Fragments of life’s rich pageant

Sharp, witty, vital, brilliant. With Between the acts, Woolf sings an eudaimonic valediction to her readers, and finally, to life, as Woolf was still working on the final revisions when she walked into the Ouse and the novel was published by Leonard Woolf four months after her death. Although sometimes perceived as unfinished and jokingly referred to as her ‘Portrait of the Artist as an Old Woman’, she gave birth to a full-term child. A full-blown, proficient novel, meant to pay homage to literature and to England’s charm. While writing the novel, she says in her diary on the 24th of December 1940 she feels in the Sussex countryside ‘how England consoles & warms one’.

At the core there is a dramatic piece, the annual pageant played by the villagers upon the grounds of a fictitious English country house, Pointz Hall, attended by the local villagers and the Oliver family members living in the house, representing scenes touching on the literature and history of England, set in the Interbellum period, ‘between the acts’.

Does this sound like tedious, obsolete bluestockingish stuff to you? Well, it isn’t. The deceptively idyllic, overly traditional setting and the play are a pretext to some exquisite, vivid and playful distillation and exploration of ambivalent human moods and experiences, bristling with Woolf’s sly, derisive and subtle humor and social criticism. The eye is barely directed to the spectacle as such, but focuses on what happens before, between and after the acts, on what commonly passes by unnoticed, the thoughts, observations and emotions that come to us when we are alone and where we do not speak about. The substance of the novel is not to be found on the pageant’s stage, satirizing England’s heroic past, but in the polyphony of the fragmented inner voices dispersed in the audience attending the play.

Juxtaposing and confronting apparently trivial, everyday concerns like talks about the weather and the food with most significant moments, present and past, rationality and spirituality, art and nature, author and audience, Woolf evokes life’s rich pageant through refined psychological and suggestive depictions of her characters, handling them with great empathy and care.

The musicality of her mercurial prose and the ingenious composition reminded me of Toccata, a choreography on the music of Bach danced by Rosas , the dance company of Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker, a Belgian choreographer which I admire: dancers moving like counterpoint melody lines, sometimes interfering, touching each other, then drifting apart, like the scraps of conversation between Woolfs’s characters and their transient trains of thought. I imagine Woolf as the omnipresent simultaneous resonating voices of Bach, the pianist and the choreographer, conducting and directing the ephemeral movements, minds and bodies of the dancing characters:

"For I hear music, they were saying. Music wakes us. Music makes us see the hidden, join the broken. Look and listen. See the flowers, how they ray their redness, whiteness, silverness and blue. And the trees with their many-tongued much syllabling, their green and yellow leaves hustle us and shuffle us, and bid us, like the starlings, and the rooks, come together, crowd together, to chatter and make merry while the red cow moves forward and the black cow stands still."

Evidently, academic research thoroughly scrutinized the abundant themes, motives and techniques Woolf packed in this concise novel, inviting to a second and third reading. Aware it is impossible to grasp it fully at this first reading, here is what stays with me now: the wonderful evocation of the archetypical rural English landscape; the people living on the brink of war again, metaphorized by the loveliness of birds, shifting into grim bombers; the people living on the verge of transition, their world crumbling and collapsing by modernity, a world that will wither like the profuse flowers adorning the park of Pointz Hall, recalling Vita’s dazzling Sissinghurst gardens. The magnificent, radiant language:

"Beyond the lily pool the ground sank again, and in that dip of the ground, bushes and brambles had mobbed themselves together. It was always shady; sun-flecked in the summer, dark and damp in winter. In the summer there were always butterflies; fritillaries darting through; Red Admirals feasting and floating; cabbage whites, unambitiously fluttering round a bush, like muslin milkmaids, content to spend a life there."And the characters of course, of which the women are the most appealing and intriguing, (according to a feminist study, the men in the novel belong to ‘exhausted patriarchy’) showing resembling traits to real women we ostensibly all know: the blatant, in-your-face voluptuousness of the buoyant Mrs. Manresa, turning on the old and the young men with her frivolous airs and graces; beautifully contrasted with the lyrical, melancholic sensuality of Isa Oliver, the daughter-in-law, jealous, “a captive balloon, pegged down on a chair arm by a myriad of hair-thin ties into domesticity”; Isa’s cynical, restless, frustrated, grumpy husband, Giles Oliver, the only person aware of the impending war; his rationalist father Bartholomew Oliver and his widowed sibling Lucy Swithin, a moving ageing woman, intensely spiritual, sensitive to natural mystic; William Dodge, the nervous companion of Mrs. Manresa, with “artistic leanings”; Miss la Trobe, the outcast artist and director of the play.

