Curbing the urge to purge

The campaign is over, the Ruffin symposium is over, Thanksgiving is over, it's December already. I'm in a maintenance mood; took a load of books to the PTA Thift Shop today to clear out space for the ones stacked on the floor. I rarely buy books for their long-term value; they're to be read, or at least read at, and available for research. Some, to be sure, I need to have around for unexplainable reasons--old grad school books mostly. But more often, when I feel pretty certain I'm not going to need a book again, it's no pain to give it away.

I almost gave away my Everyman's Library copy of Thomas Browne's Religio Medici and Other Writings. But as I landed on the last page, I decided I wasn't ready to part with it:

Think not thy time short in this World since the World itself is not long. The created World is but a small parenthesis in Eternity, and a short interposition for a time between such a state of duration as was before it and may be after it. And if we should allow of the old Tradition, that the World should last Six Thousand years, it could scarce have the name of old, since the first man lived near a sixth part thereof, and seven Methuselas would exceed its whole duration. However to palliate the shortness of our Lives, and somewhat to compensate our brief term in this World, it's good to know as much as we can of it, and also so far as possibly in us lieth to hold such a Theory of times past, as though we had seen the same. He who hath thus considered the World, as also how therein things long past have been answered by things present, how matters in one Age have been acted over in another, and how there is nothing new under the Sun may conceive himself in some manner to have lived from the beginning and be as old as the world; and if he should still live on, 'twould be but the same thing.

--"Christian Morals," sec. XXIX

Virginia Woolf in her own way suggests why I might want to hold on to old Thomas Browne.

Accustomed as we are to strip a whole page of its sentences and crush their meaning out in one grasp, the obstinate resistance which a page of Urn Burial offers at first trips and blinds us. . . . He is an amateur . . . has no call to conciliate his reader. . . . Here we approach the doubtful region--the region of beauty. . . . But why beauty should have the effect upon us that it does, the strange serene confidence that it inspires in us, none can say. Most people have tried and perhaps one of the invariable properties of beauty is that it leaves in the mind a desire to impart. Some offering one must make; some act we must dedicate, if only to move across the room and turn the rose in the jar, which, by the way, has dropped its petals.

--"Reading" (1919)

Woolf hunting

From 1996 through 1999, I was the bibliographer for the International Virginia Woolf Society. I took it online (where it has remained) at what was called SunSITE, then MetaLab, now ibiblio. For fun, I added a feature I called "passing glances"--a place to record other works of fiction or nonfiction in which Woolf plays a bit part. As I recall, the inspiration in part came from the work Brenda Silver was doing, culminating in her 1999 book Virginia Woolf Icon,

a book about "Virginia Woolf": the face that sells more postcards than any other at Britain's National Portrait Gallery, the name that Edward Albee's play linked with fear, the cultural icon so rich in meanings that it has been used to market everything from the New York Review of Books to Bass Ale.

Enlisting the help of Woolfians everywhere, I tried to call attention to these literary Woolf sightings. And I challenged readers to help me try to understand what these references were all about:

In these and other books making up our reading at random, Woolf is there--a testament to her genius and, further, to several decades of her readers' passionate and public scholarship. But she is not just there--she is being used. She is "passing" for (or against) something . . .

Even a decade ago, just to try to follow Woolf's tracks through contemporary writing was overwhelming. No grand theories, well really not any theories, emerged about what this phenomenon meant, although, then and now, it seems clear that there is Virginia Woolf and there is the idea of Virginia Woolf. Brenda Silver approached a theory; choosing to focus on Woolf's recurring image in popular culture, she asked why it was that Woolf seemed so often to be associated with dis-ease:

We cannot stop the proliferation of Virginia Woolfs or the claims to "truth" or authenticity that accompany each refashioning of her image; nor would I want to, however much I might disagree with or be scared by the effect produced by any particular representation. Instead, I have focused on those places where Virginia Woolf becomes symptomatic of embedded layers of cultural anxiety, in an effort to formulate as precisely as I can the issues--and the stakes.

