Harper's Bazoor

Virginia Woolf

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SINOD BOY

Virginia Woolf as the pursued object

THE LETTERS OF VIRGINIA WOOLF, VOLUME IV: 1929-1931, edited by Nigel Nicolson and Joanne Trautmann; Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 442 pp., $14.95.

By Don A. Keister "What is your opinion of Ethel Smyth," Virginia Woolf asked a musically knowledgeable friend, "

-her music, I mean? She has descended on me like a wolf on the fold in purple and gold, terrifically strident and enthusiastic I like her she is as shabby as a washer-woman she shouts and sings

...

as a writer she is astonishingly efficient takes every fence."

To Quentin Bell she wrote, "An old woman of seventy one has fallen in love with me. It is at once hideous and horrid and melancholy-sad. It is like being caught by a giant crab." She signed herself "your old doddering devoted aunt" she was 48.

Dame Ethel she had been knighted for her achievements in music -may now be a little better

remembered for such autobiographical writings as Impressions That Remained than for the music now rarely played. But in the end her chief claim to fame may be her appearance as the stellar attraction aside from the author herself in the fourth volume of Woolf letters.

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or

The clinically inclined may puzzle over the precise nature of the relationship between these two creative people. Virginia Woolf's passionate friendship whatever that was had passed its peak. Ethel Smyth, with her mannish dress, seems to have been a lesbian although an earlier great love she still very much dwelt on was for a man.

It is obvious enough that the older woman cross-examined the younger on a variety of personal matters, with the result that Woolf's letters are unusually revealing, especially on two topics: her sexual attitudes and the trouble she had writing The Waves "an impossible book

... it will end in failure" which many believe to be her best novel.

As far as sex is concerned, Virginia Woolf confesses with apparent regret that in those early Bloomsbury days her talk was always much bolder than her conduct. She describes herself as "sexually cowardly" and says "My terror of real life has always kept me in a nunnery.

She writes also about her "unstable" mind and occasional suicidal feelings and of her love and need of "Vita & Ethel & Leonard (her husband) & Vanessa (her sister) and oh some other people too." Without their affection and her own "burning and pressing sense of the importance and lovability and curiosity of human life" she would be "nothing but a membrane, a fibre, uncoloured, lifeless to be thrown away like any other excreta."

After a time, however, such confidences ceased. Ethel crowded

Virginia too hard, demanding more and more intimacy, dragging her to awful parties to meet influential people, giving her two-day headaches by complaining at length and fortissimo about the unfairness of the male-dominated musical world. Virginia rebelled; they quarreled; they patched it up but thing were not the same.

SELA

The letters to Ethel Smyth not the only reason for reading latest but not the last are still 10 years to cover) stallment of this correspondence. There are many other good things, including a wonderfully come de scription of an unexpected visit b the writing Udalls, father daughter descendants,they emphasize, of the author of Ralph Roister Doisterand their French visitor. It is letter 2442. Don't mis

it.

Don Keister is a professor emeritus at the University o Akron.