An “attempt at something” is, for Woolf, a center, however wavering. The apotheosis of perceptive principle here is Woolf’s beautifully poised approach to an affirmation of the difficult possibility of meaning. The Waves (1931) is a large-scale equivalent of Lily Briscoe’s painting. Bernard, the most comprehensive of the novel’s six first-person narrators, ends the book with a restrained exultation:
“Again I see before me the usual street. The canopy of civilisation is burnt out. The sky is dark as polished whale-bone. But there is a kindling in the sky whether of lamplight or of dawn. There is a stir of some sort—sparrows on plane trees somewhere chirping. There is a sense of the break of day. I will not call it dawn. What is dawn in the city to an elderly man standing in the street looking up rather dizzily at the sky? Dawn is some sort of whitening of the sky; some sort of renewal. Another day; another Friday; another twentieth of March, January, or September. Another general awakening. The stars draw back and are extinguished. The bars deepen themselves between the waves. The film of mist thickens on the fields. A redness gathers on the roses, even on the pale rose that hangs by the bedroom window. A bird chirps. Cottagers light their early candles. Yes, this is the eternal renewal, the incessant rise and fall and fall and rise again.
“And in me too the wave rises. It swells; it arches its back. I am aware once more of a new desire, something rising beneath me like the proud horse whose rider first spurs and then pulls him back. What enemy do we now perceive advancing against us, you whom I ride now, as we stand pawing this stretch of pavement? It is death. Death is the enemy. It is death against whom I ride with my spear couched and my hair flying back like a young man’s, like Percival’s, when he galloped in India. I strike spurs into my horse. Against you I will fling myself, unvanquished and unyielding, O Death!”
The waves broke on the shore.
“Incessant rise and fall and fall and rise again,” though ascribed to Bernard, has in it the fine pathos of a recognition of natural harshness that does not come often to a male consciousness. And, for all the warlike imagery, the ride against death transcends aggressivity, whether against the self or against others. Pater had insisted that our one choice lies in packing as many pulsations of the artery, or Blakean visions of the poet’s work, into our interval as possible. Woolf subtly hints that even Pater succumbs to a male illusion of experiential quantity, rather than to a female recognition of gradations in the quality of possible experience. A male critic might want to murmur, in defense of Pater, that male blindness of the void within experience is very difficult to overcome, and that Pater’s exquisite sensibility is hardly male, whatever the accident of his gender.
* * *
—
Parodying Shakespeare is a dangerous mode; the flat-out farce of Max Beerbohm and Nigel Dennis works more easily than Woolf’s allusive deftness, but Woolf is not interested in the crudities of farce. Between the Acts is her deferred fulfillment of the polemical program set forth in her marvelous polemic A Room of One’s Own (1929). To me the most powerful and unnerving stroke in that book is in its trope for the enclosure that men have forced upon women:
For women have sat indoors all these millions of years, so that by this time the very walls are permeated by their creative force, which has, indeed, so overcharged the capacity of bricks and mortar that it must needs harness itself to pens and brushes and business and politics. But this creative power differs greatly from the creative power of men…
Hermione Lee, a superb literary biographer and critic, gave an intense, rather Woolfian reverie on the moral stance of To the Lighthouse in her The Novels of Virginia Woolf (1977):
In a novel which criticizes and mocks but finally finds admirable Mr. Ramsay’s bleak drama of endurance, the consolations offered for death are based on the real Mr. Ramsay’s principles. Completed forms, whether made from a social and family group, an abstract painting, or the journey to the lighthouse, create the only lasting victory over death and chaos.
This deftly recalls Walter Pater’s exaltation of sensation and perception as the only chance in our brief interval before the dark. But Hermione Lee, closer to Virginia Woolf, extends the Paterian vision to a family group or passage to a lighthouse. But can any novel, even the finest and subtlest in mode, approximate a completed form? Shakespeare, at his most astonishing, in Hamlet and King Lear and The Tempest, achieves configurations transcending flaws and touching “the undiscovered country from whose bourn / No traveler returns.” Dante conceived a Commedia so articulated that form is at once strange beyond all measure and yet so complete that it overcomes my spiritual opposition (but I go on sympathizing with Farinata, who stands upright in his tomb, as if of hell he had a great disdain). It is uncertain whether even Tolstoy or Proust or Joyce (barring the Wake) gave us completed forms.
