Saturday, May 24, 2008

Digested classics / Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf


DIGESTED CLASSICS

Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf


John Crace
Saturday 24 May 2008

Mrs Dalloway stiffened on the kerb, waiting for Big Ben to strike. There! Out it boomed. She loved life; all was well once more now the war was over.
Clarissa recalled that summer with Peter Marsh. What was it he had said? She couldn't quite remember, yet somehow the lack of clarity felt profound. Was not this impressionistic stream of consciousness confirmation of her place in the avant-garde? Such a pity, then, that so often she seemed so shallow. And yet. Was not Peter due back from India soon? A noise like a pistol shot rang out.
The violent explosion that so shocked Clarissa - or was it Mrs Richard? - Dalloway came from a motor car. Was it the prime minister's? Septimus Warren Smith did not care, as his wife, Lucrezia, helped him cross the road. "I will kill myself," he said, as an airplane curved overhead, its smoky trail a modernist symbol.
"Dr Holmes says you must rest," cried Rezia.
Interrupting. Always interrupting. Could she not understand the importance of his shell-shock trauma as a counterpoint to superficiality?
Big Ben struck out again, the bell throbbing with masculinity from within its Freudian tower. Mrs Dalloway's mind turned to matters of love and that first kiss she had once shared with Sally Seton. How thrilling it felt to hint at lesbianism!


The doorbell rang. Who could it be? It was Peter. "How lovely to see you," she said. There was so much he wanted to tell her. How he had been heart-broken when she had chosen Richard.
"I'm in love," he blurted out. "With a married woman."
"How interesting," said Clarissa, lost in solipsism, yet somehow acknowledging their shared sense of unfulfilment. "Why don't you come to the party tonight?"
Peter marched furiously. Clarissa might be ageing into comfortable respectability, but he still felt young and vibrant at 50. He sat down in Regent's Park, his mind tired of repetitious memories of how he had once loved Clarissa to distraction. How could she have married a man with no tremulous love for Shakespeare? Why must his images contain so many portentous adjectives? And why must everything be a question?
Septimus and Lucrezia had also stopped in Regent's Park. The war. Milan. Now he only saw demons. And occasionally visions of Miss Isobel Pole whom he had once loved. There. He couldn't make it any clearer he wasn't homosexual, he told himself.
Big Ben struck 12 times as Septimus and Rezia stepped into Sir William Bradshaw's consulting rooms. "Your husband has served with distinction in the war," Bradshaw said to Lucrezia. "He is a very troubled man who needs time away in one of my homes."
Richard Dalloway was happy to take luncheon with Lady Bruton and help her compose a letter to the Times. He supposed he had some influence as a member of the House, though he was aware of his limitations. "Peter Marsh is in town," said Lady Bruton.
"Splendid," Richard replied. Had not Peter once loved Clarissa? Perhaps he should tell Clarissa that he loved her, too. But first, he would buy flowers.
Big Ben struck three as he entered the house. His mouth opened, but the words would not come. "Here," he said, thrusting the flowers into Clarissa's arms before rushing back to the House.
He wanted to say he loved me, Clarissa thought, yet he couldn't. We are trapped like icicles in the coldness between youth and old age. She sighed as Big Ben struck something or other and went to visit her daughter, Elizabeth, at Miss Kilman's house. How she hated Miss Kilman whose religious, lesbian tendencies were taking Elizabeth away from her.
Rezia tried to release Septimus from his horror. "Be still," she said. "The doctors will soon be here to take you away." Septimus trembled with the intensity of his condition. "I'll give it you," he cried, hurling himself out the window on to the railings below.
The ambulance took the body away as Big Ben struck again. How annoying, thought Peter, to be so constantly reminded that all the action was taking place on one day. How heavenly to see you, Clarissa had written. What could she mean?
The prime minister had arrived. The party was a success. And yet, somehow, Clarissa felt disengaged. Maybe if she did a little more and thought a little less, her life might be more rewarding, but it was too late in the book for that.
The doorbell rang. It was Sally Seton. "I heard you were having a party and I thought I'd come along to tie up a few loose ends."
Peter spied Sally in the corner. "How sad that Clarissa's life is so empty," he remarked. "And Richard is not bound for greatness." And you have not exactly fulfilled your dreams either, she thought. But she kept that to herself, content in the compromises of her own life.
"One of my patients committed suicide today," Bradshaw announced. "Delayed shell-shock is a terrible condition."
Clarissa's eyes glazed over.
· John Crace's Digested Reads appear in G2 on Tuesdays

