Words have been used too often; touched and turned, and left exposed to the dust of the street…
(Woolf’s sense of exhaustion and futility, page 88)

What people go through in half an hour!
(Woolf’s profound sense of the unhappiness of life)

Virginia Woolf was mad* and, I think, in this book as elsewhere, it really shows. She had a lifelong history of mental illness and ended up committing suicide. Reading this book, her third novel, helps you, I think, to understand why.

The basic subject matter is simple, insultingly simple, really: it’s another Bildungsroman or coming-of-age or growing-up novel about a clever young man from ‘the provinces’ named Jacob Flanders. The novel twist is the way the nominal protagonist, Jacob, is actually absent from most of the narrative.

We first meet Jacob as a boy on a beach holiday in Cornwall with his (widowed) mother, Betty Flanders. Then we see him roaming up the hill behind the family house in Scarborough. The local vicar and schoolmaster recommend him for Cambridge and lo and behold, in the following chapter we meet him there, hanging with other undergraduates, declaring, as if he’d invented the thought, that Greek literature is better than all modern literature. Virginia takes the opportunity to mock crusty old dons.  Then he graduates and moves to London where he meets ‘Life’ in the form of boring parties, does boring research at the British Museum and, as far as I could tell from the text, becomes involved with a prostitute, Florinda (in fact, I was wrong: Wikipedia tells me that Florinda is a sexually permissive art student; my mistake indicative of the way it’s often hard to make out exactly what’s going on.)

So far, so boring, so very like E.M. Forster’s worst novel, The Longest Journey, which describes the growth from boyhood of another provincial youth who goes up to Cambridge, knocks around with other callow undergraduates who all worship Greek literature and think they’ve invented being clever, before going on to discover how disappointing the world of work is (he becomes a teacher and is slowly crushed by the mundanity of it). So far, so dull, narrow and predictable.

But in literature it’s not the (over-familiar) subject matter, it’s the treatment of it which you pay for, and it’s here that Woolf is either a genius or a deeply disturbed individual, depending on your point of view.

A personal digression on mental illness

My sister had serious post-natal depression for years and is still on medication. Both her kids have mental health issues. At uni I went out with a woman whose mother was a schizophrenic, a trait she passed onto my girlfriend’s (deeply disturbed) brother and which darkened the lives of everyone in their family. My best friend at school had a nervous breakdown at university, jacked it in and ran off to the Continent, to the distress of his parents. Both of my children had troubled teenage years, my daughter cutting herself, my son developing month-long psychosomatic migraines which kept him off school for over two years. In the end I packed in my job to look after them both and try to get their lives back on track, but I found myself suffering a kind of secondary stress from the endless worry and ended up needing anti-depressant medication myself.

A few years ago my wife had the bright idea of taking me to see the stage production of ‘The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time’ in the West End. The production used flashing white lights and loud sound affects to do an excellent job of taking you inside the mind of a severely autistic boy, so good that after ten minutes or so I had a panic attack and, at first, sat with my fingers jammed in my ears, rocking backwards and forwards, humming loudly myself to try and block out the chaos. Eventually I could stand it no longer and pushed along the aisle of seats and ran through the labyrinth of corridors till I burst out into the fresh air of Soho, leaned against a lamp-post and threw up. It took me the rest of the evening to calm down and days and days to get back to feeling ‘normal’ and being able to smile.

Reading ‘Jacob’s Room’ made me feel a bit like that. I experienced it as a kind of assault on my mental health and equilibrium. I’m glad it is so short (160 pages) because much more would have been bad for my sanity. Having finished it I went out in the garden and start the weeding and pruning, in the winter sunshine, to try and regain my balance.

Fragments

‘Jacob’s Room’ was Woolf’s third novel and the one in which she really announced herself as an experimental novelist, shedding Victorian novelistic conventions left, right and centre in order to achieve her effects. Fans of Woolf focus on her concern to ignore the traditional contexts of plot, scene or character, and instead zero in on fragments and details. These include:

• focusing on very peripheral details of a scene or location
• giving fragments of speech with no attempt to report a complete or coherent dialogue
• jumping from one half-completed scene to a completely new scene with no explanation or introduction
• jumping into the middle of conversations without bothering to report the start or finish
• mentioning characters as if we ought to know who they are despite never having mentioned them before (e.g. ‘old Mrs. Temple’ who pops up for a passing appearance in chapter 7)

The London chapters are littered with descriptions of London street scenes which describe random passers-by, people begging or pitifully selling shoe laces or whatnot, crammed into paragraphs which either convey a marvellous panorama of London life or are the dazed fragments of an alienated mind, according to taste.

