PHYLLIS ROSE
453
tyi ng up her mind into brown paper parcels, tying up parcels seemed
seducti ve ly simple when she was writing fiction. But when she was
doing journa lism , she would lon g
to
fly free in fi ction once more. This
wasn 't mere contra riness; it was a fin ely supervised monitorin g of h er
own psychic sta tes, the
e xerci~e
of conscious will providing an antidote
fo r her mo re subterranean (or submarine) crea tivity, and vice versa.
Read in g, too, presented itself as a psychic exercise, and not just a way
of taking in informa tion-it was a state which consisted, she said, in
the to ta l elimination of the ego, providing a disembodi ed and trance–
like rapture. There is, you will no te, something sensual in thi s
character iza ti on of reading, as there was in Woolf's enjoyment of
literary activity in general. Until the last drafts of a work, when she
went back over the manuscript with the impersonal mediation of a
typewr iter (go ing over the same page three and four times), she was a
longh and writer, sensitive to the texture of the paper, to the flow of ink,
to the feel of the pen nibs, about which she was very particu lar.
She had kn own great writers in her childhood with the res ult tha t
literary grea tness seemed a thing of the past, just as mounta ins one saw
as a child remain in the memory hi gh er and more maj es tic than any
seen in la ter years. Grea tness was someone who came to tea and to
whom your parents introduced you . T hough she was the center of the
literary life o f London , she was never aga in to be conscious of g reatness
as in the days when Henry J ames or George Mered ith wa lked through
the door o f the house in H yde Park Gate. She was a bad judge of h er
contemporar ies partly because of familiarity. T. S. Eliot was "Tom,"
w ith hi s dOllY wife and hi s overdone American manners . She came,
over th e years, to love him very much , and, in literature, his rh ythm,
hi s vision o f London , and hi s sense of transitions and timing a ll
influenced hers. Nevertheless, she was fa r from being in awe of his
achi evement. He was one of the bes t poets of the age (the o thers, to h er
mind. were Yea ts and de la Mare), but they were a ll fra il reeds
compared to the grea t poets of the past. The contemporary writer who
had influenced her most was E. M. Fo rster, but tha t was in her ear ly
years, and by 1930 she had come to see hi s work as imma ture, impeded,
diminished. Typicall y, she perceived the work as a refl ectio n of the
man , who was son , daughter, sister, a nd husband to his aged mother
with whom he li ved, the two of them like a pair of mi ce in a nest. Of
th e great wri ters a li ve in her Iifeti me, her awe was reserved for Thomas
Hardy , a survivor from the pas t, a fri end of her father 's.
Snobbery, too, prevented her from rea lizing what a heroic litera ry
age she liveu in. She could no t rea ll y apprecia te J oyce (and she tri ed
