society and their “utterly fantastic plans for the edition-de-luxe”, Isherwood states that the end of this game was marked by his intentional failing of the Tripos and his subsequent emergence into the “real” world: Mortmere seemed to have brought us to a dead end. The cult of romantic strangeness, we both knew, was a luxury for the comfortable University fireside; it could not save you from the drab realities of cheap lodging and a dull, underpaid job. But Chalmers needed Gunball, at all costs. I did not. That, as writers, was the essential difference between us. Chalmers had created Gunball out of his own flesh and blood […] He was to spend the next three years in desperate and bitter struggles to relate Mortmere to the real world of jobs and the lodging-houses. (Isherwood [1938] 1977, 217–18)

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Distancing himself from his co-conspirator, Isherwood emphasises not only the way in which his ideas about his role as a writer have changed, but also that his search for a surrogate father-figure has evolved. In keeping with much of his writing, the relationship with Chalmers is replaced by another male: the search for the “ideal” or surrogate father dominates much of Isherwood’s writing. Indeed, Isherwood stated in interview: I’ve never been one to bemoan the absence of parents […] because it’s always been my experience that, if you want a father, the woods are full of them—and I’ve had a number of them […] I’ve lots of filial emotion ready to bestow on deserving cases. (Webster 2001, 64)

The early parts of Lions and Shadows cast Chalmers in the role of father, of “Truly Strong Man” and literary inspiration. However, Forster replaces Chalmers, and as such realism replaces escapism. Looking at Isherwood’s own analysis of his writing of The Memorial, the intentional movement from experiments in obscurity and modernism towards realism is specifically related to the influences of Forster. Coming to terms with the idea that the fantasies of Mortmere were in fact incompatible with “ordinary people”, that these “mere Arabian Nights fantasies” were of no use, Isherwood was introduced to the writing of Forster by Chalmers. In Lions and Shadows he describes his own excitement at Chalmers’s “new theories about novel writing”: I saw it quite suddenly while I was reading Howards End… Forster’s the only one who understands what the modern novel ought to be… Our frightful mistake was that we believed in tragedy: the point is, tragedy’s quite impossible nowadays […] The whole of Forster’s technique is based on the tea-table; instead of trying to screw all his scenes up to the highest possible pitch, he tones them down until they sound like mothers’-meeting gossip… In fact, there’s actually less emphasis laid on the big scenes than on the unimportant ones. It’s the completely new kind of accentuation— like a person talking a different language… (Isherwood [1938] 1977, 135– 36)

This “new kind of accentuation” is an example of the decentralisation, simplicity and realism of the writing of Forster. By focusing on the mundane, the everyday, the “tea-table”, Isherwood shifts his literary emphasis from escapism to a realistic narrative that deals with his own feelings about society, therefore acting as a personal commentary.

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Despite Isherwood’s claim that the fantasies of Mortmere no longer worked for him as an artist, that he was now on a quest to find a new way to write that would be able to represent the “real” world in which he was living, having left the “safety” of Cambridge, these early experiments in modernist style in fact continue and can be witnessed in particular in his first published novel All the Conspirators. In his 1957 foreword to this novel, Isherwood talks of the writing style that “annoys” him due to “the Joycean thought-stream technique”, which seems to him to be “jarringly out of style” (Isherwood [1928] 2000, 7). The obscurity of language, shifts in thought-stream and other practices copied from Joyce seem to Isherwood, as he looks back after nearly 30 years, too self-consciously adopted to be either real or effective. He continues: “But the author seems quite unaware of this. He makes use of the thought-stream freely and almost indiscriminately” (7). For Isherwood, the obscurity that even he now finds impossible to decipher is unworkable because the author is mimicking someone else’s style. In Lions and Shadows, published nearly 20 years prior to his foreword to All the Conspirators, Isherwood discusses his then titled Seascape with Figures, which would be published as All the Conspirators, and judges that his attempt to reconstruct the modernist stream of consciousness he found in Joyce’s narratives was a failure. During the editing process, Isherwood felt that he was “improving” the text making it “livelier”: “what Chalmers called ‘stage directions’ (‘he said,’ ‘she answered,’ ‘he smiled,’ ‘they both laughed,’) had been cut down to the minimum—indeed, it was now very nearly impossible to guess which of the characters was supposed to be speaking” (Isherwood [1938] 1977, 205). Despite his younger self’s hope that he has therefore improved his narrative, Isherwood continues in this later foreword to analyse his attempts to reproduce Joyce’s thought-stream passages and surmises that in the end it “yielded nothing, in obscurity, to the work of the master himself” (205). In the final chapter of All the Conspirators, for example, we are witness to what Isherwood sees as his ersatz style of consistently shifting points of view. Within this chapter the narrative is often confused, making it difficult to decipher whose voice or point of view we are privy to. The exchange between Allen and Joan moves from the traditional “she said,” “he grinned” evident at the start of the chapter, and escalates to a dialogue that is almost nonsensical: Just look at the moon rising. It’s like an arc-lamp. It’s like a phosphorescent melon. A mospherescent phelon. A phesphorscent mollen. (Isherwood [1928] 2000, 156)

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This is an example of the “impenetrable” structure and consciously obscure language adopted in this chapter, and indeed throughout this novel; in 1957, as Isherwood examines his early writing of 1928, this style now seems to him out of place. Isherwood is apparently no longer able to associate himself with his own early doctrine of literature, and indeed he talks of the author of All the Conspirators in the third-person in his foreword. This “inconsistent” narrative, which shifts from a narrator that is omniscient to one that has a limited point of view on several occasions, is a form that Forster describes as perfectly acceptable in literature, just as long as “the shifting attitude [is] convincing” (Forster [1927] 2005, 86), and it is seemingly this “convincing” approach that Isherwood is unable to maintain in this early narrative. As he looks back on his novel, the motto of this younger author, “My generation—right or wrong!”, now rings false to Isherwood. In comparison to his rejection of his attempts to adopt Joycean technique, the “echoes of E. M. Forster” that Isherwood reads in All the Conspirators he forgives, mainly due to the fact that “the author has actually learned a few lessons from [this master]” (Isherwood [1928] 2000, 7). It is these “echoes” that remain prominent in his writing, and Isherwood incorporates these most evidently in The Memorial, as will be discussed later. However, Isherwood has certainly in All The Conspirators already adopted a number of realistic elements in his writing, which he associated with Forster’s style. This can be seen for example in the first encounter between mother and son. The expectation of a dramatic clash of personalities is built up in the early parts of the novel; however, the “reality” is intentionally anti-climactic, moving away from the fantastical Mortmere creations to the “tea-tabling” of Forster that Isherwood manipulates so successfully in his later “mythologies”: On the landing he came face to face with his mother. She had been waiting for him there. The meeting had no drama, for both had passed the climax of anticipation. (42)

With no “drama”, the main characters of this “conspiracy” come face to face. Substituting dramatic confrontation with an anti-climactic encounter, Isherwood demonstrates his ability to understate and create social tensions. Unlike sections that are seemingly unmanageable for this young author, this section demonstrates a style that Isherwood would continue to develop. Isherwood had in fact already edited his narrative in order to incorporate this reduction of drama: in his original draft of Seascape Without Figures there was to be a fatal accident, which Isherwood

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excluded to focus on the “mundane” battles between the pre- and post-War generations, although the anti-heroic narrative contained in this novel remains largely written in a pastiche of many modernist novelists. However, in The Memorial Isherwood presents his personalised narrative, his emotional and social text, without the seeming histrionics that had been evident in Mortmere and All the Conspirators. As he proceeds as a writer, this movement away from the fantastically morbid towards minimised and indeed understated dramatic events is prominent in The Memorial. A marked example of Isherwood’s adoption of “Forsterian” style can be seen when we analyse the relationship between Eric Vernon and his mother, Lily—a relationship that represents the battle between the pre- and post-War Generations that is paramount in Isherwood’s early writing. The “Mother” is a figure that had been demonised in All the Conspirators, and in The Memorial the “Mother” is presented as fundamentally damaging—her smothering attitude does not allow Eric to mature psychologically.3 It is a “Ritual” of politeness, the “tea-table”, the mundane and the everyday that foreshadows the battle between mother and son (Isherwood [1932] 1988, 40), just as it had for Philip and Mrs Lindsay in All the Conspirators. It is notable that “Ritual” receives a capital, therefore linking it to “History”, the “Past”, and indeed to “Mother” herself. The “polite” battle of manners highlights not only Lily’s role as “Evil Mother”, but also Eric’s role as a “Truly Weak Man” (Isherwood [1938] 1977, 163).4 With a contradiction of personality, that of the loathing and loving son, Isherwood succinctly demonstrates that the polarity that pulls Eric is not only between Mary Scriven, a character that is representative of freedom and modernity, and Lily, but also between two ideas of Lily, or, more vitally, between his role as loathing and loving, as rebellious and accepting. Having sat in his mother’s dining room discussing the “niceness” of the cups as Lily serves his favourite pudding, Eric’s point of view and inner rebellion is evident: She doesn’t feel. For her this is only pleasant, sad. It’s a sentimental luxury. No, he thought, that’s utterly unjust. I’m a brute. I’m vile to her. Darling Mother. Can’t I help her? Must we go on like this? It seems so miserable and senseless. His mind ranged for solutions, followed the old circle. No, there’s nothing. (43)

The use of “darling” links Eric and Lily; just as her description of Eric appears false with the repetition of “darling” later in the novel (79), the sincerity of Eric’s sentiments is also questioned here. Although Lily still holds all the traits of the Evil Mother, Eric is shown to be weak and

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petulant, repeating the image of Philip. Eric, as representative of the new generation, is as unable to offer a solution as the older generation: “No, there’s nothing.” Eric is torn between rebellion against his mother and conformity to her Traditions, which is capitalised by Isherwood to highlight its importance and its link with the past and his Mother. It was with Forster at the forefront of his mind that Isherwood began to berate himself for the experimental narratives of Mortmere, and what Isherwood viewed as Forster’s literary influences is evident in Isherwood’s early novels. Indeed, both encounters between mother and son in All the Conspirators and The Memorial echo the style of writing contained in Howards End. In Forster’s novel, it is stated that the tragedy “began quietly enough” (Forster [1910] 2012, 318). Even Leonard’s death, ostensibly the dramatic climax of the novel, is described in terms that are anti-climactic and reductive. Despite Leonard’s idea that he was “on a supreme adventure” (341), there is in fact nothing thrilling about his demise: A stick, very bright, descended. It hurt him, not where it descended, but in the heart. Books fell over him in a shower. Nothing had sense […] They laid Leonard, who was dead, on the gravel; Helen poured water over him. “That’s enough,” said Charles. (342)

Leonard’s death is neither dramatic nor intense; indeed, his death actually remains unnoticed as he is carried onto the gravel. “That’s enough” seems to sum up Leonard Bast’s existence: his desire for adventure, a place in a society, money and sexual freedom are all hindered by the fact that he is an “ordinary man” with aspirations above his station. And yet, Leonard’s life, his death, and his relationships with the other characters in Howards End is important to the social implications of this narrative, which Forster achieves without narrating histrionics or spectacular events. Most vitally, it was the lack of dramatic incidents that Isherwood felt was most effective in producing the social drama that he hoped to emulate in his own narratives. Isherwood began to examine what he saw as Forster’s style of anti-climactic reduction and concluded that this revealed much more sincerely the true tragedies of society. With this literary epiphany, Isherwood turns his back on the Gothic fantasies of Mortmere in order to attempt to examine the true tragedies of human behaviour. Looking at both Conspirators and Memorial, it is possible to observe a movement away from Gothic absurdity evident in Mortmere and witness a social realism that Isherwood repeatedly states was based on his admiration for Forster’s narrative technique.

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In keeping with his desire to find a literary voice that could articulate his personal politics and social opinions more “truthfully” than his early literary experiments, Isherwood focused on the individual in his writing, which led to his construction of his namesake narrator and principal protagonist of many of his autobiographical novels and fictional autobiographies. This focus on the self is one that is prominent in much of Isherwood’s writing, even those narrated by a third-person narrator, and links to another influence on his writing: psychoanalysis in general and Sigmund Freud in particular. As part of his desire to find a voice in his writing that could equal his master, Isherwood began to look at the role of the artist—to focus on his literary self. The theorising of autobiography coincides with the birth of psychoanalysis and at the forefront of these debates was Freud. It is widely acknowledged that Isherwood was very much aware of Freud and his teachings.5 W. H. Auden, in his poem “In Memory of Sigmund Freud”, writes: If often he was wrong and at times absurd, To us he is no more a person Now but a whole climate of opinion. Under whom we conduct our differing lives. (Auden 1940, 118)

This poem was published a year after it was penned in 1939, and it can be presumed that the “we” that Auden talks of, a “we” that conducts their lives under the “at times absurd” teachings of Freud, includes Christopher Isherwood. With the development of psychoanalysis there came a heightened interest in the self, the internal man, and, by extension, in the act of writing about oneself, the “autobiographical act”. Although the internal monologues that Isherwood had attempted to copy from the writing of James Joyce in Conspirators can evidently be described as Freudian in relation to the focus on the inner mind, the manner in which Isherwood constructs an authorial identity with the creation of his namesake narrator in his later work is also in keeping with psychoanalysis. Furthermore, his early experiments in understanding the self in relation to neuroses, which was based on his own understanding of psychoanalysis, can also be related to his desire to present a literary “truth”, which was based on his understanding of Forster’s writing. It is evident that the human science of psychoanalysis worked hand in hand with the autobiographical literary form. Focus on the self is also something that can be witnessed within the Bloomsbury Group; indeed, although the famous Memoir Club would not meet until 1920, a focus on self, of the creation of portraits, whether in art or in literature, was clearly

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the preferred mode of expression for this set. Furthermore, the intellectual movements of the artists and writers of the Bloomsbury Group coincided with the new science of psychoanalysis in the years immediately preceding the First World War. As the writing and ideas of Freud filtered across from Europe, members of this influential group of writers and artists seemed to be drawn to his work. A.A. Brill’s translations of An Interpretation of Dreams and The Psychopathology of Everyday Life were reviewed by Leonard Woolf, and Lytton Strachey wrote several pieces covering Freud’s ideas. Furthermore, Leonard and Virginia Woolf published the psychoanalytical library, making it accessible to a generation of writers, which included Isherwood. It was through the teaching, writing and translations started by the Bloomsbury group in England that Isherwood was introduced to the psychoanalytical ideas that he personalised and utilised in his own writing: clearly evident in his early publications is a process of self-understanding of the Freudian kind. Whilst E. M. Forster may not be the first name that we think of when we consider the theories of Freudian psychoanalysis, and indeed Forster claimed never to have read Freud and insisted that any Freudian ideas in his writing must have been “filtered” through others (Beauman 1994, 321), we can still see evident in Forster’s writing examples of several psychoanalytical themes that Isherwood used in his own narratives, and furthermore, an understanding of Freud can help illuminate Forster’s literature. We can witness, for example, Oedipal motifs in “The Road from Colonus” (1903) and The Longest Journey (1907), where Forster suggests that the only way in which the male characters can “grow” is to escape the female figures and hence their matriarchal control: it is only by doing so that these males will be able to create a new society and find their freedom, which is ostensibly based on homoerotic male relationships.6 Although Forster’s ideas of Oedipus are certainly based on his study of Sophocles rather than Freud, what Forster does within these early narratives, as well as in subsequent publications, is address the roles of women, in particular the domineering female-figure, in reference to the effects on his young male protagonists. This is something that we can clearly witness in Isherwood’s texts, as demonstrated above in relation to the battle between mother and son. Ostensibly, as Isherwood was to do in his own writing, Forster seemingly uses his narratives in order to try and “understand” himself or at least to articulate questions that were personally significant to him. Although Isherwood’s varying ideas of selfhood are more clearly psychoanalytical than Forster’s, the shared themes that are evident can be related to these authors’ biographies: for example, both men lost their

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fathers when they were very young, both had close relationships with their mother, both arguably being domineered by their mothers, and both men were homosexual living in England at a time when being gay was outlawed and persecuted. The aim, I believe, of Isherwood’s writing has always been to engage with and represent the inner man, the constructed self, and furthermore to examine his personal politics. A preliminary analysis of both of Isherwood’s early novels leads to an understanding that All the Conspirators and The Memorial are undeniably autobiographical novels, in so far as both books focus ostensibly on a young male protagonist, Philip Lindsay and Eric Vernon respectively, and these young men bear an overwhelming resemblance to their author. The plots of both novels mirror events in Isherwood’s own life.7 It is however only with hindsight that readers are able to approach these narratives as “autobiographical”: the third-person-narrator superficially conceals the relationship between narrator and author. However, The Memorial in particular represents a consciously-adopted strategy for self-exploration. Although it was not specifically written as autobiography, the manner in which Isherwood manipulates the form of this early novel helps in this construction of a literary self. This can be seen for example in the non-linear structure of this novel: book one opens in 1928, going back in book two to 1920, progressing to 1925 in the third book, with the final book set in 1929. This fractured narrative represents what Isherwood describes as “the […] trick of jumping over almost every important scene and then describing it later […] an example of a valuable lesson learned from Forster” (Isherwood [1928] 2000, 8). Although this could also perhaps be compared to the modernist experiments that Isherwood attempted in All the Conspirators, the distorted chronology is more intimately related in this instance to Isherwood’s representation and analysis of the self. The manner in which the characters are narrated in a nonlinear manner highlights his understanding and adoption of autobiographical and Freudian themes. In the first instance, Eric’s neuroses are highlighted and undeniably linked to this character’s own unsettled childhood.8 The way that the “adult” Eric is narrated in book one, which passes on to the undeniably neurotic Edward before shifting back into childhood as Lily talks of her son, highlights Isherwood’s Freudian emphasis on the link between neuroses and the effects of parentage and childhood. The manner in which the narrative of The Memorial juxtaposes Eric’s adulthood with his childhood highlights their connection and Isherwood clearly demonstrates that Eric’s “failures” in young adulthood are fundamentally linked to his childhood, with particular stress being put on the death of his father and the figurative loss of his

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mother. This attempt to create a narrative that allows the reader to discover the relevance of a moment much later in the novel is one that he was basing on the successes that he witnessed in Forster’s writing. Eric must learn, as Mr Lucas in “The Road from Colonus” and Rickie Elliot in The Longest Journey needed to, that the only way that he can escape the pitfalls of becoming a “Truly Weak Man” is to remove himself from the society that is accepted and endorsed by his mother. Vitally, what Isherwood is constructing in this early narrative is an exploration of the ways in which his young male protagonist must escape the maternal figure, and hence the idea of the past that so haunts him, in order to discover a strength that is paradoxically in direct opposition to the traditional ideas of heroism and masculinity, and which is therefore undeniably homoerotic. Although Forster and Isherwood belonged to different generations, with Forster “coming of age” late in the Victorian and Edwardian periods and Isherwood belonging to the post-World War One group of writers often called the “Auden Generation”, they formed a relationship that was both professional and personal. In published letters, we learn of their close bond and their growing personal and intimate friendship (Zeikowitz 2008). Although, as demonstrated above, their literary relationship was ostensibly one of master and disciple, with Isherwood clearly cast in the disciple role, this was reversed when he was asked by Forster to “represent his generation” and provide his opinion of Forster’s then unpublished novel, Maurice (1971). Although Isherwood therefore was being asked to “judge” Forster’s writing, he remains firmly the disciple and describes Forster as “the master of their art” and also as the “great prophet of their tribe” (Isherwood [1976] 2001, 126). Examining both Forster and Isherwood from a genetic criticism perspective, it is evident that these male authors share many biographical features, most notably the fact that they were both homosexual males living in England in the early parts of the twentieth century. The tribe that Isherwood talks of here is one that he engages with most candidly and personally in his 1976 autobiographical work Christopher and His Kind. Having read Forster’s novel as a young man, Isherwood highlights that Maurice taught him that “there can be real love, love without limits or excuse, between two men” (126), emphasising the personal and literary inspirations that he had received from Forster. Isherwood was evidently influenced by the writing of E. M. Forster: he consistently hails him as his master and openly presents a desire to recreate the effects that Forster’s writing had on him. With his adoption of realism in place of surrealism and fantasy, Isherwood aimed to emulate the understated drama that he felt more clearly and indeed devastatingly

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represented true and human drama in Forster’s narratives. Furthermore, his adoption of psychoanalytical language and ideas in order to construct and analyse a literary identity, a feature that would continue throughout his career and become ever more pronounced as he shifted to the adoption of a namesake narrator, was based on his own understanding of Forster’s narratives as well as being traceable to the influence of the Bloomsbury group as a whole. The desire to construct an identity in literature as a represented process of self-understanding became a focus for Isherwood and was born from his reading of Forster. Forster’s own analysis of “how can I know what I think till I see what I say?” (Forster [1927] 2005, 99) continues to fit our understanding of the manner in which Isherwood constructed a literary mythology. Undeniably, Forster’s writing and friendship did indeed teach “Christopher the mental attitude with which he must pick up the pen” (Isherwood [1976] 2001, 105).

Works Cited Auden, W. H. 1940. “In Memory of Sigmund Freud.” In Another Time. 116–120. London: Faber & Faber Ltd. Abrams, M. H. 1999. A Glossary of Literary Terms: Seventh Edition. Boston: Heinle & Heinle. Beauman, Nicola. 1994. Morgan: Biography of E. M. Forster. London: Hodder & Stoughton Ltd. Buchanan, Bradley W. 2010. Oedipus Against Freud: Myth and the End(s) of Humanism in Twentieth-Century British Literature. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Finney, Brian. 1979. Christopher Isherwood: A Critical Biography. London: Faber and Faber Ltd. Forster, E. M. [1927] 2005. Aspects of the Novel. London: Penguin Books. —. [1910] 2012. Howards End. London: Penguin Books. Freud, Sigmund. [1913] 2010. The Interpretation of Dreams, translated by A. A. Brill. New York: The Macmillan Company. —. [1914] 2010. The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, translated by A. A. Brill. New York: The Macmillan Company. Geherin, David J. 2001. “An Interview with Christopher Isherwood.” In Conversations with Christopher Isherwood, edited by James J. Berg and Chris Freeman, 74–89. Mississippi: University Press of Mississippi. Heilbrun, Carolyn G. 1970. Christopher Isherwood: Essays on Modern Writers. New York: Columbia University Press.

