Virginia Woolf's The Years

 

     "All talk would be nonsense, I suppose, if it were written down," she said, stirring her coffee.

     Maggie stopped the machine for a moment and smiled.

     "And even if it isn't," she said.

     "But it's the only way we have of knowing each other," Rose protested.

  

The Years was the last novel completed by Virginia Woolf during her life, and came out in 1937. It was the biggest financial success of her lifetime, though I have to imagine Mrs. Dalloway has sold more copies now. It's the story of the Pargiter family across three generations. Colonel Abel Pargiter, who served in India, and his wife Rose, are the parents of seven children; they form the core of the novel, though there are also cousins and family friends.

 

The novel is arranged in ten chapters, each labelled with a year. The longest are the first, 1880, and the last, 'The Present Day,' presumably 1936 or so, just before the novel appears. In 1880, we meet the seven children--Eleanor, Morris, Milly, Edward, Delia, Martin, and Rose. Mother Rose has been bedridden for years, and may finally be dying, and we see the children's (and husband's--who keeps a mistress) reaction to their mother's imminent death. Delia, the rebellious one, thinks it's time for her to go; others are more uncertain, but it's true Rose the mother doesn't have much of a life by then. At the end of the chapter, after a couple of dream-haunted days of collapses and rallies, she dies.

 

The other year chapters all take place on a single day, and are built around a meeting of family members. In 1891, it's the day of Parnell's death, the advocate for Irish Home Rule; Colonel Abel goes to visit his brother and sister-in-law for his niece Maggie's birthday. Abel, perfectly content in his imperialism, had no use for Parnell, but admires his sister-in-law's emotion at the death. In 1917 Maggie, now married to a Frenchman René (Renny), host Eleanor for dinner; German air raids on London occur that night. 1918 sees the day of the armistice; we follow Crosby, the Pargiter nurse and maid, now pensioned off, in the shortest chapter; she's annoyed by all the celebratory guns going off. In 'The Present Day', Delia and her husband Patrick, throw a party; all the surviving family members appear; there's a dance and dinner, and the party ends at dawn:

"The sun had risen, and the sky above the houses wore an air of extraordinary beauty, simplicity and peace."

So it's a family novel, but if so, it's quite different from what you might expect; it's impressionistic in its style, sketch-y, even, so long as you don't imagine that as a derogatory adjective. It's half the length of Buddenbrooks, for example, and avoids scenes that might have been expected: Charles, one of Maggie's children, dies in World War I, but we only learn that obliquely and long after the event.

 

Woolf conceived the novel after she'd given a lecture 'Professions for Women' in 1931:

"When your secretary invited me to come here, she told me that your Society is concerned with the employment of women and she suggested that I might tell you something about my own professional experiences. It is true I am a woman; it is true I am employed; but what professional experiences have I had? It is difficult to say." 

That set her to thinking and she initially imagined a novel-essay about the Pargiter family, a blend of essays about the status of women mixed with fictional episodes. That book was reconstructed after her death and is available, titled The Pargiters, but I haven't read it. In the end, though, the essays became her book Three Guineas and the fictional episodes became the novel The Years. That initial conception is still visible; in the first generation, there aren't many possibilities for women: Eleanor ends up looking after her widowed father, only becoming a great world traveler after his death; Kitty, a cousin, whom  Edward Pargiter loved and wanted to marry, marries instead a great lord and lives that lifestyle; Delia, in that first generation but somewhat younger, becomes a suffragette and is sent to prison for her agitation. It's only in the third generation that real professional possibilities open up for women: Peggy, Maggie's daughter, becomes a doctor, though it doesn't seem to make her very happy.

 

But a schematic essay-novel is not the novel Virginia Woolf has given us (though the idea of it definitely colors the criticism from what I've seen). Several of the male characters are also well-rounded, particularly Abel, the patriarch, and North, Peggy and Charles' brother, who also served in World War I, but then went to be a farmer in Africa.  Like any family novel of multiple generations, it's interested in the passing of time, and 1880 to 1935 are a time of great changes in England. In 1880, tea is being made with a spirit lamp and people travel in horse-drawn carriages; in 1936, the flash and circle symbol of the British Union of Fascists is graffitied on walls, and Eleanor discusses traveling by plane (though she doesn't).

 

It's also very good on family relations. As aunt and niece suggest in that opening quote, there's never perfect understanding or communication. During that final party, Edward, by then a professor, quotes Sophocles, but refuses to translate:

"It's no go, North thought. He can't say what he wants to say; he's afraid. They're all afraid; afraid of being laughed at; afraid of giving themselves away. He's afraid too, he thought, looking at the young man with a fine forehead and a weak chin, who was gesticulating too emphatically. We're all afraid of each other, he thought; afraid of what?"

