by Lauren Elkin
Twenty years old is like forty, that way. The person we’re losing always feels like the last person who’ll want us. We’re always staring off the edge of the cliff, even before the lined face and the grey hair. It’s just that when we’re twenty, we can’t imagine how much more desperate things can get.
I’ll never meet anyone else who’ll love me like he did, my student said. Thank God for that, I tried not to answer.
Northern line to Tottenham Court Road Station, up Tottenham Court Road, past the Carphone Warehouse, past Boots, past the massive Pret (you could be anywhere in London, anywhere in Britain), right on Bedford Avenue, anyone’s guess from there
LONDON
BLOOMSBURY
Also London itself perpetually attracts, stimulates, gives me a play & a story & a poem, without any trouble, save that of moving my legs through the streets.
– Virginia Woolf, Diary, 31 May 1928
I’m standing on Bloomsbury Street, but on Google Maps it’s called Bedford Square.
Inspecting the yellow London streets criss-crossing the small square screen of my BlackBerry, I click ‘search map’. I type ‘Bloomsbury Street’. The search box suggests alternatives. Did you mean Bloomsbury Way? Or Bloomsbury Square? it asks. It wants to be helpful. It isn’t. The blue dot blinks on a corner that is, from all evidence, not the one I’m on. I can’t narrow the distance between where I am and where I need to be because I’m not where the map thinks I am. But what if I’m not where I think I am? Where am I? It’s a smartphone-prompted existential crisis. Where has Oxford Street gone? Where has north gone? As I make turn after turn, the map on the phone and the streets before me diverge in a proliferation of nearly identical names: Bedford Square, Bedford Avenue, Bedford Court Mansions. This is why I’m now standing on Bloomsbury Bedford Street Square Way, in a hyper-aware state of confusion. The slightest clue seems meaningful, but what it means, there’s no way of knowing. I think of a famous 1922 talk Virginia Woolf gave to her friends in their Memoir Club, in which she asks, ‘where does Bloomsbury end? What is Bloomsbury? Does it for instance include Bedford Square?’1 As far as I can tell, all of Bloomsbury is contained within Bedford Square, from which there is no escaping.
This is a neighbourhood I thought I knew. I’ve walked down Tottenham Court Road many, many times. But today I’ve encountered an unexpected amount of construction, and I’m thrown. They are building something very deep in the bowels of the city, and up here, on its skin, all the usual features are deformed. I may as well have taken a left into downtown Beijing.
I need to get to a conference in Senate House. I walk a little farther in the direction I understand to be correct. Nothing familiar. I ask a construction worker if he knows Malet Street. I assume, since he’s reshaping the territory, he must have a sense of the map. ‘Malet?’ he asks. I spell it. He doesn’t know. ‘What is the name of the street we’re on?’ I ask. He doesn’t know. I gesture towards the end of the road, where some kind of green area is visible. ‘That over there, is that Russell Square?’ ‘Why everyone ask me where is Russell?’ he replies. I thank him and leave him to his work.
The conference begins in ten minutes, and I have to make a good impression. I’m a recently minted PhD, about to go on the job market, a daunting prospect in this economy, and I don’t want to be the girl who comes in late on the first day. I cannot cause a disruption. Please let me just slip in. Why didn’t I leave extra time? Or bring my A–Z? Why do I always get so fucking lost?
On a whim or a hunch, I turn left, and find myself directly in front of Senate House.
* * *
Funny to be lost in Bloomsbury, when at one time I knew it better than any other place in London. I had never been there until 2004, the summer before I moved to Paris. I was in town for a conference on Virginia Woolf commemorating the hundredth anniversary of her move to Bloomsbury from Kensington, where she was raised. After their father’s death, Woolf and her siblings left their family home at 22 Hyde Park Gate, and started a new life in what was, at the time, an unusual choice of neighbourhood. Woolf continued to live in Bloomsbury (with a ten-year exception when her husband made her live in the suburbs) until just before her death; it was a district that sustained her and inspired her and kept her pen in ink. I stayed in Gower Street, a row of terraced houses turned into hotels, with shared bathrooms on the landings in between floors – the kind of gently worn British establishment with sinks in the rooms, and a kettle. There, I could imagine myself an emancipated young single woman living in a 1920s bedsit, maybe working in a travel agency, like Emmeline in Elizabeth Bowen’s To the North.
