Literary Couples and 20th-Century Life Writing

Narrative and Intimacy

Janine Utell

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781350003460
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Letteratura
• Subtopic: Critica letteraria di letteratura comparata

Exposing how modernist and late-modernist writers tell the stories of their intimate relationships though life writing, this book engages with the process by which these authors become subjects to a significant other, a change that subsequently becomes narrative within their works. Looking specifically at partners in a couple, Janine Utell focuses on such literary pairings as Virginia and Leonard Woolf, Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, Sylvia Townsend Warner and Valentine Ackland, Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy, and Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes. Utell draws on the latest work in narrative theory and the study of intimacy and affects to shed light on the ethics of reading relationships in the modern period.
Focusing on a range of genres and media, from memoir through documentary film to comics, this book demonstrates that stories are essential for our thinking of love, desire and sexuality.

1

Early 20th-Century Life Writing and the Making of Intimacy

In 1890, T. F. Thiselton-Dyer published The Loves and Marriages of Some Eminent Persons, a prosopography focusing on the courtships, romances, marriages, and family lives of notable men from Boswell and Smollett to Dickens and Livingstone. The table of contents is organized according to “Married Happiness,” “Marriage Influence,” “Marriage Romance,” “Eccentric Marriages” (the chapter dedicated to this begins with the delightfully understated opening line, “Courtship and marriage have often been conducted in a somewhat unconventional manner” [242]), “Early Flirtations,” and “Irregular Marriages” (or elopements). Despite the book being about “loves and marriages” of “persons,” the focus is almost exclusively on the experiences of men as lovers and husbands, and exemplary, noteworthy men at that. The table of contents lists the names of all the men taken as subjects, and their names appear singly, not in tandem with the other person ostensibly also involved in the love and marriage being told. The wives of these “eminent persons” are subsumed via the book’s paratext.

In his writing, Thiselton-Dyer relies heavily on letters and reminiscences available from previously published (and thus authorized and therefore also possibly appropriately sanitized) sources. He follows a model of writing on “great lives,” with men as his subjects, even if his attention is paid to the achievements of love and marriage rather than noble acts of public life. Further, he follows the decorous conventions which constrain Victorian biographical writing on intimacy and private life. In his piece on Dickens, for instance, who had died two decades before the publication of Loves and Marriages at the height of his popularity, Thiselton-Dyer describes an early romance that prompted a spell of picturesque melancholy in the author as a young man, rather than the unsettled marriage to and separation from Catherine Dickens and the affair with Ellen Ternan.¹ Thiselton-Dyer’s rather lively compendium does provide some indication of Victorian reading interest in the field of biographical writing, as it does some indication of Victorian practice, publishing realities to which as a popular writer he might have been attuned—namely, that there was a market for stories about couplehood, marriage, and intimate life, told with an element of humanity, humor, and (at least here) surprisingly little moral judgment. This text suggests that a desire existed among late Victorian readers to engage intimate worlds, that conventions constricting the telling of intimate life did not mean that readers resisted engaging with these narratives. As Trev Broughton and Sarah J. Heidt have shown in their studies of the “embroilment” surrounding James Anthony Froude’s biographical work on Thomas Carlyle and Carlyle’s marriage to Jane Welsh Carlyle, breaching the boundaries of intimate life via auto/biographical narrative created considerable anxiety, particularly around gender and the nature of marriage in relation to public life. Nevertheless, we find that interest in intimate life writing is not limited to writers, readers, and theorists of “the new biography” as it later emerged in the 1920s and 1930s.

