Mad About Shakespeare

12. Shakespeare’s Sister

To do well in our final school exams, we were again and again told, it would be important to support every argument with apt quotations. These would have to be learned by heart. I found that the best method was to recite them out loud while walking at dusk in the park, which I could enter through a wicket gate half a mile from home. Preparing myself for an Antony and Cleopatra question about Enobarbus, the conscience of the play, I addressed the deer in the bracken and the hooting owl in the old oak:

I will go seek

Some ditch wherein to die: the foul’st best fits

My latter part of life.

‘Are you all right, mate?’ asked a surprised dogwalker.

Whether or not Sevenoaks really was the school mentioned by Jack Cade in Henry VI, the town was well known in Shakespeare’s day. It was the location of one of the greatest houses in England. At the time of his execution, Lord Saye and Sele held the manor of Knole, where he was building himself a country pile. His heir sold the property to the Archbishop of Canterbury, who completed it as a palace for himself, which was occupied by his successors down to the time of Thomas Cranmer in the reign of Henry VIII, at which point the king took it over. Queen Elizabeth gave it to her favourite, Robert Dudley, but he handed it back and it eventually passed into the hands of her cousin, Thomas Sackville, co-author of the tragedy of Gorboduc, the first English play in blank verse. He embarked on a huge rebuilding project, creating a home with 365 rooms, fifty-two staircases, twelve entrances and seven courtyards. The Sackvilles have lived there ever since, though since the Second World War confined to a single wing, with the main house and the deer park maintained by the National Trust.

Unfounded family tradition has it that Shakespeare paid a visit. A woman brought up in the house reminisced about her

wild dreams that some light might be thrown on the Shakespearean problem by a discovery of letters or documents at Knole. What more fascinating or chimerical a speculation for a literary-minded child breathing and absorbing the atmosphere of that house? I used to tell myself stories of finding Shakespeare’s manuscripts up in the attics, perhaps hidden away under the flooring somewhere.

This was Vita Sackville-West in her family history, Knole and the Sackvilles, a copy of which was on our family bookcase below the row of New Temple Shakespeares. When Virginia Woolf visited Vita at Knole in 1924, she looked with reverence on chairs that Shakespeare might have sat on.

Knole and the Sackvilles were given new notoriety in the 1970s because of a mildly scandalous book called Portrait of a Marriage, by Vita’s son Nigel Nicolson. It unravelled a family history that I found a little confusing. Vita’s grandfather, a Victorian called Lionel Sackville-West, who became Envoy Extraordinary and Minister Plenipotentiary to the United States, had seven illegitimate children by a Spanish dancer called Pepita. Upon his death, one of these children claimed that he was the rightful heir to Knole, alleging that Lionel had secretly married Pepita. When the case came to court, it was revealed that Pepita already had a husband, so the claim was dismissed and the estate passed to a nephew, also called Lionel. He had married one of his uncle Lionel’s illegitimate daughters, Victoria Josefa Dolores Catalina Sackville-West, known as Lolo. These cousins were Vita’s parents. They both had many affairs, leaving their only child free to roam around Knole and indulge her passion for writing. She completed eight novels and a batch of plays by the age of eighteen. But, being a girl, she could not inherit the house she loved. This was a source of lifelong resentment, for all that she found solace in her marriage to Harold Nicolson, her lover Violet Trefusis, and the garden she created at Sissinghurst. Much of Nigel Nicolson’s book was given over to Vita’s own account, unpublishable in her lifetime, of her lesbian affairs.

The curse of male primogeniture and genetic chance continued to affect the Sackvilles. Sevenoaks School admitted girls to the sixth form shortly before I left: one of the first was Sarah, fifth and last child, all daughters, of the current Lord Sackville. Which meant that when he died, Knole passed once again to a nephew.

There weren’t any Shakespeare manuscripts in the attics, but in a display case in the Great Hall you can see the original manuscript of a novel by Virginia Woolf called Orlando. Written with the lightness of gossamer, it masquerades as a biography. Like a real biography, it includes a long set of acknowledgements to friends of the subject, scholars, librarians and archivists, but, unusually, the list begins with the author’s debt to the dead, in the form of Defoe, Sir Thomas Browne, Sterne, Sir Walter Scott, Lord Macaulay, Emily Brontë, De Quincey, and Walter Pater. That is because the book is a love letter not only to Vita, but also to English literature. I read it shortly before going up to university and it was the ideal preparation for three years’ total immersion in the subject.

