In the summer of 1938 the Woolfs had a new room built into the roof at Monk’s House, with a veranda so they could read outside in the evenings. It was hot and peaceful, and Virginia started contentedly on the fourteen volumes of Madame de Sévigné’s letters. She took her long walks over the Downs each afternoon, then there was dinner and bowls on the lawn, followed by music on the gramophone and more reading. She thought about how to live freely and expansively as she got older. She was fifty-six, and made plans for the next ten years.
But when she turned on the radio everything was different. There was the ‘violent rant’ and ‘savage howl’ of Adolf Hitler.1 She thought back to August 1914, except that this time there was no illusion about an honourable war over by Christmas. This time it felt as if they were all ‘slipping consciously into a pit’.2 As ever she had the old tensions of Hyde Park Gate in mind as the measure for her emotions. She was a powerless child again, waiting for the worst to happen: ‘As for politics, I feel as if we were all sitting downstairs while someone slowly dies.’3 That autumn came the guilty reprieve of the Munich crisis. The weather held until October, but each fine day felt as if it must be the last.
Woolf was immersed in writing Roger Fry and thankful for it. She was glad to think about Fry rather than Hitler every morning, and admired him more and more as she went on. But it was hard work. She did huge amounts of research and rewriting, and wrestled with the problem of how to keep a vivid impression of the living man in the foreground while also setting down all the necessary facts. ‘How to keep the flight of the mind, yet be exact?’ she asked herself.4 It was typical of her conscientiousness that even after all this reading she felt unqualified to comment on Fry’s painting. Hence her request to Duncan Grant that he provide a ‘technical appreciation’ of Fry’s painting to be printed as an appendix (which in the end was not very technical and did not say anything she could not have said herself). Her anxiety was linked with her sense of responsibility to those who had loved Fry, and her realization that she was shaping his posthumous reputation. As she noted when the book was published, it was as if she and he together ‘had given birth to this vision of him’ and yet he had no power to alter it.5
In representing him she suppressed herself, even to the extent of referring to Virginia Woolf in the third person. The concern with impersonality that had long shaped her approach to fiction, and which she articulated in her letters to Ethel, was again important in the biography. Woolf was known for her experiments in life-writing: here was the woman who had written lives of Orlando and of Flush, and whose numerous reviews of other people’s biographies had proposed new ways of conveying character. Yet now with a biography of Roger to write, she wanted his experiments to be the focus of attention, not hers. Her own role she saw as that of the craftsman, like a carpenter perhaps. She was making something and she would make it well, even when that meant months of ‘grind’ and ‘drudgery’ and seemed ‘appallingly difficult’.6
Roger Fry has often been thought too traditional to be of much literary interest, and certainly it does not wear innovation on its sleeve. But Woolf puts to good use here some of the great discoveries of her writing life. She is the author of Jacob’s Room itemizing the clutter in Fry’s studio and leaving us to divine the kind of life that is led there. She is the author of To the Lighthouse, relegating the bald statement of Helen Fry’s death to a footnote, or repeatedly invoking the ‘hidden centre’ of Fry’s life and the ‘moments of vision’ in which he sees his way through.7 Though she presses back her own feeling, there are passages where Woolf’s sympathy is near the surface. When Fry’s wife is taken to an asylum, for example: ‘he found, as he was often to find in the future, that the only way of facing the ruin of private happiness was to work’.8 And she copied out a comment he made as life closed in during the 1914–18 war: ‘Oh the boredom of war – the ways of killing men are so monotonous compared to the ways of living.’9
‘The view across the meadows to Caburn is before me now.’ Woolf is one of the great writers of place. Whenever she was at Monk’s House, she walked daily across the surrounding marshes, farmland, and downs. (Photo Edwin Smith)
She finished her first draft in March 1939 and revised it through another hot summer of daily incongruities, her immediate life seeming so much more real and absorbing than the mad, monotonous, shouting voice of Hitler on the radio. She was on edge – like most people that summer. There was the added tension of moving house, because building work around Tavistock Square made it so noisy. Everything was packed up and transplanted to a flat in nearby Mecklenburgh Square, but London was so full of anxieties that the Woolfs left most of their possessions in boxes and went to Monk’s House. Their tiredness showed itself in fractious exchanges. Leonard wanted a greenhouse and Virginia didn’t, which turned into an argument that neither of them wanted to have.
