Last week my wife Debbie and I had dinner with friends almost every night. First in the city and then in the “country” (East Hampton). This rapid-fire social schedule was highly unusual for us and occurred purely by accident through the vagaries of multiple calendar conflicts.
At the last of those dinners, our friends mentioned a movie they’d seen at the Hamptons film festival called Clarissa, an adaptation of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway set in modern-day Lagos, Nigeria. They said they disliked the movie. They could scarcely find any plot in it, which I agree is a flaw in a movie (although perhaps not in a “film”).
A scant plot is, however, faithful to the book.
Mention a serious book that I’ve read and you’ll have to suffer the consequences of hearing me talk about it. Mercifully for Debbie and our friends, it had been a long time since I’d tried and failed to read Mrs. Dalloway, so my memory was dim and my attack on the conversation was a mere skirmish. At least that’s how I remember it; our friends may disagree!
But once the thought of Mrs. Dalloway entered my mind, I knew I had to give it another go. So, I read it this week with the intensity and note-taking it deserves. I took pleasure—shivers down my spine—at Virginia Woolf’s artistry and her gift of sharing her mind with me. In fact, I fell in love with her mind.
But the longer-lasting, more substantial reward I sought was to discover what the book could tell me about my own life. Serious readers are at once both epicures and narcissists. 1
A magical mirror
Clarissa Dalloway is a 52-year-old upper class woman in June 1923 London. Her heart has been weakened by influenza. She is the “perfect hostess”—both a compliment and a condemnation—and she is throwing a society party the evening of this single June day which makes up the entire timeframe of the book. 2
Hence two of the book’s most memorable lines:
The opening sentence: “Mrs. Dalloway would buy the flowers herself.”
And only a few pages in, Clarissa’s ecstasy at being alive and able to enjoy the beautiful summer day: “…life; London; this moment of June.”
Throughout the book, we are given Clarissa’s interior thoughts on her life, past and present, as well as the thoughts about her of other people, including, most significantly, the judgments of her intellectual ne’er-do-well friend Peter who Clarissa rejected romantically thirty years ago in favor of her current husband, the stolid politician Richard. 3
Woolf is so deep and detailed in describing Clarissa’s interior thoughts as well as the appraisal of her by others that when we’ve finished the novel we think we must be able to know the “real” Clarissa. Instead, however, by showing how Clarissa, or any person, might run through such a shifting range of moods and emotions within a single day, Woolf gives us a remarkable sense of just how difficult it is to pin down the essence of anyone’s “personality.”
It’s not surprising, then, that authorities on Virginia Woolf’s life and her literature4 have interpreted the book in a myriad of ways. The book is a magical mirror sending back a different image to the reader according to their mood, their pre-existing beliefs, their agenda, their age, and so forth.
My aha takeaway
Mrs. Dalloway demonstrates beautifully the great and uncomfortable truth of an idea in the lines below from Proust, a writer whom Virginia Woolf devoured and admired above all others. 5
“…none of us constitutes a material whole, identical for everyone…our social personality is a creation of the minds of others.” 6
In all those dinners I had last week, where I felt myself to be a consistent character throughout the conversations, I actually have little idea what our varied and various dinner companions were thinking about me. Certainly their views of me are all different. Some were new friends, some quite old, and all from different guises and phases of my life. What were their inner thoughts about me and how could I ever know?
While I was talking, were they thinking about what they wanted to say next because they found me dull and pretentious? Were they really listening at all or were they thinking about when the next course would be served? Had they come to the dinners out of a sense of weary obligation?
One friend from my past commented, respectfully, on the intimacy of my marriage. Were others during this week of dinners observing how Debbie and I interacted. Were others thinking that we were flaunting our bliss. Or, worse, putting on a show.
In truth, I was putting on somewhat of a show because I had much on my mind that made me somber when I wasn’t at the dinners. However, like Clarissa Dalloway, in the course of my day, I could still take great pleasure from certain moments—playing tennis or seeing my dog Sophie running in happy, rapid circles, a streak of white that brought out the deep green of our lawn.
A letter to my wife
The morning after the last of our dinners, I wrote a letter to Debbie explaining some of the reasons for my sometimes gloomy mood the past few days. She always takes my moods hard. She thinks they reflect her own personal failing, and she’s almost always wrong about that.
Debbie knows me better than anyone. Yet before she opened the letter, she wanted to know if it contained a request for a divorce. She wanted to prepare herself. That made me smile, and I assured her there was no request nor would there ever be.
My mood, I explained in the letter, was about my dislike of change. Here’s an excerpt:
“So, change makes me somber. That’s why I didn’t ‘jump for joy’ forty-two years ago when you told me you were going to be exclusive with me. You gave me what I’ve desired more than anything else in my entire life, then and now, but even if I couldn’t articulate it then with any precision to myself, I knew it was a solemn moment that meant great change was coming. And I was right. And it gave me my life.”
Debbie likes my letters.
