Staying in Touch

...At Falconer the flesh is always being aroused or abused, subdued or gratified, either in reality or in recollection...

...But we do not go to the Letters for history---of that we have a large shelf SAUL MALOFF'S most recent book is Heartland (Scribner's...

...but we are in another realm of the mind when the jealousy proves kin to "sibling rivalry" with herself as dispossessed elder sibling to Vanessa's children, her own nephews and niece...

...Their fiat is dismissed with odiurn~ "acid lemon colors against black currains, and one white rose against a wall the color of skim milk"--and he, of whom "one instinctively says: 'What a Whippersnapper!' " with his "little mongrel cur's body...

...Given her history of attempted suicide and psychosis, and the hovering threat of its recurrence, it was decided that she not have children, though early in the marriage (which was soon to become sexless while remaining loving and utterly devoted) she speaks confidently of doing so, and following the decision she remains preoccupied with what she experienced as dreadful loss, yet another affliction...

...the founding,, with her husband Leonard, of Hogarth Press...

...stop and turn back to examine a passage, an allusion, note an omission (why does she never mention her mother who died when she was 137 why does she so seldom mention her illustrious,father...

...peer closely at an odd juxtaposition, watch for the slip of the pen and ponder what it may tell us--bow, since we know past and future, by what circuitous path it may lead to the inevitable fulfillment of the prophecy...

...Colin and Anne were once a playwright and an actress who, sensing their own limitations, turned to teaching...

...GERALD WEALES V mOINIA WOOLF is writing her sister Vanessa Bell, the recipient of roughly one-third of the 600 letters which Volume Two of the projected six volumes of her immense correspondence comprises.* The date is November 11, 1918, the end of the most ravaging war in history (until the next one...

...all--everything: the people, the house itself, its furnishings and decorative objects, paintings---that entire litCommonweal: 371 fie universe falls dead beneath her pen...

...The volume begins in darkness...

...BOOKS C] BI LS ]'OR CIIEEVER JANET GROTH / r JOHN CHEEVER Knop/, $7.95 Ezekiel Farragut, the hero of John Cheever's new novel, Falconer, inhabits a religious and social topography roughly bounded by the contours of his name...

...The splendid comic writing of the letter dated 29 January 1918 concerning a love triangle ensnarling dear friends being too long to quote, we must content ottrself with a couple of instances from a horn's plenty...

...Yet to make too much of these elements grossly distorts the harmonic range...

...and she is still more than twenty years away from the next major breakdown, which was to be her last, and the day she entered her element, the gentle releasing waters of the River Ouze in which she drowned herself...

...We also go to the Letters out of impure motives...

...Terrible scenes of cruelty, degradation and lust take place...

...The production begins somewhat tentatively, the scenes less vivid than they sound on the page, but as the play progresses, the Anne (Roberta Maxwell) and the Colin (Brian Murray) develop such substance that the soliloquies belong to them, not, as I feared, to the playwright...

...They are of a piece--beautifully feminine, womanly, unmistakably herself and no one else...

...it is even understandable that she should have been jealous of Vanessa's children (and yet be a fond and attentive aunt and godmother...

...You remember the kind of politeness, and the little jokes, and all the deference, and opening doors for one, and looking as ff the mention of the w.c...

...Adoring younger sisters are scarcely new creations under the sun, but her relationship with Vanessa insists on our attention...

...We watch her as Leonard did...

...She suddenly asks her sister: "Do you ever feel that your entire life is useless~ passed in a dream, into which now and then these brutal buffaloes come b u t t i n g ? . . . I believe having children must make a lot of difference...

...With this fact Cheever takes his laigest risk, for aside from the sheer implausibility of it, two other problems arise out of a Cheever novel with such a setting and such a theme...

...From that point, allowing for some small lapses, the letters are purely exhilarating (even, to my taste, these endless gossips about servants which Nicolson finds tedious, as indeed they would be if written by anyone else), rifled with marvelous observation of people, books, scenes--the incessant waves of things happening...

...As the novel opens, the state is in the act of appending something new to Farragut's name--the number 734508-32...

...Strangely mellowed by this experience, Farragut sees Chicken safely across the bar and, in the end, slips back into the outside world in the dead man's shroud...

...Not so positive an image as the classical phoenix, the shared final moment suggests that there are living coals in these ashes...

...The play ends as Anne lifts Colin's head and looks into his face...

...On the level of action, nothing very much happens...

...As I watched the play on stage, the doubts disappeared...

...of her distinguished career in literary criticism...

...In this and in his willynilly coupling of the sacred and profane he is reminiscent of John Donne...

