Particularly the Press

Abstract

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• Particularly the Press
• Charles Alexander (bio)

Often I have wished to gather into a room, for a conversation if not a lifetime of conversations, a few women writers of the early twentieth century, specifically, Gertrude Stein, Virginia Woolf, and H.D. (Hilda Doolittle). They are all, in their own way, Curies "of the laboratory / of vocabulary," as Mina Loy (who should also be in this group) described Gertrude Stein in a poem. Anyone who has run a press might think that a "laboratory of vocabulary" is a kind of euphemism for a printing room. All four of these women at one time or another were either publishers or editors, of books and/or journals that helped fuel a burgeoning modernist movement, that truly made it new, and in some ways remade the world. You might think Woolf (who is the one who more than the others got her hands inky while printing) is the only one of these writers who is not a poet, but not when one encounters a passage such as this from The Waves (1931):

I do not know—your days and hours pass like the boughs of forest trees and the smooth green of forest rides to a hound running on the scent. But there is no single scent, no single body for me to follow. And I have no face. I am like the foam that races over the beach or the moonlight that falls arrowlike here on a tin can, here on a spike of the mailed sea holly, or a bone or a half-eaten boat. I am whirled down caverns, and flap like paper against endless corridors, and must press my hand against the wall to draw myself back.

I think one might, at the least, consider her a poet in prose, one of the three or so finest poets in prose we have ever had in the English language. That she was also quite serious as a publisher enchants the imagination, that is, how did she manage it all? She had help, of course, in her most supportive husband, Leonard. Such an enterprise had a rather casual beginning, or so it seems when we consider her diary entry for her birthday, January 26, 1915: [End Page 166]

I don't know when I have enjoyed a birthday so much—not since I was a child anyhow. Sitting at tea we decided three things: in the first place to take Hogarth [a new place to live], if we can get it; in the second, to buy a Printing press; in the third to buy a Bull dog, probably called John. I am very much excited at the idea of all three—particularly the press. I was also given a packet of sweets to bring home.

So began the adventure of the Hogarth Press, which the Woolfs named after their new home. I was moved to write this column essay when I found out that one of the many books from the Hogarth Press was Composition as Explanation (1926), by Gertrude Stein, which begins in a way that speaks of both Stein's and Woolf's view:

There is singularly nothing that makes a difference a difference in beginning and in the middle and in ending except that each generation has something different at which they are all looking. By this I mean so simply that anybody knows it that composition is the difference which makes each and all of them then different from other generations and this is what makes everything different otherwise they are all alike and everybody knows it because everybody says it.

Both of these women were making something quite different, and were seeing in a different way, than their recent forebears. To get works into the public that didn't fit with prior visions (which were established publishers' visions), they resorted to beginning their own presses. Leonard, not Virginia, selected the Stein title for Hogarth, but Leonard and Virginia read together, planned together, and made decisions together, so it seems that both had to know Stein's work, at least some of it. Stein wrote her essay for a lecture at Oxford and Cambridge, and with the Woolfs...