Free Virginia Woolf by Ruth Gruber

MY HOURS WITH VIRGINIA WOOLF
    O NE MORNING IN THE summer of 2004, my research assistant, Maressa Gershowitz, came running into the room where I was working.
    “Look what I’ve found!” she shouted.
    She held up three letters, sent to me by Virginia Woolf.
    The letters were as fresh and unwrinkled as if Woolf had written them not in 1935 and 1936, but the day before.
    “Where in heaven’s name did you find these letters?”
    “You won’t believe this,” Maressa said. “They were in the back of one of your filing cabinets, behind a bunch of old tax returns.”
    The past lit up. I shut my eyes, recalling how in 1931-32, as an American exchange student at the University of Cologne in Germany, I had written my doctoral thesis, called “Virginia Woolf: A Study.” Three years later, it was published as a paperback book in Leipzig under the same title. With apprehension, I had sent Woolf the book, and she had invited me to her London home for tea.
    I recalled how on that day, the fifteenth day of October, 1935, I had walked up and down the narrow streets of Bloomsbury. I stared up at Virginia Woolf’s Georgian four-story house, which had a balcony overhanging the street.
    Everything seemed magical to me. The rain, which had fallen all day, had stopped, and the air was as clean as if it had been scrubbed in a huge washing machine.
    I rang the bell at 6 P.M. at 52 Tavistock Square. A housekeeper in a black-and-white uniform opened the door, led me into a dark corridor and up a narrow staircase to the first floor. She tapped on a wooden door, and a man who introduced himself as Leonard Woolf stepped forward.
    “Welcome,” he spoke warmly and shook my hand. He was painfully thin, with a long oval face, dark hooded eyes, black hairlaced with gray, and an air of sadness and suffering. He took me across a large parlor with sofas on each side, and motioned me to sit in an upholstered armchair close to Virginia.
    She lay stretched out in front of a fireplace. The fire cast a glow over her carved straight nose, her expressive lips, her melancholy gray-green eyes. The beautiful Nicole Kidman, playing her in the film The Hours , did not need the built-up nose or the dowdy housewife clothes. Virginia Woof was elegant, a woman of grace and beauty.
    She was a study in gray: short gray hair cut like a boy’s, a flowing ankle-length gray gown, gray shoes, and gray stockings. In her fingers, she held a long silver cigarette holder, through which she blew smoke into the parlor. There were three of us: Virginia, then fifty-three, reclining on a rug; her husband Leonard behind me, at the far end of the room but leaning forward as if he were hovering over her; and I, sitting inches away from her. I had come to sit at her feet. But now she was lying at mine.
    The fire warmed me in front as I faced her, but my back was chilled. I pulled my jacket tight around me and sat in silence, too overawed to speak.
    “I looked into the study you wrote about me,” she said. “Quite scholarly.”
    Was she praising me? I could scarcely believe it. I did not know whether to thank her or remain silent. I chose silence.
    She took a long draft of smoke and said, “I understand from my secretary that you are writing a book on women under fascism, communism, and democracy.”
    I murmured, “Yes.”
    “And you want to interview me for your book. I don’t know how I can help you. I don’t understand a thing about politics. I never worked a day in my life.”
    I wondered how she considered that it was not work to write groundbreaking novels, brilliant essays, and book reviews, and why she would demean her knowledge of politics. Her books were full of politics; her friends in the Bloomsbury crowd were energetic political thinkers—Lytton Strachey, the poet and historian who had wanted to marry her but whom she rejected; John Maynard Keynes, the economist; Roger Fry, the painter whose biography Virginia later wrote; and T. S. Eliot, the poet whose lines like