Books: A Mirror for England

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

The late, great Virginia Woolf’s last book is not one of her major works; it is almost a “light” novel. But it compares with the run of light novels as a Mozart opera compares with one by Sig Romberg. It is also the most nearly public of her exquisitely private books. Its subject is no individual, but the whole of England.

On the lawn of a country house, on a summer afternoon in 1939, a group of upper-class English people watch a village pageant and retire with its ambiguous messages fading on “the sky of the mind.” By this time the afternoon is over, Mrs. Woolf has conjured up a heroic image of the whole splendor of English literature and history, from the age when rhododendrons crowded Piccadilly to the moment when, puzzled, uneasy, a little offended, the audience beholds itself torn to pieces among the flashing mirrors of the village players in their finale, called England: Ourselves.

These spectators are a sultry, mercifully drawn set: a restive wife, her sullen husband; his aged, beak-nosed, naïvé father, dreaming of youth in India; his delicate old aunt, cherishing a crucifix between her bony hands; an assortment of eligible neighbors. The pageant they have come to see is a half-talented, half-parodied hodgepodge which in actual performance would have been sad, silly, and typically British, but which, in Mrs. Woolf’s hairline contexts, is moving too.

While Queen Bess and other principals hold the forestage, for instance, village supers clad in sackcloth creep among the trees, unable to make themselves heard through the wind as they chant: “Digging and delving, hedging and ditching, we pass. . . . Summer and winter, autumn and spring return. . . . All passes but we, all changes . . . but we remain forever the same. . . .” They remind you of Evelyn Waugh; yet in Mrs. Woolf’s many-planed perspective they are also in truth the nameless human swarm.

Nature and machines are other characters in the larger drama. A wedge of planes blasts to bits the Rector’s fuddling interpretation of the show; and butterflies are deluded by bright costumes on the grass: “Red Admirals gluttonously absorbed richness from dish cloths, cabbage whites drank icy coolness from silver paper.”

After the show, the two elders of the household, dreaming of the glories of a vanished England, move up to bed, to death. The younger couple, a sorrowful, sadly mismated Adam and Eve, are left alone to their marriage and to silence, sailing like disconsolate swans on the exhausted calm of a summer evening, and on the edge of one of the steepest chasms in history.

“Alone, enmity was bared; also love. Before they slept, they must fight; after they had fought, they would embrace. From that embrace another life might be born. But first they must fight, as the dog fox fights with the vixen, in the heart of darkness, in the fields of night.”

Virginia Woolf was the unlikeliest artist on earth to stoop to propaganda, or to any form of public ingratiation. She did not do so here. Yet England and its people, its present, past, innocence and disease, are here summarized, in much the way a nightwind can summarize a continent.