Good news, Marla!
Marla Muse: I’ve heard. Mary is back. Her fans are making a ruckus in the tents by the lake leading up to the arena.
The Post-Modern Bracket is next, but we need to get back to the Modern Bracket.
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Conrad, Remarque, and Thurber have advanced, but we have five more first round contests in this amazing Modern Bracket.
Marla Muse: Virginia Woolf. When I see pictures of her, I think she may have been the most beautiful woman in the world—but what does this mean? It means nothing. Depending on who loves it, and from what angle you gaze upon it, and all the changes that happen to a face over the years, there is no most beautiful; there is only most loved.
Marla, I’ve never heard you speak quite like this. What’s gotten into you?
Marla Muse: Shut up.
OK. Well. If we look at this passage from Virginia Woolf, from “A Room Of One’s Own,” I think we’ll find not only a sublime speech, but a strangely anti-feminist one.
Marla Muse (as if in a trance): It’s remarkable.
It is fatal for any one who writes to think of their sex.
It is fatal to be a man or woman pure and simple; one must be woman-manly or man-womanly. It is fatal for a woman to lay the least stress on any grievance; to plead even with justice any cause; in any way to speak consciously as a woman. And fatal is no figure of speech; for anything written with that conscious bias is doomed to death. It ceases to be fertilized. Brilliant and effective, powerful and masterly, as it may appear for a day or two, it must wither at nightfall; it cannot grow in the minds of others. Some collaboration has to take place in the mind between the woman and the man before the act of creation can be accomplished. Some marriage of opposites has to be consummated.
If one is a man, still the woman part of the brain must have effect; and a woman also must have intercourse with the man in her. Coleridge perhaps meant this when he said that a great mind is androgynous.
No age can ever have been as stridently sex-conscious as our own. The Suffrage campaign was no doubt to blame. It must have roused in men an extraordinary desire for self-assertion; it must have made them lay an emphasis upon their own sex and its characteristics which they would not have troubled to think about had they not been challenged.
The blame for all this rests no more upon one sex than upon the other. All seducers and reformers are responsible. All who have brought about a state of sex-consciousness are to blame, and it is they who drive me, when I want to stretch my faculties on a book, to seek it in that happy age, when the writer used both sides of his mind equally. One must turn back to Shakespeare, then, for Shakespeare was androgynous; and so was Keats and Coleridge. Shelley was perhaps sexless. Milton and Ben Johnson had a dash too much of the male in them. So had Wordsworth and Tolstoy.
The whole of the mind must lie wide open if we are to get the sense that the writer is communicating his experience with perfect fullness. There must be freedom and there must be peace. Not a wheel must grate, not a light glimmer. The curtains must be close drawn. The writer, once his experience is over, must lie back and let his mind celebrate its nuptials in darkness. He must not look or question what is being done. Rather, he must pluck the petals from a rose or watch the swans float calmly down the river. And I saw again the current which took the boat and the undergraduate and the dead leaves; and the taxi took the man and the woman who came together across the street, and the current swept them away, as I heard far off the roar of London’s traffic, into that tremendous stream.
Stunning.
Edmund Wilson has the unlucky task of going up against Woolf.
A literary critic, Wilson knew F. Scott Fitzgerald at Princeton, proposed marriage to Anais Nin by saying he had much to teach her, which she took as an insult, did not pay federal taxes for years, called Lovecraft and Tolkien hacks, had many marriages, and supposedly many affairs, and quickly turned down LBJ’s invitation to the White House in 1965.
