The Woolf Cult

Moments of Being By Virginia Woolf Harcourt, 207 pp., $8.95 Reviewing this book in Newsweek a short time ago (“a new collection of her autobiographical writings” which gives us “biography’s greatest gift”), Margo Jefferson commented upon the thriving nature of “the Virginia Woolf revival.” She also noted that “articles lamenting the ‘cult’ ” were appearing. I had not seen any of these myself, but this review certainly falls into that category.

Having witnessed the Eliot industry, the Joyce industry, and, finally, the Pound industry, and having noted that they were gradually restoring taste to that level of bland ignorance it occupied when Eliot came along to reform it sixty years ago, one realized that a Virginia Woolf revival was in the offing. After all, it was something approaching the present level of creative and critical nullity that fifty years ago billed Virginia Woolf, Joyce, and Proust as all really of equal merit. One can do little with that kind of mind. Add the fact that Virginia Woolf was a feminist of sorts, and that Bloomsbury (so essential to her fame) was, without doubt, a significant forerunner of our intellectual and sexual emancipations, and we have in her a heroine our age can look to. (She even loved to use the word “bugger,” the one epithet The New York Review of Books tells us we still seem prudishly to avoid. She uses it often in these memoirs.)

VM

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Vincent Miller

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Moments of Being By Virginia Woolf Harcourt, 207 pp., $8.95 Reviewing this book in Newsweek a short time ago (“a new collection of her autobiographical writings” which gives us “biography’s greatest gift”), Margo Jefferson commented upon the thriving nature of “the Virginia Woolf revival.” She also noted that “articles lamenting the ‘cult’ ” were appearing. I had not seen any of these myself, but this review certainly falls into that category.

Having witnessed the Eliot industry, the Joyce industry, and, finally, the Pound industry, and having noted that they were gradually restoring taste to that level of bland ignorance it occupied when Eliot came along to reform it sixty years ago, one realized that a Virginia Woolf revival was in the offing. After all, it was something approaching the present level of creative and critical nullity that fifty years ago billed Virginia Woolf, Joyce, and Proust as all really of equal merit. One can do little with that kind of mind. Add the fact that Virginia Woolf was a feminist of sorts, and that Bloomsbury (so essential to her fame) was, without doubt, a significant forerunner of our intellectual and sexual emancipations, and we have in her a heroine our age can look to. (She even loved to use the word “bugger,” the one epithet The New York Review of Books tells us we still seem prudishly to avoid. She uses it often in these memoirs.)