I have been asked for my recollections of Virginia Woolf. These are not many. We were no more than acquaintances. I met her not much more than twenty times, and I was never on terms of intimacy with her. I was not a member of her set. I find it difficult to make that statement without loading it with too many or too few implications. The Bloomsbury Group did not like me, and I did not like them. I should make two important exceptions to that rule. I found Clive Bell a gay and kind companion and Raymond Mortimer a pleasant and serious person. But the rest I found easy not to love, for reasons too complicated to state here. The situation was fascinating, if one put it into Proustian terms. Here was a group who resembled Madame Verdurin’s clan but who thought they were the Guermantes; and what was fascinating was that they had all read Proust, they had seen their own situation analysed to the last trace element and did not recognize it. I recognize the same situation in the people of a younger generation who now celebrate the Bloomsbury Group; they too are Verdurins who think themselves Guermantes, and they too have read Proust.
It was so strange that in the centre of this prehensile group there was not a Madame Verdurin, but the Virginia Woolf, who would have found herself at home with few people in Proust except his grandmother. It is hard to describe her because she had a phantom-like quality. Though she sat opposite one, the impression left was as hard to recall as if she were one of those ghosts who are only seen as they turn the corner of a passage.
I have heard people say that they had gathered the two sisters were madonna-like. The Madonna is always represented as extremely tidy, even in the disadvantageous circumstance, such as the flight into Egypt. But Virginia and Vanessa were extremely untidy. They always looked as if they had been drawn through a hedge backwards before they went out. At the time I used to meet her I was untidy myself, being overworked and rather ill, but I always used to gain confidence from the sight of Virginia. There was a beautiful phrase, late Victorian and Edwardian, ‘a well turned-out woman’. Virginia was not well turned out. But she was certainly very beautiful in a Leonardo way. Both her face and her body could not have belonged to a person not of rare gifts. In the Crush Bar at Covent Garden I once heard a man say to his wife, ‘Look at that funny-looking woman.’ His wife peered through her glasses and objected, ‘Ssh, you shouldn’t say that about her, I’m sure she’s …’ and her voice died away in vague respect, almost awe. It was an authentic compliment.
She excited affection at once. The first time I ever met her was at a flat in Chelsea, in Royal Hospital Road, which was the home of two very remarkable women. One was the Editor of Vogue, Dorothy Todd, the other was the Fashion Editor, Madge Garland. Dorothy Todd was a fat little woman, full of energy, full of genius, I should say. Good editors are rarer than good writers, and she was a great editor, and Madge Garland was her equal. She was a slender and lovely young woman, who could have been a model had she not had all the equipment of a connoisseur of the first water. Together these women changed Vogue from just another fashion paper to being the best of fashion papers and a guide to the modern movement in the arts. They helped Roger Fry in firmly planting the Post-Impressionists in English soil and they brought us all the good news about Picasso and Matisse and Derain and Bonnard and Proust and Jean Cocteau and Raymond Radiguet and Louis Jouvet and Arletty and the gorgeous young Jean Marais. They also gave young writers a firmer foundation than they might have had by commissioning them to write articles on intelligent subjects at fair prices. There never was such a paper. Madge Garland is still with us. She was the first Professor of the art of Design at the Royal School of Art in South Kensington and she is today a font of wisdom about contemporary artistic achievement. What pleased me about Virginia Woolf was hearing her ask them questions about what they had seen and what they had done and whom they had met, with the happiest receptiveness.
They must have been of special use to her because of a disability she once confessed to me – and I think that her husband, Leonard Woolf, once wrote of it. She was no judge of writers of her own day. She edited a volume of letters written by various people to any correspondent they chose – real or imaginary – and I wrote ‘A Letter to My Grandfather’. I sent it in too late for incorporation in the volume of the letters which the Hogarth Press published as there was illness in my family, but it was published separately as a pamphlet. Nobody has ever taken much interest in it except the critic Bonamy Dobree, who liked it very much. After it had been published, a friend of mine met Virginia Woolf who said, ‘Yes, we liked publishing Rebecca’s letter but I did not understand this and that passage.’ My friend was surprised, because he had understood it without difficulty and thought he must have been mistaken, but later, when I was dining with the Woolfs, I mentioned it to her and we got the pamphlet out and looked at it, and it really seemed very strange that she had not understood the passages she mentioned. Then she said to me, ‘I don’t believe you are being obscure in these passages, but I must own to a quality of mine which is a great defect in a critic. I don’t really understand contemporary writers, and when I read them a sort of blindness comes over me.’ I do not think she was merely being polite (though she was very polite) to cover up a fault of mine, for she afterwards asked me to write for the Hogarth Press. She wrote about James Joyce in an astonishing, almost stupid way. (Not that I am comparing my Letter to a Grandfather with Ulysses.)
