'We float with the sticks on the stream...'

Virginia Woolf's essay, 'On Being Ill,' and a few other odds and ends

Hello friends!

It is so nice to be writing to you! I’m sorry it’s been so long.

I have been busy with my day job and other responsibilities. I was also laid low by the flu for a week. Rest assured that I grizzled and complained for the full seven days and felt very sorry for myself. I am (I’m sorry to tell you) incapable of enduring ill-health with any sort of dignity or equanimity. No. All friends and bystanders will be kept appraised of the state of my throat, the force and character of each body ache, the regimen of remedies I’m submitting myself to. And if you are a very dear friend, you may be treated to an impassioned disquisition on the quirks of my digestive system. Lucky you. New friends, please form an orderly queue. There are enough Bristol Stool Charts for everyone.

‘On being ill’ by Virginia Woolf

My recent brush with the flu caused me to seek out Virginia Woolf’s essay – ‘On Being Ill’ – which she wrote after finishing Mrs Dalloway and before starting To the Lighthouse during a period of ill-health. Despite taking the form of an essay, ‘On Being Ill’ is, like all of Woolf’s writing, a work of art in its own right – beautifully and sensitively written, somehow wry and impassioned at the same time, light-hearted but earnest.

In this post I thought I’d give a brief overview of the essay to give you a point of entry if you’re interested – it’s such an interesting take on a neglected subject. Needless to say it’s really much better to read the original.

1. But why aren’t there novels written about the flu?

Woolf opens by observing how strange it is that illness has not taken its place with love, battle and jealousy among the prime themes of literature.

And it is not only that it is neglected as a legitimate subject matter. Literature, says Woolf, tends to be excessively concerned with the mind, as if the body were nothing more than ‘a sheet of plain glass through which the soul looks straight and clear.’ But this is not true. All day and night the body intervenes – ‘the creature within can only gaze through the pane…. it cannot separate off from the body….’¹ And yet, despite this, there is almost no record of the daily drama of the body. Almost. I immediately thought of Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich which contains an incredibly vivid description of illness and the corresponding psychic pain this causes the sufferer. Woolf herself points to De Quincey and Proust as rare exceptions; writers who wrote at times about illness. Otherwise, ‘[p]eople write always of the doings of the mind; the thoughts that come to it; its noble plans; how it has civilised the universe.’²

Woolf speculates that this state of affairs has arisen partly because over-concern with the body would cause a descent into mysticism or transcendentalism, partly because a book about the flu would be thought to lack plot, and partly because of the poverty of language available to describe illness. For love, for tragedy, we have a massive literary tradition to draw upon. But try to describe a headache and ‘language at once runs dry.’³

2. What new perspective arises when we are struck down with illness?

Here, Woolf shifts to a discussion of the plight of the invalid and the very remarkable perceptual transformation that may take place under the effect of illness. Our instinct may be to hanker after the ‘divine relief of sympathy.’ But, Woolf says, sympathy we cannot have. Ill-health reminds us that ‘Humans do not go hand in hand the whole stretch of the way.’⁴ Here we go alone. To fall sick is to experience a powerful visitation of memento mori.

The healthy – Woolf describes as ‘the army of the upright,’ while the sick are cast as deserters. This, it seems to me, is exactly how it feels to be sick. Suddenly you just don’t care. The army of the upright carries on with the important tasks and affairs of life while, for the sick, this make-believe ceases. They become deserters. They float with the sticks on the stream. They ‘become as the leaf or the daisy, lying recumbent, staring straight up…’⁵ And in this position, a new perspective arises.

What follows is some of the most beautiful writing in the essay. Woolf describes a new awareness of the sky overhead. If you are lying on your back, the sky is unimpeded by buildings and chimney stacks; you have a clear view of its unfolding cinema. Here an incredible spectacle unfurls above us every day – a spectacle largely overlooked by the army of the upright.

This is the first effect of the change in perspective brought on by being ill. One drops out of the rat race, one loses momentarily those flimsy yet all-consuming worldly concerns, one looks with new eyes at one’s surroundings. There is a change in scope and scale. The camera zooms out.

The second effect of this change in perspective is the realisation that this spectacle – the massive, fluctuating sky, the seasonal cycle of flowers blooming – is divinely heartless. Nature is self-sufficient. It does not need humans (even while humans imagine themselves to be at the centre, taming nature, dominating it). ‘It is only the recumbent who know what, after all, nature is at no pains to conceal – that she in the end will conquer.’⁶ Another serving of memento mori! Another of respice finem! The carefully erected bricks of self-importance fall in to reveal a wide outdoor space. A space that is inherently inhuman.

