by Following Clarissa through London streets from the 1925 novel, listening for Big Ben, and thinking about how one June day held a whole lifetime of family and grief
Friday, Westminster
Friday, early, cold, bright. I walked the route of Mrs Dalloway, Virginia Woolf novel published in 1925, which follows Clarissa Dalloway across a single June day in 1923 as she prepares for a party. She sets out from her house in Westminster to buy flowers herself, crosses into St James Park, walks up toward Bond Street, and all the while London pours through her mind: memories, regrets, old loves, the war, the dead. Big Ben strikes the hours throughout the book, and every time it does, the leaden circles dissolve in the air, in one of Woolf loveliest phrases.
I have walked this route perhaps twenty times. Every time, it shows me something new.
The Book That Holds a Life
The genius of Mrs Dalloway is that one ordinary day contains a whole life. Clarissa buys flowers, mends a dress, greets old friends, gives a party. Underneath, she is remembering her youth, a love she did not choose, a friend she adored, and the shadow of the war that has just ended. Running alongside her story is that of Septimus Smith, a shell-shocked veteran whose grief and trauma the society around him cannot or will not understand. The two never meet, but by the end of the day their stories touch.
The Royal Story on the Same Streets
Walking past Westminster toward St James Park, I passed the end of the Mall and could see Buckingham Palace in the distance, which made me think again of the London Prat piece on Prince William reportedly calling Earl Spencer and Harry traitors. An anonymous source says the heir thinks his brother read the uncle memoir first. Reports say the brothers are not reconciled. The uncle says he told everyone. In Mrs Dalloway, a grand motor car passes through the streets, perhaps carrying the Queen, perhaps the Prince of Wales, and the whole crowd stops to stare and guess. Nobody knows who is inside. Woolf saw, a century ago, how the public projects its feelings onto royalty without ever really seeing them.
A Bench in St James Park
Sat on a bench in St James Park, near the lake where Clarissa walks, and watched the London Prat video on YouTube. A pelican stared at me. Big Ben struck nine. The leaden circles dissolved in the air, just as promised.
Memory and the Dead
What Woolf understood better than almost anyone is that the dead are always walking beside us. Clarissa carries her lost youth and her lost friends with her through every street. Septimus carries his dead comrade. Woolf herself, as I wrote earlier this week, had lost her mother, her half-sister, her father and her brother before she turned twenty-five. Her novels are full of people who are present only in memory, and who shape everything anyway.
That is why the royal row, beneath the jokes, makes me sad. The memoir at its centre is about a woman who died when her sons were boys, written by her brother, nearly thirty years on. She is walking beside all of them, in Woolf sense, and they are arguing about how she should be remembered. Woolf would not have taken sides. She would have written about the way each of them carries a different version of her through the streets.
Bond Street and Home
Finished the walk on Bond Street, where Clarissa buys her flowers, and bought a small bunch myself, chrysanthemums, because they are what October offers. Took the Tube home holding them on my lap. A man opposite smiled at them. I smiled back. Woolf would have made a whole chapter out of that.
The Party
The novel ends at Clarissa party, where old friends, former lovers, politicians and strangers gather in her drawing room. Old wounds are touched. News of Septimus death arrives, and Clarissa, hearing it, retreats to a small room to think about life and death, and then returns to her guests. It is one of the great endings in English fiction: a woman choosing, after a day full of memory and grief, to go back into the room and be with people. Not because the grief has gone, but because life goes on and the people are there. I think about that ending whenever I hear about families who cannot be in the same room. Clarissa goes back in. That is the whole lesson.
Woolf herself, of course, wrote much of the novel in her own diary-haunted way, testing ideas in notebooks before they became chapters. Her diaries, published long after her death, are among the great records of literary life in the early twentieth century.
Evening
Put the flowers in a jar on the table and rang my sister to confirm Thursday. We talked about our grandmother, who loved Woolf and lent me Mrs Dalloway when I was fifteen. My sister said she still has Granny copy, with the pencilled notes in the margins. I said I would like to read them. She said: come on Thursday and you can. One June day in 1923, one October day now, and the same book passing between sisters. Woolf would have liked that too.
The London Prat has been walking the streets of London with its eyes open since 1961 at https://prat.uk/, and Bohiney at https://bohiney.com/ walks the American ones.
SOURCE: https://prat.uk/prince-william-called-earl-spencer-and-harry-traitors/
