Virginia Woolf’s America

Andrew McNeillie

Andrew McNellie

Virginia Woolf was the most English of the modernists, the least international. She did not even dream of hanging out with the Americans in Paris. As far as she knew about that world, she tended to distrust it. There was something distinctly ladylike in her disdain for the modernist network but also something aesthetic. The two things are in fact inseparable in Woolf, and they are both conditioned by her feminism. Either way, in the period 1910–20, at least, she would have been too fragile to survive the bohemian adventure. But she was later more robust and led a far more vigorous life than has often been allowed by her critics.

There is no reason why she might not have crossed the Atlantic to North America. She enjoyed a wide readership there, as both an essayist in various periodicals and a novelist published by Harcourt Brace. Plans for her to travel to America were afoot at least twice, but in the end she didn’t go, except, as she puts it, on the wings of imagination. By 1938, the year in which she published her essay ‘America, Which I Have Never Seen’ in Hearst’s International, she had written quite extensively on American writers. Her first published review was of a novel by an American, W.D. Howells’ The Son of Royal Langbrith, in the Women’s Supplement of the Guardian, a Church of England newspaper, in December 1904, though there’s no reference in the review to America or its literature or Howells’ Americanness.

But this 1904 article is not the starting point of Woolf’s American voyage out. That begins earlier, with her father. The Stephen household was unusual in the Victorian age not just for its American connections, but for certain related democractic sympathies: a vision, at least in Leslie Stephen’s eyes, of what America meant and promised that most of his contemporary or near contemporary compatriots – including Harriet Martineau, Charles Dickens, John Delane – could not begin to share. Noel Annan tells us how Leslie Stephen (who contemplated an essay on the United States but, unlike his daughter, abandoned it) visited the US at the height of the Civil War, in 1863. He was tired, we are told, of listening to Confederate supporters at Cambridge and went to see for himself American democracy at work. The outcome is famous. Stephen returned to attack The Times of London in a startling pamphlet, finding it to be ‘guilty of a public crime’ in its irresponsible coverage of the Civil War. It was on this trip that Stephen met Charles Eliot Norton, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and James Russell Lowell, who would introduce him to Emerson. Stephen at this point hadn’t read a word of Emerson, but he would later write about him in Studies of a Biographer, providing an interesting philosophical analysis of Emerson’s anti-Lockean Platonism, and reminding us also of the practical element in Emerson’s thought. Lowell, scion of the Boston elite, would become Minister to the Court of St James in the 1880s, and stand godfather – or, as Stephen preferred, ‘in quasi-sponsorial relation’ – to Virginia Stephen. Lowell and Leslie Stephen became intimate friends. In their persons, as Annan remarks, Cambridge, Massachusetts, learned to commune with Cambridge, England. What festered in Lowell’s mind was the English assumption that all Americans were low-bred immigrants – ‘A country without traditions, without ennobling associations, a scramble of parvenus, with a horrible consciousness of shoddy running through politics, manners, art, literature, nay, religion itself’. This was from his essay ‘On a Certain Condescension in Foreigners’, an essay Woolf knew; she once quoted the above passage when writing about Oliver Wendell Holmes.

Woolf paid no lip-service to such condescension, or at least no public lip- or pen-service (though the subject of the only poem she seems to have written exasperatedly addresses an American intrusion on her privacy at Rodmell). On the contrary, America for Woolf is a positive space, a place of democracy and futurity, of largely enabling modernity, but one hampered by European traditions, by the haunting shades of English literature, by the want among Americans of ‘a language of their own’ as she characteristically put it in her review ‘Melodious Meditations’ in the TLS of 8 February 1917. There we encounter too Woolf’s recognition that ‘the boisterous spirit of democracy’ must find its voice in writing. ‘When words are being made a literature will be made out of them,’ she would write later, in her essay on ‘American Fiction’ in the American Saturday Review of Literature of 1 August 1925. In that same essay, she asserts quite startlingly that Ring Lardner ‘writes the best prose that has come our way’ – precisely because he writes, as he speaks, what Woolf calls American English. ‘For no one can doubt that theirs is a splendid opportunity,’ she says again of the Americans in ‘Melodious Meditations’, ‘or if anyone is sceptical as to the future of American art let him read Walt Whitman’s preface to the first edition of Leaves of Grass. As a piece of writing it rivals anything we [the English] have done for a hundred years, and as a statement of the American spirit no finer banner was ever unfurled for the young of a country to march under.’

