Today we begin!

A close look at the first page of To the Lighthouse and we're away!

Hello friends!

Today we begin To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf’s 1927 novel. We are going to be doing a short sharp dash through the novel during the month of February (and into the beginning of March). The reading schedule is here if you need it and I will be putting all To the Lighthouse posts here. To begin with, we will take two weeks to read ‘The Window’ – the first of three sections in the novel. (For the ‘Time Passes’ part, you have a week. For ‘The Lighthouse’ part, you will have another two weeks. And then we’re finished!).

Yesterday…

Yesterday, in case you missed it, I shared a conversation introducing the novel and offering a few tips for readers who may be new to Woolf’s writing generally or To the Lighthouse in particular. My conversation was with the wonderful

NANCY MILLER

. Do have a listen.

Today

Today, to help us on our way – to nudge our shining vessel from its dry dock into the blue field of water of the novel – we will take a close-ish look at the first page. In this post:

1. A SHORT SUMMARY of the first page or two of the novel

2. A CLOSE LOOK at those pages

3. A SNAPSHOT of the first characters we encounter

4. Information about WHAT’S NEXT.

1. Summary of the first page or two

To the Lighthouse is about the Ramsay family – mother, father, and eight children, of which James, six, is the youngest. The Ramsays are spending the summer on the Isle of Skye in the Hebrides. Staying with them are various friends and hangers-on.

The first chapter opens with Mrs Ramsay responding to a question from her six-year-old son, James. She answers: yes – it will be possible to go to the lighthouse in the morning if the weather is fine. The lighthouse is only accessibly by boat. However, Mr Ramsay, overhearing this, stops by the drawing-room window where Mrs Ramsay and James are sitting and contradicts her. No, the weather is unlikely to be fine in the morning. In other words, it won’t be possible to go to the lighthouse. James’s thoughts swing from unbridled joy at his mother’s words to hatred and fury at his father’s words.

2. A close look at the first pages

A short exchange about the weather

We open with a brief and straightforward conversation:

Mrs Ramsay (answering her son, James): Yes, of course [you may go to the Lighthouse], if it’s fine tomorrow. But you’ll have to be up with the lark.

Mr Ramsay: But, it won’t be fine.

Mrs Ramsay: But it may be fine – I expect it will be fine.

And yet, between Mrs Ramsay’s first and second statements, we traverse nearly two pages of text. What could possibly be going on between these unremarkable lines of speech? Well, quite a lot, as it turns out, and we’ll get into that in a moment. For now, I want only to point out that here and throughout the novel, Woolf uses a type of narrative dilation. Time is slowed and expanded to give the narration adequate stowage to freight the vivid, volatile inner lives of the characters.

Time slows, yet the cadence of the writing is fast, the distance covered vast. Woolf’s central, liberating insight was that human cognition could go anywhere and encompass anything and that fiction could capture this. In depicting the capricious swoops and dives of characters’ thoughts – Woolf presents thoughts and thinking as mercurial, wide-ranging, fickle; not linear or timebound.

Long long sentences

Woolf’s writing features long sentences. Not every sentence but many. Long sentences allow a tumbling quality to the writing to better imitate the ceaseless stream of human cognition – thoughts tumbling on from one idea to the next, perhaps at times appearing haphazard to the reader but following an internal logic unique to the individual.

The first long sentence: a refrigerator endowed with heavenly bliss

There are two long sentences on the first page. Here’s the first (clocking in at 100 words):

Since he belonged, even at the age of six, to that great clan which cannot keep this feeling separate from that, but must let future prospects, with their joys and sorrows, cloud what is actually at hand, since to such people even in earliest childhood any turn in the wheel of sensation has the power to crystallise and transfix the moment upon which its gloom or radiance rests, James Ramsay, sitting on the floor cutting out pictures from the illustrated catalogue of the Army and Navy Stores, endowed the picture of a refrigerator as his mother spoke with heavenly bliss.

This first very long sentence has some interesting features. First of all, who is thinking it? Surely not James – a six-year-old? And surely not Mr or Mrs Ramsay – for how could they know their son’s inner thoughts?

