1. FLOWERS
“Do you know what Mrs. Dalloway is about?” I asked Gaby.
“No, I don’t,” she said.
“It’s about a woman who’s going out to get flowers for her party and it takes place over a single beautiful day in the middle of June, in London.”
She said, “OMG I HAVE TO READ THAT.”
Clarissa Dalloway is going to get the flowers herself; she’s enjoying the sunshine, and she’s thinking. London is just starting to come alive again after the destruction of World War 1, everyone has lost something, the memory and immanence of death hangs in the air like fog,
Did it matter then, she asked herself, walking toward Bond Street, did it matter that she must inevitably cease completely; all this must go on without her; did she resent it; or did it not become consoling to believe that death ended absolutely? but that somehow in the streets of London, on the ebb and flow of things, here, there, she survived, Peter survived, lived in each other, she being part, she was positive, of the trees at home; of the house there, ugly, rambling all to bits and pieces as it was: part of people she had never met; being laid out like a mist between the people she knew best who lifted her on their branches as she had seen the trees lift the mist, but it spread ever so far, her life, herself.
Reading Mrs. Dalloway, one gets the impression that humanity is a congruent organism.
Nothing happens that don’t effect every single one of us; we inch forward like a glacier. But when we zoom into the particulars, each private experience is almost unspeakably rich, but the problem comes when you’re trying to articulate that to somebody else.
Between the lips and the voice a thing goes dying.
Peter Walsh pulls up to Clarissa’s house unexpectedly, when she’s back from her flower-mission; she almost married Peter when she was a teenager.
He’s been in India for almost a decade. He’s don’t look like the brisk figure from her youth.
And he’s here to tell her that he’s in love, with some young married woman with two kids he met on the boat to India; he’s in London because he’s looking for lawyers to handle her divorce.
When Clarissa first starts speaking to him, she thinks,
Now I remember how impossible it was ever to make up my mind—and why did I make up my mind—not to marry him? she wondered, that awful summer?
But she quickly remembers that deep down her and Peter are completely incompatible, as he sits in front of her, playing interminably with his pocketknife,
What an extraordinary habit that was, Clarissa thought; always playing with a knife. Always making one feel, too; frivolous; empty-minded; a mere silly chatterbox as he used.
Peter confesses to her that he’s in love.
In love! she thinks, and he’s six months older than I am! Being in love will be something Peter’s thoughts go back to all day long; it’s something he has over other people. Everyone else might be what they are, Clarissa might’ve chosen boring Richard Dalloway over him, all those years ago, but he’s in love, he has that.
Clarissa asks him,
But what are you going to do?
And that’s just what makes him not the man for her, he don’t know what to do, and she can see him thinking, tortured, playing with his knife,
For Heaven’s sake, leave your knife alone! she cried to herself in irrepressible irritation; it was his silly unconventionality, his weakness; his lack of the ghost of a notion what any one else was feeling that annoyed her, had always annoyed her; and now at his age, how silly!
Peter is overwhelmed by his feelings and not knowing what to do,
he burst into tears; wept; wept without the least shame
Weepy, lovelorn, indecisive Peter leaves Clarissa’s house with no answer, but he sees a pretty young girl with a red carnation and forgets about the girl in India for a moment and starts following her down the street,
She moved; she crossed; he followed her. To embarrass her was the last thing he wished. Still if she stopped he would say, “Come and have an ice,” he would say, and she would answer perfectly simply, “Oh yes.” But other people got between them in the street, obstructing him, blotting her out. He pursued; she changed. There was colour in her cheeks; mockery in her eyes; he was an adventurer, reckless, he thought, swift, daring, indeed, a romantic buccaneer
Until she goes into her house without even so much as noticing him, and he thinks,
Well I’ve had my fun; I’ve had it, he thought.
Boring Richard Dalloway would never do something like that.
2. ME. AND ME NOW.
Virginia Woolf (neé Stephens) herself had some personal experience with weepy men.
Her father Leslie, became a blubbering mess after her mother, Julia died,
After Julia’s death, the remaining members of the Stephen family plunged into a period of oppressive mourning that stretched for nine unhappy years. Leslie turned theatrical. He took to wandering the house with his arms outstretched, proclaiming his undying love for Julia and demanding that his daughters care for him with the same selflessness their mother had shown.
