Virginia Woolf

by Gillian Gill

  Even without their very particular and deeply rooted psychological issues and Vanessa’s decision to spend more of the year in France, two social factors kept Virginia and Vanessa apart more and more in the interwar years—Virginia’s husband and her precarious health. If Vanessa stood at the heart of the Bloomsbury group because she was Clive’s wife, Lytton and Maynard’s friend, and Duncan’s partner, Virginia often stood outside the Bloomsbury group because she was Leonard’s wife. Leonard made it increasingly clear that he did not enjoy being with the Charleston set and felt at odds with their sybaritic way of life, their indifference to the course of European politics and the effects of the economic depression on ordinary people who did not have Maynard Keynes to manage their stock portfolio.

  Where Clive was independently affluent and increasingly jingoistic in his views, Leonard had to earn his living and was a committed socialist. Where Lytton was a gay butterfly, earning fat American publishing contracts with his books on Queen Victoria and Queen Elizabeth, Leonard was an industrious ant, publishing the poetry of Rilke, the stories of Christopher Isherwood, and The Notebooks of Anton Chekhov, which Leonard translated himself, with his friend Samuel S. Koteliansky. Where Maynard moved smoothly up the British power hierarchy in politics, diplomacy, and economics, Leonard was a worker for world peace, watching with alarm as totalitarianism gained ground in Russia, in Italy, in Spain, in Germany. Where Duncan was happy as long as he could paint and have sex with beautiful men, Leonard was as celibate as a monk. That the highly cultured, polylingual Leonard Woolf never traded in his social conscience for aesthetic sensibility or put poetry over politics set him apart from the people Vanessa Bell welcomed in her homes.

  Leonard Woolf was also, as his name declared without ambiguity, a Jew, a non-observant Jew who nonetheless could chant the Torah in Hebrew as readily as he could recite the choruses of Sophocles in Greek or cite the Maharamsa in Pali. Leonard Woolf did not need the rise of Hitler to know that the centuries-old perception of Jews as a poisonous threat to European society was flaming up, not dying down. In tolerant, cultured, well-traveled Bloomsbury, Leonard was always the outsider, the butt of casual anti-Semitic slurs from close companions such as Clive Bell and Maynard Keynes and even, at moments, from his wife. As he explains in his autobiography, Leonard had learned to operate successfully in the high professional class, linked to the aristocracy, into which his wife had been born, but he always felt himself an outsider, welcomed to the old boys’ club as a guest but never eligible for membership.

  Anti-Semitism was something Virginia Woolf breathed like air all her life. She was also, she would admit, a huge snob, and both prejudices were aroused by members of her husband’s family, especially the women. “How I hated marrying a Jew,” she wrote to Ethel Smyth in August 1930. “How I hated their nasal voices, and their oriental jewelry, and their noses and their wattles—what a snob I was for they have immense vitality, and I think I like that quality best of all.” And, after that grudging compliment, she goes on to say that “Jews can’t die . . . they pullulate, copulate, and amass . . . millions of money.”

  Such remarks are, to say the least, disquieting, but putting one’s prejudices down in black and white can be a step toward overcoming them, and heaven knows, many of us have problems with our in-laws. The mass of documentation the Woolfs left proves that, throughout their marriage, both Virginia and Leonard regularly visited and hosted members of his family, notably his brothers. When his mother moved to Hove, which they felt was uncomfortably close to their Sussex getaway, the Leonard Woolfs were nonetheless attentive to her care. As we can see from the portrait of suburban English-Jewish society he gives in his 1914 novel The Wise Virgins, Leonard had more than a touch of anti-Semitic snobbery himself, and I think he gave his wife credit for at least striving to rise above vulgar prejudice. By 1940, faced with the imminent prospect of invasion, and better informed than most about what was happening to Jews in Hitler’s Germany, Virginia and Leonard were sure that their names would both be on the Gestapo’s list of arrests. According to Isaiah Berlin, Virginia Woolf then spoke of herself and Leonard as “we Jews.”

