Reading Virginia Woolf: Mrs Dalloway

When I was a child, I longed to like yoghurt. I would see those tempting pots and pots of yoghurt in the chilled foods aisle, with their tempting flavours: strawberry, vanilla, raspberry, caramel. My mouth would slaver at the idea of yoghurt, but as soon as I spooned some into my mouth the sourness turned the temptation into disgust and I learned, eventually, that no matter how I desired it I would never like yoghurt.

I share this flash from my childhood to illustrate how I feel about Mrs Dalloway. It is a book I would love to like, but somehow can’t. This is the second time I’ve read it, and I still find it a strangely difficult and unhappy read. Of course it is a difficult read, though most rewarding reads generally are, but there is something about this book which is particularly difficult and which I struggle to get over.

Mrs Dalloway is a stream of consciousness novel, quite ground-breaking for its time. It follows a single day in the life of Clarissa Dalloway (who appeared, you may recall, in Woolf’s first novel The Voyage Out). It is a day on which Mrs Dalloway is having a party and it opens with this breathtakingly famous line:

“Mrs Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.”

One of those lines that sticks in the brain, a perfect composition of form and rhythm. Never let it be said that Woolf wrote bad sentences. From there we follow Clarissa as she travels across London to find flowers and prepare for her party. Along the way we see, close hand, Clarissa’s observations – switching from her mind to the minds of others that she encounters. This technique is not surprising, having been used to great effect in Woolf’s latter novel Jacob’s Room.

The novel focuses on three key characters. Clarissa Dalloway – wife of Richard Dalloway Conservative MP, the ‘perfect hostess’ (not entirely a compliment) who is preparing for an important (or is it?) party. Peter Walsh, Clarissa Dalloway’s former lover who she rejected and left for Richard Dalloway and who never quite got over it (or did she? It is a question unanswered). Finally Septimus Smith, a tragic character, former solider suffering from post traumatic stress disorder, whose plight is the most compelling and whose story is, perhaps, the most visceral of the novel. Without the Smith character, I think this novel would carry much less of a punch and would be a lot less interesting.

The stream of consciousness approach is what I think makes this a difficult novel and perhaps is what I don’t really enjoy about it. It is hard work being inside someone’s mind, their observations and fidgeting, all the time. This is also what makes the novel such a success and there’s no doubting Woolf’s skill at maintaining the flittering to and fro nature of being inside a human consciousness – the way we spin from observation to reflection to self absorption, the way the mind spins back to events which we have not reconciled. Like here, as Clarissa rests before the party:

“How like him! He would go on saying ‘An hour’s complete rest after luncheon’ to the end of time, because a doctor ordered it once. It was like him to take what doctors said literally; part of his adorable divine simplicity, which no one had to the same extent; which made him go and do the thing while she and Peter frittered their time away bickering. He was already half-way to the House of Commons to his Armenians, his Albaniand, having settled her on the sofa, looking at his roses. And people would say, ‘Clarissa Dalloway is spoilt.’ She cared much more for her roses than for the Armenians. Hunted out of existence, maimed, frozen, the victims of cruelty and injustice (she had heard Richard say so over and over again) – no, she could feel nothing for the Albanians, or was it the Armenians? but she loved her roses (didn’t that help the Armenians?) – the only flowers she could bear to see cut. But Richard was already at the House of Commons; at his Committee, having settled all her difficulties. But no; alas that was not true. He did not see the reasons against asking Ellie Henderson. She would do it, of course, as he wished it. Since he had brought the pillow, she would lie down…But – but – why did she suddenly feel, for no reason that she could discover, desperately unhappy? As a person who has dropped some grain of pearl or diamond into the grass and parts the tall blades very carefully, this way and that, and searches here and there vainly, and at last spies it there at the roots, so she went through one thing and another; no, it was not Sally Seton saying that Richard would never be in the Cabinet because he had a second class brain (it came back to her); no, she did not mind that; nor was it to do with Elizabeth either and Doris Kilman; those were facts. It was a feeling, some unpleasant feeling, earlier in the day perhaps; something that Peter had said, combined with some depression of her own, in her bedroom, taking off her hat; and what Richard had said added to it, but what had he said? There were his roses. Her parties! That was it! Her parties! Both of them criticised her very unfairly, laughed at her very unjustly, for her parties. That was it! That was it!”

