Virginia Woolf's Orlando was first published in London in October of 1928. I remember the book was regarded with some mistrust by at least one generation-- my own-- at that time "the younger." We, in our twenties during the twenties, were not only the author's most zealous readers, but, in the matter of reputation, her most jealous guardians. Her aesthetic became a faith; we were believers. We more than admired, we felt involved in each of her experimental, dazzling advances. Few of us-- then-- knew the still-conservative novels of her first period; a minority had informed itself of The Mark on the Wall and Kew Gardens, hand-printed and issued in 1919 by the original Hogarth Press. She broke full upon us, it would be correct to say, with Jacob's Room, 1922, on which followed Mrs. Dalloway, 1925; then, while we were still breathless, To the Lighthouse, 1927. What now-- what next? Next came Orlando. It was Orlando's fate to come hard on the heels of the third of those masterpieces, of which each had stimulated a further hope. We regarded this book as a setback. Now, thirty-two years later, I wonder why this should have been so.
One trouble was, I imagine, our peculiar attitude to this writer's art. Defending it as we did against all comers-- "stupids," dissidents, or the unseeing critic-- we were ready, should so desperate a need arise, to defend it against the artist herself. Never had we foreseen that we might be required to! The virtue of the art was, for us, its paradox; subliminating personality into poetry, it had-- as art-- the chastity of the impersonal. Before we had read Orlando, indeed for some time before it was "out," we scented the book as a transgression. Unofficial advance publicity was unfortunate, the more so because it was unofficial. This Orlando-- we did not care for the sound of it! The book was, we gathered, in the nature of a prank, or a private joke; worse still, its genesis was personal. Inspired by a romantic friendship, written, we understood, for the dedication of a romantic friend, it was likely to be fraught with playful allusion. Nor was that all-- a distinguished, sympathetic and "special" coterie had contributed to the invention known as Orlando. That Virginia Woolf should have intimates was a shock.
Most of us had not met Virginia Woolf; nor did we (which may seem strange) aspire to do so. She did not wish to be met. Her remoteness completed our picture of her, insofar as we formed a picture at all. Exist she must (or writing could not proceed from her), but we were incurious as to how she did. What she looked like, we had not a remote idea; author's photographs did not, then, ornament book jackets, nor were "appearances" found to be so advisable as to be, in the author's interest, all but obligatory. Our contentment with not knowing Virginia Woolf today would appear extraordinary, could it even be possible. We visualised her less as a woman at work than as a light widening as it brightened. When I say, "She was a name, to us," remember-- or if you cannot remember, imagine-- what a name can be, surrounded by nothing but the air of heaven. Seldom can a living artist have been so-- literally-- idealised.
Malevolent autumn of twenty-eight-- it taunted us with the picture of lady given to friends, to the point of fondness, and jokes, to within danger of whimsicality. Ourselves, we were singularly unco-ordinated, I see now, as generations go. When I hear it said, as sometimes I do today, that Virginia Woolf's reputation was built up by a sophisticated coterie, I ask myself, "Whom can they possibly mean?" We, the ardent many, were more rank-and-file provincials, in many cases, outlanders, free lances, students (to me, in 1922, reading Jacob's Room, Bloomsbury meant London University). We ran, if into anything, into floating groups, loose in formation, governed by vague affinities. Then scorning fringes of coteries, we have remained, I notice, unwilling to form their nucleus in our later days-- not, I hope, hostile, but nonattachable. Nevertheless, what we heard of Orlando galled us. We were young enough, inwardly, to feel out of it.
What we loathed was literary frivolity. So this was what Virginia Woolf could be given over to, if for an instant we took our eye off her-- which, to do us justice, we seldom did. Cloak-and-dagger stuff. The finishing touch was the success the book enjoyed with our elders-- Orlando charmed its way into the forts of middle-aged folly. "Your Mrs. Woolf," they said, "has so often puzzled us. But this new book of hers is really delightful! Now we see what you mean!" Betrayed...
We, naturally, read Orlando. We knew neither how to take it nor what to make of it; it outwitted us. Up to this year, I had never read it again.
The position as to Orlando has now changed. Or, better, the book itself has a position it lacked before-- it "belongs," and closely, to what is central and main in the writer's work, instead of appearing, as it once did, to hover on the questionable periphery. There has been time, since Virginia Woolf's death, to stand back and view her work as a whole-- still more, to see the whole as a thing of structure (insofar as an artist's whole art is like a building) or of inevitable growth (insofar as a whole art is like a tree). Though, again, what does one mean by "a whole art"? Seldom does a writer lay down his pen or a painter his brush with calculated finality, saying, "This is forever; I have done!"
Death, other than in very old age, is an arbitrary interruption, the snipping of a cord at what seems often a fortuitous point. Rather, in Virginia Woolf's case, say her achievement within her fifty-nine years of life seems more, rather than less, significant now that we judge it steadily, as a whole. Up to 1941, that is, while she was living and at work, judgment was bound to be piecemeal, book by book. Temporary mists, misprisions, prejudices, sometimes intervened. From those mists' evaporation nothing she did profits more than does Orlando. That Orlando was beautiful nobody ever doubted; what we now see is that it is important-- and also why.
It was important to the writer. She was the better, one feels certain, for writing it; in particular, for doing so when she did. More irresponsible than the rest of her work in fiction, it has the advantage of being less considered and more unwary. The book corresponds with a wildness in her, which might have remained unknown of-- unless one knew her. This was a rebellion on the part of Virginia Woolf against the solemnity threatening to hem her in. Orlando is, among other things, rumbustious; it is one of the most high-spirited books I know.
