Splinters

Looking at Meinhof

Two related pieces in today?s Guardian, the first a new story called Looking at Meinhof by Don Delillo, the second a bitter volley at the reputation of Virginia Woolf. In the latter, the Dickensianly-named Theodore Dalrymple portrays Virginia Woolf as a self-pitying hypocrite. He does it with an impressive relentlessness by concentrating on the evidence taken from her non-fictional work Three Guineas. In the course of the long, long version of the article in City Journal (which mentions Michel Leiris, quoted below!), he does not mention To the Lighthouse, Mrs. Dalloway or The Waves. He tries to mitigate this by saying that Three Guineas ?is important because it is a naked statement of the worldview that is unstated and implicit in all of Virginia Woolf's novels?. Unstated but implicit! It would be interesting to see if he?d come to the same opinions of Woolf if he?d had only her fiction to go by.

Now, I've not read any of Woolf's non-fiction but I have read the novels mentioned above and, while I do not have a strong opinion of them either way - even those I read more than once - I never got the implicit meanings Dalrymple claims for them. I think my lack of reaction or close memory is due to the studied ambiguity of the works.

One can?t say Don Delillo?s fiction is ambiguous in the same way, but this story speaks about that ambiguity when the woman at the centre of the story can?t work out her response, or lack of response, to portraits by Gerhard Richter of the Baader-Meinhof gang, a revolutionary band of middle-class Germans. Her concerns extend to the man she meets in the gallery, which in turn - and without giving away the details - lead back to her discomfort and curiosity about the paintings. The problems of the story are the problems of art, and also the problems of life. It?s a gently ominous story but it doesn?t tell me what Don Delillo thinks about the emancipation of ?the masses?. So it?s not one for Theodore Dalrymple as he?s keen to find scapegoats for what he perceives as a Fall from the grace and glories of the British Empire, when everyone knew their place. ?Had Mrs. Woolf survived to our time? he concludes ?she would ... have had the satisfaction of observing that her cast of mind?shallow, dishonest, resentful, envious, snobbish, self-absorbed, trivial, philistine, and ultimately brutal?had triumphed among the elites of the Western world.?

He should know.