Virginia Woolf

by Gillian Gill

  On the issue of children, Vanessa rallied to her sister’s side, urging that Virginia should be allowed to have children if she could, since that was what she wanted. Only four years earlier, soon after she had given birth to her first child and Virginia was expected to marry Lytton Strachey, Vanessa had written to Virginia,

  Can’t you imagine us in 20 years’ time, you and I two celebrated ladies, with our families about us, yours very odd and small and you with a growing reputation for your works, I with nothing but my capacities as a hostess and my husband’s value to live on? Your husband will probably be dead, I think, for you won’t have boiled his milk enough, but you will be quite happy and enjoy sparring with your clever and cranky daughter. I’m afraid she’ll be more beautiful than mine, who I know will take after the Bells. When mine is on the road [that is, in utero] I shall refuse to come here [Scotland] and shall see you every day and gaze at the most beautiful of Aunt Julia’s photographs incessantly.

  Virginia’s doctors, on the other hand—including Sir Charles Savage, the man who had once advised the family about Laura Stephen—were of the opinion that their patient was too mentally unstable to withstand the stresses of pregnancy and motherhood. The love of children was deep within Leonard also, but he not only loved Virginia more than anything else in the world; he felt he was responsible for her. Wary now of advice from Vanessa and Clive, respecting the authority of psychiatric experts, fearing that a pregnancy would lead his wife to commit suicide or, even worse, spend the rest of her life in an asylum like her sister Laura and Helen Fry, Leonard decided that he and Virginia would no longer have vaginal intercourse.

  Was it the right decision? Many women with severe mental disorders have had children and have thereby both derived and given great joy. Virginia saw childlessness as a personal tragedy and once again blamed herself. Years later she wrote to her friend the artist Ethel Sands, “I’m always angry with myself for not having forced Leonard to take the risk [of her getting pregnant] in spite of doctors; he was afraid for me and wouldn’t; but if I’d had more self-control no doubt it would have been all right.” We now know that serious mood disorders like Woolf’s are not notably amenable to “self-control,” and Woolf is forgetting how extremely ill she had been. Moreover, from the point of view of her work and our pleasure in it, if Virginia Woolf had had children, would she have been able to write To the Lighthouse or Orlando? As she herself remarked in a 1930 letter to her nephew Quentin, after a particularly exhausting and infuriating week of small domestic dramas, “How any woman with a family ever put pen to paper I cannot fathom.”

  In January 1915, seeing how profoundly her mental condition threatened her relationship with Leonard and facing a future that might, if she had the strength, include novels but no children, Woolf fell into yet another terrifying psychotic crisis. The breakdown was indirectly presaged in the final diary entry of 1915, where Virginia recorded a walk along the river on January 9 during which she and Leonard met a party of what she calls “imbeciles”: “Every one in that long line a miserable ineffective shuffling idiotic creature with no forehead and no chin & an imbecile grin, or a wild suspicious stare. It was perfectly horrible. They should certainly be killed.”

  This is a cruel remark made by a woman who was terrifyingly sure that she was about to reenter the world of the mad.

  After leaving the clinic in 1915, Woolf was for more than a year placed once again under constant surveillance lest she jump out a window or take an overdose. No effective antidepressant drugs were available at this point in time, so Woolf’s doctors administered opiates and sleeping pills and instructed their patient to stay in bed, drink lots of milk—a remedy beloved of doctors since the ancient Egyptians—and gain weight. A respected literary journalist and avid reader, she was forbidden to do any serious reading or writing. A tall, athletic woman who loved to walk for hours through the countryside or the streets of London, she was forced for many months to take a human companion with her whenever she went outside. A woman who savored solitude, she was never permitted to be alone. She became, in effect, a dumb, somnolent, force-fed beast in a padded stall with no windows. As she confided in 1930 to Ethel Smyth, “Think—not one moment’s freedom from doctor discipline—perfectly strange, conventional men; ‘you shan’t read this’ and ‘you shan’t write a word’ and ‘you shall lie still and drink milk’ for six months.”

