This is where it began:
'I think this will be a terrific affair. I must be bold & adventurous. I want to give the whole of the present society-nothing less: facts, as well as vision... The Waves going on simultaneously with Night & Day . . . . It should aim at immense breadth and immense intensity ... And there are to be millions of ideas but no preaching-history, politics, feminism, art, literature-in short a summing up of all I know, feel, laugh at, despise, like admire hate & so on.'
And this is where it ended up:
'Seldom have I been more completely miserable than I was about 6.30 last night, reading over the last part of The Years. Such feeble twaddle - such twilight gossip it seemed; such a show up of my own decrepitude, & at such huge length. I could only plump it down on the table and rush upstairs with burning cheeks to L. He said, This always happens. But I felt, no it has never been as bad as this.'
The first diary entry is from April 1933, and the second from January 1936 and together they trace the genesis of The Years, Woolf's last novel to be published in her lifetime. They provide, I think, the perfect parentheses around the agony and the ecstasy that is the writing life. And whilst obviously what happened here is terrible - and we'll get onto the terribleness in a moment - I have to say that I find it so endearing of Woolf, that literary goddess, to prove her mortality in this way. Anyone who's ever attempted to write anything will have an idea where grandiose ambition lands you. I, myself, have been justifiably accused on many an occasion of trying to do 'too much' with a piece of writing. But I've never tried to shoehorn the whole of present society in, or encompass everything I know and feel and like and hate. It's a tribute to Woolf that she nearly managed it. The first draft was a bloated 900 pages, 200,000 words and needed - Woolf at that point cheerfully admitted - to be 'sweated down'.
The Pargiters, as the first iteration was called, concerned an author giving a lecture about women's lives that involved reading passages from her novels and interspersing them with analysis. The excerpts came from different points in time - from 1880, 1891, 1907 and so on - each one its own cultural microcosm. 'In truth The Pargiters is first cousin to Orlando,' Woolf wrote in her diary, thinking of that extraordinary fictional biography that skipped like a flung stone across the crests of different moments in history. Fortunately, Woolf took one look at the first draft and knew the frame narrative had to go. But what of her cherished and curated 'facts': extracts she had been collecting since 1931 about 'women, men, law, sexuality, sports, religion, the Church, science, education, economics, politics and social mores'? Putting in everything turned out to be too much, and what was to stay from her grand vision? As she struggled over subsequent versions of the novel, the current affairs, the historical events, the fierce and lucid political views, would all be pushed further out to the margins of the story.
She finished the second draft on a roll in December 1935. 'The main feeling about this book is vitality, fruitfulness, energy,' she wrote in her diary. 'Never did I enjoy writing a book more.' But then suddenly, the following January, depression came to claim her in the form of the worst breakdown she had suffered since 1913. Leonard Woolf would later call it 'a terrifying time.' She was plagued by headaches and insomnia, able only to work on a page at a time before having to retreat to bed. There were long periods where she could not write at all, not even in her diary, and almost a full year passed this way, with Woolf picking at her novel in a state of despair. 'This is happily so bad that there can be no question about it. I must carry the proofs like a dead cat, to L & tell him to burn them unread.'
What had happened?
Depression has its own rules and seasons like any chronic illness, but there are various factors in play here. Woolf historically had a problem with the end of work on her novels, and this time she was in menopause - something whose amplifying force and attendant anxiety she had rightly feared. But there is also the task at hand, the 'sweating down' of everything Woolf wanted to say, this extraordinary synthesis of three of her most particular novels - The Waves, Night & Day, and Orlando. This novel was clearly intended to be some kind of pinnacle, some kind of fusion - possibly nuclear - of all her different kinds of literary originality. There was a lot to process, a lot to compress. The pressure on Woolf's innovative mind must have been intense.
