All the Lives We Ever Lived E-Book

Katharine Smyth

• Herausgeber: Atlantic Books
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 412

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019

Beschreibung

Katharine Smyth was a student at Oxford when she first read Virginia Woolf's modernist masterpiece To the Lighthouse in the comfort of an English sitting room, and in the companionable silence she shared with her father. After his death - a calamity that claimed her favourite person - she returned to that beloved novel as a way of wrestling with his memory and understanding her own grief. Smyth's story moves between the New England of her childhood and Woolf's Cornish shores and Bloomsbury squares, exploring universal questions about family, loss and homecoming. Through her inventive, highly personal reading of To the Lighthouse and her artful adaptation of its groundbreaking structure, Smyth guides us towards a new vision of Woolf's most demanding and rewarding novel - and crafts an elegant reminder of literature's ability to clarify and console. Braiding memoir, literary criticism and biography, All the Lives We Ever Lived is a wholly original debut: a love letter from a daughter to her father, and from a reader to her most cherished author.

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Praise for

ALL THE LIVESWE EVER LIVED

“[Smyth’s] prose is so fluid and clear throughout that it’s not surprising to observe her view of her family, its cracks and fissures, sharpen into unsparing focus . . . Her exploration of grown-up love, the kind that accounts for who the loved one actually is, not who you want him or her to be, gains power and grace as her story unfolds. I suspect her book could itself become solace for people navigating their way through the complexities of grief for their fallen idols. And they will be lucky to have it.”

—Radhika Jones, The New York Times Book Review

“Deeply moving . . . Smyth moves from the asperities of her own state to a lucid discussion of transience in general and the strange dream of any family—whose central characters abruptly vanish, never to return. This is a beautiful book about the wildness of mortal life, and the tenuous consolations of art.”

—The Times Literary Supplement

“Smyth is an elegant writer and she explores her deep, complicated love for her father in lyrical yet restrained prose . . . Smyth’s book is a fine example of a fresh approach to literary criticism.”

—Literary Review

“This is a transcendent book, not a simple meditation on one woman’s loss, but a reflection on all of our losses, on loss itself, on how to remember and commemorate our dead.”

—Charlotte Gordon, The Washington Post

“Katharine Smyth pulls off a tricky double homage in her beautifully written first book, a deft blend of memoir, biography, and literary criticism that’s a gift to readers drawn to big questions about time, memory, mortality, love, and grief . . . You’d be hard put to find a more moving appreciation of Woolf’s work.”

—Heller McAlpin, The Wall Street Journal

“This searching memoir pays homage to To the Lighthouse, while recounting the author’s fraught relationship with her beloved father, a vibrant figure afflicted with alcoholism and cancer. Smyth’s reflections on loss weave in and out of literary criticism, and gesture toward questions of how art gives meaning to life, and vice versa Smyth’s writing is evocative and incisive.”

—The New Yorker

“All the Lives We Ever Lived represents Smyth’s attempt to make sense of this legacy: of her relationship with her father and the hole his death left in her life . . . It is also—and this is what moves it from a lyrically written memoir of grief, families and loss towards something more unusual and special—an attempt to reconsider Virginia Woolf’s masterpiece To the Lighthouse . . . All the Lives We Ever Lived is both a haunting attempt to come to terms with loss and an honest appraisal of the ways in which a person can become unmoored. Acutely observed and shot through with a furious beauty, it is a book that lingers long after the final page has been turned.”

—Sarah Hughes, The i

“Her father had seemed ‘impossibly wise’ to her; seeing him through adult eyes, Smyth lays bare in raw and moving prose the impossibility of reconciling her idealised image with the man before her . . . Smyth is an elegant and powerful writer, her sentences suffused with attention to detail and rich with self-interrogation . . . [Her story is] not only an exploration of grief and family, but an effort to understand the complexity of experience and relationships, and to follow Woolf in her ‘ongoing struggle to find truth and meaning in a world where both are infinitely shifting.’”

—Prospect Magazine

“Just as Woolf unspooled the backstories and futures of her characters with deft, time-bending maneuvers, Smyth elliptically reveals the layers of her father’s character, simulating the ups and downs that the author herself must have felt in loving this extraordinary man and watching him self-destruct. It’s an experiment in twenty-first-century introspection that feels rooted in a modernist tradition and bracingly fresh.”

—Vogue

“Blending analysis of a deeply literary novel with a personal story is a high-wire act for many reasons . . . [Smyth] is up to the challenge, gently entwining observations from Woolf’s classic with her own layered experience.”

—Time

“Brilliant . . . Smyth’s beautiful debut is more tightly strung together than you’d imagine a memoir-cum-literary-requiem could be. It is innovative, like Woolf, in its power of association and its ability to transform the intangible nature of grief into a warm, graspable, fleshy mass.”

—Vulture

“The affinity between Smyth and her subject is profound even on the sentence level. She writes in Woolfian rhythms. Her sentences cascade and linger over transcendent images; she nests tangential observations into parentheses to hint at the simultaneity of experience.”

