細節
WOOLF, VIRGINIA. Seven typed letters signed (one "V.", the rest "Virginia"), eight typed letters (all but one with name typed), eight autograph letters signed (one "V.", the rest "Virginia"), one autograph letter, fifteen autograph postcards signed ("Virginia" and initials), and one typed postcard (typed initials) to her nephew Julian Bell in Cambridge, London, China, etc.; virtually all written from 52 Tavistock Square, London, and Monk's House, Rodmell, ca. March 1927 - 14 November 1936. Together 24 letters, 51 pages, 8vo-4to, and 16 postcards, 16 pages, oblong 12mo, the typed letters (mainly 4to) nearly all single-spaced, some with holograph corrections and additions, mostly typed with blue ribbon, some creases, two closed tears in the text of two letters, the autograph letters (mainly 8vo) mostly on blue stationery, one in pencil, two letters wrinkled, a few letters and cards on imprinted stationery.
"OLD BLOOMSBURY MAY HAVE MORE BLOOD IN IT THAN YOU THINK"
A fine series beginning as letters to a young poet at Cambridge and burgeoning into "things not to be whispered on the typewriter," long "diary" letters (one 6 pages, 1-6 December 1935) full of comments on her own work and reading, discussions of Bell's writings, news and gossip about her family and the literary and artistic worlds and the lives of the Bloomsbury circle. Among the various writers Virginia Woolf refers to or comments on are: her husband Leonard, Empson, Byron, Roy Campbell, T.S. Eliot (a number of times), Spender, Plomer, Gerald Manley Hopkins, Roger Fry (much on her preparatory work for her biography), A.E. Housman, De Quincey, E.M. Forster, Rose Macaulay, Vita Sackville-West, Dryden, W.H. Hudson, Richard Jefferies, Day Lewis, Lytton Strachey, Elizabeth Bowen, Wyndham Lewis, Isherwood, Aldous Huxley, and Shakespeare.
17 February 1930: "...Nessa's [Vanessa Bell] show is a great success. Leonard [Woolf] is fabricating the new paper tonight. Mr. [William] Empson came to see us. A raucous youth, but I think rather impressive and as red as a turkey, which I like. I am reading Childe Harold. If Byron had lived to my age he would have been a great novelist. As it is, he is the worst poet..." 13 May [1930]: "...I rather doubt that [Roy Campbell] is much better than a Byronic rhetorician; but people so much want a poet with guts that they cling to him like men in a storm...Tom's [T.S. Eliot] hard boiled egg [Ash Wednesday] is hard boiled...all this damnable Mary and Mother and God. Still he can write..." 14 October 1935: "...after you left we had old Tom [Eliot] to stay the weekend; he was urbanity itself, and we had a good deal of old crones talk about people like Middleton Murry, Wyndham Lewis and so on. He's [Eliot] determined to write plays about modern life in verse, and rather crusty when reviewers say he's an old fogy. In fact I think he feels that he's only just beginning to write what he wants...We dined with the Keynses, and Maynard commissioned him [Eliot] to write a play for the new theatre..." 25 October 1935: "...The bother is he [Roger Fry] writes a dull letter for the most part, and then there's a flash of great fun. And his love letters are prolific; he must have had a love every new year; and most of them are foreigners. So I am plodding away, when the light fails, and I can no longer write my long dull novel [The Years, published 1937]. And now the Stracheys want me to write about Lytton..."
1-6 December 1935: "...We went to Tom's [Eliot] play, the Murder [in the Cathedral], last week; and I had almost to carry Leonard out, shrieking. What was odd was how much better it reads than acts; the tightness, chillness, deadness and general worship of the decay and skeleton made one near sickness. The truth is when he has live bodies on the stage his words thin out, and no rhetoric will save them. There we met Stephen Spender, who also was green at the gills with dislike...Stephen is off to Portugal with Isherwood and a friend; two friends I think; of the lower orders and the male sex..." 30 January 1936: "...The literary world, or rather back kitchen, is amused every Sunday by the violence and vulgarity of Mr. [Herbert] Grigson and Edith Sitwell. You don't see the Sunday Times [Bell was in China] I imagine? Well there they befoul each other weekly -- and St. John Ervine joins in; it's about nothing but themselves as usual...I think you're lucky, starting life in China away from all this pother...Dadie has asked us to Cambridge to hear his Frogs; Lydia is bringing out her Ibsen; Maynard's book is upstairs on Leonard's table; Duncan's and Nessa's pictures are about to go to Glasgow; and Morgan [Forster] is producing a large volume of essays. So old Bloomsbury is active you'll agree..."