Woolf perfectly captures the effervescence of the mind, the preoccupation with failure, its wanderings, its distractions. Yet again she shows incredible skills in characterisation, in capturing in few words the essence of a person or a scene. She captures and shines a light on the horrors of war and the terrible toll it paid upon the young men that fought it, highlighting the very real but misunderstood character of post traumatic stress disorder and its affect on both the individual and on people around them who can’t understand what they’ve suffered ot how they continue to suffer, as Septimus Smith’s long suffering wife Lucrezia (Rezia) shows:

“But Lucrezia Warren Smith was saying to herself, It’s wicked; why should I suffer? she was asking, as she walked down the broad path. No; I can’t stand it any longer, she was saying, having left Septimus, who wasn’t Septimus any longer, to say hard, cruel, wicked things, to talk to himself, to talk to a dead man, on the seat over there; when the child ran full tilt into her, fell flat, and burst out crying.

That was comforting rather. She stood her upright, dusted her frock, kissed her.

But for herself she had done nothing wrong, she had loved Septimus; she had been happy; she had had a beautiful home, and there her sisters lived still, making hats. Why should she suffer?

The child ran straight back to its nurse, and Rezia saw her scolded, comforted, taken up by the nurse who put down her knitting, and the kind looking man gave her his watch to blow open and comfort her – but why she she be exposed? Why not left in Milan? Why tortured? Why?”

Mrs Dalloway is an excellent novel. It is dense and complex, it is imaginative and experimental. The Septimus Smith sections are soul destroying in their impact and perceptiveness. It is a testament to Woolf’s skill as a writer. It is bold, it is difficult and rewarding. It is everything a great novel should be. Yet despite all this, all its merits and complexities, I just can’t take to it. It is, perhaps, unfortunate that what makes it so supremely successful as  novel, as a work of art, is the very thing I dislike about it, a stream of consciousness that is just too much for me.

There is a light at the end of the tunnel. As it happens, despite everything I thought as a child I now love yoghurt. I especially love natural yoghurt, with its palate-stripping sourness spiked with sweeter fruit and a dash of honey. So perhaps there is a future for me and Mrs Dalloway after all.

Mrs Dalloway receives an undecided 9 out of 10 Biis for skill and 5 out of 10 Biis for enjoyment. 

A Woman in the Polar Night by Christiane Ritter (Translator: Jane Degras)

I was directed towards this book in reading Sara Maitland’s marvellous A Book of Silence earlier in the year, though it has taken me a while (as always) to get around to reading it. A Woman in the Polar Night is the self-penned account by Christiane Ritter, an Austrian housewife, of her year spent with her husband and another hunter, Karl, in Spitsbergen (otherwise known as Svalbard) in 1934. They lived for the year in a tiny cabin, no more than ten feet by ten feet in size, in the inhospitable environment on the outcropping called Grey Hook in the extreme North. Ritter left behind her child in order to spend the year with her husband in this uncommon situation. Having a love of all things icy and snowy, a particular affection for stories of endurance and adventure, I was probably a long way towards loving this book even before I started reading. Fortunately for me, it didn’t disappoint.

Ritter is initially breezy about her plans, dismissing the kindly (but interfering) advice of the men on the ship, each of whom expresses discomfort at the idea of her, a woman, living in the Arctic for a year. However, she soon begins to understand what they meant and her first impressions are definitely on the side of less than impressed as she describes:

“Stones, stones. Everywhere sleeping and waking, I see stones. I feel they are becoming an obsession. The stony land, the whole monstrous barrenness, clings to me like a bad dream.