Orlando was the book that made me think of Virginia Woolf as Shakespeare’s sister.

If there was a deficiency in the range of works we studied after choosing English Literature for the last two years at school, it was the lack of women authors. There was one notable exception. ‘Some people think that Jane Austen is trivial,’ said the other JA, Mr Adams. He paused, then added ‘and some people think that Mozart tinkles.’

Austen was accordingly given pride of place on the reading list as we began our advanced-level course. The paper on ‘Literature since 1785’ (i.e. since the death of Dr Johnson) involved submission of a portfolio of essays instead of an exam. The requirement was to make comparisons between any two novelists, any two poets and any two dramatists, from any country in the world. It was up to each student to make their own choices, after having been introduced in class to a wide array of possibilities – Austen for the art of irony, Forster’s Howards End for the intricacies of the British class system, The Great Gatsby and Death of a Salesman for the American Dream, V. S. Naipaul and Chinua Achebe for the legacy of empire, and so on.

Austen was another author with local associations. Every Saturday morning when I walked down to the record shop to buy a new album or single, I glanced at the elegantly proportioned Red House just beyond the school, now the offices of Knocker and Foskett, Solicitors. A brass plaque on the railings informed passers-by that Jane Austen had stayed there with her Uncle Francis. There were other links, too. Her father was born in Tonbridge, where he was educated and then taught at our rival school; her grandmother was matron of our own Sevenoaks and housekeeper to the headmaster, Elijah Fenton, who was an early Bardolater, writing a poem in 1711 that included the lines

Shakespear the Genius of our Isle, whose Mind

(The universal Mirror of Mankind)

Expressed all Images, enriched the Stage,

But sometimes stooped to please a barbarous Age.

Only connect, wrote Tonbridge pupil Forster.

We used to go to Box Hill for family picnics. Maybe that, as well as the perfection of its form and the wit of its prose, was why Emma was my favourite of the novels, the one that I chose for the essay in my A-Level portfolio in which I compared the ways in which Jane Austen and Henry James (in The Portrait of a Lady) got inside the heads of their heroines, simultaneously doting on them and exposing their faults by means of a device known to critics as ‘free indirect discourse’ – writing in the third person, but from the point of view of the character, thus achieving both intimacy and detachment. I saw that it was as powerful a device for the novelist as dramatic irony – the moment when an audience knows something that the character does not – was for the playwrights we were studying, Shakespeare, Ibsen and Chekhov. Was it, I wondered, a particular gift of women novelists (and maybe their hyper-sensitive and not very masculine brothers, such as Henry James)?

The dazzling technique of Orlando elevated Woolf into my small pantheon of women writers, beside Austen and Emily Brontë. In my first term as an undergraduate, when I should have been studying Spenser and Dryden, I read all her other novels. I squandered a disproportionate amount of my student grant on a four-volume collection of her essays, addressed to ‘The Common Reader’. I devoured her Writer’s Diary. ‘The feel of genius,’ I wrote in my copy of it, ‘amazing insights into an artist’s mind, influences, ideas – she read so much and so quickly, absorbing every detail – must read all her letters – oh time.’

Her books sent me into the echo-chamber of memory. To my own childhood summers by the sea, of course, but also to the awkwardness of adolescence. In The Voyage Out, her debut novel, the girl is on a bed with a boy for the first time, rolling slightly this way and that as the embrace tightened and slackened. ‘I don’t like that,’ said Rachel after a moment. A buried moment of acute embarrassment flashed into my mind. The first time I stayed with Sarah Jane at her home. We were lying on her bed as soon as I entered the house. Her parents were out, so I had not yet met them. Then the bedroom door opened. It was her father: ‘I don’t like this,’ he said as he got his first sight of his daughter’s horizontal boyfriend. I don’t like that, I don’t like this. ‘Fiction is truth?’ I scribbled in another margin.

