Volume 23, Number 12 · July 15, 1976
Cinderella in Reverse
By John Bayley
Freshwater: A Comedy
by Virginia Woolf, edited by Lucio P. Ruotolo
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 96 pp., $6.95
The Letters of Virginia Woolf Volume I: 1888-1912
edited by Nigel Nicolson, edited by Joanne Trautman
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 531 pp., $14.95
Virginia Woolf and Her World
by John Lehmann
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 128 pp., $12.95
Good conversation can last, preserved in the shorthand of Boswell or Haydon: good talk is another matter. There is a story about Desmond MacCarthy, reputed to be the best talker of Bloomsbury; competed for by every hostess, intellectual or merely socially grand; and guaranteed to enchant under any circumstances. One day someone had the brilliant idea of recording him—a most unusual procedure in days so long before Watergate—unawares and in full flow. The result, it appears, was not so much disappointing as nonexistent. Everyone present agreed that Desmond had been even more scintillating than usual, but the tape (or more presumptively, at that date, the vulcanite) produced nothing but unmeaning and discontinuous geniality, a transcript of animation that had escaped into the air.
Review, 3161 words
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