E.M. Forster on Virginia Woolf and Vice Versa

E.M. Forster was a peripheral member of the Bloomsbury group and a friend of Virginia Woolf although not a particularly close one. But they had a lot in common being not just novelists but critics of other writing.  So it is interesting to read what they had to say about each other. Each greatly admired the other, but not without qualifications. 

For instance, in a lecture on Woolf delivered on May 29, 1941, at Cambridge, two months after her death, Forster said that in her writings, Woolf “has no great cause at heart.”  Her works, he argued, are not “about something.”  Rather, as largely a form of poetry, they “are something” and when the poetry is absent, such as is the case with her second novel Night and Day and her penultimate novel The Years, her efforts fail, Forster said. 

Woolf wrote an essay entitled “The Novels of E.M. Forster” that was first published by her husband, Leonard Woolf, in 1942. Virginia may have been reluctant to release it herself,  observing in the first couple of sentences that there are many reasons for hesitating to criticize one’s contemporaries including “the fear of hurting feelings” and “the difficulty of being just.” 

Whereas Forster felt Woolf had “no great cause at heart,” Virginia felt the opposite about him. She depicted Forster as “highly conscious of a message” and said “he believes that a novel must take sides in the human conflict.” 

 “Behind the rainbow of wit and sensibility there is a vision which he is determined we shall see,” she said. But she wasn’t convinced he was successful in getting it across, describing his message as “elusive in nature.”  Forester fails, she argues, to successfully connect his very satisfying depiction of actual things with the larger message he evidently wants them to convey. “We feel something has failed us at the critical moment,” Woolf said. 

Why, Woolf wondered, when Howards End was such a “highly skillful book” and she wanted to declare it a success did she feel it was instead a failure? While elaboration, skill, wisdom, penetration and beauty are all present in the book, “they lack fusion, they lack cohesion, they lack force,” Woolf declared. 

That’s a fairly damning critique for a work often described as Forster’s masterpiece and especially if one is supposed to come away from it with a message. 

But one can view Forster as equally disparaging of Woolf. 

Early in the afore mentioned lecture, Forster depicted Woolf “is not a great creator of character.” And later, he elaborated on that. As a modernist novelist, Woolf strays from the fictional norm in various ways.  Among them, “she does not tell a story or weave a plot, and can she create character?  That is her problem’s center.” 

While her characters worked on the page and seldom seemed unreal, “life eternal she could seldom give; she could seldom so portray a character that it was remembered afterwards on its own account,” Forster said, pointing to Jane Austin’s “Emma” and George Eliot’s “Dorothea Casaubon” as successes on that score. 

Were there any exceptions? “Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay do remain with the reader afterwards, and so perhaps do Rachel from The Voyage Out, and Clarissa Dalloway. For the rest [and there are many], it is impossible to maintain that here is an immortal portrait gallery,” Forster said. 

When one largely dispenses with story and plot, isn’t character what supposedly remains?

Same-Sex Attraction in "Mrs. Dalloway"

Attraction between women was of great interest to Woolf for more than one reason.

“Chloe liked Olivia.”  [What a concept!] 

“Do not start, do not blush, let us admit in the privacy of our own society that these things sometimes happen. Sometimes women do like women,” Woof says in the fifth section of her landmark essay A Room of One’s Own.

Where did “Chloe liked Olivia” come from?  Woolf tells readers she encountered that astonishing phrase in a book called “Life’s Adventure, or some such title, by Mary Carmichael.” It was a book she at first hadn’t thought much of, based in part on Ms Carmichael’s terse and short-winded writing style, but that she was obliged to reconsider. Why? “For if Chloe likes Olivia and Mary Carmichael knows how to express it, she will light a torch in that vast chamber where nobody has yet been,” Woolf said.

That chamber was in 1928 the life of a woman “unlit by the capricious and colored light of the other sex.”  In other words, a woman defined in her own terms and not in relationship to a man as Woolf believed had been almost exclusively the case in English literature.

Well, Mary Carmichael was a figment of Virginia’s always fertile imagination and as for Chloe and Olivia, about all we are told of them is that they shared a laboratory where they minced liver, apparently for use as a cure for anemia, and that one of them was married with two small children. Woolf may have seen them as no more than friends, but that didn’t matter. This little invention – a woman being viewed independently of a man -- gave her the springboard she needed to examine at considerable length the impoverishment of women in literature.

