by Olivia Laing
If nothing else, it stands as an effective warning to any future writer who might seek, impertinently, to reimagine Woolf’s own death.
This overwrought report is followed by what purports to be ‘A Note of Correction and Addition to the above, by one of the Drowned’, in which the first story is undercut by the revelation of the survival of the boating party and its gleefully dripping progress back to the house. Though the humour is somewhat dependent on the squawking in-jokes that make Bloomsbury so oxygenless, there was something about the interplay of the two voices that I found intriguing, the first stitching a narrative that the second unpicks and reweaves. Then there were the final lines, which picked up on a problem that would dog Woolf throughout her life: how to capture in language the multiple impressions that the mind in a moment possesses. ‘Methinks the human method of expression by sound of tongue is very elementary,’ she writes, ‘& ought to be substituted for some ingenious invention which should be able to give vent to at least six coherent sentences at once . . . St John, happy creature, has a piano to speak for her with its variety of voices; but even that fails completely to carry forth the flood.’
Her tongue is firmly in her cheek and yet the last phrase stands out. I thought of the polyphonic voices of The Waves, unspooling their torrents of words that beat again and again at the limits of perception. Carrying forth the flood: it seemed to catch precisely what Woolf set out to do.
As for the other story, it was not so light-hearted. It was written a few weeks before Virginia’s death, and was evidently inspired by a visit to Brighton described in the diary, when, hovering at the edge of a complete breakdown, she became disturbed by a grotesquely fat woman eating cakes in Fuller’s teashop, and by the smell of fish and the embarrassment of ping in the little lavatory at the Sussex Grill while two common little tarts stood outside rouging and exchanging gossip. The event exercised her and she wrote it out in various incarnations. It was eventually published posthumously as ‘A Watering Place’, her final story.
The version I’d seen in the archive was a photocopy, full of typing errors and crossings out, tucked within its own manila folder and filed at the bottom of a box of drafts. Because of paper shortages during the war, it had been typed on the back of two corrected pages drawn from the manuscript of Between the Acts, though I couldn’t remember now which scenes they’d held. It was set, anyway, in a little seaside town also pervaded by the smell of fish. There is a sense of unreality to this liminal, watery place. Its population – the old men that stand on the parade and watch the waves; the women with their tottering shoes and strings of pearls – have the look of shells, ‘hard but frivolous . . . as if the real animal had been extracted on a pin’. At one o’clock, the action – but it is not really action – moves to a restaurant where, upstairs in the first floor lavatory, three women stand painting their faces, their talk interrupted by the flushing waters of the cubicle next door.
Much is made of the collusion of artifice and nature within this small partitioned space. Then the women begin to talk, their words borrowed in part from the Brighton tarts. They talk; the flush comes down; it drowns them out; it drains away; they are revealed. There is a horrible rhythm to the scene, which rapidly abandons all pretence at realism and turns the women back into little fish, smelling of ‘some queer fishy smell that seems to permeate the whole watering place’. The story ends abruptly with a swerve of tone that seemed to me a last-ditch attempt at prettification, one of those sea changes that converts bones into coral, eyes to pearls, death to a submarine and static mirage: ‘But at night the town looks quite ethereal. There is a white glow on the horizon. There are hoops and coronets in the streets. The town has sunk down into the water. And the skeleton only is picked out in fairy lamps.’
Oh, water beautifies all right. You wouldn’t know at a glance that it ran quick with nitrogen; you wouldn’t see the shopping trolleys or the occasional swollen body of a sheep, leaching out its gases, eyes picked away by the glinting, darting fish. Water conceals rot, smoothes edges, turns shards of glass into smooth green bullets, discards the resurrected on bank and beach, trees tumbled to stars, plastic addled into opacity.
Then there’s that awful rhythm: vanquish; retreat. In an earlier version of the story a lavatory attendant is also present in the room, a woman who ‘inhabits a fluctuating water world . . . constantly tossed up and down like a piece of sea weed’. I read somewhere that this thrusting up-down motion is supposed to mimic the trauma of the sexual abuse Woolf suffered as a small child at the hands of her half-brother, Gerald Duckworth, but I didn’t think it needed to be skewered so neatly to retain its power: that part voluptuous, part nauseating sense of surrender to a greater force.
