Virginia Woolf Read online

  Virginia Woolf

  The Will to Create as a Woman

  Ruth Gruber

  Beginning on page 55, is a facsimile reproduction of the original 1935 edition of the work.

  To my grandchildren Michael Evans and Lucy Evans

  Joel Michaels and Lila Michaels:

  Four votes of confidence in our future

  CONTENTS

  INTRODUCTION

  My Hours with Virginia Woolf

  HISTORICAL DOCUMENTS

  Letter from Peggy Belsher of Hogarth Press to Ruth Gruber, Dec. 16, 1931

  Letter of Recommendation from Barnes & Noble editor A. W. Littlefield, Feb. 25, 1933

  Letter from Ruth Gruber to Virginia Woolf, May 8, 1935

  Letter from M. West of Hogarth Press to Ruth Gruber, May 17, 1935

  Letter from Ruth Gruber to M. West of Hogarth Press, May 28, 1935

  Letter from Virginia Woolf to Ruth Gruber, June 21, 1935

  Letter from Virginia Woolf to Ruth Gruber, Oct. 12, 1935

  Letter from Ruth Gruber to Virginia Woolf, Dec. 27, 1935

  Letter from Virginia Woolf to Ruth Gruber, Jan. 10, 1936

  Promotional booklet for lecture bureau representing Dr. Ruth Gruber

  Letter from Nigel Nicolson to Ai’da Lovell (for Ruth Gruber), Aug. 31, 1989

  Letter from Ruth Gruber to Nigel Nicolson, Sept. 15, 1989

  Letter from Nigel Nicolson to Ruth Gruber, Sept. 25, 1989

  VIRGINIA WOOLF: A STUDY

  by Ruth Gruber, originally published in1935

  Chapter One—The Poet versus the Critic

  Chapter Two—The Struggle for a Style

  Chapter Three—Literary Influences: The Formation of a Style

  Chapter Four—The Style Completed and The Thought Implied

  Chapter Five—“The Waves”—the Rhythm of Conflicts

  Chapter Six—The Will to Create as a Woman

  A MYSTERY SOLVED

  INDEX

  INTRODUCTION

  MY HOURS WITH VIRGINIA WOOLF

  MY HOURS WITH VIRGINIA WOOLF

  ONE MORNING IN THE summer of 2004, my research assistant, Maressa Gershowitz, came running into the room where I was working.

  “Look what I’ve found!” she shouted.

  She held up three letters, sent to me by Virginia Woolf.

  The letters were as fresh and unwrinkled as if Woolf had written them not in 1935 and 1936, but the day before.

  “Where in heaven’s name did you find these letters?”

  “You won’t believe this,” Maressa said. “They were in the back of one of your filing cabinets, behind a bunch of old tax returns.”

  The past lit up. I shut my eyes, recalling how in 1931-32, as an American exchange student at the University of Cologne in Germany, I had written my doctoral thesis, called “Virginia Woolf: A Study.” Three years later, it was published as a paperback book in Leipzig under the same title. With apprehension, I had sent Woolf the book, and she had invited me to her London home for tea.

  I recalled how on that day, the fifteenth day of October, 1935, I had walked up and down the narrow streets of Bloomsbury. I stared up at Virginia Woolf’s Georgian four-story house, which had a balcony overhanging the street.

  Everything seemed magical to me. The rain, which had fallen all day, had stopped, and the air was as clean as if it had been scrubbed in a huge washing machine.

  I rang the bell at 6 P.M. at 52 Tavistock Square. A housekeeper in a black-and-white uniform opened the door, led me into a dark corridor and up a narrow staircase to the first floor. She tapped on a wooden door, and a man who introduced himself as Leonard Woolf stepped forward.

  “Welcome,” he spoke warmly and shook my hand. He was painfully thin, with a long oval face, dark hooded eyes, black hair laced with gray, and an air of sadness and suffering. He took me across a large parlor with sofas on each side, and motioned me to sit in an upholstered armchair close to Virginia.

