[Vwoolf] Weighing in

Mark mark.travis at frontier.com
Sun Aug 25 16:40:54 EDT 2013


As a non-academic Common Reader, my path to Woolf has been somewhat more 
circuitous than the many venerable scholars on this listserv.

I was around 12 or 13 years old when the film 'Who's Afraid of Virginia 
Woolf' made some sensational and controversial buzz in the U.S.  The Burtons 
were still all over the tabloid press and some of the language and thematic 
elements of the movie were unprecedented in American cinema.  But to a kid 
growing up in an Iowa town on the Mississippi River, none of that meant too 
much.  I certainly had no idea who Virginia Woolf was.  But there was 
something about the name that intrigued me.  Just the look of the two words 
in print triggered something in my mind.  The capital V of the first name 
followed by the consonant that visually couples two Vs together to form the 
W and then the W followed by the two round vowels created an image that 
stuck in my head.  I didn't realize this at the time and I certainly 
couldn't have expressed it, but I'm convinced the impression was there.

Then when I was in college, I auditioned for a production of Albee's play. 
I did not have the experience or maturity to play George and I was the wrong 
type for Nick.  I ended up working props.  So I was there for every 
rehearsal and performance.  I had never seen the film but now I began to 
memorize whole sections of the dialogue.  I shared an apartment with a guy 
that I had a brief affair with and he was a huge fan of the movie.  We used 
to toss lines back and forth to one another as a kind of silly game played 
by two young theatre majors to amuse ourselves.  I did learn to appreciate 
the power and eloquence of Albee's use of language in the play.

By this time, the early 1970s, I did know that Virginia Woolf was a writer. 
I had the impression that she was fairly obscure.  I remember looking in 
either my hometown public library or possibly the university library at some 
of her books.  But I was not yet interested enough to pick one of them out 
and read it.

Fast forward to the early 1990s and to Seattle, Washington.  I had recently 
lost a beloved partner to HIV.  Grief is a burden one bears mostly on one's 
own but if one is lucky, there may be a few people that are generous enough 
and able to listen to its expression without shying away from it.  My friend 
Melanie was my chief support during this time, the most difficult of my life 
thus far.  We often went to movies together in those days.  One afternoon we 
went to see the film 'Orlando'.  Neither of us knew much about the novel or 
Woolf or Vita Sackville-West.  But we were both delighted with the 
combination of whimsy, imagination and feminist expression in this film.  At 
some point, I finally read the novel.  As I said, I didn't know anything 
about Vita Sackville-West and read it as an imaginative, satirical piece 
about literature, the literary world, cultural shifts and attitudes about 
gender as seen over a period of 400 years of English history.

Later in the 90s there was another movie of one of Woolf's novels released 
that starred one of my favorite actresses, Vanessa Redgrave.  Again, I had 
no prior knowledge of 'Mrs. Dalloway' or what its origins were.  Here was a 
film about the wife of an MP giving a party in post WWI London who 
reminisces about making the crucial life choice to marry a man who will give 
a her a comfortable life rather than marry another suitor who attempts to 
challenge her into thinking for herself and breaking out of the perimeters 
of convention.  There is a strong attraction to a female character thrown 
into the mix as well.  Then there was this seemingly unrelated story about a 
shell-shocked soldier who commits suicide rather than put himself into the 
hands of doctors he does not respect.  One of these doctors shows up at 
Clarissa Dalloway's party and tells the story of the young soldier's death 
that had happened that very day.  And so a seemingly slim link is 
established between the two story lines.

When I read 'Mrs. Dalloway' I had never read anything quite like it before. 
I was never a good student.  I loved to read but I am not a fast reader and 
I almost never read books that were assigned reading throughout my years of 
schooling.  Being from a conventional, working-class family, I also had a 
prejudice against literature or movies or theatre or art of any kind that 
didn't tell a straight-forward story in a conventional form.  This had 
melted away somewhat when I was in college and experienced a couple of 
Albee's plays and a production of Pinter's 'The Birthday Party' which I 
don't pretend to understand.  But I was utterly fascinated by it, 
nonetheless.  I was learning about art that attempted to convey a sense of 
the 'unspoken' and challenge the mind to fill in the spaces.

For some reason I remember seeming to fly through the pages of 'Mrs. 
Dalloway'.  There seemed to be a rhythm to the prose and I had learned 
enough by this time to recognize the grace and elegance of the writing. 
Beautifully composed sentences with marvelous imagery and the narrative 
passed from one character's point of view to another's and then to another's 
and then back again.

Then there was 'The Hours'.  Still with little knowledge of Virginia Woolf's 
life, I admit to being immersed enough in Nicole Kidman's brooding 
performance to forget that it was Nicole Kidman I was watching.  Julianne 
Moore was stunning as the woman trapped in a life she was completely 
unsuited for.  And Meryl Streep turned in her usual brilliant performance as 
the Clarissa Dalloway parallel, giving a party for her writer friend who was 
suffering from the effects of both AIDS and the treatment for it available 
at the time.  Another spark of interest in Virginia Woolf was ignited.

Melanie began to read Hermione Lee's biography of Virginia Woolf.  Her 
enthusiasm infected me and I eventually picked up a paperback back copy of 
the voluminous book and also purchased a magnifier because the print was so 
small.  Finally I had a context for the little reading I had done and also a 
fascinating story about an extraordinary woman.  Her last letter to Leonard 
Woolf made me feel my late partner was somehow speaking to me, telling me 
why he had to leave me and I remember calling Melanie in tears after I read 
it.

>From there I eventually read all of the novels, 'A Room of One's Own', 
'Three Guineas', both of the 'Common Reader' volumes, the short stories, the 
diaries and for some time now I have been reading the six volumes of 
letters.  The brooding, prosthetic nose wearing Nicole Kidman character has 
been replaced by a very different image in my mind.  I am awed by the genius 
that attempted to break out of traditional forms and create a new way of 
writing.  'The Waves' is like some beautifully constructed piece of 
architecture or music to me and I continue to be awed by it.  Knowing about 
the Stephen family gives 'To the Lighthouse' a poignancy that Woolf almost 
seems to reject in the 'Time Passes' section where she tosses off the 
knowledge of Mrs. Ramsey's death and the deaths of two of the Ramsey 
children in short, unsentimental statements of fact.  All of her fiction, 
with the possible exceptions of 'The Voyage Out' and 'Night and Day', are 
like working mental puzzles and I find myself increasingly drawn to 
open-ended works that leave room for the mind to speculate.  I think the two 
'Common Reader' essay collections have led me to read books I probably 
should have read during my college and high school years.  Melanie and I 
went to England in 2005.  We stayed in Bloomsbury, travelled to Monk's 
House, Charleston Farmhouse and took the train to Cornwall where we stayed 
in Talland House in St. Ives for a weekend.  It was an enriching experience 
and added to our appreciation of Virgnia Woolf's body of work.

So I guess I came to Woolf's writing through the rather plebeian medium of 
the movies.  Up until the last 10 or so years, my selection of books to read 
has come from seeing a film adaptation of a particular book.  I think I have 
at least been able to pick some books that have some literary merit over the 
years.  Lately, however, there haven't been many movies that have inspired 
me to leave my house, let alone buy a book.  So I continue dusting off old 
classics and occasionally picking up Volume Four and reading a few more 
letters about the creation and publication of 'The Wave's and Woolf's 
contentious relationship with composer Ethel Smyth.  How entertaining so 
many of those letters are!  Some day I hope to get to the essays as well. 
In my own ignorant way, Woolf has become a life long quest for me.

Mark Scott
Common Reader 





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