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Posts from the ‘Virginia Woolf’ Category

Aug 3

Week 31 Reading (2026) Virginia Woolf & Samuel Delany

Virginia Woolf. Moments of Being: A Collection of Autobiographical Writing. 2nd ed. Harcourt, 1985. The earliest of the five pieces in Moments of Being is “Reminiscences,” begun in 1907. Written when Woolf was just a fledgling writer, it is addressed to the unborn child of her sister Vanessa, who had just married Clive Bell that year. Their son Julian was born the following year. As a result, this recollection of Virginia and Vanessa’s childhood is written a bit stiffly, yet there is great charm to the way in which it is addressed directly to her future nephew/niece. “A Sketch of the Past,” on the other hand, was written in 1939, less than two years before her death and it’s Woolf at her best—casual, humorous, precise, hyper-perceptive, and always aware of a writer’s limits. Before she can properly begin this memoir (which Vanessa urged her to write), she must elucidate “the memoir writer’s difficulties” and tell us why it “is so difficult to describe any human being.” This, in spite of the fact, that she can nail another person in a phrase. The other three absolutely delightful pieces come from her membership in the Memoir Club, a group of her “Old Bloomsbury” friends who started to gather again after World War One to read bits of memoir to each other.

Newly Redacted

Two new books have been added to the constantly growing Redacted bibliography at the top of my blog. Both of these newly added titles were written by Sarah J. Sloat. In Hotel Almighty (Sarabande Books, 2025) she reproduced about one-quarter of the original pages of Stephen King’s 1987 novel Misery and then redacted his original text through pretty much every method possible. Whatever was left became her poetry. Then, on top of each page, she collaged playful imagery. In her second book, Classic Crimes (Sarabande Books, 2025), she did the same thing with the original pages of books by William Roughead, who wrote true crime stories and books for six decades beginning around 1889.

Why did I decide to read Babel-17, Samuel R. Delany’s 1966 Nebula Award-winning sci-fi novel now? Because I love the title and had somehow managed to overlook it when I plowed through science fiction as a teenager. Because it is the book’s 50th anniversary. And because the main character is a poet. Shockingly, Delany’s books haven’t been on my dance card until now. I would have devoured Babel-17 when I was younger. Parts of it still hold up pretty well, even though science fiction has changed dramatically. The central character is a very famous poet, Rydra Wong, who is also captain of an interstellar mission with an interplanetary crew that includes several “discorporated” (or formerly dead) people. The real attraction of the book is that it is about language. It has somehow become essential that Rydra must translate a previously unknown language called Babel-17 if the Alliance is to survive the onslaught of the raiding forces, though I’m afraid the rationale for that passed me by. She also has a crew member who speaks a language that has no pronouns, like “I” or “you.” Try imaging that language.

May 29

Genevieve Kaplan Erases Virginia Woolf into Poetry

“Nothing was simply one thing.” Virginia Woolf. To the Lighthouse.

If you opened Genevieve Kaplan‘s chapbook Settings for these Scenes (Chicago: Convulsive Editions, 2013) and didn’t know how her poems were made (and you wouldn’t know that until you got to the final page), her first poem might appear to be more or less straightforward, perhaps informed a bit by Imagism. Even the space surrounding the words doesn’t look all that strange these days. But start turning the pages and the syntax in the remaining poems starts to disintegrate. The phrases get shorter and the space between words expands. There are barely any punctuation marks, but some intriguing word repetitions start to appear. One poem of twenty-four words in length repeats the word “in” eleven times to make its point. Another somewhat longer poem uses “in” fifteen times. The grammar of these poems (such as it is) has an occasional sharp corner that might suggest there is something unwritten that we are not seeing.

Kaplan’s opening poem

This beautifully produced small chapbook contains eleven, airy untitled poems which are all created by the imaginative recycling of the words plucked from one brief paragraph in Virginia Woolf’s 1927 novel To the Lighthouse. The colon- and comma-heavy paragraph that Kaplan has chosen comes from an important moment that occurs in Chapter 8, very near the end of the end. This is the first time since his mother has died that we are inside James Ramsey’s mind, reading what he is seeing and thinking. James, now 16 years old, is steering a small boat that is finally taking him, his sister Cam, their father Mr. Ramsey, Macalister (the boat’s owner), and Macalister’s son to the Lighthouse, after a delay of more than a decade. The wind has gone slack and James looks over at his father, who is calmly reading a book. In the paragraph preceding the one used by Kaplan, James thinks, “I shall take a knife and strike him to the heart.”

