The sun had not yet risen. The sea was indistinguishable
from the sky except that the sea was slightly creased, as if
a cloth had wrinkles in it. Gradually as the sky widened, a
dark line lay on the horizon dividing the sea from the sky,
and the gray cloth became barred with thick strokes
moving one after another beneath the surface following
each other, pursuing each other perpetually. As they neared the shore, each
bar rose, heaped itself, broke, and swept a thin
veil of white water across the sand. The wave paused and then drew
out again, sighing like a sleeper whose breath comes
and goes unconsciously. The light struck upon the
trees in the garden. The sun sharpened the walls of
the house and rested like the tip of a fan upon
a white blind. This has been a very animated
summer, a summer lived almost too much in public. But down here, I feel as
if I've entered into a sanctuary, a nunnery. I want to make 300 pounds from
my writing this summer. Then I can build a bath
and a hot water range here at Rodmell. But first I must strike
out some plan. Two lectures to prepare and
essays and reviews for the literary supplement. And the novel. I'm blown like an old flag
by Mrs. Dalloway. I feel I'm rushing towards the
end of it and I must stop myself, think what
I mean to say. This is one of the experiences I
have had here this summer, a consciousness of what
I call reality-- something abstract but residing
in the downs or sky, beside which nothing matters
in which I shall rest and continue to exist. Reality, I call it. And I fancy sometimes
this is the most necessary thing to me. But who knows once one takes
a pen and writes? How difficult not to go making
reality this and that, whereas it is one thing. Now, perhaps this is my gift. This perhaps is what
distinguishes me from other people. This is Monk's House in the
Sussex village of Rodmell. Virginia and her husband Leonard
Woolf bought the house for 700 pounds in July, 1919
and lived here when they weren't in London. Virginia Woolf's ashes were
buried here in the garden after she had drowned
herself in 1941. What distinguishes Virginia
Woolf is her attempt to make fiction get at something
abstract. This wasn't an easy
thing to do. There's often a painful feeling
of effort as well as a lyrical power in her novels. In her diaries, you can see her
trying over and over to find the right shape, the right
form, the right words for her vision. She was working towards
it in the three novels before Mrs. Dalloway. By 1923, she had mastered
her new form. The idea was that instead of
having a chronological plot, distinct actions, and dramatic
events, the narrative would move fluidly in and out of
different minds, in and out of speech and silence, in and out
of the past and the present. A day in the life of a
middle-aged woman planning her party might not sound
very experimental. But Mrs. Dalloway is Virginia
Woolf's first completely successful modernist novel. Mrs. Dalloway said she would
buy the flowers herself. For Lucy had her work
cut out for her. The doors would be taken
off their hinges. Rumpelmayer's men were coming. And then, thought Clarissa
Dalloway, what a morning-- fresh as if issued to children
on the beach. It was June. The war was over, the King and
Queen were at the palace, and she too was going that very
night to kindle and illuminate, to give her party. Look, Septimus. Look at the lady's flowers. Let us get on, Septimus. All right! Mrs. Dalloway stiffened. Oh, if she could have had her
life over again, she thought, remembering those summers
when she was young. How fresh, how calm the air was
in the early morning, like the flap of a wave, the
kiss of a wave. Musing amongst the vegetables? I prefer men to cauliflowers. Peter Walsh. He'll be back from India
one of these days. June or July, I forget which. She would still find herself
arguing, still making out that she had been right-- and she had too-- not to marry him. Though she had worn about her
for years, like an arrow sticking in her heart, the
grief, the anguish. She felt very young-- at the same time, unspeakably
aged. She had a perpetual sense
of being shut out, far our to sea and alone. She always had the feeling
that it was very, very dangerous to live
even one day. She had the oddest sense of
being herself invisible, unseen, unknown. There being no more marrying,
no more having of children now, but only this astonishingly
and rather solemn progress with
the rest of them-- this being Mrs. Dalloway. Away What do I feel about
my writing? This book, Mrs. Dalloway. One must write from deep
feeling, said Dostoevsky. And do I? Or do I just fabricate with
words, loving them as I do? Have I the power of conveying
the true reality, or do I just write essays about myself? The questions Virginia Woolf
asked herself about her writing are ethical,
conscientious questions. She inherited this cast of
mind from her father, the eminent man of letters,
