Virginia Woolf

by Gillian Gill

  Corrosive to Angelica’s peace of mind as she came into adulthood was the perception that the fairy-tale world her mother had created around her had been an elaborate charade. The worst part was not the knowledge of her illegitimacy but the fact that everyone had been in on the secret except herself. The sociable man who had taken her on his knee, spoiled her as a girl, and now wore her proudly on his arm at London parties was not her father. The charming man who made his home with her mother and was so unfailingly funny and nice to everyone was her father, but neither he nor his clan had ever shown her the slightest preference. Her brothers loved her and often looked out for her, but they had been allowed to know from adolescence that they were Bells, and she was somehow neither Bell nor Grant.

  In our century, we have come to see that knowing who one’s biological parents are is a basic human desire and perhaps a basic human right. Vanessa denied that right to her daughter, preferring silence to candor, deception to honesty, and that seems to have sabotaged their relationship very early on. Once Angelica understood that her mother had constructed a beautiful cage for her as a girl, she began to set up invisible barriers to intimacy that even her daughters, who found Vanessa a magical grandmother, could not break down.

  Angelica yearned in vain for Duncan Grant to treat her as his child, especially when in his last years he began displaying so much interest and grandfatherly affection for the children of his former lover Paul Roche. All the same Angelica loved her father while reserving for her mother a bitterness that came close to hatred. Years after Vanessa’s death and after hours of therapy, Angelica Bell tells us, she still felt the power of her mother, adoring, protective, secretive, blocking out her sun.

  It is chilling to read Angelica Bell Garnett’s bitter account of her relationship with her mother alongside a 1936 letter in which Vanessa Bell confided how much having a daughter had meant to her. The letter is to Julian, who, inexplicably to his mother, had gone off to China. Julian worried about his sister and, confident in his mother’s love for him, felt able to say from afar what many near at hand believed—that Vanessa should set Angelica free and allow her to get on with her life. Vanessa refused to believe that she was a possessive mother, but she was eager to say how much Angelica meant to her. To her elder son, Vanessa was willing to explore her inner world on paper as she had never done with anyone else, even Virginia.

  When Julian, her first child, was born, Vanessa wrote, he “entirely revolutionized existence for me, starting all the feelings that had slept all my life till then.” Then, as if Quentin, who would become her rock and stay in later life, did not even exist for her, Vanessa goes on to describe her feelings for Angelica:

  . . . but Angelica being of my own sex . . . suddenly gave me a feeling of complete intimacy with someone who had something so much in common with me fundamentally that it was like a revelation . . . it was different from any relationship I’d ever experienced except perhaps at moments with my mother and Stella—I don’t think I’ve ever had that peculiar thing even with Virginia. Well, that looks rather bad, doesn’t it? But I didn’t try to keep her [Angelica], did I? . . . I wanted her to be independent au fond. For one thing I’d had a tremendous lesson as to that particular thing with my mother and Stella, who were so devoted and inseparable that Stella never had any real life of her own.

  The life at 22 Hyde Park Gate, Kensington, cast a very long shadow.

  How did Virginia Woolf, who explored mother-daughter relationships in so many novels and in her essays fiercely championed a girl child’s right to freedom, education, and opportunity, feel about the way Vanessa chose to rear her daughter? Virginia too had seen how the relationship between Julia and Stella played out, so how did she feel about the power Vanessa exerted over Angelica? Remembering what had secretly happened to her as a small child, how did she react to seeing, in Vanessa’s family album, photos of a small, skinny, straight-haired naked Angelica staring stiff and unsmiling straight into her mother’s camera, or sitting between two adult males who seem to feel no need to remove so much as a tweed jacket or a tie despite the summer heat.

