Love Letters Read online

  Letter from Vita to Harold

  Long Barn, Sevenoaks

  19 December

  I simply adore Virginia Woolf, and so would you. You would fall quite flat before her charm and personality. It was a good party. They asked a lot about your Tennyson. Mrs Woolf is so simple: she does give the impression of something big. She is utterly unaffected: there is no outward adornments – she dresses quite atrociously. At first you think she is plain; then a sort of spiritual beauty imposes itself on you, and you find a fascination in watching her. She was smarter last night; that is to say, the woollen orange stockings were replaced by yellow silk ones, but she still wore the pumps. She is both detached and human, silent till she wants to say something, and then says it supremely well. She is quite old. I’ve rarely taken such a fancy to anyone, and I think she likes me. At least, she’s asked me to Richmond where she lives. Darling, I have quite lost my heart.

  1923

  Letter from Virginia

  Hogarth House, Surrey

  3 January

  Dear Mrs Nicolson,

  I should never have dared to dun you if I had known the magnificence of the book.fn1 Really, I am ashamed, and would like to say that copies of all my books are at your service if you raise a finger – but they look stout and sloppy and shabby. There is nothing I enjoy more than family histories, so I am falling upon Knole the first moment I get […]

  I wonder if you would come and dine with us? We don’t dine so much as picnic, as the Press has got into the larder and into the dining room, and we never dress.

  I would look up a train and give you directions if you can come, as I hope.

  Yours very sincerely,

  Virginia Woolf

  Letter from Vita to Harold

  182 Ebury Street, London

  10 January

  Tomorrow I dine with my darling Mrs Woolf at Richmond […] I love Mrs Woolf with a sick passion. So will you. In fact I don’t think I will let you know her.

  Virginia’s Diary

  19 February

  We had a surprise visit from the Nicolsons. She is a pronounced Sapphist, and may, thinks Ethel Sands, have an eye on me, old though I am. Snob as I am, I trace her passions five hundred years back, and they become romantic to me, like old yellow wine. Harold is simple downright bluff; wears short black coat and check trousers; wishes to be a writer, but is not, I’m told and can believe, adapted by nature. Soul, you see, is framing all these judgements, and saying, this is not my liking, this is second rate, this vulgar; this nice, sincere, and so on. My soul diminished, alas, as the evening wore on.

  Vita’s Diary

  22 February

  Dined with Virginia at Richmond. She is as delicious as ever. How right she is when she says that love makes everyone a bore, but the excitement of life lies in ‘the little moves’ nearer to people. But perhaps she feels this because she is an experimentalist in humanity, and has no grande passion in her life.

  Virginia’s Diary

  17 March

  46 [Gordon Square] has been very pleasant to me this winter. Two nights ago the Nicolsons dined there. Exposed to electric light eggs show dark patches. I mean, we judged them both incurably stupid. He is bluff, but oh so obvious; she, Duncanfn2 thought, took the cue from him, and had nothing free to say. There was Lytton,fn3 supple and subtle as an old leather glove, to emphasise their stiffness. It was a rocky steep evening.

  Vita’s Diary

  19 March

  Lunched with Virginia in Tavistock Square, where she has just arrived. The first time that I have been alone with her for long. Went on to see Mama, my head swimming with Virginia.

  Letter from Vita

  182 Ebury Street

  26 March

  Dear Mrs Woolf

  I write this tonight, because I think you said you were going to Spain on the 27th and I want it to catch you before you go. The PEN club committee are very anxious for you to join the club, and at their request I proposed you, – now will you be nice and let them make you a member? For my sake if for no other reason. It is only a guinea a year, and they would be so pleased. They dine once a month; it is quite amusing. Do, please, and come to the May dinner when they are entertaining distinguished foreign writers. There was a little shout of excitement from the Committee about you, and [John] Galsworthyfn4 (so to speak) got up and made a curtsey.

  I hope you will have fun in Spain. It is the best country I know. Please let me know when you come back, as I do want you both to come and stay at Long Barn, and come up to Knole with me. And I shan’t know when you are back unless you tell me.

  Yours very sincerely

  Vita Nicolson

  Letter from Virginia

  Hotel Ingles, Madrid

  30 March

  Dear Mrs Nicolson,

  (But I wish you could be induced to call me Virginia.) I got your letter as we left Richmond. I am much flattered that the PEN should ask me to become a member.

  I would do so with pleasure, except that I don’t know what being a member means. Does it commit one to make speeches, or to come regularly, or to read papers or what? Living so far out, dinners are apt to be difficult, and I can’t speak.

  Letter from Vita

  Long Barn, Sevenoaks

  8 April

  My dear Virginia

  (You see I don’t take much inducing. Could you be induced likewise, do you think?)

  It is nice of you to say you will join the PEN club provided you don’t have to make speeches. I can guarantee that, as by one of the club rules they are forbidden. The most you ever get is a statement from the chairman. Nor need you go to any dinners unless you want to. Nor does anyone read papers. You just go to a dinner when the spirit moves you, and take your chance of sitting next to Mr H. G. Wells or an obscure and spotty young journalist.

