by Gillian Gill
Having yet to feel any desire for a man, Virginia gave serious thought to marrying Lytton Strachey. Of course, Lytton circa 1910 was, as Quentin Bell puts it, “the Bloomsbury arch-bugger,” and—in comparison with his gay friends Duncan Grant and Maynard Keynes—an ugly, self-absorbed, tortured, unsuccessful bugger to boot. But in some odd way Lytton’s lack of physical allure for Virginia, or hers for him, made the marriage conceivable to them both. Many gay men in this period married women, and both Lytton and Virginia longed for secure comfort and domestic companionship. Both were passionately engaged with literature, and there were times when they had a meeting of minds that was thrilling.
And so, one night, Lytton proposed and Virginia accepted, but then the next day, deciding he had made a colossal mistake, Lytton withdrew his proposal and Virginia said she understood. As he reported the very next day to Leonard in Sri Lanka, Lytton, overcome by this close brush with female chastity, hurtled back to Cambridge to have sex with the obliging Duncan. As for Virginia, she was not unhappy to put another of her flirtations behind her, and her heart was not broken. All the same, to have a man propose and withdraw in a matter of hours did nothing for her self-esteem, and she knew Lytton well enough to be sure the event would be all over Bloomsbury within the week. Lytton Strachey and Virginia Woolf would always care for each other, and there were moments over the next years when the old mental intimacy was revived, but their paths would diverge more and more from this point on.
Beneath the busy surface of life that Virginia brightly reported in letters to her various women friends, there were deep, unacknowledged currents of confusion, resentment, and anger that kept her hovering on the edge of a serious breakdown and needing to retreat regularly to a private clinic. The fundamental problem triggering these minor attacks was Vanessa. Ever since the deaths of their mother and older sister, no one had mattered to Virginia like Vanessa. She was the rock Virginia stood on as the successive storms of family deaths and mental breakdowns crashed over her. The relationship between the sisters, based on Virginia’s need for care and craving for love, had never been simple, but it had seemed secure. And then, literally in a matter of days, it was, as Virginia saw it, torn up by the roots, and she lost Vanessa not to death, which, in a sad way, she had learned to deal with, but to a man, and a man she saw as unworthy. Quite suddenly, the sisters no longer looked to a shared future, as they had after all the other family deaths. They were almost never alone together. Clive was always there between them, taking his share of grief as Thoby’s best friend, relieving Vanessa of the need to grieve.
In her diary on the eve of her sister’s wedding Virginia addressed a tortured entry to Vanessa: “We have been your humble Beasts since we left our isles,” wrote Virginia to Vanessa, referring to herself, according to their shared custom, as a plural entity, “the apes.” “During that time we have wooed you and sung many songs . . . in the hope that thus enchanted you would condescend one day to marry us. But as we no longer expect this honour we entreat that you keep us still for your lovers should you have need of such.”
This is the letter of a jilted lover, not a sister, and from this point Virginia became obsessed with Vanessa. While putting Vanessa on a pedestal and thus launching the Bloomsbury myth of Vanessa as a Greek goddess, she set out to undermine Vanessa’s relationship with Clive. If she could prove to Vanessa, in the most shocking way possible, that Clive was unfaithful and unworthy of her love, then surely Vanessa would return to her. Or so, in her unhappiness and her delusion, Virginia Stephen thought.
And how did Vanessa react to the “thing” between her husband and her sister? We can only surmise what she was thinking and feeling from what she did, since she seems never to have put anything about this part of her early married life down on paper. It was probably in 1908, soon after Julian’s birth, that she became aware that her husband was trying to get her sister into bed and that her sister was leading him on, but there is no record of a confrontation. Other women might have indulged in storms of tears or shied gravy boats across the dinner table, but dramatic scenes were not Vanessa Bell’s style. She apparently watched the flirtation take its course as if it amused her, but as Lytton intuited when he taxed Virginia with causing her sister pain, Vanessa’s smiling complicity was an act of bravado, designed to deflect attention from inner anguish.
