Virginia Woolf - Hemione Lee, Immanuel Kant - Critique of Pure Reason, John Bunyan, Pilgrim's Progress, Kingsley Amis - Memoirs

Sometimes you wake slowly and drowsily, with a feeling of warmth and bliss, in a blessed state that is only punctured by the curse of rising that destroys all the comfort and reach of your rest. Today after this, after the trip in the car to the station I went back to bed, sneaking back under the covers. When I finally had to get up I started reading Virginia Woolf, Hermione Lee's dense but accessible biography and thought yet again how reading, writing and thinking are the things that can lever me out of the slough of despond*. Having read so much (but not all) Woolf the biography is full or references that I can nod at, or at least know that I can link something I have read of Woolf's to what is being said which is very satisfying. I read the part where Lee discusses the interiority of Virginia Woolf's autobiographical writing, how she saw that the external public maw in which men operate was the only biographical shape that was extant - live, emotional inner worlds - and by design and by chance therefore almost all of womens' lives are excluded, never told.

The next chunk that I read was about her memories of staying at Talland House in St Ive's, these beautiful impressionistic descriptions of the yellow blind, the acorn like end of the string that pulls the blind sliding across the floor and the rhythm of the waves, descriptions that she retells and reworks and which to me sum up the wonder of The Waves (necessarily!), the book of her that I read as a wash of sensation and beauty.

I've also just read the introduction to Kant's  A Critique of Pure Reason , the reason being that a friend of my eldest son wants to have a reading group to tackle this and there is something very attractive about actually thinking about thinking, and making sense of what it is that we do that makes us human, perhaps.

I've also added a quote below from Pilgrim's Progress, an edition of which I may still have somewhere, unloved and unread, but some of his images are so part of common parlance that we use them without thinking. I've always found it unreadable though - it does remind me of Kingsley Amis quoting Philip Larkin's attitude towards early english poems - "'apes bumfodder'" . Amis's summary is below:

"All Old English and nearly all Middle English works produced hatred and weariness in everybody who studied them"

They had the added burden of being lectured to by Tolkien who was "incoherent and often inaudible" - I had to add that - God knows what Amis thought of Lord of the Rings. It does seem to me that many so called classics are there just because they are there, just because at a certain point in time they got admired and then the admiration sort of ossified around them. I have the same kind of feelings about Citizen Kane - supposed to be one of the best films ever made, but I've never got more than half way though before turning off out of boredom and incredulity that it is so admired.

* "This miry Slough is such a place as cannot be mended; it is the descent whither the scum and filth that attends conviction for sin doth continually run, and therefore is it called the Slough of Despond: for still as the sinner is awakened about his lost condition, there ariseth in his soul many fears, and doubts, and discouraging apprehensions, which all of them get together, and settle in this place; and this is the reason of the badness of this ground."

John Bunyan, Pilgrim's Progress 

Virginia Woolf, Katherine Mansgfield and civet cats

Virginia Woolf remarked of Katherine Mansfield that she smelt like a "civet cat that had taken to streetwalking" so I wondered whether that was a bad thing or a good thing.  That ingredient of scent used to made from the anal glands of civet cats, but is now mainly synthesised (I imagine its harvest was equally traumatic for the "cat" and the collector, as civets are related to skunks and the scent collected is only pleasant when well diluted). You can still buy perfumes with civet in - Google says Giorgio Aranani in Boots has civet but I think that's wistful thinking on the part of Google. There are a number of perfumes with civet though on fragantia.com including this one which caught my eye from Opus oils. Interesting that a perfume I really like - Coco Chanel - has civet base notes.

