Textual Archaeology: a Contextual Reading of The
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TEXTUAL ARCHAEOLOGY: A CONTEXTUAL READING OF THE 1942 NURI MASS THESIS ON VIRGINIA WOOLF by Suzanne Bellamy A thesis submitted in fulfilment of requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy The University of Sydney March 2018 Abstract My thesis recovers, reads and contextualises a long-lost early Australian thesis on Virginia Woolf submitted by University of Sydney MA student Nuri Mass in 1942. Through its careful reading and contextualisation, my thesis aims to reveal the significance of the Mass thesis for both contemporary Woolf studies (early textual readings) and consequently for transnational modernist studies at large, also producing new, fine-grained insights into the 1930s Australian context for Woolf’s reception and Australian engagement with literary modernism. I will contend that the Nuri Mass thesis was written at, and fundamentally shaped by, a pivotal transition in the reception of Woolf’s writing, marking a shift in Woolf’s place in the literary modernist canon following her death, the rupture presented by world war, and the rise of Leavisite canon formation. Likewise my analysis of the Mass thesis sheds new light on academic, institutional and cultural contexts of 1930s Australian modernism. In addition to the Mass thesis itself, previously unexplored contextual manuscript and documentary materials are introduced, opening new lines of enquiry in the field of transnational/Australian modernism. ii The thesis is dedicated to Nuri Mass and Ruth Gruber iii Acknowledgements For guidance and support through this long process I wish to thank my supervisors Emeritus Professor Elizabeth Webby and Dr Brigid Rooney, for inspiration, acute insightful editing and commitment to the long haul. The children of Nuri Mass, Tess Horwitz and Chris Horwitz, have been wonderful and generous patrons, allowing me full and free access to their mother’s archive, stories and reflections. I hope I have honoured their mother and thank them very much. Nuri Mass’s cousin Clare Stanton and her daughter Mary Appleby also greatly assisted with conversation and family documents. I received assistance from various staff at the Mitchell Library in Sydney, and would particularly like to mention Mr Arthur Easton (now deceased) who found the Angus & Robertson Cousins/Mass letters which proved so valuable. My great thanks to Paris Sylvester who has been a believer in the project from the start and performed many critical tasks, including transforming the thesis PDF into a workable document, a massive piece of work. Thanks also to Reginald Sylvester, poet, who kept us all going with his many skills and jokes through the last few years. Many friends and colleagues have given me great support over the period of this work. The international Virginia Woolf community of scholars provided a crucial space for discussion over a long period and I would like to thank in particular Judith Allen, Jane Goldman, Christina Alt, Elisa Kay Sparks, Maria Oliveira, Patrizia iv Muscogiuri, J. J. Wilson, Krystyna Colburn, Isota Tucker Epes, Beth Dougherty, Diane Gillespie, Leslie Hankins, Gill Lowe, Derek Ryan and Mark Hussey. In Australia I have had great support with ideas, meals and beds, and good humour from Su Wild River, Catherine Moore, Tim McCann, Helen Small, Billy Kennedy, Biff Ward, Julia Ryan, Monika Hauber, Danny Sampson, Anna Couani, Susan Hawthorne, Renate Klein, and Diane Bell. I especially thank my sister Doreen McGarrigle for many things. In the USA I have had great support and accommodation during research times from Alix Dobkin and Kate Delacorte, and in Catalonia from Louise Higham. A special thanks to Professor Paul Stanley Craft, Dr Angela Rizzo, Kerryn Ernst and Dr Elly Law. I would also like to acknowledge and gratefully thank Fergus Armstrong for so expertly copy-editing the thesis in its final form. v vi Contents: Preface ix Introduction 1 Chapter 1. Early Critical Reception of Virginia Woolf 21 Chapter 2. Woolf in Australia 57 Chapter 3. The Making of the Young Writer 97 Chapter 4. The University Way 119 Chapter 5. The Nuri Mass Thesis: A Reading 151 Chapter 6. Completion and Afterlife 201 Chapter 7. Early Student Readings of Woolf – A New Historiography 225 Conclusion 253 Bibliography 257 Illustrations 285 Appendix 303 vii viii Preface Nuri Mass’s thesis on Virginia Woolf, lying in a box since 1942, must have been emitting some force field as a dynamic artefact. I marvel still at the connections across time that placed it on my path in 2006. The method I have chosen to track its first life, using enlarging fields of Australian and international contexts, mirrors the trajectory of its path back to life as a recovered text. My involvement with Virginia Woolf’s writing goes back to the 1970s feminist revival when I was a student then young academic in Sydney, as well as an artist and a