Leslie Stephen. Leslie Stephen was an admirable
intellectual mentor, but he had no idea how
to bring up children. After the shocking death of
her mother in 1895 when Virginia was 13, the four
Stephen children had a terrible time with
their autocratic, grief-stricken father. Virginia Woolf's writing is
always coming back to the stifling oppressiveness of the
Victorian, patriarchal home and the lack of opportunity
for Victorian daughters. When Leslie Stephen died and the
Stephen children moved to Gordon Square and Toby Stephen
brought his serious-minded men friends back from Cambridge to
talk about GE Moore and the meaning of beauty, the
reaction was intense. If the Bloomsbury group had one
general quality, it was the rejection of Victorianism. This took some very
different forms. Lytton Strachey's debunking of
19th century biography in eminent Victorians. Roger Fry's championing
of French post-impressionist painters. E. M. Forster's novels of
personal relationships. And Leonard Woolf's moderate
left support for disarmament and the League of Nations. You can see the Bloomsbury style
in The Decoration of Charleston by Vanessa Bell
and Duncan Grant-- light, optimistic, anti-authoritarianism domestic. Bloomsbury's attractive
qualities, I think, are its liberalism and freedom of speech
about homosexuality, for instance, its dislike of
imperialism, its feeling for European culture, and its
skepticism and willingness to debate, where you can detect
some leftover Victorian earnestness. The unattractive side of the
Bloomsbury Group, which has perhaps come to dominate our
view of it by now, is its snobbery, its aura of
privileged, middle-class self-satisfaction. That class bias does come
out in Virginia Woolf. But on the whole, I think her
reputation has suffered by being identified too closely
with the group. The most potent material for her
fiction was not her modern friends but her Victorian family
and her childhood. So she was not so much turning
her back on Victorianism as rewriting it, transforming it. People say I can't create
characters that survive. And I daresay it's true. I haven't the traditional
reality gift. I want to give the moment whole,
whatever it includes. Waste, deadness, come from the
inclusion of things that don't belong to the moment. This appalling narrative
business of the realist, getting on from lunch
to dinner. It's false, unreal, merely
conventional. I want to lay the emphasis upon
such unexpected places that at first it seems as if
there were no emphasis at all. And then as the eyes accustom
themselves to the twilight and discern the shapes of things in
a room, we see how complete the story is. Like a nun withdrawing or a
child exploring a tower, Mrs. Dalloway went up to her room. There was an emptiness about
the heart of life-- an attic room. The sheets were clean, tight,
stretched in a broad white band from side to side. Narrower and narrower
would her bed be. Richard insisted after her
illness that she must sleep undisturbed. And really, she preferred
to read, he knew it. So the room was an attic,
the bed narrow. And lying there reading, for she
slept badly, she could not dispel a virginity preserved
through childbirth which clung to her like a sheet. I can see what I lacked. It wasn't beauty. It wasn't mind. It was something central
which permeated-- something warm that broke up
surfaces and rippled the cold contact of man and woman
or of women together. But this question of love,
falling in love with women-- take Sally Seton, her
relation in the old days with Sally Seton. Had not that, after
all, been love? I've discovered I've
got French blood in my veins, you know. I'm not sure I believe you. It's true. It's true. I've got an ancestor who had
his head cut off with Marie Antoinette. He left a blood-red ruby ring
to his daughter who ran away to England. The strange thing on looking
back was the purity, the integrity of her feeling
for Sally. It was not like one's
feelings for a man. It was protective on her side,
sprang from some sense of being in league together, a
presentiment of something that was bound to part them. But she could remember going
cold with excitement and doing her hair in a kind of ecstasy
and dressing and going downstairs and feeling as she
crossed the garden, if it were now to die, 'twere now
to be most happy. That was her feeling,
Othello's feeling. And she felt it, she was
convinced, as strongly as Shakespeare meant Othello to
feel it, all because she was going down to the lake
in a white frock to meet Sally Seton. Such a shame to sit indoors. It's been such a glorious day. Sally, what will happened
when we get married? I'm not sure I shall
get married. I'd rather smoke cigars
and read books. There she was, alone
with Sally. And she felt that she had been
given a present, something infinitely precious, wrapped
up, which as they sat there together she uncovered. Stargazing? It was like running one's
