2021-11-18 LIVE from NYPL Annotating Mrs. Dalloway: Merve Emre with James Woods >> Aidan Flax-Clark: Hello. Good evening, or good afternoon, or happy middle of the night, depending on where and when you may be watching this. My name is Aidan Flax-Clark, and I'm coming to you from the New York Public Library where I put together our public programs and I have the distinct pleasure of introducing tonight's event which is about Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway. And it's inspired by the library's new exhibition, Treasures. The centerpiece of this evening's program will be a conversation between the author, critic, and professor Merve Emre, and the New Yorker's James Wood. And they will be discussing, of course, the recently published annotated Mrs. Dalloway which was published by our friends at [inaudible] and was edited introduced and annotated by Merve. The book is, of course, available for sale and you should, of course, purchase it from the library shop. Links to do that are in the chat on YouTube, on the event page, and you also received it in the reminder email that you got after you signed up for this. All proceeds go to benefiting your public library. And this book, like all of [inaudible] annotated editions, is absolutely beautiful. So, I very much encourage you to get one for yourself or perhaps there's a Virginia Woolf lover in your life that you still need to get a holiday gift for. This'll be perfect. You can also borrow the annotated Mrs. Dalloway or James's most recent book, both of which are behind me. His is called Serious Noticing. You can borrow both of them with a valid New York Public Library card. Links to do that are also in the chat and on the event listing. And if you don't have a library card, well, first of all, shame on you. And second of all, you can get more info on how to sign up for one on the event listing and in the chat. So, like I mentioned, tonight's event is inspired by our new exhibit, Treasures. The Polonsky Exhibition of the New York Public Library's Treasures showcases some of the most extraordinary items from the 56 million in our collections. And they tell the stories of people, places, and moments spanning 4000 years. It's sort of greatest hits from our special collections. And the hits are pretty great. We're like the library equivalent of Abba Gold. It's just hit after hit after hit. You can see Shakespeare First Folio, a Gutenberg Bible, early copies of the Bill of Rights and the Declaration of Independence, rare works of art, intimate photographs of writers, typewritten manuscripts, handwritten manuscripts by James Baldwin, Mary Wollstonecraft, Maya Angelou, Oscar Wilde, Malcolm X, and, of course, Virginia Woolf. And since we're here to talk about Virginia Woolf, before we turn the conversation over to Merve and James, Carolyn Vega is with us. Carolyn is the library's Henry W and Albert A Berg curator of English and American literature which is where the New York Public Library's unparalleled collections of Virginia Woolf material are housed. Carolyn will tell you more about those collections and a little bit about what of Woolf is in Treasures. Meanwhile, if you'd like to go see those items for yourself and visit the rest of Treasures, you can go to nypl.org/treasures to sign up for your free time ticket. And if you can't make it in for whatever reason, that page will also allow you to explore a digital version of the exhibition, an audio guide and much, much more. So, again go to nypl.org/treasures. And I'm going to guess that that link's in the chat too. Turn things over to Carolyn in a second. Just want to tell you real fast, that if you have any questions for Merve or for James, there'll be glad to take them at the end of the conversation. So, start getting them ready now. You can send them over at any time by using the chat, the Google form, or by emailing publicprograms@nypl.org. We'll make sure that they see them and they'll get to as many of them as they can. Lastly, real-time captions are available for tonight's program. You can click on the closed caption button to access that, or you can use the stream text link that we shared in the reminder email and we're also sharing in the chat for a live transcript. Okay. So, thank you again for being with us and let's turn things over to Carolyn Vega. >> Carolyn Vega: Hi, good evening and welcome. My name is Carolyn Vega. And as Aidan mentioned, I am the Henry W and Albert A Berg curator of English and American literature at the New York Public Library. And I'm delighted to speak to you tonight about the library's Virginia Woolf collection as a lead up to what I know will be a really wonderful conversation between Merve and James. So, Virginia Woolf. Here she is at age 41, staring directly at us in her fur-collared coat from the pages of her passport. It was issued to Mrs. A. V. Woolf. A for Adeline, Woolf's seldom-used Christian name on March 22nd 1923, as you can see by the foreign office stamp on the upper right-hand corner. Passport was valid throughout the British empire, France, Belgium, Switzerland, Italy, Portugal, and Spain. It expired on March 22nd 1925 just under two months before the publication of Mrs. Dalloway, that essential work of modernist literature that we're focusing on tonight. The novel as many will be familiar with already, unfolds on a single summer's day around a London society matron preparing to host a party and a shell-shocked war veteran. The Dalloways make a minor appearance in Woolf's 1915 novel, The Voyage Out, but Woolf truly started working on what would become the novel Mrs. Dalloway back in 1922. And the origins can be found in the Virginia Woolf [inaudible] papers held by the Berg Collection. Here you can see a small selection of that collection [inaudible] on the tables in our reading room, which is tucked up on the third floor of the library's flagship building on 5th Avenue. And just a side note to our researchers, we've reopened following a long closure from the pandemic. And you're welcome to write to us at berg@nypl.org to schedule a visit. So, this is one of the most important Virginia Woolf collections in the world. The Berg holds Virginia Woolf's diaries and notebooks, draft material for all of her works of fiction, and more than 1700 incoming and 700 outgoing letters as well as photographs, books, legal documents, and [inaudible]. How did this collection come to reside at the New York Public Library, you might ask. Woolf is a major British author whose home in Sussex Monk's house has been preserved by the National Trust, and