  The treatment meted out to Virginia Woolf in a private British clinic during World War I was essentially the popular Weir Mitchell system used on Charlotte Perkins Gilman in the United States in the 1880s. It was, of course, a treatment for the affluent and a great advance over such “treatments” as the clitoridectomies performed on indigent women by the great Jean-Martin Charcot, Silas Weir Mitchell’s nineteenth-century competitor. Worse things were in the offing. What woman with mental health issues would not prefer milk and bed rest to the radical therapies of the mid-twentieth century such as the lobotomy inflicted on Rosemary Kennedy or the massive electric shocks administered to Sylvia Plath?

  All the same, one can see how Virginia Woolf, in her novel Mrs. Dalloway, came to make a villain of the rich, unctuous, socialite psychiatrist Sir William Bradshaw, modeled, one can assume, on men like Savage. In the novel, Bradshaw’s patient Septimus Smith, a war veteran suffering from shell shock, is feeling a moment of renewed hope and sanity, thanks to the loving care of his Italian wife. But then his doctor arrives unheralded at his door, and Septimus’s response is to jump out the nearest window to his death. When Bradshaw arrives late at Mrs. Dalloway’s party, explaining that he has been delayed by the suicide of one of his patients, Clarissa thinks to herself, “if this young man had gone to him, and Sir William had impressed him like that with his power, might he not have said . . . they make life intolerable, men like that.” Clarissa Dalloway senses in Bradshaw a man “obscurely evil, without sex or lust, extremely polite to women, but capable of some indescribable outrage, forcing your soul.”

  Woolf emerged from her long struggle with illness in 1917 to be confronted with the insanity of trench warfare, but it did not tax her mental equilibrium as it did that of her husband and men friends. As they testify in their autobiographies, Bertrand Russell, John Maynard Keynes, and Leonard Woolf were constantly on the brink of nervous breakdown at that time. These exceptionally intelligent, rational, and capable men were taken off guard by the declaration of war. In the summer of 1914, only months before war broke out, Leonard Woolf records that he experienced “unmitigated, pure, often acute pleasure, such as I had never before had and have never had again. For the first time in the history of the world the rights of Jews, cobblers, and coloured men not to be beaten, hanged, or judicially murdered by officers, Junkers, or white men were publicly admitted; it looked for a moment as if militarism, imperialism, and antisemitism were on the run.”

  Comfortably convinced that the world was moving toward peace, enlightenment, and prosperity, men like Leonard Woolf suddenly found themselves up to their eyeballs in the stupidity, ignorance, and waste of the greatest war the world had ever seen. Nothing they could do to protest the course of international affairs made any difference, and every day, as they sat out the war in England, they saw other men go off in their place to die or to return horribly maimed in body and mind.

  Virginia missed and mourned the men like her friend Rupert Brooke and her husband’s brother Cecil Woolf who were killed in battle. But, as she was to say so forcefully years later in Three Guineas, war is neither the work nor the sport of women, so she did not bear the burden of responsibility, guilt, and helplessness that weighed on her husband.

  And when the sky was clear and the moon high and the air-raid sirens wailed and the German bombers passed over her home in Richmond on their way to central London, Woolf did not give way to fear or even depression. She and Leonard and their live-in maids calmly dressed warm and took their bedding down to the basement. There, in her diary, Virginia recorded not terror, not even fatigue, but boredom and the imperat
ive to get back to work as soon as the “all clear” sounded.

  As long as her husband was there, facing death by her side, she felt, oddly, secure. When he was forced to be away, earning money with his lecture tours, she missed him and they wrote almost every day. “My Darling Goose M,” wrote Virginia to Leonard on October 29, 1917, “I promise to do everything as if you were there, but you won’t be there, and I shall find Saxon [Sydney-Turner] such a stick and such a pussy cat after my own passionate and ferocious and entirely adorable M[ongoose].”

  ❧

  Part of the work that occupied Woolf every day was writing in her diary. She had kept diaries and notebooks since her girlhood—they were “five-finger exercises for future excellence,” in the words of fellow writer Doris Lessing. When she took her diary up again in July 1917 after an eighteen-month gap, it was not to mull over her recent encounters with psychiatry or to conduct a Freudian self-analysis. Indeed, if we turn to The Diary of Virginia Woolf—all five thick, brilliantly and exhaustively edited volumes of it—expecting to dive deep into the inner turmoil of a famously mad writer—as we do, for example, with Sylvia Plath in The Bell Jar or Charlotte Perkins Gilman in The Yellow Wallpaper or Anne Sexton in her poems—we shall be disappointed.

