On Virginia Woolf

(Italics are quotations, taken from Virginia Woolf’s “An Unwritten Novel,” the subject of this piece.)

Virginia Woolf had an odd eccentric appearance that made people stare at her in the street. [1] [How quickly we make to read people! The human face holds more than a surfeit of mystery for us.] Her writing may have been her double – unsteady in its logic, bending the form of truth as fiction had known it before – square plots, shapely people, a scheduled time for tea then off off! to the next appointed activity in a sequential beginning-middle-end. No, in Virginia’s writing it is the Spring; and each word is a blossom in the mouth: The woods flit and fly – in summer there are bluebells; in the opening there, when Spring comes, primroses (115). In her own word, primroses – the beauty that is at once unmistakable but oh, so delicate! However can a petal fall if not by a phrase, so tragic, dropping some flickering note of despair? Well, my world’s done for! And there is the fall of an egg, the crack of a shell. What do I stand on? What do I know?… Who am I? Life’s bare as bone (121). Is it possible to give words to sorrow, the sorry thought of existence when we uncover how wrong we’ve been! – hardly it would seem, but Virginia crawls inside a hollow bone and lets the whiteness speak grief enough. Or if it is not the bone, then it may be the grey thread of a patchy glove, the green cardboard boxes of too many solemn rooms, the spot on the window of a passing train – the thousands of domesticities, aglow with meaning to a narrator drunk on the epiphany of gesture, the poetry of prose. Who could be such a fine interpreter of glance as she: such an expression of unhappiness on the poor woman’s face – and there is almost a symbol of human destiny with it (112)! The poor woman never knew such valor. And here is the beauty in it! When the forgotten or the squalid attain so much loveliness of words, what transformation ensues! – some indelible combination of the reproach of the world and the splendor of rhododendrons, a fling of red and white, for which [we] starve and strive (118). It is munificence most singular, the hum of a perfectly spun phrase. Surely Miss March – whose secret world we would never have known! – sees the truth in this. But why does the beauty of everyday things so often escape us? We do not find the meaning in them. Yet Virginia must and her characters may follow, with all the perception of a writerly writer’s creation of voice. And it is translated to us, but at first we think it is an inscrutable form – for what winding paths do these phrases traverse! Maybe this is the thing – so many hyphens, such tangled thought will give us pause. Meaning, deep and shining, is not at once clear to us. And if we have no recourse to meaning, what is there? Our ears linger on the cadence of phrase and we swallow, not without joy and not without fear, the thick and real beauty of white light [that] splutters and pours, plate-glass windows, chrysanthemums, milk carts at the door (121). The wor[l]d makes such poetry – and how! A bird squawks outside my window – and there is great sadness in it. Grey is the landscape; dim as ashes; the water murmurs and moves (121). A place where the littlest thing is not too crude. There is ripeness in every thing; the flowers in our hair, unnoticed till now, scatter to the wind – by the shudder in our bones.



[1] Detail comes from online source: “Virginia Woolf’s Psychiatric History” (http://www.malcolmingram.com/vwframe.htm).

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