face against a granite wall in the darkness. The intrusion was shocking,
horrible. Peter Walsh. The mind receives a myriad
impressions. From all sides they come. And as they fall, as they shape
themselves into the life of Monday or Tuesday,
the accent falls differently from of old. The moment of importance
is not here but there. As well as being one of the most
important of the English modernists, Virginia Woolf's
exceptional in being the only woman writer of the same stature
as Joyce or Conrad or Proust or Kafka. Like all the great modernists,
she's full of tensions and contradictions. She celebrates life intensely,
but she also writes constantly about death. A lot of her fiction is
melancholy and elegiac. She's not religious. But there's a mystical quality
to her writing. That mysticism is part of her
central attempt to get to the reality behind appearances. I am not old yet. She had just broken into
her 52nd year. Months and months of it
were still untouched. And as if to catch the falling
drop, Clarissa Dalloway plunged into the very
heart of the moment, transfixed it there-- the moment of this June morning
on which was the pressure of all the other
mornings, seeing the glass, the dressing table, and all the
bottles afresh, collecting the whole of her at one point,
seeing the delicate pink face of the woman who was that very
night to give the party-- of Clarissa Dalloway,
of herself. Is this what the young women of
Cambridge expect me to talk about when they ask me to
lecture on women and fiction? The world sounds so simple. But 1,000 questions at once
suggest themselves. It seemed inevitable that I
started work on this lecture at the British Museum. If truth is not to be found on
the shelves of the British Museum, where, I ask
myself, is truth? And what was London
doing on the day I set out on my research? Well, nobody it seemed
was reading Othello. Nobody had seemed cared a straw,
and I do not blame them, for the future of fiction,
the death of poetry, or the development by the
average woman of a prose style completely expressive of
her state of mind. London was like a machine. We were all being shot backwards
and forwards on this plane foundation to
make some pattern. The British Museum was another
department of the factory. The swing-doors swung open, and
there one stood under the vast dome as if one were a
thought in the huge, bald forehead which is so splendidly
encircled by a band of famous names. One went to the counter, one
took a slip of paper, one opened a volume of the
catalog, and-- have you any notion of how many
books are written about women in the course of a year? Have you any notion how many
are written by men? Anyone who feels inclined to
dismiss Virginia Woolf as an ethereal, apolitical, neurotic
lady novelist should look at the range of her achievements. Apart from the nine novels, she
wrote enormous amounts of very distinguished criticism
and essays, a biography of Roger Fry, and volumes of
brilliant letters and diaries. She and Leonard set up and ran
their own publishing house, the Hogarth Press. She lectured and taught, and
she was an active feminist. Her two long feminist essays,
A Room of One's Own of 1929 and Three Guineas of 1938
both started as lectures to women audiences. You can hear Virginia Woolf's
public speaking voice in A Room of One's Own, elegant,
reasonable, ironic, and carefully in control
of its indignation. Mrs. Dalloway was written
some years before the feminist essays. And it isn't a feminist novel
in the obvious sense. Clarissa, after all, is a very
feminine, dependent, apolitical character. But it does act out in fictional
terms what the essays are saying. For one thing, it's a novel
which resists coercion and tyranny, the forces that have
sent the young men to their deaths in the War. And though Clarissa may seem
to be part of the social system, an MP's wife giving a
smart Westminster party, her secret self is outside it. This is partly expressed
sexually. Her deepest feelings were for
her girlhood friend Sally Seton, and she's married a man
who would give her some space in her life, not Peter Walsh,
who would never have left her alone. But Virginia Woolf's particular
kind of feminism isn't just in the subject
matter of the novel. It's also in the way
it's written. Clarissa wanting to resist
tyranny and coercion in life is like Virginia Woolf wanting
to resist old rules and rigid forms for the novel. So she connects her characters
through a fluid stream of consciousness. She dissolves official time, the
time that's measures out in clocks and bells, into
private interior time, memories, dreams, meditation. There must be two levels of
being, the surface and the spreading depths. To tell the whole story of a
life, a writer must devise a means by which the two levels of
existence can be recorded. The rapid passage of events
and actions, the slow unfolding of single and
solid moments, of concentrated emotion. Quiet descended on Mrs.
