All the Lives We Ever Lived

by Katharine Smyth

  When he turned up on the day it was due, however, he found he was the only one who had taken the assignment literally. Everyone else had produced designs for baronial halls, for manor houses, for citadels with castellated turrets.

  “Were they made out of stone?” I asked.

  “God knows what they were made of,” he said. “No one seemed to know or care. But my model got no recognition whatsoever, and I realized that reality didn’t enter into it. So I think I just sort of lost it at that point, and said, Oh, well, if this is the way it’s going to be…”

  I first heard about the Primitive Hut Project when I was in college—my father told the story as a sympathetic response to some academic trauma of my own. Yet he continued to refer to it in the coming years, and I began to understand that the assignment had become for him symbolic, the perceived foundation of a gradual, pervasive disappointment.

  A few months after handing in his model, though, he published, in Architects’ Journal and Building Design, a handful of impassioned articles that belie his portrait of himself as an increasingly cynical young man. He may well have given up trying in earnest (his final thesis, after five years of study, was a detailed design for a hovercraft), but he was, nevertheless, wholly absorbed in art, architecture, and design. His professors were the members of the avant-garde group Archigram (antiheroic, pro-capitalist, hooked on futurism; walking cities and living pods), and my father, who described himself as a kind of fringe hanger-on to the movement, seems from his writings to have zealously embraced their ideas. He was equally galvanized by new developments in fine art—many years later, when he would dismiss Archigram as a load of old rubbish, he spoke with wonder of a show at the ICA in London called The Popular Image, of seeing for the first time paintings by Warhol, Lichtenstein, and Rauschenberg. (As Woolf would later write of December 1910, alluding to the Manet and the Post-Impressionists exhibit curated by her friend Roger Fry, this was arguably another moment at which “human character changed.”) All of which is to say that my father’s time in architecture school, not a primary source of skepticism, seems rather to have been a period of great personal growth; and that his conception of these years was inherently flawed. He came to misunderstand them, I think, and misunderstood in turn a feeling of disillusionment that was no doubt very real, and very much more complicated than he made it out to be.

  Perhaps the best evidence of this is Clip-Kit, the magazine my father started with his friend Peter in his second year. Clip-Kit was intended to promote new technologies in architecture; its manifesto argued that the “narrow preoccupations of both architects and students” were at odds with “an era of unprecedented technological advance.” (“What was the idea behind it?” I asked him once. “Oh, there wasn’t any idea,” he said.) Somehow the launch party attracted the attention of the architectural establishment, including that of Reyner Banham, the influential critic. Banham was an enfant terrible, my father said, and he liked his protégés, and though my father wasn’t typically one for having mentors, Banham became the exception. That spring my father entered an IBM-funded design competition; the top ten applicants would be awarded an invitation to the Aspen Design Conference, a return ticket to England, and $2,000 in cash. As Banham was the competition adjudicator, my father figured he had a good shot. He was on holiday in Scotland with his mother when he learned he’d been selected. A telegram came to the hotel that read, simply, “You’ve got America.” They celebrated with a long, lavish meal, and my grandmother remembers how generous my father was with his tip. “He was on top of the world,” she said.

  I suppose it’s impossible to judge to what extent a single event has changed a life, but it has always seemed to me that the 1966 Aspen Design Conference was to transform the lives of a good many people I know. Old friends, yes, and I doubt my father would have settled in the United States otherwise, but also: there he met Rosamind and Leslie Julius, renowned English furniture makers who had brought with them their daughter, Corinne, a bright young art student who would one day marry my father’s younger brother, Andrew. Rosamind always recalled her first impression of my father. Young, handsome, the cynosure of all eyes, he entered the conference tent grinning and wearing an all-white suit and silver tie. His girlfriend had made the tie and he carried more of the same kind with him in a bag. They were two dollars apiece, and that batch sold out within minutes. He spent the next week selling more ties, taking photographs, peddling Clip-Kit, and going to parties. Unabashed and unself-conscious, he was that summer just nineteen years old.

