ReadFin Literary Journal (Winter 2018)

‘Why’. Nowhere is this more evident than in her novel (most call it
her masterpiece) To the Lighthouse (1927). The very title is full of
expectation and when the possibility is revealed to little six year old
James he is transfixed, incapacitated with the joy of it. This is the
opening, including the title which is really part of the first sentence.
“To the Lighthouse”
“Yes, of course, if it’s fine tomorrow,” said Mrs Ramsay. “But you’ll
have to be up with the lark,” she added.
To her son these words conveyed an extraordinary joy, as if it were
settled, the expedition were bound to take place, and the wonder to
which he had looked forward, for years and years it seemed, was, after
a night’s darkness and a day’s sail, within touch. Since he belonged,
even at the age of six, to that great clan which cannot keep this
feeling separate from that, but must let future prospects, with their
joys and sorrows, cloud what is actually at hand, since to such people
even in earliest childhood any turn in the wheel of sensation has the
power to crystallise and transfix the moment upon which its gloom or
radiance rests, James Ramsay, sitting on the floor cutting out pictures
from the illustrated catalogue of the Army and Navy stores, endowed
the picture of a refrigerator, as his mother spoke, with heavenly bliss.
It was fringed with joy.”
And what is illustrative, most of all, of her genius, and her deep and
all-consuming curiosity of human intention and behaviour, and her
determination to create art, is that by the last page the lighthouse itself
disappears into a mist and we, the readers, along with the remaining
onlookers in the house, can only assume that they have arrived.
Someone once said that Leonardo de Vinci fought tooth and nail
to acquire a particular block of marble, also much coveted by
Michelangelo because he knew that inside there was a statue of David
and all he had to do was chip away the extraneous rock to reveal the
body within. If Virginia Woolf were present it would be the act of
chipping the marble and the chips of marble lying on the floor that
would attract her interest and not the finished, polished figure.
Janet Vaughan (a medical scientist and friend) had this to say about
Virginia Woolf and ‘genius’.
“Well, it’s a sixth sense. It’s somebody who jumps a gap which other
people would need a very, very solid bridge to walk across. She didn’t
do it as a scientist might, she did it by interpreting what she saw and
what people might be thinking and how they interacted with one
another. But she had this quality of jumping gaps.”
And similarly Vita Sackville-West describes it thus: “I always thought
her genius led her by short cuts to some essential point which
everybody else had missed. She did not walk there: she sprang.”
But it’s the adjectives ‘mischievous, witty, warm and humorous’ that
are most intriguing. She loved to tease and teased most those she was
most fond of; and those teased seemed to love it and certainly were
not offended by it since the teasing was done with such warmth.
In the early 20s Virginia Woolf used the name of writer Berta Ruck
(albeit mis-spelt) on a minor character, and a subsequent tombstone,
in her novel Jacob’s Room (1920). Angus Davidson, friend, literary
critic, and manager for a time of their publishing house, The Hogarth
Press, said this was done unwittingly. This is hard to believe as the
name Berta Ruck is quite distinctive and her name and the names of
her novels were emblazoned on the tops of London buses. However Ms
Ruck was a writer of a very different genre than Virginia’s. She wrote
romantic stories and almost seventy novels (Khaki and Kisses, Love
on Second Thoughts, etc) where beautiful young women were treated
dismissively by fathers, brothers and men in general but who fell in
love with one of them and lived happily ever after. One can imagine
Virginia Woolf thinking this scenario extremely unlikely and with a
name like Berta Ruck, and the married name of Mrs Onions, perfectly
ripe for mischief. Ms Ruck, however, did not see the humour in the
incident and with urgings from her indignant husband, wrote to
Woolf in sorrow and indignation threatening legal action. Virginia
wrote back rather sarcastically, “I am more pleased than I can say that
you survived my burial. Never will I attempt such a thing again. To
think that you have bought my book.” It took Ms Ruck eight years to
discover the slight so Woolf could hardly have taken her seriously.
However they ‘made up’ via correspondence and almost a year later
Ms Ruck got her own back by becoming the success at a party by
singing a very risqué song, “Never Allow a Sailor an Inch Above Your
Knee.” Virginia was reported as being “filled with amazement and
delight.” All animosity was forgiven.
Unfortunately, the memory of her is clouded by her diaries which
record her mental suffering and her depression even though her
husband, and editor, went to great pains to explain; “...diaries give a
distorted and one-sided view of the writer, because, as Virginia Woolf
herself remarks, one gets into the habit of recording one particular
kind of mood - irritation or misery say - and of not writing one’s diary
when one is feeling the opposite. The portrait in therefore from the
start unbalanced.”
Her bouts of illness sprung from the effort of writing, and in
particular the exhaustion from finishing a particular work. Her
headaches would begin and if left unchecked, she would lose
coherence of speech, and her brain would race with images and noises
(birds crying out in Greek) and delusions (King Edward VII, among
the azaleas, swearing in the most foulest language). Complete rest and
quiet would eventually restore her normal life but her recovery would
be ridden with doubt and worry about the worth of her just-completed
work. Praise and encouragement were oxygen to her. So eventually
with Leonard’s care and concern, her own courage, immense courage,
she would roll up her sleeves and begin to write again, knowing
that creation was hard, completion fearful, and a bout of madness
inevitable.
And then this: her final piece of writing; a short letter to her husband,
written on the day she died.
“Dearest, I feel certain that I am going mad again. I feel we can’t go
through another of those terrible times. And I shan’t recover this
time. I begin to hear voices, and I can’t concentrate. So I am doing
what seems the best thing to do. You have given me the greatest
possible happiness. You have been in every way all that anyone could
be. I don’t think two people could have been happier ’til this terrible
disease came. I can’t fight any longer. I know that I am spoiling your
life, that without me you could work. And you will I know. You see I
can’t even write this properly. I can’t read. What I want to say is I owe
all the happiness of my life to you. You have been entirely patient
with me and incredibly good. I want to say that — everybody knows
it. If anybody could have saved me it would have been you. Everything
has gone from me but the certainty of your goodness. I can’t go on
spoiling your life any longer. I don’t think two people could have been
happier than we have been. V.”
She then put on a hat, a coat, grabbed a walking stick and headed to
the river. There she put down her stick, took off her hat, put rocks in
her pockets and disappeared into the water. When Leonard found
the letter, he, along with the house keeper, Mrs Meyer, searched the
house, the grounds, and the surrounding countryside and when they
found her stick and hat assumed the worst. Three weeks later her
gruesome body was found by children as it bumped against the bank
of the river many miles downstream. She was 59.
Remember Virginia Woolf as a beautiful and intelligent woman, a
prankster, a great and innovative writer, the creator of the outrageous
Orlando, and the cheeky biographer of Flush, Elizabeth Barrett
Browning’s little cocker spaniel; she was a curious and inquisitive
human being, a tease, a lover, and a writer who launched modernism
on the literary world. And remember that when her little nephews,
nieces, and their friends were preparing for a party who was number
one on their invitation list?
“V-i-r-g-i-n-i-a!” they would shriek with delight, because Virginia
always made them laugh.
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ReadFin Literary Journal