3. What then brings consolation? Not sympathy but poetry

What then brings consolation. Woolf ponders the inadequacy of religion and human imaginings of heaven and immortality to rescue us from this knowledge of the indifference, the heartlessness, of nature. ‘Heaven-making’ (by which Woolf appears to mean consolation and meaning in a cruel and indifferent world) needs time and concentration. According to Woolf, ‘It needs the imagination of a poet.’⁷

In this, the final part of the essay, Woolf considers the literary forms that we reach for when sick. Certainly poetry – for the reasons already mentioned and because when we are sick, and with rationality and responsibility in abeyance, we are perhaps receptive to a quality in words that we are blind to when well:

In health meaning has encroached upon sound. Our intelligence domineers over our senses. But in illness, with the police off duty, we creep beneath some obscure poem by Mallarmé or Donne, some phrase in Latin or Greek, and the words give out their scent, and ripple like leaves, and chequer us with light and shadow, and then, if at last we grasp the meaning, it is all the richer for having travelled slowly up with all the bloom upon its wings.⁸

‘On Being Ill’ was published in T.S. Eliot’s quarterly The New Criterion in January 1926. Though Eliot had implored Woolf to write for him, Woolf detected a lack of enthusiasm from Eliot about the essay once received. In her diary, she recorded her belief that Eliot was ‘not impressed’. Originally, she and her husband Leonard thought ‘On Being Ill’ ‘one of my best’.⁹ But following Eliot’s tepid reaction, and on rereading the essay, Woolf ‘saw wordiness, feebleness, & all the vices in it.’¹⁰ She went on, ‘This increases my distaste for my own writing, & dejection at the thought of beginning another novel.’¹¹

This was her state of mind as she embarked on the writing of To the Lighthouse, one of her best, and best-loved, novels.

Other odds and ends

Books I have read and loved

Excellent excellent books:

• Excellent Women, by Barbara Pym – why am I only hearing about Pym now? LOVED. Very English. Englishness dialled up to ten. If you’d like to know more about Pym, look no further than

  Ann Kennedy Smith
  ’s excellent essay The fascinating Miss Pym. (It’s behind a paywall but I think you can claim one post free…do it!)

• The Haunting of Hill House, by Shirley Jackson – Jackson at her absolute bloody best. I will read anything by her. ANYTHING! Both

  Henry Eliot
  and
  haley larsen, phd
  will be reading The Haunting of Hill House in October. Happy days.

• A Month in the Country, by J.L.Carr – with thanks to

  Books on GIF
  for the review which put me on to this slim but very lovely tome. I have not yet been able to lay my hands on the 1987 movie featuring a very fresh-faced Colin Firth (sporting a moustache!) and a very carrot-topped Kenneth Branagh…

I’d also like to give a shout out to…

• POMUS AUREUS
  – a new newsletter by Ellie (the author of many an excellent and astute comment during our reading of Mrs Dalloway). She is writing about Italian literature, starting with The Leopard by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa.

Where to next with Virginia Woolf?

We will read To the Lighthouse in February next year. I know! The distant future! But I’m sure you have plenty of reading projects to get on with in the meantime – I know I have. Reading Mrs Dalloway with you in June was such a joy! So I’m looking forward to getting to To the Lighthouse which is one of my favourites. One reason for having a big gap between books is to avoid overdosing on Woolf and accidentally killing our joy and enthusiasm. Let us savour! Another reason is that I’m so gosh darn busy!

Between now and then, I will continue to post about bookish things that interest me. But mostly I will skulk around the traps reading all the other excellent writing and commentary to be had on Substack.

Until very soon, I hope!

1. Virginia Woolf, ‘On Being Ill,’ in The New Criterion, January 1926, p 33.

2. Woolf, ‘On Being Ill,’ p 33.

3. Woolf, ‘On Being Ill,’ p 34.

4. Woolf, ‘On Being Ill,’ p 36.

5. Woolf, ‘On Being Ill,’ p 37.

6. Woolf, ‘On Being Ill,’ p 39.

7. Woolf, ‘On Being Ill,’ p 40.

8. Woolf, ‘On Being Ill,’ p 41.

9. The Diary of Virginia Woolf, Vol 3, 1925-1930, ed. Anne Olivier Bell, 7 December 1925, p 49.

10. The Diary of Virginia Woolf, 7 December 1925, p 49.

11. The Diary of Virginia Woolf, 7 December 1925, p 49.