Virginia Woolf (credit: Wikipedia) 

Yes, Virginia, There Is A War

I read some of Virginia Woolf’s works, as a young man in my 20’s and re-visited the same works in my 50’s. They were being touted at my university as genius works, literary art from arguably the finest stylist of the twentieth century.

For the life of me, I could not see what the fuss was about. She did handle the technique called ‘stream of consciousness’ with amazing skill. But her novels were about the trivial. For example, in Mrs. Dalloway, Clarissa Dalloway has a party. Several very "interesting" people are coming. We skip through the protagonist’s mind and into the minds of several of those guests as lightly and easily as if we were metaphorical swallows or wrens. Quick, smooth, gentle, even delicate. It is all handled with amazing skill on the part of the author.

But I know what I thought, in my twenties, at the end: boring. Boring past belief. Who cares if one spoiled upper-middle-class woman has a party to which a slough of other boring people come, and think and talk about boring, trivial things? I might as well have daydreamed about a hundred things and sat and stared out the window for five hours. Catatonic. A waste of skin and breath and hair.

It is only now that I’m past sixty that I am beginning to see something more.

In Mrs. Dalloway, one of the characters whose consciousness we pass through briefly is a soldier returned just a few years before from World War One. He is haunted by what he saw and did there. We feel his anguish, but only briefly. Then, we skip into another mind and dance delicately on into Triviatown. We find out later in the novel that, oh dear, he has committed suicide. Jumped off a high place, I think it was.

I know when I first read the novel, I felt a stab of real anger and sorrow that this woman, Clarissa Dalloway, and her trivial friends could treat as trivial the one person in the novel that maybe had a truly important, compelling story to tell.

But to me today, at 69, the whole novel speaks differently. What I see in it now is that Woolf was well-aware of how callous her 1920’s society had become. The Roaring 20’s. All were doing well, returned to their pre-war games and trivia. 

What had just transpired, 1914 to 1918, they did not have the depth of character to cognize, let alone empathize. All of this she saw, a woman who had lost men she loved in that war, including one of her own brothers. I now believe that Woolf subtly constructed the novel for people of sensibilities similar to her own.

   

                                                  At the front in World War I

                                                      (credit: dailymail.co.uk) 

How I wish I’d had better teachers when I first read Woolf.

But today, I think I see further. The author not only made me painfully aware of what that poor fellow and his comrades went through and then had to carry in their heads - if they were lucky enough to survive. She made the horror of war implant and then evolve in my imagination on its own. As a result, I did research and learned what the reality had been. She did not need to have the soldier tell of what he'd been through. And then, he killed himself - in the midst of a society that to all appearances didn’t “get” him and didn’t care to try. I ache for him as I write these lines.

I know now of the young officers on all sides from the upper middle class. Educated, sensitive, full of idealism and patriotism, which they had been programmed to think were the same thing. England, Germany, France, Belgium, Austria, Italy, Russia, Canada, the U.S., Turkey, Australia, New Zealand …the list could go on. Over 100,000 casualties in sub-Saharan Africa, a “theater” of that war that most people today know nothing about. Millions of fine young men, near to boys really. Squandered like found money. And more in the wars since, of course. How bravely they charged. Into machine guns.

Woolf was, it seems to me today, also trying to do what Thornton Wilder in his way did in “Our Town”: place a value beyond all measure on the small dignities in everyday life as shown in the decencies of ordinary people just interacting with other ordinary people. She felt instinctively that we don’t need to read any more about, and for sure don’t need to glamorize or celebrate, the horrors of war. She knew that there had been way more than enough of that particular form of madness. World War One only took it to a previously unimaginable, undeniable extreme. All illusions of “patriotism” and “idealism” got swept away in trenches full of rats, shit, mud, and exploding, gangrenous corpses.

I keep hoping some work of literature or film may tell it all and get the people of the world to give it up. But I believe I see now what Woolf was trying to do. 

Her effort to try to push her society’s consciousness in another direction came to little in the end, of course. Fellow authors could have told her as much. Vergil may have celebrated “arms and the man”, but Homer knew better, as did Thackeray, Mann, Hesse, Tolstoy, and many others. They wrote sensitively and changed nothing. Woolf was simply trying to tell that same message in a new way, one that might actually get results at the level of public consciousness. Or so I think now. Reading authors’ minds is one more trivial pastime, I suppose.

But I know because it is a matter of open public record that Virginia Woolf was deeply distressed when, in spite of the best efforts of herself and many others, another World War came, even larger and more terrible.

She really was a soul too sensitive for this world. She was likely what we now call “bipolar”. She had many mental breakdowns and had to retreat to total rest many times.  Many times, she tried to kill herself. Finally, while staying with friends in 1941, nearly two years into WWII, she succeeded. She walked into a river and drowned. Death by suicide, like the poor soldier in Mrs. Dalloway.

In the preceding months, she had seen the German bombers over London and the new generation of maimed young men coming back from the fronts. She had been to patriotic rallies in England where the rabid shouting of crowds whipped into patriotic frenzy had made her physically ill.

Was she trying unsuccessfully to repress her true lesbian self all those years? Was she born with other genes that made her bouts with madness inevitable? I believe these questions are not what we need to focus on in our assessment of Woolf.

I think I get her now. No wonder she seemed crazy. She saw with her eyes and felt with her heart and her whole self the cruelty and stupidity of this world.

Oh, no, Virginia. How I wish you had chosen to live. You weren’t crazy. No. It’s the world that’s crazy. You were the sanest person in the England of your time. 

Rest in peace, gentle lady.


   

                     German SS troops being executed by U.S. troops in a coal yard 
                                                   (Dachau, April 29, 1945) 
                                  (credit: Arland B. Musser, via Wikimedia Commons)