Anon -

Anon

14/08/2024

Culture • Literature • Books

By BRENDA R. SILVER*

Introduction to Virginia Woolf's recently published book

On September 12, 1940, Virginia Woolf recorded in her diary that, while picking blackberries, she “had conceived, or rethought, an idea for a book on common history – to be read from the beginning of literature, including biography ; and explore at will, consecutively.” On September 14, she recorded that she would “begin her new book, reading Ifor Evans, 6 Penis, Penguin”; and, on the 17th, she went to the Public Library to look for a history of English literature.

The next day, using a new notebook, she wrote “Reading at random/Notes” at the top of the first page, dating it “September 18, 1940,” and began recording ideas for a book initially titled Reading at random and later, Turning the page. By the time of her death six months later, Woolf had more or less completed one introductory essay, “Anon,” and had begun work on a second, tentatively titled “The Reader.” Despite the unfinished state of these essays – and the uncertainty about the final form of the book as a whole – enough material remained to suggest what Woolf's intentions were and to reproduce texts from her.

Although Woolf had begun talking about a new critical book as early as 1938, there is no indication that she had seriously begun planning such work before the autumn of 1940. In October 1938, she noted in her diary that she was considering her “ countless notes for the TLS” – supposedly the reading notes she had made in preparation for the articles in Times Literary Supplement and other periodicals – “as material for some kind of critical book”, but the form and underlying concept are uncertain: “citations? comments? extending over the whole of English literature as I have read and noted it during the last 20 years.”

In April 1939 she talked about reading Sévigné “for that rapid fusion of books which I long for,” and in March 1940 she mentioned her desire to read “very calmly for the C. Rs. [Common Readers]”. The reference to the title of his previous critical works, The common reader (1925/1932), suggests here that the as-yet-unwritten book would follow the old pattern: a collection of essays composed specifically for the new work or revised for it from an already published version.

In September 1940, however, when she actually began reading and taking notes for the “Ordinary History Book,” the emphasis was less on the individual essays than on the task of devising a format that described the history of English literature as a whole. continuous.

In the meantime, she was involved in the process of completing Between the acts with your pageant of English literature and with its anonymous chorus of pilgrims, sewing its way through different eras and with its presence leaving a scar on the earth even after its words have disappeared. “The idea of the book”, she states in her first entry in “Notes to read at random”, “is to find the end of a ball of yarn and unravel it.”

In the second note, dated October 3, she introduces the idea of the “instinct to create songs”, and adds: “This is continuity – the prolongation of certain emotions that are always active: always felt by people”.

Over the next eight weeks, Woolf's diary records, on par with the progress of Pointz Hall, the original title of Between the acts, a steady stream of reading for the book now described as threading a necklace through life and English literature. Much of her reading was tied to the plan of beginning her story as she had begun the pageant in the novel – with the early forms of English literature and society, and with the anonymous men and women who created them.

We know, for example, that on October 26th she began reading The history of England by GM Trevelyan, the work that provided him with the opening phrases of Anon as well as allowing him to integrate it, during this period, into Mrs. Swithin at the end of Between the acts. Three weeks later, on November 4, she wrote to Ethel Smyth: “I am almost like what you called a voracious mite that has got into gnawing on a precious vast cheese and has become intoxicated from eating so much, which is how I am now. , reading history and writing fiction and drafting, oh, a very entertaining book about English literature.”

The following day, 15 November, he responded to Vita Sackville-West's suggestion that she write a biography of Bess of Hardwick with the subterfuge that she undertook to “dedicate an essay to her in The Common Reader”. Finally, two months after her blackberry-picking escapade, she was ready to get started.

After registering “22 Nov. 1940” on the last page of the typed text of her novel, she added in her diary: “Having now finished the Pageant – Pointz Hall? – (started perhaps in April 1938) my thoughts turn entirely to writing the first chapter of the next book, Anon (unnamed) is what it will be called”. In fact, both the manuscript and the typed copy of the essay bear the heading “Anon” on the first page, and the date “24 Nov. 1940.”

In the following months, Virginia Woolf alternated her work on rehearsals with revising and finalizing Between the acts, as well as writing memoirs, essays about Ellen Terry and Mrs. Thrale, and from fragments of short stories; Nevertheless, she continued to read imaginative literature from the medieval and Elizabethan periods, supplemented by biographies and histories.

On February 4, 1941, she asked Vita Sackville-West to bring her the biography of “Lady Anne Clifford or any other Elizabethan biography,” and Vita did so; in a note written in pencil in the copy of Vita de Diary of a writer, under the entry for February 16, it reads: “She made me bring her as many books as I could on Elizabethan biographies, and she was full of plans.” She continued, moreover, during this period, to think about the themes that were at the center of her work at this time: the rise and fall of civilizations; the nature of culture; the violence associated with patriarchy and the relationships between continuity and rupture, art and society. “Anon”, as previously recorded, opens with a passage from the book history of england, authored by Trevelyan, which describes prehistoric Britain as a forest filled with innumerable singing birds.

