Bookmarked

by Wendy W. Fairey

  In November, when I was back at work at Hollins, he phoned me from Toronto, where he was attending a conference. I felt very happy to hear from him. We chatted on a bit about our lives, and he still expressed concern that I work to save my marriage. In March 1985 I received a call from my always up-to-date-with-the-news mother. “Isn’t it terrible about Ezio?” she said. “What?” I asked. I hadn’t heard. After delivering a lecture at the University of Rome, Ezio Tarantelli had been gunned down in a parking lot by two members of the Red Brigade. They killed him because of his opposition to the scala mobile, automatic wage increases to adjust for inflation. All that ebullience and aspiration and talent, and dead at forty-three! He died one year younger, it now occurs to me, than F. Scott Fitzgerald was when he suffered his fatal heart attack in my mother’s living room in Hollywood. Feeling terribly cut off from other mourners, I wrote a letter of condolence to Ezio’s wife, who did not write back to me.

  I am moved to revise my thinking about Ezio Tarantelli and Virginia Woolf. For I see ways they do connect, after all. It’s not so much that Ezio could be a character in one of her novels—he resists that still. But Virginia Woolf helps me better to understand how, growing older, one looks back to the loves of youth. Clarissa Dalloway and Peter Walsh remembering each other young. Classira remembering Sally Seton. Mrs. Ramsay remembering Mr. Ramsay handing her into a boat. Lily Briscoe seeing again the dead Mrs. Ramsay seated on a rock. And I remembering Ezio Tarantelli, who similar to Mrs. Ramsay, persists only in memory, his future comprised exclusively of the memories others have of him. I defy time with these memories—at least in those moments I muster sufficient heart and stamina to yield to their full power. That’s Virginia Woolf’s insight along with her concomitant sense of each moment’s terrible fragility. Being and annihilation, retrospection and anticipation, loss and recovery, remembrance and also forgetting—these are the conditions of mortality that enter the very rhythms of her sentences.

  It is now thirty years since Ezio Tarantelli’s death and fifty since I fell in love with him in Rome during the summer of 1964. I can see him in the Villa Borghese, proffering the crumpled laurel leaf for me to smell. I am with him on a boat returning from a half-day excursion to the island of Iscia, the two of us lying side by side on the deck with our legs stretched out and the afternoon sun in our faces. We had been sea-sick on the trip to the island, but coming back we had taken Dramamine and were sleepy. I sit next to him in the Fiat, which he drives with locked elbows—the safest way to drive, he tells me—and he talks about the beauty of the colors of landscape when the sky is overcast. I remember his smile and his opinions, his way of sleeping and sitting and walking and making love. For years after we separated, I would be behind some man on the street who had broad shoulders and a lopey walk, and my heart would quicken at the chance it might be he.

  Virginia Woolf understands how you might love one person a great deal and yet have good reasons for choosing to be with someone else. I am not sorry that Ezio and I parted. I have no doubt at all about that. But he was someone, like her heroine Mrs. Ramsay, who could make of shared moments “the thing . . . that endures.” Or perhaps we did that together. Of course, his horrendous death, a kind of bracket of violence in the flow of time’s more commonplace erosions, intensifies my sense of an idyll at once lost and reclaimed.

  ii

  THE EMOTIONAL CORE OF To the Lighthouse has always for me been Mrs. Ramsay, the character who dominates the first section of the novel, dies within square brackets and in a subordinate clause in the second, and suffuses the memories of survivors in the last, a character of intense inner and outer beauty. (These sections are respectively “The Window,” “Time Passes,” and “The Lighthouse.”) “Mrs. Ramsay, Mrs. Ramsay!” Lily Briscoe cries, and I cry with her, drawn into her consuming desire. I cry for the mother of those eight fictional children, for the life Mrs. Ramsay creates for her family and that motley assortment of guests at the prewar summer house in the Hebrides, all dining on Boeuf en Daube and merging into a magical unity when the candles are lit, a creative wholeness, the ineffable achievement of Mrs. Ramsay, in which the moment at hand seems enough. And I cry for the mother I myself had and didn’t have. By virtue of class alone, my mother couldn’t be a Mrs. Ramsay. She was too busy, all her life, running from the grim poverty of her childhood. There was no time to be a gracious lady who visits poor cottages and knits scarves for the lighthouse keeper’s son. But my mother did knit for her children. I take from my closet—the same closet in which I’ve stashed my master’s thesis on Woolf—a fragment of green scarf she was knitting for me when she died, all knit and no purl, because her eyesight had grown too bad to do both stitches. Though it’s hardly more than a rag, I can’t bear to throw it away. My mother, too, created moments of which I might say: “The thing is made that endures.” She led a very different life from Mrs. Ramsay and was a very different mother, but she, too, had a mesmerizing—and maternal—beauty.

