Reading Virginia Woolf

For months now, I have been reading Virginia Woolf.

This latest literary streak started when we were in Boston last September. One morning we were wandering around our old haunts downtown when we stumbled upon a bookshop that didn’t exist when we lived there twenty years ago. Beacon Hill Books is in a townhouse on Charles Street where the legendary restaurant The Hungry I used to  live. The Hungry I was the kind of Boston establishment that felt taken from an Edith Wharton novel. The intimate dining rooms were scattered up and down the four stories of the townhouse; the walls were covered with ornate, old-fashioned wallpaper; the tables were draped with linen and set with delicate china and cut-glass crystal; underfoot the carpet was thick, the air hushed and reserved. This was the kind of place one would go after a Harvard graduation or to announce an engagement, to celebrate a significant birthday or golden anniversary. Once, while we were living on Beacon Hill, we went to The Hungry I for Matt’s December birthday. On a dark and snowy night, we walked down the very steep hill to Charles Street from our tiny corner apartment on Revere and, stepping into the restaurant, we walked into another century. I remember nothing about the food, but I have never forgotten the evening: the black wrap dress and four-inch heels I wore, the sense of tradition and history contained within those walls, the candlelight and the quiet murmur of conversations of the well-heeled patrons around us. For a few hours, we were characters in a scene straight out of The Age of Innocence. At any moment, Newland Archer and the Countess Ellen Olenska would come through the door and take a seat at the next table.

But last September we discovered that The Hungry I is no more. Instead, it has been magically transformed into a charming bookstore, three levels of books with a café on the bottom floor. It is perfect in every way: cozy seats in bay windows overlooking Charles Street, the top floor full of children’s books and a model train that circles on tracks along the ceiling. The selection is beautifully curated and features little-known publishers and offbeat authors. In one display by a back window, there was a whole wall of books covered with grey book jackets. I was intrigued and went over for a closer look. It is trendy right now to display books by color, which both fascinates and puzzles me because I would never be able to find anything. (“You know, it’s not the blue Henry James. It’s the green one.”) But an entire wall of lovely grey books demanded an examination, and it was there I discovered a number of obscure literary treasures. Randomly, I opened Gardener’s Nightcap by Muriel Stuart to read this passage:

“When making a gardening apron, don’t make the usual deep pockets in the front…Set the pockets well to the side; you may look like a pack mule, but you’ll be far more comfortable . . .”

I mean, really, who could resist?

The publisher of the mysterious grey books was Persephone Books, located in Bath, England. Another book under their label was A Writer’s Diary: Being by Virginia Woolf. This was hardly my first exposure to the many diaries and letter collections of Ms. Woolf. Indeed, I confess to not only being a long-time Anglophile, but specifically having a bit of a Bloomsbury obsession. The Bloomsbury group consisted of the kind of cultured and upwardly mobile people that would understand the customs and traditions of the regulars at The Hungry I. They were forever swapping china and furniture and art and even servants among their wide and privileged circle. (“There must be servants,” Nigel Nicholson writes in the introduction of the second volume of Woolf’s letters. “It was the only way to buy time.”) In fact, most of the letters between Virginia and her older sister Vanessa deal with these everyday domestic affairs. “Could you give directions about bookcases, so that if we called we could get them . . .” writes Virginia to her sister in April 1913, shortly after she married Leonard Woolf. “We are now going to buy a Rhododendron hedge to put against the fence, and summer seeds.” “We’re trying hard to find a houseparlour maid,” she writes to a friend a few months later. “I suppose you don’t know a man and wife who’d do for us.”*

But the men and women that made up the Bloomsbury community in the early decades of the twentieth century did not just run complicated and intermingled households, they were artists and writers and thinkers and pushed back in various ways against the conventions and expectations of their world. “What they required from their friends,” writes Nicolson “were periodic demonstrations of the best of which they were capable.” Virginia and Leonard ran a publishing house, Hogarth Press, and her diaries and letters are a glimpse into a working life of craft and artistry and the ordinary and mundane details that such creativity demands. “Our press arrived on Tuesday. We unpacked it with enormous excitement . . . One has great blocks of type, which have to be divided into their separate letters, and fonts, and then put into the right partitions. The work of ages, especially when you mix the h’s with the n’s, as I did yesterday. We get so absorbed we can’t stop; I see that real printing will devour one’s entire life . . .”

