The undercurrent to her recollections of happier times was her on-going discomfort in Mecklenburgh Square, where the physical threat of destruction was mirrored by Woolf’s gnawing sense of disassociation from her old friends and her past. She wrote that ‘no friends write or ring up’; a ‘skeleton’ meeting of the Memoir Club, held at Vanessa’s home, Charleston, that summer, was sparsely attended, while Woolf anxiously wound herself up to believe her friendship with Elizabeth Bowen was over when Bowen failed to reply instantly to a note. Whether as a symptom or a result of the tension Woolf felt in her new house, she found it difficult to concentrate there on her main projects. She mused in a notebook that she could only remember her past when the present ‘runs so smoothly that it is like the sliding surface of a deep river’, so that one ‘sees through the surface to the depths’. The disturbance of leaving Tavistock Square for Mecklenburgh, combined with the shift of her main home from London to Rodmell, left her anxious that she would never be able to focus her memory for long enough to complete her memoirs. ‘For this reason – that it destroys the fullness of life – any break – like that of house moving – causes me extreme distress; it breaks; it shallows; it turns the depth into hard thin splinters. As I say to L: “What’s there real about this? Shall we ever live a real life again?” “At Monk’s House,” he says.’
In contrast, the Sussex landscape seemed to signal resistance by its stubborn refusal to change. Smoking on the terrace while the owls hooted from the trees, or walking over the frosty marshes in her nightgown at sunrise, habitation suggested only by the lights in occasional windows, Woolf reflected that all was ‘silent, as if offered from another world. No birds, no carts, men shooting. This specimen against the war. This heartless & perfect beauty.’ Elizabeth Bowen, who visited Monk’s House in June 1940, wrote to Virginia that ‘I don’t think I’d ever imagined a place or people in which or with whom one felt so perfectly happy.’ In Rodmell, Woolf felt free and peaceful, able to relax and almost forget the war. Partly, this state of calm was a result of their immunity from unexpected visitors. (She quarrelled with her sister when Vanessa recommended that Roger Fry’s former partner, Helen Anrep, should take a house in Rodmell; Virginia was furious at the encroachment on her private territory, and wrote to Ethel: ‘Why does this annoy me more than the war?’) But it was also thanks to the privacy the Woolfs had, at Monk’s House, from their domestic servants, a longstanding source of anxiety for Woolf.
Like most born into Victorian middle-class families, Woolf had always shared her homes with servants, who slept ‘below stairs’ or in the attic, kept at the house’s extremities just as they were meant to remain, silent and discreet, at the very edges of their employers’ vision. As she worked on ‘A Sketch of the Past’, Woolf recalled the maids at 22 Hyde Park Gate, and guiltily wondered, if the house had seemed to her a prison, how they had coped there. At the time, she had hardly noticed them. At Hyde Park Gate, access to space was directly related to relative power within the household: servants skulked in the ‘dark, insanitary’ basement, while Leslie Stephen’s library, known as ‘the brain of the house’, was a large room on the top floor, where the thud of books tossed to the floor would resound in the nursery below. When Virginia and her siblings moved to Gordon Square, they were accompanied by two servants, whose presence rendered the move just about respectable to the Stephens’ scandalised relations. Shortly before she moved to 38 Brunswick Square, defying all convention by sharing a house with three unmarried men, Woolf wrote breezily to Ottoline Morrell that ‘we are going to try all kinds of experiments’; but in the very next line, without noting any incongruity, she added that, of course, ‘if you have a house you must have servants’. While Woolf and her friends prided themselves on rejecting conformity in their household arrangements, Sophie Farrell was still living in the basement and Maud Chart at the top of the house, cooking and cleaning for the socialists discussing sexual liberation in the living room.
But over time, Woolf became increasingly uncomfortable at the irony of arguing for women’s economic and emotional liberation while her own freedom to write was contingent on the labour of lower-class dependants. She had always fought to be equal with her brothers, to renounce the shackles of conventional domesticity and make her voice heard in public – but living alongside female servants (some doting, others truculent) reminded her daily that she remained complicit in the very power structures she sought to critique. Their physical presence in her home (which was also, of course, their home, as well as their workplace) made her conscious that her freedom had limits: her responsibilities to them made her anxious, and her dependence on their labour left her feeling infantilised. Guilt mingled with anger, frustration with shame.
