A friend dropped this off for me at work several months ago. Before Christmas. Not several months... several lifetimes ago. I riffled through the pageA friend dropped this off for me at work several months ago. Before Christmas. Not several months... several lifetimes ago. I riffled through the pages, knowing it would be a cold day in hell before I'd have time to read a 600-page autobiography of an esoteric Antipodean author I'd kind of sort of heard of. You know. That vague sense that I should know who she is, should probably have gone through a Janet Frame phase in college. Did my friend think I'd be interested because I was a writer? Because I'd lived in New Zealand? How do I get out of this gracefully? How long do I hang on to this tome before she thinks I've forgotten it's hers and we both get awkward with each other...?
WELL THANK GOD FOR THE PANDEMIC.
I'd been running low on things to read, you see. And here this was, promising weeks of half an hour here, another there. Eventually I'd work my way through this and could feel some sense of accomplishment. Once I finally saw my friend again, I could return it without having to white lie my way through an explanation.
I LOVE YOU, JANET FRAME.
Oh, this was glorious. Raw, vulnerable, sweet, tender. The simple facts of a sad and wonderful life presented in the most humble and matter-of-fact manner that was both heartbreaking and so very endearing. Janet Frame, born just years before the Great Depression in rural New Zealand, was raised in a family that barely held poverty at bay; a working class Dad and a worked-to-bone Mum who wrote poetry in the spare seconds of her day. There were times of great joy and times of unimaginable grief. Janet, an unattractive kid with a bristle of red hair and a mouth full of rotten teeth, preternaturally smart and shy, made it through college and was in training to become a teacher when she attempted suicide. She was sent to a mental hospital, diagnosed as schizophrenic, and received - in eight years of incarceration - over 200 electroshock treatments.
An Angel at My Table, originally published as three separate volumes, travels through Janet's childhood, young adulthood, and blossoming as a writer. It is surprisingly short on detail of her time at mental institutions in New Zealand, but this era informs many of her novels and it is within fiction that Frame finds a way to release the horrors she endured. Instead her autobiography, after her release, focuses on her emergence as a writer, her years after she leaves her family home in New Zealand's Otago region to her schooling in Dunedin, her formation as a writer in Auckland, and the crucial time abroad in Spain and London. After she becomes more established as a writer, she has the emotional and financial resources to revisit her diagnosis and learns she was never schizophrenic. This causes a crisis of identity and she returns to full-time psychiatric care to learn how to take care of herself and be at one with the world.
Frame's slightly befuddled, childlike writing style belies the intense self-awareness of a writer and a woman coming into her own in an era when women were just beginning to assert their voices and their power. Despite her lifelong passivity, Frame develops a strong enough sense of self to make her way alone, wrestling with loneliness, sexual frustration, ridiculous men, and cultural mores that don't fit with her carefully constructed but socially perplexing identity.
I wrapped my arms around this book and cried when it ended. It will remain one of the defining points of my pandemic experience, that strange and beautiful time I read Janet Frame's autobiography and felt closer to myself, and the world, as a result....more
A friend recently raved about this series, citing it as one of the seminal literary experiences of her childhood. I'd never heard of the author or theA friend recently raved about this series, citing it as one of the seminal literary experiences of her childhood. I'd never heard of the author or the series, but when I went to my local bookstore to order the set, the bookseller reacted in much the same way. For this reader, whose imagination was shaped by the fantasies C.S. Lewis, Ursula K Le Guin, J.R.R. Tolkien, and Lloyd Alexander, and who as an adult has spooned up Philip Pullman and JK Rowling like warm butterscotch pudding, I was sold.
So, perhaps my expectations were way too high. This first book is sweet and cozy, but hardly sent my imagination soaring. Set in Cornwall contemporary to when it was written (early 60s), Over Sea, Under Stone launches three siblings off on a summer adventure to find an Arthurian-era grail, aided by their enigmatic Uncle Merry. It is delightful, but void of the mysticism and deeper metaphorical explorations that characterize Tolkien or Lewis or Le Guin. It is a lighthearted lark that promises future forays into wizards and journeys and tales of darker, deeper, magic.
Seeing as dark, damp winter still looms in the Pacific Northwest, despite cresting the Solstice, I will dig into the subsequent books in this series, on my own grail-like quest to be swept away....more
A review I choose not to quantify with stars because, although I cannot deny the quality of writing and the profundity of the narrative, it was not anA review I choose not to quantify with stars because, although I cannot deny the quality of writing and the profundity of the narrative, it was not an enjoyable reading experience. THE LOVER has been on my must-read list for years, as I slowly work my way through a canon of classics, and I'm glad to have read it. But also glad it's off the list. A slim volume that is wretched with oppressive heat, despair, anger and hopelessness. Duras wrote this in her seventies, and it's purported to be autobiographical, even while the author decried it as a "load of shit". The tone is dreamy and disjointed, shifting between a disaffected third person to a creepily intimate first. It packs, in its 117 pages, themes of race, class, sex, familial misfortune and the degrading effects of colonialism on indigenous cultures. What it's not about is love.
