Not wanting to say it out loud,
and shout it I surely will not.
Neither in a state of denial,
nor pretending to be.
And denying not the fear -
that refuses to be felt.
As an aside instead,
here then said:
To be imagined now:
this grimace not feigned.
Forced disaffection;
barely - or not even -
restrained.
Days - each one,
and to follow fast,
to Weeks turn, to more thereof-
to this date at the very least.
Distress so rarely exposed
is creeping now near,
nearer to Fate shared.
Not the cholera, no love here -
no, not in this time -
not with this pest.
(This plague upon all our houses.)
Hovering, menacing -
dictating our existence now
to that which may not come.
-Anne Dromache, April 25, 2020.
Some solace: words written and lost along the way or never found, searched for or come upon by chance, may find their time again and the readers they were waiting for.
The Great Plague of London in 1665. The last major outbreak of the bubonic plague in England.
Everyone it seems has a recommended reading relevant to this time. For me, one come’s immediately to mind: Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera – I loved this book years ago, but will not read it again now. My hefty flirtation with Latin American magic realism was a long time ago, and has life associations that I’d rather not disturb but confine to memory … I’ve been to Aracataca, I’ve not lived a hundred years…A fatalist would find confirmation and the inevitability of it all in One Hundred Years of Solitude. Many have mentioned Daniel Defoe’s The Journal of the Plague Year, which is freely available in many corners of the Internet – NO copyright! Hardly surprising given it was written in 1722 about the 1665 Great Plague of London! And then there is Samual Pepys’ diary version of the same plague – here is a collection of relevant extracts. Pepys is fun to dive into I must admit – in a very bawdy sort of Renaissance way, though just how much fun I’m up to in this regard at the moment I’m not at all sure. A book that I know of and for other reasons has been on my reading list for quite some time (and that I haven’t heard mentioned of late) is Year of Wonders (2001) by Geraldine Brooks, again set during 1665-66.
Oh, and war!…Just a few of the words that come to mind of a much darker time four hundred odd years ago (1618-1648) that puts this year of ours into perspective. One could add: torture, execution, butchery, disease…You surely get the picture.
The prankster Till Eulenspiegel, depicted with owl and mirror (title page of the Strasbourg edition of 1515)
Well I do…having finished reading Daniel Kehlmann’s latest work, Tyll, (mentioned here upon its recent publication in English, though I read in German so I can not speak on the translation) which powerfully describes the devastation visited upon a continent and its peoples – brutalised as they were through all the above said … I can’t think that it would have occurred to Kehlmann just how prescient his novel would be. Not in that the grotesqueness of a pre-modern era (and the literary form chosen) is so relatable, rather that the grotesqueness told as it is with a picaresque slant and the mocking gaze of Tyll Eulenspiegel reflected through a contemporary lens portends of the potential consequences of social disharmony.
Continuing with a topic I have recently been thinking about, I have come upon an interesting essay; inspired by a stage version of Mrs. Dalloway, it is a couple of years old but makes pertinent observations just the same, and not necessarily specific to Virginia Woolf. It reminds me of just how often I wonder at the fortitude or foolhardiness of some theatrical or cinematic adaptations from the literary moderne of a century ago, and whether some forms are just better left as they were intended. The conservative in me speaks.
Considering the 2018 experimental production at the Arcola Theater in London, Michael Cunningham’s “The Hours” and its film adaptation, Jo Glanville ponders, with reference to renowned Woolf biographer Hermione Lee, how adequate any adaptation of Woolf’s work can ever be, and especially here Mrs. Dalloway, composed as it is of a fragmentary flow of imagination and memory – unordered, even chaotic.
