Square Haunting

by Francesca Wade

  She discussed her childhood in an affectionate memoir written for Vanessa before her sister’s marriage to Clive Bell, and more critically in papers delivered to the Memoir Club, an intimate gathering of Bloomsbury friends whose rules dictated frank self-analysis and forbade the taking of offence. She sat for several portraits by Vanessa, who often painted Woolf with her eyes closed or mysteriously absent, as if to deny the possibility of capturing what lay behind them. In 1932, Woolf was also the subject of a biography, by the novelist Winifred Holtby, who approached her in the hope of writing a critical memoir, setting Woolf’s work in the context of her life. Woolf was ambivalent about the process, and claimed that she ‘roared with laughter’ on reading the book. ‘I couldn’t help laughing to think what a story she could have told had she known the true Virginia,’ she wrote to a friend. But what did she mean by the ‘true’ Virginia? ‘We’re splinters and mosaics; not, as they used to hold, immaculate, monolithic, consistent wholes,’ wrote Woolf in 1924, reflecting on the patchwork of engagements, public and private, that made up her day; she considered her self a fragmentary, chaotic and discontinuous identity composed of parts revealed to different people in different ways, and constantly changing.

  A few years after the experience with Holtby, Woolf herself took on the task of writing a full-length biography. She agreed, after some hesitation, to write the life of the artist and curator Roger Fry, who had been a close friend for decades, as well as the lover of her sister Vanessa. Woolf was distraught at his death on 9 September 1934, and considered that ‘nobody – none of my friends – made such a difference to my life as he did’. This project – which she began properly in April 1938, entering an ‘odd posthumous friendship’ with the man she had known since 1910 – occupied her throughout the first months of war. Lehmann remembered a glum picnic in Mecklenburgh Square with Virginia in September 1939: ‘While we ate sandwiches despondently in my flat, she confessed that the only way she could find to dispel the restless visions of anxiety that continually oppressed her was to force herself to carry on with the biography of Roger Fry she was preparing, and to re-create herself in her diary.’ Woolf felt comforted ‘thinking of Roger not of Hitler’, as she sat in the London Library reading reviews of his exhibitions, while far away Chamberlain was negotiating with Hitler. ‘I dont feel that the crisis is real,’ she wrote, ‘not so real as Roger in 1910 at Gordon Square, about which I’ve just been writing … how I bless Roger, & wish I could tell him so, for giving me himself to think of – what a help he remains – in this welter of unreality.’

  In her Memoir Club paper on ‘Old Bloomsbury’, Virginia remembered Roger Fry first appearing at an evening gathering in an oversized ulster coat, its pockets bulging with books and paintboxes, and being immediately awed by his ‘knowledge and experience’. Fry’s influence on the Bloomsbury artists – and on British culture – was cemented by the exhibition Manet and the Post-Impressionists which he curated at the Grafton Galleries in November 1910, bringing the work of Matisse, Van Gogh, Gauguin and Cézanne to London for the first time. The exhibition, Woolf recalled, threw the establishment of gallery-goers and critics into ‘paroxysms of rage and laughter’. The Daily Telegraph critic flung his catalogue to the floor in disgust at the paintings; Wilfrid Blunt wrote that ‘they are the works of idleness and impotent stupidity, a pornographic show’. Yet Woolf and Vanessa Bell were thrilled by the possibilities suggested by these colourful, abstract, essentially modern works, which eschewed conventions of Victorian realism in favour of formal arrangements designed to stir the imagination and senses. To Bell, the exhibition proposed new directions in form, colour and light; to Woolf, it opened up new ways of representing subjects, which would shape her approach to both fiction and biography.

