Notes on Virginia Woolf

VIRGINIA WOOLF--David Daiches--New Directions ($1.50).

For the late, probably great Virginia Woolf, Chicago University's David Daiches has written a helpful set of program notes for lay readers.

Virginia Woolf was all but born between the covers of a book, grew up and lived there until one day in 1941 when she stepped out to drown herself in the River Ouse. Her father's first wife was Thackeray's daughter. Her father was Essayist Leslie Stephen. Her husband was Essayist Leonard Woolf. Her brother-in-law was Art Critic Clive Bell. She educated herself in her father's vanguard-Victorian library, honed her fine wits against the most delicately abrasive minds in Edwardian and Georgian London. Her first novels, The Voyage Out and Night And Day, were a blotted watercolor of social comedy in Jane Austen's manner and her own brand of lyrical metaphysics. In uneasy, brilliant experiments, in critical essays putting such writers as Joyce and Arnold Bennett in their proper places, Virginia Woolf began to find her way.

She lived in an age when the word "reality" had lost its public moorings and meanings. Passionately sensitive to private intimations of reality, and to the problems of communication in a time which had no public alphabet, she once wrote: "One word is sufficient. But if one cannot find it?" She could not find it. But she rubbed innumerable words and insight against each other, achieved a luminous friction between lyric and narrative art. Her feminine intuition was strangely modulated by an obsession with time, and struck its profoundest resonances from the sounding board of death.

Death pervades each of Virginia Woolf's best books. In Jacob's Room a dead young man's life fades in other people's memories like a match streak on a tepid stove lid. In Mrs. Dalloway an image of all London shines and synchronizes beneath the reverberations of London's belling clocks. In To The Lighthouse, which Critic Daiches calls "the perfection of Virginia Woolf's art," the rhythms of time and death and change suffuse and subtilize a half-mystic seascape, a long-delayed excursion, an equally delayed resolving of family discord.

Orlando, an elaborate literary joke, uses time and death by making a myth of their powerlessness: its immortal, androgynous hero (Mrs. Woolf's friend, Victoria Sackville-West) is watched from the age of Queen Elizabeth into a night in 1928. In The Years Virginia Woolf used death and time chiefly by implication, and discarded all experiments. She was able at last, using traditional forms, "to convey her unique sensibility by sheer luminosity of language." And Between The Acts managed (not quite successfully, Mr. Daiches feels) to create an image of the whole past and present of England and resolve its mysteries and disparities in a nameless piece of music: "Was it Bach, Handel, Beethoven, Mozart, or nobody famous, but merely a traditional tune?"

Writing of Virginia Woolf's non-fiction (The Common Reader, A Room of One's Own, Three Guineas), Critic Daiches suggests that she might have made a good political pamphleteer. It seems rather like gelding the lily. Yet Mrs. Woolf is memorable for clarity as well as iridescence. A devoted artist, she was no political revolutionist, but she had her veins of wrath. She wrote: "We may prate of democracy, but actually, a poor child in England has little more hope than had the son of an Athenian slave to be emancipated in that intellectual freedom of which great writings are born." She added: "Intellectual freedom depends upon material things. Poetry depends upon intellectual freedom. . . . . Women have [always] had less intellectual freedom than the sons of Athenian slaves." With joy she remarked how at last "the sons and daughters of educated men are fighting side by side [against] the whole iniquity of dictatorship, whether in Oxford or Cambridge, in Whitehall or Downing Street, against Jews or against women, in England, in Germany, in Italy or in Spain."

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