Wilson, to defeat Woolf, will attempt to do so with this:
“Come outside a minute,” I said, when everybody was clapping and cheering. “I want to tell you something.” She went with me in silence—I was satisfied and proud, and I also felt really excited. There would be people in the courtyard, I knew, so I took her to the terrace at the side of the house. I kissed her, holding her tight against me, one arm about her naked shoulders, the other under her soft bare armpit just where the breast begins; and she seemed to me voracious and hot as I had never known her before. I said nothing, for the kiss said all. But we couldn’t go on, so at last i stopped and looked away to distract myself. There above us in the sky where it was always summer hung the dust of the richly-sprinkled stars that gave the illusion out here of being both closer-to and more tinselly than they ever did in the East—the stars of the blissful Pacific that had the look of festive decorations for people to be gay or to make love by, yet with which I had never been able to feel myself in any vital relation as I did with the remote ones at home. I spoke of this and when I looked back at her face, I saw that she was smiling and gazing up with her lips parted in such a way as to show great long bare-gummed teeth that stuck out and yet curved back like tushes and that seemed almost too large to be contained in her mouth. She looked like a dog panting when you take it out for a drive, and for a moment I was sharply repelled; but then, saying, ‘Yes, I see what you mean,’ she closed her lips, and the teeth disappeared. I saw only her wide wet mouth, and I pounded kisses against it with summoned determined passion, tasting her perfume and her flesh. It was precisely those long teeth, I thought, that gave her large mouth its peculiar attractiveness: it might have been unpleasant, but wasn’t.
My head is swimming, Marla. I’ve never been witness to a contest like this. Wilson’s memoir invokes sublimity in a strange, but forceful way. The unapologetic realism.
Yet Woolf’s passage may be the most remarkable thing in Letters a woman has written, ever.
Marla Muse: Then Virginia wins?
She does.
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F. Scott Fitzgerald—the fifth seed, is famous, died when still young (44) and has a famous entry. The fan turnout is enormous! The crowd is speaking along to every word. Tattered copies of Gatsby are everywhere. White silk and cotton. What a scene.
Most of the big shore places were closed now and there were hardly any lights except the shadowy, moving glow of a ferryboat across the Sound. And as the moon rose higher the inessential houses began to melt away until gradually I became aware of the old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors’ eyes—a fresh, green breast of the new world. Its vanished trees, the trees that had made way for Gatsby’s house, had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams; for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an æsthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.
And as I sat there, brooding on the old unknown world, I thought of Gatsby’s wonder when he first picked out the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock. He had come a long way to this blue lawn and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him, somewhere back in that vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night.
Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter—tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther. . . . And one fine morning——
So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.
The American sublime. Does his opponent have a chance?
We doubt it. It is the tall and gangly Englishman, Stephen Spender, a friend of Auden’s, publisher of an art magazine secretly funded by the CIA, who brings to this match up a poem which sounds like it was self-consciously written to be ‘great’ poem; but then some say he pulled it off! What do you think, Marla?
I think continually of those who were truly great.
Who, from the womb, remembered the soul’s history
Through corridors of light, where the hours are suns,
Endless and singing. Whose lovely ambition
Was that their lips, still touched with fire,
Should tell of the Spirit, clothed from head to foot in song.
And who hoarded from the Spring branches
The desires falling across their bodies like blossoms.
.
What is precious, is never to forget
The essential delight of the blood drawn from ageless springs
Breaking through rocks in worlds before our earth.
Never to deny its pleasure in the morning simple light
Nor its grave evening demand for love.
Never to allow gradually the traffic to smother
With noise and fog, the flowering of the spirit.
.
Near the snow, near the sun, in the highest fields,
See how these names are fêted by the waving grass
And by the streamers of white cloud
And whispers of wind in the listening sky.
The names of those who in their lives fought for life,
Who wore at their hearts the fire’s centre.
Born of the sun, they traveled a short while toward the sun
And left the vivid air signed with their honour.
Marla is not sure.
She’s smoothing her hair.
She’s running off somewhere, now…
There are parts of the first stanza where one says to oneself, “oh come on, this is silly,” but then something happens when we get to “essential delight of the blood drawn from ageless springs breaking through rocks in worlds before our earth,” and there is something so wonderfully fresh, sweet, and lyrical (even though it is still naive) about the last stanza, and by the time we read, “they traveled a short while toward the sun,” the poet has us.
But F. Scott Fitzgerald wins.