  Woolf’s first two novels, The Voyage Out and Night and Day, were relatively conventional in form, though both feature heroines frustrated by the ways external expectations fail to reflect their innermost desires. But after reading Fry’s book Vision and Design, in which he suggested that art and literature could seek ‘the expression of the imaginative life rather than a copy of actual life’, Woolf became convinced that a subject’s essence could be more than a factual likeness; that a novel could offer not just a plot but a representation of the ‘myriad impressions’ each mind receives daily. With her third novel, Jacob’s Room, Woolf felt she had ‘found out how to begin (at 40) to say something in my own voice’. It was to Fry’s influence that she ascribed her shift towards a fragmentary style of narrative, featuring multiple points of view and an emphasis on images rather than events, a technique which reached its height in The Waves (1931), her great experiment in recording the impressions and thoughts of characters without conversation or external reality at all. ‘You have I think,’ wrote Woolf to Fry, ‘kept me on the right path, so far as writing goes, more than anyone.’

  When in 1934 Fry’s sister Margery had asked Woolf to take on the task of writing Roger’s life, she had at first demurred. She recalled E. M. Forster’s biography of their friend Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson which had ignored his homosexuality, a prudishness she considered ‘quite futile’; in 1935 she agreed with James Strachey on the need for ‘a full and outspoken life’ of his brother Lytton, which would not come until the 1960s. Her thoughts on biography had evolved alongside her view of character in fiction; Woolf had welcomed the rise of the ‘new biography’ amid the social freedoms of the new century, which swapped lifeless panegyric for shorter, more selfaware studies interested in character rather than deeds. But when Woolf agreed to take on the Fry project, she began to realise that this form of writing entailed the sorts of social responsibilities from which she had long believed a writer needed to be free. She felt she couldn’t explore Roger’s ambivalent feelings towards his family, or his affairs: ‘How does one euphemise 20 different mistresses?’ she wrote in frustration. Fry himself had spoken openly at the Memoir Club about his childhood, but when she discussed with John Maynard Keynes and Lydia Lopokova whether to include an anecdote he had told about getting an erection after administering a beating at boarding school, she was dismayed to be told firmly that the time had not yet come when such subjects could be treated publicly.

  With Roger’s friends and family looking over her shoulder – and regularly turning up at her door with overflowing boxes ‘full of tailor’s bills love letters and old picture postcards’ – Woolf felt burdened by a sense of ‘joyless and unprogressive’ duty which tied her to the documentary evidence. She considered at one point writing it backwards, or in the first person, as if trying to trick herself that it was fiction. Soon after his death, she had composed a ‘private’ sketch of Fry, in which she had aimed to present him ‘almost as a novelist might make a character in fiction’; the subsequent portrait is a hybrid of fiction and biography, joyful, impressionistic and carefree. But this authorised attempt felt different, and she constantly refers in her diaries and letters to the responsibility as ‘sheer drudgery’, which left her ‘dazed & depressed’. ‘A bad morning, because I’m dried up about Roger,’ she wrote in May 1939. ‘I’m determined tho’ to plod through & make a good job, not a work of art. Thats the only way.’ The diligence of her research is clear from the finished book: she paid tribute to eight generations of his Quaker family, and ploughed through bundles of Roger’s letters sent home from school, many stained with the juice of the withered buds he enclosed for his botanically minded parents. Though she knew him so well, and witnessed many of the scenes she described, the biography remains for the most part carefully impersonal: to Ethel Smyth, Woolf wrote that ‘it was an experiment in self suppression’, herself appearing only as ‘the invisible V – the submerged V’. Yet the hints of her own experience are those which animate her subject best: she remembers Roger’s voice ‘like a harmonious growl’, the way he laughed ‘spontaneously, thoroughly, with the whole of him’, the ‘gravity and stillness’ to his face which made him look ‘like a saint in one of his Old Masters’.

  Frustr
ated by the difficulties of representing another life, Woolf’s thoughts turned towards a new project. In April 1939 Vanessa had playfully warned Woolf, who was fifty-seven, that she would soon be ‘too old’ to write her memoirs; now, in Mecklenburgh Square, Woolf began to think more seriously about beginning them. It was a project grounded from its inception in the reality of life under war. Woolf was anxious about losing her memories along with the physical reminders of the past that seemed at risk of imminent destruction: as she lay awake in Mecklenburgh Square, regretting the move and worrying about death, she found herself ‘going over each of the rooms’ in her first home at 22 Hyde Park Gate. To her pleasure, she discovered that snippets of memory, long submerged, could suddenly feel ‘more real than the present moment’, and that she was able to ‘spin a kind of gauze over the war’ by retreating into a world that existed only in her mind.

