[WOOLF, Virginia, Charles MAURON (translator), et al.] Commerce. Cahiers trimestriels … hiver 1926.

A PRE-PUBLICATION FRAGMENT OF TO THE LIGHTHOUSE

[WOOLF, Virginia, Charles MAURON (translator), et al.] Commerce. Cahiers trimestriels … hiver 1926. Paris: Librairie Henri Leclerc. 1926.

4to. Original brown printed wrappers, uncut; pp. 200, [2 (colophon, blank)]; creasing and minor chipping to spine; old repaired tear to head of front wrapper with small trace of adhesive, a few nicks to edges; very light creasing to a handful of leaves; a very good copy; bookplate of William Beekman to inner front cover.

First edition, no. 1020 of 2,500 copies on Alfa paper from a total edition of 2,900, of the tenth issue of the Parisian literary review Commerce, containing the first published excerpt of Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, predating its publication in book form by five months.

The extract is a French translation ('Le temps passe’) of ‘Time Passes’, the experimental middle portion of To the Lighthouse, completed in draft form in English by the end of May 1926 (pp. 89-133 here). Woolf’s diary makes clear that it was a piece of writing that gave her more than usual trouble. Recording the passage of ten years between the two outer sections of the novel (set pre- and post-war), the central presence is the Ramsays' holiday house on the Isle of Skye (where the events of the outer sections takes place), now empty, with the objects inside the house as ‘minor characters’, all subjected to the passage and erosion effected by time.

The literary critic and aesthetician Charles Mauron, a close friend of Roger Fry, began translating works by Virginia Woolf and E.M. Forster in 1925, at Fry’s suggestion; Mauron had been suggested to Woolf as a translator of ‘Time Passes’ by Forster in October 1926, who, as Woolf writes in a letter to Mauron, ‘so much admires your translation of the Passage to India’. Fry, who had collaborated with Mauron on the translation of A Passage to India, was ‘forced to reconstruct’ his translations of Mallarmé’s poems with Mauron’s help after they were ‘lost in a stolen suitcase in June 1933 […] [Mauron] co-edited them with Julian Bell, for publication after Fry’s death’ (King’s College, Cambridge, Roger Eliot Fry). Mauron would later translate Woolf’s Orlando and Flush into French, as well as works by Katherine Mansfield, D.H. Lawrence, T.E. Lawrence, and Laurence Sterne.

Commerce had been established in 1924 by Marguerite Caetani, Princess of Bassiano, in collaboration with Paul Valéry , Léon-Paul Fargue, and Valery Larbaud (and, initially, Adrienne Monnier), publishing twenty-nine issues between 1924 and 1932. The first issue had featured the first fragments of Joyce’s Ulysses, translated into French and ‘overseen by Adrienne Monnier, who had to resign her position as administrator of the journal in August 1924, due to overwork. Monnier’s exhaustion was not due to Joyce’s demands on her time, but rather to Léon-Paul Fargue’s strange working habits. He claimed he could contribute poems to the review only by dictating them at night, after Adrienne had spent a long and fatiguing day in the bookshop’ (Benstock, Women of the Left Bank (1986), p. 226).

‘It is noteworthy that Woolf’s middle section of To the Lighthouse was issued in a French translation before the original, published in 1927 in Great Britain - partly because Commerce only accepted unpublished literary texts, and partly because of Woolf’s connections: not only had T.S. Eliot, the editor of the Criterion to which Woolf regularly contributed, shared interests with Commerce, but Valery Larbaud, who had discovered James Joyce, played a major role in the diffusion of anglophone literature, including the work of Virginia Woolf’ (Rigeade, p. 190).

Here, ‘Time Passes’ appears as a free-standing text, more overtly experimental than the modified version that would appear as part of the complete novel in 1927. The French translation is without any allusion to the rest of To the Lighthouse: mentions of the Ramsays have been omitted, as has the first portion of the text, describing William Bankes’s return from the terrace and the lamps in the Ramsay house being extinguished one by one.

In his useful introduction to a reprint of Mauron’s translation, together with a recently discovered intermediate English typescript, James M. Haule proposes that ‘Woolf saw periodical publication as a way to present a version of the entire section in a form that conveyed her original intention: a separate but important statement of belief and unbelief. It had not become the “corridor” between the two large sections of the novel that she sketched in her notebooks. It had become something more. By publishing this section with the help of Roger Fry and by publishing it in translation, she not only saw it into print, but also accomplished something else. She put it in the hands of a critic she admired and, owing to her severe misgivings about this section, reduced her risk of unfavourable impact from what she feared was a “hopeless mess” by publishing it in a language other than English’.

One hundred copies of this issue of Commerce were printed on Hollande Van Gelder paper and three hundred on Pur fil Lafuma. Other contributions include Valéry’s ‘Oraison funèbre d’un fable’, Fargue’s ‘Second recit du naufrageur’, and a translation of Nietzsche’s Greek Music Drama by Jean Paulhan, director of the Nouvelle Revue Française.

Provenance: From the library of William Beekman, noted collector of Woolf’s works. The William Beekman Collection of Virginia Woolf and Her Circle is now held at the New York Public Library, featuring numerous books originally owned or gifted by Virginia Woolf and Leonard Woolf.

Kirkpatrick D44. See Haule, ‘Virginia Woolf and Charles Mauron’, in Twentieth Century Literature, 29.3 (Autumn 1983); Hutcheon, Formalism and the Freudian Aesthetic: the Example of Charles Mauron (2010), appendix B; Rigeade, ‘To the Lighthouse: Recycling, Remixing, Iconising’, in Recycling Virginia Woolf in Contemporary Art and Literature (2021).

SKU: 2121905