Letter 6 - Letters from London
If his time in London has had a single theme, it seems to him it is the bomb.
For those catching up, the story thus far: Letters 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5. And for first timers, perhaps begin with the bibliomancy. CW: suicide discussion
“Have you learned about modernity yet,” he asks a student during a conference. The conference had led up to it.
“No,” they reply. “Not yet.”
“Perhaps start with some Paul Fussell,” he says. He looks around his borrowed office at Queen Mary but it’s all romantic poetry, from the generous person who let him use it. He tries to recall what he found useful of what he read back in the 1980s when he was a student at Wesleyan in the late Professor Hope Weissman’s class Modernity, Gender and War. “The brief summary of the idea as I remember it was that the industrialization of war during World War I in Europe had removed war’s ability to act as a ritual for the proving of manhood, and required women to enter the workforce in roles they hadn’t been welcome in previously, precipitating a crisis in gender roles within the culture.” He hasn’t addressed the idea in a long time, himself. He wonders if it is still being taught. His reaction back then was that a relationship to gender like the one that existed before the crisis of modernity seemed entirely too fragile for war or peace for that matter.
The last meetings of the term can range quite widely, he has found, wherever he is teaching. As the he goes to his last class, as he goes on his last field trip—Stonehenge and Avebury—he prepares a set of prompts for his students as to use as they consider the end of the program, to help them write about it but also to help them just think through it. So much of the value at the end of any class becomes clear when you ask students, What did you learn? For some reason, the act of answering a question or asking it has a peculiar animating power, and answers you didn’t know you had come forward. So he tries his prompts out on himself.
What questions about London history came up as you learned to live in London? How did those questions find you and where did they lead you? What answers meant the most to you? What have you learned about the history of where you lived and studied by walking around the neighborhoods or even just walking the campus? How has this changed you in relationship to what you are reading and learning about London? What writers and texts have you found in London, through classes or on your own-- that have become important to you?
What has changed of your sense of any favorite writers you had from being here? What spaces have meant the most to you? What did you think London was before you came and what did you learn about it after all your time here? If you made a map of the city for a friend who was coming to visit, where would you send them? If you made a map of the city to remind yourself of your own experiences, where would you send yourself?
If you made another map of where you haven’t yet been but want to go—a map of longing, then, for future travel—what would be there? What are the places you didn’t even knew to look for that you want to go to now? And looking back over this, what was the theme or what were the themes that emerged for you?
Some of his answers as to themes at the end: The bombing of London, and then later, of Gaza. Virginia Woolf. Her family of anti-war pacifists and conscientious objectors. The idea of the enchanted woods you escape to in order to return to yourself, if you can—the play As You Like It, seen at the Globe that fall, from which emerged the young Prince Orlando, one of the inspirations for Woolf’s Orlando.
*
If his time in London has had a single theme, it seems to him it is the bomb. Or really, how to live in a world that has bombs? From the first taxi ride, when he learned the Brutalist apartment building he lives in was built on several blocks decimated by the Blitz, as most of London’s Brutalist buildings were, to the day he wandered into a church on Fleet Street and found it offered a basement tour of the layers of history revealed by a bomb—also during the Blitz—going all the way back to London’s Roman days as Londinium. He goes downtown to meet someone at the Barbican for a Carrie May Weems retrospective and afterward finds himself walkng along a Roman wall, revealed also by a bomb.
The ubiquitous image of Virginia Woolf, for example, her face leaning out of so many windows. Her apartments were also bombed during the Blitz. In Daniel Swift’s account of Woolf during the Blitz over at Five Dials, he finds this haunting detail:
On the day of her death, Virginia Woolf walked out to the river that runs near her house in Sussex and collected a stone from the bank. Putting the stone into the pocket of the fur coat she had retrieved from the flat at Mecklenburgh Square five months earlier, she drowned herself.
There is soon a study he is making inadvertently of the past and the Blitz, emerging really just in tour after tour of the city, or even in ordinary errands, and this crosses in his mind with the scenes out of Gaza. The horrific bombing campaign in Gaza, automated by an Israeli IDF AI named “The Gospel.” When he learns the number of Londoners displaced by the Blitz, he notes it is less than the number of Palestinians displaced in Gaza, by about 400,000. The work of two years of horror here done in two months there.
What new modernity crisis comes now?
London is one of the few major western capitals to have been bombed in modern times. A line from a friend’s Instastory about how Western countries wage war with bombs on other countries in other parts of the world. Bombs they have never experienced.