The Sussex landscape, by contrast, seemed to Virginia more peaceful and beautiful than ever. In August, on what she thought would be the last day of peace, she lay under a cornstack watching ‘the empty land & the pinkish clouds’.10 For the first time since her illness in 1913 she and Leonard stayed in Sussex for the autumn and winter rather than go back to London. Settling into a rhythm of country life, they became more involved with the village. Neighbours popped in to chat at all the wrong times, Virginia was elected treasurer of the Women’s Institute and was roped into helping with the village play, there was First Aid practice at the rectory, Leonard joined the home guard and gave away their saucepans to be made into aeroplanes, a policeman came to tell them off for carelessness with their blackout curtains, the grocer gave them an extra ration of tea. Rodmell rivalled Bloomsbury in the art of gossip. There was said to be a nun on the bus who paid her fare with a man’s hand.
The village people grew to like Mrs Woolf, though she could look very odd talking to herself on her long walks and she could be short-tempered or distracted. She in turn had very mixed feelings about the village. At times she expressed with disturbing ferocity her sense of being sucked dry by people who could give her nothing back. Yet, coming across the marsh from the Downs in the evening, she loved to see the lights close together, offering shelter. This fundamental idea of community appealed to her very deeply, and she wanted to write about it.
All the time she was working on the biography she was also thinking about a novel. As she had often found before, she needed several books on the go so that one might provide a rest and a change from the other (‘rotating my crops’, as she once told herself).11 Her new novel, Pointz Hall (she changed the title at the last moment to Between the Acts), was about a village pageant staged in the grounds of an old house in June 1939. It was set over the course of a single day, which connected it back to Mrs Dalloway, though here the intensely evoked setting was not London but rural downland. In the still air a cow is heard coughing in the distance; in the mid-afternoon a butterfly suns itself sensuously ‘on a sunlit yellow plate’.12 The mood is festive. Paper garlands are strung across the barn; tea is laid out for the audience and actors.
Woolf, looking out at the countryside in Sussex, was aware of what she called ‘a kind of growl behind the cuckoo and t’other birds: a furnace behind the sky’.13 She attended to the daily concerns of money, cooking, writing, but there was always this sense of the furnace just out of sight. And it burns behind the peaceful, civilized foreground of Between the Acts. In the fragments of talk we overhear as the local people gather for the play, worries about a new cesspool are mixed up with the prospect of invasion. Passion and violence flash out through any chink left open, but no one tone is allowed to dominate for long. It is comic when a sudden shower gives the audience a mid-performance soaking, but it is also, just for a moment, a vision of infinite grief: ‘Down it poured like all the people in the world weeping. Tears, Tears. Tears.’14
Between the Acts is made of interruptions like this one: conversations cut off, lines forgotten. People keep talking and shuffling during the play. Scenes keep being disrupted and then reconvened. The effect is like a kaleidoscope with beads falling into new patterns. The novel has in places the intensity of a life (the life of rural England) passing before one’s eyes before it ends. In other places it has the stumbling digressiveness of someone dying slowly, talking quietly about the weather, with each word weighted by the sense of an ending. One of the most ominous interruptions comes when the vicar is making a speech at the end of the pageant. He pauses, he listens: ‘did he hear some distant music?’ He continues, but then the word ‘opportunity’ is cut in two as he says it, because it was not music he heard but ‘twelve aeroplanes in perfect formation’.15 ‘Then zoom became drone’, the planes go by, the speech continues, collection boxes are passed around in the audience, attention is turned to something new.
