by Gillian Gill
Over in Gordon Square, meanwhile, the Bells reveled in the creature comforts that Clive could now afford, and they radiated sensual happiness. To Lytton’s joy, Clive and Vanessa began receiving him in the bedroom, lying next to each other, and it was no secret to their friends that Vanessa responded to her husband with ardor. According to Vanessa’s daughter, Angelica Garnett, who seems to be repeating what her mother told her, during the year and a half in which she became engaged, married, and had her first son, Vanessa Bell was “supremely happy and fulfilled.” “She was twenty-eight and had waited a long time for sexual experience. Now that it had come, she was transfigured; she was bowled over not only by the sex itself but by the intimacy it conferred on their relationship. All her tender, delicate and most endearing qualities came to the surface; she teased, joked, and laughed, enjoying the half-private, half-public parade of their feelings.”
It was at this point, when a “transfigured” Vanessa was experiencing a happiness she had never known before and daring to open up to the world, that, as Angelica Garnett puts it, “Virginia took it into her head to flirt with Clive.”
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The flirtation—for it was never an “affair” in the usual sense of the word—started while the Bells were in Italy on their honeymoon, or even before. The first extant letter from Virginia Woolf to Clive Bell dates to December 1906. Deciding which of the Stephen sisters they admired more had always been a dilemma for Thoby Stephen’s friends, and even during the brief weeks of his engagement Clive lavished expressions of affection, admiration, and concern on Virginia. He, like his wife, wrote to Virginia regularly during the first weeks of their honeymoon, and Adrian and Virginia joined the Bells in Paris for the last weeks of the honeymoon.
Virginia had told friends before her sister married that she and Adrian saw themselves leading lives separate from the Bells, but this was not what happened. Clive was an extremely social animal, he now had ample funds to travel and entertain friends, and as the ardor he had confessed to Lytton before his wedding was sated, he was not inclined to spend much time alone with his new wife. Clive was aware that his Cambridge friends considered him an intellectual lightweight, and he remembered, if Vanessa had forgotten, that only months earlier she had not only turned down his proposals of marriage but dared to suggest he get a job. Paying conspicuous attention to his wife’s sister helped Clive salve the wounds to his amour propre while enhancing the Casanova self-image he had been developing since his late teens.
Thus, right from the beginning of the Bell marriage, Virginia, at first accompanied by Adrian but soon alone, found herself spending many of her London days, and many holidays too, with the Bells. Seeing Clive and Vanessa together scratched a sore in Virginia’s psyche, and this is when she began to flatter and flirt with her brother-in-law, drawing Clive’s attention away from his wife and toward her. She was becoming Witcherina, the nickname her niece Angelica would later know her by.
As early as mid-February 1907, only weeks after the wedding, a flustered, flowery, quotation-packed letter from Virginia to Clive already sounds a note of hyperbolic intensity. The editors of her correspondence note that she actually wrote a draft of this letter. After amusingly relating her reaction to a telegram she has received about renting 29 Fitzroy Square, Virginia decides she must turn to Vanessa for real estate advice, and she then free-associates over her new pet name for her sister—Dolphin: “It contains all the beauty of the sky, and the melancholy of the sea, and the laughter of the Dolphin in its circumference, first in the mystic Van, spread like a mirror of grey glass to heaven. Next in the swishing tail of its successive esses, and finally in the grave pause and suspension of the ultimate. A breathing peace like the respiration of Earth itself.”
In the next extant letter, Virginia writes to the honeymooning Clive on March 22 that she has quarreled with Walter Headlam—one of the men seeking to marry her—since he has dared give an opinion on “my own proper science: the theory of Vanessa.” Virginia concludes her letter to Clive: “Give my love to my sister, and, if you like, kiss her on her left eye, with the eyelid smoothed over the curve, and just blue on the crest.” In her letter to Clive of August 18, 1907, Virginia Woolf similarly ends her letter: “Both eyes are to be kissed, the tip of the right ear, and the snout if its wet.”
By August 1907 it was apparent that Vanessa was pregnant and even happier than before. Virginia’s adoration of her sister moved up a notch, but her attitude to Clive remained ambivalent at best. She reported to Violet: “Nessa is like a great child, more happy and serene than ever, draped in a long robe of crimson or raspberry coloured silk, with clear drops of amethyst . . . To be with her is to sit in autumn sunlight, but then there is Clive!”