  As to Virginia Woolf’s health, Michael Cunningham’s best-selling 1998 novel The Hours and the subsequent 2002 movie starring the Oscar-winning Nicole Kidman have made a strong case that Leonard Woolf’s paternalist efforts at protection narrowed his wife’s social horizons and hobbled her creativity. I found that case persuasive until I began to immerse myself in Virginia Woolf’s own letters and journals. Then I could count how many times after 1904 she fell into a catastrophic mental breakdown, how constantly she hovered on the edge of mania, and how rationally terrified she was of falling again. Within a few years of marriage, she and Leonard had enough experience of her illness to know that small things—a series of late nights, a severe cold that prevented her from working, a social event that turned unpleasant, a hectic trip abroad—could trigger a manic-depressive episode. A vague headache, a refusal of lunch, a sleepless night were all bad signs, so Leonard would insist on bed rest and regular meals, and Virginia would reluctantly concur.

  Once she had persuaded Leonard to move back to Bloomsbury with their press, and they had found a new, permanent vacation home in Sussex, Virginia felt able to relax for a few years into an alternating routine of bed rest and vigorous social activity that was familiar and acceptable. In bed or comfortably settled on the couch, her writing board propped up on her knees, her books around her, Nelly bustling in with tea and biscuits from time to time, and hearing the rapid tap-tap-tap of Leonard’s typewriter in the next room, she could work even if she could not have visitors or venture abroad. Life as an invalid was dull and a little demeaning, but it was productive, and so much better than being locked up, on a diet of milk, laxatives, and opiates, in some select clinic for deranged gentlewomen.

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  In the interwar years, as her social and professional world expanded and she became well known, Virginia attracted a stimulating and supportive group of women friends. Among these was the New Zealander writer Katherine Mansfield, who was one of the first writers published by the Hogarth Press. Woolf and Mansfield were rivals in the world of literary journalism, and the relationship they developed was brief and rather prickly. Mansfield was young, attractive, and confident in her sexuality—Mansfield made no secret of the affairs she had had with both men and women—none of which endeared her to Woolf. Though of a socially prominent family in her native country, Mansfield was a colonial, her accent perhaps not quite cut-glass pure, and in company she came across to Virginia as tacky and shallow. Katherine managed to conceal from Virginia how very ill she was (she died of tuberculosis in January 1923), and so, when Katharine failed to reply to a friendly letter, Virginia was hurt and offended.

  But for all her feelings of professional rivalry and puritanical distaste, the literary editor in Woolf had seized upon “the living power, the detached existence of a work of art” in Mansfield’s story “The Prelude,” so she published it. On the few occasions when the two women were alone together, they talked avidly and found they could cover much more ground than was ever possible with condescending men like Tom Eliot or Lytton Strachey. Woolf confided to her diary that

  I find, with Katherine, what I don’t find with the other clever women, a sense of ease & interest, which is, I suppose, due to her caring so genuinely if so differently from the way I care, about our precious art. Though Katherine [as the wife of John Middleton Murry, the editor of the Athenaeum magazine] is now in the very heart of the professional world—4 books on her table to review—she is, & will always be I fancy, not the least of a hack. I don’t feel as I feel with Molly Hamilton, that is to say, ashamed of the inkpot.

  Katherine Mansfield was only one of the women in Virginia Woolf’s acquaintance who desired women as well as men—Alix Strachey, Carrington, Mary Hutchinson, Dorothy Wellesley, and Dorothy Strachey Bussy were others. But as she journeyed through her thirties and forties, Virginia found herself more a
nd more in the company of interesting and creative people who did not marry and identified themselves quite openly as gay and lesbian. The lesbian and gay communities were distinct and not especially friendly to each other, but they did come together in certain places—London, of course, but also in Sussex and the adjacent county of Kent. Knole and Sissinghurst in Sussex were the country estates of Edward Sackville-West and Vita Sackville-West, the best-selling author E. F. Benson had taken on the lease and the patrician ways of Henry James at Lamb House in Rye on the Kentish coast, and Dame Ellen Terry and her daughter, Edy Craig, presided over a group of lesbians at Smallhythe, some ten miles inland.

  Of course, Virginia Woolf had been in the company of homosexual men since Bloomsbury began, but she was never as intimately involved in gay men’s lives as her sister was. Maynard Keynes was never really a friend of Virginia’s, and so, though she found Lydia Lopokova infuriating, the marriage of Maynard and Lydia was not the personal betrayal for her that it was for Vanessa. Lytton’s willing submission to the sadistic tastes of his new young Oxford lover Roger Senhouse was kept from her, but Lytton’s companion Carrington didn’t know of it either. Of all the Newnham and Slade School “Cropheads,” Virginia liked Carrington best, and she worried to see Carrington neglecting her art and her self-interest to care for Lytton.

