The Waves is a book of voices. Six characters speak in turn, three men and three women, each articulating his or her own pleasures and fears, each responding to the other five, working out how they are different and how they are the same. They play together as children in the same garden, and then the boys go away to school, university, and work, while the girls make their lives at home. They have families; they part; they come together. They get older, they compete with one another, they go their separate ways, and yet still feel that they are bound together by an obscure current passing through them. ‘For this is not one life; nor do I always know if I am man or woman, Bernard or Neville, Louis, Susan, Jinny, or Rhoda – so strange is the contact of one with another.’1
One of the images around which the book started to germinate was Vanessa’s description of a huge moth that had come tapping on the window of her house in Cassis, where she sat writing to her sister with ‘moths flying madly in circles round me & the lamp’.2 Woolf took The Moths as the working title for her new novel, and she imagined her characters drawn together like moths around a light, an idea that had been with her since the evenings of bug hunting in the garden as a child. In place of the central light Woolf invented a seventh character, Percival. Like Jacob, he is absent from the start, someone we know about only through other people. Like Jacob, and like Woolf’s brother Thoby Stephen, this magnetic but elusive young man dies early, leaving his friends to gather round in his memory.
Woolf went back through Thoby’s letters as she wrote, and recorded in September 1930 that it would have been his fiftieth birthday. She wondered whether she could write his name and dates at the front of her novel and thus make it explicitly an elegy. But she had wondered the same about Jacob’s Room and decided against this kind of specific personal tribute. She had not dedicated To the Lighthouse to her parents – or to anyone else. ‘This shall be Childhood’, she said, writing the early section of The Waves, ‘but it must not be my childhood’.3 So she left her book without a dedication, standing as a universal elegy, and as a novel about the connection between people who have kept one another in mind over many years.
None of the characters is a portrait from life and the book is insistently impersonal, though there are many glimpses here of the people who had meant most to Virginia Woolf. There is Susan with her rural home and her children, envied by the childless Neville; in Louis there is a flickering sight of T. S. Eliot hanging up his cane after work and writing poetry (though the more powerful tribute to Eliot is the web of allusion to The Waste Land that runs all through the book). Each of these people is full of idiosyncrasies but impresses the reader at the same time as some kind of archetype. They have lives of their own, but they are representatives too of certain kinds of experience and aspects of personality. So we understand Jinny as a complete individual but also, more generally, as that social self which comes alive at a party, among the lights and the music.
‘The six characters were supposed to be one’, Woolf wrote.4 They are the community of her friends, but they are also the whole community of different people whom she felt herself to be. Each of the characters says things that Woolf had said to herself in her diary, and each, for a moment here or there, sounds like her. In the garden at Monk’s House she could be Susan; and though Neville the academic classicist lives the kind of establishment life Woolf did not want for herself, he makes the same nervous assessments of his worth, feeling in his pocket for the sheet on which his ‘credentials’ are written.5 So The Waves develops Clarissa Dalloway’s potent idea that we are all many things: ‘she would not say of any one in the world now that they were this or were that’.6 Much of Woolf’s writing life was devoted to the undoing of such labels, exposing the falsity involved in defining anyone as ‘this’ or ‘that’.
If the characters of The Waves are at some level ‘all one’, it doesn’t matter that we sometimes lose track of who is speaking. It is part of the point of the novel that the voices elide; though they are speaking about different things, they share the same rhythm. ‘I am writing to a rhythm and not to a plot’, Woolf said.7 Her evening habit of listening to the gramophone with Leonard became one of the most fertile times of her writing day. Several of her key breakthroughs with difficult passages in the book came while listening to music. Because it is written to a rhythm, Woolf’s readers have to beat time. It is no good trying to go too fast: Woolf slows us down to the pace of her characters’ acute observations of their world. They watch and perceive with a kind of childish wonder, long after they have grown up. Their monologues are in the present tense, as if they have stopped in the midst of things (as adults so rarely do) for a moment’s amazed reflection. The Waves may be Woolf’s most difficult book, but it is also the one in which we hear most clearly the childlike tone in her voice.
