Beware the exertions of the scholar-squirrel

Virginia Woolf once wrote of William Hazlitt that she prized him because of his “sensibility to all those emotions which disturb the reason and make it often seem futile enough to spend one’s time slicing things up finer and finer with the intellect when the body of the world is so firm and so warm and demands so imperatively to be pressed to the heart.”

The same could easily be said of Woolf herself, as a critic and essayist. Open any one of “The Common Reader” collections or dip into the “Writer’s Diary” or re-read “A Room of One’s Own” and you are in the presence of a writer whose authority is established by virtue of the encompassing talent for loving literature with which she, too, presses the warm body of the world to her heart. With her novels, however, it’s a different proposition. In them, responding brilliantly to the modernist change in writing already strong in her turn-of-the-century youth, Woolf turned deeply inward, becoming overwhelmingly alert to the spiritual isolation that human beings inflict on themselves and one another. Inevitably, in her novels, her sense of the world as such grew increasingly claustrophobic.

The elements that warred within Virginia Woolf’s own famously anguished being -- as well as in those of the time in which she lived -- were reflected in the dramatic split in her own work: The Victorian in her wrote essays and reviews, the modernist wrote novels. Which of the two Woolfs will survive to pleasure and instruct the readers of another century is anybody’s guess. In certain literary circles, such a declaration may sound heretical as there are many--academic scholars, for instance--for whom every word Woolf put on paper is to be treasured (hence, the massive publication of her diaries) and every version of every one of her books declared to be of equal and major interest (a cottage industry in itself).

Woolf’s first novel, “The Voyage Out” (1915), now appearing in a version called “Melymbrosia,” contains in embryo her working future as a fiction writer. A group of English people travel from London to a South American city and there settle in a villa in sight of the sea, not far from a hotel for English tourists. Among the people in the villa are Helen and Ridley Ambrose (she beautiful, intelligent, 40; he a bemused Greek scholar) and their niece Rachel Vinrace (anxious, dreamy, music-loving, a virgin of 24); among the tourists are Terence Hewet and St. John Hirst, two perfectly decent young men in their late 20s, still untried, filled with undergraduate cynicism. Various encounters ensue among the women, the men and the tourists in the hotel, and Terence and Rachel, breaking through a brooding fear of life, fall in love. The day after they become engaged, she contracts typhoid and quickly dies. End of story.

The book contains all the major themes that Woolf would bring to fruition in her two agreed-upon masterpieces, “Mrs. Dalloway” and “To the Lighthouse.” At one point in “The Voyage Out,” Rachel muses on “these enormous spaces of silence in which our deeds and words are but as points of rock in an ocean.” Later, Terence complains, “The truth of it [is] that one is never alone, and one never is in company.... [We each live in a bubble]. You can’t see my bubble, I can’t see yours; all we see of each other is a speck.... No one gets inside; but they colour stain the bubble. So, it follows, we’re never alone and we never get out.”

And then there is the bitterness over women and men that became Woolf’s permanent metaphor for her vision of life as brutishly isolating. “After all,” says Rachel to her would-be lover, “what’s the use of men talking to women? We’re so different. We hate and fear each other. If you could strip off my skin now you would see all my nerves gone white with fear of you.” She speaks of the domestic tyranny of her father and how she has come to see it mirrored in the world of men at large, and then she says, “When you think that you have only one life -- just for a second and all that waste of sea behind you and before you -- and that other human beings should interfere with the smallest amount of it -- then you hate them more than anything in the world. I shall never never have all the feelings I might have because of you.” From this speech to “Mrs. Dalloway” was a straight shot.

What Woolf understood -- early -- is that what people most want is to stand revealed before one another; at the same time, what they most fear is self-revelation. In “Mrs. Dalloway” and “To the Lighthouse,” the longing and terror would become fully achieved. Here, in this first novel, she was just starting to grasp her subject and, not knowing how to play it out, could only suggest the largeness of her insight--and then kill off her protagonist.

She began writing “The Voyage Out” in 1909, at age 27, under the working title of “Melymbrosia” (a word whose meaning is never explained) and, according to Woolf scholar Louise De Salvo, became so fearful of her own socially critical stance that, under pressure from friends and relatives, she worked for a number of years to purge the manuscript of what she was told were incendiary passages. As a result, De Salvo claims, a much tamer, more polite, infinitely less powerful book emerged.

De Salvo, who wrote a much-debated biography of Woolf as an “incest survivor” growing up in a “dysfunctional” family, has spent seven years reading through 1,000 manuscript pages (long ago deposited with the Berg Collection at the New York Public Library) in order to reconstruct the so-called original novel: the book we now have in hand. The claims she makes for its greater importance are extravagant indeed.

To begin with, De Salvo declares “Melymbrosia” “an immensely political, often savagely satirical piece of work,” one that “bristles with social commentary and impresses the reader with [Woolf’s] engagement with the most significant issues of her time ... labor unrest ... suffrage ... parliamentary debates ... the changes occurring in religion ... new developments in psychology ... the effect of illegitimacy upon personality ... the excitement of airplanes; the problem of road repair....” What’s more, De Salvo continues (all this in her introduction), it provides “an insightful portrayal of the effects of abuse upon the psyche of a young woman; a fierce critique of imperialist and sexual politics; a discussion of the interrelationship among childrearing practices, empire-building, and oppression as insightful and profound as that of her later ‘Three Guineas.’ ”

The uninitiated -- that is, the common -- reader stares in wonder at these words after the book has been read. Fierce? Savage? Bristles? Gee, it all went right by me. In fact, “Melymbrosia” is exactly what a young writer’s first draft of a novel should be, which makes “The Voyage Out” exactly what the published version of a talented writer’s first novel should be: better written, more artfully presented and with the same ideas on board.

Woolf, however, doesn’t “bristle” anywhere, either in “Melymbrosia” or in “The Voyage Out.” The first version is as tame as the second; only the first sometimes presents the insights with the crude strength of the sentence or passage less well written. But nowhere are these insights extended, developed or set up so that the reader will feel the real force of social complaint. Every one of the long list of “subjects” De Salvo claims for Woolf’s “engagements” is alluded to in one- or two-line exchanges, once in a while in a paragraph or two.

It was the young D.H. Lawrence, starting out at the very same time, who was doing what is here claimed for Woolf: boiling over in print from the very start. “Sons and Lovers,” published in 1912, is the work of a pugnacious, working-class writer who, smoldering with thwarted manhood and class misery, emerges with all his literary guns blazing. But the young Virginia Woolf, certainly as ambitious a writer as Lawrence, is, in 1915, a cautious young woman immensely constrained by the class into which she has been born and just beginning to emerge from the shadows and cotton wool of her own magnificently disturbed spirit. Ultimately, her “complaint” would prove as profound and as psychologically compelling as was that of Lawrence, but her sense of it, just now, is oblique, in both the early and the late versions of this first novel. She has not the chutzpah that Lawrence was born with -- or, in the jargon of our day, “the sense of entitlement” -- with which to imagine fully what is not yet clearly seen. For that, 10 more years of life and work would be necessary: “Mrs. Dalloway” was published in 1925.

Woolf scholars will be glad to sit with “Melymbrosia” and “The Voyage Out” propped on the desk, side by side. For me, the best thing about the exercise was that it sent me back to “The Common Reader,” a collection of short literary pieces that does for me what Tolstoy said great writing should do: Make the reader laugh and weep and love life more.