I stayed up all night in my snug student room, immersed in the recently published two-volume biography by Virginia’s nephew Quentin Bell, transfixed by its candour:

All that summer she was mad

and

Mr Lytton Strachey stood on the threshold. He pointed his finger at a stain on Vanessa’s white dress.

‘Semen?’ he said.

And finally the note to her husband Leonard, placed on the sitting-room mantelpiece at Rodmell in Sussex:

Dearest,

I feel certain 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 … 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.

When on that last page she took her walking stick and made her way across the water-meadows to the river, where she forced a large stone into the pocket of her coat, I thought about Ophelia, and then just for a moment the memory returned of the smell of woodsmoke that afternoon when I came back from school on the day that our neighbour – tall, thin, elegant, grey-haired, she looked a little like Woolf – built the bonfire for herself in the garden.

Quentin Bell guided me through the course of his aunt’s career. She had found her mature ‘stream of consciousness’ style in Mrs Dalloway, a novel that she described in her diary as a study of insanity and suicide; the world seen by the sane and the insane side by side. Clarissa Dalloway’s mantra, recurring throughout the novel, is Shakespeare’s line Fear no more the heat o’ the sun:

Fear no more, says the heart. Fear no more, says the heart, committing its burden to some sea, which sighs collectively for all sorrows, and renews, begins, collects, lets fall.

A better name for ‘the stream of consciousness’ would have been ‘the breaking of the waves’. It was in Woolf’s next novel, To the Lighthouse, that they broke again and again on the shore as she magically conjured back to life the summers of her childhood. In January 1927, she returned from another visit to Vita in Sevenoaks and was greeted by Leonard, who had read the manuscript of the seaside novel while she was away. He told her it was much her best book, a masterpiece, an entirely original ‘psychological poem’.

It was published in May. In June, she went to a ceremony in which Vita was presented with the Hawthornden Prize, Britain’s most prestigious literary award, for her poem The Land. That same day, Virginia sketched in her diary an outline for a new novel, to be called The Moths:

the play-poem idea; the idea of some continuous stream, not solely of human thought, but of the ship, the night etc., all flowing together: intersected by the arrival of the bright moths.

Four years and many rewrites later, it would become The Waves, her most poetic novel, demanding of deep readerly concentration. She decided that while it marinated, she would dash off a quick book, a mock biography. Having written a series of serious poetic experimental books, she needed an escapade. It would be based on Vita, Violet Trefusis, Lord Lascelles, Knole, etc.

They had begun their affair just before Christmas 1925. Virginia fell in love with Vita as she marched into a grocer’s in Sevenoaks. It must have been Payne’s, at the top of the London Road, where a generation later my mother shopped twice a week. Vita had, according to Woolf’s diary, a candle-lit radiance, stalking on legs like beech-trees, pink glowing, grape clustered, pearl hung. Neither of their husbands seemed to mind. By the summer of 1926, Vita was telling Harold Nicolson, who had no shortage of gay affairs himself, that she had slept with Virginia twice but was scared to death of arousing physical feelings in her, because of the madness. When Virginia visited Long Barn, Vita’s house in the village of Weald, rather than becoming overly sexually entangled as had happened with Violet Trefusis, they mostly sat up talking about literature deep into the night (Harold was away by this time, as Counsellor at the British Legation in Teheran). Woolf was trying to work on a history of fiction, but getting stuck. So she had the idea of writing it in the form of a novel.

Orlando was Virginia’s gift to Vita in compensation for her deprivation of Knole because she was a woman. She is made instead the inheritor of the English literary tradition that began with Sir Thomas Sackville’s invention of blank-verse tragedy, the crucible out of which Marlowe and Shakespeare worked their alchemy. Woolf was inspired by her reading of Knole and the Sackvilles, which had revealed how the house had become a literary salon in the time of Charles Sackville, the 6th Earl, who frequently entertained John Dryden, the first Poet Laureate, and numerous other writers (he also had an affair with Nell Gwyn, who called him her ‘Charles the First’). So why not create a character who was Thomas Sackville, Charles Sackville and Vita all in one?

