To want and not to have, sent all up her body a hardness, a hollowness, a strain. And then to want and not to have—to want and want—how that wrung the heart, and wrung it again! Oh, Mrs. Ramsay! She called out silently to that essence which sat by the boat, that abstract one made of her, that woman in grey, as if to abuse her for having gone, and then having gone, come back again. . . . Suddenly the empty drawing-room steps, the frill of the chair inside, the puppy tumbling on the terrace, the whole wave and whisper of the garden became like curves and arabesques flourishing round a center of complete emptiness.
That Lily, experiencing all this pain, can persevere and make art out of her yearning is really quite extraordinary. It brings me back to the importance in my own life of pushing on with work but also to the way that work can relieve pain when it carries you out of yourself to receive the gift of inspiration. One thing, interestingly, that helps Lily in this process is the way her concentration relieves her of the shackles of gender. There’s a telling moment in Part I when she allows William Bankes to look at her unfinished painting and Woolf describes how
she took up once more her old painting position with the dim eyes and the absent-minded manner, subduing all her impressions as a woman to something more general; becoming once more under the power of that vision which she had seen clearly once and must now grope for among hedges and houses and mothers and children—her picture.
So many words intervene between “becoming” and “her picture” that the reader might easily miss the astonishing assertion that Lily becomes her picture. Yes, Lily becomes her picture, and to do this she goes beyond gender, just as Mrs. Ramsay does in merging with the lighthouse beam.
I think I understand this state of being. Intense concentration has never seemed gendered to me. I never think I’m female when, say, writing a thesis or playing a match of tennis. Even loving people, though expressed through a gendered body, seems to me to dissolve gender’s bounds. If Lily Briscoe is less magnetic than Mrs. Ramsay, it’s because there is nothing alluring about her as a woman. But Lily’s androgynous sensibility grows more interesting the closer attention one pays to it. When she returns to her painting in “The Lighthouse,” again she loses consciousness of “outer things, and her name and her personality and her appearance, and whether Mr. Carmichael, the poet sleeping on the lawn, was there or not” as her mind from its depths throws up images and memories “like a fountain spurting over that glaring, hideously difficult white space while she modeled it with greens and blues.” Yes, Mrs. Ramsay seems crushingly gone. But then she imagines what Mr. Carmichael might say: “How ‘you’ and ‘I’ and ‘she’ pass and vanish; nothing stays; all changes, but not words, not paint.” And if the painting itself—“this scrawl,” Lily calls it—might “be hung in attics,” it’s “what it attempted” that “remain[s] forever.” To paint, though, she must leave all vestiges of safety behind. It’s not enough to be metaphorically on a plank overlooking the sea. She must “step off her strip of board into the waters of annihilation” or “leap from the pinnacle of a tower.” And she must also incorporate both genders into her psyche. Imagining what the impenetrable Mr. Carmichael would say about art is as if he and she are making a joint statement.
Then connecting with Mr. Ramsay must happen, too. She is able to finish the painting not merely because someone inside the house throws “an added shaped triangular shadow over the steps” that brings the composition back to more of its original mood in which a triangle represented Mrs. Ramsay reading to James; it’s also necessary to achieve a “razor edge of balance” between the picture and Mr. Ramsay, whom she imagines arriving in his boat with James and Cam at the lighthouse and opens her heart to him. Only then can she turn back to the painting and draw the final line in its center. She completes the painting only when she has drawn both Mrs. Ramsay and Mr. Ramsay into herself—male and female, mother and father, the man and the woman getting into the cab of the self.
I admire Lily’s achievement all the more because of how hard it has been for me to keep always in sight that Mr. Ramsay goes with Mrs. Ramsay. I never had a father who went with a mother, and I have spent my adult life ricocheting between men and women in my attachments, struggling to achieve a “razor edge of balance” between gendered forces but deeply craving a vision in which these seeming opposites can be reconciled. Lily Briscoe, modest artist, achieves this vision. The great novel To the Lighthouse, in which Virginia Woolf made art of the intense memories of her parents, does the same. But I, too, as modestly, surely, as Lily, have turned to art to have my vision. I wrote the family memoir that my old English teacher Miss McKown read and praised. It pulled my mother and my father from their separate spheres, retrieving them through the power of memory and language and bringing them together. It was myself I wrote into a kind of wholeness. And perhaps that freed me at last to follow my gendered heart.
