Woolfian Boundaries - Clemson University

Reading the Woolf-Raverat Correspondence
will. Rather, her active desire for a life of diffi cult responsiveness to demonic strangeness
in herself, other people, and the world is necessary to her writing. Woolf’s writing depends
upon a keen susceptibility that may capsize her, a liability that is also an ability.
Th e Woolf-Raverat Correspondence
Th e practice of bearing the proximity of another person in their “demonic” intensity,
for Rosenzweig love of God as love of neighbour, is powerfully evoked in Virginia Woolf
and the Raverats: A Diff erent Sort of Friendship (2003). When Woolf and the Raverats
renewed their acquaintance through correspondence (1922-1925), Jacques was dying of
multiple sclerosis, and he and his wife were living in the south of France in an eff ort to
relieve his declining health. Most of the letters are dictated by Jacques to Gwen, as he
was usually unable to write. After his death in early March 1925 at the age of 40, several
poignant letters are exchanged between Gwen Raverat and Virginia Woolf.
In one letter, Jacques Raverat tells Woolf that “your letters, particularly the last 3 or 4,
have given me something, which very few people have been able to give me, in these last
years” (126). What is this unnamed “something” that Woolf was able to give? In what follows,
I interpret this “something” as loving attention that allows unloveability to appear,
that for Woolf is a necessary practice for the artist akin to Rosenzweig’s religious practice
of love of neighbour: the desire to bear the proximity, the reality of other humans and oneself,
and so to release this pressured intensity into life (Rosenzweig 178-79, 214). In other
words, the letters enact an ethical encounter that allows the disorienting strangeness of
another human being (and oneself) to be seen through loving attention, a living dynamic
that may also call the reader to similar (fi rst person) ethical encounters.
Love becomes an explicit topic in the Raverat-Woolf correspondence as part of a
conversation about the shyness of love, of how humans are usually hidden behind masks
or in vapours. “[I] can only very very dimly murmur a kind of faint sympathy & love,”
Woolf writes (113). In spite of love’s shyness, it is obvious how love intimates the “eternal
in the earthly” to use Hermann Cohen’s phrase (cited in Santner, Psychotheology 145).
Refusing to speculate about the exact nature of the menage à trois of Lytton Strachey,
Carrington, and Ralph Partridge, Woolf remarks that she fi nds private relations boring
(99), to which Jacques Raverat replies that he fi nds personal relations dangerous, always
interesting, sometimes “tragic or farcical or devastating or ecstatic & half a hundred other
things” but “never never boring” (107). To this Woolf responds with what I consider to
be one of her most fascinating sentences. She clarifi es that while she has begun to fi nd
sexual relations boring, this does not include private relations: she fi nds “relations of all
kinds more & more engrossing, & (in spite of being made a fool of so often by one’s impulse
to surrender everything—dignity & propriety—to intimacy) fi nal, in some way; enduring;
gigantic; & beautiful. Indeed, I fi nd this in my relations with people, & what I can guess
of theirs” (110, emphasis added). Woolf and Jacques Raverat both enact and observe
a shared moodiness in their correspondence—within this moodiness, love transfi gures
relations and becomes “fi nal, in some way; enduring; gigantic; & beautiful.” Th at is, love
transfi gures relations just as Woolf’s “shocks” transfi gure, through writing, the everyday
into “moments of being.” Th e contingent and fl eeting is given a kind of permanence in
love, and in writing, without becoming consolation. Love and writing both bear witness
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