Orlando is born in the age of Shakespeare and lives until the present. When women enter the literary marketplace in the Restoration period, as they did with the plays of Aphra Behn, he undergoes a sex change. The style of the novel progresses from Renaissance exuberance to measured Johnsonian prose for the eighteenth century, cluttered Victoriana for the nineteenth, and Woolfian stream of consciousness for the present. Having begun as an aristocratic scribbler at the court of Queen Elizabeth, Orlando ends as the author of a poem called ‘The Oak Tree’, which stands in for Vita’s prizewinning The Land.

When he becomes a woman, Woolf had to be careful. She was writing at the time when Radclyffe Hall’s publisher was about to be prosecuted for obscenity over the explicitly lesbian Well of Loneliness. Woolf deflected. Immediately after the sex change, she nodded to Jane Austen: let other pens treat of sex and sexuality; we quit such odious subjects as soon as we can. Out of an abundance of caution, she removed an earlier passage that is in the manuscript held at Knole: Shakespeare visits Orlando and gives him a manuscript telling the true story of his relationship with Master W. H., which Orlando burns for fear of revealing a love that dared not speak its name.

Yet Shakespeare remains a presence throughout the novel. He is glimpsed in the great house that is based on Knole:

There, sitting at the servant’s dinner table with a tankard beside him and paper in front of him, sat a rather fat, rather shabby man, whose ruff was a thought dirty, and whose clothes were of hodden brown. He held a pen in his hand, but he was not writing. He seemed in the act of rolling some thought up and down, to and fro in his mind till it gathered shape or momentum to his liking. His eyes, globed and clouded like some green stone of curious texture, were fixed.

Again and again, through the centuries, this vision returns to Orlando. It is Woolf’s way of saying that Shakespeare, with what she called his androgynous or ‘man-womanly’ mind, is the presiding spirit of the whole of subsequent English literature.

Vita was not alone in her anger at the exclusion of women from history and historic institutions. This was also Virginia’s theme in the two lectures that she delivered in Cambridge to the female students of Newnham and Girton Colleges in the month of Orlando’s publication. They were expanded and published the following year as A Room of One’s Own.

It was here that Woolf asked the question: what would have happened if Shakespeare had been blessed with a wonderfully gifted sister, let us say called Judith? Could she have broken into the theatre world through the sheer brilliance of her writing? Suppose that, after honing her skills scribbling secretly in a Stratford apple-loft, she made her way to London. The theatre manager would have laughed at the idea of a woman writing:

Yet her genius was for fiction and lusted to feed abundantly upon the lives of men and women and the study of their ways. At last – for she was very young, oddly like Shakespeare the poet in her face, with the same grey eyes – at last Nick Greene the actor-manager took pity on her; she found herself with child by that gentleman and so – who shall measure the heat and violence of the poet’s heart when caught and tangled in a woman’s body? – killed herself one winter’s night and lies buried at some crossroads where the omnibuses now stop outside the Elephant and Castle.

But all is not lost. As the imaginary Orlando was made to live via Vita Sackville-West’s inheritance of the spirit of her literary ancestors Sir Thomas and Lord Charles, so, Woolf tells the female Cambridge students, Shakespeare’s fictional sister will live when women writers have five hundred pounds and a room of their own, giving them the possibility of a literary career. Judith is imagined as a continuing presence, soon to be animated in the flesh: the dead poet who was Shakespeare’s sister will put on the body which she has so often laid down. Drawing her life from the lives of the unknown who were her forerunners, as her brother did before her, she will be born.

To begin with, Virginia Woolf felt excluded from Shakespeare’s art. As Judith was to William, so was she to her brother Thoby. He was brilliant, he was eighteen months older than her, he was on his way to Cambridge, he was a boy. Shakespeare seemed to belong to him, not her. He had consumed the plays, possessed himself of them. They fought, because out he would come with his sweeping assertion that everything was in Shakespeare. She hated the way that he seemed to have it all in his grasp. She tried to argue that the plays began with some dull speech. To prove the point, she opened the book. The page fell at Twelfth Night. If music be the food of love, play on … A good beginning, she had to admit.

It was the male confidence, verging on arrogance, that she could not abide:

I remember his pride, for it seemed like a pride he took in a friend, at Shakespeare’s shuffling Falstaff off without a sign of sympathy. That large impartial sweep in Shakespeare delighted him … And so I felt that Shakespeare was to him his other world; the place where he got the measure of his daily world: where he took his bearings; in which he took his way freely from Shakespeare.

