Last Works by Mark C. Taylor

Author:Mark C. Taylor
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2017-01-23T05:00:00+00:00

Going with the Flow

What if the last work is not a novel, poem, painting, or symphony but a suicide? Just as each work of art is distinctive, so each suicide has its own style: Freud’s sigh, Wallace’s scream, Hemingway’s bravado. When death is a choice, it does not remain silent. The manner of suicide reveals something about the life it ends.

The events in Between the Acts take place in 1939. The original title of the work was Pointz Hall, which was the name of a country retreat quite unlike the Talland House of Woolf’s childhood memories. Northrop Frye has gone so far as to call Between the Acts, written under difficult circumstances, Woolf’s “most profound work.”22 She first conceived the novel in April 1938 and completed it November 23, 1940, one year after the start of World War II and just four months before her death. She was also working on a history of literature and a biography of her late Bloomsbury colleague Roger Fry at the time. Though this was a precarious time for England, Woolf remained strangely calm. Describing her mood in August 1940, Bell writes, “By that time, the Battle of Britain was approaching its climax and Virginia was passing from a mood of apprehension to one of quiet imperturbability. Her serenity was perhaps a necessary prelude to the storm—by which I mean the workings of Virginia’s mind may have been such that she had to pass from the terror of June 1940 to the final agony of March 1941 by way of an euphoric interval, and that this may have been just as much a part of her mental illness. . . . Never had a novel of hers flowed so rapidly, so effortlessly from her pen; there were no checks, doubts, despairs, struggles or revisions.”23 Her tranquility and productivity were all the more remarkable when one realizes that the war was drawing close to Monk House, where she was writing. In November, as she was finishing the novel, a bomb fell, destroying the bank of the River Ouse, flooding nearby meadows and her garden.

As I have noted, when Woolf finished a novel, she often became mentally unstable. As soon as she completed Between the Acts, confidence gave way to uncertainty, doubt, and anxiety. Pressed for money and with groceries scarce during wartime, she wrote to a friend on October 31, 1940, “I never heard a more absurd ‘business proposition’ as you call it. A month’s milk and cream in return for an unborn and as far as I can tell completely worthless book. I’ve lost all power over words, cant do a thing with them.”24 Even more revealing, four days before her death, Woolf wrote to John Lehmann, the managing editor of Hogarth Press, withdrawing Between the Acts from publication. “I’d decided, before your letter came, that I cant publish that novel as it stands—its too silly and trivial. What I will do is to revise it, and see if I can pull it together and so publish it in the autumn.

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