Square Haunting

by Francesca Wade

  As Woolf recalled her earliest childhood, the images which swam to the surface of her mind were moments of burning emotion, often little more than the deep impression of a colour, a sound, a chink of light. She called these ‘moments of being’, which punctuate the ‘non-being’ that is the vast majority of unremembered life. But these hazy visions, strangely timeless and often located in nature, soon faded in Woolf’s mind as her memories became more distinct: she began to consider that these represented a brief time before social forces began to shape her. In 1895, when Virginia was thirteen, her mother Julia had died from rheumatic fever, a tragedy followed two years later by the death of another mother-figure to Virginia and Vanessa, their half-sister Stella. Having to conform to the expectations of a mourning daughter was Virginia’s first experience of a disconnect between her inner and outer self: she and her siblings had to ‘act parts that we did not feel; to fumble for words that we did not know’, while their memories of their mother faded. Now, under the strict eye of her father, ‘the pressures of Victorian society’ weighed upon Virginia: her behaviour was governed by a strict set of precepts which dictated what she wore, how her day was divided, which rooms she spent time in, what ambitions she might hold. No longer was Virginia simply a person, receiving impressions of the world as they came to her: she was becoming a woman, and learning her place.

  Woolf had remained obsessed by her mother’s memory until she wrote To the Lighthouse: ‘I suppose,’ she now concluded, ‘that I did for myself what psycho-analysts do for their patients. I expressed some very long felt and deeply felt emotion. And in expressing it I explained it and then laid it to rest.’ But for years after that she found herself at odd moments arguing in her mind with her father, who had died in 1904. When in 1939 she began to read Freud, she instantly understood ‘that this violently disturbing conflict of love and hate is a common feeling; and is called ambivalence’. The discovery unlocked a surge of emotion. Just as Freud’s provocation had shed new light on H. D.’s vulnerability to male influence, his work now convinced Woolf that she needed to confront her father through writing, and in the process to puncture the authority he still somehow held over her. It was not the first time that she had written about him: Woolf’s first experience of biography had been a dutiful daughterly contribution to her cousin-by-marriage Frederic Maitland’s 1906 The Life and Letters of Leslie Stephen, an example of the solemn Victorian panegyric that Woolf came to mistrust. That early work was a flowery portrait of her father, emphasising his public work as editor of the Dictionary of National Biography and historian of unitarian philosophers – research which Stephen himself, not imagining his daughter might have other plans, had once suggested Virginia might continue after his death. Stella’s husband, Jack Hills, had warned Virginia, at that time, not to publish ‘anything too intimate’; like the austere George Frederic Watts portrait of her father that hung at Hyde Park Gate – exactly the sort of old-fashioned art the post-Impressionists railed against – this first biography displayed Stephen in a single pose, as a perfect example of an eminent Victorian gentleman.

  But in ‘A Sketch of the Past’, Woolf began to construct a modern portrait, focusing on her father’s domestic life, and the effects on his daughters of his ‘violent temper’. Maitland had delicately sidestepped Leslie’s rages by referring obliquely to his ‘pretty shower of coloured sparks’ – but Woolf writes, much more frankly, of the ‘tyrannical’ self-absorption he displayed at home after Julia’s death, which made Virginia feel ‘like being shut up in the same cage with a wild beast’. Had he lived to old age, she wrote, ‘his life would have entirely ended mine. What would have happened? No writing, no books; – inconceivable.’ Woolf had written before, in sketches for the Memoir Club, about the ‘Greek slave years’ that followed her mother’s death, when her socially ambitious half-brothers (‘who had so innate a respect for the conventions and respectabilities’) dragged her and Vanessa to endless society parties in an attempt to find them sophisticated matches, while she sat in a corner and refused to engage in polite conversation. Their escape to Bloomsbury, where they no longer had to perform as ‘young ladies’ but could begin to remake themselves as they desired, was – she now wrote – an essential act of rebellion. A new life, in a new house, had given Woolf the confidence to start to write: decades later, she found that in addressing her father she could shake off that ‘tremendous encumbrance of appearance and behaviour’ that her upbringing had instilled within her.