Cambridge, too, belonged to him, not to her. She was deprived of the experience of being at college, where the stir and pressure of life are so extreme, where the excitement of mere living becomes daily more urgent.

The novel I especially loved as I worked my way through Woolf’s writings during my first term at college was Jacob’s Room, her elegy for Thoby, much of it set in the Fenland city of radiant light that was becoming my new home:

They say the sky is the same everywhere … But above Cambridge – anyhow above the roof of King’s College Chapel – there is a difference. Out at sea a great city will cast a brightness into the night. Is it fanciful to suppose the sky, washed into the crevices of King’s College Chapel, lighter, thinner, more sparkling than the sky elsewhere? Does Cambridge burn not only into the night, but into the day?

Thoby Stephen died of typhoid at the age of twenty-six. Some months earlier, Virginia had pasted a bookplate into her newly acquired set of the Whitehall Edition of the Complete Works of Shakespeare: it was her own finely executed drawing of the Bard’s alleged death mask, which had been ‘discovered’ in Germany some fifty years before. Thoby, death and Shakespeare became interlaced in her imagination. Death is woven in with the violets, says Louis in The Waves, remembering Ophelia’s withered violets, death and again death.

For all her grief at Thoby’s death, there was also liberation. Now Woolf could take possession of Shakespeare for herself. The process is remembered in Jacob’s Room. Early in the novel, Jacob, the protagonist who is based on Thoby, can’t get on with Shakespeare:

What’s the use of trying to read Shakespeare, especially in one of those little thin paper editions whose pages get ruffled, or stuck together with sea-water? Although the plays of Shakespeare had frequently been praised, even quoted, and placed higher than the Greek, never since they started had Jacob managed to read one through.

His copy is symbolically washed overboard on a boat trip to the Scilly Isles. Female characters to whom he condescends are, by contrast, immersed in Shakespeare. For one, the plays, together with Adonais, Shelley’s poem about the death of Keats, are sovereign specifics for all disorders of the soul; another has all Shakespeare by heart before she is in her teens. In her imagination, Woolf is inverting the pattern of her life, where her brother had early command of Shakespeare and she initially struggled.

The novel both idealizes and ironizes Jacob’s – Thoby’s – Cambridge. His friends there mature him into Shakespeare and his peers: why read anything but Marlowe and Shakespeare, Jacob said, and Fielding if you must read novels? And later, Already he had marked the things he liked in Donne, and they were savage enough. However, you might place beside them passages of the purest poetry in Shakespeare. He indulges in the impassioned if pretentious undergraduate talk with which I was becoming familiar. ‘I’ll tell you the three greatest things that were ever written in the whole of literature,’ a fellow-student bursts out,

‘Hang there like fruit my soul,’ he began …

Wine spilling from his glass, Jacob parries with an equally inventive but less romantic line: The devil damn you black, you cream-faced loon! We often quoted that, too.

I discovered from a letter printed in the Quentin Bell biography that this exchange of quotations in Jacob’s Room must have been a remembrance of Woolf’s correspondence with her brother when he was at Cambridge:

I read Cymbeline just to see if there mightn’t be more in the great William than I supposed. And I was quite upset! Really & truly I am now let in to the company of worshippers – though I still feel a little oppressed by his – greatness I suppose … Imogen says – Think that you are upon a rock, & now throw me again! & Posthumous answers – Hang there like fruit, my soul, till the tree die! Now if that doesn’t send a shiver down your spine, even if you are in the middle of cold grouse & coffee – you are no true Shakespearian! Oh dear oh dear – just as I feel in the mood to talk about these things, you go & plant yourself in Cambridge.

Cymbeline is another of Shakespeare’s late plays of loss and recovery. In the long closing scene, Imogen, a sister who has been loved and lost while disguised as a boy, is reunited with her brothers:

O my gentle brothers,

Have we thus met? O, never say hereafter

But I am truest speaker. You called me brother

When I was but your sister: I you brothers,

When ye were so indeed.

