Virginia Woolf

by Ruth Gruber

  An ideal of perfection is created in these characters. That completion which Virginia Woolf had sought in her spiritual mothers, is in her women, fulfilled. A Greek perfection marks them; they are at once intellectual and sensual, balancing androgynously, as in “Orlando”, the creativeness of men and of maternal women. Physically submitting to the laws of life, of reproduction, they stand also beyond these laws, mentally productive.

  Their tremendous experiences of motherhood and love, Virginia Woolf pierces with self-analytic understanding. She idealizes, though she herself lacks, the rhythmic experiences of bearing children. Her women have the reality of the details and irrelevancies of life. The powerfulness with which a man heaves tremendous figures out of his own imagination; the formal strength which converts a lyric Shakespeare into a dramatic realist, fails her. Seen through her women, her writing reflects the order of life rather than the static finality of a closed drama. She is poetically idyllic, bound by her intellect to earth.

  Where she seeks for her novels the perfected woman rather than the revolter, she is, in her essays and her personal strivings, a straggler herself. She continues the revolt of women. She is a spiritual suffragist. With a strong faith in progress, in evolution, she places herself in the struggle for independence, the struggle which had broken Margaret of Newcastle, which had obstructed Charlotte Brontë, and obscured the writings of the women of the past. She saves her own art from becoming the organ of her struggle by presenting her ideal of womanhood as a completed fact. She retains her serenity, conscious however that the struggle is by no means ended, that women are still not free. She represents a deeper, evolved phase in the movement of feminine emancipation. The cry for independence which the women of the nineteenth century had sounded, she intensifies and normalizes. The violence and fanaticism which had driven the early suffragists, like Mrs. Pankhurst, to sacrifice their innate femininity, in her, loses its extravagance. She seeks to show her equality with man, not through adopting masculine neck-ties or cigars but through maintaining her femininity, and in it, in its very polarity with man, manifesting her equal heights. She desires not to imitate men nor to lose herself on their grounds; hers is the more organic struggle of opposite though equal forces.

  She identifies herself with the women who are still forced to protest, blaming their struggle upon a masculine hierarchy. With optimism, she calls out to other women to struggle with her, to perfect themselves in laying the road for the greater women to come. She is not disillusioned, not the futilitarian which Harold Nicolson and the contemporary critics would make her. Far more, she is a pioneer, with, all the self-sacrificing requisites which an ideal demands. She is working not only to penetrate her own depths, but to lay the way for the great poetess of the future “to walk among us in the flesh. This opportunity .… is now coming within your power to give her. For my belief is that if we live another century or so—I am talking of the common life which is the real life and not of the little separate lives which we live as individuals—and have five hundred a year each of us and rooms of our own; if we have the habit of freedom and the courage to write exactly what we think; … then the opportunity will come and the dead poet who was Shakespeare’s sister will put on the body which she so often laid down. Drawing her life from the lives of the unknown who were her forerunners, as her brother did before her, she will be born. As for her coming without that preparation, without that effort on our part, without that determination that when she is born again she shall find it possible to live and write her poetry, that we cannot expect, for that would be impossible. But I maintain that she would come if we worked for her, and that so to work, even in poverty and obscurity, is worth while.”65

  The tremendous battle-cry for spiritual freedom, for the breaking of chains, which had characterized men like Shelley, is sounded now by women. Just as Nietzsche had proclaimed the Men of the future, so Virginia Woolf and her contemporaries, women like Rebecca West and Dorothy Richardson, are making the way for the Women of the future. The political emancipation is one step; the intellectual emancipation must follow. The woman of the hearth becomes a woman standing in the tumult of life, defending herself. Her old bondage to her father and brothers and sons is struggling for release. She has found the will to rise up from slavery just as men have risen up from slavery, nordics as well as American negroes. Her frailty is a myth, no less forgivable than the frailty which makes men petty thieves. In her old state of slavery, she was a kind of petty thief, forced because she was hungry, to steal learning from books she hid or from worldly experiences, for whose sin she was hanged or condemned. She was denied what in a man was taken for granted or humorously tolerated: his ambitions, his curiosities, his wild oats. The material for observation has failed her. It is when she has gone out and experienced, as men are permitted to experience in the world, that she may create as Shakespeare did. It is when she has perfected and combined her physical life with her spiritual that she can become a great artist.

