I’m in a room of people, all chattering like mad. There are feathers in the hair of the women and our Charlston dresses shimmer like mad in the candlelight. We're all fringes and Art Deco jewellery. The men are more sober...at least on the outside. Inwardly, we're seething with intellect, emotion and sexuality. Everyone is secretly cheating with someone they're not married to. And as we exchange sparkling conversation about all the most important issues of the era, above us floats an ethereal presence, In the best traditions of Bloomsbury they're gender fluid...a 'he', a 'they' and sometimes a 'she', is whispering in our ears that they are three hundred years old and counting.
Where on earth am I? Is it the early 1930s, and I'm partying with the Bloomsbury set, joining in with their most decadent and amusing members?
Or...actually…I am somewhere on the Gower in Wales, where a set of 21st century friends meet regularly to celebrate story and myth?
Last time I was there, we were immersed in the novel Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, which you can read about here; this time we're celebrating the writing, and the life, of Virginia Woolf. This is a gathering of Woolf fanatics. We're the Woolflings, we tell ourselves, as we move round the room playing our parts and sipping our drinks.
From her teens Woolf regularly sank into a distressed state which we now think may have been bi-polar disorder, because when Virginia was in party mood, her conversation shimmered and she was full of life and fun, but when she was low she became very ill, often delirious, with 'vile imaginations' that threatened her sanity. She’d hear the birds outside her bedroom window sing in ancient Greek, and had strongly suicide thoughts. Her illness may have begun at the age of 13 when her beloved mother died. Her half sister Stella, who took over being a mother to her, died not long after. In her famous diary she said it was impossible to write of. A few years later, her father died, followed by her beloved brother Thoby. She wrote Jacob’s Room in memory of him, an emotion which you feel, turning her grief into a spiritual shape. In the novel, Jacob moves from childhood to his early death in battle, and we’re left with the emptiness of Jacob’s room to show the profound emptiness of loss.
We’d been discussing her work all weekend, dipping into A Writer's Diary which is a Woolfling's constant companion. This journal. which she kept from 1918 to three weeks beforee her death, included entries on her writing, books she was reading and her unfolding private world - the anguish, the triumph, the creative vision.
We mostly concentrated on four of her many books, starting with The Lighthouse. This is set in a country house similar to the one ther father kept. He was the writer and thinker Leslie Stephen and he'd take his entire family down to the rather disheveled Talland House on the rugged Cornwall coast every summer. Woolf’s book is a clear reconstruction of those times, removed to the Isle of Sky where, through the lives of the Ramsay family, she investigates human relationships. Talland must have been a respite for Virginia, but most things that are constant in our lives have to end eventually, and the novel finishes with the return of the grown children and their father to the house, after their mother's death. None of the siblings want to be there, and it's too late for them to be the least excited about trip to the eponimous lighthouse.
In 1917 the Woolfs bought a printing press, which I've already written about in this blogpost about the Hogarth Press. Virginia was slowly recovering from a breakdown and Leonard hoped the intensely manual occupation would give her something to occupy her mind when she wasn’t writing. Despite the long hours, she found it exhilarating, as she wrote to her sister Vanessa:
Reading from Mrs Dalloway “After 2 hours work at the press, Leonard heaved a terrific sigh and said ‘I wish to God we’d never bought the cursed thing!’ To my relief, though not surprise, he added, ‘Because I shall never do anything else.’ You can’t think how exciting, soothing, ennobling and satisfying it is. And so far we’ve only done the dullest and most difficult part – setting up notice.’”
Although Woolf's books were printed on this press, it would be wrong to think of it as ‘self publishing’. She received rave reviews for Mrs Dalloway, which might be thought of as the epitome of Virginia’s modernist style. It’s often the first book people will read of hers, and certainly it was my entry into her world, when I bought a finely-bound volume in the early eighties. The plot is simple and only takes place over one day. Clarissa Dalloway is throwing a party, while war veteran Septimius suffers severe PTS; hallucinations and haunting memories. Her first title for this book was The Hours; taken by Michael Cunningham for his novel that follows another Clarissa's day through New York while also detailing the last hours of Woolf’s life.
