Virginia Woolf

by Gillian Gill

  Here again we can see Vanessa attempting the combination of sexual vocabulary and arch sophistication that Lytton Strachey had perfected in his letters and in his conversation.

  On November 23, Vanessa Bell was again striving to arouse the ardor of Roger Fry by narrating a recent event that had obviously aroused her. Duncan Grant had been invited to dinner by Clive Bell and was for some reason shaving in the bathroom at the Bell residence at 49 Fitzroy Square. “And then—what do you think happened?” wrote Vanessa to Roger. “I had my bath in his [Duncan’s] presence . . . and he wanted to shave and didn’t see why he should move . . . and I didn’t see why I should remain dirty, and Clive was there, and didn’t object—and so! But I’m afraid he [Duncan] remained quite unmoved and I was really very decent. I felt no embarrassment and I think perhaps it was a useful precedent.”

  A precedent, useful or not, the bathroom scene certainly was, and we can hear the knell of Vanessa Bell’s passion for Roger Fry sounding in a letter she wrote to her husband, Clive, while she and Roger were on holiday in the French countryside in May 1914. Roger Fry, let it be noted, was a very thin, white-haired man closing on fifty, Vanessa an increasingly voluptuous thirty-five. “Dearest,” wrote Vanessa to Clive in Paris,

  We [she and Roger] have been very lucky so far . . . having had dinner on the train and found a most comfortable inn . . . and the best bed I have ever slept in. I went in to a solitary, soft couch with no hint of bony attenuated legs to spoil its down, and slept the sleep of the virtuous . . . We started out about 10 and bicycled slowly about four miles to the village where we had lunch. I am now quite at home on my bicycle and am said (by R) to have a very neat figure. My ankle of course is seen to advantage. The attitude is one of prim decorum and a little strange to me at first, also a little hard on the cunt and on the muscles of my soft legs . . . Our tour as you see is being conducted on terms of modesty and propriety—how unlike your bachelor existence. In Paris. I suppose you are at this moment being fondled under the table by some whore and presently will go off with her . . . Do you think you or Duncan or both will meet us anywhere?

  Within a year of writing that letter, Vanessa had taken a leaf from her gay friends’ playbook and told Fry, with brutal frankness, that she could henceforth be only a friend to him.

  For several years, Fry poured out his despair and frustration and incomprehension in letters to Vanessa, but she was already steering the treacherous shoals of her new affair with Duncan Grant. Vanessa confided her love troubles with Duncan to Roger as Maynard had confided his troubles with Duncan to Lytton years earlier, and Fry responded with affection and understanding, just as he had years earlier when she told him about Quentin’s feeding difficulties. Roger Fry remained a loving, trustworthy friend to Vanessa Bell and to her sons and was a key member of the Charleston set. When Fry died in 1934, after what was supposed to be routine surgery, the grief, shock, and admiration for Fry that Vanessa expressed were heartfelt.

  Vanessa’s younger son, Quentin Bell, was profoundly influenced by Roger Fry. He loved and revered Roger the man and, like Fry, became an artist, art critic, and art historian. All the same, in the book of essays Bloomsbury Recalled, which he wrote shortly before his death, Bell scrupulously refuses to blame his mother for rejecting Fry’s love. He merely remarks that “the period when Vanessa discovered Roger Fry was, perhaps, the happiest in her life,” the time when his mother—so “grave and sad” in later life—was always laughing.

  But if Vanessa Bell managed to keep Roger Fry spinning in her orbit even after she had rejected him as a lover, Virginia Woolf was Fry’s delighted and devoted friend from the outset, and in the last years of her life, Virginia Woolf undertook a biography of Fry. In some ways, I think, Woolf sought to atone for all that Fry had suffered at the hands of her sister, that “wasteful child pulling the heads off flowers—beautiful as a goddess,” as Woolf had once written to Violet Dickinson.

  The Fry biography, to be published by her own Hogarth Press, was a labor of love, but as she wrestled with it, Woolf was increasingly sure the book was doomed to fail. “Discretion is not the better part of biography,” Lytton Strachey had wittily remarked, and her Roger Fry, Woolf could see, was much closer to her father’s Dictionary of National Biography than to Lytton Strachey’s Eminent Victorians, offering none of the catnip of sexual innuendo that English readers had by this time come to expect from their literary historians as well as their novelists.