  The woman of the past found an intimation of the laws of nature, of life and immortality, in bearing children; the woman of the future, retaining this experience, will give it words and form. Virginia Woolf, of the present, is still a seeker, struggling to prepare the world for a woman Shakespeare, a woman Rembrandt, even a woman Christ. She is a transitional link between the past which produced a Jane Austen and the future yet to produce the great “Shakespearianna”. Conscious of her limitations, she finds a beautiful gratification in being one of Her mediators, one of the spiritual mothers.

  The woman she is helping to create will culminate in herself the physical creativeness of the past with the mental creativeness of women like Virginia Woolf —the woman of today.

  __________

  1 “The Waves” p. 38.

  2 Ibid. p. 73.

  3 “The Voyage Out” p. 66.

  4 “A Room of One’s Own” p. 135.

  5 “Mrs. Dalloway” p. 15.

  6 Ibid. p. 16.

  7 “A Room of One’s Own” p. 111.

  8 “The Waves” p. 35.

  9 Ibid. p. 35

  10 “Jacob’s Room” p. 230; p. 249.

  11 “The Waves” p. 156.

  12 Ibid. p. 154.

  13 “To the Lighthouse” p. 168.

  14 Ibid. p. 151.

  15 “A Room of One’s Own” p. 16.

  16 Ibid. p. 16.

  17 Ibid. p. 131.

  18 “Night and Day” p. 355.

  19 Ibid. p. 355.

  20 “The Waves” p. 73.

  21 “A Room of One’s Own” p. 131.

  22 “A Room of One’s Own” p. 140.

  23 “Jacob’s Room” p. 148.

  24 “A Room of One’s Own” p. 133.

  25 “Orlando” p. 118.

  26 “Orlando” p. 11.

  27 “Pseudodoxia Epidemica” p. 149.

  28 “King Richard II” Act V Scene V.

  29 “A Room of One’s Own” p. 148.

  30 “A Room of One’s Own” p. 148.

  31 “Aids To Reflection” p. 204.

  32 “Orlando” p. 137.

  33 “Einführung in die Psychoanalyse” p. 32.

  34 “Orlando” p. 133.

  35 “Orlando” p. 132.

  36 Ibid. p. 136.

  37 Ibid. p. 137.

  38 Ibid. p. 130.

  39 Ibid. p. 156.

  40 “A Room of One’s Own” p. 75.

  41 Ibid. p. 124.

  42 “Mrs. Dalloway” p. 47.

  43 Ibid. p. 50.

  44 Ibid. p. 49.

  45 Ibid p. 44.

  46 Ibid. p. 44.

  47 “Mrs. Dalloway” p. 44.

  48 Ibid. p. 44.

  49 “Lady Chatterley’s Lover” p. 158.

  50 “Mrs. Dalloway” p. 45.

  51 Ibid. p. 46.

  52 “Mrs. Dalloway” p. 46.

  53 Ibid. p. 183.

  54 Ibid. p. 182.

  55 “Mrs. Dalloway” p. 16.

  56 “Mrs. Dalloway”
p. 10.

  57 Ibid. p. 10.

  58 “To the Lighthouse” p. 62.

  59 Ibid. p. 131.

  60 “The Common Reader” p. 93.

  61 “The Waves” p. 237.

  62 The Common Reader” p. 200.

  63 “Pride and Prejudice” p. 158.

  64 “A Room of One’s Own” p. 88.

  65 “A Room of One’s Own” p. 172.

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Of Virginia Woolf’s Writings:

  “The Voyage Out”, London, Hogarth Press, 1929 first pub. 1915.

  “Night and Day”, London, Hogarth Press, 1930 first pub. 1919.

  “Jacob’s Room”, London, Hogarth Press, 1929 first pub. 1922.

  “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown”, New York, Doubleday, Doran, 1928 first pub. 1924.

