Virginia Woolf in Manhattan (42 page)

And as these split-second thoughts flew past and I raised my pages to begin, I saw Gerda sitting in the middle of the room, the middle of the row, the centre of my vision. The room around her faded; she was the only one.

Of course it wasn’t her, it was an illusion
.

No, Gerda was there. Her sheaf of red hair, her round pale face, her lips half-open, she was mouthing something I could not hear. I could not take in what was happening. She was at school, surely, in Hertfordshire, England, four or five hours’ flight time away. This was a red-haired doppelganger.

No, it was her. That turn of her head. I was going mad. It could not be Gerda.

Yes, my daughter. My love for her
.

But the hall was waiting. They were staring at me. A little ripple of unease. I must go on, I must give my paper. For a moment everything blurred with tears. Had I ever given enough to Gerda? I thought: I will make this talk for her, it must be for her, not Virginia. Gerda’s thirteen, on the cusp of adulthood. She will help Virginia go on into the future.

Strip out the theory, talk from the heart. I clutched the lectern, and then I began. The first page will do, I thought, then cut it.

‘This conference is yet another tribute to the power
of one woman, Virginia Woolf, whose record of human consciousness lit up the borders between self and world. Who showed us doubt, and ambivalence, and the fluidities of sex and gender. Whose witty, flashing prose, in the diaries, makes other diarists look like plodders. Who was male and female, old and young.

‘Such brilliance comes with a cost, of course. It may throw others into shadow. It may cause envy from the less successful. It may breed hatred as fierce as love.

‘By her own contemporaries Virginia Woolf was seen as modern, as well as a modernist. By those who came afterwards, however, she has sometimes been seen, or rather misrepresented, as reactionary, elitist, snobbish, self-indulgent. It is astonishing, actually, that one woman made so many people so angry.’ (
A flash: how often she has made me angry, since coming to life in the reading-room
.) ‘Including those who have barely read her. Perhaps it is her face: aristocratic arrogance complicated by vulnerability. If you prick her, you know she would bleed – ’ (
or fade, dwindle, disappear. That day in New York when she had nearly vanished, after finding all the bookshops were closing down
.)

And then I was off on my catalogue of haters. It took me ten minutes to get through the roster.

‘… art for art’s sake … stultifying … ivory tower … not relevant to today’s … if ever … undeserved pre-eminence …
Mrs Dalloway
and
To the Lighthouse
… bloodless … anaemic … no breath of real life … daughter of privilege … patronage … precious … narrow … cold … frigid … withholding …

‘I think we can see, when it is gathered together, that this is so much spiteful nonsense – often promulgated by male critics – ’

Remember to smile
.

I looked up and smiled. But the audience were looking depressed and sober. Gerda’s face was flat, uncertain. I was not having the effect I wanted. And indeed, as my words came back to my ears, I suddenly realised what I had been doing: replicating hatred, despite myself. (
Why had I gathered so many quotes? Was it my own shadow side? Did part of me feel something like hatred?
)

Turn it around.
Turn it around!
Get out of the shadow! Find the light!

My body. Somehow it knew what to do. My hands were crumpling, tearing the pages, they were falling on the floor, big flakes of white ash. My eyes moved from Gerda to the young at the back. They had not given up. They still looked to me for something. I didn’t know them, or what to give them, but Woolf, surely, was for everyone, if I could find the words to say so.

What could I surmise about the students? Only two – no three – of the girls were covered. There were boys, as well, a minority, but again, three or four had Islamic beards (no, they were just beards, don’t call them Islamic, facial hair is not a religion. Beards were signs with plural meanings.) Fifty, no a hundred, one hundred and fifty young. They were here for me, still interested. They were not inspired, but no-one was texting. If I found the right words, I might make this work.

‘You girls’ – I meant Gerda – ‘you brave young women.’ (
How had she got here? She had always been brave, she was never afraid of worms or beetles
.) ‘Virginia Woolf had a message for you. I believe you study
Mrs Dalloway
, but have you read
A Room of One’s Own?
Who has?’ There was a little ripple of self-conscious giggles, and then a very few hands went up, apart from the lecturers near my feet, who instantly sprouted a self-righteous forest. One of the hands at the back belonged to one of the male students with bushy black beards.