Woolf’s friends often remarked on her unjaded curiosity and appetite for detail. It was part of what made her enchanting to children. Vita Sackville-West’s son Nigel Nicolson, for example, remembered her asking what had happened to him one day:
I replied ‘Well nothing happened. I have just come home from school and here I am.’ She said, ‘Oh! that won’t do, start at the beginning. What woke you up?’
I said ‘It was the sun – the sun coming through the window of my room at Eton.’ Then she said, leaning forward very intently, ‘What sort of sun was it? Was it a cheerful sun or was it an angry sun?’ In this sort of way we continued to retrace my day minute by minute.8
That rising sun with its changing light becomes in Woolf’s hands the lyrical framework for a novel in which there is no such thing as ‘nothing happened’.
‘A grain fell and spiralled down; a petal fell, filled and sank. At that the fleet of boat-shaped bodies paused; poised; equipped; mailed; then with a waver of undulation off they flashed.’ Fish go darting through Virginia Woolf’s writing, as here in Between the Acts. The photograph shows Leonard Woolf feeding the fish at Rodmell c. 1932 (note the big toffee container being reused here: the Woolfs were very partial to sweets). (Ramsey & Muspratt, Cambridge)
The Waves did not come all in a flash as To the Lighthouse had done. It was trial and error throughout the autumn of 1929, until Woolf’s notebook looked ‘like a lunatic’s dream’.9 She couldn’t decide where she stood in relation to her characters: ‘am I outside the thinker?’10 In the New Year she hit her stride, feeling as if she’d come ‘breaking through gorse’ to reach the centre.11 The image recalled vigorous Stephen family walks through the dry, gorsy landscape of Cornwall, to which she was returning in imagination as she wrote the childhood sections of her book. Woolf’s images of her own progress were often this physical. Though she was writing what she called an ‘abstract, eyeless book’, she went at the task like an athlete or a racehorse.12 Her year was arranged in ‘laps’: the three months July to September at Rodmell, the winter in London up to Christmas, the New Year lap up to the spring holiday, the home strait in London through May and June before leaving again for summer in Sussex. Intellectual problems were her ‘fences’ and she would not shy at them. She was putting herself through her paces: warming up and then galloping. She took pleasure in her own efficiency and tenacity, ‘going round in the mill’. She was the romantic genius who wrote at the end of To the Lighthouse ‘I have had my vision’, but she was also the worker spurring herself on, laying bets on herself, noting as she resolved a difficult passage in The Waves ‘I have taken my fence.’13 It was her choice to do this: she could very well have written an easier book and pleased her readers by repeating a method they had seen before. But she left that to Vita, whose novel The Edwardians was making a small fortune for the Press, and took her self-built fences on her own.
Vanessa Bell’s cover for The Waves. On the day she finished the novel, 7 February 1931, Woolf looked back with satisfaction to its strange inception: ‘I have netted that fin in the waste of waters which appeared to me over the marshes out of my window at Rodmell.’ (Vanessa Bell, jacket design for The Waves by Virginia Woolf, London 1931 © Estate of Vanessa Bell, courtesy Henrietta Garnett)
Always raising the bar, Woolf measured herself against the great writers of the past. She copied out quotations from Byron; she wrote into The Waves an allusive dialogue with Shelley; for a while she read Dante’s Inferno for half an hour at the end of her morning’s writing, weighing its epic scope and rhythm against hers. She kept dipping back into Shakespeare to challenge herself (and to check that he was still better than her; he always was). Thinking of Greek drama, she wanted her own characters to be like ‘statues against the sky’.14 She was still as passionately ambitious for her writing as she had been at twenty-five when she planned to write ‘such English as shall one day burn the pages’.15 And she had the palpable feeling as she wrote The Waves that her day had come. Working at Bernard’s closing soliloquy, she wanted nothing less than to ‘make prose move – yes I swear – as prose has never moved before: from the chuckle and the babble to the rhapsody’.16
There were several periods of illness during the writing, but Woolf was able to talk herself into acceptance of them. She could just about believe in the potential creativity of these ‘curious intervals’, and she was able to cite some encouraging precedents: A Room of One’s Own had mostly been invented in bed.17 ‘To do nothing is often my most profitable way’, she wrote in February 1930, and again in September she accorded value to her ‘seasons of silence’.18 Organizing her affairs with characteristic practicality, she had done a deal with her illness. She suffered it: it paid her back.
