Virginia Woolf (5 page)

The first letter, sent from her home in Sussex, was written on June 21, 1935 on fine white linen paper, undamaged by time, with an embossed letterhead.

Monk’s House Rodmell, near Lewes, Sussex.

Dear Miss Gruber,

I found your book waiting for me on my return from Italy the other day. I think that my secretary explained that I was way [sic] hence the delay in thanking you. It was very good of you to send me a copy. But I must confess, frankly, that I have not read it, but I am sure you will believe that this is not through laziness or lack of interest in the subject. But the fact is that I try to avoid reading about my own
writing when I am actually writing.
⁶
I find that it makes me self-conscious and for some reason distracts me from my work.

But if I have not read it myself, I have lent it to a friend, who is an excellent critic; and I am told that you have written a most sympathetic and acute study of my books. I wxxx shall read it as soon as I have finished the book I am now working on.

I must thank you sincerely for having taken this interest in my work. That is in itself a great encouragement to me. And I need not say how much I hope that it will have a success with the public.

With thanks,

yours sincerely

Virginia Woolf

Reading it now, from the vantage point of nearly seven decades, I am heartened by her generosity in taking time from her own writing to send it to an “excellent critic” who had called it a “most sympathetic and acute study.” Who was the critic? In a corner of my mind, I wondered if the critic was her husband Leonard.

But this newly discovered letter contradicted the notes in her diary that she had written a few weeks earlier, revealing that she
had
looked into the book.

This first letter did not reach me until I returned home to Brooklyn in late October 1935. She had mailed it on June 21, but I had left for Europe on June 22. When the letter arrived in Brooklyn on June 27, 1935, Mama tucked it away in a file drawer for safekeeping.

That very day, I stepped off the SS
Milwaukee
at Southampton and made my way to London. After settling into a hotel, I visited the
Herald Tribune’s
London office, was greeted cordially by the reporters, and then telephoned Jon Kimche, a well-known English journalist whom I had met in New York.

When I told him that I had written a letter to Virginia Woolf and sent her my dissertation in book form, he said, “Why don’t you call the Hogarth Press and ask for an interview?”

I was less confident than I had been in Brooklyn. “I have a feeling she won’t allow me to interview her.”

“I’m sure she’d be delighted to meet you. Certainly I would be if somebody wrote a dissertation on my work. Yours is the first English dissertation anyone has written about Virginia Woolf.”
⁷

I was still doubtful. “Why would she would want to spend time with me? She must get hundreds of such requests.”

“Don’t be silly. She can’t help but feel flattered. If you’re afraid to call, I’ll make the call for you.”

“Thank you, no. I’ll make it myself.”

I telephoned the Hogarth Press and reached the manager, Margaret West.

“Mrs. Woolf and her husband,” she said, “are on vacation and will be gone for another few weeks. How long will you be in London?”

“A few weeks. Then I will be traveling for four or five months.”

“Will you be returning to London?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“Do call us as soon as you arrive. We can set up a date for you. Can you tell me now what you plan to interview Mrs. Woolf about?”

“It’s for a book I plan to write about women under fascism, communism, and democracy. I would appreciate her views on the role of women in a rapidly changing world.”

“Very good,” she said. “I will expect to hear from you when you return.”

I left London, and for four months traveled across Europe and the Soviet Arctic. On my way back to London, I stopped off in Holland to visit the Herz family, with whom I had lived as an exchange student in Cologne. They had just escaped from Hitler to Amsterdam
⁸

I stayed with Mama and Papa Herz for a few days and, while
there, sent a note to Margaret West at the Hogarth Press, telling her that I would be arriving shortly in London.

Virginia Woolf answered my letter (this is the second letter we found). The envelope showed that she had mailed her answer to me in care of the Herz family in Amsterdam. Papa Herz, in turn, had crossed out their address and forwarded it to 14 Harmon St., Brooklyn. Mama stored it with the first letter in the same safe filing cabinet drawer.

On plain white stationery, the letter read:

52 Tavistock Square London WC 1

12th Oct. 1935

Dear Madam,

I have only just received your letter; and I am afraid that this will not reach you in time.

