When is a new novel not a new novel? When it appears to be a rough draft, described as a new work - like the recently published Melymbrosia by Virginia Woolf, which, writes Eileen Battersby, is remarkably similar toWoolf's first novel, The Voyage Out.
There is a point at which the interests of scholarship become compromised by voyeuristic, commercial opportunism. This point is reached far more often than could be possibly justified by even the most Freudian of scholars or critics. Such trends have caused literary biography to fall into disrepute.
It is open season on a subject's personal life and sexuality; no intimate detail now remains private. The publication of early drafts of known works by famous writers is another unfair practice.
It invariably occurs after the death of the author who has lost the power of veto. The fact that the author, in life, chose not to publish that draft, preferring instead to continue shaping a piece until arriving at a satisfactory finished version, should be statement enough of intent. No one wants to be judged on an unpolished work, why should a novelist be? However, scholarship as practised by some academics appears more market-driven, and biographical details become more important than textual investigation. The publication of Melymbrosia as "a novel by Virginia Woolf" is an example of sensationalist publishing.
As is well-known by anyone possessing the mildest of interest in the British modernist, Melymbrosia was the early working title of Woolf's first novel, The Voyage Out, which was eventually published in 1915, after extensive agonising, some 12 drafts, and at least seven years labour. To offer this early draft, pieced together as US academic Louise DeSalvo writes, from her reading of many pages of manuscript, as a work in its own right is at best inaccurate, and at worst, misleading - particularly as DeSalvo published an annotated edition of her "discoveries" in 1982.
This new edition - proclaiming itself "First Edition, First Printing" - sets out to publish a first draft of a known novel as a separate book. But Melymbrosia is not a work in its own right, it is an early, albeit somewhat more melodramatic, stylistically cruder but indisputably recognisable version of The Voyage Out, an interestingly sinister story of a sheltered young woman, Rachel Vinrace, as she becomes involved with a group of English tourists on holiday in a South American coastal resort. A stagy, intellectualised romance is followed by a mystery fever and death.
The published novel, The Voyage Out, part of the literary canon since 1915, is not mentioned until page 14 of DeSalvo's sloppy and repetitive 18-page introduction which as early as the third paragraph announces: "Virginia Woolf, one of the 20th century's greatest novelists [this a favourite De Salvo refrain] was an incest survivor [another DeSalvo refrain]." She claims: "Although Melymbrosia is a substantial, highly polished, immensely political, often savagely satirical piece of work, Virginia Stephen chose not to publish it." But it was published - as The Voyage Out.
Having re-read The Voyage Out and then read Melymbrosia back to back, it is impossible not to say they are one and the same conventional, realistic novel, more Iris Murdoch than Jane Austen.
The Voyage Out is simply the better version of a good, not great novel that showcases Woolf's snobbery, ridiculous class-ridden characters and savage, if not always subtle, eye for human failings. A line-by-line reading of the two texts emphasises how misleading De Salvo's claims are. Anyone lacking prior knowledge of either The Voyage Out or of Woolf's life, reading DeSalvo's introduction could mistakenly believe she had made a discovery such as the 1986 first publication of The Garden of Eden, an unfinished novel by Hemingway that explores androgyny. A strange, erotic work, its appearance was a major publishing event. The publication of Melymbrosia is not.
There have been many famous books published in definitive editions aside from Ulysses. As I write I am looking at "the original, unrevised text" of William Faulkner's Sanctuary (1931) as published in 1981; I also have the 1991 Cambridge edition of F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby (1995) - both editions offer insights to add to our existing reading of texts we know.
DeSalvo writes: "And until I edited the manuscripts for the work's first publication, it was unknown and unavailable to the general reading public." But Melymbrosia has always been known as the early drafts of The Voyage Out. Is she deliberately distinguishing all who have read The Voyage Out since its publication in 1915 from the general reading public? If this is so, who or what is the general reading public if not readers? All that emerges from DeSalvo's second-rate essay is that she does not appear to have either memory or understanding of The Voyage Out. The theatricality of comments such as: "she was in the process of re-forming the novel with the boldness of her vision which sometimes terrified her. She was telling the heretofore untold story about the relationships between men and women. She was describing sexual politics in an imperialist culture. She was examining the aftershocks of incestuous abuse although, because of the times during which she was writing, she would have to disguise her meanings if her work was to see print" suggests DeSalvo has read very little English fiction and seems overawed by Woolf's heavy-handed satire.
Textual scholarship has a complex and confusing history involving writers spanning the centuries from Shakespeare to James Joyce. Few could now dispute that the textual adventures experienced by Ulysses during its composition offer an extreme example of a manuscript at the mercy of its writer's poor eyesight, obsessive revisions, bad handwriting, the culminative results of too many well-intentioned typesetters with views of their own and so forth. Joycean scholarship is a literary industry currently being dominated by US and increasingly, Japanese, scholars. One can only wonder at what Joyce might have made of it all.