  Anyone privileged to know Roger Fry knew that, while his tragically insane wife, Helen, was still alive, he had several women lovers and had conducted a brief but passionate affair with the wife of his friend and collaborator Clive Bell. Those in the know were also aware that “Goldie” Dickinson, Fry’s oldest friend from Cambridge, was for many years passionately, hopelessly in love with Fry, and that many of Fry’s other close friends were homosexual. Woolf knew that Fry’s relationships were as important to an understanding of Fry the man as his expertise in the Italian quattrocento was to Fry the art critic, but nonetheless in her book she declined to offer even the coded hints Lytton specialized in. Vanessa, Goldie, and Helen Anrep, Fry’s final partner, as well as Fry’s sisters and his children, were still alive and would feel wounded by any revelations about his private life. Virginia Woolf was a professional writer and publisher to her fingertips. All the same, consideration for the feelings of others mattered more to her, and to Leonard, her co-publisher, than the number of copies sold. Hence, what might be called the sex life of Roger Fry finds no space in her book, which was greeted with muted praise when published and is today little read, even by Woolf’s admirers.

  What we have in Woolf’s biography of Fry, the last thing she completed for publication before her suicide, is careful discussion of issues such as the influence on Fry of his Quaker heritage and the outrage he felt at the sometimes bloody canings that masters inflicted on little boys every week at his renowned prep school. Woolf was always on the lookout for documented examples of child sexual abuse. First and foremost, however, the book is the tribute to an important man from a great writer who had known and loved him well and could attest to both his greatnesses and his oddities.

  With all her wide experience of biography, Woolf knew that, as a genre, it works by accretion over time, with each generation finding its point of interest, doing its own research, and directing its spin. Sure enough, biographers like Frances Spalding in the 1980s, free of legal concerns and social shibboleths, would be able to build on Woolf’s material and use Woolf’s personal testimony to offer the public fuller, more comprehensive, and more objective biographies of Roger Fry.

  15

  Virginia’s Way, Part 1

  VANESSA BELL need not have worried that her sister would steal Roger Fry. By the late summer of 1911, Virginia was going through a revolution of her own. It came in the tall, gaunt, sunburned shape of Leonard Woolf, back in England on leave after seven years as a rising officer in the colonial administration of Sri Lanka. In her Memoir Club paper “Old Bloomsbury,” Virginia Woolf remembered that her brother Thoby had described his Trinity friend Leonard Woolf to her as “a man who trembled all over . . . so violent, so savage; he despised the whole human race.” Whether or not Thoby Stephen actually uttered them, those words capture a lot about Virginia Woolf’s husband. That she chose this man to be her husband, and remained his partner for life, tells us a lot about Virginia Woolf.

  As early as 1908 Lytton Strachey was actively promoting the marriage of his friends Virginia and Leonard, arguing in his letters that Leonard alone was worthy of Virginia and that their marriage would succeed because Leonard was physically attracted to Virginia. Lytton was right. Leonard tells us in his autobiography that he fell in love with Virginia the first time he saw her. He also says, with characteristic straightforwardness, that though Virginia’s ethereal personality and diamond-sharp intellect drew him to her, he expected sexual pleasure to become part of their love.

  When Leonard Woolf at last made his mi
nd up to come back home, Virginia Stephen was an almost thirty-year-old virgin and not happy about it. Vanessa, Clive, and Lytton had made the state of Virginia’s hymen a subject of open discussion in Bloomsbury and Sussex. The same would happen to Carrington some years later.

  According to the expanding LGBTQA spectrum we have developed in the twenty-first century, Virginia Woolf might, I think, best be described as very sensuous but sexually inhibited, unhappy in her own body, and more physically attracted to women than men. Virginia’s attraction to lesbians is a kind of running joke between her and Vanessa, and in the letters Virginia wrote to Violet Dickinson before marrying Leonard Woolf, she is quite open about her “Sapphic” feelings. To Dickinson, she presents herself as a fragile sparrow or kangaroo or wallaby longing to jump back into the pouch. “I feel all my heart drawn to you,” she wrote to Dickinson. “Upon that, I cuddle on my mat, and roll over and let you look for fleas.” Based on my reading of the early letters, for men Woolf shows not a flicker of desire. Where Charlotte Brontë, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and George Eliot had been plain women who were passionately attracted to men who often failed to reciprocate their feelings, Virginia Woolf was a beautiful woman who attracted men and, as we have seen in Chapter 13, kept them at bay.