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Hynes, Samuel. 1976. The Auden Generation: Literature and Politics in England in the 1930s. London: The Bodley Head Ltd. Isherwood, Christopher. [1928] 2000, All the Conspirators. London, Vintage. —. [1976] 2001. Christopher and His Kind. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. —. [1939] 1992. Goodbye to Berlin in The Berlin Novels. London: Vintage Random House. —. [1938] 1977. Lions and Shadows. New York: New Directions Books. —. [1932] 1988. The Memorial. London: Methuen & Co. Ltd. Isherwood, Christopher and Edward Upward. 1944. The Mortmere Stories. London: Enitharmon Press. Izzo, David Garret. 2001. Christopher Isherwood: His Era, His Gang, and the Legacy of the Truly Strong Man. South Carolina: University of South Carolina Press. Thurschwell, Pamela. 2000. Sigmund Freud. London: Routledge. Upward, Edward. 1972. The Railway Accident and Other Stories. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books Ltd. Webster, Len. 2001. “A Very Individualistic Old Liberal.” In Conversations with Christopher Isherwood, edited by James J. Berg and Chris Freeman. 57–71. Mississippi: University Press of Mississippi. Zeikowitz, Richard E. 2008. Letters Between Forster and Isherwood on Homosexuality and Literature. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Notes 1

Although Isherwood does not appear to have a fixed theory of selfhood, his writing is clearly influenced by the teachings of Sigmund Freud, and psychoanalytical terms and theories permeate his writing. 2 Samuel Hynes, for example, analyses that works prior to Goodbye to Berlin were in fact all a process of working towards a “camera-like narrator” that will be able to document, as he sees that Isherwood achieves with such skill in his 1939 publication. See Hynes 1976, 325 regarding Lions and Shadows; 343 with respect to Journey to a War; 355–57 for an analysis of Goodbye to Berlin. 3 David Garrett Izzo states that Eric and Lily are “Isherwood and Kathleen Isherwood for his gang to recognize”, which links not only to the manipulation of autobiography, but also to the use of private codes within Isherwood’s literature. (David Garrett Izzo 2001, 92). 4 This paradoxical concept is described in Lions and Shadows, although the themes of heroism are also evident in the previously published novels All the Conspirators and The Memorial. 5 See for example Kaye Ferres 1994 and David Garrett Izzo 2001.

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For additional analysis please see Bradley W. Buchanan 2010, 125–36. For example, Brian Finney argues that most of the characters of The Memorial “are recognisably modelled on individuals whom he knew intimately and to whom he had already allotted roles in his private mythology” (Finney 1979, 95). He further identifies the models for Isherwood’s characters. See Finney 1979, 95–96. 8 Izzo comments that this style of writing was prevalent in the early twentieth century, although he does not clearly examine the Freudian implications with regard to Isherwood’s own writing within this argument. See Izzo 2001, footnote 77, 271. 7

PART IV PAINTING AND PERFORMANCE

CHAPTER TWELVE JEUX (1913), SOMETIMES KNOWN AS “THE BLOOMSBURY BALLET”: VASLAV NIJINSKY’S MODERNIST WORK SUE ASH Some fifty years after Jeux was first performed in London in 1913, Leonard Woolf published his memoirs. In them he highlights the revolutionary changes which were taking place in western science and culture during the early twentieth century: Profound changes were taking place […] Freud and Rutherford and Einstein were at work beginning to revolutionise our knowledge of our own minds and of the universe. […] In literature one seemed to feel the ominous lull before the storm which was to produce in a few years […] The Waste Land, Jacob’s Room and Mrs Dalloway. In painting we were in the middle of the profound revolution of Cézanne, Matisse, and Picasso […] and to crown all, night after night we flocked to Covent Garden, entranced by a new art, a revolution to us benighted British, the Russian Ballet in the greatest days of Diaghilev and Nijinsky. (Woolf 1963, 37 in Garafola 1998, 314)

The Ballets Russes (1909–1929, the “Russian Ballet” Woolf refers to) was Serge Diaghilev’s project, and Vaslav Nijinsky was his star dancer in the pre-war years. Diaghilev was a remarkable man, a musician and entrepreneur whose “creations coloured modernism with a riot of innovative showpieces in the space of twenty years” (Pritchard 2010, 9). He was founder and editor of the Russian World of Art (Mir isk niki) journal (1895–1904), and for the group of artists and intellectuals who contributed to the journal, a new and innovative form of ballet was held to be the most important manifestation of the journal’s artistic philosophy (Nouvel letter, 14 September 1897 in Scheijen 2009, 114). Ballet joined the sensual with the formal for the World of Art group and it could be argued that ballet for them “performed” the World of Art aesthetic.

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Alexandra Benois, a central figure in the World of Art Group, the Ballets Russes, and twentieth century Russia’s cultural giant described this aesthetic thus: Ballet is perhaps the most eloquent of all spectacles […] it allows two of the supreme conductors of thought—music and gesture […] without imposing words on them; words which always put fetters on thought, bringing it down from heaven to earth. (Benois 1908 quoted in Sjeng 2009, 170)

In the Ballets Russes’ first London season in the summer of 1911 it was Nijinsky’s lyrical, athletic dancing which excited audiences, then it was his modernist choreography and the subtexts of his themes for L’Apres Midi d’un Faune (1912), Jeux (1913) and Le Sacre du Printemps (1913) which amazed and scandalised them. This essay contextualises Jeux by addressing the contemporary modernist aspects of the ballet’s staging, and by looking specifically at the choreographic subtext that played with gender norms and broke with orthodox patriarchal values. I explore the way Jeux interacted with the London literary and artistic scene examining the setting of the ballet and the inspiration for its theme; a game of tennis set in a garden overlooked by a town house. The ballet, it is often argued, was inspired by Nijinsky’s memory of Grant, Bell and Woolf promiscuously playing around after a tennis game in Bedford Square Gardens, overlooked by Lady Ottoline Morrell’s London residence.1 Thus Jeux can be read simultaneously as a modernist ballet and as a ballet which engaged with the radical gender identities of Bloomsbury’s central figures. Nijinsky was Polish born, to parents who were talented dancers. He graduated from the Imperial School of Ballet in St. Petersburg in 1907 and immediately started with the Mariinsky Ballet in soloist roles. Diaghilev noticed his extraordinary dancing talent there and Nijinsky, alongside other Mariinsky stars, was fundamental in Diaghilev’s mission to bring Russian ballet to Europe. Michel Fokine had been the chief choreographer for the Ballets Russes until Diaghilev invited Nijinsky to choreograph L’Apres Midi d’un Faune, which premiered in Paris in 1912. Between 25 June and 7 July 1913 Nijinsky’s second new ballet Jeux was performed four times at the Drury Lane theatre in London. Each performance placed Jeux between two or three other ballets which had already been seen in London, and each of the four evenings billed a different group of ballets around Jeux. None of these ballets related to each other but each embodied the new Russian modernist aesthetic, and this was recognised by London’s artistic milieu. One such was the artist Anne Estelle Rice who offered

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critiques of the Ballets Russes in the monthly ‘little magazine’ Rhythm. It is clear that Rice had already attended many performances, from the number of ballets she discusses in various volumes of the magazine. In one edition of Rhythm in 1912 she compares the painter Whistler with Leon Bakst, Diaghilev’s chief designer of the pre-war era: [Bakst is] “the greatest innovator of the pictorial art of modern stagecraft [leaving] the Whistlerian ideal hopelessly empty and inadequate” (Rice 1912).2 Rice understands the fusion of all the elements—stage scenery, costume, lighting, music, choreography and “poet”—as a harmonising scheme, with “line” as the dominant idea. Dance for Rhythm’s visual artists, and many contemporary modernists, was the Ballets Russes and Rice’s artistic style was influenced by the rhythmic exoticism and fused harmonies of the ballets she witnessed, wrote about and illustrated in Rhythm (Brooker and Thacker 2009, 329).3 Dance, and by extension an interest in the moving body, gave Rhythm its particular style and ethos. Rice’s understanding of “line” comes from her own art form as a painter and from its central importance in the fauvist style, which emphasised vigour in line and movement and which dominated Rhythm magazine. In dance, “line” signifies balance and purity of body alignment, as well as direction and coherence of movement in terms of space. Nijinsky modernised the line of movement in space in all his ballets, in a different style for each one. In his first choreographic work, L’Apres midi d’un Faune, he confined the space and line of the movement to the two dimensional by employing linear choreographed steps moving only from side to side in a narrow space confined to the front of the stage, with the dancers’ upper body angled towards the audience and the head and legs in profile, reminiscent of classical antiquity’s depictions of figures in painting, sculpture and ceramics.4 Nijinsky’s inspiration for some of the poses for the Nymphs and the Faune in this ballet came directly from ancient vases he had studied in the Louvre (Pritchard 2010, 81). Using the naturalistic poses shown on these vases, and those depicted in painting and sculpture, L’Apres midi d’un Faune echoed the modernist and modern trend for Classical references in art and literature. As with L’Apres Midi d’un Faune, Nijinsky’s ballet Jeux also marked a significant departure from the tradition of ballet that relied on familiar narrative forms and spectacular staging—epitomised by the nineteenth century “romantic” classics still so popular today such as Swan Lake and Giselle. Jeux had a subtext, rather than a narrative, which “spoke” of emotion and the subconscious, subjective elements more usually associated with the new German modern dance aesthetic of the period—in the work of Mary Wigman for example. One of the leading pioneers of

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New German Dance (also known as European modern dance and the forerunner of American Contemporary Dance) Wigman’s dance form is known as expressionist (ausdruckstanz). Expressionist dance is usually performed without music, always without plot and is concerned with raw emotion—although Wigman preferred the term “new artistic dance”, a more “natural” form of movement without the confines of ballet technique. The term ausdruckstanz was used in 1920’s Germany to differentiate it from classical ballet.5 The scenario for Jeux was simply a danced game of sporty flirtation set in a hyper-modern future. Ballets based on contemporary themes became popular in the post war era: see Bronislava Nijinska’s 1924 ballet Le Train Bleu as an example. But in 1913 it was revolutionary. Leon Bakst’s design for Jeux had no stage set, simply four painted circles on the green floor cloth, representing flower beds. His backdrop of summer trees, overlaid with stylised painted patches to depict dusk, included a large white building with many windows, one of which was open. The three dancers were dressed in modern tennis clothes, and the only props were a tennis racket and an oversized tennis ball (Buckle 1980, 340–341). Diaghilev toyed with various dates in the future on which to fix Jeux. In one letter dated 18 July 1912 to Debussy, Diaghilev states the date of 1920 and to make more of its futuristic setting, he had plans to either interrupt the “games” with the crashing of an aeroplane on stage, or to have a panel move across upstage, painted with an aeroplane with black wings (Diaghilev quoted in Nijinska 1992, 468).6 The inclusion of the plane would have been a visual demonstration of the sense of foreboding of impending war prevalent in the British and European Press at the time. However, by the time the ballet was staged Diaghilev had abandoned the idea: “As the action of the ballet takes place in the year 1920—the apparition of this machine will be of no interest whatsoever to the persons onstage” (ibid.). The sporty, contemporary theme for Jeux, the pared-down stage set, and the setting of the ballet in a garden near a large house, bring both modernism and popular modernity together in one artistic work. The device of casting the three dancers as unnamed characters in the programme—“First Young Girl” (Madam Tamara Karsavina), “Second Young Girl” (Mademoiselle Ludmila Schollar) and “A Young Man” (Monsieur Nijinsky)—emphasised Nijinsky’s vision of Jeux as being the stage representation of contemporary youth enjoying the everyday pasttime of sport. This broke with the tradition in ballet of giving the dancers specific characters to embody with specific character names, which would have appeared in the programme next to their own name. The lack of

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characterisation depicting contemporary youth in Jeux was a new approach and aligns with the modernist trope of “the everyday”. These dancers in Jeux represented ordinary, modern young people. Jeux is sometimes known as the Bloomsbury Ballet in the dance history canon and the bohemian influence of those whom Nijinsky and Diaghilev met in London through Lady Ottoline Morrell is apparent in this ballet.7 For many analysts of Jeux, Bakst’s set design, with the image of a large house in the background, bears a remarkable resemblance to the view of Lady Ottoline Morrell’s London Bedford Square residence, from the Bedford Square gardens. Lady Ottoline’s memoirs support this: He [Nijinsky] and Bakst (who also went mad) came one afternoon when Duncan Grant and some others were playing tennis in Bedford Square Gardens—they were so entranced by the tall trees against the houses and the figures flitting about playing tennis that they exclaimed with delight: Quel décor! (Gathorne-Hardy 1963, 228)8

Jeux’s status as the Bloomsbury ballet is reiterated by Marino Palleschi, who sets the ballet within the social and political context of the period and argues that the sexual subtext breaks with orthodox patriarchal values of Empire and Victorian England. The unconventional sexuality of some in the Bloomsbury group is, for Palleschi, a key inspiration for Jeux: Nijinsky and Bakst had seen the promiscuous behaviour of Woolf and Bell with post-impressionist painter Duncan Grant, also a member of the Bloomsbury group, while playing tennis at night in London.9

Nijinsky’s wife Romola wrote that the theme of Jeux was to be “the essence of flirtation, the modern form of love” and the gestures express: emotions playing physically at the game of tennis, emotionally at flirtation—a love affair between a young boy and two girls both separately and simultaneously—the eternal triangle under an utterly new aspect. (Nijinsky 1960, 152)

The danced embodiment of this modern form of love on the public stage was progressive and challenging. These danced flirtations offered traditional and non-traditional pairings to the audience—the traditional pairing is shown through the choreographic partnering of the youth with one or other of the girls, while the non-traditional relationship between the two girls is gestured by a kiss, as is the triple relationship between the two girls and the youth. In what would have been a further extension of

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unconventional sexuality, Diaghilev had wished for all the dancers to be male, but Nijinsky rejected this idea (Nijinsky 1963, 147–148). In their real lives, Bloomsbury and the wider artistic milieu also played with resistant ideas, breaking out of the Victorian confines of repressed sexuality by experimenting with free love and homosexuality. Nijinsky, who was Diaghilev’s lover, was to marry the dancer Romola de Pulszky in 1913, and the marriage of Bloomsbury’s economist John Maynard Keynes with the Ballets Russes’ ballerina Lydia Lopokova accommodated his homosexual affairs. The complex relationships in the marriages of Bloomsbury’s Vanessa Bell and Virginia Woolf are also well known and it is these unconventional lifestyles which led to the description of Bloomsbury as a “circle of people who lived in squares and loved in triangles” (Nicholson 2003, 176). In Bloomsbury’s social setting Nijinsky, Diaghilev and various other Ballets Russes’ dancers were frequently invited as star guest attractions by Lady Ottoline Morrell to her soirees during their London seasons (Seymour 1993, 229–231, 252). Attendance at these soirees by Diaghilev and Nijinsky was guaranteed to bring in influential guests to the benefit of each other and the Ballets Russes. Ottoline invited Diaghilev and other male dancers for the amusement of the gay artists in the London milieu, leaving Nijinsky for her great friend Lytton Strachey, who was fascinated by him, although this came to nothing as Diaghilev was always at Nijinsky’s side (Seymour 1993, 228). Unfortunately there is no contemporary film of this “modern form of love” ballet because Diaghilev banned film recording of all the Ballets Russes’ works. We therefore have no visual historical record of Jeux as a danced ballet, unlike those original avant-garde paintings or modernist texts of the period which can be seen and read in their original form. However, for Millicent Hodson, who staged a reconstruction of Jeux in 1996,10 the contemporary photographs and drawings of the artists and writers who visited Lady Ottoline Morrell reveal the influences of the ballet: Both reveal bodies poised for intellectual banter and the sport of human relationships […] young people side-stepping passion then throwing caution to the wind. (Hodson 2008, 20-21)

Hodson suggests that to really experience Jeux we need to imagine Nijinsky at the height of his powers, embracing the modernity of the Bloomsbury group (Hodson 2008, 21). The staging of the ballet shares with the modernist novel an emphasis on the everyday, the chance encounter. We see this in Woolf’s novel Mrs Dalloway beginning with Mrs Dalloway stepping out from her home and

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ending with the gathering at her party at the end of the novel. In Jeux the first we know of anything is an oversized tennis ball bouncing on to the stage from the wings. The youth, holding a tennis racquet then arrives on stage with a huge jéte (jump), followed by the two “girls” who arrive together and are unknowing of the youth who is already there. They are all dressed in tennis clothes. They dance in various couplings. Another tennis ball bounces across the stage from the wings, signifying someone unknown is about to arrive, and they all leave. Nothing in the ballet tells the audience anything else.11 The stage lighting and painted patches on the backdrop do imply dusk; an effect Nijinsky was keen to have after having noticed the recent technical innovation of electrical street lighting shining on trees, and which was the realisation in part of what Diaghilev had in mind when he exclaimed “quel décor!” in Bedford Square Gardens (Buckle 1980, 340). Like modernist novels the ballet is embedded in the common place (of a certain class) and presents a kind of snapshot, a moment in time, or as Vera Krasovskaya remembers it, a “dance poem” where time stood still, giving the players space to look at their feelings (McGinness 2007, 570). John Neumier, Director of the Hamburg Ballet describes Jeux’s theme as “non-action” with a choreography which reflects “interior emotional states” (Hodson 2008, 5) a comment that supports the sense I am suggesting here of Jeux as a danced “interior monologue”. An unnamed critic of The Times on 26 June 1913 had trouble with this “interior language” of the ballet, and wrote: Some of the language in which ideas are expressed is beautiful and eloquent and is really expressive … but it is like a language in which the speaker is restricted to a portion of the alphabet … Perhaps M Nijinsky will some day discover and learn the whole alphabet of which at present he has acquired only the partial use. (quoted in Macdonald 1975, 94)

This interior language would form a circular unspoken conversation between the dancers and their audience through the transmission of kinaesthetic and kinetic empathy. The dancers would draw on their emotional response to their individual role and the shifting relationships of their character to each other. At the same time there would be an unspoken dialogue between the dancers and Debussy’s score and the modernist choreography. This forms a kinaesthetic, circular empathy which goes back and forth between the dancers, the audience and back again to the dancers.12 In dance terms the choreography for Jeux used classical technique (legs in turn-out, a little like the typical Charlie Chaplin image but with

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straight knees) and modern, parallel shapes for the dancers’ legs and arms.13 Triangular shapes are significant—when made between the dancers in a group or a couple; when demonstrated by their individual arm movements during solo dance moments; and when described by the floor pattern as the dancers negotiate the flowerbeds. This choreographic device both suggests the influence of Cubism on Nijinsky’s choreography and signifies the triangular relationships which form the work’s subtext.14 While Nijinsky was not able to hear the actual music for the ballet during the months he was working on the scenario, as Debussy was still composing the score, he needed to give Bronislava a flavour of what the style would be—for she was to dance in the ballet. He showed her the books of modern paintings he was looking at which were giving him inspiration, and he was especially inspired by those of Gauguin (Nijinska 1992, 442).15 Paradoxically the triangular linear spaces and groupings in Jeux are also reminiscent of Classical (Etruscan and Roman) figuring, and a particular group position described as “The Fountain”, in which the three dancers stand in a line with Nijinsky in the middle, recalls the Three Graces (Buckle 1980 in Hodson 2008, 12).16 The Press photograph of “The Fountain” group, by the photographer Charles Gerschel, was one of many used by Diaghilev to promote the new ballet before the opening night in Paris. Another of these Press photographs, subtitled “Thus do we dance” by Hodson, epitomises Nijinsky’s choreographic aesthetic in Jeux (Hodson 2008, 145). In this photograph Karsavina (the “first girl”) is facing the camera while Nijinsky (the “youth”) and Schollar (the “second girl”) are in a pairing facing each other; there is no scenery or backdrop, the sporty clothes look relaxed and modern and their hair is unbound.17 The two women are wearing ankle socks and they are on quarter pointe—heels just lifted from the floor— with their feet in a relaxed everyday-looking position. Their legs are parallel and their bodies are not particularly lifted, as they would be if they were up on full pointe. “The youth” seems to be in a more “balletic” pose with his back leg extended, until we notice that he and the “second girl” are in a ballroom dancing hold. Then as we look carefully at the ballroom hold, we notice that the “second girl” has taken the male ballroom partnering hold with her right arm around his back, and he has his left arm on her shoulder. This reversal of the traditional male position in the ballroom hold is written on the score, above the bars of the music from which this posed grouping is taken; it is but one moment in the choreography of a group of steps for this set of musical notes. As we continue to look at this posed group we notice that the pair in ballroom hold have foreshortened necks with their heads lifted back and their free

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arms linked and twisted at shoulder height, with dropped wrists. The only detail which tells us they are ballet dancers is the girls’ pointe shoes. Meanwhile the “first girl”, on her own has a parallel arm position at rib height in front of her, with the wrists touching and the palms open. Each dancer’s inner emotion, their interiority, is written on their body position; the “first girl’s” dance-body says rejection while “the youth” and “second girl’s” dance-bodies voice defensive attraction to each other.18 This group pose represents the highly modern details of Nijinsky’s choreography in Jeux, and his use of the reverse ballroom hold (in which the two dancers then dance ballroom Tango in the ballet) demonstrates the fluid gender subtext of the piece.19 The analysis of this group pose also draws attention to just how far Nijinsky’s groundbreaking choreography was, in each of his three ballets, from the traditional classical ballet technique which audiences were used to seeing in the previous Ballets Russes’ ballets, and in which the dancers’ bodies were more comfortable. When Hodson interviewed Marie Rambert in 1979 (she had helped Nijinsky teach his new choreographic style to the dancers); she demonstrated with her body how the postures demanded by Nijinsky restricted the dancers’ movement. Rambert described how these difficult positions, or postures, restricted the body of the dancers as though they had “one hand and foot tied” (Hodson 1986, 66). Jeux occasionally incorporates an über-modern style, using a few of the latest social dance moves from not only the Tango but also the Turkey Trot. Both of these social dances would have been danced to a syncopated rhythm at tea-dances, but which in Jeux fit as easily to the music as the more classical movements in Debussy’s “stunning, arcane, difficult to grasp and extraordinary piece of music, so pointillist, back and forth, give and take, like a tennis game”.20 The female dancers were in pointe shoes but rarely rose on to full pointe—a radical break with classical choreography—thus giving a very different dynamic when moving on half pointe, than if they had been in soft shoes (as in Nijinsky’s other major works L’Apres Midi d’un Faune or Le Sacre de Printemps). To walk on half pointe in hard pointe shoes changes the weight of the dancer from what would be a very lifted and forward torso on pointe, to a more “grounded” relaxed form with the weight further back over the hips and feet. The audiences would not necessarily understand what it was in the postures which made these movements unexpected and probably ungainly to them, but is exemplary of Nijinsky’s modernist staging. These perhaps at times awkward postures could be compared to seeing the beginning of a sentence in a piece of modernist prose which begins with a lower case letter rather than with the more traditional capital letter, such as in some of

