Square Haunting

by Francesca Wade

  The lecture series was significant to Power for another reason. Her thinking had evolved over two decades of collaboration with Munia Postan, whose company had been a constant throughout her years in Mecklenburgh Square. After he returned to LSE as her research assistant, they began to write not only in the same room but even poring over the same manuscripts, sharing their ideas and taking cues from each other’s interests; he soon became a confidant in matters personal as well as professional. At some point – probably in 1933 – they became lovers. Years later, during a wartime separation, Power wrote longingly of the excitement of these early days ‘in your little flat in Hampstead, passing a white night in lovemaking and breaking off to talk about medieval history between them; and in the morning drinking our coffee in your narrow bed, running out to buy ices and lunching at the little table for two’. While Johnston had been significantly older than Power, staid and serious, Postan was young, charismatic and free-thinking; if Power had hesitated to alter the dynamic of their close working relationship, she relaxed her guard on realising that the intellectual spark which drew them together translated into a deeply satisfying emotional connection.

  Their affair, remembered Postan’s friend Raymond Firth, was ‘rigorously concealed’ from LSE colleagues; Power was reluctant to cause ‘a sensation at the school’, and knew that being the subject of gossip – a professor of some standing, intimate outside the bonds of marriage with a lecturer ten years her junior! – would inevitably diminish her reputation in and outside the school. Mecklenburgh Square remained a place of professional decorum, where Power worked and hosted friends in her public persona: her relationship was conducted in Postan’s flat at 6C Willow Road in Hampstead (the next street to Christchurch Place, where H. D. and Aldington had lived in the first years of their marriage) and in what Postan called a ‘funk-hole’ in the Cotswolds, rented for clandestine weekend getaways. But at the end of 1937, they decided to eliminate all need for secrecy. On 11 December, when Power was forty-eight and Postan thirty-nine, they very quietly married at the St Pancras Registry Office, with two friends and Power’s sisters in attendance, before returning together to 20 Mecklenburgh Square. ‘He and I have been working together in one way and another for fifteen years now and getting steadily fonder of each other and it seemed a good idea to continue the partnership,’ she wrote, almost apologetically, to Toynbee. She told few people about the wedding, writing casually after the event to most of her friends, anxious only to dispel any concerns that her new status would alter her commitment to her work. (When her bank automatically transferred her accounts to her married name, she immediately instructed it to change them back, having checked with a solicitor it was quite legal for her to continue to use her maiden name.) ‘I am not giving up my job (it will, I’m afraid, be rather a semi-detached marriage),’ she told Lionel Robbins. Her letter ended on a note of professional, rather than domestic, triumph, a sensation of the sort she did court: ‘Did you know that I had been invited to give the Ford lectures next year? This almost drove my marriage out of my head!’

  Power had long been doubtful about marriage as an institution, and – much like Jane Harrison – concerned that its domestic binds were incompatible with a woman’s public ambitions. In her twenties, she grew ‘furious and miserable’ with her old friends who were announcing engagements one by one; as she signed congratulatory cards and dispatched begrudgingly embroidered babies’ frocks, she lamented the widespread assumption ‘that the ideal wife should endeavour to model herself upon a judicious mixture of a cow, a muffler, a shadow, a mirror. A lump of plasticine, a doormat and a vacuum, and algebraically indicated by a negative.’ Should her friend Margery follow the example of several peers who had lost ‘their old interests and their old individuality and their old friendships’ upon their marriages, Power insisted with mock seriousness that she would never speak to her again: ‘The abstract cause which I care for more than anything else is the cause of women and it seems to me that until women learn to keep their individuality after marriage and to recognise that love is not the only thing in the world and its satisfaction, with all that that entails, their only function, we shall never get anywhere or be anything.’ When in 1936 Margery separated from her husband, Dominick Spring Rice, Power was unfazed at the scandal, and wrote solicitously to Margery, urging her to keep up her political work and offering refuge in Mecklenburgh Square. There’s a slight relish in her letter, perhaps a certain satisfaction that her own resolute opposition to marriage had proved the safer course in the long term.