“What is this terror? what is this ecstasy? he thought to himself. What is it that fills me with this extraordinary excitement? It is Clarissa, he
“What is this terror? what is this ecstasy? he thought to himself. What is it that fills me with this extraordinary excitement? It is Clarissa, he said. For there she was.”
I wake hours before dawn, thinking about tonight. There will be a party. I am the guest of honor and yet I am also organizing the details of seating and food and wine. I am the entertainment, a speech practiced over and over, using the cat tree as a podium, pretending to speak in front of the microphone that will be there in reality, carrying my low, soft voice into a deep, narrow room. I don't know how many will show, but I do know some of the guests, if I happen to catch their eye as I speak, will stir emotions in my already-heightened state that may lead to tears. I will have to modulate my breathing and empty my thoughts.
But today, in this long stretch of time before the zero hour, I have a house to clean—not that anyone will be here but, oh the nervous energy, oh the housework that has not happened this month of book launch—catering to fetch, wine to chill, legs to shave, black hosiery to sort through to look for a decent pair, since I have not worn anything of the sort in five, eight, ten years? I have a slight hangover to maneuver, since a family gathering last night saw my cup overflowing, literally. Vermentino and Rioja.
Clarissa. I feel you. I feel you in the lives I will pass on the street today, in the grocery store, in the café where I hope to sneak a few relaxing moments with some hot tea and my journal. Like you, a blast from my past has suddenly appeared, thirty years after he vanished, and I am thinking, thinking about young love and how I've changed and has he changed and what would we say, what will we say if we should meet? And on my walk this morning, the walk that I take nearly every morning that leads me through a small Victorian village to a working port and out to a beach and a trail, always encountering a man who bundles up on a park bench February through October, alone, asleep sometimes, sometimes awake, I sat beside him when a coyote came after me one day and we talked and now I wonder what wars he has fought, and which windows he has looked out of, deciding at the last moment not to jump.
“Quiet descended on her, calm, content, as her needle, drawing the silk smoothly to its gentle pause, collected the green folds together and attached them, very lightly, to the belt. So on a summer’s day waves collect, overbalance, and fall; collect and fall; and the whole world seems to be saying “that is all” more and more ponderously, until even the heart in the body which lies in the sun on the beach says too, That is all. Fear no more, says the heart. Fear no more, says the heart, committing its burden to some sea, which sighs collectively for all sorrows, and renews, begins, collects, lets fall. And the body alone listens to the passing bee; the wave breaking; the dog barking, far away barking and barking.”
Clarissa. You long to take the plunge. Your life has been so proscribed, so proper, and now this return of an old love brings you back to that very singular moment in time where passion and possibility were all around you: the fervent love of a beautiful woman just tingling-fingertips away; the puppy-dog devotion of a silly man that you scorned for the dull security of Richard Dalloway. And now, in your fifties, depressed, mourning the life you never had, the youth that drains from your body and soul. A day in the life . . . a day like all the other days. A day that changes everything. Nothing.
Today, as the fog clears from my brain, I will listen, I will try to listen and watch and take tender, bittersweet note of inner lives, not only my own, but those playing out around me, the couple on the park bench spending their last moments together, unaware of the tragedy soon to befall them, of a beautiful young woman on the edge of her own bloom, hers rising, Clarissa's fading and time marching inexorably on.
The party will soon be over. Twenty-four hours from now, I will be thinking of another walk, the same trail the same lives, possibly the same hangover. I will be one day older. Will I have done enough the day before to have made a difference in those to follow?
The word "time" split its husk; poured its riches over him; and from his lips fell like shells, like shavings from a plane, without his making them, hard, white, imperishable words, and flew to attach themselves to their places in an ode to Time; an immortal ode to Time.
Let's just put this right up front: the idea that it takes a white man posing as a black man to convince white America of the realities of racism smacLet's just put this right up front: the idea that it takes a white man posing as a black man to convince white America of the realities of racism smacks of patronizing racial tourism; something only tone-deaf Hollywood could conjure up (except that not even Hollywood dreamed up Rachel Dolezal, who egregiously co-opted a black identity to further her professional agenda and to block up holes in her own emotional dam).
But that is looking at John Griffin's extraordinary experiment through a 21st century lens, with all the cultural and political knowledge that hindsight affords. In 1959, Griffin darkened his skin by taking pills and sitting under a sun lamp and rubbing "stain" into his skin, and then spent six weeks traveling through the American South. That he was a black man was never questioned. He lived in black neighborhoods in New Orleans and travelled in fear into Mississippi, where the recent trial of white men accused of lynching and murdering a black man was an epic travesty of justice, like so many trials before it (of those crimes actually brought to trial). Griffin's actions became a catalyst in the Civil Rights era of the early 60s. After the publication of his experiences, first in the magazine Sepia, then in this book, Black Like Me in 1961, Griffin and his family became targets of retribution for his betrayal and his insistence on racial justice. In 1964, he was beaten with chains by a gang of white men in Mississippi and left for dead. Eventually his family moved to Mexico to live in the safety of anonymity.
