VII
IN MARCH 1924 they left Richmond for 52 Tavistock Square in Bloomsbury, dragging the Hogarth Press with them. The move was dictated by Leonard’s desire to live closer to his work, and Virginia’s for the society of her friends. Hogarth House was too remote. But their new house lacked the calm of Richmond. It was a sandwich, the Woolfs occupying the two top floors, the press the basement, and the offices of a solicitor lying between them. Virginia chose to write in a back room next to the press, sitting in a molting armchair with a board on her knee, and as it was also the stockroom, she was constantly interrupted by the assistants, who succeeded each other in quick rotation, such was Leonard’s severity as an employer and so poor the pay. Even Dadie Rylands, whom they both liked, fled back to Cambridge after a few months.
It was in these conditions that Virginia finished Mrs. Dalloway. It made great demands on her, particularly when she was describing the madness and suicide of Septimus Warren Smith. It was published in April 1925, a few weeks after The Common Reader. The two books were inevitably contrasted by the critics, the novel arousing bewilderment for its deliberate mistiness, “the half-light of experience,” the essays praise for their lucidity and wit. Vita, not wishing to offend or to be considered stupid, settled for “will-of-the-wisp” for Mrs. Dalloway and “a guide, philosopher and friend” for The Common Reader. Virginia considered that hardly anyone had grasped her intention, “but that’s the penalty we pay for breaking with tradition.” Lytton Strachey thought the novel flawed, and Virginia, always vulnerable to criticism, felt more inclined to trust his judgment than Clive Bell’s, who declared it to be a masterpiece, as did E. M. Forster and Jacques Raverat, who read the proofs as he lay dying, and dictated to his wife a letter which gave Virginia “one of the happiest days of my life.” For many readers Mrs. Dalloway meant too much hard work. Arnold Bennett admitted in a review, “It beat me; I could not finish it.” In her famous essay, “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown,” which she adapted as a lecture to a Cambridge literary society, Virginia answered him, explaining that she had hoped to change the whole direction of fiction writing. She had already written in her diary: “The method of writing smooth narrative can’t be right. Things don’t happen in one’s mind like that. We experience, all the time, an overlapping of images and ideas, and modern novels should convey our mental confusion instead of neatly rearranging it. The reader must sort it out.” Less sophisticated readers were unconvinced. In reply to Violet Dickinson’s letter of despair, Virginia advised her to give it up, and that was the end of that relationship.
She made new friends warily: Raymond Mortimer, Hugh Walpole, Vita’s first cousin Edward Sackville-West. She could find little to admire in young men: she thought them insipid. Young women like Janet Vaughan, Rose Macaulay, Frances Marshall (Partridge to be), Carrington and Rebecca West, had more spunk in them, more pride, and were less anxious to please. She and Leonard were increasingly reluctant to spend weekends away from home. They found it disagreeable to be under the constraint of other people’s habits and hospitality, and to be forced to mix cordially with their neighbors. After one such winter visit to the Arnold-Forsters in Cornwall, Virginia thought it necessary, like many another weekend guest, to simulate the pleasure she had not felt. To Ka, her hostess, she wrote, “I can’t think how you manage such comfort and warmth in that howling blizzard”: but to Vanessa, “We fled from Zennor a day early, unable to stand the perishing cold.”
Monk’s House was little better, but it was slowly acquiring the basic conveniences that they had lacked for seven years. “Mrs. Dalloway’s lavatory” and hot water on tap were operating in time to comfort Virginia when she was obliged, once more, to spend months in bed with recurrent headaches. Her illnesses alternated with moves to London and back again, at the very period when she was longing to make progress with To the Lighthouse. When she was well enough to write, it came easily to her. “I am now writing as fast and freely as I have written in the whole of my life,” she confided to her diary when she was at Rodmell, but it was not the same in Tavistock Square. “To write a novel in the heart of London,” she told Vita, “is next to an impossibility. I feel as if I were nailing a flag to the top of a mast in a raging gale.”
Vita was in Persia. In the years 1926 and 1927 she made two visits there, to join Harold in Teheran for a month or two, and her correspondence with Virginia gained on both sides a new intensity. They were not explicitly love letters, for discretion’s sake, but they were by implication. Virginia to Vita: “No letter from you. Why not? Only a scrap from Dover, and a wild melancholy adorable moan from Trieste. No photograph either. Goodbye, dearest shaggy creature.” Vita to Virginia: “It’s incredible how essential to me you have become, Damn you, spoilt creature. I shan’t make you love me any the more by giving myself away like this. But you have broken down my defences.” That was all very well. Vita was accompanied on both her journeys to the East by Dorothy Wellesley, another lover, and was writing ahead to Harold in Teheran letters as ardent as those she was writing back to Virginia in London. She did not consider it deceitful. She was simply sharing her affections between them. When she reached Teheran, having dumped Dorothy in India, she hardly mentioned her husband in her letters. She exchanged with Virginia common distastes, hers for smart diplomatic parties, Virginia’s for their London equivalents, “those damned people sitting smug round their urn, their fire, their tea-table. . . . I felt inclined to leave them all alone, for ever and ever, these tea-parties, these Ottolines, these mumbling sodomitical old maids.”
Such moods were frequent with her. Once she was persuaded by Leonard to spend a day with his brother Herbert and his wife, who lived at Cookham in Berkshire. Herbert was a stockbroker, lacking all intellectual interests, and Virginia, instead of ridiculing them as was her custom, reflected how comforting it would be never to have heard of Roger, or Clive, or Duncan, or Lytton. “Oh this is life, I kept saying to myself; and what is Bloomsbury, or Long Barn either, but a contortion, a temporary knot,” she wrote to Vita, “and why do I pity and deride the human race, when its lot is profoundly peaceful and happy? They have nothing to wish for. They are entirely simple and sane.”