I should of course be glad to do anything I can to help you in your work; and will arrange to see you if possible. But as I am not a politician and have no special knowledge of the subject on which you are writing I fear that it would probably be only a waste of your time to see me.

If you like to ring up The Hogarth Press Museum 3488 my secretary will take a message. But as I say, I fear that this letter will reach you too late.

Yours sincerely

Virginia Woolf

I think now if I had received this letter in Amsterdam, with its halfhearted invitation addressed to “Dear Madam,” I would have hesitated to telephone her. Fortunately, I followed the advice Margaret West had given me. As soon as I reached London, I phoned the Hogarth Press again.

Miss West’s answer was gracious: “Mrs. Woolf would like you to come to tea Tuesday, October 15th at 6:00
P.M.
”

I was ecstatic.

But now, sitting in the Berg Collection, I opened
The Letters of Virginia Woolf Volume Five 1932—1935.
I found my name in
the index, and I learned what Virginia Woolf had thought of me before we met on October 15th.

The day before our meeting, she had written to Julian Bell, the nephew she adored, who was teaching English in China and who later died in the Spanish Civil War.

14th Oct 1935

Dearest Julian,

… Now I suppose you are teaching the Chinks

(‘Chinks?’)

I must now go and see an importunate and unfortunate Gerwoman who thinks I can help her with facts about Women under Democracy—little she knows—what you do about your poor old Virginia.

Me? Importunate? Unfortunate? Gerwoman? I was shocked by her words. A thin flame of anger was burning my throat.

I was even angrier when I read my name again in the diary, written just before she was coming upstairs to meet me.

Tuesday 15 October

… couldn’t write this morning; & must go up & receive Miss Grueber [sic] (to discuss a book on women and fascism—a pure have yer as Lottie would say) in 10 minutes.

A pure have yer?

“What could it mean?” I asked the curator, Lola L. Szladits.

“No idea what that means,” she said, “but maybe the woman sitting over there would know.” She pointed to a woman who was studying early drafts of
Mrs. Dalloway.

I approached Ruth Webb, a friendly school inspector from London. We whispered as if there were other people in the room, though there were none.

“A pure have yer,” she repeated, “is cockney. I should know, I come from cockney stock. But really I haven’t a clue as to its meaning. All I can tell you is, it’s derogatory.”

At the information desk I asked Catherine Halls, an English librarian, if she knew what “a pure have yer” meant.

She told me she had never heard the expression.

“It’s probably slang. We have a lot of slang dictionaries. They’re right over there.”

In Eric Partridge’s
A Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English
, I looked up the word:
pure (n.) a mistress, esp. a kept mistress, a wanton, dog’s dung.

My head exploded.
Dog’s dung?

Wait. Perhaps she used
pure
as an adjective and
have
as a noun. In Partridge’s
Slang: Today and Yesterday,
I found:
Have (n), a deception, a swindle.

I felt my blood rising again. Did she think I had come to swindle her? If so, then why had she invited me to tea?

What did she think of me
after
what had been for me a magical half hour in her parlor at 52 Tavistock Square? In her
Letters, Volume Five 1932-1935
, I found an entry about me, and ordered the original letter from the stack. The letter was written to her lover, Ethel Smyth, a seventy-year-old composer, complaining that she had been unable to work. It was six days after my visit.

Monday, 21 October 1935

I’ve had a poetess reading her works aloud [Easdale]; I’ve had a French socialist declaiming against Fascism. [Walter]; I’ve had a German Jewess [Gruber]—no, I can’t go into all the vociferations and gesticulations that are our lot in Tavistock Sqre.

A German Jewess! Perhaps she decided I was a poor refugee fleeing Hitler, washed up on Britain’s shores, importuning her for help.

Years later, anxious to know the truth, I asked Aïda Lovell, one of my friends in London, to write to Nigel Nicolson, the son of Vita Sackville-West, about Virginia Woolf’s attitude toward me and about what “a pure have yer” really meant.

