To the Letter

by Simon Garfield

  I have been hearing more of the customs of these folk in this village, and it is probably the same all over this part. There is no courting before marriage. The young man writes his prospective wife’s parents. They consent to him coming to tea. They are never left alone, and the first time he holds her hand is when they are man and wife. Some marriages may be arranged in Heaven, but none are around these parts! None of the girls dare be seen talking to men (let alone soldiers), lest they be the subject of gossip. Our chaps are not very happy about feminine availability, although some have had happy moments, though a little expensive.

  I met a chap here, eighteen months younger than me, who went to the same school. We had a good talk about teachers and remembered pupils. I have also had a talk with a chap who lives in Leeds. Married a couple of years before the war, one child, been away from England two years. His wife gave birth to a child (by a married man with two children) in June. She asked for his forgiveness, but not unexpectedly, it has not been forthcoming. I have heard many similar cases, or variations on the same theme. They are all very bad, but the separation caused by war is at the bottom of most of them, I think. It is nice to think we live in a world of constancy and adherence to vows, but we certainly don’t. Some of our chaps moan about the Yanks at home, but there is plenty of evidence that many Englishmen do not act honourably.

  I love you.

  Chris

  Chapter Twelve

  More Letters for Sale

  Even Virginia Woolf sometimes went to the beach. She doesn’t strike one as a beach kind of girl, not in her writing, and not in her persona. She strikes one (or am I alone in this?) as more of a desk-and-blotter sort, a pallid hair-pinned British Museum Round Reading Room sort, a wet walk through Russell Square type. Passionate about her work and loves, of course, but when she went to the coast she looked out to the lighthouse from gloomy windows. Can you imagine Virginia in a striped swimsuit and headband on the edge of frolicking waves?

  No need to imagine – we have a photograph. Taken on the sands at Studland in Dorset, probably in 1908, when Woolf was 26 and still had the surname Stephen, the photo shows her happy, smiling with Clive Bell, who had married her sister Vanessa the year before (the photographer is unknown, but may well be Vanessa herself). The bathing suit was hired, and in her notebooks Virginia described it as ‘unisex’, and thus a perfect fit. She remembered swimming far out, ‘a drifting sea anemone’.

  In a letter that accompanied the photograph, written to Clive Bell on 19 February 1909, she described attending a dinner party thrown by her publisher Bruce Richmond at which she ‘felt like a cannibal because the dinner was so good, and I knew what went to make it – the blood of respectable young men and women like myself.’

  I am afraid that one can’t believe nowadays in starving genius, frozen in a garret. We were a dreadful set of harpies; middle aged writers of mild distinction are singularly unpleasant to my taste. They remind me of those bald-necked vultures at the zoo, with their drooping blood-shot eyes, who are always on the look out for a lump of raw meat. You should have heard the chattering and squabbling that went on among them, and the soft complacent coo of those that had been fed. That great goose Lady G[regory?] was the loudest in her squawking; the rest of us sat round and twittered, half in envy and half in derision.*

  Woolf was not yet middle-aged, and her claim that she was even of mild distinction may have been wishful thinking. Publication of The Voyage Out, her first novel, was still six years away, and her best work up to this point was in literary journals and letters. But her presence within the Bloomsbury group had brought many admirers for non-literary reasons, including advances from Sydney Waterlow, a diplomat in the Foreign Office and an early friend of Clive Bell. In 1911 Waterlow asked Woolf to marry him, an option she declined. But he persisted, and her objections hardened, partly, one imagines, because he was already married, and partly because her feelings for him were indifferent.

  ‘I don’t think I shall ever feel for you what I must feel for the man I marry,’ she wrote in December 1911. ‘I feel you have it in your power to stop thinking of me as the person you want to marry. It would be unpardonable of me if I did not do everything to save you from what must – as far as I can tell – be a great waste.’ And then the final dread nail: ‘I hope we shall go on being good friends anyhow.’

