Mitz

The Marmoset of Bloomsbury

Author
Sigrid Nunez
Publisher
Soft Skull Press
Year
1998
Collection
Fiction
Buy this book
Bookshop

In the summer of 1934, Leonard and Virginia Woolf adopted a marmoset named Mitz. The tiny, sickly monkey had been rescued from a junk store by a wealthy friend who was quite relieved when Leonard volunteered to care for it. Leonard nursed it back to health, and for the next several years, the marmoset went wherever he did—sitting upon his shoulder, or tucked into his jacket pocket. Sigrid Nunez’s story of Mitz is also the story of this famous literary couple, on the eve of the second World War, years bright with their work and with the delight of their small companion, yet darkened by that approaching shadow. To see their lives through the marmoset is to draw the line between colonial extraction and fascist expansion—twin horrors that create and feed upon each other, both seeming distant right up until the moment when they knock down your door.

Reading notes

What books are for

In despair at a critical review, Virginia Woolf turned to her husband and asked,

Well, then, what should she do about such abuse? Pay no attention, get on with her work. And if she couldn’t work, what then? If such attacks upset her so that she couldn’t write—what then, Mongoose, what then? Then she should read until she could write again; that’s what books were for.

Nunez, Mitz, page 46

(“Mongoose” was the pet name Virginia used for Leonard; he called her “Mandrill.” Mitz is fiction, but it draws from the Woolf’s diaries and other contemporary sources and is, for my purposes, true enough. All prose is fiction, as Le Guin teaches us.)

Virginia, of course, knew well the ways that reading could summon us to our own wills. Here a similar note is echoed in a passage in A Room of One’s Own:

Nature seems, very oddly, to have provided us with an inner light by which to judge of the novelist’s integrity or disintegrity. Or perhaps it is rather that Nature, in her most irrational mood, has traced in invisible ink on the walls of the mind a premonition which these great artists confirm; a sketch which only needs to be held to the fire of genius to become visible. When one so exposes it and sees it come to life one exclaims in rapture, But this is what I have always felt and known and desired!

Woolf, A Room of One’s Own, page 94

This is one of the great joys of reading, and of reading novels in particular: that something in the novel resonates so deeply that you feel it vibrate down to your marrow, feel that spark of truth race across your veins. And that spark is, very often, a light by which we can write, the energy we need to put our own pen to paper, to evoke the fire that makes those premonitions visible, however darkly and briefly and tenuously.

And yet: sometimes the words do not come. In The Left Hand of Darkness, Le Guin writes:

As they say in Ekumenical School, when action grows unprofitable, gather information; when information grows unprofitable, sleep.

Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness, page 42

Which is another way of saying, when you can’t write, read. When you can’t read, sleep.