My city of women was growing: towers and convents, houses of all shapes, wartime hospitals. It was also creeping towards me, gathering memories, snippets of conversations overheard – a great-aunt weeping, something about a train leaving from Waterloo, a telegram. Cold. Bare threads of a life that came before us. Shush, Ruby, the children. At the house on the corner friends at our table brought other memories, their own telling anecdotes, more women to walk my city, whole new streets and neighbourhoods. I dreamed of a huge book, a work of art, built brick by brick, of the stories told at the table. An installation, maybe, a table set with many chairs and in each place a book, handmade. I could see it, laid out in the long entrance hall of the Art Gallery of New South Wales. That would lift the obscuring veil. That would change the shape of my life. Dorothy Green was not impressed. It was no challenge, she said, to amass the stories of women who’d stood up to their circumstances, creditable though they may have been. Was it enough? What do you make of your city? What was its point? I didn’t mention the table installation, I wasn’t that delusional. Our talk was always of books and writing. My theory of reading might have its merits, she said, but not at the cost of deep reading. Don’t flit, she said. Don’t skitter. Skitter! Me? Flit! My city of women falling on its own edifice! No.
Instead of knuckling down to Dorothy’s questions, undaunted – or so I thought – I set about shoring up the city. If depth was the issue, who better to join us at the table than Virginia Woolf. Seated beside her was Lily Briscoe from To the Lighthouse. Of all the threads in that complex novel, Lily was the one I drew out first, the artist who is there at the house in Scotland when the novel opens, a guest among the guests at Mrs Ramsay’s table. It wasn’t until later readings that I took in the significance of Mrs Ramsay, who holds the household together, so essential she is barely noticed by the guests and children who depend on her, the mother through whom Virginia Woolf exorcised the grief and shock that came with her own mother’s death when she, Virginia, was still a girl. No, it was Lily Briscoe who was given a place at the table of my imagination, my city of women: Lily Briscoe, independent and alone, who was admired or overlooked depending on the view, an artist struggling to find a way to express in paint the flux of her thoughts. And all the while having to fend off Mr Tansley, another guest, a man alone – quite a different matter – as he muttered at her, ‘Women can’t write, women can’t paint.’ Oh how we loved to hate Mr Tansley, the ‘most uncharming human being’ Lily had ever met, talking too much, angling to be admired – in need of success, and a wife, Mrs Ramsay could see. We, like Lily, who had neither, were not sympathetic. Yes, we all knew Mr Tansleys. Show me a great novel by a woman that measures up to War and Peace, I was challenged more than once by more than one man. Middlemarch. Really? Is that what you think? Yes, as a matter of fact, it is. Why did I enter the argument on those terms? Novels aren’t horses in a race. Would you ask me to rank War and Peace against Madame Bovary? Ulysses? The curious thing was that Lily Briscoe knew, even as Mr Tansley said the things he said, that it wasn’t true to him ‘but for some reason helpful to him’. In which case, why did ‘her whole being bow, like corn under a wind, and erect itself again from this abasement only with a great and rather powerful effort?’6 Ridiculous really, all the more so fifty years later when we felt ourselves bow, and then bristle, struggling to get the argument shifted onto stronger ground.
To the Lighthouse is, and remains, a bright star in my constellation of reading, a novel that surprises me anew with each next reading. I first read it in that house, then went to the library for the diaries and the letters from that year Virginia Woolf was writing it. It is centrally placed as the fifth of her nine novels, and in it she transforms the dark, disabling shock that came with her mother’s death, when she was just thirteen, and the death soon after of her half-sister, Stella. Virginia Woolf began it in the summer of 1925, not long after the war that changed everything, she said, even, or especially, about the way a woman might write. She wrote ‘22 pages straight off in less than a fortnight’7 before juddering to a halt, ill again with the emotional weight of a death that had obsessed her for decades – both an absence and a halting interruption. She returned to the manuscript early in 1926 and had finished a draft by September. She was forty-four years old.
