I’m in London at the moment. The start of 2025 has been a mixed bag, and without wanting to bore you with the details, let’s just say two weeks in bed with the flu (although it may well have been COVID) left me physically and mentally weakened, socially isolated, and persistently anxious until I sought my jailbreak.
I’m supposed to be in Madrid right now, in fact, and had to call it off for the reasons above and more. But since I’d already booked the time off work, I decided to use it to recuperate with my partner in the capital and take the time to put my head back together.
It’s been wonderful so far, as has every trip to London since last summer, when we first started seeing each other. In fact, I’ve spent more time here over the last six months than at any point over the last five years, after moving from Deptford to Huddersfield during the COVID lockdowns.
London was difficult to leave then, and I wrote about my complicated feelings at length at the time. Even now, when I think back to my excision from the city’s clutches, I instantly recall a photograph taken along the Thames path not long before I left, of someone rowing solo past the Old Navy College in Greenwich, looking miniscule amongst everything.
There remains something about that image that totally encapsulates everything that was going through my mind the last time I was here, which is everything and nothing at all, simply feeling sloshed about, perhaps a little shellshocked.
Things feel much different now. The world feels less enormous, less alienating, less hungry to swallow me whole and churn up my bones. London, the global city, the world in microcosm, feels similar. I really like it here again. Not that that means I’m about to move back anytime soon. But it is, dare I say, very nice to visit.
The other day, I was hanging around the Slade School of Fine Art and perusing the Gower Street Waterstones. I’ve been there a couple of times in recent months, and one of my favourite detours through this relatively unfamiliar part of London — Bloomsbury — is to go and see Virginia Woolf.
I’ve said this a dozen times on the blog before, I’m sure, but one of my favourite things to do, wherever I’m living, is to disappear into books that are set in the places I’m now walking through. There’s a whole book in me about my time spent in London, Cornwall, and West Yorkshire, and the companionship provided by Woolf, Daphne du Maurier, and Emily Brontë in those places; the relationships between these writers themselves; the peculiar, bedraggled, speculative England they live in, with future and histories both cacophonous and immanent.
Case in point, back when I used to work at BAFTA, I’d read Mrs Dalloway over and over again on my long bus commute from Sydenham to Piccadilly, and as I traipsed past the Tavistock Hotel this week — formerly flats, with Virginia and Leopold Woolf living in number 52 — I began to think about the strained relationship Virginia and her characters have had with this city too, their walks across it that I’ve re-enacted for myself, feeling at times like Mrs Dalloway, at others like Septimus Smith.
This duality is everywhere in Woolf’s novels. She is prone to long expressionistic passages that flit fleetingly between lives, but as much as she evokes the effervescent life and liveliness of the city in this way, she is no less prone to ending them with a note of exhaustion. Take the following from Jacob’s Room:
At Mudie’s corner in Oxford Street all the red and blue beads had run together on the string. The motor omnibuses were locked. Mr. Spalding going to the city looked at Mr. Charles Budgeon bound for Shepherd’s Bush. The proximity of the omnibuses gave the outside passengers an opportunity to stare into each other’s faces. Yet few took advantage of it. Each had his own business to think of. Each had his past shut in him like the leaves of a book known to him by heart; and his friends could only read the title, James Spalding, or Charles Budgeon, and the passengers going the opposite way could read nothing at all—save “a man with a red moustache,” “a young man in grey smoking a pipe.” The October sunlight rested upon all these men and women sitting immobile; and little Johnnie Sturgeon took the chance to swing down the staircase, carrying his large mysterious parcel, and so dodging a zigzag course between the wheels he reached the pavement, started to whistle a tune and was soon out of sight—for ever. The omnibuses jerked on, and every single person felt relief at being a little nearer to his journey’s end, though some cajoled themselves past the immediate engagement by promise of indulgence beyond—steak and kidney pudding, drink or a game of dominoes in the smoky corner of a city restaurant. Oh yes, human life is very tolerable on the top of an omnibus in Holborn, when the policeman holds up his arm and the sun beats on your back, and if there is such a thing as a shell secreted by man to fit man himself here we find it, on the banks of the Thames, where the great streets join and St. Paul’s Cathedral, like the volute on the top of the snail shell, finishes it off. Jacob, getting off his omnibus, loitered up the steps, consulted his watch, and finally made up his mind to go in… Does it need an effort? Yes. These changes of mood wear us out.
But it is in Jacob’s Room‘s successor, Mrs Dalloway, that Woolf lets this bittersweet relationship with the city take over completely.
