passages from between the acts

The story of Between the Acts is very simple – it observes 24 hours in the lives of a few people in the English countryside. The patrician, Bart Oliver, his widowed sister Lucy Swinton, his son Giles Oliver and Giles’ wife Isabella’s are hosting at their home in Pointz Hall a pageant for the village. It is June 1939 and the eve of World War II. Melba Cuddy-Keane, the critic who wrote the introduction, says the novel “turns on a fundamental incongruity, questioning the relation between everyday life in an English village and momentous events occurring simultaneously on the world’s stage. What does it mean, the novel asks, to hold a village festival when the country is on the brink of war?”

To be honest, this book was very difficult for me to understand. Maybe because the details of the plot are meant to be confusing, and secondary to the multiplicity of voices that Virginia Woolf so skillfully moves between. The book is itself a pageant, and the subject of this pageant is the pageant playing out at Pointz Hall. I felt a lot of sympathy for Isabella in this scene where she can’t comprehend what is happening on stage:

There was such a medley of things going on, what with the beldame’s deafness, the bawling of the youths, and the confusion of the plot that she could make nothing of it.

Did the plot matter? She shifted and looked over her right shoulder. The plot was only there to beget emotion. There were only two emotions: love, and hate. There was no need to puzzle out the plot. Perhaps Miss La Trobe meant that when she cut this knot in the center?

Don’t bother about the plot. The plot’s nothing.

But what was happening? The Prince had come.

The note to this portion of the text observes that Woolf wrote, in letters, “[a work of literature] is not form which you see, but emotion which you feel.” The critic adds, “The documentation of detail, in building up impressions, leads the reader to emotional understanding.” Which is to say Between the Acts is an impressionist work, the individual phrases may seem like meaningless blobs of paint but taken as a whole they give you a cathedral.

Still, so many things to admire in the writing, in the individual phrases. Watch how she moves from a poetic, obscurantist, omniscient voice to the point of view of a boy, here pulling up a flower and then being startled by Bart Oliver’s Afghan hound and the Bart himself, holding up a newspaper to make a beak:

The little boy had lagged and was grouting in the grass. Then the baby, Caro, thrust her fist out over the coverlet and the furry bear was jerked overboard. Amy had to stoop. George grubbed. The flower blazed between the angles of the roots. Membrane after membrane was torn. It blazed a soft yellow, a lambent light under a film of velvet; it filled the caverns behind the eyes with light. All that inner darkness became a hall, leaf smelling, earth smelling, of yellow light. And the tree was beyond the flower; the grass, the flower and the tree were entire. Down on his knees grubbing he held the flower complete. Then there was a roar and a hot breath and a stream of coarse grey hair rushed between him and the flower. Up he leapt, toppling in his fright, and saw coming towards him a terrible peaked eyeless monster moving on legs, brandishing arms.

The boy bawls, and then Woolf moves seamlessly, within the page, to Bart’s thoughts on the boy: “Old Oliver raised himself, his veins swollen, his cheeks flushed; he was angry. His little game with the paper hadn’t worked. The boy was a cry-baby. He nodded and sauntered on, smoothing out the crumpled paper and muttering, as he tried to find his line in the column, “A cry-baby—a cry-baby.”

Consider the opening description of the library in Pointz Hall:

A foolish, flattering lady, pausing on the threshold of what she once called “the heart of the house,” the threshold of the library, had once said: “Next to the kitchen, the library’s always the nicest room in the house.” Then she added, stepping across the threshold, “Books are the mirrors of the soul.”

In this case a tarnished, a spotted soul. For as the train took over three hours to reach this remote village in the very heart of England, no one ventured so long a journey without staving off possible mind-hunger, without buying a book on a bookstall. Thus the mirror that reflected the soul sublime, reflected also the soul bored. Nobody could pretend, as they looked at the shuffle of shilling shockers that week-enders had dropped, that the looking-glass always reflected the anguish of a Queen or the heroism of King Harry.

I hope someday to have the confidence to write with this omniscient, judgmental voice. What backbone. This passage opens a new section. No indication of who the “foolish, flattering lady” who made the statements about libraries is. Then Isabella enters the room and there’s still no clue as to who first remarked on the library but Isabella is complicated by her association with the statements:

“The library’s always the nicest room in the house,” she quoted, and ran her eyes along the books. “The mirror of the soul” books were. The Faerie Queen and Kinglake’s Crimea; Keats and the Kruetzer Sonata. There they were, reflecting. What? What remedy was there for her at her age—the age of the century, thirty-nine—in books? Book-shy she was, like the rest of her generation; and gun-shy, too. Yet as a person with a raging tooth runs her eye in a chemist shop over green bottles with gilt scrolls on them lest one of them may contain a cure, she considered: Keats and Shelley; Yeats and Donne. Or perhaps not a poem; a life. The life of Garibaldi. The life of Lord Palmerston. Or perhaps not a person’s life; a country’s. The Antiquities of Durham; The Proceedings of the Archeological Society of Nottingham. Or not a life at all, but science—Eddington, Darwin, James.

None of them stopped the toothache.

And here’s another quick dip into the voice of another character, this time Giles Oliver getting irritated with the idea of entertaining strangers with a pageant at this point in European history:

Giles nicked his chair into position with a jerk. Thus only could he show his irritation, his rage with old fogies who sat and looked at views over coffee and cream when the whole of Europe—over there—was bristling like . . . . He had no command of metaphor. Only the ineffective word “hedgehog” illustrated his vision of Europe, bristling with guns, poised with planes.

I am so much happier when I read creative writing.