In 2013 or 14, I voted on the Goodreads list 'Books you are tired of hearing about' to express my exasperation at seeing To the Lighthouse every bloody where that summer. If, even six months ago, you'd told me not only that I'd read To the Lighthouse this spring, but that I'd give it 5 stars and mark it "favourites", I'd have told you, if you were the kind of friend I could say this to in a friendly way, to fuck off. Especially because I didn't much like Mrs Dalloway and the imprint it left of grey-grubby dejected aftermathness, a book which on at least half a dozen occasions I've called "the wrong sort of depressing", and my default position was that I didn't like Virginia Woolf apart from Orlando and didn't want to read any more. I am still not very happy to have joined the club of Goodreads bores who love To the Lighthouse, but for what it's worth, the book was rather amazing - and I don't think this way about dozens of other classics and favourites I read before GR or was already determined to read before joining the site, and which people with large followings also go on about, so it'll just have to get re-framed to fit with those. When something's this popular, it goes without saying that you won't be on the same wavelength as all the other fans.
It wasn't instant. I read Hermione Lee's excellent introduction (better than a lot of the recent introductions to classics; the notes, however may be a bit too detailed unless you're doing a dissertation about textual alterations) and then small dribs and drabs of the novel. It was full of odd metaphors that were clearly well-written but which didn't describe my own experience of anything. I was sad not to be connecting when I'd wanted to connect with its superlative descriptions. Though there was a curious sense of its being the platonic idyll of hundreds of early-to-mid twentieth century English stories about elegant families and children and lawns and parties and summer escapades - even though it was written after plenty of examples I thought of, E. Nesbit for instance, and even though a lot of the characters just weren't very nice. (Later, the family structure, with the moody writer father and caretaking mother and lots of kids and guests, would prompt me to wonder if it had partly inspired childhood favourites of mine, the Bagthorpe Saga by Helen Cresswell.)
It was a world I still couldn't imagine as great high art: it's a world that's popularly cosy Sunday evening entertainment, as described much later, in Chapter 16: when the great clangour of the gong announced solemnly, authoritatively, that all those scattered about, in attics, in bedrooms, on little perches of their own, reading, writing, putting the last smooth to their hair, or fastening dresses, must leave all that, and the little odds and ends on their washing-tables and dressing-tables, and the novels on the bed-tables, and the diaries which were so private, and assemble in the dining-room for dinner.
Back near the beginning, I couldn't grip it. (These quotation marks are all things I wrote straight after reading.) "The prose is so silky, it slips past my eyes the same way poetry does. Probably because it's very well made. But feels essentially insubstantial. Yet quite often there's a really novel image. I get this with Ali Smith too - I often find it hard to see why she's quite so revered because she doesn't do the Pynchon thing of throwing around huge words and references and gags and it seems enjoyable in a simpler way, but there's a sort of... there isn't a word for it, because I have a sense of its being plainer and more grounded than 'beautiful' would suggest, it's not ornate, but it's incredibly well crafted."
No, to work its magic it needs to be read at length: immerse oneself and swim around in it, stretch out.
"I am getting to like it a lot now. There was a bit from chapters 4-12 that was really enchanting and ethereal, and it worked despite most of the characters being prickly, interesting how it does that. And it gained momentum once I read a lot of it at a time."
"Am starting to feel how some of the curious metaphors in TtL are like paintings. It doesn't matter that I might not have experienced that thing that way, the joy is in the images themselves." [I would later start to feel the nature of the actions in a new way, through their imagery. I can't recall a book that has ever done this before, and so very many times; other great descriptions have merely captured a feeling that already existed, on the edge of consciousness and previously beyond words. This is one of the central and unique achievements of this novel as far as I am concerned.] "It is refreshing to find such a very good book that feels like it's all about other people, the characters (not something for me to identify with or see people I know in it). Totally unconvincing as being about Scotland though. Always feels like the South Coast. Walter Scott was still fashionable in Scotland decades later. Never mind the complete absence of the sense of Scottish weather." It is an airy halcyon world, like the perfectly chosen cover of this Penguin Classics edition; it is Metronomy's English Riviera a century earlier. No one is stung and importuned and tangled, raw-eyed, by perpetual smirring sea breezes that any non-native would rather call gales.
"It's incredible how tiny the moments are that are described in TtL. So much longer to read (and esp to write) than to feel. I've read some reviews that seem to miss this completely. How very fleeting these states of mind are; the sort of thing people don't feel in the long term, nor set out to be judged by, not like writing down a considered opinion." Each moment is not what one character definitively thinks of another; among these are the moments we usually forget, microscopic aberrations and contradictions.
