2023-09-18 05:30:50
Virginia Woolf She was a woman like any of us, full of contradictions, humor that was not always correct, an incredible desire to live and enjoy, threatened by moments of existential melancholy and physical pain. The book ‘Travel’, which has recently appeared in Spanish, shows its less fictional side, as it brings together his letters to those closest to him and his diaries, written until 1939, two years before his death.
He said he could only imagine books instead of writing them while walking through the cities he fell in love with. Virginia Ginnie Woolf (1882-1941) was not a long-distance traveler around the world, but she was a British woman of her time who visited Greece and Turkey, as if to confirm her inglesitud in the East. Of course, as befitted a person of enlightened class in the United Kingdom at the beginning of the s. XX, he came to Spain to confirm his folklore, he walked through France, Italy and went to Berlin. She did not travel thousands of kilometers, because she, above all, was a traveler within her country. She loved visiting Cornwall, her childhood summer resort – which made her so nostalgic – she drove herself (this means she drove along the roads) and walked. Travel (Editorial Nórdica), with translation by Patricia Díaz Pereda, is the recently published book in Spanish that gives an account of his reflections on the go, a good part of his diaries, his peaceful moments and tribulations in motion.
From her father she had inherited her love for walks and the ability to construct sentences to the rhythm of his steps, perhaps because she distrusts words, but not their rhythm. “So, we pile up words, but it is a simulation. You must see it and let your eyes jump, like free creatures, between those curves and cavities because the eyes have longed for such beauty! And the stone – if you call it stone – also seems agreeable in the sculptor’s hand: it is almost liquid, the color of alabaster and has the solidity of marble,” he writes, referring to not being able to describe Olimpia. And to us our eyes pop out facing the beauty of its powerless lines.
“The worse I write, the better you must paint,” she tells her sister Vanessa (Nessa), from Rome, in 1927, while listing things in the landscape for her, the painter.
Or, also, “I have lost all contact with language, I am an animal that spins; “a creature that sits eight hours a day looking out the window,” she admitted to her friend and lover, Vita Sackerville-West, while she was driving through France.
Despite expressing this distrust of the text, how much pleasure is felt in seeing her play with words and forms, and discovering her style to express that world of abundant vitality, even those veins of deep regret that inhabited her. She used to include those small doses of unease (or physical pain) in her diaries and in small and precious essays, but above all, in the many letters she sent to Nessa, to Vita, to her husband Leonard Woolf, to her brothers, to the friends of his brothers, to his brother-in-law Clive Bell and even to the Argentine writer Victoria Ocampo: “Oh, I have already spent all my vacations this year and I will not go as far as to South America. On another occasion? I hope so”.
Since writing had always been a daily habit in her family, at less than ten years old Ginnie had founded a weekly domestic newspaper called Hyde Park Gate Newsinspired by children’s magazines of the time, in which almost all the brothers collaborated (although Virginia was the most active editor) and which was edited for approximately five years. There the daily activities of the Stephens (her maiden name) were outlined, accompanied by illustrations; Jokes were made, riddles were made and there was an imaginary mail from readers, although sad topics were never touched on. The day it was published, the children left it next to the table, on the sofa, at dinner time, so that their parents could pay attention to them.
Cornwall, your idea of happiness
In the London neighborhood of Kensington, Leslie Stephen and Julia Duckworth – Virginia’s parents – had raised their children together: Vanessa (born in 1879), Thoby (born in 1880), Virginia and Adrian (born in 1882 and 1883). The other children also grew up with them: Laura (Leslie’s daughter with his previous wife, born in 1870), as well as George (1868), Stella (1869) and Gerald (1870), Julia’s children with her first husband Herbert Duckworth. This, of course, with the help of her seven maids.
When summer came, the Stephen-Duckworths bought third-class train tickets at the Cornish Express and they were traveling to Cornwall, 500 kilometers from London. The family spent at least 13 summers there, because Leslie was of fixed habits and invariably rented in St. Ives, the coastal town of Cornwall, in the southwest of England. Those summers were Virginia’s reference for life, because from then on she always needed a refuge outside the city and because those moments of intensity served as a measure for every trip she made outside of London. For example, to describe the landscapes of Greece by comparing them to St. Ives, where her idea of happiness was fixed.
