Reading Woolf: Between the Acts

Between the Acts was Woolf’s last novel, and she died before finishing editing the book. Having enjoyed so many of Woolf’s books, I’m sad to say that this was another that just didn’t gel for me. It has a lot of promise, more so than Flush, but it doesn’t quite hit the mark and I wonder if Woolf had had the time or inclination to work on it further, whether a tighter book would have resulted? It is impossible to know.

Between the Acts takes place entirely in the course of a single afternoon during which a play is performed, the summer pageant, in the gardens of Pointz Hall. The story centres around the family: Isa (Isabelle) a young, unhappy mother; Mr. Oliver, her aged father in law; Mrs Swithin, Mr. Oliver’s sister; and Giles, Isa’s husband. Through the characters of Isa and Giles we see played out passion and ennui; the characters of Mr. Oliver and his sister Mrs Swithin juxtapose faith and reason. Joining the family for lunch is Mrs. Manresa, a flirtatious and sexually appealing women and William Dodge, a homosexual and an ‘artist’ though he rejects the title.

The story opens with a lot of promise. “It was a summer’s night and they were talking, in the big room with the windows open to the garden, about the cesspool.” Isa, the main force of the story, is sitting in the room as her father in law is discussing practical village matters with a gentleman farmer, Rupert Haines, and his wife. Isa is reflecting on the emotions Rupert Haines, the man in grey, stirs within her. She suspects them to be love. In the meantime, the family is talking. Isa, in spite of her outward calm, is troubled. Her marriage, it seems, is also troubled with suggestions of infidelities on her husband’s part and her own struggling to understand how exactly she feels about her husband.

The family are preparing for the pageant, each person fitting to a familiar role. Mrs Swithin puts up the sign, she and her brother talk about the weather. Isa sits quietly, yet inside she is seething with emotion: frustration which rises from her marital situation and the endless cycle of repetition, the repeating of roles from one year to the next. “Every summer, for seven summers now, Isa had heard the same words; about the hammer and the nails; the pageant and the weather. Every year they said, it would be wet or fine; and every year it was – one or the other. The same chime followed the same chime, only this year beneath the chime she heard: ‘The girl screamed and hit him about the face with the hammer.”

Enter Mrs Manresa and her friend William Dodge. Dodge inspires different emotions in each of the characters. Underlying, yet not spoken, is his homosexuality which stirs disgust in some, sympathy in others. When Giles returns home from work he is stirred by the presence of Mrs Manresa, as is Mr. Oliver, who is seen as something of a ‘wild child’ not behaving to normal etiquette and flirting quite openly with the men. Isa is annoyed with Mrs Manresa’s affect on her husband and the suggestion of further infidelity.

The weather is fine and so follows the pageant. Penned by Miss La Trobe, the event is something about the ages of men. Or something like that. I don’t know. At this point I completely lost the plot (or the plot was lost); the entire pageant part of the book was a cacophony of words that meant absolutely nothing to me. Except this part, perhaps:

“Did the plot matter? She shifted and looked over her right shoulder. The plot was only there to beget emotion. There were only two emotions: love; and hate. There was no need to puzzle out the plot. Perhaps Miss La Trobe meant that when she cut this knot in the centre?

Don’t bother about the plot: the plot’s nothing.”

I don’t know if Woolf was hinting there or if not, but certainly I got the impression that the plot really was nothing and as a consequence I had no idea what it was about. Scenes opened, scenes closed. Lines were started, lines were lost. There was interval upon interval, many costume changes, we followed this character then that character. No one seemed to be able to finish a sentence or thought. No one seemed to know what was going on.

This pretty much bombed Between the Acts for me. The novel, from some point after the first third, was like the closing part of Orlando: fevered and stuttering; a whirling jumble of words, ideas and imagery. I couldn’t follow it. So much murmuring, so much half-finished dialogue. Too…unfinished, perhaps?  It was a bewildering read; despite its short length, it was a struggle to finish it. I still have no idea what I was reading. Can anybody help me?

Between the Acts receives a bewildered 5 out of 10 Biis. It’s early promise just didn’t flow through. 