The book is all about fragments and a deliberately skittish, mosquito jumping from fragment to fragment. At moments I enjoyed this, at others I didn’t. Why?

I very much liked the opening chapter which is, I think, brilliant. It starts with Jacob’s mum, Mrs Betty Flanders, on holiday in Cornwall, sitting on the beach writing a letter, and something’s made her start to cry and the scene is depicted through her tears.

Slowly welling from the point of her gold nib, pale blue ink dissolved the full stop; for there her pen stuck; her eyes fixed, and tears slowly filled them. The entire bay quivered; the lighthouse wobbled; and she had the illusion that the mast of Mr. Connor’s little yacht was bending like a wax candle in the sun. She winked quickly. Accidents were awful things. She winked again. The mast was straight; the waves were regular; the lighthouse was upright; but the blot had spread.

I see what Woolf did here, I understand the effect she’s aiming for, I thought it was brilliant and fresh. Incidentally the sentence ‘Accidents were awful things’, jarringly pasted into the stream of her thoughts, indicates the cause of her crying, thinking about an accident in which a friend has died. So you have a brilliant description of what she sees through tears and a deliberately hyper-elliptical reference to the cause of the tears.

It starts to rain and Betty makes her kids pack up their things and scamper from the beach up to the boarding house. Here she gives them tea and puts them to bed as the rainstorm continues outside and the chapter ends by zooming in on one of the kids’ buckets abandoned in the garden.

Outside the rain poured down more directly and powerfully as the wind fell in the early hours of the morning. The aster was beaten to the earth. The child’s bucket was half-full of rainwater; and the opal-shelled crab slowly circled round the bottom, trying with its weakly legs to climb the steep side; trying again and falling back, and trying again and again.

Brilliant.

I think I liked the two details I’ve selected, crying on the beach and the garden in the rain, (or I understood them) because they are both visual effects, they paint a very vivid visual picture indeed. In subsequent chapters the incidence of these visual details falls away as the book becomes increasingly psychological. As Jacob grows into a student he becomes steadily less interesting (having had two of my own, I know that student-aged people are a lot, lot less interesting than small children: small children are joyous and funny, students not so much). By the time we see Jacob attend some posh party or studying in the British Museum or walking through the busy streets, the disconnected fragments are no longer visual but psychological.

So Woolf finds herself applying her technique of fragments and pieces to people and situations which are 1) increasingly psychological and 2) of increasingly narrow subject matter (students at Cambridge, Cambridge graduates in London) and so 3) increasingly boring.

And unbearable to the narrator. What I found increasingly hard to read was not so much the tedious portraits of bright Cambridge students (God help us) or the descriptions of dinner parties or tea parties (give me strength) but the strong feeling Woolf gives of these things being too much for her.

In chapter 3 Jacob is invited to a tea party with his Cambridge tutor and wife and finds it stiflingly conventional and boring and, the second he escapes from the house,

‘Oh God, oh God, oh God!’ exclaimed Jacob, as the four undergraduates left the house. ‘Oh, my God!’ Bloody beastly!’ he said, scanning the street for lilac or bicycle — anything to restore his sense of freedom.

That’s how I felt every time I put this book down and I escaped from the prison house of mental illness, of a narrator who comes under such pressure she feels she’ll start screaming – and back into my world of birds in my garden and sunshine and freedom.

There’s a vivid example of this Woolf pressure-cooker effect in chapter 4 when Jacob takes Florinda, a girl who fancies him (I think), to dinner at some restaurant. As more and more people come in, the noise level in the big echoing restaurant goes up and up:

The room was filling; the heat increasing. Talk in a restaurant is dazed sleep-walkers’ talk, so many things to look at — so much noise — other people talking. Can one overhear?