Dalloway, as her needle drawing the silk smoothly to its
gentle paws collected the green folds together and
attached them very lightly to the belt. So on a summer's day,
waves collect, overbalance, and fall. Collect and fall. And the whole world seems to
be saying, that is all. [RINGING] Is Mrs. Dalloway expecting
you, sir? Mrs. Dalloway will see me. Oh yes, she'll see me. After five years in India,
Clarissa will see me. She heard a hand
upon the door. Now the brass knob slipped. Now the door opened. And in came-- for a single second,
she could not remember what he was called. Peter Walsh. So surprised she was to see
him, so glad, so shy, so utterly taken aback to have
Peter Walsh come to her unexpectedly in the morning. And how are you? I'm quite well-- She's grown older. --I was ill, you know-- I shan't tell her anything
about it, for she's grown older. She's looking at me. Exactly the same. The same queer look, the same
Czech suit, a little out of the straight, his face
is, a little thinner, drier, perhaps. But he looks awfully
well just the same. How heavenly it is
to see you again. I only reached town last night,
and I shall have to go around to the country at once. And what's all this? He is very well dressed. Yet he always criticizes me. Here she is, mending
her dress. Mending her dress as usual. Here she's been sitting, all the
time I've been in India, mending her dress, playing
about, going to parties. So it is. So it is. And how's Richard? Richard's very well. He's at a committee. Do you mind if I just finish
mending my dress? We've got a party tonight, which
I shan't ask you to, my dear Peter. And why not? It's delicious to hear you
say, my dear Peter. It's all so delicious,
the silver, the chairs, all so delicious. Now of course he's enchanting,
perfectly enchanting. Now I remember how impossible
it was for me ever to make up my mind. And why did I make up
my mind not to marry him that awful summer? Will your guests be as
dull as all that? I always enjoyed your parties. It's so extraordinary that you
should have come this morning. Do you remember those summers
at my father's house in the country? I do. Herbert has it now. I never go there. Do you remember the lake? Yes, yes, yes. Yes. It was an awful day. And he couldn't see Clarissa,
couldn't talk to her. That was the devilish part of
her, this coldness, this woodenness, something very
profound in her which she had felt again this morning. Everyone had gone. They were going boating
on the lake. They had all gone out. He was left quite alone. Come along. We're waiting. Clarissa. For there she was. He had never felt so happy
in the whole of his life. Why go back like this
to the past? Why make me think of it again? Why make me suffer when you
tortured me so infernally? It almost broke my heart. I was more unhappy than
I've ever been since. Oh, for heaven's sake, leave
your knife alone. You don't have the ghost
of a notion what anyone else is feeling. I know all that. I know what I'm up against. I'm a failure compared
with all this. But I'm not old. My life is not over yet,
not by any means. I'm only just 50. [CRYING] It is all over for me. The sheet is stretched
and the bed narrow. Clarissa refused me. I must go now. You've been so kind. It was if the five acts of
a play that had been very exciting and moving
were now over. Now it was time to move. And as a woman gathers her
things together, her cloak, her gloves, her opera glasses,
and gets up to go out of the theater into the street,
she rose from the sofa and went to Peter. Peter? Peter, remember my
party tonight. And doubtless I shall be
criticized as before. For it's obvious that the values
of women differ very often from those values which
have been made by men. Well, naturally this is so. Yet it is the masculine
values that prevail. Speaking crudely, football and
sport are important, the worship of fashion, the buying
of clothes trivial. WEBVTT And these values are inevitably
transferred from life to fiction. This is an important book, the
critic assumes, because it deals with war. This is an insignificant book
because it deals with the feelings of women in
a drawing room. The sun no longer stood in the
middle of the sky, its light slanted, falling obliquely. Here it caught on the edge of
a cloud and burnt it into a slice of light, a blazing
island on which no foot could rest. Then another cloud was caught
in the light and another and another, so that the waves
beneath were arrow-struck with fiery, feathered darts that shot
erratically across the quivering blue. My mind is wool-gathering away
about women and fiction. The lectures I've been asked to
give at Cambridge, should they be called A Room
of One's Own? Young women of Cambridge, you've
asked me here to talk to you about women
and fiction. The words sound so simple. But when I began to consider the
subject, I soon saw that it had one fatal drawback. I should never be able to
come to a conclusion. I should never be able to
fulfill what I understand is the first duty of a lecturer,
