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I Was Afraid of Virginia Woolf

In his Third Satire John Donne tells us that

On a huge hill,
Cragged and steep, Truth stands, and he that will
Reach her, about must and about must go,
And what the hill’s suddenness resists, win so.

Looking back, that pretty well describes how I came to Virginia Woolf. For years, like the hill’s suddenness, I resisted her. Only now do I realize that all the time I was circling her, going about her, making the gradual ascent, though it was not until a few years ago that I actually reached her.

I had come across her many times through those who knew her. I had caught glimpses of her in the letters and biographies of her relatives and friends. Sometimes the glimpses were frank and intimate, sometimes she was just passing through, captured for a moment on the edge of the scene. My circling of her began with the diaries of Harold Nicolson. While I enjoyed Nicolson, it was his wife, Vita Sackville-West, who fascinated me, and soon I was engulfed in the complex story of their marriage: their purchase of Sissinghurst Castle in 1930, the beautiful garden they created there, and Vita’s lovers, Virginia Woolf among them. This is how their son Nigel described that haunting garden at Sissinghurst:

Harold made the design; Vita did the planting. In the firm perspective of vistas . . . one can trace his classical hand. In the overflowing clematis, figs, vines, and wisteria, in the rejection of violent colour or anything too tame or orderly, one discovers her romanticism. Wild flowers must be allowed to invade the garden; if plants stray over a path, they must not be cut back, the visitor must duck; rhododendrons must be banished in favour of their tender cousin, the azalea; roses must not electrify, but seduce; and when a season has produced its best, that part of the garden must be allowed to lie fallow for another year, since there is a cycle in nature that must not be disguised. It is eternally renewable, like a play with acts and scenes: there can be a change of cast, but the script remains the same. Permanence and mutation are the secrets of this garden.

One summer afternoon I sat there entranced, but my strongest

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In his Third Satire John Donne tells us that

On a huge hill, Cragged and steep, Truth stands, and he that will Reach her, about must and about must go, And what the hill’s suddenness resists, win so.

Looking back, that pretty well describes how I came to Virginia Woolf. For years, like the hill’s suddenness, I resisted her. Only now do I realize that all the time I was circling her, going about her, making the gradual ascent, though it was not until a few years ago that I actually reached her.

I had come across her many times through those who knew her. I had caught glimpses of her in the letters and biographies of her relatives and friends. Sometimes the glimpses were frank and intimate, sometimes she was just passing through, captured for a moment on the edge of the scene. My circling of her began with the diaries of Harold Nicolson. While I enjoyed Nicolson, it was his wife, Vita Sackville-West, who fascinated me, and soon I was engulfed in the complex story of their marriage: their purchase of Sissinghurst Castle in 1930, the beautiful garden they created there, and Vita’s lovers, Virginia Woolf among them. This is how their son Nigel described that haunting garden at Sissinghurst:

Harold made the design; Vita did the planting. In the firm perspective of vistas . . . one can trace his classical hand. In the overflowing clematis, figs, vines, and wisteria, in the rejection of violent colour or anything too tame or orderly, one discovers her romanticism. Wild flowers must be allowed to invade the garden; if plants stray over a path, they must not be cut back, the visitor must duck; rhododendrons must be banished in favour of their tender cousin, the azalea; roses must not electrify, but seduce; and when a season has produced its best, that part of the garden must be allowed to lie fallow for another year, since there is a cycle in nature that must not be disguised. It is eternally renewable, like a play with acts and scenes: there can be a change of cast, but the script remains the same. Permanence and mutation are the secrets of this garden.

