Seventy-three years ago today, on April 29th 1937 – before the War, before television, before many of today’s old ladies were born – Virginia Woolf sat in a BBC studio and spoke about the particular qualities of the English language. An ordinary thing to do, for her. And many of us know roughly the kind of thing she would say. (Some of it is interesting, in fact, and completely – now – untrue.)
You know her face so well you can conjure it at will, in several modes, with your eyes shut. You know her style – her ‘Writing Voice’ – her words, books, stories, characters. But you’ve never heard what Virginia Woolf sounded like when she spoke.
But that recording from 73 years ago today is here, and it is the only surviving sound of Woolf’s voice. Somehow it’s a huge surprise – even if it isn’t really surprising. (In fact, with the heartlessness of distance, you cold say it tells you everything you need to know. But I confess I found it strangely moving.) Have a listen.
Her voice made me think of Joan Plowright’s. Class? Education? Happenstance?
Her accent made me think of Lord Peter Wimsey: ‘Fire up the Lagonda, Bunting!’
But I agree wholeheartedly with her conclusion about why we have no great poets (i.e. like Shakespeare, Milton, Wordsworth etc. though, of course, her peers Eliot and Pound were about to make a stab at proving her wrong) which is that the British were trying, and are still trying today, to make words useful, and only to consider them as useful, for ‘catching a train or passing an examination’.
This is the Creative Writing Generation, as I called it the other day, and it is based on a false premise, which is that writing ability – true writing ability as opposed to the disposable kind – can be taught. The wildness and unpredictability of words as ‘writing’, as hundreds or thousands or even millions of tiny secret entities gathered together to form a coherent and living whole, reacting to each other in context and to their own literary and folk past, simply cannot be harnessed to a Creative Writing programme and told to show up on time every week.
We are living through a great age of mediocrity, an age of the celebration and perpetuation of mediocrity. An age which Woolf could obviously glimpse ahead. No wonder she jumped into that stream, her pockets laden with stones, thinking perhaps to incarnadine the multitudinous seas in a metaphorical if not literal sense.
This old hippie lite found that thrilling. Thank you.
Wow! Thanks for sharing!
Dear Katy
I loved Jane’s comment which hit the proverbial nail smack on the head as usual. I never know what to make of Virginia Woolf. She was probably a literary genius but I’m always put off by the fact that she was such a frightful snob. I was amused to read that Vita Sackville-West had lesbian affairs with Violet Trefusis, Virginia Woolf and presumably several other women whose names began with V!
Best wishes from Simon
I’ve read To The Lighthouse many many times and start to cry about 20 pages before the sad bit, which is pretty much the whole novel. However, I digress. Did you hear that the lady downstairs from you is starting up a rival blog called Baruch in Hackney, musings on the Torah, Matzohs and Mazel Tov coctails.
Michele, what are you, psychic? I just wrote a 1,350-word post all about the little tensions currently simmering in our block, in which yours truly has virtually been called an anti-Semite! – yes! – and neatly tied them up with issues from the election campaign, including Suzanne’s peccadillo with Darcus Howe… then WordPress ate the whole thing. I’ll call you.
I do get fed up with the notion that Woolf was in any important way a snob – any evidence is from careless remarks in diaries and letters and not from the fiction and essays she gave her life to – she was democratic, socialist and subversive. What she’s saying here (and thanks very much for this Katy) underlines that: the violence of contemporary language a reaction to linguistic puritanism; the necessity of linguistic miscegenation. Yes. Yes. Yes.