  “Mrs. Dalloway”, Leipzig, Tauchnitz, 1929 first pub. 1925.

  “The Common Reader”, New York, Harcourt, Brace, 1925.

  “To the Lighthouse”, London, Hogarth Press, 1929 first pub. 1927.

  “Orlando”, Leipzig, Tauchnitz, 1929 first pub. 1928.

  “A Room of One’s Own”, London, Hogarth Press, 1931 first pub. 1929.

  “The Waves”, London, Hogarth Press, 1931.

  Of Virginia Woolf’s Influences:

  Austen, Jane: “Pride and Prejudice”. Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1919.

  Bergson, Henri: “L’Energie Spirituelle, Essais et Conferences”. Paris F. Alcan 1920, 6th ed.

  Browne, Sir Thomas: “Works”, ed. by Charles Sayle, Edinburgh, John Grant, 1927.

  Burke, Edmund: “Writings and Speeches”. Oxford University Press, 1907.

  Coleridge, Samuel: “Aids to Reflection”. London, William Pickering, 1848.

  De Quincey, Thomas: “The Confessions of an Opium-Eater and Other Essays”. London, Macmillan, 1924.

  Einstein, Albert: „Vier Vorlesungen über Relativitätstheorie”. held in May, 1921 at Princeton University, Braunschweig 1922.

  Eliot, T. S.: “The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock” in “An Anthology of American Poetry”. New York, The Modern Library, 1929.

  Fielding, Henry: “The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling”, ed. by George Saintsbury, London, Dent, 1910.

  Freud, Sigmund: „Vorlesungen zur Einführung in die Psychoanalyse”. Wien, Internationaler Psychoanalytischer Verlag, 1930, Kleinoktav-Ausgabe.

  Gibbon, Edward: “The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire”. Oxford University Press, 1914.

  Greene, Robert: “The History of Orlando Furioso”. London, Routledge, Warne, and Routledge, 1861.

  Joyce, James: “Ulysses”. Paris, Shakespeare, 1926.

  Lawrence, D. H.: “Lady Chatterley’s Lover”. Florence, privately printed, 1929.

  Milton, John: “Poetical Works”, ed. by William Aldis Wright, Cambridge University Press, 1903.

  Proust, Marcel: “A la Recherche du Temps Perdu”. Paris, Librairie Gallimard, 1920.

  Wordsworth, William: “Wordsworth’s Literary Criticism”, ed. by Nowell C. Shmith, London, Oxford Univ. Press, 1925.

  Of Virginia Woolf’sCritics:

  Badenhausen, Ingeborg: „Die Sprache Virginia Woolfs”. Marburg 1932, a doctorate dissertation limited almost solely to the accidents of grammar.

  Fehr, Bernhard: „Englische Prosa von 1880 bis zur Gegenwart”. Leipzig, Tauchnitz, 1927.

  Forster, E. M.: “Aspects of the Novel”. New York, Harcourt, Brace, 1927.

  Manly and Rickert: “Contemporary British Literature”. London, Harrap, 1929.

  Muir, Edwin: “The Structure of the Novel”. London, L. and V. Woolf, 1928.

  Nicolson, Harold: “The New Spirit in Literature”. London, The British Broadcasting Corporation, 1931.

  A MYSTERY SOLVED

  HOW 28 VOLUMES OF Virginia Woolf’s Diaries and More Than 100 of Her Letters Left

  London and Landed in the Berg Collection of the 5th Avenue New York City Public Library

  I owe this book to an epiphany.

  On June 15, 2004, Doris Schechter, whom I had brought from Italy to New York in 1944 as an enchanting five-year old, with a thousand other World War II refugees, sat next to me in Carnegie Hall.

  We were listening to a recital by two gifted teachers from SUNY Oswego, when Doris leaned over and whispered in my ear, “I just had an epiphany. Why don’t you get your publishers to republish your doctoral thesis on Virginia Woolf? It could be a fundraiser for some of the causes you’re involved with.”