And yet that's not the whole of the story either; again as that opening quote suggests, there is communication. North dances with a girl at the party, asks her for a date, she accepts. The next generation? Another way in which this would be unlike Buddenbrooks. This is a family with a decent amount of good will toward each other--not true of all families-- even if they don't always articulate it. The party is a success; it, and the novel, end with 'simplicity and peace.'

οὔτοι συνέχθειν, άλλα σθμφιλεῖν ἔφυν

-Sophocles, Antigone, l.523 (Antigone speaking) 

And what was it Edward was unable to say in English? Elizabeth Wyckoff translates as, "I cannot share in hatred, but in love."

 

Nothing of Virginia Woolf's is exactly unknown or ignored. As I noted, you can easily enough find the novel The Pargiters she decided against giving us. But when I first was reading Virginia Woolf, thirty years ago or whatever, I read Mrs. Dalloway, To The Lighthouse, Orlando, the Common Reader series, etc., but it didn't occur to me to read The Years. I don't know what bit of received opinion I picked up that I didn't need to read it, but it was wrong. 

 

This was my spin book for Classics Club Spin #44, and a very good spin it was! 

Georgi Gospodinov's Death and the Gardener

"Surely this is why we tell stories. To create another parallel corridor where the world and everything in it are in their rightful places. To divert the story down another furrow when danger and death flood in, just as he would divert the water into another row in his garden."

He, in the sentence above, is the dying father of the narrator; the father liked to garden. The narrator is a middle-aged Bulgarian novelist whose name is only given as Georgi, and that only in the flap description.

Of the four novels of Gospodinov's I've read this easily feels the most autobiographical, but Gospodinov in a headnote insists it is a novel.

The father Dinyo had been diagnosed with fatal lung cancer seventeen years earlier. Rather miraculously at that time it had gone into remission, but now, in the late fall of 2023, it's come roaring back. Georgi starts a handwritten diary to deal with his feelings. When the first set of scans comes back, there's basically no hope:

"Well, at least till Christmas, we'll get together, see the snowdrops spring up, my father said, looking at the doctor with such expectation. Christmas was twenty days away, almost no time at all. 

Christmas might be possible, the doctor replied.

And this answer was at once the most merciful and merciless I have ever heard."

Georgi's father was a storyteller himself, not professionally, just in conversation, and when the present becomes too difficult to bear, Georgi recalls one of his father's stories. It's clear Georgi simply likes his father in addition to loving him. Georgi, the writer (and reader,) turns to other writers for consolation. There's Sontag, unsurprisingly, who herself was diagnosed with a cancer that was supposed to kill her, which went away for a number of years, but in the end did return; also Montaigne, various stoics, Borges. Homer, and here as well, is a frequent touchstone for Gospodinov.

There are a few markers this is a novel. Gaustine, a recurring character in Gospodinov's fiction, shows up in this, but mostly to be quoted. Gospodinov uses himself as a character in other novels; The Physics of Sorrow is in some ways a generational family novel, but with an amusing medical/science-fiction-y twist to aid the narration. In the Booker International winner, Time Shelter, the writer Georgi Gospodinov is hired as a consultant for a psychological therapeutic project, because he's good at storytelling; Gaustine, though, makes the plot go in that novel. The distance in this between Georgi the character and Georgi Gospodinov the actual novelist feels much smaller. It's less expansive, less playful than his other novels, but also very touching. 

The Tragedy of X

"Well," said Inspector Thumm suddenly, "plain or fancy, it's a puzzler, and Mr. Bruno thought you'd be interested."

Inspector Thumm of the New York Police and Walter Bruno, the district attorney, call up on Drury Lane, retired Shakespearean actor, for help in a particularly puzzling murder case. Lane had been a help on a previous case. 

Harvey Longstreet, of the brokerage firm De Witt and Longstreet, was poisoned on the streetcar. He was a travelling with his business partner and other associates, but Longstreet wasn't very popular, and any of them would cheerfully have seen him dead. But how was it done? It was raining and the windows were closed; the streetcar was full after the Longstreet party got on and they didn't make any stops. The poison was fast-acting and everyone who could have done it was there.

The conductor of that street car sends a letter to Thumm saying he had information; his body is found bashed on the head and thrown from a ferry boat. And Longstreet's partner De Witt is murdered on a suburban train. The Commuter Murders! 

After Lane has heard the facts of the first murder, he says he knows who did it, but can't prove it. I read this twenty-five years ago, and I remembered the nature of the clue that Lane sees (though he doesn't disclose it until the end) but had still forgotten who the muderer was. But it is one of the best Queen mysteries, and shows up on best overall mystery lists as well. After reading Drury Lane's Last Case recently, I thought it was time to reread this one. Highly recommended!

Vintage Mystery Scavenger Hunt

Golden Age (1933). Train.