Continue reading and you’ll see that this is unusual. Most of the time, the narration finds expression via a specific character’s thoughts – in other words, it’s always in the head of one character or another. But in the sentence quoted above an impersonal voice explains something to us about James. It’s subtle; the impersonal voice interweaves seamlessly with the voices of other characters so that most of the time the reader hardly notices it. It provides cohesiveness to the narration and smooths out transitions between characters. (This impersonal voice will come to the fore in the ‘Time Passes’ sequence (Part 2 of the novel).)

By the end of that long sentence, however, we appear to arrive in the mind of James. James is cutting out a picture of a refrigerator from a catalogue and, so excited is he by the prospect of a trip to the Lighthouse, he endows the refrigerator with bliss.

Joys and sorrows which cloud what is to hand

In this opening scene, James allows his internal emotional weather to influence his reception of the world and people around him. This, I think, is a key, organising principle for Woolf and her approach to her characters. And it’s a two-way effect. Thoughts, emotions, memories and assumptions (that inner emotional weather) influence the characters’ reception of the world, and vice versa – the world influences the tone, colour and cadence of characters’ thoughts and emotions. There is a moment-by-moment interplay of inner and outer; it is not all in one direction.

The second long sentence: Mrs Ramsay’s vision of her son in red and ermine

The next long sentence follows soon after (105 words):

The wheelbarrow, the lawn-mower, the sound of poplar trees, leaves whitening before rain, rooks cawing, brooms knocking, dresses rustling—all these were so coloured and distinguished in his mind that he had already his private code, his secret language, though he appeared the image of stark and uncompromising severity, with his high forehead and his fierce blue eyes, impeccably candid and pure, frowning slightly at the sight of human frailty, so that his mother, watching him guide his scissors neatly round the refrigerator, imagined him all red and ermine on the Bench or directing a stern and momentous enterprise in some crisis of public affairs.

The first interesting thing about this sentence is that the narrative voice changes halfway through. We start inside the head of James and finish inside the head of Mrs Ramsay. The narrative voice is agile. It jumps from this head to that one, but the narration maintains a smooth flow.

A poetry of wheelbarrows, lawnmowers and brooms

The second interesting thing about this sentence is its ‘thinginess’ – all the objects mounded up, particularly in the first half of the sentence. Woolf writes about the inner lives of her characters but does so in a concrete way. Here, she is describing an inner run of thoughts and associations – which might otherwise have been vague, abstract, non-specific, ethereal, emotion-heavy – and yet the writing is clogged with things. In this sentence we encounter: wheelbarrows, lawnmowers, poplar trees, rooks, brooms, dresses and refrigerators along with secret codes and languages, foreheads, frowns, eyes, scissors, red and ermine robes, and so on.

This is something I love about Woolf’s writing. She describes ephemeral states of mind concretely and crams in all the stuff of life until you have a sort of poetry of wheelbarrows and poplar trees and judges’ robes and cawing rooks.

Surging thoughts

Conspicuous in these opening pages is how the characters’ thoughts are only half engaged with their material surrounds. Details which anchor the story in time and space – James sitting on the floor cutting out pictures; Mrs Ramsay knitting; Mr Ramsay outside the drawing room window walking up and down the terrace with Mr Tansley – are obscured to some extent by the profusive thoughts of the characters which are often elsewhere.

At first, the reader mostly perceives the rushing stream of each character’s thoughts, while physical actions or lines of dialogue only poke through the churning surface here and there like stones and boulders in a river bed. Or at least, this was my impression when I read the book the first time. On re-reading, those details stand out a little more, though the energy of the writing continues to lie in the leaping, lurching inner lives of the characters.

3. The first characters we encounter…

James: blissfully happy; violently angry

The first character to open his mind to us, the reader, is James – the six-year-old son of the Ramsays. He is a child and has a child’s immoderate reactions to things. For, shortly, when his father declares that it won’t be fine (that, therefore, a trip to the Lighthouse won’t be possible), James will feel murderous rage: ‘Had there been an axe handy, a poker, or any weapon that would have gashed a hole in his father’s breast and killed him, there and then, James would have seized it.’

