Persephone Book No 43: The Wise Virgins by Leonard Woolf

‘I have always been greatly attracted by the undiluted female mind, as well as by the female body,’ writes Leonard Woolf in the second volume of his autobiography. The female mind was in his view ‘gentler, more sensitive, more civilised’, than the male, but to access it a man must listen attentively, which few men did. He taught himself to listen.  The central subject of The Wise Virgins is the emotional, intellectual and social journey of Harry Davis, but it is played out with a wide cast of markedly different women, and only a small number of men for the most part either somewhat faceless or comic and not of the listening sort.

 

leonard-woolf-portrait-by-henry-lamb
Leonard Woolf by Henry Lamb 1912

 

In her life of Leonard Woolf, Victoria Glendinning describes The Wise Virgins as ‘brazenly autobiographical’, and critics and readers have had no difficulty in identifying many of the characters: Mrs Davis is Mrs Woolf, the Lawrences are the Stephens family, Camilla and Katharine, Virginia and Vanessa; the Garlands are the Woolfs’ Putney neighbours and Harry is Leonard, a very dark side of Leonard, a ‘shadow’ in whom he exposes and works out some of his own turmoil, anger, cruelty even. Woolf sets his anti-hero off on a route similar to his own, and with much of his own baggage, confronts him with similar dilemmas, but leaves him finally heading miserably down the path that he himself avoided. It is an autobiographical novel, but of the ‘what if’ school.

 

Leonard and Virginia 1912, during their engagement
Leonard and Virginia 1912, during their engagement

 

Woolf began The Wise Virgins while on honeymoon. He and Virginia were married on 10th August 1912, they left England the following week and returned three months later, having travelled through France, Spain and Italy. Virginia read Le Rouge et le Noir, Pendennis, The Antiquary, Charlotte Yonge’s The Heir of Radcliffe, D.H. Lawrence’s The Trespasser, and Crime and Punishment. Leonard started writing his second novel. What Virginia refers to in a letter to Duncan Grant as ‘the proper business of bed’ seems to have taken second place, if indeed much place at all. ‘The marriage’, writes Victoria Glendenning in her life of Leonard Woolf, ‘was consummated, not infrequently, but incompletely.’  Leonard Woolf, the married (unconventionally but not unhappily – he had made the right choice) man, established, by marriage, in a milieu remote in so many ways from that in which he was born, uses his novel to reflect on the differences between the two and justify his rejection of the one, while giving vent to his occasional angry impatience with the other.

The contempt in which his alter-ego, a Jew like him (and like him both proud of his Jewishness and uncomfortable with it), holds his family and their suburban Richstead neighbours, is weighed against the fear of being excluded or condescended to by the intellectual, Gentile, sophisticates of Bloomsbury.

The name itself, Richstead, an elision of two other London suburbs, Richmond and Hampstead, speaks of the extent to which its residents value material wealth above matters of the mind. Richstead is Woolf’s Putney, the suburb to which his mother took her large family, when the reduced fortunes of widowhood forced them to leave Kensington. Woolf encapsulates his hatred of the snobbish parochialism of suburbia in Mrs Davis, dull, self-pitying, possessive and embarrassingly Jewish  – ‘The big curved nose, the curling full lips, the great brown eyes would have made a fine old woman of her, if she had been squatting under a palm tree with a white linen cloth thrown over her head and drawn round her heavy oval face’, a crude, barely disguised portrait of his own mother which, unsurprisingly, cause deep offence to her and to his siblings.

From the opening pages of the novel the line is drawn between ‘intellectual people who really do live in London’ and those they despise who live in red-brick villas, ‘all exactly the same, like the people who live in them.’ Two different worlds just a short ride apart on the newly built tube.

 

london-underground-1910-granger

 

Harry has succeeded in crossing the line. We are not told how – there are no back stories – but he has made a bid for freedom, not following his father to make more money in the city,  but going instead to art school. There a fellow student provides an entrée into the cerebral urban élite, where he can temporarily forget the Richstead drawing rooms, in which people (mostly women) sit upright in their chairs and talk of servants, and shops and the price of mutton; he can exchange them for the deep armchairs of Bloomsbury, where conversation leaps from poetry to architecture to life and love and truth. These are the Lawrences, Camilla and Katharine, their father and (male) friends. In the Lawrence circle they address each other by their Christian names, and men and women talk freely together and between themselves (so convincing is the conversation between the two sisters on married love that one can only imagine that Woolf’s practice of listening to women extended to eavesdropping). Harry’s attempts to raise Richstead conversation to that of Bloomsbury has little success even with the compliant Gwen, who is excited by it but confused – they were talking ‘like people talked in books’.