Virginia Woolf uses this description to speculate whether the origin of literature – “the desire to sing” or to create – came from a self-awareness of birdsong. But, she continues, the hut had to be built – some social organization established – before the human voice could sing too.

Em Between the acts, on the other hand, the forests and birds appear at the end of the book, when Mrs. Swithin reads “Outline of History” against the backdrop of encroaching darkness and barbarism. (The allusion to birds was added to the novel in the version that Virginia Woolf finished in November 1940, just as she began Anon). The question raised by the novel regarding the capacity of art (of creative instincts) to overcome darkness and rupture, and to promise a new beginning, also haunted Woolf in her essays. “Only when we put two and two together,” she wrote in the first drafts, “two pencil strokes, two written words, two bricks, do we overcome dissolution and fix some stake against oblivion.”

By February 1941, as Woolf completed revisions to her novel amid a growing threat of invasion, the struggle against oblivion became intertwined with the progress of her “book on Ordinary History.” On February 1, she wrote to Smyth: “Did I tell you that I am reading all of English literature from beginning to end? When you get to Shakespeare the bombs will be falling. So, I planned one last, beautiful scene: reading Shakespeare, having forgotten my gas mask, I will extinguish myself and completely forget… Thank God, as you would say, our parents gave us a taste for reading! Instead of thinking, by the middle of May we will be – whatever it is: I think, only three months to read Ben Jonson, Milton, Donne and all the rest!”

A month later, however, even his reading had been affected by his sense of the lack of a future. “I am,” she wrote to Smyth on March 1, “at this moment trying, without the least success, to write an article or two for a new Common Reader. I'm stuck on Elizabethan plays. I'm not going backwards or forwards. I have read a lot, but not enough. That's why I can't get involved in politics... If you want to portray me right now you must fill the floor with moldy playwrights... You feel, as I do, when my head is not on that grinding wheel, that this is the worst phase of war? I feel. I was telling Leonard that we have no future. He says that's what gives him hope. He says that the need for some catastrophe urges him on. What I feel is the suspense when nothing really happens.”

Virginia Woolf's inability to see a transition from present to future, connected as she is with the larger question of historical continuity, comes to the fore in her struggle to give shape to her work. Dissatisfied with the direct approach typical of both social and literary history textbooks, compared, in an unpublished diary entry, to the service provided by Roman roads (October 26, 1940), she wished to explore what the texts ignore – the forests and will-o'-the-wisps.

As always, the question was, in Virginia Woolf's case, how to create a form that conveyed the underlying forces of the historical process as she perceived them, how to capture the most evanescent development of human consciousness and experience. “Reading at random”, “Turning the page”, “finding the end of a ball and unraveling it”: all of these phrases portray her desire to shape her own story, but each one evokes a different concept of order.

Her obsession with creating an internal order also dominated the writing of “Anon”: she continually rearranged parts of the essay and experimented with transitions between different sections. Even more notable is its difficulty in providing a transition between Anon – which traces the evolution of the anonymous element in writer and audience, from its beginnings to its death, as a conscious aspect of literary form and experience – and the second essay, its exploration of the emergence of the modern reader and sensitivity to reading . The latter exists only as a series of beginnings, none of them clear on the question of where the essay, or the story, wanted to go.

More than just a problem of structure or an illustration of his artistic skill, perhaps, the search for transitions and order within the text reveals the search for a link between the past and the future that would fill the emptiness of the present moment. “Skip today”, she notes in one of the sketches for the book “A chapter for the future”.

The connection between the search for transitions in the essays and in his own life leads to an important theme and a structuring principle of the book: the interaction between internal circumstances and creativity.

To write a history of English literature, she knew, she would also have to write the history of the society that had fostered that art, and corresponded to it. “Keep up an incessant commentary on Abroad,” she reminded herself in the notes on the book; “I must, therefore, take a poem and develop the society that supports it around it.” The result is an emphasis not just on the persistence of the “song-making instinct” but on the crucial role that external forces play in shaping both the singer and the song.

“Nin, Crot and Pulley” – the unique names given by Virginia Woolf to the complex of economic, political, cultural and personal forces that influence the writer – already appear in “Notes for random reading”, and are more evident in the first drafts of Anon. These influences change from one era to the next, she understood – and from one culture to the next – but ignoring them means ignoring the extremely important role that the historical context and the public play in the production of art.

This point was not new to Virginia Woolf, whose criticism from the beginning was imbued with an awareness of the historical and cultural forces affecting art; but the importance of the audience to the writer became profoundly clear to her as her own sense of isolation increased. Both in the notes and in the essays themselves, not to mention her recent novel, Virginia Woolf contrasts the collective aspects of early literature with the isolation of the solitary writer who emerged in the Renaissance and who struggled, in 1940 and 1941, to become creative in a changing world. that silence and emptiness were the norm.