For Shakespeare, was the moment a fantasy, with gender roles reversed, of his two daughters being reunited with their dead brother Hamnet? Or was he also turning over in his mind his own lost little brother, Edmund, who followed him to London and became an actor, only to die of plague, along with his young son, not long before Cymbeline was written? It was probably William who paid for his burial in Southwark Cathedral and for the tolling of the great bell at noon. For Woolf at the time of Jacob’s Room, the language would have conjured up an imagined restoration of brother Thoby to her and her beloved sister Vanessa.

It is in this same scene that Imogen, thought to be dead, is also reunited with her husband Posthumus. Upon her embrace, he says:

Hang there like fruit, my soul,

Till the tree die.

Virginia Woolf loved reading biographies. In singling out the image, I suspect that she was remembering not only the play itself, but also Hallam Tennyson’s memoir of his father, Alfred Lord Tennyson, who considered these lines among the greatest in the whole of literature. The memoir, which Woolf knew well, not least because Hallam married one of her relatives, records that on his deathbed in 1892 the dying Poet Laureate asked for his Shakespeare. He opened it at these lines, which he said were the tenderest that Shakespeare ever wrote. He was too weak to read them aloud one last time, saying only, ‘I have opened it.’ His family buried him with his copy of Cymbeline laid on his chest, where it had been when he died.

Shakespeare remained a comfort in the face of death in Woolf’s next novel, Mrs Dalloway. Septimus Warren Smith, the shell-shocked Great War veteran who commits suicide towards the end of the day on which the story is set, is obsessed with Shakespeare. He was one of the first to volunteer in 1914, going to France to save an England which consisted almost entirely of Shakespeare’s plays and Miss Isabel Pole in a green dress walking in a square. But after the war, when post-traumatic stress disorder brings back the death of his beloved fellow-soldier Evans, he turns against Shakespeare:

Here he opened Shakespeare once more. That boy’s business of the intoxication of language – Antony and Cleopatra – had shrivelled utterly. How Shakespeare loathed humanity – the putting on of clothes, the getting of children, the sordidity of the mouth and the belly! This was now revealed to Septimus; the message hidden in the beauty of words. The secret signal which one generation passes, under disguise, to the next is loathing, hatred, despair.

Shell shock causes Septimus to project his own despair on to Shakespeare. If he can no longer love Shakespeare, life will be intolerable. He throws himself out of a window and is impaled on the railings below. When Clarissa Dalloway is told about his death at her party that evening, she retreats to a small empty room, where she sees an old woman across the road getting ready for bed. Normal life going on, as in Auden’s poem about the painting of the fall of Icarus. The mantra returns to calm Mrs Dalloway:

There! the old lady had put out her light! the whole house was dark now with this going on, she repeated, and the words came to her, Fear no more the heat of the sun.

The words have come to her from Shakespeare: first a whisper of Othello putting out the light of Desdemona’s life and then the opening line of the dirge in Cymbeline. It occurs shortly after a stage direction that echoes the heartbreaking moment near the end of King Lear: Enter Arviragus, with Imogen, dead, bearing her in his arms. But this is late Shakespeare, not Shakespeare in the depths of tragedy. The plot of Cymbeline is convoluted, to say the least. Though Arviragus and his brother Guiderius do not know it, Imogen (disguised as their adored pageboy Fidele) is not dead. She has merely fainted at the sight of a headless body that she thinks is her husband’s (it is actually that of her wicked stepbrother, Cloten, who had a scheme to rape her – which must have affected Virginia Woolf, who was traumatized as a girl when she was sexually assaulted by her stepbrother). Arviragus and Guiderius chant over the body of the boy-girl:

Fear no more the heat o’ th’ sun,

Nor the furious winter’s rages,

Thou thy worldly task has done,

Home art gone, and ta’en thy wages.

Golden lads and girls all must,

As chimney-sweepers, come to dust …

Quiet consummation have,

And renownèd be thy grave.

Words, remembered from Shakespeare, counted like rosary beads. A moment of quiet consummation in both the play and the novel, and another epitaph for the lost brother, the golden lad Thoby Stephen.

