An Opinion of One’s Own

I’ve been on a bit of a Virginia Woolf kick lately. I seem to be a binge reader—settle in on an author and if I like their work I read many books until I’m ready to move on, not necessarily in chronological or any other order. I tend to read greedily and if I haven’t quite given the book enough of a shot or if I just loved it, I go back to the beginning and start again.

I came to Woolf because I resisted reading The Hours—I started it some time ago, before anyone knew about Hollywood plans, but it irritated me. Mostly because it felt like monstrously bad film editing. My film buff friends tell me the editing in the movie was much better. At any rate, it felt wrong to get cross about the Cunningham book when I hadn’t even read Mrs. Dalloway so, like many others, I have read that novel in the wake of the publication ofThe Hours.

I wasn’t disappointed. I moved straight on to To the Lighthouse and am now reading A Room of One’s Own. The writing is spectacular; the eye that looks deep into the souls of every character is searing.

What Woolf does is poke at, try to get at, the essence of the interior world, which is inherently not really up for grabs—as Jess Banks used to say in class of Beckett, “effing the ineffable.” I finally did read The Hours this past weekend and found it clever but, Senator, you’re no Virginia Woolf.

Part of the blame lies in our particular cultural and historical circumstances. The world would reject a Joyce or a Woolf in 2003; the writing of high modernism would come over as overblown and bombastic now. Aping it is like copying the masters of Abstract Expressionism, not Raphael; it seems all wrong. My gender-politics friends point to the value of outing Woolf, as if that were all the license one needed. It seems like a sideline, a distraction to me.

In A Room of One’s Own, written in 1928, Woolf discusses the different attitudes of the world to women versus men writers. At worst, the world says to poor Keats or Tennyson or Carlyle, “Write if you choose. It makes no difference to me.” At best, the world says to women, “Write? What’s the good of your writing?”

In 2003, where words pour out onto keyboards 24/7 in a middle-class torrent (the poor are still, as in Woolf’s day, circumstantially unlikely to write), the charge of the world might be this: “Write if you want, but your words will get lost in the ether within three years, probably far sooner. The publishing industry is in crisis. Do not look for the next Woolf or Joyce; look instead for the next Stephen King or J.K. Rowling. If you in fact happen to be the next Stephen King or J.K. Rowling, brush up on your P.R. skills.”

I am grateful to Michael Cunningham, all the same, for getting me on my reading binge in the first place—this particular one was long overdue.