New Year, new possibilities…what better way to kick off 2013 than with a gift to your mind? There are so many wonderful works to delve into; so many ideas to explore as we shake off the shadows of the previous year. The offerings below range from the biggest (and consequently, most satisfying) study of James Joyce’s Ulysses to one-meeting poetry and short story studies.
NOW is the time to suggest or request particular reads; let me know if one of the offerings here appeals (and ideal meeting time if it is not already named) or suggest a work that you would like to read in the Salon. Below are some planned; more to schedule with your requests!
January Salons
* 07.01.13 Walt Whitman Poetry Evening What better way to offset the lethargy of winter and the exhaustion of the holiday schedules then to dip into the poetry of Whitman? His poetry is exuberant, embracing and evocative of the Transcendentalist philosophy that he admired.
* 09.01.13 Bleak House This Salon started in December…we are enjoying our character-based exploration of Dickens’ critical vision: the lawyers, the street sweepers, the wards of Jarndyce and Jarndyce, the mad, the bored, the about to explode… {Salon full}
*17.01.13 The Liar by Tobias Wolff offers a protagonist caught in his own world, using language to separate and shield himself from those he loves- and fears.
* 22.01.13 ULYSSES register now for opening notes…
* 31.01.13 The Sound and The Fury
In William Faulkner’s first truly modernist work, he pushes to break through the confines of time and sequence to get at the essence of human nature- as Malcolm Bradbury explains, “Faulkner’s preoccupation with time has to do with the endless interlocking of personal and public histories and with the relation of the past to the lost, chaotic present.” The Sound and the Fury uses the interior world of its narrators to expose a crumbling world, through inference and allusion rather than through direct social critique.
* 18.02.13 Chekhov Short Story: “The Grasshopper” ‘As readers of imaginative literature, we are always seeking clues, warnings: where in life to search more assiduously; what not to overlook; what’s the orgin of this sort of human calamity, that sort of joy and pleasure…and to such seekers as we are, Chekhov is guide, perhaps the guide…’ –Richard Ford [Salon details to follow]
Other Salons I would like to offer–please let me know if these are of interest and if you prefer a day time or evening schedule; an intensive (one long meeting) or a series (meetings scheduled over a few weeks)..
BEOWULF (Seamus Heaney translation)
BETWEEN THE ACTS by Virginia Woolf
MIDNIGHT’S CHILDREN by Salman Rushdie
ABSALOM, ABSALOM! by William Faulkner
Excerpts from the London Literary Salon News
September 11, 2011
Highlights To the Lighthouse Salon starting Sept. 19
A potent day…a day that deserves reflection and some understanding of how we can be human together. So many days carry within them the history of suffering and struggle- one event should also ripple out to the others…how can we learn? How can we hear each other? How can we break through the boundaries that divide?
This past Friday a dynamic group gathered to consider Frankenstein over five hours…and we went miles: Many thanks to the voices that came together in the light of that amazing book. Some wonderful Salons ahead:
September/October Salons:
• To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf starts week of September 19; runs for five weeks: £65
o Monday afternoons 12:30- 2:30
o Tuesday Evenings 8-10 PM
• Paradisoby Dante starts week of September 12; runs for five weeks: £70
o Thursday afternoons 1-3 PM (celebratory dinner to be scheduled in October)
• Midnights Children Three sessions: Thursday evenings Sept. 22, 29 October 6 7:30-10 PM £60
• Young Writers’ Workshop for Writers 12-16 years old: Wednesdays 4:30-6 PM runs five weeks: £70
• Measure for Measure Intensive Sunday October 9th & October 16th 7-10 PM £50
To the Lighthouse **Starts NEXT WEEK*** space remaining in both afternoon and evening studies
– by Virginia Woolf
In this exquisite work, Woolf seeks to break through the restraints of language to access the interior voice of passions, fears, unspeakable thoughts and human dynamics. By employing stream of consciousness narrative and the early stirrings of the modernist aesthetic, Woolf gives insights into the nature of relationships and the formation of self in relation to others that will be recognizable – and revealing to each reader. Eudora Welty writes in her forward to To the Lighthouse: “Radiant as [TtL] is in its beauty, there could never be a mistake about it: here is a novel to the last degree severe and uncompromising. I think that beyond being about the very nature of reality, it is itself a vision of reality.”
