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September 1, 2021
Merve Emre's Playlist for "The Annotated Mrs. Dalloway"
In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book.
Previous contributors include Jesmyn Ward, Lauren Groff, Bret Easton Ellis, Celeste Ng, T.C. Boyle, Dana Spiotta, Amy Bloom, Aimee Bender, Roxane Gay, and many others.
The Annotated Mrs. Dalloway is one of the best books I have read in a long time. Merve Emre's meticulous notes and illustrations expand the original text, offering new insight into one of my favorite books. A must-read for fans of Virginia Woolf.
The Wall Street Journal wrote of the book:
"[Emre’s] introduction combines personal testimony about her relationship to the novel―she is so devoted that she retyped Woolf’s manuscript for this edition―with deep research into its genesis . . . if you can read the novel a little more analytically, if you seek instruction on how it works and why, then this new edition will tell you all that you wish to know . . . Among its many illustrations, it includes a selection of maps, tracing the paths that Clarissa, Septimus and the other characters might have walked that day in 1923. The next time I’m in London with a few hours to spare, this is the Mrs. Dalloway for me."
In her own words, here is Merve Emre's Book Notes music playlist for The Annotated Mrs. Dalloway:
The twelve songs that I have chosen are keyed to the twelve interludes of Mrs. Dalloway. I did not listen to them as I was editing or annotating; I find it impossible to listen to music while I write. They were selected after the fact. Some were vaguely on my mind while I was working on the book. Others I was pleased to discover after spending hours searching for the right words that carried the right feeling. I started to write strict interpretive accounts that matched song to section, but that ruined the pleasure of the exercise—the pleasure of drawing a thin thread, hazy with sound, from voice to text, past to present. You will have to listen to the playlist yourself.
I. Lily Allen, LDN
“In people's eyes, in the swing, tramp, and trudge; in the bellow and the uproar; the carriages, motor cars, omnibuses, vans, sandwich men shuffling and swinging; brass bands; barrel organs; in the triumph and the jingle and the strange high singing of some aeroplane overhead was what she loved; life; London; this moment of June.”
II. Appleseed Cast, Fishing the Sky
“Away and away the aeroplane shot, till it was nothing but a bright spark; an aspiration; a concentration; a symbol (so it seemed to Mr. Bentley, vigorously rolling his strip of turf at Greenwich) of man's soul; of his determination, thought Mr. Bentley, sweeping round the cedar tree, to get outside his body, beyond his house, by means of thought, Einstein, speculation, mathematics, the Mendelian theory––away the aeroplane shot.”
III. FKA Twigs, Two Weeks
“It was a sudden revelation, a tinge like a blush which one tried to check and then, as it spread, one yielded to its expansion, and rushed to the farthest verge and there quivered and felt the world come closer, swollen with some astonishing significance, some pressure of rapture, which split its thin skin and gushed and poured with an extraordinary alleviation over the cracks and sores!”
IV. David Bowie, London Bye, Ta-Ta
"Boys in uniform, carrying guns, marched with their eyes ahead of them, marched, their arms stiff, and on their faces an expression like the letters of a legend written round the base of a statue praising duty, gratitude, fidelity, love of England."
V. Tristan und Isolde: Act III Scene 1: [The Shepherd's pipe is heard]
“Such are the visions which proffer great cornucopias full of fruit to the solitary traveller, or murmur in his ear like sirens lolloping away on the green sea waves, or are dashed in his face like bunches of roses, or rise to the surface like pale faces which fishermen flounder through floods to embrace.”
VI. Bill Withers, Who is He (And What Is He to You)?
"For he was jealous, uncontrollably jealous by temperament."
VII. Kidswaste, Time
“The word “time” split its husk; poured its riches over him; and from his lips fell like shells, like shavings from a plane, without his making them, hard, white, imperishable words, and flew to attach themselves to their places in an ode to Time; an immortal ode to Time.”
VIII. Annie Lennox, No More I Love Yous
“To love makes one solitary.” / "(But he could not bring himself to say he loved her; not in so many words.")
IX. Saint Etienne, London Belongs to Me
“One might fancy that day, the London day, was just beginning. Like a woman who had slipped off her print dress and white apron to array herself in blue and pearls, the day changed, put off stuff, took gauze, changed to evening, and with the same sigh of exhilaration that a woman breathes, tumbling petticoats on the floor, it too shed dust, heat, colour; the traffic thinned; motor cars, tinkling, darting, succeeded the lumber of vans; and here and there among the thick foliage of the squares an intense light hung. I resign, the evening seemed to say, as it paled and faded above the battlements and prominences, moulded, pointed, of hotel, flat, and block of shops, I fade, she was beginning. I disappear, but London would have none of it, and rushed her bayonets into the sky, pinioned her, constrained her to partnership in her revelry.”
X. Oingo Boingo, Dead Man's Party
"For Miss Helena Parry was not dead: Miss Parry was alive ... Lady Bruton stood by Miss Parry's chair, a spectral grenadier, draped in black, inviting Peter Walsh to lunch; cordial; but without small talk, remembering nothing whatever about the flora or fauna of India."
XI. Borns, Past Lives
“She felt somehow very like him—the young man who had killed himself. She felt glad that he had done it; thrown it away. The clock was striking. The leaden circles dissolved in the air. He made her feel the beauty; made her feel the fun."
XII. The Beatles, I Don't Want to Spoil the Party
"For there she was."
Merve Emre is an associate professor of English at the University of Oxford and the author of several books, including The Personality Brokers.
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