The World Broke in Two

by Bill Goldstein

  It had occurred to Virginia in 1920 that she would like to write a story set in June because “one has more pleasure from it than all other months.” Now she was doing it. Virginia had had so little pleasure for so long, and now she set Clarissa on foot through a London that she herself had seen mainly on doctors’ visits all year. Even as Virginia worked on the story, taking the extra weeks she had told Tom would likely be necessary, Leonard noted the rare occasions when he “walked with V,” who otherwise was still usually at home. “V. ill with temp over 101. Fergusson came,” Leonard noted on May 6, the same day she wrote to Roger Fry that she had “the most violent cold in the whole parish.” A week later, on the thirteenth, Virginia had her first lengthy exercise in months. “Walk Kingston w V.,” Leonard jotted in his pocket diary. It was about four miles from Hogarth House, along the Thames. Whether it might be a sustained improvement was hard to predict. As Virginia worked on the story, the long-delayed spring arrived, even if she could not share in it. The warm weather was novel enough and had been so anticipated that the Times ran a long article under the headline “Sunshine and Happiness” describing the joy the first days of beautiful weather brought to London and “the intensity of the desire for liberty that the state of the weather creates.” The end of the usual influenza season was in sight, Virginia’s own condition apart, it seemed, but the effects of the epidemic had become clearer. In the first three months of 1922, there had been a total of 16,388 deaths in England and Wales in which influenza was the primary or contributing factor. But that number was misleading, the Times cautioned. The deaths of chronically ill people with influenza were often erroneously ascribed to other causes. In fact, it was not “improbable,” the Times reported, that about 30,000 people had died “as the direct result of this plague,” and not during three months but in a shorter, more devastating period of time, only five or six weeks. By contrast, there had been 36,204 deaths in all of 1921.

  The Times reported another distinctive fact about the influenza epidemics of 1922 and the earlier wartime one of which it was a reminder. These were the only two times during the previous fifteen years in which the deaths of women had exceeded those of men. Virginia had been in greater danger—her doctors’ fears less exaggerated—than it had appeared in her diary or letters, or as Leonard was to recall years later in his autobiography about their varying diagnoses. And Virginia was still at risk in April and May, even as she sent Clarissa Dalloway out on her errand and she herself ventured out tentatively with Leonard for exercise. Later in May there was to be yet another relapse, bringing a new cascade of symptoms, and, along with them, familiar and resented limitations. Virginia had walked to Kingston, but that freedom was short-lived. The recurrence of her infection in late May meant “my heart has gone rather queer,” she wrote to Vanessa Bell, apologizing for having to cancel a visit. There was her heart, and also her teeth—“they said there must be germs at the root of your mouth,” she told a friend, skeptical of the latest theory. Three teeth were extracted, “3 I could ill spare,” but the temperature lingered anyway. At Monk’s House a week after her visit to the dentist, she was able to take their dog for walks. But that was about all she could do. Her influenza, she wrote, “goes on like a very respectable grandfather clock.”

  Virginia gave her experience to Clarissa, who, anticipating the sound of Big Ben at the start of “Mrs. Dalloway in Bond Street,” felt “an indescribable pause; a suspense (but that might be her heart, affected, they said, by influenza).”

  * * *

  Virginia’s story was a flight of fancy, just as “Byron and Mr. Briggs” had been. Clarissa, purposefully walking through London’s familiar streets, absorbing the sounds of omnibuses and motor cars, noticing the flowers, trees, passersby, meeting people she knew well in the park, window-shopping—this was Virginia’s way of being in London, out of bed, and out of Richmond.

  Richmond was too quiet, removed from the city and social pressures (and excitement), more conducive to work, perhaps, and to mental health and equilibrium. That had been Leonard’s view of its advantages, and moving to Hogarth House had been one way of putting into practice the advice he had received from the Bell family physician in February 1914, when Virginia had recovered from the breakdown that had culminated in her suicide attempt five months before. “She must rejoice in her recovery and her entry into happier conditions of living,” Dr. S. Henning Belfrage wrote to Leonard, emphasizing the importance of “ordering her life in the most careful & thorough fashion—the all important regularity of habits—the hours of rest, immutability of meal times & of going to bed.” His prescription was that Virginia must “take life very quietly” in the morning and must be in bed “no less than 10 hours out of the 24.”

