When Virginia joked about how much she and Mitz had in common, she was right. Two nervous, delicate, wary females, one as relentlessly curious as the other. Both in love with Leonard – for both, he was their rock, their “inviolable centre”. They both were mischievous. They both had claws.
Mitz is a deceptively sweet and clever biography of the marmoset rescued by Leonard and Virginia Woolf, and by retracing the four and a half years that Mitz lived in their company, author Sigrid Nunez is able to describe both the intimate lives of the Woolfs and the events in the larger world as Europe is drawn inexorably into a second world war, without seeming to be a serious treatise on either subject. Although originally released in 1998, Mitz is being re-released in 2019 – presumably to capitalise on the popularity of Nunez's National Book Award-winning The Friend – and I am thankful that this near-forgotten gem has been resurrected for the public: both books cover similar themes, through the relatability of pet-human bonds, employing Nunez's deceivingly spare prose; fans of The Friend (as I am) ought to delight in Mitz (which I did). [Special thanks to Zoe @softskullpress for sending me a review copy.]
There has been much disagreement as to when Bloomsbury came into being (with some members of the group insisting that it never came into being at all). Was it in 1904, somewhere between 1912 and 1914, in 1920? Whenever Bloomsbury may truly have begun, there can be no disputing the fact that by the time Mitz arrived it was soon to end. (Leonard, looking back one day, would date the beginning of the end to the death of Lytton Strachey, in 1932.) But these twilight years were anything but dim. A world in decline it might be; it was still a world in which you could hear Eliot, Forster, and Virginia Woolf discussing James Joyce.Mitz may have come to the Woolfs late in life, but she was present in their home to witness some important events: the last years of the Bloomsbury Group, the rise of fascism (“Did we tell you how the marmoset saved us from Hitler?”), the writing of important works by each of the Woolfs, and the devastating loss of family, friends, and a very special dog. It feels quite clever for Nunez to have used the concept of a biography of Mitz to recount these important years for the Woolfs, but the concept is even more fitting when you recognise how caring for the marmoset demonstrates basic elements of the Woolfs' individual characters; Leonard's devotion toward wife and monkey, and a surprising degree of playfulness attributed to Virginia. In another layer of ingenuity, Nunez makes reference several times to Flush – the fictional biography of Elizabeth Barrett Browning's cocker spaniel, written by Virginia Woolf herself – making plain the connection between the two books (which recalled, in my mind, the multiple layers of Michael Cunningham's The Hours; which came after Mitz).
One aspect that really intrigued me about the writing was the narrative voice – although decidedly fiction, with events based on letters, memoirs, and diaries, Mitz reads like literary nonfiction, with Nunez seeming to insert herself every here and there in order to comment on the facts, as in:
No one could do his or her job to Leonard's satisfaction; no one knew better how a thing ought to be done than Leonard himself; he was surrounded by boobies and cheats. (Not for nothing did John Lehmann call his memoir of his year working at Hogarth Thrown to the Woolfs.)And:
To her intimate friend Vita Sackville-West she was Potto, and a potto is a kind of lemur – not a spaniel, as one of Virginia's biographers thinks – and a lemur, though not a true monkey, is a very close relation.I'm intrigued by that voice (it must be Nunez herself telling us this tale) and it adds another layer of delight to an overall delightful and intriguing story. Recommended to fans of Virginia Woolf, fans of Sigrid Nunez, and fans of palm-sized monkeys. #mitzthemarmosetofbloomsbury
