Charlie’s Literary Club: Street Haunting and other Essays
9.05.2024 Charlie Trenerry
“To read a book well, one should read it as if one were writing it. Begin not by sitting on the bench with the judges but by standing in the dock with the criminal. Be his fellow worker, become his accomplice.”
I begin my second column by promising you, dear reader, that they won’t all be on obscure little pieces by well-known authors of other things. But I’d like us to form a relationship, and in order to do that, you need to get to know me a little first. I’ve never written quite like this before, so I’m starting with what I know and love. First, a book about writing. And now, a book about books.
First published in the Yale Review in October 1927, “Street Haunting” is a stunning little essay in which Woolf, stifled by the domesticity of her living situation, finds herself stalking the streets of London late one night in search of a lead pencil. It is also the titular essay of the book I’d like to convince you to read this week – a Penguin collection of many such stunning little essays, all of which are deeply worth consuming, none of which carries the somewhat intimidating association of ‘essay’. Woolf’s natural writing style– the commonly devastating way in which she describes and personalises everything–makes this collection of essays read almost like prose poetry.
The collection opens with the piece that drew me to it, and what has held me to it since: a love of books, a love of words, a love of writing and literature. Describing a personal library, Woolf says “Here in this room, if nowhere else, we breathe the air of freedom.” She tells us of the liberation she experiences being surrounded by books; of the time she has spent contemplating them and their authors. Of the way, even at that point in time, she has observed different writers and genres, and how they’ve melded, grown, and mated.
“Books have a great deal in common; they are always overflowing their boundaries; they are always breeding new species from unexpected matches among themselves.”
She describes to us how these writers view the world, and how they can teach us to do the same. And then she teaches us how to read again. How to comprehend. How to have the grace to understand that while we may not enjoy or necessarily connect with an author, they’re doing what we’re all told to do when we first start out: write what you know.
“It is very difficult not to wish them less scrupulous. Frequent are the complaints that Jane Austen is too prosaic, Thomas Hardy too melodramatic. And we have to remind ourselves that it is necessary to approach every writer differently in order to get from him all he can give us.”
Woolf is potentially one of the most prolific female writers of the 20th century, and certainly one of the most praised for her fiction. In this collection of essays she not only puts her thoughts to paper in a way that reads as smoothly and touchingly as so much of the fictions she’s known for, but forever alters the way one reads and understands.
Depicting how the largest names in literature at the time would describe the same event, based on their upbringing and the impact they wanted to have, one can see the level of respect she had for her contemporaries, peers, and those who influenced her (including those for whom she had little time or admiration).
Virginia Woolfe, New York Public Library. Painting of Virginia Woolfe by Roger Fry, 1928.
From the Digital Collection, taken circa 1930-1941.
‘Street Haunting’, the ultimate essay in this accumulation, speaks of the author’s love of writing. Not just in the sense of expression and story-telling, but the physical act of putting pencil to paper.
“No one perhaps has ever felt passionately towards a lead pencil. But there are circumstances in which it can become supremely desirable to possess one; […] ‘Really I must buy a pencil,’ as if under cover of this excuse we could indulge safely in the greatest pleasure of town life in winter--rambling the streets of London.”
On her meander around the icy streets of London in search of a shop to buy a late-night lead pencil, Woolf describes to us the beauty of a London street, the sounds, conversations, characters one sees and the escape afforded in the anonymity of a wander.
Reality, here, is in some ways what our narrator’s imagination leads it to be, and the joy in that, is its relatability. We’ve all done it: walking the streets of a foreign city, or hurrying home at the end of a long cold night, and stopping, just for a quiet moment, unseen, to look into a warm window of someone else’s life. A family having dinner, laughing in yellow light. Perhaps there’s a fireplace, dwindling down to the ashes beside a couple sharing a cup before bed. Peeking through at the right angle to see mum and son curled up watching The Simpsons. We have all, I think, at some point found this escape in voyeurism. The comfort in seeing a slice of someone else’s comfort that perhaps we were not supposed to see.
Though I’ve only touched on two of the pieces gathered here, the first and the last, bracketing our collection like bookends; I urge you deeply to pick up a copy and have a delve. With this one, there’s no pressure to read cover-to-cover, just sit down and let Woolf’s words wash over you. A perfect friend to pick up when you feel like just a little sip of word soup.