XIV

THE WOOLFS NEVER DENIED themselves an annual holiday however pressing their work, and in June 1939 they toured Normandy and Brittany by car, finding renewed pleasure in non-English sights like a pale farmhouse disguised as a château or a bishop blessing a fishing boat. On their return to London they were obliged to leave 52 Tavistock Square, where they had lived for fifteen years, because it was due to be demolished (a fate anticipated in 1940 by German bombs), and move to a flat in 37 Mecklenburgh Square, only a few blocks away, taking the Hogarth Press and its files with them. The move was not completed until after the outbreak of war, which considerably hampered it, and they were not able to occupy even a single room until October.

Virginia was completing her revision of Roger Fry at the same time as Leonard published the second volume of his After the Deluge, and she was also writing articles and stories for American magazines, including one of her best-known “Lappin and Lapinova.” Although they were by now quite comfortably off, the Woolfs were nervous about overspending on small luxuries (“Should I spend ¹⁄₈ on scissors?” Virginia asked herself ) or on loans to other people. It was this constant need to top up their income—for Leonard earned very little—that accounts for Virginia’s remarkable output of journalism. One tends to think of her as a novelist who published a new book once every four or five years, but her critical essays filled three posthumous volumes, apart from the first and second series of The Common Reader, published in her lifetime, and her shorter fiction occupies a stout volume. In addition, the Hogarth Press issued in the autumn of 1939 her pamphlet Reviewing, and having refused the prestigious Clark lectures at Cambridge, she spent weeks preparing for the Brighton branch of the Workers’ Educational Association a lecture on modern literature, later published as “The Leaning Tower.” Pointz Hall, for the moment, was set aside. She also began to write her memoirs, but made little progress before she died.

Britain and France declared war on Germany on September 3, 1939, when they were at Monk’s House, and they remained there for most of the winter, one of the coldest on record, with occasional trips to London. At first Virginia felt only “dumb rage” at being “fought for by young people whom one wants to see making love.” Although the war entered an inactive phase between the conquest of Poland and the German invasion of Norway in April 1940, she was unable to isolate herself from it. London children and pregnant mothers were evacuated to Rodmell (but not to Monk’s House), clerks from the Hogarth Press took it in turn to spend quiet weekends there, the village windows were blacked out to hide from German pilots signs of inhabited places, and there were weekly meetings of the Labour Party to discuss the latest events. It seemed at times, as Virginia wrote to Ethel Smyth, that “there’s a peace in the country which surrounds me as a mouse is surrounded by cheese,” but in London, she recorded in her diary, “You never escape the war. Very few buses. Tubes closed. No children. No loitering. Everyone humped with a gas-mask. Strain and grimness. At night it’s so verdurous and gloomy that one expects a badger or a fox to prowl along the pavement. A reversion to the middle ages with all the space and silence of the country set in this forest of black houses.”

There was scarcely a single air raid during that first winter of war, and no fighting on land. Virginia wrote to Vita, “Of course I’m not in the least patriotic,” but she let drop phrases to other people which indicated that she was not in the least indifferent either. To Eddy Sackville-West, for example, she wrote of “the obvious horror we all feel for war; but then, with a solid block of unbaked barbarians in Germany, what’s the good of our being comparatively civilised?”; and to Judith Stephen, Adrian’s young daughter, “I’m more and more convinced that it is our duty to catch Hitler in his home haunts and prod him if even with only the end of an old inky pen.” The pen was hers; but the “catching” could only be by air attack. Bloomsbury was no longer pacifist. Even Clive Bell patrolled the South Downs with a slung rifle. Only Ham Spray, where Frances Partridge kept the flag of pacifism flying with her husband Ralph, was faithful to the cause, and this was all the more remarkable because Ralph had fought with the utmost gallantry in the First War. His experience then was his main reason for thinking its successor ethically unjustifiable.

When a significant event occurred in the outside world, like the sinking of a great ship or the Russian invasion of Finland, Virginia mentioned it casually in her diary after noting that she had seen a kingfisher on her walk. Her mood was melancholy and subdued, further depressed by an acute attack of influenza in March. Then in May 1940 it was no longer possible for anyone to lead a sheltered life. The German army swept through France, the British escaped without their weapons from Dunkirk and were evicted from Norway. In her diary of May 25 she made a rare strategic judgment, not far short of the truth: “The Germans seem youthful, fresh, inventive. We plod behind.” In her letters she barely referred to these disasters, just as Jane Austen, writing to her sister from their brother’s house near Canterbury, never mentioned Napoleon’s army poised for invasion from Boulogne. But in her diary she kept an almost day-by-day record of her experiences and reactions, and it is interesting to see how her mood varied with the intensity of the crisis. In July she wrote, “I don’t like any of the feelings that war breeds: patriotism; all sentimental and emotional parodies of real feelings,” and when she saw soldiers passing through Sussex after escaping from France, she thought it absurd to describe them as heroes. But during the air battles over southeast England, of which she was often a direct witness—even falling flat on her face in the garden of Monk’s House when German planes flew so low that she could see the swastika painted on their tail fins—she felt a stirring of hatred for them. Watching a squadron of British fighters flying out to sea to intercept a Luftwaffe raid, she wrote, “I almost instinctively wished them luck,” as if surprised by her emotion. At that moment, she was glad that she was of the same race as they. For Churchill she could not suppress a certain admiration. “A clear, measured, robust speech,” she commented when he spoke of the imminence of invasion. It was natural for her to identify love of the Sussex countryside with love of England, and to that extent she reversed what she had told Vita, that she had not a grain of patriotism in her. London, too, raked her heart. “Have you that feeling for certain alleys and little courts between Chancery Lane and the City?” she asked Ethel. “I walked to the Tower the other day by way of caressing my love of all that.” She felt for ordinary people an affinity that she had scarcely acknowledged before. In September 1940 she wrote, again to Ethel:

 

When I see a great smash like a crushed matchbox where an old house stood, I wave my hand to London. What I’m finding odd and agreeable and unwonted is the admiration this war creates—for every sort of person: chars, shopkeepers, even much more remarkably, for politicians—Winston at least—and the tweed-wearing, sterling, dull women here [Rodmell], with their grim good sense. . . . I’d almost lost faith in human beings, partly owing to my immersion in the dirty water of artists’ envies and vanities while I worked at Roger. Now hope revives again.