the papers of many of her contemporaries and predecessors reside in British libraries even some of Woolf's manuscripts. But the bulk of her papers came to New York. It was in 1958, through the work of two women based in Chicago, Frances Hamill and Margery Barker, book dealers who in an industry that was then very much an old boys club sought up the papers [inaudible] in Britain and Europe. Hamill and Barker valued scholarly access to literary collections. And they worked very hard to place material and academic and public institutions before offering collections to private collectors. Hamell and Barker approached Leonard Woolf, Virginia Woolf's widower sometime in or before 1956, built a strong relationship with him and eventually represented the archive. Scholarly access was important to Leonard Woolf, too. He would only consider offers from institutions willing to acquire the collection and [inaudible], willing make it available to serious students. The collection came to the Berg in several instalments. First, in November 1958, were major manuscripts and reading notes. Correspondence and the diaries came later. And we continue to add to the collection as recently as last month. Notable recent additions which came with the William Beekman collection of Virginia Woolf in her circle, includes several unpublished photographs, rare broadsides, unpublished letters, and many books including some bound or recovered by Virginia Woolf herself. Here, we have an unpublished half-length portrait of Virginia Stephen, later Woolf, at approximately 13, possibly in mourning for her mother. And then on the left, in 1921 broadside entitled What is a Pleasant Thing to Think About? This is an extract from her 1917 short story, A Mark Upon the Wall, and it's illustrated in the upper margin with a woodcut by Vanessa Bell. We also have a set of 10 books by George Sand decorated by Virginia Woolf with a green leather spine and decorative paper covers. And at the below right, a handwritten letter from 1907 written by Virginia Stephen, later Woolf, as an address of congratulations to her sister Vanessa on the eve of her marriage to Clive Bell. So, what will you do with all of this, with the record of the life? What does it mean? That Virginia Woolf took up binding as a hobby or that she sat for a photograph in mourning or that she wrote a letter heartfelt and wistful, and maybe just a little bit sad to her sister on the eve of her marriage. So, I'm interested in the creative process, and the documentary evidence that details the hard work of literature, and in the life of the author, and how it bears on the literary career. For Virginia Woolf, as for so many others, the heart of the archive is in the great works of literature, the correspondence and the diaries. So, I mentioned that Mrs. Dalloway was published in 1925, on Monday, May 14th to be exact, as documented by Woolf in her diary entry that you can see here on the right. Her handwriting is difficult to read, even for someone like me whose job it is to read difficult handwriting. But she tells us and I quote, The first day of summer leaves visibly drawing out of the bud and the [inaudible]green. Oh, what a country day. And some of my friends are now reading Mrs. D in the country. This is the day of publication. At left, you see the first edition of the book with the iconic desk jacket designed by Woolf sister, Vanessa Bell who designed most of [inaudible] Woolf's books. I also mentioned that the origin of the novel are to be found in the papers held by the Berg Collection. So, in this notebook, seen here, which measures just about 10 inches high by eight and a half inches wide, that Virginia Woolf bound herself with lovely cream colour, with lovely cream paper wrappers printed with a dark floral pattern. The cover of the notebook is creased on the diagonal. And you can see where the edges of the covers which really are just the paper, have been worn and folded over. And in some places even torn away. The notebook is on view in the recently opened Polonsky Exhibition of the New York Public Library's Treasures. I encourage you all to see if you are in New York or visiting or to explore online, if you're further afield. Virginia Woolf's notebook is one -- you can see an installation shot here -- as one among hundreds of similarly extraordinary works from the library's collection currently on view. But back to the notebook. Here we are, with the notebook open to the start of an 18-page short story entitled the Prime Minister. Woolf penned the story and at the final chapters of her novel, Jacob's Room, which occupies most of the notebook and was published in 1922. I hope you can get a sense of her fast-flowing [inaudible] and then the revisions on this page. It might look pretty straight forward, but this is actually a pretty busy page for Woolf. So, she almost never writes on the verso or left-hand side of the page as she does here. And while she always reserves the left margin for notes and changes, she rarely makes use of it as many as three times as she does on this page. And perhaps you can sense some kind of exuberance in the heavy underlining of the title at the top page on the right. So, Woolf, as you can see, began revising this text almost immediately. And she also added an outline which you can see here on the left which she entitled or headed, thoughts on beginning of book to be called perhaps at home or the party. Here, she jots down eight possible chapter titles. There are no chapters in the published book, only 12 section breaks. And then 10 days later, she added some notes, which you can see on the right, for a possible revision of the book. So, here she remarks that the design that quote, the design is extremely complicated. The balance must be very finely considered. And she asks herself, all to take place in one day? And the end it does take place in one day and about 12 hours [inaudible] corresponding to the Section 2 [inaudible] Mrs Dalloway, more drafts followed. Here's a very faint typescript of a later version of the Prime Minister, which she revised with a dark-colored pen. Related stories appear in other notebooks and folders throughout the Berg Collection, although the very final draft of the book is held by the British library. Mrs. Dalloway was a groundbreaking achievement for Virginia Woolf, and the book is beautifully introduced and contextualized in Merve's new annotated Mrs. Dalloway, which I would also encourage everyone to check out from the library or to purchase online from the library shop. So, here, you can see the first