Maggie Gee - Virginia Woolf in Manhattan

An inspiration. ‘Do you write?’ I asked. ‘I think you want to write yourself. How many of you,’ I looked along the rows, ‘how many of you students want to write?’

Hands unfolded, slowly at first, then a growing series of notes, like music, pale minims of faces with their stems of arms. I looked at them. They were beautiful. So many of them, a harmony.

Energy, a flurry, in the middle of the room. The worn-looking woman who had asked the first question had her thicker, older arm in the air. She was mouthing something I couldn’t hear. Then I lip-read it, or imagined it. ‘Not only students’, she was trying to tell me.

‘Sorry,’ I said, ‘Not only students. Anyone here who wants to write.’

And yes, not far from the woman, there was Gerda, strong white arm jostling the air.

Not much more than a child, but she needed to write. Virginia sat stock still beside her.

There was a ripple, a slow stirring breeze that came from somewhere closer to the stage. Was it the windows that had been opened? No, the front rows were pushing up shoots, the lecturers, the research assistants, who toiled in libraries, who sweated over footnotes, who laboured with passives, ‘It is sometimes asserted …’, ‘It is believed …’, their hands were moving, their fingers uncurling, loosing their tension, opening up like flowers, they were smiling at me, a little shyly, maybe, but they were alive, their eyes were shining –

I was staring out at a room that was a forest. Sun poured in through the windows on the right, the filmy white curtains blew like water, the living things were unfolding in their seats, they were stretching and moving, free at last, there were small cries and laughter and delight as they looked around them and saw what was happening, the hall around them swam and shifted, they turned in their seats and found each other, some were embracing, two were kissing, then another two, the students were rising to their feet, girls at the front of their section were dancing, oh girls with garlands in their hair, those circlets, sun-lets of red and white buds I’d seen on sale in the Hippodrome –

Now Moira Penny was on the move, like a fluttering bat in her blue-black garments, but she was making, aslant, for the window, she knelt in the wall of white sunlight, she raised both her arms to the wash of heat, she laid down her pain, she was young again — ’

They no longer needed me — did they? Were they still waiting for an answer, or had they found it in each other? What had I got to say to them? I had asked the question — who wanted to write? — and the seed was stirring in everyone — but what came next? What could I tell them?

The student with the laptop thought Virginia was lucky. ‘ Virginia Woolf, she was rich … How do we do what she did? For her, I think it was more easy .’

I looked for Virginia. Would she have an answer? And I saw what I had not expected. She sat isolated in the middle of her row. Gerda had left her, gone to dance with the students, the garlanded girls in their youthful roundels, off with the raggle-taggle-gypsies-oh …

Virginia sat alone. She alone was unmoving. Yes, a stillness at the heart of the hall.

The sunlight pinned her to her seat. Her face was like a photograph, the sun so sharp she was black and white, her lines erased, a perfect portrait, marble-pale twin of that famous profile taken of her as a very young woman. No-one surely, could fail to realise. This was Virginia Woolf to the life. Yet animation had drained from her. She was motionless, she was stiller than paper.

A brightness on her cheek. With a great effort, she raised her hand. As if she was lifting lead through water. She was — yes, she was trying to speak.

I tapped my microphone for quiet. The noise it made went on and on, a thunder-roll of sound in this luminous room, this sunlit ballroom of dancing bodies, and they went on moving, weaving through each other, and the whispers darted around like swallows, splitting, spinning and finally joining in a joyous place where everything was known, ‘It’s her! Yes! Virginia Woolf! Virginia Woolf is in the house!’

And the room fell silent, at last, for her. This was the room, the room she had asked for. This was the room she owned and ruled.

She did not stand; she did not, could not. She was straining to speak. It would not come.

I remembered the voice with which she’d first spoken, in the New York Public Library, hoarse, broken. I thought, ‘She’s leaving us again. Oh stay, please stay and answer them.’

On eddying currents, the mike reached her, a tiny dark boat, buffeted, it was in her white hand, so pale, so thin. Rumbles of thunder around the room. Outside the window I saw lightning flashes, and inside the room, but perhaps that was motion, the interweaving of limbs, glances, a shimmering in and out of focus, the wing-tips stretching and hovering.

We all heard her when she tried again. Out of the silence, it broke into being, her breaths, she was breathing, we heard her breathe, Virginia Woolf breathed hard for us, Virginia struggled to stay alive. Then the relief of her first words. ‘My friends — ’ But those drawling vowels, so narrowly formed, so definite a badge of the class she had come from.

No, she was more than her voice, her presence. Virginia was everything that she had been. But I thought: Virginia is going home .

‘You are my readers. Thank you, friends. Some of you, readers who would be writers. You are the minds I spoke about, the writers of a hundred years later. What do I have to say to you?

‘The young woman questioner thought I was lucky. And I admit I had great good fortune. Who is to say what I would have written without my father, without Leonard, without servants. What would I have written without money? Five hundred pounds and a room of my own?’

Wrong message, Virginia , I thought, anxious.

‘But I tell you this: I would have written. Somehow I would have found my voice. I would have found a way to be heard, published.’ (For a moment, there, her voice strengthened. In my memory, that was when her voice was strongest.)

‘And so must you. And so will you.’ There was a pause, or a fault with the power supply. Perhaps it was to do with the weather, which was crackling merrily around our heads. ‘The young woman beside me tells me that now it is easier to self-publish, but some of you feel ashamed to do this. Remember, nearly all my books were self-published.

‘What else can I say to you?’ A longer pause. Her breath laboured.

‘The light is on you. It is in this room. You are in the sunshine which, while it’s here, feels as though it will last forever.

‘There is only one kind of luck for writers. There is the room. This sunlit room. I entered in the early morning. Before my evening, I had flown again …

‘Write while you’re here. Write while you can. Write for your time. And for each other.

‘Maybe because I missed my evening, I’ve been allowed to slip back again … the absolute glory of a moment’s sunlight …’

Slower, quieter. Each word grew fainter, stretches of space between the stitches. Breaths so light the words were gossamer, silver.

‘But I am only a visitor. I ached to write … But for me, that’s over.’

We spun like planets around her star, so far away now, so barely here. More gulfs of light in the walls of our world, faces like petals, shining, falling, I tried to clutch at my text, at texture, space was splitting into thousands of threads, a thunder of feet, someone near, was it Gerda –

‘Write,’ Woolf managed. It was a whisper. ‘Your turn now … I shall write no more.’

My eyes were going. A cascading migraine shook the room into a deck of cards, a brilliant shuffle of hearts, diamonds, the jacks and queens were revolving, cartwheeling, Virginia’s image stayed for a second, translucent, hanging over our crumbling building. Moonrise over the Sea of Marmara, a white fingerprint, fading, flickering