#33: On Mecklenburgh Square and Making a Life

November 30, 2021

So, to begin:

My book is getting published! You'll (obviously) be hearing a lot more about this as publication comes closer, but for now--I'm incredibly pleased that it's going to such a good editor, at such an exciting new house, and I'm extremely excited to keep working on it....which leads me to my second announcement! Back in May, I was offered a position as the Franke Visiting Fellow at Yale's Whitney Humanities Center, where I would get to think, breathe, and work on translation while living near campus, (and get academic library privileges back!!! I miss them every day!!!) and get paid, essentially, to work on my book.

I...cannot express the degree to which all of this, any of this is a dream come true, is absolutely unimaginable to me as a reality that I get to live in, and work in, and make my little art in. Prior to this year, I joked all the time about someone giving me a bunch of money and letting me work on my writing for a year, and now I get to literally just do that full-time. My book, which up until August had been read in its entirety by about 5 people tops has now been read by...several more, and they've largely said very nice things about it! And that is not a candle to the number of people that will read it when it exists as something other than a Google Doc, which is also wild. Things have happened in the last six months that I have spent my entire life dreaming about, either abstractly or concretely, and it feels, just now, as if I am on the edge of things getting even more exciting--my life, in some serious or new way, beginning.

Enter: the book I've been reading the past few weeks, Francesca Wade's Square Haunting. It's a group biography of five women that lived in Bloomsbury's Mecklenburgh Square sometime during/between the world wars, people you've heard of (H.D., Dorothy L. Sayers, Virginia Woolf) and people you haven't (Eileen Powers, Jane Harrison). Each of them are at different places in their career, each one wants to make art, or make the world a different place, or has transitioned from a brilliant and beautiful career into a series of new interests. I think where Wade particularly shines is in placing these few critical years each woman spent in Mecklenburgh Square in context of her whole full life--Jane Harrison could not have made her right turn into Russian politics and literature in Mecklenburgh before being a renowned scholar of ancient Greek storytelling, and she could not have done that without years on the lecture circuit, imagining a life in which she got to be a scholar. Dorothy L. Sayers could not have been a brilliant detective novelist without the years spent with an awful boyfriend in a strange little flat in Mecklenburgh where she worked silly jobs and imagined better, Eileen Powers could not have fought so hard for pacifism and the League of Nations without strange little years of self-doubt.

My years of self-doubt aren't over--the book sold back in August, and I haven't been able to so much as write a word of it since, I'm really worried about moving away from Jason and my house and my dog for a few months, I have impostor syndrome out the wazzoo--but there's something about reading a group biography, especially one as brilliant and multi-layered and wonderful as Wade's that illustrates, fully and wonderfully, what it could mean to be a writer, or an artist to find your own way in the world, particularly at a time when that world is smashing itself to pieces.