Virginia Woolf (6 page)

Reading about her in Leonard’s autobiography, I learned how depressed and agitated she became as she neared the end of nearly every book she was writing. She feared that the male critics would attack
The Years
and turned to Leonard for his critique. He tried to calm her by assuring her that the critics would love the book. But when the depression threatened her sanity, he packed her in their car and took her driving. Leonard, a skillful writer himself, a social and political activist, and responsible for the Hogarth Press, dropped everything to care for her whenever she became ill. She knew he was devoting his life to her, yet she referred demeaningly to him as “my Jew,” and wrote a letter to a friend, saying, “I am marrying a poor, penniless Jew.”

In a 1932 letter to Ethel Smyth, she described a birthday party for her Jewish mother-in-law and Leonard’s nine brothers and sisters:

When the 10 Jews sat around me silently at my mother-in-law’s, tears gathered behind my eyes, at the futility of life; imagine eating birthday cake with silent Jews at 11 p.m.

She, like nearly everyone in her Bloomsbury circle, displayed what Nigel Nicolson had called “an occasional touch of anti-Semitism.” Theirs was a British society rife with racism—racism against minorities, against people of color, and pointedly against Jews.

In these seventy years since I sat worshipfully in her parlor, I learned more of her violent manic depressions, her wild helpless swings; by turns critical, nasty, and catty, moving to exquisite warmth and generosity. I learned of her constant fear that she was going insane.

In 1941, when the pain of living finally had become too great for her, she wrote two final letters to Leonard before she walked into the river. He found one in her studio:

I want to tell you that you have given me the greatest possible happiness.

He found the second one in their parlor. In it, she wrote even more lovingly:

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.

Those two love letters to Leonard, and her three letters to me, helped me work through my own anger and disillusionment, which now seem trifling in comparison to the agony she endured. They helped restore the admiration I had for her when I was nineteen and just discovering her genius. I realized that she had lived her entire life with a will to create as a woman. That was the most important lesson she had taught me. In 2004, I reread my dissertation in the light of that new understanding, underlining paragraphs that mean as much to me now as they did when I wrote them more than seventy years ago:

Virginia Woolf is determined to write as a woman. Through the eyes of her sex, she seeks to penetrate life and describe it. Her will to explore her femininity is bitterly opposed by the critics, who guard the traditions of men, who dictate to her or denounce her feminine reactions to art and life.

Admiringly, I described her literary integrity:

Against the critic, Virginia Woolf exhorts integrity, the Shakespearian ‘To thine own self be true … ’. Integrity for her [she writes in A Room of One’s Own], ‘that integrity which I take to be the backbone of the writer lies in ignoring the critical admonishers and remaining inflexibly true to herself. … So long as you write what you wish to write, that is all that matters.

Ruth Gruber

New York City February 2005

__________

¹
It was probably not Hitler, as Virginia had thought, but, according to most scholars, Hermann Goering, the head of the German Air Force and one of Hitler’s closest allies.

²
Lion Feuchtwanger was a German Jewish novelist, whose book
The Oppermanns,
for which I wrote a preface in 2001, was called “extraordinary” by the
New York Times.
“No single historical or fictional work has more tellingly or insightfully depicted … the insidious manner in which Nazism began to permeate the fabric of German society than Lion Feuchtwanger’s great novel.”

³
After World War II, he became even more famous for facing up to the evil the Nazis had wrought and worked on compensating victims of the Holocaust.

⁴
“This was the same ship that would carry 1,000 Jewish refugees from Germany in 1939. All of them had legal visas to Cuba; but when they reached the Caribbean, they were denied entrance by Cuban officials. Their brave captain then took the ship of desperate refugees to Florida. But they were not allowed to land there either. They had no visas to enter America. They were forced to sail back to Europe, where most of them were later trapped, sent to concentration camps, and killed.

⁵
“Only later did I learn that Professor Schöffler was Jewish, and that he had fallen victim to the Nazis. When the SS knocked on his door, he killed himself. Dr. Hugo Gabriel, the Protestant convert from Judaism who had been my adviser at the University of Cologne, and whom I later helped get a visa to come to New York in the late 1930s, told me of Professor Schöffler’s death. Tears formed behind my eyes. I owed him so much. Why couldn’t I have helped him get a visa?

⁶
The book she was writing was
The Years.

⁷
At Oxford in 2004, my friend Heidi Stalla, the Junior Dean, who is writing her own Ph.D. thesis on Virginia Woolf, confirmed the reporter’s words. “Dozens of other students,” she told me, “are writing Ph.D. theses on Virginia Woolf and they all use your book. Yours was the first.”

⁸
A Dutch hero later hid the Herz family in a safe house, where they survived. In 1945, my brother Irving, a captain traveling with General Patton’s army, found them looking old and skeletal. They flung their arms around him when he told them he was my brother. “Wait here,” Irving said, “I’ll be right back.” He drove to the army PX, filled his truck with provisions, and brought them the first fresh fruits and vegetables they had eaten in two years. Unfortunately, the Dutch hero who had saved them was caught and executed.

I arrived at Cologne University in 1931 on an Institute of International Education fellowship. A few weeks later, I was asked by Professor Herbert Schöffler to work for a Ph.D.: “I have a special reason. I love Virginia Woolf’s work. My students don’t know English well enough to analyze it. You are the only American here. You would be writing the first doctoral thesis on her.” I was flabbergasted. “My fellowship,” I said, “is only for one year.” “It’s never been done in one year,” he said, “but maybe you can do it.” I hung VW’s picture on my bedroom wall, and became mesmerized by her writing.
A Room of One’s Own
became my bible, and
Orlando
my favorite novel. When I told Schöffler that I wanted to know much more about her, he suggested I write her at the Hogarth Press. Thus began my correspondence with her.

In 1933, after returning home from Germany, I found a freelance job doing research and reading manuscripts for Barnes & Noble, then a small bookstore and publishing house near NYU. After a few weeks, they commissioned me to translate the German classic
Das Edle Blut
—
Noble Blood
—by Ernst von Wildenbruch into English. Hoping to help me find more work, the editor gave me this letter of introduction, which helped me find a few more literary jobs.

I was unbelieving when I received a letter from the Tauchnitz Press of Leipzig, Germany—famous for printing classics by Charles Dickens and Jane Austen and moderns like Virginia Woolf for English-speaking tourists—informing me that they wanted to publish my Ph.D. dissertation on Virginia Woolf. With apprehension and the chutzpah of youth, I sent this letter and the green paperback, letterpress edition of my book to VW.

On May 17, 1935, this letter from the manager of the Hogarth Press, Margaret West, arrived in New York.

I had received a new fellowship to write a book on women under fascism, communism, and democracy. Since I was coming to Europe, I answered Ms. West’s letter, and asked for an interview with Virginia Woolf.