He had always kept this old symbol of taking a knife and striking his father to the heart. Only now, as he grew older, and sat staring at his father in an impotent rage, it was not him, that old man reading, whom he wanted to kill, but it was the thing that descended upon him—without his knowing it perhaps: that fierce sudden black-winged harpy, with its talons and its beak all cold and hard, that struck and struck at you (he could feel the beak on his bare legs, where it had struck him when he was a child) . . .

But then James begins to see his father in a different light. In the first half of Woolf’s book, Mr. Ramsey had repeatedly blamed bad weather as an excuse not to take James and his siblings across the bay to the Lighthouse, an outing James especially craved. But now, ten years later, he wonders if his father couldn’t help himself. James “supposes” an image of a child seeing a wagon “ignorantly and innocently” crushing someone’s foot. He equates this image of the wheel with the manner in which his father heedlessly commands everyone around to obey him, in effect, crushing them in the process. But perhaps like the wheel, his father has always acted like this ignorantly and innocently. Then comes the paragraph that Kaplan uses for her redacted poems:

But whose foot was he thinking of, and in what garden did all this happen? For one had settings for these scenes; trees that grew there; flowers; a certain light; a few figures. Everything tended to set itself in a garden where there was none of this gloom and none of this throwing of hands about; people spoke in an ordinary tone of voice. They went in and out all day long. There was an old woman gossiping in the kitchen; and the blinds were sucked in and out by the breeze; all was blowing, all was growing; and over all those plates and bowls and tall brandishing red and yellow flowers a very thin yellow veil would be drawn, like a vine leaf, at night. Things become stiller and darker at night. But the leaf-like veil was so fine that lights lifted it, voices crinkled it; he could see through it a figure stooping, hear, coming close, going away, some dress rustling, some chain tinkling.

Woolf’s prose, at times, approaches music, its grasp of comprehension nearly gone. This dream-like vision of a frictionless childhood moment is a massive contrast from Jame’s’ thought only a moment earlier that he would murder his father. In another moment, James is going to look up and see that they have almost arrived and he will say to himself “So that was the Lighthouse, was it?” But wait. “No, the other was also the Lighthouse.” He thinks about that distant object they used to see across the bay from the house as children. That, too, was the Lighthouse. “Nothing was simply one thing.”

Kaplan has chosen a paragraph that lends itself to great poetic potential and variation. A good portion of Lighthouse takes place in a garden very much like the one that James “supposes.” It’s adjacent to the house on the Isle of Skye where the Ramsey family traditionally spent their summers—the parents, all eight children, plus several adult roomers. In the novel, the garden acts as a kind of theater where people eye each other across the grass, summoning up minor complaints, old grudges, moments of curiosity, or flashes of admiration for one another.

As I read and reread Kaplan’s poems, I found myself pausing to look at words in isolation, in combination with the words above and below, and then becoming indecisive about which words were supposed to connect across the broad spaces. Was the word “s o” in the poem above supposed to be read with a stutter? These poems are suggestive of more possibilities than we normally take from a standard poem with directional reading. In the poem on the left immediately below, it is possible to read “One / voice / in the / the breeze” and “came / a / rustling” by following cascading lines rather than reading strictly left to right. And, as several of these poems suggest about themselves, they are visually “very thin,” full of space. Woolf’s paragraph contains 167 words, while Kaplan’s poems economically use between 14 and 38 words. Yet, skeletal as they are, each of Kaplan’s microcosms reflect Woolf’s original paragraph and novel in ways that I find haunting.

Because the same words appear in the exact same geographic locations on the page in different poems, we can see that Kaplan is working from a fixed version of Woolf’s paragraph and is simply plucking out the words she doesn’t want to appear. This leaves the remaining words—the current poem, if you will—glued in place. The placement of the words is fixed; Kaplan can’t adjust their location.

Genevieve Kaplan’s erasures of Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse underscore the ephemeral nature of the vision that James Ramsey “supposes,” which “drawn, like a leaf / and leaf-like / could / go away” in an instant.