Reading Woolf: The Years

In embarking on a thorough reading of Woolf’s works, The Years was one of the books I was most interested in. I’m not sure why this is; perhaps it was something to do with reading Woolf’s diaries in which she spent so much time talking about her book ‘The Pargiters’, as it was originally titled; a book she spent a considerable amount of time writing and about which she was so conflicted. Coming down from something as extraordinary as The Waves, it’s perhaps not surprising that this change in direction caused Woolf so much angst. This was also the book that Leonard Woolf lied to her about for fear that telling her it was a failure would send her spiralling into a further bout of depression. This alone generates a certain degree of intrigue.

The Years is an historical novel, charting the fortunes of a family – The Pargiters of the original title – over the pre and post Great War period. The Pargiters are a ‘well to do’ family, well connected and reasonably wealthy. The novel opens as Mrs Pargiter, who has been unwell for some time, is dying. Awaiting her death are her husband Colonel Abel Pargiter (who we learn, very early on, has a mistress) and her children: Eleanor, Morris, Martin, Milly, Delia and Rose. Edward, the eldest Pargiter, is away at university. As Mrs Pargiter dies we learn key distinctions in the personalities of the children, with two in particular standing out: Eleanor who reacts with compassion both towards her mother and to her small sister Rose who has suffered a fright, and Delia who is the only one who reacts with relief and an apparent lack of sadness at her mother’s death.

“’It has come,’ Delia said to herself, ‘it has come!’ An extraordinary feeling of relief and excitement possessed her. Her father was pacing from one drawing-room to the other; she followed him in; but she avoided him. They were too much alike; each knew what the other was feeling.”

Delia senses both her own desire for her mother’s death and her father’s, whilst the others react more standardly with tears and open sadness. It is a notable distinction, created with a few, well placed, sentences.

Having established the character of Delia so clearly, she then disappears from the book almost entirely until the end. Aside from hints of some sort of disgrace, we know nothing of what happens to Delia after this point. Instead the book focuses largely on Eleanor, the eldest daughter who stays with her father, who never marries, who travels the world by herself. It is, perhaps, the most interesting part of The Years that it focuses largely on the fortunes of the female characters – these being the people least likely to achieve anything, the ones who would stay home from the war, who would not sit at the Bar or enter commerce or government or hold a distinguished post at a university. We learn about Kitty, a cousin of the Pargiters, whom Edward wished to marry but who married Lord Lasswade in line with her mother’s wishes. There is always the sense about Kitty that she suited the life that she chose (or was chosen for her) yet it was not the life that she wanted. There are Sara (also known as Sally, I found this very confusing) and Maggie; more cousins, one of which married a Frenchman and the other of which is a storyteller, a kind of fantasist who doesn’t seem to do anything in particular (yet she is very interesting all the same). There is Rose who goes to prison for throwing a brick, Rose the activist who appears, like Delia, more often through rumour and reference than in direct presence.

Through the eyes of these female characters, disenfranchised and limited in their options despite their wealth and status, we see the world changing. Yet it is Eleanor, I think, who embodies the most interest in this book. Eleanor is there from beginning to end. She suffers ennui, she furrows her small path through life always observing if not partaking in the events that occur. She reflects on subjects like marriage, like life, like war yet there is always the sense that Eleanor is outside all of these things. As she reflects here:

“My life, she said to herself. That was odd, it was the second time that evening that somebody had talked about her life. And I haven’t got one, she thought. Oughtn’t a life to be something you could handle and produce? – a life of seventy odd years. But I’ve only the present moment, she thought. Here she was alive, now, listening to the fox-trot. Then she looked round. There was Morris; Rose; Edward with his head thrown back talking to a man she did not know. I’m the only person here, he thought, who remembers how he sat on the edge of my bed that night, crying – the night Kitty’s engagement was announced. Yes, things came back to her. A long strip of life lay behind her. Edward crying, Mrs. Levy talking; snow falling; a sunflower with a crack in it; the yellow omnibus trotting along the Bayswater Road. And I thought to myself, I’m the youngest person in this omnibus; now I’m the oldest…Millions of things came back to her. Atoms danced apart and massed themselves. But how did they compose what people called a life? She clenched her hands and felt the hard little coins she was holding. Perhaps there’s “I” at the middle of it, she thought; a knot; a centre; and again she saw herself sitting at her table drawing on the blotting-paper, digging little holes from which spokes radiated. Out and out they went; thing followed thing, scene obliterated scene. And then they say, she thought, “We’ve been talking about you!””

