My Carefully Constructed Edifice Turned Out to Be a House of Cards

                She dies in the end, you know. That is the trouble with reading literary biographies—you get attached to a story with this same predicable ending, over and over. You’ve spent a good few months (not as long as it took the subject to live it, but still a chunk of time) enmeshed in someone else’s life, and they always go were you cannot follow in the end. You’ve gone through their childhoods and perhaps compared it with your own, looking for any particular genius that might have been evidenced early. Then there’s usually the adolescence and early adulthood, another formative period, especially when it comes to sex, and the history of literary influences and alliances, and to the circumstances, sometimes heartbreaking, under which the masterpieces we love were created.

                Sometimes there is an element of voyeurism (ya think?), or even some professional jealousy. Does it really change the impact of Hemingway’s or Fitzgerald’s work to know how badly they treated their wives or that they were often drunk and maudlin? Up until now, I would have said no, but now I must admit that there is a certain feeling of schadenfreude involved. Maybe, at my worst, I use those pathetic stories to validate my own life choices—I may not be a famous writer, but at least I’ve never abandoned my family. Sometimes I wonder if the biography, instead of being a way to understand and empathize with our heroes’ basic humanity, isn’t sometimes used as a way to denigrate the artists among us who have managed to create something that we can only attempt to consume.

                So, it is with these kinds of mixed feelings that I approached the end of Quentin Bell’s biography of Virginia Woolf. I’d like to think that my intentions were good going in. I was re-discovering the author, and truly wanted to know about her. I guess I was a little shocked that up until this latest reading, she had not merited a place in my literary pantheon. Surely she belonged there, yet somehow I had missed her influence. Was it the suicide? Did my superficial knowledge of a few biographical details somehow predispose me to dismiss her work? Or, was my younger self, one who often consumed books two or three a week, not discerning enough to recognize her subtle genius? It’s not like she was the first writer ever to commit suicide, in one way or another, although personally I tend to admire the lives of those, like Djuna Barnes and J.D. Salinger, who choose solitude and live to a crusty old age.

                But now, I’m faced with the last hundred pages, and the dread is starting to build. This biographer had rather little to say about the genesis of her books, and seems more interested in her relationship with the family, most specifically his mother, Virginia’s sister Vanessa. Maybe the gossip aspect, how she felt at certain times, or how she reacted to personal challenges, is easier to illustrate than the interior process of writing. It sometimes seems that he is answering contemporary criticisms that are no longer part of the literary conversation, and therefor rather opaque. And what about that mysterious footnote near the end, alluding to materials that could not yet be published? Of course, we all like the particular details of who slept with whom when, and in what position, which he reveals with an urbane delicacy that I find very entertaining. Yet there is no way around the fact that, when she was about the same age I am now, she walked out of a morning with the intention of taking her own life. And now, at the end (of the book) it becomes clear that either everything in her life had led up to that point, or nothing had.

Because that’s the way it is with our lives. The details—that suicide was a common subject of conversation in her circle, that it was not her first attempt, that she had suffered more than one psychotic breakdown in her life, are just that—details, not reasons. Perhaps I was hoping that the slow accumulation of facts would somehow mitigate the enormity of that final scene, but, of course, they don’t. She had chosen her method, and was lucid enough to search out the perfect rocks that would both fit in her pockets, and be heavy enough to provide the proper ballast once she was in the water. It all seems so rational, the easiest and most elegant solution to the intractable problem of, according to her suicide note, her returning madness. (“I begin to hear voices, and I can’t concentrate.”)

                So much was gone already. A whole world, her world was rapidly disappearing. Women no longer wore long dresses or alighted at parties from hansom cabs and carriages. Most of the Bloomsbury set, those glittering boys from Cambridge with their dazzling intellects, were either dead, sick, or hadn’t somehow lived up to their potential. Perhaps she felt irrelevant in the new age of airplanes and mechanical competence. It seems that from her letters she felt so—that the decorous, buttoned-up world she had been born into was being destroyed, that her time was finished. How sad to preside over the death of an age.

                And now, re-reading Mrs. Dalloway, how could I have not seen its greatness the first time around? It goes against my inclination to believe that great literature doesn’t somehow transcends its author, but I did get more from the book having spent so much time in her life, and now I can’t help wondering who I should read about, and re-evaluate next.