And a poem that evokes the sound of the waves…
Lake Song
Colette Inez
Every day our name is changed,
say stones colliding into waves.
Go read our names on the shore,
say waves colliding into stones.
Birds over water call their names
to each other again and again
to say where they are.
Where have you been, my small bird?
I know our names will change one day
to stones in a field
of anemones and lavender.
Before you read the farthest wave,
before our shadows disappear
in a starry blur, call out your name
to say where we are.
*****************************************************************
There is something there I think about the idea of infinity and the importance for us in our humanity to see our place in time…and it would not be indiscreet for me to mention at this point that waves and movement of water are essential elements to this work.
For those who want to go further, here is an excerpt of a review of Hermoine Lee’s wonderful biography. I encourage you to use the link here to read the whole review as it offers a good & brief summary of Woolf’s life and writings. The book, Virginia Woolf is a great read.
From ‘This Loose, Drifting Material of Life’ by Daphne Merkin
“Ms. Lee documents the evolving perception of her subject from ”the delicate lady authoress of a few experimental novels and sketches, some essays and a ‘writer’s’ diary, to one of the most professional, perfectionist, energetic, courageous and committed writers in the language.” She does this without recourse to the politicized agendas of the academy or special pleading (all of Woolf’s flaws are on display here); this account sets itself above the fray, the better to home in on the glittery and elusive creature at its center — the prize catch in what one critic has described as the Bloomsbury pond.
From its very first page Ms. Lee’s book is informed by current thinking on how to approach the writing of someone’s life: ”There is no such thing as an objective biography, particularly not in this case. Positions have been taken, myths have been made.” But it is also infused with a very personal passion for her subject, which enables the author to cut crisply through the labyrinth of theories that have sprung up…”
Although To the Lighthouse is not autobiographical, many critics & readers have found close parallels between Woolf’s early life and the world presented in the book. It may help you to have a sense of Virginia Woolf and her precarious position as a visionary on the edge of violently changing world, as we go into the read. I will have more biographical notes for you when we start.
I had the wonderful opportunity to hear Michael Cunnigham in conversation with Christopher Potter at the Royal Society of Literature in July. Michael’s enthusiasm for Virginia Woolf and his desire to speak with her across time and death is palpable in The Hours. The essay cited below offers some insights into Woolf and her life and work. The comments are enlightening as well…
Virginia Woolf, my mother and me
Ahead of Review’s book club on The Hours, Michael Cunningham explains how discovering Virginia Woolf as a teenager inspired him to write his novel about her life – and how his mother provided a surprising solution when he got stuck
I read it for the first time in a tent nearly 20 years ago. I was camping in France after my first year at university, To the Lighthouse was on my summer reading list, and I clearly remember feeling startled by the time I had finished the first page.
Looking back at that opening now, I think I was not as impressed by the novel’s extraordinary emotional pitch or defiantly domestic content, as I was by the audacity with which the author put the two together. The first paragraphs describe the “heavenly bliss” of a six-year-old boy cutting pictures of kitchen appliances out of a magazine.
For a teenager whose most involved holiday reading experiences had mainly been with Victorian doorstoppers, with their fabulously elaborate plots and detailed chronologies, the sudden death of the central character, Mrs Ramsay, in parentheses in the novel’s highly stylised middle section, was deeply strange. So this was modernism …
But I hadn’t realised until I reread it how much To the Lighthouse is a book about summer holidays. Perhaps this didn’t really register the first time around, or not consciously anyway. Woolf‘s way of writing about people and their feelings was so overwhelming, and her prose so highly wrought, that the novel’s setting somehow escaped me. Even when I studied it later, and read articles about it, they seemed to suggest that it was a book about time, or art, or the first world war. One critic thought it was about the general strike.
Famously, To the Lighthouse is also a book about Woolf’s parents – about the huge hole that opened in her world when her mother died, and about the way her father imposed himself and his grief upon his daughters. Mrs Ramsay is at the heart of Woolf’s novel. Then she is gone, and the survivors must bear her absence. This is the plot of To the Lighthouse.
This became fascinating to me as I learned more about Woolf’s life, reading her diaries, and biographies that explored the relationship between her mental illness and her history of bereavement.
None of which makes To the Lighthouse sound like a book anyone but an eager undergraduate would want to pack in their suitcase. The Hebridean island setting, the company of old family friends, the rhythms and routines the characters adopt to pass the days, can all seem like so much incidental detail in a grand literary experiment.
But they are not. To the Lighthouse really is a book about holidays – a book about family holidays and the particular intensity of getting away from it all with the people who mean most to you, especially when you are in the middle of growing up. If you, like the two youngest Ramsay children in the novel’s final section (and like me – both the first time I read the novel and again next week) are going on holiday with your parents, take it with you.
You are welcome to sign up now—previous Salon members may do so simply with an email registering your participation (please understand this does represent a commitment) and then may pay at the first meeting. First time participants are asked to pay a deposit to guarantee their registration: email me and I will send along details.
Please let me know if you have any questions; also if one of these studies really appeals but the timing is bad for you, send me an email as there may be others in a similar situation.
We are headed for Joyce’s Ulysses in January 2012: in preparation we will study the Odyssey in October followed by a quick Hamlet (can’t you soliliquize a bit faster?) and a dip into A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. That should keep us out of trouble.
I hope where ever you are over the summer holidays you have opportunities for reflection, reading and adventure. I look forward with great excitement to our work in September!
See you in the pages…
—
Toby Brothers
Parisian Literary Salon Director
“Thus when I come to shape here at this table between my hands the story of my life and set it before you as a complete thing, I have to recall things gone far, gone deep, sunk into this life or that and become part of it; dreams, too, things surrounding me, and the inmates, those old half-articulate ghosts who keep up their hauntings by day and night; who turn over in their sleep, who utter their confused cries, who put out their phantom fingers and clutch at me as I try to escape—shadows of people one might have been; unborn selves.”
—Virginia Woolf, The Waves
Reading Virginia Woolf requires a releasing of the faculty we have so carefully trained to be grounded in time and fact. Her fluid and probing prose allows such a deep and troubling glimpse in to the human heart that one comes away wiser and broader than before. This is not my first floating into The Waves—what I have already tasted makes me want to swim far out into her embracing world of character and reflection.
This review from a GoodReads reader sounds perfect for the Salon!!
My umpteenth reading of The Waves and it still floors me. There’s not a wasted word here: Woolf’s attention to rhythm—she was listening to Beethoven’s String Quartet in B-flat Minor, Opus 130 while writing this novel, and Beethoven’s nuances are found in her prose at all turns—and the ways in which she questions subjectivity, interpersonal relations, the ways in which we are connected and yet disparate from those around us are on display here more so than in any of her other fictional works.
The last section is sadly not as famous as the last section in Joyce’s Ulysses, but it may well be even more gut-wrenchingly brutal in its philosophical underpinnings and the ways in which Woolf engages with poetics to sustain the flow of her inquiries into what it means to be human. On each reading there is something more to be found here, something more to be learned, something to relish and treasure, some keen diamond-edged truth that slices just as much as it illuminates.
Salon Details
Four-meeting study
Recommended edition:
The Waves by Virginia Woolf, with introduction by Kate Flint; Penguin edition (2000); ISBN-13: 978-0141182711 OR
The Waves by Virginia Woolf, with introduction by Jeanette Winterson; Vintage Classics Ed. (Oct. 2016) ; ISBN-13: 978-1784870843
Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse–St Ives Weekend Study
“What is the meaning of life? That was all- a simple question; one that tended to close in on one with years, the great revelation had never come. The great revelation perhaps never did come. Instead, there were little daily miracles, illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark; here was one.”
― Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse
Virginia Woolf spent much of her childhood in St. Ives. The London Literary Salon invites you to join us in St Ives to explore this lovely coastal town and have it serve as a prism through which we will explore Woolf’s perspectives on landscape, domesticity and identity in her novel To The Lighthouse. We have already completed two magical weekends in this book in the environment that inspired it– this is an incredible experience!
You will have the opportunity to visit the iconic Tate St. Ives gallery overlooking the Atlantic Ocean, built between 1988 and 1993 on the site of an old gasworks, and there will be an optional boat trip to Godrevy Lighthouse. We may also look at Talland House, now privately owned, her childhood summer home. For several months of the year the elegant house overlooking St. Ives Bay would be the Stephens’ family home until 1895 when Virginia’s mother Julia Stephen died. Although the complete family never returned to St. Ives following their mother’s death, her children travellled back in 1905 following the death of their father in 1904.
This is something I have dreamed of doing since I first read Woolf’s magical book To the Lighthouse–it has haunted me always. The opportunity to study this work with a keen group of minds in the place that is so crucial to the writing is simply delicious.
“If life has a base that it stands upon, if it is a bowl that one fills and fills and fills – then my bowl without doubt stands upon this memory. It is of lying in bed, half-asleep, haf awake, in bed in the nursery at St Ives. It is of hearing the waves breaking, one, two, one, two, and sending a splash of water over the beach; and then breaking, one, two, one two, behind a yellow blind. . . . If I were a painter I should paint these impressions in pale yellow, silver, and green. There was the pale yellow blind; the green sea; and the silver of the passion flowers.”
“Here is the past and all its inhabitants miraculously sealed as in a magic tank.”
“The past only comes back when the present runs so smoothly that it is like the sliding surace of a deep river. Then one sees through the surface to the depths. The past sometimes presses so close that you can feel nothing else.”
—Virginia Woolf, “Sketch of the Past,” begun in June 1939.
Salonsitas going to the Lighthouse
SALON DETAILS
Friday – Sunday weekend in St. Ives with one Monday preparation meeting in London.
Recommended edition: To the Lighthouse, by Virginia Woolf, with introduction by Hermione Lee; Penguin Classics; (ISBN 0-14-118341-1)
More on the study:
As one of the primary modernist works, To the Lighthouse demonstrates Woolf at play with language; testing the ability of language to truly reflect human experience by recording the life of the mind not just action. One of the characteristics of Modernist writing is a shifting centre of narrative perspective reflecting a questioning of ultimate and moral authority that characterized the time with the dissolution of Imperialism and absolute values.
Writing from the edge of the violent shift from Victorian to Modernist era, Woolf’s ambivalence is demonstrated in work. She struggles against the boundaries and structures of the Victorian era while holding a great longing and nostalgia for the noble traditions of the time. Her model, Mrs. Ramsey, (Queen-like) holds her daughters to the awe of the noble men that surround her and allows them to “sport with infidel ideas…of a life different…in Paris perhaps; …for there was in all their minds a mute questioning of deference and chivalry…though to them all there was something in this of the essence of beauty, which called out the manliness in their girlish hearts…” (TtL, pgs. 10-11)
This quote also demonstrates the Modernist reworking of absolute truth…it is not a question of either this (a male-dominated world) or that (a world of female emancipation): the apparently rigid gender roles borrow from each other—“manliness in their girlish hearts” , “Indeed, she had the whole of the other sex under her protection…”: there is another Imperialism her, an intimate Imperialism of female over male. The truth in this work is not rigid (although Mr. R would like it to be) but can be permeated, blended…seen from another view.
Re-reading Hermione Lee’s biography (review quoted below) this reading has me turning over the search one makes for lost childhood—often for a place that might hold a time—but of course, never does. For Woolf, that search included a grappling with the impact & idealization of the parent figures—especially the lost mother, whose influence and contradictions continue to wrap around the child inside. VW and a few of her siblings returned to the house in St. Ives (that we are lucky enough to visit) years after her mother’s death and the sale of the house. They were like ghosts, sneaking around the gardens, peering in the windows: as though searching for their lost selves and a past that can never be re-captured. That visit—and the need to lay to rest her grief enwrapped memories of her mother—were the catalyst for TtL.
