All the Lives We Ever Lived

by Katharine Smyth

  I can’t celebrate my father’s declarations of happiness at having renounced his ambitions because I don’t believe him. Words like “rubbish” and “specious” were his own attempt at deprecating and concealing that which moved him most, at making light of the fact he had not done the things he might have done. He wasn’t happy, and giving up—on architecture, on life itself, even—was, far from an honest acceptance of his limitations, a betrayal of that uncommon radiance he once possessed.

  Mr. Ramsay’s fear of insignificance is so great that an offhand remark about nobody reading Scott anymore incites him to pick up The Antiquary so as to prove it untrue. But rather than hiding behind illusions of permanence, he bravely questions their validity. Man’s “fame lasts how long?” he asks himself. “His fame lasts perhaps two thousand years. And what are two thousand years?…The very stone one kicks with one’s boot will outlast Shakespeare.” Such interrogation is just one example of what Woolf calls his “power, his gift,” and it’s one to which he will remain forever faithful: “he would not die lying down; he would find some crag of rock, and there, his eyes fixed on the storm, trying to the end to pierce the darkness, he would die standing.” Something similar is true of Lily, who banishes her doubts by taking up her brush again, and of Virginia herself, who went on to write eight novels after her first nearly drove her to suicide.

  Such is the nature of Woolfian failure, which, despite my urge to conflate them, turns out to be a different breed from my father’s own. We see Mr. Ramsay stretch often in To the Lighthouse—to reach R, to pierce the darkness, toward his vanished wife; in our final view of him, he stands up “very straight and tall” in his boat, stretching his body toward the lighthouse. He will not grasp what he is seeking. R remains inaccessible, and darkness won’t give way to light; Mrs. Ramsay is dead, and the novel ends before he can set foot upon the lighthouse rock. But the vigor with which he continues to strive is a triumph, and one that breaks my heart when I compare it to my father’s own surrender. Striving would have nourished my father, I think. Striving might have even saved him.

  * * *

  IN 2006, MY father received a call from Peter. Peter had been invited to speak in New York, at the opening of an exhibition called Clip/Stamp/Fold: The Radical Architecture of Little Magazines. The show featured Clip-Kit—would my father be interested in coming? No, thanks, he said. He wasn’t really up to it, and anyway, it sounded dead boring. A few weeks later, in New York, I saw a poster for the exhibition taped to a wall. There indeed was Clip-Kit, a great-looking magazine, its pink-and-white cover bound by a red clip.

  The exhibition was in a long narrow room, and the magazines were displayed chronologically on the walls and inside plastic globes. A prerecorded voice was talking over a loudspeaker; with a pleasant shock I realized it was Peter. When I got to Clip-Kit, I paused to read the blurb. “After transferring from Bristol University to the Architectural Association (AA) in London,” it read, “former Megascope editor Peter Murray began collaborating with fellow AA student Geoffrey Smythe [sic] to produce Clip-Kit: Studies in Environmental Design.” Before leaving I took a few photographs of the exhibition with my cell phone. I tried to show them to my father, but they were too small and blurry for him to make out.

  15

  I never met my father’s father—he died of heart disease mere months before my birth—and for many years my only knowledge of him was a large framed photograph that sat upon my grandmother’s desk. In it, he was reclining in the cockpit of a sailboat, and he looked a kindly person, with white hair, glasses, and tanned skin. Even as a child I had looked at this picture with interest, feeling a kind of condescending sorrow for the old man from my grandmother’s other life who had had the bad luck to die. (“Oh, the dead!” thinks Lily, “one pitied them, one brushed them aside, one had even a little contempt for them.”) But my understanding of Charles Smyth expanded somewhat when, rummaging through my grandmother’s cellar one night, I found a newspaper article written on the occasion of his memorial service, an event attended by hundreds of people. He had been education officer for Slough and Eton—a service for which he was awarded an Order of the British Empire and a visit with the queen—and much loved, apparently, by his former colleagues and students. My grandmother read an excerpt from John Donne’s “Meditation XVII,” a reflection written at a time of illness: “Any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind,” she quoted and then said, “I am quite sure it would be true to say of Charles that above all he was involved in mankind.”

