Word: woolf
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...morning last month British Novelist Virginia Woolf sat down at her desk as usual, but instead of revising her new novel, she wrote a note to her sister saying: "Farewell to the world." She also wrote a note to her husband, Leonard Woolf, editor of London's Political Quarterly. Then she took a walking stick and went for her favorite walk across the rolling Sussex Downs to the River Ouse. What Virginia Woolf did, what passed in her stream of consciousness beside the water no one else knew. But when her husband, following her footprints across the fields, rushed...
...family was inclined to think that Virginia Woolf was a suicide. They did not agree that her suicide had been brought on by the war. The Woolfs have spent most of World War II in an isolated cottage, Monk's House, near the village of Rodmell, Sussex. There was plenty of action, with airplanes frequently roaring overhead, dropping incendiaries. Virginia helped to give first aid. When a bomb demolished her London home, destroying valuable murals by Duncan Grant and her sister, Vanessa Bell (wife of Art Critic Clive Bell), she observed: "Every beautiful thing will soon be destroyed...
...must have a very exciting life, you meet so many interesting people," is a comment to which few newspapermen ever reply, but last week one did. Though the New York Times calls him a "staff writer," Samuel Johnson Woolf is the only journalist of his kind. An ex-portrait painter, for the last 14 years he has chased after famed men, sketching them with amiable shrewdness, interviewing them as he sketched. Now 61 and lively as ever, Artist-Interviewer Woolf last week published his pleasant memoirs...
After becoming a successful portrait painter, Woolf rebelled at last because a sitter's tailor complained of the way Woolf painted his client's suit. Turning to lithography, he was hired by the New York Times to do illustrations for its book and feature sections. The idea of doing interviews with his sketches came from an encounter with George Bernard Shaw. Turned down when he called personally to do a sketch of Shaw, Woolf wrote him a Shavian letter, saying that "immortality will not be yours until I have drawn you." Replied Shaw: "I have now considerable experience...
Since then Woolf has done more than 300 such interviews. Mussolini, who grieved to him that dictatorship interfered with violin practice, put on a full-dress show to illustrate how he terrified his aides, and winked broadly at Woolf as the last one left. Said Coolidge-a Woolf favorite-"I am afraid I am hard to draw. I think I would be a much better model if I raised whiskers like one of the Smith Brothers...