Until:

The room got fuller and fuller; talk louder; knives more clattering.

Knives more clattering. As you read, you can feel the mental stress of the narrator building and building until, the next thing we know, someone at a nearby table, a woman, suddenly leaps to her feet, sweeps the contents of the table onto the floor and shouts something at the man she’s lunching with, clearly the climax of some kind of argument.

I can see how Woolf fans would appreciate the technique used here and it’s powerfully vivid. But what I took from it was the sense of a super-sensitive sensibility being overloaded, being oppressed by the growing roar of the large echoing room, by the clattering of the knives and then… snapping, standing screaming, smashing plates, making a scene. I felt like I was standing outside that West End theatre again, my insides screaming in distress, pushed over the edge and beyond.

Why would I read a book that makes me feel like I’m having a panic attack? And when I wasn’t having panic attack flashbacks, I just felt desperately sad for her, for Woolf. She has, it seems to me, two modes: pent-up screaming panic mode or, when her mania is under control, a sense of glum, defeated depression. At the end of chapter 4 the narrator observes:

The thought saddened him. It’s not catastrophes, murders, deaths, diseases, that age and kill us; it’s the way people look and laugh, and run up the steps of omnibuses.

Woolf was 36 when ‘Jacob’s Room’ was published. Reading that little bit of authorial wisdom didn’t strike me as very wise, it just made me feel sorry for her. Sorry for a woman who found the most commonplace sights and sounds too much to bear, which either made her want to scream and run out the room, or made her feel like they were aging and killing her. All her thoughts saddened me.

Tired of life

Here are some more examples of Woolf just sounding tired:

‘Holborn straight ahead of you,’ says the policeman. Ah, but where are you going if instead of brushing past the old man with the white beard, the silver medal, and the cheap violin, you let him go on with his story, which ends in an invitation to step somewhere, to his room, presumably, off Queen’s Square, and there he shows you a collection of birds’ eggs and a letter from the Prince of Wales’s secretary, and this (skipping the intermediate stages) brings you one winter’s day to the Essex coast, where the little boat makes off to the ship, and the ship sails and you behold on the skyline the Azores; and the flamingoes rise; and there you sit on the verge of the marsh drinking rum-punch, an outcast from civilization, for you have committed a crime, are infected with yellow fever as likely as not, and — fill in the sketch as you like. As frequent as street corners in Holborn are these chasms in the continuity of our ways. Yet we keep straight on. (p.91)

Is this an inspiring flight of fantasy? Or a kind of delirium? You can choose to be thrilled by the imaginative fantasia she projects onto the old man with the white beard she walks past in a London street – yes, excellent – or notice the tone of the last sentence: how we all ignore the fantasies of the street, walk straight past, missing out, leading blinkered lives. A sad thought.

And in the following, the never-ending people you see, lost and abandoned in the street, carries over into the powerful sense of the futility of trying to find meaning anywhere, which spills (characteristically) into the futility of reading, of seeking an answer which can’t be found.

The little man fingering the meat must have squatted before the fire in innumerable lodging-houses, and heard and seen and known so much that it seems to utter itself even volubly from dark eyes, loose lips, as he fingers the meat silently, his face sad as a poet’s, and never a song sung. Shawled women carry babies with purple eyelids; boys stand at street corners; girls look across the road — rude illustrations, pictures in a book whose pages we turn over and over as if we should at last find what we look for. Every face, every shop, bedroom window, public-house, and dark square is a picture feverishly turned — in search of what? It is the same with books. What do we seek through millions of pages? Still hopefully turning the pages… (p.92)

She has lots of these descriptions of London streets, London street scenes, which are superficially attractive – which, as a Londoner, I really enjoyed – except that they all end on the same note of futility or exhaustion. ‘Yet we keep on… What do we seek…?’