As we have seen, after the storms and shoals of her youth, Vanessa had grave doubts about marriage and avoided it for some eight years after the emotional disarray caused by her wish to marry Jack Hills. But then, amid the fresh trauma of her brother Thoby’s illness and death, she had gambled on finding, with his close friend Clive Bell, a place of intimacy where she could explore sexual pleasure, heal old wounds, and produce children to take the place of the beloved dead. She dared to envisage herself playing her own modern version of the role of adored wife and mother and domestic prodigy, which she remembered her mother playing so well. That dream lasted barely a year, and when she woke up and saw her husband both angling for Virginia and ogling Anne Raven-Hill, the wound to Vanessa’s self-esteem went deep. Had her husband within months of marriage merely revealed himself to be an unrepentant serial philanderer, it would have been hard, but Vanessa Bell could at least have found love and support in her sister. Virginia would have understood what she was going through without needing to be told. But to have Virginia colluding in Clive’s amorous projects was a betrayal worthy of a novel by the Stephens’ old family friend Henry James.
As her biographer Frances Spalding notes, “despite her belief in honesty there were certain matters on which [Vanessa Bell] maintained a guarded reticence, an impenetrable privacy.” But at Charleston in 1918, at a moment of high stress in the unstable love triangle between herself, Duncan Grant, and David Garnett, Vanessa made a revealing contribution to a heated discussion of whether “our more or less high opinion of a rival made us more or less jealous.” In his diary, Grant recorded, “Nessa thought the higher opinion the greater the jealousy . . . She produced Virginia of whom she had been more jealous than anyone at a time when she admired her more than any woman she knew.” I take this to be a reference to the “thing” between Virginia and Clive.
Virginia was even more circumspect, apparently referring to the events of 1907–11 only once in a letter to her friend Gwen Darwin Raverat, in March 1925. Raverat’s husband, Jacques, had just died after a long battle with multiple sclerosis, but as newlyweds, the Raverats had been very happy when subletting from the Stephens in Fitzroy Square. Comparing their experience to her own in the same place, Woolf wrote: “Yes I will tell you the whole of my life history one day, but I think it was my affair with Clive and Nessa I was thinking of when I said I envied you and Jacques at Fitzroy Square. For some reason that turned more of a knife in me than anything else has done.”
The remark applies equally or more, I think, to Vanessa.
Faced with a double treachery, Vanessa took stock of the man she had married and concluded that rebuking her husband in 1909 was as useless as mourning her brother had been in 1906. She had made her bed and she chose to lie in it, however crowded. The real traitor, as Vanessa saw it, was Virginia, and punishing her sister was easy. Vanessa had had occasion to see the sharp side to Virginia’s shy, dreamy, withdrawn nature. When she found herself the target of some perceived injustice, Virginia would lash out, turn turkey-cock red in the face, and use her emotional intelligence and verbal skills to wound. But once Virginia had cooled down and come to see that she had vented her anger at the expense of people she loved, she was all remorse and desperate to make it up. What she then hated most was not rebuke, but silence and a withdrawal of confidence.
So Vanessa’s revenge was to allow Virginia to know that she knew about what was going on between her and Clive, and say nothing. To admonish is to call attention and seek acknowledgment and confession. To confess is to ask for forgiveness. Virginia was not allowed to confess and thus was offered no forgiveness. Turning weakness into power, Vanessa silently inserte
d a knife and twisted it, thereby becoming, in Sydney Waterlow’s words, “icy and cynical.”
In a seeming paradox, the relationship between Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell opens up for us to see at the very time it came under great stress. The letters the two sisters kept after 1908 and that we can read today offer a simulacrum of the old, unselfconscious intimacy that we can assume was recorded in the lost pre-1904 correspondence. Funny, intimate, and perceptive, the published correspondence of Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell is a joy to read. It is also deceptive. Like Lytton, with his letters to Leonard in Sri Lanka, the sisters intended that their letters should survive them. The record they offer us is, thus, both communication and performance. Like a thighbone that is snapped and never properly set, the relationship between the sisters was broken, and they would hobble on together for the rest of their lives.
That a strain of resistance, even hostility, ran beneath the affectionate surface when her mother, Vanessa Bell, and her aunt Virginia Woolf were alone together was apparent twenty years later to Vanessa’s teenage daughter, Angelica. In Deceived with Kindness, the first volume of her memoir, Angelica Bell Garnett remembered Charleston, her mother’s personal domain in Sussex, as a combination of secret garden, full of ripe fruit and errant chickens, and a fortress, guns loaded and ready to repel invasion. During its heyday in the 1930s, according to Bell Garnett, Virginia Woolf and her husband, Leonard, mainly came to Charleston when invited for group celebrations. On occasion, however, Virginia would make an unannounced sortie from nearby Monk’s House, only to be confronted with an invisible wall, which she needed all her wit and whimsy to climb over.