And yet there was always more to write about. As her book was going to press, Silver was already trying to identify Woolf sightings on the web.

Woolfian friend Anne Fernald, now a professor of English at Fordham University-Lincoln Center and author of Virginia Woolf: Feminism and the Reader, is threatening to pick up the challenge in her blog, even though it is more daunting than ever now, with the internets to contend with.

One of Anne's recent sightings is a great one for these cold winter days, Amardeep Singh's post "Virginia Woolf, In Winter," a brief meditation on Woolf's wonderful, rambling London essay "Street Haunting."

Hakluyt and Woolf: a rare combination

I always get a kick out of the Bauman Rare Books ad on the back of the NYT book review, but this week it's more in the nature of the pleasure of finding a message hidden in plain sight; which I will share.

The featured book is a truly rare first edition of Richard Hakluyt's Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques and Discoveries (1599), offered for $60,000. Its publication is described as a crucial step toward the founding of the British Empire:

While serving in Paris as a member of Queen Elizabeth I's embassy to France, Richard Hakluyt repeatedly heard the English derided for their comparative lack of accomplishment on the sea compared to other nations. But Her Majesty's Sailing Ships had passed through the Strait of Magellan, traversed the Pacific, established trade with sultans and czars, and, most triumphantly, circumnavigated the globe under the bold and brazen leadership of Francis Drake. Determined that England be accorded her rightful place as first among sea-going nations, he undertook what no one had done before: to collect in one book and present to the world the most comprehensive collection of England's accomplishments of geographical exploration and discovery. Much was at stake, as the race to claim predominance in the New World was on, and Hakluyt, with his peers Walter Raleigh and Francis Bacon, worked tirelessly to promote the cause. The inclusion by Hakluyt of hundreds of accounts of discovery by other nations spurred Elizabeth's ambitions and helped lay the foundations of empire.

On the same page, a first edition of A Room of One's Own (1929) is offered for $9,500, "signed by Woolf in purple ink."

It wasn't a first edition of Hakluyt that Virginia Woolf's father, Sir Leslie Stephen, brought home to her from the library; as she tells us, it was "those five cumbrous volumes in which the printers of 1811 had thought good to entomb" him. As she recalled in her diary in December 1929, her father "must have been 65; I 15 or 16, then; & why I don't know, but I became enraptured, though not exactly interested, but the sight of the large yellow page entranced me. I used to read it & dream of those obscure adventurers, & no doubt practised their style in my copy books." By the time she comes to write a review of a study of Hakluyt by the early 20th century scholar Walter Raleigh, she understands that the volume is "founded on hard truth, that the voyagers were substantial English seamen, and that the whole makes a consecutive chapter of English history"; yet still, what she finds most compelling is the poetry and imagery of discovery, as in this passage from (the original) Sir Walter Raleigh on reaching Guiana:

I never saw a more beautifull countrey, nor more lively prospects, hills so raised here and there over valleys, the river winding into divers branches, the plaines adjoyning without bush or stubble, all faire greene grasse, the ground of hard sand easie to march on, either for horse or foote, the deere crossing in every path, the birdes towards the evening singing on every tree with a thousand severall tunes, cranes and herons of white, crimson, and carnation pearching in the rivers side, the aire fresh with a gentle Easterly winde, and every stone that we stouped to take up, promised either golde or silver by his complexion.

As Alice Fox was the first to notice, the sense of imagination that Woolf gathered from Hakluyt's Voyages launched her upon a lifetime of reading and reinterpreting the Renaissance in inventive, productive, even progressive ways: not as the Renaissance of Burckhardt and Empire, but more as an imagined site for personal and, potentially, cultural reinvnention. In stark contrast to T.S. Eliot, who, reading and writing at the same time, drew from the Renaissance a notion of "order" from which the modern world was in the steady process of deteriorating, Woolf relished in the moment of discovery when nothing was fixed and all worlds could be new. No doubt mistakenly--but with a compelling optimism--she persisted in seeing the Renaissance as a time "far more elastic" than her own--even finding within it the roots of an unfulfilled promise of democratic equality.

