On Reading "To the Lighthouse" beside the Ionian Sea
“I am making up To the Lighthouse—the sea is to be heard all through it.”
This very early morning a storm on the Ionian Sea just outside our windows woke me up. Waves crashed rhythmically against the safety wall. The winds howled at various pitches. I went downstairs and saw the night sky and sea appeared the same grayish blue color, stirred up by the long rippling lines of the waves’ crests. A mist hovering above the water erased the horizon line and transformed the lightening into a veiled undulating yellow glow moving north to south. As I watched, the intervals between the lightning and thunder rolls lengthened as the storm moved away, the water continuing its rhythmic beat against the wall below. A storm is a storm is a storm Gertrude Stein might say here, but as observing the spectacle alone in the night felt strangely intimate, like listening in to the ever-present pulse of an enormous indifferent being.
When my husband and I planned to come to Ortigia, an island off the tip of Siracusa, Sicily for this month of our sabbatical year, I wasn’t planning to read Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse (TTL), nor did I have any knowledge of the very slight connection between this island and the book published in spring 1927. But when A Public Space announced a virtual APStogether reading group of the book beginning on the very day we arrived in Ortigia, I joined in. As we are traveling, I had my cheap, non-annotated e-book compilation of Woolf’s major writings, which I bought to read Flush with my friend Beth years ago. I had none of the notes I took on previous reads in my old paperback, nor the notes I might have taken when I read the book in a graduate school master class with Richard Howard. I read the book “cold” as Mona Simpson, the leader for this read, suggested we do.
Whether or not it was the rhythm of the waves crashing against the seawall outside my window, this read of To the Lighthouse was astonishingly different. Though I knew they were coming, the death of Mrs. Ramsey in the famous Part 2 “Time Passes” and the heavy grief of Mr. Ramsey in Part 3 kept me up at night, looking out and listening to the sea. I don’t remember being so aware of those “veils” (of consciousness or awareness) that slowly rise and slip over the characters or of being so moved by the unanswerable question repeated by multiple characters– but what does it mean? The repetition of things and phrases and ideas, reminiscent of a painter using brushstrokes to find a desired texture, affected me more and more as the slow read progressed. The constant turn of the strokes of light from the lighthouse, long and short. Nothingness. The lighthouse that becomes at times the nothingness (James while looking at the lighthouse: “For nothing was simply one thing.”) And, of course, the sound and presence of the sea.
On this read, the carefully conceived chess moves of plot revealed themselves more clearly. There is the sophisticated yet surprisingly unsubtle ghost story (Comments Day 7); the unfolding of the “kastelrroman” (Comments Day 14), a word I only caught through fellow APS readers; Lily Briscoe’s struggle to convey what she saw through images representing the writer herself, going through the struggle to capture ideas or images becoming the writer working out her own vision, turning the liquid dream of her ideas into sentences and a solid book (Comments Day 2 and 4.) These shifts, despite having always been there, “stuck to me” more, to use a TTL term on a far deeper level.
(See also the post with the comments mentioned: Reading Notes from “To the Lighthouse” and a Resource List from APStogether TTL)
Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse, and Ortigia (Syracuse)
According to letters available to me here, Virginia and Leonard Woolf also came to Syracuse and stayed at a place identified in letters as a shabby Hotel de Rome in Ortigia in April 1927. (There is a now swank Hotel Roma beside the Greek temple side of the Duomo in the main piazza, but I don’t know that that is the same place.) Woolf had just completed the final draft of To the Lighthouse in January. The book, in press at Hogarth, was to be released in May. Perhaps the trip to Rome and Sicily was in part intended to help her recover from the project. Here, she would have heard the sound of the waves without the memories of the Isle of Skye, where the book is set, or her childhood summer home in St. Ives, Cornwall.
In an April 14 letter to her sister Vanessa Bell, Woolf sits beside the Fount of Arethusa looking over the port of Ortigia and describes exploring Syracuse by moonlight after having drank a bottle of wine for dinner. She writes: “the bay, the schooners, the blue sky with the white pillars, like paper, and clouds crossing, and people sauntering, and a man on stilts—” She rambles with Leonard through ruins––the same Greek theater and Roman amphitheater my husband I rambled through. Both Woolfs get sunburns. They drink more wine.
Woolf’s strangely beautiful sign off to her sister while sitting at the Fount of Arethusa looking over the port in Ortigia:
“You have kept your hair. You are beautiful, beloved, chaste: and I am none of these things. VW.”
(Back in February of that year, Woolf let a friend, the “boneless” Bobo Mayer “shingle” or cut her hair off at midnight while drinking wine. )
In a letter written on that same day, April 14, 1927 to Angus Davidson working back in England as an assistant at the Woolf’s Hogarth Press, she says of Syracuse: “It is perfect here.”