It’s no wonder that Virginia Woolf ended up marrying a staid, stolid, supportive fellow in Leonard Woolf. A man not unlike Clarissa’s husband Richard.
Whenever you read about this book people say Richard Dalloway is boring, and they sometimes refer to their marriage as unhappy.
But I think their marriage is happy. Richard is an earthy, practical, and kind guy; he don’t have Peter’s silly romantic vacillations.
Richard has his failings of course,
he never gave Clarissa presents, except a bracelet two or three years ago which had not been a success.
But so he’s walking around too, he was at a lunch to which Clarissa was not invited (a torment to her), and though he’s not perspicacious enough to realize she didn’t like him going to that lunch, he decides to pop by the house to tell her he loves her and surprise her with flowers (flowers are everywhere in this book!),
“I love you.” Why not? Really it was a miracle thinking of the War, and thousands of poor chaps, with all their lives before them, shoveled together, already have forgotten; it was a miracle. Here he was walking across London to say to Clarissa in so many words that he loved her. Which one never does say, he thought. Partly one’s lazy; partly one’s shy… Indeed his own life was a miracle; let him make no mistake about it; here he was, in the prime of life, walking to his house in Westminster to tell Clarissa that he loved her. Happiness is this, he thought.
Of course, he’s ultimately too shy to bring the words out of his mouth when he sees her, but she is thrilled, and she knows exactly what he means,
He was holding out flowers—roses, red and white roses. (But he could not bring himself to say he loved her; not in so many words.) …But how lovely, she said, taking his flowers. She understood; she understood without his speaking; his Clarissa.
So maybe she won’t have the teenage passion that she once felt for Peter, or for the real love of her life Sally Seton, who she also had a fling with when she was young,
She and Sally fell a little behind. Then came the most exquisite moment of her whole life passing a stone urn with flowers in it. Sally stopped; picked a flower; kissed her on the lips. The whole world might’ve turned upside down! The others disappeared; there she was alone with Sally.
But we have to chose the life we live.
The past is never far from the present in Mrs. Dalloway, but the tone is never nostalgic.
The past is an experience just the same as the present.
Woolf’s characters are capacious: her style perfectly conveys the irreducibility of personality. There are a million different, even contradictory things we could say about Clarissa, but we never lose sight of who she is.
In that way this book is extremely reminiscent of Ulysses.
One thinks of Leopold Bloom reminiscing on his first kiss with Molly and thinking,
Me. And me now.
Time passes, but there’s a You that remains contiguous.
I was stunned to find out that Virginia Woolf and James Joyce were born within a week of each other in 1882, and died in the same three month span at the start of 1941. I had a knee-jerk aversion to Woolf because I had this weird conception that she was some hoity-ass upper class British woman based on what she said about Ulysses,
An illiterate, underbred book it seems to me: the book of a self-taught working man, & we all know how distressing they are, how egotistic, insistent, raw, striking, & ultimately nauseating. When one can have cooked flesh, why have the raw?
But it’s so clear why her admiration for Ulysses would’ve been hedged or simply buried: they were competing! They were exact contemporaries exploring the same territory. And it’s funny that she calls Joyce self-taught, because she was something of an autodidact too,
Still, it is true that most of the knowledge Virginia gleaned during her childhood came from the books she squirreled from her father’s library. She turned their pages with a discipline so fierce, so relentless, that it concerned Leslie just as much as it astonished him.
That’s the attitude a real novelist gotta have toward reading: the books are there, but you pull them down yourself, hide away, devour them with frightening voracity. Joyce had the same exact attitude.
Interestingly enough, too, Woolf and Joyce had the same ambivalent devotion to Shakespeare.
A very important character in Mrs. Dalloway, Septimus Smith thinks,
How Shakespeare despised humanity! the putting on of clothes, the getting of children, the sordity of the mouth and the belly.
Both Joyce and Woolf have in droves what Keats called Shakespeare’s negative capability.
The author don’t tell us what characters are good or bad, they present them in all their fullness and we have to think it thru. I think both of them see a life-denying nihilism in Shakespeare; an attitude that produced the conditions of the first World War that caused,
The imminent death of twenty thousand men that for a fantasy and trick of fame go to their graves like beds.