One summer afternoon I sat there entranced, but my strongest memory of that visit to Sissinghurst is of climbing the stairs in the tower to look at the room where Vita did her writing. Though empty, it spoke strongly of her presence, but not only of hers. There was a tapestry on the wall, a painting, Persian rugs on the floor, books everywhere, and two photographs on her desk: Harold Nicolson and Virginia Woolf – absences that felt like presences. Even then I was not ready to meet her. Instead, I digressed to James Lees-Milne’s frank and compassionate two-volume biography of Harold. Then I launched myself into Bloomsbury, beginning with Holroyd’s great biography of Lytton Strachey. Like a dog hunting rabbits, I was diving without direction into one thicket after another. For a long, delicious interlude I read Frances Partridge’s journals, then her other books. Virginia wasn’t a dominating presence in these diaries, but she was there in the near background. I still suffered from the lazy student’s reluctance to tackle primary sources, so I continued to put off my encounter. I was still going about rather than at her, but I was getting closer. Victoria Glendinning’s biography of Vita Sackville-West brought her right into focus; but it was her biography of Virginia’s husband, Leonard Woolf, that settled me to the last bit of the climb, with a not-exactly small diversion into Hermione Lee’s biography of  Virginia herself. That did it. The zig-zag up the hill was over. I believe that we don’t tackle writers of genius till we are exactly ready for them. This was my moment. Once I started reading her I couldn’t stop. I read The Years, Mrs Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, A Room of One’s Own and Three Guineas in one tumultuous week. But it was The Waves that broke my heart. Let me say why. Philosophers talk about the problem of equivalence, which goes something like this:  because of the privileged position language holds in our culture we think we can put everything into words, make them equivalent to other realities, other experiences. We think that if we’ve worded something we’ve got it. But there is no exact verbal equivalence to our experience of even the most prosaic item. Things are not what we say they are: the word water is not drinkable. Words are signposts that point away from themselves to other realities, other experiences; but they can never be the things they point to. Except that there are a few writers of genius who manage to overcome this limitation, and whose words do more than point to experiences – they actually bring us into them. We say of them that they don’t tell, they show. Virginia Woolf is such a writer. In The Waves she achieves the miracle of enabling us to enter the consciousness of the people about whom she is writing. Often dismissed as difficult, The Waves is a book that should be heard rather than read. And I don’t mean buying the audio-version. I mean the kind of deep listening we give to a friend who needs to unburden herself. We turn self off and become an ear into which she pours her life. In The Waves we listen to the voices in the heads of a group of six friends as they stumble their way towards what Larkin called ‘age, and then the only end of age’, which is death. But The Waves is not only about the death that is the only end of all of us; it is also about a particular death, a death that comes into a number of Virginia Woolf’s books, the death of her own brother, the charismatic Thoby Stephen, Percival in this novel. We never encounter Thoby/Percival directly in The Waves; we meet him only through the consciousness of his other friends; get a sense of him through his impact on others and the astonished disbelief with which they hear about his death.

‘He is dead’, said Neville. ‘He fell. His horse tripped. He was thrown. The sails of the world have swung round and caught me on the head. All is over.  The lights of the world have gone out. There stands the tree which I cannot pass.

‘Oh, to crumple this telegram in my fingers – to let the light of the world flood back – to say this has not happened! But why turn one’s head hither and thither? This is the truth. This is the fact. His horse stumbled; he was thrown. The flashing trees and the white rails went up in a shower. There was a surge; a drumming in his ears. Then the blow; the world crashed; he breathed heavily. He died where he fell.

‘Barns and summer days in the country, rooms where we sat – all now lie in the unreal world which is gone. My past is cut from me . . . Why try to lift my foot and mount the stair? This is where I stand; here, holding the telegram. The past, summer days and rooms where we sat, stream away like burnt paper with red eyes in it. Why meet and resume? Why talk and eat and make up other combinations with other people? From this moment I am solitary. No one will know me now . . . I will not lift my foot to climb the stair. I will stand for one moment beneath the immitigable tree . . .’

The Waves was published in 1931. It is impossible to read it now without seeing it as predictive of Virginia’s own death ten years later and her own desire to pass under the immitigable tree. We cannot read it without remembering how she herself walked into the tidal river near her home in Sussex when the onset of another wave of madness became too much for her to bear.