She returns to Whitman in her 1925 essay on ‘American Fiction’:

The English tourist in American literature wants above all things something different from what he has at home. For this reason the one American writer whom the English whole-heartedly admire is Walt Whitman. There, you will hear them say, is the real American undisguised. In the whole of English literature there is no figure which resembles his – among all our poetry none in the least comparable to Leaves of Grass. This very unlikeness becomes a merit, and leads us, as we steep ourselves in the refreshing familiarity, to become less and less able to appreciate Emerson, Lowell, Hawthorne …

For Woolf the litmus test for literature is the alienation effect. Henry James, Joseph Hergesheimer (whose work she reviewed) and Edith Wharton ‘are not Americans’ in the sense that Whitman is – ‘they do not give us anything that we have not got already’. For the ‘self-consciously and self-assertively American’ Edgar Lee Masters, she wrote in 1917, ‘one native frog is of more importance than a whole grove full of sham nightingales’.

In the same spirit in which she responded to Whitman, Woolf saw Thoreau as ‘the companion of a younger generation’. Thoreau – though Woolf does not appear to have read the passage – in the essay ‘Monday’ from A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, wrote:

To an American reader who, by the advantage of his position, can see over that strip of Atlantic coast to Asia and the Pacific, who, as it were, sees the shore slope upward over the Alps to the Himmaleh Mountains, the comparatively recent literature of Europe often appears partial and clannish, and notwithstanding the limited range of his own sympathies and studies, the European writer who presumes that he is speaking for the world, is perceived by him to speak only for that corner of it which he still inhabits.

That’s not a viewpoint, I believe, to which Woolf would have taken exception. Woolf understood that America and American literature were emergent formations, or, as Raymond Williams would have said, pre-emergent, and this excited her sympathy as a self-conscious experimentalist. On the same principles she saw European literature, or at least literature in England in the early twentieth century, to be a worn-out commodity, a non-literature. There is an idealist mechanism at work here, but one that reveals Woolf in a strong and attractive light, a spokeswoman for the principle of democracy – albeit in a space where she enjoys, as it were, diplomatic immunity. Direct confrontation with the consequences of democracy, modernity in her own backyard, did not generally please her (though she rejoiced to own an automobile and to hit the road with Leonard). But otherwise, here is a deeply structuring crux in her work, not least in evidence in her diary and her letters.

Williams’s theories of the ‘emergent’ and ‘pre-emergent’ find very early, if impure, pre-emergings in Emerson, in his famous lecture ‘The American Scholar’, delivered at Cambridge, Mass., in August 1837. Woolf did not refer to this piece when writing chiefly about Emerson’s journals in the TLS in 1910. ‘We have listened too long to the courtly muses of Europe,’ runs Emerson’s peroration. ‘The spirit of the American freeman is already suspected to be timid, imitative, tame … What is the remedy? … We will walk on our own feet; we will work with our own hands; we will speak with our own minds …’. It sounds almost like Whitman, but of course it comes with European baggage in its hold: Goldsmith, Burns, Cowper, Goethe, Wordsworth, and that Victorian monster Carlyle, friend of Leslie Stephen, are all cited as exemplars by Emerson, in effectively the same breath as he makes his declaration of independence.

Walt Whitman was important for Bloomsbury, for Forster especially; ‘Passage to India’ is the title of a Whitman poem. In The Voyage Out Woolf quotes (slightly misquotes or, calculatedly, has her character misquote) from the poem ‘Whoever You Are Holding Me Now in Hand’ in Leaves of Grass, which Hewett reads as ‘Whoever you are holding me now in your hand’ and which continues:

I give you fair warning before you attempt me further

I am not what you supposed, but far different.

America and American literature are for Woolf discursive places in which she can extend her speculations, voice the frustrations of what we call a ‘modernist’ writer, and a woman writer. We’re talking about an imaginary world, not an America of which Woolf had any first-hand knowledge. It’s a question of creative desire that we’re looking at, and it can be tied back sharply into Woolf’s modernist manifesto, as we may call it: ‘Character in Fiction’ (Criterion, July 1924), better known as ‘Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown’. Woolf here attacked the ‘materialist’ Edwardians for failing to renew the tradition, and for providing her generation with no fit model to help them write as the age demanded. The modernist rhetoric of crisis is hard at work in her essay, and the options for the Georgians, or we might say the modernists, are represented as profoundly limited: ‘we must reconcile ourselves to a season of failures and fragments’. A dead culture lies on them from which they must break free to find new forms, new languages. At the same time, Woolf senses a Williamsian pre-emergent moment to be at hand: ‘we are trembling on the verge of one of the great ages of English literature’; ‘we hear all around us, in poems and novels and biographies, even in newspaper articles and essays, the sound of breaking and falling, crashing and destruction’. The Georgian writers do not, cannot pour out ‘three immortal masterpieces with Victorian regularity every autumn’. But Woolf is sanguine:

For this state of things is, I think, inevitable wherever from hoar old age or callow youth the convention ceases to be a means of communication between writer and reader, and becomes instead an obstacle and an impediment. At the present moment we are suffering, not from decay, but from having no code of manners which writers and readers accept as a prelude to the more exciting intercourse of friendship. The literary convention of the time is so artificial – you have to talk about the weather and nothing but the weather throughout the entire visit – that, naturally, the feeble are tempted to outrage, and the strong are led to destroy the very foundations and rules of literary society. Signs of this are everywhere apparent. Grammar is violated; syntax disintegrated … The more adult writers do not, of course, indulge in such wanton exhibitions of spleen. Their sincerity is desperate, and their courage tremendous; it is only that they do not know which to use, a fork or their fingers.

Woolf goes on next to write of Joyce (and his indecency) and Eliot (and his obscurity).

Although she does not make such a connection in ‘Character and Fiction’, the language in this essay, the language of ‘futurity’ and questing, of seeking to find, of trial and error, of having to wait, finds resonance, as we’ve already seen, in her writings on American literature, where the world is being made new in the vast spaces of America.

S.P. Rosenbaum has observed of ‘Character in Fiction’/‘Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown’ that if ever there were an instance where ‘absence’ means ‘presence’ it is in this essay, and the haunting presence is that of Henry James (haunter too of Woolf’s childhood, and a protégé of Leslie Stephen; Woolf could remember from her childhood the ‘hesitations and adumbrations with which Henry James made the drawing room seem rich and dusky’). Henry James, Rosenbaum would maintain, and it is hard not to agree with him, is the absent signifier, the missing link, whose psychologizing example and point of view made a bridge for Woolf into her own mature style. Woolf wrote extensively elsewhere about James, the self-described ‘cosmopolitan American’, reviewing his letters, and in her extended essay ‘Phases of Fiction’, in which he comes off second best to Proust. There was also her early stumbling review of The Golden Bowl in 1905. The embryonic Bloomsburyans at Cambridge ‘lived in a Jamesian phantasmagoria’, as Rosenbaum puts it, where ‘subtle psychological, moral and aesthetic distinctions were refined through oblique conversations’ in what became known among the group of friends as ‘the method’. James was in the air. But if James was an American, with ‘the American love of old furniture’, in Woolf’s view he transcended his Americanness by being ‘a great writer’, ‘a great artist’ (though Woolf would remain acutely critical of his formalism, his artifice).

The question of James’s ‘Americanness’ cropped up in a controversy for Woolf in 1929, through correspondence relating to her essay ‘On Not Knowing French’, published in The New Republic in February 1929. Woolf opens her essay:

One scarcely dare say it, but it is true – nobody knows French but the French themselves. In reading a language that is not one’s own, consciousness is awake, and keeps us aware of the surface glitter of the words; but it never suffers them to sink into that region of the mind where old habits and instincts roll them round and shape them a body rather different from their faces. Thus a foreigner with what is called a perfect command of English and musical English – he will, indeed, like Henry James, often write a more elaborate English than the native – but never such unconscious English that we feel the past of the word in it, its associations, its attachments.

Predictably, a month of picky correspondence followed, from Americans in Europe, New York (Edmund Wilson), Ithaca, and Wisconsin. Wilson waded in early, deploring ‘the tone of this controversy’. A letter by Harriot T. Cooke was the first to appear. You can hear the WASP mindset and the Jamesian furniture shunting between Cannes and New York, loud enough to silence the Atlantic in between. Cooke makes an allusion, which Woolf picks up, to the American who stood in quasi-sponsorial relation to her (not that he could have known of the sponsorship deal). He writes:

Just as a matter of curiosity, I am interested to know what she [Woolf] considers the native language of Henry James – Choctaw, perchance! – since he came from the wilds of Boston. I am quite familiar with that ‘certain condescension’ which the English display towards us benighted Americans, but it is a surprise to learn that we are looked on as newcomers to the English language.