The bombing of London has been metabolized to a great deal, it seems to him. The history of the Blitz discussed in nearly every site he visits, at least in casual references if not more direct ones. From the first day he arrived, he has been aware of what it would be like to be bombed and to live with the aftermath in some way he never had to before.
*
He finds a Virginia Woolf essay written during the Blitz.
Here they are again. It is a queer experience, lying in the dark and listening to the zoom of a hornet which may at any moment sting you to death. It is a sound that interrupts cool and consecutive thinking about peace. Yet it is a sound – far more than prayers and anthems – that should compel one to think about peace. Unless we can think peace into existence we – not this one body in this one bed but millions of bodies yet to be born – will lie in the same darkness and hear the same death rattle overhead. Let us think what we can do to create the only efficient air-raid shelter while the guns on the hill go pop pop pop and the searchlights finger the clouds and now and then, sometimes close at hand, sometimes far away, a bomb drops.
There is something like disagreement among scholars as to whether the Blitz caused her suicide. She famously had loved to walk the city of London. After the bombing of her apartments, she and Leonard moved full time to Monk’s House, their home in Sussex, down along the path, he learns in his reading, that the bombers used to take as they flew their raids out of occupied Paris.
In her suicide note, she mentions that her madness has come over her again. She is afraid of being a further burden to Leonard. She had sewn blackout curtains for Monk’s House at the start of the war and he imagines her unfolding the black cloth, her mind ranging out across the sky, probing it as if looking for some way to seal it against the coming conflict.
The sound of sawing overhead has increased. All the searchlights are erect. They point at a spot exactly above this roof. At any moment a bomb may fall on this very room. One, two, three, four five, six . . . the seconds pass. The bomb did not fall. But during those seconds of suspense all thinking stopped. All feeling, save one dull dread, ceased. A nail fixed the whole being to one hard board. The emotion of fear and of hate is therefore sterile, unfertile. Directly that fear passes, the mind reaches out and instinctively revives itself by trying to create. Since the room is dark it can only create from memory. It reaches out to the memory of other Augusts – in Bayreuth, listening to Wagner; in Rome, walking over the Campagna; in London. Friends’ voices come back. Scraps of poetry return. Each of those thoughts, even in memory, was far more positive, reviving, healing the creative than the dull dread made of fear and hate. Therefore if we are to compensate the young man for the loss of his glory and of his gun, we must give him access to the creative feelings. We must make happiness. We must free him from the machine. We must bring him out of his prison into the open air. But what is the use of freeing the young Englishman if the young German and the young Italian remain slaves?
What a terrible grief she would feel to know that the opposite of what she longed for has come to pass. The horror she knew too well just a prelude to the horror that has come.
*
He had taken the students to Monk’s House, a field trip to the home of the great writer. He recalls being in Virginia Woolf’s writing cabin and peering at the italicized text under a portrait of her where a line stood out to him: Virginia added the room by the kitchen after the success of Orlando… He had just been in that room, where a guide had observed both that Woolf had not enjoyed writing there and mostly had written there in the garden shed. The room was a modern brick addition to a 16th century cottage, one of the few with doors that might have allowed the very tall Virginia and Leonard Woolf to enter and exit without bowing.
He went outside and a group of his students were sitting there. He mentioned this part to them about the room and the money and added that Orlando had been a bestseller.
“You don’t hear that so often,” one said. “Usually you hear they’re only successful after they die.”
Was this how literary success was conveyed to young people, he wondered, or was it just how the culture imagined it?
He offered them apples from a bag with him of apples and quince bought in the gift shop for a 1 pound donation. He gave them out except for the quince, which needed to be taken home and cooked in order to be any good. And it should be said, the apples were shockingly good. Maybe the best apples he’d ever had.
Monk’s House had about it a tremendous charm and style. Virginia’s sister, the artist Vanessa Bell, and her lover and friend, the artist Duncan Grant, had done much of the art and furnishings inside the home. It charmed him even when he learned from a guide that her home had functioned a little like a showcase for their works with Woolf’s famous friends.
The tour of the house that day was given by a series of women volunteers stationed in each of the rooms. Some needed more prompting than others but on the whole it was like visiting with the expert of each room. Many English historical sites were like this, he’d learn later. Did you ever burn out on Virginia Woolf at work, he wondered, as he left the first room and watched another group enter the room and the sequence begin again.
It was from one these guides that he’d learned that Leonard Woolf had hoped the Hogarth Press work would calm her down—this was before the war started—and it had, it seems. Laying out the text had calmed her nerves.