  Like all the women in this book, Power found very meaningful stimulation and intimacy in her friendships with like-minded women, where she could simply be herself – ‘I do think that absolutely straight, equal, free and sympathetic intercourse is the best thing in the world,’ she wrote to Margery, describing a long day with her friend Mary Gwladys Jones spent ‘talking history all afternoon and ourselves all evening’ – and had never seen male company as an essential for a fulfilling emotional life. Having worked so hard to carve out a place for herself in a male-dominated world, marriage threatened to disrupt that delicate balance between femininity and professionalism which she always had to negotiate with the utmost care. Most of the men who displayed an interest in her were much older than she was (such as Johnston) or more established in their field (Toynbee); like Virginia Woolf, who wrote to Leonard before their engagement that she refused to ‘look upon marriage as a profession’, Power was reluctant to jeopardise her independence, and (like Sayers and Harrison) was conscious that she would be deeply unhappy in any relationship where her interests were expected to be subsidiary to another’s.

  But with Munia, things were different. After years of close collaboration, their academic interests were so closely entwined as to be almost indistinguishable: while Power had clearly begun as the senior partner, she had found that Postan’s stimulation shaped and deepened her own thought without, crucially, overpowering it. ‘One of the greatest joys I have had has been to work with you,’ she wrote to Postan later, describing the ‘unperishable happiness’ of their years together. ‘I owe my whole intellectual development of the last ten years to you.’ They came to take pleasure in each other’s personal passions, too: Power was delighted to share her love of Chinese art (over the years, Postan amassed a considerable collection of Chinese ceramics which augmented her own), while she gamely embraced his enthusiasm for mountain-climbing (though she had always claimed to be deficient in physical courage ‘to the extent of fearing dreadfully anything of the genus cow’). Together they climbed from the Rudolfshütte in Austria, from Capel Curig in Snowdonia, and from Chamonix at the base of Mont Blanc: far from confining her to domestic duty, Power’s marriage sent her up mountains, testing her physical limits safe in the knowledge that Munia was by her side. ‘We have had in common everything that two people can have in common,’ she wrote to him later, ‘and all I grudge is the years in which we did not have each other.’ It was clear to her friends that this marriage was that rare thing: an eminently viable partnership, a satisfactory balance of head and heart. When she broke the news to their mutual friend and colleague J. H. Clapham, his daughters immediately proposed a most suitable toast: to ‘Harriet Vane and Lord Peter Wimsey’.

  *

  As the British public gathered around their wirelesses waiting for the news that war had been officially declared, Power was working hard on one last effort of international cooperation: a new volume of the Cambridge Economic History of Europe, which she had conceived with Clapham and worked on throughout the 1930s. The encyclopedia was to provide a modern, comparative canon of world history, with entries sent in from historians all over the world, including contributions from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, the Lycée Henri-IV, the Sorbonne, and the universities of Ghent, Helsinki, Vienna, Lund and Zurich. In his introduction to the first volume, Clapham admitted that the project had been difficult to co-ordinate. A Finnish scholar, he lamented, ‘had occasion to write from “somewhe
re in Finland” in November 1939 that he hoped to get back to economic history but that “it was a small thing compared with the independence of his country”. We have not heard from him since. Our Spanish contributor sadly threw up his task because he was a refugee in Santander and his notes were in Seville. There has been no later news of him either … Of Professor Rutkowski all that we know with certainty is that he cannot be at his University of Poznan; we believe that Professor Ganshof, an officer of the reserve, is alive in Belgium; and that Professor Marc Bloch, after serving with the armies, is safe in America.’

  In her 1938 book Three Guineas, Virginia Woolf asks how to formulate a feminist response to war. She argues that, since women have historically had little, if any, stake in their country – deprived of education, employment and political influence – the forces of patriotism which spur men to fight mean little to women. Woolf, like Power and Harrison, saw pacifism – like feminism – as a struggle without borders, which aimed to give voice to the disenfranchised and to overthrow their oppressors, whether these took the form of tyrannical fathers, societal structures or fascist leaders. ‘As a woman,’ she writes, ‘I have no country. As a woman I want no country. As a woman my country is the whole world.’