  I don’t suppose this letter will ever reach you. It always seems to be quite incredible anyway that any letter should ever reach its destination. But I seem to remember that you have already said – or, rather, written – all that there is to be said about letters. So I won’t compete.

  I am envying you Spain more than I can say. I wish I were with you – But the lady’s smocks are very nice, along the hedges, and my tulips are coming out.

  Yours very sincerely

  Vita Nicolson

  [Written in pencil] This paper is like blotting paper to write on in ink.

  Letter from Virginia

  Murcia, Spain

  15 April

  Dear Mrs Nicolson

  The secretary of the PEN club has written to me to say that I have been elected a member. Very regretfully I have had to decline – since I see from the club papers that it is wholly a dining club, and my experience is that I can’t, living at Richmond, belong to dining clubs. I’ve tried two dining clubs, with complete disaster. But I’m very sorry, as I should like to know the members, and see you also.

  But this last I hope can be managed in other ways.

  1924

  There was then a hiatus in their correspondence, but when in March 1924 Virginia and her husband Leonard moved to Bloomsbury’s Tavistock Square, Vita was among their first visitors. Virginia invited her to publish a book with the Woolfs’ Hogarth Press. In response, Vita wrote Seducers in Ecuador while on her walking tour of the Dolomites with her husband, Harold Nicolson.

  Virginia’s Diary

  5 July

  Just back, not from the 1917 Club, but from Knole, where indeed I was invited to lunch alone with his Lordship. His Lordship lives in the kernel of a vast nut. You perambulate miles of galleries; skip endless treasures – chairs that Shakespeare might have sat on – tapestries, pictures, floors made of the halves of oaks; and penetrate at length to a round shiny table with a cover laid for one. […] But the extremities and indeed the inward parts are gone dead. Ropes fence off half the rooms; the chairs and the pictures look preserved; life has left them. Not for a hundred years have the retainers sat down to dinner in the great hall. Then there
is Mary Stuart’s altar, where she prayed before execution. ‘An ancestor of ours took her the death warrant,’ said Vita. All these ancestors and centuries, and silver and gold, have bred a perfect body. She is stag like, or race horse like, save for the face, which pouts, and has no very sharp brain. But as a body hers is perfection. So many rare and curious objects hit one’s brain like pellets which perhaps unfold later. But it’s the breeding of Vita’s that I took away with me as an impression, carrying her and Knole in my eye as I travelled up with the lower middle classes, through slums. There is Knole, capable of housing all the desperate poor of Judd Street, and with only that one solitary earl in the kernel.

  Letter from Vita

  Tre Croci, Cadore, Italy

  16 July

  I hope that no one has ever yet, or ever will, throw down a glove I was not ready to pick up. You asked me to write a story for you. On the peaks of mountains, and beside green lakes, I am writing it for you. I shut my eyes to the blue of gentians, to the coral of androsace; I shut my ears to the brawling rivers; I shut my nose to the scent of pines; I concentrate on my story. Perhaps you will be the Polite Publisher, and I shall get my story back – ‘The Hogarth Press regrets that the accompanying manuscript,’ etc. – or whatever your formula may be. Still, I shall remain without resentment. The peaks and the green lakes and the challenge will have made it worthwhile, and to you alone shall it be dedicated. But of course the real challenge wasn’t the story (which was after all merely a ‘commercial proposition’), but the letter. You said I wrote letters of impersonal frigidity. Well, it is difficult, perhaps, to do otherwise, in a country where two rocky peaks of uncompromising majesty soar into the sky immediately outside one’s window, and where an amphitheatre of mountains encloses one’s horizons and one’s footsteps. Today I climbed up to the eternal snows, and there found bright yellow poppies braving alike the glacier and the storm; and was ashamed before their courage. Consequently, you see, one is made to feel extremely impersonal and extremely insignificant. I can’t tell you how many Dolomitic miles and altitudes I have by now in my legs. I feel as though all intellect has been swallowed up into sheer physical energy and well-being. This is how one ought to feel, I am convinced. I contemplate young mountaineers hung with ropes and ice-axes, and think that they alone have understood how to live life – Will you ever play truant to Bloomsbury and culture, I wonder, and come travelling with me? No, of course you won’t. I told you once I would rather go to Spain with you than anyone, and you looked confused, and I felt I had made a gaffe – been too personal, in fact – but still the statement remains a true one, and I shan’t be really satisfied till I have enticed you away. Will you come next year to the place where the gipsies of all nations make an annual pilgrimage to some Madonna or other? I forget its name. But it is a place somewhere near the Basque provinces, that I have always wanted to go to, and next year I AM GOING. I think you had much better come too. Look on it, if you like, as copy, – as I believe you look upon everything, human relationships included. Oh yes, you like people through the brain better than through the heart, – forgive me if I am wrong. Of course there must be exceptions; there always are. But generally speaking […]

  And then, I don’t believe one ever knows people in their own surroundings; one only knows them away, divorced from all the little strings and cobwebs of habit. Long Barn, Knole, Richmond, and Bloomsbury. All too familiar and entrapping. Either I am at home, and you are strange; or you are at home, and I am strange; so neither is the real essential person, and confusion results. But in the Basque provinces, among a horde of zingaros, we should both be equally strange and equally real.