In June 1939 those planes were in training, but a year later, as Woolf revised the book at Monk’s House, the Battle of Britain was going on in the sky above Sussex. In July: ‘I open my window when I hear the Germans, & the broad stalks of light rise all over the meadow feeling for them’.16 Then in August: ‘We lay flat on our faces, hands behind head. Dont close yr teeth said L.’ Bombs shook the windows of her writing room. ‘A horse neighed on the marsh. Very sultry. Is it thunder? I said. No guns, said L. from Ringmer, from Charleston way.’17 She phoned Vita, who had bombs falling all around her at Sissinghurst.
The Hedge Hoppers, August 18th 1940, by Diana Gardner, a neighbour of the Woolfs at Rodmell. Woolf recorded the scene in her diary: ‘Yesterday, 18th, Sunday, there was a roar. Right on top of us they came. I looked at the plane, like a minnow at a roaring shark. Over they flashed […] said to be 5 bombers hedge hopping on their way to London. The closest shave so far.’ (Diana Gardner, The Hedge Hoppers, 1940. © Estate of Diana Gardner. Illustration by permission of Cecil Woof Publishers, London)
In the autumn she went up to look around London. Fifty-two Tavistock Square was destroyed; she could see just a bit of her studio wall still standing, and otherwise ‘rubble where I wrote so many books’.18 There was some strange relief in seeing it in ruins, as if the inevitable had happened and made a clean break of it. The house in Mecklenburgh Square was all ‘litter, glass, black soft dust, plaster powder’.19
Leonard and Virginia discussed how to die. When the invasion came they would have to act quickly because a Jewish intellectual and his novelist wife could expect the very worst from the Nazis. Soberly, they planned to go to the garage together, shut the doors, and breathe the fumes from the car. Leonard bought extra petrol for the purpose. Later, Adrian was able to get them lethal doses of morphine to use instead. In this context the overhead raids were not especially frightening. As the zooming receded one night Virginia reflected that it would have been ‘a peaceful matter of fact death to be popped off on the terrace playing bowls this very fine cool sunny August evening’.20 ‘Matter of fact’ became one of her phrases, though the constant tension was affecting her. She found that her hand was shaking. She was reading even more things at once than usual because her mood kept changing. She would dip in and then move on. It was a restlessness she had written about: Isa in Between the Acts looks agitatedly around the library, like someone in a chemist’s shop needing a remedy for toothache. ‘Oughtn’t I to read Shakespeare?’ Woolf wondered, thinking to end on a high. But she found it hard to concentrate.21
She was moving between different pieces of writing as well. She was taking on commissions for essays and short stories, feeling that she should earn money and wanting the sense of a readership at this time when writing could feel useless. At the same time she saw Roger Fry through publication, revised Between the Acts, and worked on two big new projects. Her response to a time of crisis was the same as Fry’s had been: ‘must work’.
Just before the war she had started notes for a memoir, having been warned by Vanessa that if she didn’t do it now it would get too late. There was certainly no shortage of material. She had the twenty-four volumes of her diary, containing one of the most intricate records of a life ever made. These she left, with hundreds of other manuscripts and papers, in the flat in Mecklenburgh Square in 1939, and there they sat when the Square was bombed, so they were very nearly lost. Woolf salvaged them from the debris before the house was completely destroyed and intended to make use of them eventually. But her memoir began with childhood and depended on other sources: her parents’ letters, and her own still-vivid memories. So she went back again to those early years.
This writing of the past made the distracted life of 1939 and 1940 seem more substantial to her. It gave her a sense of depth and trajectory: she was consciously ‘getting the past to shadow this broken surface’.22 She could turn from the debris of her bombed house to write about summers at St Ives, or she could think her way through the rooms of Hyde Park Gate, listing every bit of furniture. She was acutely aware of what she was trying to do for herself by writing this memoir at this time. These apparently casual notes for ‘Sketch of the Past’ (which she threw into the wastepaper basket by mistake and then retrieved) contain some of her most penetrating comments about her writing life. It is here that she describes her ‘shock-receiving capacity’, and her intimation of a pattern behind the ‘cotton wool’.