Nicolson, who edited many of Woolf’s diaries and letters, answered Aïda:

Dr. Gruber won’t be too pleased by this, but I was glad to read in VW’s diary that she was quite flattered by what Dr. G wrote about her … which was rare for Virginia.

I wondered if Nigel Nicolson was confirming what I had read in her first letter to me, in which she wrote that she had lent the book to an “excellent critic,” and was told “that you have written a most sympathetic and acute study of my book.” The diary entry seemed to confirm that the “critic” was Virginia Woolf herself.

Still uncertain, I wrote to Nicolson, who answered,

I fear that you may have been hurt by her references to you, but she was like that in her diaries and letters, though perfectly courteous in conversation. … That is one of the things I deplore about Virginia, her cattiness, contempt for almost everyone who were not her friends, an occasional touch of anti-Semitism, her snobbishness and jealousy.

Back in December 1935, still naïve and unaware of her biting comments in her diary and letters, I wrote to her again, taking the liberty of enclosing some material on the Soviet Arctic. Apparently she had written me a letter which I cannot find, but I found the carbon copy on yellow paper of my answer to her:

14 Harmon Street Brooklyn, New York December 27, 1935

Mrs. Virginia Woolf

Monk’s House

Rodmell, near

Lewes, Sussex

Dear Mrs. Woolf,

I thought this pamphlet showing the Arctic trip we discussed when I saw you last October in London might interest you.

I am wondering whether you have had time yet to read the study I made of your writings. Your reasons for waiting until you had finished your book were splendid, I thought. Now that Christmas has come, and I understood you to say that you would complete the work around Christmas time, I wondered if you had found the opportunity to read the work. I am deeply interested in your opinion of it.

With kindest regards to Mr. Woolf and yourself,

Yours sincerely,

Ruth Gruber

P.S. It may interest you to know that the London
News Chronicle
published an article on the Arctic soon after I had spoken of it to you, and that the
Sphere
is publishing (or has already published) an article on “Tracking Human Bootleggers,” describing the traffic in smuggling aliens from Cuba into the United States.

Years after the fact, I was embarrassed that I had written a letter with such chutzpah to Virginia Woolf. How could I have dared to tell her that her reasons for waiting to read my book while she finished hers were
splendid
? I was surprised that she even answered such a letter.

But she did answer it swiftly. It is the last of the three letters and was probably typed by Virginia Woolf herself, with eighteen corrections. Any secretary sending off a letter with so many typos and corrections would probably be fired. But of all the three letters, this is probably the most historically significant, for in it she reveals her agony in writing
The Years
, a book of frustrations, of lonely frustrated characters.

52, Tavistock Square, w.c.1.

Telephone: Museum 2621.

10th Jan. 1936

Dear Miss Gruber,

It is true that Christmas has come and gone and I had hoped to have done with my book. But unfortunately I was optimistic; and it won’t be off my hands till March I fear. The last stages are always the most dreary; therefore I shall not attempt to read your study until my mind is free from this drudgery.

Many thanks for sending me the pamphlet. I am glad to know that you have been so successful. With best wishes for the new [sic] Year,

yours sincerely Virginia Woolf

She was writing to me with even greater warmth than in her first letter, revealing her state of mind, her agitation. Leonard describes in his autobiography,
Downhill All the Way
, how ill she was at that time. “We had a terrifying time with
The Years
in 1936,” he wrote. “She was much nearer a complete breakdown than she had ever been since 1913.”

Then, in November 1936, she wrote in her diary,

I wonder whether anyone has ever suffered so much from a book as I have suffered from The Years.

After cutting the book drastically, she finally allowed it to be published in March 1937. It had the greatest success of any book she had written to that point.

My hours living with Virginia Woolf’s work ended with this extremely revealing third letter. The typing was quavering; nearly every capital letter was out of line, almost unhinged; typographical errors were corrected with a stroke of a pen. Was she just then swinging into a depression? I read over and over her line to me that the last stages of writing a book are “always the most dreary” and she would finally read my book when her mind was “free from this drudgery.”