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e e cummings’ poetry and in the way he wrote his name. Modernist vers libre would be another example where traditional punctuation is omitted at various moments in the piece as in the work of Djuna Barnes. In Jeux, Nijinsky had at one stage planned to feature all three protagonists in pointe shoes and the device of having the male dancer of the trio in pointe shoes would have given an extra nuance to the interchangeable sexual flirtations choreographically described on the stage. By the time Jeux came to the stage, however, Nijinsky was wearing traditional soft shoes. This “mixing up” of classical and modern choreography prefigures the modernist style of the neo-classical favourites of the Nijinska, and later the Balanchine, choreographic eras. Nijinska wrote in her memoirs that Jeux was the beginning of neo-classicism in ballet and was the source for all her works in this mode (Nijinska 1992, 445, 469). After the 1913 London season Nijinsky’s Jeux was never performed again. It was not a success, perhaps because it was completely overshadowed in Paris by the sensational reaction to his next ballet Le Sacre du Printemps, which premiered only two weeks later. A virtual riot broke out among the audience on the opening night of Le Sacre du Printemps, caused by Stravinsky’s modernist score of complex rhythms, which the dancers could not hear on account of the chaos in the auditorium, and the primitivist style of Nijinsky’s choreography. “Musically and choreographically Sacre bid adieu to the Belle Epoch. Few among the era’s fashionable public were ready to do the same.” (Garafola 1998, 64). Debussy’s music for Jeux was equally as challenging as Stravinsky’s score for Le Sacre du Printemps for the audience and dancers, but this is often forgotten and overshadowed by the reaction to Le Sacre du Printemps. The riot quickly became seminal in “modernism’s sense of itself as a movement” (Heisler 2012, 695) and inspired works by various artists and literary figures including Gertrude Stein and Djuna Barnes.21 One consequence of Diaghilev’s dismissal of Jeux from the Ballets Russes’ repertoire was that there was no-one in the Ballets Russes interested enough to pass on the choreography and the exact nuances of the movements to the next generation of dancers, the accepted way the authenticity of ballets and ballet history is created.22 Dance notation is a tool which supports the choreographic intention but real value is derived from the teaching of a role by the original ballerina or male lead to the next rising star, and so on over the decades. It is possible, however to view a filmed performance of Millicent Hodson’s reconstruction of Jeux, performed by the Rome Opera Ballet in 2003, on YouTube.23

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Hodson based her reconstruction on accounts of what was seen during the performances of Jeux in 1913, before she discovered Debussy’s original piano rehearsal score on which Nijinsky had made detailed notes for the ballet. These notes do not generally detail the actual arm, body, head, leg and feet alignments usually noted in dance notation; rather they are notes of the scenario. If Nijinsky did make notation descriptions of the dance steps, they have not yet been found. The emphasis in Nijinsky’s notes on the score is on the individual emotion which the movements, and therefore the dancers, will express, at minutely detailed moments in the musical score. This could again be described as the danced expression of the individual interiority of each protagonist. Whereas examples of the stage directions of the movements are noted: “preparing for the dancing jump”, “she runs behind a bush”, “they caress each other”, there is one notable direction “he dances joyfully running on his toes to the girls”. Could this be a reference to Nijinsky’s idea that the male dancer would be dancing in pointe shoes? On the other hand there are many directions for the emotions which the dancers must portray “feeling of shame by the first one”, “the desire to kiss”, “the second girl becomes jealous”, “madding passion” and intriguingly “sin his theme” (McGinness 2007, 575-584).24 The dancers must show these emotions through the plastic movements of the body, not by facial expression. Barker tells us the audience found these neutral faces disturbing (Barker 1982, 57). In traditional ballet, facial expression is a fundamental aspect of the presentation of the ballet narrative; but in modern ballet and contemporary dance, the inward emotion is carried in the dancers’ body movement and it is this aesthetic which “speaks” to the audience. A relatively neutral facial expression enhances this. The Times critic from 26 June 1913 found this as uncomfortable as the limited language of the ballet: Their faces too were rigid, for it is part of the convention that they should express no emotion, and this made one want to have them covered by masks. (quoted in Macdonald 1975, 94)

This London season, which featured all three of Nijinsky’s modernist choreographic works and in which he was dancing most evenings for over a month, marked the end of the Nijinsky era.25 But his radical approach in Jeux marked the beginning of ballet’s experimentation with contemporary modern themes; it is still difficult to stage works with radical gender identities in this centenary year of Jeux. In 1913 Jeux expressed trends which were surfacing in modernism. The move away from narrative style and characterisation is demonstrated in this ballet without a plot, performed by dancers who embodied modern

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youth. Jeux centred on interior emotion and can be viewed as a danced “interior monologue” of the individual dancers, whose plastic body movements “voice” the complexities of their triangular relationships. The ballet also voices the interior emotions of Nijinsky as choreographer, whose choreography “wrote” the emotions of the traditional and radical gender identities on the dancers’ body movements. In its refusal to conform to traditional gender stereotypes Jeux anticipated the, sometimes uneasy, reworkings of gender identities that would emerge in post-war modernist literature by writers as diverse as Djuna Barnes and Virginia Woolf. Woolf, for example, plays with gender identity in Orlando (1928), her mock biography of her lover Vita Sackville West. On the surface Orlando and Jeux are playful romps while deeper down both visit the more dangerous subtext of lesbianism. Modernist trends were contextualised by Nijinsky’s mix of classical and modern dance techniques and his choreographic engagement with abstract art forms, by Bakst’s minimalist set and by Debussy’s harmonically discordant score. For Rhythm, the Ballets Russes was the magazine’s touchstone and dance gave expression to the harmonious artistic unity, rhythmic vigour and renewed interest in the body which was the magazine’s culture. Pre-war Bloomsbury gave discerning critical responses to Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes (Jones 2009, 66) which captivated London’s artistic milieu with its exotic productions and brought risqué glamour to Bloomsbury’s social scene. As this examination of Jeux illustrates, the radical choreography and the modernist aesthetic of the Ballets Russes, linked so closely to Bloomsbury in this 1913 ballet, reflected back to the Bloomsbury group, an image of their own transgressive modern behaviour.

Works Cited Barker, Barbara. 1982. “Nijinsky’s ‘Jeux’.” The Drama Review, 1 (Spring): 51–60. Benois, Alexandra. 1908. Teatr: kniga o novum teatre. St Petersburg. Brooker, Peter, and Andrew Thacker. 2009. The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines: Britain and Ireland 18801955, Volume 1, edited by P. Brooker and A. Thacker. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Buckle, Richard. 1980. The Definitive Biography; Nijinsky. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books Ltd. Crane, Debra, and Mackrell, Judith. 2004. Oxford Dictionary of Dance, edited by D. Crane and J. Mackrell. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Garafola, Lynn. 1998. Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes. New York: De Capo Press. Gathorne-Hardy, Robert. 1963. Ottoline, The Early Memoirs of Lady Ottoline Morrell. London: Faber and Faber. Heisler, Aeron Yale. 2012. “Literary Memory and the Moment of Modern Music.” Modernism/Modernity 19 (4): 693–715. Hodson, Millicent. 2008. Nijinsky’s Bloomsbury Ballet, Reconstruction of the Dance and Design for Jeux. New York: Pendragon Press. —. 1986. “Ritual Design in the New Dance.” Dance Research, the Journal of the Society for Dance Research 4 (1): 63–77. Jarvinen, Hanna. 2009. “Dancing without Space—on Nijinsky’s L’Apres Midi d’un Faune (1912).” Dance Research, The Journal of the Society for Dance Research 27 (1): 28–64. —. 2009. “Critical Silence: The Unseemly Games of Love in ‘Jeux’ (1913).” Dance Research, The Journal of the Society for Dance Research 27 (2): 119–226. Jones, Susan. 2009. “Diaghilev and British Writing.” Dance Research, The Journal of the Society for Dance Research 27 (1): 65–92. Macdonald, Nesta. 1975. Diaghilev Observed by Critics in England and the United States 1911-1929. New York: Dance Horizons. McGinness, John. 2007. “Vaslav Nijinsky’s Notes for Jeux.” The Musical Quarterly. 556–589. Nicholson, Virginia. 2003. Among the Bohemians, Experiments in Living 1900–1939. London: Penguin Books. Nijinska, Bronislava. 1992. Early Memoirs, translated by Jean Rawlinson and Irina Nijinska. London: Duke University Press. Nijinsky, Romola. 1960. Nijinsky. Harmonsdworth, Middlesex: Gollancz, Penguin Books. Nijinsky, Vaslav. 1963. The Diary of Vaslav Nijinsky. London: Jonathan Cape Limited. Preston-Dunlop, Valerie. 1995. Dance Words, edited by V PrestonDunlop. Harwood Academic Publishers. Pritchard, Jane. 2010. Diaghilev and the Golden Age of the Ballets Russes 1909-1929, edited by J. Pritchard. London: V&A Publishing. Rice, Anne Estelle. 1912. “The Ballets Russes.” Rhythm, Art, Music Literature Monthly 2 (7): 106–110. Scheijen, Sjeng. 2009. Diaghilev A Life, translated by J. Hedley-Prole J and S.J. Leinback. London: Profile Books Ltd. Seymour, Miranda. 1993. Ottoline Morrell, Life on a Grand Scale. London: Hodder and Stoughton Ltd.

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Woolf, Leonard. 1963. Beginning Again: An Autobiography of the Years 1911 to 1918. New York: Harcourt Brace

Notes 1

In the Emile Deflin interview with Nijinsky for Gil Blas on 20 May 1913 Nijinsky is quoted as saying that the idea for Jeux originated from his watching tennis in Deauville the previous summer, when he returned to France immediately after the London ballet season. As Nijinsky’s grasp of French and English was poor he may have been told to say this. He may have been being diplomatic as it was an interview for the French press. Another story suggests the idea came from moths round a lamp in the Bois de Boulogne. Several origins for a work of art would not be unusual. See Buckle 1980, 305. 2 For further analysis of Rice and the Ballets Russes see Jones 2009, 72–73. 3 For analysis of the relationship between dance and the body in Rhythm see Brooker and Thacker 2009, 314–336. 4 See Jarvinen 2009 for a comprehensive analysis of Nijinsky’s choreography and use of space. 5 See Crane and Mackrell 2004, 32, 511 and Preston-Dunlop 1995, 18 for definitions of these dance terms. 6 Also cited in Garafola 1998, 59, 60. 7 Not all dance scholars accept the “Bloomsbury Ballet” tag. Hannah Jarvinen argues it is a trope based on reminiscences rather than contemporary evidence (Jarvinen 2009, 206). 8 Richard Buckle had felt puzzled for many years by the house in Bakst’s design for Jeux, which was not like a French hotel or country house. When he read Ottoline’s memoirs he realised that the architecture was a version of a Bloomsbury Square (Buckle 1980, 305). 9 http://www.balletto.net/giornale.php?articolo=1695. Accessed 11 July 2013. 10 The term “reconstruction” describes the process of remounting a ballet which is thought to be lost, using contemporary documentary evidence and the written score. 11 This section is informed by Barker 1982, 54. 12 Kinaesthetic empathy is an “empathic awareness of the kinaesthetic experience of another person (dancer): bridging the gap of awareness between one person’s movement and another’s perception of it as bodily experience.” (Preston-Dunlop 1995, 371). Kinetic responsiveness is “the brand of empathy that most directly unites the dancer and his or her audience” (Preston-Dunlop 1995, 553). 13 Nijinsky did not leave notes of the dance steps; the choreography discussed here is the choreography from Hodson’s re-construction. 14 See Hodson 2008 and Ballet, Jeux parte 1 2007, Ballet, Jeux parte 2 2007, Ballet, Jeux parte 3 2007 for this section of the essay. 15 See also Hodson 2008, 38.

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An image of the “fountain pose” photograph can be seen on Google images here: http://www.elitearteydanza.com.ar/biografias-ludmila-schollar.htm. Accessed 11 July 2013. 17 Scholler took the place of Bronislava Nijinska, as she was pregnant by the time the ballet came to performance. 18 These emotions, “rejection” and “defensive attraction”, are written as the subtitle to the reproduced photograph in Hodson 2008, 145. 19 An image of this photograph can be seen on Google images here: http:// mq.oxfordjournals.org. Accessed 11 July 2013. 20 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N2BKd8EOAR8. Accessed 11 July 2013. Lorin Maazel, speaking of the first time he played Jeux aged 19 in the 1st violin section of the Pittsburg Symphony. Pointillism in music is a style of 20th century composition where different musical notes give a sound texture similar to pointillism in painting which uses small coloured dots to form an image. 21 See Heisler 2012 for a thorough discussion on this theme. 22 Marie Rambert, founder of Rambert Dance Company, could have passed on Jeux’s choreography and Nijinsky’s intentions to successive generations of dancers, but it did not happen. 23 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FkZhDcB-OfA (Part 1), https://www.you tube.com/watch?v=774MfmVqMmw (Part 2), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v= C1SU5ZTkiVA (Part 3). Accessed 11 July 2013. 24 There are at least four scores in existence on which Nijinsky made annotated notes. Hodson’s research is based on two (Hodson, Nijinsky’s Bloomsbury Ballet, Reconstruction of the Dance and Design for Jeux 2008) while McGinness based his research on a third (McGinness 2007). Although there are slight variations in annotation, the particular emotions Nijinsky noted are consistent in all of the scores. 25 Diaghilev dismissed Nijinsky when he heard of his marriage, which took place soon after the 1913 London season. However Diaghilev brought him back for the USA tour in 1916. Nijinsky premiered his last choreographic work Till Eulenspiegel on 23 October 1916 in New York, but it was never performed by the Ballets Russes in Europe. Nijinsky was already suffering from mental illness by this time and he did not recover. He died at a London clinic on 8 April 1950.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN “A KISS IS LOVE. A BROKEN CUP IS JEALOUSY”: ADAPTATION BEYOND METONYMY JENS PETERS Judging from most reviews of theatre adaptations of Virginia Woolf’s novels and essays, these prose texts are notoriously difficult to translate to the stage. Michael Billington writes about a 1995 adaptation of To the Lighthouse: Adapting novels for the stage is always a dubious business. But at least the great 19th century novelists—Balzac and Dickens especially—were repressed dramatists, so it makes a kind of sense. With Empty Space’s transposition of Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse (1927), however, one simply reaches a cultural impasse: a stream-of-consciousness novel is hopelessly unsuited to dramatisation. (Billington 1995)

However, his reference to Balzac and Dickens makes it obvious that Billington is thinking about adaptation purely within the framework of realism, going back to Zola’s argument “that plays could construct accurate models of life, for the purpose of analysing the “cause and effect” of human behaviour” (Elsom 1979, 35). Indeed, many reviewers are still clamouring for “character and plot” (Mark Steyn on Kit Hesketh-Harvey’s adaptation of Orlando, Guildhall School, 1988), two of the central features of realism or what I am going to call “dramatic realism”.1 These formal elements however become highly problematic when applied as sine qua non criteria for film or stage adaptations of Woolf’s modernist experiments, since, to quote one of the many statements on this topic, “both modernist art and philosophy shared cinema’s ambitious project to refashion representations of subjectivity and time” (Reviron-Piégay 2009, 316). While a phenomenological approach to time that relates the durée of experienced time to the mechanistic progress of clock-time is intimately

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connected to the question of interiority and its representation, it falls outside the immediate concerns of this essay. Instead, I am going to focus exclusively on the “modernist move towards interiority” (ibid., 322) in order to ask the question if a different thinking about how to adapt Woolf’s writings is required. Theatre director Katie Mitchell, who staged Woolf’s novel The Waves in 2006, acknowledges the importance of finding such new forms of adapting Woolf’s texts when she states that she “was looking for other forms of writing to see whether investigating them would lead to pushing us to create a different type of language for theatre” (Katie Mitchell 2008). In this essay, I will first identify the basic structural element of dramatic realism in its representation of reality as the metonymy of verbal and nonverbal elements, using examples from Patrick Garland’s theatre adaption of A Room of One’s Own (1989, later filmed for TV), Stephen Daldry’s film The Hours (2002) and Marleen Gorris’ film Mrs Dalloway (1997). In this I expand Roman Jakobson’s argument that “realist writing is metonymic” (Jakobson quoted in Lodge 1977, 80) to include realism on stage and in film. I will also investigate Jakobson’s contrasting category of the “metaphoric” and consider ways how this might be applied to an analysis of theatre, focusing on Katie Mitchell’s production Waves (National Theatre 2006) and my own adaptation of the novel (RADA and Drill Hall, 2008). Jakobson wished to establish a direct continuity between features of cultural genres and linguistic descriptions, including rhetorical figures. This is necessarily a complex argument, and not all critics believe that it can be done. For such critics connections of this sort can never be more than analogical. I shall follow Jakobson here, however. In rhetoric metonymy is the use of a part of something to represent the whole (“the turf” for the horse-racing industry, for instance). It is not difficult to carry this over into to theatrical representations, where (for example) a kitchen sink may stand metonymically for the whole life of drudgery of which it is a part (hence the eponymous sub-genre of Kitchen Sink Drama). Metonymy is associated with realism and naturalism because it is the shorthand by which reality is represented on the stage: part for whole. In language and rhetoric, again, metaphor occurs when an action and its agent are represented by another action or agent that are not directly associated to them and are not part of the whole referred to (“she piloted her argument safely into port”). Metaphor seems less easy to define or accomplish in theatre than metonymy. But in theatre something (an action, scenario or prop, for example) would be “metaphoric” when it is a substitute for something different that is really more primary in terms of meaning. When metaphor is used in language there are obvious clues to

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direct a listener away from the surface reference to what is really intended—or to select which of the two “worlds” evoked is to be taken as primary. In theatre clues are less obvious, and audiences may be helped by theatrical devices that remind them that they are witnessing “theatre”, not simulated life, thus indicating to them that the primary reference is not to what they see and hear, but to something different that is only paralleled by what they see and hear. In contrast to metonymy, metaphor, according to Wellek and Warren’s discussion of Jakobson’s differentiation, is “poetry of association by comparison, joining a plurality of worlds” (quoted in Lodge 1977, 73), and it is in this freely associative approach to adaptation instead of a “near-fixation with the issue of fidelity” (Leitch 2003, 161) where its true power vis-à-vis the representation of interiority lies.2 The potential “plurality of worlds” is circumscribed and hinted at by theatrical metaphors rather than given and defined by the close logical weave of contiguous details of metonymy. Meaning is not a deduction but a creation on the part of the audience, as Max Black suggests: “metaphor creates the similarity [rather] than […] formulates some similarity antecedently existing” (quoted in Haverkamp 1983, 18). I shall call this breaking of the conventions of naturalism “theatrical realism” (Erickson 2003, 160). It will emerge that while a distinction between metonymic and metaphoric representations in theatre is heuristically useful, one has to remain aware that these modes of representation often mix and even overlap in a single play or film. A hybrid between metonymic and metaphoric modes of representation is more common than any “pure” or “ideal” version of the two. My aim is to heighten the sensibility for these crossovers between metonymy and metaphor and not to advocate one instead of the other. If the emphasis falls more on the possibilities of metaphoric representation, it is because this mode has been the more neglected one thus far. Woolf herself was highly critical of metonymic modes of representation in which “a kiss is love. A broken cup is jealousy.” (Woolf 1994, 350). She mainly identified these metonymic modes with the emerging movement of cinema. Nothing much seems to have changed in mainstream cinema since, more than fifty years later, Lodge is still able to refer to Roman Jakobson’s differentiation that “drama is basically metaphoric and film basically metonymic” (quoted in Lodge 1977, 79).3 Metonymy is here understood as “poetry of association by contiguity, of movement within a single world of discourse” (ibid., 73). Within the coherent world of dramatic realism and film, gestures are often interpreted as “natural” rather than constructed or performed expressions of interiority. This follows a classical understanding of gestures in which “the

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movements of the soul find their natural expression in the movements of the body” (Kuba 2005, 130).4 “Natural” in this context is in itself a social, cultural and historical construction. What underpins this construction is the assumption of a stable framework of interpretation, the belief in an essential truth to which gestures can provide access. Gestures are “understood as a reflex of the movement of the soul” (ibid.). The body as the site of the gesture “was disciplined, trained and formed to serve as a signifier, but was not an autonomous problem” (Lehmann 2006, 162). The body was merely seen as a tool to create meaning, and its own materiality that manifests itself for example in sweat, shortness of breath, or an actor’s or actress’ particular way to move, remained secondary. Gotthold Lessing’s idea of the nuance as the ideal of natural acting is a good example of this and can be found when the actress playing the eponymous Sara Sampson settles her skirt with an “inconspicuous twitch” while dying (Kolesch 2005, 223). The twitch is seen as an expression of her soul at the state of death: the actress shows the character of Sara retaining a sense of order and propriety, a bourgeois breeding that is rooted so deeply that it becomes unconscious.5 The metonymic gesture favours such a focus on the small outward detail and its intricate relationship to the larger inner whole. Again we have a hierarchy, which Stanislavski’s statement that one has “to keep one’s body completely at the service of one’s feelings” underlines (Stanislavski 1981, 105). Gestural detail is subjugated to and ruled by the inner feelings. Jakobson also mentions this importance of detail: “the Realist author […] is fond of synecdochic details” (Jakobson 1995, 130). He relates it to the logic that underpins contiguity and leads to an overall coherence of life according to the assumed “natural” patterns of dramatic realism. In The Hours, the nonverbal aspect of acting is dominated by such realist and metonymic details, effacing the process of acting and claiming to open up a direct window to the character’s interiority. The film, itself an adaption from Michael Cunningham’s novel, uses Mrs Dalloway as an intertext to link the destinies of three women: Virginia Woolf (Nicole Kidman) in 1923 Surrey, Laura Brown (Julianne Moore) in 1951 Los Angeles, and Clarissa Vaughan (Meryl Streep) in 2001 New York. When Nicole Kidman as Virginia Woolf is writing her suicide note at the beginning of the film, we see the close-up of a hand. According to Jakobson as summarised by Lodge, close-ups are specifically metonymic (Lodge 1977, 79), and indeed the cramped hand is the ultimate signifier of the character’s suicidal despair. Even when verbal and nonverbal aspects of the performance are in contradiction, it is this very contradiction that becomes the focus of expression, the character’s interior “truth” in which

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the opposition of word and gesture is resolved. When Streep’s character Clarissa is visited by Louis Waters (Jeff Daniels), the ex-boyfriend of her dying friend Richard, she becomes increasingly agitated. Even though she firmly states “I’m not worried”, Streep’s facial expression clearly displays an inner tension. Together, her words and her facial expressions become signifiers of Clarissa’s inner turmoil, her conflicting emotions when faced with this friend from a happier past. Even rhythm can be interpreted metonymically, if the overall mode of representation biases the audience in favour of such a reading: shortly after this scene Clarissa’s violent and fast cracking of the eggs while cooking, underlined by the fast-paced, hard cuts, similarly signals her tension in Louis’ company. If we consider objects under the “criterion of manipulation” (Sofer 2003, 12, original emphasis) as the extension of gestures, an investigation of their use in the adaptations at hand will throw further light on their metonymic tendencies. Objects can come to partake of the character’s interiority, as Merleau-Ponty points out: if “the distinction between subject and object is blurred in my body …, it is also blurred in the thing” (quoted in Madison 1981, 98). In general, “objects largely work as scenic metonymies” (Honzl in Sofer 2003, 21). This can also be seen in Gorris’ film adaptation of Mrs Dalloway, where the objects help to create the historical and geographical setting. The umbrella that Mrs Dalloway (Vanessa Redgrave) carries has no special signifying function apart from contributing to suggest a ladylike, probably reasonably well-off character in Edwardian England. Similarly, the rifle, barbed wire and helmet of the opening sequence with Septimus Warren Smith (Rupert Graves) as a soldier in Italy are mere signifiers of war, and World War I in particular. They are not even manipulated as objects of real use by the characters. As a parallel to Clarissa’s cracking of the eggs in The Hours, Peter Walsh’s (Michael Kitchen) constant playing with his pocket knife indicates his nervousness, insecurity and latent aggressiveness. The knife is present in the novel as well, yet Woolf is more subtle and uses it more as a metaphor of Peter’s interiority. Where the film adaptation links the nervous opening and closing of the knife directly to Peter’s confession of being in love with a married woman, Woolf does not make such sweeping connections between a character’s inner life and his manipulation of objects. Peter’s “shutting his knife with a snap” (Woolf 1954, 46) might underline the finality of his thoughts (“so it is, so it is” (46)), but retains a greater opacity than the use of the knife in the film. Woolf hints at interiority through gestures and objects through the use of association, rather than disclosing it directly. Indeed, when Peter comes to reveal his love affair to Clarissa in the novel, “he actually pared his nails with his pocket-knife”