Is The Years a failure? Compared to the poetic masterpiece that is The Waves, I think I can understand the judgement. The Years is a long book, yet it doesn’t seem to go anywhere. Unlike Woolf’s more challenging works (and arguably, brilliant), it is a very easy book to read, quite entertaining and it flows very easily. Despite its length, it didn’t take very long to read. So it felt lightweight, compared to her other works. And this is perhaps the source of the problem with The Years, it fails by comparison.

That doesn’t mean to say I felt the book a failure in itself. It includes Woolf’s excellent characterisation, her insights and ranging eye. She continues to stab characters down in a few words, pinning them like a butterfly to a board with lightning quick observations. Her focus on the feminine experience, remembering that this covered a period during which women did not have the vote, and she shows how it is possible – through the characters of Eleanor and Rose – to exercise a political influence in spite of the lack of traditional franchisement. It is a lesson, perhaps, to those who throw out those pithy remarks about voting ‘I don’t know why people don’t vote; it’s their only chance to have a say in the political landscape’ when in fact this book shows that there are a myriad ways to be politically active, rather than simply putting an ‘X’ in a box once every 5 years. Perhaps the problem with The Years is that it covers so much ground that the focus become lost, the meaning hovers somewhere in the air above the book and its power is curtailed as a result.

I don’t think The Years is a failure. I think if I had read it before Jacob’s Room, To the Lighthouse or The Waves I would have thought more highly of it. And perhaps it is one of those books that benefits from re-reading, from slow and detailed examination. It was a pleasurable book to read, enjoyable in a way Woolf’s works often aren’t. It wasn’t a failure, and I don’t think it was a book that Woolf should have been depressed about. The problem is that Woolf had set the bar so high. For any novelist of calibre, this book stands up as an accomplished piece of work. For a writer of Woolf’s calibre, perhaps it does not.

The Years receives an enjoyable 7 out of 10 Biis.  

Reading Woolf: Flush

This is going to be a very short review, because I didn’t really like Flush at all. In fact I read it in a single day, perhaps not in the best frame of mind as my son was in A&E having been run over by a cyclist (my son’s fault, as it happens). Fortunately my son was fine, but the book wasn’t. Sorry Mrs. Woolf, not your best.

Flush is the story of a cocker spaniel dog, the property of the renowned poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning (famed for the lines “How do I love thee? Let me count the ways”). Through Flush we learn something of the life of EBB and her relationship with fellow poet Robert Browning whom she married against the wishes of her family, resulting in her disinheritance. Flush walks a fine line between representing the life of the dog, his jealousies and desires, against the backdrop of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s life. I’m not sure the balance is entirely right. What we know of Flush’s life has been constructed by Woolf from Barrett Browning’s various correspondences. There are some apparent inaccuracies, but not knowing much about Elizabeth Barrett Browning beyond her poetry, I wouldn’t have know this had it not been pointed out in the introduction.

 

We join Flush at the beginning of his life, born to the family of Barrett Browning’s contemporary Mary Russell Mitford. Mitford gave Flush to the sickly Barrett Browning as a companion, and at first Flush was excessively spoiled: fed delicacies from Elizabeth’s plate, fussed over and kept indoors. At first Flush chafes against this treatment, but later he learns to love it, to recognise his spoiled nature. Everything changes, however, when Elizabeth starts corresponding with Robert Browning. Suddenly her affections turn and Flush finds himself in the cold.

Perhaps the most significant incident in the book is Flush’s kidnapping at the hands of a Whitechapel gang. Elizabeth Barrett Browning pays a ransom for him, against the wishes of both her family and Robert. There is the sense that this event affects both Flush and Elizabeth Barrett Browning intensely. Following this Elizabeth and Robert marry in secret then escape to Italy where Flush is free to roam again.

