454
PARTISAN REVIEW
hard to, because Eliot adm ired hi s work so much) because of his
earthiness, which she considered ill -bred o bscenity, and she realized
much too late the stature of D. H . Lawrence, ali ena ted from him by hi s
working-class origins and also by John Middleton Murry's approva l.
Contemporaries, moreover, provoked an unhea lthy sort of rivalry.
They were doing the same thing she was, but-as she put it-o n a
different railway track.
It
was distracting. She had
to
remind herself
that "East Coker" could be good and her own work, different as it was,
could also be good. With French wr iters, she was on safer ground. They
were from a different country, wrote in a different trad iti on . She could
read Colette and Proust with pleasure, whil e Mansfield and Joyce
produced anxiety and irrita ti on. Tolstoy, so di stant from her in time,
geography, and background, could evoke her stronges t adm iration.
Although she lived among writers, read new books constantl y for
rev iew and for the Press, her eyes were partially closed to them, and her
deepest nourishment continued to come from the literature of the past
and from her own experience.
As publisher, journalist, essay ist, novelist, polemicist, and diarist,
Virginia Woolf's literary endeavors ma tched her father's in hero ic
energy and achievement , and at some point she must have realized thal.
She had won her competition, but who was left to hand out the prize?
She was almost sixty years old when she died, a fact that always
startl es me, for I imagine her dying young. Because of illness, her career
was a belated one, but long before the age at which Woolf kill ed herse lf
in an incipient depressive state, Ba lzac and Di ckens had kill ed them–
selves through manic overactivity. For Virginia Woolf, because of the
careful guardianship of her husband , it was eas ier to sli p off and drown
herself than it would have been to kill herself by overwork.
It
was typical of Leonard Woolf's conscienti ous concern for
Virginia that he should conceive the noti on of ge tting her
to
print
to
keep her from unhealth y invo lvement in her own imagination. After
the massive mental breakdown which so inausp icious ly began their
married life, he dail y kept track of her hea lth, metering work and play.
When she caught cold, he moved her bed for her and dressed her in his
dress ing gown. He never compl a ined. A rationalist sa int, and ye t, as
any reader of his autobiography is aware, a man of a lmos t numbing
common sense.
It
hardl y seem fa ir to bl ame Leonard for fussiness in
hi s treatment of Virginia-a person tends to get the trea tment she
expects, and she might not have survived as long as she did without his