 

At the height of the invasion threat, the Woolfs moved regularly between London and the country. Rodmell was only three miles from Newhaven, one of the south-coast ports where British intelligence expected the Germans to land (correctly—it was the Schwerpunkt of their 9th Army, and paratroops would have dropped on the Downs), and Leonard, knowing that if they were captured, they would both be proscribed by the Gestapo for his Jewishness and prominent anti-Nazi activities, carried a lethal dose of morphine for both of them and kept enough petrol in his garage to asphyxiate themselves if the Germans landed. Yet they remained remarkably cool. Leonard wrote in his autobiography, “I never myself felt, or saw anyone else feeling, fear,” and although I, who lived through the same period, find this statement scarcely credible, it is true that Virginia saw some beauty and excitement in the air battles overhead. “It’s rather lovely,” she wrote to John Lehmann, “to see the [search] lights stalking the Germans over the marshes,” and when bombs breached the banks of the River Ouse, allowing the floodwater to spread as far as Monk’s House itself, she did not speculate that this would make invasion at this point less likely, but was reminded by it of William Morris’s poem “The Haystack in the Floods.” When four bombs flowered like ruby tulips in the nearby fields, she boasted that Vanessa, immune at Charleston, would be jealous.

It was during that long spring and summer of 1940 that Roger Fry was published, and it sold slowly, the military crisis making men like Fry seem somehow irrelevant. Virginia resumed her work on Pointz Hall, which at one moment she described as “so much more of a strain than Roger,” but on finishing it in November, she wrote in her diary, “I’ve enjoyed writing almost every page.” There had been nothing to match the stress of The Years. She even found domestic chores enjoyable. Having lost her only live-in maid, she discovered for the first time the freedom that came from being unmolested by servants, and began to cook their meager rations, helped by a village woman, Louie Everest, who remained with Leonard years after Virginia’s death. She also joined the village Women’s Institute and became its treasurer. It was a curiously pleasant existence, varied only by occasional visits to London and expeditions like that with Vita to Penshurst Place on the day when Paris fell. Sometimes visitors came for the night—the MacCarthys, G. E. Moore, Elizabeth Bowen.

While Mecklenburgh Square was still intact, it was possible for them to stay there for a night or two. In September a bomb shattered a house across the street from their own, and another, unexploded, prevented them from approaching it. When it went off ten days later, the ceilings of No. 37 fell in, and the flat was uninhabitable. In October it was the turn of 52 Tavistock Square. It was flattened, Duncan’s murals hanging over a smoking gap, but this was no cause for added distress, since they had failed to sublet the house and were still paying rent for it. Now it was impossible to charge for a house that did not exist. “With a sigh of relief,” wrote Virginia, “we saw a heap of ruins.”

With the greatest difficulty they moved their belongings from Mecklenburgh to the country, climbing over the fallen plaster to retrieve their sodden books and papers, and they rented some rooms in Rodmell where they could temporarily store them. John Lehmann moved the Hogarth Press and its staff to Letchworth in Hertfordshire, where the Woolfs visited him in February 1941. But it was at Monk’s House that Virginia spent the remaining months of her life, and they were the months when the German Blitzkrieg slackened. They lived in comparative peace. Virginia’s feminist instincts resurfaced. In a lecture to the village branch of the Labour Party on women and war, she argued that wars derived from “manliness” and manliness bred “womanliness”—“both so hateful,” she wrote to Lady Simon, “but I was scowled at as a prostitute.”

Those same village people, in disguise, were the characters in Pointz Hall, which she renamed in the last stages of revision as Between the Acts. In the novel she attempted to mingle history with reality, the events occupying a single day as in Mrs. Dalloway but reaching back for centuries as in Orlando. This device was made possible by making a village pageant the central episode of the book, with scenes acted by the villagers. In amateurish make-believe they depicted the English character from the time of Queen Elizabeth to the present day. The novel was as ambitious as the pageant itself. It was the only time when Virginia attempted to mingle ancient forms of dialogue with modern rustic speech, and to portray the interpenetration of classes from the owners of Pointz Hall, where the pageant was staged, to the village idiot. The novel had a deeper meaning too. She was exploring the spiritual significance of life, and how it came about that civilization had been created by such trivial characters as ourselves. Her message was as puzzling to her readers as the pageant was to its audience. Perhaps Virginia was aware of this. It is known that she intended to revise it further. Conceivably she might have toned down the comedy to reveal the tragedy more clearly, and made more obvious when her characters were speaking as themselves or as symbols. We cannot be sure. The book was published by Leonard after her death with the cautious note: “She would not, I believe, have made any large or material alterations.”

Virginia Woolf in 1939, a photograph taken, much against her will, by Gisèle Freund. She wrote to Vita: “I’m in a rage. That devil woman Giselle [sic] Freund calmly tells me that she’s showing those d——d photographs—and I made it a condition she shouldn’t. I loathe being hoisted about on top of a stick for anyone to stare at.” In fact, it is the best photograph ever taken of her.