Her hair came undone somehow in the water. And how it spread out. It was a flame. It was something significant fanning, framing her beautiful, wonderful face blue because of the cold. Yes, it was that time of the year. It was if a lotus flower had bloomed but with no roots tapping into the chilled earth, no stem sprouting from beneath the ground. There would be no myriads of green feasts of leaves either. From my perspective nothing escaped Woolf’s passionate all-seeing, all-knowing eyes.
She had her liberties, and her meditations on nature calmed her nerves. Her platelets, mitochondria and bilateral symmetry no more.
Only the grit, the brick walls, the mysterious interiors of the mansions of her work remained. Left behind. Granite. Diaries left behind for apprentices. Her intuition, breath and vitality has left this damned for an eternity to hell corpse. What does she have to do with the parenting skills of my distant manic-depressive father and my elegant and cold mother? My suicidal illness that needed the rooms of a mansion. No daughters and sons had Woolf. Only significant others with whom she journeyed inwards extraordinarily.
River Ouse captivated me. Woolf’s love letters to Vita. The love story of Woolf and Sackville-West. I am a woman who writes. Virginia Woolf was a woman who was a wife, a lover and woman who wrote. My ordinary madness became a thing of beauty to me. Me an empty vessel who found bright stars in women, in their husbands and children, in flowers in a vase, in the fabric of the universe at night. I am Orlando. I am Lady Lazarus. I have lived vicariously through Hiroshima, Jean Rhys the demimonde and artist’s model and the feminist Sylvia Plath’s cutting-edged authentic words signalling warning, communicating threads of wisdom, and protest poetry.
I needed to understand the London scene, Ted Hughes, Assia Wevill, and the child from that union, Shura. I’m afraid of fabricating the truth.
I’m afraid of modernism because it’s not modernism that is taking over the world. It’s writing. It’s female writing. The interpretations of an inner life, innerness, marriage, creativity and madness. Vita Sackville-West and Virginia Woolf sitting in a tree. K-i-s-s-i-n-g.
One woman says to the other woman, ‘Don’t ‘look’ at me. Look ‘at’ me’.
The other woman turns to face her companion and says to her, ‘Our intimacy is something special. Your skin is a fabric I could drown in.
I can do without religion but I cannot do without you. You have given me the highest form of art, and that is inspiration. How can I ever repay you?’
Perhaps what follows is some of what Virginia Woolf wrote in a love letter to her Vita Sackville-West.
Come to me you elegant creature with all of the hopes that you have for yourself. Your goals have become mine. Your dreams my own.
Beautiful, elegant Vita. My Orlando. When I read your work, I am filled with a clarity of vision, astute perfection, and I feel as if I am your sole possession to have, to have, to have. Can I borrow some of your inhibitory nature, your anticipatory nostalgia, your poetic descriptions, your sky, and the sky in your eyes, your flowers, the flowers that you meditate upon in your garden, your compass that navigates you across the passages of London and Europe?
And I want to share something else with you if you will let me. I have come to care very deeply about you. Understand this. Understand that I don’t want to own you, claim you for my own as I am sure others have wanted to do in the past, and I do not want to possess you, and enter your world as a lover and leave as an interloper. When we are together like this, you reading my words (because there are parts of me that want to be completely honest with you about how safe I feel with the charming and seductive you). When we sit together there is still a veil of privacy, an idea of privacy on my part.
I am sure the same goes for you too. When I’m with you I’m oblivious to everything around me. When we are apart all I can think of is Vita.
What is Vita doing? Planting, gardening, writing, letter-writing (is she composing one to me), planning her day ahead, is Vita making lists, running errands, opening a letter (from me, from me). Is Vita smiling, is Vita laughing, and who is making my Vita smile, my Vita laugh? If it is not me, my duty to make you smile I feel a slight hysteria, overcome with emotion and I feel like an empty biblical vessel.
I feel useless because how can I be of use to anyone if I, the authentic me is not sincerely, utterly devoted to my Vita. It is all about significant you. There is no one else above you. I am utterly devoted to you. You have the key to my heart. Once opened you will find a Pandora’s Box but I must have secrets. Don’t all female writers allow themselves that latitude at least? I must keep something for myself. Something that I can go to when I begin to become afraid that you will be spirited away from me, of our love waning, you withering Vita and passing into indifference, being erased, never returning to the story of us?
What would I do if you weren’t in my world anymore? You, my most rare paradise, my heaven. Smoking cigarette after cigarette, stockinged feet in your slippers, your hair wild, loose, unkempt in my hands, in my hands and that is when I feel at my most magical. The real and the imagined becomes a twisted union, tantalising revolution and although it fades away in the morning it is still there in memory and all I can think about is when we will be able to meet here again. I watch you put your bathrobe on, as you brush the tangles out of your fashionably cut hair my darling, and you turn around watching me watching you and you smile.