‘Come to tea, come to dinner, what’s the truth of the story? have you heard the news? life in the capital is gay; the Russian dancers….’ These are our stays and props. These lace our days together and make of life a perfect globe. And yet, and yet… when we go to dinner, when pressing finger-tips we hope to meet somewhere soon, a doubt insinuates itself; is this the way to spend our days? the rare, the limited, so soon dealt out to us — drinking tea? dining out? And the notes accumulate. And the telephones ring. And everywhere we go wires and tubes surround us to carry the voices that try to penetrate before the last card is dealt and the days are over. ‘Try to penetrate,’ for as we lift the cup, shake the hand, express the hope, something whispers, Is this all? Can I never know, share, be certain? Am I doomed all my days to write letters, send voices, which fall upon the tea-table, fade upon the passage, making appointments, while life dwindles, to come and dine? Yet letters are venerable; and the telephone valiant, for the journey is a lonely one, and if bound together by notes and telephones we went in company, perhaps — who knows? — we might talk by the way.

Doubt, doom, is this all? She sounds as depressed as T.S. Eliot:

For I have known them all already, known them all:
Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,
I have measured out my life with coffee spoons;

So that eventually I learned that whenever she sets off on one of her digressions, I know it’s going to end up being depressing. ‘Is this all? Am I doomed? Why do we bother reading books? We have to keep on.’ On every page of this book there is the heavy, lowering sense of Woolf’s struggle against depression and futility.

He sat at the table reading the Globe. The pinkish sheet was spread flat before him. He propped his face in his hand, so that the skin of his cheek was wrinkled in deep folds. Terribly severe he looked, set, and defiant. (What people go through in half an hour! But nothing could save him. These events are features of our landscape. A foreigner coming to London could scarcely miss seeing St. Paul’s.) He judged life. These pinkish and greenish newspapers are thin sheets of gelatine pressed nightly over the brain and heart of the world. They take the impression of the whole. Jacob cast his eye over it. A strike, a murder, football, bodies found; vociferation from all parts of England simultaneously. How miserable it is that the Globe newspaper offers nothing better to Jacob Flanders!

‘How miserable it is…’ could be Woolf’s motto.

A window tinged yellow about two feet across alone combated the white fields and the black trees …. At six o’clock a man’s figure carrying a lantern crossed the field …. A raft of twig stayed upon a stone, suddenly detached itself, and floated towards the culvert …. A load of snow slipped and fell from a fir branch …. Later there was a mournful cry …. A motor car came along the road shoving the dark before it …. The dark shut down behind it….

Spaces of complete immobility separated each of these movements. The land seemed to lie dead …. Then the old shepherd returned stiffly across the field. Stiffly and painfully the frozen earth was trodden under and gave beneath pressure like a treadmill. The worn voices of clocks repeated the fact of the hour all night long.

Mrs Jarvis wonders why we all run round doing foolish unnecessary things, in tones which sound just like her creator:

‘I never pity the dead,’ said Mrs. Jarvis, shifting the cushion at her back, and clasping her hands behind her head. Betty Flanders did not hear, for her scissors made so much noise on the table. ‘They are at rest,’ said Mrs. Jarvis. ‘And we spend our days doing foolish unnecessary things without knowing why.’ (p.124)

Chapter 9 contains an extended description of scholars working in the British Museum Reading Room. I suppose it’s intended to be satirical but the effect isn’t funny, it’s just sad. It conveys all too vividly the immense waste of life in futile scribbling.

Nobody laughed in the reading-room. There were shirtings, murmurings, apologetic sneezes, and sudden unashamed devastating coughs. The lesson hour was almost over. Ushers were collecting exercises. Lazy children wanted to stretch. Good ones scribbled assiduously — ah, another day over and so little done! And now and then was to be heard from the whole collection of human beings a heavy sigh, after which the humiliating old man would cough shamelessly, and Miss Marchmont hinnied like a horse. (p.101)

There’s lots of sighing in the book.

‘The Daily Mail isn’t to be trusted,’ Jacob said to himself, looking about for something else to read. And he sighed again, being indeed so profoundly gloomy that gloom must have been lodged in him to cloud him at any moment… (p.132)

What is the point, of this, of anything?

It all seemed to him very distasteful. Something ought to be done about it. And from being moderately depressed he became like a man about to be executed…

This gloom, this surrender to the dark waters which lap us about, is a modern invention.

The artist’s model, Fanny Elmer, falls in love with Jacob but he doesn’t even notice which makes her feel suicidal.