That’s pretty much the crux of the story. Barring the Whitechapel event it’s all very pedestrian and there’s not a great deal to grab the attention. Consequently I found myself quite bored reading this book. It lacked the power, the intensity of others of Woolf’s work like, say, To the Lighthouse which also focuses on quite a small event but is different entirely in character. Instead Flush is a fussy book, a little formless and lacking Woolf’s keen eye and insight to lift it beyond being a mildly interesting view of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s life. There were elements of the book I intensely disliked, for example the focus on Flush’s ‘breeding’ and class, and I get the sense that Woolf was trying very hard to make this a book from a dog’s perspective without really giving serious thought to how different that perspective would be. Consequently it is a book that feels too heavily overlaid with human concerns and one wonders why she didn’t simply write a book about Elizabeth Barrett Browning as that would, I think, have made a much more interesting subject.

In the end Flush felt like a failure. It’s not a terrible book, but it’s not a particularly good one either. In reading Woolf’s diaries it is apparent that at the time of writing and editing Flush she was also absorbed in writing The Pargiters (what became The Years) and perhaps because of this Flush feels like an interlude, thrown out, perhaps, to bring in some income whilst Woolf worked through the difficulties in bringing The Years to life. A huge disappointment following The Waves and perhaps not surprising that Woolf herself referred to it as a ‘silly little book’, an opinion I’m not in disagreement with.

Flush receives a disappointed 4 out of 10 Biis. 

Reading Virginia Woolf: The Waves

The Waves is Woolf at her most unreachable, Woolf transmitting her highest art. Consequently it is also Woolf at her hardest to read, and as a person who generally likes to guzzle books down taking the time to give credit to Woolf’s great work was difficult. Yet worthwhile, I think. Very worthwhile.

The Waves follows the lives of six people: Bernard, Neville, Louis, Susan, Jinny and Rhoda, starting at their childhood in the nursery school they went to together and following them to their deaths. There is a seventh person, the silent Percival, who I will get to later. Their stories are told in blocks of perspective: Bernard speaks, Susan speaks, Louis speaks and so on, and this is the only perspective we receive barring the interludes between chapters in which the waves, the scenery, the time of day are described, forming a frame through which we view the passage of time. Yet the waves do not change.

To understand the challenge of The Waves, I think it’s best to allow the book to speak for itself. From the beginning:

“’Stones are cold to my feet,’ said Neville. ‘I feel each one, round or pointed, separately.’

‘The back of my hand burns,’ said Jinny, ‘but the palm is clammy and damp with dew.’

‘Now the cock crows like a spurt of hard, red water in the white tide,’ said Bernard.

‘Birds are singling up and down and in and out all round us,’ said Susan.

‘The beast stamps; the elephant with its foot chained; the great brute on the beach stamps,’ said Louis.

‘Look at the house, said Jinny, ‘with all its windows white with blinds.’

‘Cold water begins to run from the scullery tap,’ said Rhoda, ‘over the mackerel in the bowl.’

The initial part of The Waves is brief and choppy in that way, though later in the book each character is given greater space to speak and at this point I began to find it much easier to read. At this point, also, each character started to resolve into a distinct personality and it is testament to Woolf’s skill at characterisation that with so brief a remit she can draw something distinct from each character. I started to see how each resolved into a kind of conflict: Bernard and his ‘phrases’ whose personality was changeable and existed only through and in the presence of others; Louis who could never forget his origins, who felt he didn’t ‘fit in’, who wanted to expunge his history with another, more noble origin; Neville who was sharp, who was true and somehow unforgiving, who loved one only (Percival); Susan who is of the earth, a person rooted in land and property; Jinny who is of the body, who is immediate and quick and of the moment; Rhoda who is uncertain who she is, who desires to be invisible, to be not herself, who finds being a challenge and a constant conflict of fear. There is a sense here and throughout the book that Woolf is exploring herself, exploring the nature of identity, what separates and unites us, how we are made and unmade by the perspective of others who surround us. Of all Woolf’s works I have read so far, this is the one in which Woolf the woman is most heavily present. You get the sense, almost, that you are exploring her mind, exploring her questing and imagining, her questions about the nature of who and what she is.

