Like and ‘like’ and ‘like’ — but what is the thing that lies beneath the semblance of the thing?
The effort of The Waves is an effort of exactness. To test experience against language and language against experience is a task that has traditionally been the job of poets. It is the poet who must work at the image until image and meaning can no longer be separated. The force of poetry lies in its exactness.
To say exactly what one means, even to one’s own private satisfaction, is difficult. To say exactly what one means and to involve another person is harder still. Communication between you and me relies on assumptions, associations, commonalities and a kind of agreed shorthand, which no-one could precisely define but which everyone would admit exists. That is one reason why it is an effort to have a proper conversation in a foreign language. Even if I am quite fluent, even if I understand the dictionary definitions of words and phrases, I cannot rely on a shorthand with the other party, whose habit of mind is subtly different from my own. Nevertheless, all of us know of times when we have not been able to communicate in words a deep emotion and yet we know we have been understood. This can happen in the most foreign of foreign parts and it can happen in our own homes. It would seem that for most of us, most of the time, communication depends on more than words.
For the poet, there are words and there are words only. The poet must communicate through language or not communicate at all. If the poet feels an emotion which he or she cannot express, then for effective purposes, the poet does not feel that emotion. The reader is not expected to be psychic, and the reader does not have the poet before her, busily explaining, badly and at great length, what he really means. The poet does not have gesture, physical intimacy, well knownness or fifty-five other books on the subject that he or she can point to. The poet has the poem, made of words, and the reader has the poem, made of words. Often the poet is dead but if the words have been chosen with sufficient prescience the poem will be alive and will continue its work among new generations of readers.
The language poets use is and is not the language that all of us use. For a poet a word carries in itself an abundance of meanings. There is the meaning of the moment, because words alter their meanings, or less drastically, but with equal significance., they alter their associations. Thus the word ‘fantastic’ which means strictly, a matter of fancy, capricious, wild, has now been almost entirely submerged by its slang meaning of ‘excellent’. The poet who is considering ‘fantastic’ will have to be aware of its strict and its received meaning, but she will have to be aware too of how other poets have used the word. She will have to think of Shakespeare, say, The Two Gentlemen of Verona, ‘To be fantastique may become a youth of greater time than I shall show to be’ (where the context here glosses fantastic as extravagant, unrealistic, foppish even), and she will have to beware of Milton, who had an odd habit of using words arbitrarily. Recall his ‘fantastic-footed’ nymphs. We know he means their astonishing and other-worldly dancing style but how he means it is by bending the word, not so much as to break it but so as to make it accommodate him. All great poets do this, and inevitably their innovations become the stock of the language. Milton, though, like James Joyce, wanted to be the end-stop of the language. Both men hoped that their work would kill off any other means and any other method. The rest would be decoration merely. Joyce knew this about Milton but the irony seems to have been lost on him. While both men failed in their ambition but succeeded in their literature, the poet has to be wary of their wilful cul-de-sacing. It is often necessary to beat a retreat from the innovations of either man, not because their innovations are final, but because they are unhelpful. Both men carry their eccentricity to the point of a wholly private language. The poet has no use for a wholly private language; it is exactly what he is trying to avoid.
When Virginia Woolf objected to Ulysses (1922) on the grounds that ‘a great work of art should not be boring’, she was, I think, objecting to the schoolboy scrum of codes and jokes and back-handers, at once self-advertising and self-obscuring. Joyce’s freemasonry of language delights scholars, because it gives them something to do, but there is a danger that it appeals only to the acrostic element in most readers. Fathoming Joyce is fun, if you have that kind of mind, but if you do not have that kind of mind, what is fathoming Joyce for?
For itself. Of course. Modernism (in literature) was a poet’s movement. Like Woolf, Joyce had a fine ear, and he is entranced by the rhythm of words; the shuffle of words, the march of words, the words that dance, the words that can be choreographed into battle. He is Irish and he lets the words lead him down to the sea, through the strange green waters, until he is returned, salt-washed to the streets of Dublin. His pocketfuls of words, that abrade and glitter, he scatters them, grinds them, and eventually reforms them into a great whale of words, a thousand pages long, that spouts and dives and terrifies and welcomes little men with picks.