She went on writing out the vivid scenes that had remained intact in her mind through the years, and imagining as well the scenes she didn’t see: her parents’ lives before her birth, and the conversations between adults that had gone on while she was in the nursery. As she had done in To the Lighthouse, she was trying to see her parents and siblings on their own terms as well as from the child’s point of view. What motivated them? What made that strange ‘machine’ of the Victorian household go on as it did? She knew that in writing To the Lighthouse she had ‘rubbed out’ some of the force of her parents’ memory, but it was far from erased.23 The memoir kept circling outward and then leading inevitably, irresistibly, back to Julia’s death. Then, as Woolf’s focus moved on to her father, she found that she was still angry with him, still writing out her physical rage at his behaviour. She used a raw language of ‘horror’, ‘torture’, ‘brutality’.24 Vanessa had hated him and rejected him, but Virginia was caught in the more complicated and persistent state of ‘ambivalence’ (she took the word from Freud, whose work she was now reading for the first time though she had long been aware of his ideas). Her anger was disturbing because she also still loved her father, ‘this unworldly, very distinguished and lonely man’.25
There was no external need for Virginia Woolf to confront this painful past in November 1940. She made herself do it, shying round it at first, then ‘plunging’ in. Once she was in it she was caught and held there. Her images are of physical traps. She imagined George Duckworth and his social demands as a torturous contraption holding her with sharp teeth.26 The memoir which had started as a holiday from other work seemed to be closing in as well. At the same time, Woolf was reaching the end of Pointz Hall and that vulnerable period which accompanied the end of a novel. Seeing the risk and knowing that she needed to think of something different, she immediately turned to the next book, which was already (like Miss La Trobe’s next play at the end of Between the Acts) rising ‘to the surface’.27
It was to be a history of literature, starting right at the beginning with a man in the woods listening to birdsong. She was full of plans and excitement about it. Like Pointz Hall, to which it was closely connected, it was to be partly a summing up: a celebration of literature ‘as I’ve read it & noted it during the past 20 years’.28 It was a celebration of her places too. She wanted to show the English landscape changing and shaping the literature that was written and read in it. She wanted to think about writers and their ‘backgrounds’ – the views from their windows as they work.29 Even though she had written so much about England in Pointz Hall, she kept wanting to describe it rapturously. In her diary she wondered at its ‘incredible loveliness’: ‘How England consoles and warms one.’30 In the new book she evoked the countryside of the medieval poets, imagining an anonymous figure bringing his lyrics over the Downs, along paths deep in mud, from the cottages to the manor house, where he sang at the back door. She described London at a time when there were fields beyond Bankside. She imagined the actors on their outdoor stage and the crowds cheering in the penny seats. She called this first chapter ‘Anon’, associating the culture of the Middle Ages with an instinctive community feeling. These were writers who did not even think to give their names.
This selflessness was important to Woolf. Since her earliest diaries she had criticized and controlled her own egotism.31 Through her years as a famous writer she had refused photographs and interviews. ‘Sketch of the Past’ is a memoir which strenuously reconstructs other people’s points of view to test her own. She traced the source of all this to her father. She had learned, she said, at least one lesson from his self-centred behaviour: ‘that nothing is so much to be dreaded as egotism’.32 So, as she continued to do battle with him in 1940, she put the word ‘Anon’ at the head of her page. In the next chapter she again shifted the emphasis away from the personality of the writer and called it simply ‘The Reader’.
She wanted to go on with this book, but if she had to die this seemed a fitting place to stop. ‘By the time I’ve reached Shakespeare the bombs will be falling’, she told Ethel, ‘So I’ve arranged a very nice last scene: reading Shakespeare, having forgotten my gas mask, I shall fade far away and quite forget…’33 Those words from Keats’s ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ had been in her mind as she wrote Between the Acts as well. Isa, looking for a quotation, finds that this fantasy of oblivion is the first thing that comes into her head:
Fade far away, dissolve, and quite forget
What thou among the leaves hast never known,
The weariness, the fever, and the fret
Here, where men sit and hear each other groan.
