Snail around the Flowerbed of Literature

A Snail Around the Flowerbed of Literature: The Hogarth Press’s Call to Slowness

Five days after 2019’s Dalloway day, Japanese international news agencies reported that a snail in the south of the country “personally caused dozens of trains to fail and some 12,000 passengers to be delayed.”¹ The snail caused a short circuit at an electricity box, resulting in chaos and shock among the Japanese, who live to the standards of a transport system known to be accurate to the second. With good reason, this is soon interpreted among the readers as a warning call from barren nature against the dangers of a high-speed modern life; as we impose our standards on it, alternative life forms strive to survive and make themselves visible. With a butterfly effect, what this little snail managed in Japan made me—a scholar thinking in Turkey—contemplate that only when we are attentive to the needs of all such forms can we experience satisfyingly rich Woolfian moments of being. In that context, this particular snail recalls Dora Carrington’s woodcut snail image, printed on the final page of the first hand-published Virginia Woolf story “The Mark on the Wall” (1917) and serving as a seal of the Hogarth Press, a signature of its focus on nature and the natural against a shockingly rapid industrialized life.² The early Hogarth Press both explicated and stood against the threats of that speed.

To put it in Woolfian terms, on or about March 1917, something changed when Virginia and Leonard Woolf who had bought a long-desired hand printing press placed it on their kitchen table and began an alternative history of publishing in Britain. Hogarth, the boutique publishing “house,” saw not only the priceless handmade copies of Woolf’s works adorned with her sister Vanessa Bell’s beautifully designed covers and illustrations but also some of the seminal texts of English Modernism and avant-garde by T. S. Eliot, Hope Mirrlees and Nancy Cunard. The professionalism and scope of their enterprise were far beyond their means; as amateur bookmakers, they initially used wallpapers and curtains available at home for their book covers and bound loose papers, literally sewing them with a needle and thread. As the early Hogarth books demonstrate, the strands of blue thread left behind in the early handmade copies were, in a way, the blueprints for a firm move away not just from mechanical publishing methods but also from the rapid and standardizing forms of modern existence. Like the snail I mentioned above, with its home on its back, the Hogarth married private and public life with a letterpress machine on a dining table, not just to create an alternative publishing house; it suggested a new pace in the way of life, of thinking, looking, writing and reading parallel to the change Woolf put in her essay “Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown”: “On or about December 1910 human character changed”. She observed that all human relations shifted and wrote that “when human relations change there is at the same time a change in religion, conduct, politics and literature” (n. pag.).³ The impetus behind the experimental works of the early Hogarth was to grasp and record the minutiae of this change, which required an absorbed interest.

The snail that makes its appearance on the first publication of the Hogarth Press, “The Mark on the Wall,” can be regarded as the very emblem of the Woolfs’ mission. Like E. F. Schumacher’s claim for the economy “Small is Beautiful,” the Woolfs seemed to suggest that in “express[ing] the rapidity of life, the perpetual waste and repair”: Slow is beautiful! This first Woolf story they published can also be read as a fictional manifestation of Woolf’s ars poetica. The narrator in the story first situates herself in the world she describes, understanding one truth about it, “what an airless, shallow, bald, prominent world it becomes! A world not to be lived in,” and then discerns her calling in it:

I want to think quietly, calmly, spaciously, never to be interrupted, never to have to rise from my chair, to slip easily from one thing to another, without any sense of hostility, or obstacle. I want to sink deeper and deeper, away from the surface, with its hard separate facts.

This quiet, calm, spacious, and uninterrupted mode of deep thinking is the very engine behind Woolf’s modernist texts, which require a special mode of reading, deliberately slow and effortful like the movements of a crawling snail fictionalised in “The Mark on the Wall.” A central motif in the story, visually reproduced in Dora Carrington’s woodcut print to accompany the text, the snail is one of the many lives that the narrator feels committed to describe in detail:

[…] there are a million patient, watchful lives still for a tree, all over the world, in bedrooms, in ships, on the pavement, lining rooms, where men and women sit after tea, smoking cigarettes. It is full of peaceful thoughts, happy thoughts, this tree. I should like to take each one separately.

While the narrator attempts to describe and visualize each thought without haste, the text invites its reader to a rhythm that would allow her to attend to these images with a similarly slow pace. The story features the consciousness of a narrator who wants to focus, this time, on one idea, in the stream of her consciousness, Shakespeare. As she delves deeper and deeper into the flow of Shakespeare’s thoughts, she becomes able to see the “shower of ideas” falling upon his stream;

To steady myself, let me catch hold of the first idea that passes.... Shakespeare....Well, he will do as well as another. A man who sat himself solidly in an arm-chair, and looked into the fire, so—A shower of ideas fell perpetually from some very high Heaven down through his mind. He leant his forehead on his hand, and people, looking in through the open door,—for this scene is supposed to take place on a summer’s evening—…. (my emphasis)

¹ “Snail on track causes a delay for twelve thousand Japanese travelers.”

² This idea was originally published at Paula Maggio’s “Blogging Woolf” as a brief note I composed for the event co-organised with Dr. Nana Ariel, “A Press of One’s Own: Celebrating 100 Years of Virginia and Leonard Woolf’s Hogarth Press” on April 26, 2017 at Harvard University, Houghton Library.

³ Sources retrieved from Project Gutenberg do not have page numbers.

This passage, with its keen interest in the contemplative inquiry, is like the first draft of the 1919 essay “Modern Fiction,” in which Woolf suggests a new way of writing, a new perspective that should grasp the train of thoughts that fall upon our minds and convey the spiritual rather than the material world surrounding it:

Examine for a moment an ordinary mind on an ordinary day. The mind receives a myriad impressions—trivial, fantastic, evanescent, or engraved with the sharpness of steel. From all sides they come, an incessant shower of innumerable atoms; and as they fall, as they shape themselves into the life of Monday or Tuesday, the accent falls differently from of old. (my emphasis)

For her, to describe this ordinary mind, the novelist should follow the rhythm of it, often working against the chronology of the clock time. Interestingly, the Shakespeare of “The Mark on the Wall” is visualised in contemplation like the flame that thinker Gaston Bachelard describes in his The Psychoanalysis of Fire. He suggests that when a person descends into a deep “reverie,” she departs from the boundaries of the present time and space through a creative mental process whereby she produces thoughts and emotions in a state of daydreaming and musing: “What better proof is there that the contemplation of fire brings us back to the very origins of philosophical thought?” (18). Woolf’s Shakespeare here stands as an emblem of this mental state, which has a pace of its own, independent from the bounds of clock time. Mimicking Shakespeare, the narrator focuses her creative energy on the snail, the very mark on the wall; and Woolf portrays the narrator’s mind at work trying to identify the mark in tune with the pace of the snail. This mimetic technique wonderfully reflects Woolf’s production of the text through letter printing, which consisted of identifying small lead letters, placing them in a frame in order to make the correct syllables, words, sentences and paragraphs with correct spaces and punctuation marks. In his interview “This Incredible Need to Create,” the print master Ted Ollier describes the labour and care required in the process of letter printing:

So, anyone looking to print a book would typeset the text in chunks, print them in sets, and slowly work their way through the book, reusing letters from previous pages as they proceeded. It becomes even more complicated when you realize that printed text that is intended for binding into a book is not laid out in page order—1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8. The pages have to be divided up and imposed into signatures that make it easier to print and bind—8, 1, 2, 7, 6, 3, 4, 5. You may wish to decide your page breaks and page flow before you even start laying lead into a composing stick.