  Woolf’s major project across her fiction, as well as in her political writing, was to break down these conventions and offer new ways of expressing the self. In her fiction, she had always been interested in the effects on people when their own desires – to paint, to work, to marry – conflict with what society expects; her own life had been a process of unlearning the rules of Victorian society that were supposed to have dictated her future. She decided that her memoir would interrogate the ‘invisible presences’ – gender, public opinion, social status, other people and what they ‘say and think’ – which work on one subconsciously from outside, pulling one in different directions and creating a gap between one’s outer presentation (which Woolf called ‘the fictitious VW whom I carry like a mask about the world’) and the private self. ‘One’s life,’ wrote Woolf in ‘A Sketch of the Past’, ‘is not confined to one’s body and what one says or does; one is living all the time in relation to certain background rods or conceptions.’ Woolf’s memoir is a call for a world where women are free to invent themselves, not forced to follow the preassigned roles and cultural scripts which impose a certain form on their lives. She never finished the project, and it’s not certain whether she would have intended it for publication. (The surviving manuscript, of around eighty pages, was published posthumously in 1976.) But this private writing entertained and comforted her during this difficult year in Mecklenburgh Square. Not only did it provide her with a ‘fidget ground’ amid the external tension; it also let Woolf feel that, finally, she was following her own exhortation in A Room of One’s Own to ‘kill the angel in the house’ and describe, openly, ‘the passions which it was unfitting for her as a woman to say’. Her post-Impressionist autobiography is itself a form of resistance, a way of writing the self which privileges the private, inner world where, throughout time, women’s lives have been lived.

  *

  The winter of 1939–40 was one of the coldest on record; the electricity at Monk’s House failed and the Woolfs had to cook on the open fire, sleep in mufflers and go without baths, as the pipes were iced up. ‘I’m using this frozen pause to confront a long last grind at RF,’ Virginia wrote to Ethel Smyth. ‘Then it’ll be done, but goodness knows when. The family has to pass it. Endless objections I foresee.’ On 9 February 1940 she wrote that, ‘though of course I shall get the black shivers when I reread let alone submit to Nessa & Margery, I can’t help thinking I’ve caught a good deal of that iridescent man in my oh so laborious butterfly net’. Two days later, she felt that ‘the authentic glow of finishing a book is on me’, and that week completed Roger Fry at Mecklenburgh Square. John Lehmann recalled that from that point on Woolf was transformed: ‘radiant and buoyant, full of teasing malice and the keenest interest in what her friends were doing, and finding a startling new beauty in London – the squares and side-streets in the black-out on a clear night’.

  Virginia Woolf in the garden at Monk’s House, 1926.

  Leonard read the manuscript while Virginia was in bed with influenza, and when she emerged he hauled her to the meadows for a ‘very severe lecture’, protesting that the book felt dull and dead. Knowing Virginia’s vulnerability, his decision to be so honest with his criticism shows how seriously he took his responsibilities as his wife’s publisher, determined to set feeling aside as he pushed Virginia to do her best work. And Virginia was surprised to find herself not upset but impressed by his passion: ‘so definite, so emphatic, that I felt convinced: I mean of failure; save for one odd gleam, that he was himself on th
e wrong tack, & persisting for some deep reason – dissympathy with R.? Lack of interest in personality?’ But then Vanessa sent a note: ‘I’m crying can’t thank you’, before coming to tea and forbidding her sister to change a word. Margery Fry also approved the book, writing ‘it’s him … unbounded admiration’, though she also sent ‘some 100 corrections; all to be entered; some to be contrived’, which infuriated Virginia: ‘all the detail that seems to the non-writer so easy (“just to add this about Joan &c”) & to me is torture’. On 10 June 1940, she sent off the corrected page proofs, delighted to be ‘free’ of the book and satisfied ‘to have given Nessa back her Roger’. She wrote in her diary that she was ‘rather proud of having done a solid work’. But she looked forward to writing once more ‘entirely to please myself’.

