I’ve written about Virginia Woolf a fair bit on this site. She was one of the first writers I came to as a girl, not even really a young woman, not yet, and recognized in her something of a kindred spirit. I loved her use of language, of structure, of attention. Would she have recognized any of these things in me? Not then. Probably not even now. But for more than 50 years I’ve read her regularly, I keep her A Writer’s Diary on my desk and use it almost as a form of divination. What was she thinking around this time of year in 1930 when she was writing The Waves?
How to end, save by a tremendous discussion, in which every life shall have its voice–a mosaic–I do not know. The difficulty is that it is all at high pressure. I have not yet mastered the speaking voice. Yet I think something is there; and I propose to go on pegging it down, arduously, and then re-write, reading much of it aloud, like poetry. It will bear expansion.
What was she thinking in 1940, the war filling the airwaves? (She thought about it a lot. But she also tried to preserve her own sanity.)
Relish the Monday and the Tuesday, and don’t take on the guilt of selfishness feeling: for in God’s name I’ve done my share, with pen and talk, for the human race. I mean young writers can stand on their own feet. Yes, I deserve a spring…
What was she thinking, just before her suicide by drowning, by forcing a large stone into her coat pocket and walking into the River Ouse 83 years ago today, what was she thinking 20 days earlier, when her life must have felt like something she could leave behind with a letter (“You’re in your body like a plant is solid in the ground,/Yet you’re the wind. You’re the diver’s clothes/lying empty on the beach.” –Rumi).
I intend no introspection. I mark Henry James’ sentence: observe perpetually. Observe the oncome of age. Observe greed. Observe my own despondency. By that means it becomes serviceable. Or so I hope. I insist upon spending this time to the best advantage.
In London in late February, I walked over to Mecklenburgh Square where Virginia and Leonard lived briefly and ran the Hogarth Press before German bombs destroyed the house. A few years ago I read Francesca Wade’s Square Haunting, a history of the square and five women who called it home: Dorothy Sayers, the poet HD, Eileen Power, classicist Jane Harrison, and Virginia Woolf. It was a wet day and I could only peer through a hedge at the garden in the middle of the square, locked to the public. I’d left John in St. George’s Garden, among the newly flowering trees and birdsong. I thought of how traces are left, and not left, houses are bombed, and how we are both remembered and forgotten. The world hasn’t improved. At least Virginia Woolf was spared what was to come. We on the other hand are both burdened and spared.
This morning, after my swim, I was sitting on a bench outside, waiting for John and all around me the robins were singing. I waited all winter for this song, the long syllabic whistles over in the maples near the creek. On dark days in January, I thought of it, the way it almost drowns out every other bird in the area, except for the piercing note of the varied thrush. I even checked to see what Woolf was thinking in the months before her death.
It’s the cold hour, this: before the lights go up. A few snowdrops in the garden. Yes, I was thinking: we live without a future. That’s what’s queer: with our noses pressed to a closed door.
Or our ears longing, near an open window.
Note: the passages of VW are from A Writer’s Diary: Being Extracts from the Diary (Persephone Books, 2017). The passage of Rumi was translated by Coleman Barks.
...Theresa Kishkan 