...Two days later, again writing to Vanessa, again deploring the loud, festive messiness of Armistice (now even more nastily: "The London poor, half drunk and very sentimental or completely stolid with their hideous voices and clothes and bad teeth, make one doubt whether any decent life will ever be possible, or whether it matters if we're at war or at peace...

...and yet perhaps its [sic: she almost never uses the apostrophe] no good making them responsible for one's own inefficiency---but I mean rather transparency-nonentity--unreality...

...and then another inch protrudes, which must be the last...

...Both elements are in fact present, but it would be a pity to come away from this book having got no more from it than that...

...As Rudkin told Gussow, "An awful lot of my work is about love...

...Reading the play, I had some doubt about the long soliloquies which carry the play thematically beyond the personal story...

...These heroes have families who--deeply implicated as they are in America's civic and military history--seem always to have fallen, just the generation before, from positions of wealth into reduced circumstances...

...and it isnt the last---and so on, until . . . . " Nowhere in these letters is she the pallid, diaphanous, ethereal creature of legend...

...Again that is one thing...

...Farragut has visitors, writes letters, gets into trouble, is punished, forms a homosexual liaison, and is exhilarated to witness his lover's escape...

...A moment later, war and peace behind her, she gives Vanessa the truly important news of the day---"gossip" of the sublimest kind, an account of a *The Letters o] Virginia Wool], Volume Two 1912-1922, edited by Nigel Nicolson and Joanne Trautman (Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, $14.95) "tea" with friends of the older generation, "all dressed up so irreproachably so nice, kind, respectable--so insufferable...

...The observations are perfect: exact, lethal...

...A superb, cruel performance, at once murderous and channing, which proves a mere preparation, now that she has wanned to the task, for bloodier mayhem to come, "gossip" about her beloved friend Ka Cox and her new husband, a painter-of-sorts...

...Ka, she remarks with almost audible pleasure, got "nervous when my eyes rested too long upon him...

...Letters were her health: they were written only when she was well, were a constant reminder to herself and others that she was well, and (apart from the occasional ominous headache) never better...

...When Virginia Woolf's eyes rested too long upon anything, the focus tended to narrow until it assumed the shape and tensile strength of a stiletto whereupon its object, pierced through, quivered once and died most horribly...

...We go to the Letters for the excellent reason that they are a pure pleasure to read...

...Farragut su~umbs, for a time, to the lethargy the prison authorities try to induce in all the inmates, lest they catch rebellious fire from reports of an Atticalike uprising nearby--but, rousing himself, he begins to build a radio...

...and elsewhere speaks of herself as Vanessa's "firstborn" adding, lest her sister be confounded by the news, that by "firstborn" she refers to herself, Vanessa's "darling B.", a pet-name signifying "Billy goat...

...in part because they were a "group," the last to observe the rites of friendship, their cult, rather than a "generation," which is a function of chronological accident, common experience, and perhaps a common aesthetic...

...He is being incarcerated in Falconer Prison for a crime of which he feels himself to be innocent, the murder of his brother...

...small comfort that she herself should have said of someone else's published privacies: "I know its a base pleasure that one takes in these indecent revelations-why do they do it...

...But if they enjoy it, I don't see why we shouldn't," though she also spoke of the "horror or having . . . all ones private papers hung up in public . . . . " The clinical point, however, must be made...

...after ten Lytton and Carrington left the room ostensibly to copulate...

...Rather, he has incorporated into the novel a symbolic richness usually associated with densely imaged poetry or the best crafted short story...

...The comic negation in the gesture cannot erase the fact that a phoenix has been introduced into these ashes...

...She speaks of Vanessa, whose life was notorious, a rather spectacular example of the "advanced woman" in that or this time, as an earth mother, as Demeter, Diana of the Ephesians, a fertility goddess (the paternity of whose third child was a popular guessing-game) a sea nymph dwelling in deep waters...

...as Leslie Stephen's daughter she had been born to that condition...

...Farragut himself, having turned white-collar worker, makes his living as a college professor...

...To say that the novel proceeds in symbolic or metaphysical terms is not to deny that the flesh is invol~,ed...

...Stay calm...

...Disguised in the robes of an acolyte, the escapee is borne away in a visiting bishop's helicopter...

...when, do what you will, fresh coils appear, and duty seems to urge you to break off...

...especially so, when against our will, we are guiltily cast in the role of prurient onlooker--watching, peering, for signs of the fatal flaw, the crack in the column which in the end will bring it down...

...but suspicion was aroused by a measured sound proceeding from the room, and on listening at the keyhole it was discovered that they were reading aloud Macaulays Essays...

...Reading other people's mail, when it's not meant for your eyes (as writers' letters, whatever their denials, often are) is always a dirty business...