Kingsley Amis - Memoirs

Thank God I can still read and I can still write despite - although the wireless network connector has just fallen over and I can't save this at the moment, then the browser froze and I can’t even type so I’m continuing in Word, ready to paste back here> That was very irritating, the whole PC freezing up, DNS look-up gone to fuck and Christ knows what else. Maybe this is just the psychic version of the pathetic fallacy updated for the Internet, but one knows that it is just coincidence. One of those difficult times which one does realize are shared by countless millions but trapped in your own little bubble it is difficult to find this comforting other than in an abstract "well this is what its like for lots of people kind of way".
Kinglsey Amis, amazingly, tried all different kinds of therapy, because he suddenly found that he was having panic attacks on empty trains, or when he went out anywhere. He talks about "fears of depersonalisation", first from dark nights, then from getting on empty trains. Sounds like panic attacks, which I used to get but don't seem to now, where you suddenly experience this immense fear that you are going to literally disappear. It's in the section of the Memoirs entitled shrinks, and he doesn't think very much of them and if his reporting of their input is accurate, neither do I.

My current therapist, who I have only been seeing for a few weeks, I chose because she looked and sounded interesting (my wife added, yes and young and attractive too), and didn't look like one of those people who've spent years and years making a living out of chatting to people with half - arsed complaints like me, but someone who was interested in what makes people tick. And largely I talk in the sessions, so there is little of the framing / reframing of the problem that Amis complained about. When it does arrive, usually in the from of a "well that sounds positive, that's good" or something "positive" like that I merely look pained and bewildered and say "No that's not it" It's hard to say if it's going anywhere at all - we've established that I feel trapped by lots of situations, that I use depressants to suppress my emotions, that I would like to escape some of these props and prisons, but just stating the problem isn't solving it by any means.

One of the reasons that I'd like to stop taking any kind of depressant is that it stops me thinking properly. I remember once seeing Germaine Greer interviewed and the thing that stuck out, in fact the only thing I remember about the interview was that she said that she loved thinking, that being able to think was the thing that she most enjoyed doing. That certainly resonated with me, and it's why sometimes when I've perhaps drunk too much while cooking, so that I can't really think clearly and accurately,  then the only thing I can think of to do is to go to bed and sleep even if it is only 8pm in the evening or earlier. This feels like such a waste of time, but once the drugs are loaded in your system there's nothing you can do except wait for your body to process them. Which begs the question of course of why load up in the first place? Well that question is of course the key, and some of the answer is that it's all about passing the time, about getting through the time, and without something huge and beautiful and wonderful to do the time drags heavily and dangerously and depressingly. The answer is to do something, anything, but keeping doing things - keeping writng would be a fucking start, actually get some more things finished.

London Review of Books (cont), Diary- Virginia Woolf, Kingsley Amis - Memoirs, Lucky Jim

Writing about Rupert Brooke and the Olivier sisters and all their sexual shenanigans (or not - the point being that women were always at the risk of ruined reputations and pregnancy) reminded me of  Virginia Woolf's diary entries re Marjorie Strachey. There was a lot of discussion over her saying she had fallen in love with a married man (Jos Wedgewood) - Virginia Woolf says that she certainly seems to be in love. But Jos Wedgewood was a "pillar of the establishment", with a wife and seven children, albeit his wife had left him two years earlier. The discussion revolves around the fact that to be an ordinary mistress would lead to "ruin" - there is no way in which she can have this relationship and stay respectable. Of course it all ended badly - Jos Wedgewood finally divorced his wife then promptly married his deaf governess. According to Virginia Woolf's diary Marjory had renounced him ( Letters, 15/7/1918) and was quite sprightly about it. ( I found all this out with the usual Googling, but then I noticed that you could buy a complete Virginia Woolf including the diary and all the letters for £1.92 - the thing being that while it might not be so satisfactory reading the letters and diary on a Kindle, having the ability to search for "Marjory Strachey" though all the works is a great thing. A great thing. It beggars belief the amount of sheer library slog biographers would have had to go through before the digitization of everything. This is so easy now, to search for references and cross - references).