The situation was so bad, she maintained, that in order to accurately depict what happens when a woman goes into a room, “whole flights of words” would have to be added to the English language.

[What would the English language look like now if James Joyce had been a woman, one wonders?]

But “Chloe liked Olivia” could certainly have implications other than just friendship and that brings me to Mrs. Dalloway.

Early in the book, after Clarissa is back from her morning walk, she climbs up to the little attic bedroom where her husband, Richard, has insisted she sleep undisturbed after her recent illness. This gets her thinking of Richard and how she has disappointed him sexually –initially “on the river beneath the woods at Clieveden” and later at Constantinople, “and again and again.”

In contrast, she has had a tendency to fall in love with women -- first and foremost with Sally Seton when Clarissa was 18 years old and “knew nothing about sex.” Encountering Sally at a party, Clarissa couldn’t take her eyes off her and then, when Sally unexpectedly arrived penniless at the Parry’s door and was somewhat reluctantly taken in, the two very different young women became almost inseparable, talking for hours about how they were going to reform the world – all Sally’s ideas, one is told.

Finally, out on the terrace one evening at Clarissa’s childhood home, Burton, “came the most exquisite moment in her whole life.” Alone with Sally – the others had gone on ahead – Sally picked a flower and kissed Clarissa on the lips. “The whole world might have turned upside down!” But then who should appear to ruin things but Peter Walsh, and her moment of happiness was embittered.

Readers aren’t told whether Sally and Clarissa took matters any further on a subsequent occasion, but from everything one learns about what Clarissa was like at 18, it seems unlikely. And in later years, when Sally married a rich Manchester industrialist, Clarissa wanted nothing to do with her, turning down invitations to visit.

Woolf contrasts this idyllically romantic, same-sex moment (the “laughing girls in their transparent muslins” Clarissa saw on her morning walk may have helped bring to her mind the “white frock” she was wearing when Sally kissed her) with a far darker example of possible same-sex attraction later in the book.

Whereas Clarissa was pursued by the vivacious, free-spirted Sally Seton who, among other things, ran down the hall naked on one occasion at Burton, Clarissa herself and possibly the Dalloway’s 17-year-old daughter Elizabeth, stimulates barely controllable desires within the rather distressing Doris Kilman, who, like a flasher lurking among trees in a public park, dresses in a green mackintosh no matter what the weather.

Miss Kilman, originally engaged by Richard Dalloway to teach his daughter history, in due course brings Elizabeth under her relatively recently acquired religious sway, much to the distress of Clarissa who wonders at one point if her daughter is falling in love with Doris.

Matters come to a head, when Miss Kilman, laughed at by the far more attractive Clarissa, is consumed by jealously and perhaps also lust.

“It is the flesh” she keeps muttering as she takes Elizabeth to a local department store, loses control of herself, buys of all things a petticoat (what was she thinking, Elizabeth wonders as the sales girl thinks Kilman “mad”) and gorges herself on sweets over tea as a possible substitute for another form of physical pleasure. Increasingly uncomfortable, Elizabeth finds her white gloves (as powerful a symbol as Clarissa’s flowers) and flees. Doris implores her in a quivering voice not to forget her, but she knows that Elizabeth, “so beautiful,” is gone.

Woolf, in an especially powerful passage, depicts Elizabeth, obliged out of politeness to have tea with Miss Kilman, as being “like some dumb creature who has been brought up to a gate for an unknown purpose, and stands there longing to gallop away.”  And so she finally did.  “Right away to the end of the field the dumb creature galloped in terror.”

The down side of possible same-sex attraction doesn’t get any darker than that. But the self-possessed Elizabeth, perhaps lucky to be relatively clueless over exactly what was happening, pulls herself together and appears at Clarissa’s party in a pink dress. Yet another powerful symbol, I think.

“Mrs. Dalloway,” like “Ulysses,” is a Saga of the Much-Denigrated Beta Male

“Mrs. Dalloway,” by Virginia Woolf, and “Ulysses,” by James Joyce, are sometimes mentioned in the same breath: they are both novels set in one day. “Ulysses,” published in 1922, came out first – and even earlier if one takes into consideration chapters released individually.

