From inauspicious beginnings: reading Virginia Woolf

If you fail, try failing again. And again. Maybe something will change.

When I was in my early twenties I bought a copy of Mrs Dalloway. It was a classic, you see, and I had every intention of reading and enjoying all the classics. I recall sitting on a lush patch of grass in Hyde Park in Sydney among ibises and strolling tourists and reading the same line of text over and over. Somehow, I slogged my way to the end but I didn’t understand. The whole story seemed to be one long detour away from sense and plot development. I put Mrs Dalloway down and did not hurry to pick it up again.

A few years later, I stumbled across an audio version of To the Lighthouse at the library (back when audio books were on CD). Perhaps listening would be easier for a dullard like me. And I should give it a go, I thought, since I had every intention of reading and enjoying all the classics. I did fare a little better listening – despite the narrator’s strange and distracting pronunciation of ‘egotist’ as ‘eggotist’ (is it a British thing?). Listening made it easier to fall into the pleasing rhythm Woolf’s writing. And there were interesting repetitions which stood out in the audio version. ‘Women can’t paint, women can’t write,’ says odious Mr Tansley, words that ricochet around the mind of Lily Briscoe as she wrestles to achieve her artistic vision in an oil painting.

And yet… as with Mrs Dalloway, I struggled to grasp what was going on. To the Lighthouse was dense and difficult and seemed always to be pirouetting away from any sturdy statement about anything. Was Mrs Ramsey happy or sad, impatient or pleased? Did she like Mr Tansley or hate him? Why couldn’t I get any ground under my feet? Certainly, there was very little enjoyment going on which I was sure reflected serious deficits in my mental acuity. If only I were smarter, maybe I would like this sort of thing more.

At about this time, I began to read other things and not worry quite so much about mastering the canon. There were thousands of people brilliantly mastering the canon; probably my help wasn’t needed anyway.

A year or two later, I went camping with a bunch of friends. We hired canoes and paddled down a river into a National Park. One of the others on the trip, my dear friend C, brought along a copy of The Waves. He told me that the novel moved between the perspectives of six people and each voice was like a wave of consciousness. Then he read some aloud. We were lying on the riverbank under the trees. Before us was a large, tilled expanse of water, wrinkling here and there under the breeze. I suppose C caught me at the right moment because I was relaxed and receptive and all the doors of my mind stood open – though afterwards I couldn’t quite remember what it was about Woolf’s prose that had so moved me. Maybe it wasn’t the prose after all. Maybe it was the lovely riverbank and lapping wavelets. Maybe it was the stand of trees leaning over the water with bands of light rolling ceaselessly down their branches.

Another few years and I moved away from the city to a farmhouse in the country. In a small second-hand bookshop in the next town, I came across a copy of The Waves and remembered about the camping trip and how moved I’d been by C’s reading (or possibly the scenery). I bought it but felt, in my heart, that probably I wouldn’t manage to read it. It would be beyond me. I would try and fail. Why put myself through this?

It's difficult to convey what a profound experience reading The Waves was for me. That autumn, I chased sunshine around the farmhouse’s wraparound veranda, moving my chair over, inch by inch, to avoid the sliding angles of shade. And I read. The Waves exploded my understanding of what was possible in fiction. Of what a novel could do. Of what art could do. The inner lives of the characters were so vivid and humane and complex. The novel’s scope was both expansive and intimate. Despite being prose, the writing was poetry-like. Ordinary objects and moments seemed to chime twice, once with distinctiveness and again with familiarity. How did Woolf do it?

After The Waves I returned to Mrs Dalloway and To the Lighthouse and my reading experience was entirely different. Along the way I’d gotten a better understanding of modernism and what Woolf was trying to do in those novels. I read A Room of One’s Own and Julia Briggs beautiful biography, Virginia Woolf, An Inner Life. I read The Years. I read parts of Quentin Bell’s biography of his aunt. I’m now in the enviable position of being a devoted fan and still having books of hers I haven’t read – The Voyage Out, Night and Day, Orlando, Between the Acts, The Common Reader. I’m part way through Jacob’s Room.

As I write this, I begin to feel sheepish. Surely, I’m overstating things. Can Woolf’s novels really be so good? Well, they are to me. And they reward close and repeated readings. They are so clogged with life.

Once upon a time I intended to read and enjoy all the classics. Do I ‘enjoy’ reading Woolf? Well, in the end it’s the word that’s inadequate, not Woolf. Enjoyment is not why I return again and again to her novels. They haven’t become easier to read. They are dense and I am also dense. I’m still challenged. I still reread lines waiting for comprehension to strike. But I am profoundly moved by the keenness of Woolf’s vision, the vitality of her writing. Yes, I think as I read, yes that’s exactly it! That’s exactly how life is.