Listening, grading, trying not to worry

Sisyphus

It’s been a hard month at Fernham. I was so excited to turn in the first submission of Mrs. Dalloway in January. Making the revisions in May, however, was less exciting. Still, I thought we were moving closer to proof stage. I worked around the clock, as hard as I know how, sure that I was making progress toward a book. Now, it turns out that what I’ve done has to go to the series editors one more time and then to the Advisory Board. The goal posts haven’t just moved, they have receded from sight. I’m not sure why I didn’t understand the process, but it’s considerably lengthier and more involved than with my first book.

The good news is that the series editors tell me that what they’ve seen is good.

The good news, for you, is that this will make for a better book.

The bad news is that I am beyond done with thinking about this project. The bloom is off the rose, the flowers have wilted, and I’m ready to quit. On top of everything else, the editors are also asking me to excise all my Americanisms. Not knowing what those are, I’ve asked them, with all due respect, to do it themselves.

In the end, this is probably only a two-month delay, but I’m so discouraged that it feels like this book is never going to be done. Sometimes, unfortunately, the scholar’s life is even less than it’s cracked up to be.

Still listening

Just about the most romantic song I know.

LIstening...

Memorial Day & Mrs. Dalloway

This Memorial Day, I’m doing what I’ve been doing for most of this year: working on the final details of my edition of Mrs. Dalloway. While the big push was for first submission in January, I have now received comments on my work from the editors and need to incorporate those corrections by Thursday, so this is another moment of stressed and constant working on details.

To honor those soldiers who have died at war, I offer part of one more footnote from my forthcoming edition of the novel. This one is on the models for Septimus Warren Smith, the novel’s veteran. What struck me, in writing this footnote, was the overwhelming abundance of young men Woolf had to choose from in painting a portrait of a shell-shocked soldier grieving for the death of his friend (and this footnote doesn't even mention Woolf's brother-in-law, Philip Woolf, injured by the shell that killed his brother Cecil. Upon seeing Philip shortly after, Woolf wrote: ‘I can imagine that he is puzzled why he doesn’t feel more’ (D1 92), a thought she gives to Septimus in the novel:

Septimus Warren Smith [….] Critics have linked Septimus to real life soldiers whom Woolf knew, including Rupert Brooke, Siegfried Sassoon, Ralph Partridge, and Gerald Brenan. For more on these real-life models for Septimus, see Introduction. Steinberg suggests T. S. Eliot as another possible model for Septimus, noting Woolf’s intimacy with him at the time. Eliot’s hasty marriage to Vivenne Haigh-Wood came just after the death of his friend Jean Verdenal at Gallopoli (8-9), a circumstance that parallels Septimus’s hasty marriage after Evans’s death. (Verdenal is the dedicatee of Eliot’s 1914 ‘The Love Song of J.Alfred Prufrock’.) [….]

I repeat my daily prayer with extra fervency this Memorial Day: Honor the dead. Work for peace.

Also: This old post on women and war might be worth revisiting on Memorial Day:

Car Wheels on a Gravel Road

Songs evoke memories, sure. Every day I listen to music and every day a song reminds me of some earlier self. But twice this week, Lucinda Williams’ great song, “Car Wheels on a Gravel Road” has come on the radio and has brought me back not just to a period, but to an eerily precise time and place.

In August of 1998, I drove my little 4-door Civic from my beloved home in

Cambridge to Lafayette, Indiana, to take my first tenure-track job at Purdue. Driving behind me, in his nicer 4-door darker blue Civic was my boyfriend. As the land got flatter and Boston receded, I could see his terror mounting. Why, I could feel him thinking, have I followed this woman away from the East?

I had found a charming apartment: the top floor of a Victorian house facing a tiny pocket park on the top of a hill. Unfortunately, the prior tenants refused to leave in time. When I called the landlady to insist on our rights, she demurred: “He’s from India,” she explained by way of apology. “I think he’s a rajah!”

Rajah or no, I wanted in to our new apartment, but there was nothing to do. The moving company left our stuff in the garage and our landlady put us up in a vacant apartment a few blocks away. This apartment was a tiny one bedroom in a largely abandoned small apartment building with a distinctly Sunset Boulevard feel. One vacant apartment in the same building had a ballroom with French doors leading to a small garden. Although I’d seen it when I was apartment-hunting and had been momentarily charmed by the faded glamour and the promise of parties to come, in the end, it was too much to live up to. My boyfriend and I had never lived together before, and it seemed like a bad omen to move into a house that reminded me of Miss Havisham.