Let me take you: that is what the water says. Lean back, abide with me. Endow yourself and I will dandle you, though dandle, to be sure, is not so far from mangle.
The low ground by the river came then to an abrupt end and I struggled up the bank to the path that threaded along the top. But this too was almost overwhelmed by vegetation, so that with every step I had to break bodily through the entangled, chest-high grass. The wind was full in my face and my eye would not stop streaming. I continued doggedly along, head down, listening for the first break of thunder.
I’d come to where the misfit stream Glynde Reach entered the river, its muddied waters sluicing down the Levels into the greener Ouse. The railway, which ran right through to Newhaven on the eastern bank, crosses the Reach at this confluence and as I approached I counted twenty-one swans gathered by the bridge. One had black plastic caught somehow around its wing, though this did not prevent it from dipping beneath the surface in search of food, raising its head in that inelegant waggle-gulp manoeuvre as it swallowed down a root or leaf. Fish were jumping in the shadows and as I passed I could make out a ruffled line where the two rivers met, a serpentining cord of ripples that tightened almost to a crest.
Asham was dead ahead now, the white scar bared to the eye. Before the cement works closed there used to be an aerial ropeway, dismantled now, that ran down the hill to the water’s edge, linking the quarry to a concrete wharf where barges delivered coal and collected cement. It was here that Virginia’s body was found, on 18 April 1941, three weeks after she’d walked into the river, by two girls and two boys who’d stopped on their way to Seaford to eat their lunch and had as they sat in the field become preoccupied with flinging stones at a floating log to knock it into shore. As it drifted closer they saw that it was not a log. One of the boys waded out and, turning the body, cried out: It’s a woman – a woman in a fur coat!
She was wearing Wellington boots and her hat remained wedged on by a string of elastic tied beneath her chin. The policeman, Collins, whom she’d recently described as rude and rasping after an altercation about blackout curtains, noted when he came to fetch the body that her watch had stopped at 11 .45 a.m., which is to say a good hour and a quarter before Leonard, on 28 March, had found the letters she’d left for him in the upstairs sitting room at Monks House and run pell-mell through the Brooks to find her. Seeing her walking-stick lying upon the bank, he knew at once what had occurred, though Collins, summoned by the housekeeper Louie Mayer, had dived and dived while the blacksmith Frank Dean and his son brought ropes and dragged the river.
The cause of death, wrote the coroner, was ‘immersion in the river . . . by her own act so killing herself while the balance of her mind was disturbed’. Louie added in an interview years later: ‘There were heavy stones in the pockets of her jacket and she must have put them there and then walked straight down into the river. And that was terrible. It was the most terrible thing that I have ever known.’
Why does someone walk out of the world like that? When the painter Dora Carrington shot herself in 1932, two months after her beloved Lytton Strachey had died of stomach cancer, Woolf was not entirely sympathetic or endowed with fellow feeling. On the contrary, she wrote a week or so later: ‘I am glad to be alive & sorry for the dead: cant think why C
arrington killed herself & put an end to all this.’ As for Leonard: ‘it was histrionic: the real thing is that we shall never see Lytton again. This is unreal.’ Time hardens such comments, calcifying them into a cruelty that was not perhaps intended, but they also form a counterweight to the sense that the river was the end Woolf plunged inevitably towards. No, even as they draw to a close gladness – aliveness – bubbles periodically through the diaries.
In her last winter, Woolf worked on Between the Acts; became treasurer of the Rodmell W. I.; played bowls. Her London house, in Mecklenburgh Square, was bombed and in October the Woolfs went down to salvage what they could from amidst the dust and rubble: diaries, Darwin, glasses, her sister’s painted china. A melancholy business, but she says she likes the loss of possessions, the liberation. Glee is in ascendance, just. Never have I been so fertile, she writes, and binds the mouldy notebooks in coloured paper, that they may refresh the eye.
