ReadFin Literary Journal (Winter 2018)

Don’t be Afraid of
Virginia Woolf
Michael Freundt
On 7 February 1910 a telegram was received from Sir Charles
Hardinge, the Permanent Under-Secretary of Foreign Affairs, by
the Commander-in-Chief of the Home Fleet and the captain of the
H.M.S. Dreadnought, the flagship of the British navy, then lying off
Portland, Dorset. It informed him that Prince Makalin of Abyssinia
and his party were arriving in the afternoon and were to receive
every attention. When they arrived by private train carriage they
were received with an honour guard and taken ceremoniously on
board. The chatter of the dusky-skinned entourage was completely
unintelligible although one of the party, Prince Mendax, wearing a
sky-blue silk robe, beard, jewels and a turban, constantly murmured
“Bunga bunga” which their interpreter explained was Abyssinian for
“Isn’t it lovely?” They refused all refreshments which the interpreter
again explained was due to their religious beliefs as they could not be
served food or drink with the naked hand. Gloves were not available.
A few days later the officers and crew of the Dreadnought were
amazed and dismayed to learn, via the Daily Mirror, that it was all
a monumental practical joke and the Royal navy was pilloried and
laughed at for weeks in the national press and at every dinner table
in the land. It has become known as the Dreadnought Hoax and was
reported all over the world.
One of the hoaxers, Prince “Bunga Bunga” Mendex, was, in reality,
a young girl who was quoted as saying “I found I could laugh like
a man easily enough but it was difficult to disguise the speaking
voice. As a matter of fact the only really trying time I had was when
I had to shake hands with my first cousin, who is an officer on the
Dreadnought, and who saluted me as I went on deck. I thought I
should burst out laughing, but, happily I managed to preserve my
Oriental stolidity of countenance.”
This young lady was the 28 year old Miss Adeline Stephen, who two
years later married and became Mrs Woolf. We know her better as
Virginia.
Apart from being a practical joker, Virginia Woolf was a very beautiful
woman. This is certainly not how we think of her today but all the
people who wrote about her, and there were many, used adjectives,
especially those that knew her well, like, beautiful, mischievous,
intelligent, talkative, and inquisitive. She would say things like, “You
said you went for a walk, but what made you go for a walk?” When
out walking herself with a friend she would see a farmer tossing hay
and say, “Look at that farmer pitching hay. What do you think he had
for breakfast?” It was this inquisitiveness that made her attend to
everything you said to her; and attend with real interest. When you
talked to Virginia you always felt that you were intently listened to,
and, once literary fame came into the picture, you didn’t even mind
that she was mining you for information, words and reasons for
human behaviour; in fact, you were flattered that such a famous and
beautiful woman was hanging on your every word; gazing into your
eyes and eagerly waiting for your next pronouncement. Of course
under such scrutiny, if you simply said ‘I don’t know’ you could be
sure that she would lose interest immediately and seek someone else’s
company. She had a habit of forcing you to search your brain for the
right words, because nothing less than the right words were always
expected.
She was tall, with a thin face, slender hands and always wore
shapeless clothes of indeterminate colours: fashion was of no concern
to her.
She was born Adeline Virginia Stephen in 1882 but almost
immediately was called Virginia despite the confusion of initials with
her elder sister, Vanessa. She came from a good family of landowners
and was well but home educated. She was the third child of her
father’s second wife and an incident with her half-brother, George
Duckworth, was to have a profound effect on her.
“I still shiver with shame,” she wrote many years after the incident,
“at the memory of my half brother standing me on a ledge, aged
about six or so, exploring my private parts.” Then, many years later,
when her father lay dying from cancer three floors below, George
would fling himself on her bed, kissing and hugging her, aged in her
early 20s, to console her, he later said. Quentin Bell, her biographer
and nephew, would write, “in sexual matters she was from this time
terrified back into a posture of frozen and defensive panic.” She briefly
considered accepting Lytton Strachey’s proposal of marriage knowing
that he was homosexual so she thought a simple brother-sister sort
of marriage may be preferable to one that included the ‘horror of
sex’. She wanted to be married, since being a spinster was considered
a failure and finally accepted the proposal of Leonard Woolf and
they were married on August 10 1912 after an engagement that, her
sister wrote, was “an exhausting and bewildering thing even to the
bystanders.” Virginia said to him “I feel no physical attraction to you,
... and yet your caring for me as you do almost overwhelms me. It is
so real and so strange.” They were planning a honeymoon in Iceland
(how metaphoric) but settled for a Mediterranean one instead.
Michael Holroyd wrote,
“There seemed some unfathomable inhibition that made male
last, even when compounded with love, if not horrific, quite
incomprehensible to her. The physical act of intercourse was not
even funny: it was cold. Leonard regretfully accepted the facts and
soon brought the word in line with the deed by persuading her that
they should not have children. It was a sensible decision for, though
she could never contemplate her sister’s fruitfulness without envy,
children with their wetness and noise would surely have killed off the
novels in her: and it was novel-writing that she cared for most.”
In 2002 the film The Hours was released with much fanfare and a
stellar cast. It was written by David Hare and based on the Michael
Cunningham Pulitzer Prize winning book of the same name, which
in turn used Woolf’s novel Mrs Dalloway (1925) as the core of the
film about, not only Virginia Woolf and the writing of the book, but
also its effect on two women. one in the 1950s and one in the 1980s.
Readers can find Mrs Dalloway curious, annoying and tedious but
when you read you must not let the words wash over you as one lets
light from a fire without looking into the flames; into the terrifying
beauty at its core.
Her novel of 1928, Orlando, is dedicated to Vita Sackville-West,
Woolf’s friend, neighbour and sometime lover and tells the story,
over a period of 300 years, of the romantic adventures of a man called
Orlando, who suddenly, miraculously, half way through the book
becomes a woman. This is revealed in the film as Orlando with his
long, straight, reddish blond hair gazes at himself standing naked
in front of a full length mirror and seeing the reflection of a long,
straight, reddish blond haired naked woman staring back saying,
“Same person, different body.”
Virginia confessed her affair with Vita to her sister Vanessa and in a
letter to Vita describes the moment.
“I told Nessa the story of our passion in a chemist’s shop the other
day. ‘But do you really like going to bed with women’ she said – taking
her change. ‘And how’d you do it?’ and so she bought her pills to take
abroad, talking as loud as a parrot.”
Uncharacteristically a lot happens in Orlando but It’s not plot that
interests Virginia Woolf ( “facts are a very inferior form of fiction”)
but the feelings, nuanced emotions that precede the action, or
arise because of it; she was more interested in, not the ‘What’, but
the ‘Why’, and, more importantly, how one would describe that
ReadFin Literary Journal 51