The Genius of Virginia Woolf
In Her Last Book the English Novelist Again Says the Unsayable
When Virginia Woolf quietly wrote a farewell note to her husband, took her stick--so fixed is habit--and went on her favorite walk across the summery meadows down to the Ouse to slip under the water, it was a sad hour for English letters. Why did she do it? No one knows precisely. It may well have been a combination of four factors--sorrow over the war with its breeding hatreds; the demolishment of her Bloomsbury apartment ("They are destroying all the beautiful things!" she cried); the revising of her book, which always caused her pain; and the fear of "an old madness" coming over her.
"Between the Acts" had been completed before her death, but she was still working on the final revisions when the compulsion for the ultimate escape seized her. It is with curiosity, profound regret, and a cool sort of reverence that one takes up the last work of the sole indisputable genius among contemporary British women-of-letters.
Virginia Woolf has left to posterity a shelf of sixteen volumes that enrich our literature in a very special way. Two are books of criticism of extraordinary perception, and ten are novels, in which she has achieved inimitable distinction. And though her fiction has been predominantly caviar to the general, yet in two of her novels she achieved best sellers--one, "The Years," held the top place on best seller lists for months in 1937. With "Jacob’s Room" in 1922 Mrs. Woolf was recognized by the discriminating as a novelist of first rank. From "Mrs. Dalloway" on, she was widely regarded as the foremost woman writing in English.
As the bulk of the iceberg lies beneath the water’s surface, so the greater opulence of Mrs. Woolf’s prose fiction may be said to lie above the clouds. In rarefied strata of pure sensation, ephemeral beauty, celestial imaginings, she flies with skill and daring. Without eager wings and sympathetic vision, even the practiced reader may fail to realize how she has pierced the screen ‘twixt thing and word, "where language is lit straight from soul."
"Between the Acts" is one of Mrs. Woolf’s most seemingly simple books: the plot well integrated, the fancy under deft control. There is even a new calmness, a new clarity. She is not lost in webs of speculation, thin-drawn to incommunicability as in "The Waves," where she wrote, "I desire always to stretch the night and fill it fuller and fuller with dreams."
Yet in her "easier" last book, ingeniously the story is played out on three levels--a pageant within a pageant and all within the vaster pageant of creation and infinity. The animal plane, the human and the spiritual, each has function and counterpointal significance. As to actual plot, despite the disciplined guidance, what does it amount to, and who seriously cares?
Did the plot matter? She shifted and looked over her right shoulder. The plot was only there to beget emotion. Don’t bother about the plot: the plot’s nothing.
So says Miss La Trobe, the enigmatic author and producer of the pageant, who seems to represent the creative mind in relation to an audience and actuality.
On a single day of June, 1939--with the war imminent but virtually unperceived--the action takes place at Pointz Hill, an English country house. It revolves about a pageant played upon the lawns by the local villagers. In its unity of time "Between the Acts" recalls "Mrs. Dalloway." Through implications of the scenes touching on the whole history of England and the mutations of English literature it suggests "Orlando."
Despite her necessity, the solitary, thick-legged, masculine Miss La Trobe, who knew how "vanity made all human beings malleable," is not one of the principal characters. The chief actors are the members of the Oliver household. The head of the house is old Bartholomew Oliver, who like so many retired English soldiers has only his India to cling to. He marvels at his widowed sister’s orthodoxy. ("Deity," as he supposed, "was more of a force or a radiance, controlling the thrush and the worm, the tulip and the hound; and himself too, an old man with swollen veins.") This aging sister, Mrs. Swithin, who would have become a clever woman is she could ever have fixed her gaze, is the most sympathetic figure in the book. Living with the older Olivers are Isa, the poetry-quoting daughter-in-law, temporarily attracted to a gentleman farmer, and Giles, the stock broker son, handsome, hirsute, virile and surly.
To this special group are added buoyant, big-hearted Mrs. Manresa, "a wild child of nature" for all that her hands are bespattered with emeralds and rubies, dug up by her thin husband himself in his ragamuffin days in Africa. Uninvited she drops in at luncheon, bringing along with the picnic champagne a maladjusted, putty-colored young man named William Dodge, whom Giles contemptuously sizes up as "a toady, a lickspittle, not a downright plain man of his senses, but a teaser and a twitcher, a fingerer of sensations; picking and choosing; dillying and dallying; not a man to have a straightforward love for a woman."
William tries dallying with Isa, and Giles, partly to annoy his wife, pays court to the full-blown charms of sparkling Mrs. Manresa, who confesses she loves to take off her stays and roll in the grass.