11 March 1936: "...I only write now by way of passing the time, for I'm so pressed with this more than accursed book [The Years] -- its now being sent to the printers; -- I have to keep them going; have to re-type, correct, re-write all at the last moment -- that my wits are wandering and my eyes are dim. I suspect it is a complete flop; that I've tried to do all the things nature never meant me to do; but unless one flies in her face with a large duster there's nothing for it but to moulder in one's own dung. (Excuse the image.)..." 2 May 1936: "...Old Blooms[bur]y may have more blood in it than you think. I get the most astonishing elaborate letters from poet Eliot; who is now the titular head of English-American letters since the death yesterday of [A.E.] Housman...I don't altogether like his Muse; why, I can't say. Always too laden with a peculiar scent for my taste. May, death, lads, Shropshire. But they say he was a great scholar, and I can remember when his Manilius came out...But old Tom [Eliot] has issued all his poems in one vol., which he gives me...Where he fails is when he takes on him to be a burly Englishman, without gift for character drawing. Not a touch of Dickens or Shakespeare in him. Last night I read Midsummer Night's Dream. Well there you have it -- all England all may [be?] in a song or two...Now I am going to beat L. [Leonard] at bowls, on a fine blowing evening with the children playing with their dolls in the meadow, all the trees in blossom, and some heat in the sun for a wonder..." (40)
"OLD BLOOMSBURY MAY HAVE MORE BLOOD IN IT THAN YOU THINK"
A fine series beginning as letters to a young poet at Cambridge and burgeoning into "things not to be whispered on the typewriter," long "diary" letters (one 6 pages, 1-6 December 1935) full of comments on her own work and reading, discussions of Bell's writings, news and gossip about her family and the literary and artistic worlds and the lives of the Bloomsbury circle. Among the various writers Virginia Woolf refers to or comments on are: her husband Leonard, Empson, Byron, Roy Campbell, T.S. Eliot (a number of times), Spender, Plomer, Gerald Manley Hopkins, Roger Fry (much on her preparatory work for her biography), A.E. Housman, De Quincey, E.M. Forster, Rose Macaulay, Vita Sackville-West, Dryden, W.H. Hudson, Richard Jefferies, Day Lewis, Lytton Strachey, Elizabeth Bowen, Wyndham Lewis, Isherwood, Aldous Huxley, and Shakespeare.
17 February 1930: "...Nessa's [Vanessa Bell] show is a great success. Leonard [Woolf] is fabricating the new paper tonight. Mr. [William] Empson came to see us. A raucous youth, but I think rather impressive and as red as a turkey, which I like. I am reading Childe Harold. If Byron had lived to my age he would have been a great novelist. As it is, he is the worst poet..." 13 May [1930]: "...I rather doubt that [Roy Campbell] is much better than a Byronic rhetorician; but people so much want a poet with guts that they cling to him like men in a storm...Tom's [T.S. Eliot] hard boiled egg [Ash Wednesday] is hard boiled...all this damnable Mary and Mother and God. Still he can write..." 14 October 1935: "...after you left we had old Tom [Eliot] to stay the weekend; he was urbanity itself, and we had a good deal of old crones talk about people like Middleton Murry, Wyndham Lewis and so on. He's [Eliot] determined to write plays about modern life in verse, and rather crusty when reviewers say he's an old fogy. In fact I think he feels that he's only just beginning to write what he wants...We dined with the Keynses, and Maynard commissioned him [Eliot] to write a play for the new theatre..." 25 October 1935: "...The bother is he [Roger Fry] writes a dull letter for the most part, and then there's a flash of great fun. And his love letters are prolific; he must have had a love every new year; and most of them are foreigners. So I am plodding away, when the light fails, and I can no longer write my long dull novel [The Years, published 1937]. And now the Stracheys want me to write about Lytton..."
1-6 December 1935: "...We went to Tom's [Eliot] play, the Murder [in the Cathedral], last week; and I had almost to carry Leonard out, shrieking. What was odd was how much better it reads than acts; the tightness, chillness, deadness and general worship of the decay and skeleton made one near sickness. The truth is when he has live bodies on the stage his words thin out, and no rhetoric will save them. There we met Stephen Spender, who also was green at the gills with dislike...Stephen is off to Portugal with Isherwood and a friend; two friends I think; of the lower orders and the male sex..." 30 January 1936: "...The literary world, or rather back kitchen, is amused every Sunday by the violence and vulgarity of Mr. [Herbert] Grigson and Edith Sitwell. You don't see the Sunday Times [Bell was in China] I imagine? Well there they befoul each other weekly -- and St. John Ervine joins in; it's about nothing but themselves as usual...I think you're lucky, starting life in China away from all this pother...Dadie has asked us to Cambridge to hear his Frogs; Lydia is bringing out her Ibsen; Maynard's book is upstairs on Leonard's table; Duncan's and Nessa's pictures are about to go to Glasgow; and Morgan [Forster] is producing a large volume of essays. So old Bloomsbury is active you'll agree..."
11 March 1936: "...I only write now by way of passing the time, for I'm so pressed with this more than accursed book [The Years] -- its now being sent to the printers; -- I have to keep them going; have to re-type, correct, re-write all at the last moment -- that my wits are wandering and my eyes are dim. I suspect it is a complete flop; that I've tried to do all the things nature never meant me to do; but unless one flies in her face with a large duster there's nothing for it but to moulder in one's own dung. (Excuse the image.)..." 2 May 1936: "...Old Blooms[bur]y may have more blood in it than you think. I get the most astonishing elaborate letters from poet Eliot; who is now the titular head of English-American letters since the death yesterday of [A.E.] Housman...I don't altogether like his Muse; why, I can't say. Always too laden with a peculiar scent for my taste. May, death, lads, Shropshire. But they say he was a great scholar, and I can remember when his Manilius came out...But old Tom [Eliot] has issued all his poems in one vol., which he gives me...Where he fails is when he takes on him to be a burly Englishman, without gift for character drawing. Not a touch of Dickens or Shakespeare in him. Last night I read Midsummer Night's Dream. Well there you have it -- all England all may [be?] in a song or two...Now I am going to beat L. [Leonard] at bowls, on a fine blowing evening with the children playing with their dolls in the meadow, all the trees in blossom, and some heat in the sun for a wonder..." (40)