Another First For Boom Town -- Drive-Through Hotels -- March 13, 2018

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Heartbreak Hotel, Elvis Presley    

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Bloom's BioCritiques

Virginia Woolf, editor with an introduction by Harold Bloom, c. 2005.

Introduction is spent mostly on Shakespeare.

Some data points from the general introduction by Harold Bloom:

• literary biography found its masterpiece in James Boswell's Life of Samuel Johnson
• modern instances of literary biography, such as Richard Ellmann's lives of WB Yeats, James Joyce, and Oscar Wilde, essentially follow in Boswell's patter
• William Shakespeare: writer-of-writers; the writer is in the work
• we know nothing of Shakespeare
• in Shakespeare, more even than in his peers, Dante and Cervantes, meaning always starts itself again through excess or overflow -- Falstaff, Hamlet, Iago, Lear, Cleopatra
• unlike Shakespeare, of Goethe's life we know more than everything -- I wonder sometimes if we know as much about Napoleon or Freud or any other human being who ever has lived, as we know about Goethe
• a contrast between Shakespeare and Goethe demonstrates that in each -- but in very different ways -- we can better find the work in the person, than we can discover that banal entity, the person in the work
• Goethe to many of his contemporaries seemed to be a mortal god
• Shakespeare, so far as we know, seemed an affable, rather ordinary fellow, who aged early and became somewhat withdrawn
• there are writers whose lives were so vivid that they seem sometimes to obscure the literary achievement: Byron, Wilde, Malraux, Hemingway
• but most major Western writers do not live that exuberantly, and the greatest of all, Shakespeare, sometimes appears to have adopted the personal mask of colorlessness
• and yet there are heroes of literature who struggled titanically with their own eras -- Tolstory, Milton, Victor Hugo -- who nevertheless matter more for their works than their lives
• there are three great figures -- Emily Dickinson, Wallace Stevens, Willa Cather -- who seem to have had so little of the full intensity of life when compared to the vitality of their work, that we might almost speak of the work in the work, rather than even of the work in a person
• Emily Bronte might well be the extreme instance of such a visionary, surpassing William Blake in that one regard

Harold Bloom's introduction begins:

Virginia Woolf was one of the most original novelists of the century now passed. Her life was a long, heroic struggle against madness. Her first breakdown was precipitated, at thirteen, by the death of her mother. The death of her father, Leslie Stephen, when was twenty-two, stimulated a second breakdown and an attempted suicide. A third crisis lasted for three years, from thirty to thirty-three. Finally, under the terrible stress of German air bombardment, Woolf drowned herself at the age of fifty-nine.

And then, this, and then I'll quit:

Woolf's major novels, by common consent, are Mrs Dallowy (1925) and To the Lighthouse (1927). Orlando (1928) remains popular, but is a secondary work. Her later novels are all extraordinary work, and clearly will survive: The Waves (1931), The Years (1937), and a final masterpiece, Between the Acts (1941). Formally speaking, Woolf's finest novel is To The Lighthouse, which is a miraculous concentration of her varied gifts.