to hand you, after an hour's discourse, a nugget of pure
truth, for you to wrap up between the pages of your
notebooks and keep on the mantelpiece forever. As I prepared for this lecture,
I thought of that old gentleman-- who is dead now but was
a bishop, I think-- who declared that it was
impossible for any woman, past, present, or to come,
to have the genius of Shakespeare. He wrote to the papers
about it. He also told a lady who applied
to him for information that cats do not, as a matter
of fact, go to heaven. Although they have, he added,
souls of a sort. How much thinking those old
gentlemen used to save one! How the borders of ignorance
shrank back at their approach. Cats do not go to heaven. Women cannot write the
plays of Shakespeare. That persistent voice kept
coming back to me, now grumbling, now patronizing, now
domineering, now grieved, now shocked, now angry,
now avuncular. That voice that cannot let women
alone but must be at them like some too-conscientious
governess, adjuring them to be refined,
dragging even into the criticism of poetry criticism of
sex, admonishing them-- if they would be good and win, as
I suppose, some shiny prize-- to keep within certain limits
that the gentleman in question thinks suitable. Female novelists should only
aspire to excellence by courageously acknowledging the
limitations on their sex. That puts the matter
in a nutshell. Limitations of their
sex indeed. And what would the gentleman
in question think of Mrs. Dalloway? I think the design is more
remarkable than in any of my other books. Reviewers will say it's
disjointed because of the mad scenes not connecting with
the Dalloway scenes. But I want it to be a study of
insanity and suicide, the world seen by the sane and
the insane side by side. I still feel in the thick of
the mad scene in the park. Look, Septimus. Look at the lady's flowers. Let us get on, Septimus. All right. Virginia Woolf was worried that
Clarissa Dalloway might come out too stiff, too
glittering and tinsely. She tried to prevent this by
taking us into Clarissa's memories and by linking her
with a young man, the shell-shocked, suicidal
Septimus Warren Smith. This was a difficult thing
to do, since Septimus and Clarissa never meet
in the novel. But at the climax, Septimus's
death must come as a message of truth for Clarissa. Originally, in fact, Virginia
Woolf intended Clarissa to kill herself or to die at
the end of the party. The two characters are connected
not through plot but through overlapping images,
similar physical sensibilities, shared lines of
poetry and shared feelings of alienation from the
social world. Even so, Virginia Woolf thought
people would say that the novel was disjointed because
of the mad scenes not connecting with the
Dalloway scenes. And there is a sense of
strain in the way the connection is made. But it's that connection between
Septimus and Clarissa which gives the novel
its meaning. In historical terms, Septimus
stands for the appalling legacy of the war. By comparison, Clarissa's
pleasure in life, London, this moment in June, seems trivial. Septimus puts her
in her place. It's wicked. Why should I suffer? No. I can't stand it any longer. He says hard, cruel things. He talks to himself, to a dead
man on that seat over there. I've done nothing wrong. I have loved him. I have been happy. Why should I suffer? She must go back again to
Septimus since it was almost time for their appointment
with the doctor, Sir William Bradshaw. She must go to him, sitting
there under the tree talking to himself or to that
dead man, Evans. He had seemed such a nice, quiet
man, a great friend of Septimus, and he had been
killed in the war. But Septimus had grown stranger
and stranger. He said people were talking
behind the bedroom walls. Suddenly he said, now we
will kill ourselves. How wicked people are. I can see them making up lies
as they pass in the street. I know all their thought. I know everything. I know the meaning of
the whole world. When peace came, I was in Milan,
billeted in the house of an innkeeper with a
courtyard, flowers, and little tables in the open, daughters
making hats. And to Lucretia, the younger
daughter, I became engaged one evening when the panic was on
me that I could not feel. But I am so unhappy, Septimus. Love between a man and woman was
repulsive to Shakespeare. The business of copulation was
filth to him before the end. But she said she must
have children. We have been married
five years. My hand has grown so
thin I've put my wedding ring in my purse. Oh, look. Our marriage is over. The rope is cut. I am free. As it was decreed that I, the
lord of men, should be free. I am called for in advance
of the mass of men to hear the truth. The trees are alive. Next, there is no crime. Next, love-- universal love. It is time. Time. Time. Always time. Time, time, time. The word time split Its
husk and poured its riches over him. And from his lips fell like
shells, like shavings from a plane without his making them,
hard, white, imperishable words and flew to attach