I remember a curious little drama, a period piece, in which this politeness of hers played a part. We all knew a Romanian diplomat called Antoine Bibesco, who had been brought up in Paris, and will be remembered by most people as a friend of Proust. He had married Asquith’s daughter, Elizabeth, a very nice woman (who played a heroic part against the Nazis in Romania) and who wrote very novelettish little short stories, and when one volume of hers was published, Virginia Woolf either failed to review it or reviewed it unfortunately. This seemed quite extraordinary to both Antoine Bibesco and his wife and Antoine in genuine bewilderment found an occasion to discuss it with Virginia. They had a conversation which both parties afterwards related to me. Antoine told me that Virginia had betrayed to him the reason for her hostility. It was envy. She longed to lead a more glamorous social life than she did, to go to really great parties: as he put it, she wanted ‘more chandeliers in her life’. But Virginia explained to me that Antoine had taken her by surprise and she had found herself telling him that Elizabeth belonged to such a gorgeous and superior world that she was unable to follow her when she described it in her novel. That Antoine should have misinterpreted this tactful explanation as a confession of disappointed social ambition was particularly funny considering that, though Virginia Woolf was very discontented with her work, and drafted and redrafted it times without number, she was beautifully contented with her niche in the world.
She instantly convinced my generation of her genius and I was also impressed by her originality. Because, of course, the attempts made to show that she derived from other writers – such as Dorothy Richardson – ignore chronology. The tendency to ‘the stream of consciousness’ technique was general, but she was as early as anyone in applying it. But I do not think her work merits the wholesale approval that is given it. The Waves is Pre-Raphaelite kitsch and should be forgotten. A Room of One’s Own is on the right side and is a good piece of craftsmanship, but it is hardly worth while teaching it in schools, and indeed I think too much is made of The Common Reader. If you contrast her critical writings with those of her father, it is apparent what a much smaller world she inhabited. But there was this marvellous gift of perceptiveness, and the felicitous choice of what to perceive, which made her unique. For a few months we lived in a house near Rodmell, and it was a delight to see the wonderful garden which had been made by Leonard Woolf, who should have been a professional gardener. There among brilliant and profuse flowers that grew better for him than for anybody else, she sat and perceived them more blissfully than anybody else, I used to think it probable, in the world. She was a prodigy and one’s heart still goes out to her. Yet I still do not understand everything about her. How could she have spoiled that exquisite book, Orlando, with those terrible photographs? How could she be so blind to some people? I once took to see the Woolfs, at Leonard’s request, a woman from Kentucky who was staying with me. She was beautiful and elegant and witty and a remarkable historian, doing pioneer work in the history of the Indians of the South-West. Leonard was charmed by the visitor but I could see that Virginia was making nothing of her. I went back the next day to leave a book they wanted to borrow, and Virginia, sitting in an armchair, looked up at me and said, ‘Leonard says your swan really was a swan. Describe her to me.’ It was really the oddest mixture, this intense perceptiveness alternating with failure to perceive what was obvious to other people.
I am not conscious of her influence on the writers of today. It is odd how the French writers who think they are carrying on her method simply show that they do not read English very well. She did not catalogue, as the nouvelle vague does, she, I repeat it, perceived. It is an odd thing that the great writers of her time – Proust, Kakfa, Joyce – had a horde of imitators immediately after their deaths, and then the flow ceased. She and they had carried their method so far that nobody could carry it any further.
There was something about her which was unusually clean, unsoiled. I never heard anybody relate a story about her which was tinged with anything that was not commendable. I remember having a foolish illusion when she died which shows this quality. Once she wrote me a delightful letter, and I had it framed and hung it on the wall of my room, with one from D. H. Lawrence on one side and one from George Moore on the other. Suddenly I looked up at the wall and Virginia’s writing had disappeared. There was just an oblong of paper in the frame. Two days later I read in the paper that she was dead and for a dazed moment I thought idiotically, ‘Ah, yes, she was politely trying to soften the shock, she was giving me a warning.’ It is significant that an acquaintance, on pleasant terms but not a friend, should have so strong a feeling at her death.