Indeed, the continuities among Victorian and modernist theory and practice of auto/biography, among other factors, shaped what I see as a relationship between and interest in life writing and intimacy, while also shaping the discursive and affective patterns of early and mid-twentieth-century relational life writing more broadly. This chapter will take up, in turn, an overview of the scholarship which has been essential to defining both those continuities and early twentieth-century life writing, including “the new biography,” as well as instances of intimate life writing from authors identified as integral to these continuities and developments. I examine Leslie Stephen’s Mausoleum Book, an intimate life writing text created in response to the loss of his second wife (and Virginia Woolf’s mother) Julia Duckworth Stephen; Vita Sackville-West’s writing on and through her marriage to Harold Nicolson in Portrait of a Marriage; and Virginia Woolf’s Flush, a text I argue functions as a couple biography.²

Rather than traverse the vast landscape that is scholarship on modernist life writing and “the new biography,” I will identify several themes and threads in that scholarship that are especially salient to the texts I have chosen to analyze. First, we will take a look at what constitutes “the new biography,” the ways its modernist theorists and practitioners sought to distinguish it from its Victorian forebears, and the suggestion that we attend to continuities rather than reify schema of rupture. Second, we will note the aesthetic, social, and cultural factors that contributed to the development of “the new biography,” what made the mode and its readers possible. Finally, we will emphasize the importance of the idea of relationality, particularly as it emerged via the thinkers and writers of Bloomsbury, and particularly as a function of performing and narrativizing becoming.

Modernist formulations of “the new biography,” and of early twentieth-century life writing generally, privilege the instability, the fragmentary nature, of the subject. In her groundbreaking work on modernist women writers and autobiography (and in her own prosopography Women of the Left Bank), Shari Benstock argues that modernist women’s life writing, especially that of Virginia Woolf, reveals the fissures in the notion of a unified subject, decentering the autonomous, individual, coherent self (“Authorizing” 21, 22–29). Woolf remains central to discussions of “the new biography,” with many scholars taking her 1927 essay “The New Biography” (a review of Harold Nicolson’s Some People) and her 1939 essay “The Art of Biography” as germinal texts. “The New Biography,” along with Harold Nicolson’s 1927 The Development of English Biography (published by Virginia and Leonard Woolf’s Hogarth Press, in their Lectures on Literature series) positioned radical shifts in life writing, coinciding with similar shifts in fiction, against the work of the Victorians. Max Saunders has detailed the conversation between Nicolson and Woolf, specifically around “The New Biography” and Some People (458–70). Harold Nicolson pronounces that “Victorianism only died in 1921,” when biographers finally did away with the “essentially commemorative” impulse governing their writing (145). Meanwhile, in her oft-cited dichotomy of “granite” and “rainbow” from “The New Biography,” Woolf notoriously juxtaposes the “granite” of the Victorian biography as monument with the “rainbow” of life writing dedicated to the fluidity of character and personality.³ The emphasis on subjectivity, on “identity rather than event or action,” on “self-consciousness about form” and “psychological and experiential complexity” (Marcus, “Newness” 205), was meant to do away with what was perceived to be the Victorian monumentalizing of heroic deeds by great and noble men. As Alison Booth puts it, according to the modernists, the Victorians “were a nation of undertakers, indulging in mortuary pomp” (237). Booth does also suggest that the primacy of Woolf in the study of twentieth-century life writing displaces other possible conceptualizations of the forms of auto/biography, particularly those not embedded in privileged modernist cultural discourses (239–40). She writes, “Feminist researchers seeking critical ways to think back through foremothers need to rethink the history of life writing as well” (226).

While modernist life writers may have required resistance to Victorian ways of doing things in order to position their own work and thinking, the cultural and historical position of such writers did shape what we continue to call “the new biography.” As Laura Marcus and Max Saunders have shown in their essential and helpful work on the subject, two factors contributed to the development of emphases on interior life and the unconscious, subjectivity and consciousness, and relationships and intimate life in early twentieth-century life writing. The first is an openness to focusing on sex and sexuality. As noted in the introduction, Paula Backscheider and Nigel Hamilton point to this shift as integral to the development of relationality and private life as priorities in biographical writing later in the twentieth century; we might discern the roots of this preoccupation here. The biographical interest in sex is traced by Marcus to Woolf’s “The Art of Biography” (“Newness” 214–16), in which Woolf writes on Lytton Strachey’s Elizabeth and Essex, and to a wider cultural interest in engaging with sexuality. We might look as well to the rise of sexology as a field and the emerging discourse of scientia sexualis. ⁴ Relatedly, and secondly, life writing ideas and practices were affected by growing interest in Freud, brought to English-speaking audiences through the translations of Alix and James Strachey published by the Hogarth Press; Lytton Strachey’s biographical writing, especially Elizabeth and Essex, furthered Freud’s reach with readers. Marcus makes the point that “Strachey and Freud were, it could be argued, the two primary influences on biography in the 1920s” (“Newness” 216). Saunders notes that sexologist Havelock Ellis was an important influence on Strachey, too, and suggests that while biographers did not fully grapple with the implications of Freud’s theories until after the Second World War, “the new biography” laid much groundwork for ways of writing and reading intimate life (454–55).