themselves to their places in an ode to time. He sang. Evans answered from
behind the tree. The dead are in Thessaly. Evans sang among the orchids. There they waited till
the War was over. But the branches parted. A man in gray was actually
walking towards them. It was Evans. But no mud was on
him, no wounds. He was not changed. I must tell the whole world. The time, Septimus. What time is it? WEBVTT I will tell you the time. It is a quarter to the hour. I have-- I have committed a crime. The whole world was clamoring,
kill yourself, kill yourself. But why should he kill himself
for their sakes? How does one set about it? With a table knife uglily
with floods of blood or sucking a gas pipe? Now that he was quite alone,
condemned, deserted, as those who are about to die are alone,
there was a luxury in it, an isolation full of
sublimity, a freedom which the attached can never know. He was an outcast who gazed back
at the inhabited regions, who lay like a drowned sailor
on the shore of the world. Heavens, heavens. For god's sake, don't come. Septimus, you mustn't shout. You mustn't upset yourself. And that is being young-- to be having an awful scene. The poor girl looks absolutely
desperate. But what is it about? What awful fix have they got
themselves into, both to look so desperate as that on a
fine summer afternoon? --people are watching us. Septimus. Oh, Clarissa. Clarissa. Clearly Virginia Woolf was
writing here about the two sides of her own nature. She had already had two
prolonged experiences of mental illness and had made at
least one suicide attempt. When she writes about Septimus's
hallucinations, she's writing about her
own experience. Her whole life was a fragile,
careful balancing act between being able to use her intense
mental states creatively and feeling them take her
over and engulf her. I don't think it's at all easy
to talk about Virginia Woolf's mental instability in relation
to her writing. It's possible to diminish the
value of her fiction by seeing it merely as an expression
of neurosis. This goes along with the kind
of criticism started by the Leavises, which attacks her
for being too precious and rarefied and sensitive. As Iris Murdoch once said about
Mrs. Ramsay in To the Lighthouse, some people think
there's a bit too much luminosity based on
not enough stuff. A more admiring kind of critical
approach, which can also in its way be rather
damaging, is to interpret all the novels, particularly the
Septimus sections of Mrs. Dalloway, as cathartic
autobiographies which show the greater insights that
madness can produce. What strikes me most is the
amazing discipline and control with which she mastered the
subject of madness and contained it inside the shape
of the novel even though writing about it, she said, made
her mind squirt so badly she could hardly
bear to go on. The way to rock oneself back
into writing is this. First, gentle exercise
in the air. A very good summer, this, for
all my shying and jibbing. Beautifully quiet, airy
and powerful. The body has gone
out of the air. It is thinning itself, becoming
pale and pure like the eyes of an old man. I like going from one lighted
room to another. Such is my brain to
me, lighted rooms. And the walks in the fields
are corridors. One's progress through life is
made immensely interesting by trying to grasp everything
as one passes. I feel as if I were putting out
my fingers tentatively on either side as I grope
down a tunnel rough with odds and ends. There I am, now. At last to the party. It is to be a most complicated,
spirited, solid piece, knitting together
everything, summing up Mrs. Dalloway. Fetch another tray
of glasses, Lucy. Oh, dear. It's going to be a failure,
a complete failure. Why do I do these things? Every time she gave a party, she
had this feeling of being something not herself and that
everyone was unreal in one way, much more real
in another. Clarissa. So you have come after all. Oh, I'm so pleased. There was a breath
of tenderness. Her severity, her prudery, her
woodenness were all warmed through now. And she had about her an
inexpressible dignity. A feeling of depression is on
me, as if we were old and near the end of all things. It must be the change from
London and incessant occupation. And then the party, the summing
up of Mrs. Dalloway, linking her with the suicidal
young man, Septimus. I daresay I shan't be able
to carry it out. And I begin to count
myself a failure. No, thank you. This party, these triumphs,
had a hollowness. And it might be that she was
growing old, but they satisfied her no longer
as they used. --Mrs. Dalloway, we hardly
dare to come in. No matter, no matter. And how is your son at Eton? He's just missed his 11
because of the month. Ugh. My husband minded even more than
I did, being nothing but an excellent boy himself. Just as we were starting out,
my husband was called up on the telephone. Very sad case. A young man had killed
himself. He was in the army and married
to a young Italian milliner. Apparently they lived
in Bloomsbury. [MUTTERING] Oh. In the middle of my party,
