I imagine sitting down with Virginia Woolf and asking her “Virginia, what do you think your best short story is?”. I see her looking at me with pity. “Short story, darling? What might you mean?” Virginia Woolf didn’t believe in the conventional genres of writing. Novel, essay, short story, memoir, biography? These were for her muddles in the large sphere of literature. Before her suicide, she was working on what she called a novel-essay, and what I see as her masterpiece, To the Lighthouse, might very well be called novel-memoir. But of course we, in the world out here, don’t indulge in this kind of dreaming. We deal in “The Short Stories of Virginia Woolf” and “The Complete Novels of Virginia Woolf” and such.
Whether ‘A Sketch of the Past’ published in its current form is a short story is up to the reader’s interpretation. What it is, though, is a series of diary entries from 1939, which Woolf intended to form the base for an upcoming autobiography. Her death in 1941 put an end to that project. In her diary entries, Woolf is writing of her mother, whose memory never stopped haunting her, her father and her siblings. She recalls the vacation house at St. Ives, which shaped her earliest memories, and describes not just events, but the sensory impressions that surrounded them. “Sound and sight seem to make equal parts of these first impressions. When I think of the early morning in bed I also hear the caw of rooks falling from a great height. The sound seems to fall through an elastic, gummy air”. These fragments of memory do not follow a linear structure; they ebb and flow like the very act of recollection itself, creating an impressionistic tapestry of her childhood.
What makes ‘A Sketch of the Past’ read so close to fiction is the fluid quality of the writing and the sense of certainty that there is a narrative thread which will in the end lead somewhere. There is the feel of a narrative voice which is not simply documenting events, but shapes them and draws attention to the shortcomings of memory. Following the Modernist belief, the text rejects a rigid plot structure in favour of mood, perception and interiority. And, after all, isn’t a good short story at its core simply a powerful act of storytelling, which goes beyond the simple narrative?
First published in Moments of Being, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1976
A Personal Anthology 