Vintage Classics Edition

[Check out the Redacted Poetry tab at the top of this blog, where there are bountiful fascinating things to read.]


Jun 25

3 Comments

Who’s Afraid of Virginia and Vita?

[Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant, photograph of Vita Sackville-West as Orlando, 1927]

It must be remembered that when bright colours like blue and yellow mix themselves in our thoughts, some of it rubs off on our words.

For too many decades I repeatedly rejected opportunities to read Virginia Woolf’s 1928 novel Orlando and I probably had a different reason each time.  But I recently watched Sally Potter’s better-than-mediocre film version with Tilda Swinton and immediately decided the time was ripe to give the book a chance.  Should I have been surprised when I found myself enjoying it tremendously?  The book follows the life of Orlando, from his birth in the sixteenth century through “the twelfth stroke of midnight, Thursday, the eleventh of October, Nineteen Hundred and Twenty-eight,” the final words on the final page.

One of the chief pleasures of reading Orlando is watching Woolf as she modulates the voice of her narrator between several registers.  Much of Orlando purports to be the work of a writer with a penchant for using flowery language and routinely complaining about the frustrations of a biographer.  (“We have done our best to piece out a meagre summary from the charred fragments that remain; but often it has been necessary to speculate, to surmise, and even to make use of the imagination.”)   On occasion, however, Woolf treats her mock biographer like a lowly studio assistant, grabbing the pen and inkpot away when a juicy bit of writing comes along.  One of my favorite such moments is Woolf’s extended description of one of the Great Frosts that resulted in the freezing of the Thames, which turned the frozen river into a thoroughfare of ice.  Here’s just a tidbit.

Here and there burnt vast bonfires of cedar and oak wood, lavishly salted, so that the flames were of green, orange, and purple fire.  But however fiercely they burnt, the heat was not enough to melt the ice which, though of singular transparency, was yet of the hardness of steel.  So clear indeed was it that there could be seen, congealed at a depth of several feet, here a porpoise, there a flounder.  Shoals of eel lay motionless in a trance, but whether their state was one of death or merely of suspended animation which the warmth would revive puzzled the philosophers.  Near London Bridge, where the river had frozen to a depth of some twenty fathoms, a wrecked wherry boat was plainly visible, lying on the bed of the river where it had sunk last autumn, overladen with apples.  The old bumboat woman, who was carrying her fruit to market on the Surrey side, sat there in her plaids and farthingales with her lap full of apples, for all the world to see as if she were about to serve a customer, though a certain blueness about the lips hinted the truth.

The crux of Orlando comes a little less than halfway into the book.

And now again obscurity descends, and would indeed that it were deeper!  Would, we almost have it in our hearts to exclaim, that it were so deep that we could see nothing whatever through its opacity.  Would that we might here take the pen and write Finis to our work.  Would that we might spare the reader what is to come and say to him in so many words, Orlando died and was buried.  But here, alas, Truth, Candour, and Honesty, the austere Gods who keep watch and ward by the inkpot of the biographer, cry No!  Putting their silver trumpets to their lips they demand in one blast, Truth!  And again they cry Truth! and sounding yet a third time in concert they peal forth, The Truth and nothing but the Truth!

The fearful Truth (fearful, at least, to the biographer) is that Orlando awakes one day to find that he has become a she.  This change of gender results in Orlando seeing the world anew through the eyes of a woman armed with direct comparisons to her previous existence as a man.  Men, needless to say, do not come off well.  In part, the gender change (or gynomorphosis, as Maria DiBattista calls it in the Introduction to the Harcourt edition of the book) points to the coded layer of Orlando.  Hidden in somewhat plain sight within Orlando is a coded homage to Woolf’s relationship with Vita Sackville-West and a great deal of the book takes place within Orlando’s country house, which is overtly based upon Knole, the 15th century residence inherited by Vita and famous for having 365 rooms, 52 staircases, 12 entrances and 7 courtyards.