  My students write almost as many papers about Mrs. Ramsay as they do about Jane Eyre. Last year I directed a master’s thesis on “Silence in To the Lighthouse and Murk Amand’s Untouchable,” written by a young woman of Bengali descent who grew up in New Jersey. The student was interested in silence as a mark of women’s oppression but also silence as a form of resistance and inviolability. She brought together Mrs. Ramsay with Sohini, the untouchable sister of the untouchable hero of Amand’s novel. My student saw Mrs. Ramsay both as a victim of patriarchy and as a survivor who escapes, through silence, her husband’s excessive demands. When she handed in the finished manuscript, she told me of two developments in her own life: she’d got engaged to another Indian American, a medical student at Columbia, and had landed a promising new job in publishing. As a twenty-first-century young woman, she enjoys far wider opportunities than Mrs. Ramsay. Yet she is tied still to traditions of culture and gender that draw her to the subject of women’s silence.

  In class discussions of To the Lighthouse strong opinions get expressed. Students champion Mrs. Ramsay over Mr. Ramsay, whom they tend to see as arid and egotistical, and many deem the Ramsay marriage a failure. They point to its conflicts and tensions and find unpersuasive the final line of “The Window” section: “She had not said it; yet he knew,” Woolf’s assertion that Mrs. Ramsay has “triumphed” in an indirect expression of love for her husband. To some Mrs. Ramsay seems smug and controlling—though perhaps this is not surprising since even Lily Briscoe, so mesmerized within the novel by Mrs. Ramsay and so “in love with them all,” acknowledges “there must have been people who disliked her very much,” who found her “too sure, too drastic.” Students seeking to be more analytic write papers about Mrs. Ramsay’s role as a participant in the Freudian triangle. Or cast her as a Jungian archetype of the great mother. Or see the yearning of the other characters for her, and their failure to possess her, as an expression of Lacanian desire that must always remain unfulfilled. And so it goes.

  My own young take on Mrs. Ramsay was to see her as the creative center of the novel, almost a kind of artist—not one who is separate like Stephen or Tonio but rather one who dispels separateness in those extraordinary transcendent moments.

  I was fascinated by the moment when Mrs. Ramsay contemplates an inanimate object—the lighthouse—and essentially merges with it. In the novel’s third-person indirect discourse, the narrator tells us that

  often she [Mrs. Ramsay] found herself sitting and looking, sitting and looking with her work in her hands until she became the thing she looked at—that light, for example . . . . It was odd, she thought, how if one was alone, one leaned to inanimate things; trees, streams, flowers; felt they expressed one; felt they became one; felt they knew one, in a sense were one; felt an irrational tenderness thus (she looked at that long steady light) as for oneself.

  Mrs. Ramsay merges so completely with the lighthouse beam that looking at it, “it seemed to her like her own eyes meeting her eyes,” and the character feels, “It is enough! It is
enough!” Throughout the novel, individuals search anxiously for meaning and coherence in their fleeting lives. Here the searcher is rewarded. Life—if only for a moment (Mrs. Ramsay relinquishes her out-of-body state to return to her web of human attachments; we next see her engaged in random chatter with her husband as they stroll across the lawn)—is enough.

