All the Lives We Ever Lived

by Katharine Smyth

  My father is dead. I say that not as I did in that first year (trying to make it real, trying to understand what it might signify), but as a fact, and one that sometimes makes me wonder whether all this—this reading, this remembering, this reflecting, this reckoning, this parsing, this clarifying, this hoping, this hypothesizing, this meaning making, this solace seeking, this writing—counts for anything all. Have I come up with anything, has Woolf come up with anything, that is more than merely circling a brutal truth? I mean that literally—does there exist any revelation that could lessen loss, that could help to make the fact of death okay? I doubt it; almost certainly not. To want and want and not to have: there is no escaping that lot. My father is dead. My father is dead. But I keep returning, still—I can’t help it—to those invisible ties between people and places; to the force of a moment; to a world that sings the song of everyone who has ever been; to art, to love, to memory; and to that quixotic notion—the light in the heart.

  “All the lives we ever lived and all the lives to be,” says Mr. Ramsay at dinner, his voice at once melancholy and exultant, and Mrs. Ramsay will repeat the phrase as she sits knitting in the sitting room. The words are from a poem by Charles Elton that envisions the speaker and his subject as living over and over and over again, roaming primordial forests, and paying tribute to the world’s great kings, and lying cold beneath a churchyard tree, and always, always rising; as if to say those lives were theirs, were ours, it does not matter whose, for nothing gets lost, everything gets carried forward. It’s just another fantasy, of course—my father is dead—but I can’t shake it: to think that Mrs. Ramsay’s light is burning; to think my father’s light is burning; that they survive in me, in you; that even in their absence they will guide us (for was it not just yesterday night I saw him last? running along a path so quickly that the gravel blurred beneath my feet and leaping at the water’s edge into his boat, the wheel turning—Safe, safe, safe!—and laughing at his greeting, so right, so easy, and thinking as we sped away, Oh, of course, there is no one like him!…). A fantasy, yes, but its relief and happiness are real.

  * * *

  WHEN I ARRIVED in Rhode Island on our last weekend there—it was November, just weeks before my father went on hospice—he was dismantling the billiard table that had been his fortieth birthday present and giving instructions to the two men who were going to buy it. “Hello, lovey,” he said when he saw me; his voice was weary, and before I could hug him hello, he made a terrible face, waved me away, and ran outside. I found him kneeling over the seawall, his hands spread against the concrete, vomiting pink onto the rocks below. He was still retching when the men walked by carrying the table’s green felt top. They looked uncomfortable and averted their eyes. “He has cancer,” I felt like saying, but instead I said nothing and stared out over the basin until they had gone. It was a blank day, the gray sky one shade lighter than the sea. I touched my father on the shoulder and asked if he wanted some water. “Go away,” he said. “Go on, go away.”

  My parents had arrived that morning to find the house reeking of rotting meat—the electricity had gone out weeks before when a tree fell across a power line. They had placed most of the freezer contents in trash bags on the front porch, but my father wanted to get rid of the meat as soon as possible. “Pops, do me a favor,” he said when he was feeling better, “and chuck it into the sea before the sun sets. I don’t want the raccoons getting at it.” I procrastinated until I saw stark low lines of orange light between the clouds, then put on an old coat and carried the plastic freezer drawer down to the end of the dock.

  The hunks of meat had been sealed in clear plastic bags, but several weeks of putrefaction had turned these into taut, bloody balloons. When I punctured one, I heard a pop, and instantly the rancid smell I had carried with me down the dock was overpowering. I gagged and turned my head away; the air was cold enough to burn the back of my throat, but I was sure the smell would make me sick. I held the bag at arm’s length and dropped its contents, a steak, into the water below. The meat fell with a plop and immediately sank. In this way, I dropped whitefish, scallops, duck; more steak, lamb shank, and several pounds of shrimp. Sometimes I botched the job of slicing open the bags, and when this happened sour liquid ran down my wrists and splashed onto the wooden planks. The chicken breasts didn’t sink, but floated away like phantom ships; they caused a stir among the seagulls, who all at once rose screaming from their perches and swooped down to seize the easy prey. When I was done, I dunked the freezer drawer in the sea, and as I did this I had to fend off the circling gulls with my hand. The odor of decay had made them bold.