But is Woolf at her keenest—in To the Lighthouse, The Waves, Between the Acts—composing novels or prose poems rather like Pater’s Imaginary Portraits? Here is my favorite passage in To the Lighthouse, centering on the beauty of Mrs. Ramsay:
But which was it to be? They had all the trays of her jewel-case open. The gold necklace, which was Italian, or the opal necklace, which Uncle James had brought her from India; or should she wear her amethysts?
“Choose, dearests, choose,” she said, hoping that they would make haste.
But she let them take their time to choose: she let Rose, particularly, take up this and then that, and hold her jewels against the black dress, for this little ceremony of choosing jewels, which was gone through every night, was what Rose liked best, she knew. She had some hidden reason of her own for attaching great importance to this choosing what her mother was to wear. What was the reason, Mrs. Ramsay wondered, standing still to let her clasp the necklace she had chosen, divining, through her own past, some deep, some buried, some quite speechless feeling that one had for one’s mother at Rose’s age. Like all feelings felt for oneself, Mrs. Ramsay thought, it made one sad. It was so inadequate, what one could give in return; and what Rose felt was quite out of proportion to anything she actually was. And Rose would grow up; and Rose would suffer, she supposed, with these deep feelings, and she said she was ready now, and they would go down, and Jasper, because he was the gentleman, should give her his arm, and Rose, as she was the lady, should carry her handkerchief (she gave her the handkerchief), and what else? oh, yes, it might be cold: a shawl. Choose me a shawl, she said, for that would please Rose, who was bound to suffer so. “There,” she said, stopping by the window on the landing, “there they are again.” Joseph had settled on another tree-top. “Don’t you think they mind,” she said to Jasper, “having their wings broken?” Why did he want to shoot poor old Joseph and Mary? He shuffled a little on the stairs, and felt rebuked, but not seriously, for she did not understand the fun of shooting birds; and they did not feel; and being his mother she lived away in another division of the world, but he rather liked her stories about Mary and Joseph. She made him laugh. But how did she know that those were Mary and Joseph? Did she think the same birds came to the same trees every night? he asked. But here, suddenly, like all grown-up people, she ceased to pay him the least attention. She was listening to a clatter in the hall.
“They’ve come back!” she exclaimed, and at once she felt much more annoyed with them than relieved. Then she wondered, had it happened? She would go down and they would tell her—but no. They could not tell her anything, with all these people about. So she must go down and begin dinner and wait. And, like some queen who, finding her people gathered in the hall, looks down upon them, and descends among them, and acknowledges their tributes silently, and accepts their devotion and their prostration before her (Paul did not move a muscle but looked straight before him as she passed) she went down, and crossed the hall and bowed her head very slightly, as if she accepted what they could not say: their tribute to her beauty.
Virginia Woolf’s mother, Julia
Duckworth, was widowed before she married Virginia’s father, Leslie Stephen. The beauty of Julia Duckworth passed to her daughters Vanessa Bell and Virginia Woolf. Julia (then Julia Stephen) died at just forty-nine and Vanessa Bell at eighty-one, and Virginia Woolf killed herself at fifty-nine. Julia’s beauty, immortalized in Mrs. Ramsay, is more than visual: it gathers up moments of being in one regnant image. There is a mournful undersong; Virginia was only thirteen when Julia died. I think on this, and Edmund Spenser’s “Epithalamion,” made for his own marriage, peals in me:
Now al is done; bring home the bride againe,
Bring home the triumph of our victory,
Bring home with you the glory of her gaine,
With joyance bring her and with jollity.
Never had man more joyfull day then this,
Whom heaven would heape with blis.