He is difficult. Woolf is difficult. Eliot is difficult. A poet’s method, because it works towards exactness, is exacting on the reader. The nineteenth-century novel, and I include in there, 95 per cent of English novels written now, in the late twentieth century, is a loose overflowing slack-sided bag. Much can be stuffed into it and much of that without thought. A first-rate prose writer, Dickens, Emily Brontë, who veers unconsciously or perhaps half-guiltily, towards the poetic method, will create something much finer and firmer, but will still leave us with far too much for the journey. Robert Graves was wrong to try and write an essential, that is, a potted David Copperfield, but his irritation with Dickens was not out of place. No writer is safe from the temper of the times, and Dickens wrote feverishly in a feverish age that was made nervous by highbrowism, introspection, and the kind of intensity needed to make poetry. Even Tennyson had to hide his feminine sensibility behind themes of daring-do. There are people who say that if Dickens were alive now, he would be writing soap-operas. He would not but Marie Corelli would.
The poet wants readers. The poet wants to communicate but the poet cannot compromise her method. Not to build the Chinese Wall of a private language and not to slip into conversational slackness are the errors a poet must avoid. Either route has its temptations and when Eliot published The Waste Land (1922) he was accused of having followed after both. This is understandable when he and other Modernists were trying simultaneously to find a language that could cope with the multiplicity and fragmentation of the new modern world and yet speak out to an ever-growing body of readers. The average reader (and we must remember that the average reader does not exist before the late nineteenth century) is a product of modern schooling and conservative taste. To be taught to read is not the same thing as to be taught how to read. The average reader demands that he find himself and his world in what he reads, in that the writer must be ever up to date, but at the same time, he demands that the writer’s form and style be at least a hundred years out of date. The average reader hates experiment and suspects innovation of being merely cleverness to trick him. He has the writer in an impossible arm-lock. ‘Write about ME,’ he says, ‘but make your poems rhyme and give your novels plenty of plot. Don’t be fancy and don’t be difficult.’ Hence the mass popularity of Galsworthy and co., and our present day obsession with reproduction nineteenth-century novels where only the costumes and the sex have been updated.
Under this kind of pressure, the lesser writer, however able, is likely to break down into populism or to retreat into an arid privacy, where only a few others will be welcome. There is no virtue in being difficult for the sake of being difficult. The poet’s method of exactness is a move towards a clearer communication and the more blurred everyday speech has become, the more precise must be the poet. This can be painful to the reader who is used to travelling through a lukewarm bubble of noise.
Of the great Modernist triangle, Eliot, Woolf and Joyce, Woolf seems to me to be the writer most interested in communication. Eliot put his faith in an élite, Joyce put his faith in himself, but Woolf, although a self-confessed highbrow, wants the world in her arms. That is, she sees the world as her business and her business to return it to itself again; coherent, whole.
Science they say, has made poetry impossible; there is no poetry in motor cars and wireless. And we have no religion. All is tumultuous and transitional. Therefore, so people say, there can be no relation between the poet and the present age. But surely that is nonsense. These accidents are superficial; they do not go nearly deep enough to destroy the most profound and primitive of instincts, the instinct of rhythm … Let your rhythmical sense wind itself in and out among men and women, omnibuses and sparrows, whatever comes along the street, until it has strung them together in one harmonious whole. That perhaps is your task – to find the relation between things that seem incompatible yet have a mysterious affinity. To absorb every experience that comes your way fearlessly, and saturate it completely so that your poem is a whole and not a fragment; to re-think human life into poetry and so give us tragedy again and comedy by means of characters not spun out at length in the novelist’s way, but condensed and synthesised in the poet’s way …
Letter to a Young Poet (1932)
Orlando was one of those happy events in a writer’s life, where, without compromising, and indeed while honing her own method, she cuts through to an audience who would usually regard her blankly, if at all. Woolf was delighted with her success but she knew she could not repeat it. To repeat it would have been to copy herself, and no true writer should copy anyone, especially themselves.
