Yesterday she let me know that we can all meet Mrs. Dalloway in Graham Greene’s The Confidential Agent. Here are Molly’s interesting observations:
“Graham Greene’s text features walking up and down three times, three traffic jams, three instances of false pretences, and two pistol shots that resemble a car backfiring, or a car backfiring that sounds like a pistol shot. There is a bookstore window display with titles included, a skywriting airplane, and a person who jumps out of a window. Another person gets lost in a crowd of people intervening.
“The Tatler and bananas also appear with the suggestion that the narrative will start over again. The main character – “My name is D” leads a Kafkaesque thriller of which Greene said he felt as if he were ghosting someone else’s novel.”
Knowing of my continued pursuit of Woolf references in fiction, Stuart Clarke of the Virginia Woolf Society of Great Britain pointed me to Olivia Manning’s The Great Fortune, the first book in the Balkan Trilogy, which, combined with the Levant Trilogy, is called Fortunes of War.
With a sky-high stack of reading for summer and beyond, it wasn’t my intention to take on six volumes of fictionalized Eastern European political and cultural history during World War II. But I checked out the first volume to get the reference in context, started at the beginning, and now I’m hooked. My world atlas and the “R” volume of my encyclopedia are open on the floor for quick reference, and I’m steeped in Romania’s complicated and convoluted history from its early Ottoman days through the period covered in the novels, to its Communist takeover and subsequent revolution in 1989.
Romania’s wartime occupation and shifting allegiance are balanced by a fascinating cast of characters and their relationships, primarily newlyweds Harriet and Guy Pringle—he’s there to teach English at the University of Bucharest—and the questionably charming but shifty Prince Yakimov.
Harriet is the anchor, observing and absorbing daily life and the players, mostly male, mostly enthralled with war. At one point Guy and some of his non-combatant colleagues are drawn into a plan to commit illicit actions, which the organizer tells them will be “lots of fun.”
Woolf comes into a literary discussion that Harriet has with another English resident of Bucharest. Seeing that she’s reading D.H. Lawrence, he dismisses “These modern novelists…. Why is it that not one of them is really good enough?”
A one-time aspiring writer, Clarence says that if one can’t be a Tolstoy, Flaubert or Stendhal, then why try to be a writer. Harriet asks him about Woolf, and he replies: “I think Orlando almost the worst book of the century.” To the Lighthouse is “all right—but all her writing is so diffused, so feminine, so sticky.”
So what is Manning saying here? And why Woolf? Harriet defends the writers that Clarence attacks, noting that “So much creative effort has gone into their work,” so perhaps it’s a way of differentiating Harriet from her milieu, adding to her sense of being an outsider.
Manning (1908-1980) published her first book in 1937, overlapping with Woolf’s Three Guineas and The Years, though Fortunes of War wasn’t written until the 1960s and ‘70s. I haven’t discovered yet if Woolf and Manning had any personal contact or what influence Woolf had on Manning, although they almost certainly had shared acquaintances in literary London and seem to have held similar views about war and those who perpetuate it.
I have to thank her — and Google news — for the reminder. The novel had slipped from my mind after I posted about it in August. Now it’s out in print and back at the top of my must-read list.
I only found two reviews of the novel, and those were mixed.
The L.A. Times called it “intriguing” and said it “highlights not only Barron’s ability to alchemize historical fact into fiction but also her ability to present absorbing details of Sissinghurst’s gardens, history and the surrounding Kentish countryside. But reviewer Paula A. Woods also complained that the plot and characters are formulaic.
Januarymagazine’s mini-review says the novel is “a clever tapestry of past and present.”
Anita Brookner published her first novel in 1981 at the age of 53, following with one a year until 2000 when she slowed down just a bit. Her 25th novel, Strangers, was released this year.
She rejects feminism, and her protagonists are very traditional, but sometimes they make surprisingly independent and unorthodox choices.
Virginia Woolf appears in at least two of her novels, once as a significant icon and once in passing, both references adding flavor to the stories.
Edith Hope is a romance writer with the pen name of Vanessa Wilde. People have noted her resemblance to Virginia Woolf, including her publisher, who says: “She really does look remarkably Bloomsburian…the hollowed cheeks and the pursed lips.”
Her life in disarray, she retreats to a Swiss resort and its eclectic cast of characters. A man says, “Whoever told you that you looked like Virginia Woolf did you a grave disservice, although I suppose you thought it was a compliment.” Edith prefers men to women, and favors the work of Colette and Henry James. Yet she is proud that she earns her own money, and she rejects the opportunity for a conventional life of comfort and ease.
Claire faces her future after her mother’s death, content to take life as it comes: her job in a Bloomsbury bookshop, involvement with the lifeless Martin. Claire’s opening line is a hook: “It is my conviction that everyone is profoundly eccentric.” She admits to making hasty assessments as a result of observing rather than participating in life, but her bland façade hides secrets.
Claire says of the bookshop owners: “I was surprised that they…always had lived in Bloomsbury. But I suppose that what was once an accident of geography had hardened over the years to a conviction that he was part of a ‘set’, an authentic Bloomsburian. Whether [Virginia Woolf] ever noticed him when they passed in the street, as they must have done on occasions, would have been highly unlikely.”
The Debut
I reread Brookner’s first novel, with another woeful protagonist and dutiful daughter, and another great opening line (“Dr. Weiss, at forty, knew that her life had been ruined by literature”), wondering if I might find a forgotten reference to Virginia Woolf.
Woolf didn’t appear, but Ruth Weiss, an authority on women in Balzac, seems the academic counterpart to Edith Hope. “Her appearance and character were exactly halfway between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; she was scrupulous, passionate, thoughtful, and given to self-analysis, but her colleagues thought her merely scrupulous…” She is often sidelined by the exploits of her manipulative parents and escapes for a time to Paris to pursue her Balzac studies.