—HuffPost

“This gorgeous, moving book gracefully moves between memoir and literary criticism . . . Smyth’s writing possesses a unique ability to wend its way into your head, traveling into all the darkest corners of your mind, triggering thoughts on love and loss and family and memory you hadn’t known were lurking; it’s a profound experience, reading this book—one not to be missed.”

—Nylon

“A conceptually ambitious and assured debut, successfully bridging memoir and literary criticism . . . A work of incisive observation and analysis, exquisite writing, and an attempt to determine if there is ‘any revelation that could lessen loss, that could help to make the fact of death okay.’”

—Kirkus Reviews (starred)

“Calling all English majors: This is the memoir for you. Katharine Smyth manages to entangle her personal experience of grief with—wait for it—Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse. Smyth’s memoir is an ode to both her father and her favorite writer, whose words brought her comfort and clarity in a time of loss.”

—Marie Claire

“[Smyth] expertly dissects the finest gradations of emotion in any given scene . . . All the Lives We Ever Lived is a powerful book, driven by the engine of Smyth’s controlled, rich description. It’s an astonishingly clear-eyed portrait of a person through myriad lenses, a kind of prismatic attempt to capture a life.”

—The Boston Globe

“A daughter coping with her father’s illness and death takes a deep dive into Virginia Woolf’s novel To the Lighthouse, looking for insight and comfort . . . Other writers have attempted similarly braided memoirs with mixed success. Katharine Smyth . . . has more than lived up to her premise, delivering a lyrical and thoughtful examination of character, place and grief.”

—The Providence Journal

“Both a reflection on To the Lighthouse and a lingeringly beautiful elegy in its own right . . . What [Smyth’s] book does is add to our perception of To the Lighthouse, not through analysis or commentary, but by writing through the novel, assuming and exploring its worldview, and in the process redescribing it to us with an infectious passion and hard-earned wisdom . . . She writes with a measured, lyrical grace all her own.”

—Los Angeles Review of Books

ALL THE LIVESWE EVER LIVED

Seeking Solace in Virginia Woolf

KATHARINE SMYTH

Published by arrangement with Crown, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

First published in hardback in Great Britain in 2019 by Atlantic Books, an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd.

This paperback edition first published in Great Britain in 2020 by Atlantic Books.

Copyright © Katharine Smyth, 2019

The moral right of Katharine Smyth to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

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A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Image of To the Lighthouse, holograph notes: Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox, and Tilden Foundations. Owing to limitations of space, permissions credits can be found on page 305.

Cover design by Michael Morris

E-book: 978-1-78649-287-6

Paperback: 978-1-78649-286-9

Printed in Great Britain

Atlantic Books

An imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd

Ormond House

26–27 Boswell Street

London

WC1N 3JZ

www.atlantic-books.co.uk

For my mother

“It was strange how clearly she saw her, stepping withher usual quickness across fields among whose folds,purplish and soft, among whose flowers, hyacinths orlilies, she vanished.”

—VIRGINIA WOOLF, To the Lighthouse

PREFACE

Perhaps there is one book for every life.

One book with the power to reflect and illuminate that life; one book that will forever inform how we navigate the little strip of time we are given, while also helping us to clarify and catch hold of its most vital moments. For me, that book is To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf’s novel about her parents, Julia and Leslie Stephen, who died when Virginia was thirteen and twenty-two, respectively. First published in 1927, it tells the story of the Ramsays, a family of ten who, along with an assorted group of friends, spends the summer on a remote island in the Hebrides. Tells the story of the Ramsays? I should rephrase: To the Lighthouse tells the story of everything.

I first read it as a junior in college, a literature student studying abroad at Oxford University. It was Christmas 2001, and my parents and I were visiting my father’s family on the south coast of England. After dinner, I joined my father and Robert, his older brother, in the sitting room. My father was listening to Handel and reading, and I was listening to my uncle talk about books. An eccentric, shuffling bachelor, he asked about Oxford and told idealized stories of his own time there; he scoffed at the novels I had been assigned and wrote me a syllabus of his own. As he left the room to find me a copy of his magnum opus, a history of one of England’s ancient woodlands, my father looked up from his sailing magazine and smiled. “He’s sweet,” he said.

“He makes me nervous,” I said. “I think he thinks I’m an idiot.”

“No,” my father said. “He thinks you’re twenty.”

Robert returned. I expressed admiration for Forest People and Places and then we each settled down into our respective worlds—mine, the sitting room in which Mrs. Ramsay joins her husband late at night, a room much like the one in which our minds now roamed, and feels herself swinging from branch to branch, flower to flower, climbing, climbing, as she murmurs the words of poetry her husband had recited at dinner. My father and uncle drank brandy; my father smoked cigarettes and my uncle cigars. The logs on the fireplace cracked and blackened. Earlier my father had latched the wooden shutters and drawn the heavy velvet drapes; now, in the softened space he had created, the music seemed to strengthen and the stillness of the night to grow. So too on that far-flung Scottish island, where Mr. Ramsay sets down his book and looks up at his wife, who, still climbing, nevertheless begins to sense the pressure of his mind.