I admit that the personal memories of Virginia Woolf cast, for me, their own light upon Orlando, though I certainly never spoke to her of the book, heard her speak of it, or attempted to find my way back to it while I knew her. Friendship with her-- chiefly laughter and pleasure, and an entering, in her company, into the rapture caused her by the unexpected, the spectacular, the inordinate, the improbable, and the preposterous-- filled out nine years of the lengthy interval between my first and second readings of Orlando. From her I learned that one can be worse than young and foolish; it is among the glories of Orlando that it is in some ways a foolish book. It is not disorganised-- on the contrary, it is a miracle of "build"-- but it is rhapsodical. Halfway through her creative life, she desired a plaything-- also a mouthpiece. Shyness is absent from Orlando; in what sometimes are rhetorical exclamations, sometimes lyrical flashes like summer lightning, she voices herself on the subjects of art, time, society, love, history, man, woman. The book is a novelist's holiday, not a novel.
By definition, Orlando is a fantasy, What is that? A story that posits "impossible" circumstances and makes play with them. Fantasy may juggle with time and space, and ignore, for instance, the law of gravity. Infinitely less fortunate is the novel, a work of imagination fettered to earthly fact and subject to dire penalty if it break the chain-- one slip on the part of the novelist as to "reality" and his entire edifice of illusion totters and threatens to tumble down. At the same time, the licence accorded the fantasist is not boundless-- the probable must enter his story somewhere. Should it fail to do so, interest is lost. Against extraordinary events, he must balance (in some sense) ordinary, or at least credible, characters. Where would Wonderland or Through the Looking Glass be without the prim, dogmatic lucidity of the temperamentally unadventurous Alice? Virginia Woolf, whom the "musts" of the novel bored, fell in without complaint with the laws of fantasy. Her Orlando-- that is, her central character-- though redeemed by grace, genius, and breeding from being "ordinary," is as a character absolutely convincing. To the change of sex, to the mysterious flight of time-- centuries slipping by like months in the country-- he-she reacts in a matter one cannot challenge-- psychologically, all is extremely sound. And the more transitory, lesser cast are touched in, manipulated, with great adroitness. Nothing in Orlando, other than the outright impossible, seems improbable. Ironically, fantasy made Virginia Woolf a more thoroughgoing, "straight," one might say assiduous, novelist than she was wont to be. The entire thing was a pleasure-- she did not "have to"; she was out of school.
What an amazing performance Orlando is, simultaneously working on amazement and suspending disbelief! At the start, a sixteen-year-old aristocrat, male, proffering a bowl of rose water to the ancient Queen Elizabeth I; at the close, a woman of thirty-six, still Orlando, under an oak tree in the moonlight, in the reign of Britain's King George V-- the month October, the year 1928, the exact day probably that of the publication of Orlando. The change of sex took place in Constantinople, where Orlando was being ambassador, towards the end of the seventeenth century. The longing to be a poet which consumed the youth has been realised by the woman, who has combined this with giving birth to a son. Exquisite social comedy has enjoyed a run of-- roughly-- three-and-a-half centuries, partly in London, partly in the great Kentish country house. The Victorian age has been survived. Love has seared its way into a young breast, never to be forgotten, always to be associated with a Jacobean Thames ice carnival lasting a winter. Among the series of grand effronteries with which Orlando handles English history, there appear to be a few inadvertent errors-- surely St. Paul's cathedral acquires a dome sooner than it did? The enormous sense of release that runds through the book is partly an affair of effortless speed, mobility, action-- carriages dashing, whips cracking, mobs swaying, ice islands twirling doomfully down the river. By contrast, I remember Virginia Woolf-- back to being a novelist, writing Between the Acts-- coming down the garden path from her studio, saying, "I've spent the whole of the morning trying to move people from the dining room into the hall!"
I have a theory-- unsupported by anything she she said to me, or, so far as I know, to anyone-- that Virginia Woolf's writing of Orlando was a prelude to, and in some way rendered possible, her subsequent writing of The Waves, 1931. Outwardly, no two works of fiction could be more different; yet, did the fantasy serve to shatter some rigid, deadening, claustrophobic mould of so-called "actuality" which had been surrounding her? In To the Lighthouse (coming before Orlando), she had reached one kind of perfection. This she could not surpass; therefore, past it she could not proceed. In Orlando, delicacy gives place to bravura, to rhetoric. It was a breaking point and a breathing space at the same time, this fantasy. She returned to the novel, to The Waves, with-- at least temporarily-- a more defiant attitude to the novel's "musts."
Captive in the heart of the book Orlando, in the midst of the splendid changing and shifting scenes, are accounts of the sheer sensation of writing, more direct than this writer has ever given us. For instance:
There is a touch of hallucination about "reality"; creative Orlando was right, so was his-her creator. Virginia Woolf's vision conferred strangeness, momentarily, on all it fell on; it was, I believe, her effort to see things as they were apparent to other people that wore her down. The bus, the lamp-post, the teacup-- how formidable she found them, everyday things! Nothing of an ordeal to her, however, were melodrama or panorama-- she was at home with, or within, either.
Orlando, about which we who were then young were so stupid in 1928, is, I believe, a book for those who are young in a big way. How will it strike those who are young now?