  I returned to the house to find my father leaving for a pack of cigarettes. He was wearing pajamas, slippers, and a dressing gown. His hair was wild. “I’m off to terrify the poor clerks,” he said. While he was gone, I showered and scrubbed my hands—the sweet, acidic meat smell would linger for days; I scrubbed so hard my mother took to calling me Lady Macbeth—and then I settled in the living room with a copy of the Sakonnet Times. The front-page story was about the old railway bridge at the basin’s northern end: after more than a century, they were finally tearing it down. I thought of all the times that we had passed this bridge by boat—at the narrow channel the water churned and thickened, and the tiller leapt from my hands. I was still reading when my father returned.

  “You lot have no sense of lighting!” he exclaimed, offended by the naked windows. He shuffled from spot to spot, turning on lamps and lowering blinds; he put on Vivaldi, a guitar concerto, and kneeled to rake the stove, sifting ashes into the pan below, unearthing liquid orange coals. As he worked, I read aloud another article, this one about a horse named Duncan who had been stuck in a swamp in the Weetamoo Woods—Duncan was sedated, lifted into the air in a giant sling, and carried back to his stables. “That’s nothing compared to my goat,” my father said, and retrieved from the recycling basket an earlier story about a goat who had fallen from the back of a truck and showed up three days later on a rock in Stafford Pond. “All the animals here are saved,” I said. My father grunted, unwilling to engage in a conversation so ridiculous.

  After dinner, though, he called me over to the nautical chart of Narragansett Bay that was mounted on the landing, and together we traced the tracks of the missing animals: the woods where the horse was drawn from a swamp; the pond where the goat found refuge on a rock. My attention wandered to a beige oval in the center of the bay. “Have we ever been to Conanicut Island?”

  “Yes, that’s where Jamestown is,” my father said.

  “What about Prudence?” I asked, looking at the island above it. “Do people live there?”

  “Yes, unfortunately. It’s ridden with Lyme disease, and there are two schools and terrible water.” Then, smiling suddenly, he pointed toward Providence. “Do you remember taking Mistral up the river that time? You were only little—we ran aground, and had to plough backwards through the mud.” I didn’t, but no matter: he was still smiling, thinking of it. Finally he ran his finger along a squiggle of water above Fall River. “I’ve always wanted to take the dinghy up there as far as it could go,” he said. “Let’s do that next summer, shall we?”

  * * *

  EVERY FALL, I travel to Rhode Island to close up the house for winter. I empty the fridge and drain the pipes, turn off the heat and let the rooms freeze over; sometimes, in the depths of February, I imagine the bleakness of the place, its faraway gelidity, and I shiver, marveling at the notion of its parallel existence. The ritual is a recent one—after my mother moved to Australia—and it joins a host of other new behaviors: long days spent working in the studio, solitary walks along abandoned railroad tracks, gin and tonics on the deck at sunset. We have replaced the chain-link fence with picket and clad the seawall in teak; a gardener was hired, the rattling windows repaired, the rooms upstairs repainted peach and cream and blue. I could list a dozen other changes, too (the renovated kitchen; the library that supplan
ted the billiard table), but the truth is that, for all we have altered, for all we have lost, the house still floods with lemon heat, the water still reflects upon the ceiling; the light still bleaches spines of books, and the nautical chart of the bay—mounted on foam core, a little black pushpin marking the location of our home—still decorates the landing where my father screwed it to the wall some thirty years ago.

