Brian Dillon
In Heather Christle’s new book, the memorist haunts her own past through the lens of Virginia Woolf’s life and work.
In the Rhododendrons: A Memoir with Appearances by Virginia Woolf, by Heather Christle, Algonquin Books, 278 pages, $27
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“Never to be yourself and yet always—that is the problem.” Thus Virginia Woolf on writing essays, though she might as easily have been referring to a peculiarly current literary genre joined by the American writer Heather Christle’s new book, In the Rhododendrons. (Christle is primarily a poet; her most recent prose volume, published to acclaim in 2019, is an essay-cum-memoir, The Crying Book.) The urge to decorate personal narrative with biographical or critical comment on a beloved writer—or is it the other way round?—has in recent decades produced rich, illuminating books as well as texts of surpassing whimsy and sentiment. The guide or guardian invoked is usually a writer of fiction, not an essayist (too buttonholing on the page?) or a poet (too ambiguous?). My [DELETE AS APPROPRIATE] Year/Life With [INSERT PROLIFIC NINETEENTH-CENTURY NOVELIST OR DAUNTING MODERNIST] is a tempting form to fill: it absolves the critic of academicism, frees the memoirist from the charge of “narcissism.” Full disclosure: I have practiced this racket myself, and am unlikely to give it up.
Virginia Woolf is an especially attractive shade to summon for writers in this line—perhaps because there is such a well-mapped, fertile hinterland between the life and the work, and so her diaries, letters, essays, biographies of others, not to mention psychic pain and suicide, may all be solicited alongside the novels for one’s own memoiristic ends. Proust-Woolf-Plath: a holy trinity for the contemporary autobiographer in search of a twentieth-century patron or precursor. In the case of In the Rhododendrons, all of the above texts by Woolf and facts about her are brought to bear on the story of Christle’s strained family relations, sexual assault as a teenager, sometimes crippling mood disorder, and complicated love for the sort of venerable London precincts haunted by Woolf herself. The book describes a period, between 2018 and 2023, when Christle visited England regularly as she tried to piece together certain details of her English mother’s life and her own. During these trips, she thought of herself as akin to Septimus Warren Smith, Woolf’s traumatized First-World-War veteran in Mrs. Dalloway, who hears voices of the dead from behind rhododendron bushes.
The geographical coordinates of Christle’s London, which she grew up listening to her mother recall time and again, are at the rarefied end of the tourist trail. The leafy suburb and parkland of Richmond, where Virginia and Leonard set up their Hogarth Press; the horticultural Victoriana of Kew Gardens; the British Museum, with its mountains of looted colonial treasure; the streets and squares of Bloomsbury, where Woolf also lived and wrote. All her life, Christle has been attached to these genteel places, although her family background is decidedly working-class: her great-grandfather was a trolley-bus conductor, and her grandfather the inmate of a Barnardo’s children’s home. On one of their recent trips, Christle’s mother relates that, at the age of eight, down an alley on the outskirts of Kew, she was molested by a stranger. Among other things, In the Rhododendrons is a canny reflection on the lures and lies of a constructed England, an England of the heart and mind.
Of the innocent authorial body, too. On a visit to London in the mid-1990s, the fourteen-year-old Christle was taken out on the town by her cousin and his girlfriend. Drunk at the Underworld nightclub in Camden, she met a man who took her outside. “I never feel like rape is exactly the right word,” she writes. When she cried in the bathroom back at her cousin’s, the girlfriend seemed oblivious: “Was it your first time?” As a teenager, she hoped for some comfort or understanding from her mother, who was convinced instead that her daughter had gone bad. Twenty-eight years later, Christle goes looking for the alley (which intersects her mother’s in the imagination) where it happened, and finds a single word of graffiti on a nearby wall: “Please.” She says it out loud: “Nobody came. I tried again.”
For the memoirist who haunts her own past, the city is full of such hints and traces, accidental but fraught with import: “We’re time travelers”—“Light indicates approval”—“Wild deer roam freely in the park.” Christle loves these signs for their unintended meanings: “I seek their instruction as if they were telegrams from another world.” At times, instead of letting ambiguous found messages go to work on the reader as they have on the author, she points a touch too obviously to their significance, as if we might not spot the joke, irony, or poetry. This anxiety seems of a piece with the book’s larger reflection on how meanings get made, and especially on metaphor and its discontents. Christle quotes Woolf in Orlando, admiring but mocking the power of figural language: “Trees were withered hags, and the sheep were grey boulders. Everything, in fact, was something else.” Christle is often very deft with her own images—in the Sussex countryside, the superimposition of paragliders on power lines reminds her of musical notation—but suspicion remains: Why cannot things be themselves?
The answer is the same as the justification for writing a memoir “with appearances by Virginia Woolf” (or any writer, artist, thinker) in the first place. That is, our most intimate stories don’t only belong or connect to us alone—and they may not even be stories at all. In the Rhododendrons can in places seem an oddly reticent work, both in terms of Christle’s pursuit of fact and feeling from her family, and as regards her own frankness about her wayward adolescence and vexed relationship with her mother. Narrative swerves often toward other voices, texts, authors: Woolf of course, but also Walter Benjamin, Jamaica Kincaid, Michel Foucault. “How good, the books behind which one can hide!” The wager with this approach is that the map of reading is a map of the heart, and both compose the more honest and accurate portrait of what a life is, or has been, or might become, than the straight story.
There are awkwardnesses in Christle’s “bibliomancy,” which is what she calls her reading the guts or runes of life through the medium of literature. But for the most part, her lapses are part of the memoirist’s plan: she’s only too aware how veiling as well as revealing the method can be. There are also distractions or digressions, which usually succeed but occasionally misfire. Christle’s concern with the brutal colonial past embodied in London’s tourist-trap museums—this feels correct, but a little dutiful or belated. Her passing references to Benjamin’s London-exiled son, Stefan, who ran a bookshop near the British Museum, are tantalizing—I feel like a pilgrimage to find that store right now—but don’t amount to much. On the other hand: a thread of Trump-era fear and fury runs through the book, heightened by Christle’s instinct to shield her child, Hattie, from the whims of America’s predator-in-chief. Half-grown inside In the Rhododendrons is another, perhaps more outward-looking, book about gender, androgyny, transformation—and Virginia Woolf.
Brian Dillon’s Affinities, Suppose a Sentence, and Essayism are published by New York Review Books. He is working on Ambivalence: An Education.