of starlings eddied about the rusting ribs above me. I hadn’t realised, until I entered the water, how strong the undertow was; or, as I swam out, how it would take me up, take control and tip me head over heels before dragging me back out.
I’d lost my grip on the world. The heavy pebbles of the beach rolled beneath me, and in the falling darkness, as the lights came on along the esplanade, I thought how banal it would be to die within sight of a dual carriageway and a row of fish-and-chip shops and burger bars. And I wonder, when I am dead, what thoughts will be left in my head, like the black box recorder of a downed plane.
Another time, on Dorset’s West Bay, under its towering cliffs, the tow played a similar trick. I quickly realised what I had done, and tried to climb out. Again I was turned over for my impudence and thrown face-down on the shingle, my features squashed like a peat bog man. Mark told me this was the way surfers smashed their faces, and that evening in town, someone warned me that the beach was notorious, and that only a few months before a young man had drowned there.
And I thought about Virginia Woolf’s body being taken out, as if her death were a culmination of all her words, moving inexorably towards the sea.
It’s odd to return to the books I was required to read at college, their unbroken backs covered in clear plastic to protect them against some future event, preserving them for a time when I would actually understand them, although their pages are now vignetted in brown, as if the sun had penetrated their closed edges. They wait for me to open them, to bring them back to life, familiar and strange and dangerous, as though I were reading them for the first time.
To the Lighthouse is set in the Hebrides, but it draws on Woolf’s childhood holidays in Cornwall, and memories of her Victorian mother. Mrs Ramsay hears and feels the waves as they ‘remorselessly beat the message of life’; they make her think of ‘the destruction of the island and its engulfment in the sea’. At night, as her guests sit around the candlelit table, she looks out of the uncurtained windows through the dark rippling glass – ‘a reflection in which things waved and vanished, waterily’, as if all the world was at sea – and she thinks of herself as a sailor who, if the ship had sunk, ‘would have whirled round and round and found rest on the floor of the sea’. In the distance, the lighthouse stands tall and white on a rock.
The water possessed an ambivalent power for Woolf. One moonlit night, when she was a young woman, she and Rupert Brooke swam naked in the river Cam at Byron’s Pool, named after the poet, who had swum there when he was at Cambridge. Brooke was proud of his improbable and Byronic ability to emerge from the water with an erection. Later, Woolf joined Brooke and his Neo-Pagans, as she called them, when they camped on Dartmoor and swam in the moorland river. Virginia, both prim and liberated, did not quite feel at ease with their attempts to commune with nature; her future biographer Hermione Lee would lament the fact that the nude photographs taken on that occasion did not survive.
Woolf – only an extra O away from being an animal herself, a virgin wolf – had a relationship with the natural world that was both paradoxical and predatory. Nature was unfeeling, going about its business. The beach was no consolation. In To the Lighthouse, after a scene in which ‘the sea tosses itself and breaks itself, and should any sleeper fancying that he might find on the beach an answer to his doubts, a sharer of his solitude, throw off his bedclothes and go down by himself to walk on the sand … to ask the night those questions as to what, and why, and wherefore, which tempt the sleeper from his bed to seek an answer’ – we discover, almost in passing, that Mrs Ramsay has died. In the aftermath, the sea seems to take over the house, as death has overtaken the Ramsays. Of their eight children, Andrew is killed in the war and Pru dies in childbirth. Virginia’s own mother, Julia, died aged forty-nine, and her brother Thoby died of typhoid fever when he was twenty-six years old. For Woolf, the water meant death as well as life.