When she started To the Lighthouse, she’d drawn a diagram of its shape, an H on its side, ‘two blocks joined by a corridor’ through which the time passes – in nineteen brief pages – between the Victorian era of her parents and the transformed, uncertain world in which she wrote. She wanted to make something as ‘formed and controlled’ as a building, an analogy I pointed out to Dorothy, who, of course, knew Woolf better than I did. ‘Words are more impalpable than bricks’, she quoted back at me.8 Was it the bricks, she asked, the corridor drawn like an H on its side, that captures the passing of time, the rupture of war and the death of Mrs Ramsay felt even in the furniture? Or was it the fluidity of Virginia Woolf’s words, the rise and fall of her language above, around, beneath those building blocks? Both, of course, though at the time I preferred the solidity, the clear shapes of a building. It was years before I could appreciate The Waves; all that fluidity. I wanted form. I wanted shape.
To the Lighthouse was published on Thursday, 5 May 1927, the date of Woolf’s mother’s death thirty-two years before. I liked that – dates for the marking of time, the history of a woman’s life, the making of a book. It gave some sort of shape to life, though of course marking your own life by the ages of those who’ve gone before can bring you up against some difficult moments. For me, it was fifty-nine that loomed as dangerous, a border line beyond which I could not see; fifty-nine, the age my mother died, and also Virginia Woolf. It wasn’t until I was almost that age, shadowing the last months of Poppy’s life, returning to Woolf’s diaries, that I worked out that they had died at exactly the same age: not just at fifty-nine, which I’d long known, but at fifty-nine years, two months and three days.9 Exactly the same age. The twentieth of December 2005 would be a potent day for me when I reached that age. I had a party in the garden of the man I had been with for a decade by then, a chapter we have not yet reached.
The book that jolted me out of my city of women – book, installation, fantasy – wasn’t To the Lighthouse, but a biography that took the life of a woman who belonged in my city and treated it in a way that made me furious. Victoria Glendinning’s Rebecca West: A Life was published in 1987, and I read it soon after. The ‘rebellious Rebecca West’, Vera Brittain called her. Unlike Vera Brittain, who hadn’t so much as held Roland’s hand by the start of the First World War, Rebecca West, at twenty, was pregnant from an affair, newly begun, with the much older, married and already famous writer, H. G. Wells. He’d wooed her with his considerable mind, and made no secret of his marriage, which satisfied him in many ways, he told her – as many a man has told his mistress – but not sexually. Although it’s hard to like Wells on reading of this decade-long liaison, it was not a crude seduction. He was Rebecca West’s first lover – ‘one of the most interesting men I have ever met’ – and he, it seems, loved her in a real, if selfish, English, masculine kind of a way. He took her seriously as a writer, and gave her enough intellectually for her to think – at least for a while – that with him she could have both independence and love. Instead, she found herself trapped in a ‘divided life’. With the birth of their son – whom Wells was slow to acknowledge and only reluctantly put in his will – Rebecca West was consigned to the country, out of danger and out of sight. She hated it – the exile from London, the sight of German planes coming in over the coast; the quiet beauty of the countryside became ‘an affront’ to be endured. Even so, the affair lasted all through the war, and on into the 1920s, when she could return to London and live more openly. The child was older, and she was writing, but still she suffered the humiliations and inequities of the divided life that H. G. (as she called him) expected her to deal with ‘harmoniously’; when she objected or complained – which she did
– the fault was due to failings in her, not to the situation; they were certainly not due to him. The consequence, you won’t be surprised to hear, was that Wells took a new mistress.
