Virginia Woolf, "Walter Sickert: a Conversation"

Just leaf through the Damocle editions catalog to understand that Pierpaolo Pregnolato belongs to quality micro-publishing: he directs a series of paperbacks and the latest bet was the publication of an unpublished essay by Virginia Woolf “Walter Sickert: a Conversation”.

I have the little book in my hands wondering if it is diminished — or rather embellished — by its pocket-sized, even miniaturized dimensions. Disclosure with parallel text is a noble choice, Woolf’s essay splendid, but unfortunately overshadowed by the translation into Italian that does not do it full justice. Published in 1934 by Hogarth Press, the essay links Virginia Woolf to Walter Richard Sickert, who she, in her diary, calls “my Sickert” (see notes of Tuesday April 17 1934) complaining that, with the painter she loves, critics “play contemptuous” (Friday November 2 1934).

Reflecting on Mario Praz’s statement that: “Woolf’s technique could be similar to that of pointillism”, we think that it is composed of “a plurality of moments isolated from each other, put together at random by the imagination” (again Mario Praz) therefore just a sort of literary pointillism, of impressionism of writing. Sickert detached himself from his Whistlerian — and therefore Pre-Raphaelite — origins to approach Degas, who taught him not only to portray from life, but also to paint on the basis of memories, photographs, drawings and introduced him to the school of French impressionism. He then became the main exponent of the Camden Town Group, of English post-impressionist matrix.

Woolf describes an imaginary conversation that took place on a December evening. The text opens with a piece of skill on chromatism, on insects that are all eyes, indeed, one, with the color they see, to the point of absorbing it. You immediately notice how much Woolfian language draws on poetry, drinking from it and, while keeping rationality intact, transcolors into lyricism.

“When I first went into Sickert’s show, said one of the diners, I became completely and solely an insect — all eye. I flew from color to colour, from red to blue, from yellow to green. Colors went spirally through my body lighting a flare as if a rocket fell through the night and lit up greens and browns, grass and trees, and there in the grass a white bird.

Sickert is a biographer, Woolf manages to extrapolate entire lives, plots, narratives from his portraits.

“Yes, Sickert is a great biographer, said one of them; when he paints a portrait I read a life.”[…] When he sits a man or woman down in front of him he sees the whole of the life that has been lived to make that face.”

If the novelist shows us what he describes, that is, in a sense, paints and brushes, Sickert “writes” a story. We have a sort of chiasm, a cross between the pairs Woolf — Sickert and writing — painting.

For Woolf, more than a portrait painter and biographer, Sickert is a novelist, like Dickens or Balzac. His characters draw on reality, he loves to describe the middle class, the workers in their squalor, in their suffering, in their faces shaped by fatigue and disillusionment, in their clothes deformed by use, in their worn out and cheap furniture. We hear these characters move and speak, we build plots around them, we listen to the conversations, the noises that surround them, that come from the street, from the open windows.

While a realist, Sickert is not a pessimist. It is as if in his paintings a parallel condition is hinted at, of which the characters are an unconscious part, a reality of greater joy and fullness of life. Furthermore, although of humble origins, his figures are never degraded. They are well-nourished men and women who enjoy the pleasures of life, the possession of simple objects, good food. There is always an intimacy between the characters and their rooms, their interiors. Every object, a chest of drawers, a hat, a glass, a bed, is an expression of the owner. Human nature is never far from Sickert’s paintings, in the background of his paintings there is always a human being, a seller, a passer-by.

Sickert narrates without running the risk of falling into sentimentality, as happens to novelists. He tells with a brushstroke of green or red, with a wave of the hand, dry and wrapped in silence. And yet, he is still a true poet, it can be seen above all in the paintings that portray Venice, the circus, the music hall, the markets. Beyond the concrete, fleshy subject, there is always a sky, a cloud, a red-gold light that we can even hear “dripping” from the brush into the image. In this way he makes us aware of the beauty, of the hidden poetry, even if he is not a visionary or a rhapsode, he is not a Blake or a Shelley. His painting “is made not of air and star-dust but of oil and earth”).

Painting and writing have a lot in common, Woolf describes the torment of the novelist who tries to make us “see” what he has in mind. The following passage can be considered a real poetic manifesto.

“The novelist is always saying to himself how can I bring the sun on to my page? How can I show the sun and the moon rising? And he must often think that to describe a scene is the worst way to show it. It must be done with one word, or with one word in skilful contrast with another. […]They both speak at once, striking two notes to make one chord, stimulating the eye of the mind and of the body”.

The essay continues with a roundup of great writers — from Pope, to Keats, to Tennyson — whose pictorial but also musical properties Woolf analyzes, the unconscious lexical choice that serves to feed and nourish the reader’s eye and ear. Woolf believes that there is no contemporary writer of hers capable of writing life as Sickert knows how to paint it.

“Words are an impure medium; better far to have been borne into the silent Kingdom of paint”.

Throughout the essay she refers to that border beyond which there is only silence, there is the desperation of the writer unable to express what he sees, the music in his head, the picture in his mind. It is what Praz defines as “the oppression of the enormous burden of the unexpressed”.

“We try to describe it and we cannot; and then it vanishes, and having seen it and lost it, exhaustion and depression overcome us; we recognize the limitations which Nature has put upon us.”

Finally, in her essay, there is no lack of a jab against criticism, of which Woolf felt like a victim, as can also be seen from reading her diary; criticism which, in fact, is not always capable of grasping the pictorial and musical nuances of writing, but remains relegated and limited to the printed page.

Better to remain silent, says Woolf, better to venture into the “silent land”, the silent land that stands in place of — or perhaps beyond — the word, where all art combines, where poetry, painting and music merge, where drops of color, written words and melodies become one, where the meaning disappears and gives way to preconscious understanding, to pure emotion that satisfies and gratifies.