She drawls the word “conversation” as if it is stretched to the breaking point between quotation marks. Virginia is loving the picture: the poets, old and new, stuck and writhing, and, of course, the sound of the grand Lady Ottoline on her knees, flustered and beseeching her to—only she can possibly—save the “conversation.”
And why not? It is certainly better than being a dung beetle. What’s more, how can she pass up another chance at dear, mystifying Yeats, of all the prophets, who foretold that they would meet again? And so, here they are. Again.
She must go.
She throws on her shawl, careers down the stairs and out the door to fetch a taxi. It is only several blocks to Gower Street from Tavistock Square, but she must do as asked and fly.
Coming into Ottoline’s flat is like coming into a funeral home for atheists who grew up going to church. It is not dour, but it is not dapper either. It bears the morbid legacy of the prior age: the damask, the chintz, the paneling and the long, dark, polished dining table, which looks as if it might have been a bier for Gulliver. And then there is the portrait of Lady Ottoline herself, by Augustus John, hanging above it like a vaguely macabre portrait of the deceased, who is every strand of pearl and Ascot chapeau the great lady, except that she appears to be feasting on a leech or biting off the end of her tongue. It is hard to know with Ottoline whether she has hung the portrait in spite of or because of this unflattering detail, or simply because it is by John, but one does feel inclined to give her credit for brashness in this, as in all things.
There are other paintings throughout the flat, by Walter Sickert and Henry Lamb, which are part of the modern flair and liveliness of hue that mitigates the funereal fust of these rooms. Still, the faint odor of airless parlors and sickrooms out of the last century lingers in the pomander bowls that are spread about the room. Again, one never knows with Ottoline whether this is a provocation or a compulsory nod to tradition.
When Virginia makes her way through the sensory assault and busybody battery of the anterooms and arrives at last in the sanctum, she sees that for once Ottoline has not been exaggerating. Yeats and Spender are indeed as forked and twisted as mandrakes in their chairs, and seemingly afflicted with encephalitis lethargica.
Spender is lean and fine-boned, with a Cupid’s-bow mouth that seems to slip a contradictory come-hither into his otherwise tense and serious face. Those lips, with the lapidary jaw and the winning cleft in his chin, make him almost handsome, but not quite. His thin mousy hair is a roguish swirl that he will lose in middle age, and which, Virginia observes, only gives him a more rending boyish appeal. Like many English princes, his flowering will be short-lived, and his momentary brush with beauty will give way to the unfortunate balding and beaking of his Norman-Saxon genes. At present, though, Lytton would have called him defilable.
Through Julian’s introductions, Stephen (as they have been urged to call him) has become something of a friend and regular at the Woolfs’, so when he sees Virginia, he leaps to his feet as if cured, and kisses her firmly and wetly on both cheeks.
“Good God,” she cries, “but you are eager today, Stephen.”
“Yes,” he drawls, turning immediately to Yeats. “Forgive me. But this venerable gentleman here is the eager one. He has been waiting with misted eyes for your arrival ever since Ottoline importuned you to save him from me.”
Yeats shakes his head as if to demur, but he has clearly been pained by the intimidated lad and is every bit as relieved to see her as Stephen is. Though Yeats would not say so, he does have the grateful look of someone saved—and this much he might say when they are alone, for he has said as much elsewhere, she knows—how sharper than a serpent’s tooth they are, Spender and his lot, this thankless gaggle of lettered offspring. Dreamless, angry, dialectical materialists, he calls them, beating their poems into ploughshares. And she agrees. She has said the same herself. Yeats must be nearly seventy now, and Stephen is just about Julian’s age, give or take, a mere toddler of twenty-six. They are indeed so young, so brash, so chipped against the shoulders they have stood on. Yeats, meanwhile, does resemble the woeful parent Lear. Today he is open-collared and windblown, yet rosy with the vigor of something suspect. Or supernatural, perhaps?
He is not shy in telling her his secret, though the moment he does, Stephen seems to petrify with shame or disgust and fall into his former vegetative state, for succor, if nothing else.