  She lay stretched out in front of a fireplace. The fire cast a glow over her carved straight nose, her expressive lips, her melancholy gray-green eyes. The beautiful Nicole Kidman, playing her in the film The Hours, did not need the built-up nose or the dowdy housewife clothes. Virginia Woof was elegant, a woman of grace and beauty.

  She was a study in gray: short gray hair cut like a boy’s, a flowing ankle-length gray gown, gray shoes, and gray stockings. In her fingers, she held a long silver cigarette holder, through which she blew smoke into the parlor. There were three of us: Virginia, then fifty-three, reclining on a rug; her husband Leonard behind me, at the far end of the room but leaning forward as if he were hovering over her; and I, sitting inches away from her. I had come to sit at her feet. But now she was lying at mine.

  The fire warmed me in front as I faced her, but my back was chilled. I pulled my jacket tight around me and sat in silence, too overawed to speak.

  “I looked into the study you wrote about me,” she said. “Quite scholarly.”

  Was she praising me? I could scarcely believe it. I did not know whether to thank her or remain silent. I chose silence.

  She took a long draft of smoke and said, “I understand from my secretary that you are writing a book on women under fascism, communism, and democracy.”

  I murmured, “Yes.”

  “And you want to interview me for your book. I don’t know how I can help you. I don’t understand a thing about politics. I never worked a day in my life.”

  I wondered how she considered that it was not work to write groundbreaking novels, brilliant essays, and book reviews, and why she would demean her knowledge of politics. Her books were full of politics; her friends in the Bloomsbury crowd were energetic political thinkers—Lytton Strachey, the poet and historian who had wanted to marry her but whom she rejected; John Maynard Keynes, the economist; Roger Fry, the painter whose biography Virginia later wrote; and T. S. Eliot, the poet whose lines like “In the room the women come and go, talking of Michelangelo” often sang in my head.

  “I understand,” she said, “that you have been traveling. Where have you been?”

  “Germany, Poland, Russia, and the Soviet Arctic.”

  “The Soviet Arctic!” Leonard called out.

  I turned to look at him.

  “I didn’t think,” he said, hunching closer, “that the Russians allowed anyone to go up there.”

  “They said I was the first journalist.”

  “And you were writing for whom?” he asked.

  “The New York Herald Tribune.”

  “How old are you?”

  “Twenty-four.”

  “And how old were you when you wrote your essay on Virginia?”

  “Twenty.”

  Virginia seemed not to be listening, drifting off, when her housekeeper Lotte entered with a tray of teacups. She handed me one, but I put it on a small table next to me. I was afraid my hands would tremble and I would drop the cup. Virginia sipped her tea gracefully and began to speak again.

  “We were just in your Germany,” she said.

  Why did she call it my Germany? True, the thesis had been published as a trade paperback by the Tauchnitz Press in Leipzig. The publishing house, then 100 years old, was famous for printing the books of English and American authors such as Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, Mark Twain, and Virginia Woolf, all for tourists who could not read German and wanted to read a good book while traveling. To be sure, I had sent her my first letter in 1931 while I was a student at Cologne University. But I had sent the published book from my home in Brooklyn in 1935. She had sent her answer to me in Brooklyn, and I had spoken with a New York accent.

  “We were driving through Bonn, on holiday,” she said. “Our car was stopped to let Hitler and his entourage pass.”

>   From her diary of April 2, 1935, I later read her impressions as she watched the Nazi convoy:

  Hitler, very impressive, very frightening. … No ideals except equality, superiority, force, possessions. And the passive heavy slaves behind him, and he a great mould coming down the brown jelly.1

  In her parlor, puffing her cigarette, Virginia Woolf shook her head, still talking of Germany.

  “Madness, that country. Madness.”

  I felt I could talk comfortably about Germany; I had lived there from 1931 to 1932.

  “When I was an exchange student in Cologne,” I said, aware that Leonard was moving his chair closer to me, “I went to a Hitler rally held in a Messehalle, a huge hall near the Rhine. The family I lived with was terrified that I might be arrested, but I was determined to find out what that madman was really like.

  “There were guards and soldiers everywhere, but no one stopped me and I entered the hall with trepidation. I found a seat in a half-filled balcony near the stage. A brass band struck up marching music as, within minutes, the hall filled up with an army of stormtroopers in brown uniforms and heavy black boots, marching and waving flags with swastikas.”