  These letters lie at one end of a career, and at the other lies a remarkable sequence of eight letters written between 28 March and 6 April 1941 by Leonard Woolf, the man she did decide to marry, and her sister Vanessa Bell. They were addressed to Vita Sackville-West, Virginia’s fervent friend and likely lover, and documented the immediate period after her suicide.* Woolf had written two suicide notes to Leonard and one to Vanessa, now famous artefacts.* But what happened next is less well known. As of May 2013 the following letter, in green ink, written by her husband on the day of her death on 28 March, remains in private hands.

  Not drowning but laughing: Virginia Woolf and Clive Bell in Dorset.

  I do not want you to see in the paper or hear possibly on the wireless the terrible thing that has happened to Virginia. She has been really very ill these last weeks & was terrified that she was going mad again. It was, I suppose, the strain of the war & finishing her book* & she could not rest or eat. Today she went for a walk leaving behind a letter saying that she was committing suicide. I think she has drowned herself as I found her stick floating in the river, but we have not found the body. I know what you will feel & what you felt for her. She was very fond of you. She has been through hell these last days.

  The following day, Vanessa writes to Vita.

  Leonard says he was writing to you so this is only because I feel I want to be in touch with you somehow – as the person Virginia loved most I think outside her own family. I was there yesterday by chance & saw him. He was of course amazingly self-controlled & calm & insisted on being left alone. There is nothing I can do yet. Perhaps some time you & I could meet? It is difficult I know. But we will manage it presently. Now we can only wait till the first horrors are over which somehow make it almost impossible to feel much. Forgive the scrawl.

  More than a week later, her body has still not been found. On 6 April, Leonard Woolf wrote again to Vita: ‘They have been dragging the river the last week, but are now, I think, abandoning the search.’ And then on the same day, Vanessa also writes to her: ‘There is no news of course. It seems to be likely there never will be which perhaps is best.’

  The post office in oils by Vanessa Bell.

  We know what happened, and as we read we know more than the participants; that this is so often the case with letters – an inherent fallibility – adds to their worth. Letters with hindsight would be a terrible thing. For here is Woolf just three years before, indelibly delighted with her lot in a letter to her sister about her serene time with Leonard at their house in the small village of Rodmell in Sussex after a visit to what she called the ‘scrimmage’ of ‘appalling’ London: ‘We get snatches of divine loneliness here, a day or two;’ she wrote in October 1938, at the age of 56,

  and sanguine as I am I said to L. as we strolled through the mushroom fields, Thank the Lord, we shall be alone; we’ll play bowls; then I shall read Sévigné; then have grilled ham and mushrooms for dinner; then Mozart – and why not stay here for ever and ever, enjoying this immortal rhythm, in which both eye and soul are at rest? . . . We were so sane, so happy.*

  Her bliss is spoiled by the intrusion of visitors who wouldn’t leave (‘An interval of sheer horror; of unmitigated despair’) but in the end it was her sanity that failed her. Two weeks after Vanessa wrote to Vita about the non-appearance of her sister’s body, she wrote again, by which time the body had been found by children on a far bank.

  It was another shock of course & one had so hoped it wouldn’t happen. But I think Leonard meant it when he said, as he did to me, that it was no more horrible
than all the rest. . . . He arranged for cremation at Brighton yesterday & didn’t want me to go so I didn’t. There was no ceremony. Nothing. Poor old Ethel,* who had written to me, apparently wanting a country church yard, will be disappointed, but after all anything else would have been too uncharacteristic.

  The image of Virginia Woolf walking to the edge of the nearby River Ouse and filling her pockets with stones is another indelible one, more so perhaps with the contrasting image we have of her smiling on the beach in her twenties in that photograph. But the epistolary story doesn’t end there. Woolf once defined letter-writing as ‘the humane art, which owes its origins to the love of friends’*. So it is fitting that her story continues among her friends after her death; there is another sequence of five letters between Leonard Woolf and Vita Sackville-West that occurred between May and June 1941 to settle Virginia’s will.