The irony of course is that the very segment of the American population Griffin tried to speak for, black America, could never pick up and move to a safer, more just life in another place. Black America could not wash its face, wait for its skin to lighten, and then capture the spotlight as a curiosity or social experiment and earn speaking fees or royalties; no, black America is still waiting for so much of white America—fifty-five years after Griffin said to himself, "The only way I could see to bridge the gap between us was to become a Negro"—to acknowledge that systemic racism is ground into our political and cultural institutions, that it can't be washed off like Griffin washed off the stain from his skin.
Black Like Me is a painful read. I had a very hard time suspending disbelief that Griffin could so easily pass for black. I struggled with extreme discomfort at Griffin speaking for people of color in the narrative. This discomfort played out in Griffin's own life, when he admitted a few years after the publication of Black Like Me the terrible irony that people came to hear him speak, as if he were a circus side-show, yet would not give the same attention to civil rights and social justice advocates of color who lived their lives in the world where he had only sojourned for six weeks.
But again, I must put my reactions and feelings in context. What Griffin accomplished was revolutionary—he provoked white America into a radical empathy and exposed the fallacy of colorblindness. In his 1977 memoir, A Time To Be Human, he states, “Surely one of the strangest experiences a person can have is suddenly to step out into the streets and find that the entire white society is convinced that individual possesses qualities and characteristics which that person knows he does not possess. I am not speaking here only of myself. This is the mind-twisting experience of every black person I know." That statement is at the heart of the why and the what of his actions in 1959. Black Like Me is a mind- and heart-twisting book. It cannot be judged out of the cultural context in which it was written, but it can continue to be read for the profound relevance it still holds today, when we still have to explain why Black Lives Matter.
Joan Didion once said that writing is a hostile act. An imposition of the writer's sensibility on the reader's most private space.
Play It As It Lays, Joan Didion once said that writing is a hostile act. An imposition of the writer's sensibility on the reader's most private space.
Play It As It Lays, published in 1970, slaps down at your soul's kitchen table and announces itself, not loudly, but in a voice that crawls under your skin, not really caring whether or not you want to see anyone, and lights a cigarette. In between noxious exhales, it tells you some version of the truth.
Maria Wyeth's story, told in shifting first and close third person, is a 20th century existential tragedy, a sort of American The Stranger, in which Maria is Meursault and Los Angeles, Algiers; a psychiatric hospital stands in for a prison; there is a Nevada desert instead of a North African beach.
At thirty-one, Maria is an actress of fading relevance with an impending divorce and a beloved four-year-old daughter in a care facility for the developmentally disabled (oh, my heart stuttered at the term 'retarded' used throughout the book). No one at the institution combs Kate's hair and the sad tangles Maria tries to smooth out during her visits are somehow emblematic of the chaos in her own life.
The chaos isn't a busy one. It isn't an overflow of demands. It is the chaos of nothingness. “By the end of the week she was thinking constantly about where her body stopped and the air began, about the exact point in space and time that was the difference between Maria and other.” Maria has become paralyzed by life, by the emptiness of her career and her relationships, where friends exchange each other as lovers as often as they exchange yesterday's soiled underwear for today's clean pair. She has had her insides scraped clean of a child conceived not in love, but in desperate boredom, and that act—the back alley abortion so terribly, graphically evoked here, remember, this is the late 1960s—is the ultimate creation of empty chaos.
Maria finds solace traveling the freeways that criss-cross this City of Angels. Cruising the nothingness of the tarmac is the only time she feels safe and in control.
Yes, this is a wrenching read. But so brilliant. The multiple points-of-view are deftly handled, the lightest touch bringing in this character or that. Didion's writing, with its echoes of Hemingway and McCullers, is spare and unflinching. The chapters are short and white space is left on the page, reflecting the white space in Maria's life that she tries to fill with alcohol, sex, acting, driving.
Few novels have taken me so deeply inside one character, injecting me into her bloodstream, so that I breathe with her, see through her eyes. I love Maria, I hate her, I want to protect her, I want her out of my life.
Time has done nothing to diminish the power of Maria's story, yet Play It As It Lays is a fascinating time capsule of feminist literature. Highly recommended. ...more
Lock up your libraries if you like; but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind.
Is it strange that I want to f
Lock up your libraries if you like; but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind.
Is it strange that I want to fist bump Virginia Woolf whenever I read this iconic line from A Room of One's Own?
Woolf wrote this essay in October 1928 for an Oxbridge lecture on the topic of Women and Fiction. It was published a year later, as the Jazz Age came to a skidding halt and the Great Depression fell like a heavy curtain across the world's stage. But on this glorious mid-autumn day, suspended in thought, she wanders the grounds of an Oxford college that has curious rules about where women can walk and sit. Woolf contemplates what it means to be addressing women's intellectual and creative pursuits in a place that won't let her walk through gardens or enter a chapel because of her sex. She contrasts the opulent luncheon of sole "spread with a counterpane of the whitest cream" and partridge and an ethereal "pudding" she enjoys in the men's hall with the meagre dinner at a women's college later that evening.