IF I find myself growing more appreciative of Lily Briscoe, I also draw closer to Mrs. Ramsay, in whom my interest has shifted over the years. These days I’m focused on her standing as an older woman. Her fatigue at having to worry about the cost of fixing the greenhouse roof, her astonishment that the lives of the Mannings have gone on for twenty-five years without her having once thought about them, her looking across the length of the dinner table at her husband and having the double vision of him now and as a young man helping her out of a boat, her pleasure in the beauty of her daughter Prue, and generally, the depth in her life of time past and passing that Woolf conveys so brilliantly—these are details and aspects of the character and story that hold new resonance for me. When Mrs. Ramsay thinks of the future, she thinks of others’ futures—that her son Andrew will get a scholarship and Prue will be happier than other people’s daughters. She is excited that Paul and Minta are engaged and determined that Lily and William Bankes must marry. Certainly some older women, in and out of fiction, can still have personal adventures: they can work, travel, love, suffer, and possibly, even, themselves decide to marry (an opposite-sex or same-sex partner). But Mrs. Ramsay’s bright hopes are for others, not herself—a function of her stage of life as well as character.
Mrs. Ramsay links for me with three other memorable older women in modern British fiction: Forster’s Mrs. Wilcox from Howards End and Mrs. Moore from A Passage to India and, another Woolf heroine, the eponymous Mrs. Dalloway. Of these, Mrs. Moore and Mrs. Ramsay don’t even have first names. And although Mrs. Wilcox and Mrs. Dalloway do—Ruth and Clarissa—they’re not Janes or Beckys or Isabels or Rhodas, young women whose stories we read to watch their destinies unfold, to see what husbands’ surnames they will succeed or fail to acquire. Mrs. Wilcox, Mrs. Ramsay, and Mrs. Dalloway have longstanding husbands and with these a settled social position; Mrs. Moore is a widow. All four are devoted mothers, women who at least in conventional terms have ceded the place of narrative adventure to the next generation. Yet they draw us into their stories. We care who they are and wish for their happiness. The question is not what they will do for themselves—their moods change but not their place in the world—but how they will exert maturely formed selves. Our concern is with their being rather than their becoming, and the palpable mystery of that being seeps like air into others around them. No matter that three, including Mrs. Ramsay, die well before the end of the works in which they appear and death figures prominently in the thoughts of Mrs. Dalloway, the only one still alive on her story’s final page. They are potent figures, lingering in the minds and hearts of those they have touched. You might say they are as potent in death as in life. Potent and creative.
Whereas I used to think of Mrs. Ramsay as the mesmerizing living character of “The Window,” now I pay more attention to her haunting presence in “The Lighthouse.” The future for her that is realized in the novel’s final section—when so many of her hopes for others have proved so poignant (Andrew dies in the war and Prue in childbirth; the Rayley marriage turns out badly; Lily and William Bankes don’t marry)—is as a memory in others’ lives. I t
hink about this kind of future, too, how my children and grandchildren might remember me, and I hope their memories of what I was or said or did, perhaps some remembered moment of fun or counsel, might somehow linger, as if out of time, to comfort and inspire them, to help them to greater happiness. There’s a way of being older that seems to make you more detached and impersonal, less invested in self. Mrs. Ramsay has this quality. I like it in her and aspire to it in myself.
This being said, I know I’m not ready yet to become a permanent “wedge of darkness,” Mrs. Ramsay’s metaphor for her escape from self. I hope still to experience an abundance of moments when life coalesces into wholeness and those inevitably succeeding moments when these become “already the past.” This is our life in time, as Virginia Woolf so beautifully captures its poignant rhythms in her fiction. “So you’re still at it,” my son remarked when I told him some time back of a new important relationship in my life. Yes I am. I have formed a partnership with a wonderful woman who brings to my life new hope for the future, a new chance to mitigate separateness, at least as much as two people can. Her name is Mary Edith Mardis, and she’s an artist—a photographer. She also reminds me a bit of Hans and Ingeborg in Thomas Mann’s story, not only in being blond and blue-eyed but also in seeming more readily sociable than I am. She has a great laugh and an easy manner. And the great thing is that she has chosen me as well as I her. Yet part of me, I know, still remains a Tonio Kröger—or perhaps I should say a Lily Briscoe—buried within myself, always marked as a little apart, caught up with the phantoms, living, dead, and even fictional, “wound about” in my heart, as Mrs. Ramsay is wound in the hearts of those who loved her. I’m in their grip. There’s no safety from their ambushes and surprises. A stray sight or sound stirs a memory of my mother that brings me to the point of tears. It swells and fades. Next I’m talking or making dinner or lost again in thought, perhaps another memory, perhaps the working out of sentences for a piece of writing. And all this, too, is being “still at it.” “Could it be,” Lily marvels, “even for elderly people, that this was life?—startling unexpected, unknown?”