In 1931 she published The Waves and was dismayed to find that Leonard Woolf had printed up 7,000. ‘I’m sure three thousand will feed all appetites then the other four will sit around me for ever like decaying corpses in the studio.’ The Waves was a success, but it was not, at the time, the success of Orlando. Since then, its fate has been student bookshelves and university lists and even though it continues to sell all over the world, it is not easy to find someone who simply loves it because it is wonderful. Fortunately I found myself, and I hope that by discussing it now I will coax someone else into dusting it off the shelf and reading it again – for pleasure.
There is not a single sentence in The Waves that you would be likely to overhear on the street. Not a single sentence that you would be likely to speak yourself. This is the language we do and do not use. Intelligible, certainly, no Joyceisms, no secret passwords, nothing that cannot be readily construed, and yet and yet it is as strange and mobile as a language of a people undiscovered.
Who are they?
They are ourselves.
Susan, Jinny, Rhoda, Louis, Neville, Bernard. A hexagon of words. Six sides and six angles that form a crystal around the silent figure of Percival who stands perpendicular to their plane.
By refusing Percival a character other than the clean-cut lines of the hero; by denying him speech; by presenting him always through the consciousness of the others, Woolf creates the perfect stable focus for the cluster of altering energy that is the six.
Percival, so straight backed, is the civilised world at the best it can be. Percival inspires devotion, duty, effort, fair play. It is through Percival that the lines of the street steady. But against this sub-text of order and regularity, is the text itself.
We are only lightly covered with buttoned cloth; and beneath these pavements are shells, bones and silence.
The function of the Victorian novel is not to uncover the world but to recover it; to smooth it out in a matching fabric, to give it a coherence it would not otherwise possess. It is the Victorians, pattern makers and order-givers extraordinary, who are fervent in the religion of art as consolation. It is the Victorians who want to see not the skull beneath the skin but the head dignified even in tragedy. The Renaissance could manage both, and it seems to me that art must manage both if it is to be the right kind of consolation, if it is to reveal a genuine coherence and not one manufactured for the moment. I have said that the best Victorian writers push against the spirit of their age but that they were infected by it. Woolf was remarkably free from a falsity in fiction that has now reached epidemic proportions. Lifting the pavements, she did not lie, she found a language for shells, bones and silence.
This is not going to be the language of shop assistants and tabloids. It is not going to be the cultivated voice of education. It will have to be the language of a poet; heightened, exact, using rhythm not logic as its anchor.
This is hard to read. I am not talking about sense here, or philosophy, or ideas, or content. I mean that the chosen order of the words and the movement they make is so unfamiliar to us, that the experience of reading The Waves can be like listening to a piece of classical music that seems at first to have neither narrative nor structure. We are groping for the tune and all we can find are strange intervals and tones and beats. These can sound odd to an ear raised on the tumpety tum of jog-along prose with a melody line to whistle.
The opening is not promising; not promising that is, of narrative and structure as we have come to expect them in the concert afternoon of a well-made novel. We realise straight away, and rather crossly, that we have paid our money and we are not getting programme music.
‘I see a ring,’ said Bernard, ‘hanging above me. It quivers and hangs in a loop of light.’
‘I see a slab of pale yellow,’ said Susan, ‘spreading away until it meets a purple stripe.’
‘I hear a sound,’ said Rhoda, ‘cheep, chirp; cheep, chirp; going up and down.’
‘I see a globe,’ said Neville, ‘hanging down in a drop against the enormous flanks of some hill.’
‘I see a crimson tassel,’ said Jinny, ‘twisted with gold threads.’
‘I hear something stamping,’ said Louis. ‘A great beast’s foot is chained. It stamps, and stamps, and stamps.’
Try that at a creative writing class and you will be told it is no way to open a novel. Worse, the novel begins, as all its later sections do, with a passage about the sun on the waves. The passages are dense and particular. Rush the beginning and you will find yourself plunged too fast into the dialogue above. Take the overture slowly, as it needs to be taken, and you will be at exactly the right pace for the dialogue. It will come as a pleasure, and more than that, it will seem a right necessity.
