Katharine Smyth- All the Lives We Ever Lived: Seeking Solace in Virginia Woolf

“Perhaps there is one book for every life,” Katharine Smyth writes in her biblio-memoir All the Lives We Ever Lived. For Smyth, that book is Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse and it is the lens with which she views her father’s life and death. Smyth writes that Woolf is “a writer whose characters drift about like plankton in a soup of consciousness” (82) Following Woolf’s lead, Smyth moves languidly between fiction and memoir.

Each chapter begins with an epitaph from To the Lighthouse setting the mood and context in which the story enfolds. This biblio-memoir begins as does To the Lighthouse at a beach house. The epitaph from Woolf reads,

The house as all lit up, and the lights after the darkness made his eyes feel full, and he said to himself, childishly, as he walked up the drive, Lights, lights, lights and repeated in a dazed way, Lights, lights, lights, as they came in to the house. (13)

Like the characters of To the Lighthouse, based on Woolf’s own experience of losing her mother, Smyth’s happiness “is always measured for her against the memory of being a child in [the beach] house” (18)

Beach house themes of water and light permeate the book easily and organically. Water reflects light, throwing “itself against the ceiling, transforming the rooms into a string of tide pools.” (17) Water is where we find Smyth’s father most content, “calm” and “smoking a cigarette” as he looks out over the water. (26) Light has a “peculiar quality” and “floods the house with lemon heat.” (17) The beach house is “drenched in light” arising curiosity just as Woolf wrote “we linger in front of a house where the lights are lit and the blinds not yet drawn, and each floor of the house shoes us a different section of human life in being.” (29)

Smyth writes,

We learned quickly how bleached things become in a house on the water, how exhaustively salt and light leach color, leaving behind pale blues and yellows. The spines of books, the cork-titled floors, the rugs and prints and bed linens-each became a cheerfully bloodless version of itself. (15)

The paragraph is a metaphor for her father and the story she is about to tell, of a once vibrant and interesting man who faded into a shadow of himself. “I think the most difficult aspect of loving my father then, as any child of an alcoholic could attest, was the way in which nearly every evening the person I adored simply disappeared,” Smyth writes.(77) When the matriarch of To the Lighthouse, Mrs. Ramsey dies midway through the novel “light extinguished.”

Smyth moves effortlessly between Virginia Woolf’s own life of love and loss, To the Lighthouse, on which much is based on Woolf’s life and Smyth’s own. “How did father ask you to marry him?” Virginia Woolf had once asked her mother.(40) Smyth recognized the question as she too asked the same question of her own mother. She was met with such “bashfulness” and “privacy” that she had to piece together the narrative. It easily parallels Woolf’s own as Smyth’s parents and Virginia and husband Leonard spend a significant trip in Venice, Italy. Smyth tells the story of both “coupling” paired with Mrs. Ramsay in To the Lighthouse saying of Paul and Minta, will say “we” all their lives. Nor longer just “I” but both couples slide from “I” into “we.”

Smyth also compares the three parental figures of Woolf’s mother Julia Stephens, Mrs Ramsay and Smyth’s father as appearing sad. Mrs. Ramsay is described as “never did anybody look so sad.” Like Julia and Smyth’s father, “she possesses a past full of shadows, one informed by some central catastrophe.”(66) After her father lost his job “his light---that astonishing light-grew noticeable dim.” (68)

 “Long ago I used to wonder what would have happened if my father hadn’t lost his job,” Smyth writes, “would he have smoked less, drunk less? Would he be cancer-free today? But I recently came across some letters that convinced me this thinking was foolish.” (65) Later Smyth writes about Lily Briscoe in To the Lighthouse Smyth,

But one of the things I love about Lily is her willingness to utter such meaningless questions, or hope that splashing around the edges of the unfathomable depths they represent a one day yield a truth that will persist. She seeks nothing less than the meaning of life itself, she admits at one point, with an earnestness that is almost embarrassing. (239)

Smyth again moves so flawlessly between fact and fiction that the reader wonders if it is only Lily Briscoe she speaks of, or does she speak of herself and her desire for the truth.

This biblio-memoir was a marvelous example of living and breathing the text until it becomes a way to explain your own story.