“Mrs. Dalloway” arrived in 1925 and one often hears, particularly from Joyceans, that Woolf copied Joyce in using the one-day format.

Woolf was familiar with “Ulysses,” having begun to read it in serial form and having been asked to publish the entire book through the Hogarth Press, which she operated with her husband, Leonard. That, they concluded, was impractical given the technical capabilities of the press and the length of Joyce’s book. But there are indications they also considered some of the content of “Ulysses” problematic (legally or otherwise), as did other publishers.

Woolf was initially unimpressed with “Ulysses.” At the time she first encountered it, she was much taken with Marcel Proust’s great novel, and, among other things, irritated that she might have to turn her attention away from it. But she revised her views on Joyce as time passed.

In my opinion, “Ulysses” and “Mrs. Dalloway” are similar in a fashion much more interesting than their common time frame: they both deal with a very difficult subject for readers to accept as worthy of consideration – what one might call the “beta male.”

When it comes to men, “alpha males” – men who take command and make things happen – are the chief protagonists of most works of literature and, indeed, almost all forms of public entertainment. They can be good or they can be evil so long as they are confident, assertive and bent on directing the course of events within whatever sphere they are operating. If unsuccessful, they fail in spectacular fashion, often only to get up, dust themselves off and try again – with even greater determination. They don’t just slink away, or fail to try at all.

Readers – woman as well as men in my personal experience – don’t like beta males. “Why do we care about this guy?” they tend of ask, in a plaintive or annoyed tone of voice.

In the post-war era, a good example of the beta male is Nick Jenkins, the chief protagonist of Anthony Powell’s 12-volume cycle of novels known as “A Dance to the Music of Time.” The subsequent BBC miniseries was a disappointment: in trying to keep Jenkins “beta,” he was depicted as far too sappy. Alphas are easy to cast, not so with betas meant to have top billing.

But let’s stick with Joyce and Woolf.

Leopold Bloom exemplifies just about everything an alpha male isn’t. He’s about to be made a cuckold (perhaps for the first time, perhaps not), knows it and does nothing about it – despite the fact that about half of Dublin also knows it is going to happen later in the day in question, or so it seems.

As he goes about his day, Bloom suffers one indignity after another. An ad canvasser for newspapers, he has no luck getting one renewed. And despite being in the publishing business, his name is misspelled – “Boom” – in a news item mentioning his attendance at a funeral. At one point he farts audibly and later masturbates in public. There is a lot more. In fact, the list of Bloom’s shortcomings is virtually endless.

The heroic highpoint of Leopold’s day comes when he stands his ground against the xenophobic, anti-Semitic views of a presumably inebriated man identified only as “the Citizen,” but that’s arguably not saying much. The worst “the Citizen” can do is hurl an empty cookie tin at Bloom as he departs and the object clatters harmlessly on the pavement.

Bloom is far from a man who parts the waters: he just tries to stay afloat. And I have no hesitation in saying that any number of readers have, over the years, wondered why in the world they should spend so much time with him.

In “Mrs. Dalloway,” the chief protagonist is, of course, a woman about whom a great deal can be said, but not here. Her opposite number is clearly Septimus Smith, a casualty of WWI, whose response to mental and emotional instability is meant to be a counterpoint to Clarissa’s struggle to keep her own psychological demons at bay.

While that is an exceptionally important issue for Woolf, and for her novel, it lies apart from what I want to discuss. Rather, I am restricting myself to the more superficial aspect of Clarissa’ life: how it turned out based on who she decided to marry – and the decision was clearly hers.

Here comes the beta male again – and not just one, but two of them. Neither Peter Walsh nor Richard Dalloway is a man of action, a leader, a man who commands deference and makes things happen. Quite the reverse, so why did Clarissa find both attractive, but in different ways?

Let’s start with Walsh, since he appears in the book well before Dalloway. The scion of “a respected Anglo-Indian family which for at least three generations had administered the affairs of a continent,” he himself has done nothing of the sort. Well, not quite: he did manage to invent a plow for his district in India where he has been for the past five years. While out there, his first marriage failed and it now seems he intends to make off with a much younger married woman, probably depriving her of her two children and likely leaving her an impoverished, socially disadvantaged widow at a relatively early age.