It was June (life, London, this moment in June), and London couldn’t have been more different from my first visit, one rainy, wet January in 1999, which gave me the worst case of bronchitis I’d ever swallowed. It was Bloomsbury that corrected the terrible first impressions of London I had retained from that trip, when I was exposed to the wretched tourist itinerary of Trafalgar Square, Piccadilly Circus and Madame Tussaud’s. I remember taking the Eurostar back to Paris in disgust. Why does anyone bother with London? I wrote in my journal. But that June of 2004 was the first time London had lifted her skirts and showed a shapely bit of ankle. Oh, I thought, I think I get it now. I picked up a few battered orange Penguin Classics for a pound at a used bookstore; I was handed my first Pimm’s Cup outside at a pub, sitting at a picnic table. I bought an array of readyfood at Pret and sat down to eat it in a patch of sun on the grass in Russell Square, looking at the other people doing the same, who with my outsider’s eyes I took to be Londoners, enjoying their city, but who may well also have been Americans on their second visit to London discovering its charms at the same rate as I was.
I wanted to see London as Woolf had seen it, and set to tracking down her various addresses. I strolled in Tavistock Square, where she lived from 1924 to 1939. In the park in the centre, I walked past a bronze bust of Woolf I did not like; I found out later it had been placed there by the very group who had organised the conference I was attending. The bronze was pockmarked, gnarled, her skin coarse and scaly as if she had lived to a hundred instead of fifty-nine. I tried to picture her with soft flesh, soft hair, instead of hard bronze, wrought into some expressionist idea of a great writer, and wondered what kind of shoes she was wearing. (Busts never have shoes.) This was the Bloomsbury square Woolf lived in the longest; this was where most of the novels were written. I walked round and round but couldn’t find her building. I remembered the address was number 52, and knew that the house had been bombed in the war, but hadn’t realised the site is now occupied by the Tavistock Hotel, a modern brick-and-glass building, institutional, vaguely medical-looking. As I stood contemplating the even, textureless brick, a million moments of Woolf’s life flooded in, as if I were living them all at once, a compression of time through study and recall: Woolf walking around the outside of the square, one day in the mid-1920s, thinking up the To the Lighthouse in, as she later wrote, ‘a great involuntary rush’.2 Finding a flat in Bedford Row (or Place? or Square?) which was only to be let furnished, whereas the Woolfs already had furnishings, and which because of its unavailability came to seem to her the finest flat in all London.3 Walking in Oxford Street in 1930, observing people fighting, struggling, ‘[k]nocking each other off the pavement. Old bareheaded men; a motor car accident; &tc,’ then noting ‘To walk alone in London is the greatest rest’.4 Woolf reviewing E. V. Lucas for the TLS and realising, ‘Personally, we should be willing to read one volume about every street in the city, and should still ask for more.’5 Writing in her diary in 1925, ‘I like this London life in early summer – the street sauntering & square haunting.’6 That moment in The Years when Peggy remembers the bombings of 1918 and thinks to herself, ‘On every placard on every street corner was Death; or worse – tyranny; brutality; torture; the fall of civilization; the end of freedom. We here, she thought, are only sheltering under a leaf, which will be destroyed.’ And then Woolf walking in Tavistock Square in 1940, looking at t
he bombed-out shell of their house: ‘Basement all rubble. Only relics an old basket chair (bought in Fitzroy Square days) & Penmans board To Let. Otherwise bricks & wood splinters. One glass door in the next door house hanging. I cd just see a piece of my studio wall standing: otherwise rubble where I wrote so many books. Open air where we sat so many nights, gave so many parties.’7
Throughout 1940 and 1941, she and Leonard mainly lived in Sussex, but she came to town as often as she could, and would go walking, taking in the damage. It ‘raked my heart’, she wrote to Ethyl Smyth, to see ‘the passion of my life, that is the City of London’ reduced to rubble.8 It seemed, she wrote, ‘like a dead city’. She grew sentimental, asking Ethel, ‘Have you that feeling for certain alleys and little courts, between Chancery Lane and the City?’9 Then, in February 1941, she complained in her diary that she had not gone walking in ‘ever so long’, and, not incidentally, in the same entry, worried ‘shall I ever write again one of those sentences that gives me intense pleasure?’10 A month later, she walked into the River Ouse with rocks in her pockets.11
* * *
The following summer I was in my apartment in Paris when the square was bombed again. Wrote Ian McEwan, in the Guardian, ‘It is unlikely that London will claim to have been transformed in an instant, to have lost its innocence in the course of a morning. […] It has survived many attacks in the past.’12 The reference, of course, was to my own city, New York, which had never been attacked before 2001. London, on the other hand, had seen battles. This was one more. Londoners were still unsettled, McEwan noted; they wanted to know: is it safe to ride the Tube, the bus? And the state would step in to assure that security. But, he wondered, ‘how much power must we grant Leviathan, how much freedom will we be asked to trade for our security?’