...Readers are liable to expect from it either a social document, a protest of some kind over the horrors of our penal system, or, more typically, a Cheerer portrait of an alienated upper-middle-class American simply translated behind bars...

...certain to swell still more...

...even would convey nothing whatever to them...

...He has a wife, a son named Peter, and a home somewhere on the Eastern seaboard (where, customarily, a bowl of roses sits, mirrored, on a table in the front hall...

...She "knew" and wa~ known by everybody...

...Nothing touched her life without evoking a fullness and immediacy of response...

...What a bother~ After all, she was that very day trying to complete her second novel, Night and Day...

...That "mile" is the inner arm, between wrist and elbow, Nigel Nicolson explains in a footnote) and "How pleasant it would be to see you here, or to roll on the downs together, and the Ape [another pet-name for herself] would steal kisses from the most secluded parts...

...what a noise they make" is the prevailing sentiment...

...A painful business...

...10 June 1977:372 As I've taken unwonted liberties with her family secrets I might as well allow myself license...

...Outside her window a bled" England desperately celebrates: the guns of peace boom, sirens whistle, "people seem to be whistling and giving catcalls and stirring up the dogs to bark . . . oh dear, now drunken soldiers are beginning to cheer...

...How am I to finish my last chapter with all this shindy . . . . " Not that she was entirely without a certain degree of relief that the end had at last arrived (her set, the Bloomsbury group and its extensions, were in the main opposed to the war: many of them were C.O.s, and Bertrand Russell was not alone in having gone to jail for opposing the war...

...For sisters (for perfect strangers, for that matter) to share "intimacies" (we're talking about the eaHy years of the century, remember, when Victoria was still warm in her grave and may even have been listening, looking with us over the scribe's shoulder as she wrote)--for Virginia to have mentioned the unmentionable is one thing...

...Voices of Old Testament prophets reverberate down the corridors of his psyche, while, outwardly, he displays both the polish and the paranoia we have come to expect from Cheerer's heroes...

...but "O God...

...and in that same letter Commonweal: 373 (to Vanessa) she speaks of her "terrible faux pas" during a visit to herself and Leonard from Lytton's mother, the august Lady Strachey...

...Once she's underway she can't stop herself, as if the joy of recovered and augmented power drives her pen...

...They are the "day" and dalliness of her life, the proof and soul of sanity: spontaneous, awesomely intelligent, witty, eccentric, boisterously funny, endearing, robust, original, fond, malicious, magnificently malicious, sometimes wicked, bitchy, even vicious, always observant of the telling detail and the turning, shifting flow of life--of "things happening...

...Ashes is moving and intelligent, a theatrical evocation of the public world through the private suffering and courage of a single couple...

...Just as regular literary journalism served as counterpoint to the innerness of the novels and the privacies of her diaries and autobiographical writings, so did the letters serve as a way of breaking out of the isolation of the mind...

...However, when we look at these fleshly encounters of Farragut's and those of his fellow inmates, Cuckold, Jody, Chick10 Jutw 1977:374...

...I enjoyed it immensely . . . . " The report is devastating...

...The years encompassed, 1912-1922, are good years, some of her very best, and we partake of their excitement: the Imbrication of the The Voyage Out and Night and Day and--far more siguifieantly--Jacob's Room, the first of the six novels in the distinctive mode that will project her permanently into literary history...

...Foolishly, we want to say: Put it out of your mind...

...Understanding the necessity to put no-longer-possible selves behind them, they must now face the fact that they will not be parents...

...Virginia had thoughtlessly asked whether she, Lady S., had yet been to Tidmarsh, where Lytton was living with Carrington...

...and it must be said that her life and death, including her private papers, belong to us, conferred on us by her genius...

...Brace yourself: "I wish I could stop writing this letter," she says to Duncan Grant, " - - i t is like an extremely long visit to the w.c...

...There is even a kind of metaphysical wit in evidence: Dante is evoked, appropriately enough, except that we read his "Abandon hope, all ye who enter here," not over the prison gates but in a tattoo on Chicken's backside...

...what comes of reading other people's mail...

...A list of the friends and acquaintances, old and new, who received these letters or walk through its pages as familiars is to construct a directory to the literary, artistic and intellectual history of the great period: Lytton Strachey (these are the years of Eminent Victorians and Queen Victoria), Roger Fry, Clive and Vanessa Bell, Maynard Keynes, G. E. Moore, E. M. Forster, Duncan Grant, Katherine Mansfield, Desmond and Molly MacCarthy, Lady Ottoline Morrell, Sidney and Beatrice Webb, G. B. Shaw, D. H. Lawrence, T. S. Eliot . . . the familiar luminous company...

...petting and free rights of kissing and stroking the ladies mile...