Meanwhile the wineglasses had flushed yellow and flushed crimson; had been emptied; had been filled. And thus by degrees was lit, half-way down the spine, which is the seat of the soul, not that hard little electric light which we call brilliance, as it pops in and out upon our lips, but the more profound, subtle and subterranean glow which is the rich yellow flame of rational intercourse.
and later, a far more modest affair at the women’s college:
What force is behind that plain china off which we dined, and (here it popped out of my mouth before I could stop it) the beef, the custard and the prunes?
The difference in the meals serves as a starting metaphor for the opportunities afforded a female scholar of the literary arts. With belly sated and senses enlivened by the romance of this beautiful October day, wandering the hallowed, golden grounds of Oxford, Woolf lays out the central premise of her essay:
All I could do was to offer you an opinion upon one minor point—a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction; and that, as you will see, leaves the great problem of the true nature of woman and the true nature of fiction unsolved.
She imagines Shakespeare's twin sister Judith, a woman possessing curiosity, ambition and talent at least equal to that of her celebrated brother but because of cultural and political oppression of women, her voice and eventually her life are wasted. And then Woolf goes on to show us how all women are related to Shakespeare's sister.
Women have served all these centuries as looking-glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size.
The central tenet of Virginia Woolf’s essay is to counter the notion that women’s writing is inferior to men’s. She offers up, in language at once accessible and divine, proof of history’s disavowal of women’s promise. What seems obvious today was radical feminist thinking at the time.
The history of men's opposition to women's emancipation is more interesting perhaps than the story of that emancipation itself.
And what is to be done to right history’s wrongs?
Give her a room of her own and five hundred a year, let her speak her mind and leave out half that she now puts in, and she will write a better book one of these days.
Woolf examines the women writers who did break through, despite the walls and ceilings holding them in. I’m new enough to Woolf’s writings that I did not know she held such affection for Jane Austen. This fills me with shivery delight and makes me want to hug the world.
Here was a woman about the year 1800 writing without hate, without bitterness, without fear, without protest, without preaching. That was how Shakespeare wrote.
Here we are, ninety-five years after Virginia Woolf wrote her essay. How things have changed. How they have not.
Have you any notion of how many books are written about women in the course of one year? Have you any notion how many are written by men? Are you aware that you are, perhaps, the most discussed animal in the universe?
I am sure, were Virginia alive today, she would be involved with VIDA: Women in the Literary Arts, which does an annual count to tally the gender disparity in major literary publications and book reviews. Woolf imagined that in a hundred years’ time, women’s writing would be on par with men’s in terms of acceptance, publication, readership, and critical review and respect. Alas, although things have improved immensely, there is still work to be done.
Now my belief is that this poet who never wrote a word and was buried at the cross-roads still lives. She lives in you and in me, and in many other women who are not here to-night, for they are washing up the dishes and putting the children to bed.
Judith Shakespeare is present among us. She may have found her way from middle-class America and Europe into universities and be earning an income and enjoying a room of her own, but she is still waiting to be lifted from poverty elsewhere, into education and independence, to use the full-throated power of her own voice.
But I maintain that she would come if we worked for her, and that so to work, even in poverty and obscurity, is worth while.
A call to action, if ever there was one. An astonishing work of literary criticism, of feminist thought, that is as vital, powerful, and important today as it was on that golden October afternoon in 1928. I am moved beyond words.
My copy of A Writer's Diary—I tried to post a photo, but Goodreads just couldn't deal with whatever it was I had to offer—has a forest of little tags My copy of A Writer's Diary—I tried to post a photo, but Goodreads just couldn't deal with whatever it was I had to offer—has a forest of little tags poking out from the side. All the passages I've marked.
As a writer, I move between despair and joy on a daily basis. A good day of writing leaves me scoured clean and refilled with peace;
There is some ebb and flow of the tide of life which accounts for it; though what produces either ebb or flow I'm not sure.
but the stress of rejection and of praise is such an invasion of the external world into my inner equilibrium.
...the worst of writing is that one depends so much upon praise. One should aim, seriously, as disregarding ups and downs; a compliment here, silence there.
The only way to right the imbalance is to shut out the world and offer myself up to the page. To sit and write until my limbs are stiff, my eyes ache, my brain empties out.
The truth is that writing is the profound pleasure and being read the superficial.
Then, to take a walk, letting the words sift from my head down to my toes. When I return home, I have room for the words of others.
The way to rock oneself back into writing is this. First gentle exercise in the air. Second the reading of good literature.
A Writer's Diary show the decades of a writer's life unfolding in real time: the highs and near-shame of success; the deep, quiet pleasures of the life of the mind; the fear and resignation of failure, which is usually far more a product of the writer's imagination than of the external world.
Arrange whatever pieces come your way. Never be unseated by the shying of that undependable brute, life, hag-ridden as she is by my own queer, difficult, nervous system.
What would Woolf make of the cult of personality she has become?
Now I suppose I might become one of the interesting–I will not say great–but interesting novelists?