In a consideration of Bloomsbury—“queer Bloomsbury”—Madelyn Detloff and Brenda Helt point to the importance of “personal life” and “being together” for Bloomsbury figures:

While identity is important, especially as a strategic way of understanding one’s position within social hierarchies, as an analytic tool it has the unfortunate side-effect of fixing one’s objects of study into relatively static categories or characteristics of being at the expense of becoming, of co-evolving, or (a phenomenon that has special resonance for the Bloomsbury Group) of becoming together. (1–2; emphasis in original)

My introduction has made clear the necessity of theorizing “becoming” ontologically and ethically, as well as narratively and discursively, in the study of relational life writing.⁵ We can hone in here on Detloff’s and Helt’s emphasis on “co-evolving” and “becoming together,” beyond identity, a point echoed by Rosi Braidotti (Ryan 104–5). Writers associated with Bloomsbury, Virginia and Leonard Woolf, their Hogarth Press—the writers under consideration in this chapter—evince a preoccupation with relationality, its ethics, and the transformative effects of relationships on the singular person, along with a heightened interest in the writing of the interior and the personal.⁶

The aesthetics of representing subjectivity as it emerges in the modernist “new biography” reverberates throughout the critical writing on the subject. Maria DiBattista and Emily O. Wittman, for instance, describe twentieth-century life writing as seeking “to accommodate the fluidity and variousness of life and how it feels to be living it” (xiii). The attention to the processural subject, to becoming, and the ways the practice of life writing enacts, performs, even prioritizes, that process, renders intimacy more visible. It should be noted again, though, that Booth, along with Laura Marcus and Ruth Hoberman in their writing on “the new biography,” have all suggested that continuities among Victorian and modernist life writers should not be discounted. I believe we find such continuities in an interest in relational and intimate life, both the reading and the writing of it.

Leslie Stephen, notable literary critic and mountaineer, editor of the Dictionary of National Biography, and Virginia Woolf’s father, is often set as the “granite” to Woolf’s “rainbow,” an eminent Victorian against whom the polemics of “the new biography” is directed. Stephen was himself a reader of intimate lives, even as the practice came in for some of his criticism, as Trev Broughton has shown in the Froude/Carlyle “embroilment” (“Froude-Carlyle” 558–61). And he was a writer of intimate lives, as well. His Mausoleum Book, composed privately, unlike his literary criticism, biography, or alpine writing, is an elaborated instance of writing through death, and an exemplar of the late Victorian memoir of widowerhood. Stephen enacts the impulse to narrativize the life of a dead spouse, and the life shared as a couple, and through that process to narrativize a major ontological shift.⁷ As much as Stephen claims to not be doing this, at one point apologizing for “dropping into narrative” (66), the process of fitting his narrative alongside his wife’s, and thus within an emplotment of couplehood as a way of managing grief, is made visible in spite of his protestations. The writing of a memoir of widow(er)hood is an attempt to claim the life story of the deceased, and by extension the story of the couple itself once it no longer exists. By writing the memoir of the deceased, the surviving spouse appropriates the life, claiming a place of centrality for themselves, and making the shared world available to others. Such writing becomes a means of managing the alteration of ontological status experienced by the one left behind, allowing for the generation of possible worlds wherein the experience of the now-distant and unknowable other can be realized and shared. The writing becomes a way to assert the intimate knowledge of both body and mind.