As it is as good an example of lupine sarcasm as you’re likely to find, let me quote Woolf’s response to Cooke in full:

I hasten to submit to your correspondent’s correction and to retract my opinion that because Henry James was born in Boston he therefore did not write English like a native. I will do my best to believe that the language of Tennyson and the language of Whitman are one and the same. But may I explain that the responsibility for my error rests with Walt Whitman himself, with Mr Ring Lardner, Mr Sherwood Anderson, and Mr Sinclair Lewis? I had been reading these writers and thinking how magnificent a language American is, how materially it differs from English, and how much I envy it the power to create new words and new phrases of the utmost vividness. I had even gone so far as to shape a theory that the American genius is an original genius and that it has borne and is bearing fruit unlike any that grows over here. But in deference to your correspondent I hasten to cancel these views and will note for future use that there is no difference between England and America; climate and custom have produced no change of any kind. America is merely a larger England across the Atlantic; and language is so precisely similar that when I come upon words like boob, graft, stine, busher, doose, hobo, shoe-pack […] and many others, the fact that I do not know what they mean must be attributed to the negligence of those who did not teach me what is apparently my native tongue.

Having thus admitted my error, may I ‘just as a matter of curiosity’ ask to be enlightened on another point? Why, I wonder, when I say that Henry James did not write English like a native, is it assumed that I intend an insult? Why does your correspondent at once infer that I accuse the Bostonians of talking Choctaw? Why does he allude to ‘condescension’ or refer to ‘us poor benighted Americans’ and suppose that I look upon them as ‘newcomers to the English language’ when I have said nothing of the sort? What have I done to make him angry? Lowell’s essay ‘On a Certain Condescension in Foreigners’ (for such he apparently thought the English), should, I think, have a pendant ‘On a Certain Touchiness in’ – dare I say it? – ‘Americans’. But may I implore you, sir, if I use that word, not to infer that I thereby imply that you wear a pigtail and paint your forehead red? If I speak of ‘Americans’ it is merely because our common ancestors some centuries ago agreed, for reasons best known to themselves, to differ.

We need not dwell on Edmund Wilson’s intervention. He makes some ponderous noises about confusing Ring Lardner’s ‘slang’ and what we might call received American, and gestures at the diversity of demotic American, regional variety, and so on, as if Woolf were not capable of perceiving such complexity or appreciating it. It’s pretty clear whose snobbery is on parade here.

Woolf understood snobbery and recognized her own. Writing in 1919 about two books by Theodore Dreiser, she begins:

American literature is still terribly apt to excite the snobbish elements in an English critic. It is either feeble with an excess of culture, or forcible with a self-conscious virility. In either case it appears to be influenced by the desire to conciliate or flout the European standards; and such deference not only never attains its object, but, perhaps deservedly, brings its own punishment in the shape of patronage and derision. One cannot help, on such occasions, boasting of the English descent from Shakespeare. At first sight Mr Dreiser appears to be another of those pseudo-Europeans whose productions may pass muster across the Atlantic, but somehow look over here like careful copies from the old masters.

But Woolf corrects herself and recognizes Dreiser’s genuine vitality and bubbling and boiling interest in life. The verdict is that Dreiser’s work attains ‘a character of its own – an American character’. Her Dreiser review is entitled ‘A Real American’; in the essay ‘American Fiction’ Woolf calls Whitman ‘the real American’.

In writing to Ethel Smyth in 1931, Woolf returns to the vitality issue. She’s reacting to Henry Brewster’s writing in his letters. ‘I should never say that his books were badly written because they’re not literary – in fact, for me, like most Americans, he is much too literary in one sense – too finished, suave, polished and controlled; uses his brains not his body … He writes too well – takes no risks – doesn’t plunge and stumble and jump at boughs beyond his grasp, as I, to be modest, have done in my day …’ The body’s role in writing is a subject seriously to ponder in relation to Woolf, especially in light of the persistent stereotype of her as an aesthete reclined on a sofa. What’s also notable here is that Woolf expressly requires experimentation of her Americans. She wants to recruit them to their own modernism. In her famous essay on Hemingway, ‘An Essay in Criticism’, in the New York Herald Tribune (October 1927), the essay that caused an infuriated Ernest to punch a lamp in Sylvia Beach’s bookshop, it is not his being or not being American that becomes the issue, but his not being modern. Woolf concludes: ‘this rumour of modernity must have sprung from his subject matter … rather than any fundamental novelty in his conception of the art of fiction’. He is ‘modern in manner but not in vision’. Like Lawrence, Douglas and Joyce he is one of those who ‘partly spoil their books for women readers by their display of self-conscious virility’. The role of the body in their writing is something quite different from that which Woolf detects in Dreiser’s work, read through a lens ground by Whitman. Lardner, Anderson and Lewis, writers mentioned in Woolf’s letter in defence of her essay ‘On Not Knowing French’, are all central to her essay ‘American Fiction’, in which she said, so eminently quotably: ‘in America there is baseball instead of society’ and ‘Women writers have to meet many of the same problems that beset Americans.’