And in me too the wave rises. It swells; it arches its back. I am aware once more of a new desire, something rising beneath me like the proud horse whose rider first spurs and then pulls him back. What enemy do we now perceive advancing against us, you whom I ride now, as we stand pawing this stretch of pavement? It is death. Death is the enemy. It is death against whom I ride with my spear couched and my hair flying back like a young man’s, like Percival’s, when he galloped in India. I strike spurs into my horse. Against you I will fling myself, unvanquished and unyielding, O Death!

In her last ten years she threw herself against more than her own death. She threw herself against the vanity of male power, death’s favourite harbinger. Three Guineas, published in 1938 as war clouds darkened over Europe, is a challenge to powerful men to catch themselves as they strut and posture in their pomp. She looks at their world from the angle of the private house, the sphere to which women were confined.

Your world, then, the world of professional, of public life, seen from this angle undoubtedly looks queer. At first sight it is enormously impressive. Within a small space are crowded together St Paul’s, the Bank of England, the Mansion House, the massive if funereal battlements of the Law Courts; and on the other side, Westminster Abbey and the Houses of Parliament. There we say to ourselves, pausing, in this moment of transition on the bridge, our fathers and brothers have spent their lives. All these hundreds of years they have been mounting those steps, passing in and out of those doors, ascending those pulpits, preaching, money-making, administering justice. It is from this world that the private house . . . has derived its creeds, its laws, its clothes and carpets, its beef and mutton. And then, as is now permissible, cautiously pushing aside the swing doors of one of these temples, we enter on tiptoe and survey the scene in greater detail. The first sensation of colossal size, of majestic masonry is broken up into a myriad points of amazement mixed with interrogation. Your clothes in the first place make us gape with astonishment. How many, how splendid, how extremely ornate they are – the clothes worn by the educated man in his public capacity! Now you dress in violet; a jewelled crucifix swings on your breast; now your shoulders are covered with lace; now furred with ermine; now slung with many linked chains set with precious stones . . .

Even stranger, however, than the symbolic splendour of your clothes are the ceremonies that take place when you wear them. Here you kneel; there you bow; here you advance in procession behind a man carrying a silver poker; here you mount a carved chair; here you appear to do homage to a piece of painted wood; here you abase yourselves before tables covered with richly worked tapestry. And whatever these ceremonies may mean you perform them always together, always in step, always in the uniform proper to the man and the occasion.

Eighty years after she wrote these words Woolf would be unsurprised to see that the British Establishment is still walking in step in the uniform proper to the occasion. I wonder what she’d make of the women who have been permitted to join the procession. She believed these parades were a way of demonstrating superiority over other people. More significantly, she thought they encouraged division and disagreement, even war. There are different kinds of warfare, of course; and religious warfare is one of the most vicious. Reading this passage fortified my own decision to resign from the Church’s uniformed branch and find a place on the sidewalk to watch the procession pass by. Virginia Woolf did not long survive the writing of Three Guineas. Madness had engulfed the world. And she feared the return of her own madness. The last words in her diary were Leonard is doing the rhododendrons . . . Four days later, on 28 March 1941, she filled her pockets with stones and flung herself, ‘unvanquished and unyielding, against the wave of death’. She left for her husband Leonard one of the purest love letters ever written.

Dearest,

I want to tell you that you have given me complete happiness. No one could have done more than you have done. Please believe that. But I know that I shall never get over this: and I am wasting your life. It is this madness. Nothing anyone says can persuade me. You can work, and you will be much better without me. You see I can’t write this even, which shows I am right. All I want to say is that until this disease came on we were perfectly happy. It was all due to you. No one could have been so good as you have been. From the very first day till now. Everyone knows that.

V.

She left the letter in the house. Then she walked into the garden, through the gate at the end, past the church, down to the river and along the bank towards the bridge at Southease . . .

Now the sun had sunk. Sky and sea were indistinguishable. The waves breaking spread their white fans far out over the shore, sent white shadows into the recesses of sonorous caves and then rolled back sighing over the shingle.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 48 © Richard Holloway 2015


About the contributor

Richard Holloway is the author of Leaving Alexandria: A Memoir of Faith and Doubt.

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