Virginia Woolf om självförstörande böcker och beskattning av överproduktion.

I nya numret av TLS, som nådde mig i måndags, finns det en hel del att läsa med anledning av att det sjätte bandet med Virginia Woolfs essäer utkommit. Det är Stuart N. Clarke som är redaktör för serien THE ESSAYS OF VIRGINIA WOOLF. Volume Six: 1933–1941. Trev Broughton* recenserar utgåvan med bland annat följande ord:

Leslie Stephen was in his forties, with a decade of literary reviewing behind him, when the publication of Hours in a Library (1874–9) consolidated his unsigned essays and his reputation as a serious critic. At the age of fifty his daughter was contemplating a similar act of consolidation – a project that would last “my 20 years, if I have them”. She wanted to “go through English Literature, like a string through cheese, or rather like some industrious insect, eating its way from book to book”. Long in gestation, the idea was taking shape in October 1938: “to collect, even bind together, my innumerable T.L.S. notes: to consider them as material for some kind of critical book: quotations? comments? ranging through English lit: as I’ve read it & noted it during the past 20 years”.

och vidare:

The relationship between the ephemeral and the enduring in literature puzzled and excited Virginia Woolf. In a broadcast debate with her husband Leonard in 1927 she had countered his curmudgeonly bad-cop approach to the question “Are too many books written and published?” with the mischievous suggestion, “Why not print the first edition on some perishable material which would crumble to a little heap of perfectly clean dust in about six months’ time? If a second edition were needed, this could be printed on good paper and well bound . . . . No space would be wasted and no dirt would be collected”. Books should be cheap enough to throw away, and this would discourage “reading seldom and . . . reading solemnly”; professional authors should be taxed for overproduction; prizes should be awarded to encourage “tramps and duchesses; plumbers and Prime Ministers” to venture a book, preferably an autobiography.

I den svenska bokfloden har jag många gånger tänkt tanken att utgivningen är för omfattande för att ens bli överskådlig. Jag befann mig i den floden i många år, och när jag för femte gången gallrade mitt bibliotek och gav bort hundratals titlar insåg jag hur mycket försumlig litteratur man samlar på sig. Jag tror inte jag skulle ha valt Woolfs metod, men jag kommer att akta mig noga framöver, både med utgivningen av egna böcker och i hanteringen av andras.

*Senior Lecturer in English at the University of York. She is working on John Constable’s letters and editing Margaret Oliphant’s biographical writings.

PS: Jag försökte scanna in hela framsidan på TLS men den fick inte plats, så det ni här ovan ser är en stympad version som dock återger Christian Tonnis målning av henne från 1998, dels återger en del av numrets “This Week”.