What would we have made of her work, what more could she have offered us, if mental illness had not had the final say, if she could have found her way to a different final chapter?
A thousand things to be written had I time; had I power. A very little writing uses up my capacity for writing.
I remarked to another writer what an inspiration this book is to me, what comfort I have found in Woolf's own struggles and doubts. She reminded me how things ended for Woolf. That she took her own life. How strange a response. She missed the point entirely. Instead of being haunted by Woolf's end, I think of Mary Oliver's poem, "The Summer Day" Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life? Oliver asks.
Here is how Woolf would have answered:
Now is life very solid or very shifting? I am haunted by the two contradictions. This has gone on for ever; will last for ever; goes down to the bottom of the world—the moment I stand on. Also it is transitory, flying, diaphanous. I shall pass like a cloud on the waves.
Virginia Woolf passed like a cloud on the waves. But her words have become moments upon which we all stand, strengthened, made taller by the foundation of her genius. And we look up at those clouds, mouthing, Thank you....more
“Safe, safe, safe,” the heart of the house beats proudly. “Long years—” he sighs. “Again you found me.” “Here,” she murmurs, “sleeping; in the gard
“Safe, safe, safe,” the heart of the house beats proudly. “Long years—” he sighs. “Again you found me.” “Here,” she murmurs, “sleeping; in the garden reading; laughing, rolling apples in the loft. Here we left our treasure—” Stooping, their light lifts the lids upon my eyes. “Safe! safe! safe!” the pulse of the house beats wildly. Waking, I cry “Oh, is this your buried treasure? The light in the heart.”~The Haunted House
"Come, dream with me," beckons Virginia Woolf in this collection of eighteen stories, some previously published, some unfinished and offered up posthumously by her husband, Leonard.
This is the sensation I had while reading—dreaming scenes that seemed perfectly normal at first, but which were beset by a surreality, a super-reality shimmering just beneath the surface, signaling not all is as it seems.
"Here is something definite, something real. Thus, waking from a midnight dream of horror, one hastily turns on the light and lies quiescent, worshipping the chest of drawers, worshipping solidity, worshipping reality, worshipping the impersonal world which is a proof of some existence other than ours.”~Monday or Tuesday
This "worshipping the impersonal world which is a proof of some existence other than ours" is the theme at the heart of this collection. Woolf takes the impersonal world like a glass ball in her hands and cracks it open ever so slightly, revealing the chaos within.
In Kew Gardens, surely one of the finest in the collection, she juxtaposes the order of natural world with the disorder of human emotion.
Woolf shows in the tense and eerie The Mark on the Wall what the most minute shift of the kaleidoscope of our perspective can do to shape our chose reality.
A New Dress is an exercise in acute self-consciousness, a woman realizing, or imagining she knows, how she appears to others. It is a cruel and perceptive knife thrust at classism.
“She was a fly, but the others were dragonflies, butterflies, beautiful insects, dancing, fluttering, skimming, while she alone dragged herself up out of the saucer.”
Her skewering of Britain's gentry continues in the parodic The Shooting Party, which has a scene I had to read several times to make certain I understood what was happening. Why yes, the Squire does lash his whip about, causing Miss Rashleigh to fall into the fireplace, toppling the shield of the Rashleighs and a picture of King Edward. It's a laugh-out-loud moment of horror.
We talk about powerful opening lines in novel and short stories, but this. This may be one of my favorite closing lines, ever: "So that was the end of that marriage."~Lappin and Lapinova A devastating story of the fickle nature of . . . what? Love? Was there ever love here?
But speaking of opening lines, this one, belonging to The Lady in the Looking-Glass: A Reflection is sublime: “People should not leave looking-glasses hanging in their rooms any more then they should leave open cheque books or letters confessing some hideous crime.” It is also a perceptive and tragic story. One that will have you avoiding mirrors. For how can you trust what you see within? Is your reflection reality or a mistaken image of your own creation?
The Dalloways, particularly, Clarissa, make frequent appearances in this collection, as if Woolf had crafted small sketches, playing with her characters, trying to sort them out. I've not yet read Mrs. Dalloway, so perhaps the integration of these stories and the novel will become clear to me once I've put them all together.
Of all things, nothing is so strange as human intercourse, she thought, because of its changes, its extraordinary irrationality, her dislike being now nothing short of the most intense and rapturous love, but directly the word love occurred to her, she rejected it, thinking again how obscure the mind was, with its very few words for all these astonishing perceptions, these alternations of pain and pleasure. For how did one name this. That is what she felt now, the withdrawal of human affection, Serle’s disappearance, and the instant need they were both under to cover up what was so desolating and degrading to human nature that everyone tried to bury it decently from sight... ~Together and Apart
From the voice of a character, yet one feels the author keening to uncover what society, the society of her time, wants to desperately to hide: the vulnerability of human emotion, the insistence on "worshiping the impersonal world" instead of acknowledging the very personal within and without ourselves.
A beautiful, raw, vulnerable collection of stories, rendered in language both intimate and abstract. I remain in awe of Woolf's ability to transcend the limits of the word and create something divine.