It’s a trade many of us are unwilling to make.
For months afterward there were tanks on the streets of Manhattan, and to this day, squadrons of men with machine guns roam the train stations. Today, there are eight armed guards standing outside my building in Paris, protecting the Jewish school next door, after the attacks on Charlie Hebdo and the Hyper Cacher.
And it becomes part of what life is.13
* * *
Since that summer, I’ve visited Bloomsbury with great regularity, to sit in the parks, to visit the British Museum or the London Review Bookshop or Persephone Books, to meet friends for Szechuan after a long day at the British Library. Which is why it was so odd to lose my way so utterly. Back in my room after the conference, squinting at my A–Z, I tried to map the Bedfords, so as not to repeat my mistake the next morning. It turns out everything around there is part of the Bedford Estate, owned by the Russell family, the Dukes of Bedford. All the squares round there belong to them – Bedford Square, Bloomsbury Square, Gordon Square, Russell Square, Tavistock Square, Torrington Square and Woburn Square. Every square is secretly Bedford Square. And every square has its requisite blue plaques indicating the former residence of various members of the Bloomsbury Group. The one at Gordon Square reads:
Their informal society, which also included Roger Fry, John Maynard Keynes and E. M. Forster, was instrumental to the freedom Woolf discovered in that part of town, particularly after one night when Lytton Strachey broke the ice maintained over several years’ cordiality by gesturing at a white stain on Vanessa’s dress and asking, ‘Semen?’ Once she got over her shock, Woolf wrote, ‘There was now nothing that one could not say, nothing that one could not do, at 46 Gordon Square.’14 ‘They lived in squares, painted in circles, and loved in triangles,’ Dorothy Parker reportedly said. But before they were the Bloomsbury Group, they were a disparate assortment of educated and artistically inclined people who had their own ideas about things.
Though once genteel and bourgeois, Bloomsbury had declined in the early twentieth century, and you were more likely to find a young clerk living there than a respectable society lady. It was decidedly not the kind of place that young ladies like the Misses Stephen would move to, if they could help it. A deeply historical, literary neighbourhood, it surely would have appealed to Woolf on those grounds, and it did to me as well. The British Museum was built on the site of Montague House, which was once home to some famous frescoes and furniture, making it a place that has for many years housed things that are valuable to one regime or another. Russell Square was famously home to the Sedleys and Osbornes in Thackeray’s Vanity Fair (Thackeray was related to Woolf by marriage; Leslie Stephen’s first wife was the novelist’s daughter). According to Augustus J. C. Hare, author of the 1879 volume Walks in London, which Woolf received on her fourteenth birthday from her half-brother George, the name is a corruption of ‘Blemundsbury’, which was the thirteenth-century manor of ‘De Blemontes, Blemunds, or Blemonts’.15 Everything in that neighbourhood ‘commemorates the glories of that great ducal family’. Howland Street and Streatham Street, for instance, ‘record the marriage of the second duke with the daughter of John Howland of Streatham in 1696. Gower Street and Keppel Street, built 1778–86, commemorate his son, who was made Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland in 1756.’ Gordon and Torrington Squares indicate other marriages the family made. And not far from where I stood, totally lost near Bedford Square, number 6 had been home to a certain Lord Eldon from 1809 to 1815, in whose home, Hare recounts, the Prince Regent ‘wrung from him the appointment to the vacant post of Master in Chancery for his friend Jekyll the wit’.16
The move to Bloomsbury was thanks, in part, to Vanessa; she packed up the old house, found them the new one, and organised the move across town, all while Virginia was in the countryside recuperating from her latest breakdown and suicide attempt. ‘It was thus that 46 Gordon Square came into existence,’ Woolf writes, as if Vanessa had done no less than construct the building herself, brick by brick. In a pair of essays delivered to the Memoir Club, an informal gathering in which Bloomsbury types would give autobiographical accounts of themselves, Virginia twice contrasted the Kensington house with her home in Gordon Square. It seemed she could not speak of the one without mentioning the other. In ‘Old Bloomsbury’ Woolf writes that the ‘shadow’ of 22 Hyde Park Gate lay across Bloomsbury; ‘46 Gordon Square could never have meant what it did had not 22 Hyde Park Gate preceded it’, and, no doubt, the ‘gloom’ of 22 Hyde Park Gate was darkened in Woolf’s mind by the free-spirited life she led afterward.17 Bloomsbury seemed ‘the most beautiful, the most exciting, the most romantic place in the world’.18 Hyde Park Gate had a muffled, protected air around it, but in Bloomsbury she heard the ‘roar’ of traffic, and encountered all God’s creation on the streets: ‘Odd characters, sinister, strange, prowled and slunk past our windows.’19