The Cornish house was called Talland House, and from that scenario Woolf’s most important consideration developed: “If life has a foundation on which it rests, if it is a bowl that we fill, fill and fill, then my bowl, without the slightest doubt, rests in that memory. It is the memory of lying half asleep, half awake, in the nursery bed in St. Ives. It is the memory of hearing the waves breaking, one, two, one, two, behind a yellow blind. It is the memory of hearing the blinds dragging the small wooden ball of the cord along the floor when the wind pushed it outwards. It is the memory of lying and hearing the splashes of water and seeing that light, and feeling, it is almost impossible for me to be here; to experience the purest ecstasy that it is possible for me to conceive.”
For those of us who write, these gushing texts (that seem unpolished) from our great grandmother-teachers constitute an indelible lesson in how say the amazed look – that of a girl or a poet – in front of any everyday object or action. This, if we want to learn.
If what we are looking for is to know the most pedestrians and humans of our heroes, in this case, Virginia, we can also look at this book to laugh with her and her unreserved vision of places and people. “If only God had forgotten to create German men and women, he would have no complaints,” he tells Angus Davidson, from Rome. Or, regarding the French, according to these lines from his diary: “No matter how beautiful the French language is, I would not trust my body, nor my soul, to people who do not know the bathtub.”
He summarizes, with self-referential homesickness, from Greece: “England has the sound of everything that is clean and healthy, and serious.”
His view on religious practice
We can also sincerely understand her in the face of rumination (or procrastination) in the moments when she senses that she has to start writing, but prefers to enjoy the soft world after drinking a wine. “There is a march to the square, right now, the band is playing, there are lanterns and some sacred object under a panoply – it’s Easter, I guess. I like the Catholic religion. I say it is an attempt at art; Leonard is furious. We came across a ceremony of little girls wearing white veils this morning that really moved me. It seems to me simply the desire to create, slightly distorted, without God at all,” he tells her sister Nessa from Palermo, in April 1927.
They are perspective of spirituality and religious practice It is really interesting with today’s eyes, since she looked at the services with a distant kindness and respect. And not just Christian rituals. Here, in one of her diaries, she exposes her feelings in front of “the most beautiful mosque in Constantinople.” She writes: “The mosque is nothing other than a huge hall; Here you could dance dressed in silk or have afternoon tea… The place invites you to come in and sit on the floor at your leisure; You will have happy thoughts and they will be about high and healthy things… The loud voices of the men praying are not different from those of those same men in the market, and a child ran without fear… as if it seemed like a place to play as good as anyone and saw no reason to interrupt their joy.”
Anyway, Travel They are almost 300 pages of pure Virginia, with her corrosive humor and her different emotional states, reflections on writing, the lives of women and her condition as a European who knows certain comforts, but who cannot live without working.
By the way, it is also possible to gossip something about other personalities of his time, such as Henry James and his “marble eye”, or smile at Ginnie’s descriptions, in confidence, of chance encounters that can end with a touch of melancholy, or of contradiction. “Looking out the window of the carriage in Civita Vecchia, who do you think we saw sitting on a bench, well, DH Lawrence and Norman Douglas… Lawrence pierced and penetrating. A train erased them and we continued to Rome. I am sure that Rome is the city where I will go to die (a few months before death, however, because there is no doubt that the surrounding countryside is, by far, the most beautiful in the world). There I will go to die; I suggest, you can consider the idea, founding a colony with the mature ones, Roger, you, Lytton, me: all sunken-cheeked, wobbly and polite.
But Virginia did not go to die in Rome. In March 1941, she plunged into the River Ouse, having filled her coat pockets with stones. Close to home.
It leaves us thinking… She hated war and described it as an unconscious game of men. Her delicate mental health was especially affected by the warmongering of her time, so we will never know if that unpleasant time of hers also contributed to pushing her into the river. This book allows us to look at a long period of her existence (from 1882 to 1939), almost until the end, and also to speculate on the nature of her relationship with Leonard, the husband who cared for her so much – apparently tolerant and patient with her illness and her moments of fragility – but… might she not have felt suffocated?
What way out was there then for a woman without a protective husband?
After this reading, all the questions will remain open, but we will have learned to love her a little more.
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Analia Iglesias
Analía Iglesias is a writer and journalist on gender, human rights, science, environment and culture. She coordinated the Eros blog of El País for five years and is co-author of the books ‘What the hole hides: porn in obscene times’ and ‘I can’t you: the fantasy of power in bed’, both published by Editorial Catarata. She writes biographies about women in history and disseminates the documentary work of African filmmakers. As an essayist, she approaches the emotions of the time with the need to investigate sexual drives and the function they fulfill in today’s consumer society. On twitter ‘@analiaigles’
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