By January 1941, for all her joy in writing, Woolf was struggling against profound despair. She acknowledged it in the diary, swearing that it would not ‘engulf’ her.34 She carried on entertaining, writing letters, and correcting the typescript of Between the Acts, and there was laughter at Monk’s House when Elizabeth Bowen came for the weekend. On 25 February Woolf finished her corrections and gave the novel to Leonard. Her health went downhill quickly after that. Needing to get through the hours without thinking too much, she set herself physical tasks. It helped to be moving around, so she scrubbed floors and vigorously arranged books. The mass of papers and possessions that had been moved down from London made the house feel oppressively full. She tried to put things in order, but she couldn’t find a calm place to settle. She asked for Hogarth Press manuscripts to read as a distraction, but her mind kept racing off.
On 18 March she returned soaking wet from a walk. Leonard found her on her way back through the garden and was alarmed. He tried to get her on to the regime of complete rest to which they had resorted many times before, but it was difficult to impose. The following week he made an urgent appointment with Dr Octavia Wilberforce in Brighton, who found Virginia very thin, very restless, and strangely remote as if she were sleepwalking. Wilberforce was disturbed, but there was not much she could prescribe except rest.
The next morning, Friday 28 March, Virginia sat in her lodge and wrote a letter for Leonard. ‘You have given me complete happiness’, she told him.
But I know that I shall never get over this: & I am wasting your life […] All I want to say is that until this disease came on we were perfectly happy. It was all due to you. No one could have been so good as you have been. From the very first day till now.35
She put this on the sitting-room table, next to a letter for Vanessa that she had written in preparation the previous Sunday. ‘I have fought against it,’ she wrote to her sister, ‘but I can’t any longer.’36 She was resigned to a lonely death, one that she could not discuss with either of them. It was not the joint end in the garage she had planned with Leonard; or the ‘very nice scene’ fading far away with Shakespeare. Because of her illness, and because of the consequent burden of care that she dreaded placing on Leonard again, she decided to die. She put on her wellingtons and fur coat, took her walking stick, and went out across the garden towards the river. She left her stick on the bank and pushed a large stone into her coat pocket. She drowned herself in the very cold, fast-flowing water.
For a long while she disappeared. Her body was not found until more than three weeks later, by which time the winter had become spring. A group of picnickers spotted something in the river as they ate their lunch at Asham Wharf, a short way downstream from Rodmell. Letters of condolence from hundreds of Woolf’s friends and admirers began to arrive at Monk’s House.37 Leonard dealt with the necessary inquest and arranged a cremation, which he attended alone. He buried the ashes in the garden at Monk’s House, under one of the two elm trees they had named ‘Leonard’ and ‘Virginia’. He and John Lehmann made the typescript of Between the Acts ready for publication, and Virginia Woolf’s last novel came out in July.
It has gradually come to be recognized as one of her greatest books. It is restlessly, acrobatically experimental while at the same time taking its energy from all that is most traditional in English life: village talk, the old house, the landscape in the distance, the clatter of teacups, rhymes, songs, snatches of poetry, unpredictable summer weather. The pageant staged by Miss La Trobe has the same ambitious dynamics – pushing hard against the conventions even as it makes its fond, moving, comic tour through English history. Miss La Trobe worries all the way through about how it will be received. Will she make her audience feel anything? What is it all for? These are questions which reach back through Woolf’s writing: to Rhoda in The Waves, knowing that she has something to give but wondering repeatedly, ‘O, to whom?’; or Mr Ramsay on the terrace, agitated because his work will be forgotten; or Lily imagining her pictures rolled up in an attic; or Clarissa Dalloway thinking of her party: ‘it was an offering; to combine; to create; but to whom?’38
Miss La Trobe disappears at the end of her pageant, refusing to acknowledge the applause. She doesn’t want to be the centre of attention at the end; she wants to throw the focus back on the audience. Disoriented by this lack of an author to thank, the spectators in Between the Acts start getting uneasily to their feet, looking round at each other and making up their own minds about what they have seen.