Clarissa Dalloway loves walking in London. “‘Really, it’s better than walking in the country’”, she claims. But she also questions why she and so many other Londoners love the semio-blitz-spirit of the city so much:
For Heaven only knows why one loves it so, how one sees it so, making it up, building it round one, tumbling it, creating it every moment afresh; but the verist frumps, the most dejected miseries sitting on doorsteps (drink their downfall) do the same; can’t be dealt with, she felt positive, by Acts of Parliament for that very reason: they love life. In people’s eyes, in the swing, tramp, and trudge; in the bellow and uproar; the carriages, motor cars, omnibuses, vans, sandwich men shuffling and swinging; brass bands; barrel organs; in the triumph and the jingle and the strange high singing of some aeroplane overhead was what she loved; life; London; this moment of June.
What begins as a sense of awe and wonder before the tumult of urban life soon fades into an existential crisis – a crisis prefigured by that of Septimus Smith himself. He has a very different relationship to London and its calamity of signs. As his wife Lucrezia leads him through the tumult of the busy streets, Septimus is irritable, discombobulated, easily startled, paranoid. “‘I will kill myself’”, he suddenly mutters, and Lucrezia whisks him away to the relative tranquillity of a nearby park.
Sounds that might ground Clarissa in the hubbub of the capital instead transport Septimus somewhere else. When a car backfires, that famous scene, we pass through the collective consciousness of that street in Piccadilly seamlessly, as Clarissa and a throng of others all imagine who might be passing through their midst – perhaps it is someone important, maybe the Prime Minister. Meanwhile, aeroplanes passing overhead remind others of exotic climes: “Hadn’t Mrs. Dempster always longed to see foreign parts?” But Septimus is on edge. The reader intuits that the bangs and drones remind him of the battlefield. He is, in that moment, suffering from shellshock.
Shellshock is an interesting condition; its name so evocative, it lingers on in our lexicon as a hyperbolic adjective. It’s a great word, uncoupled from its more clinical cousin, post-traumatic stress. Although both are still associated with war veterans, only shellshock is explicitly tied to shelling. Indeed, shellshock was thought to be acquired very literally. Physicians who had observed the extreme distress suffered by soldiers returning from war thought that their condition had been caused directly by the indirect impact of explosions on the spine and nervous system, such that being close to heavy shelling had shaken something loose. As mundane as this old misnomer might be, it’s a wonderfully poetic image that seemed obvious until the Freudian unconscious displaced these experiences to somewhere more unknowable.
Woolf’s husband was responsible for first publishing Freud’s works in English translation, although her own relationship with him is as complicated as that with London itself. She took a great interest in his theories, but also disparaged his influence on literature, following which “all the characters have become cases”. She instead spurns the singular for the multiple, the deadened past for the interminable present. For Elizabeth Abel, Woolf fundamentally “rewrite[s] the developmental fiction of psychoanalysis.” She notes how Mrs Dalloway is contemporaneous with Freud’s rewriting of Sophocles’ Oedipus into a complex, but whereas Oedipus becomes Freud’s analogous scene for our entrance into culture and community, Mrs Dalloway instead “defines the moment of acculturation as a moment of obstruction”. For Clarissa, this obstruction leaves her wistfully wondering what could have been, whether she made the right choices for herself as a debutante, soon married, and whether they were choices of her own at all; for Septimus, there is a sense of being too worldly, of having seen far more than can be contained by human culture as it likes to think of itself. As remains common for so many veterans, it is a torturous re-entry into society and its cultures that Septimus seems incapable of.
It is possible to play at length with Woolf’s social drama and account of PTSD; there are bombshells of varying sorts scattered throughout her characters’ many exchanges with the world around them. This is felt most poignantly through the shellshocked Septimus, for whom everything has been deterritorialized, at once deadened and felt hyper-sensitively. He feels nothing; he feels everything. “Scientifically speaking, the flesh was melted off the world. His body was macerated until only the nerve fibres were left.” But whereas these frayed nerve-endings produce a calamity of shocks within Septimus, those around him are find their nerve-endings plugged into a London “so enchanting – the softness of the distances; the greenness; the civilisation”. Their experiences, in radically different context, nonetheless reveal emotional turmoil that, for both, is a jangling of the nerves.
For Septimus, however, things are always more extreme. London appears still at war for him, for instance, with his body a gaping wound that flinches at every intrusion made upon it by the city’s various forces. He cannot escape these intrusions, and so inevitably, involuntarily, begins to read the swirling signs that surround him, that engulfed him. He is not unlike everyone else, in this regard, but he is abjectly incapable of enjoying the dizzying spectacle of urban life like those that pass him on the street, hoping to instead plummet beneath London’s surface and into its deadened depths.