  Eileen Power’s life-work stands as a firm riposte to the narratives of nationalism that Woolf denounced as symptoms of an unequal society, but also takes Woolf’s statement further. While Woolf suggested that women should form a ‘Society of Outsiders’, rejecting the structures of a world not built for them, Power’s response to militarist patriarchy took the form of direct action, through her valiant efforts to reshape the narratives that uphold those systems of exclusion. During her Kahn Fellowship, Power saw how entrenched stereotypes and unchallenged assumptions of cultural superiority lead to misguided, ignorant, violent politics. Her history displays a loyalty not to her country, but to the world she wanted to see in the future: where women and the lower classes would be given voice, where East would be afforded the same respect as West, and where military threats would be replaced by international cooperation in the service of peace. In her extensive notes on the League of Nations, to which she added throughout her life, Power wrote that she wanted to inspire through her work a sense of ‘international patriotism’, cultivating the same mix of reason and emotion that drives people to fight for their country, but funnelling it towards a commitment to world citizenship: the belief that, ‘in spite of national antagonisms and divergent interests, mankind as a whole is what the League of Nations presupposes it to be: a community with common aims and a common history’. It was a bold and hopeful ideal. But in the autumn of 1939 – just as Virginia Woolf was moving into Mecklenburgh Square – Power’s vision appeared to be crumbling.

  VIRGINIA WOOLF

  (1882–1941)

  37 Mecklenburgh Square, August 1939–October 1940

  Up & down – up & down.

  VIRGINIA WOOLF, diary, 13 June 1940

  When Virginia and Leonard Woolf arrived in Mecklenburgh Square on 17 August 1939, they found the entrance to their new home obstructed by sandbags, laid by the band of Irish labourers digging an air-raid shelter in the square’s garden. Six days later, news came that Germany and Russia had signed a non-aggression pact; Hitler consequently invaded Poland, an act to which the British government had pledged to respond by entering into war. The following day, as parliament was recalled, the Woolfs came up from their Sussex home, Monk’s House, to oversee the move of their personal possessions from 52 Tavistock Square to 37 Mecklenburgh Square. The journey was sombre and silent: the train was nearly empty, and as they walked from the station they found London eerily indifferent, the British Museum shut, ‘no stir in the streets’. Their removals man had just received his call-up notice, and informed the Woolfs that he wouldn’t be there tomorrow. ‘It’s fate, the foreman said,’ wrote Woolf in her diary that evening. ‘What can you do against fate? Complete chaos at 37.’

  The Woolfs’ tenure at Mecklenburgh Square began – and continued – in a state of tension and unease, the immediate political crisis echoing the domestic disruption of the move. They had signed a lease on 37 Mecklenburgh Square ‘rather rashly’ in May, after the noise from building works on the Royal Hotel on Tavistock Square rendered their home there almost impossible to live in. That summer, Virginia had lain dozing on her bed, her head ‘a tight wound ball of string’, while Leonard and their solicitors negotiated in vain with the Bedford Estate to annul their current lease. ‘I long for 37 Mecklenburgh Sq,’ wrote Woolf: ‘a large seeming & oh so quiet house, where I could sleep anywhere.’ But unlike Sayers or Power, who arrived at Mecklenburgh Square excited to make a new start, the process of undoing and reassembling her life reminded Woolf uncomfortably of her mortality, forcing her to confront a future which seemed increasingly futile.

  The move was the culmination of a difficult year for the Woolfs, as personal tragedies accentuated the deepening political danger. On 23 June, their friend Mark Gertler had committed suicide, only a fortnight after dining with the Woolfs and discussing, among other subjects, his fear at Hitler’s treatment of Jews. The following week, Leonard’s elderly mother, already suffering from a protracted illness, had broken two ribs in a fall, and died soon afterwards. Visiting Leonard’s mother had always convinced Woolf of ‘the horror of family life’, but her loss left them both feeling strangely unmoored. The fresh promise of the new house dissolved into a dull anxiety that they had made a terrible mistake in leaving Tavistock Square, where they had spent fifteen largely happy years. As they went through the Mecklenburgh Square house that July, fitting electric lights and planning how to arrange their furniture, ‘a grim thought struck me: wh. of these rooms shall I die in?’