A Passage to India and Beyond
In 1992 a friend invited me to travel with her to India. We would be there for the month of August, after the monsoon season but still at a very hot time. India is the most foreign place you can visit, she said, that will be accessible to you through English. I was just short of fifty and had never ventured beyond a narrow circle of Western European countries. To have gone many times to England, France, Italy, and Switzerland and dipped into Germany, Ireland, and Spain, to know good French, fair Italian and German, and a smattering of Spanish had seemed broad enough to confer cosmopolitan credentials. But I also knew my experience was limited—the word we were beginning to use was “Eurocentric.” There was the whole rest of the world to reckon with, and my friend, who taught Asian Studies at a nearby college, seemed a good person with whom to begin this reckoning. She had lived in Delhi and Calcutta and done field work in Bengali villages; she knew India well and would be an astute guide.
I had no way of knowing I was on the brink of a phase of experience that would extend over the next twenty years and lead me to unexpected new places both through travel and in my reading and teaching. If I think of my life in stages, I can see that just as my attachment to the struggles of the orphan once gave way to fascination with the freedoms of the new woman and the scope of the artist, so now like the immigrants I would soon be teaching about in my courses, I was about to exchange roots for “routes”—the title of anthropologist James Clifford’s 1997 work as he explores “traveling in dwelling, dwelling in traveling,” no longer opposing concepts in a world on the move. Through friendships and accidents of family (my son married a Frenchwoman), I would travel twice to India as well as a number of other non-Western countries, teach a semester at a university in Paris, and embrace in my reading and teaching the postcolonial broadening of the field of English literature.
In 1992 all of this lay ahead. I was excited at the prospect of going to India, but I was also afraid, and not just because this distant and unknown land would most likely prove too hot, too poor, too polluted, too upsetting to my somewhat delicate stomach to make traveling there an easy trip. For all the places I had been to, I was not someone who easily encountered the unfamiliar. It’s not that I considered staying home. My mother’s daughter, I had been taught to say yes to opportunity. “Step into the tennis ball; don’t back away from it,” my mother had repeatedly exhorted. When someone asks you to do something, say yes, and then figure out how to do it. And at all costs, keep your doubts to yourself.
It’s not a bad way to live. I had said yes, for example, when offered the teaching job in 1971 at the University of Hawaii, even though it was so far from my life and friends in New York. And however hard my time there, those three years in Hawaii, in which I taught students from many different Asian countries, opened my world a little more. I had said yes again when offered the job of Dean of Students at Bowdoin, even though I hadn’t the slightest notion of what it meant to be a college administrator. The prospect of the job gave me nightmares, but I took it anyway. Over twelve years I had a succession of dean’s positions, enjoying the challenges of the work though without ever feeling this was quite my true vocation. Still, always I went forward, always dismissing reservations, trying to step into the tennis ball.
But if Hawaii had seemed far away from my New York vantage point, India seemed even farther. Anticipating our trip, I had the sensation of a kind of freefall. It was similar to the way I had felt as I child when I was afraid that the road ahead, as we wound along the curves of the Pacific Coast Highway, wouldn’t be there if I couldn’t see it. I had loved plunging into the winding streets of European cities, but always with a sense of how I could get back to the main artery: the Seine or the Tiber, the Ramblas or the Brompton Road; always knowing where the subway stops were and where I was in relation to some home base. Going to India seemed like venturing beyond where I could see the road ahead; it seemed like going behind the length of any lifeline. On the level of a very primal fear, I worried how I could go so far away and still make it home again.