Did I already suspect the revelatory role these words would play for me? I don’t think so: To the Lighthouse is a work that rewards—that demands—reading and rereading; it was not until at least my second time through it that I had the impression of actually swimming round beneath its surface. But already, as I curled up with that book by the fire, it was beginning to reciprocate and even alter my experience, while also giving me a vocabulary by which to fathom that experience, so that I would always understand that Christmas night, a night on which I relished my father’s vices rather than cursing them, as a version of that final sitting room scene, and its tacit, book-tinged intimacy a version of Mrs. Ramsay’s final triumph.

A FEW WEEKS later, my parents called me from Boston. After eight years of failed cancer treatments, they said, my father’s oncologists had decided to remove his bladder altogether. My father assured me he was pleased. He hadn’t been feeling well for some time, he said, and I remembered that over the holidays I had occasionally turned to see him grimacing. There was one more thing, my mother said. The surgery would mean that he could no longer drink. No longer drink! How marvelous that would be, and yet, how impossible to imagine.

At the time of the twelve-hour operation, I was visiting Amsterdam with a group of college friends. My mother called almost hourly with updates. Dim sum, a trip to the Van Gogh museum, and a walk through the red-light district were all interrupted with medical reports: “Well, they’ve removed the bladder completely, and they’re about to build a new one from the intestine.” We were watching an impeccably choreographed and oddly sterile orgy scene at a midnight live sex show when my mother called one last time to say that the surgery was over and couldn’t have gone better. For weeks I had been having nightmares, but with this news I immediately lost a bit of interest. Of course it had been a success, I thought.

It was this same winter that Virginia Woolf, escaping the prim ranks of Women Writers to which my high school teachers had consigned her, became instead the nexus of my reading life. My tutor, Shane, was a sharp, wry Beckett scholar who had taught me James Joyce earlier in the year; his comprehension of British modernism was so effortless and unsentimental that my own hard work and enthusiasm embarrassed us both. Miffed by Woolf’s snarky dismissal of Joyce—a “queasy undergraduate scratching his pimples,” she famously called him—Shane never missed an opportunity to ridicule her snobbishness and eccentricity. On the day we were to discuss Orlando, he brought in a particularly unflattering photograph of Vita Sackville-West, her friend and paramour. “How anyone could write a love letter to that is beyond me,” he chortled. I enjoyed his irreverence; certainly I needed reminding that one mustn’t take literature so seriously all the time. But as I read my way through every one of Woolf’s novels, my own admiration for her only intensified. It wasn’t long before I began to answer Shane’s questions with uncharacteristic certainty, and though I couldn’t always locate the corresponding textual evidence, I never failed—as I had constantly during our Joyce tutorial—to produce the exact response for which he had been angling. He soon grew frustrated by this instinctive, unscholarly version of literary criticism, but when he told me, not at all complimentarily, that I seemed to have “an intuitive sense of Woolf,” I was overjoyed.

One week after my father’s operation—I was foraging for Mrs. Dalloway criticism in the depths of the Bodleian Library, a pleasure that, as Woolf acerbically recalls in A Room of One’s Own, had been denied her as a woman some seventy years earlier—my mother called again. My father was fine, she said, but he had reacted badly when they tried to switch him from a feeding tube to solid food. When she called the following day, it was to say that he was actually suffering from delirium tremens, or alcohol withdrawal. The previous evening, he had started to complain of a terrible smell, then to frantically wave away the hundreds of tiny gnats he saw swarming the hospital room. (Neither my mother nor the doctors smelled or saw anything unusual.) Within hours he had become incoherent, hostile, and violent. He shouted at doctors, nurses, and my mother; he tried to tear out his many tubes; he had several near-fatal seizures; and he was moved to intensive care and restrained. My mother related all this only after the worst was over.

I wanted to go home. The next available flight to Boston left in two days’ time, and I spent those days trying to ignore the morbid scenarios being staged in my mind. On the plane, I grew increasingly frightened, convincing myself that he had died during the flight, and that my mother would greet me at the airport with the news. But she didn’t. She drove me to the hospital instead. Due to a bed shortage, my father had been placed in the ICU burn ward, where the other patients were contained in giant temperature- and moisture-controlled clear plastic bubbles. Asleep when we walked in, he was lying in what seemed, from its multiple folding parts, like a very uncomfortable bed. His body was shrunken and corpse-like, but for his right arm, which was badly swollen where the doctors had pinched a nerve during the operation. Tubes ran in and out of his veins, and his face was yellow. His lips were two contiguous pieces of flaking skin. My mother introduced me to his nurse, a friendly, talkative woman who said, “Don’t worry, he won’t remember any of this.”

“I’ll remember all of this” came a pitiful and totally unfamiliar voice from the bed. I went to him, uneasily patted his head, and said hello. Sedated and only half-awake, he could barely open his eyes, and when he did, he gave me a clouded, heavy-lidded, tortoise look. He asked us to help him sit up; we failed at sliding his body farther up the bed, and he began to swear viciously under his breath. It was only then I noticed the thick leather bands that restrained all four of his limbs. He was very weak, but whenever he wanted to move he would bang his arms as hard as he could, up and down against the bonds. In a few days, both wrists would bruise deep violet. Finally the flailing exhausted him, and he slumped over to one side. We continued to sit there, talking to his cheerful nurse, and I watched him as he slept. He shook violently, and coughed and wheezed with each breath.