  These are typed (in contrast to the autograph death letters), and unravel a friendly dispute. ‘Virginia has left you one of her MS with instructions to me to choose it,’ Woolf wrote on 24 May, ‘and now the probate people have asked me to inform them which it is to be.’ Woolf suggests giving her The Years or Flush, her highly successful biography of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s cocker spaniel (inspired by her reading the Brownings’ letters), but Vita evidently wanted something else, perhaps The Waves or To the Lighthouse. Five days later, Woolf writes: ‘I am glad you are outspoken, as always, and I will be.’ The manuscripts became the subject of fierce bargaining: he wishes to retain The Waves, but offers her Mrs Dalloway. He also requests that Vita sends him the unpublished pages of Orlando in her possession, and in a subsequent letter he returns them with the belief they are ‘incohate [sic]’. Sackville-West then apparently suggests that she should inherit the manuscript of To the Lighthouse, which Woolf declines. His final, unpublished, letter to her on this matter reads:

  Dear Vita,

  Here is the book. I am also sending the MS of Mrs Dalloway. I presume that it is legal for me to do so before the estate is settled. The first vol. is called The Hours which is what V. intended the title to be originally.

  The garden here had been rather knocked about by the weather. I think we have less fruit than any year since we came here.

  Yours,

  Leonard Woolf

  The letters, all but one confined to a single leaf, are written on light blue or beige-coloured paper and composed with an eager but legible hand in green or black ink. They are a thrill to hold. I held them in an unlikely location: a sixth-floor office on West 18th Street in downtown Manhattan, the New York premises of Glenn Horowitz Bookseller Inc. I took the Woolf letters in and out of plastic slipcases on a large table in the middle of what, as with letters, I took to be a fading and fusty concern: a rare book dealership where one may buy inscribed first editions and browse obscure and tantalising items one would never discover online.

  ‘They have been dragging the river . . .’ Letters to Vita Sackville West in 1941.

  But the office of GHB is neither fading nor fusty, because it is something else as well: a trader in literary souls. Horowitz, late fifties, curly grey hair, something of a steely Marx Brother about him, runs a literary brokerage firm that deals in the archives (essentially manuscripts, notebooks and letters) of great and famous writers. Horowitz has handled the archive sales of Vladimir Nabokov, Norman Mailer, Bernard Malamud, Joseph Heller, Kurt Vonnegut, Nadine Gordimer, J.M. Coetzee and David Foster Wallace (among others). He has also bought letters from presidents, and sold the Watergate notebooks of Woodward and Bernstein for a reported $5m. The smaller archives may be bought by private clients, but most of the big ones will end up at institutions: Emory University in Atlanta, perhaps, or Harvard, or the Berg Collection at the New York Public Library, or the British Library, or the splashiest and seemingly most insatiable of all, the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas in Austin.

  Horowitz is not one to sit back and wait for something to enter the open market; he will actively seek out the writers he believes will have something valuable to sell. He has, for instance, recently been having discussions with Tom Wolfe; he is trying to persuade him that buying his archive is not a sign that he is creatively dead, nor even no longer a Master of the Universe, but rather that his manuscript of The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby and The Bonfire of the Vanities, with editor’s emendations and the attendant letters from nutzoid fans, may be worth more while he is still alive, when he can join in the purchase celebrations and benefit from the not inconsiderable mountain of loot.

  Glenn Horowitz is, as one might hope for, something of a showman. He speaks a showman’s language, a strange combination of hyperbole and litotes, his wrangled vocabulary finding drama in the everyday. Take his account of how he added the archive-selling business to his rare book business in his mid-twenties. ‘I didn’t know shit from Shinola,’ he told me. ‘But I obviously had instincts. I come from a background of Jewish peddlers, people who had come over as immigrants and literally pushed and pulled carts through the streets.’ His first archive negotiation, in 1981, was between the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet W.S. Merwin and the University of Illinois. ‘I put together a deal that began with the institution offering me $25,000 for his papers, and ended up with us settling at $185,000. I was entitled to 15 per cent of the transaction, and when the cheque for $28,000 arrived on my desk, it was not only the largest cheque I’d ever seen with my name on it, but it didn’t take me very long to realize that it would take me a long time to earn that sort of profit selling books. So I looked at it and saw that this was fundamentally a very interesting spin on the traditional buy-sell dynamic within the world of books.’

  He handled several other collections in the next decade, but nothing spectacular. Then in 1991 he was ‘summoned’ to Switzerland by Vera and Dmitri Nabokov to ‘help them unwind the seemingly unsolvable problem of what to do with Vladimir’s archive. I shuttled between Montreux and New York, and after six to nine months of intense negotiating, prevailed upon the New York Public Library to buy these papers for a million and a half dollars.’ This, he observes, was ‘the transformational transaction, the one that suggested not only to me, but to those watching me, that not only did I have a negotiator’s skill to bring various parties with disparate interests together, but I was also able to find what was then an historic amount of dollars to attach to an archive.’

  And from there, it was seemingly inevitable that he would go on to handle the Woodward and Bernstein Watergate papers, John Updike, Mailer (‘which took up a small tractor trailer’), Cormac McCarthy, the photographs of Elliott Erwitt, the Magnum photographic archive, ‘on and on and on’. He calculates that about 85 per cent of his market consists of not-for-profit research institutions ‘extending their brand of scholarship’.

  But these institutions had clearly obtained many fine collections before Horowitz and others like him arrived on the scene, and in a far cheaper way – through donation. Writers considered it an honour to have their paper life stored by Harvard, and there was an issue about whether their estates would have to contribute to their upkeep. Things changed gradually after the war. Libraries and universities enjoyed increased capital and patronage; places like Texas University saw the accumulation of unique literary material as a way of establishing themselves as a world-class research institution. Horowitz established what he calls ‘a competitive environment’ for these papers, but maintains that he will only be paid his fee if he represents the interests of both seller and buyer. In this mission his spirits have not dulled. The excitement, he says, ‘is to identify bodies of work that heretofore people had not thought about having significant research value, and to prevail upon an institution to share that vision.’ It is a vision that, prior to his involvement, ‘was only shadows and fog’.

  I was guided through the Woolf letters by Sarah Funke Butler, the firm’s senior literary archivist. Funke Butler is in her late thirties, and has
been with the company for 15 years, joining shortly after completing her Nabokov thesis at Harvard. She calls herself ‘a self-confessed letter fetishist’, a passion that began with a pen-pal assignment with a French grammar school in the 6th grade. ‘Their handwriting was uniform, legible, full of curlicues, and they all wrote on graph paper,’ she says. ‘I didn’t find that better or worse than our American scrawl on a range of unlined notepaper, just different, but distinct. At the age of 10 I wasn’t thinking in terms of “cultural consistency” though – mostly I was just embarrassed that my new friend Joel had signed off, “Lots of love”.’

  In recent years she has handled the archives of Don DeLillo, Tim O’Brien, Cormac McCarthy, Erica Jong (with fan letters from Sean O’Connery and others expressing admiration for Fear of Flying), John Updike (with dozens of form letters rejecting his work), Norman Mailer (who preserved carbon copies of his outgoing letters for decades), Hunter S. Thompson (who taught her how to shoot), James Salter, David Mamet, Alice Walker, Timothy Leary, ‘and so many more’. In this time she has naturally generated many letter-related archives of her own, most memorably a multi-page fax from a nonplussed Dmitri Nabokov complaining about the use of certain phrases in a book she was compiling about his father. He wrote ‘that the standards for English instructions at Harvard had clearly changed since his time there’.