To the Editor:
Cynthia Ozick’s article [“Mrs. Virginia Woolf,” August] is simply fascinating. And I’m glad to see COMMENTARY devote so much space to considering a writer who, until recently, was slighted even in the universities in this country. I have an undergraduate major and a Ph.D. in English literature, and I was never given a reading list that included something of Virginia Woolf’s. I even remember Yvor Winters’s referring, some years ago, to “the iridescent triflings of Mrs. Woolf.” Which is nonsense. Perhaps even better, Miss Ozick reminds us of a time when intellectuals and artists nourished one another’s gifts and richly honored one another’s sensibilities. Though she gives us good reason to question how entirely their ideals were realized, she looks respectfully to a group who seriously believed each should have a fine and generous sense of the other’s feelings; violation of friendship was tantamount to cardinal sin. From the distance of New York in the 70’s, such sustained human response seems part of a small Golden Age.
Celia Morris
New York City
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To the Editor:
I thought Cynthia Ozick’s piece on Virginia Woolf was simply superb, one of the best things you’ve run this year.
Richard Schickel
New York City
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To the Editor:
. . . There are today many shortsighted, mostly-metropolitan critics who herald a certain view which, repeated and repeated over and over again, has somehow managed to wind itself into irrefutable dogma: namely, the opinion that the artist is a “rebel” and the more he shuns tradition the more honorable he becomes. . . .
Cynthia Ozick’s article suffers from this most contagious malady. Her article, though filled with brilliant insights here and there, champions a romanticized vision of artistic creation. . . . Of course, the trend in modern criticism is the edification of a hero or the deification of a martyr. No one, after all, can resist making a Prometheus or a Hyperion of every artist.
Virginia Woolf was a brilliant writer when she did not try to write. Witness her essays and her diary: they are first-rate. Everyone knew her to be a critic gifted with a keen literary intellect. Her judgments are, to say the very least, most sound, and I share wholeheartedly her assessment of Joyce, as I do her appraisal of Thomas Hardy. Nevertheless, I strongly question Virginia Woolf as genius—since that word is not sparingly used in Miss Ozick’s article. If one compares her work with that of Proust, Joyce, Mann, or Svevo . . . one has to admit in all honesty that her star is not that which shineth most nor her muse that which singeth best. That she lags behind and loses ground with the others is obvious. But . . . by how much? The answer is, unfortunately, not by a hair’s width. Her handling of the “flash” is in no way as effective as Joyce’s epiphany in, say, “The Dead,” where a simple quatrain evokes the long forgotten memory of Michael Furey, nor as powerful as Proust’s madeleine which remains today the best example of what Proust himself calls “analogic” . . . E. M. Forster, who admired Mrs. Woolf very much, was at a loss for a compliment when she presented him with a copy of one of her novels, the reason being that he felt it deserved no compliment.
Then, of course, one must mention Virginia Woolf’s prose. Personally, I find it too mellifluous, too mushy with stifled tears to be taken seriously. And though I wouldn’t go so far as to say—as I would in the case of Anaïs Nin—that the only hope left for her style is that it might gain in translation, I still find it as saccharine and as indigestible as a cup of tea with four teaspoons of sugar. However, if that is what goes under the name of “poetical prose,” then I strongly suggest one take another look at Joyce’s more sober passages in Ulysses or at Proust’s description of Albertine’s sleep. To be quite candid, I find Virginia Woolf’s diary more engaging than her novels; the outline of The Years or of To the Lighthouse as noted in her diary far surpasses the novels in their finished form. I hesitate to use the word “effeminate” with reference to her style, but then I could point to Jane Austen or to Emily Brontë for excellence in feminine prose or, for that matter, to Katherine Mansfield, whom I deem by far superior to Mrs. Woolf. In fact, Virginia Woolf never liked Katherine Mansfield and in her diary, harboring a sense of rivalry (not to say envy), she does not make use of the name K. without casting a silent aspersion. . . . It is a real pity that Katherine Mansfield should have such a large reading public in France and such a meager one in English-speaking countries. Virginia Woolf herself confesses somewhere in her diaries that she had a greater facility with situations than with plots. She wasn’t the least proud when she wrote it. She knew what that meant, she knew it to be her weak spot, and no reader today, no E. M. Forster, could read To The Lighthouse without knowing, to use a common idiom, whether he is coming or going. No, Mrs. Virginia Woolf was not a genius, and though the feminist movement today would very much like to flaunt her as the victim of a uxorious husband, as a martyr of her times, as proof of feminine genius (if that, indeed is what feminine genius is) they have picked the wrong heroine for the wrong reasons. . . .
André Albert Aciman
New York City
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Cynthia Ozick writes:
Too mushy with stifled tears to be taken seriously, I would nevertheless like to sob over one or two of Andre Albert Aciman’s critical propositions—over his view of Joyce, for instance. Reminding us that the world values Joyce much more than Virginia Woolf (more than a hair’s width, anyhow), and comparing the work of both, Mr. Aciman (later on he will hint at his scorn for “poetical prose”) points out “in all honesty that her star is not that which shineth most nor her muse that which singeth best.” And yet he insists that he “share[s] wholeheartedly [Virginia Woolf’s] assessment of Joyce.” This is impressive: Virginia Woolf, as my essay noted, found Joyce “ultimately nauseating.”
For Mr. Aciman to assign a superior star and a melodious muse to that very James Joyce who is, he wholeheartedly agrees, ultimately nauseating, demonstrates in Mr. Aciman not only an unusually generous spirit but a critical judgment that is an instructive model for his remaining remarks—especially those on romanticized vision and effeminate prose.
