new yorker & virginia woolf, after the heatwave

A mother and two daughters living and talking with their bot friends in Cleveland, USA; the enhanced Olympics, impure competition no different from pure, both are camera-ready; the lost art of the bromance, american men and their friendships; two dramas of jewish identity I could relate to via films like dirty dancing; plus a poet's farewell to the world. "But, hey, it's not a deathbed till you die in it." This is New Yorker fare, read prone on a surly summer day, neither sunny nor breaking the drought. 

Virginia Woolf, Between the Acts as antidote next day, and the one after that. I know the society of Virginia Woolf from inside; though I wasn't there I've read her long enough to be one of her own.

A paragraph more than halfway through, just after after the interval, as people are going back to their seats for the second half of the pageant, the va-et-vient of people and swallows in 1939, before her own death her place in someone's history, the pull of that in a garden. Harold Brodkey decided to write himself into his own death in a hospital bed. Virginia Woolf refines her place in England in the light of soon having none. 

For I hear music, they were saying. Music wakes us. Music makes us see the hidden, join the broken. Look and listen. See the flowers, how they ray their redness, whiteness, silverness, and blue. And the trees with their many-tongued much syllabling, their green and yellow leaves hustle us and shuffle us, and bid us, like the starlings, and the rooks, come together, to chatter and make merry while the red cow moves forwards and the black cow stands still.  

late Virginia Woolf

As I read Virginia Woolf's The Waves this time I slowed and slowed until the last fifty pages took nigh on a week. I still have a few pages left, in fact. Now that she has massed her six characters, Bernard, Neville, Jinny, Susan, Rhoda and Louis, plus Percival, who died in an accident in India, now she has pulled them in close to herself and finally met them as her own creatures, I am not ready; I will never be ready. The coming together of these six or seven creatures, the uniting of them as hers, as mine, I can wait for as long as it takes.

And now I ask, "Who am I?" I have been talking of Bernard, Neville, Jinny, Susan, Rhoda and Louis. Am I all of them? Am I one and distinct? I do not know. We sat here together. But now Percival is dead, and Rhoda is dead; we are divided; we are not here. Yet I cannot find any obstacle separating us. There is no division between me and them. As I talked I felt "I am you." This difference we make so much of, this identity we so feverishly cherish, was overcome.

This has been a late Virginia Woolf summer: Between the Acts, To the Lighthouse, Mrs Dalloway, and The Waves. An uneasy summer with uneasy weather. A communal awareness is always uneasy. The weather, the earth, know what to do.

Virginia Woolf was urban at heart. Gardens registered a little, seascape and blackcurrant bushes, but it was London streets that her creatures walked, that she walked, finding her phrases and writing them down in innumerable notebooks, writing herself down. 

George Craig, Grace Paley, Virginia Woolf, Katherine Poyntz,

How effortlessly you inhabit my life, said George Craig in a letter circa 1972. I didn't know quite what he meant but I was pleased and it was a model, a paradigm for much else, later. Writers inhabit my life effortlessly. As I came upstairs one evening, a few weeks ago, I had a Grace Paley moment. Whatever adjustments life was making just then, Grace Paley was the woman for them. I didn't need to read her; she was there.

And in July, a broody season, the field not yet cut, bird's foot trefoil showing up in new places, vetches and hawkbit moving down the slope, Virginia Woolf's Between the acts comes into focus. I read it, that is, technically that's what I'm doing. But it feels like setting a calque of an uneasy leisured england on the meadow I walk through and stare at every day, leisured and uneasy.

Reading, like walking, is associative. Pointz Hall, where Between the acts happens, in 1940, gave rise to a pseudonym I used once: Katherine Poyntz. The first novel I wrote, On foot the velvet odyssey, echoed the pageant of Between the acts as well as a performance I saw at the Edinburgh Festival in 1985, in which Europe shuffled west, puppets and humans alike.

So, when I say I have been reading Between the acts slowly for the past week or so, often at night, I am also adjusting my life to its past. Counting meadow brown butterflies and grasshoppers.

Suddenly the tune stopped. The tune changed. A waltz was it? Something half known, half not. The swallows danced it. Round and round, in and out they skimmed. Real swallows. Retreating and advancing. And the trees, O the trees, how gravely and sedately like senators in council, or the spaced pillars of some cathedral church....

E.M.Forster, The Celestial Omnibus, Proust

The first three paragraphs of my copy of 'The Celestial Omnibus' by E.M. Forster have pencil brackets around them. This was a passage for translation I chose circa 1978, trying for completeness in the classroom as elsewhere, I willed the students to sense the moment of beginnings and endings before they fell into the messy pit of translation into french.

At dawn an early twentieth century boy rides an omnibus from the dead-end alley signposted To Heaven, opposite his house, at dawn, the steaming horses driven by Sir Thomas Browne, physician of the queasy soul. He meets a swathe of world literature and is home for tea.

I found the same brackets around the end of Virginia Woolf's Between the Acts, with its pageant in the garden, suffusing land and history, and then, the pageant over, the house giving little cracks as if it were very brittle, very dry, the garden returns to primeval forest. 'On the top of their matted branches birds sang...'.

When the boy takes the omnibus again next day, with Mr Bons, a family friend and possibly the wisest man in the world, owner of vellum books, and seven copies of Shelley, they are driven by a Dan someone, a sallow man with terrifying jaws and sunken eyes—Dante.

Marcel Proust said he wrote about his own past because he had no imagination. E.M. Forster, out of similar need, and only a tad more imagination, rehearses in his stories all he can't entirely deal with in his life.

Between the wise Mr Bons and the innocent boy, Marcel Proust or Virginia Woolf, is perfect literacy and dependency, an entirely period fantasy of which I am a late product. I am drawn to writers who find their safety in books, and, by extension, their authors. The celestial omnibus is driven by writers. The nether world is peopled by characters: Mrs Gamp, Mrs Harris, Achilles, Tom Jones and the Duchess of Malfi; the soundtrack is Wagner. Heaven is nether, it's a riot, and, the boy, in his innocence, gets back home to hand the cake-stand on another day.

Mr Bons the wise, who knows his Keats from his radishes, does not come back.

The body of Mr Septimus Bons has been found in a shockingly mutilated condition in the vicinity of the Bermondsey gas-works. The deceased's pockets contained a sovereign purse, a silver cigar-case, a bijou pronouncing dictionary, and a couple of omnibus tickets.