  What struck me most on reading the article, however, was the text of a short note my grandmother had found among her husband’s papers. No grief, please, he had written. I’ve had a good innings. I was deeply affected by those words, not really for the man I’d never met, but because I hoped, and yet was doubtful, that when the time came my father would be able to say something similar.

  16

  “It is enough! It is enough!”

  My favorite sentence in all of To the Lighthouse comes at the end of Mrs. Ramsay’s episode of solitude. As she sits alone, feeling herself aligned with the lighthouse’s third stroke, her serene acknowledgment of death—“It will come, it will come”—becomes an exalted affirmation of happiness and the value of the moment:

  With some irony in her interrogation, for when one woke at all, one’s relations changed, she looked at the steady light, the pitiless, the remorseless, which was so much her, yet so little her, which had her at its beck and call (she woke in the night and saw it bent across their bed, stroking the floor), but for all that she thought, watching it with fascination, hypnotised, as if it were stroking with its silver fingers some sealed vessel in her brain whose bursting would flood her with delight, she had known happiness, exquisite happiness, intense happiness, and it silvered the rough waves a little more brightly, as daylight faded, and the blue went out of the sea and it rolled in waves of pure lemon which curved and swelled and broke upon the beach and the ecstasy burst in her eyes and waves of pure delight raced over the floor of her mind and she felt, It is enough! It is enough!

  I love this sentence for its beauty, its strangeness—what are waves of pure lemon?—its splendor and its surging exultation; I love it too for what I see as its encapsulation of the book itself, its evocation of Woolf’s unrelenting search for meaning in the face of death. At the same time as her novel was beginning to take shape—and as a deep depression was again beginning to govern her mood—she found herself reflecting on a recent trip to France. “L. & I were too too happy, as they say,” she wrote in April 1925, “if it were now to die &c. Nobody shall say of me that I have not known perfect happiness.” The sentiment prefigures Mrs. Ramsay’s own revelation, of course, getting at how—for Virginia, as for Othello—perfect happiness (such a simple concept!) is bound up in death in ways both good and bad; it forces us to confront our own mortality, yes, the fact that all is fleeting, but it also provides what may be the best and only consolation for these truths. Indeed, central to Mrs. Ramsay’s discovery is the idea that—despite its pitilessness, despite its remorselessness—the passage of time is ultimately unable to efface the great gift of a moment, and that a moment is enough.

  Yet Mrs. Ramsay’s words, while far from a capitulation to her predicament, are not exactly a celebration of it either. Hung about with exclamation points—marvelous on the page, but the reason I’ll probably steer clear of that tattoo—the word “enough” appears triumphant, an instance of genuine victory over life, that old antagonist. But “enough” is mere adequacy, mere sufficiency—not abundance, undoubtedly not ideal fulfillment. Mrs. Ramsay’s happiness may partake of eternity, but she herself will die within the year. Here, then, is the most Woolfian of epiphanies: ambiguous, equivocal, and wholly fitting of a writer whose work is characterized above all by inconclusiveness, and who, like Lily in “The Lighthouse,” the novel’s third section, found herself longing for a great revelation that would al
most certainly remain elusive. “I enjoy almost everything,” Virginia wrote in February 1926, a time at which To the Lighthouse was pouring from her with uncommon ease. “Yet I have some restless searcher in me. Why is there not a discovery in life? Something one can lay hands on & say ‘This is it?’ My depression is a harassed feeling—I’m looking; but that’s not it—thats not it. What is it? And shall I die before I find it?”