Europe is already left far behind. It seems to me now like a magic land. Flowers and fruits grow out of the earth there. Out of the earth grows what man needs in order to live. Here, where nothing grows, I grasp for the first time the whole tremendous miracle of eternally growing food.

Secretly, though I do not wish to speak of it, I come to believe we shall die of hunger here, or at least of scurvy…”

She openly expresses her shock at the apparently laid back approach of the men, who seem to be assured that they will be able to source plenty of food. Soon, however, she is wolfing down the seal that the men are able to shoot and despite her initial reluctance she learns to accept the hunters life, the sparseness and the strange, bleak lifestyle.

What we see, then, in Ritter is a transformation and it is beautiful. She moves quickly from hating her new environment to a blissful, wondrous love. There is something ecstatic about the way she speaks of her new home, though it is doubtless that she experiences suffering, fear and a test of the limits of her endurance. She becomes lost on the ice, she seeks to protect the Arctic foxes that the men have come to hunt, she hears voices and spends weeks alone in the darkness and violence of an Arctic storm. Despite this, she learns to love and appreciate the beauty of her new, spartan home. As she describes here in what became my favourite chapter, chapter 8 – Peace After the Storm:

“It has become quite clear. A lofty, greenish-blue evening sky arches over the snowy landscape of the fiord. Like a shell opalescing in its own shadowy hues, the earth is floating in transparent space, in which light from distant fountains stirs and floats to and fro. Low on the eastern horizon there is a round, bright pool of light, blueish-pink in colour, the reflection of the sun, now slowly circling the earth far below our horizon. We ourselves live in shadow.

But it is as though things up here have acquired a light of their own, as though they themselves emitted rays of the most beautiful and mysterious hues. All the mountains, tremendous in the foreground and sharply edged in the distance are glassy-bright with rigid ice, glass bright the foreland and glass bright the cliffs along the shore that, transfigured by frost and surf into high, round domes of ice, drop steeply into the sea.[…]

I myself stand forlornly by the water’s edge. The power of this worldwide peace takes hold of me, although my senses are unable to grasp it. And as though I were insubstantial, no longer there, the infinite space penetrates through me and swells out, the surging of the sea passes through my being, and what was once a personal will dissolves like a small cloud against the inflexible cliffs.”

Ritter writes beautifully of a transformative experience with such wonder and ecstasy that I defy anyone not to want to spend a year in the Arctic, in the cold and isolation, after reading this book. What Ritter describes is an experience so awe inspiring and unique that it was life changing, that after her year in the Arctic she was a changed person but changed for the better. She had a new respect for nature, she had a love of quiet and solitude and a changed perception of her old life. As she describes here:

“As we go on with our conversation, we find ourselves pitying all the people in the towns of Europe, particularly the housewives, who besides being worn out by the unending struggle against soot and dust, moths and mice, also feel themselves obliged to keep up appearances. And then we talk about the aesthetic pleasures of Europe, which when we were there seemed so priceless to us – music, for example, that elevates the mind and lightens the heart and without which we could hardly live. Remarkably enough, the hunger for music is quite absent here. Our hearts are light, our minds are in a permanent state of elevation. Nature seems to contain everything that man needs for his equilibrium.”

It is an astonishing book. Written with simplicity and honesty, Ritter is matter of fact about her experience whilst transmitting something of such frail and incomparable beauty that I found myself quite envious of her experience. It is a gripping and mesmerising story, told with wonder and skill. A beautiful read, and one which I’ll return to over and over. A book which deserves to be much more widely known.

A Woman in the Polar Night receives a spellbound 10 out of 10 Biis. 

How to be Both by Ali Smith

There is always a point in any novel by Ali Smith where it becomes so adorable and charming that you want to high-tail off to wherever Ali Smith is currently residing to give her a hug, tell her she’s awesome and follow her around like a lost little puppy for an entire day waiting for her to say something clever (which she will) and memorable (which she also will). I’m glad to say that How To Be Both didn’t disappoint in this area and reminded me, quite forcefully, why Ali Smith is one of the greatest writers of our generation. It is not just because of the adorableness of the book (which helps) but because she is incredibly clever, experimental and her novels are unlike any other. But just to prove how wonderful Smith is, read this little snippet (I read it to my daughter and she loved it):

“By the time she gets back upstairs Henry and H are engaged in a kind of verbal ping-pong.

