Virginia Woolf (1927)

                                                        (credit: Wikimedia Commons)

Today, I am going to write a kind of post I very rarely write. I am going to take back much of what I had to say in an earlier post.

Back near the end of October of last year, I wrote about how I had come to see Virginia Woolf’s novels in a kinder light than I had seen them in my youth. But the post had been bothering me for weeks so last week I sat down to read the novel Mrs. Dalloway closely one more time.

What I gained from this third reading was a new respect for my younger self. I was smarter and more sensitive in many ways then than I am now.

I was most disturbed by Mrs. Dalloway when I read the book in 1971 as part of the assigned reading for a university course on the development of the English novel from Defoe to D. H. Lawrence. (30 to 40 pages of reading minimum per day, as I recall, or one would never keep up. I wonder whether the students at the uni now are pressed that hard. And that was just for one course.) The book disturbed me, but it did not make me dislike Woolf. In fact, quite the opposite. 

What came back to me just a couple of days ago was not that I had thought Woolf a supercilious shill for an unbelievably smug upper class in England. I could see even then that she was quietly mocking Clarrisa Dalloway and all her smug guests. They understand nothing of what has just happened less than six years before in World War One. Woolf left me in no doubt as to the silly superficiality of these people. The salmon was undercooked, and cricket is important, and – oh dear – a doctor's wife says quietly to Clarrisa, one of her husband's patients, a veteran of the war killed himself that afternoon.

What came back to me is this: I remember feeling very clearly back in 1971 that while Woolf got how cruel, obtuse, and stupid these people are, most of the people in my novel study class at the uni did not. In fact, for me to try to tell them was – like the doctor’s news – in bad taste. Yes, terrible things happened just a few years ago, but why bring them up now? Nothing to be done. So goes the world. Get on with the party. 

So, one of the things I’d like to take back from my post in October is any hint of the notion that there was something in these wealthy, spoiled people’s lives, some mysterious quality (their servants even referred to them as “the quality”), some extraordinary sensitivity to Art and Culture and History, that made them worthy of the sacrifice of all those young limbs and lives. Clarrisa is so upset for a minute or two when she hears the terrible news from Dr. Bradshaw's wife, as the doctor is passing it on to her husband, that she withdraws from her own party. ("What business had the Bradshaws to talk of death at her party?") 

But then Clarissa is back, and her old flame, Peter, is thinking how charming she looks. And it’s clear she thinks so too. All the same, you see, there is “something”.

No, there isn’t. The “something” about these people is a myth about as real as Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy. It needs to be said, and repeated, over and over. 

Did Woolf really think these people were drivel-driven drudges? She killed herself when the next war got under way. How sincere do we need her to get? 

The whole book drips sarcasm of the subtlest, bitterest kind to my ear. Woolf was too smart and too sensitive to ever have accepted that these “quality” really were worthy of all the maiming and death done to preserve them and their way of life. Clarissa's guests were bumbling clowns, including her MP husband and the many friends who come to see and be seen at the Dalloways’ party. If any of them, even the Prime Minister (who does come to the party), were anything more than muddle-heads, they show no signs of it anywhere in the novel.  

I guess I got too much of Marx in my early university years. I know his plan for society fails. Centrally-run economies wither. Market-based ones outperform them every time. But there’s much to be said for his analysis of history. The rich have played at war for thousands of years. It’s just that they and their sons nearly always aren’t the ones who fight, kill, maim, and die. Working class joes do that.

I think I see very clearly now why Woolf killed herself. In my view anyway, she saw her work fail almost totally - fail to bring to the ruling class, or most of Britain for that matter, any deeper examination of their smug assumptions. The novel's bitter irony was lost on them. For the ruling class, Clarrisa was a good representative for their way of life. There was a kind of dignity to people who hold their posture very straight and work at respectable firms or in government and speak with a certain accent. A kind of glow so worth preserving that it justifies any sacrifice. Or so far too many of them believed -- and believe to this day. 

No, it isn’t. No, they aren’t. Damn their stiff upper lips, their stiff backs, and their stiff minds. Ordinary working-class boys got laid in rows with white stones at their heads, rows that stretched out to the horizon. Millions of them. At home, their moms and dads wept and wept and got old still grieving. Broken. Them I understand.

   

                                               Canadian memorial at Vimy Ridge 

                                                     (credit: Wikimedia Commons) 

But the ruling class? At best, they are 90+ percent drunks, lechers, and thieves. The worst are homicidal maniacs, bent on getting into the history books or at least being mentioned in dispatches. (And in fairness, we should say that it was so in Russia, Austria, Germany, Turkey, and France, in fact most of Europe, too.) 

Ah, well. We only gain by all this analysis if we learn the lessons and do better. Teach the kids to like each other, all kinds of kids, everywhere, and live together and get along. It could be done. So, hug your kids and grand-kids and try, when you can, to tell them a man’s a man for a’ that. And a woman too.

In the shadow of the mushroom cloud, nevertheless, have a hopeful day. We are slowly getting better. The big question for us now is: Will it be in time?   

                                     Canada Bereft (statue at Vimy Ridge memorial) 

                                                  (credit: Wikimedia Commons)