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(52), a manipulation of the object which suggests a more ambiguous mixture of unease and composure. The television version of A Room of One’s Own largely operates on the same metonymic principles as the adaption of Mrs Dalloway and The Hours, and it is safe to assume that these therefore also governed the original stage performance. It was especially praised for the “selfeffacing” performance of Eileen Atkins as Virginia Woolf (Peter 2001). Consequently, Atkins’ own personality was perceived to disappear behind the metonymic function of her performance of Woolf (her appearance, her mannerisms, etc.). The realist mode of the performance is clearly indicated by its setting—it was shot on the original location of Woolf’s lecture, Girton College in Cambridge; the theatre version showed a faithful reproduction of Girton’s Junior Common Room. When Atkins as Woolf describes the episode in which she tries to enter a college library to have a look at the manuscript of Milton’s “Lycidas”, she embodies the pose of the “guardian angel” with which a “silvery, kindly gentleman” bars her from the library (Woolf 1929, 7). While in Woolf’s text the image functions as a metaphor, the gestural language used to realise it in Garland’s film adaptation is a metonymy of this metaphor: Atkins opens her arms wide so as to suggest wings, but slightly bends her elbows so that her palms face outwards in a gesture of rejection. The theatrical adaption chose to find a direct, metonymic representation of the “guardian angel” (rather than the “kindly gentleman”). However, there is something more to this gesture than its metonymic representation. Its mixture of metonymy and metaphor confronts the audience with an idiosyncratic choice in which the physical reality of the performer asserts itself in addition to her fictional character. Alain Robbe-Grillet describes this potential of metonymy to shade into metaphor (which, in its plurality of worlds, represents an excess of meaning): What they signify remains obvious, but instead of monopolizing our attention, it becomes something added, even something in excess … because what affects us … are the gestures themselves … to which the cinema has suddenly (and unintentionally) restored their reality. (quoted in Leitch 2003, 157)

In this reassertion of reality, gestures cease to be mere metonymic functions of a particular meaning and assume their own, independent reality. Eileen Atkins performing Virginia Woolf is not Virginia Woolf: “her precise delivery and eloquent gestures [are] more compelling than the original” (John Thaxter 2001). In going beyond a pure “impersonation” of Woolf (which other reviewers detected), Atkins’ performance opens up

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new levels of meaning. What the audience sees is not a hypothetical “Virginia Woolf”, but precisely Atkins’ interpretation of this character in her performance.6 The frequency of representations of Woolf herself within stage or film adaptations of her work is in itself an interesting question: Why are the author and her biography so often set alongside her fictional creation? It seems that her inclusion is also part of the metonymic mode of realism: Woolf’s character comes to stand for the “authenticity” of her experience and its use is designed to lend a corresponding authenticity to her fictional creations. Hence, many adaptations construct themselves as metonymic references to the “reality” of Virginia Woolf’s life. In The Hours, the director uses montage and voice-over to suggest that the characters of Laura Brown and Clarissa Vaughan are direct expressions of Woolf’s mind. Early on in the film, shots of the three women sleeping are juxtaposed and thus aligned, and shortly afterwards the voice-over of Woolf writing Mrs Dalloway becomes the narration for a sequence in the other two characters’ lives. What is suggested is a contiguity of the women’s lives across time. Similarly, my adaptation of The Waves suggested a core of biographical “truth” in the novel by framing each section with quotations from Virginia Woolf’s diaries, a notion that I have come to find problematic. It is noticeable that even Katie Mitchell’s highly reflective, deconstructive and multi-layered adaptation Waves uses the author in a similar way. The show begins with the character of Woolf sitting on stage at the desk, reading first a biographical passage and then the beginning of the novel as if she had just written them. This is accompanied by the screening of waves crashing on the shore. As these episodes recur, the contrast to the rest of the performance becomes evident. Unlike the other characters, the character of Woolf is not deconstructed and split into stage and screen image (with one exception). Consequently, the audience does not witness her character as a process of construction but as a given. As in dramatic realism, actor and character here seem to merge into one auratic presence suggesting an outside reality that is more solid and coherent than the other creations on stage. This impression is reinforced by the fact that the waves on the screen similarly are the only image whose creation we do not witness—they are also drawn from and refer back to an outside reality. The apparent coherence and “reality” seems to suggest the character of Woolf as the source and origin, the focal point of all the different layers on stage. Mitchell’s production in this instance withdraws to the pure metonymy of dramatic realism. But let us return to the question of metonymy extending into metaphor. In Gorris’ Mrs Dalloway, we encounter a similar extension, but on the

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level of objects. When Septimus Warren Smith and his wife Rezia (Amelia Bullmore) are in Regent’s Park, we see a single black bicycle lying on the lawn just before Septimus has his vision of his dead fellow soldier Evans. Cut loose as it is from any manipulation by humans, from its use as a tool, the bicycle transforms from a clearly defined object of everyday use into a more ambiguous “thing” and thus from something full of functional metonymy related to its use into something open to the associative meanings of metaphor. In his essay “The Secret Life of Things (Virginia Woolf and the Matter of Modernism)”, Bill Brown describes the process of this return of the object to a more primordial state: Producing a thing—effecting thingness—depends, instead, on a fetishistic overvaluation or misappropriation, on an irregular if not unreasonable reobjectification of the object that dislodges it from the circuits through which it is what it typically is. Thingness is precipitated as a kind of misuse value. By misuse value I mean to name the aspects of an object— sensuous, aesthetic, semiotic—that become legible, audible, palpable when the object is experienced in whatever time it takes (in whatever time it is) for an object to become another. (Brown 1999, 1–2)

Our attention is refocused on the materiality of the bike (metal) and its state of abandonment, thereby affecting the transition from the world of the park into the vision of the war. The bicycle as metal debris is what connects the two, what allows the one to arise out of the other. In this “fetishistic overvaluation”, we create an excess of meaning that destabilizes our conventional meaning-making processes and puts us dangerously close to Septimus’ madness. We retain elements of this state of hyper-awareness, so that when we encounter the bicycle again, lying on the lawn of young Clarissa’s summer house during a flashback into a carefree, happier past, it has retained its excess of meaning and serves as a menacing prolepsis of things to come. By becoming a metaphor, the bike has reasserted its “thingness” over its habitual (significatory) function. This conjunction between metaphor and overvaluation in the above example works because the type of metaphor employed here is an open or creative metaphor in contrast to a closed or lexicalized one. Whereas the latter type designates associations that have been conventionalized through frequent use (for example calling a courageous person a lion), the former type is newly created in the context they appear in. Cognitive science has demonstrated that lexicalized metaphors “are apparently ‘stored’ in the left half of the brain and can be immediately recalled in a linguistic event; creative metaphors however “necessitate a slower, more complex processing and integrate more diffuse associations which stimulate an

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increased mental ‘creativity’ and possibly a more ‘visual’ way of thinking, and which are particularly typical of the right half of the brain” (Kohl 2007, 58). Theatrical realism makes use of this latter, creative type of metaphor. I have already touched on the possibility of harnessing the concept of metaphor for an attempt to find new modes of stage and film adaption for Woolf’s prose writings. In the following section, I will consider stage and film adaptations that have tried to integrate these modes into their underlying concept (in contrast to my earlier examples, which were restricted to specific instances within largely metonymic adaptations). I would argue that it is through metaphor that these adaptations can move “from a mimetic mode of representation to an abstract one” in a way corresponding to the movement of modernist fiction itself (Reviron-Piégay 2009, 320). Reviron-Piégay explicitly refers to David Lodge’s opinion that “the move from metonymy to metaphor […] is the hallmark of modernism” (ibid., 324). My adaptation of The Waves is situated on this trajectory with the aim to create a “multi-layered signification on stage” (Peters 2008, 7) by “translating […] inwardness into poetic images” (ibid., 14). When the recorded voice of Bernard (James Clarkson) describes how the girls had “acquired the look of startled foals” and how “Jinny was the first to come sidling up to the gate to eat sugar” (Woolf 1953, 175), the actress playing Jinny (Annie Julien) indeed comes over to Susan (played by Kate Harper), pretending to be a horse nibbling off some sugar from Susan’s hand. But the moment is extended and develops a sexual tension between the two characters—culminating in the sharing of a piece of sugar with their mouths—that is in excess of the situation described by the words. Metonymy as illustration (Julien pretending to be a horse) widens into a metaphor of the relationship between Susan and Jinny, their sexuality, and Woolf’s own sexuality. The relationship between the verbal and the nonverbal thus becomes contrapuntal: the production does not suggest that they can be synthesized in some kind of “inner truth” of the characters. This emerges most clearly when words and gestures are in opposition: Louis (Leon Silver) narrates how Susan “has the stealthy yet assured movements (even among tables and chairs) of a wild beast. She seems to find her way by instinct” (86). At the same time we see Susan (Kate Harper) bumping into the furniture, lost and confused. Unlike Clarissa’s verbalized calmness and embodied tension in The Hours, this opposition is not resolved into one meaning, but opens up a wide range of possible associations in the tension it generates. The film however includes one fully developed instance of metaphor when the water of the

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Ouse in which Woolf committed suicide floods Laura Brown’s hotel room where she is about to kill herself. Mitchell’s production of Waves similarly operates with a metaphoric mode of representation but is able to constantly link it back to the metonymical through the simultaneity of live performance and video. On stage, the significatory potential of gestures and objects is deconstructed. The movement of an arm no longer expresses a character’s interiority unproblematically, since the arm belongs to one actor but the voice and the words to another. The gesture on stage thus becomes a “pure” gesture, emptied out of meaning and thereby turning into a metaphor open to a multitude of associations. It displays what Agamben calls “the becomingvisible of the medium ” (Agamben 1992, 102). And yet, the metonymic potential of the gesture is simultaneously reinstituted on screen, where the arm’s movement rejoins voice and body to form a coherent entity. A result of Mitchell’s deconstruction of the actor’s performance is that it becomes visible as a process. The actor no longer merges with his or her character and its interiority. Instead, he or she allows the audience to see the hermeneutic process of entering into the character’s interiority, of constructing it in the first place. When the actors only put on the top part of a costume, this taking on of a role becomes most visible: merging with the character on screen, the actor qua actor in his/her lower half of the body remains visible on stage. Due to this excess of material, of physical presence, the performance as atmosphere gains greater weight in considerations of adaptation than if the performance hid itself behind a semiotic system that attempts to refer exclusively to the fictional world of the adapted material. Sabine Schouten explains: While the illusionist theatre aims at the identification of the audience with the characters and their actions and thereby at the more or less complete self-forgetfulness of the perceiver, the postdramatic theatre instead aims more strongly to direct the spectator’s attention towards himself and his manner of perception. (Schouten 2007, 85)

When body and object become metaphor, thereby cutting loose the way they come to mean something from the logic of contiguity, their atmospheric potential is heightened since the audience’s perception is refocused on their materiality:7 “Form, material, structure, colour and volume are therefore not only attributes defining a thing as such, but characteristics which mould or “tinge” the space around them through the specific nature of their presence” (Böhme in Schouten 2007, 28). The black bicycle in Gorris’ Mrs. Dalloway is one example where such an “ecstasy of things” creates an excess of meaning which surpasses their

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habitual (significatory) function and refocuses our attention on their materiality and its metaphoric potential. I tried to push such a transformational approach to objects further in my adaptation of The Waves. This does not mean that the metonymic function of objects is completely obliterated: white ribbons tied in the actresses’ hair are used to signify childhood, the dinner table and its objects stand for the meals the friends often have together, and so on. Indeed, the way the actresses pick up a notebook at the beginning of the performance while announcing the title of the book suggests a metonymic relationship not only between performance and novel (the performance tries to anchor itself to the novel through the object of the notebook, thereby trying to claim legitimacy), but also between the performances (and the novel’s) fiction and the autobiographical fact that is contained in the notebook and read out throughout the performance. However, at other points the performance expands metonymy into metaphor. In one section towards the end, Jinny (Annie Julien) describes how she is “now past thirty” (Woolf 1953, 124) and then speaks about an incident where someone “has broken from the wall. He follows” (126). She wonders if her red “scarf […] float[ed] and signal[led]” (126), thereby triggering this potentially frightening pursuit. Up to this point, the scarf fulfils a simple metonymic function in novel and performance. However, the performance already differs in one detail: whereas Woolf describes it as a “yellow scarf with strawberry spots” (126), I decided to use a completely red scarf, thus making the colour red, with all of its associations of sexuality and vigour, but also of blood and pain, more prominent. By refocusing the audience’s attention on the colour, I am opening up the scarf as a whole to metaphoric meaning. As a consequence, shortly afterwards, when Jinny falls to the ground like the “little animal that I am” (137) and the scarf spreads over her body, its colour reasserts itself. The scarf ceases to be functional (and thus metonymic—for example as a representation of Jinny’s stylishness) and instead becomes a metaphor of blood, linking itself to the images of hunt and rape contained in Jinny’s description. Returning to Böhme’s phrase, I would argue that this “ecstasy of things” contained in Jinny’s scarf in my theatre adaptation of The Waves or in the black bicycle in Gorris’ film version of Mrs. Dalloway creates a new access to interiority, separate from the standard metonymic approach and in fact closer to Woolf’s own strategies. This becomes most visible in her short story “Solid Objects”, which is essentially not about solidity, but about the fluidity of objects, about how they decompose and recompose themselves as the object of a new fascination. It is about the materials that make up the material object world, about the

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Woolf herself writes that “any object mixes itself so profoundly with the stuff of thought that it loses its actual form and recomposes itself a little differently in an ideal shape which haunts the brain” (Woolf 2003, 98). Objects and gestures are rarely treated as one-dimensional metonymies giving “proof” of a character’s interiority in Woolf’s writing. Instead, they assume the status of entities with their own inner life, a life that both blends with the life of the characters and remains separate from it. Consequently, Woolf displays a phenomenological view of the relationship between humans on the one hand, and their gestures and objects on the other. In such a state of being, “from the exteriority of matter, to the in-betweenness of life, to the interiority of mind, a continuum exists such that interior and exterior can no longer be separated into unique spheres” (Olkowski and Morley 1999, 5). Any hierarchical and strictly logical relationships start being dissolved in this phenomenological way of representation; therefore, one can no longer be the “proof” of the other. Instead, characters, gestures and objects both enrich and question their respective meaning. If theatre and film adaptations of Woolf’s work want to capture this aspect of her writing, they need to mix signification through metonymy (which remains viable, but only as one possible option and not as the dominant mode) with metaphoric signification in which an associative connection between the characters on stage, their gestures and the objects they use come to express their phenomenological flowing into each other. The director should see himself as a “bricoleur, ‘speak[ing] not only with things … but also through the medium of things,’ reordering debris the way a kaleidoscope, to borrow Lévi-Strauss’s figure, transforms bits of glass into a ‘new type of entity’” (Brown 1999, 7).

Works Cited Agamben, Giorgio. 1992. “Noten zur Geste.” In Postmoderne und Politik, edited by J. Georg-Lauer, 99–107. Tübingen: Edition Diskord. Billington, Michael. 1995. Review of To the Lighthouse. The Guardian, 7 January. Elsom, Jon. 1979. Post-War British Theatre. London: Routledge. Brown, Bill. 1999. “The Secret Life of Things (Virginia Woolf and the Matter of Modernism).” In Modernism/Modernity 6 (2): 1–28. Erickson, Jon. 2003. “Defining Political Performance with Foucault and Habermas: strategic and communicative action.” In Theatricality,

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edited by Tracy C. Davis and Thomas Postlewait, 156–185. Cambridge: Cambridge University Publishers. Haverkamp, Anselm. 1983. Theorie der Metapher. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft. Jakobson, Roman. 1995. On Language. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press. Kohl, Katrin. 2007. Metapher. Stuttgart: Metzler. Kolesch, Barbara. 2005. “Natürlichkeit.” In Metzler Lexikon Theatertheorie, edited by Erika Fischer-Lichte, Doris Kolesch, Matthias Warstat, 220–223. Stuttgart: Metzler. Kuba, Alexander. 2005. “Geste/Gestus.” In Metzler Lexikon Theatertheorie, edited by Erika Fischer-Lichte, Doris Kolesch, Matthias Warstat, 129–136. Stuttgart: Metzler. Lehmann, Hans-Thies. 2006. Postdramatic Theatre. Translated from German by Karen Jürs-Munby. London: Routledge. Leitch, Thomas. 2003. “Twelve Fallacies in Contemporary Adaptation Theory.” In Criticism, 45 (2): 149–171. Lodge, David. 1977. The Modes of Modern Writing. Metaphor, Metonymy, and the Typology of Modern Literature. London: Edward Arnold. Madison, Gary Brent. 1981. The Phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty. Athens: Ohio University Press. Mitchell, Katie. 2008. Conversation with Christopher Campbell, 12 January. http://www.nationaltheatre.org.uk/23945/podcast-episodes/katie -mitchell-on-emwavesem.html. Accessed 28 April 2013. Olkowski, Dorothea and James Morley. 1999. Merleau-Ponty, Interiority and Exteriority, Psychic Life and the World. Albany: State University of New York Press. Peter, John. 2001. Review of the revival of A Room of One’s Own. The Sunday Times, 25 November. Peters, Jens. 2008. “Granite and Rainbow. An Auto/biography of identities.” Unpublished portfolio for the MA dissertation. Reviron-Piégay, Floriane. 2009. “Translating Generic Liberties: Orlando on Page and Screen.” In Biography 32 (2): 316–339. Schouten, Sabine. 2007. Sinnliches Spüren. Wahrnehmung und Erzeugung von Atmosphären im Theater. Berlin: Verlag Theater der Zeit. Sofer, Andrew. 2003. The Stage Life of Props. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Stanislavski, Constantin. 1981. Creating a Role. Translated from the Russian by Elizabeth Reynolds Hapgood. York: Methuen. Steyn, Mark. 1988. Review of Orlando. The Independent, 25 March.

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Thaxter, John. 2001. Review of the revival of A Room of One’s Own. What’s On, 21 November. Woolf, Virginia. 1953 [1931]. The Waves. London: The Hogarth Press. —. 1954. Mrs Dalloway. London: The Hogarth Press. First published in 1925. —. 1993. A Room of One’s Own / Three Guineas. London: Penguin. First published in 1929. —. 2003. Solid Objects. In A Haunted House. The Complete Shorter Fiction, edited by Susan Dick. London: Vintage. First published in 1920. —. 2011. “The Cinema.” In The Essays of Virginia Woolf: 1925–1928, Volume 4, edited by Andrew McNeillie, 348–354. London: Hogarth Press. First published in 1926.

Performances A Room of One’s Own, Dir. Patrick Garland. Hampstead. 1989. The Hours, Dir. Stephen Daldry. Paramount Pictures. 2002. Mrs. Dalloway, Dir. Marleen Gorris, First Look International, 1997. Waves, Dir. Katie Mitchell. National Theatre. 2006. The Waves, Dir. Jens Peters. RADA and Drill Hall. 2008.

Notes 1

See Erickson 2003, 160. The discussion of fidelity in translation studies offers a useful parallel. 3 Jakobson’s here understands theatrical realism as the primary form of drama, as Lodge clarifies later on: “The naturalistic ‘fourth wall’ plays which have dominated the commercial stage in our era must be seen as ‘metonymic’ deviation from metaphoric norm which the drama displays when viewed in deep historical perspective.” (Lodge 1979, 82). 4 If not otherwise indicated, all translations are my own. 5 Here we see again that what was propagated and received as “natural” gestures were in fact a class-based code expressing its values and ideologies. 6 This is a different kind of acting, more closely related to performance art and postdramatic theatre. A discussion of the different modes of acting lies beyond the scope of this essay. The interested reader can find a detailed differentiation for example in Richard Schechner’s Environmental Theatre or the original German edition of Hans-Thies Lehmann’s Postdramatisches Theater. 7 We have already encountered an example of this in the analysis of Eileen Atkins’s performance. 2

CHAPTER FOURTEEN “NATURE ONCE MORE HAD TAKEN HER PART”: RECUPERATING ANON, THE COMMON VOICE AND THE UNCOVERED THEATRE SHELLEY SAGUARO AND LUCY TYLER This jointly-authored article, presented by a playwright and a literary critic, explores the correlation between Virginia Woolf’s views as expressed in her last work, Between the Acts, and those theories currently being developed in relation to contemporary outdoor performance and to the field of “ecoperformance” (Bealer 2012). In the unfinished companion pieces to Between the Acts, “Anon” and “The Reader”, Woolf charts what she sees as “the progress of Anon from the hedgeside to the Bankside” (Woolf 1979, 380), that is, the movement from “the minstrel” sauntering in the forest and “singing at the back door”, through the partially enclosed theatres of the Elizabethans, to the rise and dominance of the Reader. She notes the effect this had on theatre and drama generally (Caxton’s press, says Woolf, foretold the death of Anon) (384 and 385). As Woolf explained it, “the uncovered theatre where the sun beats and the rain pours” increasingly became replaced by enclosed spaces, including “the theatre of the brain” (398). The dominance of the writer and reader became established at the expense of “the anonymous playwright [who was] like the singer” (Woolf 1979, 398) the participatory audience and the various uncontrolled performance-specific elements, including interventions from outside, in all senses of the word. Brenda Silver, who edited and commented on these late manuscripts, noted that the novel Between the Acts enacted a reversal of the trajectory outlined in “Anon”: “in the novel, as opposed to the end of ‘Anon’, the audience moves out of the private library into the open air” (425), which constitutes a return to something “not yet dead in ourselves” (398): the vitality and communality of “the common voice singing out of doors” (382). In Between the Acts an

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outdoor pageant is convened, vulnerable as all outdoor performances are, not just to nature’s contributions but also, as with the drone of aeroplanes, to post-industrial interventions. Adele H. Bealer, in “Reading Out Loud: Performing Ecocriticism as a Practice of the Wild”, an essay published in 2012, some seventy years after Between the Acts, articulates theoretically what Woolf depicted in her posthumous publication of 1941: Investigating the cocreative performances of actors (human and nonhuman), and of the places-as-spaces within which those performances are enacted, offers a methodology that privileges neither nature over culture, nor culture over nature: performance theory recognises that performance occurs between the constructions of nature and culture, and in the very moment of their coconstruction. (7)

Bealer in turn endorses Edward Schieffelin’s view, which also echoes Woolf’s, that “text can never be duplicated in performance and performance is not reducible to text” (7). However, it is when she cites and refers to ecocritics Adam Sweeting and Thomas Crochunis that Woolf’s prescience is perhaps most readily apparent: If we understand space not as an inert given condition but as something called into being by human and more-than-human performance, the interconnectedness of seemingly disparate gestures, places and times will become visible. (8)

“Rather than relegating the natural environment to a passive role as scenic background or hapless victim,” Bealer invokes, like Woolf, shared performances that risk improvisation from a range of “actors”, and which are, literally, open performances: In this way, environment is not restricted to an objective place over there or over here; instead ecological space that coheres around cultural performers is more readily understood as an environing, enveloping and dialogically potent partner. (8)

This chapter, then, contends that Virginia Woolf’s “Anon”, “The Reader” and Between the Acts should be seen as illustrative and potentially influential texts for understanding a history of performance as well as contemporary “alfresco” theatrical practice. Though rarely read in this context, Between the Acts anticipates contemporary experiments with outdoor theatre and the contributions currently being made to “ecoperformance” and performance-related ecocriticism. When Adele Bealer asks: “How might performative environmental writing serve to

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create opportunities for intervention by collaborative subjectivities?” (13), our response is that Woolf has already provided an exemplar in the novel Between the Acts and in its anonymous, peripatetic and outdoor dramatist, Miss La Trobe.

