By Virginia Woolf (1882-1941), this was published in 1922, and is only her third novel.

Two much more famous works came next: Mrs Dalloway in 1925, and To the Lighthouse in 1927. I read both the latter as a young person. The oracular Memory of Books list, drawn up in 2011 when hundreds and hundreds of our books were scattered to the four winds, notes that the copies were not dated, so they go back a long way; it codes them PWRA, which means "Probably Wouldn't Read Again" (which is ironic, given I'm going to embark on a re-read of Mrs Dalloway next week with Henry Elliot's Read the Classics book club); and it comments, "I guess you HAD to experience Woolf, but I’m not sure I would return except for Orlando" (at that point, I hadn't read Orlando -- it was dated 1995, and so had spent a long time in the pipeline -- and when I finally did, in 2012, I didn't like it much, according to the post-Australia Memory of Books addendum, which adds that the now-read copy was left behind in Manila).

I hardly ever DNF something. Frank Herbert's Dune was the only one last year that I definitively drew a line under after the first chapter. Too hard, and I just didn't feel like making the effort.

I do, on the other hand, frequently LSL (Let Stuff Linger). And Jacob's Room, which I started on some train in January, is one such... I started it, but couldn't get into it. There was so much chopping and changing of perspective, so little continuity, so little to get hold of...

But, with Mrs Dalloway coming up, I felt an effort had to be made.


The first cover was designed by Woolf's sister, Vanessa Bell. It didn't go down well with booksellers (kind of understandably, I think...)

Four points, initially:

1. The chopping and changing is a feature not a bug. And many early critics didn't get it either. Example: "[Woolf] provides us with chunks of what seems arbitrary and is certainly not explicit, and leaves us to sort them. There is art in it, of course, and doubtless the unaccustomed reader permits himself to be disconcerted too much by the disjointedness... Her book is a sort of phantasmagoria; sometimes it seems that madness lies this way... Life is seen in flashes, and the reader has a good deal to do..." Oliver Tearle explains that Jacob's Room was a watershed in Woolf's development as a writer. In a short story collection of 1921, she explored a new way of writing that moved away from the fiction of Edwardians like Arnold Bennett, H.G. Wells, and John Galsworthy (whose work, she felt was both too realist, and too poor at reflecting the way we actually live our lives). Jacob's Room was her attempt to transfer this new mode of expression to a full-length novel. And yes, it is a bit baffling. Alex Zwerdling, in a really, really helpful analysis, comments: "Its narrative techniques are so innovative that they call attention to themselves; its central character, Jacob Flanders, seems to be a classic instance of psychological inscrutability in fiction; and its rapidly shifting tone, now somber, now mocking, deprives Woolf's audience of a stable sense of her own attitude toward the world she describes." So that's reassuring...

2. It helps to think of it cinematically (as was pointed out by Winifred Holtby, an early analsyt of Woolf's work). Zwerdling has a similar take: "The style of Jacob's Room is that of the sketchbook artist rather than the academic painter. Scenes are swiftly and allusively outlined, not filled in, the essential relationships between characters intimated in brief but typical vignettes chosen seemingly at random from their daily lives... No incident is decisive or fully developed. Nothing is explained or given special significance."


Scarborough, 2017. "Mrs Jarvis... [sitting] on the grass high above Scarborough... thinks to herself, 'If only some one could give me... if I could give some one...' But she does not know what she wants to give, nor who could give it to her"

3. I'd have found the book much easier to tackle, I think, if I'd read the Internet Archive version (which reproduces the actual pages) rather than the Gutenberg version (which doesn't differentiate paragraph breaks from section breaks).

4. When I rescued it from the Lingering pile this week, and re-read the first few chapters, I had a very different impression. The first chapter, for example. First time round, I was just frustrated with it. Second time, however, I could see that it's full of beautiful little cameos. You just have to roll with the shifting perspectives. Throughout, Woolf's descriptions are jewel-like. Mrs Flanders's tears; sailing off the Cornish coast; King's College Chapel; St Paul's Cathedral; the Opera; the London streets; the church in Scarborough...


"Moors behind, sea in front, and the whole of Scarborough from one end to the other laid out flat like a puzzle"

***

So, what's it about? Essentially, it's the story of the eponymous young man, Jacob Flanders. The catch is that his creator, as Angela Harris puts it, purposely writes him "to be wholly unknowable".

Whereas we are sometimes privy to the stream of consciousness of the other characters (Woolf was one of the earliest practitioners of this technique), Jacob remains pretty impenetrable throughout. We don't follow his thoughts; we see him, rather, through the eyes of those who meet him. Some of them think very highly of him, love him even, but each only grasps a fragment of the whole.