* *

It is her reading for the 1925 essay ‘American Fiction’ that seems largely to lie behind her Hearst’s International essay ‘America, Which I Have Never Seen’.^[1] By 1938, the year in which the Hearst’s essay was published, Woolf had more or less written all she would write about American literature; she now wrote not about literature but about America itself – or not quite itself, as you will see.

Precisely when she knocked the piece off cannot be established. Maybe sometime towards the end of 1937, maybe earlier, maybe in the first weeks of the new year. We have little way of knowing what the timeframe for this kind of journalistic exercise was, but one gets the impression that Woolf moved quite fast in these matters, though she invariably re-wrote extensively. Around this time she was in the last throes of Three Guineas, which would be published on 2 June 1938. The TLS review would be headlined ‘Women in a World of War’, and would state: ‘This brilliant and searching pamphlet might mark an epoch in the world’s history … This picture of the procession of men, with their hierarchies and uniforms, their associations and loyalties and jealously guarded guilds, is a kind of refrain recurring at intervals. Culture and liberty – what has this world of professors, lawyers, priests and soldiers done to preserve them in all the centuries?’

On 1 April 1938 The Times bore some ominous headlines: ‘Europe a Rumbling War Machine’, ‘Mr Hoover Advises US to Keep Out’, ‘Nazi Plebiscite Begins’, ‘Germans in Spain’, ‘Italy Under Arms’, ‘Press Gang Methods in Vienna’, ‘Forced Labour for Jews’. Woolf had visited Nazi Germany in May 1935 and seen ‘Banners stretched across the street. “The Jew is our enemy”. “There is no place for Jews in –”…’. In the TLS for Saturday 2 April, on the very front page, you will find two photographs, side by side, of Hitler and Lenin, and an opening article on ‘UNSTABLE EUROPE: From Lenin to the Nazis’, which begins, with a topicality never to be found in today’s TLS: ‘It is not a mere coincidence that the three books at the foot of this column follow hot on the heels of the destruction of Austrian independence.’ (The books reviewed were works of political history and theory.) The TLS for 9 April carried articles on ‘MUSSOLINI IN THE MAKING’, and ‘OURSELVES AND GERMANY’, and also reviewed Max Brod’s pioneering life of Kafka, though without so much as a nod at matters Kafkan currently afoot in the territory of The Trial and The Castle. (Clearly the review of the biography had not been written by an anonymous Walter Benjamin. We can say that Woolf would almost certainly have read these issues of the TLS, though she had no contributions in them: her next TLS appearance was on 28 April, writing about Ottoline Morrell.) Kafka of course wrote a novel called Amerika, and it is tantalizing to see that the novel (unfinished, written around 1912/13), was published in England for the first time in 1938, in Willa and Edwin Muir’s classic translation, by Routledge and Kegan Paul. The Hogarth Press had published Edwin Muir’s First Poems and Willa Muir’s Women: An Inquiry, both in 1925, and other books by Edwin Muir, who contributed to the columns of the Nation & Athenaeum under Leonard Woolf’s literary editorship. It is possible that Virginia Woolf knew about the Muirs’ translation as a forthcoming publication, but I have not been able to discover any evidence that Woolf’s America found its donné in Kafka’s title. (But were we Shakespeare scholars, who knows what astounding claims we might not make on such circumstantial evidence?) The translation was reviewed in the TLS in October 1938. Woolf’s essay and Kafka’s novel pass unaware of each other, it seems, like ships in the night, though both are bound in the same direction, and both traffic in fantasy and imagination. Whereas Kafka’s is a symbolic tale of innocence in a wicked world, for Woolf the encounter is reversed: an idealism bred of weariness in a profoundly uninnocent Europe encounters and embraces a refreshing modernity, in a primeval landscape.

This is what happens in Woolf’s ‘America’. The piece is circular, as so often Woolf’s essays are, a return trip rather than a one-way journey across the Atlantic. The author asks to know what does America look like? And the Americans themselves, what are they like? Her ‘Imagination’ undertakes to find out: ‘Sit still on the coast of Cornwall,’ it bids her, giving its wings a shake (like something out of Paradise Lost), ‘and I will fly to America and tell you what America is like.’ So while Woolf sits on a rock in Cornwall, pregnant Edenic location, Imagination sends back reports of what she sees: fishing boats, tramp streamers, the Queen Mary, several airplanes, a shoal of porpoises.