A Case Study: “the common voice singing out of doors” Between the Acts was published posthumously in the year of Woolf’s death, 1941. Its setting is a single June day in southern England in 1939; much is familiar and consoling, but with aeroplanes overhead and the threat of invasion, there is also much that is dramatically alarming. An annual summer pageant is nonetheless being staged, and one very familiar worry is whether the weather will be fine enough for it to be performed outside, or if rain will force it into the barn. The hosts are the Oliver family of Pointz Hall, but the convener of the pageant is an outsider known only as Miss La Trobe. Miss La Trobe’s pageant is a play of the history of England up to the present day. As Woolf was finishing her novel with its embedded literary-historical pageant, she was turning her attention to a related project. In September 1940 she began to note in her diary plans for a “Common History book— to read from one end of lit. including biog; & range at will, consecutively” (Woolf 1977, 318), later described as “threading a necklace through English life and literature” (Silver 1979, 357). At the time of her death Woolf had almost finished the book’s introductory essay, “Anon”, as well as some other material referred to as “The Reader” and “Notes for Reading at Random” (Silver 1979, 356). As Brenda Silver, editor of these late manuscripts describes, during the last months and weeks of her life, Between the Acts and the reading for and writing of her “Common History book” were closely related. Much of her reading was linked to her plan to begin her history as she had begun the pageant in her novel—with the early forms of English literature and society, and with the anonymous men and women who created them. (Silver 1979, 357)

Woolf describes Anon as a wandering, “out of doors” troubadour, a figure also invoked by the name La Trobe; Anon belongs to a collective and oral tradition of song-making and story-telling: The voice that broke the silence of the forest was the voice of Anon […] the singer had his audience but the audience was so little interested in his name that he never thought to give it. The audience was itself the singer;

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In Woolf’s view, “it was the printing press that finally was to kill Anon” (1979, 384) although “the world beneath our consciousness” is “the anonymous world to which we can still return” (385). It is clear that Miss La Trobe, (“Miss Whatshername” (Woolf 1992, 177)), deliberately setting her play amidst the trees and amongst the swallows and starlings, recuperates the song-making instinct of the medieval minstrel and the sustained anonymity of the early-Elizabethan pageant-playwright. Interestingly, as early as 1929, Woolf was conjecturing about an anonymous, outdoor-inspired writer: “In its leaves she might see things happen. But who is she? I am very anxious that she should have no name” (Woolf 1980, 229, emphasis ours). Miss La Trobe, otherwise unnamed, convenes the summer pageant from “behind her tree” and, at the end of the event, chooses to be “invisible” wishing “to remain anonymous” (Woolf 1992, 172, 175). Again, consistent with “Anon”, the (human and more-than human) audience has, most often to its own surprise, taken its part in the performance. The outdoor performance includes both scripted and adventitious aspects: a gramophone chuffs albeit unreliably, its sounds distorted or intermittently erased by the breeze; the trees, swallows, weather, cows, take their part in effects that seem more apt than could have been conceived or stage-directed: the trees tossing and the birds swirling seemed called out of their private lives, out of their separate avocations, and made to take part (105) […] The view repeated in its own way what the tune was saying […] the cows, making a step forward, then standing still, were saying the same thing to perfection. (121)

“Nature once more had taken her part” notes a gratified Miss La Trobe at the end of the play, but so too had the aeroplanes in duck-like but ominous formation, with their particular resonance in a time of war and threatened invasion. “If one spirit animates the whole, what about the aeroplanes?” (178) muses one onlooker. The aeroplanes and the gramophone keep the play from being an anachronistic throwback to the medieval minstrelsy celebrated in “Anon”. Miss La Trobe’s event is not simply a nostalgic or exclusive endeavour. In fact, the mechanical aeroplanes are more likened

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to than differentiated from all the other ad hoc and al fresco contributors that provide uncalculated meaning and effect. When the aeroplanes “interrupt”, cutting the word “opportunity” in two, the audience is affected and reflective: “the aeroplanes interrupted. That’s the worst of playing out of doors… Unless of course she meant that very thing” (180). Thus, the outdoor performance allows meanings to be made through the adventitious and even, inconvenient, “interruptions” that cannot be scripted, excised or controlled. The “outsider” (in many senses of the word), Miss La Trobe (“where did she spring from?”) (Woolf 1992, 53), began planning the pageant and choosing its summer setting months before its performance. Although the hosts have a contingency plan that if it rains, the players will move to the barn, her preference has always been for an outdoor setting and her vision, even on a leafless winter’s day, seems clear: “the very place!” (52 and 69), with the audience on the terrace that “Nature had provided” (10), the actors “winding in and out between the trees” (53 and repeatedly), “among the bushes a perfect dressing room” (53) and the director, “behind her tree” (73 and repeatedly). However, although Miss La Trobe is clearly Woolf’s enactment of the figure she posits in “Anon”, she has, like all Woolf’s artist figures and like Woolf herself, agonies and ambivalences. In moments of angst, she doubts her vision with its pre-Caxton elements and resorts instead to longing for the stability of a written text and the safety of distance from an audience. Audiences were the devil. O to write a play without the audience—the play. But here she was fronting her audience. Every second they were slipping the noose. Her little game had gone wrong. If only she’d a backcloth to hang between the trees—to shut out cows, swallows, present time! (161)

When the dreaded “real” rain falls, however, it “completes the emotion”, which is aptly lachrymose: “Down it poured like all the people in the world weeping. Tears, Tears. Tears” (162). “That’s done it,” sighed Miss la Trobe […] The risk she had run acting in the open air was justified (162) […] the reticence of nature was undone, and the barriers that should divide Man the Master from the Brute were dissolved. (165)

It is this idea of control by “Man the Master” that Woolf is at pains to undercut. In “Anon” she identifies the ways in which Caxton’s printing press is part of the post-Enlightenment need to “stamp [one’s] own name” (Woolf 1979, 397), not just on artefacts but on so-called discoveries, flora,

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fauna, mountains and other geographical features of the “other than human” world. In her June 1939 pageant, Miss La Trobe recovers the song-making instinct of the medieval minstrel and the sustained anonymity of the earlyElizabethan pageant-playwright. She is not the medieval troubadour her name invokes, but someone situated in her own historical moment, affected by “a stream of influences”, “tugging, obscuring, distorting” (Woolf 1979, 403). Woolf’s “fanciful” coinage for forces, economic, cultural and political among them, was “Nin, Crot and Pulley” (404). Nature, as a concept, in particular, is similarly affected by these forces. Woolf has often been celebrated for her depictions of the natural world, which are detailed, but never naïvely romantic. In Between the Acts she is attentive, not just to descriptive observations of natural phenomena, but to the ways that Nature and the natural world—of which humans are a part but, within which, humans set themselves apart—have been objectified and man-handled by the hubris of humans, post-Caxton and postEnlightenment. Woolf opens the novel not just with attention to the human impact on the landscape with its “scars”, “made by the Britons; by the Romans; by the Elizabethan manor house; and by the plough […] in the Napoleonic wars” (Woolf, 1992, 3–4), but also to the ways in which “Nature”, socalled, is thoroughly misapprehended. Thus, the humans set the house in “the hollow, facing north” (“to escape from nature” but are nonetheless vulnerable to being snowbound (Woolf 1992, 7)), “when beyond […] there was this stretch of high ground” (9). “Nature had provided”, but “man built his house in a hollow” (10). The seen and unseen of “Nature” is also addressed; Woolf invokes aspects of nature that, because they escape “registration” (21), are ignored or ignored because a domesticated apprehension of the natural world affects what is registered. Thus, Mrs Sands enters the barn and deems it “empty”. Repeatedly the word “empty” is used alongside references to “minute nibblings and rustlings”, “whiffs of sweetness and richness” and an omniscient narrator’s descriptions of mice, insects, a butterfly, noises. All these “she never saw” (“had there been a cat, she would have seen it […] But there was no cat. The Barn was empty”) (91). Writing (post-Caxton, post-Anon) has its part to play in this occlusion for, as Jonathan Bate puts it, in a written-text-oriented world, “the environmentalist’s loving gaze upon ‘nature’ entails a forgetting that ‘nature’ is a word not a thing” (Bate 2000, 248). Further, the naming of “nature” or, in Heidegger’s terms, its “enframing”, has rendered it simultaneously (and singularly) identified and concealed: “Enframing

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means making everything a part of a system, thus obliterating the unconcealed being there of particular things” (Heidegger in Bate 2000, 254). Modern technology turns all things into what Heidegger calls a “standing reserve” […] When a mountain is set upon, whether it is made into a mine or a nature reserve, it is converted into standing-reserve. It is then revealed not as a mountain but as a resource for human consumption—which may be tourism’s hungry consumption with the eye as much as industry’s relentless consumption of matter. (254)

Once again, we find an unforced correlation in Between the Acts: Woolf presents the “view” from Pointz Hall in ways that illustrate it as just such a “standing reserve”. Different views on “the view” are expressed throughout the text, but “the view” now dictates: “to quote Figgis’s Guide Book (1833) ‘it commanded a fine view over the surrounding country’ […] the Guide Book told the truth. 1833 was true in 1939 […] If Figgis were here now, Figgis would have said the same […] They looked at the view; they looked at what they knew” (Woolf 1992, 48). Nonetheless, viewing “the view” engenders different responses, including Giles’s rage “with old fogies who sat and looked at views over coffee and cream when the whole of Europe was […] bristling with guns” (49) or the “wild child” Mrs Manresa’s pretence of admiring the fine and picturesque view when really she finds it, in its “repetition”, “senseless, hideous, stupefying” (61). In relation to the play, however, the view is an actor, like the trees, birds, cows and rain: “The view repeated in its own way what the tune was saying” (120). The title Between the Acts leads of course to much speculation about what “acts” are being referred to—and what “betweens”—acts of war (this being the last stage of an interregnum between the two World Wars), human acts, conscious and unconscious, variously scripted acts (on the stage or in everyday social and sexual interactions), acts of perception, acts of imaginative conception, the acts of and interventions by the “more than human” world. The summer pageant was something of a convention in “middle England” from the 1900s and Woolf can be seen to be using just such a benign convention in juxtaposition to the threat and terrors of war. However, when considered alongside its companion piece “Anon”, it reveals a more thoroughgoing analysis of the ways in which writing, war and “Nature” have much in common, not least in “Man the Master”. Writing as world war was once again looming, Woolf’s play is also political. She saw the necessity of displacing the predominance of “Man the Master” of War (tellingly, the pageant leaves out the British Army:

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“what’s history without the Army, eh?” demands Colonel Mayhew (141)) and of print culture: facts and figures, scripts, authority and power, authorship. Thus, Woolf’s outdoor pageant in Between the Acts is in part a recuperation of those aspects of Anon’s world still accessible, “the world beneath our [contemporary] consciousness” (Woolf quoted in Silver 1979, 385), and an enactment of the views expressed in “Anon” and “The Reader”, representing two ends of a performative spectrum. Brenda Silver notes: “in the novel, as opposed to the end of ‘Anon’, the audience moves out of the private library into the open air in what may be an attempt to reenact the ‘attitude of mind’ associated in the past with the ‘common art’ of the playhouse” (1979, 425). However, at the close of the novel the family sits reading, having moved back indoors after the outdoor pageant; they have reverted to their text-based preoccupations. They become a “circle of the readers attached to white papers” (Woolf 1992, 195)—reading variously and respectively: letters, bills, “the morning paper—the paper that obliterated the day before” (194) but had, for this generation, become “a book” and the monumental Outline of History. Each of them, nonetheless, has been affected by the “orts, scraps and fragments”, the diversity and colourfulness of the “vanishing play”, not fixed by print or exclusive authorship, uncertain in meaning and utterly, vitally inclusive— capacious and adventitious. And while the family returns to the library (where assembled they had begun the day), Miss la Trobe is nearby, gestating her next project: Words of one syllable sank down into the mud […] The mud became fertile. Words rose above the intolerably laden dumb oxen plodding through the mud. Words without meaning—wonderful words. […] Suddenly the tree was pelted with starlings […] She heard the first words. (191)

Miss la Trobe’s creative processes are described with the not uncommon metaphor of “fertile mud”, but this is not simply an analogy. The starlings are not metaphors but cocreators and participants; they are diegetic and part of the mise-en-scène. In providing this example of cocreation, Woolf sets out the principles of ecoperformance, inclusive of human and more than human contributions, and undermining the authority of an individual author, director or actor. The interstices “between” are as important as the Acts planned. Thus Woolf offers a compelling example of outdoor theatre and its practitioners’ methodologies, which can be compared (and are useful) to a contemporary practice of the art form.

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Contemporary Outdoor Theatre Practice: A Contested Space Woolf’s “Anon” and Between the Acts both call for—and are, in their own right, examples of, outdoor theatre as it is currently, and has historically been, practiced in the UK. In this sense, they form part of a critical backdrop relevant to the practice of outdoor theatre, and they are particularly helpful when attempting to understand both contemporary ecocriticism in performance and the contested cultural space in which outdoor theatre currently exists. Outdoor theatre, once the primary theatrical art form, has now become the marginalised “other” of indoor theatre. The practice itself is known by many names—for example, environmental art, outdoor performance, ecoperformance and landscape theatre (Wilkie 2000a, 151)—but in many ways it continues to be defined by what it is not; it is defined in opposition to mainstream indoor theatre. Consider Jez Butterworth’s Jerusalem (2010). Jerusalem is intended for indoor performance, even though it is set entirely outdoors. The action occurs in a woodland clearing occupied by an outsider named Rooster. Rooster, an itinerant drug dealer, is ostracised as a public menace. He is banned from the nearby town, where the township is holding a fête. The town’s youth avoid this official pageant and congregate away from it with Rooster. Once the drugs have taken effect, Rooster tells stories to the intoxicated youths. These stories are wildly extravagant mythic folklore narratives he has witnessed in the English wilderness. Like Woolf’s Anon, the peripatetic troubadour whose voice was once heard throughout the British countryside, Rooster is a spokesperson entertaining a “drop in” audience. When Phaedra, the drugged-up, teenage Fairy Queen of the fête, sings “Jerusalem” as preface, she initiates the discord that runs through the play; the act of telling stories is a worthless pastime—a pastime of addicts and drop-outs. In this sense, Jerusalem at once performs and challenges the redundancy and loss of Anon’s methods which Miss La Trobe attempts to reinstate. Butterworth’s point is that theatre audiences have lost the value of being entertained by “Anons” or “Miss La Trobes” or “Roosters”, out-of-doors; they have lost the once valued combination of story and countryside working cocreatively. Jerusalem is a concept audiences no longer understand because theatre is a concept with no relationship to the out-of-doors. And yet, paradoxically, Jerusalem is itself performed indoors. Therefore, Jerusalem exemplifies, in both content and form, theatre’s contested relationship with the outdoors.

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Of course, it is not surprising that Jerusalem, despite its content, should be performed indoors (and correspondingly “Anons” and “Miss la Trobes” and their artistic creations are marginalised). After all, theatre practitioners are often at pains to stress the difficulty of performing in the open air and advise against it on the grounds of the practical and logistical difficulties involved.1 Even the unstoppable theatre practitioner, Miss La Trobe struggles with the variability of working outdoors as much as she admires the cocreativity of nature and play in post-show discussion. Logistical difficulties are often conceptual barriers to many who would engage in the art form: one stereotype of the British summer is the village fête (or sports day or tea party) advertised with the precautionary reminder that the parish hall will be available in the event of rain. And yet, despite the unpredictability of the British weather, numerous weather-dependent activities have evolved on this island and continue to be performed here. It is quite accepted that from time to time the rain will interrupt the Lord’s test match, and it was only in 2009 that the All-England Club erected a roof over one of their tennis courts. Why should the unpredictability of the outdoors—and the weather is only one example of the exterior world’s changeability—be deemed so prohibitive to theatre? The answer may in part be economic. Many playwrights, play-makers, audiences and box offices conceptualise the cultural practice of “theatre” as a specifically indoor, inner city, commercial experience. Performances are staged where they are most easily accessible to the most customers— the inner city—in buildings that afford spectators a leisure event as well as an artistic experience—buildings designed as spaces of consumption. In considering Jerusalem, then, we can see why the capital gain associated with theatre’s grandeur, luxury and special effects—especially when the play transferred from the Royal Court Theatre to the West End—could not easily be carried outside. As Jen Harvie observes pessimistically, “Theatre in the city [is] where citizens and audiences seem to be inevitably caught in an oppressive, exploitative, uncreative culture with no opportunity to escape its hold, challenge its exploitations and be creative” (Harvie 2009, 43). By Harvie’s definition, Woolf’s Miss La Trobe, a regional, outdoor ecoperformer, like her real-life successors, presents an antithetic form of theatre to the one to which we have become accustomed—to the one which houses, however paradoxically, plays which are set outdoors, but aren’t staged there—like Jerusalem. There are, of course, artistic as well as economic reasons why even plays about outdoor theatre should be performed indoors. In part, perhaps, the explanation lies in the concept of theatrical artifice as something to be reproduced perfectly. Roland Barthes contends that theatre is associated

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with death “however ‘lifelike’ we strive to make it” (Barthes 2000, 31). The aliveness and changeability of nature (the very cocreation Woolf advocates in “Anon” and Between the Acts) threatens to interfere with a predetermined, perfected, “dead” performance. In contrast to the “fullness” of the outdoors, performance places should be “empty”; they should be unchangeable containers that hold dramatic performance, but do not, in themselves, inform that performance, detract from it or alter it. Miss La Trobe’s imagined legacy and inspiration, then, is to offer insight into the methodologies and outcomes of “living”, devised and immersive ecoperformance. Her practice, and the successful reception of her play, suggest that however marginalised outdoor theatre is, the connection between nature and culture, through cocreation, is the very reason to celebrate, rather than marginalise, the art form. But how far has British theatre gone to recognise the value of cocreation in the staging of theatrical works? In the USA, the Institute of Outdoor Drama oversees the production of plays and festivals in outdoor settings, and protects, nurtures, and ideologically informs the practice. There is no equivalent organisation in the UK. Lacking any centralised structure, outdoor performances in the UK are theoretically and practically diverse and divergent. However, it is possible to suggest two main traditions: the “urban” and the “alfresco”. “Urban” theatre is a term often used to refer to experimental, often nonnarrative, self-referential performance which makes use of the cityscape to establish strong reference to place (Jenkins 2012). Conversely, however, “alfresco theatre” is a term that is deployed in the marketing, advertising and reviewing of traditional, narrative and canonical, outdoor performance at established, historical, scenic or semi-rural venues such as The Globe, The Dell in Stratford-Upon-Avon, Regent’s Park, The Scoop, public parks and National Trust country homes. Alfresco theatre typically relies on productions of well-known plays in carefully chosen, or deliberately constructed, outdoor settings. Alfresco performances, which is a term that could be used to describe Woolf’s example in Between the Acts, are often written up as a compilation of regional, seasonal, family orientated events, or under a generic “arts” banner (Dunford and Gilling 2008; Stott 2010). When outdoor theatre is advertised, attempts are made to appeal to audiences’ sense of rustic authenticity rather than real artistic innovation (Wilkie 2002, 151). Outdoor theatre company Rain or Shine’s 2012 Cheltenham performance of Shakespeare’s As you Like It was a good example of alfresco practice. The performance was staged in the grounds of an open air swimming pool. Audiences were invited to picnic in front of the

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temporary stage, providing their own chairs and blankets. The set itself was minimal, but an elevated platform made from wood had been erected, presumably for ease of viewing. Before the interval, natural light allowed the audience to see the players. For the second half, temporary electric lights lit the stage. The play itself was a well-rendered adaptation of Shakespeare, but it took inspiration from the London 2012 Olympics (ongoing at the time the play was produced). Indeed, a notable feature of this experience was a shared (or assumed) understanding of national identity. People had gathered to watch the work of a nationally-treasured writer, and the event illustrated a self-conscious awareness—both in the play and among the audience—of “British” outdoor experience (complete with anoraks, flasks, blankets, and strawberries). The construction of Britishness (or, more accurately, Englishness) was enhanced by dramaturgical additions such as references to the Olympics, and the comedy derived from Madame Le Beau—an exaggeratedly French character in a play otherwise transposed to England. Finally, of course, the play took place against the backdrop of the English landscape. The main attraction, however, of alfresco theatre is the very cocreation that Woolf promotes, and suggests is lost from indoor, scripted works. Although the plays staged are usually well-known in this vein of outdoor performance, the variables, possibilities and limitations that the change in context promotes are what stimulate interest. In Rain and Shine’s As You Like It, for example, the representation of the forest of Arden was clearly informed by the birdsong, swallows, sunset and trees enclosing the performance area. Although the cocreation in alfresco theatre radically challenges both definitions of theatricality and aesthetic representation, the art form is still sometimes perceived as saccharine and, perhaps, dowdy. More recently, attempts have been made to shake the stereotype by emphasising cocreation and the importance of place in the staging of outdoor works. For example, The Globe’s 2013 tour of Shakespeare’s war plays to their real-life locations render the art form (and the plays) as visceral and as shocking as any new-writing theatre’s production.2 And, like Miss La Trobe’s play, generally, alfresco theatre appropriates landscape as a scenic backdrop against which to place its figures.3 Perhaps it is only in this last point—in the importance of place—that alfresco theatre is connected to the other strand of outdoor performance: that which is sometimes described as “urban”. Reminiscent of Woolf’s Anon’s peripatetic and random acts, “urban” theatre refers to performances that are designed to operate counter-