… Woolf evokes the very experience of being alive through a ceaseless poetic chain of thoughts, responses and memories as the narrative shifts between the world within and the world outside. In an essay on the novel, Hermione Lee quotes from Woolf’s correspondence with the painter Jacques Raverat while she was writing Mrs Dalloway. Raverat wrote that it was not possible to represent the way our minds respond to an idea or experience in a linear narrative. Woolf responded that it’s the job of a writer to go beyond ‘the formal railway line of sentence’ and to show how people ‘feel or think or dream […] all over the place’. How can an adaptation recreate that effect?…
Glanville doesn’t exactly answer the question she poses, and appears as sceptical as I tend to be, but nevertheless clearly admires the bravura in having a go, for better or worse, at transforming all the fleeting moments, shadings of emotions, muddled thoughts that make Mrs. Dalloway such a splendid work of literature, into a “real time” experience of sorts. When it’s all said and done, any attempt to capture the haunted past and let it mingle amongst the crowded present is very much in the spirit of Virginia Woolf. Perhaps an adequate enough reason after all. Bring them on – the reworkings, the inspired appropriations! The radical now raises her voice.
With book 4 ends the Telemachy, it is now Telemachus’ father, the hero Odysseus, our star (!), who takes centre stage; with his fate resting on the good will and intentions of some powerful women, but above all the continuing favours of daughter goddess Athena and her wily ways of influencing father Zeus to do well by the hero with traits of intelligence and cunning paralleling her own.
Book 5: From the Goddess to the Storm
pp. 180-196
Odysseus und Kalypso by Arnold Böcklin (1883)
We are introduced to a morose Odysseus on Calypso’s island – held there long captive by the nymph for eternal love’s sake. Years before washed upon her shores, the gratitude he may have felt for the sanctuary she provided has turned to a bitter indifference towards his captor. Her physical attractions and the gifts she bestows no longer temper his misery or distract from his profound longing for his home and wife – Ithaca and Penelope.
Nudged to intervene (by you know who), Zeus sends Hermes to command the release of Odysseus so that he may finally continue on his journey home. Calypso reluctantly complies, and her affections are indeed such that she ensures Odysseus is outfitted such as to bear the dangers of the high seas, though not counting upon the intervention of the forever cranky Poseidon who whips up the fiercest of storms. But, lo and behold, there is another “girl” on his side – the White Goddess, Ino – who drapes him in a magic veil to guide him through the dangerous seas to the shores of Phaeacia, where Athena hovers to keep him safe.
Athena manipulates another beauty, the princess, Nausicaa, to further her rescue plan. Encouraged by a dream to do so, Nausicaa is laundering garments with her slave girls at the washing pools, when the bedraggled Odysseus appears and with words, heavily laden with flattery, seeks her aid. His plea is not denied, for Nausicaa understands the rites of courtesy due to needy strangers, and (now bathed and spruced up some by Athena!) is impressed by Odysseus’ beauty and grandeur. She instructs him on how he may find his way inconspicuously to the town walls; where at book’s end our hero awaits the right time to proceed to the palace of Nausicaa’s father, King Alcinous.
book 7: a Magical Kingdom
pp. 208-219
Enveloping him in her magic mist and leading him under the guise of a little girl, Athena ensures that Odysseus safely finds the King’s palace. As their daughter, so the royal pair Alcinous and Arete offer all due hospitality, their guest having a look and manner such that for a moment he was mistaken to be of godly nature. Odysseus reveals his story of being lost at sea, years spent at Calypso’s pleasure and Zeus’ intervention to set him free; only then to encounter an irate Poseidon and be washed upon their shores, whereupon their daughter saved him. After having eaten and drunk his fill and parried the King’s suggestion that he be a good match for his daughter – but still been assured that they will assist him in getting home, a good bed is prepared for the weary stranger and a feast in his honour is planned for the morn.
book 8: The songs of a poet
pp. 220-239
And on the next day there is indeed a worthy celebration in honour of the stranger – a fine banquet of meats and sweets and wines, and games of athletic prowess in which a taunted Odysseus shows too his excellence of person, and a very Homeric poet – the blind Demodocus – sings of the Archaeans and Trojans and of a quarrel between the heroes Achilles and Odysseus (Odysseus weeps!), of the adulterous Aphrodite and Ares, and later, at Odysseus’ request, of the fall of Troy and the Wooden Horse (and Odysseus weeps some more!). Alcinous, alert to all the weeping, demands that the stranger come clean – tell his story.