2008
The Outsider by Albert Camus
The Great Gatsby by Scoot Fitgerald
Heart of Darnkess by Joseph Conrad
Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis
The Trial by Franz Kafka
Rebecca by Daphe du Maurier
Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
The End of the Affair by Graham Greene
Death in Venica by Thomas Mann
To Have and Have not by Ernest Hemingway
The Cry of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon
Bonjour Tristesse by Françoise Sagan
Bright Lights, By City by Jay McInerney
Banned Books
The Thirty-nine Steps by John Buchan
Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
Lady Chatterley's Lover by DH Lawrence
Breakfast at Tiffany's by Truman Capote
Righ Hoo, Jeeves by PG Wodehouse
The Painted Veil by Somerset Maugham
Cid with Rosie by Laurie Lee
Justine by Lawrence Durrell
Portnoy's Complaint by Philip Roth
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark
Love in a Cold Climate by Nancy Mitford
The Catcher in the Ryan by JD Salinger

2009
A Question of Unbringing by Anthony Powell
High Fidelity by Nick Hornby
Lord of the Flies by William Golding
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce
Sucess by Martin Amis
Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
The Sheltering Sky by Paul Bowles
Enduring Love by Ian McEwan
The Thief's Journal by Jean Genet  
The Bella Jar by Sylvia Plath
Siddartha by Hermann Hesse
The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler
Wide Sargasso by Jean Rhys
The Scarlet Pimpernel by Baroness Orczy
Saturday Night, Sunday Morning by Allan Sillitoe
More Pricks Than Kicks by Samuel Beckett
Herzog by Saul Bellow
As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner
The Day of the Triffids by John Wyndham
Junky by William S Burroughs
Tarzan of the Apes by Edgar Rice Borroughs
Kim by Rudyard Kipling
Hotel du Lac by Anita Brookner
Swann's Way by Marcel Proust
The Hound of the Baskervilles by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert M Pirsig
The Inmoralist by André Gide
Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit by Jeanette Winterson
The Golden Bowl by Henry James
The Bonfire of the Vanities by Tom Wolfe
Anna of the Five Towns by Arnold Bennett
Atomised by Michel Houellebecq
Le Gran Macabre György Ligeti
Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy
Mr Fortune's Maggot by Sylvia Townsend Warner
The Highway Code: 1930
Call of the Dead by John le Carré
The Turn of the Screw by Benjamin Briteen
Darnkness at Noon by Arthur Koestler
The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton
Duke Bluebeard's Castle by Béla Bartó
Trainsportting by Irvine Welsh
Staying On by Paul Scott
The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera

2010
Candleford Green by Flora Thompson
The History Man by Malcolm Bradbury
The Sea, the sea by Iris Murdoch
The French Lieutenant's Woman by John Fowles
A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis
Beloved by Toni Morrison
Praxis by Fray Weldon
Gentleman Prefer Blondes by Anita Loss
Ann Veronica by HG Wells
Le Grand Meaulnes by Alain Fournier
The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy
Crash by JG Ballard
The Prophet by Khalil Gibran
Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man by Siegfried Sassoon
The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by L Frank Baum
Cry, The Beloved Country by Alan Paton
Tarr by Wyndham Lewis
Cry, The Beloved Country by Alan Paton
Possession by AS Byatt

2012
David Copperfield by Charles Dickens


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