Virginia Woolf Sums It Up

LESSONS FROM THE ENGLISH AUTHOR ON GRIEF AND HARD TIMES

BY HARRISON BERRY

There’s no good time to deliver bad news. And so, on a warm summer day filled with birdsong, I took a call from my mother, whose first three words changed my life: “He’s leaving me!”

Writing this, I have just received my first injection of the Moderna COVID-19 vaccination. The clouds from a year of quarantine and death have started to lift. With that release comes a new tension between wanting to make sense of what has happened to the world and my life, and the knowledge that, like my parents’ divorce, understanding may forever elude me. So it was for Woolf, whose life and work struggled to reckon with the havoc of the early 20th century.

My parents’ marriage lasted 35 years, produced two children, and survived the collapse of the family business. In the months following its seemingly random demise, friends and family would forward their theories of what happened, and my parents would never explain why they split sheets the same way twice. From my mother’s announcement of the divorce to today, I’ve followed Virginia Woolf’s observation that, “there is also the highly respectable opinion that character-mongering is much overdone nowadays.”

Born to a famous intellectual and a Pre-Raphaelite beauty, Woolf was raised among some of the greatest minds of the 19th century and with the full use of her father’s vast library. She was sexually abused early in life by a family member and, in 1895, her mother Julia died, kicking off a string of family calamities. She had a playful side. Her cadre of friends became the Bloomsbury Group, and in 1910, they participated in the Dreadnought Hoax, dressing as members of the Abyssinian royal family to gain access to the Royal Fleet and humiliate the Navy. A lifelong pacifist, she was deeply affected by the First World War.

Her first groundbreaking novel, Jacob’s Room (1922), from which I cribbed the above quotation, obsesses over its titular character, who was killed in that conflict. Its narrator lurks behind bushes and spies on Jacob socializing, but the truth of him confounds: “It is no use trying to sum people up. One must follow hints, not exactly what is said, nor yet entirely what is done.”

Thought to have suffered from bipolar disorder, Virginia Woolf was “one of the most professional, perfectionist, energetic, courageous, and committed writers in the language,” her literary biographer Hermione Lee said.

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Her characters reach for the cup of knowledge while Woolf pulls from the tap of grief. In her, depth of feeling meets breadth of output. Even in a sick year—Woolf probably suffered from bipolar disorder—she would send one novel to the printer and start writing another, all while keeping a diary,publishing shorter fiction and nonfiction, and reading voraciously. Describing her as “one of the most professional, perfectionist, energetic, courageous, and committed writers in the language,” her literary biographer Hermione Lee admitted, “I think I would have been afraid of meeting her. I am afraid of not being intelligent enough for her.”

I first read Jacob’s Room as a freshman in college, my professor telling me that Woolf and I were “eminently distracted people.” Her language and ideas are high-gloss, easy to read but difficult to understand. Woolf taught me more than anyone else that words depend on each other for meaning, like people, and this strongly influences my writing and my relationships. I later wrote my thesis about gender transformation in her novels, and her books on my shelf serve as testament to my pride in that project.

I thought how unpleasant it is to be locked out; and I thought how it is worse, perhaps, to be locked in.

-Woolf on the lockdown during the approach of the Second World War.

Then came life-graduate school, failed romances and the deaths of grandparents. I began my journalistic career just as newspapers slipped into decline. The divorce fell in there, and speaking with my parents I felt as shamefully mute as Lily Briscoe did in To the Lighthouse (1927), when Mr. Ramsay came to her with his grief after the death of his wife. Mom and Dad bore their souls as best they could to assuage the fears and answer the questions they were sure I had. Sometimes, I wondered if I was a bad son for not feeling as intensely as they did? Perhaps, like Lily, I, “should have known how to deal with it.” Experience suggested fresh re-readings of her classics, and Woolf didn’t disappoint.

As the Second World War approached, London prepared for the Blitz. “There is no society, no luxury, no splendour, no gadding and fitting,” Woolf wrote of the great metropolis on lockdown. “I thought how unpleasant it is to be locked out; and I thought how it is worse, perhaps, to be locked in.”

Life similarly contracted in the present crisis, but the planet nonetheless rotated and robins now sit outside my window in yellow warmth. Do you hear their songs?