It is enough!
Katharine Smyth, All The Lives We Ever Lived: Seeking Solace in Virginia Woolf
Atlantic, 320pp, £17.99, ISBN 9781786492852
reviewed by Ben Leubner
Katharine Smyth’s memoir, All The Lives We Ever Lived: Seeking Solace in Virginia Woolf, might have been more precisely subtitled, Seeking Solace in Virginia Woolf’s To The Lighthouse, as it is by way of that novel in particular that Smyth attempts to understand certain events in her own life, especially her father’s long struggles with alcoholism and cancer, a combination that cost him his life at a young age. Smyth draws expertly from both Woolf’s life and her entire body of work throughout the memoir, but To The Lighthouse is its focus.
There are three main layers to the memoir, layers that constantly bleed into one another. There are the events and characters of Woolf’s novel, which Smyth reads acutely; there are the events and people of Woolf’s life and the ways in which they gave rise to the novel, where Smyth’s scholarship is excellent; and there are the events and people of Smyth’s own life and the ways in which she was better able to understand them as a result of having immersed herself from a young age in Woolf’s life and work. The deftness with which Smyth manages to keep these layers separate from one another while at the same time showing that this is something that cannot — and should not — be done is one of her book’s most impressive feats. It makes for both a critical and reflective delight.
I bought and read Smyth’s book earlier this year, not long after its publication. Strangely, I had written a brief reflective essay the previous summer in which I tried to better understand my relationship to the members of my own family through a consideration of To The Lighthouse and the circumstances in Woolf’s life that produced it. It’s the kind of novel, in Smyth’s words, that ‘tells the story of everything’ and so becomes as much a mirror as it is a text, inviting the reader to see in it variations on their own experiences. My own attempt was cursory and abruptly ended. Smyth’s, meanwhile, is long and elegant and thorough and in several places stunning. She decided, in the mid-2010s, to write a memoir at the heart of which would be a young woman’s relationship to her father, a consideration of illness in the forms of cancer and addiction, and an attempt to redeem, or at least understand, life through art. These are all quite well trod paths in recent years in the genre of memoir, so to have embarked on them in such a way that the result is refreshing and singular is no small feat. I’m both envious and appreciative.
In the first of the three parts that comprise To The Lighthouse (Smyth’s memoir makes use of a similar tripartite structure), the novel’s central character, Mrs Ramsay, sits looking at the sea and weighs the joys and sorrows of her life. In the end, the fact that ‘she had known happiness, exquisite happiness, intense happiness’ leads her to conclude: ‘It is enough! It is enough!’ Oblivion may follow; nevertheless, existence has sufficed. But the repetition of the exclamation, in addition to its fierce insistence, betrays the doubt locked inside of it. She is trying to convince herself. It is, says Smyth, ‘the most Woolfian of epiphanies: ambiguous, equivocal’, the exclamation points themselves indicative of desperation.
Weighing the joys and sorrows of her father’s life, and the joys and sorrows of her life with him, Smyth, like Mrs Ramsay, similarly insists, and no less desperately, that life, despite its travails and brevity, is enough. But Smyth’s father’s own words counter Mrs Ramsay’s desperate assurance to herself. When Smyth confronts him about his renewed drinking despite his illness, and the fact that it will hasten his end, she implores him to explain why he does it. He responds: ‘Because I don’t care that much.’ It isn’t enough, then. Smyth, a young woman at university at the time, is understandably dismayed, and resolves not to give in to this way of thinking. All The Lives We Ever Lived reads at least in part as a steadfast refusal to countenance a pessimistic approach to life, insisting that even when the case seems desperate, one might find sufficiency in a moment. Mrs Ramsay’s ‘recognition that our moments of joy are sufficient to sustain us in the face of death . . . feels enlightening,’ writes Smyth. Of her father’s attempts to occasionally work on his sailboat while seriously ill, she says, ‘I believe [he] found a kind of happiness during those hours spent on board, and perhaps even that it, too, was enough.’