  I paused. Had I talked too much?

  Leonard moved his chair closer, as Virginia took the cigarette holder out of her mouth. I went on:

  “The crowd went wild when Hitler entered and goose-stepped to the podium, followed by his entourage. The audience shouted, screamed, some applauded, others wiped their eyes in rapture. My heart was beating so loud, I thought one of those SS men would surely hear and maybe throw me out. But no one approached me.

  “The moment Hitler raised his right hand in salute, the band stopped playing, the stormtroopers stopped marching, the flags stopped waving. Hitler’s worshippers stood frozen.”

  Leonard nodded, as if to encourage me to go on. Virginia had still not resumed smoking.

  “Hitler,” I said, “was ranting against the Weimar Republic, ranting against America, and mostly against Jews. It was a hysterical voice that seemed to come not from his throat, but from his bowels. Terrifying.”

  “He has a terrifying voice,” Virginia agreed. “There is such horror in the world.”

  I took up courage to say more.

  “Hitler’s stormtroopers are now burning books in the university courtyard.”

  I wondered if they were burning a copy of the paperback book I had sent her.

  “What strikes me so forcefully in your books,” I said, “is the hope that women will help end the horror and create peace. Men make wars, not women.”

  “Once,” she said, “we had such hope for the world.”

  The words rang in my head. Such hope for the world.

  I stood up. Half an hour had passed. I knew I should not take more of her time. I bent over and shook her hand.

  “Thank you so much. Your writing gives me the will to write as a woman.”

  She nodded, “Thank you.”

  Leonard took my arm and led me out into Tavistock Square.

  I returned to my hotel and swiftly jotted notes in my notebook, though I needed no notes to remember this day. I would remember it all vividly for the rest of my life. I was in rapture. I had met Virginia Woolf.

  It was late October 1935 when I left London and sailed home on the SS Normandie. In the busy New York harbor, I looked around the pier. No one was there to meet me. I guessed my family was getting used to my comings and goings. I tossed my suitcase into the trunk of a yellow cab, and in the taxi’s back seat clutched my camera bag and checked my briefcase to make sure that my notebooks and the Virginia Woolf book were all safe.

  Driving through Manhattan, then across the Williamsburg Bridge to Brooklyn, I kept breathing the air. Free air. Everything seemed peaceful, serene. The crowded streets seemed purely American with pushcart sellers selling fresh vegetables, while other vendors shouted, “Bargains, everybody. Come get your bargains here,” as they pointed to the housedresses hanging from racks. The dark shadow of war had not yet crossed the Atlantic.

  I had scarcely rung the doorbell on Harmon Street when Mama opened the heavy black gate, kissed me, and said, “You must be starving.”

  “Not at all.”

  “Come in the kitchen anyway.” Mama, in a starched white apron, hurried me inside. “I prepared a whole meal for you.”

  To Mama, food was love. I knew I was home.

  In the sun-filled kitchen-dining-living room, Papa sat at the head of the table, waiting for me. I kissed him as he put his arm around me. “Thank the Almighty you’re safe,” he murmured. I took my favorite seat at his right. Mama was already filling our soup bowls with hot chicken noodle soup; and then she sat down to join us.

  “We were so worried about you,” Mama said, “when we got your letters from Germany, Poland, Russia. All you hear on the radio is Hitler with that little mustache. He looks like Charlie Chaplin. Who goes to those countries now? Nobody. Only my mishuggeneh [crazy] daughter.”

  She looked at Papa to make sure he agreed. He said nothing but smiled at me. Mama went on, “My aunt Mirel in Poland wrote us you left a lot of your clothes with her granddaughter Hannah.”

  “I wish I could have brought her to America. She’s fifteen. In a couple of years, they’ll marry her off. What future does she have?” I turned to Papa. “What future did you have in Odessa?”

  Papa stroked his white mustache for a minute. “I had to leave Odessa,” he said, “when I was sixteen. That’s when the police picked you up, put you in the army, and nobody ever saw you again.”