  The regularity of habits she understood, and prized, too, but the slower pace and lack of stimulation in Richmond were disappointing at the start and had become almost intolerable by 1922, particularly after her winter, and much of her spring, too, in bed. Virginia’s first impression of their new neighborhood, in January 1915, had been, “Somehow, one can’t take Richmond seriously.” And when one wanted “serious life,” as she often did, she had to go to London to find it, “for the sake of hearing the Strand roar, which I think one does want, after a day or two of Richmond.” Writing “Mrs. Dalloway in Bond Street” seven years after this diary entry, she continued the thought as if without interruption. “Omnibuses joined motor cars; motor cars vans; vans taxicabs, taxicabs motor cars—here was an open motor car with a girl, alone,” she wrote.

  This was the unexpected thrill of urban—serious—life, longed for in 1915 and even more so in 1922. In “Mrs. Dalloway in Bond Street,” the sounds of the city intrude even into the quiet confines of the glove shop, and as the story ends there is a violent explosion outside that makes the shop-women cower behind their counters. What is it? No one knows, but it is a counterpoint to the chimes that started the story, a sound that amid other associations is a sound of war, a scar that even full-length gloves cannot hide. Clarissa, however, is not afraid, and she smiles at another customer.

  In the first sentence of the story Clarissa proposed to buy the gloves herself. In the next she was out in the street, on her errand. This was the essence of life in London, for Clarissa and Virginia—impulse, the immediate fulfillment of desire. The first thought Mrs. Dalloway had may be about buying her gloves. But the first thing she actually says in the story, when she runs into a friend, is, “I love walking in London. Really it’s better than walking in the country.” Was it Clarissa or Virginia speaking? Writing itself gave Virginia a feeling of happiness she once compared to “a strip of pavement over an abyss,” an image she used again two weeks later when, to express contentment at some early progress in Jacob’s Room, she wrote in her diary that she had gone “some way further along the strip of pavement without falling in.”

  * * *

  It was a question of looking at an old character with a new method. And in trying to find the “solid, living, flesh-and-blood” of a character from within, as she would later put it in “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown,” she was continuing the development of techniques she had tried in earlier stories. But in her newest experiment she was also influenced by Proust, a writer who had not been on the list of books she was reading in the hope they would “fertilise” her brain, and whom, she had told Forster, she had been biding her time in avoiding. Perhaps Virginia’s January letter to him had been in Morgan’s mind when he bought his copy of Swann in Marseilles. Perhaps during his March visit to Hogarth House they had talked of Proust. But at some point in the spring, Virginia began to read Proust. And like Forster, she was immediately enthralled. Working on “Mrs. Dalloway in Bond Street,” she attempted for herself what Forster noted as Proust’s breakthrough: to use memory and experience to illustrate a character’s state of mind. In Virginia’s story, the chime of Big Ben announced that the present and the past were happening simultaneously in Clarissa’s mind and also on the page, in the space of a single paragraph
or even sentence, just as Proust was able to do in the first sentences of Du côté de chez Swann. The eleven solemn strokes of Big Ben bring back an entire national past, including the war. Yet the murmur of footsteps around Clarissa are quiet enough that it is as if she is able to hear her own thoughts, too—of eleven o’clock as an “unused hour fresh as if issued to children on a beach,” which in the course of a few phrases leads her to thoughts of her own happy childhood, repeating the seamless movement of the narrator’s thoughts in the first section of Swann she had read.

  In The Voyage Out, Clarissa is described by the narrator, or by other characters, who see the same glossy surface Lytton Strachey did. That technique suited a novelist at work on her first book, but Virginia worried, even when the book was published, that it was already outmoded. In “Mrs. Dalloway in Bond Street” her experiment became to have Clarissa think everything we need to know about her. The warm day is not only leading Clarissa through London, it is leading her back to her childhood as the daughter of Justin Parry, who had “seemed a fine fellow (weak of course on the Bench).” It occurs to Clarissa, “there is nothing to take the place of childhood. A leaf of mint brings it back: or a cup with a blue ring.”

