The island of the ill

On being ill Virginia Woolf With an introduction by Hermione Lee Ashfield (MA): Paris Press; 2002 64 pp US$20 (cloth) ISBN 1-930464-06-1 Reviewed from uncorrected proofs.

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On Aug. 19, 1925, Virginia Woolf, aged 43, collapsed at a party hosted by her sister, Vanessa Bell. Thus began a recurrence of mental and physical debility, the root of which — bipolar disorder? — is still the subject of scholarly dispute. She spent much of the next four months in bed, unwell, exhausted, a victim of her “queer, difficult nervous system,” living “that odd amphibious life of headache.”1 Although Woolf's literary output during that period was not what she would have wished — “Cant write (with a whole novel in my head too — its damnable),”2 it was nothing to scorn. She wrote many letters (flirting exquisitely with Vita Sackville-West) and some reviews, began writing To the Lighthouse, read a great deal (ranging from Shakespeare to “trash”) and accepted an invitation from T.S. Eliot to compose an essay for his quarterly, the New Criterion.

That essay, “On Being Ill,” has been published several times since Eliot's first “unenthusiastic” use of it in January 1926, including a pamphlet edition of 250 copies that Woolf set by hand in 1930 at the Hogarth Press. This new and beautiful reprinting by Paris Press, a small nonprofit house in Massachusetts, replicates design elements of the Hogarth edition, including Vanessa Bell's cover art. It also contains a superb introduction by literary scholar and biographer Hermione Lee, who considers “On Being Ill” one of Woolf's “most daring, strange, and original essays” (p. xi).

If Woolf skates from subject to subject surprisingly, she does not do so randomly, as Lee sensitively shows. Lee's indispensible essay led me to reread Woolf's with the third volumes of the diary and letters open at either elbow, compounding the pleasure of dipping into this singular mind. In these texts Woolf is vain, snobby, coquettish and dazzling, but never self-pitying. She exerts a formidable intellectual resistance against ill health (Lee describes her as “gallant”), using her faltering convalescence as material for her ongoing literary project, the replication of states of mind.

Woolf pronounces it “strange indeed that illness has not taken its place with love and battle and jealousy among the prime themes of literature. Novels, one would have thought, would have been devoted to influenza; epic poems to typhoid; odes to pneumonia; lyrics to toothache” (p. 3–4). We might not believe her, but still take the point. Probably Woolf would press such a claim now, despite the current vogue for “pathographies,” those minor-heroic confessions unendingly announced in Publisher's Weekly. Woolf wasn't much interested in plot, heroic or otherwise. The conscious mind was “the proper stuff of fiction,” and her great experiment was to overthrow the staler conventions of narrative and to create character in the form of private, inner discourses rather than as “materialist” — her word — social constructs. Her essay “Modern Fiction” offers a manifesto:

Examine for a moment an ordinary mind on an ordinary day. The mind receives a myriad impressions — trivial, fantastic, evanescent, or engraved with the sharpness of steel. From all sides they come, an incessant shower of innumerable atoms … . … Let us record the atoms as they fall upon the mind in the order in which they fall, let us trace the pattern, however disconnected and incoherent in appearance.3

In illness, the atoms fall oddly. The writer in a “recumbent” mode realizes how the body mediates mental experience: “All day, all night, the body intervenes; blunts or sharpens, colours or discolours” (p. 4). In illness our discourse with the body becomes more explicit, leading to thoughts of clouds or roses or love or death or, perhaps, suicide. In any case it leads to an acute understanding that each of us is inescapably alone. But solitude was a state that Woolf embraced bravely and ironically: “Always to have sympathy, always to be accompanied, always to be understood would be intolerable” (p. 12).

As Woolf knew, one of the joys of discovering a good book is to be lured to another; thus readers of “On Being Ill” might be allowed a digression to Gabrielle Roy's story, “My Whooping Cough.”4 Roy's child-narrator swings in a hammock, listens to glass chimes and, like Woolf, gazes at clouds, contemplating love and death and the consolations of her loneliness: “[W]hy is it that the time of futile questions, of minute problems probed to no effect, is the time that recurs and recurs to the soul as the time it has used the best?” Like Woolf's, Roy's reverie might give solace to those stranded on the island of illness, as well as a salutary hint to others to keep the surrounding waters calm as they row past.

Anne Marie Todkill CMAJ