Review: “Angel Down," "To the Lighthouse" and the communicative difficulties of World War I

“It was absurd, it was impossible. One could not say what one meant. So now she laid her brushes neatly in the box, side by side, and said to William Bankes:

'It suddenly gets cold. The sun seems to give less heat,’ she said.”

- Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse.

The difficulty of interpersonal communication at the turn of the century was a common subject for British literature in the Victorian and Edwardian eras. From Will and Dorothea in George Eliot’s Middlemarch, who drown in longing while unable to express their true feelings, to EM Forster, whose motto “Only Connect” underscored the extent to which his characters could never quite get on the same page. By the time World War I started, all Europe may have been sick from this communicative illness. A case can even be made that the war began and worsened because of this difficulty, which must have infected the network of literal royal cousins who ruled the whole continent when the archduke of Austria was suddenly murdered, and the world blundered into an intractable war. Did the era’s difficulty in expressing intent--extensive protocols, the gap between diplomatic language and actual meaning--contribute to the disaster? One thinks of Philip Zelikow’s case that Woodrow Wilson might have been able to strike a peace deal ending the war before the United States’ entry into the conflict had his top deputy Colonel Edward House not trusted snail mail by boat to conduct urgent diplomacy with Great Britain. By the time Wilson’s letters reached their recipients they had already been fired or decided what they thought of key diplomatic issues. Communication was not easy in those years, for both interior and exterior reasons. And after years of trench warfare the world shared a widespread trauma that made it even more difficult to be forthcoming in interpersonal communication.

This may be one of the reasons that literature exploded with new forms of expression during the war and after it ended: Years of bottled-up communication bubbled over in records of thought rather than spoken expression in Joyce’s 1922 Ulysses and Woolf’s 1927 To the Lighthouse, among other books. Last month’s new Pulitzer winner for fiction went to a book firmly in that line of heritage, Daniel Kraus’s Angel Down, which covers the Great War with a single run-on sentence that comprises the whole book, beginning and ending with the word “and.” It represents World War I as a seemingly never-ending conflict that to its contemporaries was like “a sentence in a book careening without periods, gasping with too many commas, a sentence that, once begun, can’t ever be stopped.” I just read both Angel Down and To the Lighthouse, the latter of which was just named the number four novel of all time by London’s Guardian. I was struck with the similarities between these seemingly very different depictions of the Great War and its effects. Both books convey this sense of a runaway train of contained interiority. Each can be interpreted as an extended argument for its own stylistic innovations. And implicitly both contain as a theme the difficulty of communication in this emotionally constrained time.

A classic text on the way language changed because of the war, Paul Fussell’s The Great War and Modern Memory, reminds us how vastly different language was before and after the war. “Indeed, the literary scene [before the war] is hard to imagine. There was no Waste Land, with its rats' alleys, dull canals, and dead men who have lost their bones: it would take four years of trench warfare to bring these to consciousness. There was no Ulysses, no Mauberley, no Cantos, no Kafka, no Proust, no Waugh, no Auden, no Huxley, no Cummings, no Women in Love or Lady Chatterley's Lover. There was no ‘Valley of Ashes’ in The Great Gatsby. One read Hardy and Kipling and Conrad and frequented worlds of traditional moral action delineated in traditional moral language.”

The novels could not be more different in subject. Angel Down takes place directly on the front lines, depicting what happens when five American soldiers find a literal angel among the wreckage of No Man’s Land. It has been called a horror novel. To the Lighthouse, which could certainly have been on Fussell’s list of post-war works, by contrast shows us the quiet lives of about 15 English men and women summering on the Isle of Skye before and after the war. Not much happens; a boy wishes to take a boat to the lighthouse off the coast of their summer home and is unable to go for 10 years because the war breaks out. The novel paints a picture of a Victorian and post-Victorian temperament that was too much without words. In this case, that picture justifies the stream of consciousness style of the novel, as the characters say so little to each other that a conventional approach to dialogue and storytelling would leave a very laconic book. Instead, it unveils the thoughts of the characters as brimming with verbosity and on the brink of boiling over, because so little is stated outright. 

The book is full of lines like the one that serves as the epigraph of this review, depicting the quietness of its protagonists: “Mrs. Ramsay sat silent,” Woolf writes at one point. “She was glad, Lily thought, to rest in silence, uncommunicative; to rest in the extreme obscurity of human relationships. Who knows what we are, what we feel? Who knows, even at the moment of intimacy, This is knowledge? Aren't things spoilt then? Mrs. Ramsay may have asked (it seemed to have happened so often, this silence by her side) by saying them. Aren't we more expressive thus? The moment at least seemed extraordinarily fertile.”

Or, take this moment in which Mrs. Ramsay, who is based on Woolf’s own Victorian mother, surveys a dinner table full of 15 guests and feels as though she can see who they are beneath the little that they express directly:

“It could not last, she knew, but at the moment her eyes were so clear that they seemed to go round the table unveiling each of these people, and their thoughts and their feelings, without effort, like a light stealing under water so that its ripples and the reeds in it and the minnows balancing themselves and the sudden silent trout are all lit up hanging, trembling. So she saw them; she heard them; but whatever they said had also this quality, as if what they said was like the movement of a trout when, at the same time, one can see the ripple and the gravel, something to the right, something to the left; and the whole is held together; for whereas in active life she would be netting and separating one thing from another; she would be saying she liked the Waverley novels or had not read them; she would be urging herself for-ward; now she said nothing. For the moment she hung suspended.”