We visited every morning and evening. Sometimes he slept for our entire visit, and sometimes he was talkative, but—paranoid, hallucinatory, malevolent—he was almost never himself. Unsure of his whereabouts, he initially thought himself in my mother’s native Australia, then in Madras—a city to which he had no connection—and finally at our summerhouse in Rhode Island. One particularly persistent hallucination was his belief, which he explained again and again, that he was lying next to an Arab. He would look to his left, as though someone were there, and repeatedly apologize: “Look, I’m terribly sorry, but I can’t move over any further . . .” Occasionally he was kind. He would smile at me; the nurses said he often looked for me when I was not there. But his most consistent preoccupation was wanting to leave. He kept asking me in a whisper to get a “short, sharp knife” and cut his restraints. When I said no, he grew furious. “Dad, I can’t,” I said. “Rubbish,” he said. “Of course you can.” Even in his stupor, he could upbraid me for being too bound by convention.

It was eight days before he was finally deemed well enough to move to a regular hospital room. He was free of cancer for the first time in a decade—a diagnosis of kidney cancer and the removal of his right kidney had plagued him before the bladder—and he did not recall any of the days he’d spent in the ICU. Now, no longer angry, he was desperately sad. He cried often, from embarrassment, and when he learned he still could not go home. Mostly, though, he cried because he’d never drink again—if he did, his doctor said, he’d drink himself to death. Still, his surgeon assured me he would live to see my children. It was a hope I had never thought to have.

On the morning of the day I returned to England, my mother and I drove him straight from the hospital to an inpatient drug and alcohol rehabilitation facility called Faulkner. The rooms of the clinic were cold and spare, and the halls slick, the color of old chewing gum. Patients loitered by the exit. I could not connect them to my father, to what I knew of his sophistication; how uncivilized, how demeaning, to admit him to such a lonely, ugly place. While he attended an AA meeting, my mother and I went to a support group for families. I took a dislike to the woman who ran it, and to her platitudes about a higher power, and saw at once that these kinds of mantras were something my father would never embrace.

We met in his room to say good-bye. I threw my arms around him and sobbed into his shirt. “Hey,” he said. “Hey. Don’t worry—I’ll be fine here.” Distressing as it was to leave him, I was gratified that he was acting like a father again. And as it turned out, he enjoyed his weeklong stay at Faulkner (the longest his insurance would allow). He loathed the mandatory meetings each morning and evening, but he was a big hit with the other patients, who loved his English accent and thought him hilarious. He in turn was moved and horrified by their stories. “God, people have tough lives,” he told me later. “Their problems make mine look like a piece of cake.”

Less than ten days after my father left rehab, he had a glass of wine. He confessed it with shame to my mother and poured the rest of the bottle down the sink. Within six months, he was back to drinking the equivalent of three bottles daily.

MY PARENTS RETURNED to England three months after the operation. I was surprised by how well my father looked—apparently his uncanny ability to appear fit and healthy had endured. I was also surprised by his mood, which, unlike the curt, distracted voice to which I’d grown accustomed on the phone, was gentle and subdued. But he was thin, and he walked with a hunch. His right hand was temporarily paralyzed where the nerve had been pinched during surgery. He was in extreme and constant pain. My parents picked me up in Oxford, and we embarked on a short, Virginia Woolf–inspired road trip that finished at my grandmother’s house. At every stop, my father wandered away from the car and lit a cigarette. We went first to Knole, the historic family estate of Vita Sackville-West that was the model for Orlando’s own ancestral residence, and next to Charleston, the country home of Duncan Grant and Vanessa Bell, Virginia’s older sister. We visited Berwick Church, where Grant and Bell had painted every inch of wall as they had their home, and finally Monk’s House, Leonard and Virginia’s own country home in nearby Rodmell. I do not much remember the interior, except that it was dark and shabby, with spindly, inhospitable chairs, well-worn upholstery, paintings dull with time.

It is the garden I recall, with its path of weathered stone weaving through flower beds and opening onto a larger lawn. There was a shaded pool in front, slithering with silver fish, and, in back, a bare and sunlit room where she wrote—including, in less than a fortnight, the first twenty-two pages of To the Lighthouse. (“Never never have I written so easily, imagined so profusely,” she wrote in her diary of its creation, and later, in a letter to Vita, “close on 40,000 words in 2 months—my record.”) The present caretakers had placed on her desk an empty teacup and a few scattered pages of her diary, and I imagined her setting off, only a moment before, across the yellow pastures that lay beyond the garden gate. Her ashes had once been buried beneath an elm, but the tree had subsequently died, and in its place—off to one side and ensconced in purple columbine—was a bronze bust in her likeness, with an epitaph taken from The Waves: “Against you I will fling myself, unvanquished and unyielding, O Death!” It was a warm, brilliant day—a good day—but coupled with my recollection of those places is the image of my father, his body bent as though he were walking into the wind, lighting a cigarette and drifting away from the houses toward the deep green of the woods or fields in the distance.