Leslie Stephen, the least poetical of men, bereaved of Julia when he was sixty-two, has a claim on sympathy in losing so rare a wife. It is not simple to surmise Virginia Woolf’s deeper motivations in creating Mr. Ramsay. Shortly before she died, she jotted down a note describing Leslie Stephen as a tripartite father: writer, social being, tyrant. Does one hear a tyrant in the self-pitying, forlorn widower who becomes obsessed with William Cowper’s “The Castaway”?
“But I beneath a rougher sea,” Mr. Ramsay murmured. He had found the house and so seeing it, he had also seen himself there; he had seen himself walking on the terrace, alone. He was walking up and down between the urns; and he seemed to himself very old and bowed. Sitting in the boat, he bowed, he crouched himself, acting instantly his part—the part of a desolate man, widowed, bereft; and so called up before him in hosts people sympathising with him; staged for himself as he sat in the boat, a little drama; which required of him decrepitude and exhaustion and sorrow (he raised his hands and looked at the thinness of them, to confirm his dream) and then there was given him in abundance women’s sympathy, and he imagined how they would soothe him and sympathise with him, and so getting in his dream some reflection of the exquisite pleasure women’s sympathy was to him, he sighed and said gently and mournfully,
But I beneath a rougher sea
Was whelmed in deeper gulfs than he,
so that the mournful words were heard quite clearly by them all. Cam half started on her seat. It shocked her—it outraged her.
“The Castaway,” perhaps William Cowper’s most severe lyric and his last published poem, laments his melancholia and compares it to a crewman washed overboard who cannot be helped by his shipmates because of a violent storm:
No voice divine the storm allay’d,
No light propitious shone;
When, snatch’d from all effectual aid,
We perish’d, each alone:
But I beneath a rougher sea,
And whelm’d in deeper gulfs than he.
If you were Leslie Stephen’s daughter, his self-indulgence had to outrage you. But we are readers. We love Mrs. Ramsay and shrug at her uneasy husband. Like another precursor, Samuel Johnson, Virginia Woolf made her appeal to the common reader. There is a paradox here. Most common readers, however devoted, find To the Lighthouse and The Waves difficult. James Joyce and Virginia Woolf were born about eight days apart in 1882, and he died only two months before her in 1941. Though Leonard Woolf wished to publish Ulysses with his Hogarth Press, Virginia demurred. Her diary entries on this are hardly salubrious:
An illiterate, underbred book it seems to me; the book of a self taught working man, and we all know how distressing they are, how egotistic, insistent, raw, striking, and ultimately nauseating.
I finished “Ulysses” and think it is a mis-fire. Genius it has, I think; but of the inferior water. The book is diffuse. It is brackish. It is pretentious. It is underbred, not only in the obvious sense, but in the literary sense. A first-rate writer, I mean, respects writing too much to be tricky; startling; doing stunts.
In writing about the many books she loved, Virginia Woolf could be a good Johnsonian critic. On Joyce’s Ulysses, she is at her rare worst: snobbish, resentful, a touch frightened. And wrong, absolutely wrong. The Jesuit-trained James Joyce was erudite beyond measure and so gifted as to be almost the fusion of Dante and Shakespeare. That was his vaunting ambition. It was beyond reach. You would need an amalgam of Proust, Joyce, Kafka, Beckett to approximate either Dante or Shakespeare.
Virginia Woolf loved Proust, never read Kafka, and was gone before Beckett began to be known. I have been reading her since I was a teenager, and believe I know all of her work, fictional and personal. Before the final parting, I would like to read again To the Lighthouse, The Waves, Between the Acts, and the posthumously published Moments of Being, a collection of five autobiographical essays, the most intense centering upon the death of her mother.
That panoply is not Joyce or Proust, but is not minor. Her sensibility was so tenuously attuned to the aesthetic ideal that I am reminded of Thomas De Quincey’s wonderful remark about Samuel Taylor Coleridge: “He wanted better bread than can be made with wheat.”
