Virginia Woolf s Art
Griffin, C. W. Jr.
Virginia Woolf's Art Virginia Woolf and Her Works, by Jean Guiguet. Harcourt, Brace and World. 488 pp. $8.50. Reviewed by C. W. Griffin Jr. Asa central member of the Blooms-bury group, Virginia...
...It was a time of optimism, confidence, and humanistic faith, inspiring a creative outburst like that of Pericles' Athens...
...Woolf have said, confronted with the following...
...The haunting presence of Mrs...
...Based on her childhood, this book posed a grave threat to such a hypersensitive writer...
...She had a marvelous gift for inventing sustained metaphor...
...Ramsay, an idealization of her mother, broods throughout the second half of the book...
...Asa central member of the Blooms-bury group, Virginia Woolf was immersed in the intellectual life of the Edwardian era—that innocent, happy time, so near and yet so far, when H. G. Wells was preaching the onward-and-upward gospel of science, G. B. Shaw was merrily smashing Victorian icons, and Bertrand Russell was solving the most baffling technical problems of philosophy...
...But surely one can demand more of a 180,000-word book than this desiccated exercise in critical taxidermy...
...Jean Guiguet's book falls short on most counts...
...Her snobbery, for example, is evident from the following comments on Joyce's Ulysses: "An illiterate underbred book it seems to me...
...Ramsay is the embodiment of life, love, and hope...
...Today, Virginia Woolf's name is ironically maintained more by Edward Albee's violent play, with its display of raw, savage emotions, than by her own civilized work...
...But despite the obvious hazards of the theme, the book is imbued with a classic serenity...
...For the key survivors the anguish and pain of loss continually interrupt the process of mending, the renewal of life...
...it was a religion...
...She dispensed with the humdrum cataloguing of extraneous details that clutter up the conventional novel...
...Simply as a writer, she is worth reading for her swift and simple prose...
...He glorifies her suicide with ludicrous extravagance: "The fact that she repeatedly contemplated suicide and eventually yielded to that temptation only confirms her zest for life, carried to excess...
...Though she lived well into the era that crushed these naive hopes, Virginia Woolf retained the supremely civilized, snobbish outlook of an aristocratic intellectual...
...Worse yet, Guiguet sentimentalizes a woman who perpetually fought sentimentality...
...For Virginia Woolf art was not merely a profession...
...the book of a self-taught working man, and we all know how distressing they are, how egotistic, insistent, raw, striking, and ultimately nauseating...
...To exist, for Virginia Woolf, meant experiencing that dizziness on the ridge between two abysses of the unknown, the self and the non-self...
...He sprinkles 1,743 footnotes through the text, mainly chips and fragments from Virginia Woolf's diary, which was published as A Writer's Diary by Leonard Woolf twelve years after her suicide...
...Guiguet does better in assessing Virginia Woolf's literary significance, but again his message is submerged by his pretentious jargon: As a proponent of clear, simple prose, what would Mrs...
...Despite clear evidence to the contrary, he glosses over her less admirable traits, which are nonetheless central to her personality...
...Even in her impressionistic, modified stream-of-con-sciousness passages, she maintained the taut discipline of the classicist...
...Reason appeared destined to replace power as the guiding principle in human affairs...
...Through it all stands the lighthouse : a symbol of human evanescence, but also a symbol of hope, and a goal finally attained...
...Like the existentialists, whose jargon he occasionally parrots, Guiguet is leaden, deadpan, pompous, and pedantic...
...They added the challenge of contemporaries to the inspiration of the classics...
...Her peculiar gifts, above all conquest of the personal and the sentimental, are best illustrated in To the Lighthouse, which, I think, ranks as one of those rare, perfect little masterpieces such as The Red Badge of Courage...
...The final phrase sets one pondering...
...Her ecstatically alert mind kept constantly distilling experience, refining her material until she had literary gold, common truths captured in passages that read like spontaneous poetry...
...Through her writing she attempted to make terms with life...
...In Leonard Woolf's words: "It seemed as though human beings might really be on the brink of becoming civilized...
...In her pioneering experiments with the novel, she sought to reveal the inner life—the isolation, anguish, and joy—of super-civilized beings like herself and her friends...
...The task of analyzing her work and the troubled personality behind it and of assessing her art in a frantic world cut loose from the comfortable, urbane world of early Bloomsbury is a worthwhile project...
...she collided almost daily with friends like Lytton Strachey, E. M. Forster, Roger Fry, Clive Bell, Desmond McCarthy, and John May-nard Keynes...
...It is competent enough in outlining Virginia Woolf's place along with Proust and Joyce as a pioneer in the literary exploration of the subconscious...
...Yet if today her world seems narrow and sheltered, I think her work still has enduring value and will come into its own when the world has settled into a stabler shape...
...Despite the ultimate failure, her work stands as testimony that the struggle was worthwhile...
...Her death rips a whole social fabric of family and friends and leaves it in tatters...
...The text is interrupted by continual paraphrasing and quoting, often to little discernible purpose...
...In the rarefied atmosphere of Bloomsbury, genius was commonplace...
Vol. 30 • November 1966 • No. 11
