Seeking solace in a classic

After her father’s death, Tiverton writer turns to a masterpiece

By Bruce Burdett
Posted 2/16/19

When Tiverton summer resident Katharine Smyth lost her father to cancer, she eventually turned to a beloved book — Virginia Woolf’s masterpiece ’To the Lighthouse’ — for consolation and to …

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Seeking solace in a classic

After her father’s death, Tiverton writer turns to a masterpiece

Posted

When Tiverton summer resident Katharine Smyth lost her father to cancer, she eventually turned to a beloved book — Virginia Woolf’s masterpiece ’To the Lighthouse’ — for consolation and to better understand this painful moment in her life.

Now she has written a book of her own, ‘All the Lives We Ever Lived — Seeking Solace in Virginia Woolf,’ an acclaimed work that intertwines Woolf’s family experiences with her own.

“Braiding memoir, literary criticism, and biography, ‘All the Lives That Matter’ is a wholly original debut: a love letter from a daughter to her father, and from a reader to her most cherished author,” writes the publisher.

“It struck me,” Ms. Smyth said, that ‘To the Lighthouse,” which shared an almost eerie number of parallels with the story that I sought to tell, was the model for which I had been searching all along.”

Among those eerie parallels was the family’s Tiverton cottage by the sea, a place that stirred thoughts of another childhood place — she also spent time in England — and of Woolf’s childhood on the Cornish coast of England.

“When I was five, my parents bought a summerhouse,” she writes. “For years we had spent our weekends sailing, driving between our home in Boston and the Rhode Island marina where we kept the boat, and for years my parents had admired the row of waterfront cottages they could see from the highway bridge.

They eventually found one on Tiverton Basin — “a wooden house built in 1890 and in a state of price-deflating disrepair. Sheets of plastic were stapled across its windows, to one side was a garage, to the other a desiccated lawn and concrete steps leading to the water. The small adjoining lot was full of rubble, all that remained of a shack annihilated by a hurricane 50 years before … A bare wooden deck faced the water, but it, too, was wrapped in thick plastic.

“A beastly wind leapt off the basin, slipping through cracks and ripping at the plastic sheets that now stood in for windows … We wore winter coats indoors.”

Bit by bit they rebuilt it, planted flowers, built a dock and dropped a mooring for their sailboat.

Tiverton became a happy place of weekend visits and longer.

“In Boston, our lungs were black and horrible,” her father said, “but in Rhode Island they were lovely and shiny and pink.”

They loved time spent combing the basin shore at the foot of the seawall, “collecting sea glass, broken bits of blue and white china, lady’s slippers, conch shells, the forsaken skeletons of horseshoe crabs, and, once, a rusty key chain from the Stone Bridge Inn, a hotel a mile down the road that had shuttered 25 years earlier.”

It was much the same for Woolf in Cornwall who wrote of awaking to the sound of waves, “lying and hearing this splash and seeing this light, and feeling, it is almost impossible that I should be here; of feeling the purest ecstasy I can conceive.” It was sharp contrast to her family’s London home, a far darker place.

Back and forth Ms. Smyth’s book goes — Tiverton to Cornwall, one family to another.

But all was not happiness — for Woolf or for the Smyth family, even in Tiverton. There was drinking, there were bitter fights, business failures and, in time, sickness and death.

After one especially dark time of hospital ICU stays and operations, they came back to Tiverton.

Walking back up the dock after sunset, “The Rhode Island house was all lit up, and I could see my parents’ figures through the windows.” She felt moved, exultant, yet “worried about my father and the future, and I remember that I actually said to myself, aloud, ‘Will it be like this when he is gone?’ Was the solace and strength that I had always taken from this house dependent upon my father, or could they endure without him?” It’s a question to which she seeks answers through much of the book.

Released by Crown Publishing (NY), ’All the Lives We Ever Lived’ has met with critical praise.

“In her brilliant debut, Katharine Smyth has done the impossible — invented a new form of memoir,” says Michael Scammel, author of ‘Solzhenitsyn.’ Her prose is luxuriant and supple, but never sentimental, and her piercing insights into the dynamics of the nuclear family are often profound.”

“Astonishing wisdom,” writes Jamie Quatro, author of ‘Fire Sermon.’ “This is a smart, moving portrait of a family in crisis.”

“A conceptually ambitious and assured debut,” offers Kirkus Reviews, “successfully bridging memoir and literary criticism … a work of incisive observation and analysis, exquisite writing, and an attempt to determine if there is “any revelation that could lessen loss, that could help to make the fact of death okay.”

Ms. Smyth is based in Brooklyn, NY, but she and her mother still own their Tiverton cottage, still keep a sailboat there. After graduating from Brown University, she worked as an editorial assistant and researcher at The Paris Review and Radar Magazine. In 2010, she received her MFA in nonfiction from Columbia, where she also taught, and was awarded a Dean’s Fellowship, the university’s highest merit-based award. Her essays and articles have appeared in a number of publications; an essay was selected among the Best American Essays 2014.

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