While Ollier’s first-hand experience in printing with a machine similar to the one the Woolfs used at the Hogarth Press definitely sounds challenging, in her letters, Woolf describes the work as “tremendous fun” (Nicolson 165). She joyfully repeats the terms “absorbing” and “absorbed” to describe the full concentration that printing requires. John Lehmann, who worked with Woolf and served as the general manager and a partner at the Hogarth Press between 1938 and 1946, also observes that for Woolf, manual labor at the Hogarth Press was “particularly soothing and restoring” after the heavy mental work on her novels (126). He suggests that “Packing up parcels and setting the type for poems were like a quiet walk along the sea-shore after all the heaving and tossing” (my emphasis; 126). Lehmann’s nature metaphor particularly stresses the redeeming results of the unity between the textual and creative energies. It is very interesting to note that for an item like “Kew Gardens” (1919), a story of around 2700 words with illustrations, an edition of 500, the Woolfs needed about “three working weeks, most of which would probably have been spent printing and binding” (Ollier). Obviously, for conceiving, drafting, writing, rewriting, editing, typesetting and printing a story, then covering the volumes and making them available to the reader, Woolf almost follows the pace of the snail she fictionalises in the story, literally turning it into a textual representation.⁴ The medium and the message act in unison to convey the absorbed interest, the very source and the product of the text.

In “Kew Gardens,” Woolf makes a snail one of the central consciousnesses in the story. In Woolf’s careful design, the narrative slowly follows the snail that revolves around the flowerbed in Kew Gardens on a hot and humid day in July. A single figure among those visitors coming from different walks of life, the snail “consider[s] every possible method of reaching his goal.” As achieved with the image of Shakespeare in reverie in “The Mark on the Wall,” a contemplative state is invoked through the recurrent scenes of the snail’s endeavors to move. Trying to “[decide] whether to circumvent the arched tent of a dead leaf or to breast it,” the snail is represented as an emblem of slow thinking. While drawing attention to the snail’s mind at work, Woolf attunes the reader to the necessary slowness to capture the flow of intersecting consciousnesses in the story. As E. D. Kort notes, through this attention, the reader becomes a “part of the general rhythms of a vibrant world—a world that invites our notice, respectful consideration, and integrity of living” (19). Thus, I argue that Woolf’s snail marks a special state of consciousness fit to attend to the illuminated moments often solidified in her use of the stream of consciousness technique.

⁴ Elisa Kay Sparks’ inspiring suggestion to “[read] Woolf’s snails as producing creative works of art” (23) contributes to this interpretation.

Studying fictive patterns and form as compensation for life in Woolf’s novels, Holmesland observes that many of Woolf’s scenes aim to evoke “reintegrative natural rhythms” (2). I argue that the fictive pattern in “Kew Gardens” follows the natural design of a snail’s shell which grows in line with the growth of the snail. Woolf describes the sense of interconnectedness among time, space and the consciousnesses in the final scene of the story,

like a vast nest of Chinese boxes all of wrought steel turning ceaselessly one within another the city murmured; on the top of which the voices cried aloud and the petals of myriad of flowers flashed their colours into the air.

This Chinese box image can be read as the reiteration of the circles on a snail’s shell created as it moves; the shell includes the trace of each movement that the snail makes. In “Are Snails Born With Shells?,” Kaitlyn Boettcher reports that the snail produces new shell material, like the soft material of its protoconch, that first expands its shell and hardens. Thus, the part of the shell it was born with ends up in the centre of the spiral when the snail and its shell become fully-grown. As if to keep a record of all the moves it makes, “as a snail matures, the number of whorls or spirals which its shell has increases, as do the rings that grow inside the shell.” Describing the conglomeration of seemingly disparate experiences and states of being, the finale of “Kew Gardens” similarly accentuates the interconnection between what is outside and what is inside. Obviously, the Hogarth Press, which became Woolf’s shell—her haven where she could freely⁵ publish the products of her intellectual experiments—encompasses each and every trace Woolf made through a rich intellectual journey. Soon the scope of the house expanded to include Vita Sackville-West’s best-selling novel Edwardians, Sigmund Freud’s works, travel writing by Freda Utley, and poetry criticism by Edith Sitwell, as well as translations from the literature of Russia. In other words, Hogarth’s shell grew as the creative energy in it ceaselessly moved on.

