I can’t see anything, but I think they’re grinding away at balcony railings, which are going to be replaced. It’s rather like the dentist’s, only with my mouth closed. That kind of fun.

Otherwise, it’s a lovely day. But that otherwise lies far away. I woke from some sweet but melancholy dreams about wandering up the West Side, in and out of the H and K line stations, deciding at last that I would try to reach Kathleen at her apartment — for this was the New York of 1980 (or earlier), and we were not yet married. And Kathleen wasn’t there. Wasn’t in the bed beside me, I mean. She was already dressed, reading the paper in the living room, and waiting for a conference call. When the call came, she had to give up on the cordless landline phone because of the racket. I made tea and toast for her, and two soft-boiled eggs for myself. (Never have I managed to drop so much eggshell into the bowl.)

I do have to get out of the house today, if only to take some photographs.  

***

It’s hard to read. My time with Virginia Woolf and Elizabeth Taylor was intense. I was reading their work and then dipping into their biographies. The biographies are of course very different. Hermione Lee is writing about an acknowledged master of English literature, whereas Nicola Beauman, in The Other Elizabeth Taylor, finds herself picking bones with her subject for having done so little to advance her fame (beside all the hard work of writing, that is). Virginia Woolf is intimately associated with feminism, so that even people who don’t care for her fiction have to respond to her criticism. Elizabeth Taylor wrote no criticism. She ran a household and raised two children, writing pretty much in the Jane Austen manner — whenever she could. Seventy years after her death, Virginia Woolf holds few secrets; forty years after Elizabeth Taylor’s death, Beauman discovered a bombshell that led Taylor’s children to repudiate her book: the letters that Taylor wrote to her hitherto unknown-of lover, Ray Russell.

You may wonder why I’m even comparing the two writers. Elizabeth Bowen once told Elizabeth Taylor that it was a pity that she and “Virginia” couldn’t have been great friends. In time, I have no doubt that they will be thought of together, as the leading women writers of twentieth-century England. How long that will take, I daren’t opine. More powerfully than any others, they wrote about life as it is lived, and they did so in language that brings their stories to life. Eventually, it will be necessary to do a little background reading in the period, just as it already is in the case of Lady Murasaki or even Jane Austen herself. But once the social rules have been explained (and the technological deficits borne in mind), Woolf and Taylor will be seen to capture the ambiguities and ambivalences of consciousness, the resentments entailed in doing one’s duty and keeping the social fabric in good repair, and the very flavor of resignation and acceptance, better than anyone else. They are not dreamers, these two; nor are they thinkers. (Dreaming and thinking are for children.) They are unblinking observers. And, despite everything, they write with more hope than despair. 

Someday, it will be more generally understood that these are the things that good literature must accomplish. I hope that men can keep up.

Drop me a line at rjk@dailyblague.com
This entry was posted on Friday, November 9th, 2012 at 11:29 am.