  When Leonard first proposed, Virginia asked for time to consider, and in a remarkable letter, on May 1, 1912, she strove to be as open and straightforward as possible about her most intimate needs and desires—“I want everything—love, intimacy, adventure, work” she writes—but also about her lack of sexual desire. “As I told you brutally the other day, I feel no physical attraction in you. There are moments—when you kissed me the other day was one—when I feel no more than a rock.” In her willingness to confront her sexual issues and put them into her own words, Virginia was very different from her sister, and Leonard’s passion burned through her defenses; she had never met a man she liked, admired, and trusted so much. With Leonard Woolf, Virginia Stephen was willing to give sex a try, and in May 1912 they were married at St. Pancras town hall.

  The short ceremony was interrupted when Vanessa Bell, out of the blue, broke in to request information from the civic official as to how she could change the name of her second son. Such casual interference from the Bells would mark the early years of the Woolf marriage.

  Virginia and Leonard Woolf on their wedding day

  On her honeymoon, Virginia tried hard to respond to her husband, and in one letter from Italy she laughingly remarks that really, making love is not so hard. But this was wishful thinking on her part, and her husband, an inexperienced and over-eager lover, was feeling a kind of despair. After a particularly bad night, he sent a letter of appeal to his wife’s sister, the act of a practical, well-meaning man who had successfully governed a large province in Sri Lanka but had no idea as yet of how to handle the socio-sexual dynamics of Bloomsbury. Leonard may have realized he had in good faith made a bad move when he got Vanessa’s reply.

  You and Virginia have been very naughty not keeping us filled in on all your doings, Vanessa begins, but

  after your awful description of a night with the apes [Virginia’s weirdly plural pet name] I can imagine why you don’t write to me. I am happy to say it’s years since I spent a night in their [Virginia’s] company, and I can’t conceive anything more wretched than it sounds. It would be bad enough to know they were in the next bed with all their smells and their whines and their wettings, but to have to change beds with them and all the rest of it—a coal hole would be more to my taste.

  Vanessa was, perhaps, making a ham-fisted attempt at honeymoon humor, but if Leonard shared the letter with Virginia, as he most probably did, one doubts that she found it funny.

  Back in England, Leonard and Virginia consulted specialists, and word of the Woolfs’ sexual incompatibility spread around Bloomsbury. All parties, including Virginia, believed that the marital difficulties were her fault. She was not only deemed “frigid,” in the vocabulary of the day, but unlike other women (surprisingly, the sex goddesses Madame de Pompadour and Marilyn Monroe come to mind), she was unable to fake pleasure or even just close her eyes and think of England, as per the old Victorian saying.

  From a modern perspective, the one-sidedness of the medical consensus on the Woolfs’ sexual issues is rather glaring. Leonard Woolf was certainly no sexual athlete like Clive or Maynard, and at least one close friend with a lot of expertise in the matter thought Leonard was gay. In his 1978 book Thrown to the Woolfs, John Lehmann, for some years a partner in the Hogarth Press, opined that Leonard was a closeted homosexual, his manifest neuroses rooted in frustrated sexuality. Lehmann saw Woolf pay serious money for a nude male statue for his garden and react with pleasure to an especially attractive young man. Lehmann says Leonard once admitted that he had been in love with Thoby Stephen, which casts more light on the circle of Cambridge men in “Old Bloomsbury” that I discussed in Chapter 11.

  Conjecture aside, we know that Leonard was the product of a prep school–public school system in which Jewish boys were routinely bullied, and abuse could easily take a sexual turn. In the Cambridge of his day, gay life flourished, and after university Woolf spent years in the kind of colonial outpost where white women were scarce and the exploitation of local boys was common. The single affair in Sri Lanka, which Woolf briefly alludes to in his autobiography, was, however, with a woman. After his marriage to Virginia, Leonard had no mistresses. Bloomsbury letters and memoirs would have mentioned it if he had. According to Virginia’s biographer Hermione Lee, Leonard Woolf never had sex with his second wife, Trekkie Parsons.

