The Waves, first editionPortrait of Virginia Woolf by Roger Fry
Is it a novel? Is it a poem? What exactly was Virginia Woolf trying to achieve when she wrote The Waves?
In his review in the New York Times in October 1931, critic Louis Kronenberger wrote:
“This prose, this imagery, is not in other words a medium, but an end in itself. The texture of the prose is a warp of sensory impressions woven into woof of poetical abstraction. As prose it has very often a high distinction–it is clear, bright, burnished, at once marvelously accurate and subtly connotative. The pure, delicate sensibility found in this language and the moods that it expresses are a true kind of poetry. And since literature comes before the novel, and “The Waves” reaches the level of literature, whether it is a good or bad novel, or any novel at all, is not really important. Bernard’s summing up at the end, for instance, of what their lives have meant–a cohesive, exquisite and sometimes moving stretch of writing–must be allowed, if no precedent exists for it, to set its own.”
Over the years The Waves has remained one of Woolf’s lesser-known works, perhaps because it defies categorisation and lacks the narrative unity of novels such as Mrs Dalloway and To the Lighthouse. Yes, it can seem difficult, but it is also extraordinarily beautiful, the writing complex and daring. There will be much to discuss during our time in St Ives and two places remain on the Salon study this October!
June rolls on, and suddenly it’s the middle of summertime in the northern hemisphere – longest day of the year, midpoint of the year. The peak of solar energy, the green stuff bursts forth. Celebrating the Solstice means observing fire and our great living sun, not just literally (our inexorable connection to the sun as a life source), but also figuratively (illumination of the mind, the soul).
Like literature. It’s no stretch that I’m thinking about my favourite midsummer novel, Joyce’s Ulysses – not only 16 June, just a few days before the Summer Solstice in Dublin, but also the longest day in literature (Stephen Dedalus notes at the end of Proteus: “By the way next when is it? Tuesday will be the longest day.”) It is indeed a long day for Bloom: it’s between 8 and 9.00pm in Nausicaa when he says “Long day I’ve had.”
Readers know there’s still a long way to go! It will be a few hours and a few hundred pages until “the heaventree of stars hung heavy with humid nightblue fruit.” This, my favourite line in the novel comes near the end of that long midsummer day and captures a moment of noticing. An observation of the glorious evening sky. For me, it’s something about seeing the cosmos as a tree that roots me in my tiny here and now every time. It’s perspective. And something about that humid nightblue fruit nourishes . . .
There is still time to book a place on Alison Cable’s three-session Midsummer Writing study running on 14, 21 and 28 June.
Salon Director Toby Brothers & salonista Sheila Fitzgerald celebrating Bloomsday 2021
Ulysses – the story of Leopold Bloom’s day-long Dublin odyssey on 16 June 1904 – was published in February 1922, making this year’s Bloomsday the one-hundredth anniversary.
A quick reminder of some of the Salon-related celebrations taking place over the coming week (click on links for more information):
Sunday 12 June, Nick Midgley’s Radio play Bloomsday will be broadcast on RTE Radio 1
Congratulations to Salonista Farah Ahamed, who has been shortlisted for the prestigious Commonwealth Short Story Prize. The overall winner will be announced on 21 June.
You can hear Farah speaking about her story Hot Chutney Mango Saucehere.
The story is included in an anthology of writing about menstruation in South Asia, Period Matters, which Farah has also edited and which is due for publication on 28 June.
Have you noticed the way in which, when there is more than one child in a family, each of them tends to be given a particular role? In my case, my mother always used to say that she hoped I would become a banker, or a lawyer – someone who would earn enough money to look after her in her old age. My brother, by contrast, was expected to be ‘an Artist’. It wasn’t entirely clear what this should involve, but clearly included him being somewhat unstable but brilliant, bringing reflected glory to his parents because of his talent, even if the consequence might be a painful (and impoverished) life… It didn’t really matter than I wrote poetry (and had no interest in banking), or that my brother quite liked the idea of having a comfortable and stable life (and maybe even helping to look after his parents in old age). In both our cases, growing up involved us having to work out our own responses to the expectations we were born into…
It won’t come as any surprise, then, that when I started reading about the life of James Joyce, I quickly became fascinated about his relationship to his younger brother, Stannie. As the eldest son of an eldest son, James was his father’s favoured child, carrying all his father’s frustrated hopes for fame and glory. Stannie did his best to follow in his brother’s footsteps, but that meant he was always a step behind – looking up with admiration (and some envy) at his brother’s achievements. From his teenage years onwards, Stannie kept a diary, much of which was filled with commentary on his brother’s life. Some of this was published posthumously, as The Dublin Diaries. He became Joyce’s first reader and critic – and gathered materials for his brother to use in the short stories that were eventually to be published as Dubliners. When Joyce went into exile in Trieste with Nora Barnacle, Stannie followed them out there; working tirelessly to earn enough money to allow his brother to write, often ‘rescuing’ him from the bars of Trieste, where he feared his brother was dissipating his talents. Joyce never fully acknowledged his brother’s contribution. Indeed, he cut the character based on him (Maurice) almost entirely from the final version of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Oh, and when it was finally published, he forgot to include the promised dedication to his brother in Dubliners.
Even today, with biographies and novels about the lives of Joyce’s father, John, his wife Nora, and his daughter Lucia, there is still no full-length book about Stanislaus Joyce. So when I joined the Lit Salon to re-read Ulysses, which I’d first had a go at when I was at university, it was no surprise that I also started to remember my fascination with James Joyce’s brother…
Eighteen months later, and I’m delighted to say that my radio play about the relationship between the brothers, Stannie and James Joyce, is going to be broadcast on RTE, to coincide with this year’s Bloomsday celebrations on 16 June. The play is called ‘Bloomsday’ and tells the story – in a fictionalized form – of the ten years when Stannie lived with James Joyce and Nora Barnacle in Trieste, between 1905 and 1915. Joyce wrote in Ulysses that ‘a brother is as easily forgotten as an umbrella’, and in some ways my play was an attempt to bring Stannie back into the story – indeed, to tell his story, the one that he never really got to write.
