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 

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.