There came a point early in To The Lighthouse when I understood why I had not been ready to read Virginia Woolf before now, or if I had, it would haveThere came a point early in To The Lighthouse when I understood why I had not been ready to read Virginia Woolf before now, or if I had, it would have been a literary chore, something to check off the, “Been There, Done That” list. It was in the moments Mrs. Ramsey spends picking up after her children at the end of the day, thinking how glad she was to be alone, at last:
“She could be herself, by herself. And that was what now she often felt the need of—to think; well, not even to think. To be silent; to be alone. All the being and the doing, expansive, glittering, vocal; and one shrunk, with a sense of solemnity, to being oneself; a wedge-shaped core of darkness, something invisible to others.” (The Window; Chapter XI).
I could have read those words and understood them years ago, but I wouldn’t have felt them as I do now, at an age when “all the being and the doing” become less important, but no less expected, and “a sense of solemnity” becomes precious.
To The Lighthouse is a meditation in three acts: The Window; Time Passes; The Lighthouse. It is not so much a story as a vignette of a marriage, a family, of the passage of time, and the meaning of home. It is a study of this, in Woolf’s own words:
"'...how life, from being made up of little separate incidents which one lived one by one, became curled and whole like a wave which bore one up with it and threw one down with it, there, with a dash on the beach.'"
And what Woolf does here, why this book is so beautiful, so maddening, so genius, is to make the reader live those moments one by one, literally (as she does in Mrs. Dalloway, my first unsuccessful attempt at reading Virginia Woolf. But I’m open to another go.) The progression of plot is minute; time slows, breathing slows. I found myself reading passages over to catch details my eyes had missed the first time. But in one moment, the world can change.
“...she took her hand and raised her brush. For a moment it stayed trembling in a painful but exciting ecstasy in the air. Where to begin?--that was the question at what point to make the first mark? One line placed on the canvas committed her to innumerable risks, to frequent and irrevocable decisions. All that in idea seemed simple became in practice immediately complex; as the waves shape themselves symmetrically from the cliff top, but to the swimmer among them are divided by steep gulfs, and foaming crests. Still the risk must run; the mark made.”
Time Passes brings the inanimate to poignant life. It shows how a house can decay with neglect, as if a home is somehow aware that the family, which had once filled its rooms with conversation, arguments, love and expectations, has also suffered tragedy. It is the story of all life: when we do not have a purpose to serve, we begin to wither and face.
The final section is a riddle of anticlimax I haven’t solved, but I’m willing to accept it for what it is—a sober leaking away of expectation and hope. It is, as Macbeth tells us after learning of Lady Macbeth’s death, the sad irony that "This life .... is but a walking shadow; a poor player, that struts and frets his hour upon the stage, and then is heard no more: it is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”
Give To the Lighthouse the time it requires to sink in and work its quiet spell on your psyche. Allow Virginia Woolf’s writing to awe you with its sound and fury.
I discovered I’m not the only one who found that this book gets better with age (of the reader, ahem): The indelible woman ...more
For three weeks I have looked at this book on my desk, trying to summon the necessary courage to write up my thoughts. Courage, because whatever I sayFor three weeks I have looked at this book on my desk, trying to summon the necessary courage to write up my thoughts. Courage, because whatever I say will be an inadequate, tepid articulation of how The Waves made me feel.
'I was running,' said Jinny, 'after breakfast. I saw leaves moving in a hole in the hedge. I thought "That is a bird on its nest." I parted them and looked; but there was no bird on a nest. The leaves went on moving. I was frightened. I ran past Susan, past Rhoda, and Neville and Bernard in the tool-house talking. I cried as I ran, faster and faster. What moved the leaves? What moves my heart, my legs? And I dashed in here, seeing you green as a bush, like a branch, very still, Louis, with your eyes fixed. "Is he dead?" I thought, and kissed you, with my heart jumping under my pink frock like the leaves, which go on moving, though there is nothing to move them. Now I smell geraniums; I smell earth mould. I dance. I ripple. I am thrown over you like a net of light. I lie quivering flung over you.'
The Waves made me quiver. It made my heart jump under my frock like the leaves. I don’t know when I have read such a thing of beauty, a work that soars in joy and plummets elegiacally, rising and falling, ever in motion, and yet caught in stillness. A listening.
Woolf writes the silence between the words, the spaces that we rush to fill with chatter and speeches. She writes the heartbeats we take for granted.
Look, when I move my head I ripple all down my narrow body; even my thin legs ripple like a stalk in the wind. … I leap like one of those flames that run between the cracks of the earth; I move, I dance; I never cease to move and to dance. I move like the leaf that moved in the hedge as a child and frightened me. I dance over these streaked, these impersonal, distempered walls with their yellow skirting as firelight dances over teapots. I catch fire even from women's cold eyes. When I read, a purple rim runs round the black edge of the textbook. Yet I cannot follow any word through its changes. I cannot follow any thought from present to past. I do not stand lost, like Susan, with tears in my eyes remembering home; or lie, like Rhoda, crumpled among the ferns, staining my pink cotton green, while I dream of plants that flower under the sea, and rocks through which the fish swim slowly. I do not dream.