Then a familiar little hoot of laughter. Yes, Virginia had put her hand up, a long white hand, a goose-neck waggle. When she saw I had seen her, she dropped it again.

There was another hand in the middle of the room.

Gerda’s hand was so high she was almost bursting, thrusting her plump arm out of its socket.

Had Gerda read
A Room of One’s Own
?

It was extraordinary, but must be true. She was always difficult, but rarely a liar.

– But where was I? I was thrown off course.

– Suddenly I thought, don’t talk about gender. Gender divides before it joins. I’ll come back to it. There are other things to say.

‘
Mrs Dalloway
– your set text, I believe? – in so many countries, that’s the one they choose – is a wonderful book – stylistically, structurally – but it is a book that is focused on a certain party, certain individuals, a certain class. It stays, finally, in the early twentieth century, and in London, England, very far away. To some of you, I think, it must seem rather old-fashioned.’ (I looked up for corroboration; at the back, some guilty smiles and nudges. I didn’t look at Virginia.) ‘Why should you be interested in Virginia Woolf? Yes, she came to Istanbul in 1906, as a young woman of twenty-four, and again in 1910, when she was twenty-eight – but her Constantinople was a very different city.

‘
Mrs Dalloway
herself is a great fictional creation – as are Mr and Mrs Ramsay in
To the Lighthouse
, Miss La Trobe in
Between the Acts
– but she is, deliberately, defined by her limits. She is creative, but only socially. She makes theatre in a private house. She is bodiless. Physically, she ‘fails’ her husband – the suggestion is, she doesn’t like sex – sex with a man, in any case.

‘It’s tempting to see her creator like this. How many of you, consciously or not, have superimposed Virginia’s face on
Mrs
Dalloway
’s privileged body? When she sets out to shop, did you see Virginia? That elegant neck and long delicate nose?’

A little laughter, a few nods, but I certainly had a long way to go. I had to dig deep inside myself. What did they want? How could I woo them?

‘I want to invite you to see Woolf more widely. She is a great writer because she is neither Clarissa Dalloway nor Mrs Ramsay. The fact is, she can be anybody. She has Keats’s “negative capability” – in her, others can find their lost voices. That means, my voice, your voice’ (
I was pointing at the front row
) ‘your voices’ (
now I was reaching out to the back
). ‘I believe we can all find our lives in her pages.’

‘Politically, culturally, you are at a crossroads. You live at the heart of all the twenty-first century’s conflicts. Your quarrel isn’t with New York. There are close relations, politically, between America and Turkey. Your Prime Minister Erdogan is apparently exactly what America wants him to be. A free market capitalist: isn’t that what we are all supposed to be, today? Yet Erdogan is a devout Muslim. So is it over, religious conflict?

‘You cannot look at the great rose-red dome of the Aya Sophia without seeing the fight between the faiths, the endless struggle for religious dominance: the heartland of the Christians, taken by Muslims. I have travelled, for this lecture, from New York, and I’ve thought a lot about the two cities. New York has its skyline with the absent twin towers, brought low by Islamist jihadists. Both cities wear the scars of religious conflict.’

(My eyes dipped briefly to the row of lecturers. A mixture of expressions: interest, puzzlement. Melike’s eyebrows telegraphed:
a little off message
.)

‘The Turkish government - correct me if I’m wrong - has strong links to religious orthodoxy, and was formerly supported by Fethullah Gülen, the banned Islamic leader.

And America takes pride in its own religious faiths. Obama must be photographed singing Christmas carols; evangelical Christians attack the teaching of evolution in American schools and universities. Sometimes it’s as if the world is going backwards, as if we all modernised too fast, and now religion’s rushing in through the back door, which we were all too busy to close. Here you are seeing, a little more each day, Atatürk’s Turkey becoming Erdogan’s: secular Turkey veiling itself.

‘Religion means authority. Religion means people have to behave. First, no alcohol, then no sex, then, perhaps, no other freedoms.

‘Clarissa Dalloway didn’t like religion. “Love and religion!” thought Clarissa … how detestable they are!” She was afraid of the brute power of both, their appeal to our instincts rather than our brains.