There's an article in the Guardian (A century later, why do we still kneel at the shrine of the Bloomsbury set?) that says, essentially, they were successful Bohemians but only because they had money. Which is true, of course, but there were plenty of other people who had money that didn't live or behave like they did, so it doesn't seem to right to write off their experimentation and way of living as the pure and only result of a private income. Would it have been possible without the money - no it wouldn't.  And here's my point, given the riches that large numbers of us live with these days, there are opportunities to experiment and do different stuff!  And given the huge wealth of literature and film and insights that are available to us the fact that Bloomsbury still shines through, not only in the writing of Virginia Woolf but in the lives they chose to lead it's not just a matter of televisual lives of posh others that we watch in superbly recreated costume environments, there's more substance and sustenance than that. It's all about choices (Barcode Brothers), as ever. 

Before I stop and have some more coffee, have to mention Kinglsey Amis's Memoirs  which have that witty wicked voice describing such a dull dreary life in the 1930s to 1950s, which seems to me to be the absolute opposite of the more life affirming dalliances of the Bloomsbury set. It's funny to read, but full of bile at the same time - a tale of relatives and upbringings in Norbury and Purley, perhaps this savage tone is the only one that is adequate. It reminds me uncomfortably of my own writing - the Clive and Beth stories where Clive is a cynical and desperately sad character who would love to be loving and real but just can't quite make it. I've read Lucky Jim a couple of times and it is a comic classic - the next book, whose title I forget is less successful, a portrait of a young man with a wife and child who is trapped in every sense of the word by circumstance, but utterly fails to live the life he could - its a weary and miserable comedy, brought alive by some of the set pierces but collapsing under it's own black mood. 

London Review of Books, Virginia Woolf, Rupert Brooke, Noel Olivier

The LRB is proving it's worth - still haven't read it all. After the article on Turner's

Turner’s ‘Rain, Steam and Speed’  I started reading this: Something Rather Scandalous,a review of various books about Rupert Brooke that segues pretty easily and scandalously into a review of his sexual life and mores, complete with one of the most erotic photographs I've ever seen in a mainstream publication, a picture of the Oliver sisters naked on the beach at St Ive's. Prurience and genuine awe mean that I must reproduce it here - so here it is: 

The Olivier sisters in Cornwall in 1914. From left, Margery, Brynhild, Noel, Daphne

Proof that people had a lot of fun a hundred years ago, that sex was and always will be such a driving motivation. The picture is in the LRB because Rupert Brookes was in love with, or certainly eager to get into bed with Noel, for some years, but she kept him at arms length. The reason why that might be is fairly mundane and obvious - while all the young men  were fairly busy having sex with one another (Rupert Brookes was bisexual), the women and girls were unable to join in this rampant promiscuity. The boys could get away with it, the girls faced pregnancy and ruined reputations. The popularity mentioned, later in the review, of swimming naked as recommended by the Headmaster of Bedales( the progressive school where Noel Olivier went)  at the time must have allowed for a tantalizing eroticism that was seldom sated with actual sex. Hang on though, why this picture of Noel Olivier? (there are loads of others).  Yes it does fit in with the very sexual themes of the Rupert Brooke's life, but you have to conclude that even the LRB knows that salacious pictures and sex sells. I'm not complaining - I think it's a fantastic picture.  They are very beautiful. The review does mention that Noel studied medicine - in fact she became a doctor, in a lot of ways she is a much more interesting character than Rupert Brooke (apopros of  available pictures there is a great, if completely unsalacious, picture elsewhere on the web,of Noel Olivier, Maitland Radford, Rupert Brooke and Virginia Woolf. 

By Unknown - National Portrait Gallery: NPG x13124

The picture is dated 1911, so she is 19 perhaps. Brooke met her and fell for her when she was 15).

