virginia woolf came into the drawing room at clarence terrace, visibly shy, for an instant like a deer or some elegant wild creature dazzled by the lights, and walked straight across the room to stand in one of the long windows, looking out into the park. she was, as has been sufficiently stated, far more beautiful than any of the photographs show, and perhaps less strange, and that night, in a long green robe-de-style, she looked exactly as one had imagine she would look. it was a moment of total recognition and delight. later on that evening she realized that it was i who had left poems and primroses at her door, and the ice was finally broken. she told me how someone had just presented her whit a small chinese vase, and how improbable it seemed that at that very moment primroses should appear out of thin air, to be placed in it. i was invited to tea the next week.

this time i saw her alone, in the small upstairs drawing room which contained so many patterns and small bright objects it gave the impression of being like the inside of a kaleidoscope: a screen painted by vanessa bell, flowered prints on the chairs, a wall of french books in many-colored paper covers, and two hassocks by the fire upon one of which i sat, suffering a crisis of shyness.

virginia woolf, like the elephant's child in kipling, was a woman of "insatiable curtiosity", as well as rippling malice. she may have looked like some slightly unreal goddess, transparent to every current of air or wave, the eyes set in the sculptured bone in such a way that their beauty was perfectly defined; her conversation was anything but ethereal.

i remember that we laughed hilariously, that she teased me about poetry, and told me that it was easy to write poems and immensely difficult to write novels. but when i stammered out that i was actually at work on a novel at the moment, she looked at me with sudden intensity, and said, "you are writing a novel? ah, then all this must seem totally unreal to you". the years had just been published; i did not think it the best of her novels, nor, i think, did she. for she spoke of it that day as an immense act of will, to break the mold of the waves; she said that someone had called her on the telephone, a disembodied voice like that of a sybil, and had said, "you are becoming too special, too involved in your own inner world. come back to us". so she labored at the years, which was, she said, to be "about ordinary people". she had worked at it in a curious way, many scenes at a time, picking out first one and then another like the pieces of a mosaic. so that the horror in this case, as she explained, had been the transitions, the liking passages.

at precisely six leonard woolf appeared. i felt at once that his arrival was a signal: it was time for me to leave. i felt this, but i also felt that it would be rude to rush away, and, caught in the dilemma, found myself launching into a glowing description of whipsnade, of the restaurant and the tigers among the hawthorns; suddenly before i knew it, i had invited the woolfs to come out for dinner.

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much later, during the battle of britain, i heard that the baby giraffe had died of fright in a bombing, that gay gambol turned into a hideous terrified gallop and failure of the heart. and shortly afterward, when i was in chicago on a lecture trip, someone quite casually handed me a newspaper clipping. it contained a brief statement that virginia woolf early that morning had walked down to the river ouse and drowned herself. i remember how, in an instant of acute grief and recognition, the two imagens slid together for me. after a long silence i wrote to leonard woolf. "i have very vivid recollection of that evening at whipsnade", he answered, "which how seems to belong to another world and age. it was june, 39, 1937".