edition at the right, the original desk jacket by Virginia Woolf's, sister Vanessa Bell, which was recently acquired by the library through the generosity of collector Susan Tane. I love that through this collection at the New York Public Library, you can trace a great work of literature from its very origins through the drafts, with all of the context provided by letters, photographs, and diaries, and even the dust jacket art to publication. This is an enduring work of literature. And I can't wait to hear Merve and James speak to it further. Thank you. >> Merve Emre: Thank you, Carolyn. That was really lovely. >> James Wood: Thank you very much indeed for both of those introductions. And it was tremendous to see those beautiful notebooks and first iterations, earlier iterations. And it was just wonderful. It's a real pleasure to be talking tonight to Merve Emre, who has edited and labored over this extraordinary, annotated Mrs. Dalloway. Just very briefly, I'm sure she'll be known to many of you following this. Merve teaches at Oxford, teaches English at Oxford, is the author of two books. A book about the making of bad readers in post-war America which came out in 2017. And the book about the invention, essentially, of personality tests in business particularly the Myers Briggs personality tests which came out in 2018. She'll also be known to you, I'm sure, as a frequent appearer in the New Yorker, in the New York Times, in other places she most recently wrote a wonderful essay about Simone de Beauvoir, for instance, in the summer in the New Yorker. And here she is introducing and meticulously annotating this edition of Mrs. Dalloway for us. And we're all the beneficiaries. So, I'll just plunge straight in, if I may. Merve, in your introduction, which I think is a remarkable piece of writing in itself, you tell a story at the beginning of your long involvement, much longer than mine, it has to be said, with Mrs. Dalloway. It goes back to your childhood. And I wonder if you wouldn't mind just telling us a bit about that. >> Merve Emre: Well, I will. But then I want to hear about your involvement, afterward. [Inaudible]. So, the story that I tell in the introduction is that I first read it when I was very young, when I was around 10 or 11. And I was a bookish and relatively lonely child. But I had one friend, a boy would I read novels with at that age. And we would read novels and we would send them to one another. So, I read Mrs. Dalloway and I mailed it to him. And I must've included a note, indicating that I felt like our relationship reminded me of the relationship between Clarissa Dalloway and Peter Walsh. And he wrote back to me a letter that I still have, maybe the only letter that I have from my childhood. And he said, you are wrong. We are not Clarissa and Peter. We are Jake Barnes and Lady Brett Ashley from The Sun also Rises by one Ernest Hemingway. [ Laughter ] >> James Wood: I love that one, by one Ernest Hemingway. >> Merve Emre: By one Ernest Hemingway. And it's very funny, of course, looking back on that now because I don't think either the impotent American journalist and the sexually insatiable English divorcee or Clarissa and Peter, were particularly good models for our 11-year-old friendship. But I do use the anecdote to get into Woolf's theory of character, and how it is that characters can be created to create a bridge between fiction and life which was so important to her. >> James Wood: Yeah. And I wanted to talk to you about that because it's such a crucial part of how we read Mrs. Dalloway and of how we read Woolf at all. So, I wonder if you would just talk a little bit about this art of character reading that Woolf both explicitly proselytizes for and also enacts again and again in her own writing. >> Merve Emre: Well, she talks very beautifully in her say, Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown about the art of character reading. And she begins not by defining it but by explaining or indicating that it is the art of the young, she says. And that when people are young, they frequently speculate about minds and the hearts of others in order to prime themselves for engaging in all kinds of dramatic escapades with other people, whether it's to become friends, whether it's to fall in love, whether it's to fall out of love. And she seems to indicate that that kind of earnest speculation about the intensities of other people is something that wanes as we get older. And that we only use it in so far as it is practically beneficial for us to get through our day to day lives. But for her, that is the novelists art. And the novelist remains fixated on the mysteries of other people on their inner most depths long after it ceases to be practically useful for her to do so. >> James Wood: And she felt and argued that this there was some lack in Victorian and Edwardian fiction -- the fiction that proceeded her, the fiction that was by her parents' generation, that they, as it were, to put it crudely, sort of worked from the outside in and she needed to work from the inside out. What was she, what do you feel when you read those manifestos of hers, those essays from particularly from the twenties, what do you feel that she what was that? What was that thing that was lacking that she felt when she read Arnold Bennett or even perhaps Dickens? I mean what did she feel was, what was she going to change? What was this character reading going to do in fiction? >> Merve Emre: Well, I want to reverse the, well, I want to ask you a question which is, do you buy that distinction that she makes between the, essentially, between the Victorian model of character and the modernist model of character? Because I wonder how accurate of a diagnosis it is. >> James Wood: I think I -- well, I do buy it except that I wish she had been less hard on George Eliot in A Room of One's Own. [Laughter] Given how much she admired and respected George Elliot. I felt, I always felt in A Room of One's Own, she needed to be much more hospitable to this great predecessor than she is. And it's certainly true that when you read certain novels by Arnold Bennett, you feel this is a novelist who really knows how to deal with character and a vocal and animated. But I think this particular aesthetic enabled her above all to do what she needed to do. And she needed, I mean because we're not just talking about a notion of self. We're also talking, of course, about a freeing of character from certain realist formulae [inaudible], and you know scenes in which people have conflict, in which characters