Review: Modernism, Memory, and Desire

This review first appeared in Virginia Woolf Bulletin No. 41, September 2012.

Modernism, Memory, and Desire: T. S. Eliot and Virginia Woolf, by Gabrielle McIntire, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press (ISBN 9780521178464), paperback 2012, £20.99

In 1923 the six-year-old Hogarth Press issued T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, the second book of Eliot’s that Leonard and Virginia Woolf had handset and printed at Hogarth House (Woolmer 5, 17; Willis 20, 73).[1]  Leonard and Virginia were close friends with ‘Tom Eliot’, as Leonard refers to him in his autobiography, adding, ‘Tom had a great opinion of Virginia as a critic’.[2] Given such promising beginnings for criticism, Gabrielle McIntire’s is rather surprisinglythe first book-length study pairing the works of the modernists Eliot and Woolf.

As Gabrielle McIntire points out, ‘Woolf and Eliot happened to meet exactly as the Great War was ending, so that the historical consequences and circumstances of one of the century’s major traumatic events shadowed their early acquaintance’ (86).  The beginning of their friendship and the emergence of their mature writings entered history at a heightened moment, a crossroads encompassing an incomplete exit from the past and an uncertain entrance to the future.  McIntire takes that moment of disorientation as emblematic for each writer and fleshes it out, showing the crucial roles played in Woolf’s and Eliot’s works by history, time, memory, and a complex impulse that McIntire terms desire.

Modernism, Memory, and Desire, a book of seven chapters with introduction and epilogue, consists of four chapters on Eliot (1–4) and three on Woolf (5–7).  Eliot’s famous opening of The Waste Land provides the informing concept of McIntire’s book, ‘offering one of those rare moments when a poetic conceit happens to express a key dilemma of the time’ (1):

April is the cruelest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.[3]

McIntire argues that Eliot’s complex depiction of time as ‘mixing’ supplies an essential pillar of modernist aesthetics.  ‘The coupling of memory and desire links what is past to the desires of the present, and always involves at least a double yoking[.]  [. . .]  What we find then is a copulative relation: to remember is to desire; to desire is to remember’ (8-9).  As the book progresses, McIntire argues that Woolf also evinces this modernist yoking.

McIntire allows her readings of Eliot and Woolf to do the work of building cohesion for the book as a whole.  Her approach succeeds to the extent that, by the end of the book, the careful reader is rewarded with a strong sense of shared concerns.  Ultimately, however, even a careful reader feels the lack of a direct articulation of a relationship between the treatments of Eliot’s satirical, sexually explicit Columbo and Bolo verses (chapter 1) and the Proustian intricacies of Woolf’s To the Lighthouse or Between the Acts (chapters 6 and 7).  Indeed, although it is clear that the first chapter, ‘An unexpected beginning: sex, race, and history in T. S. Eliot’s Columbo and Bolo poems’, provides the space for McIntire to include her archival research and to add to our knowledge of Eliot, it is not clear that this chapter is essential to Modernism, Memory, and Desire as a work about Eliot and Woolf.

Further undermining the cohesion of the work is McIntire’s inconsistent use of Sigmund Freud in analysing the works of the two authors.  Although in the later chapters she discusses Woolf’s personal and intellectual acquaintance with Freud in detail, she does not mention Freud at all in the first chapter, and mentions his work only in passing (for example, see 55–6, 63, 92–3, 106) in chapters 2–4.  In strong contrast to her treatment of Woolf, discussed in detail below,, McIntire evinces no interest whatsoever in Eliot’s actual reading of Freud or in any anxiety of influence.

McIntire begins with a provocative analysis of Eliot’s mostly unknown Bolo poems, which, as she writes, offer ‘a satirical poetics of desire and memory whose comic edge is always in danger of collapsing into the outright racism, homophobia, and misogyny that they ventriloquize, repeat, and critique’ (13).  This first chapter exemplifies McIntire’s persistent use of dense diction and overlapping concepts.  At times her style provokes thought, in that the layering of terms serves to foreground something unexpected.  For instance, McIntire asks us to consider the way in which ‘burlesque’ and ‘ribald’ fit into our understandings of society and of art.

Though McIntire’s evident love of language is admirable and often used to good effect, it sometimes tangles her argument.  Clauses such as ‘we are suddenly conscious of our ontology’ (167) and ‘Her simile tropes from the vitality of an event to the death of memory’ (180) spring from an enthusiasm that overflows into semantic error.  Such moments diminish the analysis they are perhaps meant to enhance.

Chapter 2 addresses the need to reread Eliot’s canonical poems in the light of the incidental Bolo poems, highlighting ‘a major line of continuity’ (39) between these two strikingly different collections.  McIntire offers intricate and elegant meditations on what we mean by ambiguity in poetry, including readings of ‘Rhapsody on a Windy Night’, ‘Gerontion’, and The Waste Land.  The following chapter maps a trajectory through Eliot’s oeuvre in terms of McIntire’s re-reading, paying special attention to the ‘Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’.