I was enthralled by the recurrent image of a thread connecting the characters, a masterful leitmotiv, visualizing the pas de deux between the characters that will take place in the greenhouse during the interludes to the play:

”The wild child, afloat once more on the tide of the old man's benignity, looked over her coffee cup at Giles, with whom she felt in conspiracy. A thread united them--visible, invisible, like those threads, now seen, now not, that unite trembling grass blades in autumn before the sun rises. She had met him once only, at a cricket match. And then had been spun between them an early morning thread before the twigs and leaves of real friendship emerge.”

Was she referring to her pending death, when she entered the legend of the drowned lady into the book? Her untimely death could easily rouse the usual hineininterpretierung. However, the joyous and playful tone seems to gainsay that morbid interpretation. Adumbrating definitely the gloom of imminent war and suffering, the novel is a hymn of praise to life, being full of pleasure, passion and imagination.

Just read this, let her take you eight miles high with her in the flight to the higher realms of celestial beauty and imagination. Listen to her symphony. A swan song and farewell performance indicating that not only Bowie could leave the stage as a genius.

Warning: you might end up a Woolfie.

'It is about people talking and the gaps between words, about violent change and continuity', Olivia Laing writes in her thoughtful piece
on ‘Between the Acts’, connecting it to Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem and Julia Blackburn’s Time Song. And 'Continuation is a comfort; life of some sort is surely assured' - which is perhaps true.

The last act.

This is the tenth and last of Virginia Woolf’s novels. Of the other nine, I read the two most famous ones some years ago; the rest I’ve read in the last three months, which makes eight in a row, non-stop.

I feel as if I’ve attended a series of plays, each with a differently decorated set and its own cast of characters but each sharing themes, locations and character types with the others. There are even characters who appear in more than one of the works: Clarissa Dalloway and her husband Richard have roles in the very first book, [b:The Voyage Out|148905|The Voyage Out|Virginia Woolf|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1328874751s/148905.jpg|1412170], as well as being central to [b:Mrs. Dalloway|14942|Mrs. Dalloway|Virginia Woolf|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1319710256s/14942.jpg|841320]. I mention them because there is a character in [b:Between the Acts|46105|Between the Acts|Virginia Woolf|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1433080568s/46105.jpg|2651199] called Giles who resembles Richard Dalloway and who highlights a theme that occurs in the first book, the middle book, [b:Orlando|18839|Orlando|Virginia Woolf|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1404345499s/18839.jpg|6057225], and the last book. It is a theme that is more or less absent from all of the other books, but in this final book, written just before Woolf gave in to the powerful death drive she'd struggled against all her life, she makes the most direct references to the theme that is death’s shadow partner: the sex drive. Sex pervades all the crucial scenes in [b:Between the Acts|46105|Between the Acts|Virginia Woolf|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1433080568s/46105.jpg|2651199].

[b:Between the Acts|46105|Between the Acts|Virginia Woolf|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1433080568s/46105.jpg|2651199] is an enormous pageant: the reader watches a play in which the characters watch a pageant in which the players watch a play about the death of the bawdy Restoration Period.
But the characters watching the pageant are themselves engaged in a titillating drama behind the scenes, and are themselves facing the death of an age: the summer day on which the pageant takes place is in 1939 not long before the outbreak of the war.

On that day, an uninvited guest arrives at Pointz Hall where the pageant is about to take place, a guest who might well be Lady Wishfort from William Congreve’s Restoration comedy, [b:The Way of the World|191275|The Way of the World|William Congreve|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1172557370s/191275.jpg|184938] vulgar as she was, in her gestures, in her whole person, over-sexed, over-dressed for a pageant.

And so Mrs Manresa ogles her way though the household at Pointz Hall, from Candish, the butler, to Giles, the man of the house, to his elderly father, Bartholomew. And the reader is not passive either in the face of her pageantry:
She took the little silver cream jug and let the smooth fluid curl luxuriously into her coffee, to which she added a shovelful of brown sugar candy. Sensuously, rhythmically, she stirred the mixture round and round….she looked over her coffee cup at Giles. She looked before she drank. Looking was part of drinking. Why waste sensation, she seemed to ask, why waste a single drop that can be pressed out of this ripe, this melting adorable world? Then she drank. And the air around her became threaded with sensation. Bartholomew felt it; Giles felt it. Had he been a horse, the thin brown skin would have twitched, as if a fly had settled. Isabella twitched too. Jealousy, anger, pierced her skin.
“And now”, said Mrs Manresa, putting down her cup, “about this entertainment—this pageant, into which we’ve gone and butted”—she made it, too, seem ripe like the apricot into which the wasps were burrowing—“Tell me, what’s it to be?”

