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Posts Tagged ‘Leonard Woolf’

This Devastating Fever, a new novel by Sophie Cunningham, follows the story of novelist Alice Fox and her struggles to write about Leonard Woolf as he deals with what he and Virginia would do if Hitler invaded England.

The novel, shortlisted for a Victorian Premier’s Literary Award, links Leonard and Virginia’s past dilemmas to those of the present, as Alice deals with the COVID-19 pandemic.

About the author and the talk

Cunningham, a member of the Order of Australia for her literary contributions and the author of nine novels, spent 15 years writing her latest.

If you can get to Sydney, Australia, you can hear Cunningham talk about her novel at Castle Hill Library 11 a.m. – noon on May 27, as part of the Sydney Writers’ Festival.

Complex, darkly funny and deeply moving,– a dazzlingly original novel about what it’s like to live through a time that feels like the end of days, and how we can find comfort and answers in the past.

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Eighty-two years ago today, Virginia Woolf walked into the River Ouse with a stone in her pocket and drowned. The act was deliberate. The effect on her friends, her family, and the literary world was profound.

Many somber thoughts have been shared on the anniversary of her death. But none are as poignant as those expressed by her husband, Leonard Woolf, in The Journey Not the Arrival Matters: An Autobiography of the Years 1929 to 1969, the final volume in his five-volume set.

Virginia’s attitude to death was very different. It was always present to her. The fact that she had twice tried to commit suicide — and had almost succeeded — and the knowledge that that terrible desperation of depression might at any moment overwhelm her mind again meant that death was never far from her thoughts. She feared it and yet, as I said, she was ‘half in love with easeful Death’ (74).

Leonard went on to write that on Friday, March 28, he “was in the garden” and “thought she [Virginia] was in the house. But when at one o’clock I went in to lunch, she was not there. I found the following letter on the sitting-room mantelpiece”:

Dearest,

I feel certain I am going mad again. I feel we can’t go through another of those terrible times. And I shan’t recover this time. I begin to hear voices, and I can’t concentrate. So I am doing what seems the best thing to do. You have given me the greatest possible happiness. You have been in every way all that anyone could be. I don’t think two people could have been happier till this terrible disease came. I can’t fight any longer. I know that I am spoiling your life, that without me you could work. And you will I know. You see I can’t even write this properly. I can’t read. What I want to say is I owe all the happiness of my life to you. You have been entirely patient with me and incredibly good. I want to say that – everybody knows it. If anybody could have saved me it would have been you. Everything has gone from me but the certainty of your goodness. I can’t go on spoiling your life any longer.

I don’t think two people could have been happier than we have been (93).

He went in search of her.

When I could not find her anywhere in the house or garden, I felt sure that she had gone down to the river. I ran across the fields down to the river and almost immediately found her walking-stick lying upon the bank. I searched for some time and then went back to the house and informed the police. It was three weeks before her body was found when some children saw it floating in the river (94-95).

The “long-drawn-out horror” of those three weeks produced in him “a kind of inert anaesthesia. It was as if I had been so battered and beaten that I was like some hunted animal which exhausted can only instinctively drag itself into its hole or lair” (95-96).

Past posts on Virginia Woolf’s death

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Virginia Woolf didn’t get old—not what we call old—but she brooded about aging,VW Diary Vol. 5 increasingly so in middle age.

Shortly before her 50th birthday, she wrote in her diary:

Can we count on another 20 years? I shall be fifty on 25th and sometimes feel that I have lived 250 years already and sometimes that I am still the youngest person on the omnibus” – Diary 4, 1/13/32)

Her ambivalence was predicated on her writing. When it was going well, she was contented and high—“divinely happy & pressed with ideas” (D4, 1/16/34). If it wasn’t, she was “so old, so ugly, & can’t write” (D5, 3/11/39).

The clock ticks for us all

Woolf’s experience isn’t unique. After 40 or 50, we hear the clock ticking, feel age creeping up on us. We fend it off, stay active and engaged, but we can’t deny the inevitable. We get old, and as we do, our creativity and productivity become increasingly challenged. We face and fear disability, dementia, decline, death. We’re subjected to increasing ageism from without and self-doubt from within. How can we sustain a positive mindset?