The pace of Woolf’s writing is carefully measured. In The Waves the pace is slow. This is not a defect. Nobody would expect to play a piece of music at twice the speed of the score and be able to enjoy it. Yet, in literature this is happening all the time. The reader chooses the pace without taking the trouble to first pick up the rhythm. To get used to a writer’s rhythm, to move with a writer’s own beat, needs a little bit of time. It means looking at the opening pages carefully. It can help to read them out loud. Much of the delight everyone gets from radio adaptations of classics is a straightforward delight in pace. The actors read much more slowly than the eye passes, especially the eye habituated to scanning the daily papers and skipping through magazines. It is just not possible to read literature quickly. Neither poetry nor poetic fiction will respond to being rushed. In a traditional novel, in a crime novel, in any of the trash novels that come and go, it is easy to skim ahead or to miss out whole sections. To be truthful, there are whole sections of Dickens that should never have been written, therefore they should never be read. Tennyson at his worst is just as guilty. Nevertheless, a real book needs real time, and only by paying it that small courtesy can a reader begin to unravel it. The Waves is not Blackpool beach. There is no use in diving in here and splashing out there. I am sure that 90 per cent of the people who think it boring have never taken the time to read it.
It seems so obvious, this question of pace, and yet it is not. Reviewers, who can never waste more than an hour with a book, are the most to blame. Journalism encourages haste; haste in the writer, haste in the reader, and haste is the enemy of art. Art, in its making and in its enjoying, demands long tracts of time. Books, like cats, do not wear watches.
Over and above all the individual rhythms of music, pictures and words, is the rhythm of art itself. Art objects to the fakeries of clock culture.
This is one reason why it remains anarchic even at its most canonised. The modern world is Time’s fool. Art is master of itself.
But, you may say, who has long hours for a book these days? The answer must be whoever wants to read one. A reader must pick up a book, then the reader must pick up the beat. At that moment the clock is stopped.
Now I am getting his beat into my brain (the rhythm is the main thing in writing).
If rhythm, not logic is the anchor of The Waves, we should not be misled into thinking the book vague and pretty. It is not wallpaper. There is not a single unfocused shot in the entire book. Every passage, every sentence, every word, is hard and bright. Where Woolf wants to shade or fade for the sake of effect, she does so as a painter does so, by taking a strong line and manipulating it. This is quite different from a line unfixed or ill-drawn. Anyone can lack power; that is not the way to achieve a subdued tone. A subdued tone that works on us is a strong tone weathered by the artist.
Alone, I rock my basins; I am mistress of my fleet of ships. But here, twisting the tassels of this brocaded curtain in my hostess’s window, I am broken into separate pieces; I am no longer one.
This weathering, the clear image rubbed down until deeper layers of feeling show through is characteristic of Woolf, and part of her tonal capacity. She uses words that will bear inspection, that have association (impossible to read the above and not think of Cleopatra), that can be made to yield up more than their surface function. Nevertheless, the words at face value are strong enough to convey their primary meaning. You need not think of Cleopatra, but if you do, the image will be deeper coloured. A true poet knows that associative or cultural values alone, cannot be relied upon to ferry the meaning from her heart to yours.
She knows that if she is to pierce the thick wall of personality, her arrows, however beautifully decorated, must above all, be sharp.
Popular culture depends for its effects on popular associations. It is something of an in-joke, the product of a particular people at a particular time. This is why it dates so rapidly. If a piece of work is going to last it will have to have self-definition and depend on nothing but its own power.