Up to now the essay reads like a web page with links that don’t take us all that far beyond itself. It is Woolf in jeu d’esprit, almost throwaway, mode. We will shortly think of feminism and Three Guineas as the Imagination reports ‘a huge grey rock’ that ‘appears to be the figure of a giant woman who seems, as I come closer, to be lighted up, whether with electric light or with the light of reason I am not at this moment certain …’ Here we have enlightenment America and modernized America in some kind of aporia. But Woolf, typically, refrains here from making anything more of the fact that Liberty is a woman or that the light of reason bears a potent European association. What interests her more, beyond the air quality (a thousand times clearer than the air in England – as indeed it still seems to be in Manhattan), are signs of modernity: the skyscrapers, the traffic, the speed of everything. ‘The blood courses through my veins. The old English words kick up their heels and frisk. A new language is coming to birth.’ Though Imagination makes no such disclosure, here we are in the world of Ring Lardner; and one thing that emerges is that Imagination here is drawing very heavily, no matter how belatedly, on Woolf’s reading for the essay ‘American Fiction’, published in 1925: her sources are Lardner, Sherwood Anderson, Sinclair Lewis (especially Babbitt – think of the behaviour of the European tourists in that novel), and Dreiser. This is a world without privacy, without ‘dark family portraits hanging in shadowy recesses’; there is ‘no parlormaid in a cap and apron [to] bring in a silver-covered dish’. It is far beyond the world in 1910 (when the Georgian cook in ‘Character in Fiction’, ‘a creature of sunshine and fresh air’, goes in and out of the drawing-room, ‘now to borrow the Daily Herald, now to ask advice about a hat’). Now, instead of a maid, ‘A spring is touched: a refrigerator opens; there is a whole meal ready to be eaten: clams on ice; ducks on ice; iced drinks in tall glasses; ice creams all colors of the rainbow.’ Woolf warns us at the outset and again at the end of her essay that Imagination is ‘not always strictly accurate’. But what the figure of Imagination is doing here is willing into being a future world, unhampered by Europe, materially, and in every cultural way – or almost every.

Henry James might have written as obliquely and fugitively as often Woolf does – may we see parallels here of sexual and social repression? – but I am not sure he would have written as Woolf’s Imagination speaks at the end of her Hearst’s essay: ‘But the best way of illustrating the difference between them and us [the Americans and the English] is to bid you observe that while we have shadows that stalk behind us, they have a light that dances in front of them. That is what makes them the most interesting people in the world – they face the future, not the past.’

America, Which I Have Never Seen
Virginia Woolf [1938]

This essay was first published in April 1938, in Hearst’s International (combined with Cosmopolitan). It has not been reprinted until now. Unlike the majority of Woolf’s journalistic pieces it left no traces of its writing in her diaries, letters, or reading notebooks. She nowhere remarks about it and no material invitation to her to write it has survived. It was written in response to an awkwardly expressed question, apparently one put to a succession of writers (J.B. Priestley was billed as next in line). Woolf was asked: ‘What interests you most in this cosmopolitan world of today?’ In a headline flashed across the appropriate page in Hearst’s we find Woolf, billed as ‘Author of The Years’, answering: ‘America, WHICH I HAVE NEVER SEEN, Interests Me Most in This Cosmopolitan World of Today.’ The piece was illustrated with a graphic montage-style view of Manhattan: its cocktail bars, its skyscrapers, its traffic, the Statue of Liberty. —A.M.

‘What interests you most in this cosmopolitan world of today?’

That is an enormous question; the world is a very large object, buzzing and humming on every inch of its surface with interesting things. But if we compress and epitomize, this essence and abstract of the world and its interesting things reduces itself undoubtedly to the United States of America. America is the most interesting thing in the world today.

But what – if, like me, you have never been to America – does America mean to you? What does it look like, and the Americans themselves – what are they like?

These are questions that the English, marooned on their island, are always asking of Imagination. And Imagination, unfortunately, is not an altogether accurate reporter; but she has her merits: she travels fast; she travels far. And she is obliging. When the question was put to her the other day, ‘What is America like?’, she gave her wings a shake and said, in her lighthearted way: ‘Sit still on a rock on the coast of Cornwall; and I will fly to America and tell you what America is like.’ So saying, she was off.