In the recently published Dancing with the Muse in Old Age (Coffeetown Press, 2022), Priscilla Long proposes looking at creativity in old age “as a potentially dynamic and productive time full of connections to others and deeply satisfying work.”

Our advantage is experience, the skills we’ve learned and exercised over time, not just technical and craft skills but also the attitudes and ways of working that Long calls meta-skills.

In her own case, she says, “I have learned how to learn. I have learned how to focus, how to break a problem down into its component parts, how to encourage myself, how to take my time when venturing into new territory.”

Continuing to create

Dancing With the Muse reinforces extensive research and scientific findings with examples of women and men, most in the arts, who continued to be creative and productive well into old age. Long cites more than 100 artists and musicians, scientists and athletes, and writers, including Margaret Atwood, Maya Angelou, Iris Murdoch, and Doris Grumbach (a Woolf enthusiast who died last year at 104). And Leonard Woolf!

Among those whose creative output in their later years included “looking back, remembering, and articulating one’s life and its meanings,” Leonard Woolf wrote his five-volume autobiography in his last decade. Had she lived to old age, I believe Virginia Woolf would have expanded her self-writing, extending the autobiographical work in Moments of Being.

This is Priscilla Long’s sixth book, including two volumes of poetry, an essay collection, and a writing manual. At 79, she has several works in progress, her goal to publish ten more books while making sure to clock her 10,000 steps every day. Virginia Woolf didn’t have a Fitbit, but her miles over the Downs and around London were conducive to her physical and mental health and stimulated her creativity.

Poised to shoot forth arrows

The painter Robert Motherwell said at age 71 that “to retire from painting would be to retire from life.” I’m certain that “old Virginia,” as she liked to refer to her future self in her early diaries, would have concurred and would have continued to write. At 50, she declared herself “poised to shoot forth quite free straight and undeflected my bolts whatever they are. I don’t believe in ageing. I believe in forever altering one’s aspect to the sun” (D4, 10/2/32).

When an acquaintance worried that his creative well would run dry, she observed that her concern was quite the opposite; she wondered if she would have enough time to write everything that was in her head.

Days before her death at 59, she reminded herself to “Observe perpetually. Observe the oncome of age. I insist upon spending this time to the best advantage. Suppose I selected one dominant figure in every age and wrote round and about. Occupation is essential” (D5, 3/8/41).

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Tomorrow is Memorial Day in the U.S., the day when we remember and honor those who died in the service of our country. Although I consider myself a pacifist, I feel a special sense of gratitude to those who fought in World War II, the conflict I often think of as “the Good War.”

I am not alone. Elizabeth D. Samet, author of Looking for the Good War: American Amnesia and the Violent Pursuit of Happiness (2021), explains that this “flattering and seductive narrative” regarding World War II took hold in the 1990s, around the time of the 50th anniversary of the conflict. And it has become engrained in American consciousness since then.

The U.S., ambivalence and isolationism

Samet makes the case for a different reality, one of American ambivalence about the war, as well as a reluctance to become involved.  The bombing of Pearl Harbor changed that, but it still did not result in universal American support. The ambivalence, differences of opinion, and different levels of support for the war existed before, during — and even after — U.S. involvement, she explains.

“The idea that we went to war specifically or primarily to liberate Europe is largely a fiction, even though we obviously helped to accomplish that feat,” Samet explains. “We went to war because we were attacked and because we felt suddenly that there was an existential threat.”

The lives of the Woolfs during World War II

Virginia and Leonard Woolf, living in London and Lewes during the war years, experienced deprivation, bombing, and enemy planes flying overhead, leaving them no choice but to support the war. Leonard was a member of the Home Guard. Virginia wove messages about war and its consequences into her writing. Most notable from the mid-1930s on are three novels: The Years (1937), Three Guineas (1938), and the posthumously published Between the Acts (1941), as well as essays such as “The Leaning Tower” (1940) and “Thoughts on Peace in an Air Raid” (1940).

