NOVELIST ON LIFE

Wairarapa Times-Age, 8 July 1941, Page 6

NOVELIST ON LIFE

LATE MISS VIRGINIA WOOLF. In a memoir on the late Miss Virginia Woolf, “The Times” Literary Supple-* ment recalls her profession of faith as a novelist in her essay on “Modern Fiction.” Therein she complains against the novels of Messrs Bennett, Wells and Galsworthy that they are cut to a pattern which is not that of life. “Is life like this?” she asks. Look within, she continues, and life, it seems, is very far from being “like this.” Examine for a moment an ordinary mind on an ordinary day. The mind receives a myriad impressions—trivial, fantastic, evanescent or engraved with the sharpness of steel. From all sides they come, an incessant shower of innumerable atoms; and as they fall, as they shape themselves into the life of Monday or Tuesday, the accent falls differently from of old; the moment of importance came not here but there, so that if a writer were a free man and not a slave, if he could write what he chose, not what he must, if he could base his work upon his own feeling and not upon convention, there would be no plot, no com l edy, no tragedy, no love interest or catastrophe in the accepted style, and perhaps not a single button sewn on, as the Bond Street tailors would have it. ■ Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end. Is it not the duty of the novelist to convej*- this varying, this unknown and uncircumscribed spirit, whatever aberration or complexity it may display, with as little mixture of the alien and external as possible?