  I have never felt myself to be one with a thing. Perhaps the closest I’ve come is at the ocean, where I truly lose the sense of time as I succumb to the water’s vastness and rhythms. Virginia Woolf knows the dangers of such identification. If Mrs. Ramsay is not to be “blown forever outside the loop of time,” like Rhoda in The Waves, or lapse into insanity like Septimus Warren Smith in Mrs. Dalloway when he confuses himself with a tree, she must be able to move from intense to surface levels of existence, from the life that denies the individual body to the life that is lived in it. Mrs. Ramsay breaks her bond with the lighthouse by seeing it “with some irony.” She realizes that it is “so much her, yet so little,” and she calls out to her husband who has been waiting for her to emerge from her reverie.

  I love the way Virginia Woolf passes from one consciousness to another, the way she shows the shifts and shoals in human intercourse. She sees that we are opaque to one another, that we use others to bolster our own egotism. And yet communication occurs. I am one of those readers who see the Ramsays’ marriage in a favorable light. But I also think its successes are largely Mrs. Ramsay’s doing.

  Mrs. Ramsay has seemed to me the heroine of To the Lighthouse not only because everyone in the book, from her husband to her children to Lily and even disagreeable Charles Tansley, her husband’s disciple, is in love with her but also because more than any of the other characters, she rejects “inventing differences” and strives to bring people together in the face of powerful forces that keep them apart. I find it interesting to compare Woolf’s sense of the factors that impede connection with E. M. Forster’s. As does he, she understands differences of class and gender and all the slights and wounds and miscommunications they can cause. But added to these is something else, something more basic. Morally condemning egotistical individuality, she nonetheless sees that human beings must maintain their “screens,” as she puts it in a diary entry, to preserve their sanity. “If we had not this device for shutting people off from our sympathies,” she writes, “we might dissolve utterly; separation would be impossible. But the screens are in excess; not the sympathy.”

  At the dinner gathering, which is the culmination of the novel’s opening section, the screens, because of Mrs. Ramsay, not so much let down as become transparent. Woolf builds the scene for twenty pages in a fascinating crescendo. The gong sounds, bringing to a common table the people who have come and gone throughout the day. But when Mrs. Ramsay takes her place at its head, she feels that “nothing seemed to have merged. They all sat separate.” She is overwhelmed by the barrenness of her life, the shabbiness of the room, and even the depressing length of the table.

  If the general gloom is to be alleviated, Mrs. Ramsay knows she must exercise her special feminine qualities of sympathy and tact and take upon herself “the whole effort of merging and flowing and creating.” Woolf shows how hard this effort is, how recalcitrant are the individuals around the table. But finally, almost magically, the movement towards harmony begins. Mrs. Ramsay and the poet Mr. Carmichael look simultaneously at the fruit arrangement, and it occurs to Mrs. Ramsay that “looking together united them.” Then the candles are lit, and William Bankes, the old botanist friend of Mr. Ramsay, pronounces the Boeuf en Daube “a triumph.” At last, looking at husband, children, and friends, Mrs. Ramsay feels they are safely held together in an “element of joy” and observes:

  Nothing need be said; nothing could be said. There it was, all around them. It partook, she felt, carefully helping Mr. Bankes to an especially tender piece of eternity; as she had already felt about something different once before that afternoon; there is a coherence in things, a stability; something, she meant, is immune from change . . . so that again tonight she had the feeling she had had once today, already, of peace, of rest. Of such moments, she thought, the thing is made that endures.

  There’s the phrase that had such an impact on me—“the thing is made that endures.” Because Mrs. Ramsay “makes” such moments, I have called her an artist. But, of course, if an artist is ultimately someone who creates artwork, that she is not—this woman whom marriage and motherhood have absorbed so entirely that it’s hard even to imagine what she might have been or done, had she not become Mrs. Ramsay. The actual working artist of the novel is Lily Briscoe struggling to complete her painting, a character completely without glamour and to me perhaps most interesting for that reason.

  Like Tonio Kröger, like Stephen Daedalus, Lily Briscoe is more onlooker than participant in life’s feast. She compares the act of painting to “walking . . . out and out, . . . further and further, until at last one seemed to be on a narrow plank, perfectly alone over the sea.” This image reminds me of Stephen in Portrait, walking out of the city and seeing the wading girl on the beach, whom he takes as his muse and inspiration when he decides to devote himself to art and beauty. To paint, whether she paints well or badly, Lily must remain apart.