As the word ‘perhaps’ indicates, however, this is not, in the end, a simple case of blind optimism, Smyth desperately trying to stand up to a pessimism that is much better suited for combat. Instead (and this is the case in both Woolf’s novel and Smyth’s memoir), we are led to understand that a significant part of ‘it’ being ‘enough’ is precisely the fact that it almost certainly isn’t. It is the very preciousness of the moment, of existence, that makes it simultaneously both enough and, almost by definition, not enough. As her father languishes in the Intensive Care Unit one summer, Smyth busies herself at their Rhode Island home rescuing starfish:
The metaphor is clear: Smyth is trying to save a life become brittle that would otherwise be doomed, and may be, anyway. She remembers a story from her childhood: a woman ‘walks along a vast beach throwing stranded starfish out into the waves. “Why bother?” a stranger asks her. “You’ll never be able to save them all.” The woman pauses, picks up a single starfish, and casts it into the ocean. “Yes, she says, “but I just saved that one.”’ As I was reading this passage in Smyth’s memoir, I began preparing to roll my eyes. Here came the sappy optimism, the cliché wisdom that so often results when memoir succumbs to the temptation to dip into self-help. Before I could roll them, though, Smyth was rolling hers: ‘I had always hated that story,’ she says, ‘had always felt irritated by its cloying sentimentality.’ Any conception of life as either sufficient or redeemable must eschew such simplistic moralising and instead acknowledge the grim fact of the matter, that very often life seems neither. Months spent in chemotherapy trounce a few hours spent scrubbing down a sailboat in the setting sun. Our insistence that those hours of respite are enough in the face of those months or even years of tribulation seems more an act of defiance than a statement of a fact. At best, it is a performative claim, attempting to bring about what it claims to already be the case.
One finds such insistences, varying in the extent of their ambiguity and equivocation, throughout Woolf’s work. Mrs Dalloway, herself thinking of life’s accumulations, reflects somewhat placidly at the start of the day, ‘that one should wake up in the morning; see the sky; walk in the park . . . it was enough.’ And in The Waves Bernard, summing up his life, says, ‘The moment was all; the moment was enough’; he is building up to his final defiant crescendo in the face of death. Mrs Ramsay is not alone. But for Smyth there is ‘one book for every life . . . one book that will forever inform how we navigate the little strip of time we are given,’ a single book for each person to live by, and hers is To The Lighthouse. It is Mrs Ramsay’s exclamation that captivates Smyth. She even admits that when she was younger she ‘considered tattooing the phrase “It is enough!” across my forearm,’ and then adds, parenthetically, ‘I still might.’
It would make a good tattoo. Tattoos are seen as permanent (this, depending on your perspective, either their appeal or their foolishness), but the body itself will ultimately decompose, the tattoo along with it. Smyth’s tattoo would be a good one precisely because of the way in which its form, to use the old critical terms, would interact with the content of the quotation itself. Woolf could not stop asking the question, Can that which will not last be enough? Or, Can the insufficient suffice? Or, Can the joy that can be squeezed from this set of circumstances outweigh the sorrow that follows? Can our time in the window of our existence at least counterbalance the fact that, in the end, and inevitably, time passes? She repeatedly answered these questions in the affirmative, almost always betraying her doubts in the process. To inscribe in ink Mrs Ramsay’s insistent affirmation, ‘It is enough!’ upon a surface ultimately more perishable than paper would be to make a gesture equal to Mrs Ramsay’s own: a defiance of defeat that admits it in the same motion.
All The Lives We Ever Lived seeks solace in the work of Virginia Woolf precisely because Woolf provides no easy answers, no cheap optimism. But what solace she does offer, however meager it may be, can be counted on. Smyth’s subtitle is perfectly precise: seeking solace in Virginia Woolf, as opposed to finding it. In the 'Time Passes' section of To The Lighthouse, Woolf muses, ‘Almost it would appear that it is useless in such confusion to ask the night those questions as to what, and why, and wherefore, which tempt the sleeper from his bed to seek an answer.’ We are brought to the brink of despair, but are held safe from losing ourselves in it by that first word that anchors the sentiment and that Smyth repeats and so emphasises: almost.
I already have a quotation from Woolf tattooed along my own forearm. It’s from Mrs Dalloway. As Clarissa Dalloway, Peter Walsh, and others make their way through London throughout the course of a summer’s day, Big Ben regularly strikes the hours, where Woolf describes, in several instances, the resonant aftermath of the tolls thus: ‘the leaden circles dissolved in the air.’ It means: time passed. It is two iambs followed by two anapests. It is a perfect combination of the solid and the evanescent. It is simultaneously literal and figurative. In The Waves it is transformed into Bernard’s recollection, ‘The voice petered out in the dome, wailing,’ which clothes a similar skeleton with different flesh.