While writing To the Lighthouse between 1925 and early 1927, Woolf suffered two breakdowns. At the outset of writing the book, she recorded in her diary:
“I’m now all on the strain with desire to stop journalism and get on to To the Lighthouse. This is going to be fairly short; to have father’s character done complete in it; and mother’s; and St. Ives; and childhood; and all the usual things I try to put in—life, death, etc. But the centre is father’s character, sitting in a boat, reciting We perished, each alone, while he crushes a dying mackerel.”
Writer’s Diary, April 14, 1925
The art model and mother Virginia Stephens and the demanding and erudite Lesley Stephens do haunt these pages as Mrs. and Mr. Ramsey with obvious, almost tactile specificity. But the characterization alternates with the ethereal and suggestive manner of their internal stream of inner dialogue. The light strokes and broad strokes of the characterization—we see their insecurities and vulnerabilities beneath their external postures—also make them painfully universal. (How does Woolf do it!?!) I can’t help but wonder if balancing the essence of her parents so delicately, which in my mind also means more truthfully, may be part of what took its toll on her mental health.
Since my last reading of To the Lighthouse, I’ve lost my father. I’ve also lost two friends by suicide. I’ve experienced that “nothingness” both expected and unexpected absence can bring. More happily, I’ve also married a philosopher, (referred to in previous posts as My Brilliant Friend, see his post on Tracking Plato and Cicero in Syracuse), who puts emphasis on that search for truth and like Mr. Ramsey, works almost constantly. Lily Briscoe’s understanding of the philosopher’s work as a “scrubbed kitchen table when your’re not there” is dead-on in a way I couldn’t have observed before. (See Comments Day 3) However MBF, glad is in most ways very different from the melancholic Mr. Ramsey.
I’ve also since my previous readings, spent hours immersed in journals and correspondence of the Transcendentalists and a few Stoics. This time, while reading TTL, I sensed Woolf implementing her observations as both a diarist and a reader of diaries. In TTL, Woolf notes with a diarist’s awareness how time passes with rhythmic repetition, as waves move across the sea. The small changes explored in people (the Ramseys, Lily Briscoe, and Carmichael), in ideas (“What is the meaning of life? That was all—a simple question; one that tended to close in on one with years.” ), and things (that empty house, the lighthouse, the scrubbed kitchen table) gain resonance or tidal force over time. But still….how does she do this?
Finding oneself in a book and noticing how differently it reads years later is not an original observation. But some books manage to achieve this more deeply and for more people. In TTL, Mrs. Ramsey tries to protect her writer husband from facing the possibility that his books won’t be remembered or read in the future. Part of her loss for Mr. Ramsey was he had to suddenly face this possibility directly. Woolf was surrounded by writers and scholars her entire life and could have drawn the observation from her father, her concerns with her own work and of those they published as Hogarth Press, and countless others to hone in on that particular concern.
But what makes Woolf’s work, and To the Lighthouse in particular, last? That alternation between tactile and ethereal nature? The well-wrought particulars that achieve something universal? The deep investigation of interior monologue and thought? The philosophical questioning—but what have I done with my life? Or, what does it mean? The fact that I can’t put my finger on what achieves this in a work of literature may be the most telling. The book’s essence becomes its own mystery.
Stream of How-Does-She-Do-This?-ness
“How” Woolf does this has obviously been scrutinized by Woolf scholars, one of which I am not, but I can’t resist contemplating how she makes this prose move. In the APStogether reading crew, a few of us wrote about technique and about Woolf’s obvious meditations on artistic perspective through Lily Briscoe. (See comments Day 8) I’m constantly struck by the way Woolf conveys how the boundaries between the perceptions characters have of each other keep bumping into the reality of each other in moments of action, such as the dinner table.
Included in the weird e-book of Woolf’s work I happen to have while traveling, I found notes from letters and diaries on the form she was trying to invent. The lines in bold are my emphases.
Riffing on the sea, there are early glimmers of what she wants to invent in 1921 while on a trip to Cornwall with Leonard, four years before she begins TTL:
Diary, March 22, 1921
Why am I so incredibly & incurably romantic about Cornwall? One’s past, I suppose: I see children running in the garden. A spring day. Life so new. People so enchanting. The sound of the sea at night…almost 40 years of life, all built on that, permeated by that: how much so I could never explain. And in reality it is very beautiful. I shall go down to Treveal & look at the sea—old waves that have been breaking precisely so these thousand years. But I see I shall never get this said….
I don’t think she’d conceived of To the Lighthouse yet, but the desire to create the essence of childhood, the sea, and continuing time was very much in her consciousness. Here she begins TTL:
Writer’s Diary, Thursday, June 27, 1925
But while I try to write, I am making up To the Lighthouse—the sea is to be heard all through it. I have an idea that I will invent a new name for my books to supplant “novel”. A new —— by Virginia Woolf. But what? Elegy?)
And this:
Writer’s Diary, July 20, 1925
“It might contain all characters boiled down; and childhood; and then this impersonal thing, which I’m dared to do by my friends, the flight of time and the consequent break of unity in my design. That passage (I conceive the book in 3 parts. 1. at the drawing room window; 2. seven years passed; 3. the voyage) interests me very much. A new problem like that breaks fresh ground in one’s mind; prevents the regular ruts.”