In their youth, he and Clarissa discussed, and argued about, things such as Socialism, which Clarissa found greatly stimulating and which she sometimes imagines would have made for an exciting life with Walsh. But on reflection, she notes he never did a thing along the lines of the issues they talked about. Meanwhile, across town, Lady Bruton, Hugh Whitbread (yet another beta male – he had known Prime Ministers, but not taken part in any of the great movements of his time) and Richard Dalloway agree over lunch that Walsh is a man impossible to help because “there was some flaw in his character.” In other words, he is a born loser, a person who almost always manages to make a mess of things.

Walsh can be charming and he knows it: that’s about the beginning and the end of him. In his self-assessments, at best, he thinks of himself as a man who filled his posts adequately and did just respectably; at worst he, too, thinks of himself as a failure, for which, at one point, he blames Clarissa. As he walks though London, about to stalk a young woman for amusement, he acknowledges he will at some point have to ask Richard Dalloway for help in getting a job. Good luck.

Do readers care about Peter Walsh? Should they?

All of which takes us to Clarissa’s husband himself, the man she married for “support” even if Richard believes she didn’t need it. Actually, she does need it, we discover, when she feels Richard has abandoned her by agreeing to lunch with Lady Bruton on the very day of her party.

Far from the sort of alpha-male who makes a conquest of an attractive, sought-after woman by sweeping his rivals aside, Dalloway considers it “a miracle” Clarissa agreed to be his wife and he remains devoted to her despite her episodic inability to respond to him sexually.

In one of the most poignant passages in the book, Clarissa understands that she remains “his Clarissa” when Richard, unable to tell her he loves her in so many words despite his determination to do so, presents her with roses instead. She knows she is cherished.

In Walsh’s eyes (and this seems to be an assessment shared by others), Dalloway, despite being “a thoroughly good sort,” is a bit limited, a bit thick in the head, devoid of imagination or brilliance. Where Walsh deploys charm, Dalloway seems to get by in large part by virtue of possessing “the inexplicable niceness of his type.”

But such characteristics mean Richard is wasted on politics and should have been a country gentleman, out in Norfolk, bandaging wounded dogs.

Clarissa’s husband appears to have gone into politics largely because there is, in the Dalloway family, a tradition of public service. But, we are told, family members weren’t brilliant in any of the positions they held and Richard has remained in that vein: he hasn’t become a government minister and everyone knows he never will become one. On the day of the party, he’s off to a Parliamentary committee meeting, but can’t recall if it is about the Armenians or the Albanians.

Richard initially made so little an impression on Clarissa that she could remember neither his name nor who had brought him to Burton, their family house. She introduced him to everyone there as “Wickham,” prompting Richard to “blurt out” that his name was Dalloway, much to the amusement of Sally Seaton who then relentlessly mocked his discomfort and lack of stature.

One could go on, except that there is an endearing side to Richard, ineffectual as he is in the affairs of the world, that Woolf teases out at some length. As she does, readers begin to understand why Dalloway may be worth their time.

For instance, he has taken pity on the problematic if not downright odious Miss Kilman, allowing her to teach history to the Dalloway’s daughter, Elizabeth. Miss Kilman, who detests Clarissa, in large part as a result of envy, thinks well of Richard. He was “really generous” to her, she believes, and that is a very significant concession on her part.

In Parliament, readers are told Dalloway doggedly championed the downtrodden of society; that he was concerned about police malpractice, wondered what could be done to help female vagrants and thought parks should be for children and that the trash they might generate could be picked up.

When Clarissa’s party finally gets underway, Richard is the only person unable to let poor Ellie Henderson stand there all evening by herself. He makes a point of asking her how she is doing, but before she can respond, none other than Peter Walsh pulls Richard away.

When the Prime Minister arrives, it isn’t clear he says a word to Dalloway – nothing worth recording at any rate – despite the fact that the party is presumably being given to help Richard’s prospects. Clarissa takes the elderly leader around until he disappears into a side room for a tete a tete with alpha-male-wannabe Lady Bruton, after which the PM promptly departs.