In her famous 1924 essay ‘Character in Fiction’, Woolf had argued that the dawning of a new age could be seen in the changing relations between mistress and servant; in Victorian houses, servants hid quietly in their separate quarters, but in modern homes they mingled much more freely, breezing into the parlour to borrow a newspaper or ask advice about a hat. But while Woolf approved, in theory, of the barriers between classes beginning to erode, she privately hated the feeling of being watched. She regularly fantasised about living a ‘nomadic life’ without the material trappings of household maintenance. And at Rodmell, over the 1930s, she and Leonard took practical steps to realise this vision. Throughout her life, Woolf used the royalties from her books to renovate her living spaces into environments where her work could thrive. When A Room of One’s Own sold twenty-two thousand copies in six months, she used the proceeds to commission a new room at Monk’s House, detached from the main building and accessible only from the garden. Other successes paid for new lavatories, an electric fire, a mains water system and an oil stove, a labour-saving device which to Woolf represented sublime release from domestic drudgery. ‘At this moment it is cooking my dinner in the glass dishes perfectly I hope,’ she wrote in glee, ‘without smell, waste, or confusion: one turns handles, there is a thermometer. And so I see myself freer, more independent – & all one’s life is a struggle for freedom – able to come down here with a chop in a bag & live on my own.’
The fantasy of living completely without servants never became reality – Woolf’s enjoyment of cooking did not extend to cleaning – but after 1934, the Woolfs no longer had live-in servants at Monk’s House. That year, they bought a small cottage in the village – next door to one they had already bought for their gardener – and advertised for a cook-housekeeper who would receive rent-free accommodation in addition to a salary. It was an expensive solution, and not one which addressed the underlying inequality of the servant system, but it made a significant difference to Woolf’s state of mind. Louie Everest, who took the job, worked at the house until lunchtime (leaving the evening meal pre-prepared), and the rest of the day Woolf would bask in the quiet: ‘all so heavenly free & easy – L & I alone’. Now that they were spending more time in Rodmell than ever before, Woolf resented returning to Mecklenburgh Square and the ‘terrors and constrictions’ of working alongside their live-in servant Mabel, with the Hogarth staff bustling around downstairs and visitors liable to interrupt. After the stress of a visit to London, it was a joy to return to Monk’s House and experience ‘the divine relief’ of ‘silence alone with L … peace – my private peace – restored’.
Woolf often complained that the countryside provided none of the excitement of London, and spoke scornfully of the ‘contraction’ of life she felt there: ‘There is no echo in Rodmell – only waste air.’ But without the stimulus of social life, she found she could retreat into her imagination: ‘take a turn on the terrace, throw away my cigarette & go in to more rambling & discursive sauntering over all the countries of the mind’. And the more time she spent in the country, the more she came to see that the village might, after all, provide her with subject and inspiration. ‘One of the charms of Rodmell is the human life,’ Woolf wrote in 1920. She had always remained mostly on Rodmell’s outskirts, an
observer rather than a participant in its community. But as the war confined her more and more to the countryside, Woolf became, somewhat awkwardly, involved in village activity. To some extent, the war had levelled class boundaries: Woolf bumped into her neighbours collecting identical rations from the local shop, participated in first-aid classes in the knowledge that the bombs would choose their victims indiscriminately, joined the committee constructing the air-raid shelter and attended sessions in the village hall to learn how to escape from burning buildings.