  Vanessa Bell was included in the Woolfs’ medical and private consultations in 1912 and was pleased to be able to pass details on to her husband. Clive was no longer hoping to get Virginia into bed, but he was jealous of any man who might, and he didn’t much like the post–Sri Lanka Leonard. Clive would be glad, Vanessa knew, that things were not working out well between the newlyweds, so on December 27, 1912, she wrote to him that the “Woolves,” as she was beginning to call them,

  are evidently both a little exercised in their minds on the subject of the Goat’s [that is, Virginia’s] coldness. I think I may have annoyed her but consoled him by saying that I thought she had never understood or sympathized with sexual passion in men. Apparently she still gets no pleasure at all from the act, which I think is curious. They were very anxious to know when I first had an orgasm. I couldn’t remember. Do you? But no doubt I sympathized with such things if I didn’t have them from the time I was 2.

  Ah—here we have Bloomsbury’s legendary “frankness” and “honesty” on the page. A woman of the respectable higher professional classes, daring as early as 1912 to use the word “orgasm” in a letter to a man and admitting to having felt sexual tingles since infancy. Perhaps, as Bell’s biographer Spalding claims, a letter like this marks an important step toward equality between the sexes—or perhaps it was a twisted kind of revenge from a woman whose own sexuality was far from straightforward and has been publicly betrayed in her own marriage. Certainly, Vanessa’s new frankness in matters sexual was of no help to Virginia, who in 1913 plunged into a yet more serious mental breakdown, taking a massive dose of the barbiturate Veronal to try to kill herself.

  The word “genius” had been used about Virginia Woolf since her teens, notably by Violet Dickinson and Madge Vaughan, and her new husband passionately endorsed this. Virginia, Leonard tells us in his autobiography, was the only real genius he had ever known, but according to his analysis, hers was a genius periodically riven by self-doubt. Whereas the poet Robert Lowell became physically aggressive and hypersexual when manic and manifested a Napoleonic, “I can conquer the world” complex, Virginia Woolf turned her aggression on herself, convinced of her own laziness, unearned privilege, and inability to achieve anything important. “I am obsessed at night with the idea of my own worthlessness,” she told her composer friend Ethel Smyth in 1929. While manic, Woolf turned violently against those she loved best, sc
reaming vituperations against her sister and refusing for some time to even be in the same room as her husband. Leonard had never seen his wife like this, and he was overcome with shock and horror. Virginia was, by any standard, raving mad and lucky to be able (just!) to afford a private asylum. And yet, there was a truth in her mania and an inspiration.

  The truth related to her as a woman. If Virginia Woolf in 1913 felt obscurely that it was not her fault that she could not feel orgasm, that faking sexual pleasure was an elemental form of deception that no woman should be forced into, and that both her husband and sister were now colluding against her behind her back, was this madness or a higher kind of sanity?

  The inspiration related to her aspiration to be a novelist. “In the lava of my madness,” she once wrote to Ethel Smyth, “I still find most of the things I write about.” To the same confidant, she wrote in October 1930: “After being ill and suffering every form and variety of nightmare and extravagant intensity of perception—for I used to make up poems, stories, profound to me and inspired phrases all day long, as I lay in bed, and thus sketched, I think, all that I now by the light of reason try to put into prose.”

  ❧

  The first three years of the Woolfs’ marriage were traumatic and would have broken most couples. Virginia had one breakdown after another. Her fertility, not her frigidity, came to be the main issue, since she professed herself willing, even eager, to continue “normal” marital relations regardless of her “pleasure in the act.” Leonard felt passion as well as love for his wife, and he had a legal right to sexual congress, but if he chose to exercise it, he would put Virginia at risk of becoming pregnant. As everyone close to her knew, Virginia loved children and had always seen herself as a mother. One of the most poignant things she received as a wedding gift was an antique cradle, presented to her by her beloved old friend Violet Dickinson.