Infinite Strange Shapes

By Christopher Porterfield

THE LETTERS OF VIRGINIA WOOLF, VOLUME ONE: 1888-1912

Edited by NIGEL NICOLSON and JOANNE TRAUTMANN

531 pages. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. $14.95.

"A true letter," she wrote to Clive Bell in 1907, "should be as a film of wax pressed close to the graving in the mind." Virginia Woolf composed such letters by the thousands--quick, nervous jottings of the moment, full of teasing, deliberately haphazard and unliterary.

A staggering 3,800 of them survive. Editors Nigel Nicolson and Joanne Trautmann have decided to publish most of the missives in a series of six stout volumes. This first installment, which collects Virginia's correspondence between the ages of six and 30, includes a glut of juvenilia and ends on the eve of her first publication, before she had become the Virginia Woolf of literary history. Yet it provides the undeniable fascination of watching her become that woman.

"I know I can write, and one of these days I mean to produce a good book," she announced in a letter at 22. Virginia's father was Sir Leslie Stephen, the critic and biographer, and she grasped early that she had inherited his vocation. Virginia also sensed the innovative direction of her gifts: "I am sure the facts of life--the marryings and bearings and buryings are the least important, and one acts one's drama under the hat."

Briskly supporting herself with literary journalism, she labored for seven years on the novel she called Melymbrosia (published in 1915 as The Voyage Out).

"I think a great deal," she confessed to Clive Bell, "of how I shall re-form the novel and capture multitudes of things at present fugitive, enclose the whole, and shape infinite strange shapes."

Platonic Passions. Her sense of vocation seemed to compensate for her lack of social and sexual ease. "I went to a dance last night," she wrote at 23, "and found a dim corner where I sat and read In Memoriam. You see I am not successful." It was only in the rarefied atmosphere of Bloomsbury that her formidable mind and odd beauty were appreciated. Men like Clive Bell, Lytton Strachey and Roger Fry accepted her, flirted with her, and in some cases proposed. At one point she and the homosexual Strachey became engaged, but both came to realize their folly and amicably called it off.

Her passions, platonic but deep, were saved for the older women in her life: her sister Vanessa, who became a painter and married Critic Clive Bell; Madge Vaughan, a writer who was married to one of Virginia's cousins; and above all Violet Dickinson, an aristocratic spinster who was part intimate confidante, part sponsor. With Dickinson especially, Virginia tended to lapse into repellent pet names and quasi-erotic baby talk ("I feel myself curled up snugly in old mother wallaby's pouch. Is mother wallaby soft and tender to her little one?"). But these women also inspired some of her most candid passages about literary ambition and travail. With them she shared an intensely personal feminism, a concern for the fate of the talented woman in Edwardian society.

Dozens of Virginia's letters were scribbled beside deathbeds. During the span of this volume, a cousin, an uncle, her mother, her stepsister, her father, her older brother and an aunt all died. She was reticent about the pain of these losses but characteristically scornful of the conventional pieties surrounding them. "The relations swarm," she wrote as her father lay dying. "Three mornings have I spent having my hand held, and my emotions pumped out of me, quite unsuccessfully."

Tests of Devotion. Her mother's death was so shattering that it sent her, at 13, into the first of a series of mental breakdowns that were to haunt her throughout her life and trigger her suicide at 59. These episodes left blanks in her correspondence, except when she made a diffident reference ("my usual disease, in the head you know") or when, as in a letter to Vanessa, the illness itself shadowed her prose: "All the devils came out--hairy black ones. To be 29 and unmarried--to be a failure--childless--insane too, no writer."

She was going through one of these cataclysms when Leonard Woolf decided that he wanted to marry her. It was one of several stern tests of his devotion. Leonard was a fringe Bloomsburyite, in Virginia's words "a penniless Jew," a former Colonial Service officer in Ceylon whose years in the jungle seemed to have purged him of the dilettantism that tainted her other admirers. She warned him that she was not physically attracted to him ("There are moments -- when you kissed me the other day was one -- when I feel no more than a rock"), but she realized that he offered the sympathy and strength she needed.

In view of the story that remains to be charted in the succeeding five volumes of these letters -- the high achievement, the madness, the early death -- Virginia's final letter to Leonard before their wedding is both stirring and excruciating: "We both of us want a marriage that is a tremendous living thing, always alive, always hot, not dead and easy in parts as most marriages are. We ask a great deal of rife, don't we? Perhaps we shall get it; then, how splendid!"

Christopher Porterfield

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