On Wednesday I quoted Elizabeth Bishop who, in a letter to Marianne Moore, describes her awareness of insistent, disparate objects. Unhappy with nearly everything she has written, Bishop despairs, but she finds reason to go on in these disconnected things, which might, she intuits, be brought into one: ‘I hardly know why I persist at all…but I have this continuous uncomfortable feeling of “things” in the head…awkwardly shaped pieces of furniture…And I can’t help having the theory that if they are joggled around hard enough and long enough some kind of electricity will occur, just by friction, that will arrange everything.’
Thinking of Bishop’s letter today, I hear an echo of Mrs. Dalloway. Clarissa Dalloway also had a theory; hers was ‘to explain the feeling they had of dissatisfaction; not knowing people; not being known.’ And she, too, felt compelled to bring together the disparate, in her case by throwing a party. In my mind Bishop’s frictional gathering resembles Clarissa Dalloway’s fictional one:
Here was So-and-so in South Kensington; some one up in Bayswater; and somebody else, say, in Mayfair. And she felt quite continuously a sense of their existence; and she felt what a waste; and she felt what a pity; and she felt if only they could be brought together; so she did it. And it was an offering; to combine, to create; but to whom?
It is interesting to me that Clarissa can’t initially articulate what or whom her offering is for. She only knows it is important. She eventually concludes that her parties are offerings to life itself. But it is what she is gathering—otherwise disconnected things—that strikes me as the most important element of her offering. William Carlos Williams once said that poetry is powerful when it ‘draws perhaps many broken things into a dance by giving them thus a full being.’ This is true at the level of the individual as well. We are in search of that full being, our own Byzantium, a place that will allow us to bring into one ‘All that man is, / All mere complexities, / The fury and the mire of human veins.’ 20th-century postwar poetry reflects the broken world, and the broken self, through a broken mirror. It leaves gaps; it breaks the flow of time with broken lineation, syntax and spatiality. We know this. But we also know that Modernism tries to build with what is broken, to draw meaning out of discontinuity. Geoffrey Hill argues that language carries in it the marks of original sin, so the poet-maker is always composing with broken material. But he also writes that ‘the technical perfecting of a poem is an act of atonement, in the radical etymological sense – an act of at-one-ment, a setting at one, a bringing into concord, a reconciling, a uniting in harmony.’ Along these same lines, in his ‘Art Recentered’ manifesto, philosopher Frederick Turner argues that ‘even when it deals, as it often should and must, with the terrifying, tragic, and grotesque, art should help heal the lesions within the self and the rifts in the self’s relation to the world.’
Indeed, I believe this is literature’s raison d’être. There are, of course, literary works that do nothing of the kind. Edward Hirsch calls the postmodern aesthetic ‘a genre of disruption’ that ‘revels in its own incompleteness, its partiality, since all texts are incomplete and all poetic language insufficient.’ Certainly literature can be, and at times must be, disruptive, dissident and even revolutionary. But on the whole, I don’t think poetry or indeed any genre of literature has ever found a fundamental purpose in disruption for its own sake. I am opening myself up to all kinds of counterarguments and exceptions with this gross generalization, but I have no qualms about saying that I believe poetry, indeed all literature, rises from a yearning for wholeness. Writers need the darkness, but again, not for its own sake. To quote Emily Dickinson, ‘We grow accustomed to the Dark / When Light is put away…Either the Darkness alters / Or something in the sight / Adjusts itself to Midnight / And life steps almost straight.’
Elizabeth Bishop wrote her letter to Marianne Moore in September of 1940. Six months later, in March of 1941, Virginia Woolf took her own life. These events are unrelated, and there is no reason that their proximity to each other should mean anything. But it does, to me, today, because every piece of writing, even this blog post from a writer no one has heard of, is an act of bringing things together and seeing what the resulting friction might create. Questions about literature’s ability to effect change, to solve anything, to heal anyone are ancient and abiding, but the fact that we still ask them is itself an answer. For many of us the debate was settled from the moment we picked up a book, and like the great Rilke poem about the torso of Apollo, it whispered to us, You must change your life. For a writer this change comes from making an offering, and it is rather like building an undefined structure when the directions for assembly are not included. But we persist because, like Bishop and like Woolf, we feel an obligation to those un-gathered things.
Woolf originally intended for Mrs. Dalloway to die, and there is a moment near the end of the novel where Clarissa considers taking her own life. But unlike her other half, Septimus Warren Smith, Clarissa finds she is able to rejoin the party, that gathering of previously disconnected individuals that symbolizes Clarissa’s assembled identity. In her journal, Woolf writes, ‘There I am now, at last at the party…It is to be the most complicated spirited solid piece, knitting everything together & ending on three notes…each saying something to sum up Clarissa.’ Clarissa survives by doing what Septimus could not do, was not allowed to do: assemble, connect, bring broken things together and ask them to dance.
The easy rejoinder is that art, in the end, did not save Virginia Woolf’s life. But of course it did. That fact is on every page of her journals. Each work exacted a toll, but it also gave her life: ‘I’ve been battling however so long with The Hours…I want to freshen myself, not deaden myself, so I will say no more. Only I must note this odd symptom: a conviction that I shall go on, see it through, because it interests me to write it.’ For nearly two decades after she wrote that, Woolf found reasons to go on, and thank God she did. How many lives has she healed, even saved, with what came later, including A Room of One’s Own, To The Lighthouse, and Orlando? I count myself among that number. And Clarissa’s transcendental theory has been proven true in her case: ‘the unseen part of us, which spreads wide… might survive, be recovered somehow attached to this person or that.’ Writing is just such a quest to recover and to attach, to bring together this person or that. And while I know it’s incredibly presumptuous of me to speculate, I can’t help wondering if, or rather hoping that, had Woolf known how many lives she might affect, how many broken things she would bring into at-one-ment, she might have walked back to the party one more time on that March day instead of down to the River Ouse.