Enacting a ritual rooted in the Kensington past, Virginia would demand that Pixerina (Angelica) should kiss Witcherina (herself) from wrist to elbow—all this in an effort to extract one embarrassed, reluctant kiss from Vanessa. Once this strange little exercise was over, Vanessa would feel able to relax, smile, and order tea. She and Virginia would sit in deck chairs and gossip, the picture of sisterly love and understanding, and yet, Angelica concludes, “seeing them together, in spite of their habitual ironic affection and without any idea of the cause, I could see a wariness on the part of Vanessa and on Virginia’s side a desperate plea for forgiveness.”
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That Vanessa Bell destroyed the correspondence with her sister from their last years in Hyde Park Gate is only my hypothesis. That Clive Bell did the opposite is a fact. He kept Virginia’s letters from 1907–11, and, later on, would occasionally produce them to amuse his mistresses who found Virginia Woolf intimidating. Here in the writer’s own hand was proud testimony that Clive Bell had been the man who came closest to conquering the frigidity Bloomsbury loved to gossip about.
Clive Bell never got close to getting into bed with Virginia Woolf. Many years later, when Virginia accused Clive of being “a cuckoo who lays eggs in other birds’ nests,” Clive jovially responded, “My dear Virginia, you would never let me lay an egg in your nest.” But the existence of the letters documenting their “affair” was an act of treachery that would haunt their relationship. For the rest of her life, Virginia would go to the same parties and take part in the same country house weekends as Clive, observing him, judging him, pinning him down like a dead moth in the pages of her diary, all the while knowing that he had her letters.
Thanks to Clive Bell, those early, disturbed, inchoate letters Woolf wrote to him are part of the collected edition of her correspondence. They can be cited as an example of Bloomsbury’s sexual perversity. We too, like Clive’s mistress Mary Hutchinson, can read titillating sentences like “kiss my sister on the tip of the left ear and the snout if wet.” But then this question arises: Is this frankness and a lack of sexual prejudice, or is it the posthumous revenge of a thwarted cad?
Part V
A Tale of Two Sisters
14
Vanessa’s Way, Part 1
ASKED WHAT they associate with the Bloomsbury group, people tend to reply with a word—SEX!—and kinky, complicated sex it was, fodder for a tall, growing heap of books and memoirs. We have Duncan Grant sleeping with Lytton Strachey and Maynard Keynes and Adrian Stephen and Vanessa Bell and David “Bunny” Garnett. We have gay Lytton relieving the sex-averse artist Dora Carrington of her hymen and Carrington (as she preferred to be called) bedding the muscular army veteran Ralph Partridge because her adored Lytton liked to have a hot he-male in charge of his house. Then there is gorgeous hetero Bunny shagging Duncan and trying to shag Vanessa and ending up twenty years later as the husband of Duncan and Vanessa’s daughter, Angelica. Julian Bell, Angelica’s older brother, has a quick fling with Anthony Blunt—the future Cambridge spy—while her other brother, the self-described “old Bloomsbury bugger” Quentin, does his best to stop his father, Clive, from jumping his young women friends. If just reading this makes your head reel, imagine how it was to live through it, as Virginia Woolf did!
As the books appear—a new biography of Morgan Forster, very gay, a new biography of David Garnett, very straight—questions of psychology and motivation continue to be raised, especially with regard to the women associated with Bloomsbury. Did Lytton save or enslave Carrington? When Vanessa Bell dedicated her life to the comfort and happiness of Duncan Grant, was she rebelling against Victorian convention or inventing a new model of female self-sacrifice? Was Angelica the instrument of David Garnett’s revenge or a frisky young thing weirdly encouraged by her mother to explore sex in the arms of an attractive older man?