All through her literary career, the words of Shakespeare came to Virginia Woolf. They wove themselves into the fabric of her writing, as when, near the climax of The Waves, Bernard reaches an understanding of the flow of the world through Lear’s image of himself and Cordelia as birds in a cage, telling old tales and laughing at gilded butterflies: So now, taking upon me the mystery of things, I could go like a spy without leaving this place, without stirring from my chair. I can visit the remote verges of the desert lands …

She read Shakespeare when she was ill. And she read him after writing, when her mind was agape and red-hot. She never ceased to be astonished how amazing his stretch and speed and word coining power is, until I felt it utterly outpace and outrace my own, seeming to start equal and then I see him draw ahead and do things I could not in my wildest tumult and utmost press of mind imagine.

Even the lesser-known plays, she believed, were written at a speed that was quicker than anybody else’s quickest. The words drop so fast that one can’t pick them up. Look at this, she wrote, alighting on a random passage in Titus Andronicus:

‘Upon a gathered lily almost withered’ … Evidently the pliancy of his mind was so complete that he could furbish out any train of thought … Why then should anyone else attempt to write? This is not ‘writing’ at all. Indeed, I could say that Shakespeare surpasses literature altogether, if I knew what I meant.

She was not intimidated. She found a way of answering to his pliancy of mind and speed of composition. I copied out a passage from her diary. She was writing of her quest for a style that was loose knit and yet not slovenly, so elastic that it will embrace anything, solemn, slight or beautiful that comes into my mind. Imagine some deep old desk, or capacious hold-all, in which one flings a mass of odds and ends without looking them through, but to which one returns with the passing of the years to find that the collection had sorted itself and refined itself and coalesced, as such deposits so mysteriously do, into a mould, transparent enough to reflect the light of our life, and yet steady, tranquil compounds with the aloofness of a work of art.

I wasted a lot of time in my first year at college trying to write a novel in this style. I had the good sense to put it in a drawer and never look at it again. But I wondered whether it might be possible to write literary critical prose that answered to Woolf’s fluency and transparency. Not to mention her commitment to a criticism that was accessible to ‘The Common Reader’.

My first experience of a Cambridge lecture was not auspicious. ‘Introduction to Medieval Studies’: old professor, rambling, mildly senile, plugging his own books. He said, ‘When I hear the word relevance, I reach for my umbrella.’ The only compensation was that I found myself sitting next to a Newnham fresher, flushed with sensibility, called Marianne. When I visited her college, it seemed like a girls’ boarding school, but I was enchanted by her attic room decorated with kilim throws, a bowl of fresh fruit from the market and postcard reproductions of paintings by Matisse.

Attendance at lectures was optional, and it was easy to discover from second- and third-year students for which ones it was worth getting out of bed. ‘Prynne is a must,’ someone told me. So a couple of days later, I jostled my way into a packed lecture room to hear the poet-critic J. H. Prynne – at that time unknown outside Cambridge. Wearing his trademark black-velvet jacket, white shirt and orange tie, he delivered what I described as an ‘intense, hilarious, brilliant exegesis of Coleridge’s prose passage about skating and its transcendence’. The following week, he provided an ‘explanation of D. G. Rossetti’s theory of poetic language having to carry the weight that theology once carried’. At moments such as this – and there were many of them – one sensed that although Dr Leavis had left for York, his zeal for the discipline still hung over the Faculty. English Literature mattered because it had, as Matthew Arnold predicted, inherited the mantle of religion.

In retrospect, I see that it was a moment of dusk for the Cambridge English Faculty, and indeed the entire discipline as conceived by Leavis. But to be there and to be young was very heaven. During the course of any week in term, you could hear lectures by Christopher Ricks, Raymond Williams and Frank Kermode, the world’s leading practitioners of, respectively, pyrotechnic close reading, Marxist literary analysis, and the urbane fusion of traditional scholarship with new ideas imported from Paris. Alone of the three, Ricks lectured as well as wrote with panache, yet their collective presence was thrilling because my first inspirational encounters with literary criticism at school had been his Milton’s Grand Style, along with Williams’s The Country and the City and Kermode’s Romantic Image and Arden Edition of The Tempest. Might it be possible, I wondered, to write criticism that moved nimbly between Ricks’s sense of how writers speak to their admired forebears through an art of allusion, Kermode’s understanding of the process whereby a work becomes a ‘classic’, and Williams’s attunement to the social and political contexts in which literature is produced and consumed?