Henry: As blind as?

H: Houses.

(Henry laughs)

Henry: As safe as?

H: A bell.

Henry: As bold as?

H: A cucumber.

(Henry rolls about on the floor laughing at the word cucumber.)

H: Okay. Switch!

Henry: Switch!

H: As keen as?

Henry: A cucumber.

H: As pleased as?

Henry: A cucumber.

H: As deaf as?

Henry: A cucumber.

H: You can’t just keep saying cucumber.

Henry: I can if I want.

H: Well, okay. Fair enough. But if you can, I can too.

Henry: Okay.

H: Cucumber.

Henry: Cucumber what?

H: I’m just playing it your way. Cucumber.

Henry: No, play it properly. As what as a what?

H: As cucumber as…a…cu-

Henry: Play it properly!

H: Likewise, Henry. Like plus wise.

When H goes home at eleven George literally feels it, the house becomes duller, as if all the light in it has stalled in the dim part that happens before a lightbulb has properly warmed up. The house becomes as blind as a house, as deaf as a house, as dry as a house, as hard as a house. George does all the things you’re meant to do before bed. She washes, she brushes her teeth, she takes off the clothes she’s been wearing in the daytime and puts on the clothes you’re meant to wear at night.”

How To Be Both is a novel split into two parts. The first part (I say the first part) is about George, a teenage girl whose mother has just died and is struggling to come to terms with it. She also looks after her young brother, Henry (of the extract above) and works around her father who has descended through grief into alcoholism. The second part (I say the second part) is about Francescho (Francescha), a Medieval Italian painter responsible for a fresco on the wall of a palace (the palace of not being bored) that George and her mother visited before her mother’s death, and over which George becomes slightly obsessive. In George’s era, little is known about the painter (presumed to be a man) who painted the frescos. In Francescho’s era it is shown that Francescho is, in fact, a girl who lives as though she is a man in order to pursue her painting.

I say these are the first parts and the second parts because depending on which version of the book you happen to buy or borrow, it may be one way around or the other. In the version I read George came first.

How To Be Both is an experimental novel, and there are a few core themes that flow through and structure the book. One, perhaps not surprisingly if you’re familiar with Smith’s oeuvre, is gender and it is notable that both key characters are girls and both are ‘both’ male and female. I think Smith is extremely adept at drawing out the nuanced duality of gender. George and Francescho are both male and female, though it is the character of Francescho which draws this most extremely. In her era she must live as a though a man if she is to follow through with her painting talent. It is one of the elements I love about Smith’s work, how she does not place her characters into genderised boxes, instead she shows a more true picture of gender – how people have attributes and those attributes are labelled ‘male’ and ‘female’ and the idea that your genitalia demand that you behave in a certain way is a societal construct that doesn’t fit when you apply it to real people. In the case of Francescho, she is forced to live in this extreme construct so that she can pursue her art, and through this character we see how potentially toxic this idea can be.

A second key theme in the book is time. This is most explored by George who is struggling with the idea of how her mother can be both dead and alive in her mind. She thinks of herself as the George of before and the George of after, whilst still being the same George and still having very present and alive memories of the time before. Tied into this is the question of language: does the English language force us to think in terms of before and after because of the way in which we use tenses; does the existence of tenses in language reflect an innate concept of time, or does the presence of tense in language force a mindset into which time is partitioned. It is an interesting question, especially considering that there are cultures and languages which do not have this highly structured concept of time. The character George is a grammar pedant, constantly correcting the speech of other. This is quite endearing, yet also annoying, and an excellent way to explore the question of time and language.