In her own short Preface to the book, Woolf states her perpetual debt to a handful of her predecessors – Daniel Defoe, Sir Thomas Browne, Laurence Sterne, Sir Walter Scott, Lord Macauley, Emily Brontë, Thomas DeQuincey, and Walter Pater.  But it’s Defoe and Sterne who serve as the godparents for the sense of linguistic abandon, farce, and goofy experimentalism that define Orlando‘s DNA.  Nevertheless, Woolf seemed to have enjoyed creating a narrator who abuses this great heritage of English writing most of the time.  “Love, birth and death were all swaddled in a variety of fine phrases,” the narrator admits.

…she was like a fire, a burning bush, and the candle flames about her head were silver leaves; or again, the glass was green water, and she a mermaid, slung with pearls, a siren in a cave, singing so that oarsmen leant from their boats and fell down, down to embrace her; so dark, so bright, so hard, so soft, was she, so astonishingly seductive that it was a thousand pities that there was no one there to put it in plain English, and say outright “Damn it, Madam, you are loveliness incarnate,” which was the truth.

Orlando is illustrated with eight images, four of which represent paintings in the collection at Knole and four of which are photographs made specifically for the book.  Rather smartly, the purported historical photographs are each styled differently, with the portrait of Angelica Bell as a Russian princess harkening back to the 19th century photographs of Julia Margaret Cameron, Virginia Woolf’s great aunt.  First published in 1928, Orlando came out in the same year as Andre Breton’s Nadja.  Together, these were the first works of fiction that included photographs as part of the text to be published since Georges Rodenbach‘s groundbreaking novel Bruges-la-Morte (1892).  Nadja, too, is a biography in its way, the story of the author’s obsession with a young woman who may or may not exist.  But the forty-four illustrations in Nadja never include an image of the titular character.  Both books, however, format the illustrations as full page plates with accompanying titles rather than inserting them into the text as someone like Sebald does.  Orlando represents one of the surprisingly few photographically-illustrated novels for which the photographs were also fictionalized, with real people posing as characters in the novel.

[Vanessa Bell, Angelica Bell as a Russian princess, 1928]

[Lenare, studio portrait of Vita Sackville-West in the manner of Sir Peter Lely, 1927]

[Leonard Woolf, photograph of Vita Sackville-West as Orlando, 1928]

Jul 20

1 Comment

Mitz

mitz-and-pinka.jpg

This photograph, which serves as a coda to Sigrid Nunez’s wonderful book Mitz: The Marmoset of Bloomsbury, about Virginia and Leonard Woolf’s pet marmoset, strikes me as the kind of image W.G. Sebald would have used. Its evidential value is about nil. Try as I might I really cannot say for sure where the marmoset is – possibly in the lower right hand corner of the wooden box? And even if that were true, does this photograph tell us anything about the marmoset that the Woolfs owned and treasured during the latter half of the 1930s? No. It can’t even show us what a marmoset looks like.

On the other hand, it seems perfectly fitting to use such a cheeky photograph to illustrate what Nunez’s website refers to as a “mock biography”. (By the way, have we failed to invent the portmanteau “mockiography” yet? Not quite. A Google search turns up precisely one previous usage for that word.OED here we come.) I think there is an underlying lesson in the way Nunez uses this photograph and the way Sebald uses numerous equally fuzzy and indistinct photographs. These are the kinds of photographs that mean considerably more to the people who were actually there, to the witnesses, than they mean to any subsequent viewer. This is the basis for the disconnect between people who feel they have photographed the Loch Ness Monster or a UFO and all the disbelievers who see only blurry nothings. How many times has someone pointed to a tiny speck in a snapshot and proudly said “That’s my daughter!”

Mitz is highly entertaining and if breezy wasn’t usually taken to signify an empty-headed read, I would have called this breezy because it is fun to read. But Mitz is not empty-headed stuff, it’s a pretty serious bit of biography and one comes away feeling almost intimate with Virginia and Leonard Woolf. Nunez uses Mitz as a vehicle to slip us into the eerily personal realm of their lives as they write, entertain, travel through the early days of Nazi Germany, grieve over the deaths of friends and relatives, and worry about their own health and mortality.

Mitz was first published in paperback in 2007 by Soft Skull Press, Brooklyn.

The first edition of Mitz, published in hardcover in 1998 by Harper Collins does not include the marvelous, mysterious photograph of Pinka and Mitz. The 2019 edition from Soft Skull includes at least one new photograph of “Mitz in Rome” as a frontispiece.]