Sophie Cunningham on ‘This Devastating Fever’
This Devastating Fever (Ultimo, September) is Sophie Cunningham’s first novel in more than a decade. The novel interweaves the story of Leonard and Virginia Woolf and their friends in the Bloomsbury Group with the story of Alice, a writer working on a book about Leonard. Reviewer Chris Saliba says that with her innovative and humorous novel, Cunningham ‘has pulled off something genuinely moving’. Saliba spoke with the author.
This Devastating Fever has an original, even unusual design: part autofiction, part travelogue, part Bloomsbury history. How did you decide on the style and format?
It took a lot of years to find the right shape for this novel. I never explicitly set out to achieve any particular design but I certainly realised (after a few years and drafts) that it wasn’t going to work as a traditional novel so I leant into the fracturing that seemed to be occurring—something I’ve been doing with my nonfiction as well. These fractures, and connections, seemed to be falling along the fault lines of fact and fiction, life and death, the past and the present.
I also thought it was important to acknowledge some of the difficulties with writing ‘historical’ fiction. How do you write the story of two people, people like Leonard and Virginia Woolf, who have been so thoroughly documented? How do you allow yourself to play around in the way you have to to make a book work without losing your nerve? How do you write fiction rather than get bogged down in ‘facts’? I’d also say that one of the games I play in this novel is with the idea of autofiction. While Alice might have some things in common with me, she very definitely was not me. I’m not married to a librarian, I did not lose a loved one to Covid, and I don’t talk to ghosts—just for starters.
The research in your novel is superb. It’s a smorgasbord of quotes, footnotes and lists, all woven into a page-turning narrative. How much work did you have to put in to get everything right?
Well, it took about 16 years to get it half right, and then almost no time at all to pull it altogether. Finally, in the last draft, which only took a few weeks, it did just go: click! But that wouldn’t have happened if I hadn’t been mucking around and getting it wrong for all the years beforehand. Basically I (finally) stopped trying so hard and I stopped worrying about the rules for these things. I leant into the weirdness. And one of the things I had to do was let go of the research being the driving force. The narrative was drowning in research in earlier versions, and that made the writing stiff. That said, the research was endlessly fascinating. Delicious even. I had to share the joy (and pain) of some of the things I discovered with my readers. Thus the footnotes. I also wanted to indicate how hard it can be for a writer to stay on topic. I think there is a lot of emphasis on smoothing over the cracks in novels but to my mind the cracks can be the most interesting bits.
Today we think of Virginia Woolf as an acutely literary writer, read by aficionados and fans. How popular a figure—if it can be put like that—was she in her day?
It took her career a while to find momentum, but she started to become considered a writer of some significance in the 1920s and by the time she died in the early 1940s was being widely read. The Years, published in 1937, was the most popular of her novels during her lifetime, but the novels published in the 20s, such as Mrs Dalloway, To the Lighthouse and Orlando, are more widely known and read today. She, and her husband Leonard, were also extremely well regarded as publishers—they started and ran Hogarth Press, which published many major writers of the day.
The sections that deal with Virginia and Leonard Woolf’s marriage are very moving and intimate, showing the couple’s vulnerability. Did you find yourself becoming emotionally involved during the research and writing? What effect did it have on you?
Oh of course—I could only have persisted with This Devastating Fever if that had been the case. In fact I think a person can only write any novel if they become emotionally involved with their characters. I had read so many books and articles which made various pronouncements about Virginia and Leonard but they often felt abstract and not totally convincing to me. One of these was the discussion of Virginia as a ‘lesbian’ which is a word that doesn’t accurately capture, to my mind, the complexities of Virginia’s sexuality.
As well, being a carer, as Leonard Woolf was for much of his relationship with Virginia, would have been extremely demanding. Of course he didn’t always get it right. Who does in these situations? As well there has been a lot of focus on what the Woolfs did or didn’t do in bed with each other, which struck me as an extremely limited way to understand love and relationships. I was keen to engage with these issues but also to put then into a broader perspective—the perspective of interesting lives, well-lived.
Fans of the Bloomsbury Group will find much to enjoy in This Devastating Fever. Following the group’s crisscrossing sexualities—gay, straight, bisexual and quite a few unknowns—is a dizzying experience in itself. How was it that such an unconventional group found acceptance? Are they in some ways more liberated than us in 2022?
I was interested in the idea that no one really knows what happens between a couple in the course of a long-term relationship. I certainly think there was a broader public understanding back then, that while marriage as an institution is the norm, what happens within marriages tends to be incredibly variable—both between different couples but also over the lifetime of a relationship. That said, loyalty was deeply valued even if fidelity was not. (Though fidelity was important to Virginia and Leonard.) These days romantic love is valorised in a way that deep friendship is not. People don’t need to be married, or even have much sex, to have an intensely intimate and at times physical bond. (I’m thinking here of Lytton Strachey and Dora Carrington, Virginia Woolf and Vita-Sackville-West, Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant.) Perhaps it was useful that sex and love were separated for many members of the Bloomsbury Group? Perhaps it made these negotiations easier to manage?
Gender presentation was particularly fluid in the 1920s I would argue—something that Virginia captures beautifully in Orlando. That said, homosexuality for men was illegal until 1967 and gay men like Lytton Strachey took very serious risks by being relatively indiscreet on these matters. E M Forster on the other hand was discreet but gave up writing novels because he found the double-think of writing heterosexual romantic plot lines fairly soul-destroying. Another comment I’d make is that while we talk about how broad-minded the Bloomsbury set were it was still considered quite shocking when books such as Michael Holroyd’s biography of Lytton Strachey were published in 1967–1968 that had many ‘revelations’ regarding Strachey’s sex life. Leonard Woolf himself was no prude, but he too was shocked that these matters were finding their way into the public domain. That is, there was a very clear line between private and public lives. That line is less clear today, I think. Which is probably a good thing.
Image credit: Alana Holmberg.
Read Chris Saliba’s review of This Devastating Fever here.