  Woolf wrote her diary in a state of high rationality, conceiving it as a writerly tool and an aesthetic artifact. The diarist would record the doings of her external world and hone her craft as a novelist, with snatches of dialogue, character sketches, nature notes, and social vignettes. Her goal in writing the diary, Woolf wrote in the entry of April 20, 1919, was to capture the “loose drifting material of life” in a prose “loose knit & yet not slovenly, so elastic that it will embrace anything . . . like some deep old desk or capacious hold-all, in which one flings a mass of odds & ends.” Over the years the diary would become, she hoped, “a mould, transparent enough to reflect the light of our life & yet steady & tranquil, composed with the aloofness of a work of art.”

  Well, here we are a hundred years later, reading The Diary of Virginia Woolf alongside To the Lighthouse and A Room of One’s Own, so Woolf obviously succeeded in her lofty aesthetic goal. Moreover, if we plot the diary entries against Woolf’s battles with incipient psychosis, we can see that writing a diary was in fact a direct but undisclosed response to her mental illness. It was a form of disciplined self-therapy, and one more effective than anything prescribed by her doctors. In her diary, Woolf eliminates the menacing turmoil of her inner life and sticks fast to the often grim but reassuring nitty-gritty of the external world.

  Woolf’s diary, in contrast to her often experimental fiction, is very much in the tradition of English diarists, observant and down-to-earth, at times lyrical, often caustic. It is also quintessentially a woman’s diary. It lets us know, for example, that Virginia Woolf, like her sister Vanessa and many other middle-class women with home help, always stayed in bed on the first day of her period. The bulky cotton pads on sale offered spotty (!) protection and were quite expensive, and Virginia once boasts in a letter to Vanessa that she has saved several shillings a month by fabricating her own pads.

  Woolf the diarist is willing to admit that she has rotting, crumbly teeth and that she comes down with flu several times every winter—but there was nothing unusual about that. In chilly, damp, sugar-addicted Britain, colds and flu were commonplace, and in the Woolfs’ social set, only the Sinhalese, the Americans, and Clive’s mistress Mary Hutchinson flashed a gleaming smile. Leonard too had bad teeth and got a lot of colds. He also had regular bouts of malaria and had suffered since adolescence from a chronic nervous tremor of the hands serious enough to disqualify him for military service. But Leonard kept going and refused to complain, and so did Virginia. Illness, if we believe the diarist, is just a fact of life, to be slotted into a busy schedule with humor and without complaint.

  That Virginia had an illness that, unlike Leonard’s malaria, could be terrifyingly unmanageable was the diary’s secret. Woolf the diarist is not weak and not helpless, neither defined nor confined by mental illness. And for over twenty years the physical record of daily events and ideas that the diarist not only wrote but regularly read and reread for confirmation and encouragement, helped keep the woman on the right side of madness.

  Virginia’s Bloomsbury friends knew about her diary, knew that she was busy recording the world around her, and this knowledge induced a distinct wariness. Highly self-conscious and already obsessed with its legacy, Bloomsbury could sense that in Virginia Woolf it had found its Pepys or its Boswell. Already by the end of World War I, Woolf’s published reviews and literary essays had an easy brilliance and casual erudition that commanded respect and helped sell copies on the newsstand. She was also crafting a new kind of novel and finding readers on both sides of the Atlantic. In person, her combination of whizz-bang-pop social critique and dreamy fantasy held her friends spellbound at Garsington or Charleston. Her letters, as anyone today can attest who reads them in chronological order, grew more marvelously witty each year.

  But for her friends, the question arose as to what Virginia—fervent and flighty, her outworn bloomers sometimes slipping to her ankles in public, the woman who was institutionalized in 1905, took a massive overdose of Veronal in 1913, and in 1915 was vituperatively, bouncing-off-the-asylum-walls MAD—was saying about everyone in the diary. Some in Bloomsbury, Clive Bell, for example, had cause to be worried.

  Clive Bell was always welcome in the home of Virginia and Leonard Woolf, not because he and Leonard were old Cambridge friends, though they had been, but because Clive had married Vanessa, Virginia’s sister. Their open door did not mean, however, that the Woolfs actually liked him or appreciated him much, to judge from the diary entry in which Virginia recounts a pleasant tea party she had on January 13, 1918.