“I’ve had the Steinach operation, my dear,” Yeats announces. “It’s marvelous. I feel sixteen again.”
She does not want to know what the Steinach operation is—something gonadal, she gathers—but she is grateful for the bloom it seems to have given him. Though she has not read it yet, she knows that he has just published another collection, The Winding Stair. He seems as prolific as ever. A prick of envy catches her, but it is soon dispelled by his enthusiasm, which is as brimming with her as it was dry when he was with Stephen. She feels for him, Stephen, being alone with an icon. How can one help but dry up and turn into a tuber? Unless one is an icon oneself? The puckish thought wanders through her brain, but she dismisses it in favor of a better formulation, mystic. She is a fellow mystic, and this time she is prepared.
But she needn’t be. Yeats is doing all the spinning.
“Oh, Mrs. Woolf,” he cries, “do you know I wrote a little poem after we met the last time? It is in this new collection. You are an inspiration to this withered vine. I grow the vaunted grape once more.”
Again, this is not a metaphor she wishes to pursue, but she is cheered by his zeal.
“Ah, youth,” she sighs, a little caustically, casting a slightly suspicious eye on Stephen, who is still catatonic and stiff in his chair, as if he has changed ages with Yeats or had all his natural verve siphoned from him by the old wizard. “It has so many secrets,” she adds, glancing now at Yeats, who is—she must agree—sitting oddly pretty to the youngster’s left and looking almost sinisterly sated by some juice.
Yeats smiles meekly at this, but does not reply, and so she goes on with her thought.
“I had a similar conversation with Tom Eliot several years ago about De Quincey’s purported secret of youth, but as I remember, Tom was quite drunk at the time.”
Yeats is roused. “Ah, yes. Tom Eliot. He, too, has heard the mermaids singing. What did he say De Quincey’s secret was?”
“Drink,” Virginia says. “Well, that and other substances, both ingested, I believe he said, and excreted. He came to De Quincey via Baudelaire, it sounded, and was very keen on Les Paradis Artificiels. Mysticism achieved through derangement of the senses and all that.”
“And you disagree? Or is it disapprove?”
“No. No. Neither,” she says. She is going to be surprisingly honest with the old man, she realizes. “I think that in his drink, Tom has an excuse for mysticism, not a method, and his newfound spirituality, such as it is, while it scans beautifully in print, is cover.”
Yeats’s eyes light up with what Virginia takes at first for a fellow gossiper’s glee at the bitchiness of her remark, but he is no Lytton or Ottoline, and he will not contribute to slander.
“I think you do him a disservice. You know, of course, that in his poem ‘Ash Wednesday,’ Tom and I have shared the metaphor of the winding stair. We have done so unwittingly, I would say, except that there is nothing unwitting in the Spiritus Mundi. We are drinking from the same spring. As are you, dear lady, as are you.”
She cocks her head, saying nothing, then looks down, both because she has been caught talking idly and because Yeats, as always, has seen through it.
“We shine with brightness,” Yeats pronounces, but she does not understand that he is quoting. Seeing this, he adds, “That is from ‘Ash Wednesday.’ Tom’s conversion poem, I believe it is called?”
She nods meekly. “So it is.”
“And then there is you,” Yeats says. “I feel myself shining in the dark.”
He is quoting again, this time from the mouth of Jinny,
her own half self in The Waves. But she cannot acknowledge it. How can she now, when this repository of a man has plucked seven words from the middle of her book, as if once again they are written on the palm of his hand, and matched them to five nearly identical words in Tom’s latest poem?
“It is the same thought,” Yeats continues. “Coming from the same vast permeating source. In The Waves you have captured this in fictional form. You have given linguistic expression to this oneness, this continuation of universal consciousness and the pulsations of energy that are coursing through it. You have shown that the individual and the collective mind are one and the same. These are indeed the very waves, as you have so aptly called them, for whose existence today’s most innovative physicists are producing the scientific evidence, and which the newest developments in psychic research are beginning to corroborate.”
