Virginia Woolf had more to say on suggestiveness.
In a review of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Journals, published in Books and Portraits, she writes —
[Emerson] discovered that ‘No man can write well who thinks there is any choice of words for him... In good writing, every word means something. In good writing, words become one with things.’ But the theory has something priggish about it. All good writing is honest in the sense that it says what the writer means; but Emerson did not see that one can write with phrases as well as with words. His sentences are made up of hard fragments each of which has been matched separately with the vision in his head. It is far rarer to find sentences which, lacking emphasis because the joins are perfect and words common, yet grow together so that you cannot dismember them, and are steeped in meaning and suggestion.
Her final image is strange, and strangely metamorphosing. It moves from furniture (or joinery) to plants (or cultivation) to bodies (or surgery) to food (steeped in).
As with Henry James’s stew of yesterday, Woolf is talking about a liquid interpenetration.
There’s no doubt she’s contrasting a male hardness and dryness with a female pliability and fluidity.
But she is also implying a richness — for her, writing must not just just be dipped in meaning and suggestion but steeped in it.
Practically, this means living with the implications of what you’re writing, or the sense of something to be written, for a long time.
I remember an aside from [the great Australian poet] Les Murray, after a reading at the Troubadour, London, about how he liked to chuck the poem into the back brain, not feel it was being dictated too directly by the flippant forelobes.
Any writing requires a great deal of time and of experience.
My favourite words on this — perhaps my favourite words on writing — come from Rainer Maria Rilke’s The Notebook of Malte Laurid’s Brigge. They are often excerpted as ‘What does a poem take?’ Parts of what he say make me uneasy, but I think that’s deliberate.
“For the sake of a few lines one must see many cities, men and things. One must know the animals, one must feel how the birds fly and know the gesture with which the small flowers open in the morning. One must be able to think back to roads in unknown regions, to unexpected meetings and to partings which one had long seen coming; to days of childhood that are still unexplained, to parents that one had to hurt when they brought one some joy and one did not grasp it (it was joy for someone else); to childhood illness that so strangely began with a number of profound and grave transformations, to days in rooms withdrawn and quiet and to mornings by the sea, to the sea itself, to seas, to nights of travel that rushed along on high and flew with all the stars-and it is not enough if one may think all of this. One must have memories of many nights of love, none of which was like the others, of the screams of women in labor, and of light, white, sleeping women in childbed, closing again. But one must also have been beside the dying, one must have sat beside the dead in the room with the open window and the fitful noises. And still it is not enough to have memories. One must be able to forget them when they are many, and one must have the great patience to wait until they come again. For it is not yet the memories themselves. Not until they have turned to blood within us, to glance, to gesture, nameless and no longer to be distinguished from ourselves-not until then can it happen that in a most rare hour the first word of a verse arises in their midst and goes forth from them.”
Again, there’s the fluidity — the blood within us.
But the idea of writing as coming out of forgotten memories is surely his essential insight.
Memories are still too much themselves. It’s only when they’ve decomposed and deliquesced into something beneath that, some very dark mulch, that they become the stuff of imagination.