by Virginia Woolf
[Harcourt, Brace, $2.50]
VIRGINIA WOOLF’S new novel is, like so much of her work, and like so much contemporary fiction, chiefly concerned with the passing of time. We are first shown the children of Colonel Abel Pargiter in 1880; their childhood and youth are described against a Victorian background; they grow up, they marry, — or do not marry, — they grow old, they become a tissue of memories; and we See them finally, at the present day, their hair white, their memories wandering, handsome or bloated shells in a world that has left them behind.
This is not the book one expected of Mrs. Woolf after The Waves. To be sure, her individual and fascinating technique seemed in that novel to have reached a conclusion; it was difficult to see how she could go any further without repeating herself. But one did not expect that, she would almost entirely abandon, except for certain stylistic mannerisms, the method of capturing life which she had there, and in earlier books, worked out with such grace and accomplishment. Yet in The Years that is just what she has done. Though she is more deft than Galsworthy, her theme and method in this new novel are fundamentally a reversion to Galsworthy’s theme and method — the method she once deliberately repudiated. The interior monologue is put aside, and the characters are revealed in the old-fashioned manner, almost entirely through conversation. Consequently the book, from the technical point of view, is uncertain, and there are, surprisingly, imitative passages which will be distressing to Mrs. Woolf’s admirers. For example, near the end, when she is describing the evening party which brings all the main characters together for the last time, two children are brought in, the children of the caretaker, to sing a song. They sing it; but the words are meaningless; ‘Etho passo tanno hai,’ they chant senselessly. It is meant to be a symbol, a bitter commentary. But it does n’t come off; it is merely bad Aldous Huxley,
This uncertainty of technique, of presentation, is reflected by, or perhaps is a reflection of, an uncertainty in point of view. The grace and delight we felt in much of Mrs. Woolf’s earlier writing came from her ability to communicate a kind of radiance, a glimmering sheen, on the surface of experience. The wave might break, but while it was breaking it caught, in a dazzle of whiteness, the glory of the sun. And because Mrs. Woolf made us see that radiance, that momentary beauty in her characters, we saw it, for the moment, in our own experience; we were given, for the moment, new eyes. But The Years, in spite of all Mrs. Woolf can do, does not give us that experience. These people have little dignity and little pathos, and when they ask, as others of Mrs. Woolf’s characters have asked before, ‘What is life? What does it mean? ’ they see no radiance on the crest of the breaking wave. ‘She took down a book. . . . She opened it. . . . That was it. Precisely ... la petitesse de tautes chases m’emplit de déjoût.‘
I do not want to suggest, however, that there are not admirable things in this novel. The opening section, for example, is finely done; it is deft, convincing, and delightful. In fact one begins the book by feeling that this may be the best thing that Mrs. Woolf has written. But the feeling does not last; and as we read further we become increasingly aware that the élan, the vision, the particular flavor which belonged to Mrs. Woolf’s earlier work - all these have disappeared. Instead we have a sense of labor and fatigue. It is perhaps significant that not once — the story covers many people and many years — are we given a convincing picture of the love of one human being for another.
The weakness of this particular book raises certain questions in the mind of anyone concerned with the present state of the novel. Does this weakness represent merely the lapse of an individual talent? Or is it also the symbol of the desiccation of a method and a point of view?
Mrs. Woolf, like many writers of her generation, has stressed the importance of emotion and sensation for themselves alone. When the strength of feeling has slackened, when the sensitiveness has grown dull, — as they have in this book, —there is little left. There is merely the passing of time, merely the movement of the years. But the novelist’s job is not only to convey a sense of evanescence; he must also create characters solid enough to give us the illusion of permanence. This Mrs. Woolf has not done. And her inability to do so represents, I believe, the end of a movement in recent fiction.
THEODORE SPENCER