Bless and damn him. She is on the verge of tears of sheer joy and relief that someone outside her immediate family has understood The Waves, and said so. The words, the labor, the pain have not been wasted. God, but he is astounding.
“And did you speak with Tom of Baudelaire’s ‘Correspondances’?” he asks.
“No. Not specifically.”
“You know the poem, of course.”
“Yes, but not by heart. My French is poor.”
“By mind.” He smiles, and she nods gamely.
He begins once more to recite: “La nature est un temple où de vivants piliers / Laissent parfois sortir de confuses paroles.” And then to translate: “Nature is a temple where living pillars / Sometimes let fall confused words.”
She furrows her brow.
“Living pillars,” he says. “The stones are alive! All around us, they are alive. And speaking, what’s more. Speaking!”
She immediately recalls the time, so many years ago, when she and Leonard were courting. She had told him virtually the same thing. You are my rock, she’d said, meaning it in just this way, as a compliment, but he, of course, had taken it as a slight. Then, as she had proceeded to explain that no, no, rocks were as sentient as everything else, he’d looked at her for the first time with that mixture of awe and worry that would cross his face so often over the course of their marriage.
This, for some reason, makes her remember Stephen, and she looks across at him to see how his brain is taking this assault. He is now sitting forward in his chair with his head in his hands, but from between his splayed fingers she can see his goggle eyes swiveling frantically back and forth between Yeats and her, as though he is watching a game of tennis being played between the undead with a ball of fire.
Then, out of nowhere, as if she, too, is energetically in tune, Ottoline appears at Virginia’s shoulder in a flash of trailing purple silks and floral headscarves. She leans in, levers rigid Stephen out of his chair without a word and shuffles him to a chaise across the room, where what appears to be a troop of truant brokers and their daytime tarts are gathered round, sipping champers and talking political rot. Just the thing.
Virginia turns laughing back to Yeats, who is chortling avuncularly at the sight of the overcorrupted ears of a tyro being scuttled on their wobbling pins to safety among the starched shirtfronts.
“I take it you hear voices, Mrs. Woolf?” he resumes, now that they are alone.
The question is as artless as she feels, yet rather lawyerly, too, she thinks, in the way it is phrased. He knows the answer, or he would not have asked. And for her part, she is as liberated as he has been by Ottoline’s rare showing of good sense. Perhaps the two of them are emanating, after all, levitating there on their side of the room, speaking of things that are, like demonic charms, dangerous to say aloud.
“Sometimes,” she says. “Yes.”
“And do you know how?”
This is startling. How? The whats of her illnesses have been far too preoccupying for her to have ever considered the hows. And she gave up hope long ago that any of her doctors would ever know anything of cause, so why should she?
“No,” she says at last, politely but a little disapprovingly, as if she is a teetotaler refusing a stiff drink.
But Yeats is determined.
“It is not mysterious,” he asserts. “Have you listened to a wireless?”
She shrugs. “Of course.”
“And do you know what makes a wireless work?”
Again she makes the flat response. “No.”
And again he urges past it without pause.
“To keep it simple,” he says, “the metals and the carbon in the vacuum tubes inside your wireless are receiving, converting and then amplifying waves that are running through the air. Radio waves, to be exact.”
She shrugs again and says nothing.
“This is clairaudience at work. Do you see?” he insists. “The mechanism of it man-made, already in many houses in the land, as accepted and commonplace as pudding.”
“Man-made?” she repeats, a bit dazed, and not quite caring to contest.