But anyway back to sex and nudity - I knew that a theme was emerging in this post. It's interesting and sad the terrible taboos we still have on nudity - that poor guy who likes to walk nude is always being imprisoned for it. And when I say "terrible taboo", I mean internal, self - censoring taboos, the kind of inner dialogue which says "Ohh I wouldn't want him / her / it to see my naked body, ohhh they're all pervs, that's what they are". The kind of dialogue that means if you want to swim naked in Brighton you have to go all the way up to the marina and climb a steep bank of stones. And then of course you do meet the very "pervy" behaviour that people are so frightened of, men with paunches slowly walking up and down the beach seeing if they can look at a woman naked. It does spoil it a bit - I'm not sure I would be comfortable being a woman alone on a nudist beach just for the sheer  heavy traffic of passers by just hoping for a glance, which would make you feel a bit self conscious if not unsafe..  Which is a real shame because I hate swimming with trunks on, they just drag you down, and I feel perfectly comfortable being naked especially on the beach. 

The London Review of Books

As if I didn't have enough to read I have just taken out a subscription to the London Review of Books (LRB from now on). This isn't quite as mad as it sounds as it's the kind of newspaper size that I read flat on the table at breakfast, where a book never stays open easily at the page you are on. Currently that kind of reading material is restricted to the Saturday issue of the Guardian and the New Yorker magazine, so I often run out of suitable material by Wednesday.  First thought is that the LRB is just that, it is just book reviews by and large (I had bought it on the strength of the serialization of Jenny Diski's In Gratitude, so thought there was quite a lot of other kinds of writing in it), so that was at first sight a little bit disappointing. That being said the first few pages of the LRB consisted of a load of verbatim quotes from Donald Trump, and these I had come across all but a few before, and they were frighteningly familiar and depressing to read - what a dangerous idiot the man is) It was only when I started to read the reviews, that's when my disappointment disappeared completely.

The first review I read was "Great Again", by Malcolm Turnbull which was a review of a translation of Martin Heidegger's Ponderings II-IV: Black Notebook 1931-1938. I've got no previous knowledge of Heidegger - no knowledge at all except for a very unfortunate and ignorant classification of him as someone who had some thing to do with Hegel, who I also have very little knowledge of), and it has to be said, not that much interest. But I ploughed on anyway, and then ceased ploughing on  and began reading with a kind of rather wonderful joy about this Nazi and antisemitic philosopher. The review is beautifully written - that does help in keeping your interest, both in terms of its prose and in terms of the way it throws in little snippets of history and story about Heidegger's life and in terms of the way it knits in a little contemporary context. Hidden away in this review (hidden because you would be forgiven in thinking the review was about Heidegger only) are some very interesting perspectives on Brexit and the rise of far right nationalisms in Europe, and of course their counterpart in Trump.  It's worth quoting a whole paragraph:

Officially, such nationalisms reject biological racism, but by placing great emphasis on geographical origin and citizenship, they are both exceptionalist and exclusive. Decline is universal, and only if you were born in the right place can you exempt yourself from it. ‘The day I was born I had already won the greatest lottery on earth,’ Trump writes in Crippled America. ‘I was born in the United States of America. With that came the amazing opportunities that every American has. The right to become the best person that you can be.’ The crucial point here is that the right to become the best you can be is a birthright and not as (Obama and Hillary suppose) a universal human right. That’s both why illegal immigrants must be deported, and why ‘we can restore America and unleash the incredible potential of our great land and people.’ To think otherwise is to deny that there is something ‘special or exceptional about America’.

LRB 20th October 2016,  p10


A brilliant skewering of the way such nationalisms  "replace" pure outright racism with a culture of "birthright" and "place" which all too many people buy into with its fake nostalgia and pretence of some kind of golden age of British-ness or some other kind of "ness" . This is explained rather well by what the economist Branko Milanović calls "citizenship rent (the increased income you get from doing the same job in one country rather than another)."
The thing is that this kind of citizenship rent has a built in adjustment - as people move from areas of low income to areas of higher income so there is a levelling out of earnings - and this is what the cosseted earners of the West do not want (albeit they are happy to use their differential wealth to pay cheap cleaners and keep their health service going  and their old people looked after and their bars run - the list goes on). It's your birthplace that determines the extent of poverty or not that you will grow up in, not your class anymore, and the likes of Trump and Farage are cashing in on this nativism. 

