Square Haunting

by Francesca Wade

  Now, she called the declaration of war ‘the worst of all my life’s experiences’. The Woolfs knew that the Gestapo had drawn up a 350-page blacklist which included the names of ‘Leonhard Woolf, Schriftsteller’ and ‘Virginia Woolf, Schriftstellerin’; after a ‘sensible, rather matter-of-fact talk’ they agreed that, in the event of defeat, they would gas themselves at home rather than await capture. But Virginia refused to contemplate this fate. ‘No, I dont want the garage to see the end of me. Ive a wish for 10 years more, & to write my book wh. as usual darts into my brain.’ Throughout her year in Mecklenburgh Square, Woolf galvanised energies for an astonishing variety of projects: she completed, with relief, a biography of her old friend Roger Fry, she wrote a novel, Between the Acts, and she began sketching her own memoirs, as well as making notes for a new study of English literature. Her diaries and correspondence mix the constant ‘rumours of war’ with accounts of dinners, parties, commissions for stories and journalism, and changes in her Sussex garden. To read them is to experience a dizzyingly intimate insight on a time of turbulence and transition, both in European politics and in Woolf’s own life. Often, in her diary, she jots quick, distracted lists, amalgamating public and private fears in her characteristic, penetrating shorthand: ‘Over all hangs war of course. A kind of perceptible but anonymous friction. Dantzig. The Poles vibrating in my room. Everything uncertain. We have got into the habit however. Work, work, I tell myself.’ The work Woolf undertook during this year formed responses to ideas she had long explored: the nature of the self, the impossibility of knowing others, the effects of culture on people, the violence of patriarchy, the relationship between art (and the artist) and society, and a concept of community founded not on patriotism but on a shared sense of history.

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  The Woolfs soon established an uneasy ‘betwixt and between’ routine, spending four days of every fortnight at Mecklenburgh Square and the rest of the time writing uninterruptedly at Monk’s House in Rodmell (‘our village – which must be typical of all villages’), a sixteenth-century cottage which they had bought at auction in 1919. This arrangement was designed to help Virginia negotiate ‘the usual fight between solitude & society’, her delicate balance of public and private life which the war threatened to shatter. But the constant back and forth, by car or train, soon began to aggravate. ‘We lead a distracted life – one week in London, the next here,’ she wrote to her friend, the composer Ethel Smyth. ‘As you can imagine I leave there what I want here, and t’other way about.’

  London – ‘this doomed and devastated but at the same time morbidly fascinating town’ – became the site for the Woolfs’ sociability, while at Rodmell she enjoyed being able to ‘take my brain out, & fill it with books, as a sponge with water’. They crammed their days in the square with engagements: Leonard would hurry to the House of Commons to carry out his duties as secretary of the Labour Party Advisory Committee, then return to discuss with Kingsley Martin whether the New Statesman should declare in favour of peace (‘all in the know say we are beaten’). The Russian translator S. S. Koteliansky visited to rage against fascism with a vehemence that took Virginia aback (‘He gets up at 6 to listen to the BBC at 7, is obsessed – brooding alone at Acacia Road’). Over dinners in Mecklenburgh Square she and her guests darted easily between contemporary gossip (the death of Sigmund Freud, whom Woolf had met earlier in 1939, on which occasion he had given her a narcissus; her niece Angelica Bell’s scandalous affair with David Garnett, the one-time lover of her father, Duncan Grant, who himself had just sold a painting to the Queen) and animated discussions about Joseph Conrad’s servants, Thackeray’s prostitutes and Dickens’s mistresses, ‘all spoken of as if they were old friends’. One evening, T. S. Eliot, Clive Bell and Saxon Sydney-Turner came over to debate whether ‘this war means that the barbarian will gradually freeze out culture’, before wandering out in the early hours, leaving the door ajar. Virginia strolled with Elizabeth Bowen from Mecklenburgh Square through Temple and along the river to the Tower of London, then rode back again on the top of a bus, talking away about house moves, writing and the escalating tensions between Britain and Ireland. ‘A good idea; talking in many changing scenes,’ wrote Woolf, happily, that evening: ‘it changes topics & moods.’ But despite these glimmers of the old pleasures of London life, she could not long be distracted from the encroaching threat.

