Alice Thomas Ellis found that housework was the best form of writerly procrastination. She would dither at the Aga for a while, do some laundry and prepare the dinner, her mind turning over the thing she needed to write. Then she would lie on the couch with a packet of cigarettes watching an old movie, by which time she would be ready and the words would fall out in a torrent before anyone had time to wonder where she was.
In this as in much else, Ellis – whose real name was Anna Haycraft – was the opposite of Virginia Woolf. Woolf’s essay A Room of One’s Own is a pillar in the feminist literary canon, but it is also a book about writing. It narrates the daily life of the writer when she is doing all the activities necessary for writing besides the putting of words on paper: time at the desk, time to think uninterrupted, to drive “through London in an omnibus” or have “luncheon in a shop by herself”. In this way, A Room of One’s Own narrates the kind of life that, Woolf argues, a woman writer needs if she is to flourish. The reader is invited to follow her as she wanders through London, economically free and unencumbered by family responsibilities.
Woolf asked: what conditions are necessary for the creation of works of art? And she offered her own answer: “freedom”. Anna’s answer, however, was “suffering”. Two of her seven children died in her lifetime and it was the death of her 19-year-old son Joshua that started her career as a novelist. He fell from the roof at Euston Station and lay in a coma for a year. Her notebooks from this time are heartbreaking. They record the process through which writing fiction emerged as the painfully logical result of her efforts to stay sane.
While Joshua lay in the hospital bed, as mysterious and unresponsive as a newborn baby, Anna began taking notes for Birds of the Air, in which the bereaved heroine acts on Anna’s own compulsion to follow her son into death. The prose of Anna’s own words to Josh merge into novelistic prose: “You were born in an orange painted room. No waters broke, a dry birth. It hurt a bit. Nothing like as much as it hurts now. How can you die without my permission? My dear child … COME BACK TO ME … She had lost interest in the exterior usual world that people took for granted. She knew and wished to know better another world that began inside herself but did not finish there.”
In her own life, as in her novels, it was Anna’s friendships with other women, including fellow novelists like Caroline Blackwood and Beryl Bainbridge, that helped her to live with bereavement. The friendship that structured her everyday experience was that of the indomitable Janet – nanny, secretary, driver, a regular character in the “Home Life” column, who also appeared in the novels under the guise of the steady, street-smart companion with criminal connections and a gypsy’s view of family loyalty. Janet spent her life working for Anna. From the age of 20 she would arrive in the morning and do whatever was needed – clean out the fridge, help cater for a lunch party, help pull the shopping basket through Camden Market, take the kids out, drive to Wales, type up a manuscript, or just sit at the kitchen table and drink.
At the legendary Haycraft parties, the great and good would gather in the hallways and sitting rooms, each hoping to receive a bit of Anna’s wit, but she would hover downstairs by the Aga with Janet and smoke, preferring the easy company of a familiar friend with whom to gossip. In Anna’s final notebook, written on her deathbed, there are snatches of thoughts about the past, lists in which she tries to find appropriate objects to leave her many loved ones, observations on dying (“The time may have arrived in my life when I can use the Exclamation Mark!”) and then, out of this muddle, the surprising: “I must try and understand (!) that Janet isn’t coming with me … I see her familiar, well-loved face at the barrier.”
Anna loved women in the way her husband, Colin, loved men: for their fellowship. He was happiest in his drawing room or at high table with Horace, whisky and men of letters, as she was happiest, at least once the babies had grown up, drinking in the kitchen with smart and familiar women, either in London or in her preferred house in the Welsh countryside. While Colin edited classical scholarship and philosophy and professed to disdain the work of women novelists like those who sought Anna’s editorial acumen, she relished the writing of her female peers and predecessors: only women could look into the deepest horrors of life’s humiliations, its violence, and come up laughing.
Woolf was concerned that women had no heritage comparable to that of men, no solid legacy of prominent women thinkers on whose knowledge and tradition they could draw. Anna’s faith gave her a female history that her Protestant peers lacked: Catherine, Teresa, Julian, Edith, Elizabeth, Mary.