Well so far so good - there is more I could say about this review, which is as much an essay as a review, but then there is the very next article / review which, in parlance long gone out of use "blew my mind" with its literacy, its comfortable situating of itself in the old British class system (this inelegant difficult phrasing is trying to get across the sense of privilege and establishment insider insight with which this article is written, which is perhaps, a signature style of the LRB), and its easy gloss on the review author's own situation, best summed up in the opening paragraph. I have to quote it, it's just too good to miss. So here goes, the first paragraph of Herberts & Herbertinas, which is Rosemary Hill's review of Outlandish Knight: The Byzantine Life of Steven Runciman by Minoo Dinshaw

"I met Steven Runciman several times towards the end of his long life. On one occasion he told me, as he told many people, that as a young man he had danced with a friend of his mother who, in her own youth, had danced with Prince Albert. He seemed slightly disconcerted when I insisted that he dance a few steps with me so that I could say I had danced with a man who danced with a girl who danced with the Prince Consort..."

LRB 20th October 2016,  p11

This portrait of privilege  (Eton, Cambridge, Bloomsbury etc.) is I think a portrait of a life that could not be lived now, but maybe I am wrong, maybe you can still float from Cambridge to the head of the British Council in Greece, but I think probably not - as the end of the review says this man who knew everybody was: 

" finally defeated by the ascent of Tony Blair, the only prime minister in his lifetime apart from Bonar Law with whom he had no mutual acquaintance – and ‘nobody knew’ Bonar Law. Blair was distasteful on many fronts. ‘How can anyone marry a wife called Cherie?’"

LRB 20th October 2016,  p14

We're only left with the unfortunate nationalism of the West, privilege of income and life that arise out of where we are born, more than who we were born too. You may be born into the right family now but the effortless ascent isn't what it used to be - you have to go into politics and at least make some effort. There's that lovely little twist in the jibe about Cherie Blair's first name, so out of touch, so far behind. Or maybe I'm wrong and it all goes on the same, we just don't have the far off perspective of a biography and a review to see it all  with.  

The Diary of Virginia Woolf Vol 1 1915-19

This afternoon I picked up Virginia Woolf's first volume of diary again and was completely absorbed yet again - there's something about journals, about looking in through someone else's window on the world, hearing their thoughts - or those thoughts and events that they saw fit to write about - that has this fascination to me - that they, at that time, on that day were thinking about these things. What strikes me about Virginia Woolf from her diary is how connected she was - always seeing people, lunching with people, walking with people, and of course this very warm loving ( yes I'd use that word specifically) relationship with Leonard. As I was reading I came to a gap. The last entry of the 1915 diary is on 15th February, she has just bought a dress. Then there is nothing until Friday 3rd August 1917. Apparently back on the 16th February 1915 she had a headache, and then in Anne Bell's words "... from then onwards, with increasingly sleepless nights and restless aching days, she slid inexorably into madness" (The Diary of Virginia Woolf Vol 1 1915-19, Penguin Edition, p13). Apparently from June she began to improve, then from November she no longer needed a nurse and she " slowly returned to normal life, shaken, older-looking and heavier" (ibid).  Of course she had had episodes of mental illness before, but this episode seems so sudden and violent, with no obvious cause. Leonard Woolf dared not see her for two months as she "took against" him.

I went to an exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery in 2014 - there were portraits and letters as well including the last heart breaking letter that she left for Leonard before she walked into the River Ouse with her cardigan pocket full of stones. It was a tremendously upsetting thing to see and read. Of course I'm reading the journals of Sylvia Plath too. Both women with so much sensitivity, energy and life it hardly bears belief that they both committed suicide.