Then it is colder and there is less food, and little fat. The raids continue, out on the marshes. No petrol, no sugar, a slower post. Virginia’s hand begins to shake. But England is good, England is firm, the wave of the Downs unbroken, these deep hollows, where the past stand almost stagnant. After Christmas there is a comet, snow; the sense of speaking into a void becomes tangible. James Joyce dies in Zurich. There are fires in London. More: there is a rent in the fabric. Nothing to nothing, one might say. Broken fingernails, broken windowpanes, streets lost, bricks turned to powder, so yes, dirty hands. Small beer, small beer. Then there is the day in Brighton with the tarts, the decision to cook haddock, a will towards cheerfulness. The diary ends with Leonard doing the rhododendrons, ends as any life might, which is to say on an in-breath, albeit an illusory one.
At some point the tide had begun to turn, the chalk banks revealed as the water drained away. Chalky waters are the best to swim in, almost powdery against the skin, the suspended particles delaying the light so that it seems perpetually imprisoned, dropping with infinite slowness towards the riverbed.
I was trying as I walked to recall Gertrude’s speech on the death of Ophelia, in which another hellish sight is tricked out into prettiness. Like a creature native and indued unto that element. Was that it? I suppose we are all water’s natives, swimmers first, and indued proclaims this while catching also, with that near-echo endowed, at the sense of a bride, crowned with weeds, giving herself up to the envious river. And then there was the line I thought of more than any other: as one incapable of her own distress.
My old Swan Hamlet translated the word incapable as unaware, but I suspected it was not that, or not that alone. To be incapable of one’s own distress is the opposite of suffering, for the root of the word suffer, ferre, is to carry. In the first state, one hurtles from pain; in the second one experiences it; one bears it up. Is this when suicide occurs, when one has been so whittled by what must be borne that the undercarriage collapses and oblivion is the only solution?
A local woman drowned in the Ouse not long before Woolf. When was it, the late 1930s? She lived up on Mount Misery, a hill between Southease and Piddinghoe that is named not by virtue of its depressing aspect but because a wayfarer is said to have prayed a Miserere there that later brought him luck. She had been a midwife, this woman, and had a son who died; her house had broken windows and one day when the tide was high she killed her dog and dropped herself into the water. Like Carrington’s death this bleak little incident is not mooned over in the diary, but it is recorded, the choice not to be; it remains.
At even the most cursory glance Woolf’s novels are riddled with absences like these, with what takes place when someone is lost or loses themselves. It is not perhaps surprising: if one were to take a biographical approach to criticism, one would certainly note that her mother, half-sister, father and brother were all dead by the time she was twenty-five, and that their presence echoes, say, through Mrs Ramsay in To the Lighthouse, or the vanquished Percival in The Waves. This is not to class her as a victim, for there’s not a man jack among us who won’t misplace someone, should we live so long.
Nonetheless, this acute sense of peril is, I wager, what drove Woolf to write throughout her life. Her take is not consoling exactly, but nor is it depressing: simply alert. I thought then, standing on the remade bank, of that chapter at the centre of To the Lighthouse, where over the course of years time breaks apart a house. War comes, the war that knocked down like skittles the men who walked and waltzed and talked through Jacob’s Room; here too it brings death. The books in the house grow mouldy, the plaster falls in shovelfuls and swallows fresh from Africa build nests in the drawing room. And then, as a pendulum slides into its opposite arc, the decay is arrested. Builders come, and housekeepers, the servants whose function it still just about is to mop and scrub and polish other people’s dirt.
One senses in this chapter, which is perhaps nineteen pages long and called, appropriately enough, ‘Time Passes’, a great battle carried out between the forces of thanatos and eros, between the desire to destroy and the contrary impulse to order, clean and build. It is a battle, I think one can fairly say, that was carried out likewise in Woolf’s own life; it is, I think one could equally add, a battle fought by everything that lives. Right at the pivot of this long scene, as the house teeters on the precipice of pitching downwards to the depths of darkness, Woolf begins to list the wild things that have taken refuge there. I find this passage more consoling than the mending that follows, for it seems to imply that even here, on the outer threshold of chaos, something abides; that in the untended beds that accompany human dereliction the cabbage mates with the carnation and the lavish poppy seeds itself. An unweeded garden, one might say, that grows to seed; things rank and gross in nature possess it merely. On the other hand, one might watch those windblown sports and think, as Woolf did elsewhere, this has a holiness. This will go on after I’m dead, and take comfort in the thought.