As a new year totters forward one day at a time, I think about what is beautiful, and worthwhile, and what craft and practice might mean in a broken world. After the election last fall, one friend said to me, “I can’t understand how this happened, but I have decided that I am going to lean into art and music and all those things that make the world a more beautiful place to be.” A hundred years ago, Virginia Woolf and her circle of friends and family were doing the same thing, really. They may have had household help, but they also had plenty of challenges. They endured London bombings and war-time food shortages and evacuations. Women often died in childbirth. Their relationships were fragile and often convoluted and full of heartbreak. They were faced with mental and physical illnesses. Virginia herself suffered from repeated nervous breakdowns and in 1941 committed suicide at the age of 59. And yet, the recurring theme in Woolf’s diaries and letters is that the pursuit of beauty is a worthwhile one, and that the crafting of one’s work and life is a form of art. It can hardly be a coincidence that she lived in a home called “Monk’s House” for she integrated a certain austerity and contemplative discipline throughout her days and hours. Ultimately, her life is a study of practice. On the page, she wrestled with plot details and writing schedules: “I think I am about to finish The Waves. I think I might finish it on Saturday . . .” She asked her fellow artists about their work and muses: “I should very much like to hear from you an account of your doings.” She was forever struggling to find a balance between work and inspiration, a rhythm between predictable routine and creative spontaneity. “It is worth mentioning, for future reference, that the creative power which bubbles so pleasantly in beginning a new book quiets down after a time, and one goes on more steadily. Doubts creep in. Then one becomes resigned . . . writing is always difficult.”

At home in the studio during these unsettling winter days, I keep asking the question: How did you practice this? After the distraction of the holidays, it’s a good way once to again focus our work and attention, and the question forces us to be specific about our intentions and plans. This worked. That didn’t. I forgot to do that. Maybe I should try this. In her letters, Virginia Woolf was not just retelling the events of her week, she was assessing them for significance, meaning and efficiency. “Yes, that damnable book is coming out,” she writes about her novel The Voyage Out. “To my great relief, I find that though long and dull, still one sentence more or less follows another, and I had become convinced that it was pure gibberish.” How did you practice this? I ask the twelve-year-old working on a William Gillock prelude. How did you practice this? I ask the sixty-year-old working on a Beethoven sonata. How did you practice this? I ask myself as I scan through my day and my habits, my bare refrigerator and my dirty floors, my empty practice boxes and jumbled thoughts. How did you practice this?

For many of us, last November’s election result was not the one we wanted or wished for the world. This will be a week to endure, ignore, or merely survive, depending upon the hour. But I take some solace in a woman writing a century ago, who grappled with unreliable help and writer’s block, an unstable political world and a rapidly changing society, and who managed to record and account for the small ordinary ways she worked and practiced. And above all, her writings are evidence of real human connection and the time and energy she invested in the deep and varied relationships throughout her life. “Will you come again? Any day to tea, if you’ll say which. Please do.” . . . “Will you dine with us one night? The house is really rather nice, or will be when I have done a few repairs.” . . . “It was most delightful to see you, and I hope we may discuss everything under the sun before we die.”

Friends, at the end of the day all we know is that the world is broken, and the future uncertain. Lean into whatever beauty makes your heart sing. Have tea with people you love and dinner with those who keep you honest. Above all, keep practicing.

*All quotes taken from A Writer’s Diary: Being and The Question of Things Happening: Collected Letters II by Virginia Woolf.