Mrs. Dalloway

National Review, March 23, 1998 by John Simon

AS with Henry James, I never felt comfortable with Virginia Woolf. Her fiction, that is; her nonfiction I have always found of considerable interest. Now comes the film version of Mrs. Dalloway, and though the movie is perforce different from the wholly stream-of-consciousness novel, it presents separate but equal problems.

For starters, I have always mistrusted writings about men and women in love, sex, and marriage by authors lacking those experiences. (There are, to be sure, exceptions: Jane Austen and Tennessee Williams leap to mind.) But here we have Virginia Woolf in her long and totally asexual marriage to Leonard Woolf, whatever the exact nature of her lesbian mopings and gropings with Vita Sackville-West may have been. Something like this surfaces in the novel Mrs. Dalloway, where the young heroine chooses the safe Richard Dalloway over the passionate Peter Walsh, and has a quasi-sexual involvement with her best friend, Sally Seton.

But what may work in exquisitely invertebrate, unhingedly expansive prose, does not parse in the more concrete medium of film. Why does the young Clarissa of the recurrent flashbacks, who proudly proclaims the world-changing feats she aspires to both with Peter and with Sally, settle for the safe but pedestrian union with Richard Dalloway? She who, in the movie, is so full of energy, so bent on absorbing life through every pore? The film does not make clear the trajectory from the impassioned excitement of youthful life at the picturesque country house of Bourton to the successful but mundane compromise of Westminster, where life dwindles to mere social life.

To return to Woolf the novelist, however. Of Mrs. Dalloway, Mitchell A. Leaska writes, "Events are no longer given in the traditional manner of cause and effect. The focus now is on the internal atmosphere of her characters, whose lives are dramatized . . . through a series of interior monologues of their remembered past, and the novel moves forward through successive moments of condensed experience. . . . Here it is mental time, psychological time, that governs." All very well, though hardly Woolf's invention -- the monologue interieur dates back to Edouard Dujardin (1888) and, in English, to James Joyce. The big question is whose consciousness is streaming, and how. For the movements of the psyche need to be, however subtly and inconspicuously, controlled; Woolf oozes, bleeds, and dissolves all over the place, from incoherent simile to inaccessible metaphor.

Take "overcome with his own grief, which rose like a moon looked at from a terrace, ghastly beautiful with light from a sunken day." Far-fetched in isolation, such tropes become intolerable in heaps: e.g., "Such are the visions which proffer great cornucopias full of fruit to the solitary traveler, or murmur in his ear like sirens lolloping away on the green sea waves, or are dashed in his face like bunches of roses, and rise to the surface like pale faces which fishermen flounder through floods to embrace." This hurtling from dubious to yet more dubious -- and suffocating -- image is utterly stifling, not helped by that unfortunate flounder, which, in this context, conjures up fish rather than fish-tailed maidens. In short -- which Woolf seldom is -- a riot of images spilling into one another in a fuzz of exquisiteness, frenzied sensitivity running smoothshod into deliquescence.

Bad as this strikes me in fiction, it is fatal for cinema. Although movies thrive on dissolves, the crossfades are from specifics to other specifics, not from fancies to further (or furthest) fancies. The screenwriter adapting Woolf must either plunge into excessive voiceover, or opt for harder edges and greater solidity than is consistent with the material, and thus betray the text. The latter is preferable, though, and is what Eileen Atkins proposes as scenarist, and Marleen Gorris delivers as director.

Miss Atkins, a great actress, qualifies for this job, too. Her stage adaptations -- A Room of One's Own as a solo piece for herself, Vita and Virginia (the Sackville-West - Woolf affair) as a duet for Vanessa Redgrave and herself -- were superb achievements, and there was also the five-part BBC radio series she made from the Woolf diaries. But as a movie Mrs. Dalloway is something else again. All those intersecting interior monologues, those shuttlings between past and present, those minuscule grains of happenstance accreting around them such enormous pearls of poetic verbiage -- how is the screen to cope with such unleashed orgies of sensibility? Even in the expert hands of Eileen Atkins, whose name ironically echoes that of "a grim old housemaid" fleetingly mentioned in the novel: Ellen Atkins.

The main theme is, of course, the curious near-parallel between Clarissa Dalloway and her semi-demented alter ego, the shell-shocked war veteran Septimus Warren Smith. Both have a teamingly hyperactive life of the imagination, both rely heavily on support from their spouses, both are trying to escape from their dogging pasts (she from not marrying Peter Walsh, he from watching his beloved officer -- or, in the film, fellow soldier -- Evans being blown to bits in battle). But Clarissa, a model hostess who, during the one day covered, gives a glittering party, ultimately differs from Septimus, who, subjected to the callous ineptitude of a bullying physician and an arrogant psychiatrist, kills himself.