Books: How Time Passes

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The Writing. To say that Virginia Woolf writes well will hardly be news to anyone who reads contemporary literature. But it is sometimes hard to tell whether she is writing prose or poetry. Such a book as The Waves (TIME, Oct. 19, 1931), for instance, is not only in the mood but in the manner of poetry, flagrantly trespassing on poetry's ground. The Years has fewer of these ambiguously-styled passages than To the Lighthouse or The Waves, but they appear now & then. Sometimes they are onomatopoetic: "And the walloping Oxford bells, turning over and over like slow porpoises in a sea of oil, contemplatively intoned their musical incantations." But most of Virginia Woolf's descriptions are pictures: "It was March and the wind was blowing. . . . With one blast it blew out color—even a Rembrandt in the National Gallery, even a solid ruby in a Bond Street window: one blast and they were gone ... it paled every window; drove old gentlemen further and further into the leather smelling recesses of clubs; and old ladies to sit eyeless, leather cheeked, joyless among the tassels and antimacassars of their bedrooms and kitchens. Triumphing in its wantonness it emptied the streets; swept flesh before it; and coming smack into a dust cart standing outside the Army and Navy Stores, scattered along the pavement a litter of old envelopes; twists of hair; papers already blood smeared, yellow smeared, smudged with print and sent them scudding to plaster legs, lamp posts, pillar boxes, and fold themselves frantically against area railings." It takes more than graceful, ingenious or suggestively beautiful writing to earn an author the name of "great." As in a cosmic Customs Bureau, everything must be declared, even ideas. And Virginia Woolf's ideas are hard to declare. The suggestion of three ideas runs through her books, appears in their very titles: Time, Space, the Sea. Since all three are undefinable in novelists' terms, they have to be suggested semi-poetically, which is what Virginia Woolf does. Time, Space, the Sea are symbols, recurrent aspects of a dimly, intermittently perceived pattern.

The lives of human beings are even less observable indications of the same pattern but serve to mark the wavelike motion of life's force. Nearest that common readers can get to Virginia Woolf's prose meaning: human nature does not change, it only seems to, like the particles of water moved by a wave. Thus her characters are not so much individual people as aspects of human nature: human particles in the moving wave of time.

What Time means, what Space is, what the Sea mirrors is more than Virginia Woolf can say: but that they are, that they mean and mirror some Reality measureless to man is the whole import of her writing.