An Uncommon Reviewer

...Johnson's definition of the general reader to force into being an audience like herself, "guided by an instinct to create out of whatever odds and ends some kind of whole...

...They were not mollified by the sensible dissenting note added at the end by Leonard Woolf: "The function of the review remains to give to readers a description of the book and an estimate of its quality in order that they may know whether or not it is the kind of book which they may want to read...

...She had a theory of reading as a complex performance, not unlike the ideas advanced today by those critics who do not separate what literature "is" from what it "does...

...Supp.," she said, "how to compress, how to enliven, and also was made to read with a pen and notebook, seriously...

...To admit authorities, however heavily furred and gowned, into our libraries and let them tell us how to read is to destroy the spirit of freedom which is the breath of these sanctuaries...

...we learn through feeling...

...According to Leonard Woolf, her husband, she looked on journalism as a welcome chance to use a different part of her brain...

...That was her response to academicians who saw her as a "literary-journalist-poet type," leading the reading public by the nose...

...Was she writing reviews or criticism...

...for by the common sense of readers, uncorrupted by literary prejudices, after all the refinements of subtilty must be finally decided all claim to poetical honors...

...By 1934, in her second collection, she did not speak of the reader as Everyman...

...True, Woolf went beyond Dr...

...To read a book," she said then, "calls for the rarest qualities of insight and judgement...

...The New Statesman "was polite but aghast...

...Yes and no...

...All parties would thus be spared "the present discordant and distracted twitter...

...Again, "a new book is attached to life by a thousand minute filaments...

...This service Virginia Woolf no longer cared to provide, but her belief—however fleeting—that the ideal reader was legion, still encourages common reviewers in their troubled trade...

...Toward the end of her life she proposed the institution of a "Gutter,'' who with scissors and paste would extract the plots from novels, a few anecdotes from biographies, a verse or two from poetry...

...Yet she transcended self-reference and special pleading as well, with a vision that embraced the general reader in an activity that was at once reading, writing and criticism...

...She took her theme from Samuel Johnson: "I rejoice to concur with the common reader...

...Should professors review fiction...

...I must find a quicker cut into books," she wrote in her diary, " something swifter and lighter and more colloquial...

...She interchanged the terms and at the same time distinguished them: "Reviewers we have but no critic...

...The Times responded, she observed, with a "tart and peevish leader," in a "rasped and injured" tone...

...Sometimes she seemed to patronize him, as when she says of the five-volume Voyages of Hakluyt that "they are not always, perhaps, read through.' But at her best, she gives the impression that he had anticipated her in discovering the intention of a novel, or in recognizing that several apparently disparate works are in the same tradition...

...On these the reviewer, to be known as the "Taster," would stamp asterisks for approval, daggers for disapproval...

...She would be troubled, perhaps, by another aspect of today's book journalism: the likelihood that we are developing a new "literati" who depend utterly on reviews for information, for a kind of knowledgability and—with fiction and poetry—for a merely vicarious experience of a writer's power...

...Then, an editorial "we" exposes their pretenses by showing "us" her own critical prejudices...

...He tends to praise or damn a new book that he would know, if he were "content to read only, is neither great nor bad...

...They set up all kinds of irrelevant responses...

...Her diary entry when she was finishing Mrs...

...She may have sensed that here, through a rather cozy use of "we" and "us," the critic was identifying with her audience at the cost of excluding the writer...

...But the length of Welty's piece—it ran through seven pages?she probably would have questioned...

...I've done with that kind of criticism...

...And if he is preoccupied by a writer's sex, it is the writer's fault...

...In a harsh little Hogarth Press pamphlet called Reviewing, she proposed that since the author wanted to avoid suffering and the critic desired to talk only to him, private "doctor-patient" consultations should be arranged, with the writer paying a fee large enough to insure serious attention from the judge of his choice...

...First, she shares with us the discomfort of intimidation by "infallible" critics?we, humble readers bow our submissive heads...

...When we look at her first Common Reader, we see that Woolf both addressed that character and at least to some extent did create him...

...Gradually these acquire authority, as she moves toward the conclusion that she found in Men Without Women many stories "which if life was longer, one would wish to read again...

...Everywhere else we may be bound by laws and conventions—there we have none...

...That may explain why in 1924, recording her release from "almost weekly" assignments, she "felt turned out into the open air," and wanted to know "masses of sensitive, imaginative, unselfconscious, un-literary people who have never read a book...

...Woolf did not include in her three collections of essays and reviews (three more, chosen by Leonard Woolf, were published posthumously) a 1927 New York Herald Tribune review of Hemingway's Men Without Women...

...I learned a lot of my craft working for the [London Times] Litt...

...Moreover, she came increasingly to want to address the writer directly in reviewing contemporary work...

...As he reads the major novelists, "the critic is not reminded that he belongs to the masculine or feminine gender...

...A work on fiction by David Cecil she found "good for readers...

...Writers &Writing AN UNCOMMON REVIEWER BY RUTH MATHEWSON l hope the New York Times Book Review plans more issues like the one last November 14 that began with Eudora Welty's wonderful ordering of quotations from a new volume of Virginia Woolf's letters, and ended with an excerpt from a forthcoming collection of her autobiographical writings...

...This review so upset Hemingway that he put off reading the others—actually, as it happened, much harsher...

...Still, "the nerve of sensation that sends shocks through us is our chief illuminant...

...Woolf would almost certainly have approved the choice of Welty for reviewer, believing as she did that it was necessary for a critic to practice the art being discussed—although she later reversed herself on this, as on many other opinions about reviewing, disqualifying some of her colleagues precisely because they were writers...

...In doing a review, she commented, "I write every sentence as if it were going to be tried by three Chief Justices...

...Dalloway and preparing the first Common Reader?My fiction before lunch and then essays after tea"—suggests a steadier rhythm than was often the case, but she brought the same intensity to both activities...

...The ratio would have interested her...

...F R. Leavis, less crude but no less aggressive, raised the most serious question: Was Woolf not merely "addressing" the "ideal Common Reader" rather than "creating" him, as a true critic should...

...The judge should be close on the scene, quick with "one of those profound statements which are caught up in the mind hot with the friction of reading as if they were the soul of the book itself...

...One polemicist, Q. D. Leavis, attacked her for "Nazi dialect without Nazi conviction...

...Readers, that is, who were writers themselves—such as Lytton Strachey, E. M. Forster and other authors in her immediate circle...

...And the regular reviewer—can we trust him...

...What Hazlitt did, she notes disapprovingly, was "needless to say not criticism [but] building up image after image of what one has seen in a book...

...Throughout her journalistic career Woolf commented on, or was involved in, virtually every problem in the profession...

...About the unusual Times corrective—letting the writer speak for herself—Woolf could hardly complain, but during her 30 years as a reviewer she might have worried about unemployment if the policy had become general...

...she might conclude that Hardwick, in devoting most of her space to modern literature, was not neglecting Speedboat but—through strategies not unlike her own—was setting the terms for responding to it...

...Not often, because he must pronounce on something just published, "with the shell still sticking to its head...

...What would she make of Elizabeth Hardwick's proportions?00 words on Renata Adler's Speedboat out of some 3,000 in a New York Review of Books treatment of that novel...

...Was she, then, recommending impressionism...

...Her most cherished project is to uproot criticism in the Nazi manner...

...A million competent policemen, but no judge...

...She began at 22, and went on because she needed the money and valued the training...

...Woolf was herself painfully sensitive to bad notices...