The beginning ten pages are a salvo in which Woolf reflects on how her memory will shape this very remembrance she is writing. Her perceptions are briefly examined, then exampled in the remaining pages. At the onset of the second entry, she discovers “a possible form for these notes.” She would like to remember the past by making “the two people, I now, I then, come out in contrast” (italics added). She believes the past is or should be “much affected by the present moment,” though her remunerative task at hand is to finish the biography of art critic and Bloomsbury friend Roger Fry. Thus, she “has no energy at the moment to spend upon the horrid labour that it needs to make an orderly and expressed work of art” (75).
The self-consciousness of the opening pages is beguiling. The book Woolf didn’t write, and the one she left us, may be better than any we might imagine. (In part, Woolf is known for the thoughtful development of ideas and emotions in her intimate diaries, letters, and essays. Though less artistically composed than her novels, her personal writing abounds with inspired commentary.) The first entry of “A Sketch” is written at Monks House, near Rodmell, Sussex, and the River Ouse, on Tuesday, April 18, 1939. Before her family memories (some going back more than fifty years) become the focus, Woolf considers how she remembers, what memory means, what “one’s memoirs” might be. All of a sudden, consideration turns to criticism and she begins thinking about new methods of representing the self and the past. She first says that most memoirs are failures because the writers “leave out the person to whom things happened” (65). They err on the side of overnarrating events, and gossip, instead of uncovering the character of the rememberer, a character alive as much now as then. To flesh out the author, it is important to know who the parents were, their class, their proclivities. It is more crucial, however, to know the perception of the rememberer. Woolf follows suit, recalling first pictures—a nursery and the sensual feelings of St. Ives’s air, beach scenes, wave sounds. So strong are these memories that she tests them against a view of her present surroundings. “At times,” she writes, “I can go back to St. Ives more completely than I can this morning. I can reach a state where I seem to be watching things happen as if I were there. That is, I suppose, that my memory supplies what I had forgotten, so that it seems as if it were happening independently, though I am really making it happen” (67).
How marvelous that she reports her mental state in the throes of remembering early childhood. She does not merely catalog the past, nor tell the psychiatrist the lurid details. Her own psychotherapist, she moves from analysis to objective fact to a self-possessed intimacy. She is aware of her present “rapture” with recollecting St. Ives. And then, as quickly as she raises the ship of the past, she questions its seaworthiness. She writes that life makes childhood memories “less strong … less isolated, less complete” by adding “much that makes [memories] more complex” (67). Looking back over an accumulation of years gives memories their depth. More is made of them as we mature; we need to cherish or resolve what is recalled. The question is, can such memories ever be recollected for what they were? Woolf says no. To revisit such brief scenes and moods is “misleading, because the things one does not remember are as important; perhaps they are more important” (69). The more important the memory, the harder it is to retrieve. But memories are imprinted and, because of their imprint, contain wholeness. Woolf labels such memories “exceptional,” which means the few and the intense. For her the exceptional memory always possesses “being,” while other parts of life—conversation, meals, weather, train rides, running a press, waiting around (Woolf says the unconsciousness of life is “a kind of nondescript cotton wool”)—comprise “non-being” or boredom (70–71).
The exceptional moments are “moments of being” (70). They are physically overwhelming and, over time, represent a legendary quality about the self. The moments require days and weeks of unexceptional life to pad and pace the distance between them as moments. The quotidian life is a complement to these peaks of being. Moments are enlarged by our memory; this grandiosity makes much about the past seem more exceptional than it probably was. Moments are self-selective: they highlight, expand, over-power, and change the past. Moments argue for their being as they wrangle with the present to be heard, to be part of a dialogue, to frame the picture of, at least, a part of one’s life. Woolf becomes animated by this idea. Given the time and the calm, the ideal way to write her life would be to contrast the intense present, one being-full and intense, with a part of the past, itself equally being-full and intense, and make their dueling exceptionalities work on each other.
Without doubt, the present is full of being: England is under attack. What would the past recollected during this dire present be like were she to write of it under these imposed conditions? Woolf ventures forth. Her first attempt is placid, before the bombing of London has begun, while the second is much different because it includes the bombs.
On July 19, 1939, Woolf has just returned from an uneventful crossing of the Channel. Before she writes about one of her stepsister Stella Duckworth’s lovers, she longs to recall the past because the present is running “so smoothly.” It is like the “sliding surface of a deep river.” “Then one sees through the surface to the depths. In those moments I find one of my greatest satisfactions, not that I am thinking of the past; but it is then that I am living most fully in the present. For the present when backed by the past is a thousand times deeper than the present when it presses so close that you can feel nothing else” (98). How curious that a smooth present is tantamount to seeing the past smoothed of its turmoil.
But once the bombs start falling on London, everything changes. The destruction agitates Woolf about how and what she remembers. Upset, she recalls the pain of so much unexpressed feeling for her parents. She begins “venting that old grievance” once again. Her mother died prematurely and her father, whom she “alternately loved and hated,” became a ward to his daughters, particularly Stella and Vanessa. That sullied thought shifts her back to the present. Aflutter, she enquires of her husband Leonard whether he thinks there’s a “third voice” between the past and the present that can express her “vague idea.” She wonders “whether I make up or tell the truth when I see myself taking the breath of these voices in my sails and tacking this way and that through daily life as I yield to them.” She wonders if anyone cares: “Which of the people watching the incendiary bomb extinguished on the hill last night would understand what I mean if they read this?” (133). Remembering her difficult aging father and a Nazi bomb in her midst isolates her in rough seas. To calm down, she recalls sailing at St. Ives, which momentarily stabilizes the lurching. To calm down, she tries taking control of the present so she can take control of the past.
Is Woolf suggesting that what we remember about ourselves can be—perhaps should be—influenced or changed by present circumstances? Is she suggesting that depending upon the degree of unsettlement, the past can mislead the present as much as the present misleads the past? If the past’s moments of being are what we tend to recall, while the present mixes, pell-mell, being and non-being, must we write