The Waves transcends literary convention. It is beyond poetry, it defies prose. It loops in and around itself, carrying the characters through their linear lives—youth, the obligations of adulthood, the melancholy of aging—within the circular swell of internal thought.
What is this book? What words can describe the effect the moon has on the tides, the tilt of the hemisphere has on the seasons? A colloquy of six characters. Streams of consciousness flowing into a sea that encompasses the whole of life. A tragedy like all of life is a tragedy. Is it something to love, to admire, to imitate, to despair of?
Like and 'like' and 'like' – but what is the thing that lies beneath the semblance of the thing?'" How do words relate to the world? What is constant in the flux of identity? How do we know ourselves and each other, how do we understand a moment or a life in those terms?
Bernard, the writer, is our anchor. If there is anything conventional to The Waves, it is Bernard who serves as a main character, like a Maypole around which the others twirl, their lives entangling, unraveling, dancing on. It is he who reminds us of the impermanence and unreliability of our personal narrative
But in order to make you understand, to give you my life, I must tell you a story – and there are so many, and so many – stories of childhood, stories of school, love, marriage, death, and so on; and none of them are true. Yet like children we tell each other stories, and to decorate them we make up these ridiculous, flamboyant, beautiful phrases
And what lives these are, these characters representative of Woolf’s England: the ex-patriate, the mother, the ingénue, the depressive, the artist, the scholar, and, in one character mourned for but who is never given a voice, the hero.
Louis, stone-carved, sculpturesque; Neville, scissor-cutting, exact; Susan with eyes like lumps of crystal; Jinny dancing like a flame, febrile, hot, over dry earth; and Rhoda the nymph of the fountain always wet.
As I neared the end of The Waves, I read through a conversation in an online writing group started by a writer who works as a first reader for a literary agent. She is tasked with culling through slush pile manuscripts, making the call whether or not a novel is sent on to the agent for the next round of consideration. She came into our group bemoaning the terrible state of many of these manuscripts and suggested several writing craft guides that she wished the hapless authors of those rejected manuscripts would have consulted as they wrote. Guides that trace character arcs into percentages and tidy packages of outlines and moments. I died a little inside as I witnessed other writers scrambling to write down the books she suggested. Books I have read. I get it. I understand. Convention sells books. But for one moment, I wished the human experience could be released from genres and arcs, released to ride the waves of thought and experience.
How impossible to order them rightly; to detach one separately, or to give the effect of the whole – [...] like music.
Then again, if dancing out-of-bounds became convention, it would lose its fragile, precious power.
I am forever changed from reading The Waves. I am filled with the wonder and possibility of a mind freed from convention and embracing humanity, of what happens when we allow in silence and at last hear the roar of our own hearts. ...more
This book. What am I supposed to do about this book? Ridiculous to think I can say anything that hasn't been said by generations of readers, academicsThis book. What am I supposed to do about this book? Ridiculous to think I can say anything that hasn't been said by generations of readers, academics, and Cliff Notes. Thomas Hardy: Feminist Poet. Goddamn Amazing. ...more
This is a novel to admire, to tremble in sheer awe at the power of Gordimer's language, her mastery of sensuality, and the importance of its themes: tThis is a novel to admire, to tremble in sheer awe at the power of Gordimer's language, her mastery of sensuality, and the importance of its themes: the skewering of apartheid during a time when the anti-apartheid movement floundered, leaderless and without much will (early-mid 1970s). It is a tough novel to love. I felt alienated by the dense language and the stream-of-consciousness writing and frustration at being trapped inside Mehring's morally bankrupt brain. Which of course is the paradox of this brilliant, difficult novel: Mehring represents white South Africa and to see the world through his eyes, as we do in The Conservationist, is to trap the other characters--black, Indian, women--in a kind of subordinate, pitiful stasis. Nadine Gordimer deliberately holds us at arm's length as Mehring considers the human world around him, but draws us in close when showing us the land.
Shortly after book opens on Mehring's country farm, twenty-five miles outside Johannesburg, the corpse of a black man is discovered by the river. No one knows who he is or how he died. The local authorities simply bury the man where he is, promising to collect the body later and investigate. Mehring is a bit put out at first, thinking of that dead body on his property, but after a while, the man troubles him much less than the hippos who abort their fetuses in the river, signs of a worsening drought.
Mehring purchased this farm as a tax write-off and as a weekend fancy. It isn't terribly productive, but he doesn't need the income--he's a mining executive. The land and its cattle are tended by a collection of black families and undocumented workers who drift over from nearby shanty towns. Mehring holds dominion over so much land-conquering its underground during his day job; plucking at its veldt on the weekends. He is apolitical, bored, lonely, a beneficiary of a society built on the backs of the oppressed. His wife has left him, as has his mistress. His son flees to Namibia--a nation-state seeking independence from South Africa-- to escape compulsory military service. To keep himself company, Mehring flirts with sexual predation, all the while imagining himself above the cocktails-and-flirtations of South Africa's smart set. He really is despicable. God. But again, the genius of Gordimer is that you are inside Mehring's head, and of course he sees himself as enlightened and obliging--even a young girl sitting next to him on the plane opens her legs and allows his fingers inside. What was he supposed to do? Opportunity for the white man is everywhere, just for the taking.
