Once, I wrote a fictional essay in which I burst into your room, where you sat surrounded by papers, your pen poised in ink-stained fingers. I crossed the room to kiss you. I suppose I did not imagine you as much as I imagined Nicole Kidman's you in "The Hours," but my point is that I wrote about kissing you. I made love to you, and the pen dropped from your fingers, splattering ink across the pages on the brocade carpet. You were surprised. Vita didn't know half of what I knew.
How arrogant, that I believed I could move you to passion with my 21st century lesbian love. I'm sorry.
I've been thinking about you. About what's important. I've been re-reading you, and wishing I could read you. You said: "a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction". I haven't thought about that as much as I should have. I interpreted it to mean independence. Financial stability. But you were talking about space, too, weren't you? About the mental and spiritual and physical space from all other people. If I really want to become a real writer, I must hold myself somewhat apart.
Is it possible to hold myself apart and also love?
I want to know more about you and Vita. I read Orlando and it told me only that you loved her, and that you imagined her as man and woman and also something more than either of those. You wrote asking her to "throw over" her man and come walk with you in the moonlit darkness, and she wrote to you that she missed you, loved you, longed for you. And? When Vita was with you, finally, Virginia, did you merely wish to return to that solitary room of your own?
I read that you struggled to see yourself as a sexual being, and that Vita struggled because she wanted you to recognize her as a real writer. Your affair ended in 1929. "All extremes of feeling are allied with madness," you wrote in Orlando in 1928.
Is it possible to engage in madness and also to create art, or is the madness the art? I recognize myself in you, and so I offer us Georgia O'Keefe as a reminder that it is possible to create art and not be mad. It is possible to paint passion and be balanced. Tempered.
When I wrote that fictional essay, Virginia, I wrote that you'd be saved by my passionate kiss, by my bold 21st century life. I wrote that you'd never have entered the river with stones in your pockets if you'd had other options for your life. What did I know? You'd tasted that life with Vita. You weren't oppressed by homophobia, but by the heaviness of your own mind. The room of your own was not large enough. It couldn't quiet the voices in your head, the persistent sadness.
I want to know why writing didn't save you. What would have? In Orlando, you wrote, ". . .We write, not with the fingers, but with the whole person. The nerve which controls the pen winds itself about every fibre of our being, threads the heart, pierces the liver." But?
I want to know more about the room of your own. About the room of my own. I want to know if it could be enough.
Sarah
