Night and Day. Woolf, Virginia. 1919. London: Grafton, 1987.
Why bother with Virginia Woolf? When one reads her one gets the impression that he has ventured into exalted territory—a domain in which every intricacy of the English language is exploited and celebrated. In short she is not for beginners and occupies a perch beyond which lies that radical branch of modernism that does not make literal sense, where cohesive thoughts and sentences are not taken for granted.
Yet despite these and other flaws (in addition to a voluptuous use of English a stubborn Metropolitan snobbery exponentially stronger than Woody Allen) she is worth a writer's time. I could say the same for readers but there are plenty of great writers who are easier to digest. Woolf is a writer's writer and if one is not too interested in the craft of expression then she may not be worth the effort.
But her prose is so damned good—so good that you wonder how anyone could write this well. Writers and aspiring writers can and should love her (or at least substitute envy for admiration).
Night and Day is not a novel to read for the plot. Typical love triangle. At the centre is Katherine Hilbery—rich, beautiful, noble, well-bred and yet flawed. Katherine does not know how to love and would prefer to entrench herself in calculus and astronomy. This despite the fact that she is of poetic nobility as the granddaughter of a fictional prototype of Lord Tennyson. Indeed Katherine is the perfect foil to the extraordinary character of her mother who is eerily similar to a hippie except she predates Woodstock by half a century. Katherine is no poetry junkie (despite her bloodline) and does not wax poetical about stepping on the hallowed ground upon which the Bard may have squatted as her mother does.
Perhaps the two do agree on one thing: don't marry a man unless you are in love with him. Katherine almost breaks this rule when she is engaged to Rodney, who by all accounts should be her perfect match. Rodney is an academic sort but he is not privileged enough to earn his bread solely by means of his Elizabethan monographs (though he licks his lips at the possibility once entered into the Hilbery fortune).
Katherine must hear his blatant poetic rendering of herself as the Muse even though it is rubbish and she can't believe it. Her noble resolve is finally broken (as is the engagement) not by means of a frank declaration that she does not share Rodney's love...at least, not originally. Katherine only becomes forthright after her apparent public ridicule of Rodney forces him to chastise her in a effort to justify the apparent emasculation. We are speaking of nothing particularly devastating (at least by today's standards). Apparently agreeing to take a walk and then standing one's partner up is enough to constitute ridicule according to Rodney. Despite his devotion to literature he is still attuned like a satellite to the public opinion of himself in elevated Chelsea circles. He seems to lack the poetic abandon and fearlessness towards scandal that is sometimes expected of those who write verse.
But Katherine is a woman of class and women of class eventually have to settle. She has not the unfettered quality of her friend Mary Datchet whose life is fueled by the passion for justice that is a necessary consequence (for those modern and enlightened) of Parliament's beastly avoidance of the suffrage issue. Woolf seems to suggest that Katherine is not a woman of ideals precisely because she has money. Or perhaps she is a woman of ideals except that her ideals are personally and purposefully dehumanized (mathematical figures; constellations in the sky). Perhaps it is a facile treatment of the sciences but Virginia Woolf probably never would have called herself as a scientist.
Anyway Katherine settles for Ralph Denham even though he shows similar attributes of the idealistic, fanatical, "head in the clouds" love that she rejects from Rodney. Katherine's social status towers over these two male friends of hers and to both of them she does not reciprocate their love. Yet in the end she chooses (or considers or settles upon) Ralph. Both men adore her and she ultimately rejects the respective angelic depictions of herself but there is a difference that draws her to Ralph.
It certainly helps that Ralph (unlike Rodney) does not fall for the youthful, exuberant Cassandra, dearest cousin of Katherine. Cassandra, due to her inexperience, lacks the cruelty of Katherine; she must learn how to ridicule a man as society has not endowed her with the foul seeds of that knowledge. Things don't end happily for Rodney but it is perhaps excusable that he falls for a relation of Katherine's. It is also excusable (and perfectly reasonable) that Katherine almost welcomes the news as a feasible (if controversial and scandalous) way of justifying the end of her engagement to her parents.
Yet it is scandal that marks the difference between these two intellectual young men—in particular Ralph's complete lack of fear toward it. He is perfectly alright with making a fool of himself by staring into the window of the Hilbery drawing room. So deep is his love (or infatuation or vision) that the poor man cannot help it.
The ending of this novel is beautiful in that there is a working agreement; a compromise between the two (dare we call them lovers?). It is majestically left unfinished as it should since the two of them must resolve the different visions of their relationship.
No doubt Katherine expresses the view of Woolf in that true knowledge of another person is impossible (even among lovers). She cannot believe that if she loves Ralph the way he loves her the world would suddenly change for the better (as Ralph believes). But she is willing to try to believe it and perhaps that's all that love is, or at least all that we can expect of it.