“What is the most important event in women’s history?” she was asked by one feminist interviewer. “The Annunciation,” she replied.
She pointed out elsewhere that the Church “permitted and encouraged women to form communities of their own, to live autonomously in convents and beguinages. They were allowed to reject men and marriage and the constraints of family life; to take a name other than their patronym and escape from the limitations and irritations of wedlock and a male-dominated society.”
Late in her life, when her journalism was at its most uncompromising, Anna mocked her generation of feminists, and the “dreadful breed of feminist men”. She mourned a womanhood that she had known in inter-war Liverpool: tough, funny, capable women who could handle a scythe or smoke a pipe. She also mourned the womanhood of early Hollywood actresses: sharp-tongued, elegant, clever, feminine and moral: “Katherine Hepburn, Joan Crawford, Bette Davis etc, none of whom resemble in the least the downtrodden wimps so crucial to the
feminist myth.”
Anna saw very early that feminist attacks on the priesthood were a denigration of the office’s mystery that hurt all Catholics, both men and women, but which robbed men of a sanctification so absent from their daily lives. Where women participate directly and personally in so many of Christ’s mysteries through their physical role in creation, men require the dignity of holy office:
Men are painfully vulnerable and their fragile self-esteem is easily damaged. They are often all outward show and bluster. Sensible females, being aware that they constitute the stronger sex, do not suffer the same impulse to cut a figure and make a mark but quietly get on with the business of progressing from the cradle to the grave without too much fuss or demanding to be “visible”… Some of them used to be acutely aware that their first purpose was to seek God.
Her distaste with all the liberation movements of the 1960s was grounded in a deep concern over the rise of the “me” culture she saw all around her. Anna believed that true freedom could only be found in giving one’s self away – to children, to neighbours (in the widest sense), and ultimately to God.
Even in her final moments she was making something for her children. In her hospital bed, with second-stage lung cancer, she had no kitchen, no house, no paint with which to engage them. But she began a new notebook, filling it with thoughts for her daughter to read and comment upon once she was gone. Called ‘gardening in the dark’ the small pages are a space in which Anna and Sarah can continue their conversation, with each party on either side of the wall. It was a conversation already recorded with great clarity in Anna’s late autobiographical work:
Even as I sit by the stream under the shade of the hawthorn, hand on the sun-warmed rock, watching the bees and the beetles and the birds doing concentratedly what they were conceived to do, feeling the grasses under my feet, and painstakingly identifying the wild flowers, I still cannot accept the moment for what it is. I know it will pass. Self-consciousness is the price we pay for the hope of immortality, and it is a high price. You put your hand in the stream and it runs through your fingers. You pick the flowers and they die. You hear the birds of this year but they are not the birds of last year, and next year they will be different birds. You know that – pesticides and herbicides permitting – the genus will continue, but you also know that your own awareness will have changed, and that you will not be there. And the grief is not for your self, but that all the loveliness may go unseen and unrecorded, and no one will ever know how, for you, the blossom smelled, and the grasses bent, and the light changed – and how you got up to go home as the shadows fell and the air grew cold and you came back to another mode of existence: the habitations of men and the demands of life and the world. It is perhaps easier to be sedated, to be bored, for at each moment of joyful consciousness comes the knowledge that it will pass; and as time passes, you realise it will never come again. It is more than that. It is an awareness that some of this world is so beautiful that it cannot be described; and, greedy and grasping as we are, we want not only to enjoy it but to tell it – so that it listens, and in listening becomes fixed – how unknowingly lovely it is. We look for a response from that which is unresponsive – for it takes no account of us. No wonder we dream of death, or a true consummation where longing ceases and the earth itself embraces us until we cannot be told apart, cannot be discerned, and have no responsibility.
The laboured sentences of Anna’s last, unfinished notebook for her daughter return again to these thoughts and make painfully clear Anna’s insistent desire to observe and record, and her knowledge that such a desire is ultimately fleeting. In life, there are observations through which the rapid passing of time can be caught – and shared. In death, there is only completeness.
Bonnie Lander Johnson is a writer and academic
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