Psychosomatic?: Mental and Physical Pain in Eve Sedgwick’s Writing

I knew Ian Watt, the author of The Rise of the Novel (1957), a little in his later years, and he once told me a story about his having been one of the Cambridge undergraduates in the 1930s who had invited Gertrude Stein to the university to speak. The responsibility of meeting Stein’s train and entertaining her until time for her lecture fell to Watt, and he said he was a little concerned beforehand about whether as an undergraduate he was quite up to interacting with Stein, who was by that time a famously formidable person. So he was relieved on meeting her to discover that she seemed entirely agreeable and good natured; he probably did not know at the time that Stein had made a career not only of very much making her own way as an artist but of helping the ambitious young men around her—Ernest Hemingway, Aaron Copland, Paul Bowles, Sam Steward, Thornton Wilder, and many others—make theirs. Stein was a dab hand of long experience at drawing out bright young men by the time she met Watt.

Watt took Stein to a tea shop on the way to campus, and they proceeded to chat amicably about her recent travels and about his work at the university. That is, they continued to chat amicably until the door opened and into the otherwise nearly empty teashop walked someone whom Watt had never seen before but recognized immediately from her photographs: Virginia Woolf. Unfortunately for himself, Watt said, Stein also recognized Woolf and visibly plummeted into a state of abjection. A little black rain cloud formed over the table where Stein and Watt sat as Woolf was seated a few tables away and was served tea. The flow of conversation between Watt and his guest ended abruptly, never to be resumed. Watt said he could all but hear Stein’s miserable and resentful thought emanating from her celebrated brain: “And they think that woman is an experimental writer!” After ten or fifteen long minutes of Stein’s all but audible seething, Watt said he suggested that perhaps they should be getting on to campus.

I yield to no one in my admiration of Stein’s writing, but far from sharing her apparently invidious opinion of Woolf, I also highly esteem and have enjoyed teaching several of Woolf’s books, especially Three Guineas (1938) and A Room of One’s Own (1929). Nevertheless, I was reminded of Watt’s story about Stein’s disdain when I reread Woolf’s 1926 essay “On Being Ill,” as I was preparing these remarks about illness in Eve Sedgwick’s thinking and writing. In the essay, Woolf points out the, to her, puzzling absence from literature of illness and its effects. Is there any other common field of ordinary human experience, she asks, as generally underrepresented in literature as illness is? But illness as a category remains small and domesticated in Woolf’s evocation of it; she never allows it to expand far beyond the head cold and the mild bout of flu. For me, the essay fails to the extent that it trivializes its subject. Perhaps my great expectations that Woolf might have something uniquely perceptive to say about the relation of the experience of illness to writing are unfair or at least irrelevant to her actual essay, insofar as they were founded on my sense of Woolf as someone who appears to have had profound and extensive experience of mental anguish and emotional pain. I had hoped that she might have brought her long struggle with psychic turbulence to bear on her thinking about illness; perhaps it would be fairer to look elsewhere in her writing, in some of her novels and diaries, for traces of her long engagement with navigating the defiles of so-called mental illness to its limits and hers.

Although illness is much less central—indeed, entirely marginal—to Stein’s authorial legend, much of her early writing—Three Lives (1909), The Making of Americans (1925), Q.E.D. (written in 1903; published in 1950), and so on—engages...