  Woolf admired the stoic bustle of the city, full of people ‘all set on getting the day’s work done’, but was unsettled by the ‘sense of siege being normal’ which was coming to replace the initial terror. Barrage balloons floated above the waving plane trees in the square’s garden; on the streets, pairs of soldiers in helmets and khaki greatcoats listlessly patrolled. Shops shut early and people dashed quickly between destinations, glancing anxiously around for any sign of emergency – which still didn’t come. Soon, disgruntled commentators were referring to the period – which lasted until the spring of 1940 – as the ‘Phoney War’. Many Londoners had rushed to volunteer for war service when the announcement was made, but now found themselves bored as the threatened invasion failed to materialise. One night, Virginia roused the whole house, having in her heightened state of anxiety mistaken the buzzing of two wasps in a jam jar for the urgent hum of planes overhead.

  Driving up to London, passing posters proclaiming ‘Hitler says, Now it’s on’, Virginia felt they were ‘driving open eyed into a trap’. News was scarce: the Woolfs relied on gossip from a neighbour’s nephew who worked at the War Office and on the ‘few facts’ that came nightly from the wireless. As Hitler made no move, a heated exchange of letters in the New Statesman debated whether Britain should simply ignore the war, leaving the Russians and Germans to come to terms. John Maynard Keynes argued that the left had been vociferous in demanding that Nazi aggression must be resisted at all costs, and was now being defeatist in not supporting an attack; George Bernard Shaw countered that it was folly to enter a war without knowing what one is fighting for. That Christmas, radio broadcasts expressed the tentative hope that the new year would bring peace. ‘Yes, its an empty meaningless world now,’ wrote Woolf soon after the declaration of war. ‘It seems entirely meaningless – a perfunctory slaughter, like taking a jar in one hand, a hammer in the other. Why must this be smashed? Nobody knows.’

  ‘This idea struck me,’ Woolf mused in her diary, ‘the army is the body: I am the brain. Thinking is my fighting.’ It’s a somewhat preposterous statement – showing little concern for the brains among the armed forces – but work, for Woolf, provided comfort and consistency amid the uncertainty of the Phoney War. In the mornings she would write, sitting in a low armchair in the Monk’s House living room. On her knees rested a large notebook of plain paper, laid on a plywood board with an inkstand glued to it. Strewn around her on the table and floor was an array of old nibs, used matches, crumpled envelopes and ink bottles. In the afternoons, she would type out what she had written that morning, revising as she went; long walks across the water meadows would provide intense periods of solitary rumination. She found herself able to focus on work as never before, the numbness of the first days of war giving way to a whirl of ideas – for stories, articles and books – which forced her to organise and work fast, carefully balancing the demands on her time. The Woolfs’ Sussex housekeeper, Louie Everest, recalled often hearing Virginia reciting the previous day’s sentences in her morning bath, and when she brought in the breakfast tray she would notice pencils and scraps of paper – several with the same sentence written over and over – lying around Woolf’s bed, remnants of the previous night’s work.

  Immediately after moving into Mecklenburgh Square, Woolf wrote to Raymond Mortimer, then literary editor of the New Statesman, to propose some books for review: ‘It’s best to have a job, & I don’t think I can stand aloof with comfort at the moment.’ Woolf was drawn to ‘the frying pan of journalism’ as a way of remaining engaged with the outside world, though public work brought with it the fear of negative recep
tion, and she lamented the loss of ‘my old age of independence’ in favour of the grind of ‘1,500 words by Wednesday’. But both Woolfs saw journalism as an essential means of shoring up financially. Although they benefited from substantial capital investments as well as the money they made from their own work, they still had to pay for Tavistock Square, which remained unlet, as well as even higher rent on Mecklenburgh Square. The war had driven up prices, and the Woolfs began to ration their paper, sugar and butter, and to count up the logs they had amassed from an elm tree that fell (‘This will see us through 2 winters. They say the war will last 3 years’). On 1 October 1939, Virginia told her niece Angelica that they might have to reduce the allowance they sent her: ‘Leonard says we shall be a good deal poorer, owing to taxes, not having let 52, the Press not paying etc … What a damnable curse the war is.’

