Sacred Values

By Christopher Porterfield

THE LETTERS OF VIRGINIA WOOLF, VOL. VI: 1936-1941 Edited by Nigel Nicolson and Joanne Trautmann; Harcourt Brace Jovanovich; 556 pages; $19.95

"The art of letter writing," Virginia Woolf wrote in 1930, "has now reached a stage, thanks to the penny post and telephone, where it is not dead--that is the last word to apply to it--but so much alive as to be quite unprintable. The best letters of our time are precisely those that can never be published."

How wrong she was, especially in her own case. Granted, she had a point about the stylistic changes since Horace Walpole or, later, those Victorian worthies enshrined in three-decker "Lives and Letters." Vanished are the leisurely epistles addressed to a quasi-public circle of acquaintances (and, between the lines, to posterity); the 20th century goes elsewhere for its literary entertainment and journalism. In all of Woolf's 3,710 collected letters--here rounded off in the last of six stout volumes that have been coming out since 1975--she scarcely ever troubles to paint a scene or describe great events; even wars are kept to the background: "I write with the usual air raid going on; distant droning; a bomb now and then."

Modern letters are hasty and utilitarian, usually meant for one pair of eyes only. But by that token the best of them, like Woolf's, are also vibrant with immediacy, intimacy and often indiscretion ("Why," she asks, "is it so pleasant to damn one's friends?"). With her aristocratic sense of decorum she may have felt that their very privacy was what made them unpublishable. If so, she failed to reckon on this age's voracious, ransacking appetite for all that is private in a writer's life. As significant as her novels may be in the canon of modernist fiction, what really makes her writing live today--and what largely accounts for the current Virginia Woolf boom in publishing--is the vividness of personality in her nonfiction. When her letters and memoirs are added to the complete diaries (three volumes published, with two to go), we may, as Editor Nigel Nicolson says, "be able to know Virginia Woolf better than we can know almost any other person of this century."

Her deeper, more solemn reflections on art and life she saved for her diary. In her letters she is determinedly light, at times kittenish; but she gives full play to her quick eye, sharp tongue and mocking sense of social comedy. An unfavorite cousin's face reminds her of a "mandrill's behind." T.S. Eliot's poem Ash Wednesday she greets as "Tom's hard-boiled egg." She describes avoiding an encounter with Ethel Smyth, the doughty, pipe-smoking feminist and composer who became infatuated with her: "I could not face her, though she was passing our door. Her letters sound as if she was in a furious droning mood, like a gale, all on one note."

Woolf scribbled as fluently as she talked, and almost as fast. Letter writing for her was a compulsion, a sport and an antidote to solitude, but it was also a matter of principle. It was a way of cherishing friendships, with all the sacred personal values that friendships implied in Bloomsbury. "Life would split asunder without letters," she maintained in Jacob 's Room. Her massive correspondence shows her weaving a variegated web to hold it together. She pours out affection and admiration to her sister, Vanessa Bell, whom she wonderfully characterizes as a mixture of pagan goddess and Moll Flanders. She is ardent and extravagant to Vita Sackville-West, with whom she has a love affair and later slips into a "warm slipper" relationship. She is fondly exasperated and patient with Ethel Smyth, considerate to friends (like the dying Janet Case) who are in need, practical and encouraging to younger writers like Stephen Spender and Elizabeth Bowen.

If any element is conspicuously missing, it is a strong masculine presence for her sensibility to play off against. The most important man in her life is rarely addressed because he is so constantly with her: her husband, Leonard Woolf. Yet there are glimpses of her devotion to and dependence on him, as when she mentions the "immortal rhythm" of their quiet times together in Sussex. This final volume closes with the simple, moving note she left him when, at 59, fearing the loss of her artistic gift and sensing the onset of another bout of madness, she decided to drown herself: "Dearest, I want to tell you that you have given me complete happiness. No one could have done more than you have done . . . But I know that I shall never get over this: and I am wasting your life."

Her last injunction to Leonard was to burn all her papers. He ignored it, as did most of her correspondents. The posterity of which she was so heedless can only be grateful, since this was what enabled Nicolson and Co-Editor Joanne Trautmann to assemble such a monumental collection. Even Horace Walpole, however perplexed he might have been by its modernity, would have made a deep 18th century bow to its greatness.

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