Virginia Woolf

by Ruth Gruber

  When I told him that I had written a letter to Virginia Woolf and sent her my dissertation in book form, he said, “Why don’t you call the Hogarth Press and ask for an interview?”

  I was less confident than I had been in Brooklyn. “I have a feeling she won’t allow me to interview her.”

  “I’m sure she’d be delighted to meet you. Certainly I would be if somebody wrote a dissertation on my work. Yours is the first English dissertation anyone has written about Virginia Woolf.”7

  I was still doubtful. “Why would she would want to spend time with me? She must get hundreds of such requests.”

  “Don’t be silly. She can’t help but feel flattered. If you’re afraid to call, I’ll make the call for you.”

  “Thank you, no. I’ll make it myself.”

  I telephoned the Hogarth Press and reached the manager, Margaret West.

  “Mrs. Woolf and her husband,” she said, “are on vacation and will be gone for another few weeks. How long will you be in London?”

  “A few weeks. Then I will be traveling for four or five months.”

  “Will you be returning to London?” she asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Do call us as soon as you arrive. We can set up a date for you. Can you tell me now what you plan to interview Mrs. Woolf about?”

  “It’s for a book I plan to write about women under fascism, communism, and democracy. I would appreciate her views on the role of women in a rapidly changing world.”

  “Very good,” she said. “I will expect to hear from you when you return.”

  I left London, and for four months traveled across Europe and the Soviet Arctic. On my way back to London, I stopped off in Holland to visit the Herz family, with whom I had lived as an exchange student in Cologne. They had just escaped from Hitler to Amsterdam8

  I stayed with Mama and Papa Herz for a few days and, while there, sent a note to Margaret West at the Hogarth Press, telling her that I would be arriving shortly in London.

  Virginia Woolf answered my letter (this is the second letter we found). The envelope showed that she had mailed her answer to me in care of the Herz family in Amsterdam. Papa Herz, in turn, had crossed out their address and forwarded it to 14 Harmon St., Brooklyn. Mama stored it with the first letter in the same safe filing cabinet drawer.

  On plain white stationery, the letter read:

  52 Tavistock Square London WC 1

  12th Oct. 1935

  Dear Madam,

  I have only just received your letter; and I am afraid that this will not reach you in time.

  I should of course be glad to do anything I can to help you in your work; and will arrange to see you if possible. But as I am not a politician and have no special knowledge of the subject on which you are writing I fear that it would probably be only a waste of your time to see me.

  If you like to ring up The Hogarth Press Museum 3488 my secretary will take a message. But as I say, I fear that this letter will reach you too late.

  Yours sincerely

  Virginia Woolf

  I think now if I had received this letter in Amsterdam, with its halfhearted invitation addressed to “Dear Madam,” I would have hesitated to telephone her. Fortunately, I followed the advice Margaret West had given me. As soon as I reached London, I phoned the Hogarth Press again.

  Miss West’s answer was gracious: “Mrs. Woolf would like you to come to tea Tuesday, October 15th at 6:00 P.M.”

  I was ecstatic.

  But now, sitting in the Berg Collection, I opened The Letters of Virginia Woolf Volume Five 1932—1935. I found my name in the index, and I learned what Virginia Woolf had thought of me before we met on October 15th.

  The day before our meeting, she had written to Julian Bell, the nephew she adored, who was teaching English in China and who later died in the Spanish Civil War.

  14th Oct 1935

  Dearest Julian,

  … Now I suppose you are teaching the Chinks

  (‘Chinks?’)

  I must now go and see an importunate and unfortunate Gerwoman who thinks I can help her with facts about Women under Democracy—little she knows—what you do about your poor old Virginia.

  Me? Importunate? Unfortunate? Gerwoman? I was shocked by her words. A thin flame of anger was burning my throat.

  I was even angrier when I read my name again in the diary, written just before she was coming upstairs to meet me.

  Tuesday 15 October

  … couldn’t write this morning; & must go up & receive Miss Grueber [sic] (to discuss a book on women and fascism—a pure have yer as Lottie would say) in 10 minutes.

  A pure have yer?

  “What could it mean?” I asked the curator, Lola L. Szladits.

  “No idea what that means,” she said, “but maybe the woman sitting over there would know.” She pointed to a woman who was studying early drafts of Mrs. Dalloway.

  I approached Ruth Webb, a friendly school inspector from London. We whispered as if there were other people in the room, though there were none.

  “A pure have yer,” she repeated, “is cockney. I should know, I come from cockney stock. But really I haven’t a clue as to its meaning. All I can tell you is, it’s derogatory.”

  At the information desk I asked Catherine Halls, an English librarian, if she knew what “a pure have yer” meant.

  She told me she had never heard the expression.

  “It’s probably slang. We have a lot of slang dictionaries. They’re right over there.”

  In Eric Partridge’s A Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English, I looked up the word: pure (n.) a mistress, esp. a kept mistress, a wanton, dog’s dung.

  My head exploded. Dog’s dung?

  Wait. Perhaps she used pure as an adjective and have as a noun. In Partridge’s Slang: Today and Yesterday, I found: Have (n), a deception, a swindle.

  I felt my blood rising again. Did she think I had come to swindle her? If so, then why had she invited me to tea?

  What did she think of me after what had been for me a magical half hour in her parlor at 52 Tavistock Square? In her Letters, Volume Five 1932-1935, I found an entry about me, and ordered the original letter from the stack. The letter was written to her lover, Ethel Smyth, a seventy-year-old composer, complaining that she had been unable to work. It was six days after my visit.

  Monday, 21 October 1935

  I’ve had a poetess reading her works aloud [Easdale]; I’ve had a French socialist declaiming against Fascism. [Walter]; I’ve had a German Jewess [Gruber]—no, I can’t go into all the vociferations and gesticulations that are our lot in Tavistock Sqre.

  A German Jewess! Perhaps she decided I was a poor refugee fleeing Hitler, washed up on Britain’s shores, importuning her for help.

  Years later, anxious to know the truth, I asked Aïda Lovell, one of my friends in London, to write to Nigel Nicolson, the son of Vita Sackville-West, about Virginia Woolf’s attitude toward me and about what “a pure have yer” really meant.

  Nicolson, who edited many of Woolf’s diaries and letters, answered Aïda:

  Dr. Gruber won’t be too pleased by this, but I was glad to read in VW’s diary that she was quite flattered by what Dr. G wrote about her … which was rare for Virginia.

  I wondered if Nigel Nicolson was confirming what I had read in her first letter to me, in which she wrote that she had lent the book to an “excellent critic,” and was told “that you have written a most sympathetic and acute study of my book.” The diary entry seemed to confirm that the “critic” was Virginia Woolf herself.

  Still uncertain, I wrote to Nicolson, who answered,

  I fear that you may have been hurt by her references to you, but she was like that in her diaries and letters, though perfectly courteous in conversation. … That is one of the things I deplore about Virginia, her cattiness, contempt for almost everyone who were not her friends, an occasional touch of anti-Semitism, her snobbishness and jealousy.

  Back in December 1935, stil
l naïve and unaware of her biting comments in her diary and letters, I wrote to her again, taking the liberty of enclosing some material on the Soviet Arctic. Apparently she had written me a letter which I cannot find, but I found the carbon copy on yellow paper of my answer to her:

  14 Harmon Street Brooklyn, New York December 27, 1935

  Mrs. Virginia Woolf

  Monk’s House

  Rodmell, near

  Lewes, Sussex

  Dear Mrs. Woolf,

  I thought this pamphlet showing the Arctic trip we discussed when I saw you last October in London might interest you.

  I am wondering whether you have had time yet to read the study I made of your writings. Your reasons for waiting until you had finished your book were splendid, I thought. Now that Christmas has come, and I understood you to say that you would complete the work around Christmas time, I wondered if you had found the opportunity to read the work. I am deeply interested in your opinion of it.

  With kindest regards to Mr. Woolf and yourself,

  Yours sincerely,

  Ruth Gruber

  P.S. It may interest you to know that the London News Chronicle published an article on the Arctic soon after I had spoken of it to you, and that the Sphere is publishing (or has already published) an article on “Tracking Human Bootleggers,” describing the traffic in smuggling aliens from Cuba into the United States.

  Years after the fact, I was embarrassed that I had written a letter with such chutzpah to Virginia Woolf. How could I have dared to tell her that her reasons for waiting to read my book while she finished hers were splendid? I was surprised that she even answered such a letter.

  But she did answer it swiftly. It is the last of the three letters and was probably typed by Virginia Woolf herself, with eighteen corrections. Any secretary sending off a letter with so many typos and corrections would probably be fired. But of all the three letters, this is probably the most historically significant, for in it she reveals her agony in writing The Years, a book of frustrations, of lonely frustrated characters.

  52, Tavistock Square, w.c.1.

  Telephone: Museum 2621.

  10th Jan. 1936

  Dear Miss Gruber,

  It is true that Christmas has come and gone and I had hoped to have done with my book. But unfortunately I was optimistic; and it won’t be off my hands till March I fear. The last stages are always the most dreary; therefore I shall not attempt to read your study until my mind is free from this drudgery.

  Many thanks for sending me the pamphlet. I am glad to know that you have been so successful. With best wishes for the new [sic] Year,

  yours sincerely Virginia Woolf

  She was writing to me with even greater warmth than in her first letter, revealing her state of mind, her agitation. Leonard describes in his autobiography, Downhill All the Way, how ill she was at that time. “We had a terrifying time with The Years in 1936,” he wrote. “She was much nearer a complete breakdown than she had ever been since 1913.”

  Then, in November 1936, she wrote in her diary,

  I wonder whether anyone has ever suffered so much from a book as I have suffered from The Years.

  After cutting the book drastically, she finally allowed it to be published in March 1937. It had the greatest success of any book she had written to that point.

  My hours living with Virginia Woolf’s work ended with this extremely revealing third letter. The typing was quavering; nearly every capital letter was out of line, almost unhinged; typographical errors were corrected with a stroke of a pen. Was she just then swinging into a depression? I read over and over her line to me that the last stages of writing a book are “always the most dreary” and she would finally read my book when her mind was “free from this drudgery.”

  Reading about her in Leonard’s autobiography, I learned how depressed and agitated she became as she neared the end of nearly every book she was writing. She feared that the male critics would attack The Years and turned to Leonard for his critique. He tried to calm her by assuring her that the critics would love the book. But when the depression threatened her sanity, he packed her in their car and took her driving. Leonard, a skillful writer himself, a social and political activist, and responsible for the Hogarth Press, dropped everything to care for her whenever she became ill. She knew he was devoting his life to her, yet she referred demeaningly to him as “my Jew,” and wrote a letter to a friend, saying, “I am marrying a poor, penniless Jew.”

  In a 1932 letter to Ethel Smyth, she described a birthday party for her Jewish mother-in-law and Leonard’s nine brothers and sisters:

  When the 10 Jews sat around me silently at my mother-in-law’s, tears gathered behind my eyes, at the futility of life; imagine eating birthday cake with silent Jews at 11 p.m.

  She, like nearly everyone in her Bloomsbury circle, displayed what Nigel Nicolson had called “an occasional touch of anti-Semitism.” Theirs was a British society rife with racism—racism against minorities, against people of color, and pointedly against Jews.

  In these seventy years since I sat worshipfully in her parlor, I learned more of her violent manic depressions, her wild helpless swings; by turns critical, nasty, and catty, moving to exquisite warmth and generosity. I learned of her constant fear that she was going insane.

  In 1941, when the pain of living finally had become too great for her, she wrote two final letters to Leonard before she walked into the river. He found one in her studio:

  I want to tell you that you have given me the greatest possible happiness.

  He found the second one in their parlor. In it, she wrote even more lovingly:

  Everything has gone from me but the certainty of your goodness. I can’t go on spoiling your life any longer. I don’t think two people could have been happier than we have been.

  Those two love letters to Leonard, and her three letters to me, helped me work through my own anger and disillusionment, which now seem trifling in comparison to the agony she endured. They helped restore the admiration I had for her when I was nineteen and just discovering her genius. I realized that she had lived her entire life with a will to create as a woman. That was the most important lesson she had taught me. In 2004, I reread my dissertation in the light of that new understanding, underlining paragraphs that mean as much to me now as they did when I wrote them more than seventy years ago:

  Virginia Woolf is determined to write as a woman. Through the eyes of her sex, she seeks to penetrate life and describe it. Her will to explore her femininity is bitterly opposed by the critics, who guard the traditions of men, who dictate to her or denounce her feminine reactions to art and life.

  Admiringly, I described her literary integrity:

  Against the critic, Virginia Woolf exhorts integrity, the Shakespearian ‘To thine own self be true … ’. Integrity for her [she writes in A Room of One’s Own], ‘that integrity which I take to be the backbone of the writer lies in ignoring the critical admonishers and remaining inflexibly true to herself. … So long as you write what you wish to write, that is all that matters.

  Ruth Gruber

  New York City February 2005

  __________

  1 It was probably not Hitler, as Virginia had thought, but, according to most scholars, Hermann Goering, the head of the German Air Force and one of Hitler’s closest allies.

  2 Lion Feuchtwanger was a German Jewish novelist, whose book The Oppermanns, for which I wrote a preface in 2001, was called “extraordinary” by the New York Times. “No single historical or fictional work has more tellingly or insightfully depicted … the insidious manner in which Nazism began to permeate the fabric of German society than Lion Feuchtwanger’s great novel.”

  3 After World War II, he became even more famous for facing up to the evil the Nazis had wrought and worked on compensating victims of the Holocaust.

  4 “This was the same ship that would carry 1,000 Jewish refugees from Germany in 1939. All of them had legal visas to Cuba; but when they reached
the Caribbean, they were denied entrance by Cuban officials. Their brave captain then took the ship of desperate refugees to Florida. But they were not allowed to land there either. They had no visas to enter America. They were forced to sail back to Europe, where most of them were later trapped, sent to concentration camps, and killed.

  5 “Only later did I learn that Professor Schöffler was Jewish, and that he had fallen victim to the Nazis. When the SS knocked on his door, he killed himself. Dr. Hugo Gabriel, the Protestant convert from Judaism who had been my adviser at the University of Cologne, and whom I later helped get a visa to come to New York in the late 1930s, told me of Professor Schöffler’s death. Tears formed behind my eyes. I owed him so much. Why couldn’t I have helped him get a visa?

  6 The book she was writing was The Years.

  7 At Oxford in 2004, my friend Heidi Stalla, the Junior Dean, who is writing her own Ph.D. thesis on Virginia Woolf, confirmed the reporter’s words. “Dozens of other students,” she told me, “are writing Ph.D. theses on Virginia Woolf and they all use your book. Yours was the first.”

  8 A Dutch hero later hid the Herz family in a safe house, where they survived. In 1945, my brother Irving, a captain traveling with General Patton’s army, found them looking old and skeletal. They flung their arms around him when he told them he was my brother. “Wait here,” Irving said, “I’ll be right back.” He drove to the army PX, filled his truck with provisions, and brought them the first fresh fruits and vegetables they had eaten in two years. Unfortunately, the Dutch hero who had saved them was caught and executed.

  HISTORICAL DOCUMENTS

  I arrived at Cologne University in 1931 on an Institute of International Education fellowship. A few weeks later, I was asked by Professor Herbert Schöffler to work for a Ph.D.: “I have a special reason. I love Virginia Woolf’s work. My students don’t know English well enough to analyze it. You are the only American here. You would be writing the first doctoral thesis on her.” I was flabbergasted. “My fellowship,” I said, “is only for one year.” “It’s never been done in one year,” he said, “but maybe you can do it.” I hung VW’s picture on my bedroom wall, and became mesmerized by her writing. A Room of One’s Own became my bible, and Orlando my favorite novel. When I told Schöffler that I wanted to know much more about her, he suggested I write her at the Hogarth Press. Thus began my correspondence with her.