My fifth day at the New York Public Library’s Berg Collection was yesterday. But since I skipped out early to go to the Athena Film Festival at Barnard College, I don’t have a lot to say about my research for the day.
Instead, I’ll tell you about my visit to the library’s current free exhibit at its 42nd Street location. Of course, it includes two Virginia Woolf items. And one of them is mentioned in the banners publicizing the exhibit.
“Celebrating 100 Years” contains highlights from the library’s extensive collections, including everything from a Gutenberg Bible to one of Malcolm X’s journals. It features more than 250 items and is available through March 4.
The Woolf items on display are the walking stick she was carrying when she walked into the River Ouse on March 28, 1941, the day she died, and her March 24, 1941, diary entry, her last, in which she wrote:
After four hours of reading mostly unpublished letters from Vanessa Bell to her sister Virginia Woolf today, I felt sad.
The letters — and there are 371 of them dating from 1910 to 1940 in the New York Public Library’s Berg Collection — are full of details about living arrangements, house guests, child rearing, artistic endeavors and personality conflicts.
But the thing that stuck out to me today — which is well off my research topic of the Bloomsbury pacifists — was how much Vanessa had to juggle. And that made me sad.
The letters written during the World War I years, which was also the period of time in which she had young children at home, had the biggest impact on me. In them, I saw how much she did to keep so many balls in the air at once.
Vanessa kept the household running smoothly, doing her best to economize on household expenses such as coal and foodstuffs and to work around such challenges as war rationing and exiting servants. She kept the men in her life, Clive Bell and Duncan Grant and David “Bunny” Garnett, happy and productive, and she helped Grant and Garnett obtain conscientious objector status. She raised three children, instructing at least two of them in French and music, along with the similarly aged children of friends.
To me, several of the most poignant letters were written shortly before Christmas 1918, after the Armistice but before Vanessa gave birth to her third child and only daughter, Angelica. Those letters, obviously written hastily, with last-minute thoughts scribbled up the margin and across the top of the page, were full of instructions to Virginia about the children.
Virginia had generously agreed to care for Vanessa’s two eldest, Julian and Quentin, when she gave birth to her third child. And Vanessa was frantic to convey her gratitude, as well as her advice — about using nightlights and administering bromide and promising to ship additional clean clothing for the boys after their arrival.
While writing the last of the letters, on Christmas Eve, Vanessa went into labor. Angelica was born on Christmas Day.
Even then, there was no real rest for Vanessa. For she had guests. Garnett was at Charleston Farmhouse on the day of the birth, and Maynard Keynes was a houseguest as well.
More amazing than all this is that on top of the busy life as a wife and mother that Vanessa led, she produced art, wonderful art. How did she find the time and energy for it all?
All I can say is, she was a woman. And that is what women do. Isn’t it?
First, he showed me an article he wrote comparing the proof copy of Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own to the first published copy. It includes an appendix listing every variant between the recently-acquired proof (long thought to have been lost) and the first published version.
As the article shows, Woolf made significant revisions, many related to her views on war and patriarchy. Dr. Gewirtz’s article was published last year in Woolf Studies Annual Volume 17.
Second, Dr. Gewirtz gave me a printout of a Feb. 4 Guardian article that discusses a newly found letter related to the Dreadnought Hoax in which Woolf and four of her friends impersonated Abbysinian royalty to dupe a British admiral and board a Royal Navy dreadnought ship in 1910.
Written by Horace de Vere Cole, one of the pranksters, the letter is being offered for sale by Rick Gekoski, a London dealer in rare books and manuscripts who is imported from the U.S. The letter is accompanied by an original photograph of the hoaxers.
Third, Dr. Gewirtz told me that the Berg Collection holds one of the few existing photos of the Bloomsbury Group members who participated in the Dreadnought Hoax.
All three pieces of information connect to my research topic, the Bloomsbury pacifists.
Isaac Gewirtz is another reason why I ♥ librarians, including library curators.
The fall 2012 issue of the Virginia Woolf Miscellanyinvites brief analyses and explorations of how queer studies can help or has helped illuminate Woolf’s life and work, and vice versa – how Woolf’s work and life nuances or otherwise influences queer studies, broadly conceived.
Rebecca Filner, librarian at the New York Public Library’s Berg Collection, doesn’t leave her job behind when she walks out of the Schwarzman Building on 42nd Street and Fifth Avenue.
What that means for me is that after she left work last night, she continued thinking about the Bloomsbury pacifists, the focus of my research at the Berg. And when I arrived this morning for the second day of my Short-Term Research Fellowship, she had some tips to share.
She told me of a recent Berg acquisition, a letter from Lytton Strachey to Duncan Grant. And she also sent me links to unpublished letters from Vanessa Bell to Maynard Keynes currently housed at the Morgan Library & Museum, 225 Madison Avenue at 36th Street in Manhattan, and sent me the link to the reading room application.