And yet, despite it all, Rebecca West managed to make headway into journalism and the literary culture of London. In 1918 she published The Return of the Soldier, a short novel for which she earned a remarkable £1000 for the serial rights, and which went into a second printing within a month. I stopped the biography at that point to read the novel. It’s an account of a shell-shocked officer returning to England with amnesia. He has no memory of having married, is repulsed by the wife who has run his large country house in his absence, and longs for the working-class girl whom, for the sake of propriety, he’d stepped away from fifteen years before. With its reference to Freud’s ‘return of the repressed’, it’s less an anti-war story than a way of peeling under the surface of class, convention and marriage; an enactment of the unconscious that loves where it will, a plea for forms of love and ways of living that are not accepted as ‘normal’. The ‘cure’ for this amnesia is the ‘talk’ – orchestrated by a psychoanalytically-minded doctor – which brings him back to the present by restoring to memory the child, now dead, he’d had with his wife. Here he is on the last page of the novel, returning to the house after the encounter with the doctor: ‘He was looking up under his brows at the over-arching house as though it were a hated place to which, against all his hopes, business had forced him to return … He wore a dreadful decent smile … He walked not loose limbed like a boy, as he had that afternoon, but with the soldier’s hard tread upon the heel.’10 He was returned to a social norm he had been able to reject only in the extremis of amnesia. What’s more, cured of his shell shock, he could be sent back to ‘that flooded trench in Flanders’. Whether he returns to the front or not, whether he’s killed or not, we don’t know. The novel ends with his wife’s satisfaction: ‘He’s cured!’
Edward Brittain, who’d recovered from a first round of wounds in the hospital at Camberwell while Vera was nursing there, was returned to the front to be killed five months before the war ended. It was a bitter loss for his sister, made worse by the revelation years later, after Testament of Youth had been published, that he’d learned, just days before, that he was being investigated for a homosexual relationship with a fellow officer – some letters had been intercepted – and was facing a court martial. The circumstances of his death, by a bullet in the head, had always been vague until fifteen years after the war had ended, when Vera Brittain was given these details and had to face the possibility that her brother might have run ahead, inviting the enemy fire, or even have shot himself in the head. Or was it, as with hundreds of thousands of others, simply the horror of war? She would never know. She would live forever with the knowledge that her brother had not been able to confide in her, such was the shame and the stigma of homosexuality in 1918.
The cure of society, I took Rebecca West to be saying in The Return of the Soldier, is no cure. There was no cure, no hope for Edward Brittain, and none for the soldier of West’s novel. There was certainly no hope for her and Wells, who separated in 1923. Victoria Glendinning, for reasons I couldn’t fathom then and still can’t now, saw The Return of the Soldier as a story about ‘salvation through unselfish love’, by which I think she meant the suffering one bears for a child. Was she applauding the cure? Surely not. It might have been a sacrifice, but not because of the child – who was dead – but because of the terms on which having a child happened in that society at that time. Salvation it was not, unless, of course, you consider being restored to the acceptance of society – which in this case meant a large house and the prestige of position – a form of salvation.
In some ways I was grateful to this account of the affair with H. G. Wells, which I first read of in Rebecca West: A Life. From it, speaking entirely selfishly and from the norms of the society I inhabited, I learned two very personal things. The first – from the story of her struggle to get money out of H. G. to help provide for their son, who’d grow up to hate her anyway – was a profound sense of relief that I hadn’t got pregnant with Ross. The second was that when it came to infidelity, maybe lies were worse than honesty. H. G.’s were still rebounding on Rebecca West fifty years later when, for instance, her account of his next (and overlapping) affair as brief and slight, given in the confidence that Wells had told her the truth, was publicly contradicted by his biographer. In an article she wrote in 1925 called ‘I Regard Marriage with Fear and Horror’, Rebecca West proclaimed that the conjugal life was useful only for ‘riveting the fact of paternity in the male mind’.11 This distaste for marriage, according to Glendinning, was also not true. Bruised by the humiliation that was seen as hers rather than his, West had hoped for a ‘conspicuous’ marriage to Lord Beaverbrook, who, in 1923, was paying her court, but he, we are told, proved impotent with her. What was Victoria Glendinning doing, catching her out? Was that the role of biographer? Rebecca West, the book, did nothing to soften me towards England and Englishness. I loathed the biographical distance that assumed a very English form of superiority, another layer of unquestioned norms, in this case another layer again of humiliation to a woman who’d lived messily, not perfectly – which of us does? – but with courage. Okay, so Rebecca West said one thing in one place, another in another; is there not more that can be said about this than proof of the contradiction between public and private in her attitude to love and marriage? (She did later marry, for the most part happily.)
