Books: G. B. S. & E. T.

• Share

(2 of 5)

Ellen Terry's letters to Shaw, hardly ever as long, as funny, as well-turned as his, are surprisingly human, touchingly wise. They serve as an excellent foil to the Shavian epistolary brilliance. And she brought out in the "inhuman" Shaw a side his readers and audiences have not often seen, a side of him which was uppermost when he wrote this last tribute to her memory: "She became a legend in her old age; but of that I have nothing to say; for we did not meet, and, except for a few broken letters, did not write; and she never was old to me. Let those who may complain that it was all on paper remember that only on paper has humanity yet achieved glory, beauty, truth, knowledge, virtue, and abiding love."

One of Those Lamps

THE WAVES — Virginia Woolf — Harcourt, Brace ($2.50).

Like all professions, literature is roomy at the top. To that top few women have aspired; fewer still in their own lifetime have arrived. This generation has had its fair share of authoresses who were first-class writers: the late Elinor Wylie and Amy Lowell, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Willa Gather, Colette, Virginia Woolf. Of this little list Virginia Woolf stands preeminent. Never a popular writer, always dangerously clever, she writes not as one enameling teacups but as one embroidering a theme; her theme is life.

The Waves, most ambitious, least tea-cuppy of Virginia Woolf's books, like most of her books is startlingly original in method. As a kind of prolog you are treated to a description of dawn over the English coast; this scene comes in again a little later, when the sun has risen—and so on, till night has fallen again. The story proper is written entirely in direct discourse which is really soliloquy, shading sometimes into a kind of ghostly dialog. Except for the inevitable "said Bernard" 's and "said Louis" 's there is not a word in it outside quotation marks. This may sound like boring reading, but Authoress Woolf knows her job: it is not boring. Into her soliloquies she has put everything you need to know about the characters; as you get used to this artfully artificial method you cease to notice its strangeness.