In one moment, he watches
a seedy-looking nondescript man carrying a leather bag stood on the steps of St. Paul’s Cathedral, and hesitate[s], for within was what balm, how great a welcome, how many tombs with banners waving over them, tokens of victories not over armies, but over, he thought, that plaguy spirit of truth seeking which leaves me at present without a situation, and more than that, the cathedral offers company, he thought, invites you to membership of a society; great men belong to it; martyrs have died for it; why not enter it, he thought, put this leather bag stuffed with pamphlets before an altar, a cross, the symbol of something which has soared beyond seeking and questing and knocking of words together and has become all spirit, disembodied, ghostly – why not enter in? he thought and while he hesitated out flew the aeroplane over Ludgate Circus.
The only reprieve from the noise, it seems, is the silence of death. The signs are all mixed up here. At first, we might think Septimus is longing to join a congregation before God, but at the same time, the spirit he seeks may well be less than holy and more cryptic, in multiple senses of the word. As above, so below. Feeling himself invisible, trapped within his memories of the horrors of war, it is the society of unknown soldiers that Septimus longs to make himself a member of. The kingdom of heaven, longed for by the living, is only occupied by the dead. By the story’s end, he has gained his entry.
Septimus’s doctors recommend a stay in a psychiatric hospital, but before long, he has thrown himself from a high window. Coincidently, one of his doctors, Sir William Bradshaw, later attends Clarissa’s party and begins talking of Septimus’s suicide with the guests. His wife hears the news first:
Lady Bradshaw … murmured how, “just as we were starting, my husband was called up on the telephone, a very sad case. A young man … had killed himself. He had been in the army.” Oh! thought Clarissa, in the middle of my party, here’s death, she thought.
For all her love of life, Clarissa appears shellshocked by death’s arrival. “Always her body went through it first, when she was told, suddenly, of an accident; her dress flamed, her body burnt.” Before long, she too is awash with cold thoughts of the tomb, the subdued pageantry of the funereal, the silent strength of it:
Death was defiance. Death was an attempt to communicate; people feeling the impossibility of reaching the centre which, mystically, evaded them; closeness drew apart; rapture faded, one was alone. There was an embrace in death.
An embrace like a welcoming return to the place from whence we all came, perhaps, as she is afflicted by “the terror; the overwhelming incapacity, one’s parents giving it into one’s hands, this life, to be lived to the end, to be walked with serenely”.
But something about these thoughts, as if transmitted from the inner monologue of the mind through the ballet of body language, make Clarissa so enchanting to others. By the novel’s end, when this same existential questioning returns, arriving in the mind of another — “What is this terror? what is this ecstasy? … What is it that fills me with extraordinary excitement?” — it is Clarissa herself who exemplifies life’s tightrope walk, as if it is the capacity to die in each of us, and one’s quiet contemplation of the void, that affects those closest to us.
It is the fragility of it all, the murmuring hum of it all, the vibrational shellshocking that weathers the spinal cords of all of us. That is the terror that lurks in those we love, and which accumulates like micro-fissures in the body’s central column. For this reason, we might argue that Mrs Dalloway is not so much a work of Freudian fiction than it is a tale of spinal catastrophism. Remember when Barker spoke:
Trauma is a body … The issue here — as always — is real and effective regression. It is not a matter of representational psychology … DNA as a transorganic memory-bank and the spine as a fossil record … The mapping of spinal-levels onto neuronic time is supple, episodic, and diagonalizing.
Woolf maps time in this way too, and I am left with the image of my copy of Mrs Dalloway, read and re-read, sat on the bookshelf back at home in Newcastle, its own spine close to breaking.
Time, like the city of London, churns up and churns away. It is a motor, juddering in place. The present is idling. My memories drift away from Bloomsbury toward the periods of Woolf’s childhood spent in Cornwall, my retracing of her steps in St Ives in 2019, then moving diagonally to Barbara Hepworth’s studio… There was a famous sculptor who worked with stone and heavy machinery, who had to give up their craft because the motor of the pneumatic drill they used to carve into stone had turned the bones in their hands to dust. Was that Hepworth? My memory fails.
Still, I think of Woolf’s attempts to dig down into the depths of the present similarly, that is, pneumatically. She suffered from her own kind of shellshock, her own kind of vibrational trauma, perhaps exacerbated by the depth charges she planted throughout her novels.
I begin to feel silly, beginning this post with such positivity, but as I scratch at the surface, I find all manner of mixed feelings buried here. There is always something self-destructive about excavating one’s own foundations, whether they are reset with the stage dressing of fiction or not. As I chip away at this post in various spots around Bloomsbury, I can’t entirely ignore the tremors occasioned by writing in this city. They are painful, and yet, they are life-affirming.
This is not a sad piece of writing, but it was nonetheless written whilst vibrating.