On a Virginia Woolf essay

Meditation on a paragraph from 'A room of one's own'

In an interview, when asked about his opinion on awards, the writer Vikram Seth mentioned a letter he got from one of his readers. In the mail the reader had mentioned that she was reading Seth’s book ‘Three Chinese Poets’ during a subway ride and got so engrossed that she forgot to get off at her station. Seth said that this was the best award a writer could hope for. I am paraphrasing. He must have been way more articulate. As far as I know, writers don’t derive any sadistic pleasure from commuters missing their stations. What Seth must have meant was that the metric of success for a writer is their ability to engross a reader so much that the reader forgets about their surroundings. If this is true, I have given so many awards to so many writers - ‘missed my meal award’, ‘got late to office award’, ‘missed a party award’ and so on. Recently, it was the first time that I awarded a writer with ‘missed my station award’. The author was Virginia Woolf and the book was the audiobook version of ‘A room of one’s own’. Though I can’t tell the exact sentence that was playing when I crossed my station (KR Puram metro station if you’re interested), I do remember the paragraph that I was listening to. It was this short section where Woolf talks about lunch. I thought of spending some time on it to see why it worked for me so well. Or maybe why I think it worked for me. Here’s the paragraph -

It is a curious fact that novelists have a way of making us believe that luncheon parties are invariably memorable for something very witty that was said, or for something very wise that was done. But they seldom spare a word for what was eaten. It is part of the novelist’s convention not to mention soup and salmon and ducklings, as if soup and salmon and ducklings were of no importance whatsoever, as if nobody ever smoked a cigar or drank a glass of wine. Here, however, I shall take the liberty to defy that convention and to tell you that the lunch on this occasion began with soles, sunk in a deep dish, over which the college cook had spread a counterpane of the whitest cream, save that it was branded here and there with brown spots like the spots on the flanks of a doe. After that came the partridges, but if this suggests a couple of bald, brown birds on a plate you are mistaken. The partridges, many and various, came with all their retinue of sauces and salads, the sharp and the sweet, each in its order; their potatoes, thin as coins but not so hard; their sprouts, foliated as rosebuds but more succulent. And no sooner had the roast and its retinue been done with than the silent serving-man, the Beadle himself perhaps in a milder manifestation, set before us, wreathed in napkins, a confection which rose all sugar from the waves. To call it pudding and so relate it to rice and tapioca would be an insult. Meanwhile the wineglasses had flushed yellow and flushed crimson; had been emptied; had been filled. And thus by degrees was lit, half-way down the spine, which is the seat of the soul, not that hard little electric light which we call brilliance, as it pops in and out upon our lips, but the more profound, subtle, and subterranean glow which is the rich yellow flame of rational intercourse. No need to hurry. No need to sparkle. No need to be anybody but oneself. We are all going to heaven and Vandyck is of the company – in other words, how good life seemed, how sweet its rewards, how trivial this grudge or that grievance, how admirable friendship and the society of one’s kind, as, lighting a good cigarette, one sank among the cushions in the window-seat.

Let’s begin at the beginning. It is indeed curious that novelists seldom spare a word for what is eaten, but there is an explanation for it. Novelists often privilege what is rare because what often stands out is what seldom occurs. Witty remarks during a luncheon are rare while the food is always there. Value is supposed to be associated with something that is in short supply. Woolf turns this argument on its head. Not just by calling this tendency curious, but by showing in this paragraph later that the description of something as mundane as what you had for lunch can be, to use the cliched corporate word, valuable, and, to use the cliched artistic word, beautiful. In the next sentence, which is the last one before she lunges into the description of her luncheon, she further consolidates the argument by giving specific examples. This is my favourite sentence from the entire paragraph - 

It is part of the novelist’s convention not to mention soup and salmon and ducklings, as if soup and salmon and ducklings were of no importance whatsoever, as if nobody ever smoked a cigar or drank a glass of wine.

It would have been a good sentence if it ended at ‘whatsoever’. There is a nice rhythm to ‘soup and slamons and ducklings’ and the repetition of this phrase lends that rhythm to the whole sentence. But we would not have known anything new. Woolf had made her point clear in the previous two sentences. What follows ‘whatsoever’ is what makes this sentence remarkable. What follows is the explanation of why mundane things are important. They’re important because ‘someone smoked a cigar’, ‘someone drank wine’, ‘someone ate soup and salmon and duckling’. In other words, if someone has had an experience, no matter how trivial, it is of some importance.

It doesn’t end here. This point could have been made by writing ‘as if nobody ever had soup and salmon and duckling’. By not doing this she expanded the scope of mundane important things from ‘having lunch’ to ‘drinking wine’ and ‘smoking a cigar’. What a person does after lunch is as important as what a person had during lunch. She then goes on to describe the items in the luncheon. To say anything about the sentences that follow, except that it’s a perfect description of an ordinary luncheon, would be redundant. But this entire essay is redundant by that logic so we won’t dwell on it for long and move on to another sentence I found fascinating -

Meanwhile the wineglasses had flushed yellow and flushed crimson; had been emptied; had been filled.

Notice the use of semicolons. Grammatically, commas would have sufficed. I suspect that Woolf used semicolons because she wanted the reader to pause for a bit longer and pay attention to individual phrases, especially the last two that are not strong enough to stand on their own - ‘had been emptied’; ‘had been filled’. Also notice the repetition of the word ‘flushed’. Flushed yellow (/  /  -) and flushed crimson (/  /  -) have a nice symmetry in terms of sound.

Woolf seems to have composed these sentences like poetry without line breaks. Isn’t that what prose aspires for? There are other examples in this very small paragraph where sound effects are evident. Take these sentences - 

No need to hurry. No need to sparkle. No need to be anybody but oneself.

The first two sentences have two strong beats while the last sentence has four. These sentences could have been taken out of a carefully composed poem. Meaning-wise they are an elaboration of the metaphor used in the preceding sentence. It is worth highlighting -

…but the more profound, subtle, and subterranean glow which is the rich yellow flame of rational intercourse.

I’ve read very few writers who can give such a precise image to something as abstract as ‘rational intercourse’.

I have not been able to finish reading this slim book of around a hundred pages. Not because I am reading it with the intention of post-morteming its sentences, I am not that patient a reader, but because every page has a sentence that forces me to stop and makes the option of not moving on an offer impossible to refuse. While reading these sentences one feels exactly the way Woolf must have felt when she ‘sank among the cushions in the window seat’. One usually ‘sinks into a cushion’ but to ‘sink among the cushions’ is something else altogether.

I am not suggesting that this is the best paragraph of this book. Coincidentally, it happened to be the one that made me miss my station. It is unlikely that I will miss my station again while listening to an audiobook. Such things don’t happen frequently. Also, I will be more careful of the damage remarkable sentences can do to my routine. It’s difficult but I can try. I will leave you with the sentence that follows the section I have quoted and hope that it doesn’t interrupt whatever you plan to do today - 

If by good luck there had been an ash-tray handy, if one had not knocked the ash out of the window in default, if things had been a little different from what they were, one would not have seen, presumably, a cat without a tail.

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