[Vwoolf] A Night's Darkness, A Day's Sail

Sat Jun 4 05:01:33 EDT 2016

Thank you for that.  After all those years of fuss about copyright and its never being repeated on TV, here it is!

The first time I’ve seen it since it was broadcast on 18 Jan 1970.  Some of the contributions are transcribed and included in "Recollections of Virginia Woolf", NOBLE, Jean Russell (ed.).  It is thought that in the Mrs McNab passage, the camera ascends the now-demolished staircase of Talland House.

REVIEW:

“The Times”, 19 Jan 1970

The ghost lives

By Michael Ratcliffe

BBC I:

A Night's Darkness, A Day's Sail

Twenty-nine years after her death, Virginia Woolf retains, as disconcertingly as ever, her power to animate - and confuse - all those who knew her; and almost half of Julian Jebb's Omnibus film, “A Night's Darkness, A Day's Sail”, on B.B.C.1 last night was given to the sharply edited rememberings of Bloomsbury's more articulate survivors and disciples. It proved a rich and sometimes highly comic record of tribal memory stirring a still active legend. The ghost lived.

Only on the fact of Virginia Woolf's unquestioned genius was there any kind of unanimity. Just as Virginia Woolf herself invented necessary fantasies from their lives, so they each retained something necessary of her particular to themselves. She looked, thought Lord David Cecil, supported by a caption perfectly illustrating his point, "like a deeply mocking Madonna"; like the wife of a very distinguished soldier" (Elizabeth Bowen); like "a seventeenth-century abbess" (Raymond Mortimer); "a Botticelli dancer" (David Garnett); "a cross between a horse and a greyhound " (her niece Angelica, in whom something of her own stunning sense of urgency obviously survives).

Benedict and Nigel Nicolson, respectively grave and shining, sat in the garden at Sissinghurst nudging mutual memory and, in true Bloomsbury fashion, as firmly putting it down. They were star material; in their scenes, and when kindly Quentin Bell held the screen from over his spectacles, backed by long shelves of Virginial documentation, we were not very far from the world of Jonathan Miller's “Alice”. Was Bloomsbury "affected"? Lord David Cecil thought not, although it was said that they had this sort of breathless way of talking. The celebrated brand of italicized disbelief ("But you can't *possibly* mean ... ? *Too* extraordinary!") was given its place, too.

This was the day's sail. These interviews, firmly handled by Mr. Jebb and beautifully edited by Roger Crittenden, recalled the quality of Virginia Woolf's life, the personality, both of which were, in spite of the suicide, triumphant. Miss Bowen concluded with a late memory of Mrs. Woolf mending a torn curtain and suddenly rocking back on her heels in the spring sunshine, hooting with joyous and uncomplicated laughter.

Parallel with these bright orderings of the myth ran some more ambitious sequences. Following a suggestion made by Leonard Woolf in an earlier, quoted, film of 1967, Mr. Jebb sought to establish a visual link between the life and the work, between the ecstasy and the ultimate madness. A disintegrating animism is a terrifying prospect and almost impossible to interpret in other than abstract or surrealist terms. Mr. Jebb did not attempt that: instead, a camera lurching upstairs into a sheeted summer bedroom and homing on a bowl of flowers ("Will you fade? Will you perish?") provided an image of crack-up touching enough but falling far short of the terrible intensity that informed the accompanying words. Perhaps there were too many words.

The times of happiness were more successfully suggested: the childhood genesis of “To the Lighthouse” on a Mediterranean day near St. Ives, Elgar's “Introduction and Allegro” perfectly matching the luminous intensity of the scene; Mrs. Woolf's delight in the London summer elevated into total joy by the unlikely use of Chabrier's piano variations on themes from “Tristan and Isolde”. Mr- Jebb concluded his film with the cavatina from Beethoven's Opus 130 B flat quartet which Leonard Woolf had wished to hear at his wife's cremation. When the time came, he was so stunned and exhausted from the three weeks' search for her body that he could not bring himself even to mention it to the Dean at the top of the village.

The music came to rest on the blank face of Vanessa Bell's portrait of her sister and the filling-in could begin all over again. What about those famous evenings in Fitzroy Square? What did they eat? Oh, strawberries, cheap white wine, that sort of thing (George Rylands). But Duncan Grant, smiling his enchanter's smile, remembered principally the coffee. And perhaps, occasionally, the buns.

Stuart

From: Shannon, Drew 
Sent: Friday, June 3, 2016 10:43 PM
To: vwoolf listserve 
Subject: [Vwoolf] A Night's Darkness, A Day's Sail

Greetings!

I had no idea this documentary, A Night's Darkness, A Day's Sail, was available on YouTube.  Well worth looking at, given the people they feature, including Quentin Bell, Angelica Garnett, David Garnett, Janet Vaughan, Duncan Grant, Dadie Rylands, Louie Mayer, Ben and Nigel Nicolson, Raymond Mortimer, Elizabeth Bowen, William Plomer, and David Cecil.  I'd been wanting to see this since I saw it mentioned in Regina Marler's Bloomsbury Pie.  Enjoy!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fnN_Gik7or4

Drew Shannon, Ph.D.
Associate Professor of English
Mount St. Joseph University
5701 Delhi Road
Cincinnati, OH 45233 USA
(513) 244-4541
Drew.Shannon at msj.edu 
Historian/Bibliographer of the International Virginia Woolf Society

"I meant to write about death, only life came breaking in as usual." -- Virginia Woolf, Diary, 17 February 1922

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