  In Vanessa Bell’s Family Album, the coffee table book that she and her brother Quentin published in 1981, Angelica Bell chose to include several of these nude studies of herself as a little girl. One assumes that she saw no problem with them and endorsed her brother’s contention that they showcased their mother’s talent for photography. For my part, as I look at my copy of what is today a rare book, I completely endorse the decision of the Tate Gallery, the repository for Vanessa Bell’s photographs, to take them out of its catalog and carefully weigh all requests for permission to reproduce them. The fear that these images could circulate unchecked on the internet as child pornography seems all too real.

  But to return to the question of what Virginia Woolf thought of her niece Angelica’s upbringing, the answer is that we have little hard information, just a few indirect hints, since Virginia knew that Vanessa would brook no interference with any of her children. The following little piece from a letter of April 24, 1929, is as close as Virginia ever got to hinting at what she saw as a problem with Vanessa’s relationship with her children. Recounting a visit she and Leonard had had from Julian, Virginia writes, “Julian . . . is growing like a crab, I mean only half covered with shell . . . The Bell sociability is so odd, mixed with the Stephen integrity. I daresay he’ll give you a lot of trouble before he’s done . . . he’s too charming and violent and gifted altogether, and in love with you in the bargain” [my emphasis].

  This is remarkably prescient. Within four years of this letter, Julian Bell had taken a teaching position in Wuhan, China, about as far from Bloomsbury and his mother as he could get. On his return from the East in 1935, driven by his passionate opposition to fascism and eager to put his life on the line, Julian joined an ambulance corps on the battlefront during the Spanish Civil War and was killed within days of his arrival. Caught in a bombing raid, Julian threw his body over his companion in the ambulance to protect him.

  With Angelica, Virginia was even more careful than with her nephews not to say anything that could be construed as criticism. She knew how important Angelica was to her sister, and in her diary she refrained from exploring the relationship of her sister and her niece. Though women friends like Ethel Smyth and Ethel Sands would have had treasures of memories and advice to offer, Angelica was not something Virginia could discuss with them in letters.

  Thus, the little we know about the relationship of Virginia and Angelica comes mainly from Angelica’s 1984 memoir. Angelica Garnett says that her uncle Leonard sternly disapproved of the way she was being brought up and shocked her on two occasions by demanding that she acknowledge an act of serious carelessness. “These contacts with a sterner reality impressed me,” writes Angelica Garnett, since they formed a contrast with “Vanessa’s tendency to compound and procrastinate in favor of those she loved, and Duncan’s ability to laugh away and ignore things he didn’t like.” Virginia Woolf probably endorsed her husband’s sternness to Angelica but refrained from saying so, lest it be reported back.

  Vanessa always organized a gala party for her daughter’s birthday. When Angelica turned eleven, the party had an Alice in Wonderland theme, and Virginia Woolf turned up with ears and paws, as the March Hare. Returning home after the party, Leonard, dressed up as the Carpenter, “came in conflict with the police on behalf of a drunken prostitute who, being insulted by three tipsy men, answered them in their own coin. ‘Why don’t you go for the men who began it? My name’s Woolf and I can take my oath the woman’s not to blame.’” Virginia reported all this to Clive Bell, while also noting that Angelica at her party had been “ravishing, flirtatious, commanding and seductive.” That sounds more like Virginia Woolf the caustic social critic than Virginia the affectionate auntie.

  In the final year or so of her life, Virginia Woolf was happy to note that Angelica was showing an interest in books and ideas at last and was beginning, like her brothers, to take a par
t in adult conversation. Woolf gave Angelica a copy of the letters of Madame du Deffand, the great eighteenth-century writer and scientist, which she herself had been given by Lytton Strachey. She encouraged Angelica to give a talk at the Rodmell Women’s Institute. “[Virginia] tried to probe and loosen my ideas,” writes Angelica, “and, when she forgot to be brilliant and amusing, showed a capacity for intimacy which I found illuminating.” The youngest of the three Bell children, Angelica had much less time to get to interact as an adult with Virginia Woolf. As a girl, she says, she was aware of being somehow a disappointment to her aunt. It is all very sad.