‘Anyhow, I can drown myself in the Thames,’ Fanny cried, as she hurried past the Foundling Hospital. (p.132)

Hard not to read that and remember that Woolf, of course, eventually killed herself by drowning. On every page the characters sigh, are filled with gloom, wonder what the point is of all this fuss and fret.

Jacob went to the window and stood with his hands in his pockets. There he saw three Greeks in kilts; the masts of ships; idle or busy people of the lower classes strolling or stepping out briskly, or falling into groups and gesticulating with their hands. Their lack of concern for him was not the cause of his gloom; but some more profound conviction — it was not that he himself happened to be lonely, but that all people are. (p.133)

Lonely, lonely and sad. The over-familiar line from Pink Floyd came to mind: ‘Hanging on in quiet desperation is the English way.’ In this book Woolf seemed to me a perfect epitome of quiet, well-mannered desperation.

Strolling in at dusk, Sandra would open the books and her eyes would brighten (but not at the print), and subsiding into the arm-chair she would suck back again the soul of the moment; or, for sometimes she was restless, would pull out book after book and swing across the whole space of her life like an acrobat from bar to bar. She had had her moments. Meanwhile, the great clock on the landing ticked and Sandra would hear time accumulating, and ask herself, ‘What for? What for?‘ (p.153)

‘What for? What for?’ I wonder if Woolf made repeated suicide attempts before she finally succeeded. It sounds like it. Misery dribbles from every page of this grimly depressing book.

The thought saddened him. It’s not catastrophes, murders, deaths, diseases, that age and kill us; it’s the way people look and laugh, and run up the steps of omnibuses.

(A few days later, I read in the notes to the Oxford University Press edition of ‘Mrs Dalloway’ that Woolf suffered mental collapses in 1895, 1904 and 1913 to 1915; that she tried to kill herself by jumping out a window in 1895 (aged 13) and again in 1913 (aged 31). In 1922 when she felt another attack coming on, she went to see a Harley Street specialist who was, predictably, useless. Anyway: I wasn’t wrong to feel through the pages of this book a profound experience of barely controlled unhappiness, gloom, misery and mental dislocation.)

Muddle

It’s odd that the ‘serious’ authors of the 1900s, 1910s and 1920s went out of their way to indicate how puzzled and perplexed they were by the world around them. The buzzword which recurs in so many of these novelists is ‘muddle’, as they throw up their hands and declare: ‘It’s too complicated for me to understand; it’s all a big muddle’. E.M. Forster routinely gives up trying to understand his own narratives and admits it’s all a ‘muddle’. Woolf isn’t much better. Here she is in the Cornish holiday home in chapter 1:

There was a click in the front sitting-room. Mr. Pearce had extinguished the lamp. The garden went out. It was but a dark patch. Every inch was rained upon. Every blade of grass was bent by rain. Eyelids would have been fastened down by the rain. Lying on one’s back one would have seen nothing but muddle and confusion — clouds turning and turning, and something yellow-tinted and sulphurous in the darkness.

And now in central London:

Indeed, drums and trumpets is no phrase. Indeed, Piccadilly and Holborn, and the empty sitting-room and the sitting-room with fifty people in it are liable at any moment to blow music into the air. Women perhaps are more excitable than men. It is seldom that any one says anything about it, and to see the hordes crossing Waterloo Bridge to catch the non-stop to Surbiton one might think that reason impelled them. No, no. It is the drums and trumpets. Only, should you turn aside into one of those little bays on Waterloo Bridge to think the matter over, it will probably seem to you all a muddle — all a mystery. (p.106)

So many of Woolf’s digressions kick off with bold declaration, with fine phrases, then get bogged down in her digressive meandering, and then completely give up, admitting it’s ‘all a muddle — all a mystery.’ Joseph Conrad’s more discursive passages quickly turn into moralising about Man and the Cruel Universe. E.M. Forster’s frequent digressions tend to bring in the Greek gods. Woolf’s digressions again and again end in the admission of defeat, failure to understand and a stifling sense of futility.