  With Morgan Forster (known to the world as E. M. Forster), a novelist who had achieved earlier and greater success than she, Virginia enjoyed an affectionate and mutually admiring but intermittent relationship. Morgan, known as “the Mole” in Bloomsbury, was by the 1920s engaged in a series of passionate love affairs with working-class men and came under the influence of a misogynistic gay theorist. Fearing to feed the Bloomsbury gossip mill, he was careful not to air his new views or confide personal details to the increasingly feminist Virginia Woolf.

  When she found herself at gay parties, Virginia Woolf felt like an anthropologist gathering information on an alien tribe. The new generation of gay men fascinated and appalled her because they were so very much “not in the style of our day in Cambridge,” Woolf wrote to Ethel Smyth, the notable composer and lesbian activist. Woolf means, I think, that the new generation were not tall and gangly like Lytton and Maynard (six foot seven) or broad and brawny like Duncan or her brother Adrian (six foot five). Two of these confidently gay young men, however, became friends and colleagues of the Woolfs—John Lehmann, who for several years was an editor and then a partner in the Hogarth Press, and Eddy Sackville-West, an artist and music critic.

  One evening over dinner, John Lehmann recalls in Thrown to the Woolfs, Virginia opened the conversation by asking, like an affectionate aunt trying to be tolerant and à la page, “Now, John, tell us about your bugger-boys.” Unwilling to enter into a discussion of his complicated personal life, Lehmann offered an amusing anecdote about Fred, a young guardsman he had once known, noting that brief sexual encounters between upper-class men like himself and working-class men like Fred were quite common. “But does this really go on all the time in London?” Virginia exclaimed. “Leo, have you ever heard of it?” And Leo of course had.

  Eddy Sackville-West and his coterie of musicians and artists were a lot harder for Virginia to take seriously than Lehmann and his rugged, scruffy socialist writers. Sackville wore makeup, spoke in a high voice, had ruffles at throat and wrists in the evening, and lolled in Japanese silk pajamas at home. He struck Virginia as a lap dog, and her reaction to him led Virginia to write an extraordinarily revealing letter to Ethel Smyth, in which she analyzes her feelings toward men, gay and straight:

  When I go to what we call a “Buggery Poke” party, I feel as if I had strayed into the male urinal; a wet, smelly, trivial kind of place. I fought with Eddy Sackville over this, I often fight with my friends. How silly, how pretty you sodomites are I said; whereat he flared up and accused me of having a red-nosed grandfather. For myself, why did I tell you that I had only once felt physical feeling for a man [presumably Lytton Strachey] when he felt nothing for me? I suppose in some opium trance of inaccuracy. No—had I felt physical feeling for him, then, no doubt, we would have married, or had a shot at something. But my feelings were all of the spiritual, intellectual, emotional kind. And when 2 or 3 times in all, I felt physically for a man, then he was so obtuse, gallant, foxhunting and dull that I—diverse as I am—could only wheel around and gallop the other way. Perhaps this shows why Clive who had his reasons, always called me a fish. Vita also calls me a fish. And I reply (I think often while holding their hands and getting exquisite pleasure from contact with either male or female body) “But what I want of you is illusion—to make the world dance.”

  Ethel Smyth was an older woman who fell in love with Woolf and became a close friend in Woolf’s last years. Smyth made little effort to conceal her lesbian identity, and she was an ardent suffragist. Smyth’s “Women’s March” became the anthem of the women’s suffrage movement and was played not only on the streets of England but in the exclusive Paris salon of Natalie Clifford Barney, where Smyth was often a welcome guest. The younger artist Ethel Sands, who shared two elegant homes with her female partner, Nan Hudson, also became a confidante and supportive friend to Virginia Woolf by the early 1930s. It was to Sands, as we have seen, that Woolf felt able to confide her regrets about not having children, and Woolf’s trust in Smyth allowed her to explore emotional depths that she could never broach with Vanessa. These women were deeply attracted to Woolf—as Woolf once remarked, “these Sapphists love women,” and their friendships were never “untinged with amorosity”—but with neither of them was Woolf tempted to have a physical relationship. The great love affair of Virginia Woolf’s adult life was with another member of the English lesbian community—though one who carefully kept her membership secret from the public—Vita Sackville-West.