Nevertheless, they tried to live their lives as normally as possible, despite the enemy planes that flew above their heads at Monk’s House. This passage from Leonard’s Downhill All the Way (1967), volume four in his five-volume autobiography, provides a good example.

I will end … with a little scene that took place in the last months of peace. They were the most terrible months of my life, for, helplessly and hopelessly, one watched the inevitable approach of war. One of the most horrible things at that time was to listen on the wireless to the speeches of Hitler — the savage and insane ravings of a vindictive underdog who suddenly saw himself to be all-powerful. We were in Rodmell during the late summer of 1939, and I used to listen to those ranting, raving speeches. One afternoon I was planting in the orchard under an apple-tree iris reticulata, those lovely violet flowers. … Suddenly I heard Virginia’s voice calling to me from the sitting room window: “Hitler is making a speech.” I shouted back, “I shan’t come. I’m planting iris and they will be flowering long after he is dead.” Last March, twenty-one years after Hitler committed suicide in the bunker, a few of those violet flowers still flowered under the apple-tree in the orchard.

The Woolfs and wartime music

As part of their effort to get on with their lives, the Woolf listened to music on the wireless, as well as on their gramophone. And now, thanks to Marielle O’Neill, doctoral researcher at Leeds Trinity University and Executive Council Member of the Virginia Woolf Society of Great Britain, we can listen in on the wartime music they enjoyed.

With the help of Stephen Barkway’s classical music expertise, O’Neill has created a playlist on Spotify of the Woolfs’ wartime music. She based her list on a purchase of Woolfs’ gramophone records made by Sheila Wilkinson, Virginia Woolf Society of Great Britain co-founder.

Wilkinson purchased the records and their annotated storage box at a Lewes auction 20 years ago. According to Barkway, Leonard recorded — in his own shaky hand — the dates on which he and Virginia listened to each record on index cards cut in half. Wilkinson found four of these cards in the archive that corresponded with the records she had purchased.

Wilkinson donated the records to Charleston, who later sold them to the National Trust, which ultimately returned them to Monk’s House.

Listen to the Woolfs’ wartime music on Spotify

The Woolfs’ Wartime Music can now be accessed by everyone, thanks to O’Neill’s ingenuity. She has included old recordings that appeared on the 78 rpm records purchased from Monk’s House. They include music by Beethoven, Schubert, Mozart, and Brahms.

In addition, members of the Virginia Woolf Society of Great Britain can read Barkway’s article about the Woolfs’ musical tastes around the time of the Second World War in the May issue of the society’s Virginia Woolf Bulletin. In “Some of the Woolfs’ Gramophone Records: A Spotify Playlist,” Barkway pairs the Woolfs’ musical selections with events from the Woolfs’ life, as well as with quotes from Virginia’s diary, letters, and autobiographical writing.

The article includes information that Wilkinson shared in a booklet she produced for delegates during a “Virginia in Yorkshire” study week in Settle. On the final night that week, Barkway introduced and played the Woolfs’ records at Wilkinson’s request.

Join the VWSGB

If you are not a member of the VWSGB but would like to be, you can easily join.

 

 

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A piece by Leonard Woolf from the October 1955 issue (Vol. 2, No. 10) of The London Magazine is now online.

Titled “Coming to London — II,” it was reprinted in A Bloomsbury Group Reader edited by S.P. Rosenbaum and published by Blackwell Publishers in 1993.

In addition, much of it is incorporated in Leonard’s biography, according to the Virginia Woolf Society of Great Britain.

In the “London Magazine”, it was part of a regular series that was published in book form by Phoenix House, London, 1957, and then by Books for Libraries Press, Freeport, NY, 1971. The other contributors were: William Plomer, V. S. Pritchett, George Barker, J. B. Priestley, Elizabeth Bowen, Geoffrey Grigson, John Middleton Murry, Christopher Isherwood, Alan Pryce-Jones, William Sansom, Jocelyn Brooke, Rose Macaulay, Edith Sitwell.

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