By the time she was writing the magically realistic Orlando, Virginia had met Vita, and taken her for her muse. Orlando follows an English nobleman who lives for three centuries and mysteriously becomes a woman during that time. Woolf received critical praise for the groundbreaking work, as well as a newfound level of popularity – most people agree it is her most accessible and witty story.
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| Vita |
The final book we explored was The Waves, my personal favourite. The voice of this novel is like listening to the waves break on a shore...I can still feel her prose shusshing in my ears. Despite there being almost no story at all, I think it's a thrilling novel. We watch six friends grapple with the death of a mutal friend, Percival. Woolf does this by revealing their inner soliloquies. This is Virginia Woolf’s theory of how fiction works for her, an amazing, poetic dreamscape.
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| 'Violet' |
But now, after a weekend of study, reading, dramatising and interpretating, we're allowed to loosen our (bow) ties and let our (shingled) hair down. At the party, we greet each other with air kisses and whoops as the ‘four Vs’ and their male partners arrive in their finery.
First to pour a drink is Virginia herself, accompatined by the ever loving and caring Leonard Woolf. And here's her sister Vanessa Bell, but there's no Clive Bell in sight. She's accompantied by her lover and gay friend Duncan Grant, who is an artist, like her. By now, Vita Sackville-West has arrived with her long-suffering husband, Harold Nicolson. Vita was also a novelist, writing books that are still enjoyable (see this blogpost), but is most famously known as a gardener. With her hubby she transformed the derelict gardens at Sissinghurst Castle into something so wonderful it's an attraction to this day. Finally, the enigmatic Violet Keppel comes in, sulking somewhat. She is Vita’s true love and was her lover before and after the little fling with Virginia. She’s on the arm of her fiancé Major Trefusis, who she will eventually marry after many gay affairs, still suffering a deep depression.
Finally, Orlando is here, in all zir glory. Man, woman, young, ageless. Nothing thicker than a knife's blade separates happiness from melancholy, zie whispers to the others...All extremes of feeling are allied with madness. We can all hear zir, even though we can't see zim clearly... we write, not with the fingers, but with the whole person. The nerve which controls the pen winds itself about every fibre of our being, threads the heart, pierces the liver. Is not writing poetry a secret transaction, a voice answering a voice?
The atmosphere in the candlelit room is electric. While Orlando floats above us, Vanessa is trying to find out just how things are with her sister, whom she cares for deeply, while discussing her art with Duncan and, more importantly, trying to pursued him to give her a child…despite being a wonderful artists she was also a born mother and finally they did have a child together.
Meanwhile Violet is griping and glowering at everyone. Temporarily at least, Vita has gone off with her new amour, Virginia. It’s possible they only spent one weekend together, and no one knows if the relationship was consummated, but Violet isn’t happy and poor Major Trefusis is getting it in the ear.
As for Virginia…she’s high tonight. Her conversation is witty, avant-garde and irreverent to the point of bawdiness. She's talking about life...I have a deeply hidden and inarticulate desire for something beyond the daily life...and feminism...as a woman, I have no country. As a woman I want no country. As a woman my country is the whole world... and books...Second hand books are wild books, homeless books; they have come together in vast flocks of variegated feather.
She’s using language to create; ‘some kind of whole made of shivering fragments that capture the flight of the mind.’
Virginia might have been mentally desperate at times, but there's no doubt she was cherished and loved by her husband. Leonard was always by her side, watching for signs of depression, keeping things quiet and calm, providing her with a balanced diet, and that most important of essentials...A Room of One's Own. As the Second World War continued, and she finished Betweenn the Acts, her last book, Leonard saw how she was sinking into deepening despair as their London home was destroyed in the Blitz. She was also terrified that if England was invaded by Germany, Leonard, who was Jewish, would be in particular danger. On the 28th March 1941, Virginia Woolf filled her overcoat pocket with stones, walked into the River Ouse and was swept away. She was a strong swimmer, so the stones made her determination clear. Although she'd had enough of her life, her books remain as a testiment to her. They are filled with such understanding of life and death, such wonder, and such a clear acount of the human condition. Let's let her have the last words as we party on her behalf on into the night...So long as you write what you wish to write, that is all that matters; and whether it matters for ages or only for hours, nobody can say.
Hello to her