Virginia Woolf in Manhattan. Maggie Gee
No pickup at the airport. When I called the hotel to remonstrate, they said there was no record that the plane had landed. Sleepless night, glaring orange hotel sign outside my window. Everything felt frazzled and burnt out. Yet underneath, something itching, energetic.
I slept. And woke: to a new beginning.
A new day, after all, in New York! One of my favourite things, a New York morning. So what if the breakfast room was overcrowded? A fat man shouldered his way out and I nipped into his seat by the window. Sun on my eggs. Outside, the wide street streaming with purpose. I’m a positive person, it’s one of my virtues – Edward was a bit of a moaner. The gorgeous light scored straight to the park. The hotel was a dump, but near Central Park.
I love it all. The skating rink, the joggers, the lake, the spring trees, that delicate yellow – the zoo. Oh yes, I love the zoo. It’s a play zoo, really, tiny and lovely. Monkeys, bears, in the heart of the city, so alien and mysterious. Alive in the moment, so different from us.
But first of all: work to do. Off to the New York Public Library.
(Inside, part of me was still shaking. I’d felt shallow or hollow, ever since that terrible blaze of white light.)
The woman in charge of the private Berg Collection where the Woolf manuscripts are kept gave me an oblong yellow reader’s card: ‘ANGELA LAMB is hereby admitted to the BERG COLLECTION (Room 320) for research on VIRGINIA WOOLF. This card is good through 27 NOV 2025 unless revoked.’ I like membership cards. They make me feel entitled. I haven’t always felt that way.
Virginia, of course, was born entitled. But part of me is still the daughter of Lorna and Henry, born in Wolverhampton.
Statutory humblings. Abandon your coat, your briefcase, your camera, your pens, your phone before you can enter. I didn’t mind. I was excited. I couldn’t wait to get my hands on her!
Then the librarian explained.
There’s a rule that only applies to Woolf, because she is so valuable: no original manuscript material can be accessed. ‘I’m afraid you have to read her on microfilm.’ But it’s hardly the same, is it? She hasn’t breathed on that film, or used it, or touched it.
I was muttering furiously under my breath, head down because I didn’t want to be evicted from this submarine, cosy, womb-of-a-room where only the two librarians and I were working. At least I was near those manuscripts. At least I sat two feet away from the heavy glass case where the walking stick she carried on that final day was lurking, a horrible thing of dark, hooked cane. It looked – cursed. I’m allergic to suicide. And yet, it was a link to her.
Who has more right than me to read her?
All the senseless ‘No’s of my life jostled and surged in my head as I sat there. Virginia, I thought, Virginia, I crossed an ocean to get close to you. Can’t they let me reach you somehow? I sat there and longed: for her elegant angular writing, her amused, classic face. English! She was English, but these rich Americans had filched her!
Then the pleasant girl brought me one article, a strange piece Woolf had written for Hearst Magazine and Cosmopolitan in 1938, a carbon copy on thin onion-skin paper, with a few corrections in ink. The title was ‘America which I have never seen interests me most in the cosmopolitan world of today’.
And at once I was enjoying the dance. ‘Cars drive sixty or seventy abreast,’ she assures us (though she never went there!). ‘While we have shadows that walk behind us, they have a light that dances in front of them, which is the future.’ I was smiling as I read. I’ll take you home to Europe, I silently promised, if I can get to you I’ll slip you in my bag and take you back to Sussex, to Leonard, to Lewes …
Perhaps I had spoken aloud – ‘I’ll take you back to Leonard, to Lewes’ – for one of the librarians was staring at me fixedly.
Or not at me. No, behind me.
I heard, or half-heard, a croaking sound. Half-human. Distressed. Straining. And I turned in my chair. And saw.
VIRGINIA
Did I hear ‘Leonard’? Did I say ‘Leonard’? Can I now even
remember how it was?
Suddenly from nothing
was I something again?
My own voice waking me from too far away –
hearing my own voice rather deep and tremulous, I thought
& almost – old –
(for inside I was still young, a girl, when I died)
I followed it up
from the depths of cold watery sleep
into the warmth of a small dim room I did not know
a woman breathing as she read, lips half-moving, very serious,
a sigh a small smile
She was reading me with such strong desire and I wondered
‘Who is she?’
she has blonde hair but she is not young
I am on the threshold I’m too tired I don’t know
a fish jerking it’s me that she’s reading yes, it’s my soul
it’s me –
And she reeled me in, hauled me up. A strain like a tooth being pulled.
ANGELA
This woman. This strange woman. That was all I thought. Tall and dusty in bedraggled green and grey clothes. A suit. The librarian said, ‘Excuse me. May I help you?’Then closed in on her like a gaoler.
VIRGINIA
Stirring and gathering myself too late to go back –
an ache coming together
puckering a long fall of satin curtain
a wavering
a pulling together not wanting
to be seen
exposed
her eyes, their eyes
but oh –
the waking of the light
in the dark so long lost in my own crushed rib-cage
weighted with mud and slime though dying was no
worse than the terror nothing
is worse than the terror
Here, I am suddenly here.
Warm wood. Women. Electric lights. A strange room.
Two books in my hands. Yes, they’re mine. Hold them close to my body, hide them. Mine.
And, as if new-born, no fear. Was it over?
ANGELA
Almost before I knew what was happening, she was gone. In a pincer movement, two librarians hustled her out of the door. ‘If you don’t have a need for access to original material …’ one was saying, and the strange woman gaped like a fish, while the other librarian intoned, ‘The librarians in the open reading rooms will be happy to help you.’
The door swung shut. There followed a hubbub of librarian excitement, which is quiet, but the first words I could make out were ‘Who was THAT?’
And as soon as I heard it as a question, I knew the answer, and made for the door.
Out on the landing, a gaggle of Japanese tourists with cameras, a big-nosed man in a red woollen hat – but not her. So I ran down the stairs, and there, on the last flight but one, by a seat where a black boy in shades was sleeping, there she stood, yes it was her. A tall angular shape from the back, not going forward, hovering, leaning, like a tall-masted sailing ship.