Send your hero abroad…

Like so many of the authors of the day, when Woolf couldn’t think what to do with her protagonist she sent him off abroad in the hope that something interesting might crop up, first to Italy, then to Greece. Just like Forster sending Lucy Honeychurch to Florence (A Room with a View) and Lawrence sending Aaron to Florence (Aaron’s Rod). So we are treated to descriptions of train journeys across Italy, views of the hot dry landscape, sturdy Italian peasants, Florence, the Colosseum blah blah, then – shazam! – we are in Greece, Patras, more trains, even hotter drier landscapes, Athens, the Parthenon.

Woolf may be a clever writer but this feels like a desperately tired expedience. Her views on the timeless beauty of the Acropolis join the exact same views of the thousands and thousands of other British tourists and diarists and journal-writers and essayists and archaeologists and historians and novelists who preceded her. Boring. And her protagonist is (rightly) bored. He diligently visits all the sights, reads all the guidebook facts but is stubbornly ‘morose’ (p.141).

I was hoping he’d get run over and killed by a tram, in the completely pointless way the protagonist of ‘The Longest Journey’ is run over by a train at the abrupt ending of that book, but no such luck. Instead, in Italy he falls in with an older couple, Evan Wentworth Williams who is a frustrated would-be politician, and his wife, Sandra Wentworth Williams, who sensitively swans around Athens in a long white dress.

It is made clear that Sandra wants to collect Jacob, to leech on to his youthful gaucheness, and that her husband acquiesces, staying behind in their hotel while Sandra and Jacob go for a walk up the Parthenon in the moonlight. But then, in a characteristic move to frustrate our conventional expectations, just as we are expecting something to happen (a kiss in the moonlight!), the narrative cuts away to Jacob’s mother in bed in her house in Scarborough. And after a few pages with her, when it cuts back to Athens, Jacob and Sandra have disappeared. It is a deliberate strategy of obliquity and evasion.

Then it’s the next morning, they all get up early and journey on to Constantinople. I don’t think anything at all happened between them, even a kiss. The only practical outcome is that Jacob gives Sandra the copy of John Donne’s poems which he’s reading and annotating and we are told it joins the select number of volumes the older lady keeps on her dressing table, and occasionally picks up as she moons over her old lovers. He has been collected.

All the important moments in these little scenes is deliberately omitted leaving a narrative made of fragments built around absences. The central character and all his key experiences, those character-forming experiences you expect from a Bildungsroman, have been carefully excised to leave a hole in the middle of the text.

… then bring him back

The penultimate chapter, chapter 13, gives a kind of panoramic overview of all the characters we have met so far, in the course of one day of coming and going, mostly in London.

Jacob is back in London, lean, brown and boring everyone with his trite opinions about the glories of Greece. He is walking through Hyde Park with his best buddy Dick Bonamy who is unhappy (of course) because of his frustrated love affair with the elusive Clara Durrant.

From one point of view the entire History of The Novel is a record of the long, pitifully useless efforts of adult human beings to manage even the simplest affairs of the heart, to manage their love lives. Whenever anybody gets up on their hind legs and starts pontificating about ‘human wisdom’ and what a clever species we are, even before you get out the history books with their mountainous records of wars and tortures, just hand them a couple of classic novels and say ‘Here: this is the evidence against’. Here are a half dozen examples of the human race who couldn’t manage the most basic aspects of human relationships and ended up killing themselves – Madame Bovary, Anna Karenina.

We are introduced to Mr Bowley, a new character, an older gentleman, who accompanies Clara as she puts her dog Troy on a leash and takes him for a walk in the park. They are disturbed when a horse which has thrown its rider goes galloping by. Characteristically for Woolf, this tear in the fragile surface of good manners and etiquette, is all it takes to trigger Clara to tears, just like the slow crescendo of knives and forks clattering triggered the unnamed woman in the restaurant.

“‘This statue was erected by the women of England…'” Clara read out with a foolish little laugh. ‘Oh, Mr. Bowley! Oh!’ Gallop—gallop—gallop—a horse galloped past without a rider. The stirrups swung; the pebbles spurted. ‘Oh, stop! Stop it, Mr. Bowley!’ she cried, white, trembling, gripping his arm, utterly unconscious, the tears coming. (p.159)

‘White, trembling, gripping his arm.’ It is my contention that this hysteria lies just below the surface of every sentence, every perception in the book, just waiting to burst out. Nice polite well-mannered young women are poised to snap and burst into tears at the slightest provocation.