My hand caresses the warmth that the physical you left behind on the sheets. I inhale your expensive perfume. And I come to the slow realisation that society will be the death of us. They will never accept us. You make me forget. I like that. You make me forget about Vanessa’s progeny. I like that. You make me forget about my secrets. I like that. You make me forget about my childhood. I like that. You make me forget about being molested by my two half-brothers when I was a child Vita. I like that most of all. You are so right for me woman.
Vita, you’re my gravity, my aorta, and I love how you acknowledge complicated me, my self-punishment, self-imposed exile, and childlike innocence. I love you and Leonard equally and if I were to lose you both, and not live up to both of your expectations then that would be the death of me. You’re an event. When the silence, in my room becomes unquiet, too much for me to endure, and I become self-conscious of it, self-conscious of a writer’s rituals, aware of self-pity I must continue to write. You’ve become my obsession and I can think of no one else’s company that I want to be in. As crazy as it sounds when I’m with you I can feel electricity humming in my bones.
Our connection is an infinite one. I find your poetry, your humility, your abandonment, your inhibitory current stunning, Vita. You are the second love of my life. You are all the dimensions of my world. I find you clever, so artistic, your work is electric, so electrifying, so imaginative, and so artful and you’ve tamed drowning me, Vita. I’ve always been curious of married life. I thought I would be surround by the walls of a prison if I ever found someone to propose to me, and then I married, became a wife but did not have those children and I discovered how far from the truth that was.
Marriage frees you in a sense in so many wonderful and illuminating ways. I wanted Leonard. I wanted love but not necessarily a husband because I didn’t think that love came with having a husband. Love comes with having a likeminded companion. You, Vita, are that likeminded companion. You come with measures of love, with passion, intelligence, you machine. Observe the adjustments in my personality carefully whenever I am with you, study, and evaluate my dying in your arms. Learn my half-truths and white lies as I do yours Vita. I only have to hear your voice and I thrive. I achieve a new intelligence, a new acting, a new materialism, and a new language in that dry season.
It should be as obvious to you now as it is to me that I am utterly besotted, smitten by you. I am in love with you. Let’s set up house together. Get away together if that’s impossible. And when I am without you I am a winter guest in an ice storm. I must brave the cold somehow, mustn’t I dearest? Well, I’ll put on a coat, a hat, and a scarf and my walking shoes, that’s brought a smile to my face. I tell myself that soon we will be together again like this.
I want to tell you that there is something luxurious and soothing about your skin. My Vita. I am at your mercy. Your perfume fills my head. And when I begin to live vicariously through you, self-consciously, or consciously my sadness has a complex wavelength.
Brutal accomplishments threading my humanity. I have longed for them my whole life. The gratitude I have for you being a part of my life has become educational.
And so Virginia returned to the book she was dedicating to the woman in her life who had made her feel extraordinarily loved, and blessed.
They did not think of the extraordinary consequences of the gift of their relationship. They did not think. Period. They lived for love like other women did for being regarded as sex objects, parties, men, the London scene and flowers. Instead they are transformed. The lovers whisper to themselves. They don’t want to part. The grass was a dream.
And they were both brides blushing, as if they were both rushing to the get to the end of adolescence, the English summer weather, its immediacy of sustaining both women’s ideas of silence in the complexity of detachment.
Here in the countryside, shielded by multitudes of simplistic chores, sharing the routine of waking up to their literary work, neither woman could untangle herself from their ‘marriage’. These elegant English heroines, English novelists whose writings were hypnotic were oblivious to reality, the outside world, and men were rendered insignificant, invisible. Men became others and humanity, the female of the species existed in a time and space that became known as the unknown, as the future of which was nearly upon them but not quite there yet.
And now I add my own voice again to the story. It is not Woolf’s voice. It is not Sackville-West’s voice.
After the dust, the cunning sexual disclosure, the impulsivity of the lesbian love affair between Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West no sentence could shame the both of them, their writing process, their divine prowess. Woolf gave Sackville-West authority over her physical body, and in return Sackville-West did the same. Gaps, flashbacks, embarrassing regret should come with the territory of an affair that comes to an end. The silence is textured with what is not being said, the acute longing, and the despair of loneliness, of a seductive theory identifying the beginning of this lifelong romance, the mutual admiration committee between these two gifted English women.
I know what it is to suffer. To live with the face of enduring love shining upon my frozen countenance, love realigning my psychological frame, my sexual pace. Your power stifles me, a thing. And a woman alone. At first it’s a glance framing reality, a sensual anticipation and so the landscape’s feast becomes symbolic of what will come after this inconvenient love. Photographs survive. Historical events, knowledge, actors but not manic depressives, the mentally ill, people who have an absence of order in their lives.
Already she had a plan while writing in her diary Virginia, ‘I know I’ll never love this way again.’ And then the River Ouse was upon her like a lake. And there it was. She wanted to die. She wanted to waste away. Find a wilderness of her own making. She wanted to beg to the gods. The unwritten freedom which had been her church, and like a religion to her had left her angelic perspective. The dead end the shortcut to a hellish parade, the seducer. The hook of injustice was in her heart. She lived (a half-life that was but a pale gesture) but in death she lives extraordinarily.