PART ONE

1

“The house was all lit up, and the lights after the darkness made his eyes feel full, and he said to himself, childishly, as he walked up the drive, Lights, lights, lights, and repeated in a dazed way, Lights, lights, lights, as they came into the house.”

When I was five, my parents bought a summerhouse. For years we had spent our weekends sailing, driving between our home in Boston and the Rhode Island marina where we kept the boat, and for years my parents had admired the row of waterfront cottages they could see from the highway bridge. One weekend, leaving me with friends, they stopped at a local real estate agency. “The houses on the water almost never come up,” the agent said, not quite truthfully, “but one came on the market this morning.” She took them to see it, a wooden house built in 1890 and in a state of price-deflating disrepair. Sheets of plastic were stapled across its windows; to one side was a garage, to the other a desiccated lawn and concrete steps leading to the water. The small adjoining lot was full of rubble, all that remained of a shack annihilated by a hurricane fifty years before. A night nurse was the house’s current occupant, and my parents had to wait until midnight before they were shown inside. They found rooms cramped and badly lit. Dampness seeped from the basement’s earth floor. A bare wooden deck faced the water, but it, too, was wrapped in thick plastic. We’ll take it, my parents said, and in the morning signed the papers.

Both architects, they spent the coming months drawing up plans. They tore down walls and put up new ones; winterized the basement and made it their bedroom. A new deck ousted the living room, and the old deck became the dining room. The garage was transformed into a studio, the empty lot to the south a garden, and every wall that faced the water became a wall of windows. We devoted our weekends that winter to supervising the renovation. A beastly wind leapt off the basin, slipping through cracks and ripping at the plastic sheets that now stood in for windows altogether. The house then was a skeleton; from the water, it looked like an architectural cross section. We wore winter coats indoors. I spent my time collecting the sawdust that drifted like snow into the corners of rooms—I liked how light and downy and dry it was—and when, come spring, the house was finally finished, I mixed this sawdust with glue, molded it in the shape of a heart, and baked it in the oven.

That summer my parents planted an olive tree, a dogwood, a Japanese maple, and star magnolias. They put in rose bushes, honeysuckle, and a porcelain vine to soften the deck. They hoped a wisteria plant would gently envelop the trellis over the sunken yard; instead the vine grew freakishly, its weighty boughs promising to fell the structure altogether. My father vowed each summer to rip the wisteria out at its roots, and each summer my mother protested, citing the two glorious May weeks in which it shot forth its cloud of amethyst flowers. There were rolls of sod that steamed in the sunlight—my father carried them from the car, set them down on the soil, and gave them a push, unfurling each one like a long green carpet. For a few weeks they showed at the seams, but then the roots plaited together, and I could no longer tell where one piece stopped and the next began. Something similar happened inside, where the rooms at first were neat and spare: one day I looked around me and realized our expanding lives had filled the gaps. We learned quickly how bleached things become in a house on the water, how exhaustively salt and light leach color, leaving behind pale blues and yellows. The spines of books, the cork-tiled floors, the rugs and prints and bed linens—each became a cheerfully bloodless version of itself. Before my parents were finished they built a dock and then they put down a mooring of their own. There is a photograph of the three of us posing beside this hunk of chain and metal; it was the last time we would see it before sending it down to the bottom of the sea, to settle in the mud and provide a stay against the tides to come.

The next summer—I must have been about seven—my father and I built a doll’s house. It was a pretty Victorian home with two bay windows, a wraparound verandah, and scalloped trim along the eaves, and it demanded many months of work; I can still recall the care with which we affixed each individual baluster and shingle, the tackiness of the glue we used to wallpaper the rooms. We painted the woodwork in colors reminiscent of our Boston home: dark green, slate blue, taupe, and russet red. In another photograph from that time, the half-finished doll’s house sits at the end of the dining table; through curtainless windows, you can see the lights on the far shore double in the water’s surface. My father is consumed by the application of some fixture or other, and I, wearing a flannel, rose- print nightgown, hair matted, am standing on a chair and supervising. I loved playing with that house when it was finally finished; and yet the greatest pleasure of all was in its construction, in the evenings that my father and I passed together in nearly wordless concentration.

The divide between week and weekend was extreme then, and when I considered the difference, I thought of something he had told me when we were sailing, as our boat, Mistral, was heeling and the wind filling our throats. In Boston our lungs were black and horrible, he said, but in Rhode Island they were lovely and shiny and pink. It was an image I held on to as I went about my days—days that I filled with pointed yet purposeless tasks (paddling to nearby sand dunes; watering the rock wall moss), much as a cat will suddenly decide that now is the moment she must leap from the window and dash to the couch.