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culturally. Where alfresco theatre typically attracts a theatre-going, ticketbuying audience, urban performance is often designed for an unknown and changeable “drop in” audience, and it usually occurs in an unadorned, outdoor location away from predefined theatrical structures.4 These urban performances can be static—appealing to audiences unfamiliar with the proscenium and black box, but used to the idea of sedentary spectating— or peripatetic—asking its audience to physically engage with narrative progression, often journeying through cities highlighting the hidden stories of the cityscape. Most strikingly similar to Woolf’s critiquing of post Caxton Press theatre (where the use of scripts inspired the art form to become increasingly static), urban performances honour the political dissidence of a heterogeneous, non-scripted, fluctuating (non) use of words to entertain. For example, Moving Stories Theatre Company arranges non-scripted tours around people’s places of work or homes where non-actors tell their real, autobiographical stories ad-lib and with interjection.5 Performances in this vein are sometimes called “unintended theatre”. Conscious of spectators who may not consider themselves part of the “audience”, they “play up” to unstaged surroundings. Augusto Boal called these easily-ignorable works “invisible theatre”; there is no obligation on the audience’s part to enjoy or engage (2008). Considering even a small selection of the performances categorised here as “urban” suggests the diversity of this alternative theatrical practice. Acting as antithesis to mainstream theatrical formations in the capital, The Greenwich and Docklands Festival has programmed some of the most revered of recent outdoor theatre works, such as Punchdrunk’s The House that Jack Built (2009). The festival is an example of inner-city outdoor performance which functions as countercultural to indoor, mainstream events, but there are many more, increasingly impromptu expressions of uncovered theatre in the city. Recent examples include Suzanne Gorman’s show Moonwalking in Chinatown; site-specific paint performances in Bankside Transformed as part of the Merge Festival 2012; Elizabeth Streb’s bungee-jumping dancers; Jeremy Deller’s Sacrilege and Mark Rylance’s pop-up What You Will (Gardner 2012). What all these performances have in common—and what they share with alfresco performances—is an appreciation of place as an active part of the performance. This directly contradicts the chameleon spaces that indoor theatres can offer plays and performances. In this sense, outdoor theatre is often allied with site-specific performance generally. Often, outdoor theatre is so inflected with location that it is marketed as “bespoke”—performances which have been generated from active observance of context, rather than ignorance of it (such as Miss La Trobe’s

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site-specifically designed piece for Pointz Hall). If uncovered theatre has a relationship with site-specific theatre in terms of localising event in reference to place, it can also be site-specific through a direct interaction with the community. Participative outdoor practice involves large-scale calls for the mass participation of communities to aid in the telling of a story that is relevant locally. One such theatre company that specialises in participatory outdoor performance is Wildworks: a theatre company that, for thirty years, has been creating non-building based work. Basing performances in collective community spaces and found landscapes, Wildworks recruits players from the community to make expansive pieces in a collective space, usually a park, where extradiegetic elements coalesce with and inform the performance. The company’s practice reflects and embraces the host communities from which it draws its meaning. In many ways, Wildworks’ contemporary practice is strikingly similar to Miss La Trobe’s practice of alfresco theatre in Between the Acts: both productions are performed in garden spaces, and both deploy members of the community to enact the play. Contemporary Urban theatre, correspondingly, is very similar to how Woolf defines Miss La Trobe’s peripatetic, pop-up, theatrical endeavours. Woolf’s examples, of both outdoor forms, comment on the marginalisation, or even death of, the art form. In this way, Woolf has anticipated the contested space in which contemporary outdoor theatre practice exists. Both Woolf’s texts convey urban and alfresco practice—the ways in which both modes of outdoor theatre attempt to join the play to the place in which it is staged. But what can the texts relay about a practice of cocreation in outdoor theatre—that play and place, or nature and culture, exist as one?

Recuperating Outdoor Theatre Although Woolf’s texts have not directly influenced contemporary outdoor theatre, they suggest a practice of cocreation, and advocate a resurgence of outdoor performance, which has occurred over the past fifty years. In a guide for the makers of outdoor theatre, practitioner Nina Ayres describes the practice as “in no way a new phenomenon [… but] fast becoming one of the most talked about and popular forms of theatre in the modern day” (2008, 9). The resurgence of outdoor theatre is, of course, partly due to developments in other related art forms, for example, public art, land art, (street) installation, performance, culture jamming, conceptual art and community-based art. To the extent that this essay allows, the contemporary making of outdoor plays has already been discussed, but it

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now seems important to examine the reasons why outdoor theatre has reemerged to the extent that Ayres suggests—and in the ways which Woolf advocates. Perhaps one way to assess the reinstatement of outdoor theatre is to examine the origins of contemporary practice after the near cessation of outdoor theatre between the mid-nineteenth and mid-twentieth century, when, due to theatrical and technological developments such as electric lighting, theatre had been almost entirely interiorised. However, in the 1920s, modernist theatre creators Adolphe Appia and Edward Gordon Craig spearheaded new experiments with stage configurations, which made the proscenium arch appear outdated. Their ideas are a testament to the growing interest in reconceptualising playmaking during this period, but practitioners were still not taking plays outside (Ayres 2008, 22). Indeed, there may not be one specific event or circumstance that propelled the exteriorisation of theatre in the twentieth century. However, the history of the outdoor events staged in Regent’s Park serves as an example of the reversal in the evolution of theatre practice that Woolf calls for in “Anon”. The outdoor theatre season in Regent’s Park is now an annual practice and one of the most mainstream examples of outdoor theatre in the UK, but how did this practice originate? The decision to stage outdoor theatre in Regent’s Park was due to the disastrous run of Benito Mussolini’s play Napoleon: A Hundred Days at the New Theatre (now the Noel Coward). The early closing of the play, after just thirty-two performances, left the theatre with an immediate need to recover through a new production. The theatre produced Twelfth Night instead, and transferred it to a makeshift theatre in Regent’s Park in 1932. This anecdote offers us a localised event from which to chart the reinstating of outdoor practice. Indeed, one could argue that only by evoking such a profoundly theatricalised national identity (i.e., staging Shakespeare in a quintessentially-British outdoor location) could British Theatre as an institution appease and atone for the staging of the Italian dictator’s play. However, the revival of outdoor theatre cannot be straightforwardly related to this event or even to the closure of London theatres during World War Two. After 1945, audiences were just as keen to return to indoor theatre. The history of the Drury Lane Theatre, in particular, offers us an example of audiences returning indoors to spectate during this period. Despite the damage sustained to the theatre, Noel Coward’s Pacific 1860 and Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Oklahoma! were produced and well attended in the damaged building in 1946.6 Indeed, the stoical staging of plays at theatres during this period of rehabilitation may account, in part, for the acquisition of other derelict or dilapidated spaces in which plays would be performed

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in subsequent years. For example, Wilton’s Music Hall in the East End of London, now a thriving cultural venue, was restored in such a way as to maintain its dilapidated aesthetic. The use of found (often forgotten or rundown) space has become increasingly popular. The Royal Exchange in Manchester, The Roundhouse in London, Tramway in Glasgow, and Theatre Absolute in Coventry are examples of successful theatres in found spaces. Although these new encounters between play and (found) place demonstrate the breaking away of theatre from traditional indoor stages during the early twentieth century (and a recognition of the possibilities of cocreation), they don’t fully account for the partial reversal of theatrical evolution and the re-emergence of outdoor theatre. Perhaps one of the most significant catalysts for new outdoor practice came from the director Peter Brook in 1960. Brook provided a critical vocabulary for the existing objections to the traditional indoor theatre, and he offered an alternative vision of what the theatre site ought to be in the twentieth century: a bare, empty container, which does not add meaning to, or detract meaning from, the play. I can take any empty space and call it a bare stage. A man walks across this empty space whilst someone else is watching him, and this is all that is needed for an act of theatre to be engaged. Yet when we talk about theatre this is not quite what we mean. Red curtains, spotlights, blank verse … a theatre of box offices, tip-up seats, footlights, scene changes … and little more. (Brook 2008, 1)

Here Brook articulates the mood of twentieth-century theatrical experimentation; in the 1960s, practitioners such as Bablet, Copeau, and Grotowski advocated a turning away from traditional indoor spaces. This began as a radical avant-garde aesthetic, but by the end of the twentiethcentury, the black box—a minimal studio space—had become the dominant container for new theatrical work. Indeed, the low cost adaptability of the black box facilitated the increasing popularity of fringe theatre and new writing (which was also stimulated, of course, by the beginning of the annual Edinburgh International Festival in 1948). The black box offered one democratic response to an art form otherwise entrenched in bourgeois convention and encoded meaning. The flexibility of space afforded by the black box has promoted manifestations of artistic and aesthetic freedom that would not have been possible beneath proscenium arches. It was devised as a space in which to stage a less artificial—less fraudulent—theatre: a space that forces a self-aware acknowledgement of artifice and performance.

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However, this ran contrary to the new aesthetic realism being offered to television and film audiences. So, simultaneous to the emergence of black box theatre, the outdoor play, with its unavoidable inclusion of the real (real mise-en-scène, real conditions, etc.), reasserted itself as another viable option and considerable interest in the practice re-emerged.7 Practitioners started to pay attention to spectators’ increasing cynicism towards the artificiality of indoor theatre experiences, and, increasingly informed by eco-awareness, some found, in outdoor theatre, an alternative. Pearson remarks that “[outdoor performances] have the characteristics of a complex living thing”, and he quotes Clifford McLucas, artistic director of the Welsh performance company Brith Gof, who states that outdoor performances “provoke a whole array of questions about reality and pretense” (116). Practitioners in the twenty-first century started to directly contradict Brook and negotiate the real in performance through referencing, rather than neglecting, site and context. Wiles discusses this moment as “the passing of modernism, and the retreat from what Lefebvre terms ‘abstract space’” (2003, 265). There emerged the argument that a play cannot and should not be separated from its historical and dimensional place—that, as Cathy Turner puts it, “A place and what is made there bleed into one another” (2004, 373). The outdoor site offered the play-maker the opportunity not only to be site-inclusive, but to disentangle the performance from the complex codes of all previous theatrical enterprise. Outdoor performance offered, instead, the opportunity to, as Pearson puts it, “work in a landscape lacking authoritative viewpoints” (2010, 82) and Woolf’s opposition to the “Master” certainly correlates with this assertion. In outdoor theatre, Pearson claims, “Landscape is constitutive rather than merely scenic backdrop. Not only are other occupants apparent and cognitively active, it may also change its nature instantly” (2010, 82). This relating of play to place gave practitioners the critical rationale for once again working outdoors, but also allowed for artistic and pragmatic freedom which had been—and in many instances still was—lacking from indoor theatre. According to Pete Talbot of The Rude Mechanical Theatre Company: Working outside gives us a great deal of independence […] We can work in a field if we want and split income with the birds […] Being outdoors with your community may be an ancient rite. The village green is a holy place. I think we are closer outdoors, far more than we ever could be indoors, to people who may be intimidated by conventional theatre spaces. But the usual theatre-goers are there too, so we are bringing people together. (quoted in Ayres 2008, 23).

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Although not all outdoor theatre is responsive to site, or positions itself in opposition to indoor theatre, the recent resurgence of the practice is coded with the language of escape and returning to the forgotten as Woolf signifies in the very naming of Miss La Trobe to sound something akin to “troubadour”. A more recent example of this encoding of escape and returning to the forgotten can be seen in the National Theatre’s outdoor space at the front of the theatre building which is called “The Breakout Space”. Although this essay has argued that outdoor theatre is marginalised and has a contested position in relation to the larger, indoor theatre market, perhaps the contested position of outdoor theatre is not as passive as it first appears. Outdoor theatre actively seeks to be outside— both literally and figuratively. It uses the language of escape to qualify and maintain this position. Jonathan Petherbridge of the London Bubble Theatre Company explains the vocabulary of escape surrounding outdoor theatre practice when he says “Romantically I like to think theatre started out of doors then sort of got caught. After a period of confinement it became tamed” (quoted in Ayres 2008, 21). To follow Petherbridge’s analogy, perhaps outdoor theatre is now liberated and seeks to remain so. However outdoor theatre self-identifies, or is identified, the practice is now a cornerstone of British theatre. In addition to the events already mentioned, London hosts a wealth of other outdoor theatre events, including those performances staged in Holland Park and at the Cannizaro Park Open Air Theatre Festival. And outdoor production is just as popular in regional theatre: outdoor theatre venues which have benefitted from the resurgence include Nottingham Castle, Newstead Abbey, Creswell Crags, Thoresby Park, the Weald and Downland Open Air Museum in Chichester, Pergola Open Air Theatre, Grosvenor Park Open Air Theatre, Willow Cottage Garden Theatre, Brownsea Island Open Air Theatre, and Sheldon Open Air Theatre. This section will end, as both of Woolf’s texts end, by contemplating the future of outdoor theatre, cocreativity and ecoperformance. The practice is revitalised, but that does not mean it will endure. Financial climates are of course the most powerful gate-keepers of artistic practice and consumption, but Pearson indicates a new theatrical concern which may impact just as much on the practice: Increasing environmental awareness and growing concerns over degradation and climate change will doubtless impact upon site-specific performance, encouraging practices directly empathetic, or politically demonstrational, or proactive in espousing the recycling of materials and moves toward carbon-neutrality. (2008, 103)

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Outdoor space, which has always been in flux, is set to change more radically than at any time in the age of theatre. Will a changing environment be more conducive to outdoor performance, or will it once again drive theatre audiences indoors? Perhaps the importance of outdoor theatre will only be fully realised when performers step into the garden (or whatever by then is left of it) to confront the effects of environmental damage.

Towards a Woolf-inspired Contemporary Ecoperformance It could be said that what drives a play out of doors is a certain foolhardiness or perversity in the face of inevitable risks and discomforts. Another assessment, one posited by Woolf in Between the Acts, “Anon” and “The Reader”, is that it represents humility and collectivity, as Pete Talbot has claimed, and that these are essential aspects to enact and reenact. As Miss La Trobe showed with her mirrors and reflecting fragments held up to the audience, it is time for the convictions of anthropocentrism to be reframed, decentred and reflected side by side with fellow cohabitants as part of a collective audience of co-creators. This Woolf both explained in “Anon” and demonstrated (albeit as text) in Between the Acts: “the play was a common product, written by one hand, but so moulded in transition that the author had no sense of property in it. It was in part the work of the audience” (1979, 385). Or, to cite a more recent claim: Theatre and performance studies’ theorists are increasingly concerned with the role that nature performs in our shared biotic and social life […] rather than relegating the natural environment to a passive role as scenic background or hapless victim […]. (Bealer 2012, 20)

Theorists developing ideas now collected under the banner of ecopoetics or ecocriticism emphasise the profound importance of the approaches being discussed which Woolf, much earlier, saw both as necessary and urgent in a time of crisis. Whereas ecocritics and ecofeminists have often noted Woolf’s attention to the natural world, generally and, in particular in Between the Acts,8 until now Woolf’s potential contribution to contemporary ecoperformance has been overlooked. Douglas E. Christie, in a book published in 2013, cites Henry David Thoreau, a precursor to Woolf and a widely acknowledged influence in contemporary ecocritical discourses. He refers to Thoreau’s belief in “the possibility of social transformation” (Christie 2013, 65) that can come about by virtue of “the radical dispossession and reorientation of the self that takes place in the

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presence of the wild” (65). Woolf would certainly agree that “such relinquishment […] leaves one less inclined to claim knowledge and power, more open to and curious about the life of the other, more capable of exchange, reciprocity, love” (65). Such is surely the next act in the history of outdoor performance, to which Woolf’s contribution could be significant.

Works Cited Ayres, Nina. 2008. Creating Outdoor Theatre: A Practical Guide. Wiltshire: Crowood. Barthes, Roland. 2000. Camera Lucida. Berkshire: Vintage. Bate, Jonathan. 2000. The Song of the Earth. London: Picador. Bealer, Adele H. 2012. “Reading Out Loud: performing Ecocriticism as a Practice of the Wild.” In Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, 19 (1): 5–23. Boal, Augusto. 2008. Theatre of the Oppressed. London: Pluto Press. Brook, Peter. 2008. The Empty Space. London: Penguin Classics. Butterworth, Jez. 2010. Jerusalem. London: Nick Hern Plays. Cantrell, C.H. 2000. “The Flesh of the World: Virginia Woolf’s Between the Acts.” In The Green Studies Reader: From Romanticism to Ecocriticism, edited by Laurence Coupe, 275–281. London: Routledge. Christie, Douglas E. 2013. The Blue Sapphire of the Mind: Notes for a Contemplative Ecology. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Dunford, Jane, and Juliana Gilling. 2008. “Alfresco Arts.” The Guardian, 4 May. http://www.guardian.co.uk/travel/2008/may/04/uk.theatre. Accessed 10 February 2013. Gardner, Lyn. 2012. “Why We Need More Open-Air Events like Piccadilly Circus Circus.” The Guardian. 3 September. http://www. guardian.co.uk/stage/theatreblog/2012/sep/03/piccadilly-circus-circus. Accessed 4 December 2012. Hartnoll, Phyllis, ed. 1983. The Oxford Companion to the Theatre (4th edition). London: Oxford University Press. Harvie, Jen. 2009. Theatre and the City. China: Palgrave Macmillan. Hickling, Alfred. 2013. “Shakespeare on the battlefield: The Globe Theatre Step Out.” The Guardian. 9 July. http://www.guardian.co.uk/ stage/2013/jul/09/shakespeare-battlefield-globe-theatre. Accessed 10 July 2013. Jenkins, Mark. 2012. The Urban Theater. Germany: Die Gestalten Verlag. Maran, Timo. 2006. “Where do your borders lie? Reflections on the semiotical ethics of nature.” In Nature in Literary and Cultural

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Studies: Transatlantic Conversations on Ecocriticism, edited by Catrin Gersdorf and Sylvia Mayer, 455–476. Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi. Pearson, Mike. 2010. Site-Specific Performance. Bodmin: Palgrave Macmillan. Phipps, Alison M. 1999. “Risking Everything: Political Theatre for Mass Audiences in Rural Germany.” In New Theatre Quarterly 15 (58): 109–123. Runciman, Rosy. “A History of the Noel Coward Theatre.” http:// www.delfontmackintosh.co.uk/Theatres/NoelCowardTheatre/NoelCow ardTheatre_History.asp. Accessed 10 March 2013. Saguaro, Shelley. 2013. “‘Something that would stand for the conception’: The inseminating world in the last writings of Virginia Woolf.” In Green Letters 17 (2): 109–120. Saguaro, Shelley. 2009. “Telling Trees: Eucalyptus, ‘Anon,’ and the Growth of Co-evolutionary Histories.” Mosaic: A journal for the interdisciplinary study of literature 42 (3): 39–56. Silver, Brenda. 1979. “‘Anon’ and ‘The Reader.’: Virginia Woolf’s last Essays.” Edited by Brenda Silver. Twentieth Century Literature, 25 (3/4): 356–441. Stott, Sally. 2010. “Outdoor Theatre needs a Breath of Fresh Air.” The Guardian. 25 June. http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/theatreblog/2010/ jun/25/outdoor-theatre-shakespeare?INTCMP=SRCH. Accessed 25 November 2012. Turner, Cathy. 2004. “Palimpsest or Potential Space? Finding a Vocabulary for Site-Specific Performance—The exploration and the performance of space and place.” In New Theatre Quarterly 20 (80): 373–91. Tyler, Lucy. 2012. “Come to Where I’m From.” Paines Plough Theatre Company. —. 2013. “The Recipe for Belonging.” Eleven Places Theatre Company. Walker, Charlotte Z. 2001. “The Book ‘Laid upon the Landscape’”. In Beyond Nature Writing: Expanding the Boundaries of Ecocriticism, edited by Karen Armbruster and Katherine R. Wallace, 143–161. Charlottesville & London: University Press of Virginia. Waller, L. Elizabeth. 2000. “Writing the Real: Virginia Woolf and the Ecology of Language.” In New Essays in Ecofeminist Criticism, edited by Glynis Carr, 137–156. London and Toronto: Associated University Presses. Westling, Louise. 2006. “Literature, the Environment and the Question of the Posthuman.” In Nature in Literary and Cultural Studies:

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Transatlantic Conversations on Ecocriticism, edited by Catrin Gersdorf and Sylvia Mayer, 25–47. Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi. Wildworks Theatre Company Website. http://www.wildworks.biz/. Accessed 20 March 2013. Wiles, David. 2003. A Short History of Western Performance Space. Singapore: Cambridge University Press. Wilkie, Fiona. 2002a. “Mapping the Terrain: a survey of Site-Specific Performance in Britain.” In New Theatre Quarterly 18 (70): 140–161. —. 2002b. “Kinds of Place at Bore Place: Site-Specific Performance and the Rules of Spatial Behaviour” New Theatre Quarterly 18 (71): 243– 261. Woolf, Virginia. 1979. “Anon” and “The Reader.” Edited by Brenda Silver. In Twentieth Century Literature, 25 (3/4): 382–441. —. [1941] 1992. Between the Acts. Edited by Frank Kermode. Oxford: Oxford University Press. —. 1980. The Diary of Virginia Woolf: 1925–1930, Volume 3, edited by Anne Olivier Bell. London: Hogarth. —. 1985. The Diary of Virginia Woolf: 1936–1941, Volume 5, edited by Anne Olivier Bell. Harmondsworth: Penguin.