 

'Conversation Piece' by Vanessa Bell 1912. University of Hull
‘Conversation Piece’ by Vanessa Bell 1912. University of Hull

 

Gwen is the youngest of the four Garland girls, each in their way, carefully drawn representative types of Edwardian English womanhood. Ethel, the eldest, is thirty-seven, unmarried and doomed to remain so, sweet, patient and ‘curiously unintelligent’, Janet, ‘one of those female “sports” born into so many families in the eighties’ – presumably ‘sport’ is code for lesbian – who, had she been born in Kensington rather than Richstead, might have been a militant suffragette. May reads library novels, has sturdy legs, and grumbles to herself that ‘these Jews [the Davises] should come and dump themselves down at Richstead and in her set’, before swiftly turning her thoughts as to what to wear should young Mr Davis come to visit (Leonard Woolf knows how girls think!). Totally at home in ‘her set’, she wants nothing more than to marry the local vicar, the wonderfully comic Mr Macausland, who ‘had taken a bad third-class degree at Cambridge’, and whose ‘intellectual claims rested upon his lectures on Browning and a three weeks’ personally conducted tour in Italy.’ The garden party master-minded by the vicar in aid of ‘The Poor Dear Things’ is a keenly observed and wonderfully witty set piece.

Incidentally,  but interestingly, Leonard Woolf also says critically of Mr Macausland that he had ‘one manner for men and another for women’: how very modern, and how shocked he would be to find that one hundred years on, there are still men in England of whom the same could be said. And for all its enlightened attitudes Bloomsbury is not without its comedy characters with decidedly old-fashioned attitudes: Arthur Woodhouse with ‘his fat, round little body and his little, round, fat mind’, happy ‘when alone between the sheets, to recognise how susceptible he was and how virile, and still happier to believe that other people, including women, recognised it’. And the once handsome ‘Lion’ Wilton, who thirty years earlier would have young women falling at his feet: ‘Hockey and women’s suffrage had, however, spoilt his market, which was still fairly large among married and older women who have not entirely lost their love of submission and of being ill-treated by the male.’

The youngest and the prettiest, Gwen is also the most vulnerable of the Garland sisters, because she doesn’t protect herself in the same way behind the conventions of her class and her ‘set’. She is an easy catch for Harry, who plays with her, more cruelly perhaps than he realises. He is attracted by the idea of educating her, moulding her, and she is a more than willing pupil, on who whom to try out the lessons he is learning from his new friends in Bloomsbury. Virginia, when Leonard first kissed her, had felt ‘like a rock’. Camilla, whom Harry loves, is friendly but physically cold (her sister, Katharine, by contrast is a creature of ‘flesh and blood’ and it is she Harry pictures across the marital breakfast table – brazenly autobiographical?). Gwen, whom he doesn’t love, is hotly responsive. A more experienced teacher might have foreseen the consequences.

His struggle to define and determine his individuality mirrors Leonard’s, but ultimately fails when, unlike Leonard, he gives way to the force of sexual desire. Having eaten of the apple, Harry Davis must say goodbye to the Paradise of Bloomsbury, and spend the rest of his days in a dreary corner of suburban Richstead.

 

 

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‘Hampstead Garden Suburb from Willifield Way’ c 1914 by William Ratcliffe. Tate Britain

 

 

 

 

 

 

Persephone Book No 42: The Blank Wall by Elisabeth Sanxay Holding

Unusually for a Persephone book, the plot of The Blank Wall turns on murder and blackmail. ‘…the top suspense writer of them all’, wrote Raymond Chandler of Elisabeth Sanxay-Holding, a dream puff for her publishers, in what is generally considered to have been a golden age for crime fiction. ‘Her characters are wonderful’, he added, ‘and she has a sort of inner calm which I find attractive’ – not such good copy for the dust cover, but subtle and perceptive. As a thriller, The Blank Wall is a gripping page-turner, but I found myself torn between racing to the end, and lingering over the eccentric, and unexpected charms of the main players, and the silent  musings of Lucia.

It is war-time and Lucia Holley is the thirty-eight year-old wife of Tom, away fighting in the Pacific, and mother of fifteen year old, straight-laced, David, and the wayward Beatrice, seventeen going on eighteen, whose reckless affair with Ted Darby, a twice-married dealer in obscene pictures, triggers a chain of events that turns Lucia’s life upside down.

 

 

reckless moment poster

 

Elisabeth Sanxay-Holding wrote eighteen crime novels as well as short stories in the genre, of which several were turned into films, The Blank Wall, being filmed twice, first as The Reckless Moment in 1949, starring James Mason and Joan Bennett, and later as The Deep End in 2001, starring Goran Visnijc and Tilda Swinton. Both films made significant changes to the plot (although, in the extracts I have seen, the 1949 version sticks closely to S-H’s dialogue, proving just how good an ear she had), the 2001 version shifting the love interest from a heterosexual to a homosexual liaison, and both sidelining the characters of Lucia’s (Margaret in The Deep End) elderly fatherly and her tireless maid, and, most radically, changing the period.

