This review first appeared in Virginia Woolf Bulletin<\/em> No. 41, September 2012.<\/p>\n Modernism, Memory, and Desire: T. S. Eliot and Virginia Woolf<\/i><\/b>, by<\/b> Gabrielle <\/i>McIntire, <\/i>Cambridge, Cambridge University Press (ISBN 9780521178464), paperback 2012, \u00a320.99<\/b><\/p>\n In 1923 the six-year-old Hogarth Press issued T. S. Eliot\u2019s The Waste Land<\/i>, the second book of Eliot\u2019s that Leonard and Virginia Woolf had handset and printed at Hogarth House (Woolmer 5, 17; Willis 20, 73).[1]<\/a>\u00a0 Leonard and Virginia were close friends with \u2018Tom Eliot\u2019, as Leonard refers to him in his autobiography, adding, \u2018Tom had a great opinion of Virginia as a critic\u2019.[2]<\/a> Given such promising beginnings for criticism, Gabrielle McIntire\u2019s is rather surprisinglythe first book-length study pairing the works of the modernists Eliot and Woolf.<\/p>\n As Gabrielle McIntire points out, \u2018Woolf and Eliot happened to meet exactly as the Great War was ending, so that the historical consequences and circumstances of one of the century\u2019s major traumatic events shadowed their early acquaintance\u2019 (86).\u00a0 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.\u00a0 McIntire takes that moment of disorientation as emblematic for each writer and fleshes it out, showing the crucial roles played in Woolf\u2019s and Eliot\u2019s works by history, time, memory, and a complex impulse that McIntire terms desire.<\/p>\n Modernism, Memory, and Desire<\/i>, a book of seven chapters with introduction and epilogue, consists of four chapters on Eliot (1\u20134) and three on Woolf (5\u20137).\u00a0 Eliot\u2019s famous opening of The Waste Land<\/i> provides the informing concept of McIntire\u2019s book, \u2018offering one of those rare moments when a poetic conceit happens to express a key dilemma of the time\u2019 (1):<\/p>\n April is the cruelest month, breeding McIntire argues that Eliot\u2019s complex depiction of time as \u2018mixing\u2019 supplies an essential pillar of modernist aesthetics.\u00a0 \u2018The coupling of memory and desire links what is past to the desires of the present, and always involves at least a double yoking[.]\u00a0 [. . .]\u00a0 What we find then is a copulative relation: to remember is<\/i> to desire; to desire is<\/i> to remember\u2019 (8-9).\u00a0 As the book progresses, McIntire argues that Woolf also evinces this modernist yoking.<\/p>\n McIntire allows her readings of Eliot and Woolf to do the work of building cohesion for the book as a whole.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Ultimately, however, even a careful reader feels the lack of a direct articulation of a relationship between the treatments of Eliot\u2019s satirical, sexually explicit Columbo and Bolo verses (chapter 1) and the Proustian intricacies of Woolf\u2019s To the Lighthouse<\/i> or Between the Acts<\/i> (chapters 6 and 7).\u00a0 Indeed, although it is clear that the first chapter, \u2018An unexpected beginning: sex, race, and history in T. S. Eliot\u2019s Columbo and Bolo poems\u2019, 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<\/i> as a work about Eliot and<\/i> Woolf.<\/p>\n Further undermining the cohesion of the work is McIntire\u2019s inconsistent use of Sigmund Freud in analysing the works of the two authors.\u00a0 Although in the later chapters she discusses Woolf\u2019s 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\u20136, 63, 92\u20133, 106) in chapters 2\u20134.\u00a0 In strong contrast to her treatment of Woolf, discussed in detail below,, McIntire evinces no interest whatsoever in Eliot\u2019s actual reading of Freud or in any anxiety of influence.<\/p>\n McIntire begins with a provocative analysis of Eliot\u2019s mostly unknown Bolo poems, which, as she writes, offer \u2018a 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\u2019 (13).\u00a0 This first chapter exemplifies McIntire\u2019s persistent use of dense diction and overlapping concepts.\u00a0 At times her style provokes thought, in that the layering of terms serves to foreground something unexpected.\u00a0 For instance, McIntire asks us to consider the way in which \u2018burlesque\u2019 and \u2018ribald\u2019 fit into our understandings of society and of art.<\/p>\n Though McIntire\u2019s evident love of language is admirable and often used to good effect, it sometimes tangles her argument.\u00a0 Clauses such as \u2018we are suddenly conscious of our ontology\u2019 (167) and \u2018Her simile tropes from the vitality of an event to the death of memory\u2019 (180) spring from an enthusiasm that overflows into semantic error.