This struggle is recorded in the remaining fragments of “The Reader,” which are among Woolf's last works. Although she begins by stating that the reader “still exists; for it is a fact that he is still getting books printed. He is still reading Shakespeare”, she ends by stating that the importance of the reader “can be gauged by the fact that when his attention is diverted, in times of public crisis, the writer exclaims: I can't write anymore”.

It is worth noting, however, that in one of Woolf's last diary entries, she is still planning her own book: “Suppose I bought a ticket at the Museum; ride a bike daily and read history. Suppose I selected a dominant figure from each era and wrote it down at random” (daily, March 8, 1941). And the last words of “The Reader” – a description of Anatomy of melancholy by Burton – we are told: “We live in a world where nothing is finished”.

Today, to help us trace Virginia Woolf's attempts to write her book, we have at hand a variety of sources: the ideas and sketches recorded in “Notes for random reading”; the three volumes of reading notes made specifically for this work; and the numerous manuscripts and typed pages of “Anon” and “The Reader”.

With the exception of a single volume of reading notes and seven pages of “Anon” found in the Monk's House at Sussex University Library, all of this material is now housed in the New York Public Library's Berg Collection. The essay manuscript consists of one hundred and one pages. Seventy-two of them are included in a notebook that contains drafts of a variety of other essays and reviews; The pages of the notebook are numbered by the New York Public Library.

The remaining twenty-nine manuscripts consist of loose sheets, mostly unnumbered, which have been collected into three folders. The typed pages are approximately sixty-one in number, six of which are in Sussex. Most pages in the Berg Collection appear in the thirteen folders filed as “Anon” and “The Reader”; two are archived with other works. The typed pages were numbered by Woolf as she typed them.

Although the essays were left in an incomplete state when Virginia Woolf died, I was able to reconstruct from existing material the various stages of their development, and arrive at what was, most likely, the final narrative sequence. To do this, however, it was necessary to establish the order in which the manuscript and typed pages were produced. The current order of the loose pages does not correspond to the order in which they were written nor, necessarily, to the same narrative sequence. These sheets arrived at the New York Public Library divided into separate groups.

Once the various drafts are placed in chronological order, what appears is the following: (a) three distinct versions of “Anon,” only the last of which constitutes a complete essay, and (b) six short beginnings, or fragments , from a second essay I call “The Reader”.

I designated the three versions of “Anon” as versions A, B and C; the six fragments of “The Reader” are labeled A to F. Woolf abandoned version A of “Anon” – which is dated “24 Nov. 1940” and which follows, in its initial drafts, the ideas and format outlined in “Notes to read at random” – when the incorporation of new material led her to restructure the parts. When arranged to include the last draft of each of her sessions, version A consists of a sequence of typed pages numbered 1 to 19. Version B, Woolf's first attempt at a reorganization, drastically condenses the material in version A and makes some important deletions; No new material is added. It exists only as a ten-page typewritten document. In version C, on the other hand, Woolf added a great deal of new material – each new section being present in several drafts – and restructured the material in the first two versions.

When we put together the last draft of each individual section, the typed copy goes, with the exception of two pages numbered “13” and one unnumbered page between 28 and 29, from page 1 to 30. The result of this scheme is the rough outline of a complete and coherent essay. It is this sequence that led to the text of Anon reproduced here.

Anyone who has read all of the material in the Berg Collection, or even just skimmed it, will immediately recognize how much Virginia Woolf excluded from Anon as he gained his last – albeit incomplete – form. Although it would be possible to reproduce entirely the three versions of “Anon” and the six fragments of “The Reader”, this is the task of a critical edition, which is not feasible here.

Instead, in order to provide as comprehensive a view of Virginia Woolf's late critical work as possible, I have divided it into three parts. The first, “Notes to Read at Random,” is an exact transcription of the manuscript of that name. The second part, “Anon,” presents the thirty-two-page text of “Anon” derived from version C of the essay, followed by a commentary that explains the development of the text and reproduces selected passages that were deleted or condensed in the final draft. The third part, “The Reader”, reproduces the typed copy of fragment F, the last of the six, which incorporates most of the ideas explored in the previous fragments. This is also followed by a commentary and examples of previous drafts.

The incomplete state of the essays, indicated by the large number of handwritten corrections in the “final” drafts and the repetitions in the typed text (Virginia Woolf was clearly working at the typewriter at this point), required several important editorial decisions. My intention was to provide clear texts and, at the same time, show the complexity of the typed copies themselves.

*Brenda R. Silver is a literary critic, editor and writer. Author, among other books, of Virginia Woolf's reading notebooks (Princeton University Press).

Reference

Virginia Woolf. Anon [was a woman…]. Editing: Brenda R. Silver. Translation: Tomaz Tadeu. Belo Horizonte, Autêntica, 190 pages. [https://amzn.to/3YMqrya]