art of the manuscript

[For our inaugural “Reading List” column, Full Bleed asked artist Molly Springfield to draft a list of books that have helped advance her thinking about this issue’s theme, materiality, in relation to her own artwork.] 

In September of 2016, I was recovering from hand surgery brought on by years of making extremely labor-intensive graphite drawings based on photocopies of printed text. I was in the early days of physical therapy and barely able to sign my name. I couldn’t draw. But I could think about what I would draw when—or if—I could draw again.

I had questions about ekphrasis—a form of writing, often poetry, that vividly describes a scene or a work of art. Could a drawing, a work of visual art, itself be ekphrastic—that is, could it prompt the viewer to “read” its words and thereby evoke a mental impression of another work of visual art?

My search began at my usual starting point: in the library stacks, where I often look for books with inspiring content, but whose physical form also suggests the ultimate form of my drawings. I gravitate to books with visible signs of use and age or unusual layouts that are then accentuated by the photocopier, and in turn, my hand.

A catalog search in George Washington University’s Gelman Library took me to row PR 6045, which shelved several promising titles. This was the Virginia Woolf section and, as I always do in the library, I began to browse.

Until this point, I had never read one of Woolf’s novels or essays, but I was familiar with her biography. Like me, she came of age at the turn of a new century and experienced that new century’s technological and cultural revolutions. Unlike me, Woolf experienced severe mental and physical illness throughout her life. Yet she still found ways to produce her groundbreaking work. If Woolf could persevere, I too could make my time of convalescence productive.

So I started reading. And, eventually, I started drawing. As my reading and research evolved, I learned how Woolf’s writing was influenced by the formalist ideas of the visual artists in her circle and the visual technologies of her lifetime. For Woolf, language formed images just as clearly as the camera or paintbrush. Her work as a novelist, publisher, and photographer informed a series of works I would produce once my hand recovered. I am grateful for the following books for helping me along the way.

Maggie Humm, Snapshots of Bloomsbury: The Private Lives of Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell (Rutgers University Press, 2006).

 Virginia Woolf famously recorded memories in her written diaries. But she also kept a visual record in a series of personal photo albums. Known as the Monk’s House Albums—named after the house she and her husband Leonard lived in part-time from 1919 until her death in 1941—Humm provides their first catalogue and positions Woolf as an “autobiographical artist whose [writing] draws on visual memories that shaped fictional identities.” 

By the time Woolf was born in 1882, four decades after the invention of the technology, photography was deemed a proper pastime for young ladies. Woolf was an enthusiastic practitioner throughout her life.

In the Monk’s House Albums, mood rather than chronology seems to be Woolf’s organizing principle; I observed this myself when in the fall of 2019, I obtained permission to look through two of the fragile albums in person at Harvard’s Houghton Library, where they are in the Theatre Collection. 

A photo depicting a young Virginia with her parents in 1892 is followed by four photographs from August 1931 arranged in a grid—Virginia in the bottom left corner, three separate portraits of Leonard in the remaining slots. Their off-camera, faraway gazes share a pensiveness with the profiles of Virginia’s parents on the previous page, who are caught quietly reading. In another spread, different sitters pose in the same armchair in an alcove that produces variable compositions depending on the camera angle or time of day. 

“Virginia’s early knowledge of photographic techniques, including framing, space, and distance,” Humm observes, “would unconsciously shape her fictional use of frames.”

Donna E. Rhein, The Handprinted Books of Leonard and Virginia Woolf at the Hogarth Press, 1917-1932 (UMI Research Press, 1985).

This compact history begins in 1917 when Virginia and Leonard Woolf bought a small hand press and a set of Caslon Old Face type to begin the laborious work of hand-printing books under the imprint of Hogarth Press. Virginia set the type. And when Leonard was done pulling pages, Virginia would bind the books, carefully selecting endpapers and cover fabrics. 

A friend recently texted me about a colleague who looked down their nose at self-published authors. I replied that she could remind them that Virginia Woolf was at various times in her career self-published. Of the thirty-four books Hogarth Press hand printed between 1917 and 1932, three were by Virginia.

Hogarth Press commissioned visual artists to provide illustrations for many publications; Virginia’s sister, artist Vanessa Bell, designed covers—though she often questioned Leonard’s taste. By all accounts, the Woolfs’ enthusiasm for printing did not translate to mastering the art. “They were never very good printers,” writes Rhein. 