\u00a0 Such moments diminish the analysis they are perhaps meant to enhance.<\/p>\n Chapter 2 addresses the need to reread Eliot\u2019s canonical poems in the light of the incidental Bolo poems, highlighting \u2018a major line of continuity\u2019 (39) between these two strikingly different collections. \u00a0McIntire offers intricate and elegant meditations on what we mean by ambiguity in poetry, including readings of \u2018Rhapsody on a Windy Night\u2019, \u2018Gerontion\u2019, and The Waste Land<\/i>.\u00a0 The following chapter maps a trajectory through Eliot\u2019s oeuvre in terms of McIntire\u2019s re-reading, paying special attention to the \u2018Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock\u2019.<\/p>\n In her reading of the essay \u2018Tradition and the Individual Talent\u2019, McIntire argues that Eliot refuses to objectify the past, which leads him to \u2018redraw\u2019 or \u2018encounter\u2019 tradition (107).\u00a0 Eliot\u2019s new approach amounts to hypothesising a subjectivity of the past: the past may be loved, visited, learned from; the past may even effect change.\u00a0 This view of the past provides McIntire with a rich mine of meaning whose tunnels connect Eliot and Woolf.<\/p>\n McIntire\u2019s fifth chapter focuses primarily on Orlando<\/i>, delving into Woolf\u2019s challenging portrayal of a character refracted and dispersed like light \u2013 in this case dispersed over space and time \u2013 and teasing out from Woolf\u2019s writing the notion that biography (including fictional biography) \u2018involves the knowledge of being subjected<\/i> to the demands of one\u2019s subject\u2019 (125).\u00a0 McIntire highlights the \u2018delightful contentment about its method\u2019 (129) that Orlando<\/i> displays as it plays with the seriously philosophical categories of \u2018time, consciousness, and identity\u2019 portrayed as \u2018commensurately unknowable\u2019 (127).<\/p>\n When McIntire turns to Woolf\u2019s artistic uses of autobiography and autobiographical fiction, she examines the use of epiphany in \u2018A Sketch of the Past\u2019 and explores \u2018modes of remembrance\u2019 as \u2018modes of a profound vulnerability\u2019 (149). \u00a0\u00a0Drawing on Freud, Wordsworth, and Joyce, she traces the past as \u2018tangible, accessible, and infinitely desirable\u2019 with a \u2018promise of retrievability\u2019 (169).\u00a0 McIntire offers a skilful reading of To the Lighthouse<\/i>, with special emphasis on the relationship between James and Mr Ramsay, and brings her own ongoing narrative regarding \u2018mixing memory and desire\u2019 (quoting Eliot 1, 120, and passim<\/i>) into conversation with Woolf\u2019s portrayal of time.<\/p>\n Proceeding to Between the Acts<\/i>, McIntire\u2019s analysis puts the novel into dialogue with Eliot\u2019s poetry and with the modernism of Bergson and Proust.\u00a0 Here the argument focuses persuasively on two tensions: first, between spatiality and temporality; and second, between public memory and private memory.\u00a0 Although McIntire does highlight the intertextuality manifest in Miss La Trobe\u2019s play, she neglects to note that the novel\u2019s themes resonate intrinsically with ancient Greek and Shakespearean drama..\u00a0 In referring to the pageant as an \u2018allusive illusion\u2019 (201), however, McIntire reminds us of Eliot\u2019s uses of intertextuality and citation in The Waste Land<\/i> (discussed 95\u20136, 203\u20134).<\/p>\n 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.\u00a0 Modernism, Memory, and Desire<\/i> presents Eliot and Woolf as pursuing that ambitious project.\u00a0 Eliot and Woolf aspire to perform \u2018elegy while acceding to the responsibility of transforming one\u2019s present\u2019 (187) as they simultaneously seek a way to \u2018\u201cre-fashion\u201d the past by bringing new revelations to bear on the old material\u2019 (177).\u00a0 As McIntire points out, Woolf recognizes this ambition in her friend Tom Eliot.\u00a0 Woolf observes that Eliot wished to make \u2018this new poetry flower on the stem of the oldest\u2019 (quoted 86; Diary<\/i>, 15 November 1918).<\/p>\n \u00a0*****<\/p>\n A number of mistakes obtrude into McIntire\u2019s sections on Woolf, ranging from editorial mishaps to misreadings and factual errors.\u00a0 Distressingly, these mistakes point to carelessness in engagement with Woolf\u2019s texts and contexts by McIntire, her preliminary readers, and her editors.\u00a0 A footnote incorrectly cites \u2018Phases of Fiction\u2019 for a quotation from Orlando<\/i> (237, footnote 54), which quotation was cited\u2014correctly\u2014on page 137.