This horse bolting is a symbol which is used to bring together disparate strands right at the end of the book. Assiduous visitor of the sick, Mrs Julia Eliot, saw the incident too, en route to her appointment with Lady Congreve in Bruton Street.

At that precise moment Florinda (the sexually permissive art student) who’s discovered she’s pregnant, watches the arrival of the painter Nick Bramham, at the restaurant, Verrey’s, where she’s booked a table. Have they agreed to marry? Has he agreed to pretend to be the father? Is he the father? Or is he stepping in for Jacob who is the real father? I can see that the way it isn’t spelled out is deliberate and artful. It joins the collection of many other issues which are elided and cut off. It creates the sense of a panorama of puzzles, allusions, mysteries, which is clearly how Woolf saw life.

At that moment far away in her country house, Sandra Wentworth Evans fondles the volume of Donne and wonders whether she can emotionally manipulate Jacob. Meanwhile, back in Hyde Park, abandoned by a cross Bonamy, Jacob idly draws in the dirt with the end of his umbrella what may or may not be a sort of diagram of the Parthenon.

A deckchair attendant asks him for a penny, but Jacob can only find half a crown which he gives the man, with some asperity.

Fanny Elmer loves Jacob more than ever and writes him notes and postcards which she never sends. She’s taken to hanging round the British Museum in the hope of sighting him. Why did no-one tell her that life is grim and frustrating?

‘One’s godmothers ought to have told one,’ said Fanny, looking in at the window of Bacon, the mapseller, in the Strand — told one that it is no use making a fuss; this is life, they should have said, as Fanny said it now, looking at the large yellow globe marked with steamship lines. ‘This is life. This is life,’ said Fanny. (p.163)

At which point, with Woolfian misery, she bursts into tears. She catches a bus which is held up in the Charing Cross Road because there’s a big political rally marching down Whitehall, past the various government ministries and Woolf gives us the last of what have been quite a few page-long digressions about international politics, about the enormous reach of the British Empire and the need to address issues with Kaisers and Rajahs and so on all around the world. Because of my own personal interest in history, these were the only bits of the novel I really enjoyed, because of their sense of range, of the wider world rising above the petty, small-minded backbiting of most of the ‘characters’.

Back to individuals: Timmy Durrant (Clara’s brother) is at work in one of these government departments which Fanny is walking past. He is aided by Miss Thomas, one of the typists who doesn’t want to be late to meet her beau at the Gaiety Theatre.

Jacob gets up from his deckchair. It’s past five and the sun is setting. Far away in Scarborough his mother is writing a letter to his older brother, Archer, who works in Singapore.

Coming out of Carter’s shop in Piccadilly, the Reverend Andrew Lloyd half recognises Jacob as he walks past because it was he, Floyd, back in chapter 2, who recommended Betty to try her son for Cambridge i.e. had a hand in the formation of Jacob’s personality, in a sense is partly responsible for the entire narrative. But he hesitates to approach Jacob just long enough for the latter to disappear into the crowd. It is a world of lost opportunities. Fleeting glimpses and unfulfillment.

In a cab in a traffic jam in Long Acre sit smooth Mr Wortley, Clara and her mother Mrs Durrant, who is concerned about arriving late to the opera and missing the overture.

Far away on the edge of the moors overlooking the sea, Mrs Pasco watches two ships pass each other out on the waves.

Even further away, Greek housewives knit their stockings while the sunset colours the Parthenon red. Artillery fires over the Piraeus to mark the end of the day.

Betty Flanders is woken by a distant booming but can hear nothing distinct. It connects back to the guns in Greece but (being 1920), was it a prolepsis or anticipation of the sound of the guns of the Great War which was to sweep all this away?

I liked the panoramic effect of this chapter very much, although maybe it was simply from the relief of having gotten to the end of the book on one piece.