Nonetheless, there we were, in the very building I had known to avoid, in a tiny furnished apartment, waiting for the rajah and his girlfriend to move out.

Guilty, our landlady had stocked the fridge with cold cuts. I had never seen so many in my life. We had a pound of roast beef, a pound of turkey, a pound of corned beef, a pound of ham, a pound of swiss, and a pound and a half of American, a loaf of bread, some mayonnaise, and a jar of yellow mustard.

No sooner had we arrived, then my boyfriend had to head off on a sad errand: to the Mayo Clinic to be with his family while his dad underwent treatment for the cancer that would kill him a year later. He lived to see us married, but not much more.

Alone with a boombox and pounds and pounds of sliced meat, I spent my days planning my classes and listening to Lucinda Williams on a bulky black boombox:

Can't find a damn thing in this place

Nothing's where I left it before

Set of keys and a dusty suitcase

Car wheels on a gravel road

…

Child in the backseat about four or five years

Lookin out the window

Little bit of dirt mixed with tears

Car wheels on a gravel road

I wouldn’t want to live through that week again, and I couldn’t have made it without that song.

It's an honor just to be nominated....

Here's a little bit of good news for International Women's Day: My blog post on rape for Guernica is a finalist for the 3 Quarks Daily blog prize! Thanks for voting. Wish me luck with the judging!

Reculer...

...pour mieux sauter.

Some cross-country skiing. A renewed commitment to health. Yoga DVDs. Checking back in with friends.

#dalloway took her toll.

I'll be back soon.

One last draft footnote

31:9 Princess Mary Princess Mary (1897-1965) was the third child and only daughter of George V and Queen Mary. She married Viscount Henry Lascelles (1882-1947) on February 28, 1922. Lascelles had been an early suitor of Vita Sackville-West and would be the model for the Archduke Harry in O. Michael North notes that, for many people in England, this royal wedding was a sign that the war was finally over (5). Woolf took a passing interest in the wedding ‘Please tell me why Pr. Mary married Ld. Lascelles’ (L2 511). Later Clarissa's maid Lucy imagines herself as attending Princess Mary (59). 

Happy Birthday, Miss Jan

Adeline Virginia Stephen, later Virginia Woolf, was born on this day in 1882. One of her family nicknames was Miss Jan, on account of her January birthday. In the Monday 21^st December [1891] issue of the Hyde Park Gate News, young Virginia, nearly 10, this fictional love letters, part of a regular series in the HPGN:

My own Tom I love you with that fervent passion with which my father regards Roast beef but I do not look upon you with the same eyes as my father for he likes Roast Beef for its tast [sic] but I like you for your personal merits.

Happy Birthday, Miss Jan!

Draft footnote of the day: the green dress

58:14-15 By artificial light the green shone The green dress that becomes magical by artificial light reverses a distressing memory of a green dress gone wrong: ‘Down I came one winter’s evening about 1900 in my green dress […] All the lights were turned up in the drawing room; and by the blazing fire George sat, in dinner jacket and tie, cuddling the dachshund [….] He said at last: “Go and tear it up”’ (MB 151).

Draft footnote of the day: red flowers in Flanders Fields

104:19-20 Red flowers grew through his flesh John McCrae’s 1915 poem ‘In Flanders Fields’ commemorates the fact of red poppies blooming abundantly in battlefields that saw some of the heaviest casualties during World War One: ‘In Flanders fields the poppies blow / Between the crosses, row on row’ (1-2). Line six begins ‘We are the dead.’ Since 1920, the red poppy has been a symbol of remembrance of the war dead.

Hampstead

Not her most charitable mood, but sometimes I find myself thinking something similar about those #occupy kids. Yeah, they're my heroes, but they're kind of weird...

266:20 Hampstead Village in North London dating from the eighteenth century, where artists and freethinkers have resided. The poet John Keats, who, like Jim Hutton, Woolf imagines in red socks, lived in Hampstead from 1818-1820 (see EN 265.28). He wrote ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ there. Adjacent is the preserved open space of Hampstead Heath. Cf. ‘It’s unfortunate the civilization always lights up the dwarfs, cripples, & sexless people first. And Hampstead provides them’ (D 1:110; 21 January 1918).

Draft footnote of the day: Voltaire

An oldie but a goodie:


77.27-28 getting books sent out to them In 1904, when Leonard Woolf went to Ceylon as a young colonial administrator, he brought with him the complete works of Voltaire in seventy volumes (Glendenning 66).