The specter of boredom gave rise to ingenuity, I think, which is how I came to clomp down the beach in my roller skates, and make the acquaintance of a horse-shaped boulder I named Star, and build a nest beneath the billiard table, and run barefoot up and down the street; by mid-July, I could stick sewing needles deep into my heels without sensation. I loved beachcombing best, though—every day I spent hours wandering the rocky strand at the foot of the seawall, collecting sea glass, broken bits of blue-and-white china, lady’s slippers, conch shells, the forsaken skeletons of horseshoe crabs, and, once, a rusty key chain from the Stone Bridge Inn, a hotel a mile down the road that had shuttered twenty-five years earlier. When I’d gathered enough shells, my father took me to the hardware store to buy a diamond drill bit—the only tool strong enough, he said, to bore into the lady’s slippers and make a necklace for my mother. It was years before I noticed the peculiar quality of light the days here possessed, how on afternoons and evenings the house would flood with lemon heat, or how the reflection of the water outside, at once blue and gold and glittering, would throw itself against the ceiling, transforming the rooms into a string of tide pools. But from the very beginning, I felt that light within my lungs.

“IF LIFE HAS a base that it stands upon,” Virginia Woolf wrote in “A Sketch of the Past,” her longest and most abundant memoir, “if it is a bowl that one fills and fills and fills—then my bowl without a doubt stands upon this memory. It is of lying half asleep, half awake, in bed in the nursery at St Ives. It is of hearing the waves breaking, one, two, one, two, and sending a splash of water over the beach; and then breaking, one, two, one, two, behind a yellow blind. . . . It is of lying and hearing this splash and seeing this light, and feeling, it is almost impossible that I should be here; of feeling the purest ecstasy I can conceive.” This brilliant, sea-filled nursery belonged to Talland House, the nineteenth-century home in Cornwall where Virginia, her parents, and her seven siblings spent every summer until she was thirteen. She called this recollection “the most important of all my memories,” and, much like the schism between my own childhood weeks and weekends, its radiance was in sharp contrast to her impressions of her family’s London home, a dim, narrow six-story townhouse in Kensington where “busts shrined in crimson velvet, enriched the gloom of a room naturally dark and thickly shaded,” and where, in the words of her sister Vanessa, “faces loomed out of the surrounding shade like Rembrandt portraits.”

Talland House—its light, its cresting water—would be consecrated in Virginia’s imagination, saturating not only To the Lighthouse but also Jacob’s Room and The Waves. “To go sailing in a fishing boat,” she waxed in her late fifties, “to scrabble over the rocks and see the red and yellow anemones flourishing their antennae; or stuck like blobs of jelly to the rock; to find a small fish flapping in a pool; to pick up cowries; to look over the grammar in the dining room and see the lights changing on the bay. . . . All together made the summer at St Ives the best beginning to life conceivable.” The tumbling passage conveys the lasting vigor of these memories; as Hermione Lee notes in her terrific biography of Woolf, Talland House “is where she sites, for the whole of her life, the idea of happiness. . . . Happiness is always measured for her against the memory of being a child in that house.”

When Virginia’s mother died of rheumatic fever in 1895, the Stephens’ visits to Talland House abruptly ceased. “Father instantly decided that he wished never to see St Ives again,” she recalled. “And perhaps a month later Gerald [Duckworth, Virginia’s half brother] went down alone; settled the sale of our lease to some people called Millie Dow, and St Ives vanished for ever.” Some thirty years later, this sudden, devastating break—the actual and figurative end to Virginia’s childhood—would spark the plot of To the Lighthouse, in which she transposed Cornwall’s Talland House, seemingly in its entirety, to the Hebrides, a cluster of islands off the coast of Scotland to which she had never been. (“An old creature writes to say that all my fauna and flora of the Hebrides is totally inaccurate,” she wrote to Vita, and to Vanessa: “there are no rooks, elms, or dahlias in the Hebrides; my sparrows are wrong; so are my carnations.”) This house and its story are, quite literally, at the novel’s center, as vital to it as the Ramsays and their friends; which is why, during a trip to England to celebrate my grandmother’s ninety-ninth birthday, I made a St Ives pilgrimage: I wanted to see what the Cornish landscape might teach me, not just about To the Lighthouse and its author but also about those homes by which we measure happiness.

It was a clear afternoon in June when I boarded the train in my grandmother’s village; sipping wine, passing through Tiverton—the namesake of our Rhode Island town—I was feeling as dreamy as Virginia about the coming journey. “This time tomorrow,” she wrote in 1921, “we shall be stepping onto the platform at Penzance, sniffing the air, looking for our trap, & then—Good God!—driving off across the moors to Zennor—Why am I so incredibly & incurably romantic about Cornwall?” My train pulled in at half past eight, but the sun was still high above the houses, and I thought I could see through the gaps in the buildings the white stripe of Godrevy Lighthouse. Then, suddenly, I turned a bend and St Ives Bay unveiled itself, the same view, more or less, that causes Mrs. Ramsay to stop short, exclaiming aloud at its beauty. “For the great plateful of blue water was before her,” we first hear of the novel’s beacon, “the hoary Lighthouse, distant, austere, in the midst; and on the right, as far as the eye could see, fading and falling, in soft low pleats, the green sand dunes with the wild flowing grasses on them.” I had read those words a hundred times, and the image they had always conjured was of a seascape much nearer and brighter than this one; for here the lighthouse stood no taller than a matchstick upon its little pile of black rock, and I had to squint to see the thin green lines of land.