  Here was Proust’s discovery of the whole of Combray in the cup of tea that the narrator’s Aunt Léonie offers him. For Virginia, too, a cup and mint unexpectedly lead back to a buried and supposedly irretrievable past. The echo is so explicit. Perhaps this was the effect she had feared when she wrote to Morgan before her birthday, months before—to be submerged in Proust and never to come up again. Four months later, she wrote to Roger Fry that she had changed her mind about what submersion in Proust might mean. She might, as she wrote him on May 6, have the worst cold in the parish, and she might be “sweating out streams of rheumish matter.” But the wonderful news, she told him, was that she didn’t mind. It was, for once, a relief to be confined to bed, and perhaps because Fry had been the first person from whom she had heard praise of Proust, it was to him that she exulted that, sick as she was, “Proust’s fat volume comes in very handy.” Far from dreading submersion, she now longed for it as the ideal distraction, proposing “to sink myself in it all day.”

  Proust so titillates my own desire for expression that I can hardly set out the sentence. Oh if I could write like that! I cry. And at the moment such is the astonishing vibration and saturation and intensification that he procures—theres [sic] something sexual in it—that I feel I can write like that, and seize my pen and then I can’t write like that. Scarcely anyone so stimulates the nerves of language in me: it becomes an obsession. But I must return to Swann.

  Virginia couldn’t write like Proust, but soon enough, she was writing like herself again.

  Woolf, who did not subscribe to the Dial, was unlikely to have seen Ezra Pound’s Paris Letters in spring issues of the magazine praising Joyce and Ulysses. But she might have been surprised to see that he was largely in agreement with her about how a writer like Joyce or, in her case, Proust inspired the next writer’s “desire for expression”—and what happened when she seized her pen.

  “No ‘method’ is justified until it has been carried too far,” Pound wrote, “and perhaps only great authors dare this.” But in another sense, Pound argued, it was not possible to go too far, as Joyce, and Proust, had perhaps done. A “great author has some share in the work of his students and disciples,” Pound wrote, “and only sound work will stand a continuation and further development.”

  Virginia had begun the further development.

  * * *

  Beginning to read Proust affected her as beginning to read Ulysses had not. In April, having decided despite her influenza to spend two weeks, including Easter, at Monk’s House, Virginia wrote to her bookseller to order Ulysses, reluctantly and almost against her will. “I see it is necessary to read Mr Joyce,” she wrote, as if the literary world were conspiring against her, “so please send Ulysses to the above address,” meaning Monk’s. She ordered it from London on Sunday, and it arrived a few days later. On Thursday, she spent two or three hours cutting the pages—but it was Leonard who began to read it, she wrote to Tom on Good Friday, April 14. She would begin, she wrote, “if it goes on raining,” warning Tom that then, “your critical reputation will be at stake.” She wrote to Clive the next day that Leonard had started reading. But she had other plans. “Now Mr Joyce … I have him on the table.… Leonard is already 30 pages deep. I look, and sip, and shudder.”

  Leaving it for Leonard was not a surprise, least of all to Clive, with whom she had first discussed Joyce after she read A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man in 1917, and to whom she confessed her “unutterable boredom” with the book. “I can’t see what he’s after … I did my level best.” Her anxiety about Joyce after that was similar to the low-grade fever that lingered through the spring: present, nagging, not in itself debilitating, but worrisome and persistent. Her jealousy of Katherine Mansfield was personal. They knew each other and had been confidantes. Her feelings about Joyce were more abstract. Joyce’s ability to command attention—and the respect of those whose respect she desired—undermined her own sense of her powers. In September 1920, when she had not been far into Jacob’s Room, Tom stayed with the Woolves and talked with them about Ulysses.