grow, people come in and out of rooms, and so on. That is replaced by a pouring of the character from scene to scene which has made possible, I think, by a notion of character reading. >> Merve Emre: Well, I think it's in some ways much more intimately connected with or explanatory of the way that the narrative consciousness gets shaped in Mrs Dalloway, in particular, and how one has been narrator move from one character to the next. And that sense of porousness, I think, is created by the idea that when you tunnel deep down into characters, the way that she purports to do, you find a kind of similarity, a texture that is knitted through everybody, in the fictional world that she creates. And so, coming up from that texture, it becomes easy to then shift from one character to another. So, in some ways, I think you're right that what it explains is the inter subjective relations between the characters more than it explains something, like a different model of the self or of interiority or whatever. >> Absolutely. I mean, you quoted in your introduction, that the famous transcendental theory of Mrs. Dalloway is a transcendental theory which was a horror of death allowed her to believe or say that she believed for all her scepticisms, that since our apparitions, the part of us which appears so momentary compared with the other, the unseen part of us, which spreads wide, the unseen might survive, be recovered somewhere attached to this person or that, or even pointing certain places after death. And then right at the beginning of the novel, you'll remember, there's that wonderful line in which she imagines herself being laid out like a mist between the people she knew best. And I think that's exactly what you're talking about. It enables suddenly a connectivity between characters that can't be there in the same way when we talk about Dickens' great gallery of characters who are so wonderfully distinct in and all their vibrancy, it's almost the opposite of that. >> Merve Emre: Right. And can't be there when Eliot asks a question like, but why always Dorothea. >> James Wood: Right. >>Merve Emre: No, And I think that one of the most powerful things about Woolf is precisely the ability for her language to be at, one, so idiosyncratic but then also extraordinarily depersonalized, in that it allows for that connectivity to exist. And that is really the remarkable balance that her fiction strikes, that balance that she's always talking about, too, between the personal and the impersonal, between a highly elevated sense of style. And that fabric that texture that's woven into the lives of everybody such that casting a light on it is not at all an act of excavating or identifying something personal. [Inaudible] But now I want you to tell me about your long-term engagement with Mrs. Dalloway. If you have a story. >> James Wood: Well, I don't know that I have a story around Mrs. Dalloway because actually my long-term love is To the Lighthouse. Although, in obvious ways, it seems to me that Mrs Dalloway is a much fuller novel [inaudible] novel. For me, there's something extraordinarily beautiful about the slight almost metaphysical thinning of the air that you get into the lighthouse that it becomes almost more poem like than this book with, yes, with just as it were more consciousness and less business, less busy-ness in it. And anyway, just happened to be the first Woolf novel I read, and kept on reading. And I certainly wasn't as precocious as you. I dread to think of the drivel that I was reading when I was about 11. While you were exchanging letters about one Hemingway and one Woolf. But I did grow up eventually. And I don't think I read Mrs Dalloway before university, though. I certainly didn't read, I was a slightly lazy teenage reader. And what I did read as a teenager were quite a number of Woolf's essays. I just got into essays. I suppose it was at the time I was beginning to think that maybe I would like to review books and do that thing. And so, I was extremely interested in always have been in Woolf's career, starting at the TLS, writing anonymously and so on, of course. But we're probably getting beyond ourselves. Because I think, to be fair to our audience, we should go back a little bit to, just a grounding ourselves in the novel. And maybe a good way of doing that would be simply to discuss, for me to ask you about the two main characters, Mrs. Dalloway and Septimus Smith, and how they came about as characters. You wrote very well about possible models. And I think it might be interesting to talk about that briefly. >> Sure. I mean, Carolyn already mentioned that Clarissa Dalloway and her husband Richard, who is only referred to as Dick in here, appear in the Voyage Out. And in that novel, they are these entirely satirical or satirized characters. They are caricatures of upper-class British people who board this ship, and Richard Dalloway's function on that ship is to sexually assault Rachel Vinrace, the main character of the novel. And he and Clarissa disembarked from the ship. And she has no idea what has happened. She's been seasick the whole time. And when Woolf wrote that novel, she wrote to her sister, she wrote to Vanessa Bell. She described Mrs. Dalloway as being kitty to a tee. I wonder if she'll notice, and by kitty, she's referring to her long-time friend, Kitty Max, who had helped take care of her after her mother had died. But she seems to have unfinished business with that character because after she has been secluded for several weeks, fighting off a bout of influenza in the early 1920s, she decides to write her short story Mrs. Dalloway in Bond Street. And one of the extraordinary things that the NYPL has are the early plans that are in the notebook that Carolyn showed us. That show how Mrs. Dalloway in Bond Street undergoes this incredible metamorphosis from being the first short story in a short story cycle that she's planning, to be coming that first interlude for Mrs. Dalloway. But as she's starting to plan that short story cycle, before it becomes a novel, her friend Kitty Max dies. And in her diary, the same day that she learns of Kitty Max's death -- and Kitty Max committed suicide, she threw herself over the banisters of her home -- she comes up with the name Septimus Smith. And in the 1928 introduction to the novel, she confesses that she had planned to have Mrs. Dalloway kill herself. But then eventually outsourced that to Septimus Smith. And the other thing that's -- I'll just say that's in the incredible papers at the NYPL are the two plans where she first