Monday 14 September 1925
'A disgraceful fact - I am writing this at 10 in the morning in bed in the little room looking into the garden, the sun beaming steady, the vine leaves transparent green, & the leaves of the apple tree so brilliant that, as I had my breakfast, I invented a little story...'
It has been quite exciting to dip into Virginia Woolf's letters and diaries since my return from those few days on the Bloomsbury trail in Sussex recently. I had wanted some context before writing a little about it all, but how much more immediate the Monks House entries seem now that I have seen and felt its atmosphere, with its benign ghosts, for myself. Little corners where you can just imagine the conversations and the heated debates with friends and visitors taking place.
And how frustrating nosey old me finds it when I see a staircase knowing full well that this part of the house is closed to visitors and that I can't go up it and explore.
There was an upstairs sitting room at Monks House, the thought that I couldn't see it nearly killed me.
It is nigh on impossible to walk through the rooms and not think about Virginia being unwell. I used the term madness yesterday, and afterwards thought perhaps I shouldn't have. It's not very 2013 PC after all, whilst being highly perjorative too, but it was common parlance for the 1920s, and there was a summer when the birds were chirping in Greek and the King was hiding in the bushes in the garden (checking out the drugs and treatments prescribed that's all hardly surprising) . So however well those around her protected Virginia, the 'madness' word, and the terror it invoked, can't have been far from anyone's lips.
I could only begin to imagine what Virginia may have thought was happening to her when those episodes descended...
'...wearisome headache, jumping pulse, aching back, frets, fidgets. lying awake. sleeping draughts, sedatives, digitalis, going for a little walk and plunging back into bed again - all the horrors of the dark cupboard of illness once more displayed for my diversion.'
And so there was a moment, as I stood in Virginia Woolf 's bedroom, an extension to the house accessed by an outside path by both Virginia in her day, and by us on the day of our visit, when I thought of the weeks and months of enforced rest that she took here when unwell.
'Those great wars which the body wages with the mind a slave to it, in the solitude of the bedroom against the assault of fever or the oncome of melancholia...'
The heating is meagre, the walls are lined with books...how those must have taunted her when reading was beyond her.. then there was the bell alongside to beckon...
I added my footprint to the carpet because you can't avoid treading on it...
and I coveted the Vanessa Bell design on the curtains...
So, forbidden to write for long periods, often unable to concentrate for long enough to read, just how many interminable hours must Virginia have spent staring out of the window alongside her little bed (it seemed short for the tall-ish person we assumed Virginia Woolf to be ) and onto her garden.
I thought of her dosed with Chloral...
'that mighty Prince with the moth's eyes and the feathered feet...'
And then looking very closely at the glass right by the bed I spotted its flaws and distortions. If it is the original glass then Virginia would have seen this view of the church exactly as I did, enough to befuddle even the most sober of eyes, let alone drugged ones...
Maybe it even inspired these lines in her revelatory little book On Being Ill, written after a prolonged period of illness during the Summer of 1925...
'...the body is a sheet of plain glass through which the soul looks straight and clear...the creature within can only gaze through the pane smudged or rosy.'
Later on Virginia, in the same book, sounds a note of cautious and hopeful optimism for recovery..
'Even so, when the whole earth is sheeted and slippery. some undulation, some irregularity of the surface will mark the boundary of an ancient garden, and there thrusting its head up undaunted in the starlight, the rose will flower, the crocus will burn. But with the hook of life still in us we must wriggle. We cannot stiffen peacably into glass mounds,'
And there, right outside the door, all this would be waiting for her...
and the writing desk too.
And the views, Virginia's beloved views of the South Downs.
Coming soon, some thoughts on Charleston, and then Berwick Church.
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