[22. September 2021] Odysseus weeps and weeps some more as Demodocus sings of the mayhem and blood shed as Troy falls, but it has come to my attention, that the sorrow he exhibits, the tears he sheds, can be interpreted as an asymmetrical act to the grief of Andromache on the death of Hector and her anguish about what fate now awaits her.
Odysseus was melting into tears;
his cheeks were wet with weeping, as a woman
weeps, as she falls to wrap her arms around
her husband, fallen fighting for his home
and children. She is watching as he gasps
and dies. She shrieks, a clear high wail, collapsing
upon his corpse. The men are right behind.
They hit her shoulders with their spears and lead her
to slavery, hard labor, and a life
of pain. Her face is marked with her despair.
In that same desperate way, Odysseus
was crying [...]
Book 8 [lines 521-532], The Odyssey, trans. Emily Wilson (pp. 237-239)
It is really extraordinary how a woman introduced as a simile for the state of the grieving Odysseus then takes on a life of her own in the verse. And that life could be, generically speaking, the widow who has lost her beloved on the battlefield and is facing an uncertain future, or it could be imagined more specifically as Andromache. Though, in the moment, Odysseus’ emotions are being stirred by his intense warrior pride and the desire to hear again tales of days of glory, perhaps I was remiss in not allowing some credence to the possibility that Odysseus’ reaction was not also a gesture of empathy for those who had suffered in Troy; after all he has come some way – and in more than nautical miles – since the Trojan war.
Brought to my attention while listening to the Times Literary Supplement Freedom, Books, Flowers & the Moon podcast here isan essay by A.N. Wilson in the TLS (a free article if you’re lucky or with subscription) that starts and ends with Josiah Wedgwood IV, a descendent of the potter and a Labour Party MP from 1923 until his death in 1943. Clearly here a name known through the familiar colour and motif of Wedgwood porcelain, but to me also because I recall Virginia Woolf sharing some gossipy, interesting stuff of another variety regarding “Jos.” in her diary. What I can’t remember are comments about his passionate political commitments (and make herewith a note to myself to look into this – Leonard Woolf would have surely had sympathy with some of his opinions).
For Wedgwood was certainly a radical sort – leaving the Liberals behind him in the interest of a commitment to the working class fight, standing almost alone against the eugenics zeitgeist, ever alert to the dangers of fascism, supportive of Zionism, Indian independence – and, in respect to the Prayer Book controversy, opposed to Anglican matters of cleric, communion or anything else being disputed in the Houses of Parliament. It was not the substance of the 1928 Prayer Book revisions (foremost being that opponents saw in it an opening towards Catholic practices) that Wedgwood railed against (as an agnostic he presumably didn’t give a twig!), rather that as a matter it had no place in a secular establishment.
Title page of the 1662 Prayer Book
For the record: the bill brought forward was defeated two times in the House of Commons, soon thereafter the Bishops took matters into their own hands and the 1928 version was authorised after a fashion, the Church of England has its own governing Synod (1969) and must no longer seek parliamentary approval, and the infamous 1928 book and its 1662 precursor exist together; neither absolutely adhered to in practice amidst a variety of forms of worship.
And what concerns A.N. Wilson (Wiki informs: that he is a biographer of “the potter”, that his father was in fact managing director of Wedgwood – oh, and that he is Emily’s father!) is just how Protestant is Britain now, and that leads to curious considerations; including whether at the next Coronation Service the new monarch will swear an oath to uphold the Protestant Religion. And what can that possibly mean in a nation comprising so many beliefs and in an increasingly secular society?
Writing up my thoughts as I reread Virginia Woolf’s diaries, I turned for a browse back to Night & Day (1919), and I was overcome in some segments with the rhythm of Dante. Perhaps I am imagining it, but take the time here to experiment a little anyway – beneath are a couple of excerpts (a Kindle version) that I have broken up (rather willy-nilly!) in tercets ending with a quatrain as with some English translations of The Divine Comedy.
