As a child, I never managed to get past the first page of James Joyce's Ulysses when I picked up the copy that sat incongruously on my mother's bookshelf beside the Jilly Coopers, and reading three of Virginia Woolf's best known novels recently, I was revisited by similar feelings of confusion.
At first, at any rate, for once I had attuned myself to her wavelength (the word is well chosen - not only are waves a recurring motif in her work, along with gasometers, snail shells, lifts and cows, but the third of her middle period books is called The Waves), I found myself drawn into her world.
It is a bleak world, to be sure, made all the bleaker for the modern reader by the fact that it is impossible to read her work without the realisation that keeps rolling over you like a wave of its own that the woman who created it killed herself at the age of 58 by walking into a river, her overcoat laden with rocks. Her body wasn't found for three weeks.
Suicide is a theme of all three of the books on which her reputation chiefly hinges, Mrs. Dalloway (1925), To The Lighthouse (1927)and The Waves (1931). In the first, Septimus Warren Smith, the lower middle-class protagonist whose life is told in parallel to that of the eponymous heroine, ends it all by jumping from a window (Woolf had tried that earlier in her life, but failed for lack of elevation), while one of the six friends (or are they merely acquaintances?) in The Waves also jumps, although if you blink you may miss it.
Suicide is also a theme of arguably her best known and best book, To The Lighthouse, essentially a story told in flashback of a family expedition from their summer home in the Scottish Isles to a nearby lighthouse.
The book ends rather abruptly when they finally get there, not so much, you feel, because Woolf wants to say that to travel is better than to arrive, but because the story isn't really about a lighthouse at all; it's about the purpose we try to give to lives that ultimately have little or no meaning. The beams that radiate from the lighthouse serve more to point up the darkness of existence than to illumine it.
Woolf's stream of consciousness style works best (and when it works well, it works brilliantly) when she gives herself some structure to hang it on. That is why her two earlier novels work better than the later one. Woolf appears to have known this. She writes in her letters and diaries about her desire to get away from "set pieces" - the fulcrum of Mrs. Dalloway is a dinner party she is giving, and then we have that outing to the lighthouse.
The problem with making The Waves a series of monologues is that the three women and the three men all sound like Virginia Woolf. To paraphrase Pirandello, it is Six Characters in Service of An Author. Woolf is at her best when she is setting down on the page the product of her female characters' internalised thinking, when she uses that device to explore the frailties of human nature, the darkness of the human condition. Virginia Woolf is Mrs. Dalloway, she is Mrs. Ramsay in a way that she never is Bernard, the prosaic male character who emerges from the pack as the major player in The Waves.
Reading Woolf, I was reminded of the work of a near contemporary of hers, Charles Williams, a lower middle-class man who might have served as the model for Septimus Warren Smith, had he not been possessed of unusual literary gifts of his own. But, while Williams's unique blend of mysticism and Christianity served to provide an anchor in his life, Woolf, who claimed to have been sexually abused by her two half-brothers, appears haunted by her past and ultimately as rudderless as the jetsam tossed about on her waves.
At first, at any rate, for once I had attuned myself to her wavelength (the word is well chosen - not only are waves a recurring motif in her work, along with gasometers, snail shells, lifts and cows, but the third of her middle period books is called The Waves), I found myself drawn into her world.
It is a bleak world, to be sure, made all the bleaker for the modern reader by the fact that it is impossible to read her work without the realisation that keeps rolling over you like a wave of its own that the woman who created it killed herself at the age of 58 by walking into a river, her overcoat laden with rocks. Her body wasn't found for three weeks.
Suicide is a theme of all three of the books on which her reputation chiefly hinges, Mrs. Dalloway (1925), To The Lighthouse (1927)and The Waves (1931). In the first, Septimus Warren Smith, the lower middle-class protagonist whose life is told in parallel to that of the eponymous heroine, ends it all by jumping from a window (Woolf had tried that earlier in her life, but failed for lack of elevation), while one of the six friends (or are they merely acquaintances?) in The Waves also jumps, although if you blink you may miss it.
Suicide is also a theme of arguably her best known and best book, To The Lighthouse, essentially a story told in flashback of a family expedition from their summer home in the Scottish Isles to a nearby lighthouse.
The book ends rather abruptly when they finally get there, not so much, you feel, because Woolf wants to say that to travel is better than to arrive, but because the story isn't really about a lighthouse at all; it's about the purpose we try to give to lives that ultimately have little or no meaning. The beams that radiate from the lighthouse serve more to point up the darkness of existence than to illumine it.
Woolf's stream of consciousness style works best (and when it works well, it works brilliantly) when she gives herself some structure to hang it on. That is why her two earlier novels work better than the later one. Woolf appears to have known this. She writes in her letters and diaries about her desire to get away from "set pieces" - the fulcrum of Mrs. Dalloway is a dinner party she is giving, and then we have that outing to the lighthouse.
The problem with making The Waves a series of monologues is that the three women and the three men all sound like Virginia Woolf. To paraphrase Pirandello, it is Six Characters in Service of An Author. Woolf is at her best when she is setting down on the page the product of her female characters' internalised thinking, when she uses that device to explore the frailties of human nature, the darkness of the human condition. Virginia Woolf is Mrs. Dalloway, she is Mrs. Ramsay in a way that she never is Bernard, the prosaic male character who emerges from the pack as the major player in The Waves.
Reading Woolf, I was reminded of the work of a near contemporary of hers, Charles Williams, a lower middle-class man who might have served as the model for Septimus Warren Smith, had he not been possessed of unusual literary gifts of his own. But, while Williams's unique blend of mysticism and Christianity served to provide an anchor in his life, Woolf, who claimed to have been sexually abused by her two half-brothers, appears haunted by her past and ultimately as rudderless as the jetsam tossed about on her waves.
2 comments:
As an undergraduate I battled through To the Lighthouse. I would like to embark on the journey again to see what difference forty years makes. Thanks for this post. By the way, if you get a chance, do have a look at Christopher Hitchens' Arguably. It's Clive James Light in some ways but there are also many entertaining moments in the pieces that deal with writers. An elegy to the hard-drinking Fleet Street that now, alas, is gone includes this gem: 'The Guardian is no longer celebrated for its misprints but there will always be those of us who are nostalgic for the days when it was, and when the opera critic Phillip Hope Wallace, for example, could wake up to find that he had reviewed last night's Covent Garden performance of Doris Godunov.' A Shaky fan perhaps ?
Henry
One of the good things about reading Woolf is that, if you lose your place, it doesn’t really matter, as she is sure to repeat what you might have missed.
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