#2: Is Virginia Woolf based?
A great icon of progressivism would be canceled today
Books Worth Reading is an email digest that allows busy people to connect with great minds - without wading through thousands of pages to do so. I’ll recommend at least three books a week, as well as highlighting a poem or two, some quotes and articles, and perhaps some discussion of great literary figures or movements.
Books Worth Reading This Week
My three recommendations this week are Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own, Anne Applebaum’s Red Famine, and Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones. We’ll start with Virginia Woolf.
1) A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf, 123 pages
Is it ok for a right-leaning man under 35 to like Virginia Woolf? If it’s wrong, I can’t help it. There’s something intriguing about her prose. It’s clear, cutting, sometimes brutal. And it reflects a view of human nature that is often anti-woke. Based, if you will.
Quotes:
“If woman had no existence save in the fiction written by men, one would imagine her a person of the utmost importance (...); as great as a man, some think even greater.”
“... it is fatal for anyone who writes to think of their sex.”
”Life for both sexes — and I looked at them, shouldering their way along the pavement — is arduous, difficult, a perpetual struggle. It calls for gigantic courage and strength. More than anything, perhaps, creatures of illusion as we are, it calls for confidence in oneself.”
Why is it worth reading? Next to Hemingway, Woolf is my favorite modernist writer, and although the comparison is superficially jarring, Hem and Woolf have a lot in common. Both of them knew that good writing was about the Truth, capital T.
Woolf puts it beautifully in “A Room of One’s Own”: “What one means by integrity, in the case of the novelist, is the conviction that he gives one that this is the truth…Or perhaps it is rather that Nature, in her most irrational mood, has traced in invisible ink on the walls of the mind…a sketch which only needs to be held to the fire of genius to become visible.”
I suspect that most people that are drawn to Virginia Woolf are attracted by some part of her biography - her sapphic romances, proto-feminism, her lifelong struggle with depression, her dramatic suicide, her sparkling circle of friends.
She was larger than life. But that’s not what I find most compelling about Woolf.
I love the way she writes about cars, and gloves, and flower shops. Woolf at her best, writes simply and beautifully about real things. She records truth about things that usually slip by unnoticed, “an accumulation of unrecorded life.”
Read the description of London streets coming to life on a beautiful June morning in Mrs. Dalloway - it’s true. That is exactly what happened, and we know it, and have experienced it before, but never had the words to describe it. To tell the truth so beautifully is a talent that only a few have ever possessed.
Yes, Woolf was a progressive, for her time
“A Room of One’s Own” is a reflective essay, not a novel, and it’s best known as a defining document of the feminist movement. It has its share of strident complaints about patriarchal Victorian society, some of them fair. (Some of them no doubt, appeal to even woke feminists, especially when taken out of the context of Woolf’s overall view of the two sexes.)
Woolf understandably complains about the exclusion of women from an Oxford library but neglects to credit the patriarchy for one very significant benefit she reaped from its strict segregation of roles - an exemption from military service at a time when that was a matter of life or death.
Woolf’s childhood friend, the poet Rupert Brooke, was a man, so he died in WWI, as did her brother-in-law, as did many of her male literary compatriots. To be an upper-class British male in Woolf’s generation was to die or be maimed in Flanders fields, where casualties among officers far outpaced enlisted men.
Woolf’s burning intellectual light was not extinguished because it was sheltered in the body of a woman.
It may not have been a worthwhile trade-off in exchange for the exclusion she complains of, but it would be at least fair to note it.
Reading “A Room of One’s Own” in 2023 is bound to be different than it was in 1928; far from being excluded, women now significantly outnumber men in universities. But 2023 has its own anti-women pathologies, most of which come from the left. Chief among them is the puzzling refusal of woke activists to define what a woman is. There is an institutional erasure of the idea that a woman is in any way different than a man.
On this point, Woolf sounds like a right-wing activist, inasmuch as she is utterly uninterested in erasing the uniqueness of femininity. She writes: “...it is obvious that the values of women differ very often from the values which have been made by the other sex; naturally, this is so." Further: “It would be a thousand pities if women wrote like men, or lived like men, or looked like men…Ought not education to bring out and fortify the differences rather than the similarities?”
In praising the virtues of Bronte and Jane Austen, Woolf notes that for female authors “it is useless to go to the great [male] writers for help” because they (Lamb, Dickens, and Thackeray among them) used the “current sentence” a style “unsuited for women’s use.” Jane Austen, “looked at it and laughed at it and devised a perfectly natural, shapely sentence proper for her own use and never departed from it.”
Is there such a thing as a male sentence or a female sentence? I know for sure that this sort of distinction between the sexes is verboten today.
Woolf’s mind is clear and powerful. Her prose is, to use a very Edwardian-sounding adjective, limpid. Regardless of her politics, the writing is brilliant. Of course, for her time, Woolf was a progressive - there’s no denying that - but for our time, her complementarian views would get her labeled a right-wing extremist.
It seems that the ground has shifted, and Woolf’s writing is a good barometer of the changes. “A Room of One’s Own” is worth reading for that alone.
2) Red Famine by Anne Applebaum, 367 pages
William Styron said “A great book should leave you with many experiences, and slightly exhausted at the end.” Anne Applebaum’s Red Famine is a good book, not a great one, because while I was emotionally exhausted by the end, it had a single note - crushing horror, sadness and despair. (This is not a knock on the writer - there’s no other option with a topic this tragic.) Nonetheless, it should be required reading for every liberal arts major in America.
Quotes:
“In addition to taking the food, the brigades went out of their way to spoil it…activists spoiled grain with water so it turned black, sprouted, and was then thrown into a local ravine…When anything was discovered, they scattered it on the floor and enjoyed the sight of weeping children.”
“Many felt, that when they had dug the mass graves, it didn’t matter how they were filled. They didn’t even shoot, they economized on bullets and pulled living people into the hole.”
“The horror, the exhaustion, the human indifference to life and constant exposure to the language of hatred left their mark. Combined with the complete absence of food, they also produced, in the Ukrainian countryside, a very rare form of madness: by the late spring and summer, cannibalism was widespread.”
Why is it worth reading? Red Famine is about the Holodomor, one of the 20th century’s least understood genocides. Applebaum’s exhaustively researched book methodically exposes the evil at the heart of Stalin’s attack on the Ukrainian peasantry.
It’s an emotionally exhausting account, made worse by the fact that, unlike the denouement of the Holocaust, with a late rescue and justice at Nuremberg, the Holodomor had no such resolution. The perpetrators were triumphant, unpunished, and completely in control of the coverup and the history books.
The Holocaust is rightfully commemorated as a horror “lest we forget.” In contrast, we have already forgotten the Holodomor and most of the other atrocities committed by communist governments.
That’s no accident. As Applebaum documents, the erasure of the horror famine was carefully carried out by the Soviet government and aided and abetted by leftist Western intelligentsia and journalists. It’s time to remember.
3) Tom Jones by Henry Fielding, 768 pages
On a lighter note, I’ve been reading Henry Fielding’s most famous novel, The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling. It’s a contender for first great English novel, along with Richardson’s Pamela and Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe.
Quotes:
“One of the maxims which the devil, in a late visit upon earth, left to his disciples, is, when once you are got up, to kick the stool from under you. In plain English, when you have made your fortune by the good offices of a friend, you are advised to discard him as soon as you can.”
“And here, I believe, the wit is generally misunderstood. In reality, it lies in desiring another to kiss your a-- for having just before threatened to kick his; for I have observed very accurately, that no one ever desires you to kick that which belongs to himself, nor offers to kiss this part in another.”
Why it’s worth reading: It’s on every Top 100 novels list, and is a foundational piece of the history of literature, but that’s not why it’s worth reading. It’s just really funny.
It’s also eye-opening for those who think that humanity has somehow changed fundamentally in the last few decades, or even the last few years (looking at you Gen Z-ers)
Once you get into the swing of the language, the characters in Tom Jones are hilariously drawn - but also, highly realistic. It’s bawdy, rambunctious, sentimental, cynical, and always entertaining.
Poem of the Week:
This week’s poem is from the noted English pamphleteer, journalist and novelist Daniel Defoe, who, as it turns out, had quite the knack for verse as well. I’ve excerpted the most famous lines from his elegy to his friend Samuel Annesley here:
The CHARACTER Of the late Dr. Samuel Annesley. By way of ELEGY.
For the best of Men cannot suspend their Fate; The Good die early, and the Bad die late. The Eternal Laws of Life are fix'd and fast, And he who latest dies, yet dies at last. Tho' early Vice does early Death presage, Yet Piety can lengthen no Man's Age: The Stroke's promiscuous, and there's no suspence Beyond the stated Bounds of Providence; For if distinguish'd Piety could save, We had seen no Elegy, nor he no Grave. Stay then, and spend a Thought upon his Herse, Whose Name is more immortal than my Verse: For Death's Stroke, like an impetuous Flood, Involves in common Fate the Just and Good
Defoe’s updated take on Ecclesiastes is a poignant reminder of mortality, as well as an affecting tribute to an old friend. You can read the full poem here.
Old Book Advice Column
“I recommend that you take care of the minutes: for hours will take care of themselves.” - From “The Wit And Wisdom of Lord Chesterfield: Advice to his Son"
“To ask advice is in nine cases out of ten to tout for flattery. - John Churton Collins, Maxims and Reflections
Book Looks
Notable links
Philip Bunn writes about reading bad books on Everything Was Beautiful. Every reader has experienced this.
Oliver Bateman writes about the genre of time management books at Unherd. “There is no way to buy more time, to waste time, or even, in the final analysis, to save it. You get what you get.”
Daniel DiSalvo reviews The Call of the Tribe, by Mario Vargas Llosa. Llosa is one of our greatest living novelists, but he’s also an important political voice against authoritarian collectivism.
A young William Faulkner lived in New Orleans, and it changed his writing forever. (Mosquitos, Faulkner’s second novel, was written in NOLA, and is highly underrated)
I’m undecided on chiropractors, but H.L. Mencken sure wasn’t. A prime example of the vitriolic essay by one of America’s most savage writers.
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