What remains of the Ramsay family and their friends return ten years later. The house, once so full, has stood empty; the elements threaten to overtake it. We expect the deluge of war to have washed it away. But it is rescued by the housekeeper, to whom Mrs Ramsay appears as a ‘faint and flickering’ image, a kind of ghost, ‘like a yellow beam or the circle at the end of a telescope, a lady in a grey cloak, stooping over her flowers’. The memory is electric, almost cinematic: Virginia’s mother Julia was photographed by her aunt, Julia Margaret Cameron, more than fifty times, her profile turned this way or that, her smooth hair, glaucous eyes and strangely vacant face the same as her daughter’s, wearing a black gown, white cuffs and collar, caught on the path at Freshwater, moving in her dark clothes; then not moving, stilled in the instant, then moving on, ‘the Star like sorrows of Immortal Eyes’.
So too Virginia would pose for Vogue in her mother’s dress in 1924, ravished by a Pre-Raphaelite sea, acting as her own sepia ghost, rehearsing her last scene, floating down the Ouse as Ophelia, ‘her clothes spread wide, | And mermaid-like, awhile they bore her up’. After her father died, and Virginia and her orphaned siblings moved to Bloomsbury, she hung Cameron’s fantastical portraits of famous men and fair women in the hallway as an ironic gesture. For all her modernism, Virginia was anchored in a Victorian past, shaped and damaged by its history, and her own.
Those remote summers by the sea would remain with her. In her book, the ferocious Atlantic becomes a character itself, like the moor in Wuthering Heights or the whale in Moby-Dick (of which she owned two copies, and which she read at least three times). ‘In both books,’ she wrote in an essay on Brontë and Melville in 1919, ‘we get a vision of presence outside the human beings, of a meaning that they stand for, without ceasing to be themselves.’ Woolf’s white lighthouse is Melville’s white whale; an impossible mission over unfathomable waters.
Cam, the riverishly-named youngest Ramsay daughter, dangles her hand in the waves as she and her brother reluctantly accompany their father on the long-postponed trip to the lighthouse. Out at sea they become becalmed, and in her dreamy, deceptive state, Cam’s mind wanders through the green swirls into an ‘underworld of waters where the pearls stuck in clusters to white sprays, where in the green light a change came over one’s entire mind and one’s body shone half transparent enveloped in a green cloak’. As blank and ever-changing as it is, as calm or crazed, the sea could embody ecstasy or despair; it was a mirror for Woolf’s descent into madness, a process made profound by knowing what was about to happen. She might have been enchanted by Ariel. ‘I felt unreason slowly tingling in my veins,’ she would say, as if her body were being flooded by insanity or filled with strange noises: birds singing in Greek; an ‘odd whirring of wings in the head’.
Cam seems besieged by the sea, by a numb terror and ‘a purple stain upon the bland surface as if something had boiled and bled, invisibly, beneath’. Meanwhile ‘winds and waves disported themselves like the amorphous bulks of leviathans whose brows are pierced by no light of reason’. Eventually the Ramsays reach the lighthouse, but even that epiphany is darkened by the fact that they pass over the place – if water could be said to have a place – where their fisherman had once seen three men drown, clinging to the mast of their boat. All the while their father, as gloomy and tyrannical as Ahab, dwells on William Cowper’s doomy poem, ‘The Castaway’: ‘We perish’d, each alone: | But I beneath a rougher sea, | And whelm’d in deeper gulfs than he.’ When, as a young woman, Virginia had heard of the fate of Titanic, she imagined the ship far below, ‘poised half way down, and become perfectly flat’, and its wealthy passengers ‘like a pancake’, their eyes ‘like copper coins’. Later, to another friend, she said, ‘You’ll tell me I’m a failure as a writer, as well as a failure as a woman. Then I shall take a dive into the Serpentine, which, I see, is 6 feet deep in malodorous mud.’ To her even the bridge over the monstrously-named inland sea in a London park was a white arch representing a thousand deaths, a thousand sighs.
While writing To the Lighthouse, Woolf read of another disaster. On the first ever attempt to fly westbound across the Atlantic, the wealthy Princess Löwenstein-Wertheim had perished, along with her pilot and co-pilot. ‘The Flying Princess, I forget her name, has been drowned in her purple leather breeches.’ In her mind’s eye Virginia saw the plane