  Vita Sackville-West, to use her maiden name and the name under which she published, was already a successful author when she met Virginia Woolf, and the two came together first because of a commonality of professional interests. The Woolfs had a publishing house, and Sackville-West made overtures to them about publishing her next book or books. The Woolfs and the Nicolsons (Vita in private life was Mrs. Harold Nicolson) met over dinner at the Bells’ home at Gordon Square, and then exchanged Sussex visits, and were at first not much impressed with one another. The Nicolsons were accustomed to cold and dog hair but not to a chaos of books and manuscripts and a dearth of finger bowls and Limoges china. The Omega Workshops designs of Bell and Grant made the Nicolsons wince. For their part, the Bell-Woolfs were bored by the Nicolsons’ references to sitting next to Winston Churchill at dinner or lunching at Woburn Abbey and unimpressed by their attempts at repartee. Virginia was quickly of the opinion that Vita’s mind lacked depth.

  But despite a hint of dark mustache Virginia noticed on her new friend’s lip, Vita was a blazing physical presence, wearing a pink sweater and pearls even in the Sevenoaks fishmonger’s shop. Virginia soon fell in love with Vita’s voluptuous body and the romantic mix of feudal aristocracy and Spanish gypsy in her lineage, and, as Hermione Lee puts it, Virginia began to “make Vita up,” in the sense of creating a persona for her—rather in the way she had “made up” her sister.

  For a time Vita was more than happy to play her assigned role, and she entranced Virginia by driving her over to visit Knole, the ancient and immense “calendar” castle with, supposedly, 7 courtyards, 52 staircases, and 365 rooms where she had spent her youth. Vita Sackville-West was the only child of a mother and father who were Sackville-West first cousins, but she could not inherit Knole because she was born female, and Knole was subject to an entail on a male heir. When Vita and Virginia lay down on the bed that Elizabeth I had once slept in, in the royal bedroom at Knole, Woolf felt she was next to a romantic hero as well as an exciting woman. That scented, silk-cravated Eddy, not Vita—the very image of aristocratic vigor as she strode around the Sussex countryside in jodhpurs and boots—was heir to Knole, filled Virginia’s feminist heart with sympat
hy and rage.

  In her correspondence with Violet Dickinson as a young woman, Virginia had been a furry wombat or a fragile sparrow. Now, in her letters to Vita, Virginia split herself into two. The first Virginia was the renowned wit and brilliant intellect who looked down on Vita and called her a donkey. The second Virginia was a furry animal, a squirrel, a little dog, and finally a “potto,” a small exotic creature wistfully eager to nestle in her lover’s capacious bosom. Virginia ends a 1930 letter to Vita “With a soft, wet warm kiss from poor Potto.” After spending a night alone with Vita, Virginia was so excited, she had to tell her sister about it. The two sisters were waiting to check out in a pharmacy, and, to the fascination no doubt of the others in line, Vanessa, taking her change and “talking as loud as a parrot,” responded to her sister’s news of Vita with “but do you really like going to bed with women? . . . and how do you do it?”

  For a while, Vita was fascinated by Virginia, and Harold began to fear that this time his wife had finally found her great love and would leave him in a scandal that would make Vita’s affair with Violet Trefusis seem pale. But amorous dalliance was never enough for Vita, and Virginia’s mixture of fragile neediness and intellectual scorn wore thin. Vita Sackville-West was an eager and experienced lover who had gotten her first orgasms at the hands of a boy on her relatives’ Scottish farm, and she was falling madly in love with girls when she was still in school. Virginia, as we have seen, had always felt more desire for women than for men, so one would expect her affair to be a glorious revelation to her. As it turned out, however, Virginia was no more homosexual than heterosexual, and Vita was no more able to make her relax and feel comfortable in her body than awkward, inexperienced Leonard had been. Vita confessed to her husband, Harold, who liked to be kept up to date on her amours, that she was afraid that if, as it were, she turned up the heat when she took Virginia Woolf in her arms, Virginia would go mad.