A small coda however. After finishing work on the play, and having had so much pleasure reading Ulysses again, I decided to have a go at reading Finnegans Wake with Toby in the Lit Salon. Although I hadn’t known about it at the time I was writing my play, it turns out that Finnegans Wake puts the relationship between two brothers – Shem and Shaun – at the heart of the book. Shem is an artist; and Shaun is a postman, one who can only deliver letters, not write them. So even in his final work, the family roles were still being played out. But I think Finnegans Wake is also a reckoning with these family scripts too. Indeed, despite the contempt in which Shem seems to hold his brother, and the sense of disapproval that Shaun shows towards his irresponsible sibling, in the end they both recognise that they need each other. And love each other. The family roles each were asked to play is part of what makes them who they are; but in questioning and challenging those roles, they also each become the person they should truly be.
Nick Midgley’s radio play, ‘Bloomsday’, will be broadcast on RTÉ Radio 1 on Sunday 12 June at 8.00 pm (BST) and will be available online at rte.ie/dramaonone.
Continuing my long association with the City Lit, starting on 13 June I am leading a four-week ‘sampler’ course introducing the first four chapters of Ulysses.
For those who can’t get enough of Joyce – or for those who would like to know what all the fuss is about – this course will immerse you in the realm of Modernism and Joyce’s experimentation with language. Ulysses is the huge book that sits atop most ‘best novels of all time’ lists, but few people have actually managed to read this work. The writing is challenging – but when discussed with a group of readers, with carefully chosen resources, you will be amazed at how much this work will develop your perspective on language, love, nationhood, identity, history and lemon soap. And funny – it is a deeply humorous and at times absurd book. We will consider just the first four chapters of the work: this will introduce readers to the vast wealth of material that the book offers. Most readers, once they have engaged with the book the first time, return repeatedly, finding more with each read.
More Joyce reminders:
On Sunday 12 June Nick Midgley’s radio play Bloomsday will be broadcast on RTE’s Drama on One.
On the same day in London the Balloonatics (joined by, ahem, me) will enact the second annual Tufnell Park Bloomsday Walk.
Meanwhile, a group of Ulyssians and Wakians from the Salon will head to Dublin to experience the carnival in the streets that celebrates this bounding work.
Those who have not YET read Ulysses may wonder what all the fuss is around Bloomsday, 16 June. There are those books you read that shift your world view – adding more intense colours to the interior and exterior landscape, have you rolling a favourite line or two sweetly in your mind – and then there are those few works that blast the mind right open: frustrating, challenging and ultimately symphonically exploding your understanding of what language can do, of what we might be able to understand about ourselves, each other, through the medium of language. Ulysses is the latter.
Having stumbled, trotted and slip-slided through this beautiful work many times now with such wonderful minds, Ulysses is in my bones – constantly reminding me that any given day, for any regular person, can be epic when we attend to the mind’s stream…Always passing, the stream of life, which in the stream of life we trace is dearer than them all….
On this, the 100th year anniversary of Joyce’s publication, the Salon is proud to highlight some of the many ways readers and would-be readers celebrate this work that warmly embraces the rhythm of life.
On Sunday 12 June Nick Midgley’s radio play Bloomsday will be broadcast on RTE’s Drama on One (more to follow on this).
On the same day in London the Balloonatics (joined by, ahem, me) will enact the second annual Tufnell Park Bloomsday Walk.
Meanwhile, a group of Ulyssians and Wakians from the Salon will head to Dublin to experience the carnival in the streets that celebrates this bounding work.
Our very own Kaye Seamer (who spans Joyce and Proust gracefully) has also sung for twelve years with the Royal Choral Society, which is staging a concert at the Royal Festival Hall on 1 June to mark its 150th Anniversary. The concert will be particularly special because the RCS gave the premier British performance of the work at the Royal Albert Hall in 1875, conducted by Verdi himself.
The literature of the past sometimes appears to have a language of its own, perhaps too intricate and opaque for us in the twenty-first century. Can it speak to me? Is it relevant? Could reading Renaissance texts be simply self-indulgent, nothing more than an escape from the miseries of our contemporary world?
But reading poems by Wyatt or Donne, visiting the fictional island of Utopia, witnessing pirate actions on the shores of Brazil or touring a mysterious castle in The Faerie Queene, we immediately realize we have walked into a world that is strangely familiar, yet disturbingly new. And it’s not just the words on the page – our journey to the Renaissance involves digging up booty: everyday objects, museum items, prints, paintings. The world of objects surviving from the past, be they mundane or works of art, tells us even more about our common glories and miseries and how life was lived by people like us in another time.
Exploring the English Renaissance can make us tourists: we get the chance to visit the exotic from the comfort of the printed page or images on a screen. What we discover is a period of intense experimentation, exploration and feverish creativity, but also of disease, violence and abuse of power. It can be unsettling and inspiring in equal measure. We return from this trip with at least one souvenir: the feeling that words and objects create disturbing synergies across time, offering opportunities to find ourselves where we least expect. They tell the story of who we were, who we are and where we might be heading.
Our latest newsletter is out now, with new studies, last chances to book, and news of a TV documentary on mental health featuring contributions from Salonista Dympna Cunnane, CEO of the charity Our Time.