Outstanding among the villagers in pageant and audience and the gentry from neighboring estates, is the minister.
The Reverend G. W. Streatfield looked at the audience, then up at the sky. The whole lot of them, gentles and simples, felt embarrassed, for him, for themselves--there he stood, their representative spokesman, their symbol, themselves, a butt, a clod, laughed at by looking glasses, ignored by the cows, condemned by the clouds which continued their majestic rearrangement of the celestial landscape, an irrelevant forked stake in the flow and majesty of the Summer silent world.
There is explanation, but no development of character in "Between the Acts." Mrs. Woolf seems to be saying that for all the transcendental beauties of nature and the high-breeding processes of civilization, human beings haven’t changed much from the time when "prehistoric man, half- human, half-ape, roused himself from his semi-crouching position and raised great stones." Fashions change, days are wet or fine, but the essential heart of man remains much the same. Mrs. Woolf is as poignantly aware of the durability of land and sky as she is of the impermanence of man’s relationships. "That’s what makes a view so sad," says Mrs. Manresa nodding at the strip of gauze laid upon the distant fields. "And so beautiful. It’ll be there when we’re not."
As in most of her novels, the cream of "Between the Acts" lies between the lines--in the haunting overtones. And the best of the show--the part one really cares about--happens between the acts and immediately before the pageant begins and just after it is over. So the play is not really the thing at all. It is merely the focal point, the hub of the wheel, the peg on which to hang the bright ribbons and dark cords of the author’s supersensitive perceptions and illuminated knowledge. It is in her imagery, in her felicitous gift for metaphor, for cadence, for exciting association, in her "powers of absorption and distillation" that her special genius lies. She culls exotic flowers in the half-light of her private mysticism along with common earthgrown varieties and distills them into new essences. Her most interesting characters move in an ambienteof intuition. With half a glance they regard their fellow-mortals and know their hidden failures. They care less for the tangible, the wrought stone, than for fleeting thought or quick desire.
In ten novels Mrs. Woolf lifted veil after veil to reveal what she perceived as the secret meaning of life. When one finishes a book of hers it is not characters he remembers but their spiritual emanations, which are in reality manifestations or facets of Virginia’s Woolf supervision. Her peculiar interest not in surfaces but in mysterious motivations and subterfuges that do not meet the eye. And no other English novelist has ever written more dazzling passages of poetry undefiled than Virginia Woolf. Like the great poets--Shakespeare, Donne, Shelley, Blake--Mrs. Woolf could say the unsayable, and it is there in her books for those who have ears attuned to unheard melodies, even if they can never recommunicate it in any language except Mrs. Woolf’s own precisely.
At once a woman of profound erudition and intuitive intelligence, she is also the most poignantly sensitive of English novelists. Yet there was a leaven of zest and humor in her make-up, and her wit was akin to that slyly malicious kind that ran in the veins of Prince Hamlet. Steeped in the classical tradition, she was an audacious experimentalist. She looked upon existence as a maze of paradoxes, but she was continually uplifted and renewed by the transient beauty of the world. One passage from "Between the Acts" seems to epitomize the attitude of mind, the prose style, the whole art of Virginia Woolf:
"Here came the sun, an illimitable rapture of joy, embracing every flower, every leaf. Then in compassion it withdrew, covering its face, as if it forebore to look on human suffering."
"Between the Acts" has no more ending, no more conclusion than English history. The pageant is played out, the guests depart, night falls. The old folks retire and Isa and Giles are alone for the first time that day.
"Alone, enmity was bared; also love. Before they slept, they must fight; after they had fought, they would embrace. From that embrace another life might be born. But first they must fight, as the dog fox fights with the vixen, in the heart of darkness, in the fields of night.
Isa let her sewing drop. The great hooded chairs had become enormous. And Giles too. And Isa too against the window. The window was all sky without color. The house had lost its shelter. It was night before roads were made or houses. It was the night that dwellers in caves had watched from some high place among rocks.
Then the curtain rose. They spoke."
The physical embodiment of Virginia Woolf is no more, but her inimitable voice remains to speak to generations yet unborn. The first line of her last book begins, "It was a Summer’s night and they were talking"--The last paragraph ends: "Then the curtain rose. They spoke."
As long as English is read the voice may go on--if without new delight, also without fresh pain. For Virginia Woolf, the woman, "Peace, Let her pass!" as the author says of a person just dead in the pageant. "She to whom all’s one now, Summer and Winter."
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