Letters from Vienna #115
The Voyage Out and Empire
The Unity of Aim, Dominion and Progress
Perhaps the best expression (at least I know of) of what I was discussing in my previous letter, the philosophy which animates the Anglo-American Empire, was given expression by Virginia Woolf in her work: “The Voyage Out”, which was published in 1915. In it Richard Dalloway, says that his ideal is: “Unity of aim, of dominion, of progress. The dispersion of the best ideas over the greatest area.”[1]
Although the voyage is away from England the subject rarely escapes the minds of the characters on the ship. Richard Dalloway’s wife, Clarissa, says at one point: “D’you know, Dick, I can’t help thinking of England,” said his wife meditatively, leaning her head against his chest. “Being on this ship seems to make it so much more vivid—what it really means to be English. One thinks of all we’ve done, and our navies, and the people in India and Africa, and how we’ve gone on century after century, sending out boys from little country villages—and of men like you, Dick, and it makes one feel as if one couldn’t bear not to be English!”[2]
Indeed, England seems to be the measure of all things: “Hewet and Rachel had long ago reached the particular place on the edge of the cliff where, looking down into the sea, you might chance on jelly-fish and dolphins. Looking the other way, the vast expanse of land gave them a sensation which is given by no view, however extended, in England; the villages and the hills there having names, and the farthest horizon of hills as often as not dipping and showing a line of mist which is the sea; here the view was one of infinite sun-dried earth, earth pointed in pinnacles, heaped in vast barriers, earth widening and spreading away and away like the immense floor of the sea, earth chequered by day and by night, and partitioned into different lands, where famous cities were founded, and the races of men changed from dark savages to white civilised men, and back to dark savages again. Perhaps their English blood made this prospect uncomfortably impersonal and hostile to them, for having once turned their faces that way they next turned them to the sea, and for the rest of the time sat looking at the sea. The sea, though it was a thin and sparkling water here, which seemed incapable of surge or anger, eventually narrowed itself, clouded its pure tint with grey, and swirled through narrow channels and dashed in a shiver of broken waters against massive granite rocks. It was this sea that flowed up to the mouth of the Thames; and the Thames washed the roots of the city of London.”[3]
The further they got away from England the more they dreamed about it: “It’s spring in England. The ground is rather damp. However, I cross the road and get on to the grass and we walk along, and I sing as I always do when I’m alone, until we come to the open place where you can see the whole of London beneath you on a clear day. Hampstead Church spire there, Westminster Cathedral over there, and factory chimneys about here. There’s generally a haze over the low parts of London; but it’s often blue over the park when London’s in a mist. It’s the open place that the balloons cross going over to Hurlingham. They’re pale yellow. Well, then, it smells very good, particularly if they happen to be burning wood in the keeper’s lodge which is there. I could tell you now how to get from place to place, and exactly what trees you’d pass, and where you’d cross the roads. You see, I played there when I was small. Spring is good, but it’s best in the autumn when the deer are barking; then it gets dusky, and I go back through the streets, and you can’t see people properly; they come past very quick, you just see their faces and then they’re gone—that’s what I like—and no one knows in the least what you’re doing—”[4]
Work and Crisis
“At the end of 1912” Hermione Lee tells us “there was no evidence that she (Virginia Woolf) would ever become a money-earning professional novelist. The breakdown of 1913 was triggered, in large part, by the pressure she placed on herself to finish “The Voyage Out”. Though a penultimate draft had been completed just before the wedding (to Leonard Woolf), she still felt she had work to do on it…”
“She had written at least five drafts of her novel, and, between 1909 and 1913, she may have had two versions on the go simultaneously. Between December 1912 and March 1913, she retyped and to an extent rewrote it entirely – and she may have been working on still another version. She typed 600 pages in two months, working, according to Leonard, “with a kind of tortured intensity” and “excruciating effort”.
“On 9 March 1913 Leonard Woolf delivered the typescript to Gerald Duckworth’s publishing house, and for the rest of the month she was in the unpleasant position of waiting for the half-brother she had never liked to decide whether he would accept it.”[5]
“But then Edward Garnett wrote a perceptive and enthusiastic reader’s report, and “The Voyage Out” was accepted for publication on 12 April. From May to June Virginia Woolf corrected her proofs…” and her despair at her rereading them led directly to her breakdown. “Because of it, Duckworth decided not to publish the novel until the first year of the war, on 26 March 1915. But when at last “The Voyage Out” was published, weeks after her thirty-third birthday, and Leonard registered her, under the National Registration Act of 1915, as an “author”, she was in the dark cupboard of her mental illness and did not emerge until the autumn of that year.”[6]
The war didn’t help matters: “Her reaction to the war was a mixture of pacifist horror of the glorification of militarism and alienation from the ordinary combatant or civilian’s view. The behaviour of most of her friends in wartime occupied this uneasy space between snobbish detachment and courageous resistance. Though they were naively unprepared for August 1914, when war came they were in the vanguard of the peace movement, before a wider disillusionment with the war set in in 1916. None of her closest friends fought; many of them did “alternative service”. They all thought that “the war which had begun in opposition to militarism was militarising England and taking away one of the outstanding liberties of the British people. All the people she knew best were articulately anti-war; even her more equivocating friends, like Maynard Keynes, thought it was disgusting and unnecessary. Duncan Grant summed up their feeling: “I never considered the possibility of a great European war. it seemed such an absolute mad thing for a civilian people to do. I had become, I suppose, in a sense, unpatriotic, as most artists must do…I think the war utter madness and folly.”[7] Of course, he was right.
For someone like Webster Griffin Tarpley the promotion of Virginia Woolf would have been no accident but rather the expression of the policy of the ruling oligarchy. Cultural supremacy has always been a key component of imperial supremacy. Edwardian England was no different in that respect.
Webster Griffin Tarpley traces the growth of imperialism in England to Shakespeare’s time: “Shakespeare’s “Othello, The Moor of Venice” …was written and performed shortly after 1603, when the Venetians and Genoese had acquired vast powers in England through the accession of their puppet James I to the throne.”[8]
Yet whatever the origins of the Empire its effects were undeniable. John Newsinger, when attacking Niall Ferguson’s “Empire”, a book which I mentioned in the previous letter, states: “One problem with contemporary apologists for empire…is their reluctance to acknowledge the extent to which imperial rule rests on coercion, on the policeman torturing a suspect and the soldier blowing up houses and shooting prisoners…this is the inevitable reality of colonial rule and, more particularly, that a close look at British imperial rule reveals episodes as brutal and shameful as in the history of any empire.”[9]
[1] p.57, The Voyage Out, Virginia Woolf
[2] Chapter 1, Ibid
[3] Chapter 16 Ibid
[4] Ibid
[5] p.326 Virginia Woolf, Hermione Lee
[6] p. 327 Ibid
[7] pp. 344-5 Ibid
[8] https://archive.org/stream/pdfy--vMPBwiHw_IDIeob/Against+Oligarchy+by+Webster+Griffin+Tarpley_djvu.txt
[9] p.15 The Blood Never Dried, John Newsinger