There was no reason, she assured herself, for this feeling of happiness; she was not free; she was not alone;
she was still bound to earth by a million fibres; every step took her nearer home.
Nevertheless, she exulted as she had never exulted before. The air was fresher, the lights more distinct,
the cold stone of the balustrade colder and harder, when by chance or purpose
she struck her hand against it. No feeling of annoyance with Denham remained; he certainly did not hinder any flight
she might choose to make, whether in the direction of the sky or of her home;
but that her condition was due to him, or to anything that he had said, she had no consciousness at all.
Virginia Woolf. Night and Day Ch.XXIII (Kindle Locations 4335-4339).
He walked on upon the impetus of this last mood of almost supernatural exaltation
until he reached a narrow street, at this hour empty of traffic and passengers.
Here, whether it was the shops with their shuttered windows, the smooth and silvered curve
of the wood pavement, or a natural ebb of feeling, his exaltation slowly oozed and deserted him.
Virginia Woolf. Night and Day Ch.XXIII(Kindle Locations 4362-4364).
How they came to find themselves walking down a street with many lamps, corners radiant with light,
and a steady succession of motor-omnibuses plying both ways along it, they could neither of them tell;
nor account for the impulse which led them suddenly to select one of these wayfarers and mount to the very front seat.
After curving through streets of comparative darkness, so narrow that shadows on the blinds
were pressed within a few feet of their faces, they came to one of those great knots of activity where the lights, having drawn close together,
thin out again and take their separate ways. They were borne on until they saw the spires of the city churches pale and flat against the sky.
Virginia Woolf. Night and Day Ch.XXXIV (Kindle Locations 7346-7351).
Perhaps it is just this “stream of consciousness” flowing from Katherine & Ralph respectively, in which inner-contemplation is interwoven with the descriptive place as they wander through Kew Gardens or then together walking in the City at the end of the novel, when what is settled is clearly not, that causes me to wonder at this. But I seem to remember Dante was important to Woolf, and to the familial and social milieu of her Victorian youth, and coincidentally at the end of 1918 she is alerted to Tom Eliot’s allusions to Dante, and this at a time she was struggling with her revision of Night & Day.
Well, I meant to just browse, but in the end I read it through. Perhaps I agree with Katherine Mansfield’s insinuation (as VW interpreted her criticism anyway) that it was not a break-out work but rather a throw back – old-fashioned in other words! But with a century in-between and the luxury of being able to appreciate Woolf’s work in its entirety, I very much see Night & Day as Woolf’s bridge into the moderne. And the irritations that plagued her with regard to this book, and they were numerous, may well have resulted from an awareness of its failings; only a bridge when she could have been braver and taken an enormous leap like some of her contemporaries, including Mansfield. But I like the way she took, I like how her life intruded into her story – romance and friendship and not quite ménage à trois, the serious and shallow of both sexes and the occupations they chose, urban living and rural retreats, patriarchal legacies and generational conflicts. Very few lives change radically from one day to the next, so why should the writing of? And stylistically, the omniscient voice, whilst presented formally, has a way of “wandering” that suggests the more fragmented narratives to come (and a life’s journey, divine too in its way.)
While half listening to BBC Radio 4 today, and being informed of a virtual service to be led by the Archbishop of Canterbury, I am reminded that today is what is known in the UK as Mothering Sunday. I have taken the time to track down Justin Welby’s sermon – it is not long and the circumstances we face from this wretched pandemic do not have to be explicitly stated to impart a warmth and nearness that contrasts with the coldness and distance that threatens to envelope us. Not surprisingly, Welby advocates seeking consolation in the Church, as a conduit to imparting the same to others, but he also suggests that loving and giving to family and friends, and commitment to our place as a member of a community will in itself offer hope and consolation.