In her reading of the essay ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’, McIntire argues that Eliot refuses to objectify the past, which leads him to ‘redraw’ or ‘encounter’ tradition (107).  Eliot’s new approach amounts to hypothesising a subjectivity of the past: the past may be loved, visited, learned from; the past may even effect change.  This view of the past provides McIntire with a rich mine of meaning whose tunnels connect Eliot and Woolf.

McIntire’s fifth chapter focuses primarily on Orlando, delving into Woolf’s challenging portrayal of a character refracted and dispersed like light – in this case dispersed over space and time – and teasing out from Woolf’s writing the notion that biography (including fictional biography) ‘involves the knowledge of being subjected to the demands of one’s subject’ (125).  McIntire highlights the ‘delightful contentment about its method’ (129) that Orlando displays as it plays with the seriously philosophical categories of ‘time, consciousness, and identity’ portrayed as ‘commensurately unknowable’ (127).

When McIntire turns to Woolf’s artistic uses of autobiography and autobiographical fiction, she examines the use of epiphany in ‘A Sketch of the Past’ and explores ‘modes of remembrance’ as ‘modes of a profound vulnerability’ (149).   Drawing on Freud, Wordsworth, and Joyce, she traces the past as ‘tangible, accessible, and infinitely desirable’ with a ‘promise of retrievability’ (169).  McIntire offers a skilful reading of To the Lighthouse, with special emphasis on the relationship between James and Mr Ramsay, and brings her own ongoing narrative regarding ‘mixing memory and desire’ (quoting Eliot 1, 120, and passim) into conversation with Woolf’s portrayal of time.

Proceeding to Between the Acts, McIntire’s analysis puts the novel into dialogue with Eliot’s poetry and with the modernism of Bergson and Proust.  Here the argument focuses persuasively on two tensions: first, between spatiality and temporality; and second, between public memory and private memory.  Although McIntire does highlight the intertextuality manifest in Miss La Trobe’s play, she neglects to note that the novel’s themes resonate intrinsically with ancient Greek and Shakespearean drama..  In referring to the pageant as an ‘allusive illusion’ (201), however, McIntire reminds us of Eliot’s uses of intertextuality and citation in The Waste Land (discussed 95–6, 203–4).

In recapitulating, McIntire points to the complexity of presenting as coexistent the prehistoric, the history of a nation, the literary historical, the history of a culture, and the memories of individuals.  Modernism, Memory, and Desire presents Eliot and Woolf as pursuing that ambitious project.  Eliot and Woolf aspire to perform ‘elegy while acceding to the responsibility of transforming one’s present’ (187) as they simultaneously seek a way to ‘“re-fashion” the past by bringing new revelations to bear on the old material’ (177).  As McIntire points out, Woolf recognizes this ambition in her friend Tom Eliot.  Woolf observes that Eliot wished to make ‘this new poetry flower on the stem of the oldest’ (quoted 86; Diary, 15 November 1918).

 *****

A number of mistakes obtrude into McIntire’s sections on Woolf, ranging from editorial mishaps to misreadings and factual errors.  Distressingly, these mistakes point to carelessness in engagement with Woolf’s texts and contexts by McIntire, her preliminary readers, and her editors.  A footnote incorrectly cites ‘Phases of Fiction’ for a quotation from Orlando (237, footnote 54), which quotation was cited—correctly—on page 137.  In a discussion of Between the Acts, Isa Oliver is referred to first incorrectly as ‘the daughter of the owner of the estate’ and second, a little farther below, correctly as the ‘daughter-in-law’ of ‘the proprietor of Pointz Hall, Mr. Oliver’ (197).  In a reading of a Diary entry on ‘Peace day’ (19 July 1919), McIntire comments on Woolf’s mention of ‘the Boxall family’: ‘a name perhaps chosen for its echoic rhyme with “Vauxhall Bridge” upon which the servants stood’ (184).  This overlooks the very specific and significant Nelly Boxall, part of Woolf’s household since 1916.

In citing Mrs. Dalloway in her discussion of ‘memory and desire as unassailably permanent’ and ‘history-made-evident’ (205–6), McIntire describes a passage as Peter Walsh’s reflections.  Though there may be room for interpretive licence, the passage belongs more properly to the voice of the narrator: ‘she remembered’, ‘Still remembering’, and the parenthetical reference to Peter’s getting into a taxi.[4]  In a second acutely inaccurate case, McIntire’s text refers to a passage on the flowering of memory as ‘Clarissa’s contemplation’ (144), when in the novel it is clearly given as Peter Walsh’s musings as he walks to his hotel (Dalloway 153).

When McIntire offers her otherwise helpful and insightful treatment of the character Mrs Swithin in Between the Acts, she gets waylaid by overemphasising the character’s agedness.  Woolf does refer to Mrs Swithin (aka Lucy, Cindy, Old Flimsy) as an ‘old woman’, but she also emphasises her agility and activity: ‘I’ve been nailing the placard on the Barn’, ‘The old girl with a wisp of white hair flying’, ‘she smiled a ravishing girl’s smile’.[5]  McIntire calls Mrs Swithin ‘the most elderly woman of the text’, ignoring multiple mentions of elderly audience members, and then mistakenly takes the sentence ‘The old lady … was being wheeled away by a footman’ (quoted 207) to refer to Mrs Swithin, when it clearly refers instead to one of the guests, seen by Bart as he stands beside Lucy by the lily pool (Between the Acts 203).