She’d taken her life shortly after moving full-time to the house. People had treated her as unpatriotic for committing suicide, a kind of violence after the violence. As if she owed it to them to live through the war and die from the war, possibly, if she could. But it seemed so clear to him. A nail fixed the whole being to one hard board, she’d written of waiting to discover whether the bomb was for you or not.
He feels he can see her in her coat, brought from her ruined home to this one, the cottage mugged by roses and apples out in Sussex. Headed out after she finished the note. The choice of the coat like the note you don’t write.
*
There is a figure he found on a walk home in early October that returns to him again and again as the season turns. It is like the spot on the wall a dance teacher will tell you to find so as to practice as you whirl in place. The spot that helps you keep your balance.
The night was Oct. 5th, the night of his event with Rebecca May Johnson for the new Daunt Books edition of Natalia Ginzburg’s novella, Valentino, translated by Avril Bardoni. He’d written the introduction, which was about learning what he could about Ginzburg’s life from her introductions, the ones she’d written for herself and the ones written for her.
He had never had a bookstore event in London before this, and so the night first opened for him like the box to a beautiful present: the Daunt Books store in Marylebone, the window beautifully set up with his books and Rebecca’s books, the new Ginzburg at the center. The store became in just a few moments as he walked from the entrance to the back for the event one of his favorite bookstores—the sort of bookstore that makes you feel as if all you can do is read. He knows he will feel a constant affection for Marigold Atkey, who organized the event, and her colleagues at the store as he will for the crowd of friendly Natalia-Ginzburg-loving people and the friends who came.
The conversation with Rebecca about post-war Italian literature and Ginzburg’s life, and how fascism shaped her life and her writing, her debut under a pen name so as to get around the laws that prevented Italian Jews during fascism from publishing. The talk centered on the novella, Valentino, a novella from the 1950s in Italy when there were so few contemporary queer characters in Italian literature that the two gender traitors in this novella loomed large. He enjoyed the conversation with Rebecca, also a fan of Ginzburg’s, and they’d each spoken of their favorite essays by her as well.
He invited a few friends to dinner with him and Dustin afterward—Lauren Cerand, Damien Barr, Saleem Hadad—and so they made a bit of a parade through a series of restaurants, half on their phones trying to make a reservation, half trying to find a place, and finally landed on one that would take their little party last minute. London restaurants, he was learning, often had reservations with a time in and a time out. The table is needed back at ____. Spontaneity was hard. And so there they ate a late dinner outdoors on a table in the street while it was still warm enough to do so. The waiter at the restaurant next door provided a kind of spontaneous theater at the end of the dinner, the sort of lean man with a mustache who could flash his eyes as he smoked in the street, each cigarette a performance. Then the check came and was divided and paid and all said good night, and he and Dustin walked back to Bloomsbury, enjoying the quiet dark streets lined by trees and the parks that appeared every few blocks.
The hour was late, somewhere around midnight.
This was when he saw what looked like a woman and child floating in the air high up along the arch of a roadway entrance in the distance, but made somehow out of the dark. Some dark metal for their skin and yet they floated there, as if held up by a supernatural force that emitted from them. The woman had her arms outspread and between them floated a small boy, arms raised, triumphant. The figures emitted the force of life but held in suspension by some great focus and the sight of it sent a visceral shock through him. It looked like a magic act not meant for humans to see. Below the figures people were walking by, occasional cars or a bus driving through on the road.
They approached carefully, amazed.
Closer in, he could see it was a statue, mounted at the arch’s highest point. The woman had a halo as did the child. The dense grey-black, richly dark, he learned, as he googled the statues, was lead taken from the ruin of the roof of the former convent where it was now mounted, back from when it had been bombed during the Blitz. The sculpture was called “Madonna and Child,” commissioned from Jacob Epstein by the architect hired by the convent, and whoever owned the property now seemed to know the impression the figures might cast. The statue’s aura enhanced by a faint purple coming from some carefully trained spot-lights. Almost a prank.
He had never seen an image of Mary that made her look so powerful. It rearranged his sense of her. He posted the photo to Instagram and a friend replied, Oh, this is near my old nursery school. With only affection for it.
A strange symmetry, he finds, after he looks up the statue again and again. The statue and the Ginzburg novella were created in the same two year-period. The one leading him eventually, after many years, to the other.
The Letters from London project will continue as I process more of my experiences but I return to Vermont today. Season 2 will begin sometime in the new year: Letters From America.
Thank you for reading. The series will continue for a while, I’m just processing a lot of material.
This post was perfect. Brought me back round to my 20-year-old studying-abroad-in-London self, and to all the wondering I’ve done about Virginia Woolf in the decades since. Thank you.