  I decided it was safe to tell them something I had never written about to them, knowing how worried they would be. “In your shtetl, Mama, I was sitting with all your relatives who wanted to know about everyone in America until two o’clock in the morning. Suddenly two Polish policemen came banging on the door. One of them, a fat one, said, ‘We hear you have somebody from America.’ He pointed a club at me. ‘Open your bags.’ I opened my suitcase and watched him silently holding everything, even my panties and bra, up to the candle light. Then he went into my briefcase, opened every book, even a copy of my Virginia Woolf book, and shook them all.”

  “Those police can’t read, can they?” Mama looked defiant.

  “Certainly not English. I was worried they might take my notebooks with all my notes. But they left the notebooks alone. I must have looked very suspicious to them, especially carrying a typewriter and a camera. They told me to get out of Poland by morning or I’d be arrested.”

  “What I was always afraid of,” Mama sighed.

  “Your Aunt Mirel looked shaken. ‘You must go right now,’ she said. ‘You don’t know what they can do to you, arrest you, maybe, God forbid, kill you.’ Mirel’s son Yankel put me in his wagon, covered me with straw up to my neck, and made his poor old horse go faster and faster until we got to Warsaw.”

  Papa put his head in his hands. “That was Poland? What happened to you in Germany? We read every day that hundreds of Jewish men are thrown in concentration camp. Jews can’t work. Even Jewish judges can’t sit in court any more. Jewish children can’t go to school. You weren’t scared?”

  “It was scary sometimes,” I admitted. “Hitler has been in power almost three years and the country is completely changed. Completely Nazified. But there were some very brave people, real fighters. I went to see a woman in Berlin, a Jewish social worker. She kept looking out the window, to make sure the SS didn’t see me enter her office. ‘My daughter is your age,’ she told me. ‘She can’t get out. No visa. No country wants us. Go home and scream. Go home and scream in America what Hitler is doing to us.’ ”

  The kitchen-dining room fell silent. A thought flashed across my mind. We’re three thousand miles away from Virginia Woolf. Except for mentioning my book about her, we haven’t said one word about her. We were fixated on the terrible news from Germany.

  “What did Hitler do to your friends?” Mama persisted.

  “I found a few of them. They all had to leave th
e university. One told me his Ph.D. thesis was stolen from his locker. It was his only copy. He’s desperate to get out of Germany. But the lines are so long with people trying to get out.”

  “Master of the Universe,” Mama said, looking up to the heavens. “He took care of you.”

  I didn’t sleep well that night. Images of Virginia Woolf in front of her fireplace, Leonard hunching over to hear about the Soviet Arctic, the talk about Hitler’s terrifying voice all kaleidoscoped in my head. Long past midnight, I finally fell asleep.

  The next day, I called on Helen Rogers Reid, the wife of the New York Herald Tribune’s publisher Ogden Reid, and George Cornish, the senior editor. They were not interested in my interview with Virginia Woolf. “Ruth,” Helen Reid said, “we want to hear about your trip to the Soviet Arctic. You know you scooped the world.”

  George Cornish nodded. “We want you to write a series of four articles on your experiences up there.”

  The articles were syndicated and then appeared full-page four Sundays in a row, with the photos I had taken. The Trib received a score of letters, but none of them meant as much to me as Helen Reid telling me I’d scooped the world.

  Virginia Woolf began to recede from my mind when Max Schuster, head of Simon and Schuster, asked me if I had enough unpublished material to write a book on the Soviet Arctic. I could hardly believe my luck when I signed the contract. I realized how timely such a book could be. War was in the air. The Arctic, at the top of the world, would soon serve as the shortest distance between the continents. Planes from New York, Chicago, and California could fly across Alaska to the Soviet Arctic, then across eleven time zones to Moscow, bringing butter and guns. A book I had planned to write on women in a changing world would have to wait until I finished this one.

  I Went to the Soviet Arctic was published on September 1, 1939, the very day Hitler’s tanks and trucks and armies blasted into Poland. The war in Europe had begun. Virginia Woolf and the book on women were relegated to the drawer in the filing cabinet where the three letters written in 1935 and 1936 would be found almost seventy years later.