I’ve decided that over the next few months I’ll use this space to chip away at the work I’ve been meaning to do for a zine about Virginia Woolf (described in more detail last month, when I also did a bit on writing on this). So without further preamble, here are a few more excerpts from Woolf’s diary and my thoughts on them.
I can’t fill up the lost days, thought it is safe to attribute much space in them to printing. The title page was finally done on Sunday. Now I’m in the fury of folding and stapling, so as to have all ready for glueing and sending out tomorrow and Thursday. By rights these processes should be dull; but it’s always possible to devise some little skill or economy, and the pleasure of profiting by them keeps on content.
That description should sound familiar to anyone reading this, either from your own experience or just from a general knowledge of the small press comics world. This entry, from July 1918, is the first of many times that Virginia writes about the time she spent working on the Hogarth Press as useful to her writing. Both the physicality of the work, which let her mind wander, and the fact that it had tangible results seem to have been important.
Of course, it’s an important point that Virginia and Leonard (referred to here and going forward by their first names for clarity) were never in a truly dire financial situation, but they also did not have excess funds to spend on a vanity publishing project in their early years. So they kept costs low, selected their projects carefully, and only printed a few hundred copies of each book. Sound familiar?
Leonard’s careful accounting of their income in this period is a useful resource. I’ve roughly converted these amounts to 2019 US dollars, because one of my goals here is to think explicitly about how the Woolfs’ financial situation does or does not offer any lessons today:
| Journalism | Books | Total | |
| 1919 | $7,834 | 0 | $7,834 |
| 1920 | $10,372 | $5,782 | $16,154 |
| 1921 | $2,808 | $597 | $3,405 |
| 1922 | $4,785 | $2288 | $7,073 |
| 1923 | $11,660 | $2,951 | $14,611 |
| 1924 | $9,497 | $2,744 | $12,241 |
Leonard provided these details, which he describes as “miserable figures” but not “particularly unusual”, to give a clearer picture of the life that he and Virginia led. So we must ask questions like: Where could you live off $3,000 or even $16,000 in 2019? Certainly not anywhere. What circumstances might lead you to feel comfortable launching a publishing house on this income? What does it say that Leonard neglect to mention the family’s (small, but not zero) inherited wealth in this tabulation?
I have just reread my year’s diary and am much struck by the rapid haphazard gallop at which it swings along, sometimes indeed jerking almost intolerably over the cobbles. Still if it were not written rather faster than the fastest typewriting, if I stopped and took thought, it would never be written at all; and the advantage of the method is that it sweeps up accidentally several stray matters which I should exclude if I hesitated, but which are the diamonds of the dustheap.
This is the first appearance of another important theme. Virginia used her diary to record events that might, to think through challenges in her work, and for experimental writing exercises that she later says helped her develop the style she uses in her best work. Her practice might best be described as regularly irregular; she sometimes did not write in her diary for weeks or even months.
In a later entry, she explains:
…the habit of writing thus for my eye only is good practise. It loosens the ligaments. Never mind the misses and the stumbles. Going at such a pace as I do must make the most direct and instant shots at my object, and thus have to lay hands on words, choose them, and shoot them with no more pause than is needed to put my pen in ink.
One challenge when applying this mentality to comics is the simple fact that drawing takes more time than writing. Is it possible to draw as quickly as we think? Attempting to do so might be a useful exercise. Or maybe a better approach is to draw automatically, without thinking.
—
The Hard Tomorrow, Eleanor Davis
Kaleidoscope #1, Laura Knetzger
Atlas #1, Dylan Horrocks
Underwater #2, Chester Brown
Becoming, Michelle Obama