I REMEMBER THAT IN 1933 Virginia Woolf was invited to stay the night by her first cousin H. A. L. Fisher, Warden of New College. Mrs Fisher told me that she did not care for her much, as she thought her somewhat arrogant, but Herbert Fisher had a high regard for her, apart from his close relationship. The dinner party was given in the Warden’s Lodgings, and there were present, apart from the guest of honour and the host and Mrs Fisher, John Sparrow, then a fellow of All Souls (as, indeed, was I), Richard Crossman, whom Mrs Fisher greatly liked, C. S. Lewis, who could not bear feminine company and disapproved of women writers particularly, and a classical tutor from Brasenose College called Alan Ker, who was, I think, a friend of the Fisher family. Virginia Woolf, who was certainly the most beautiful woman I had ever seen, then or perhaps even later, looked exceedingly nervous and unseeing – she did not exactly stumble against the furniture, but she made her way to the table very uncertainly. I sat at Fisher’s left, she on his right. Mrs Fisher, flanked by Crossman and Lewis, was at the other end of the table. Mary Fisher (later Mrs Bennett), Fisher’s daughter, who fell totally under her cousin’s spell, and her friend Rachel Walker were also present.
Mrs Woolf twitched nervously, and when her neighbour, the don from Brasenose, asked whether Mr Woolf would be coming also, did not reply. The explanation apparently was that Leonard Woolf was convinced that Fisher had been responsible, at any rate in part, for inventing the Black and Tans to quell the Irish rebellion in 1921, and refused to be in the same room with so wicked a member of Lloyd George’s cabinet.
Mrs Woolf was silent, so was the host. Then, to break the silence, he said, ‘Do you do much reading, Virginia? Have you been reading novelists at all – Scott, for example?’ To which she replied, ‘No, not Scott, I think it’s all terrible rubbish. I know that David Cecil has just published a lecture about him, God knows what he finds in him, I didn’t like the lecture either.’ After that, another silence.
‘Do you go for walks at all, Virginia?’ asked Fisher a little desperately. ‘Yes, I do. Not much in London. Mostly in the country.’
‘What do you notice most on your walks?’
‘I think mostly goats on hillsides, they look so ecclesiastical.’
Meanwhile, at the other end of the table, in loud voices, the company was saying how much they liked Uppingham (I do not vouch for my recollection of the actual words spoken).
‘I like hearty schools,’ said Crossman, ‘none of your arty-tarty people there – there were some at Winchester when I was there, but not all that many. Eton, of course, is much worse.’ Mrs Fisher, I think, agreed.
Lewis said he found it difficult to teach introverts at Magdalen – ‘Arty-tarty, that’s very good: Betjeman, Pryce-Jones, I found they had no genuine grasp of either prose or poetry, either modern or old – I was greatly relieved when they left.’
Mrs Woolf winced at the tone, the loudness, the sentiments, and Fisher quickly tried to intervene. They talked about people they had known, about travel in Italy and the like – I have no recollection of what either of the young women said. Then we went to the drawing room, where no fewer than forty or fifty graduates and undergraduates of New College who were thought suitable had been gathered to see and hear the great writer.
She stood in front of them, silent, nervous, her gaze fixed on some distant point, unable to utter – it was a little like an execution, or perhaps like a very shy bishop about to confirm a class of schoolboys or undergraduates. Finally she spoke.
‘Has anyone here ever read Jane Eyre?’ she said, looking at the ceiling, then at the windows, trying not to look at anyone’s face.
One young man raised his hand. ‘Can you tell me the plot?’ said Mrs Woolf.
The young man did his best, he took ten minutes or so over it.
‘Has anyone here read Wuthering Heights?’
The same process followed.
‘What about The Moonstone?’ Someone had read that too.
‘Do you like reading detective stories?’ There were mixed answers about that. Then, looking really at her wits’ end, she said, ‘I cannot go on talking like this, I am so sorry. Let us mingle like human beings.’ And we did so.
It was by now near 10 o’clock, and Mrs Fisher announced that she was going to bed, but that those who wished to stay could do so. Fisher asked Mrs Woolf whether she liked Handel, Mozart, Haydn, Beethoven. She said she liked them all – ‘What a very catholic taste you have,’ he said. After that we broke up into little groups and she talked most amiably in a corner with two or three young women, perhaps her cousin Mary among them, and we all went to bed.
Much later, I think in 1938, Mrs Woolf asked me to dinner in her house in Tavistock Square. On her postcard she wrote: ‘If you knock on my little grey door I shall open it.’
Apart from myself the only persons present were Leonard, Ben Nicolson and Sally Graves, niece of Robert Graves, by then married as Mrs Chilver, who later became Principal of Lady Margaret Hall in Oxford – Mrs Woolf obviously had a passion for her and had been cross-examining her (so Mrs Chilver told me) about whether there was much free love going on among young people: was lesbianism known at all? And so on. I rather think she must have cross-examined her nieces about that kind of thing too – she had a feeling that she knew too little about the contemporary world in England.
She began describing a visit which one of the Royal Princesses, I think Princess Beatrice, had paid to Duncan Grant’s studio, and how delightful this was. Leonard, who, with a trembling hand, was fumbling to light the gas fire, said, ‘I don’t know why you think that – royalty are exactly like everybody else, there’s no difference between them and ordinary people.’ ‘You are quite wrong, Leonard,’ she said, ‘they are quite different. Quite wonderful. Quite marvellous. Not at all like ordinary people. I was very excited on that occasion and I’m not ashamed of it.’ Then she turned to Ben Nicolson – there was always someone she evidently liked to tease – and said, ‘Ben, do tell us [he was the Assistant Surveyor of the King’s Pictures], do you have to wear knee-breeches when you go to Buckingham Palace or Windsor? Do you bow very low? Do you go down on one knee? Do you ever speak before you are spoken to? Do you ever ask any questions? When you leave the King’s presence do you walk backwards?’ And so on.
Ben answered as best he could, without smiling, quite solemnly as was his way, and did finally burst out, ‘You always tease me, Virginia. I’ll never forget when you asked poor Hugh Walpole whether his car was lined with gold.’
She then turned to me. ‘What is that book that you came in with? I saw it.’
I said it was Henry James’s book on Hawthorne.
‘I expect there are no bats in your belfry, Mr Berlin,’ she said, ‘I can see that – you don’t look to me like someone interested in dreams or fancies – or are you?’
I cannot remember what I answered. I expect I faltered out of pure terror at her presence. She did convey the presence of genius, and her conversation, which I cannot hope to reproduce, was full of wonderful images and analogies, and was more fascinating to listen to than that of I think anyone I have ever met – Pasternak was the only person who came close to it.
‘Henry James,’ she said, ‘well everybody reads him now, of course, but by the time I met him he was nothing but a frozen-up old monster. I don’t read many modern novels, not even those that we publish, Leonard and I. Stephen Spender told us how marvellous he thought In a Province by Laurens van der Post was – we published it, you know. Quite decent, I thought, but wonderful? No. Have you read Murder in the Cathedral, or seen it? I rather liked it.’
‘I walked out of it in the middle, I couldn’t bear it,’ said Leonard, ‘Tom Eliot is too obscurantist for me. All that religious nonsense.’
I can remember no more, but I spent three of the most wonderful hours of my life in the presence of that not entirely sympathetic and certainly not very kind, but wonderfully gifted, writer, a writer of genius, as I still regard her – more and more so as I reread the works of her middle period.