  Tom told her that what he’d seen of the book—“the life of a man in 16 incidents, all taking place (I think) in one day,” she wrote in her diary—was brilliant. But it was not simply his praise of the book that was a threat. It was that Tom’s praise of Joyce (and his regard for Wyndham Lewis and Ezra Pound) was inseparable from what she felt was Eliot’s complete neglect of her own “claims to be a writer.” He was on their side, and she was able to resist being overpowered by him by recognizing that his opinions, including his effective dismissal of her, were liberally mixed with his own “concealed vanity & even anxiety” about his own work. “I suppose a good mind endures, and one is drawn to it & sticks to it, owing to having a good mind myself,” she wrote in her diary, trying to understand the strength of her feelings. “Not that Tom admires my writing, damn him.” Writing in January to Forster about why she was avoiding Proust, she had written of her fear of going down and down and never coming up again. She used the same metaphor in her diary when describing this weekend encounter with Eliot. She felt the “waters rise once or twice” and wondered whether, had she been more meek about pressing her own claims as a writer, “I should have gone under—felt him & his views dominant & subversive.” But Eliot’s dominance—and her fear of Joyce’s—had persisted after his departure. Reflecting on Eliot’s enthusiasm for Joyce the next day, which she was unable to shake from her mind, she feared that what she was trying to do “is probably being better done by Mr Joyce.” She could not think of him, except as a rival: “Then I began to wonder what it is that I am doing: to suspect, as is usual in such cases, that I have not thought my plan out plainly enough—so to dwindle, niggle, hesitate—which means that one’s lost.”

  The sense of inadequacy was made more intense by the praise she did receive. In the British Weekly of April 23, 1921, she was acclaimed as “in the opinion of some good judges” to be “the ablest of living women novelists,” an accolade she quoted in her diary but meant little—she was not a writer, but a woman writer. As one of her characters in To the Lighthouse would put it, “women can’t paint, women can’t write.”

  Ulysses had been “published” on February 2, in Paris, the day of Joyce’s fortieth birthday—if the appearance early that Thursday morning of two copies in Paris, rushed by train by the printer, could be called its official publication. The first copy went to Joyce, the second copy to the window of Sylvia Beach’s bookshop.

  Virginia had turned forty only the week before Joyce did. It was not a happy point of comparison that they were the same age and that he had this novel out in the world, a massive—expensive—box of a book. She had not published a novel in more than two and a half years and had had the fear eighteen months ago that perhaps what she
was attempting to do in the novel that still had not been published was being done better by Mr. Joyce. Even in an unfinished state, appearing in pieces, Ulysses had become a fearsome presence in the landscape of her own literary prospects, seeming, in its style, its subject, its fame (and its notoriety), the unwavering conviction of Joyce’s adherents, to mock her aims, her capacities, her sex, her invention, and her talent all this time. Despite her doubts about Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist, she saw, as early as 1918, the importance of Ulysses as it was published in installments—aware of its interest and yet distrustful of its influence. In April of that year, Harriet Weaver, Joyce’s publisher at the Egoist Press, had come to see Leonard and Virginia about whether the Hogarth Press might be willing to publish Ulysses as a book. Virginia was struck by the contrast between the prim Miss Weaver and the text of the first four chapters of the novel she brought with her. And though Virginia described some mild shock at some explicit passages, her displeasure with Joyce’s work was that its unpolished surface betrayed, she thought, a lack of artistry. “First there’s a dog that p’s—then there’s man that forths, and one can be monotonous even on that subject,” she wrote to Lytton, referring to Leopold Bloom’s reading a newspaper while defecating. The chapters were “interesting as an experiment,” she wrote to Roger Fry, “he leaves out the narrative, and even tries to give the thoughts,” but she did not think Joyce had “anything very interesting to say.… Three hundred pages of it might be boring.” The decision whether to publish Ulysses as a book was made for them by the limited capacity of the Hogarth Press. They had not published a book even half as long as the manuscript of Ulysses as it stood, then, in its far-from-finished state, and Virginia wrote to Miss Weaver that it would be an “insuperable difficulty.” She had escaped publishing Ulysses but could not escape thinking about it.