452
PARTISAN REVIEW
Sep timus Wa rren Smith and Mrs. Da ll oway in to the same book.
It
was
a way to make use of her interna l sense of di visio n . Mo reover, fo r a
person terrifi ed of so much of the wo rld outside her, writing books
offered a way of retiring fr om the world without abandoning the hope
of communi ca ti on-without , tha t is, retiring into a world so pri va te
she was actua ll y insane. Leona rd Woo lf, a long with man y o th ers, saw
that there was a close connec ti on between her madness and the sou rces
of her crea ti vity, but it is equ a ll y true tha t her crea ti vity was her
pr incipal stay aga inst madness.
Finishing a book was dangerous, no t just because of the immi –
nence of p resenta tion and se lf-reve la ti on .
If
she was no t a lready
wor king on ano ther book, her underl ying guilt and anxi ety came to the
surface, no longer kept in cont ro l by the sheer acti vity of writing. Or
perhaps she was simpl y exhausted fr om the effo rt. She became irritabl e
and melancho ly. She felt her mind was bo bbin g like a cork on the
ocean . Absorbed in her work , she li ved a n underwa ter exi stence; she
resented interru p tions whi ch haul ed ht'r, like an indi gnant fi sh , to the
surface. When she set to work, she would li ght a cigarette, take her
wr itin g board on her knees, and let herself down , like a di ver, she sa id ,
in to the sentence she had written the day before. After some twenty
minutes she wo uld see a li ght in the ocean depths and stea lthil y
app roach , flin g in g a sentence like a net over some sea pea rl which was
li ke ly to sli p away, and whi ch , bro ught
to
the surface, mi ght no t look
anythin g like wha t it had underwa ter. Very littl e of her imagina tive
effo rt went into scene-building o r dramat ic constructi o n . An image, a
p icture (like tha t of her fa ther sitting in the boa t at St. Ives) o r an
experimenta l no ti on (like the mi ddl e secti on of
T o Th e L ighthouse)
would fl ash into her mind , often when she was wa lking, and from then
on the busin ess of writin g consisted of fitti ng words onto the bac ks of
rh ythm . T hese subaquaeous p ursuits were her grea tes t excitements in
li fe.
Wh ether she was in her stud y, writing, or wa lking the Sussex
uowns, or stro lling about th e stree ts of Lo ndon , she had the capac ity
fo r total absorpti on in her wo rk. Loui e Mayer, when she fir st started
work as the WooJ[s' cook a t RodmeJl , was startl ed to hea r her ta lkin g to
herse lf, as kin g ques ti ons and answerin g them , as she took her mo rning
ba th in the room over the kitchen . She was tryin g o ut the sentences tha t
had come to her the ni ght before. Res t consisted of varying her literary
acti vity, turnin g from fi cti on to criti cism o r from criti cism to fi cti on ,
ta kin g a break for memo irs fr om time to time, and perpetua ll y ma king
ti me for correspondence and her journa l.
If
writing a rticl es was like