\u00a0 In a discussion of Between the Acts<\/i>, Isa Oliver is referred to first incorrectly as \u2018the daughter of the owner of the estate\u2019 and second, a little farther below, correctly as the \u2018daughter-in-law\u2019 of \u2018the proprietor of Pointz Hall, Mr. Oliver\u2019 (197).\u00a0 In a reading of a Diary<\/i> entry on \u2018Peace day\u2019 (19 July 1919), McIntire comments on Woolf\u2019s mention of \u2018the Boxall family\u2019: \u2018a name perhaps chosen for its echoic rhyme with \u201cVauxhall Bridge\u201d upon which the servants stood\u2019 (184).\u00a0 This overlooks the very specific and significant Nelly Boxall, part of Woolf\u2019s household since 1916.<\/p>\n In citing Mrs. Dalloway<\/i> in her discussion of \u2018memory and desire as unassailably permanent\u2019 and \u2018history-made-evident\u2019 (205\u20136), McIntire describes a passage as Peter Walsh\u2019s reflections.\u00a0 Though there may be room for interpretive licence, the passage belongs more properly to the voice of the narrator: \u2018she remembered\u2019, \u2018Still remembering\u2019, and the parenthetical reference to Peter\u2019s getting into a taxi.[4]<\/a>\u00a0 In a second acutely inaccurate case, McIntire\u2019s text refers to a passage on the flowering of memory as \u2018Clarissa\u2019s contemplation\u2019 (144), when in the novel it is clearly given as Peter Walsh\u2019s musings as he walks to his hotel (Dalloway<\/i> 153).<\/p>\n When McIntire offers her otherwise helpful and insightful treatment of the character Mrs Swithin in Between the Acts<\/i>, she gets waylaid by overemphasising the character\u2019s agedness.\u00a0 Woolf does refer to Mrs Swithin (aka Lucy, Cindy, Old Flimsy) as an \u2018old woman\u2019, but she also emphasises her agility and activity: \u2018I\u2019ve been nailing the placard on the Barn\u2019, \u2018The old girl with a wisp of white hair flying\u2019, \u2018she smiled a ravishing girl\u2019s smile\u2019.[5]<\/a>\u00a0 McIntire calls Mrs Swithin \u2018the most elderly woman of the text\u2019, ignoring multiple mentions of elderly audience members, and then mistakenly takes the sentence \u2018The old lady … was being wheeled away by a footman\u2019 (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<\/i> 203).<\/p>\n Most detracting of all are the mistakes in McIntire\u2019s examination of Woolf\u2019s intersections with Freud.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Her readings could stand without them.<\/p>\n McIntire refers in passing to the only time that Woolf met Freud in person: \u2018she had met him in Vienna\u2019 (162).\u00a0 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<\/i>, 29\u201330 January 1939).[6]<\/a><\/p>\n Twice McIntire makes the extraordinary assertion that Virginia Woolf \u2018set the type for the Hogarth Press\u2019s International Psychoanalytic Library<\/i>\u2019 (148, 163).\u00a0 McIntire\u2019s evidence is a letter from Woolf to Molly MacCarthy in which Woolf says, \u2018we are publishing all Dr. Freud, and I glance at the proof\u2019 (quoted 163; Letters<\/i>, no. 1500, 2 October [1924]).\u00a0 McIntire\u2019s 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.\u00a0 The Press did not take on the actual labour of typesetting and printing the Library<\/i>; this was done by R. & R. Clark in Edinburgh (Woolmer <\/i>183).\u00a0 Of all the titles published by the Press, only thirty-four were hand printed by Leonard and Virginia (Woolmer xi).<\/p>\n Finally, to cap McIntire\u2019s miscalculations regarding Woolf and Freud, she writes that \u2018until the last two years of her life she [Woolf] claimed<\/i> she had had no exposure to his [Freud\u2019s] writings\u2019 (my emphasis, 161).\u00a0 Her assertion is an embellishment of what one could term an inverse of Woolf\u2019s statement, \u2018Began reading Freud last night\u2019 (quoted 162; Diary<\/i>, 2 December 1939), and it is misleading.\u00a0 McIntire\u2019s own argument brings out the fact that Woolf made no such claim, pointing to Woolf\u2019s participation in conversations about psychoanalysis, her close relationship with Bloomsbury psychoanalysts, and her allusions to Freud and psychoanalysis in her work (162\u20133).<\/p>\n Further, Woolf herself reports her \u2018exposure\u2019 to Freud.\u00a0 The second number of the Hogarth Essays series featured Roger Fry\u2019s The Artist and Psycho-Analysis<\/i>, and it seems clear from Woolf\u2019s 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 Athen\u00e6um<\/i> article.