CHAPTER 38
In Search of Lost Time (1927)
MARCEL PROUST
MARCEL PROUST died in 1922, the year in which James Joyce published Ulysses, and T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land. Harmonium, the first book of poems by Wallace Stevens, appeared in 1923, to be followed by Hart Crane’s White Buildings in 1926. The seer of In Search of Lost Time was just fifty-one when he died, having published Swann’s Way in 1913. During the war years, publication being impossible, Proust vastly expanded his encyclopedic novel. When peace came, individual volumes appeared, with the last, The Past Recaptured, published posthumously.
I have written a great deal about Proust, particularly in my last book, Possessed by Memory. Since I endlessly reread him, he has to be here, but I do not wish to repeat myself and will confine my relatively brief discussion to his epiphanies, as James Joyce called them, or privileged moments of vision, in Walter Pater’s idiom. When I think about them, they change. I cannot hold them steady. That is as it should be. Samuel Beckett deftly called them “fetishes.” Roger Shattuck restored them as moments bienheureux. The greatest, Beckett suggests, is “The Intermittencies of the Heart,” which comes between Chapters 1 and 2 in Sodom and Gomorrah, Part Two. Exhausted and ill, the narrator arrives on his second visit to Balbec, and goes to his hotel room:
Disruption of my entire being. On the first night, as I was suffering from cardiac fatigue, I bent down slowly and cautiously to take off my boots, trying to master my pain. But scarcely had I touched the topmost button than my chest swelled, filled with an unknown, a divine presence, I was shaken with sobs, tears streamed from my eyes. The being who had come to my rescue, saving me from bareness of spirit, was the same who, years before, in a moment of identical distress and loneliness, in a moment when I had nothing left of myself, had come in and had restored me to myself, for that being was myself and something more than me (the container that is greater than the contained and was bringing it to me). I had just perceived, in my memory, stooping over my fatigue, the tender, preoccupied, disappointed face of my grandmother, as she had been on that first evening of our arrival, the face not of that grandmother whom I had been astonished and remorseful at having so little missed, and who had nothing in common with her save her name, but of my real grandmother, of whom, for the first time since the afternoon of her stroke in the Champs-Elysées, I now recaptured the living reality in a complete and involuntary recollection. This reality does not exist for us so long as it has not been re-created by our thought (otherwise men who have been engaged in a titanic struggle would all of them be great epic poets); and thus, in my wild desire to fling myself into her arms, it was only at that moment—more than a year after her burial, because of the anachronism which so often prevents the calendar of facts from corresponding to the calendar of feelings—that I be
came conscious that she was dead. I had often spoken about her since then, and thought of her also, but behind my words and thoughts, those of an ungrateful, selfish, cruel young man, there had never been anything that resembled my grandmother, because, in my frivolity, my love of pleasure, my familiarity with the spectacle of her ill health, I retained within me only in a potential state the memory of what she had been.
· · ·
I remembered how, an hour before the moment when my grandmother had stooped in her dressing-gown to unfasten my boots, as I wandered along the stiflingly hot street, past the pastry-cook’s, I had felt that I could never, in my need to feel her arms round me, live through the hour that I had still to spend without her. And now that this same need had reawakened, I knew that I might wait hour after hour, that she would never again be by my side. I had only just discovered this because I had only just, on feeling her for the first time alive, real, making my heart swell to breaking-point, on finding her at last, learned that I had lost her for ever. Lost for ever; I could not understand, and I struggled to endure the anguish of this contradiction: on the one hand an existence, a tenderness, surviving in me as I had known them, that is to say created for me, a love which found in me so totally its complement, its goal, its constant lodestar, that the genius of great men, all the genius that might have existed from the beginning of the world, would have been less precious to my grandmother than a single one of my defects; and on the other hand, as soon as I had relived that bliss, as though it were present, feeling it shot through by the certainty, throbbing like a recurrent pain, of an annihilation that had effaced my image of that tenderness, had destroyed that existence, retrospectively abolished our mutual predestination, made of my grandmother, at the moment when I had found her again as in a mirror, a mere stranger whom chance had allowed to spend a few years with me, as she might have done with anyone else, but to whom, before and after those years, I was and would be nothing.
Bright Book of Life : Novels to Read and Reread (9780525657279) Page 43