juxtaposes them as Mrs. D seeing the same truth, and SS seeing the insane truth of the world. And then revises that slightly, to say that the major juxtaposition will be between life and death. >> James Wood: And then there's also a story you tell, a troubling one that might be behind also the Septimus Smith character, an event that happened in 1920 at a party. >>Merve Emre: Oh, yes, that she was at, well, she wasn't at the party but Vanessa was at a party, and a young man fell from the roof of a party. And she records that in her diary as well. But then, we might also want to add to that her own first suicide attempt where she tried to kill herself by throwing herself out of a first floor Bloomsbury style window. >> James Wood: Right, in 1913, was that? >> Merve Emre: Yeah. And she's very clear in her, just to get back to what we were talking about that interesting tension between the personal and the impersonal that marks this novel. In her diary, there's a very famous entry where she writes, am I writing the hours from deep emotion? And she says the mad part tries me so hard. It makes me squint. I can only eke out 50 words a day. And so, she was certainly drawing on this constellation of death that she either sought or that she had witnessed or heard of. But the character that results from that is very, very different from any of its specific inspirations. >> James Wood: So, she begins really writing the novel as we have it in earnest in 1922, in the middle of 1922, I think. It takes about two years to write, I'm always struck by it. Generally speaking how fast Woolf writes, how fast she works despite agonizing self-doubt, and so on. The work gets written. >> Merve Emre: She also revises that. So, she won't admit that it takes two years. So, in her diary she says, it really only took me nine months. [ Laughs ] >> Merve Emre: That's great. And writes most of it, I think, according to your excellent note, I think, in one of the many wonderful annotations, writes most of it in Bloomsbury and Tavistock Square. And, of course, what we have is this astonishing [inaudible] London novel, in which characters are walking around thinking and being. And we'll come back to that in a minute. But we shouldn't stint on how extremely funny the novel often is in its wonderful poking lunges. The kind that you get often in her diaries when she's writing about the people, the human traffic that came through her various homes. But these satirical strikes at an entire English Imperial establishment. It's wonderful. >> James Wood: Yeah, and I think it is, it's surprising that even now, when you talk to people about Woolf, sometimes even when you speak to Woolf scholars, her political satire just doesn't really get acknowledged the way that it ought to be. And it cuts in so many different directions at once. So, I think the funniest bits are when she turns to a mock epic register when she talks about proportion and conversion. Those long digressions, but also the way that she has the servants, the way she has Clarissa's servant, Lucy. [Inaudible] mistress as a crusading goddess, walking through the doors of the house, placing her umbrella in the umbrella stand. And that to me is probably my favorite of Woolf's comic gestures is the turn to the mock epic. >> Merve Emre: Totally. Yes. The you mentioned both Lucy, the maid, and then also the frightening doctor, Sir William Bradshaw, who serves proportion and in that radiating circle way that the novel does, she sort of says, he's not only served his own clientele. He'd dealt proportion onto England, into England itself. He disciplined the lunatics, and so on. And then it begins to turn, in a proportion has also a sister conversion, and conversion is essentially coercion. It's like, I'll take you, you'll come down to my hospital and sorry, we'll take care of you down there. It's really extraordinarily sinister to read that. And one feels, of course, that one knows of course, what's running through it is quite a lot of Woolf's own experience at the hand of various medical doctors. >> Merve Emre: Well, and the way that they insisted on her isolation. >> James Wood: Yes. >> Merve Emre: That is the thread that runs through the discourse on conversion. But then also, that links up later on with Septimus' suicide. The idea that what it means to get better or what one needs to get better is to be taken out of this scene, as we were saying before, of dispersed being to have to be a totally separate and a totally isolated subject, without access to the rest of the world. The world of impressions by which one is made. And that to me is, rereading it this time, the most sinister part of the proportion conversion section is Lady Bradshaw. And the spectacle of Lady Bradshaw -- >> James Wood: Who went under. >> Merve Emre: Who went under. And comparing that with a photograph that he has of her in her court dress -- >> James Wood: Yes. >> Merve Emre: -- that the elevation of that photograph, and then the idea that she has gone under, that really gave me chills this time rereading it. Yeah. >> James Wood: Yeah. So, at the party, at the Bradshaw's, sinister, felt slightly less sinister, but reasonably sinister creatures like the absurd Hugh Whitbread who serves, polishes the Kings boots whatever he gets up to, counts the wine bottles at the Buckingham palace. I wrote a couple down, just because they made me laugh. So, I've always -- >> Merve Emre: [Inaudible] walking through the park with his dispatch box. That always makes me laugh. >> James Wood: Oh, yes, that's absolutely [inaudible] oh, and the yes, I've always loved the painter from St. John's Wood's Harry, who just does paintings of what she wonderfully described as [inaudible] absorbing moisture. [ Laughing ] And then you have the radiating outwards. All his activities, dining out, racing were founded on capital standing absorbing moisture and sunset pools, just a fabulous line. So, there they are all our Lady Bruton, and the rest of them who thinks that to be not English even among the dead, would be impossible. They're all at this party. In my rereading it just a couple of days ago, I had forgotten. I'd always remembered the political stuff and the wonderful little satirical jabs. But I neglected to remember how focused her attention is on this superstructure resting on empire. She really never leaves that alone. India, Burma, and imperial reach. >> Merve Emre: I mean, it is the schema for this novel's use of detail. So, I think a lot about Peter Walsh on his walk, and the way every statue that he see, every statue that is a