  17

  Virginia’s Way, Part 2

  After the end of World War I, Virginia and Leonard carefully put together a life based on a commonality of work, ideas, and values, which was there for all to see, and on intimate pleasures they kept hidden, not just from the world but from the diaries and memoirs they planned to leave to posterity. The past six years had been an education in group living for them both, and Leonard was now an expert in Bloomsbury politics as well as international socialism. They made no secret of keeping separate bedrooms, yet what Mongoose [Leonard] did to make Mandril [Virginia] so rapturously happy when they found themselves alone and unobserved—that they kept to themselves.

  In their financial arrangements as well as their intimate relations, the Woolfs were different from Vanessa’s Charleston set, working toward an economic parity that is far more common in our day than it was in theirs. Leonard in Sri Lanka had probably been sending money home to his widowed mother, so, despite his steady rise up the ranks of the colonial service, he came back to England in 1911 with only the few hundred pounds he had won in a raffle. When he made the decision to marry Virginia and stay in England, he had no job. Virginia, on the other hand, had a steady stream of investment income from various legacies and was also earning modest but regular fees from her reviews.

  Living on his wife’s money was not what Leonard wanted, and after their wedding, the Woolfs moved out of Bloomsbury, took cheap rooms in the Inns of Court, and, to the indignation of their old cook, Sophie Farrell, and her friend Maud, ate their meals at a nearby chophouse and employed a charwoman. Following Virginia’s major breakdowns of 1913 and 1915, money got really tight as Virginia incurred medical bills that ate up her private income and her doctors forbade her to write. But over the next years both Woolfs put their pens and typewriters seriously to work and earned enough to live on, she as a reviewer, essayist, and novelist, he as an editor, lecturer, and journalist.

  Along with her private happiness, the years between 1919 and 1939 were the period of Virginia Woolf’s greatest creativity, with the publication of Night and Day (1919), Jacob’s Room (1922), The Common Reader (1922 and 1932), Mrs. Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927), Orlando (1928), A Room of One’s Own (1929), The Waves (1932), Flush (1933), The Years (1937), and Three Guineas (1938). The first two were published by Duckworth, the publishing house founded by her brother Gerald, but the rest were published by the Hogarth Press, founded and owned by her and her husband.

  At the outset, the Hogarth Press (named after the house they occupied in Richmond for some years) was a hobby, something to do together on weekends, something to keep Virginia’s hands active and her mind at rest. Virginia as a young woman had taken a course in bookbinding, and she was delighted to locate a little printing press they could afford. The machine was barely functional, but the Woolfs persisted and began to turn out a few copies of short pieces by themselves and their friends. Virginia, with her steady hands, set the type, while Leonard, who was thin but wiry, pulled the handle. Together, they glued the pages, covered them in bits of wallpaper, and carried them down to the post office.

  In May the new press published The Critic in Judgement, an essay by the well-known writer J. Middleton Murry; Kew Gardens, a short story by Virginia; and Poems, by T. S. Eliot. Tom Eliot was a young American working at Lloyds of London who had recently come into the Woolfs’ orbit. At first, to Virginia’s dismay, Kew Gardens got few orders, and that dismay deepened when Vanessa, whom she had asked to illustrate the story, complained bitterly at the amateurish way her illustrations had been printed. “She says she will not do any more art work for the HP which is a failure,” wrote Virginia in her diary. “This both stung and chilled me.”

  But Leonard was an experienced editor who had wide connections with left-wing writers throughout Europe, while Virginia was an experienced reviewer with a nose for literary talent. Thus, it was not by chance that the Woolfs put their precious time, ink, and glue into publishing early poems by T. S. Eliot. Little by little, the Hogarth Press found readers, a bigger press was bought, and then a contract was signed with a commercial printer, leaving the owners to scout for talent, read submissions, secure reviews, and communicate with bookshops. Nothing came easily. In the early 1930s, Virginia could still be found in the basement of the Hogarth Press’s new premises at Tavistock Square, dressed in dusty overalls and making up parcels of newly printed books.