  On the whole, I think you had much better make up your mind to take a holiday and come.

  Letter from Virginia

  Monk’s House, Lewes

  19 August

  Have you come back, and have you finished your book – when will you let us have it? Here I am, being a nuisance with all these questions.

  I enjoyed your intimate letter from the Dolomites. It gave me a great deal of pain – which is I’ve no doubt the first stage of intimacy – no friends, no heart, only an indifferent head. Never mind: I enjoyed your abuse very much […]

  But I will not go on else I should write you a really intimate letter, and then you would dislike me, more, even more, than you do.

  But please let me know about the book.

  Letter from Vita

  Long Barn

  22 August

  Aren’t you a pig, to make me feel like one? I have searched my brain to remember what on earth in my letter could have given you ‘a great deal of pain’. Or was it just one of your phrases, poked at me? Anyhow, that wasn’t my intention, as you probably know. Do you ever mean what you say, or say what you mean? Or do you just enjoy baffling the people who try to creep a little nearer?

  My story I fear is but a crazy affair. If you gave me a severe date by which it must reach you, typed and tidy, I should obey, being very tractable. If you say you must have it next week I will sit up all night and finish it. If you say ‘any time will do’ I shall continue to glance at it disgustedly once a day and shove it back into its drawer with no word added. Three-quarters of it exist at present and your letter gave it a fillip. Please issue an irrevocable command.

  ‘Dislike you even more.’ Dear Virginia (said she, putting her cards on the table), you know very well that I like you a fabulous lot; and any of my friends could tell you that. But I expect you are blasé about people liking you, – no you aren’t, though, – I take that back.

  I nearly came to see you last Sunday, as I was coming back from my mother at Brighton, but I thought you mightn’t like it. And it was such a horrible day of gale and rain.

  Now I had better go on with that story.

  Letter from Virginia

  Monk’s House

  26 August

  My position about your story is this: if you could let us have it by Sept. 14th, we should make an effort to bring it out this autumn; if later, it is highly improbable that we could bring it out before early next year […]

  But really and truly you did say – I can’t remember exactly what, but to the effect that I made copy out of all my friends, and cared with the head, not with the heart. As I say, I forget; and so we’ll consider it cancelled.

  Vita spent the night of 13 September with Virginia and Leonard, her first visit to Monk’s House. She brought the manuscript of her story, Seducers in Ecuador.

  Virginia’s Diary

  15 September

  Vita was here for Sunday, gliding down the village in her large new blue Austin car, which she manages consummately. She was dressed in ringed yellow jersey, and large hat, and had a dressing case all full of silver and nightgowns wrapped in tissue. Nelly [Boxall]fn1 said ‘If only she weren’t an honourable!’ and couldn’t take her hot water. But I like her being honourable, and she is it; a perfect lady, with all the dash and courage of the aristocracy, and less of its childishness than I expected. She is like an over ripe grape in features, moustached, pouting, will be a little heavy; meanwhile, she strides on fine legs,fn2 in a well cut skirt, and though embarrassing at breakfast, has a manly good sense and simplicity about her which both L. and I find satisfactory. Oh yes, I like her; could tack her on to my equipage for all time; and suppose if life allowed, this might be a friendship of a sort. [She] took us to Charlestonfn3 – and how one’s world spins round – it looked all very grey and shabby and loosely cut in the light of her presence. As for Monk’s House, it became a ruined barn, and we picnicking in the rubbish heap.

  Letter from Virginia

  Monk’s House

  15 September

  I like the story very very much – in fact, I began reading it after you left, was interrupted by Clive, went for a walk, thinking of it all the time, and came back and finished it, being full of a particular kind of interest which I daresay has something to do with its being the sort of thing I should like to write myself. I don’t kno
w whether this fact should make you discount my praises, but I’m certain that you have done something much more interesting (to me at least) than you’ve yet done. It is not, of course, altogether thrust through; I think it could be tightened up, aimed straighter, but there is nothing to spoil it in this. This is all quite sincere, though not well expressed.

  I am very glad we are going to publish it, and extremely proud and indeed touched, with my childlike dazzled affection for you, that you should dedicate it to me.

  Letter from Vita

  Long Barn

  17 September

  I have walked on air all day since getting your letter. I am more pleased than I can tell you at your approval, and if I can tighten I will, – I felt myself that it needed this. Any suggestion would be welcomed?

  How charming of you to sit on the millstones and say nice things. Altogether after reading your letter I felt like a stroked cat. You see, I appreciate the fact that neither of you are easy-going critics […] whether of work or persons.

  Letter from Virginia

  52 Tavistock Square, London

  4 October

  We are just back; what did I find on the drawing room table, but a letter from which (to justify myself and utterly shame you) I make this quotation:

  ‘Look on it, if you like, as copy, – I believe you look upon everything, human relationships included. Oh yes, you like people through the brain, rather than through the heart’ etc.: So there. Come and be forgiven. Seducers in Ecuador looks very pretty, rather like a lady bird. The title however slightly alarms the old gentlemen in Bumpuses.