On Being Ill

"Yes. Well, she’s horizontal because she’s ill and is lying on her back, and so the essay is about what it feels like to have given up the race to make your living and go out and live in the normal world. And so I suppose vertical reading would be orthodox reading where you are accountable and have to make sense of what you’re reading, and to be able to have an intelligent conversation about it once you have read it. Whereas horizontal reading is when you’re lying down with a raging temperature—perhaps you have got the flu—and you’re picking up books that happen to be lying around, as they would have been in her house, and you are biting off little bits of poetry, and little bits of stuff here and there, and you’re not even making sense of it. It’s almost like nonsense, but all kinds of unlikely and unexpected emotions are coming at you through the little fragments that you’re picking up here and there. Reading with a high temperature is a sort of illicit reading. “What Woolf does in her narratives is to think about many kinds of different shapes and forms, like a painting.” One of the things that is amazing about her—and I can’t really think of anyone who does it quite so well—is the way she writes about the body, and the relationship between the life of the body and the life of the mind. She was often ill, and not just mentally ill, but also physically ill. She had terrible phases of rapid heartbeat, she would get appalling headaches and migraines, she had tremendous problems with eating. There was a whole gallery of symptoms that had to do with being very vulnerable. She writes about these. There are astonishing descriptions in her first novel, The Voyage Out , of a woman with a mortal illness. You get inside that illness, and feel what it’s like. In her diaries and in her writing, she transcribes what it feels like to be in a particular physical state. This essay, ‘On Being Ill’, is one of the most remarkable pieces of writing about what it feels like to be writing out of ill health, not in a self-pitying way, but in an experimental way. Like the conversational essay on Sickert, it’s a very free associational piece of writing, so she’ll jump, with some wit and glee, between the most unlikely subjects."

"I think it’s a really important piece of writing just because it’s so beautifully executed. That said, it does lose its way about half way through, and Woolf goes off in pursuit of some enthusiasms that I don’t share. Maybe that’s because I’m not living in 1920s Bloomsbury. I respect Hilary Mantel’s point of view: her essay is about being really very ill whereas Virginia Woolf’s essay is about having a touch of the ‘flu, and they’re two very different things. But Woolf asks a profound question: why don’t we have a greater literature of illness? Exactly! She writes Novels, one would have thought, would have been devoted to influenza; epic poems to typhoid, odes to pneumonia; lyrics to toothache. But no; with a few exceptions — De Quincey attempted something of the sort in The Confessions of an English Opium Eater ; there must be a volume or two about disease scattered through the pages of Proust — literature does its best to maintain that its concern is with the mind, that the body is a sheet of plain glass through which the soul looks straight and clear, and, save for one or two passions such as desire and greed, is null, and negligible and non-existent…People write of the doings of the mind; the thoughts that come to it; its noble plans; how the mind has civilised the universe. They show it ignoring the body in the philosopher’s turret; or kicking the body, like an old leather football, across leagues of snow and desert in the pursuit of conquest or discovery… I think she’s put her finger on a real issue that, in 1922, literature needed to more closely address the transitions in experience that being ill can effect. And maybe the problem is because there are so many different ways of being ill. It’s as Susan Sontag wrote: “Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick.” And when you are given a diagnosis it can be liberating, because your illness has a name, and it becomes something outside you that others have suffered before. But it can also feel as if you’ve been handed your passport for the kingdom of the sick. You move amongst all the people who are well, but you no longer feel you are any part of them. John Donne also wrote very well about illness 400 years ago. “Disease hath established a kingdom, an empire in me, and will have certain arcana imperii , secrets of state, by which it will proceed and not be bound to declare them.” It’s like an evil empire is slowly colonising his body but he doesn’t understand the rules by which it’s operating. A deeply disturbing aspect of illness that we consider our bodies to be ourselves, but then you get a diagnosis like a tumour…and suddenly you think, my body is no longer myself. I’m up here, above the neck perhaps, and it’s down there, the body is in mutiny and I need to surpress it. Illness can disassemble us, split what we consider ourselves."