  By the mid-1930s, the Hogarth Press had a wide range of interesting publications, and its owners were able to buy and rent out the duplex in Richmond, establish their home and their business at two successive properties in Bloomsbury, and buy Monk’s House, a tiny, rundown building in a magnificent garden that Virginia had come upon in her rovings through Sussex. Virginia delighted in having money to spend at last, and she happily paid for the extension, renovation, and furnishing of Monk’s House. She commissioned Vanessa to design furniture and upholstery and, as a birthday gift, paid for live women models to pose for Vanessa.

  Whereas, at least to my eye, Vanessa and Duncan essentially halted their artists’ rebellion with Matisse, Virginia, on a steady diet of reading for the press, kept abreast of the challenges posed by the new generation of writers around the world. Virginia disliked James Joyce’s Ulysses, but she and Leonard would have published it if they had been able to persuade their printers to take the risk of prosecution. Through her psychoanalyst brother and sister-in-law and her friends James and Alix Strachey, Virginia read deeply in the new field of Freudian psychoanalysis, and the Hogarth Press was by the 1930s able to take on the challenge of publishing the Stracheys’ translation of The Complete Works of Sigmund Freud.

  Through her socialist husband, Virginia was connected to the world of international politics and left-wing radicalism. That connection helped her see that inherited money is the privilege of the few, like herself, but also that creativity needs a few hundred a year and a room of one’s own. Virginia Woolf always tuned in to the political scene with reluctance. All the same, if she, like her sister, had once found herself in conversation at a party with a gentleman called Asquith, she would have recognized the prime minister and refrained from asking if he was interested in politics—a memorable gaffe by Vanessa that went the rounds among Bloomsbury’s enemies.

  Reading the diaries and letters and memoirs of Virginia Woolf and Leonard Woolf, one is impressed by the amount of work they got through while still being sociable on weekends, taking Continental holidays with friends like the Frys, having dinner at Clive’s favorite little Italian restaurant in town, maintaining a very large garden, and making their own jam from local strawberries. But at the end of a busy week in London, lunching with prospective contributors, reading submissions, editing copy, talking to press representatives in the field, writing articles and novels and essays and innumerable letters both professional and private, what Virginia wanted to do was go down to Sussex, troll the local shops for fish and buns and toffee, walk the moors to see the hares and the butterflies, feed the dogs (neither Virginia nor Leonard could bear to live without a dog), and then close the door—just Mongoose and Mandril.

  Vanessa was still indispensable to Virginia, and relations between the sisters had settled into a more comfortable pattern by the early 1930s, when both Vanessa and Duncan were achieving a success in the art world that equaled the success of Virginia and Leonard in the publishing world. The i
nfluence of Vanessa’s circle of working painters on Virginia as a novelist was considerable, and as Woolf learned to see paintings with her sister’s expert eye, she carried those insights into words on the page. The Waves, Woolf’s most experimental and poetic novel, is also highly pictorial, structured around descriptions of a seascape as it changes from season to season. In To the Lighthouse, Lily Briscoe and the painting whose finishing touch is a blurred shape representing the Madonna-like Mrs. Ramsay are keys to the meaning of the book.

  Virginia learned to rein in the passion for Vanessa she had once let loose in her letters to Clive, but amid the social updates and family chat she supplies in her letters, Virginia still occasionally sounds the old note of abandonment. She needed Vanessa and always wanted more of her while knowing that Vanessa did not need her and wanted rather less than more. Writing to her sister, who was in the French village of Cassis, where Vanessa and her household had taken root during the winters, Woolf in London wrote on April 12, 1929, “I can’t tell you how bitter and autumnal it is; not a leaf out, many indeed have gone in. And the snow falls in my heart too, slow, soft flakes salt-tasting with tears. Why? Ah Hah! Dolphin being a beast covered with brine who never shed a tear don’t know the meaning of that pleasure. And Duncan, whom I adore, is cased in oil silk from the assault of the waves.”