Woolf’s words are cells of energy. Their relationship to one another increases that energy but the circuit is only complete when the book is taken as a whole. Woolf uses repetition, recurring imagery, particular rhythms for particular speakers, she is adept at plundering the stock of devisings bequeathed to her by her literary ancestors. This makes her a very satisfying writer; if we are interested in literature we want it to be literary. I have used the example of Cleopatra, and it is true that a reader finds pleasure in recognition. Recognition within the work itself; phrasing, notation, and recognition of other work that crowds in to watch this new piece performed. When Woolf writes she writes with generations at her back. There is more. No matter how brilliant, no matter how perfect are certain lines and certain passages, a book, a poem has to work altogether to be complete, and in its completion to cast light on its whole self. At the end of a piece of work there should be a feeling of inevitability; this could not have been made in any other way. At that moment, the watchers draw back, it is not, after all, their book. Here is Sterne, but it is not Sterne’s, here is Shakespeare, but it is not Shakespeare’s. Donne and Henry James stand in line, and there is that old villain Ben Jonson. The poet is connected, vitally so, but when we close the book there is only one voice we can hear; the writer’s own. It seems as if we are face to face at last and the busy world has disappeared.
Lover’s talk? yes. Private language? no. For most of us intimacy demands a private language; pet names, baby talk, double meanings known only to initiates. Thus we communicate across formality, through informality, communicating a confidence in one another and secrets we share. If the poet is not allowed to do this, is she playing a trick? Is she persuading us to feel that we belong when we have never met?
Trick no. Paradox yes. Exactness allows intimacy. The exactness a poet seeks is not the pedantry of the grammarian or the pile of dead bodies to be found in any technical manual. It is the same inspiration of relationship that the painter seeks, that the architect seeks, that the musician seeks. It is a harmony of form. A close balanced series of weights and measures and proportions that agree with one another and that agree as a whole. Poets and cathedrals sing.
The language of The Waves is the language of rapture. For some people this is embarrassing. The twentieth century, in the footsteps of the nineteenth, has difficulty with the notion of art as ecstasy. Yet that is the traditional notion and I believe it is the right one. It is quite easy to live at a low level of sensibility; it is the way of the world. There is no need to ask art to show us how to be less than we are. Art shows us how to be more than we are. It is heightened, grand, an act of effrontery. It is a challenge to the confines of the spirit. It is a challenge to the comfortable pleasures of everyday life. There is in art, still, something of the medieval mystic and something of the debauch. Art is excess. The fiery furnace, the freezing lake. It summons extremes of feeling, those who denounce it and its makers, do so violently. Those who fall in love, with that picture, that book, do so passionately. Once encountered, art will get a response. My worry is, that the media, like some hideous chaperone, shoves its burly form in between the audience and the art and prevents close encounters of the real kind. Turn off the television and slip away …
The language of rapture.
Your days and hours pass like the boughs of forest trees and the smooth green of forest rides to a hound running on the scent. But there is no single scent, no single body for me to follow. And I have no face. I am like the foam that races over the beach or the moonlight that falls here on a tin can, here on a spike of mailed sea holly, or a bone or a half-eaten boat. I am whirled down caverns and flap like paper against endless corridors and must press my hand against the wall to draw myself back.
There is no fight between exactness and rapture. The Waves is carried away by its own words. The words in rhythmic motion in and out, preoccupying, echoing, leaving a trail across the mind.
Rapture is a state of transformation. Woolf lifts up the veil of words that filmy or thick hides myself from the moment, you from me. These are not words to hide behind. These are not words to pad me against emotion or to be chanted as a prayer to make life safer than it is. These are words that cut through the semblance of the thing to the thing itself. Against the blunted days of approximation comes the clarity of the Word. This is frightening, this is a relief. This is what I have been hoping for and what I fear. I do not want to be exposed under language in this way. I do not want to face the cross-section of my heart. Do I want an act of clear seeing in a world that keeps its hands over its eyes? Human kind cannot bear very much reality. Reality of language, rapture of language, exactness of words that has found me out. Words that wipe clean the dirt on the window-pane leave me with an unexpected view.
Of what? Myself and strangers. The horror and the glory. All that I have made such an effort to avoid.
The language of rapture.
That would be a glorious life, to addict oneself to perfection; to follow the curve of the sentence wherever it might lead, into deserts, under drifts of sand, regardless of lures, of seductions; to be poor always and unkempt; to be ridiculous in Piccadilly.
In Piccadilly rapture is ridiculous and we are encouraged to be Piccadilly men and women. The language of The Waves is so outside the fumblings of tidy mouths that it can read like an insult. It is a 200-page insult to mediocrity.