  Excited by the idea, I took Doris’s epiphany to my editor, Philip Turner, at Carroll and Graf. The idea percolated. A few weeks later, the three letters from Virginia Woolf turned up.

  Philip called me. “Drop everything you’re doing. We’re going to do it. We’re going to reprint your whole dissertation with the three letters. We want you to write an introduction telling how you wrote the first feminist interpretation of Virginia Woolf. Make it as personal as you can. You have to do it fast. We want to bring it out in the spring of 2005.”

  I was working on volume 3 of my memoirs, tentatively called In Spite of Time: How to Live at 93. I put it aside, and worked seven days a week, writing “My Hours with Virginia Woolf.” It gave me the joy of leafing through many of Virginia Woolf’s books and essays and Leonard Woolf’s masterful autobiography, Downhill All the Way.

  While writing the introduction, I wondered how twenty-eight volumes of Virginia Woolf’s diaries and hundreds of her letters and original manuscripts had come from London to the Berg Collection in New York City’s 5th Avenue Library.

  I have two brilliant surrogate daughters; one, Doris Schechter, who had the epiphany, is now a creative restaurant owner and author of a handsome cookbook, named for her restaurant, My Most Favorite Dessert. The second surrogate daughter, Patti Kenner, is a social activist, philanthropist, and fundraiser who, with her 92-year-old father, runs Campus Coach Lines. One day, answering Patti’s question on the phone, “What are you up to now?,” I told her I wanted to find out how Virginia Woolf’s diaries and letters came to the New York Public Library.

  Patti, who knows most of the movers and shakers in New York, said “I’ll call you back in a few minutes.”

  Five minutes later, she was on the line again. “I called my friend, Dr. Paul Le Clerc, the president and chief executive officer of the New York Public Library. He’s handling it.”

  I had hardly hung up when the phone rang again. “This is Isaac Gerwirtz. I’m the curator of the Berg Collection. How may I help you?”

  “I’m looking for an answer: How did Virginia Woolf’s diaries and letters come into a collection named for two Jewish doctors?”

  He suggested I come to the library, and within an hour I was at the Berg Collection where Isaac, efficient and eager to help, assured me that he would get me the answer. “It will take some time,” he said, “but we will have it.”

  I thanked him.

  “I have to rush out now,” he spoke quickly, “but my people here will bring you whatever you need. I will be back in a little while. You can stay as late as you want, even eight o’clock, if you need to.”

  I was alone now with Virginia Woolf, once again reading her diaries, and once again finding the strange things she had written about me. Isaac returned, and when I stood up to leave and thank him for his help, he presented me with a slim red volume called Brothers: The Origins of the Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature, The New York Public Library.

  Written by the former curator, Lola L. Szladits, it told the story of these two distinguished American Jewish physicians, who created the Berg Collection. In Vienna, their father, Moritz Berg, had dreamed of becoming a physician but could never afford medical school. So in 1862, while the Civil War raged in America, he and his wife, Josephine Schiff, gathered up their first-born son, Henry, and sailed in steerage to a country at war.

  Like many penniless immigrants, Moritz gave up his dream, forsaking medicine and becoming a tailor. He fathered seven more children. Henry, the oldest, an
d Albert, the youngest, fulfilled their father’s dream, becoming doctors, educated at City College and then Columbia’s College for Physicians and Surgeons. They soon were on the staff of Mount Sinai Hospital, and when Moritz died of cancer, they became specialists in cancer treatment.

  Medicine was part of their lives, buying real estate was another. Bachelors, they lived together in a townhouse they owned on East 73rd Street, and amassed a fortune of over $8,000,000. They used that money to purchase rare books and manuscripts, and spread their fortune among a bevy of Jewish and non-Jewish hospitals, libraries, universities, and high schools, also donating two million dollars to the New York Public Library. Henry had already died when Albert A. Berg opened the Berg Collection in Henry’s memory with a moving speech on October 11, 1940:

  These books, manuscripts, and letters, together with the appointments in this room, were the dear friends of my late brother and myself. In presenting them to you and the Trustees of the Public Library of our City, and through you to the public it is with the pleasant anticipation that their new friends will use them and love them as much as we did.