Meet Virginia

by Lydia Pottle Currie

Let us then take for our starting point the statement that words are not useful. This happily needs little proving, for we are all aware of it. When we travel on the Tube, for example, when we wait on the platform for a train, there, hung up in front of us, on an illuminated signboard, are the words "Passing Russell Square." We look at those words; we repeat them; we try to impress that useful fact upon our minds; the next train will pass Russell Square. We say over and over again as we pace, "Passing Russell Square, passing Russell Square." And then as we say them, the words shuffle and change, and we find ourselves saying, "Passing away saith the world, passing away. . . . The leaves decay and fall, the vapours weep their burthen to the ground. Man comes. . . ." And then we wake up and find ourselves at King's Cross. — Virginia Woolf, "Craftmanship"

I had no problem whatsoever in remembering that the train passed Russell Square, because I was staggering under 35 unaccustomed pounds of baby plus carrier plus accessories, all suspended from my shoulders and threatening to drive me straight into the earth like a tent spike. But I persevered—I had crossed the Atlantic Ocean with this weighty little package in tow, and we were going to see Virginia Woolf's first house in Bloomsbury: No. 46 Russell Square, where the daughters of Leslie Stephen entertained a pack of scruffy, ill-assorted Cambridge graduates who would become the movers and shakers of their generation.

It wasn't there. There was "Virginia Woolf's Bar and Bistro," which is every bit as touristy as it sounds, but No. 46 was part of a block-long University of London research lab. I had remembered the address incorrectly. I plunked down on a bench in the park, spooned apricot puree into James' mouth, and thought about my life.

Luckily for me, this was only the first day of our London vacation. My husband left for the Continent, and my mother and I spent nine days doing the tourist thing—castles, jewels, the contents of desecrated tombs and temples. Oh, and gardens. Mom loves gardens. I spent a lot of time searching for shade.

The good thing about grandmothers is that you can leave your baby with them and be fairly confident that they'll keep it alive until you get back. The morning of our last day in London, I slipped out at the sunrise and headed back to Bloomsbury. The place I was looking for was Gordon Square, and I found it about half past seven.

Woolf's first adult home is just another row house, shorter than the ones on either side. The plaque on the front is for John Maynard Keynes, who lived there with the ballet dancer he married when he got tired of trysting with his Cambridge pals. The people who live there now have a sign on their gate firmly warning passers-by that unauthorized bicycles will be removed. Rich people may own the houses in Gordon Square, but it's clear that the university students still own the streets.

Gordon Square was mostly what I expected. I could imagine why the mere sight of open space from her bedroom window would have been thrilling for Woolf after the treeless cul-de-sac where she spent her first two decades; but to me, it was just another city square, more evocative of Vanessa Bell who raised a family here than of her little sister, who moved out when Mr. Bell moved in.

A block north of Gordon Square is Tavistock Square, probably the hot spot for Woolf tourism, if such a thing exists. Woolf lived there when she wrote To The Lighthouse: "Then one day walking round Tavistock Square I made up, as I sometimes make up my books, To the Lighthouse, in a great, apparently involuntary rush." Woolf's house in Tavistock Square was destroyed during the Blitz and replaced by a truly hideous hotel. But the garden she walked around has flourished. The trees tower over the buildings that surround them—apparently they were better than Woolf's house at dodging bombs.

I walked around the garden square. The Great American Novel did not spring fully formed into my mind. But the sun was shining and the birds were singing, and in the absence of the fidgeting 35-pound pack I was pretty much walking on air. Everything seemed possible for a woman who was not yet thirty, not yet certifiably crazy, and finally starting to remember what she had loved in life before the baby fog descended.

They've put a memorial bust of Woolf in the southwest corner of the square. In life, she sat for one sculptor, and after reading in Leonard's Woolf's autobiography how awful she found it to have somebody staring at her for hours on end, I can't really enjoy any of the works that derived from that sitting. But I'm glad it's there, because it joins two other memorial installations Woolf would have heartily approved—a statue of Gandhi at which people light candles every day, and a plaque erected in 1994 "to commemorate men and women conscientious objectors to military service all over the world and in every age who have established and are maintaining the right to refuse to kill."

I looked for Virginia Woolf all over London—the place of her birth, her childhood haunts, the Reading Room of the British Museum where she labored toward an unofficial version of the education denied her on account of sex—but the only place I felt her was in the park at Tavistock Square, where little that she saw or touched is likely to still exist. In a country now harking back to its imperialist roots, Tavistock Square is a haven for uncompromising peaceniks. We profess to hate war, but Woolf and Gandhi and those unnamed millions of COs really meant it. Tavistock Square is an open-air chapel to pacifism, and my heroine is fittingly remembered there.

Woolf never had children. I worried that once I did, our paths might diverge so hugely that she would no longer capture my imagination. But despite our differences, it seems that I'm still her disciple, emerging from the temporary madness of creation to find the world pretty much as I left it—inspring, tragic and full of opportunities to make words useful.

Lydia Pottle Currie is an English teacher currently during her stint as an overeducated mommy. She washes diapers by day and looks for writing gigs by night.