  The chart’s scale is such that I can sketch and measure the various running routes I have devised over the years: one up the hill to the library and down past Sin and Flesh Brook, a stream named for a Quaker who was murdered and thrown to its waters; another along the basin, past Gould Island, to the banks of Nanaquaket Pond; and yet another through an almost rural length of land on which grow flaxen, papery crops of corn. But the distance covered by this chart is large enough, too, to include the destinations to which we used to sail, and the towns to which we used to drive, and looking at it closely, I can feel the years piling atop one another, the encounters accruing, gathering in messy, lifelike heaps; so that halted on the landing, studying the light brown fingers of land and pale blue stretches of water, I am returned to all that came before—not just to the night I stood here with my father, so gladly wasting time, but also to the weekends moored in Wickford Harbor and the regattas off Block Island, to tumbling down fine-as-flour dunes in Island Park and jumping from the cliffs at Brenton Cove; to wandering the rocks at Fogland Beach, and sneaking off toward Sakonnet Light, and passing by boat beneath the Mount Hope Bridge, its soaring metal underbelly; and to hearing, as a child, the voice of the man who phoned from Point Judith to say he had found on the beach the letter in a bottle I had flung into the bay some weeks before.

  And I am returned, finally, to the last night in Rhode Island that my father and I ever spent together—my hair still drying from a bath, he determined not to tire—to an evening that was cold and glowing and blue, to a short walk that took us north, past the houses, to the foot of the elevated green highway. There we stopped to rest, and watched as a crane loaded corroded pieces of metal onto a barge moored in the middle of the basin. With a shock I realized, looking at the now-empty sweep of water beneath the overpass, that they were the rusty remains of the old railway bridge. The crane was yellow, and as it clumsily pushed about the growing mound of steel, I was reminded of a timid animal searching and sniffing for food. But then the crane grasped a long, reddish-brown beam in its mouth, raised its head, magnificent, and let this beam drop from an immense height down upon the pile; there was a split second of silence, and next a great booming roar that roused the water and shook the street, and as we watched a haze of orange dust rose up from the barge, ascending higher and higher before floating away to nothing against the deep blue air. We stood there for a long time, hearing the thunder and watching rust speckle the sky; again, hearing the thunder and watching rust speckle the sky, and only when the power and beauty of this spectacle had diminished, did we return, our bodies flushed with winter, to the warmth of our waterfront home.

  NOTES

  When I first read To the Lighthouse, I had no idea how different was my battered 1955 Harcourt, Brace edition from the original British—that “laboriously correcting two sets of proofs,” as Virginia wrote to Vita Sackville-West in February 1927, would give rise to a host of variant versions that diverge in sometimes significant ways. (For more on this subject, see Mark Hussey and Peter Shillingsburg’s essay “The Composition, Revision, Printing and Publication of To the Lighthouse.”) Since then, I have immersed myself in a handful of different copies, cobbling together an ideal novel that incorporates my favorite passages; though I’m drawn to the last lines of “The Window” as they appear in the American first edition, for instance, I’m partial to the wording and syntax of Mrs. Ramsay’s death as it unfolds in the 1992 Penguin. Unless otherwise noted, I have drawn all quotations in this book from the 1981 Harcourt, Brace edition of To the Lighthouse—a difficult decision, but one that seemed to make sense given my initial introduction to the novel and its familiarity to American readers.

  My engagement with Virginia Woolf and her work has been an occasionally haphazard process, one stretching nearly two decades. In college I threw myself into a great pool of criticism—books and essays by Erich Auerbach, John Batchelor, E. M. Forster, Mark Hussey, James Wood, and Alex Zwerdling in particular—but I have since focused my reading on biographies and memoirs, including Julia Briggs’s Virginia Woolf: An Inner Life, Viviane Forrester’s Virginia Woolf: A Portrait, and Amy Licence’s Living in Squares, Loving in Triangles: The Lives and Loves of Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Group. The literary scholar Arnold Weinstein, who oversaw a senior honors thesis that I wrote on Woolf in college, has also been a major influence and an unflagging source of inspiration.

  I am indebted above all to the work of Hermione Lee, not just to her wise, empathetic biography but also to her incisive notes and criticism. Ever since I had the privilege of attending Lee’s lectures as a student at Oxford, her mastery of Virginia Woolf has indelibly shaped my own understanding of my favorite author’s life and writing. Many of the quotes that I incorporate from Woolf’s diaries and letters I initially encountered in Lee, and so too many of the scenes from her life; these extracts have often led me down new paths, but it was Lee who showed me how and where to wander in the first place.