Woolf finished the book in a state of such intense excitement that her pen could hardly keep up with her mind:
I wrote the words O Death fifteen minutes ago, having reeled across the last ten pages with some moments of such intensity & intoxication that I seemed only to stumble after my own voice, or almost, after some sort of speaker (as when I was mad). I was almost afraid, remembering the voices that used to fly ahead.19
She was comparing her writing to her illness, but illness is not invoked here as a measure of pain or fear as it might have been in previous years. ‘Almost afraid’, she says: but there is something now that holds fear just at bay.
The other big story of Woolf’s life during 1930 and 1931 was her friendship with the composer Ethel Smyth. The Waves is elusive, suggestive, impersonal; the seventy-year-old woman who came marching in with the New Year of 1930 was loud, insistent, and usually talking about herself. They had known about each other for years and had read each other’s books (Smyth produced autobiographies at a great rate), but only now, inspired by A Room of One’s Own, had Ethel made contact. She came to tea at Tavistock Square on 21 February; the foundations of a friendship were laid as she and Virginia were going up the stairs to the sitting room, they talked ‘ceaselessly’ for a further few hours and parted as the major new players in each other’s lives.20 ‘I want to talk and talk and talk’, Woolf wrote to Smyth soon afterwards: ‘About music; about love.’21 And she did. Many of the most-quoted statements about her life come from long letters to Ethel in which she would spell out in numbered points (echoing Ethel’s no-nonsense tone) her attitudes to sex, work, and her past. This was linked with her sense of getting older and starting to assess what she had made of things. But why was it Ethel Smyth with whom she wanted to talk?
Ethel lent herself to caricature. Inevitably Woolf and her surprised friends had a field day with ‘the rant and the riot and the egotism’ of this large, deaf, outspoken septuagenarian warhorse of the feminist cause.22 She had once been in prison with Emmeline Pankhurst and had written the suffragist anthem ‘The March of the Women’. She had fought for her rights with military pride (she was the daughter of a major-general, as Woolf constantly reminded her). In her lifelong campaign for freedom she had taken just the opposite approach to Woolf’s subtle, ironic experimentalism, and Woolf liked her for it. It was one of the defining things about Woolf’s life that she loved people (Vita and Ethel especially) who were not at all like herself. She did not need them to understand what she was doing in her writing; and though she wanted their devotion she was always imagining what their lives were like without her. ‘Please if I ever come again, dont meet me’, she wrote quietly and movingly to Ethel after a visit to her home in Woking, ‘let me find you among your things’.23
At the height of their relationship, Ethel’s letters were daily and extremely long, telegrams frequently arrived in between, and her visits in person – invited or not – came at gale force. The whole effect could feel like ‘a circulating thunderstorm’.24 It was a tremendous distraction from work; only Leonard, Vanessa, and Vita had previously been allowed to take up this much time. ‘Should I curtail her?’ Woolf wondered, but part of the attraction was Ethel’s refusal to compromise.25 A moderate friendship would be a contradiction in terms. So Woolf let the whole symphony continue, making space for Ethel in her life, and coming to depend on her as one depends on a lover.
Virginia Woolf was not in love with Ethel Smyth, though Ethel was quite openly in love with her. Virginia was swept up, mothered, challenged, and given new energy, but Ethel did not inspire the kind of fantasies that bubbled up the moment Virginia thought of Vita. For a while she played Vita off against ‘that old sea-monster encrusted with barnacles’, enjoying the frisson of Vita’s jealousy.26 She wondered about the difference between love and friendship. Society’s compulsion to label sexual feelings was one of the things she wrote to Ethel about: ‘Where people mistake, as I think, is in perpetually narrowing and naming these immensely composite and wideflung passions – driving stakes through them, herding them between screens.’27 This discussion with Ethel was a version of the thinking she was doing in The Waves about ‘composite’ and fluid personalities. There can be no screens set up between her silent work in writing that book and the ‘talk talk talk’ that went on around it.
