[Vwoolf] More Swinnerton: the Bloomsbury conspiracy theory

[Stuart N. Clarke]

“Massingham was so little impressed by Virginia Woolf’s ‘Night and Day’ that he wrote derisively of the number of times the characters in that book had tea.*  He paid the price for his derision, of course, when ‘The Nation’ was merged with ‘The New Statesman’ [actually the ‘Athenaeum’, in 1921]; but the fatal words had been printed.  Therefore I fear it must be said that the great Liberal editors had lost pace with the literary times.”
(SWINNERTON, Frank, "Figures in the Foreground: Literary Reminiscences 1917-40", Hutchinson & Co. (Publishers) Ltd., 1963, p. 109)

*”Nation”, 29 Nov 1919, p.295 – partly reprinted as one of the ‘adverts’ in the back of the first UK edn of “Jacob’s Room”.

Stuart


From: Harish Trivedi 
Sent: Tuesday, October 13, 2020 4:52 PM
To: Stuart N. Clarke 
Cc: vwoolf 
Subject: Re: [Vwoolf] Frank Swinnerton on The Waves

But why "short-term"? Did he recover from it after 1935?  Or was that meltdown his final dictum?  

I loved the joke about the weighing machine ticket. Exactly my feelings very often, both recto and verso! 


Sent from my phone

On Tue, 13 Oct 2020, 20:14 Stuart N. Clarke via Vwoolf, <vwoolf at lists.osu.edu> wrote:

  It was a short-term memory problem.  I have a 1st edn of The Georgian Literary Scene (quote on pp. 392 –3) – so battered that I only paid A$0.50 on 27/4/76 – it was published in 1935.  However, in "Marionette shows", his review of “The Waves” in 1931, he refers to “six characters” (reprinted in MAJUMDAR, Robin, & Allen McLaurin).

  Stuart
  From: Jeremy Hawthorn via Vwoolf 
  Sent: Tuesday, October 13, 2020 3:19 PM
  To: vwoolf 
  Subject: [Vwoolf] Frank Swinnerton on The Waves

  You remember right.  I tracked down the comment.

  "She claimed to be presenting not Mrs Brown, but Mrs Brownness. That sounds splendid. But in order to discover the Mrs Brownness Virginia Woolf was forced to write solely of ruminative or introspective persons, and when she had carried her exploration to the four minds in The Waves she had reached as far as that particular method would take her. There were four poetic somethings; but they all thought alike." (Frank Swinnerton, The Georgian Literary Scene, Everyman edition, revised 1951, p. 281)

  This reminds me of the old humorous seaside postcard that has a picture of a rather formidable wife looking at the card a weighing machine has given to her very meek looking husband. "It says you are handsome, muscular and decisive. It's got your weight wrong too." Had he even read the novel?


  Jeremy H




  On 05.10.2020 17:03, Harish Trivedi wrote:

    Did not Frank Swinnerton in The Georgian Literary Scene count the total number of characters in the novel as four -- if I remember right.  They were all too vague for him, obviously, and tended to merge into each other. 
         
    Harish Trivedi




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