Listening to BBC Radio 4 this morning, as I mostly do, and with various degrees of attention, I caught up with, for the first time in quite a while, Melvyn Bragg’s long running cultural programme “In Our Time” – the topic: Fernando Pessoa. This, a name, ringing somehow familiar, but hard to place. May I be forgiven my ignorance, for he is a man of many names – just check out this impressive list of heteronyms! Now somewhat enlightened, I will surely dedicate some attention to him (or them!). On the programme website are a number of references, that may offer a good start.
As is often the case with me, one thing often leads to another. In the process of googling Pessoa, a link was returned to a NYT Q & A interview with the academic André Aciman from last year; in which (amongst other things) he names Pessoa’s The Book of Disquiet as “the last great book” that he had read.
Skimming through the piece further, I was immediately distracted – irritated would be a better description – by Aciman’s assertion that Mrs. Dalloway is overrated – neither “gripping” nor “interesting”, he states – and badly written! Each to his own, I could say; reading after all is a very subjective activity. That Mrs. Dalloway doesn’t interest him, well so be it; though one is tempted to presume that he doesn’t know terribly much about her person nor her writing life and how they intersected to produce her fiction, for should he do so, Mrs. Dalloway could not help but enthral. But that a literary scholar would fail to recognise the consistent quality of Virginia Woolf’s prose surprises me. I mean to say, Woolf’s hastily scribbled asides to herself (diary) or others (letters) are mostly always druckreif – whether fragmentary gems of observation or gossipy meanderings. And her fiction, absolutely so, even when structurally imperfect or not to her satisfaction.
What is interesting, and probably unbeknownst to Aciman, is that some of the names he drops (we won’t count Proust – of whom he is an expert and Woolf a devotee) were likewise people of interest also to Virginia Woolf a long time ago.
Firstly, Dorothy Strachey. Yes, one of the Stracheys! But I couldn’t think which, and then realised that Woolf always referred to her by her married name of Dorothy Bussy.
Woolf’s first reference to Dorothy appears to be in a diary entry on Saturday 14 June 1919; made upon visiting with her (and her sister-in-law Ray Strachey) in Hampstead and, as all the Strachey family, she will turn up again over the years in Woolf’s diary and correspondence. Bussy’s only novel, Olivia (1949), cited by Aciman – a lesbian schoolgirl narrative; an experience it is presumed she is not unfamiliar with – was in fact published by Hogarth Press, albeit eight years after Woolf’s death, and was dedicated (or so says Wikipedia) “to the very dear memory of Virginia W.” I should say, Aciman says “nothing happens” in the novel he recommends, but unlike the dull Mrs. Dalloway that seems enough. Further, a new Penguin Classics edition was published in June, in which he writes an introduction, and one wonders whether he approached Penguin or vice versa, and whether a little bit of marketing wasn’t going on here. Just a suggestion. Irrespective, any Strachey interests me, so I certainly intend to read Olivia; now credited to Dorothy Strachey. Thanks for the tip, Mr. Aciman! (My tip: the Vintage UK edition is a bit cheaper, at least on Amazon outside the US.)
And in the same segment, Mr. Aciman announces the virtues of another great “unread” – La Princess de Clèves by Madame de La Fayette – Woolf loved this, though she only wrote about it in passing – in her “On Rereading” essay for instance. In my reading notes of Volume 2 of Woolf’s diary I make reference to her February 18 1922 entry, and include an excerpt which clearly illustrates her enthusiasm for La Princess. Though, I am not that sure, it is is as so “unread” as Aciman suggests – certainly not in France, and I thought it to be also well known in wider feminist literature studies. Fortunately, for the interested, La Princess de Clèves is easily found on the internet.
Finally, Aciman’s favourite book to assign students. Here, he nominates Laurence Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey, for which Virginia Woolf wrote an introduction for the 1928 Oxford World’s Classics edition (also included in The Common Reader Second Series), and which begins with her observation that maturity grants a writer certain privileges – with language and composition. I make the observation that at the time this essay was written, being just a couple of years after Mrs. Dalloway was published, Woolf was of an age such that she too had granted herself permission to be messy – to write what was in head; messy, as I said. It is a riddle to me how Sterne can be so admired and not Woolf. Maybe it is only Mrs. Dalloway that Aciman dislikes; but why do I think otherwise? He didn’t qualify his verdict, but Woolf certainly possessed some prejudicial traits that are not easy to disregard by everyone.
