It was not difficult to find a copy of my next choice for the 1937 Club, as the public library down the street has a copy of Virginia Woolf's The Years.
One cannot, I feel, read a person's diary and letters without considering them a friend, even if only at a considerable remove of both place and time -- and it is that way for me with Virginia Woolf -- five volumes of diaries, six of letters! Yes, she could be biting and sarcastic in conversation, and a terrible snob at times, but we all have flaws, and she could also be charming and sensitive and vulnerable. But I'm afraid that I was deeply disappointed in The Years, and I hesitate, even almost dread saying so, as though I am somehow letting down an old and dear friend. I even considered, far too many times, not finishing the book. I could barely tell apart many of the characters, and about halfway through gave up and made a list of them with the help of study notes on the internet -- while I was doing so, I read something that said that The Years was well-reviewed in its day but has fallen a bit out of favor since then, "not her best work" or something like that. I certainly would not have thought from The Years that Woolf is considered one of the greats of English literature, for the writing does not seem particularly facile -- even the (short -- too short?) descriptive passages that open each section -- and although there isn't ever going to be much "plot" in a family saga ("I can make up situations but I cannot make up plots," she wrote once, partly facetiously but surely partly dismayed), The Years seems to have even less point than there might be. Perhaps it was an editing issue that quite a number of times, the pronouns get entangled -- one person speaks, then another line of dialogue appears, as though it was the same person but it is in fact another, making the reader pause and try to sort it out, which never makes for a fluid read. It's also difficult to tell the characters apart because they seem all to be in some stream-of-consciousness daze at the same time, bored perhaps, or angry, or bored and angry, even to the point of these streams interweaving or colliding with each other, and so many of them more-or-less alike, each person being on the verge of some philosophical truth then losing it somehow -- though I suppose, on reflection, that that is ultimately the truest thing about the human condition, that Woolf has put her finger on it exactly. We do so often seem to be on the verge of a great understanding of ourselves -- war is hell so why don't we just stop? why are so many people not free to live their lives as their true selves? how can we know others if we do not know ourselves? &c. &c. &c. -- then losing it or getting distracted. It is hard, too, as a reader -- and I would like to think that even in 1937 I would be revolted, though, sadly, I can never know for certain -- to read her casual and clearly-disgusted remarks about "greasy Jews" or servants: "Maids bothered Kitty with their demure politeness; with their inscrutable, pursed-up faces. But they were very useful." (Now, of course this is a character's thoughts, not an authorial observation, but it is only one instance of that particular kind of English upper-middle class superiority, still well in evidence in the 1930s, that appears here so complacently.) The only marginalized faction (for want of a better word) of society that seems to come off well in Woolf's opinion is homosexuals (who are, rather surprisingly, given Woolf's own experiences, exclusively male -- though I did get the impression from her letters and diaries that she was tolerant of homosexuality but had mixed feelings about what she called "Sapphism"), but on the other hand, the homosexual character's foreignness is the "different" aspect of him most often pointed out, usually to his detriment. Someone called The Years a scathing indictment of British society, but so very many of these aspects are treated as natural that they come across simply as the way things are, not as things that must be changed if we are to survive as a humane civilization. I do know that this novel took Woolf a very long time to write, with much editing and polishing and revision and cutting -- "I wonder if anyone has ever suffered so much from a book as I have from The Years," she wrote -- and it just seems to me at the end that perhaps too much was cut, or the wrong things, for although the impressionistic feel of the novel shows the fragmentary nature of life as it so often really is, even in retrospect, it does not leave me with the ultimate cohesiveness of, say, a Monet landscape, but as though with the distinctly, sometimes violently separate pieces of a Cubist Picasso portrait.
Reviews are popping up all over the place, but the "main" page for the 1937 Club can be found here.
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