Caleb Azumah Nelson: ‘Virginia Woolf's London is the London I know'

The Guardian

03-08-2025

It's always a surprise when ecstasy arrives. Recently, I've found myself waking early, with dawn on the horizon. I think it might be beautiful to catch the sunrise, and in those quiet moments, I am reminded of the bustle of the city, or a lover's hand in mine, or the words that I couldn't quite say, and, looking back towards the sky, find the sun already risen. I rue that I've missed it; I'm surprised it arrived so quickly. But for a moment, the light shines bright; and briefly, the parts of myself I don't always get to are illuminated. In these moments, I'm reminded of our aliveness.
Much of my writing practice is concerned with closing the gap between emotion and expression. The sense of loss in this chasm is inevitable; it's impossible to translate the excitement of seeing a loved one across the room, or the bodily jolt that arrives when you pass a friend on the street and realise you have become strangers. But still, I try to write, as Virginia Woolf did, not so much concerned with knowledge, but with feeling. And since language won't always get you there, I employ music, rhythm.
Woolf does this masterfully in Mrs Dalloway. She was not just concerned with the notes of an instrument, but moments when a pianist's hands might hover over the keys, or the break before a trumpeter blows; and even before that, what route did the pianist take to work today? What did the trumpeter say to his wife before they slept the night before, and what did she say back? And even further back: what might the musician have witnessed, at 18, which has shaped their life? How did Sally Seton kissing Clarissa Dalloway – a moment Woolf describes as a revelation, a religious experience – shape both their lives? The question that pulses through this novel: how do we come to be? They may not be musical notes but these questions and their answers are all music of some kind.
Woolf also writes with a painterly touch. The images she conjures remind me of work by my favourite painter, Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, in which the interior preoccupations are externalised in the strokes on the canvas, both tender and sure; in the ways characters fill the frame with their bodies, their personhoods; in the ways the backgrounds speak as much to the narrative as the foremost subject does.
In Woolf's work, there are rarely any direct gazes. Everyone looks away, unable to wrangle with the feeling of being seen, or they glance away when caught. And you understand. It can be scary to be seen. All these emotions and feelings, preoccupations and fears, all out in the open, with nowhere to hide. And yet, if we don't show ourselves, Woolf suggests, it's impossible to truly live.
Speaking of backgrounds, allow me a couple of indulgences here: the first, the city. Specifically, the city of London, which I've always known as home, have always known and loved, for all its ways. In Mrs Dalloway, London is not just a backdrop but an essential character. It is a living, breathing organism, to be held, touched, traversed, poked and prodded. To be, in some way, loved. Woolf writes in relation to our love of London, foolish as it may be. And yet, I cannot resist the allure of the city, because it's home to me. The way the streets speak; the frenetic pace of its workers; the all-knowing boom of Big Ben, followed by St Margaret's; 'the carriages, motor cars, omnibuses, vans, sandwich men shuffling and swinging; brass bands'; the way quiet breaks open on entering St James's Park accented only by the slow steps of others, or the flap of ducks swimming in the pond; the way the symphony starts back up as soon as you break out of the park, on to the streets, a distinct hum being heard all round, rising up from the ground. The city hums.
But the hum isn't coming from the pavement. Home, whether it is a city, or town, or village, can only really be its people. The London of Mrs Dalloway, the London I know, is filled with parents and children, lovers and enemies, strangers and familiar faces; filled with love and envy, ambition and grief; filled with an immense beauty, a beauty she, I, might witness 'in people's eyes'. And if we look closely, as strangers and lovers pass us, we might see this beauty as further evidence of our aliveness.
And, if you'll allow me, I'd like to speak briefly on love. When I mention the ecstatic or this notion of aliveness, I'm speaking to the moments that are at the height and depths of the human experience. Love encompasses all of these categories. Early on in the novel, Woolf broaches Clarissa's relationship with Sally Seton: 'had not that, after all, been love?' It makes me wonder, is love a question, or does it make us question? Does it make us ask 'who is that?' when confronted with our pull towards another? Does it make us reframe this pull as something that cannot be resisted, as if desire is something to be resisted, as if it is weakness and not virtue?
There are no answers, only more questions. But I'd like to point to ecstasy, to one person's lips meeting with another: 'the radiance burnt through, the revelation, the religious feeling'. Is this not how it feels to be closest to oneself? To feel the most alive? There are no answers, only more questions. But I think, this is what love does. It expands our lives and the ways we express ourselves by making space for our truest, deepest desires, even if we're only glimpsing these needs for a moment. It questions how we came to be, and what we need to go on; it finds us in the space between who we have been and who we are trying to become. And right there, in the midst of it all, love holds up a mirror to see ourselves, our full selves.
Grief, I think, is both love's opposite and companion. The grief of a life you might have lived. The grief of a person you might have been. And grief arrives not as loss but its inarticulacies. Clarissa is able to say what happened to her sister, Sylvia, felled by a tree, but she struggles to say how it made her feel. She's able to understand that if she had married Peter, 'this gaiety would have been mine all day!' but she struggles with the emotional heft of this possibility. Some people never find the language to express their grief, or else it tumbles down the chasm between emotion and expression; but we try. 'It is a thousand pities never to say what one feels', but we try. Sometimes, the moonlight briefly vanishes as night does; the sun doesn't blaze but a new dawn breaks; and with that first light, that early sunshine before any clouds appear, the grief eases. And, doused in sunlight, once more, we are reminded, we are alive.
Extracted from a talk commissioned by Charleston festival 2025.