  On 3 September 1939, Chamberlain announced to the waiting nation that Britain was at war with Germany. Woolf spent hours sewing blackout curtains while listening for sirens, finding herself ‘too tired, emotionally, to read a page’. Number 37 Mecklenburgh Square seemed uncomfortable and hostile – ‘The kitchen very small. Everything too large. Stairs bad. No carpets.’ The external uncertainty dampened the Woolfs’ enthusiasm for domestic comfort: a week after they had moved in, the hallway remained blocked with boxes, and even in November, Woolf informed a friend that there was ‘a chamber pot in the sitting-room, and a bed in the dining-room’. Gradually, uneasily, they unpacked and settled in, Woolf and their servant Mabel Haskins emptying cases and laying carpets. As before, the house was divided, with the Hogarth Press lodged in the basement, while the solicitors Dolman & Pritchard – who had sublet part of Tavistock Square since 1924 – occupied the ground and first floors, and the Woolfs ‘perched’ on the upper two storeys. ‘I’ve two nice rooms at the top,’ Virginia wrote to Vita Sackville-West. ‘I like them – there you’ll come – one side is chimneys on a hill, I suppose Islington – t’other all green fields and the Foundlings playing.’

  *

  ‘How to go on, through war? thats the question,’ wrote Virginia ten days after moving into the square. That dilemma occupied Woolf throughout her tenure in Mecklenburgh Square, infiltrating every aspect of her writing and daily life. During the First World War most of the Woolfs’ friends had been conscientious objectors, but now most of their circle was resolved that fascism had to be countered, through militarism if necessary, since the League of Nations’s policy of collective security seemed to have failed. David Garnett – who had worked as a fruit farmer throughout the First World War – now joined the RAF; E. M. Forster broadcast in defence of war; Leonard published The War for Peace, which argued that Britain’s participation in a military defence of democracy could no longer be avoided. Virginia’s own determined inclination to non-resistance left her feeling isolated and helpless. ‘She is for Peace, Leonard for the war,’ wrote Rose Macaulay after bumping into Virginia at the London Library. Since 1915, Virginia had, like Jane Harrison and Eileen Power, considered patriotism ‘a base emotion’, which she associated with an uncritical acceptance of tradition and an arrogan
t sense of superiority: in her 1938 essay Three Guineas, she had urged her readers ‘to take no share in patriotic demonstrations; to assent to no form of national self-praise’. But now, much like H. D. in 1916, Woolf felt out of step with the national mood.

  Leonard and Virginia Woolf photographed by Gisèle Freund in 1939

  The ‘preposterous masculine fiction’ of war haunts Woolf’s writing, from the futile death of Jacob Flanders in Jacob’s Room (1922) to the ‘insidious … fingers of the European War’ that claw at the shell-shocked and suicidal Septimus Smith in Mrs Dalloway (1925). Her novels often represent the First World War as a gap, an absence; it is portrayed in To the Lighthouse (1927) by a short section entitled ‘Time Passes’, and in The Years (1937) by a ‘complete break’ after which no character can remember what they were saying before. For Woolf herself, that war was connected with a dark period of mental illness which confined her to bed and forced her to leave Bloomsbury for the comparative peace of Richmond. Now, Woolf felt herself plunged into another blank. The political consequences of a second war blended, for her, with its devastating repercussions for her last decades of writing and a peaceful old age: defeat, she wrote, would signal ‘the complete ruin not only of civilisation, in Europe, but of our last lap’. She was terrified that her beloved nephew Quentin Bell would be conscripted – she knew this would be unbearable for her sister Vanessa, already traumatised by the death of her son Julian in the Spanish Civil War – and that she would never again settle to writing another book. When a woman in a Bloomsbury coffee shop cheerfully assured her that Britain would win the war, Woolf replied: ‘But what’s the point of winning?’