Woolf in her life, however, enjoyed far more authorial control, indeed in time she became, with her husband Leonard, her own publisher, in the guise of the Hogarth Press.
But while her stature as a major 20th-century experimental innovator remains secure, largely due to the achievement of her finest novel, a powerful ghost story and elegiac masterpiece, To The Lighthouse (1927) - there is also to a lesser yet still considerable extent, Mrs Dalloway (1925), Orlando (1928) and The Waves (1931) - in time Woolf the essayist may obscure the novelist. Yet the greatest difficulty overshadowing her art is her contradictory life as a member of the self-indulgent Bloomsbury set, her complex and heavily documented bi-sexuality, lifelong depression, and of course, her death; orchestrated as only a novelist would.
On Friday March 28th, 1941, having composed a detailed farewell letter to her husband, Woolf walked out of her garden and down towards the River Ouse. It was still cold although there were signs of Spring. The river was running very fast and high. As was later confirmed, the novelist, then 59, picked up a large stone from the river bank placed it in her pocket, discarded her habitual walking stick, and either walked or jumped into the Ouse. She could swim, but she intended to drown. It was the final act in a series of suicide attempts.
For much of the 20th century, the British literary establishment and also, of course, academe, acknowledged Woolf, an Edwardian who was born a Victorian, as an influential modernist and rival of her close contemporary, Joyce. Yet, by the late 1980s, interest in the Bloomsbury generation, itself a literary industry fuelling a library of books, began to falter. By late 1996, British academic and critic Hermione Lee, having completed a definitive biography on Woolf, found little interest among London newspaper literary editors. She told me she was repeatedly assured that unless she had discovered "that Woolf had had a child with T.S. Eliot or some such thing" there would be no interviews.
There was no such revelation. Virginia Woolf, it seemed, no longer excited literary editors.
Irritation best describes the British reaction to DeSalvo's shaky thesis, although no one appears to have closely compared the texts. This is understandable because, unless you are prepared to conduct a line-by-line comparison for a full-scale academic article, why read the same novel twice? Not least because anyone interested in Woolf will already have read The Voyage Out, the novel in which Mrs Dalloway has a walk-on part and in which her creepy, politician husband Richard perpetrates an act of shocking initiation by kissing Rachel, the doomed young heroine.
Look at the two "novels" passage by passage, for example in this sequence, which appears in both versions: ' "I can't stop thinking of England" said his wife [Mrs Dalloway] . . . "Being on this ship seems to make it so much more vivid - what it really means to be English. One thinks of all we have done, and our navies, and the people in India and Africa, and how we've gone on century after century, sending out boys from little country villages . . . and it makes one feel as if one couldn't bear not to be English . . ." '. You will find both books, with a few stylistic changes, are the same - with the addition of extra detail and tighter, less melodramatic prose in The Voyage Out. You will immediately realise you are reading the same novel. No one could fairly suggest otherwise.
Far from creating a sensation, the appearance of Melymbrosia in a commercial edition, minus the interesting 1982 textual annotations but with a suitably period jacket design, seems merely to reiterate the fact that The Voyage Out is hardly Ulysses and that British critics are insufficiently interested to go to war with DeSalvo, whose Freudian criticism is thought to be more biographical than textually based.
In her Woolf biography, Lee cautions against "simplistic" interpretations based on superimposing the facts of Woolf's sexual experiences on any reading of her fiction. DeSalvo should ponder this advice.
In an earlier biography, Quentin Bell's Virginia Woolf (1972), the novelist's nephew gave detailed attention to Melymbrosia and it is indexed as "See: The Voyage Out". Also included is Appendix D, "Clive Bell and the Writing of The Voyage Out". DeSalvo makes a point that the manuscript of Melymbrosia is the only manuscript Woolf kept.
Well, without falling into the trap of matching biographical details to a work, it is relevant to concede that aside from Melymbrosia/The Voyage Out with its lengthy gestation representing her first attempt at writing a novel, Woolf sent various drafts to Bell, her sister's husband, with whom she was having an affair. One does not have to be a Freudian critic to appreciate the added importance of Woolf's project, considering the intimate, secret relationship between her and Bell.
His textual insights are useful, far more so than DeSalvo's unconvincing, self-congratulatory ramblings. "My Dear Virginia", writes Bell in October 1908, "I find it hard to believe that you really attach such importance to my opinion of your work . . . to my apprehension, the wonderful thing that I look for is there unmistakeably: one can always recognise it when one gets that glimpse of the thrilling real beneath the dull apparent." The Voyage Out is interesting because it is Woolf's début.
Based on a reading of both texts, I believe that Melymbrosia is not, as DeSalvo claims, a restored text that Woolf "cannibalised" to create the later novel. It is what it has always been, an earlier draft - no more, just marginally less than The Voyage Out as published in 1915.