‘I have passed fishing boats,’ she began, ‘tramp steamers; the Queen Mary; several airplanes. The sea looks much like any other sea; there is now a shoal of porpoises cutting cart wheels beneath me.

‘But what is that huge gray rock? It appears to be the figure of a giant woman who seems, as I come close, to be lighted up, whether with electric light or with the light of reason I am not at this moment certain. Behold! It is the Statue of Liberty. Liberty introducing America!

‘Liberty seems clothed in radiant silver. The air here is about a thousand times clearer than the air in England. There is not a shred of mist or a wisp of fog; everything shines bright. The City of New York, over which I am now hovering, looks as if it had been scraped and scrubbed only the night before. It has no houses. It is made of immensely high towers, each pierced with a million holes.

‘Coming closer, I see in every hole – they are windows – a typewriter and a desk. Down below in the streets long ribbons of traffic move steadily, on and on and on. Bells chime; lights flash. Everything is a thousand times quicker yet more orderly than in England. My mind feels speeded up. The blood courses through my veins. The old English words kick up their heels and and frisk. A new language is coming to birth.’ Though Imagination makes no such disclosure, here we are in the world of Ring Lardner; and one thing that emerges is that Imagination here is drawing very heavily, no matter how belatedly, on Woolf’s reading for the essay ‘American Fiction’, published in 1925: her sources are Lardner, Sherwood Anderson, Sinclair Lewis (especially Babbitt – think of the behaviour of the European tourists in that novel), and Dreiser. This is a world without privacy, without ‘dark family portraits hanging in shadowy recesses’; there is ‘no parlormaid in a cap and apron [to] bring in a silver-covered dish’. It is far beyond the world in 1910 (when the Georgian cook in ‘Character in Fiction’, ‘a creature of sunshine and fresh air’, goes in and out of the drawing-room, ‘now to borrow the Daily Herald, now to ask advice about a hat’). Now, instead of a maid, ‘A spring is touched: a refrigerator opens; there is a whole meal ready to be eaten: clams on ice; ducks on ice; iced drinks in tall glasses; ice creams all colors of the rainbow.’ Woolf warns us at the outset and again at the end of her essay that Imagination is ‘not always strictly accurate’. But what the figure of Imagination is doing here is willing into being a future world, unhampered by Europe, materially, and in every cultural way – or almost every.

This essay was first published in April 1938, in Hearst’s International (combined with Cosmopolitan). It has not been reprinted until now. Unlike the majority of Woolf’s journalistic pieces it left no traces of its writing in her diaries, letters, or reading notebooks. She nowhere remarks about it and no material invitation to her to write it has survived. It was written in response to an awkwardly expressed question, apparently one put to a succession of writers (J.B. Priestley was billed as next in line). Woolf was asked: ‘What interests you most in this cosmopolitan world of today?’ In a headline flashed across the appropriate page in Hearst’s we find Woolf, billed as ‘Author of The Years’, answering: ‘America, WHICH I HAVE NEVER SEEN, Interests Me Most in This Cosmopolitan World of Today.’ The piece was illustrated with a graphic montage-style view of Manhattan: its cocktail bars, its skyscrapers, its traffic, the Statue of Liberty.—A.M.

‘What interests you most in this cosmopolitan world of today?’

But what – if, like me, you have never been to America – does America mean to you? What does it look like, and the Americans themselves – what are they like?

‘I have passed fishing boats,’ she began, ‘tramp steamers; the Queen Mary; several airplanes. The sea looks much like any other sea; there is now a shoal of porpoises cutting cart wheels beneath me.

‘But look a little closer,’ we interrupt – ‘what strikes you about the houses in which people live?’

‘That there is no privacy,’ she resumed. ‘The houses stand open to the road. No walls divide them; there are no gardens in front and no gardens behind. There are no curtains to the windows. You can see right in. The rooms are large and airy. There are no inglenooks or cosy corners. There are no old people drawn up over the fire, reading books. There is no fire.

‘There are no dark family portraits hanging in shadowy recesses. Nor, although it is dinnertime, does a parlormaid in cap and apron bring in a silver-covered dish. A spring is touched; a refrigerator opens; there is a whole meal ready to be eaten: clams on ice; ducks on ice; iced drinks in tall glasses; ice creams all colours of the rainbow.

‘The Americans never sit down to a square meal. They perch on steel stools and take what they want from a perambulating rail. The Americans have swallowed their dinner by the time it takes us to decide whether the widow of a general takes precedence of the wife of a knight commander of the Star of India.

