Susan's Notes

The process of seeing my novel, Vanessa and Virginia, transposed into a stage play has been fascinating, hugely educational, surprising. I’ve written about it on my blog

Here, in addition, are my notes for a talk on the process given in conjunction with Beth Wright at the Tramway Theatre in Glasgow on November 3^rd 2010.

NOTES:

What prompted me to write a novel about Virginia Woolf?

For past ten years, I’ve been working on a scholarly edition of Woolf’s writings for Cambridge University Press. This led me to read or reread not only VW’s writing – her novels, essays, diaries, and correspondence – but also a great deal by her contemporaries.

This provided an extraordinarily rich seedbed of information – I felt as if I knew Woolf and Bell and their world intimately. This an important starting point for fiction: you have to know your characters to the extent that you can second-guess how they will feel, what they will say or do – and you have to know the world they inhabit well enough to be able to select from it the pertinent details that will bring it alive to a reader.

The work on the edition was also an impetus for other reasons. The more I read Woolf and Bell, the more questions I had about their lives. Many of these questions cannot be answered by the historical record. Like Orlando’s narrator, there are gaps and omissions in what seemed to me some of the most important places. For example, why did Vanessa Bell – whose art work (particularly in her decoration of her house at Charleston) suggests extraordinary sensuality - fall irrevocably in love with the homosexual painter Duncan Grant? The answers to these and other questions can only be speculative, and it seemed to me that fiction presented an arena in which it was possible to explore these questions and answers ethically.

To give an example, using a different question. It has always seemed to me particularly moving that Virginia Woolf committed suicide relatively late in life – when she was almost sixty. What was it about this particular moment in her life that led her to drown herself when she had survived other bouts of illness, surmounted other acutely difficult moments in her life. One possible explanation is the effect of the second world war and the threat of Nazi invasion. Virginia and Leonard knew they were listed by the Nazis and that in the event of an invasion they would be interned at best – Leonard was a jew after all, and Virginia had a record of mental health problems. To prepare for this they kept a spare can of petrol in their garage and discussed how they would gas themselves before the Nazis arrive. Did this fear (it was not at all clear that there would not be an invasion in 1941) and these discussions feed into Virginia’s depression and suicide? In fiction, it is possible to present these events in proximity – allowing the reader to speculate too and without making categoric claims.

To give an example, I want to read a short passage, where I use a known historical fact creatively to suggest adolescent rivalry between the two sisters.

READING:

‘It’s the fact that she must stand.’ Aunt Minna puts her cup down on the table. Her starched collar crackles as she reaches for the pot.

‘Another for you, Leslie?’ Father’s only response is a grunt. For the past half hour he has sat staring into the space ahead of him, his silence broken only by the occasional groan. Aunt Minna has not yet abandoned her aim of trying to cheer him and interprets his grunt as a yes.

‘Pass me your Father’s cup, will you Virginia, there’s a dear.’ You glare at Aunt Minna and I see that you have taken her silly observation to heart. Aunt Minna prattles on.

‘Writing seems to me a much better activity for a woman. The body is supported, and as long as one makes sure to sit up straight there is no pressure on the back. I can’t think it can be good for Vanessa to have to stand all day before an easel. Have you thought, dear, of the impact on your posture?’

I ignore Aunt Minna. I know what she says is kindly meant. I watch you pick up Father’s cup and pass it to her. There is no mistaking the look of fury on your face.

Only later do I realise the extent of your anger. For your birthday you ask Father for a lectern so that you can write standing up. You will not allow that painting is the more difficult art.

At the same time as I was working on the Woolf edition, I was also thinking about the relationship between sisters, particularly in connection to Freud’s insistence that the developing human infant forges its sense of self in relation to its mother, then its father. I was teaching a course on contemporary fiction that included Helen Dunmore’s novel about sibling incest, and reading Juliet Mitchell’s powerful challenges to Freudian theory in her studies Mad Men and Medusas and Siblings where she argues that siblings and one’s peers play an even more dramatic role in subject formation.

I mention this because the novel focusses closely on the relationship between Woolf and Bell as sisters, which as you will hear becomes a crucial focus for Beth’s play.

I want to say a few things about decisions I made in writing the novel, again with a view to hearing in a moment how they were transposed to the stage.

I wrote the novel from the point of view of Vanessa Bell, primarily because her written voice was much less familiar to me and I did not want to produce a poor pastiche of Woolf.

The novel begins after Virginia’s death with Vanessa looking back over their lives together, so that it is her memories that structure the chronology of the narrative. This was important because some aspects of the biography – for instance the period in the late 1890s when the sisters lose first their mother then their beloved half-sister Stella – were almost impossible to fictionalize as a sequence. (Coming so close together, the events felt like overload and hardly credible.)

As you will hear, this use of memory – of long interior passages – posed problems in the novel’s staging.

I said a moment ago that I think in order to write good fiction – in order to bring your characters alive on the stage – you have to know your characters and their world intimately. But as I’ve also suggested I think that what drives writing are questions – things you don’t know but which unfold as you work. For me personally, this not-knowing, this mystery, is at least as important in prompting me to write.

One of the things that was mysterious to me about Vanessa Bell was that the fact that she was a visual artist. To research this, I watched artists at work, and became fascinated by the way a painting is built up, brush-stroke by brush-stroke. This I think fed into the structure of the novel, which is a series of short vignettes which I hope cumulatively create a picture. It also gave me a rich source of metaphor and palette of language. It was fascinating to me to try to inhabit a character who sees the world visually, and the narrative draws heavily not only on descriptions of Vanessa painting, but on her paintings. As you’ll hear in a moment, this was a challenge which also presented an unexpected opportunity for the staging.

READING:

A wall of orange ablaze in the sun, the glow of hot coals. My colours have the sheen of silk, the rough textures of hessian. In the top right-hand corner of my painting is a pale pink square, edged in blue. The clash between the pink and orange is violent, compelling, gorgeous. I mute it by adding a daub of white to the pink, but only slightly. I do not want to diminish the effect. On the left of my canvas I paint a series of rectangles. Some interconnect, some stand alone. I paint two of them blue, one a potent aquamarine, the other paler, and tempered with the same hint of whiteness as the pink. I am careless with the outlines. I have had too many years of cloying detail. What interests me is the impact of colours.

In the centre of my picture I paint a single rectangle. It is a rich, crimson red with traces of darker vermilion. It dazzles and sizzles against the orange. I revel in its daring. I turn my attention to the two remaining bars. I paint one green, a blue-sage, slightly chalky. For the other I choose a strong burgundy.

I am fascinated by the way the different reds shun and call to each other. Sometimes, when I stand back from my canvas, I can see nothing else. The way the orange recedes against their impact astonishes me. I cannot believe the past has already lost its power. I turn my attention to my central rectangle. I am audacious. I will create the spaces I need. I will be mistress in my own house.