by Philip Hoare
Cam, the riverishly-named youngest Ramsay daughter, dangles her hand in the waves as she and her brother reluctantly accompany their father on the long-postponed trip to the lighthouse. Out at sea they become becalmed, and in her dreamy, deceptive state, Cam’s mind wanders through the green swirls into an ‘underworld of waters where the pearls stuck in clusters to white sprays, where in the green light a change came over one’s entire mind and one’s body shone half transparent enveloped in a green cloak’. As blank and ever-changing as it is, as calm or crazed, the sea could embody ecstasy or despair; it was a mirror for Woolf’s descent into madness, a process made profound by knowing what was about to happen. She might have been enchanted by Ariel. ‘I felt unreason slowly tingling in my veins,’ she would say, as if her body were being flooded by insanity or filled with strange noises: birds singing in Greek; an ‘odd whirring of wings in the head’.
Cam seems besieged by the sea, by a numb terror and ‘a purple stain upon the bland surface as if something had boiled and bled, invisibly, beneath’. Meanwhile ‘winds and waves disported themselves like the amorphous bulks of leviathans whose brows are pierced by no light of reason’. Eventually the Ramsays reach the lighthouse, but even that epiphany is darkened by the fact that they pass over the place – if water could be said to have a place – where their fisherman had once seen three men drown, clinging to the mast of their boat. All the while their father, as gloomy and tyrannical as Ahab, dwells on William Cowper’s doomy poem, ‘The Castaway’: ‘We perish’d, each alone: | But I beneath a rougher sea, | And whelm’d in deeper gulfs than he.’ When, as a young woman, Virginia had heard of the fate of Titanic, she imagined the ship far below, ‘poised half way down, and become perfectly flat’, and its wealthy passengers ‘like a pancake’, their eyes ‘like copper coins’. Later, to another friend, she said, ‘You’ll tell me I’m a failure as a writer, as well as a failure as a woman. Then I shall take a dive into the Serpentine, which, I see, is 6 feet deep in malodorous mud.’ To her even the bridge over the monstrously-named inland sea in a London park was a white arch representing a thousand deaths, a thousand sighs.
While writing To the Lighthouse, Woolf read of another disaster. On the first ever attempt to fly westbound across the Atlantic, the wealthy Princess Löwenstein-Wertheim had perished, along with her pilot and co-pilot. ‘The Flying Princess, I forget her name, has been drowned in her purple leather breeches.’ In her mind’s eye Virginia saw the plane running out of petrol, falling upon ‘the long slow Atlantic waves’ as the pilots looked back at the ‘broad cheeked desperate eyed vulgar princess’ and ‘made some desperate dry statement’ before a wave broke over the wing and washed them all into the sea. It was an arch nineteen-twenties scene; Noël Coward out of The Tempest. ‘And she said something theatrical I daresay; nobody was sincere; all acted a part; nobody shrieked.’ The last man looked at the moon and the waves and, ‘with a dry snorting sound’, he too was sucked below, ‘& the aeroplane rocked & rolled – miles from anywhere, off Newfoundland, while I slept in Rodmell’. Ten years later Virginia drove past a crashed aeroplane near Gatwick and learned afterwards that three men on board had died. ‘But we went on, reminding me of that epitaph in Greek anthology: when I sank, the other ships sailed on.’
The sea echoes over and over again in Woolf’s work, with the rhythm of moon-dragged tides. Having finished To the Lighthouse, she entered a dark period, exhausted, fighting for breath; yet out of it she sensed the same vision of presence beyond being that she had seen in Brontë and Melville; something ‘frightening & excited in the midst of my profound gloom, depression, boredom, whatever it is: One sees a fin passing far out.’ It was a deep, cryptic image, hard to diagnose or discern, as she confessed to her diary a year later, summoning ‘my vision of a fin rising on a wide blank sea. No biographer could possibly guess this important fact about my life in the late summer of 1926: yet biographers pretend they know people.’
As a boy on holiday in Dorset, I saw a distant glimpse of dolphins, arcing through the water off Durleston Head, a rocky promontory held out in the grey English Channel. As a girl holidaying in Cornwall, Woolf had seen cetaceans too: one family sailing trip in the summer of 1892 ‘ended hapily [sic] by seeing the sea pig or porpoise’; her nickname for her sister Vanessa, with whom she was extraordinarily close, was Dolphin. And in The Waves, the book that followed To the Lighthouse, and which became her most elegiac, internalised work, her vision returned as one character watches a fin turn, ‘as one might see the fin of a porpoise on the horizon’.