To give myself courage and prepare for the trip, I started a program of reading. Books would show me where I was going and make it more palpable to me that I would get there and back. I read histories of India, ancient and modern, books on Hinduism and Islam, travel books—one wonderful one, Arrow of the Blue Skinned God, recounts a modern traveler’s journey tracing the route of Rama in the ancient epic the Ramayana—and soon I settled into the novel, in this instance novels by Indians who wrote in English. The first were by authors of an earlier generation. R.K. Narayan’s The Guide, the story of a con artist who fakes being a holy man and perhaps becomes one, engaged me with its wryness and its subtle understanding of human nature. Nectar in a Sieve by Kamala Markandaya, the story of poor rice farmers whose village and traditional lifestyle is despoiled by a tannery but whose heroine, Rukmani, clings to hope throughout the most dire hardships, evoked my childhood reading of Pearl Buck’s The Good Earth, a familiar story in which the valiant peasant suffers and endures.
Kanthapura by Raja Rao was more perplexing. The villagers who were its characters had strange, similar-sounding names such as Akkamma and Waterfall Venkamma and Rangamma and Subbayya and Chandrayya, and its prose tumbled breathlessly along as the author explicitly set himself the task of conveying “in a language that is not one’s own the spirit that is one’s own.” The book has a memorable scene in which a Brahman, a follower of Gandhi who returns to his South Indian village of Kanthapura, forces himself to eat in the house of an untouchable. That gave me insight into the viscerally felt prohibitions of the caste system. I also could follow the buildup of fervor for Swaraj, Gandhi’s concept of home rule, climaxing when the villagers march on a British-run coffee plantation and their leaders are arrested. Overall, though, Kanthapura didn’t seem to have much of a plotline or characters you could get dee
ply involved with. Characters and plot aren’t so important, my friend explained. What is, she said, in Indian literature, is mood; the overall tone and feeling. Okay, I said to myself. Think about mood in poetry and music.
By the time of the trip I had a roadmap in my mind of the Aryan wheat-eating North of India and Dravidian rice-eating South as well as rudimentary knowledge of such concepts as caste, karma, dharma and rasa, and the achievements of the great Mogul emperors. I had also started reading more recent fiction: works by Salman Rushdie, Anita Desai, Amitav Ghosh, and Bharati Mukherjee, among others, writers with the exception of Rushdie I’d previously not even heard of. It’s amazing, given all the postcolonial literature I’ve read since, to think that in 1992 the only works I knew by authors living in non-Western countries were The Story of an African Farm by Olive Schreiner, a novel I’d discovered in the 1980s as part of my interest in late nineteenth-century feminism, a few works by Nadine Gordimer, and Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe, my choice—and the choice of most of my English department colleagues—for the mandatory single non-Western text we were asked to include in the core curriculum Great Books literature course at Brooklyn College.
I did fall sick in India. A spicy meal in a palace hotel in Jaipur led to a bad stretch on an eighteen-hour train ride from Delhi to Calcutta. Then in Calcutta the fume-filled acrid air seemed literally to take me by the throat and infect me. Dr. Chatterjee, a sympathetic young Bengali doctor, came to our hotel and was impressed that we had books with us—serious novels and tomes of theory. He warned us against the danger in India of succumbing to lassitude. Lassitude, as its syllables hovered in the air, seemed such a poignant word and seductive concept that we felt ourselves half in love with its invoker, our own Dr. Aziz. I must say, though, that neither my friend, the seasoned Indophile, nor I, the neophyte, succumbed to lassitude. Being sick didn’t matter. I got better. The heat didn’t matter. We took shelter from it when we could and otherwise pushed through it. And in all the places we visited—Delhi, Agra, Jaipur, Calcutta, Madras; through transportation adventures that included long rides in careening buses, days and nights in second-class AC trains with their shared compartments (I had a Muslim gentleman praying through the night in the berth above me on the thirty-six hour ride from Calcutta to Madras), travel by rented cars with hired drivers, and rides in rickshaws pedaled through the heat by bicycle wallahs; through the visits to imposing mosques and exquisitely carved temples, a session watching a class of Bharatnatyam dancers in Tamil Nadu, shopping expeditions to bazaars and government emporiums, meals of Tandoori lamb and chicken, grilled cheese sandwiches, and Chinese food (easier on my poor stomach) and drinks of fresh lime soda—through all this and more, I had a surprising sense of ease.
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