It is enough! The leaden circles dissolved in the air. The leaden circles dissolved in the air. It is enough! The first ordering is a corrective reminder, the second an insistence that the very curtailments of time are to be praised.
There are three main layers to the memoir, layers that constantly bleed into one another. There are the events and characters of Woolf’s novel, which Smyth reads acutely; there are the events and people of Woolf’s life and the ways in which they gave rise to the novel, where Smyth’s scholarship is excellent; and there are the events and people of Smyth’s own life and the ways in which she was better able to understand them as a result of having immersed herself from a young age in Woolf’s life and work. The deftness with which Smyth manages to keep these layers separate from one another while at the same time showing that this is something that cannot — and should not — be done is one of her book’s most impressive feats. It makes for both a critical and reflective delight.
I bought and read Smyth’s book earlier this year, not long after its publication. Strangely, I had written a brief reflective essay the previous summer in which I tried to better understand my relationship to the members of my own family through a consideration of To The Lighthouse and the circumstances in Woolf’s life that produced it. It’s the kind of novel, in Smyth’s words, that ‘tells the story of everything’ and so becomes as much a mirror as it is a text, inviting the reader to see in it variations on their own experiences. My own attempt was cursory and abruptly ended. Smyth’s, meanwhile, is long and elegant and thorough and in several places stunning. She decided, in the mid-2010s, to write a memoir at the heart of which would be a young woman’s relationship to her father, a consideration of illness in the forms of cancer and addiction, and an attempt to redeem, or at least understand, life through art. These are all quite well trod paths in recent years in the genre of memoir, so to have embarked on them in such a way that the result is refreshing and singular is no small feat. I’m both envious and appreciative.
In the first of the three parts that comprise To The Lighthouse (Smyth’s memoir makes use of a similar tripartite structure), the novel’s central character, Mrs Ramsay, sits looking at the sea and weighs the joys and sorrows of her life. In the end, the fact that ‘she had known happiness, exquisite happiness, intense happiness’ leads her to conclude: ‘It is enough! It is enough!’ Oblivion may follow; nevertheless, existence has sufficed. But the repetition of the exclamation, in addition to its fierce insistence, betrays the doubt locked inside of it. She is trying to convince herself. It is, says Smyth, ‘the most Woolfian of epiphanies: ambiguous, equivocal’, the exclamation points themselves indicative of desperation.
Weighing the joys and sorrows of her father’s life, and the joys and sorrows of her life with him, Smyth, like Mrs Ramsay, similarly insists, and no less desperately, that life, despite its travails and brevity, is enough. But Smyth’s father’s own words counter Mrs Ramsay’s desperate assurance to herself. When Smyth confronts him about his renewed drinking despite his illness, and the fact that it will hasten his end, she implores him to explain why he does it. He responds: ‘Because I don’t care that much.’ It isn’t enough, then. Smyth, a young woman at university at the time, is understandably dismayed, and resolves not to give in to this way of thinking. All The Lives We Ever Lived reads at least in part as a steadfast refusal to countenance a pessimistic approach to life, insisting that even when the case seems desperate, one might find sufficiency in a moment. Mrs Ramsay’s ‘recognition that our moments of joy are sufficient to sustain us in the face of death . . . feels enlightening,’ writes Smyth. Of her father’s attempts to occasionally work on his sailboat while seriously ill, she says, ‘I believe [he] found a kind of happiness during those hours spent on board, and perhaps even that it, too, was enough.’
As the word ‘perhaps’ indicates, however, this is not, in the end, a simple case of blind optimism, Smyth desperately trying to stand up to a pessimism that is much better suited for combat. Instead (and this is the case in both Woolf’s novel and Smyth’s memoir), we are led to understand that a significant part of ‘it’ being ‘enough’ is precisely the fact that it almost certainly isn’t. It is the very preciousness of the moment, of existence, that makes it simultaneously both enough and, almost by definition, not enough. As her father languishes in the Intensive Care Unit one summer, Smyth busies herself at their Rhode Island home rescuing starfish:
‘If a starfish is left in the sun too long, it will ossify to a crispy brown and die, [so] I got in the habit of climbing down the seawall ladder at low tide and tossing into the water those creatures left behind.’
