The Fin on the Sea

...When the run of reminiscence by friends and relatives was finally exhausted, a new wave of Woolfi-ana arose in such recent volumes as Michael Holroyd's massive biography of Lytton Strachey, and last year's Recollections of Virginia Woolf, edited by Joan Russell Noble...

...In her vigorous essays on modern fiction (her literary journalism and criticism are much livelier and more rewarding than her novels), Virginia Woolf decried the grubby materialist reliance of Galsworthy, Bennett, and Wells-then the titans of British fiction-on facts and objects, figures and things...

...a generous and lovable friend, but when her snobbery, jealousy, or fear was aroused, she could just as easily become a scurrilous vixen...

...The word bugger was never far from our lips...

...In her diary she kept a painful record of the anguish and terror that gripped her throughout the composition of Mrs...

...Though Virginia Stephen's intellectual pedigree was not so rich in Victorian eminence as Aldous Huxley's, she was nonetheless born with a cultural spoon of purest silver in her mouth...

...Bell exposes her worst side with delicacy and compassion, for the spectre of madness was never entirely absent from her days and insomniac nights...

...She is a redoubtable presence in dozens of British autobiographies, in the journals and letters of an ardent crowd of literary worthies, as well as in the memoirs of mere hangers-on (blessed always with total recall of their every encounter with the beautiful doyenne of Bloomsbury...

...Her first breakdown occurred when she was 13, and she twice tried to commit suicide before she finally succeeded in 1941...

...A number of reviewers have censured Quentin Bell for limiting Virginia Woolf to the events of her life and demurring from critical discussion of her art...

...A nephew would seem, in fact, the perfect choice for this biography, for if Quentin Bell must himself admit that "To know the psyche of Virginia Woolf...

...She loved her husband wholeheartedly, but found the "crudities" of physical love distasteful...

...She adored her sister but flirted outrageously with Vanessa's husband, Clive Bell...

...In the end Virginia Woolfs greatness depends on her personality, not her art, and Quentin Bell was intuitively right in the choice he made...

...Dalloway and the far more ambitious The Waves...

...She relied on concentric circles of metaphor that put a fatal distance between their poetic configuration and the concrete roots of human character and experience...

...The novelist's reality, she declared, consists in "the inexhaustible richness of human sensibility," the myriad impressions that the mind receives: "From all sides they come, an incessant shower of innumerable atoms...

...Woolfs letters and diaries that was previously available only to her husband...

...Her elegantly stylized, cut-crystal prose makes one crave the coarseness of brute matter, the dirty words and ugly faces that loomed beyond the snug confines of her brilliantly cultivated and solvent upper-class British world...

...She had little physical resistance to collapse, and without Leonard Woolfs selfless devotion, she would probably have died long before the War...

...Most important, he had access to a vast hoard of Mrs...

...Bell makes agonizingly clear the steep price she paid-or was always afraid she would soon be forced to pay-for the gifts that committed her to the making of literature...

...Virginia never quite forgave her father for depriving her of a classical education, but she also realized how crucially important it was to her development as a writer that from her early teens she had unrestricted freedom of Stephen's magnificent library...

...Why, then, does it matter so little in the case of Virginia Woolf...

...But in molding this evanescent reality into the lyric prose of her novels...

...Virginia later wrote: "With that one word all barriers of reticence and reserve went down...

...As a result the unity of her novels, as William Troy wrote, is "merely superficial or decorative, corresponding to no fundamental organization of the experience...

...Even more significantly, she came of age in those early years of the 20th century when the arthritic spine of middle-class Victorian dogma about life and art was beginning to crumble...

...She admired Joyce, and acknowledged that the "indecency" in Ulysses is the desperate act of a "man who feels that in order to breathe he must break the windows...

...life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end...

...Her father, Leslie Stephen, was first married to Thackeray's daughter Harriet, and by the time Virginia was born to his second wife in 1882, Stephen occupied a distinguished place in the world of Victorian letters as critic, editor of The Saturday Review and The Cornhill, biographer, intellectual historian, and above all as the power behind that monument to Victorian stamina, the Dictionary of National Biography...

...As she once wrote, only half-facetiously, "On or about December, 1910, human nature changed...

...Her strongest attachments lay in her passionately complicated friendships with women, particularly with Vita Sackville-West, but Bell admits that we will never be able to know with certainty whether or not she and Vita had a Lesbian affair...

...Sex permeated our conversation...

...She urged her readers to understand, on the contrary, that "Life is not a series of gig-lamps symmetrically arranged...

...The reason, I think, is that her novels have not endured...

...Like any cultivated and respectable Victorian family, the Stephens took it for granted "that the boys would go to public schools and then to Cambridge...

...These invaluable papers, and his own intimate store of family history, have enabled Bell to recount her life with both objectivity and affection...

...Curiously, his omission does not seriously diminish the strength of his book, and this raises a question about the stature of Virginia Woolf that the biographer may disregard with impunity, but the critic cannot...

...We discussed copulation with the same excitement and openness that we had discussed the nature of good...

...Yet it was also characteristic of Virginia that sex interested her mainly as a verbal game...

...Yet she could not follow his lead...

...A similar neglect of the writer's imaginative life would be unthinkable in biographies of James Joyce or Henry James...

...As for the girls, they would, in a decorous way, become accomplished and then marry...

...Her story is hypnotic and terrible, and Bell has told it superbly...

...In her early adulthood a life given to the excruciating but mandatory boredom of "correct" dinner parties with the "right" people was transformed by an earth-shaking moment in 1907 when Lytton Strachey pointed to a stain on her sister Vanessa's dress and said "Semen...

...What he can confidently tell us about is her temperament, a tangled skein of opposites: In the right mood she could be enchantingly witty and gay...

...From her husband to the transient apprentices at the Woolfs' Hogarth Press, she inspired exceptionally interesting gossip...

...As Bell demonstrates with lucid authority, Virginia Woolf was a contradictory mixture of virgin and bohemian, bourgeois and parlor Socialist, a writer wracked by "dread of the ruthless mockery of the world" and a boldly tenacious experimenter in new techniques of fiction...

...one would have to be either God or Virginia, preferably God," the difficulties would surely have been insurmountable to an outsider...

...Even in the best of them-To the Lighthouse, The Waves, and Mrs...

...Her nephew Quentin Bell undertook some years ago to write her definitive biography, and his fascinating book reminds us that (with the best-forgotten exception of Aileen Pippett's execrable The Moth and the Star) the extraordinary story of Adeline Virginia Stephen Woolf has hitherto been told only in anecdotal shreds and patches...

...its stealthy presence would regularly erupt in her mind as the image of "a fin rising on a wide blank sea...

...But it appears that the subject of Virginia Woolf has not yet been done to death...

...Virginia Woolf failed to find any unifying idea or form that could lift sensibility above the fragile impermanence of a cobweb of tenuous insights...

...In Virginia Woolf (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 530 pp., $12.50) Bell has brought the order of veracity to a chaos of dubious memory...

...In the hundreds of reviews and essays that she regularly contributed to the Times Literary Supplement and other journals, she drew upon an erudite familiarity with a vast range of books no university training could have bettered...

...Dallowayshe did not accomplish what she meant to do, did not capture the elusive realities of time and sensibility that she pursued with such obstinacy and courage...

...On recent reading, I found these books mannered, self-conscious, and stifling...