Violet seems to have sensed that something was not quite right in Virginia’s relationship with Clive since in a letter of October 1907, Virginia writes defensively, “Nessa and Clive came back yesterday—but I cant now go into his character; it will really be some time before I can separate him from her. I dont think I have spoken alone with him since they were married.” Within six months, however, Clive and Virginia were speaking to each other alone quite a lot, as well as exchanging intimate letters when apart.
Julian Heward Bell was born on February 4, 1908, a large, strong, healthy child. Julian immediately bonded with his mother, but he had difficulties with feeding. The Bells hired a nanny and a nurse to take care of the baby, but when Julian cried in the night Vanessa got up to nurse him. This caused Clive, who hated his sleep to be disturbed, to move into his dressing room. When Vanessa’s breast milk failed to satisfy, Julian was hungry and colicky, his howls echoing up and down the stairs at 46 Gordon Square, and things did not improve when the Bells, accompanied by Virginia and Julian’s nurse, went away to St. Ives in Cornwall in chilly April. The owner of the rented house also had a fractious child, and every adult conversation seemed to be interrupted by a scream from upstairs. Clive refused even to pick up his child—not uncommon behavior for a father at this period—and Vanessa refused to enroll her sister’s help in caring for Julian. Instead she was relieved when Clive and Virginia, who was a prodigious walker, went off for walks together with their dogs, Gurth and Hans. Clive Bell appreciated the brilliance of Virginia’s mind even as he responded to the beauty of her long, slender body, unswollen by pregnancy and lactation. Virginia was struggling to write her first novel, then burdened with the title Melymbrosia, and Clive became her chosen reader.
When Virginia departed St. Ives for London, she left behind her copy of the book she was reviewing for the Times Literary Supplement, and in his hurry to retrieve the book and get it to Virginia before her train left, Clive fell and injured himself. Such extreme solicitude may have raised a tiny red flag in Vanessa’s mind for, in her next letter—the first since those she had written in 1904 during Virginia’s illness that Virginia kept hold of—she suggests to Virginia that they had all been suffering from boredom while in St. Ives. Vanessa composes a little monologue (a very Virginian fictional technique, I would note) of how Virginia might be viewing herself and Clive. “‘Of course,’” Vanessa imagines Virginia telling their London friends, “‘Nessa was quite taken up with the baby. Yes I’m afraid she is losing all her individuality and becoming the usual domestic mother and Clive—of course I like him very much, but his mind is of a peculiarly literal and prosaic type. However they seem perfectly happy and I expect it’s a good thing I didn’t stay longer. I was evidently beginning to bore them.’ Now Billy [that is, Virginia] on your honour haven’t you uttered one of these sentiments?”
In another letter, having seen some of Virginia’s letters to Clive, Vanessa remarks that her sister was writing her the kind of love letters that her husband never wrote to her. On some level, Vanessa Bell was aware that she was one side of a love triangle being formed with her sister and her husband, and for a brief moment she came close to challenging them about it.
When Clive took his wife and new son to visit his parents at Cleeve House
in Wiltshire, he fell back into the company of the Raven-Hills. Anne Raven-Hill was the neighbor’s wife with whom Clive had enjoyed a passionate affair for several years. In 1908 Anne was striving to maintain a façade of respectability while nursing a child that, as the Wiltshire rumormongers had it, was not her husband’s.
Three key letters written at the time of the Bells’ visit to Cleeve House in 1908—one from Clive to Virginia, one from Virginia to Clive, and one from Vanessa to Virginia—are evidence that the company of Anne Raven-Hill and her complaisant artist husband caused a turning point in the relationship between wife and husband, sister and husband, and sister and sister. Suddenly exurban Wiltshire starts to resemble the Vienna of Arthur Schnitzler and Freud or the Paris of Colette and Willy.