All these complex scenarios were spun around and by Virginia Woolf’s sister Vanessa Stephen Bell, and as one surveys the accumulating evidence, it becomes clear that, if indeed Vanessa Bell and Virginia Woolf together were the founding mothers of Bloomsbury, they occupied different spaces and played different roles. Vanessa was, as we shall see in this chapter, the heart of Bloomsbury, and her Charleston farm near Lewes in Sussex was the group’s archetypal place. In her thousands of paintings and her dozens of photographs, Vanessa Bell offers us a pictorial record of Bloomsbury, while also contributing a trove of letters and autobiographical fragments. Virginia meanwhile was the Bos-well of Bloomsbury, and to her we owe six fat, tightly packed volumes of letters, and five equally fat volumes of diaries, all in small print and supplemented by juvenilia and the many volumes of her fiction and her essays.
One of the conceits of Bloomsbury was that Vanessa and Virginia were compounded of ancient Greek goddesses. Virginia was both Artemis, virgin goddess of the chase and the moon, and Athena, goddess of wisdom, more mind than woman, springing whole out of the head of her father, Zeus. Vanessa was both Aphrodite, goddess of sexual love, and Demeter, goddess of fertility, who made the earth dark when her daughter Persephone was stolen from her.
Both images are a partial truth at best. As her letters and essays prove, Vanessa wrote with clarity and elegance and probably inherited a bigger share of the Stephen intellect than her two brothers did. She had only three children, whereas her mother had had seven, and she was sexually active from age twenty-eight to thirty-nine, and only intermittently even during that period. Virginia did not desire men, it is true, but she was as sensuous as the furry animals she habitually compared herself to. As girl and woman, she was attracted to women, and she was as eager for motherhood as her sister was.
But if Vanessa had a lot of Athena in her, and Virginia yearned to be a Demeter, when it came to the sexual antics of their friends, each Stephen sister followed her own course. Vanessa at the center stage-managed, designed, and oversaw the script for many of the Bloomsbury dramas. Some were farce, like Maynard arriving for the weekend with his plebeian Ganymede, Mr. Atkins. Some were tragedy, like the commitment to an asylum of Harry Norton, a distinguished Cambridge University mathematician and a close friend of both Clive and Vanessa Bell. Virginia moved in and out of Bloomsbury, now active participant mesmerizing her friends with her whimsical fantasy and mordant wit, now detached, critical observer.
When Leonard Woolf became Virginia’s hus
band, he became the most important person shaping her world, but Vanessa was always the second sun in Virginia Woolf’s sky, and to understand her we need to see the evolution of their relationship and the contrast between their lives. Even as she weaned herself off the adoring, erotic dependence on Vanessa of the period 1907–11, Woolf followed the idiosyncratic trajectory of her sister’s life with passionate concern and a deep longing for the harmonious intimacy they had once known. As late as June 1929, Woolf was adding a desolate little postscript to a letter to Vanessa, her “Dearest Dolphin”: “I almost wrote you, by the way, ten pages of adoration and deification of motherhood—but refrained, thinking you wd think it sentimental. Now if you sometimes kissed me voluntarily I wd. not be afraid.” Woolf signs herself “B”—Billy, the Goat of the happy old Kensington days.
Through her flirtation with Clive Bell, Virginia had, without thinking it through, sought to take control of her sister’s life and reclaim Vanessa for herself. She would never make that mistake again. Vanessa had declared herself a woman intent on living her own life and controlling her own destiny, and Virginia’s role was to support, if not endorse, the choices her sister made. Unfailing loyalty was Virginia’s way of atoning for the great betrayal.
In the next four chapters, we will be interweaving the lives of the two sisters and contrasting the different communities that gathered around them within the general social entity known as the Bloomsbury group.
Vanessa’s Bloomsbury was small, well-defined, male-oriented, self-absorbed, financed largely by unearned income, hostile to the world outside, very gay in both senses of that word, the epitome of what people admired and loathed about the group. As we shall see, Vanessa Bell’s Bloomsbury declined when Carrington became Lytton Strachey’s companion and housekeeper and Lytton and Carrington’s homes at Tidmarsh and Hamspray competed with Charleston for visitors. It suffered even more when John Maynard Keynes married the Russian dancer Lydia Lopokova, and the Keynes estate at Tilton in Sussex again turned into an alternative mecca for the group. Vanessa Bell’s Bloomsbury swelled again as her sons came of age and her daughter blossomed.