But I liked this readjustment of my vision; in fact it was an enlargement, the gentle pop of a jigsaw puzzle fitting together; and then again when I took a wrong turn after dinner and the cobblestone path curved round and up to reveal a vast sandy beach, with regular waves coiling and crashing in rows of four. The last bit of light shone through between the clouds, and the water beat against the sand—I would hear it all night through my bedroom window—and I knew then what Virginia meant when she wrote, addressing Cornwall’s pull for her, of “old waves that have been breaking precisely so these thousand years,” and when she wrote, in her original notes for To the Lighthouse, that “the sea is to be heard all through it.” As much as anywhere I’ve ever been, the sea is the lifeblood of St Ives.

The following morning, I made my way to Talland House. I didn’t have a house number, so I relied on Woolf to help me find it. “A square house,” she said, “like a child’s drawing of a house; remarkable only for its flat roof, and the crisscrossed railing.” When, at the end of a cul-de-sac, it finally materialized, I felt a stab of disappointment. Its ivory walls were streaked with rust, and a tangle of exterior metal staircases, providing access to second- and third-floor flats, crept up the rear. A Ford Focus was parked in the driveway. I was still debating my approach when a beefy young man in blue sweatpants walked out with a Rottweiler—the epitome of a Virginia Woolf fan, in other words. “Yeah?” he asked, suspicious.

“I’m just looking at the house,” I said. “You know Virginia Woolf lived here?”

“Yeah?”

“Is it okay if I look around?”

“Yeah,” he said again, gesturing toward a snarl of vegetation. “There’s a lawn round back if you like.”

I thanked him, wondering how many seekers had appeared at his door, then plunged into the upper garden. I knew the grounds were greatly changed; much of the land had been sold off, and a parking lot replaced the orchard. But I could still see what Leslie Stephen had meant by “a garden of an acre or two all up and down hill, with quaint little terraces divided by hedges of escallonia.” A stepping-stone path led off to the left and I followed it down into a clearing with a tiny pond, hidden from the house above. My heart beat faster with the thrill of trespassing, and perhaps because this was itself a childhood feeling, I had a strong sense of how much fun it would have been to be a child in this garden, with its climbing trees and secret hollows; I thought of Cam, the Ramsays’ youngest daughter, picking flowers and tearing villain-like across the bank.

Then, throwing off the cloak of greenery, stepping onto the main lawn, I finally met the Talland House I knew from pictures. The ivy had been stripped from its façade, and its railing replaced by an addition, but I recognized the two sets of French doors that opened onto steps leading down to the grass—there’s a photograph of Henry James perched here, reading—and, above them, the wrought iron verandahs that feature in one of Virginia’s earliest memories: her mother emerging “onto her balcony in a white dressing gown” as passion flowers spilled from the walls. All morning the scraps of text had been surfacing, all morning they had blended and echoed; the landscape had been pulling phrases out from deep within my mind, and my head was all a jumble, so that it was Mrs. Ramsay standing on the balcony in a white dressing grown, and Leslie Stephen striding back and forth along the terrace, and even my own mother, stopping, growing grayer-eyed, and saying as she looked across the basin, This is the view my husband loves. And meanwhile I had grown bolder and was peering through the French doors into the drawing room where over a century before the Stephens had sat reading while ten-year-old Virginia looked on, chin in hand, her gaze startlingly curious; and that was when I heard the gardener, crossing the lawn with a stack of severed branches in his arms.

I apologized, explaining that I was interested in Woolf and her house, adding that I’d come all the way from America. He was in his early forties, friendly, weathered, with strawberry blond hair. “I could show you some pictures if you’re interested,” he said.

“Oh, yes!” I said, and he raised his bundle of branches: “Let me just put these down and I’ll get them for you.”

I looked through windows in his absence. One revealed a generous foyer, another a bedroom with a collection of dead-eyed, antique teddy bears. The door to the upstairs apartments was open, and I climbed the narrow stairs toward the attics, which in To the Lighthouse “the sun poured into,” drawing from “the long frilled strips of seaweed pinned to the wall a smell of salt and weeds, which was in the towels too, gritty with sand from bathing.” I had always loved that image—it reminded me of the light and sea smells of Rhode Island—and in fact all descriptions of the Ramsays’ home suggest a space as bleached and weathered as a rowboat, a space that even at the book’s beginning maintains only the flimsiest barrier between the family and the elements. Doors and windows are flung open; the rose-patterned wallpaper is faded and flapping. Ruined by wet, the “crazy ghosts of chairs” drag their entrails all over the floor. This encroachment by nature prefigures “Time Passes,” the novel’s middle section in which the chaos that Mrs. Ramsay has up until then succeeded at keeping at bay begins to penetrate the home. But the attics on the day of my visit were dark and dry, with clean blue carpets and bolted doors that precluded further exploration; and even the rooms facing the bay seemed unusually hermetic, as if they hailed from an altogether different book.