While the two stories can be read in any form as verbal endorsements of the natural rhythm the mental and bodily figures enjoy in them, the early Hogarth editions with the beautiful woodcut prints of Dora Carrington (“The Mark on the Wall”) and Vanessa Bell (“Kew Gardens”) offer a rhythmic reading experience that follows the movement of the emblematic snail: stopping to relate the visual to the verbal images in the text, and revising her mental images upon such pauses, the reader, like the snail of “Kew Gardens” climbing a leaf, makes effort to experience the text and turn it into a mark on her shell. Presenting books as aesthetic objects with beautifully decorated covers and hand-made figures inspires a tempo that cultivates a deeper look into the cotton wool of everyday life. The visual and verbal images of the Hogarth snail draw attention to an eccentric, marginal and extraordinary vision that necessitates a reading slow enough to savor millions of surrounding lives. Just as the snail in Japan could do in June 2019, such a vision has all the rich potential to stop all the other trains of thought and focus on the moments of being.

Mine Özyurt Kılıç, “A Snail Around the Flowerbed of

Literature: The Hogarth Press’s Call to Slowness,” Virginia Woolf Miscellany 96 (Fall 2019): 20-22.

Turkish translation of this essay by Atahan Mahir Karabiber is available at Nesir.

Hebrew translation of this essay by Nana Ariel is available at the Garage.

⁵ In his autobiography Leonard Woolf states that their idea[l] was “to print and publish in the same way poems or other short works which the commercial publishers would not look at.”

Works Cited

Bachelard, Gaston. The Psychoanalysis of Fire. Trans.

Alan C.M. Ross. Boston: Beacon Press, 1968.

Boettcher, Kaitlyn. “Are Snails Born With Shells?”

15 February 2013. http://mentalfloss.com/article/48796/are-snails-born-shells. 19 April 2017.

Holmesland, Oddvar. Form as Compensation for life:

Fictive Patterns in Virginia Woolf’s Novels. Colombia: Camden House, 1998.

Kort, E. D. “The Snail in ‘Kew Gardens’: A Commentary

on Ethical Awareness.” Virginia Woolf Miscellany 84 (2013): 17-19.

Lehmann, John. “Working with Virginia Woolf.” Virginia

Woolf: Interviews and Recollections. Ed. J. H. Stape. London: MacMillan, 1995.

Nicolson, Nigel. The Letters of Virginia. (ed.) New York:

Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1975.

Ollier, Ted. “This Incredible Need to Create: Letterpress

Salon with Ted Ollier.” Interview by Mine Özyurt Kılıç. 29 May 2017.

https:// hogarthpress100.wordpress.com. 18 May 2019.

Sitwell, Dame Edith. “She enjoyed each butterfly aspect

of the world.” Virginia Woolf: Interviews and Recollections. Ed. J. H. Stape. London: MacMillan, 1995.

“Snail on track causes a delay for twelve thousand

Japanese travellers.” 26 June 2019. https://www.tellerreport.com/news/. 26 June 2019.

Sparks, Elisa Kay. “‘The curious phenomenon of your

occipital born’: Spiraling around Snails and Slugs in Virginia Woolf.” Virginia Woolf Miscellany 84 (2013): 22-24.

Woolf, Leonard. An Autobiography, Oxford: Oxford UP,

1980.

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http://gutenberg. net.au/ebooks03/0300031h.html. 16 May 2019.

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Gutenberg.

http:// gutenberg.net.au/ebooks02/0200211.txt. 16 May 2019.

Woolf, Virginia. “Kew Gardens.” Project Gutenberg.

https://www. gutenberg.org/files/29220/29220-h/29220-h.htm.16 May 2019.

Woolf, Virginia. “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown.” Project

Gutenberg. http://www.gutenberg.org/files/63022/63022-h/63022-h.htm. 16 May 2019.