In some respects Woolf presents this quite openly. Here, it seems Woolf addresses criticism of her work in which plot is often notably absent:

“But then Rhoda, or it may be Louis, some fasting and anguished spirit, passes through and out again. They want a plot, do they? They want a reason? It is not enough for them, this ordinary scene. It is not enough to wait for the thing to be said as if it were written; to see the sentence lay its dab of clay precisely on the right place, making character; to perceive, suddenly, some group in outline against the sky. Yet if they want violence, I have seen death and murder and suicide all in one room. One comes in, one goes out. There are sobs on the staircase. I have heard threads broken and knots tied and the quiet stitching of white cambric going on and on on the knees of a woman.”

Here, through Rhoda, she appears to explore the difficulties of being trapped in society life:

“’Oh, life, how I have dreaded you,’ said Rhoda, ‘oh human beings how I have hated you! How you have nudged, how you have interrupted, how hideous you have looked in Oxford Street, how squalid sitting opposite each other staring in the Tube! Now as I climb this mountain, from the top of which I shall see Africa, my mind is printed with brown-paper parcels and your faces. I have been stained by you and corrupted. You smell so unpleasant too, lining up outside doors to buy tickets. All were dressed in indeterminate shades of grey and brown, never even a blue feather pinned to a hat. None had the courage to be one thing rather than another. What dissolution of the soul you demanded in order to get through one day, what lies, bowing, scrapings, fluency and servility! How you chained me to one spot, one hour, one chair and sat yourself down opposite! How you snatched from me the white spaces that lie between hour and hour and rolled them into dirty pellets and tossed them into the wastepaper basket with your greasy paws. Yet those were my life.”

Then there is the enigmatic Percival. Percival never speaks for himself in The Waves, though he appears to be the pivotal point around which the others circle. Percival is loved by all, envied by some. Neville is evidently in love with Percival. Percival loves Susan, yet she refuses him. Percival is a hero who dies an un-heroic death at the age of twenty-five, falling from his horse in India. His death is a shockwave to the others, having invested Percival with all their expectations. And yet Percival never has real presence or weight in the book, we never really see nor hear him. We only know of his influence and the impact of his passing. It is an interesting approach, perhaps taking the premise of Jacob’s Room even further by denying Percival any voice at all.

It is an interesting book, The Waves. There is so much to say about it that I simply don’t have the space to get into here. Its style is unusual, it is the most inaccessible of Woolf’s books (so far) and yet it is the most thought-provoking and the most beautiful. It is so stunningly written, it is pure poetry from start to finish. It is a book to read slowly and to savour, a book to return to, to read in short bursts and then over again. It is framed by the concept of waves, it has a wave-like structure and a wave-like rhythm to its words. The protagonists speak in waves and then disappear. It was interesting, also, to see the appearance and re-appearance of the motif of the moth, as Woolf started the book as ‘The Moths’ and then changed it later, yet didn’t remove the concept entirely. Moths, waves: the idea runs through the book of something beating, something flowing forwards and backwards, sending ripples out into the world. It certainly creates ripples, ones which I need time and repetition to confront and understand.

It would be wrong to say I loved this book. I didn’t love it; I found it hard to read, exhausting at times. Yet it is beautifully written, thought-provoking and inspiring. I appreciate the artistry that has gone into its making and I know it is a book I will return to when I am better able to read slowly and absorb all of its wisdom. It is a wise book, it is explorative, it presents a lot of questions around being and identity which I don’t think it answers but prompts the reader to similarly question. It is pure poetry, and like poetry it takes time to absorb, it is something to be read, re-read and unpicked slowly. It is not a book to be swallowed down in great gulps, it takes patience though I think it rewards in equal measure. It is a book to be scribbled on and scribbled over in great quantity, and I cannot do it justice here. One must simply read it, and then again in ten years time read it again. A book for all time, and a great work of art. Whether or not you enjoy the book, I think you have to respect it. And I do.

The Waves receives a thought-provoked 9 out of 10 Biis.

Reading Virginia Woolf: Orlando

Earlier this year I was lucky enough to see the Royal Exchange Theatre (Manchester, UK) production of Orlando, starring Suranne Jones. It was a strange encounter. I was already familiar with the story, having read Orlando a number of years ago. It was a strange experience all the same. The story was narrated and acted, which created an unusual resonance, an off-tone which was somewhat distracting. Yet it was beautiful, at times compelling to the point of tears, and Suranne Jones leaped miles in my estimation as her performance was nuanced, gentle and brutal. I left the theatre unsure how I’d felt about the production. The story is magnificent, the delivery somewhat unsettling. I think this is a fair summation of how I feel about the book too.