Our minds were stretched by a close reading of A. E. Housman one week, an intellectual workout with Roland Barthes the next. Then it all fell apart: Williams retired, while Ricks and Kermode took opposite sides in a Faculty argument about the promotion of a Young Turk who practised literary theory which became so explosive that it hit the national press, leading the Sun newspaper to attempt to explain structuralism to readers more accustomed to ogling page-three girls.

We used to joke that the termly lecture list resembled a well-stocked bar: there were two Beers (John and Gillian) for the Romanticists and Victorians, a Barrell (John) for those with eighteenth-century tastes, and a Brewer (Derek) for the medievalists. The wineskins were prepared by two Tanners – Michael for the philosophically inclined and Tony for aficionados of the novel. Having imbibed English literature from 1300 to the present in the first two years, we were ready for the strong liquor of Finals, where the intimidating Tragedy paper began with Poole (Adrian) plunging us into the ancient Greeks. Directing us to Ezra Pound’s translation of the climactic moment in Sophocles’ Women of Trachis, he showed how in the instant before death the tragic hero achieves anagnorisis, knowledge of the self and the world:

Come at it that way, my boy, what

SPLENDOUR,

IT ALL COHERES.

There were no set texts, only the injunction to read widely and to decide with your supervisor which authors you were going to write about. Week by week, I worked my way through the centuries, churning out essays that my supervisor, Dr Paul Hartle, stripped of priggishness and rushed judgement by means of gentle marginal comments such as ‘You don’t seriously believe this shit, do you, Bate?’ The relationship between the exams and the lecture courses was, to say the least, tangential. Dons were given free rein to ride their hobby horses. I was particularly struck by a course offered by ‘Mad Mike’ Long called ‘Nabokov, Marvell, Arcadia, Childhood’. The twentieth-century Russian émigré novelist Vladimir Nabokov and the seventeenth-century Metaphysical Poet Andrew Marvell seemed an unlikely pairing, but Long made the conjunction work: they shared a longing for lost childhoods and lost Arcadias – Marvell’s gardens, Nabokov’s pre-revolutionary Russian origins, Humbert Humbert’s kingdom by the sea where he loses his first love, twelve-year-old Annabel Leigh, causing him to regress into perversion and madness, fixating on girls of her age.

The comparison gave me an idea for the dissertation I needed to submit as part of my degree. Nabokov was a butterfly-hunter. His novels are full of moths, as in the very last sentences of Bend Sinister:

Possibly, something of the kind may be said to occur in regard to the imprint we leave in the intimate texture of space. Twang. A good night for mothing.

Wasn’t The Waves originally going to be called The Moths? And hadn’t Woolf addressed her own depression, shortly before her suicide, in an essay called ‘The Death of the Moth’? Didn’t these two novelists – for me, the supreme English-language stylists of the twentieth century – share a technique of using moments of vision, shards of light and whispered sounds, as a way of facing up to death and living through it? Woolf in her diary seeking to catch the light of our life; Humbert’s first phrase for Lolita, light of my life. The glimpse of a pair of Jacob’s old shoes. The absence of Lolita’s voice from the concord of children’s voices heard from a hillside in Telluride, Colorado, where Humbert is listening (and Nabokov butterflying and mothing). The art that defeats time, whether it be Shakespeare’s sonnets, Renaissance frescoes, or the wall-paintings depicting extinct beasts on the walls of the caves of Lascaux:

I am thinking of aurochs and angels, the secret of durable pigments, prophetic sonnets, the refuge of art. And this is the only immortality you and I may share, my Lolita.

My dissertation, ‘The Flight of the Moth: A Comparative Study of Virginia Woolf and Vladimir Nabokov’, did not get a very good mark. Too impressionistic, insufficiently scholarly (and, besides, Nabokov wasn’t sufficiently English – despite the fact that he had studied at Cambridge). But I was proud of it. I had found my voice as a writer. And writing, with reading, would be my way of enduring the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.

Knole: inspiration for Orlando

Virginia Woolf’s bookplate for her Shakespeare edition: her drawing of his supposed death mask (thought in her time to be authentic)