The metaphor is clear: Smyth is trying to save a life become brittle that would otherwise be doomed, and may be, anyway. She remembers a story from her childhood: a woman ‘walks along a vast beach throwing stranded starfish out into the waves. “Why bother?” a stranger asks her. “You’ll never be able to save them all.” The woman pauses, picks up a single starfish, and casts it into the ocean. “Yes, she says, “but I just saved that one.”’ As I was reading this passage in Smyth’s memoir, I began preparing to roll my eyes. Here came the sappy optimism, the cliché wisdom that so often results when memoir succumbs to the temptation to dip into self-help. Before I could roll them, though, Smyth was rolling hers: ‘I had always hated that story,’ she says, ‘had always felt irritated by its cloying sentimentality.’ Any conception of life as either sufficient or redeemable must eschew such simplistic moralising and instead acknowledge the grim fact of the matter, that very often life seems neither. Months spent in chemotherapy trounce a few hours spent scrubbing down a sailboat in the setting sun. Our insistence that those hours of respite are enough in the face of those months or even years of tribulation seems more an act of defiance than a statement of a fact. At best, it is a performative claim, attempting to bring about what it claims to already be the case.
One finds such insistences, varying in the extent of their ambiguity and equivocation, throughout Woolf’s work. Mrs Dalloway, herself thinking of life’s accumulations, reflects somewhat placidly at the start of the day, ‘that one should wake up in the morning; see the sky; walk in the park . . . it was enough.’ And in The Waves Bernard, summing up his life, says, ‘The moment was all; the moment was enough’; he is building up to his final defiant crescendo in the face of death. Mrs Ramsay is not alone. But for Smyth there is ‘one book for every life . . . one book that will forever inform how we navigate the little strip of time we are given,’ a single book for each person to live by, and hers is To The Lighthouse. It is Mrs Ramsay’s exclamation that captivates Smyth. She even admits that when she was younger she ‘considered tattooing the phrase “It is enough!” across my forearm,’ and then adds, parenthetically, ‘I still might.’
It would make a good tattoo. Tattoos are seen as permanent (this, depending on your perspective, either their appeal or their foolishness), but the body itself will ultimately decompose, the tattoo along with it. Smyth’s tattoo would be a good one precisely because of the way in which its form, to use the old critical terms, would interact with the content of the quotation itself. Woolf could not stop asking the question, Can that which will not last be enough? Or, Can the insufficient suffice? Or, Can the joy that can be squeezed from this set of circumstances outweigh the sorrow that follows? Can our time in the window of our existence at least counterbalance the fact that, in the end, and inevitably, time passes? She repeatedly answered these questions in the affirmative, almost always betraying her doubts in the process. To inscribe in ink Mrs Ramsay’s insistent affirmation, ‘It is enough!’ upon a surface ultimately more perishable than paper would be to make a gesture equal to Mrs Ramsay’s own: a defiance of defeat that admits it in the same motion.
All The Lives We Ever Lived seeks solace in the work of Virginia Woolf precisely because Woolf provides no easy answers, no cheap optimism. But what solace she does offer, however meager it may be, can be counted on. Smyth’s subtitle is perfectly precise: seeking solace in Virginia Woolf, as opposed to finding it. In the 'Time Passes' section of To The Lighthouse, Woolf muses, ‘Almost it would appear that it is useless in such confusion to ask the night those questions as to what, and why, and wherefore, which tempt the sleeper from his bed to seek an answer.’ We are brought to the brink of despair, but are held safe from losing ourselves in it by that first word that anchors the sentiment and that Smyth repeats and so emphasises: almost.
I already have a quotation from Woolf tattooed along my own forearm. It’s from Mrs Dalloway. As Clarissa Dalloway, Peter Walsh, and others make their way through London throughout the course of a summer’s day, Big Ben regularly strikes the hours, where Woolf describes, in several instances, the resonant aftermath of the tolls thus: ‘the leaden circles dissolved in the air.’ It means: time passed. It is two iambs followed by two anapests. It is a perfect combination of the solid and the evanescent. It is simultaneously literal and figurative. In The Waves it is transformed into Bernard’s recollection, ‘The voice petered out in the dome, wailing,’ which clothes a similar skeleton with different flesh.
It is enough! The leaden circles dissolved in the air. The leaden circles dissolved in the air. It is enough! The first ordering is a corrective reminder, the second an insistence that the very curtailments of time are to be praised.