BOOK REVIEWS
JACOB'S ROOM
Jacob's Room. By Virginia Woolf. 12mo. 303 pages. Harcourt, Brace and Company. $2.
VIRGINIA WOOLF seems to me the most interesting of the younger writers now living as well as the best of them, but her work is so individual that another writer can learn little from it, and I very much doubt if she will have a direct influence on her contemporaries. In that respect she may be compared with Matisse among the painters. In each case the art is perfect, but the gifts are personal and defy imitation. Mrs Woolf's writing is characterized by remarkable beauty of phrasing, and the merit of her work lies in the fact that the beauty of each line runs into the next one and forms part of the whole work.
"Long past sunset an old blind woman sat on a campstool with her back to the stone wall of the Union of London and Smith's Bank, clasping a brown mongrel tight in her arms and singing out loud, not for coppers, no, from the depths of her gay wild heart—her sinful tanned heart, for the child who fetches her is the fruit of sin, and should have been in bed, curtained, asleep, instead of hearing in the lamplight her mother's wild song, where she sits against the Bank, singing not for coppers, with the dog against her breast."
In Jacob's Room the task that Virginia Woolf has set herself is "to create Jacob's environment, to approach him on this side and on that, so that the surroundings evoke Jacob about whom she does not tell us very much directly.
"Listless is the air in an empty room, just swelling the curtain, the flowers in the jars shift. One fibre in the wicker armchair creaks though no one sits there. Bonamy crossed to the window. Pickford's van swung down the street. The omnibuses were locked together at Mudie's corner. Engines throbbed, and carters jamming the brakes down, pulled their horses up sharp. A harsh and unhappy voice cried something unintelligible. And then suddenly all the leaves seemed to raise themselves up. 'Jacob, Jacob,' cried Bonamy standing by the window. The leaves sank down again."
By the end of the book we know Jacob as one knows one's brother, but we never identify ourselves with him.
To do this Mrs Woolf employs a particular method which she has employed before, but never so completely to the exclusion of other methods. Just as in Conrad's The Heart of Darkness we hear everything as a story from the lips of Marlow, so here we learn everything as a fragment of memory passing through Virginia Woolf's mind. One thing calls up another, and we skip on to something very different, yet queerly linked with what went before. The story is tangled and inconsequent as are our digressions into the past. To use Mr Strachey's metaphor she drops a little bucket now here, now there, and fishes up—What is it? Ah, the sheep's jaw so treasured at eight years old, the door slamming all night in the passage.
Things so recalled have a peculiar beauty, an added value, yes, and an odd reality, which the things we are passing have not got as we flash by in the 16-40 automobile of life. Every moment in life we are carried beyond the possibility of turning our heads to take a second look, and we are haunted by whatever it is—an old woman stooping to gather a dry stick, a child by the red currant bushes, the sun sweeping down between the clouds so that the valley is barred and chequered with light, like waking, years ago in the night nursery with the sun pouring in through the Venetian blinds.
That is the impression Mrs Woolf gives, that the illusion got by art. Our own memories are pale trodden-away things like the pattern of the linoleum in the parlour, her words fresh like childhood, or first love, and real—as poetry i1s. And we actually have to remind ourselves that Mrs Woolf is not drawing upon her memories, but her imagination, and that somehow she gilds everything she writes with the beauty of something remembered.
If she were not so individual she would almost certainly be a sentimentalist, as it is no doubt there are some people who would accuse her of being one.
Jacob's Room and Ulysses! Turn from one to the other and compare them, for both are new departures in literary method. Both could only have been written in the last few years, but they are utterly different.
M Valéry Larbaud has told us that Ulysses is written exactly on the pattern of the Odyssey, and that Mr Joyce wrote it in different coloured chalks in order to make quite clear to what part each sentence belonged. But in spite of the coloured chalks it is impossible to find out why one part leads to the next. It is an agglomeration, not a unity. But the real failure of Ulysses is not that it lacks unity, but that the author has a different set of values from the rest of us. It is the things from which mankind instinctively turns away that Mr Joyce delights to write about.
In the art of painting subject is probably of no importance: but the aesthetic of writing is different. Not only must a poem or story have some sort of subject, but, even though they cannot be graded like apples, some subjects are more important than others. And the failure of Ulysses is that it is full of subjects of practically no aesthetic value, not that it is full of obscene words. This is all very relevant to Jacob's Room, for Mrs Woolf is incapable of Mr Joyce's offence. She can touch only what will move us aesthetically. She is the kind of butterfly that stoops only at the flowers, Mr Joyce "a painted lady or peacock that feasts upon bloody entrails dropped by a hawk," or even on less interesting droppings.
And Jacob's Room has form. Tangled and twisted as is the story, discursive, full of alleys (but not blind alleys) yet the whole has unity.
"Oh yes, human life is very tolerable on the top of an omnibus in Holborn, when the policeman holds up his arm and the sun beats on your back, and if there is such a thing as a shell secreted by man to fit man himself here we find it, on the banks of the Thames, where the great streets join and St. Paul's Cathedral, like the volute upon the top of the snail shell, finishes it off."
Yes, the same thing can be said of Jacob's Room, though it has more form than London has. But the book would be better if not quite so many pictures were called up; with all its beauty it is a little bit too much like fire, or like a very amusing person's memories of life. Here and there in it one finds something a little haphazard. In a work of Art as in St Paul's Cathedral: "if a boot creaks it's awful; then the order; the discipline. The verger with his rod has life ironed out beneath him." So should the artist. One thing calls up another, it is endless, and the images are introduced again and again, we never forget the surroundings, the setting.
No book so completely gives the feeling of London since Henry James wrote, but it is the London of to-day. "A homeless people, circling beneath the sky, whose blue or white is held off by a ceiling cloth of steel filings and horsedung shredded to dust."
In Jacob's Room Mrs Woolf has broken the conventional mould of the novel into which she poured The Voyage Out and Night And Day. For four or five years she wrote a number of short sketches, experiments to enable her to find the style which suits her. These sketches were published together under the title Monday or Tuesday, and it is by using the style she developed in them, that she was able to write Jacob's Room. She is now free to do anything she likes.