  From Aspen he headed to Denver, from Denver to San Francisco; with $2,000 he was able to travel for months, staying with people (students, professionals, academics) he had met at the conference. In Los Angeles someone lent him a gold 1958 T-Bird convertible, and he was cruising along the Sunset Strip with the top down, wearing a crimson Levi’s suit, when he spotted David Hockney, a former neighbor, in the next car. Hockney invited him back to his house, later the scene of A Bigger Splash, but all my father could remember was lots of turquoise water and lots of young men. He left LA for San Diego, for Tijuana (where he stocked up on Ovalados cigarettes), for twenty-four hours and nearly as many rolls of film in Las Vegas. Next was Chicago, where his host, the dean of the University of Chicago architecture school, hired him to give a slide show and lecture on his travels. That night, still wearing his crimson suit, he set off on a Frank Lloyd Wright walking tour of Hyde Park. There he was befriended by an elderly black man, who, certain he would be mugged, insisted my father return home and waited with him till the bus came.

  From Chicago to New Hampshire to Boston to New Haven: at Yale he crashed with a prime mover like himself, an architecture student he’d met in Aspen. They stayed up all night and then the prime mover said, “We’ve got to go.” “Where are we going?” my father asked. “We’re going to Philadelphia,” the prime mover said. They climbed into his Mini Cooper S and drove through the dawn; they got there at daybreak and toured the city as the sun rose. Finally, just before he was to fly back home, my father stopped in New York. “New York,” he said, “was unbelievable. New York was fantastic, it was all happening in New York. It was all happening everywhere. America was cultural overload, it was like having an excess of exquisite desserts, just crammed at you over a three-month period.”

  Of his final years at architecture school, he remembered little. Upon graduating he joined a small, up-and-coming firm, and left two years later having been project architect for three buildings—one in Bath, one in Runnymede, one in Maryland. This was a terrific amount of responsibility for someone so young, and he later attributed his success to the very pragmatism that at other times he described as his downfall. “I was never the world’s greatest designer,” he said, “but I was practical and a good manager. I could do useful work for people, and I was promoted on that basis.” At twenty-five he started his own firm; it was 1972, the year he met my mother.

  * * *

  EARLY ON IN To the Lighthouse, we learn that Mr. Ramsay is “one of those men who do their best work before they are forty”—that, as his old friend Mr. Bankes puts it, he “had made a definite contribution to philosophy in one little book when he was only five and twenty,” and that the labors that followed were essentially “amplification, repetition.” Mrs. Ramsay fears something similar, worrying that her husband “might guess, what she a little suspected, that his last book was not quite his best book.” She’s right to worry, for it’s Mr. Ramsay’s paralyzing belief in his own failure that gives rise to his worst qualities, which are considerable; he is, as Lily attests, “petty, selfish, vain, egotistical; he is spoilt; he is a tyrant; he wears Mrs. Ramsay to death.”

  Woolf adopts the seemingly simplistic analogy of an alphabet to convey her patriarch’s intellectual development: “his splendid mind had no sort of difficulty in running over those letters one by one, firmly and accurately, until it had reached, say, the letter Q….But after Q? What comes next?
…In that flash of darkness he heard people saying—he was a failure—that R was beyond him.” The analogy is likely grounded in Leslie Stephen’s own titanic efforts to finish the Dictionary of National Biography, a project that spanned nearly a decade; at any rate, Mr. Ramsay’s anxiety about his legacy certainly evokes that of Virginia’s father. “Despite his obvious eminence,” Hermione Lee writes in her biography, “Leslie read himself as a failure, a ‘jack of all trades’ whose name would only be mentioned in the footnotes of ‘the history of English thought.’ ”