Woolf finished her novel and Leonard loved it and so it was published. But once again the Janus faces of The Years manifested themselves. At the time of publication, it was hailed as Woolf's masterpiece by the critics and it was her only bestseller. Yet it has become the novel that is the least read and taught of her works. 'The Years is usually talked about in sober terms,' Alexandra Harris writes. 'Critics emphasize the failure and suffering of the characters, as well as the failure and suffering of their author.' There is a tendency to believe that the fraught conception of The Years was the start of Woolf's journey to stones in her pockets and the fast flowing currents of the River Ouse in 1941. But her diaries suggest otherwise. This had been a triumphant battle against anxiety and depression, one that ended with Woolf's faith in her abilities restored and the prospect of further creativity ahead: 'L shall have his new car: we will be floated again: & my last lap - if I've only 10 years of life more - should be fruitful. Work - work.'
So what are we to make of this perplexing, conflicted novel? The story of The Years was something I only found out after I had read the novel (twice), and it shocked me; nothing in my reading experience had led me to suspect it. And then, like one of those bystanders at a cataclysm who decides to be wise after the event, I began to wonder whether there was a kind of pentimento effect, after all.
***
The Years is a trompe l'oeil of a novel. It looks like a novel, it sounds like a novel, and yet it is nothing like a novel. It follows the fortunes of the Pargiters, a large Victorian family living in Kensington at Abercorn Terrace, a kind of facsimile of Woolf's own family and her own childhood home at Hyde Park Gate. It's an episodic novel, dipping in and out of the lives of the extended family members between 1880 and the present day of 1936, but there is no continuity between any of the moments depicted, no obvious main characters, no plot, no character development. We recognise people who crop up, and occasionally we find out a little of what's been happening to them, but mostly we eavesdrop on lives rather than witness them. The reader might be Rumpelstiltskin, woken from his enchanted sleep from time to time and allowed a glimpse out of his window at the neighbours. What happens during those long periods of unconsciousness is never discovered.
I came to this novel for the second time after a series of writing courses, during which I had various rules of narrative drummed into me. Stories need an inciting event. They must be based on conflict. They must 'raise the stakes' relentlessly. They must have strong plot lines full of motivated causality that reach engaging climaxes. And so on and so forth. Every edict I had been forcibly told was essential is missing from this novel. Every. Single. One. 'What rules?' Virginia Woolf asks innocently, as she crushes them beneath the sensible heel of her neat Oxford brogue. I will admit that I was cheering her on. At every level in the text, this refusal to play the conventional game of narrative is reinforced. We have little idea what any character wants in each scene, and there is resolutely no action. The moments in time we inhabit are transitional, liminal, passageways between main events that mostly occur offstage. Even conversations are truncated, their questions left hanging. And yet I find none of this frustrating. It's all done so deliberately and consistently, I'm left asking the much more interesting question of why these should be Woolf's choices? What are we invited to be reading and what does it mean?
In the long opening scene, the matriarch of the Pargiters is slowly dying, and this is an event so weighty and fraught that no one can look at it directly, like the eclipse of the sun. Her husband has been to visit his mistress, escaping the cloying atmosphere at home, and mostly preoccupied with his dislike of having to ring the bell at a house in such a socially inferior street. At Abercorn Terrace, it's teatime and the daughters are engaged in preparations, fussing over the fact the kettle won't boil. The youngest daughter, Rose, wants to go to the toyshop before bedtime and is figuring out how to sneak away without being noticed. Eleanor, the oldest daughter, is distracted by totting up numbers in the household accounts. Even when she is obliged to sit with her mother, Delia's attempts 'to whip up some feeling of affection, of pity,' come to nothing, and the memory she tries to conjure of her mother 'melted as she tried to look at it,' to be replaced by a more potent fantasy of making a rousing political speech in front of her idol, Parnell. The headline here is a beloved mother's death, but for her family it's the private inner dramas that play out with domineering insistence.
As Delia sits, lost in thought, her mother suddenly rouses. '"Where am I?" she cried. She was frightened and bewildered, as she often was on waking. ... For a moment, Delia was bewildered too. Where was she?' It's in the textures of life that The Years finds its consistency, and this trope of being in two places at once to the extent that they become a palimpsest, impossible to separate out, crops up repeatedly. Eleanor, leaving Rose's room after trying to soothe her nightmare, is so lost in thought about what her sister might have seen to upset her that the house becomes strange and unreal. 'She paused, looking down the hall. A blankness came over her. Where am I? she asked herself, staring at a heavy frame. What is that?' It's the dog's bowl, in fact, and her eventual realisation steadies the ground beneath her feet.