In the Woods - Tana French, Tennyson - Idylls of the King, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind - Yuval Noah Harari, Ringworld

So I've been dotting around a bit. In The Woods, or In The Woods Dublin Murder Squad: 1 (Dublin Murder Squad series) to give it its full Amazon title cost 99p in its Kindle version, and was well worth it - a quick read - I finished it ion two days while reading other stuff as well but none the worse for that. Intricate psychological plot, good writing, comfortable tropes of police procedural detective land, it was a welcome break from the more difficult texts and above all it was great  storytelling. The next five in the series are all 99p so I bought them too once I'd established that the first was something I wanted to read. 99p! - still her latest novel is full price - and interestingly has a title that goes like this on Amazon: The Trespasser: The most hotly anticipated crime thriller of the year - I'm slightly fazed by the putting of  "The most hotly anticipated crime thriller of the year" in the title, but I'm sure there's  dead cert marketing intelligence behind it. At least the author will make some money from it any way at.

Note: I've just gone back to check out the price of the paperback versions and the Kindle versions are now £5.99 - so I got five bargains there - it must have been either a mistake or a temporary advertising thing?

Yuval Noah Harari's Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind is a great read too - slightly breathless in tone at times but based on good hard research and good hard thinking at other times. Essentially it feels like  a more hopeful rerun (at the moment - I'm only a hundred or so pages in) of John Gray's Straw Dogs - in both books it's made clear that we made the beds we lie in - the growth of the agricultural culture says Harari means that we gradually lost a carefree nomadic existence for a boom and bust cycle of huge population growth and then the creation of all sorts of fantasies like companies ( are they real things he asks - what is Peugeot - its workers? its owners? its cars? )and money to allow us to do things in concert and make our modern scientific world.John Gray is very clear that we have merely increased the effectiveness of our means of suppression and killing to benefit a lucky few.

So then Tennyson -, Merlin and Vivien one of the Idylls where the evil Vivien follows Merlin and gradually seduces him into revealing the spell that will imprison him forever. It's a strange poem, quite straightforward, all the imagery surrounding Vivien is snakelike and confining, an at the end of the day Merlin is old and depressed and Vivien is young and sensuous, it can only go one way, even though Merlin is aware of how treacherous she is.

I still haven't finished Ringworld yet, have slowed up because in the seemingly unending journey across the ring all they seem to meet are people weho are now savages and believe that the protagonists are the engineers. It's getting a bit repetitive and I've lost momentum. I will go back and finish it, but it seems to lack some of the intricate plotting that Iain M Banks has, and the "savages" are just not very interesting.

The Journals of Sylvia Path

Still as I read them I hear a questioning vibrant voice so like my own that it feels as if she were in my head voicing my thoughts - laying aside the obvious difference that I'm not a teenage girl at college in the USA in the 1950s. It's the questioner behind the voice, the "I" behind the questioning that I identify with so much. It's the way that she leaps on things and experience that surround her and uses those as the focus for her exploration of who, what, why she is. You can feel the patina of adolescence in her writings, coloring the choice of subject and experience - there's a lack of world weariness and length in her experience, but still she comes across as so alive and spirited and so aware of the way she is wrapped up in her own environment and life, always aware that she is this teenage american girl at college and how limited that scope of experience must be, but always seeking to burst out of those confines. It's almost impossible to think that she committed suicide and yet in other ways it is so understandable in that that fierce sensitivity, that intense knowledge of her own limitations are the seeds of the despair that must have eroded her self-belief and her strength. Because with great insight goes a vulnerability that can be hugely difficult to bear - when she pours out her feelings about the atomic bombs and Korea it's not just a rant , it's a heart rending apprehension of the vast damage that is being done, and her insignificance in it, but her complicity too, part of this amazing country that is so incredibly powerful.

"They're really going to mash the world up this time, the damn fools. When I read that description of the victims of Nagasaki I was sick..."

Journals , p46