monument to the empire is called out for you in the text. I mean that is what the details of the city are made out of. I mean, the empire is in the details, I think, in this novel. And it is on the one hand, so copious and on the other hand, so subtle that it can actually be quite easy to miss, if you're not intent, I think, on seeing it. But yes. I mean, I think it's absolutely there in the party. And I think the moment when she learns about Septimus' death and she retreats into that little room to think about it. That moment gains so much of its, I think, amazing quality from the sense that, okay, here is somebody withdrawing from this hyper saturated world, that has been set up over the past a hundred and [inaudible]. >> James Wood: It's a very moving passage, that. Do you want to, I have it. Would you like to read it out? >> Merve Emre: Do I have a copy? Hold on. Yes, of course. I must have. I must have a copy. It would be very like me to not have a copy, to not have a copy of it. So, I think I'll read the part that includes the line that is included in the American edition. Not from the British edition because I really like it. So, it's toward the end of the of the penultimate chapter, of the penultimate interval, sorry. The young man had killed himself. I'll begin there. The young man had killed himself but she did not pity him. With the clock striking the hour one, two, three, she did not pity him with all this going on. There the old lady had put out her light. The whole house was dark now with this going on she repeated. And the words came to her. Fear no more the heat of the sun. She must go back to them. But what an extraordinary night. She felt somehow very like him. The young man who had killed himself. She felt glad that he had done it, thrown it away while they went on living. The clock was striking. The leaden circles dissolved in the air. He made her feel the beauty, made her feel the fun. But she must go back. She must assemble. She must find Sally and Peter and she came in from the little room. And I mean there are two reasons that given our conversation that's so striking to me right now. The first is that in a novel where isolation is so much to be feared, it is this momentary scene of isolation of withdrawal. And then the imperative to go back. She must go back. She must assemble. So, she cannot do what he has done, which is to withdraw himself entirely from life. But then, I mean, I'm really struck by the fact that that line "he made her feel the beauty, made her feel the fun' is a line that Woolf cut from the first British edition. And she left it in the first American edition. And it's every editor's decision whether to include it or not. But I spent a lot of time agonizing over what the implications are of including something as simple as a single line -- >> James Wood: Yes. >> Merve Emre: -- because there's no real good conceptual justification for doing it one way or another. So, it ultimately does end up just being your own judgment is [inaudible]. >> James Wood: I'm glad you kept it. I mean, I like it because there's such complexity anyway in Clarissa Dalloway's responses to death, to life. Does she believe in an afterlife? Is she actually an atheist? Peter Walsh to seems to think she is more of an atheist than a mystique. The page just before the one you read out has that beautiful thing about how, which -- lovely lines -- a thing there was, this is death that mattered. The thing reached about with chatter, defaced, obscured in her own life. See it preserved. Death was defiance. Death was an attempt to communicate. People feeling the impossibility of reaching the center which mystically evaded them. Closeness drew apart. Rapture faded. One was alone. There was an embrace in death. And then, that goes onto the passage, I think that you quoted one moment about how, then she'd felt terror, the overwhelming incapacity one's parents giving it into one's hands. This life to be lived to the end, to be walked with serenely. There was in the depths of her heart an awful fear. And yet she's also absolutely turned out to life, and that's followed by a passage in which she says she was as happy as she'd been. It just -- and I suppose again, to go back to those manifestos that Woolf wrote and all those wonderful essays, I imagine that even when she was reading her, when she was reading Magnificent George Eliott, I imagine that she felt that there wasn't enough contradiction and shifting within moments that to really write about the self, you have to be able to be, as it were, an atheist an a mystic in the same minute. >> Merve Emre: Well, I was thinking about her suicide note. And I was thinking about the insistence in her note that she can't concentrate. This is, she writes to Leonard. She says I can't concentrate. And the description of death in Dalloway but also elsewhere in her writing is of death as an intense form of concentration. There all of the faculties of the self, crystallize into that one, what she describes elsewhere in Mrs. Dalloway is that one diamond-like point. And yes, one is alone. But one is also intensely concentrated. And that dispersion of being, that scattering of the self that makes life what it is no longer on offer. And there's something appealing in the intensity of that concentration, the idea that your spirit would be totally saturated with the unliving body as opposed to the dispersion of living. But, yeah, I think that is the contradiction that absolutely structures this novel, that structures the waves too, that structures between the acts. And even more, basically, I was thinking about I have a, particularly, death obsessed five-year-old, who last night turned to me and he said, do you like dying? And I realized that what he was actually asking me was do you like living? But in his mind, that's do you like dying? Because those are two completely, they're exactly the same phenomenon in a certain sense. And one question I think that Woolf asks is, how can you bring that same sense of concentration to the act of living, that same attention, that rapture, that pressure to the act of living that one brings to dying? >> James Wood: Yes. I sometimes wonder if she, I mean she did say about, I wonder about the connection between that and depression, or the fear of losing one's mind, altered states. She did say to Ian Forster that those experiences that she'd had, did for religion, as she put it, that they functioned religiously for her. And there was that amazing moment when she's working on To The lighthouse in her diaries, when she says I saw