  Their financial difficulties were exacerbated by the increasing pressures placed on the Hogarth Press, a longstanding and important source of income for the Woolfs. They had begun the press in 1917 in Richmond, where they had moved to provide calm for Virginia. She had experienced nervous breakdowns in 1895, 1904, 1913 and 1915, each one preceding a suicide attempt. Doctors were bewildered by her symptoms, which included headaches, racing thoughts, hallucinations, refusal to eat and fainting; any strain was a risk, and if an episode intensified, it might take weeks to dissipate. Seeking a form of manual therapy – Virginia found that repetitive tasks like typing or gardening helped her in convalescence – she and Leonard had spent £38 on type and a small printing machine which could stand on their dining table, and taught themselves to use it. ‘You can’t think how exciting, soothing, ennobling and satisfying it is,’ wrote Virginia in delight. Following a successful series of hand-bound pamphlets (starting with a volume containing a story by each of them), they quickly grew more professional and began to send their books to commercial printers – though the editorial and design work was always done in the house. By 1923, they were publishing over a dozen titles each year, including Virginia’s own books, beginning with her third novel, Jacob’s Room. From this point, relieved no longer to have to shape her work to the taste of outside editors, she considered herself ‘the only woman in England free to write what I like’. The Woolfs worked together on the press, editing, commissioning, typesetting and packing up books to be sent to reviewers and customers; Leonard kept assiduous notes of their profits, from which each of them took an allowance at the end of the year, to be spent entirely on themselves.

  The success of the Hogarth Press is testament to the strength of the Woolfs’ partnership, a marriage founded – like that of Power and Postan, or Wimsey and Vane – on a mutual commitment to freedom and to work. Though she loved her nephews and nieces, Virginia had long shied away from domestic life, seeing it as a potential threat to the intensive solitude she required for writing: aged twenty-five, she insisted that she was content to spend her life ‘a virgin, an Aunt, an authoress’. When Leonard – whom she had met through her brother Thoby – first proposed marriage in April 1912, Virginia was ambivalent. ‘As I told you brutally the other day,’ she wrote to him, ‘I feel no physical attraction in you. There are moments – when you kissed me the other day was one – when I feel no more than a rock. And yet your caring for me as you do almost overwhelms me. It is so real, and so strange.’ She was insistent that she could only possibly consider a new sort of marriage (of the type to which H. D., Sayers and Power all aspired, and that Harrison, a generation earlier, simply couldn’t conceive): ‘If you can still go on, as before, letting me find my own way, that is what would please me best; and then we must both take the risks. But you have made me very happy too. We both of us want a marriage that is a tremendous living thing, always alive, always hot, not dead and easy in parts as most marriages are. We ask a great deal of life, don’t we? Perhaps we shall get it; then, how splendid!’ Woolf’s articulation shows a fierce commitment to her freedom, even when she was aware of the challenges this unconventional marriage would present: nonetheless, she knew she could not live outside her principles – and Leonard was willing to experiment.

  The marriage went through difficulties. During an early illness Virginia refused to see Leonard for some months; she resented his insistence on rest during the time they lived in Richmond, where she felt trapped and scrutinised, while her relationship with Vita Sackville-West – which Leonard tacitly condoned – provided a flurry of erotic excitement which the marriage did not have. Yet Woolf never considered leaving Leonard; he anchored her, and offered routine and safety in times of turbulence. During her affair with Vita, she wrote movingly of the comforting ‘dailiness’ of their marriage, the small joys of a shared life and the contentment of their complete trust in one another. And the dynamics of their relationship were echoed in the Hogarth Press – which turned their marital home into an egalitarian workplace, where Virginia wrote her books surrounded by the printing paraphernalia that would bring them to the public, and the secretaries and managers the Woolfs had hired to support them. When others recalled their relationship, they mainly spoke of Leonard’s steady devotion to Virginia, and his determination to protect her from anything that could disrupt the fragile equilibrium she required to write. By 1939, their relationship had mellowed into an affectionate co-dependency that reassured them both: ‘their bonds were very close indeed,’ wrote John Lehmann, their neighbour in Mecklenburgh Square and partner in the Hogarth Press, ‘as anyone who had observed them together would testify.’