Notes 1

See for example Artaud quoted in Phipps 1999, 118. See Hicking 2013. 3 See Pearson 2010, 49–50. 4 See Mason 1992. 5 See Moving Stories Theatre Company Website. http://www.movingstories.org.uk. Accessed 10 July 2013. 6 See Hartnoll 1983, 230–232. 7 See Ayres 2008, 22 8 See Cantrell 2000; Walker 2001; Waller 2000; Westling 2006; Saguaro 2013. 2

CHAPTER FIFTEEN THE LEGACY OF VANESSA BELL AND THE HEART OF BRAND BLOOMSBURY HANA LEAPER The Bloomsbury group were consummate raiders, referencers and recyclers of their own familial and cultural inheritances. It is only fitting, therefore, that their influences crop up in many forms in the cultural output of subsequent generations. This essay will focus particularly on “borrowings” from group linchpin Vanessa Bell’s oeuvre, uncovering her fingerprints in a diverse range of works and projects. Bell is Britain’s first “Old Mistress”, and her work in its many forms— from her Avant Garde abstractions of the 1910s to her proto-feminist dinner sets of the 1930s—have made a much deeper and more lasting impact on English culture than current levels of critical acknowledgement and acclaim recognize. A central theme of her work was the creation of what I have elsewhere termed her “matrifocal archive” (Leaper 2013, 24), a body of work that creates an alternative and female-focused family history. This project was visual, haptic, and moved backwards and forwards between generations with multiple authors and ongoing potentialities. Work by a multiplicity of artists, including the Euston Road school artists (Claude Rogers, Victor Pasmore, William Coldstream and Graham Bell), Judy Chicago, The Singh Twins, Lydia Corbett, Sophie MacCarthy, Cressida Bell and Anna Fewster, links directly to her work and ideas adding to this archive in playful, imaginative and unexpected ways. Bell’s contributions to British visual culture have been wide-reaching and have influenced and enabled many more practitioners who may not even know her name, or only associate it negatively with a misconceived notion of “Bloomsbury.” This essay is dedicated to evaluating the ways in which Bell’s work and life have both directly and indirectly challenged, influenced and inspired the work of a wide range of subsequent artists and designers. It will uncover the artists who are consciously and overtly adding to Bell’s body of work—perhaps even to her matricentric archive—

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and the design brands using her name on a much more commercial basis, and question how their range of approaches are contributing to her legacy. In many ways, Bell’s eventful life and famous connections have obscured her contribution to the canon. She has been referred to as the “Queen Bee” of the Bloomsbury group around whom “the others buzzed” (Noël Annan quoted in Giachero 1998, 168). She painted many of them, and was a muse to both the artists and writers who gathered around her family at her Sussex home, Charleston. In her book Bloomsbury Pie: The Making of the Bloomsbury Boom, Regina Marler charts the development of a Bloomsbury industry from the 1960s onwards. She introduces the work by acknowledging the strong emotional responses the term Bloomsbury elicits, stating this is “not a book about the Bloomsbury group so much as the emotions surrounding the idea of Bloomsbury, and the industry that fuels those emotions.” (Marler 1997, 6). Marler traces how both fans and critics of Bloomsbury (“enthusiasts” (5) and their “popular conceptions” (6) of the group, versus “scholars and critics” (6) with their “scholarly investigations” (6)) created an industry, and popular mythology, of the group. This brand then, is a somewhat curious construction, created posthumously around the group, rather than actively from within, and based largely on an emotional response, rather than through a strategic business plan.1 Never having been concretely laid down, its perceived values are nebulous. They are most readily perceived as friendship, free thought, and the passionate advocacy of truth, art and love. Donald J Watts argues that Cambridge philosopher G.E. Moore’s views on truth, humour, only saying things worth saying, and expressing them in a clear and adequate manner, were a strong influence on the group and “provide[d] philosophical strength for some of Bloomsbury’s most seminal convictions.” (Watts 1969, 119). Bell’s memoir of the group in its early stages corroborates the importance of Moore, but is imprecise about the depth and direction of his influence. Instead it suggests youth, talk and new social freedoms as more solid foundations for their friendship: What did we talk about? The only true answer can be anything that came into our heads. Of course the young men from Cambridge were full of the ‘meaning of good’. I had never read their prophet G.E. Moore, nor I think had Virginia but that didn’t prevent one from trying to find out what one thought about good or anything else.2 The young men were perhaps not clear enough in their own heads to mind trying to get clearer by discussion with young women who might possibly see things from a different angle. At any rate talk we all did, it’s true, till all hours of the night. Not always, of course, about the meaning of good. Sometimes about books or paintings or anything that occurred to one […] we seemed to be a company of the young, all free, all beginning life in new surroundings, without elders to

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whom we had to account in any way for our doings and this was not then common in a mixed company of our class. (Bell 1998, 101–2)

The popularized brand history is much more concrete, and is synonymous with a simplified story of Bell’s life. Virginia Woolf began to engineer this history when she recorded her sister’s assertive move from the restriction and darkness of their Victorian upbringing to Bloomsbury (“the most beautiful, the most exciting, the most romantic place in the world” (Woolf 1985, 184)) where Bell instituted a Post-Impressionist world of bright colours and progressive social and sexual codes. In her memoir “Old Bloomsbury”, Woolf mythologises her sister’s actions: Vanessa had wound up Hyde Park Gate once and for all. She had sold; she had burnt; she had sorted; she had torn up. Sometimes I believe she actually had to get men with hammers to batter down—so wedged into each had the walls and the cabinets become […] The family which had seemed equally wedged together had broken apart too […] And Vanessa— looking at a map of London and seeing how far apart they were—had decided we should leave Kensington and start life afresh in Bloomsbury. (Woolf 1985, 184)

The next stage in the story of Bloomsbury is Bell’s establishment of the group’s countryside base at Charleston during World War One, where it is popularly, if not entirely accurately, believed she spun her bohemian web of friends, family, sex, art and the good life. This world has been chronicled in many photographs, paintings and memoirs of life there, and in the preservation of Charleston as a house museum. A sense of bohemianism can be found in the letters and diaries of those who visited, many of which are published in the collections Charleston, Past and Present, and A Cézanne in the Hedge and Other Memories of Charleston and Bloomsbury.3 There are several facets to the branding of Bell’s perceived lifestyle, the first of which has resulted in a simplified, saleable image of Bell, popularized by ventures directly related to her estate or selling her actual work, like Charleston House Museum and The Bloomsbury Workshop. The second facet is more atavistic and tends to regard Bell as a cultural icon who has become public property, rather than as an individual artist whose name, image and motifs are unique markers of an individual identity. It uses Bell’s name, or the “Bloomsbury” label to sell products that are sometimes tenuously connected (or altogether unconnected) to her practice through invoking generalised connotations of what she represents. On the one hand, this illuminates Bell’s cultural importance and the enduring appeal of an idea of her and her work, but on the other it tends to

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propagate an image of her that is not necessarily in keeping with her actual values or achievements. Adding a certain irony to her position as emblematic of Bloomsbury taste, values and history is the fact that Bell was deeply sceptical of the notion of a unified “Bloomsbury Group” identity and problematized it several times in her writing. She was adamant that after 1914, the popularly held conception of the group no longer existed and argued that when “the critics of today abuse Bloomsbury, let them in the interests of accuracy distinguish it from all that came after the 1914-18 war.” (Bell 1998, 113). She was also critically cognisant of the developing mythologisation of the group and protested against the fictions created by this process: “criticise or abuse if you will, but while there are still those who remember, take the trouble to get your facts right.” (114). Not only has Bell’s personal history become emblematic of the group’s, but her various romantic relationships with Clive Bell, Roger Fry and Duncan Grant, her familial relationships with Woolf and her children, and her numerous portraits of the group including Lytton Strachey, Virginia Woolf, Roger Fry, Duncan Garnett, Mary Hutchinson, Leonard Woolf and a group portrait The Memoir Club, place her absolutely at the centre of this constellation.4 Her position within the dynasty-turned-brand and the “emotions surrounding the idea of Bloomsbury” (Marler 1997, 6) often obscures her work and means that the wider implications of it within the visual canon have been overlooked. Bell’s resistance to the inaccurate labelling of Bloomsbury is somewhat poignant given that the brand image surrounding her has engulfed her actual practice, to the extent that up to this point there has been extremely limited critical consideration of her actual work and stature as an individual artist.5 The emulation of her style by major international artists and iconic British design firms attest to how powerful her work is— even whilst it remains critically undervalued and little known by the public at large. Her evaluation as an independent artist, it seems, has suffered in inverse proportion with the success of the Bloomsbury industry surrounding her. The first strand of Bell’s legacy I want to investigate is being propagated by artists related to Bell or Bloomsbury who have been directly influenced by her oeuvre and who have, in various ways, contributed to the continuation of a Bloomsbury “industry.” “Bloomsbury” has been seen as a poisonous legacy by some, including Bell’s daughter, Angelica Garnett, who felt herself “incestuously bound up” (Garnett 1995, 163) in and unable to escape from the power of the world her mother had created. Rather than supported and cherished by her privileged upbringing,

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Garnett felt herself caught like a particularly exquisite spider in a matrixial maze, and found herself living in “a tangled web of repressed emotion” (5) long after Bell’s death: As a daughter […] I was Vanessa’s exclusive property, and as a female I was led to believe that I would need all the protection she could provide […] I had to deal with the entire weight of Vanessa’s personality—difficult to resist as she was used to having the last word in all situations of importance. (5)

Just as Bell and her sister could never fully rid themselves of their own beautiful Mother’s spectre and found Julia cropping up again and again in their painting and writing, Garnett was haunted by her mother. She later saw her marriage to David Garnett (David “Bunny” Garnett had been the lover of her father, Duncan Grant, at around the time Angelica was born) as an ineffective attempt to try to liberate herself from her mother’s influence. Unfortunately, it had only complicated her already entangled relation to her inheritance: My effort towards liberation from Vanessa had ended in a feeling of guilt and its concomitant paralysis. Although she was now over a hundred miles away, Vanessa was omnipresent. (159)

Garnett describes Bell as an “enchantress”, and admits that on being summoned to her deathbed she had hoped “her absence would reveal a new perspective in which I might be able to find freedom.” (171). This was not the case and she found herself extending her mother’s legacy by writing repeatedly about her Bloomsbury upbringing in an autobiography Deceived with Kindness: A Bloomsbury Childhood, The Eternal Moment (1998) a book of essays about Bloomsbury characters, and a collection of autobiographical short stories The Unspoken Truth (2010). Garnett participated in several of Bell’s decorative schemes and produced a wide range of her own work, but although a talented artist, her work remained undeveloped. This lack of confidence extended to Garnett’s four daughters who cut beautiful, tragic figures in the on-going Bloomsbury saga.6 Happily, Henrietta Garnett is now a published author whose works include a biography of her great-great-step-aunt, Anne Thackeray Ritchie, and several other of Bell’s descendants have built successful and fulfilling artistic careers. Though these artists are highly independent, the precedent of a grandmother who was one of the most brilliant and innovative artists of the Twentieth Century has had an unavoidable influence. All three of Quentin Bell’s children have embraced their inherited talents and the Bloomsbury legacy to forge successful

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creative careers, whilst avoiding being overshadowed by the family name. Julian Bell is a painter and writer, Virginia Nicolson a writer, and Cressida Bell a successful designer.7 Three artists inspired, but not swamped by Bell, whose work is sold by the shop at Charleston, agreed to discuss their experiences of following in her distinct footsteps: Bell’s granddaughter, designer Cressida Bell; the granddaughter of her great friends Molly and Desmond MacCarthy, potter Sophie MacCarthy; and letterpress artist Dr Anna Fewster. During our discussion in her Clarence Mews studio/mini factory in July 2011 Cressida pointed out that she never really knew her Grandmother (Bell died in 1961) and did not realise her artistic significance until she was much older: “Nobody talked about her much. Duncan was the painter.” As her parents became involved in writing Virginia Woolf’s biography it became apparent to her that her family were somewhat unusual “and we all got incredibly bored by it.” This generational distance seems to have enabled Cressida to work within Bell’s field without being suffocated by it. Interestingly in terms of my argument that critical receptions of Bell have been impeded by her proximity to other Bloomsbury group members, she notes that “Vanessa always seemed to play second fiddle” to both Woolf and Grant. As a child she remembers spending a good deal of time at Charleston in the holidays, playing with Grace and soaking up the decorations. Whilst certain that these visits had a profound effect on the development of her artistic sensibility, Cressida maintains that this was indirect and unconscious. When clients occasionally ask her to “do Bloomsbury” she warns them that the results won’t be a complete re-creation, but will contain elements of her own unique style. In some respects she finds it irritating that some of her more targeted “Bloomsbury” pieces are so popular when she would rather concentrate on her own original work, but on the other hand, she recognizes that a ready-formed market is a useful thing. Confident in her own work and strengths, the weight of artistic tradition does not worry her too much. In fact, the chance to work closely with it (entering into Bell’s matrifocal archive in the process) has allowed her to gain penetrating insights into her grandmother’s work. Making a copy of the table at Charleston for a tablecloth gave her an opportunity to examine Bell’s design processes where she found “certain weak elements—if she’d been my pupil, I’d have told her to change.” She regards her grandmother as a “wonderful painter”, but claims to dislike Bell’s Omega designs and is firmly convinced that many of her own designs are much better. Whilst Cressida’s work would not look out of place at Charleston (it is sold in the shop there), and it has a similar

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freehand, free-spirited feel to Bell’s work, none of the motifs are identical and Cressida’s work has a much more professional “finished” feel to it. In terms of what she has gained from her painter forebear Cressida is frank: “If it doesn’t move, I paint it, which I get from my family background, but the biggest influence” she says laughingly, “is the double ‘ss’ of my name”!

The Woman and Mandolin and Red Isis, copyright Cressida Bell, www. cressidabell.com8

Potter Sophie MacCarthy also spent time at Charleston growing up and remembers clearly Bell’s portrait of her grandfather, Desmond MacCarthy, there. While in conversation with the author in July 2011 she recalled “playing outside with Cressida and Virginia and being more interested in haystacks than people.” “Bloomsbury” she asserts “was something simmering in the background and not something I was fully aware of or immersed in.” Despite training initially as a sculptor and then a potter in the 70s, MacCarthy “only discovered decoration and colour in the mid-80s when I started doing patterns and free figures … which was a tremendous release and relief.” This work is beautifully expressive, full of rich colour, free-hand figures and energetic patterns. Although the awareness of her Bloomsbury connections had not been too powerful growing up and she had not set out to create intentionally “Bloomsbury-esque” work, “something must have seeped in” as her style was identified as sympathetic to Charleston and the shop contacted her to stock her work. In 1992 she was offered a residency there, and she solidified her connections with people and place by staying with the Bells. The residency proved to be another turning point. Her work up to this point had a Bloomsbury “vibe”, but she was not sure what would happen

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to her work in the Charleston environment. Spring arrived around the same time as MacCarthy and she found the landscape of the Sussex Downs drew her in “completely”. She “put aside pattern and went abstract” with gestural, rolling, landscape-inspired works which she associates more with other Sussex artists like Howard Hodgkin and Ivon Hitchens than Bell.9 This was a “very freeing up experience” during which she discovered “the endless possibilities of pattern and colour and looseness.” The critical response was enthusiastic, but MacCarthy soon found it was insufficiently commercially viable and has had to focus the majority of her energy on more decorative work, with patterns and representational imagery in order for her business to flourish. She regards this residency as an important moment in her career when the twin influence of atmosphere and environment inspired her to explore the potentialities of colour and form— also primary concerns in Bell’s work. She feels that although her work can no longer be classified as “Bloomsbury-esque”, the decorative quality within it still enables her to sell work through the shop: “There is no distinctive Bloomsbury legacy in me, more a consciousness.” Another beneficiary of spending time at Charleston is letterpress artist Anna Fewster who resided there between September 2005 and September 2009 and still works there as a tour guide and workshop tutor. Fewster has been fascinated with the house since her mother took her there for the first time aged 15, and jumped at the opportunity of an AHRC Collaborative Scholarship with the University of Sussex, to do Ph.D. research on and in the house. Cressida Bell’s, Sophie MacCarthy’s and Fewster’s early encounters with Charleston all point to the power of these early experiences on their artistic directions. This overwhelmed Bell’s daughter, who felt she was trapped in “the tangled web” of Bloomsbury, but provided a powerfully evocative and inspirational point of reference for these other artists for whom the experience was less all-encompassing. Fewster’s original project was a doctoral thesis titled “Bloomsbury Books”, but in the four years she spent in Vanessa Bell’s studio studying the books designed, illustrated, printed, and bound by the Bloomsbury group at the Hogarth Press and the Omega Workshops, she became increasingly interested in the ways in which the visual and verbal interact on the page. In an interview with the author in July 2011 Anna remembered: In the middle of writing a chapter about the influence of typesetting on Virginia Woolf’s fiction I decided to buy myself a press and teach myself to print. While my finished thesis sits on a shelf, the outcome of my research has developed into a letterpress printing business, through which I produce limited edition books, broadsides, and stationery.

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She found it a very inspiring place to work: “just being in the rooms significantly shaped and informed my approach, and I became more and more interested in the domestic space as a place of shared craft activity”, but is in two minds about its function as a museum and marketplace: As a tour guide, I see how much people enjoy the house, and how profoundly important it is for many Bloomsbury fans to make the “pilgrimage” to Charleston and its surrounding landscape. But equally it always seems a shame that this means it has to be a museum, and not a workspace for living artists.

She believes there is much to be learned from Charleston—in terms of sexual politics, the value of progressive domesticity over the avant-garde, and anti-industrial methods of production—and that the more people that have access to this, the better. On the other hand, she also finds that the conservative nature of heritage sites sometimes seems at odds with these values. Fewster reveals that Bell and Grant’s influence on her work has been very significant, particularly their illustrative woodcuts and cover designs for the Hogarth Press and their decorative work. She feels that the “Bloomsbury Industry” is a powerful international industry, but that it “can tend to reduce and simplify meaning, aesthetics, and politics.” On the positive side “it offers a sense of community and shared understanding to many, and is hugely beneficial for Bloomsbury inspired artists to be able to tap into a fatastically keen existing market.” She finds it is very much harder to sell her non-Bloomsbury related work and her best selling works are her Bloomsbury Silhouettes, Bloomsbury Bookplates, and Bloomsbury Notecards, with her primary market being the USA, where much of the “Bloomsbury Industry” is focused. She intends to move further away from stationery, and focus more on publishing limited edition illustrated books by living writers (and very much inspired by the publications of the Hogarth Press) but finds it is much more difficult to sell products not associated with Bloomsbury. A more unlikely impact of Bell’s work has been on “past-modern” contemporary artists Amrit and Rabindra Singh.10 Of Indian descent, The Singh Twins grew up on the Wirral and are some of the region’s most successful contemporary artists. During Liverpool’s Capital of Culture celebrations in 2008, they exhibited a specially commissioned work Art Matters: The Pool of Life at the Bluecoat Gallery. Amidst the colourful profusion of instantly familiar figures, places and events depicted in this work, stands a lone, nude woman sharing a theatre box between two of English history’s most recognisable icons, Shakespeare and Queen

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Elizabeth II. This figure has been copied, without modification, from Bell’s 1917–1918 painting The Tub. Bell’s grandmother, Maria Pattle Jackson, and mother, Julia Prinsep Stephen, had been born and brought up in India, though her mother lived there only a few years before returning to England, but she had few connections with Liverpool. So why did the Singh Twins include this figure and why might they have considered Bell’s work to be an important element of contemporary Liverpudlian cultural life? One answer is that both Bell and the Singh Twins work with issues of heritage and inheritance. The Singh Twins” “past-modern” approach brings together multiple sets of cultural influences, “challenging existing stereotypes and redefining generally accepted, narrow perceptions of heritage and identity in art and society”.11 Like Amrit and Rabindra Singh, Bell was a woman whose work has challenged categorizations and redefined the remit of female artists. The wide range of cross-cultural references and influences in these artists’ work (for example, between Victorian and Modern in Bell’s work, and India and England in the Singh Twins’), and their close working relationships (Bell with Grant, the twins with one another), make them interesting counterpoints—particularly given their vastly different cultural contexts.12 Between September 2007 and March 2009, The Tub was displayed at Tate Liverpool in the “The Twentieth Century, How it looked and how it felt” exhibition. Although there were plenty of pictures of women, Bell was one of the few female artists included in this otherwise wide-ranging and varied show. The Tub (depicting Mary Hutchinson, Clive Bell’s mistress, at Charleston) was shown with a series of other female bathers, a popular subject for Modernist artists. However, unlike these other works where the voyeuristic gaze of the male artist can be felt as a violatory presence on the unaware female body, Bell’s bather seems both to be in harmony with her surroundings, and to register the presence of the artist. The shapes of her body echo the shapes of the tub, the colours of her skin match the tones of the floor; she faces towards the artist calmly plaiting her hair, but is not “displayed” for the viewer. Within Art Matters: The Pool of Life, this figure stands out for her stillness and solemnity amongst the other brightly coloured and gilded celebrants. Although stylistically The Singh Twins’ work is very different from anything within Bell’s oeuvre, this inclusion seems a fitting tribute to a woman who in many subtle ways, such as her emphasis on the domestic lives of middle class women, her determination to succeed as a working mother and her drawing together of high art and craft-forms to create bohemian interiors, has been instrumental in shaping the way the twentieth century looked. Bell’s figure is enshrined within the work as an important cultural icon,

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and thus the Singh Twins propose that the woman who painted it has also attained iconic status in the English cultural landscape.

Art Matters: The Pool of Life, copyright The Singh Twins, www.singhtwins.co.uk

Also suggestive of this status are several collections issued by major design houses that draw on Bell’s name or aesthetic. During the restoration of Charleston it was agreed that some of the original fabrics at Charleston would have to be replaced. Iconic English firm Laura Ashley were approached and director Nick Ashley, already an admirer of the Omega Workshop and of both Bell and Grant, offered to both “provide the fabrics as a donation to Charleston and to buy the copyright of the designs to be

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produced commercially.” (Ashley quoted in Arnold 2010, 68). Diana Reich (Charleston’s publicity director during this period) describes how distinctions “between the fabrics that were re-created especially for Charleston and those which entered the Laura Ashley commercial range” (Reich quoted in Arnold 2010, 69) were to be maintained. “The colours and some details of the design were not to be the same”, although Charleston and Ashley both felt that “they should correspond as closely as was reasonably practicable, in terms of material, colour, scale of repeat and graphics, to the originals” (69). Most of the designs chosen for replication were from the industrially produced commercial projects of the 1930s, Grapes, Grapes Border, West Wind, and Urn and Abstract, except for White, an Omega fabric. Nick Ashley’s prior admiration of Bell and Grant’s work was not only a great piece of luck (as Reich put it: “one of those serendipitous events, frequently associated with the restoration of Charleston” (68)), but a sign of their cultural standing. In the late twentieth century Laura Ashley was one of Britain’s most influential design houses, globally recognisable for its brand of aspirational “Englishness”. It was at its peak in the 1980s when Nick Ashley, himself a designer, eagerly embraced this opportunity to reissue these designs under the Laura Ashley banner.13 The success of the Laura Ashley brand can be traced back to a new era of English design that Bell was a vital part of in the 1930s. The firm followed on from the success of this movement within the domestic market, and is associated globally with an English country garden aesthetic. In 1993 another major British design firm, Mulberry At Home, a branch of the emblematically British fashion house Mulberry, produced the “Bloomsbury Collection” consisting of fabrics and objects that were purposely in the spirit of Charleston. Mulberry have not responded to enquiries about the collection, so it is difficult to fully analyse the connection and exact significances of their adoption of Bloomsbury, but the firm’s founder, Roger Saul, claimed in The Independent, 9 January 1994: “It seemed like a logical step to come to Bloomsbury. It seemed warm and summery and we like the freedom and spirit of it.” In the same article Caroline McGhie elaborated on the range’s popularity: “The collection has been hugely successful—from Oslo to New York, from Munich to Madrid—with limited edition blanket chests, hand-painted with nudes, selling at £795 and fabrics at around £30 to £45 per metre.” Mulberry’s use marks a departure from work that is directly connected to designs created by the Bloomsbury artists, to designs produced by anonymous teams for commercial firms using Bloomsbury names, but with no actual connection to Bloomsbury figures or works. It completes

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the brand transformation from a friendship group whose fame generated an industry based on their work; to a brand that is largely independent of the individuals whose names it engages and instead targets the values held by its desired consumers. The stronger the identification between a brand’s own label and the Bloomsbury brand, the stronger their marketing platform. For individual artists this is problematic, as aligning their names with Bloomsbury risks subsuming their own identities’ to the collective concept of the brand, but larger brands with strong existing brand names are strengthened, not conflicted by this. Web-based clothing and small furnishings firm Anthropologie made artful use of the name Bloomsbury when they issued a small run of cushions loosely based on Bell’s designs in 2011: “Bouquet”, featured a still life motif, with a maroon background, large pottery vase decorated with circles and bouquet of white, yellow, orange, red and mauve flowers; “Landscape”, resembled one of Bell’s views from Charleston; and “Reclining Woman” was obviously an attempt to evoke an Omega nude. The products had little sympathy with the original designs and ethos of Bell, Grant or Fry, but harnessed the generic power of the groups’ identity. A larger scale example of this generic invocation of the Bloomsbury name comes from British design firm Sanderson (established 1860). Sanderson is a recognizable design brand that produces wallpapers and fabrics by a team of anonymous designers. They have issued a number of ranges that utilise not only the Bloomsbury-group name, but also the names of associated individuals and have shot a photo-shoot of these products at Charleston. Their “Bloomsbury Canvas Wallpaper” collection consists of 8 styles, described on the website as “inspired by the hugely creative output of the artists, poets and designers of the 1930s, especially those associated with the Bloomsbury Group and the Omega Workshop.”14 This wording demonstrates not only the common slippage between particular individual artistic identities and the group name, but also a further level of generalisation that seems to suggest that the Omega Workshop, which ended in 1919, was still in business in the 1930s, and that the core Bloomsbury set included poets, whilst omitting to the mention “writers” a number of products are named for. “Do these things matter?” Bell had asked about the factual inaccuracies peddled about the group. Her conclusion remains pertinent: Perhaps not very much, but why get them all wrong? When it comes to painting a picture with many of the figures in it such as never could have been there, then I think it does matter. (97)

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The papers including “Omega Cats”, “Ottoline”, and “Clarice”, are an example of how the manufactures have brought quite disparate figures, concepts and practitioners under the Bloomsbury umbrella.15 The “Bloomsbury Canvas Fabrics” range includes “Angelica”, “Lytton”, “Ottoline”, “Vita”, and “Vanessa” which is described as: Huge, loosely painted peonies feature in this abstract design, originally painted with layers of white pigment to create a romantic, transparent feel which has been beautifully captured in print. It is printed on linen union in four soft colourways making it ideal for bedrooms.16

This is mis-labelled slightly as it is not an “abstract design”, but a repeat pattern of white flowers. The description does not identify Bell as its namesake and the pretty colouring and four carefully coordinated colourways are distinctly un-Bellian. Yet, given the context, and the hint of Bell in the big, blowsy style of the peonies—which are none-the-less far more detailed than her usual indistinct execution of a variety of blooms, as exemplified in many of her still lifes, for example Arum and Tulips (n.d.) —we can be under no illusion that the Sanderson team intend customers to understand her as the “Vanessa” of the title.