Draft footnote of the day: Albanians

181:8 Albanians Albania, too, was in the news at this time, although for far different reasons than Armenia and with much less public sympathy from Britain. By 1921, Albania was bankrupt, having been at war continuously since 1910. The discovery of oil led the British-based Anglo-Persian Oil Company to send significant financial support to Ahmed Zogu. Zogu was elected prime minister in 1922, then, president in 1925. In 1928, Albania became a monarchy and Zogu, its king, Zog I. See Vickers.

This morning's mystery

I'm off to read 'The Rape of Lucrece' for Mrs. Dalloway and it strikes me as a pretty grim task. I was summarizing Cymbeline yesterday, trying to describe how Imogen's husband makes a bet that she is faithful, sets up a friend to test her, and he sneaks into her bedroom and spies on her while she's asleep. Later he pretends to have raped her.

Then, I spent all that time re-reading Clarissa last spring which is all about rape.

And the other Clarissa in literature is the rapist's accessory in 'The Rape of the Lock.'

And Jane de Gay's book pointed me to the links between Clarissa's thought that there will be no more marrying and Hamlet's 'Get thee to a nunnery' speech.

So why, I want to know, is Clarissa Dalloway's happy memory of love also Othello's feeling? Why, when she remembers feeling in love, does she remember the feeling of a lover who will become a murderer, a man who will go mad from suspicion of his wife's infidelity?

Looked at from this angle, the violence and the threat of rape seems to be in too many places with no one untainted.

Draft footnotes of the day: The Tempest & Cymbeline

Jane de Gay's excellent book led me to look again at Ariel's song in The Tempest. Earlier, I had heard 'those are pearls that were his eyes' more strongly through Eliot's quotation of it than through Shakespeare himself. Jane's work taught me to think differently and led me to a great dog footnote too. Enjoy.

61:18 Fear no more From Cymbeline. See EN 16:23. See also 46:26, 211:1. Jane deGay notes that Woolf’s earlier allusion to Ariel’s song from The Tempest (47:21) informs this allusion to Cymbeline: ‘Fear no more says the heart, committing its burden to the sea’ (61:18-19). Both songs are dirges sung for characters presumed dead who turn out to be alive (de Gay 89). See also EN:61:24. 

61:24 the dog barking See The Tempest: ‘Hark, hark! | burthen dispersedly, [within]. Bow-wow. | The watch-dogs bark! (1:2:381-383). This, from the first half of Ariel’s song, closely follows the combined allusion to Cymbeline and The Tempest above (61:18).

Shakespeare, the sun to our little moons

One of the puzzles in writing footnotes to Mrs. Dalloway is that the direct allusions don't necessarily correlate to the writers who most influenced Woolf. This makes a lot of sense--we often talk a lot about influences that bother us and talk seldom at all about those who are so important to us that they run in our veins. Still, one of my challenges as an editor has been to think about ways to depict this accurately. Woolf herself offers an explanation for this phenomenon in this discussion of Shakespeare from the 1924 essay ‘Indiscretions’: 

‘Of Shakespeare we need not speak. The nimble little birds of field and hedge, lizards, shrews and dormice, do not pause in their dallyings and sporting to thank the sun for warming them; nor need we, the light of whose literature comes from Shakespeare, seek to praise him’ (E 3:463)

It's a beautiful metaphor. I've certainly found a lot more Shakespeare than I expected in Mrs. Dalloway and, thank to other critics, will be able to cite many more.

Mocking James

Nothing is better than when Virginia Woolf gets going on Henry James. (We have played this game before.) This is from a review of a very bad-sounding book of reminiscences of 19th c. novelists by Molly MacCarthy:

'through the drawing-room door we may hear the reverberation of Mr. Henry James, who, seeing the end of his sentence in the distance, with uplifted hand and rumbling fence of sound wards off intruders.' (E 3 444).

Hello, TR; Hello 2012

Why not start the year with more dark comedy? This from a review by Woolf of a book on Teddy Roosevelt. 'Body and Brain' is the title of the review & Woolf's point is that TR, unlike many politicians, clearly possessed both:

When he was President of the United States a cowboy came up to him and said, ‘Mr. President, I have been in jail a year for killing a gentleman.’ ‘How did you do it?’ asked the President, meaning to inquire as to the circumstances. ‘Thirty-eight on a forty-five frame,’ replied the man, thinking that the only interest the President had was that of a comrade who wanted to know with what kind of tool the trick was done.’ No other President, it is said, from Washington to Wilson, would have drawn that answer. (E 3:225)