There is a sort of Oedipal tension at play and, in later scenes, James will continue to feel irritated when his father approaches and takes away the attention of his mother.

Mr Ramsay: exact; relishing facts, science, knowledge; uninterested in accommodating the feelings of others

Our first impression of the Ramsay patriarch is of a man who relishes his own accuracy of judgement – and who enjoys, perhaps, disillusioning his child and correcting his wife’s ill-informed ideas about the next day’s weather. But, after all, he is only reporting the facts. He is blameless! His children understand, through experience, that their father is always right about everything: ‘He was incapable of untruth; never tampered with fact; never altered a disagreeable word to suit the pleasure or convenience of any mortal being, least of all his own children…’

The Mr Ramsay that emerges in the pages that follow is tyrannical and impatient, but also eccentric, needy, and full of self-doubt. He is a philosopher who has written books and now wonders about his legacy – will he be remembered and respected by future generations or forgotten like so many before him?

Mrs Ramsay: kind; concerned about the needs and comfort of others

Mrs Ramsay is not concerned about making an accurate prediction about the weather. In a later chapter, she will wonder at her husband’s dogged obsession with facts, with being right – ‘[t]o pursue truth with such an astonishing lack of consideration for other people’s feelings, to rend the thin veils of civilisation so wantonly...’ Mr Ramsay’s thoughts will go in the opposite direction as he considers the ‘extraordinary irrationality’ of his wife’s mind, how ‘she flew in the face of facts, made his children hope what was utterly out of the questions, in effect, told lies.’

The conversation about going to the Lighthouse causes Mrs Ramsay’s thoughts to go immediately to the Lighthouse keeper, his plight, how she may help him. This is what governs Mrs Ramsay’s character – an abiding concern for others, for the poor, for her children, for her guests, for her husband, for the Lighthouse keeper and his son.

Charles Tansley

Mr Tansley is a young philosopher and pupil of Mr Ramsay and is staying with the family during the summer. He likes nothing more than talking shop with Mr Ramsay and is disliked by the Ramsay children for intruding on their summer. They find him to be a miserable specimen – ‘all humps and hollows’ – but it’s his personality they object to. Mr Tansley has a chip on his shoulder about his humble origins and his insecurities result in him asserting himself awkwardly, desperate for recognition.

Augustus Carmichael

Mr Carmichael is an older gentleman staying with the family over the summer. According to Mrs Ramsay, he could have been a great philosopher but made an unfortunate marriage. (Mr Carmichael appears to be one of the few characters immune to Mrs Ramsay’s charms.) His beard is stained yellow from opium…

[Mr Carmichael] was basking with his yellow cat’s eyes ajar, so that like a cat’s they seemed to reflect the branches moving or the clouds passing, but to give no inkling of any inner thoughts or emotion whatsoever…

4. What’s next?

According to our reading schedule, you now have two weeks to read ‘The Window’ (the first of three parts).

Upcoming posts

IN ONE WEEK, I will share a conversation I recorded with

Ronald Turnbull

and

NANCY MILLER

about Virginia Woolf’s father, Leslie Stephen, and his fictional avatar, Mr Ramsay. That conversation takes a close look at Chapter 6 (and a bit at Chapter 7 too) so reading those chapters ahead of time will probably make the conversation more meaningful.

IN TWO WEEKS, please aim to have finished ‘The Window.’ I will put up a post then to share some thoughts and hear back from you. I will also share a conversation I recorded with

NANCY MILLER

about the dinner party scene.

Participation in the discussion

I invite you to comment below if you want to! Please add your observations or questions about the first pages. You might like to consider: What stood out to you in the first pages? What was unexpected? Where did your readerly eye catch or slow down or speed up? What are your early impressions of the characters?

But also know that it is perfectly alright to read along with us without participating in the discussion. Whatever you like!

Happy reading and I’ll be in touch again in a week!