The Measure of Life: Virginia Woolf's Last Years. - book review

Criticism, Spring, 2001 by Lisa Low

The Measure of Life: Virginia Woolf's Last Years by Herbert Marder. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000. Pp. xiii 418. $35.00 cloth.

The list of authors who have tried to describe the life of Virginia Woolf is long: it includes Woolf herself and her nephew, Quentin Bell (1972); Roger Poole (1978), Stephen Trombley (1981), Lyndall Gordon (1984), Louise DeSalvo (1989), Peter Alexander (1992), James King (1995), and Hermione Lee (1996). Now we must add Herbert Marder (2000)--yet another aspirant who has taken on the interesting, if apparently unresolvable problem of narrating the life of Woolf. (Marder's book is distinguished from these in its attempt to study only the last ten years.)

Of all the biographies of Woolf, the most authoritative are probably Quentin Bell's and Hermione Lee's. Each book has its own claim to greatness. Lee's 1996 study was hailed by American feminists as a long-awaited antidote to the excesses of DeSalvo and the blindnesses of Bell. Nearly 800 pages long, Lee's Virginia Woolf is encyclopedic. Written by a feminist with considerable intellectual sensitivity and apparently endless patience, it demonstrates thorough research and a lifelong passion, even obsession with Woolf.

But for sheer wit and charm, Quentin Bell's biography is hard to beat. Not only is Bell a first-rate writer, he is a Bloomsbury insider who can speak of Woolf in the first person. Bell's biography is nevertheless flawed. Indeed, it has annoyed American feminists since its publication in 1972. In Bell's hands, Woolf emerges too much as the upper-class madwoman dependent for survival upon her husband, the brilliant political strategist, Leonard Woolf. Most disturbingly, Bell turns a blind eye on the political Woolf. When he takes up the important question of Woolf's Three Guineas, the antifascist pamphlet she spent six years writing, he dismisses it, saying that Woolf never had the gift for political writing and that she had best stick to the fictions for which she was better suited.

It's hard to know how Marder's book will measure up against these two more obvious giants. It's shorter and more lyrical than Lee's book; more sympathetic and more feminist than Bell's. The book's value--and that is considerable--must derive in large part from its focus on the last decade of Woolf's life. Such a choice, by definition, claims the importance of political Woolf, for it was in the thirties, during the rise of Hitler, Mussolini, Franco, and Stalin, that Woolf became convinced that no artist could remain immune; in the thirties that she turned her intensities to pamphlet writing; and in the thirties when a life of thinking about women emerged as Three Guineas, her harshest and most comprehensive critique of patriarchy. In focusing on the last decade of Woolf's life Marder facilitates the American academic feminist shift from the public image of Woolf as the upper-class aesthete, to Woolf the political theorist and activist. Indeed, the book's title implies that Woolf's life should be measured not (as it usually is) by the experimental novels she wrote in the 1920s (Jacob's Room, Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, Orlando), but by the more self-consciously political texts of the 1930s: the novel-essay The Years, the prophetic satire, Three Guineas (Suzanne Bellamy has called it the most important political document of the century), and the novel-drama Between the Acts.

Marder's book has much to recommend it: its sympathetic treatment of Woolf; its perceptive criticism of her work; its poetic/elegiac tone; its awareness of history. While Bell, for example, leapfrogs over such events as Leonard and Virginia's odd decision to travel to Germany in 1935 at the exact moment when Jew-hating Germany was revving up for war, Marder slows the camera down, taking us at a much more detailed pace through the events of that potentially dangerous trip. We see, for example, that Leonard's pet marmoset distracted the Germans from Leonard's Jewishness. "It was obvious to the most anti-semitic stormtrooper," Leonard later remarked, "that no one who had on his shoulder such a `dear little thing' could be a Jew" (179). We hear of the worried ten minutes Woolf spent waiting in the car at the custom office on the German border where she feared increasingly that Leonard was being detained (in the event, Leonard was all right, though he had witnessed a "violent tirade" directed at the man in front of him, a peasant with a farm cart). Frightened by the custom house incident, the Woolfs showed exaggerated delight when a border guard smiled at their monkey. "We become obsequious," Woolf later commented disgustedly in her diary; this is the "first stoop in our back" (176), the first consequence of thuggery.

Marder's prior contribution to Woolf studies is Feminism and Art, a prophetic study of Woolf's politics which anticipated the American feminists' appropriation of Woolf by almost a decade. It is endearing to find Marder returning to Woolf in his later years. From the lyrical-elegiac tone of the whole, one suspects that he is half in love with her. While Marder's tone seems objective, it is as if he must force himself to stay at a distance, as if his interest in Woolf could dissolve at any moment into something dangerously emotional. One feels a stiff upper lip driving the book, right down to its poetic last words, where he quotes Rhoda's death speech: "me dissolving." "Me dissolving"--the last words of Marder's book--are Woolf's words, not Marder's. In choosing them, Marder both intuits the stream of Woolf's own thought and allows it to carry the book.