Virginia Woolf (and Edward Albee)

Virginia Woolf in 1902
by George Charles Beresford
(source: wikimedia)
no copyright infringement intended

My first encounter with the name of Virginia Woolf took place in Bucharest, by the mid of the seventies. At the National Theater, Radu Beligan and Marcela Rusu, Valeria Seciu and Costel Constantin were playing George and Martha, Honey and Nick, the old couple and the young one, in Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf. My knowledge of modern English literature (and generally of modern literature) was next to nothing. I had read a decent number of authors, but all of them were from the 19th century. A Romanian book about the post-war English and American theater had come just in time to show me new horizons (together with a long article published in one of the few liberal magazines allowed to exist in the Communist country that was by then Romania). It was a period of cultural opening (it didn't last long, that's another story), and some of these English or American guys began to be staged in one or another of the Bucharest theaters. So I went to see Albee's play, eager to swallow that modern mentality, to get familiar with that world, as much as I could. You know, I was young and enthusiastic.

It was much later that I understood that the name of Virginia Woolf was used in the play just as a pun (as well as the names of George and Martha: just another pun - a reference this time to George Washington and his wife). Irreverent puns? Well, yes, young rebels are always irreverent.

I was no more young when I had the occasion to visit Washington's places, a great journey that I made on the Potomac, admiring the view of all those superb manors strung on the Virginian shore between Alexandria and Mount Vernon, enduring a heavy rain (sheltered under the boat's roof), and listening to the stories of the captain, a guy with a respectable white beard pretending to be an old buccaneer. As I said, I was no more young, and through the years I had got the habit to be sometimes irreverent myself (for good or bad reasons). So all kind of puns (some of them innocent) came to my mind as I was walking through Washington's manor, or along the houses of his slaves, or in the exhibition showing his farming preoccupations (or just listening to the story of his false teeth).

And much, much later, I learned that George and Martha from Albee's play were based on a real couple famous in the New York artistic world of the fifties, Willard Maas and Marie Menken. A great couple, promoting the new trends, with a formidable vision of what the arts should become, mentoring the young artists, instilling in them the courage to experiment. And yes, the two having a well known tempestuous relationship. Albee knew them well and actually Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf was a subtle tribute, an accolade if you like, a modern form of tribute (irreverent and paradoxical, why not?) paid to these promoters of modernity. I have to tell you sometime about the movies they made these two guys, Maas and Menken, and about their importance in the modernist movement of that epoch.

And perhaps I should tell you also about my other encounters with the name of Virginia Woolf.

• Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, The Arrangements
• Michael Cunningham
• The Discreet Charm of a Manhattan Afternoon
• The Last Word: Edward Albee

(A Life in Books)

(Maas and Menken)

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, The Arrangements

illustration by John Cuneo
(source: NY Times)
no copyright infringement intended

Melania decided she would order the flowers herself. Donald was too busy now anyway to call Alessandra’s as usual and ask for “something amazing.” Once, in the early years, before she fully understood him, she had asked what his favorite flowers were.

The NY Times Book Review asked Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie to write a short story related to the current US presidential campaign. She came with The Arrangements, a very contemporary replica to Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway, with Melania Trump as Clarissa:

The Arrangements

(Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie)

(Virginia Woolf)

Michael Cunningham

Michael Cunningham
photo: Barbara Zanon/Getty Images
(The Guardian)
no copyright infringement intended

He lives in a world where Virginia Woolf and Walt Whitman are present and their books unfold surprising destinies through their heroes and readers altogether. An unexpected image of eternity, caught in a myriad of glimpses of time and space, completely distant and different each other, each one ultimately revealing the forever, specimen days and specimen hours. Decades pass and then centuries, everything changes, Miss D. is passing through all this, forever evolving, forever the same.

And the Old Bard tuning his lyre:

Fear not, o Muse! truly new ways and days receive, surround you,
And yet... the same within, without...

The same old love, beauty...

(Walt Whitman, Song of the Exposition)

(A Life in Books)

(Walt Whitman)

(Virginia Woolf (and Edward Albee))

The Discreet Charm of a Manhattan Afternoon

(http://www.noiscriem.net/2012/04/camil-petrecu-femeia-enigmatica-doamna.html)
no copyright infringement intended

(click here for the Romanian version)

I didn't know her real name, and nobody of us knew it, on our web group of discussions. I was calling her Mrs D, as I had noticed she liked that. I was thinking at the heroine imagined by Virginia Woolf, wondering about any connections. Our meetings were exclusively on the web, each of us lived in a very different place.

We two share the memory of an afternoon spent together in New York. She was at the end of an American voyage during which she had traveled coast to coast. Now she was staying for a few days at a friend in a New Jersey town, before going back home. From that town she was coming every day to New York, by bus. The trip was half an hour long. I was living in a suburb in the Greater DC Area and the two of us had convened by phone to meet on Saturday afternoon in Manhattan. I came there in the morning and intended to leave the following day.

As I arrived I went firstly to a kind of literary café, close to the 1-st Street (for those familiar with Seinfeld, there was an episode there where the personages were looking in vain for the 1-st Street - it's true that it's hard to find it, actually it's a morsel rather than a full street). I knew that I would find there some friends I wished to say hello, poets and musicians from the artistic bohéme of the place.

I went then to a party where I needed to stay at least fifteen minutes, once that I was in town. It was near Cooper Square (in the building hosting the Village Voice, that tribune of those eternal bohemians that keep on moving from the Village to East Village, from SoHo to East SoHo, as prices are soaring everywhere, and the free spirit atmosphere of the Village is becoming a legend, and the Village is becoming kind of a panopticum where popular outlets like Milady's cannot resist any more, being replaced by snobbish expensive restaurants). I stayed at the party those scheduled fifteen minutes and then I went to meet Mrs D.

What point in New York would be the best meeting place for two people who have never seen each other? You'd say Empire State Building, for you have watched Sleepless in Seattle or An Affair to Remember - there have been about four remakes, the original with Charles Boyer has been made in 1939.

Well, not for us. We both were aficionados of classic literature and pre-classic music, so our meeting point was in front of the Public Library. And that was the place where I saw Mrs D for the first time in my life. In that city, so noisy and so aggressive, she was bringing a note, very neat, and very singular, of distinction. She was classy, oh God, she was so classy... And we walked down the streets at random, talking about anything and everything. We had a cup of coffee somewhere on the 14-th Street, then we dinned in a small Italian restaurant in the Village.

Was she beautiful? Yes, only it was a very special beauty, a charm that was letting itself to be guessed only, like a mystery. I remembered the words of someone who had known Emily Dickinson: she was not a beauty, but she had great beauties.

It was something else here, though. My thoughts were unwillingly flying toward the dilemmatic heroine of Virginia Woolf. And again I was coming back to the woman in front of me. What dilemma was hidden behind her smile?

I led Mrs D then to the bus. We lingered a bit in Times Square and she lit a cigarette. A gavroche gesture adding to her appearance a sudden note of warm familiarity. A couple of youngsters asked me to help them with some photos. We continued to talk a little bit, and there was an amusing contrast between the class of Mrs D and the total lack of sophistication of the two guys.

She then took the bus and I left, dreaming, wandering along those streets that I knew so well, those streets that now were telling me things I hadn't suspected, things about me, whom else? The next day I was back home. I opened the computer and I found an email, totally unexpected. It was to change my whole life. No, it wasn't Mrs D.


(New York, New York)

(A Life in Books)

(Virginia Woolf)