As the neighbourhood had fallen out of favour Bloomsbury had become more affordable, attracting the shabbily genteel, if not the desperately poor; full of bedsits, it was home to many young single working women.20 Jean Rhys lived in Torrington Square in 1917, in a cheap boarding house where there were ‘hairs in the soup’, that was ‘draughty, dirty, and disreputable’, but nevertheless ‘comfortable, warm, fun’.21 The local newspapers were full of advertisements of rooms to let, specifically for young women, and there were many boarding houses that were subsidised to help them out, ‘often run by philanthropic organizations, where women could live communally with a private bedsitting room but shared dining and living areas’.22 Thomas Burke, a popular writer of the time, claimed it was home to ‘nests of the sorrier sort of bordel’.23 It was also a hotbed for political reformers, with strong ties to the suffrage movement. The suffragettes began to march just as Woolf moved to Bloomsbury, and many organisations were headquartered there, including the Women’s Social and Political Union in Russell Square, and the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies, in Gower Street. In 1919, in her novel Night and Day, Woolf would house her feminist activist Mary Datchet in a Bloomsbury bedsit. ‘One might argue,’ writes Barbara Green, ‘that Virginia Woolf was emboldened to streetwalk, because the suffragette marched first.’24
It’s hard to
imagine today what it meant for the Stephen siblings to move there; in our own time we’re so used to people of means chasing down bargains in shabby parts of town. As they were house-hunting, Woolf noted in her diary that her brother-in-law warned that the neighbourhood was so ‘bad’ that ‘we should never get anybody to come and see us, or to dine’.25 But for Woolf it was a different ecosystem; the brackish waters and ‘Oriental gloom’ of her Victorian family’s neighbourhood could be exchanged for the fresh, clean, Georgian terraced lines of Bloomsbury squares. In Bloomsbury, Woolf threw off the mantle of her family, of her mother, the Angel in the House, and her father, the Eminent Victorian. She wrote an early story, ‘Phyllis and Rosamond’, about a pair of young ladies clearly modelled on Virginia and Vanessa who visit their artistic doppelgängers, the Tristram sisters, in Bloomsbury, where the very architecture makes them realise they are condemned to a life lived behind ‘stucco fronts’ in the ‘irreproachable rows of Belgravia and South Kensington’. Phyllis longs to trade those rows for Bloomsbury’s ‘great tranquil squares’, where ‘There was room, and freedom, and in the roar and splendour of the Strand she read the live realities of the world from which her stucco and her pillars protected her so completely’.26
In the fictionalised view of Kensington she offers in ‘Phyllis and Rosamond’, life was ‘trained to grow in an ugly pattern to match the staid ugliness of its fellows’.27 In Bloomsbury, they could remake the pattern themselves – and did, as the Omega Workshops would demonstrate, when the Bloomsberries founded them nearly a decade later, producing furniture, textiles and pottery in modern, Post-Impressionist-influenced designs. As the Stephen siblings set up home, Woolf recalled all the ways in which they decided their life would be different, rebellious, original. They were ‘full of experiments and reforms’, Woolf recalled to the Memoir Club. ‘We were going to do without table napkins, we were to have [large supplies of] Bromo instead; we were going to paint; to write; to have coffee after dinner instead of tea at nine o’clock. Everything was going to be new; everything was going to be different. Everything was on trial.’ (I imagine Bromo as some kind of Edwardian kitchen roll, which I find implausible but amusing.) Little Ginny discovered the joy of rearranging her bedroom, and she wrote in her diary that she turned it round and round until it was to her ‘liking’.28