South From Granada by Gerald Brenan

Author:Gerald Brenan
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780141918037
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2008-09-14T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

VIRGINIA WOOLF’S VISIT

∗

IT was in the spring of 1923 that Leonard and Virginia Woolf came out to see me. I met them at Granada at the house of some friends of mine, the Temples, who wished to discuss the African colonies with Leonard, and after a couple of nights there we came on by bus and mule to Yegen. This time the journey went smoothly, without any of the difficulties that had marked Lytton Strachey’s passage three years before, and it was evident that they enjoyed it.

The first thing that comes to my mind when I think of Virginia as she was in those days, and particularly as I saw her in the quiet seclusion of my house, is her beauty. Although her face was too long for symmetry, its bones were thin and delicately made, and her eyes were large, grey or greyish blue, and as clear as a hawk’s. In conversation they would light up a little coldly, while her mouth took an ironic and challenging fold, but in repose her expression was pensive and almost girlish. When in the evening we settled under the hooded chimney and the logs burned up and she stretched out her hands to the blaze, the whole cast of her face revealed her as a poet.

There are writers whose personality resembles their work, and there are others who, when one meets them, give no inkling of it. Virginia Woolf belonged strikingly to the first category. When one had spent half an hour in a room with her one could easily believe that it was she who, as one was told, had scribbled quickly in purple ink in the summer house at Rodmell that fresh and sparkling article that had just appeared in the Nation, and when one saw her in a reflective or dreamy mood one recognized only a little less slowly the authoress of To the Lighthouse. One reason for this was that her conversation, especially when she had been primed up a little, was like her prose. She talked as she wrote and very nearly as well, and that is why I cannot read a page of The Common Reader today without her voice and intonation coming back to me forcibly.’ No writer that I know of has put his living presence into his books to the extent that she has done.

Not, however, that what she said was ever bookish. She talked easily and naturally in a pure and idiomatic English, often, like many of her friends, in a lightly ironical tone. Irony, it will be remembered, plays a great and important part in her writings. There it is of a gay and playful kind, sometimes verging on facetiousness, but in her conversation it became personal and took on a feminine, and one might almost say flirtatious, form. Leaning sideways and a little stiffly in her chair, she would address her companion in a bantering tone, and she liked to be answered in the same manner. But whatever her vein, all the resources of her mind seemed to be at her immediate disposal at every moment.

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