And a note on the sentence-making and rhythm as profound and deep, breaking and tumbling as a wave in the mind:
From a letter to Vita Sackville-West, March 16, 1926
"Style is a very simple matter; it is all rhythm. Once you get that, you can’t use the wrong words. But on the other hand here am I sitting after half the morning, crammed with ideas, and visions, and so on, and can’t dislodge them, for lack of the right rhythm. Now this is very profound, what rhythm is, and goes far deeper than words. A sight, an emotion, creates this wave in the mind, long before it makes words to fit it; and in writing (such is my present belief) one has to recapture this, and set this working (which has nothing apparently to do with words) and then, as it breaks and tumbles in the mind, it makes words to fit it: But no doubt I shall think differently next year."
Then this thinking of how to maintain the momentum of the novel:
Writer’s Diary, Friday, Sept. 3, 1926
"The problem is how to bring Lily and Mr. R. together and make a combination of interest at the end. I am feathering about with various ideas. The last chapter which I begin tomorrow is In the Boat: I had meant to end with R. climbing on to the rock. If so, what becomes of Lily and her picture? Should there be a final page about her and Carmichael looking at the picture and summing up R.’s character? In that case I lose the intensity of the moment. If this intervenes between R. and the lighthouse, there’s too much chop and change, I think. Could I do it in a parenthesis? So that one had the sense of reading the two things at the same time?"
(The wave-like imagery of chop and change gets applied to prose. I also love: “could I do it in a parenthesis?” We know she can and does in the final version of TTL.)
At last, she seems to be almost convinced she was able to translate her vision onto the page.
Writer’s Diary, January 23, 1927:
Well Leonard has read To the Lighthouse, & says it is much my best book, & it is a ‘masterpiece’. He said this without my asking. I came back from Knole & sat without asking him. He calls it entirely new ‘a psychological poem’, is his name for it.
And weeks before they leave for Rome and Sicily in April:
Diary, Monday, March 21, 1927
Dear me, how lovely some parts of The Lighthouse are! Soft & pliable, & I think deep, & never a word wrong for a page at a time. This I feel about the dinner party, & the children in the boat; but not of Lily on the lawn. That I do not much like. But I like the end.
Because Woolf was a prolific diarist, we have these invaluable glimpses of her process. And, because she was a prolific diarist, she has a conscious understanding of her process. Though the process took a toll on her mental health, reading these connections with the final manuscript offers an additional voyage. With these, the novel, despite its sadness and meditations on grief, offers strange hope. Woolf gets through it. She even likes the book in places. And then, days after they return from Sicily and Rome, she comes back to it:
Sunday, May 1, 1927:
We came back on Thursday night from Rome; from that other private life which I mean to have for ever now. There is a complete existence in Italy: apart from this. One is nobody in Italy: one has no name, no calling, no background. And, then, not only is there the beauty, but a different relationship. Altogether I dont think I’ve ever enjoyed one month so much. What a faculty of enjoyment one has! I liked everything. I wish I were not so ignorant of Italian, art, literature & so on.....And then I remember how my book is coming out. People will say I am irreverent—people will say a thousand things. But I think, honestly, I care very little this time—even for the opinion of my friends. I am not sure if it is good. I was disappointed when I read it through the first time. Later I liked it. Anyhow it is the best I can do….
The Sound of the “Sea All Through It”
That’s it for the connection between Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse and Syracuse and Ortigia––those letters and notes documenting she was here. I don’t suggest the Woolfs’ 1927 excursion to Syracuse was significant to the writing of the book. But for some strange reason, I love the idea that in the month between finishing and launching this book, Virginia and Leonard were running through these same streets after drinking too much wine, sitting beside the nearby fountain of Arethusa writing letters, or walking through the ruins of the ancient Temple of Apollo and the Greek theater. The connection merely finds me here, reading to the sound of sea Woolf’s book founded on an ethereal desire to catch “the sea all through it.”
What a beautiful piece. Thank you for sharing. I have a gigantic book of letters by Virginia Woolf and will now go back and read the April 14 letter as well as the others written during her stay in Ortigia in 1927. We spent ten days in Sicily in 2019. I would love to have stayed longer. I can't remember the name of the tiny town where we stayed, only that we had traveled from Paris to Sicily for my son's spring break to escape the cold, and as we were driving to our airbnb, climbing higher and higher, we drove into a blizzard! The winds raged for several days and I stayed inside the big stone house, looking out at the pool that had been gorgeous in the photos and was now frozen over. There was a book in the house, Siracusa by Delia Ephron, which I read and very much enjoyed. I always remember what book I was reading on any given trip. How wonderful that you were able to join a virtual book club with Mona Simpson for TLL while in Ortigia!
What a fully immersive and considered experience for you! No blues at all. Thx for sharing.