Chapter 14

The final chapter is precisely one page long and shows Jacob’s friend Dick Bonamy in Jacob’s room tutting about the chaos and the letters scattered everywhere. Then Jacob’s mother, Betty, enters, asking what is she to do with these, holding up a pair of Jacob’s old shoes? Is Jacob dead? Thank God! But how? There is no clue whatsoever, so I turned to the internet for help.

The SuperSummary web page tells me that:

When World War I breaks out in Europe, Jacob enlists in the British army and is killed in combat. The novel ends with a scene of Betty Flanders and Richard Bonamy clearing out Jacob’s London apartment in the wake of Jacob’s death.

Ah. OK. but none of that is expressed in the text. I had picked up on the booming of the guns but was misled because I thought Betty heard them on the same evening when Jacob was strolling through Hyde Park. No. Turns out that all the events the SuperSummary lists (war breaking out, Jacob enlisting, training, being shipped to France, fighting, dying, Betty receiving notification of his death and travelling to his London room) takes place with no mention or description in the narrative. Offstage. That’s a really significant amount of information, data, events, to completely omit from your story, wouldn’t you say?

It was already a strikingly non-conformist book, a revolutionary book in its understated way, simply ignoring most of the conventions of the novel up to that date. This highly elliptical conclusion really rams that home. Contemporary readers must have been mystified.

The implied author

I happily admit that the picture I’ve built up here of Woolf-the-author may bear no close relationship to the actual Virginia Woolf of 1920. Here’s the Wikipedia definition of ‘the implied author’:

The implied author is a concept of literary criticism developed in the 20th century. Distinct from the author and the narrator, the term refers to the ‘authorial character’ that a reader infers from a text based on the way a literary work is written. In other words, the implied author is a construct, the image of the writer produced by a reader as called forth from the text. The implied author may or may not coincide with the author’s expressed intentions or known personality traits.

Many people’s main reaction to a novel they’re reading, whether they like it or not, is in fact a response to the character of its implied author – whether they find them warm and sympathetic or cold and brutal, whimsical and funny or difficult and literary, etc.

And canny authors exploit this, creating a persona which is not identical even with the narrator, but a larger thing – the book’s personality. As every reader knows, liking or disliking a novel often relies on your response to the total mood of the text, to the implied author, to the book’s personality.

I like literature which adds something to life, which adds factually or psychologically a richness or strangeness. Everything by D.H. Lawrence explodes with life and enhanced perception, even when he’s at his most messianic and delusional. My enthusiasm even extends to the wildest of Samuel Beckett’s prose works, a man renowned for concentrating on futility and despair, works such as the very strange How It Is. What is exhilarating about Beckett’s works is the totality of their commitment. They are bleak as hell but written with a visionary intensity.

By comparison, Woolf, to me, seems half-hearted. She is like E.M. Forster seen through a kaleidoscope, a distorting mirror. Her works radiate a kind of wet unhappiness. She – well the author implied by this book, its authorial persona – is very clever, very perceptive, very artful, but very wounded.

* A note on the word madness

I wondered whether I’m allowed to use the term ‘mad’ and ‘madness’. Surely I should be more sympathetic, up-to-date and use terms like ‘mental illness’ or ‘neurodivergent’? So I was struck by the way the author biography on the inner sleeves of the Granada paperback editions of Woolf’s works which I read bluntly states:

Recurring bouts of madness plagued both her childhood and married life and in April 1941 Virginia Woolf took her own life.

And it’s not just here. Throughout Victorian Glendinning’s excellent biography of Leonard Woolf, Glendinning refers to Virginia’s ‘madness’. And in her own writings and diary, Woolf freely uses the term mad and madness. She used it in the intensely moving suicide note she left for her husband – ‘Dearest, I feel certain I am going mad again’. So I’m not using the word flippantly or insensitively. I’m using the same word used by her editors, publishers, biographers and by Virginia herself to describe her condition.

Credit

‘Jacob’s Room’ by Virginia Woolf was first published by the Hogarth Press in 1922. References are to the 1965 Penguin paperback edition, 1971 reprint.

Related links

• Jacob’s Room online
• Virginia Woolf’s suicide note

Related reviews

• Virginia Woolf reviews
• 1920s reviews