Though she had been coming to the village for twenty years, Woolf had always stopped short of joining the very active local branch of the Women’s Institute. This had been established in 1915 as an offshoot of the Agricultural Organisation Society, and aimed to bring rural women together to socialise and contribute to the war effort; by 1918 it was a flourishing independent organisation, with groups meeting across the country. With its motto (‘For Home and Country’) revealing its emphasis on domestic tradition and patriotic fervour, the WI was a very different community from the antinationalist Outsiders’ Society Woolf imagined in Three Guineas. But in the summer of 1940, the branch president – the ‘very determined, socially minded’ Mrs Chavasse – decided that all local talent needed to be mobilised to take women’s minds off the war, and deputised Woolf’s neighbour Diana Gardner to solicit her membership. Gardner was anxious about the assignment: having read and admired Three Guineas, she knew that Virginia Woolf ‘did not believe in belonging to any group or society’, and doubted that the great writer would be interested in the ‘simple unintellectual gathering at the draughty village hall’. On the doorstep, Woolf initially resisted, uncomfortable that the Rodmell WI was run by middle-class women rather than the wives of farm labourers who made up the majority of the membership. But Gardner assured Woolf that the WI was ‘dedicatedly democratic’, and was surprised and delighted when she agreed to join.
‘I can’t give you all the gossip of Rodmell, because it would need a ream,’ Woolf wrote in May 1940 to her niece Judith Stephen. ‘We’re acting village plays; written by the gardener’s wife, and the chauffeur’s wife; and acted by the other villagers.’ She drew the line at contributing a script herself, though she was involved in the production of plays by two other members – including a daring airraid comedy titled ‘False Alarm’ – which were performed in August. Woolf was bothered by these plays, which seemed to her to be conventional parodies of middle-class manners; she wished the authors would speak in their own voices. Furthermore, she was frustrated that these working-class women didn’t seem fired up by social injustice, and felt distinctly uncomfortable that, rather than demanding to hold her class advantages to account, as Agnes Smith had done, they seemed to be in awe of her and meekly grateful for her presence among them.
Woolf’s relationship with the WI was always ambivalent, her theoretical instinct towards class solidarity – manifested in ‘The Leaning Tower’ – often at odds with her private sensibilities. She wrote bitterly in her diary that ‘My contribution to the war is the sacrifice of pleasure: I’m bored: bored & appalled by the readymade commonplaces of these plays: which they cant act unless we help.’ These cruel private outbursts are some of the most scathing in Woolf’s diaries, and are difficult to read: her vitriol at ‘the minds so cheap, compared with ours, like a bad novel’; her sneering at her servant for taking ‘this infernal dull bore seriously’; her regret that by spending so little time in London they had ‘exchanged the clever for the simple’. But this snobbish sense of superiority – never publicly expressed – is intermingled with shy hints of her pleasure at being included: Woolf wrote in November 1940 that the village ‘now has become familiar & even friendly’. That month she was appointed treasurer of the WI, her election reported in the East Sussex News. She enjoyed exaggerating her rural credentials to her London friends, hinting at the ‘violent quarrels’ and ‘incessant intrigues’ of village life and claiming that she and Leonard are ‘thought red hot revolutionaries because the Labour Party meets in our dining room’. Woolf’s awareness of her hypocrisy does not excuse it. But her uneasy relationship with the WI speaks to Woolf’s deep-seated anxiety about her own social position, only accentuated by the strain of maintaining parallel lives in two very different places.