It is, perhaps, unfortunate that my two initial introductions to Woolf – Mrs Dalloway and Orlando – put me off re-reading Woolf for some time, and in the course of my reading so far these remain the two that I feel most ambivalent and conflicted about. Orlando is probably what you would describe as exactly my kind of story. It confronts issues of gender, of the female ‘role’, it spans centuries of history, it has levity and adventure. There’s a lot to recommend it. Yet, again, I found myself struggling through it. I’m not entirely sure why.

The premise of Orlando is that Orlando, a boy, is born in the Elizabethan era. He is born into a wealthy aristocratic household and is fortunate to be taken under the tutelage of the Queen. Orlando the boy has numbers of adventures and encounters, until circumstances lead him to take a position as Ambassador in Constantinople. Here, in the throws of revolution, Orlando sleeps and sleeps and wakes one morning having become a woman. From that point on Orlando lives through the following centuries as a woman, landing in the ‘present’ in the end. It is an interesting premise.

That Orlando confronts the question of gender is quite obvious from the subject matter, and it is enables Woolf to use the text as a vehicle for exploring male and female roles though I think she manages to do this without it being a sledgehammer approach (though perhaps I’m biased there, I don’t know). For example here where Orlando approaches England for the first time as a woman and starts to realise what this will mean for her:

“She remembered how, as a young man, she had insisted that women must be obedient, chaste, scented and exquisitely apparelled. ‘Now I shall have to pay in my own person for those desires,’ she reflected; ‘for women are not (judging by my own short experience of the sex) obedient, chaste, scented and exquisitely apparelled by nature. They can only attain these graces, without which they may enjoy none of the delights of life, by the most tedious discipline. There’s the hairdressing,’ she thought, ‘that alone will take an hour of my morning; there’s looking in the looking-glass, another hour; there’s staying and lacing’ there’s washing and powdering; there’s changing from silk to lace and from lace to paduasoy; there’s being chaste year in year out…’ Here she tossed her foot impatiently, and showed an inch or two of calf. A sailor on the mast, who happened to look down at the moment, started so violently that he missed his footing and only saved himself by the skin of his teeth. ‘If the sight of my ankles means death to an honest fellow who no doubt has a wide and family to support, I must, in all humanity, keep them covered,’ Orlando thought. Yet her legs were amongst her chiefest beauties. An she fell to thinking what an odd pass we have come to when a woman’s beauty has to be kept covered lest a sailor may fall from a mast head. ‘A pox on them!’ she said, realising for the first time what, in other circumstances, she would have been taught as a child, that is to say, the sacred responsibilities of womanhood. “

There is more, of course. At its heart Orlando is a lightweight tale, full of silliness and raptures. Its premise is, of course, quite unrealistic and there is a sense throughout the novel that Woolf is having a little play with words, with spinning a yarn to the benefit and credit of her friends (inspired, as it was, by Vita Sackville-West). It is in spirit a fun novel, particularly in the early stages as Orlando falls in love with Sacha during the infamous winter storm that froze the Thames for several months and has his heart lifted then broken. These scenes are beautiful, evocative. Like here, as Sacha describes her home:

“Sacha, as if to reassure him, was tenderer than usual and even more delightful. Seldom would she talk about her past life, but now she told him how, in winter in Russia, she would listen to the wolves howling across the steppes, and thrice, to show him, she barked life a wolf. Upon which he told her of the stags in the snow at home, and how they would stray into the great hall for warmth and be fed by an old man with porridge from a bucket.”

I think where I lose the thread with Orlando is towards the end, where the writing becomes tumultuous and vivacious. It is, perhaps, a similar issue to that experienced in Mrs Dalloway when the spin and whirl of the writing becomes too much and I simply find it painful to go on reading. Towards the last ten pages or so the words jumbled and tumbled and spun and I really wasn’t sure what was going on. And perhaps the fact that it spins this way towards the end colours my whole experience of the book. I found myself just wanting to finish it, all semblance of enjoyment obliterated. Not a great experience to end with.

(I might still watch the movie though)

Orlando receives an unhappy 6 out of 10 Biis.