  She worked on a story called ‘The Searchlight’, in which the beams of light from planes overhead spur a woman to recall her Victorian childhood; meanwhile, she gradually assembled these scraps into the beginnings of a piece she called ‘A Sketch of the Past’, which she continued during 1939 and 1940 ‘by way of a holiday from Roger’. ‘I have no energy at the moment,’ she wrote, ‘to spend upon the horrid labour that it needs to make an orderly and expressed work of art; where one thing follows another and all are swept into a whole.’ If the resulting sketch is halting, full of ellipses, stops and starts, it’s a reflection on the very circumstances of its composition, over a period when Woolf was confronting the serious possibility of death at any moment. In some ways, her memoir-writing was an immediate, pragmatic response to the war: a way of shoring up her legacy against the potential wreckage of an explosion. ‘Shall I ever finish these notes – let alone make a book from them?’ Woolf wondered, acknowledging that, if the war were to be lost, ‘book writing becomes doubtful. But I wish to go on, not to settle down in that dismal puddle.’ As the Phoney War continued, Woolf travelled back and forth in time, finding that she automatically recalled her life through the houses in which she had lived: from 37 Mecklenburgh Square to her first Bloomsbury residence at 46 Gordon Square, and further back to her childhood homes: Talland House in St Ives, and 22 Hyde Park Gate. Writing about herself, with no responsibility to anyone else, she thought, would absolve her from the sense of duty she felt with Roger Fry, and allow her to write a form of biography more akin in sensibility to fiction: something fragmentary, resisting form or plot, focusing not on an outward chain of events, but – like her novels – on an inner life.

  Woolf had always been fascinated by autobiography, and enthusiastically encouraged her friends to write their own. (It was her encouragement that led to Jane Harrison publishing her Reminiscences with the Hogarth Press.) In part, this was down to Woolf’s endless interest in stories and characters, but more than that, she considered autobiography a potent weapon for women’s freedom. She had noted in A Room of One’s Own that, ‘until very recently, women in literature were the creation of men’, but are now – citing as an example ‘Jane Harrison’s books on Greek archaeology’ – beginning to ‘write of women as women have never been written of before’. Like H. D., Woolf saw autobiographical writing as a means of countering the narratives so often imposed on women’s lives from outside. ‘I was thinking the other night that there’s never been a womans autobiography,’ she wrote to Ethel Smyth. ‘Nothing to compare with Rousseau. Chastity and modesty I suppose have been the reason. Now why shouldnt you be not only the first woman to write an opera, but equally the first to tell the truths about herself?’ When Smyth began her memoir, in July 1940, Woolf wrote to congratulate her: ‘Lord how I envy you, compared with my tethered and literal rubbish-heap grubbing in RF, this complete and free handed and profound revelation.’ Woolf never finished ‘A Sketch of the Past’ – she threw away scraps of notes in fits of efficiency when she was concentrating on Roger Fry, and recovered them sheepishly from the dustbin when the urge to procrastinate took over again. She wrote in concentrated bursts of ten minutes at a time, with Roger set aside, thinking guiltily that ‘this is bosh & stuffing compared with the reality of reading say Tawney’. But the project set Woolf thinking in new and productive ways about speech and freedom, and the difficulties of expressing life through language; ‘A Sketch of the Past’ is a nuanced exploration of war and of childhood, but more than that, of life lived under oppression of any kind.