  But Lily Briscoe is not just an artist; she’s also a woman, and an “odd” one at that—the spinster with her Chinese eyes and puckered-up face, “keeping house for her father off the Brompton Road.” Mrs. Ramsay views her with some pity and thinks she should marry the widowed William Bankes. We as readers know she probably shouldn’t since her friendship with him is described as “without any sexual feeling.” Yet Lily doesn’t escape the marriage plot for anything grand. We don’t see her opting for “silence, exile, and cunning” or pronouncing herself the great artificer of her race. Rather, as she catches sight of the salt cellar on the patterned table cloth at dinner, she thinks, “at any rate . . . she need not marry, thank Heaven: she need not undergo that degradation. She was saved from that dilution. She would move the tree [in her painting] rather more to the middle.”

  Both as a woman and as an artist Lily’s ambitions appear modest. She returns to the Ramsay summer house after the war, ten years older and seeming, to Mr. Ramsay, “to have shriveled slightly.” She is terrified of the demands the bereft widower will make of her as the only adult woman at hand, and she is uncertain, as well, about the enduring value of her art—“it would be hung in attics, she thought.” But she is still the frail vessel chosen by Virginia Woolf to penetrate to the heart of things and have a “vision.”

  I ask why Virginia Woolf didn’t choose a grander figure for this task. Perhaps she needed to contain Lily Briscoe in order to keep Mrs. Ramsay at the heart of the novel. No one looks longingly at Lily Briscoe; no one is mesmerized by her presence. Lily serves not to rival Mrs. Ramsay but to see, love, and paint her. Or rather, in keeping with the tenets of Woolf’s art critic friend Roger Fry, to paint a “significant form” created by a relation of parts, one of which is the figure of Mrs. Ramsay. And why not make her a bolder artist? I think Lily dramatizes the difficulty and uncertainty of being any artist at all and especially of being a woman artist. Her painting, she feels “would never be seen, never be hung even, and there was Mr. Tansley whispering in her ear, ‘Women can’t paint, women can’t write.’” Lily struggles against great odds to hold her ground—figuratively and even literally—as men bear down upon her.

  It’s hard for me, raised by a mother who had little time for doubts, or whose reflex in the face of them was always to charge full steam ahead, to yield myself as a reader to Lily’s lacks and insecurities. In a way I’m back to the kind of choice I set up between Becky Sharp and Jane Eyre, between defying constrictions and feeling their pain. And Lily is constricted not just as a spinster and a woman artist unsupported by the culture, but also as a woman silently in love with another woman. Though “in love with them all, in love with this world,” her especial object of desire is Mrs. Ramsay.

  Could loving
, as people called it, make her and Mrs. Ramsay one? For it was not knowledge but unity that she desired, not inscription on tablets, nothing that could be written in any language known to men, but intimacy itself, which is knowledge she had thought, leaning her head on Mrs. Ramsay’s knee.

  It’s not surprising that critics and writers of the last twenty or so years have reclaimed Lily Briscoe as a lesbian, part of the interest in seeing Woolf as one and exploring the extent to which her Sapphic life imbues her fiction. I think this is important work, especially given the powerful resistance it has met with and continues to encounter. If I find myself at all holding back, it may be because I’ve not found labels of much use to me personally in sorting out questions of reality. Should I link to Jewish or Episcopal traditions? Am I a Californian or a New Yorker? Did I have Trevor Westbrook or Freddie Ayer as my father? Each choice seems only a partial truth. I’d now not hesitate to say I am or Lily Briscoe is gay, but that label, as do others, seems to flatten rather than illuminate identity. Whether Lily seeks intimacy as a daughter or lover, whether she wants Mrs. Ramsay or her world, I don’t want to have to choose. “Mrs. Ramsay, Mrs. Ramsay,” Lily cries. I can’t help wondering if sexual consummation with Mrs. Ramsay would have assuaged her yearning. Maybe a little. Probably not for long. I think ultimately Woolf identifies Lily’s longings less as specifically homoerotic desire than a general human condition, our isolation from one another in our separate bodies, the insufficiency of language to connect us, the body’s feelings of “emptiness.” Lily looks at the empty drawing room steps and feels unpleasant “physical sensations.”