Clive wrote to Virginia,
Mrs Raven-Hill, Mrs Armour, Mrs Clive Bell, three young or youngish women; how beautiful do they sit, each in her own day nursery smiling down Madonna-like on a smiling child. Last night they dined with three men: Mr Raven-Hill, Mr Armour, Mr Clive Bell, artists, young members of the youngest Bohemian clubs, stained by drink and lust and too warm contact with the sin-besodden world . . . but Vanessa like some beautiful black velvet foil takes the measure of her peeresses and can judge their colour to a shade. Her appreciation is so sure that she is rarely descried, and yet she continues to get confidences. Explain me that.
Responding on April 15, Virginia sounded a new note of open flirtatiousness to Clive. While in St. Ives she had offered to let Clive kiss her, and now she concluded her letter to her brother-in-law in this provocative way:
I have been writing Nessa’s life; and I am going to send you 2 chapters in a day or so. It might have been so good! As it is, I am too near and too far; and it seems to be blurred, and I ask myself why write it at all seeing I never shall recapture what you have by your side this minute . . . I gather that you are going to a dance; and I believe you go because you think your wife the most beautiful woman in England, and she goes because she thinks so too. Kiss her, most passionately, in all my private places—neck—arm, an eyeball, and tell her—what new thing is there to tell her? How fond I am of her husband?
On April 19 Vanessa at Cleeve House wrote to Virginia about the astounding Mrs. Raven-Hill: “Talk about freedom of talk. She stops at nothing and the joys of married life were freely discussed and notes compared by her, Mrs Armour and myself, and I quite enjoyed myself as you will believe. Also I can see that I can get some useful tips from Mrs Raven-Hill as to the best means of checking one’s family and I mean to make use of the dance at Devizes for the purpose, though as she is very deaf I shall probably cause a scandal.”
Here we begin to see a new Vanessa, no longer uncertain, probing, and pleading, as in the letter from St. Ives, but gossiping salaciously about birth control to her naive unmarried sister and taking on the persona of the sophisticated, blasé woman of the world she was beginning to understand her husband expected her to be.
In 1909, according to Quentin Bell, the Bells, Virginia, Saxon Sydney-Turner, Adrian Stephen, and Walter Lamb, one of Virginia’s suitors, began a letter-writing game that enabled Clive, in his fictional persona, to “renew his gallantries” to Virginia in her fictional persona, “with unusual openness and ardour.” To taunt Virginia, who welcomed his letters but eluded his embraces, Clive would lavish caresses on his wife. It was all very sleazy, and Lytton Strachey chided Virginia for the pain she was causing her sister.
By 1909 Vanessa and Clive Bell were drifting apart, and in 1910, the year in which his second son, Quentin, was born, Clive Bell renewed his liaison with Anne Raven-Hill. Encouraged by his wife’s savoir vivre, he no longer bothered to hide his fascination with her sister. He and Virginia were in regular correspondence when apart, and when together they walked and talked, arguing with gusto but quick to reconcile. This went on for more than two years. It took the arrival of Leonard Woolf from Sri Lanka in the summer of 1911 to stop the Clive-Virginia “thing” in its tracks.
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What was going on in the heads of those in this odd little amorous triangle? On Clive’s side the answer is not hard to come up with, and when he described himself as an “artist” and a member “of the youngest Bohemian clubs, stained by drink and lust and too warm contact with the sin-besodden world,” he offered us an important clue to his character and his motivation. Clive Bell had an active libido and a reliable cock, Anne Raven-Hill seems to have taught him how to give women pleasure in bed, and in Paris he fell under the spell of the belle époque, with its jeweled cocottes, purple-silk-cravated homosexuals, leather-booted lesbians, and wild-eyed opiomanes. As young men, Clive’s artist friends, like Gerald Kelly and Duncan Grant, lived in that world, and throughout his life Clive would seek it out on yearly visits to France.
Clive knew that, as a married man, he would come into the kind of money that made the life of the Baudelairean flâneur possible. Back in England in 1905, he settled quickly on Vanessa Stephen as an agreeable woman likely to please his father, and when Vanessa responded to conjugal intimacy with unexpected passion, Clive was amused and ready to try the same trick on his sister-in-law. Clive had always found Virginia attractive, and the fascination with his wife’s body that she revealed to him in her letters appealed to the libertine in him. To seduce Virginia would be delectably incestuous as well as adulterous, and Clive could persuade himself that Virginia would be glad to be relieved of her maidenhood at long last. Thus, what Clive Bell wanted from Virginia, his son Quentin bluntly tells us, was “no less . . . and not much more than a delightful little infidelity, ending up in bed.” Lytton, who was always going on about Virginia’s virginal nature, would definitely have approved when Clive told him about the seduction.
The deliciously French version of libertinism made fashionable circa 1900 by best-selling literary entrepreneurs like the author Colette’s husband, Henry Gauthier-Villars, alias Willy, had immense allure for affluent heterosexual Englishmen weary of Victorianism. In one of the salacious little essays he may actually have penned himself, Willy advises the man about town to marry a rich, pretty girl, offer her an advanced course in eroticism in the manner of Les liaisons dangereuses, and then move on to his next mistress. This is pretty much exactly what Clive Bell did. With the new king, Edward VII, doing his best to make Sandringham more like Neuilly, men like Clive Bell were encouraged to see fidelity in marriage as not just absurdly Victorian but hideously lower-middle-class. Artists and aristocrats married, sired heirs, and then, duty done, moved on. Having friends in the art world allowed Clive Bell to see himself as an artist, and his family’s money gave him aristocratic pretensions. Did he not shoot and ride to hounds with the county set and rent a trout stream in the Highlands—all, of course, thanks to the large fortune his grandfather had made out of the slag heaps and poisoned air of Merthyr Tydvil in Wales?
As for why Virginia let herself get entangled with Clive, she must have asked herself that question many times, but she never put her thoughts and feelings down on paper. The fraught relationship with her sister and brother-in-law before her own marriage was not something that could be communicated to a friend like Violet; neither was it the kind of thing she cared to record in her diary. One thing is clear. Virginia Woolf never, to put it crudely, had the hots for Clive Bell. As her comments to Violet Dickinson in the months following her brother Thoby’s death indicate, she felt an ambivalence bordering on repulsion for her sister’s husband—which makes it all the stranger that, within weeks of her sister’s marriage, she embarked on a sexual game for which no one had yet given her the rule book.
In the period between her sister’s marriage and her own, Virginia Woolf seesawed between frenzied activity and mental collapse, her mind too befogged to see sense or heed the advice of friends like Violet. Professionally, she had made great strides since her father’s death in 1904, and if at times she craved solitude, holing up in rented rooms in Yorkshire and Cornwall to write, she always kept in constant touch by letter. When she emerg
ed, her days were a whirl of social engagements mixed with serious writerly work. The modest fees she earned from her reviews added to her small but steady income from her various inheritances, allowed her in 1910 to rent a small house at Firle on the Sussex coast, an easy rail journey from London. This would be the first of a series of houses in rural Sussex (notably Asheham and Monk’s House) where Virginia would work on her novels and her reviews, welcome chosen friends, and lead the healthy outdoor country life she thrived on.
Socially, Virginia continued to rely on the affection and support of female friends like Nelly Cecil and the Thynne sisters, but her flirtatious relationship with Violet Dickinson had cooled. Violet was doing more traveling with other female friends, and Virginia felt an increasing urge to be married. Despite her mental fragility, or perhaps because of it—so many men adore crazy women—Virginia, unlike Vanessa at the same age, attracted suitors. Walter Headlam, Edward Hilton Young, Walter Lamb, and Sydney Waterlow all wanted to marry her, and she enjoyed keeping them dangling.
When these gentlemen proposed, however, she gracefully and decisively said no. When it came right down to it, she could not imagine herself in bed with any of them and was not at all sure that they could actually imagine themselves in bed with her. She was a tall, athletic woman, and the Cambridge classicist Lamb was so small and so obsequious. As for Headlam, rumors had been floating around about his taste for small girls even when Julia Stephen was alive. The diplomat Sydney Waterlow, after Virginia turned him down in the fall of 1911, stalked off and found himself a prostitute, which at least shows that his preference was for women. Waterlow continued to socialize with the Bloomsbury group, and his later comment on Virginia and her sister is interesting: “Vanessa icy, cynical, artistic. Virginia much more emotional and interested in life rather than beauty.”