The land has the final say. Biblical rains and flood end Mehring's farm fancies. The flood returns the body of a slain man to the surface, to be buried properly. But it would take another twenty years after the publication of The Conservationist for the flood of public opinion and political will to end the shame of apartheid.
The Conservationist won the Booker prize; it was also banned in South Africa. Rich in allegory, description, nuance, and psychology, it makes for disturbing, difficult reading.
“We have neither of us anything to tell; you because you do not communicate, and I, because I conceal nothing.” Marianne Dashwood to her sister, Elino
“We have neither of us anything to tell; you because you do not communicate, and I, because I conceal nothing.” Marianne Dashwood to her sister, Elinor.
And thus is Marianne’s yang to Elinor’s yin. Two halves of a whole, two women bound in love and in blood, as different and dependent as the sun and moon. Passion and logic. Emotion and propriety. ESFP and INTJ.
Jane Austen first crafted this story as an epistolary novel and titled it “Elinor and Marianne.” Although the structure would change as she revised the novel over fifteen years until it was published in 1811 as Sense and Sensibility, the relationship between these two young women remained its core.
But this novel isn’t about a conflict between sisters with opposing characters, one directed by Sense, the other driven by Sensibility. It’s about recognizing the sense and sensibility we each possess and how to release one and harness the other when love beckons and threatens in equal measure. It is about a quest for harmony and the embrace of one’s true self, about the ability to admit fallibility while still seeking personal growth. Sense and Sensibility is the Tao of Austen.
The moments of self-actualization are many and profound. Elinor’s is the least notable because she enters and remains the most centered and stable person; Colonel Brandon’s came many years before the novel takes place—we learn of it as he relates the sorrowful story of his lost love and the child he takes on as a ward; but John Willoughby, Edward Ferrars, Marianne Dashwood—each has a period of reckoning that challenges the weakest aspects of their characters and each arrives at a resolution.
Elinor may well be my favorite of Austen’s women (I hedge, because as soon as I reread Pride and Prejudice, I’ll claim it to be Lizzy). She is certainly the most dignified and humane. She is also the most relatable. Her compassion is justified and deeply-felt, which makes her uncharitable thoughts all the more delicious. In this comedy of manners, Elinor is above reproach, but beneath her unflappable surface is a wry sense of humor, prone to irony and exasperation.
Lucy was naturally clever; her remarks were often just and amusing; and as a companion for half an hour Elinor frequently found her agreeable; but her powers had received no aid from education: she was ignorant and illiterate; and her deficiency of all mental improvement, her want of information in the most common particulars, could not be concealed from Miss Dashwood, in spite of her constant endeavour to appear to advantage.
And although Edward Ferrars does not make my heart thump in the slightest, not compared to the enigmatic Mr. Darcy, the dashing Mr. Knightley, or the heroic Christopher Brandon, I have the most tender of spots reserved for the most hopeless of introverts:
My judgment," he returned, "is all on your side of the question; but I am afraid my practice is much more on your sister's. I never wish to offend, but I am so foolishly shy, that I often seem negligent, when I am only kept back by my natural awkwardness. I have frequently thought that I must have been intended by nature to be fond of low company, I am so little at my ease among strangers of gentility!"
Sense and Sensibility has Austen's most rousing cast of secondary characters, with the wicked witch Mrs. John Dashwood (portrayed with perfect insufferableness by Harriet Walter in the 1995 film adaptation. The one I must watch at least once a year), effusive, lovable busybody Mrs. Jennings, sly and silly Lucy Steele, and the preposterously mis-matched Mr. and Mrs. Palmer. But it is Elinor for whom I turn each page, in admiration and tenderness. It is Elinor who I most aspire to be, to create, who I wish I could have known, who I mourn because she is the closest connection to the author herself. Elinor had the Happily Ever After that Jane was denied.
“Know your own happiness. You want nothing but patience- or give it a more fascinating name, call it hope.”
The Tao of Elinor. The Tao of Jane Austen.
And now. I’m done parsing Jane Austen. For that is Sense. I read Jane Austen to indulge my Sensibility. I sink into her novels and want them never to end. I cherish her language, I adore her characters, I marvel at the simplicity and perfection of her plots, I cry because love triumphs in the end. There is just no making Sense of why I adore Jane Austen. There is only Sensibility: Capacity for refined emotion; delicate sensitiveness of taste; also, readiness to feel compassion for suffering, and to be moved by the pathetic in literature or art. (Oxford English Dictionary; 18th and early 19th c. Usage); the ability to appreciate and respond to complex emotional or aesthetic influences; sensitivity (Modern Usage).
Until next time, Jane.
Edited: Correction and Apologies to Harriet Walter!...more
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