A Writer’s Life Readings Week 2: Virginia Woolf, The Waves
Curated and read by Beena Kamlani
26th April, 2020
Hello Friends: Welcome back. Last week I read from Stefan Zweig’s Balzac, where nighttime silence brings the solitude most conducive to creativity. Today, I’m focusing on a different kind of solitude: the kind you experience only in a city. Even while immersed within its milling crowds and its raucous sounds, it provides a solitariness that revives us, brings us both the opening-up we’re looking for and the aloneness we need to feel our thoughts, to give words to our feelings. We form our own affiliations, establish our own landmarks, make the city our own. As our cities closed down to avoid the worst miseries of the coronavirus, we wondered what would happen to a cherished bookstore, restaurant, bar, or hardware shop. Sheltering in our homes, we worry about what will still be there when we emerge? Will we ever be able to eavesdrop, and flirt across tables, and walk in groups again? No one knew this feeling of impending loss better than Virginia Woolf, a walker of the first order. During the war, as beloved buildings fell to bombs, and people disappeared, she wondered, as we will wonder, what happened to all the people who worked in our chosen places—the people who handed us our lattes, our bagels, our oven-hot pizza slices. The first three passages are from Francesca Wade’s marvelous new book Square Haunting. The final selection is from the concluding passages of Virginia Woolf’s novel, The Waves.
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“Woolf associated walking in London with fertile trains of thought—she often referred to ‘making up’ phrases and scenes as she rambled through Bloomsbury or around Charing Cross—and called her visceral response to city-walking ‘street frenzy.’ She described the city as ‘reviving my fires’ after days spent indoors through illness or bouts of hard work: ‘London itself perpetually attracts, stimulates, gives me a play and a story and a poem without any trouble, save that of moving my legs through the street…To walk alone in London is the greatest rest.’ London, she wrote to Ethel Smyth after the Blitz began, was ‘the passion of my life’: even the uncomfortable tenure at Mecklenburgh Square had not dimmed her love for the city and her belief in its healing powers. Early in the war she had written: ‘Odd how often I think with what is love I suppose of the City: of the walk to the Tower: that is my England; I mean if a bomb destroyed one of those little alleys with the brass bound curtains and the river smell and the old woman reading I should feel—well, what the patriots feel.’
In Rodmell in March 1940, lying awake in bed with the starlight pouring through the window, anxious about aeroplanes and Margery Fry, Woolf tried to force herself to think of something ‘liberating and freshening’; and chose ‘The river. Say the Thames at London Bridge; and buying a notebook; and then walking along the Strand and letting each face give me a buffet.’ Her words echo her 1927 essay “Street Haunting”, a paean to the imaginative possibilities of the city, in which a search for a lead pencil—a means of writing—provides ‘an excuse for walking half across London between tea and dinner.’ Wandering out, feeling like ‘an enormous eye’ giddy with the ‘irresponsibility which darkness and lamplight bestow,’ Woolf celebrates the sense of freedom and community she feels in London, where we ‘shed the self our friends know us by and become part of that vast republican army of anonymous trampers, whose society is so agreeable after the solitude of one’s own room.’ Gazing up into the lighted windows, she thinks of all the lives being lived in parallel, the characters, stories and history hidden—for now—behind closed doors. Her words are a rallying cry for the possibility of fiction, of history and biography, and by extension for the pleasure of reading.
‘Into each of these lives one could penetrate a little way, far enough to give oneself the illusion that one is not tethered to a single mind but can put on briefly for a few minutes the bodies and minds of others. One could become a washer-woman, a publican, a street singer. And what greater delight and wonder can there be than to leave the straight lines of personality and deviate into the heart of the forest where live those wild beasts, our fellow men?’
And from The Waves:
“Dawn is some sort of whitening of the sky: some sort of renewal. Another day; another Friday; another twentieth of March, January, or September. Another general awakening. The stars draw back and are extinguished. The bars deepen themselves between the waves. The film of mist thickens on the fields. A redness gathers on the roses, even on the pale rose that hangs by the bedroom window. A bird chirps. Cottagers light their early candles. Yes, this is the eternal renewal, the incessant rise and fall and fall and rise again.
“And in me too the wave rises. It swells: it arches its back. I am aware once more of a new desire.”
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Thanks for listening. Till next Sunday, be safe, be strong, be an “enormous eye.”
Thanks, also, to Francesca Wade for kind permission to read from her wonderful group biography of five women writers, Square Haunting, published in the U.K. by Faber and Faber and in the United States by Penguin Random House in April 2020.