It is doubtful whether Herbert mentioned the stock exchange or Leonard the problems of the Hogarth Press, for shop talk, by common convention, was taboo. Yet the press was causing them much worry. They were still printing and binding pamphlets like Laura Riding’s Voltaire and Robert Trevelyan’s Poems. Longer books, like Virginia’s own novels and Vita’s Passenger to Teheran, they delegated to commercial printers, but their time, which Leonard would have preferred to devote to journalism, books and politics, and Virginia to her novels, was eroded by their mechanical tasks, packing parcels and interviewing booksellers and salesmen. Was it worth this incessant drudgery? In 1927 their net profit was only £27. But they persisted. They considered buying David Garnett’s bookshop, and publishing the works of Freud in translation. They abandoned Garnett, but Freud they carried through, though it is doubtful whether Virginia read a word of him.
Leonard and Virginia Woolf at Monk’s House in 1926, with Pinka (Flush) in the foreground. A photograph taken by Vita.
The general strike of May 1926 was more of an excitement than a diversion. The Hogarth Press was only marginally affected by it, because their sole employees, Angus Davidson and a secretary, did not strike, and printing by outside firms was interrupted only for the nine days that the strike lasted. The main public services were kept going by volunteers. Buses, underground trains and taxis no longer ran, but London’s traffic was sustained by bicycle and its communications by telephone and the radio. The strike obliged Virginia to take political sides. Hitherto she had been lukewarm. Now, in support of Leonard, she stood by the strikers, if not as valiantly as he did. “If ever a general strike was justified,” he wrote in his memoirs, “it was in 1926,” and he organized in their support a petition by leading intellectuals, which only Galsworthy refused to sign. The strike was suddenly settled, to the disadvantage of the miners who had started it. “Everyone is jubilant,” Virginia reported to Vanessa. “We are going to have a strike dinner, and drink champagne with Clive, the Frys, and other spirits.” Her support for the strikers was couched in terms of dislike for authority, including the prime minister, Stanley Baldwin, whose radio appeal she thought ridiculous. She did not explain her reasons, not even in A Room of One’s Own, where she quoted Baldwin’s broadcast. She was as uncertain in her political judgments as Leonard was firm in his.
It was in the middle of this shindy that she wrote the magical chapter in To the Lighthouse, “Time Passes.” On Vita’s return from her first journey to Persia, their love affair continued intermittently with exchange visits to Rodmell and Long Barn. Virginia was at heart more passionate, Vita on paper more outspoken. While Virginia could write in her diary, “It is a spirited, creditable affair, I think innocent (spiritually) and all gain I think, rather a bore for Leonard, but not enough to worry him,” there was no “I think” in Vita’s replies from Persia on her second visit in 1927: “I always get devastated when I hear from you. God, I do love you. You say I use no endearments. That strikes me as funny, when I wake in the Persian dawn, and say to myself, ‘Virginia, Virginia.’ ”
After two months in Teheran (“God, the people here!” by whom she meant not the Persians but the diplomats and their wives), she embarked with Harold and two friends on an arduous crossing of the Bakhtiari mountains to the Persian Gulf, the subject of her second book of Persian travels, Twelve Days. At the same time Virginia and Leonard were in Italy, loving it so much (“We found wild cyclamen and marble lapped by the water”) that they thought of taking a villa in Rome’s campagna. Vita and Virginia reunited in May, exhilarated by work and travel. Each was buoyed up by success. The Land won the Hawthornden Prize, and To the Lighthouse, the Femina Prize, England’s two most prestigious literary awards. The reviews of Virginia’s book were favorable but cautious, as if the critics felt themselves to be on trial as much as the author Arnold Bennett acknowledged that it was “an improvement” on Mrs. Dalloway, but he was still disconcerted by her fragmentary style, as was Aldous Huxley, who wrote that she had lost touch with the real world. Edwin Muir wrote of “Time Passes,” “For imagination and beauty of writing it is probably not surpassed in contemporary prose.” But the verdict that Virginia most anxiously awaited was Vanessa’s. The book was written in recollection of their childhood holidays in Cornwall. Mr. Ramsay was a portrait of Leslie Stephen, Mrs. Ramsay of their mother, and “James” of their brother Adrian. The lighthouse was not in the Hebrides as she pretended, but at Godrevy, across the bay from St. Ives. She need not have worried. Vanessa wrote her a long letter of gratitude. “You have given a portrait of mother which is more like her to me than anything I could have conceived of as possible. It is almost painful to have her so raised from the dead.” The book sold well in England and America, and with the profits, the Woolfs bought their first car, a secondhand Singer, which Virginia never learned to drive.
Vita’s return from the Bakhtiari was followed by two overnight expeditions. She went to Oxford to hear Virginia lecture to undergraduates on poetry and fiction, and on June 28-29, 1927, with Harold, Leonard, Quentin and Edward Sackville-West, they took the night train to Yorkshire to view the total eclipse of the sun in a cloudy dawn. I have photographs of the occasion. The party looks dismally cold and unbreakfasted. Virginia wrote in her diary, “Then it was all over till 1999.” It was startling to find her reaching so far into the future to nominate the very year (in fact the actual day, August 11, 1999, on which I was writing these lines) when to English observers the sun would next be extinguished by the moon. She recalled the whole episode in the final pages of The Waves.