The sickle-sharp shape seen against the featureless sea – something there and not there – is the emblem of knowing and unknowingness. It is not the real dolphin leaping through the waves, or the curly-tailed, boy-bearing classical beast, or the mortal animal sacrificed and stranded on the sand, but something subtly different: the visible symbol of what lies below, swimming through the writer’s mind as a representation of her own otherness. In Woolf’s play Freshwater, a satire on the bohemian lives of Julia Margaret Cameron and Tennyson on the Isle of Wight, a porpoise appears off the Needles and swallows one of the characters’ engagement ring; in The Years, ‘slow porpoises’ appear ‘in a sea of oil’; and in a vivid episode in Orlando, a porpoise is seen embedded in the frozen Thames alongside shoals of eels and an entire boat and its cargo of apples resting on the river bed with an old woman fruit-seller on its deck as if still alive, ‘though a certain blueness hinted the truth’.
Woolf made a sensual connection between the porpoise and her lover. Vita Sackville-West, tall and man-womanish – a kind of Elizabethan buccaneer clad in her brown velvet coat and breeches and strings of pearls and wreathed in the ancestral glamour of her vast house, Knole, where the stags greeted her at the door, and even wandered into the great hall – morphed from she-pirate into a gambolling cetacean for Virginia. It was a dramatic appropriation, dragging the strange into the familiar. Perhaps it was no coincidence that Shakespeare – for whom gender and species were fluid states – often linked whales, living or stranded, with royal princes; or that Woolf’s name evoked both the queen and her colony.
At Christmas 1925 the two women, who’d just spent their first night together, went shopping in Sevenoaks, where they saw a porpoise lit up on a fishmonger’s slab. Virginia elided that scene with her elusive paramour out of the sixteenth century into the twentieth, Vita standing there in her pink jersey and pearls, next to the marine mammal, both curiosities. ‘I like her & being with her, & the splendour,’ Woolf admitted to her diary like a schoolgirl, ‘she shines … with a candlelit radiance, stalking on legs like beech trees, pink glowing, grape clustered, pearl hung … so much in full sail on the high tides, where I am coasting down backwaters.’ ‘Aint it odd how the vision at the Sevenoaks fishmongers has worked itself into my idea of you?’ she wrote to Vita two years later, and proceeded to replay the image at the end of Orlando, when her gender- and time-defying hero/ine returns home in 1928 – ‘A porpoise in a fishmonger’s shop attracted far more attention.’ Meanwhile Vita made her own boast, of ‘having caught such a big silver fish’ in Virginia.
Orlando is an updated fairy tale which collapses four centuries of English history into a whimsical modernist fantasy. History rushes by, briefly arrested in close-up, acid-trip details: the grains of the earth, the swelling river, the long still corridor in Orlando’s sprawling palace which runs as a conduit into time, as if a production of The Tempest were being acted out silently at the end of its wood-panelled tunnel. Orlando is both player and prince, like Elizabeth, or Shakespeare’s Fair Youth, Harry Southampton, animal and human, a chimera out of a Jacobean frieze, ‘stark naked, brown as a satyr and very beautiful’, as Virginia saw Vita. As the deer walked into Knole’s great hall, so Orlando moves through species, sex and time; she too might become a porpoise strung with baroque pearls, animating the unknown sea.
There is more than a little of Melville’s playfulness in Orlando. Woolf read Moby-Dick in 1919, in 1922, and ag
ain in 1928. In 1921, in her two-paragraph prose poem ‘Blue and Green’, she wrote a remarkably vivid picture of a part real, part fantastical whale inflected with her recent reading: ‘The snub-nosed monster rises to the surface and spouts through his blunt nostrils two columns of water … Strokes of blue line the black tarpaulin of his hide. Slushing the water through mouth and nostrils he sings, heavy with water, and the blue closes over him dowsing the polished pebbles of his eyes. Thrown upon the beach he lies, blunt, obtuse, shedding dry blue scales.’ In Orlando, she uses a line from a sea shanty in one of Melville’s chapters, ‘So good-bye and adieu to you, Ladies of Spain,’ and his influence is felt elsewhere in the book, not least when, halfway through a long sentence set in the seventeenth century, Woolf informs her reader of the precise moment at which it was written, ‘the first of November 1927’, in the same way that Melville time-codes his chapter ‘The Fountain’ ‘down to this blessed minute (fifteen and a quarter minutes past one o’clock P.M. of this sixteenth day of December, A.D. 1850)’. ‘For what more terrifying revelation can there be than it is the present moment?’ Woolf wrote. ‘That we survive the shock at all is only possible because the past shelters us on one side and the future on another.’ She even had an active interest in science fiction, prophesying a machine that could connect us with the past, as well as a telephone which could see.