There’s also a time-anxiety in Shakespeare, a desperate yearning for permanence; Time is the greatest evil,
Yet do thy worst, old Time; despite thy wrong.
My love shall in my verse ever live young.
Whatever Woolf and Joyce felt about permanence personally, the attitude in Ulysses and Mrs. Dalloway is a total acceptance and submission to time’s tyranny. I don’t think it’s right to even call it tyranny: the situation of time.
Charles Darwin is referenced frequently in Mrs. Dalloway; he is the perfect foil to Shakespeare’s time-anxiety.
Darwin has a God’s eye view of time. These processes that lead to Me and You right here have been going on longer and will continue longer than you can even fathom.
We gotta accept our impermanence. We can accept it so much we can even throw a party.
3. VIGOROUSLY FLUNG
Ok, we do have to talk a little bit more about Septimus Smith.
He might be the character Woolf put the most of herself into. He was a budding poet who moved to London and married a lovely young Italian woman, then he went to war where,
he developed manliness; he was promoted; he drew attention
But when he came back he was different,
For now that it was all over, truce signed, and the dead buried, he had, especially in the evening, these sudden thunder-claps of fear.
He’s all fucked up. This ain’t a world he can handle anymore,
One cannot bring children into a world like this. One cannot perpetuate suffering, or increase the breed of these lustful animals, who have no lasting emotions, but only whims and vanities, eddying them now this way, now that.
Septimus is having wild hallucinations. He thinks he’s gotten to the bottom of the mysteries of the world. He’s reading Dante in the park, but it’s just words, he don’t feel nothing. His wife, Rezia, tells him to stop reading Dante and to be her husband for a moment.
But nobody can understand him, especially not his wife Rezia,
For she could stand it no longer. Far rather would she that he were dead. She could not sit beside him when he stared so and did not see her and made everything terrible; sky and tree, children playing, dragging carts, blowing whistles, falling down; all were terrible… To love makes one solitary, she thought.
For a brief moment, later in the book, she recognizes her old Septimus.
She’s making a hat for a woman named Mrs. Peters, and he starts making fun of her and they start laughing together,
How it rejoiced her that! Not for weeks had they laughed like this together, poking fun privately like married people. What she meant was that if Mrs. Filmer had come in, or Mrs. Peters or anybody they would not have understood what she and Septimus were laughing at.
This is key.
For a second, this privacy of understanding stops being solely Septimus’s domain and he brings Rezia back into it. They’re together again. Mutual understanding is the bedrock of civilization. But it’s soon gone. Nobody will ever understand Septimus again. This world is not for him.
He must die,
He did not want to die. Life was good. The sun hot. Only human beings—what did they want? Coming down the staircase opposite an old man stopped and stared at him. Holmes was at the door. “I’ll give it you!” he cried, and flung himself vigorously, violently down on to Mrs. Filmer’s area railings.
The problem is other human beings.
If he can’t figure out and accept what they want, and they can’t understand him, then what’s the point?
News of his suicide (nobody knows the man, he is just a death to be reported) spreads at Clarissa’s party later that night, and she thinks,
Then (she had felt it only this morning) there was the terror; the overwhelming incapacity, one’s parents giving it into one’s hands, this life, to be lived to the end, to be walked with serenely; there was in the depths of her heart an awful fear… that young man had killed himself. Somehow it was her disaster—her disgrace. It was her punishment to see slip and disappear here a man, there a woman, in this profound darkness, and she forced to stand here in evening dress… Nothing could be slow enough; nothing last too long… But what an extraordinary night! She felt somehow very like him—the young man who had killed himself. She felt glad he had done it; thrown it away. The clock was striking. The leaden circles dissolved in the air. He made her feel the beauty; made her feel the fun.
Maybe Clarissa is enacting here the worst of what people say about her: snobbishness, sentimentality.
But I think she’s happy Septimus did it because she has considered this option before. It seems to her to be a reasonable reaction to the world.
And she’s just overwhelmed with gratitude that she did not chose that path, and instead, she threw this party.
And now they’re at this party. They are still trying to understand one another. That’s what Mrs. Dalloway is about. It’s about how to exist surrounded by misunderstanding and death.
And that’s what makes these fripperies like flowers and parties and literature so important: they’re an effort at connection, at ornamenting this shitpile we’re dropped into.
Death and suffering is waiting for all of us: Let’s party.