serious diarist. It was influenced by my great friendship with Bessie Guthrie (née Mitchell, 1905-1977) who had been a small independent publisher of modernist writers in Sydney in the 1920s-1940s.1 A Woolf reader and book collector, Bessie shared insights about Woolf’s work as a reader of the first wave. She died in 1977 shortly after reading the first published volume of Woolf’s Diary, so missing out on the new diary, letter and essay material that began to be released from that time onwards. Working together on activist campaigns in Sydney Women’s Liberation, we spent many hours discussing the intersections of art and politics, activism and creativity, feminism and modernism, reading A Room of One’s Own and Three Guineas as texts with fresh resonance for the new feminism. Virginia Woolf was a shared passion, and after Bessie’s death I inherited her papers and her library, adding over time all the new Woolf material.2 Her library was a treasure house of books and magazines from the fugitive early publishing world of Australian and UK/European 1 Suzanne Bellamy, “Guthrie, Bessie Jean Thompson (1905-1977),” in Australian Dictionary of Biography, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, 2006, http://www.adb.online.anu.edu.au/biogs/A140394b.htm. Article originally published in Australian Dictionary of Biography, vol. 14 (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1996). 2 Bessie Guthrie’s Papers are now in my Archive, in the National Library of Australia. ix modernism, my first experience of bibliographic context. Bessie’s last years were spent in intellectual engagement with young women like myself, hungry for ancestors and predecessors, and in the process knocking off some of the romanticism and glitter with which I endowed the 1930s. At around the same time in the early 1970s I had also met writer and publisher Nuri Mass (1918-1994) who was part of the friendship circle of Sydney poet and publisher Marjorie Pizer. Having a very different sensibility to Bessie Guthrie, Nuri Mass found the new women’s movement and its young activists a bit wild, but was sympathetic, being herself an environmentalist and anti-nuclear pacifist. We shared an interest in literature and became friends, especially after Nuri became a brilliant osteopathic practitioner, guaranteeing her late celebrity among my own feminist cohort. Conversation, ideas and great laughter flowed while bones were being cracked. My career teaching Women’s Studies at Macquarie University (1974-1980) was built over the ruins of an earlier struggle at the University of Sydney, during the turbulent years of the anti-war movement. My love of English literature had been badly affected by the alienating Leavisite battles in the English Department while I was an undergraduate so I majored instead in History, embarking on a PhD in 1970 in the same year as the birth of Women’s Liberation. Having been trained in revolutionary theory by good historians, my heart and head were a battleground of politics and history, but my PhD did not survive my walking out after a fight in my fourth year about the invention of new terms and concepts, another casualty of the times before the foundation works of the new field of women’s studies. Optimistically, having had a wonderful formal education and private training in art practice from an early age, I x imagined for myself a life as artist and researcher/writer, setting forth with utopian dreams and no money. A year later I was offered a tutorship in Politics at Macquarie University. Though teaching classes on A Room of One’s Own, Three Guineas and other Woolf texts, I still wanted a more independent creative life. My decision to leave Macquarie in 1980 was in part inspired by Woolf’s “freedom from unreal loyalties.” Since then I have lived as a studio artist and writer, exhibiting internationally, working as a guest artist in the USA, and contributing to Woolf scholarship through the annual International Virginia Woolf conferences since 1997. Radio Woolf Two years after Bessie Guthrie’s death, I had the opportunity in 1979 to write and present two ABC radio programmes on Virginia Woolf.3 At Nuri Mass’s osteopathic clinic and home in Summer Hill we discussed the planned programmes as I read the new material by Jane Marcus which revolutionised Woolf interpretation. Indeed, we discussed everything, including feminism, as well as Nuri’s complex ideas about arcane magical forces and forms, and the stories of her mother Celeste who was an artist and Christian Scientist, then still living with Nuri. These were always wonderful days for the mind and painful days for the body. One day now clearly stands out in my memory and yet was forgotten for almost three decades. I was lying on the leather massage table at Summer Hill with my face through the hole, when Nuri said that she had written a thesis on Virginia Woolf at the 3 Suzanne Bellamy, “Virginia Woolf,” The Coming Out Show, July 1979.