WH Auden on Virginia Woolf

                I read this article by WH Auden on Virginia Woolf and loved it. I find it so exciting that it was written all the way back in 1954!! - https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1954/03/06/a-consciousness-of-reality

               Ruminations like the ones in Virginia Woolf's diary I find wonderful because of their capacity to show how truly universal our seemingly personal/unique longings/suffering/joys are.

               Here are my favourite snippets from the article:

1. Virginia Woolf refused to be distracted from writing her life of Roger Fry: “It’s the vastness, and the smallness, that makes this possible. So intense are my feelings (about Roger); yet the circumference (the war) seems to make a hoop round them. No, I can’t get the odd incongruity of feeling intensely and at the same time knowing that there’s no importance in that feeling. Or is there, as I sometimes think, more importance than ever?”

2. I have never read any book that conveyed more truthfully what a writer’s life is like, what are its worries, its rewards, its day-by-day routine. Some readers, apparently, have been shocked to find how anxious and sensitive Virginia Woolf was about reviews, and how easily commendation of others could make her envious, but most writers, if they are honest, will recognize themselves in such remarks as “No creative writer can swallow another contemporary. The reception of living work is too coarse and partial if you’re doing the same thing yourself. . . . When Desmond praises ‘East Coker,’ and I am jealous, I walk over the marsh saying, I am I,” and even in her reflection on her father’s death: “Father . . . would have been 96 . . . and could have been 96, like other people one has known: but mercifully was not. His life would have entirely ended mine.”

3. Some of us keep up an air of stoic indifference to reviews, some avoid distress by refusing to read them, but we all care, and for good reasons. Every writer who is original is often doubtful about the value of a work; praise from a critic whom he respects is a treasured reassurance, silence or blame a confirmation of his worst fears: “So I’m found out and that odious rice pudding of a book is what I thought it—a dank failure.”

4. Sensitive as she was to attacks, she was never too vain to deny any truth there might be in even the most prejudiced: “The thing to do is to note the pith of what is said—that I don’t think—then to use the little kick of energy which opposition supplies to be more vigorously oneself. . . . To investigate candidly the charge; but not fussily, not very anxiously. On no account to retaliate by going to the other extreme—thinking too much.”

5. Like every other writer, she was concerned about what particular kind of writer she was, and what her unique contribution could and should be. “My only interest as a writer lies, I begin to see, in some queer individuality; not in strength, or passion, or anything startling." 

[...]

 What she felt and expressed with the most intense passion was a mystical, religious vision of life, “a consciousness of what I call ‘reality’: a thing I see before me: something abstract; but residing in the downs or sky; beside which nothing matters; in which I shall exist and continue to exist. . . ."

6. Moreover, as is true of most mystics, she also experienced the Dark Night when “reality” seemed malignant—“the old treadmill feeling, of going on and on and on, for no reason . . . contempt for my lack of intellectual power; reading Wells without understanding. . . . society; buying clothes; Rodmell spoilt; all England spoilt: terror at night of things generally wrong in the universe.”

7. 1926 [She is finishing To the Lighthouse]:

September 30. It is not oneself but something in the universe that one’s left with. It is this that is frightening and exciting in the midst of my profound gloom, depression, boredom, whatever it is. One sees a fin passing far out. What image can I reach to convey what I mean?

8. 1931: [On January 20th, she gets the idea, in her bath, for Three Guineas]

February 7. I wrote the words O Death fifteen minutes ago, having reeled across the last ten pages with some moments of such intensity and intoxication that I seemed only to stumble after my own voice, or almost, after some sort of speaker. . . . Anyhow it is done; and I have been sitting these fifteen minutes in a state of glory, and calm, and some tears. . . . How physical the sense of triumph and relief is!

9. I do not know how Virginia Woolf is thought of by the younger literary generation [...]

[...] I rather suspect that her style and her vision were so unique that influence would only result in tame imitation—but I cannot imagine a time, however bleak, or a writer, whatever his school, when and for whom her devotion to her art, her industry, her severity with herself—above all, her passionate love, not only or chiefly for the big moments of life but also for its daily humdrum “sausage-and-haddock” details—will not remain an example that is at once an inspiration and a judge.