  After the book was published, Woolf received a disgruntled letter from Vita’s son Benedict Nicolson. Nicolson told her that he was struck, on reading the biography, by the ‘fools paradise’ in which Roger and his friends had lived, and suggested that Fry had ‘shut himself out from all disagreeable actualities and allowed the spirit of Nazism to grow without taking any steps to check it’. Woolf, her loyalty stirred, rejected Nicolson’s observation in strong terms. Fry’s mission, she sharply reminded him, had been to encourage more people, from all walks of life, to enjoy art, bringing to their appreciation not expert knowledge but an open mind. She had always admired Fry’s belief that art was important not for its value or its historical context but for the empathy it could inspire; wasn’t teaching others to see, think and feel, she argued, ‘the best way of checking Nazism?’ In her biography, she had emphasised Fry’s forbearance during the First World War, and his determination to make his Omega Workshops ‘a centre in which some kind of civilised society might find a lodging’, employing conscientious objectors, producing pacifist plays and holding concerts in aid of Belgian refugees. Fry’s studio, wrote Woolf, was ‘an arsenal where he forged the only weapons that are effective in the fight against the enemy’: free thought and open expression. If they should both survive this war, she asked, would Nicolson give up his job as an art critic and take to politics? ‘I,’ she added, ‘shall be too old to do anything but write.’

  Nicolson was part of a generation, alongside John Lehmann, Julian Bell and the new Hogarth poets, who consciously distinguished themselves from their elders by the urgency of their engagement with the chaos around them, and their determination to act on their principles, not simply write about them. Woolf followed their work with interest, and was broadly supportive of their ideas, though bristled somewhat at the implication that she and her friends were now the old guard, perceived as out of touch and faintly embarrassing. When Nicolson wrote back to insist that his quarrel was not with art but with Bloomsbury’s elitism and listless detachment from real-world concerns, Woolf objected vehemently. Following a calculated jibe at Nicolson’s own academic career at Eton and Oxford, she reminded him of her work with the People’s Suffrage Federation, teaching literature to working-class students at Morley College and chairing the Richmond branch of the pacifist Co-operative Women’s Guild, as well as publishing books with Hogarth and doing her best ‘to make them reach a far wider circle than a little private circle of exquisite and cultivated people’. ‘Leonard too is Bloomsbury,’ she wrote, her indignation fuelling a spate of rhetorical flourishes. ‘He has spent half his life in writing books like International Government, like the Barbarians at the Gate, like Empire and Commerce, to prevent the growth of Nazism; and to create a League of Nations. Maynard Keynes is Bloomsbury. He wrote the Consequences of the Peace. Lytton Strachey was Bloomsbury. His books had a very large circulation and certainly influenced a wider circle than any small group. Duncan has made a living ever since he was a boy by painting. These are facts about Bloomsbury and they do seem to me to prove that they have done their very best to make humanity in the mass appreciate what they knew and saw.’

  But this accusation of a lack of class consciousness stung Woolf more deeply than her critics might have expected. It was not the first time she had been chastised for failing adequately to interrogate systemic injustice. In his editorial to the February 1940 issue of Horizon, Cyril Connolly had attacked Woolf, Joyce and Proust as ‘ivory towerdwellers’, claiming that recent Marxist criticism of their work had ‘set fire to a lot of rotten timber’. Throughout this year, she exchanged letters with a Huddersfield millworker named Agnes Smith, who had read Three Guineas and wrote to complain that Woolf seemed to ‘consider working women and the daughters of educated men as a race apart’. Woolf’s replies haven’t survived, but she evidently responded to Smith’s challenges seriously, and the pair corresponded for some time on friendly terms; when Smith pointed out that she might herself have written Three Guineas had she received access to books, stimulating conversation and economic freedom, Woolf urged Smith to publish her autobiography with the Hogarth Press. At one point Smith suggested Virginia might like to swap houses for a week, chuckling at the prospect of luxuriating at Monk’s House or Mecklenburgh Square while Mrs Woolf shivered in her tiny kitchen. Woolf had always believed that art was inherently political, but was now forced to confront the uncomfortable truth that her way of life was undeniably the product of inherited privilege, and not necessarily compatible with a commitment to class solidarity.