\u00a0 In 1936 she was one of almost 200 writers and artists to sign a greeting to Freud that testified to his importance to their \u2018mental world\u2019 (Willis 297; and see VWB<\/i>40 6). \u00a0Scrupulous reading of Leonard\u2019s autobiography as well as taking into account the character and tone of Virginia\u2019s Letters<\/i> and Diary<\/i> would have prevented any misrepresentation of her casual reporting as firm claim.<\/p>\n \u00a0*****<\/p>\n Notwithstanding these drawbacks, McIntire\u2019s book has value for Woolf scholars because it draws out Woolf\u2019s thematic, stylistic, and philosophical connections to Eliot, adding meaningful content to our understanding of high literary modernism.\u00a0 Central to these connections is the \u2018mixing\/Memory and desire\u2019 theme, which McIntire articulates in a number of ways, using various figures to get at the gist of a slippery matter.\u00a0 For Eliot and Woolf the past and the present are always in movement, approaching each other.\u00a0 From a great distance, the stance of an artist, this two-way motion appears as a complex synchronicity.\u00a0 In a discussion of To the Lighthouse<\/i>, McIntire describes this vividly as a \u2018tripartite template of temporality,\u2019 a \u2018near-cubist depiction of time\u2019 (174).[7]<\/a><\/p>\n This project of \u2018asserting that present and past time are simultaneous and interdependent\u2019 (102) gains substance when brought together with another thematic connection between Eliot and Woolf, the resonance of location.\u00a0 McIntire describes in architectural terms Eliot\u2019s and Woolf\u2019s engagement with the placement of time: \u2018their efforts in the present all at once involved dismantling and preserving literary and cultural ideals, while building on and among shifting cultures\u2019 (102).\u00a0 McIntire\u2019s readings of The Waste Land<\/i>, \u2018Prufrock\u2019, Orlando<\/i>, To the Lighthouse<\/i> and Between the Acts<\/i> contend that Eliot and Woolf \u2018figure memory and history as a compelling ground\u2019 (143).\u00a0 For McIntire, Eliot\u2019s and Woolf\u2019s memorable uses of place and landscape, especially of London, represent temporality known via spatiality.<\/p>\n In spite of tenuous and even mistaken moments in Modernism, Memory, and Desire <\/i>that undermine the reader\u2019s 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.\u00a0 McIntire asks us to look at Eliot from a new perspective through the Bolo poems and to read Woolf through the lens of Eliot\u2019s repositioned canonical texts.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n \u00a0Karen Daubert<\/i><\/p>\n [1]<\/a>See J. H. Willis, Jr., Leonard and Virginia Woolf as Publishers: The Hogarth Press, 1917\u20131941<\/i> (Charlottesville, VA: University Press of Virginia, 1992 [hereafter \u2018Willis\u2019 in the text]), 20, 73; and J. Howard Woolmer, A Checklist of the Hogarth Press: 1917\u20131946<\/i> (Revere, PA: Woolmer\/Brotherson, 1986 [hereafter \u2018Woolmer\u2019 in the text]), 5, 17.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n [2]<\/a>Leonard Woolf, Downhill All the Way: An Autobiography of the Years 1919\u20131939<\/i> (Hogarth Press, 1967), 109.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n \u00a0\u00a0 [3] Quoted, 1.\u00a0 See also T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land and Other Poems<\/i> (NY: Harcourt, 1934), 29.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n [4]<\/a>Mrs. Dalloway<\/i>, intro. Maureen Howard (NY: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1981 [hereafter Dalloway<\/i> in the text]), 81\u20132.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n [5]<\/a>Between the Acts<\/i> (NY: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1941), 22, 27, 72.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n [6]<\/a>See also Downhill All the Way<\/i>, <\/i>168\u20139.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n [7]<\/a>Jeanne Schulkind, in her introduction to Moments of Being<\/i> (Hogarth Press, 1985), highlights this very aspect of Woolf\u2019s aesthetic, noting that the autobiographical writings emphasise \u2018the active interpenetration of past and present that continually results in fresh arrangements\u2019 (13).<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 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, \u00a320.99 In 1923 the six-year-old Hogarth Press … Continue reading
\nLilacs out of the dead land, mixing
\nMemory and desire, stirring
\nDull roots with spring rain.[3]<\/a><\/p>\n
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