  And yet Mr. Ramsay’s obsession with failure is drawn as much from Virginia’s experience as from her father’s own. Her diaries and letters are full of self-doubt, most often about her work, occasionally about her childlessness; struggling to finish her first novel—“you wont like it,” she wrote to her friend Violet Dickinson, “you’ll tell me I’m a failure as a writer, as well as a failure as a woman”—was partly responsible for her breakdown in 1913. Her distress on revising The Years some twenty years later was equally severe, nearly giving rise to another mental collapse and inspiring thoughts of suicide. “I have never suffered, since The Voyage Out, such acute despair on re-reading,” she wrote in 1936. “On Saturday for instance: there I was, faced with complete failure.” In response, Leonard planned a trip to Cornwall, her first in six years, hoping that its happy memories would calm her; as he later recalled, they “crept into the garden of Talland House and in the dusk Virginia peered through the ground-floor windows to see the ghosts of her childhood.” But while the Cornish visit did alleviate her headaches, their return to London and the specter of additional revision was debilitating. Writing in her diary in June—one of only a handful of entries from that time—she described “a week of intense suffering…a feeling of complete despair and failure.”

  Even To the Lighthouse, which she called “easily the best of my books,” was a source of anxiety. She worried it was “rather thin,” that readers would find it “sentimental,” that “it will be too like father, or mother,” that “all my facts about Lighthouses are wrong.” Concerns about the work’s inherent value weave their way into the novel itself—Lily associates the moment at which she first picks up her brush with a child’s fear of the dark, and later, returning to her picture, thinks it so bad she wants to weep. Like Mr. Ramsay himself, moreover, who is always fretting over his readership, she can’t stop dwelling upon the fate of her canvas, painfully aware it will be relegated to an attic somewhere. (“Although to be fair,” said my Oxford tutor Shane, meditating upon the picture’s “brown running nervous lines,” its stew of red, gray, green, and blue, “it does sound like an absolutely dreadful painting.”)

  “Failure” is also the term by which, as early as fifteen or sixteen, I had come to understand my father’s own career. He was finally earning good money from his commercial properties, but I couldn’t stop comparing the man he might have been—a great architect—with the indifferent real estate developer he had become; I couldn’t stop wondering what had befallen that whirlwind of energy, passion, and ambition. Was his defeat, as I then saw it, a by-product of alcoholism or depression? A function of aging? An outgrowth of that creeping disillusionment he always cited? Was it the case, as my uncle Andrew once suggested, that life threw at him more than his fair share of challenges, challenges for which his native enthusiasm had left him ill-equipped? Did he make a mistake in abandoning England? “I always thought America would be good for him because he was so enterprising,” my mother said, “but in a way he was too English and eccentric. I often wonder what he would have been like if he’d gone back—would he have started his own firm? Sometimes I think it was all wrong what we did.” The men who know my father best cite, and this surprised me, a crisis of confidence, a deep-seated doubt about his own abilities; he believed there was some inner core of creativity that was essential to becoming a successful architect, they say, and that he didn’t have it—that, if we are to borrow Woolf’s analogy, he knew he would never reach R.

  Maybe he was right. Maybe I’m being too hard on him. It takes a certain courage to recognize one’s gifts or lack thereof and act accordingly—to face the truth that, as Mr. Bankes acknowledges, “we can’t all be Titians and we can’t all be Darwins.” Besides, “failure” is my word, and not one I ever heard my father utter; what right have I to label him thus? In To the Lighthouse, Lily and Mr. Bankes lament Mr. Ramsay’s inability to accept his true nature—they wonder why, rather than admitting the pleasure he takes in his work, in his family, in the accolades he receives, he must instead dismiss their importance to him. The answer? “All had to be deprecated and concealed under the phrase ‘talking nonsense,’ because, in effect, he had not done the thing he might have done. It was a disguise; it was the refuge of a man afraid to own his own feelings, who could not say, This is what I like—this is what I am.”

