Modern Reading

Whether over lunch, or in the midst of bedtime ritual, beginning tomorrow and for ten consecutive weekdays (Jan 24 – Feb 4), BBC Radio 4 presents a reading of Mrs. Dalloway; embedded within what the BBC calls a “celebration of the birth of Modernism a hundred years ago”. Here, the reference is to literary Modernism and the publication of James Joyce’s Ulysses in 1922 (and Eliot’s The Waste Land). Virginia Woolf’s ‘one day’ novel was published three years later, but fits very well in the modernist tradition – and may justifiably be considered (by the broadcaster) more readable (and listenable) than Joyce’s epic work; dense as it is in allusion and parody.

Start the Week tomorrow morning (with Kirsty Wark – the third presenter in three weeks – and I am still getting used to NOT starting the week with Andrew Marr!) starts the season with a discussion that broadens the scope of modernism beyond the literary – into the visual arts, music and the public space. One of the guests is Matthew Sweet whose ten part series 1922: The Birth of Now also begins tomorrow (through to Feb 4). [BBC is quite generous, and most of these links should remain live for some time.]

Presumably, there is more in store across the BBC but I can’t find the theme centrally organized (generally this is a problem with Sounds – and I know I’m not alone in this opinion!). I actually only became aware of an upcoming “Modernism” project through a passing reference on Feedback at the end of last year and was reminded with a programming note on Open Book last week. That episode, by the way, is all about Ulysses, and listening to the very interesting participants has motivated me to consider (and not for the first time, and as an important condition) diving in. Given this interest of mine in the modernists, and my interest in their interest in the ancients, I shouldn’t need to be pushed (one would think), and rather have been tempted to jump in long ago. Or do I have an insurmountable interest conflict?

Anyway, I have at least tracked down a very good digital version of Ulysses, and there is no shortage of study material, so I will collate what I have in a separate post for future reference. For the moment, may I just refer to Virginia Woolf’s struggle with Joyce (which she never really resolved – personally, I’m not totally convinced she read Ulysses in its entirety nor any of his other works) in particular and, more generally, Volume 2 of her diary which includes this year; one which for her was just another, and was to become for us (and maybe posterity), and unbeknownst to her, much more.

Housekeeping at the Dalloways

With the end of year two of the pandemic, I note with pleasure – whereby, in these complicated days, that a relative state of being – where it was that one of our literary flights of fancy led. And, that was back to the London of a century ago, and all that could happen on just one day traversing the topography between Westminster and Bond Street – on the ground, in the heart and in the head.

Penguin ed. 2021

A particular literary journey inspired, at least to some extent it seems, by the publication of two new editions of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dallowayone from Penguin Random House (with a forward by Jenny Offill and introduction and notes by Elaine Showalter) and an annotated edition from Merve Emre published by Liveright (w.w. norton). Or was it the other way round, and these publications came with an awareness of renewed interest and the potential of a new readership amongst younger generations?

Whichever, as a matter of ‘housekeeping’, and before they go astray amongst my chaotic collection of bookmarks and the like, following are links to just three of the articles that I have collected during the year. (Some other good pieces, unfortunately, require subscriptions.)

Doing the Bloomsbury Walk

This warm mid-June Wednesday (June 16th 2021), decreed this year to be “Dalloway Day”, is just the most perfect opportunity for a city stroll. Not the famous London walk from Westminster to Bond Street that Clarissa Dalloway made all those years ago to buy flowers for her party, but a virtual guided tour with Bonnie Greer through some of the haunts of Clarissa’s creator and her friends – and, what a radical bunch they were; more than queer, however one chooses to define the word, some were, like Duncan Grant, unabashedly taking the private into the public space – and making art out of it.

Each Dalloway Day, then, can be none other than an opportunity for a sometimes loud, but often reflective, celebration of Virginia Woolf and those in her orbit; artists all, who were inspired by their favorite haunts in a city coming to terms with the monumental intellectual and material changes of modernity – its tempo and its promises.

Introducing Mmes. Woolf & Dalloway

Today at The New York Times: an essay, excerpted from the introduction by Michael Cunningham (famously, a Woolf disciple) to a new edition of Mrs. Dalloway, to be published by Vintage in the US in January

“Mrs. Dalloway” (new ed. 2021, Vintage)

And, to my mind anyway, a most finely wrought tribute to this exquisite gem. Mrs. Dalloway is modest in length and deceptively so in ambition, yet Michael Cunningham identifies its epic character and its grandeur that I too have for so long admired; how within a rigorous time frame of just one day and through the eyes of one woman, Woolf’s novel expands out into time and space and allows memory to work its magic; to magnify and enhance, and to expose the true largesse of life, right there all the time in the apparently ordinary – just waiting to be discovered.

For some time, I have been very much wanting to write something about Mrs. D., but Cunningham’s essay is so good, and says so many of the things I would like to say, and so much better, that … Enough! I refuse to be deterred! Rather, inspired to add my bit to the multitudes.

We are all Mrs. Dalloway

“We are all Mrs. Dalloway now.” says Evan Kindley in The New Yorker. Well, it may well be that many of us can’t afford to be – she is, after all, a lady of means, of a certain class. But I do get the point – the simple pleasures, the granted freedoms; of a walk in the streets, buying flowers, having a party – for us now laden with the aura of nostalgia and even adventure.

And, at the very least, we crave some moments, however fleeting, like those shrouding Clarissa Dalloway on that beautiful June morning in 1923 London; tempering her disquiet and apprehensions in the aftermath of war and illness, and allowing her instead to revel for a time in the bustle of city life.

From page to stage (II)

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?…

Boundless, Unbound.com

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.

Clarissa’s other party

Doing some podcast catching up over Christmas, I particularly liked an episode of “The Essay” from BBC Radio 3 in which Bernardine Evarista imagines another ending to Mrs. Dalloway.

From BBC Radio 3 “The Essay”

In fact, several things Evarista says in her (audio) essay interest me. Firstly, “To the Lighthouse” was her first encounter with Virginia Woolf, but that contrary to my immediate delight on reading this book many years ago, she as a girl of colour yearning to discover something of herself in the books she read, was left cold by the very white, very English world of the Ramsays, and so concluded Woolf had nothing to say to her. A lot later then came Mrs. Dalloway into the life of the the mature writer Evarista, comfortable now in her skin and in her person, she sees the fearless experimentalist writer that also does “skin”; differently, inhabiting the skin of her characters. Evarista it seems can at last appreciate the unique genius of Woolf. (And, in this audio, speak beautifully on it.)

Thinking of Mrs. Dalloway not so long ago, I too used the expression “a day in the life of” , but Evarista cleverly takes our shared expression one step further; turning it around and adding “…or a life in a day”, thereby getting to the very essence of the novel; unmasking the shallow exterior to reveal the history and complexity of an inner life, and not just that of Clarissa Dalloway, for all the characters carry the baggage that a life brings; strewn as it is with regrets, dissatisfactions, repressions, be they emotional, sexual or matters of practical predicament.

Bernadine Evarista’s ending is a reimagining of the character of Lady Rossiter – Sally – Clarissa’s intimate friend of youth, such that, instead of bowing to the restrictions of convention and society, Sally leads still the spirited, free life so promised in that rebellious girl long ago.