But Virginia’s work as a typesetter—in which she confronted the physical space that words and punctuation occupy on a page and how that space impacts the experience of reading—influenced the form of her writing as did her time behind the camera lens. In a 1929 diary entry, Woolf describes struggling with the “shape” of The Waves: “I am not reeling it off; but sticking it down. . . . never, in my life, did I attack such a vague yet elaborate design; whenever I make a mark I have to think of its relation to a dozen others.”

Virginia Woolf, On Being Ill (Paris Press, 2002).

This was the last book by Woolf hand-printed by Hogarth Press. My copy closely replicates the original edition, which Woolf typeset and for which Vanessa Bell designed the cover. It’s a slim, lovely volume with gilded print on the spine.

The opening sentence fills the entire first page, a masterclass in the art of a well-placed em-dash or comma. In it, Woolf asks why illness hasn’t been granted the same literary status as love and war.

I ordered my copy in the early days of the pandemic. Illness pervaded—and at the time, I also had two dear friends with terminal cancer—so I looked for language I could latch onto for solace. 

But, as Woolf points out, one reason illness isn’t a subject of great literature is that we lack the necessary language to describe it. “The merest schoolgirl,” Woolf writes, “when she falls in love, has Shakespeare or Keats to speak her mind for her; but let a sufferer try to describe a pain in his head to a doctor and language at once runs dry.”

Woolf, though, with considerable experience in both illness and literary innovation, goes on to knit together a seemingly disparate array of subjects and imagery—dentistry, ice ages, the heroism of insects, more Shakespeare—in a seamless line. And the joy she clearly takes in her experimentation with language is its own form of solace.

Virginia Woolf, A Writer’s Diary (Hogarth Press, 1965).

Originally published in 1953, and lovingly edited by Leonard, A Writer’s Diary extracts all of Virginia’s diary entries related to her own writing. 

In his preface, Leonard describes it as a “psychological picture of artistic production from within.” It is a memorial to Woolf’s abilities as a writer. (My copy, which I found last summer in a used bookstore in Toronto, was owned by a woman named Elizabeth Brady who inscribed her name on a “From the Library of” sticker inside the front cover. Elizabeth’s straight-edged, blue-ballpoint underlining appears throughout—a memorial to her dedication as a reader.) Woolf used her diaries like visual artists use sketchbooks: as a test site for ideas. Like all artists, she gives in to self-doubt, wallows in bad reviews, but also allows herself to revel in her gifts, to take pleasure in winning the battles of the writing day.

In an entry from February 23, 1927, about her drafting To the Lighthouse, Woolf writes (and Elizabeth has underlined): “I am now writing as fast & freely as I have written in the whole of my life; . . . I think this is the proof that I was on the right path; and what fruit hangs in my soul is to be reached there.”

Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse: The original holograph draft, transcribed and edited by Susan Dick (University of Toronto Press, 1982).

That Woolf was indeed fast and free and on the right path is evidenced here. The holograph draft of To the Lighthouse is nearly identical to the final version of the novel. 

A holograph draft is a typed version of an author’s handwritten manuscript. I learned this on that day in Gelman Library in 2016, when I pulled this book off the shelf. After exhausting my renewal privileges, I bought a deaccessioned copy online. It has the call number sticker on the spine (PR 6045 072 T6 1982) and the original card catalog card is pasted inside the back cover.

Woolf drew a heavy vertical line down the left-hand side of each page of her manuscript. She used these wide margins to write emendations to the main text. The holograph draft preserves these margins but transcribes Woolf’s spidery handwriting into readable type. Woolf’s editing marks—checks, slashes, circles—are reproduced in situ over the transcribed text.

I’d secretly thought of my text-based drawings as poems for a while but didn’t think—as a visual artist—that I could claim that word. The transcribed form of Woolf’s manuscript supplied the armature I needed to make that leap. It is the cornerstone of the Woolf-inspired drawings that I went on to make after that day in the library.

In many of them, Woolf’s marginal notes become fragmented poems. They float within the negative space created by Woolf’s wide margins and are framed by the edges of the book’s pages spread against the photocopier’s glass.

They are not strictly ekphrastic. But the images that Woolf materialized with language become images themselves in the mind of the viewer, who is also the reader. 

Molly Springfield’s work is in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art and Metropolitan Museum of Art. Her drawings have been featured in gallery exhibitions in New York, Chicago, San Francisco, Washington, and Cologne; museum exhibitions at The Drawing Center and Indianapolis Museum of Art; and reviews in Artforum, Art Papers, Modern Painters, and the New York Times. Her M.F.A. is from UC-Berkeley. Residencies include Skowhegan, MacDowell, and Tamarind. Mollyspringfield.com