With husbands merely away working, for finite periods of time, on the end of telephones, with no threat of widowhood, or shortages of food, or petrol, or friends, Lucia’s celluloid incarnations have not been toughened as she has.  Lucia Holley of The Blank Wall has been formed by the war. For three years she has struggled to hold family and home together, in a rented house, in a strange village.

 

V-mail 2

 

Her contact with Tom via V-mail, the forces’ post, is erratic on his side, nightly on hers, but ever less substantial. Her gentle and gentlemanly English father is kind but ineffectual. His one show of manliness has dreadful consequences, of which he remains in blissful ignorance: it is he, not Bee as in The Reckless Moment, or her brother as in The Deep End, who, inadvertently causes the death of Ted Darby (not too many spoilers, if I can help it!). of whom, most importantly, he knows nothing other than that his daughter disapproves of him.

Lucia discovers the body, realises what has happened, hides the body, tells no-one. What else can she do? ‘She had the resourcefulness of the mother, the domestic woman, accustomed to emergencies … For years she had been the person who was responsible in an emergency.’ Ensuring that her daughter break off an unsuitable relationship, concealing a corpse, protecting her father – all in a day’s work for a wartime wife, along with queuing for the week’s rations, struggling home with heavy bags, and digging her Victory garden.  And yet Lucia ‘had always been faintly disappointed in herself … most of all disappointed in herself as a mother.’  And her life is about to get far more complicated with the arrival of Nagle, a  blackmailer and his Irish sidekick, Martin Donnelly, holding a stack of indiscreet letters from Beatrice to Ted.

The task of protecting her family will test her courage and resourcefulness to the limit, and will be doubly difficult for having to be kept the secret from them: from Bee, who sees herself as a modern young woman, unappreciative of Lucia’s efforts to keep her children fed and tidy, and ignorant of the risks she is taking to protect her (Bee’s) reputation, who despises her mother’s life for its dullness and lack of adventure; from her father whose unwavering sense of honesty would drive him straight to the police; and from her husband to whom she sends brief notes on the dullness of life – there is something gently humorous in the stark contrast between the astonishing drama facing Lucia and the unreality of  her tender mendacious V-mails (desperate for something to write, she resorts on one occasion to retrieving an old rejected draft from the waste paper-basket). While she guards them, her children are anxious to protect their mother from the charms of Donnelly, the elegant and mysterious lothario, who has taken to visiting them.   What a tangled web we weave …

The rock in the household is Sybil, the coloured (in 1940s American speak) help. Sybil is understanding, and brave and reticent. She has worked for Lucia for eight years, covering up for her employer’s failings as a housekeeper, and as a gardener, even lending her money, for Lucia is absent-minded, and careless, and not a little self-absorbed.

 

Vixtory garden

 

Lucia loves and trusts Sybil but she knows nothing about her, doesn’t know that she is married, that she lost a baby, that her husband has been in prison for eighteen years for accidentally killing a man – ironically mirroring the killing of Ted Darby for which none of the Harper family will be punished. ‘Maybe when he gets out,’ says Lucia, ‘you can take a trip.’  Lucia really doesn’t understand a thing about Sybil’s life but she shares her belief, ‘that life was incalculable, and that the only shield against injustice was courage.’

Justice does not necessarily equate with the law. Old Mr Harper’s appraisal of crime fiction is accurate in the case of The Blank Wall, ‘They generally show the murdered person as someone you can’t waste any pity on’. Our sympathies are all with Lucia, an accessory after the fact if ever there was one, and with Donnelly, the compassionate blackmailer, the generous black-marketeer, the honest thief. We like him for his soft heart, for his imaginative, practical giving – ham, beef, a reliable laundry service (did any other reader mistake the young man introducing himself as ‘Regal Snowdrop’ for another member of the criminal fraternity, but with an unusual name?).

We love Lucia for her self-deprecating reflections, for her wistful recollections of her children’s early years, for her sense of priorities – she delays meeting Donnelly’s vicious partner not from fear, but in order to read her teenage son’s entry for a short story competition. We love her, when she interrupts plans for disposing of a second body to reprimand Donnelly for his sleeping pill habit. We love her for her sense of the ridiculous, ‘I’m just going to take a little drive with a blackmailer’, for ensuring that she always dresses appropriately whatever the circumstances  –  has any Persephone heroine ever changed outfits quite so often?

 

1940s-spring-frocks-parade

 

Most of we love her for her fierce dedication to her family, a dedication that has evolved over the years and is tested to its limits, and her capacity to accept the life that she has been given, to put a good face on things, to hide her tears, to know that honesty may not always be the best policy, in small things, and sometimes in big ones. A most unusual Persephone war-time heroine, but with much in common with her British ‘sisters’.