  * * *

  A FEW MONTHS after our dinner at Peter’s house, in the fall of 2000, my father underwent the last of the three chemical treatments aimed at curing his bladder cancer. The first two treatments had failed. We were warned it was unlikely the third would succeed, but in November he called me, his voice alight. He’d just had his checkup, he said, and for the first time in all his years as a cancer patient, his doctors hadn’t found a single tumor. “We’re going out to dinner to celebrate.”

  By February, the tumors had returned. No further treatments were available; the only option was for my father to continue to go to the hospital at three-month intervals to have the growths removed. Meanwhile, however, I was happy—truly happy—for the first time in years. From the very beginning of freshman fall, when I’d spent the night with a senior and walked home barefoot at sunrise, heels in hand and laughing out loud at the thrill of it, college had felt like it held space for me in a way that high school never had. I didn’t think much of the English department and its New Historicist bent, but I made great friends; I took up Italian; I discovered comparative literature, enrolling in courses on Strindberg and Ibsen. As a sophomore, I even fell in love.

  It was against this backdrop that my father, who must have reconciled himself to small surgeries every three months for the rest of his life, became the unexpected beneficiary of that operation—revolutionary in those days—to remove his bladder entirely. He was only fifty-four, and his body free of cancer for the first time in nearly a decade. But he was not at peace.

  “He’s changed, you know,” my mother reported while I was still at Oxford.

  “What do you mean?” I said. Ever since his bout with delirium tremens, any reference to my father’s condition had roused in me a feeling of alarm.

  “He’s…I don’t know. Calmer. Less excited than he was. Less funny. A bit remote.” And then, “I’ll be interested to see what you think.” As if he were a book she was recommending, I thought, or a movie. Her obliqueness frustrated me, but at the same time I thought I knew what she meant. I was used to speaking to my father on the phone for well over an hour. He would take the receiver out on the deck, along with a drink and his cigarettes (every so often I’d hear the click of a lighter, a slight pause, his deep inhale). I would tell him stories; he would laugh and say, “It’s lovely chatting with you, I feel we haven’t had a chat in ages.” Since the operation, though, we hadn’t spoken for longer than five minutes. My mother would have trouble finding him, and on taking the phone he was unfocused and abrupt. I would speak, he would listen, and then he would say, determinedly, “I must go. I’ve got to finish my lunch.” Or “set the table” or “make some calls” or “water the plants”—any number of excuses for “ringing off.”

  Aside from our Virginia Woolf pilgrimage that spring and a few long weekends over the summer, I didn’t see my parents again at any length until the following Christmas, which we spent visiting family in Australia. My father seemed well, I thought, and, if drinking, drinking less. Each night we stayed up late, talking and reading. He had started To the Lighthouse, to please me, but found it detached, hazy, delicate. He was too insensitive, he said. He liked Dickens, Trollope, and Raymond Chandler. The place we were staying was overrun with wallabies and possums, and every evening the possums dropped down from the eucalyptus trees and landed at our feet. If we did not raise our legs, they tried to climb into our laps, and later, once I had left my father and gone to bed, I could hear through the screen his ongoing conversations with them. “Hel-lo!” he would call, in the same warm voice with which he would one day speak to my cats, and sometimes, when the creatures sought to jump onto his shoulders, “Look, you are a nuisance,” or “Stop it, you silly thing.” Animals and children: they loved my father.

  By Christmas Eve his mood had changed. We spent the holiday at a distant cousin’s sheep farm in Tasmania, and over dinner I watched as he helped himself to glass after glass of wine. I watched the cousin and his wife, neither of whom had ever met my father, watch him too. (“If he drinks again, he’ll drink himself to death.”) Outside the light was fading, and through the window I could see the low hills across the lane, at sunset a pretty gilded green, turn dark purple, then dark gray. We spoke of wool, of irrigation, of hanging laundry on a line—he was so grateful, my cousin said, that he had had the courage to give up engineering and city life. Hostile, my father opened another bottle of wine.