  She picked up these themes in her lecture ‘The Leaning Tower’, delivered to the Workers’ Educational Association at Brighton on 27 April 1940 and subsequently published in New Writing. There, she praised the new generation of writers working ‘under the influence of change, under the threat of war’ for their commitment to a widening perspective. Insisting that ‘the novel of a classless and towerless world should be a better novel than the old novel’, she ended her lecture with a call for ‘a stronger, more varied literature’, a tribute to public libraries and a demand for a system of free national education, to ensure that in future literature may be open to all, not just ‘a small class of well-to-do men who have only a pinch, a thimbleful of experience to give us’. ‘Let us trespass at once,’ she declared, including herself – somewhat tactlessly – in the realm of the excluded. ‘Literature is no one’s private ground; literature is common ground. It is not cut up into nations; there are no wars there. Let us trespass freely and fearlessly and find our own way for ourselves. It is thus that English literature will survive this war and cross the gulf – if commoners and outsiders like ourselves make that country our own country, if we teach ourselves how to read and write, how to preserve, and how to create.’ It was a stirring speech. But Woolf left Brighton anxious that the audience had not enjoyed it, that ‘it was hopeless for me to tell people who had been taken away from school at the age of 14 that they must read Shakespeare’. All the same, she remained convinced, as Fry had been, that the participation in the arts by people from all classes was essential for the survival of society. That belief – that this generation needed to lay the groundwork for a new and more equal order in Europe after the war – would be central to the projects to which she now turned her mind.

  *

  In Sussex, life continued much as ever before. Out on the Downs, Virginia ‘lay under a cornstalk & looked at the empty land & the pinkish clouds in a perfect blue summer afternoon sky. Not a sound. Workmen discussing war on the road – one for it, one against. So to bowls.’ Leonard made a rock garden, planted violets under the apple tree and attempted to resuscitate hedgehogs drowned in the lily pond; Virginia ate homemade bread (her culinary speciality) with yellow butter sent in the post from Vita at Sissinghurst, and tried to cook without saucepans, since Leonard had donated all theirs to make aeroplanes. Throughout these months Woolf experienced a disconcerting – almost ‘treasonable’ – feeling of private contentment amid the desolation elsewhere. ‘Its so hot and sunny on our little island – L gardening, playing bowls, cooking our dinner: and outside such a waste of gloom,’ she wrote to Vita. She contrasted herself with her brother-in-law Clive Bell, who had glumly admitted he
could hardly bear to live through the war: ‘We privately are so content. Bliss day after day … No feeling of patriotism.’

  But this contentment, to Woolf’s dismay, was limited to the time she spent in Sussex. ‘This diary might be divided into London diary & country. I think there is a division,’ she wrote in February 1940. Her frantic long weekends in Mecklenburgh Square, packed with business and social engagements, were increasingly stressful: she found that she needed the ‘protected shell’ of Monk’s House in order to get serious writing done, and that the ‘incessant interruption’ of visits to London was leaving her mind ‘in a torn state’. ‘You never escape the war in London,’ she wrote in her diary, finding that she could barely remember the city in peace. In a sketch titled ‘London in War’, she commented on the eeriness and disorientation of living in the city under siege: ‘Everybody is feeling the same thing: therefore no one is feeling anything in particular. The individual is merged in the mob.’ In Rodmell, conversely, she found she appreciated the comforting routine of the village, where ‘everyone does the same thing at the same hour’. As she wrote her memoirs, she lovingly recalled the excitement of first moving to Bloomsbury, and the thrill of those days in Gordon or Brunswick or Tavistock Squares, where houses were open and crowded with friends, the telephone constantly ringing, everyone brimming with radical ideas and possibilities. Now, walking the streets was a continual danger, maintaining the house a draining responsibility, the city ruled by an atmosphere of silence and suspicion. London, she wrote, ‘has become merely a congeries of houses lived in by people who work. There is no society, no luxury no splendour no gadding & flitting. All is serious & concentrated. It is as if the song had stopped – the melody, the necessary the voluntary. Odd if this should be the end of town life.’