So he goes on a seaside holiday with Betty, his widowed mother, and his brothers; goes to school (Rugby); goes to university (Cambridge); forms various attachments to women; pursues various scholarly interests; wonders about his future; heads off to Greece and Italy on his Big OE; and returns. It's a kind of twist on the Bildungsroman, in that it takes us through a series of snippets indicating a young man's progress through life, but there's no arc, no teleology -- because everything is interrupted: As we might have guessed from his family name, he dies in World War I, still in his twenties.

Harris continues: "'Nothingness' echoes through the novel, beginning with the title 'Jacob’s Room', which gestures toward an existential vacancy that Jacob inhabits like a ghost: 'one fibre in the wicker armchair creaks, though no one sits there'." That sentence about the armchair is repeated in the final chapter, which shows us first Jacob's friend Bonamy and then his mother in his now deserted room:

"'He left everything just as it was,' Bonamy marvelled. 'Nothing arranged. All his letters strewn about for any one to read. What did he expect? Did he think he would come back?' he mused, standing in the middle of Jacob's room... Listless is the air in an empty room, just swelling the curtain; the flowers in the jar shift. One fibre in the wicker arm-chair creaks, though no one sits there."

Betty arrives, and we close with this:

"Bonamy turned away from the window.
"'What am I to do with these, Mr Bonamy?'
"She held out a pair of Jacob's old shoes."

Death in general is much foreshadowed in the novel, you start to realize; and, more specifically, there many portents of the impending conflict that was going to wipe Jacob out.

But the book has many little touches of humour, too, as Sebastian Knowles recognizes. Often it's just a word aptly chosen that makes you smile.


"And now, what's the next thing to see in Scarborough?"

***

Jacob's Room is often interpreted as an elegy for Woolf's favourite brother, Thoby, who died of typhoid in 1906 at the age of 26. Woolf had already been pummelled by death (her mother died in 1895, her stepsister in 1897, and her father in 1904).

But of all the commentary that I read (and I read quite a bit, in my tussle with this book), it's Zwerdling's that provides the most holistic exposition. Describing the novel as a "satiric elegy", his key question is WHY Woolf wrote it in the ambiguous way she did.

Her goal, he argues, was not just to be experimental. Rather, her reason for giving us so little of Jacob's inner world was to avoid sentimentalization. A comparison of the different versions of the text before publication shows that time after time, Woolf stripped away our access to Jacob's thoughts. Partly, this is "to give the sense of someone who remains a permanently unknown quantity" (one of Woolf's beefs with Edwardian fiction was that it is unrealistic to think that we can ever KNOW the people we are reading about). But mostly she is concerned to maintain an ironic distance. She wants to prevent our reaching out in sympathy to this specific person.

Zwerdling goes on: "Is this any way to treat a young man whose life is about to be snuffed out?... [In contrast to the well-known passages that reverently describe the war dead] Woolf's elegiac novel is persistently small-scaled, mischievous and ironic... Woolf's elegy for the young men who died in the war is revisionist: there is nothing grand about Jacob; the sacrifice of his life seems perfectly pointless, not even a cautionary tale. Jacob's Room is a covert critique of the romantic posturing so common in the anthems for doomed youth."

Woolf's point, he says, is that the sum of Jacob is not that his life was cut short: "There was something about his whole life pattern that she disliked intensely... Everything in his life is a traditional step on the road to establishment success. The class was Woolf's own, but the sex was not; and between the training and expectations of its young men and young women, there was a great gulf. Woolf's satiric detachment is in part attributable to her feeling that Jacob's world was created by men for men, and essentially excluded her."



She also wants us to wonder what, if Jacob had not been caught up in this senseless slaughter, would have happened to him. The alternatives are set out in snippets, like everything else, but they don't glow with hope. Jacob was on course for respectability, responsibility, a place in the establishment -- and, very probably, disillusionment.

Despite the novel's ironic distance, however, the sense of death that hovers over the novel means that we DO find it moving: "'Ja-cob! Ja-cob!' his brother calls in the novel's first scene; and Woolf comments: 'The voice had an extraordinary sadness. Pure from all body, pure from all passion, going out into the world, solitary, unanswered, breaking against rocks -- so it sounded'. 'Jacob! Jacob!': it is a refrain that will be heard again and again in the book, from Mrs. Flanders, from Clara Durrant, from Richard Bonamy, from all those fellow mortals who make the mistake of attaching their deepest feelings to someone who precedes them into the earth. For all Woolf's ironic distance and critical awareness of Jacob's limitations, she knows that such composure dissolves when our emotions are engaged."

We may not know Jacob, or have any feeling that we would like him if we did, but we still respond to his absence, and feel, all over again, what a hard thing it is to be in a world that has death in it.