Virginia Woolf in the Pay of Booksellers: commerce, privacy, professionalism, Orlando

Twentieth Century Literature, Winter, 2002 by Patrick Collier

Intellectual integrity, of course, never becomes an issue with Nick Greene, who is consistently portrayed as subliterary and money-driven. Orlando's particular take on patronage has a laughable but disturbingly canny and self-involved writer successfully ensnaring a patron. Three years earlier, Woolf had published an essay that used patronage as a metaphor to comment on the multiply mediated literary marketplace of the early twentieth century, with its attendant threats to the writer-reader relationship. The essay, "The Patron and the Crocus," seeks insight on the question of whom one should write for given the current, fragmented nature of the readership. Artists in previous centuries, Woolf suggests, could rely on a stable relation between artist and audience: Renaissance poets wrote for the aristocracy, eighteenth-century writers for "coffee-house wit[s] and Grub Street bookseller[s],"Victorians for "the half-crown magazines and the leisured classes" (212). But the modern writer can follow no such "enviably simple" route to the audience; she can only look back with envy at "the splendid results of these different alliances" (212). In a move typical of Woolf's essays in the twenties, the writer-reader relationship is figured as an alliance (Dubino 133), but the conditions of the literary market threaten to disrupt it; the press is simultaneously a means of access and a barrier to the artist, who faces an array of confusing choices when considering audience:

   There is the daily Press, the weekly Press, the monthly Press; the
   English public and the American public; the best-seller public
   and the worst-seller public; the highbrow public and the red-blood
   public; all now organised self-conscious entities capable
   through their various mouthpieces of making their needs known
   and their approval or displeasure felt. Thus the writer who has
   been moved by the sight of the first crocus in Kensington Gardens
   has, before he sets pen to paper, to choose from a crowd of
   competitors the particular patron who suits him best. (213)

While Dubino reads "the patron" as "the reader" here (133), Woolf's point is precisely that no simple access to a clearly defined reader is possible. The modern "patron" is a confusing compound of the reader, the particular medium through which the reader is reached (the daily, weekly, or monthly press), his or her social location (class and nationality--"the British public and the American public"), and the literary journalist middlemen ("mouthpieces") who in some way represent the reader. The relationship between reader and artist, once marked by direct contact between aristocratic patron and poet, is now multiply mediated. (7) Writers can only "know" their audiences through the mediation of their "mouthpieces," who presumably (Woolf seems dubious as to how reliably) express their aesthetic preferences. (Interestingly, Woolf sees literary journalists here as speaking for the audience rather than to it--a clever acknowledgment that authors read reviews with greater attention and trepidation than the paper-buying public does.) While the essay acknowledges that the "patron" was always a compound, that is, "half-crown magazines and ... leisured classes," the levels of mediation have multiplied as readership has spread throughout society, producing "high-brow and ... red-blood" publics and new conduits of communication between artists and these audiences.