‘On the way here, on the plane from New York, I travelled with about thirty orthodox Israelis. It felt as if we had gone back in time. They were binding their arms with leather straps, praying in the gangway, facing the east, all of this on a modern jet-plane flying over the Atlantic at five hundred miles an hour. I overheard a very young woman explaining her philosophy: “Follow the ways of our forefathers.” This is going back to the Old Testament, the most conservative, warlike part of the Bible! It’s as if God is making a comeback, everywhere, in all his forms – as if secular democracy has been too taxing.

‘I always remember what Virginia Woolf had to say about the Old Testament of the Bible. In one of its books, the Book of Job, a man is relentlessly tested by God. She said, “I read the book of Job last night, I don’t think God comes out well in it.”

‘She used her wit and her sceptical intelligence. And this is what she would expect of you young people, you lucky group who attend this university, one of the best in Turkey.
A university education teaches you to think, as well as feel. It teaches you to criticise.

‘But in Turkey, I hear, academic jobs and money are increasingly going to the religious. And what are these new “crimes against Turkishness”? The same kind of insults are flung in New York: dissenting academics are called “un-American”. So is it wrong to criticise your country?

‘Virginia Woolf criticised her country. She wrote a great tract against the folly of war,
Three Guineas
. It’s witty, truthful, unpompous, passionate, a book none of her usual male admirers had time for: they found it “shrill”, an embarrassment. She talks about war-making, and its illusions. She sees war as the sport of men, so perhaps it’s not surprising men did not like it. Even her husband did not like it much.

‘Woolf did not risk imprisonment, as you do. I have seen you young people protesting on the streets, and I know what perils you incur when you do. But she risked men’s sneers, she risked male scorn. For a mind so unarmoured, it was like braving acid.

‘You need no-one to teach you to be brave. But you can find your lives, and your struggles, in her pages.’

I looked up. They were listening, now. Gerda had colour in her cheeks. I came out from behind the lectern and stood with my feet among my torn and crumpled pages, so they could see the whole of me. I had a body, so did they.

‘Which is one great gift literature offers, when we aren’t just studying it for exams. To find ourselves – new parts of ourselves, or parts of ourselves not fully expressed. To find ourselves in others. “Our unacted parts”, Woolf talked about. How books can free our other selves.

‘“We have other lives, I think, I hope …” I am quoting, some of you will know, from Virginia’s last novel,
Between the Acts
. A short, generous-spirited book that reinvents art as something
for everyone, for villagers and landowners, for rich and poor. You have these divisions in Turkey too: between those with an education, like you, and your contemporaries who could not afford it; between the city and the village. Art, Woolf says, can be a village pageant. Where even the audience play their part. As you do now, my audience.’ I found Virginia, I smiled at her. ‘Art, she says, unites us all. All of us need to play, or sing.’

I could not make out if she was smiling back. The sunlight had washed out her face again. Suddenly I could not see her at all. (But then, I was walking around the stage; obviously she must be behind a pillar; or else it was problems with my contact lenses.)

‘Most of you here are younger than me,’ I said. ‘Your country’s population is young. I want to come back to something I began with, something important to you young people. Sex and gender in Virginia Woolf – ’ (As I said it, I thought about
my
Virginia, the day before, when we’d fled the demonstration and sat in the café near Istiklal. She’d tried so bravely to talk about sex, and I had been deaf, and fobbed her off.
You fool, you thought she was too old for it
.)

‘ – which is important to us older people as well,’ I added, in time to raise a few wry smiles from the lecturers in the front row. ‘Virginia Woolf came to Istanbul – Constantinople – as I said. She was twenty-four: young and inexperienced. She found a city of domes and minarets, yes, but also free women on the streets, some of them veiled but taking their veils lightly, throwing them back to look in the shops, not what she had expected to find. She found a people who did not envy or copy the people of London or Paris, people who were happy in their own existence.

‘By the time she wrote
Orlando
, in 1928, nearly everything here was different. The First World War had changed the maps, and in Turkey Atatürk had come to power and was dragging
Turkey into the future. But because
Orlando
is set in the past, Woolf was free to work from her memories.