The making ofA Writer's Diary

A Writer's Diary (1953) is now generally considered an unfortunate and ill-conceived moment in the posthumous editing of the work of Virginia Woolf. Yet this article shows how early reviewers (among them Elizabeth Bowen and Maurice Blanchot) were uniquely alive to the specificity and the significance of Leonard Woolf's project. The book that Leonard Woolf literally cut out of his wife's diaries partakes of a special category of diary, one that announces its distinctiveness not only from the diaries of non-writers but also, as the subtitle suggests, from the diary of the writer: it purports to be a record of the ‘life’ of his wife's books. While the article questions the legitimacy of that category in the light of current interest in the processes of literary creation, as typified by genetic criticism, it also draws on the insights of Bowen, Blanchot, and others to make a case for the conceptual value of Leonard Woolf's made-up book. Keywords: Literary creationthe history of the bookgenetic criticismthe modern writer Notes The promotional pamphlet issued by Harcourt, Brace and Company which announces the publication of the American edition of A Writer's Diary is held in the Leonard Woolf archive (AWD/Reviews of Books), Special Collections, University of Sussex Library. See Anne Olivier Bell, ‘Editing Virginia Woolf's Diary’ in James M. Haule and J. H. Stape (eds), Editing Virginia Woolf: Interpreting the Modernist Text (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002), p. 13. See also Victoria Glendinning, Leonard Woolf: A Life (London: Simon and Schuster, 2006), p. 418. The full entry reads: ‘But what is to become of all these diaries, I asked myself yesterday. If I died, what would Leo make of them? He would be disinclined to burn them; he could not publish them. Well, he should make up a book from them, I think; and then burn the body. I daresay there is a little book in them; if the scraps and scratching were straightened out a little. God knows.’ Virginia Woolf, in Leonard Woolf (ed.), A Writer's Diary: Being Extracts from the Diary of Virginia Woolf (London: Hogarth Press, 1953), pp. 86–7. A Writer's Diary is henceforth referred to as AWD. ‘Or suppose she had got up and killed a wasp. Then, at once, we [biographers] could out with our pens and write. For there would be blood shed, if only the blood of a wasp. Where there is blood there is life.’ Virginia Woolf, in Rachel Bowlby (ed.), Orlando (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), pp. 254–55. Here I am paraphrasing Julia Briggs's account of this problem :‘Though silent, and apparently doing practically nothing, the writer is paradoxically doing exactly what makes her life matter to us, even though her activity [...] may be invisible to an observer.’ Julia Briggs, Virginia Woolf: An Inner Life (London: Penguin, 2006), p. ix. See also Laura Marcus's discussion in Virginia Woolf: Writers and Their Work (Plymouth: Northcote House, 1997), p. 119. Rachel Bowlby, ‘Inside the Private Room of Her Own Mind’ (review of Julia Briggs's Virginia Woolf: An Inner Life [London: Allen Lane, 2005]), The Independent (22 April 2005). All of the early reviews referred to in this article were published in 1953 and 1954 and can be found in the dossier of press cuttings collated by Leonard Woolf and held in the Leonard Woolf archive (AWD/Reviews of Books), Special Collections, University of Sussex Library. A small number, such as the one cited here, are anonymous. See, for instance, Laura Marcus's summary of the responses to Leonard Woolf's posthumous editing of his wife's writings in ‘Woolf's Feminism and Feminism's Woolf’, in Sue Roe and Susan Sellars (eds), The Cambridge Companion to Virginia Woolf (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 209–45. Daniel Ferrer, ‘Récit, métamorphose du récit, récit de métamorphose du récit: quelques éléments programmatiques de génétique woolfienne’, Études Britanniques Contemporaines, 4 (Special Issue) (1997), pp. 3–15; this quote p. 8. See Jed Deppman, Daniel Ferrer, and Michael Groden, ‘Introduction: A Genesis of French Genetic Criticism’ in Jed Deppman, Daniel Ferrer, and Michael Groden (eds), Genetic Criticism: Texts and Avant-Texts (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004). Deppman et al., Genetic Criticism: Texts and Avant-Texts, p. 2. Julia Briggs, Virginia Woolf: An Inner Life (London: Penguin, 2006), pp. x–xi. Anne Olivier Bell, ‘Editing Virginia Woolf's Diary’, p. 23. Barbara R. Silver, Virginia Woolf icon (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), p. 97. Anne Olivier Bell, ‘Editing Virginia Woolf's Diary’, p. 11. Laura Marcus, ‘Woolf's Feminism and Feminism's Woolf’ in Sue Roe and Susan Sellars (eds), The Cambridge Companion to Virginia Woolf (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 209–45; this quote pp. 233–4. Anne Olivier Bell and Andrew McNeillie (eds), The Diary of Virginia Woolf: Volumes 1–3 (London: Hogarth, 1977–1980). Virginia Woolf and Anne Olivier Bell (eds), A Moment's Liberty: The Shorter Diary (London: The Hogarth Press, 1990), p. xi. Isaiah Berlin, The Sunday Times (20 December 1953) (my emphasis). Rumer Godden, ‘Virginia Woolf, Critical and Creative, Always the Dedicated Writer’, New York Herald Tribune Books (21 February 1954) (my emphasis). Elizabeth Bowen, ‘The Principle of Her Art Was Joy’, New York Times Book Review (21 February 1954) (my emphasis). ‘This repetition, of which she is very aware – who was more lucid? – is made even more annoying by the abridgements of the Journal, but these errors of perspective also have their truth).’ Maurice Blanchot, reviewing Le Journal d'un écrivain (translated by Germaine Beaumont), ‘The Failure of the Demon: The Vocation’ in The Book to Come, translated by Charlotte Mandell (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), p. 97. Maurice Blanchot, ‘Diary and Story’ in The Book to Come, p. 183. Virginia Woolf, Anne Olivier Bell, and Andrew McNeillie (eds), The Diary of Virginia Woolf: Volume 3, 1925–1930 (London: Hogarth, 1980), pp. 339–40. Philippe Lejeune, ‘Auto-Genesis: Genetic Studies of Autobiographical Texts’ in Genetic Criticism, pp. 193–217, this quote p. 208. See André Gide, Log-book of the Coiners, translated by Justin O'Brien (London: Cassell and Co., 1952). Maurice Blanchot, The Book to Come, p. 187. Blanchot is also referring to Franz Kafka's diaries in this context, which share the ‘impersonality’ of both Gide's log and A Writer's Diary. See Maurice Blanchot, The Book to Come, p. 262. Maurice Blanchot, The Book to Come, p. 97. See, for example, Gustave Flaubert, in Geneviève Bollème (ed.), Préface à la vie d'écrivain ou Extraits de la correspondance (Paris: Seuil, 1963). I also suggest that Julia Briggs's Virginia Woolf: An Inner Life falls into this genre. Blanchot's sense of the impersonal and general nature of any documentation of the writing experience (whether undertaken by critics or writers themselves) and the repetitive nature of the ‘conclusions’ to be drawn from a variety of writer's experiences has recently been (indirectly) contested by William Marx in an article on the theoretical ‘resistances’ to genetic criticism. For Marx, genetic criticism heralds the ‘triumph of individuation’ since each ‘dossier’ constitutes a world unto itself and demands a unique labour of adaptation on the part of the genetician. However, it is significant that here the emphasis is on the singular nature of the genetician's editorial task rather than the narrative he or she ‘adapts’ from the available material. See William Marx, ‘Les résistances théoriques à la génétique’ in Paul Gifford and Marion Schmid (eds), La création en acte: devenir de la critique génétique (New York and Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2007), p. 51. Leonard Woolf, in F. Spotts (ed.), Letters of Leonard Woolf (London: Bloomsbury, 1990), 24 May, 29 May 1941, pp. 259–60. Laurent Jenny, ‘Genetic Criticism and Its Myths’, in Drafts, special issue of Yale French Studies 89 (1996), pp. 9–26, this quote p. 16. ‘I have often thought how interesting a magazine paper might be by any author who would – that is to say who could – detail, step by step, the processes by which any one of his compositions attained its ultimate point of completion. Why such a paper has never been given to the world I'm at a loss to say [...]’ Edgar Allen Poe, ‘The Philosophy of Composition’ in David Galloway (ed.), The Fall of the House of Usher and Other Writings (London: Penguin, 1986), p. 481. Virginia Woolf, ‘Life and the Novelist’ in Andrew McNeillie (ed.), The Essays of Virginia Woolf, Vol. 4: 1925–1928 (London: Hogarth Press, 1986), p. 41–2. Deppman et al., Genetic Criticism: Texts and Avant-Texts, p. 2. Deppman et al., Genetic Criticism: Texts and Avant-Texts, p. 7. Deppman et al., Genetic Criticism: Texts and Avant-Texts, p. 2. Roland Barthes, Mythologies, translated by Annette Lavers (London: Vintage, 1993), p. 29. Barthes, Mythologies, p. 30. Maxwell Geismar, ‘Art as Obsession’, Nation (27 February 1954). Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, translated by James Strachey, The Penguin Freud Library (London: Penguin, 1991), Vol. 4, p. 422. Review of A Writer's Diary published in The Miami Herald (7 March 1954). Silver, Virginia Woolf Icon, pp. 97–101. Asked in this context, ‘What is writing?’ is evidently a different question to the ‘Qu'est-ce que l'écriture?’ which opens Barthes's Writing Degree Zero (1953). Although some theorists of genetic criticism draw on Barthes's work to support their enterprise, Jenny convincingly argues that the ‘poststructuralist’ use of the term ‘writing’ is of a very different order to the emphatically ‘literalised’ conception of the activity required by genetic criticism (Jenny, ‘Myths’, p. 12). Louis Hay, ‘Qu'est-ce que la génétique?’ [on-line], 2 April 2007, http://www.item.ens.fr (my translation). See Pierre-Marc de Biasi, ‘Toward a Science of Literature: Manuscript Analysis and the Genesis of the Work’ in Genetic Criticism, pp. 36–67. As Marion Schmid puts it, ‘Genetic theoreticians imagine the creation of their science through the collection and interpretation of a sufficiently large amount of data’ in The Processes of Literary Creation: Flaubert and Proust (Oxford: Legenda, 1998), p. 46. Jenny, ‘Myths’, p. 22. Virginia Woolf, ‘Memoirs of a Novelist’ in Susan Dick (ed.), A Haunted House: The Complete Shorter Fiction (London: Vintage, 2003), p. 70. Virginia Woolf, ‘Life and the Novelist’, p. 41–2. Ferrer, ‘Récit de métamorphose’, pp. 13–14 (my translation)

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