Angel Down wields commas the way Woolf wields those semi-colons. The more recent book furthers modernism’s exploration of this damaged moment in radical formal terms. Like the film 1917 which depicted trench warfare in one long take, Angel Down uses its one long sentence to depict the endlessness of the war. Fussell depicted the same thing by quoting Great War veteran and poet Edmund Blunden, who wrote of the Somme battle of July 1916, "By the end of the day both sides had seen, in a sad scrawl of broken earth and murdered men, the answer to the question. No road. No thoroughfare. Neither race had won, nor could win, the War. The War had won, and would go on winning.” That’s Angel Down all over.

In Angel Down the difficulty of communication is not the major theme, but is implicit, and the torrent of thoughts that express so much that are not expressed in dialogue is in part the offspring of Woolf’s approach. The difficulty of communication, the dominance of the unspoken, is shown in “Angel Down” too as each of the five soldiers carrying the angel back to camp react differently to the brush with the celestial. Most of them turn out quietly to be interpreting the angel as someone from their own lives whom they have lost or are otherwise obsessed with. This is like something out of Woolf, if more dramatic: everyone leaves their true selves at a hidden level and it takes the angel to uncover the truth.

Meanwhile, Kraus’ book is full of black humor, and when it isn’t black humor it’s a black sensibility. Fussell says black humor was born in World War I. "The more revolting it was,” he quotes WWI-era writer Philip Gibbs as saying, "the more... [people] shouted with laughter. It was ... the laughter of mortals at the trick which had been played on them by an ironical fate. They had been taught to believe that the whole object of life was to reach out to beauty and love, and that mankind, in its progress to perfection, had killed the beast instinct, cruelty, blood-lust, the primitive, savage law of survival by tooth and claw and club and ax. All poetry, all art, all religion had preached this gospel and this promise.”

This line about the beast instinct even seems directly echoed in the epigraph that leads Kraus’ Angel Down. “But they are hideous creatures— degraded beasts of a lower order. How could you speak the language of beasts?” The quote is from Edgar Rice Burroughs’s The Son of Tarzan, references to which are spread throughout Angel Down because Burroughs is being read by two of the main characters in the trenches. The adoption of this adventure novel for the epigraph, rather than some weightier citation, suits the book, which dares to be a genre novel even as it handles higher questions in rich and sparklingly original prose. It isn’t giving away too much to say that sections of the final sequences read almost more like a Harry Potter book than a modernist classic, as the climax dips into a supernatural fantasy reminiscent of Harry’s battles against Voldemort. The amazing thing is that it works, largely because it segues back to a higher tone so swiftly. One is reminded that TS Eliot began his masterpiece on World War I, The Waste Land, with an epigraph from Joseph Conrad’s “The Heart of Darkness,” specifically, of all (now-)hackneyed things, “the horror! The horror!” It was Pound who said “I doubt if Conrad is weighty enough to stand the citation,” leading Eliot to switch to a line from “The Satyricon.” The weight of the citation in Angel Down is defiantly right for the beastly content.

The communicative illness depicted in both books, as I noted, started before World War I. Virginia Woolf said in 1924 that human character changed in December 1910, seven months after George V took over from Edward VII in Britain. What Woolf meant when she said character changed in 1910, said James Wood in his essay “Virginia Woolf’s Mysticism,” was that “Character, to the Edwardians, was everything that could be described, to her generation it was everything that could not be described. The Edwardians blunted character, she felt, by stubbing it into things--clothes, politics, income, houses, relatives. She wanted to sharpen character into the invisible.” This invisibility Woolf would develop more specifically in The Waves, which omits more information about characters’ details, incomes, houses, politics. But the invisibility shows up in To the Lighthouse too, as the novel is about what is not said—what is invisible—more than what is said.

In this way the book makes its case for its own style. It does this largely through the figure of the painter Lily Briscoe, who paints in a modernist style that is based on Woolf’s sister Vanessa Bell’s post-impressionism. Lily struggles to capture a stylistically radical vision on the canvas in the same way Woolf struggled to capture it on the page. Susan Dick, who transcribed the first draft of To the Lighthouse, has said that it gives "the impression that at times [Woolf’s] mind was working more swiftly than her pen and that she was able only to jot down fragments of her thoughts before these were crowded out by others.” Lily Briscoe has the same trouble getting her thoughts on the canvas while painting. Lily describes that difficulty in the passage that leads up to the epigraph that began these reflections:

“She could see it all so clearly, so commandingly, when she looked: it was when she took her brush in hand that the whole thing changed. It was in that moment's flight between the picture and her canvas that the demons set on her who often brought her to the verge of tears and made this passage from conception to work as dreadful as any down a dark passage for a child. Such she often felt herself - struggling against terrific odds to maintain her courage; to say: 'But this is what I see; this is what I see, and so to clasp some miserable remnant of her vision to her breast, which a thousand forces did their best to pluck from her. And it was then, too, in that chill and windy way, as she began to paint, that there forced themselves upon her other things, her own in-adequacy, her insignificance, keeping house for her father off the Brompton Road, and had much ado to control her impulse to fling herself (thank Heaven she had always resisted so far) at Mrs. Ramsay's knee and say to her - but what could one say to her? 'I'm in love with you'? No, that was not true. I'm in love with this all', waving her hand at the hedge, at the house, at the children? It was absurd, it was impossible. One could not say what one meant. So now she laid her brushes neatly in the box, side by side, and said to William Bankes: 'It suddenly gets cold. The sun seems to give less heat,’ she said.”

This leaves us where we began, in a struggle to communicate what can’t be communicated verbally. Both To the Lighthouse and Angel Down do impressive work exposing the interior thought that Woolf shows to be such a struggle to get on the page or canvas. They both get to the heart of the communicative sickness endemic to the era surrounding World War I.