Then comes Sir William Bradshaw, the eminent therapist of his day and most definitely an alpha male. But he brings news of the death of Septimus Smith, a development that greatly upsets Clarissa even though she doesn’t know Smith.
Retreating into the same side room used by the PM and Lady Bruton, Clarissa confronts her demons and realizes she couldn’t have gotten through life without Richard, even if he just sat there reading The Times. “It was due to Richard, she had never been so happy.” (One thinks here of Virginia’s marriage to Leonard Woolf.)

And Richard is totally with Clarissa when it comes to her suspicions about Sir William Bradshaw -- in some way “obscurely evil,” she thinks. “Only Richard agreed with her, ‘didn’t like his taste, didn’t like his smell’,” Clarissa notes to herself, eyeing Sir William and his wife at her party.

The assessment is close to the truth, readers discover, when it comes to Bradshaw’s interaction with Clarissa’s psychological alter-ego, Septimus Smith. But to give Sir William his due, he does lobby Richard Dalloway at the party to have Parliament address shell-shock victims.

Lastly, as Clarissa’s party reaches a conclusion, Richard can’t help admiring his daughter, Elizabeth, although he initially doesn’t recognize her in her pink frock. Sensing rather than noticing his gaze, Elizabeth turns away from a young admirer and joins her father, who she adores. There are few things she would rather do, readers have been told earlier, than be alone in the country with her father and the dogs.

Richard hadn’t meant at that moment to tell Elizabeth how proud of her he was, but he could not help telling her so.

Looking on, Sally Seaton, initially so scornful of Dalloway, tells Peter Walsh that Richard has improved. She will go talk to him and say goodbye.

“What does the brain matter compared with the heart?” says Sally, now known as Lady Rosseter, in reference to Richard Dalloway -- just before the book ends.

A Story for the California Fire Season

As I write, the Carr fire in Northern California -- a blaze that at its peak had characteristics that seemed almost apocalyptic -- has diminished, but still remains a significant threat to some communities.

Shruti Swamy, a woman of Indian extraction who says she grew up in the woods of Northern California (but now lives in San Francisco), has a story in the Summer 2018 edition of the Paris Review entitled "A House is a Body." It's about a woman and her sick child living in a region where "rain had not come for months and months."  What has come instead is a fire.

Ben Marcus and "Notes from the Fog"

Ben Marcus is described as a dystopian writer, but he's far from apocalyptic when it comes to the bad news that lies ahead. Rather, Marcus sees the world as a stagnant pool with little to recommend it.

Death is a welcome development, readers learn in "Notes From the Fog," a short story published in the summer 2018 issue of "The Paris Review."  It is also the title of a new book of Marcus short stories scheduled for release next month. Among others, the book includes "Cold Little Bird" and "The Grow-Light Blues" about which I have previously written.

Gbessa, or "She Would Be King," by Wayétu Moore

Myths, some more religious than others, appear to be essential to human existence. They serve to explain the origin of various societies and often are the source of values and behavioral norms. Most have important supernatural elements that elevate such stories above the commonplace and render them seemingly timeless.

Artists, seeking to give their work and thus themselves a transcendent quality, often anchor their efforts in myth. One thinks, for instance, of Richard Wagner basing what he considered his masterpiece – the Ring Cycle operas – in Norse legend. And James Joyce appropriating Homer’s epic to give “Ulysses” a framework and a name that serves to place the book in a more universal context than early 20^th century Dublin.

Then there’s T.S. Eliot who identified Tiresias, a leading prophet in Greek mythology, as the most important voice in his poem “The Waste Land.”

All of which brings me to contemporary American author Wayétu Moore, who has apparently decided that Liberia, her distant homeland, needs a foundation myth that she provides in her debut novel, “She Would Be King.” Scheduled for released in hardcover in September 2018. Moore, in interviews, has described it as “a novel of African magical realism.”

Impressionable Cacao Beans; the Wisdom of Bourbon

"Thoughts About Fiction" -- the title of this blog -- could easily extend well beyond literature.

How about marketing, for instance?

What about this assertion from the folks at Raaka, a maker of what might be called artisanal chocolate bars:

"This chocolate is years in the making. Our bourbon casks have lived multiple lives before we receive and fill them with cacao.  As they age, the young impressionable beans absorb the history and wisdom of the bourbon before them." (my emphasis)

Really?