‘When they have finished their meal the Americans, who are all in the prime of life, clean-shaven if they are men, and extremely well groomed, both men and women, jump into their cars. Everyone has a car: the millionaire has one; the hired man has one; the hobo has one. And their cars go much more quickly than our cars, because the roads are as smooth as billiard balls and very straight. Sixty or seventy cars thus can drive abreast at the same time. Traveling at ninety miles an hour – but it feels like twenty – we are soon out of sight of houses. We are in the country.

‘But the country is not like England, or Italy, or France. It is a primeval country: a country before there were countries. The space is vast; mountains rise; plains spread. Yet at some time, it is clear, people must have picnicked here in these woods: witness that heap of rusty tins; that deserted shed of corrugated iron; that skeleton of an old motorcar. But when the picnic was done they threw away the tins, the sheds, the cars, and on they drove! They never settled down and lived and died and were buried in the same spot.

‘But now we are in the open again. Hold your hat to your head, for that giant man, standing as if he were carved in stone, makes one nervous, remembering “The Last of the Mohicans”, about one’s scalp. He has a tomahawk in his hand, a blanket round his shoulders; eagle feathers ray out around his head. He is taking aim at some prehistoric extinct monster – surely that was a mammoth behind that rock?

‘But next minute – remember the speed of the car – we are round the bend; we have dropped into a rich and fertile valley, willow-shaded, cow-pastured. From it mounts the mellow lin-lan-lone of church bells. Are we passing through some ancient English village on a Sunday morning? Is it May Day? Are they keeping up the ancient festival?

‘The villagers are dancing round a Maypole; they are singing songs that have a strange familiar sound; we seem to have heard them before, in Shakespeare, in Herrick.

‘This valley is like a cup into which time has dropped and stands clear and still. There is the England of Charles the First, still visible, still living in America. In her broad plains and deep valleys America has room for all ages, for all civilizations. There, just beyond the corner, is the past – the red man aims his tomahawk at a bison; here in the car is the present; but what are we reaching now over the crest of a hill? Is it the future?

‘For now we are running along the boulevards of an up-to-date city; the road is laid with blocks of concrete, the loud-speaker is ticking out the latest prices; druggists’ stores are crowded with men in shirt sleeves; shop windows display complete outfits of Parisian clothes.

‘But that immense building which might be a factory or a cathedral – what is that? It occupies a commanding position. In England it would be the King’s palace. But here are no sentries; the doors stand open to all. The walls are made of stainless steel, the shelves of unbreakable glass. And there lie Shakespeare’s folios, Ben Jonson’s manuscripts, Keats’ love letters blazing in the light of the American sun.

‘Down there in the courtyard is a palace lifted bodily from the Grand Canal; now we are in Stratford-upon-Avon; there is an Elizabethan cottage with the moss still growing on its tiles. From this extraordinary combination and collaboration of all cultures, of all civilizations will spring the future –’

‘But,’ we interrupt, ‘tell us about the Americans in the present – the men and women. What are they like now, the inhabitants of this extraordinary land? Are they human beings as we are? Do they love and hate, sometimes feel tired, find it hard to get up in the morning, grumble at their wives?’

‘The Americans themselves,’ replies Imagination, ‘are a most remarkable people. Superficially, they differ little from ourselves. That is to say, they wear petticoats and trousers; marry and bear children. But whether it is that the mountains are so high and may at any moment belch out fire and decimate a town, or that the rivers are so huge and may at any moment roll out their long liquid tongues and swallow up a city, or that the air is decidedly alcoholic so that everyone is always a little tipsy, the Americans are much freer, wilder, more generous, more adventurous, more spontaneous than we are.

‘Look how they battle and punch, hack and hew; tunnel through mountains; erect skyscrapers; are ruined one moment, millionaires the next. In the same span of time we should have earned a modest pension, acquired a villa in Surrey, and decided, after due deliberation, to lop the cherry tree on the lawn.

‘But the best way of illustrating the difference between them and us is to bid you observe that while we have shadows that stalk behind us, they have a light that dances in front of them. That is what makes them the most interesting people in the world – they face the future, not the past.’

So saying, Imagination folded her wings and settled on the Cornish rock again. While she had been to America and back, one old woman had filled her basket half full of dead sticks for her winter’s firing. But of course, we must remember, Imagination, with all her merits, is not always strictly accurate.

Read more in The Dublin Review issue No. 5 Winter 2001–2

[i] Reprinted by kind permission of the Society of Authors, acting on behalf of the Woolf estate.