  Clive Bell, his Cambridge friend Gerald Shove, and Shove’s young Newnham-educated wife, Fredegond—one of Virginia’s Fisher first cousins once removed—had unexpectedly dropped in on the Woolfs at Hogarth House, their home in Richmond, a London suburb. Virginia Woolf was happy to see them that dark January afternoon and was able to manage tea with milk and even sugar, despite the wartime food shortages. Marooned in the outer boroughs for much of the time, she was thirsty for news of all her friends in central London, and Clive Bell had an avocation for collecting and disseminating gossip. It was his strategy for deflecting, forestalling, and controlling what people said about him.

  Whenever her brother-in-law turned up on her doorstep, Virginia would sit him down next to her, and smoke and chat and giggle with him over the teacups. Leonard meanwhile would take himself off to type another article for the international journal he edited or to compose a lecture for his next Cooperative Society tour of “The North.” Leonard, as his wife once laughingly recorded, was like a mowing machine, relentlessly cutting his way through the work, week after week. Clive, hopping between braggadocio and schadenfreude, played grasshopper to Leonard’s ant, and the entry in Woolf’s diary uncovers the deep currents of hostility that, beneath the surface amity, ran between Virginia and Clive. “When one sees Clive fairly often, his devices for keeping up to the mark in the way of success & brilliance become rather obvious . . . His habits are like those of some faded beauty; a touch of rouge, a lock of yellow hair, lips crimsoned!”

  The male butterfly has fluttered his wings, approached the flame, and zap, sizzle, splatter.

  16

  Vanessa’s Way, Part 2

  WHILE VIRGINIA between 1913 and 1917 was fighting for her marriage and her sanity, Vanessa was undergoing a crisis of her own making. She had found her ideal man and was marshaling all the charm, intelligence, energy, determination, and tolerance for which she was famous in her social set to make their relationship work. The man was Duncan Grant and he would be Vanessa’s beloved companion until her death in 1964.

  Duncan Grant entered Vanessa Bell’s life as a family friend in 1907 when she was on her honeymoon in Paris. Lytton Strachey had urged the Bells to look up his you
ng cousin Duncan who, thanks to a gift from a maternal aunt, was enrolled in the art school of the noted French painter Jacques-Émile Blanche. When Maynard Keynes became a part of Bloomsbury, renting rooms from Virginia and Adrian Stephen, he brought Duncan, who was then his lover, along with him. By 1911, Duncan was such an integral part of the Bloomsbury group that, as we have seen in Chapter 14, he was not only dining at home with the Bells but shaving in their bathroom at the hour when Vanessa Bell was accustomed to taking her bath.

  Duncan, along with Vanessa, was one of the British artists whose paintings Roger Fry chose to hang in the second post-impressionist exhibition at the Grafton Galleries, and he became one of the most enthusiastic and active members of the Omega Workshops. With Roger so often abroad and her husband bent on the pursuit of other women, Vanessa and Duncan spent more and more time together and began to collaborate on projects. After harshly and inexorably breaking off her affair with Roger Fry, Vanessa, in a storm of tears, astonished her sister Virginia by blurting out that she was in love with Duncan Grant.

  Vanessa Bell, as we have seen, was not prone to shed tears, indulge in dramatic scenes, or tell love secrets to her sister, but her loss of control at that moment is more than understandable. Duncan Grant, according to the testimony of just about everyone who knew him, was an unusually attractive man. In 1915, he was just thirty years old, slim, well-muscled, the very kind of man he himself loved to sketch and photograph. He cared nothing for money, usually needing to borrow a few pennies from Clive Bell to get the bus home after dinner, but he was already being heralded as one of England’s most promising young painters. He was good-natured, even-tempered, marvelous company, a practical joker and impersonator, the life and soul of every party. His mother and his aunts adored him, and he rarely had a bad word to say about anyone. He was charm personified. And—for it was never a “but” with Duncan Grant— he was actively, unrepentantly gay. Asked, as a very old man, by the journalist Paul Levy if the men of Bloomsbury actually had all that sex with one another, or just talked about it, Grant shrugged and replied that he couldn’t speak for the rest, but he personally had been happy to have sex with anyone who wanted to have sex with him.