She struggled with the demands of sociability now imposed on her country as well as her city life. (‘The WI party tomorrow. My old dislike of the village bites at me. I envy houses alone in the fields.’) Nonetheless, whether out of enthusiasm or guilt, she made the effort to petition her friends to come and speak at meetings, and personally made the arrangements for the projection of lantern slides, motoring into Lewes in search of a suitable ‘Epi-dia-scope’. Leonard lectured on a Wednesday evening on ‘causes and issues of the war’, Vita gave a talk on Persia to ‘20 old ladies in black bonnets’, and Woolf’s niece Angelica (who was studying acting at the London Studio Theatre) was hauled in to speak on modern drama. Virginia herself addressed a meeting, in July 1940, with a lively reminiscence of the Dreadnought Hoax of 1910, in which she and several friends had gone to Weymouth in disguise as an Abyssinian prince and his entourage, and received a tour of Britain’s premier battleship. The security breach had leaked to the Daily Mirror, prompting questions in the House of Commons, to the horror of Woolf’s relations. Her choice of subject was subversive in this context: this sending-up of authority and Empire sat uncomfortably within a meeting preceded by a chorus of ‘Jerusalem’, where the rulebook stated that nothing which ‘might cause friction or lead to serious difference’ should be discussed. But Woolf’s talk emphasised the fun of the performance – rummaging through the wares of a theatrical costumier in Garrick Street, spending the day cramming from a Swahili grammar, the fear of their moustaches blowing off in the wind or drinks dissolving their make-up. The audience was left ‘nearly helpless with laughter’. Woolf slipped out before the celebratory tea, but was secretly pleased with the experience. ‘I spoke to the Women’s Institute yesterday about the Dreadnought hoax,’ she wrote to Ethel Smyth. ‘And it made them laugh. Dont you think this proves, beyond a doubt, that I have a heart?’
*
If Woolf was not drawn to the WI for its social or creative stimulation, her involvement speaks to her increasing desire at this time to feel part of a wider community, to cross class barriers and live in accordance with the principles she had set out in ‘The Leaning Tower’. She had long sought independence, but this didn’t mean she necessarily enjoyed isolation: complete individuality, she had written in Three Guineas’s closing lines, ‘has by itself alone no meaning or importance at all. It takes on meaning only in becoming a part of the general life.’ Contemplating the ‘severance that war seems to bring’, Woolf wrote in her diary that she now found solace in ‘the community feeling: all England thinking the same thing – this horror of war – at the same moment. Never felt it so strong before.’ Rodmell’s landscape and social life had come to signify a welcome permanence in the midst of uncertainty; there, Woolf began to reflect on the idea of community as a potential salvation in the midst of chaos. In her diary, two years earlier, she had made a cryptic note: ‘“I” rejected: “We” substituted.’ In The Waves she had explored the idea of writing through a shared consciousness, but now – sitting between the cook and the gardener at Labour Party meetings – she began to consider how this polyphonic form could take on more political urgency. An idea for a new novel began to brew: set in an English village where war threatens, where characters stand together in a chorus, yet are absorbed by private fantasies, where amateur theatricals represent an abiding continuity of Englishness, and where aeroplanes circle menacingly overhead.
‘Wasnt it my conscientious grind at The Years that killed it?’ Woolf asked in September 1939, vowing to take a break from endlessly rewriting single sentences of Roger Fry. ‘I’m brain fagged & must resist the desire to tear up & cross out – must fill my mind with air & light, & walk & blanket it in fog.’ As she contemplated embarking on
a new project, anxious about taking on the ‘huge burden’ of a knotty narrative again after The Years, Woolf decided its form would need to provide an antidote to the ‘grind’ of structuring Roger Fry: to be ‘random & tentative’, and incorporate all sorts of forms including poetry and drama. She worked on this novel sporadically through 1939, and more concentratedly from May 1940, delighted to be writing ‘to amuse myself’, and at the ‘relief of fiction after all that fact … And I feel so free from any criticism; own no authority.’ The resulting novel, Between the Acts, takes place over the course of a June day in 1939, at a family home in a ‘remote village in the very heart of England’. The house has stood unchanged for centuries, its inhabitants existing within a reassuringly permanent natural landscape: jam is made from the apricot trees planted by a previous generation, conversation is peppered with ancient folklore and superstition, and each year the same flock of swallows returns, dancing ‘to the unheard rhythm of their own wild hearts’. Yet tensions simmer beneath the surface. The novel’s imagery is full of foreboding, the peace liable to vanish at any moment like snippets of conversation misheard or declarations tossed to the wind. The newspapers bring rumblings of Europe ‘bristling with guns, poised with planes’, and the characters feel ‘the doom of sudden death hanging over us’. In the house is preserved a family heirloom: a watch, its face shattered during the Battle of Waterloo and its hands frozen in time. History progresses, the book suggests, but the lessons of the past cannot be disregarded.
Square Haunting Page 31