The gardener came back covered in blood. “I cut myself looking for the pictures,” he said apologetically, holding up three large black-and-white photographs, or rather, photocopies of photographs, encased in rickety frames, ribboned with cobwebs, and now, slightly smeared with red. He assured me he was all right and turned the frames around to reveal their written descriptions. “Family by front door c. 1892,” read one, and another, “Adrian, Thoby, Vanessa, Virginia with dog.” I was struck by Virginia’s fidgety hands, the girls’ heavy skirts, the obvious intimacy between sisters; Virginia leans complacently against Vanessa, who looks as if she’d take a knife to anyone who crossed her strange and visionary younger sister. “You’re welcome to them,” he said, “if you can get them back to America.” Looking closer, I saw that spiders had attached their egg sacs to the glass, but I accepted the photos gratefully and held out my hand to say good-bye. The gardener hesitated: “I’m a bit bloody, I’m afraid.” We shook with his left instead.

Before leaving, I paused at the bottom of the lawn and looked one last time at the house. Time passes, I thought, yes, but what does that mean? To the shock and despair of all who have read To the Lighthouse, Mrs. Ramsay dies unexpectedly midway through the novel; with her gone, the Scottish property is abandoned, its light extinguished. Swallows nest in the drawing room, plaster falls from the rafters, and then, finally, there comes a tipping point, a moment at which the weight of one feather would result in the house’s total ruin. Mrs. McNab, the housekeeper, eventually intervenes to protect against collapse, but not before Woolf can offer an alternate rendition of its fate:

In the ruined room, picnickers would have lit their kettles; lovers sought shelter there, lying on the bare boards; and the shepherd stored his dinner on the bricks, and the tramp slept with his coat round him to ward off the cold. Then the roof would have fallen; briars and hemlocks would have blotted out path, step, and window; would have grown, unequally but lustily over the mound, until some trespasser, losing his way, could have told only by a red-hot poker among the nettles, or a scrap of china in the hemlock that here once some one had lived; there had been a house.

Woolf’s pastoral vision of the future could just as easily be a vision of the past; the prickly, poisonous foliage restores the land to wilderness, while the figures she chooses to populate the scene—lovers, tramps, and shepherds—are eternal. But as I gazed up at Talland House, at its labyrinthine staircases and additions, at the nearby flats and cranes (for a rising apartment block will soon obstruct Talland’s lighthouse view), I felt a twinge of nostalgia for that more elemental prophecy. The reabsorption of the Stephens’ home into the earth, so that it lived on in language for trespassers like me and not as some grotesque distortion of itself, seemed infinitely preferable to this current portrait of time’s passage.

I was halfway down the drive when the gardener ran toward me with a garbage bag—“To carry the pictures,” he explained. We slid them in together and he handed me a folded piece of paper. “My CV,” he said, “in case you ever need a gardener in the States.” He admitted that after twelve years he was being let go—apparently the landlord had decided that Talland House no longer needed full-time upkeep. I thought of Mrs. Ramsay as she joins her husband on the lawn, lamenting the fifty pounds that it will cost to mend the greenhouse. Even so, she says, the gardener’s beauty is so great that she couldn’t possibly dismiss him.

We said good-bye again, and as I walked down the hill to the beach, it occurred to me, for the first time in all my years of reading and rereading To the Lighthouse, that Mrs. Ramsay’s refusal to fire the gardener is in fact another iteration of her power to protect against entropy; and that, conversely, the dismissal of Andrew Shaw—for that was the name on the CV—may well have been the first step toward Woolf’s vision of a timeless, sylvan future. Perhaps the garden will grow wild after all.

TWENTY YEARS AFTER my parents bought and renovated the Rhode Island house, I found my father on the hammock, looking out over the water and smoking a cigarette. We had driven that morning from the hospital, where he had spent the past month in intensive care following complications from chemotherapy and radiation. He seemed calm, and though his face and frame were thin, he held himself easily beneath his navy-blue sweater, always able, even on that night, to command the space around him. I was sorry to have caught him smoking, but I still admonished him gently. “It might not matter,” he said. “I’m still waiting to hear my prognosis.”

He patted the ropy spot beside him, and I sat down. The ghost of a hurricane was passing through; the sky over the basin was soft and heavy with black fog. Ropes strummed against the metal masts of sailboats, and the lights of the faraway houses sent shocks of white across the water. The grass, neglected these few weeks, had already grown calf-high. When I commented on how pretty it was, he said, “Yes, but not too pretty.”

By morning, the hurricane had scoured the sky and left in its place a beautiful fall weekend. I was sitting on the front porch beneath a rising sun, drinking tea and nestled in one of the white Adirondack chairs. Things were ending, a faint melancholy drifting. But that was true of all Septembers.

Later, the sun swung round to the west, I stood at the end of the dock, wearing an old bathing suit and staring down into water made bottle green by my shadow. The house was drenched in light, the dock too, light thinner than that of midsummer, it was like wheat, and the air was laced with cold. (“The sun seems to give less heat,” says Lily Briscoe, a young, unmarried painter and the Ramsays’ houseguest, of September in the Hebrides, looking round her at the grass and flowers.) My father was returning Solent, our new sailboat, to the mooring; I could see him from where I stood, a slight figure across the water, now reaching for the mooring wand, now disappearing down below. There had been a mix-up with the engine, and though he was supposed to rest, he had spent his day flushing diesel from the bilges. I wouldn’t wait for him to swim—he hadn’t been swimming all summer. (“I’m hopeless, Petal.”) So I dove.