THERE is no saying when a literary clique will come into being. It needs no corporation papers, no publicity agents; its only requirement seems to be a congeniality in taste and purpose. The Wordsworths and Coleridge once formed a happy clique in the Lake Country. Probably the most articulate clique in English letters to-day is the so-called Bloomsbury group, which embraces Virginia Woolf, V. Sackville-West and her husband, Harold Nicolson, Clive Bell, and Lytton Strachey, three of whom have new books appearing in America this autumn.
V. Sackville-West is a name increasing in significance. She has written a history of Knole House, that huge pile in which she was brought up; her poem, The Land, is mighty respected by the knowing few; hers were the photographs that appeared in Mrs. Woolf’s Orlando; last year she was represented by that charmingly reminiscent novel, The Edwardians, this year by her new book, All Passion Spent (Doubleday, Doran, $2.50). Ju the two last, the touch of the clique is apparent: Miss Sackville-West has committed herself to that purpose which has long been guiding Virginia Woolf and which, as a style of writing, is referred to as the ‘stream-of-consciousness.’ It is a style which places full emphasis on the inwardness of the characters portrayed. Direct narrative is almost obliterated; instead, the characters are shown to us by their thoughts, speech, and above all, their reflection. Their deeds we see only as they reverberate in thought, and it is by the force and tragedy of what is taking place in the arena of the mind that we are stirred.
This contemplative method accords almost perfectly with the theme of All Passion Spent. Here is the story of an old lady of eighty-four. Wife of a distinguished man, once Viceroy of India, once Prime Minister, she spends the few months left her after his death in a seclusion which remains a mystery to her selfish, bickering children, but which for her is a time of mellow reverie. Keeping company with a few old eccentrics, she lives in a Hampstead cottage, and there, threading back through the years, she rejoins the self that she was before her marriage. This reverie — which for the story’s sake is not free from surprising interruption — is a poetic thing; it has about it the fading glow and poignancy of an English summer’s dusk. Wise, mellow, and without complexity, this story of Lady Slaue reaches inward to touch the reader.
The Waves, by Virginia Woolf (Harcourt, Brace, $2.50), is a book of more intricate pattern. Her first novel in nearly three years’ time, this marks an advance, but an advance which the reader must equip himself to follow. In reading Mrs. Woolf’s novels (and I wish more Americans would do so) you must accommodate yourself to her disregard of those partitions — punctuation, the ’she thought’s’ and the ’he replied’s’ - which are commonly used to divide the text; you must allow for some occasional discomfort with the pronouns; you must be prepared for imagery which fatigues, violates the mind with its everchanging color and import. I say ‘you must’ because I believe that there are few pages of contemporary fiction which so richly repay the conscientious reader as Mrs. Woolf’s do.
In The Waves we follow the career of a group of six friends, three men and three women, who grow up together and whose lives continue to touch till death. We may label Susan as maternal, Jinny the sensualist, Neville the orderly scholar, Louis vain, self-tortured, and efficient, Bernard the observer, Rhoda the visionary. But here are no flat characters; these people so twist and turn, they do in Mrs. Woolf’s brilliant development so reveal their separate and complex entities, that, as in real life, no simple tag will serve. We are given a rare insight of minds — of people — interesting in themselves, twice interesting in their reactions upon each other. Yet, I must add this qualification: the unfamiliar method, with its trace of artifice, does set up a barrier; I have a close regard for these people objectively, but they hardly touch my feelings. Thus at times the narrative fails to hold my interest.
The title, of course, is figurative. The Waves are the waves of time that beat upon us all. Each chapter of the book is prefaced by a highly wrought description marking the dawn, the early sunshine, the bright midday, or the sunset of life, and each suggesting the time and mood of the narrative which follows. Figures from these preludes — the birds, the waves, the flowers — are woven, Wagnerian-fashion, into the body of the text; motives appear and reappear with intensifying effect. In Mrs. Woolf’s writing, poetry is finely balanced with firm prose of common sense.
For a change I turn to two young American novelists easier to read. In New England Holiday (W. W. Norton, $2.00) Charles Allen Smart brings together fourteen people, half, at least, strangers to each other, for a week-end house party. In separate chapters each gives his or her own account — somewhat self-consciously — of this holiday community, which is, incidentally, quite well behaved as such things go. No overshadowing mystery invades the group; there is merely the give-and-take of propinquity. The difficulty with the concept is that the reader, like so many of the guests, never really gets beyond a mere acquaintanceship. Meeting these people is not enough; we have got to follow them to be deeply interested — and that the scope of the narrative precludes. Deftly written, clear in so much of its perception, this book yet seems to me more of a promise than a thorough performance.
The Old Crowd, by William Fitzgerald, Jr. (Longmans, Green, $2.00), is a well-rounded job. Here, as in The Waves, the author is dealing with a small group of people intimately connected. There the likeness stops. Mr. Fitzgerald writes the language and about the associations of a New Hampshire village. Seven members of ‘the old crowd ' have their minds disturbed, the recollections quickened by an angry remark. There follows a story of hindsight in which these respected citizens, now in their maturity, go back individually to the early days in the '90s when the town was alive and they the most vibrant part of it. Their attentions centre upon a despicable hypocrite who has left his ugly mark upon each of them; he, ‘the Colonel,’may be taken to stand for the degeneration throughout the countryside to-day. He supplies the key to the plot, but is otherwise a stock figure. The warmth, the honest, crude, compelling identities of Racey, Miss Bess, Uncle George, Claire Frey — these are what make the book a sound one and worth reading. These people really lived.
On the page following is the Atlantic’s list of Readable Books published this autumn