...Bloomsbury" is by far the best documented of all "groups," individually and en masse...

...For once the tiresome word is not abused: she was a "compulsive" writer, knew herself to be one and said it most vividly...

...his face which appears powdered and painted like a very refined old suburban harlots, and his ridiculous tittle voice"-he is wholly dissolved in acid...

...nor even for biography--there too the record is abundant (valuably increased by Quentin Bell's recent biography), of her and of so many of the others...

...Those who suspend their disbelief will find that, in Falconer, John Cheever has written a stunning meditation on all the forms of confinement and liberation that can be visited upon the human spirit...

...We want to tell her to eat well, watch her weight, sleep and rest, take exercise, guard against overwork and excitement and be mindful of her excesses and intensities...

...it is, and often in the grossest way...

...Life would split asunder," she wrote in Jacob's Room, "without letters...

...Luckily for us she was driven to letter-writing by constant, compelling, almost daily need, equally to write and receive...

...Farragut's is no exception...

...They were, one feels, a primary way of reaching out when she was alone, of holding on, of staying in touch, of fixing securely the otherwise shimmering outlines and textures of the world-out-there which, in her mind, was always at the edge of becoming transfigured into space and phantoms, something more desolate and more watery...

...Against her own barrenness, her sister's fecundity and beauty appeared mythic in her eyes and perhaps induced her to make of her "curse" a kind of offering, a sacrifice, a vindication...

...Surely this is understandable...

...Shut out darkness and the night...

...Then by measurable degrees she regains herself, gathers force, tries it out, sees that it is indeed there at her disposal, extends its compass, extends it further, and still further, until she is confident of it, as we are...

...One wants to compile a large anthology of her leaping vigor of mind, spirit, senses--of her bounding health...

...and "It was very melancholy not to see more of you but the little I did see seemed in fine feather, and I had some difficulty in restraining poor B's amorosity, which became at moments violent--Never' was there a more lovely creature---and I'm afraid the children mean to make me jealous...

...Take a second look at that sequence of events, however, and it begins to assume almost allegorical configurations: to prefigure a kind of divine comedy, from Farragut's doom-laden entry into the gates of Falconer, through a time in Purgatory, to a miraculous, grace-bestowed happy ending...

...He sits at the deathbed of the least likable of his fellow-prisoners, a wretch named Chicken Number Two...

...Swept deliciously along by her wit, deftness, acuity-the sheer marvel of her writing--we in the midst of our relief and pleasure pause to scrutinize a phrase that otherwise would need no scrutiny...

...Just that: "And why," she asks Vanessa, "did you bring me into the world to go through these ordeals...

...We read her as we would a character in one of her own novels...

...Typically in her letters to Vanessa her manner is flattering, enticing, cajoling, entreating, begging--to say flirting and seductive would not be excessive or reckless...

...but for her to have informed her sister of every descent of the "curse of Eve" (her phrase, along with "monthlies," "periods"--and "affairs" in the sense of monthlies and periods, not in the contemporary sense) that seems quite another...

...We watch her as her doctors and nurses did~better, knowing more than they did at a time when her doctor believed influenza to be a disease of the nervous system treatable by milk and ovaltine...

...in the early years recorded here she is desperately ill and then slowly, cautiously, convalescent, periods marked by long silence, a terrible emptiness...

...yet again, making all possible allowances for playfulness, the conventions of the period, fancy, private jokes and the pecularities of family manner, what are we to make of this--again, always, to Vanessa: "Its [sic.] your aristocratic aloofness that intimidates me---who always was so soft and attached, like an adhesive oyst e r . . . " and "if I stay with you, shall I get special attention...

...typically she implores her sister to visit her (their country houses were within walking/cycling distance of each other) or to invite a visit from her, dangling the treasure of rich, naughty gossip as inducement and reward...

...Knowing their background and immediate foreground, knowing bow their life will eventually end, we become voyeurs, pornographers of her psyche...

...We observe her in the process of becoming Virginia Woolf and taking immense pleasure in being herself, as we must...

...Yet this is no allegory Cheerer is giving us...

...Colin explains that when he tried to tell Cousin Sammy that "we have to try to find some new way," Sammy, who is willing to fight until "Ulster is in ashes," made an up-yours sign and said, "Phoenix yerself...

...She became perfectly glum and stony: and said at length, to L: 'Well, what d'you think of it all?' L: thinking she meant the relationship between Lytton and Carrington was beginning a long account of his views on buggery, when we realized that she was changing the conversation to the food famine[" At this point she is writing Night and Day (in which Vanessa figures prominently as a character) and is soon to begin lacob's Room, the first of the "Virginia Woolf" novels and the gateway to the great years...