CurvatureSarah Irene RobinsonThe week has been an eternity. A whole eternity. How I amsupposed to live outside of this week? When I was depressedand living mostly in my own mind, the weeks would fly by. Iwould blink and a year would have passed. These days, I livefour days in one. I get to the end of the day and try and lookback at the start, but I can’t see it because the curvature of theearth is in the way. Back when the earth was flat you couldprobably look and see the start of your day, the start of yourlife, the start of your parents’ life even. That overlapping oftime now seems too complicated to lay out and be spoken of.We now just hang out and take for granted that we are allliving at different speeds. I don’t even know how many daysmy mother has lived this year, let alone in her whole life. Somedays, I bet, we lived exactly the same. I think that’s what happenswhen you get real close and cosy with someone; you startrowing at the same bits and sitting back at the same bits andfalling out at the same bits.50ReadFin Literary Journal
Don’t be Afraid ofVirginia WoolfMichael FreundtOn 7 February 1910 a telegram was received from Sir CharlesHardinge, the Permanent Under-Secretary of Foreign Affairs, bythe Commander-in-Chief of the Home Fleet and the captain of theH.M.S. Dreadnought, the flagship of the British navy, then lying offPortland, Dorset. It informed him that Prince Makalin of Abyssiniaand his party were arriving in the afternoon and were to receiveevery attention. When they arrived by private train carriage theywere received with an honour guard and taken ceremoniously onboard. The chatter of the dusky-skinned entourage was completelyunintelligible although one of the party, Prince Mendax, wearing asky-blue silk robe, beard, jewels and a turban, constantly murmured“Bunga bunga” which their interpreter explained was Abyssinian for“Isn’t it lovely?” They refused all refreshments which the interpreteragain explained was due to their religious beliefs as they could not beserved food or drink with the naked hand. Gloves were not available.A few days later the officers and crew of the Dreadnought wereamazed and dismayed to learn, via the Daily Mirror, that it was alla monumental practical joke and the Royal navy was pilloried andlaughed at for weeks in the national press and at every dinner tablein the land. It has become known as the Dreadnought Hoax and wasreported all over the world.One of the hoaxers, Prince “Bunga Bunga” Mendex, was, in reality,a young girl who was quoted as saying “I found I could laugh likea man easily enough but it was difficult to disguise the speakingvoice. As a matter of fact the only really trying time I had was whenI had to shake hands with my first cousin, who is an officer on theDreadnought, and who saluted me as I went on deck. I thought Ishould burst out laughing, but, happily I managed to preserve myOriental stolidity of countenance.”This young lady was the 28 year old Miss Adeline Stephen, who twoyears later married and became Mrs Woolf. We know her better asVirginia.Apart from being a practical joker, Virginia Woolf was a very beautifulwoman. This is certainly not how we think of her today but all thepeople who wrote about her, and there were many, used adjectives,especially those that knew her well, like, beautiful, mischievous,intelligent, talkative, and inquisitive. She would say things like, “Yousaid you went for a walk, but what made you go for a walk?” Whenout walking herself with a friend she would see a farmer tossing hayand say, “Look at that farmer pitching hay. What do you think he hadfor breakfast?” It was this inquisitiveness that made her attend toeverything you said to her; and attend with real interest. When youtalked to Virginia you always felt that you were intently listened to,and, once literary fame came into the picture, you didn’t even mindthat she was mining you for information, words and reasons forhuman behaviour; in fact, you were flattered that such a famous andbeautiful woman was hanging on your every word; gazing into youreyes and eagerly waiting for your next pronouncement. Of courseunder such scrutiny, if you simply said ‘I don’t know’ you could besure that she would lose interest immediately and seek someone else’scompany. She had a habit of forcing you to search your brain for theright words, because nothing less than the right words were alwaysexpected.She was tall, with a thin face, slender hands and always woreshapeless clothes of indeterminate colours: fashion was of no concernto her.She was born Adeline Virginia Stephen in 1882 but almostimmediately was called Virginia despite the confusion of initials withher elder sister, Vanessa. She came from a good family of landownersand was well but home educated. She was the third child of herfather’s second wife and an incident with her half-brother, GeorgeDuckworth, was to have a profound effect on her.“I still shiver with shame,” she wrote many years after the incident,“at the memory of my half brother standing me on a ledge, agedabout six or so, exploring my private parts.” Then, many years later,when her father lay dying from cancer three floors below, Georgewould fling himself on her bed, kissing and hugging her, aged in herearly 20s, to console her, he later said. Quentin Bell, her biographerand nephew, would write, “in sexual matters she was from this timeterrified back into a posture of frozen and defensive panic.” She brieflyconsidered accepting Lytton Strachey’s proposal of marriage knowingthat he was homosexual so she thought a simple brother-sister sortof marriage may be preferable to one that included the ‘horror ofsex’. She wanted to be married, since being a spinster was considereda failure and finally accepted the proposal of Leonard Woolf andthey were married on August 10 1912 after an engagement that, hersister wrote, was “an exhausting and bewildering thing even to thebystanders.” Virginia said to him “I feel no physical attraction to you,... and yet your caring for me as you do almost overwhelms me. It isso real and so strange.” They were planning a honeymoon in Iceland(how metaphoric) but settled for a Mediterranean one instead.Michael Holroyd wrote,“There seemed some unfathomable inhibition that made malelast, even when compounded with love, if not horrific, quiteincomprehensible to her. The physical act of intercourse was noteven funny: it was cold. Leonard regretfully accepted the facts andsoon brought the word in line with the deed by persuading her thatthey should not have children. It was a sensible decision for, thoughshe could never contemplate her sister’s fruitfulness without envy,children with their wetness and noise would surely have killed off thenovels in her: and it was novel-writing that she cared for most.”In 2002 the film The Hours was released with much fanfare and astellar cast. It was written by David Hare and based on the MichaelCunningham Pulitzer Prize winning book of the same name, whichin turn used Woolf’s novel Mrs Dalloway (1925) as the core of thefilm about, not only Virginia Woolf and the writing of the book, butalso its effect on two women. one in the 1950s and one in the 1980s.Readers can find Mrs Dalloway curious, annoying and tedious butwhen you read you must not let the words wash over you as one letslight from a fire without looking into the flames; into the terrifyingbeauty at its core.Her novel of 1928, Orlando, is dedicated to Vita Sackville-West,Woolf’s friend, neighbour and sometime lover and tells the story,over a period of 300 years, of the romantic adventures of a man calledOrlando, who suddenly, miraculously, half way through the bookbecomes a woman. This is revealed in the film as Orlando with hislong, straight, reddish blond hair gazes at himself standing nakedin front of a full length mirror and seeing the reflection of a long,straight, reddish blond haired naked woman staring back saying,“Same person, different body.”Virginia confessed her affair with Vita to her sister Vanessa and in aletter to Vita describes the moment.“I told Nessa the story of our passion in a chemist’s shop the otherday. ‘But do you really like going to bed with women’ she said – takingher change. ‘And how’d you do it?’ and so she bought her pills to takeabroad, talking as loud as a parrot.”Uncharacteristically a lot happens in Orlando but It’s not plot thatinterests Virginia Woolf ( “facts are a very inferior form of fiction”)but the feelings, nuanced emotions that precede the action, orarise because of it; she was more interested in, not the ‘What’, butthe ‘Why’, and, more importantly, how one would describe thatReadFin Literary Journal 51
Change language