Orlando

Thursday, November 7th., Chiltern Court, London.

Well, I have read Virginia Woolf's "Orlando" and hope thereby to keep my end up more successfully in middle-brow circles.

It is a very odd volume. The novel, which is a play of fancy, a wild fantasia, a romance, a high brow lark, is illustrated with ordinary realistic photographs, including several of Vita Sackville-West, to whom the book is dedicated. The portraits of Miss V. S-W are labelled "Orlando". I draw no particular conclusion from this, though certain rumours have been brought to my attention. Who knows why Mrs. Woolf has decided to indulge herself in this way and whether she has some objective in view vis-a-vis her relationship with Miss S-W.

Orlando at the end of the book has attained an age of some four centuries, which reminds one of the Wandering Jew and the Flying Dutchman. Halfway through the story he changes into a woman - and 'stays-put'. Which reminds one of "Seraphita", the dullest book that Balzac ever wrote. I surmise that Orlando is intended to be the incarnation of something or other - say the mustang spirit of the joy of life, but this is not quite clear to me; in fact it is as clear as mud. The first chapter is goodish. It contains vivacious descriptions of spectacular matters such as a big frost, royal courts, and the love-making of Orlando and a muscovite girl in furs and in the open air amid the fiercest frost since the Ice Age. Mrs. Woolf almost convinces us of the possibility of this surely very difficult dalliance. The second chapter shows a startling decline and fall-off, and succeeding chapters are still more tedious in their romp of fancy. Mrs. Woolf does not seem to understand that fancy must have something to play on. I shall no doubt be told that I have missed the magic of the work. The magic is indeed precisely what I have missed.

The theme is a great one. But it is a theme for Victor Hugo, not Virginia Woolf who, while sometimes excelling in fancy and in delicate realistic observation, has never yet shown the mighty imaginative power which the theme clearly demands. Her best novel "To the Lighthouse" raised my hopes of her. "Orlando" has dashed them, and they lie in irridescent fragments at my feet.