There is an echo of this peculiar mix of acquiescence and defiance in the matter of Virginia’s memorial. Her body was cremated at Downs Crematorium, up on the Woodingdean Road in Brighton, overlooking the hated housing estates that sprang up in the wake of the First World War. Leonard attended the ceremony alone, and it was conducted, to his horror, to the accompaniment of the movement from Gluck’s Orpheus in which the suffering Orpheus finds himself in Elysium, though not yet reunited with Eurydice’s shade. Virginia had once described it as the loveliest opera ever written, but its hopes for the afterlife filled Leonard with rage.
He took the ashes home in a casket and buried them beneath an elm tree in the garden at Monks House, that building which seems almost to exhale damp from its greenish distempered walls. He ordered a headstone from a Lewes stonemason, and the words engraved on it were those with which The Waves ends: ‘Against you I will fling myself, unvanquished and unyielding, O Death!’ Are these the words of a lover or a soldier? They flirt; they taunt: they are steel; they dissolve with lust. Either way, they endure, as those thousands of mildewed pages have also endured, though the house that contained them was bombed; though the woman who wrote them has vanished clean away.
VII
BEDE'S SPARROW
THE THUNDER NEVER CAME. The clouds were lifting now and drifting south and as they rose the heaviness seemed to drain from the day. The scales that had covered the sun slipped or broke apart, unmaking themselves as they floated high above the valley, following the same invisible path that the birds took to the sea.
It was half past five when I reached the track that forked up to Rodmell. I’d been out on the Brooks two hours, tacking the banks in the teeth of the wind. To celebrate I sat down by the stile and ate an oatcake. My toenails were bothering me, and I carried out some rudimentary surgery with the Opinel, though it wasn’t pleasant work. I thought regretfully of the small nail clippers I’d left on my desk. If only they were in my pack I could, I felt, walk on into the hills quite happily for years, though no doubt the absence of mascara would also come to bother me in time.
I lay back in the long grass and gazed out across the Brooks. There was something subtly oppressive about these flat, dredged fields and swift, featureless river. The land should have been a model of man’s ingenuity and instead the banks and ditches left me uneasy, for it seemed that the river was held back by the application of enormous force, against which it threatened momently to break through and take the valley. It was this sense of strain that bothered me, and in a way I wished it would, for I find it uncomfortable when the inevitable is postponed. I imagined it flooding every trace of fences away, imagined it flushing implacably across the fields, filling barns and houses with knots of eels. Mind you, I probably didn’t have long to wait. What will it be: a hundred years before the rising sea slips in and England’s edged with marsh again? Fifty? What a future we have stored up for us, when an ooze of mud replaces these false pastures, sheep-cropped and sewer-seamed, on which the wind rolls unimpeded.
I wasn’t being fair. The fields yielded food, and while the sewers might not be pretty, they provided essential habitats and furthermore acted as sightlines, drawing the eye backwards through time. The one opposite, Celery Sewer, ran in a series of kinks from the Cockshut to the Ouse, providing the main drainage for the Brooks. Its outfall was barred by a sluice gate that closed with flap valves first installed in 1949 by Frank Dean, the old Rodmell blacksmith, with such skill that it was reported you could open it with your little finger. This was the same Frank Dean who dragged the river for Virginia’s body, the same Frank Dean who waited on the bank alongside the white-faced Leonard, writing in his own memoir years later: He was a brave man. It was Frank who organised Virginia’s cremation, and who was inadvertently implicated in the choice of music, for Leonard wanted the Cavatina from Beethoven’s string quartet no. 13 in B flat major, but felt too shy to ask. No matter now. Both men are long gone, though Dean’s forge in Rodmell still stands, as does the tiny garage beside it, its windows crammed with shelves of dead and dying geraniums.