WOOLF'S EMU PROBLEM

...and then from the square box on the floor there emerged an emu, and then another emu, until there were more than a dozen of them in the room, their plumage matted down and their eyes dulled as a result of the long trip which had brought them from their Australian home to this Surrey estate. The emus varied in size, with the smallest one being roughly as small as a thimble and the largest being roughly as large as an automobile, and yet they all seemed to get along with one another perfectly well, with the smallest specimens cleaning the largest ones in the manner of dentist-fish, and the largest ones protecting the smallest in return. The light in the room travelled across the floor, and travelled across the emus as well, illuminating the colors in the feathers, which had seemed to be a drab mix of grey and brown but were in fact a more promising assortment of other hues, tending toward red in the roots and toward a kind of lemon-yellow in the further fingers of the plumage. It would be natural to assume that in such a group of emus, the largest emu would lead the rest, but in this case the largest seemed slow-witted: the dullness in his eyes, it soon became apparent, was not a result of his long trip but rather the limits of his intellect. The mid-size emus were dominant, and in particular one whose legs were somewhat stouter than the others. When he gave a bray, the others leaned in as if they were receiving marching orders. Even the smallest emus stopped cleaning their titanic compatriots and listened.

 

Most of her work, of course, was emu-centric when drafted. Jacob’s Room was originally titled Jacob's Emu. To the Lighthouse had an early draft that Woolf referred to in correspondence as Away From Or Maybe Toward the Emu. Her friends were alternately alarmed and amused by this preoccupation. Leonard, in particular, despised dromaius novae-hollandiae, and insisted that her books focus more on humans. In a letter of 1928, he could not contain his frustrations any longer: "Damn you and your emus," he wrote. "Do you see Joyce writing Emulysses? Did Eliot labor for months on The Waste Land of Emus? Of course not. But you, my dear, fritter away your time attempting to limn the social machinations and intellectual reticulations of these preposterous creatures. In the end, sadly, the birds that are flightless are not the emu – or the ostrich, or the rhea – but the birds of your sentences, sodden, heavy, grave with avian pretention." Virginia apparently took this advice to heart and never wrote about emus again. 

©2021 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas