More Travels with Jean Hanuman: England
You may revisit Hanuman's travels in France here.

Hanuman arrives in England
Hanuman at Blenheim Palace
Jean Hanuman, Photographer

     "How I love East Sussex," proclaimed Jean Hanuman one day last winter, in Austin.
     "Did you know that it was the home of Virginia and Leonard Woolf, and other luminaries of the Bloomsbury are group?" asked Professor Mia Carter, his dear friend, with whom Jean was sharing conversation over one of his special hot toddies (Mia called this drink "miraculous," for its power to lift the spirits).
     "My dear girl," sighed Hanuman. "I'll admit that you've given me some insight here and there with your perspicacious reading of Ms. Woolf, but don't go thinking you're all that and a bag of crisps. Get me to Sussex, and I'll take you on a tour you shan't forget."
     This is the story of that tour.

   

 The first stop was Seaford, a village Hamuman claims to have visited "just after the war. 

"Let's pack a lovely picnic," said Jean Hanuman's friends.
     "No need," replied the traveler. "When you pack a picnic, you feed the group for a day on picnic food. When I pack my fishing gear, you roast halibut on the beach with whle garlic cloves, butter and pepper, for a meal that stands alone in your memory."
     Hanuman produced a prodigious amount of gear, and heroically cast time and again into the spot in the surf, he insisted, was perfect for the halibut run. After an hour of this, he turned to his companions, saying, "I do this more for relaxation that with any real expectation of a catch."
     Luckily, his companions had brought along some provisions and they had a lovely beach picnic. Hanuman put away his share, I can tell you. "You can work up a real appetite fishing," he exclaimed between mouthfuls.

"Hey, Jean Hanuman, that's too far out!" called his alarmed friends," as Jean cut through wave after wave, seemingly on his way to Nova Scotia.
     "Nonsense," replied the intrepid swimmer. "Get in here, the water is great!"

     Here, Corinne (in cap), Catherine (in goggles?), and Robert are glad they followed Jean into the sea.

     On to Monk's House, which Leonard and Virginia Woolf purchased for their residence in 1916. Jean led a group through the modest house, commenting on objets d'art that had been preserved just as the Woolfs might have had them in their home. "A masterpiece is something said once and for all, stated, finished, so that it's there complete in the mind, if only at the back." quotes Jean from the work of Woolf, along with quite a few phrases that he used as apt aphorisms.
     "Almost any biographer, if he respects facts, can give us much more than another fact to add to our collection. He can give us the creative fact; the fertile fact; the fact that suggests and engenders."
     and "I can only note that the past is beautiful because one never realises an emotion at the time. It expands later, and thus we don't have complete emotions about the present, only about the past."
     Among Jean Hanuman's audience were the docents of the house, who, having spent a good part of their long lives steeped in the writings and the lore of Woolf and Bloomsbury, were discovering in Jean's discourse new ways of expressing an appreciation for Virginia Woolf's genius, new facts about her life and times



Jean sits near the bust of Virginia, contemplating the quote Leonard had inscribed on the tablet. "Death is the enemy. Against you I will fling myself unvanquished and unyielding--O Death."

Here Hanuman sits by the bust of Leonard Woolfe. "If he were only the support and foundation for his wife, VIrginia, in her Most fertile years of creation, oh, what a great man he would be. He was that, and so much more--novelist, journalist, essayist, publisher. I suppose to say that he lives in history in the shadow of his wife is a kind of praise of its own."


Corinne seems transported to another time, walking in the same garden that inspired Woolf.
Across the back walled garden, a quaint country church and graveyard, "two constructs to stir the soul of a writer," says Hanuman, who knows.


After walking in the same footsteps of Virginia Woolf at Monk's House, and later at Charleston Farmhouse, will the young scholars of her writing gain new perspective on and identification with her work? As Hanuman took this shot, he had the scholars say, instead of "Cheese," "When the shriveled skin of the ordinary is stuffed out with meaning, it satisfies the senses amazingly. "