The Patron and the Crocus 1 comments

By David Griffith

Virginia Woolf begins her essay “The Patron and the Crocus”:

“[T]he writer who has been moved by the sight of the first crocus in Kensington Garden has, before he sets pen to paper, to choose from a crowd of competitors the particular patron who suits him best.”

Woolf likens the work of a patron to that of an “instigator” who “cajoles the best out of the writer’s brain.”

As the faculty adviser for the newspaper at the college where I teach, I know a little about instigating and cajoling. I try not to get too involved. I write diagnostic emails to the editor-in-chief about the latest edition, and lend her words of encouragement and advice when she is feeling defeated by yet another article turned in with three anonymous sources, or a news article with rampant and vapid editorializing, or a column glutted by overblown rhetoric. The sloppiness of her writers weighs heavily on her because, as I’ve told her many times now, “It’s on you.”

I genuinely feel bad for her, so sometimes I show up at editorial meetings in my professorial brown corduroy jacket looking very grim and preach teamwork and accountability. The students look at me with glassy eyes, doing a poor job of hiding their disdain.

I hate being the heavy, not because their seeming lack of care pisses me off and puts me in a very bad mood (though it does), but because I am not an editor and not used to having to deal with these problems in others, just in myself. After all, I am a writer, prone to blowing deadlines, sensationalizing, romanticizing, and overwriting.

Admittedly, this is a tough community for a journalist to cover. We are small—800 students and 70 faculty—which creates a near-utopian emphasis on maintaining the peace and keeping up the appearance that everyone gets along, to the extent that many are reticent of saying a cross word for fear that it will tear the fabric of the community.

I share these words with you at the end of very hard February in which the fabric of this community has been tested. We received 37 inches of snow, which brought campus and the surrounding community to a grinding halt. Tempers flared over icy sidewalks and plowed-in cars, fender benders and fourteen straight snow days, which frayed the nerves of working parents. Then, just as the snow was beginning to melt and everything was beginning to return to normal, a professor, one of my colleagues, went missing. She was last seen three weeks ago walking by the brown, swollen river. No foul play is suspected.

Woolf continues in her essay: “It is futile to say, ‘Dismiss [the patrons]; think only of your crocus,” because writing is a method of communication; and the crocus is an imperfect crocus until it has been shared.’”

Sharing these words now after such a month, there is a pressure to romanticize—to adopt the patron who will pay the most and deliver these words to the greatest number of people—to see the crocus as a symbol of new life, that hope is still alive all these weeks later.

Students who worked closely with the missing professor trade theories that become more improbable by the day. They complain they are being kept in the dark. They genuinely feel that they will be able to solve this mystery if they just had access to what the police know. I want to give these students hope, but I feel it is unethical at best and cruel at worst.

And so the grim and prudent editor soberly meditates on the facts and their permanence: 37 inches of snow; the cracked bumper of our car; she is still missing; last seen by the river; no foul play.

But perhaps it is possible to strike a balance between romance and prudence. If such a balance is possible, it begins with our first crocuses of the season. My wife bought them at Whole Foods. They bloomed on the kitchen counter sometime in the middle of the night.

When I saw that first little purple bud I was so relieved—I was so sure that they wouldn’t even bloom. I drank my morning coffee and stared at the purple bud in wonder.

The next day, cutting back vines and pulling weeds along the fence line in our backyard, I found a clump of bright green crocus stems straining upward, but they were shorn close to the ground, probably by the deer who have been coming in groups of seven or eight closer and closer to the house in search of food. Later that day, walking through the kitchen, I noticed even more of the store-bought buds on the kitchen counter had bloomed.

By the end of the week the crocuses by the back gate had still not bloomed, but all of the buds in the kitchen had. It began to feel like we had cheated. I felt that the relief and joy the crocus gave me was unearned.

Woolf’s essay on patronage comes from the book The Common Reader in which she defends the reader who is not a scholar but a lowly literary gleaner who takes little pieces of poetry and wisdom from everywhere and weaves them together into a “rickety and ramshackle fabric.” She says that this is a “hasty, inaccurate and superficial” kind of reading, concerned with creating a shape that is pleasing to him, to his personal vision.

I have a tendency to be this sort of reader (and writer), especially now. I look at everything but the crocus: the barren garden; the rinds of snow still lingering in the cool, dark hollers; the famished deer munching the tender crocus stems; the brown swollen river; reports that my colleague left her apartment with a white envelope in her hand—a note, rumors have it.

Woolf riddles: “The patron we want, then, is one who will help us to preserve our flowers from decay.... To know who to write for is to know how to write.” This could mean the best patron helps us to see what is necessary and what is not. But she could also mean that the good patron reminds us that writing is a vocation that sometimes asks you to put aside your precious needs and desires for those of others.

Whether you tend toward the romantic or the prudent, perhaps the most effective and unsettling patron is the missing person. Their absence directs our eyes and ears away from the frivolous and guides our thoughts toward the beauty of what remains.

Today, after a month that saw a record 37 inches of snow and the disappearance of a colleague, the crocuses finally bloomed in our backyard.