  So why not laud my father’s admission that, as he told me once, he was perfectly happy with no particular ambitions or objectives, just muddling through on a hedonistic path? Why not celebrate his ability to say aloud, “This is what I like—this is what I am”?

  * * *

  WHEN I WAS nineteen, I spent a summer in London working for Peter, my father’s university friend and Clip-Kit cofounder. Following a successful career in magazine publishing, Peter had started an architectural branding company; on arrival I was given some busywork and a desk across from Peter’s son, who dated an editor at British Vogue and turned up each morning carrying a silver motorcycle helmet under his arm. I was slightly in love with him, and slightly in awe of his father, whose sporadic appearances at the office always gave rise to a low hum of excitement. Which is not to say that Peter was mesmeric: he was quiet and thoughtful, and his employees were responding not to some great personal magnetism, but to talent fulfilled.

  In late August my parents came to visit, and one night we went to Peter’s house for dinner. I had never met his wife, but heard she was stylish, clever, and cutting. Indeed: Jane opened the door wearing a tight white tank top, black pants, and hot-pink high-heeled shoes. She was dark and very thin, and her black hair was cast in a sharp, implacable bob. We settled in the living room—art covered every inch of the walls—and within minutes Jane had us laughing, telling funny stories that won’t be funny now. Her oldest son was a terror, she said, shagging every man, woman, and goat in sight. Her oldest daughter was shy, but nevertheless up at Oxford snogging the Prince of Canterbury (or someone like that). Her other son worked for Peter—“The heartthrob!” my father exclaimed, and I flushed—and Alice, her youngest, was my age. Alice bounded down the stairs a few minutes later. She wanted to be a doctor, and she called her parents by their first names.

  In time Peter turned to my mother. How was she, he asked, and listened intently to her answer. He seemed to like her, and to like my father too—for a little while my father had made Peter’s family laugh in turn. But he’d been drinking since noon, and as the night wore on I watched him toughen and grow surly. He declined to speak about the buildings he had renovated; he shrugged off questions about his health. My mother asked after Peter. He told her about the book he was writing on the Sydney Opera House, about biking across France. “My goodness!” said my mother, who was nervous. “All that way!” Peter enthused about new developments in high-rise architecture and then glanced at my father, who was pouring himself another glass of wine. Had he been following any of this stuff?

  “Come off it, Peter,” he said. “You know it’s all completely specious.” Earlier in the evening he had won Jane over, but now she turned on him.

  “What do you care about, Geoffrey?”

  He stared at her. “Nothing much,” he said. “I’m a nihilist, aren’t I, Katharine?”

  I shrugged, embarrassed. “I don’t know,” I said.

  Jane stood up. “Right. Let’s eat.” She led us to the table, where soon enough we enjoyed ourselves again. But to my father, she didn’t say
anything further.

  After dinner he went outside to smoke a cigarette, and Peter joined him in the garden. The women sat at the table drinking coffee. Alice laid her head on her mother’s shoulder. She purred and yelped. “We speak to each other in cat language,” Jane explained.

  “Peter hates it!” Alice said. “He begs us to stop,” and they laughed. They were so exotic, I thought, so wonderful.

  In the car on the way home I asked my father if he and Peter had had a good conversation. “No, not really,” he said.

  “How come?”

  “Well, I’d had too much to drink, and he was being boring.”

  “Oh,” I said, and turned to the window. At dinner Peter had produced an old black-and-white photograph of my father and himself at university, a publicity shot taken for Clip-Kit. In it they were staring sternly at the camera, my father holding a copy of the magazine—it was clear they were trying to look as serious as possible. (For what they were doing was important! New technologies in architecture!) But instead they just looked young. I cringed, imagining their exchange in the garden. Peter would have tried to engage my father, once, twice, three times: he was tolerant and kind, and as passionate and driven as he had been at nineteen. And my father—he was the boring one—would have disparaged everything that Peter said.