When Vera Brittain returned to Oxford after the war, she switched from English to history, in order, she said, to understand ‘how the whole calamity had happened’ and how it had been possible that her generation through ‘our own ignorance and others’ ingenuity’ were ‘used, hypnotised and slaughtered’. She wrote Testament of Youth, she said, because she felt that it was only by attempting ‘to write history in terms of personal life that I could rescue something that might be of value, some element of truth and hope and usefulness from the smashing up of my own youth’.12 Yes. Rather than catching a woman out, couldn’t there be a way of writing her life that honoured – rather than excused – the inconsistencies, the confusions, that – as I knew from my own wavering, crisscrossing desires – were still integral to the struggle to live with both love and independence of mind in a world that did not easily accord this combination to a woman? Wasn’t the ‘social cure’ part of the problem?
Rebecca West deserved better, was my thought, and it was a thought that had implications. If I were to succeed with Poppy, which I was on the brink of, it would have to be written from an entirely different angle of vision. It was a what the fuck moment. I was forty, with no child, no husband, no mother, living in a house with Sophie, already eating lentils, already bruised enough by the Ross debacle, and – looked at from the point of view of the England I’d left – by the very fact of living here. Orstralia, friends of my father would say, Oh dear. Or, once, from a man at a party: How frightfully jolly. I was never going to please them, no chance. I didn’t even know if I’d please anyone here. What the fuck, I said, slamming down Rebecca West on the table, going out the back door and marching up the hill to Ali’s house. Maybe Dorothy was right. I could tell a lifetime’s worth of anecdotes and still not understand what had happened to me, to Poppy, to our small family and the generation I was part of, born to 1950s mothers, our lives turned by feminism, the Pill, university educations, rooms and incomes of our own.
With so much given to us, why the unhappiness, why that dark hour before dawn? With Virginia Woolf’s conditions for independence in place, why this mess in our relationships with men? It made no sense, and yet, for many of us, it was a dominant reality.
Ambivalence, uncertainty; the experience of life between the lines of the tide: that was the story, not the certainty of bricks. Life is like the weather, an acupuncturist I visited in New York years later told me, a Mr Lee. You can’t expect it otherwise. You must live with it, chi for any weather.
At the moment I opened the door to Ali’s house and called out to her, I felt strong, clear, ready for any weather. She was writing poetry then, part of her struggle from the other side, married with children and a household, welcoming, bountiful – and full of needs. Poetry was her way of keeping balance, moments of solitude in the search for something not yet known. She’s a psychotherapist now; there were years of training to come after that day we sat in a wedge of sun and talked of the determination we could feel in ourselves, a strange impulse we didn’t understand. Today she’d say writers and psychotherapists have in common that they do what they do in order to discover ‘what they don’t know about themselves’; an urge, a process, she suspects, in which ‘the element of unconsciousness in their undertaking is somehow crucial to it’.13 And that’s how it was for me, that day: raw, uncomprehended, necessary. It wasn’t a solution, but it was a spur, a challenge that changed the shape of my days at the desk in the large downstairs room at the house on the corner.
By a strange coincidence, the first time I spoke at a writers’ festival, I was on a panel with Victoria Glendinning. It was about biography. I had published Exiles at Home, rewritten from the thesis Dorothy had pulled apart; it was there in the bookshop, but Poppy, though written, was not yet on the stands. This, despite my low opinion of Rebecca West, left me feeling at a disadvantage in the company of not only one, but two famous English biographers. The other was Andrew Motion, who spoke of his book The Lamberts, which had faced him with the question of which members of this talented family to include, or not. I met him again years later and liked him; but that day I was awed by his confident Englishness. Fortunately Brian Matthews was also on the panel. He’d just published Louisa, his biography of Henry Lawson’s mother – which turned the conventions of biography by writing of the mother rather than the famous son. Victoria Glendinning’s contribution to the panel was suave and polished; the audience loved her. I rose to the occasion if not with English panache then at least with conviction, saying something to the effect that here in Australia we were thinking about what biography might mean if we took as our subjects those who are not usually considered ‘worthy’ of ‘A Life’ – and if, as a result of this choice, we let our own story as biographer onto the page, what would that tell us about the way a life became a narrative? How extraordinary, Victoria Glendinning said. We’re not thinking about that in England.
Second Half First Page 5