Woolfian Boundaries - Clemson University

Foreword
by Ruth Gruber
On October 15, 1935, Virginia Woolf invited me for tea at 52 Tavistock Square,
her home in London. I spent the day walking up and down the street in Bloomsbury.
I was going to meet my literary idol. In May of that year, with the daring
of youth, I had sent her a trade paperback of my doctoral thesis on her work, published
by the Tauchnitz Press in Leipzig. I had written it three years earlier, at the age of twenty,
as an American exchange student at the University of Cologne.
Professor Herbert Schöffl er, Head of the English department at Cologne, asked me
to work for a PhD. I told him it was impossible. My fellowship, given by the Institute of
International Education, was designated for one year only. Moreover, there was no mention
of pursuing a doctorate.
Schöffl er smiled benignly. “I have a special reason,” he explained. “I love Virginia
Woolf’s writings, but my students don’t know English well enough to analyze her work.
You are the only English speaker on our campus. A doctorate has never been done in a
year, but maybe you can do it.”
Even then my philosophy was “Dream dreams, have visions, and let no obstacle stop you.”
I had to work fast to complete the two German requirements for a doctorate: to write a thesis
and to pass the oral exams. I had never read Virginia Woolf before, but Professor Schöffl er gave
me a stack of her books in light-green hardcover, each one noting on the title page: “Published
by Leonard & Virginia Woolf at the Hogarth Press, Tavistock Square. London.” Downtown
in the bookstores I found two additional works by her, published for English-speaking tourists
by Tauchnitz in the days before television. Th ey were Orlando (quickly to become my favorite)
bound in a bright-red hardcover, and Mrs. Dalloway in a tan paperback.
Soon I was jotting impressions in the margins of each book, captivated by Woolf’s
literary innovations, her vivid descriptions of the confl ict between poets and critics, and
the equally vivid confl ict between women as creators and men as destroyers.
In the summer of 1932, with the thesis fi nished, I stood for the orals. Sweat poured
down my face; my knees trembled as three inquisitors interrogated me. Among the questions
that Professor Schöffl er asked was a pivotal one: “You called Virginia Woolf’s novel
Th e Waves a ‘rhythm of confl icts.’ What did you mean?”
I managed to pull out of my brain sentences still fresh from my thesis. “It’s the
struggle between light and darkness. It is the law of polarity, of confl icts as irreconcilable
as night and day, of poets versus critics, that reverberates through all her writing. It is her
fi nal solution to the problem of style and the riddle of life. No truth is absolute, no style
is supreme. We live our lives in a polarity of confl icts.”
After half an hour, Professor Schöffl er ushered me out the door and told me to wait.
Soon he reappeared, shook my hand, and announced: “You have received the doctorate
mit sehr Gut. It is the equivalent of your magna cum laude.”
Th e Virginia Woolf thesis was to chart the course of my life. In 1935, after its publication,
I asked Woolf if I could interview her for another book I was planning to write on
the subject of Women under Fascism, Communism, and Democracy. In response to my
vi