  Lehmann had joined the press as manager in 1931, aged twenty-four. A university friend of Virginia’s nephew Julian Bell, Lehmann brought Hogarth in touch with a new generation of poets – among them Stephen Spender, Louis MacNeice, Cecil Day Lewis and W. H. Auden – lambasting the futile devastation of war, the economic violence of the precarious peace, and the hypocrisy of social convention. In 1932, frustrated with Leonard’s controlling attitude to the business, he walked out (‘That egotistical young man with all his jealousies & vanities & ambitions,’ raged Virginia) but in January 1938 he returned and bought a half-share in the press for £3,000, becoming managing editor alongside Leonard, while Virginia retired to a position on the advisory board in order to spend more time on her writing. Lehmann was more entrepreneurial than the Woolfs, and was keen for their publishing programme to engage meaningfully with contemporary politics, to publish a wider range of international voices (building on its Russian connections) and to establish Mecklenburgh Square as a bastion of culture in a beleaguered world. From his second-floor back room at number 45 – which he had decorated with maps of the old Austro-Hungarian Empire – Lehmann worked on his magazine, New Writing, which he had founded in 1936 to ‘create a laboratory where the writers of the future may experiment’, and to set writing by his own generation, who had come of age after the First World War, alongside international luminaries such as Boris Pasternak and Bertolt Brecht.

  Leonard Woolf and John Lehmann at the Hogarth Press

  In the first days of the war, the doorways to London bookshops were blocked up by sandbags, and sales plummeted. After a few weeks, Leonard sent Lehmann on a tour of the country to gauge the mood among booksellers, who proved optimistic about Christmas trade, forecasting a renewed enthusiasm for reading while other entertainments ceased in the blackout. But in March 1940, the government implemented Paper Control, limiting publishers’ paper consumption to 60 per cent of the previous year’s usage. After urgent confabulations in Mecklenburgh Square, the press decided to use its allotted stocks to keep steady sellers in print – Virginia’s novels, the poetry of Rilke, the complete works of Freud, which Hogarth had been the first to bring into English translation – and retain enough paper for the eventuality of a surprise bestseller, and also for new books by existing authors, to avoid losing them to bigger publishers. The first novel Hogarth published from its Mecklenburgh Square address was Henry Green’s Party Going, a portrait of Bright Young Things stranded at Victoria station when a thick fog halts all transport; the
ir nervous imprisonment conjures something of the uneasy limbo of the wait for war. But Virginia Woolf had stepped back from the operations of Hogarth, and the works of the press were a diverting backdrop to her London life: in her upstairs room, while Leonard and Lehmann debated downstairs about the future of European literature and politics, she was thinking back over her past.

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  Woolf’s fiction is populated by characters whose sense of self is uncertain, their inner lives at odds with the personae they present to the outside world. Many of her characters feel isolated from those around them, unable to see beneath the surface of others’ behaviour or reveal their own thoughts: in Night and Day, Katharine Hilbery is struck, looking at her fiancé, by ‘the infinite loneliness of human beings’; Rhoda in The Waves feels ‘alone in a hostile world’; Lily Briscoe in To the Lighthouse wonders ‘how … did one know one thing or another thing about people, sealed as they were?’ and resigns herself to understanding others by ‘the outline, not the detail’. Woolf loved to watch and analyse the people around her, both strangers and friends. (‘Observe perpetually,’ she enjoined in one of her last diary entries, quoting Henry James.) Yet she was always aware that perceptions can be unreliable.

  Throughout her life, Woolf engaged in an examination of the problems and potentials of biography. Like H. D., she turned parts of her own life into fiction, with episodes from her diary and letters recurring, in various forms, in her novels. She kept a diary on and off from the age of fourteen until her death, ripe with caustic portraits of her friends and acquaintances (regularly jotted down the minute guests had left), though often reticent on significant aspects of her private life, such as her illnesses. As she grew older, she was increasingly aware that her diary might be mined by future biographers for juicy revelations about herself and her eminent contemporaries (‘Which of our friends will interest posterity most? Maynard?’ she asked in January 1940), and spent a good deal of time reading other diarists – Francis Kilvert, André Gide, Augustus Hare – and pondering how to order her reflections. She published spoof biographies of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s dog Flush and of the fictional, slippery Orlando, whose personality and gender shift as time passes, the biographer chasing her subject across the centuries in a futile attempt to pin them down.