  As soon as she began thinking back over her past, Woolf was overwhelmed by the flood of memories: it was immediately clear to her that a linear narrative, such as she had attempted with Fry, would not work. She could not present herself authoritatively, as if her past self remained ‘miraculously sealed as in a magic tank’; she knew that her childhood memories were partial, and that the significance she ascribed to certain events – such as an intense sense of shame she felt at looking into a mirror – might be false projections. (She connected this tentatively with the sexual abuse she experienced from her half-brother, but admitted ‘I do not suppose that I have got at the truth.’) In 1939, she had been ‘gulping up’ Freud – who had been exiled from Vienna in 1938 and ended his life in Hampstead, where both H. D. and Woolf had visited him – and was particularly intrigued by his idea that the self splits as a response to trauma, resulting in multiple possible lives for a biographer to pursue. As she worked, her concentration occasionally interrupted by the noise of strawberry-sellers and organ-grinders wafting up from the square below, Woolf lit upon a form which allowed her to be impressionistic, authentic and self-aware: she decided to interweave vignettes of the past with diary-like entries on the present, acknowledging – as H. D. also knew – that memoir does not merely preserve history but also shapes it. In a discarded draft, she noted that she wrote ‘to rescue a real moment from this unreal chaos’. But the threat of a world overrun by fascism now lent Woolf a fresh perspective on her strict Victorian childhood under the aegis of her ‘tyrannical’ father, a period with which she had spent her whole life coming to terms.

  It’s not surprising that, in 1939–40, Woolf was writing again about the way women’s lives are shaped and curtailed by social expectations. At the outbreak of the Second World War, the vision of heroic masculinity familiar from propaganda two decades earlier returned to popular discourse, as if the advances in women’s position during the interwar period had never happened. Katharine Burdekin’s 1937 dystopian novel Swastika Night describes a future society ruled by the descendants of Hitler’s Nazis where women are considered a subspecies and kept, in pens, solely for the purpose of reproduction: in 1940, the book was reissued by Victor Gollancz’s popular Left Book Club, and copies were sold with a note informing readers that this horrific vision of male supremacy was intended to be symbolic, not prophetic. Woolf had long been aware of how significant a threat Nazi rule posed to women’s autonomy. Over the 1930s, as she worked on Three Guineas and The Years, she had assembled a scrapbook of newspaper cuttings revealing Hitler’s deplorable attitudes towards women, as well as his hatred of Jews – his idealisation of marriage, his anxiety about falling birth rates, his punitive legislation against women’s education and work. In Three Guineas, written on the verge of war, Woolf denounced the way fascism sought to return society to the Victorian model of public and private spheres, and urged women to challenge this vision by writing: now, she wrote that she was ‘convinced that it is our duty to catch Hitler in his home haunts and prod him if even with only the end of an old inky pen’.

  ‘More and more I come to loathe any dominion of one over another; any leadership, any imposition of the will,’ Woolf had written in her diary shortly after the end of the First World War. In May 1935, as a second conflict loomed, she and Leonard had visited Germany (Virginia took with her Lawrence’s Aaron’s Rod, which she was reading in the car as they crossed the border from Holland) and had seen at first hand the adoring crowds waving banners and waiting for a glimpse of their Führer. She had reflected on the dangers of exactly the sort of herd ment
ality that Jane Harrison had denounced in 1914, by which an uncritical community blindly follows a leader bent on destruction. Now, in the midst of war, she remained firm in her belief that the enemy was not Germany but militarism in general, an authoritarian ideology that constrains men and women alike. In an essay called ‘Thoughts on Peace in an Air-Raid’, written from Mecklenburgh Square in August 1940 for an American feminist symposium, Woolf defined ‘Hitlerism’ as a societal problem made manifest: ‘the desire for aggression; the desire to dominate and enslave’, which turned men and women into enemies. The war would be won not by defeating the Germans, she wrote, but by destroying ‘aggressiveness, tyranny, insane love of power’ – all qualities which diminish women in the home as much as in politics. In Mecklenburgh Square, recalling Hyde Park Gate, she began to reflect further on how patriarchal authority, on a domestic level, had deeply affected her own life. ‘A Sketch of the Past’ is a personal history, yet also – like Three Guineas – a critique of social structures, an exploration of the way ‘public and private tyrannies’ are inextricably connected. And her chosen form makes this connection manifest. In deciding to blend a record of the present war with recollections of her own past, Woolf was drawing a radical parallel between the personal and the political.