Creating Clarissa
After I wrote that letter, I read Mrs. Dalloway. And for the first time, I really understood that line from Proust about how the diverse ways other people see us, and the diverse ways we see ourselves, creates our personality. Clarissa Dalloway is a different person to each of her close friends and family. Her discarded old suitor Peter remembers the promise of her youth and “how [the two of them] would change the world if she had married him.”
But now, instead, he disparages her fate as being “middle-age and “mediocrity.” Nevertheless, Clarissa still has a magnetic hold on Peter. He still loves her. 7
When Clarissa recalls herself as a young woman, she thinks of the “most exquisite moment of her whole life,” when her best friend Sally suddenly kissed her on the lips at the country estate of Clarissa’s family.
Thirty years later, Sally attends Clarissa’s London party. She recalls Clarissa as the most influential person in her life even if Clarissa has become a snob and has snubbed Sally for marrying a rich Manchester business man with a working class background. 8
As for Peter, Clarissa credits herself with shrewdness in knowing that a marriage to him would have been a disaster. She wanted nice things and stability and who can blame her for that? 9
Clarissa does not seem to regret her life or her marriage choice. She loves her husband and he loves her, even if their marriage is free of passion. She takes great pride in being the “perfect hostess” and providing the “offering” of a party that brings people together, including the Prime Minister.
As she returns home from buying the flowers for her party, Clarissa’s in a lofty mood, reveling in the sounds and sights of her household preparing for the party. It’s a moment she compares to “some lovely rose that had blossomed for her eyes only.”
Then she sees a telephone message. An elderly and influential Lady has invited her husband to lunch but not Clarissa. Her mood darkens at what she sees as a snub.
A supreme comfort
And isn’t it true for many of us that in the course of any given day, not only will our social personality be created in a unique fashion, depending on who we encounter, but also that in the course of any day our mood and our self-appraisal will swoop up and down. And isn’t it supremely comforting to realize that a disappointment will be followed, if we’re ready to receive it, by some exquisite moment.
Below, a 45 second audio reminiscence by Clive Bell, Virginia’s brother-in-law. “Virginia, of course.”
Serious readers who are writers are also thieves.
In her youth, Clarissa was scorned for abandoning her free-spirited ideas and was told, bitingly, that in her conventionality she “had the makings of the perfect hostess.” It was a comment that made her cry.
Now, at 52, she in fact has become the perfect hostess and takes great pride in the tastefulness and success of her parties.
It’s Peter who long ago made her cry by calling her the perfect hostess. And it’s Peter who is her “impartial spectator” even when he’s absent.
“…but suddenly it would come over her, if [Peter] were with me now what would he say…”
I make no claim to being an authority on either Virginia Woolf’s life or literature. I’m just a reader.
I should also note that in Mrs. Dalloway there is a parallel story that June day about a soldier suffering from shell-shock. Doctors fail the soldier and he eventually kills himself. The connection between the soldier and Clarissa is that she hears about his death at her party from one of her guests, an inept and pompous doctor who treated the soldier.
But the novel is dominated by Clarissa.
In her diary from 1925, soon after the publication of Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf writes:
“I wonder if this time I have achieved something? Well, nothing anyhow compared with Proust, in whom I am embedded now. The thing about Proust is his combination of the utmost sensibility with the utmost tenacity…And he will, I suppose, both influence me and make me out of temper with every sentence of my own.”
The above is from A Writer’s Diary: Enriched Edition. Events Recorded From 1918-1941. Edited and Published by Good Press, 2023.
From Swann’s Way, the Lydia Davis translation. More of the quote below:
“But even with respect to the most insignificant things in life, none of us constitutes a material whole, identical for everyone, which a person has only to go look up as though we were a book of specifications or a last testament; our social personality is the creation of the minds of others.”
Mrs. Dalloway ends with Peter lingering alone at the end of the party and asking himself:
“What is it that fills me with extraordinary excitement?
It is Clarissa, he said.
For there she was.”
There’s also an incident where upon meeting Dalloway, Clarissa initially mis-introduces him as “Wickham.” Later, after Clarissa is romantically paired with Dalloway, Sally persists in calling him Wickham. This makes Clarissa quite annoyed at Sally and leads to a break between them.
“Wickham” is a cad in Austen’s Pride and Prejudice.
Fifty-two-year-old Peter has come to London to get a divorce (and beg for a job) so he can marry a 24-year-old mother of two back in India. He fled to India after Clarissa wisely rejected him as a potential husband.
It has often occurred to me that modern technology allows us more than ever to fracture ourselves.
How often do we carry on multiple text conversations that are of completely different moods?
While I was tearfully texting an old friend of my grief over the loss of our dog, I was also switching to answering my young grandson’s silly picture with an appropriate light-hearted reply — I didn’t want him to know his Oma was crying. And I answered the roofing guy’s text in a business-like way. He didn’t need to know I was crying, either.
None of the three knew of the simultaneous very different conversations going on. Only one person knew I was sad. If we’d all been at one gathering it would have been a different matter.
This made me sad for Debbie, that she was so worried.