Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.

On May 1st, two things are happening. First, I’m being interviewed by Kris Welch of KPFA-FM in Berkeley. I’m going to be on Living Room between noon and one. I’m very excited to have such a big interview lined up, but it’s the synchronicity that’s really got me going. It centers around the second event, which is a reading at Mrs. Dalloway’s bookshop in Berkeley that same night. The two events came into being almost simultaneously, one because of the other.

Now, most people know, I’m pretty sure, that Mrs. Dalloway is one of Virigina Woolf’s characters. It’s the name of her best known novel, and Mrs. Dalloway, the character, is a key player in the film, Hours. Right? Okay. So, loosely speaking, you could say that Mrs. Dalloway is about the fluidity of time. Mrs. Dalloway is going through a day in her life. She’s on her way to buy flowers, and she’s remembering her past, which like William Faulkner said, is never really gone, it’s not even past. The book’s about a lot more than time, as Woolf herself said, “In this book I have almost too many ideas.” The same could be said of Requiem for the Author of Frankenstein, it’s a book of almost too many ideas and it’s a book that focuses on the mystery of the passage of time, in a very different way from Mrs. Dalloway, but then it’s a very different time and my experience of life has been significantly different from Virginia’s Woolf’s.

Now, don’t get me wrong here. I’m not claiming the books are on equal footing, nor am I trying to draw great parallels between Mrs. Dalloway and Requiem. I’m just pointing to the mystery and curiosity of it; the way it seems Virginia Woolf is playing her role both inside my novel and inside my life.

Mrs. Dalloway is not what’s on Anne Trevor’s mind. (Anna is the present time protagonist in Requiem.) But Virginia Woolf is. Anna’s story opens with her arrival at her Rose’s B&B in Hampstead where the room she’s staying in has two postcard pictures tucked into the bookcase; one of Mary Shelley and one of Virginia Woolf. Rose has put them there because she admires both women and thinks of herself as an “old feminist, I suppose.”

The curiosity of it is like a signal to Anna. She’s writing a paper about Mary Shelley that she’s been invited to present at a conference that’s taking a look at the progress women are making in reclaiming their literary history. It’s a conference about Shakespeare’s Sister. Shakespeare’s Sister is pure Virginia Woolf. Woolf told the story in A Room of One’s Own, which is a nonfiction work that talks about the fact that women will not create a Shakespeare until they know and can build upon their gender’s history, that genius is a collective expression, a gathering of the past into the present.

Anna and Rose discuss this concept and it sets the scene in many ways for what is to come. It’s enough in my mind that Virginia Woolf figures into Requiem to be pleased to be doing a book signing at Mrs. Dalloway’s bookshop, but that’s not where the synchronicity ends. I had developed the thesis about Virginia Woolf and was using it in my novel before I went back to England in the fall of 2003. (I first went to England to research Requiem in 1992.) In 2003, I was making a brief trip, almost a refresher course. There were a few very specific things I wanted to revisit or see for the first time. One of the places I stayed was in a Hampstead B&B that became the setting for Rose’s B&B. Why? Well, one of the main reasons was because there was, in fact, a small room where I stayed that had a bookcase with two postcard-sized pictures in it: one of Mary Shelley and one of Virginia Woolf.

The conversation Anna has with Rose is, in part, the conversation I had with the very interesting woman who ran that B&B. She said something like that to me, about being an ‘old feminist’ when I asked her about the pictures. My experiences that fall became formative in the final version of the novel. They changed its course. They redefined it. They were magical.

Am I making sense? What I’m trying to point out is the fact that Virginia Woolf, who tasked modern women with the chore of pulling our literary history out of obscurity, is once again moving things along here, at least symbolically, if not literally, somehow.

Virginia Woolf basically said that each women who contributes to the task whether she succeeds in some huge way or not, is adding to the psychic edifice that is necessary to bring forth the genius of the feminine, to create the necessary foundation for Shakespeare’s Sister to emerge and speak the fullness of her poetry, her eloquence, her vision of being. Woolf believed this genius of the feminine needed us all. In Requiem, Anna believes that this is part of her mission with Mary Shelley—that Mary Shelley’s life and writing is relevant because she contributed in a dramatic way to our intellectual history.

Anna believes that, because I believe it. I created Anna to believe it. But what fascinated me, and what fascinates Anna in Requiem for the Author of Frankenstein, is the way these ideas take on concrete expression in the real world in the form of coincidence and synchronicity. That I’d be invited to do a reading at Mrs. Dalloway’s the same day I’m invited to go on KPFA and potentially introduce my novel to a much wider audience than I’ve thus far been able, is remarkable, magical, coincidental—perhaps a sign I’m on the right path here. Yes?

In any event, it leaves me with the feeling that Virginia Woolf is watching over me, and, if I can be so bold as to claim it, is pleased with my effort. I believe Woolf would conclude that Requiem has value in its attempt to capture a piece of women’s collective literary history and bring it to light. It is the kind of thing that will ultimately make Shakespeare’s Sister’s creative life possible.

If you’re in the Bay Area, or have plans to be on May 1st, I invite you to come out for the reading. It’s a 7:30 pm and I intend to bring flowers for Mrs. Dalloway.

May 1, 2008. Berkeley, CA
Mrs. Dalloway’s, 7:30 pm
2904 College Ave
Berkeley, CA 94705
Reading & Book Signing

May 1, 2008. Berkeley, CA
KPFA-FM Radio, 94.1
Living Room with Kris Welch, 12 noon-1pm
Interview

******
and then of course, there’s Goethe, the grandfather of the Romantic Movement:

Until one is committed
There is hesitancy, the chance to draw back
Always ineffectiveness.

Concerning all acts of initiative (and Creation)
There is one elementary truth
The ignorance which kills countless ideas and splendid plans:

That the moment that one definitely commits ones self
Then Providence moves too.

All sorts of things occur to help one
That would never otherwise have occurred.

A whole stream of events issues from the decision
Raising in one’s favor all manner
Of unforeseen incidents and meetings
And material substance
Which no one could have dreamt
Would have come your way.

Whatever you can do or dream you can, begin it.
Boldness has genius, power and magic in it.

GOETHE