Final Acts

in the midst of war, in the curve of self-doubt, at a time of tumult, Virginia Woolf found pleasure in the writing of her final book

“Final Acts,” Beth Kephart, Cyanotype

“Scraps, orts and fragments,” Virginia Woolf repeats (channeling Shakespeare) in the final pages of Between the Acts*—the last novel she will write, the last novel she will not finish, the last novel she will implore her husband and press not to publish until she has a chance to improve it.

It is trivial. It is silly. Don’t publish this version of this.

Her husband will posthumously tidy it, her press will publish it, her generation will ponder it, it will live, and I have been reading it, greedy as I am for news on the relationships that writers have with their work (and lives) when the clock begins its profound tick and it might be time after all, after all this, to get the last word in.

Scraps, orts and fragments: The syllables crescendo like a nursery rhyme. The meanings multiply. The context is a pageant play written and directed by a Miss La Trobe, a thick-ankle-boned, mercurial, effortfully perfectionist Woolfian stand-in who is, with her play that episodically encapsulates English history, desperate to entertain and edify. Desperate to say something. To be heard. To be remembered. Between the Acts is magpie art, construed of lines plucked from Woolf’s favorite writers, nested with Woolf’s own indelible oddities, flapping at both comedy and horror, and revealing, through its fictions, the existential conundrum of the writer.

Who will be heard? For what will writers be remembered?

Woolf began writing her last novel in 1938, as a reprieve from the Roger Fry biography that had presented ungodly challenges. Premonitions of war would become rumors of war would become air raids and nightly havoc. Her London home at Tavistock would be leveled by a bomb. The Hogarth Press she had launched with her husband would be partially demolished. Her country retreat would become claustrophobic with the stuff of recovered libraries, press pages, manuscripts, new letters, bad news, war refugees.

Through it all, she was cold, increasingly thin, distracted; her hands tremored. She needed a room of her own; there wasn’t one. She needed paper upon which to organize her thoughts, but paper was in short supply, and so she scribbled her sentences onto whatever she could find—onto scraps, as fragments. During the previous war, her nerves had shattered; she remembered the devastation, the long recovery. During recent years her literary significance had, by her own most probably inaccurate estimation, been on the decline. What was she to do about that? Who was her audience now, and how did they view her, and were they worth writing for, and were these, really, the questions?

What, in fact, is any writer to do when their world—private or public—feels under siege? To what should they commit their imagination, their love, the passing hours? Is now the time to wrestle with a brand-new tale? To polish the draft? To revive early stories? To organize the archives? To set the work aside and live? What will be the meaning of the writer’s life, and who will shape, direct, control, or name it?

On some days Woolf and her husband and their friends would spend their time concocting an exit plan, should Hitler’s people appear headed for their doors.

On some days Woolf would make her way to London and walk among charred and ruined streets and look down among the Thames and miss the city in which her imagination once freely roamed.

On some days Woolf would be so startled and thwarted by the proximity and blare of bombs, the carom and the careen, that she would enter into her diary words like these:

Oh I try to imagine how one’s killed by a bomb. I’ve got it fairly vivid—the sensation; but can’t see anything but suffocating nonentity following after. I shall think—oh I wanted another 10 years—not this—and shan’t, for once, be able to describe it. It—I mean death; no, the scrunching and scrambling, the crushing of my bone shade in on my very active eye and brain: the process of putting out the light—painful? Yes. Terrifying. I suppose so. Then a swoon; a drain; two or three gulps attempting consciousness—and then dot dot dot. (A Writer’s Diary, Wednesday, October 2, 1940)

Don’t publish this draft, Woolf cautions Leonard, her husband, about Between the Acts, for it might be silly or trivial. Don’t publish this, but her wish did not become Leonard’s command. A Hogarth Press ad had already (while Virginia Woolf was alive and without her permission) been circulated announcing the upcoming publication of Woolf’s next novel. The book hit the stores less than four months after Woolf’s passing. Subsequently it was Leonard who released his wife’s diaries, her letters, her annotated editions, Leonard who sanctified her biographers and biographies, Leonard who wrote of her in his own autobiographies. It was Leonard—the man with whom Virginia had shared most of her life, the man who was Virginia’s first and most fastidious reader, the man who also, often, sought to control what Virginia ate, when Virginia slept, who Virginia saw, where Virginia went (all for her own good, he argued, all for the sake of her mental stability)—who built the stone temple of his wife’s legacy.

It may be silly, it may be trivial, let me try again to make it better, Woolf said, in so many words, to her husband and her press. She was anxious about the audience she had always feared—so fickle, so inconstant, so unmanageable, so unruly. She was anxious about the war, about the pressing potency of bombs, about the clear and present dangers that afflicted every waking hour.

But to focus solely on the nerves that Woolf expressed as she imagined releasing Between the Acts to the world is to ignore the grace and solace of the hours she’d spent at play with her own imagination—assembling the novel’s many parts, activating Miss La Trobe, dressing the pageant-play players at they played their parts, mocking the mockery of the audience. To focus only on the shattering anxieties of the writing life is to ignore the shattering beauties.

“I enjoy it intensely,” Woolf wrote in her diary on October 6, 1938, about “taking a frisk” at the final novel.

On December 19, 1938: “I’ve written to 120 pages of [Between the Acts]. I think of making it a 220 page book. A medley. I rush to it for relief after a long pressure of Fry facts.”

On November 3, 1940: “Medieval in the mist tonight. I am happy, quit of my money-making; back at [Between the Acts], writing in spurts; covering, I’m glad to say, a small canvas. Oh the freedom—”

On November 5, 1940: “Also: the old hunger for books is on me: the childish passion. So that I am very ‘happy’ … and excited by [Between the Acts].”

Perhaps most exultantly on November 23, 1940: “I am a little triumphant about the book. I think it’s an interesting attempt in a new method. I think it’s more quintessential than the others. More milk skimmed off…. I’ve enjoyed writing almost every page.”

The bombs were falling and the cold had crept in. London was wracked and rattled. Woolf’s nerves were frayed. But here, in the writing her last novel, Woolf had found a kind of shelter. She had found joy in the making of her medley. She had enjoyed, from time to time, the company she had kept with herself.

*

Tomorrow Will Bring Sunday’s News: A Philadelphia Story, received a Booklist star and was recently featured in Washington Post Book World and Historical Novel Review. Caroline Leavitt and I talked about the book’s making here.

My first book on the writing of memoir, Handling the Truth, won a Books for a Better Life Award shortly after its publication in 2013. I’ve continued to write books about the making of true stories ever since, working with my husband to create workbooks, prompt-rich books, and suggested approaches to the page. A guide to those resources, along with a link to my essay collection You Are Not Vanished Here (illustrated by William Sulit) can be found here.

Join me for a CraftTalk on sentence making, May 21, registration here.

Join me for a Cleaver master class, “Transcending the Tumult: Write Right Now,” July 27, registration here.

Join me for an in-person writing workshop in September, through Maine Media.