It is remarkable to have created such a beautiful and shimmering book from actively cathartic writing about a dysfunctional, sometimes abusive family , and a delineation of the frustrations of being an intelligent, artistically ambitious woman in the early twentieth century. It still barely seems possible. Just as it is strange to think of Woolf as a Victorian or Edwardian, yet those were decades of her life, drawn here, as she, like Lily, created new strange modernist forms that were anything but characteristic of the century of her birth. (Though perhaps the most modern - the most twenty-first century moments are of the irascible Mr. Ramsay with his nose forever in a book whilst in company, like a smartphone addict neglecting his guests.) It is a book very much about art, about painting, concerned with the creative process - perhaps the central human moment of the story being Lily's resolution to move the tree - as well as these memoirish themes which are often considered the opposite of art, a way to make art unartistic; rather it makes them into a resolutely aesthetic object.
"And how wonderful is 'Time Passes'?! I was expecting something knotty and Joycean - based on a negative review (whose saying it was too similar to Mrs Dalloway continues to puzzle me because this book is so gorgeous and Mrs D made me feel 'urghhh') and someone else saying it was hard to make sense of - but I think it's one of my favourite bits of a book I've ever read. It's almost animist (makes me want to read" [Amitav Ghosh's recent, and I think vital work of criticism on the neglect of climate change and nature in fiction] The Great Derangement all the more" [for this, surely, is its project of writing about and from the viewpoint of the non-human and the absence of humans: here the characters are buildings and the force of nature and history itself, taking over the unlived-in building, ending the Edwardian pre-war eternal summer of the upper classes, combining in the effects of human deaths, and new life in other forms: animals, plants and the renewed interest in poetry after the war]"- but the writing is so superlative: I couldn't believe there was something like that, which mentions things I love hearing about in evocative low fantasy, in an author like Virginia Woolf. And it does actually say what happens, and mostly in full sentences. Makes me want my own paper copy just so I can re-read those pages over and over."
The servants become full characters here in this section whilst the family is gone: they are aligned with nature, which both feels right - because they are local, they are part of the place, whereas the Ramsays belong in London - and feels wrong because it seems part of Woolf's only-half-developed class consciousness to align them with the non-human, with invisible forces.
This is a book which works by accumulation; I am not sure if some favourite moments from 'Time Passes' will seem so special in isolation.
weeds that had grown close to the glass in the night tapped methodically at the window pane (as well as the darlingly anthropomorphistic 'methodically', it's that collapse of time that suggests both night as a metaphor for the years of awayness, and the speed at which growth occurs in the absence of humans, that it does feel like overnight, yet also it is like fantasy where the plants do grow triffid-like in a few hours)
Toads had nosed their way in (... that adorable way animals affectionately push at you with their snouts: but here directed not at people but at the absence of humans that allows them to truly flourish).
Ideas that arrived earlier in reading seemed to be affirmed subsequently by the book:
And she opened the book and began reading here and there at random, and as she did so she felt that she was climbing backwards, upwards, shoving her way up under petals that curved over her, so that she only knew this is white, or this is red. She did not know at first what the words meant at all. (pt 1 Ch 19)
the slumbrous shapes in her mind; shapes of a world not realised but turning in their darkness, catching here and there, a spark of light; Greece, Rome Constantinople (pt 3, Chapter 10)
It was only towards the end of the third part that I realised the reader doesn't actually find out if the Ramsays went to the lighthouse at some off-screen moment during their visit in part one, and it doesn't matter. What matters is what's in the frame, as in a painting.
Yet also not: Lily's Cubist canvases - which she feels driven to work on despite suspecting they will end up as nothing more than attic bric-a-brac (something relateable all too well to writing a 685th Goodreads review) - are created as much by what is left out as by what is shown.
When the Ramsays finally make it to the lighthouse, their boat is out of sight from the mainland, out of the painter's view: the distance of the boat from land is the greater distance from the past Woolf gained by writing about this refraction of her family (as the letters quoted in the introduction more or less confirm). It really is a remarkable achievement to make such very artistic art from this stuff - compared with the thousands of lightly fictionalised memoirs now in vogue - though in its concern with posterity (The very stone one kicks with one's boot will outlast Shakespeare.) and details of the creative process, overtly and in recursive, "symbolical" commentary on itself, it may be an artists' book most of all.
(read & reviewed March 2017; the review and comment thread on Goodreads.)
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