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Malya Woolf: a socialite who craved time alone |
Malya’s posthumous debut
SOMETIMES, I HAVE TO CLOSE MY EYES
By Malya Woolf. Marchmont Street Publishing £9.99.
THERE is a tone of sweet melancholy among Malya Woolf’s friends when they reflect on what they know about her life.
Her posthumously published novella, Sometimes I Have to Close My Eyes, is a labour of love – entirely funded, edited and published by tem.
Malya’s own story as an actress, playwright and socialite and the former wife of Cecil Woolf, Virginia’s Woolf’s nephew, is perhaps another story but given that by some accounts she wrote the novella in the days following their split, sitting in the public reading rooms of the British Library, it is likely that the two tales intertwine.
Her obscure, mysterious history is maintained in her style of writing, which is purposefully cryptic.
The book’s heroine, Sophie, lies and waits for her body to mend from what emerges towards the end of the 90-page book to be a terrible road accident. She escapes reality using the tools at hand: her mind, the scenery and the staff.
Written as a stream of consciousness but with short, punchy sentences, Malya fires snippets of emotion and nuggets of description at the reader.
She had a reputation as a Soho animal. Her neighbour of 18 years, Brita Forstrom, recalls how Malya, who would leave freshly baked bread for her on her doorstep in Herbrand Street on the Peabody estate, continued to party well into her 70s.
Andrew Sillett, who edited the book, said: “The last words she said to me were, ‘you are beautiful’. She always had an eye for the men, even when she was about to croak.”
But the socialite, who described herself as a “garrulous loner” also craved time alone and would often pass her neighbours on the stairs without saying a word.
Filmmaker Beth Sanders, one of the key founders of Marchmont Street Press, the publishing company with this one-book portfolio, met Malya in a shop in Marchmont Street when she was in her 80s, recovering from a stroke yet ever stylish and theatrical, always wearing her lippy and her scarf.
They would meet at least once a week at Bertorelli’s in Charlotte Street. She gives a sense of her friend’s frivolity when she says: “Malya called everyone ‘darling’ and she didn’t like to give dates. She’d say ‘oh I don’t know, darling, time goes’.”
From humble beginnings, the daughter of Italian immigrants who owned a grocery store in Clerkenwell, she operated on the fringes of the Bloomsbury set. She performed in WH Auden’s poetic drama The Ascent of F6, acted alongside Mae West and in her later years took roles in TV’s The Bill.
Self-taught, Malya wrote two plays for her English literature degree which she completed in her 60s and she embarked on her PhD in her 80s.
“When I read the manuscript I just loved it and wanted to get it published,” says Ms Sanders. “I took it around a few people and got some initial responses but you know she was 88 years old and not going to publish another book. We planned to present it to her on her 90th.”
But when Malya died a few months later Sanders set herself the challenge to publish it within five years.
“People who did not even know her got involved,” she said. “She lived a life. She was generous in her nature in all respects. It’s contagious, that spirit, which is alive in a lot of people’s hearts.”
Sara Newman
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