a fin passing far out in the water. And there's some sense of that she could in a novel [inaudible] lighthouse here that's so full, of course, of the sea, that she could pass into the sea and become one with it, and become as it were, the solitary traveller, to use the phrase from this novel. I think, that's really fascinating. I have to say that there was one, in my rereading, there was one passage that, I haven't read this Mrs. Dalloway for quite a long time. And there was one passage that moved me terribly. And it's this one. I just want to read it out and ask you about it. I mean, I don't think you need to have anything to say about it, necessarily. >> [Chuckle] I will. I will. Which one is it? >> James Wood: Well, it's one that, it moved me quite a lot. I recently lost a parent. I lost my father, and it means I've now lost both of my parents. I mean that orphan state that feels like true, finally, the real growing up has to begin. There's this lovely passage which you'll know, of course, she was a child and there were a few [inaudible]. She was a child. She's remembering being down by a pond feeding the ducks, between her parents, and at the same time a grown woman coming to her parents, who stood by the lake, holding her life in her arms which as she needed them grew larger and larger in her arms until it became a whole life, a complete life which she put down by them, and said, this is what I've made of it. This. And what had she made of it? What indeed? That's, essentially, that's why I read Virginia Woolf. I don't know any other writer who gives me that. It's just stunning. >> Merve Emre: I know, that is actually one of my favorite one of passages in the novel, and in part, because I think it does go back to what we were talking about earlier. The idea that you could concentrate your life in your arms and that you could give it to another person as an offering. That's the word she uses over and over again throughout the novel, and an offering to another person is an, I mean, it requires an extraordinary act of grace, doesn't it? It requires a certain kind of belief to even be able to imagine that. And that is one of the reasons I like it too, but also to give it to your parents, to give it to the people who gave your life, in the first place to reverse that movement is also extraordinarily poignant. I think. >> James Wood: Yes. I just love about these two novels in particular. It's also true, the way, of course, of this lake to work. That they're so unafraid, they're so unafraid to say precisely that. What is life? Or as Lily Briscoe puts it, what is the meaning of life? What is it? What is this thing we're embarked upon or imprisoned by, as Mrs. Dalloway sometimes thinks? Do you think is that, in part, what Leonard Woolf was talking about when he looked at the earlier work and said, it's great but it needs a philosophy of life? >> Merve Emre: Yeah. I absolutely think so. And I think that's what she's pursuing throughout her entire career. And if in the mid period novels, let's say, Dalloway and To the Lighthouse. She has characters pose the question. What is life? And then gives us these scenes about them meditating on it. Then I think, a later work, a slightly later work like the waves. It adds to those meditations a kind of what she calls, an inglobing where every word, every sentence itself seems to vibrate with life itself such that it's no longer just asking the question, but it's giving you the answer in language. And that to me is how you trace the arc of her career. >> James Wood: Yeah. >> Merve Emre: It's amazing. I mean, it's truly, truly amazing. >> James Wood: It is indeed. Let's see. There was a question I have. So, one question comes up. Was Woolf familiar with the writings of Freud? The question I asked because she was the first to be writing about mental illness. That is the question. >> Merve Emre: Oh, Hogarth Press published Freud. So, yes, she was. And many people think that behind that very famous statement on or about 1910 [inaudible] that part of what she's thinking about there is not just her reading of the Russian novelists, but that she's also thinking about Freud and thinking about the sudden accessibility of a particular form of human interiority. So, yeah. >> James Wood: I don't know if there are other questions. I have one [inaudible] which is, I just wanted to ask you about this wonderful thing that you talk about at the end of the introduction of deciding that you would, I think it's a fabulous gesture, that you would type out the manuscript yourself, the book. What do you want to do there? What was that doing for you? >> Merve Emre: Well, I think there were two things going on. The first was, I think I just had some slightly monkish fantasy about how proper philological work should be typed. And since I wasn't going to write it by hand, I said, well, the next best thing is probably to type it. But I'm actually glad that I did. And I don't know if you ever do this when you teach, but I've actually started giving my students transcription exercises because I think being forced to type another person's words acquaints you with their style on some almost haptic level. You start anticipating a semi-colon in your ring finger, on your right hand. And I also just think that one of the, I think for me, annotation is something that made me a much better close reader. And I think one of the reasons, and one of the reasons that I wanted to type it was because it forces you to think very, very closely about the different scales of analysis. So, what does it mean to analyze a single word? What does it mean to pick out a phrase that repeats across an author's work? What does it mean to focus on a sentence or to read a passage and to identify a certain segment of text as such as a passage? How does one track character as this construct that appears throughout an entire novel? So, I think it does estrange you from, at the same time that it brings you into intimacy with the text, it also estranges as you from your typical categories of thinking about how novels work. And I like it as an estranging exercise, I suppose. >> James Wood: I think that's great. I haven't done that thing about, I think it's tremendous. I hadn't imagined asking students to copy something out. I do a kind of equivalent that which you probably remember. I do believe a lot in reading out in class and, quite often, I'll come to the end of a passage and say we just need to read that over again. [Inaudible] And I certainly write out a lot myself when I'm copying out passages. But I love this