Later, Giles tries to reconnect with his wife Isabel over the dinner table: With its sheaf sliced in four, exposing a white cone, Giles offered his wife a banana. She refused it. He stubbed his match on the plate. Out it went with a little fizz in the raspberry juice.

However Isabel is far more than a temporarily jealous wife who wonders what went on in the greenhouse between the acts. She herself is a very sexual being and carries all the oppositions of this contradictory work within her. She hears her father-in-law talk constantly of the weather, will it rain on the day of the pageant or will it not, the refrain she’s heard now for years, and she thinks about man and nature, about sex and death, about the cycle of the seasons, the trees and fields, the things of the earth that will endure long after she and her kind are gone. The mainspring of the entire work is buried inside Isabel; she, not Giles, not Bartholomew, not Mrs Manresa, is at the centre of this very clever book.

..........................................................................
In June 1940 when she was half way through writing this book, Woolf wondered if Europe would ever see June '41. She sent the book to the publisher in March 1941. A few days later, she requested they send it back again as she felt it needed more changes. But she couldn't stay around long enough to make those changes; she was not to see June '41.

The fire greyed, then glowed, and the tortoiseshell butterfly beat on the lower pane of the window; beat, beat, beat; repeating that if no human being ever came, never, never, never, the books would be mouldy, the fire out and the tortoiseshell butterfly dead on the pane.

It is always ungrateful to judge an unfinished novel: did what was found in Woolf's estate comply with what she herself intended it to be? What changes would she have made? These are questions that cannot be answered properly. Most experts emphasize that this manuscript was almost complete, so who am I to pass judgment on that?

Anyway, I noticed striking similarities with her other works: the same thoughtful character sketches, the flow of interactions between the characters that reveal a wealth of significant details, and the way time both seems to stand still in the story and at the same time storming ahead at full speed. Especially in the opening scenes the style is very precise and copious, with abundant descriptions of the natural scenery in the English country side.

The stage of this novel is a annual summer event, June 1939, with a play that is brought on the estate of a country house. It's a rather heterogenic play, in several acts, evocating fragments from English history. The company we're in is very mixed: new and old bourgeoisie, vulgar and learned peasants and, obviously, a bunch of domestic servants, … how more English could this be? The short acts of the play, each time in the style of the historical periods involved, are full of references and keys to the relationships and backgrounds of the people in the audience. And the entractes (to which the title of the novel refers) deepen this dynamic and always take it a step further. In the background the coming war is manifest, giving the whole setting a somewhat menacing flavour.

All ingredients are there for a remarkable novel. Yet, to me, this is certainly not Woolf's most accomplished one. It reminded me a little bit too much of those typical English society novels I already read so many of. And I specifically struggled with the stage scenes and their often archaic style. The whole gave me the distinct impression it lacked the more dense focus Woolf's other novels have. But – finished or not – I agree this book is yet another testimony to her deep introspection into the richness and capriciousness of life, set in a typical English context.

Ein Alterswerk par exelánce.

Sprachlich erinnert der Roman sehr an das Spätwerk von Jorge Luis Borges oder auch Henrik Ibsen, d. h. Woolf benutzt eine gewollt schnörkellose, wiederholungsreiche, ja spröde Sprache, um den Effekt des "Abgesanges" auf ihr Lebenswerk zu erzielen.
Dazu kommen die vielen Parallelen zu Tschechow: die Anlage des Romans erinnert sehr stark an den I. Akt von "Die Möwe" und auch in den Ansichten von Miss La Trobe, welche über die Funktion des Theaters geäußert werden, erkennt man deutlich den russischen Dramatiker wieder.

Am schwächsten ist der Roman noch in den dramatischen Einlagen (das konnte Woolf wirklich nicht und diese lesen sich eher wie Fremdkörper im Text), was dazu führt, dass ein großer Teil des Romans schlichtweg überflüssig erscheint. "Zwischen den Akten" findet man dann wieder für Woolf typische feinste Psychogramme der einzelnen Theaterbesucher und kleine motivische Köstlichkeiten.
Sicherlich ist ihr das in anderen Romanen auch schon besser gelungen, aber hier kehrt sie am ehesten zur alten Größe ihrer früheren Bücher zurück.

Bei aller Liebe zu Virginia Woolf, dennoch bislang ihr schwächster Text, den ich gelesen habe.
Als nächstes sind aber "The Waves" am Start.