Arum and Tulips, n.d., courtesy of Salford Art Gallery and Henrietta Garnett

In the same vein, the “Dalloway weave” and “Orlando Velvet” collections invoke the novels of Virginia Woolf, without making the

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connection explicit. Carefully created to complement the “Bloomsbury Canvas collection”, the “Dalloway weave” range features the “Vanessa Embroidery”, which again features peonies and carries the same description as the wallpaper. The “Orlando” range, “inspired by the geometric, medium-scale motifs popular in the 1920s and 30s”, is particularly interesting in terms of how the brand name is being used and the continuing commercial appeal of Bloomsbury as it also boasts a “Cressida” fabric, described as: an asymmetric silk and cotton stripe which has been woven as a jacquard to retain the irregular torn paper edges of the original design. Up to twelve colours are used in the warp to create four subtle colour combinations. This unusual stripe works well as contemporary blinds and curtains.

Cressida Bell is a practicing designer in her own right, and although she works in the same field, was unaware of “her” wallpaper, which indicates how far removed from the actual people involved the concept of Bell and Bloomsbury have become. The anonymous design team have utilized her name—and those of Vanessa Bell, Angelica Garnett, Ottoline Morrell, and Vita Sackville-West, alongside Woolf’s characters—as though they were not real historical figures and practising artists, but fictional characters. Saul described a “spirit” that Mulberry sought to evoke by invoking the Bloomsbury name. Likewise, Anthropologie and Sanderson are also using the brand name to evoke a spirit—or a set of connotations that they believe will appeal to their target audience. This “spirit” consists of the elements discussed in the introduction: freedom, friendship, dedication to the arts and intellect, and a frisson of sexual deviancy and bohemian glamour. Textile artist Debbie Siniska who sells work at Charleston and has re-created a rug for the house, put this allure into plainer terms when she revealed in conversation with the author in June 2013 that she is attracted to the “honesty and boldness” of Bell’s work.17 Siniska pinpoints one of the key concepts that bigger commercial design firms seek to invoke when she stated that the look of Charleston “is instantly recognisable—[a] kind of classic artisan country home.” Beyond aligning one’s tastes with the “spirit” of Bloomsbury principles, part of the allure of invoking the Bloomsbury name is the tacit understanding that by producing or consuming associated design or cultural artefacts, one becomes a Bloomsbury stakeholder—a member of the family firm. The impact of the “Bloomsbury Industry” on Bell’s lasting artistic legacy has resulted in several different effects. On the one hand, it has kept her name and a loose association with her aesthetic in the public consciousness. Conversely, the popularisation of a commercialised version

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of her work, together with other factors such as gender, genre and general prejudice towards Bloomsbury has meant that her work has been neglected by art historians and theorists.18 Whilst this lack of critical regard has seriously handicapped the reception and display of Bell’s work in academic forums and galleries and has made it difficult to assess her true stature as an artist, the tribute paid to her by subsequent artists and designers, and the commercial desirability of her name are eloquent tributes to the power of her work. In conversation with the author in June 2013, Charleston curator Dr Wendy Hitchmough recognised the power of these accolades and confirmed that the Charleston Trust are “very conscious of the way in which the house and work by Bell and Grant continue to influence artists and designers in many fields” and that as an institutional body Charleston “welcomes and encourages new work inspired by our collection.” Bell’s widespread influence is testament to my argument that she is one of our finest twentieth century artists, and Britain’s first “Old Mistress.”

Works Cited Annan, Noël. 2010. “Bloomsbury’s Ups and Downs.” In A Cézanne in the Hedge and Other Memories of Charleston and Bloomsbury, edited by Hugh Lee, 12-18. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Arnold, Anthea. 2010. Charleston Saved: 1979–1989. London: Robert Hale. Bell, Vanessa. 1993. Selected Letters of Vanessa Bell. Edited by Regina Marler. New York: Pantheon Books. —. 1998. “Notes on Bloomsbury.” In Sketches in Pen and Ink, edited by Lia Giachero, 95-114. London: Pimlico. Brockington, Grace. 2013. “A ‘Lavender Talent’ or ‘The Most Important Woman Painter in Europe?’ Reassessing Vanessa Bell.” Art History, 36 (1): 128-153. Kirkova, Deni. 2013. “Classic English brand Laura Ashley plans a mega makeover as it announces first sales slump in five years.” The Daily Mail, 28 March. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-2300629/ Classic-English-brand-Laura-Ashley-plans-mega-makeoverannounces-sales-slump-years.html. Accessed 13 July 2013. Garnett, Angelica. 1995. Deceived with Kindness: A Bloomsbury Childhood. London: Pimlico. Giachero, Lia. 1998. “Afterword.” In Sketches in Pen and Ink by Vanessa Bell. Edited by Lia Giachero, 167-184. London: Pimlico.

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Leaper, Hana. 2013. “Vanessa Bell and the Significance of Form.” Unpublished PhD Thesis. University of Liverpool. Marler, Regina. 1997. Bloomsbury Pie: The Making of the Bloomsbury Boom. London: Virago. Nicholson, Virginia. 2003. Among the Bohemians, Experiments in Living 1900-1939. London: Penguin Books. Spalding, Frances. 2005. National Gallery Insights, The Bloomsbury Group. London: National Portrait Gallery. Watts, Donald J. 1969. “G.E. Moore and the Bloomsbury Group.” English Literature in Transition: 1880-1920, 12 (3): 119-134. Woolf, Virginia. 1985. “Old Bloomsbury.” In Moments of Being, A Collection of Autobiographical Writing, edited by Jeanne Schulkind, 181-201. London: Harcourt Brace.

Notes 1

In A Cézanne in the Hedge and Other Memories of Charleston and Bloomsbury, Noël Annan jokingly uses the open market as an “appropriate metaphor” (12) for assessing Bloomsbury’s reputation. However, his assessment that “on the stock exchange of culture, the market in Bloomsburys has always been volatile” (12), is a far more suitable way of discussing the twenty-first century reality of the Bloomsbury industry than he realized at the time. 2 Virginia Woolf read Moore’s Pincipia Ethica in 1908, a few years after the period Bell was describing. 3 Further sources include: Quentin Bell and Angelica Garnett, eds. Vanessa Bell’s Family Album, London: Jill Norman and Hobhouse Ltd., 1981; Quentin Bell, Angelica Garnett, Henrietta Garnett and Richard Shone, Charleston Past and Present, London: The Hogarth Press, 1987; Quentin Bell and Virginia Nicolson, Charleston: A Bloomsbury House and Garden, China: Frances Lincoln, 2004; Maggie Humm, Snapshots of Bloomsbury: The Private Lives of Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell, London: Tate Publishing, 2006; Anthea Arnold, Charleston Saved 1979-1989, London: Robert Hale, 2010; Nuala Hancock, Charleston and Monk’s House: The Intimate House Museum of Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012. 4 Giles Lytton Strachey, 1911, Anthony d’Offay Gallery, London; Virginia Woolf, 1912, National Portrait Gallery, London; Roger Fry, 1912, National Portrait Gallery, London; David Garnett, 1915, National Portrait Gallery, London; Mrs St John Hutchinson, 1915, Tate, London; Leonard Sidney Woolf, 1940, National Portrait Gallery, London; The Memoir Club, c.1943, National Portrait Gallery, London. Aside from chronicling her own generation, Bell was inspired by her predecessors, even using images from their work to create the basis of an open ended familial archive which she then invited subsequent generations to contribute to. For further reading on this intergenerational archive see Leaper 2013. 5 For recent discussions of this issue see Brockington 2013 and Leaper 2013.

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A former school friend of Bell’s granddaughters discussed their disturbed lives in an article for The Daily Mail, 23 May 2012. 7 Though his style is very different to Bell’s and he often tackles unrelated subject matter, Julian Bell’s attention to the Lewes people and area, for example Window in Beddingham (1984) and Cash (2001), strongly link to his grandmother’s work. 8 Two of the cushion covers sold in Cressida’s shop illustrate the difference between her own work, and work she has created based on the Charleston aesthetic. The Woman and Mandolin cushion cover is based on panels by Duncan Grant (c.1925) in the library at Charleston, whilst the Red Isis cover is an example of her own work. 9 Bell also appreciated Hitchins, writing to her daughter on 4 May 1950: “I think Ivon Hitchens’ works are really very good” (Bell 1993, 525). 10 The Singh Twins. “Profile.” http://www.singhtwins.co.uk/PROFILE.html. Accessed 10 July 2013. 11 Ibid. 12 For further reading about Bell’s cross-cultural references and influences see Leaper 2013, particularly Chapter 1 “Crossing the Line: From out of the shadow of the Victorians”. 13 After Laura Ashley died in 1985 “Laura Ashley Holdings went public in a flotation that was 34 times oversubscribed.” (Kirkova 2013). 14 The Sanderson Website. “Bloomsbury Canvas Wallpaper.” http://www. sanderson-uk.com/bloomsbury-canvas-wallpaper.aspx. Accessed 10 July 2013, 15 Clarice Cliff’s pottery shapes tend to be more muscularly geometric than the simpler, rustic shapes used by Bell, or other Bloomsbury associated designers. Cliff also tended to use brighter, primary or acidic colours. However, in 1934 Bell and Grant both designed tea pots for Cliff’s “Bizarre” range for A.J. Wilkinson. 16 The Sanderson Website. “Bloomsbury Canvas Fabrics.” http://www.sandersonuk.com/bloomsbury-fabrics.aspx. Accesssed 6 September 2013. All further references to the collection are taken from this website. 17 Debbie Siniska is a textile artist based in East Sussex. Debbie teaches rag rug and felt making in schools, adult residential colleges, and at her own regular monthly workshops in East Sussex. See the “Events” page on her website for more details. She was commissioned to create a large reproduction of an old rug for Maynard Keynes’ bedroom at Charleston. In 2000, the Tate Gallery shop commissioned her to produce eight Bloomsbury rag rugs to accompany “The Art of Bloomsbury” exhibition. She based her designs on a 1913/14 Omega Workshops design for a screen by Vanessa Bell. Her work can be found at www. debbiesiniska.co.uk. Accessed 10 July 2013. 18 See Marler 1997 and Annan 1992 for further reading on the critical hostility towards Bloomsbury.

LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS Sue Ash is a part time PhD research student in the Department of English and Modern Languages at Oxford Brookes University. Her research focuses on dance in the modernist period and as dance is very underrepresented and could be described as amongst the most prominent lacuna in cultural studies of modernism, Sue’s project aims to mine this gap in the modernist story. Sue gained her BA and Masters in Modern History at Oxford Brookes University. Sue is a dancer and had a professional career working with Scottish Ballet and English National Opera, in film, choreography and teaching. Ian Blyth is a lecturer in English and Philosophy at Inverness College UHI. He is a member of the Editorial Board for the Cambridge Edition of the Works of Virginia Woolf, for which he is co-editing Orlando (with Suzanne Raitt), and his published works include Hélène Cixous: Live Theory (Continuum, 2004), and various articles on Woolf and others. Kirby Joris holds a Ph.D. in Languages and Literatures from the Université catholique de Louvain, Belgium. Her main research interests revolve around recent biographical fictions (1980-present) about real-life writers from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and, more particularly, their link with traditional and metaphysical detective stories. Her recently defended thesis (March 2013) is entitled “Between Fingerprints and Red Herrings. The Metaphysical Detective Inquest in Contemporary Biographical Novels about Oscar Wilde.” Gerri Kimber is a Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Northampton. She is co-editor of Katherine Mansfield Studies, the peerreviewed annual yearbook of the Katherine Mansfield Society, published by Edinburgh University Press. She is the author of Katherine Mansfield’s Early Years (2015), Katherine Mansfield: The View from France (2008), and A Literary Modernist: Katherine Mansfield and the Art of the Short Story (2008). She is the deviser and Series Editor of the four-volume Edinburgh Edition of the Collected Works of Katherine Mansfield (201215): with Vincent O’Sullivan, she is co-editor of the first two volumes: the Collected Fiction (2012), and with Angela Smith, co-editor of the Poetry

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and Non-Fiction (2014), and Diaries (2015). She is also co-editor of the following volumes: Katherine Mansfield and the First World War (2014), Katherine Mansfield and the (Post)colonial (2013), Katherine Mansfield and Literary Modernism (2011), Celebrating Katherine Mansfield: A Centenary Volume of Essays (2011) and Framed! Essays in French Studies (2007). She has contributed chapters to several books including: Katherine Mansfield and Influence (2014), The Great Adventure Ends: New Zealand and France on the Western Front (2013), Katherine Mansfield and Literary Modernism (2011), and Translation and Censorship: Arts of Interference (2008). Gerri has had numerous articles published in journals such as Europe, Les Cahiers du CICLaS, and British Review of New Zealand Studies. She is Chair of the Katherine Mansfield Society and has co-organised several international Mansfield conferences and events. Gerri is also on the committee of BAMS, the British Association for Modernist Studies. Bethany Layne has recently submitted her PhD at the University of Leeds entitled “(Post)Modernist Biofictions: Literary Afterlives of Henry James, Virginia Woolf, and Sylvia Plath”. Her work has appeared in NeoVictorian Studies, Women and the Arts, and Textual Practice, with an article forthcoming in The Henry James Review. Hana Leaper holds a BA in English Literature and the History of Art, and MA in Cultural Studies from the University of Leeds. She is currently studying for a PhD in the English Literature department at the University of Liverpool. Her research and teaching interests are Modernist to contemporary British, Commonwealth and European art and literature. Her thesis, “Vanessa Bell and the Significance of Form” focuses on busting Bell out of the Bloomsbury ghetto and contextualising her within a much wider International framework. She has recently begun to research dynamism in the work of Anglo-Canadian printmaker Sybil Andrews. Christopher Lewis is a part-time lecturer in English Literature and Philosophy at Bath Spa University and is currently working towards the submission of his PhD thesis which concerns the writings and paintings of Wyndham Lewis. His present research is focused on artistic, literary and philosophical interpretations of “modernity,” particularly the way in which the arts responded to the social, cultural and technological revolutions of the early decades of the 20th century.

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Sandeep Parmar is Lecturer in Twentieth-Century Literature at the University of Liverpool. Her Collected Poems of Hope Mirrlees appeared in 2011 (Carcanet Press) and her monograph, Reading Mina Loy’s Autobiographies, was published by Bloomsbury in 2013. She is currently writing a biography of the modernist Hope Mirrlees. Jens Peters holds a BA in English from Cambridge University, an MA in Text & Performance Studies from King’s College London and The Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, and a PhD in Drama from the University of Exeter. For his PhD thesis, he investigated “Narration and dialogue in contemporary British and German-language drama “(texts - translations mise-en-scène)”. He has published articles on Howard Barker’s use of chorus, the translation of postdramatic texts, and the history of dramaturgy in Britain. His next publication, in The Routledge Companion to Dramaturgy, is going to investigate the National Theatre’s live broadcasts. Jens is currently working as a freelance dramaturg and researcher in Berlin. Susan Reid, an independent scholar in the UK, is the Editor of the Journal of D. H. Lawrence Studies and Reviews Editor for the Journal of Postcolonial Writing. She has published several articles on D. H. Lawrence, Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf, as well as co-editing three volumes of Katherine Mansfield Studies (2010–12) and an essay collection Katherine Mansfield and Literary Modernism (2011). She is currently writing a monograph on Lawrence and masculinities. Sarah Roger is a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada postdoctoral research fellow in English at McMaster University. She is studying the works of the Argentine-Canadian critic and novelist, Alberto Manguel. Formerly, she was a lecturer in Spanish at the University of Oxford and a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Edinburgh. Her doctoral research on Franz Kafka’s influence on Jorge Luis Borges made use of T. S. Eliot’s and Harold Bloom’s theories to understand Kafka’s role in shaping Borges’s transition from writing poetry to writing prose. Sarah has published on Borges’s work as a translator and on the differences between real-life libraries and fictional ones. Rebecca Gordon Stewart holds a Ph.D. from the University of Aberdeen. Her thesis, “Constructed Selves: Authorial Identity in Selected Works of Christopher Isherwood,” positions Isherwood as an influential literary force of the twentieth century. She was the Christopher Isherwood

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Foundation at the Huntington Library for 2009-2010. Her work includes, “I was obsessed by a complex terrors and longings connected with the idea of ‘War,’” published in First World War Studies. And “Christopher and Frank: Isherwood’s Representation of Father and Son in Kathleen and Frank” published in A/B: Auto/Biography Studies. Her current research includes an examination of Isherwood’s novel Down There on a Visit as a rewriting of Dante’s Purgatoria, due for publication in forthcoming book American Isherwood (Minnesota University Press). She is currently working as a part-time lecturer at Bath Spa University and the USA Exchange programme Advanced Studies in England. Shelley Saguaro is Head of the School of Humanities and Faculty Leader for Research at the University of Gloucestershire, U.K.. Her recent publications include her monograph on Garden Plots, The Politics and Poetics of Gardens (Ashgate, 2006); the article “Telling Trees: Eucalyptus, ‘Anon’, and the Growth of Co-evolutionary Histories” in Mosaic: a journal for the interdisciplinary study of literature (2009); and a chapter on Toni Morrison’s Paradise in Literature as History (Continuum, 2010). She recently published an article on Virginia Woolf’s late unpublished manuscript “Anon” and Between the Acts, “‘Something that would stand for the conception’: the inseminating world in the last writings of Virginia Woolf”, in Green Letters: Studies in Ecocrticism. She has a jointlyauthored chapter forthcoming (Palgrave Macmillan) on trees and forests in J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit and in The Lord of the Rings trilogy. Lucy Tyler is a playwright and Course Leader of the MA in Creative and Critical Writing at the University of Gloucestershire. Her performed works include The Measurements of a Murderer (Origin Theater Company, 2010; Hampstead Theatre, 2009 (reading)), Claudia Schiffer’s Mind (Theatre Absolute, 2010), and Come to Where I’m From (Paines Plough Theatre Company, 2012). Her play The Operators (The Georgetown Theatre Company, 2010-11) ran in Washington in 2011 to critical acclaim. Lucy is artistic director of Eleven Places Theatre Company and recently co-wrote and directed their first production, The Recipe for Belonging (2013). In her role as lecturer in Creative Writing at the university, Lucy also works as a practitioner. She was dramaturg for Smoke Rings, a collaboration between the University of Gloucestershire, the Everyman Theatre, and Dreamshed Theatre Company (2013). $JDWD :RĨQLDN obtained her Masters degree in English from the Jagiellonian University of Krakow, Poland, where she worked on the

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functions of intertextuality in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway. She is currently a PhD candidate in the Department of English Studies at Durham University. Supervised by Prof. Patricia Waugh, her research investigates the intertextual relationship between contemporary British women writers, such as Jeanette Winterson, Pat Barker, Ali Smith and Hilary Mantel, and earlier twentieth-century authors, namely Virginia Woolf and Muriel Spark. She is a translator and Fiction Editor at Inkapture, a creative writing e-magazine which she co-founded in 2011. Elizabeth Wright is a playwright and senior lecturer in English and European Literature at Bath Spa University. Her play “Vanessa and Virginia” has been nominated for five Off West End Awards including Best New Play and Most Promising Playwright and has been published by Play Dead Press. Her academic publications include a biography of Virginia Woolf (Hesperus 2011) and various articles covering the Bloomsbury Group, Joseph Conrad and Henrik Ibsen. She is currently researching a monograph on Virginia Woolf and drama and writing a play for children which is under consideration by Moving Stories Theatre Company. Annabel Wynne has a primary interest in Modernism and British literature produced during and about 1912-1950. She has a particular interest in the Anglo-Irish writer, Elizabeth Bowen, and it is this interest which forms the basis of her PhD, which she is currently researching under the supervision of Dr Elizabeth Wright and Dr Fiona Peters at Bath Spa University. Annabel has secondary research interests in children’s literature and the picture book, as well as literature of the eighteenth century. She has previously taught and lectured on literature and has written a number of short courses. Annabel is also an accomplished artist and has exhibited widely, including at the Society of Women Artists and the Chelsea Arts Club. Her work is held in many private collections in the UK and abroad and two of her paintings are in the private collection at Kensington Palace.