As Orlando leaves the eighteenth century and changes sex, her Shakespearean origins are reflected in the nineteenth-century weather: ‘the clouds turned and tumbled, like whales’, reminding her, like Keats, ‘of dolphins dying in Ionian seas’, while the carriages in Park Lane conjure up ‘whales of an incredible magnitude’. In these ‘unfathomable seas’ the natural world takes on an erotic charge. For Ishmael, Melville’s unreliable narrator, the shape-shifting sperm whale is freighted with the ocean’s obscure desire, while the sea reflects Narcissus examining his own beauty. As the equally unreliable Orlando reaches the eighteen-forties – when both Moby-Dick and Wuthering Heights took shape – she declares, like Cathy, ‘I have found my mate. It is the moor. I am nature’s bride.’ And in another Melvillean image, she sees a ship sailing through the bracken while her lover recites Shelley and watches it cresting a white wave which, like the Serpentine bridge and the white whale, represents a thousand deaths. (It is telling that Woolf compared George Duckworth, her half-brother and abuser, to ‘an unwieldy and turbulent whale’.)
As a writer, Virginia felt she had to conduct a transaction with the spirit of the age; and so she played with the ages – an artist has to stand outside like a seer, or in between, like a medium. Slowed down compared to the speeding time suffered by the humans around her, Orlando lives for four hundred years, as long as an Arctic whale; like Moby Dick, she too seems immortal and ubiquitous – ‘for immortality is but ubiquity in time’, as Melville says. Perhaps she cannot die. At the end of the book, Orlando drives her fast car back to her country house. Swapping her skirt for whipcord breeches and a leather jacket, she wanders through her estate to a pool which is partly the Serpentine, partly the sea, ‘where things dwell in darkness so deep that what they are we scarcely know … all our most violent passions’. It is her version of Gatsby’s orgiastic future that recedes before him, beating against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past, just as Ahab’s ship sinks in a sea rolling on as it had done for five thousand years – its biblical age.
In fiction and reality and in between, Woolf continued to delve in a pre-Darwinian, aquatic uncanny. During a visit to Loch Ness in 1938, she met a charming couple at a lochside inn ‘who were in touch … with the Monster. They had seen him. He is like several broken telegraph posts and swims at immense speed. He has no head. He is constantly seen.’ And in another gothic episode, like one of the gruesome Victorian family stories she liked to retell, Virginia recorded the fate of Winifred Hambro, wife of a wealthy banker, who drowned in the loch when their speedboat burst into flames. Her husband and sons swam to safety, but despite being a good swimmer, and pulling off her skirt, she sank. ‘Loch Ness swallowed Mrs Hambro. She was wearing pearls.’ It was said that because of its steep sides, the loch never gave up its dead: divers were sent down to recover the body and the pearls, which were worth thirty thousand pounds, but reported only a story of a sinister underwater cave, warm and black. In To the Lighthouse, the artist Lily imagines throwing herself off the cliff and drowning while looking for a lost pearl brooch on the beach. The lustrous pearls, lit from within, slide into the abysmal darkness; the sensual product of the sea, they once more become the eyes of the dead.
That same year, 1938, Woolf dwelt on something else elusive. In her essay ‘America, Which I Have Never Seen’, she looks out over the ocean to a continent she will never visit, sending her ‘Imagination’ to explore it for her, like Odin’s all-seeing ravens or an updated Ariel, ‘to fly, | To swim, to dive into the fire, to ride | On the curl’d clouds’.
‘Sit still on a rock on the coast of Cornwall,’ her spirit-familiar tells her, ‘and I will fly to America and tell you what America is like.’ Passing fishing boats and steamers, soaring over Queen Mary and several aeroplanes, Imagination reports back: ‘The sea looks much like any other sea; there is now a shoal of porpoises cutting cart wheels beneath me.’ She makes landfall, like an exhausted swallow or monarch butterfly arriving on the Cape. Then the Statue of Liberty looms, and New York: a century on from when Ishmael looked over its harbour, it is now overlooked by ‘immensely high towers, each pierced with a million holes’; each a white lighthouse of its own.
