Virginia Woolf Read Online Free PDF Page B

1989, I discovered that those diaries—and boxes of her letters—were in the New York Public Library on 5th Avenue at 42nd Street.
    To read them, I climbed a flight of stairs, walked down a long hall, and entered a room marked “Berg Collection.” It was an elegant oak-paneled reading room that had the air of a cloistered sanctuary. Formal oil paintings of Dr. Henry W. Berg and Dr. Albert A. Berg, separated by a wooden arch with corinthian columns, filled the east wall. A terra cotta figure of Moses, holding the Ten Commandments, stood above the front door.
    The Berg brothers were lovers of books and learning. They spent their days working as surgeons at Mt. Sinai Hospital in New York. Then, with a fortune amassed in real estate, they distributed money generously to hospitals and universities and purchased rare manuscripts, which they donated to the room named after them in the library. It was their funds that were used to purchase Virginia Woolf’s diaries and letters.
    When I convinced the curator, a large, scholarly, and formidable woman, Lola L. Szladits, that I was a serious student of Virginia Woolf’s writings, she allowed me to hold some of Woolf’s letters in my hands. I was holding the thin blue paper on which she wrote, and I actually felt her presence around me. Her writing was small and crowded, and seemed to have been written in haste.
    I was astonished to find myself mentioned in both the diary and the letters in the Berg Collection. Now, with the additional help of the three letters she sent me, I am able to put together a chronology of our correspondence and the relationship between a mature and supremely skillful writer and a young woman struggling to define herself.
    Four months before we met, she confided to her diary:
31 May, 1935
    … the usual tremor & restlessness after coming back, and nothing to settle to, & some good German woman sends me a pamphlet on me into which I couldn’t resist looking, though nothing so upsets anddemoralizes as this looking at one’s face in the glass. And a German glass produces an extreme diffuseness and complexity so that I can’t get either praise or blame but must begin twisting among long words.
    I was amused to find that she called me “some good German woman.” I have not an ounce of German blood, and I was born in Brooklyn, New York. I knew, though, what she meant about German writing and how complex German words could be. True, the book was published by the Tauchnitz Press, but I had written my thesis in English, not German, and I had sent the published English book to her from Brooklyn. Just as she could not “get either praise or blame,” now I could not tell how she felt about my book. It seemed to me that if she had really read it, instead of saying she “couldn’t resist looking,” she would have known that I was an ardent admirer of her work.
    Three weeks after she wrote this entry in her diary, she sent the first of her three letters to me. These letters—placed chronologically next to her diary and her massive correspondence—helped me to see her in the context of her era in Britain, and to understand the violent swings of her illness and her all-too-real fear that she was going insane.
    The first letter, sent from her home in Sussex, was written on June 21, 1935 on fine white linen paper, undamaged by time, with an embossed letterhead.
Monk’s House Rodmell, near Lewes, Sussex.
    Dear Miss Gruber,
    I found your book waiting for me on my return from Italy the other day. I think that my secretary explained that I was way [sic] hence the delay in thanking you. It was very good of you to send me a copy. But I must confess, frankly, that I have not read it, but I am sure you will believe that this is not through laziness or lack of interest in the subject. But the fact is that I try to avoid reading about my ownwriting when I am actually writing. 6 I find that it makes me self-conscious and for some reason distracts me from my work.
    But if I