Virginia’s Apple: Collected Memoirs by Judith Barrington

Internationally known poet, professor, and writing teacher Judith Barrington’s new book, Virginia’s Apple: Collected Memoirs, is a gathering of fourteen prose pieces, published previously in journals, now edited “to make them one longer narrative.” It is an important memoir encompassing second-wave lesbian, feminist, creative, academic, and political communities. Barrington’s activities and explorations stretch from the United Kingdom and Europe to the United States, where she eventually settled in the Pacific Northwest. One story alone, “Allegiances,” is worth reading for the politically relevant activism incited successfully after the Oregon ceremony in which Barrington attained U.S. citizenship.

Barrington’s use of language is figurative, reflective, and forthright, skillfully combining a poet’s guileless honesty and vulnerability, often culminating in compassionate introspection. Her stories possess glimmers of British reserve from someone raised among the middle class, but Barrington also shines a light revealing a fearless determination to emerge from the comfort zones of her family’s and society’s expectations.

The memoir opens with “The Walk Home.” It begins, simply, Roy was a landmark. After moving to suburban Tongdean Lane, eleven-year-old Judith exits a bus each afternoon to walk uphill toward home. She notices Roy, thrashing around uncontrollably in his wooden wheelchair outside his house. Despite Judith’s attending a private school with nobody who wasn’t able, both physically and mentally and a mother who referred to Roy (later identified with cerebral palsy) as a spastic, Barrington recounts he clearly was completely compus mentis…. The only impediment to their initial conversations was his inability to control his lips and tongue and throat. She tells Roy her name is Judy, and a passing friendship begins. Then a game ensues: Roy tosses his keys. As Judy returns them, Roy pulls her into his lap, his grip painfully strong. He holds her until Roy’s body subsided into an unusual calm. Their encounters continue, and Judith acknowledges her shame was not of the small sexual explorations, but of the ease with which [she] stood up and left him. This account ends with Barrington’s biggest regret, realized several decades later, after being diagnosed with a neuromuscular disease…gradually impairing mobility. “Judy” was too young, scared, and paralyzed by unexplained guilt to lift up the wooden bar…and snuggle into his body until our breathing merged, our heartbeats slowed down, and we were both quite still.

Other themes introduced in “The Walk Home” recur throughout the memoir. The metaphor of “landmarks” returns as new horizons or revisited views of home. Gravesites of women in history become touchstones of important mentors. In “The Condolence Dog,” readers learn that both of Judith’s parents drowned in the Lakonia cruise ship disaster, leaving her an orphan at nineteen. Her parents’ recovered bodies are buried at Gibraltar, on British soil just eight miles from Africa. Judith’s flatmates, well-schooled in the denial of death, give her a brown, energetic, and untrained dog, which serves as comic relief to Barrington’s inability to grieve this loss. As Barrington’s life unfolds during the mid-sixties and seventies, she openly explored the sexual revolution, women’s liberation, and many countercultural events within various communities while also grappling with societal and internal homophobia. A short-lived marriage occurs during this time, alongside a proper middle-class career in a family business, soon abandoned after the marriage. Other landmarks are seen from a ship’s deck, or through the windshield of a convertible inherited from her mother. Any references to ghosts are subtle and indirect. One familiar building, the Esperanto Society on Bayswater Road, is mentioned as Judith describes a late night alone, driving the streets of London. Because Judith’s grandfather had translated Shakespeare into Esperanto, she hints at linguistic and literary intellectuals rooted within her family tree, but her focus is on painting feminist graffiti on billboards without getting caught.

I’d entered a landscape that looked familiar at first—but the light was different, the geographical features out of place, and the weather much more unpredictable.

“Nicolette” lays bare the complexities of Barrington’s first lesbian love affair.  The seduction began when Judith was an impressionable age fourteen, by an aunt of questionable background. Judith was easily charmed by this twice-divorced woman’s paying exclusive attention to her, asking grown-up questions, then sending an invitation to visit, which was quashed by Judith’s mother, who hated the woman for destroying her brother-in-law’s thirty-year marriage. Five years later, Judith agrees to drive Nicolette home after the memorial service for her drowned parents, and their furtive relationship begins, including the contradiction of “loving” a married alcoholic twenty years older, experienced at manipulating the tragic loss of another for attention to her own narcissistic charisma and grift.

Although Judith eventually ends this affair, it is a long process, rife with self-doubt, suicidal thoughts, and bouts of solitary drinking. Their ongoing secrecy morphs into assumptions from co-workers, friends, and family (a lover who dumped her! An affair with a married man!), none of which Judith disputes. This leads to early poems, later published as Trying to Be an Honest Woman. The LGBTQ catch phrase “It Gets Better” might have helped during this time, but instead Judith survived with others in consciousness raising groups, lesbian-feminist-separatist households, business launches, and political protests. There were also books of women writers who provided inspiration and instruction during those years of growth and exploration, influencing Barrington’s own writing. She recalls, It was as if a door had opened where…I’d entered a landscape that looked familiar at first—but the light was different, the geographical features out of place, and the weather much more unpredictable.

For those unfamiliar with Judith Barrington’s previous books of poetry, life stories, writing instruction, and edited anthologies, reading Virginia’s Apple may invite further explorations of earlier publications. For those who know and love Judith Barrington’s work, may her life inspire further research, including a biographical exploration of letters and postcards archived between Judith Barrington and Adrienne Rich, or testimonies from literary contemporaries who were brought together through the various reading groups, workshops, and residencies Judith and her beloved partner Ruth Gundle helped to facilitate.

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Marie-Elise Wheatwind has published poetry, interviews, articles, and flash prose in various journals and magazines. Her writing has been awarded a PEN Syndicated Fiction prize, an Oregon Literary Arts Fiction Fellowship, and other grants and recognition for editing, teaching, and writing, spanning five decades. She currently lives in Portland, OR.