This sea is as freighted as any in Moby-Dick or The Tempest, and it suffuses Woolf’s most intensely felt work. The Waves is flooded with a stream of consciousness, invoking the voices Virginia heard in her head on the days and nights when her condition drove her to talk unintelligibly for hours on end, and when she lay confined to her bed in her house by the river at Richmond, ‘mad, & seeing the sunlight quivering like gold water, on the wall, listening to the voices of the dead’.
The book follows six characters, loosely based on Woolf’s siblings and friends, as they move from schooldays to adulthood, drawn together by the loss of their dead friend Percival, just as Virginia lost her brother Thoby. Each section is separated by descriptions of the sea which are more painterly or musical than literary, redolent of Turner’s seascapes or Britten’s sea interludes. Surging and ebbing, borne on the immemorial Thames and its intimations of the ocean beyond, the water seeps into lives landbound by London. It is the same refined, barbaric world undermined by Conrad’s heart of darkness and Eliot’s waste land; where the river sweats oil and tar, and barges drift past Greenwich Reach to Gravesend. Bernard, Susan, Rhoda, Neville, Jinny and Louis speak in the voices of the long or recently dead, voices submerged by civilisation and the city-drowned suburbs, crushed by their pressure. They long to escape. They speak as their creator spoke, in perfectly composed sentences which sound like quotations from their own fiction. ‘One was compelled to listen even when she only called for more milk,’ wrote a friend after spending an evening with Virginia. ‘It was strangely like being in a novel.’
‘Here, in this room, are the abraded and battered shells cast on the shore,’ Jinny says. Louis – for whose voice Woolf drew on Eliot, whom she saw as a slippery eel – is summoned to ‘wander to the river, to the narrow streets where there are frequent public houses, and the shadows of ships passing at the end of the street’. Bernard feels the world moving past him like ‘the waves of the sea when a steamer moves’; he dreams of going to Tahiti and watching a fin on the horizon. All along the river, time leaks; the Thames is a time machine. We might be standing by Orlando’s side as she looks out from her Blackfriars house, past the empty warehouses of empire once filled with colonial plunder and on with the heaving tide, swelling high and brown along the Embankment while twenty-first-century tourists pass by.
This city, through which Virginia wandered in a state of inner loneliness, is a place of ritual and sacrifice as much as of trade an
d progress, coursed with a relentless tide of humanity undone by death, as though it would flow backward out of time. ‘It was this sea that flowed up to the mouth of the Thames,’ as she wrote in The Voyage Out, ‘and the Thames washed the roots of London.’ And as the characters of The Waves watch the steamers sail from the imperial city, they bear witness to the same sea-reach where Marlow saw that ‘we live in the flicker, but darkness was here yesterday’.
Under the pavements of Piccadilly – ‘the descent into the Tube was like death’ – Jinny feels the trains running ‘as regularly as the waves of the sea’. Neville – based on Woolf’s whinnying intimate, Lytton Strachey – reads a poem, and ‘suddenly the waves gape and up shoulders a monster’ (an image to be replayed in Iris Murdoch’s The Sea, the Sea, with its own Tempest-inflicted story); he sees his life as a net lifting ‘whales – huge leviathans and white jellies, what is amorphous and wandering … I see to the bottom; the heart – I see to the depths.’ And in a passage auguring her author’s own fate, Rhoda imagines launching a garland of flowers over a cliff, beyond ‘the lights of the herring fleet’, to ‘sink and settle on the waves’, and she with it, like Melville’s Billy Budd or Hamlet’s Ophelia. ‘The sea will drum in my ears. The white petals will be darkened with sea water. They will float for a moment and then sink. Rolling me over the waves will shoulder me under. Everything falls in a tremendous shower, dissolving me.’
This is a fractured, brutal sea, far darker than Orlando’s brocaded dreams. It is ‘violent and cruel’, a new myth enacted under a sky ‘as dark as polished whalebone’. Woolf’s prose catches that dark and light, washed over by ‘water that had been cooled in a thousand glassy hollows of mid-ocean’, inundating and uncaring, everything and nothing: an empty eternity, ‘no fin breaks the immeasurable waste’. The modernists had found their sea in Melville, an alternative, absolute power with which there is no dialogue, no debate. It stood beyond the depredations of a violent, unequal century, yet was filled with stories like those wreaths cast into its depths, dashed with votive offerings and ghosts of the living and the dead: ‘There are figures coming towards us. Are they men or women? They still wear the ambiguous draperies of the flowing tide in which they have been immersed.’ The shores are patrolled by phantoms abandoned to the waves. ‘It is strange how the dead leap out on us at street corners, or in dreams.’