  I have drawn the lion’s share of Woolf’s autobiographical writing from “A Sketch of the Past,” her 1939 memoir; at times I have pulled from “Reminiscences” (1908) and “Hyde Park Gate” (1920) as well. All three essays appear in Moments of Being, a collection edited by Jeanne Schulkind that was published posthumously in 1976 and revised in 1985; in all cases, I have relied on the 1985 edition. It’s worth noting, too, that while I have occasionally altered verb tenses and capital or lowercase letters for clarity, I have otherwise maintained Woolf’s original spelling and punctuation whenever I quote from her letters, diaries, books, and manuscripts.

  Much the same is true of my father’s Italian diary and his letters from Harvard: aside from cutting a few extraneous words and one or two commas for clarity, I have otherwise maintained his original spelling and punctuation. Finally, all character names are unchanged, with the exception of my grandmother’s friend Claudette, whose real name, confusingly, is also Zette.

  ABBREVIATIONS

  D: The Diary of Virginia Woolf

  E: The Essays of Virginia Woolf

  L: The Letters of Virginia Woolf

  MB: Moments of Being

  PA: A Passionate Apprentice: The Early Journals of Virginia Woolf

  PREFACE

  “queasy undergraduate” D, 2:188–89, 16 August 1922.

  “Never never have I” D, 3:58, 8 February 1926.

  “close on 40,000 words” Virginia Woolf to Vita Sackville-West, 16 March 1926, L, 3:249.

  “Against you I will fling” The Waves, 297.

  PART ONE, CHAPTER 1

  In Chapter 1, I am grateful to Hermione Lee and her biography Virginia Woolf for drawing my attention to both the darkness of the Stephens’ London home and Virginia’s and Vanessa’s later recollections of it.

  “If life has a base” “A Sketch of the Past,” in MB, 64–65.

  “the most important” “A Sketch of the Past,” in MB, 64.

  “busts shrined in crimson” “Hyde Park Gate,” in MB, 164.

  “faces loomed” Vanessa Bell, “Life at Hyde Park Gate after 1897,” in Sketches in Pen and Ink, 81.

  “to go sailing” “A Sketch of the Past,” in MB, 127–28.

  “is where she sites” Lee, Virginia Woolf, 22.

  “Father instantly decided” “A Sketch of the Past,” in MB, 136.

  “An old creature” Virginia Woolf to Vita Sackville-West, 13 May 1927, L, 3:374.

  “there are no rooks” Virginia Woolf to Vanessa Bell, 22 May 1927, L, 3:379.

 
“This time tomorrow” D, 2:103, 22 March 1921.

  “old waves” D, 2:103, 22 March 1921.

  “the sea is to be heard” D, 3:34, 27 June 1925.

  “A square house” “A Sketch of the Past,” in MB, 128.

  “a garden of an acre” Stephen, Mausoleum Book, 62.

  “onto her balcony” “A Sketch of the Past,” in MB, 66.

  “we linger in front” “How Should One Read a Book?,” in The Second Common Reader, 261.

  PART ONE, CHAPTER 3

  “obsessed…full of her” “A Sketch of the Past,” in MB, 80–83.

  “of red and purple flowers” “A Sketch of the Past,” in MB, 64.

  “I suspect the word” “A Sketch of the Past,” in MB, 83.

  a writer who couldn’t “Can I remember ever being alone with her for more than a few minutes? Someone was always interrupting.” “A Sketch of the Past,” in MB, 83.

  PART ONE, CHAPTER 4

  In Chapter 4, the observation that Virginia switches from “I” to “we” while writing to Leonard belongs to Hermione Lee, who offers an insightful analysis of the letter in her biography. The account of Leonard and Virginia’s wedding is drawn from Viviane Forrester’s Virginia Woolf: A Portrait.