Meant as a testament about his second marriage to Julia Duckworth Stephen after her death in May 1895, the Mausoleum Book was conceived as a letter for their children as well as a family album, not to be published: “I mean further to write in such a way as to put out of the question any larger use of it than I have indicated, even after my death” (4). Stephen began his labors in 1895 and ended with a chronology and summary of events going from 1895 to 1904; the compilation was first published in an edition by Alan Bell in 1977. The text covers most of Stephen’s life, beginning with his childhood and including his first marriage and his work, with the ostensible purpose of commemorating Julia Stephen. Stephen asserts continually that he will resist any impulse toward autobiography: “Now I have no intention of writing autobiography except in this incidental way” (4). Stephen’s insistence that he does not consider what he is doing in the Mausoleum Book as autobiography at all is striking. It is true that the work is an assemblage of commentary, letters, and chronology—not unlike Sylvia Townsend Warner’s own assemblage of memoir, annotations, letters, and poetry created after Valentine Ackland’s death, as we shall see in Chapter 3. It is also true that as the text was never meant to be made public (unlike in the case of Warner, who at least considered making it available to scholars; see Micir), perhaps, in Stephen’s mind, it escapes the generic or formal signifier of “autobiography.” Perhaps he seeks to mitigate (self-)accusations of exhibiting his personal life, something regarded as problematic for the Victorian life writer, as emerged in the instance of Froude and Carlyle. Here, according to Stephen, he functions merely as an “arranger,” laying out material in order to “come nearer to my darling’s story” (30), including her love letters to her first husband; and gesturing toward distancing and concealing even as he seems to lay bare his intimate life (Broughton, Men 7). We will consider the distinction between arranger and narrator in our discussion of Portrait of a Marriage later in this chapter, as well as in Christopher Isherwood’s Kathleen and Frank. Whether he admits it or not, the telling of his own life is essential to Stephen’s construction of his couplehood with Julia Stephen, as is his appropriation, as husband and ideal reader, of her private papers. The Mausoleum Book is a phenomenological documentation of his perceptions of what their couplehood comprised, and the ways their two stories came together as “one” in what he understands as a process of shared worlding. As far as he is concerned, his own story is significant only insofar as it is “involved in hers”: “I have put all this down to make our story clear” (85, 88). “This” includes his years at Cambridge, his renunciation of his faith, his first marriage, and—importantly—his literary labors.

The scholarship on Virginia Woolf’s relationship to Leslie Stephen is copious, including work delving into their respective positions on biography and life writing; some readers see the assertions of “the new biography” previously detailed here not only as responses to Victorian biographers but also as Woolf writing back to her father.⁸ In relation to Stephen’s Mausoleum Book and Woolf’s own life writing, including her fragmentary memoirs (published posthumously), Alex Zwerdling writes, “Virginia Woolf learned about the danger of reverence from her father’s memoir, with its tendency to turn flesh and blood into a marmoreal object. What concerned her was not the proper attitude to the dead but their individual identities. . . . She focused not on essence but on particulars” (63). Zwerdling’s point is well taken, especially considering what we know about the difficulties Woolf had in her relationship with her father after her mother’s death. Yet to narrativize love is to rely on particulars, even as love stories are shaped by a common emplotment, consisting of narrative regularities. In other words, love stories might look similar, as this study will show—but any love story depends on the particularity, and the singularity, of the loved person in order to be told in the first place. Stephen’s attempts to fix Julia Stephen in death, in his “mausoleum,” require him to attend to her lovable particularity, her irrevocable singularity: granite and rainbow. To gesture toward a reading that accounts for the affects of love and loss, one could argue that by fixing Julia Stephen in her mausoleum, her husband seeks to hold on to her, to possess her eternally, to maintain an intimate connection with her, what he called “the romance of my life” (25); all of the work of the book is to “come nearer to my darling’s story” (30). In a word, he seeks not simply to entomb her in “granite” but to contemplate the “rainbow” of who she was and what it was they shared. The creation of the book makes something that stands in for the woman herself, and provides a means to reflect on who she was and what she meant in the context of the marriage.

When Stephen comes to “my darling’s story,” he begins by discussing a series of portraits made of Julia over the course of her young womanhood and adult life. Portraits can serve to capture the “rainbow,” the dynamism of the subject, their character and their becoming, not necessarily always a fixed or stati...