My copy of Mothering Sunday,Graham Swift, Scribner UK, 2016
And this day reminds me of the wonderful 2016 work from Graham Swift entitled Mothering Sunday, which I liked so very much – each of the 149 pages! Best described therefore as a novella, an oft maligned and not easy to define genre but the perfect form I think for this gem from Swift.
Not long ago I was contemplating the single day narrative, but I did forget this one, and essentially it is just that, and that day is Mothering Day, 30th March, 1924; diverging only to explain the situation and the perspective from which the narrator speaks. The mood of that day is so beautifully described that it is almost tangible. And startling is Swift’s first person narration – unafraid as he is to choose a woman’s voice; the language, the measure he brings is, to my mind, truly brilliant. To me his work is put together as a Matryoshka doll – a literary form within a literary form, and is illustrative of how a historical moment can define the trajectory of a life, can define literature, can define life, lives …
Subtitled “A romance”; that it is, but more, for it also is a snapshot of British society at that time, when, exacerbated by the trauma and losses of war, the stringent class structures were being stretched and opportunities being created, such that a young woman with brains and ambition had alternatives, places to go beyond servitude.
Covid-19 knows not social status, not race nor creed, nor national borders. We are in this together -or so we are told. (Do I alone wonder at the limits of our proclaimed solidarity?) And amidst these strangest of days in which we have been hurtled, many of us may wonder at the times ahead – how long? what to do? – we ponder philosophical and political questions on freedoms and responsibilites – individual and collective, reappraised is the role of the oft maligned State, and we even look beyond: at the “who we are” that comes out when it’s all said and done. More than anything we contemplate what this will be like, this “staying at home”, this “minimising social interaction”. Olivia Lange writing on ‘How to Be Lonely’ at The New York Times, offers her thoughts, and some from Virginia Woolf:
But loneliness isn’t just a negative state, to be vanquished or suppressed. There’s a magical aspect to it too, an intensifying of perception that led Virginia Woolf to write in her diary of 1929: “If I could catch the feeling, I would: the feeling of the singing of the real world, as one is driven by loneliness and silence from the habitable world.” Woolf was no stranger to quarantine. Confined to a sickbed for long periods, she saw something thrilling in loneliness, a state of lack and longing that can be intensely creative.
To put this a little more in context, the Woolf quote is part of a lengthy and fragmented diary entry on Friday 11 October 1929; finding herself “surrounded with silence”, not in a physical sense but what she refers to as a pervasive “inner loneliness”. Reflecting on all her personal and professional good fortunes, the triumphs of family and friends, she wonders at the disquiet that haunts her, and which she can not quite grasp; but this time at least she will “Fight, fight. If I could catch the feeling…”
And as Virginia Woolf fought (for most of her life & until she could no more) the demon lurking in her head, guised as an empty void, so then should we all give it a go – be creative; find new ways of occupying ourselves, of communicating, of sharing not only our anxieties but also little kindnesses, and be patient and alert not only to our own needs but those of others. And, as Laing says at the end of her piece:
Love is not just conveyed by touch. It moves between strangers; it travels through objects and words in books. There are so many things available to sustain us now, and though it sounds counterintuitive to say it, loneliness is one of them. The weird gift of loneliness is that it grounds us in our common humanity. Other people have been afraid, waited, listened for news. Other people have survived. The whole world is in the same boat. However frightened we may feel, we have never been less alone.
And I would add – a good dose of well placed humour. Returning to Virginia Woolf – often overlooked in any short telling focusing on the scathingly brilliant and problematic personality legend would have us believe, is that Woolf often displayed, and especially in her diaries and private correspondence, an abundance of humour and warmth, an appreciation of human frailty and no mean measure of self-deprecation. Some laughter and an awareness of the very smallness of ourselves and greater humanity in the continuum of history may help placate our fears. And a recognition that more likely than not there are many who are a whole lot worse off than ourselves.
And music – personal comfort music for when times are tough, and that for me always includes the Beatles.
