Are You There?

By Melvin Maddocks

THE LETTERS OF VIRGINIA WOOLF, VOLUME II: 1912-1922

Edited by NIGEL NICOLSON and JOANNE TRAUTMANN 627 pages. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. $14.95.

Between 1912 and 1922, Virginia Woolf wrote two novels, Night and Day and Jacob's Room, which secured her reputation, and revised a third, The Voyage Out. Almost weekly she reviewed for the Times Literary Supplement, composing superb little essays. She married Leonard Woolf ("Precious Mongoose" in her letters) and with him founded the Hogarth Press, for which she functioned as chief talent scout and reader of manuscripts as well as typesetter (on the dining-room table). During this decade the press published, among other titles, Prelude by Katherine Mansfield, Poems by T.S. Eliot and Story of the Siren by E.M. Forster.

As part of her professional discipline, Woolf began and sustained a writer's diary, brushed up on her Latin, and undertook to learn Russian. For recreation this intensely introspective yet active woman walked, skated and rode horseback. She managed a town and a country house and, in Nigel Nicolson's phrase, led a "scintillating social life." When she had nothing else to do, she typed manuscripts for her friend Lytton Strachey (Eminent Victorians) or scurried to raise a fund of -L-500 a year to free T.S. Eliot from his job at the bank. Despite this hectic, variegated life, she wrote up to six letters a day.

Surely these letters would bear witness to a woman of brilliance, possibly genius. There are, in fact, marvelously unmodified capsule comments on her reading. She devoured Crime and Punishment on her honeymoon, lying on a sofa nibbling chocolates, and she kept reading and judging--nonstop, it seemed--happily ever after. While Dostoevsky was nonpareil, others came off less fortunately. Conrad, the letter reader learns, was a "distant admiration." Joyce was a doubtful quantity: "I don't know that he's got anything very interesting to say." Henry James emerged as "faintly tinged rose water." Ezra Pound was "humbug." Aldous Huxley, "in spats and grey trousers," proved eminently resistible. The elegant aphorist Logan Pearsall Smith left an impression of "perfect sentences of English prose served up in a muffin dish, over a bright fire, with the parrot on a perch."

Yet a great many of these letters consist of a kind of British banterchatter. The author of the shimmeringly exquisite Waves, writing to her artist-sister Vanessa Bell, natters on endlessly about the servant problem, her dog Shot, the difficulties of choosing chair covers, the advisability of drinking plenty of milk, and the jolly monotony of life in the Sussex country ("Leonard caught two moles this morning"). Deeper feelings blurt through only in a sentence here and there ("Nothing except painting and writing is really interesting nothing can be quite so important as child bearing"). Such revelations are surrounded like desert islands by a sea of gossip: "Lord Esher has forbidden Brett to live with Gertler . . . Fame has come to me with her arms full: Lady Colefax has invited me to tea ... There's Kitty Maxse falling over the bannister and killing herself."

Yet Woolf could write, "Life would split asunder without letters." Who can doubt that the author of 4,000 of them meant it? There is a craving to these letters -- an almost palpable need to reach out and touch. Taken as a whole, they constitute a ritual against loneliness, a message in a bottle repeating with a hundred only apparently casual variations, "I'm here. Are you there?"

In a letter to a struggling young writer, Gerald Brenan, Virginia Woolf dropped her entertaining-letter-writer mask to confess: "I am doubtful whether people, the best disposed toward each other, are capable of more than an intermittent signal as they forge past."

Here is the essential theme of Woolf's novels, with their dream-sense of human beings as interior space floating down the corridors of a world of bewitched objects. The letters -- fascinating for what they don't say, can't say -- reveal between the lines the author living out her own theme.

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