For those who want to go further, here is an excerpt of a review of Hermione Lee’s wonderful biography. The book, Virginia Woolf is a great read.
From ‘This Loose, Drifting Material of Life’ by Daphne Merkin“Ms. Lee documents the evolving perception of her subject from ”the delicate lady authoress of a few experimental novels and sketches, some essays and a ‘writer’s’ diary, to one of the most professional, perfectionist, energetic, courageous and committed writers in the language.” She does this without recourse to the politicized agendas of the academy or special pleading (all of Woolf’s flaws are on display here); this account sets itself above the fray, the better to home in on the glittery and elusive creature at its center — the prize catch in what one critic has described as the Bloomsbury pond.From its very first page Ms. Lee’s book is informed by current thinking on how to approach the writing of someone’s life: “There is no such thing as an objective biography, particularly not in this case. Positions have been taken, myths have been made.” But it is also infused with a very personal passion for her subject, which enables the author to cut crisply through the labyrinth of theories that have sprung up…”
Although To the Lighthouse is not autobiographical, many critics & readers have found close parallels between Woolf’s early life and the world presented in the book. It may help you to have a sense of Virginia Woolf and her precarious position as a visionary on the edge of violently changing world, as we go into the read. I will have more biographical notes for you when we start.
“Losing personality, one lost the fret, the hurry, the stir; and there rose to her lips always some exclamation of triumph over life when things came together in this peace, this rest, this eternity; and pausing there she looked out to meet that stroke of the Lighthouse, the long steady stroke, the last of the three, which was her stroke…”
—Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse
In this exquisite work, Woolf seeks to break through the restraints of language to access the interior voice of passions, fears, unspeakable thoughts and human dynamics. By employing stream of consciousness narrative and the early stirrings of the modernist aesthetic, Woolf gives insights into the nature of relationships and the formation of self in relation to others that will be recognisable – and revealing to each reader.
Eudora Welty writes in her forward to To the Lighthouse: “Radiant as [TtL] is in its beauty, there could never be a mistake about it: here is a novel to the last degree severe and uncompromising. I think that beyond being about the very nature of reality, it is itself a vision of reality.”
SALON DETAILS
Five-meeting study
Recommended edition: To the Lighthouse, by Virginia Woolf, with introduction by Hermione Lee; Penguin Classics; (ISBN 0-14-118341-1)
“Memory is the seamstress, and a capricious one at that. Memory runs her needle in and out, up and down, hither and thither. We know not what comes next, or what follows after. Thus, the most ordinary movement in the world, such as sitting down at a table and pulling the inkstand towards one, may agitate a thousand odd, disconnected fragments, now bright, now dim, hanging and bobbing and dipping and flaunting, like the underlinen of a family of fourteen on a line in a gale of wind.”
― Virginia Woolf, Orlando
I have worked with many of Virginia Woolf’s texts, and each one leaves me breathless with its narrative beauty, unique aesthetic and remarkable understanding of the depths of the human mind. Orlando is new territory for me: an ironic biography – or possibly a love letter to Vita Sackville-West – or perhaps imagined autobiography? Critics disagree on how to categorise this book, making it all the more intriguing.
The proposal of Virginia Woolf as a comic genius is not how we usually consider this writer of such depth and nuance. In Orlando, Woolf seeks to probe the limits of gender before gender was understood to be a societal construct – ahead of her time, as always. The central character survives centuries and does the Tiresias – by changing genders, the character gets the unique ability to compare what it is to be male and what it is to be female. As always, reading this work and the discussions that will be provoked – around gender, same-sex love, societal constraints and the search for joy across historical epochs – will illuminate the chaotic world we live in,where gender continues to be problematised and re-considered.
SALON DETAILS
One meeting study
Recommended edition: Orlando by Virginia Woolf Vintage Classics (October 2016) ISBN-10: 1784870854