What Woolf shows is that the ground beneath our feet is rarely the only place we are standing. In any given moment, our experience is woven from a network of thoughts, memories, fantasies, and these mental elements ricochet around the mind, pulled back and forth towards intense emotion and potent objects and the powerful memories of the past. Where are we indeed in the midst of this mental starburst of activity? And what could be called the main plot line of life, if the headline events are ones that we rarely experience with any kind of sustained immediacy?
In her unfinished memoir, A Sketch of the Past, written just after the publication of The Years, Woolf identifies some of the earliest memories she can still remember and recalls the potency of their impression. The past is 'an avenue lying behind; a long ribbon of scenes, emotions.' And in these remembered 'exceptional' moments, 'there seems to be no reason why one thing is exceptional and another not. Why have I forgotten so many things that must have been, one would have thought, more memorable than what I do remember?' This is, I think, the key to the structure of The Years. We read it forwards, chronologically, but it's an act of looking back over a long, full life, with randomly exceptional moments standing out in ardent detail against a backdrop of cyclical seasons, the tolling of bells, the coos of the pigeons, the inexorable passage of time to which so much is lost forever.
My favourite scene of the entire novel sees Kitty, a family cousin, leaving behind a party at her grand London house to catch the sleeper train north. She arrives early in the morning at her estate, where she walks in the woods, overwhelmed by the fragile beauty of the spring. She thinks of her son who will inherit the place, and she thinks of her own still vigorous health, enjoying how 'her muscles felt strong and flexible as she pressed her thick-soled shoes to the ground.' Then Kitty reaches a high point of land.
'Her body seemed to shrink, her eyes to widen. She threw herself on the ground, and looked over the billowing land that went rising and falling, away and away [...] A deep murmur sang in her ears - the land itself, singing to itself, a chorus alone. She lay there listening. She was happy, completely. Time had ceased.'
This chapter occurs in 1914 and the First World War will shortly be declared. I wondered about Kitty's sons and whether they would be alive to inherit or not. As I read on, I waited for an answer to come. For any other novelist, this would be a moment of poignant intensity, with some kind of implied causality as great happiness precedes intolerable loss. But if Kitty loses children to the great war, we are never to know it. They are never mentioned again. What matters to Woolf is this moment of being, its splendour, its eternal quality. And I think this is what makes the novel so readable. What matters in life is not, in fact, our political activism, the great ideas we think, the ambitions we hold, the achievements, the triumphs and the disasters. What matters is this thick, complicated texture of life that sometimes coalesces into a moment that stays in the mind forever. History - the catalogue of events kind - exists in the margins of the intensely personal.
And this is especially intriguing when Woolf intended the novel to be her great work of socio-political insight. This book had to offer 'the whole of present society; nothing less', she had to be 'bold and adventurous' and there were to be 'millions of ideas'. The introduction to my copy of the novel describes how the critic 'Grace Radin's detailed comparison of the holograph with The Years concludes that the changes between the two versions marked a failure of courage, a disappointing retreat.' But was that really the case? I prefer Woolf's own account, written in a letter post publication to Stephen Spender where she suggested that her aim had been to tap into the deeper, underlying parts of her characters: 'Because I think action generally unreal. Its the thing we do in the dark that is more real.'
That thing we do in the dark is put under Woolf's microscope, drawn out and detailed in this novel of the intense present moment. The basic overwhelm of living can leave us ineffectual, languid, passive, as Woolf's characters often are, unable to engage with each other, unable to finish a sentence, or answer a question. And why should that matter? The world is indifferent to us, but we are not indifferent to the sheer richness of that world around us, and all the little things that happen to us within it. The novel shows the actions of its characters being constantly checked, never realised, and no wonder that all those fine impulses are interrupted. There's so much going on.
