Maggie Gee - Virginia Woolf in Manhattan

‘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.