Luckily for me, just as I was starting to write my dissertation on Woolf and the Renaissance, a microfilm copy of her voluminous papers held by the New York Public Library was issued. It wasn't hard to talk the UNC library into buying it, and it was great fun to be the first to use it. It saved me a trip or several to New York; but on the other hand, I still have never seen the originals, which are written in various colors of ink, including purple. A whole layer of interpreation flattened by the microfilm camera!

A copy of A Room of One's Own "signed by Woolf in purple ink" would be quite a thing to discover.

Fragments

Up from the recycle bin floats a page containing a letter that Virginia Woolf wrote to Ethel Smyth, a friend and also a writer, on July 24, 1940. With her Jewish husband, Woolf she spent the last months before her suicide dodging German bombs.

I'm here at the moment--here being a place much visited by German raiders. Its odd, rather satisfactory, how soon one gets accustomed, at least to their neighborhood, and the sound of a bomb or two dropping over Brighton. If they dropped in the garden, doubtless this facade would break; and out would tumble a coward.

I wish I hadn't let a whole week of incessant human voices--London last week--come between me and your book. However, it survives; and in answer to your question, about sequacious (a word Coleridge uses) it means connected; and I used it to indicate a quality of currency, flowingness, in this book, which, though I didn't find it so crested and high stomached, as some of yours I liked. For so the characters come together more subtly: thats I think why I grasped H B more firmly this time. He was too quiet and many tinted to survive the abandonment--emphasis of the other books. Here you let him grow. I never agree that one book is "the best." Unless of course one's Shakespeare--and how few of us are!--I believe every book is only a fragment; and one may be a brighter or bigger fragment; but to complete the whole one must read them all. Certainly you got things said in this one that you didn't in Imp [Impressions That Remained 1919]: and t'other way about. Thats, partly, why I want you to continue. Because you do continue, thank God, not a finished precious vase, but a porous receptacle that sags slightly, swells slightly, but goes on soaking up the dew, the rain, the shine, and whatever else falls upon the earth. Isn't that the point of being Ethel Smyth? Now Vernon Lee, I daresay, completed her shape, and was sun dried and shell like. Well, I musn't run on inordinately.

No, I shan't send you R.F. [her biography of Roger Fry]: because, dear Ethel, its no more your book than Maurice Baring was mine. And I don't like to think of you rubbing your spectacles and screwing up your forehead. No, let it lapse; and one of these days I'll write something you'll take to like a duck: or so I hope. I cant say what I'm doing next week: alls a vast leap in the dark. So I'll leave it to the moment and the telephone, as before.

Now its clouding over: is there time for a game of bowls? Thats my passion.

V.

Woolf and Smyth had a complicated relationship, Woolf betraying in her creative work little of the ego that Smyth did.



Woolf's "Thoughts on Peace in an Air Raid" (August 1940), written for an American audience while in the same mood of futility and frustration with a political situation she is powerless to influence, ends with plaintive urgency:

Let us send these fragmentary notes to the huntsmen who are up in America, to the men and women whose sleep has not yet been broken by machine–gun fire, in the belief that they will rethink them generously and charitably, perhaps shape them into something serviceable.

The disappearing art of the book

So I wanted a hard copy of the Wilmington Report. Sure it's online, but I wanted the thing itself. Getting one was easy enough through my state senator's office. But what a disappointment. It's photocopy paper with a spiral binding. Surely the state of North Carolina could have done better. I wasn't expecting a fancy hard cover, but a nice paperback, you know, with the state seal or something on it, would not have been a stretch. Is a real print edition planned? I haven't heard that it is.

Beautiful books have been made. Vanessa Bell designed covers for her sister.



Smith College has a collection of elegant book bindings.



Those were different times.

Many online resources on bookbinding.