here's death. What business has she to talk
of death at my party? A young man has killed
himself. He has killed himself,
but how? Why has he done it? And she talks of
it at my party. I once through a shilling
into the serpentine. Never anything more. But he has flung it away. We go on living. I will have to go back. The rooms are so crowded. People keep on coming. They would grow old. A thing there was that mattered,
a thing wreathed about with chatter, defaced,
obscured in her own life, let drop every day in corruption,
lies, chatter. This he had preserved. Death was a defiance. Death was an attempt
to communicate. People feeling the impossibility
of reaching the center which mystically
evaded them. But this young man who had
killed himself, had he plunged holding his treasure? If it were now to die, 'twere
now to be most happy, she had said to herself once,
coming out in white. But this young men has
killed himself. Somehow it was her disaster. It was her punishment to see
sink and disappear here a man, there a woman, in this profound
darkness and she forced to stand here in
her evening dress. Odd, incredible. She had never been so happy. Nothing could be slow enough. Nothing lasts too long. Nothing could equal this having
done with the triumphs of youth, lost herself in the
process of living, defined it with a shock of delight as the
sun rose, as the day sank. People were still laughing and
shouting in the drawing room. The young man had
killed himself. But she did not pity him. She did not pity him with
all this going on. She felt somehow
very like him. She felt very glad that he had
done it, thrown it away, while they went on living. What's marvelous about Mrs.
Dalloway is not just its beautiful formal control and
its edgy, risky movement between madness and sanity. And it's not just that in this
novel she perfects her characteristic rhythmical,
lyrical prose sentence, which she would use again in To the
Lighthouse and The Waves. It's also that the novel
negotiates between a social history and the obscure secret
parts of the personality. Virginia Woolf tries to find a
language for the things that are hard to write about-- memory, dreams, the
mixing of physical and emotional states-- and to put the real things--
war, money, jobs, social relations-- at the periphery. But it's quite wrong, I think,
to say that she makes the factual areas simply
disappear. People often complain that she's
divorced from reality. But Mrs. Dalloway speaks very
powerfully about the effects of war on a particular
society. The English upper classes,
partly admirable, partly ridiculous, trying to carry on
as though nothing had happened while right in the middle of
their city, the ghost of a slaughtered soldier
is haunting a shell-shocked clark. That's a strong image. In her next novel, To the
Lighthouse, the War cuts like a great slice through
the middle. And in the '30s, she tried
harder than ever to find her own way of writing about the
rise of fascism and the imminence of the Second
World War. One of the impressive features
of Virginia Woolf's work is its courage. After Mrs. Dalloway, she goes
on looking for new forms for her vision of reality. If her novels have one thing in
common, it's that they all try to make some lasting and
coherent shape out of the intractable materials of life. But they all try to do
it in different ways. Perhaps this is what gives
me my strongest pleasure. When in writing I seem to be
discovering what belongs to what, making a scene come
right, making a character come together. From this, I reach what
I call a philosophy-- at any rate, it's a constant
idea of mine-- that behind the cotton wool is
hidden a pattern and that we-- I mean all human beings-- are connected with this,
that the whole world is a work of art. But we are parts of
the work of art. Hamlet or a Beethoven quartet
is the truth about this vast mass that we call the world. But there's no Shakespeare. There's no Beethoven. Certainly and emphatically,
there is no God. We are the words. We are the music. We are the thing itself. Where's Clarissa? He looked back over that long
friendship of almost 30 years. Brief, broken, often painful as
their actual meetings had been, the effect of them on
his life was immeasurable. She had influenced
him more than any person he had ever known. Where is she? Why doesn't she come
and talk to me? Come along. We're waiting. Clarissa. For there she was. That is the moment. It is, or will become, a
revelation of some order, a token of some real thing
behind appearances. And I make it real by putting
it into words. The sun was sinking. The hard stone of the day was
cracked, and light poured through its splinters. Red and gold shot through the
waves in rapid, running arrows, feathered
with darkness. Erratically, rays of light
flashed and wandered, like signals from sunken islands. But the waves, as they neared
the shore were robbed of light and fell in one long concussion,
like a wall falling, a wall of gray
stone, unpierced by any chink of light.
