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Sigrid Nunez is a contemporary American novelist with a quiet reputation as a writer’s writer. She’s caught my eye. September will bring the release of her latest novel, “Salvation City.” It is set in the near future after a flu epidemic has devastated America, leaving too many orphans for society to absorb. The book is on my must-read list. In the meantime, in preparation for that upcoming heavy meal, I thought I’d try an hors d’oeuvre, a smaller piece (of an entirely different flavor) by the same author.
“Mitz: The Marmoset of Bloomsbury” is a small book Nunez wrote in 1998 that takes as its ostensible subject the life of a household pet of Leonard and Virginia Woolf. Some readers might consign the narrative to the facetious genre of pet biography. I place it, instead, securely within the category of terrifically enjoyable reads. This is not because I am a fan of Bloomsbury (I am in fact suspicious of the durability of that circle’s artistic output), but for the reasons expressed below.
In 1934 a sickly marmoset — “a mere scrap of a monkey; you could have balanced her on your palm, like a fur apple, a head no bigger than a walnut” — came into the care of Leonard Woolf, who gained the animal’s affection and nursed her back to health. For the next few years Mitz was a ubiquitous presence in Bloomsbury society, surveying the world from atop Leonard’s shoulder (when she was not resting warmly in his waistcoat pocket). Mitz moved with the Woolfs between their homes in London (at 52 Tavistock Square) and Sussex (in the village of Rodmell, a seventeenth-century cottage called “Monk’s House”). The animal once traveled with them through Europe — a journey that saw the trio caught in heart-stoppingly slow car ride through a Nazi rally in Bonn. Mitz died on the eve of World War II, one snowy December night in Sussex, far from her South American birthplace. Nunez takes the references to Mitz found in Bloomsbury records (letters, diaries, and memoirs) and blends them with her own sure imagination, to reconstruct the wee creature’s brief yet full life.
Nunez’s writing style is simple and self-effacing. She prizes clarity above all. Hers is a very American voice, in the way E.B. White and F. Scott Fitzgerald are American voices. One reviewer of “Mitz” noted how the novel unfurls its prose in so relaxed a manner as to resemble, at times, a children’s book. Indeed, Nunez has since mentioned that this was the original plan for the tale.
Amid the book’s anecdotes and antics, the dominant theme is the nature of — and quest for — a well-lived life. Gently, the reader is reminded that a marmoset is predestined to live only 4 or 5 years, and that Mitz’s time in the cold foreign clime of England will be especially stressful. Yet, despite the pain, what a life she led! It was a life not to be pitied but celebrated.
Among the subtle triumphs of this book is Nunez’s avoidance of traps that otherwise would sink its quiet message and its quiet charms. Yes, through the marmoset Mitz (a stranger in a strange land) the reader is led to witness human folly in a sober light. But Nunez measures out this message (the objective strangeness of mankind) winsomely, so as not to turn the book into a clichéd satire.
Within its slim frame the book accomplishes many things. It is a playful writer’s holiday. It is a recreation of a time and place in history. It is a deft exercise in stagecraft as the author is called on to direct the moves of heavy-weight actors, among them T.S. Eliot, John Maynard Keynes, and Vita Sackville-West — not to forget the quintessential literary power couple known affectionately by friends (and not so affectionately by enemies) as “the Woolves.” The book is a window into a storied household and the quotidian pleasures sheltered therein: reading, writing, eating, talking, quarreling. Nunez’s touch is light as air as she anatomizes domesticity via the device of a domesticated (or, for the most part domesticated) pet. “Mitz” charts the breathing of a successful marriage. It offers lessons in patience and protectiveness and love.
In its final dozen pages the book takes a breathtaking turn. Nunez gambles that her simple and, up to that point, dispassionate prose will satisfy a new challenge: recounting the young Mitz’s expulsion from the paradise of her tropical rainforest home in South America, as men arrive to seize her and dozens of her fellow creatures for exportation. It’s a winning gamble on Nunez’s part. The reader feels the harrowing experience of forced dislocation, of becoming a refugee, broken and condemned to live out one’s life far from home. The parallels to the devastation that Europeans were about the face is unmistakable. A shared sadness also comes to Bloomsbury: just as nothing can hold back Mitz’s swiftly oncoming date with death, so too can nothing stay the inexorable decline in Virginia Woolf’s mental state.
Nunez is a wonderful writer. Here is how she describes Virginia visited by her muses:
“One morning while she was working in her studio in the basement of Tavistock Square, Virginia put down her pen, aware of a faint vibration, as of some deep nerve being plucked. She leaned forward; she held her breath. The eerie and rapturous feeling that something was about to be communicated to her, as from another world. She half closed her eyes and she waited. What came: a muffled music, like distant horns; a soft rising and falling, a rhythm to which she matched her breathing when she breathed again. Looking around her studio, she saw a kind of haze over all — and the next instant her mind took flight: people, houses, streets, landscapes, weather, seasons, friendships, passions, fates, patterns, necessities —
A new novel. ”
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Notes:
1. Nunez was inspired to write “Mitz” by Virginia Woolf’s “Flush,” her biography of Elizabeth Barrett Brown’s cocker spaniel, published in 1932. That book is currently out of print, but its full text (E-Text) is available online, here.
2. 52 Tavistock Square, London, which Virginia and Leonard Woolf occupied from March 1924 to August 1939 (and was home to Mitz as well), was bombed in October 1940 and replaced with a Hotel in 1951.
3. A version of the above review is posted on Amazon, here.
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