image of you actually typing up the whole manuscript so that you get a, well, and that with the annotation you've done, you have this extraordinary musical sense of the whole score. >> Merve Emre: Oh, thank you. Thank you. Well, and it was, I mean, one thing that I should say is that this was a lockdown project for me, because it started in March 2020. And one of the other things that I think typing it out helped you was actually give my days a new kind of rhythm. >> James Wood: Yes. >> Merve Emre: And rhythm, and I suppose this goes back to our conversation about the personal and the impersonal, a rhythm that was in part set by the demands of childcare which was that my two children were now home, and my eight-hour workday was suddenly a four-hour workday. >> James Wood: [Inaudible] that you got anything done. >> Merve Emre: [Laughing] My husband cleaned out the shed in our backyard, but the children [inaudible] that they could lock me in it [James chuckling] especially [inaudible] needed to go to the bathroom. So, but that saying, I'm just going to type 10 pages and annotate 10 pages a day. That gave a time that was otherwise totally new and unstructured, a kind of structured rhythm and rhythm structured by someone else's prose. That was, that that felt like it saved some part of my sanity. >> James Wood: No, I can totally understand that. I have a friend who wrote out something like three times a novel by Per Petterson called I Curse the River of Time which is I think his best book. He became obsessed with it and wrote it out three times. And I think it did wonders for his sanity, actually, in doing that, even though it sounds like a slightly insane act. >> Merve Emre: Well that [inaudible] because I just read Men In My Situation, and I would not imagine it doing wonders for anyone's sanity but [chuckle]. >> James Wood: No. Well, actually, weirdly, they have no other connection. I think I Cursed the River of Time and Mrs. Dalloway could be read together as profound engagements with being middle-aged, with just realizing you're in the midst of something that might also be the beginning of an ending. There are a couple of other questions. One is whether you plan on annotating any other Woolf novels. So, it sounds like that probably you've got other things to do from -- >> Merve Emre: But you know what, I actually do want to annotate, although I don't want to do the entire thing myself, but because we keep bringing up George Elliott, and I keep thinking that it would be wonderful to do a Middlemarch in which each character was assigned to a different annotator chosen roughly by, let's say temperament or age or whatever, and to have different colors of annotation for each character and have, say, 15 people annotating that. And then I thought I could sneak in as the narrator and annotate the [inaudible]. >> James Wood: It's great idea though you wouldn't want to be the person given, as a word, by temperament Casaubon. But -- >> Merve Emre: No, no. I thought we could give that to Jonathan Franzen. [ Laughing ] I thought he would be the right person to do that. >> James Wood: I have a question here which in some ways I think we've already answered, but it probably doesn't do any harm in our current world to go back to what we were discussing, to emphasize it again. And the question is what relevance does the novel have in a world so wrought by issues of class and race which are problematic in the novel when mentioned at all. I think we both agree with that they undergird the novel throughout, but let's just talk about that. >> Merve Emre: Well, I would just gently push back on the phrasing of that question, and say, when mentioned it all makes it sound like they're not mentioned all that often, but in fact they're everywhere in this novel. And I think one of the arguments that I'm interested in, and one of the arguments that many post-colonial feminists, for instance, make about Woolf is that one of the reasons she's so good at satirizing colonialism, for instance, is because she is not entirely removed herself from its prejudices and its biases. And that you see this in the kinds of racial epithets that she uses in her diary. But that there is a kind of shame that attends to that, and a shame that's getting worked out in the form of satire. In terms of the relevance that it has to the world today, I mean one of the things that I've been thinking a lot about, particularly this term, where at Oxford we do not have a vaccine mandate. We do not have a mask mandate. The UK, the government's general policy seems to be to pretend that nothing has happened. >> James Wood: Sort of a Florida on Thames as it were. >> Merve Emre: Yes, [chuckle] right, exactly. And I do think that part of what this novel is about is that it's a novel that wonders how we grieve mass death in a social system where no one will take responsibility for it properly. And that to me seems like a fairly relevant question today. How do we acknowledge the extraordinary toll that not just the virus, but a great deal of political incompetence has wrought on this country and on the world, more generally? And so, I think this the figure of Septimus, so that's getting to the final question in that list as we're nearing the end of our time -- one of the reasons the figure of Septimus is fascinating to me is because he's someone who refuses to reassimilate to a new post-war normal, and he's not willing to forget and he's not willing to let go of the idea that killing other people, even if you do it under the auspices of the state is a crime. That it is a moral and an ethical crime to kill other people. Just because the state has sanctioned, it doesn't mean that it's okay. And so, one way to claim the novel's relevance for the present is to say that all of us who have felt extraordinarily uncomfortable about things returning to normal, I think would do well to read this novel and to understand the twin pressures of wanting to live, of wanting to continue to live and to ring everything that is beautiful and wonderful out of life and wanting to mourn, and not knowing how to do that properly. Hopefully, that answers those last two questions together. >> James Wood: I think, we can't do better than end there. I think that those are very eloquent and very suggestive words that leap from 1925 to now, about the novel and it's continuing relevance. Merve, thank you very much indeed. This has been absolutely a treat. >> Merve Emre: Oh, thank you so much, James. This was wonderful. Thank you so much. >> James Wood: Thank you. >> Merve Emre: Thank you.