***
I have read The Years twice, now. The first time I was 22 and working in Waterstones. It was a transitional year between my first and only 9-to-5 business job (which I hated), and my return to graduate studies at the university. I have the strongest memory of sitting curled up in a secondhand armchair I'd bought in Mill Road for £25 that was surprisingly comfortable, completely entranced by the novel. The second time I read it, I actually listened to it, in the long dark pre-spring evenings in the cabin in Somerset. On both occasions it had a physical effect on me. I felt my heart rate slow down, my breathing steady and deepen. The mood of the day was washed away by the words of the narrative as if they were an incantation for peace. On both occasions I was conscious of being in a busy, meaningful, hard-to-process point in my life and thirsting for the cool water of the book. It's a book that steadies me and calms me. It's a book that puts me into a parasympathetic state, something I often find hard to reach.
It's a sort of in-joke that English Departments at universities drink the most alcohol at their meetings, and it seemed to be true when I was teaching that both students and staff in the literary subjects have a remarkable number of issues with depression and anxiety. It was only once I had stopped teaching and was thinking about writing books myself that I started to come across these 'rules' of narrative. And the first rule I read was that 'The worst must always happen.' This struck me forcibly. The worst must always happen. I began to see a connection between the people who study books and read hundreds and hundreds of them, and chronic anxiety. I certainly saw it in myself. What we consume in our minds is as influential to mental health as the food we consume in our bodies is to physical health. I was a card-carrying paid up member of the catastrophising club, and really nothing I had experienced in my own life could account for it. Between 2017 and 2019, I read very little indeed and with a rueful kind of recognition, I noticed how much my general anxiety improved.
Giving up reading has never been an option, that's for sure. But I am more cautious about what I read these days, and I have lost my taste for the kind of coruscating/violent/high octane fiction that has a great deal of cachet. In any case, I'm extremely interested in what Woolf calls 'the thing we do in the dark'. I think, too, that action is perhaps unreal, and am more interested in what it is just to be, in all the myriad movements of consciousness and the great net of thoughts and feelings and memories. This is my reading journey and I don't wish to prescribe it for anyone else. But I can't help but wonder how the contemporary rules of narrative have come to be formulated along the lines of constant conflict, tightly bound causalities and infinitely high stakes. In American style rules, the passive voice is not to be used because someone must always be responsible for any action. It isn't true - a great deal happens that no one is personally accountable for - but it's become the kind of literary truth that is obligatory.
And you might say to me, well this is what produces exciting fiction. These combinations of elements are necessary to keep a reader engaged with the story. This is what a story does - it shows us the knife edge, it allows us to experience terrible things in a safe imaginative space. Yes, yes, to all this, it's true. But if art mirrors life, it is equally the case that life mirrors art - we use its structures to make sense of experience. That still makes me wonder, why this story, primarily, about the organisation of stories? We are very quick these days to criticise a book for having the wrong ethics at the level of content, and we are also very ready to condemn the authors of books who behave in ways we think are unacceptable. But in focusing on this are we missing an important point? What about the ethics of form itself? If so many of the stories in books, on television and in film are organised this way, adrenalising us and arousing primal fear, putting us all in fight or flight even when we are supposed to be relaxing, is it any surprise that the world is in a state of endless conflict?
But a final thought, a thought that is sobering in a different way. The Years strikes me as a work of great lightness, a work of joy and beauty, even in its sorrowful passages. There is a serenity in the way it eschews conflict and consequence. But it cost Virginia Woolf so very much to reach this final draft, with all the dark, angry politics of the 1930s tidied away (waiting in fact to be released into Three Guineas). Is it possible that Woolf suffered so much because she had to digest all the darkness, swallow it back into herself in some measure? It's a fanciful idea but one that looks at me with a Janus face - at once ridiculous and deeply serious. The rules of conflict in narrative lie crushed beneath the sensual intensity of The Years, but do those same rules I dislike so much guide writers to their own necessary catharsis?