“Yes. The wireless is”—he puts up his hands to bracket the words—“an ‘invention.’ But in fact it is only mimicry, a reinvention of what already exists all around us in the earth and in ourselves. All the elements and conductive metals in a radio are not only in the hills, the mines and mineral deposits in rocks, in air, in soil and in seawater, they are also in your body. Did you know that zinc, copper and iron are in your blood? And you yourself are made primarily of salt water and carbon? Water is a marvelous conductor, which, as the latest techniques in neurological research are showing, acts as a kind of bioelectrical charge on our skin when we sweat. They are calling it the galvanic skin response and have used it to measure states of psychoemotional arousal in the human brain. Notice the word ‘galvanic.’ In common usage, as you know, it means to cover something with a metal coating, specifically zinc, and also to electrify or spur something into a heightened state of activity. And that, my dear, is the metal in our sweat acting on us like a conductor, and turning a human being into a wireless.”
Now she is nodding politely and thinking that he is as mad as she sometimes is. Yet he is talking of things she knows, or has sensed at least and felt. She cannot deny it. And he does talk so like an Irishman. The blarney is rolling over her like a cascade of hands. She cannot help but lose herself in the feel of his voice.
“We will not live to see it,” he continues, “but one day people will be communicating across seas and continents, their messages traveling through nothing but air, and they will be doing so through yet another of these so-called marvelous inventions, which will in fact turn out to be nothing more than what we ourselves are—modifications of the same earth, air and water that are all around us and babbling all the time.”
Now he can see that she is addled, and slightly afraid, somewhere back behind her glazing eyes.
“I did not mean to frighten you, Mrs. Woolf.”
She surprises him and herself by coming suddenly and rather fiercely out of her daze to assert her side of this description. She does not wish to have the tortures of her mind swept so nonchalantly into the speculations of this wild-eyed Fenian shaman. In any case not without a fight.
“Why is it, then, Mr. Yeats,” she says testily, “if all of this activity you speak of is so real, if it is going on always and everywhere, why do I, and, alas, some of the unfortunates who are caged and so cannot be among us, seem to be the only ones who hear or see or feel it? Tell me that.”
“Wonderful,” he says in a strange tone of voice. “And brava, my dear. You have hit the pith of it in one.”
She frowns, regretting that she spoke at all.
“Think of Melville’s whales,” he says.
She looks at him quizzically, and still annoyed. But then, she thinks, at least they are back in the neighborhood. And besides, what can she do? He is off again like a crier before she can protest.
“Melville spends a great deal of time, you may remember, on his cetology, the science and classification of whales. He tells us of their singing. T
he humpback, one of the baleen whales, which is also called the Mysticeti whale, is perhaps the greatest composer among the whales, propagating his song through the waters in waves of sound. Many of these vocalizations are too low for us to hear, just as our very own Sir Francis Galton’s dog whistle is too high for us to hear. But humpback whales can hear these sounds, and they have been making these sounds to each other for thousands of years, unheard by us, because they are specially equipped to function in a wider range of frequencies.”
He fixes his eyes on her like pins.
“I ask you, then, if we are able to hear what is indubitably only a fraction of the whale’s deep-throated symphony, and we cannot hear Galton’s dog’s whistle at all, does this mean that these sounds do not exist?”
She shakes her head.
“Of course not,” he cries, his voice rising sharply. “That was what I meant to show you with the example of the wireless. There are many, many more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in our philosophies. That is given. But some of our wildest dreaming is coming true and being made real through discoveries in science. What’s more, these dis-coveries are just that, uncoverings of what has always been there, in the songs of the whales of the seas, and the babbling gossip of the air that is being heard and answered by the mountains.”
She does not like the manner of this much better than she did before, but she does love that they are back to poetry, and that he has quoted Viola, the androgyne, whose speech of love is among her favorites in all of Shakespeare. If I did love you in my master’s flame / With such a suffering, such a deadly life . . . Halloo your name to the reverberate hills / And make the babbling gossip of the air / cry out . . .
She is smiling without knowing it.
“So, at last, Mrs. Woolf,” he is saying, “I submit to you the notion that you and I, and Tom and others, who are able to hear and see and smell things that others cannot, are not perhaps mad, after all, but only distinctively equipped to receive the complete experience. And that, again, is Baudelaire: Les parfums, les couleurs et les sons se répondent. Perfumes, sounds and colors correspond.”
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