Living Poets – by Jessica Lim
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Recently I read Virginia Woolf’s 1929 classic A Room of One’s Own while my daughter slept off her adenotonsillectomy overnight in hospital. It was two days before Queensland’s vaccine mandate was due to kick in. On the day we were admitted, staff wore no masks; the next morning, case numbers were in the air and rules had changed. Woolf’s essay, 100 or so pages on the centuries-long war between austerity and female creativity, was always going to interest me as a writer and mother and intimate acquaintance of ‘the heat and violence of the poet’s heart when caught and tangled in a woman’s body’. I immediately understood Woolf’s creation of an imagined sister to Shakespeare, her entreaty to make such a thwarted spirit corporeal: hadn’t I spent years writing and rewriting a poem I alternately called ‘Ghost’ and ‘Ambition’? Relating the two as pale, half-realised, trapped, and hard to draw with crayons? In my poem there are barnacle children and a pylon husband and a yard big enough for 30 years’ wages and a bed that is made and made, and happiness (but) …
Of course the limitations of Woolf’s common sitting-room with all its openness and interruptions would naturally resonate.
The sureness of her message, I suppose, had accounted for the lack of any real urgency on my part to read it – a 100-year-old truth will still be true tomorrow. My Nanny used to collect fabric the way I collect books – without immediate design, but sure of some future use. Here, finally, the sure thing, the mid-weight cotton, had been picked from its shelf because it was the right shape and size for the task ahead and – I thought – able to be sewn up easily.
“But of course, Virginia Woolf is more of silk than cotton. The way she freewheels a stream of consciousness, the way her ideas fall in elegant swoops one upon the other on the floor as you try to hem her in.”
But of course, Virginia Woolf is more of silk than cotton. The way she freewheels a stream of consciousness, the way her ideas fall in elegant swoops one upon the other on the floor as you try to hem her in. I wasn’t expecting the light touch, the humour, the mildness of tone. ‘For it is the nature of biscuits to be dry,’ Woolf writes at one point, ‘and these were biscuits to the core.’ To have had suffrage as a sex for only 9 years at time of writing, to have been asked to present a talk at Cambridge on the underrepresentation of great women writers and the cause while still not being allowed in certain parts of a college herself, and to do so with a twinkle in the eye, is Gandalf the Grey and Albus Dumbledore-type wizardry. A feminist polemic? I was expecting something scalding; this was bathwater of exactly the right temperature.
And so the first lesson, explained but also modelled: the writer’s mind must be free of hate, bitterness, fear and protest else ‘she will never get her genius expressed whole and entire. Her books will be deformed and twisted. She will write in a rage where she should write calmly. She will write foolishly where she should write wisely.’ Jane Austen and Shakespeare, having ‘consumed all impediments’ in their minds, were able to discharge their gifts completely; not so Charlotte Brontë, whose own self, Woolf argued, slipped at times onto the page.
“A radical message to read 100 years on, during a polarising pandemic in an age of omnipresent opinion.”
A radical message to read 100 years on, during a polarising pandemic in an age of omnipresent opinion. The ability to write free from fear or sermon seemed a Kipling-esque (Woolf was not a fan) exercise; if you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs, etc.
Covid has broken the fourth wall, has been an impediment in our minds, has caused the very conditions – financial stress, uncertain health, an interrupted workspace/no workspace, limitations on travel and experience – that Woolf identified as being public enemies of creativity. Stories are the work ‘of suffering human beings’, she wrote, by way of her main argument, ‘and are attached to grossly material things, like health and money and the houses we live in’. I had expected to make comparisons between the lot of my gender then and now; instead I thought of all creatives caught in the current moment.
I thought of them in the opening chapter, when the loss of the old poets and their exuberance, the loss of an old feeling, is mourned. ‘But the living poets,’ Woolf complains, ‘express a feeling that is actually being made and torn out of us at the moment.’
“How much of what we write, I found myself thinking, even the scraps of nothing we post for 24 hours on social media, feels torn out of us lately? How much of our feelings are new to us? How different, our current dispositions?”
How much of what we write, I found myself thinking, even the scraps of nothing we post for 24 hours on social media, feels torn out of us lately? How much of our feelings are new to us? How different, our current dispositions? For Woolf’s generation the finger pointed at war. ‘When the guns fired in August 1914,’ she wrote, ‘did the faces of men and women show so plain in each other’s eyes that romance was killed?’
Next to me, my daughter stirred. Her nose had been strangely pale since she came out of surgery, paler than the rest of her face, and she was breathing differently. The notion of a changeling, of a sickly fairy left in place of the healthy child, came to mind. This sickly fairy, this virus, growing where the healthy thoughts of our living poets should be.
On Instagram, an author I follow responded to the prompt: ‘Photo of you early 2020 not knowing what was coming’. I clicked to see other tagged images and the recurring motif was joy. People around people, in all the ways we used to connect. Bodily, musically, emotionally, globally, sartorially, humorously. In crowds, pubs, large family gatherings. Wide smiles, wide as the world was. It was an age of courting, before, and now the romance is killed.
I went back to my book, even though I love social media, or did, before the faces of people were shown very plain. Besides, I was trying to find inspiration for the writing I’d do this holiday – if I could overcome impediments – looking to the female muses who’d come before. ‘A woman writing thinks back through her mothers,’ Woolf said, pointing to the spotty history of female storytelling tradition to illustrate the particular poverty facing her contemporaries. ‘For masterpieces are not single and solitary births; they are the outcome of many years of thinking in common, of thinking by the body of the people, so that the experience of the mass is behind the single voice.’
As I finished the essay, my patient woke; looked to me. In her pain she wanted hugs, jelly, cartoons. The old feeling. ▼
Image: Las mariposas de la amistad , Virgnia Woolf y Victoria Ocampo, by Claudia Marciano
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