Virginia Woolf and Ethel Smyth at Monk’s House. Smyth was in her seventies and hard of hearing, but nothing could hinder the stream of talk. (Estate of Professor Quentin Bell by permission of Julian Bell)
Though she complained of the constant interruption of ‘seeing people’, and though her socially packed letters give few clues that she was doing any work at all, Woolf was in fact getting a great deal done. In need of a fantastic excursion in the vein of Orlando, she wrote her biography of Flush the spaniel, taking her own spaniel Pinker as a model. It was another tribute to her affair with Vita, especially since Pinker was the offspring of Vita’s dog Pippin and since much of their courtship had deferred to canine goings-on as code for their own seductions. Again, half laughing, half serious, she was pushing at the limits of life-writing, arguing for a telling change of perspective, looking up at Elizabeth Barrett Browning from a point of view close to the floor.
Then, straight after The Waves, she compiled a second volume of The Common Reader, ‘furbishing up’ twenty-six of her recent essays. Sorting through the critical work she had published since the first Common Reader in 1926, she found she had more than a hundred pieces to choose from. She often felt frustrated by her non-fiction, feeling that she had not sufficiently freed herself from the conventions of reviewing, wondering what form might be supple enough to express the experiences of reading. Nonetheless, she is one of the great critics in English.
She liked her essays to sound like a conversation with the reader, and in some cases actually staged a dialogue, as she did with ‘Walter Sickert: A Conversation’ in 1933. She was not going to tell people what to think of a book, and this form freed her from the self-assertion she loathed. She wanted instead to evoke mood, and to measure what remains in memory when the novel is put away. Take her long essay on Thomas Hardy (first published on his death in 1928 and revised for the second Common Reader). She hears ‘the sound of a waterfall’ booming through an early novel, she sees ‘moments of vision’ ebbing away into ‘stretches of plain daylight’.28 In every one of Hardy’s books, she says, ‘three or four figures predominate and stand up like lightning conductors to attract the elements’.29 Her inexhaustible similes translate abstract impressions into pictures of arresting clarity.
Woolf’s essays open up conversations, but one of the people whose conversation about books she most valued was not there to respond. Lytton Strachey was dying at Ham Spray House. She had dedicated the first Common Reader to Strachey, and she mourned him as she worked on the second. His absence affected her feelings about Ethel’s non-stop presence. At times she just wanted Ethel to shut up. She wanted to associate herself with reflective quietness rather than the shimmering talk for which Bloomsbury had become known. ‘Everyone I most honour is silent’, she wrote to Ethel pointedly at Christmas 1931.30
For years her happiest moments had been quiet ones: ‘I like driving off to Rodmell on a hot Friday evening and having cold ham, and sitting on my terrace and smoking a cigar with an owl or two.’31 In the hot summer of 1930 she had sunk deep into her country life, ‘languid as an alligator with only its nostrils above water’.32 Now she was thickening her carapace again and sliding under. To protect her quietness and autonomy, she turned down numerous invitations to write and speak. She was famous, but she did not want to be in the public eye. There were several books being written about her, but she was either unhelpful or actively hostile to their authors, insisting that her novels must speak for themselves. She was being made into a mosaic for the floor of the National Gallery as part of a modern pantheon (which is still there) and, though she didn’t protest, most people would have been more pleased. She wanted to be read, she wanted some money, and she wanted to be free to write what she chose. That was what mattered, and she rejected the other trappings that fame offered her.
Woolf was suspicious of all pomp and ceremony. Where once she had recoiled from George Duckworth’s black-tie parties, now she declined official honours, which she saw as part of the same establishment parade. She turned down an honorary doctorate from the University of Manchester. She wrote a long letter to the New Statesman explaining her wish to be private, and proposing a ‘Society for the Protection of Privacy’.33 It was a fierce statement, but it was full of conflicting ideas. Even in asserting her privacy she was speaking out, promoting a cause, forming (albeit in parody) a new society. That negotiation between public and private was at the heart of the new novel she was writing at great length and compulsive speed. When in 1932 the University of Cambridge asked her to give the prestigious Clark Lectures, which her father had given in 1888, she paused to think. But no, she decided, she would not give the Clark Lectures at Trinity (where once she had been shooed off the grass). What she wanted to talk about now was not the kind of thing the dons of Trinity would want to hear.