It is the insult of the saint to pragmatists everywhere.
It is the insult of the rake to the marriage bed.
It is the insult of excellence against institution. It is the age-old insult of art.
How dare she? The Waves is in dialogue but men and women never talk that way. The words are not difficult, Latinare or obscure. No-one need consult a dictionary to read this book. The grammar is not exotic. The syntax is hardly ever arcane. It would be easy to paraphrase any page. And yet, and yet, this is not a language we have learned at school or in the company of our kind. If we were fair we would say ‘I would talk like this if I could talk poetry.’ The emotional experience of The Waves is not class-bound. It is not the rarified world of the better-off before the war. If the language seems remote it is because we are remote from our own rapture.
Trust it. Art is an act of faith; first for the artist herself and foremost for the audience. It is necessary to believe that there is something here worth having and to persevere into the other world of the artist which will reveal itself with a little work and a little patience. It is a love-affair and anyone who has fallen in love will know that outside of that moment of recognition, the beloved is only another face among faces. What changes is not the beloved but our perception of her.
I do not say that The Waves will be a love-affair for everyone. I do say that there is much here to love.
The language of rapture.
When reading Woolf we have to be careful of the resistances built up in us by our social and emotional training. The state, the family, the way most of us are educated, dampens down spontaneous feeling and makes us wary of excess. Woolf, in her lifetime, suffered from an invalidish image, a spinster type of delicacy which is supposed to make her work, delicate, fragile, beautiful maybe, but out of touch and not robust. Woolf, as a woman, was no more invalidish or fussy than James Joyce, as a man, with his chronic eye trouble and ferocious migraines.
I see no reason to read into Woolf’s work the physical difficulties of her life. If I said to you that a reading of John Keats must entertain his tuberculosis and the fact that he was common and short, you would ignore me. You should ignore me; a writer’s work is not a chart of their sex, sexuality, sanity and physical health. We are not looking to enlist them in the navy we are simply trying to get on with the words. Many readers, especially men, think that they dislike Woolf because her work is ethereal and dreamy. They conjure up a picture of the Bloomsbury madwoman and put her books away. I argue that it is not Woolf’s remoteness that puts people off but her nearness that terrifies them. Her language is not a woolly blanket it is a sharp sword. The Waves, which is the most difficult of her works, is a strong-honed edge through the cloudiness most of us call life. It is uncomfortable to have the thick padded stuff ripped away. There is no warm blanket to be had out of Virginia Woolf; there is wind and sun and you naked. It is not remoteness of feeling in Woolf, it is excess; the unbearable quiver of nerves and the heart pounding. It is exposure.
And it is exactness.
Art always dresses for dinner. Does this seem stuffy in the jeans and T-shirt days of popular culture? Perhaps, but without a formal space art cannot do its work. To be exact is to clear away the clutter from what is essential. Informality breeds clutter and to call something informal has become a euphemism for disorganisation. Disorganised people live and work in clutter and they make clutter for others. Contrary to the bohemian stereotype, the true artist is highly organised and must constantly select and order her material, choosing only that which can be shaped to an ultimate purpose. This can be daunting for anyone who believes that the word ‘relaxed’ has a higher human value than the word ‘disciplined’. To read The Waves is to collide violently with a discipline of emotion and language that heightens both to a point of painful beauty. There is no compromising with this book; either you read it on its own terms or you cannot read it at all. No-one would expect to play cricket according to the rules of ping-pong and it is unreasonable to come at any work of art and blame it for not happening as you think it should.
The Waves is not an easy book to master but it never tires and it never fades. If you do wrestle with it and find the spring of its opening it will be a place to rest in all the days of your life.
It will give you too, what all art promises; a greater pleasure in the moment and a sense of permanencies. It is not time-locked and it will unlock for you a history otherwise hidden; the history of the human heart. I know of no better communicator than art. No better means of saying so precisely those things which need so urgently to be said. It has been a baton handed on to us across centuries and through difference. It is an act of courage.
Line and colours almost persuade me that I too can be heroic.