The theme which struck me most forcefully about How To Be Both was one of watching, or observation, particularly when the object of observation does not know it is being observed. This is a heavy presence throughout the whole of the book, and one which starts with the cover which includes two pictures: one by Francescho del Cossa which is on the rear cover, and the other a photograph of Sylvie Vartan and Françoise Hardy walking along a street. Both pictures figure heavily in the story. There are so many instances in which this theme occurs, and it is perhaps a key theme of our current era in which the ability to control one’s image is increasingly difficult. In George’s case we see her first encounter with H arising from a trend of girls recording other girl’s peeing in the bathroom, then posting the results on YouTube. H intervenes and saves George from humiliation, and through this they become friends. It is not the first time I’ve encountered this type of bullying in a novel – this was one of the more disturbing elements from A Tale for the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki and perhaps reflects the kind of sexual bullying that happens increasingly to women (revenge porn, for example, the hacking and posting of nude selfies, Kate’s breast photographed from a million miles away, etc etc).

Similarly George becomes compelled to watch a particular item of porn, in which a very young girl figures, over and over. This element, too, feeds into the theme of time, as George explains here:

“She told him she was doing it in witness, by extension, of all the unfair and wrong things that happen to people all the time.

George, it’s good of you, her father said. I applaud the sentiment.

It’s not just sentiment, George said.

Honestly George, when I saw you out here watching something I was cheered, he said. I thought, good, Georgie’s back, she watching something on the iPad, she interested in things again. I was pleased. But sweet heart. It’s appalling, that stuff. You can’t watch that. And you have to remember, it’s not really meant for you. And I can’t even look at it. And anyway. That girl. I mean. It probably happened years ago.

That’s no reason not to do what I’m doing, George said.

She was probably very well paid for it, her father said.

George’s eyes widened. She snorted.

I can’t believe you just said that, she said. I can’t believe I’m even related to you.

And sex isn’t like that. Loving sex. Real sex. Sex between people who love each other, her father said.

Do you really think I’m that much of a moron? George said.

And you’ll drive yourself mad if you keep watching stuff like that, her father said. You’ll do damage to yourself.

Damage has already happened, George said.

George, her father said.

This really happened, George said. To this girl. And anyone can watch it just, like, happening, any time he or she likes. And it happens for the first time, over and over again, every time someone who hasn’t seen it clicks on it and watches it. So I want to watch it for a completely different reason. Because my completely different watching of it goes some way to acknowledging all of that to this girl. Do you still not understand?”

George’s mother, too, felt she was being watched. Her mother was involved in a subversive art project which used internet popups to send messages, and she believed she was being followed, watched, by someone from the government. Yet George’s mother expresses this as something good, the idea of being watched making her more real and more alive. This is the conundrum that Smith explores from many different angles. Sometimes it is good to be watched, to be seen. It can be a positive thing. Yet there is a tipping point when being watched becomes menacing and dangerous. How do you walk the line between the two? People want to be seen, but not to the point where being seen becomes a hazard. This is a line many many women have to walk every day. And it is a line that is used against them too. You wore a short skirt, therefore it is not rape. You dressed for the male gaze, etc etc. These are fallacies, yet they are presented daily as truths. Smith’s cleverness, here, is in shining a light on those fallacies.

I could go on and on and on about this book. It is clever and entertaining. I haven’t explained here how present, how real the characterisation is. One of Smith’s strengths is in capturing the essence of a person in a few words (much as Francescho captures the essence of whatever she is painting in a few strokes). There is much about art, love, desire, the nature of human grief and loss. It is an interesting idea that the reception of the book could change if the stories are swapped, and I’d like to read How To Be Both again, with Francescho’s story coming first to see how that alters the way I feel about the book.

How To Be Both receives an enraptured 10 out of 10 Biis. I’d recommend everyone reads it. It is strange how it feels quite lightweight, frivolous at times and yet it is so deep. That is the cleverness of Smith. And that’s why I’m off to find a train now and seek out where she lives…

(okay, not really. But it’d be interesting wouldn’t it?)