by A novel that takes place in a single June day, read on the eve of the single day Dublin gives to the nation’s accounts
Monday Evening, the Top of a 24 Bus
I closed the shop at six and came home along Whitehall on the upper deck, at the front, which is the only way to travel. As we came round Parliament Square the great clock struck the half hour. I had Mrs Dalloway in my bag. I laughed, and the man beside me moved his knees.
Because that is the book. That sound, at that corner. A woman walking through Westminster on a morning in June, and the clock striking, and the sound spreading out over the city.
“The leaden circles dissolved in the air.” It comes back again and again through the novel, every time the hour strikes. I think it is one of the best sentences about a noise that anyone has written.
One Day
For anyone who has not read it. The novel was published in 1925. It follows a society hostess, Clarissa Dalloway, through a single day in London as she prepares to give a party. That is the plot. She buys flowers. She mends a dress. An old suitor calls. In the evening people come.
And running alongside, never meeting her, is a young man called Septimus, a soldier back from the war whose mind has broken. He walks through the same streets. He hears the same clock.
Everything happens inside their heads. The past pours into the present. A whole life is there in the time it takes to cross a road.
What Woolf understood was that a day is not twenty-four equal hours. It is a few moments that are enormous and a great deal of time that passes without being noticed. And the clock, striking over all of it, does not care which is which.
Another Single Day
I had been thinking about days and deadlines because of what is due to happen across the Irish Sea tomorrow afternoon.
The Irish Times ran a piece a fortnight ago that I had kept. It began with a clock. That ticking sound you can hear, it said, is the countdown to the Budget. It described the pressure on the two ministers responsible as unusually high, in a budget they dare not mess up. It said that this one feels different, as if the margin for error were extraordinarily tight.
It noted that this was the Finance Minister’s first budget in the job, and that his colleague had been embracing his role as the Government’s hard man on spending. And it ended on a line I thought very fair: the refrain from ministers is, correctly, that no budget can soothe all ailments.
So tomorrow, in Dublin, two men will stand up and compress a year of argument into an afternoon. One day. Everything prepared for months, and then it is said aloud, and it is over.
The Party and the Speech
There is more in common between Clarissa’s party and a budget than you would think.
Both are occasions. Everything leads up to them. There is frantic preparation, a great deal of worry about who will be offended, and a fear that it will fall flat. Clarissa stands at the top of her stairs convinced it is a failure. Then the Prime Minister arrives, a small ordinary man, and everyone pretends not to look.
And both are over almost before they begin. The thing you prepared for takes place and is immediately the past.
Woolf knew that the occasion is not the point. The party in the novel matters because of what goes through Clarissa’s mind in the middle of it, when she hears that a young man has killed himself, a stranger, and goes alone into a small room and thinks about it. That is the real event of the day. Nobody at the party knows it happened.
What Does Not Get Announced
I wonder what the equivalent is, on a budget day. The thing that actually happened, which was not in the speech.
Perhaps it is a family in Sligo working out on the back of an envelope whether the increase covers the heating. Or a civil servant who fought for a line that was cut at midnight. Or the minister himself, sitting down afterwards, not knowing yet if it has gone well.
The official day is the clock striking. The real day is whatever was going through someone’s head when it struck.
Time in a Novel
I should say why this book matters so much to people who love my period.
Before the moderns, novels moved like a train. This happened, then this, then this. Woolf, and Joyce, whose Ulysses also takes place in a single day, saw that a mind does not work that way. You are walking down Bond Street and you are also eighteen, in a garden, being kissed. Both are happening.
So she let the clock keep the outside time, strict and public, and let the inside time go where it liked. Big Ben is the frame. It keeps saying: it is eleven, it is half past, it is three. And inside each hour, thirty years.
That is why the clock is so present. It is the one thing all the characters share. They are locked in separate heads, but they all hear it.
The Woman Herself
It is easy to patronise Clarissa. A rich woman fretting about a party while a damaged soldier walks to his death. Critics have done it.
I do not think Woolf does. She gives Clarissa the central insight of the book: that making an occasion, bringing people together in a room, is itself a kind of offering. “That was her gift,” she thinks. It is a small gift. It is still a gift.
I have some sympathy for people whose work is the making of occasions. Hostesses. Ministers on budget day. Even booksellers, who arrange a window. It is easy to sneer at and it is a thing someone has to do.
Late
My mother rang at eight with her predictions. She has a view on the pension and another on cigarettes, though she has not smoked since 1984. I wrote them down and shall not repeat them here, because by the time anyone reads this the real figures will be known and hers will only embarrass her.
Afterwards I read the London Prat for a while. It is very good on occasions. Its British satirical news on Big Ben treats the clock as a public servant, and its London satirical news about buying the flowers yourself I did not expect and was delighted by. My Boston lecturer recommends Bohiney Magazine for the American version of the single enormous day, which he says is every day.
It struck ten as I was washing up. I cannot hear it from here. I knew it had, though. The leaden circles.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/