Most detracting of all are the mistakes in McIntire’s examination of Woolf’s intersections with Freud.  These errors are particularly lamentable because, although McIntire places weight on insupportable statements, in the end they are not essential to the most evocative aspects of her argument.  Her readings could stand without them.

McIntire refers in passing to the only time that Woolf met Freud in person: ‘she had met him in Vienna’ (162).  In fact, the Woolfs did meet Freud only once, on 28 January 1939 at his home in Maresfield Gardens in Hampstead, where he resided after he and his family fled Austria in 1938, and which now houses the Freud Museum (Diary, 29–30 January 1939).[6]

Twice McIntire makes the extraordinary assertion that Virginia Woolf ‘set the type for the Hogarth Press’s International Psychoanalytic Library’ (148, 163).  McIntire’s evidence is a letter from Woolf to Molly MacCarthy in which Woolf says, ‘we are publishing all Dr. Freud, and I glance at the proof’ (quoted 163; Letters, no. 1500, 2 October [1924]).  McIntire’s interpretation seems to indicate a lack of knowledge about the details and vocabulary of the printing and publishing businesses as well as a dearth of knowledge about the Hogarth Press.  The Press did not take on the actual labour of typesetting and printing the Library; this was done by R. & R. Clark in Edinburgh (Woolmer 183).  Of all the titles published by the Press, only thirty-four were hand printed by Leonard and Virginia (Woolmer xi).

Finally, to cap McIntire’s miscalculations regarding Woolf and Freud, she writes that ‘until the last two years of her life she [Woolf] claimed she had had no exposure to his [Freud’s] writings’ (my emphasis, 161).  Her assertion is an embellishment of what one could term an inverse of Woolf’s statement, ‘Began reading Freud last night’ (quoted 162; Diary, 2 December 1939), and it is misleading.  McIntire’s own argument brings out the fact that Woolf made no such claim, pointing to Woolf’s participation in conversations about psychoanalysis, her close relationship with Bloomsbury psychoanalysts, and her allusions to Freud and psychoanalysis in her work (162–3).

Further, Woolf herself reports her ‘exposure’ to Freud.  The second number of the Hogarth Essays series featured Roger Fry’s The Artist and Psycho-Analysis, and it seems clear from Woolf’s letter to Fry of 22 September 1924 (no. 1498) that as she evaluated his essay for publication she reviewed other writers on Freudian topics, such as Clive Bell in a Nation and Athenæum article.  In 1936 she was one of almost 200 writers and artists to sign a greeting to Freud that testified to his importance to their ‘mental world’ (Willis 297; and see VWB40 6).  Scrupulous reading of Leonard’s autobiography as well as taking into account the character and tone of Virginia’s Letters and Diary would have prevented any misrepresentation of her casual reporting as firm claim.

 *****

Notwithstanding these drawbacks, McIntire’s book has value for Woolf scholars because it draws out Woolf’s thematic, stylistic, and philosophical connections to Eliot, adding meaningful content to our understanding of high literary modernism.  Central to these connections is the ‘mixing/Memory and desire’ theme, which McIntire articulates in a number of ways, using various figures to get at the gist of a slippery matter.  For Eliot and Woolf the past and the present are always in movement, approaching each other.  From a great distance, the stance of an artist, this two-way motion appears as a complex synchronicity.  In a discussion of To the Lighthouse, McIntire describes this vividly as a ‘tripartite template of temporality,’ a ‘near-cubist depiction of time’ (174).[7]

This project of ‘asserting that present and past time are simultaneous and interdependent’ (102) gains substance when brought together with another thematic connection between Eliot and Woolf, the resonance of location.  McIntire describes in architectural terms Eliot’s and Woolf’s engagement with the placement of time: ‘their efforts in the present all at once involved dismantling and preserving literary and cultural ideals, while building on and among shifting cultures’ (102).  McIntire’s readings of The Waste Land, ‘Prufrock’, Orlando, To the Lighthouse and Between the Acts contend that Eliot and Woolf ‘figure memory and history as a compelling ground’ (143).  For McIntire, Eliot’s and Woolf’s memorable uses of place and landscape, especially of London, represent temporality known via spatiality.

In spite of tenuous and even mistaken moments in Modernism, Memory, and Desire that undermine the reader’s willingness to rely on McIntire, this study offers many strong and valuable readings of Eliot and Woolf, draws worthwhile connections to theorists such as Walter Benjamin and Michel Foucault, and brings two modernist artists into dialogue.  McIntire asks us to look at Eliot from a new perspective through the Bolo poems and to read Woolf through the lens of Eliot’s repositioned canonical texts.  By so doing, McIntire may lead her readers to a new discovery or an enriched appreciation of the philosophical and thematic connections existing in the works of two Bloomsbury friends.

 Karen Daubert