  The next day, Christmas, we left for Tasmania’s west coast, once considered the end of the world. For years it had been accessible only by sea—a wild sea, a sea still known for its shipwrecks. My father continued to drink; there was a tense Christmas dinner, a terrible fight, that freighted silence. I sat alone in the bedroom. My father is destroying himself, I thought. I tried to read, my mind skittering over the pages; I put down my book and went out to the deck.

  His shape was barely visible against the dim gray harbor. “Hey,” he said when he saw me crying. He put his arms around me. The night was cool, misty; I could hear waves slopping at the seawall below. “Let’s go inside,” he finally said, putting out his cigarette.

  He followed me into the bedroom. “Don’t worry,” he said as he shut the door. “This isn’t your life.”

  “It is my life,” I said. I sat down on the bed; he sat facing me. I remember the aseptic bedspread, the sheen of oak veneer. “I’m crying about your drinking,” I said. “It’s ruined my life since your surgery.” I was stilted, as always during these kinds of conversations. I was so worried I would alienate him that I spoke in shorthand, using words that cast mere shadows of the truth.

  “How?” he asked. His tone was dismissive, and I realized then how drunk he was.

  “I’m depressed, I’m unhappy,” I said. “I’m petrified of your dying.”

  “You never told me that.” He took my hand and pressed it.

  “But why do you do it?” I finally asked. “When you know…Why do you do it?”

  He looked right at me. “Because I don’t care that much.”

  Those words—I felt like I’d been punched.

  The bathroom door opened; my mother had finished her bath. He rolled his eyes. “We’ll talk later,” he said, withdrawing to the deck.

  The following day we went by boat to the shallow, treacherous mouth of the harbor—Hells Gates, they call it—and my father stood upright and apart. He wore a black windbreaker and mirrored wraparound sunglasses we had found on the street, and where his eyes should have been was the battered bronze of the sea. I thought him evil then, and impenetrable, and so too later when he clasped my hand again and said, “We will talk soon.” That evening he pulled over without explanation and threw up on the side of the road.

  * * *

  A FEW WEEKS later, back in Sydney, we went for a swim and afterward sat on beach towels in the sun. “Shall we have our talk now?” he asked, surprising me. “I guess so,” I said.

  I faltered at first, and he became facetious, claiming yet again that there was no medical reason why he should not drink. His excuses were evasive and familiar. He needed some hobby to keep him occupied; his work was not demanding enough. I grew frustrated. He was so transparent, I thought, so gutless. When I said again how terrified I was that he would die, he simply looked puzzled. “Why?”

  “Because I love you!” I yelled. “Because you are my favorite person!”

  “Oh, well, I suppose I always think of myself as being a bit superfluous.”

  I was looking, when he said that, at a narro
w dock that cut into the harbor, at white paint peeling from its pylons, at water turning muddy at the shore. When he spoke again, it was as if some tide had changed its course.

  “I don’t want to upset you,” he said, his voice suddenly sincere. “You’re the most important person in the world to me.” And then: “I’m sorry. I love you so much.” It was the only time I heard him say it, that he loved me, and it was what I wanted. He never explained for what he was apologizing, and when I told him how terrible I thought those words—Because I don’t care that much—he did not take them back but held more tightly to my hand. It did little to console me. But I was so close to him then, and he to me, and with it I was joyful, and with it whatever had happened, and whatever was to happen, had a kind of unreality. This was the mean level of the sea, this the zero point, and all the rest was only rise and fall.

  Before we got up from the beach, he told me he had been thinking about sailing to Cuba. It was a long haul, he said, and a bloody expensive one at that, but he figured that he (and I, if I wanted to come along) might be able to leave in the spring. “Wouldn’t it be neat!” he cried, becoming a younger version of himself. “Wouldn’t it be fantastic?” His excitement was electrifying; I recognized it from another time. And now, remembering its resonance, it occurs to me that my father at fifty-five had forgotten how to be well, and forgotten how to access the particular ease—the particular complacency, even—that wellness brings.